The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In the lecture today we shall make a rather far-reaching sweep into cosmic space. This will reveal to us, in broad outline, the inner course of world evolution, and at the same time its intimate connection with human evolution on the Earth. Everything in the universe is interconnected. To be able to follow these complicated connections naturally takes a long, long time, and it is only very gradually that man can find his way, so to speak, into the intricate workings of the cosmos.

In previous lectures you have heard how certain beings who have their abode on other cosmic bodies exercise an influence upon our own life, how they are related to what we call lymph, to the digestive fluids, also to our sense-perceptions. This will have given you a picture of the wide-spread operations of the spirit throughout cosmic space. We shall study a different aspect of these things today, reminding ourselves, to begin with, that our Earth, like man himself, has passed through different embodiments and will pass through others in times to come.

We look back to three previous embodiments of our Earth: to the immediately preceding embodiment which we call the Old Moon (not to be confused with our present moon); then to that of the “Sun”; and still further back to that of “Saturn.” And looking forward we see prophetically that our Earth will be transformed into a “Jupiter,” a “Venus” and a “Vulcan.”

These are the successive embodiments of our planet Earth. If you give a little thought to these stages of our Earth's evolution, you will realize that what in occult science we call a “Sun” is—like our present sun—a heavenly body around which a number of planets revolve. When, apart from this, we also speak of a planetary Sun-existence, saying that our Earth itself in an earlier state of evolution, was “Sun,” we imply, in a certain respect, that the sun which is today the centre of our planetary system, was not always a sun. It has advanced, so to speak, to the rank and dignity of a sun in the Cosmos. It was once united with the substances and forces contained in our Earth and then, taking away, as it were, what was the best and most capable of the highest development, it separated from the Earth, leaving us, together with certain forces which were destined for a slower evolution, behind. The Sun took with it certain higher beings and together with these higher beings established itself at the centre of our system. Therefore two stages earlier, what is contained in the sun today had a planetary existence only and it has risen from this to the form of existence belonging to the fixed stars. This will show you what mighty changes in evolution take place in the universe. At the outset, a sun is not a sun. A fixed star has not, from the very beginning, been a fixed star, but has had to pass through the lower school of planetary existence.

Now you may quite naturally ask me: What, then, happens when a fixed star evolves to a further stage? As truly as the Sun-existence—a fixed star existence—has risen from a planetary existence, so truly does its evolution proceed to further stages of life in the cosmos. We shall of course understand this evolution still better if we study the further evolution of our Earth.

It is true that for a certain period of its cosmic evolution our earth has been separated from the sun. The sun and its beings advance along a more rapid evolutionary path. Our earth and the beings belonging to it take a different course. But these beings, and the earth as a whole, will one day have progressed to the stage where union is again possible with the sun—after a separate existence has enabled them to complete and perfect their present phase of development. For our earth will again unite with the sun. During the stage of Earth-existence itself, the earth will reunite with the sun, just as during the same phase of evolution it separated from the sun. But during the Jupiter-stage there must again be a separation. The earth-beings must again be separated from the sun during the Jupiter-condition. Again there will be a reunion, and during the Venus-condition our earth will be united permanently with the sun, will have been taken up for all time into the sun. During the Vulcan-condition our earth will itself have become a sun within the sun and have contributed something to the sun-evolution, will have added something which, in spite of their higher rank, those beings who have always remained in the sun, could never themselves have achieved. Earth-existence was necessary in order that men might evolve as they have evolved, with a consciousness that alternates between waking and sleeping. This is connected with the separation from the sun. Beings who live always in the sun do not have day and night. The sense-consciousness which we call the clear consciousness of day and which in times to come will evolve into higher conditions, carries with it into the sun-evolution the fruits of experiences connected with the things of outer physical space. In this way the earth-beings give something to the sun, enrich the sun. And out of what is thus acquired on the earth, augmented by what is acquired on the sun, the Vulcan-existence comes into being. This Vulcan-existence is actually a higher condition than that of our present sun-existence. The earth evolves, the sun evolves, until they can unite to constitute the Vulcan-existence.

You may ask me: When a planet has evolved in this way to a sun-existence, what does this sun become in the course of further cosmic evolution? When our earth reaches the Venus-condition it will itself have become sun, and all the beings on Venus are sun-beings—actually at a higher stage than the beings of the present sun. What, then, is the further stage of such planetary evolution?

The following will seem grotesque, even preposterous, to those whose concepts are rooted in modern astronomy. Nevertheless it is a truth of cosmic evolution that when a planet like our earth has risen to sun-existence, when it has gradually achieved union with the sun and even sun-existence is transcended, there arises, as a still higher stage of evolution, something that in a certain sense you can perceive in the heavens: there arises what we today call a “Zodiac”—it is the stage higher than that of a fixed star. Thus when beings are no longer restricted to the form of existence belonging to a fixed star but have expanded their evolution so powerfully that it extends beyond fixed stars and the fixed stars lie like bodies embedded in it—then a higher stage is reached, the stage of Zodiac-existence. The forces which work from a Zodiac upon a planetary system themselves evolved, in former ages, in a planetary system and have advanced to the stage of a Zodiac.

And now cast your minds back to the old Saturn evolution, the first embodiment of our Earth. This Saturn once glimmered, as it were, in cosmic space, as the first herald of the dawn of our planetary existence. You know, too, that on this old Saturn the first germinal inception of our physical body was brought into being. Even at its greatest density this Saturn was not nearly as physically dense as our earth. It was a condition of utmost rarefication. That which today permeates all beings as warmth—known in occultism as “fire”—was the matter of Saturn. We may picture to ourselves that around this Saturn, this first, dawn-condition of our planetary system, there were the constellations of the Zodiac—but not yet as they are today. The single stars composing the Zodiacal constellations around that ancient Saturn were scarcely to be distinguished from each other. They glittered only very faintly, like beams of light streaming out from Saturn. The best way to picture this is to think of ancient Saturn encircled by beams of light, just as our earth is encircled by a Zodiac. And in the course of Earth-evolution itself these light-masses developed into the present star clusters comprised in the Zodiac. So that the Zodiac—to use an abstract expression—has differentiated out of that original ocean of flame. And from what did this ocean of flame itself arise?

It arose from the planetary system which preceded our own. Saturn itself was preceded by planetary evolutions in an age which, speaking in the sense of occult astronomy, can by no means be described as “time” as we understand time, for its character was rather different. But for the human mind today the concept is so fabulous that we have no word with which to express it. Speaking in analogy, however, we can say that the forces which preceded our planetary system in an earlier cycle of planetary existence went forth in the light-streams, and out of a small portion of matter gradually gathering together at the centre, this first, dawn-condition of the Earth arose; this was ancient Saturn and the forces contained in the Zodiac radiated down upon it from the cosmic All.

