The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In a former lecture I pointed out that Christianity is wider in reach and compass than the sphere of religion as we normally understand it. I said that when, in future times, men have outgrown what they are now wont to call religion, the substance and content of Christianity will have thrown off the outmoded forms of religious life and will have become a potent spiritual influence in the whole of human culture. Christianity has the power in itself of transcending the forms in which, in the cultural development of our day, we quite rightly express our religious life.

Since that lecture, many significant expressions of cultural life have come to my notice. I have had a brief period of lecturing in the Northern countries—in Sweden, Norway and Denmark. The week before last I had to give a lecture in Stockholm, among other towns in Sweden. Because of the low rate of population—remember that London alone has as many inhabitants as the whole of Sweden—there is much unoccupied territory, and people are separated by far greater distances than is the case in our Middle European countries. This will help you to understand what I mean when I tell you that the influences of the old Nordic Gods and Beings are still perceptible in the spiritual environment of those districts. To one who has some knowledge of the Spiritual it is in a sense an actual fact, that wherever the gaze turns one can glimpse the contenances of those ancient Nordic Gods who appeared to the Initiates in the Northern Mysteries, in times long before Christianity had spread over the world.

In the very heart of these lands, enwreathed as they are by myth and legend, not only in the poetic, but also in the spiritual sense, another symptom came into evidence. Between the lectures in Stockholm I had also to give one in Uppsala. In the Library there—in the very midst of all the evidences of spirituality dating from the times of the ancient Gods—lies the first Germanic version of the Bible; the so-called ‘Silver Codex,’ consisting of the four Gospels translated in the 4th century by the Gothic Bishop Wulfila. During the Thirty Years' War, through strange workings of karma, this remarkable document was taken as booty from Prague and brought to the North, where it is now preserved in the midst of the spirit-beings who, in remembrance at least, pervade the spiritual atmosphere of those regions. And as though it were right and proper that this document should lie where it does, a strange occurrence played a part in the story. Eleven leaves of this Silver Codex were stolen by an antiquarian, but after some time his heir suffered such pricks of conscience that he sent the eleven leaves back again to Uppsala, where they now lie, together with the rest of the first Germanic translation of the Bible.

The subject of the three public lectures in Stockholm was Wagner's “Ring of the Nibelungs,” and, walking along the streets, the announcements of the last performance at the Opera of Wagner's Ragnarök, the “Götterdämmerung” (Twilight of the Gods), were to be seen on the kiosks. These things are really symptomatic, interweaving in a most remarkable way. Underlying the old Nordic sagas there is a note of deep tragedy, indicating that the Nordic Gods and Divinities would be superseded by One yet to come. This motif and trend of the Nordic sagas reappears in a medieval form in Wagner's. Siegfried is killed by a thrust between his shoulder-blades, his only vulnerable part. This is a prophetic intimation that here, at this place in his body, something is lacking, and that through One yet to come it will be covered by the arms of the Cross. This is no mere poetic image, but something that has been drawn from the inspiration belonging to the world of saga and legend. For this same note of tragic destiny was implicit in the Nordic sagas, in the Mystery-truth underlying them, that the Nordic Gods would be replaced by the later, Christian Principle. In the Northern Mysteries the significance of this ‘Twilight’ of the Gods was everywhere made plain.

It is also significant—and here again I mean something more than a poetic image—that in the very hearts of these people to-day the remembrance of those ancient Gods lives on in peaceful reconciliation with all that has been brought there or made its way thither from Christianity. The presence of the Gothic Bible amid the memories of ancient times is verily a symptom. One can also feel it as a symptom, as a foreshadowing of the future, that in lands where more intensely than anywhere else the ancient Gods are felt as living realities, these Gods should be presented again in their Wagnerian form, outside the narrow bounds of ordinary religion.

Anyone in the slightest degree capable of interpreting the signs of the times will perceive in the art of Richard Wagner the first rays of Christianity emerging from the narrow framework of the religious life into the wider horizons of modern spiritual culture. One can discern quite unmistakably how in the soul of Richard Wagner himself the central idea of Christianity comes to birth, how it bursts the bonds of religion and becomes universal. When on Good Friday, in the year 1857, he looks out of the Villa Wesendonck by the Lake of Zürich at the budding flowers of early spring, and the first seed of “Parsifal” quickens to life within him, this is a transformation, on a wider scale, of what already lives in Christianity, as a religious idea. And after he had reached the heights of that prophetic foreshadowing of Christianity to which he gave such magnificent expression in the “Ring of the Nibelungs,” this central Idea of Christianity found still wider horizons in “Parsifal,” becoming the seed of that future time when Christianity will embrace, not only the religious life, but the life of knowledge, of art, of beauty, in the widest sense of the words.

This is the theme that will be presented to you to-day, in order to kindle the feeling of what Christianity can be for mankind in times to come.

In connection with this, we will penetrate deeply to-day into the evolution of humanity, for the purpose of discovering the real relation between religion in the ordinary sense and Christianity. The present point of time is itself not unsuitable, lying as it does just before the great Festival symbolising the victory of the Spirit over Death. The Festival of Easter is close upon us and we remember, perhaps, those Christmas lectures in which we endeavoured to grasp the meaning of Christmas in the light of the Mystery-knowledge. If from a higher vantage-point we think of the Christmas Festival on the one side and the Easter Festival, with its prospect of Whitsuntide, on the other, the relation between religion and Christianity, if rightly conceived, is brought in a most wonderful way before the eye of spirit.

It will be necessary to go far, far afield in laying the basis of this study, but by doing so we shall realise what has been preserved in such Festivals and what they can bring to life in the soul. We shall go far, far back in evolution—although not so far either in time or space as in our last lectures, when we dealt with the Spiritual Hierarchies. Those lectures, however, will have been a help, because of the vistas they opened up of the earth's evolution and its connection with that of the Beings of the heavens. To-day we shall go back only to about the middle of the Atlantean epoch, when the ancestors of present-day humanity were living in the West, between Europe and America, on the continent now lying beneath the waters of the Atlantic Ocean. In those times the face of the earth was quite different. Where now there is water, then there was land, and on this land dwelt the early ancestors of men who now constitute the civilised humanity of Europe and Asia. When the eye of spirit is directed upon the soul-life of these antediluvian, Atlantean peoples, it is seen to have been quite different from the soul-life of Post-Atlantean humanity. We have learnt, from earlier studies, of the mighty changes that have taken place in earth-evolution since that time, including changes in the life of the human soul. The whole of man's consciousness, even the alternating states of waking consciousness by day and sleep by night, have changed. The normal state to-day is that when a man wakes in the morning he comes down with his astral body and Ego into the physical and etheric bodies, making use of the physical senses: the eyes for seeing, the ears for hearing, and all the other senses, in order to receive the impressions coming from the material world around him. He plunges with his astral body down into his brain, into his nerves, combining and relating his multifarious sense-impressions. Such is the life of day. At night, the Ego and astral body draw out of the physical and etheric bodies, and sleep ensues. The physical and etheric bodies lie in the bed, but the Ego and astral body have passed out of them and all the impressions of the sense-world and of the waking life of day are obliterated; joy, suffering, pleasure, pain—everything that composes man's inner waking life of soul passes away, and in the present cycle of human evolution darkness enshrouds him during the night.

At approximately the middle of the Atlantean epoch it was not so. Man's consciousness in those times was essentially different. When in the morning he entered into his physical and etheric bodies he was not confronted with sharply outlined pictures of the outer, material world. The pictures were much less distinct and definite, rather as when street lamps in thick fog appear surrounded with an aura of rainbow-like colours. This homely illustration will help you to envisage what the mid-Atlantean man saw and perceived, but you must remember that these colourforms surrounding and blurring the sharp outlines of objects, and also the tones resounding from them, revealed a great deal more than the colours and tones familiar to us to-day. These encircling colours were the expressions of living beings—of the inner, soul-qualities of these beings. And so when a man had come down into his physical and etheric bodies he still had some perception of the spiritual beings, around him—unlike to-day when, on waking in the morning he merely perceives physical objects with their sharp outlines and coloured surfaces.

Moreover, when at night the Atlantean left his physical and etheric bodies, the world into which he passed was not a world of darkness and silence; the pictures were hardly less numerous than by day, with this difference only, that whereas in the waking life of day man perceived outer objects, belonging to the mineral-, plant-, animal- and human kingdoms, at night the whole space around him was filled with colour-forms and tones, with impressions of smell, taste and so forth. But these colours and tones, these impressions of warmth and cold of which he was conscious, were the garments, the sheaths, of spiritual Beings who never descend to physical incarnation, Beings whose names and images are preserved in the myths and sagas. Myths and sagas are not just folk-songs; they are memories of the visions which in olden times came to men in these conditions of existence. Men were aware of the spiritual alike by day and by night. By night they were surrounded by that world of Nordic gods of which the legends tell. Odin, Freya, and all the other figures in Nordic mythology were not inventions; they were experienced in the spiritual world with as much reality as a man experiences his fellow-men around him to-day. And the sagas are the memories of the experiences actually undergone by men in their shadowy, clairvoyant consciousness.

At the time when this kind of consciousness had evolved from a still earlier form, the sun in the heavens rose at the vernal equinox in the constellation of Libra (the Scales). As the Atlantean epoch took its further course, the kind of consciousness that is ours to-day gradually developed. The impressions received by man during the night when his Ego and astral body were outside his physical and etheric bodies became dimmer, less and less distinct; whereas the images of waking life coming to him when he was within his physical and etheric bodies by day, increased in clarity and definition. Paradoxically speaking, night became more intensely night, day more intensely day.

Then came the Atlantean Flood and the dawn of the later, Post-Atlantean epochs of civilisation: the ancient Indian civilisation when the Holy Rishis themselves were the teachers of men; the epoch of ancient Persian culture; the epoch of Chaldean-Assyrian-Babylonian-Egyptian culture; the epoch of Greco-Roman culture, and finally our own. These epochs of civilisation followed one another after the submergence of Atlantis. And the mood-of-soul prevailing in men during early Post-Atlantean times, and to some extent also during the last phases of the Atlantean epoch itself, can be indicated by saying that among the peoples everywhere, including those who, as the descendants of the Atlanteans, had wandered across to the East and settled there, the ancient memories still survived, as well as the old myths and legends describing the experiences of the earlier form of Atlantean consciousness. These legends and myths which originated in Atlantis had come over with the migrating peoples, who preserved and narrated them. They were their inspiration, and the oldest inhabitants of the North were still vitally aware of the power flowing from these myths, because their ancestors remembered that their own forefathers had actually seen what was narrated in the legends.

Something else too had been preserved, namely the things that had been experienced, not it is true by the masses of the people, but by those who were the Initiates in olden times, the priests and sages of the Mysteries. Their eyes of spirit had penetrated into the same depths of world-existence that are disclosed to-day through spiritual investigation. The Initiation-consciousness of man's early forefathers worked in the spiritual world as powerfully as the Folk-Soul. Clairvoyance, although dim and shadowy, was still a real and vital power in those olden days. Folk-lore and saga preserved and proclaimed, in revelations often fragmentary and broken, realities that had once been experienced. What had been seen in vision and cultivated in the Mysteries was preserved in the form of an ancient wisdom. It was then possible, in the Mysteries, to infuse into the individual consciousness of those who became Initiates, a wide, all-embracing vista of the universe. But forms of consciousness which had been natural in remote ages had in the later times of the Mysteries to be artificially induced.

Why was spiritual vision a natural condition in the far distant past? The reason is that the connection between the physical body and the etheric body was different. The connection existing to-day did not develop until the later phases of the Atlantean epoch. Before that time the upper part of the etheric head extended far outside the boundaries of the physical head; towards the end of Atlantis the etheric head gradually drew completely into the physical head until it coincided with it. This gave rise to the later form of consciousness which became natural in Post-Atlantean man, enabling him to perceive physical objects in sharp outlines, as we do to-day. The fact that man can hear tones, be aware of scents, see colours on surfaces—although these are no longer expressions of the inmost spiritual reality of things—all this is connected with the firm and gradual interlocking of the physical body and etheric body.

In earlier times, when the etheric body was still partly outside the physical body, this projecting part of the etheric body was able to receive impressions from the astral body, and it was these impressions that were perceived by the old, dreamlike clairvoyance. Not until the etheric body had sunk right down into the physical body was man wholly bereft of his dim clairvoyance. Hence in the ancient Mysteries it became necessary for the priests to use special methods in order to induce in the candidates for Initiation the condition which, in Atlantis, had been natural and normal. When pupils were to receive Initiation in the Mystery-temples, the procedure was that, after the appropriate impressions had been received by the astral body, the priests conducting the Initiation induced a partial loosening of the etheric body, in consequence of which the physical body lay for three and a half days in a trancelike sleep, in a kind of paralytic condition. The astral body was then able to imprint into the loosened etheric body experiences which had once come to Atlantean man in his normal state. Then the candidate for Initiation was able to see around him realities that henceforth were no longer merely preserved for him in scripts, or in tradition, but had become his own, individual experiences.

Let us try to picture what actually happened to the candidate for Initiation.—When the priests in the Mysteries raised the etheric body partially out of the physical body and guided the impressions issuing from the astral body into this released etheric body, the candidate experienced in his etheric body the spiritual worlds. So strong and intense were the experiences that when he was restored from the trance and his etheric body was reunited to the physical body, he brought back the memory of these experiences into his physical consciousness. He had been a witness of the spiritual worlds, could himself bear witness to what was happening there; he had risen above and beyond all division into peoples or nations, for he had been initiated into that by which all peoples are united; the primal wisdom, primal truth.

Thus it was in the ancient Mysteries; so too it was in those moments of which I told you in connection with the Christmas Mystery, when the boundaries which were to characterise the consciousness of later times disappeared before the gaze of the Initiate. Think for a moment of the fundamental characteristic of Post-Atlantean consciousness. Man is no longer able to see into the innermost nature of things; between him and this innermost core of being a boundary is fixed. He sees only the surfaces of things in the physical world. What man's consciousness in the Post-Atlantean epoch could no longer penetrate, was transparent and clear to the one who in olden times was about to receive Initiation. And then, when the great moment came, in what is called the “Holy Night,” he was able to see through the solid earth and to behold the Sun, the spiritual “Sun at midnight.”

In essentials, therefore, this pre-Christian Initiation consisted in re-evoking what in ancient times had been the natural condition, the normal state of consciousness. Little by little, as civilisation advanced, these memories of olden times receded and the power to experience reality outside the physical body became increasingly rare. Nevertheless, in the earliest periods of the Post-Atlantean epoch there were still many in the ancient Indian, Persian, Chaldean civilisations, indeed even in ancient Egypt, whose etheric bodies were not yet so firmly anchored in the physical body as to prevent them from receiving the impressions of the spiritual world—in the form of atavistic remains of an earlier age. Later, during Greco-Roman times, even these vestiges disappeared and it was less and less possible for Initiation to be achieved in the same way as before. It became increasingly difficult to preserve for humanity the memories of the ancient, primal wisdom.

At this point we are drawing near the time of our own Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch which denotes something of peculiar significance in the evolution of humanity. In the Greco-Latin epoch it was still true to speak of an equal possibility, on the one side of remembering the visions arising in the ancient, shadowy clairvoyance, and on the other, of living wholly within the physical body, and of being thereby completely cut off from the spiritual worlds. Individuals here and there had this experience. The whole trend of modern life goes to show that the man of the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch has descended still more deeply into the physical body—the outer sign being the birth of materialistic concepts. These made their appearance for the first time in the Fourth Post-Atlantean epoch, with the Atomists of ancient Greece. Then, having passed from the scene for a time, we find them cropping up again, and during the last four centuries their influence has so greatly increased that man has lost, not only the content of the old memories of the spiritual worlds, but, gradually, all belief in the very existence of those worlds. There you have the true state of affairs. In this Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch, man has sunk so deeply into the physical body that he has lost even belief! In a very large number of people, belief in the existence of a spiritual world has simply vanished.

And now let us look from a different point of view at the course taken by evolution. Looking back into those ancient Atlantean times of which we have been trying to form a concrete picture, we can say that man was still living with and among his gods. He believed not only in his own existence and that of the three kingdoms of nature, but also in the reality of the higher realms of the spiritual worlds, for in the Atlantean epoch he was an actual witness of them. His spiritual consciousness by night and his physical consciousness by day did not greatly differ; they were in balance, and it would have been foolish of a man to deny the reality of that which was perceptibly around him—for he actually beheld the gods. There was no need for religion in our modern sense. What now forms the content of the various religions was a perceived reality to the majority of human beings in the times of Atlantis. Just as little as you yourselves need religion in order to believe in the existence of roses or lilies, rocks or trees, as little did the Atlantean need religion in order to believe in gods, for to him they were realities. But this immediate reality faded away, and more and more the content of the spiritual worlds became mere memory—partly preserved in traditions of the visions of very ancient forefathers, partly in the myths and sagas, and in what a few individuals gifted with special powers of clairvoyance had themselves witnessed of these spiritual worlds. Above all, however, this content of the spiritual worlds was preserved in the Mysteries, guarded by the priests of the Mysteries. The secret knowledge under the guardianship of the Priests of Hermes in Egypt, of Zarathustra in Persia, and the sages of Chaldea, the successors of the Holy Rishis in India, was nothing else than the art of enabling human beings, through Initiation, to witness what men in days of yore had seen around them in a perfectly natural way. Later, what the Mysteries preserved was expressed in the form of the folk-religion—here in one, there in another religion—according to the constitution of a people, according to its particular faculties and powers of perception, even according to its native climate. But the primal wisdom was the basis of them all, as the one great unity. This wisdom was one and the same, whether cultivated by Pythagoras in his School, by the Chaldean sages in Western Asia, by Zarathustra in Persia, or by the Brahmans in India. Everywhere it was the same primal wisdom—expressed in varied form according to the needs and conditions obtaining in the folk-religions of the different regions. Here, then, we see the primal wisdom as the fount and basis of all religion.

What is religion, fundamentally speaking? It is the intermediary between the spiritual worlds and mankind when men are no longer able to experience these spiritual worlds through their own organs of perception. Religion was the proclamation, the announcement of the existence of spiritual worlds, made for the sake of men who could no longer experience spiritual reality. Thus was the spiritual life spread over the earth as religious culture in the several epochs of civilisation, in ancient India, ancient Persia and the rest, down to our own time.

As I have already said, the purpose of man's descent into a physical body was that he might gain knowledge of the external world, experiencing existence through his physical senses, in order, finally, to spiritualise what he thus experienced, and so lead it to future stages of evolution. But at the present time, having plunged deeply into the physical body, and having already passed the middle point of the Post-Atlantean civilisations, we are facing a very definite eventuality.

The whole evolution of mankind has a certain strange quality. It goes forward in one direction until a certain point is reached and then it begins to stream in the opposite direction. Having streamed downwards to a certain point, it turns again upwards, reaching the same stages as on the descent, but now in a higher form. To-day man stands in very truth before a fateful future, that future when, as is known to everyone who is aware of this deeply significant truth of evolution, his etheric body will gradually loosen itself again, freeing itself from its submergence in the physical body, where the things of the physical world are perceived in their sharply outlined forms. The etheric body must release itself again in order that man's being may become spiritualised and once again have vision of the spiritual world. To-day humanity has actually reached the point when in a great number of individuals the etheric body is beginning to loosen.

A destiny in the very highest degree significant is approaching us, and here we come near to the secret of our own epoch of civilisation.

We must realise that the etheric body, which has descended very deeply into the physical body, must now take the path upwards, carrying with it from the physical body everything that has been experienced through the physical senses. But just because the etheric body is loosening itself from the physical, everything that was formerly reality—in the physical sense—must gradually be spiritualised. It will be essential for mankind in times to come to have conscious certainty that the spiritual is reality. What will happen otherwise? The etheric body will be freed from the physical body while men still believe only in the reality of the physical world, and have no consciousness of the reality of the spiritual, which will be manifest in the loosened etheric body as the fruit of man's past experience in the physical body. In such conditions men may be faced with the danger of losing all relationship to this loosening of their etheric bodies.

Let us consider the point at which a man's etheric body, which has been firmly anchored in the physical body, begins to loosen from it again and to emerge. Suppose that this happens to a man who in his physical existence has lost all belief in, all consciousness of, the spiritual world, and has cut himself off from any connection with it. Let us assume that he descended so firmly and deeply into the physical body that he has been able to retain nothing save the belief that the physical life is the one and only reality. Now he passes into the next phase of human existence. Relentlessly the etheric body emerges from the physical body, while he is still incapable of realising the existence of a spiritual world. He neither recognises nor knows anything of the spiritual world about him. This is the fate which may confront men in the near future, that they do not recognise the spiritual world which, as the result of the loosening of the etheric body, they must inevitably experience, but regard it as a phantasy, illusion, vain imagination. And those who have experienced most ably, with the utmost perfection, the physical body, the men who have become the pundits of materialism and are full of fixed, rigid notions of matter, it is they who, with the loosening of the etheric body, will face the greatest danger of being without a single inkling that there is a spiritual world. They will regard everything that then comes to them from the spiritual world as illusion, fancy, as so many figments of dream.

If in times to come, when the etheric body has again loosened itself from the physical, man is to live his life in any real sense, he must have consciousness of what will then present itself to the etheric body. In order that he may be conscious that what then comes to him is knowledge of the spiritual world, it is essential that realisation of the existence of the spiritual world shall be preserved in humanity and carried through the period when man is most deeply immersed in the material world. For the sake of the future, the link between the religious life and the life of knowledge must never be lost. Man came forth from a life among the gods; to a life among the gods he will again return. But he must be able to recognise them; he must know that in very truth the gods are realities. When the etheric body has loosened he will no longer be able to rely on remembrances of ancient human times. If meanwhile he has lost consciousness of the spiritual world, has come to believe that life in the physical body and things to be seen in the physical world are the only realities, then for all ages of time he must dangle, as it were, in mid-air. He will have lost his bearings in the spiritual world and will have no ground under his feet. He will be threatened, in this condition, with what is known as the “spiritual death.” For around him there is only phantasy, illusion, a world of whose reality he has no consciousness, in which he does not believe, and so ... he dies! That is the death in the spiritual world. It is the doom which threatens men if, before passing again into the spiritual worlds, they fail to bring with them any consciousness of those worlds.

At what point in the evolution of humanity was attainment of consciousness of the spiritual world made possible for man? It was at the point where man's descent into the physical body was countered by victory over that body, and there was placed before men the great Prototype of Christ Himself. The understanding of Christ forms for man the bridge between the memories of his ancient past and the foreshadowings of his future. When Jesus of Nazareth had reached the age of 30, the Christ came down into his body. For the first and last time Christ lived in a physical body. And His victory over death—when it is rightly understood—reveals to man what the manner of his own life must be if, for all ages of time, he is to be conscious of the reality of the spiritual world. That is the true union with Christ.

What will the Christ Mystery, the Christ Deed, come to mean in the life of man in the future? The man of the future will look back upon our present epoch, when he lived wholly within the physical body, just as Post-Atlantean man looks back to those Atlantean times when he was living together with the gods. As he ascends again into the spiritual world, man will know that through the Christ Deed he has gained the victory over what he experienced in the physical body; he will point to the physical as something that has been overcome, surmounted. We should feel the Easter Miracle, then, as a mighty Deed, a foreshadowing of the Future.

Two possibilities lie before the man of the future. The one possibility is that he will look back in remembrance to the time of his experiences in the physical body, and he will say, “These alone were real. Now there is about me only a world of illusion. Life in the physical body—that was the reality.” Such a man will be gazing into a grave and what he sees in the grave is a corpse. But the corpse—the physical thing—will still be for him the true reality. That is the one possibility.

The other is that man will look back upon what was experienced in the physical world, and will know that it is a grave. Then, with deep consciousness of the import of his words, he will say to those who still believe the physical to have been the one and only reality: “He Whom thou seekest is no longer here! The grave is empty and He Who lay within it has risen!”

The empty Grave and the Risen Christ—this is the Easter Mystery, the Mystery that is a foreshadowing, a prophecy. Christ came to establish the great synthesis between the Easter Mystery and the Christmas Mystery. To the Christmas re-enactment of the ancient Mysteries is added the Mystery of future time, the Mystery of the Risen Christ. This is the Mystery enshrined in the Festival of Easter. The future of Christianity is that Christianity will not merely proclaim the existence of higher worlds, nor be mere religion, but an inner affirmation, a powerful impulse in life itself. It will be an inner affirmation, because in the Risen Christ man will behold that which he himself will experience through the ages of time to come. This Mystery is a Deed, a reality of life, inasmuch as man looks up to Christ not merely as the Saviour but as the great Prototype with whom his life conforms, in that he too will eventually overcome death. To live and work in the spirit of Christianity, to see in Christ not merely the Comforter but the One Who goes before us, Who is related in the deepest sense with our innermost being and Whose example we follow—this is what the Christ Idea will be in the future, pervading all knowledge, all art, all life. And if we remind ourselves of what is contained in the Easter Idea, we shall find there a Christian symbol of true Deed, true Life.

In times when men will have long since ceased to need the teachings of religion to tell them of the ancient gods, because they will again be living among gods, they will find in Christ that source of strength which enables them to find their own firm centre among the gods. Men will no longer require religion in order to believe in gods whom they will once again behold, any more than they required religion in former times when they lived and moved among gods. Themselves spiritualised, men will live consciously among spiritual Beings, fulfilling their tasks in communion with these Beings. In a future by no means far distant, man will find that the physical world is losing its importance for him, that physical things are becoming evanescent. Their reality will have already paled long before man's existence on the earth has drawn to its close.¹ But when the things of the physical world of sense cease to be all-important and fade into shadow, man will either find that the physical is losing its importance while he is still incapable of believing in the spiritual realities before him, or he will be able to believe and preserve for himself the consciousness of these spiritual realities—and then for such a man there will be no spiritual death.

