The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Here, the four Platonic Virtues (described in The Republic) are developed in the direction of that comprehensive picture of man's threefold being—the head-system, the rhythmic system, and the metabolic and limb system—of which Steiner gave the first full description in 1917, and which is summed up in the Foundation Stone Meditation in 1923.

Our spiritual science has the task of removing for our consciousness, indeed for our whole inner life, the gulf that exists for our external human consciousness between the physical world, in which man spends the time between birth and death, and the spiritual world in which man spends the other part of the totality of his existence, the time between death and a new birth.

For one who lives in spiritual science with every fibre of his soul, such a saying is familiar, and even self-evident. But one may well say that it becomes particularly holy to us at such a moment as this. Through the grave events of war we have lost within quite a short time a number of our dear friends and members, and are soon to accompany friends upon their last paths on earth. Tomorrow morning at eleven we shall have here in Zürich the cremation of a dear member, Frau Dr Colazza, and we have just heard that our dear friend Fritz Mitscher died this afternoon about five near Davos. With these two members, souls dear to us have left the physical plane; but spiritual science has shown us the way to understand in a much higher sense than we would otherwise be able to achieve that we do not lose such souls, but remain united with them.

There are already a considerable number of souls belonging to us, who have gone through the gate of death since our work in this movement began. And from those sources from which knowledge of the spirit comes to us, it can be said that these souls have become faithful fellow-workers with us in the spiritual world, each according to his powers. With the full responsibility, with which something can be said, which should have a firm foundation in spiritual knowledge, I can say: in them we have won pillars supporting our spiritual movement. Many have passed through the gate of death, working within our spiritual movement, and looking down upon that to which their love is directed. In the period between birth and death they have grown attached to the kind of aspiration which is represented in our circle. They have left behind them in our Society something which is itself upon the path between death and a new birth.

Just as nature around us is a world upon which we look back, we can look back upon our physical life from that moment onwards, which can be compared with man's birth. Immediately after death man passes through a condition which can be compared with the embryonic life, with the life within the maternal body, except that this period in the life after death can be counted in days, and is much shorter than the embryonic life in relation to physical life. Then follows what can be compared to the entry into the physical world, with the drawing of the first breath. This can be called the awakening in the spiritual world; it is a perceiving that the will of the soul which has gone through the gate of death is received by the beings of the higher Hierarchies. Just as a human being physically entering the physical world from his mother's body finds himself able to receive the external air, and as his senses gradually awaken—in the same way there comes the moment after death when the soul feels: that power of will, which during physical life was contained within the limits of the physical body, now flows from me out into the universe. And this soul then feels how this will is really received through the activity of the beings of the next higher hierarchy, the hierarchy of the Angels. That is like drawing the first breath in the spiritual world, and the gradual growth into the spiritual environment; spiritual experience shows us this.

I would like to speak of the destiny of those who have gone from us in the course of the years, leaving the physical plane. I would like to look at those who have become attached to our spiritual movement here, and who look down upon it as something of which they know that it informs human souls while still within the physical body about that condition in which they themselves live. To be able to relate oneself in this way in memory of earthly life is something which even here in the physical world belongs already to the spiritual world. For those who have gone through the gate of death this is something infinitely precious and significant. When, like a tributary into a river, they can flow entirely into that stream which flows up to them from the physical world, taking its source from what they have experienced in our movement—the stream in the thoughts of those linked with them in love or by family ties—then the community is a much closer one than it could otherwise be in our materialistic times, because it is based on spiritual relationships.

We may say: with many a one, who has gone early through the gate of death into the spiritual world, it seems as if he had done this from intimate love to our spiritual movement, in order to help with stronger powers from the spiritual world. Among a considerable number of those who have gone from us there lives in their souls the most wonderfully clear feeling about the need for our spiritual movement. For him who can look into the spiritual world all those who have gone through the gate of death, and now gaze down upon the movement with which they were connected, are like spiritual heralds of our movement. They carry their standards before us, and call to us constantly: we were convinced while we were united with you of the necessity of this movement. But now that we have entered the spiritual world we know that we can help and how we must help at a time in which this movement is necessary.

This is something which those who are left behind on the physical plane will feel more and more, when they have lost people dear to them. For them what has been said can be the deepest comfort, for they have here all that can bring about a still deeper connection between souls when we can no longer be connected in the external realm of manifestation, through physical eyes and physical words.

This spiritual movement, of which we are to become part, has to bring a very great deal. Today I would like to choose out one particular chapter. A time like ours, in which external civilisation, in spite of the last echoes of the old religions, builds entirely upon the materialistic consciousness, can only develop the impulses of the moral life in a way that reckons only with life between birth and death. Among the many things which should come about through our spiritual movement will be a fresh development of the whole moral life of humanity. For men will learn to regard the moral life from a point of view which extends beyond birth and death, and which reckons with the fact that the human soul goes through repeated lives on earth, and that this soul, as we bear it within us between birth and death, has passed through many lives, and can hope for other lives in the future. When we have extended our vision from a single life to a series of successive lives, we shall have a more comprehensive understanding for our existence, and a sounder and more comprehensive understanding of what virtue and morality are.

When we speak of human virtues we can distinguish four of these which we can describe in ordinary language. There is one virtue, as we shall indicate later on, which lives in the depths of the human soul, but of which we should speak as little as possible as we shall see, for reasons that are holy. All other virtues which exist in life, and which together make up morality, can be regarded as special examples of the four virtues which we shall consider, four virtues of which antiquity in particular had much to say.

Plato, the great philosopher of ancient Greece, distinguished these four virtues in particular, because he was able to draw his wisdom from the echoes of the ancient Mysteries. Under the influence of the old Mysteries Plato could distinguish the virtues better than later philosophers and much better than our times, in which knowledge of Mystery wisdom has become so remote and so chaotic.

The first virtue which we must consider, if we speak about morality from a comprehensive knowledge of human nature, is the virtue of wisdom. But this wisdom is to be understood in a rather deeper sense, more related to ethics, than is usually done. Wisdom is not something that comes to man of its own accord; still less can it in the ordinary sense be learned. It is not easy to describe what its meaning for us should be. If we pass through life in such a way that events work upon us, and we learn from them how we could have met this or that more adequately, how we could have used our powers more strongly and effectively—if we are attentive towards everything in life, so that when something meets us a second time in a comparable way we can treat it in a way which shows us we have benefited from the first experience—then we grow in wisdom. If we preserve all through life a mood of being able to learn from life, of being able to regard everything brought to us by nature and our experience, in such a way that we learn from it, not simply accumulating knowledge, but growing inwardly better and richer—then we have gathered wisdom, and what we have experienced has not been worthless for the life of our souls.

Life has been worthless for us if we pass through decades and still judge something that we have experienced in just the same way as we thought about it earlier in our lives. If we pass through life in such a way, we are most remote from wisdom. Karma may have brought it about that in youth we grew angry, and condemned this or that human action. If we retain this quality we have made poor use of our lives. We have used them well, supposing we formed harsh judgments in our youth, if at a later stage of life we do not judge harshly, but with understanding and forgiveness; if we make the effort of wishing to understand. If we have the character that from birth some things aroused furious anger in us, and if when we are old we no longer grow angry as in our youth, but our anger has left us and we have grown gentler—then we have used life in accordance with wisdom. If we were materialists in our youth, but then allowed ourselves to experience what our time could bring us as revelations from the spiritual world, then we have used our life in accordance with wisdom. If we close ourselves to the revelations of the spiritual world we have not used our life in accordance with wisdom.

To be enriched in this way, and to achieve a wider horizon, we can call the use of life in accordance with wisdom. What spiritual science seeks to give us is able to help us in opening ourselves towards life, in order to grow wiser. Wisdom is something which strongly opposes human egoism. Wisdom is something which always reckons with the course of universal events. We let ourselves be instructed by the course of universal events because this liberates us from the narrow judgment made by our ego. Fundamentally, a wise man cannot judge egoistically; for if one learns from the world, and grows in understanding for the world, one allows one's judgment to be corrected by the world; thus wisdom detaches us from narrow and limited vision and brings us into harmony with itself. Much else could be described, in order gradually to form a picture of wisdom. We should not attempt a definition of such ideas, but keep our hearts open, in order to grow wiser, even about wisdom.

Here in the physical world everything which man is to experience in waking life has to use the instruments of external physical and ethereal nature. Between birth and death we are only outside our physical and ethereal body with our soul-being, in so far as this is ego and astral body, during our periods of sleep. In our conscious, waking condition we use as instruments our physical and ethereal bodies. When we fill ourselves with wisdom, when we try in action and thought, in feeling and perception to live in accordance with wisdom, we use those organs of our physical and ethereal bodies which are so to speak the most perfect in our earthly life—those organs which have developed over the longest period, which were prepared by Saturn, Sun and Moon and have come into our lives as a heritage, having reached a certain completion.

I would like to give you from another point of view an idea of what can be understood by more or less perfect organs. Take on the one hand our brain. The brain is not the most perfect organ, but we can still call it more perfect than other organs, for it has needed longer for its evolution. We can compare the brain with our torso, upon which we have our hands. When we intend to do something with our hands, we have the thought: I stretch out my hand, I take the vase, I draw back my hand. What have I done ? I have stretched out not only the physical hand, but also the ethereal and the astral hand, and a part of my ego; the physical hand went with them.

If I only think, clairvoyant consciousness can see how something like spiritual arms stretch out from the head, but the physical brain remains within the skull. Just as my ethereal and astral hand belongs to my physical hand, something ethereal and astral belongs to the brain. The brain cannot follow, but the hands can follow. In a later time the hands will one day be fixed, and we shall only be able to move their astral part. Hands are on the way to become what the brain is already. In earlier times, during the old Sun and Moon periods, what today stretches out from the brain as something that is only spiritual was still accompanied by the physical organ. The skull has now covered it, so that the physical brain is held fast within it during the evolution of the Earth. The brain is an organ which has passed through more stages of evolution. The hands are on the way to become similar to the brain, for the whole man is on the way to become a brain. Thus there are organs which are more perfect, and have evolved into something more self-enclosed, and others which are less perfect. The most perfect organs are used for what we achieve in wisdom. Our ordinary brain is really used only as the instrument for the lowest form of wisdom, earthly cleverness. The more we acquire wisdom, the less we depend upon our cerebrum, the more activity is withdrawn (a thing unknown to external anatomy) to our cerebellum, to that smaller brain enclosed within our skull which looks like a tree. When we have become wise, when we have become wisdom, we find ourselves in fact under a ‘tree,’ which is our cerebellum and which then especially begins to unfold its activity.

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Section of cerebellum, enlarged, showing tree-like structure

Imagine how a man who has become especially wise stretches out the organs of his wisdom mightily, like the branches of a tree. They originate in the cerebellum which remains within the hard covering of the skull; but the spiritual organs stretch far out, and man is under the tree, the Bodhi tree, in spiritual reality.

And so we see too that what we do in wisdom is the most spiritual thing about us, or at least belongs to the most spiritual, for the organs are already at rest. If we do anything with our hands, we must use part of our strength in the movement of the hand. If we form a wise judgment, or decide something wisely, the organs remain at rest, strength is no longer used upon the physical organ. We are there more spiritual; those organs which we use on the physical plane for the development of wisdom are those on which we need to use the least amount of energy—they are in a sense the most perfect.

Thus wisdom is something in the moral life which allows men to experience themselves in a spiritual way. It is connected with this that what man attains in the way of wisdom enables him to reap the greatest harvest from his earlier incarnations. Because we can live in wisdom within the spirit without any effort by the physical organs, we are most able through the life of wisdom to make fruitful what we have won in earlier incarnations for this life, bringing over this wisdom from earlier incarnations.

We have in German a good expression for a man who refuses to become wise. We call him a Philistine.¹ A Philistine is a man who resists the development of wisdom, who wants to remain as he is his whole life through, without altering his opinions. A man who seeks to become wise makes the effort to carry over the work which he has done and stored up in the course of earlier incarnations. The wiser we become, the more we bring over from earlier incarnations into the present, and if we do not wish to become wise, so that we leave barren the wisdom developed in earlier incarnations, there is then one who comes to saw it off: Ahriman.

No-one likes it better than Ahriman that we fail to grow wiser. We have the power to do it. We have gained far, far more in earlier incarnations than we believe; we won far more during the times in which we passed through the old conditions of clairvoyance. Everyone could become much wiser than he does become. No-one has the excuse that he could not bring much over from the past. To become wise means that one develops what has been won in earlier incarnations in such a way that it fills us in this incarnation.

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The Buddha as Tree of Wisdom (sandstone relief from Bharhut, India, c. 2nd. Century B.C.) Indian Museum, Calcutta.

Another virtue can be called—though it is difficult to describe it exactly—the virtue of Courage. It contains the mood which does not remain passive towards life, but is ready to use its strength and activity. It can be said that this virtue comes from the heart. Of one who has this virtue in ordinary life it can be said: he has his heart in the right place. This is a good expression for our condition when we do not withdraw in a timid way from things which life asks from us, but when we are prepared to take ourselves in hand and know how to intervene where it is necessary. When we are inclined to get moving, confidently and bravely, we have this virtue. It is connected with a healthy life of feeling, which develops bravery at the right moment, while its absence brings about cowardice. This virtue can naturally be used in the physical course of life only through specific organs. These organs, to which the physical and ethereal hearts belong, are not so perfect as those which serve wisdom. These organs are on the way to alter, and will indeed become different in the future.

There is a great distinction between the brain and the heart in their relation to cosmic evolution. Suppose that a man goes through the gate of death, and passes through life between death and a new birth. His brain is altogether a work of the Gods. The brain is permeated by forces which leave him altogether when he goes through the gate of death, and for his next life the brain is built up entirely anew, not only materially, but also in its inner forces. That is not the case with the heart. With the heart it is so, that not the physical heart itself, but the forces which are active in the physical heart, remain in existence. These forces withdraw into the astral and into the Ego, and continue in existence between death and a new birth. The same forces, which beat within our hearts, beat again next time in our new incarnation. What works in the brain has gone; that does not appear in the next incarnation. But the forces active in the heart reappear in the next incarnation. If we contemplate the interior of the head we can say: invisible forces are working there, which compose the brain. But when a man has gone through the gate of death these forces are given over to the universe. But if we perceive a human heart-beat, we perceive spiritual forces which are not only present in this incarnation, but will live too in the next incarnation, having passed through death and a new birth.

Popular feeling has had a wonderful inkling of such things. It is because of this that it is so much concerned with the feeling of the heart-beat, not because the physical heart-beat in itself is valued so much, as because we are looking at something much more eternal when we consider a human heart-beat. If we have the virtue of courage, of bravery, we can use for it only a part of certain forces. We must use the other part for the organs which are the instrument for this virtue. They are organs for which we have still to use part of the forces concerned. If we are not courageous, if we let ourselves go and withdraw timidly from life, abandoning ourselves to our own weight, then we cannot bring to life those forces which have to accompany the use of the quality of courage in life.

When we stand in life in a cowardly way, the forces which should fire our hearts remain unused. They are then seed for Lucifer. He takes charge of them, and we lack them in the next life. To be cowardly towards life means to abandon a number of forces to Lucifer; and these are missing for us, when we seek to build up our hearts in our next incarnation. For these hearts should be the organs, the instruments of courage. We come into the world with defective, underdeveloped organs.

The third virtue reckons with the least perfect organs, those which will achieve a form in the future, of which they contain at present only the seed. This virtue can be called Temperance.² One shade of it can be called ‘Moderation.’ We have thus three virtues: Wisdom, Courage, and Temperance.

Now it is possible to be intemperate in the most varied ways. One can be intemperate in excessive eating and drinking; this is its lowest form. Here the soul is absorbed into bodily desire, and we live entirely through our body. But if we take our desire in hand, if we command the body, what it may not do, we are then temperate or moderate. Through such moderation we keep in the right order those forces which ought to help us, in order that we do not abandon the organs concerned to Lucifer in the next incarnation. For we abandon to Lucifer those forces which are expended through giving ourselves up to a life of passion. We do this in the worst way when our passions intoxicate us, and we are content to live in a dreaming, drowsy state.

When we lose our clear consciousness through intemperance we are always abandoning powers to Lucifer. He takes up these powers, and thereby deprives us of the forces which we need for the organs of breathing and digestion. We return with bad organs of breathing and digestion, if we do not practise the virtue of moderation. Those who like to be carried away by their desires, who give themselves up to the life of their passions, are candidates for decadent human beings in the future, for those future human beings who will suffer from all kinds of faults in their physical body.

It can be said that this virtue of Temperance depends upon the least perfect human organs, those organs that are at the beginning of their development and have to be fundamentally transformed. When we consider our organs of digestion and all that is connected with them, they are put in motion by the use of Ego, astral body, ethereal body and physical body. It is different with those organs which are the instruments for Courage. Here our Ego remains more or less outside, and we move freely; only what is astral and ethereal in us is absorbed into the physical. If we go further to the virtues embraced by Wisdom, we retain Ego and astral body in free detachment. For as we become wiser, we develop the organisation of the astral body and achieve control over it. That is the essential thing, that through becoming wise we transform the astral into the Spirit-Self, and only the ethereal accompanies the physical. In the brain only the ethereal accompanies the physical. While during waking life in relation to the rest of the body we are closely connected, at least with our astral nature, with the physical organ, we retain for the brain the condition, which we have in sleep, in the highest degree. Thus we require physical sleep particularly for the brain. For when we are awake we are also outside the brain with our Ego and our astral body, and these have to make the greatest efforts within themselves, without being supported by the external organ.