Something rather remarkable comes to light when we compare planetary existence with zodiacal existence. The occultist makes use of two words to indicate the difference between them. He says: Everything that is contained in the Zodiac is under the sign of “Duration”; everything that is comprised within planetary existence is under the sign of “Time.” You can get an idea of what this means if you remember that not even the farthest reaches of the mind can conceive of changes having taken place in the Zodiac. Each single planet may have undergone considerable change through long and greatly differing periods of evolution; the forces working in the Zodiac remain, relatively speaking, fixed and permanent. These concepts can, in any case, be only relative. The only difference in these changes of which we can conceive is in respect of the speed. Changes in the Zodiac take place slowly; changes in the planetary world and even in the existence of a fixed star take place rapidly—in comparison, that is to say, with what happens in the Zodiac.—The difference is always relative, only relative. As far as human thinking is concerned, we can say that planetary existence belongs to the sphere of the Finite, whereas Zodiacal existence belongs to the sphere of Infinitude. This, as already said, must be taken in the relative sense, but for the present it is sufficiently accurate.

And now I would ask you to pay special attention to the following: What has been achieved in a planetary existence and has become sun, ascends to “heavenly” existence, becomes zodiacal existence. And having reached zodiacal existence, what does it do? It offers itself in sacrifice! Please take account of this particular word. The first dawn-condition of the Earth, ancient Saturn, arose in a mysterious way as the result of sacrifice on the part of the Zodiac. The forces which caused the first, rarefied Saturn-masses to gather together were those which streamed down from the Zodiac, producing on Saturn the first germinal inception of physical man. This continued without cessation. You must not picture it as happening only once. Fundamentally speaking, what is happening continuously is that within what we call a planetary system the forces which evolved to a higher stage after having themselves passed through a planetary system, are sacrificed. We can say in effect: what is at first contained in a planetary system evolves to a “sun” existence, then to zodiacal existence and then has the power to be itself creative, to offer itself in sacrifice within a planetary existence. The forces from the Zodiac “rain” down continuously into the planetary existence and continuously ascend again; for that which at one time became our Zodiac must gradually ascend again. The distribution of forces in our earth existence may be conceived as follows:—on the one side forces are descending from the Zodiac and, on the other, forces are ascending to the Zodiac. Such is the mysterious interplay between the Zodiac and our earth. Forces descend and forces ascend. This is the mysterious “heavenly ladder” upon which forces are descending and ascending. These forces are indicated in various ways in the different scriptures; you find them indicated, too, in Goethe's Faust:

“What heavenly forces up and down are ranging,
The golden vessels interchanging.”

As far as our human understanding goes, these forces began to descend during the Saturn-existence of our Earth and when the Earth-existence proper had reached its middle point, the stage had arrived when they gradually began again to ascend. We have now passed beyond the middle point of our evolution, which fell in the middle of the Atlantean epoch; and what human beings have lived through since then is a phase of existence beyond the middle point. In a certain sense, therefore, we may say that at the present time, more forces are ascending to the Zodiac than are descending from it.

When, therefore, you think of the whole Zodiac, you must picture that some of its forces are descending and some are ascending. We think of the forces which are now involved in the ascending line of evolution, collectively, as Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra—because they actually belong to these constellations. These seven constellations comprise the ascending forces. The descending forces are comprised, approximately speaking, in the five constellations of Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius, Pisces. Thus forces rain down from the Zodiac and ascend again: seven constellations of ascending, five of descending forces. The ascending forces also correspond, in man, to the higher members of his being, to his higher, nobler attributes. The forces which are in the descending phase of evolution have first to pass through man and within him to attain to the stage at which they too can become ascending forces.

In this way you will realize that there is interaction between everything in cosmic space, that everything in cosmic space is interconnected, inter-related. But it must never be forgotten that these operations and activities are going on all the time, that they are ever-present. At any given moment in our evolution we can therefore speak of forces which are going forth from man and forces which are coming in; forces are descending and forces are ascending. For all and each of these forces there comes, at some point, the moment when from being descending forces they are transformed into ascending forces. All forces which eventually become ascending forces are at first descending forces. They descend, so to say, as far as man. In man they acquire the power to ascend.

At the middle point of its evolution, when our Earth had passed through the three planetary stages of Saturn, Sun, Moon, had reached the fourth planetary condition, having in front of it the stages of Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan (as Earth, therefore, it is midway in the span of its existence)—it had passed through three “life-conditions” (also called “rounds”). It has passed through three of these life-conditions and is now in the fourth; it has passed through three “form-conditions”—the arupic, the rupic, and the astral, leading down to physical existence. Therefore in respect of the “form-conditions,” our Earth is in the middle phase of its evolution. As physical Earth, in the fourth form-condition of the fourth life-condition of the fourth planetary existence it has had upon it three great races: the first, the Polarian race; the second, the Hyperborean race; the third, the Lemurian race. The Atlantean race is the fourth. In the Atlantean race, humanity was in the middle of those phases of evolution of which we are speaking. Since the middle of the Atlantean epoch humanity has passed beyond this middle point. And since the middle of the Atlantean epoch there have begun, for men in general, those conditions in which the ascending forces preponderate. If we were speaking of the proportion of forces descending from and ascending to the Zodiac before the middle of the Atlantean epoch, we should have to say: they were in equal proportion. We should have to speak differently of the conditions then prevailing, enumerating as the ascending forces: Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo—counting Libra with the other descending forces.

But something else is connected with all this. You must realize that in speaking of these cosmic processes, we are not speaking of physical or etheric bodies but of beings in-dwelling the several heavenly bodies. When we speak of man in terms of Spiritual Science we say that the whole man—and we think of man only in this sense—is a seven-fold being, consisting of physical body, etheric body, astral body, ego, spirit-self, life-spirit, spirit-man. His development is not yet complete but will be when his sevenfold being has fully developed. But in the great cosmic All there are beings other than man, beings of a different nature. There are, for example, beings in the cosmos of whom we cannot say that, like man, they have the physical body as one of their members. There are beings of whom we must speak differently. The members of which man is composed can be enumerated as follows:

7. Spirit-Man
8. Life-Spirit
9. Spirit-Self
10. Ego
11. Astral Body
12. Etheric Body
13. Physical Body

Now there are beings whose lowest member is the etheric body; they too are sevenfold, having an eighth member, higher than spirit-man. We begin to enumerate thus: etheric body, astral body, and so forth, finishing with a member above our spirit-man (Atma). There are other beings whose lowest member is the astral body; above spirit-man they have an eighth and yet a ninth member. Again there are beings whose lowest member is the ‘I,’ the ego, and who therefore have not a physical nor an etheric nor an astral body in our sense but whose Ego streams outwards without the three sheaths. They are therefore beings who send forth ‘Egos’ in all directions. These Beings have an eighth, a ninth, and a tenth member; they are described in the Apocalypse as beings who are “full of eyes”. Then there are beings in whom spirit-self (Manas) is the lowest member. They have yet an eleventh member. And finally there are beings whose lowest member is the life-spirit and who have yet a twelfth member. You must therefore think of beings who, just as man's lowest member is a physical body, have life-spirit (Budhi) as their lowest member and above, a highest member best designated by the number 12. These are most sublime beings, far transcending everything that man is able to conceive. How is it possible to form any kind of idea of these most wonderful, most sublime beings?

