The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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.

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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.).

This evening we will speak of sin, original sin, disease, and so on. First, let us look back at the past and then let us envision the future. Before our time, we have the time of Rome and of Athens, which was preceded by the Egyptian-Chaldean time; further back, the actual historical documents are missing. For the even older epochs, we have two sources from which we can draw information: the old religious teachings, if one knows how to decipher them, and the retrospective images that the clairvoyant consciousness can see. We want to talk about the latter. Everything on earth is subject to the laws of evolution, and this applies in a very special way to the human soul life. In ancient times, the life of the soul was different from the present soul life. In the prehistoric age, people in Europe, Asia and Africa had a soul life that was quite different from today's human soul. When we look back thousands of years, we find that the ancestors of today's humanity had a much broader spiritual outlook than we have now. They did not have the intellect that enables us to read and calculate, but they did have a primitive clairvoyance and, in addition, an enormous memory, of which ours cannot even give a pale idea. We will see how this was possible. To give you an idea of how the world appeared to them, I will say, for example, that when they woke up in their day-consciousness, they saw everything as if surrounded by an aura. A flower, for example, appeared to them surrounded by a circle of light similar to the one we see around lanterns in the evening mist. During sleep, however, these people could perceive spiritual entities in reality. Gradually man learned to see the outlines of things more distinctly. At the same time, however, the conscious intercourse with the spiritual world and the entities in it became less and less, until it finally ceased altogether when the ego individualized itself in each individual being. Before this individualization, people were not separate from each other.

The earth also had a completely different configuration in those times than it does now. Humanity lived in different areas - continents - and our ancestors lived on a continent that is now occupied by the Atlantic Ocean. Tradition calls this continent Atlantis. The disappearance of this part of the world is told in the myths of all peoples, and the legend of the universal flood refers to this. The Atlantean civilization was magnificent, and with its demise, humanity lost many important insights that it must now laboriously regain. Just as we know how to use the forces hidden in fossil plants - coals - for trade and industry, so the Atlanteans knew how to use the driving forces in seeds, for example, to move their airships, which moved a little above the ground, in that air, which was much denser than ours.

Let us now look at the physical organism of the Atlanteans. It showed a significant peculiarity, namely that the etheric body was not completely similar to the physical body and that the etheric head protruded beyond the physical head. This peculiarity is precisely connected with the clairvoyant abilities of the Atlanteans, with their extraordinary memory and their magical powers. The etheric head had a special point of perception [...]. In the course of evolution, this etheric head retreated more and more into the physical head, thereby changing the profile. Now, at the point in question, we have the organ whose development will give humanity back its clairvoyance: the pineal gland. Thus, the clairvoyant power of the Atlanteans gradually disappeared, along with their tremendous memory and magical powers, and our ability to think and count developed.

If we go back even further, we find other catastrophes. Entire continents were destroyed by fire. Our present-day volcanoes are the last remnants from that era. The continent that perished at that time is called “Lemuria” and was the area that is now mostly occupied by the great ocean and the Indian Ocean. The inhabitants of that continent had a form that was very different from ours, which would even seem grotesque to us. Their physical and astral bodies were different. The crown was open, and the rays of light penetrated into this opening, so that the head was surrounded by a radiant aura and the people looked as if they had a lantern on top.

The body was huge and formed by a fine, almost gelatinous substance. We see the last hint of the Lemurian crown on the head of a newly born child, namely the small opening at the top, which remains open until about a year old. or something:maehr.

At that time, man was not independent at all; he could only do what was inspired by the spiritual powers in the midst of which he was, so to speak, embedded. He received everything from them, and he acted as if driven by a psychic instinct. This revealed the power of spiritual beings who had not descended to physical incarnation. These beings were not well-disposed towards humanity and influenced it in such a way that it gained the independence it lacked. According to the divine plan, humanity was to achieve this independence securely at some point, but these beings brought it about earlier. Together with the other forces, they slipped into the astral body of the person who had not yet entered into a close relationship with his or her essence, and gave the person a kind of willpower that, because it was only astral and not guided by reason, enabled him or her to do evil. These forces are called the luciferic forces. As we can see, the influence of these forces has a good and an evil side, because on the one hand they seduced humanity, but on the other hand they gave it freedom.

Our present consciousness comes from the clairvoyant consciousness, and we find the latter more and more developed the further we go back in human evolution. The Lemurians could only perceive spiritually. For example, they perceived neither the shape nor the color nor the external characteristics of a flower. They saw a luminous astral form that they perceived with a kind of inner organ. According to the divine plan, human beings were not supposed to have begun to perceive with the external sensory organs until the middle of the Atlantean period. But the luciferic forces caused this fact to occur earlier, while human instincts were still pure. This is what the “fall of man” consists of. The religious records say that the serpent opened the eyes of man. Without the interference of the luciferic influence, the human body would not have become as solid as it is now, and the Atlantean humanity would have seen the spiritual side of all things. Instead, man fell prey to sin, illusion and error. To make matters worse, towards the middle of the Atlantean period, the influence of Ahrimanic forces was added. The Luciferic forces had worked on the astral body, whereas the Ahrimanic forces worked on the etheric body, especially on the etheric head. As a result, people fell into the error of regarding the outer physical world as the true world. “Ahrimanic” comes from Ahriman, the name given to this principle by the Persians. Zoroaster spoke of him to his people and said that they should beware of him and strive for union with Ahura Mazdao - Ormuzd. Ahriman is the same as Mephistopheles and has nothing to do with Lucifer. Mephistopheles comes from the Hebrew word: Me-phis-to-phel, which means “the liar,” “the deceiver.” Satan in the Bible is also Ahriman and not Lucifer. The ancient Atlantis was gradually destroyed by floods over the course of centuries, and the remaining inhabitants retreated to areas that were spared from the catastrophe, in Asia, Africa and America. The first area in which Atlantean culture developed further was what was later called “India”. There, people retained a clear memory of their former clairvoyance and of their vision of the spiritual world. It was not difficult for their teachers, the Rishis, to draw their attention to the spiritual side of the world, and initiation was an easy matter. Clairvoyance was never completely lost, and until Christ there were always clairvoyants. We see a remnant of this primitive clairvoyance in mythology, the core of which refers to beings who really lived, such as Apollo, Zeus and so on. Although, as we have said, the Ahrimanic influence had its beginning in the Atlantean epoch, it did not assert itself fully in Humanity until later. The ancient Indians were sufficiently protected against him, and the physical world was never anything but Maya, illusion, to them. It was only in the epoch of Zarathustra, the original Persian, that the physical world began to have a value for people, who thereby fell prey to the power of Ahriman. In this way, Zarathustra's admonition, of which we have already spoken, becomes clear to us.

Thus the evolution of humanity continued until Greek times. Then another power approached man, which began to drive him up again to the spiritual world from which he had been driven out, so to speak, since the Lemurian time. The new power was the Christ principle, which entered into Jesus of Nazareth, permeating his three bodies - physical, etheric and astral. When the human soul is completely filled with the Christ principle, the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic forces are conquered, and through this principle a reversal in evolution takes place. But the Christ could not have influenced people if his appearance had not been proclaimed to them long beforehand. But he has always guided them inwardly; we see this in the magnificent images in which people were prophesied that he would come. Otherwise, who would have given them the strength to form such powerful imaginations?

A great change takes place in the physical, etheric and astral bodies of humanity through the incarnation of the Christ, just after the Mystery of Golgotha has been accomplished, when the blood flows from the five wounds and the Christ penetrates into the lowest realms. His etheric and astral bodies multiplied like a seed, and the spiritual world was filled with these images. So that, for example, in the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries, those people who had reached a sufficient degree of development were incorporated at birth with such an image of the Christ-incarnation of Jesus of Nazareth. The person in whom this participation in the etheric body of Christ is most clearly evident is St. Augustine. The great significance of his life can be attributed to this fact. From the tenth century until approximately the sixteenth century, the astral body of Christ was embodied. We have to thank this for the appearance of people like Saint Francis of Assisi and the great Dominicans, full of humility and virtue, who reflect the great astral qualities of Christ. That is why they had such a clear image of the great truths within them, which they practiced in their lives, in contrast to Augustine, who was never free of doubt and always argued between theory and practice. Among the great Dominicans, special mention should be made of Saint Thomas, in whom the influence of the astral body of Christ was highly developed, as we shall see later. In the sixteenth century, the time began when the images of the Christ-I began to weave themselves into the ego of individual individuals. One of these was precisely Christian Rosenkreutz, the first Rosicrucian.

It is thanks to this fact that a more intimate connection with Christ has become possible, as revealed to us by esoteric teaching. The power of Christ will make man ever more perfect, will spiritualize him and lead him back into the spiritual world. Humanity developed its reason at the expense of clairvoyance; the power of Christ will enable people to learn and ascend here on earth with what they have acquired. Man comes from the Father and the power of Christ leads him back to the Father.

It has been said many times in the course of these lectures that Christianity marks the turning point of human evolution. All the religions have their raison d'etre and have been partial manifestations of the Logos, but none have changed the world so deeply as Christianity.—Those who ‘have not seen’ are those who have not known the Mysteries. Through Christianity, certain fundamental teachings of the ancient Mysteries—for instance those which dealt with morality, the immortality of the soul by Resurrection or the ‘second birth’—were given to the whole world.

Before Christianity, super-sensible truth was revealed in the rites and dramatic ritual of the Mysteries. Since then, we have believed in it as it was revealed in the Divine Personality of Christ. But in every epoch there has been a difference between esoteric truth as known to the Initiates and its exoteric form which has been adapted to the multitude and expressed in the religions. The same applies to Christianity. What is written in the Gospels is the message, the good tidings announced to all the world. But there was a more profound teaching; it is contained in the Apocalypse in the form of symbols

There is a way of reading the Apocalypse which only now can be made public. But it was practised in the Middle Ages, in the occult schools of the Rosicrucians. They paid less attention to the historic aspect of the writing, the question of its author and all the problems which occupy the minds of modern theologians who only seek to discover the outer, historical circumstances. Theology today only knows the shell of the Apocalypse and has neglected its essence and core. The Rosicrucians were concerned with the prophetic utterances, with the eternal truths.

Occultism in general is not concerned with the history of a single evolutionary cycle or period but with the inner history of human evolution as a whole. True occultism is at pains to discover the first manifestations of the life of our planetary system and the earlier stages of man's existence, but it looks forward through the millennia to a divine humanity, to a time when the Earth herself will have changed in substance and in form. Is it possible to predict the far distant future? It is indeed possible, because all that has finally to become physical in the future, already exists in germ, in archetypal form. The plan of evolution is contained in archetypal thought. Nothing comes into being in the physical world which in its broad lines has not been foreseen and prefigured in the devachanic world. Individual freedom and power of initiative depends upon the manner of the realisation of this truth.

Esoteric Christianity is not based upon vague and sentimental idealism, but upon a realisation born of a knowledge of the higher worlds. Such was the knowledge possessed by the author of the Apocalypse, the Seer of Patmos, who gave a picture of the future of humanity.

Let us try to envisage this future in the light of the cosmological principles which we have been studying in these lectures. Certain visions of the past and also of the future were revealed to the pupils in the Rosicrucian Schools and then, in order that they might interpret these visions, they were told to study the Apocalypse. We will proceed in the same way and consider how man has gradually become what he is today and what lies before him in the future. We have spoken of the ancient continent of Atlantis, and of the Atlanteans who had only a primitive consciousness of the ‘I’ towards the end of their period. The Post-Atlantean civilisations were as follows:

1. Pre-Vedic civilisation in the south of Asia and in India—the beginning of Aryan culture.
2. The epoch of Zoroaster, comprising the civilisation of ancient Persia.
3. Egyptian civilisation (including the Chaldean and Semitic). The first germs of Christianity were laid down in this epoch among the Hebrew peoples.
4. Graeco-Roman civilisation, the era of the birth of Christianity.
5. A new epoch commenced at the time of the migrations of the peoples and of the invasions. The heritage of the Graeco-Roman civilisation was taken over by the races of the North: the Celts, the Germanic peoples and the Slavs. We ourselves are living in this epoch. It is a later transformation of the Graeco-Roman culture, brought about by the invigorating impulses of new races under the influence of Christianity mingled with the leaven of the East which was brought into Europe by the Arabs. The essential mission of this epoch of civilisation is to adapt man to the physical plane to develop reason and practical logic, to immerse intelligence in physical matter so that matter may be understood and finally mastered. In this hard and difficult task which is reaching its culminating point in our own day, man has temporarily forgotten the higher worlds whence he came. If we compare our intellectuality with that of the Chaldeans, for example, it is easy to see how much we have acquired and yet how much we have lost. When a Chaldean Magus looked at the sky—which for us simply presents problems of heavenly mechanics—his feelings were quite different from ours. Whereas modern astronomy is concerned with calculations and abstractions, the Magus of old Chaldea sensed the deep harmony of the heavens as that of a living and divine Being. When he looked at Mercury, Venus, Moon or Sun, he not only perceived the physical light of these celestial bodies; he perceived their souls and he knew that his own soul was in communion with these mighty souls of the heavens. Their forces of attraction or repulsion seemed to be a marvelous symphony of divine will; the music of the macrocosm sounded in his being. Thus the ‘Music of the Spheres’ was a reality uniting man to the heavens. The superiority of the scholar in our modern age lies in a knowledge of the physical world, of mineral matter. What was once spiritual knowledge has descended to the physical world, to the world we know so well. But from now onwards we must strive to reach a knowledge of the astral world and of the world of pure Spirit by true clairvoyance.

