The Rudolf Steiner Archive

My task in these lectures will be to give you a picture of the theosophical conception of the world based upon the so-called Rosicrucian method. Please do not misunderstand this statement by expecting an historical account of Rosicrucianism. The expression “Rosicrucian method” is intended only to imply that theosophy will be presented in accordance with the method always adopted in the Mystery Schools of Europe since the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and called Rosicrucian training.

You know that theosophy is the truth that was imparted to mankind in ancient times in order that there might be formed in hearts everywhere a basic fount of human knowledge. But the further back we go into the past, the greater was the secrecy in which this knowledge was held. What was the reason for such secrecy? In the course of these lectures I shall return to the question why this universal wisdom was communicated in secret schools and centers to individuals who were destined not only to learn but to undertake training that transformed their souls to such an extent that they developed clairvoyance and insight into higher worlds. Such individuals were then sent out as emissaries, charged with guiding and leading others. But progress consists in the fact that more and more human beings become capable, through their power of judgment and intellect, of grasping this wisdom. Hence it has become necessary for what was formerly kept secret gradually to be made publicly known.

In the course of the nineteenth century, as the result of external conditions that we shall come to know, it became necessary to allow a great deal, indeed, a very considerable amount, of knowledge of occult science to make its way into the open for the sake of the well-being and progress of humanity. In the nineteenth century the Guardians of this knowledge said to themselves that in earlier times the communications of spiritual teaching made to human beings in the religions or by other means, were able to satisfy their needs in regard to eternal truths. But the needs of humanity change. So these Guardians of the primeval wisdom were obliged to realize that in the future there would be an increasing number of human beings whose souls could no longer be satisfied by the old forms of communicating spiritual truth.

Such people can find satisfaction in anthroposophy. This new form of communication springs from observation of a need of humanity in the modern age. The Guardians of the secret knowledge were naturally aware that such conditions were inevitable in the future, but not until a certain point of time was it necessary to make actual preparation for the influx of this wisdom into humanity and to emphasize that these secrets must also be grasped by the general intelligence prevailing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

This was realized in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. There were few at that time who were aware of this starting point of preparation in Europe. The first Rosicrucians were those who gathered around a significant individuality known as Christian Rosenkreutz. It was he, Christian Rosenkreutz, who could affirm with the most convincing clarity, “From the Mysteries we have received a treasure-store of knowledge and wisdom of the super-sensible. If we adhere to this, we may hope in the future, too, to succeed in doing what was done in the past, namely, to send out individuals trained in our schools to instruct others when they have learnt and discerned the secrets of the primeval wisdom.”

This old method of promulgating the primeval wisdom was to continue, but preparation was to be made for something else as well. He, Christian Rosenkreutz, spoke as follows. He said, “A far greater number of human beings who long for the primeval wisdom will come to us and we could communicate it to them in the form in which we now possess it. But its acceptance demands belief in and recognition of our authority in a high degree—an attitude that will progressively disappear from mankind. The more men's power of judgment increases, the less will be their belief in those who teach them. Belief and trust were preconditions for the earlier form of communication.”

At the present time one would have to say, “People will come who wish to test for themselves what is communicated to them. They will insist that they wish to apply to what is told them the same logical intellect that is used for observation of the material world. They admit that something in addition to this intellect is necessary for investigation of the spiritual world, but for all that they insist upon testing things by means of this intellect.” Hence, at the beginning of our epoch it was necessary to clothe the primeval wisdom in new forms. The work of the Rosicrucians was to give expression to the primeval wisdom in a form enabling it to be acceptable to the modern mind and the modern soul.

What is theosophy when presented according to the Rosicrucian method? Theosophy in itself is always and everywhere the same. A Rosicrucian theosophist today is a theosophist of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the forms it takes, its wisdom is adapted exactly to what human beings desire and need to understand. What is the specific characteristic of our time? The course of the evolution of humanity was such that men were obliged to become ever more familiar with outer, physical reality. Look back into olden times, for example into the ancient Egyptian culture, and you will realize with what simple measures and forces men worked, erected their buildings, satisfied their personal needs. Then think of our modern life with all its ingenious gadgets for physical comfort. What tremendous spiritual force and mental activity are expended on the physical needs of daily life! This, of course, was necessary, because the specific task of the Western world was so to shape external culture and gain such control of outer nature that the physical plane came truly under the control of the human spirit. A world such as our own needs measures different from those current in antiquity to be capable of imbibing the wisdom guarded in the secret schools.

On the other hand, when we compare the knowledge possessed by the Chaldeans and their grasp of spiritual realities with our present knowledge, the Chaldeans admittedly tower heavens high above us. Today we admire a Copernicus, a Galileo and what is recorded by external science, but this is all child's play compared with the wisdom of the ancient Chaldeans. To the modern researcher the planet Mars, for example, is an objective body whose course and movement can be measured. But the Chaldeans knew as well what forces and entities are connected with Mars, what divine will governs all this, what connection there is between these forces and man. The mystery and sway wielded by these spiritual forces were known to the Chaldeans. That is why the modern researcher is so powerless in face of the inner character of this ancient Chaldean culture. External means for its investigation are at his disposal but there are no longer any inner means. Theosophists and Rosicrucians, however, have the spiritual, esoteric possibilities for penetrating into the spirit of that ancient culture.

The great scientific authorities, of whom we read that they excavate clay cylinders and fragments covered with inscriptions of the ancient Babylonian wisdom, stand before these objects like three-year-old children facing some electrical apparatus. The researcher does not know what to make of what he excavates from such ancient sites, so penetrating, so unbounded was the spiritual knowledge current in that era. But to produce by means of the intellect and the external devices of our civilization what we justifiably admire today as evidence of the great progress made during recent centuries—this was first possible for modern science. Such an era, however, needs a different kind of thinking and perception in order to understand the spiritual. At this point, perhaps, a warning may be given. People speak so much today about higher or lower degrees of evolution, arguing about whether Buddha or Christ is the greater. But that is not the essential. Whether the Assyrian wisdom or our own is the higher is not important. We are living in the present, materialistically-minded age and the inflow of spiritual knowledge into our culture is needed in order that mankind's longing for such knowledge may be satisfied. It is the Rosicrucian wisdom that gives this knowledge to modern man in the form suitable for him. What is being said here may possibly seem rather daring, but please accept it now for what it is and later on it will become clear. As a matter of fact, Rosicrucian wisdom has been more greatly misunderstood than anything else in the world.

As time went on, the great individuality who was Christian Rosenkreutz foresaw what demands of understanding would be made by rationalistic thought and he realized that already in that period it had become necessary to promulgate all spiritual knowledge in the form demanded by the modern age. We must realize that for the Rosicrucians it was much more difficult than for any similar movement of an earlier period, because their initial activity in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries took place at the time when materialism was approaching apace. All modern achievements such as steam engines, telegraphy and so on were bound to place human beings firmly on the physical plane. The Rosicrucians were obliged to work for an era when men's thinking would be guided by mathematical principles. They were obliged to make their preparations with this in view and hence were entirely misunderstood. For this reason one cannot be informed truly about Rosicrucianism by what is said about it in public. Nothing of what was cultivated in true Rosicrucianism is to be found in literature. The deepest spiritual truths cultivated by the Rosicrucians were interpreted in such a mistaken way as to suggest that spiritual phenomena can be produced in alchemists' cellars with the help of retorts and so forth! This conception of alchemy gave rise to the materialistic caricature of Rosicrucianism that is presented in literature today. The task of the Rosicrucians was to formulate a science by means of which they would be able to let their wisdom flow gradually into the world.

From all this you will realize that when we present theosophy to people today it must be Rosicrucian theosophy. By using an older terminology we could win over a certain number of people, but they would necessarily be individuals who are connected with every fiber of their being with the modern world and its culture. There are egoists who withdraw from the tasks of the present age. We, however, wish to take modern life and its forms of expression seriously. We must accept our epoch as it actually is but endeavor to influence it spiritually. This is the conception that Rosicrucian theosophy must have of its task.

In the course of this Congress there will have been opportunity for you to realize what a fruitful effect theosophy can have, for example, in the sphere of medicine. Suppose medicine continues to develop along materialistic lines. If you could see forty years ahead you would be horrified by the brutality of the procedures to be adopted by medicine, by the forms of death with which medical science will set out to cure human beings. How does medical science today investigate the effects of its remedies? By means of the human material it finds in the hospitals and elsewhere; therefore, by outer observation. But spiritual wisdom, by its very nature, penetrates into the inner relationships of the spiritual, knows what in the physical world corresponds to the spiritual. A completely new creation of all medical science will proceed from what is called Rosicrucianism. But that is only one domain.

Compare the complicated conditions of our existence today with those of the ancient Chaldeans. Think what an amount of intellectual energy and what complicated cooperative measures are essential to enable a check issued in New York to be cashed in Tokyo. An era of this character, which has spread such culture over the globe, needs methods of spiritual activity different from those of earlier epochs. Occultists are aware of this. Modern thinking is simply unable to cope with and master the chaos of outer conditions and tasks in which man is becoming so deeply involved. Thinking itself will become rigid. Today we are living in an age of transition but thinking will soon no longer be sufficiently fluid and flexible to grapple with and transform the complicated conditions of life.

Why do we promulgate theosophy? In order to achieve practical effects. Theosophical thoughts make thinking more elastic, more flexible, enable a more rapid survey of far-reaching circumstances. Rosicrucianism has therefore to fertilize every domain of life. To realize the practical effect of theosophy you may turn to my essay, The Education of the Child in the Light of Anthroposophy. It is impossible for you to under-stand its content without Rosicrucian theosophy, which must not remain theory but become a helping hand in practical life. This element is simply not present in the earlier forms of theosophy. The role of Rosicrucian theosophy or occultism is to satisfy the spiritual longings of men and to enable spirit to flow into the daily round of their duties. Rosicrucian theosophy is not there for the salon or for the hermit, but for the whole of human culture.

Wisdom is always and forever one. But just as the individual man lives and evolves to further and further stages, so too does humanity as a whole. For this reason the forms of the wisdom revealed to men must change in order to be in keeping with the course of their evolution. The great teachers of humanity are working among us today, as always. We, too, who are present here as souls, were incarnated in earlier times, have lived through all the periods of evolution, the Greco-Latin, the Egypto-Chaldean and epochs still further back in time, in order to benefit from constantly new achievements and acquire constantly new knowledge. Think of a soul in an Egyptian incarnation, surrounded by the gigantic pyramids and mysterious sphinxes. What a different effect all this had upon the soul from what surrounds it today! For as long as the earth has something new to display—and the earth is forever making progress—for so long does the soul undergo constantly new experiences.

The soul does not incarnate on the earth in order to please the gods, but in order to learn! The face of the earth was quite different when the soul incarnated for the first time and will again be different when the final incarnation is reached. We return to this earth when, and not until, there is something new to be learned here. That is why the interval between two incarnations is lengthy. Only think how greatly Northern Europe, merely as landscape, differed from what it is today at the time when Christ was on the earth. We do not come to the earth twice without being able to learn something new. Everything in the world is in process of evolution, but evolution means the elaboration and later manifestation of the new.

Not only men but all beings evolve. We have to seek the way to beings who are at stages of evolution higher than that reached by man, although in this life he comes into relation with them in many ways. These beings are also subject to the law of evolution and just as our souls were different thousands of years ago, so, too, in earlier epochs, were the beings now revealing themselves. They also are perpetually learning. When we are speaking of one of the higher beings who has descended to our world in order to reveal to us with the resources of the spirit the mysteries of the higher worlds, we must affirm that that is a sublime art that must be mastered. Even a god has to master it.

Human beings of today must be addressed differently from those who were living ten thousand years ago. The higher beings, like men, undergo evolution, and what I have said during this Congress about the event of Damascus indicates how they evolve. A man with spiritual vision sees not only the outer environment but also everything that belongs to the spiritual aura of the earth. Just as human beings are surrounded by an aura, so, too, are the cosmic bodies. A clairvoyant is eventually able to perceive the aura of a cosmic body. What a clairvoyant would have seen in the earth's aura two thousand years ago would be quite different from what would have been seen a thousand years ago and different again from what would be seen by one who has developed clairvoyance today. Just as the picture of outer nature changes, so, too, does the picture of the spiritual world into which vision penetrates.

I shall now refer to an event of which I shall speak again later on, namely, the event of the burning thorn bush and the proclamation from Sinai. What happened to Moses at that time? His clairvoyant power had developed to a certain stage and he beheld the super-sensible reality in the physical phenomenon. An individual who was not clairvoyant would simple have seen a happening in nature. Moses, however, beheld in the burning thorn bush the Being who proclaimed Himself as “I AM the I AM.” He knew that this Being was there in very truth, that the fire was not only outer fire but harbored a spiritual reality. A Being belonging intimately to the whole further evolution of humanity, who announced His name as the “I AM the I AM,” had revealed Himself to Moses. What was it that was now known to all the pupils of Moses? In the Mystery Schools of that era they had learned that the same Being who had revealed Himself on Sinai would one day come down to the earth, live in a human body, and speak for three years in a man, Christ Jesus. This was known to the initiates. It was also known to Saul, who later became Paul. But he said to himself, “This Being exists in very truth and will come down to the earth. But I cannot conceive that the Being who revealed Himself in the burning thorn bush as Jehovah could suffer the shameful death on the Cross.” What was it that eventually convinced Saul? The event of Damascus! At the moment when he became clairvoyant and the earth's aura was visible to him, when in that aura he beheld the Christ, the living Christ, who revealed Himself as the same Being who had died on the Cross, at that moment Saul became Paul.

But that vision could not previously have been possible. Earlier than two thousand years ago Christ was not yet present in the earth's aura but He was still visibly present in the sun. Zarathustra beheld the sun surrounded by an aura he called Ahura Mazdao, the great Aura of Ormuzd. But this Being had descended, had first revealed Himself to Moses in the burning thorn bush and had then lived on earth as a man in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. Hence Christ could say of Himself, “I am the Light of the World.” Before then, nobody could have spoken these words, because the Light of the World had not previously been present in any being.

We will study these themes until they are fully understood. Today, however, it will merely be indicated that it was not possible for the Christ Being always to reveal Himself as He did, for example, in the case of Paul. The Christ Being had first to muster the necessary power, to develop it to the point where this revelation was possible. Earlier than two thousand years ago this could not have taken place. Each soul, in each incarnation, makes progress. This is what has happened in the case of leading individualities. We must realize that Christ has not always been the same and in His distinctive ways of working we must recognize how He, too, advances from one evolutionary stage to another. It gives rise to an overwhelming feeling of exultation when a man is made aware that just as in the case of his own soul and its incarnations and progress, the spiritual beings also reach higher and higher stages and become more and more powerful. This realization gives one a living feeling of evolution. It is an essential part of Rosicrucian esotericism to show how a being such as Christ has worked both in the past and at the present time, in Moses and in Paul, and to see from this how even a Being of such sublime eminence makes progress. This gives a rise to an intimate concept of evolution.

Now let us think of a child. He is born, sees the light of the world—this is the usual expression—and in the very first years of life changes particularly quickly. Compared with the later epochs of life it is then that the course of evolution is the most rapid. Materialistic science itself could make many relevant discoveries here. When the brain is examined, which is possible by external means, it can be observed how on the top of a child's head at the place that remains soft for a considerable time, the skull bones do not close immediately and the brain itself takes shape only gradually. The function of articulation is to pro-duce an instrument for a power of which the child will only later be capable, namely, the power to think, to correlate his perceptions. A clairvoyant sees how during the very first weeks and months after birth the child is surrounded by intensely active, powerful forces belonging to the etheric body, the second member of man's constitution. We know that in an adult human being of today the dimension of this etheric body is practically the same as that of the physical body, but in a young child it still extends far beyond the physical body, especially around the head. The activity of the forces, which to a clairvoyant seems to be like a play of light, is particularly strong here. It is wonderful to see how certain forces surge up from the body below and then stream from the nape of the neck in all directions, wherever hair appears; the forces radiate in a living play of light to become an astral-etheric radiance in the child's etheric body, a radiance that fades away in the course of time. In this radiance lie the forces that create the connective tissues in the brain. The brain is formed out of spiritual substance after the child has been born. Forty to fifty streams of forces can be seen working together. The body of light is composed of these streams. A wonderful spectacle is presented by a child during the first weeks of life. This body of light gradually presses into and is then within the child's brain. To begin with, the etheric body was outside the child, surrounding the head, and was entirely primitive. This was surrounded by a body of light from which the etheric body gathered forces, and now it penetrates gradually into the child's head and remains there as the complicated etheric organism.

What is so wonderful about the process of evolution is that everything physical is produced from the spiritual, formed by the spiritual, which we then receive into ourselves. The psyche has itself fashioned the dwelling place in which it subsequently resides. So we see that what takes place in the microcosm, the little world, in the brain of a human child, also takes place in the macrocosm, the great world. Now think of an outstandingly advanced individuality, such as Jesus of Nazareth, in whose body Christ lived as soul for three years. Just as in a child the etheric body itself prepares the physical brain into which it subsequently passes, so, too, had Christ previously prepared the abode in which He was to dwell. He had to accomplish this by His own activity. To begin with He was only outwardly connected with the earth, which could not yet have received Him. The most highly evolved souls had, however, worked at the earth in such a way that the Christ was able to draw nearer and nearer, and He Himself had participated in this work. Who, then, had so transformed the body of Jesus of Nazareth and finally brought it to the stage where it was able to receive the Christ? The Christ Himself had done this! To begin with He had worked upon the body from outside and was subsequently able Himself to pass into the human being concerned.

What takes place in the microcosm also takes place in the macrocosm, and it is because the beings above us also develop that evolution is possible. It was only because Christ could reveal Himself supersensibly that He became the planetary Spirit of the Earth. The microcosmic invariably tallies with the macrocosmic.

I have not been able today to present even the first chapter of Rosicricianism to you. All I have done is to indicate how a man of the present age should learn to think and perceive. The true meaning of the mandate, “Know thyself!” lies in our following in this way the evolution of the cosmos. Where is our self? Certainly not in us alone! To think that would be egoistic. The self is formed out of, born out of the whole universe and our own ascent leads us finally to merge in the whole cosmos. The aim of self-knowledge is to give man his place in the great world in order to reveal to him there the true meaning of the word, self-knowledge.

It gives me great joy to be here for the first time in this newly founded group bearing the great name of Christian Rosenkreutz,²³ which gives me the opportunity for the first time of speaking about Christian Rosenkreutz at greater length. What is contained in the mystery of Christian Rosenkreutz? I cannot tell you all about this personality in one evening, so we shall speak about Christian Rosenkreutz himself today, and tomorrow we shall talk about his work.

To speak about Christian Rosenkreutz presupposes great confidence in the mysteries of spiritual life, confidence not only in the person but in the great secrets of the life of the spirit. The founding of a new group, however, also always presupposes faith in spiritual life.

Christian Rosenkreutz is an individual who is active both when he is in incarnation and when he is not incarnated in a physical body; he works not only as a physical being and through physical forces, but above all spiritually through higher forces.

As we know, man lives not only for himself but also in connection with human evolution as a whole. Usually when man passes through death his etheric body dissolves into the cosmos. A part of this dissolving etheric body always stays intact, however, and so we are always surrounded by these remaining parts of the etheric bodies of the dead, for our good, or also to our detriment. They affect us for good or ill according to whether we ourselves are good or bad. Far reaching effects emanate also from the etheric bodies of great individualities. Great forces emanating from the etheric body of Christian Rosenkreutz can work into our soul and also into our spirit. It is our duty to get to know these forces, for we work with them as rosicrucians.

Strictly speaking the rosicrucian movement began in the thirteenth century. At that time these forces worked extraordinarily strongly, and a Christian Rosenkreutz stream has been active in spiritual life ever since. There is a law that this spiritual stream of force has to become especially powerful every hundred years or so. This is to be seen now in the theosophical movement. Christian Rosenkreutz gave an indication of this in his last exoteric statements.²⁴

In the year 1785 the collected esoteric revelations of the rosicrucians appeared in the work: The Secret Symbols of the Rosicrucians²⁵ by Hinricus Madathanus Theosophus.²⁶ In a certain limited sense this publication contains references to the rosicrucian stream active in the previous century which was expressed for the first time in the works collected and put together by Hinricus Madathanus Theosophus. Another hundred years later we see the influence of the rosicrucian stream coming to expression again in the work of H. P. Blavatsky, especially in the book Isis Unveiled.²⁷ Much of the meaning of this image has been put into words. A considerable amount of Western occult wisdom is contained in this book that is still a long way from being improved upon, even though the composition is sometimes very confused. It is interesting to compare The Secret Symbols of the Rosicrucians by Hinricus Madathanus Theosophus with the works of H.P. Blavatsky. We must think especially of the first part of the publication, which is written in Symbols. In the second part Blavatsky deviates a little from the rosicrucian stream. In her later works she departs entirely from it, and we must be able to distinguish between her early and her later publications, even though something of H.P. Blavatsky's uncritical spirit already appears in the early ones. That this is said can only be the wish of H.P. Blavatsky who is not in incarnation now.

When we look at the characteristic quality of human consciousness in the thirteenth century we see that primitive clairvoyance had gradually disappeared. We know that in earlier times everybody had an elementary clairvoyance. In the middle of the thirteenth century this reached its lowest point, and there was suddenly no more clairvoyance. Everyone experienced a spiritual eclipse. Even the most enlightened spirits and the most highly developed personalities, including initiates, had no further access to the spiritual worlds, and when they spoke about the spiritual worlds they had to confine themselves to what remained in their memories. People only knew about the spiritual world from tradition or from those initiates who awakened their memories of what they had previously experienced. For a short time, though, even these spirits could not see directly into the spiritual world.

This short period of darkness had to take place at that time to prepare for what is characteristic of our present age: today's intellectual, rational development. That is what is important today in the fifth post-Atlantean cultural epoch. In the Greco-Roman cultural epoch the development of the intellect was not as it is today. Direct perception was the vital factor, not intellectual thinking. Human beings identified with what they saw and heard, in fact even with what they thought. They did not produce thoughts from out of themselves then as we do today, and as we ought to do, for this is the task of the fifth post-Atlantean cultural epoch. Man's clairvoyance gradually begins again after this time, and the clairvoyance of the future can now develop.

The rosicrucian stream began in the thirteenth century. During that century personalities particularly suitable for initiation had to be specially chosen. Initiation could take place only after the short period of darkness had run its course.

In a place in Europe that cannot be named yet²⁸—though this will be possible in the not very distant future—a lodge of a very spiritual nature was formed comprising a council of twelve men who had received into themselves the sum of the spiritual wisdom of olden times and of their own time.. So we are concerned with twelve men who lived in that dark era, twelve outstanding individualities, who united together to help the progress of humanity. None of them could see directly into the spiritual world, but they could awaken to life in themselves memories of what they had experienced through earlier initiations. And the karma of mankind brought it about that in seven of the twelve all that still remained to mankind of the ancient Atlantean epoch was incarnated. In my Occult Science it has already been stated that in the seven holy Rishis of old, the teachers of the ancient Indian cultural epoch, all that was left of the Atlantean epoch was preserved. These seven men who were incarnated again in the thirteenth century, and who were part of the council of twelve, were just those who could look back into the seven streams of the ancient Atlantean cultural epoch of mankind and the further course of these streams. Among these seven individualities each one of them could bring one stream to life for their time and the present time. In addition to these seven there were another four who could not look back into times long past but could look back to the occult wisdom mankind had acquired in the four post-Atlantean epochs. The first could look back to the ancient Indian period, the second to the ancient Persian cultural period, the third to the Egyptian-Chaldaean-Assyrian-Babylonian cultural period and the fourth to the Greco-Roman culture. These four joined the seven to form a council of wise men in the thirteenth century. A twelfth had the fewest memories as it were, however he was the most intellectual among them, and it was his task to foster external science in particular. These twelve individualities not only lived in the experiences of Western occultism, but these twelve different streams of wisdom worked together to make a whole. A remarkable reference to this can be found in Goethe's poem The Mysteries.²⁹

We shall be speaking, then, of twelve outstanding individualities. The middle of the thirteenth century is the time when a new culture began. At this time a certain low point of spiritual life had been reached. Even the most highly developed could not approach the spiritual worlds. Then it was that the council of the spiritual elite assembled. These twelve men, who represented the sum of all the spiritual knowledge of their age and the twelve tendencies of thought, came together in a place in Europe that cannot as yet be named.

This council of the twelve only possessed clairvoyant memory and intellectual wisdom. The seven successors of the seven Rishis remembered their ancient wisdom, and the other five represented the wisdom of the five post-Atlantean cultures. Thus the twelve represented the whole of Atlantean and post-Atlantean wisdom. The twelfth was a man who attained the intellectual wisdom of his time in the highest degree. He possessed intellectually all the knowledge of his time, whilst the others, to whom direct spiritual wisdom was also denied at that time, acquired their knowledge by returning in memory to their earlier incarnations.

The beginning of a new culture was only possible, however, because a thirteenth came to join the twelve. The thirteenth did not become a scholar in the accepted sense of that time. He was an individuality who had been incarnated at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. In the incarnations that followed he prepared himself for his mission through humility of soul and through a fervent life devoted to God. He was a great soul, a pious, deeply mystical human being, who had not just acquired these qualities but was born with them. If you imagine to yourselves a young man who is very pious and who devotes all his time to fervent prayer to God, then you can have a picture of the individuality of this thirteenth. He grew up entirely under the care and instruction of the twelve, and he received as much wisdom as each one could give him. He was educated with the greatest care, and every precaution was taken to see that no one other than the twelve exercised an influence on him. He was kept apart from the rest of the world. He was a very delicate child in that incarnation of the thirteenth century, and therefore the education that the twelve bestowed upon him worked right into his physical body. Now the twelve, being deeply devoted to their spiritual tasks and inwardly permeated with Christianity, were conscious that the external Christianity of the Church was only a caricature of the real Christianity. They were permeated with the greatness of Christianity, although in the outside world they were taken to be its enemies. Each individuality worked his way into just one aspect of Christianity. Their endeavour was to unite the various religions into one great whole. They were convinced that the whole of spiritual life was contained in their twelve streams, and each one influenced the pupil to the best of his ability. Their aim was to achieve a synthesis of all the religions, but they knew that this was not to be achieved by means of any theory but only as the result of spiritual life. And for this a suitable education of the thirteenth was essential.