When we try to characterize man, in one aspect, it is obvious that with respect to the universe, he is a being who receives. The things and beings of the world are outspread around you; you perceive them, you form concepts of them. Just imagine that the world around you were empty, or dark. You could have no perceptions, nor would there be anything of which you could form concepts. You have to rely upon receiving from outside the content of your inner world. It is characteristic of man that he is a being who receives; he receives the content of his soul-life, his inner life, from outside; things must exist in the world if his soul is to have content. The nature of man's etheric body is such that it could experience nothing in itself were it not beholden to the whole surrounding universe for all experiences, for everything that enters into it. These beings of whom I have just told you, who have life-spirit as their lowest member, are in an entirely different position. In respect of their life, these beings are not dependent upon receiving anything from outside; they are “givers,” they are themselves creative. You know from what I have often told you, that the ‘I,’ the ego, works in the etheric body and that ‘Budhi’ is nothing else than a transformed etheric body. In respect of substance, therefore, the life-spirit too is an ether body. The twelfth member of these sublime beings is also an ‘ether body’ but one which pours forth life, which works in the world in such a way that it does not receive life but gives it forth, offers life in perpetual sacrifice.

And now let us ask: Can we conceive of a being who is in any way connected with us and who radiates life into our universe? Is it possible to conceive of life that is perpetually streaming into the world, imbuing the world with life?

Let us think for a moment of what was said at the beginning of the lecture, namely that there are ascending and descending forces—forces that are ascending to the Zodiac and forces that are descending from the Zodiac. How has man reached a position which makes it possible for something to stream from within him? What has happened to man that enables something to stream forth from him? He has reached this position because his ego, after long, long preparation, has steadily unfolded and developed. This I, this ego, has been in course of preparation for long, long ages. For truth to tell, the object of all existence in the Saturn-condition, the Sun-condition and the Moon-condition when the sheaths into which the I was to be received were produced—was to prepare for the I. In those earlier conditions, other beings created the dwelling-place for the I. Now, on the earth, the dwelling-place was at the stage where the I could take root in man and from then onwards the I began to work upon the outer, bodily sheaths from within. The fact that the ego is able to work from within has also brought about a surplus, a surplus of ascending forces; there was no longer a state of parity. Before the ego was able to work within man, the ascending forces gradually evolved until the middle point had been reached; and when the, ego actually entered into man the ascending and the descending forces had reached the stage where they were in ‘balance.’ At the entry of the ego, the ascending and the descending forces were in balance and it rests with man to turn the scales in the right direction. That is why the occultists have called the constellation which was entered at the time when the ego itself began to operate, the ‘Balance’ (Libra). Up to the end of Virgo, preparation was being made for the deeds of the ego in our planetary evolution, but the ego had not itself begun to work. When Libra had been reached the ego itself began to participate and this was a most important moment in its evolution.

Just think what it means that the ego had reached this stage of evolution:

From then on it was possible for the ego to participate in the work of the forces belonging to the Zodiac, to reach into the Zodiac. The more the ego strives for the highest point of its evolution, the more it works into the Zodiac. There is nothing that happens in the innermost core of the ego that has not its consequences right up to the very Zodiac. And inasmuch as man with his ego lays the foundations for his development to Atma, or spirit-man, he develops, stage by stage, the forces which enable him to work upwards into the sphere of Libra, the Balance, in the Zodiac. He will attain full power over Libra in the Zodiac when his ego has developed to Atma, or spirit-man. He will then be a being from whom something streams out, who has passed out of the sphere of Time into the sphere of Duration, of Eternity.

Such is the path of man. But there are other beings whose lowest sphere of operation is man's highest. Let us try to conceive of these beings whose lowest sphere of operation is man's highest (Libra in the Zodiac). When we relate man to the Zodiac, he reaches to Libra. The Being whose innermost nature belongs wholly to the Zodiac, whose forces belong wholly to the Zodiac, who only manifests in planetary life through his lowest member, which corresponds to Libra (as man's lowest member corresponds to Pisces)—this is the Being who spreads life throughout the whole of our universe:

Just as man receives life into himself, so does this Being radiate life through the whole of our universe. This is the Being Who has the power to make the great sacrifice and Who is inscribed in the Zodiac as the Being Who for the sake of our world offers Himself in sacrifice. Just as man strives upwards into the Zodiac, so does this Being send us His sacrificial gift from Aries—which is related to Him as Libra is related to man. And just as man turns his ego upwards to Libra, so does this Being radiate His very Self over our sphere in sacrifice. This Being is called the “Mystical Lamb,” for Lamb and Aries are the same; therefore the description ‘Sacrificial Lamb’ or ‘Ram’ is given to Christ. Christ belongs to the cosmos as a whole. His I, his Ego, reaches to Aries and thus He becomes Himself the “Great Sacrifice,” is related with the whole of mankind and in a certain sense the beings and forces present on the earth are His creations. The configuration of forces is such that He could become the Creator of these beings in the constellation of Aries, or the Lamb. The designation “Sacrificial Lamb” or “Mystical Lamb” is drawn from the heavens themselves.

This is one of the aspects revealed to us when from our circumscribed existence we look up into the heavens and perceive the interworking of heavenly forces and beings in cosmic space. Gradually we begin to realize that the forces streaming from heavenly body to heavenly body are akin to those forces which stream from one human soul to another as love and hate. We perceive soul-forces streaming from star to star and learn to recognize the heavenly script which records for us what is wrought and effected by those forces in cosmic space.

We have seen how at his death a man leaves behind him the corpse, first of his physical body, then of his etheric body and finally of his lower astral body. What is then left when he has shed these three bodies? The memory-picture which comes before the soul at death vanishes at the moment when the etheric body takes leave of the astral. It sinks into the unconscious, so to speak, and ceases to have any significance for the soul as an immediate impression. But although the picture itself vanishes, something important, something that may be called its fruit, survives. The total harvest of the last life remains like a concentrated essence of forces in the higher astral body and rests there.

But a man has often gone through all this in the past. At each death, at the end of each incarnation, this memory-picture has appeared before his soul and left behind what I have called a concentrated essence of forces. So with each life a picture is added. After his first incarnation a man had his first memory-picture when he died; then came the second, richer than the first, and so on. The sum-total of these pictures produces a kind of new element in man. Before his first death a man consists of four bodies, but when he dies for the first time he takes the first memory-picture with him. Thus on reincarnating for the first time he has not only his four bodies but also this product of his former life. This is the “causal” body. So now he has five bodies: physical, etheric, astral, ego and causal. Once this causal body has made its appearance, it remains, though it was first constituted from the products of previous lives. Now we can understand the difference between individuals. Some of them have lived through many lives and so have added many pages to their Book of Life. They have developed to a high level and possess a rich causal body. Others have been through only a few lives; hence they have gathered fewer fruits and have a less developed causal body.