Thus we find a connection between our human being and the virtues. We can call Wisdom a virtue, which belongs to man as a spiritual being, where with his Ego and his astral body he is freely active, using his physical and ethereal organs only as a kind of basis. We can name Courage as the virtue active where man is only free with his Ego, which is supported by his astral, ethereal and physical bodies. Finally we can speak of Temperance, where the seed contained in our Ego is becoming free; where our Ego is still bound to the astral, ethereal and physical bodies, and yet with our Ego we are beginning to work ourselves free from these bonds.

There is then a virtue which is perhaps the most spiritual of all. This is connected with the whole human being. There is an exercise of the human being which we lose early, which we possess only in the first years of childhood. I have often mentioned this. When we enter the physical plane we do not yet have the attitude which belongs to our human dignity: we crawl, on all fours. I have pointed out that we only achieve the right attitude, the upright position, through our own forces. We develop too through the forces which enter into speech. In the first years of our life we develop the forces which in the main guide us into the position which we have in the world as true men. We do not enter the world in such a way that we already have the right direction in the world. We crawl. But we are set in it rightly, when we direct the head outwards towards the stars. This corresponds to inner forces.

In later life we lose these forces. They no longer appear. There is nothing which enters human life again so radically as learning to walk and stand upright. In relation to standing upright we grow more and more weary. If we begin in the early morning to live with our brain, then when the day is ended we grow tired and need sleep. What makes us upright in childhood, when we are tired, remains tired all through life and grows feeble, and anything comparable to achieving uprightness as children is no longer done by us in later life.

And how do we direct ourselves into life when we learn to speak? Forces of direction work as well when we learn to speak. But the forces which we use in early childhood are not really lost for us in later life. They remain for us, but they are connected with a virtue; with the virtue which is related to rightness and the right, the virtue of all-comprehending Justice, the fourth virtue. The same impulse, which we use as a child when we raise ourselves up from crawling, lives in us if we have the virtue of justice, the fourth that Plato mentions.

Whoever really exercises the virtue of justice puts every thing and every being in its right place, and goes out of himself and into the others. That is what all-comprehending Justice means. To live in Wisdom means to derive the best fruits from the forces we have stored up during earlier incarnations. If we have there to point towards what was imparted to us during earlier incarnations, where we were still permeated by divine forces, with Justice we have to point out still more: we are sprung from the whole universe. We exercise justice by developing those forces which relate us spiritually to the entire universe. Justice is the measure of a man's connection with the divine. In practice Injustice is equivalent to the godless; equivalent to the one who has lost his divine origin; we blaspheme against God, the God from whom we spring, if we do any man injustice.

Thus we have two virtues, Justice and Wisdom, which guide us back to what we were in earlier times, in earlier incarnations in the times when we ourselves were still in the womb of the godhead. And we have two other virtues, Courage and Temperance, which guide us towards later incarnations. We provide all the more forces for these, the less we give to Lucifer. We have seen how what is of the nature of courage and of temperance goes into the organs, and how the organs are prepared thereby for the next incarnation. In the same way moral life extends into the future, when we fill ourselves with spirituality. Two virtues shine out over the past incarnation: Wisdom and Justice. Courage and Temperance shine out over the incarnations to come.

The time will come when men will see clearly that they are throwing themselves into the jaws of Ahriman, when they shut themselves off against justice and wisdom. What was theirs in earlier incarnations, what belonged to the divine world, they would cast over to Lucifer through intemperate or cowardly actions. All that can be seized by Lucifer is taken away from the powers available to us for building up our body in the coming life.

We cannot practise wisdom and justice without becoming selfless, as has been indicated. Only a self-seeking man can be unjust. Only a self-seeking man can be willing to remain unwise. Wisdom and justice lead us out beyond our own Self and make of us members of the whole organism of humanity. Courage and temperance make us in a sense members of the whole organism of humanity; only through experiencing courage and temperance and expressing them in our lives, do we provide for ourselves for the future with a stronger organism to take its place within humanity. We do not then lose what we would otherwise throw to Lucifer. Egoism is of itself transformed into selflessness when it is rightly extended over the whole horizon of life, and man finds his place in the light of the fourth virtue. That is what will be brought by spiritual wisdom for the future of man, and will extend over ethics and the moral life. This will pour into educational method as well. Through understanding wisdom and justice in the sense that I have indicated, the desire to learn all through life will arise. It will be seen that one has to begin learning in the right way when one has already youth behind one—while people think now that they do not need to learn anything more once their youth is past. In this way even the greatest and noblest works of art of the greatest poets are lost. We would understand them best if we took them up again in old age. If people read Goethe's Iphigenia or Schiller's Tell, they usually think: we read that at school already. That is not right; one should not forget that these writings have their best effect if they are read in later life, for then they develop justice and wisdom.

And again the education of children will bring special fruit if the virtue of courage and the virtue of temperance are seen in the right light. Where children are to be educated, these virtues must be regarded in an individual way, by showing the children again and again that they are to take hold of life courageously, and not be afraid or withdraw themselves from all sorts of things; and that they grasp life temperately and moderately, in order gradually to free themselves from their passions. An immense amount can be done for the education of children in this way. In the later course of our study of spiritual science these things will have to be developed in greater detail.

So we see that while otherwise the ethical life only provides laws concerned with life between birth and death, on the external physical plane, the considerations of spiritual science extend to an unlimited horizon. It is the same as with other things in spiritual science. Humanity has had to experience in relation to the science of nature the extension of its horizons. Giordano Bruno showed men that there is not only the earth, but many other worlds in cosmic space. Spiritual science shows men that there is not only earthly life, but many earthly lives. Before Giordano Bruno men believed that there was a fixed boundary up in the sky. Giordano Bruno showed that there is no boundary, that the blue of the sky is not a limit. Spiritual science shows that birth and death are not there, but that we introduce them into life through the limitation of our understanding.

Thus the gulf between the physical and the spiritual can be bridged over. Things which rest upon a spiritual-scientific foundation are like this for those seeking to found a genuine, truthful Monism. Those who often call themselves Monists today manage their Monism very simply. They take one part of the world and make of it a unity by throwing away the other half. True Monism comes about through allowing both halves to have their significant influence upon one another. This comes about through spiritual science. This should not only arise in a significant way for our consciousness, but for the whole of our life. We have to come more and more to the real knowledge, looking out into the world: in all that lives and works around us something super-sensible is present, not only in what is seen by our eyes, but also in what can be perceived by the understanding which is bound to the brain. There are everywhere spiritual forces, behind every phenomenon, behind the phenomenon of the rainbow, behind the movement of the hand, and so on.

If you read the lecture cycle which I held in Leipzig at the turn of the year last year, [Christ and the Spiritual World. The search for the Holy Grail (six lectures, Leipzig, 28th December 1913 – 2nd January 1914), published by the Rudolf Steiner Press.] you will find how the Christ Impulse worked through the Mystery of Golgotha, and how Christ lives in the most important affairs of humanity, not only in human conscious knowledge. For instance, there were quarrels about dogmas. But while men were quarrelling, the Christ Impulse lived on and brought about the necessary events.

Take the figure of the Maid of Orléans. In European history the simple shepherd girl appears. She appeared in a remarkable way; there lived in her soul not only those forces, which are otherwise to be found in human beings, but the Christ Impulse works in this personality, enlivening and sustaining her through its mighty influence. She became a kind of representative of the Christ Impulse itself for her time. This she was only able to do, because the Christ Impulse could enter and live within her.

You know that we celebrate the Christmas Festival in the time when the sun has least power, in the deepest darkness of winter, because we can be convinced that at this time the inner light, the spiritual light, has its greatest power.

Old legends tell us that over Christmas, up to 6th January, people have had special experiences, because at this time the life of the earth, and the inner forces of the earth, are most concentrated. Those who have the right disposition for it, experience then in fact the spiritual forces within the earthly forces. Countless legends describe this. The best time for this covers thirteen days before 6th January.

The Maid of Orléans passed through these thirteen days in a particular condition, in a condition in which the life of her feeling was not yet affected by the external world. It is remarkable that the time during which the Maid of Orleans was carried in her mother's body ended during the Christmas time of the year 1411. She was born, having been carried for the last thirteen days in her mother's body, on 6th January. Before she drew the first breath, before she saw the physical life with physical eyes, she experienced what is earthly during these thirteen days in that sleep, through which man passes before he enters the physical world.

Here I am indicating something immensely significant, which shows how the world is guided from the spiritual; how what happens externally in the physical world is given its direction by the spiritual world; how, through the physical, the spiritual world is flowing.

Thus in our time we must work ever more consciously to remove through spiritual science the gulf between the physical and the spiritual. We do this for one field of our lives, when we become conscious that within our movement the powers of those are at work, who united their soul and body during their earthly life with our movement, and have passed through the gate of death. If we look across to the other bank of the stream, where they are active, feeling ourselves united with them, directing our thoughts towards them—we do this in full consciousness, the consciousness won through spiritual science. We know that we are in the most living connection with those who have gone through the gate of death, and we know that they provide the best powers among us. When we do this, or can think it, we regard life like a field that is to be sown. Between what we ourselves plant, we see plants everywhere springing up, which we could not have grown ourselves. Then we can know: these plants have been put in by those to whom it is granted to be in the world of the spirit, those with whom we feel ourselves connected, those with whom we become united.

Human brotherhood with those as well who no longer bear a physical body—that will be the characteristic sign of this movement and of those who feel themselves as members of this movement, and reckon themselves as belonging to it in the future. Other societies, founded only upon earthly things, will be able to remove many barriers between human beings. The barriers between the living and the dead will more and more be taken away by the movement which unites those men who wish to be united in the sign of spiritual science. We will carry all this in our souls, and keep as an abiding sense this characteristic quality, uniting us with this spiritual movement, which has become dear to us.

• 1. The German and the English meanings of the word are rather different. (Tr.)
• 2. The German word ‘Besonnenheit’ seems impossible to render adequately in English. ‘Temperance’ is widely used for Plato's word σωϕροσύνη) (Tr.)

The Spirit Realm. The scene is set in floods of significant colour, reddish deepening into fiery red above, blue merging into dark blue and violet below. In the lower part there is a globe symbolising the earth. The figures that appear seem to blend into a complete whole with the colours. On the left of the stage the group of gnomes as in Scene 2, page 173, in front of them Hilary, and in the immediate foreground the soul-forces.

Felix Balde's Soul:

(Seated at the extreme right of stage, having the form of a penitent, but arrayed in a light violet robe girdled with gold.)

I thank thee, Spirit, wise to govern worlds,
My saviour from my gloomy loneliness;
Thy word awakens unto work and life.
I will make use of what thou giv'st to worlds
About which I can meditate, whilst thou
Dost let mine own become,, insensible.
For then thou bearest to them on thy rays
That which in pictures fashioneth powers for me.

Lucifer:

(Bluish-green glittering under-garment, reddish outer-garment, shaped like a mantle and gleaming brightly, which extends into wing-like outlines; his upper part is not an aura but he wears a mitre of deep red bordered with wings; on his right wing a blue shape having the appearance of a sword; a yellow shape, like the ball of a planet (Venus), is supported by his left wing. He stands somewhat behind and to the right, towering over Felix Balde's soul.)

My servant, such activity as thine
The sun-time needs, in which we find ourselves.
The earth-star now receives a faded light;
It is the time when souls like thine can work
Unto the best advantage on themselves.
On thee I ray forth from my fount of light
The germs that tend to raise self-consciousness.
Go, gather them to make thine ego strong.
In later earth-life they will come to flower.
There shall the blossoms by thy soul be sought;
In its own nature it will take delight
When it can joy in planning its desires.

Felix Balde's Soul:

(Gazing at the group of gnomes. From this moment, the gnomes becoming conscious, keep swaying up and down, slightly raising and lowering themselves, as if the group was breathing from above.)

There far away, bright being disappears;
It floats in shadow-pictures through the deeps;
And, floating, strives to gain some steadying weight.

Hilary's Soul:

(With the figure of a steel-blue-grey elemental spirit modified to resemble a man's; the head less bowed, and the limbs more human.)

The mist of wishes doth reflect the light
Thrown on the realm of spirit by earth's star,
The star for which in this world thou dost form
From soul-material a thinking self.
For thee 'tis but a fleeting web of mist,
But to themselves they seem like solid souls.
On earth they work, by cosmic reason led,
In old fire forces, thirsting after form.

Felix Balde's Soul:
I will that their weight shall not burden me,
Which grievously resists the soaring will.

(The gnomes cease their movement.)

Ahriman:
Thy speech is good. Swift will I seize thy words
That I may keep them for myself unharmed.
Thou canst not yet develop them thyself;
But on the earth they would fill thee with hate.

Strader's Soul:

(Toward the left of the stage; only his head is visible; it is in a yellowish-green aura with red and orange stars. At this moment on Strader's immediate left appears the soul of Capesius. Similarly only his head is to be seen. It is in a blue aura with red and yellow stars.)

I hear a word which sounds and sounds again.
It seems significant, and yet the sound
Doth vanish, and the lust for life doth seize
Its echoed answer. Which road would it take?

The Other Philia:

(Arrayed like a copy of Lucifer, though the radiance is lacking. Instead of the sword she has a kind of #8224, and in place of the planet a red ball like a fruit.) It travels onward in its search for weight

Unto the place where radiant being fades
And misty pictures surge into the deep.
If thou dost keep its meaning in thy realm
I'll bring its power to thee within the mist;
Then thou wilt re-discover it on earth.

Philia:

(Figure like an angel, yellow merging into white, with wings of a bright violet, a lighter shade than Maria has later.—All three soul figures and the Other Philia are near Strader's soul and stand in the centre of the stage.)

The mist-creations I will tend for thee
That they may not when conscious guide thy will;
That will I unto cosmic light entrust
Wherein they form the heat thy nature needs.

Astrid:

(Figure like an angel, robed in bright violet, with blue wings.)

I beam forth clear and wondrous life of stars
To beings, that they may make forms therefrom. They to thine earthly body shall give strength, From knowledge far, but near to heart's intent.

Luna:

(Figure like an angel, robe of blue and red, with orange wings.)

The weighty beings, who with toil create,
In thy sense-body will I later hide;
That thou mayst not in thought turn it to ill
And thus stir up a storm in earthly life.

Strader's Soul:
The three were speaking to me sunshine's words,
They work for me where I can see them work.
Full many figures are they fashioning;
I feel an impulse by soul-power to change
Them with design, and make them one with me.
Awake in me, O royal Solar power
That I may dim thy might by the resistance
Which my desire from the Moon sphere brings.
A golden glow now stirs, I feel its warmth,
And silver sheen, forth-spraying though yet cold;
Awake in me O Mercury again
And wed my severed cosmic self to me.

Well do I feel that once again a part
Is formed from out that picture, which I here
From cosmic spirit forces must create.

Capesius' Soul:
On that far shore of souls I see emerge
A picture that ne'er touched my being yet
Since I escaped the clutch of earthly life,
It rays out grace and soothes with soft appeal.
The warming glow of wisdom streams therefrom,
And clarifying light gives to my soul.
Could I but make this picture one with me
I should attain the end to which I strive.
Yet know I not the power which could avail
To make this picture active in my sphere.

Luna:
That which two earth-lives gave thee thou must feel.
One, many years ago, slid gently by
In earnest effort; later on thou hadst
One by ambition soiled; which must be fed
With strengthening grace descending from the first,
That Jupiter's fire-souls may be revealed
Within the circle of thy spirit-sight.
Then shalt thou feel that wisdom strengthens thee.
Then will the picture, which thou see'st afar
Upon the borders of thy soul's expanse,
Be set at liberty to come to thee.

Capesius' Soul:
I needs must be indebted to the soul
That now prepares for being, since it shows
A warning picture in my soul's expanse.

Astrid:
Thou art indeed but not as yet doth it
Demand a payment in, thy next earth-life.
This picture serves to give thee powers of thought
That thou as man mayst recognize the man
Who shows his earthly future to thee here.

The Other Philia:
The picture may indeed come closer yet
But cannot penetrate thy very self;
And so restrain its longing for thyself,
That thou mayst find thyself on earth again
Ere it can flow into thine inmost self.

Capesius' Soul:
I feel before what I shall owe to it
When I shall will to bring it near to me,
Yet can assert that I am free therefrom.
From Philia's domain I now behold
in picture-sequences the energy
Which I shall gather from its near approach.

Philia:
When Saturn soon his many-coloured light
Shall ray on thee, use well the favour'd hour.
Then through his power in thy soul's vehicle
That which in spirit is akin to thee
Will plant the roots of thought, which will disclose
The meaning of the cyclic life of earth
When thou dost tread again this star thyself.

Capesius' Soul:
Thy counsel shall become my monitor
As soon as Saturn pours his light on me.

Lucifer:
One thing more will I waken in these souls:
The view of worlds whose light will cause them pain,
Ere they can leave this sun-time fortified
With powers for later life upon the earth.
Pain must through doubt mature their fruit in them;
So will I summon up those spheres of soul
Which they have not the strength to look upon.

(The souls of Benedictus and Maria appear in the middle of the region. Benedictus, in dress and in figure, is a microcosmic counterpart of the entire scenic effect. Below, his robe, becoming broader, shades into blue-green; around his head is an aura of red, yellow and blue; the blue blends into the blue-green of the entire robe. Maria on his right is an angelic figure; yellow shading into gold, without feet and with bright violet wings.)