Whilst the spiritual forces of the thirteenth increased beyond measure, his physical forces drained away. It came to the point where he almost ceased to have any further connection with external life, and all interest in the physical world disappeared. He lived entirely for the sake of the spiritual development which the twelve were bringing about in him. The wisdom of the twelve was reflected in him. It reached the point where the thirteenth refused to eat and wasted away. Then an event occurred that could only happen once in history. It was the kind of event that can take place when the forces of the macrocosm co-operate for the sake of what they can bring to fruition. After a few days the body of the thirteenth became quite transparent, and for days he lay as though dead. The twelve now gathered round him at certain intervals. At these moments all knowledge and wisdom flowed from their lips. Whilst the thirteenth lay as though dead, they let their wisdom flow towards him in short prayer-like formulae. The best way to imagine them is to picture the twelve in a circle round the thirteenth. This situation ended when the soul of the thirteenth awakened like a new soul. He had experienced a' great transformation of soul. Within it there now existed something that was like a completely new birth of the twelve streams of wisdom, so that the twelve wise men could also learn something entirely new from the youth. His body, too, came to life now in such a way that this revival of his absolutely transparent body was beyond compare. The youth could now speak of quite new experiences. The twelve could recognise that he had experienced the event of Damascus: it was a repetition of the vision of Paul on the road to Damascus. In the course of a few weeks the thirteenth reproduced all the wisdom he had received from the twelve, but in a new form. This new form was as though given by Christ Himself. What he now revealed to them, the twelve called true Christianity, the synthesis of all the religions, and they distinguished between this true Christianity and the Christianity of the period in which they lived. The thirteenth died relatively young, and the twelve then devoted themselves to the task of recording what the thirteenth had revealed to them, in imaginations—for it could only be done in that way. Thus came the symbolic figures and pictures contained in the collection of Hinricus Madathanus Theosophus, and the communications of H.P. Blavatsky in the work Isis Unveiled. We have to see the occult process in such a way that the fruits of the initiation of the thirteenth remained as the residue of his etheric body, within the spiritual atmosphere of the earth. This residue inspired the twelve as well as their pupils that succeeded them, so that they could form the occult rosicrucian stream. Yet it continued to work as an etheric body, and it then became part of the new etheric body of the thirteenth when he incarnated again.

The individuality of the thirteenth reincarnated as soon as the fourteenth century, roughly in the middle. In this incarnation he lived for over a hundred years. He was brought up in a similar way in the circle of the pupils and successors of the twelve, but not in such a secluded way as in his previous incarnation. When he was twenty-eight years old he formed a remarkable resolution. He had to leave Europe and travel. First he went to Damascus, and what Paul had experienced there happened again to him. This event can be described as the fruits of what took place in the previous incarnation. All the forces of the wonderful etheric body of the individuality of the thirteenth century had remained intact, none of them dispersed after death into the general world ether. This was a permanent etheric body, remaining intact in the ether spheres thereafter. This same highly spiritual etheric body again radiated from the spiritual world into the new incarnation, the individuality in the fourteenth century. Therefore he was led to experience the event of Damascus again. This is the individuality of Christian Rosenkreutz. He was the thirteenth in the circle of the twelve. He was named thus from this incarnation onwards. Esoterically, in the occult sense, he was already Christian Rosenkreutz in the thirteenth century, but exoterically he was named thus only from the fourteenth century. And the pupils of this thirteenth are the successors of the other twelve in the thirteenth century. These are the rosicrucians.

At that time Christian Rosenkreutz traveled through the whole of the known world. After he had received all the wisdom of the twelve, fructified by the mighty Being of the Christ, it was easy for him to receive all the wisdom of that time in the course of seven years. When, after seven years, he returned to Europe, he took the most highly developed pupils and successors of the twelve as his pupils, and then began the actual work of the rosicrucians.

By the grace of what radiated from the wonderful etheric body of Christian Rosenkreutz they could develop an absolutely new world conception. What has been developed by the rosicrucians up to our time is work of both an outer and an inner nature. The outer work was for the purpose of discovering what lies behind the maya of the material world. They wanted to investigate the maya of matter. Just as man has an etheric body, so does the whole of the macrocosm have an etheric macrocosm, an etheric body. There is a certain point of transition from the coarser to the finer substance. Let us look at the boundary between physical and etheric substance. What lies between physical and etheric substance is like nothing else in the world. It is neither gold nor silver, lead nor copper. It is something that cannot be compared with any other physical substance, yet it is the essence of all of them. It is a substance that is contained in every other physical substance, so that the other physical substances can be considered to be modifications of this one substance. To see this substance clairvoyantly was the endeavour of the rosicrucians. The preparation, the development of such vision they saw to require a heightened activity of the soul's moral forces, which would then enable them to see this substance. They realised that the power for this vision lay in the moral power of the soul. This substance was really seen and discovered by the rosicrucians. They found that this substance lived in the world in a certain form both in the macrocosm and in man. In the world outside man they revered it as the mighty garment of the macrocosm. They saw it arising in man when there is a harmonious interplay between thinking and willing. They saw the will forces as being not only in man but in the macrocosm also, for instance in thunder and lightning. And they saw the forces of thought on the one hand in man and also outside in the world in the rainbow and the rosy light of dawn. The rosicrucians sought the strength to achieve such harmony of willing and thinking in their own soul in the force radiating from this etheric body of the thirteenth, Christian Rosenkreutz.

It was established that all the discoveries they made had to remain the secret of the rosicrucians for a hundred years, and that not until a hundred years had passed might these rosicrucian revelations be divulged to the world, for not until they had worked at them for a hundred years might they talk about them in an appropriate way. Thus what appeared in 1785 in the work The Secret Symbols of the Rosicrucians³⁰ was being prepared from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century.

Now it is also of great importance to know that in any century the rosicrucian inspiration is given in such a way that the name of the one who receives the inspiration is never made public. Only the highest initiates know it. Today, for instance, only those occurrences can be made public that happened a hundred years ago, for that is the time that must pass before it is permissible to speak of it in the outside world. The temptation is too great that people would idealise fanatically a person bearing such authority, which is the worst thing that can happen. It would be too near to idolatry. This silence, however, is not only essential in order to avoid the outer temptations of ambition and pride, which could probably be overcome, but above all to avoid occult astral attacks which would be constantly directed at an individuality of that calibre. That is why it is an essential condition that a fact like this can only be spoken of after a hundred years.

Through the works of the rosicrucians the etheric body of Christian Rosenkreutz became ever stronger and mightier from century to century. It worked not only through Christian Rosenkreutz but through all those who became his pupils. From the fourteenth century onwards Christian Rosenkreutz has been incarnated again and again. Everything that is made known in the name of theosophy is strengthened by the etheric body of Christian Rosenkreutz, and those who make theosophy known let themselves be overshadowed by this etheric body, that can work on them, both when Christian Rosenkreutz is incarnated, and when he is not in incarnation.

The Count of Saint Germain was the exoteric reincarnation of Christian Rosenkreutz in the eighteenth century.³¹ This name was given to other people, too, however; therefore not everything that is told about Count Saint Germain here and there in the outside world applies to the real Christian Rosenkreutz. Christian Rosenkreutz is incarnated again today. The inspiration for the work of H.P. Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, came from the strength radiating from his etheric body. It was also Christian Rosenkreutz's influence working invisibly on Lessing³² that inspired him to write The Education of the Human Race (1780). Because of the rising tide of materialism it became more and more difficult for inspiration to come about in the rosicrucian way. Then in the nineteenth century came the high tide of materialism. Many things could only be given very incompletely. In 1851 the problem of the immortality of the soul was solved by Widenmann^{33, 34} through the idea of reincarnation. His text was awarded a prize. Even around 1850 Drossbach wrote from a psychological point of view in favour of reincarnation.

Thus the forces radiating from the etheric body of Christian Rosenkreutz continued to be active in the nineteenth century too. And a renewal of theosophical life could come about because by 1899 the little Kali Yuga had run its course. That is why the approach to the spiritual world is easier now and spiritual influence is possible to a far greater degree. The etheric body of Christian Rosenkreutz has become very strong, and, through devotion to this, man will be able to acquire the new clairvoyance, and lofty spiritual forces will come into being. This will only be possible, however, for those people who follow the training of Christian Rosenkreutz correctly. Until now an esoteric rosicrucian preparation was essential, but the twentieth century has the mission of enabling this etheric body to become so powerful that it can also work exoterically. Those affected by it will be granted the experience of the event that Paul experienced on the road to Damascus. Until now this etheric body has only worked into the school of the rosicrucians; in the twentieth century more and more people will be able to experience the effect of it, and through this they will come to experience the appearance of Christ in the etheric body. It is the work of the rosicrucians that makes possible the etheric vision of Christ. The number of people who will become capable of seeing it will grow and grow. We must attribute this re-appearance to the important work of the twelve and the thirteenth in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

If you can become an instrument of Christian Rosenkreutz, then you can be assured that the smallest detail of your soul activity will be there for eternity.

Tomorrow we will come to speak about the work of Christian Rosenkreutz. A vague longing for Spiritual Science is present in mankind today. And we can be sure, that wherever students of rosicrucianism are striving seriously and conscientiously, they are working creatively for eternity. Every spiritual achievement, however small, brings us further. It is essential to understand and revere these holy matters.

• 23. Christian Rosenkreutz: A fourteenth century personality not given historical credence by external history but known to us from two anonymous rosicrucian legends ‘Fama Fraternitatis or Discovery of the Brotherhood of the highly commendable Order of the Rose Cross’; Cassel 1614; and ‘Confessio Fraternitatis or Confession of the commendable Brotherhood of the highly honoured Rose Cross’; Cassel 1615; according to which Christian Rosenkreutz was a German of noble descent who lived from 1378 to 1484. The name occurs for the first time in a document called ‘Chymical Wedding: Christian Rosenkreutz. Anno 1459’ written in 1604, handwritten copies of which were anonymously published in Strasbourg in 1616, the publisher being Johann Valentin Andreae who was inspired by Christian Rosenkreutz. See Rudolf Steiner ‘Die chymische Hochzeit des Christian Rosenkreutz’, an essay in the periodical ‘Das Reich’, Munich, 1917/18. In ‘Philosophie und Anthroposophie’, Gesammelte Aufsdtze (collected essays) 1904 – 18, GA 35; Dornach 1965. See also Johann Valentin Andreae ‘The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz Anno 1459’; Minerva Books, London.
• 24. Christian Rosenkreutz gave an indication of this in his last exoteric statements: Rudolf Steiner is evidently referring here, as he did in an earlier lecture (Berlin 16th December 1904) to an utterance of Count de Saint Germain handed down in literature (see reference to page 47) according to which he said in Vienna in 1790: ‘I shall disappear from Europe towards the end of the century and proceed to the regions of the Himalayas. I shall rest; I must rest. In 85 years time I shall be seen daily.’ (Quoted from Isabella Cooper-Oakley in the periodical ‘Gnosis’ Vol. 1, no. 20 of 15.12.1903). In the year 1875, that is, exactly 85 years after this utterance, the Theosophical Society was founded.
• 25. The Secret Symbols of the Rosicrucians: Secret Symbols of the Rosicrucians in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, 3 books, Altona 1785 – 88 (anon.). Book I contains an essay by Hinricus Madathanus Theosophus: “Aurcum Seculum Redivivum”, which had already appeared in 1621.
• 26. Hinricus Madathanus Theosophus: Anagrammatic pseudonym of the paracelsist Hadrianus a Munsicht (Adrian von Mynsicht: Mynsicht is also an anagram of the surname Symnicht, originally Seumenicht, an alchemist) whose distinction it is to have been the first person to produce antimonoxydkali. He was born in Braunschweig the son of a pastor and lived from about 1590 – 1638. See C.S. Picht, Hinricus Madathanus, in “Die Drei”, Stuttgart 1927, Vol. VII No. 4.
• 27. H.P. Blavatsky ... Isis Unveiled: 2 volumes, New York 1877.
• 28. In a place in Europe that cannot be named yet—though this will be possible in the not very distant future: this place was not named later, either.
• 29. Goethe's poem ‘The Mysteries’: see Rudolf Steiner's lecture ‘The Mysteries. A Christmas and Easter Poem by Goethe’, Cologne, 25th December 1907; Rudolf Steiner Publishing Co. London, 1946.
• 30. ‘The Secret Symbols of the Rosicrucians’: see note 25.
• 31. The Count of Saint Germain was the exoteric reincarnation of Christian Rosenkreutz in the eighteenth century: Rudolf Steiner mentioned the connection between these two figures before, in a lecture of 4th November 1904, in ‘A Christian Rosenkreutz Anthology’.
• 32. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing: 1729 – 81. In his work ‘The Education of the Human Race’, Lessing discusses the concept of reincarnation.
• 33, 34. Widenmann ... Drossbach: in 1849 Maximilian Drossbach, 1810 – 84, wrote the article ‘Wiedergeburt, oder die Losung der Unsterblichkeitsfrage auf empirischen Wege nach den bekannten Naturgesetzen’ (Reincarnation, or the Solving of the Problem of Immortality by Empirical Means according to the known Laws of Nature). Without disclosing his name he offered a prize of 40 ducats of gold for the best exposition of the idea expressed in this article. This prompted the writing of the article by Gustav Widenmann (1812 – 76) ‘Gedanken uber die Unsterblichkeit als Wiederholung des Erdenlebens’ (Ideas on Immortality as the Repetition of Life on Earth), Vienna 1851, which won the prize. This short article was recently published anew in cornbination with an essay by C.S. Picht ‘Das Auftauchen der Reinkamationsidee bei dem Arzt und Philosophen Gustav Widenmann um 1850’ (The Emergence of the Concept of Reincarnation in Gustav Widenmann, doctor and philosopher around 1850), im Verlag Freies Geistesleben, Stuttgart, 1961.

My task today will be to tell you something about the work of Christian Rosenkreutz. This work began in the thirteenth century, is still going on today, and will continue right into eternity. The work began, of course, with what I told you yesterday of the initiation of Christian Rosenkreutz, and all that took place between the council of the twelve and the thirteenth. When Christian Rosenkreutz was born again in the fourteenth century, in an incarnation lasting more than a hundred years, his main task was instructing the pupils of the twelve. At that time hardly anyone else came to know Christian Rosenkreutz apart from these twelve. This is not to be understood as if Christian Rosenkreutz did not meet other people, but only that the other people did not recognise him for what he was. Fundamentally this has remained the same until today. However, the etheric body of Christian Rosenkreutz has been constantly active in the circle of his pupils, its forces working in ever growing circles, until today many people are actually able to be influenced by the forces of his etheric body.

Christian Rosenkreutz selects those whom he wants to have as his pupils in a remarkable way. The one chosen has to pay attention to a certain kind of event, or several events in his life of the following kind: Christian Rosenkreutz chooses people so that, for instance, someone comes to a decisive turning-point, a karmic crisis in his life. Let us assume that a man is about to commit an action that would lead him to his death. These things can be very different one from the other. The man goes along a path which, without noticing it, can lead him into great danger. It leads to the edge of a precipice, perhaps. Then the man, now only a step or two from the precipice perhaps, hears a voice saying ‘Stop!’—so that he has to stop without knowing why. There could be a thousand similar situations. I should say, of course, that this is only the external sign of being outwardly qualified for a spiritual calling. To be inwardly qualified, the chosen person has to have an interest in something spiritual, theosophy or some other Spiritual Science. The external event I have described is a fact of the physical world, though it does not come by means of a human voice. The event always occurs in such a way that the person concerned knows quite clearly that the voice comes from the spiritual world. He may at first imagine that the voice has come from a human being who is hidden somewhere, but when the pupil is mature enough he discovers that it was not a physical person intervening in his life. In short, this event convinces the pupil that there are messages from the spiritual world. Such events can occur once or many times in life. We have to understand what effect this has on the soul of the pupil. The pupil tells himself: I have received another life through grace; the first one was forfeited. This new life given him through grace sheds light on the whole of the pupil's further life. He has this definite feeling which can be described in this way: without this rosicrucian experience of mine I should have died. My subsequent life would not have had the same value but for this event.

It can happen, of course, that even though a man has already experienced this once or even several times he does not come to theosophy or Spiritual Science at once. Later on, however, the memory of the event can come back. Many of you here can examine the past course of your lives and you will find that similar occurrences have happened to you. We give too little attention to such things today. We ought altogether to realise how very important occurrences we pass by without noticing them. This is an indication of the way the more advanced pupils of rosicrucianism are called.

This kind of occurrence will either pass a person by without being noticed at all, in which case the impression is blotted out and he attaches no importance to it; or, assuming the person to be attentive, he will appreciate its significance, and he will then perhaps rise to the thought: you were actually facing a crisis then, a karmic crisis; your life should actually have ended at that moment. You had forfeited your life, and you were only saved by something resembling chance. Since that hour a second life has been grafted onto the first, as it were. You must look on this life as a gift and live it accordingly.

When such an event awakens in a person the inner disposition to look at his life from that time onwards as a gift, nowadays this makes him a follower of Christian Rosenkreutz. For that is his way of calling these souls to him. And whoever can recall having had such an experience can tell himself: Christian Rosenkreutz has given me a sign from the spiritual world that I belong to his stream. Christian Rosenkreutz has added the possibility of such an experience to my karma. That is the way in which Christian Rosenkreutz makes his choice of pupils. He chooses his community like this. Whoever experiences this consciously, knows: a path has been shown me, and I must follow it and see how far I can use my forces to serve rosicrucianism. Those who have not understood the sign, however, will do so at a later time, for whoever has received the sign will not be free of it again.

That a man can have an experience of the kind described is due to his having met Christian Rosenkreutz in the spiritual world between his last death and his last birth. Christian Rosenkreutz chose us then, and he put an impulse of will into us that now leads us to such experiences. This is the way in which spiritual connections are brought about.

To go further, let us discuss the difference between Christian Rosenkreutz's teaching in earlier times and in later times. This teaching used to be more in the nature of natural science, whereas today it is more like Spiritual Science. In earlier times, for instance, they considered natural processes and called this science alchemy, and when the processes took place beyond the earth they called it astrology. Today we consider things from a more spiritual aspect. If we consider, for instance, the successive post-Atlantean cultural epochs, the culture of ancient India, ancient Persia, the Egyptian-Chaldaean-Assyrian-Babylonian culture and the Greco-Roman culture, we learn about the nature of the development of the human soul. The rosicrucians of the Middle Ages studied natural processes, regarding them as the earth processes of nature. They distinguished, for instance, three different natural processes which they regarded as the three great processes of nature.

The first important process is the salt process. Everything in nature that can form a deposit of hard substance out of a solution was called salt by the rosicrucian of the Middle Ages. When the medieval rosicrucian saw this salt formation, however, his conception of it was entirely different from that of modern man. For if he wanted to feel he had understood it, the witnessing of such a process had to work like a prayer in his soul. Therefore the medieval rosicrucian tried to make clear to himself what would have to happen in his own soul if the formation of salt were to take place there too. He arrived at the thought: human nature is perpetually destroying itself through instincts and passions. Our life would be nothing but a decomposition, a process of putrefaction, if we only followed our instincts and passions. And if man really wants to protect himself against this process of putrefaction, then he must constantly devote himself to noble thoughts that turn him towards the spirit. It was a matter of bringing his thoughts to a higher level of development. The medieval rosicrucian knew that if he did not combat his passions in one incarnation he would be born with a predisposition for illness in the next one, but that if he purified his passions he would enter life in the next incarnation with a predisposition for health. The process of overcoming through spirituality the forces that lead to decay is microcosmic salt formation. So we can understand how a natural process like this occasioned the most reverent prayer. When observing salt formation the medieval rosicrucians told themselves, with a feeling of deepest piety: divine spiritual powers have been working in this for thousands of years in the same way as noble thoughts work in me. I am praying to the thoughts of the gods, the thoughts of divine spiritual beings that are behind the maya of nature. The medieval rosicrucian knew this, and he said to himself: when I let nature stimulate me to develop feelings like this, I make myself like the macrocosm. If I observe this process in an external way only, I cut myself off from the gods, I fall away from the macrocosm. These were the feelings of the medieval theosophist or rosicrucian.

The process of dissolution gave a different experience: it was a different natural process that could also lead the medieval rosicrucian to prayer. Everything that can dissolve something else was called by the medieval rosicrucian quicksilver or mercury. Now he asked again: what is the corresponding quality in the human soul? What quality works in the soul in the same way in which quicksilver or mercury works outside in nature? The medieval rosicrucian knew that all the forms of love in the soul are what correspond to mercury. He distinguished between lower and higher processes of dissolution, just as there are lower and higher forms of love. And thus the witnessing of the dissolution process again became a pious prayer, and the medieval theosophist said to himself: God's love has been at work out there for thousands of years in the same way as love works in me.

The third important natural process for the medieval theosophist was combustion, that takes place when material substance is consumed by flames. And again the medieval rosicrucian sought the inner process corresponding to this combustion. This inner soul process he saw to be ardent devotion to the deity. And everything that can go up in flames he called sulphur. In the stages of development of the earth he beheld a gradual process of purification similar to a combustion or sulphur process. Just as he knew that the earth will at some time be purified by fire, he also saw a combustion process in fervent devotion to the deity. In the earth processes he beheld the work of those gods who look up to mightier gods above them. And permeated with great piety and deeply religious feelings at the spectacle of the process of combustion, he told himself: gods are now making a sacrifice to the gods above them. And then when the medieval theosophist produced the combustion process in the laboratory himself, he felt: I am doing the same as the gods do when they sacrifice themselves to higher gods. He only considered himself worthy to carry out such a process of combustion in his laboratory when he felt himself filled with the mood of sacrifice, when he himself was filled with the desire to devote himself in sacrifice to the gods. The power of the flame filled the medieval theosophist with lofty and deeply religious feelings, and he told himself: when I see flames outside in the macrocosm I am seeing the thoughts and the love of the gods, and the gods' willingness to sacrifice.

The medieval rosicrucian produced these processes himself in his laboratory and then he entered into contemplation of these salt formations, solutions and processes of combustion, letting himself at the same time be filled with deeply religious feelings in which he became aware of his connection with all the forces of the macrocosm. These soul processes called forth in him divine thoughts, divine love and divine sacrifice. And then the medieval rosicrucian discovered that when he produced a salt process, noble, purifying thoughts arose in him. With a solution process love was stimulated in him, he was inspired by divine love, and with a combustion process the desire to make a sacrifice was kindled in him, it urged him to sacrifice himself on the altar of the world.

These were the experiences of one who did these experiments. And if you had attended these experiments yourself in clairvoyant vision, you would have perceived a change in the aura of the person carrying them out. The aura that was a mixture of colours before the experiment began, being full of instincts and desires to which the person in question had perhaps succumbed, became single-hued as a result of the experiment. First of all, during the experiment with salt formation, it became the colour of copper—pure, divine thoughts—then, in the experiment with a solution, the colour of silver—divine love—and finally, with combustion, the colour of gold—divine sacrifice. And then the alchemists said they had made subjective copper, subjective silver and subjective gold out of the aura. And the outcome was that the person who had undergone this, and had really experienced such an experiment inwardly, was completely permeated by divine love. Such was the way these medieval theosophists became permeated with purity, love and the will to sacrifice, and by means of this sacrificial service they prepared themselves for a certain clairvoyance. This is how the medieval theosophist could see behind maya into the way spiritual beings helped things to come into being and pass away again. And this enabled him to realise which forces of aspiration in men's souls are helpful and which are not. He became acquainted with our own forces of growth and decay. The medieval theosophist Heinrich Khunrath,³⁵ in a moment of enlightenment, called this process the law of growth and decay.

Through observing nature the medieval theosophist learnt the law of ascending and descending evolution. The science he acquired from this he expressed in certain signs, imaginative pictures and figures. It was a kind of imaginative knowledge. One of the outcomes of this was The Secret Symbols of the Rosicrucians which was described yesterday.

This is the way the best alchemists worked from the fourteenth to the eighteenth and until the beginning of the nineteenth century. About this truly moral, ethical, intellectual work nothing has been printed. What has been printed about alchemy concerns purely external experiments only, and was only written by those men who performed alchemy as an end in itself. The false alchemist wanted to create substance. When he experimented with the burning of substances he saw the material results as the only thing gained, whereas the genuine alchemist attached no importance to these material results. For him it all depended on the inner soul experiences he had whilst the substance was forming, the thoughts and experiences within him. Therefore there was a strict rule that the medieval theosophist who produced gold and silver from his experiments was never allowed to profit from it himself. He was only allowed to give away the metals thus produced. Modern man no longer has the correct conception of these experiments. He has no idea what the experimenter could experience. The medieval theosophist was able to experience whole dramas of the soul in his laboratory when, for example, antimony was extracted; the experimenters saw significant moral forces at work in these processes.

If these things had not taken place at that time, we would not be able to practise rosicrucianism in the Spiritual Scientific way today. What the medieval rosicrucian experienced when he beheld the processes of nature is a holy natural science. The mood of spiritual sacrifice, the tremendous joys, the great natural events, including pain and sadness, as well as the events that uplifted him and made him happy, all these experiences that he had during the experiment he performed, worked on him in a liberating and redeeming way. All that was planted into him then, however, is now hidden in the innermost depths of man.