This descent into materialism was necessary in order that the fifth epoch might fulfil its mission. It was essential that astral and spiritual clairvoyance should grow dim in order that the intellect might develop by dint of precise, minute and mathematical observation of the physical world. Physical Science must be supplemented by Spiritual Science. Here is an example: Comparisons are often made between Ptolemy's chart of the heavens and that of Copernicus. It is said that Ptolemy's chart is erroneous. Now this in itself is not correct. Both are true from different points of view. Ptolemy's chart is concerned with the astral world where the Earth is seen in the centre of the planets, including the Sun. The map of the heavens given by Copernicus was prepared from the point of view of the physical world—the Sun is at the centre of the solar system. The significance of Ptolemy's system will be recognised again in ages to come.

Our fifth epoch will be followed by another, the sixth. This sixth epoch will see the development of brotherhood among men, clairvoyance and creative power. What will Christianity be in the sixth epoch? To the priest in the Mysteries before Christ, there was harmony between science and faith. Science and faith were one and the same. When he looked up to the heavens, the priest knew that the soul was a drop of water from the celestial ocean, led down to Earth by the great streams of life flowing through space. Now that the attention of men is wholly directed to the physical world, faith has need of a refuge, of religion. Hence the separation between science and faith. Faith in the Person of Christ, of the God-Man on Earth has temporarily replaced Occult Science and the Mysteries of antiquity. But in the sixth epoch, the two streams will again unite. Mechanical science will become spiritually creative. This will be Gnosis-spiritual consciousness. This sixth epoch which will be radically different from our own, will be preceded by mighty cataclysms. It will be as spiritual as ours has been material. But the transformation can only be brought about by physical catastrophes. The sixth epoch will prepare for a seventh epoch. This seventh epoch will be the end of the Post-Atlantean civilisations and conditions of earthly life will be entirely different from those we know. At the end of the seventh epoch there will be a revolution of the elements analogous to that which put an end to Atlantis, and the subsequent eras will know a spirituality prepared by the two preceding Post-Atlantean periods.

Thus there are seven great epochs of Aryan civilisation in which the laws of evolution slowly come to expression. At first, man has within him what he later sees around him. All that is actually around us now, passed out from us in a preceding epoch when our being was still mingled with the Earth, Moon and Sun. This cosmic being from whom the man of today and all the kingdoms of nature have issued, is referred to in the Cabala as Adam-Cadmon. Adam-Cadmon embraced all the manifold aspects of man as we know him today in the various races and peoples.

All that lives today in the inner being of man, his thoughts, his feelings, will find expression in the outer world and become his surroundings. The future lies within man. He is free to make it good or evil. Just as he has already left the animal kingdom behind him, so the evil in him today will form a race of degenerate beings. In our age man can to a certain extent hide the good or evil within him. But a time will come when he will no longer be able to do so, when the good and the evil will be written in indelible characters upon his countenance, upon his body, nay even upon the very face of the Earth.

Humanity will then divide into two races. Just as today we see rocks or animals, in that future age we shall encounter beings who are wholly evil, wholly ugly. In our time it is only the clairvoyant who is able to see moral goodness or moral ugliness in human beings. But when man's very features express his karma, human beings will divide into groups of themselves, according to the stream to which they manifestly belong, according to whether the lower nature has been conquered or whether it has conquered the Spirit. This differentiation is beginning to operate little by little. When we derive understanding of the future from the past, and strive to realise the ideal of this future, its plan begins to unfold before us. A new race will come into being to be the link between the man of the present and the spiritual man of the future.

It was taught in Manicheism that from our age onwards the souls of men would begin to transmute into good the evil which will manifest in full force in the sixth epoch. In other words: human souls must be strong enough to bring good out of evil by a process of spiritual alchemy.

When the Earth begins to recapitulate the previous phases of its evolution, there will first be a re-union with the Moon, and then of this Earth-Moon with the Sun. The re-union with the Moon will mark the culminating point of evil on the Earth; the re-union with the Sun will signify, on the other hand, the advent of happiness, the reign of the ‘elect.’ Man will bear the signs of the seven great phases of the Earth. The Book with the Seven Seals, spoken of in the Apocalypse, will be opened. The Woman clothed with the Sun who has the Moon under her feet, refers to the age when the Earth will once again be united with Sun and Moon. The Trumpets of Judgment will sound for the Earth will have passed into the Devachanic condition where the ruling principle is not light but sound. The hallmark of the end of earthly existence will be that the Christ-Principle permeates all humanity. Having become like unto Christ, men will gather around Him as the hosts around the Lamb, and the great harvest of evolution will constitute the new Jerusalem.

The second part of the gospel of John

The experiences John described from the 13th chapter onwards refer to the devachanic level. John indicated this by saying he had been raised from the dead. John was Lazarus raised from the dead. We can understand therefore why it is only now that mention is made of the disciple whom the Lord loved. This is the secret at the centre of the gospel, that the writer was Lazarus raised from the dead.

John then went through experiences with the Christ in the world of the spirit. The second part in particular does not merely tell what has happened on some particular level but describes the things every human being can inwardly experience. The way in which one can inwardly know oneself to be at the level John spoke of is the following. From a certain point in his development the individual no longer feels separate from all things. He enters wholly into the things that are around him. This is to expand one's self into a universe. John felt himself to be part of the whole world around him. This comes to expression in the devachanic image of the washing of the feet.⁴⁶ John experienced this in the world of the spirit, though it was at the same time also a historical event.

A higher realm of nature always develops at the cost of a lower one. If there were no mineral world, the plant world would not be able to take nourishment from it. The plant world is pushed lower down so that a yet higher realm, the animal world, may develop, and so on. The human world also depends on the other realms. A more highly developed form needs the one that is less developed. There could be no higher caste if there were not also a lower one. Just as there has to be a mineral world so that the plant world may exist, so did the apostles have to exist for Christ Jesus to be there. No one can be a saint without pushing others lower down. It says in chapter 13, verse 16: ‘The servant is no greater than his lord.’ The Christ has evolved on the basis of the apostles and is therefore able to call them the lords out of whose community he has arisen. He washes their feet to indicate that he is lower than they are in so far as he owes his existence to them. This is something we must all experience in our own bodies. Anyone who has not had this experience has no true perception of the path of Christian mysticism.

Jesus also said: ‘He that eats bread with me has lifted up his heel against me.’⁴⁷ He felt himself to be in the community of the whole earth. He felt that the whole of humanity was resting upon him, that he was under its heel.

Having experienced all this at the devachanic level, John was able to understand the words of the vine and its branches that followed.⁴⁸ They refer to the community of the whole Christian congregation.

We are now in the fifth root race of our earth existence. This has seven sub-races, the ancient Indian, the ancient Persian, the Egypto-Babylonic-Chaldean, the Graeco-Roman-Semitic, the Germanic, the Slavonic and the seventh sub-race. The last three sub-races of the fourth root race, which was the Atlantean one, were particularly important. From the third from last, the ancient Semitic race, has come the fifth root race. This sub-race dwelt in the region where Ireland is today. It migrated from there, letting itself be guided to the Gobi desert or Shamo. This is the region where the present, the fifth root race originated. Three sub-races of the Atlanteans, seven sub-races of the Aryan root race and two of the sixth root race, belong together in some respect. When humanity has gone through all these races it will have reached a point where a great part of humanity will have achieved what it is meant to achieve.

The twelve apostles are symbols of those twelve sub-races. Jesus has evolved from the twelve apostles. In the washing of the feet he bows before the races to whom he must bring salvation.

In the parable of the vine, the Christ feels himself to be connected with all races; he provides them with the spiritual life blood.

Many different images also come into this in the higher world. We are told of Judas Iscariot's betrayal. He represents one of the races, the race which is now bringing everything down on to the material level, our own fifth sub-race, which is materialistic. In the process of evolution in which humanity first lived in direct spiritual perception and then had to be taken into the physical world it was perfectly natural for the representative of this fifth sub-race to be the betrayer. Judas Iscariot represented the race that descends deeper than any other. The gospel of John continues to be valid beyond space and time for the very reason that it must be seen in symbolic terms. The act of Judas forms an organic part of the Christ's mission. Judas went through a form of martyrdom. He was the traitor and in a sense also a martyr. He brought about the sacrifice of the Christ.

The sequence of parables served to take the apostles up into the inner nature of Christianity. At the Christ's sacrificial death everything that had in earlier times been mystery rite appeared before the world as a historical event. In the mysteries, the pupils went through what here has become the three days of Lazarus' symbolic death. With the Christ this was to appear in the great historical level. From then on a human being was to be redeemed if he believed, without having gained direct vision in the mysteries. Everyone was to have that experience when the spirit of truth came. It would tell of the element brought into world history with the Christian events. ‘He will proclaim to you the things that are to come.’⁴⁹

John was speaking out of this spirit of truth. The historical betrayal of the Christ was to happen in the future in the race of which Judas was the representative.

The events that follow are exemplary of the Christian mystic's inner experience. Then the Christ was given a slap in the face.⁵⁰ This was the second important event after the washing of the feet. It is something everyone must receive who inwardly seeks to go through the life of Christ. It has to be borne with complete inner composure that the people to whom one is giving the best one has, will not acknowledge this. The scourging also follows. In moral terms it means that we bear the pain the world causes us and do so calmly. Together with the slap on the face this is the second stage the Christian mystic must go through.

It is something pupils of Christian mysticism have really and truly been going through since that time. The ability to bear the pain calmly is learned in the pupil's own body. He really gets a feeling as if he is pierced with needles.

The next, third stage is the wearing of the crown of thorns. It is to accept humiliation calmly. It is the human I which is humiliated. The forebrain, which developed during the last period of ancient Atlantis, senses the crown of thorns. Genuinely painful experiences develop in this mystical soul state and have to be overcome.

The fourth stage is the crucifixion. It is a mystical experience which signifies that one's own body has become as foreign to one as an outside object. The human being then bears the burden of the cross. His soul has grown independent. It is only tied to the body the way the body of Christ was nailed to the cross. This is an inner experience for the mystic. He now knows himself to be living in a spiritual body. A blood trial goes hand in hand with this. The wounds of the Christ truly appear on hands and feet when the Christian mystic has gone through this. There is a physical aspect to everything that is of the spirit.

When the human being has reached this point, death on the cross ensues. This is a spiritual experience. Goethe brought it to expression in the following words:

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

Jakob Boehme said: ‘If you don't die before your death comes, you will perish when you die.’⁵² The Christian mystic must go through the whole of death. Otherwise he cannot enter into a higher life. The sixth event is the entombment. This is mystic realization of community with the earth organism. The pupil unites with the planet earth, becoming a planetary spirit. Everything around him then becomes his body. The seventh stage is the higher life, the resurrection, given to man. These are the seven stages of Christian mystic development: the washing of the feet, the slap on the face and the scourging, the crown of thorns, the crucifixion, death, entombment and resurrection. It is an inner development with external symbols.

John wrote about it in a way that has truly given us a basic work for mystics. The sentences must become the subject of meditation as we read them. This gives us the meditation we need to go through these events. The gospel of John is a book of miracles for it brings about miracles in the soul. It has been written for every human being and everyone can gain inward experience of the gospel of John.