Benedictus' Soul:
Ye do weigh heavy on my cosmic task
With these opaque earth-laden spheres of yours.
If ye will still assert the sense of self
Then wilt ye find that in this spirit-life
Mine own sun-nature will not shine on you.

Maria's Soul:
He was unknown to you, when ye did last
The robes of earthly matter woven, wear;
Yet doth it still bear fruit in your soul-sheath—
The sunshine's word of power, with which he fed
You kindly in far distant times on earth.
Search out your nature's deepest impulses
And ye shall feel him near you then with power.

Felix Balde's Soul:
Words issue out of circles strange to me,
And yet their tones illuminate me not:
And so they are not fully real to me.

Strader's Soul:
On spirit-shores illumination works,
Yet howsoe'er I strive to understand
The sense of these light-forces, they are dumb.

Dame Balde's Soul:

(Figure of a penitent with white coif, like that of a nun; robe yellow-orange, with silver girdle; she appears quite close to Maria; on her right and near Felix Beide.)

Ye souls now summoned up by Lucifer!
The penitent doth hear your voices tone,
But only sunshine's voice doth give him light;
Its super-splendour doth destroy your voice.
The other can behold your starry light,
But starry writing is to him unknown.

Capesius' Soul:
The starry writing! this word wakens thoughts,
And bears them on the waves of soul to me.
Thoughts which in earth-lives in the distant past
Were to my being wondrously revealed.

They lighten still, yet—as they grow, they fade;
Oblivion sheds its gloomy shade around.

The Guardian:

(Enter the Guardian of the Threshold, like an angel, symbolically arrayed, to the side of the souls of Maria and Benedictus.)

Ye souls who now at Lucifer's demand
Have drawn near the bounds of other souls,
In this domain ye are within my power.
The souls whom ye are seeking seek you too.
Within this cosmic age 'tis not ordained
Their beings shall touch yours within their spheres,
Not e'en in thought;—and so do ye beware
Lest to their orbits ye should force your way.
Should ye do this, 'twould harm both them and you.
I should be bound to take away from you
The starry light, and banish you from them
For cosmic ages into other spheres.

In those days, when the earth and moon were still together, in the time of fiery gases, all water was still dissolved in steam, it was a smoke of all substances.

Those physical bodies into which the souls had moved were not like today's humans and animals. They would appear grotesque to us; the physical bodies were formed by the soul entering them. It is of great importance that the lungs form when the soul enters. Until then, the beings moved by floating and swimming in the air. During the cooling period, the swim bladder transforms into lungs; they formed when the soul entered.

This transformation enabled blood to be formed. The I was able to couple with the human being. These conditions do not occur quickly; millions of years are necessary for this. The ability to breathe through the lungs and the descent of the souls into the bodies is wonderfully expressed in the Bible: God breathed the breath of life into man, and he became a living soul.

Thus, through theosophy, the profound truths in the religions emerge, compelling people to respect the tremendous facts in the development of mankind. This worship of the supernatural remained until about the fourteenth century, until Christianity became materialistic. It is not at all Christian to understand the spiritual essence of Christianity in its spiritual form in an abstract, dry way through the research of theology, geology and so on. It is genuinely Christian to express the great events in cosmology as Moses did in the past: “Adam fell into a deep sleep!” This means: Adam saw clearly the development on the astral plane. It is presented as a symbol that he clairvoyantly perceived on the astral plane how the [gill-breathing] being was transformed into a lung-breathing being through the self.

The migratory instinct on the moon was related to the mating and rutting season. Reproduction took place on its sunny side, and the interim period was spent on the other side.

The animal-men, who were the highest lunar beings, had not yet attained a degree of love; love, which descends from the highest level to the plant world, had not yet gained any strength on the moon. Everything was strictly regulated by cosmic forces; wisdom was the guiding principle. With the advent of the astral body, humans descended to a lower level, and with that, love began. The moon is the planet of wisdom, the earth the planet of love.

The wisdom-filled structure of the body developed mainly on the moon; at the end of the earth, love will be the motto. When we see the wonderful plant formations and the wisdom-filled structure of the human being, we find everything permeated by love. In the human being, it first reveals itself in the blood relationship of the ancient Atlanteans, and then develops into the compassion of brotherly love. From the coarsest forms of sexuality to the finest soul bonds, all beings are entwined in the bond of love. The transition from wisdom to love is a great step forward.

Mankind owes the gradual infusion of love to the high solar beings, who already possessed all parts of the spirit and whose progress had reached its peak. Yahweh lowers the ego; he is the bringer and giver of love, through whom a unified bond is created; it is a mutual giving and taking that furthers the soul in love.

There were also beings between gods and humans, only a part reached the Atma level. Many remained at the Budha level, while humans developed the beginning of Manas.

The Atma gods, the sun beings, wanted to imprint love on people, while the moon gods wanted to imprint wisdom on them. The important role that blood love played at the beginning of the Lemurian period approached people. Because the Hebrews felt that they were related by blood, they were able to base their legislation on it.

Love brings people together. They form larger and more comprehensive communities. The moon gods create an important counteraction. Freedom, individuality would have disappeared, people would have merged into a general love mess, that is why the moon gods directed their strongest attack against the union, their leader was Lucifer. So there were two currents, that of Yahweh and that of Lucifer, that of love and freedom.

The Atlanteans already had their secret schools. In the post-Atlantean period, the most developed people moved under the great leader Manu to the Gobi Desert, from where colonizers went out to all cultures. Wisdom was spread by people, by initiates, not by books.

The Indian culture consisted of descendants of the Lemurians and Atlanteans. The Indians received the Vedanta wisdom from the emissaries from Gobi, who were the holy rishis, seven in number.

The first post-Atlantean culture, the Indian culture, preserved the memory of the clairvoyance of the Atlanteans, hence the deep longing of the Indians for this time when man still felt connected to the divine; they valued clairvoyance more than the vision of external objects. They said to themselves: What we see outside are mere shadows, illusions! That is why they aspired to transcend this world. Through the yoga training, they sought to achieve the extinction of physical reality in order to exchange it for clairvoyance.

The Indians have retained their appreciation of the supernatural, but also their underestimation of the sensual world. It is a great mistake if this culture must pass away irretrievably, that it should be brought back into the present.

Persian culture is a step forward in that it regards the earth as reality, as a field of labor. The Persians were aware that one must plant the spiritual in the sensual world. [The Persian] wanted to redeem the sensual world with the help of the spirit. The great Zarathustra saw the god of light in the solar aura, and opposite him stands Ahriman, the god of darkness.

This was followed by the Chaldean-Babylonian-Assyrian-Egyptian culture. It had powerful leaders who married spirit and science. The Egyptians tried to impress the spirit of reality. Their interpretation of the stars was based on astrology and was imbued with spiritual wisdom, as were their architectures and famous monuments.

In the fourth post-Atlantean period, the Greco-Latin period, something new was added. While the Indians longed for a dream world, the Persians progressed by thinking of the sensual world as a field of work, and the Egyptians were able to align their earthly existence with the orbits of the stars, it was left to the Greeks to see themselves as a form of spiritualization. Form and material became the means of a living immortalization of the spirit. The Greeks brought art down into earthly reality. Its social effectiveness was a real, social state structure.

Great states are founded on causes other than physical facts. The Romans were the first to develop the concept of the “citizen”. In Greece, people were like members of a state; with the Romans, the individual figure came into its own. They imbued their own being with spiritual concepts, which is why jurisprudence flourished among them. They were conquerors of the external reality of man.

Then came an event of fateful significance. From the Atlantean era until the Romans, the God of Love, Yahweh, and the God of Wisdom, Lucifer, fought within man. It was a matter of uniting and individualizing the two extremes. The close blood ties also diverged among the Hebrews. The time came when these associations were no longer sufficient. The peoples were thrown into confusion by the campaigns of Alexander the Great; the campaigns of the Romans formed a center of spiritual selfishness.

It was a tremendous advance when Christ Jesus transformed the bond of love from a natural into a spiritual bond. His words are to be understood in this way: “Whoever does not leave brother and sister, son and daughter, and so on, cannot be my disciple.

The beginning of love was sexuality. The soul relationships between people must become ever more refined until, at the end of the earth, brotherhood embraces all people.

The preliminary stage of brotherhood came through Yahweh; the Christ brought spiritual love into the world; only then can man completely abandon it when love is spiritualized. This love must increase more and more in the relationships between people; it must become so great that it will triumph over all resistance.

The Christ Jesus appeared at a time when people were drifting apart, to unite them in a great brotherhood. Therefore, the Christ Jesus is the true spirit of the sun and the earth, the ruler of the earth, who puts love at the center.

Through Christ's atonement and sacrificial death, the astral plan is transformed from love of blood relationship into universal brotherly love. The first act takes place in Palestine, where a great brotherly bond is formed around humanity, the bond to love correctly where no blood ties exist. Christ Jesus provided the impetus for a transforming love that overcomes all. Christ Jesus is the greatest marriage between God and Man.

The fifth epoch signifies a deep descent into matter; the spirit is held captive by it, it becomes its slave. Even religion has become materialistic, Christianity must be renewed through theosophy.

It is a descent of the spirit into matter, this is not meant to be a criticism [of our age], but it must also be understood as a necessity. It is through this that concepts and logic are developed; natural science becomes the ruler of natural forces. However, it is still an enslavement of the spirit when the gigantic achievements are used only to serve the basest needs that were previously satisfied in the simplest way, while the spirit was cultivated. It is a waste of spiritual strength when animal instincts are satisfied with it.

The latter part of the Bhagavad Gita is permeated by feelings and shades of meaning saturated with ideas of sattwa, rajas and tamas. In these last chapters our whole mode of thinking and feeling must be attuned so as to understand what is said in the sense of those three conditions. In the last lecture I sought to give an idea of those important concepts by making use of present-day experiences. Certainly anyone who enters deeply into this poem must perceive that since the time when it arose those concepts have shifted to some extent. Nevertheless, it would not have been correct to describe them simply by verbal quotations from the poem because our mode of feeling is different from what is contained there and we are unable to make those very different feelings our own. If we tried to we would only be describing the unknown by the unknown.

So in the Bhagavad Gita you will find with regard to food that the concepts we developed last time have shifted a little. What is true for man today about plant food was true for the ancient Indian of that food Krishna calls mild, gentle food. Whereas rajas food, which we described correctly for man today as mineral food (salt, for instance), would have been designated at that time as sour or sharp. For our constitution meat is essentially a tamas food, but the Indian meant by this something that could hardly be considered food at present, which gives us an idea of how different men were then. They called tamas food what had become rotten, had stood too long, and had a foul smell. For our present incarnation we could not properly call that tamas food because man's organism has changed, even as far as his physical body.

Thus, in order to understand these feelings of sattwa, rajas and tamas, so fundamental in the Gita, it is well for us to apply them to our own conditions. Now if we would consider what sattwa really is, it is best to begin by taking the most striking conception of it. In our time the man who can give himself up to knowledge as penetrating as our present knowledge of the mineral kingdom is a sattwa man. For the Indian he was not one who had such knowledge, but was one who went through the world with intelligent understanding as we would say, with heart and head in the right place. A man who takes without prejudice and bias the phenomena the world offers. A man who always perceives the world with sympathy and conceives it with intelligence; who receives the light of ideas, of feelings and sentiments streaming out from all the beauty and loveliness of the world; who avoids all that is ugly, developing himself rightly. He who does all this in the physical world is a sattwa man. In the inorganic world a sattwa impression is that of a surface not too brilliant, illuminated in such a way that its details of color can be seen in their right lustre yet bright also.

A rajas impression is one where a man is in a certain way prevented by his own emotions, his impulses and reactions, or by the thing itself, from fully penetrating what lies around him, so that he does not give himself up to it but meets it with what he himself is. For example, he becomes acquainted with the plant kingdom. He can admire it, but he brings his own emotions to bear on it and therefore cannot penetrate it to its depths.

Tamas is where a man is altogether given up to his bodily life, so that he is blunt and apathetic toward his environment, as we are toward a consciousness different from our own. While we dwell on the physical plane we know nothing of the consciousness of a dog or a horse, not even of another human being. In this respect man, as a rule, is blunt and dull. He withdraws into his own bodily life. He lives in impressions of tamas. But man must gradually become apathetic to the physical world in order to have access to the spiritual worlds in clairvoyance. In this way we can best read the ideas of sattwa, rajas, and tamas. In external nature a rajas impression would be that of a moderately bright surface, say of green, a uniform green shade; a dark-colored surface would represent a tamas impression. Where man looks out into the darkness of universal space, when the beautiful spectacle of the free heavens appears to him, the impression he gains is none other than that blue color that is almost a tamas color.

If we saturate ourselves with the feeling these ideas give we can apply them to everything that surrounds us. These ideas are really comprehensive. For the ancient Indian, to know well about this threefold nature of his surroundings meant not only a certain understanding of the outer world, it also meant bringing to life his own inner being. He felt it somewhat as follows. Imagine a primitive country man who sees the glory of nature around him—the early morning sky, the sun and stars, everything he can see. He does not think about it however. He does not build up concepts and ideas about the world but just lives on in utmost harmony with it. If he begins to feel himself an individual person, distinguishing his soul from his environment, he has to do so by learning to understand his surroundings through ideas about them.

To set up one's environment objectively before one is always a certain way of grasping the reality of one's own being. The Indian of the time of the Bhagavad Gita said, “So long as one does not penetrate and perceive the sattwa, rajas, and tamas conditions in one's environment, one continues merely to live in it. A person is not yet there, independently in his own being, but is bound up with his surroundings. However, when the world about him becomes so objective that one can pursue it everywhere with the awareness that this is a sattwa condition, this a rajas, that a tamas, then one becomes more and more free of the world, more independent in himself.” This therefore is one way of bringing about consciousness of self. At bottom this is Krishna's concern—to free Arjuna's soul from all those things that surround him and are characteristic of the time in which he lives. So Krishna explains, “Behold all the life there on the bloody field of battle where brothers confront brothers, with all that thou feelest thyself bound to, dissolved in, a part of. Learn to know that all that is there outside you runs its course in conditions of sattwa, rajas and tamas. Then wilt thou contrast thyself with it; know that in thine own highest self thou dost not belong to it, and wilt experience thy separate being within thyself, the spirit in thee.”

Here we have another of the beautiful elements in the dramatic composition of the Bhagavad Gita. At first we are gradually made acquainted with its ideas as abstract concepts, but afterward these become more and more vivid. The concepts of sattwa, rajas, and tamas take on living shape and form in the most varied spheres of life. Then at length the separation of Arjuna's soul from it all is accomplished, so to say, before our spiritual gaze. Krishna explains to him how we must free ourselves from all that is bound up with these three conditions, from that in which men are ordinarily interwoven.

There are sattwa men who are so bound up with existence as to be attached to all the happiness and joy they can draw from their environment. They speed through the world, drinking in their blissfulness from all that can give it to them. Rajas men are diligent, men of action; but they act because actions have such and such consequences to which they are attached. They depend on the joy of action, on the impression action makes upon them. Tamas men are attached to laziness, they want to be comfortable. They really do not want to act at all. Thus are men to be distinguished. Those whose souls and spirits are bound into external conditions belong to one or other of these three groups.

“But thine eyes shall see the daybreak of the age of self-consciousness. Thou shalt learn to hold thy soul apart. Thou shalt be neither sattwa, rajas nor tamas man.” Thus is Krishna the great educator of the human ego. He shows its separation from its environment. He explains soul activities according to how they partake of sattwa, rajas or tamas. If a man raises his belief to the divine creators of the world he is a sattwa man. Just in that time of the Gita, however, there were men who in a certain sense knew nothing of the Divine Beings guiding the universe. They were completely attached to the so-called nature spirits, those behind the immediate beings of nature. Such men are rajas men. The tamas men are those who in viewing the world get only so far as what we may call the ghost-like, which in its spiritual nature is nearest to the material. So, in regard to religious feeling also these three groups may be distinguished.

If we wished to apply these concepts to religious feeling in our time we should say (but without flattery) that those who strive after anthroposophy are sattwa men; those attached to external faith are rajas men; those who, in a material or spiritual sense, will only believe in what has bodily shape and form—the materialists and spiritualists—are the tamas men. The spiritualist does not ask for spiritual beings in whom he may believe; he is quite prepared to believe in them, but he does not want to lift himself up to them. He wants them to come down to him. They must rap, because he can hear rapping with physical ears. They must appear in clouds of light because such are visible to his eyes. Such are tamas men in a certain conscious sense, and quite in the sense too of the tamas men of Krishna's time.

There are also unconscious tamas men; the materialistic thinkers of our time who deny all that is spiritual. When materialists meet in conference today they persuade themselves that they adhere to materialism on logical grounds, but this is an illusion. Materialists are people who remain so not on the basis of logic but for fear of the spiritual. They deny the spirit because they are afraid of it. They are in effect compelled to deny it by the logic of their own unconscious soul, which does indeed penetrate to the door of the spiritual but cannot pass through. One who can see reality can see in a materialistic congress how each person in the depths of his soul is afraid of the spirit. Materialism is not logic, it is cowardice before the spiritual. All its arguments are nothing but an opiate to damp down this fear. Actually, Ahriman—the giver of fear—has every materialist by the neck. This is a grotesque but an austere and fundamental truth that one may recognize if one goes into any materialistic meeting. Why is such a meeting called? The illusion is that people there discuss views of the universe, but in reality it is a meeting to conjure up the devil Ahriman, to beckon him into their chambers.