How shall we rediscover these hidden forces that used to lead to clairvoyance? We shall find them by studying Spiritual Science and by devoting ourselves deeply to the inner life of the soul in serious meditation and concentration. By means of inner development of this kind, work with nature will gradually become a sacrificial rite again. For this to come about human beings must go through what we now call Spiritual Science. Human beings in their thousands must devote themselves to Spiritual Science; they must cultivate an inner life, so that in the future the spiritual reality behind nature will be perceptible again, and we learn to understand again the spirit behind maya. Then, in the future, although it will only happen to a small number of people to begin with, they will be able to experience Paul's vision on the road to Damascus and to perceive the etheric Christ, Who will come among men in super-sensible form. But before this happens man will have to return to a spiritual view of nature.

If we did not know the whole significance of rosicrucianism we could believe that humanity was still at the same stage as it was two thousand years ago. Until man has gone through this process, which is only possible by means of Spiritual Science, he will not come to spiritual vision. There are many good and pious people who are theosophists at heart, although they are not followers of Spiritual Science.

Through the event of the baptism in Jordan, when the Christ descended into the body of Jesus of Nazareth, and through the Mystery of Golgotha, mankind has become capable of beholding and recognising the Christ later in the etheric body—since 1930 onwards. Christ has only walked the earth once in a physical body, and we should be able to understand this. ‘The second coming of Christ’ means seeing Christ supersensibly in the etheric. Therefore everyone who wants to tread the right path of development must work to acquire the capacity to see with spiritual eyes. It would not signify human progress for Christ to appear again in a physical body. His next appearance will be a revelation in the etheric body.

What was given in the different religious creeds has been gathered into one whole by Christian Rosenkreutz and the council of the twelve. This means that everything that the separate religions had to give and all that their followers strove and longed for will be found in the Christ Impulse. Development during the next three thousand years will consist in this: the establishing and furthering of an understanding of the Christ Impulse. From the twentieth century onwards all the religions will be reconciled in the mystery of rosicrucianism. And in the course of the next three thousand years this will become possible because it will no longer be necessary to teach from documents, for through the beholding of Christ human beings will themselves learn to understand the experience Paul had on the way to Damascus. Mankind itself will pass through the experience of Paul.

The Maitreya Buddha will appear five thousand years after Buddha was enlightened under the bodhi tree, that is, about three thousand years from now. He will be the successor of Gautama Buddha. Among true occultists this is no longer in doubt. Occultists of both the West and the East are in agreement about it. So two things are beyond question:

Firstly, that the Christ could appear only once in a physical body; secondly that He will appear in the twentieth century in etheric form. Great individualities will certainly appear in the twentieth century, like the Bodhisattva, the successor of Gautama Buddha, who will become the Maitreya Buddha in about three thousand years. But no true occultist will give to any human being physically incarnated in the twentieth century the name of Christ, and no real occultist will expect the Christ in the physical body in the twentieth century. Every genuine occultist would find such a statement erroneous. The Bodhisattva, however, will especially point to the Christ.

Secondly, it will be three thousand years before the Bodhisattva who appeared in Jeshu ben Pandira appears as the Maitreya Buddha. The real occultists of India, in particular, would be horrified if we were to maintain that the Maitreya Buddha could appear before then. There could well be the kind of occultists in India, of course, who are not real occultists and who, for reasons of their own, speak of a Maitreya Buddha already in incarnation. Proper devotion to rosicrucian theosophy and to Christian Rosenkreutz can protect anyone from falling into these errors.

All these things are stated in rosicrucianism in such a way that they can be tested by reason. Healthy human understanding can test all these things. Do not believe anything on my authority, but just take what I say as an indication and then test it for yourselves. I am not perturbed, for the more you examine theosophy or Spiritual Science the more sensible you will find it. The less you take on authority, the more understanding you will have for Christian Rosenkreutz. We know Christian Rosenkreutz best when we enter properly into his individuality and become conscious that the spirit of Christian Rosenkreutz lives on and on. And the nearer we approach his great spirit the stronger we shall become. We can hope for a great deal of strength and help from the etheric body of this great leader, who will always be there, if we ask him to help us.

We will also be able to understand the strange event of Christian Rosenkreutz falling ill if we absorb ourselves properly in the work of Spiritual Science. In the thirteenth century this individuality lived in a physical body that grew weak to the point of transparency, so that for several days he lay as though dead, and during this time he received from the twelve their wisdom and he also experienced the event of Damascus.

May the spirit of true rosicrucianism be with you and inspire you in this group, then the mighty etheric body of Christian Rosenkreutz will be all the more active here.

• 35. Heinrich Khunrath: 1560 – 1605, medical doctor and the writer of a great number of articles on alchemy. A reference to ‘Nashni Khuni’ in a transcript of a lecture suggests that the ‘Khuni’ could point to Khunrath.

When talking about the initiation of the Rosicrucian, or the Rosicrucian Initiation, we must briefly place the concept of initiation in front of our soul. Mainly, this concept is about searching for a way to penetrate, through our own experience and own adventures, into the higher worlds that underlie our sensory world. We must distinguish three paths: initiates, clairvoyants and adepts. These are the three distinct paths to establish a relationship with the higher worlds.

Today, we will talk about how man can get to know the super-sensible worlds through his own experience. We will dispense with the tripartite division for today, but keep in mind carefully that when talking about initiation, we have one method of initiation in front of us.

One will easily get over the differences in the various methods, considering that people seek the way to the higher worlds from different starting points. When we have reached the peak of a mountain, we will have a clear view from up there. To get up there, we can start from different points of departure, using different ways. It would be nonsensical if, to get to the peak, we did not use the path straight in front of us, but first went around the mountain.

Let's apply this principle to initiation. Again, we encounter different starting points because people have different dispositions. External natural science is not in a position to really study the subtle differences which we encounter here. Our physiologists and anatomists are not able, with their crude instruments and methods, to find out these subtle differences of human beings. But for someone with occult knowledge there is a tremendous difference between a person born in the Orient, and one born in Europe or in America. This is evident right down to the physical nature. There is an enormous difference between someone who still has the living immediate emotion and feeling for Christ, and a man who is completely alienated from the original Christian feeling and whose entire worldview is based on the accomplishments of modern science. Not only are the feelings and thoughts of such a person different from those of someone with a Christian spirit, but differences can be observed even in someone's physique. Such subtle differences exist, which affect the most subtle structures of the body, that physiology and biology have nothing to say about them. Therefore the individual human nature has to be considered, as one cannot lead everyone in the same way to rise up into the higher worlds through higher development.

To understand this, we must go back into former ages of mankind. Mankind has gone through a long period of development. At the time we call Atlantean, our ancestors, that is, our own souls, lived in completely different bodies in ancient Atlantis in the West between our present-day Europe and America. Floods then occurred, on which the story about the biblical flood and many other different sagas of floods are based, including those floods which caused the downfall of the ancient Atlantis. This was followed by the post-Atlantean evolution in which we still find ourselves.

We have gone through four time periods during the post-Atlantean evolution, and we are still in the fifth. The first of these time periods included the old Indian culture, where people were taught by the holy Rishis themselves, inspired human beings who modern man can no longer imagine. Then came the second cultural epoch, the Persian, with the Zarathustra-religion. The third cultural epoch was the Babylonian-Assyrian-Chaldean-Egyptian one, from which the Hebrew culture slowly developed. As a fourth one, the Graeco-Roman cultural period followed, within which Christianity arose and which derived its elements from the people who had developed organically from the third culture. Now we are living in the fifth cultural epoch and heading towards the sixth.

Not only the thinking has changed, in the long time since the Atlantean catastrophe, but also the astral body, the etheric body and the physical body. We must not imagine though, that all people are equally placed within our fifth cultural period. Many peculiarities of the earlier cultural traditions were preserved. What has developed one after another, still lives next to each other.

Human beings went through completely different cultural epochs. They experienced changes within their whole being, which made it necessary to adapt the introduction to the higher worlds given to them by their spiritual guides.

During the Atlantean age men were still astrally clairvoyant. They lived together with their Gods and spirits in the same way as with the external plants, minerals, animals and humans. In the post-Atlantean period, men could no longer gain access to the higher worlds. They could no longer penetrate by direct observation of the divine-spiritual into the higher worlds, but could only artificially put themselves into a state where they became ‘companions' of the Gods again. This is the basis of the Indian way of yoga initiation. This yoga introduction to the higher worlds consists mainly in the dampening of the consciousness that man had acquired in the post-Atlantean age, the external perception, and in putting oneself back into former clairvoyant states of consciousness like those which were experienced by the Atlantean man.

If we continue to trace mankind's evolution beyond the Persian and the Chaldean cultural periods, we arrive at the Christian cultural period. This brought with it the Christian initiation, which can only be attained by a direct relationship with Jesus Christ through the Gospel of John and the Apocalypse. Then follows in the 13th and 14th century the first dawn of the materialistic cultural period. At that time the enlightened people were able to perceive: now the material time is coming up. Everything, that was fully realised in the 19th century, what had happened in the extreme, had been prepared long before. We find materialism not only in areas of external activity, but must confront it in all areas.

Until the turn of the 13th to the 14th century men held on to completely different feelings and emotions. A drastic change occurred in all areas, even in the most seemingly isolated ones. In the art of painting, for example, we encounter a great change in the emotions of people. Today, it seems arbitrary to the materialist when, for example, Cimabue¹ paints the background in gold on his pictures. However, this painter still followed the tradition of illustrating the higher world. When looking into the highest regions of the astral world, one will find that this golden background is a reality, an actual fact. Those, who later wanted to paint similar things, as imitators of those ancient painters who still possessed knowledge of the reality of the astral world through tradition, appear to us like barbarians compared to those who really still had a relationship to the higher world. For example, Giotto² did no longer portray what he felt to be true, but everything is painted based solely upon external tradition. At his time, it was natural to move towards that which could only be seen on the physical plane, to materialistic art. Only the greatest painters of that time still held on to tradition.

In Raffael's³ Disputa (Disputation of the Sacrament) one can see how in the basic colour from the bottom to the top is indeed reproduced with a certain accuracy, the experience that someone has who ascends to the higher worlds. This experience of the gradual transition from the lower to the higher worlds, up to the illustration of the genii that emerge from the golden background, is a necessity.

Those who know the spiritual truths know that behind the physical facts something else is hidden. They know that the reason why people are materialists today is that they are under external materialistic influences. But it is not just a matter of external perception. From the occult perspective one learns to know about other reasons. Thoughts and feelings are realities that radiate out into the world. We are swarmed by materialistic thoughts. Everywhere those thoughts are buzzing around us. Even if no books and newspapers that promote the materialistic views reach a farmer out in the countryside, materialistic thoughts that matter still buzz around and influence him.

If we ask, how human beings entered into the world at times when one still knew about occult powers, we will find that in those times care was taken, for example in China, that a human being at his birth into the physical world was welcomed by people filled with spiritual thoughts. This is something completely different from being welcomed by a materialistic doctor and a materialistic thinking environment. Here quite different things are encountered by man than what was formerly the case in an environment alive with spiritual thoughts. Herein lies the reason for the materialistic attitude of man. Already since the 13th and 14th century, man dives into a materialistic atmosphere from the moment of his birth. This had to be so. But, therefore, a method also had to be created for those who wanted to rise into the higher worlds, by which they could become strong and robust enough to be able to achieve the ascent into the spiritual worlds, despite the external materialistic circumstances.

This initiation method is the Rosicrucian one, which was created around the turn of the 13th and 14th century and was first inaugurated by Christian Rosenkreutz,⁴ one of the great leaders of mankind. Strictly separated from the external world, this method worked since those times for centuries, known only to a tight circle, most closely restricted during the 19th century, the materialistic one. Only during the last third of the 19th century it became necessary to reveal to the world through Theosophy what had been taught, at least in its elemental parts, in the Rosicrucian schools.⁵

In the year 1459 the true founder of the Rosicrucian stream himself reached that level, by which he gained the power to exert influence on the world in such a way, that this initiation could be brought by him to the world.

Since that time, this individuality of Christian Rosenkreutz has appeared again and again as leader of the movement in question. Through centuries he led a life ‘in the same body'. We have to understand the expression ‘in the same body' as follows: When looking at the physical body, we find nothing is left of what it consisted of ten years ago. But the consciousness has stayed the same. Every seven to eight years a human being exchanges all parts of his physical body, but the consciousness outlasts this ongoing exchange of physical substances throughout the whole life. What we in this way experience between birth and death, an initiate will experience this by dying and, shortly afterwards, reincarnating in a new body as a child. But he makes this journey fully conscious. The consciousness is maintained from one incarnation to the next. Even the physical resemblance remains with the initiate, because the soul builds up the new body consciously based on the experience of the previous incarnation. In this way the highest leader of the Rosicrucian school lived for centuries.

Only now it has become possible to make public some of the Rosicrucian principles. Until then none of this was made accessible, only once something had been shared.⁶ That which, according to the Rosicrucian study, leads human beings up into the higher worlds, are the following seven stages: First, the Study; second, the acquisition of Imaginative Knowledge; third, learning the Occult Script; fourth, the preparation of the Philosopher's stone; fifth, the correspondence of Microcosm and Macrocosm; sixth, the union with the Macrocosm; seventh, the Divine Bliss.

This does not mean that these seven stages need to be completed consecutively. A student, who meets a Rosicrucian teacher receives his instructions for higher development according to his individuality. From the seven stages of higher development will be selected what is most suitable for him. One might begin with the first and second stage and then maybe the fourth and fifth will follow for him. Only what is called ‘the Study', everyone needs to begin with.

Here ‘Study ' means something different than what is usually understood by it in daily life. What is meant is the particular way of acquisition of ideas and concepts, which is called ‘sensory-free thinking'. The whole thinking of an ordinary man is attached to the external sensory nature. Pay attention to everything that you experience from morning to night and then mentally discard everything that you have seen and heard externally. For most people, very little or nothing will be left. But whoever wants to make his way into the higher worlds must get used to being able to think without connecting to the external world, when the source of his thinking lies only within himself.

The only type of sensory-free thinking in European countries is arithmetic. The child learns that two times two is four, first by looking at an external illustration, at the fingers or the beans or at the terrible adding-machines. But a person will not arrive at a satisfactory result in this field as long as he is not able to imagine without the crutch of the external visual aid. One can never see a circle in the external reality. Circles, which one draws on the blackboard are chalk hills strung together. Only a devised circle is exact. You must construct the circle in your mind, you must devise the circle.

Today, people's sensory-free thinking can only be found in the fields of numeracy and geometry. But for most people these are not accessible and therefore only mentioned for the purpose of comparison. The best means to acquire sensory-free thinking is Theosophy itself, because there a person will hear about things he hasn't seen. What people learn there—how the human being consists of a physical, etheric and astral body, or how the Earth itself developed by going through different stages—they cannot see. Only when we exert our thinking and perceive the inner logic of a thing, we will grasp these things with ordinary logic, provided one relies on the comprehensive basis of logic. If people today are saying that they cannot comprehend this, then this is not because they are not clairvoyant, but rather because they do not wish to apply the logic of comprehension. The experiences of a clairvoyant can be understood with simple logic; clairvoyance is needed only for research purposes. Theosophy is the only logical thing for the theoretical and practical life. In contrast, what people say about super-sensible things in a materialistic way is illogical. What the science of the spirit brings is real concrete fruitfulness in life.

If we look at the principle of education from the standpoint of a theosophical worldview and from the standpoint of a materialistic mind-set, we can draw a comparison. In the former, things are being said about the developing human being which cannot be seen from the outside. But it is so that just within this the real, the true, the concrete exists. Today's materialistic worldview does not understand the growing child. Only by considering the whole nature of a human being, not only observing the outside, does one learn to place a human being with its full potential into the world.

At the same time, someone, who immerses himself into the teachings of the theosophical worldview, has got a method to learn sensory-free thinking. The true Theosophy will always aim as much as possible to develop sensory-free thinking. When we look at Theosophical teachings we will find descriptions of conditions that we cannot see. When looking at the evolution of our Earth and where it emerged from, we describe a planetary condition where everything was different from the current stage of our Earth: that old Moon—not the current one—where no hard, mineralised Earth crust yet existed on which the human being can walk, but where the planet only existed in a kind of plant nature. In this compound, which we can compare with cooking lettuce or spinach, more solid components only existed in a form like today's crust or bark of trees. Minerals didn't exist then at all.

If this is disputed from a materialistic perspective, because one can only imagine plants growing in mineral soil, then one could admit that under today's conditions this is certainly not possible any other way. But in earlier ages completely other conditions prevailed. A materialist is not able to imagine this, because he will always relate to today's conditions.

However, by means of such pictures, one can free oneself from what one sees all around. Nonsense makes sense when we contemplate far distant circumstances. Thus we learn to educate ourselves, to get away from our sensory conditions. We learn to place pictures before our soul, that we do not know today. Thus, our thinking lifts off from what is possible today. Those who try to connect with their thinking only to what would be possible today, stick to today's conditions and can't get away from them. For study in the Rosicrucian spirit it especially matters to train one's thinking on images of conditions that no longer exist today. To let a concept emerge from a concept, out of completely sensory-free thinking, is a means to arrive at what is called the Study. One can also get there by studying a book like the Philosophy of Freedom.⁷ The author has offered in it only the opportunity that thoughts think themselves. There the individual thoughts emerge by themselves out of completely sensory-free thinking, organise themselves in such a way that no thought can be removed from its place and be placed into a different spot. Just as a hand cannot get cut off from the body and be placed into another place. This is the way of sensory-free thinking.

A burning desire to absolutely want to raise oneself into the higher worlds is something many want, but it is something unhealthy. Striving is healthy only when an inner, dignified logic is cultivated by a thinking that is completely free of sensory impressions.

One who knows one's way around the higher worlds, knows that the perceptions there are quite different from those in the physical world. But there is one thing that remains the same element in the three worlds—in the physical, in the astral and in the Devachan world: that is logical thinking. This safe leader protects us from following all the will-o'-the-wisps. Without it we will never learn to tell illusion from reality, and come to believe that every illusion is an astral reality. Here in the physical world, it is easy to differentiate illusions from reality because the external facts correct us. For example, if you have walked down the wrong street, you will not arrive at the right place. In the higher worlds we have to find the correct way ourselves by applying our own mental strength. Otherwise, we will keep getting into increasingly more difficult labyrinths there, if we have not learned to tell illusion from reality beforehand. We can learn this in a Rosicrucian training.

The second stage in the Rosicrucian training is imaginative recognition, the recognition through pictures. This is the first stage of ascending from the physical into the spiritual world. Goethe provided the leitmotif, the leading principle, with the last words of the second part of his Faust, when he said: “All that is transitory, is but an allegory.”⁸ If we begin to see everything that surrounds us as spiritual pictures, then we strive upwards into the world of imagination.

In the Rosicrucian schools and also in earlier schools, it was attempted to teach the students the evolutionary principle that applies throughout the different kingdoms. Today one speaks about evolution in relation to materialistic thinking. Theosophy also speaks about this, but it is something else to transform the concept of evolution into a picture and lift it into imagination. Normally, it is only the mind that is occupied with the evolutionary principle. We arrive at the imagination as follows: Through many weeks or through months the soul was transformed through the directions of the teachers in the following way. We can best retell this in the form of a dialogue which, however, has never happened in this way. The teacher might have said something like, look at the plant, how with its leaves and blossoms it strives up towards the sun and sinks its roots into the ground, striving towards the centre of the Earth. If you are comparing it with the human being, it would be wrong to compare the bloom with his head, the roots with his reproductive organs. Darwin⁹ drew the right comparison. He pointed out that the root of the plant corresponds to the head of the human being. The human being is the inverted plant. The root, that the plant sinks into the ground, corresponds to the head of the human being. But that which the plant chastely holds up towards the Sun, the bloom and its fertilisation organs, the human being turns towards the Earth. If one turns the plant around fully, one gets the human being. If one turns it around halfway, one gets an animal with its horizontal spine.

If we conceive these things imaginatively, then not only our thoughts, but also our feelings and our emotions will be deeply ushered into the world that surrounds us. We will learn to recognise the inner relationship between plant and human being. We will recognise the pure, chaste plant nature which has not yet been pervaded by desires and passions, and the nature of the human being in whom chaste plant substance has been transformed into flesh pervaded by desires and passions. But through this entered at the same time something higher into man's being—he gained the clear day consciousness. The plant is asleep, but the human being has gained his clear day consciousness by being incarnated in flesh pervaded by desires, passions and instincts. To do this, he had to complete a full turn. The animal stands right in between. Although it has desires and passions, it has not yet gained the clear day consciousness.

The teacher told the student: If you feel this, you'll understand Plato's¹⁰ saying, “The world soul is crucified on the world body”. Plant, animal, man, that is the real innermost meaning of the sign of the cross. What passes through the nature kingdoms as common soul substance, as ‘world-soul', appears in symbolic form as a cross. This has been taught in the occult schools as the deepest meaning of the cross.

Then the teacher said to the student; watch how the plant chastely holds its calyx towards the Sun, how the shaft of sunlight kisses the plant's bloom. This was called the chaste kiss of the sunray, the holy lance of love. In this chaste kiss of the sunray, the holy lance of love, to which the calyx of the plant opens up, is a hint towards the ideal of the future where the human being once again will develop his organs higher to the chastity of the plant. Currently, man has developed up to the stage where he is penetrated by desires. He will develop further to the stage where he will have transformed his desires and will again be kissed by the spiritual sunray; where he will, on a higher level, bring forth his own kind anew, where the reproductive power will be spiritualised. This was called the ‘Holy Grail' in the occult schools. This is the real ideal of the Holy Grail—an organ that man will have, once his reproductive powers have been spiritualised. In the past, we see the chaste plant-nature; in the present, we see man permeated by desires; and in the future, we will see man with the purified body and how he receives in the Holy Grail chalice, a higher stage of development of the plant calyx, the spiritual shaft of sunlight.

This is not abstract thinking, but a state of being, where we feel each stage of development, not only think about it. When we feel in this way what is evolving, then we slowly raise ourselves up so that we arrive through the pictures at imaginative recognition. The picture of the Holy Grail will stand before us, once we detach these pictures from the sensory appearance, and receive the picture from the higher world.

If we let such pictures affect us—those that represent specific processes in the spiritual world and that were validated in the occult schools—then we call this ‘allowing the Occult Script to affect us'. This is the third stage of the Rosicrucian training.

We will find such pictures in seals and pillars, like those that were portrayed at the Munich Congress,¹¹ of the beginning and the end of the evolution of mankind and in the Apocalypse. In former times man was on an Earth that consisted of molten magma. He has come to his current body only gradually, through many incarnations, and he will continue to evolve through many incarnations. In particular there will be a transformation of the larynx and the heart. These will be the reproductive organs in the future. Today, my thoughts, feelings and emotions only embody in words which let the emotions of my soul in this room reach your ears through vibrations and will awaken similar thoughts and feelings in your souls. Later, the human being will create warmth and finally light, just as he now communicates his thoughts in words through the air. Just as man descended from of a sphere of light and warmth in the past, he will create warmth and light himself in the future.

This is depicted on the first apocalyptical seal.¹² The original condition of mankind, when the Earth was still in a stage of molten magma, is represented by the feet of the man on the picture being submerged in a fiery metal stream. The state of the future is depicted by a fiery sword, protruding from the mouth of a man. Such a picture works not only on the imagination, but also on someone's will power, when we observe the great powers of nature in this way. Because the same power, which lives as primordial force in the will of the human being, also lives in the whole external world. By learning to train our will, the will of the world will live in us—then our will is going to become one with the will that flows through nature. Man learns this by selfless devotion to the occult scripts.

The fourth stage of the Rosicrucian training is the preparation of the Philosopher's stone. This is a high mystery, kept secret. Towards the end of the 18th century some of it was revealed. For example, there was a remark in a central German newspaper¹³ by a person who had heard something about it. It said, “The Philosopher's stone really exists, and there are only a few people who do not know it. Many already held it in their hands, without knowing that it was the Philosopher's stone.” This definition was correct verbatim, only one must understand it. It is not a mere allegory. A Rosicrucian works on reality in such a way that he will penetrate into the physiology. He works at the real transformation of the Earth and of man, deeply into the physical body, not only on what is usually known as moral uplift, refinement of morals, and so on.

Let us look at the human breathing. Regulation of the breathing process forms an important part of occult development. People breathe in, use the oxygen that mixes with the carbon inside of them, and then they breathe out carbon dioxide. If this would continue forever by itself, then the atmosphere of the Earth would incrementally be filled with carbon dioxide and that would lead to the downfall of mankind. The existence of mankind presupposes the existence of plants. The plant absorbs the carbon dioxide, retains the carbon and releases the oxygen again. A continuous circulation happens between humans and plants. Humans, animals and plants belong together, one is not possible without the other.

The development in the human body is like this: Today, what the plant has to do for man, namely to produce the coal ― plant corpses are still recognisable in hard coal ― will later be done by man himself. Occultism can demonstrate that through the further development of the human being and his later transformed heart and respiratory organs, man will achieve this himself. One way how the human being can take up the plant process and consciously carry this out himself, is by rhythmisation of the breathing process, so that he doesn't release the carbon dioxide to the plant, but builds up the carbon within his own body The human being learns to build up his own body within himself.

If we compare this, with what we have been told about the Holy Grail, we will have the Grail now concretely before us. Through the rhythmisation of the breathing process man learns to produce in himself the carbon, that occurs in nature as graphite and diamond, in the form of chaste plant nature. To produce within oneself the carbon, the pure, chaste substance, is called the “Preparation of the Philosopher's Stone”. One must imagine it similar to a translucent diamond, but in a softer form. Man is a mighty inner apparatus, he learns through occult training that he is working on the evolution of his own lineage to a higher form. Someone with a materialistic view, on hearing about this, very characteristically remarked, that this would be a nice thing, from which it might be possible to develop a profitable branch of industry. Not at all! Exactly this remark illustrates the necessity to keep such disclosures secret. For only when people have reached such a moral and intellectual level that they can no longer think egoistically can such secrets be revealed to them.

