The Rudolf Steiner Archive

This lecture was edited in 1996 by J. W. Haslett from a typescript of unknown origin. This lecture is also the 6th of 20 lecture in the lecture series entitled,The Temple Legend: Lecture VI: Manicheism.

Before one can understand Freemasonry, one must study the original spiritual streams with which it is connected. An even more important spiritual stream than that of the Rosicrucians was that of Manicheanism. The Faust Problem is connected with it. Manicheanism was founded by Manes about the third century after Christ and its great opponent was Augustine. Manicheanism came from the region lying in the eastern part of Asia Minor, ruled over by the kings of Western Asia.

Manicheanism founded a mighty spiritual stream to which the mediaeval Albigensians, Waldensians, and Cathari also belonged, and later the Order of the Templars and through an extraordinary concatenation of relationships, Freemasonry. Freemasonry really belongs here, in spite of the fact that it united with the Rosicrucians.

The tradition is as follows: In Western Asia there lived a merchant who was exceedingly learned. He was the Author of four works: (1) The Mysteries, (2) The Letters, (3) The Gospel, and (4) The Thesaurus. Tradition holds that his death he left the writings to his widow, who was a Persian. She had once redeemed a slave named Manes and he was called ‘the Son of the Widow.’ His followers called themselves ‘Sons of the Widow.’ Manes designated himself ‘Paraclete’ or ‘Holy Spirit’ promised by Christ to humanity—that is as an incarnation of the Holy Spirit, merely a reincarnation of the same. The teachings he proclaimed were attacked by Augustine when he had become a member of the Catholic Church. He presented the views of Catholicism as opposed to the Manichean teaching, making a personality whom he calls ‘Faustus’ the advocate of Manicheanism. It is usually thought that the different conceptions of evil held by Manicheanism is what distinguishes it from Western Christianity. Manicheanism is supposed to have taught that evil is eternal, like the good, that there is no resurrection and that evil has no end, that it has the same origin as the good and is without beginning and hence without end.

We will examine the matter according to the tradition which is supposed to have originated from Manes himself. In the legend of Manicheanism we have a starting point for this examination. It is the Temple Legend. All these Spiritual Streams came to expression esoterically through legends. The Legend of Manes is a legend dealing with super-sensible truths, a mighty cosmic legend. The Spirits of Darkness wished to storm the Kingdom of Light. They came to its borders for the attack. They were, however, able to achieve nothing. Now they were to be punished by the Kingdom of Light. But in the Kingdom of Light there is only good. Thus the Demons of Darkness could only have been punished through good. Therefore the Spirits of the Kingdom of Light took a portion of their own kingdom and mingled it into the Kingdom of Darkness. Thereby a leaven, so to speak, came into the Kingdom of Darkness and a kind of vortex arose. Death came into it, whereby it consumed itself. It now carried within itself the seed of its own destruction. There then arose from the Kingdom of Light the Archetypal Man, the human race who must mingle with the Kingdom of Darkness and overcome it.

The deep and profound thought here contained is the following: the darkness must be overcome through the Kingdom of Light, through the mingling of the Good with the Evil, in order that the Evil may be redeemed, but not through punishment. The conception underlying this is also that of Theosophy, namely that Evil is only an untimely Good. For example, an excellent piano technique is good, but if the executant wanted to hammer it out on the piano in the concert hall, there it would be evil. That which without any doubt is evil today must have been, in its own time proper place, good. The guiding forces of the Lemurian epoch would work evil in a later epoch if they were then still mingled in evolution.

In ancient epochs, in Atlantis and Lemuria, all knowledge was in part influenced by that which stands above man. Not until our own epoch have men matured to the stage where they have, as brothers, human beings who have passed through all stages since the middle of the Lemurian Race. In the Fifth Root Race, the guidance of the soul from above withdraws, leaving it to take its own paths. In esotericism, the soul was called the Mother or Isis. The Father was the Instructor or Osiris, who represented the inpouring Divine. He is the Revealer. The soul conceives or receives. The soul is the Mother. During the Fifth Root Race the Father withdraws. Then the soul is widowed, becomes the Widow. The soul, which will later on become completely independent, is designated by Manes, the Divine Fructifier, as the Widow. Then Manes designates himself as the Son, He it is who prepares the soul to become independent. Everything that comes from him is a call to the Divine-Spiritual Light of the soul, a rebellion of the soul against everything which has not come from out of the soul itself. ‘You must strip off everything that is external revelation, everything that external authority has transmitted to you. Then you must become ripe to behold your own soul.’

Augustine, on the contrary, advocated the principle: I would not believe in the truth of the Gospels unless the authority of the Catholic Church compelled me to do so.

But Faust says, “We will only accept the teachings in freedom.” That is presented exoterically in the Faust Saga. Luther is the continuer of the principle of Authority. Faust, on the contrary, supports himself on the inner spiritual light of the soul. Luther throws an inkpot at the Devil's head. Faust enters into a pact with Evil.

From the Kingdom of Light a spark is sent into the Kingdom of Darkness in order that through itself the Darkness may be redeemed, in order that Evil may be overcome through gentleness (Milde). We must explain the confluence of Life and Form out of the cooperation of Good and Evil. Life becomes form through finding opposition. It does not all at once express itself in a form. Only consider how Life hurries from form to form. Life has fashioned the lily, then Life overcomes the Form and it passes over into the seed out of which a new form will be born. Life is formless it could (not?) live out its own nature in itself. Life is everywhere. The limited form is the hindrance. There would be no forms if Life were not obstructed and arrested in its forces which stream out in every direction. Form grows precisely out of that which at higher stages appears as fetters. The Life that pulsates in the Catholic Church is the Christian Life. (From the time of St. Augustine until the 15th century.) The Life therein is Christianity. This pulsating Life emerges again and again. (As for example in the Christian Mystics.) The form is nothing else than the Life of the old Roman Empire. What was first republic, and then empire, what lived then in its external appearance as the Roman State, surrendered its Life to the Form. (The old offices of the state were continued further through the Bishops and Presbyters.) The new Life is poured into the old Form. What was formerly Life, later becomes Form for a new Life.

The fructification of Manes is today the Life of men. The Form is what has come, like a seed, out of the Lunar Epoch. In that epoch, evolution was the Life of men. Now this is its outer shell, its form. In the confluence of Life and Form, the other is given at the same time. The Good of an earlier age unites with the Good of a newer age. That gives at the same time the possibility of material manifestation, the possibility of manifested existence. That is the doctrine of Manicheanism.

What is the meaning of the utterance of Manes that he is the Paraclete, the Holy Spirit, the Son of the Widow? It means that he will prepare for that epoch in which the men of the Sixth Root Race will be led by themselves, by the light of their own souls. Manes will create an overlapping stream, a stream which goes further than the stream of the Rosicrucians. The stream of Manes goes over to the Sixth Root Race which has been in preparation since the founding of Christianity. Christianity will appear in its perfected form in the Sixth Root Race.

Life as such overcomes every Form. It propagates itself through Christianity and lives in all forms and confessions. Whoever seeks the Christian Life will find it. It creates Forms and shatters Forms. But, in addition, a form for the Christian Life of the Sixth Root Race must be prepared. A number of human beings must be formed into an organization, a Form, in which the Christianity of the Sixth Root Race can find its place. This Form, this external Form of Society must spring from a handful of men whom Manes prepares. This is the community that Manes prepares. Therefore the first endeavor of Manicheanism is to shape external life in its pure form. That is why Manicheanism laid such great stress on purity. The Cathari were a sect which appeared like a meteor. They gave themselves this name, Cathari, because Cathari means ‘the Pure Ones.’ They were human beings who had to keep themselves pure in their mode of life and in their moral relationships. In Manicheanism, it was less a question of the cultivation of Life but rather of the cultivation of the external Form of Life for the Sixth Root Race. In this Sixth Root Race, Good and Evil will form a far greater contrast than they do today. What will appear in the Fifth Round for the whole of humanity, i.e., that the physiognomy will be a direct expression for that which karma has created in man, so, in the Sixth Root Race, Evil will appear, especially in the Spiritual. There will be men who are mighty in Love and Goodness. But Evil will also be there as a mood and a disposition (Gesinnung) without any covering, within a large number of human beings. They will extol Evil. Some inkling in regard to the Evil in the Sixth Root Race glimmers in many men of genius. (Nietzsche's Blond Beast is a portent of this Evil in the Sixth Root Race.) The task of the Sixth Root Race is to draw Evil again into itself through gentleness (Milde). In those who are the followers of the Sons of the Widow there will live the inviolable principle that Evil must be overcome through gentleness. That is the task of the Manichean spiritual stream. It appears in forms which many can call to mind, and need not be mentioned. It must express itself in the forming of a community which has to spread above all things: Peace, Love, and Non-resistance to Evil. It must create a Form for the Life that is to come later.

Augustine worked out the Form of the Catholic Church. It was the Form for the present, and had to be the most vigorous opponent of the Form for the future. Augustine, building the Form for the present, Faustus striving to prepare in man the sense for the Form of the future—that was the contrast in the third and fourth centuries after Christ. It is still there. It comes to expression later, again modified and toned down, in the two streams of Augustinianism and Manicheanism. Those who lead the conflict on the one side are all conscious that they are waging war. But those who, as Manes, are battling on the other side, are not all of them conscious of this. Only the head of the movement is conscious of it. Thus they are pitted against each other: Jesuitism (Augustinianism) and Freemasonry (Manicheanism).

On our Earth, there was a repetition of the previous planetary conditions. In the state of the Sun, Moon and Earth, man could not develop the powers of his soul. In the lunar and terrestrial state, the substances were too poor; the moon had to come out of the earth first, only then was it possible for man to build his body out of the earth. In the end, the tired earth will be reunited with the sun. The moon will disintegrate into atoms. On the moon, the animal developed. Man on earth must overcome this stage again.

The Christ is a high being, towering above all beings connected with the earth. The appearance of the Christ was a cosmic event. He is the spirit of the sun and of the earth. He emerged from the sun and created the earth through his word. It is his body. He could therefore say: Those who eat my bread trample me underfoot.

According to esoteric Christianity, the Christ appeared under the sign of the Lamb, Aries. The Revelation of John is set in signs: he saw into the future. In occultism, everything has a sign.

The sun sign.

Man will control the beam of light.

Sign of the solar demonic cult: Sign of an evil spirit, the beast with two horns.

The number of the evil beast is 666.

taw = 400.
resch = 200.
waw=6
samech = 60]

Sorat is the name of the evil beast.

The Apocalypse contains theosophy; no ordinary wisdom is deep enough to comprehend such wisdom.

The effect of the Lamb is the training of the will, because the way to the will of the world is found. The trained will must rise to the great will that rules the sun and stars.

The philosopher's stone is found through the training of thinking, feeling and willing through imagination and inspiration. Only today is the truth of this penetrating into the public domain. One always heard of alchemists who wanted to make gold. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the secrets of the alchemists were betrayed, and making gold fell into disrepute.

Man breathes in pure air to transform his blue-red blood into life-blood; he breathes in oxygen and transforms it into toxic carbon, which kills. In the case of plants, it is the other way around. They breathe in carbon and transform it into oxygen, so man and plant complement each other. Although plants also consume five percent oxygen, this is relatively little compared to the oxygen they release. The plant uses the carbon to build its own body.

By regulating the breathing process, humans develop an organ that allows them to do the work that plants now do. They breathe in oxygen and retain the carbon, and then they develop a substance, light and fluid, diamond-like, from which they build themselves up like plants. Through this rhythmic 'breathing process', the human being learns to free himself from the unchaste flesh. The animal is the plant nature permeated by desire. When the human being works on himself in the way described, he produces what is called the philosopher's stone, the fourth stage of the Rosicrucian training:

1. Study.
2. Imaginary Knowledge.
3. Reading of Occult Writing.
4. Rhythmic Breathing Process (Philosopher's Stone).
5. Correspondence between Microcosm and Macrocosm.
6. Living in the Macrocosm.
7. Godliness.

Every part of the human organism corresponds to something in nature, in the world. A saying of Paracelsus: “The world is a stretched-out human being, the human being a contracted world”.

At the time when Mars exerted its influence on Earth, the heart was formed; Leo corresponds to it. The heart would increase in a predatory way if it were left to itself. In the past, man moved in a swimming and floating manner; the hands have become his organs of labor and are under the spiritual influence of Venus. What is inside is outside. All compositions are letters and words, a correspondence between macrocosm and microcosm. Through schooling, the human being lives himself into the macrocosm. The heart illuminates the inner spiritual being. If one could descend into the interior, one would see, for example, the group soul of the lion. The blood flow becomes different when the human being breathes differently. When the heart is transformed, it comes into a living relationship with the spiritual world. As the human ego develops, it learns to study individual limbs and to know the macrocosm; one learns to experience within oneself what happened at the time of the beginning of the earth. Everything is connected internally.

At the seventh level, one senses the forces of divinity wafting through the world. The gods had divinity at the beginning of our development, and man will have it at the end. He will develop the chalice of the Holy Grail.

Everything emerged from the Word; the world came into being through the Word, the Logos. Man is the Word of Christ made flesh. In Him the evangelists understood the Word. And He will return when the time for Him is prepared. John, His herald, appears when the days are at their longest. He must set when the spiritual sun appears.

The course of development is expressed in the first fourteen sentences of the Gospel of John. The Rosicrucian training begins to have its significance, it was spread in the thirteenth century. The other training is no longer easily applicable.

During these last weeks I have lectured on many forms of the Mysteries. We have been trying to gain insight more especially into those Mysteries which, in a certain sense, were the last of the great Mysteries connecting man’s inner life directly with Nature, with the spirit of Nature-existence. These were the Mysteries of Hibernia. And on the other hand we have seen how, through insight into Man himself, through insight of an altogether intimate, spiritual kind, individual and personal, the Greek Mysteries penetrated into the inner being of Man. One may indeed say: Just as in external Nature various regions of the Earth bear various kinds of vegetation, so in the course of human development in the different regions of the Earth the most manifold influences upon Man appear from the side of the spiritual world.

If we were now to proceed Eastward—as we shall be doing in the course of the next few days in our study of historical connections—we should find there many other forms of the Mysteries. Today, however, since all our visitors are not yet here, rather than start on something new, I will add to what we have already been considering. Looking back on the evolution of man we may describe it as a threefold development, as it appears with all clarity to the Imaginative consciousness. I say the ‘Imaginative’ consciousness, for by extending the epochs of which I am about to speak further and further into the past, we should of course arrive at a greater number than the threefold; and it would be the same if we were to penetrate farther into the future. Today, however, we will take for our study those middle stages of human evolution which do not appear first to Inspiration, but quite clearly even to Imagination. We will consider these today from a particular standpoint.

As late as the Egyptian epoch mankind was still at the stage when for the European-African as well as for the Asiatic peoples there was for the consciousness of man no such thing as what we call matter. There was no external coarse substance of any kind for human consciousness, much less those abstractions which we now call carbon, hydrogen, sulphur, and so on. There were none of these things; everything in outer Nature was immediately seen as the embodiment of divine-spiritual Beings who manifest themselves throughout the whole of Nature. If today we go into the hills and pick up a stone, we look upon it as a substance like any other. Nothing at all comes into our consciousness such as came into the consciousness of the ancient Egyptian and Oriental.

If we today stand before a man and look, let us say, at his finger, we do not consider what we find there as human finger to be an object just like any other. We regard it as belonging to the human organism as a v/hole. If we were to look, for example, at the last joint of the index finger, we could not do otherwise than speak of it as a part of a whole organism. Thus it was for the consciousness of the ancient Egyptians; and thus too it was for the consciousness of the ancient Orientals. If they came upon a stone and took it up, it was not for them merely a stone as it would be for us today; it was not ordinary earthly substance at all; it was a part of the divine body which the Earth appeared to them to be. Men of old regard the outer surface of the Earth just as we in our consciousness regard the human skin. Again, we may meet a man, and become conscious that he reminds us of someone else we already know, who is perhaps not now present; and if it afterwards transpires that the person we met is the brother or sister of the other, then we see at once : these two arc of the same flesh and blood, they belong in a special physical way to one another. When the ancient Greek or Oriental raised his eyes to Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and then looked at the Earth, he saw in the Earth the divine body of the God of the Earth, but at the same time he saw also in the Earth the sister or brother of the planets—in short, he saw a family likeness to the planets which revolve out there in space around the Earth,—Jupiter, Mars, Saturn.

Thus, in their perception of the Cosmos as a whole, and in their perception of the Earth as part of the Cosmos, there was for these ancient people something of soul and spirit. You must picture to yourselves what an utterly different experience this was from the experience modern man has in his perception. It means something, indeed, to gaze at the divine body of the Earth, and to see in the Earth a member of the great family of the planets of the Universe! The people of old did indeed think of the Universe as God-enfilled. For them not only was the whole Earth filled with the Gods, but the great planetary world-bodies, each single planet—all were God-enfilled. In stone and tree, in river and rock, in cloud and lightning, some spiritual being was revealed. This consciousness was awake in wide circles of people on the Earth, and this consciousness was intensified in the various forms of the Mysteries to be found here and there on the Earth.