Krishna, then, indicates to Arjuna how the different religious beliefs may be classified, and he also speaks to him of the different ways men may approach the Gods in actual prayer. In all cases the temper of man's soul can be described in terms of these three conditions. Sattwa, rajas, and tamas men are different in the way they relate to their Gods. Tamas men are such as priests, but whose priesthood depends on a kind of habit. They have their office but no living connection with the spiritual world. So they repeat Aum, Aum, Aum, which proceeds from the dullness, the tamas condition of their spirit. They pour forth their subjective nature in the Aum.

Rajas men look out on the surrounding world and begin to feel that it has something in it akin to themselves, that it is related to them and therefore worthy to be worshipped. They are the men of “Tat” who worship the “That,” the Cosmos, as being akin to themselves. Sattwa men perceive that what lives within us is one with all that surrounds us in the universe outside. In their prayer they have a sense for “Sat,” the All-being, the unity without and within, unity of the objective and the subjective. Krishna says that he who would truly become free in his soul, who does not wish to be merely a sattwa, rajas or tamas man in any one respect or another, must attain to a transformation of these conditions in himself so that he wears them like a garment, while in his real self he grows out beyond them.

This is the impulse that Krishna as the creator of self-consciousness must give. Thus he stands before Arjuna and teaches him to “Look upon all the conditions of the world, with all that is to man highest and deepest, but free thyself from the highest and deepest of the three conditions and in thine own self become as one who lays hold of himself. Learn and know that thou canst live without feeling thyself bound up with rajas, or tamas, or sattwa.” One had to learn this at that time because it was the beginning of the dawn in self-liberation, but here again, what then required the greatest effort can today be found right at hand. This is the tragedy of present life. There are too many today who stand in the world and burrow down into their own soul, finding no connection with the outer world; who in their feelings and all their inner experiences are lonely souls. They neither feel themselves bound up with the conditions of sattwa, rajas or tamas, nor are they free from them, but are cast out into the world like an endlessly, aimlessly revolving wheel. Such men who live only in themselves and cannot understand the world, who are unhappy because in their soul-life they are separated from all external existence—these represent the shadow side of the fruit that it was Krishna's task to develop in Arjuna and in all his contemporaries and successors. What had to be Arjuna's highest endeavor has become the greatest suffering for many men today.

Thus do successive ages change. Today we must say that we are at the end of the age that began with the time of the Bhagavad Gita. This may penetrate our feelings with deep significance. It may also tell us that just as in that ancient time those seeking self-consciousness had to hear what Krishna told Arjuna, those seeking their soul's salvation today, in whom self-consciousness is developed to a morbid degree, these too should listen. They should listen to what can lead them once more to an understanding of the three external conditions. What can do this?

Let us put forward some more preliminary ideas before we set out to answer this question. Let us ask again, what is it that Krishna really wants for Arjuna, whose relation to external conditions was a right one for his time? What is it that he says with divine simplicity and naïveté? He reveals what he wishes to be even to our present time. We have described how a kind of picture-consciousness, a living imagery, lighted up man's soul; how there was hovering above it, so to say, what today is self-consciousness, which men at that time had to strive for with all their might but which today is right at hand. Try to live into the soul condition of that time before Krishna introduced the new age. The world around men did not call forth clear concepts and ideas, but pictures like those of our dreams today. Thus the lowest region of soul-life was a picture-like consciousness, and this was illumined from the higher region—of sleep consciousness—through inspiration. In this way they could rise to still higher conditions. This ascent was called “entering into Brahma.” To ask a soul today, living in Western lands, to enter into Brahma would be a senseless anachronism. It would be like requiring a man who is halfway up a mountain to reach the top by the same way as one still down in the valley. With equal right could one ask a Western soul today to do Eastern exercises and “enter into Brahma” because this presupposes that a man is at the stage of picture consciousness, which as a matter of fact certain Easterners still are. What the men of the Gita age found in rising into Brahma, the Western man already has in his concepts and ideas. This is really true, that Shankaracharya would today introduce the ideas of Solovieff, Hegel and Fichte to his revering disciples as the first stage of rising into Brahma. It is not the content, however, it is the pains of the way, that are important.

Krishna indicates a main characteristic of this rising into Brahma, by which we have a beautiful characterization of Krishna himself. At that time the constitution of the soul was all passive. The world of pictures came to you, you gave yourself up to these flowing pictures. Compare this with the altogether different nature of our everyday world. Devotion, giving ourselves up to things, does not help us to understand them, even though there are many who do not wish to advance to what must necessarily take place in our time. Nevertheless, for our age we have to exert ourselves, to be alive and active, in order to get ideas and concepts of our surrounding world. Herein lies all the trouble in our education. We have to educate children so that their minds are awake when their concepts of the surrounding world are being formed. Today the soul must be more active than it was in the age before the origin of the Bhagavad Gita. We can put it so:

Bhagavad Gita Age—rising to Brahma with passive souls.

Intellectual Age (our present age)—actively working our way up into the higher worlds.

What then must Krishna say when he wishes to introduce that new age in which the active way of gaining an understanding of the universe is gradually to begin? He must say, “I have to come; I have to give thee the ego-man, a gift that shall impel thee to activity.” If it had all remained passive as before—a being interwoven with the world, devoted to the world—the new age would never have begun. Everything connected with the entry of the soul into the spiritual world before the time of the Gita, Krishna calls devotion. “All is devotion to Brahma.” This he compares to the feminine in man; while what is the self in man, the active working element that is to create self-consciousness, that pushes up from within as the generator of the self-consciousness that is to come, Krishna calls the masculine in man. What man can attain in Brahma must be fertilized by Krishna. So his teaching to Arjuna is, “All men until now were Brahma-men. Brahma is all that is spread out as the mother-womb of the whole world. But I am the father, who came into the world to fertilize the maternal womb.”

Thus the consciousness of self is created, which is to work on all men. This is indicated as clearly as possible. Krishna and Brahma are related to each other as father and mother in the world. Together they produce the self-consciousness man must have in the further course of his evolution—the self-consciousness that makes it possible for him to become ever more perfect as an individual being. The Krishna faith has altogether to do with the single man, the individual person. To follow his teaching exclusively means to strive for the perfection of oneself as an individual. This can be achieved only by liberating the self; loosening it from all that adheres to external conditions. Fix your attention on this backbone of Krishna's teaching, how it directs man to put aside all externals, to become free from the life that takes its course in continually changing conditions of every kind; to comprehend oneself in the self alone, that it may be borne ever onward to higher perfection. See how this perfection depends on man's leaving behind him all the external configuration of things, casting off the whole of outer life like a shell, becoming free and ever more inwardly alive in himself. Man tearing himself away from his environment, no longer asking what goes on in external processes of perfection but asking how shall he perfect himself. This is the teaching of Krishna.

Krishna—that is, the spirit who worked through Krishna—appeared again in the Jesus child of the Nathan line of the House of David, described in St. Luke's Gospel. Thus, fundamentally, this child embodied the impulse, all the forces that tend to make man independent and loosen him from external reality. What was the intention of this soul that did not enter human evolution but worked in Krishna and again in this Jesus child? At a far distant time this soul had had to go through the experience of remaining outside human evolution because the antagonist Lucifer had come; he who said, “Your eyes will be opened and you will distinguish good and evil, and be as God.” In the ancient Indian sense Lucifer said to man, “You will be as the Gods, and will have power to find the sattwa, rajas and tamas conditions in the world.”

Lucifer directed man's attention to the outer world. By his instigation man had to learn to know the external, and therefore had to go through the long course of evolution down to the time of Christ. Then he came who was once withdrawn from Lucifer; came in Krishna and later in the Luke Jesus child. In two stages he gave that teaching that from another side was to be the antithesis of the teaching of Lucifer in Paradise. “He wanted to open your eyes to the conditions of sattwa, rajas, and tamas. Shut your eyes to these conditions and you will find yourselves as men, as self-conscious human beings.” Thus does the Imagination appear before us. On the one side the Imagination of Paradise, where Lucifer opens man's eyes to the three conditions in the external world, when for a while the Opponent of Lucifer withdraws. Then men go through their evolution and reach the point where in two stages another teaching is given them, of self-consciousness, which bids them close their eyes to the three external conditions. Both teachings are one-sided. If the Krishna-Jesus influence alone had continued, one one-sidedness would have been added to another. Man would have taken leave of all that surrounds him, would have lost all interest in external evolution. Each person would only have sought his own perfection. Striving for perfection is right; but such striving bought at the price of a lack of interest in the whole of humanity is one-sided, even as the Luciferic influence was one-sided. Hence the all-embracing Christ Impulse entered the higher synthesis of the two one-sided tendencies.

In the personality of the St. Luke Jesus child Himself the Christ Impulse lived for three years; the Christ who came to mankind to bring together these two extremes. Through each of them mankind would have fallen into weakness and sin. Through Lucifer humanity would have been condemned to live one-sidedly in the external conditions of sattwa, rajas and tamas. Through Krishna they were to be educated for the other extreme, to close their eyes and seek only their own perfection. Christ took the sin upon Himself. He gave to men what reconciles the two one-sided tendencies. He took upon Himself the sin of self-consciousness that would close its eyes to the world outside. He took upon Himself the sin of Krishna, and of all who would commit his sin, and He took upon Himself the sin of Lucifer and of all who would commit the sin of fixing their attention on externalities. By taking both extremes upon Himself he makes it possible for humanity by degrees to find a harmony between the inner and the outer world because in that harmony alone man's salvation is to be found.

An evolution that has once begun, however, cannot end suddenly. The urge to self-consciousness that began with Krishna went on and on, increasing and intensifying self-consciousness more and more, bringing about estrangement from the outer world. In our time too this course is tending to continue. At the time when the Krishna impulse was received by the Luke Jesus child mankind was in the midst of this development, this increase of self-consciousness and estrangement from the outer world. It was this that was brought home to the men who received the baptism of John in the Jordan, so that they understood the Baptist when he said to them, “Change your disposition; walk no longer in the path of Krishna”—though he did not use this word. The path on which mankind had then entered we may call the Jesus-path if we would speak in an occult sense. In effect, the pursuit of this Jesus-path alone went on and on through the following centuries. In many respects human civilization in the centuries following the foundation of Christianity was only related to Jesus, not to the Christ Who lived in Jesus for the three years from the baptism by John until the Mystery of Golgotha.

Every line of evolution, however, works its way onward up to a certain tension. In the course of time this longing for individual perfection was driven to such a pitch that men were in a certain sense brought more and more into the tragedy of estrangement from the divine in nature, from the outer world. Today we are experiencing this in many ways. Many people are going about among us who have little understanding left of our environment. Therefore, it is just in our time that an understanding of the Christ Impulse must break in upon us. The Christ-path must be added to the Jesus-path. The path of one-sided striving for perfection has become too strong. It has gone so far that in many respects men are so remote from their surroundings that certain movements, when they arise, over-reach themselves immediately, and the longing for the opposite is awakened. Many human souls now feel how little they can escape from this enhanced self-consciousness, and this creates an impulse to know the divinity of the outer world. It is such souls as these who in our time will seek the understanding of the Christ Impulse that is opened up by true anthroposophy; the force that does not merely strive for the one-sided perfection of the individual soul but belongs to the whole progress of humanity. To understand the Christ means not merely to strive toward perfection, but to receive in oneself something expressed by St. Paul, “Not I, but Christ in me.” “I” is the Krishna word. “Not I, but Christ in me,” is the Christian word.

So we see how every spiritual movement in history has in a certain sphere its justification. No one must imagine that the Krishna impulse could have been dispensed with. No one should ever think either that one human spiritual movement is fully justified in its one-sidedness. The two extremes—the Luciferic and the Krishna impulses—had to find their higher unity in the mission of the Christ.

He who would understand in the true anthroposophic sense the impulse necessary for the further evolution of mankind, must realize how anthroposophy has to become a means of shedding light on all religions. He must learn to see how the different streams in evolution all flow into the one main current of development. It would be a dilettante way of beginning to do this if one tried to find again in the Krishna stream what can be found in the stream of Christianity. Only when we regard the matter in this way do we understand what it means to seek a unity in all religions. There is, however, another way of doing so. One may repeat over and over, “In all religions the same fundamental essence is contained.” In effect, the same essence is contained in the root of a plant, in the stem, leaves, flowers, the pollen, and the fruit. That is true, but it is an abstract truth. It is no more profound than if one were to say, “Why make any distinctions? Salt, pepper, vinegar, and milk all have their place on the table; all are one, for all are substance.” Here you can tell how futile such a way of thought can be, but you do not notice it so easily when it comes to comparing religions. It will not do to compare the Chinese, Brahmin, Krishnan, Buddhist, Persian, Moslem, and Christian faiths in this abstract way, saying, “Look, everywhere we find the same principles. In each case there is a Savior.”

Abstractions can indeed be found in countless places and in countless ways, but this is a dilettante method because it leads to nothing. One may form societies to pursue the study of all religions, and do so in the same sense as saying pepper, salt, etc. are one because they are all substance. That has no importance. What is important is to regard things as they really are. To the way of looking at things that goes so far in occult dilettantism as to keep on declaiming the equality of all religions, it is one and the same whether what lived in the Christ is the pivot of the whole of evolution or whether it can be found in the first man you meet in the street. For one who wishes to guide his life by truth it is an atrocity to associate the impulse in the world's history that is bound up with the Mystery of Golgotha and for which the name Christ has been preserved—to associate that impulse with any other impulse in history, because in truth it is the central point of the whole of earthly evolution.

In these lectures I have tried by means of a particular instance to indicate how present-day occultism must try to throw light on the different spiritual movements that have appeared in the course of human history. Though each has its right and proper point of contact, one must distinguish between them as between the stem of a plant and the green leaf, and the green leaf from the colored petal, though all together form a unity. If one tries with this truly modern occultism to penetrate with one's soul into what has flowed into humanity in diverse currents, one recognizes how the different religious faiths lose nothing of their greatness and majesty. How sublime was the greatness that appeared to us in the figure of Krishna even when we simply tried to get a definite view of his place in evolution. All such lines of thought as we can give only in outline are indeed imperfect enough, and you may be assured that no one is more aware of their imperfection than the present speaker. But the endeavor has been to show in what spirit a true consideration of the spiritual movement toward individuality in mankind must be carried out. I purposely tried to derive our thoughts from a spiritual creation remote from us, the Bhagavad Gita, to show how Western minds can perceive and feel what they owe to Krishna; what he, through the continued working of his impulse, still signifies for their own upward striving.

However, the spiritual movement we here represent necessarily demands that we enter concretely, and with real love, into the special nature of every current in man's spiritual history. This is a bit inconvenient because it brings us all too near to the humble thought of how little after all we really penetrate into their depths. Another idea follows upon this, that we must go on striving further and ever further. Both of these ideas are inconvenient. It is the sad fate of that movement we call anthroposophy, that it produces inconvenient results for many souls. It requires that we actively lay hold of the definite, separate facts of the world's development. At the same time it requires each of us to say earnestly to himself, “I can indeed reach something higher, and I will. Always it is only a certain stage and standpoint that I have attained. I must forever go on striving—on—and on—without end.”

Thus, all along it has been not quite comfortable to belong to that spiritual movement that by our efforts is endeavoring to take its place in what is called the Theosophical Movement.¹ It has not been easy, because we demand that people shall learn to strive ever more deeply to penetrate the sacred mysteries. We could not supply you with anything so easy as introducing some person's son or even daughter, saying, “You need only wait, the Savior of mankind will appear physically embodied in this boy or girl.” We could not do this because we must be true. Yet, one who perceives what is happening cannot but regard these latest proceedings as the final grotesque outcome of the dilettante comparison of religions that can also be put forward so easily, and that continually repeats what should be taken as a matter of course, the tritest of all sayings, “All religions contain the same essence.”

The last weeks and months have shown—and my speaking here on this significant subject has shown it again—that a circle of people can be found at the present time who are ready to seek spiritual truths. We have no other concern than to put these truths forward, though many, or even everyone, may leave us. If so, it will make no difference in the way the spiritual truths are here proclaimed. The sacred obligation to truth will guide that movement that underlies this cycle of lectures. Whoever would go with us must do so under the conditions that have now become necessary. It is certainly more convenient to proceed otherwise, not entering into another side of the matter as we do by pointing out the reality in all things. But that also is part of our obligation to truth. It is simpler to inform people of the equality and unity of religions, or tell them they are to wait for the incarnation of a Savior who is predestined, whom they are to recognize not by themselves but on someone's authority.

Human souls today will themselves have to decide how far a spiritual movement can be carried on and upheld by pure devotion to the ideal of truthfulness. In our time it had to come to that sharp cleavage, whose climax was reached when those who had no other desire than to set forth what is true and genuine in evolution, were described as Jesuits. This was a convenient way of separating, but the external evidence was the work of objective falsehood. This cycle of lectures may once more have shown you that we have been working out of no one-sided tendency, since it comprises the present, the past, and the primal past, in order to reveal the unique, fundamental impulse of human evolution. So I too may say that it fills me with the deepest satisfaction to have been able to give these lectures here before you. This shows me there is hope because there are souls here who have the impulse, the urge toward that which works also in the super-sensible with nothing but simple, honest truthfulness.