Let us consider the second chapter once more, now from this point of view. Before the washing of the feet man faced the need to give birth to the new human being. He then went through the seven stages and became the new human being. The new human being related to the old one as a child does to his mother. The old human being conceived him and bore him. This is how we must see the image of the mother of Jesus. Every old human being has the ability to become a new human being.

The old human beings are of different types. When the new human being is born of them, all will give birth to the same Christ. The old human being, the mother, may exist in different ways. When the Christ was on the cross he looked back to his mother, and those were three women representing three different human configurations from whom the mystic may come. The mother of Jesus cannot be given a name. She is, however, called Mary. Mary is the same as Maya, the womb from which the new human being has come.

When the Christ was taken down from the cross, his legs must not be broken. This has to do with the whole development of our civilization. In ancient Atlantis human beings were still able to influence the generative etheric forces. They were able to use the germinative powers of grain to set airships in motion. The mission of the twelve sub-races, starting with the fifth Atlantean sub-race, is to develop powers and abilities relating to the mineral world, powers of making combinations. The twelve races have to take the earth to the point where the mineral world is essentially conquered. The time when Christianity is the central member is the time when man transforms the mineral world. Man will make the earth's magnetism serve him once he has the moral powers to influence the earth. He still more or less lacks conscious awareness of everything else.

The gospel of John is one of the works that have the infinite in them and this is like a well-spring.

• 46. John 13: 1-11.
• 47. John 13: 18.
• 48. John 15: 1 -8.
• 49. John 16: 13.
• 50. This and the following events John 18 and 19.
• 51. Goethe, West-östlicher Diwan, poem ‘Selige Sehnsuch’.
• 52. Boehme, Jakob (1575–1624); see chapter on Valentin Weigel and Jakob Boehme in Steiner R. Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Age (GA 7). Tr. K. E. Zimmer. Blauvelt: Steinerbooks 1980; and two lectures (not translated) given in Berlin on 3 May 1906 (in GA 54) and 9 Jan. 1913 (in GA 62).

We can say that there are two kinds of people on earth. Two great spiritual streams may be seen among human beings. The difference between the two is that one kind seek to see everything in the light of knowledge whilst the other kind want to be guided, in a way. The very way in which the view of the world presented in the science of the spirit is received shows that the desire to look for bright, clear light is not widespread. The majority of people still have not reached the point where they want to know about everything. Many rather like to be befogged; it embarrasses them to be given complete clarity with regard to something. It will, however, be necessary to let go of anything that may cause the mind to be befogged. This also applies to the whole way we lead our lives. We need to be restrained also in feeding ourselves and avoid anything that will cloud consciousness, such as alcohol, for instance. Countless other things also prevent the clarity that is needed. Doing without such things will also make us more practical in everyday life. Belief in authority also puts us in darkness. We should let ourselves be stimulated by authority but not build on it.

Clarity, as it is meant here, has least to do with a subordinate way of seeing the higher worlds. Such a subordinate way is in fact connected with soul mists clouding the conscious mind. In earlier stages of human history this was widespread. In Atlantean times the human mind was much less clear than it is today. Today even the most savage tribes have gone far beyond the Atlanteans' state of mind. Going further and further back in human evolution we come to conditions where human beings had inner vision but did not grasp things with the rational mind. Rationality first began to dawn in the Atlantean race. At one time the Atlanteans lived in the place where Ireland is today. When another individual was approaching, astral images would arise in the Atlantean's mind. He was not yet able to reflect. Man was only able to say ‘I’ to himself when the forebrain had developed. Human beings first began to develop self-awareness in the part of Atlantis which is Ireland today. From there they spread through Europe and into Asia. The human bones found in the Neander valley came from the descendants of Atlanteans; these still had sloping foreheads. From then on, man very slowly learned to think rationally and develop self-awareness. When man began to live his life bearing the seed of the spirit in him here on earth he was already well beyond the animals, but as yet unable to speak or to think.

Divine spirits known as devas existed at the time who did not need a physical body but floated in astral space. They had gained the things they needed by being in a physical body on the moon. Other spirits had not completed their evolution on the Moon, had not been able to manage it. These are the luciferic spirits which lagged behind the devas. The gods, or devas, lived on something that had become a characteristic of humans on earth—love between two sexes. Love between human beings is the air, or the food, which the gods enjoy. In Greek mythology it was called nectar and ambrosia.

The cohorts of Lucifer had no real function in humanity for as long as human beings were still somnambulant. It was only in the fifth root race that they really made man their very own child. Human thinking is not all that old. Ancient wisdom lived among the earliest peoples. This ancient wisdom was revealed from within to the priests. True insight and perception only came a few centuries before the birth of the Christ, in about 600 BC. The power of judgement also only developed later in the world.

This brings us to an important mystery, a fact to be found among early peoples. To grasp this, we must be able to shine a light into the sphere of the soul. In a North American Indian tribe one hears strange terms used for family relationships. Among the Iroquois, first cousins were called ‘brothers and sisters’, but only the children of brothers, not those of sisters. This is a relic of ancient Atlantis. At that early period in human history, the family was all that mattered. A woman would have several husbands and it was impossible to say who was a child's father. All peoples originally had ancestors who would unconcernedly marry close relatives. Close blood bonds were not an obstacle to marriage. It was said that children from closely related parents were the most enlightened; they would be somnambulant. As evolution progressed, it happened more and more that people would marry who were not related by blood. It is a law that the union of individuals who were not so closely related the ether body came loose from its connection with the physical body. With marriages between blood relations the ether bodies of offspring would be firmly lodged. They would be illumined from within. They would still think more with the solar plexus but have no powers of judgement. This grew with distant marriages and showed itself to the degree to which the old marriages between blood relations disappeared. The old somnambulant vision would vanish then, and a new way of seeing things develop, power of judgement. This new period was referred to as the development of the Dionysian principle. Dionysus was cut to pieces, with only the heart preserved. When the Dionysian principle arose, people were cut to pieces and then brought together again through the heart, a meeting of souls, and this brought a complete change in sexual life. The rational mind is the earlier sexuality between relatives transformed.

The earlier developmental stages of humanity are recapitulated in seven-year rhythms in individual human lives. From the first to the seventh year, the child's ether body is still very much in the background. We therefore should not develop children's powers of memory before they reach their seventh year, only their senses. That is the time when we can influence the senses, rousing their inner powers with the help of the senses. We should stimulate those powers by giving children toys that bring their powers of imagination to life, perhaps a block of wood with dots painted on for eyes, and so on, but not dolls that are so complete that the child cannot add anything using his powers of imagination. From the seventh to the fourteenth year it is above all important to get children to develop firm habits that will give them something to hold on to later on in life. These are the years when everything by way of memory must be brought to the human being. It is thus better not to invoke the child's powers of judgement at this period in life. A child should have authority around him at that time but not be an authority himself. Influence him by telling stories, not preaching morals but refer to great examples. For moral development it would be necessary then to develop a feeling for it in the old Pythagorean form. Pythagoras¹³¹ said to his pupils: ‘Do not strike into the fire with your sword’—indicating that one should not do useless things. Another Pythagorean axiom of this kind was: ‘Do not turn back on the road before you have reached the end of it.’ Human beings should only learn to make their own judgements and form their own opinions once they have reached sexual maturity. The ether body loosens at this time, and the astral body will only then be ready to take action in the outside world.

This evolution, today gone through by every individual in seven-year rhythms, was gone through by humanity in the course of its great periods of evolution. Some of the subordinate powers in the human being were raised to a higher level so that the power of judgement could develop. And only then was it possible for Lucifer's cohorts to intervene. This luciferic power comes to expression in people's independent judgement. In those times, when the luciferic principle was intervening, people for the first time did independent work. If you study the past, you can say to yourself: in those early times, all that came about was what was needed to make a family. The individuals who wanted to put a purely spiritual element in the place of blood relationship were working in the name of Lucifer. The Church had developed as a continuation of ancient priestly wisdom. But parallel to it the stream arose where people sought the light, luciferic people such as the Templars, for instance.¹³² They said one had to find one's own light and truth. There was a sect in the middle ages, its members calling themselves Luciferians, who understood this. They would say: ‘Man may be truly blessed indeed, but without the light of knowledge; this is not for us; we want to fight our way through to the light.’¹³³

These are the two streams in humanity. One seeks only to be blessed, the others want the light. Those who are afraid of knowledge consider Lucifer to be evil. But for the others Lucifer is the light-bearer, the bringer of light. This is written in a manuscript kept in the Vatican, but the Church is keeping it a secret, and the people who take this direction in the Church warn people against Lucifer.

Dogma may indeed contain truth. The Pythagorean theorem is dogma for those who do not understand it. But if they do understand it they gain clear, lucid insight. Dogmas are presented as something given by authority. When one understands them they, too, become lucid insight.

At the time when Paul lived, the nature of Christianity was such that it could lead to general love of humanity. A tribal and national religion was to become a world religion. Belief in revelations was connected with the blood-based community. Moses gave established laws. The Christ did not give established laws, and instead of the law there was grace. The inmost human soul was coming alive.

The aims pursued in the Church are a wave that is going down; those of people who want freedom of opinion a wave that is rising. Some brotherhoods, like the Templars for instance, endeavour to seek the light. The race which is striving for the light—those are the children of Lucifer.

At a time when Christianity is beginning to be strictly organized, Edouard Schure¹³⁴ published his play The Children of Lucifer.¹³⁵ This is one stream in the Church, and there is also the other one, the luciferic principle. The children of Lucifer are the children of the inner light, not of belief in revelations. Those who seek to move on into the future must feel related in the spirit. It has been said in the science of the spirit that we must reach the light by our own efforts. Profound, most deeply inward freedom is to develop in the human soul.

The theosophical journal has been called Lucifer for good reason.¹³⁶ It is connected with the inmost nature of the theosophical movement. It needs to be stated for once that the luciferic principle was deliberately cast into the world. When the Roman Catholic Church established the dogma of infallibility,¹³⁷ the emphasis on the luciferic principle provided the counter pole. Conversely we might say that the dogma of infallibility arose in polar relationship to the declaration of spiritual freedom in theosophy, for this was the only way the Church could save itself.

• 131. Pythagoras(C.582–C.507 BC), pre-Socratic Greek philosopher. It has not yet been possible to identify the quotes given here
• 132. See Steiner R. Inner Impulses Working in the Evolution of Mankind (in GA 171). 7 lectures, Dornach 16-18, 23-25 Sept., 1 Oct. 1916. Tr. not known. Manuscript translation R 45, Rudolf Steiner House Library, London; and The Templars (in GA 171). Tr. not known. Lecture given in Dornach on 2 Oct. 1916. Manuscript translation Z 156, Rudolf Steiner House Library, London.
• 133. Followers of Bishop Lucifer von Cagliari (d. 370), existing for a time in Sardinia, Spain, Gaul, Italy and Africa
• 134. Edouard Schur
  é (1841–1929).
• 135. Authorized translation into German by Marie von Sivers and published in Leipzig in 1905. Rudolf Steiner then rewrote it in free rhythms (1909), published in Rudolf Steiner/Edouard Schuré Lucifer. Die Kinder des Lucifer, Dornach 1955.
• 136. See Lucifer-Gnosis. Gesammelte Aufsätze, 1903–1908 (GA 34). See also reference to this in Steiner R. Rudolf Steiner, an Autobiography (GA 28). Tr. R. Stebbing. New York: Rudolf Steiner Publications 1977.
• 137. 1869–70 Vatican Council—infallibility of the pope when he speaks ex cathedra on faith and morals.

Tonight we will talk about sin, original sin, illness, and so on. Let us first look backwards into the past and then allow the future to pass by our spiritual eyes. We have before our modern era the time of Rome and Athens, which was preceded by the Egyptian-Chaldaic period; actual historical records are lacking for the time before then. However, for these older prehistorical epochs there are two sources that can give information; ancient religious teachings for those who know how to decipher them and retrospective images that can be perceived by clairvoyant consciousness. It is the latter we wish to discuss.