To confront a reality that is unrecognisable, means to be shattered in the spirit. And men would come to this pass if, with the loosening of the etheric body, the spiritual worlds were to appear before them without being recognised and known as such. Many a man to-day could have consciousness of the spiritual worlds but has it not. Therefore these worlds take vengeance, and this shows itself in man's restlessness, his neurasthenic condition, his pathological fears, which are nothing else than the consequences of failure to unfold consciousness of the spiritual worlds. Those who realise the significance of these things feel the necessity of a spiritual Movement which, for those who are outgrowing the substance of ordinary religion, preserves belief in man, in the whole man, including, therefore, the spiritual man.

To know Christ means to know man as a spiritual being. To be filled with the Christ Mystery in the future will mean that Christianity as mere religion will be surmounted and will be carried as knowledge to infinite horizons. Christianity will permeate art, will broaden and inspire it, will bestow in abundance the power of artistic creation. Richard Wagner's “Parsifal” is the first foreshadowing of this.

Christianity will flow into all life and activity on the earth and when the formal religions have long ceased to be necessary, mankind will have been strengthened and invigorated by the Christ Impulse which had once to be given in the middle of the Fourth Post-Atlantean epoch, during the Greco-Latin epoch, when Christ came down among men. Just as it was man's destiny to sink into the deepest depths of material life, so must he be lifted again to knowledge of the Spirit. With the Coming of Christ this Impulse was given.

These are the feelings that should inspire us in the days when we have the Easter Mystery in symbols around us. For the Easter Mystery is not merely a Mystery of Remembrance. It is also a Mystery of the Future, foreshadowing the destiny of those who free themselves more and more from the shackles, ensnarements and pitfalls of the purely material life.

• 1. This is the answer to the scientific prognostication of the end of the human race.

Today, my task is to speak to you about the origin of evil in the sense of spiritual science. The fact of evil and its presence in the world is like a great mystery of life in the midst of our existence. And those who think that human development is permeated by divine power and divine providence are confronted with the question: How is it possible that the Divine allows evil? And for those who deny the Divine, the existence of evil is easily one of the reasons for such denial. They say: How can one imagine a world under divine guidance where evil reigns in the most diverse forms? In any case, this question of evil intrudes mysteriously and disconcertingly into our lives.

Since time immemorial, the question of the cause and origin of evil has been an important question. So today we want to deal with the fact of evil; and it should be said and attention should be drawn to individual points of resolution. In doing so, we must above all remember Jakob Böhme, who in his writings repeatedly raises the question: How does evil come into the world and what position does it occupy in the development of humanity?

Schelling draws on Böhme in his reflections on this in order to form a concept of evil and its existence in the world. For Böhme, evil is what darkness is to light. Böhme says: Beings owe their existence to the light of the sun; light is the sustainer, the creator of existence in the world. It is only through darkness that light is recognized, and light only exists when mixed with darkness. If we ask about the cause of darkness or even try to explain the light with darkness, we come to the correspondence of the ungrounded in relation to the primal ground.

If the light is to appear, then it must drive out and overcome that which is there for no reason and yet opposes the light; the divine primal ground of existence, the good, stands out by itself in the process. It is good; it is the pure good; but the light penetrates into the ground of evil in order to be able to fully unfold. This is an explanation of the concept that seems to shed light on our understanding.

In modern times, the question of good and evil seems to be playing a role again, for example in the work of someone who has impressed many, many people, Nietzsche. You all know the book “Beyond Good and Evil”. The modern philosopher Nietzsche juxtaposes good and bad, not good and evil. He says: We do not need to worry about the origin of evil, we distinguish between the weak and the strong, the strong-willed. They rule, the strong-willed; they want to assert themselves, their ideas, and that must naturally lead to a struggle with the weak, to their oppression. Those in power see themselves as the good guys. The oppressed think quite differently. They feel that what the powerful do is to their detriment. Since they are the weak, they come to the conclusion that there is still a good that has not been realized. They regard what the strong do as evil. Therein lies the origin of the contradiction in ideas between the weak and the strong. From this flows what is called slave morality.

Basically, those who have thought more deeply have always taken the position on good and evil relatively; we need only think of Goethe when he says: Oh, if men would only not always speak in the same way, this is good and that is evil, but would go into the motive power of their actions.

In his “Faust”, Goethe described the struggle between good and evil in humanity. In his youth, Goethe had not yet worked out these powerful contradictions in his Faust creation. In the present version, however, the characteristic features of good power and Mephistopheles emerge in Goethe and his Faust as early as the “Prologue in Heaven”. Goethe sensitively perceived the profound impact of good and evil in man; in Faust he seeks to fathom this supremacy of feelings.

Our task today is to fathom the fact of the origin of good and evil according to the new spiritual research or theosophy. We must indeed go back a long way in human development to do this. The Bible goes back very far indeed, almost to the origin of man. One of the most wonderful and greatest allegories on this subject is the “Fall of Man”, even for those who do not believe in the fact. The snake is the seducer of man, who in the beginning was created only for good. Only through an act of free will on the part of man is the difference between good and evil conceived. The animals do much more terrible things than what we call evil in humans; but who would think of speaking of an evil animal in this sense. The animal follows an implanted law in its actions, and there is no sense in speaking of good and evil; this is only the case with humans. In answering this question, spiritual science must go back to the point where man appears as the crown on our Earth planet. Why can we not speak of evil in animals? The animal also has a soul, but not an individual soul, but a group soul. What is a group soul? What a whole group is in the animal, man has for himself alone. To understand this, we need only consider the fact that a person has a biography, whereas an animal does not.

Every person, without exception, has a biographical interest for us and we know that there is no other person with exactly the same biography. With animals, it is only the whole species and type that interests us to the same extent. Like all lions together, we are interested in the individual person. The soul exists for an entire animal species together. Man has only just ascended from a group soul to an individual one. Man is in the midst of this development. We still meet people who appear to be members of the tribe.

But the richer the life of the soul becomes, the less this soul is a soul of the species, the more it takes on its own character in gestures and feelings. Thus man himself is mostly situated between group soul and individual soul; and as we go forward into the future, he becomes more and more individual, and in the past more and more group soul,

right back to the beginning of man's development. When we trace man back, we go back the periods that we call the historical ones. We conclude the historical times with the fifth main race and its five different sub-races.

If we look at the Indian Vedas, we sense a powerful culture that even Max Müller, a very sober researcher, recognizes. So far, then, are the historical times. From these, spiritual science goes back to prehistoric times. The methods of how to go back through the development of the inner senses can be found in more detail in my magazine “Luzifer - Gnosis”. Theosophy assumes that a huge continent once existed between America, Africa and Europe, Atlantis, which was destroyed by natural disasters and of which only small island peaks remain today. Today, modern science is beginning to confirm this. You can read about Atlantis in the magazine “Kosmos”. Spiritual science has always spoken of Atlantis. The living conditions there were completely different; the atmosphere was like billowing masses of fog, hence “Nibelheim”. This home of fog is preserved for us in the folk tales. At that time there was still an ancient human race; but we have to look even further back for the origin of earthly man, to Lemuria, a continent that was located in what is now the Indian Ocean. There we find the first humans of the kind that today's humans are.

So how does spiritual science view the origin of humanity? For spiritual science, humans do not originally descend from a material being; rather, the spiritual is the first. At that time, the physical body was still very imperfect. Spiritual science takes the view that the Lemurian man was very imperfect on the outside, but never descended from the ape, but the other way around; he left the apes behind at a lower level.

The organization of the physical man at that time was at the level of the reptilian organization, and his soul still dwelled outside his body. Today, the waking person has his soul in his body; in the sleeping person, who does not perceive through the doors of the senses, spiritual science knows that his soul is outside his body. The clairvoyant sees the astral body and its work on the physical body at night. The further back we go, the more we see the astral body at work on the physical. For in spiritual science, the spiritual body is the creator of the physical. In Lemuria, we see the physical human being still surrounded by the active astral body. The astral body or the soul has created the physical body; it is the creator of it, and the important point in time is when this soul was completely outside the body, where, after having made it perfect, this soul now passes from purely external activity to the inner being and becomes the I. An important moment, how in the Lemurian time the incarnation takes place. The Bible expresses this in a grand, powerful and meaningful way when it says: “And God breathed into the man the breath of life, and he became a living soul.” (Genesis 2:7) This indicates the moment when the group soul becomes an individual soul in the human being, the moment of the astral body's entering into the physical body. As a group soul it remained in the spiritual world; the religious expression for this would be: As long as the soul rested in the bosom of the Godhead, it was a group soul. Example: the fingers of the hand; they are members, organs; they stand in exactly the same relation to the physical body as the soul was before it entered the physical body, that is, as a group soul. It was a limb in the great Being, which we may now call God or All-Spirit. In these souls it was the Godhead that acted. Example: water and sponges that fill with water. When these souls moved into the physical body, they became individual drops of water.

Thus, in the process of development, the physical body, as it were, snatches the soul from the Divine. What are the consequences of this? Before, the soul does not feel and act independently, but as the Divine inspires it. This Divine is a part of the common Divine substance. All souls therefore knew something of each other; they had a common consciousness; this now ceased. Individual existence now begins. Before, Divine law was their conductor, now no longer. And with that, selfishness now begins to play a role. God's will was previously the will of one's own soul; now it had to come to its own will, to selfishness. Now it had to come to the birth of selfishness, with it at the same time the birth of self-awareness. The replacement of the world order of wisdom by the world order of love occurred now, that is what spiritual science of all time called it. Love and egoism were not there before.

Love demands that the independent comes to the independent, that free devotion is given. Example of the fact that love was impossible before: My right hand cannot love my left hand. — So now love entered the world, and in its most subordinate form, in sexual love. Spiritual science tells us that this was also the time of the separation of the sexes. With physical incarnation, they appear simultaneously as male and female with differentiation; and with that, the first impulse is given to utilize the first power for the body. So we have two epochs: one completely dominated by wisdom, the second completely dominated by the development of love, the higher and the lower human being. At that time the body was less developed, the soul more highly developed.

At today's stage, the soul is far from having the perfection that the physical body has as such. Later, the soul will develop to the same extent. Example of the wonderfully perfect nature of the physical body: the thigh bone, which, with the smallest amount of material, develops such a load-bearing capacity that even the most ingenious engineer could not have conceived. The spiritual researcher knows that this body is the expression of divine wisdom. Example: Contemplation of the heart. — The physical body of man is embodied wisdom. If, on the other hand, we look at the soul, which in the future will far surpass the physical body in perfection, it is now very imperfect. It is the soul that tempts man to do his deeds, not the physical body. The soul is flawed, sins, and goes astray in the body.

In its kind and perfection, the body is superior to the soul today. At that time, when the human body was occupied by the soul, it was already predisposed to this perfection. Today, this entry of the soul has not yet been fully completed. As much of it as is the group soul has been built up by the physical body. The part that has moved into the body still has to go through this. There is no other way for the human being to develop than to go through the physical body. In the Greek mystery teachings, the soul was therefore called a 'bee'. It absorbs light, it hears, it collects by using the body as an instrument. And what the soul gathers down here on this earth, she will take with her and one day lay on the altar of the deity.

In this way she will become perfect and ever more capable of immortalizing the temporal. The temporal passes away, but the fruits of it will be immortalized by the human soul. But all the marvels, the joys, are destined to remain sensations. So the life of the soul is an essence that brings it to spiritual existence.

By going through the physical existence, it has to establish something that is wisely integrated into the wise construction of the cosmos. This did not come about suddenly, but in a long, long process of becoming.

What is wisely constructed today was once not wisely constructed. Let us imagine the same process with love, for example; here the same development can be seen. Likewise, love rises to ever higher and purer aspects and forms, towards the love that will one day make all people brothers. Love will one day be that which glows and drives the whole cosmos. The whole world is permeated by a stream of love, which will then rule everything, as wisdom does now. Wisdom flows from the world to us, and love will flow from the world to them, to the later races. Our work is to impress the love of the world. But that could never be if the opposite were not also possible. Love must be brought independently, freely from person to person, that is why the era of love begins at the same time as that of egoism. Love will work itself out to overcome egoism, that is its goal. The starting point of the cosmos is love; out of it, egoism has also grown all by itself.

The family, the tribe, groups of people were permeated by love; what is related, what has common blood, loves each other. Although there may be raging conflict, humanity is gradually being driven towards love. It spreads from tribe to tribe, from generation to generation, from nation to nation. When the principle of Jehovah or Yahweh gradually spread among the Jewish people, it is recorded in the secret or spiritual science that existed before our era. And now we speak of a force, of a principle that is called evil, of a force in spiritual science that opposes the Jehovah principle.

I will explain this to you with an example. You know that in school there are students who do not move from one class to the next; they stay put; it is the same in the cosmos. The world was then ruled by entities like us; these beings had completed their development in the Age of Wisdom. But there were also forces in this epoch that had not completed their development in the Age of Wisdom; these now continue to work in the Age of Love. That is the retarded, the luciferic principle; this we see as the opposite pole of the Jahve principle. Therefore, so that love can be free, the principle of separation is at work in the world. It tries its effects on the person who loves other people, on the person who wants to be a free, independent personality. In the counter-effect we see the counter-force, evil, which actually, to speak with Goethe's Faust, creates good. This power, which is the egoistic principle, drives people apart; but love must therefore become ever greater and greater in order to unite people. The principle of Yahweh needed blood relationship to assert the principle of love, and then the principle of Lucifer worked alongside it, promoting selfishness and independence. Love and selfishness are constantly growing, and humanity swings back and forth between them; and that is why the presence of good and evil is so natural, the pendulum movement between love and selfishness. With selfishness, evil came into the world; selfishness must now be overcome. He has to accept it because good could not be achieved without evil. It provides the opportunity for the development of love. Spiritual science sees it in such a way that a point in time had to come when an act, the greatest of our earthly development, had to happen that was suitable for bringing people together; and the forerunner of this is John the Baptist, who prepares this, and in Christ Jesus this act is embodied. The words of Christ Jesus: “If anyone does not give up father and mother and brothers for my sake, he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26; Matthew 19:29), are to be understood spiritually.

Christ, through whom one can receive the great love and the independent human being together, who is able to overcome all the impulses of evil, Christ is the embodiment of this great power, which, after overcoming all selfishness, is to become the bond of love from person to person. Through Christ, the bond of love shall link free man with free man.

Christianity is the power that is only at the beginning of its development; it will overcome the necessary evil and the world. Only the free man can become the true Christian; he can see in the Redeemer the power that leads to the fully liberated personality. Thus evil is the background into which the light of love shines; thus light is only recognizable through darkness. “And the light shone in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.”

Love will gradually permeate human development; the stronger the force it has to overcome, the more it will grow. It is this love that explains the meaning of evil, the position of evil in the world.

And so we may compare this with a word from Fabre d'Olivet. “Consider the pearl with its wondrous radiance and delicate beauty; how is it formed? From the disease of a shell."

In the same way, beauty arises from evil. This is how we must see evil and its mission. Love develops as a pearl of the world. Where does it come from? Let us think of the parable of the pearl!

Yesterday we drew attention to the existence of great leaders of mankind as far back as the epoch we call the Atlantean period of human evolution. We know from what was brought forth yesterday that this epoch ran its course on a continent we call the Old Atlantis, lying between Europe-Africa, and America; we also mentioned that human life at that time was very different from what it is today, particularly with regard to the nature of human consciousness. Our scrutiny disclosed the fact that the consciousness with which man is endowed today developed only gradually, and that he started from a sort of dim clairvoyance. We know further that the human physical bodies of the Atlantean period consisted of a substance far softer, more flexible, more plastic, than at present; and clairvoyant consciousness reveals the fact that at that time men were not yet able, for example, to perceive solid objects such as our eyes see today in sharp outline. The Atlantean could distinguish the objects of the outer world—the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms—but only indistinctly, blurred. Just as nowadays in a foggy autumn evening the street lights show a fringe of color, so people of that time saw objects surrounded by a colored border—an aura, as the term is. The auras were the indication of the spiritual beings belonging to the objects. At certain times in the course of the day the perception of these spiritual beings was very indistinct, but at others very clear, especially in the intermediate states between waking and sleeping.

If we wish vividly to imagine the consciousness of an ancient Atlantean, we must think of it as follows: He did not see a rose, for example, so sharply outlined as we do today. It was blurred, hazy and surrounded by colored borders. Even by day it was indistinct, but it became more so and disappeared entirely in the interval between waking and sleeping. On the other hand, however, he discerned quite clearly what we must term the rose spirit, the rose soul. And the same was true of all other objects in his environment. In the progress of evolution outer objects became ever clearer, while perception of the spiritual beings associated with them grew dimmer. But in compensation man kept developing his self consciousness: he learned to be aware of himself.

Yesterday we mentioned the period in which a distinct sense of the ego emerged, adding that the etheric body came to coincide with the physical body as the last third of the Atlantean age approached. You can imagine that previously the nature of leadership as well was quite different, for at that time there existed nothing like a mutual understanding among men resting on an appeal to reason. In those days of dim clairvoyance mutual understanding was based upon a subconscious influence passing from one to the other. Especially was there still present to a high degree something we know today only in its last misinterpreted and misunderstood survival, namely, a kind of suggestion, a subconscious reciprocal influence, invoking but little the collaboration of the other's soul. Looking back to early Atlantean times we see that a powerful effect was exercized on the other's soul the moment any image, any sensation, arose in the soul, and the will was directed upon the other. All influences were powerful, as was also the will to receive them. Only scraps of all this have survived.

Picture to yourself a man of that time passing another while executing certain gestures. If the observer were even slightly the weaker of the two he would have felt impelled to imitate and mimic all the gestures. The only surviving remnant of this sort of thing is our inclination to yawn when we see another person yawning. Formerly a far closer tie prevailed between human beings, based on the fact that they lived in an atmosphere totally different from that of today. Only during a heavy rain do we nowadays live in water-soaked air, whereas at the time of which we speak the air was constantly saturated with dense moisture; and in the early Atlantean epoch man was composed of a substance no more dense than that of certain jellyfish now living in the sea and scarcely distinguishable from the surrounding water. That was the way man was constituted at that time, and he solidified only gradually. Nevertheless we know that even then he was exposed to influences not only of the regular guiding higher spiritual beings who either dwelt on the sun or were distributed among the various planets of our solar system, but also of the Luciferic spirits that influenced his astral body; and we have learned, too, in what manner these influences took effect. But we found further that those who were to be the leaders of the Atlantean people had to combat these Luciferic influences in their own astral body. By reason of the spiritual and clairvoyant nature of their consciousness all men of that time could perceive whatever spiritual influences were exerted on them.—Nowadays one who knows nothing of spiritual science laughs when you tell him his astral body shows the effects of Luciferic spirits; but then, he does not know that the influence of these spirits is far stronger than it would be if he took note of them.

“The Devil your good-folk ne'er scent,
E'en though he have them by the collar.”

That is a very profound utterance in Goethe's Faust; and many a materialistic influence of today would not exist if people knew that we are by no means rid of all the Luciferic influences as yet.

In Atlantis the leaders and their disciples kept a careful watch for everything that excited passions, instincts, and desires, for everything emanating from that quarter which aroused in man a deeper interest in his physical-sensible surroundings than was beneficial for his progressive development in the cosmic scheme. The first duty of one who aspired to become a leader was to practice this self-knowledge, to guard carefully against anything that might arise in him through Lucifer's influence. He had to study these Luciferic spiritual beings in his own astral body most accurately, for by so doing he could keep them at a distance. This also enabled him to perceive the other divine-spiritual beings, the higher, guiding ones, and particularly those that had transferred their own sphere of action from the earth to the sun, or to other planets; and the regions beheld by men corresponded to that from which they had descended. There were human souls, for instance, that had come down from Mars; and when these, in keeping with their development, combatted the Luciferic influences in their own astral body, they attained to a higher degree of clairvoyance, to a pure and good seership, and they beheld the higher spiritual beings of the region from which they themselves had descended, from the Mars region. Souls that had come down from Saturn learned to see the Saturn beings, those from Jupiter or Venus, the Jupiter or Venus beings: each beheld his own region.

But the most advanced among men, those who had survived the moon crisis, were able gradually to prepare themselves to envision not only the spiritual beings of Mars, Jupiter, or Venus, but those of the sun itself, the exalted sun beings. Having come down from the various planets the initiates were again able to behold the spirituality of these planets. From this it is clear why in ancient Atlantis there were institutions, schools, where those who had descended, for example, from Mars were accepted, when sufficiently mature, for the purpose of studying the mysteries of Mars; and that there were other sanctuaries where those who had come from other planets could learn their mysteries. Applying the later term “oracle” to these institutions, we have in Atlantis a Mars Oracle, where the mysteries of Mars were studied, a Saturn Oracle, a Jupiter Oracle, a Venus Oracle, and so on. The highest was the Sun Oracle; and the loftiest of all the initiates was the ranking initiate of the Sun Oracle.

Because suggestion and the influences of will played so important a part, the whole method of instruction was very different. Let us try to imagine the nature of the intercourse between teacher and pupil. Assuming the presence of spiritual teachers who had achieved initiation as by an act of grace, we ask, How did the later neophytes arrive at initiation in the Atlantean age? Here we must imagine first of all the mighty impression exercized by those already initiated—through their whole conduct, their mere presence—upon those predestined to become their pupils. The very sight of an Atlantean initiate was enough to start a sympathetic vibration in the soul of the neophyte, thus disclosing his fitness for the discipleship. The influences that passed between men at that time were entirely remote from objective day-consciousness, and the type of instruction we know today was then unnecessary. All intercourse with the teacher, everything the teacher did, worked hand in hand with men's imitative faculty. A great deal passed unconsciously from teacher to pupil; hence the most important factor, for those sufficiently matured through their previous life conditions, was that in the beginning they should merely be admitted to the sanctuaries and remain in contact with their teachers. Then, by observing what the teachers did and by impressions made on their feelings and sensations, they were trained—prepared, indeed, over a very long period of time. Eventually the harmonious accord between the soul of the teacher and the soul of the pupil reached the point where everything the teacher possessed in the way of deeper spiritual secrets passed over of itself to the disciple.—Such were the conditions in those ancient times.

Now, what was the situation after the union of the etheric and physical bodies had become established? Although the two bodies had come to cover completely during the Atlantean epoch, the union was as yet not very firm, so that by an effort of will the teacher could, in a certain sense, withdraw the pupil's etheric body from the physical. It was no longer possible, even when the right moment had come, for the teacher's wisdom to pass over into the pupil as of its own accord; but the teacher could easily withdraw the pupil's etheric body and then the pupil could see whatever the teacher saw. So the slight or loose connection between the etheric and physical bodies made it possible to release the former, and the wisdom, the clairvoyant vision, of the master passed over into the disciple.

Then there occurred the great cataclysm that swept away the Atlantean Continent. Mighty elemental disturbances in air and water, terrific upheavals in the earth, gradually altered the entire face of the globe. Europe, Asia, and Africa, which had been dry land only to a very slight extent, arose out of the water, as did likewise America. Atlantis disappeared. Men migrated eastward and westward, and a great variety of settlements came into being. But after the mighty catastrophe mankind had advanced another step. Again a change had taken place in the connection between the etheric and physical bodies: in the post-Atlantean time the union of the two became much firmer. The teacher could now no longer detach the pupil's etheric body by an impulse of will and thereby transmit his power of vision as he had formerly done. Hence initiation, leading to vision of the spiritual world, had to take another form which can be described somewhat as follows:

The instruction which had been based largely upon direct psychic influence from teacher to pupil had gradually to be superseded by a form slowly approaching what we know as instruction today; and the farther the post-Atlantean age advanced, the greater grew the resemblance to our modern method of instruction. Corresponding to the Atlantean oracles, institutions were now established by the great leaders of mankind exhibiting similarities to the old Atlantean oracles: Mysteries, initiation temples, came into being in the post-Atlantean epoch; and just as formerly those fitted for it were received into the oracles, so now they were admitted to the Mysteries. There the neophytes were carefully trained by means of exacting instruction, because they could no longer be influenced as they were formerly. In all civilizations over a long period of time we find such Mysteries. Whether you seek in the culture we knew as the first post-Atlantean, which ran its course in ancient India, or in that of Zarathustra, or among the Egyptians or Chaldeans, you will invariably find neophytes being admitted to the Mysteries which were something part-way between church and school; and there they underwent a severe training calculated to promote thinking and feeling as these apply to events of the invisible, spiritual world—not merely as related to things of the sense world.

And what was taught there can now be accurately defined: to a great extent it was the same as what we have come to know today as anthroposophy. That was the subject of study in the Mysteries; and it differed only in that it was adapted to the customs of that time and was imparted according to strict rules. Today people who in a certain sense are ripe can be told of the mysteries of the higher worlds in a more or less free way and comparatively rapidly. Of old, however, the instruction was strictly regulated. In the first grade, for instance, only a certain sum of knowledge was imparted and all else kept completely secret. Not until the pupil had digested this was he apprised of anything pertaining to a higher grade. Through this sort of preparation, concepts, ideas, sensations, and feelings referring to the spiritual world were implanted in his astral body, a procedure tending at the same time to combat the influences of Lucifer; for all that is imparted in the way of spiritual-scientific concepts refers to the higher worlds, not to the world in which Lucifer aims to stimulate man's interest, not to the sense world alone.