The fifth stage is the ‘correspondence of microcosms and macrocosms'. For everything that happens in the world outside, there is a process within the human being, that repeats this in him on a small scale. One must only contemplate what happens within oneself, then one will intuitively come across the processes in the external cosmos. For example, through a specific meditation and concentration on the inner part of the eye, man learns to recognise the inner nature of the Sun, because the eye is an extract of the essence of the Sun. Goethe once said that ‘the eye is made by the light for the light.'¹⁴ The light created the eye. Without the Sun, there is no eye. All that is essential in the Sun is in some way reflected in the eye. To recognise the light of the Sun by concentrating on the essence of the eye—this is Rosicrucian training. In this way, one can learn to know the whole world from within the human being. For example, through concentration on the liver, man learns to know quite specific creative natural forces, right into the creativity of man. Thus man learns to know the whole world through himself, because he is a small world. Here he learns how in reality microcosm and macrocosm correspond to each other.

Concentrating in a certain way on the human heart will provide knowledge of the lion nature outside. This is not only a phrase. Each human being must singularly find the way into the vast universe. Then the perception of being one and feeling one with the whole cosmos will occur by itself. When man learns fully, out of every limb of his body—also out of his etheric and his astral body—to walk the way to the vast universe with patience step by step, then he will expand his organism to one that encompasses all space. He will then be within all beings. He is then able to experience the feeling which is called ‘divine bliss'.

It is important that man lets go of himself, so he can find the way to the creative powers. The more he emerges out of himself, the more he will reach into the higher worlds. Goethe described in the poem The Mysteries,¹⁵ how someone walks to a mysterious temple to meet with various people, through whom the diverse schools of thought come together. Goethe places a cross that is entwined with roses at the entry portal of the temple. ‘Who added to the cross the wreath of roses?' says the poem. Only someone who knows that the cross entwined with roses expresses the development to a higher human state would say this. Goethe has also expressed this in those words:

And until thou truly hast
this ‘dying and becoming’
thou art but a troubled guest
over the dark earth roaming¹⁶

Man has to approach more and more a state where he, out of the dying part of himself, will be newly created inside. Like a tree whose bark outside is dying, but on the inside new shoots are developing, thus man too surrounds himself with death on the outside, to be newly created inside. Thus in former times initiates were compared to the oak and called druids.¹⁷ This ‘dying and becoming' means the human being always creates fresh life inside. The dying will become for him the preserver of new life.

Therefore, it is said:

The power that holds constrained all humankind,¹⁸
the victor over himself it no more can bind.

By this it is meant for humankind to overcome the ordinary life and turn it into a vessel, so that within it the sprouting seeds of a higher life can evolve to fruition.

• 1. Cimabue, from 1240 until after 1302, Italian painter, teacher of Giotto. 1
• 2. Giotto, 1266-1337, Italian painter and master builder, student of Cimabue. 2
• 3. Raffael, actual name Raffaello Santi, 1483-1520. 3
• 4. Christian Rosenkreutz: Not recognised by public history as a real historic figure of the 14th/15th century, Christian Rosenkreutz became legendarily known from two anonymous Rosicrucian texts Fama Fraternitatis or the Discovery of the Brotherhood of the Highly Laudable Order of R.C., Kassel 1614, and Confessio Fraternitatis or Confession of the laudable Brotherhood of the highly honourable Rose Cross, Kassel 1615. According to this, he was a German of noble birth who lived from 1378 to 1484. The name appears for the first time in a text handwritten and as such distributed in 1604, and in 1616 anonymously published in the text The Chymical Wedding of Christiani Rosencreutz, Anno 1459. Rudolf Steiner portrayed the author of this text, Johann Valentin Andreae, as the carrier of inspiration of Christian Rosenkreutz. Refer to Rudolf Steiner, The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz in Philosophy and Anthroposophy. Collected Essays 1904-1923, GA 35. The essay is also contained in the translation of The Chymical Wedding into New High German by Walter Weber, Basel 1978. According to Rudolf Steiner, Christian Rosenkreutz was a real historical personality. Compare also, The Esoteric Christendom and the Spiritual Leadership of Humanity, GA 130. 4
• 5. Re the Rosicrucian method - refer to note 4 above. Obviously, the deliberations of Rudolf Steiner at this point have been only fragmentary captured by the note taker. For better comprehension refer to the presentation in the lecture dated 15 September 1909; Lecture 1 in The Lucas Gospel cycle, GA 114. 5
• 6. Rudolf Steiner refers to an article about the Philosopher's Stone by Karl Arnold Kortum (1745-1828), which appeared in a central German newspaper, the Reichsanzeiger, on 8 October 1796.
• 7. Translator's note: The book The Philosophy of Freedom is also known as The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity.
• 8. Goethe, Faust, Part II, 5th act, closing choir.
• 9. Charles Darwin, 1809-1882, British Natural Scientist. His hint about the correspondence of the human head and the plant root can be found in his work The Power of Movement in Plants translated from English by Victor Carus, Volume 13, of Charles Darwin's Gesammelte Werke, Stuttgart 1881, Chapter 12, Summary and Final Remarks, Page 492 (Ending): “It is hardly an overstatement, when one says, that this tip of the root is equipped in a way that has the ability to direct the movements of the neighbouring parts, like a brain of a lower animal; the brain sits within the foremost end of the head, and receives impressions from the sense organs and directs the various movements”.
• 10. Rudolf Steiner often quoted this saying from the Timäus, Chapter 8, always using the wording of the Vienna philosopher Vincenz Knauer, from his work Die Hauptprobleme der Philosophie in ihrer Entwicklung und Teilweisen Loesung von Thales bis Robert Hamerling, (The main problems of philosophy in its development and part solution from Thales to Robert Hamerling) Vienna and Leipzig 1892, page 96 (belonging to the library of Rudolf Steiner and underlined by him): The myth told in Timäus is that God created the world soul in the shape of a cross that he laid through the universe and spanned across it the world body”. In Timäus itself it says that God split the world soul into two halves “slang both parts together in the form of the letter Chi (X) and twined of each a circle, so that both met with each other across the middle, and each one with itself. To both parts he gave the uniform and in the same room happening movement of the circular reversal, but one of the circles he made into the outer one and the other into the inner one” (quoted from the translation by Otto Apelt of Die Philosophische Bibliothek, Volume 179, Leipzig 1919). In the view of the elders two circles were of greatest importance in the whole world: The equator and the ecliptic. Thus the translator (O.Apelt) remarks about this point in Timäus: “And so it is then in Plato's explanations, that by way of a mysterious process the soul extends itself to the spatial building of the ecliptic and the equator. When the position of these two biggest circles towards each other is illustrated through the form of the letter X (Chi, whereby one needs to imagine the letter not in a vertical but horizontally orientation) then this is a quite appropriate comparison. Because these two circles cut each other at an angle of 23 1/2 degrees. The reversal of the equator proceeds from East to West (that is from right to left, because the ancient ones have often, when determining areas of the world, turned their gaze towards the North); the rotation of the ecliptic proceeds from West to East.” In addition, it should be remarked that the Church Father Justin the Martyr points out in his first Apology, that the source for Plato's teaching about the creation of the world is the Old Testament: Even what Plato said in the Timäus about the Son of God for the explanation of the World, where it says “He builds him in the universe like a Chi”, was similarly borrowed by him from Moses. Because in Moses' scripts it is written that at the time when the Israelites left Egypt and were in the desert, they were confronted by poison spraying animals, adders, vipers, and all kind of snakes, that brought death to the people. Then Moses, acting on an inspiration and impulse from God, took ore and shaped a cross from it. He then erected it in the holy tent and talked to the people; “If you look at this picture and trust in it then you will find healing.” Thus, so he reports, the snakes died, but the people, he continues, escaped death. This was read by Plato, and because he did not understand it properly and believed that it was not the shape of the cross that was meant, but the form of the Chi, he made the statement that the power that is primary to the first God, was distributed in the universe like a Chi.” Quoted from Bibliothek der Kirchenväter. Frühchristliche Apologeten und Märtyrerakten, Band 1 (Early Christian Apologists and Martyrs Files, Volume 1), Kempten-Munich 1913, Page 73/74).
• 11. A Congress of the Theosophical Society held in May 1907–compare Rudolf Steiner, Pictures of Occult Seals and Columns; the Munich Congress, Pentecost 1907 and its Impacts, GA 284/85.
• 12. Refer to note 10 above.
• 13. Refer to note 6 above.
• 14. Goethe once said; “The eye has been made by the light for the light”... literally: The eye owes its existence to the light. From similar animal auxilliary organs the light calls forth an organ that is capable of becoming its equal. And so the eye builds itself at the light for the light, so that the inner light can meet the outer light”. In Goethes Naturwissenschaftliche Schriften (Goethe's Natural Science Writings), published by and commented on by Rudolf Steiner in Kürschner's German National Literature, 5 Volumes, 1884-97. Reprint, Dornach 1975, GA 001, Volume III, Design of a Theory of Colours, Introduction, page 89.
• 15. Re the poem The Mysteries refer to GA 98, Part 1, Lecture 4, Cologne, 25 December 1907.
• 16. “and until though truly hast, this dying and becoming..” is the final verse of the poem by Goethe Blessed longings of the collection West-Eastern Divan.
• 17. Druids were called knowledgeable of oaks, from Latin after Caesar, Cicero and Tacitus.
• 18. Goethe, The Mysteries, 22nd Verse.

My task of to-day and of tomorrow will be to show you the path into the spiritual worlds which has been followed ever since the 14th and 15th century, particularly in the so-called Occult Training, and which is the most suitable path for modern people. But it will be easier for us to understand the essential points if we first cast a glance over the future development of humanity.

We have already spoken of the course of human development through the Stages of Saturn, Sun, Moon and Earth. Those who are only accustomed to think in accordance with present-day conceptions will find it difficult to understand that it is possible to know something about the future course of evolution: But you must bear in mind that certain great laws which are now active, will also exercise their activity in the future, and those who know these laws can therefore cast a glance into the future.

In the sphere of physical reality no one doubts that things can be foretold,—for example, lunar and solar eclipses and other astronomical phenomena can be calculated in advance, far into the future. In the sphere of physical reality there is no doubt as to this. And everybody knows that when certain substances are mixed in a retort, scientists can foretell the result. This is a prophecy relating to external sensory facts, and these things can be foretold because the laws which influence the substances are known.

Similarly we learn to know through spiritual science the laws which govern the course of human life, so that it is possible to foretell what will take place in the future.

An objection might now be raised which has been advanced by the thinkers of every epoch: “It is impossible to speak of human freedom if future events can be foreseen!” But here people confuse the capacity of looking into the future with predestination. In every philosophy you will therefore come across the strangest observations, for all philosophers were unable to make this distinction. Jacob Böhme was the only exception!

Let me now give you an example to make things clearer to you. Let me compare time with space. Imagine yourself standing here, and two people in the street, outside. You can see what these two people are doing, for you are watching them from a distance. But are you able to influence their actions, in view of this fact? No, you are simply looking at them, and these two people act in perfect freedom. You can determine nothing in their actions through the fact that you are looking at them. Now imagine a clairvoyant who observes what will take place in the future. He merely sees this, and he does not in any way influence the events. If these events could be influenced, if they were, so to speak, predestined in the present, there would be no pre-vision. But we can only grasp the difference between predestination and prevision if we ponder over this problem for a long tune.

I do not intend to describe to you what the Earth will be like when it shall have reached the Venus and the Jupiter stages; instead, I wish to tell you something which will give you an idea of man's future development; I wish to explain to you something which comes from the oldest Christian Mysteries, which originates from the Christian School of the true Dionysius; it was a teaching which was always taught in the Christian esoteric schools.

The following comparison was taken as a starting point:—I am now speaking to you. Yell can hear my words; you hear the thoughts which were, to begin with, in the depths of my soul; you hear thoughts which would remain concealed to you were I not to express them in sounds. But you could not hear my words, if the air did not exist between us. Whenever I utter a word, the air in the space around us is set into motion; whenever I speak, I cause the whole volume of air around me to vibrate, it vibrates in accordance with the words which I pronounce. Let us now proceed further: Imagine that you were able liquefy the air, and then to render it solid. Air can be liquefied; you know that water can exist in the form of steam and that this air becomes liquid when it cools; and then the liquid can become a solid block of ice. Imagine now that I pronounce the word.“God” into the air; a form would fall down, for instance, the form of a shell; if the sound-vibrations could render the air solid. And another wave of sound would fall down as a solid form if I pronounce the word “World”. A crystallized form of air would correspond to every word I utter, and you would be able to perceive these crystallized forms.

This example was in fact advanced in the Christian schools. First of all we have the spoken word, and then this word becomes a solid form, but before it became solid, it existed as an inner thought. Now the early Christian imagined the following: The creative process in the universe resembles the creative process which takes place in space, when we speak. The creative proceeded from the idea of things and then the Godhead expressed these ideas in the form of words uttered out into space. Everything which appears to us outside in the form of plants, minerals, etc. is the crystallization of God's utterances. It is possible to imagine everything dissolved into tone-vibrations of the Divine Cosmic Word. “Whatever I see before me, is the crystallization Word of God!” said the Christian. And on a certain wy he made a distinction between the “Father in Concealment”, Who had not yet expressed Himself, the “Word” or the Son, Who resounds through space, and the crystallized Word, the “Revelation”.

This enables us to understand in a deeper sense the beginning of the Gospel of St. John:—“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. It was in the very beginning with God. Everything was made by Him, and except through Him was nothing made that was made.” Everything that was made, was made by the Word! We should take things as literally a possible, then we can easily recognise the creative element of the Word, or the Logos. In the Christian meaning, the Word or the Logos stands in the second place. “Logos” should only be translated with “Word”, for this means that at the foundation of everything which exists in the created world lies the unuttered creative Word; it then resounded as spoken Word, and this is the origin of every existing thing. If we go far back into times we could hear animals, plants, minerals, and men, resound through the cosmic spaces as “Word”—even as you now hear my own words—for in those remote, times, the air had not yet cooled down to such extent as to enable words to take on solid form.

Let us bear this in mind, for then we can say to ourselves: Once upon a time, the Word was ,creative. Men are now beginners in an activity which was once carried out by their ancestors, the Gods, who stood above them. Once upon a time, the Gods created the world by uttering their words into the cosmic spaces, and this creative activity gave rise to the created world round about us. The forces of procreation in the vegetable, animal, and human kingdoms are but, a metamorphosis of the former creative Word of God. We still bear within us a higher and a lower nature. The greatest perfection has been reached by that part within us which is endowed with sex, whereas our larynx contains the first stage of a new procreative power. Whenever we pronounce words, we are at the beginning of an activity which will one day become procreative. At present we are only beginners in an activity which was once carried out by the Gods. A new form of procreation will replace the old one. The larynx is now able to form words but in the future it will become an organ of procreation, a generative organ, which will produce more and more condensed and higher forms. The larynx can now mould forms of air, but in future it will give rise to real beings. When the earth shall have reached the Jupiter stager the Word will have creative power in the mineral kingdom, and during the Venus stage it will be able to produce plants. Thus the course of development will proceed, until man will be able to procreate himself through the Word.

The present form arose, when man first sent the air streaming through his lungs through sounds. But in future stages of the earth's development, the words, the mere words which we now tell each other, will have a lasting form. And finally, the larynx will become man's generative organ, through which he will procreate himself in purity without the intromission of sex.

This shows us the future aspects of human development, and the predisposition of the human larynx. Indeed, an enigmatic phenomenon can show you how intimately the larynx is connected with certain stages of development: When a boy reaches puberty, his voi0e breaks, it undergoes mutation. The human larynx is at the beginning of its development, whereas sexual life is at the end of its development. This shows us the intimate connection of certain things in Nature. In sexual life we are confronted by something which is dying off; the larynx, the word, on the other hand, will in the future become man's generative organ.

We might indicate many other examples showing how the human being will gradually develop organs which now exist in a rudimentary form—for instance, the organs which now constitute his breathing system, but which really form part of the heart system.

The training which was introduced into Europe since the 14th century in fact anticipates future conditions of human evolution and it enables us to follow a speedier course of inner development than the ordinary one. The training which is called the Rosicrucian training is the one most suited to modern men. In a certain sense, Rosicrucianism has not a good reputation among men who have only heard of it now and then. If we could rely on the statements made in books, and on what scientists know about Rosicrucianism, then it would indeed be the swindle which it is reputed to be! But those who judge Rosicrucianism by these sources do not know real Rosicrucianism, but a mere swindle!

But let us now consider Rosicrucianism in it s true form; it arose through an individuality concealed under the name of Christian Rosenkreutz, who gave rise to the Rosicrucian Movement in the year 1459.¹

I expressly remark that what I an telling you now is only to be taken as an example, in the same way in which I spoke to you yesterday of the Christian. training. Let me therefore indicate right away the seven chief points of Rosicrucian training. The sequence of these stages is not the same for all, but let me point them out to you, for they come into consideration for everyone who passes through the Rosicrucian training.

The first thing is what we call Study; the second is what we call the Appropriation of Imaginative Knowledge; the third, the Appropriation of the Occult Writing; the fourth, the Preparation of the Stone of the Wise; the fifth stage is called Conformity of the Small World, the Microcosm, with the Large World, the Macrocosm. ² The sixth stage is the Penetration into the Life of the Macrocosm and the seventh is what we the Divine Blissfulness.

The Rosicrucian path leads in the surest and profoundest way to a knowledge of Christianity. The Christian path of training is more suited for those who can abide in faith and who can awaken their feeling life within them, in the manner described to you yesterday. But the Rosicrucian path is for these people who can connect the truths of Christianity with the truths relating to the external world This above all, will enable them to protect Christianity against every attack from outside. Christianity is a world-conception of such profundity that our wisdom will never suffice to grasp it fully. The path of Rosicrucian training is the most suitable one for modern men.³

If we follow a train of thought which has nothing in common with the sensory world, we pursue study in the Rosicrucian meaning. What is designated as “thinking in free thoughts” is only known to the civilisation of the west, through geometry, the Christian-Gnostic schools therefore used the name “mathesis” for the designation of things connected with the higher truths, with God and the higher world, for such truths had to be grasped independently of everything pertaining to the sensory world, even as mathematics must be grasped independently of all sensory impressions. A circle drawn with chalk is most imperfect, a real circle can only be conceived in thoughts; thought alone is able to grasp everything that can be learned in connection with the circle. Through mathematics we learn to think of the circle independently of the senses; we construct it in thought, with the aid of the triangle built up spiritually, whose angles equal to 180 degrees.

It is somewhat uncomfortable to have to think without the support of external sensory objects, and for the majority of men there is no other field of study in this direction than spiritual science. In my first lecture I told you that the knowledge contained in spiritual science can absolutely be grasped through logic. But clairvoyance is needed if anyone wishes to investigate these truths. Logic suffices, however, for the understanding of the truths contained in spiritual science.

Our materialistic age could only invent the calculating machine, which teaches us to form thoughts which are not independent of the senses: A child, above all, should learn to grasp things independently of sensory impressions. Thee influence of spiritual science will therefore be of greatest value in education: Spiritual science is an excellent training for the development of a thought activity independent of the senses. Everything which I have told you in connection with Saturn, the Sun, and the various members of the human beings relates to things which cannot be, seen; they must be grasped through thought, independently of the senses. No one should, however, believe that he can train himself unless he first grasps these truths theoretically. The advantage of such truths is that they do not exist for the senses, so that they can transmit us a way of thinking which goes beyond sensory life. For many people it is sufficient at first, to penetrate into the truths which theosophy describes in connection with facts which cannot be grasped through the senses. These truths constitute, the kind of thoughts which were always explained to the pupils of the Rosicrucian Schools, and the truths were well impressed upon them.

If we now wish to proceed, we can find a good means of a Training in Thought in my books “Truth and Science” and “The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity”. These books are merely a gymnastic in a form of thinking which is independent of the senses. Generally speaking, you will find that in other books it does not make much difference if the thought- contained in one sentence is transferred to another one. But in the above-mentioned books no thought can be transferred to another place. These books have arisen in such a way that my own person merely, gave this thought-structure the opportunity to take on a sensory form. It was necessary to yield to these thoughts, so that they could arise of their own accord, continue of their own accord. Those who are willing to penetrate more deeply into these thoughts, devoting themselves to this study for, say, half a year (this is not easy, but the effort entailed is the very best way of tackling ) those who can read these books to the very end, have drawn out of their inner being a dormant force.

The second stage is Imagination, or the Imaginative Knowledge, which is entirely under the influence of Goethe's beautiful words: “All transient things are but a symbol”. Only those who have acquired a firm, sure thinking, should enter this second stage. For they might easily fall into delusive fancies without a firm foundation of thought. Consequently, the first condition is to have a clear head; nothing can protect us more against mistakes than a clear way of thinking.

In the widest meaning, imagination might be characterized by observing everything which surrounds us in the following Manner:—Observe the face of a human being; you see upon it creases and wrinkles,which come and go; you do not only describe these lines, but you designate them as smiles or sorrow. A man's smile reveals to you his happy disposition of mind. You do not only deduce an inner truth from something which you see outside, but this outer perception is for you a real symbol of that man's inner life or else you see a tear falling; you are not only a physicist who observes that tear in accordance with the law of gravity, but you know that that falling tear is the expression of the soul's inner sadness. Thus everything which you see outside on a person's countenance becomes for you the expression of the soul's inner mood. The Rosicrucian pupil learns to feel that everything which he sees outside is similarly the expression, let us say, of the Earth-Spirit, a certain plant, for, example the meadow-saffron, really appears to him as the expression of the mourning life of the earth. Even as a smiling countenance reveals to him the soul's happy mood, so the flowers become an expression for the earth's happy or sorrowful mood.

Goethe did not only wish to convey an external image when the Earth-Spirit in “Faust” speaks:

“In Lebensfluten Tatensturm,
Wall ich auf und ab,
Webe hin und her
Geburt und Grab,
Ein ewiges Meer,
Ein wechselnd Weben,
Ein glühend Leben,
So schaff ich am sausenden Webstuhl der Zeit,
Und wirke der Gottheit lebendiges Kleid.”

In the floods of life,
in the storm of action,
I surge up and down,
I weave to and fro!
Birth and the Grave;
An eternal ocean,
A changing weaving,
A glowing life,
Thus I work on the whirring loom of Time
And weave the Godhead's living garment.

For Goethe, the Spirit of the Earth gradually becomes something that lives in the earth; he acquires a soul-spiritual connection with the whole surrounding Nature.

Let me now explain to you more in detail one of the moods which can be found in Nature.

We have a Rosicrucian pupil walking across the fields. He sees the tiny pearls of dew upon each plant. This reminds him of the ancient “Neflheim, the “Land of Mists”, where the air was filled with a dewy mist and where the human beings had quite a different connection with Nature than they have now. The Rosicrucian pupil who is thus walking over the meadows and who perceives the pearls of dew upon the plants says to himself: In the ancient Land of Mists this was once dissolved in the atmosphere. And within his soul rose up a deeply concealed memory of the Atlantean age.

Imagination was specially cultivated among the pupils of the medieval Rosicrucian Schools, and als0 among the pupils of the Holy-Grail. Since I cannot express myself in any other way, let me now convey to you in the form of a dialogue some of the truths which were taught in these Schools.

The teacher said to his pupil:—“Behold the plant: see how it springs out of the ground, opening its calyx with the organs of fructification; see how the sun's rays come down upon it and open the blossom, so that the fruit can ripen”. The Rosicrucian pupil, and also the pupil of the Holy Grail, had to conjure up before their soul this image, this idea.

Now there is something very significant, even in materialistic science, whenever a plant is being compared with the human being. You must, in that case, take the plant's root as corresponding to the human head, whereas the flower corresponds to man's generative organs, to the which he shame-facedly conceals. In the plant the root corresponds to the human head. Man is a reversed plant, the animal is a half reversed pant. Rosicrucianism therefore says: Behold the plant: Its root is in the ground and its organs of fructification are chastely turned towards the sun's ray. Behold the animal: Its spine is horizontal ... and then behold man: There you have a complete reverse, a complete transformation. In the cosmic process of evolution the plant, the animal and man are symbolized by the Cross! The Cross is the plant, the animal and man.—Now you will be able to understand Plato's words: The soul of the universe hangs upon the Cross of the universe.—the soul of the universe, the cosmic soul which permeates everything, is stretched out upon the plant, the animal, and man.

Now it was impressed upon the Rosicrucian student: “Behold the plant: In its kind, it is lower than you, for it is not endowed with consciousness and with the power of thinking; but its substance is pure and chaste; it turns its calyx towards the sun; its organ of reproduction is turned without any passion towards the sun's ray, the holy spear of love. But physical substance has become permeated with passion. Now think of the future ideal—a purified substance, producing itself in purest chastity,” And his attention, was drawn towards the larynx, where man shall one day have attained the purity and chastity of the flower's calyx. “Think of the plant's calyx, which is devoid of passion. It develops through passion, but it will become pure again and reproduce itself chastely, by allowing itself to be fructified by the spiritual ray of the sun, by the Holy Spear of Love.” A prototype of this “holy spear of Love” is the spear which pierced the heart of Christ-Jesus upon the Cross.

Yesterday we have seen that this blood which streamed out of the Redeemer's wound banished egoism from the earth. The spear which pierced him is therefore a foreboding of that higher spear, the sun's ray in a spiritual form. And the Holy Grail indicates the chalice of humanity which develops out of the larynx, and which will be the purified generative organ of the future, as is the case to-day in the plant.