Everything on earth is subject to the laws of evolution, and that is especially true for the life of the human soul. The life of the soul in ancient times was different from what it is today. In prehistoric times, thousands of years in the past, the scope of the souls of human beings in Europe, Asia, and Africa was much wider and more comprehensive than that of human beings of our time. To be sure, they did not have the kind of mind that enables us to read or to do arithmetic, but they did possess a primitive clairvoyance and a tremendous memory of which ours cannot have the slightest notion. We shall see later why that was so.

To give you an idea of how these prehistoric people perceived the world, let me tell you, for example, that they saw everything surrounded by an aura when they awakened to their day-consciousness. A flower, for instance, appeared to them surrounded by a circle of light similar to that we see around the light of street lamps in the evening fog. And during sleep these human beings were able to perceive the soul- spiritual beings in their full reality. Human beings learned gradually to see the contours of objects more clearly, but simultaneously and in direct proportion to their ability to do so, the conscious interaction with the spiritual world and the beings in it decreased; it ceased altogether when the ego became individualized in every single being.

The earth, too, had quite a different configuration in those early ages. Human beings lived in other regions and on other continents, and our own ancestors lived on a continent that is now covered by the Atlantic Ocean. The traditional name for this continent is Atlantis, and its disappearance as well as the legend of the universal flood is related in the myths of all peoples. The Atlantean culture was magnificent, and mankind lost many important insights with its destruction, insights that now can be retrieved only with great difficulty. Just as we in our times know how to harness the forces hidden in fossil plants—coal—for trade and industry, so the ancient Atlanteans knew how to utilize the driving forces in grain as energy, for example for the purpose of propelling their air vehicles that moved just a little bit above the ground in air that was much denser than is ours.

Let us now look at the physical organism of the Atlantean individual. It had the peculiar characteristic that the etheric body was not completely identical with the physical body and that the head of the etheric body projected beyond the head of the physical body. This peculiarity is connected with the clairvoyant capabilities of the Atlanteans, also with their extraordinary memory and with their magical powers. The ether-head had a special and central point of perception.

When the ether-head in the course of evolution retracted more and more into the physical head, the profile was changed. Now we have at that point an organ, the development of which will restore the power of clairvoyance in humanity: the pineal gland. And thus, the clairvoyant power of the Atlanteans, as well as their tremendous memory and their magical powers, disappeared gradually; and in its place we developed our present ability to think and to do mathematics.

Going still farther back, we find other catastrophes. The volcanos that we have today are the last remnants of an epoch when whole parts of the earth were destroyed by fire. The continent that perished in those times is designated by the name “Lemuria” and was the area that is now largely taken up by the Pacific and Indian Oceans. The inhabitants of that continent had bodies that were quite different from human bodies in our age and by our standards would appear grotesque. The relationship of the physical to the astral body was different in those early human beings. The crown of the head was open, and rays of light penetrated this opening, so that the head was surrounded by a resplendent aura, and this gave one the appearance of having a lantern on top. The last remnant of this Lemurian head structure can be seen today when we look at the head of a newborn baby and discover the small opening on top that remains open for about a year or a little longer. The bodies of the Lemurians had gigantic dimensions and were made out of a fine, almost gelatine-like substance.

Human beings in the Lemurian age were not at all independent and could do only the things they were inspired to do by the spiritual forces within whom they were, in a manner of speaking, imbedded. Receiving everything from these forces, they acted as if driven by a soul-instinct. At this time the powerful effect of spiritual beings who had not descended into a physical incarnation made itself felt. These beings, who were not well-disposed to humanity, had such an effect on humanity that it attained the independence it had lacked heretofore. According to divine providence, mankind was certainly meant to attain this independence some day, but only through the influence of these beings did that independence come about so early. Together with the other forces, these beings slipped into the astral bodies of human beings, who had not yet entered into a close relationship with their own essence, and bestowed on them a kind of will power that would enable them to do evil since it was only astral and not guided by reason. The influence of these forces, called Luciferic forces, as we can see, may be good or bad because, on the one hand, they led mankind astray and, on the other, gave it freedom.

Today's consciousness originated in clairvoyant consciousness, which we find increasingly more developed as we go back in human evolution. The Lemurians were able to perceive things only with their soul. They were, for example, unable to perceive the form, the color, or the external qualities of a flower. It revealed itself to them as a shining astral configuration that they perceived with a kind of inner organ. According to the divine plan, human beings were not supposed to perceive the world with external sense organs before the middle of the Atlantean period, but the Luciferic forces made this happen earlier, at a time when human instincts had not yet matured. That represents the “Fall” of mankind. Religious documents tell us that the snake opened man's eyes, but without the interference of Lucifer the human body would not have become as firm as it now is and the Atlantean humanity would have been able to see the spiritual side of all things. Instead, man fell into sin, illusion, and error, and to make things worse, toward the middle of the Atlantean period he was also subjected to the influence of Ahrimanic forces. The Luciferic forces had worked on the astral body, but the Ahrimanic forces worked on the etheric body, especially on the ether-head. By that, many human beings fell into the error of mistaking the physical world for the world of truth. The name “Ahrimanic” comes from Ahriman, the name the Persians gave to this erroneous principle. Zoroaster told his people about Ahriman, warned them about him, and exhorted them to become one with Ahura Mazdao—Ormuzd. Ahriman is identical with Mephistopheles and has nothing to do with Lucifer. Mephistopheles comes from the Hebrew word me-phis-to-pel, which means the liar, the cheater. Satan in the Bible is Ahriman too, not Lucifer.

Ancient Atlantis was gradually destroyed in the course of centuries by floods, and the inhabitants left over from the catastrophe retreated to regions that had been spared, such as Asia, Africa, and America. The first region in which Atlantean culture continued to develop was the area that later came to be called India. There the people kept a clear memory of the earlier clairvoyance and of the perception of the spiritual world. It was therefore not difficult for their teachers—the Rishis—to direct their attention to the spiritual side of the world, and initiation was easy to achieve. Clairvoyance was never completely lost; there always existed some clairvoyant people up to the time of Christ. We can recognize a remnant of this primitive form of clairvoyance in mythology, in which the central concern was with beings who had actually been alive, such as Zeus, Apollo, and so forth. Although the Ahrimanic influence began in the Atlantean epoch, as we have said, it unfolded its full strength only later in human evolution. The ancient Indians were sufficiently protected against Ahriman; for them the physical world was never anything else but maya, illusion. Only in the most ancient Persian period of Zarathustra did people begin to place value on the physical world and thereby come into the power of Ahriman. This clarifies for us Zarathustra's admonition of which we spoke earlier.

As the evolution of humanity reached the Greek period, human beings were confronted by another force that began to drive them back up to the spiritual world from which, as it were, they had been expelled since the Lemurian age. This new force was the Christ-Principle, which entered Jesus of Nazareth and permeated His three bodies—the physical, the etheric, and the astral. When the human soul is completely imbued with the Christ-Principle, the Ahrimanic and Luciferic powers will be defeated, and through this principle the course of evolution will be reversed. Christ would not have been able to influence humanity had His coming not been announced to it a long time before He actually appeared. Inwardly, however, humanity has always been led by Christ; we can deduce this from the magnificent images by which His coming was prophesied. Who else could have inspired such mighty imaginations?

Immediately after the mystery of Golgotha when Christ's blood ran from five wounds and His spirit permeated the lowest realms, the incarnation of Christ brought about a remarkable change in the physical, etheric, and astral bodies of humanity. Christ's etheric and astral bodies multiplied like a grain of seed, and the spiritual world was filled with these copies. For example, human beings living in the period from the fifth or sixth through the tenth centuries who had developed sufficiently received at their birth such an imprint of the Christ-Incarnation of Jesus of Nazareth. St. Augustine is the individual in whom such partaking in the etheric body of Christ is most clearly evident, and the great significance of his life must be attributed to this fact. On the other hand, Christ's astral body was incorporated into human beings from about the tenth to the sixteenth centuries, and this explains the appearance of human beings who were endowed with extraordinary humility and virtue, such as St. Francis of Assisi and the great Dominicans who reflected the wonderful astral qualities of Christ. These individuals were imbued with such a clear image of the great truths they practiced throughout their lives. By contrast, St. Augustine was never free of doubt and always experienced the conflict between theory and practice. Of the great Dominicans, St. Thomas Aquinas³⁰ is especially noteworthy because in him the influence of the astral body of Christ was manifest to a high degree, as we shall see later. Beginning with the sixteenth century, copies of the Christ-Ego begin to weave themselves into the egos of a few individualities, one of them being Christian Rosenkreutz,³¹ the first Rosicrucian. This phenomenon led to the feasibility of a more intimate relationship with Christ, as is revealed by esoteric teaching.

The power of Christ will make human beings more perfect, spiritualize them, and lead them back into the spiritual world. Mankind developed its reason at the expense of clairvoyance; the power of Christ will enable human beings to learn on this earth and to ascend again with what they will have acquired on earth. Human beings descended from the Father, and the power of Christ will lead them back to the Father.

• 30. St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) was the Italian theologian and philosopher whose philosophy was declared the official philosophy of the Catholic Church. He is generally regarded to have been the most prominent mind of scholasticism.
• 31. Christian Rosenkreutz is generally regarded by most scholars as the pseudonym for the German writer Johan Valentin Andrea (1586–1654). In his works Fama fraternitatis (1614) and in Confessio rosae crucis (1615), he traced the development of the Rosicrucian Society to Arab and Oriental origins.

The theosophical worldview seeks to deepen our spiritual life, not arbitrarily, but because it wants to serve, to satisfy the deeply felt yearning of our time. That the theosophical worldview is not arbitrary can be seen by comparing it with other spiritual currents.

Today we want to consider a cultural current in art in relation to Theosophy. We want to talk about Richard Wagner. Richard Wagner always emphasized that he wanted to serve an ideal that could permeate people like any other religious ideal.

Goethe longed for an interpreter of art. Richard Wagner endeavored to be such an interpreter throughout his life. One could say: What is not said about Richard Wagner, what is not thought of him! Richard Wagner himself would not have thought that. Nor is it necessary that he should have consciously thought all this so clearly. Just as a plant cannot itself say what a poet might say about it, so Richard Wagner does not need to have said or thought all that is said about him. The botanist cannot place himself above the forces of the plant. He only knows their laws. The plant, on the other hand, can grow according to these laws without knowing them. The same applies to the artist: he implements the laws of art. Richard Wagner himself was of the opinion that truth comes to light in philosophy and that the secrets of the world are revealed in art. He says of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony that in such a creation there is a revelation of another world, much more than through logical thinking.

Richard Wagner always had the feeling that the spiritual world, as the basis of the sensual world, stands behind this sensual world. He sees beings in the devachanic world, as we call it, that are connected to the physical bodies. An extract of this spiritual world is the physical. One must have what Goethe calls spiritual eyes and ears in order to see and perceive this spiritual world.

The Pythagorean spoke of the harmony of the spheres, which is not an arbitrarily chosen, superficial image. Goethe speaks very clearly about this spiritual world of the music of the spheres. For him, what is around us is the material expression of this spiritual world. He says in Faust:

What a roar brings the light! It trumpets, it trombones, the eye blinks and the ear is amazed, the unheard does not listen.

And elsewhere:

The sun sounds in the ancient manner In the song of the spheres, And it completes its prescribed journey With a thunderclap.

A great artist does not just use images like these as pictures.

Richard Wagner said that the individual musical instruments are like individual organs through which the world expresses itself in primal feelings. He had no theosophical view. However, since he was imbued with a theosophical attitude, he always knew that there are deep relationships between people and what stands behind them. Much of this is contained in old legends, for example in the legend of “Poor Henry”. A maiden must sacrifice herself so that the sick Poor Henry can be healed. The sacrifice acts as a force from one to the other. The outer science can find nothing of the magical power that passes from the redeemer to the redeemed.

In the Flying Dutchman, we have before us a man who has become sinful. The sacrifice of Senta, the power that passes from person to person, must have an effect here.

The whole music drama is imbued with this idea. Richard Wagner felt: In the ordinary drama, only the external action takes place, only the purely external expression of inner experiences. In the symphony, on the other hand, we experience the feeling only inwardly, that is, what is missing in the drama. Beethoven sought a balance in the Ninth Symphony, in which the feeling resonated in the word. Wagner's music drama also arose from the same endeavor.