Eventually, when the neophyte had been prepared in this way, the time approached for him to be guided to independent vision, when he himself should see in the spiritual world. This implied the ability to reflect in his etheric body everything he had accumulated in his astral body; for vision of the spiritual world is achieved only when the fruits of study stored in the astral body are experienced so intensely, through certain feelings and sensations connected with the knowledge acquired, that not only the astral body, but the denser etheric body as well, is thereby influenced. If the pupil was to rise from learning to seeing, all that had been taught him must have borne fruit.

That is why, throughout the Indian, Persian, Egyptian, and Greek epochs the training period closed with the following act. First the pupil was again prepared for a long time—now not through learning, but by means of what we call meditation and other exercises designed to develop inner concentration, inner tranquility, inner equanimity. He was trained to make his astral body in every respect a citizen of the spiritual worlds; and when the right time had come the conclusion of this development consisted in his being placed in a deathlike state lasting three and a half days. While in Atlantean times the etheric and physical bodies were so loosely joined that the former could be withdrawn more easily than in later periods, it had now become necessary in the Mysteries to throw the neophyte into a deathlike sleep. While this lasted he was either placed in a coffinlike box or bound to a sort of cross—something of that sort. The initiator, known as the hierophant, possessed the power to work upon the astral, and particularly upon the etheric body—for during this procedure the etheric left the physical body. That is something different from sleep: in sleep the physical and etheric bodies remain in bed while the astral body and ego withdraw; but in this final act of initiation only the physical body remained in place. The etheric body was simply withdrawn from the greater part, at least, of the physical body—from the whole upper portion; and this left the candidate in a deathlike state. Everything that had been learned through meditation and other exercises was now impressed into the etheric body while in this condition. During these three and a half days the neophyte really moved about in the spiritual worlds wherein the higher beings dwell. Finally the hierophant called him back, meaning that he had the power to awaken him; and the candidate brought with him a knowledge of the spiritual world. Now he could see into this spiritual world and could proclaim its truths to his fellow men who were not yet ready to envision it themselves.

Thus the ancient teachers of pre-Christian time had been initiated into the profound secrets of the Mysteries. There they had been guided by the hierophant during the three-and-a-half-day period; they were living witnesses to the existence of a spiritual life and to the fact that behind the physical there is a spiritual world to which man belongs with his higher principles and into which he must find his way. But evolution proceeded. What I have just described to you as an initiation existed most intensively in the first epoch after the Atlantean catastrophe; but the union of the etheric and physical bodies grew ever firmer, hence the procedure became more and more dangerous, because man's whole consciousness accustomed itself increasingly to the physical sense world. You see, that was the import of human evolution: men were to become used to living in this physical world with all their inclinations and propensities. This learning to love the physical world was a great step forward for mankind.

In the early part of the post-Atlantean civilization there still remained a living recollection of the existence of a spiritual world. People said: We, the late descendants, can still see into the spiritual world of our ancestors.—They still retained the dim, dull, clairvoyant consciousness and they knew where lay the world which was their true home. They said, All that surrounds us in our day-consciousness is like a veil spread over truth: it hides the spiritual world from us; it is maya, illusion.—They did not accustom themselves at once to what they now could see, nor could they readily understand that it was intended that they lose their awareness of the old spiritual world. That was the characteristic feature of the first post-Atlantean civilization; hence that was the time in which men could most easily be guided to the spirit: they still felt a lively interest in the spiritual world. Naturally matters could not remain thus, because the Earth's mission consists in man's becoming fond of the forces of the earth and conquering the physical plane. Were you able to envision ancient India, you would discover the spiritual life to be on a tremendously lofty level.

A comprehension of what the original teachers revealed to mankind is possible in this day and age only after a study of spiritual science. For others, the teaching of the great holy Rishis is nonsense, foolishness, for they can make no sense out of what is told them there about the mysteries of the spiritual world. From their standpoint they are naturally quite right: everyone is always right from his own standpoint.

In ancient India spiritual vision was enormously extensive, but the use of even the simplest implements was non-existent. People provided for themselves in the most primitive ways. There was nothing like a natural science of any kind—or what is so called today—because everything that could be observed on the physical plane was looked upon as maya, the great illusion; and only by uplift to the great Sun Being or similar beings was the real, the true, to be found. But again, matters could not stop there: among the post-Atlanteans there had to be those as well with the will to conquer the kingdom of earth; and the first attempt to this end was made in the time of Zarathustra. In the transition from the old Indians to the ancient Persians we see a mighty step forwards. In Zarathustra's view the outer world ceased to be mere maya or illusion: he showed men that what surrounds them is of value, though he emphasized the presence of spirit underlying all. While the ancient Indian saw a flower as maya and sought the spirit behind it, Zarathustra said, The flower is something we must value, for it is an integral part of the universal spirit existing in all things; matter grows out of spirit.

We have already mentioned that Zarathustra drew attention to the physical sun as the field of action of spiritual beings. But initiation was difficult; and for those who wanted not merely to be told of the spiritual world by the initiates but to see for themselves into the great sun aura, more drastic measures were called for in connection with their initiation. Furthermore, all human life gradually changed; and in the next cultural epoch, the Egypto-Chaldean, the physical world was conquered to a still greater extent. Man was no longer bent upon a purely spiritual science which studies the realm that underlies the physical: he observed the course of the stars; and in their position and movement, in what is outwardly visible, he sought the language of divine-spiritual beings. In this script co-ordinating visible objects he recognized the will of the Gods. That is the way cosmic interrelationships were studied in the Egypto-Chaldean time. And in Egypt we see arising a geometry applied to external things. Such is the story of man's conquest of the outer world.

In Greece even greater progress was made in this direction. There we see come about the union of soul experiences and external matter. In a Pallas Athene or a Zeus we sense that into the material substance has streamed what first lived in a human soul. It is as though everything which man had made his very own had flowed out into the sense world. But as man became ever more powerful in the sense world and his soul grew more and more attached to it, his alienation from the spiritual world increased correspondingly in the life between death and a new birth. When the soul left an ancient Indian body and entered the spiritual world, there to pass through the requisite development before the next birth, it retained a feeling for the living spirit. Through his whole life the man of that time yearned for a spiritual environment; and all his sensations were kindled by the revelations he had heard concerning life in the spiritual world, even though he was not an initiate himself. So when he passed the portal of death the spiritual world lay open before him, as it were, in light and radiance.

But as the physical world became more and more congenial and men adapted themselves to it ever more readily, the periods between death and birth were proportionately obscured. In the Egyptian epoch this had gone so far, as can be established by clairvoyant consciousness, that in passing from the body into the spiritual world the soul was enveloped in darkness and gloom, in a sense of loneliness, of segregation from other souls; and when a soul feels loneliness and can hold no converse with other souls it experiences a frosty chill. And while the Greeks lived in an age in which, by means of such glorious external beauty, men had made the earth into something quite special, this period was darkest, gloomiest, most chilling, for the souls living between death and rebirth. A noble Greek, questioned as to his sojourn in the nether world, replied, “Better a beggar in the upper world than a king in the realm of shades”. That is not a legend but an utterance actually in accord with the attitude of that time.

It can therefore be said that with the advance of civilization men became more and more alienated from the spiritual world. The initiates who could see into the higher regions of the spiritual world became increasingly rare because of the growing dangers connected with the initiation procedure: it became more and more difficult to preserve life for three and a half days in a cataleptic state, with the etheric body withdrawn.

Then there intervened a regeneration of the whole life of humanity through the impulse already mentioned in the foregoing lectures, the Christ-Impulse. We have described how Christ, the exalted Sun Spirit, gradually approached the earth; we have learned how in Zarathustra's time He still had to be sought in the sun as Ahura Mazdao, and how Moses beheld Him closer by—in the burning bush and in the fire on Mount Sinai. Gradually He entered the sphere of the earth in which a great change was thereby destined to be wrought. The first concern of this Spirit was that men should come to recognize Him when He appeared on this earth.

The salient feature of all the old initiations was the necessity for withdrawing the etheric out of the physical body. Even in the postAtlantean initiations the candidate had to be reduced to a deathlike state of sleep, that is, a state in which he was devoid of physical consciousness. This implied coming under the control of another ego: it was invariably thus. The candidate's ego was wholly controlled by his initiator, his hierophant. He quitted his physical body completely: he did not dwell in it, nor did his own ego exercize any influence upon it. But the great aim of the Christ-Impulse is that man shall undergo a wholly self-contained ego development and not descend to a state of consciousness beneath that of the ego in order to attain to the higher worlds: and in order to achieve this, someone had first to offer himself in sacrifice so that the Christ Spirit itself might be received into a human body. We have already pointed out that a certain Initiate Who had prepared Himself through a great many incarnations had become able, beginning with a definite period in His life, to yield up His own ego and receive the Christ within Himself. This is indicated by the Baptism in the Jordan, as told in the Gospel of St. John.

Here we must ask, What was the real import of this Baptism? We know that John the Baptist, the Forerunner who told of the coming of Christ Jesus, carried it out among those whom he had prepared to receive the Christ in the right way. We will understand what the St. John Gospel tells us of the Baptism only if we bear in mind that John's purpose in baptizing was the true preparation for the coming of Christ. A modern baptism, which is but an imitation of the original symbol, provides no understanding of the question. It was not a mere sprinkling with water, but a complete immersion: the candidate lived under water for a certain length of time, varying according to circumstances. What this signified we shall now learn by delving into the mystery of the being of man.

Recall to mind that the human being consists of physical body, etheric body, astral body, and ego. In the waking state during the daytime these four principles are firmly knit together, but in sleep the physical and etheric bodies remain in bed, while the astral body and the ego are outside. In death, on the other hand, the physical body remains as a corpse: the etheric body withdraws, and for a short time the ego, the astral body, and the etheric body remain united. And to those of you who have heard even a few of my lectures it must be clear that in this moment a quite definite experience appears first: the deceased sees his past life spread out before him like a magnificent tableau; spatially side by side, all the situations of his life surround him. That is because one of the functions of the etheric body is that of memory bearer, and even during life nothing but the physical body prevents all this from appearing before him. After death, with the physical body laid aside, everything the man had experienced during his lifetime can enter his consciousness.

Now, I have mentioned as well that a retrospect of that sort also results from being in peril of death, or from any severe fright or shock. You know, of course, from reports that when a man is in danger of drowning or of falling from a mountain height, he experiences his whole past life as in a great tableau—provided he does not lose consciousness. Well, what a man thus experiences as the result of some danger, such as drowning, was experienced by nearly all who were baptized by John. The baptism consisted in keeping people under water until they had experienced their past life. But what they experienced in this way was, of course, experienced as a spiritual picture; and here it became apparent that in this abnormal state the spiritual experiences linked up, in a way, with the spiritual world in general, so that after being lifted out of the water again, after the baptism by John, a man knew: There is a spiritual world! In truth, what I bear within myself is something that can live without the body.—After baptism a man was convinced of the existence of a world to which he belonged in respect of his spirit.

What, then, had John the Baptist brought about by baptizing in this way? People had become more and more attached to the physical world as a means of mutual contact, and believed the physical element to be the true reality. But those who came to the Baptist experienced their own lives as spiritual: after being baptized they knew that they were something over and above what their physical body made them. Human interest had gradually developed in the direction of the physical world; but John evoked in those he baptized the awareness of the existence of a spiritual world to which their higher selves belonged. You need only clothe this utterance in other words and you have: “Transform your interest that is now directed toward the physical world.” And that is what they did—those who received the baptism in the right way. They knew, then, that spirit dwelt in them, that their ego belonged to the spiritual world.

It was in the physical body that this conviction was gained. No special procedure was involved, as formerly in the initiations: what occurred was experienced in the physical body. And in addition, the experience of the baptism, as carried out by John, acquired a special meaning as a consequence of the manner in which the whole doctrine of the time was received and merged with the soul—the doctrine established by Moses' revelation. After baptism, a man not only was aware of his oneness with the spiritual world, but he recognized the particular spiritual world which was approaching the earth. He knew that what now pervaded the earth was identical with what had revealed itself to Moses as ehjeh asher ehjeh in the burning bush and in the fire on Sinai; and he knew that the word Jahve or Jehovah, or ehjeh asher ehjeh, or I am the I AM, was the true expression of that spiritual world. So through the baptism by John men knew not only that they were one with the spiritual world, but that in this spiritual world there dwelt the I AM out of which the spirit in them was born. That was the preparation John imparted through his baptisms; that was the feeling, the sensation, he aroused in those whom he baptized. Their number, of course, was necessarily small, since few of them were ripe enough to experience all this when submerged; but some discerned the approach of the Spirit later to be called the Christ.

Try now to compare all this with what was set forth yesterday. What the ancient spiritual beings had brought about was love based on blood ties, on physical communion, whereas the aim of the Luciferic spirits was to render each individual dependent solely upon his own personality, his own individuality. Lucifer and the lofty spiritual beings had been working simultaneously. Gradually the old blood ties had loosened, as can be established even historically. Think of the conglomeration of peoples in the great Roman Empire! That was a result of the loosening of the blood ties and of the universal desire, in varying degrees, to find the center of gravity in personality. But another result was that people had lost contact with the spiritual world: they had identified themselves with the physical world and developed a love for the physical plane. As the ego-consciousness had increased through Lucifer's agency, man had proportionately coalesced with the physical world and rendered barren his life between death and a new birth.

Now, the Baptist had indeed prepared something that was of great significance for mankind: he had prepared the way for man to remain within his personality and at the same time find there, after the submersion, exactly what once he had experienced as “gods” at the time when he himself still lived in water, when the atmosphere was saturated with moisture and fog. That experience in the divine worlds was now repeated. In spite of being an ego, man, as a human being, could now be reunited with his fellows, could be led back to love, a love that was now spiritualized.

That is the mainspring of the Christ event characterized from another aspect. Christ represents the descent to our earth of the spiritual power of love, though even today its mission is only beginning to take effect. If we trace this idea by means of the John and the Luke Gospels we find spiritual love to be the very core of the Christ impulse through which the egos that had been sundered are increasingly brought together again—but now in respect of their innermost souls. From the beginning, men have been able to surmise but dimly what Christ had come to mean for the world; and today very little of it has been realized because the sundering force, the after-effect of the Luciferic powers, is still present and the Christ principle has been active only for a short time. And though nowadays people seek to co-operate in certain external activities, they have not so much as an inkling of what is meant by harmony and accord between souls where the most intimate and important matters are concerned—or at best they vaguely sense it with their thoughts, their intellect, which counts for little.

Truly, Christianity is only at the beginning of its activity: it will penetrate ever deeper into the souls of men, will increasingly ennoble their ego. This has been felt particularly strongly by people of the younger nations: they feel the need of identifying themselves with the Christ force, to steep themselves in it, if they are to get on. One of our contemporaries in eastern Europe, the executor of the great Russian philosopher Solovyev, once said: “Christianity must unite us as a nation, otherwise we shall lose our ego, and with it, all possibility of being a people.” A mighty utterance, emanating as from an intensive intellect for Christianity. But that again proves the need for Christianity to penetrate into the depths of the human soul.

Let us examine a certain very radical case. It will show us that precisely in respect of the innermost life of the soul even the most high-minded and noble men are still far from possessing what will one day lay hold on them, when Christianity shall have filled man's innermost thoughts, his innermost ideas and feelings. Think of Tolstoi and of his work during the last decades which seeks to reveal in its own way the true meaning of Christianity. A thinker of his caliber should arouse enormous respect, especially in the West where whole libraries are cluttered up with lengthy philosophical manglings of the same thing that a Tolstoi can say in great and powerful words in a book like On Life. There are pages in Tolstoi's writings in which a certain extensive understanding of theosophical truths is expounded with elemental grandeur, truths, to be sure, which a philosopher of western Europe cannot hit upon so accurately—or at best he must write volumes about them, because what they reveal is mighty. It can be said that in Tolstoi's works there is an undertone we can call the Christ impulse. Engross yourselves in his books, and you will see that what pervades him is the Christ impulse.

Now turn to Tolstoi's great contemporary, interesting if for no other reason than that from a comprehensive philosophical Weltanschauung he attained to the very gates of a life of such genuine vision as enabled him to survey an epoch in full perspective—apocalyptically, so to speak. While his visions themselves are distorted, due to an inadequate background, Solovyev nevertheless rises to clairvoyant perception of the future: he places before us a forecast of the 20th Century. And if we read his writings with sympathetic understanding we find there much that is great and high-minded, especially in connection with Christianity. Yet he speaks of Tolstoi as of an enemy of Christianity, as of the Antichrist! This goes to show that two men today can be profoundly convinced they are giving their epoch the best there is, can act out of the very depths of their souls, and yet fail to understand each other: for each of them the other is “anti”. Nowadays people do not reflect that if outer harmony, a life permeated by love, is to become a possibility, the Christ impulse must first have penetrated to the profoundest depths: love of mankind must be something very different from what it is today, even in the noblest spirits.

The impulse that was foretold and then entered the world is only at the beginning of its work, and it must be ever better understood. What is it that is lacking, particularly in our time, among all those who cry for Christianity and declare it a necessity, yet cannot bring it within reach? Anthroposophy, spiritual science, that is what they lack: the present-day way of understanding Christ. For Christ is so great that each successive epoch will have to find new means of comprehending Him. In former centuries other ways and forms were employed in the search for wisdom. Today we need anthroposophy; and what anthroposophy offers today for an understanding of Christ will hold good through long ages to come, because anthroposophy will prove to be something capable of stimulating every human capacity for knowledge. Humanity will in time grow into a comprehension of the Christ.

But even the anthroposophical conception is a transient one—we are aware of this; and the time will come when so great a subject, now framed in ephemeral terms, will call for still vaster conceptions.

This is the third opportunity I have had of speaking in Switzerland about the greatest of all events in the history of the Earth and of Mankind. The first was in Basle, when I spoke of the aspect of this event presented in the Gospel of St. John; on the second occa.sion the lectures were based on the account given by St. Luke; and now, on the third occasion, the basis of the lectures is to be the Gospel of St. Matthew.¹

As I have often said, it is an important fact that accounts of this event have been preserved in four records, in certain respects seeming to differ from each other. This often gives rise to negative and destructive criticism from materialistic scholarship to-day yet it is precisely the point that we, as anthroposophists, consider significant. For nobody should venture to portray any fact or being he has observed from one side only. If a tree is photographed from a single side, it cannot justifiably be said that this photograph is a true or complete portrayal of the whole outer appearance of the tree. If, however, it is photographed from four sides, by comparing the four pictures—even if they differ considerably—we can gain a comprehensive idea of the tree. If this analogy holds good for ordinary things, even in such an external sense, how could anyone fail to realise that an event embracing in the fullest sense all happenings and essential facts of existence would be incomprehensible if it were described from one side only. We should not therefore speak of ‘contradictions’ in the four Gospels. The truth is far rather that each writer knew himself to be capable of describing only one aspect of this stupendous event and was aware that by comparison of the different accounts it would be possible for humanity gradually to form a comprehensive picture of it. So we too will be patient and try to gain some understanding of this greatest of all events in Earth-evolution from the four accounts given in the New Testament.

From what has been said in other lecture-courses, you will certainly be able to gather how the four points of view presented in the Gospels can be differentiated. But now, before characterizing these four points of view even in their purely external aspect, let me make it clear at the beginning of this lecture-course that I shall not do what is customary nowadays when studying the Gospels. It is usual to begin with accounts of their historical origins. But it will be better for us to wait until the end of the lectures before hearing what there is to be said about the origin of the Gospel of St. Matthew. It is after all only natural and would be borne out in the case of other branches of knowledge, that the gist of any subject must be thoroughly grasped before its history can be truly understood. No one can usefully study a history of arithmetic, for example, who is entirely ignorant of that subject. The proper place for historical details is at the end of a study, and when this procedure is not followed the natural needs of human cognition are being overlooked. Here, then, we shall try to satisfy these needs by examining, first, the content of the Gospel of St. Matthew, and afterwards by saying something about its historical origin.

Study of the Gospels, even of their external form, makes us aware of a certain difference in the modes of expression, and this feeling will be intensified when we recall what was said in my lectures on the Gospels of St. John and St. Luke. In trying to fathom the mighty communications given in the Gospel of St. John, we are almost overwhelmed by their sublimity and spiritual grandeur; we feel that this Gospel reveals the very highest goal to which human wisdom can aspire and human cognition gradually attain. Man seems to be standing below, lifting the eyes of his soul to the heights of cosmic existence and saying to himself : However insignificant I may be, the Gospel of St. John enables me to divine that some element with which I myself am akin descends into my soul and imbues me with the feeling of infinitude.—Thus the spiritual magnitude of the cosmic life to which man is related is experienced a by the soul when contemplating the Gospel of St. John.

In studying St. Luke's Gospel we found that the manner of its presentation was different. In contemplating the Gospel of St. John it is paramountly the spiritual greatness—even though divined but dimly—that pervades the soul like a magic breath, whereas in the Gospel of St. Luke the influence is more inward, causing in the soul an intensification of all that the powers of cosmic love and sacrifice can effect in the world when we are able to share in them. So, while St. John describes the Being of Christ Jesus in His spiritual stature, St. Luke shows us His immeasurable capacity for sacrifice. St. Luke gives us an inkling of what this power of sacrificing love has brought about in the evolution of the world and of mankind—this love, which, in the same way as other forces, pulsates and weaves throughout the universe. We see, therefore, that while it is mainly the element of feeling that is uppermost when we steep ourselves in the Gospel of St. Luke, it is the element of understanding—informing us, to some extent, of the very foundations of knowledge and of its goals—that is aroused by the Gospel of St. John. That Gospel speaks more to our faculty of cognition, our understanding, the Gospel of St. Luke more to our hearts. The Gospels themselves produce these feelings in us; but it was also my endeavour to let the keynotes sound through the lectures that were given on the two Gospels in the light of Spiritual Science. Those who heard only words in the lectures on the Gospel of St. John or in those on the Gospel of St. Luke, certainly did not hear everything. There was a fundamental difference in the manner and style of speaking in the two lecture-courses. And everything must again be different when we come to study the Gospel of St. Matthew.

The Gospel of St. Luke makes us feel as if all the human love that ever existed in the evolution of mankind poured into the Being who lived as Christ Jesus at the beginning of our era.

Considered merely in its external aspect, the Gospel of St. Matthew appears at first to present a picture of greater variety than do the other two Gospels, even than do all the other three. For when the time comes to study the Gospel of St. Mark we shall find that in a certain respect it too presents one particular aspect.

The Gospel of. St, John reveals to us the magnitude of the wisdom of Christ Jesus; the Gospel of St. Luke, the power of His love. When we study the Gospel of St. Mark, the picture will primarily be one of might, of the creative Powers permeating the universe in all their glory. In that Gospel there is something overwhelming in the intensity with which the cosmic forces come to expression: when we really begin to understand the content of the Gospel of St. Mark, it is as though these forces were surging towards us from all directions of space. While the Gospel of St. Luke brings inner warmth into the soul and the Gospel of St. John fills it with hope, the Gospel of St. Mark makes us aware of the overwhelming power and splendour of the cosmic forces—so overwhelming that the soul feels well nigh shattered.

The Gospel of St. Matthew is different. All three elements are present here: the warmth of feeling and love, the knowledge full of hope and promise, the majesty of the universe. These elements are present in the Gospel of St. Matthew in a modified form and for this reason seem to be more humanly akin to us than in the other Gospels. Whereas the wisdom, the love and the splendour depicted in the other three Gospels might overwhelm us almost to the point of collapse, we feel able to stand erect before the picture presented in the Gospel of St. Matthew, even to approach and stand on a level with it. Everything is more humanly related to us; we never feel shattered, although it too contains elements which in the other Gospels tend to have this effect. It is the most human of the four records and describes Christ Jesus as a man, in such a way that in all His deeds He is near us in a human sense. In a certain respect the Gospel of St. Matthew is like a commentary on the other Gospels. It clarifies to some extent what otherwise is often beyond the reach of human understanding and once we realise this, great illumination is shed upon the nature of the other three Gospels.

In the Gospel of St. John we are shown how with his wisdom and knowledge man can set out towards the goal that is attainable; this is made plain at the very beginning of the Gospel, where Christ Jesus is referred to as the Creative Logos. The highest spiritual conception our minds and hearts can attain is presented in the very first sentences of this Gospel.

It is different in the Gospel of St. Matthew. This Gospel begins by giving the lineage of the man Jesus of Nazareth from a definite point in history and within a particular people. It shows us how the qualities that were concentrated in Jesus of Nazareth had been acquired through heredity from Abraham and his descendants; how throughout three times fourteen generations a people had allowed the best it had to impart to flow into the blood, in order that preparation might be made for the flowering, in one single Individuality, of the highest powers possible to man.

The Gospel of St. John points to the infinity of the Logos, the Gospel of St. Luke leads back to the very beginning of mankind's evolution. The Gospel of St. Matthew shows us a man, Jesus of Nazareth, born from a people whose qualities had been transmitted by heredity from Abraham, the father of the tribal stock, through three times fourteen generations.

