The Rudolf Steiner Archive

[The first part of the text is missing.]

When the selfless stream in two cyclic outpourings returns to its starting point and matter dissolves again, nothing has happened except that it has been enriched as it returns to its origin. It is only by taking in and overcoming the selfish stream that the selfless stream will develop such powerfully vibrant strength that it will have to go beyond itself, that is, beyond the cosmic circle which is the first encounter of the two streams. Something new will be born as selflessness disintegrates, a new region, called forth from it: para nirvana, which is negative matter, for, in contrast to matter, which is held within the cosmic circle due to attraction, it spreads outside it. It helps to understand the process if you think of a pendulum swing. The pendulum, swinging forward, will immediately swing back again, and unless there are obstacles in its way it will swing so hard that it goes beyond its starting point, just as a cart rolling forward cannot stop suddenly but must continue to roll on for some distance.

Following this preparation and the evolution of matter in stages, the material constituents for the creation of planets would be produced, but planetary life could not yet arise. Thus the Logos could not remain in para nirvana; it had to go back, and on the way back created the mahapara nirvana region. From here, the Logos had to make a sacrifice and begin the cycle through matter again, so that other life might arise—apart from itself but out of itself.

All life in manifold forms has arisen from oneness, the one Logos. The manifoldness lies hidden within it, as yet unseparated, undifferentiated. As the Logos becomes recognizable, perceiving itself as self, it emerges from the absolute, from the state of no differentiation, and creates the non-self, its mirror image, the second Logos. It ensouls this mirror reflection and gives it life; it is its third aspect, the third Logos.

The first Logos, the undifferentiated, with life and form in oneness within it, would thus have to be seen as the Father. Time began with its existence; it separated off its mirror reflection, the form, the feminine, which it filled with its life—the second Logos; and this ensoulment gave rise to the third Logos as Son, enlivened form. Thus all religions thought of their god in threefold form—as father, mother and son. Thus Uranos and Gaia, maternal earth; Chronos, time, came from her womb as son; Osiris, Isis and Horus, and so on.

The sacrifice of the Logos is: The spirit descends into matter, ensouls its mirror reflection, and with this the world of living forms is given its existence, with all of them living separate existences and going through the cycle of evolution, to be at one with the Logos again as individual entities that have reached the highest level of development, with the Logos receiving the riches of experience through them. If it had not poured itself out to give life to all these forms, there would be no independent growth and development. All movement, all genesis, would have no life of its own; it would merely move and stir according to the god’s directions.

Just as a human being is interested only in what is unknown to him, in the individual aspect of the human being, whilst anything he is able to calculate and understand leaves him indifferent, so the Logos, too, can take delight only in life that develops independently, life that comes forth from it, for which it sacrifices and gives itself.

There began the process of the evolution of matter, in which the qualities of the essence are reflected and effective, until these mirror reflections begin their own activity as separate forms, gradually making matter more and more spiritual and ensouled, until it will again be one with the entity atman, budhi, manas ... [gap]

First of all the cosmic foundation was created when the two qualities—selfishness and selflessness of the first Logos—came together. Through the second stream in this, guided by harmony, atomistic essence was created. This enveloped itself in mother substance, which was already extant, and the creation of atoms ensued.⁸⁴ These atoms, with their outer shells of varying density, step by step created the matter which could then serve the second Logos, the mirror reflection of the first, as a medium to give its mirror reflection over to it. The second Logos then flowed into this matter, which on its first, nirvana level was so subtle in consistency that it could flow through it without hindrance and without being changed. It then entered into the budhi region; here it was stopped, and even though selflessness is so strong in this region that it does not seek to hold the Logos fast in its realm, it does lay claim to it for its whole cosmos. Here the Logos’ sacrifice began; the voice, the sound came forth from it: it wanted to enliven matter with its spirit, that its thoughts should exist as independent forms. This realm, where divine thought became sound and voice,⁸⁵ in the budhi sphere, was the divine realm of the Middle Ages. Enveloped in budhi, the Logos then flowed into the mental region, which consisted of the arupa and rupa levels; the world of divine thought poured in, with exemplary ideas surging and mingling. Here the exemplary idea was created of what later would be separate entity, still resting in the Logos in the budhi sphere. This arupa level of the mental sphere was Plato’s world of ideas, the world of medieval rationality. At the arupa level these ideas assumed their first configurations. As divine genii they began their separate existence, floating and interpenetrating still, being entities of a like kind. It was the medieval realm of heaven.

These spiritual entities then entered into the astral sphere; here, enveloped in denser matter, sensation awoke from touch; only now did they feel themselves to be separate entities, sensing the separation. It was the elemental world. Following descent to the ether sphere this sensation was pushed from the inside to the outside, it swelled up, expanded and grew because of the etheric vegetative power, and was then enclosed by physical matter and crystallized, for here the selfish principle was still seeking with all its power to be set limits. Sentience is thus shut up in the mineral world, with the divine ideas sleeping in sublime peace in the virginal rock. Stone—a frozen divine thought: ‘The stones are dumb. I have put the eternal creator word into them that it may lie hidden; virginal and bashfully they hold it enclosed within them.’⁸⁶ This is an ancient druid saying, a prayer. In medieval times, ether and physical world or mineral world were called microcosm or small world.

Streaming in, the Logos surrounded itself with progressively denser vestments until it learned to define its limits firmly in rock. Stones are dumb, however, unable to reveal the eternal creator word. The rigid physical shell had to be cast off again; it remained behind in its world, whilst the crystalline forms in their soft ether vestment were able to expand, growing from the inside, that is, able to live. For life was growth; stone became plant. Ascending further the Logos also shed this ether vestment and came to the sphere of astral sensation. Here, activity developed through interaction between touch and sensory perception; sentient animal existence configured itself in a living way out of sentience and active will. It then gradually developed its organs of perception, with the impetus from outside acting inwards as sensation. The types evolved. On transition into the mental realm this sentience perceived itself, and the human level was reached with self-awareness.

From the cosmic point of view the Logos would descend most deeply into matter on streaming into the mineral world and begin its ascent on casting off the first outer vestment. From the human, anthroposophocentric point of view, which the ancient druids held, among others, the spirit resting in the chaste rock would be a sublime level of existence. Untainted by selfish intent, the stone obeys only the law of causality. For human beings on the lower mental level of development, which is where we are now, the rock would be a symbol for higher development. Going through lower kamic passions and errors we would develop to an etheric plant existence, living and growing from inside in a selflessly self-evident way, later to live in our causal body, untouched by anything external, resting in ourselves, pure spirit, just as the crystallized spirit rests enclosed in the rock.

The second Logos as mover and quickener of matter, in which it is enclosed, has only come as far as the lower mental sphere. The sentient animal has in self-awareness reached the human level of existence. It is able to relate the outside world to its individual nature, perceiving itself. Thus far, nature led and guided the human being; here it leaves him alone and in freedom. The further development of the human being now depends solely on his will. He must make himself the vessel, shedding the outer vestment of the lower mental sphere, so that he may now receive the inflow of the first Logos, just as a seed opens and waits for the impregnation without which it will not be able to grow and bear fruit.

The first Logos is the eternal principle in the universe, the unalterable law according to which the heavenly bodies move in their orbits; it is the basis of all things. Individual forms are subject to annihilation and change. We perceive colours through our ability to see that may look different to a different ability to see. The solid external object, held together in its specific form by its parts, may vanish at a particular degree of heat. Its parts may dissolve, but the law according to which it came into existence will remain; it is eternal. Thus the whole universe moves according to eternal laws. The first Logos flows in it, spread abroad. The human being must rise to it with his will. He must develop the selfless lower inner sense organ (antahkarana) in himself. In pure contemplation he must perceive this eternal, unalterable law in all that is transitory, must learn to distinguish between anything that is transitory, having assumed a particular form, and the core of his being, must take what is seen into himself as thought and guard it. He thus gradually comes to know the unreal nature of the world of phenomena. Thought becoming real to him, he gradually ascends to the arupa level, living in the world of pure thought. Multiplicity dissolves for him, merging into oneness, he feels at one with the universe. He will then have risen so high that he is able to receive the inflowing first Logos directly, as intuition. It was not a single soul, however, which thus came to the single individual. No, it was the All Soul, the soul of Plato and others in which he had a part, coming to be at one with them in his thoughts. Step by step the higher human being evolved from the kamic one.

At the turning point where the human being was thus meant to ascend in freedom, using his will, he needed guidance. In the third race of the fourth round, in the Lemurian age, the sons of manas therefore descended, letting themselves be incarnated to serve as guides. The simple process of counting, of understanding number, initiated mental development, thus separating the thinking human being from the animal which was merely sentient.

• 84. See ref. 68.
• 85. See also the two esoteric lessons given in Berlin on 18 December 1906 and Hamburg on 11 February 1907 in Aus den Inhalten der esoterischen Stunden GA 266/1. These concepts were also used in early Christian Gnosis, see G. R. S. Mead, note 81.
• 86. The formula may be found in Rudolf Steiner’s Rosicrucian and Moorish ritual. See Zur Geschichte und aus den Inhalten der erkenntniskultischen Abteilung der Esoterischen Schule 1904–1914, GA 265.

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

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

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

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

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

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

And elsewhere:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Eternal Feminine

Draws us upward

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Revelations of John seek to tell us what will happen in the course of time. The Apocalypse is written in pictures that express the appearance of the eternal spirit of the world. John, who beholds them, is to record these highest mysteries.

We are, to begin with, concerned with seven communities, represented symbolically by seven lamp stands and seven stars. The stars are the communities' geniuses watching over them.

In the second vision John sees the four apocalyptic living beings, the lion, the bull, the eagle, and Man, surrounding a throne where sits the spirit of God. Twenty-four elders are sitting around the throne of the spirit of God. “And I saw in the right hand of him who was seated on the throne a scroll written within and on the back, sealed with seven seals.” (Rev. 5:1) A lamb opens the book. The book contains, with the opening of the first four seals, what is expressed symbolically in the four apocalyptic riders; with the opening of the fifth seal the martyrs appear. These are those who have lifted themselves up to knowledge and life in the spirit. The opening of the sixth seal is followed by a horrible earthquake. With the seventh the revelation becomes audible: the seven trumpets sound forth. Mysterious pictures are then revealed; for example, a being whose legs are like two pillars, one foot stands in the sea, the other on the earth. “Then I saw another mighty angel coming down from heaven, wrapped in a cloud, with a rainbow over his head, and his face was like the sun, and his legs like pillars of fire. He had a little scroll open in his hand.” (Rev. 10:1,2) John must eat the secret of this book. Then a woman appears dressed with the sun, and the moon at her feet.

We read further: “And I saw a beast rising out of the sea, with ten horns and seven heads, with ten diadems upon its horns and a blasphemous name upon its heads.” (Rev. 13:1) The sound of trumpets accompanies this vision. The victory of good over evil is shown us in a picture. A beast is shown which, in a certain sense, is supposed to represent to us the principle of evil. It is the beast with seven heads and ten horns.

Then a beast appeared with two horns like a lamb, a beast that will appear in the future. “Then I saw another beast which rose out of the earth; it had two horns like a lamb and spoke like a dragon. It exercises all the authority of the first beast ... And it causes all, both small and great, both rich and poor, both free and slave to be marked on the right hand or the forehead so that no one can buy or sell unless he has the mark, that is, the name of the beast, or the number of its name. This calls for wisdom; let him who has understanding reckon the number of the beast, for it is a human number, its number is six hundred and sixty-six.” (Rev. 13: 11, 16–18)

It is further related how all enemies are eliminated: Michael conquers the dragon, the evil elements; then a new world arises. In the first Christian centuries this was prophesied and always understood as a reference to the future. Admittedly, the exegetes soon knew little more than that; but again and again, also in the Middle Ages, there were those who came forward to explain it. The year 1000 A.D. was often thought to be the time for the beast's appearance. The later the era the more senseless the explanations became, especially in the nineteenth century—when the ancient commentators were seen as children still able to believe in prophecy. The Apocalypse was seen as a historical document, as if everything described therein had already taken place when John wrote it. There were wars after the appearance of Christianity. John could have meant to express them with the red horse. The white horse would then symbolize the martyrs. Earthquakes such as John described with the opening of the sixth seal were also to be found at that time in Asia Minor. And neither was it difficult to prove the existence of locust plagues. But the passage concerning the two-horned beast was a real cross for the commentators. They had heard a rumor concerning the way numbers are to be read but it was dripping with occultism. How does one read in numbers? Every letter also signifies a number; the esotericists wrote in numbers when they wanted to hide something. One had to replace each number with the correct letter; one had to be able to read the letters and then also know what the resulting word meant. Who then, is the beast whose number is 666? The commentators thought it must be something in the past. One wrote the letters in Hebrew—wrongly—in the place of the numbers. That resulted in “Nero.” The horns were then related to the generals or the enemies of the Romans, for example, the Parthians. If one had written correctly with Hebrew letters (right to left) and then read correctly (also from right to left), the following would have resulted: 60, Samech, 6 Waw; 600 was written by esotericists as 200 + 400: 200 Resch + 400 Taw. Hence, we get 666, which in Hebrew letters spells “Sorat.” Sorat is also the corresponding word in Greek. Sorat has meant “Demon of the Sun” since ancient times. Every star has its good spirit—its intelligence—and its evil spirit—its demon. The adversary of the good powers of the sun is called Sorat. Christ was always the representative of the sun, namely, the intelligence of the Sun. Sorat is, then, the adversary of Christ Jesus. The sign for Sorat looks like this:

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

The sign of the intelligence of the Sun is the following:

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

This is, at the same time, the occult sign of the lamb. The lamb receives the book with the seven seals. “And between the throne and the four living creatures and among the elders, I saw a lamb standing, as though it had been slain, with seven horns and with seven eyes, which are the seven spirits of God sent out into all the earth.” (Rev. 5:6) The seven corners of the sign are called “horns.” But what do the “eyes” mean?

In occult schools the signs of the seven planets are written next to the seven eyes. The seven eyes signify nothing other than the seven planets, while the names of the planets designate the spirits incarnated in them as their intelligence. “Saturn” is the name of the soul of Saturn. The names of the planets come from the spirits of the seven planets found around the earth. These have an influence on human life. The lamb, Christ, contains all seven. Christ is the alpha and the omega; the seven planets are related to him like members to an entire body. The entwining of the lines of the sign portray in a wonderful way the interaction between the seven planets. From Saturn one rises to the Sun, from there down to the Moon, then on to Mars, Mercury, and so forth. The same thing is expressed in the names of the seven days of the week: Saturday, Saturn; Sunday, the Sun; Monday, the Moon; Tuesday, Mardi, Mars; Wednesday, Mercredi, Mercury; Thursday, Jeudi, Jupiter; Friday, Vendredi, Venus. Christ is the regent of all these world spheres; their actions constitute only part of his being; he unites them all. In Rosicrucian schools a lamb is often drawn as a sign for the intelligence of the Sun.

We determine time according to the movement of the heavenly bodies. Was the method for calculating time always the same as today's? Important things have changed. If we look into the past a little we see the Atlantean culture before the great flood on earth. The Lemurian age preceded it. If we go even further back into the past the earth, sun, and moon are still united in a single body. Back then time had to he determined differently than today. Day and night were entirely different. In Lemuria, conditions for the whole earth were the same as it is today at the north pole, half a year day and half a year night. When sun, moon, and earth were still one this unified mass moved through space. Already back then this movement was calculated by occult wisdom, just as today one calculates time according to the sun which moves across the sky through the signs of the zodiac. Eight hundred years before Christ the sun stood in the sign of Aries. Christ was originally worshiped under the sign of the cross, with a lamb lying at the foot of the cross. The cross with Christ upon it appeared only in the sixth century. Before that the Bull, Taurus, was worshiped when the sun stood in its sign. Earlier, it was the Twin, Gemini, that was worshiped in Persia. The team of goats that pulled Thor's chariot had the same significance. Before that the Crab, Cancer, was worshiped, and so forth.

Before the Lemurian age the sun, moon, and earth, united in one body, moved forward in terms of the zodiac. Time was measured following this movement. For this reason, the twelve signs of the zodiac are characterized as the heavenly clock and drawn as such.

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

A planet alternates between pralaya, a cosmic night, and manvantara, a cosmic day, just as we alternately pass through day and night. The planet passes through the signs of the zodiac during both pralaya and manvantara; for that reason the twelve signs of the zodiac are counted twice, just as we also count two times twelve to equal twenty-four hours. The hours symbolize the signs of the zodiac. The united sun, moon, and earth also moved through the cosmic days and nights according to the heavenly clock. Then their separation occurred. But at that time human beings were not the same as we are now. The soul only gradually descended, and only gradually did the human being develop from the generic into a specific individual being. If one had taken together the generic souls of human beings during the Lemurian and Atlantean times, then one would have perceived something very strange. The aura of the human being is constantly changing; like all astral beings it is in constant motion. The generic souls were reflected in the forms of animals, for example, in sphinxes and so forth. The ancient Atlantean and Lemurian generic souls were constantly changing but they expressed themselves again and again in a fourfold way. The fourfold nature of human generic souls is characterized by the four living creatures of the Apocalypse: lion, bull, eagle, and Man. The lower human being is portrayed through these four living creatures, and the lamb symbolized the perfected human being—that is, the fifth living creature.

Twice twelve heavenly constellations and four living creatures were once the regents of the world. Mighty cosmic powers ensouled the signs of the zodiac and the four living creatures. The twenty-four elders in the Apocalypse are the two times twelve stars on the world clock who were once rulers. The evolution of the human being can be portrayed in this drawing:

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

The lowest point designates clear day-consciousness. In pre-Lemurian times the human being had a dull clairvoyance. At that time human beings were closer to God than today. Then they acquired day consciousness. Human beings will take that consciousness with them in the course of their further evolution when they again approach God and become clairvoyant. Every point on the descending line corresponds to a point on the ascending line. If we could live backward we would see all the things that we will see in the future in a different, clairvoyant way. In the future we will again see the twelve spirits of the planets, and the sun, moon, and earth will once again be united, “... and the sun became black as sackcloth, the full moon became like blood ...” and so forth. (Rev. 6:12)

When the soul first descended from the womb of God it found a human animal on earth. These human animals looked grotesque; they needed to be transformed, overcome. In the future, there will also be such an animal to overcome. That is what the beast with the two horns would say to us.