I was forced to add this final word to these lectures, for it is necessary in view of all that has happened to us in the course of time down to the point of being excluded from the Theosophical Society. Considering all we have suffered, and all that is now being falsely asserted in numerous pamphlets, it was necessary to say something, although a discussion of these matters is always painful to me.

Those who desire to work with us must know that we have taken for our banner the humble, yet unconditional, honest, striving for truth; striving ever upward into the higher worlds.

• 1. Dr. Steiner is referring here, and in the following passages, to his break with the Theosophical Society and to the formation of the Anthroposophical Society. A full account of these events can be found in G. Wachsmuth, The Life and Work of Rudolf Steiner, pp. 186–189, available from the Anthroposophic Press, Inc.

The Temple of the Mystic League mentioned in the first and second scenes. Here Benedictus, Torquatus, and Trustworthy have the robes and insignia of their office of Hierophant as described in the ‘Portal of Initiation.’ The Eastern altar supports a golden sphere; a blue sphere rests upon the Southern altar; whilst the sphere upon the altar of the West is red. As the scene opens Benedictus and Hilary are standing at the altar in the East; Bellicosus and Torquatus at the altar in the South; Trustworthy at the altar in the West; then enter Thomasius, Capesius, Strader then Maria, Felix Balde, and Dame Balde, and later on the Soul of Theodora; and last of all the four Soul-Forces. [East is here at right of stage, West at left.]

Benedictus:
The souls of all my pupils have received
The spirit-light, each in that special form
Which was appointed for him by his fate.
What they have now achieved each for himself
Each now must render fruitful for the other.
But this can only happen, if their powers
According unto number's rhythmic law
Desire to join within the holy place
To form the higher unity, which first
Can waken to true life what otherwise
Could only stay in solitary state.
They stand upon the threshold of the shrine,
Whose souls must first unite, and then shall sound
In unison according to the rules
Imprinted in the cosmic book of fate:
That harmony of spirits may achieve
What each alone could never bring to pass.
'Twill bring fresh inspiration to the old
Which here hath nobly reigned since Time was not.
To you, ye brethren, I these pupils bring
Who found their way here through the spirit-worlds
And through the strictest proving of their souls.
The holy customs will they treat with awe,
And treasure ancient sacred mystic ways
Which here are seen as powers of spirit-light.
Ye too, who have fulfilled in truest wise
Your lofty spirit-service for so long,
Henceforth will be entrusted with new tasks.
The cosmic plan loth call the sons of men
But for a time unto the sacred shrine,
And when in service they exhaust their strength
It guideth them to other fields of work.
Even this temple had to stand its trial;
And one man's error had to guard it once,
The guardian of the light—from darkness deep,
One cosmic hour big with the fate of worlds.
Thomasius perceived through inward light
Which rules unconscious in the souls of men,
That o'er its threshold he must not pursue
His way unto the holy mystic shrine
Ere he had crossed that other threshold o'er,
Of which this only is the outward sign.
So of himself he shut the door again
Which you would fain have opened wide in love.
He now will as another come again
Worthy of your initiation's gift.

Hilary:
Our souls here humbly offer sacrifice
Unto the spirit by whose power alone
The inner soul of man is fructified.
And we would strive that our own wills may be
A revelation of the spirit-will.
By cosmic wisdom is the temple led
Which unconfused doth guide to future times.
Thou showest us directions which thyself
Hast read within the cosmic book of fate,
What time thy pupils passed their proof severe.
So lead them now within our sacred shrine,
That they may join their work unto our own.

(Hilary knocks within the Temple; then enter Thomasius, Capesius, Maria, Felix Balde, Dame Balde, and Strader. Trustworthy and Torquatus so guide their entrance that when they come to the middle of the Temple, Thomasius is standing in front of Benedictus and Hilary, Capesius in front of Bellicosus and Torquatus, Strader in front of Trust-worthy, whilst Maria is with Felix and Dame Balde.)

My son, the words man utters in this place
Spell guilt which cries aloud to spirit-worlds
Unless the speaker follows truth alone.
great the guilt, so strong too are the powers
Which strike it, and destroy the one who speaks
And proves himself unworthy of his task.
He who is standing here before thee now,
Was conscious of the working of his words
And tried to full extent of all his powers
To render service to the spirit-world
Before this holy symbol of that light
Which shines upon our Earth from out the east.
It is the will of fate that thou henceforth
"Shalt stand and serve within this sacred place.
And he who consecrates thee to the task
And of his office hands thee now the key,
Doth give his blessing also that it may
Prove of good service, in so far as he
Hath served the sacred customs worthily.

Thomasius:
Exalted Master, he would not presume—
This poor weak mortal, who doth dare to stand
Before thee now in body,—e'en to shape
One wish that thy successor he might be
Within this ancient consecrated place.
He is not worthy e'en to place one step
Across the threshold of this mystic shrine,
But what he dares not wish for, for himself,
He must receive in deep humility
Since powers of fate have of necessity
Desired to send this call unto his soul.
It was not I, as I am in my life,
Or as I saw myself a short time back
In spirit, as a wholly worthless soul,
That let me now draw near unto this place.
And yet the man who stands here visible
Hath been, by Benedictus and his friend,
Endowed with second manhood, which the first
Shall henceforth only as a bearer serve.
The spirit-pupilship hath given me
A self that can show forth itself with power
And to the full unfold its own pursuits
E'en when the bearer needs must know himself
Full far removed from lofty aims of soul.
If, in such case, his duty it doth seem
To give this second self that's roused in him
To service in the progress of the Earth
His life must aye observe this strictest rule
To be a light before his spirit-eyes,
That nought from his own self must enter in
Or cause disturbance in that work, which he
Hath not himself arranged or brought to pass
But which his second self must execute.
Concealed within himself he thus will work
That one day he may be what he doth know
To be the future goal of his true self.
Throughout his life he'll carry his own cares
Locked fast in deep recesses of his soul.
I told thee when at first thou called'st me
That I could never tread the temple courts
In mine own human personality.
He who now comes, as though another's life
Had been entrusted to him, sees that fate
Hath laid on him the task of watching o'er
Results of his own work and guiding them
With dutiful attention from this place
For such time as the spirit doth command.

Torquatus (in the South, to Capesius):
Capesius, henceforth 'twill be thy task
To serve the holy temple in this place
Whence love through wisdom shall stream forth to men
As warmly as the sunshine's noontide rays.
He who would to the spirit sacrifice
With understanding of the mystic work,
Must needs face dangers here, for Lucifer
Can in this place draw near with secret tread
To whomsoever faithfully doth try
To carry out the spirit-service here,
And on each word he can impress the seal
That marks the adversary of the gods.
Thou stood'st before the adversary's throne
And saw'st what follows his activities;
So for thine office thou art well prepared.

Capesius:
He who hath viewed the adversary's realm
As powers of fate permitted me to do,
He knows that ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are but words
Which mankind scarce can understand aright.
Who speaks of Lucifer as wholly bad
Might also say that fire is evil too,
Because it hath a power that can kill life;
He might call water evil, since a man
Might in the water easily be drowned.

Torquatus:
Through other things doth Lucifer appear
As evil to thee; not through that which he
Himself, in his own being, signifies.

Capesius:
The cosmic spirit who could bring the light
To souls of men when first the Earth was formed
Must render service to the universe,
In ways which in themselves seem neither good
Nor evil unto spirits who have learned
What stern necessity doth oft reveal.
For good can turn to ill, if evil minds
Make use of it for their destructive ends
And what seems evil may be turned to good
If some good being guideth it aright.

Torquatus:
So dost thou know what thou wilt have to do
So long as thou dost stand within this place.
Love does not weigh by judgment's rote or rule
The forces that the Universe reveals;
She treasures them for what they may bring forth
And asks how she can mould and use the life
Which is created out of cosmic depths.

Benedictus (in the East):
Yet love speaks often with such gentle words,
And needs support within the depths of soul.
Here in this place she will unite with all
That follows cosmic law with threefold will
And is unto the spirit dedicate.
Maria will unite her work to thine.
The vow she took in Lucifer's domain
Is now permitted to ray forth its powers.

Maria:
Of import deep Capesius spake words
Which can reveal the truth if they proceed
From that same spirit which can guide mankind
Towards true love, in progress of the Earth,
But which but error upon error heap
When they are fashioned by an evil mind
And in the soul transform themselves to ill.
'Tis true that Lucifer doth show himself
As bearer of the light to man's soul-sight
When it would seek to gaze on spirit-space.
But then the human soul will always wish
To waken also in its inmost depth
What it should only gaze on and admire.
Although upon his beauty it must look
Ne'er may it fall 'neath Lucifer's fell sway
he should gain the power to work within.
When he, the bearer of the light, sends forth
His rays of wisdom and the worlds are filled
With haughty sense of self, and with full light
Each creature's personality shines forth
A pattern of his own imperious self,
Then may the inmost being of the soul
Build up on this appearance, and rejoice
In all its senses, whilst it radiates
The joy of wisdom, all around, that lives
In its own self and loves to feel alive.
But, more than any other spirit, man
Requires a god who doth not only ask
For admiration when his outward form
Reveals itself in glory to the soul,
But One who radiates His highest power
When He Himself doth dwell within man's soul,
And loving unto death foretelleth life.
A man may turn to Lucifer and feel
Inspired by beauty, or some splendour bright,
And yet so live his life within himself
That Lucifer can ne'er find entrance there.
But to that other Spirit man doth cry,
When he can fathom his own self aright:
‘The goal of love for earthly souls—'tis this
Not I, but Christ, doth live within me now.’

Benedictus (turning to Maria):
But when her soul shall to the spirit turn,
As before Lucifer she vowed it should,
Then to the Temple through her strength, shall beam
The guiding light of Earth's salvation-path.
And Christ will kindle in the hallowed place
Of wisdom warming rays of spirit-love.
What she can thus accomplish in the world
Is done because the course of her own life
Is bound up closely with that knot of fate
Which Karma spins in human lives on Earth.
In some long-past existence, it was she
Who caused the son to leave his father's home;
And now she leads the son to him again.
The soul, which in Thomasius now dwells
In former life was to that one which now
Fulfils itself within Capesius,
As son to father bound by ties of blood.
The father will not now through Lucifer
Demand the debt Maria owes to him,
For by Christ's power, the debt hath been annulled.

Magnus Bellicosus (speaking to Hilary and Benedictus, but frequently turning to Felix Balde and Dame Balde):
Within the holy place doth shine the light
Which flows with power from out the spirit-heights,
When souls can worthily receive its strength.
But yet those lofty powers of wisdom's realm
Which thus reveal themselves in mystic shrines
Have chosen also other paths to souls.
The signs of our own times have made it clear
That all these paths must now lie joined in one.
The temple must unite itself with souls
Who have reached spirit-light in other ways
And yet have been enlightened in good truth.
Now Dame Felicia and her husband too,
Are such as may approach this sacred place
And who can bring to it a wealth of light.

Dame Balde:
I can but tell the fairy-tales that rise
Within my heart quite of their own accord—
I only know about their spirit-source
What oft Capesius hath told to me.
In all humility I must believe,
What he hath told me of my gift of soul;
So also I believe what ye make clear
Why I am called within these temple walls.

Felix Balde:
I followed not alone the outward call
Sent to me by the guardian of this shrine;
But true unto my spirit-pathway's goal
I have applied myself unto the power
Which, as mine inmost guide, doth ever point
In what direction I shall turn my steps,
That I may best be able to fulfil
In life what spirit-powers have foreordained.
This time I saw quite clearly I was meant
To seek that way which Benedictus now
Hath shown his pupils in the spirit-life.
The signs that now I see within this shrine
Appeared to me in vision previously.
For often when my soul did tread the depth
And all self-will had been destroyed in me,
And power and patience could maintain themselves
In that dread loneliness which aye approached
Before I could experience spirit-light,
Then all the universe seemed one with me,
And soon I found myself within that world,
Where life's true purpose was revealed to me.
During such spirit-wand'rings I have been
In many a temple which it seems to me
Resembles that which now my sense perceives,
Just as the writing of the spoken word
Must show a written picture of the speech.

Trustworthy (in the West, to Strader):
Dear Strader, it is now thy destiny
To speak that word henceforth within the shrine
Which will agree with all Thomasius
Makes known to us, as sunset must agree
With that hope-giving glow of morning light.
This word, in its full sense doth seize upon
The working of that Power who showed himself
To thee, when thou wert standing on thy trial.
Thou hadst to stand within that spirit-place
Where thought is strictly ordered to stand still.
For if thine hand should wield a hammer now
And only strike the air, it could not know
The power it hath, unless the blow should reach
Some anvil; even so it is with thought.
It ne'er could really fathom its own depth
If Ahriman were not opposed to it.
All thought within thy life hath cast thee up
On rocks of opposition which have caused
Within thy soul both heavy doubt and pain.
Thus didst thou learn to know thyself through thought,
As light can only gaze upon itself,
Through the reflection of its rays thrown back:
The words of him who serves the temple here
Thus, in a picture, life's reflection show.

Strader:
In truth the light of thought for long time streamed
But through reflection into mine own life;
Yet for full seven years the spirit showed
Itself to me in its bright splendour too,
And did reveal those worlds unto my soul,
In front of which my soul had formerly
Stood ever still in torment and in doubt.
Within my soul this light must grow so deep
That it shall last through all eternity,
If I would find the path to spirit-aims
And make my own creations bring forth health.

Theodora (becoming visible, as a spirit-being, at Strader's side):
I was allowed to win this light for thee,
Because thy power did strive toward my light,
As soon as thy right time had been fulfilled.

Strader:
So too thy light, thou spirit-messenger,
Will stream o'er all the words that in this place
Shall be wrung forth from out mine inmost soul.
For Theodora's self is now with mine
To holy mystic service consecrate.

(Philia, Astrid, Luna, and the Other Philia appear in a glowing cloud of light.)

The Other Philia:
To Earth's primeval source
Mount thoughts of sacrifice
From many a holy shrine;
Let all that lives in souls,
Let all that spirit lights
Soar up from worlds of form;
Let cosmic-powers incline
With graciousness to men,
To kindle spirit-light
Within their powers of soul.

Philia:
From cosmic spirits I
Will beg their being's light,
The soul-sense to uphold;
The sound too of their words,
To loose the spirit-ear,
That what hath been aroused
Upon the paths of soul
May not become extinct
In lives of men on Earth.

Astrid:
The love-streams will I guide
That fill the world with warmth
Unto the souls of men
Who are initiate,
That sense of holiness
May be preserved and kept
Within the hearts of men.

Luna:
From primal powers will
I For might and courage pray,
For these will help to make
Self-sacrifice to grow,
So that it may transform
What now is seen in time
And change to spirit-seeds
For all eternity.

Curtain falls while all the characters, including Theodora, Philia, Astrid, Luna, and the Other Philia are still inside the Temple

The same. The persons who were at first assembled have left, with the exception of Felix Balde and Dr. Strader, who remain with Hilary True-to-God, the Grand Master; Magnus Bellicosus, the Second Preceptor; Albertus Torquatus, the First Master of the Ceremonies; Frederick Trustworthy, the Second Master of the Ceremonies; Maria; and Johannes Thomasius.

Hilary:
My son, what thou hast perfected must now
Within this holy place receive the seal,
Which sacred and primeval knowledge gives,
Besides the blessing of the Rosy Cross.
What thou hast brought the world must be through us
Unto the Spirit offered; that it may
Bear fruit in all the worlds, where power of man
Can be made use of for world-fashioning.

Bellicosus:
That thou mights't give unto the world this work
Thou had'st to part for many years with much
That in thine inmost soul thou loved'st best.
There stood a spirit-teacher at thy side,
Who went from thee, so that thy human soul
Might perfectly unfold its powers in thee.
Thou wast in closer touch with one dear friend
She also left thee, for thou had'st to learn
That which men only learn when they are set
To follow out their soul's powers in themselves.
With courage hast thou passed through this ordeal.
That which was taken from thee for thy good
Is, for thy good, restored to thee anew.
Thy friend stands here before thee: in the shrine
She waits for thee to follow out our wish.
Soon, thou wilt meet thy teacher once again.
These friends, who on our temple's threshold stand,
Desire to join with us-in greeting thee,
As one who brings great knowledge here with him.

Felix Balde (to Thomasius):
Thy mystic art which heretofore aspired
Through inward contemplation toward the light,
Will through thine act be able now to work
Through knowledge gained within the world of sense.

Strader (to Thomasius):
Those souls who after spirit-knowledge strive
While life still unto matter binds them fast,
Will now through thee find out a road by which
They can attain the light in their own way.

Thomasius:
Exalted Master, and ye, honoured sirs!
Ye think to see before you now a man
Who, through the Spirit's power and earnest strife,
Was able to produce the work you praise
And can acknowledge with your fostering care.
Ye think that he will certainly succeed
In reconciling science of to-day
With ever-ancient sacred mystic art.
And truly were there anything besides
The voice of mine own soul, which could instil
Belief about it into me, I think
It well might be your words ...

Trustworthy:
The Master's word
Doth but express that which without a doubt
Thou feelest in thy soul. There is no need
To strengthen what thine inner voice declares.