To turn now to the Greek nature, at the time when the external political greatness of Greece sank into a kind of chaos and the Macedonian power arose, we find a new current flowing into human knowledge. It is what we came to know last time as Aristotelianism, as that which Alexander the Great in a spiritual connection had made his task. When we look at the culmination of the greatness of Greece on the one hand, and on the other the fall of Greece and the rise of Macedonia, we are faced, first of all, with what external history tells us, which is in reality a mere legend. But we can also see something else. In the subconsciousness of the deeper thinkers we perceive an impulse which came from those Mysteries to which Aristotle was very near—despite the fact that he never spoke of them outwardly. They were those Mysteries which, in the deeper sense, awakened to full life in their hearers the consciousness that the whole world was a theogony, a divine process of being, and that we see the world in an altogether illusory way if we believe anything comes to being in the world other than Gods alone. It is Gods who are manifested in the beings and entities of the world. It is Gods who have experiences in the world, it is Gods who perform deeds. And what we see in clouds, what we hear in thunder, what we behold in lightning, what we see on the Earth in rivers and mountains, in the mineral formations—all are revelations, expressions of the coming-into-being of the destinies of the Gods hidden behind them. And what appears externally as cloud, lightning, thunder, trees or forest, mountains or stream, is nothing else than a revelation everywhere of Gods’ existence—-just as the skin of a man reveals his inner nature of soul. And if everywhere there are Gods, then, as the pupils of the Mysteries were taught in Northern Greece, one must differentiate between the lesser Gods who are in single Nature-beings and Nature-processes, and the greater Gods who manifest as Beings of the Sun, of Mars, of Mercury, and of a fourth who cannot be made externally visible in an image or a form.

Those were the great Gods, the great planetary Gods, who were presented to man in such a way that his gaze was led out into the cosmic expanse, to see with his eyes, to see too with his whole heart, what lives in Sun, Mars, Mercury—yes, and what lives not only out there in one little circle in cosmic space but what lives everywhere in cosmic space. This was what was first of all revealed to man.

And then, after what I may call a majestic impulse had been awakened in the pupil of the Mysteries of Northern Greece, in that his gaze was directed out to the planetary spheres—then this insight was deepened within him in such a way that the eye was, so to speak, taken hold of by the heart, so that he might see with the soul. Then the pupil understood why, on the altar facing him, three symbolically formed vessels had been placed.

Here in Dornach we once introduced a portrayal of these vessels in a Eurythmy performance of Faust. They were presented there exactly as they appeared in the Samothracian Mysteries of Northern Greece. The important fact is that with these vessels in their whole symbolic form there was associated an act of consecration, an act of sacrifice. A kind of incense was put into them and lighted, and as the smoke streamed up, three words (of which we shall speak tomorrow) were uttered with mantric power into this smoke by the Father who was celebrating; and there appeared the forms of the three Kabiri. It happened in the following way. The human breath, as it was exhaled, took shape through the mantric word that was spoken, and communicated its form to the ascending, evaporating substance that had been incorporated in the symbolic jars. When in this way the pupil learned to read in the stream his own breath, to read what the stream of his breath wrote in the smoke, he learned at the same time to read what the mysterious planets said to him from out the wide Universe. For now he knew: as the one Kabir was formed through the mantric word and its power, so in actuality was Mercury; as the second Kabir was formed, so in actuality was Mars; and as the third Kabir was formed, so in actuality was Apollo, the Sun.

When we look at those fashion plate figures—if you will forgive such plain speaking—such as we see only too often in the galleries, of the later Greek plastic art, and which are only so greatly admired because people have no idea of the majesty from which they have declined, when we direct our gaze to those figures of an Apollo, a Mars, a Mercury, we must look at them with the gaze with which Goethe looked, during his Italian journey; for then we may gain some idea of what Greek art really was in the productions that are now lost—lost and destroyed along with so much else in the first centuries of the Christian era, in the frightful devastation which befell those times. If we look penetratingly at those late Greek plastic figures, held to be so great (and rightly on the one hand), as pointing the way, but on the other hand wrongly because they are mere imitative reproductions of the earlier—if we look through them back to that from which they arose, we see how in the older Greek times it was nothing less than the revelations accompanying the sacrificial rites that were reproduced in art—revelations that in those earlier times were even more majestic and grand than later on in the Kabiri Mysteries of Samothrace. We look back into times when the mantric word was uttered into the incense smoke, and the true figures of Apollo, of Mars, and of Mercury appeared.

Those were times when man would not say, in the abstract: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was a God—for then he could say something quite different. He could say: In me the outgoing breath takes shape, and inasmuch as it shapes itself in an ordered way, it shows itself as an image of cosmic creating; for it creates for me, out of the sacrificial smoke, forms which are for me living fines of writing, telling me what the planetary worlds would say to me.

When the pupil of the Kabiri Mysteries at Samothrace approached the gates of the places of Initiation, then through the instruction he had received the feeling came to him: Now I am entering the place that holds for me the magic acts of the celebrating Father. (The Initiate who celebrated in these Mysteries was called the Father.) What did the magic power of this celebrating Father reveal to his pupil? Through what was laid within man by the Gods, through the power of speech, the priest-magician and sage wrote into the sacrificial smoke the writing which expressed the secrets of the Universe.

Thus it was that the pupil, as he approached the gate, said in his heart: I am entering that place within whose shelter dwells a powerful Spirit, within whose shelter dwell the greater Gods, who unveil on Earth the secrets of the Universe through the sacrificial acts of man.—There, my dear friends, words were spoken and a writing written that appealed not only to the intelligence but laid claim to the whole man. In the Samothracian Mysteries there was still present something of a knowledge that is today quite dimmed. Modern man is perfectly able to speak with truth something of what he feels a quartz crystal to be like, he can say what hair feels like, or the human skin, or the fur of an animal, he can say how silk or velvet feels to him. Modern man has the capacity of realising such things through his feeling. In the Samothracian Mysteries something still existed by means of which man could truly say how the Gods let themselves be felt. For the sense of feeling, the sense of touch, was still capable of that of which in ancient times it had always been capable; it was still able to feel the spiritual, to touch the Gods.

And now the wonderful thing is this. We must certainly go back to very ancient times even to speak of how man could say with truth: I know through my finger-tips what the Gods feel like. In the Samothracian Mysteries, however, man had another way of touching the Gods. It was as follows:

When the priest-magician spoke the words into the smoke rising from the incense, when he intoned the words into the exhaled breath, then in the outgoing breath he felt as man otherwise feels when he stretches out the hand to touch; and as one knows that one touches differently with the fingertips in passing them over different substances—in feeling velvet, or cat’s fur, or the human skin,—so did the Samothracian priest-magician perceive with the outgoing breath; he perceived the exhalation which he breathed out towards the incense smoke as an expression of something coming out of himself, he felt it as an organ of touch reaching towards the incense smoke. He felt the smoke, and in the smoke he felt the great Gods, the Kabiri coming to meet him. He felt how the smoke forced itself and how the forms there shaping themselves came into the exhaled breath, so that the exhaled breath felt: here is something spherical, there is angularity, there again something is catching hold of me. The whole divine figure of the Kabir was touched and felt by the breath clothed in the form of the word. With the speech issuing from the heart the Samothracian wise men ‘touched’ the Kabiri, that is, the greater Gods descending to them in the smoke of the incense; it was a living interchange between the word within man and the word without in cosmic space.

When the initiating Father led the pupil to the sacrificial altar, and, step by step, taught him how man can feel with speech, and when the pupil progressed further and achieved for himself this ‘feeling with speech’, he came at last to that stage of inner experience in which he first had clear consciousness of the form of Mercury or Hermes, of Apollo, and of Ares or Mars. It was as if the consciousness were wholly raised up out of the body, as if that which the pupil earlier knew as the content of his head, had gone up above his head, as if the heart were located in a new place, being thrust up out of the breast into the head. Then, in the one who had in this way really gone out beyond himself, there arose a knowledge that inwardly formed itself into the words: Thus do the Kabiri, the greater Gods, will thee! From that time the pupil knew how Mercury lived in his limbs, the Sun in his heart, Mars in his speech.

So you see it was not by any means only natural processes and beings in the outer world that were presented to the pupil in ancient times. What was presented to him was something neither one-sidedly naturalistic, nor one-sidedly moral, but he was given something wherein Morality and Nature flowed into one. That was the secret of the Samothracian world—that to the pupil it was granted to have the consciousness: Nature is Spirit, Spirit is Nature.

To those times which found their last echo in the cult of the Kabiri, is to be traced the insight which brings earthly substances into connection with the Heavens. In olden times, when one saw that red-brown mineral with the coppery sheen, which we call copper, one could not simply say as we say today: ‘That is copper, that is a constituent of the Earth.’ It could not be thought of in this way. For the ancients it was no constituent of the Earth. They said: ‘Wherever copper is manifest, there is manifest a deed of Venus on the Earth. The Earth has only suffered rocks and stones to appear, such as sandstone, or chalk, in order to take up in her lap what the Heavens have planted on to the Earth.’ As little as we now should venture to say of a seed that it had merely grown out of the Earth—-just as little in those times would one have been able to say that copper ore was a constituent of the Earth. One had to say: The Earth that is here with its sandstone, or any other stone, is the ground within which something of a metallic nature has been planted by some planet. The metal is a seed planted in the Earth by a planet. Everything within the Earth was viewed as proceeding from the influence of the Heavens upon the Earth. Today the Earth and its substances are described as you may see it done in any mineralogical or geological work, and as it would never have been in the science of the ancients. In those times when man let his gaze wander over the Earth, looking at a substance meant looking up to Heaven and there in the Heavens beholding the essence and reality of the substance.

Copper, tin, lead, only apparently lie in the Earth; they are seeds planted in the Earth-existence during the time of Old Sun and Old Moon. This was still the teaching of the Kabiri in the Samothracian Mysteries. And this it was ultimately that worked upon Aristotle and Alexander—if only as an atmosphere or mood of knowledge. And then a beginning was made for something quite different.

Man did not, with his insight, come right down at once on to the Earth; he went through an intermediary stage. Even in the echoes of those ancient times, in the Samothracian Mysteries, if men wished to describe the metals of the Earth or other earthly substances such as sulphur or phosphorus, it was in fact the Heavens they were describing, just as one describes a plant when one wants to know the nature of a seed.

If you have a seed of corn before you, you cannot recognise its nature and kind unless you know the plant. What would you do with a seed which looks like this, for example, if you did not know what the aniseed plant looks like? What then, the men of old would have asked, would you make of the copper appearing in the Earth, if you did not know what Venus looks like, in spirit, soul and body, up there in the Heavens?

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From the knowledge of the Heavens, gradually a knowledge of the environment of the Earth, a knowledge of the atmosphere, was gained. When man regarded what was of the Earth, instead of describing what the stars are, in their essence and nature, he looked to a being of Earth and said to himself; There lives in it first of all what we see in the firm soil; and there lives in it that also which we see as fluid with the tendency to form into drops, and there lives within it too what tends to spread out on all sides, the aeriform, which lives, for example, in human breath and speech. And then there lives in it the fiery element which decomposes the single being so that from the scattered, disintegrated parts a new being may arise. Thus did man behold the elements in every earthly formation.

And as in the ancient Mysteries men looked to the Salt—true, it is also cosmic in nature, but it is formed and moulded by the Earth—as they looked to everything of a salt-nature and saw in it that which Mother Earth has brought to meet the metals, so they looked on the other hand to Mercury, and they saw the Mercurial in that which comes from out of the Universe and is destined to become metal.

It is really so utterly childish to try to give descriptions, as modern man does, of what was thought of as Mercury in olden times! Persistently in the background is the idea that by Mercury, even in the Middle Ages, something like quicksilver, some single metal, could be intended. This is not the case; no single metal alone is denoted. Mercury means every metal in so far as it stands under the influence of the whole Cosmos. For what would copper look like if the Cosmos alone, in its periphery, worked upon it? Copper would be globular like quicksilver. If the Cosmos alone affected it, what would lead be like? Lead would be globular, like quicksilver. What of tin, if it were affected only by the Cosmos? Tin would be globular. Every metal if affected only by the Cosmos would be quicksilver. All metals are Mercury in so far as the Cosmos acts upon them. But what about Mercury, the actual present-day Mercury which still takes on a globular form on the Earth? What, then, is it?

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I will tell you. The other metals—let us say, lead, copper, tin, iron—have progressed beyond the globular form. If the whole Earth were still under the influence of the spherical Cosmos all metals would be mercurial. They have progressed beyond the mercurial form. Today they crystallise into other forms. Only the true quicksilver, in the present-day sense of the word, has remained at that stage. What did the ancients and even the mediaeval alchemists say of quicksilver? They said: copper, tin, iron, lead are the good metals which have progressed with Providence. Quicksilver is the Lucifer among the metals, for it has remained at an earlier form. Thus it was in earlier times; when the terrestrial was spoken of in this way, in truth men were really speaking of the celestial.

Thence could men come to speak of that which lies between the periphery and the Earth. Between the periphery and the Earth there lies first, below, the Earth itself, then the watery element, the aeriform, and the fiery.

Thus did the ancients see everything on the Earth in the aspect of the Heavens. And thus did the men of mediaeval times, which came to an end in the first third of the fourteenth century, see everything in the aspect of the surrounding atmosphere. Then, in the fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries came the great change. Man, in his outlook, fell down right on to the Earth. And now to his consciousness the elements of water, air, fire, split up; they split up into sulphur, carbon, hydrogen and so forth. Man sees everything in its terrestrial aspect.

Therewith begin the times which I indicated when describing the fading of the Hibernian Mysteries—the times when man comprehended the Earth with his knowledge, but the Heavens became for him a matter of mathematics. He calculated the size of the stars, their movements, their distance away, and so on. The Heavens became an abstraction to him.

Nor was it only the Heavens which became an abstraction. The reflection of the Heavens in the living human being is his head, and what man can learn of the Heavens is in his head. Since man has learnt to know only the mathematics of the Heavens, that is, the logical and abstract, therefore from this time onwards only the logical and abstract lived in his head—only that which is of the nature of concepts and ideas. Man lost all possibility to receive what is of soul and spirit into his life of concepts and ideas. Then, when the spirit was sought for, there began that great struggle between what man could attain with the idea-content of his head, with his brain-content, and what the Gods desired to reveal to him from the Heavens. This struggle was fought out at its fiercest, and in its grandest aspects, in Rosicrucianism—in the true forms of what are called the Rosicrucian Mysteries in the Middle Ages.¹ There the helplessness of modern man was perceived as a preparation for true knowledge. For, even then, in circles of true Rosicrucian Initiation something very powerful made itself felt. And it was this. The pupil became—not abstractly, but inwardly—livingly illumined to perceive: As modern man you can penetrate only to the world of ideas; thereby, however, you lose the very essence of your being as Man.

And the pupil felt that what the new age was giving him could not lead him on to that which was his own true being. He felt: Either you must despair of knowledge or you must go through a kind of death of the pride in abstraction.

The Rosicrucian, the true Rosicrucian pupil, felt as if the master had given him a blow on the cheek, to indicate to him that the abstractions of the modern brain are not suited to penetrate into the spiritual worlds, and that he must make a recantation of the merely abstract, if he would enter those worlds.

That was indeed a great moment of preparation for what we may call the Rosicrucian Initiation.

• 1. See Rosicrucianism and Modem Initiation. Six lectures given at Dornach, 6th to 13th January, 1924. (Rudolf Steiner Press.)

You'll remember the esoteric saying that stood on one of our columns at the Munchen congress:

In pure thoughts you find the self
That can maintain itself.

The truth in this verse makes up a large part of esoteric life. One can divide everything that a man thinks and feels today into two areas. By far the most of what men think and feel is stimulated by outer perceptions. Thoughts and feelings are ignited by things. In principle it makes no difference whether you see a streetcar and let your thoughts be stimulated by this or if an astronomer looks through a telescope and calculates a planet's path on the basis of these observations with the help of the arc of a circle. All thoughts that are stimulated from outside hinder the astral body's development. The astral body is active all night long. All the thoughts that a man thought during the day come to it. And since these are mostly thoughts that arose through stimulation from outside, they burden it. Only the part of the astral body that preserved its harmony through the fact that it's born out of higher worlds works on the restoration of the worn out physical and etheric bodies. Only thoughts that aren't stimulated from outside work as forces in the astral body to promote and purify it.

Where do these thoughts come from? They come from divine creator beings. It's very important for an occult pupil to know about the thoughts of these spiritually creative beings. These beings had the present world in them as thoughts before they created it. The very first thing that was in them was will; the will to act was there first. This stimulated them to have feelings. And from feelings arose the thought by which they solidified and created things. Thus the world was built according to thoughts.

Today the carrying out of a human deed occurs in the reverse order. The thought is there first—stimulated by an outer object; this arouses a feeling, and only then does a man's will principle step in to bring about a deed.

All real esoteric life can only develop by taking in the thoughts of these divine creator spirits, the thoughts before the creation of things. Most people devote themselves entirely to exoteric life and try to suppress all esoteric life. Thereby they're holding up human progress. They're enemies of further development and they rigidify men. Only esoteric truths promote human evolution.

Now it's a law of occultism that every esoteric truth is used up after awhile. And mankind's leaders must see to it that a new one is proclaimed. So what do we need a new truth for, some say. They want to stop all esoteric progress. It's the task of all true occultists to see to it that thinking is kept alive and in flux. This is attained by taking in the thoughts of divine creator beings. These thoughts work at night in the astral body and work into the etheric body. And when the work of these thoughts in the astral body becomes ever stronger and more active with respect to the etheric body, then that moment approaches that must come sooner or later for every pupil where he becomes aware of spiritual worlds, where thoughts become impressed in the etheric body like a seal in wax.

One of these thoughts is in the Rosicrucian verse that we spoke of last time. Today we'll look at this verse from a somewhat different viewpoint. We know that Saturn existed first. Its matter wasn't even gaseous, it was a warmth matter. A man with present-day senses would not have seen Saturn; he would only have felt warmth if he was at the place where Saturn stood. A Saturn man consisted of warmth mater. The atmosphere of Saturn was fiery-bloody. Man didn't have any blood yet, but the first germ of his later blood lay in the atmosphere around him. Man's physical parts were only germinally present.