Only someone who explains the Apocalypse within its entire context can understand it properly. The Apocalypse is a cosmic explanation of the world. The author was an initiate. He spoke of universal laws that apply to the world from the beginning to the decline, from the alpha to the omega.

We should allow the holy symbols given in the Apocalypse to work upon us. The sign of the Sun intelligence, for example, should not remain a mere sign for us; we should immerse ourselves in this sign until we feel it is no longer dead but flowing with life. The signs should be for us doors connecting the physical to the spiritual world. Then we have fulfilled our duty: to connect the physical and the spiritual worlds.

The age of human evolution that counts as the fourth and is characterized by the letter to the community in Thyatira began in the seventh or eighth century before Christ and lasted until the thirteenth or fourteenth century after Christ's birth. Only then do we begin to count our fifth age, the Germanic cultural epoch. The fourth age stands in the middle. In manifold ways it brought to expression the life between birth and death and developed a love for the material world. It had its greatest blossoming in the beauty of Greek art.

The soul would have had to experience a darkening if the event of Golgotha had not occurred, if the light coming forth from this event had not had its effect. After human beings came to full consciousness of their earthly I, when they had fully entered into the physical world, there appears, among other things, for the first time the concept of the “last will and testament” as a sign that the human will had become so important that it survived death. This first appears only in ancient Rome, not yet in Greece. Greece did not yet have the concept of the single man or woman standing firmly anchored on the earth. Only gradually did the feeling arise that the human being was not only a member of a community but an individual. Before this the concept of personality, the concept of the divine-spiritual anchored in the human being, would not have been understood. In ancient Greece they could only understand the divine-spiritual residing in the spiritual world. But Greek culture could, in the fullest sense, feel what it meant to know with human consciousness that the I lives. Nevertheless, it did not recognize that the I is divine. In the Orient it was proclaimed by Moses. For the Greeks, between birth and death it was not present as something spiritual. And there was a deeply tragic feeling that went through all the souls ... [gap in manuscript]. The Greeks said to themselves that the human being has descended from the divine spiritual world. But they did not know that human beings could work themselves back up into that world again, that they could return in the future to the spiritual world.

This is expressed in the myth of Prometheus;¹ it is expressed so tragically in the drama of Aeschylus² when Io, who has become insane, appears to Prometheus. Io represents the old clairvoyant consciousness that, in this fourth epoch, could no longer appear in normal states of consciousness but only in a state of madness. Science in the modern sense did not yet exist in the earliest times of our culture. Only gradually did the human being become a seeker in that science which can independently research the external world independently. For this reason something like science has only existed since Thales.³ It is an abstraction to speak of “oriental philosophy.” Those who began science with Thales were right: before them science was always inspired, born out of the mysteries. That was the case with Heraclitus,⁴ who was still inspired by ancient mystery wisdom. We are told that he placed his book on the altar of the goddess of Ephesus.

To the extent that external natural science increases in humanity, to that extent true wisdom will be obstructed. We are told in the fourth letter of the Apocalypse how people must find the connection to true wisdom. Let us assume that the Christ principle, the revelation of Golgotha would not have come. Then, in terms of external science, outstanding people such as Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and so forth,⁵ would have been present, but the science would have remained merely intellectual and none of it would have contributed to a new ascent to the spiritual. Celsus,⁶ the contemporary of Marcus Aurelius, wrote only external historical gossip about the event of Golgotha. But in terms of scientific, logical thinking these people all stood at the highest level.

What is called skepticism came into this stream. We find in Roman culture a complete skepticism existing alongside a highly refined approach to knowledge concerning all things intellectual. Let us consider, on the other hand, a personality like Augustine's. He was not in a position to arrive at anything other than doubt concerning what he had learned of Greek and Roman science. Then he encountered Manicheism, which he came to know only in a false form. He became acquainted with a teaching that took into account everything that Zarathustra taught. However, his soul was not inclined to take in all of this because the souls of the people living at that time were not meant to undertake such lofty flights of the spirit and see the spirit everywhere behind the physical world. The science that had penetrated all the way to the stars deteriorated; and even if this science had reached the Europeans no one could have understood it. The soul had to remain attached to what could be seen in the external world of the senses.

Science only reawakened during the time of the Renaissance. What Greece and Rome had started became Arabic wisdom; it became the spirit of Mohammedanism. Arabism then spread from Spain into Europe. This science is outstanding with regard to everything directly relating to the sensible-sensual world. The science that became a powerful stimulus for European science, that influenced Bacon and Spinoza,⁷ arises from Spanish Arabism. It comes from Spain. However, it cannot rise above a pantheism that is unable to reach concrete spiritual beings. Arabism did not arrive at the concrete. It ascended to the sensible human being but what was seen beyond that was only an abstract divine unity. It was not known what this unity is. A poor and comfortable world view! There is no knowledge of the spirit if it is summed up in a unity. Therein lies the poverty of pantheism.

As a result, we entered the fifth age with a science of the external world that began its great rise to ascendancy in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. We see this, for example, with the Scholastics. We experience in their thought the dawning of a new science that is, however, wholly chained to the sense world, that is unable to go even a step beyond the sense world. Thus we see how the split appears between faith and knowledge. Augustine was not able to understand a reference to something spiritual standing behind the sun. He did not understand Manicheism because it speaks of the veil of the senses spread over the spiritual. He could believe in Christ who had descended into a physical man. But faith and knowledge had entirely split apart at that time. All believers who stood on medieval science wanted faith and knowledge entirely separated.

We can illustrate schematically how what began in the Greco-Latin age still lives today, only on the external, physical level. The evolution of humankind takes place in such a way that what was cultivated in the Egypto-Chaldean age we experience again today—but we experience it as knowledge, and now it is illuminated and spiritualized by the Christ impulse. Everywhere in Europe we see the ancient wisdom of Egypt appearing again, but illuminated by the principle of Christ. In our time the human being will only be able to take this in consciously through the Rosicrucian teaching.

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

When the ancient Egyptians spoke of the stars they meant the spiritual aspect of the stars, which they still knew. A wonderful consciousness of ancient knowledge penetrated the science of Copernicus and Kepler. As a result, what the ancient Egyptians knew we now see appearing in a physical form. In the past they had seen beings moving through space, now only spheres were seen, moving in elliptical circles.

The fifth epoch is called to find again the spiritual world behind sense existence; and Theosophy must reach the point where it can lead people increasingly to permeate all knowledge with the principle of Christ.

If a clairvoyant being had been in a position to observe the earth through millennia then, it would have appeared that the entire aura of the earth suddenly changed color, radiated with different colors when the redeemer died on Golgotha. Ahura Mazdao, who had been proclaimed by Zarathustra, became at that time the elemental spirit of the earth. Christ expressed this when, at the Last Supper, he said: “This is my body” (Matt. 26:26) and, for the grape juice, found the expression, “This is my blood.” (Matt. 26:28)

If we really studied the earth we would have to see members of the spirit of Christ in everything that lives and grows, even in the smallest thing we look at. Human beings of the future will not speak of atoms; they will scientifically understand the earth as the expression of Christ.

We are standing only at the beginning of this development. Christ must first be understood in the simplest way. In the future all science will find Christ, even though it finds today nothing but a dead corpse-like existence in the sensible world. The fifth epoch can feel, to begin with, only as a perspective, that this new science is approaching, that humanity will understand in a new way what Zarathustra meant when he spoke of Ahura Mazdao.

The ancient wisdom of Zarathustra will appear again in a new form in the sixth age. Finally, the age of the holy Rishis will come again in a new form. There may be only a small band of people who understand Theosophy in our age; there may be only the smallest of groups present to hear the reenlivened wisdom of Zarathustra in the sixth age; and, finally there may be only a fraction remaining for the seventh age. The further course of human evolution will be such that more and more people will gather together who will understand what Zarathustra proclaimed.

Then an age will come upon the earth when the victors will be those who lead the war of all against all. But the souls who will have been preserved from the sixth age must found a new culture after the war of all against all. The seventh age will have neither people who glow with enthusiasm for the spiritual, nor those who glow with enthusiasm for sense existence; even for that these people will be too blase. Very little of the Indian, the first culture, will be perceptible on the earth in the seventh age. But these souls from the sixth age when earned up into the spiritual world, purified and “Christened, will walk as it were etherically, no longer touching the earth, while humanity then will be able to master what the entire culture of earth has to offer. The seventh age will be such that here below on the earth, people living in increasingly dense and hardened bodies will make the greatest discoveries and inventions. In the seventh age, human beings wholly entangled in matter will no longer have to fear much from Theosophy, for on earth there will no longer be much to find of those transformed human beings who will have increasingly spiritualized themselves in the sixth age by absorbing Theosophy. The people who have understood the call of the master today will be carried over into a distant future. The key will be turned in the sixth cultural epoch. Those who have heard the call will be the founders of a new humanity. If only a few people are entangled with matter, the community of Laodicea will not last long. It lies within the free will of every human being to belong to either the community of Philadelphia or the community of Laodicea.

• 1. Compare the Berlin lecture of October 7, 1904 on “The Prometheus Saga,” in The Temple Legend (GA 93) (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1985).
• 2. Aeschylus (525 – 456 s.e.) was the most important founder of Attic tragedy and the oldest of the three great Greek writers of Greek tragedy. Quote comes from his trilogy “Prometheia.”
• 3. Thales of Miletus, (ca. 625 – ca. 545 B.C.) was a Greek philosopher, one of the “seven wise men,” and one of the founders of philosophy
• 4. Heraclitus of Ephesus, (ca. 540 {544} – 480 {483 s.c.} was a Greek philosopher.
• 5. Marcus Aurelius: (121 – 180 A.D.) also know as Marcus Aurelius, the Philosopher. was the Roman caesar from 161 A.D.; Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4 B.C. – 65 A.D.) was a Roman politician, philosopher, and poet.
• 6. Celsus: was a Greek philosopher of the second century. Around 180 he wrote “True Discourse” which was the first polemic against Christianity. It has been lost but the essence of its content is contained in Origen's response, Contra Celrum.
• 7. Francis Bacon (1561 – 1626) was an English Renaissance philosopher. Benedictus Spinoza (1632 – 1677) was a Dutch philosopher.

Now that we are resuming activities in the Berlin Group it is well to think for a short time of the studies in which we have been engaged since last year.

You will remember that about a year ago, in connection with the General Meeting of the German Section, I gave a lecture to the Berlin Group with the title: The Sphere of the Bodhisattvas¹ In that lecture on the mission of the Bodhisattvas in the world my purpose was to introduce the subject to which our main attention was to be directed in the Group meetings last winter. Our study was concerned with the Christ-problem, particularly in relation to the Gospel of St. Matthew and also in relation to the Gospels of St. John and St. Luke. And I indicated that at some later date we should be preparing for a still deeper study of the Christ-problem in connection with the Gospel of St. Mark.

In these studies we were not attempting a mere exposition of the Gospels. I have often spoken of this in perhaps rather extreme terms, and made it clear that Spiritual Science would still have been able to describe the events in Palestine even if there had been no historical records of them. The real authority for what we have to say about the Christ Event is not to be found in any written document but in the eternal, spiritual record known as the Akasha Chronicle, decipherable only by clairvoyant consciousness. I have often explained what this really means. We compare what has first been learned from spiritual investigations with what is recorded in the Gospels or in other New Testament sources about the events in Palestine. And in the end we recognise that in order to read the Gospel records as they should be read, we must first—without reference to them—have investigated the mysteries connected with the happenings in Palestine, and that precisely because of this independent approach the value we attach to the Gospels and the reverence we feel for them, greatly increase.

But if we take into account not only the immediate interests of our present gathering but also the fact that contemporary culture needs a new understanding of the recorded sources of Christianity, we shall expect Spiritual Science not merely to satisfy our own intellectual difficulties about the events in Palestine but also to translate into the language of present-day culture what it says about the significance of the Christ Event for the whole evolution of humanity. It would not do to limit ourselves to the contributions made in previous centuries towards an understanding of the problem and the figure of Christ. If that were sufficient for the cultural needs of the modern age we should not find so many people unable to reconcile their sense of truth with accepted Christian tradition and who in one way or another actually repudiate the accounts of the events in Palestine as they have been handed down and believed in for centuries. All this makes it clear that modern culture needs a new understanding, a new enunciation, of the truths of Christianity.

Among many other aids to the investigation of Christian truths one is particularly effective. It consists in extending our vision and our feeling and perception beyond the horizons within which, in recent centuries, man has had to seek an understanding of the spiritual world. Here is a simple indication of how these horizons can be widened.

Goethe—to take as an example this master-spirit of recent European culture—was, as we all know, a man of titanic genius. Many studies have helped us to understand what depths of spiritual insight lay in Goethe's personality and to see that we ourselves can attain a high level of spiritual understanding through contemplating the texture of his soul. But however good our knowledge of Goethe may be, however deeply we steep ourselves in what he has to offer, there is something we shall not find in him, although it is essential if our vision is to be broadened in the right way and our horizon widened for our most urgent spiritual needs. There is no indication that Goethe had any inkling of certain things we can learn about and benefit from to-day—I mean, the concepts of the spiritual evolution of humanity which first became accessible to us in the nineteenth century through interpretations of documentary records of the spiritual achievements of the East. We there find many concepts which, far from making an understanding of the Christ-problem more difficult, if rightly applied help us to realise the nature of Christ Jesus. I therefore believe that there could be no better introduction to the study of the Christ-problem than an exposition of the mission of the Bodhisattvas—as they are named in Oriental philosophy. They are the great spiritual Individualities whose task it is from time to time to influence evolution. In Western culture there had for centuries been no knowledge of concepts such as that of the Bodhisattvas: yet only by mastering such concepts can we acquire some measure of knowledge of what Christ has been for mankind, what He can be and will continue to be.

So we find that study of an extensive phase of the spiritual development of mankind can be fruitful for the civilisation and culture of our own time. From another point of view as well it is important, when reviewing past centuries, to emphasise clearly the difference between men living at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and men living in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, as well as the fact that until about a century ago very little was known in Europe about Buddha and Buddhism. Finally, we must remember that the impulse leading to the goal of our endeavours is the feeling we have when we confront great spiritual truths. For what really matters is not so much the knowledge that someone may wish to acquire, but rather the warmth of feeling, the power of perception, the nobility of will, with which his soul confronts the great truths of humanity. In our Groups the prevailing tone and atmosphere are more important than the actual words spoken. These feelings and perceptions vary greatly but the most important of all is reverence for the great truths and the feeling that we can approach them only with awe and veneration; we must realise that we cannot hope to grasp a great reality through a few concepts and ideas casually acquired and co-ordinated.

I have often said that we cannot accurately visualise a tree that is not actually in front of us if we have drawn a sketch of it from one side only, but that we must go round it and sketch it from many different sides. Only by assembling these different pictures can we obtain a complete impression of the tree. This analogy should make clear to us what our attitude should be to the great spiritual truths. We can make no progress at all in any real (or apparent) knowledge of higher things by approaching them from one side only. Whether or not there is truth in the particular view we may hold, we should always be humble enough to recognise that all our ideas are, and cannot help being, one-sided. If we intensify such a feeling of humility we shall welcome all ideas which throw light on any possible aspect of the great facts of existence. The age in which we are living makes this necessary, and the necessity will be increasingly borne in upon us. Consequently we no longer shut ourselves off from other views or from paths to the supreme truths which may differ from our own or from that of contemporary thought. During the course of the last few years, in considering the fruits of Western culture, we have tried always to maintain the principle of true humility in knowledge. I have never had the audacity to attempt to give one single survey of the events which comprise what we call the Christ-problem. On the contrary, I have always said that we were approaching the problem now from one point of view, now from another. And I have always emphasised that not even then has the problem been exhausted but that much further patient work is necessary.

The reason for studying the four Gospels separately is that we can then approach the Christ-problem from four different standpoints. We find that the four Gospels do, in fact, present four different aspects, and we are reminded that this stupendous problem must not be approached from one side only but at least from the four directions of the spiritual heavens indicated by the names of the four Evangelists: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. If this is done we shall come increasingly to understand the problems and the great truths which are needed for the life of the human soul; and on the other hand, we shall never say that the one form of truth we may have grasped is the whole truth.

All our studies this last winter have been directed towards evoking a mood of humility in knowledge. Indeed without such humility no progress in the spiritual life is possible. Again and again I have laid stress upon the basic qualities essential for any progress in spiritual knowledge, and anyone who has followed the lectures given here week by week will confirm this.

Progress in spiritual knowledge—this is of course one of the basic impulses of our Movement. What does it mean to the soul? It fulfils the soul's worthiest needs and longings and provides the support which everyone conscious of his true humanity requires. Moreover this support is completely in line with the intellectual needs of the present day.

The progress in knowledge made possible by Spiritual Science should throw light on things which cannot be investigated by our ordinary senses but only by the faculties which belong to man as a spiritual being. The great questions about man's place in the physical world and what lies beyond the manifestations of the senses in this world, the truths concerning what lies beyond life and death—these questions meet a profound need, indeed the most human of all needs, of man's soul. Even if for various reasons we hold aloof from these questions and succeed for a time in deceiving ourselves by maintaining that science cannot investigate them, that the necessary faculties do not exist, nevertheless in the end the need and longing to find answers to them never disappear. The origin of what we see developing in the course of childhood and youth, the destination of what lies harboured in our soul as our bodily constitution begins to wilt and wither, in short, how man is connected with a spiritual world—these questions arise from a deep human need and man can dispense with the answers to them only when he deceives himself about his true nature.