Richard Wagner saw the ideal human behind the ordinary everyday person. He saw this ideal human in myths and legends, which contain in the imagination what man contains in his nature and in his germs. The saga of the Nibelungs is a particularly vivid expression of this. At the time of the ancient Atlantis, people lived under very different conditions than we do today. Year in, year out, Atlantis was covered by dense masses of fog. Rain and sunshine were not distributed as they are today, so that the rainbow could only appear after the great flood, the Deluge, because only then were the conditions for its appearance present. Noah saw the first rainbow. In myths and legends, the memory of the old conditions has been preserved, for example in the name Niflheim – Mistheim. We receive truer knowledge from the myths than from materialistic science. The state of mind at that time was such that the individual ego did not yet exist. In the course of the migration from the west to the east, the human being developed his ego nature. The Atlanteans had a collective consciousness at that time. The Germanic tribes, for example the Cherusci, still had this collective consciousness as well. Legends and myths depicted this in images.

In the transition from the collective self to the individual self, to the single self, the self contracts more and more around the individual human being. This increasingly contracting individual self was depicted as a ring. Truth and wisdom are interwoven with the image of poetry. The human egoistic self is expressed in the ring. The masses of mist flowed together to form rivers where people now live. In the Rhine, the myth sees what has become of the harmonious, collective consciousness of the self. The last stragglers of those endowed with universal consciousness have been drawn into the waves of the Rhine, as it were. Gold is the symbol of power.

With love, the possibility of selfish love also flows into the soul of the self. What is represented by gold, the symbol of power, is what the egoistic self strives for. Alberich kills love in order to take for himself what used to come to every individual from the All-consciousness. In the long-held E-flat major pedal in the prelude to “Rheingold”, we see the drawing in of the self into the human being.

The relationship between people must be regulated by external law. We find this with Wotan. Through his love for his wife, he loses his only eye, even if it is only slightly clairvoyant. For what the giants have done for him, he wants to give up the representative of love, of that which preserves youth, love for selfish power. Wotan still has connections to the All-consciousness. This emerges in Erda, this ancient consciousness, which is a dim but clairvoyant consciousness. She experiences the depths of the natural world clairvoyantly in what lives and weaves in springs and waters:

Her sleeping is dreaming, her dreaming is sensing, her sensing is prevailing knowledge.

This ancient consciousness cannot be expressed better, and all this is also expressed in drama and music. When the I was locked in the ring, it was locked in the skin. People who have the clairvoyant consciousness and the consciousness of today are called initiates. This was always represented in the image of the feminine. Goethe's words:

The Eternal Feminine

Draws us upward

refers to the higher human consciousness that humanity yearns for. Every nation has leaders who correspond to its character. Here, among the Germanic peoples, bravery is the corresponding characteristic. The soul of the warrior rises above the ordinary consciousness. This is symbolized in a female personality, the Valkyrie. Those who do not die on the battlefield die a death on the battlefield. But those who fall in battle are led up by the Valkyries. The feminine leads into the spiritual realm.

The initiate experiences in life what the ordinary person experiences only after death. Siegfried is an initiate. He unites with the Valkyrie already here. The All-consciousness passes over into the I-consciousness. From close marriage gradually arises distant marriage. The mixing of related blood gave the power of vision. This power passes with distant marriage. When distant blood is brought to distant blood, clairvoyance and ruling knowledge perish.

This transition to long-distance marriage can be found in the world of legends, where a member of the blood relationship goes out and marries outside of it. This is characterized in the saga in such a way that it is always associated with suffering and hardship. Siegmund and Sieglinde are characteristic representatives of close marriage. The child of this marriage, Siegfried, must not know any of this. He must grow up, completely on his own. Fricka, the representative of the new order, rebels against the union of Sieglinde and Siegmund.

In his unfinished drama “Der Sieger”, begun in 1856, Richard Wagner incorporated theosophical teachings. Amander, an Indian prince, is loved by a Jandalah maiden. He does not consider her worthy of him and enters a monastery. The maiden remains behind and later realizes that in a previous incarnation she was a king's daughter and that the present prince was a Jandalah, whom she did not want to marry. A balance had now been struck. She too enters a Buddhist monastery. This would have been a purely theosophical drama with reincarnation in it, but Richard Wagner did not yet feel up to it.

The following year he was invited to stay at Villa Wesendonck. From his window he saw spring outside, the first signs of sprouting, the resurrection of nature. He recognized the connections between this cosmic event and the mystery of resurrection. The “Parsifal” was created from this. The symbol at the center of the Parsifal problem is the Holy Grail. There really was a school of the Holy Grail. It still exists today: the realization of the pure ideal.

What the Grail student and the Rosicrucian student go through is to be reflected in a dialogue that did not take place literally in this form, but in spirit. The pupil was shown: Look at the plant. The root goes down into the soil, the sap – the “blood” – goes up, where the fruit attaches itself. It stretches the calyx towards the sunbeam, the holy lance of love. Compare this with man. Unconscious, the plant is not yet permeated by desires. It develops upwards to become human. Then the plant sap becomes blood, permeated with desires, the plant leaf becomes flesh. By incorporating the desires, the human being acquires day-consciousness in contrast to the sleep-consciousness of the plant.

One also spoke of future development: everything is in development. The human being will develop to ever more perfect levels. Richard Wagner also points this out. An organ that is still developing, that is still at the lowest level – every materialist will find what I am about to say terrible, but that does not matter, it is still true – the heart, it is indeed a real crux for materialistic science; it is an involuntary muscle with striated fibers like the voluntary muscles. This already points to a later stage of development. The human larynx will also have a higher development. It will be productive, it will create the image of man: it will become the future organ of reproduction. Later, like the plant now, man will turn his chalice chastely towards the sun, towards the holy lance of love. This was said to the Grail disciple. One can only arrive at this knowledge through spiritual insight, not through speculation. The Grail disciple should feel and relive it.

In “Parsifal” the one who strives for the Grail ideal is portrayed, the Christian initiate. The pure fool, he knows nothing through his own speculation, but he has felt it, he knows through compassion.

In Kundry, Wagner depicts the lower sensuality that passes from incarnation to incarnation. Kundry is Eve, is Herodias. She mocked the Redeemer. But she must not be lost; she must also be redeemed. This happens through the kiss of Parsifal. Klingsor represents black magic, brute force.

In Siegfried, the old initiation is combined with the Christian initiation. Siegfried is vulnerable only in one place: where the Redeemer later carried the cross. The old can only develop into unselfish free love if Christian love is grasped. This is expressed in Richard Wagner's transition from the “Nibelungen” to “Parsifal”, when he moved from the Nibelung saga to the Parzival saga. Richard Wagner himself felt he was a herald.

Wahnfried shall this house be called,
Where my delusion found peace.

That is written on his house. Man must pass through delusion if he wants to ascend to the spiritual world.

If one wants to interpret the secrets of the world, one must turn to art.

We have seen that the writer of the Apocalypse intended the seven letters in the first chapters of the Apocalypse as messages for the seven representatives of the seven cultural epochs of the post-Atlantean age; that is, the age that followed the great water catastrophe also known as the Flood. The age that will come after the seven post-Atlantean epochs reveals itself to the initiate in seven seals as the seven epochs like those of our post-Atlantean age.

We must realize that the soul development of humankind in the future still has many and manifold changes to go through. The more we imagine ourselves back into the state of consciousness in the ancient past when the human being's feeling for self was just a dim dawning, the more we also find a dim clairvoyance; the further back we go the less people appear as individuals. If we go far back into Atlantean times we no longer see people as individual beings but rather united with one another into group souls. But even in historical times, in the last centuries before Christ, we still find group souls. At that time the people in middle Europe felt themselves to be members of an organism, members of a tribe. Tacitus tells us how the individual Cheruscans experienced themselves, not as individuals, but as members of the tribal I.¹

We find in early Atlantean times that human beings over wide, wide geographical regions were very similar in appearance. They broke down into groups of striking similarity. In the middle of the Atlantean age humankind still fell into four main groups. In the first stages of Atlantean development the members of the individual groups still resembled one another in a very pronounced way: only the groups were sharply distinguished. The clairvoyant today can see very little of what constituted the physical body at that time. It was still completely made up of a very soft material, much like certain fish in the ocean today that can barely be distinguished from the rest of the water. The air then was entirely permeated by the watery element and the human physical body was still very difficult to distinguish from the watery element surrounding it. However, the bones and nervous system were also already present as forces at that time. The human being only became a real earthly human being through a process of hardening.

If we wish to characterize the various human beings, borrowing, as it were, present-day images, then we can consider first those who had developed and condensed their physical nature the most. The occultist refers to them as the bull people. The people whose etheric body was developed the most, the aggressive people, the powerful ones, were called the lion people. A third group had an astral body that strongly ruled over the other members; that is the group referred to as actual human beings. Then there were the people who could be called the eagles, who had already developed a strong I. In this way they ruled over the others. We can speak of these four group souls, and a clairvoyant perceives them by looking back into those ancient times.

These four groups of people were characterized by whatever aspect had been most formed in them on the earth below. The bull people at that time had developed their digestive system the most; the lion people their heart and blood circulation ... [gap in the manuscript]. The clairvoyant can see four such group souls. That is what appears with initiation in the astral world. What then presents itself to the clairvoyant can be compared approximately with what those four animals are today. One who sees the evolution of humankind today with the view of an occultist sees this picture of the four human groups symbolized in these four animals.

The war of all against all will be an expression of the egotism that is always growing stronger, the egotism conjured forth by humanity today as the I is and will always become, stronger and stronger. That will be the end of the last post-Atlantean culture. This catastrophe will also have its mission, its usefulness in the ascent of the entire human race. However, the great war of all against all will be something much worse than war of the present-day with weapons. It will be a war of souls, of souls who no longer understand one another, a war of the classes. This future catastrophe is difficult for present-day consciousness to understand.

The Atlanteans were magicians. As we today use the powers asleep in coal, so the Atlantean used the forces in plant seeds. The forces in the seeds served them in their technology, in their industry.

There is a mysterious connection between these forces. As long as the Atlanteans used the seed forces properly, they were in harmony with the working of the forces of the air and water. However, from the middle of the Atlantean age onward, the Atlantean magicians increasingly approached their moral fall; and in the mysteries of the black occult schools these magical forces were misused in a terrible way. They were placed in the service of the most horrible egotism. In this way the powers of air and water were increasingly excited which finally had to result in the mighty Atlantean water catastrophe. Today, those who know the secret of the use of these forces know full well that the use of such forces in our time means that powers of black magic are at work. Magic must never be made to serve when selfish purposes are involved. Hence, the employment of seed forces is not permitted today even to serve white magic. On the other hand, in Lemurian times the seed forces of the animals were used. But everywhere that the growth forces of animals are misused, horrendous forces of fire, the vulcanic element, are awakened.

Today these things are not so obvious. Today the feeling for one's self, the overwhelming egohood of people has brought about the drying up, the desolation of those regions of the earth that have developed this egotism to the greatest extent. It is absolutely true that this war of all against all is being prepared on the surface of the earth because a connection exists between the egotistical withering of the soul's forces and the paralyzation of the earth's productive powers. The Nordic myth of the Twilight of the Gods also tells us this.

We must understand the difference between the evolution of souls and the evolution of bodies. From epoch to epoch human souls find themselves again and again in different bodies. These souls will one day see the strife that will reign among the human souls who will be born in the last post-Atlantean age. This experience will be a lesson for them and will help to free them from egotism. Then they will be able to grow into an era where they will have the fruits of selfhood but without its disadvantages. An age will come with clairvoyant conditions similar to those prevailing in ancient Atlantis, but with this difference: human beings will have a free consciousness of self. We will then have learned, in these seven cultures of the post-Atlantean age, what can be achieved in the physical world. This self-perception or consciousness of self can only awaken in a physical body; but the human being must again subjugate the physical body. After the war of all against all, we will have achieved a stage of evolution where we live in a bodily nature in such a way that we are no longer slaves of our physical bodies.

The impulse for this development comes from the Christ principle. Christ even falls right in the middle between the age of the Atlantean catastrophe and the war of all against all. On the one hand we can thank the descent into matter for our consciousness of self within our physical bodily nature. On the other hand, we thank the Christ event for our ability to ascend with the achievements of the physical world. We thank the Christ principle for our ability to ascend to universal brotherly love, to the universal love of humanity, since we will again unite in groups with love for one another.