It can only very briefly be indicated here that anyone who desires really to understand the Gospel of St. Mark must have some knowledge of the cosmic forces streaming through the evolution of our world. For the picture of Christ Jesus presented in that Gospel shows us that the Cosmos itself—an essence of the cosmic forces in the infinitude of space—is operating in and through a human agency. St. Mark sets out to describe the deeds of Christ as extracts of cosmic activities, how in Christ Jesus, the God-Man on the Earth, we have before us a quintessence of the boundless power of the Sun. Thus St. Mark describes to us the manner in which the forces of the heavens and the stars operate through human powers.

In a certain way the Gospel of St. Matthew too is concerned, with stellar activity, for at the very beginning it is clearly indicated that cosmic happenings are connected with the evolution of humanity, inasmuch as the three Magi are guided to the birthplace of Jesus by a star. But this Gospel does not describe cosmic workings as does the Gospel of St. Mark; it does not require us to raise our eyes to these heights. It shows us three men, three Magi, and the effect the Cosmos has upon them. We can contemplate these three men and become aware of what they are feeling. Thus if it is a matter of being able to experience cosmic realities, the Gospel of St. Matthew directs our gaze, not to infinitudes of space, but to man himself, to the effect, the reflection, of cosmic activities in human hearts.

(Again I beg that these indications shall be taken merely as pointing to the style in which the Gospels are written. For it is fundamentally characteristic of the Gospels, I repeat, that they describe events from different angles. The distinctive style in which each is written is in accordance with what they want to convey about the greatest event in the evolution of Mankind and of the Earth.)

So we see that the fact of paramount significance at the beginning of the Gospel of St. Matthew is that attention is called to the direct blood-relationships of Jesus of Nazareth. An answer is given to thc question: How was the physical personality of Jesus of Nazareth constituted? How were all the qualities of a people since its founder, Abraham, concentrated in this one personality in order that the Being we call Christ could reveal His presence there ? We are told: In order that the Christ Being might be able to incarnate in a physical body, this body must have qualities that could only be present if all the qualities of the blood of Abraham's descendants were concentrated in the single personality of Jesus of Nazareth. We arc therefore shown how the blood of Jesus of Nazareth leads back through the generations to the founder of the Hebrew people; and how on this account the essential attributes of this people, their particular function in world-history, in the evolution of the world and of humanity, were concentrated in the physical personality of Jesus of Nazareth. To understand the intention of the writer of the Gospel of St. Matthew in giving this introduction, it is therefore necessary to know something about the intrinsic nature of the Hebrew people and to be able to answer the question: What was this race, by virtue of its special character, able to give to mankind?

Materialistic history pays little attention to what must here be advanced. It gives abstract accounts of outer happenings, placing one people practically on a par with every other. But this entirely ignores a fact which anyone wishing to understand the evolutionary process must regard as fundamental, namely, that no people has the same task and mission as another; each has its own specific task and mission; each has to contribute a particular share of the riches which should accrue to the Earth as the result of mankind's evolution. And each share is distinct from the others. Even down to physical details, each people is so constituted that it can make its appropriate contribution to humanity as a whole. In other words: the physical, etheric and astral bodies of human beings belonging to a particular people develop and arc combined in such a way as to afford the appropriate instrument for the contribution that people has to make to humanity.—What, then, was to be the contribution of the Hebrew people, and how were its essential qualities concentrated in the body of Jesus of Nazareth?

To understand the mission of the Hebrew people we must make a deeper study of the whole evolution of humanity. It will be necessary to speak with greater precision of certain matters indicated more briefly in other lectures and in the book Occult Science—an Outline. The part played by the Hebrew people in the evolution of mankind as a whole will be most easily understood if we take the Atlantean catastrophe as a starting-point.

When the face of the Earth was changed as a result of the Atlantean Deluge, the peoples then living on the continent of Atlantis moved from the West across to the East in two main streams, one taking a more northerly, the other a more southerly course. One stream in this great movement of Atlantean peoples through Europe towards Asia spread to the region around the Caspian Sea, while another passed through the land we now call Africa. Over in Asia a kind of confluence of these two streams took place, as when two currents meet and a vortex is formed.

But what chiefly interests us about these peoples who were thus forced to make their way across to the East from Atlantis, is their mode of perception, the general form of their soul-life—in the case, at least, of the main mass of them. In the first post-Atlantean epoch man's whole constitution of soul was different from what it came to be later on—different above all from what it is to-day. Those ancient people still had clairvoyant perception of their surroundings; they were able to behold the spiritual, and even what is now seen physically was perceived then in a more spiritual way. But a point of special importance is that this clairvoyance of the original post-Atlantean peoples was again different, in a certain respect, from that of the Atlanteans themselves in the heyday of their culture. Their clairvoyance enabled men to gaze into a spiritual world with purity of vision, and the revelations of the spiritual world engendered impulses for the good in their souls. Indeed it would be true to say that during the prime of Atlantean culture, the strength of impulses for the good depended upon the ability of a man to look deeply into the spiritual world; in one with less ability these impulses were correspondingly weaker.

The changes which then took place on. the Earth were such that already towards the last third of the Atlantean epoch, but especially in the early post-Atlantean epoch, the good aspects of the old Atlantean clairvoyance had gradually disappeared and were preserved only by those who had undergone special training in the centres of Initiation. As time went on, what remained of this clairvoyance as a natural, inborn gift assumed a character leading all too easily to vision of the evil Powers of existence. Clairvoyance had become too weak to behold the good Powers. On the other hand, vision of the evil, delusive Powers remained, and a form of clairvoyance by no means commendable was widespread in certain regions inhabited by post-Atlantean peoples, a clairvoyance acting in itself as a kind of tempter.

This decline of the old clairvoyance was accompanied by a gradual development of the faculty of sense-perception recognized as normal for human beings to-day. But the things men perceived with their eyes in the first post-Atlantean epoch, and which they perceive normally to-day, were not sources of temptation in that past time, because the soul-forces that are now the cause of temptation had not yet developed. External perceptions which may give rise to inordinate enjoyment in a man to-day, however deceptive they may be, did not constitute any particular temptation for early post-Atlantean man. It was when inherited remains of the old clairvoyance awakened in him that his temptation began. He had practically no vision of the good side of the spiritual world; the Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces bad such a strong effect upon him that what he saw Were the Powers of temptation and delusion. With these inherited faculties of ancient clairvoyance he perceived the Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces. And so it became necessary for those whose wisdom for the leadership and guidance of human evolution had been received from the Mysteries, to institute means to ensure that in spite of these adverse circumstances men should ultimately be led to the good goal and to clarity of understanding.

The people who had spread to the East after the great Atlantean catastrophe were at very different stages of evolution; it can be said that the level of moral and spiritual development was highest in those who went farthest East. The dawning faculty of external perception was like the opening of a new world, revealing with ever greater clarity the grandeur and splendour of the outer world of the senses. This faculty was especially characteristic of the people who settled to the North of present-day India, in the regions extending to. the Caspian Sea, as far as the Oxus and Jaxartes. In this region of Asia there had settled groups of people from whom many racial streams spread out in different directions, one such stream being the ancient Indian people whose spiritual view of thc world has often been characterized.

Soon after the Atlantean. Flood, indeed to some extent - while it was still in process, the sense-awareness of external reality had already developed among this group of people in Middle Asia. But at the same time, in the human beings who had incarnated there, a kind of memory-knowledge persisted, a living recollection of what they had experienced in the days of Atlantis. This characteristic was strongest in those who went down into India. They had, it is true, great understanding of the splendour of the external world; their faculties of observation and sense-perception were more developed than those of the other peoples, but. at thc same time their remembrance of the ancient spiritual powers of vision in Atlantis was vivid and strong. Hence there arose in them an intense longing for the spiritual world which they remembered; it was easy for them to gaze again into that world—but they also had the feeling that what was presented to the external senses was maya, illusion. And so in these people too the impulse arose not to pay particular attention to the outer world of sense but to do everything possible to enable the soul—now through development deliberately induced, through yoga—to rise to the realm where it could receive the revelations which in the days of old Atlantis had come directly from the spiritual world.

This tendency to despise the outer world, to regard it as illusion and to follow only those impulses which led to the spiritual, was less strongly developed in the people who remained farther North. But they were in a very tragic situation. The innate qualities of the ancient Indian people were such that it was comparatively easy for any one of them to undergo a definite training in Yoga enabling him to rise once again into the realms he had known in Atlantean times. It was easy for such a man to overcome, what he regarded as illusion. He overcame it in acts of cognition, and his supreme conviction was this: The sense-world is maya, is illusion; but if I make efforts to develop my soul I shall reach the world lying behind the sense-world! Thus it was through an inner process that the Indian succeeded in overcoming what he regarded as maya.

The character of the more northerly peoples was different. They were the Persians, the Medes, the Bactrians—known in history as Aryans in the narrower sense. In them too there was a strong tendency towards the development of external perception, external intellectuality. But the urge to achieve through inner development, through some form of Yoga, what the Atlanteans had experienced quite naturally, was not particularly marked. Recollection of the past was not strong enough in these more northerly peoples to become a striving to overcome, through knowledge, the illusion of the outer world. Their attitude of soul was not the same as that of the Indians. The attitude of an Iranian, a Persian, a Mede, might be expressed in modern words somewhat as follows: If we once dwelt in the spiritual world, experiencing and perceiving realities of spirit and of soul, and now find ourselves transplanted into the physical world we see with our eyes and grasp with the brain-bound intellect, the cause of this does not lie in man alone; what has to be overcome cannot be overcome merely in the inner being of man. Nothing much would result from that ! An Iranian would have said: It is not only in man that a change has taken place; Nature herself and everything on the Earth must also have changed when man descended from divine-spiritual realms. It cannot therefore be right to leave the surrounding world just as it is, saying simply: This is maya, illusion, but WC will disregard it and rise into the spiritual world! In that way we shall, it is true, bring about a change in ourselves but not in the world around us.—Therefore the attitude of an Iranian did not allow him to say: maya is outspread around me; I will transcend it, will overcome it in my own being and so reach the spiritual world.—No, he said: man belongs to and is a member of the world around him. Therefore if that which is divine in him, and has descended with him from divine-spiritual heights, is to be transformed, not only what is within him must be changed back to its former state, but also everything in the outer world around!—And this was what gave the people the impulse to take an active and vigorous share in transforming thc world.

Whereas in India men said: The world has fallen; what it now presents is maya—in the more northerly regions they said : True, the world has fallen, but it is our task to change it in such a way that it becomes spiritual again. Contemplation, contemplative understanding—this was basically characteristic of the Indian people. Their attitude was simply that sense-perception is illusion, maya. Activity, physical energy, the will to transform external Nature—these were the basic characteristics of the Iranian and other peoples living in regions North of India. They said: The world around us has fallen from the Divine but man is called upon to lead it back again to the Divine! And the innate traits of the Iranian people were sublimated and charged with measureless energy in the spiritual leaders who went forth from the Mysteries.

What took place towards the East and South of the Caspian Sea can only be adequately understood, even outwardly, by comparing it with conditions still farther to the North, that is to say in the regions bordering on the Siberia and Russia of to-day, and extending even into Europe. Here there were people who had preserved much of the ancient clairvoyance and in whom a kind of balance could be held between the faculty of the old spiritual perception and that of material perception, of the new intellectual thinking. Very many among them were still able to look into the spiritual world. This faculty of vision—which had already degenerated and become, as we should say nowadays, a lower astral clairvoyance had in its character a certain effect upon the general evolution of mankind. That this lower form of clairvoyance produces a very definite type of human being, a definite trait of character in those endowed with it, was clearly evident in these people. It was innate in them to demand from surrounding Nature what they needed for their sustenance while expending the minimum of effort themselves. They knew that divine-spiritual Beings are present in the plants, the animals, and so on, because they actually beheld them; they knew that these Beings are the powers behind all physical creation. But this knowledge prompted them to demand that without any effort on their own part the divine-spiritual Beings by whom they had been placed in existence should provide for their sustenance. Many things could be quoted as expressions of the disposition and tenor of soul prevailing in these peoples with their decadent, astral clairvoyance.

In the period which it is important for us to consider now, all these peoples were nomadic, having no settled habitations; they wandered about as herdsmen, without preference for any particular locality, careless with what the Earth had to offer and only too ready to destroy anything around them when they needed it for their sustenance. These people were not called upon, nor indeed were they qualified, to do anything to raise the level of culture, to transform the Earth.

Thus there arose what is perhaps one of the greatest antitheses in the whole of post-Atlantean evolution: the antithesis between these more northerly peoples and the Iranians. Among the Iranians the longing arose to take a hand in what was going on around them, to live settled lives, to acquire possessions through effort, in other words, to apply man's spiritual forces in order to achieve the transformation of Nature. That was the strongest urge in the Iranians. And in the immediately adjacent lands to the North, lived the people who saw into the spiritual world, were on familiar terms, so to speak, with the spiritual beings, but were wanderers, having no inclination for work and without any interest in furthering culture in the physical world.

This drastic antithesis was purely the outcome of the different forms taken by soul-development. It is also known in external history as the great antithesis between Iran and Turan. But the causes of it are not understood. Actually they are as stated above.

Turan lay to the North, in the area towards Siberia. Its inhabitants, as already said, were people heavily endowed with an inherited, lower astral clairvoyance, and who in consequence of their experience in the spiritual world had neither inclination or sufficient understanding to establish any form of external culture. Because these people were of a passive disposition and their priests were often magicians and sorcerers of an inferior type, whenever spiritual matters were concerned they were wont to engage in very questionable magical practices, indeed not infrequently in actual black magic. To the South lay Iran, where at a very early stage, as we have seen, an urge arose in the people to transform the world of sense with even the most primitive means then available and through the spiritual faculties of man to establish forms of external culture and civilization.

Now you will be able to form an idea of the great antithesis between Iran and Turan.—A beautiful myth—the legend of Djemjid—tells how King Djemjid led his people from the North down towards Iran. He had received from the God who would presently come to be recognized and whom he called Ahura Mazdao, a golden dagger by means of which he was to fulfil his mission on Earth. From the apathetic masses of the Turanians, King Djemjid drew people whom he had specially trained, and in the golden dagger we have to see an impulse for the attainment of wisdom connected with the external faculties of men, wisdom capable of redeeming certain faculties that had already become decadent and of imbuing them with the spiritual force man can acquire on the physical plane. This golden dagger, like a plough, turned the earth into arable land, made possible the first, primitive inventions of mankind. It worked on and is working to this clay in all the achievements of culture and civilization in which men take pride. There is great significance in the fact that King Djemjid who went from Turan down to the Iranian country received this dagger from Ahura Mazdao. It represents a force given to man whereby he can work upon and transform external Nature.

The same Being from whom this golden dagger was received was also the great Inspirer of Zarathustra or Zoroaster, Zerdutsch, the leader of the Iranian people. It was Zarathustra who in primeval times—soon after the Atlantean catastrophe—instilled the impulses he was able to bring from the holy Mysteries into the people who felt the urge to apply the power of the human spirit to external culture. Zarathustra was to give new hopes, new vistas of the spiritual world to this people who no longer possessed the ancient Atlantean vision. He opened out the path along which the people were ultimately to realise that the outer sunlight is only the external body of a sublime spiritual Being whom he called Ahura Mazdao, the ‘great’ Aura, in contrast to the 'little' aura of man. Zarathustra wanted to convey that this same Being—then still in remote cosmic distances—would one day descend to the Earth in order to unite His very substance with the Earth and to work on further in the history and evolution of humanity. Thus Zarathustra directed the minds of these people to the same Being who lived later on in history as the Christ.²

The mighty achievement of Zarathustra consisted in this: to the new post-Atlantean humanity who had fallen away from the divine worlds, he revealed the path of re-ascent to the spiritual and gave to men the hope of being able to reach the goal, even with forces that had descended to the level of the physical plane. Whereas the ancient Indian attained to the spiritual in its old form through Yoga-training, a new path was to be opened out to men through the teaching of Zarathustra.

Zarathustra had a. patron—a figure of great significance. But here I must emphasize that thc date of the Zarathustra of whom I am speaking was said, even by the Greeks, to have been five thousand years before the Trojan War; He is not, therefore, the figure whom external history calls by that name, nor the Zarathustra mentioned as living in the days of Darius.—The original Zarathustra had a patron who can be called Gushnasp—the name that became customary later on. Zarathustra was a majestic, priestly character, one who pointed to the great Sun Spirit, Ahura Mazdao, the Being who guides humanity back from the physical to the spiritual, and Gushnasp was a kingly character, ready to perform any action in the external world that would spread the mighty inspirations of Zarathustra. Hence the inspirations and aims of Zarathustra and Gushnasp that were taking effect in ancient Iran inevitably came into contact with the conditions prevailing immediately to thc North. And the result of the impact was one of the greatest wars ever fought in the world, a war of which little is said in external history because it took place in such a remote past. It was a conflict of the greatest possible magnitude, between Iran and Turan. And out of this war—which lasted, not for decades but for centuries—there developed a certain mood and attitude of soul that persisted for a long time in Asia and the nature of which can be described somewhat as follows:

The Iranians, the followers of Zarathustra, spoke to this effect: Wherever we look there is a world that descended from divine-spiritual heights but has now fallen very far from its earlier level. We must assume that the world of animals, plants and minerals around us once existed at a higher level and that it has all become decadent. But man has the hope of being able to lead it upwards again.

We will now further translate into words of our language what an Iranian felt, and try to convey how a teacher would have spoken to his pupils. He might have said: Think of the wolf. The animal living as the physical wolf you now see has fallen from its former estate, has become decadent. Formerly it did not manifest its bad qualities. But if good qualities germinate in you and you combine them with your spiritual powers, you can tame this animal; you can instill into it your own good qualities, making the wolf into a docile dog who serves you! In the wolf and the dog you have two beings characterizing as it were two great streams of forces in the world.—And so men who used their spiritual faculties to work upon the surrounding world were able to tame the animals, to raise them to a higher level, whereas the others left the animals as they were, with the result that they descended to lower and lower stages of existence.

Here were two different forces, the one being applied by men whose attitude was as follows: If I leave Nature as she is, she sinks lower and lower; everything becomes wild. But I can direct my eyes of spirit to a good Power in whom I trust; then that Power will help me and I shall be able to lead up-wards again what is in danger of sinking. This Power gives me hope that further development is possible!—The Iranian conceived this Power to be Ahura Mazdao and he said to himself: Man can ennoble and sublimate the forces of Nature when he unites himself with Ahura Mazdao, with the power of Ormuzd. Ormuzd represents,an upward-flowing stream. But if man leaves Nature as she is, he will see everything degenerating into a wild state. This is due to Ahriman—And now the following mood developed in the regions of Iran. Men said: North of us live many who are in Ahriman's service. They are the Ahriman-folk who wander about the world and take what Nature gives them, who will do nothing to spiritualise Nature. We, however, will unite ourselves with with Ahura Mazdao!

Thus men became aware of duality in. the world. The Iranians, the people of Zarathustra, felt this duality and desired so to organise their life that the urge towards a higher form of existence should come to expression in their laws. This was the outer consequence of Zoroastrianism and herein we must see the contrast between Iran and Turan. The war of which occult history gives so many and such detailed accounts, the war between Ardshasp and Guslinasp—the former being the King of the Turanians and the latter the patron of Zarathustra—is an expression of the antithesis between the North and the South, between the men living in the two regions of Turan and Iran. If we grasp this, we shall perceive a current of soul-life flowing from Zarathustra to the whole of the humanity upon whom his influence was exercised.

To begin with, then, it was necessary to describe the whole milieu, the whole environment into which Zarathustra was placed. We know from earlier lectures³ that the Individuality who incarnated into the bloods that flowed from Abraham through three times fourteen generations and who appeared as Jesus of Nazareth of whom the Gospel of St. Matthew tells, was Zarathustra, the Individuality who had been Zarathustra. It was therefore necessary to look for him where he is first to be found, in the very early post-Atlantean epoch. And now the question arises: Why was it that the blood that flowed from Abraham in Western Asia through the generations was the blood best fitted for a later embodiment of Zarathustra? (For in one of his incarnations Zarathustra was Jesus of Nazareth.)

In order to approach this question it was necessary, in the first place, to ask about the central figure—the Zarathustra-Individuality—who incarnated into the blood of the Hebrew people. Tomorrow we shall have to consider why it was necessarily this blood, this particular racial stock, from which Zarathustra derived his body as Jesus of Nazareth.

• 1. A list of publications recommended for study in connection with the following lectures will be found on page 239.
• 2. See Appendix I, p. 233.
• 3. E.g. Deeper Secrets of Human History in the Light of the Gospel of St. Matthew, Lecture II. (Obtainable from Rudolf Steiner Press.)

It is a very complicated matter, as you may well imagine, when the Spirits of the different Hierarchies have to coordinate their forces in such a way that the mission of the Earth can be fulfilled and ultimately a state of balance or equilibrium be achieved. You will understand therefore that statements such as those made in our last lecture are valid only in so far as they refer to a definite period in evolution and that the whole picture changes immediately one depicts evolution at another period. Hence in order to arrive at a fuller understanding of these complex problems a particular course of lectures cannot be isolated from the rest.

I shall here draw attention to one point only and what I am about to say is to be taken as footnote or addendum to the lectures on the Spiritual Hierarchies.¹ In creating the harmony or equilibrium of our Earth the whole cooperation of the Hierarchies is involved and we must envisage the Spirits of Will, the Cherubim and Seraphim, which we described yesterday as the highest Hierarchy, as raying outward from the Earth. We must envisage these Beings as originally working inward from the Universe towards the centre of the Earth. Man does not become aware of these forces in the former aspect but only in the latter aspect when they are reflected from the Earth's centre.

You will only be able, therefore, to form a complete picture of the very intimate processes which here take place if you compare what was said in my last lecture with the more detailed information about the Hierarchies in the lecture-course given at Dusseldorf, in which a comprehensive picture was given of the cosmic activity of the three Hierarchies. These things are by no means so simple, and in order to make the mission of the Earth comprehensible we must approach this problem in such a way that we are prepared to accept that the Spirits of these Hierarchies are reflected in the elements of Earth existence. If you bear this in mind then you will also sense the infinite wisdom inherent in a universe of relationships. To a certain extent you will also feel that the field of knowledge must be continually enlarged, that it is unlimited, since things are so complicated that when we imagine we have grasped one point of view we immediately reject it in favour of another which throws light on the problem from a different angle. We can only advance step by step in our knowledge: Nevertheless from the indications given in the last lecture) especially at the close of that lecture, you will have a clearer understanding of the cooperation between the normal and abnormal Spirits of Form, a cooperation which ensures that the population of the Earth should not be limited to a single homogeneous species spread over the whole Earth, but that a diversity of individual races should be possible. In order to achieve that corporate humanity, which is only possible to man in the course of Earth-evolution, it would have been necessary for the normal Spirits of Form to act independently. These are the same spiritual Beings who in Genesis are called the Elohim. In the whole Universe which surrounds the Earth and together with the Earth forms a single whole, we can distinguish seven of these normal Spirits of Form. There are therefore seven Spirits of Form or seven Elohim. If we wish to form a conception of these seven Elohim with their various missions and their task of establishing Harmony or Love as the ultimate mission of the Earth, we must clearly understand that these seven Spirits of Form cooperate in such a way that what we described in Lecture Four as “man in the second third of his life” would become a reality. Thus, if all these seven Spirits of Form could work in accordance with their declared intention, then collectively they would fashion the real Ego-being. But as other spiritual Beings cooperate with them and diversify this uniform humanity, it was found necessary to make special preparations in the Cosmos. If today you wish to find in the Cosmos the sphere of activity of the normal Spirits of Form—those Beings who, as I described yesterday, shine down upon us in the light from our present Cosmos—then you must seek for them in the Sun. You must always look towards the Sun sphere for that cosmic “Lodge”, that community in the Universe, where these Spirits of Form plan to establish the earthly harmony and to fulfil the mission of Earth-evolution. Lest the activity of the abnormal Spirits of Form should provoke too great a disharmony amongst mankind, one of the Spirits had to detach Himself from the community. In reality, therefore, only six Spirits of Form or Elohim work from the Sun; one of these Spirits had to detach Himself lest the simultaneous activity of the abnormal Spirits of Form, who are really Spirits of Movement should disturb the balance or harmony. It was the Spirit who in the Bible, in Genesis, is called Jahve or Jehovah. If you wish to follow His activity in the Universe you must look for it, not in the Sun sphere, but in the Moon sphere at a particular epoch. I have touched upon this in my Occult Science—an Outline from another angle, where I have shown that the Spirits of Form withdraw with the separation of the Sun, but in the special disposition following upon the separation of the Moon, the preliminary conditions were first established for the further evolution of man. For if the Moon had remained united with the Earth the evolution of man could not have taken place. This further evolution of man has only been made possible because one of the Elohim, Jahve, accompanied the separation of the Moon—while the other six Spirits remained in the Sun—and because Jahve cooperated with His six colleagues to counteract the forces of the backward Spirits of Movement.

Now the separation of the Sun was a necessity for the following reasons: after certain older Spirits of Movement who possessed more potent forces than the Spirits of Form—for they stand higher in the rank of the Hierarchies—had decided to remain behind, the normal Spirits of Form were obliged to modify their activity by detaching one of their members, otherwise they would not have been able to establish the balance or harmony necessary for further evolution.

If we wish to have a clear idea of the activities of these normal Spirits of Form it is best to think of them as streaming down to us in the sunlight. If, however, we wish to understand how the abnormal Spirits of Form cooperate with the normal Spirits of Form who are centred in the Sun (for Jahve withdrew towards the Moon sphere solely for the purpose of establishing the equilibrium), then we must imagine that a certain Sun-force, which streams towards us in the normal Spirits of Form is modified by the force that rays down to us from the abnormal Spirits of Form who are really Spirits of Movement. These have their centre in the other five planets, in Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus and Mercury, speaking in terms of the seven heavenly bodies of ancient astronomy.