But because these questions spring from so deep a need, because the soul cannot live in peace and contentment if it does not find the answers, it is only natural that people should look for an easy, comfortable way of finding them. Although many people would like to deny it, these questions have become particularly urgent in every domain of life, and what a variety of paths to the answers are offered to us! It can be said without exaggeration that the path of Spiritual Science is the hardest of them all. Many of you will admit that some of the sciences to-day are very difficult, and you will hesitate to tackle them because you are frightened by what you will have to master if you are really to understand them. The path of Spiritual Science may appear to be easier than, let us say, that of mathematics or botany or some other branch of natural science. Yet in the strictest sense the path of Spiritual Science is more difficult than that of any other science. This can be said without exaggeration. Why, then, does it seem easier to you? Only because it stirs the interests of the soul so forcefully and makes so compelling an appeal. It may be the most difficult of all the paths along which man is led into the spiritual world to-day, but we should not forget that it will lead to the highest within us. Is it not natural that the path to the highest should also be the hardest? Hence we should never be frightened by or blind to the inevitable difficulties of the path of Spiritual Science.

Among many features of this path, one has repeatedly been mentioned here. A person wishing to follow it must, to begin with, seriously imbibe what spiritual investigation has already been able to present about the mysteries and realities of the spiritual world. Here we touch upon a very important chapter of progress in Spiritual Science. People speak glibly about a spiritual science that cannot be corroborated, about spiritual facts alleged to have been witnessed and investigated by some initiate or seer, and they ask: Would it not be better simply to show us how we can quickly make our own way upwards into regions from which to glimpse the spiritual world? Why are we constantly told: This is what it looks like, this is how it appears to such and such a seer? Why are we not shown how to make the ascent quickly ourselves?

There are good reasons why facts which have been investigated about the spiritual world are communicated in general terms before details are given of the methods of training whereby the soul itself can be led into those higher spheres. We gain something very definite if we apply ourselves reverently to the study of what spiritual investigations have revealed from the spiritual world. I have often said that the facts of the spiritual world must be investigated and can be discovered only by clairvoyant consciousness; but I have as often said that once someone possessed of clairvoyant consciousness has observed these facts in the spiritual world and then communicates them, they must be communicated in such a way that even without clairvoyance, everyone will be able to test them by reference to the normal feeling for truth present in every soul, and by applying to them his own unprejudiced reasoning faculties. Anyone endowed with genuine clairvoyant consciousness will always communicate the facts about the spiritual world in such a way that everyone who wishes to test what he says will be able to do so without clairvoyance. But at the same time he will communicate them in a form whereby their true value and significance can be conveyed to a human soul.

What, then, does this communication and presentation of spiritual facts mean to the soul? It means that anyone who has some idea of conditions in the spiritual world can direct and order his life, his thoughts, his feelings and his perceptions in accordance with his relationship to the spiritual world. In this sense every communication of spiritual facts is important, even if the recipient cannot himself investigate those facts with clairvoyant consciousness. Indeed for the investigator himself these facts acquire a human value only when he has clothed them in a form in which they can be accessible to everyone. However much a clairvoyant may be able to see and investigate in the spiritual world, it remains valueless both to himself and to others until he can bring the fruits of his vision into the range of ordinary cognition and express them in ideas and concepts which can be grasped by a natural sense of truth and by sound reasoning. In fact, if his findings are to be of any value to himself he must first have understood them fundamentally; their value begins only at the point where the possibility of reasoned proof begins.

There is a radical test which can be applied to what I have just said. Among many other valuable spiritual truths and communications you will certainly attach very great importance to those concerning what a man can take with him through the gate of death of the spiritual truths he has assimilated on the physical plane between birth and death. Or, to put it differently: How much remains to a man who, by cultivating the spiritual life, has mastered the substance of communications relating to the spiritual world? The answer is: Exactly as much remains to him as he has fundamentally grasped and understood and has been able to translate into the language of ordinary human consciousness.

Picture to yourselves a man who may have made quite exceptional discoveries in the spiritual world through clairvoyant observation but has never clothed them in the language of ordinary life. What happens to such a man? All his discoveries are extinguished after death; only so much remains of value and significance as has been translated into language which, in any given period, is the language of a healthy sense of truth.

It is naturally of the greatest importance that clairvoyants should be able to bring tidings from the spiritual world and make them fruitful for their fellow-men. Our age needs such wisdom and cannot make progress without it. It is essential that such communications should be made available to contemporary culture. Even if this is not recognised to-day, in fifty or a hundred years it will be universally acknowledged that civilisation and culture can make no progress unless men become convinced of the existence of spiritual wisdom and realise that humanity must die unless spiritual wisdom is assimilated. And even if all space were conquered for the purposes of intercommunication, mankind would still have to face the prospect of the death of culture if spiritual wisdom were rejected. This is true beyond all shadow of doubt. Insight into the spiritual world is absolutely essential.

In addition to the value of spiritual wisdom for single individuals after death there is its value for the progress of humanity on the Earth. To have the right idea here, distinction must be made between the clairvoyant who has been able to investigate the spiritual world and express his findings in terms of healthy human reason, and a man whose karma while he was incarnated made it impossible for him to see into the spiritual world, and who had consequently to rely upon hearing from others about the findings of spiritual research. What is the difference between the fruits enjoyed after death by two such individuals? How do the effects of spiritual truths differ in an Initiate and in one who knows them only by hearsay and cannot himself see into the spiritual world? Is the Initiate better off than a man who could only hear these truths from someone else?

For humanity in general, vision of spiritual worlds is, of course, worth more than absence of vision. A seer is in touch with those worlds and can teach and help forward the development not only of men but of spiritual beings as well. Clairvoyant consciousness, then, is of special value. For the individual, however, knowledge alone has value and in this respect the most gifted clairvoyant is not to be distinguished from one who has merely heard the communications without being able in the present incarnation to look into the spiritual world himself. Whatever spiritual wisdom we have assimilated will be fruitful after death, no matter whether or not we ourselves are seers.

One of the great moral laws of the spiritual world is here presented to us. Admittedly, our modern conception of morality may not be subtle enough to understand its implications fully. No advantage is gained by individuals—except perhaps a merely selfish gratification—because their karma has made it possible for them to see into the spiritual world. Everything we acquire for our individual life must be acquired on the physical plane and must be moulded into forms appropriate to that plane. If a Buddha or a Bodhisattva stands at a higher level than other human individualities among the hierarchies of the spiritual world, it is because he has acquired these higher qualities through a number of incarnations on the physical plane.

Here is an indication of what I mean by the higher morality, the higher ethics, resulting from the spiritual life. Let nobody imagine that he gains any advantage over his fellow-men through developing clairvoyance, for that is simply not so. He makes no progress which can be justified on any ground of self-interest. He achieves progress only in so far as he can be more useful to others. The immorality of egoism can find no place in the spiritual world. A man can gain nothing for himself by spiritual illumination. What he does gain he can gain only as a servant of the world in general, and he gains it for himself only by gaining it for others.

This, then, is the position of the spiritual investigator among his fellow-men. If they are willing to listen to him and assimilate his findings, they make the same progress as he does. This means that spiritual achievement must be employed only to further the general well-being of man, and not for any selfish purposes. There are circumstances when a man is moral not merely of his own volition but because immorality or egoism would be of no advantage. It is also easy to realise that there are dangers in penetrating into the spiritual world without proper preparation. By leading a spiritual life we do not achieve anything which will fulfil a selfish purpose after death. On the other hand, a man may wish to gratify an egotistic purpose in his life on Earth through spiritual development. Even if nothing egotistic can benefit existence in the spiritual world, there may be a wish to fulfil some egotistical purpose on the Earth.

Most people who follow the path leading to higher development are likely to say that they will obviously strive to discard egoism before trying to enter the spiritual world. But believe me, there is no province of life where deception is likely to be as great as it is among those who claim that their endeavours are free from egotistic interests. It is easy enough to say this, but whether it can be a fact is quite another matter. It is a different matter because when a man begins to practise exercises which can lead him into the spiritual world, he then, for the first time, confronts himself as he truly is. In ordinary life very few things are experienced in their true form. A man lives in a web of ideas, of impulses of will, of moral perceptions and conventional actions, all of which originate in his environment, and he seldom stops to ask himself how he should act or think in a given case if his upbringing had not been what it was. If he were to answer this question honestly, he would realise that his shortcomings are very much greater than he has assumed them to be.

The result of practising exercises through which a man learns how to rise into the spiritual world is that he grows beyond the web woven around him through custom, education, environment. He quickly grows beyond all this. In soul and spirit he is stripped naked. The veils with which he has clothed himself and to which he clings in his ordinary feelings and actions, fall away. This accounts for a quite common phenomenon of which I have often spoken.—Before beginning to work at his spiritual development a man may have been a reasonable, possibly also a very intelligent and at the same time, humble person who went through life without committing any particular stupidities. Then, after beginning this development, he may become arrogant and do all sorts of senseless things. He seems to have lost his bearings in life. To those familiar with the spiritual world the reason for this is clear. If we are to maintain balance and a sense of direction in face of what comes to the soul from the spiritual world, two things are necessary. It must not make us giddy or light-headed. In physical life our own organism protects us through what we call in anthroposophical lectures, the 'sense of balance or equilibrium'. Just as in a man's physical body there is something which enables him to keep himself upright—for if the organism is not functioning properly he will get giddy and may fall down—so in the spiritual life there is something which helps him to orientate himself in his relation to the world, and this he must be able to do. Spiritual unsteadiness comes about because what used to support him, namely the external world and his own sense-perceptions, fall away and he has then to rely upon himself alone. The supports have gone and there is a danger of giddiness. When the supports fall away we may easily become arrogant, for arrogance is always latent in us although it may not previously have disclosed itself.

How, then, can we attain the necessary spiritual balance or equilibrium? We must assimilate with diligence, perseverance and dedication the findings of spiritual research which have been expressed in terms harmonising with our normal sense of truth and sound reasoning. It is not out of caprice that I emphasise so repeatedly how necessary it is to study what we call Spiritual Science. I emphasise it not in order that I may have opportunity to speak here often but it is the only thing which can give the firm support we need for spiritual development. Earnest, diligent assimilation of the results of Spiritual Science is the antidote for spiritual `giddiness' and insecurity. And anyone who has experienced this insecurity through having followed a wrong path of spiritual development—although he may think he has been very diligent—should recognise that he has failed to take in what can flow from Spiritual Science. The study of spiritual-scientific facts from every possible aspect—that is what is necessary for us. And that was why, last winter—though our ultimate purpose was to bring home the significance of the Christ Event for humanity—emphasis was laid over and over again upon the fundamental conditions for spiritual progress.

If a man is to make such progress there must be purpose and direction in his life of soul; but he needs something else as well. The soul can indeed acquire assurance through the study of Spiritual Science but it also needs a certain spiritual strength and courage. Courage of the kind necessary for spiritual progress is not essential in ordinary life because from the time of waking to that of going to sleep, our inmost being of soul-and-spirit is embedded in our physical and etheric bodies; and during the night we are inactive and can do no harm. If a man spiritually undeveloped were capable of acting during sleep as well as during waking life, he could do a great deal of harm. But in our physical and etheric bodies there are not only the forces which are active in us as conscious beings, or as thinking and feeling beings, but also those forces at which divine-spiritual Beings have worked through the evolutionary periods of Old Saturn, Old Sun, Old Moon and the Earth itself. Forces from higher spheres are continually active in us and support us. On waking from sleep we give ourselves up to the divine-spiritual Powers which, for our Well-being and blessing, are present in our physical and etheric bodies and lead us through life from morning till evening. Thus the whole spiritual world is active within us; we can do harm to it in many respects but very little to make amends for the damage we have done.

All spiritual development depends upon our inner being, that is to say, our astral body and Ego, becoming free; we have to learn to become clairvoyant in the part of ourselves that is unconscious during sleep, and because it is unconscious can do no harm. What is unconscious in the members of our constitution in which divine-spiritual forces are active, must become conscious. All the strength we have because on waking we are taken in hand by spiritual powers anchored in our physical and etheric bodies, falls away when we become independent of those bodies and clairvoyant perception begins. We withdraw from the forces which have been a buttress for us against the influences working from the external world; but that world remains as it was and we still confront the whole power of its impact. If we are to resist this impact we must develop in our Ego and astral body all the power we otherwise draw from the physical and etheric bodies. This can be achieved if we follow the indications given in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment. The aim of all these indications is to impart to our inmost self the strength previously bestowed by higher Beings, the strength which falls away when we lose the external supports provided by our physical and etheric bodies.

Individuals who have not made themselves inwardly strong enough to replace the powers they have discarded when they become independent of the physical and etheric bodies through serious training of the soul—above all through purifying the quality designated as immorality in the external world—these individuals may still be able to acquire faculties enabling them to see into the spiritual world. But what happens then? They become over-sensitive, hypersensitive. They feel as if from every side they are being spiritually buffeted and cannot stand up against the blows rained on them from all sides. One of the important facts to be realised by anyone who aspires to make progress in spiritual knowledge is that inner strength must be developed through the cultivation of the noblest and finest qualities of the soul.

What are these qualities? Egoism will not help us in the spiritual world and indeed makes it impossible to exist there. Naturally, then, the best preparation for the spiritual life is to banish egoism and everything which stimulates selfish prospects of spiritual progress. The more earnestly we adopt this principle the better are our prospects for spiritual progress. Anyone who has to do with these things will often hear a man say that his action was not prompted by egoism. But when such a man is on the point of letting words like this pass his lips, he should check them and admit to himself that he is not really able to insist that there is no trace of egoism in his action. To admit it is much more intelligent, simply because it is more truthful. And it is truth that matters whenever self-knowledge is concerned. In no realm does untruthfulness bring such severe retribution as in the realm of spiritual life. A man should demand truth of himself instead of claiming to be without egoism. At least if we acknowledge our egoism we have a chance to get rid of it!

In regard to the concept of spiritual truth, let me say this. There are people who claim to have seen and experienced all kinds of things in the higher worlds—things which are then made public. If we know that these things are not true, should we not use every possible means to oppose them? Certainly, there may be points of view according to which such opposition is necessary. But those whose main concern is truth have a different thought, namely that only what is true can flourish and bear fruit in the world and what is untrue will quite certainly be unfruitful. Put more simply, this means that however much people may lie about spiritual matters, what they say will not get very far, and they should recognise that nothing fruitful can be achieved by lies. In the spiritual world, truth alone will bear fruit; and this holds good from the very beginning of our own spiritual development, when we must admit to ourselves what we really are. The conviction that truth alone can be fruitful and effective must be an impulse in all occult movements. Truth justifies itself by its fruitfulness and by the blessings it brings to mankind. Untruths and lies are always barren. They have only one result which I cannot go into in any further detail now; I can only say that they react most violently against those who actually spread them abroad. We shall consider on some other occasion what this significant statement implies.

I have tried to-day to give a kind of review of the activities in our Groups during the past year and to recapture the mood and tone which permeated our souls.

In speaking of the work carried on outside the Groups during the past year, I may perhaps mention my own participation which culminated in the production in Munich of the Rosicrucian Mystery Play, The Portal of Initiation. Later Group meetings will give us an opportunity of explaining what was then attempted. For the present I will merely say that in the Play it was possible to give a more artistic and individual form to what could otherwise be expressed in a more general way. When we speak here or anywhere else of the conditions of the spiritual life, we speak of them as they concern every soul. But it must always be borne in mind that each man is an individual whose soul must be studied individually. Consequently it was essential that one particular soul should be depicted at the threshold of Initiation. The Rosicrucian Mystery Play is accordingly to be regarded not as a manual of instruction but as an artistic representation of the preparation for Initiation of a particular individual, Johannes Thomasius.

In our approach to truth we have thus reached two important standpoints. We have presented the general line of progress and have also penetrated to the heart of an individual soul. We are always conscious of the fact that truth must be approached from many sides and that we must wait patiently until its different aspects merge into a single picture. We shall adhere faithfully to this attitude of humility in knowledge. Let us not say that man can never experience truth. He assuredly can! But he cannot know the whole truth at once; he can know only one side. This makes for humility in knowledge and true humility is a feeling that must be cultivated in our Groups and carried into the general culture of the day, for the whole character of our age needs such an attitude.

In this spirit we shall continue our task of presenting the Christ-problem, in order to learn from it how to achieve real humility in knowledge and thereby make further and further progress in the experience of truth.

• 1. When the present lecture-course was given, Rudolf Steiner was the General Secretary of the German Section of the Theosophical Society. His association with that Society was terminated in 1912 by its President, Mrs. Annie Besant, largely on account of the difference in his teaching on Christianity and the nature of the Second Coming, and the official founding of the Anthroposophical Society took place in Berlin, in 1913. The lecture on the Bodhisattvas is printed as the first in the Course entitled: The Christ Impulse and the Development of the Ego-Consciousness.

(Given at the conclusion of the General Meeting of the German Section of the Theosophical Society)

May I once more make it known¹ that I intend to hold a lecture tomorrow morning about certain contemporary occult questions connected with Freemasonry. And that will take place, following an ancient occult practice, separately for men and for women. The lecture for men will take place at ten o'clock; for women at half past eleven. Perhaps you may ask why this custom is retained, since—only through the theosophical view of things—it will become superseded. That will become clear through the content of the lecture. I would also like to say that the Besant Branch² will have its regular meeting tomorrow evening at eight o'clock.

Now I would like to speak about the relationship of occultism to the theosophical movement and about a few other connected questions. On that topic, it is very often debated whether the theosophical movement, and the Theosophical Society in particular, should be an occult movement, or whether it must be kept distinct from all occultism.

The theosophical movement as such, in so far as it expressed in the Theosophical Society, cannot be an occult movement. An occult movement is based on different assumptions from those which can find expression in the Theosophical Society. There have been occult societies in all periods. One thing above all else has been necessary for them; namely, that, on account of the whole manner of their endeavours, they have some kind of hierarchy in their Organisation. That means that the members of such a society, of such a brotherhood, were ranked by degree. Every degree, from the first up to the ninetieth, had its quite specific task. In each degree there were quite specific tasks. Nobody could be promoted to a higher degree until he had fulfilled the tasks of the lower one.