If one looks at how after a pralaya old Saturn changed into old Sun with the spiritual gaze that moves over the planets one notices that Saturn's warmth atmosphere condenses into air. Man gets an etheric body on the Sun. He is a shining being. Spiritual beings work through the Sun's astral atmosphere upon the etheric body, ignite it and thereby make it shine. One calls this the sulfuric process. Something quite similar arises today in thinking. When our fiery blood runs into nerve masses there's a combustion process and things light up.

When the Sun passes over to the Moon, air condenses to water. The Moon's body is a water body. We notice something very strange about this water body. Single water drops change their position in an extremely lively manner and race around with inner mobility. In some respects one can compare this property of the water drops with mercury. That's why one calls this principle that's added on the Moon the mercurial principle. The parts are put together into forms by sounds, somewhat like Chladni's sound figures. First two came together, then two pairs made four, etc., just as one still finds in new plant, animal and human forms. That's the female principle. The male principle only arose later from pure earth forces.

When the moon passed over to the earth, water condensed to earth. The precipitating salt process took place on the earth for the first time through the interaction of fire and water. Man arose from female and male and began to dissolve things again through thinking so that evolution could continue. Man received the erring I on earth.

Now if we look at this evolutionary series we see the four elements fire, air, water, earth as in the third line of the verse (2–12):

... see the three
salt, mercury and sulfur,
two arise from sun and moon (male and female)
From this grows the Son of Man
The crown of creation.

Understood like this, the Rosicrucian verse gains meaning.

It is easy to see how the conceptions of spiritual science that have been voiced for some years within our circle, and in the German section generally, are spreading more and more in the world, that understanding of them is beginning to find its way into the hearts and souls of our contemporaries. It is naturally not possible, although it might be a help to present day understanding, to speak casually of introducing the ideas, feelings, and knowledge of our spiritual movement into the modern world. Many of you might be glad to know how the spiritual nourishment you have received has affected other souls at the present time. It is only on certain occasions that we can speak of the spread of our spiritual ideas, but it may fill you with a certain satisfaction to know that we can see again and again how in different countries and in different hemispheres the spirit which inspires us is gaining a footing—more in one place, less in another. When I was in Triest a short time ago trying to arouse some comprehension of our point of view, I could see how the ideas we hold were gaining ground. And when from that southern city I passed northwards to Copenhagen, where, in a recent course of lectures, I tried to arouse some interest in the hearts of my hearers, it could be seen there also how the spirit we cherish under the symbol of the Rosy Cross is entering into them more and more. Taking together these separate facts one sees that a need and a longing for what we call “spiritual science” does exist at the present time.

That we should not carry on any agitation or propaganda is a fundamental principle of our spiritual movement; we should rather listen attentively to what of the great wisdom of the world the hearts and souls of the men of to-day required, so that they may have both the possibility and the certainty of life. We may therefore add to the thoughts put forward in a general lecture like this, one more—that we consider it a kind of duty at the present time to make of these spiritual. thoughts nourishment for other souls. This depends upon the whole manner in which we enter into the life of our time.

You have doubtless already accepted sufficient of the great law of Karma to know that it is not a matter of chance when an individual feels constrained at a certain point of time to assume a physical body and come down in the physical world. All the souls gathered here have felt a longing to assume a physical body at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, because they desired to experience in their own souls all that was being prepared and carried out in their physical environment at this time.

Let us now consider our own age as it appears spiritually to souls, which, like our own, are born in it. Things were very different in the spiritual world, as well as in the external world, at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to what they were even fifty or sixty years earlier.

The person who is making progress—and you are all in this position—is trying to learn something of the spirit, and of the spiritual guidance of the world; of what fills surrounding space as the creatures of the different kingdoms of nature, and of what enters into our own souls. For the past half century souls longing for the spirit found extraordinarily little true spiritual nourishment where they hoped to find it. This longing for the spirit exists deep within the souls of all men, it is easily silenced for it does not speak loudly, but the longing is there, and each one whatever he is, or does in life, can receive true spiritual nourishment. Whatever department of science people take up to-day, they only learn from it external material facts which serve to further the progress of civilisation in a bright and clever way, but they learn nothing of what is revealed to man through the spirit. Whether he works as an artist or in some practical walk of life he finds little of what he has need, nothing that can enter his soul, his head, or his hands, to give him power and impulse for his work, and also assurance, solace, and power in life. At the beginning of the nineteenth century people had already come to the conclusion that in the near future little of this would be found. Many a one said to himself in the first half of the nineteenth century when some remnants of the old life still remained even if in another form:—“There seems to be something in the air; it is as if the ancient treasures of the spirit that have come down to us from olden times were disappearing. It is as if the expected advance in culture of the nineteenth century had entirely wiped out the spiritual communications that have been handed down to us from ancient times.” Many such voices were,heard,in the first half of the nineteenth century. To show what I mean I will mention but one example. There was a man living at that time who knew the old kind of Theosophy well; he knew also that this old form would completely disappear in the course of the nineteenth century, yet he was firmly convinced that a future was coming when the old Theosophy would surely return. The passage I am about to read was written in the year 1847, when the first half of the nineteenth century was drawing to a close. He who wrote it was a thinker such as is no longer met with to-day, for he was still conscious of the last echoes of those ancient communications which have long since been lost to us:—

What Theosophy really desires is often difficult to discover from the older theosophists, and this is even less clear to-day, because on its present path theosophy can attain to no scientific existence, and therefore cannot have any great results. It would be most premature to conclude from this that it is a passing phenomenon without scientific justification. History loudly proclaims the opposite. It tells how it can never get to the bottom of this mysterious phenomenon which breaks out unnoticed again and again, and whose changing forms are preserved by the links of a never-dying tradition. At all times there has really been little that has connected this vital, speculative need, with vital religious needs. It is only for these last that theosophy exists. The main thing is, if it might one day become really scientific, and produce clearly defined results, so that it would become popular and come to be accepted generally, and in this way bequeath these truths to others who are unable to travel the path on which alone they could discover them for themselves. But all this rests within the womb of the future which we have no wish to anticipate; for the present we are thankful for the beautiful writings of Oetinger, which can certainly reckon on a large circle of sympathisers.¹

From this we see how the theosophic spirit was regarded in 1847 by a man like Richard Rothe of Heidelberg.

What kind of spirit is the theosophic spirit really?

It is a spirit without which true culture would never have taken place. When we think of what is greatest in this, we think of the spirit without which there would have been no Homer, no Pindar, Raphael or Michelangelo, without which there would have been no deep religious feeling in man; neither spiritual life nor external culture. Everything a man creates must be created by the spirit; if he thinks he can produce anything without it, he is unaware that his whole spiritual endeavour would in that case fail for a certain time. The less spiritual the source from which anything comes the sooner it dies. Anything having enduring worth must have its source in spirit. The smallest creative act, even in everyday concerns, has an eternal value and connects us with what is eternal; for everything done by man is under the guidance of spiritual life. We know that theosophical life as cultivated by us is founded in Rosicrucianism, and it has often been explained that since the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries the Masters of Rosicrucian wisdom had been preparing what has come to pass since the end of the nineteenth century and will go on further into the twentieth. What was indicated by Rothe as a “future” he hoped and longed for, has already become “present” for us to-day, and will continue to become so more and more. This had long been in preparation by those who allowed this spiritual influence to pour, at first unconsciously, into mankind.

What in a special sense we have called the “Rosicrucian path” has been consciously accepted within our theosophical movement since the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and what the spirit has imprinted as science on the people of Europe, has since then flowed into our hearts.

Can we form an idea from what has taken place in our civilisation of how this spirit works?

I have said that since the eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries it has “worked” as the true Rosicrucian spirit, but it was always there, and has only assumed this last form since the dates mentioned. This spirit that is active at present as the Rosicrucian spirit goes back to very early ages of humanity. Its mysteries existed in Atlantis. The activity it has recently developed, becoming ever more and more conscious, streamed not so very long ago in an unconscious way into the hearts and souls of men. Let us try to form some idea of how this spirit entered man unconsciously.

We meet together here, and our studies show us how the human soul has developed in this or that, till it has gradually attained to a region where it understands spiritual life, where it may even perhaps see spiritual life. Many of you have striven for years to fill your souls with thoughts and ideas which can set the spiritual life before your eyes. You know the way we regard the secrets of the world. I have often explained the different stages of development the soul passes through, and how it rises to higher worlds. You know that we have to distinguish a higher from a lower part of the self; that man has come over from other planetary conditions and has experienced the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions. During these his physical body, etheric body and astral body were formed; he then entered on his earthly development. You know that something dwells within us that passes through its training here so as to rise to higher conditions. You have heard that certain Beings remained behind on the Moon as Luciferic Beings, and these later approached the human astral body as tempters, giving to humanity in this way what they had to give. Then we have often spoken of how man has to overcome certain things in his lower self, that he has to conquer them before he can enter those spheres to which his higher self belongs—that in order to reach these higher regions he has to fulfil the saying of Goethe:—

Und so lang du das nicht hast
Dieses Stirb und Werde,
Bist du nur ein trüber Gast
Auf der dunklen Erde.

“So long as thou hast not experienced death and becoming, thou art a gloomy (sorry) Guest upon a dark earth.”

We have also said that the human evolution possible to-day, and that can give us power, certainty, and real content in our lives, is only to be attained when we learn, for instance, of the manifold natures of man, and that this man is not put together in any chaotic manner, but consists of physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego. This must not be accepted merely as words, but by describing different temperaments, by studying the education of man, we have presented clear conceptions of these things, showing how up to his seventh year he is concerned with the development of the physical body, up to his fourteenth year with that of the etheric body, and up to his twenty-first year with the astral body. And we learnt from our studies dealing with the mission of truth, of devotion, of anger and so on that what we describe as physical body, etheric body, and astral body, feeling-soul, rational-soul and consciousness-soul are no abstract ideas, but that they impart life to our whole mental outlook, making everything around as clear and full of meaning.²

It is possible by such ideas to gain understanding of the secrets of the world. And if there are many who consciously or unconsciously persist in their materialistic opinions, there is also a certain number of souls who feel it as a necessity of existence to listen to such statements as we are able to give. Many of you would not have shared in what has been practised herefor years if it were not a necessity of your life. Why are there souls present to-day who understand the views and ideas evolved here, and who conduct their lives in accordance with them? Because, as you have been born into the world with longings such as I have described, so your forefathers (which means many souls present here to-day) were born in past centuries into other surroundings and into another world than that of the nineteenth century. Let us look backwards to the sixth and seventh, or to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when many who are here now were incarnated, and let us see what these souls experienced at that time.

There was no theosophical society in those days where people discussed things as we do here, but souls then heard something quite different from the people about them. Let me try to call up before you what these souls heard. They did not travel from place to place in order to hear lectures on spiritual science, but they heard rhapsodists who passed from village to village, from place to place, declaring things concerning the spirit. What did these people say? Let us recall a single instance of this. People did not then say:—“We have a Theosophy, a teaching concerning the lower and higher ego, that deals with the different members of man's Being and so on,” but rhapsodists travelled through the land, men who were called by the spirit to declare somewhat as follows:—(I am now repeating some of the things that were spread abroad through Middle and Eastern Europe at that time).

There was once a king's son. He rode forth and came presently to a deep ditch, he heard moaning proceedi.ng from it. He followed the course of the ditch to discover the cause of the moaning, and there he found an old woman. He left his horse, descended into the ditch, and helped the old woman out. He then saw that she could not walk for she had injured her leg, so he asked her how this accident had come about. She then told him:—I am an old woman and I must rise early soon after midnight in order to go to the town to sell eggs. On the way I fell into this ditch.” The king's son said:—“Thou canst” not now reach thine own dwelling. I will set thee on my horse and take thee there.” This he did. The old woman said:—“Although of noble birth thou art a kind and good man, and because thou hast helped me, thou shalt receive a reward from me.” He now guessed that she was something more than an old woman. Then she said:—“Because of the kindness thou hast shown me thou shalt receive the reward that thy good soul deserves. Dost thou desire to marry the daughter of the Flower-Queen?” “Yes,” he said. Then, she continued:—“To do so thou hast need of what I can easily give thee.” And she gave him a little bell, saying:—“When this is rung once the king-eagle will come with his hosts to help thee, whatever the position in which thou mayst be, when thou ringest twice the king of the foxes with his pack will come to help thee, wherever thou art, and if thou ringest thrice the king of the fishes will come with his hosts and will help thee wherever thou art.”

The king's son took the little bell and returned home and said that he was going to seek the daughter of the flower-queen, and rode forth. He rode a long, long time and no one could tell him where the daughter of the flower-queen dwelt. His horse was by this time worn out and broken down, so that he had to pursue his wanderings on foot. He met an old man and asked him where the dwelling of the flower-queen's daughter was. “I cannot tell thee,” said the old man, “go on further and ever further, and thou wilt find my father, and he will perhaps tell thee.” So the king's son went on further, and at last found a very ancient primeval man of whom he asked if he could tell him where the flower-queen dwelt with her daughter. Then the old man said to him:—“The flower-queen dwells afar in a mountain that thou canst see in the distance from here. She is, however, watched over by a savage dragon. Thou canst not reach her, for the dragon never sleeps in these days; there is only a certain time in which he sleeps, and this is his waking time. But thou must go still further to another mountain, there lives the dragon's mother. Through her thou will reach thy goal.” Courageously he went on. He reached the first mountain, then the second mountain; there he found the dragon's mother, the archetype of all ugliness. But he knew it depended on her whether he would find the daughter of the flower-queen or not. He then saw near the first, seven other dragons who all desired to watch over the flower-queen and her daughter, who had long been held prisoners and who were to be liberated by a king's son. He said to the dragon's mother:—“O, I know that I must be thy bondsman if I am to find the flower-queen!” “Yes,” she answered, “thou must be my bondsman,” and thou must do me a service that is not easy. Here is a horse, thou must lead him out to pasture the first day, the second and the third day. If thou bringst him home safe then on the third day perhaps thou mayst attain thy desire. But if thou doest not bring him safe home the dragon will eat thee—we shall all eat thee.” The next morning he was given the horse. He tried to lead it to the pasture, but soon the horse escaped from him. He sought it but could not find it, and was most unhappy. He remembered the little bell the old woman had given him. He drew it forth and rang it once. Then many eagles appeared led by the king-eagle. They found the horse, and he was able to lead it back to the mother dragon. She said:—“Because thou hast brought it back I will give thee a mantle of copper; with it thou canst take part in the ball that is to be given tonight in the circles of the flower-queen and her daughter.”

On the second day he was again to take the horse to the meadow. It was given to him, but soon it escaped again, and nowhere could he find it So he drew forth the little bell again and rang it twice. Immediately the king of the foxes appeared with a large following. They found the horse, and he was able to restore it to the dragon's mother. She then said to him:—“To-day thou shalt receive a silver mantle with which thou canst again attend the ball that takes place tonight in the circle of the flower-queen and her daughter.” At the ball the flower-queen's daughter said to him:—“Demand on the third day a number of these horses, with them thou canst rescue us and we shall be united.” On the third day the horse was again handed over to him so that he could take it to the pastures. At once it escaped again, for it was very wild. He drew forth his little bell and rang it three times. The fish-king then appeared with his following. They found the horse and he took it back a third time. He had successfully performed his task. The dragon mother then gave him as recompense a mantle of gold as his third covering; with it he could take part on the third day at the ball at the flower-queen's dwelling. Besides this he was able to bring as a fitting present to her those horses that he had taken care of. With them he could carry the flower-queen and her daughter to their own fortress. And round this fortress which all the others wished to steal from her they allowed a thick hedge of bushes to grow so that the fortress could not be taken.

Then the flower-queen said to the king's son:—“Thou bast won my daughter, thou shalt have her by and by, but only on one condition. Thou shalt only have her for half the year, the other half she must withdraw from the surface of the earth so that she may be with me; only thus is it possible for thee to be united with her.”

In this way he won the daughter of the flower-queen and lived with her always for half the year; during the other half she was with her mother. This and other stories entered into very many souls. They listened to them, but did not interpret them allegorically after the manner of the strange theosophists of recent times; for these things have no value as symbolic or allegoric statements. No! people accepted them because they found pleasure and joy in them, they felt warm life flow through their souls when they listened to such tales.

There are many souls living now who heard such tales and accepted them with joy. And when received in this way they continued to live within these souls, they turned into thought-forms, into feelings and perceptions, thus they became something different than they were before. This produced results, it imparted powers to such souls, and these powers were changed, they were transformed into something else. Into what were they changed?

They were changed into that which lives in men's souls to-day as longing for a higher elucidation of these same secrets, a longing for theosophy. The rhapsodist did not tell of people who strove towards their higher self, and to attain it must conquer the lower self which held them down, but they told of a king's son who, as he rode forth through the world, found an old woman in distress, and did a good and kindly deed! To-day, we say:—People must do good deeds, deeds of love and sacrifice. At that time men spoke in images. To-day we say:—Men must feel within such sympathy for the spirit that they divine something of the spiritual world, something that connects them with it, and enables them to develop forces that can put them in touch with it. In earlier times men were told in parables of the old woman who gave the king's son a bell. To-day they are told:—Man has taken all the other kingdoms of nature into himself, what lives scattered in them is united harmoniously in him. But he must understand how something lives in him which lives in all surrounding nature, that he can only overcome his lower nature when this is brought into right relationship with himself so that it can help him.

We have often spoken of the evolution of man through the Saturn, Sun and Moon epochs, how he left the other kingdoms of nature behind him, retaining the best out of each, so that he might rise to something higher. By what means has he evolved? By means of that which Plato uses as a symbol—the horse; on this he rides forward from incarnation to incarnation. At that time the image of the bell was used; it was rung to summon the kingdoms of nature through their representatives—the Eagle-king, Fox-king, and Fish-king—so that he who was to become the ruler of these kingdoms might be brought into right relationship with them.