This is the deeper meaning of the Holy Grail, which was brought to the knowledge of the Rosicrucian students and of the disciples of the Holy Grail when they had reached the imaginative stage. Now compare the vision which you obtain through these images—the plant's calyx, sex filled with passion, the Holy Grail. the passionless chalice—compare this with the dry, intellectual concept supplied by modern science; this will show you the difference between imagination and mere intellectual thought: the whole cosmic process must be grasped in images! This is important, for the more intellectual concepts which we have to-day are not creative; but if these concepts are added to an image, then the images will become creative. This was felt in past times, and it should be considered in the education of the child.

Let me now discuss an actual problem. To-day people say so easily: What nonsense our elders taught us children, by telling us the story of the stork! Children should be told the truth.

If our descendants will treat us as we treat our forefathers, they will also laugh at us and say: Our forefathers thought that that the human being arises through a physical act!—And they will look back upon the time when this was explained to children in a spiritual way. In ancient times, when the story of the stork arose, also adults believed in it, for they knew that when a human being is born, his soul descend a from the spiritual world; and so they always connected birth with the descent of a winged being. You may even find this again in nursery-rhymes, for instance in the following one:

Flieg, Käfer, flieg!
Dein Vater ist im Krieg!
Deine Mutter ist im Pommerland
Pommerland ist abgebrannt;
Flieg, Käfer, flieg!

Fly, Beetle, fly!
Your father is in the war.
Your mother is in Pommerland,
Pommerland is burnt to ashes!
Fly, Beetle, fly!

This “fly, beetle” is meant as an image for the human soul, because a faint knowledge still existed of the astral world, from where the souls fly down into the physical world. And what is “Pommerland”? “Pommer” is the sane word as “Pommerle” which means a small child, so that “Pommerland”, or “Pommerleland”, is the Land of babies, where the mother goes to-fetch her baby. Such things must simply be explained in the light of the spiritual world. If you bear in mind that the image of the stork bringing babies is really an image for a spiritual process—reincarnation—you will realise how immensely important it is that certain things should first be grasped in the form of pictures; if the child is first taught to look upon the image of the spiritual process, he will develop an entirely different frame of mind enabling him to listen reverently even to the description of the physical process.

If you know that the stork is an image for the descending soul, you, yourself will once more believe in the stork! Your words can wing a child's fancy, if you understand the truth underlying an image; in that case a mysterious fluid will stream out of it and pass over to the child. This applies to every image. Children can thus be taught everything.

How can you deal with the problem of life after death? Lead the child to a butterfly's cocoon and tell him: Even as the butterfly flies out of its cocoon, so the soul flies out of the body when we die, but we cannot see this. If you really believe in this, you will be able to convince the child that when the butterfly leaves its cocoon, this is, upon a lower stage, the same as when the soul leaves the body. If spiritual science enables us to dive down again into the spiritual world, so that living images rise up in human hearts, education will change altogether; then the child will no longer be taught dry intellectual facts which coarsen his soul. We should not pull things down to a grotesque or comic sphere but we should realise instead what important things lie at their foundation.

The third thing which must be acquired for the paving of the “path” is the Learning of the Occult Writing. This does not consist in learning a writing, as is the case in ordinary life. The letters of the alphabet may indeed ba traced back to occult images but they are not by a long way an occult writing. In occult writing we must penetrate into the real great cosmic forces which are active in the universe. And all that we write down, must be so that one process of development passes over into the next. Take a plant: It bears seeds; in the seed you have the starting point for a new plant. But if you could really investigate the process, you would find that nothing of the old plant passes over into the new plant. In reality, the old plant perishes completely in regard to its substance; while the new plant builds up its form from entirely new substances—all that passes over into the new plant is a kind of movement. Here you have some sealing wax and there a seal: you press the seal into the wax. Of the seal itself nothing has gone over into the wax, only the form remains.—This is the case in every process of development. When it perishes the old substance merely supplies the opportunity for a new form to arise in accordance with the old form. This is designated

with two inter-twining spirals which do not meet. Such a transition existed after the Atlantean epoch of culture; this epoch disappears and a new one arises in the Indian epoch of culture; also this must be designated with two spirals. I have already told you that in the year 800 A.D. the sun rose in the sign of Aries; before that in the sign of Taurus; further back in the sign of Gemini and still further back in the sign of Cancer. The Greco-Latin age, containing the seeds of our present epoch, coincided with the time when the sun rose in the sign of Aries; the preceding civilisation; the Chaldean-Assyrian-Egyptian one, coincided with the time when the sun rose in the sign of Taurus; before that we have the Persien culture; when the sun rose in the sign of Gemini; and the ancient Indian culture developed itself when the sun stood in the sign of Cancer. It was then that the sign of Cancer; two inter-twining spirals was first written down.

Thus I might explain to you each sign of the Zodiac according to its true meaning. These signs were formed out of Nature, they are an expression for the forces and laws which are active outside, in Nature. If we learn to know the occult signs we begin to go outside ourselves; we penetrate into the mysterious foundations of Nature.

Thus I have given you some indications 0n the first three stages of the Rosicrucian path: Study, Imaginative Knowledge, and the Acquisition of the Occult Writing.

To-morrow we shall discuss the other stages, beginning with the Preparation of the Stone of the Wise.

• 1. See lecture 5 of Life Between Death and a New Birth.
• 2. See Macrocosm and Microcosm. Soul Problems, Life Problems, Spiritual Problems.
• 3. See The Path of Knowledge and its Stages

The object of these lectures is to place before you an idea of the Christ-Event in so far as it is connected with the historical appearance of the Christ in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. So many questions of the spiritual life are bound up with this subject that the choice of it will enable us to make a wide survey of the realm of Spiritual Science and its mission, and to discuss the significance of the Anthroposophical Movement for the spiritual life of the present time. We shall also have the opportunity of learning what the content of religion is. And since this content must spring from the common heritage of mankind, we shall seek to know it in its relation to the deeper sources of religious life, and to what the sources of occult science have to tell us concerning the foundation of all religious and philosophic endeavours. Much that we shall have to discuss will seem to lie very far from the theme itself, but it will all lead us back to our main purpose.

We shall best come to a more precise understanding of our subject—modern religious life on the one hand and the spiritual-scientific deepening of spiritual life on the other—if we glance at the origins both of religious life and of occult spiritual life in recent centuries. For as regards spiritual development in Europe during this period, we can discern two directions of thought which have been cultivated with the utmost intensity: on the one hand an exaggeration of the Jesus-Principle, and on the other a most careful, conscientious preservation of the Christ-Principle. When we place before our minds these two recent streams, we must see in the exaggeration of the Jesus-Principle a great and dangerous error in the spiritual life of those times, and on the other side a movement of deep significance, a movement which seeks above all the true paths and is careful to avoid the paths of error. From the outset, therefore, in our judgment of two entirely different spiritual movements, we have to ascribe serious errors to one of them and most earnest efforts after truth to the other.

The movement which interests us in connection with our spiritual-scientific point of view, and which we may call an extraordinarily dangerous error in a certain sense, is the movement known in the external world as Jesuitism. In Jesuitism we encounter a dangerous exaggeration of the Jesus-Principle. In the other movement, which for centuries has existed in Europe as Rosicrucianism, we have an inward Christ-movement which above all seeks carefully for the ways of truth.

Ever since a Jesuitical current arose in Europe, much has been said and written in exoteric life about Jesuitism. Those who wish to study spiritual life from its deeper sources will thus be concerned to see how far Jesuitism signifies a dangerous exaggeration of the Jesus-Principle. If we wish to arrive at a true characterisation of Jesuitism, we must get to know how the three chief principles of world-evolution, which are indicated in the most varied ways in the different world-outlooks, find practical expression in human life, including exoteric life. Today we will first of all turn quite away from the deeper significance and characterisation of these three fundamental streams, which run through all life and all evolution, and will review them from an external point of view.

First of all we have the cognitional element in our soul-life. Now, whatever may be said against the abstractions of a one-sided intellectual search for truth, or against the alienation from life of many scientific, philosophical, and theosophical endeavours, anyone who is clear in his own mind as to what he wills and what he can will, knows that Cognition belongs to the most deeply rooted activities of the soul. For whether we seek knowledge chiefly through thinking, or more through sensation or feeling, Cognition always signifies a taking account of the world around us, and also of ourselves. Hence we must say that whether we are satisfied for the moment with the simplest experiences of the soul, or whether we wish to devote ourselves to the most complicated analysis of the mysteries of existence, Cognition is the primary and most significant question. For it is basically through Cognition that we form a picture of the content of the world—a picture we live by and from which our entire soul-life is nourished. The very first sense-impression, in fact all sense-life, must be included in the realm of Cognition, along with the highest formulations of the intellect.

Under Cognition we must include also the impulse to distinguish between the beautiful and the ugly, for although it is true in a certain sense that there is no disputing about taste, yet cognition is involved when someone has adopted a certain judgment in a question of taste and can distinguish between the beautiful and the ugly. Again, our moral impulses—those which prompt us to do good and abstain from evil—must be seen as moral ideas, as cognition, or as impulses to do the one and avoid the other. Even what we call our conscience, however vague the impulses from it may be, comes under the heading of cognition. In short, the world we are consciously aware of, whether it be reality or maya; the world we live in consciously, everything we are conscious of—all this can be embraced under the heading: cognitive spiritual life.

Everyone, however, must acknowledge that under the surface of this cognitive life something else can be discerned; that in our everyday existence our soul-life gives evidence of many things which are not part of our conscious life. When we wake up in the morning, our soul-life is always strengthened and refreshed and newly born from sleep. During the unconsciousness of sleep we have gained something which is outside the realm of conscious cognition, but comes from a region where our soul is active below the level of consciousness.

In waking life, too, we must admit that we are impelled by impulses, instincts and forces which throw up their waves into our conscious life, while they work and have their being below it. We become aware that they work below the conscious when they rise above the surface which separates the conscious from the subconscious. And indeed our moral life also makes us aware of a subconscious soul-life of this kind, for we can see how in the moral realm this or that ideal comes to birth. It takes only a little self-knowledge to realise that these ideals do rise up into our soul-life, but that we are far from always knowing how our great moral ideals are connected with the deepest questions of existence, or how they belong to the will of God, in which they must ultimately be grounded. We might indeed compare our soul-life in its totality with a deep ocean. The depths of this oceanic soul-life throw up waves to the surface, and those that break out into the realm of air, which we can compare with normal consciousness, are brought within the range of conscious cognition. All conscious life is rooted in a subconscious soul-life.

Fundamentally, the whole evolution of mankind can be understood only if a subconscious soul-life of this kind is acknowledged. For what does the progress of spiritual life signify save that many things which have long dwelt down below take form for the first time when they are brought to surface level? So it is, for example, when an inventive idea arises in the form of an impulse towards discovery. Subconscious soul-life, as real as our conscious life, must therefore be recognised as a second element in our life of soul.

If we place this subconscious soul-life in a realm that is at first unknown—but not unknowable—we must contrast it with a third element. This element is immediately apparent to external, exoteric observation, for if we turn our attention to the outer world through our senses, or approach it through our intellect or any form of mental activity, we come to know all sorts of things. But a more exact consideration of every age of cognition compels us to realise that behind everything we can know about the world at large something else lies hidden: something that is certainly not unknowable but in every epoch has to be described as not yet known. And this not-yet-known, which lies below the surface of the known in the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms, belongs as much to ourselves as it does to external nature. It belongs to us in so far as we absorb and work up in our physical organism the materials and forces of the outer world; and inasmuch as we have within us a portion of nature, we have also within us a portion of the unknown in nature. So in the world wherein we live we must distinguish a triad: our conscious spiritual life; our subconscious soul-life below the threshold of consciousness; and that which, as the unknown in nature and at the same time in man, lives in us as part of the great unknown Nature.

This triad emerges directly from a rational observation of the world. And if looking away from all dogmatic statements, from all philosophical or theosophical traditions, in so far as these are clothed in conceptual definitions or formulations, we may ask: How has the human mind always expressed the fact that this triad is present not only in the immediate environment, but in the whole world to which man himself belongs? We must then reply: Man gives the name of Spirit to all that can be known within the horizon of the conscious. He designates as the Son or the Logos that which works in the subconscious and throws up only its waves from down below. And to that which belongs equally to the unknown in Nature, and to the part of our own being which is of one kind with Nature, the name of the Father-Principle has always been given, because it was felt to express the relation of the third principle to the other two.

Besides what has now been said concerning the Spirit, the Son, and the Father-Principle, it can be taken for granted that other differentiations we have formerly made, and also the differentiations made in this or that philosophy, have their justifications. But we can say that the most widely accepted idea of this differentiation corresponds with the account of it given here.

Now let us ask: How can we characterise the transition from that which belongs to the Spirit, and so plays directly into the conscious life of the soul, to the subconscious element which belongs to the Son-Principle? We shall best grasp this transition if we realise that into ordinary human consciousness there plays quite distinctly the element we designate as Will, in contrast to the elements of ideation and feeling. If we rightly interpret the Bible saying, ‘The Spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak’, it indicates that everything grasped by consciousness lies in the realm of the Spirit, whereas by ‘the flesh’ is meant everything that lies more in the subconscious. As to the nature of the Will, we need only think of that which plays up from the subconscious and enters into our consciousness only when we form concepts of it. Only when we transform into concepts and ideas the dark impelling forces which are rooted in the elemental part of the soul—only then do they enter the realm of the Spirit; otherwise they remain in the realm of the Son-Principle. And since the Will plays through our feelings into the life of ideas, we see quite clearly the breaking out into the conscious of the waves from the subconscious ocean. In our threefold soul-life we have two elements, ideation and feeling, which belong to conscious life, but feeling descends directly into the realm of the Will, and the nearer we come to the impulses of Will, the further we descend into the subconscious, the dark realms into which we sink completely when consciousness is engulfed in deep, dreamless sleep.

Thus we see that the Will-element, because it descends into the realm of the subconscious, stands towards the individual being of man in a relationship quite different from that of cognition, the realm of the Spirit. And so, when we differentiate between Spirit and Son, we may be impelled to surmise that man's relationship to the Spirit is different from his relationship to the Son. How is this to be understood?

Even in exoteric life it is quite easy to understand. Certainly the realm of cognition has given rise to all kinds of debate, but if people would only come to understand one another concerning the concepts and ideas they formulate for themselves, controversy over questions of cognition would gradually cease. I have often emphasised that we no longer dispute over mathematics, because we have raised mathematics entirely into consciousness. The things we dispute about are those not yet raised into consciousness: we still allow our subconscious impulses, instincts, and passions to play into them. So we see that in the realm of cognition we have to do with something more universally human than anything to be found in the subconscious realm. When we meet another human being and enter into the most varied relationships with him, it is in the realm of conscious spiritual life that understanding should be possible. And a mark of a healthy soul-life is that it will always wish and hope to reach an understanding with the other person concerning things that belong to conscious spiritual life. It will be unhealthy for the soul if that hope is lost.

On the other hand, we must recognise the Will-element, and everything in another person's subconscious, as something which should on no account be intruded upon; it must be regarded as his innermost sanctuary. We need consider only how unpleasant to a healthy soul-life is the feeling that the Will of another man is being put under compulsion. It is not only aesthetically but morally unpleasant to see the conscious soul-life of anyone eliminated by hypnotism or any other powerful means; or to see the will-power of one person working directly on the Will of another. The only healthy way to gain influence over another person's Will is through cognition. Cognition should be the means whereby one soul comes to an understanding with another. A person must first translate his wishes into a conceptual form; then they may influence another person's cognition, and they should touch his Will only by this indirect route. Nothing else can be satisfactory in the highest, most ideal sense to a healthy life of soul. Every kind of forcible working of Will upon Will must evoke an unpleasant impression.

In other words, human nature strives, in so far as it is healthy, to develop in the realm of the Spirit the life it has in common with others, and to cherish and respect the realm of the subconscious, in so far as it comes to expression in the human organism, as an inviolable sanctuary that should rest in the personality, the individuality, of each man and should not be approached save through the door of conscious cognition. So at least a modern consciousness, attuned to our epoch, must feel if it is to know itself to be healthy.

In later lectures we shall see whether this was so in all periods of human evolution. What has been said today will help us to think clearly about what is outside us and what is within us, at least for our own period. This leads to the conclusion that fundamentally the realm of the Son—embracing everything that we designate as the Son or Logos—must be awakened in each individual as a quite personal concern; and that the realm of common life, where men may be influenced by one another, is the realm of the Spirit.

We see this expressed in the grandest, most significant way in the New Testament accounts of the attitude of Christ Jesus towards His first disciples and followers. From all that is told concerning the Christ-Event we can gather that the followers who had hastened to Jesus during his life-time were bewildered when His life ended with the crucifixion; with that form of death which, in the land where the Christ-Event took its course, was regarded as the only possible expiation for the greatest crimes. And although this death on the cross did not affect everyone as it did Saul, who later became Paul, and as Saul had concluded that someone who suffered such a death could not be the Messiah, or the Christ—for the crucifixion had made a milder impression on the disciples, one might say—yet it is obvious that the writers of the Gospels wished to give the impression that Christ Jesus, through his subjection to the shameful death on the cross, had forfeited some of the effect he had had on the hearts of those around him.

But with this account something else is connected. The influence that Christ Jesus had acquired—an influence we must characterise more exactly during these lectures—was restored to Him after the Resurrection. Whatever may be our present thoughts about the Resurrection, we shall have to discuss it here in the light of occult science; and then, if we simply go by the Gospel narratives, one thing will be clear: for those to whom Christ appeared after the Resurrection He had become someone who was present in a quite special way, different entirely from His previous presence.

In speaking on the Gospel of St. John I have already pointed out how impossible it would have been for anyone who knew Jesus not to recognise Him after three days, or to confuse Him with someone else, if He had not appeared in an altered form. The Evangelists wish particularly to evoke the impression that the Christ appeared in this altered form. But they also wish to indicate something else. For the Christ to exert influence on human souls, a certain receptivity in those souls was necessary. And this receptivity had to be acted on not merely by an influence from the realm of the Spirit but by the actual sight of the Christ-Being.

If we ask what this signifies, we must realise that when a person stands before us, his effect upon us goes beyond anything we are conscious of. Whenever a human being or other being works upon us, unconscious elements affect our soul-life; they are produced by the other being indirectly through consciousness, but he can produce them only if he stands before us in actuality. What the Christ brought about from person to person after the so-called Resurrection was something that worked up from the unconscious soul-powers of the disciples into their soul-life: an acquaintance with the Son. Hence the differences in the portrayal of the risen Christ; hence, too, the variations in the accounts, showing how the Christ appeared to one or other person, according to the disposition of the person concerned. Here we see the Christ-Being acting on the subconscious part of the souls of the disciples; hence the appearances are quite individual, and we should not complain because they are not uniform.

If, however, the significance of the Christ for the world was to be His bringing to all men something common to all of them, then not only this individual working of the Son had to proceed from the Christ, but the element of Spirit, which can encompass something that belongs to all men, had to be renewed by Him. This is indicated by the statement that after the Christ had worked upon the Logos-nature of man. He sent forth the Spirit in the form of the renewed or ‘holy Spirit’. Thus was created that element common to all men which is characterised when we are told that the disciples, after they had received the Spirit, began to speak in the most diverse tongues. Here we are shown how the common element resides in the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. And something else is indicated: how different is this outpouring of the Spirit from the simple imparting of the power of the Son, for in the Acts of the Apostles we are told that certain persons to whom the apostles came had already received the Jesus-baptism, and yet they had now to receive for the first time the Spirit, symbolically indicated by the laying on of hands. In the characterisation of the Christ-Event we are made very precisely aware of the difference between the working we have to designate as the Christ-working, which acts upon the subconscious impulses of the soul and so must have a personal, inward character, and the Spirit-element, which represents something common to all mankind.

It is this Spirit-element that those who have named themselves ‘Rosicrucians’ have sought to preserve most carefully, as far as human weakness permits. The Rosicrucians have always wished to adhere strictly to the rule that even in the highest regions of Initiation nothing must be worked upon except the Spirit-element which, as common between man and man, is available in the evolution of humanity. The Initiation of the Rosicrucians was an Initiation of the Spirit. It was never an Initiation of the Will, for the Will of man was to be respected as a sanctuary in the innermost part of the soul. Hence the individual was led to those Initiations which were to take him beyond the stage of Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition, but always so that he could recognise within himself the response which the development of the Spirit-element was to call forth. No influence was to be exerted on the Will.

We must not mistake this attitude for one of indifference towards the Will. The point is that by excluding all direct working upon the Will, the purest spiritual influence was imparted indirectly through the Spirit. When we come to an understanding with another man with regard to entering on the path of knowledge of the Spirit, light and warmth are radiated from the spiritual path, and they then enkindle the Will, but always by the indirect path through the Spirit—never otherwise.

In Rosicrucianism, therefore, we can observe in the highest sense that impulse of Christianity which finds twofold expression: on the one hand in the Son-element, in the Christ-working which goes down deeply into the subconscious; on the other, in the Spirit-working which embraces all that falls within the horizon of our consciousness. We must indeed bear the Christ in our Will; but the way in which men should come to an understanding with each other in life concerning the Christ can be found only—in the Rosicrucian sense—through a conscious soul-life which penetrates ever more deeply into the occult.

In reaction against many other spiritual streams in Europe, the opposite way was taken by those who are usually called Jesuits. The radical, fundamental difference between what we justifiably call the Christian way of the Spirit and the Jesuit way of the Spirit, which gives a one-sided exaggeration to the Jesus-Principle, is that the intention of the Jesuit way is to work directly, at all times, upon the Will. The difference is clearly shown in the method by which the pupil of Jesuitism is educated. Jesuitism is not to be taken lightly, or merely exoterically, but also esoterically, for it is rooted in esotericism. It is not, however, rooted in the spiritual life that is poured out through the symbol of Pentecost, but it seeks to root itself directly in the Jesus-element of the Son, which means in the Will; and thereby it exaggerates the Jesus-element of the Will.

This will be seen when we now enquire into the esoteric part of Jesuitism, its various spiritual exercises. How were these exercises arranged? The essential point is that every single pupil of Jesuitism goes through exercises which lead into the occult life, but into the Will, and within the field of occultism they hold the Will in severe discipline; they ‘break it in’, one might say. And the significant fact is that this discipline of the Will does not arise merely from the surface of life, but from something deeper, because the pupil has been led into the occult, in the way just indicated.

If now, leaving aside the exercises of prayer preparatory to all Jesuit exercises, we consider these occult exercises, at least in their chief points, we find that the pupil has first to call up a vivid Imagination of Christ Jesus as the King of the Worlds—mark this carefully: an Imagination. And no one would be received into the degrees of Jesuitism who had not gone through such exercises, and had not experienced in his soul the transformation which such psychic exercises mean for the whole man. But this Imaginative presentation of Christ Jesus as King of the Worlds has to be preceded by something else. The pupil has to call up for himself, in absolute solitude and seclusion, a picture of man as he was created in the world, and how by falling into sin he incurred the possibility of most terrible punishments. And it is strictly prescribed how one must picture such a man; how if he were left to himself he would incur the utmost of torturing penalties. The rules are extraordinarily severe. With all other concepts or ideas excluded, this picture must live uninterruptedly within the soul of the future Jesuit, the picture of the God-forsaken man, the man exposed to the most fearful punishments, together with the feeling: ‘That am I, since I have come into the world and have forsaken God, and have exposed myself to the possibility of the most fearful punishments.’ This must call forth the fear of being forsaken by God, and detestation of man as he is according to his own nature.

Then, in a further Imagination, over against the picture of the outcast, God-forsaken man, must be set the picture of the God full of pity who then became Christ, and through His acts on earth atones for what man has brought about by forsaking the divine path. In contrast to the Imagination of the God-forsaken man, there must arise that of the all-merciful, loving Being, Christ Jesus, to whom alone it is due that man is not exposed to all possible punishments working upon his soul. And, just as vividly as a feeling of contempt for the forsaking of the divine path had first to become fixed in the soul of the Jesuit pupil, so must a feeling of humility and contrition now take hold of him in the presence of Christ.

When these two feelings have been called forth in the pupil, then for several weeks he has to practise severe exercises, picturing to himself in Imagination all details of the life of Jesus from his birth to the Crucifixion and Resurrection. And all that can arise in the soul emerges when the pupil lives in rigorous seclusion and, except for necessary meals, lets nothing else work upon his soul than the pictures which the Gospels give of the compassionate life of Jesus. But these pictures do not merely appear before him in thoughts and ideas; they must work upon his soul in vivid, living Imaginations.

Only someone who really knows how the human soul is transformed through Imaginations which work with full living power—only he knows that under such conditions the soul is in fact completely changed. Such Imaginations, because they are concentrated in the most intense, one-sided way, first on sinful man, secondly on the compassionate God, and then only on the pictures from the New Testament, evoke precisely, through the law of polarity, a strengthened Will. These pictures produce their effect directly, at first hand, for any reflection upon them must be dutifully excluded. It is solely a matter of holding before one's mind these Imaginations, as they have just been described.

What then follows is this. In the further exercises Christ Jesus—and now we may no longer say Christ but exclusively Jesus—is represented as the universal King of the Worlds, and thereby the Jesus element is exaggerated. Because Christ had to be incarnated in a human body, the purely spiritual took part in the physical world; but over against this participation stand the monumental and most significant words: ‘My kingdom is not of this world.’ We can exaggerate the Jesus element by making Jesus into a king of this world, by making Him that which He would have become if He had not resisted the tempter who wished to give Him ‘all the kingdoms of the world and the glory thereof’. Then Jesus of Nazareth would have been a king who, unlike other kings who possess only a portion of the earth, would have had the whole earth under his sway. If we think of this king portrayed in this guise, his kingly power so increased that the whole earth is his domain, then we should have the very picture that followed the other exercises through which the personal will of each Jesuit pupil had been sufficiently strengthened.