I can only indicate very broadly why that is so. We must then speak only generally about the tasks of such occult brotherhoods. The honoured friends will understand me all the better today, who have so often heard me speak about such things. Occult brotherhoods are the guiding brotherhoods of mankind. They have the task of preparing the things of the future. Everything which is to happen in the future is indeed preparing itself now, is finding its expression now, as an idea, as a plan, and will then be realised in the future. Even when you consider the development of the human race on the outward physical plane, you would then find that things which later find fulfillment were much earlier in the bud as ideas, bursting to find expression in the minds and souls of leading personalities and individualities. Take the steam engine for example: you will find, if you trace the matter back, how the steam engine developed itself from the simplest facts; how the pan filled with boiling water already contained the idea of the steam engine, which then developed itself from this simplest form to the most complicated mechanism.

These are however trifles compared with the great structure of humanity that we confront. The most important matters are based on much greater and more significant perspectives. They presuppose that what is to happen in the far distant future is already, in a specific way, being prepared today. How can anything happen in this way? Through it being in one's grasp today already to introduce forces into the world which will take effect in the future. Whatever is going to take place here on the physical plane in the future has prepared itself on the astral and Devachanic plane, long before its physical manifestation; so that the forces bringing about really distant future events can be identified in the higher planes and worlds. However, man cannot satisfactorily influence the future unless he prepares the effect in the light of a knowledge of the influencing forces. Man is a self-aware creature, and has to take his destiny into his own hands. Therefore, there have always been advanced Brothers of our human race, who can see not only on the physical plane but also on higher planes.

Let us seek to conceive what it means to have foresight on higher planes. Let us suppose you have water in a pond. You can foresee that the pond will become frozen if the temperature falls, so that skating and so on will be possible. In a similar way do we have [foresight] with the relationship of the so-called astral plane to the physical plane, that is to the world in which we are involved. If therefore one follows events on the astral plane one could then in fact see what will be, in a later period, with the help of astral happenings, as if it were a thickening of them. And so one can watch those astral events which subsequently step forth, solidified, on the physical plane. Physical events are nothing else than such thickened occurrences which have already taken place in the higher worlds.

An example: throughout antiquity there were mysteries. These had the task of receiving individual men and initiating them into the secrets of existence, or—as John of the Apocalypse says—showing what must ‘shortly,’ that is to say in the future, come to pass. In the precincts of such temples, the pupils who were to be received into the first degree were instructed. Now there was a further instruction for each successively higher level of development in the pupils. The first stage was for the candidates to purify their astral bodies. This meant that they did not merely embrace the ordinary bourgeois ethic; the bourgeois ethic was the preliminary requirement, what was then involved had to be followed in the strictest performance of duty. For, as the pupil progressively advanced to higher ideals, passing beyond the passions and instincts of ordinary life to yearnings above human pettiness, so purifying his sympathies and antipathies that the great world-embracing affairs of the human race became his own—as he reached out beyond himself in his feelings and perceptions, then he was on the way to completing what one calls the purification of the astral body. Then he was allowed to work upon the denser bodies. He was allowed to work upon his etheric body, and was no longer restricted to reshaping the soft, flexible and compliant astral substance of his soul and spirit bodies, but was allowed to work on his etheric body. He was then what is called a Chela. Such a Chela is one who acknowledges not only higher duties, who has undertaken not only enough purification to make humanity's duties his own, but is so advanced that he has outgrown the lower and higher affairs of individual nations and even of individual creeds. His gaze is now addressed to the life of the whole of humanity. And through his by now thoroughly structured etheric body he becomes a participant in the great affairs of the building of the earth. To do all this, the following must happen.

The Chela has to immobilise all the forces which hinder his work on his etheric body. If you have a human being before you, he has indeed a physical body, an etheric body and an astral body. The Chela has refined his astral body, and is allowed to work upon his etheric body. What happens when the astral body has been purified? What then penetrates the etheric body?—that which is organised in the astral body. The things which live in the astral body stamp themselves on the etheric body. The more you work at your astral body, the more you can redress its defects; the astral substance is thin and soft, you can always bring it back into balance again. However, if a person has begun to develop his etheric body as a Chela, then these qualities stamp themselves on the etheric body, and that is much more permanent. The man who made his earthly defects permanent would thereby become dangerous as a member of humanity. Hence the constant stress on necessary purification. The etheric body is stamped by the forces that work on it. Think of it separated from the physical body, it would then have quite a different elasticity. If it is fixed in [the physical body] this is held in by the form; but so long as it remains there, it is at first too weak to stamp into itself what has undergone catharsis as astrality.

Therefore throughout ancient times the following had to be done. One had to set aside those forces which impeded the elasticity of the etheric body. That was achieved by bringing the whole physical body into a lethargic condition. The human being lay down, and the etheric body was drawn out of the physical body. While the physical body lay as if dead, the astral body came to be formed by its autonomous forces. That is the entombment, the [body] concerned being kept in a lethargic state for three to three and a half days. And then he could work on the etheric body. And then, after he had formed his etheric body in conformity with his astral body, he returned into his physical body. He had thus awakened an inner life in himself; he was one of the resurrected and was given a new name.

This was a transaction on the astral plane. Everything which I have described took place on the astral plane; the physical body had nothing to do with it. This event repeated itself in all the ancient mysteries. Every initiate knew it. Now imagine it densified, translated down into the physical plane, so that something [physical] has happened, through this event, which had previously only happened astrally; analogous to, for example, your having a piece of ice where you had water before. Many such astral events must combine, must flow together, for the physical thickening eventually to become possible. Through this means the Mystery of Golgotha became historically possible, it could be translated down on to the physical plane, in that, through the appearance of Christ, things happened on the physical plane which previously had happened over and over again on the astral plane. We learn to conceive, through this example, how the future is actually prepared in the occult brotherhoods.

If we were now to ask ourselves: what then is really happening here?—then we should answer: One can certainly comprehend a great deal in thought, in ideas. But ideas have no real existence. An idea is nothing more than what has been brought down from higher planes to the physical plane. What man thinks about [something] is however the most ineffectual aspect, since this is only extant on the physical plane. It is different when such an idea is brought face to face with something which also originates from the higher spheres. Take as an example Pythagoras's teaching about the music of the spheres³ as he imparted it to his pupils. Philosophers try to make the occult music of Pythagoras out to be quite a simple notion. Reason could easily grasp it. But what was important [for Pythagoras] was that the pupil only approached this [subject] when his soul, his disposition had been prepared for it. Thus it is impossible to explain the deeper meaning of Raphael's Sistine Madonna to anyone who has no feeling for pictures which originate in the astral. One has to raise heart and soul up to it. What leaves one cold as an idea, appears in the picture as artistically full of life, as divine universal thinking, as something the divine forces followed in creating the world—and a simple line becomes something holy! Thought, by twining itself around a divine element, is brought face to face with divine influence. Thus, what matters in this sort of training is to prepare man step by step, as he is able to approach the great world thoughts, as he receives them. Then he will gradually combine with that influencing but otherwise occult power that penetrates these great world thoughts and which is already preparing, on the astral plane, the future of the physical plane. If the leading brother of mankind perhaps has pupils who follow such spirit-filled ideas, then these will be a force which also helps him forward in his work for the outward world; great centres of spiritual activity will spring up. You see, therefore, that what I have called occultism really has very much to do with the progress of humanity. And in our times we have a quite particularly important task. Let us seek just to indicate, in a few words, how we have come to this our task.

We are within the great Root Race of humanity, which has peopled the earth, since the land on which we now live rose up out of the inundations of the ocean. Ever since the Atlantean Race began slowly to disappear, the great Aryan Race has been the dominant one on earth. If we contemplate ourselves, we here in Europe are thus the fifth Sub-Race of the great Aryan Root Race. The first Sub-Race lived in the distant past in Ancient India. And the present-day Indians are descendants of that first Sub-Race, whose spiritual life is still extant in the ancient Indian Vedas.⁴ The Vedas are indeed only echoes of the ancient culture of the Rishis. At that time there was of course no writing yet—there was only tradition. Then came the second, third and fourth Sub-Races. The fourth Sub-Race adopted Christianity. Then, halfway through the Middle Ages, we see that the fifth Sub-Race formed itself, to which we and the neighbouring nations belong.

The ancient Indians of the first Sub-Race lived under conditions different from ours, and were also basically organised differently. Even the modern descendants, the Indians of today, are essentially differently organised from our European races. He who, as an occultist, investigates the difference finds that, in the ancient Indian people, the etheric body was much less closely fettered to the physical body, had not so totally submerged itself in the physical body, and that it was much easier to influence it from the astral body. The corollary of that is that the Indian race can easily transfer something from the astral to the etheric body, can easily work on the etheric body. That signifies no less than that the Indian can more easily attain to certain higher perceptions through occult training. The easier it is for the etheric body to be influenced through the astral body, the easier it is to work into the etheric body with pictures, without abstract concepts. And the easier it will be for someone who undergoes yoga training in the astral to come into contact with higher realms through pictorial concepts. These work into the etheric body, which is still pliable. One does not have to work with harsh concepts, since one can work upon the soul of an Indian person with very straightforward pictorial images; and he will [thereby] be able to arrive at very high stages of development.

The human race has undergone change through the various Sub-Races. Our etheric body is today much more strongly under the influence of the physical body than was the case with the ancient Indians. And thus it comes about that we have to work much harder and more inwardly in order to influence the etheric body. We cannot grasp half-dreamlike concepts. We must subject everything to rigorous concentration, we must work upon our inner being by strongly concentrating our soul in the purely super-sensible, not merely by means of imaginative concepts. Such a concept which brings about a strong concentration of our inner being, can then influence the etheric body fettered to the physical body much more strongly. For the astral body to be able to work upon the etheric body, it had in earlier times to be drawn out of the etheric [physical?] body. Nowadays, however, the etheric body can be influenced by the astral body even inside the physical body. Were we to make the same experiment that was customary in the ancient Mysteries, and induce a state of lethargy, we would then be in a position to influence the etheric body. But when the earthly consciousness, the mobility of thought, returned, what the astral body had imprinted on to the etheric body would immediately be erased again. We have to influence the etheric body very strongly if we want it to retain what we have impressed upon it. The occult task has become different today and is now more inward.

Thus you see also how great differences arise in the course of time in the successive occult schools. The yoga system of the Indians is something different from the instruction of the Rosicrucians. The Rosicrucian teaching takes into account what I have just explained. But something else still crops up. For such a step forward to be able to occur at all, the reasoning power had to be influenced. The reason was exerted much more than hitherto, and could then develop its process of transference towards comprehending the super-sensible. In more recent times, therefore, much more was learnt in concepts; more importance was ascribed to the development of reason and to the ability to conceptualise abstractly.

Just compare the transubstantiation in culture between the ancient Indian age and our own. In ancient India you have high intuition and very little outward expression of civilisation; nowadays, in our time, it is the other way round. The consequence is that even the position of occultism has become something quite different; the consequence is that much of what was formerly kept secret has today become a matter of common knowledge. Many, many such perceptions and concepts were formerly guarded within the occult brotherhoods, and people only came near to these things if their whole hearts had been transformed. Today this no longer lies in the hands of the occultist. Much of what was formerly reserved for the later stages of instruction must now be acknowledged as having been revealed in the culture of the outward world. The initiate in the mysteries must reckon with that. And so many of the truths which had been taught in the occult schools were perforce gradually disseminated on the physical plane.

Even what is taught in present-day elementary schools would deflect us from the spiritual, if occult backgrounds did not come into play from another side. In earlier times the pupil knew that behind what he received in school and in the academic world as precepts, there was something still higher, and that he himself might perhaps one day attain this higher knowledge. He knew that he was a cell in a spiritual organism. Today, in the democratic world, one receives many concepts which do not lead to such an insight. Therefore to the structure of outer democratic knowledge the apex of the pyramid has, as it were, to be added. The elementary knowledge of the powers hidden in the world had now been imparted; the apex was missing still, which would lead to a spiritual view of the world. To provide this, a world-embracing movement had to be founded. The theosophical movement was conceived as such. Hence, in certain brotherhoods, it was resolved, as the popularisation of the hitherto secret knowledge went still further and further, to share with the world as much as was necessary of the underlying secrets, in order to bring the knowledge of the outer world into harmony with the all-embracing occult knowledge of the brotherhoods.

We have here arrived at the point where we can see the connection of the theosophical movement and the Theosophical Society with occultism. The theosophical movement is no occult movement, no occult brotherhood, for it is formed on a democratic basis by which each member is as worthy as the next. Nevertheless, it is another matter if one is to understand the Theosophical Society's task. The Society's task is on the physical plane. If one wishes to grasp it fully one must be able to see into the higher worlds. But the point is not that the theosophist is already able to see into higher worlds, but that, within the movement, occult forces are indeed being developed, so that the Theosophical Society can be a place from which occultism can emanate and come to be discussed. It is a different question, whether a society is an occult brotherhood, or whether it says to itself: We are, indeed, no occult brotherhood, but, in our society, occultism comes to be discussed.

Today, when basically the whole of mankind longingly gazes towards the higher worlds without finding the way there, yet another installment of occult knowledge must be popularised in a form appropriate for them. And the occultism within the Theosophical Society has this task. Spiritual movements have always had a fruitful influence on cultural development, even on the physical plane. Its outward expression is nothing else than the realisation on earth of what has been spiritually prepared. What difference is there, if we contemplate, for example, the works of Michaelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci? In these works you have something spiritual conjured up on to the wall in colour and form; the picture is permeated with what first lived in the soul of the artist as something spiritual. The spiritual preceded its subsequent expression as a manifestation in the material world.

And the materialistic external culture is only the copy of the materialistic tendency in mankind's inner convictions. The purely materialistic urban culture has spread itself throughout civilised countries since 1850. We can see the great things that it has achieved on the physical plane, but we also see what it has been unable to achieve. In the realm of art, for instance, no really new style has been evolved, with one exception, and that is the style of the department store. This is something which, in relation to our outward civilisation, is inwardly real. All else, what has been inherited from the past, has no relation to the present. Only if we have formed a society whose members are seized by a spiritual power such as that which used to live in Christianity, and as it still lives as a longing in the best Christian souls, and can be won back again, then we will again have a spiritual culture. And such a culture will again produce artists in all spheres of life. Only let theosophy live in the souls of men and it will flow out of those souls again as style, as art, it will be visibly and audibly there. The world can again be an outward expression of the spiritual, if this can already be brought to life in such a society today.

In this sense the Theosophical Society could help to shape the culture of the distant [future]. If we are together, we must be clear that we are the cells that have to combine to create a future culture. In our souls, those powers will be prepared which will so transform the future world that it will be a physical copy of our present state of mind and outlook on life. Everything which is now revealed and manifest, was once occult. Just as electricity is a revealed force today, so it once used to be an occult force. And what is still occult today is destined to become a motive force for the future. Exactly as our human body has been prepared in advance millions of years ago by forces which are all around us, so a higher body is preparing itself in us today, a body of the future; however, this body of the future will only become ours in a far-off time.

Let us briefly trace the path of our evolution. What used to be there? A dim dream-like human consciousness, mirroring a world very different from our own; men had a dreaming awareness. And even when their communal existence developed, they had no parliament for the exchange of opinions; they had nothing of that kind. Everything was merely mirrored in the consciousness which was developing in man. As for present-day bodily organs, how did they originate? Through those forces having worked upon man. Just as the animals in the dark caves of Kentucky lost their ability to see⁵ because they did not use it, so too, what we possess in the way of eyes and ears was organised by outward forces. These were formed by the forces of sound and of light, and evolved out of our organism. Our spiritual organism of the future will be evolved out of what lives in us today. Those things which stand before us as the expression of our spiritual culture, the churches and so on, the works of culture which bring beauty and truth to us, these will impress themselves in the higher members of our being. And when one day these unfold themselves towards a self-developing life, then what lives in the outward culture as beauty and truth will rise up in our inner being. What eyes and ears perceive now, these will be the stones for building and organising a higher future. If we contemplate the world from this point of view, then man's inner being takes on a totally different meaning.

Here we are confronted with a fact that can explain in a simple way what is called yoga, or inner training. From the words I have spoken, you will be able to gather that the forces which have created the world, that are working and creating in the world, were formerly taken from our inner being. What is in me today was formerly outside me: that is the fundamental thought in occult training. Before our physical body existed, our etheric body was already there. Again, our etheric body is a structure which has been formed by our astral body. And that is the starting point of the yoga training. Whoever engages in yoga training descends into his etheric body, and knows that he will find forces in it which constructed it once, millions of years ago. The physical body slowly developed itself out from the basis of the etheric body.

I can only describe broadly how the descent into the etheric body takes place. Certain currents exist in the etheric body which are the precursors of the physical bodily organs. The nervous system, the nerves themselves, the sympathetic [nervous] system which extends into the back, the ganglia of the sympathetic nervous system, these are parts which were developed etherically in primeval times. That is a process which took place in the remote past. Then, after man had progressed further and further, there came a time when, within his body—which already contained within it the potentiality to develop the physical nervous system—a structure developed which gave man the ability to develop his inner bodily warmth, which prepared him for warm blood. That, again, is a later structure from the etheric body, which then was already strongly influenced by the forces of the astral body. And out of what we subsequently find to be the basic structure of the brain, the spinal column formed itself, again out of the etheric body, as the other pole of the etheric body, which on the one hand developed towards the brain, and on the other hand towards the inner warm blood. That happened in the past. It was not only natural forces that worked on this development of man, but also higher spiritual beings.

When the yogi descends step by step into his etheric body he penetrates into the times gone by in which his spiritual archetypal form was influenced by these forces and beings, times when what lives in us today was produced. When a person thus descends into life, he can then reach that point once again in his descent. He descends from the head down into the lower parts of the body, which were formed in the most ancient times, and then goes back into the head. That is a description, if only a sketchy one, of the path of occult perception. More can be imparted in the occult schools. The pupil of mystery wisdom thus developed the ability to look back into past epochs; so the time comes when he is able to undertake his occult pilgrimage. He attains to this by means of a special exercise through which he overcomes his own personal self and thereby ceases to be a small fettered ego. Only then can he accomplish his ascent into the universe. Once again he descends into the ocean of the past, taking the world forces with him. Then, taking the ascending curve, he can slowly retrace point by point the way that he has thus traveled. Slowly, gradually, the person learns to proceed [further] down into the ocean of his formative forces, and at length he arrives at a point near to [his] origin. Thus must it have been for the person in whom an eye first evolved, with which to direct his gaze into the universe. Then, for the pupil, the flowing together of his ego with the great universal ego blossoms. And now he must learn to say to the little ego: I am not thou.