Thomasius:
Ah! were it so, most humbly would I stand
Before you and implore that I might gain
The temple's blessing on this work of mine.
I used to think it so, when first I heard
The word by which I came to understand
That ye would take my work beneath your care
And open gateways to me, which before
Only initiates could e'er approach.
But as I trod the path that led to you
There opened out upon my soul a world
To which, at such a time ye certainly
Would not have wished to lead me. Ahriman
In all his greatness stood before me there.
And then I saw that he it is in truth
Who is the expert in seal cosmic laws.
What human-beings think they know of him
Is of no value. Only he can know
Who once hath seen him in the spirit-world.
It was from him alone that I could learn
The truth about this work of mine in full.
He showed how in the progress of the world
One could not judge effects of such a work;
Since its true progress cannot be appraised
By those impressions men may form of it
Who judge by science and strict logic's law.
Their verdict on it would alone be true
If creature from creator were set free
And freed from him could follow its own path
Throughout the courses of the spirit-life.
Yet now the work is so bound up with me
That it is possible that I might turn
That which I guide back from the spirit-realms
To something evil, even though it were
Good in itself and in its working power.
I must myself from out the spirit-world
Send forth afar my influence on all
Which shows itself on Earth as the result
Of that which I have brought forth from my mind.
And if I should let evil issue forth
From out the spirit-world, through these results,
Then would the truth do damage greater far
Than error, for men follow after truth
According to their insight, error not.
I shall for certain at some future time
Turn the results of this my act to ill,
For Ahriman hath clearly shewn to me
That these results must all belong to him.
While I was at my work, and filled with joy
That it should lead me with such certain tread
Step after step, up truth's great pyramid,
I only noticed in my soul that part
Which lent itself to help me in my search;
And all the rest I left without a guard.
All those wild impulses, which formerly
Were but in bud, could now in quietude
Bloom forth and ripen into full grown fruits.
I thought I dwelt in highest spirit-realms,
But was in truth in deepest night of soul.
It was the strength of these same impulses
Which Ahriman in his own realm revealed.
And so I know the effect that I shall have,
For in the future all these impulses
Will go to form my personality.
Before I took this work in hand, I gave
Myself to Lucifer, because I wished
To learn to know and understand his realm.
Now know I, what I could not see before
When I was lost entirely in my work,
That he it was who wove around my thought
Those beauteous pictures, while within my soul
He planted wild desires, which silent now
Will surely one day gain control of me.

Trustworthy:
How can one who hath reached such spirit-heights
And knows all this for certain, yet believe
That he hath no escape from evil left?
Why, thou canst see where danger for thee lies;
And so canst crush it, and with courage save
Thyself, and the results of thy great work:
A spirit-pupil is in duty bound
To kill what hinders progress in himself.

Thomasius:
I see, thou judgest not by cosmic laws,
I could e'en now fulfil what thou dost wish
And I myself could quite well tell myself
In this same hour all that thou tellest me.
But that which Karma now doth let me do
Will not in future be permissible.
For things must come which will o'ershadow me
And darken all my spirit, till I turn
To that which I described to thee just now.
Then as the world progresses I will seize
With greed on anything that's in my work
Which can be used for harm, and all of this
I will embody in my spirit-life.
Then I shall have to love great Ahriman
And joyfully to his possession give
All that I have produced in earthly life.

(Pause, during which Thomasius meditates deeply.)

If all alone I could encounter this,
And bear it also in my soul alone,
I could await with fullest peace of mind
All that was destined for me on my way.
But it will harm your league as much as me.
Whatever bad shall follow from my work
Both for myself and other souls of men,
Will find its balance through just Karma's law.
The fact that ye fell victims to this fault
Makes it far harder for the life of earth,
Since ye are leaders in this self-same life
And ought to read the spirit-worlds aright.
Ye ought not to have failed to notice then
That it was someone else, and not myself
Who should have had the doing of this work.
Ye should have known it must be put aside
For now; and later would appear again
Through one who otherwise would guide its course.
So by your judgment, ye deprive the league
Of rights it ought to have, if it would still
Direct the service of the Sacred Place.
Because this fate for you was shown to me
I now appear upon your threshold here.
Knowledge would otherwise have kept me far,
For truly I can claim no blessing now
Upon this work, which does both good and harm.

Hilary:
Dear brethren, that which we have just begun,
Cannot be carried any further now.
We must betake ourselves unto the Place
From whence the Spirit can make known His will.

(Hilary leaves the hall with Bellicosus, Torquatus, and Trustworthy. Doctor Strader and Felix Balde also leave. Only Maria and Thomasius are left.)

The hall grows dark. After a short pause the three Spirit forms Philia, Astrid, and Luna appear in a cloud of light, and group themselves so that they completely hide Maria. The following is a spirit-experience of Thomasius.)

Philia:
The soul is athirst
To drink of the light
Which flows from the worlds,
An all-caring Will
Hides close from mankind.
But eagerly seeks
The spirit to hear
The language divine
Which wisdom in love
Doth hide from the heart.
For danger surrounds
The thoughts that would search
In realms of the soul,
Where far from the senses
Secrets hold sway.

Astrid:
Yet souls are enlarged,
Which follow the light
And work through the worlds
Which bold spirit-sight
Reveals to mankind.
The spirit doth strive
Enraptured to live
In realms of the gods
Which wisdom benign
Makes known to the seer.
There mysteries beckon
The bold keen desire
To win those new worlds
Which far from man's thought
Deep secrets conceal.

Luna:
It ripens the soul
To picture the sight
Whence powers will spring forth
Which Will, reft of fear
Doth rouse in mankind.
The ransoming powers
From primeval depths
Bring magical might
That sense cannot know,
Close barriered in earth.
And traces are there
That each searching soul
May find out the gate
Fast closed by the gods
'Gainst erring desire.

The Voice of Conscience (invisible):
Now totter thy thoughts
In Being's abyss;
And what was lent as help to them,
Thou now hast lost.
And what shone as the sun for them
For thee is quenched.
Alone in cosmic depths thou wanderest,
Which men intoxicated with desire
Would seek to win.
Thou tremblest in the fundaments of growth
Where men must learn to be bereft of all
Comfort of soul ...

(The last words run straight on into the following ones spoken by Maria, who is still hidden by the Spirit forms and cannot be seen. She speaks at first in a ghostly inward voice.)

Maria:
So blend thy soul
To powers of love
Which once could penetrate her with the hope
Of living warmth,
Which once could all her will illuminate
With spirit-light.
Rescue from loneliness
The powers of heart that seek
And feel the nearness of thy friend
In the darkness of thy strife.

(The Spirit forms vanish with the cloud of light. Maria becomes visible in her old place. Maria and Thomasius are alone, standing opposite each other. From now onwards the experiences are on the physical plane.)

Thomasius (rousing himself from deep meditation):
Where was I even now? My powers of soul
Unveiled the conflict of my inner-self;
The conscience of the world revealed to me
What I had lost; and then as blessing came
The voice of Love within the darksome realm.

Maria:
Johannes, the companion of thy soul
May once again be present at thy side,
And follow thee to earth's primeval depths,
Where souls can win perception e'en as gods,
By conquest that destroyeth, yet acquires
By bold persistence life from seeming death.
E'en in the ever empty fields of ice
She may go with her friend, where from his soul
The light will surge which spirits must create
When darkness wounds and maims the powers of life.
My friend, thou standest at that threshold now,
Where man must lose what once he hath attained.
Full many a glance thou hast toward spirit-realms
Directed, and from them hast gained the power
That made thee capable of thy great work.
It seems to thee, that now that work is lost;
Desire not then that it were otherwise,
For such desire must rob thee of all power
Of further progress into spirit-realms.
Whether thou walk'st in error or in truth,
Thou cant keep ever clear the view ahead,
Which lets thy soul press further on its path
If thou dost bravely bear necessities
Imposed upon thee by the spirit-realm.
This is the law of spirit-pupilship.
So long as thou still harbourest the wish
That what hath happened might be otherwise
Thou wilt forego the power which must be thine,
If thou dost wish to stay in spirit-land.
That thou hast lost what thou erewhile hadst won
Is surest sign to thee that thou may'st walk
In safety further on the spirit-path.
Henceforward thou must not rely upon
That understanding which thou hast till now.

In the month of May, 1906, Rudolf Steiner came to Paris with a number of students to give a series of private lectures to a small circle of friends. I myself had never seen him and did not then even know of his existence, but I had entered into correspondence on the subject of one of my dramas (Les Enfants de Lucifer) with his friend Mademoiselle von Sivers, who later on became his wife and his most understanding colleague. It was she who brought her teacher to my house one happy morning.

I shall never forget the extraordinary impression made upon me by this man when he entered the room. As I looked at that thin, powerful face, at the black mysterious eyes flashing light as if from unfathomable depths, it was borne in upon me that for the first time in my life I was face to face with one of those supreme seers who have direct vision of the great Beyond. Intuitively and poetically, I had described such seers in The Great Initiates, but I had never hoped to meet one in this world. The impression was instantaneous, irresistible—of the unexpected as well as of the already known. Even before he opened his lips, an inner voice said to me: Here is a true master, one who will play an all-important part in your life.

Our subsequent relations were to prove that this first impression was not an illusion. The programme of the daily lectures, which was told me in advance by the speaker, aroused my keenest interest. The lectures were to cover the whole field of his philosophy although it was only possible to develop certain outstanding points. One would have said that the teacher's aim was to give a vista of the general plan from its own heights. His fervent, convincing eloquence, irradiated by invariable clarity of thought, struck me at once as possessing two outstanding and unusual qualities. First, its artistic power,—When Rudolf Steiner spoke of the phenomena and beings of the invisible world he seemed to be living in his own home. With striking details and in familiar terms he told of events in these unknown realms just as if he were speaking of the most ordinary things. He did not describe, he actually saw and made others see the objects, scenes and cosmic vistas in clear-cut reality. Listening to him, one could not doubt the power of his astral vision; it was as limpid as physical vision, only much more penetrating. Again, another characteristic, no less remarkable,—This philosopher-mystic, this thinker-seer related all experiences of soul to the immutable laws of physical Nature. These laws were used to explain and classify the super-physical phenomena which, to begin with, appear before the seer in overwhelming variety and almost bewildering abundance. Then, by a wonderful counterstroke, these subtle, fluidic phenomena, proceeding from cosmic Powers grouped in a mighty hierarchy, began to illumine the edifice of material Nature. The diverse parts of Nature were linked together, related to these cosmic Powers from the heights to the depths, from the depths to the heights, and a vista of the mighty architecture of the universe opened up from the inner world where the visible is ever coming to birth from the womb of the invisible.

I took no notes of the first lecture, but it made such a vivid impression upon me that when I reached home I felt impelled to write it down without forgetting a single link in the chain of these illuminating thoughts. I had absorbed the lecture so completely that I found no difficulty at all. By a process of involuntary and instantaneous transmutation, the German words, which had ingrained themselves in my memory, changed into French. The same thing, repeated after each of the eighteen lectures, gradually grew into a dossier which I keep as a rich and rare store of treasure. These lectures, never having been steno-graphed or revised by Rudolf Steiner, do not exist in the archives of his public lectures or in the collection of lectures duplicated for members of the Anthroposophical Society. They are, therefore, entirely unedited. A number of members of the French Group of the Society have expressed the desire to publish them in book form and Mademoiselle Rihouet, the editor of La Science Spirituelle, has kindly offered the pages of this magazine. I respond all the more readily to this desire because these priceless lectures mark a significant phase of Rudolf Steiner's thought—that of the spontaneous burst of his genius and its first crystallisation. And, furthermore, it gives me joy to pay this new tribute to the teacher to whom I owe one of the great revelations of my life.

1. The Origin of Esoteric Christianity

These lectures give a kind of summary of what Rudolf Steiner calls Anthroposophy. In this Foreword I do not pretend to give anything like a resume of this vast and all-embracing philosophy. Its principles are contained in a theogony, cosmogony and psychology complete in themselves. It lays down the basis of a moral philosophy, an art of education, a science of aesthetics. The teaching of this thinker-seer extends into all and every domain of life. His sweeping vision embraces the whole history of mankind and imbues modern science with spiritual conceptions without by one hair's breadth distorting it from its exactitude and pristine clarity. My only aim here is to draw my reader's attention to the most strikingly new chapters, for they lead us again to the very roots of this sublime thought.

At the time when he was delivering these lectures, Rudolf Steiner was still the General Secretary for Germany of the Theosophical Society, which has its Headquarters at Madras. The Theosophical Society, originally founded by H. P. Blavatsky, has as its present President, Mrs. Annie Besant. In spite of many gaps and ultimate digressions, this theoretical system of oriental thought which originated in India and derived its name Theosophy from Alexandrian tradition, served to recall to the uninitiated West, the two fundamental tenets of all esoteric tradition: (1) The plurality of the progressive lives of the human soul under the law of karma, and (2) The ascending evolution of man under the influence of spiritual Powers.

At the time when Rudolf Steiner entered the Theosophical Society—which he had chosen as his first field of action—he was already fully master of the doctrine he owed to his own Initiation. These lectures, given in the year 1906, are proof of this.

The essential difference between Indian Theosophy and Anthroposophy lies in the supreme rôle attributed by Anthroposophy to the Christ in human evolution and also in its connection with Rosicrucian tradition. This appears clearly in the first two lectures, entitled: The Birth of the Human Intellect and The Mission of Manicheism. More clearly than any other occultist, Rudolf Steiner has seen the profound change which has come about in the course of ages in man's constitution of body and soul and in his way of perceiving truth. In ancient, pre-Christian times, man was universally endowed with a faculty of atavistic clairvoyance. In the Atlantean period, he lived more in the ‘world beyond’ than in this world. Clairvoyance was his outstanding faculty and his chief mode of cognition, but his perception of higher worlds was confused and chaotic. This faculty weakened and gradually faded away in the course of subsequent evolution; reason and the mere observation of Nature came to the fore. The Yoga of the Indian Rishis—the source of Aryan mythology and religion—represents an effective endeavour to regain the lost power of clairvoyance and at the same time to regulate it according to cosmic laws. But shortly before the coming of Christ, humanity had reached the last stage of descent into matter and passed through a perilous crisis. The passions emanating from the animal stage, beyond which he had now passed, threatened to engulf man. Civilisation itself was in peril. The human Psyche—having freed herself from primitive darkness by dint of long struggle—threatened to be lost in the decadence of Greece and the orgies of Rome.

2. Jesus the Christ as the Axis of Human Evolution.
The Rosicrucian Initiation

This lecture deals with the dangers which necessitated the Incarnation of the “Word which was in the Beginning,” the Divine Logos Who became man. The mission of Jesus the Christ had long been foretold in the sanctuaries of India, Persia and Chaldea, proclaimed in the vision of the Risen Osiris and of the “Sun at Midnight” in the crypts of ancient Egypt. The human race had reached such a point of materialisation that salvation was only made possible by a manifestation of the Divine Spirit on the physical plane. And so the Light which up till then had not descended further than the Moon, this “Light of grace and truth” came down into the darkness of the lower earthly realms, to incarnate in the man Jesus of Nazareth and become the axis of human evolution.

A mighty revolution, a change of incalculable significance took place in the inner planes—one which was destined to transform the whole world. The result was a complete change in the mentality of man, the two poles of which were in a manner reversed. A separation took place between these two outstanding faculties: sensibility and intelligence, intuition and reason. Up to this time, intuitive seership had predominated and reason had played a secondary part; science had remained the docile hand-maiden of religion. Primordial wisdom had been a combination of the two. The conquest and mastery of the material world had now become the goal of humanity. Reason gained the upper hand and instinctive feeling was henceforward to live its life apart. On the one side there was the triumph of reason in Aristotelian thought; on the other, religious feeling reached its climax in contemplation of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. Science and religion became two separate powers and then—shortly afterwards—rivals and mortal enemies. In religion, the Cross of Christ was sufficient for salvation. By contrast, science was not long in proclaiming: that alone has reality which has passed through the sieve of physical observation and of syllogism. Hence the dualism which for two thousand years has divided and rent in twain the consciousness of man. The advantage has been the development—to their extreme points—of the two poles of the soul, the two dominating faculties of intelligence. But in our day, when pure reason has hunted intuition from science and insight from education, our materialistic civilisation has reached such a condition of anarchy that its very existence is threatened.

From the outset, the aim of Christian Esotericism was to heal this dualism, to cultivate ideas capable of reconciling the two enemy-powers of religion and science, of intuition and reason, the combined knowledge and operation of which can alone arrive at truth and ensure the healthy development of mankind.

Esoteric tradition has at all times been characterised by two fundamental principles. First, that of the plurality of progressive existences of the soul and, secondly, a knowledge of the origin of evil and the means whereby man may become its victor. All great teachers of esoteric doctrine have enjoined their pupils to tread two paths of Initiation simultaneously in order the more surely to arrive at truth: the path of mysticism or ecstatic contemplation of the spiritual world, and the path of rationalism, or the synthetic contemplation of the visible universe in the light of archetypal ideas which proceed from the spiritual hierarchies but are attainable by human intelligence through intuition, even when direct seership is not there. I think that everyone will be deeply interested to read the notes of Rudolf Steiner's eighth lecture where he describes how the Rosicrucians strove to unite themselves with the Christ by meditation upon the first fourteen verses of the Gospel according to St. John. In successive visions the Rosicrucians lived once again through the seven stages of Calvary from the scourging and crowning with thorns, the bearing of the Cross to the mystic Death and ineffable Resurrection. Bathed in an ocean of love, they heard the resounding Logos, the “Word which was in the Beginning,” radiating the spiritual Light which pervades the whole universe and is the Creator of souls. The cosmic meaning attached to these stations of the Cross is deeply moving and provocative of thought.