What is the purpose of man's repeated appearance on Earth? If there were no connection between the various incarnations, the whole process would of course be senseless, but that is not how it goes. Think how different life was for a man who was incarnated a few centuries after Christ, compared with the conditions he will find when he reincarnates today. Nowadays a child's life between the sixth and fourteenth years is taken up with acquiring knowledge: reading, writing, and so on. Opportunities for the cultivation and development of human personality are very different from what they were in the past. A man's incarnations are ordered in such a way that he returns to the Earth only when he will find quite new conditions and possibilities of development, and after a few centuries they will always be there. Think how quickly the Earth is developing in every respect: only a few thousand years ago this region was covered with primeval forests, full of wild beasts. Men lived in caves, wore animal skins and had only the most primitive knowledge of how to light a fire or make tools. How different it all is today! We can see how the face of the Earth has been transformed in a relatively short time. A man who lived in the days of the ancient Germanic people had a picture of the world quite different from the picture which prevails today among people who learn to read and write. As the Earth changes, man learns quite new things and makes them his own.

What is the usual period between two incarnations and on what does it depend? The following considerations will give us the answer and we shall see how the changing conditions of the Earth come into it.

In the course of time certain Beings have enjoyed peculiar honours. For example, in Persia in 3000 B.C. the Twins (Gemini) were specially honoured; between 3000 B.C. and 800 B.C. the sacred Bull Apis (Taurus) was revered in Egypt and the Mithras Bull in Asia Minor. After 800 B.C. another Being came into the foreground and the Ram or Lamb (Aries) was honoured. So arose the legend of Jason, who went to fetch the Golden Fleece from the sacred Ram in Asia beyond the sea. The lamb was so highly revered that in due time Christ called Himself the “Lamb of God”, and the first Christian symbol was not the Cross with the Saviour hanging on it, but the Cross together with the Lamb.

This means that there were three successive periods of civilisation, each associated with important happenings in the heavens. The Sun takes his course in the sky along a particular path, the Ecliptic, and at the beginning of Spring in a given epoch the Sun rises at a definite point in the Zodiac. So in the year 3000 B.C. the Sun rose in Spring in the constellation of the Bull; before that in the constellation of the Twins, and about 800 B.C. in the constellation of the Ram. This vernal point moves slowly backwards round the Zodiac year by year, taking 2,160 years to pass from one constellation to the next, and people chose as the symbol of their reverence the heavenly sign in which the vernal Sun appeared. If today we were able to understand the powerful feelings and the exalted states of mind which the ancients experienced as the Sun passed on into a new constellation, we should understand also the significance of the moment when the Sun entered the sign of Pisces. But for the materialism of our time no such understanding is possible.

What was it, then, that people saw in this process? The ancients saw it as an embodiment of the forces of nature. In Winter these forces were asleep, but in Spring they were recalled to life by the Sun. Hence the constellation in which the Sun appeared in Spring symbolised these reawakening forces; it gave new strength to the Sun and was felt to be worthy of particular reverence. The ancients knew that with this movement of the Sun round the Zodiac something important was connected, for it meant that the Sun's rays fell on the Earth under quite different conditions as time went on. And indeed the period of 2,160 years does signify a complete change in the conditions of life on Earth. And this is the length of time spent in Devachan between death and a new birth. Occultism has always recognised these 2,160 years as a period during which conditions on Earth change sufficiently for a man to reappear there in order to gain new experience.

We must remember, however, that during this period a person is generally born twice, once as a man and once as a woman, so that on average the interval between two incarnations is in fact about 1,000 years. It is not true that there is a change from male to female at every seventh incarnation. The experiences of the soul are obviously very different in a male incarnation from those it encounters in a female incarnation. Hence the general rule is that a soul appears once as a man and once as a woman during this period of 2,160 years. It will then have had all the experiences available to it under the conditions of that period; and the person will have had the possibility and opportunity to add a new page to his Book of Life. These radical changes in the conditions on Earth provide a schooling for the soul. That is the purpose of reincarnation.

A man takes with him into Devachan his causal body and the purified, ennobled parts of his astral and etheric bodies; these belong to him permanently and he never loses them. At a particular moment, just after he has laid aside his astral corpse, he stands face to face with himself as if he were looking at himself from the outside. That is the moment when he enters Devachan.

Devachan has four divisions:

1. The continents
2. The rivers and oceans
3. The airy region; etheric space
4. The region of spiritual archetypes

In the first division everything is seen as though in a photographic negative. Everything physical that has ever existed on this Earth, whether as mineral, plant or animal, and everything physical that still exists, appears as a negative. And if you see yourself in this negative form, as one among all the others, you will be in Devachan. What is the point of seeing yourself in this way?

You do not see yourself once only, but by degrees you come to see yourself as you were in former lives, and this has a deep purpose. Goethe says: “The eye is formed by the light for the light.”¹⁸ He means that light is the creator of the eye, and this is perfectly true. We see how true it is if we observe how the eye degenerates in the absence of light. For example, in Kentucky certain creatures went to live in caves; the caves were dark and so the creatures did not need eyes. Gradually they lost the light of the eyes, and their eyes atrophied. The vital fluids which had formerly nourished their eyes were diverted to another organ which was now more useful for them. These creatures, then, lost their sight because their whole world was without light: the absence of light destroyed their power of sight. Thus if there were no light, there would be no eyes. The forces which create the eye are in the light, just as the forces which create the ear are in the world of sound. In short, all the organs of the body are built up by the creative forces of the universe. If you ask what has built the brain, the answer is that without thinking there would be no brain. When a Kepler¹⁹ or Galileo²⁰ directed his reasoning power to the great laws of nature, it was the wisdom of nature which had created the organ of understanding

Ordinarily a man enters the earthly world with his organs to a certain extent perfected. During the interval since his last incarnation, however, new conditions have arisen, and he has to work upon them with his spirit. In all his experiences there is a creative power. His eyes, and the understanding which he already possesses, were formed in an earlier incarnation. When after death he reaches Devachan, he finds, as we have seen, the picture of his body as it was in his last life, and within him he still carries the fruits of the memory-picture of his last life. It is now possible for him to compare the course of his development in his various lives: what he was like before the experiences of his last life and what he can become when the experiences of this latest life are added to those of the others. Accordingly he forms for himself a picture of a new body, standing one step higher than his previous bodies.

At the first stage in Devachan, therefore, a man corrects his previous life-picture, and out of the fruits of his former lives he prepares the picture of his body for his next incarnation.

At the second stage in Devachan, life pulsates as a reality, as though in rivers and streams. During earthly existence a man has life within him and he cannot perceive it; now he sees it flowing past and he uses it to animate the form he had built up at the first stage.

At the third stage of Devachan, a man is surrounded by all the passions and feelings of his past life, but now they come before him as clouds, thunder and lightning. He sees all this as it were objectively; he learns to understand it, and to observe it as he observes physical things on Earth; and he gathers all his experiences into the life of his soul. By dint of seeing these pictures of the life of soul he is able to incorporate their particular qualities, and thus he endows with soul the body he had formed at the first stage.