The soul of man is untamed, and only when love and wisdom control it is it brought into the right relationship. At one time this was brought to man's notice in pictures; his soul was guided so that he could understand what to-day is told us differently. At that time he was told:—When you ring the bell once the Eagle-king comes, when you ring it twice the Fox-king comes, and when you ring it three times the Fish-king; these brought back the horse. This means the storms which rage in the human soul must be recognised, and when we recognise them we can free it from the lower disturbances and bring it into order.

Man must learn to know how his own passions, anger and so on, are connected with his development from one seven years to another seven; he must learn to know the threefold nature of the human sheaths. In former days we were presented with a wonderful picture. Every time the king's son rang the bell (that is when by his own power he had subdued one of the kingdoms) he acquired a covering, a sheath.

To-day we say:—We study the nature of the physical body; at that time an image was used, the dragon-mother gave the man a mantle of copper. To-day we say:—We study the nature of our etheric body; then it was said:—The dragon-mother gave him a silver mantle. Again we say:—We learn to know our astral body with all its surging passions. At that time they said:—The dragon-mother gave him on the third day a golden mantle.

What we learn to-day concerning the threefold sheath-nature of man was brought to people at an earlier day through the image of the copper, silver, and golden mantles. And to the souls that then received the thought-form of the copper, silver, and golden mantles, we say to-day:—What brings you understanding of the dense physical body, is related to the other bodies as copper ore is to silver and gold. To-day we say:—Backward Luciferic Beings of seven different kinds remained behind on the moon and worked upon the human astral body. The rhapsodists said:—When the king's son came to the mountain where he was to be united with the flower-queen's daughter, he met seven dragons who would have devoured him if he had not accomplished his day's task. We know that if our evolution is not carried out aright it is owing to the power of the seven different kinds of Luciferic Beings. To-day we say:—In carrying out our spiritual development we find our higher self. Formerly, people were presented with a picture. The king's son they were told united himself with the flower-queen's daughter. We say:—The human soul must attain to a certain rhythm.

In one of the earlier lectures in this course I said:—When an idea rises in a man's soul he must allow it time to mature, he will then observe a certain rhythm. After seven days the idea has entered deeply into his soul; after fourteen days, the idea now being more mature, is able to lay hold of the outer astral substance, and to allow itself to be “baptised by the universal spirit”; after twenty-one days it has matured still further, and only after four times seven days does it reach the stage where he can give it to the world as his own personal gift. What I have described is an inner rhythm of the soul.

A man can only create successfully when he has no desire to impart hurriedly to the world what has chanced to come to him, but knows that the orderliness of the external universe must enter in his soul. We must live so that we repeat the macrocosm microscopically in ourselves.

These pictures which were told everywhere—and hundreds of them could be cited—stimulated the powers of the human soul by means of thought-forms, so that such souls are to-day ripe enough to listen to the other form of instruction, the form cultivated in spiritual science. But the longing for this had first to become very strong. All the conscious striving of men's souls had first to disappear from the physical plane. Then with the coming of the second half of the nineteenth century materialistic culture arose, and all was desolation as regards spiritual life. But the longing, on the other hand, grew ever greater and greater, the more the ideal of a future spiritual movement grew. There were but few remaining in the first half of the nineteenth century who felt, as in a faint memory, and experienced in silent martyrdom, how the ideas which were once perceived, discussed, and developed, still existed; but were in decline.

In 1803 a man was born in whose soul some echo of the wisdom of an earlier day still remained. Something dwelt in him that was closely related to our theosophical ideas. His soul was filled with longing to solve the secrets of spiritual science—his name was Julius Mosen. His life could only be preserved by spending the greater part of it in bed. His soul no longer suited his body, for owing to the way he had grasped these things, yet was unable spiritually to enter further into them, he had drawn his etheric body out of his physical body, and consequently he had become an invalid. He had, however, risen spiritually to considerable heights. In the year 1831 he wrote a remarkable book called “Ritter Wahn.” He knew of a wonderful legend in Italy about the Knight Wahn, and when studying it he said to himself:—Something of the spirit of the universe lives in this legend, this saga has arisen in the way it has, these pictures have been formed as they are, because those who formed them were filled with the living spiritual guidance of the world. What was the result? In 1831 he wrote a most wonderful dramatic work. It has naturally been forgotten—as everything is that originates in this way from greatness of spirit. Ritter Wahn sets out to conquer death. On the way he meets with three old men. It occurred to Julius Mosen strangely enough to translate the name of one of the old men, it Mondo, as Ird (earth), for he knew something special lay in translating it thus into German. The name of tile three old men whom Ritter Wahn met when he set out to conquer death were Ird, Zeit, and Raum—earth, time and space. The three could not help him for they were subject to death. Ird (earth) is that which is subject to the laws of the physical body, and therefore to death; Zeit (time), the etheric body, is transient; and the third, the lower astral body, which gives us the impression of space, is also subject to death. Our individuality passes from incarnation to incarnation, but that by which we are fixed within our three sheaths according to this Italian legend is Ird, Zeit and Raum (earth, time and space). What is the Ritter Wahn?—Illusion.

We have often spoken of what enters us as Maya. We ourselves are it; we who go on from incarnation to incarnation look out on the world, and are confronted with the great illusion. Each one of us is a “Ritter Wahn” and each one goes forth, if we live in the spirit, to conquer death. In this life we meet the three old men, our sheaths. They are very old. The physical body has existed since the age of Saturn, the etheric body since the Sun-age, the Astral body since the Moon-age, and that which dwells in man as the “I” has been united with him since the coming of the Earth-age. Julius Mosen represents this in such a way that the soul, by which Ritter Wahn would conquer death, first storms out into the world as a rider, thus employing the Platonic image which was prevalent all over Central Europe and far beyond it. So Ritter Wahn rides forth, and would conquer heaven with the aid of materialistic thoughts—as people do who trust to the senses—thereby remaining entangled in delusion and Maya.

But when at death they enter the spiritual world, what happens is beautifully described by Julius Mosen—life is not exhausted, souls long to return to earth to carry out their further development. Ritter Wahn comes down to earth again. And as he sees the beautiful Morgana, the soul as it is stirred by everything earthly—just as was the flower-queen's daughter—and revealing its union with everything that can only come to man through earthly schooling, there when united with the beautiful Morgana, when again united with the earth, death falls away from him. This means he passes through death in order to raise his own soul (represented by Morgana) ever higher, to purify and develop it further in each incarnation.

From images like these, which bear the stamp of many centuries, ideas enter into man and are aided by artists like Julius Mosen. They sprang in his case from a soul too great to live healthily in a body belonging to the age of materialism that was approaching, therefore, owing to the greatness of his glowing soul, he suffered a silent martyrdom. This was in the year 1831. All these thoughts lived in the soul of a man in the first half of the nineteenth century. They must rise again, but now so that they will kindle human powers, human forces. Yes, they will rise again This gives us some understanding of what is meant when we speak of a theosophical spirit, the spirit of Rosicrucianism which must enter into mankind.

We now divine that what is cherished in our movement has existed always. We fall into the illusion of Ritter Wahn if we imagine anything can prosper without active co-operation of this spirit.

Whence came the Rhapsodists of the seventh to the twelfth century; the men wandered through the world giving rise to thought-forms so that souls might comprehend things somewhat differently.

From what centre did they come? Where had they learnt how to present such pictures to the souls of men They learnt this in those temples, which we recognise as the schools of the Rosicrucians. The Rhapsodists were pupils of the Rosicrucians. Their teachers told them:—You cannot go forth to-day and speak to mankind in ideas as will be done later; to-day you must speak to them of the king's son, of the flower-queen, of the three mantles. By this means thought-forms are built up which will live in men's souls, and when these souls return they will understand what is necessary for them for their further progress.

Spiritual centres are continually sending their messengers out into the world, so that in every age that which lives in the depths of the spirit may be brought near to the souls of men.

It is a trivial point of view when people think they can construct such tales as I have been describing from fancy. Ancient legends which express the spiritual secrets of the world arise because the men who compose them have harkened to and been purified by those who impart these secrets; the whole form of the legends is constructed in accordance with these spiritual secrets. The spirit of all humanity—both of the Microcosm and the Macrocosm—lives in them.

The Rhapsodists were sent to spread their meaningful legends through the world from the same temples whence originates the special knowledge of to-day; knowledge that entering into men's hearts and souls makes the culture they demand possible. In this way the spirit that is deeply implanted in humanity passes on from epoch to epoch. And in this way the great Beings, who in pre-Christian times instructed individualities within the holy temples concerning the things they had brought over with them from earlier planetary conditions, strengthened this teaching by introducing into it the Christ so that their work might continue in accordance with this superlative Being—the Christ who had now become the great leader and guide of mankind!

When I tell you that the tales which have endured for so many centuries and called forth thought-forms in Western culture came from the same source, and expressed the same things—only in pictures—that we tell the world to-day concerning the Christ; you will realise how in the time following the Mystery of Golgotha the spiritual guides of humanity did in fact further arid support the teaching of Christ in their centres of learning. All spiritual guidance is connected with the Christ. When we are aware of this connection we catch a glimpse of the light we must have, and must make use of, more especially in respect of the things our souls longed for when they came into incarnation in the nineteenth century. If we allow those forms to affect us which can inform us regarding the longings of earlier days, we feel we can rely upon our souls and can say—those others waited so that we might accomplish what they longed for. What spirits like Julius Mosen had longed for, because they felt within them all that the messengers of the Holy Temples had related in countless pictures, so as to prepare souls for times to come; what these souls longed for is set forth in the words of Richard Rothe, who, when speaking of theosophy in 1847 at Heidelberg, says:—“Would that one day it might become really scientific, and produce clearly defined results, so that it might become popular and be generally accepted; for only in this way can it bequeath those truths to others who are unable to travel the path on which alone they could discover them for themselves.”

In those days Rothe felt this longing—not only for himself but for his contemporaries—he found resignation in saying:—“All this lies as yet within the womb of the future which we have no wish to anticipate!” Those who knew the secrets of the Rosicrucians did not speak in 1847 so that these could be perceived in an external way. But what rests within the womb of the future comes to life when a sufficient number of souls are found who realise that knowledge is a duty. We dare not give back our souls unevolved to the Spirit of the Universe, for in that case we would have deprived the Spirit of something He had implanted in us. When souls are found who realise what they owe to the Spirit of the Universe because of their strivings to solve the secrets of the world, they will have fulfilled the hopes cherished by the best men of an earlier age. These men looked to us who were to come after them and said:—“Once this knowledge becomes scientific it must become popular and lay hold of men's hearts.”

But such hearts must first exist, they must be there I This depends on those who have joined our spiritual society realising:—“I must gain spiritual illumination, I must learn the secrets of existence I” It depends on each separate soul within our society, whether the longing I have described is to be but a vain dream of those who hoped for the best from us, or a worthy dream that we can realise for them.

When we perceive the emptiness in modern science, in art, and in social life, we feel there is no need to be lost in this desert, we can get out of it. An age has once more come round in which the Holy Temples speak, not now merely in images and parables, but in truths, which, though still regarded by many as theoretical, will become ever more and more a source of life, and will pour living sap into the souls of men.

Each one can determine with the best powers of his soul to receive this living sap into himself.

These are the thoughts we would impress on your souls at the present time, being the sum of all we have received concerning the true meaning of the spiritual guidance of mankind. When we allow such thoughts to work within our souls we have a lively stimulus for future endeavour, and we see how much of constructive force they contain that is quite independent of the actual words with which these thoughts have been expressed.

However imperfect my words may be, it is the reality that matters, not the way the thoughts are expressed, and this reality can live in every soul. For the sum of all truth dwells in each separate soul like a seed which can blossom when this soul accepts it.

• 1. From the introduction by Richard Rothe to “The Principles of Theosophy according to Frederick Cristopher Oetinger,” Tubingen, 1847.
• 2. “Metamorphoses of the Soul Volume One,” and “Metamorphoses of the Soul Volume Two,” (see Book Catalogue).

by Marie Steiner

The wealth of ideas and spiritual treasure bestowed upon us by Rudolf Steiner in his lectures often makes it difficult to arrange certain series of lectures under one category and heading. They are like concentrated foci of energy from which sparks shoot out in every direction, lighting up the near and the far, piercing their way to the primal beginnings and again into infinitudes of space and time—then giving sharp definition to details which may seem unessential but are of great symptomatic importance. Out of the cumulative mass of details the necessities of storm-charged destiny arise but also a sustaining power of the Spirit. We discern the play of forces which preceded the sufferings of our present time, discharged itself with unparalleled fury in the world war and its aftermath and will burst out in tempests yet to come. We understand why this had to be, what failings will be forgiven, what demands made of us. A great and impressive tableau of history unrolls from the precision given to details otherwise ignored and from the vast cosmic-human background against which the life of man stands out in bold relief.

These vistas of primordial cosmic happenings, of ages of grey antiquity in human history which, nevertheless, shed clearest light upon our present time, are opened up with particular vividness in the lectures given to members of the Anthroposophical Society—with certain interruptions, but in constantly recurring rhythm—in places where Rudolf Steiner made his home between continual travelling: Berlin and Dornach. The lectures were given in order that the conscience of a small group of human beings at least might be made alive to the tasks of the time, to the vital significance of the hour in which we were living before the world war, and are still living today.

Rudolf Steiner spoke gravely and impressively, like the voice of destiny itself, like the awakened human conscience, linking his arguments with factual details in every sphere. And then, when in the world outside, all supports hitherto thought secure tottered for every eye to see, as the forces burst upon one another with elemental might, it was he who tried ever and again to formulate the thoughts of deliverance and recovery without which chaos cannot be overcome. Although an unfledged humanity could not understand this voice, a light must somehow be brought into the chaos—even though it might reach only a small group of immature, but eager-hearted people. An attempt had also to be made to penetrate here and there into the field of concrete, practical life. To be sure, the representatives of this “practical side of life” as they are pleased to call it, scornfully and with vicious measures of sabotage, rejected everything that seemed to them so remote from reality in that it spoke of spiritual worlds. Yet the living thought has the power to outlast the moment and to rise up again in a new form. Its duty is to work even where there is no prospect of success; in all its purity it has to find its way to souls who, through constant testing, gradually become open to receive it. Out of the concrete realities of existence from which his spiritual vision was never willing to withdraw, Rudolf Steiner created a science of knowledge embracing every domain of life and able to pour vitalising, creative impulses into the manifold branches of science and art, philosophy and religious activity.

To live through this was, and remains, an intense upliftment, like climbing up steep mountain crests in snow-cleansed, sun-pierced air. Deep, refreshing breaths can be drawn in this region of the higher cosmic realities which imbue human life with meaning and even now shape the picture of destiny in those future times, when, out of a quickened consciousness, thought will encompass higher and higher spheres of existence.

Treasures of the Spirit of well-nigh frightening brilliance have been bequeathed to us, demonstrating through their very existence that the might of the Dark Age, of Kaliyuga, has been broken and conquered. True, the darkness is within us still, but the Light is there and may not be withheld—not even from a humanity living in shadow.

The Light—of which Rudolf Steiner says that it is the Christ Impulse—had first to prepare and shape the vessel of human consciousness into which it can flow; it will bring to men that re-awakening by which alone they can wrest themselves from downfall.

Neither the powers of the Sentient Soul, nor the fervent passion of religious experience known to the Middle Ages, to the saints and the mystics along the path of the Christian Initiation, are competent to overcome the obstructions brought by the age of rationalism. But wise Providence, guide and leader of human existence, inaugurated, even before the dawn of the modern age, a second path of Christian Initiation along which souls were gradually to be made ready for the demands of a later future.

The call of this, the Christian-Rosicrucian path, went out above all to the powers of the Consciousness Soul, the Spiritual Soul. Hence its mission was also to establish the human being firmly within the personality, to allow him to experience to the full the significance of the single life. Through study, through imagination and contemplation, it led the human being out into the macrocosm—which was discovered again, in image, within his own being. But the full development of the forces of the personality, whereby the “ I ” could be led to conscious realisation of the Spirit, made it necessary that the knowledge of repeated earth-lives should, to begin with, be hidden for a time from the portion of humanity destined to unfold these forces of personality.

What the new age needs is not a return to the past through a revival of the methods of Yoga, nor of the Gnostic or Rosicrucian paths in the form in which they served the spiritual weal of men in days gone by. In accordance with the demands of the modern age, a new impulse must be given to the rigorous path of Rosicrucian knowledge which in its true form has nothing whatever to do with the charlatanry that has usurped its name—a new impulse, in the form of the revelation of the great truths of Reincarnation and Karma.

Until the task of proclaiming these truths devolved upon Rudolf Steiner, Rosicrucianism concealed them, kept silence about them. But it came about that with the passage of the centuries, these truths were able to flash into the consciousness of minds in Europe, as the result of rigorous and strenuous ways of thought, and as a fruit of knowledge born of alert reason; as a concern, too, of mankind, through which the evolution of human history receives meaning and significance, not as a concern of the single individual whose goal, as in Buddhism, is liberation from the wheel of rebirth. We need only mention the names of Goethe and Lessing.

The salvation of the individuality passing onwards and unfolding through the recurrent earthly lives, the rebirth of the Divine “ I ” in man—this is the deed wrought by Christ, and with the stupendous power of knowledge at his command Rudolf Steiner brought this deed ever and again before our eyes.

When after long reluctance he had made up his mind to comply with the request of German Theosophists to lead their work, he was able to accept the proposal because of the avowed task of the Theosophical Society: to establish knowledge of Reincarnation and Karma in the world. The lectures leading to the request that he should become the leader of this Movement in Germany were those on Mysticism at the Dawn of Modern Spiritual Life, and Christianity as Mystical Fact. Therewith, the impulse which he was to bring to the Movement had been clearly indicated, and he was assured of absolute freedom to teach as he would. He himself acted in line with the spirit of true occultists of all ages who make a link with the store of spiritual knowledge already existing in order to preserve its life and lead it forward. He still saw hope of being able, through the new impulse, to rescue the Theosophical Society, too, from lapsing into the rigidity of dogma, to imbue it with fresh forces and enrich its very defective understanding of the Mysteries of Christianity.