It is an important moment when he realises what this means: I am not thou. That is a moment when a person begins to understand that in nature there are higher forces than thought, that there is something outside of him, which cannot be expressed in contemporary thought, but which brings it about that two people, both able to speak on the same thing, can in the case of one of them talk clearly but be dull, whereas the other's speech is vibrant with the warm light that will create the future.

When the pupil is this far, he can learn now in another way than has hitherto been possible for him. He thereby experiences something very special. A spiritual being confronts him in the super-sensible world: he meets that individuality with whom he was once, formerly, very close. It is a great and significant mystery, when particular stages of our existence recapitulate themselves. We rise consciously from Manas to the higher forces; we once descended from spiritual worlds, and at that time this same being implanted something in us, whom we now meet again at the level corresponding to that point in the past at which he was with us. It is the teacher, the so-called guru. Long ago we met him for the first time; we now meet him again, when we can grasp consciously what he implanted into us at that time, and was received by us unconsciously. And if we descend still further we meet with the spirits who shared in our creation aeons ago. We meet with the Twelve Spirits: the Spirits of Will, the Spirits of Wisdom, the Spirits of Form, the Spirits of Movement, the Spirits of Personality or of Egoism, the Spirits of Warmth or Fire, the Spirits of Dusk or Twilight, and so on. All of this offers itself to our spiritual sense through this descent into the universe, through this pilgrimage. And this alone makes it possible for us to gaze into the future, makes it possible to anticipate what ‘shortly’—as the writer of the Apocalypse puts it—will happen.

That is the task of occultism. It is to be discharged, because that discharge is necessary. There are movements in plenty which are idealistic, which are ethical. But the movement called theosophy distinguishes itself from the others, in that occultism consciously comes to expression in this movement.

With that, the connection between occultism and theosophy is made clear. The Theosophical Society can never want to be an occult brotherhood. What must give it the strength to fulfil its task, what must give it life, can only be the things that emanate from occultism. Therefore the Theosophical Society will thrive if the cultivation of occult teaching and occult life is understood. That is stiff not a demand that the members themselves should be occultists. But if the Theosophical Society were to forget that this blood pulses in it, then it might remain an interesting society, but what was intended for it by the sublime powers who assisted at its birth would not be achieved.

Whoever understands this will never want to take away the Theosophical Society's occult character. All the same, whoever thus belongs to the Theosophical Society will be brought into a two-sided situation. He must necessarily give an ear to the side whence flow the occult truths, on the other hand he must turn his attention to the exoteric life of the Society. These aspects must be kept strictly apart; they must never be mixed together. When one talks about the outward Theosophical Society, one must never, however, even mention the occult personalities who stood over its inception. The powers who live on the higher planes and who live for the sake of mankind's evolution, outside of the physical body, never interfere in these affairs. They never impart anything other than impulses. Whenever we are engaged, in a practical way, in extending the Theosophical Society, the great individualities whom we call the Masters are standing at our side; we may turn ourselves to them and allow them to speak through us. When it concerns the propagation of occult life, it is the Masters who speak. When it only concerns the Organisation of the Society then they leave it to those who are living on the physical plane. That is the distinction between the occult current and the framework of the theosophical organisation. Allow me to express the difference between what flows as inward spiritual stream and what manifests through individual personalities, as it can perhaps best be expressed: When it concerns spiritual life, then the Masters speak; when it only concerns Organisation, since error is possible, the Masters are then silent.

• 1 . The first announcement was most probably given during the General Meeting of the German Section which had taken place beforehand.
• 2 . The then name of the Berlin Branch which held its usual evening meetings.
• 3 . The principle teaching of Pythagoras (ca. 580–500 B.C.) was that the universe was conceived in the form of a harmoniously ordered whole (the harmony of the spheres).
• 4 . Veda (Sanskrit word for ‘sacred knowledge’). The Vedas are the complete collection of the oldest religious documents of the Hindus, written in Sanskrit, to which a supersensible origin has been attributed. They contain a comprehensive literature which was handed on by word of mouth for many ages. The Vedic manuscripts are divided mainly into the following: 1. the Sanhitas; 2. the Brahmanas; 3. the Aranyakas and Upanishads. The Sanhitas are the anthologies of songs, sacrificial formulae and magical incantations. Four such anthologies are distinguished, usually referred to simply as ‘the four Vedas.’
• 5 . This example is often cited by Rudolf Steiner. The phenomenon of the rudimentary organs was first observed in the American caves. See: Darwin's Origin of Species, Chapter 5, ‘The Laws of Mutation.’

I spoke to you yesterday of the relations of anthroposophical spiritual science to the forms of our building, and I wished particularly to point out that these relations are not external ones, but that the spirit which rules in our spiritual science has flowed, so to speak, into these forms. Special importance must be attached to the fact that it is possible to maintain that an actual understanding of these forms through feeling indicates, in a certain sense, a deciphering of the inner meaning existing in our Movement. Today I should like to take up a few things concerning the building, in order then to present today and tomorrow some important anthroposophical matters.

You will see when you contemplate the building that its ground-plan consists of two intersecting circles, one smaller than the other; so that I may sketch it roughly thus:

The whole building has an east-west orientation; and you will note that this east-west line is the only axis of symmetry; that is, everything is constructed symmetrically upon this axis.

For the rest, we do not have a mere mechanical repetition of forms, such as we find elsewhere in architecture, perchance with identical capitals, or the like, but we have an evolution of forums, as I explained in detail yesterday, with the later ones emerging from the preceding.¹

You will find seven columns on the left and seven on the right, defining the outer circular passage; and I mentioned yesterday that these seven columns have capitals and pedestals, with corresponding architraves above, which develop their forms in continuous evolution.

When you feel this ground-plan—and you must comprehend it through feeling—you will have, simply in these two intersecting circles, some-thing which points to the evolution of humanity. I said yesterday that a very significant, incisive change in the evolution of humanity occurred about the middle of the 15th century. What is exteriorly and academically called “history” is only a fable convenue, for it records external facts in such a way as to make it appear that the human being was essentially the same in the 8th or 9th century as, let us say, in the 18th or 19th. There are, however, modern historians—for example, Lamprecht—who have discovered that this is nonsense, that as a matter of fact man's soul-constitution and soul-mood were entirely different before and after the point of time indicated. We are at present in the midst of an evolution which we can only understand when we realize that we are developing toward the future with special soul forces, and that those soul forces which had been developed before the 15th century are now still, we might say, haunting the souls of men, becoming fainter and fainter; but that they belong to what is perishing, to what is condemned to fall out of human evolution. We must develop a consciousness concerning this important change in the evolution of humanity if we are to be qualified at all to have anything to say about the concerns of humanity in the present and the immediate future.

Such things find expression particularly when people wish to refer significantly to what they feel, what they sense. We need only to remind ourselves of one fact in the development of architecture which has already been mentioned here, but to which I wish to refer again today, in order to show by an example how the evolution of humanity strides forward.

Just observe the forms of a Greek temple! How can they be understood? Only by realizing clearly that the whole architectural idea of this Greek temple takes its orientation from the fact that it was the dwelling place of a god or a goddess, whose statue was placed within it. All the forms of the Greek temple would be absurdities if it were not conceived as the shelter, the abode, of the god or goddess who was intended to dwell in it.

If we proceed from the forms of the Greek temple to the next forms of construction which are significant, we come to the Gothic cathedral. Anyone who has the feeling upon entering a Gothic cathedral that in this cathedral he has before him something completed, something finished, does not understand the forms of Gothic architecture; just as anyone fails to understand the forms of the Greek temple who can regard it as if it contained no statue of a god. A Greek temple with-out the image of a god—we need only to imagine that it is there, but it must be imagined in order to understand the form—a Greek temple without the statue of a god is an impossibility to the understanding which comes through feeling. A Gothic cathedral which is empty is also an impossibility for the person who really has some feeling for such things. The Gothic cathedral is complete only when the congregation is in it, when it is filled with people—really, only when it is filled with people and the word is spoken to them, so that the spirit of the word rules over the congregation or in their hearts. Then the Gothic cathedral is complete. But the congregation belongs to it; otherwise the forms are unintelligible.

What kind of an evolution really confronts us in the evolution from the Greek temple to the Gothic cathedral—for the other forms are actually intermediate ones, whatever mistaken historical interpretation may say about it—what kind of an evolution confronts us there? If we look at the Greek civilization, this flower of the fourth post-Atlantean period, we must say that in the Greek consciousness there still lived something of the tarrying of divine-spiritual powers among men; only that the people felt impelled to erect dwelling places for their gods whom they could represent to themselves only in images. The Greek temple was the abode of the god or the goddess, of whose presence among them the people were conscious. Without this consciousness of the presence of divine-spiritual powers the phenomenon of the Greek temple in the Greek civilization is unthinkable.

If we go on now from the summit of the Greek civilization to its close, toward the end of the fourth post-Atlantean period, that is, toward the 8th, 9th, or 10th Christian century, we come to the forms of Gothic architecture, which requires the congregation to complete it. Everything corresponds to the feeling life of the humanity of that time. Human beings were then naturally different in their soul-disposition from those living when Greek thought was at its height. There was no longer a consciousness of the immediate presence of divine-spiritual powers; they were thought of as being far removed to the beyond. The earthly kingdom was often accused of having deserted the divine-spiritual powers. The material world was looked upon as something to be avoided, from which the eyes were to be averted and to be turned instead toward the spiritual powers. The individual sought by joining with the others in the congregation—going in quest, as it were, of the group-spirit of humanity—the rule of the spiritual, which in this way acquired a certain abstract quality: hence the Gothic forms also produce an abstract-mathematical impression, as contrasted with those of Greek architecture, which appear more dynamic, and which have something of the comfortable inclusion of the god or goddess. In the Gothic forms every-thing is aspiring, everything points to the fact that what the soul thirsts for must be sought in remote spiritual regions. For the Greek his god and his goddess were present; he heard their whispers, as it were, with the ear of the soul. In the time of the Gothic architecture the longing soul could only have an inkling of the presence of the divine in upward-pointing forms.

Thus in its soul-mood humanity had become filled with longing, so to speak; it built upon longing, upon seeking, believing that it was possible to be more successful in this seeking through union with the congregation; but it was always convinced that what is recognized as the divine-spiritual is not directly active among men, but conceals itself in mysterious depths. Now if one wished to express what was thus yearningly striven for and sought, it could only be done by linking it in one way or another with something mysterious. The contemporary expression of this whole soul-mood of the people was the temple or, we could also say, the cathedral, which in its proper typical form is the Gothic cathedral. But again, if that which man yearned for as the highest of all mysteries was observed with spiritual vision, then at the very moment when one was about to rise from the earthly to the super-earthly, it would be necessary to pass over from the mere Gothic to something else, which—we might say—did not unite the physical congregation, but caused to tend toward one central point, toward a mysterious central point, the whole spirit of humanity striving together—or the souls and spirits of humanity striving together.

If you imagine, let us say, the totality of human souls as streaming together from all directions, you have in a certain way united on the earth the humanity of the whole earth, as in a great cathedral, which was not however thought of as Gothic, although it should have the same significance as the Gothic cathedral. In the Middle Ages such things were connected with the Biblical narrative—and if you imagine that the seventy-two disciples (it is not necessary to think of physical history, but of the spirituality which in those times actually did permeate the physical view of the world)—if you imagine, as was believed in accordance with the spirit of the time, that the seventy-two disciples of Christ spread out in all directions and implanted in souls the spirit which was to flow together in the Mystery of Christ: then in all that streamed back again from those in whose souls the disciples had implanted the Christ Spirit, in the rays which come from all directions from all those souls, you have that which the man of the early Middle Ages conceived in the most comprehensive and universal way as striving toward the Mystery.

It is not necessary perhaps to draw all seventy-two pillars, but I merely indicate them (see drawing), and you are to imagine that there were seventy-two. From these seventy-two pillars, then, would come the rays which tend from all humanity toward the Mystery of Christ. En-close the whole with some kind of wall—it would not be Gothic, but I have already told you why one did not stop sharply with the Gothic—enclose it with a wall whose ground-plan is a circle; and if you imagine here the seventy-two pillars, you would have the cathedral which encloses all humanity, so to speak. And if you also imagine it as having an east-west orientation, then naturally you must sense in it an entirely different ground-plan from that of our building, which is constructed from two segments of circles—the feeling toward this ground-plan must be entirely different, and I tried to describe this feeling roughly for you: it would then be supposed that the principal lines of orientation of a building erected according to this ground-plan would have the form of a cross, and that the main aisles would be arranged according to this cross-form (see drawing.)

This is the way the man of the Middle Ages conceived his ideal cathedral. If east is here and west here (see drawing), then we should have north and south here. And then in the north, south, and west there would be three doors, and here in the east would be a sort of lateral high altar, and a kind of altar at each pillar; but-here, where the beams of the cross intersect, would have to stand the temple of the temple, the cathedral of the cathedral—a sort of epitome of the whole, a representation in miniature of the whole. We should say in modern speech, which has become abstract: here would stand a little tabernacle, but in the form of the whole.

What I have drawn for you here you should imagine in a style of architecture which only approximates the real Gothic, which still includes all sorts of Romanesque forms, but which has throughout the orientation I have indicated. In this I have drawn for you at the same time the sketch of the Grail-temple, as conceived by the man of the Middle Ages, that Grail-temple which was, so to speak, the ideal of construction toward the end of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch,—a cathedral in which the longings of all humanity orientated to Christ flowed together—just as in the single cathedral the longings of the members of the congregation flowed together; and just as in the Greek temple the people felt them-selves united even when they were not in it—for the Greek temple demands only that the god or goddess be in it, not the people—in other words, as the Greek people of a certain territory felt that they were united through their temple with their god or goddess. If we wish to speak in accordance with the facts, we can say: When the Greek de-scribed his relation to the temple, he did it in somewhat the following way: When he said in speaking of any person—say Pericles—“Pericles dwells in this house,” this was not intended to mean that the man him-self who uttered it had a relation of ownership or any other relation to the house; but he simply realized the fact of his union with Pericles when he said: “Pericles dwells in this house.” With exactly the same shade of feeling the Greek would also have expressed his relation to what was to be deciphered in the style of architecture, thus: “Athene dwells in this house,”—it is the abode of the goddess—or, “Apollo dwells in this house!”

The congregation of the Middle Ages could not say that with regard to their cathedral, because it was not the house in which the divine-spiritual being dwelt; it was the house which expressed in every single form the gathering-place where the people attuned their souls to the mysteriously divine. Therefore, in what I might call the prototype-temple, at the end of the fourth post-Atlantean period, there stood in the center the temple of the temple, the cathedral of the cathedral; and of the whole one might say: “If anyone enters here, he will be able herein to lift himself to the mysteries of the universe.” It was necessary to enter the cathedral. Of the Greek temple it was only necessary to say: “That is the house of Apollo; that is the house of Pallas.” And at the central point in that prototype-temple, where the beams of the cross intersect—at the central point the Holy Grail was enshrined, there it was preserved.

You see we must in this way follow the soul-attitude characterizing each historical epoch, otherwise we cannot come to know what really happened. And most of all, we cannot without such observation learn what soul-forces are beginning to bud again in our time.

The Greek temple, then, enclosed the god or goddess, and the people knew that the gods were present among men. But the man of the Middle Ages did not feel that; he felt that in a sense the earthly world was deserted by God, forsaken by the Divine. He felt the longing to find the way back to the gods, or to God.

Indeed we are today only at the starting point, for only a few centuries have elapsed since the great change in the middle of the 15th century. Most people scarcely notice what is unfolding, but something is unfolding; human souls are becoming different; and that must also be different which must now flow anew into the forms in which the consciousness of the time is embodied. These things cannot, of course, be grasped by speculating about them with the reason, with the intellect; they can only be sensed, felt, viewed artistically. Anyone who wishes to put them into abstract concepts does not really understand them; but they can be indicated descriptively in the most various ways. So it must be said that the Greek felt the god or the goddess as his contemporary, as his fellow-citizen. The man of the Middle Ages had the cathedral which served, not as the dwelling-place for the god, but which was intended to be in a sense the entrance-door to the way which leads to the divine. The people gathered together in the cathedral and their yearning arose, as it were, out of the group-soul of humanity. That is the characteristic quality, that this entire humanity of the Middle Ages had something which can be understood only in the light of the group-soul. Up to the middle of the 15th century the individual human being was not of such importance as he has become since that time. Since then the most essential characteristic in the human being is the striving to be an individuality, the striving to concentrate individual forces of personality, to find a central point within himself.

Neither can that be understood which is arising in the exceedingly varied social demands of our time unless the dominion of the individual spirit in each single human being is discerned, the desire of each individual to stand upon the foundation of his own being.

Because of this there is something that becomes especially important for man at this time; it began about the middle of the 15th century and will not come to a close until about the third millennium—something of very special importance for this time set in then. You see it is quite indefinite to say that each man strives for his particular individuality. The group-spirit, even when it comprises only small groups, is much more comprehensible than is that to which each single human being aspires out of the well-spring of his own individuality. For this reason it is particularly important for the people of modern times to understand what may be called seeking balance between opposite poles.

The one wishes to soar beyond the head, as it were. All that causes a man to be a dreamer, a visionary, a deluded person, all that fills him with indefinite mystical impulses toward some indefinite infinity—even if he is pantheist or theist or whatever else, and there are many of the kind today—that is the one pole. The other is that of prosiness, aridity—expressed trivially, but not with unreality as concerns the spirit of the present time, certainly not—the pole of philistinism, of narrow-mindedness, the pole which draws us down to earth into materialism. These two poles of force are in man, and between them stands the essential being of man, seeking equilibrium. In how many ways can equilibrium be sought? You can represent that to yourselves by the illustration of the scales (see drawing). In how many ways can one seek balance between two poles pulling in opposite directions?