When you look out into the Cosmos you have now a picture of the distribution of the normal and abnormal Spirits of Form. Six of the normal Spirits of Form are centred in the Sun and one of them, Jahve or Jehovah, from the sphere of the Moon acts as a counterpoise by virtue of this function as Regent and Guide of that sphere. The activities of these Spirits of Form are influenced by the activities proceeding from Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus and Mercury. The forces of the abnormal Spirits stream down upon the Earth are arrested by the Earth and ray outward again from the Earth-centre as was described at the close of the last lecture.

Thus if the Elohim or normal Spirits of Form, operating from the Sun, are active in a particular region of the Earth's surface, then only the normal ‘I’, that which determines man's normal being, his general make-up, would come into existence in that particular region. Now the forces of Mercury, for example, mingle with these forces of the normal Spirits of Form which, but for the state of equilibrium, would “dance” upon the surface of the Earth. Hence in that which here manifests in the potent forces of the Spirits of Form, there dance and vibrate not only the normal forces but also that which intermingles with the normal forces of the Elohim or Spirits of Form, namely that which emanates from the abnormal Spirits of Form who are centred in the several planets. Thus we see that through these abnormal Spirits of Form there are five potential centres of influence where these reflected planetary forces are concentrated and produce in effect what we know as the five Root Races of the Earth.

Let us now look more closely into the centre which, in Lecture Four, we situated in the interior of Africa. If we state that the Negro race was born of the cooperation between the normal Spirits of Form and the abnormal Spirits of Form centred in Mercury) then from an occult standpoint we are perfectly correct in describing the Negro race as the “Mercury race”.

Let us now continue along the line joining the centres or focal points from which the individual races spread outward. We then come to Asia, which is the seat of the “Venus race” or the Malayan race. We then move northward across the wide expanse of Asia and we find the Mongolian race, which is formed by the Mars forces. Then we cross over into Europe and find the Europeans who in their original racial character are “Jupiter men”. If we cross the ocean to America which is the centre where civilizations or races die, we find there dark “Saturn's race”, the original Red Indian race. The American Indian race is the “Saturn race”. Thus if you look into the matter more closely from an occult standpoint you will become aware of the five centres where the planetary forces are concentrated and are manifested in the external world.

With a progressively more definite and concrete conception of this racial distribution you will develop an inner understanding of the racial characteristics peculiar to the peoples spread over the Earth, an understanding of this unique cooperation of the normal and abnormal Spirits of Form. We have thus sketched the picture, as we are able to capture it at a definite moment in time. But what I have said about the different centres on the Earth is again only valid for a specific epoch of evolution. It is valid for the epoch when, at a definite moment of time in the old Atlantean evolution, the peoples began to migrate from a centre in Atlantis and sought the particular centre where they could receive the: training appropriate to their race. Hence in my book Occult Science, I pointed out that in old Atlantis specific Mystery Centres called the Atlantean Oracles were responsible for directing this distribution of peoples over the Earth, so that in effect that state of balance or equilibrium could be achieved which led to the proper distribution of the races. In one such Mystery Oracle the truths of which we are now speaking were always investigated and originally man took his direction entirely from them. In this manner the events on Earth were determined in accordance with these spiritual centres.

The wave of peoples who swept across Africa and crystallized into the Ethiopian race is an expression of an impulse from the Mercury Oracle in which one could clearly observe the cooperation of the normal Spirits of Form (the six Elohim and Jahve or Jehovah) and also the participation of the abnormal Spirits of Form working from the Mercury Centre. The Centre of equilibrium on Earth was selected in accordance with the right astrological conjunction of planetary forces at the various centres and the point of radiation for the race in question was determined thereby.

The formation of the other races was determined in a similar way. In accordance with these determining factors the grand design is drawn up, charting the cosmic influences in relation to peoples, families, etc. It is an image of cosmic activity and reflects the planetary forces which stream down into the Earth, ray outwards from the Earth and determine man's destiny.

Now how do we look upon a member of the Ethiopian race, of the Mercury race? We see him as one who was originally chosen, who was predestined by the Elohim to express the quintessence of the all-human. But from the Mercury Centre the potent influences of the abnormal Spirits of Form intervened and modified the form of man to such an extent that the Ethiopian race arose. And such was the case with each individual race. The migrations of the peoples were specifically directed from the original centre; this is indicated by the line linking the focal points or centres in my diagram a few days ago. You must therefore imagine the Spirits of Form radiating from a centre, which, we must assume, existed at a definite moment of time in old Atlantis. These Spirits of Form rayed down into the Atlantean continent and fashioned it in such a way that the human souls were brought under the dominion of the corresponding abnormal Spirits of Form.

In this way the broad foundations of the races were laid, and when man looks up into the infinite expanse of the Macrocosm he must seek there the forces out of which he was built up. He is fashioned by their spiritual rays reflected from the Earth-centre. And when he looks up to the normal Spirits of Form, the Elohim, he is looking up to that which actually makes him into man. When he looks up to the forces concentrated in the individual planetary Spirits (with the exception of the Sun and Moon) he perceives the forces which determine his membership of a particular race.

Now how do these Race Spirits work in and upon man? They work in a very unique way; they permeate his vital energies, they penetrate even down into his physical body. Now you know that the four fundamental members of man find their impress and are reflected in corresponding parts of the physical body: the ‘I’ finds its impress in the blood, the astral body in the nervous system, the etheric or life-body in the glandular system. Only the physical body is self-sufficient; it is a reflection of its own inner being which for the man of the present is subject to its own fixed laws.

Now those spiritual Beings who are stirring in man and determine his racial character cannot at first work directly into his higher vehicles. They are active first of all in these reflections of the higher vehicles in the physical body. They cannot as yet enter directly into the physical body, but they are active in the three other members, in the blood which is the reflection of the ‘I’; in the nervous system, the reflection of the astral body; and in the glandular system which is the reflection of the etheric body. The Race Spirits, the abnormal Spirits of Form, are active in these three systems, which are part of man's organic system, but are reflections of the higher vehicles.

Thus the physical body of man is determined from within. These various spiritual Beings invade those members of the physical body, which are the preliminary drafts, the suggestions of the higher vehicles. Now where, for instance, does Mercury make his influence felt? Under Mercury, I include all the abnormal Spirits of Form to be found in Mercury. He makes his influence felt by cooperating with others, especially in the glandular system. He is active in the glandular (or lymphatic) system where are manifested the forces born of that preponderance of the Mercury forces which are present in the Ethiopian race. Everything which gives the Ethiopian race its distinctive character stems from the ferment of the Mercury forces in the glandular system of this people. What transforms the undifferentiated universal human from into the distinctive Ethiopian type with his black pigmentation and woolly or frizzy hair is the consequence of their activity.

If you now move over to Asia you will find there likewise the planetary forces of Venus, an abnormal development of the Spirits of Form. By transferring their point of attack principally to what we call the impress of the astral body, these Venus forces work in the nervous system. They work upon the nervous system however in a peculiar way, not directly as Venus spirits. For the nervous system can be worked upon indirectly in two ways. One way is through the respiration. By working especially upon the respiration, these activities of the Venus Spirits are localized in the respiratory and nervous system and give it a definite form. In this indirect way the abnormal Spirits of Form whom we may call Venus Beings work through the respiratory and nervous system in the Malayan race, in the yellowish-brown races found in Southern Asia and in the direction of the Malay Archipelago. Just as the glandular type is found distributed over Ethiopia, so in these regions is found the type of man in whom the abnormal Spirits of Form work upon the nervous system indirectly through the respiratory system. In the nervous system is prepared that which, with special modifications, produces the more or less yellow skinned racial types. The transformation wrought in these races manifests itself more in that part of the nervous system covered by the term ‘solar plexus’—not in the higher or central nervous system therefore, but in that mysterious part of the nervous system which runs in two cords parallel with the spinal medulla and branches out in various directions to form a network. This part of the nervous system therefore which from our point of view is not yet associated with higher mental activity, is worked upon indirectly through the respiratory system. The unconscious organism is deeply stirred by these Venus forces which work in these racial types.

Let us now move northward to the wide Mongolian plains where are largely concentrated those Spirits of Form who work indirectly through the forces of the blood. In this geographical area is prepared in the forces of the blood that which brings about a modification of the human species and determines the basic character of the race. There is however a very peculiar feature attaching to the Mongolian race; the Mars Spirits enter into the blood. But they work in the blood in a specific manner. They are able to counteract the influence of the six Elohim who are centred in the Sun. In the Mongolian race, therefore, they work in opposition to these six Elohim. At the same time they actively oppose the influence of Jahve or Jehovah who has withdrawn His field of action from that of the six Elohim. But apart from this interaction of the Mars Spirits with the six Elohim and Jahve which produces the Mongolian race there is another factor of paramount importance which must be taken into consideration. Just as in the one case, the Mars Spirits in opposition to the six Elohim from the Sun and Jahve from the Moon create the Mongolian race, so in another case, we must assume that the Jahve forces from the Moon sphere meet and cooperate with the Mars Spirits and thus a special kind of modification arises, namely, the Semitic race. Here is the occult explanation for the origin of the Semites. The Semitic people are an example of a modification of collective humanity. Jahve or Jehovah shuts Himself off from the other Elohim and invests this people with a special character by cooperating with the Mars Spirits, in order to bring about a special modification of his people. You will now understand the peculiar character of the Semitic people and its mission. In a profound occult sense the Biblical writer was able to claim that Jahve or Jehovah had made this people his own. If you add to this the fact that Jahve cooperated with the Mars Spirits who worked principally in the blood, you will understand why racial continuity through the blood-stream was of particular importance to the Semitic-Hebrew people and why Jahve describes Himself as the God who is present in the blood of the generations, in the blood of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. When he declared himself to be the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, He proclaimed that He was present in the blood stream of the Patriarchs. Whatsoever works in the blood, whatsoever must be determined through the blood—the cooperation with the Mars Spirits—that is one of the mysteries, which give us a deep insight into the wise guidance of all mankind.

The blood of mankind is thus subject to a twofold influence; two races emerge, the Mongolian race and the Semitic race. This points to the existence of an important polarity in mankind and we must emphasize the immense importance of this polarity if we wish to plumb the depths of the Folk Souls.

We must now turn our attention to the Western centre and trace the way in which dynamic forces of the Spirits and Beings who are centred in Jupiter operate in man. These elect to work directly upon the nervous system via the outer life of the senses. This is the one way. In the other, the planetary forces work into the sympathetic nervous system, entering indirectly into the solar plexus through the respiratory system. Now the Jupiter forces work indirectly through the sense-impressions and from there radiate to those parts of the central nervous system which are situated in the brain and spinal cord. Here is the seat of those forces which determine the particular racial character of those races belonging to the Jupiter humanity. This applies more or less to the Aryans, to the peoples of Asia Minor and Europe whom we regard as members of the Caucasian race. In these peoples the modification of the generic character which stems from the abnormal Spirits of Form is accounted for by the influence upon the senses of the abnormal Spirits whom we may describe as Jupiter Spirits. The Caucasians therefore are determined through the senses.

Now you will also understand why a people like the Greeks who were consciously under the special influence of Jupiter or Zeus and who felt themselves to be a focal point for the Zeus influence, were predominantly determined by what flows into the nervous system via the senses. The Greeks, of course, were also influenced by the forces of the Elohim, which stream in from the Sun. But the Greeks dedicated everything that acts upon the senses to the service of Jupiter or Zeus and so achieved greatness. To them all external forms, all forms of external life were imbued with deeper meaning. They perceived the spiritual in the physical and hence became the chief exponents of sculpture and architectonic forms. We have here indicated the very special mission of the Greek people who are so preeminently the people of Jupiter or Zeus. Even at the time when) especially under the influence of the new planetary constellation, the cooperation of the Jupiter or Zeus forces with the universal Elohim forces took place, they felt themselves to be the people of Zeus.

All the peoples of South-West Asia, and especially the European peoples are, on the whole, modifications of this Jupiter influence and you can well imagine that as man has many senses, many modifications are possible and that in the formation of the individual peoples within this root race, peoples who were formed by the influence of the senses upon the nervous system, one or other of the senses may predominate. Consequently the various peoples may assume the most diverse forms. According as the eye or the ear or one of the other senses predominates, so will the different peoples respond in this or that way to the particular national tendency within the racial character. In consequence of this they are faced with quite specific tasks. The particular task of the Caucasian race is to find the way to the spirit through the senses, for this race is orientated chiefly towards the sense-world.

Here is disclosed something that introduces us to the deeper secrets of occultism; it shows how, in those peoples who are subject to the Venus forces, the initial steps in development, even in occult development, must be concentrated on the respiratory system. Amongst the peoples living more in the Western Hemisphere, on the other hand, the initial steps must start from an enrichment and a spiritualisation of the life of the senses. This is experienced by those peoples inhabiting countries more towards the West in their stages of higher cognition, in Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition, in so far as the Jupiter Spirit originally modified the character.

Hence these two geographical centres were always present in human evolution; the one presided over by the Spirits of Venus, the other by those of Jupiter. The Jupiter Spirits in particular were perceived in those Mysteries in which—as those of you will know who attended my lecture-course in Munich last year²—the three Individualities ultimately came together, the three spiritual Beings, Buddha, Zarathustra or Zarathas in his later incarnation, and that great leader of humanity, Skythianos. This is the “Council” or spiritual conference which, under the guidance of One still greater, set itself the task of investigating the mysterious forces which must be developed for the evolution of humanity, forces which originated from that centre initially connected with the Jupiter forces and which was pre-ordained in the chart of the cultural centres already mentioned.

Finally, the abnormal Spirits of Form who have their centre in Saturn work indirectly via all the other systems into the glandular system. In the Saturn race, therefore, in everything to which we must ascribe the Saturn character, we must expect to find the combination of the forces leading to the twilight of mankind, forces which set the seal upon its development and sow the seeds of its ultimate decline. This action and its effect upon the glandular system can be seen in the American Indian race and was the cause of its ultimate extinction. The Saturn influence finally works via all the other systems into the glandular system which secretes the hardest parts of man. This slow decline is characterized by a kind of ossification which is clearly reflected in the external form. If you look at the pictures of the old American Indians the process of ossification described above is evident in the decline of this race. In a race such as this everything pertaining to the forces of the Saturn evolution has become realized in a special manner; then Saturn withdrew into itself, abandoned man to his bony system and thus hastened his decline. One feels something of this truly occult activity if one observes how, in the nineteenth century, a representative of these old American Indians still preserves a memory of that great Atlantean civilization which could not adapt itself to later evolution. There exists a description of a beautiful scene in which a chieftain of this moribund Red Indian race confronts a European colonist. Imagine the conflicting emotions when two such men confront each other, the one representing those who came from Europe, and the other those who, in the earliest ages, at the time of the separation of the races, moved Westward. The Red Indian brought over to the West all that was great in the Atlantean culture. What the Red Indian valued most highly was that he was still able dimly to sense something of the former greatness and majesty of a period which existed in the old Atlantean epoch when the separation of the races had hardly begun, when man could look up to the Sun and perceive the Spirits of Form through a sea of mist. Through an ocean of mist the Atlantean was clairvoyantly aware of the seven Spirits of Form acting in concert. And this cooperative activity was called by the Atlanteans the Great Spirit who revealed himself to man in ancient Atlantis. The Atlantean had not assimilated all that the Venus, Mercury, Mars and Jupiter Spirits brought about in the East, to whom we owe all the civilizations which reached their zenith in Europe in the middle of the nineteenth century. The descendant of the brown race did not participate in this development. He held firm to the Great Spirit of the primeval past. He became aware of achievements of the Europeans (who, in a remote past, had also known the Great Spirit) when a piece of paper was laid before him on which were many little symbols, letters, of which he understood nothing. All that was alien to him, for in his soul still dwelt the Great Spirit. The speech he made has been preserved to us and it is noteworthy because it provides evidence of what we have already indicated. It runs somewhat as follows: “Here in the soil, trampled beneath the feet of the conquerors the bones of my brothers lie buried. Why are the feet of our conquerors allowed to desecrate the graves of my brothers? Because they are in possession of that which makes the White Man great. But there is something else which makes the Brown Man great; it is the Great Spirit who speaks to him in the soughing of the wind, in the murmuring of the forest, in the surging of the waves, in the purling of the brook, in thunder and in lightning! That is the Spirit who to us speaks truth. Yes, from the lips of the Great Spirit comes truth. But your spirits here on paper and who express what to you is great, they do not speak the truth.” Thus spoke the Indian chieftain from his point of view. “Redskin is servant of the Great Spirit; Paleface is servant of the spirits who, in black shapes resembling pygmy beings”—he was referring to the letters—“dance on the paper; they do not speak the truth”. This dialogue of historic importance was exchanged between the conqueror and the last of the great chieftains of the Red Indians. Here we have an example of the Saturn forces and their activity and of what follows from the cooperation between Saturn and other Spirits at such a moment as this when two contrasting civilizations meet.

Thus we have seen how here on Earth the birth of universal humanity was prepared by the Elohim or the normal Spirits of Form, how then the five principal races of human evolution detach themselves from the collective body of mankind, from the teaming mass of humanity, and how these five races are related to the guiding Spirits in the Hierarchy of the abnormal Spirits of Form, races whom we must name after the five planets, whereas the normal Spirits of Form are centred in the Sun and in the Moon. From here we shall pass on to something which will be easier to understand, because we shall be able to relate it to something familiar to us, namely, to tribes and peoples.

• 1. This lecture-course was given in Dusseldorf, in April 1909, and was entitled: Spiritual Hierarchies and their Reflection in the physical World. Zodiac, Planets, Cosmos.
• 2. The East in the Light of the West. The Children of Lucifer and the Brothers of Christ. Nine lectures given in Munich, 23rd – 29th August, 1909.

We have been considering the whole law of evolution of the post-Atlantean humanity, and we have tried to understand why the founding of Christianity should have taken place just at a particular moment in this period of evolution. Yesterday at the close of our lecture, we observed that an understanding of important questions in the Gospel of St. John and in the whole of Christianity depends upon our keeping well in mind this evolutionary law in its esoteric, Christian sense. Only in this way shall we be able to gain a complete understanding of the meaning of the words “Holy Spirit,” “ Father and Mother of Jesus.” Above all we must remember that in the course of the last lectures, it was made clear that the post-Atlantean humanity falls into seven sub-divisions. It is, in fact, that humanity to which, strictly speaking, we, ourselves belong and which developed after the Atlantean Flood. I intentionally avoided the idea of “sub-races,” because the concept “race” does not fully coincide with the idea we are considering. What we are considering are cultural periods of development and what we still experience as racial laws in our present humanity is, in fact, an echo of the Atlantean evolution. The human evolution which preceded the Atlantean Flood, which took place for the most part upon a continent lying between present Europe and America, upon ancient Atlantis, can also be divided into seven successive groups. To these seven groups the expression “racial evolution” is applicable, for these seven successive stages of humanity upon ancient Atlantis differed widely from each other bodily, both internally and externally. We include in the external body also the inner configurations of brain, blood and other fluids. But it cannot be said that the earliest humanity of the post-Atlantean age, the Indian, differed sufficiently from ourselves for us to be able to employ the expression “race” for it. We must always hold fast to the continuity of Divine Wisdom, therefore it is often necessary to form a connection with this ancient concept of the race. Yet false ideas can very easily be created by this word “race” through our failing to see that the reason for the division of humanity of the present is something of a much more inner character than the idea usually attached to the word race. Race can no longer be used for the culture that will replace our own after the seventh subdivision, because then humanity will be divided according to quite different fundamental laws.

From this point of view we must consider the division of the post-Atlantean period into the following epochs: 1st the ancient Indian epoch; 2nd the ancient Persian; 3rd the Babylonian-Assyrian-Chaldean-Egyptian; 4th the Greco-Latin; and 5th, the epoch in which we now live. Our epoch will be replaced by a 6th and that by a 7th evolutionary epoch. We are now in the 5th post-Atlantean cultural epoch and say to ourselves:—Christianity entered into human evolution in its full profundity and significance in the 4th epoch. It has had its influence on the humanity of the 5th epoch to a marked degree and we shall now forecast prophetically what its further effect will be, as far as this is possible out of Spiritual Wisdom. We indicated yesterday that the mission of Christianity was prepared in the 3rd epoch. The Egyptian civilization belongs to the 3rd epoch, and out of its womb the adherents of the Old Testament directed the development of Hebrew culture in such a way that Christianity was born, as it were, coming fully into the world in the 4th epoch, in the person of Christ Jesus. We may say that humanity experienced a certain spiritual influence in the 3rd epoch of the post-Atlantean age. This worked on into the 4th Epoch, concentrating in the person of Christ Jesus, then continued on into the 5th, our own, and from thence it will work on over into the 6th epoch which will follow ours. Now we must clearly understand how all this has occurred.

Let us call to mind that in the course of human evolution, the various constituent parts of the human being have experienced their own evolution. Let us recall how it was in the later Atlantean period. We have described how the ether head sank into the physical body and how at that time people developed the rudimentary capacity for saying “I AM” to themselves. When the Atlantean Flood occurred, the human physical body was permeated by the power of the “I AM;” this means that human progress had advanced far enough to have prepared the physical instrument for the ego or for self-consciousness. By this we understand quite clearly that if we were to go back into the middle of the Atlantean period, we should find no human being in the position to develop a self-consciousness in which it was possible for him to speak the words, “I am an I” or “I AM,” out of himself. That could only occur after that part of the ether head, of which we have spoken, has united with the physical part of the head. Up to the time of the submersion of Atlantis by the Flood, the human being had developed the rudiments of the physical brain, which was to become the bearer of this self-consciousness, and the germs of the other configurations of his physical body. Up to the time of the Atlantean Flood, the physical body was being made ready to be the bearer of the ego. We may ask: What was the mission of Atlantis? It was to implant the ego in the human being, to imprint it upon him, and this mission then reached out beyond the Flood—described as the Deluge—over into our age. In our post-Atlantean epoch, however, something else had to enter; gradually and by degrees, Manas or Spirit-Self had to enter into the human being. The influence of Manas or Spirit-Self begins with our post-Atlantean age. We know that after we have passed through various embodiments in our sixth or seventh epochs, Manas or Spirit-Self will have overshadowed us to a certain degree. But a longer preparation is needed for the human being to become a fit instrument for this Manas or Spirit-Self. Before that, he will first have to become a true bearer of the “I” or ego, even though it take thousands of years. He will not only have to make his physical body an instrument for the ego, but the other members of his being as well.

In the first cultural epoch of the post-Atlantean period, the human being for the first time made his ether body into a bearer of the ego, just as he had previously done with his physical body. This was the ancient Indian civilization. In this epoch, the human being acquired the ability to develop not only a physical instrument for the ego, but also a fitting ether body. Therefore in the following table, the first epoch, the ancient Indian civilization is indicated as having an ether body.

If we now wish to consider the further evolution of these cultural epochs in relation to the human being, we must not, merely superficially, consider the soul as the astral body, but we must proceed more accurately and take as a basis the membering of the human being which you will find in my book “Theosophy.” You know that there we distinguish, in general, not only the seven human members, but the middle part we again divide into Soul Body, Sentient Soul, Intellectual Soul and Consciousness Soul—and then we have the higher members, Spirit-Self, Life-Spirit and Spirit-Man. Usually only seven members are to be distinguished. The fourth member which we summarize under the name “Ego,” we must again divide, because in human evolution it is thus divided. What was evolved during the ancient Persian period is the actual Astral or Soul Body. It is the bearer of the actual human active forces, therefore the transition from the Indian to the Persian periods consisted in passing over from a state of inactivity to one of activity in the material world.

The movement of the hands and everything that was connected with it, the transition from inactivity to physical work is what characterized this epoch. To a much greater degree than is supposed, the inhabitants of ancient India were disinclined to bestir the hands, but in contemplation were much more inclined to lift themselves above the material existence into higher worlds. They had to penetrate deeply into their inner being when they wished to call to memory those earlier states. Therefore the Indian Yoga, for example, consisted in general in giving special care and cultivation to the ether body.

Now let us proceed further. In the culture of the ancient Persian epoch, the ego had sunk into the Soul Body. In that of the Assyrian-Babylonian-Chaldean-Egyptian epoch, the ego mounts into the Sentient Soul. You inquire, what is the Sentient Soul? It is the means by which the sensitory human being directs himself outwardly, whereby the perceiving human being by means of his eyes and other senses becomes aware of the ruling spirit in outer nature. Consequently in that epoch, the eyes were directed toward the material things spread out in space, toward the stars and their courses. What was spread out externally in space acted upon the Sentient Soul. In the Egyptian-Chaldean-Assyrian-Babylonian period, very little existed as yet of what can be called an inner, personal and intellectual human culture. We of the present can no longer really imagine what constituted the Egyptian Wisdom of that epoch. It was, in fact, not at all a matter of thinking, a matter of speculation as was the case later on; but when the Egyptian turned his glance toward the outer world, he inwardly experienced the law which he read in the physical world with the physical senses. It was a reading of the laws, a science of perception, a science of feeling, not a science of concepts. If our scholars would only reflect—I am using a harsh expression—then all that has just been said would be pointed out to them, as it were, with fingers, with spiritual fingers. For if the Egyptian did not think with the true, inner forces of the intellect, that means nothing more nor less than that there could not have been, at that time, a real science of thought or of logic. It is true, there was none. History points out to you that the real founder of logic was Aristotle. If there had previously been a logic, a science of thought, it would have been possible to inscribe it in a book. A logic, which is in itself a process of reflection in the ego, in which ideas are united and separated within the ego, in which one forms judgments logically and does not gather them from the things themselves, first appeared in the fourth cultural epoch. Therefore we call this fourth epoch the epoch of the Intellectual Soul, and we ourselves are now in the epoch of the appearance of the ego in the Consciousness Soul. Humanity entered into this epoch about the middle of the Middle Ages, beginning with the 1oth, 11th, and 12th Centuries. It came as late as that. The ego first entered the Consciousness Soul about the middle of the Middle Ages.