If we look back to the time of the original group souls of Atlantis and then into the future we see these four group souls appearing again. The lamb will stand in the middle as a sign for the love that will unite people who will then be living in a bodily nature that is less dense.

But this state must be prepared today through the setting aside of a small group that will carry brotherly love into the future. Therefore, a stream has arisen in our time that will lead to brotherly love through real spiritual knowledge. Humankind will not attain brotherly love through preaching but rather through knowledge. Preachers who constantly speak of love achieve nothing. But if people are given wisdom, knowledge of evolution, in such a way that it becomes life in the soul, then humanity will arrive at love. The soul can attain this when it is warmed by wisdom. Then it can radiate love.

For this reason the masters of wisdom and harmony of feelings have formed this stream for the raying forth of love into humanity and for the influx of wisdom into humanity. Humankind, rushing toward the war of all against all, will then find the fruit of the theosophical movement in an understanding of peace—while all around it, the nature of humankind will have everywhere led into strife those who have not heard the call of the master of wisdom and harmony of feelings on the basis of the Christ impulse in the fourth age.

Let us look back again to the first epoch of our culture, to the holy Rishis who pointed to the Vishva Karman, whom, as clairvoyants, they saw by means of the etheric bodies of the Atlantean initiates they carried within them. The writer of the Apocalypse directed his spiritual gaze toward him and saw how he holds the seven star oracles, through the seven Rishis, in his hand. These holy, simple men wanted to awaken the spiritual senses of humanity by saying to human beings that the world surrounding them is just maya or illusion. Only the spirit standing behind the surrounding world could be called truth. The seven holy Rishis pointed to this spirit. Human beings had to descend into physical life; but in order to preserve them from a descent into matter that would be too deep. they first had to absorb the teaching concerning maya or illusion. The souls that are now living in our bodies have also lived in Indian bodies, and at that time learned to see matter as an illusion. But all around there were the souls of many human beings who were locked in the fetters of matter. For those souls incarnated again today it means that they are theoretical materialists. Among materialists those are the least harmful, for their materialistic thoughts will be driven out of them in the future when the earth will become devastated and only the soul will remain alive, the soul that they no longer believe in today.

What is even worse is practical materialism. But this form of materialism was even more dangerous in ancient times because the memory of magic powers was still present; then this materialism always led to the practice of black magic. Therefore, at that time this materialism always signified the fall into the decadence of black magic. The writer of the Apocalypse always spoke of these people as Nicolaitans who have lost the first, the glorious love of the spirit. Therefore, when he wanted to praise he said that the Nicolaitans were hated.

We find the least amount of black magic in the ancient Indian culture. We find the greatest misuse in Egypt because the lofty teachings of Hermes went over into the art of black magic. Balaam is intended as a black magician. The writer of the Apocalypse directs his admonishment to the community in Pergamon in the verse: “But I have a few things against you: you have some there who hold the teachings of Balaam.” (Rev. 2:14) Common immorality is not meant here but rather the development of the powers in matter, black magic.

In the occult schools of the first age after Christ the Apocalypse was a favored book. The ancient mysteries founded the primal wisdom, the wisdom of the Atlanteans. The Christian mysteries, on the other hand, strive to direct their view to the future. They did this not only in order to know but also in order to stimulate their wills so that, with this spiritual treasure, humanity could pass through increasingly higher incarnations.

• 1. Publius Cornelius Tacitus (ca. 55 – 120 A.D.), the Roman historian, in his book “De origin et situ Germanorum,” generally known as “Germania.”

The Old Initiation Centers. The Human Form as the Subject of Meditation.

Yesterday we spoke of the mysterious connection between the earlier evolutionary conditions of our earth and the various world-conceptions of the successive post-Atlantean periods. The remarkable fact emerged that when the Atlantean catastrophe had altered the face of the earth, the holy pre-Vedic Indian culture, in its philosophical conceptions, showed something like a mirror-picture of the events that, in the beginning of the, earth's evolution, took place in that remote past when sun, moon, and earth were still united. What the eye of the spirit beheld at that time was nothing but a spiritually conceived form of what actually existed when our earth stood at the beginning of its evolution.

The second condition of the earth, when the sun had detached itself but earth and moon still formed one body, came to light during the second cultural period, the old Persian, as a philosophic-religious system in the opposition of the light-principle in the sun-aura to the principle of darkness, the opposition of Ormuzd to Ahriman. The third period, the Egyptian-Babylonian-Assyrian, is a spiritual reflection of what took place when earth, sun, and moon had become three bodies. We also pointed out that the trinity of Osiris, Isis, and Horus reflected the third epoch's astral trinity of sun, earth, and moon.

This separation occurred in the Lemurian time. After this followed the Atlantean time, the fourth evolutionary condition of the earth, in which there prevailed conditions of consciousness entirely different from those of today. Through these different forms of consciousness man lived with the gods, he was acquainted with the gods who were later named Wotan, Balder, Thor, Zeus, Apollo, etc. These were beings whom the Atlantean man could perceive with his clairvoyance. We have a repetition of the Atlantean perception of divine-spiritual beings in the memory of the peoples of the Greco-Latin time, and also among the peoples of northern Europe. It was a memory of the experiences of earlier conditions of consciousness. Be it Wotan or Zeus, be it Mars, Hera, or Athena, all were a memory of the spirit-forms of that old world of gods.

Today we must gradually penetrate a little more into the souls of the ancient Indian, Persian, and Egyptian cultures. If we want to form a true picture of the religious experiences of these ancient cultures, we must bear in mind that, the most important parts of the population among these ancient peoples, including the seers, prophets, and enlightened persons, were successors of men who had already lived in the Atlantean time. Furthermore, it was by no means the case that the whole of Atlantean culture was destroyed immediately after the great catastrophe; on the contrary, what remained was gradually carried over and planted into the new time. We will best understand the souls of the post-Atlantean descendants if we steep ourselves in the soul-life of the last Atlanteans.

In the latter Atlantean time men were different one from another, some having retained a high degree of clairvoyant ability. This faculty did not vanish suddenly, but was still present in many of the men who took part in the great migration from west to east. In others, however, it had already disappeared. There were advanced persons and retarded persons and, in accordance with the whole nature of evolution at that time, we can understand that the least advanced were those who were the most clairvoyant, for in a certain way they had remained stationary and had preserved the old Atlantean character. The most advanced were those who had already achieved a physical perceiving of the world, thus approaching our form of day-consciousness. It was they who, ceased to see the spiritual world clairvoyantly at night, and who during their waking hours saw objects with sharper contours. That little handful of whom we have already spoken, who were led by the greatest initiate (generally known as Manu¹ ) and his pupils deep into Asia and thence fructified the other cultures, just this handful, being composed of the most advanced men of that time, first lost the ancient gift of clairvoyance for the ordinary relationships of life. For them the true day-consciousness, in which we see physical objects sharply contoured, became ever clearer. Their great leader led this group farthest into Asia, so that they could live in isolation; otherwise they would have come too closely in touch with other peoples who still preserved the old clairvoyance. Only because they remained separated from other peoples for a time could they grow into a new type of man. A colony was established in inner Asia, whence the great cultural streams could flow into the most varied peoples.

Northern India was the first country to receive its new cultural current from this center. It has already been pointed out that these little groups of cultural pioneers nowhere found un-populated territory. Earlier still, before their great migration from west to east, there had been other wanderings, and whenever new stretches of land rose from the sea, they were peopled by the wanderers. The persons sent out from this colony in Asia had to mix with other peoples, all of whom were more backward than they who had been led by Manu. Among these other peoples were many persons who had retained the old clairvoyance.

It was not the custom of the initiates to establish colonies as this is done today; they colonized in a different way. They knew that they had to start with the souls of the persons whom they met in the lands that were to be colonized. The emissaries did not impose what they had to say. They reckoned with what they found. A balance was reached that took into account the needs of the old inhabitants. This reckoned with their religious views, which were based on the memory of earlier epochs, and also with the old clairvoyant disposition. So it was natural that only a handful of the most advanced could develop true concepts. The great masses could form only ideas that were a sort of compromise between the old Atlantean and the post-Atlantean attitudes. Therefore, we find in all these countries, in India, in Persia, in Egypt, whenever the different post-Atlantean cultures appeared, religious ideas which for that age are less advanced, less cultivated; which are nothing but a sort of continuation of the old Atlantean ideas.

To understand what kind of conceptions really appeared in these folk-religions we must form a picture of them. We must transport ourselves into the souls of the last Atlantean population. We must bear in mind that in the Atlantean time man was not unconscious at night, but that he could then perceive just as he perceived by day—if we can speak at all of night or day in that time. By day he perceived the first traces of what we today so clearly see as the world of sense-perceptions. By night he was the companion of the divine spiritual beings. He needed no proof of the existence of gods, just as we today need no proof of the existence of minerals. The gods were his companions; he himself was a spiritual being during the night. In his astral body and ego he wandered about the spiritual world. He was himself a spirit and he met beings who were of like nature with himself.

Naturally, man did not meet only these higher spiritual beings. He also met beings lower than those who were later known as Wotan, Zeus, etc. These were the choicest figures, but by no means the only ones. It was like seeing kings and emperors to day. Many do not see them, yet still believe that there are kings and emperors.

In this state, which was common to everyone, man perceived the surrounding objects in a way different from his perception today. This was true even while he was conscious during the day. We must try to understand what this consciousness of the latter Atlanteans was.

We have described how the divine beings became imperceptible to man when he dived down into his physical body in the morning. He saw objects as though they were surrounded by mist. These were the images of his waking day at that time. But these pictures had another remarkable property, which we must grasp clearly. Let us suppose that such a man approached a pond. He did not see the water in the pond so clearly defined as we do today, but when he directed his attention to it he experienced something quite different. In approaching the pond a feeling arose in him, merely through looking at it, that was like a taste of what lay before him physically, without his having to drink the water. Simply through looking at it he would have felt that the water was sweet or salty. It was not at all like our seeing water today. We see only the surface and do not penetrate into the inner qualities. But while a dim clairvoyance still prevailed, the man who approached the pond had no alien feeling toward it. He felt himself as being within the properties of the water; he did not stand over against the object as we do; it was as though he could penetrate into the water.

If we had encountered a block of salt at that time, we would have noticed its taste as we approached it. Today we must lick it before we perceive what was then given through mere sight. Man was, as it were, within the whole, and he perceived things as though they were ensouled. He perceived beings that imparted a salty taste to the block. Everything was ensouled for him; air, earth, water, fire. Everything revealed something to him. He could feel himself into the interior of objects; he experienced their inner essence. Nothing appeared to him as a soulless object in the modern way. Therefore man felt everything with sympathy and antipathy because he saw its inner nature. He felt, he experienced, the inner being of the objects.

Memories of these experiences remained everywhere. The parts of the Indian population encountered by the colonists had such a relation to things. They knew that souls lived in things. They had preserved the ability to see the properties of things. Let us bear in mind this whole relationship of men to things. At that time man could perceive how the water tasted as he approached the pond. There he saw a spiritual being, who gave the water its taste. He could meet this spiritual being during the night if he lay down by the water and fell asleep. By day he saw the material; by night he saw what lived in things. By day he saw stones, plants, and animals, he heard the wind blow and the waters roar; by night he saw within himself, in its true form, what he only sensed by day—the spirits that live in all things. When he said that spirits live in the minerals, in the plants, in the water, in the clouds, in the wind, this was for him no poetic license, no mere fantasy, but something that he could see.

We must live, deeply into these souls in order to understand them. Then we understand what dreadful folly it is when our scholars speak of animism and allege that it is the “folk-imagination” that ensouls and personifies things. There is no such folk-imagination. One who really knows the folk does not speak in this way. Repeatedly we find this singular analogy; just as a child, bumping against a table, strikes the table in revenge because (so say the scholars) it thinks of the table as having a soul, so did the primeval man in his childishness ensoul the objects of nature, such as the trees. This is repeated ad nauseam. Certainly there is imagination here, but it is the imagination of the scholars rather than of the folk. It is the scholars who are dreaming. Those who originally saw everything as ensouled were not dreaming; they only reported what they actually saw.

As a sort of remnant, this kind of perception emerged among the ancient peoples as a memory. But the error in the above analogy is that the child does not see the table as ensouled; he does not yet feel a soul in himself, but regards himself as a lump of wood. Feeling himself soulless, he places himself on the same level as the soulless table that he bangs. The fact is just the opposite of what we read in the learned books. Whether we look at India, Persia, Egypt, Greece, or any other place, we find everywhere the same images that were described above, and into these images was poured the culture that was given out by the old initiates.