Without overthrowing anything at all, gradually laying stone upon stone, he created the basis for this understanding. For the new insight must be acquired by the listeners only through knowledge consciously put to the test of reason. And so, to begin with, he adopted the terminology current among the Theosophists, gradually widening the ideas and giving them life so that they might conform to the more alert consciousness of the modern mind. The basis once created, wider and wider perspectives could be opened out, until, from the side of the super-sensible, there broke the light which reveals the mission of the earth and the tasks of mankind.

Not only from the point of view of their content, but also from that of chronology, the opportunity of studying every such series of lectures given by Rudolf Steiner seems to us to be of great importance for newcomers to Spiritual Science, for only so is it possible to realise the living, organic growth of the work. Remarks interpolated here and there in the lectures about contemporary happenings seeming to have little bearing at a later time, have such moral and educational value that they are of lasting significance.

There can be no concealment of the firm stand Rudolf Steiner was compelled to take against the attempts that were clouding objective truth and corrupting the Theosophical Society by the introduction of pet projects and personal ambitions. The warnings given in this connection may not always be understood by the reader today. In the main they were connected with the occult despotism—for so indeed it may be called—which took the form of the announcement of the coming of a World-Saviour in the flesh—to whom they dared to give the name of Christ. The Indian boy Krishnamurti was chosen for this role and the “Order of the Star in the East” founded with a flourish of trumpets. The Theosophical Society was expected to place itself in the service of this new aim. By these crude means it was hoped to win souls who were open to listen to the explanations of Christian Esotericism given by Rudolf Steiner. But a campaign, fought with all the arms of calumny, was launched against him. The International Theosophical Congress which was to have been held in Genoa in the year 1911 and in which Rudolf Steiner was to have given two lectures on “Buddhism in the twentieth century” and “Christ in the twentieth century,” was cancelled at the last minute for inadequate reasons—but in reality because of fear that the influence of Dr. Steiner's words might be too strong. In the lectures that year, many references had to be made to this affair which to very many people was absolutely incomprehensible.

It had become necessary to make it clear that methods so grievously degrading the level of the Theosophical Society, could not be countenanced. Dr. Steiner stated this firmly, but with pain, and pouring his very heart's blood into the words, he spoke repeatedly of his one great wish—that the Society led by him might not succumb to the failings into which occult societies so easily lapse when they fall short of the demands of strict truthfulness and drift into vanity and ambition.

The words should live like cleansing flames in the souls of those who represent his work and over and over again arise before them as an exhortation and warning.

The lectures given in Berlin in the year 1912, contain many references to the struggles Rudolf Steiner was obliged to face in order that in spite of hidden attacks, the spirit of such a Movement might be rescued in its purity, for Spiritual Science. The lapse in the Theosophical Society made it necessary to lay sharp emphasis upon the autonomy of the anthroposophical work in Middle Europe vis-à-vis the Anglo-Indian Theosophical Society, and during the last days of December, 1912, the “Anthroposophical League (Bund)” was officially founded. The rhythms of the years recall such days vividly to the memory.

Thirty years ago, on the 20th October, 1902, in Berlin, Rudolf Steiner gave his first lecture on Anthroposophy, and on the 21st translated into German the theosophical lecture delivered by Annie Besant who at that time had not come under the sway of the unhealthy influences to which she afterwards fell victim. Twenty years ago, Rudolf Steiner was obliged to protect the anthroposophical Movement inaugurated by him from the despotic attacks going out from Adyar, and to speak the words which are like a heritage left by the lectures and are now being made available to us once again as a memorial of those days. They rang out in power during the last days of December of that same year, in Cologne, when in Rudolf Steiner's lectures on The Bhagavad Gita and the Epistles of St. Paul, the purest oriental wisdom was presented to the listeners with unprecedented grandeur, in the light of Christian knowledge.

Again his concluding words were an impressive appeal for self-knowledge and humility in those belonging to the Movement inaugurated by him. But the opposing powers were not slumbering. Ten years ago, on New Year's night, 1922-23, the Goetheanum was in flames. Only the Group, sculptured in wood, portraying the Representative of Humanity between the vanquished Adversaries, was saved. We are hoping that by Christmas of this year, this Group will stand in a space worthy of it, in the new Goetheanum. There is a moving description of the Representative of Humanity, of the Christ Figure, at the end of one of the lectures of 1912, when there was no thought—even of the possibility—of its execution in sculpture. It came before us then in words, and now it stands before our eyes as a work of Art.

Marie Steiner
December, 1932.

In the course of these lectures we have said repeatedly that Christianity constitutes the decisive midpoint of human evolution. All religions have their right to exist—they were partial revelations of the Logos—but none has changed the face of the world as much as Christianity. One can feel this influence in the words of John's Gospel, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.” (John 20:29) The words, “those who have not seen,” refer to those people who had no knowledge of the mystery religions. An essential part of the ancient mysteries is made public through Christianity, for example, the most important commandments concerning morality, and the teaching concerning the immortality of the soul through resurrection or rebirth.

Before Christianity, one could see super-sensible truth in the revelations, rites, and dramatic presentations of the mysteries. Now, however, one can believe in the super-sensible thanks to the divine person of Christ. There had always been a difference between the esoteric truth known to initiates, and its exoteric form—appropriate for the great masses—which came to expression through the various religions. The same holds true for Christianity. What is found in the Gospels is the new good tidings, promulgated for all to hear. But there was a deeper teaching. It is contained in the Apocalypse in the form of symbols.

There is a way to read the Apocalypse that can be made public only in our time. It was cultivated in the Middle Ages in the occult schools of the Rosicrucians. At that time historical questions concerning the book were considered unimportant. These were questions concerning its composition and the identity of the author; in short, all that which occupies the sole interest of theologians today, who seek nothing more than historical facts in this book. Modern critical theology knows only the external shell of this book and ignores the kernel. The Rosicrucians stayed with the prophetic aspect, the eternal truth of the book.

Occultism is not usually concerned with the history of a single century or a single era, but rather with the inner history of human evolution as a whole. This is true when it delves into the first manifestations of our planetary system, when it looks into the distant past at the vegetative and animal conditions of humanity, and when its perspective expands over millions of years forward to a future when humanity will have become divine. The earth itself will have changed then both in form and substance. But how can the future be guessed? Is prophecy really possible? It is possible because all that is to take place physically in the future already exists in seed form in the womb of the archetypes whose thoughts form the plan for our evolution. Nothing appears on the physical plane that was not already planned and preformed in general outline in the region of devachan. Nothing happens in the depths that did not exist before in the heights. That is the way things are realized. They depend upon the freedom and initiative of the individual.

Esoteric Christianity is not based on vague and sentimental idealism but rather on a concrete ideal that originates in knowledge of higher worlds. This is the knowledge that the writer of the Apocalypse had, the great seer of Patmos, who sketched the future of humankind in Christian perspective.

Let us consider this future according to the laws of world creation just described. The Rosicrucians first revealed to their pupils some visions from the past and the future. Then the pupils were given the Apocalypse to interpret these visions. Let us do the same and observe how humanity has become what it is, and what future will open for it.

We have, for example, spoken of the ancient Atlantean continent and of the Atlanteans whose etheric body was far more developed than their physical body. Their preliminary consciousness of self, their I-consciousness, came to them only at the end of their culture. The successive post-Atlantean cultures were: First, the pre-Vedantic culture in southern Asia, in India. That was the beginning of the Aryan cultures; second, the epoch of Zarathustra, including the culture of ancient Persia; third, the Egyptian culture, the epoch of Hermes, to which are attached the Chaldean and Semitic cultures. The first seeds of Christianity were sown during this age in the womb of the Hebrew peoples; fourth, the Greco-Latin cultural epoch that experienced the birth of Christianity; and fifth, a new epoch was prepared at the time of the mass migrations and wars of conquest in the fourth through the sixth centuries.

The legacy of the Greco-Latin culture was taken over by the northern races: Celts, Germans, and Slavs. This is the epoch in which we are now still living. It is a slow transformation of the Greco-Latin cultural heritage brought about through the powerful element of the new peoples under the mighty impulse of Christianity. This impulse has also been mixed with the leaven of the East brought to Europe through the Arabs. The actual goal of this cultural epoch is to adapt the human being fully to the physical plane. This occurs when our reason, our practical commonsense is developed and our intellect delves into physical matter in order to understand and master it. In the course of this hard work, this astonishing achievement that has culminated in our time, human beings have momentarily forgotten the higher worlds of their origin. By comparing our spiritual soul constitution with that of the Chaldeans, for example, it is easy to see what we have won and what we have lost. When Chaldean magicians observed the heavens, which present for us nothing more than a problem in celestial mechanics, they had an entirely different idea, an entirely different feeling, one could say, a totally different experience than we. Where a modern astronomer sees nothing more than a soulless machine, the ancient magicians felt the harmony of the heavens depths as a divine, living being. When they observed Mercury, Venus, the moon, or the sun, they saw not only the physical light of these heavenly bodies, they perceived the planets' souls as belonging to living beings, and they felt their own souls in connection with these great beings of the firmament. They perceived the influence of heavenly bodies as attraction and repulsion, like a wonderful concert of streaming, flowing divine will; and the symphony of the cosmos sounded forth in the magicians like a harmonious echo of the human microcosm. In this way the music of the spheres was a reality that united human beings with heaven.

The superiority of the modern scholar is rooted in knowledge of the physical world, of matter. Spiritual science has descended to the physical plane we know so well. However, we must now be concerned with again achieving knowledge of the astral plane through clairvoyance.

This descent into matter was necessary for the fifth epoch to fulfill its mission. Astral and spiritual clairvoyance had to be veiled so that the intellect could develop itself on the field of the sense world through minute, mathematical observation of the physical world.

Now we must supplement natural science with spiritual science. Here is an example: Ptolemy's map of the heavens is usually placed next to that of Copernicus and then the former is declared to be false. This is, however, not true. They are equally justified. Ptolemy's map is concerned with the astral plane wherein the earth forms the center point of the planets and the sun is itself a planet. Copernicus's map is concerned with the physical plane where the sun is in the middle. All truths are relative according to time and place. Ptolemy's system will be rehabilitated in an epoch yet to come.

After our fifth epoch another will come, the sixth, which will be related to ours as a spiritually minded soul is related to a rationally inclined soul. This epoch will bring genius, clairvoyance, the creative spirit, to development. How will Christianity appear in the sixth epoch? There was a harmonious union of science and faith for the ancient priests of the pre-Christian age. Science and faith were one and the same thing. When the ancient priests observed the firmament they knew and felt that the soul was a drop of water that had fallen from the heavenly ocean and had been led down to earth by immeasurable rivers of life that flow through space. Today, when our sight is directed only to the physical world, faith needs a free space, a religion. For this reason science and faith are separated. The faithful reverence of the person of Christ, the god of the human being on the earth, has for a certain time taken the place of occult science and the mysteries. But the two streams will be united in the sixth epoch. The mechanical science of the physical plane will be elevated to the heights of spiritual creative power. That will be gnosis or spiritual knowledge. This sixth epoch will be radically different from ours. Great, tumultuous catastrophes will precede it, for the sixth epoch will be just as spiritual as ours is materialistic, but such a transformation can only occur through great, physical upheavals. Everything that will be formed in the course of the sixth epoch will call into existence the possibility of a seventh epoch which itself will form the end of these post-Atlantean cultures and will know completely different conditions of life from our own. This seventh epoch will end with a revolution of the elements, similar to the one that brought an end to the Atlantean continent. The condition of the earth that will then appear will have a spirituality prepared through the last two post-Atlantean epochs.

The Aryan cultures encompass seven great epochs. We see the laws of evolution slowly unfolding. Human beings always carry within themselves what they will see around them in future times. All that presently exists around us actually came forth from us in preceding ages when our being was still united with the earth, the moon, and the sun. This cosmic being, from which the present human being together with all the kingdoms of nature have arisen, is called in the Kabbala, “Adam Kadmon.” All of the manifold forms of men and women presently represented by ethnic groups and races were contained in this human archetype.

What human beings possess today as their inner soul life, their thoughts, their feelings, will similarly be revealed externally and become the environment in which people live. The future resides in the hearts of men and women. The choice is ours to decide for a future of good or of evil. Just as it is true that the human being once left behind something that then became the world of animals, so too, what is evil in the human being will one day form a kind of degenerate humanity. At the present time we can more or less hide the good or evil within us. A day will come when we can no longer do this, when the good or the evil will be written indelibly on our forehead, on our body, and even on the face of the earth. Humanity will then be split into two races. In the same way that we encounter boulders or animals today, in the future we will encounter beings of pure evil and ugliness. When a human being's facial features become an expression of that individual's karma, then people will separate themselves according to the stream in which they apparently belong. Everything depends on whether human beings have conquered the lower nature within them or whether this lower nature has triumphed over the spirit.

Beginning in the past we can see the lines of a future reality beginning to form. To the extent that we are prepared to understand the past and to work in the present we can realize the ideal of this future reality. A new race will be formed that will constitute the connecting link between present-day humanity and the spiritualized human being of the future. But one must distinguish between the evolution of races and the evolution of souls. It lies within the freedom of every single soul to develop itself toward this external form of a race, whose character corresponds to the good that it will incarnate. Individuals will belong to this race only through the exercise of their free will and through a great exertion of their soul forces. Membership in a race will no longer be forced upon a soul, but rather it will be the result of an individual's evolution.

The meaning of Manichean teaching is that, from now on, souls should prepare themselves to transform into good the evil that will appear in its full strength in the sixth epoch. Indeed, it will be necessary for human souls to become strong enough to protect, through a spiritual alchemy, the good from the evil that will come to light.

The evolution of our planet earth will lead it back through the former phases of its development in reversed order. First the earth will unite with the moon, then a union—a reunion—of this mixed-world body with the sun will occur. The reuniting of the moon with the earth will coincide with a high tide of evil on the earth. In contrast to this, the union of the earth with the sun will mark the beginning of blessed happiness, the reign of the chosen people.

Human beings will bear the mark of the seven great phases of earth evolution. The book of the seven seals spoken of in the Apocalypse will be opened. The woman dressed in the sun and with the moon under her feet is related to the time when the earth will be united again with the sun and the moon. The trumpets of the last judgment will sound forth, for the earth will have arrived in a devachanic condition, where tone, not light, will rule. The end of earthly evolution will stand in the sign of the Christ principle that will permeate all of humankind. Human beings will have become similar to Christ; they will gather around Christ like a multitude around the lamb, and the New Jerusalem will arise as the fruit of this evolution. It represents the crowning of the world.

My dear Friends:
A special festival has long been celebrated on this particular day of the year by a great number of those seeking higher wisdom; and many friends of our anthroposophical movement here in this city have wished this series of lectures to commence on this day, St. John's Day.

The day of the year bearing this name was a festival as far back as the time of ancient Persia. There, on a day corresponding to a June day as we know it, the so-called Festival of the Baptism by Water and Fire was celebrated. In ancient Rome the Festival of Vesta was held on a similar day in June, and that again was a festival of the baptism by fire. Going back to the time of pre-Christian culture in Europe and including the period before Christianity had become widely disseminated, we find a similar June festival coinciding with the time when the days are longest and the nights shortest, when the days start to become shorter again, when the sun once more begins to lose some of the power that provides for all earthly growth and thriving. This June festival seemed to our European forefathers like a retrogression, a gradual evanescence, of the God Baldur who was thought of as associated with the sun. Then in Christian times this June festival gradually became the Festival of St. John in memory of the Forerunner of Christ Jesus. In this way it can form the starting point, as it were, for our discussions during the coming days of that most significant event in human evolution which we call the deed of Christ Jesus. This deed, its whole significance for the development of mankind, the way it is revealed primarily in the most important Christian document, the Gospel of St. John—and then a comparison of this with the other Gospels—a study of all this will form the subject of this lecture cycle.

St. John's Day reminds us that the most exalted Individuality that ever took part in the evolution of mankind was preceded by a forerunner. This touches at once an important point which—again like a forerunner—we must place at the beginning of our lectures as a subject of discussion. In the course of human evolution there appear again and again events of such profound import as to throw a stronger light than others. From epoch to epoch we see history recording such vital events; and ever and anon we are told that there are men who, in certain respects, know of such events in advance and can foretell them. This implies that such events are not arbitrary, but rather, that one who discerns the whole sense and spirit of human history knows how such events must unfold, and how he himself must work and prepare in order that they may come to pass.

We shall have occasion in the next few days to refer repeatedly to the Forerunner of Christ Jesus. Today we will consider him only as one of those who, by means of special spiritual gifts, are able to see deep into the relations within the evolution of mankind, and who thus know that there are pre-eminent moments in this evolution. For this reason he was able to clear the path for Christ Jesus. But if we turn to Christ Jesus Himself, thus coming to the main subject of our discussions, as it were, we must understand that not without reason does a large part of mankind divide the record of time into two epochs separated by the appearance of Christ Jesus on earth. This discloses a feeling for the incisive importance of the Christ Mystery. But all truth, all reality, must ever be proclaimed to humanity in new forms, in new ways, for the needs of men change from one epoch to another. In certain respects our epoch calls for a new revelation even of this greatest event in the earthly evolution of man, the Christ Event; and it is anthroposophy's aim to be this revelation.