This can be very easily proven historically, and light could be thrown into every corner were there time to point out much that might come into question. At that time a very definite concept was implanted in mankind, the concept of individual freedom, of individual ego-capacity. If you consider the early part of the Middle Ages, you will still find everywhere that the value of the individual, in a certain sense, depended upon his position in the community. A person inherited his standing, his rank and position from his father and his kinsmen, and in accordance with these impersonal things, which are not consciously connected with the ego, he acted and worked in the world. Only later, when commerce expanded and inventions and modern discoveries were made, did the ego-consciousness begin to extend itself, and we can see arising everywhere in the European world the external reflection of this Consciousness Soul in very definite forms of municipal government, municipal constitution, etc. From the history of this city of Hamburg, for example, it can easily be proven how these things have developed historically. What in the Middle Ages was called the “free city” is the external counterpart of this breathing of the ego-conscious soul through humanity. And if we now allow our glance to sweep into the future, we may say: We are now about to develop this personal consciousness within the Consciousness Soul. All the demands of the modern age are nothing but the demands of the Consciousness Soul which mankind is unconsciously expressing. But when we look still further into the future, we see spiritually something else. The human being then rises in the next cultural epoch, to Manas or Spirit-Self. That will be a time when men will possess a common Wisdom in a very much greater degree than at present; they will be, as it were, immersed in a common Wisdom. This will be the beginning of the feeling that the innermost kernel of the human being is at the same time the most universal. What is looked upon as the possession of the individual, in the present sense of the word, is not yet so on a higher plane. At present there is a notion, closely linked with the individuality, with the human personality, that human beings must contend with one another, must have different opinions. Men say: if we could not have different opinions we would not be independent human beings. Just because they wish to be independent, they must hold different opinions. That, however, is an inferior point of view. Men will be most peaceful and harmonious when they, as separate persons, become most individualized. As long as men are not yet fully overshadowed by Spirit-Self there will be opinions which differ from each other. These opinions are not yet experienced in the true, innermost part of their being. At present there are only a few forerunners of things experienced in the depths of the soul, and these are mathematical and geometrical truths. These cannot be put to the vote. If a million people were to say to you that 2x2=5 and you perceive in your inner being that it is 4, you know that this is true and that the others must be wrong. It is as though someone were to maintain that the sum of the three angles of a triangle does not amount to 18o degrees.

It will be Manas-Culture when more and more the sources of truth are experienced within the strengthened human individuality, within the human personality, and when, at the same time, there is an agreement between what different people experience as higher reality, just as now there is an agreement between what they experience as the truths of mathematics. Men agree upon these mathematical truths at present everywhere, because they are the most elementary truths. In respect of other truths, men contend not because there can be two different right opinions about the same subject, but because they have not yet reached the point of recognizing and fighting down the personal sympathy and antipathy that divides them. Were personal opinions still to come into consideration in simple mathematical truths, many housewives might then, perhaps, agree that 2x2=5 and not 4. For those who see more deeply into the nature of things, it is quite impossible to disagree about their higher nature; there is only one possibility for those who disagree: that of developing themselves to perceive more deeply. Then reality discovered in one soul will coincide exactly with that in another, and there will be no more strife. That is the guarantee for true peace and true brotherhood, because there is but one Reality and this Reality has something to do with the Spiritual Sun. Just think how orderly the plants grow; each plant grows toward the sun and there is only a single sun. When in the same way, in the course of the sixth cultural epoch, that Spirit-Self draws into human beings, a Spiritual Sun will actually be present, toward which all men will incline, and in which they will become harmonized. That is the great perspective which we have in prospect for the sixth epoch. Then in the seventh, Life-Spirit or Budhi will, in a certain way, enter into our evolution. This is the far distant future toward which we, only divining, can turn our glance.

But we now see clearly that an epoch will come, the sixth, which will be a very important one; important, because it will bring Peace and Brotherhood through a common Wisdom. Peace and Brotherhood, because not only will the Higher Self sink down into its lower form as Spirit-Self or Manas in certain chosen human beings, but also in that part of humanity passing through a normal evolution. A union of the human ego, as it has been gradually evolved with the higher, the unifying Ego, will then take place. We may call this a spiritual marriage and the union of the human ego with Manas or Spirit-Self was always so called in Esoteric Christianity. However, things of the world are bound closely together and men cannot stretch out their hands, as it were, and draw this Manas or Spirit-Self into themselves. They must reach a very much higher stage of evolution in order to be able to help themselves in respect of these things. In order that the human being in the post-Atlantean age may unite with the Higher Ego, men had to have help in their evolution. When something is to be accomplished, there must be a preparation. If a child is to develop into something special at fifteen years of age, something must be done to that end as early as his sixth or seventh year. Everywhere, evolution must prepare its impulses. What is to happen to mankind in the sixth epoch must be slowly and gradually prepared. The power and force of what is to take place within mankind in the sixth epoch has to come from without.

The first preparation was something still wholly external, operating from the spiritual world, something that had not yet descended into the physical world. That has been pointed out in the great mission of the Hebrew people. When Moses, an Initiate of the Egyptian Mysteries, received those instructions from the Spiritual Guidance of the World which we were able to characterize with the words: “When thou speakest unto them of My laws, tell them that My Name is the ‘I AM,’” he was charged in these words: “Prepare them by pointing to the formless, invisible God. Point out that, while the Father-God is still active in the blood, the ‘I AM’ who is to descend even to the physical plane is prepared for those who can understand.” This was prepared, as it were, in the third cultural epoch. Out of the Hebrew people we see streaming forth the mission to deliver to humanity the God who then descended deeper into matter and appeared in the flesh. First He was prophesied, then later He appeared to the physical eyes in the flesh. Thus came to expression in the right sense what had been prepared by Moses.

Let us keep this point of time clearly in mind: the spiritual prophecy through Moses, and the conclusion of this prophecy in the appearance of the prophesied Messiah in the Christ. From this time onward—which we can designate as the first division in the history of Christianity—the real Impulse was implanted in human evolution for unity and brotherhood which will eventuate in the sixth epoch. It is like a force that, having sunk down deeply into an object, continues to be active there until gradually results emerge. In a similar way, this spiritual force has been active up to our present time which we must describe as an age in which humanity has wholly descended into matter with all its intellectual and spiritual powers. The question may be asked: Why did Christianity have to come to the world as a direct forerunner of the most deeply materialistic epoch?

Just imagine, for a moment, that humanity had entered into this most deeply materialistic age without Christianity. It would then have been impossible for it to find again the impulse upwards. Think away the Impulse that has been implanted in mankind through the Christ, then the whole of humanity would have had to fall into decadence, would have had to be bound forever to matter. As it is expressed in occultism, it would have been “seized by the force of gravity in matter” and would have been thrown out of its evolution. Thus we must imagine that in the post-Atlantean epoch, mankind made a movement downward into matter, and that before the lowest stage was reached, there came the other Impulse which impelled it again upward in the opposite direction. This was the Christ Impulse. Had the Christ Impulse been active earlier, humanity would never have come to a materialistic development at all. Had it fallen in the ancient Indian epoch, mankind would certainly have been permeated with the spiritual element of Christianity, but it would never have descended deeply enough into matter to have been able to produce all that we call today an outer physical culture. It may seem extraordinary to say that without Christianity there would never have been any railroads, any steamships etc., but for anyone who knows things in their relationship, it is a fact. Never would these means of culture have arisen out of the ancient Indian civilization. There exists a mysterious connection between Christianity and all that is today the so-called pride of mankind. Because Christianity waited until the right moment of time for its appearance, an external culture became possible, and because it entered just at the right moment, it became possible for those who unite themselves with the Christ Principle to be able to rise again out of materiality. However, since Christianity has been received without understanding, it has become very greatly materialized. Because it has been so greatly misunderstood, it has itself been materialistically interpreted. Thus, in a certain way, it is a very distorted, materialistic form which Christianity has assumed in the course of that period which we have just been following right up to our own times, and which we may designate as a second division of Christian history. Instead of the Last Supper, for example, being apprehended from its higher spiritual aspect, it has become materialized and has been represented as a transubstantiation of gross physical substance. And we could instance hundreds and hundreds of examples of the fact that Christianity as a spiritual phenomenon has not been understood.

We have now almost reached the moment when this second period ends, when men must of necessity form a connection with the spiritual aspect of Christianity, with what Christianity really should be, in order that its true spiritual content may be drawn forth. This will come about through the Anthroposophic deepening of Christianity. By applying Anthroposophy to Christianity, we are following the universal historic necessity of preparing the third Christian epoch which directs its life toward the in-streaming of Manas in the sixth epoch. That will be, as it were, the third chapter. The first chapter is the period of the prediction of Christianity up to the time of the appearance of Christ Jesus and a little beyond. The second chapter is the deepest possible immersion of the human spirit in matter and the materialization of Christianity itself. The third chapter will be a spiritual understanding of Christianity by means of a deepening of the soul through Anthroposophy. That such a document as the Gospel of St. John has not, up to our own age, been understood is due to our whole materialistic evolution. Such a materialistic culture as has gradually developed could not fully understand this Gospel. The spiritual culture which must begin with the Anthroposophic Movement will understand this document in its truly spiritual form and prepare what will then lead over into the sixth epoch.

For those who have attained a Christian or a Rosicrucian initiation—even for those who have attained any initiation whatsoever—an extraordinary phenomenon makes its appearance. Things which take place acquire for them a double meaning; one which is enacted in the outer physical world, another, by means of which things enacted in the physical world become indications of great, comprehensive spiritual happenings. You will, therefore, understand if I now attempt to describe somewhat the impressions of the writer of the Gospel of St. John on one particular occasion.

An extraordinary event took place during the life of Christ Jesus and this event occurred upon the physical plane. The one who is describing it, according to the Gospel, does so as an initiate. Accordingly, the event represents to him simultaneously the perceptions and the results that accrue during the process of initiation. Picture to yourselves the end of this act of initiation.

During three and a half time periods, which in ancient times, as we have already pointed out, were represented by three and a half days, the candidate for initiation lay in a lethargic sleep. Each day he experienced something different in respect of the spiritual world. On the first day he had definite experiences which presented to him events in the spiritual worlds; and on the two subsequent days he had still other experiences. Now in this particular passage of the Gospel, the person we are considering had shown to him what is always spiritually presented to the clairvoyant faculty, that is, the future of mankind. If we know the impulses of the future, we can then inject them into the present and thereby lead the present over into the future.

Picture to yourselves the seer of that age. He experienced the spiritual meaning of the first of the three chapters I have described from the time when the command resounded: “Say unto your people, I am the ‘I AM,’” to the descent of the Messiah. As second chapter he experienced the descent of the Christ into matter, and as third chapter he experienced how gradually mankind is being prepared to receive the Spirit or Spirit-Self (Manas) in the sixth epoch. He experienced all this in an astral prevision. He experienced the marriage of humanity with the Spirit. That is an important experience which mankind can only impress upon the outer world through Christ having entered into time, into history. Previously mankind had not lived in this kind of brotherliness, brought about by means of the spirit unfolding within the inner being, in which peace exists between man and man. Prior to this, there was only the love prepared physically through the tie of blood. This love develops gradually into a spiritual love which then descends upon earth. As final result of this third chapter of initiation, we may say that humanity celebrates its marriage with Spirit-Self or Manas. This can only happen when the time for it has arrived, when the time has matured for the full realization of the Christ Impulse. So long as the time has not yet come, so long will the relationship which is based upon the kinship of blood obtain, and so long will love be an un-spiritual form of love.

Wherever in ancient documents numbers are mentioned, the hidden aspect of numbers is meant. When we read, “On the third day there was a marriage in Cana of Galilee,” every initiate knows that with this “third day,” something very special is meant. What is meant? The writer of the Gospel of St. John points out that it is not alone a matter of an actual experience, but that it is, at the same time, a great, an overpowering prophecy. This marriage expresses the great marriage of humanity which occurred on the third day of initiation. On the first day there occurred what took place in the transition from the third to the fourth cultural epoch; on the second day, what took place in the transition from the fourth to the fifth epoch and on the third day what will occur when mankind passes over from the fifth to the sixth epoch. These are the three days of initiation. The Christ Impulse has been compelled to wait until the third epoch. Before that, the time had not come when it could operate. The Gospel of St. John points to a special relationship between “me and thee,” between “us two.” That is what is really said, not the absurd “Woman, what have I to do with thee.” When the Mother asks the Christ to make a sign, He answered: “My time is not yet come” to be active at marriages, that is, to bring people together. That time is yet to come. What is based upon the blood-bond still works on and will continue to be active; hence the reference to the relationship between mother and son at the Marriage of Cana.

When we consider the documents in this way, all that is really external stands out in bold relief against a significant spiritual background. We gaze into the abysmal depths of the spiritual life when we penetrate into what has been bestowed upon mankind by such an initiate as the writer of the Gospel of St. John, into what he was able to bestow upon it, because the Christ had implanted His Impulse within human evolution.

Therefore we have seen that these things must be explained by the astral reality which the initiate experiences, not by empty allegory or symbolism. We are not dealing with a symbolic interpretation only, but with the narration of the experiences of the initiate. If this were not so, then one might feel that those who stand outside are right when they say that Spiritual Science offers nothing but allegorical interpretations. If we apply to this passage the spiritual-scientific interpretation, as we now understand it, we learn how, through three cosmic days, the Christ Impulse works upon humanity, from the third cultural epoch over into the fourth, from the fourth to the fifth and from the fifth into the sixth. And viewing this evolution from the standpoint of the Gospel of St. John, we are now able to say: The Christ Impulse was so great that mankind of the present has understood but very little of it, and only in a later age will it be wholly comprehended.

When we discuss subjects such as that of today's lecture, we must keep before our mind's eye mankind's whole evolution. Only then can we understand the evolution of the individual, and guide the young through education. At the center of education is the school. We shall attempt to understand what is required of education on the basis of human nature and a person's evolution in general.

We see a person's being as consisting of four distinct members: physical body, ether or life body, astral body, and at the center of the being, the “I.” When an individual is born, only the physical body is ready to receive influences from the external world. Not until the time of the change of teeth is the ether body born, the astral body not until puberty is reached. The faculties of the ether body, such as memory, temperament, and so on, are, up to the change of teeth, protected by an etheric sheath, just as the physical senses of eyes and ears are protected before physical birth by the material body. The educator must during this time leave undisturbed what should develop naturally of itself.

Jean Paul expressed it by saying that no world traveller learns as much on his far-flung journeys as the little child learns from his nurse before the age of seven. Why then must we have schools for children?

What only evolves after the physical birth has taken place is in need of a protective covering just as the embryo needs the protection of the maternal body. Not until a certain stage of development is reached does the human being begin a life that is entirely new. Up to then his life is a repetition of earlier epochs. Even the embryo repeats all primordial stages of evolution up to the present. And after birth, the child repeats earlier human evolutionary epochs.

Friedrich August Wolf¹ describes the stages through which a human being evolves from childhood onwards as follows: The first epoch, lasting up to the third year, he calls the "golden, gentle, harmonious age" corresponding to the life of today's Indian and South Sea Islander. The second epoch, up to the sixth year, reflects the Asiatic wars and their repercussions in Europe, and also the Greek heroic age, as well as the time of the North American savage. The third epoch, up to the ninth year, corresponds to the time from Homer² to Alexander the Great.³ The fourth epoch, up to the twelfth year, corresponds to the time of the Roman Empire. The fifth epoch, up to the fifteenth year, when the inner forces should be ennobled through religion, corresponds to the Middle Ages. The sixth epoch, up to the eighteenth year, corresponds to the Renaissance. The seventh epoch, up to the twenty-first year, corresponds to the Reformation, and in the eighth epoch, lasting up to the twenty-fourth year, a human reaches the present.

This system is on the whole a valuable spiritual foundation, but it must be widened considerably to correspond to reality. It must include the whole of a human being's evolutionary descent. A person does not stem from the animal kingdom, though certainly from beings who, in regard to physical development, were far below what human beings are today. Yet in no way did they resemble apes.

Spiritual science points back to a time when human beings inhabited Atlantis;⁴ compared with modern human beings the Atlantean's soul and spirit were differently constituted. Their consciousness could be termed somnambulistic; the intellect was undeveloped—they could neither count nor write, and logical reasoning did not exist. But they beheld many aspects of the spiritual world. The will that flowed through their limbs was immensely strong. The higher animals such as apes were degenerate descendants of the Atlanteans.

Our dream consciousness is a residue of the Atlantean's normal pictorial consciousness, which could be compared with that of a person experiencing vivid dreams during sleep. But the pictures of the Atlantean were animated, more vivid than those of today's most fertile imagination. Furthermore, an Atlantean was able to control his pictures, which were not chaotic. We see an echo of this consciousness when young children play, investing their toys with pictorial content.

The human being first descended into physical bodies during Lemurian time. A person repeats that event during physical birth. At that time, having descended into a physical body, a person begins developing through soul and spirit to ever higher levels. The Lemurian and Atlantean epochs are repeated in a child's development up to the seventh year. Between the change of teeth and puberty that epoch of evolution is repeated in which great spiritual teachers have appeared among men. Buddha,⁵ Plato,⁶ Pythagoras,⁷ Hermes,⁸ Moses,⁹ and Zarathustra¹⁰ are some of the latter. In those days, the influence of the spiritual world was much greater, a fact we find preserved in heroic legends and sagas. It is therefore important that what is taught during this period of the child's life conveys the spirit of the earlier cultural epochs.

The period between the seventh and fourteenth years corresponds in the child to the time up to the twelfth century, the time when cities were founded. The main emphasis must now be on authority and community. The children should experience something of the power and glory that surrounded the early leaders. The most important issue that concerns a school is therefore the teacher. The teacher's authority must be self-evident for the children, just as what was taught by the great teachers was self-evident to the human soul. It is bad; it does great harm if the child doubts the teacher. The child's respect and reverence must be without reservation, so that the teacher's kindness and good will—which he naturally must have—seem to the child like a blessing. What is important is not pedagogical methods and principles, but the teacher's profound psychological insight. The study of psychology is the most important subject of a teacher's training. An educator should not be concerned with how the human being ought to develop, but with the reality of how the student in fact does develop.

As every age makes different demands, it is useless to lay down general rules. It is not knowledge or proficiency in pedagogical methods that matter in a teacher, but character and a certain presence that makes itself felt even before the teacher has spoken. The educator must have attained a degree of inner development, and must have become not merely learned, but inwardly transformed. The day will come when a teacher will be tested, not for knowledge or even for pedagogical principles, but for what he or she is as a human being.

For the child the school must be its life. Life should not just be portrayed; former epochs must come to life. The school must create a life of its own, not draw it from outside. What the human being will no longer be able to receive later in life he must receive at school. Pictorial and symbolic concepts must be fostered. The teacher must be deeply aware of the truth that: “Everything transient is but a semblance.” When the educator presents a subject pictorially the teacher should not be thinking that it is merely allegory. If the teacher fully participates in the life of the child, forces will flow from his or her soul to that of the child. Processes of nature must be described in rich imaginative pictures. The spiritual behind the sense-perceptible must be brought to life. Modern teaching methods fall completely in this respect, because only the external aspects are described. But a seed contains not only the future plant, it contains forces of the sun, indeed of the whole cosmos. A feeling for nature will awaken in the child when the capacity for imagery is fostered. Plants should not merely be shown and described, the child should make paintings of them; then happy human beings for whom life has meaning will emerge from their time at school.

Calculators ought not to be used; one must do sums with the children on living fingers. Vigorous spiritual forces are to be stimulated. Nature study and arithmetic train the power of thinking and memory; history the life of feeling. A sense for what is noble and beautiful awakens love for what is worthy of love. But what strengthens the will is religion; it must permeate every subject that is taught. The child will not immediately grasp everything it is capable of absorbing; this is true of everyone. Jean Paul made the remark that one should listen carefully to the truth uttered by a child, but to have it explained one must turn to its father. In our materialistic age too little is expected of memory. The child first learns; only later does it understand, and only later still will it grasp the underlying laws.

Between the seventh and fourteenth years is also the time to foster the sense for beauty. It is through this sense that we grasp symbolic meaning. But most important is that the child is not burdened with abstract concepts; what is taught should have a direct connection with life. The spirit of nature, in other words the facts themselves existing behind the sense-perceptible, must have spoken to the child; it should have a natural appreciation of things before abstract theories are introduced, which should only be done after puberty. There is no need for concern that things learnt may be forgotten once school days are over; what matters is that what is taught bears fruit and forms the character. What the child has inwardly experienced it will also retain; details may vanish but the essential, the universal, will remain and will grow.

No education can be conducted without a religious foundation; without religion a school is an illusion. Even Haeckel's Riddle of the Universe contains religion. No theory can ever replace religion, nor can a history of religion. A person who is basically of a religious disposition, who has deep conviction, will also be able to convey religion. The spirit that lives in the world also lives in humans. The teacher must feel that he or she belongs to a spiritual world-order from which a mission is received.

There is a saying that a person's character is formed partly by study and partly by life. But school and education should not be something apart from life. Rather should it be said that a person's character will be rightly formed when study is also life.

• 1. Friedrich August Wolf (1759–1805) was a philologist.
• 2. Homer (8th centure B.C.) was a Greek epic poet who wrote the Iliad and Odyssey.
• 3. Alexander the Great (356-323 B.C.) was king of Macedonia and conqueror of the Persian Empire.
• 4. Atlantis is a mythical continent, said to have sunk into the sea. Plato describes it in the Timaeus and Critias, and Steiner mentions it frequently.
• 5. Buddha, Guatama (c. 563–483 B.C.) the founder of Buddhism.
• 6. Plato (c. 427–347 B.C.) was a Greek philosopher who founded the academy where Aristotle studied.
• 7. Pythagorus (c. 570–c. 500 B.C.) was a Greek philosopher who founded the Pythagorean school.
• 8. Hermes was a Greek god and messenger of the gods. He was the god of roads, commerce, invention, cunning, and theft. Identified by the Romans with Mercury.
• 9. Moses (c. 13th century B.C.) was a Hebrew lawgiver and prophet who led the Israelites out of Egypt.
• 10. Zarathustra (c. 6th century B.C.) was a Persian. The religion Zoroastrianism is based an his teachings.

Yesterday I tried to give you some idea of the way the Greeks thought about the relationship between the human soul and our Earth evolution, laying special emphasis upon two things. I said the Greeks were conscious that in primeval times the soul had been gifted with clairvoyance, and they regarded Persephone, the daughter of Demeter, as the ruler of those clairvoyant powers which played into men's souls from the cosmos. On the other hand I showed how the entire intellectual civilisation of mankind can be traced back to the stream associated with the names of Odysseus, Menelaus and Agamemnon. I tried to make you feel that this civilisation calls for a continual sacrifice. Thus the finest feelings and sentiments of which the human soul is capable, when it comes under the influence of this intellectual civilisation, were offered up to a kind of religious sacerdotal-ism, and the sacrifice of Iphigenia expresses this thought for us. Such views enable us to realise that the tradition, and to a certain extent the actual knowledge, of what we are now endeavouring to regain through Spiritual Science was still very much alive in ancient Greece. We draw attention to the fact that in primeval times the soul had clairvoyant capacities. You can read in my Occult Science—An Outline how in Atlantis men saw into the spiritual world and how cosmic forces appeared to them as actual forms or figures; so that men did not then speak of abstract forces, but of real Beings. Such a figure as Persephone is a relic of this consciousness. Through Spiritual Science we are struggling gradually to come to know again from our modern viewpoint the same living reality in the spiritual world which was familiar to men in primeval times, the same living Beings who lay hid behind the figures of Greek mythology.

The more deeply one goes into Greek mythology, the greater is one's respect, one's admiration, for the profound cosmic wisdom which lies behind it. To give you some idea of this, let me just mention one thing. I said yesterday that Greek mythology draws attention to two different trends—to the intellectual civilisation associated with the names of Menelaus, Agamemnon and Odysseus, and so beautifully exemplified in the sacrifice of Iphigenia, and to the other culture associated with Persephone and her mother Demeter. Now a thoughtful person will naturally reflect that such movements do not take their course in complete independence. Despite their apparent separation there must have been a point of contact somewhere. How does Greek mythology express this profound truth? We know that modern scholarship has nothing but a few abstract ideas to offer in this connection. But Greek mythology traces the ancestry of Agamemnon back to a representative of human soul-forces whom we may call Tantalus. According to the Greek legend Tantalus wantonly offered his own son to the gods as food. We know too that the gods recognised the impious nature of this act, and only one—a goddess—partook of a shoulder-blade. That goddess was Demeter. In this remarkable touch of symbolism—Demeter's eating of the shoulder-blade of the son of Tantalus—we find an indication that there is a connection between the two streams. It confirms that Demeter forces enter into the entire modern civilisation associated with the names of Agamemnon, Menelaus and Odysseus. Thus every item of Greek mythology has its correspondence in what we are bringing to light again in the form of modern spiritual wisdom. It is worth while to call attention now and again to such deeply significant features. It brings home to us the fact that the way man looks at the wonders of Nature changes in course of time. Our natural science is proud of its interpretation of Nature. There seems little ground for this pride when we reflect that by representing the force hidden in the depths of Nature as the female ruler of the wonders of Nature, the Greek system of divinities showed a far deeper wisdom than the science of today has any inkling of, or will so much as guess at until Spiritual Science is allowed to penetrate into our civilisation. It can give a considerable spur to our own knowledge, to the knowledge which we have acquired in the course of years, to consider it in relation to the depths of wisdom in Greek mythology.