In ancient India the Rishis guided the culture. We must try to understand something of what gave the impulse to a form that developed into one of the most important forms of the Indian outlook. We know that in all ages there have been so-called mystery schools, where those who could develop their spiritual faculties learned to see more deeply into the world-all, awakening the slumbering faculties so as to see the spiritual connections of things. From these mystery-places proceeded the spiritual impulses of the various cultures. In order really to understand the initiates, we usually consider them as they were in post-Atlantean times, since their nature at that time is most easily comprehensible. But in Atlantis we could encounter something similar to initiate-schools. In order to understand them thoroughly, let us examine the methods of such an ancient Atlantean initiation-school.

If we go back to those times, we find that the above-described conditions of consciousness prevailed and also that man did not then have his present shape. He had quite a different form.² Let us go back to the first half of the Atlantean period. Man consisted already of physical, etheric, and astral bodies, plus the ego, but the physical body still looked quite different. We might compare it with the bodies of certain sea-animals, transparent, hardly to be seen, although laced with luminous threads in certain directions. It was much softer than today, having as yet no bones. It is true that there was already cartilage in some parts, but in these ancient times the physical body was definitely not of its present form.

The etheric body was a much more important member. The physical body was then more or less the same size as now, but the etheric body was extraordinarily large. This etheric body varied among individuals, but one could perceive four different types. One part of mankind would resemble one type, another part another. These four types may be designated by the names of the apocalyptic beasts: bull, lion, eagle, man. It would not be correct to imagine that these beasts were exactly similar to the present animals, but the impression that they made reminds us of these. The impressions that the etheric bodies made can be understood through the picture of a lion, bull, eagle, or man. We can compare with the bull the portion of mankind that gave the impression of having powerful reproductive forces or an unusual appetite. Another portion lived more in the spiritual; these were the eagle men, who felt less at home in the physical world. Then there were men in whom the etheric body was already similar to the present-day physical body; it was not quite identical, but it was like the human form. However, we must not imagine that each man represented only one type; all four types would show some traces in each person, but one or another would predominate.

Such were the etheric bodies of the Atlantean population. As to the astral body, it was especially powerful but largely undeveloped, while the ego was still wholly outside of man. People were entirely different at that time from today. Naturally, some men matured earlier and assumed the ultimate form before the others, but in the main one can describe the men of that time as we have just done. This was the normal condition of the average man.

It was entirely different with the more advanced persons, with the pupils of the mystery-places, who strove after the initiation of the ancient Atlantis. Let us enter in spirit such a center of initiation and try to picture what the teacher had to give. First, what was this teacher himself?

If one meets an initiate today, there is nothing in his general appearance by which he can be recognized. Few persons would recognize him today. The initiate must live in a physical body, and the physical body has developed a long way; hence it differs from others only in certain inner refinements. At that time, however, the initiate was vastly different from other men. The others still had a more animal-like form; the physical body was small in comparison with the gigantic etheric bodies, forming a clumsy animal-like mass. The initiate differed from these in that his physical body was more similar to the modern formation; his countenance was similar to that of modern man, and he had a forebrain such as that of the average man of today. His brain was highly developed, which was not true of other men at that time. These initiates had their schools, into which they admitted pupils who, having proved themselves mature and sufficiently developed, were selected out of the ordinary run of men by special methods.

We must bear one thing in mind if we wish fully to understand what follows. We must realize that in the course of time the power of man's spiritual members over his physical body has almost completely disappeared. The man of today has a certain degree of control over his body. He can move his arms and legs, pedal on bicycles, and exercise some command over his physiognomy, but this is only a last meager remnant of the mastery over the physical body that obtained in ancient Atlantean times. In those days the thoughts and feelings had a much greater influence over the physical body. If today a person were to concentrate for weeks, months, or even years on a certain thought, only in exceptional cases would this influence more than the etheric body. Seldom would the physical body be influenced by a meditation. If, for example, someone should succeed by this means in making his brain move further forward, thus working even on the bones of his forehead, this would be an astounding achievement. Very, very seldom does this happen today. Extraordinary energy would have to be developed today for a thought to work on the physical body. It is easier to affect the blood-circulation or the breathing, but even this is difficult. Thoughts can work on the etheric body today, and in the next incarnation they will have worked so powerfully as to alter the external physical structure. Man should work today in the knowledge that he is working not for one incarnation but for many incarnations to come. The soul is eternal; it continually returns.

Things were different in the ancient initiation schools. Thinking had such mastery there that it could influence the physical body in a comparatively short time. The pupil of the mysteries could mold his own organization until it resembled the human. One could accept a pupil out of the normal run of men and had only to give him the right impulse. The pupil himself did not have to think; through a sort of suggestion thoughts were implanted in his soul. A definite spiritual form had to stand before his soul, and the pupil had to steep himself in this form. Everywhere the Atlantean initiates gave to their pupils a thought-form, into which the pupils had to immerse themselves over and over again. What kind of picture was this? What did the pupil have to think? What did he meditate on?

We have already pointed to the original condition of the earth, sketching out the whole of evolution and mentioning the light-form in the primeval dust. Had one at that time looked about clairvoyantly, the archetype of the man of, today would have arisen. This grew out of that pollen, out of that primeval atom. Not the form of ancient man or of Atlantean man, but the form of modern man grew out of that atom. And what did the Atlantean initiate do? He placed before the soul of his pupil precisely this archetype that reared itself out of the primeval seed.

The pupil had to meditate on this archetype. The initiate placed before the pupil's gaze the human shape as a thought-form, with all the impulses and feelings that were contained in it. Whether the pupil was of the lion type or of one of the others, he had to hold before himself this picture of what man was to become in post-Atlantean times. He received this thought-picture as an ideal. He had to will the thought, “My physical body must become like this picture.” Through the power of this picture his body was so influenced that it became different from the bodies of other men. Certain parts were transformed, and gradually the most advanced pupils became more similar to the man of today.

Thus we look back on remarkable mysteries, the mysteries of ancient Atlantis. No matter how the various men might be formed, there floated before their souls, as a picture, a thing that was already present as a spiritual picture when the sun was still united with the earth. This picture emerged more and more as the meaning of the earth, as what lies spiritually at the foundation of the earth. This picture did not appear to them as this or that form, as the picture of this or that race; it appeared to them as the universal ideal of mankind.

This is the feeling that the pupil was to develop through this picture: “The highest spiritual beings have willed this picture, through which unity comes into mankind. This picture is the meaning of the earth's evolution; to bring this picture to realization the sun separated itself from the earth and the moon detached itself. Through this man could become man. This is the One who will at last appear as the high ideal of the earth.”

Into this high ideal streamed the feelings that enlivened the pupil in his meditation.

So did things stand about the middle of the Atlantean epoch. We will see later how this picture, which stood before the pupil as the human form, transformed itself into something different, and how this was salvaged after the Atlantean catastrophe. This is what lived again in the Indian initiation-teaching, where it was summed up in the ancient sacred name of Brahm. What the God-head willed as the meaning of the earth was the most sacred thing for the ancient Indian initiate. He spoke of it as Brahma. From this sprang later Zarathustra's teaching and the Egyptian wisdom, both of which will be discussed later. How it transformed itself from Brahma to the Egyptian wisdom we will see tomorrow.

• 1. Echoes of this term were preserved by many peoples: e.g. Menes in Egypt, Manu in India, Minos in Crete, and Manitu in America.
• 2. The genesis of the human form is much discussed in this and succedding chapters. The reader will find Dr. H. Poppelbaum's book Man and Animal (Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1960) to be a helpful companion in this study.

THE process that I have described to you as the division of the sexes was of such a nature that the two sexes are to be thought of as still united in that animal-man of the Moon and also in his descendants in the Moon recapitulation of the Earth. Then there really took place a kind of cleavage of the human body. This cleavage came about through densification; not until a mineral kingdom had been separated out as it is today could the present human body arise, representing a single sex. The Earth and the human body had first to be solidified to the mineral nature as we know it. In the soft human bodies of the Moon and of the earlier periods of the Earth human beings were of dual-sex, male-female.

Now we must remind ourselves of the fact that Man in a certain respect has preserved a residue of the ancient dual sex inasmuch as in the present man the physical body is masculine, the etheric body feminine, and in the woman it is reversed; for the physical feminine body has a masculine etheric body. These facts open up an interesting insight into the soul life of the sexes; the capacity for sacrifice in the service of love displayed by the woman is connected with the masculinity of the etheric body, whereas the ambition of the man is explained when we realise the feminine nature of his etheric body. I have already said that separation into the human sexes has arisen from the intermingling of the forces sent to us from the sun and the moon. Now you must be clear that in the man the stronger influence on the etheric body emanates from the moon and the stronger influence on the physical body from the sun. In the woman the opposite is the case, the physical body is influenced by the forces of the moon and the etheric body by those of the sun.

The continual change of mineral substances in man's present body could not take place until the mineral realm had taken shape; before this there was quite a different form of nourishment. During the Sun-period of the Earth all plants were permeated by milky juices. Man's nourishment was then actually effected by his imbibing the milk-juices from the plants as today the child draws its nourishment from the mother. The plants which still contain milky juices are the last stragglers from that time when all the plants supplied these juices in abundance. It was not till a later time that nourishment took on its present form.

To understand the significance of the separation of the sexes we must be clear that upon the Moon and during its recapitulation on the Earth all the beings looked very much alike. Just as the cow has the same appearance as her “daughters,” as all other cows, since the Group-soul lies behind, so could men scarcely be distinguished from their forefathers, and this continued till long into the Atlantean Age. Whence arises the fact that human beings no longer resemble each other?

It comes from the rise of the two sexes. From the original dual sex-nature the tendency had continued in the female being to produce similarity in the descendants; in the male the influence worked differently, it tended to call forth variety, individualisation, and with the flowing of the male force into the female, dissimilarity was increasingly created. Thus it was through the male influence that the power of developing individuality came about.

The ancient dual sex had yet another peculiarity. If you had asked one of the old dwellers on the Moon about his experiences, he would have described them as identical with those of his earliest ancestors; everything lived on through the generations. The gradual rise of a consciousness that only extends from birth to death came about by the individualising of the human race, and at the same time arose the possibility of birth and death, as we know them today. For those ancient Moon beings with their floating, swimming motion, were suspended from the environment with which they were united by the “strings” conducting the blood. Thus if a being died it was not a death of the soul, it was only a dying off of a sort of limb, while the consciousness remained above. It was as if your hand, for instance, should wither on your body and a new hand grow in its place. So these human beings with their dim consciousness only experienced dying as a gradual withering of their bodies. These bodies dried up and new ones continually sprang forth; consciousness, however, was preserved through the consciousness of the group-soul, so that really a kind of immortality existed.

Then arose the present blood, which was created in the human body itself, and this went hand in hand with the rise of the two sexes. And with it the necessity of a remarkable process came about. The blood creates a continuous conflict between life and death, and a being who forms red blood within himself becomes the scene of a perpetual struggle, for red blood is continually consumed and changed into blue blood, into a substance of death. Together with man's individual transformation of the blood arose that darkening of the consciousness beyond birth and death. Now, for the first time, with the lighting up of the present consciousness, man lost the ancient dimly sensed immortality, so that the impossibility of looking beyond birth and death is intimately connected with the division of the sexes. And something else too is connected with this.

When man still possessed the Group-soul, existence went on from generation to generation, no interruption was caused through birth and death. Then this interruption appeared and with it the possibility of reincarnation. Earlier, the son was but a direct continuation of the father, the father of the grandfather, consciousness did not break off. Now there came a time when there was darkness beyond birth and death, and a sojourn in Kamaloca and Devachan first became possible. This interchange, this sojourn in higher worlds, could only come about at all after individualisation, after the expulsion of Sun and Moon. Only then appeared what today we call incarnation, and at the same time this intermediate state, which again will one day also come to an end.