As far as its content is concerned, the anthroposophical presentation of the Christ Mystery is nothing new, not even for us today; but its form is new. All that is to be disclosed here in the next few days has been known for centuries within certain restricted circles of our cultural and spiritual life. Only one feature distinguishes today's presentation from all those that have gone before: it can be addressed to a larger circle. Those smaller circles in which for centuries the same message was proclaimed within our European spiritual life, these had recognized the same symbol that confronts you here in this lecture hall today: the Rose Cross. For this reason it is fitting that today, when this message goes forth to a larger public, the Rose Cross should again be its symbol.

First let me characterize once more in a symbolical way the basis of these Rosicrucian revelations concerning Christ Jesus. The Rosicrucians are a brotherhood that has fostered a genuinely spiritual Christianity within the spiritual life of Europe ever since the 14th Century. This Rosicrucian Society which, ignoring all outer historical forms, has endeavored to bring to light the deepest truths of Christianity, always called its members “Christians of St. John.” If we come to understand this term the whole spirit and trend of the following lectures will be—if not mentally comprehended, at least imaginatively grasped.

As you know, the Gospel of St. John—that mighty document of the human race—begins with the words:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and a God was the Word.

The same was in the beginning with God.

The Word, then—or the Logos—was in the beginning with God. And we are further told that the light shone in the darkness, and that the darkness at first comprehended it not; that this light was in the world among men, but that these men counted but few among their number who were able to comprehend the Light. Then the Word made flesh appeared as a Man, a Man Whose forerunner was the Baptist John. And then we see how those who had some understanding of this appearance of Christ on earth endeavored to make clear what Christ really was. We see the author of the John Gospel pointing directly to the fact that what dwelt in Jesus of Nazareth as profoundest essence was nothing different from that in which originate all other beings that surround us: the living Spirit, the living Word, the Logos itself.

And the other Evangelists as well, each in his own way, have been at pains to characterize what it really was that appeared in Jesus of Nazareth. We see, for example, the writer of the Luke Gospel endeavoring to show that something quite special manifested itself when, at the Baptism of Christ Jesus, the Spirit united with the body of Jesus of Nazareth. Then the same writer tells us that this Jesus of Nazareth was the descendant of ancestors reaching far, far back; that His genealogy went back to David, to Abraham, to Adam—even to God Himself. Note well that the Luke Gospel points emphatically to this line of descent:

Jesus of Nazareth was the son of Joseph, Joseph was the son of Heli.

... he was the son of David ...

he was the son of Adam, and Adam was the son of God.

This means that the author of the Luke Gospel considers it of special importance that a direct line runs from Jesus of Nazareth, with Whom the Spirit united at the Baptism by John, to Him Whom he calls the Father of Adam, to God. Such things must be taken entirely literally.

In the Matthew Gospel, on the other hand, the attempt is made to trace the descent of this Jesus of Nazareth back to Abraham, to whom God revealed Himself.

In this way and in many others—through many statements we can find in the Gospels—the Individuality that is the vehicle of the Christ, as well as the whole manifestation of Christ, is set before us not only as one of the greatest, but as the very greatest of all events in the evolution of humanity. Clearly this means, does it not? what can be expressed quite simply as follows: If Christ Jesus is regarded by those who divined something of His greatness as the most significant phenomenon in the evolution of man upon earth, then this Christ Jesus must in some way be connected with what is most vital and sacred in man himself. In other words, there must be something in man himself that can be brought into relation with the Christ event. Can we not ask, If Christ Jesus, as the Gospels maintain, is really the most important phenomenon in human evolution, does it not follow that always, in every human soul, there is something that is related to Christ Jesus?

And that is precisely what the Johannine Christians of the Rosicrucian Society deemed of greatest import and significance: that there is in every human soul something directly related to the events in Palestine as brought about through Christ Jesus. If the coming of Christ Jesus can be called the greatest event for mankind, then what corresponds in the human soul to the Christ event must be the greatest and most significant as well. And what can that be? The disciples of the Rosicrucians answered: There exists for every human soul something that is called awakening, or rebirth, or initiation.

Let us see what is meant by these terms. Looking at the various things around us—things we see with our eyes, touch with our hands—we observe them coming into being and perishing. We see the flower, the whole annual plant life, come up and then wither; and though there are such things in the world as rocks and mountains that seem to defy the centuries we need only consider the proverb, "a steady drip hollows out the rock" to realize that the human soul senses the laws of transience as governing even the majestic boulders and mountains. And we know that there comes into being and perishes even what is built of the elements: not only what we call our corporeality, but what we know as our perishable ego is engendered and then passes. But those who know how a spiritual world can be reached know also that this is not attained by means of eyes or ears or other senses, but by the path of awakening, of rebirth, of initiation.

And what is it that is reborn? When a man observes his inner self he finally comes to realize that what he sees there is that to which he says “I”. Its very name differentiates it from anything in the outer world. To everything in the outer world a name can be applied externally. Everyone can call a table a table or a clock a clock; but never in the world could the name “I” fall on our ear if it were intended to denote ourself, for “I” must be spoken within us: to everyone else we are “you.” This in itself shows us that our ego-being is distinct from all else that is in or around us.

But in addition, we now come to something that spiritual scientists of all times have emphasized from their own experience for the benefit of mankind: that within this ego another, a higher one, is born, as the child is born of the mother. A man as he appears in life is first encountered as a child, awkward in his surroundings but gradually learning to understand things: he gains in sense, his intellect and his will grow, and his strength and energy increase. But there have always been people who grow in other ways as well, who attain to a stage of development beyond the average, who find, so to say, a second I that can say “you” to the first one in the same way that the I itself says “you” to the outer world and to its own body—that looks upon this first I from above, as it were.

As an ideal, then, for the soul of man, and as a reality for those who follow the instructions of spiritual science, we have the thought: the ego I have hitherto known takes part in the whole outer world, and together with this it is perishable; but there slumbers within me a second ego of which men are unaware but can become aware. It is linked with the imperishable, just as the first ego is bound up with the perishable, the temporal; and by means of rebirth this higher ego can behold a spiritual world just as the lower ego does perceive the physical world through eyes and ears.

This awakening, rebirth, initiation, as it is called, is the greatest event for the human soul—a view shared by those who called themselves confessors of the Rose Cross. These knew that this event of the rebirth of the higher ego, which can look from above on the lower ego as man looks on outer forms, must have some connection with the event of Christ Jesus. This means that just as a rebirth can occur for the individual in his development, so a rebirth for all humanity came about through Christ Jesus. That which is an inner event for the individual—a mystical-spiritual event, as it is called, something he can experience as the birth of his higher ego—corresponds to what occurred in the outer world, in history, for all mankind in the event of Palestine through Christ Jesus.

How did this appear to a man like, for instance, the author of the Luke Gospel? He reasoned as follows: The genealogy of Jesus of Nazareth goes back to Adam and to God himself. What today is mankind, what now inhabits a physical human body, once descended from divine heights: it was born of the spirit, it was once with God. Adam was he who had been sent down out of spiritual heights into matter, and in this sense he is the son of God. So there was at one time a divine-spiritual realm—thus the argument would continue—that condensed, as it were, into an ephemeral, tellurian realm: Adam came into being. Adam was an earthly image of the Son of God, and from him are descended the human beings that dwell in a physical body. And in a special way there lived in Jesus of Nazareth not only what exists in every man and all that pertains to it, but something the essence of which can be found only when one is aware that the true being of man derives from the divine. In Jesus of Nazareth something of this divine descent is still apparent. For this reason the writer of the Luke Gospel feels constrained to say, Behold Him Who was baptized by John! He bears special marks of the divine out of which Adam was originally born. This can come to life again in Him. Just as the God descended into matter and disappeared as such from the human race, so He reappears. In Jesus of Nazareth mankind could be reborn in its innermost divine principle. What the author of the Luke Gospel meant was this: If we trace the genealogy of Jesus of Nazareth to its source, we find the divine origin and the characteristics of the Son of God appearing in Him in a new way, and in a higher degree than would hitherto have been possible for mankind.

And the writer of the John Gospel emphasizes even more strongly the existence of something divine in man, as well as the fact that this appeared in its most grandiose form as the God and the Logos themselves. The God Who had been buried, as it were, in matter is reborn as God in Jesus of Nazareth. That is what was meant by those who introduced their Gospels in this way.

And those who endeavored to perpetuate the wisdom of these Gospels—what did they say? How did the Johannine Christians put it? They said: In the individual human being a great and mighty event can take place that can be called the rebirth of the higher ego. As the child is born of the mother, so the divine ego is born of man. Initiation, awakening, is possible; and when once this has come to pass—so said those who were competent to speak—a new standard of values will arise.

Let us try to understand by a comparison what it is that henceforth becomes important. Suppose we have before us a man seventy years old—an "awakened" man who has attained to his higher ego—and suppose he had been in his fortieth year when he experienced rebirth, the awakening of his higher ego. Had someone approached him at that time with the intention of describing his life he could have reflected: I have before me a man who has just given birth to his higher ego. It is the same man I knew five years ago in certain circumstances, and ten years ago in others.—And if he had wanted to portray the identity of this man—if he had wanted to show that this man had a quite special start, even at birth—he would trace back the forty years with his physical existence in mind and describe the latter as far as pertinent, in the spirit of one who sees matters from the spiritual-scientific viewpoint. But in his fortieth year a higher ego was born in this man, and henceforth this higher ego irradiates all the circumstances of his life. He is a new man. That which existed previously is of no further importance. What is now important is to understand, above all things, how the higher ego grows from year to year and develops further. Now, when this man had arrived at the age of seventy, we would enquire into the path taken by the higher ego from the fortieth to the seventieth year; and if we believe in what was born in the soul of this man thirty years before, it would be of importance that it is the true spiritual ego he presents to us in his seventieth year. That is the way the Evangelists went about it; and it was thus, and in connection with the Gospels, that the Johannine Christians of Rosicrucianism dealt with the Being we know as Christ Jesus.

The Gospel writers had set themselves the task of showing, first of all, that Christ Jesus had His origin in the primordial World Spirit, in the God Himself. The God that had dwelt unseen in all mankind is specifically manifested in Christ Jesus; and that is the same God of Whom the John Gospel tells us that He was in the beginning. What the Evangelists set out to do was to show that it was precisely this God that dwelt in Jesus of Nazareth. But those whose task it was to perpetuate the eternal wisdom right into our own time had to emphasize the fact that man's higher ego, the divine spirit of mankind—born in Jesus of Nazareth through the event in Palestine—had remained the same and had been preserved by all who approached it with true understanding. Just as in our comparison we described how the man bore his higher ego in his fortieth year, so the Evangelists pictured the God that dwells in man up to the event of Palestine—how the God developed, how he was reborn, and so forth. But those upon whom it was incumbent to demonstrate that they were the successors of the Evangelists, these had to point out that the time was ripe for the rebirth of the higher ego, when we have to do only with the spiritual part, irradiating
all else.

Those who called themselves the Johannine Christians and whose symbol was the Rose Cross held that precisely what was reborn for mankind as the secret of its higher ego has been preserved—preserved by the close community which grew out of Rosicrucianism. This continuity is symbolically indicated by that sacred vessel from which Christ Jesus ate and drank with His disciples, and in which Joseph of Arimathia caught the blood that flowed from the wound—the Holy Grail which, as the story is told, was brought to Europe by Angels. A temple was built to contain this vessel, and the Rosicrucians became the guardians of what it contained, namely, the essence of the reborn God.

The mystery of the reborn God had its being in humanity. It is the Mystery of the Grail, a mystery propounded like a new Gospel, proclaiming: We look up to a sage such as the writer of the John Gospel who was able to say:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and a God was the Word.

That which was with God in the beginning was born again in Him Whom we have seen suffer and die on Golgotha, and Who is arisen.—This continuity throughout all time of the divine principle and its rebirth, that is what the author of the John Gospel aimed to set forth. Something known to all those who endeavored to proclaim this truth was that what was in the beginning has been preserved. In the beginning was the mystery of the higher ego; it was preserved in the Grail; with the Grail it has remained linked. And in the Grail lives the ego united with the eternal and immortal, just as the lower ego is bound to the ephemeral and mortal. He who knows the secret of the Holy Grail knows that from the wood of the Cross there springs ever new life, the immortal ego, symbolized by the roses on the black wood of the cross.

The secret of the Rose Cross can thus appear like a continuation of the John Gospel; and in reference to the latter and to its continuation it can truly be said:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and a God was the Word. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by It;¹ and without It was not any thing made that was made. In It was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in the darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.

Only a few men—those who possessed something of what is not born of the flesh—comprehended the light that shone in the darkness. But then the light became flesh and dwelt among men in the form of Jesus of Nazareth. Here we can say, wholly within the meaning of the John Gospel: That which dwelt as the Christ in Jesus of Nazareth was the higher divine ego of all humanity, of the reborn God Who, in Adam, as His image, became earthly. This reborn human ego was perpetuated as a holy secret, was preserved under the symbol of the Rose Cross, and is now proclaimed as the secret of the Holy Grail, as the Rose Cross.

The principle which can be born in every human soul as the higher ego points to the rebirth of the divine ego, in the evolution of mankind in its entirety, through the Event of Palestine. Just as the higher ego is born in the individual, so the higher ego of all mankind, the divine ego, was born in Palestine; and it is preserved and developed in what lives concealed in the sign of the Rose Cross.

But if we study the evolution of man we find not only this one great event, the rebirth of the higher ego, but a number of lesser ones as well. Before the higher ego can be born, before this mighty, comprehensive, pervasive experience can come to the soul—the birth of the immortal ego in the mortal ego—extensive preparatory stages must have been passed through. A man must prepare himself in many different ways. And after the great experience has come to him that enables him to say to himself, Now I feel within myself something that looks down from above on my ordinary ego, just as my ordinary ego looks upon the things of the senses; now I am a second being within my first; now I have attained to the realms in which I am united with the divine beings—when the human being has had this experience, then he faces further stages that must be passed through, stages differing in their nature from the preparatory ones, but which none the less must be traversed.

Thus there is for each individual the one great incisive event, the birth of the higher ego; and there is a similar birth as well for the whole of mankind: the rebirth of the divine ego. Also, there are stages leading to this incisive event and others that must follow it. To find the former, we look back in time beyond the Christ event. There we encounter other great manifestations in human evolution. We become aware of the gradual approach of the Gospel of Christ, as indicated by the writer of the Luke Gospel when he says, In the beginning there was a God, a spirit-being in spiritual heights. He descended into the material world and became man, became humanity.—True, one could discern in man, as he developed, his origin in the God, but the God Himself could not be perceived by observing human evolution with outer physical eyes alone. He was behind the earthly-physical world, as it were; and there He was seen by those who understood where He was, by those who could behold His kingdom.

Let us turn back for a moment to the first civilization that followed upon a great catastrophe, to the ancient Indian civilization. There we find seven great and holy teachers known as the Holy Rishis. They pointed upwards to a higher being of whom they said, Our wisdom can divine the existence of this being, but it suffices not to perceive it.—The vision of the Holy Rishis was great, but the exalted being they called Vishva Karman was beyond their sphere. Vishva Karman, though permeating the spiritual world, was a being beyond what the clairvoyant human eye of that time could reach.—Then followed the civilization called after its great leader, Zarathustra, and Zarathustra spoke as follows to those whom it was his mission to guide: When the clairvoyant eye contemplates the things of this world—minerals, plants, animals, men—it perceives behind these things all sorts of spiritual beings. The being, however, to whom man is indebted for his very existence, who in the future is destined to dwell in man's deepest self, remains hidden as yet even from the clairvoyant eye when it contemplates the things of this earth. But by raising the clairvoyant eye to the sun, said Zarathustra, more than the sun is seen: as an aura is perceived surrounding man, so, in contemplating the sun, the great sun aura is discerned—Ahura Mazdao.—And it was the great sun aura that once brought forth man, in a manner to be characterized later. Man is the image of the sun spirit, of Ahura Mazdao; but as yet Ahura Mazdao did not dwell on earth.—Then came the time in which clairvoyant men began to see Ahura Mazdao in what surrounded them on earth. The great moment had arrived when something could take place that had not been possible in Zarathustra's time. When Zarathustra discerned clairvoyantly what was manifested in earthly lightning and thunder, it was not Ahura Mazdao, the great sun spirit who is the prototype of mankind, that he saw; but when he turned to the sun he saw Ahura Mazdao. When Zarathustra had found a successor in Moses, Moses' clairvoyant vision could see in the burning bush and in the fire on Sinai the spirit who proclaimed himself as ehjeh asher ehjeh, as the “I am,” as He Who was, as He Who is, as He Who shall be: Jahve, or Jehova.

What had taken place? During that remote period between the appearance of Zarathustra and that of Moses upon earth, the Spirit Who previously had dwelt only on the sun had moved downward to earth. He flamed up in the burning bush and shone in the fire on Sinai: He was in the elements of the earth. And then another period passed; and the Spirit Whose presence the great holy Rishis felt, but of Whom they had to say: Our clairvoyance does not suffice to see Him—the Spirit Whom Zarathustra had to seek in the sun, Who revealed Himself to Moses in thunder and lightning—this Spirit appeared in a human being: in Jesus of Nazareth. That was the evolution: first a descent from the cosmos into the physical elements, then into a human body. Only then was reborn the divine ego from which man descended, and to which the writer of the Luke Gospel traces the genealogy of Jesus of Nazareth. This was the great event of the rebirth of the God in man.

That is a retrospect of the preparatory stages, and it shows us that mankind, too, passed through these. And those who had advanced with mankind as its early leaders were also destined to progress until one of them had achieved the capacity to become the bearer of the Christ. Such is the evolution of mankind as seen through spiritual eyes.