One feature of The Mystery of Eleusis draws attention to an important natural wonder. What is really the crucial event of the drama? Persephone, who represents the ancient clairvoyant forces of the human soul, is carried off by Pluto, the god of the underworld. The whole wondrous action comes alive for you in the Pluto scene of the reconstructed drama; once more we have it before our very eyes ... what does it mean, when we apply what Greek mythology and the Mystery of Eleusis thus express to the nature of man himself? What in terms of Spiritual Science has happened to the old clairvoyant faculty of the human soul? This rape of Persephone has in fact been going on from the earliest times right up to our own day; the old clairvoyant culture has vanished. But nothing in the world ever really disappears, things are really only transformed. Whither, then, has Persephone gone? What is the Regent of the old clairvoyant forces doing today in human nature? In the opening chapters of a little book¹ now on the verge of publication, and which virtually reproduces the contents of my recent lectures in Copenhagen, you can read that the human soul encompasses far more than what it knows by way of intellect, by way of reason. A more comprehensive soul-life, a subconscious soul-life, is at work in us—it is better to call it subconscious rather than unconscious—a soul-life which in most modern men does not emerge into consciousness at all. In this subconscious life which is at work today in the human being without his being able to give a reasoned account of it, is Persephone; that is where the suppressed clairvoyant forces have gone. Whereas in primeval times they worked in such a way that the soul could see into spiritual worlds, today they work in the depths of the human soul. They assist in the development and formation of the ego principle, making it firmer and firmer. Whereas in primeval times these forces were dedicated to the task of making man clairvoyant, today they devote themselves to the establishing to the consolidation of our ego. Thus these Persephone forces have been drawn down into the human subconscious, they have been embraced, have so to say been raped, by the depths of the human soul. Thus in the course of the historical development of humanity, the rape of Persephone has been brought about by soul-forces which lie deep in the subconscious, forces which in outer Nature are represented as Pluto. According to Greek mythology Pluto is the ruler of the underworld, of the interior of the earth. But the Greek was also aware that the same forces which are at work in the depths of the earth are also at work in the depths of the human soul. Just as Persephone was carried off by Pluto, in the same way, in the course of human development, the soul was robbed of its ancient clairvoyant capacity through Pluto's intervention.

Now Persephone is Demeter's daughter, and so we infer that in Demeter we have a still older ruler, both of the forces of external Nature and of the forces of the human soul. I said yesterday that Demeter is a figure of Greek mythology whom we associate with the kind of clairvoyant vision which belongs to the very oldest endowment of wisdom of Atlantean humanity—for it is in Atlantis that Demeter is really to be found. When an Atlantean man gazed into the spiritual world, he saw Demeter; she really came to meet him. When, out of this spiritual world, this whirling world of constant movement and changing forms, the archetypal mother of the human soul and of the fruitful forces of Nature appeared to him, what did he say? He said to himself, not in full consciousness, but as it were in the unconscious, ‘I myself have done nothing, I have gone through no inner development, as later ages will do, in order to see into the spiritual world. The same forces of Nature which have given me my eyes, my brain, my organism, and are active in me, these very same forces give me also the power of clairvoyance; just as I breathe, so also I have clairvoyant sight.’ Just as man went through no special development to produce breathing, so at that time he did not form his own clairvoyant faculty, but both these things were given to him by the powers of Nature, by divine Beings. When man turned his attention to what was outside him, to what existed all around him, and along with the sensible received the spiritual, he consciously felt: ‘I absorb into myself the substance of the plant kingdom in the world around me (a plant kingdom quite different from our present one), I absorb from outside everything that is growing, but with the substances I take in also the forces active in them.’ The man of that time was not so hopelessly limited in his outlook as to believe that what he took in as food was only physical substance, only something which could be analysed by the chemist; he knew that with the substances he took in the inner configuration of the forces which are active in them, and that it is these forces which construct him, which build up his body again. Atlantean man said to himself: ‘Outside in Nature, forces are at work; through my breathing and through the food I eat they enter into me. What they are outside me is under the control of the great Demeter. But Demeter sends these forces into the human soul, there they are worked upon and transformed into the faculty of clairvoyance.’ (We may call these forces the process of digestion, but the digestion was then a spiritual one.) ‘Through the forces under the control of Demeter, the fecundating goddess of the whole world, the clairvoyant capacity represented by Persephone is born in the human organisation.’ Thus Atlantean man feels that he too has his place among the wonders of Nature. He feels this clairvoyant capacity born in him as the birth of Persephone, he feels that he owes this birth to Demeter, who spreads abroad in the wide cosmos the very same forces which in man develop into the faculty of clairvoyance.

Thus the man of old looked up to the great Demeter, and in ancient Greece man was still aware that it had once been so. But you will have already realised from this that the human organism, the entire bodily constitution, has changed since those ancient times. The human body of today, with its organisation of muscle and bone, is substantially denser, more compact, than the bodies of those men who were still able to give birth to Persephone within themselves, since they still had the faculty of clairvoyance. And because this organism of ours has become denser, it can also hold fast the clairvoyant forces in the sub-earthly realm of the soul. The imprisonment of the clairvoyant forces within human nature comes about as a result of the densification of the human body. And when the ancient Greek feels the old, more delicate, rarefied body becoming denser, it is because he is taking in forces which are active in the inner earth, whereas formerly he had been more under the sway of forces connected with the surrounding air, which rendered him in consequence softer, more supple. And what is active in the sub-earthly realm, the realm governed by Pluto, obtained a greater and greater influence on the human body, so that we may say that Pluto obtained an ever increasing hold over man; he densified the human body and in doing so abducted Persephone. This densification went on right into the physical body. For even in the earlier postAtlantean times the human organisation appeared very different from what it does today. It is very shortsighted to think that the human being was always formed as he is today.

Thus we see that the rape of Persephone and man's connection with Demeter are really expressions of the wonders of Nature within man himself. They show us how Greek mythology was dominated by the consciousness that man is a microcosm, an expression of the macrocosm, the great cosmos. As Demeter works without in the powerful forces of all that brings forth fruit from the Earth, so also is what comes from Demeter active within us. As the forces represented in Greek mythology by Pluto are active within the Earth and not on the Earth's surface, so does Pluto work in man's own organism. We must be able to blot out entirely the usual way of looking at things today, our own habits and customs, if we want to understand the completely different habit of thought even of people as recent as the Greeks. When the modern man wants to make laws he looks to the government, he looks to his parliaments. This is of course, not a criticism, it is merely a comment. That is where our laws come from today, and a man would probably be considered a fool if he were to put forward the theory that cosmic forces pass through the heads of the sitting members! We will not pursue this any further; it is sufficient that the man of today would find such an idea grotesque.

It was not so in prehistoric times, it was not even so in ancient Greece. In those times there was prevalent an idea so wonderful, so impressive, that modern man can scarcely believe it. Think of all that I have told you about the development of the Greek gods. I pointed out how Demeter worked in ancient times, how she instilled her forces into human nature—her forces which were active in the plants and caused her child to be born in that human nature. That is what Demeter did in ancient times. Now there were also other gods working in like fashion both with the forces of Nature and the wonders of Nature. How did they work? Well, when the human being ate and when he breathed, he knew that the forces which he took in from the air and from the plants came from Demeter, and he knew that it was Demeter who gave him his clairvoyant consciousness, but he knew too that it was she who taught him how he had to behave in the world. There were at that time no laws in the later meaning of the term, there were no commandments outwardly expressed, but since man was clairvoyant, it dawned in him clairvoyantly how he ought to behave, what was right, what was good. Thus in those very remote times he saw Demeter, who gave him his food, also as the cosmic power of Nature who, when he took in foodstuffs, so transformed their forces within him that they gave him his morality, his rule of conduct. And the man of old said to himself: ‘I gaze upwards to the great Demeter, and whenever I accomplish something in the world, I do so because forces active in the plant world without are sent into my brain.’ This Demeter of old was a law-giver, giving law which did not flash up into consciousness, but which was self-evident, impelling the soul. And it was the same with other gods. In nourishing human beings, in causing them to breathe, in prompting in them impulses to walk and to stand, they at the same time gave men the impulse for morality, for the whole of their outer conduct. When the gods assumed the forms they had later and of which we have spoken ... when Demeter saw her child Persephone lost in man's nature, saw her raped as it were by the now denser human body so that these clairvoyant forces could henceforth only be used for coarser bodily nutrition. ... When at that point she so to say gave up imparting the moral law directly, what did she do? She instituted a Mystery, thereby providing a substitute, a new form of law, for the old law which worked through the forces of Nature. Thus the gods withdrew from the forces of Nature into the Mysteries, and gave moral precepts to men who no longer possessed a morality drawn from the activity of Nature within them.

This was the essence of Greek thought in the matter, that originally the gods bestowed morality upon men along with the forces of Nature; then the forces of Nature more or less withdrew, and later the gods substituted a moral law in a more abstract form through their messengers in the Mysteries. When man became estranged from Nature he needed a more abstract, a more intellectual morality, hence the Greeks looked to their Mysteries for guidance in their moral life, and in the Mysteries they saw the activity of the gods, as previously they had seen their activity in the forces of Nature. For this reason the earliest Greek period attributed the moral law to the same gods who were at the back of the forces of Nature. When the Greeks spoke of the origin of their earliest laws they did not refer to a parliament, but to gods who had come down to men and who had in the Mysteries given them the laws which continue to live in human morality.

But as the human body became denser and denser, as it became transformed, what happened to the original Demeter forces? If I may use a very rough illustration, you all know that one cannot do with ice what one can do with water, because ice is in another form. In the same way one cannot do with the solid human body what it was once possible, out of the forces of Nature, to do with the finer body. Into this more rarefied body Demeter had been able to instil, with the products of Nature, the spiritual forces which were in them and thereby to develop clairvoyant forces.

What became of the Demeter forces as a result of the solidifying of the human body, or to use the language of Greek mythology, through the rape of Persephone by Pluto? They had to take a back place in the organisation of the human body, they had to become less active; man had to be alienated from the direct influence of Demeter, to become subject to other forces, forces to which I called attention yesterday. What is it that makes the denser human body fresh and healthy? Just as of old it was Demeter, now it is Eros, it is what is represented in the Nature-forces by Eros, who brings this about. If Eros were not working upon the human body, if Demeter had continued to work, the body would be shrivelled and wrinkled throughout life. Today, Demeter forces are not to be found in youthful bodies, in chubby rosy cheeks; they are in the body just when it eliminates the Eros forces, as it does when it becomes older, when it becomes shrivelled and wrinkled. This profound truth is actually portrayed in The Mystery of Eleusis. After the rape of Persephone, Demeter appears before us denuded of her original forces. She is transformed by Hecate, so transformed that she now bears the forces of decline. The rape of Persephone also represents the withdrawal of Demeter from the bodily organisation in the course of the historical development of humanity. How splendidly those ancient wonders of Nature are expressed in the figures of the ancient gods! When in old age Eros begins to withdraw from the human body, then the influence of Demeter begins again. Then Demeter can, once again in a way, enter the body, then forces of fruitful chastity can predominate, while the Eros forces fall into the background. We are touching upon a tremendous mystery in human growth, human development, when we speak of old age, when we speak of the metamorphosis of Eros into Demeter forces. Secrets such as this were hidden deep within the Eleusinian drama, so deeply hidden that no doubt anyone with the usual education of today would regard everything I have just said as fantasy. In fact, however, it is the pronouncements of materialistic science about these things that are fantastic, that is where all the dreaming and the superstition really lie!

What is it then that, between the time of Atlantis and our own time, has really changed in human nature? It is that part of man in which his essential being is ensheathed. His essential being is enclosed in three bodily sheaths; it is enclosed in the physical body, the ether body and the astral body; our innermost, our ego, is hidden within these three sheaths. These three have all become different in the course of evolution from the age of Atlantis up to our own time. What is the essential drive which makes these sheaths different? We have to look for this impulse primarily in the ether body. It is the ether body which is the energising influence, which is the really impelling factor. It is the ether body which has made the physical body denser, and which has also transformed the astral body. For these three bodies are not like the rind of a fruit, or the layers of an onion, one outside the other, but their forces mutually interpenetrate, they are in living interplay with one another. The sheath which plays the most important part in this process of transformation, in this historical development of the human being, is the ether body. Let us make a diagram of the three bodies to illustrate this. I will draw them simply as three layers lying one under the other.

We have to look for the real forces, the effectual forces, especially those of Eros and Demeter here in the ether body; from the etheric they are sent upwards into the astral body, and downwards into the physical body; that is to say, the ether body has an influence both on the astral and upon the physical bodies. During the period I have referred to the ether body makes the physical body definitely denser, more compact; it so transforms the astral body that it no longer develops forces of clairvoyance, but only the intellectual forces of human nature. Because man has been transformed in this way, because the ether body has brought about a transformation in all three bodies, important and fundamental changes have taken place. They have all three been changed. The Atlantean body, even a post-Atlantean body of the first period, was utterly different from a body of the present day. All the relationships and conditions of life were quite different, everything has changed.

If we look at the physical body as it develops from the earliest times right up to the present day, we see that through having become denser it has come more under the influence of its physical environment whereas the delicate physical body of old was more subject to the spiritual conditions of existence. Hence certain characteristics of the physical body which did not exist earlier in a similar form have been enhanced; the causes of disease, of illness, in the physical body in particular have become quite different. In olden times what we call sickness and health were due to quite other causes. In those times human health was directly dependent upon conditions in the spiritual world. Today the physical body is bound up with external physical conditions and therefore dependent upon them; today we have to look for the requisite conditions for health more to the external physical environment. Thus, to use the language of Greek mythology, because of the rape of Persephone by Pluto and her captivity in the nether world of human nature, man in his inmost being has become subject, so far as sickness and health are concerned, to external conditions. That is one of the things which has happened to humanity.

The second thing has to do with the ether body itself. Besides being the source of the forces of metamorphosis, the ether body has also changed in itself. In primeval times this ether body was so organised that the human being did not get to know the world in the way he does today; but when through the old Persephone clairvoyance he gazed into the spiritual world he saw pictures of spiritual Beings. Man saw around him a world of images. Of course it was the forces of the astral body which called forth these images, but the astral body would not have been able to see them if it had depended upon itself alone. The astral body does not of itself see images. Just as a man does not see himself advancing unless a mirror confronts him, so the astral body would not see the images it produces if its activity were not so to say reflected back by the ether body. Thus it is the ether body which brings to the point of vision, to perception, the images called forth by the astral body. What man perceives of the goings-on in his own astral body is what is mirrored for him by his ether body. If all our inner astral processes were not reflected by our ether bodies we should of course still have the astral body's activity within us, but we should not be aware of it, we should not perceive it. Hence the whole picture of the world which the human being makes, the total content of his consciousness is a reflection of his ether body. Whether a man knows anything of the world depends upon his ether body. This was so in the old clairvoyant days, and it is still so today.

What is the secret of the ether body? Its secret is that it is the key to knowledge of the world. What the world brings about in the astral body would not open the door to knowledge of the world were it not for the ether body. The ether body contains all that I have referred to in certain passages of the two Mystery Plays² of mine which you have just seen performed. The Plays mention the labyrinth of thought, the threads which have to weave our knowledge of the world. We do not come to know the world merely by looking at it. Either, as in the old clairvoyance, we move from picture to picture, or as in modern intellectualism, we move from thought to thought as if through a labyrinth. This association too is brought about by the activity of the ether body. Thus what we may call the key and what we may call the threads which connect the single images of our consciousness when we acquire knowledge of the world have both undergone a change. Thus you see what is dependent on the forces of the ether body and what has to be changed in these forces.

Let us now consider the third member, the astral body itself. This is the element in us which is subject to the influences of the world and in which the forces and the skills are formed which are then reflected by the ether body. Knowledge is kindled in the astral body; it is brought to consciousness through the ether body. A thought, an image, is kindled in the astral body; we have these in us because we have astral bodies. But these thoughts and images become conscious in us because we have ether bodies; they would still be in us even if we had no ether bodies, but we should not be aware of them. The torch of knowledge is kindled in the astral body; this torch is reflected as conscious knowledge in the ether body. This torch of knowledge which is kindled in the astral body has changed in the course of the historical development of mankind; in ancient times man had clairvoyant or imaginal knowledge; today he has intellectual or rational knowledge. That is the change which has come about in the astral body.

Thus during the course of the historical development of man forces have been at work in his nature which have changed his whole relationship with Demeter. Out of the human body, once so rarefied, Demeter was so to say driven. She was driven out of the astral body with its lost clairvoyant capacities and Eros took her place. In return, as I have shown you today, certain different Eros-free forces in human nature came more under the sway of Demeter. Thus during this period from the time of Atlantis up to the present day a force has been working on the development of human nature in three ways: there is a triple kind of development, of transformation, a triple kind of metamorphosis, emanating from the ether body and working upon the physical body, upon the ether body itself, and upon the astral body. This force of genetic change has been and still is in human nature. It changes us from youth to age by leading over the forces of Eros into those of Demeter. There is in our organisation this threefold development which in the physical body brings about changes in the conditions affecting sickness and health, which causes the ether body to reflect knowledge in a different way, and which transmutes the torch of knowledge in the astral body. How wonderful it is to find these genetic forces represented in Greek mythology, forces which are active in all of us, forces which transform our astral bodies and therefore the nature of Demeter herself. These human etheric forces which work upon the physical body, upon the ether body itself and upon the astral body are represented by the threefold Hecate. Whereas today we say that forces of metamorphosis emanate from the ether body in a threefold way, the Greek spoke of the threefold Hecate.

One of Nature's wonders in the genesis of the human organisation is expressed in this threefold Hecate. We there get a glimpse into immense wisdom. You can still see the statue of this ‘triple Hecate’ in Rome today.³ It reveals how one of her aspects has to do with the conditions determining sickness and health, being furnished with the symbols of the † and the serpent (this latter symbol was also assigned to Aesculapius as the representative of medicine). The † represents the external destructive influences upon the human organism. The endowment of one aspect of the threefold Hecate with these emblems indicates forces which act upon the ether body in its development. The second aspect of Hecate had to indicate that in the ether body itself the key to knowledge of the world had changed; what are the symbols shown by this second form? They are the key and the coil of rope, typifying the labyrinth of thought. The third Hecate carries a torch—the torch of knowledge developed in the astral body. We cannot help feeling that the way in which this profoundly meaningful figure is regarded in our materialistic age is one great mass of superstition. What new life such profound and impressive symbols as that of the threefold Hecate will acquire when we know once more what they mean! When the soul steeped in Spiritual Science stands before such a statue, ancient Greece will arise anew in her thought, all the knowledge of the spiritual nature of man mysteriously hidden in such a statue will stream into her again. We should not take these things in an abstract way. Of course we can only express them by clothing them in abstract thought, but all this can become for us living feeling if we permeate ourselves with the consciousness that Hecate has only changed the manner of her activity, that she is in us even today, is at work in every single one of us.

The ancient Greek said that not only humanity as a whole but every individual is subject in his development to the forces of Hecate, in the changes undergone by physical, etheric and astral bodies. Hecate works in man in a threefold way. But what was communicated to the soul at that time in pictorial form can also be learnt again today. How is this expressed by the pupil of Spiritual Science, who no longer speaks in this pictorial way? He says that in the course of the development of the individual from birth to maturity his sheaths undergo changes. In the first seven years the physical body is changed, in the second seven years the ether body, in the third seven years the astral body. The forces which you find described in my little book Education of the Child⁴ without the use of pictures, work in the human organisation in a threefold way. They are the Hecate forces. When Spiritual Science describes for you how up to the change of teeth the human being develops primarily his physical body, it is saying that one form of Hecate is working in him. There we are saying in a modern way what the Greek meant when he represented one part of Hecate with † and serpent; and the second seven years of transformation, when the ether body works upon itself, is represented in the key and the coil of rope; and the third seven years, during which changes take place in the astral body, is represented in the emblem of the torch. Thus long ago I said in modern form what was expressed in the ancient Greek Mysteries by the figure of Hecate.

That is also the meaning of the development of our European civilisation. Going back to Greek times, we find in the tradition of Greek mysticism, of Greek mythology, the powerful pictures which were placed before the pupils in order to awaken in them the knowledge which man at that time needed. In a different way the figure of the threefold Hecate awakened the knowledge which we today absorb when we grasp the doctrine of the threefold change which takes place between birth and about the age of twenty. And when we understand such teaching, then we grasp correctly the course which human civilisation has to take. The old clairvoyant form of knowledge had to be buried in the Plutonic region of the human soul, and for a period, from the time of Socrates right up to our own day, men had to remain more or less in ignorance about all these things. Men had to build up, to consolidate, their egos. But under the surface the old knowledge, the knowledge aroused by those impressive pictorial images of the Greeks, still remained. It was buried as it were under the load of intellectual culture. Now it is emerging again from the dark depths of the spirit. What was submerged in the depths of the soul is coming to the surface again for the life of today in the form of Spiritual Science. Today we are again beginning in the way I have described in Education of the Child to recognise the threefold Hecate in a more abstract way. This is preparing the human soul for a future clairvoyance which is already in sight, notwithstanding our intellectualism.

The triple Hecate, Demeter, Persephone, and all those other figures of whom Greek mythology tells us, were not in Greek times abstractions as the credulous scholars of today imagine. No, they were living figures of Greek seership! All these figures will appear again to clairvoyant vision, which in the future will press more and more urgently upon man from the spiritual world. And the force which penetrates into human souls in order to lead them up again to clairvoyance—or I could also say in order to bring down clairvoyance to them—is the force which was first prepared as conscious thought in the old Jahve civilisation, and then reached its full development through the coming of the Christ Being, who will become ever better understood by men. And when among the adherents of genuine Spiritual Science it is said that this clairvoyant vision of the Christ, who has been united with the Earth since the Mystery of Golgotha, is already beginning in this twentieth century, it is also made clear that this return of Christ will certainly not be in a physical body, but will come about for etheric vision, as it did for Paul at Damascus.⁵ The power of the Christ provides all the impulses to enable human nature to rise again and to see all that has been buried in the depths of the soul—such as for instance, the figures of the Greek gods. That will be the greatest event for the future history of the human soul. It is the event for which Spiritual Science must prepare, so that the soul may become capable of acquiring the etheric vision. In the next three thousand years it will lay hold of more and more souls, the next three thousand years will be devoted to kindling the forces in the human soul which will make it aware of the etheric wonders of Nature around it. It will begin to happen in our own century that one here and one there will see with their etheric souls the reappearing Christ, and within the next three thousand years more and more men will see Him. Then will come the fulfilment of the true oriental tradition, a tradition with which all true occultism is in agreement. At the end of three thousand years the Maitreya Buddha will descend, and will speak to humanity in a form which every human soul will understand, and will mediate the Christ-nature to man. That is the secret guarded by oriental mysticism, that about three thousand years after our time the Maitreya Buddha will appear. What can be added as the contribution of western culture is that the cosmic Individuality who has only once appeared in a human body will become ever more visible to the etheric vision of man; you will find this again emphasised in my Mystery Play, The Soul's Probation. The Soul's Probation. Thereby He will become a trusted friend of the human soul. Just as two thousand years ago the Buddha spoke of what was natural to the best human souls of his time, so in words which will thrill the soul, the Maitreya Buddha will be able to proclaim everywhere what today cannot be proclaimed publicly: the vision of the Christ in the etheric world which is to come. That is the greatest event of the twentieth century, this upward development of human nature towards what we may call the recurrence of the vision of St. Paul. In the vision at Damascus it came to one person only; in the future it will come little by little to all humanity, beginning in our own century. Whoever has faith in the progress of human nature, whoever believes that the soul will develop ever higher and higher powers, knows that it was necessary for the soul which had sunk to the uttermost depths of the physical plane, that the Christ too should appear once in a physical body. It was necessary because at that time the soul could only see the Godhead in a body which was visible to the physical eye, to physical organs. But because, after the old Hebrew civilisation had paved the way for it, this event did take place, the soul is being led to ever higher capacities. The soul's heightened capacities will show themselves in that man will learn to see the Christ even when He no longer walks among men in a physical body, when He shows Himself as He is among us now, as He has been since the Mystery of Golgotha, visible of course only for clairvoyant sight. Christ is here, He is united with the ether body of the Earth. What matters is that the soul should develop so as to be able to see Him.