To prepare for this picture of ‘King Jesus’, this Ruler over all the kingdoms of the earth, the pupil had to form an Imagination of Babylon and the plain around Babylon as a living picture, and, enthroned over Babylon, Lucifer with his banner. This picture had to be visualised with great exactitude, for it is a powerful Imagination: King Lucifer, with his banner and his hosts of Luciferic angels, seated amidst fire and dense smoke, as he sends out his angels to conquer the kingdoms of the earth. And the whole danger that issues from the ‘banner of Lucifer’ must first of all be imagined by itself, without casting a glance upon Christ Jesus. The soul must be entirely engrossed in the Imagination of the danger which issues from the banner of Lucifer. The soul must learn to feel that the greatest danger to the world's existence that could be conjured forth would be a victory for the banner of Lucifer. And when this picture has had its effect, the other Imagination, ‘The banner of Jesus’, must take its place. The pupil must now visualise Jerusalem and the plain around Jerusalem; King Jesus with His hosts, how He sends out His hosts, how He conquers and drives off the hosts of Lucifer and makes Himself King of the whole earth—the victory of the banner of Jesus over the banner of Lucifer.

These are the strength-giving Imaginations for the Will which are brought before the soul of the Jesuit pupil. This is what completely changes his Will; makes him such that in his Will, because it is trained occultly, he turns away from everything else and surrenders absolutely to the idea: ‘King Jesus must become the Ruler upon earth, and we who belong to His army have to employ every means to make Him Ruler of the earth. To this we pledge ourselves, we who belong to His host assembled on the plain of Jerusalem, against the host of Lucifer assembled on the plain of Babylon. And the greatest disgrace for a soldier of King Jesus is to forsake His banner.’

These ideas, gathered up into a single resolution of the Will, can certainly give the Will immense strength. But we must ask: what is it in the soul-life that has been directly attacked? The element that ought to be regarded as intrinsically holy, the element that ought not to be touched—the Will-element. In so far as this Jesuit training lays hold of the Will-element, while the Jesus-idea seizes the Will-element completely, in so far is the concept of the dominion of Jesus exaggerated in the most dangerous way—dangerous because through it the Will becomes so strong that it can work directly upon the Will of another. For where the Will becomes so strong through Imaginations, which means by occult methods, it acquires the capacity for working directly upon the Will of another, and hence also along all the other occult paths to which such a Will can have recourse.

Thus we see how in recent centuries we encounter these two movements, among many others: one has exaggerated the Jesus-element and sees in ‘King Jesus’ the sole ideal of Christianity, while the other looks solely at the Christ-element and carefully sets aside anything that could go beyond it. This second outlook has been much calumniated because it maintains that Christ has sent the Spirit, so that, indirectly through the Spirit, Christ can enter into the hearts and minds of men. In the development of civilisation during the last few centuries there is hardly a greater contrast than that between Jesuitism and Rosicrucianism, for Jesuitism contains nothing of what Rosicrucianism regards as the highest ideal concerning human worth and human dignity, while Rosicrucianism has always sought to guard itself from any influence which could in the remotest sense be called Jesuitical.

In this lecture I wished to show how even so lofty an element as the Jesus-principle can be exaggerated and then becomes dangerous, and how necessary it is to sink oneself into the depths of the Christ-Being if we wish to understand how the strength of Christianity must reside in esteeming, to the very highest degree, human dignity and human worth, and in strictly refraining from groping our clumsy way into man's inmost sanctuary. Rosicrucianism, even more than Christian mysticism, is attacked by the Jesuit element, because the Jesuits feel that true Christianity is being sought elsewhere than in the setting which offers merely ‘King Jesus’ in the leading role. But the Imaginations here indicated, together with the prescribed exercises, have made the Will so strong that even protests brought against it in the name of the Spirit can be defeated.

This lecture is in the collected edition of Rudolf Steiner's works; the volume containing the German texts is entitled, Von Jesus Zu Christus, From Jesus to Christ (Vol. 131 in the Bibliographic Survey, 1961). It is the first lecture in this series of ten lectures.

The object of these lectures is to place before you an idea of the Christ Event in so far as it is connected with the historical appearance of the Christ in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. So many questions of the spiritual life are bound up with this subject that the choice of it will enable us to make a wide survey of the realm of Spiritual Science and its mission, and to discuss the significance of the Anthroposophical Movement for the spiritual life of the present time. We shall also have the opportunity of learning what the content of religion is. And since this content must spring from the common heritage of mankind, we shall seek to know it in its relation to the deeper sources of religious life, and to what the sources of occult science have to tell us concerning the foundation of all religious and philosophic endeavors. Much that we shall have to discuss will seem to lie very far from the theme itself, but it will all lead us back to our main purpose.

We shall best come to a more precise understanding of our subject—modern religious life on the one hand and the spiritual-scientific deepening of spiritual life on the other—if we glance at the origins both of religious life on the one hand and of occult spiritual life in recent centuries, for as regards spiritual development in Europe during this period, we can discern two directions of thought which have been cultivated with the utmost intensity: on the one hand an exaggeration of the Jesus-Principle, and on the other a most careful, conscientious preservation of the Christ-Principle. When we place before our minds these two recent streams, we must see in the exaggeration of the Jesus-Principle a great and dangerous error in the spiritual life of those times, and on the other side a movement of deep significance, a movement which seeks above all the true paths and is careful to avoid the paths of error. From the outset, therefore, in our judgment of two entirely different spiritual movements, we have to ascribe serious error to one of them and most earnest efforts after truth to the other.

The movement which interests us in connection with out spiritual-scientific point of view, and which we may call an extraordinarily dangerous error in a certain sense, is the movement known in the external world as Jesuitism. In Jesuitism we encounter a dangerous exaggeration of the Jesus-Principle. In the other movement, which for centuries has existed in Europe as Rosicrucianism, we have an inward Christ-movement which above all seeks carefully for the ways of truth.

Ever since a Jesuitical current arose in Europe, much has been said and written in exoteric life about Jesuitism. Those who wish to study spiritual life from its deeper sources will thus be concerned to see how far Jesuitism signifies a dangerous exaggeration of the Jesus-Principle. If we wish to arrive at a true characterisation of Jesuitism, we must get to know how the three chief principles of world-evolution, which are indicated in the most varied ways in the different world-outlooks, find practical statement in human life, including exoteric life. Today we will first of all turn quite away from the deeper significance and characterisation of these 3 fundamental streams, which run through all life and all evolution, and will review them from an external point of view.

First of all we have the cognitional element in our soul-life. Now, whatever may be said against the abstractions of a one-sided intellectual search for truth, or against the alienation from life of many scientific, philosophical and theosophical endeavors, anyone who is clear in his own mind as to what he wills and what he can will, knows that Cognition belongs to the most deeply rooted activities of the soul. For whether we seek knowledge chiefly through thinking, or more through sensation or feeling, Cognition always signifies a taking account of the world around us, and also of ourselves. Hence we must say that whether we are satisfied for the moment with the simplest experiences of the soul, or whether we wish to devote ourselves to the most complicated analysis of the mysteries of existence, Cognition is the primary and most significant question. For it is basically through Cognition that we form a picture of the content of the world—a picture we live by and from which our entire soul-life is nourished. The very first sense-impression, in fact all sense-life, must be included in the realm of Cognition, along with the highest formulations of the intellect.

Under Cognition we must include also the impulse to distinguish between the beautiful and the ugly, for although it is true in a certain sense that there is no disputing about taste, yet cognition is involved when someone has adopted a certain judgment in a question of taste and can distinguish between the beautiful and the ugly. Again, our moral impulses—those which prompt us to do good and abstain from evil—must be seen as moral ideas, as cognition, or as impulses to do the one and avoid the other. Even what we call our conscience, however vague the impulses from it may be, comes under the heading of Cognition. In short, the world we are consciously aware of, whether it be reality or maya; the world we live in consciously, everything we are conscious of—all this can be embraced under the heading: cognitive spiritual life.

Everyone, however, must acknowledge that under the surface of this cognitive life something else can be discerned; that in our everyday existence our soul-life gives evidence of many things which are not part of our conscious life. When we wake up in the morning, our soul-life if always strengthened and refreshed and newly born from sleep. During the unconsciousness of sleep we have gained something which is outside the realm of conscious cognition, but comes from a region where our soul is active below the level of consciousness.

In waking life, too, we must admit that we are impelled by impulses, instincts and forces which throw up their waves into our conscious life, while they work and have their being below it. We become aware that they work below the conscious when they rise above the surface which separates the conscious from the subconscious soul-life of this kind, for we can see how in the moral realm this or that ideal comes to birth. It takes only a little self-knowledge to realise that these ideals do rise up into our soul-life, but that we are far from always knowing how our great moral ideals are connected with the deepest questions of existence, or how they belong to the will of God, in which they must ultimately be grounded. We might indeed compare our soul-life in its totality with a deep ocean. The depths of this oceanic soul-life throw up waves to the surface, and those that break out into the realm of air, which we can compare with normal consciousness, are brought within the range of conscious cognition. All conscious life is rooted in a subconscious soul-life.

Fundamentally, the whole evolution of mankind can be understood only if a subconscious soul-life of this kind is acknowledged. For what does the progress of spiritual life signify save that many things which have long dwelt down below take form for the first time when they are brought to surface level? So it is, for example, when an inventive idea arises in the form of an impulse towards discovery. Subconscious soul-life, as real as our conscious life, must therefore be recognized as a second element in our life of soul.

If we place this subconscious soul-life in a realm that is at first unknown—but not unknowable—we must contrast it with a third element. This element is immediately apparent to external, exoteric observation, for if we turn our attention to the outer world through our senses, or approach it through our intellect or any form of mental activity, we come to know all sorts of things. But a more exact consideration of every age of cognition compels us to realise that behind everything we can know about the world at large something else lies hidden: something that is certainly not unknowable but in every epoch has to be described as not yet known. And this not-yet-known, which lies below the surface of the known in the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms, belongs as much to ourselves as it does to external nature. It belongs to us in so far as we absorb and work up in our physical organism the materials and forces of the outer world; and inasmuch as we have within us a portion of nature, we have also within us a portion of the unknown in nature. So in the world wherein we live we must distinguish a triad: our conscious spiritual life; our subconscious soul-life below the threshold of consciousness; and that which, as the unknown in nature and at the same time in man, lives in us as part of the great unknown Nature.

This triad emerges directly from a rational observation of the world. And if looking away from all dogmatic statements, from all philosophical or theosophical traditions, in so far as these are clothed in conceptual definitions or formulations, we may ask: How has the human mind always expressed the fact that this triad is present not only in the immediate environment, but in the whole world to which man himself belongs? We must then reply: Man gives the name of Spirit to all that can be known within the horizon of the conscious. He designates as the Son or the Logos that which works in the subconscious and throws up only its waves from down below. And to that which belongs equally to the unknown in Nature, and to the part of our own being which is of one kind with Nature, the name of the Father-Principle has always been given, because it was felt to express the relation of the third principle to the other two.

Besides what has now been said concerning the Spirit, the Son and the Father-Principle, it can be taken for granted that other differentiations we have formerly made, and also the differentiations made in this or that philosophy, have their justifications. But we can say that the most widely accepted idea of this differentiation corresponds with the account of it given here.

Now let us ask: How can we characterise the transition from that which belongs to the Spirit, and so plays directly into the conscious life of the soul, to the subconscious element which belongs to the Son-Principle? We shall best grasp this transition if we realise that into ordinary human consciousness there plays quite distinctly the element we designate as Will, in contrast to the elements of ideations and feeling. If we rightly interpret the Bible saying, ‘The Spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak’, it indicates that everything grasped by consciousness lies in the realm of the Spirit, whereas by ‘the flesh’ is meant everything that lies more in the subconscious. As to the nature of the Will, we need only think of that which plays up from the subconscious and enters into our consciousness only when we form concepts of it. Only when we transform into concepts and ideas the dark impelling forces which are rooted in the elemental part of the soul—only then do they enter the realm of the Spirit; otherwise they remain in the realm of the Son-Principle. And since the Will plays through our feelings into the life of ideas, we see quite clearly the breaking out into the conscious of the waves from the subconscious ocean. In our threefold soul-life we have two elements, ideation and feeling, which belong to conscious life, but feeling descends directly into the realm of the Will, and the nearer we come to the impulses of Will, the further we descend into the subconscious, the dark realms into which we sink completely when consciousness is engulfed in deep, dreamless sleep.

Thus we see that the Will-element, because it descends into the realm of the subconscious, stands towards the individual being of man in a relationship quite different from that of cognition, the realm of the Spirit. And so, when we differentiate between Spirit and Son, we may be impelled to surmise that man's relationship to the Spirit is different from his relationship to the Son. How is this to be understood?

Even in exoteric life it is quite easy to understand. Certainly the realm of cognition has given rise to all kinds of debate, but if people would only come to understand one another concerning the concepts and ideas they formulate for themselves, controversy over questions of cognition would gradually cease. I have often emphasised that we no longer dispute over mathematics, because we have raised mathematics entirely into consciousness. The things we dispute about are those not yet raised into consciousness: we still allow our subconscious impulses, instincts and passions to play into them.

On the other hand, we must recognise the Will-element, and everything in another person's subconscious, as something which should on no account be intruded upon; it must be regarded as his innermost sanctuary. We need consider only how unpleasant to a healthy soul-life is the feeling that the Will of another man is being put under compulsion. It is not only aesthetically but morally unpleasant to see the conscious soul-life of anyone eliminated by hypnotism or any other powerful means; or to see the Will-power of one person working directly on the Will of another. The only healthy way to gain influence over another person's Will is through Cognition. Cognition should be the means whereby one soul comes to an understanding with another. A person must first translate his wishes into a conceptual form: then they may influence another person's cognition, and they should touch his Will only by this indirect route. Nothing else can be satisfactory in the highest, most ideal sense to a healthy life of soul. Every kind of forcible working of Will upon Will must evoke an unpleasant impression.

In other words, human nature strives, in so far as it is healthy, to develop in the realm of the Spirit the life it has in common with others, and to cherish and respect the realm of the subconscious, in so far as it comes to statement in the human organism, as an inviolable sanctuary that should rest in the personality, the individuality, of each man and should not be approached save through the door of conscious cognition. So at least a modern consciousness, attuned to our epoch, must feel if it is to know itself to be healthy.

In later lectures we shall see whether this was so in all periods of human evolution. What has been said today will help us to think clearly about what is outside us and what is within us, at least for our own period. This leads to the conclusion that fundamentally the realm of the Son—embracing everything that we designate as the Son or Logos—must be awakened in each individual as a quite personal concern; and that the realm of common life, where men may be influenced by one another, is the realm of the Spirit.

We see this expressed in the grandest, most significant way in the New Testament accounts of the attitude of Christ Jesus towards His first disciples and followers. ====================== From all that is told concerning the Christ-Event we can gather that the followers who had hastened to Jesus during his life-time were bewildered when His life ended with the crucifixion; with that form of death which, in the land where the Christ Event took its course, was regarded as the only possible expiration for the greatest crimes. And although this death on the cross did not affect everyone as it did Saul, who later became Paul, and as Saul had concluded that someone who suffered such a death could not be the Messiah, or the Christ—for the crucifixion had made a milder impression on the disciples, one might say—yet it is obvious that the writers of the Gospels wished to give the impression that Christ Jesus, through his subjection to the shameful death on the cross, had forfeited some of the effect He had had on the hearts of those around Him.

But with this account something else is connected. The influence that Christ Jesus had acquired—an influence we must characterise more exactly during these lectures—was restored to Him after the Resurrection. Whatever may be our present thoughts about the Resurrection, we shall have to discuss it here in the light of occult science; and then, if we simply go by the Gospel narratives, one thing will be clear: for those to whom Christ appeared after the Resurrection He had become someone who was present in a quite special way, different entirely from His previous presence.

In speaking on the Gospel of St. John I have already pointed out how impossible it would have been for anyone who knew Jesus not to regognise Him after 3 days, or to confuse Him with someone else, if He had not appeared in an altered form. The Evangelists wish particularly to evoke the impression that the Christ appeared in this altered form. But they also wish to indicate something else. For the Christ to exert influence on human souls, a certain receptivity in those souls was necessary. And this receptivity had to be acted on not merely by an influence from the realm of the Spirit but by the actual sight of the Christ-Being.

If we ask what this signifies, we must realise that when a person stands before us, his effect upon us goes beyond anything we are conscious of. Whenever a human being or other being works upon us, unconscious elements affect our soul-life; they are produced by the other being indirectly through consciousness, but he can produce them only if he stands before us in actuality. What the Christ brought about from person to person after the so-called Resurrection was something that worked up from the unconscious soul-powers of the disciples into their soul-life: an acquaintance with the Son. Hence the differences in the portrayal of the risen Christ; hence, too, the variations in the accounts, showing how the Christ appeared to one or other person, according to the disposition of the person concerned. Here we see the Christ-Being acting on the subconscious part of the souls of the disciples; hence the appearances are quite individual, and we should not complain because they are not uniform.

If, however, the significance of the Christ for the world was to be His bringing to all men something common to all of them, then not only this individual working of the Son had to proceed from the Christ, but the element of Spirit, which can encompass something that belongs to all men, had to be renewed by Him. This is indicated by the statement, that after the Christ had worked upon the Logos-nature of man, He sent forth the Spirit in the form of the renewed or ‘holy, Spirit’. Thus was created that element common to all men which is characterised when we are told that the disciples, after they had received the Spirit, began to speak in the most diverse tongues. Here we are shown how the common element resides in the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. And something else is indicated; how different is this out-pouring of the Spirit from the simple imparting of the power of the Son, for in the Acts of the Apostles we are told that certain persons to whom the apostles came had already received the Jesus-baptism, and yet they had now to receive for the first time the Spirit, symbolically indicated by the laying on of hands. In the characterisation of the Christ-working, which acts upon the subconscious impulses of the soul and so must have a personal, inward character, and the Spirit-element, which represents something common to all mankind.

It is this Spirit-element that those who have named themselves ‘Rosicrucians’ have sought to preserve most carefully, as far as human weakness permits. The Rosicrucians have always wished to adhere strictly to the rule that even in the highest regions of Initiation nothing must be worked upon except the Spirit-element which, as common between man and man, is available in the evolution of humanity. It was never an Initiation of the Will, for the Will of man was to be respected as a sanctuary in the innermost part of the soul. Hence the individual was led to those Initiations which were to take him beyond the stage of Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition, but always so that he could recognise within himself the response which the development of the Spirit-element was to call forth. No influence was to be exerted on the Will.

We must not mistake this attitude for one of indifference towards the Will. The point is that by excluding all direct working upon the Will, the purest spiritual influence was imparted indirectly through the Spirit. When we come to an understanding with another man with regard to entering on the path of knowledge of the Spirit, light and warmth are radiated from the spiritual path, and they then enkindle the Will, but always by the indirect path through the Spirit—never otherwise.

In Rosicrucianism, therefore, we can observe in the highest sense that impulse of Christianity which finds twofold statement: on the one hand in the Son-element, in the Christ-working which goes down deeply into the subconscious; on the other, in the Spirit-working which embraces all that falls within the horizon of our consciousness. We must indeed bear the Christ in our Will; but the way in which man should come to an understanding with each other in life concerning the Christ can be found only—in the Rosicrucian sense—through a conscious soul-life which penetrates ever more deeply into the occult.

In reaction against many other spiritual streams in Europe, the opposite way was taken by those who are usually called Jesuits. The radical, fundamental difference between what we justifiably call the Christian way of the Spirit and the Jesuit way of the Spirit, which gives a one-sided exaggeration to the Jesus-Principle, is that the intention of the Jesuit way is to work directly, at all times upon the Will. The difference is clearly shown in the method by which the pupil of Jesuitism is educated. Jesuitism is not to be taken lightly, or merely exoterically, but also esoterically, for it is rooted in esotericism. It is not, however, rooted in the spiritual life that is poured out through the symbol of Pentacost, but it seeks to root itself directly in the Jesus-element of the Son, which means in the Will; and thereby it exaggerates the Jesus-element of the Will.

This will be seen when we now enquire into the esoteric part of Jesuitism, its various spiritual exercises. How were these exercises arranged? The essential point is that every single pupil of Jesuitism goes through exercises which lead into the occult life, but into the Will, and within the field of occultism they hold the Will in severe discipline; they ‘break it in’, one might say. And the significant fact is that this discipline of the Will does not arise merely from the surface of life, but from something deeper, because the pupil has been led into the occult, in the way just indicated.

If now, leaving aside the exercises of prayer preparatory to all Jesuit exercises, we consider these occult exercises, at least in their chief points, we find that the pupil has first to call up a vivid Imagination of Christ Jesus as the King of the Worlds—mark this carefully: an Imagination. And no one would be received into the degrees of Jesuitism who had not gone through such exercises, and had not experienced in his soul the transformation which such psychic exercises mean for the whole man. But this Imaginative presentation of Christ Jesus as King of the Worlds has to be preceded by something else. The pupil has to call up for himself, in absolute solitude and seclusion, a picture of man as he was created in the world, and how by falling into sin he incurred the possibility of most terrible punishments. And it is strictly prescribed how one must picture such a man; how if he were left to himself he would incur the utmost of torturing penalties. The rules are extraordinarily severe. With all other concepts or ideas excluded, this picture must live uninterruptedly within the soul of the future Jesuit, the picture of the God-forsaken man, the man exposed to the most fearful punishments, together with the feeling: ‘That am I, since I have come into the world and have forsaken God, and have exposed myself to the possibility of the most fearful punishments.’ This must call forth the fear of being forsaken by God, and detestation of man as he is according to his own nature.

Then, in a further Imagination, over against the picture of the outcast, God-forsaken man, must be set the picture of the God full of pity who then became Christ, and through His acts on earth atones for what man has brought about by forsaking the divine path. In contrast to the Imagination of the God-forsaken man, there must arise that of the all-merciful, loving Being, Christ Jesus, to whom alone it is due that man is not exposed to all possible punishments working upon his soul. And, just as vividly as a feeling of contempt for the forsaking of the divine path had first to become fixed in the soul of the Jesuit pupil, so must a feeling of humility and contrition now take hold of him in the presence of Christ.

When these 2 feelings have been called forth in the pupil, then for several weeks he has to practise severe exercises, picturing to himself in Imagination all details of the life of Jesus from his birth to the Crucifixion and Resurrection. And all that can arise in the soul emerges when the pupil lives in rigorous seclusion and, except for necessary meals, lets nothing else work upon his soul than the pictures which the Gospels give of the compassionate life of Jesus. But these pictures do not merely appear before him in thoughts and ideas; they must work upon his soul in vivid, living Imaginations.

Only someone who really knows how the human soul is transformed through Imaginations which work with full living power—only he knows that under such conditions the soul is in fact completely changed. Such Imaginations, because they are concentrated in the most intense, one-sided way, first on sinful man, secondly on the compassionate God, and then only on the pictures from the New Testament, evoke precisely, through the law of polarity, a strengthened Will. These pictures produce their effect directly, at first hand, for any reflection upon them must be dutifully excluded. It is solely a matter of holding before one's mind these Imaginations, as they have been described.

What then follows is this. In the further exercises Christ Jesus—and now we may no longer say Christ, but exclusively Jesus—is represented as the universal King of the Worlds, and thereby the Jesus element is exaggerated. Because Christ had to be incarnated in a human body, the purely spiritual took part in the physical world; but over against this participation stand the monumental and most significant words: “My kingdom is not of this world.” We can exaggerate the Jesus element by making Jesus into a king of this world, by making Him that which He would have become if He had not resisted the tempter who wished to give Him ‘all the kingdoms of the world and the glory thereof’. Then Jesus of Nazareth would have been a king who, unlike other kinds who possess only a portion of the earth, would have had the whole earth under his sway. If we think of this kind portrayed in this guise, his kingly power so increased that the whole earth is his domain, then we should have the very picture that followed the other exercises through which the personal will of each Jesuit pupil had been sufficiently strengthened.

To prepare for this picture of “King Jesus”, this Ruler over all the kingdoms of the earth, the pupil had to form an Imagination of Babylon and the plain around Babylon as a living picture, and, enthroned over Babylon, Lucifer with his banner. This picture had to be visualized with great exactitude, for it is a powerful imagination: King Lucifer, with his banner and his hosts of Luciferic angels, seated amidst fire and dense smoke, as he sends out his angels to conquer the kingdoms of the earth. And the whole danger that issues from the ‘banner of Lucifer’ must first of all be imagined by itself, without casting a glance upon Christ Jesus. The soul must be entirely engrossed in the Imagination of the danger which issues from the banner of Lucifer. The soul must learn to feel that the greatest danger to the world's existence that could be conjured forth would be a victory for the banner of Lucifer. And when this picture has had its effect, the other Imagination, ‘The banner of Jesus’, must take its place. The pupil must now visualise Jerusalem and the plain around Jerusalem; King Jesus with His hosts, how he conquers and drives off the hosts of Lucifer and makes Himself King of the whole earth—the victory of the banner of Jesus over the banner of Lucifer.

These are the strength-giving Imaginations for the Will which are brought before the soul of the Jesuit pupil. This is what completely changes his Will; makes him such that in his Will, because it is trained occultly, he turns away from everything else and surrenders absolutely to the idea: ‘King Jesus must become the Ruler upon earth, and we who belong to His army have to employ every means to make Him Ruler of the earth. To this we pledge ourselves, we who belong to His host assembled on the plain of Jerusalem, against the host of Lucifer assembled on the plain of Babylon. And the greatest disgrace for a soldier of King Jesus is to forsake His banner.’