That is the purpose of Devachan. A man has to advance a stage further there, so he himself prepares the image of his body for his next incarnation. That is one of his tasks in Devachan; but he has many others also. He is by no means concerned only with himself. Everything he does is done in full consciousness. He lives consciously in Devachan, and statements to the contrary in theosophical books are false. How is this to be understood? When a man is asleep, his astral body leaves the physical and etheric bodies, and consciousness leaves him also. But that is true only while the astral body is engaged on its usual task of repairing and restoring harmony to the weary and worked out physical body. When a man has died, his astral body no longer has this task to perform, and in proportion as it is released from this task, consciousness awakens. During the man's life his consciousness was darkened and hemmed in by the physical forces of the body and at night he had to work on this physical body. When the forces of the astral body are released after death, its own specific organs immediately emerge. These are the seven lotus-flowers, the Chakrams. Clairvoyant artists have been aware of this and have used it as a symbol in their works: Michaelangelo²¹ created his statue of Moses with two little horns. The lotus-flowers are distributed as follows:

• The 2-petalled lotus-flower at the base of the nose, between the eyebrows;
• The 16-petalled lotus-flower in the region of the larynx;
• The 12-petalled lotus-flower in the neighbourhood of the heart;
• The 8- or 10-petalled lotus-flower in the region of the stomach;
• A 6- and a 4-petalled lotus-flower are to be found lower down.

These astral organs are hardly observable in the ordinary man of today, but if he becomes clairvoyant, or goes into a state of trance, they stand out in shining, living colours, and are in motion. Directly the lotus-flowers are in motion, a man perceives the astral world. But the difference between physical and astral organs is that physical organs are passive and allow everything to act on them from outside. Eye, ear and so on have to wait until light or sound brings them a message. Spiritual organs, on the other hand, are active; they hold objects in their grip. But this activity can awaken only when the forces of the astral body are not otherwise employed; then they stream into the lotus-flowers. Even in Kamaloka, as long as the lower parts of the astral body are still united to the man, the astral organs are dimmed. It is only when the astral corpse has been discarded and nothing remains with the man except what he has acquired as permanent parts of himself—i.e. at the entrance to Devachan—that these astral sense-organs wake to full activity; and in Devachan man lives with them in a high degree of consciousness.

It is incorrect for theosophical books to say that man is asleep in Devachan; incorrect that he is concerned only with himself, or that relationships begun on Earth are not continued there. On the contrary, a friendship truly founded on spiritual affinity continues with great intensity. The circumstances of physical life on Earth bring about real experiences there. The inwardness of friendship brings nourishment to the communion of spirits in Devachan and enriches it with new patterns; it is precisely this which feeds the soul there. Again, an elevated aesthetic enjoyment of nature is nourishment for the life of the soul in Devachan.

All this is what human beings live on in Devachan. Friendships are as it were the environment with which a man surrounds himself there. Physical conditions all too often cut across these relationships on Earth. In Devachan the way in which two friends are together depends only on the intensity of their friendship. To form such relationships on Earth provides experiences for life in Devachan.

• 18. “Goethe says ...” Literally, “And so the eye is formed by the light for the light.”
• 19. Johannes Kepler, 1571–1630, astronomer and mathematician. Established the three laws concerning the movements of the planets.
• 20. Galileo Galilei, 1564–1642. Laid the foundations of mechanics, discovered the laws of free fall, of the pendulum, of ballistics.
• 21. Michelangelo Buonarroti, 1475–1564. His “Moses”, intended for the tomb of Pope Julius II, is in the church of S. Pietro in Vincoli, Rome.

Today I would like to connect and amplify individual observations that we have made in the course of our studies with this or that detail. If you follow the times attentively, you will have been able to notice here and there that, in the thoughts, experiences, and impulses that in the past man felt had “brought him so wonderfully far,” he can no longer find what can help him reach into the future. Yesterday, one of our members pressed into my hands last week's issue of the Frankfurter Zeitung, dated November 21, 1917. In that journal is an article by a very learned gentleman—it must have been a very learned gentleman, because he had in front of his name not only the title Doctor of Philosophy but also the title Doctor of Theology, and in addition there is also Professor. He is thus Professor, Doctor of Theology, and Doctor of Philosophy. He is therefore, of course, a very clever man! He has written an article that deals with all sorts of contemporary spiritual needs. In the course of this article there is a section that is expressed in the following way: “The experience of being that lies behind things has no need of pious consecration or religious estimation, because it is in itself religion. Here it is not a matter of the feeling and comprehension of one's own individual values but of the great Irrational that is hidden behind all existence. He who touches it so that the divine spark leaps across undergoes an experience that has primary character, the ‘primeval experience.’ To experience this, along with all that is moved by the same stream of life, endows him with, to use a word beloved in modern times, a cosmic feeling for life.”

Forgive me, dear friends. I am not reading this to arouse within you some particularly lofty mental pictures to correspond with these washed-out sentences but rather to lead before you a symbol of our time. “A cosmic religiosity is in the process of growing among us, and the extent of the longing for it is shown by the perceptible growth of the theosophical movement that undertakes to discover and unveil the circulation of life behind the senses.” It is indeed difficult to stagger over all these washed-out concepts, but is it not nevertheless true that as a symbol of our time this is quite peculiar? Further on he says, “In this cosmic piety, it is not a question of mysticism that begins with rejection of the world . . .” etc.

One cannot conceive of anything clever in these sentences! Since the Professor, Doctor of Theology, and Doctor of Philosophy represents it, however, one must naturally consider it as something clever. Otherwise one would perceive it as something that is brought falteringly to expression in an unclear tirade, reminding one of the learned gentleman who can no longer continue on the path on which he has traveled and who feels obliged to point to something that is there, something that apparently seems to him not completely hopeless. One should not be at all delighted with these utterances; such things must not lull us into slumber just because we notice that from some direction someone has again observed that something lies behind the spiritual scientific movement. That would indeed be very harmful, because those who make these remarks are often the same ones who feel satisfied with such utterances, who do not go further. They even point with these washed-out things to an event that will enter the world, and this would thereby belong precisely to those who are altogether too comfortable to become involved in something that requires earnest study of spiritual science. This event must really break in and take hold of human feeling (Gemuet) if what is bound up with reality is to flow into the time-stream of evolution so that healing forces are able to rise from it. It is naturally easier to speak of the “surging waves” and of “cosmic feelings” than to enter seriously into the things that are demanded by the signs of the time and that must be made known to humanity. For this reason it seems to me necessary to say things here that have been stated previously in public lectures but that will be spoken of further, now with a strong emphasis on the difference between what is worn out, what is no longer capable of life, which has led to these catastrophic times, and what must really take hold of the human soul if any progress is to be made.

With the old wisdom by which human beings have reached the present, thousands of congresses can be held—world congresses and national congresses, and whatever—thousands of societies can be founded, but one must be clear that these thousands of congresses, thousands of societies, will not be effective unless the spiritual life-blood of the science of the spirit flows through them. What man is lacking today is the courage to enter into the real exploration of the spiritual world. It sounds strange, but it must be said that all that is needed to begin with is to circulate to a broad public, for example, the small brochure, Human Life in the Light of Spiritual Science. Something new would be achieved through this in calling forth knowledge of man's connection with the cosmic order. Attention is drawn precisely to such knowledge in this brochure. Concrete attention is drawn to the way in which the earth annually alters its conditions of consciousness and the like. What is said in this lecture and in this brochure is said with particularly full consideration of the needs of our time. To receive this would be of greater significance than all the wishy-washy talk of “cosmic feeling” and of entering some sort of “surging waves,” or what have you. I have only quoted these things to you, because to reword them is impossible for me, as they are too senseless in their formulation.