If here on one side of the scales there are 50 grams or 50 kilograms, and also here on the other side, they balance, do they not? But if here on one side there is one kilogram and one kilogram on the other, they still balance; and if there are a thousand here and a thousand here, they balance! You can seek equilibrium in innumerable ways. That corresponds to the infinite number of ways of being an individual human being. Hence for people of the present it is very essential to comprehend that their nature consists in the struggle for balance between two opposite poles. And the indefiniteness of the effort for balance is that very indefiniteness of which I spoke before. Therefore the man of the present time will succeed in his seeking only if he unites this seeking with the struggle for balance.

Just as it was important for the Greek to feel: In the commonwealth to which I belong Pallas rules, Apollo rules; that is the abode of Pallas, that, of Apollo; just as it was important for the people of the Middle Ages to know: There is a place of assembly which enshrines something—be it relics of a saint, or even the Holy Grail—there is a place of assembly, in which, when the people gather, the soul-yearnings can flow toward indefinite mysterious things,—so is it important for modern man to develop a feeling for what he is as an individual human being; that as an individual human being he is a seeker for equilibrium, between two opposite, two polaric forces. From the point of view of the soul it may be expressed thus: On one side that force holds sway through which man wishes to soar beyond his head, as it were, the ecstatic, the fantastic, that which would develop rapture and takes no account of the real conditions of existence. As from the point of view of the soul we can characterize one extreme in this way, and the other by saying that it pulls toward the earth, toward the insipid, the barren, the aridly intellectual, and so on, and so on, we can also say, speaking physiologically, that the one pole is everything that heats the blood, and if heated too much it becomes feverish. Expressed physiologically, the one pole is everything connected with the forces of the blood; the other pole all that is connected with the ossifying, the petrifying of man, which if it goes to the physiological extreme would lead to sclerosis in most varied forms. And man must also maintain his balance physiologically between sclerosis and fever as the terminal poles. Life consists fundamentally in seeking the balance between the insipid, the arid, the philistine, and the ecstatically fantastic. We are healthy in soul when we find this balance. We are healthy in body when we can live in balance between fever and sclerosis, ossification. That can be done in an endless number of ways, and in it the individuality can express itself.

It is in this sense that modern man must come to understand, through his feeling, the ancient Apollo-saying: “Know thou thyself.” But “Know thou thyself” not in some abstract way; “Know thou thyself in the struggle for balance.” Therefore we have to set up at the east end of the building what is intended to cause the human being to feel this struggle for balance. That is to be represented in the plastic wood group mentioned yesterday, with the Christ-Form as the central figure—the Christ-Form which we have tried to fashion in such a way that one may imagine: It was really thus that the Christ went about in Palestine at the beginning of our era in the man Jesus of Nazareth. The conventional pictures of the bearded Christ are actually only creations of the fifth or sixth century, and they are really not in any way true portraits, if I may use the expression. That has been attempted here: to produce a true portrait of Christ, Who is to be at the same time the Representative of the seeking human being, the human being striving for balance.

You will see then in this group two figures (see drawing No. VII): here the falling Lucifer, here the upward-striving Lucifer; here below, connected with Lucifer, as it were, an Ahrimanic form, and here a second Ahrimanic form. The Representative of Humanity is placed between the Ahrimanic form—the philistine, the insipid, the aridly materialistic—and the Lucifer-form—the ecstatic, the fantastic; between the Ahriman-figure—all that leads to petrifaction, to sclerosis—and the Lucifer-figure—the representation of all that leads man feverishly out beyond the limit of what his health can endure.

After we have placed in the center, as it were, the Gothic cathedral, which encloses no image, but either the relics of saints or even the Holy Grail—that is, something no longer directly connected with beings living on earth—then we come back again, I might say, to the idea of the building as enclosing something, but now enclosing the being of man in his struggle for balance.

If destiny permits it, and this building can some day be completed, he who sits within it will have directly before him, while he is looking upon the Being who gives meaning to the earth evolution, something which suggests to him to say: the Christ-Being. But this is to be felt in an artistic way. It must not be merely reasoned about speculatively as being the Christ, but it must be felt. The whole is artistically conceived, and what comes to artistic expression in the forms is the most important part. But it is nevertheless intended to suggest to the human being through feeling—I might say to the exclusion of the intellect, which is to be merely the ladder to feeling—that he is to look toward the east of the building and be able to say: “That art thou.” But now, not an abstract definition of man, for balance can be effected in innumerable ways. Not an image of a god is enclosed, for it is true for Christians also that they are to make no image of a God—not an image of a god is enclosed, but that is enclosed which has developed of the qualities of the human group-soul into the individual force-entity of each separate human being. And the working and weaving of the individual impulse is taken into account in these forms.—

If you do not reason about what I have now said (that of course, is the favorite method today), but if you penetrate it with the feeling, and realize that nothing is symbolized or thought out with the intellect, but that first of all the effort has at least been made to let it flow out in artistic forms: then you have the basic principle which is intended to be expressed in this Goetheanum Building; but you have also the nature of the connection between that which purposes to be anthroposophically-orientated spiritual science and the inner spirit of human evolution. In our time one cannot reach this anthroposophical spiritual science except by way of the great modern demands of humanity's present and immediate future. We must really learn to speak in a different way about that which is actually bearing mankind toward the future.

There are now many kinds of secret societies which take pride in them-selves, but which are really nothing more nor less than mere custodians of that which is still being projected into the present out of the time before the great turning point in the 15th century,—a fact which frequently comes to expression even quite externally. We have also repeatedly been able to experience that such aspiration has penetrated our ranks. How very often, when some one wishes to express the special merit of a so-called occult movement is reference made to its age. We had among us at one time, for example, a man who wished to play himself up a little bit as a Rosicrucian; and when he said something, which was generally his most personal, trivial opinion, he almost never failed to add: “as the old Rosicrucians used to say;” and he never omitted the “old.” If one looks about among many of the secret societies of the present time, it will be seen everywhere that the value of the things advocated consists in being able to point to their venerable age. Some go back to Rosicrucianism—in their own way of course—others naturally go back much farther still, especially to Egypt; and if anybody today can retail Egyptian temple wisdom, a large proportion of humanity will be taken in at the mere announcement.

Most of our friends know that we have continually emphasized that this anthroposophically-orientated spiritual movement has nothing to do with this straining after the ancient. Its endeavor concerns that which is now being revealed directly from the spiritual world to this physical world. Therefore about many things it must speak differently from some secret societies,—which are to be taken seriously, but which are nevertheless building upon antiquated foundations, and are at present still playing a prominent role in human events. When you hear such people talking (indeed, sometimes in this day their own inclinations make them speak), people who are initiated into certain mysteries of present day secret societies, you will notice that they speak chiefly of three things. First, of that which the real seeker for the spiritual world experiences, and which he cannot possibly avoid when he first crosses the threshold of that world, namely, the meeting with powers which are the actual enemies of mankind, the real essential opponents of the physical human being living here on earth as he is intended by the Divine Powers to live. That is to say, these people know that what is concealed from the ordinary human consciousness is permeated by those powers which may be called with some justice the essential causes of illness and death, but with whom also is interwoven all that is connected with human birth. And you can hear from the people who know something of these things that one ought to be silent about them, because what lies beyond the normal consciousness cannot be revealed to profane humanity. (In speaking thus they really mean the immature souls who have not made them-selves strong enough for it—and indeed that includes a large proportion of humanity.)

The second experience is, that at the moment in which man learns to recognize the truth (it can be recognized only when one has knowledge of super-sensible mysteries) he learns to recognize also to what extent everything that can be affirmed merely through sense observation of the environing world is illusion, deception,—indeed, the more exact the external research, the greater the illusion. This loss of the solid ground from under his feet which the man of our time especially needs, so that he can say, “That is a fact, for I have seen it”—this loss takes place with the crossing of the threshold.

The third is, that at the moment we begin to do the work of a human being—whenever human deeds are accomplished, whether working with tools or cultivating the ground, but especially when we perform human deeds which we weave into the web of the social organism—when we work in this way we do something which not only concerns us as men, but which is related to the whole universe. Of course man believes to-day that when he builds a locomotive, or makes a telephone or a lightning conductor or a table, or when he cures the sick, or even fails to cure, or does anything at all,—he believes that such things play a role only with-in human evolution on earth. No; it is a deep truth which I have indicated in my mystery-drama, The Portal of Initiation, that when some-thing occurs here, there are resultant events in the whole universe (call to mind the scene between Strader and Capesius). The people who today know something of these things begin with these three experiences, which are, however, preserved in these societies in the form they had be-fore the middle of the 15th century—and in this form they are often greatly misunderstood. Such people begin with these things, referring first to the mysteries of illness, health, birth, and death; second, to the mystery of the great illusion in the sense world; third, to the mystery of the universal significance of human work; and they speak in a certain way. What is said about all these things, and especially about these most important things, must be different from the past. I should like to give you an idea how differently such things were spoken of in the past, how what was said flowed out into the general consciousness, how it permeated the ordinary natural science, the ordinary social thinking, and so on; and how they must be spoken of in the future, whenever the truth is really spoken; how what then comes from the secret sources of the striving for knowledge must flow out into the external knowledge of nature, into the external social view, and so forth.

Of this mighty metamorphosis—which should be understood today, because men must awake fully from the group consciousness to the individual consciousness—of this great metamorphosis, this historic metamorphosis, I should like to speak to you further.

• 1. Compare: Der Dornacher Bau als Wahrzeichen kunstlerischer Umwandlungs-Impulse (not yet translated).

Like two mighty pillars of the spirit have the annual festivals of Christmas and Easter been placed by the Christian world within the course of the year, itself a symbol of the course of human life. On these spiritual pillars standing before the human soul in its contemplation are inscribed the two great mysteries of mankind's physical existence. We must regard them very differently from the way we regard other events in the course of our physical life.

It is true that a supersensible element reaches into this physical life through our sense observation and our intellectual judgments, through the content of our feeling and will. In certain instances it proclaims itself clearly as supersensible—when, for example, Christian feeling undertakes to symbolize it in the festival of Pentecost. With Christmas and Easter, on the other hand, we must look at two events in earthly life that in external appearance would seem perhaps to be completely physical events; and yet, in contrast to all other physical events, they do not—indeed, they cannot by their very nature—present themselves as simply physical events. We can observe human physical life as we observe nature, perceiving with our senses the external manifestation of the spirit. But we can never observe the two boundary events of human life, not even just their physical occurrence, without confronting through physical perception itself their tremendous riddle, their profound mystery. These are the events of birth and death. In the life of Christ Jesus, and in our thoughts of Christmas and Easter reminding us of it, these two events of man's physical life stand before our soul, addressing the Christian heart.

As we contemplate these two great mysteries in their relation to Christmas and Easter, we find illuminating strength for our thinking, a powerful incentive for our willing, and an uplifting of our whole being. They stand there, these two pillars of the spirit, possessing an eternal value.

In the course of human evolution, however, men's capacities have changed for approaching the sublime conceptions of Christmas and Easter. During the early Christian centuries, when the Event of Golgotha had penetrated and shocked many hearts, men gradually found their way to the thought of a Savior dying on Golgotha. In the Crucified One hanging on the Cross they found the idea of redemption. And they gradually formed the powerful imagination of Christ dying on the Cross. But in later times, especially since our modern age began, Christian feeling has adjusted itself to the materialism rising in human evolution and has turned to the picture of the childlike element entering the world as the newborn Jesus.

One may certainly say that a sensitive person will find European Christianity decidedly materialistic from the way it has concentrated in recent centuries upon the Christmas manger. The desire to fondle the infant Jesus—this is not meant in a bad sense—has become trivial in the course of centuries. And many songs about the Jesus Child that today are still considered beautiful, or—as some people would say—charming, seem to us not serious enough for these grave times.

But the conception of Christmas and the conception of Easter are eternal pillars, eternal monuments of the human heart. One can truly say that this age of new spiritual revelations will cast new light upon Christmas, so that gradually it will be experienced in a glorious, new form. It will be our task to hear the call in present world events for a rejuvenation of many old conceptions, the call for a new revelation of the spirit. It will be our task to understand that a new meaning for Christmas is working its way out of world events for the strengthening and uplifting of the human soul.

The birth and death of a human being, however intently we may observe and analyze them, manifest themselves as events happening on the physical plane but in which a spiritual element prevails. No one who reflects earnestly can possibly deny that they give evidence in the way they occur that man is the citizen of a spiritual world. No physical observation of birth and death will ever find anything in what the senses can perceive and the intellect grasp, other than events in which the spirit is directly manifested in the physical. Only these two earthly events appear in this way to the human heart.

For the event of birth, the Christmas event, the human and Christian heart must develop an ever deeper sense of mystery. One may say that men have seldom looked from a high enough level upon the mysterious nature of birth. Seldom, indeed; but then at such moments its tidings speak to the depths of the human soul.

So it is, for instance, with the images associated with that spiritual genius of fifteenth-century Switzerland, Nikolaus von der Flüe.¹ It is related of him—and he himself told it—that before his birth, before he breathed the outer air, he beheld the physical form that he would have after birth and during the course of his life. Also, he beheld before birth the ceremony of his own christening, with the persons who were present and who were then around him in his early childhood. With the exception of one elderly person whom he did not recognize, he knew all these people because he had seen them before he saw the light of the physical world.

However one may view this story, one cannot but see that it points impressively to the mystery of human birth, which is so magnificently symbolized for world history by the Christmas imagery. The story of von der Flue suggests that there is something connected with our entrance into physical life that only by a very, very thin wall is hidden from our everyday view, a wall so thin that it can be broken through when a karmic situation exists as in the case of Nikolaus von der Flüe. Such moving allusions to the mystery of birth and Christmas still meet us here and there. But one must say that as yet mankind is hardly aware of the fact that birth and death, the two boundary pillars standing there in the physical world, reveal themselves even in their physical appearance as spiritual events that could never occur in the ordinary course of nature, as events in which, on the contrary, divine spiritual Powers actually intervene. This is evident from the fact that both these boundary experiences still remain mysteries, even in their physical manifestation.

The new revelation of the Christ now moves us to contemplate the course of human life—allow me to express it in the following way—as Christ wishes us to contemplate it in the twentieth century. As we try today to grasp the meaning of Christmas, let us recall a saying attributed to Christ Jesus that points truly to the Christmas event: “Except ye become as little children, ye shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” “Except ye become as little children”: this is certainly not encouraging us to strip away all the mystery of the Christmas conception, and to drag it down to the banality of “dear little Jesus,” as many folk songs and other songs have done—the folk songs less than the art songs—during the materialistic development of Christianity. This very saying—“Except ye become as little children, ye shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven”—impels us to look up to mighty impulses flowing through human evolution. And in our own time, all that is happening in the world can surely be no reason for lapsing into trivial ideas of Christmas, when the human heart is filled with pain, when it must look back upon millions of human beings who have met their death in these last years, must think of countless human beings hungering for food. At this time surely nothing is fitting but to contemplate the mighty thoughts in world history that have impelled and inspired humanity. One can be brought to such thoughts by the saying, “Except ye become as little children.” And one can supplement it by these words: “Unless you live your life in the light of this thought, you cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”

When a human being enters this world as a child, he has come directly from the spiritual world. What happens in physical life, the procreation and growth of his physical body, is only a covering for the event that cannot be described otherwise than by saying: man's central being leaves the spiritual world. He is born out of the spirit into the body. When the Rosicrucian says “Ex Deo Nascimur,” he is speaking of the human being entering the physical world. What first en-sheathes him, what makes him a complete physical being here on earth: this is what is referred to by the words “Ex Deo Nascimur.” If one would speak of the kernel of the human being, his innermost core of being, one must say: he comes down from the spirit into this physical world. Through what takes place in the physical world—which he is able to observe from spiritual regions before his conception and birth—he is clothed with a physical body, in order that he may have experiences that are only possible in such a body. But he has come, in his central core of being, out of the spiritual world. And he reveals—to one who wants to see things as they really are in this world, who is not blinded by materialistic illusions—he reveals in his very first years by his very nature that he has come out of the spirit. One's experiences with a child, if one has insight, are of such a character that one feels in him the after-effects of his recent life in the spiritual world.

This is the mystery that is indicated by such stories as the one associated with Nikolaus von der Flüe. A trivial view and one strongly influenced by materialistic thinking asserts in its simplicity that a human being develops his ego gradually in the course of his life from birth to death, that his ego becomes more and more clearly manifest and more and more powerful. This is a naive way of thinking! If one observes the true human ego that comes from the spiritual world into its physical sheath through birth, one speaks quite differently about the entire physical development of the human being. For one knows that as the human being grows physically in his physical body, actually his true ego slowly vanishes into the body, becoming continually less and less manifest. One knows that what develops here in the physical world between birth and death is only a mirrored reflection of spiritual happenings, a dead reflection of a higher life. One is expressing it properly if one says, the entire fullness of a man's being gradually disappears into the body; it becomes more and more invisible. He lives his life here on earth by gradually losing himself in his body. At death he finds himself again in the spirit. That is what one says who knows the facts. Someone ignorant of the facts will declare that a child is incomplete, that his ego gradually develops to greater and greater perfection, growing out of vague subconscious levels of human existence. A knowledge of what the spiritual investigator sees, causes one to speak differently about these things than is done from today's sense-consciousness, enmeshed as it is in external illusions and materialistic feelings.

Thus the human being enters the world as a spiritual being. His bodily nature while he is a child is still undefined; it has as yet laid small claim to his spiritual nature, which is entering into physical existence as if it were falling asleep. This spiritual nature only seems so empty of content to us because we cannot perceive it in ordinary life, just as we cannot perceive the sleeping ego and astral body when they are separated from the physical and etheric bodies. But the fact that we do not perceive a being does not make it less perfect. This is what the human being has to accomplish in regard to his physical body: that he shall bury himself in it more and more deeply, in order to acquire faculties that can only be acquired in this way. His soul and spirit being must lose themselves for a while in physical existence. In order that we may always remember our spiritual origin, in order that we may grow strong in the thought that we have journeyed out of the spirit into the physical world: it is for this reason that the Christmas festival stands there like a mighty pillar of light within the Christian world.