And there is another point. What the holy Rishis revered as Vishva Karman, what Zarathustra addressed as the Ahura Mazdao of the sun, and what Moses reverenced as ehjeh asher ehjeh—this had to appear in a single human being, in Jesus of Nazareth, in physically circumscribed humanness. This consummation was fore-ordained. But to enable so exalted a being to dwell in such a man as Jesus of Nazareth, many circumstances had to contribute. For one thing, Jesus of Nazareth Himself had to have arrived at an exalted level. Not every man could be the vehicle of such a being that came into the world as described. Now, we who have made contact with spiritual science know that there is reincarnation, so we must realize that Jesus of Nazareth—not the Christ—had experienced many incarnations and that He had passed through the most manifold stages in His previous incarnations before He could become Jesus of Nazareth.

What this means is that Jesus of Nazareth had Himself to become a high initiate before He could become the Christ bearer. Now, when a lofty initiate is born, how do such a birth and the subsequent life differ from the birth and life of an ordinary man? In a general way it can be assumed that when a man is born he bears the characteristics, at least approximately, of what derives from a previous incarnation. But that is not the case with an initiate. The initiate could not be a leader of mankind if he bore within him only what wholly corresponds with his outer self, for that he must build up according to the conditions of his external environment. When an initiate is born there must enter his body a lofty soul that in past times has had mighty experiences in the world. That is why legend so often tells of the strange births of initiates.

As to why and how this is so, we have already touched upon the answer to the first of these questions. It is because a comprehensive ego that had already passed through significant experiences in the past now unites with a body, but this body is at first unable to receive what seeks to incarnate in it as spiritual nature. For this reason it is necessary, in the case of a lofty being incarnating as a high initiate in a perishable human being, that the reincarnating ego should from the start envelop the physical form more intensely than in the case of other men. While in the ordinary human being the physical form resembles and adapts itself soon after birth to the spiritual form, or human aura, the human aura of a reborn initiate is luminous at birth. It is the spiritual part that here indicates the presence of more than can be seen in the ordinary sense. What does this indicate? That not only has a child been born in the physical world, but that something has occurred in the spiritual world. The stories that attach to the birth of all reincarnating initiates express the idea, not only is a child born: something is born in the spirit as well, something that cannot be encompassed by what is born down below.

But who can discern this? Only one who himself has a clairvoyant eye for the spiritual world. Hence we are told that in the birth of Buddha an initiate recognized an event differing from an ordinary birth; and hence also it is related of Jesus of Nazareth that His coming was to be foretold by the Baptist. All who have insight into the spiritual world know that the initiate must come and be reborn; and they know that this is an event in the spiritual world. The Three Kings from the East who came to offer sacrifice at the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, these knew it, too. And the same truth is indicated when the initiated Priest of the Temple says:

Now I can die gladly, since mine eyes have beheld the One Who will be the salvation of mankind.

Clearly, then, we must here differentiate accurately. We have an exalted initiate reborn as Jesus of Nazareth, of Whose birth it must be said that a child was born; but with this Child there appeared something that will not be encompassed by His physical body. This discloses at the same time something in this Jesus of Nazareth that has significance in the spiritual world, something that will gradually develop this body upward to the point at which it will be fit to receive this spirit. And when this was fulfilled, we have the event in which the Baptist approaches Jesus of Nazareth, and a loftier spirit descends and unites with this Jesus of Nazareth: the Christ enters Jesus of Nazareth. And then the Baptist, the Forerunner of Christ Jesus, could well say: I came into the world. It was I who prepared the way for a loftier one. With the words of my mouth I proclaimed the coming of the Kingdom of God, the Realm of the Heavens, and I exhorted men to change their hearts. I came among men, and it was vouchsafed me to bring them tidings of a special impulse that is to come to mankind. As in the springtime the sun mounts higher to announce the budding of something new, so did I appear to bring tidings of what is burgeoning in mankind as the reborn ego of humanity.

Then, when the human principle had reached its height in Jesus of Nazareth, His human body having become an expression of His spirit, He was ripe to receive within Himself the Christ at the Baptism by John. The body of Jesus of Nazareth had unfolded like the bright sun on St. John's Day in June. That had been foretold. Then the spirit was to be born out of the darkness, just as the sun steadily gains in strength and power up to St. John's Day, and then begins to decline. That was what the Baptist had to proclaim. He had to continue to bear witness until—pointing to the sun's ever-increasing splendor—he could say, He of Whom the old Prophets told, He Who in the spiritual realms has been called the Son of the Spiritual Realms, He has appeared.—Up to this point John the Baptist was active. But then—when the days become shorter and darkness begins to gain the upper hand—then the inner spiritual light is to shine as a result of right preparation, is to become ever brighter as the Christ shines in Jesus of Nazareth.

That is the way John the Baptist saw the approach of Jesus of Nazareth; and he felt the growth of Jesus of Nazareth as his own diminution and as the increase in the power of the sun. From now on I shall wane, he said, even as the sun wanes after St. John's Day. But He will wax—He the spiritual sun—and shine out of the darkness.—Thus was the Christ heralded; and thus began the rebirth of the ego of mankind, upon which depends the rebirth of every individual higher human ego.

This characterizes the most important event in the development of the individual human being: the rebirth of what can proceed from the ordinary ego as the immortal principle. It is linked with the greatest event, the Christ event, to which the next lectures will be devoted.

• 1. St. John I, 3 and 4.—Luther's translation differs here from the King James Version: "it" (the Word) remains the subject throughout the passage, not "he" (God), as in the English. That this is the correct translation is specifically stated by Dr. Steiner in the first lecture of his other cycle on the St. John Gospel (Basel, November 16, 1907), and it is therefore incorporated in this translation.

Yesterday I spoke to you about initiation in the sense of the Rosicrucian spiritual world current, about the stages of knowledge, of feeling, of will impulses, of activities that a person has to undergo if they want to move up the path of knowledge and towards higher levels of humanity. Today let us try to deal with a chapter of this Rosicrucian theosophy ourselves. Not that this Rosicrucian wisdom is anything but the common spiritual wisdom of all peoples and times, as must be emphasized again and again. It is only adapted to our modern way of thinking, to the modern temporal need. It is born out of the realization that our epoch needs a special way of speaking in order to proclaim the eternal truths of all times, so that they can live themselves into the very configuration of today's humanity in Europe and America.

It is perhaps a very distant chapter that is chosen here, yet it is one of the most essential. For nothing shows us man's origin and goal as much as the realization of this chapter and at the same time points us to the forces that we are to unfold in ourselves in order to become co-workers in the service of human evolution. We cannot look at the great evolution of the cosmos any other way than by starting with the human being and his or her essence. And I will say nothing other than what is a common theosophical and Rosicrucian wisdom, what anyone would say who speaks from these sources. There is no contradiction. Many already know what I would like to say here again.

We distinguish seven members of human nature. This morning we heard that one could also take another number as a basis: three times three. It does not matter that I will combine the three middle members into one name today, and if you summarize these three members under what I will call the fourth today, then the explanations will be completely consistent.

We divide the human being in such a way that we say that the human being first has his physical body; it is what hands can touch and eyes can see, what the human being has in common with all of nature and what is subject to physical and chemical laws. The second is the so-called etheric or life body. It is that which the chemical and physical forces and substances call to life and which leaves the connection of physical and chemical substances in death. Occultism says: The human physical body is such a combination of substances and forces that it cannot exist as a physical body by itself; only by having an etheric body inserted into it and as long as it is inserted, it is protected from the disintegration of physical substances and forces. In the moment when the etheric body leaves the physical forces, death occurs, the physical body is a corpse. Therefore, it is also said that the etheric body is what protects us from death at every moment. In every moment, there is a great struggle in the etheric body against that which would otherwise cause our chemical substances to disintegrate. The third link is the carrier of pleasure and suffering, joy and pain, feelings and emotions, which we call the astral body. It is the link of the human being that man has in common with animals, just as he has the ether body in common with the plant and animal world and the mineral body with the whole outer world. The name astral body has been in use since the earliest times. There is no more appropriate name for this part of the human being than astral body. And there is perhaps no better definition of why this body is called the astral body than the one given by the great theosophist Paracelsus. Just as the etheric body leaves the physical body at death, so the astral body leaves the etheric body some time after death. But the astral body also leaves the physical and etheric bodies every night. Then it is outside of us. Where is it then?

Paracelsus rightly asks: Where is it, and what does it do during the night? Does it rest, does it have a task? Yes, it has a task. Although those who do not have clairvoyant powers cannot see into the activity of the astral body during the night. But everyone feels the consequences of this activity. They all go to bed tired in the evening. The fatigue is an expression of disharmony in the composition of our physical and etheric bodies. It must arise if the astral body does not have the power to bring harmony into the other two, the physical and etheric bodies. And as man is today, such disharmony must necessarily arise during the waking hours of the day, were our physical and etheric bodies merely under the control of the astral body - how the forces are to be joined together - then there would always be harmony in our etheric and physical bodies. But as it is, not only does the astral body live in the physical body, but at the level of consciousness that humanity has reached on the Earth, the whole environment of physical, sensually perceptible objects has an effect on the human being. Impressions from the eye and ear and the other senses flow into it from the outside. During the waking hours, disharmony will inevitably arise in every person who has not yet reached a certain higher level of spiritual development. If this astral body could never dwell in any other place than in our physical and etheric bodies, it would itself become disordered. Then its power currents would not remain as they should be if a real etheric and physical body is to be formed. During the day, the inner harmony of the astral body is disturbed, and the expression of this disorder is fatigue. The moment you feel tired, the inner disharmony is there. Where is the astral body during the night?

Paracelsus rightly said: When the lines of force that connect it to the physical body during the day begin to loosen, it then comes into contact with the entire harmonious system of forces that flows through the starry sky. At the moment when a person falls asleep, he rests in the harmony of the spheres, and from there he brings the forces to balance what has been used during the day. Thus, the astral body rests during the night in the world of the stars; that is its true home. And when it returns, it brings with it the powers of the stars to help remove the substances that cause fatigue. That is why sleep is a good doctor, because order and harmony can then be restored when the astral body rests again for some time in the world that contains the laws for the starry sky, and these are the laws for the spiritual world in general. If a person does not sleep, their health will be undermined because the astral body has not rested in the starry world for a while. That is why the astral body has been given this name. In the past, names were not given that did not correspond to the essence of the matter. And before we correct occult names and designations, we must first think about the name, why it was given. Today, when a comet or a minor planet is discovered, one opens a mythology encyclopedia and gives the star a name. The principle of naming in spiritual times was to let the essence of the thing itself resonate in a name: it sounded in the name of the connection with the world.

In the fourth aspect of his being, man has something that makes him the crowning of earthly creation of planetary existence. Follow me for a short time in a subtle observation. In the whole range of the German language, there is a name - and in other languages it is similar - that is fundamentally different from all other names. Each of you can say “table” to the table, “picture” to the picture, and so on. But there is one name which we cannot use in the same sense, and that is the name I. None of them can say “I” to another. Each one is a “you” to every other, and you are a “you” to everyone else. If this name is to describe ourselves, no sound in the external world can embody it; it must resound from within ourselves. This has been felt at all times by those religions that had an impulse from the secret teaching. In the secret teaching, therefore, one says the name for the being, and in the Hebrew secret teaching, the unpronounceable name of God, the name of Yahweh, is nothing other than the name for the ego. In truth, the name of Yahweh is the name for that which begins to hold a monologue in the soul - to live in its self. It was felt that in those worldviews and religions that were built on spiritual foundations, one said: In the I, in the innermost part of the soul, God begins to speak. It is a beginning, but it must be made, and this I - this single central point - is what makes up the most essential distinguishing feature of man from all the beings that surround us on this planet. Sensible people have always felt this. Jean Paul tells us how, as a very young child, he stood in the courtyard of his parents' house and he knew exactly how he first felt: you are a self-being! And he adds that there is no possibility of error and that others have added something to this memory. Because at that time, says Jean Paul, I looked into the hidden holy of holies of my inner being; at that time I knew that I was immortal because I had found the connection with God.

If we now go outwards from the I, we come to the point where we can consider the mutual relationships of the human being. Human evolution consists in the I working on the three bodies, within which it appears like the core of a fruit in its shell. And how does this I work?

If we want to understand this, we must remember primitive peoples. Take a people who today stands at a lower level of culture. You see that this people is ruled by its feelings and instincts, by drives and passions, much like the animal: they devour each other. Now compare this savage with the members of a more highly developed culture, with a Francis of Assisi. What is the difference between the two forms of development?

If we want to answer this question, we must be aware that the human being – through the many incarnations through which he develops – does his work from his I: first on the astral body, then on the etheric body and then also on the physical body. This is human development: this emanation of the I into the three bodies. The savage follows all the instincts and passions that live in him. The cultured man says to himself, “I must not follow certain instincts”; he denies himself certain instincts and passions. The still higher idealist not only denies himself, but out of himself generates ideals that add something new to what the instincts of the astral body constitute at a primitive level of culture. Thus, in the clairvoyant view, we see the astral body as consisting of two parts: what was originally in it and then what the ego itself has made of it. If you look at a highly developed idealist, this part [it is drawn] is larger than in others due to the work of the ego, and in a person like Francis of Assisi you can see how little is left of what the person called his own when he embarked on his first incarnation. In Theosophy, this practically transformed part of the human astral body, over which man has gained control, is called the German word “Geistselbst”, which is otherwise referred to in Theosophical literature as “Manas”; it is a transformed part of the astral body.

But the human being also works on his etheric body from his I. What does it mean to work on the etheric body? Let us make this clear with an example. You can do this in your own development. Remember what you knew as a seven-year-old child in terms of concepts and ideas, and what you know today, what you have learned and changed in your imaginative life. You will find a great deal. But now compare what you have learned with what has changed in other things that are also in you, in temperament, memory, certain basic characteristics of human nature. If you were hot-tempered as an eight-year-old child, this hot temper will still show through at times. If your temperament was melancholy, then perhaps this coloring will remain throughout your life. So that we can say comparatively: what a person actually learns moves forward like the minute hand of a clock; but what a person's basic inclinations are, that moves forward more slowly, like the hour hand. And as slowly as the hour hand of a clock, the etheric body transforms. The etheric body is denser than the astral body; therefore, the work of the ego on the etheric body is essentially more difficult than the work on the astral body. And only when the ego not only works on its intellectual ideas but begins to transform its temperament, then this is accompanied by a transformation of its etheric body. For many, this is only possible during the transition from one incarnation to another. But that is precisely the essence of occult training: everything you can learn is only preparation for occult training, and you have done more if you have tried to get rid of any basic mood, for example, if you have transformed your melancholy temperament into a harmonious one. The moment we begin to change not only our feelings and impulses but our fundamental nature, we begin to work on the etheric body. The part of the human etheric body that has been reshaped by the ego in this way is in turn a new link in human nature. Today, very few people can consciously bring about this transformation of the etheric body, but only those who are in occult training. For example, one of the laws of the Pythagorean school was that the astral body must first be completely purified before work on the etheric body could begin. But one must distinguish between conscious and unconscious schooling of the etheric body. The part that is permeated by the work of the ego is called the “life spirit” in the German language; it is the same in its fundamental essence as what is called “buddhi” in theosophical literature.

The third and most significant thing is when the human being not only begins to become master over the forces of his etheric body, but when he begins to work down into the physical body. It might seem as though the work of the I on the physical body is the basest; but it is in fact the highest. And the work on the physical body is more difficult than the work on the etheric body. When a person consciously begins to work on mastering the forces that work in the physical body through the I, then something else occurs to him. What works in the physical body are the same forces that work in the cosmos. When a person learns to control the forces of his blood and his breathing, he learns the magic of the cosmos. Then what he can do flows out of his physical body and into the universe, and that is a real, true work that can only begin when a person has reached a certain level of work on the etheric body. And because we begin with the regulation of our neighbor, with the regulation of breathing, the name breathing is also taken from 'Atma'. The more a person transforms in his inner physical nature, the more there is of the 'spirit man', of 'Atma'; there is a part of spirit matter in him that has been transformed.

This is not an ascetic escape from the physical world; rather, we have the task of entering the physical world in order to transform it into a spiritual one. That is the great law of redemption. This physical body is a part of the spiritual body that has become what it has become so that we could reach our present stage of development. We now have the task of spiritualizing this physical body again, of redeeming it. This principle lies behind the word redemption. There you have the mutual relationship of the seven members of human nature, as one must have them if one wants to utilize them in practical theosophical work.

Now let us consider the evolution of man. A materialist, who, being acquainted only with the physical body, has only an abstract idea of the evolution of man. But he who realizes how complicated man is, also sees how complicated the evolution of man is. Which of these four members is the oldest and most perfect? Some may be surprised to hear that the oldest and most perfect link in the human being is the physical one; it is the one that took the longest time to develop. The etheric body is younger, and the astral body is even younger. The baby is the I. It is only unfair to call the physical body an imperfect part of the human being. Just consider, for example, the structure of the thigh bone: a wonderful work of art. The beams are laid with such wisdom that no human engineering could achieve it, and they are laid in such a way that the upper body is supported with the least expenditure of energy. Let us now move from this limb to the construction of the human heart. Anyone who delves into what our physiologists teach us about the heart and also about the other organs knows that these limbs are so wisely constructed that no human wisdom can even penetrate these physical forms. The physical body would be good for all people. But now let us look at the astral body, which it does throughout life. Through the activity of its astral body, man continually introduces heart poisons to the physical body, for example to the heart; but the heart is so wisely constructed that it can withstand the attacks of the astral body for quite some time. Only in the future will the astral body be found just as wise as the physical body is today. The physical body is the oldest part of the human nature, which required the longest time to evolve. The parts of the human nature are, however, connected with the whole environment. Just as a single finger can only exist if it is a part of the whole hand, so man is only conceivable in connection with the whole cosmos. If you lift him a few miles above the earth, then he will experience the same fate as the finger if you cut it off. And just because man can walk around on the earth, this dependence is not admitted.