Herein lies the great advance in the evolution of the human soul. Anyone who believes in this progress, who believes that Spiritual Science has a mission to fulfil in regard to it, will understand that the powers of the soul must become ever higher, and that it would mean stagnation if in our time the soul were obliged to see the Christ in the same physical form in which He was once seen. He will know that there is a sublime meaning in the old Rosicrucian formula about God the Son, who once, and once only, incarnated in a human body, but Who, beginning from our own century, will become visible as an etheric Being to human souls to an ever increasing extent. This is confirmed by prophecy as well as by our own knowledge. Anyone who believes in human progress believes in this Second Coming of the Christ, who will be visible to those endowed with etheric sight. Those who refuse to believe in this progress may well believe that the powers of the soul remain stationary, and still today need to see the Christ in the same form in which He was seen when humanity was plunged in the uttermost depths of matter. They are the ones who can believe in a Second Coming of Christ in a physical body.

• 1. The Spiritual Guidance of Man and of Mankind. (Anthroposophic Press Inc., New York, 1950).
• 2. Die Pforte der Einweihung and Die Priifung der Seele, the first two of four Mystery Plays by Rudolf Steiner. Translated as The Portal of Initiation and The Soul's Probation in the first volume of Four Mystery Plays. The references are to be found in Scene 2 of The Portal of Initiation and Scene 2 of The Soul's Probation. See 1983 edition of the Four Mystery Plays, translated by Adam Bittleston, published by Rudolf Steiner Press, London.
• 3. The triple Hecate. A bronze statuette in the Capitoline Museum.
• 4. Translated by Mary and George Adams (Rudolf Steiner Publishing Co.).
• 5. See The true Nature of the Second Coming. Two lectures by Rudolf Steiner (1910) (Anthroposophical Publishing Co.).

In this lecture we shall speak about the Mystery of Golgotha and connect it with an anthroposophical consideration of Easter. In the last lecture I was able to point out that the Mystery of Golgotha is extremely important, not only in the historical development of humanity, but that it has the deepest significance for the evolution also of the earth, inasmuch as we human beings are included in it. If an observer were to direct his gaze for thousands of years towards our earth from a distant planet it would appear to him to be undergoing a transformation. If he were to see clairvoyantly and not only physically, he would be able to observe that with the advent of Christ Jesus a spiritual transformation took place, and that the spiritual atmosphere of the whole earth changed. The earth also has a physical body, etheric body and astral body, and we are all enveloped not only by air but also by the etheric body and astral body of the earth. The observer would see that up to the advent of Christ Jesus these bodies exhibited certain colours; they then changed and took on new colours and different movements, so important was this event to the earth and to the evolution of humanity! But we must not think that with the birth of Jesus, with the advent of Christ, this transformation took place suddenly: it was being prepared during hundreds of years, and the change is not yet complete; it will, in fact, be a long time before all the fruits have matured, the seed for which was sown through the advent of Christ. If we wish to understand this, we must once more bring to mind the whole of evolution. We must go back to the time when man first assumed his present shape; we know that this was in the Lemurian epoch. We are now living in the so-called fifth age of the fifth epoch of our earth. If we were to go back to the Graeco-Latin age we should find in that fourth age a wonderful art and a wonderful justice. Further back, in the third age, the Egyptian-Chaldean-Babylonian- Hebrew Age, the priestly wisdom flourished. In ancient Persia appeared the first germs of religion which the wise Zarathustra sowed in the second age of our fifth epoch. Still further we come to the time when the most ancient Indian culture flourished, not that which we know from the Vedas and the Bhagavad Gita; further back than that there was a wonderful ancient culture in the first age of our fifth epoch which was guarded and guided by the ancient Rishis, who instructed and led even the Initiates! Immediately prior to that, old Atlantis had been engulfed by the great flood. In Atlantis, which is called the fourth epoch, there lived people who had neither laws nor commandments; they were not yet able to think logically, neither could they reckon nor count. However, at that time people possessed other psychic powers, for example, their memory was extraordinary, and they lived in what to us would appear a wonderful intercourse with nature. We only imagine this epoch aright when we know that at that time the physical conditions which surrounded humanity were quite different from what they are to-day. A remembrance of it has been preserved in the Sagas of Niflheim or Nebelheim. Heavy, dense volumes of mist filled the whole atmosphere of ancient Atlantis, and as all the beings lived in these masses of mist the spiritual conditions also were entirely different. If we go still further back we come to the third epoch, to ancient Lemuria. The humanity which developed in this epoch did not come to an end, like the Atlanteans, through a gigantic flood, but through a mighty upheaval by the forces of fire. This ancient Lemuria lay south of present Asia, north of Australia and east of Africa. The seer who with spiritual vision looks back to the first portion of this Lemurian epoch, finds human beings with quite a different form from present-day humanity. They did not yet possess the germ of the higher soul which dwells in present-day humanity; they only had the coverings of this soul. These coverings consisted of physical body, etheric body and astral body, and these coverings had a kind of indentation in which to receive the Ego or ‘I.’

The self-consciousness, that of which we say ‘I,’ this immortal kernel in the nature of man still rested in the bosom of the Deity. Below on the earth were those bodies which were ready to take in this germ; and if we could see them they would seem very grotesque and extremely ugly. Just as at the present time these human coverings are enveloped by the air, so at that time the beings were enveloped by a spiritual atmosphere, they lived and moved in it. They had a form, a covering (the diagram may make this more comprehensible), which was ready to take in the ‘I,’ the higher soul. But this was still in a spiritual stratum which surrounded and moved around man. We must clearly understand that the spirit can assume different forms and that, which at that time was your spirit, had not till then needed a body; that is just its development, that it took up its abode in man, that it needed the physical body for its further development. The several souls at that time were not yet separated, but might be compared to a glass of water which consists of a great number of drops of water; just as the several drops are united with one another in this glass of water, so were all the souls dissolved in this spiritual atmosphere and united with one another. And if I now place a great number of tiny sponges in this water and each one absorbs a drop of it, so that the water is then divided up among the sponges, in the same way must we conceive of the process of the ensouling of the human bodies. That, which previously was around, sank into the bodies and thus the common spiritual substance was individualised in the several human coverings. However, these human vehicles did not take in the soul entirely. I had to indicate to you the method of ensouling in this manner, but you must clearly understand that outside the body, in the environment, a great deal of this spiritual substance was left over. And the development from Lemurian times up to our own consisted in this spiritual part which remained outside mankind, drawing in more and more into the human bodies.

You must imagine that at that time man was continually in a half-sleeping, half-waking condition. Just as to-day when a sleeper is observed with spiritual eyes it is seen that only the physical body and etheric body He on the bed, while the astral body is outside and works upon the physical body (for the condition of sleep is produced through the astral body being outside), in the same way at that time one would have been able clairvoyantly to see these human beings always in this condition, but dreaming the most vivid dreams. When one human being approached another there arose in his soul a form of colour which signified sympathy or antipathy according as the other was a friend or a foe. Thus did the human being perceive the objects around him. But the more that which I have just described to you sank into man from the spiritual environment, the more did his consciousness become like the present-day consciousness and along with this went a physical fact. In the Bible there is the statement that ‘God breathed breath into man and he became a living soul’! In fact, at that time not only the breath was breathed into man as a physical movement of air, but there was also that which was contained in the air as Spirit. That which is within us as material air, the air which we can trace, is the physical body of a spirit surrounding the earth! When we breathe we inhale spirit.

It is quite true that that which sank into the coverings of man at that time when he breathed in the breath is the spirit, and the air is only the substance of this spirit! Really and truly we to-day inhale the body of this spirit; that which sank into man at that time is what is called the Holy Spirit! We must clearly understand that together with this kind of air-breathing, together with this in-sinking, there was something else which was interiorly connected with it, namely, the warm blood of man. Before this period of time had arrived there were no warm-blooded beings on the earth, these only originated later. Therefore at that time something else also took place: into the human body came a certain amount of warmth. The warmth which you now have within you was at that time in the environment of the physical ancestors of mankind. Imagine that the warmth which is in the blood of all mankind upon the earth was still at that time outside man, enveloping the earth. Warmth and spirit surrounded the globe,—it was enveloped in a mighty atmosphere of warmth. In this warmth was embodied a different spirituality, which was similar to the spirits who had reached their perfection on the Sun, when the Sun was still a planet. The spirituality embodied in warmth, equals in perfection the beings now inhabiting the sun. In fact, at that time, when this warmth-spirituality enveloped the earth, it was the vehicle of a common spiritual nature for all mankind, indeed it was none other than that of the Spirit of the Earth itself. For just as each man has a spirit, so to those who can see these things each planet is the expression of a spiritual being; and thus our earth is the body of a spirit, the Earth-Spirit, and the means by which this spirit penetrates into man is the warmth of the blood; through it the Spirit of the Earth penetrates into man himself. We must imagine that when the Lemurian development began, the spirit which belongs to the air sank into man, and also at the same time, as a higher spirit there began to sink into man, the spirit which is contained in the warmth of the blood, namely, the true Earth-Spirit.

The first spirit, which has its body in the air, makes it possible for man to develop the power of Speech; with the breathing process speech develops, the process of the utterance of the Ego begins, attaining its culmination in the Atlantean epoch. At the moment when God breathed breath into man the spirit began to speak out of the inner being of man, the soul began to utter its language,—from within man spoke Jehova Jahve—that is: ‘I Am. He Who is, He Who was, and He Who will be!’ This is the eternal kernel of being in every man, which is imperishable, and which will develop to all eternity as the permanent individuality. This was the first outpouring of the Deity into man; it is called the outpouring of the Holy Spirit or the outpouring of Jehova I According to the myths and sagas this god lives in the rushing wind; that which dwells in the air, that which is perceived as a sort of Storm-God or Wind-God is Jehova. It indicated that this Deity has His external body in the air. This Deity worked at the individualisation of mankind. He could not, however, accomplish this individualisation all at once, he had first to find a means to this end. At first mankind was divided into groups; a human being did not yet feel himself separated as an individual, he felt that he belonged to a tribe. The man of the present day, who has such a different consciousness, can scarcely form a right idea of this ‘feeling that one is part of a tribe.’ As a hand feels itself to be a part of our organism so did a human being feel himself to be a part of his tribe. The more the tribe expanded to a nation the more individual did the several human beings become.

What we know as the process of becoming more individualised is connected with the blood. When this outpouring of the spirit took place in the Lemurian epoch, it was not one common spirit which sank into the human bodies. There were many separate individualities in the spiritual environment of the earth. Jehova was one Deity among many! It is because many such Race-Spirits sank down, that mankind split up into peoples; the more they sank down the more were the greater races formed. But a complete union of humanity into one single brotherhood was impossible in this way! Brotherhood is only possible when in addition to this ensouling which acts in many races, the common Earth- Spirit which dwells in warmth gradually streams into mankind! When one speaks of Jehova one has really to speak of many Jehovas, many Holy Spirits; but when we speak of the spirit dwelling in warmth we are then speaking only of one. In this one spirit we have the Logos itself, the Christos, the Spirit of the Earth, the unifying spirit of humanity on the earth!

If we reflect that everything contained in what pertains to Manas exists in multitude, and that everything contained in Buddhi acts as unity, we have here the contrast between the two, and we understand it in this way: That through the outpouring of spirit through Manas humanity had to be prepared for the outpouring of the uniting Spirit of Buddhi, until Christos Himself came Who gathers all together into an unity!

At the time when Christos appeared there was a common covering which surrounded the whole earth. In it we have all that exists as Christos Spirit, as the unifying principle. And just as in Lemuria the Spirit was out-poured, so also the Christos Spirit was poured forth slowly into humanity and is still being out-poured, that Spirit Who has His Body in the warmth of the blood. When He is completely poured forth, there will be in the whole of humanity the consciousness that it is a single brotherhood. Each one will feel himself drawn to the others as a brother; all that separated will have given way, and humanity will be gathered into one great community.

In the earth-planet and in all the beings connected with it we have what is called the body of the Christos Spirit. Therefore, we have to take quite literally the statement, ‘He who eats My bread treads upon Me with his feet!’ (John 13, 18, Lutheran version). For whose bread does man eat? What does he tread upon with his feet? He eats the bread of the body, and treads with his feet upon the body, which is described as the body of the Christos Spirit, that into which the Christos Spirit has come!

If we had been able from another planet to observe our earth a few centuries before Christ, and then on through further centuries, we should have been able to follow with the eyes of the spirit how that which previously formed the spiritual atmosphere gradually began to pour into the several human beings, and how the whole atmosphere of our earth has thereby changed. This is the Christos Spirit, Who from that time has poured Himself in, and that is the cosmic significance of Christ Jesus!

Preparations for this were made thousands of years before Christ. Anyone able to follow the evolution of the earth would see that the transformation began in the circle of the so-called founders of religion. In Egypt Hermes Trismegistus, Hermes the Thrice-Great, guided humanity in the transformation of the narrow tribal-principle; Zoroaster, Moses, Pythagoras, Plato, all worked at this transformation also. Only when we understand all this do we learn to understand the spirit of Christianity more and more.

The outpouring of the Spirit was able to bring it about that the love of human beings towards one another was connected with the blood: people loved one another more as members of a tribe, their love was conditioned by the blood which they had in common; but the spirits who came into mankind as Race-Spirits, who brought about this love which was connected with the blood, acted at the same time in such a way that they separated and individualised the human beings more and more; men thereby became more and more egoistic and selfish. But then, on the other hand, there poured down the spirit of Christianity, the spirit of the unifying Christos. Only when these two streams work fully in man can he, entirely of himself, and filled with the Christos Spirit, find his way to others in love.

Now we must clearly understand that with the human blood was connected that which produced the feeling which expressed the blood-love. This later developed into selfishness; the blood took on the character of egoism, selfishness. This blood which had become egoistic had to be overcome. The surplus egoism in human blood was sacrificed on the Cross. If it had not flowed then, selfishness would have become greater and greater, egoism would have had the upper hand more and more. Human blood was sacrificed in order to cleanse humanity from egoism, and this cleansing of the blood from the egoistic ‘I’ is the Mystery of Golgotha!

He who sees only the material process, he who only sees the Man bleeding upon the Cross can never understand this deeply mystic event! We only understand the Mystery of Golgotha when we know that on the Cross flowed the blood which humanity had to lose in order to be set free from the bonds of egoistic selfishness. He who cannot understand this spiritually can never understand Christianity, nor can he understand the so-called redemption. We only understand the evolution of humanity when we comprehend the central position occupied in it by the Mystery of Golgotha, which expresses the highest spiritual development of humanity.

In ancient times before the Christos-principle entered into human evolution we have the Mystery of the Spirit; later, when Christos Jesus came in, the Mystery of the Son was revealed; in the future there will be the Mystery of the Father. This last is announced in the Apocalypse where the future Mysteries of the Father are described.

We shall now describe the Mysteries of the Spirit. They were founded in the ancient seminaries of the Adepts in a place lying between America and Europe, in ancient Atlantis. These ancient Atlantean Adept-Schools have been continued up to our day. The Mysteries in Post-Atlantean countries were a continuation of these ancient Turanian Adept-Schools. We find these Mysteries everywhere, in ancient India, in Persia, Chaldea, Egypt and Greece. One who was sufficiently prepared and who had withstood the necessary tests was admitted to the training and could be initiated. He had received the teachings of the Wisdom, he had purified himself from impulses and desires, he had accustomed himself to a regulated thought-life, he loved all humanity; he had become homeless, for he could love all men equally—not only those to whom he belonged through the ties of blood. All this was done in these Schools. What was gained in them and is still gained to-day is a stage of development in advance of the normal.

The pupil who had advanced so far that he no longer felt himself as the son of a tribe or a family, who had reached this last phase so that he loved all humanity, and had thus become the Son of Man, passed on to initiation, to the secret of the Pyramids. He was then put into a sleep which lasted for three days. In this sleep the Initiator was able to withdraw the spirit of the pupil, just as your spirit is withdrawn from your body in sleep; this process, however, was conscious in the case of the pupil. The Initiator was thus able to lead over into life what the pupil had previously learned. He had learned that there is an astral and a devachanic world, he had acquired ideas and feelings, and because he passed out of his physical body with these ideas and feelings, which are anchored in the astral body and etheric body, the Initiator was able to present all this before him in actuality; the pupil went through the astral and devachanic worlds, he experienced what he had previously learned, he thus became one who knows. Those worlds were no longer hidden from him; be brought back the remembrance of them. When he then reawakened in his physical body there came a cry which wrung itself from the soul when it returned from the spiritual worlds, when the ‘I’ had become a citizen of the higher worlds, when it had sojourned among spirits. When the pupil had experienced the secrets of the spiritual worlds, when he had returned into this life and become a missionary, a messenger of the spirit—all this on awaking burst forth exultantly in the words, ‘Eh, Eh, lama azobothami!’ that is, ‘My God, my God, how hast thou glorified me 1’ This was what one heard from each one who was initiated in this way: ‘My God, my God, how hast thou glorified me!’

If you had tested such a person you would have found that initiation was a pre-announcement of what is contained in Christos Jesus; that in the etheric body of such an Initiate Buddhi had awakened; in him Christ had inwardly awakened, but He had not come as far as to the physical body. As etheric men these Initiates had become immortal, in their etheric body they had experienced immortality.

Then came a great advance. It came with the advent of Christos to the earth,—with the One Who died upon the Cross. He experienced everything down even to the physical body: in the physical body everything had become life within Him which the Initiate in the Mysteries underwent in his etheric body. One could now see this with physical eyes.

The Initiates could feel bliss because they inwardly experienced how fife must conquer death. After this time one needed this no longer; through Golgotha there had descended to the physical plane that which formerly was experienced in the Mysteries.

I must now describe one thing to you before we can understand the Mystery of the Son. In the Gospel we find a description of the last Easter-supper. This was not an ordinary meal. Christos Jesus was surrounded by twelve human figures. He sat among them as if at table. And as what did they appear, these twelve human figures? Each one who as an Initiate had gone through the experiences of the higher worlds, had experienced the same. By these twelve Apostles are to be understood twelve of the Initiate’s own embodiments, twelve of his own fives through which he himself had passed. And these twelve fives were nothing else than that which he bore within himself as the parts of his body. In an occult sense the body is divided into twelve parts, and this is also meant to be nothing else than the representation of twelve incarnations. Each incarnation signifies an ascent; a human being is gradually purified in this ascent through his incarnations. Thus a human being is surrounded by the forms through which he himself has passed. They surround him as on the occasion of a meal; he himself, the human being, is the host. This is a picture which comes before the soul of each one in the Mystery of the Spirit. The one who comes last is the Son of Man; this is the man who through the series of his incarnations is so purified from egoistic love that he no longer feels himself as the son of a family, tribe or nation, but as the son of all humanity. This is the thirteenth among the twelve, who represents the highest perfection, he who loves all; this is the Initiate, he himself. That which was experienced by each one who was initiated into the higher world was repeated by Christos Jesus on the physical plane in this Easter meal.

Let us now trace this repetition. It is enveloped as if by a veil. Just as everything esoteric is given externally, exoterically, hidden as with a veil, so also was this Easter meal which Christos Jesus gave. This is not an ordinary meal; that which the Initiates of the Spirit had formerly experienced so often on the higher plane was to be repeated on the physical plane as an external, physical gathering.

In St. Luke’s Gospel, Chapter 22, v. 8-20, we read: ‘His disciples asked Him: Where wilt Thou that we prepare the Pascal Lamb? He sent His disciples, saying: Go into the city and you will meet a man carrying a pitcher of water, follow him. And where he goes in, say to the householder, the Master saith unto thee, where is the guest-chamber where I may eat the Pascal Lamb with My disciples? And he will show you a large room furnished with cushions and ready, there make ready for us.’ (Also Mark 14, v. 12-25.)

During the Easter meal He explains once more that He is the Spirit of the Earth, that the bread is His Body and the wine His Blood. As the Spirit of the Earth He may say of all the fluids which course through the earth, ‘This is my Blood,’ and with regard to all the materials which make up the body of the earth he may say, ‘This is My Body.’

Then comes the scene where Jesus develops the Mystery of the Spirit into the Mystery of the Son, in order to lead it up to the Mystery of the Father.

If you bear in mind the fact of the embodiment of twelve of his own incarnations as the figures which represent around him twelve of his own parts,—if you bring this to mind correctly and then with delicacy and inward tactfulness of soul try to comprehend a passage which contains what is deepest in Christianity, then in it you will be able to see the transition from the Mystery of the Spirit to the Mystery of the Son.

Remember once more what had to happen before the Mystery of the Son could come. That blood which is important to egoism on the earth had to be lost. Times will come when men will become more and more egoistic, and precisely for this reason had the superfluous egoistic blood to be sacrificed, in order that humanity might be united into one great brotherhood.

That which had been produced by humanity as such was spiritualised and ennobled by Christianity, although the egoistic element grew greater and greater through humanity becoming more and more independent. If we survey what since then has surrounded the globe; for example, if we consider all the means of external intercourse, all that reason has devised, all that the egoistic intellect has produced—all these things are only subsidiary means for the gratification of egoism. People were less egoistic when they produced fire by knocking two stones together and when they satisfied their needs in the simplest manner! The only counterbalance to this egoism was Christianity.

Just as the Son of Man sees the twelve figures around Him as the expression of his own incarnations, so will one who sees into the future recognise in these figures what humanity has still to pass through before it attains the conditions of completeness. He who passes through the Mystery of the Son sees into the future, and indeed to the end of the earth’s evolution when the earth passes over from the astral condition it will then have attained, into the Jupiter condition, the new planetary condition. Then as the fruit of its development it will imprint into the Jupiter condition the perfect love which will have been divested of all egoism, which will be entirely refined, purified, and spiritualised.

Hence Christos Jesus could say, ‘You who now sit around Me represent the various parts of My bodies, various degrees of perfection, and when I look into the future these are the twelve stations which must be surmounted in order to lead to the Father, to perfection.’ All that pertains to sensuality, all impulses and passions, instincts and passionate desires must be overcome. This is shown symbolically by what happens to the twelve. The age which follows is represented by Judas Iscariot! The lowest sensuality is here connected with the greatest egoism. It is Judas Iscariot who betrays Christianity! There will come a time when that which took place upon Golgotha will take place over the whole earth. It will seem as if egoism would put Christos and Buddhi to death. That will be the time of Antichrist. It is the law that everything that took place around the Cross will have to take place also on the physical plane. Then in a still later period of development everything that is base in man will fall away from him, and even now there is being prepared what he will become later. He will then no longer create from the impulse of lower passion. Just as at the present time he produces the word which can embody the highest that is in his soul, so he will in the future work creatively by the word; just as through sexuality he has become egoistic, so by the falling away of the same he will again become selfless. The blood of man will be transformed so that in the future he may create from pure, selfless feeling. There will be a human race which will create by the Word. The sexual organ will be transferred to the heart, lungs and larynx, and here we have one of the two evolutions which follows after Christianity.

The age when egoism rules is represented by Judas Iscariot. He who considers the events of the world impartially sees how sexuality in man is in the position to betray and kill everything spiritual. Man will become more alive when his higher part, the Word, is creative and when his heart is his spiritual creative organ. This is a picture which is to be compared with a passage in St. John’s Gospel from which we may see what will be the consequence when Christianity shall have made all mankind selfless and brotherly.

That which makes mankind egoistic you see embodied in Judas Iscariot; and the ultimate goal to which humanity will develop in the distant future, the twelfth station, is the Figure of Christ Himself.

The transformation comes about through the creative power pressing upwards from the lap to the heart. Now read the passage concerning the disciple of Jesus whom He loved most, and of whom it is said that he lies on Jesus’ breast. This is the passage which tells how the lowest power of production, the creative power of man, moves upwards from the lap to the heart, which is connected with the lungs and larynx. This passage tells that John is initiated into the Mystery of the Son by Christ Jesus. After the pupil has experienced this, he will have transformed his lower productive power into the higher and he will come through the Son to the Father.

And what may he then say? He may say what all Initiates say, ‘My God, My God, how hast Thou glorified Thy Son.’

Read in St. John’s Gospel: ‘Then Jesus said, Now is the Son of Man glorified, and God is glorified in Him.’ Then the Easter meal, which took place on the physical plane, was finished.

Those who have gone through this by the side of Christos Jesus, will, when they pass out of earthly evolution and rise to a higher development, gather around Christos, and He will then once more be able to utter in the midst of this gathering the words which He uttered at that time on the Cross.

This passage has been wrongly translated as it passed through the Greek. It ought to read, ‘My God, My God, how very much hast Thou glorified me!’ (That is, spiritualised me).

This passage reveals to us the struggling loose from matter: The Mystery of the Son. It shows us that at that time the seer’s inner vision of the Redeemer of the world saw to the end of the earth’s evolution.

The great goal of humanity consists in overcoming all difference and in founding the great love of humanity. This goal will not be gained in any other way than by people learning to penetrate more and more into the spiritual worlds. But they will then not be dissolved in the Deity, as they were before they descended into the several human beings, they will be individualised—like the water in the tiny sponges. Humanity proceeded from the Divine Being and developed the various egos, and it will ultimately, completely individualised, but at the same time united into a brotherhood, form an unity which will give birth to a new star: the new star which in the Apocalypse is called The New Jerusalem. And then the Sphere-Harmony will echo the words, ‘My God, My God, how hast Thou glorified Me!’

These words were uttered on Golgotha, and they will be repeated when humanity has risen to the highest stage, when it has progressed from Son to Father. Far, very far does the spiritual vision extend when it seeks to comprehend this Mystery of Golgotha!

The great festivals of the year are important times at which we ought to halt, lift ourselves above ordinary everyday affairs and cast our eyes over the great path of human evolution; they are occasions when we ought to survey not only centuries but thousands of years, and when at the same time we ought to look back consciously at the stations through which humanity has passed in the course of its evolution.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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