The Christmas imagination must grow ever stronger in the future spiritual evolution of humanity. It will then become powerful again for humanity. Human beings will once more be able to draw strength from it for their physical life; it will remind them in the right way of their spiritual origin. Seldom in our present time does it have so powerful an effect upon human hearts as it will have in the future. For it is a strange fact, but rooted in the very laws of spiritual existence, that what appears in the world to help mankind forward does not appear at once in its ultimate form. It appears first, as it were, tumultuously, as if it were launched prematurely by unlawful spirits of world evolution. We only understand the historical evolution of humanity properly when we realize that truths are not always to be taken up as they first appear. The right moment must also be considered for their entrance into evolution in their true light.

Among various thoughts that have entered into the evolution of modern humanity—inspired, certainly, by the Christ Impulse but appearing at first in premature form—is that of human equality before God and the world, the equality of all men. This is a profoundly Christian conception capable of ever increasing in depth. But it should not have been presented to human hearts in such vague form as it was given by the French Revolution when it first appeared among mankind so tumultuously. We must realize that human life is involved in a process of evolution from birth to death, and that the chief impulses working upon it are distributed in time. Think how it is with the human being as he enters sense-existence: he is filled with the idea of the equality of human nature in all men. We experience the child nature most intensely when we regard the child as permeated through his whole being by this idea. Nothing that creates inequality among men, nothing that organizes men so that they feel different from other men: nothing of all this enters at first into the child's nature. It is all imparted to him in the course of his physical life. Inequality is created by men's physical existence. They come from the spirit equal before God and the world and their fellowmen. This is proclaimed by the mystery of the child.

This mystery is closely related to our understanding of Christmas, which will be made more profound by new Christian revelations. For these will have to do with the new Trinity: the human being, representing all humanity; the forces of Ahriman; and the forces of Lucifer. As one learns how man is placed in world existence in a situation of balance between Ahriman and Lucifer, one comes to understand the real significance of the human being in external physical life.

Most of all, understanding must come about, Christian understanding, for a certain aspect of human life. Someday Christian thought will announce a fact that has already been put forward by some minds since the middle of the nineteenth century—may I say, in stammering accents, but quite distinctly. When one has first grasped the fact that a child enters his earth life with a consciousness of human equality, then one must go on to the fact that as the child becomes a man, unequal powers develop in him—as if from just the fact of being born—powers that are obviously not of this earth. One is then confronting another great mystery of human existence, one that is in direct contrast to the idea of equality. To see into this mystery will help one to form a true picture of mankind—something that already at this present moment in time has become earnestly necessary for the future evolution of the human soul. One faces the startling fact that human beings begin to differ from one another while they are growing out of childhood, by reason of something that obviously is born in them, something in their blood: that is, their various gifts and capacities.

One meets the question of gifts and capacities that create such inequality among men in connection with the thought of Christmas. Future Christmas festivals will point to the origin of this vast difference throughout the world in human capacities, talents, even genius. A person will only attain balance in his life when he has learnt to know the origin of certain capacities that are distinguishing him from other men. The light of Christmas, of the Christmas candles, must provide an explanation for evolving humanity. It must answer the question: Do individuals suffer injustice between birth and death from the way the universe is ordered? What is the truth about capacities and talents?

Dear friends, many things will be seen in a different light when mankind has become permeated by the new Christian feeling. Particularly, it will be understood why an esoteric knowledge of the Old Testament included special insight into the nature of prophecy. Who were those prophets who appear in the Old Testament? They were individuals who had been sanctified by Jahve and authorized by Him to use special spiritual gifts that reached far beyond those of ordinary men. Jahve had first to sanctify those capacities that are born to men through the blood. We know that Jahve influences human beings in the time between their falling asleep and waking; He does not work in their conscious life. Every true believer of the Old Testament said in his heart: The capacities and talents that differentiate men, rising to the level of genius in the case of a prophet, are indeed born with the individual. But they are not used by him beneficently unless he sinks in sleep into the realm where Jahve guides his soul impulses. Jahve, active from the spiritual world, transforms his talents; otherwise they would only be physical, only part of his bodily organism.

We point here to the deep mystery of an Old Testament conception. But this must die away, including the belief in the nature of a prophet. New conceptions must enter the evolution of world history for the salvation of mankind. The talent that the ancient Hebrew believed was sanctified by Jahve during unconscious sleep must now in this modern age be sanctified by the human being himself when he is awake and in a state of clear consciousness. But he can only do this if he knows that all natural gifts, capacities, talents, even genius, are luciferic endowments, that they work luciferically in the world unless they are permeated and sanctified by all that enters the world as the Christ Impulse. One touches upon a tremendously important mystery in the evolution of modern humanity if one grasps this central fact of the new Christmas thoughts. The Christ must be so felt, so understood that a human being can now stand before Him as a New Testament believer and say: In spite of my childhood sense of equality, I have been endowed with various capacities and gifts. But they can only contribute to the salvation of mankind if I dedicate them to the service of Christ Jesus, if I permeate my whole nature with the Christ, so that they may be freed from the grasp of Lucifer.

A heart permeated by the Christ tears away from Lucifer what otherwise works luciferically in human physical existence. This must be the powerful thought that will pervade the future evolution of the human soul. It is the new Christmas thought, the new annunciation of Christ's activity in our souls, transforming the luciferic influence. Lucifer's power in us is not due to our having come out of the spiritual world, but to the fact that we are clothed by a physical body permeated by blood. We have our talents through heredity. Our individual capacities come to us through the luciferic stream of heredity. They must be mastered and put to use during physical life not through inspirations we receive from Jahve during sleep, but through the Christ Impulse that we can feel working within us in our fully conscious life.

“Oh, Christian,” says the new Christianity, “turn your thoughts to Christmas! lay upon the Christmas altar all the differentiation you have received through your blood! sanctify your capacities, gifts, genius as you behold them illuminated by the light coming from the Christmas tree!”

The new revelation of the spirit must speak a new language, and we must not be dull and unheeding as it addresses us in this extremely serious time. If we remain receptive, then we will find the power that mankind must find for the great tasks that will confront us in this very age. We must experience the meaning of Christmas in all its gravity. Today we must realize in clear waking consciousness what the Christ was really saying when He spoke those words, “Except ye become as little children, ye cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” The sense of equality that is natural to a child is not—if we regard him properly—proved false by these words. For the Child Whose birth we commemorate on Christmas Eve reveals ever new thoughts to mankind in the course of our evolution. He now proclaims that we must place all the distinguishing capacities we possess within the light of the Christ who ensouled this Child. All that our different talents achieve must be brought to the altar of this Child.

Perhaps, stirred by the earnestness of this Christmas thought, you will now ask, “How am I to experience the Christ Impulse in my own soul?” This question is often a burden in men's hearts.

Dear friends, what we may call the Christ Impulse does not become rooted in our souls in a moment, suddenly and tempestuously. It has taken root differently at different periods of evolution. In our present time a human being must take up in full, clear waking consciousness the cosmic truths that have been imparted stammeringly by our anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. As these truths are made known and as he comes to understand them, they will awaken in him the assurance that a new revelation, the new Christ Impulse for this age, has been brought to him. He will perceive the new Impulse if only he is attentive.

Try—in a truly lively way such as is appropriate for this age—to take into yourselves the spiritual thoughts of the cosmic Powers; try to take them up not merely as a teaching, or a theory, but so that they move your souls to their very depths and warm them, illuminate them, permeate them, so that you carry the thoughts living within you! Try to feel them so intensely that they seem to enter your soul by way of your body and change the body itself. Try to strip away from them all abstractions, all theory. Try to realize that they are true nourishment for the soul; they are not just thoughts, they are spiritual life coming from the spiritual world.

Enter into the most intimate inner union with these truths and you will observe three things. First you will observe that gradually—however they may be expressed—they eradicate from your soul something that usually appears so obviously in human beings in this age of the consciousness soul: self-seeking. When you begin to notice that they kill egotism and disarm self-seeking, then you will have perceived the Christ-permeated character of the thoughts of our anthroposophical spiritual science.

Secondly, observe the moment that untruthfulness approaches you, untruthfulness in any form, either when you yourself are tempted to be careless about the truth or when the falseness approaches you from the outside. If at such a moment you can also observe that immediately there is an impulse moving within you, warning you, pointing to the truth, admonishing you and impelling you to hold fast to the truth, wanting to prevent falsehood from entering your life—in contrast to ordinary present-day life, so much inclined to sham—then you are again experiencing the living Christ Impulse. No one will find it easy to lie, or to be casual about sham and pretence, in the presence of the spiritual thoughts of anthroposophy. A sign pointing the way to a sense for truth—apart from all other aspects of understanding: this you will find in the thoughts of the new revelation of the Christ. When you have reached the point where you do not seek a merely theoretical understanding of spiritual science, as is sought for any other science, but where the thoughts so penetrate you that you say to yourself, “Now that these thoughts are united with my soul, it is as if a Power of conscience stood beside me admonishing me, directing me toward the truth”: then you will have found the second aspect of the Christ Impulse.

In the third place, when you feel that something streams from these thoughts even down into your body, but especially into your soul, working to overcome illness, making you healthy and strong, when you sense the rejuvenating, invigorating power of these thoughts, the adversaries of illness: then you will have experienced the third aspect of the Christ Impulse. This is the goal toward which mankind strives through the new wisdom, in the new spirit: to find in the spirit itself the power to overcome egotism and the falseness of life, to overcome self-seeking through love, the sham of life through truth, illness through health-giving thoughts that put us into immediate accord with the harmonies of the universe, because they flow from the harmonies of the universe.

Not all these things can be attained at the present time, for man carries an ancient heritage around with him! There is a foolish lack of understanding, for instance, when such a backstairs politician as Christian Science twists into a caricature the thought of the healing power of the spirit. Even though, due to our ancient heritage, our thinking is not yet sufficiently powerful to accomplish what we long to accomplish—perhaps from a selfish motive—nevertheless thought does possess healing power. But in regard to such things people's ideas are always distorted. Someone who understands may tell you that certain thoughts give you health, and then he is suddenly stricken with this or that illness. It is indeed due to that ancient heritage that we cannot today be relieved of all illness merely by the power of our thought. But are you able to say what illness you would have had if you had not possessed these thoughts? Can you say that you could have passed your life in your present state of health if you had not had these thoughts? Can you prove that a person who has interested himself in our spiritual science and then has died at forty-five years of age, would without these thoughts not have died at age forty-two or age forty? People think the wrong way around! They concern themselves with what their karma cannot bestow upon them and pay no attention to what their karma does bestow upon them. If—in spite of every contradiction in the external world—you will watch and observe through the power of inner trust that you have gained from an intimate acquaintance with the thoughts of spiritual science, you will perceive the healing power that is penetrating even your physical body, the health-giving, freshening, rejuvenating force that is the third element which Christ the Healer brings with His continuous revelations to the human soul.

We wanted to enter more deeply into the thought of Christmas which is so closely related to the mystery of human birth. We wanted to bring in brief outline what is revealed to us today from the spirit as a continuation of the thought of Christmas. We can feel that it gives strength and support to our lives. We can feel that it places us, no matter what happens, in the midst of the impulses of cosmic evolution. We can feel ourselves united with those divine impulses; we can understand them and draw power for our will from this understanding, and light for our life of thought. Humanity is evolving—it would be wrong to deny it. Our only right course is to go forward with this evolution.

And Christ has declared: “I am with you always, even to the end of the world.” This is not just a phrase, it is truth. Christ has not only revealed Himself in the Gospels; Christ is with us; He reveals Himself continually. We must have ears to hear what He is ever newly revealing in this modern age. Weakness will overcome us if we have no faith in these new revelations; but strength will be ours if we have such faith.

Strength will indeed come to us if we accept the new revelations, even if they speak to us from life's seemingly contradictory suffering and misfortune. We journey as individual souls through repeated earth-lives during which our destiny comes to fulfillment. Even this thought, which enables us to sense the spiritual working behind external physical life, even this we can only accept if we take into ourselves in a truly Christian sense the revelations that follow one another. The Christian in this age, the true Christian, when he stands before the candles on the Christmas tree, should begin to work with the strengthening thoughts that can now come to him from the new cosmic revelations, bringing power to his will and illumination to his thinking. And his feeling should support the power and light of his thought in the course of the Christian year, to help him approach that other thought that points to the mystery of death: the Easter thought, which brings the final experience of human earthly existence before our souls as a spiritual experience. We will feel the Christ more and more livingly as we are able to place our own existence in the right relation to His life. The Rosicrucian of the Middle Ages, uniting his thought with Christianity, declared: Ex Deo Nascimur; in Christo Morimur; Per Spiritum Sanctum Reviviscimus. Out of the Divine we have been born, if we think of ourselves as human beings here on earth. In Christ we die. In the Holy Spirit we shall be awakened again. This all pertains to our life, our individual human life. If we look away from our own life to the life of Christ, then we see our life as mirrored reflection. Out of the Divine we are born; in Christ we die; in the Holy Spirit we shall be awakened again. This saying is true of the Christ living in our midst as our first-born Brother. We can so affirm it that we feel it to be the Christ-truth raying forth from Him and reflected in our human nature. Out of the Spirit was He begotten—as it stands in the Gospel of Luke, represented by the symbol of the descending dove—out of the Spirit was He begotten; in the human body He died; in the Divine will He rise again.

We can only perceive eternal truths in the right way if we see them in their contemporary reflection—not in a single, absolute, abstract form—and if we feel ourselves not as abstract humanity but as live, individual human beings whose duty is to think and act in harmony with the time in which we live. Then we will try to understand the Christ, who is with us “always, even to the end of the world,” to understand Him in His contemporary language as He teaches and enlightens and empowers us through the thought of Christmas. We will want to take the Christ into ourselves in His new language. We must become intimately related to Him. Then we will be able to fulfill in ourselves His true mission on this earth and beyond death. In each epoch human beings must take the Christ into themselves in their own way. This has been people's feeling when they have beheld in the right way the two great pillars of the spirit, Christmas and Easter.
That profound German mystic, Angelus Silesius,² expressed it in this way:

“Should Christ a thousand times in Bethlehem be born
And not in thee, then wert thou still forlorn.”

And, contemplating Easter, he wrote:

“The cross of Golgotha must be upraised in thee
Ere from thy sin its power shall make thee free.”

Truly, the Christ must live within us. We are not human beings in some abstract sense, we are human beings of a definite epoch, and the Christ must be born within us in our epoch in accordance with His words. We must endeavor to bring the Christ to birth within us, for our strengthening, for our illumination. As He has remained with us until now, as He will remain with mankind throughout all ages, even to the end of earthly time, so He wills now to be born in our souls. If we try to experience the birth of Christ within us in this epoch, as it becomes a light and a power in our soul—the eternal Light and eternal Power entering into time—then we perceive in the right way the historical birth of Christ in Bethlehem and its image in our own souls.

“Should Christ a thousand times in Bethlehem be born And not in thee, then wert thou still forlorn.”

As He creates the impulse in our hearts today to contemplate His birth—His birth in the course of human events, His birth in our individual souls—so we deepen the thought of Christmas within us. And so let us look toward that “night of consecration” (Weihenacht), which we should feel is bringing a new strength and a new illumination to mankind, to help them to endure the many evils and sorrows they have had to suffer and will still have to suffer.

“My Kingdom,” Christ said, “is not of this world.” It is a saying that challenges us, if we regard His birth in the right way, to find in our own souls the path to His Kingdom where He will give us strength and light for our darkness and helplessness, through the impulses coming from the world of which He Himself spoke, which His appearance at Christmas will always proclaim. “My Kingdom is not of this world.” But He has brought His Kingdom into this world, so that we may always find strength, comfort, confidence, and hope bestowed upon us in all the circumstances of life, if only we will come to Him, taking His words to heart, words such as these:

“Except ye become as little children, ye shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”

• 1. Nikolaus von der Flüe: 1417–1487. Urged arbitration as a method for resolving disputes.
• 2. Angelus Silesius: 1624–1677. See Rudolf Steiner, Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Age, GA 7 (Blauvelt, New York, Steinerbooks, 1980).

How are we to conceive of the astral world? The three different worlds of which occultism speaks are as follows:—

1. The physical world.
2. The astral world (Purgatory)
3. The spiritual world, or Devachan in Sanscrit terminology (The Christian Heaven)

There are yet other worlds above and beyond these three but they will not concern us in these lectures. They are, moreover, beyond all human conception. Even the highest Initiates can have but a faint presentiment of them. We will concern ourselves here with planetary evolution within the confines of our solar system.

The physical world encloses us in the narrow span of material existence between birth and death. Between two incarnations we live and move in the astral and devachanic worlds. The kernel of man's being is immutable, reincarnating perpetually but not eternally. The rhythm of incarnation and reincarnation had a beginning and will have an end. Man comes from other-where and passes other-where.

The astral world is not a place but a state, a condition of existence. It surrounds us and we are immersed in it while we live on Earth. We live in it as beings born blind who guide themselves by touch. If sight is opened up for them by operation they see for the first time the forms and colours with which they have always been surrounded.

Thus does the astral world open up to clairvoyant sight. It is another state of consciousness. In Goethe's scientific works there is a wonderful passage on the essence of the light as the language of Nature:

“It is useless to attempt to express the nature of a thing abstractedly. Effects we can perceive, and a complete history of those effects would, in fact, sufficiently define the nature of the thing itself. We should try in vain to describe a man's character, but let his acts be collected and an idea of the character will be presented to us.

“The colours are acts of light—its active and passive modifications: thus considered, we may expect from them some explanation respecting light itself. Colours and light, it is true, stand in the most intimate relation to each other, but we should think of both as belonging to Nature as a whole, for it is Nature as a whole which manifests itself by their means in an especial manner to the sense of sight.

“The completeness of Nature displays itself to another sense in a similar way. Let the eye be closed, let the sense of hearing be excited, and from the lightest breath to the wildest din, from the simplest sound to the highest harmony, from the most vehement and impassioned cry to the gentlest word of reason, still it is Nature that speaks and manifests her presence, her power, her pervading life and the vastness of her relations; so that a blind man to whom the infinite visible is denied, can still comprehend an infinite vitality by means of another organ.