One is not hindered, of course, by being attentive to these things, because they are important and essential. What I wish to draw to your attention is that we must not “mystify” ourselves, that we must be clear. Utter clarity is necessary if we wish to work for an anthroposophically oriented spiritual science.

I wish to point out once again that what is essential for humanity in this fifth post-Atlantean period is to enter into a special treatment of great issues of life that have been obscured in a certain way through the wisdom of the past. I have already pointed this out to you. One great issue of life can be characterized in the following way: an attempt will have to be made to place the spiritual etheric in the service of outer practical life. I have brought to your attention that the fifth post-Atlantean period will have to solve the problem of how human moods, the motions of human moods, allow themselves to be translated into wave motions on machines, how man must be brought into connection with what must become more and more mechanical. For that reason I called your attention a week ago to how superficially this mechanizing will be accepted by a certain portion of the surface of the earth. I presented an example to show how, following the American way of thinking, an attempt was made to extend the mechanical over human life itself. I presented the example of the pauses that were to be exploited so that, instead of far fewer tons, up to fifty tons could be loaded by a number of workmen. For this one need only carry the Darwinian principle of selection actually into life.

In such situations the will is there to harness human energy to mechanical energy. These things should not be treated by fighting against them. That is a completely false view. These things will not fail to appear; they will come. What we are concerned with is whether, in the course of world history, they are entrusted to people who are familiar in a selfless way with the great aims of earthly evolution and who structure these things for the health of human beings or whether they are enacted by groups of human beings who exploit these things in an egotistical or in a group-egotistical sense. That is what matters. It is not a question of the what in this case; the what is sure to come. It is a question of the how, how one tackles these situations. The what lies simply in the meaning of earthly evolution. The welding together of the human nature with the mechanical nature will be a problem of great significance for the remainder of earthly evolution.

I have deliberately drawn attention often, even in public lectures, to the fact that the consciousness of the human being is connected with the forces of disintegration. On two occasions I have said in public lectures in Basel that within our nervous system we are dying. These forces, these forces of dying away, will become more and more powerful. The bond will be established between these forces dying within man, which are related to the electric, magnetic forces, and the outer mechanical forces. Man will to a certain extent become his intentions, he will be able to direct his thoughts into the mechanical forces. Hitherto undiscovered forces within human nature will be discovered, forces that will work on outer electric and magnetic forces. The first problem is to bring together human beings with the mechanical, which will have to prevail increasingly in the future. The second problem consists in calling upon the help of the spiritual circumstances. This can only be done, however, when the time is ripe and when a sufficient number of people are prepared for it in the right way. The time must come, however, when the spiritual forces are made mobile enough to master life in relation to illness and death. Medicine will become spiritualized, intensely spiritualized. Of all these things, caricatures are being made from certain directions, but these caricatures show only what really must come.

Again it is a question of whether this problem is attacked from the same direction to which I pointed regarding the other problem, in an outer egotistical or group-egotistical way.

The third problem is to introduce human thoughts into the actual evolution of the human species, in birth and education. I have pointed out that conferences have already been held on how in the future a materialistic science would be founded regarding conception and the relationships between man and woman. All these things indicate to us that something most significant is in the process of evolving. It is still easy today to say, “Why is it that people who know about these things in the right sense do not apply them?” In the future it will become clear just what is involved in this application and which forces are still actively hindering the foundation of large-scale spiritualized medicine or spiritualized national economy. No more can be accomplished today than to talk about these things, until people have enough understanding of them, people who are inclined to accept them in a selfless way. Today many people believe that they are able to do this, but many circumstances of life hinder what they are able to do. These life circumstances can be overcome in the right way only when a deeper and deeper understanding gains ground and when there is willingness to renounce, at least for a time, the immediate, practical application of these things on a larger scale.

These things have all developed in such a way that one can say that little has been retained of what was once hidden behind the ancient, atavistic strivings until the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. There is much talk today about the ancient alchemy. The proceedings of the procreation of Homunculus are also recalled at times, and so on, but what is spoken of here is for the most part groundless. If one once understood what can be said in connection with the Homunculus scene in Goethe's Faust, one would be better informed about these things, because what is essential is that, from the sixteenth century on, a fog has been spread over these things; they have receded in human consciousness.

The law that governs these things is the same as the law that regulates within the human being the rhythmical alternation of waking and sleeping. Just as man cannot rise above sleep, so, in regard to spiritual evolution, he cannot disregard the sleeping of spiritual science that has marked the centuries since the sixteenth century. It was necessary for humanity to sleep through the spiritual for a time in order that it could appear again in another form. One must comprehend such necessities, but one must also not allow oneself to be depressed by them. For this reason one must be very clear that the time of awakening has come and that one must take an active part in this awakening, that events often hurry ahead of knowledge and one will not understand the events that take place around us unless one accustoms oneself to knowledge.

I have repeatedly pointed out to you that certain egotistical groups are striving esoterically, and their influence is active in the ways that I have often indicated in these studies. First of all, it was necessary that a certain knowledge should recede within humanity, a knowledge that is designated today with such misunderstood words as alchemy, astrology, and so on. This knowledge had to recede, fall into a sleep, so that man would no longer have the possibility of drawing what pertains to the soul out of observation of nature but would have to become more dependent on himself. Through this he would awaken the forces within him, for it was necessary that certain things appear first in abstract form and later take on again concrete, spiritual form.

Three ideas have gradually arisen in the course of evolving during the last centuries, ideas which, in the way they have entered human life, are essentially abstract. Kant has named them falsely, while Goethe has named them correctly. These three ideas Kant called God, freedom, and immortality; Goethe called them correctly God, virtue, and immortality. When one sees the things that are hidden behind these three words, it is clear that they are exactly the same as what modern man views more abstractly but that were viewed more concretely until the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In the ancient atavistic sense they were also viewed more materially. They experimented in the ancient way, indeed, they sought at that time with alchemical experiments to observe the processes that showed the working of God in process. They tried to produce the Philosopher's Stone.

Behind all these things is hidden something concrete. This Philosopher's Stone was to present human beings with the possibility of becoming virtuous, but it was thought of more materially. It was to lead human beings to experience immortality, to put them into a certain relationship to the universe, through which they would experience within themselves what goes beyond birth and death. All these washed out ideas with which one seeks today to grasp the ancient things no longer coincide with what was intended at that time. These things have become simply abstract, and modern humanity speaks from abstract ideas. They have wished to understand God through abstract theology; virtue is also regarded as something purely abstract. The more abstract the idea, the better modern humanity likes to use it in speaking about these things, even immortality. One speculates about what could be immortal in man. I spoke about this in my first Basel lecture, saying that the science that occupies itself today philosophically with questions about immortality is a starved science, an undernourished science. This is only another form of expression for abstract thinking in which such matters are pursued.