3. The Interior of the Earth and the Problem of Evil

Instead of lingering upon the Rosicrucian Initiation which reveals the axis of Christianity and carries us into the realms of the world invisible, let me specially call readers' attention to the 16th lecture, the novelty of which is no less striking. Rudolf Steiner there gives us a striking example of his mode of contemplating visible Nature in order to penetrate to her essential being. It is as though matter became translucent and the hidden Spirit suddenly revealed.

The highly suggestive title of this lecture is Earthquakes, Volcanoes and the Will of Man. The special significance is that the main theme is related to the very roots of the nature of man.

The mystery of the interior of the Earth, the basis and stage of human evolution, is one of the numerous problems which materialistic science has never been able to solve. Unceasing research has been of no avail. Many scholars think of the interior of the Earth as an igneous mass (which would be capable of bursting the crust of the Earth); others imagine that it is a compact mass of mineral substance (which explains neither the volcano nor the earthquake). Now the Earth is a living being like the planets and suns, endowed with an interior organism indispensable to its functions and its rôle in the Cosmos. Rudolf Steiner sees the constitution of the Earth in the form of nine layers—or rather nine layers embedded one within the other. The eight interior layers under the crust of the Earth represent, as it were, the physiological organs of our planet from which its life emanates and upon which this life depends. The substance of these eight inner spheres does not resemble the mineral matter of which the outer crust and—in a sense—the skin of the Earth is formed. The elements composing these layers are half-liquid and half-gaseous. The Fire principle, the air-fire, mobile and pregnant with life, reservoir alike of impulses of will and the cause of volcanic eruptions, is only one of the spheres which are embedded one within the other. It is the fourth, counting from the centre, the fifth, counting from the outer mineral crust. The interior fire communicates with the crust along paths which are veritably ‘ventilating tracts’—hence the volcanic eruptions on the surface of the Earth.

If we cast a momentary glance at this interior constitution of the Earth, one fact immediately strikes us. It comprises the forces which are concentrated in the planet and worked at its upbuilding, through successive metamorphoses from the nebula of Saturn, through the Old Sun and Old Moon periods on to its present state. These same forces have worked at the structure of man and are more active than ever in the present age. (1) Egoism and Black Magic constitute the opaque centre of the Earth, for the reason that egoism, love of self for its own sake—of which black magic is the exaggeration and excess—is indispensable to the development of human individuality. The fatal products of egoism are the hatred and strife represented by the two next layers of (2) division, and (3) the prism, where individualities multiply and differentiate in order to battle with each other.

This ternary may be said to represent the kernel of the Earth as it existed in the nebula of the Saturn period. This basis is indispensable to the whole of the Earth's subsequent evolution. It is the ‘spring-board’ from which the individuality can rise to higher worlds, if egoism (the principle of evil) is conquered and transformed by the higher forces proceeding from the Sun and the Firmament—forces of which Divinity is the wellspring and true human freedom the fashioner. The period when the Earth was still united with the Moon is indicated in the Earth's interior by the existence of three other elementary spheres. (4) The Fire principle which lies at the root of impulses of will and is the cause of volcanic eruptions when a path is forged to the mineral crust of the Earth. (5) Above this lies the level of organic plant-life and again (6) there is the still higher level of the vortex of animal forces, where the ethereal embryos of the living beings destined to crawl, to walk and to fly, germinate and quicken in a laboratory of ceaseless activity.

In this second ternary of forces constituting the interior of the Earth, we have the remains of the period when the Earth was still united with the Moon. In those times, the Earth's surface was a kind of porous substance, the home of hybrid beings, half-vegetable, half-mollusc, with gigantic tentacles, while the germs of terrestrial flora and fauna floated in the semi-liquid, semi-vaporous atmosphere. Wonderful words in the book of Genesis refer to this period: “Darkness was upon the face of the deep and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the Waters.”

The third ternary of the inner organs of the Earth represents its actual form. The last metamorphosis occurs at the time of the separation of the Moon from the Earth and is indicated by the addition of two new elements which are, as it were, the ‘humanised’ replica of the centre of the Earth: (7) Consciousness inversed, where everything changes into its opposite; (8) Negative life, or death. Every living being descending into this realm must instantly perish. It is the Styx of the Greeks, cursed by the Gods of life and of beauty. (9) Above the sphere of death stretches the solid mineral envelope of the Earth, the theatre of humanity.

It must be admitted that this extraordinary description of the interior constitution of our planet cannot be verified by any means of observation adopted by natural science. None but a seer possessed of equal power could contradict or confirm. On the other hand, it is surely impossible to deny that this scheme of the Earth's constitution opens up amazing vistas of man's whole evolution. The seership itself bears a unique power of persuasion and its truth may in a measure be demonstrated by effects which reveal themselves in man. The parallelism between the cosmic fire and human passions, their close relationship, mutual action and reaction, throw a flood of light on the origin of evil. Many historians have stated that the great crises in history (wars, revolutions, social upheavals) are nearly always accompanied and followed by earthly cataclysms (earthquakes, volcanic eruptions). The passions of men have a magnetic action on the interior fire of the Earth, and this fire, when released from its chains, feeds human passions. Thus fire—which is destined to generate life—begets evil by means of the human will.

And yet the Earth, having as its kernel the egoism that is indispensable to the development of individuality, is nevertheless the solid, immutable base on which the soul can find support in order then to soar to the spiritual worlds which shelter and fashion her by the power of the solar Logos. Evil becomes a leaven of evolution, finally, however, to be conquered by Good. The man who has won through to freedom holds the balance between destiny and Providence from the moment he can chose between good and evil. His yearning for the Divine begets enthusiasm. By his own efforts he can draw near to the sublime truth reigning in the universe. Thus Satan-Ahriman—the demon of negation and hatred—is laid low by the genius of infinite Love radiating in the Logos, the Christ. And Lucifer, the Spirit of intelligence and of beauty, released from his sojourn in the lower world of matter, is on the point of taking flight to his star. Yet Ahriman, his dire companion, who is held in check by the Christ, strives to break his chains in order that Lucifer's flight may be stayed.

Anthroposophy is the most potent means in our present epoch to restore the severed harmony between the worlds of matter and of spirit, between science and religion. It is also the agent whereby peace may be established in social affairs.

In very truth the hour is grave. Mankind has never faced so great a danger. The forces of evil are mobilised; not so those of good. That is proved by the unprecedented ravages of Bolshevism which is the. relentless application of destructive materialism. A mustering of all the spiritual forces at the disposal of humanity will be required to combat this scourge. But a wide and high ideal is necessary. Man would fain know whither his feet are wending in this world and in the world beyond. He needs a sublime goal in the one and the beginnings of actual realisation of the other. “Evil can only be conquered by a high ideal” says Rudolf Steiner. “A man without an ideal is weak and powerless. In the life of man ideals play the part of steam in an engine—they are the driving force.”

The knowledge gained by Rudolf Steiner in the course of his life and during his apostolate of a quarter of a century, is scattered through his writings and numerous lecture-courses, most of which have been reported. The peculiar interest attaching to the lectures of 1906 is that they reveal the genius of this thinker-seer at the beginning of his career and the zenith of his inspiration, at the very moment when his all-embracing thought was coming, fully armed, into its own. Those who read these notes may catch, here and there, an echo of the power of the master's living words. A striking example of this impressed itself upon me during a lecture he once gave on Planetary Evolution and the Spiritual Hierarchies: “The thoughts of the Gods are not as the thoughts of men. The thoughts of men are images the thoughts of the gods are living beings.”

Revelations like this flash out into the Infinite. They are an echo from far away of the Word creative invoked by St. John at the beginning of his Gospel. Their vibrations thrill through us like the Sound Primordial whence shines the light—the Sound whose harmonies bring worlds to birth.

EDOUARD SCHURÉ

After the opening of the Pforzheim branch we are together again and will best fill our time by immediately entering into a spiritual theme, a theme which, through Anthroposophy, shows that we don't only absorb teaching and thoughts but that our life of feeling and of experience is enriched, calmed and protected. We do not dare imagine that teaching, imagining and thoughts are unimportant in our life of feeling. It's like this: in our time we will gradually come to say: Of thoughts and science there is enough in the world and we only need to take some or other book of instructions regarding the starry worlds or whatever else, to fill our minds with enough science. Theosophy however should be involved with mood or experience.—That is definitely correct because science, as encountered through popular lectures and publications, can offer little for the heart and soul. We don't dare conclude however that teaching, observation and knowledge are worthless.

Spiritual scientific knowledge is quite different to teachings of outer science. When we allow spiritual knowledge to really work into us, it becomes transformed in us as feelings, as soul impulses, as a way of thinking and in no other way can we acquire courage, certainty and power than through the deepening of this knowledge. It is quite different to merely recognise and know sense perceptible things and pioneering events, how things come about, than it is to penetrate behind the sensual things into the preceding spiritual events. When we allow spiritual events to work through the soul, we become warm, healthy and strong. We recognise the connections between us and that which weaves throughout the entire world as spirit and soul, the originators of all appearances. Consequently we want to come to grips with the relationship between the outer sensual world, outside, and our soul. On looking at our own souls, we find so to speak those things closest to us—suffering, joy, pain and pleasure—and now the question arises: When spiritual sciences says that everything in the world is spirit-penetrated, then we can argue that suffering, joy, pain and pleasure can also be found in those things which surrounds us, as well as in those things which we also meet as being callous, painless and insensitive.—We need to acquire the right way of thinking about things around us, through Anthroposophy.

We see for instance the various plants, animals and minerals around us. Not only do animals equally give us joy and suffering, pleasure and pain; that no one doubts. With plants and the apparently lifeless world of stones we can come to doubt that feelings, pleasure, joy and pain can be inherent in them. It is exactly this, which we acquire as experiences related to the entire surrounding world, that all beings are not only physically linked to us but that these beings link to us in such a way as to have soul content, just as we have soul content. Now we need to deepen within us, in the right way, what spiritual research and spiritual knowledge has to say about it. It is even understood in our time, from more sensory thoughts, that the plants could posses something spiritual, yes, one may be tempted to admit that an apparently lifeless stone could contain something spiritual.

When you consider you can still easily make mistakes if you don't take into account spiritual scientific research, you can easily say: If I cut the physical body of a person then I cause hurt, the same with animals; but when I cut a plant, will it also feel hurt?—Hence I can infer that if I crush a stone, I'm hurting it also. As a result, when people think about these things they come to believe that everything happening to other beings is experienced in the same way as to human beings, and because of this belief, they find it so difficult to enter with their thoughts into knowledge of spiritual knowledge. Occult science offers us quite a different way of recognising the soul nature of plants and stones, for instance. It appears, when we contemplate the plant, that certainly, when the plant is partly damaged where it grows out of earth towards the heights, no feeling of pain penetrates the plant, that it doesn't hurt but that the opposite is the case. That which comprises the actual soul of the plant feels pleasure, almost joy, when over the surface of the earth sensitive parts of plants are destroyed. Pain only starts for the plant soul when the plant is pulled out of the earth, uprooted; a similar pain is experienced when we or animals for instance have hair pulled out. This is something which a soul can gradually experience when on the so-called way or path of knowledge.

These things only allow us to experience them in our own souls when we transform our souls in such a way as to wake the slumbering, true powers of knowledge. Then the ability begins for the soul not only to feel compassion towards other people but to have compassion for the whole of the rest of nature, and the rest of nature becomes understandable in a wonderful way.

Now we could say: what do we get from spiritual scientific research if we ourselves can't feel such things?—It is an incorrect objection if we believe Anthroposophy has no meaning. It already has an account of spiritual-soul facts of great value. When such knowledge for example speaks about the relationship of plant suffering to plant joy then we really need to think about this knowledge and should allow such thoughts to work on us. Through our mere reflection regarding this knowledge we lure out contained forces and we will soon feel that it is indeed so, what is said by spiritual science. We learn however through knowing that when we look into the wisdom of nature, the plant soul experiences pleasure when we pick it. From this we can get the notion that we can think what is going to happen should the plant have been able to experience pain. Just think about it, what a large part of the earth's beings are nourished through plants, and how, through the nourishment of people and animals the pain could increasingly be spread over the earth. That isn't the case, but pleasure and joy spreads over the earth when an animal grazes in a pasture. Whoever has knowledge about this, feels entire streams of joy weave over the earth when in autumn the sickle cuts through the blades of grain. When the young animal sucks milk from its mother it does not mean there is pain, but a definite feeling of pleasure. Thus we see into the wisdom of nature when we go through life this way.

Against these things one should never turn your back: yes, it can appear gentler under the circumstances when a plant is dug out with its roots and replanted, instead of picking flowers.—Certainly, but this doesn't change the facts that uprooting causes actual pain to the plant soul. Deliberate ripping off blossoms can naturally from a certain point of view be rebuked, but even that changes nothing about the plant soul undergoing pleasure. From various points of view it looks different. A person may consider for example, from a standpoint of beauty, that pulling out the first grey hairs seems quite justified, even though it causes pain. Something else comes to our notice when we take this comparison of the uprooting of plants and the uprooting of human hair. We start to understand what it means when spiritual science considers not a single plant, but so to speak looks at the plant growth over the entire earth. Just as hair belongs to all human beings, so plants and earth create a unity, and we understand and can also think that, what we call the “I” (Ich) in spiritual science regarding a person, we can't find in a single plant but in the central point of the earth. The plant is absolutely not a single being, but becomes part of the great living being, existing out of many single living beings, but which has their “I” in the centre of the earth.

No one dares ask the question: Is there a place for this “I” everywhere?—Certainly, because it is spirit and can penetrate all. So our earth becomes a living being. So every single plant becomes something which grows out of a large supersensible being and, on the surface, becomes what nails or hair is to the human being. When we take such a fact seriously then we no longer argue about dry cerebral concepts regarding a physical planet on which we are living but then we feel that not only are we living beings but that we are linked to a great living being which is our planet. We learn to take cognisance of this spiritual being and we learn that it concerns more than just a comparison, when, in the sap flowing through the plant something happens similar to when blood courses through the human body. We learn to transform these things in our feelings by understanding them spiritually.

When we touch a plant we experience the soul-spiritual, we feel safe within the soul-spiritual. Gradually it becomes possible to add the thought given in spiritual science: The earth has gone through divers metamorphosis. We discover, when we go back in the most distant past, that the earth appeared quite different, that for example such solid rock masses as we have today, were not present then. There had been a time when the earth existed of only air and water and a certain condition of warmth. Only gradually solidity developed from the fluid and soft conditions. On contemplating this whole development, the activity within the entire development appears to us as one of growing and thriving. At one time the earth was young and in time it will become old and aged.

If we apply all imaginings which we relate to ourselves, to the earth, then we will understand that during our earth development certain extraordinary important stages were reached. We will bring such important stages in our earth development before our souls when we contemplate the following: Already from our earth's plant growth we realize, by considering the earth as a whole, that it is a living being. Similarly various other heavenly bodies are living beings which stand in a certain relationship to us. Let us look at our sun and moon. Consider the sun. You all know what we owe to the sun. You all know that when you have rested for the night, when you had been in a state of consciousness which had brought about the astral body and the ego (Ich) leaving the physical and ether bodies—you know, when the astral body and ego return, that it so to speak expects everything which the earth owes to the sun. What would the earth be without the sun? The sun surrounds our entire earthly mass with warmth and light. But we have to consider the activity of such a heavenly body on another not only as merely substantial and materialistic but we need to be clear that this sun does not only have a physical body floating in space but the sun is inhabited by spiritual beings and that in each ray of sunshine not only physical light but also spiritual activity streams to us.

A spiritual exchange between sun and earth was always there, but it has essentially changed in the course of earthly development. While no great difference in the physical exchange between sun and earth has come about during many, many millions of years, a spiritual and meaningful stages were reached. High beings these are, who live in the light and warmth of the sun and who work into the earth from there, flooding us with light and warmth.

A Sun Being, who had up to a specific moment in time his stage in the sun, which man could through long, long earthly cycles only observe clairvoyantly, this Being descended at a specific moment from the sun down to the earth. This is something which allows us to see in depth into spiritual development: through the event which we call the Mystery of Golgotha, or in other words, through the passage of Christ on earth, the spiritual Being who had been up to that point on the sun, united himself with the earth. He connected himself with the earth. Humanity's division of earthly time into pre-Christian and post-Christian has its origin in this: that this living being, which we call the earth, underwent through this deed an important development through the appearance of Christ on earth. What was previously only found in the sun, since then can be found in the astral body of the earth. The astral body of the earth changed through the Mystery of Golgotha: at the very same moment the blood flowed out of the wounds of the Redeemer, at that moment the Christ-Soul felt itself uniting with the body of the earth.

This has to be understood in order for us to consider the reported story of Christianity in the correct light. We can ask ourselves: what then was one of the most important events with reference to the spreading of Christianity? When one looks at the propagation of Christianity one can say: firstly more had been accomplished by Paul than those who were the physical companions of Christ Jesus in Palestine; Paul who was no physical companion of Christ Jesus, who had even persecuted the Christ. Paul didn't become a believer through sharing the life and suffering of the Christ, but he became a warrior for Christ through the Event of Damascus.