Thus we have reached the period in which we have seen the earlier dual-sexed organism, representing a kind of group-soul, divide into a male and a female, so that the similar is reproduced through the female, what is varied and dissimilar through the male. We see in our humanity the feminine to be the principle which still preserves the old conditions of folk and race, and the masculine that which continually breaks through these conditions, splits them up and so individualises mankind. There is actually active in the human being an ancient feminine principle as group-soul and a new masculine principle as individualising element. It will come about that all connections of race and family stock will cease to exist, men will become more and more different from one another, interconnection will no longer depend on the common blood, but on what binds soul to soul. That is the course of human evolution.

In the first Atlantean races there still existed a strong bond of union and the first sub-races grouped themselves according to their colouring. This group-soul element we have still in the races of different colour. These differences will increasingly disappear as the individualising element gains the upper hand. A time will come when there will no longer be races of different colour; the difference between the races will have disappeared, but on the other hand there will be the greatest differences between individuals. The further we go back into ancient times the more we meet with the encroachment of the racial element; the true individualising principle begins as a whole only in later Atlantean times. Among the earlier Atlanteans members of one race actually experienced a deep antipathy for members of another race; the common blood caused the feeling of connection, of love; it was considered against morality to marry a member of another stock.

If, as seer, you wished to examine the connection between the etheric body and the physical body in the old Atlanteans you would make a remarkable discovery. Whereas in the man of today the etheric head is practically covered by the physical part of the head and only protrudes slightly beyond it, in the old Atlantean the etheric head projected far out beyond the physical head; in particular it projected powerfully in the region of the forehead. Now we must think of a point in the physical brain in the place between the eyebrows, only about a centimetre lower, and a second point in the etheric head which would correspond to this. In the Atlantean these two points were still far apart and evolution consisted precisely in the fact that they continually approached each other. In the fifth Atlantean period the point of the etheric head drew in to the physical brain and by reason of these two points coming together there developed what we possess to-day: calculation, counting, the capacity of judging, the power of forming ideas in general, intelligence. Formerly the Atlanteans had only an immensely developed memory, but as yet no logical intellect. Here we have the starting point for the consciousness of the “ego.” A self-reliant independence did not exist in the Atlantean before these two points coincided, on the other hand he could live in much more intimate contact with nature. His dwellings were put together by what was given by nature; he moulded the stones and bound them together with the growing trees. His dwellings were formed out of living nature, were really transformed natural objects. He lived in the little tribes that were still preserved through blood relationship, whilst a powerful authority was exercised by the strongest, who was the chieftain. Everything depended on authority, which however was exercised in a way peculiar to those times.

When man entered on the Atlantean Age, he could as yet utter no articulate speech; this was only developed during that period. A chieftain could not have given commands in speech, but on the other hand these men had the faculty of understanding the language of nature. Present day man has no idea of this, he must learn it again. Picture, for instance, a spring of water which reflects your image to you. As occultist a peculiar feeling emerges in your soul. You say—My image presses towards me out of this spring, to me this is a last token of how on old Saturn everything was reflected out into space. The memory of Saturn arises in the occultist when he beholds his reflection in the spring. And in the echo which the spoken sound gives back arises the recollection of how on Saturn all that resounded into cosmic space, came back as echo. Or you see a Fata Morgana a mirage in the air, in which the air seems to have taken up whatever pictures are imprinted in it and then reflects them again. As occultist you see here a memory of the Sun-period, when the gaseous Sun took in all that came to it from cosmic space, worked it over, and then let it stream back, giving it its own sun-nature at the same time. On the Sun planet you would have seen how things were prepared as Fata Morgana, as a kind of mirage within the gases of the Sun condition. Thus without being a magician one learns to grasp the world from many aspects and that is an important means towards developing into higher worlds. In ancient times man understood nature to a high degree.

There is a great difference between living in an atmosphere like the present and such as it was in Atlantis. The air was then saturated by immense vapour masses; sun and moon were surrounded by a gigantic rainbow halo. There was a time when the mist-masses were so dense that no eye could have seen the stars, when sun and moon were stiff darkened. Only gradually they became visible to man. This coming into sight of sun, moon and stars is magnificently described in records of the Creation. What is described there has really taken place, and much more besides.

The understanding of surrounding nature was still very vividly present in the Atlantean. All that sounds in the rippling of the spring, in the storm of winds, and is an inarticulate sound to you today, was heard by the Atlantean as a speech he understood. There were at that time no commandments, but the Spirit pierced through the vapour-drenched air and spoke to man. The Bible expresses this in the words “And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” The human being heard the Spirit from surrounding objects; from sun, moon and stars the Spirit spoke to him and you find in those words—in the Bible a plain expression for what took place in man's environment.

Then came the time in which an especially advanced portion of the human race, who lived in a region which today is on the bed of the ocean in the neighbourhood of present Ireland, first experienced that definite union with the etheric body and thus an increase of the intelligence. This portion of humanity began to journey eastwards under the guidance of the most advanced leader while gradually immense volumes of water submerged the continent of Atlantis. The advanced portion of these peoples journeyed right into Asia, and there founded the centre of the civilisation that we call the Post-Atlantean Culture. From this centre civilisation radiated out; it proceeded from the groups of people who later moved farther to the east. There in Central Asia they founded in India the first civilisation, which still had an echo of the culture attained in Atlantis. The ancient Indian had not yet such a consciousness as we have today, but the capacity for it arose when these two points of the brain of which I have spoken coincided. Before this union there still lived a picture-consciousness in the Atlantean, through which he saw Spiritual beings. In the murmuring of the fountain he not only heard a clear language, but the Undine, who has her embodiment in the water, rose for him out of the spring: in the currents of air he saw Sylphs; in the flickering fire he saw the Salamanders. All this he saw and from it have arisen the myths and legends which have been preserved with most purity in the parts of Europe where there remained remnants of those Atlanteans who did not reach India. The Germanic Sagas and Myths are the relics of what was still seen by the old Atlanteans within the vapoury masses. The rivers, the Rhine, for instance, lived in the consciousness of these old Atlanteans as if the wisdom, which was in the mists of ancient Nivelheim had been cast down into their waters. This wisdom seemed to them to be in the rivers, it lived within them as the Rhine Nixies or similar beings.

So here in these regions of Europe lived echoes of the Atlantean culture, but over in India another arose, that still showed remembrances of that picture world. That world itself had sunk from sight, but the longing for what was revealed in it lived on in the Indian. If the Atlantean had heard the voice of Nature's wisdom, to the Indian there remained the longing for the oneness with Nature, and thus the character of this old Indian culture is shown in the desire to fall back into that time where all this was man's natural possession. The ancient Indian was a dreamer. To be sure, what we call reality lay spread all around him, but the world of the senses was “Maya” in his eyes. What the old Atlantean still saw as hovering spirits was what the Indian sought in his longing for the spiritual content of the world, for Brahma. And this kind of going back towards the old dream-like consciousness of the Atlantean has been preserved in the Oriental training to bring back this early consciousness.

Farther to the north we have the Medes and Persians, the original Persian civilisation. Whereas the Indian culture turns sharply away from reality, the Persian is aware that he must reckon with it. For the first time man appears as a worker, who knows that he is not merely to strive for knowledge with his spiritual forces, but that he is to use them for shaping the earth. At first the earth met him as a sort of hostile element which he must overcome, and this opposition was expressed in Ormuzd and Ahriman, the good and the bad divinity, and the conflict between them. Men wished more and more to let the spiritual world flow into the terrestrial world, but as yet they could recognise no law, no laws of nature within the outer world. The old Indian culture had in truth a knowledge of higher worlds, but not on the grounds of a natural science, since everything on the Earth was accounted Maya; the Persian learnt to know nature purely as a field of labour.

We then come to the Chaldean, the Babylonian and the Egyptian peoples. Here man learnt to recognise a law in nature itself. When he looked up to the stars he sought behind them not the gods alone, but he examined the laws of the stars and hence arose that wonderful science which we find among the Chaldeans. The Egyptian priest did not look on the physical as an opposing force, but he incorporated the spiritual which he found in geometry into his soil, his land; outer nature was recognised as conforming to law. The external star-knowledge was inwardly united in Chaldean-Babylonian-Egyptian wisdom with the knowledge of the gods who ensoul the stars. That was the third stage of cultural evolution.

It is only in the fourth stage of post-Atlantean evolution that man advances to the point of incorporating in civilisation that which he himself experiences as spiritual. This is the case in the Greco-Latin time. Here in the work of art, in moulded matter man imprints his own spirit into substance, whether in sculpture or in the drama. Here too we find the first beginnings of human city planning. These cities differed from those of Egypt in the pre-Grecian age. There in Egypt the priests looked up to the stars and sought their laws, and what took place in the heavens they reproduced in what they built. Thus their towers show the seven-story development which man first discovered in the heavenly bodies; so too do the Pyramids show definite cosmic proportions. We find the transition from priest-wisdom to the real human wisdom wonderfully expressed in early Roman history by the seven Kings of Rome. What are these seven kings?

We remember that the original history of Rome leads back to ancient Troy. Troy represents a last result of the ancient priestly communities who organised states by the laws of the stars. Now comes the transition to the fourth stage of culture. The ancient priest-wisdom is superseded by human cleverness, represented by the crafty Odysseus. Still more plainly is this shown in a picture which can only be rightly understood in this way and which represents how the priest-wisdom has to give way before the human power of judgment. The serpent can always be taken as symbol of human wisdom, and the Laocoon group depicts the overthrow of the priestly wisdom of ancient Troy through human cunning and human wisdom symbolised in the serpents.

Then by the directing authorities who work through millennia the events were outlined that had to happen and in accordance with which history must take its course. Those who stood at the foundation of Rome had already foreordained the sevenfold Roman culture as it stands written in the Sibylline Books. Think it out: you find in the names of the seven Roman kings reminiscences of the seven principles. That goes so far in fact that the fifth Roman king, the Etruscan, comes from without; he represents the principle of Manas, Spirit-Self, which binds the three lower with the three higher. The seven Roman kings represent the seven principles of human nature, spiritual connections are inscribed in them. Republican Rome is none other than the human wisdom, which replaced the ancient priestly wisdom. Thus did the fourth epoch grow within the third. Man sent forth what he had in his soul into the great works of art, into drama and jurisprudence. Formerly all justice was derived from the stars. The Romans became a nation of law-givers because there men created justice, “jus,” according to their own requirements.

We live ourselves in the fifth period. How does the meaning of the totality of evolution come to expression in it? The old authority has vanished, man becomes more and more dependent on his own inner nature, his external acts bear increasingly the stamp of his character. Racial ties lose their hold, man becomes more and more individualised. This is the kernel of the religion which says “He who doth not leave father and mother, brother and sister cannot be my disciple.” This means that all love which is founded on natural ties alone is to come to an end, human beings must stand before one another, and soul find soul.

We have the task of drawing down still further on to the physical plane that which flowed from the soul in Greco-Latin times. Man becomes in this way, a being who sinks deeper and deeper into materiality. If the Greek in his works of art has created an idealised image of his soul-life and poured it into the human form, if the Roman in his jurisprudence has created something that still further signifies personal requirements, then our age culminates in machines, which are solely a materialistic expression of mere personal human needs. Mankind sinks lower and lower from heaven, and this fifth period has descended deepest, is the most involved in matter. If the Greek in his creations has lifted man above man in his images (for Zeus represents man raised above himself), if you find still left in Roman jurisprudence something of man that goes out beyond himself (for the Roman placed more value on being a Roman citizen than on being a person and an individual) then in our period you find people who utilise spirit for the satisfying of their material needs. For what purpose is served by all machines, steamships, railways, all complicated inventions? The ancient Chaldean was accustomed to satisfy his need of food in the simplest way; today an immensity of wisdom, crystalised human wisdom, is expended on the stilling of hunger and thirst. We must not deceive ourselves about this. The wisdom that is so employed has descended below itself right into matter.

All that man had earlier drawn down from the spiritual realms had to descend below itself in order to be able to mount upwards again—and with this our age has received its mission. If in man of an earlier time there flowed blood which bound him with his tribe, today the love which still flowed in the earlier blood shows greater and greater cleavage; a love of a spiritual kind must take its place and then we can ascend again to spiritual realms. There is good reason for us to have come down from spiritual heights, for man must go through this descent in order to find the way up to spirituality out of his own strength. The mission of Spiritual Science is to show mankind this upward path.

We have followed the course of mankind as far as the time in which we ourselves stand; we must now show how it will evolve further, and how one who passes through an initiation can even today forestall a certain stage of humanity on his path of knowledge and wisdom.