Certain brotherhoods in the West, however, have still preserved a relationship to the old traditions and have tried to apply them in a corresponding way, to place them in the service of a certain group egoism. It is really necessary for these things to be pointed out. Naturally, when these things are spoken of in public, from this comer of the West, in exoteric literature, then God, virtue or freedom, and immortality are also talked about in an abstract way. It is only in the circle of the initiates that it is known that all of this is only speculation, that these are all abstractions. For themselves, they seek what is being striven for in the abstract formulas of God, virtue, and immortality in something much more concrete, and for this reason, these words are translated for the initiates in their respective schools. God is translated as gold, and one seeks behind the mystery to come to what can be described as the mystery of gold. Gold, representing what is sun-like within the earth's crust, is indeed something within which is imbedded a most significant mystery. In fact, gold stands materially in the same relationship to other substances as within thinking the thought of God stands to other thoughts. It only matters in which way this mystery is understood.

This relates to the egotistical group exploitation of the mystery of birth. One is striving to wrestle here with real cosmic understanding. Modern man has completely replaced this cosmic understanding with a terrestrial understanding. When man today wishes to examine, for example, how the embryo in animals and man develops, he examines with a microscope what exists precisely in the place on earth onto which he has cast his microscopic eye; he regards this as what is to be examined. It cannot be a matter only of this, however. It will be discovered—and certain circles are coming close to this in their discoveries—that the active forces are not in what one meets with the microscopic eye but are rather within what streams in from the cosmos, from the constellations in the cosmos. When an embryo arises, it arises because into the living being in which the embryo is being formed are working forces from all directions of the cosmos, cosmic forces. When a fertilization takes place, what will develop out of the fertilization is dependent upon which cosmic forces are active.

Diagram 9 Click image for large view

There is one thing that will come to be understood today that is not yet understood. Today one looks at some living being, let us say a chicken. When in this living being a new embryo arises, the biologist examines how, so to speak, out of this chicken the egg grows. He examines the forces that are supposed to allow the egg to grow out of the chicken. This is a piece of nonsense. The egg does not at all grow out of the hen; the hen is only the foundation; the forces work out of the cosmos, forces that produce the egg on the ground that has been prepared within the hen. When the biologist today works with his microscope, he believes that what he sees in the microscopic field also includes the forces on which what he sees depends. What he sees there, however, is subject to the forces of the stars that work together in a certain constellation, and when one discovers the cosmic here, one will discover the truth, the reality: it is the universe that conjures the egg from the hen.

All of this, however, is connected above all with the mystery of the sun and, observed from the earth, with the mystery of gold. Today I am offering a kind of programmatic indication; in the course of time these things will become clearer.

In the same schools about which we are speaking, virtue is not called virtue but is simply called health, and one endeavors to acquaint oneself with those cosmic constellations that have a connection with the health and illness of human beings. Through acquainting oneself with the cosmic constellations, however, one learns to know the individual substances that lie on the surface of the earth, the juices and so on, that are connected with health and illness. From certain directions, a more material form of the science of health is increasingly being developed, one that rests, however, on a spiritual foundation.

The notion will also spread from this direction that man becomes good not by learning all sorts of ethical principles, through which man can become good, but rather by, let us say, taking copper under a certain constellation of stars or arsenic under another. You can imagine how these things could be exploited for power by groups of egotistically inclined people. It is only necessary to withhold this knowledge from others who are then unable to participate, and one has the best method of ruling over great masses of people. One does not need to speak about these things at all; one need only introduce, for example, some new delicacy. Then one can seek a market for this new delicacy, which has been tinged appropriately, and thus bring about what is necessary, if these things are comprehended materialistically. One must be clear that in all matter there are hidden spiritual workings. Only one who knows in the true sense that there is nothing really material but only the spiritual will penetrate beyond the mysteries of life.

Likewise, the attempt will be made from this direction to bring the problem of immortality into materialistic channels. This problem of immortality can be led into materialistic channels in the same way, by exploitation of cosmic constellations. One does not, of course, attain through this what is often speculated as being immortality, but one attains a different immortality. One prepares oneself—so long as it is impossible to influence the physical body to prolong life artificially—to undergo soul experiences that will enable one to remain in the lodge of a brotherhood even after death, to help there with the forces that one has at one's disposal. Immortality is simply called prolonging life in these circles.

You can see outer signs of all these things. I do not know whether some of you have noticed the book that for a time provoked a sensation, a book that also came from the West bearing the title, The Disturbance of Dying (Der Unfug des Sterbens). These things all move in this direction. They are only the beginning. What has gone further than the beginning is carefully preserved for the group egotism, is kept very esoteric. These things are actually possible, however, if one brings them into materialistic channels, if one makes the abstract ideas of God, virtue, and immortality into concrete ideas of gold, health, and prolonging life, if one exploits in a group-egotistical sense what I presented to you as the great problems of the fifth post-Atlantean times. What is called in a washed-out way “cosmic feeling” by Professor, Doctor of Theology, Doctor of Philosophy, is presented by many—and unfortunately by many in an egotistical sense—as cosmic knowledge. While science for centuries has beheld only processes occurring on earth, has rejected all study of what is approaching as the most important extraterrestrial occurrence, it will be precisely in the fifth post-Atlantean time that exploitation will be considered of the forces penetrating in from the cosmos. Just as it is now of special importance for the regular professor of biology possibly to have a much-enlarged microscope, possibly to use much more exact laboratory methods, so in the future, when science has become spiritualized, what will matter will be whether one carries out a certain process in the morning, evening, or at noon, or whether one allows what one did in the morning to be somehow further influenced by active factors of the evening, or whether the cosmic influence from morning until evening is excluded, paralyzed. In the future such processes will prove themselves to be necessary; they also will take place. Naturally much water will run over the dam until the materialistically oriented university chairs, laboratories, and so on, are handed over to the spiritual scientists, but this exchange must take place if humanity is not to come completely into decadence. This laboratory work will have to be replaced by work in which, for example—when it is a matter of the good that is to be attained in the future—certain processes take place in the morning and are interrupted during the day; the cosmic stream passes through them again in the evening, and this is preserved rhythmically until it is morning again. The processes are conducted in such a manner that certain cosmic workings are always interrupted during the day, and the cosmic processes of morning and evening are studied. To achieve this, manifold arrangements will be necessary.

You can gather from this that when one is not in a position to participate publicly in what happens, one can only talk about these things. From the same direction that wishes to put gold, health, and prolonging life in place of God, virtue, and immortality, the effort is made not to work with the processes of morning and evening but with something totally different. I called to your attention last time that the impulse of the Mystery of Golgotha was to be eliminated from the world by introducing another impulse from the West, a kind of Antichrist; from the direction of the East, the Christ impulse, as it appears in the twentieth century, is to be paralyzed by directing the attention, the interest, away from Christ appearing in the etheric.