In theology much dust is raised over the Event of Damascus. Yet no one comes to an understanding of the Events of Damascus but through spiritual science. Let's try to bring this into harmony in only a few words—which will be uttered now. The moment Paul's reasoning consciousness changed into the higher consciousness, what did he see? He saw in that moment this spirit in the astral world, who had become the earth spirit; he saw the living Christ, who since the Event of Golgotha had united with the earth. One can well ask: what was this light which he saw, which people could not see before?—Paul first learnt to know the Christ from the time Christ united with the earth. Thus we may point out this important moment of the earth by saying: the earth prepared itself for this, to become a worthy body for the Christ-Spirit and while the earth was preparing for the uniting of itself and the Christ-Spirit, during this time the Christ-Spirit worked into it. Christ said according to the St John's Gospel: “Whoever eats my bread, treads me with their feet.” People who walk on earth step on the earth with their feet. “Whoever eats my bread, treads me with their feet,” is an expression for the mystery which lies in this important stage of earthly development.

How endlessly profound this becomes with the inauguration of Communion with this in mind, that the earth became from then on the body of Christ! How meaningful this becomes with reference to the words: “This is my body” and that which flows through the plants: “This is my blood.” We learn to take literally what we only dared pronounce in words. So we come, when we consider the earth as alive, as a living being which gradually matures, to the right moment, ready for the acceptance of the Christ-soul.

So from all sides it appears that we encounter the physical planet as spiritual; it appears penetrated by spirit. We then learn to understand connections between that which we meet daily and the super-sensible. When we turn our attention from the plant kingdom to the stone realm then it will not appear through clairvoyant consciousness that we inflict pain when we crush a stone to dust; by contrast, when a stone is turned into dust, what we could call the stone-soul, experiences pleasure and joy. Those who have the sight know that with crushing the stone world, joy streams out of the rock. When, for example, salt is dissolved in a glass of water, pleasure spreads through the water as the salt particles move apart. The opposite is the case when through cooling the solution of salt crystallizes; through the crowding together of the stone particles pain takes place. We look again deeply into the way in which the Initiates speak to us, when they want to tell humankind something like this.

These things are not simply said. We must go through them in a spiritual way to reach an understanding of the great religious documents. It has already been said that originally no hard rock kingdom existed, that the earth was fluid. Its solidity came into existence through the gathering of parts and by hardening. What does man and animal owe to the earth's condensing? Surely so man and animal can live in the present state? Without solid ground and land the earth couldn't offer a base for man and animal. Now bring this imagination into our souls as actual spiritual history. This is hardly understood when only considered with the mind of a physicist. Only when we, with our hearts and minds, explore the earth's coming into being, then we can become conscious of what lies in the stone kingdom, that soul processes are at play, while the was earth solidifying. Pain and suffering was involved—through this, man and animal owe the possibility to live on the earth.

These are the facts that lie at the basis of Paul's words after his Initiation and perception into these things: “All creatures suffer and sigh under the gradual solidification, all creatures sigh and wait for the spiritualisation.” He points with these deep words to the innermost, to the soul of the earthy beings. Now we may en-soul everything, by looking through the eyes of spiritual science, and only through glimpsing the soul and spirit in everything, will we gradually find the world around us becoming more and more comprehensible. We come to an understanding that the world which surrounds us, as in physiognomy, is an outer expression of an inner life. Then we will learn to grasp that the world looks exactly as it appears to people. Further we will learn to understand that behind all physicality is the soul-spiritual which has to be the origin of everything physical, and when the spiritual researchers take us back they show us how in the far, distant past, everything gradually developed out of the spiritual. The human being gradually descended from the spiritual world into the physical, and we must not imagine this descent as something as materialistic as is usually done these days, but rather ask: where does this actual material world which surrounds us, originate from, which is spreading ever more around us?

Mankind were for some time through and through spiritual, embedded in the soul-spiritual. Mankind developed only gradually out of this soul-spiritual. If we glance back to a relatively short time ago—when the realms of time were long, but for the spiritual researcher they are short to name—we find that our earth didn't appear as it does today, that her countenance has thoroughly changed, above all things through the event of the Flood, which in spiritual science goes under the name of the Atlantean Flood. Under this Atlantean flooding we may consider that through air and water activity the face of the earth was completely transformed. Previously the people lived in an area of the earth where the Atlantic Ocean is today. Land existed and there our souls actually lived in previous embodiments in Atlantean bodies. If we look spiritual scientifically at these people at the beginning of this Atlantean time, they appear quite differently to our souls from today. They appear in the early Atlantean times as if they perceived everything in a different way to later. Today, when one of us, during our waking hours glances around, we perceive objects in colour and light. When in the night, the physical and ether bodies are released from the ego and astral bodies, this world disappears. We call this unconsciousness.

During early Atlantean times it was not the case that unconsciousness surrounded people when they entered into another condition during night time. Everything emerged at that time that was soul and spirit in the physical world. People for instance saw flowers before they fell asleep. During sleep they perceived the soul-spiritual of the flower in the soul-spirit world. Therefore these things were, what we call physical outer objects today, not sharply defined as today, because the people saw these as if in a mist surrounded by edges of colour. So we see how the soul too has gradually changed its look. When we go back even further, we will find that the souls only perceived the spiritual, because the physical had not solidified out of the soul yet.

Now the people on our earth were subject to an important point in their development and this moment lay in the middle of their Atlantean development. At this midpoint the people would, if a certain achievement hadn't already been reached, not have ceased perceiving the spiritual world with their nocturnal consciousness. If a certain event hadn't intervened, the people of the middle Atlantean time would for instance not have seen some or other object, like a flower, as yellow, but as it were the spirit of the plant would have appeared to them. That this happened differently was due to people allowing Lucifer and his supporters to exert their influence earlier. The Atlantean was so to speak unaware of the outer physical world; it would have appeared transparent. He had perceived the spiritual world behind everything.

What now happened for the physical world to be not spread under a transparent crystal blanket but to become opaque? Through the spiritual world becoming concealed, yet another possibility, the influence of Ahriman, or as Goethe called him, Mephistopheles, could be expressed. As a result this spirit, which we call the ahrimanic, could penetrate, and after a certain time error and illusion stepped in. That which we call Maya, illusion, could mix into the conception of the world. So behind everything which we take as the physical world, stand the principals of this world, as we call them in the Bible. Their influence penetrates everywhere. Without these influences, matter would appear transparent and reveal the underlying spiritual. As a result an enormous change came about through these events within the souls of people. When we consider how human beings developed on the earth, we see how at a certain time the luciferic and at another time the ahrimanic influences made themselves effective.

When we look back at that time when the human being was still spiritual, when solidity hadn't crystallized, we see how the forces of nature and humanity were not as separate as they are today. They were in that time much closer while the earth was still penetrated by the watery element. The softer the earth was, the more spiritual were the people—human thoughts and human feelings influenced forces of nature. When we go even further back behind the Atlantean times, we find: As human will impulses turned to anger it had quite a definite influence on fire, and thus a large portion of the earth was destroyed in order for the human being to go through the luciferic influence and stimulate evil instincts, through which in an alternate hindsight mankind acquired his freedom and independence. Thus, what we call forces of nature, were linked to human thinking during the Atlantean time.

Now it happened, through humanity's so called luciferic influence granting them independence, that it was given the possibility to influence the forces of nature through the will. Gradually human beings withdrew from the influence of nature forces. This went hand in hand with the influence of Ahriman who wanted to mask the spiritual world from the human being. People who could still see the spiritual world were able to influence nature's forces. Single people were able to withdraw from these influences, the majority of mankind not. Even today actually very few individuals have a direct influence on the forces of nature, in comparison to humanity as a whole, and when we consider humanity in its entirety then we will see accordingly that besides individual karma there exists earth karma for the whole of humanity.

This is a result of what once were a luciferic and then an ahrimanic influence. This being we call Ahriman stands in a mysterious connection to the powers of earth fire which goes back to the direct influence of a few single people. These fire powers of the earth is a life element of ahrimanic spirits and through the ahrimanic influence the collective karma of the whole human race is bound in a certain extent to Ahriman. When specific soul attitudes of mind and events enter into human development, then again the relationship between people and Ahriman is valid, and that, which enabled people to influence forces of nature, still takes place today through Ahriman and his spiritual horde.

Every time Ahriman stirs, it indicates nothing other than that something had happened in human history which attracted Ahriman and brought him into turmoil and rage. In the soul of man something happens, something which for instance lets the largest part of mankind fall into materialism. This enables Ahriman to work in his own element—he then has a living element—because human materialism attracts him more than people who become spiritual. Ahriman awakens storms, volcanic outbursts and earthquakes. Here we really have something which shows how nature and spirit are connected. Nothing happens on earth without a spiritual connection. Our soul is connected to its good and evil deeds as a result of what is going on, on earth. When the earth rages during an earthquake, we will never say it is as a result of a single person's karma, but mankind's karma. Everyone can thump his heart and say his individual karma is included here, the single must perish, because right here the valve of the earth had to open up. He will be recompensed in future.—A materialistic point of view will say this is superstitious but whoever says this doesn't realise how childishly the argument is. How can a flower grow without a spiritual basis, how can it be an expression of spirit and soul, just so no earthquake, no volcanic eruption can be without a spiritual origin, without a spiritual cause. When we, as we said, stare karma in the face, then we make it valid for the entire life of humankind.

Only when we don't bring spiritual scientific teaching into movement, it appears cold and calculated by the mind. When we however allow our feelings, our attitude of mind and our experiences to be penetrated, then we will see the earth as a living being, through and through soul and spirit, and then you will see that this earthly body is bound to spiritual beings of the most various kinds and that a very important event has come to the fore, whose effectiveness is only beginning: the appearance of Christ on earth. Through Christ alone are the consequences of Ahriman's power driven out.

As a result of spiritual science's infusion into the human heart with this Christ-Spirit, that which spreads out on earth as the entire spirit of humanity, now enables the earth right into its nature elements to come to peace and harmony.

When all human hearts in the true sense experience the Christ-Spirit then the power which will stream from this will be so strong, it will calm fire and water. Then the Christ-Spirit would bring peace and harmony into the elements of nature, and the earth itself become an expression of the spirit. The earthly body, which is a living being, would become soft and mild and rise with the human spirit and human soul towards its spiritualisation. To a higher spiritual existence the earth will rise. We can place this as a higher, further ideal and can allow this to penetrate us each moment. No moment is lost in the development of humanity which is applied in such a way that knowledge and will impulses are inter-penetrated by spirit.

World evolution and human evolution always go hand in hand, and one who goes to an esoteric school must take his age into account. But since one is connecting oneself with evolution's eternal values through an esoteric training something went through an Egyptian mystery school, for instance, that's of lasting importance for a pupil, namely words that can work on a modern just as well s they did back then. Such words from the past are the following: I arrived at the portal of death; I got to know the four elements; I saw the sun at midnight; I got close to the upper and lower Gods. I returned to the outer world.

What does “I arrived at the portal of death” mean? In our meditations we'll gradually start to feel like a double personality, where we no longer feel that our I belongs to what we previously identified with our ego—the physical body. When a man dies, it's only natural that he no longer looks upon his physical body as something that belongs to him. But he must already attain this through his training. If a man had developed in the way that the good Gods wanted, he would have directed his body from outside. For instance, if a man had wanted to travel from one city to another, he would have directed his body there from outside through a magical will impulse. His body would have been like a weight that belonged to him. We can make this clear to ourselves if we suppose that a Mars dweller was suddenly placed on earth, and the first man whom he met was carrying a weight in each hand. Since the Mars dweller had never seen a man before, he might think that the two weights were grown together with the body. Likewise, we think that we are grown together with our body too much. But if we train ourselves properly, we'll increasingly get the feeling that our ego is splitting and that one part of it is directing the other from outside. As we come in contact with sublime, creative beings with our I that's lifted out—which we should humbly feel to be grace—it may happen that we increasingly identify this I with the sublime beings. For we have no idea of how permeated we are by pride and vanity. However, there's a good way to counteract this vanity.

When men's predecessors on earth, the Elohim, appeared, how did they do this? They didn't vainly bask in their glory. The Bible tells us that they created and that they then looked at their deeds and saw that they were good. So we should look at the deeds of our ego, at what the ego has achieved; then we'll see how bad everything still is. Let's take our handwriting. This is an expression of our ego, a part of us that we place outside. Now man would be so vain as to think that his handwriting was very beautiful. And if a man looks at many of his achievements more closely, he will find them rather deficient.

Now what does “I got to know the four elements” mean? The first element in which man was created was warmth. And in earth evolution it was really intended that a man was supposed to send streams of warmth into his body from outside. The heat of summer and winter's cold that he now experiences in his body as a single man he was, as it were, supposed to feel as his ego streaming towards him from outside. He was supposed to feel that this ego was connected with all other egos The fact that warmth has moved into our blood is Lucifer's deed. Air is the second element with which we're closely connected. We should really have the feeling that we are the air that's outside there, that we stream into the body with every breath to re-enliven it. Instead of this, we feel that air is something that comes to us from outside, and we give it back as something that kills. Ahriman comes towards us in this lethal air.

We only identify ourselves with the solid and fluid elements in us—the physical body and its blood. But we should identify ourselves so little with our respective personality that even if we get to know our previous incarnations, we only look upon these as through stations. We should never say that we were this or that personality. For thereby, we combine our eternal I with something perishable.

(Rudolf Steiner's version of the Egyptian verse above:

I went up to the boundary of death
I crossed Proserpina's threshold.

And after I had gone through all the elements
I came back again.

At midnight I saw the sun
Radiating with bright, white light.

I stepped before the lower and upper Gods, face to face
And prayed to them from close up.

Those of you who've been to esoteric classes before know that what is said here isn't said by me only; we'll ask the help of the Spirit of the Day for this—(the Friday verse followed.)

When we look at the course of our life between birth and death, then from an esoteric viewpoint we see that it's there so that we can learn something for our esoteric path. If we survey our physical life, we see that we bring the organs and pre-requisites for everything that we can do in life with us—except for three things that we must learn here in physical life. We can see color very soon after birth, we do not have to learn it, the ability, for it is simply there; the same is true of hearing, etc. The only three things we have to learn are walking, speaking and thinking or the making of concepts.

The main thing in walking is that we have to learn how to stand. We simply fall down before we can do that; we don't have a feeling of balance yet. We must first learn to feel our way into space's three dimensions And we must also learn to speak and think.

If we've learned to walk in the first year of life, we can go on our way. If we've learned how to make concepts we can give life to truth and do living things through the word. We learn to walk, speak and make concepts in the first three years of our life. We find these three years again, symbolically, in the three years that Christ lived on earth.

Everything that an esoteric pupil needs for his esoteric life is given to him in esoteric classes. He gets answers to all of his questions from what is given to him in mediation exercises; he only has to listen properly. What's given to us as a meditation must acquire life in us. Such as the verse: In pure rays of light …

We shouldn't just let these words pass before us; they should come to life in us. We should devote ourselves entirely to the meditation's content, forget everything that's around us in physical life, personal interests and so on. As a reward for the fact that we've, as it were, given up physical life, have sacrificed it for the duration of the meditation, a tone will resound in us after the first two lines:

In pure rays of light
Gleams the Godhead of the world …

That will be maintained for as long as our karma prescribes. It's not a tone that resounds from within, but one that sounds towards us from outside. No more will be said here, everyone must experience and grasp it himself. And while this sound, sacred word and unspeakable name resounds, the pupil should make a vow that he could also make before, but at this moment he must do so. The vow is that the pupil tells himself: I will consider every sound besides this sacred word, if it's not physically caused, to be a work of Ahriman.

This is a withdrawal, a turning away from what's around him, which creates a feeling of coldness in the pupil; a feeling of indifference takes hold of the man; he feels isolated and surrounded by a great frost. The pupil must bring love towards this frosty feeling that's created by pure thought.

When he's heard this sound he thereby gets the direction towards the east; the sound comes from the east. The pupil can orient himself in the spiritual, he no longer falls over like a child who hasn't learned how to stand and walk. He can now stand and walk in the spiritual.

And when the pupil lets the third and fourth lines live in him:

In pure love for all beings
Radiates the godliness of my soul

He will then feel warmth, radiant living warmth. Only experiences that he has during this feeling of warmth have real truth value; everything else is Lucifer's work. And if he has really enlivened the last three lines:

I rest in the Godhead of the world
I will find myself
In the Godhead of the world

he will then grasp the truth.

So in the first two lines the pupil has attained the way, the truth in the last three, and then life, spiritual life flows from the lines in between.

A pupil must develop something that's often talked about in outer life but is not put into practice, and people don't have an inkling of its depth. Many talk about love for men, and yet what people in outer life consider it to be doesn't correspond to this feeling. An esoteric pupil should begin by telling himself in all humility: I know nothing about human love. We love men for various reasons but all of this is not the right thing. We should love a man because he's a human being. Christ set a good example for this.

In the spirit lay the germ of my body.
And the spirit has imprinted in my body
The eyes of sense,
That through them I may see
The lights of bodies.
And the spirit has imprinted in my body
Reason and sensation
And feeling and will,
That through them I may perceive bodies
And act upon them.
In the spirit lay the germ of my body.
In my body lies the germ of the spirit.
And I will incorporate into my spirit
The super-sensible eyes
That through them I may behold the light of spirits.
And I will imprint in my spirit
Wisdom and power and love,
So that through me the spirits may act
And I become a self-conscious organ
Of their deeds.
In my body lies the germ of the spirit.