These ideas, gathered up into a single resolution of the Will, can certainly give the Will immense strength. But we must ask: what is it in the soul-life that has been directly attacked? The element that ought not to be touched—the Will-element. In so far as this Jesuit training lays hold of the Will-element, while the Jesus-idea seizes the Will-element completely, in so far is the concept of the dominion of Jesus exaggerated in the most dangerous way—dangerous because through it the Will becomes so strong that it can work directly upon the Will of another. For where the Will becomes so strong through Imaginations, which means by occult means, it acquires the capacity for working directly upon the Will of another, and hence also along all the other occult paths to which such a Will can have recourse.

Thus we see how in recent centuries we encounter these two movements, among many others: one has exaggerated the Jesus-element and sees in ‘King Jesus’ the sole ideal of Christianity, which the other looks solely at the Christ-element and carefully sets aside anything that could go beyond it. This second outlook has been much calumniated because it maintains that Christ has sent the Spirit, so that, indirectly through the Spirit, Christ can enter into the hearts and minds of men. In the development of civilisation during the last few centuries there is hardly a greater contrast than that between Jesuitism and Rosicrucianism, for Jesuitism contains nothing of what Rosicrucianism regards as the highest ideal concerning human worth and human dignity, while Rosicrucianism has always sought to guard itself from any influence which could in the remotest sense be called Jesuitical.

In this lecture I wished to show how even so lofty an element as the Jesus-Principle can be exaggerated and then becomes dangerous, and how necessary it is to sink oneself into the depths of the Christ-Being if we wish to understand how the strength of Christianity must reside in esteeming, to the very highest degree, human dignity and human worth, and in strictly refraining from groping our clumsy way into man's inmost sanctuary. Rosicrucianism, even more than Christian mysticism, is attacked by the Jesuit element, because the Jesuits feel that true Christianity is being sought elsewhere than in the setting which offers merely ‘King Jesus’ in the leading role. But the Imaginations here indicated, together with the prescribed exercises, have made the Will so strong that even protests brought against it in the name of the Spirit can be defeated.

There is no doubt that the Spiritual Science we have been studying for many years is beginning to make more and more headway in the world and to find increasing understanding in the hearts and minds of our contemporaries. It might be useful occasionally to speak of how the ideas of Spiritual Science are being made known and many of you would be glad to know what effect the spiritual nourishment you have yourselves received has had upon others at the present time. It is only now and then that I can speak of this spread of spiritual-scientific thought in the outer world, but it will be some satisfaction to you to know that we can see how the spirit inspiring us all is finding entry in various countries. I could see, for instance, that our ideas were beginning to find a footing when I was lecturing in the south of Austria, in Trieste, recently. Then, when I gave a course of lectures in Copenhagen¹ only a few days ago, there too it was evident that the spirit we are trying to cultivate under the symbol of the Rose Cross is gaining more and more ground. Signs such as these make it clear that there is a need and also a longing for what we call Spiritual Science.

It is fundamental to the spirit informing our Movement that we should refrain from any agitation or propaganda and far rather pay heed to the great, all-embracing wisdom needed by the hearts and souls of modern men if they are to feel any security in life to-day. It is our duty to make these spiritual thoughts into real nourishment for our souls. You will certainly have understood enough of the great law of Karma to know that it is by no chance or accident that an individual feels urged to come down into the physical world at this particular time. The souls of all of you here have felt the longing to incarnate in a physical body at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century because of a desire to experience what can be achieved in the present physical environment.

Let us look at our own epoch and see how its spiritual aspect appears to souls which, like yours, have been born into it. At the turn of the century conditions were very different from what they had been fifty or sixty years earlier. Human beings who—like all of you here—are growing up at the present time, attempt now and then to hear about the spiritual guidance and leadership of the world, about the spiritual forces and influences pervading the external world in the different kingdoms of nature and penetrating into the souls of men. But for the last fifty years a soul longing and searching for spiritual nourishment has found very little. This longing has been present in the depths of men's souls, although it may have been a very faint voice, easily silenced. Nevertheless the longing is there and everyone is seeking for spiritual nourishment, whatever his position in life and whatever use he may make of his faculties. No matter in what department of science you may be working to-day, you learn only external, material facts; they can be utilised very cleverly and ingeniously to advance modern culture but they are no help at all towards understanding what the spirit may reveal. No matter whether you are an artist or are engaged in some practical work, you will find little that can pass into head or hand to give you not only energy and impetus for your work but also security and comfort in life. By the beginning of the nineteenth century people had forebodings that in the near future very little spiritual nourishment would be left. During the first half of the century, when vestiges of an old spiritual life were still present, although in a different form, many people felt that there was something in the air presaging the complete disappearance of the ancient treasures of the spirit handed down by tradition from olden times. Yet it is precisely the legitimate progress of culture during the nineteenth century that will completely wipe out the spiritual traditions handed down from the past.

During the first half of the nineteenth century, many voices are to be heard speaking in this strain and I will quote one example of a man who lived during that period and had a wide knowledge of the old form of theosophy, but who also knew that owing to the course of events in that century it was bound to disappear; at the same time he was convinced that a future must come when there would be a revival of this old theosophy but in a new form. I am going to read you a passage written towards the end of the first half of the nineteenth century, in 1847. Its author was a thinker of a type no longer in existence to-day—men who were still sensitive to the last echoes of those old traditions which have now been lost for a considerable time.—

‘It is often difficult to learn among the older theosophists what the real purpose of theosophy is ... but it is clear that along the paths it has taken hitherto, theosophy can acquire no real existence as a science nor achieve any result in a wider sphere. Yet it would be very ill-advised to conclude that it is a phenomenon scientifically unjustifiable and also ephemeral. History itself decisively disproves this: it shows how this enigmatic phenomenon could never make itself really effective in the world but for all that was continually breaking through and was held together in its manifold forms by the chain of a never-dying tradition. ... At all times there have been very few in whom this insistent speculative need has been combined with a living religious need. But theosophy is for these few alone. ... The important thing is that if theosophy ever becomes scientific in the real sense and produces obvious and definite results, these will gradually become the general conviction, be acknowledged as valid truths and be universally accepted by those who cannot find their way along the only possible path by which they could be discovered.

But all this lies in the womb of the future which we do not wish to anticipate. For the moment let us be thankful for the beautiful presentation given by Oetinger, which will certainly be appreciated in wide circles.’

This shows what a man such as Rothe of Heidelberg felt about the theosophical spirit in 1847. The passage is from his Preface to a treatise on Oetinger, a theosophist living in the second half of the eighteenth century.

What, then, can be said about the spirit of theosophy? It is a spirit without which the genuine cultural achievements of the world would never have been possible. Thinking of its greatest manifestations, we shall say: Without it there would never have been a Homer, a Pindar, a Raphael, a Michelangelo; there would have been no depth of religious feeling in men, no truly spiritual life and no external culture. Everything that man creates he must create from out of the spirit. If he thinks that he can create without it he is ignorant of the fact that although in certain periods spiritual striving falls into decline, the less firmly rooted a thing is in the spirit the more likely it is to die. Whatever has eternal value stems from the spirit and no created thing survives that is not rooted in it. But since everything a man does is under the guidance of the spiritual life, the very smallest creation, even when used for the purposes of everyday life, has an eternal value and connects him with the spirit. We know that our own theosophical life has its source in what we have called the Rosicrucian stream; and it has often been emphasised that since the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries the Masters of Rosicrucian wisdom have been preparing conditions that began at the end of the nineteenth century and will continue in the twentieth. The future longed for and expected by Rothe of Heidelberg is already the present and should be recognised as such. But those who caused this stream to flow into souls, at first in a way imperceptible to men, have been preparing conditions for a long, long time. In a definite sense what we have called the Rosicrucian path since the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries is present in our Theosophical Movement in a more conscious form; its influence has flowed into the hearts and minds of the peoples of Europe and sets its stamp upon them.

From what has happened in European culture, can we form an idea of how this spirit has actually taken effect? I said just now that it has worked as the true Rosicrucian spirit since the eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; it was always present although only at that time did it assume Rosicrucian form. This Rosicrucian spirit goes back to a very distant past—it had its Mysteries even in Atlantean times. The influence has been taking effect for long ages, becoming more and more conscious as it streamed into the hearts and souls of men.

Let us try to form some idea of how this spirit made its way into humanity. We meet together here and our studies help us to perceive ways in which the human soul develops and gradually rises to regions where it can understand the spiritual life, and perhaps actually behold it. Many of you have for years been trying to let concepts and ideas which mirror the spiritual life stream into your souls as spiritual nourishment. You know how we have tried to acquire some understanding of the riddles of the world. I have often described the different stages of the soul's development and how it can rise to the higher worlds; how a higher part of the Self must be distinguished from a lower part; how man has come from other planetary conditions, having passed through a Saturn-, a Sun- and a Moon-evolution, during which his physical, etheric and astral bodies were formed; and how finally he entered into the period of Earth-evolution. I have told you that there is something within us that must receive its training here on the Earth in order to rise to a higher stage. We have also said that the development of certain beings—the Luciferic beings—was retarded during the Old Moon-period and they later approached man's astral body as tempters, and also in order to impart to him certain qualities. I have often told you too how man must overcome certain tendencies in his lower self and through this conquest rise into the spheres to which his higher Self belongs, into the higher regions of the spiritual life. Words of Goethe must be remembered:

And as long as thou knowest it not,
This Dying and Becoming,
Thou art but a troubled guest
Upon the dark Earth!

The degree of development that is possible to-day and can give strength, assurance and a genuine content to life is within our reach if we acquire knowledge of the manifold nature of man and realise that his constitution is not a haphazard medley but consists of physical body, etheric body, astral body and Ego. We have formulated definite ideas, for example of the temperaments, by studying the process of education and the development of the physical body up to the seventh year, of the etheric body up to the fourteenth and of the astral body up to the twenty-first year. By studying the mission of Truth, of Prayer, of Anger, our ideas of the three bodies, of the sentient soul, intellectual or mind-soul and consciousness—or spiritual soul, do not remain mere abstractions but impart meaning, clarity and content to our existence.

In this way we have achieved some understanding of the riddles of the world. And although there are large numbers of people outside our circle who still, consciously or unconsciously, persist in materialism, there are nevertheless many souls who feel it necessary to their very existence to listen to expositions of the kind we have been able to give. Many of you would not have been present among us for years, sharing our experiences and activities if it were not a necessity of your very lives. Why are there souls to-day who understand these things and for whom the ideas and concepts developed here become a guide on their life's way? The reason is this.—Just as you have been born into the modern world with these longings, so our forbears in Europe—and this means very many of those present here to-day—were born during past centuries into a world and environment very different from those of the nineteenth century. Let us cast our minds back to the sixth, seventh or even the twelfth and thirteenth centuries of our era when many of those present here were incarnated, and think of the sort of things that souls then living might have experienced.

In those times there was no Theosophical Society where subjects such as those with which we are concerned were studied; the influence of the environment upon the souls of men took a very different form. People did not travel about giving lectures on spiritual-scientific subjects, but minstrels went from village to village, from city to city, proclaiming the spirit. These minstrels did not speak about theosophy, about the lower and higher Ego, about man's physical, etheric and astral bodies and so on. As they moved around the land their mission was to speak of the spirit in the way it was wont to be proclaimed at that time. The following story was told all over Middle and Eastern Europe.—

Once upon a time there was a King's son. During a ride one day he heard moans coming from a ditch, and following the course of the ditch in order to discover the source of the moans, he found an old woman. He dismounted, climbed down into the ditch and helped the old woman who had fallen into it, to get out. Then he saw that she had injured her leg and could not walk. He asked her how the accident happened and she told him: ‘I am old and I have to get up soon after midnight to go to the city and sell my eggs; on the way I fell into this ditch.’ The King's son said to her: ‘You cannot get home by yourself so I will put you on my horse and take you.’ This he did, and the woman said to him: ‘Although you are of noble birth, you are a kind and good man; and because you have helped me I will give you a reward.’ He guessed now that she was not an ordinary woman, for she said: ‘You shall have the reward which your kind soul has earned. Do you want to marry the Flower-Queen's daughter?’ ‘Yes!’ he replied. She went on: ‘For that you will need something that I can easily give you,’ and she gave him a little bell, saying: ‘If you ring this bell once the Eagle-King will come with his hosts to help you in the predicament in which you find yourself; if you ring twice the Fox-King will come with his hosts to help you in the predicament in which you find yourself; and if you ring three times the Fish-King will come with his hosts to help you in the predicament in which you find yourself.’—The King's son took the little bell and returned home, announced that he was going to search for the Flower-Queen's daughter, and rode off. He rode a long, long way but nobody could tell him where the Flower-Queen lived with her daughter. By this time his horse was completely exhausted and could carry him no longer so that he was obliged to continue his journey on foot. He came across an aged man and asked him where the Flower-Queen lived. ‘I cannot tell you,’ the aged man replied, ‘but go on and on and you will find my father who may perhaps be able to tell you.’ So the King's son went on, year after year, and then found another, still more aged man. He asked him: ‘Can you tell me where the Flower-Queen lives?’ But the aged man replied: ‘I cannot tell you, but you must go on and on for many more long years and you will find my father who will certainly be able to tell you where the Flower-Queen lives.’—So the King's son went on and at last found an old, old man and asked him if he could tell him where the Flower-Queen lived with her daughter. The old man replied: ‘The Flower-Queen lives far away, in a mountain which you can see from here in the distance. But she is guarded by a fearsome Dragon. You cannot get near at present for this is a time when the Dragon never sleeps; he sleeps at certain times only and this is one of his waking periods. But you must go a little further, to another mountain, and there you will find the Dragon's mother; through her you will attain your goal.’ So he went on and found the Dragon-mother, the very archetype of ugliness. But he knew that whether he could find the Flower-Queen's daughter would depend on her. Then he saw seven other dragons around her, all eager to guard the Flower-Queen and her daughter who had been long imprisoned and were destined to be set free by the King's son. So he said to the Dragon-mother: ‘I know that I must become your servant if I am to find the Flower-Queen.’ ‘Yes’, she said, ‘you must become my servant and perform a task that is not easy. Here is a horse which you must lead to pasture the first day, the second day and the third. If you can bring it home in good condition you may possibly achieve your object after three days. But if you fail, the dragons will devour you—we shall all devour you.’ The King's son agreed to this and the next morning he was given the horse. He tried to lead it to pasture but it soon disappeared. He searched for it in vain and was in despair. Then he remembered the little bell given him by the old woman, took it out and rang it once. A host of eagles gathered, led by the Eagle-King, looked for the horse and found it, so that the King's son was able to take it back to the Dragon-mother. She said to him: ‘Because you have brought the horse back I will give you a cloak of copper so that you can attend the Ball tonight at the court of the Flower-Queen and her daughter.’ Then, on the second day, he was again given the horse to take to pasture, but again it disappeared and he could not find it. So he took out the bell and rang it twice. Immediately the Fox-King appeared with a host of his followers; they looked for and found the horse and the King's son was again able to take it back to the Dragon-mother. She then said to him: ‘To-day you shall have a cloak of silver so that you can attend the Ball to-night at the court of the Flower-Queen and her daughter.’ At the Ball the Flower-Queen said to him: ‘On the third day ask for a foal of that horse and with it you will be able to rescue me and we shall be united.’ Then, on the third day, the horse was again handed to him to lead to pasture, and again it soon disappeared, for it was very wild. So he took out the bell and rang it three times, whereupon the Fish-King appeared with his followers, found the horse, and for the third time the King's son brought it home. He had now successfully performed his task. The Dragon-mother then presented him with a mantle of gold as his third garment in order that on the third day he might attend the Flower-Queen's Ball. He was also given as a fitting reward the foal of the horse he had cared for. With it he was able to lead the Flower-Queen and her daughter to their own castle. And around the castle, since there were others who wanted to steal her daughter, the Flower-Queen caused a thick hedge to grow to prevent the castle from being invaded. Then the Flower-Queen said to the King's son: ‘You have won my daughter and henceforth she shall be yours, but only on one condition. You may keep her for half the year but for the other half she must return beneath the surface of the earth and be restored to me. Only on this condition can you be united with her.’ So the King's son won the Flower-Queen's daughter and lived with her for half the year, while for the other half she was with her mother.—

This story, as well as others like it, was listened to by many people in those days. They listened and drank in what they heard but did not, like many modern theosophists, proceed to invent allegories, for symbolic or allegorical interpretations of such matters are valueless. People listened to the stories because they were a source of delight to them and a warm glow pervaded their souls as they listened. They wanted nothing more than this as they listened to the story of the Flower-Queen and the King's son with his bell and his wooing of the Flower-Queen's daughter.

There are many souls alive to-day who in those days heard such tales with inner delight, and the effects lived on in them. Their feelings and perceptions were converted into thoughts and experiences and their souls were transformed by new forces. These forces have changed into the longing for a higher interpretation of the same secrets, a longing for Spiritual Science. In those days the wandering minstrels did not go about saying that man strives towards his higher self and to that end must overcome his lower self which holds him back. They gave their message in the form of a story about a King's son who rode out into the world, heard moans coming from a ditch and thereupon performed a good deed. To-day we speak simply of a good deed, a deed of love and sacrifice. In earlier times the deed was described in pictures. To-day we say that man must develop a feeling for the spirit which will awaken in him an inkling of the spiritual world and create powers through which he can establish relationship with it. In earlier times this was expressed in the picture of the old woman who gave the King's son a bell which he rang. To-day it is said: Man has taken into himself all the kingdoms of nature and unites in harmony everything that lies outspread before him. But he must learn to understand how what is outspread in the external world lives within him and how he can overcome his lower nature, for only if he can bring what is at work in the kingdoms of nature into the right relationship with his own being can it come to his aid.

We have spoken often enough of man's evolution through the periods of Saturn, Sun and Moon and of how he left behind him the other kingdoms of nature, retaining within himself the best of each in order that he might rise to a higher stage. To what stage has he evolved? To indicate what lives in the human soul Plato had already used the picture of the horse on which man rides from one incarnation to another. In the times of which we have been speaking the picture used was that of the bell which was rung to summon the representatives of the kingdoms of nature—the Eagle-King, the Fox-King and the Fish-King—in order that the being destined to become the ruler of these kingdoms might establish the right relationship with them.

Man's soul is unruly and can be brought into the right relationship with the kingdoms of nature only when it is tempered by love and wisdom. In earlier times this truth was presented in pictorial form and the soul was helped to understand what we to-day express differently. Men were told that the King's son rang the bell once and the Eagle-King appeared; twice and the Fox-King appeared; three times and the Fish-King appeared. It was they who brought back the horse. In other words: the tumults which rage in the human soul must be recognised; when they are recognised the soul can be freed from lower influences and brought into order.

In the modern age we say that man must learn how his passions, his anger and so on, are connected with his development from one seven-year period to another. In other words, we must learn to understand the threefold sheaths of the human being. In earlier times a wonderful picture was placed before men: the King's son was given a mantle, a sheath, every time he rang the little bell—that is to say, when he had subjugated one of the kingdoms of nature. To-day we speak of studying the nature of the physical body; in earlier days a picture was used—of the Dragon-mother giving the King's son a cloak or mantle of copper. We study the nature of the etheric body; in earlier times it was said that the Dragon-mother gave the King's son a silver cloak on the second day. We speak of the astral body with its surging passions; in earlier times it was said that on the third day the Dragon-mother gave the King's son a cloak of gold. What we learn to-day about the threefold nature of man in the form of concepts was conveyed through the picture of the copper, silver and golden cloaks. Instead of the pictures of the copper, silver and golden cloaks we speak to-day in terms which convey an understanding of how the solid physical body is related to the other sheaths of the human being as copper ore is related to silver and gold.

We speak to-day of seven classes of Luciferic beings whose development was retarded during the Moon-evolution and who set about bringing their influence to bear upon man's astral body. The minstrels said: When the King's son came to the mountain where he was to be united with the Flower-Queen's daughter, he encountered seven dragons who would have devoured him if he had not accomplished his task. We know that if our evolution does not proceed in the right way it will be corrupted by the forces of the sevenfold Luciferic beings. We say nowadays that by achieving spiritual development we find our higher Self. The minstrels said: The King's son was united with the Flower-Queen. And we say: A certain rhythm must be established in the human soul. You will remember that a few weeks ago I said that when an idea has arisen in the soul we must allow time for the idea to mature, and it will then be possible to detect a certain rhythm in the process. After seven days the idea has penetrated into the depths of the soul; after fourteen days the maturing idea can lay hold of the outer astral substance and allow itself to be baptised by the World-Spirit. After twenty-one days the idea has become still more mature. And only after four times seven days is it ready to be offered to the world as a gift of our own personality. This is the manifestation of an inner rhythm of the soul. A man's creative faculty can work effectively only if he does not try immediately to force upon the world something that occurs to him but is aware that the ordered rhythm of the external world repeats itself in his soul, that he must live in such a way that the Macrocosm is reflected in the Microcosm of his own being. The minstrels said: Man must bring the forces of his soul into harmony, must seek the Flower-Queen's daughter and enter into a union with her during which he spends half of the year with his bride and for the other half leaves her to be with her mother who lives in the depths. This means that he establishes a rhythm within himself and the rhythm of his life takes its course in harmony with the rhythm of the Macrocosm.

These pictures—and hundreds like them could be mentioned—stimulated the soul through the thought-forms they created; and the result is that souls living to-day have become sufficiently mature to listen to the different kind of presentation given by Spiritual Science. But before this could happen man had perforce to experience a sense of deprivation and intense longing. The spiritual longings of the soul had first to be engulfed in the physical world. This did in fact happen in the first half of the nineteenth century; and then, in the second half of the century, came the materialistic culture with its devastating effect upon spiritual life. But the longing grew all the stronger and the ideal of the spiritual-scientific Movement became all the more significant. In the first half of the century there were only few who in a kind of silent martyrdom felt that ideas once conveyed in the form of pictures in narratives still survived but only in a state of decline.

In the soul of a man born in the year 1803, echoes of the old wisdom of past times were still reverberating. Something closely akin to theosophical ideas was a living reality in him. His soul was completely engrossed in what we to-day call the spiritual-scientific solution of the riddle of world-existence. His name was Julius Mosen. His soul was able to survive only because for most of his life he was bedridden. Soul and body could not adjust themselves to each other because owing to the way in which Mosen had grasped these ideas without being able to penetrate them spiritually, his etheric body had been drawn out of his physical body which was paralysed as a result. His soul had nevertheless risen to spiritual heights. In 1831 he wrote a remarkable book, Ritter Wahn. He had learnt of a wonderful legend still surviving in Italy, an old Italian folk-legend. As he studied it he became convinced that it enshrined something of the spirit of the universe, that those who created its imagery were filled with the living spirituality of the World Order. The result was that in 1831 he wrote a truly wonderful work—which, needless to say, has been forgotten, in common with so much that is the product of spiritual greatness.

Ritter Wahn sets out to conquer death and on his way he comes across three old men—Ird, Time and Space. Julius Mosen hit on the German word Ird to translate the Italian il mondo, because he knew that there was something particularly significant in it. Ird, Time and Space are the names of the three old men who, however, can be of no use to Ritter Wahn because they are themselves subject to death. Ird denotes everything that is subject to the laws of the physical body, and so to death; Time, the etheric body, is by its very nature transitory; and the third, the lower astral body, which gives us the perception of Space, is also subject to death. Our individuality passes from incarnation to incarnation; but according to the Italian folk-legend, Ird, Time and Space represent our threefold sheath.

Who is ‘Ritter Wahn?’ Each of us, passing from incarnation to incarnation, looks out upon the world and faces maya, the great Illusion; each of us, in that we live a life in the spirit, goes forth to conquer death. On this quest we meet the three old men who are our three sheaths. They are indeed very old! The physical body has existed since the evolutionary period of Old Saturn, the etheric body since the period of Old Sun, and the astral body since the period of Old Moon. The Ego, the ‘I’, has been embodied in men in the course of the Earth period itself. Julius Mosen depicts Ritter Wahn seeking to overcome death. He uses the Platonic image of a rider on horseback—an image that was known all over Middle Europe and still farther afield. Ritter Wahn rides out in an attempt to conquer the heavens with materialistic thinking—like those who cling to the sense-world and are imprisoned in illusion and maya. But when through death they enter the spiritual world, what happens is faithfully described by Julius Mosen. Such human beings have not lived out their lives to the full and long to come down again to the Earth in order that their souls may continue to evolve. So Ritter Wahn returns to the Earth. He sees the beautiful Morgana, the soul, which is destined to be stimulated by whatever is earthly and—like the Flower-Queen's daughter—represents the union with what man can acquire only through schooling on Earth. He falls a victim to death through being again united with the Earth and the beautiful Morgana. This means that he passes through death in order that he may raise his own soul, represented by Morgana, to higher and higher stages during each succeeding incarnation.

It is from pictures like these which carry the stamp of their thousands of years’ life that ideas stream into artists of the calibre of Julius Mosen. In his case they were given expression by a soul too great to live healthily in a physical body during the approaching age of materialism and Julius Mosen had consequently to endure the silent martyrdom imposed on him by his passionate soul.—Such was the impulse at work in a man living in the first half of the nineteenth century. It will become active again but in such a way as to kindle human powers and forces; and it will enable us to have some understanding of what is meant by the spirit of Rosicrucianism—the spirit that must make its way into the souls of men.

We can now surmise that what we ourselves are cultivating has always existed. Were we to imagine that anything in the world can prosper without this spirit working in men we should be succumbing to the delusions suffered by Ritter Wahn.

Whence came the minstrels of the seventh, eighth or even thirteenth centuries, wandering as they did through the world to create thought-forms that would enable souls in our own day to have a different kind of understanding? Where had these minstrels learnt how to bring such pictures to men? They had learnt from the centres we think of to-day as the Rosicrucian schools. They were pupils of Rosicrucians. Their teachers said to them: You cannot now go forth into the world and clothe your message in concepts and ideas, as will have to be done later on; you must speak of the King's son, of the Flower-Queen and of the three cloaks, in order that from these pictures thought-forms may come into being and live in the souls of men. And when these souls return to Earth they will understand what is needed for their further progress.—Messengers are continually sent out from the centres of spiritual life in order that in every age what lies in the depths of the spirit may be made accessible to men.