“And thus as we descend the scale of being, Nature speaks to the senses—to known, misunderstood, and unknown senses: so speaks she with herself and to us in a thousand modes. To the attentive observer who is nowhere dead nor silent, she has even a secret agent in inflexible matter, in a metal, the smallest portions of which tell us what is passing in the entire mass.” [Theory of Colours. Preface.]

Let us endeavour to form some conception of the astral world. We must accustom ourselves to quite a different mode of vision. To begin with, everything is confused and chaotic.

The first thing to realise is that in the astral world, everything that exists is revealed as it were in a mirror, inversed. In the astral light the cipher 365 must be read backwards: 563. If an event unfolds before us, it is perceived in inverse sequence. In the astral world the cause comes after the effect, whereas on Earth, the effect follows the cause. In the astral world, the aim appears as the cause—proving that the aim and the cause are identical, acting in an inverse sense according to the sphere of life in which we are functioning. The teleological problem which no metaphysician has been able to solve by dint of abstract thought is thus solved by clairvoyance.

Another result of this inverse unraveling of things in the astral world is that it teaches man to know himself. Feelings and passions are expressed by plant and animal forms. When man begins to behold his passions in the astral world he sees them as animal forms. These forms proceed from himself, but he sees them as if they were assailing him. This is because his own being is objectivised—otherwise he could not behold himself. Thus it is only in the astral world that man learns true self knowledge in contemplating the images of his passions in the animal forms which hurl, themselves upon him. A feeling of hatred entertained against another being appears as an attacking demon.

This astral self-knowledge occurs in an abnormal way in those who are troubled with Psychical illnesses which consist in constant visions of being pursued by animals and menacing entities. The sufferers are seeing the mirror images of their emotions and desires.

No psychical trouble arises in true initiation, but the premature and sudden flashing-up of the astral world may give rise to insanity. In clairvoyance, man is liberated from his physical body. Hence the dangers that may threaten the mind and brain of one who attempts this kind of training without being absolutely balanced.

The Rosicrucian initiation involved a discipline which was directed to making man objective to himself, to producing, as it were, an objective self. We must begin by seeing ourselves objectively. This outer personification of the self makes it possible for the astral body to go forth from the physical body.

What happens at the moment of death? After death, the etheric body, the astral body and the Ego of man have left the physical body. The corpse alone remains in the physical world. A short time after death the etheric and astral bodies unite. The etheric body imprints in the astral body the memory of the life just passed; then the etheric body slowly dissolves and the astral body passes alone into the astral world.

The astral body then contains all the desires generated by life and, being bereft of the physical body, has no means of satisfying them. This gives rise to a sensation of devouring thirst—the basis of the imagination of the punishment of Tantalus in Greek Mythology. There is also the impression of being immersed in fire—Gehenna or Purgatory. The idea of the fire of Purgatory which is laughed at by materialists is a true expression of the subjective state of man after death. By contrast, unsatisfied thirst for action produces the sensation of cold in the soul. It is this cold—born of action unrealised on Earth—that is said to be sensed by the spirits in mediumistic séances. The soul living in the astral body must learn to break free from the forces of the physical organs and acquire a new organism for existence in the astral world.

The soul now begins to live through the past life in backward order, beginning at death and going back to birth. Not until the life has been lived through in this purifying fire to the point of birth is the soul ready to pass into the spiritual world—into Devachan. Such is the import of Christ's words to His disciples: “Verily, verily I say unto you, unless ye become as little children, ye cannot enter into the kingdom of heaven.”

Man is impelled by desire when he is descending to earthly incarnation. Not for nothing is desire for the Earth born in man. The end and aim is that he shall learn.

We learn through all our experiences and they enrich our store of knowledge. But in order that man may learn on the Earth, he must be allured by, [or] involved in enjoyment.

When the soul is experiencing the past life in the astral world after death, in backward order, there must be abnegation of enjoyment, while the essence of the experience itself is retained. The passage through the astral world is thus a purification whereby the soul learns to forego all taste for physical pleasures.

Such is the purification of the Hindu Kamaloca, of the ‘consuming fire.’ Man must grow accustomed to existence without a physical body. Death gives rise, at first, to the impression of an immeasurable void.

In cases of violent death and of suicide, the impressions of emptiness, thirst and burning are much more terrible. An astral body that is not prepared for existence outside the physical body, separates with great travail, whereas in natural death the detachment of the matured astral body takes place easily and smoothly. In the case of violent death that is not caused by the will of man, the process of separation is less distressing than in the case of suicide.

During life itself a kind of spiritual death may occur, caused by a premature separation of the Spirit from the body. The astral world is confused with the physical world. Nietzsche is an example of this. In his book Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche has all-unconsciously transferred the astral into the physical world. The result is a confusion and chaos of ideas, culminating in error, insanity and death.

The dim, dreamy life of many mediums is an analogous phenomenon. The medium invariably loses his orientation between these different worlds and is unable to distinguish the true from the false.

A lie in the physical world becomes an agent of destruction in the astral world. A lie is a murder in the astral world. This phenomenon is the origin of black magic. The earthly commandment, Thou shalt not kill, may therefore be translated into Thou shalt not lie, in reference to the astral world. The lie is nothing but a word, an illusion. It may do untold harm, but nothing is actually destroyed. In the astral world, every feeling, every idea is a visible form, a living force. The astral lie brings about an impact between the false and true forms, resulting in death.

The white magician would impart to other souls the spiritual life he bears within him. The black magician has the urge to kill, to create a void around him in the astral world because this void affords him a field in which his egoistic desires may disport themselves. He needs the power which he acquires by taking the vital force of everything that lives, that is to say, by killing it.

That is why the first sentence on the tables of black magic is: Life must be conquered. For the same reason, in certain schools of black magic the followers are taught the horrible and diabolical practice of gashing living animals with a knife at the precise part of the body which will generate this or that force in the wielder of the knife. From the purely external aspect, there are certain points in common between black magic and vivisection. On account of its materialism, modern science has need of vivisection. The anti-vivisection movements are inspired by deeply moral motives. But it will not be possible to abolish vivisection in science until clairvoyance has been restored to medicine. It is only because clairvoyance has been lost that medicine has had to resort to vivisection. When man has regained conscious access to the astral world, clairvoyance will enable doctors to enter spiritually into the inner conditions of diseased organs and vivisection will be abandoned as worthless.

Knowledge of life in the astral world leads us to a conclusion of fundamental importance, namely that the physical world is the product of the astral world.

The epidemics which raged notably in the Middle Ages are one example among thousands of the relation of human sins to astral events, as well as of the repercussion in the astral world of sins committed in earthly life. Leprosy was the result of the terror caused by the invasions of the Huns and hordes of Asiatic peoples. The Mongolians, the descendants of the Atlanteans, bore within them the germs of degeneracy. This contact with the European populace produced, in the first instance, the moral malady of fear in the astral world; the substance of the astral body decomposed and this field of astral decomposition became a field for the development of bacteria, giving rise, on Earth, to diseases such as leprosy.

All that we throw out of ourselves into the astral world at one time will reappear in times to come, on the physical plane. What we sow in the astral world we reap on Earth in future times. We are reaping today the fruits of the narrow, materialistic thoughts strewn by our ancestors in the astral world.

This will make us realise how essential it is to nourish ourselves with occult truths. If science would accept the truths of occultism—merely as hypotheses to begin with—the very world would change. Materialism has cast man into such depths that a mighty concentration of forces is necessary to raise him again. He is subject to illnesses of the nervous system which are veritable epidemics of the life of the soul.

What on the Earth we call feeling comes back again to Earth in the form of actuality, event, fact. The nerve-storms that exhaust man have their origin in the astral world.

It is for this reason that the Occult Brotherhoods decided to demonstrate and reveal the hidden truths. For humanity is passing through a crisis and must be helped to regain health and equilibrium. Only by virtue of spirituality can this health and equilibrium be restored.

Today I would like to talk about Christian initiation and the interior of the Earth. It should be borne in mind that Christian initiation was undergone by all those who were to teach Christianity from an occult depth, for example, by the priests of the first Christian centuries. These initiations have been preserved for a long time, but they have gradually been somewhat modified, and only in certain narrow circles were these strict exercises still undergone. One should not think that the severity of these exercises can be expected of everyone, but those who submit to them will also attain a high level of knowledge by the Christian path. In this respect, Christ is, as it were, the original guru for all Christian disciples on this path. Angelus Silesius once said:

If Christ a thousand times in Bethlehem is born
And not in you, you will remain lost forever.

Something like this comes from inner experiences. Similarly, in the Gospel of John, where it says: “But Jesus went out of the temple.”

This is an astral experience and means that the astral body steps out of the physical body. In the Christian initiation, the demand for Christian humility is a substitute for the strict guru of the Orient, the submission not to a single human being, but to Christ Jesus.

The first step is the washing of the feet. One arrives at this step by having for months tried to live with the following ideas in mind: The plant cannot live without the mineral kingdom, which is beneath it. If it could speak, it would have to say: You mineral kingdom, you are admittedly lower than I, but I owe my higher existence to you. And when man looks around at life, he must admit to himself: If I have come far in the spiritual, then others must work for me. We must therefore bow down in humility and gratitude to those who stand below us. “Whoever wants to be first will be last in the kingdom of heaven,” is a word of the gospel. This practice eventually leads to the inner image of the washing of feet. Christ washes the feet of the apostles to offer them the tribute of his thanks. He who lives in these conceptions of humility will realize that the image of the washing of feet appears to him in the form of an astral dream. Thereby what is described in the Gospel of John becomes one's own experience.

Then one can proceed to the second step. The disciple must learn to bear all sufferings and obstacles in life uprightly and to remain calm even when everything rushes in on him. And again, in the dream, an image appears on the astral plane, that of the scourging. Not only does the disciple see the image, but he feels burning pain in his whole body, even in his nails and hair.

When this has been established, one proceeds to the third stage. Here the student must not only endure pain, but must be able to calmly endure mockery and ridicule. The crowning with thorns as a dream experience manifests itself as a peculiar, temporary headache.

It is very difficult to reach the fourth stage. The disciple must develop a feeling that his own body has exactly the same value for him as the things around him; he must learn to regard it as something alien, he must come to feel: Not I go there, but I carry my body there. The disciple then no longer lives in his body, but carries it like an object, like the wood of the cross. These exercises lead to the vision that the disciple sees himself crucified. And outwardly, this stage of initiation even manifests itself in the appearance of so-called stigmata. The disciple then receives, corresponding to the stigmata of the crucifixion, real stigmata at the respective places on his body, which may appear temporarily. These inner and outer experiences occur after appropriate contemplation.

The fifth step is mystical death. Now the disciple becomes truly clairvoyant on the astral plane. The other symptoms were at the beginning. The disciple experiences a moment when everything disappears, when he is faced with nothingness. This darkness is the opposite of the general darkness that fell over the whole country at the death of Christ. Then the darkness splits; this is the tearing of the curtain in the temple and Christ's descent into hell. This is also experienced at this level. Those who do not reach this point do not yet really know what evil is. The student of the fifth level descends into the depths of existence. This is the descent into hell.

In the sixth stage, the Entombment, he feels the entire earth as his body, and his own body as a part of it. He becomes one with the whole planet. The disciple is then as if laid into the whole earth, covered and buried in it, he himself now becomes one with the planetary spirit.

The seventh stage, the resurrection, cannot be described further, because no soul whose thinking is still bound to the brain can grasp all that it means in terms of grandeur and sublimity. When the secret disciple goes through these seven stages, Christianity comes to life in him. He experiences the Gospel of John as reality.

Finally, the formation of the earth's interior will be discussed. This exploration of the earth's interior is connected with the Christian stages of initiation. It is precisely through Christian initiation that one can gain a true understanding of the earth's inner states.

From the occult point of view, there is a connection between human life, layers of the earth, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions and so on. There are still tremendous changes to come in this direction. The view of science that the earth's interior is molten is not correct. The definite substance that you know from the outer view because you step on it, that is the outermost, physical-substantial layer of the earth. It is called the mineral earth. Natural science does not even reach the middle of this layer. Each experience of Christian initiation now leads to penetration into a certain layer of the earth's interior. The third degree of initiation, for example, allows penetration into the third layer, the seventh into the seventh layer, and so on.

What is in the second layer cannot be compared with any chemical substance in the uppermost layer; it is a completely different matter. The physical warmth increases only in the first layer. The substance of the second layer has properties that cause any living thing brought into contact with it to be killed immediately within that substance. Any plant would immediately become mineral in it; life would be driven out of it. This layer is also called the life-destroying layer.

The third layer is a substance that transforms the soul's perception into its opposite. It transforms joy into pain, and pain into pleasure. It reacts to the feelings of living beings, it has this property as matter and is called the layer of perception.

The fourth layer corresponds in some sense to the first region of Devachan, for there too physical things appear in their negative. In Devachan, instead of the physical thing, there is a kind of aura, a negative, a hollow light image in which nothing can be seen, and which emits a certain sound from within. The fourth layer of the earth's interior, on the other hand, is substantially what gives the earth's things form. There are, as it were, the inverted forms; it can be compared to a seal and its imprint. This fourth layer is therefore called the form layer.

The fifth layer is full of rampant life. Here life is not restricted to form.

The sixth layer, the water layer, is substantially impressionable and consists entirely of will and sensation. It responds to impulses of will, it cries out, as it were, when it is pressed. Because this inner life can be compared to fire, this layer is called the fire earth.

The seventh layer of the earth is then reached in the seventh stage of initiation. Just as the eye produces counter-effects within itself in response to certain influences, so it is also in the seventh layer. Its substance transforms all properties into their opposite by reversing them. This is why this layer is called “the earth reflector”.

The eighth layer, which also becomes perceptible at the seventh stage of initiation, does not only have physical properties, but also moral ones; it transforms all the moral qualities that people develop into their opposite. Everything that is connected on earth is separated and scattered there. All moral feelings, such as love and compassion, are transformed into their opposite there, into harshness, brutality, and so on. This layer is called the Shatterer.

The ninth layer is the Earth Brain. There, evil works magically. Black magic is connected with it. The white path turns black there.

It is much more difficult to explore the interior of the Earth than the astral and devachan planes. This exploration is truly one of the most difficult of all. What Sinnett says about the interior of the earth in his book “Esoteric Buddhism” is not correct. Instead of doing his own research as a clairvoyant, he used a medium. Only in the actual Rosicrucian school can one speak of the interior of the earth. And in the best times of Christianity, the interior of the earth was viewed similarly. The Nordic mysteries, the Trotten and Druid mysteries also spoke about it quite extensively. In a poetic way, Dante also speaks of the nine-part interior of the earth in his “Divine Comedy”. There you will find the eighth layer as the layer of Cain, because through Cain, evil and fragmentation came into the world.

In fact, occult facts are described in the great poems, such as the Odyssey, Parzival and so on. In the story of Poor Henry, for example, reference is made to the influence of the decaying astral substances of the decadent peoples of the early Middle Ages. The Secret Doctrine has always influenced great poets, both consciously and unconsciously. In the light of Theosophy, not only does the whole world become tremendously deep to us, but also the great poetry of humanity. There one can truly seek out and recognize the divine.

It was a characteristic of the Lemurian Age that the upper layers of the earth were only sporadically developed at that time, so to speak only as islands, so that much of the fiery layer penetrated to the outside. The fire layer is the foundation of the other layers. The will of the Lemurian people, which was still very strong at that time, was still able to magically influence this fire layer. The surging movements of the earth were still connected with the will of man. This is why the Lemurian continent was destroyed by the fire layer. People had sunk too low, especially in Late Lemuria. Fearful aberrations had spread. And so these destructive impulses of will affected the fire layer: Lemuria, like Sodom and Gomorrah, perished in a fire catastrophe, combined with earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. The will has an effect on the fire layer. Thus there is a connection between the inner being of man and the inner being of the earth. The layer of Cain, the layer of the earth shattering, will be transformed through a continuous moral development of man. Whatever man does on earth gradually transforms the entire planet. And when white magic has progressed to a high degree, the core of the earth will change as well. The black magicians will be ejected onto a moon when our planet perishes.

When very definite evil volitions combine today, they affect the layer of fire, and it may be that the shock from the layer of fire is transmitted to the layer of water and through the other layers to the uppermost one. This causes earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, seaquakes and so forth. When humanity ensures that things improve morally on earth, things will slowly improve in relation to natural disasters. The progress of the planet earth is connected with the progress of humanity; what the earth's interior shows us is just one example of this. The relationship between the karma of the individual and the karma of the whole has been studied, and research has been conducted into how their future destiny might unfold. It has been found that such people [who die in an earthquake] usually appear in their next incarnation as particularly spiritual personalities, or at least bring with them a predisposition for spiritual life. They have experienced the vanity of material things forcefully and quickly; it was the last jolt they needed to turn to the spirit. Similarly, the fiery death of the martyrs results in particular idealism in the next incarnation. The connections between births and earthquakes are also interesting. In most cases, people born immediately after an earthquake occur, prove to be particularly materialistic people. The force by which man descends again from Devachan has something to do with the fire layer. Man sets the fire layer in motion in that his will, which leads him to embodiment, is particularly sensual at his birth. In the beginning of its development, the Earth was a being capable of transformation, and accordingly, it is humanity. Man has bound the Earth's fate to his own. You can imagine how, in view of this, the occultist's sense of responsibility grows in relation to the spiritual currents that are brought into humanity. The Theosophical movement is connected with a definite goal of the evolution of the Earth. It has to bring about the general fraternization of men. Its goal should therefore be to improve the Earth fragmenter, the eighth layer; it strives to save what can be saved from the center of the Earth. Here, constant dripping hollows out the stone. Even the smallest effect is not lost. The person who strives to transform his soul so that the power that comes from occultism becomes effective, is working on this work and will then also take everyday life quite differently. The true study of occultism consists in the fact that the spiritual student penetrates into ordinary, natural life. Occultism can bear fruit in all areas and have a beneficial effect. Every soul must and will eventually attain the truth. And so occultism relies on the response it will receive in the souls.