Look back at times long past! And when you look ahead to future times, you see that the shape of its limbs is constantly changing. But they can only change if everything around the person changes. Just because man, despite his advanced science, looks back over such a short span of time, he believes that things have always been as they are. But anyone who looks further knows that our planet must change from form to form if we ourselves want to change. But it is not enough just for the changes that the earth itself is undergoing to happen, but in a certain respect man was already there before the earth could be called “earth” in the cosmos. As man progresses in the cosmos, so do the planets or the beings that inhabit them. Our planet is the reincarnation of another planetary state, and we can trace three preceding incarnations of our Earth and look forward to three subsequent ones. What we call planetary evolution is nothing more than an analogy to our human evolution. The three preceding planetary states through which our Earth had to pass are called in Rosicrucian terms Saturn, Sun, Moon, so that we have to imagine: the Earth was, before it became Earth, Moon, and before it became Moon, it was Sun, and before the Sun it was Saturn; and the later states, which we are looking at, are called Jupiter, Venus, Vulcan. What does it mean that the Earth has passed through these states?

We are today in the fourth incarnation of our own planet, and this is intimately connected with human evolution. On the first planetary form - that is, on Saturn - the first structures of the human physical body were already present. At that time, however, the human physical body was such during the entire Saturn development that no independent etheric body was yet incorporated into it. Through the stages of the sun and moon, down to the stage of the earth, this physical body became more and more perfect, so that we can say: the physical human body today stands on the fourth stage of its development, it stands today at the point of the earth's development. It was only in the second incarnation of our earth that an independent ether body was incorporated into this physical body. The physical body became more perfect, as it were, through the working of an etheric body within it. Then the third reincarnation of the earth — the moon — led to the incorporation of the astral body into the two others, so that the inhabitant of the moon, the ancestor of today's earth man, consisted of three bodies — the physical, the etheric and the astral body. And the meaning of evolution on Earth is this: to integrate the I into these three members, the worker, who then begins to transform what has come to him from the past. Thus we see that the physical body is older than the others, and the I is only at the first stage of its development. One can even know from the configuration of the physical body what comes from the state of Saturn in us. The highest part of our physical body is the sensory organs, and the germ of our sensory organs was laid on Saturn. And so limb by limb was built up, becoming more and more perfect in stages with the other limbs of human nature.

What is called Saturn and Sun here is not the present-day Sun and Saturn, but rather denotes phases of development. Nevertheless, what our Earth has gone through in its development is related to present-day Saturn. Present-day Saturn is to the Earth as a boy is to an old man. The same conditions that Saturn is going through today are the same conditions that our Earth went through in the past. This is why in real occultism we do not speak of Saturn, the Sun and so on, but of a Saturn, a Sun and so on. Our Earth is an older Saturn.

Now we must still be clear about the meaning of this whole development. If we look back to that Saturn development, where man was still without etheric body, astral body and I - insofar as they were independent beings -, we get the best difference of those ancient conditions from today's by referring to the “consciousness”. A state of consciousness is connected with every state of development. There are seven states of consciousness. The present human being is in the fourth; no being can have this state that cannot say “I” to itself. Therefore, the human being developed the form of consciousness that he now has only on earth. The purpose of evolution on Earth is to develop the waking consciousness. On the earlier planetary conditions, there were only imperfect states of consciousness for humans. On Saturn, the human ancestor in his primitive form had a consciousness like that of minerals, or rather: the human physical ancestor is that consciousness. We can hardly find words for it easily; we can only hint at it. This consciousness is a very, very dim, deep trance-like, sleepy consciousness, dull and dusky, but which in a way had an advantage: it encompasses a much larger scope, is much more universal; a mineral consciousness knows of the whole solar system.

Then this consciousness was narrowed down to that of the plant. But it is now a somewhat brighter consciousness than that of the mineral. Man was in this consciousness when the earth was in the sun. The third form of consciousness is pictorial consciousness, also called primary psychic consciousness. It differs from the present one in that it works in images, but in such a way that it conveys the psychic of the other. Imagine a being - and the human ancestor on the moon was like that - that does not yet have sensory consciousness and can cover objects with colors when it wakes up: you have a last remnant of such consciousness in the dream world. The dream world is not the astral consciousness. The present dream consciousness is to the moon consciousness what some atrophied limb is to the form it was in when it still had its tasks in the human being; for example, certain muscles that could move the ears have lost their purpose in the human being. The present-day world of dreams has remained as a vestige of the astral pictorial consciousness of the moon; that is why it also works in the same way as the astral imaginative consciousness works. Imagine someone dreaming that he is catching a tree frog. He sees it jump and grabs it. Then the sleeper wakes up and sees that he had the corner of the bed cover in his hand. Or another dream that really happened. A farmer's wife dreams that she is going to church. She listens devoutly. Then the pastor moves his arms violently and, lo and behold, he gets wings. It was not too strange for the pious farmer's wife that a pastor who preaches from heaven occasionally gets wings too. But what happens? The pastor begins to crow loudly in the pulpit. At the same moment, the farmer's wife wakes up and outside in the yard, the cock crows.

What has happened here, where a whole dramatic action is taking place? In the symbolic image, something is expressed that you would have perceived as an external object in the waking day consciousness. Something is formed symbolically that is not present in this way. But if you retain the symbol in form – think that people use it to have perceptions of the real psychic world, then you have what I am talking about now. A symbolic consciousness that is true and real was the consciousness of the moon. Imagine a human being without our present-day object-consciousness. He approached another being. He does not see the limited form in this being, but a color formation appears before him. When there is sympathy, he sees a very definite color, and likewise when there is antipathy. This is something other than color today: it is the expression of sympathy or antipathy for the other being. And someone who has moon consciousness does what corresponds to moon consciousness: he bases his actions on the symbols. If he perceives a certain color, he knows that something hostile is happening, and he will withdraw.

A later stage of development is that which develops under the influence of the ego, where consciousness no longer perceives the psychic phenomenon, but where what has arisen as a coloration is superimposed over the objects. The colors that you see spread over the objects today are the old colors that once arose as psychic phenomena.

If modern man had, in addition to today's consciousness, that of the moon, so that he fully perceives the psychic world as well as the physical, he would have expanded the present consciousness into the imaginative one. A higher form would be if he had added to this the consciousness that plants have today and that humans had dimly and dully during their solar incarnation. And the highest form would be where man would also have the consciousness that the mineral has today, which in turn would enable him to merge into the universal cosmos. This last consciousness hovers before us as the ideal of man, and it is called spiritual consciousness.

The purpose of planetary evolution is therefore that states of consciousness succeed one another; but for this to happen, the planetary arena must also change completely each time. However, we only understand the complete evolution if we know that within each planetary state, seven stages must be traversed. Thus Saturn, Sun, Moon and now Earth had to cover seven stages. These are called “rounds” in Theosophy, “realms” in Christian esotericism. Each of the planets that the Earth passes through has seven smaller cycles; for each consciousness, if it is to ascend, has degrees, from the most imperfect to the most perfect. They are also called states of life. Each of these realms or states of life, however, must in turn pass through seven different states of revelation or seven states of form: arupa, rupa, astral, physical, plastic, intellectual, spiritual (archetypal).

Thus we have 7 times 7 times 7 = 343 states; they describe the 343 planetary incarnations in their entirety. The development of one state of consciousness encompasses 49 of these states. So you can see how we can glimpse into an enormous cosmic development.

When man still lived on the sun and had only developed his etheric and physical bodies, he was still a completely different being. One could not call him a plant, but in a certain figurative sense one could say that he was then in the plant existence. In relation to his position on earth, he was turned around: what today projects freely into the ether, the head, was then directed towards the center of the earth. The development of consciousness is simultaneously linked with the reversal of the entire human form. This is why the sun man is also called a man directed towards the center of the earth, and in the same sense the man of the moon age is called an orbiting man. If one had drawn a tangent to the moon's surface... [gap in the transcript]. And the earth man is the reverse of the sun man.

Thus everything moves forward. When we look back at lunar evolution, we must realize that what we call affects today could only develop on the moon as an astral impact. But at that time the I had not yet developed. Because the ego did not develop until the earth, the moon man did not yet feel pain as his individual pain; it was the pain of the moon. This physical-etheric-astral moon ancestor was not independent. Unindividual passions, affects and pains arose from this. For example, it was so on the moon — one may express it today, even if so few believe it — that at certain seasons of the year the whole world, all living beings, began to scream, to utter sounds, surrounded by an astral body; this was connected with a certain development in animal life. A vestige of this can still be seen in the mating call in the sexual life of certain animals, where cries are associated with it at certain times.

Now the law of evolution is such that in later states certain earlier ones are always repeated. Thus the earth had to go through the repetition of the Saturn, Sun and Moon existence. Now the earth is in its most essential existence. You can get an idea of what was called the sun here if you stir all the beings that are on the sun, moon and earth today into a pulp; all of this once existed on the sun. During the solar age, the sun, moon and earth were one body. Then the sun had developed into the moon's existence and only then were the sun and moon divided. And during the repetition on earth, first the sun and then the moon separated again, and the actual becoming-ego of the human being is linked to the separation of the moon. The moon contains the forces that prevent the other parts of the human being from becoming the carrier of an ego. I can only suggest that the point in time that occurred for our earth's development in the ancient Lemurian period could only occur because first the sun broke away and then the moon. When the earth had become independent, it could only then bring forth the human form from which today's human being has developed.

Thus, human evolution is most intimately connected with cosmic evolution. If you look back to the ancient Atlantean times, the predecessor of our present time, when man lived on Atlantis – which science has at least already discovered for the animal world – you have the human ancestor who does not yet possess the same consciousness as the human being of today, who can calculate and manufacture industrial objects. But another faculty was highly developed. The Atlantean man had an excellent memory, of which one can no longer really imagine today. Something else was connected with this. You would find that physically, too, this old Atlantis differs quite considerably from the configuration of the earth today. What we call air and water today was not yet there. All the air was filled with a fine water vapor. The water was still dissolved. That is why the old German saga has preserved the name 'Nifelheim'. It means that people in those days lived in a kind of water-laden air, and only in such an air could the image consciousness of man at that time live. The myths and legends of Germanic mythology arose out of this consciousness. Anyone who really knows the people knows that they do not create poetry as today's scholarship claims. The myths and legends were the remnants of an ancient ethereal pictorial consciousness, the expression of an ancient, dim clairvoyance, and people have only forgotten their origin after they have advanced to today's bright day consciousness.

So you can see how the development of mankind is tied to the cosmos. On a round earth, where the air is saturated with water, man perceives the world quite differently. For the Atlanteans, the sound of the wind was a language they understood. There were no commandments or laws in those days. There were still times when, if man wanted to know how he should behave, he went out and listened to the spring as it trickled: that told him something. And when he went out to listen, he listened to a fundamental and underlying tone that was present like a musical keynote that the Atlantean understood. It is a simple, multi-syllabic syllable; it lived in the entire environment of the Atlantean; it went through everything, and the Atlantean said to himself: “In this fundamental tone, the god speaks to me.” And when he wanted to address his prayer to his God, it was in this fundamental tone. The wisdom of the ancient Atlanteans had to change into our own in order for man to progress. But in the process of development we will again have to gain the consciousness of the Atlanteans, in addition to our own. Sometimes we have to make the sacrifice that the old must lie dormant for a time.

Thus the evolution of man is connected with the evolution of the cosmos. Just think how far man has strayed from the sources of wisdom that lie in the world itself! How far he has strayed from direct contact with nature! But what we have lost we shall regain in what we have conquered. This consciousness that we have arises from the consciousness of the individual, concrete facts that in the Rosicrucian method were designated as the “wisdom of the world”. It permeates the whole life of man. If we imbibe it, we feel what the teacher wanted, to whom the name “Rosenkreutz” is linked, who, as a leading individuality, guides and directs the spiritual movement through the centuries.

It seems far-removed when we consider the human being in the context of the whole world; but if it penetrates our hearts, it becomes a force within us that will bless us if we want to work on the transformation and transformation of the cosmos. One has the duty to integrate oneself into the cosmos. Just as a single stone does not seek to dispense itself from the house, so man must not dispense himself from the Cosmos. One must recognize that it must be one's duty to serve within the great evolution of the world. Then that which is eternal in us will integrate itself into the world existence. There will be a reflection of it in our most everyday life, so that man can express this wisdom in every movement of his hand. Then the Cosmos will truly partake of the human being, for everything is in the process of transformation. Everything must be transformed again through beings who are placed in the movement of the world. If we work in this way, we will feel vividly how true it is. And truth will be the impulse for our actions. Thus a beautiful saying of a highly inspired poet will be fulfilled:

Time is a blooming meadow,
Nature is one great living being,
And everything is fruit, and everything is seed!

Last time an imagination was placed before our soul that liberated forces that can be of help to us on our occult path. Today two inspiring thoughts shall appear before your soul that can be effective in the same way. The essential thing about such thoughts and questions is that we let them rest in our soul for awhile, that we let them speak to us without doing much with them.

People have occupied themselves with these thoughts a great deal, but in a quite different way, so that they've led men to impossible commentaries and disputes. Grasped esoterically, they're of help to occult pupils. The first of these inspiring thoughts is the “motherless human being” who's called Adam in Genesis. Everything that comes to meet us in the way of a human being is unthinkable if he's not born from a mother. Adam is the only motherless human being; only father forces were active in him. Of course we mustn't place him before our soul as a sensorial, physical man, or when Yahweh created the first earth man in his etheric body present physical conditions didn't exit on our earth planet; and namely he created him out of the earth-planet's substances, as the Bible indicates. These substances or earth forces are still present in every man today, so that we can say: Yahweh is the father of us all, and the planet is our mother.

So father forces continue to work in men today; they are an earth-bound, planetary force. They work in everything that's on earth, and so also in men. For after the conception of a child, the mother's forces work on it, but so do the father forces; they go into the child from the earth via the father and form the upbuilding forces there that are most strongly active up to age 33.

Let's make it clear to ourselves: what happens at the birth of a new human being? The mother bears one part in her, but the other part is super-sensible—invisible and is connected with the father. Place yourself meditatively into this thought of a motherless human being, try to grasp it purely spiritually, and place a second picture beside it: that of the fatherless Christ.

Whereas planetary forces coming from the father are mainly active until the Mystery of Golgotha, forces of the cosmos, mother forces are added since then by Christ Jesus. We know that this most important of all earth events falls in the fourth cultural age of the post-Atlantean epoch. This was preceded by the Egyptian age in which the perfected Isis culture was cultivated in the Egyptian mysteries. Egyptians revered the nature forces that come to expression in all minerals, animals and plants in the figure of Isis. But an Egyptian soul looked at man sorrowfully and told himself that he wasn't aware of these nature forces in him, and that's why he thought that Isis was veiled. He said that no mortal was allowed to lift her veil to press towards her. What does this mean? Nothing else than that the Goddess lives in the astral world and not in the physical one, and that only someone who's gone through the portal of death can know her; no living person could lift her veil. That is, the effect of the Isis forces was denied to live people. And what were these Isis forces? They were pure mother forces that a man could only be given in the spiritual world before the Mystery of Golgotha, that is, when he had gone through the portal of death.

People in the Egyptian mysteries knew about this. Over Isis' picture were the words: I am the I am, that I was and that I will be—the same Eyeh asher eyeh that spoke to Moses out of the burning bush. An Egyptian could only get a presentiment of the Mystery of Golgotha, through which pure mother forces would also act upon living men. Pure mother forces—out of the cosmos—can only work in men on earth now because Christ Jesus, the fatherless human being, has completely connected himself with the earth after he went through the portal of death.

Let our modern scholars laugh when they look at the Egyptians' worship of animals. It can only fill us with the deepest reverence, for we know that what's concealed behind it is the veneration of these nature forces that were locked up for men. We look at the great wisdom that underlies all these mysteries with great wonder.

Let's ask ourselves how these two forces are active in men. The father force that's transmitted from the earth to a child via his father works in an upbuilding and strengthening way until age 33. Although the mother force that strives downwards is already at work in man, the father forces are stronger up to this time. If only the forces striving downward, Christ forces, would rule a man, he wouldn't incarnate on earth. Whereas if only the forces that strive up, the planetary ones, would rule him he would always live on earth; then there would be no death.

The sacred center of forces that was Isis in the Egyptian mysteries is the Maria-Sophia in John's Gospel in Christianity. It was only the union of ascending and descending forces that took place in the Mystery of Golgotha that enabled a man to also feel the activity of mother forces between birth and death. Christ Jesus couldn't get older than 33. From an occultist's standpoint, a man is only carrying his body with him like a corpse by the time he's 33. Of course, the effect of the forces and their change doesn't appear all at once, but happens gradually. The mother and father forces are both in man from the beginning, except that the upbuilding earth forces predominate. During the father forces period, the life we lead is conditioned by our preceding life. But from the time when the dying mother forces predominate, we create karma for the next life through this spiritual force. The father or upbuilding nature force works in us without our help, whereas to become aware of the effect of the mother force, we must strive and work in spiritual things ourselves. We must become aware of this sublime force, for it's the force that streams into us directly from Christ.

As so often before, we now get an inkling of the deep meaning in the Rosicrucian verse: We're born from the Gods—Ex Deo nascimur. The Adam force of the motherless man works on the physical body in an upbuilding and preserving way. Whereas what's working since the Mystery of Golgotha is the fatherless man, Christ Jesus, the dying force, the force that leads to the dying of the physical body here on earth and that awakens spiritual life if we devote ourselves to it consciously. In Christ we die, that is, die with all of our physical concepts and the lower ego that was built up for us while the Adam forces were active. And then we'll really experience the last line of the Rosicrucian verse: We're born again in the Holy Spirit.