It is a superficial view to believe that such tales can be invented by human fancy. The old tales which give expression to the spiritual secrets of the world came into being because those who composed them gave ear to others who were able to impart the spiritual secrets. Consequently we can say with truth that the spirit of all humanity, of the Microcosm and the Macrocosm, lives in them.

The minstrels were sent out to tell their stories from the same centres whence we to-day draw the knowledge on which the culture needed by humanity is based. Thus it is that the spirit in which mankind is rooted moves on from epoch to epoch. The Beings who in pre-Christian times imparted instruction to individuals in the temples, teaching them what they had themselves brought over from former planetary evolutions—these Beings placed themselves under the leadership of Christ, the unique Individuality who became the great Teacher and Guide of mankind. Stories which have come down through the centuries and have inspired in the whole of Western culture thought-forms expressing in pictures the same teaching about Christ as we give to-day, make it quite clear that in the period after the Mystery of Golgotha the spiritual leadership of mankind, working through its centres of learning, was vested in Christ. All spiritual leadership is connected with Him. If we can make ourselves conscious of this fact we shall be turning our gaze to the light we need in order to understand the longings of human souls incarnated in the nineteenth century.

If we think deeply about souls who reveal the longings of earlier times, we shall recognise with a sense of profound responsibility that they waited for us to bring their longings to fulfilment. Julius Mosen, the author of Ritter Wahn and Ahasver, and others like him, were the last prophets of the West because the teachings once given by messengers from the holy temples in the form of pictures to prepare souls for later ages, were living realities to them. And their yearning is indicated in words written by Rothe of Heidelberg in 1847: ‘... if theosophy ever becomes scientific in the real sense and produces obvious and definite results, these will gradually become the general conviction, be acknowledged as valid truths and be universally accepted by those who cannot find their way along the only possible path by which they could be discovered ...’ At that time a man who had these yearnings—thinking not only of himself but also of his contemporaries—could only say with resignation that all this lay in the womb of the future which he had no wish to anticipate. In 1847, men who were cognisant of the secrets of the Rosicrucian temples had not yet spoken in a way that could be generally understood. But what lies in the womb of the future can become living power if there are enough souls who realise that knowledge is a duty—a duty because we must not give back undeveloped souls to the World-Spirit. Were we to do that we should have deprived the World-Spirit of forces implanted in us. If there are souls who recognise their duty to the World-Spirit and endeavour to understand the riddles of the world, the hopes cherished by the best men of earlier times will be fulfilled. They looked to us, who were to be born after them, and longed that theosophy should become scientifically acceptable and lay hold of the hearts of men. But these hearts must exist! And that depends upon people who have identified themselves with our spiritual-scientific Movement being convinced of the need for spiritual illumination of the riddles of existence. It depends upon every single soul among us whether the longings of which I have spoken prove to have been empty dreams on the part of those who had hoped for the best in us or to have been dreams now brought to fulfilment.

When we see the barrenness of science, art and every domain of social life we must tell ourselves that we need not succumb to it but that there is a way out. For again an age has dawned when voices from the holy temples are speaking—not in pictures and stories but proclaiming truths which many people still regard as theories but which can and must become sources of life and nourishment to the soul. Each individual can resolve with the highest powers of his soul to receive this source of life.

This is what we must impress upon our souls as the epitome of the meaning and spirit of the guidance of mankind. If we allow this thought to be active in our souls it will be an impulse in us for many months. We shall find that it can grow into an impressive structure—quite independently of the words used to express it. My words may well be imperfect but it is the reality in the thought that matters, not the form in which it is expressed. This reality can live in every single soul. The totality of truth is present in every soul as a seed and can be brought to blossom if the soul devotes itself to the development of that seed.

• 1. The Spiritual Guidance of Man and of Mankind. (Obtainable from Rudolf Steiner Press.)

How different people are now from the ancient Indians! We are subject to completely different influences than people were eight millennia ago! How literature has changed since the invention of the printing press! In the past, people limited themselves to the spoken word, and spiritual life consisted mainly of religious practices. Today, spiritual life has a thousand and one channels. Popular science, newspapers and so on, railways, telegraphs – all this changes the physical plan more than one imagines. Around us is not only a physical, but also a spiritual world. Even our fellow countrymen are exposed to the spiritual currents that currently prevail. So everyone lives under the influences of the materialistic age, people have to face the necessities.

It is necessary to arm oneself against the many harmful influences and to stand firm against all temptations.

In a training, all circumstances must be taken into account. Christian training is only carried out with great energy and perseverance. In the past, people withdrew from the world to train; Christian training requires an almost inexhaustible amount of energy and a strictly ascetic life. Nevertheless, it is necessary to speak about it in a few words;

The secret Christian training began at the time of the Apostle Paul. He had the power and the authority of the word to proclaim outwardly. His disciple Dionysius founded the secret school in Athens. From the sixth century this fact was considered a fable. There are the “pseudo-Dionysian” writings. In the past, “Homer” was known by heart; people relied on memory, then it became customary to write a lot. In the secret schools, the word was considered too sacred to be written down; the most worthy received it from mouth to mouth. And Dionysius himself was a hierophant; he taught the secret doctrine with power and fire. The training continued after his death. The secret teachers of this school were all called “Dionysius.”

In contrast to the other gospels, the gospel of John and the Apocalypse are to be understood in an occult sense. They are not books for brooding over. One must always read the scriptures patiently and let the first fourteen sentences [of the Gospel of John] take effect on oneself as meditation material, year after year. In this way, forces are developed that lie dormant in us. Through the Apocalypse, man comes into higher worlds; it is the description of spiritual processes. They have a great effect on the mind.

There are seven stages to Christian initiation:

- foot washing,
flagellation,
crown of thorns,
crucifixion,
mystical death,
burial,
resurrection, ascension.

The Christian disciples regarded all things with reverence and gratitude. Plants cannot live without the mineral kingdom, nor animals without the plant kingdom. Everything is interdependent, the lower is sacrificed to the higher. Therefore, the higher must lean towards the lower. Jesus Christ set the example for his disciples, leaning towards them by washing their feet.

[1. Washing of the feet:] The gospel of John is an enormous chapter, from which the hierarchy of things was born. If you immerse yourself in the feeling “I owe you my existence,” then the image of the redeemer washing the disciples' feet appears before us. You can feel as if the water is trickling around your feet.

[2. Flagellation:] Through pure devotion, one develops higher feelings. Whatever may come to him, it is necessary to remain upright without grumbling. The flagellation is the feeling of being strong against all blows. It is as if one feels an itch and pain.

[3. Crowning with Thorns:] The emotional life must be so strong that we can silently endure when our most sacred things are treated with scorn and derision. We must find the inner strength not to break down. We have the feeling of being crowned with thorns in our heads.

[4. Crucifixion:] The feeling must be: “This body you are carrying is not what you are. I carry my body here and there.” Then, little by little, one can be ready to have the blood sample, the crucifixion wounds on the hands and feet. They are involuntarily caused pathologically.

[5. Mystical Death:] To look behind the scenes of existence is known as mystical death. One no longer knows the world. In this sense, it is to be understood that after the crucifixion the black curtain in the temple tears.

[6. Entombment:] Being able to see everything that exists as related to one's body; other beings are similar to it; feeling part of the earth.

[7. Resurrection, Ascension:] It is the possibility of living in the spirit, the ability to separate from the body, that is the liberation, the ascension. It is a whole gamut of feelings that can be seen in images from the thirteenth chapter onwards in the Gospel of John. Through them one can experience a great, incomparable event: the vision of the risen Christ.

Man will prove his existence in vain from the documents he has left behind; he can only be found in a spiritual way, that is the way to the Christ who lives here. Never can a Christ live within if an historical Christ has not lived. Likewise, no being would have light and life if the outer sun did not shine in life. Thus the world owes its vision of the inner Christ to the Christ who appeared on earth. This is the fruit of the Gospel of John.

[Probably notes on the subsequent discussion from here on out.]

Theology only wants to accept the Synoptics. With the spiritual, man has lost the meaning of the Gospel of John, but an esoteric Christ will sprout from it, which gives the world a new light. The future of development is contained in the Apocalypse [of John]. For centuries, Christian initiation has been proof that the content of the Gospel is the right one.

Theology would be able to see this if it studied the documents properly; it is not for lack of clairvoyance that theologians do not find the truth. One can also use reason and feeling to arrive at the right understanding. It is said that John [Scotus Eriugena] lived as a monk in Scotland, was prior and was said to have been killed by his monks with pins. [...]

If we treat thinking, feeling and willing correctly, thousands of truths will become accessible to us. The cultivation of the soul's powers depends a lot on correct thinking, and also on nutrition. We should not be thoughtless about food. Matter, in the rough sense, is nonsense. Everything is condensed spirit. Matter is not an illusion. The fact that we take matter for spirit is an illusion. We should become aware that everything is an expression of spirit, one way or another.

We must eat like someone who knows that they are taking on spirit with matter. We have every reason to be fervently grateful to the divine powers, because we are eating divine power. We should eat in the highest spirit of worshipful devotion, not thoughtlessly, because eating is not a base pleasure.

When we eat food that rises towards the sun, we also eat the power of the sun, which gives us wings. When we eat food that grows down into the earth, we become material. Meat pulls us down into matter the most. Milk and milk products are beneficial to us because they come from the life process of the animal. The animal's Kama is present in the flesh; it is the salt that separates out in the plant root that hardens everything. We should be aware of whether we are striving up or down on a higher level. If we put ourselves in the position of how nature grows, a spiritual understanding awakens in us; it grows in us.

The teacher of the secret teaching will be a physician in the spiritual sense. If we live for years on milk, we will gain the strength to achieve magnetic healing success. Living for years on milk spiritualizes the human being. Thus spiritual relationships are present in the seemingly most crude of activities.

When an animal walks across a meadow, it can still see the spiritual essence of things, the etheric body of the plant. Man has lost this ability through the development of the intellect. He must regain it through higher vision, then he will come into a secure relationship with all things in the world.

Our age is for material body care. The more you leave your body alone, the freer your spirit becomes to reach higher levels; the opposite approach enslaves the spirit. Achieving this, walking for hours in the sun and the like, is more effective as a hardening process than sun baths and cures, which take up the whole day.

Imagination affects feeling; the environment is very important. Centuries ago, all objects were made with devotion. The facades of the houses, even the keys had an inner relationship to the people. Our soul no longer has spiritual relationships to objects outside of us. It is the task of theosophy to reflect in all things what we feel. All activity must be a reflection of theosophical feeling. Every age thus reflects its world. Everlasting artists such as Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael reflected Christianity in their paintings. In music, Christianity became sound. Pictures awaken mysterious feelings. There is an enormous difference between poison being instilled into the soul and feeling being nourished by pictures born out of the spirit.

The forms of Gothic architecture express themselves in the times of Meister Eckhart and Johannes Tauler, who mystically raised souls to God. It is the same in stone that was the Christian feeling in the Middle Ages. The sunny views of this people are reflected in the Greek orders of columns. Our age has no style of its own. A style must be born out of the feelings of a people. We have patchwork styles. The material age is evident in the department store. It is no coincidence that stone has become iron. We are at a turning point. It is the spiritual process of Theosophy to take everything that is deeply felt into our feelings, which is likely to ennoble it. The blood is purified and ennobled by good pictures. A theosophical hour must have a blood-purifying and healing effect. A teacher has a liberating effect when he evokes images that are beneficial to people. This is a remedy that not only works externally, but also brings about the recovery of the whole being.

We have to integrate our will into the laws of the world. Exercises can subjectively integrate the human being into the will of the world; he experiences it, while the feeling is more negative.

Nothing is more harmful to secret training than fear. It is necessary to systematically eliminate it. This is best done by planning actions that one carries out happily, without being deterred by obstacles. If possible, divide one's time into seven periods. Observe and reverse the method, and in this way you will fit into the laws of the world.

When a person reaches the age of thirty-five, he becomes mature and experiences a crisis in a special way. Dante wrote the “Divine Comedy” when he was thirty-five years old. The divine truths are hinted at in number, measure and weight. Those who live with the laws develop a strong will, otherwise they weaken. What Goethe achieved after the age of thirty-five is quite different from what he achieved earlier. When so-called prodigies are pushed too hard too soon, they wither away.

It takes patience and perseverance to develop dormant powers. Maturity delights the teacher. He is always there when you need him. What awakens life carries the human being forward. Theosophy and Life: Everyone has a mission to fulfill in their own place. The Theosophists must be the architects of giving the world what it needs. The social question is not solved theoretically and dogmatically, but through understanding in the theosophical sense.

Theosophy must become a spiritual sun that fertilizes everything earthly, something universal. In the thousands of lodges, there are enough people who do not know the alphabet of science. They are not the ones who provide higher education, and yet the impetus must come from them. A picture: the catacombs rise up before me. Underground, the new spiritual culture of Rome spread. The emperor Nero had people who were secretly Christians smeared with pitch and set on fire. They were persecuted when they came to the surface. And yet, through the uneducated beginners and proclaimers, the rising Christianity conquered the world; the others followed. Those who have mastered life live in secret. Science still looks down on them. It will become theosophical when it can no longer do otherwise.

Every age has its task, they are similar. There is something in the Middle Ages that individual branches of the mind will become in the future; all life flows together to form a spiritual pyramid.

A painting in the chapter house in Florence depicts the mission of intellectual life. At the base are figures representing the individual branches of intellectual life. Above them is the feminine, which inspires the soul. Higher still stand the protectors of spiritual life: Job, David, Isaiah, Saul, John. The whole is crowned by the group of virtues: justice, wisdom, temperance, faith, love, hope.

In his work, Dante tried to bring together the whole of time as if at a central point. It is up to our time to bring together the separate spiritual currents.

We implore the protection of the powers of the spiritual trinity: spirit self, life spirit, spirit man.

The composite Rosicrucian training forms a center from which a unified spiritual truth is to permeate everything.

Something emanated from the persecuted Christians of the catacombs that penetrated to the highest spiritual world. We resemble the first Christians in many ways, and a new upsurge of spiritual life is expected of us.

What is gathering together in feeling, what is slowly preparing, must flow up to the highest spiritual spheres.

In our time, Theosophy seeks to be a spiritual movement that will deepen our entire spiritual life and steer man away from the sensual and back to the supersensible. It does not bring humanity something absolutely new – no, it stands on the ground of earlier times. It is based on what previous generations have worked for us. But even what earlier generations did and knew was not something new; these were also conceptions of the general and great fundamental truths. Each generation and each time expresses what it can understand of it in its own way, adapting to the spirit and circumstances of the time. Theosophy in our time means the realization of the basic truths in the form in which they are useful for our time.

Now let us think back to a culture like that of 600 to 700 years ago. At that time there were not a lot of channels through which anyone who wished could gather knowledge, as is now the case in schools, libraries and so on. We have now undergone the development for this in the last century. The sciences have spread, one always wants to know more and more and to express everything in scientific forms and terms, because man dresses his thoughts in forms to which he is accustomed. Now the time has come when everyone wants to know, learn and read for themselves, and they can also find the way to do so.

In ancient times there were also a few preachers of wisdom and a great multitude who believed them at their command. (The speaker means that the large circle of people who know a little and who currently exist could not be found at that time, besides the individuals who knew more, whose number is not large even now, any more than it was in the Middle Ages.) Those who knew more of the great truths of life, of this great wisdom, which in its present form we call 'Theosophy', were called initiates or adepts, because they had a great and certain experience behind them. And those who have this experience behind them do not speak of these things as if they were speaking of another world, but as if they were constantly living in this world. And that is the case, because this world has become their own. There are always other worlds around us, spiritual worlds, other beings are always at work around us, and they relate to the sensual and physical life of a person in the same way that the colorful splendor of the world of light relates to a blind person. What the initiate has gone through can be compared to the experience of a blind person who has been born blind, has undergone an operation and been given the ability to see the light.

The Rosicrucian method of initiation presents the experiences that a person undergoes when the world of the spirit opens up to him.

As for the Rosicrucians themselves (the speaker does not say it in so many words, but implies that this is the name of an order or association of initiates who practice the same wisdom teachings as those found in Theosophy) - this name has been much discredited by people who knew very little about it and not much more than a few external forms. What one can find here and there in old writings about the Rosicrucians was not calculated to command respect from the outside world. But all this was very natural, because what was really Rosicrucian was actually kept secret until the end of the nineteenth century, because it was only in this century that it was destined to benefit humanity in general. It is only the present-day theosophical movement that is destined to absorb and disseminate the wisdom of the Rosicrucians.

Now (said the speaker) we are not dealing with the history of the Rosicrucians, but with living Rosicrucianism. The system we are talking about was only founded in the fourteenth century, arising from various spiritual seeds.

Rosicrucianism should not be confused with Theosophy in general: it is only one method. But when it comes to linking Theosophy to modern science, the Rosicrucian method is probably the most suitable.

And how is this method presented? In seven degrees (stages) man is led to the knowledge of spiritual truths.

These seven degrees are:

1. Degree: study
2. Degree: imaginative knowledge
3. Degree: knowledge through the occult scriptures
4. Degree: (what is called) the search for the philosopher's stone
5. degree: the study of the correspondence between man and the great world outside (microcosm and macrocosm),
6. degree: merging into the macrocosm,
7. degree: that which follows from the preceding degrees: beatitude.

Let us take a closer look at these different degrees:

First degree, “Study”: This is the acquisition of elementary knowledge of the higher worlds; for, above all, one needs some elementary knowledge before one can actually feel at home in it. But the higher worlds can only be known through an opening of the soul: Then man becomes a seer, in a certain sense already an initiate. Now, not every person can find the way out of themselves – at least not easily – but every person who is an explorer, gifted with common sense, can find their way through study, which would not have been so easy to find on their own. This is a kind of guidance, like using a map to find your way around an unfamiliar area. In this way, many have found what they previously searched for in vain: a coherent body of knowledge that never fails to provide a logical answer.

Here in the physical world, things correct people when they make a mistake: we would find our way here even without a map, even if it were less convenient. In any case, we would clearly see where we could not go and where there would be serious obstacles. This is not the case in the higher worlds: there you have to find your own guidance.

Once a person has absorbed the basic features of higher knowledge, they can be guided to the second degree of “maginative knowledge”. This is the knowledge that behind everything we perceive lies the truth of things, and that the (sensually) perceived things are only parables for the real spiritual (things).

Everything that is understood in science is in itself only a concept of the mind, it only exists in an idea. The task of the Rosicrucian is to recognize things not only in the idea, in the concept, but in the image.

We will give an example in the form of a dialogue, as it might have been held by a Rosicrucian teacher to his disciple:

The teacher: “Observe how the plant grows out of the ground, as an example of its own development, [observe] how it becomes: stem, blossom, fruit. And then understand that all these environmental conditions were necessary for the plant to develop in this way: air, light, earth and all the substances in it.

And now turn your gaze to the human being: a being formed differently. Flesh has come in place of plant substance, and instead of chlorophyll, the red blood flows through this being.

Sensually, the plant also has a consciousness, roughly that of a human being during sleep. The human being has a consciousness that is elevated to great heights. But this consciousness he has had to purchase at the price of being permeated by desires, instincts and passions. That which the plant contains and which grows into a fruit is pure; but on the other hand, consciousness is narrow and limited. And now grasp the pure plant on the one hand, and man on the other, with his higher development, permeated by the stream of passions."

The Rosicrucian (continued the speaker) must come to feel that it is the stream of passions that transforms the plant substance into muscle tissue, the green plant sap, the chlorophyll, into the red blood.

And then it was said: As a human being, you must rise to a higher ideal. Development does not end with this state. If it is to continue, then the human being and his consciousness must take on other forms, become a higher consciousness. He then returns to the chaste, pure plant substance at a higher level. Then the blood without passions has become like the plant sap again. Just as the plant produces fruit without desires, so the human being will then have become a being again whose organs produce without desires.

This ideal is called the ideal of the “Holy Grail”, the image of the cup in which the blood from the wounds of Christ was caught. As soon as the red blood has become chaste and pure like chlorophyll, it will be the blood of the pure human being.

There is a folk legend that tells how the bees came to suck honey from the wounds of Christ on the cross, just as they do from flowers. This image gives us an idea of what is meant. Everything that prevents man from rising above the plant must be killed. To represent this ideal, a symbol was chosen: the black cross with red roses around it. – The symbol of the spiritual ideal.

And it was of this spiritual ideal that an initiated man, a poet, spoke when he said: He who does not have this remains an ever-gloomy guest on our dark earth. (Goethe - see the same quotation in the lecture in Amsterdam.) It is clear that this is something quite different from intellectual knowledge. When we try to look at the whole world through this image, it makes a different, warmer impression on us than intellectual knowledge. It leaves us cold.

When we then face the world with such images, we feel what is happening in the world. Who can look at the black cross surrounded by red roses without shuddering with inner experience and feeling a flood of feelings within themselves? Feelings are creative forces. Because of them, new thoughts are born, a new world opens up for the person, as for the blind man who has been operated on and now sees the light. A new world opens up for the initiate through imaginative knowledge. These are things that are just as exact as the laws of nature.

Third degree: The appropriation of occult writings. In them, one not only gets to know the laws of nature, but also how to penetrate them with the will. An example of this: two experiences of the soul that are well known to us are shame and fear. If a person wants to hide something, then it is called shame, and the person blushes. If a person sees danger and fears being overwhelmed by it, then he feels fear. And then the person pales. These are two examples of how the inner state of mind results in a change in the physical, outer state. A world view is currently coming to us from America that seeks to explain everything the other way around, namely from material things. According to this, for example, a person does not cry because he is sad, but he is sad because he cries, because the eyes and lacrimal glands are under such material influences that tears are produced. This is: completely reversing the truth.

One can see that spiritual knowledge wants to say: everything that happens in the world is a consequence of the spiritual, which is the principle of this world; and man must experience for himself what happens outside in the great world, namely, by learning to understand how the spiritual is expressed in physical forms. You do not get to know the world by describing things and deducing the laws from them (abstracting), but by experiencing them inwardly.

(What followed here about the heart and its symbolic meaning was not sufficiently explained by the speaker to be more clearly reproduced.

Fourth degree: “The search for the Philosopher's Stone. Which involves no sorcery or deception, but something very natural. A writer who, incidentally, knew little or nothing about the secrets of the Rosicrucians, said something right about this point: the Philosopher's Stone is in the hand of every man - but he does not know it.

The significance of the breathing process is this: in the blood, oxygen combines with carbon to form carbonic acid, which the human being then exhales again. The plant inhales this carbonic acid through a process that is also a kind of breathing, even if we call it by a different name (assimilation process). The plant separates the carbon from the carbonic acid and returns the oxygen to man through evaporation. Without the plant world, human life on earth would be physically impossible, at least in the form in which we know it today. But then man must also realize that he is not an independent being; the plant belongs to him, just as his own limbs belong to him. That man could exist alone is an illusion.

And now we must consider that this material process is just as much based on a spiritual process as the feeling of shame is based on the blush of shame, and so on. This process is only an outward sign of an underlying spiritual process. We must understand that there is a real connection between humans and plants, and that changes in one must take place in the other as well, so that there must be a rhythmic connection between human breathing and that of the plant. There is actually a breathing rhythm in nature – but one cannot discuss this in public – which establishes a conscious contact between humans and plants.

But of this it can be said: When man consciously learns to direct the breathing process towards a goal, then he learns with his consciousness to carry out the process that the plant performs: the direct building of forms from carbon.

This is a completely true fact, even if it may sound strange: Man can learn to transform the carbon within himself, the transformation of matter.

The conquest of consciously transforming carbon into living substance is called the “philosopher's stone”. This is the path of the Rosicrucian: to use and master this greatest of all minerals. We now also understand what the man meant who said that we have all held the “philosopher's stone” in our hands without knowing it.

Now, in conclusion, we must again realize that the breathing process is based on and preceded by a spiritual process; that the transformation of carbon is a symbol of the transformation of man's inner being by ascending into the spiritual world; and also that what will be material in the future must first be spiritual.

Fifth degree: “The correspondence between man and the universe, between microcosm and macrocosm. This is based on the fact that everything that exists in the great world is also present in man as essence; and therefore man can find in himself everything that exists in the great world.

We owe our eye to the sun – its light. The eye is the creation of sunlight. And so the human being in his or her entire being is a creation of the universe. Just as we have to learn how to use our eye to see sunlight, we have to learn how to use our inner organs to receive spiritual light. Man must learn to recognize the relationship of external things to the spiritual world - the relationship of the microcosm to the macrocosm. And then he feels how roots expand out of him into the whole great world. Then he must come to forget his inner self completely: to forget the eye for the sake of the sun. Then it is as if the inner being of man has expanded into a whole universe.

Man learns to no longer say “I” in reference to himself, but in reference to the universe. This is the feeling through which man is absorbed in the macrocosm [- sixth degree].

The ideal of this knowledge is that everything eventually ends in a feeling that encompasses the world. And we cannot grasp this all at once, not with phrases like: Man must become selfless, but only along the long and arduous path of the Rose Cross initiation. To possess this feeling and thus understand the world, that is the initiation of the Rose Cross.

Everything that current science says can be understood in this light, but we do not stop at this science; we learn to understand the world and divinity [- seventh degree]. These are the preparatory teachings of Rosicrucianism.

We see that the teachings and methods of Rosicrucianism are based on the teachings of Theosophy, namely that there is a spark of God in man and that the goal is not to gather wisdom about God, but to learn to feel the pulse of the universe within oneself. Then man has become free. The knowledge that man can do this gives us a powerful impulse to act.

This concept is beautifully expressed by a man who knew (Goethe), in these words: “Man frees himself from the force that binds all beings by overcoming himself.”