Those concerned with introducing the Antichrist instead of the Christ have endeavored to exploit what could work especially through the most materialistic forces, yet working spiritually with these materialistic forces. Above all they strive to exploit electricity and especially the earth's magnetism to have influence over the entire earth. I have shown you how, in what I have called the human double, earthly forces arise. This mystery will be penetrated. It will be an American mystery to make use of the magnetism of the earth in its “doubleness,” to make use of the magnetism in North and South to send guiding forces that work spiritually across the earth. Look at the magnetic map of the earth and compare it with what I am now saying. Observe the course of the line where the magnetic needle swings to East and West and where it does not swing at all. (I can only give indications at this time.) From a certain celestial direction, spiritual beings are constantly at work. One need only put these spiritual beings at the service of earthly existence and, because these spiritual beings working in from the cosmos are able to transmit the mystery of the earth's magnetism, one can penetrate the mystery of the earth's magnetism and can bring about something very significant of a group-egotistical nature in relation to the three things, gold, health, and prolonging life. It will simply be a matter of mustering the doubtful courage for these things. This will certainly be done within certain circles!

From the direction of the East, it is a matter of strengthening what I have already explained: the in-streaming and actively working beings from the opposing sides of the cosmos are placed at the service of earthly existence. A great struggle will arise in the future. Human science will move toward the cosmic. Human science will attempt to move toward the cosmic but in different ways. It will be the task of the good, healing science to find certain cosmic forces that, through the working together of two cosmic streams, are able to arise on the earth. These two cosmic streams will be those of Pisces and Virgo. It will be most important to discover the mystery of how what works out of the cosmos in the direction of Pisces as a force of the sun combines with what works in the direction of Virgo. The good will be that one will discover how, from the two directions of the cosmos, morning and evening forces can be placed at the service of humanity: on the one side from the direction of Pisces and on the other side from the direction of Virgo.

Diagram 10 Click image for large view

Those who seek to achieve everything through the dualism of polarity, through positive and negative forces, will not concern themselves with these forces. The spiritual mysteries that allow the spirituality to stream forth from the cosmos—with help from the twofold forces of magnetism, from the positive and negative—emerge in the universe from Gemini; these are the forces of midday. It was known already in antiquity that this had something to do with the cosmos, and it is known even today by exoteric scientists that, behind Gemini in the Zodiac, positive and negative magnetism are hidden in some way. An attempt will be made to paralyze what is to be won through the revelation of the duality in the cosmos, to paralyze it in a materialistic, egotistical way through the forces that stream toward humanity especially from Gemini and can be put completely at the service of the double. With other brotherhoods, which above all wish to bypass the Mystery of Golgotha, it is a matter of exploiting the twofold nature of the human being. This twofold nature of the human being, which has entered the fifth post-Atlantean period just as man did, contains the human being but also, within the human being, the lower animal nature. Man is to a certain extent really a centaur; he contains this lower, bestial, astral nature. His humanity is somehow mounted upon this astral beast. Through this cooperation of the twofold nature within the human being there is also a dualism of forces. It is this dualism of forces that will be used more by the egotistical brotherhoods of the Eastern, Indian stream in order also to mislead Eastern Europe, which has the task of preparing the sixth post-Atlantean period. For this, forces from Sagittarius are put to use.

The question standing before humanity is whether to master for itself the forces of the cosmos in a doubly wrong way or simply to master them in the right way. This will give a real renewal to astrology, which was atavistic in its ancient form and would not be able to continue in this form. There will be a struggle among the knowledgeable ones in the cosmos. Some will bring about the use of the morning and evening processes, as I indicated; in the West, the midday process will be preferable, excluding the morning and evening processes; and in the East the midnight processes will be used. Substances will no longer be prepared according to forces of chemical attraction and repulsion; it will be known that different substances will be produced depending upon whether they are prepared with morning and evening processes or with midday or midnight processes. It will be known that such substances work in a totally different way upon the three-foldness of God, virtue, and immortality—gold, health, and prolonging life. From the cooperation of what comes from Pisces and Virgo one will not be able to bring about anything harmful. Through this one will achieve what in a certain sense loosens the mechanism of life from the human being but will in no way found any form of rulership and power of one group over another. The cosmic forces that are called forth from this direction will beget strange machines but only ones that will relieve the human being from work, because they will have within them a certain force of intelligence. A cosmically oriented spiritual science will have to concern itself so that all the great temptations that will emanate from these mechanized beasts, which man creates himself, will not exert a harmful influence upon the human being.

To all of this the following must be added: it is necessary for human beings to prepare themselves by not taking realities for illusions, really entering into a spiritual conception of the world, into a spiritual comprehension of the world. What is important is to see things as they are. One can only see things as they are, however, when one is in the position of applying to reality the concepts, the ideas, that emerge from an anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. The dead will actively participate for the remainder of earthly existence. How they will participate is what matters. Here, above all, the great distinction will appear. Through man's conduct on earth, the participation of the dead will be guided from a good direction in such a way that the impulses of the dead to work will be able to originate from themselves, impulses taken from the spiritual world that the dead are experiencing after death.

Opposing this will be many endeavors to lead the dead in an artificial way into human existence. By the circuitous route through Gemini, the dead will be led into human life in such a way that human vibrations will reverberate in a definite way, will continue to vibrate within the mechanical performance of the machine. The cosmos will bring motion to the machines through the circuitous route that I have just indicated.

For that reason, it is important that nothing inappropriate be applied when these problems appear; only elementary forces that are part of nature should be applied. One will have to renounce introducing inappropriate forces into mechanical life. From the occult sphere one must refuse to harness human beings themselves into mechanical factory work, a practice through which the Darwinian theory of selection is used for the determination of the work force, as I presented to you as an example last time.

I make all these suggestions, which naturally cannot exhaust the subject in such a short time, because I think that you will meditate further upon these things, that you will seek to build a bridge between your own life experiences and these things, above all those life experiences that can be won today in these difficult times. You will see how many things will become clear to you when you observe them in the light that can come to you through such ideas. In our time, we are not really concerned with forces and constellations of forces confronting one another, the sorts of things about which one is constantly speaking in outer, exoteric life, but with entirely different things. Some intend actually to cast a kind of veil over the true impulses that are involved. There are bound to be certain human forces at work to save something for themselves. What is there to be saved? Certain human forces are at work to defend impulses that were justified until the French Revolution and were even defended by certain esoteric schools; they are being defended now in the form of an Ahrimanic/Luciferic retardation, being defended so as to maintain a social order that humanity believes has been overcome since the end of the eighteenth century.

There are mainly two powers that stand in opposition to each other: the representatives of the principle that was overcome at the end of the eighteenth century and the representatives of the new age. It is quite clear that a large number of people instinctively are representatives of the impulses of the new era. The representatives of the old impulses—still of the eighteenth, seventeenth, sixteenth centuries—must therefore be harnessed to these forces by artificial means, to forces emanating from certain group-egotistical brotherhoods. The most effective principle in the new age to extend power over as many people as one needs is the economic principle, the principle of economic dependency. That is only the tool, however. What is involved here is something entirely different. What is involved is something that you can deduce from all my suggestions. The economic principle is bound up with all that is involved in making a large number of human beings from all over the earth into an army for these principles.

These are the things that oppose each other. The one points essentially to what is fighting at present in the world: in the West, a rigid, ironclad principle of the eighteenth, seventeenth, sixteenth centuries, which makes itself noticeable by clothing itself in the phrases of revolution, the phrases of democracy, a principle that assumes a mask and has the urge to gain in this way as much power as possible. It helps this endeavor when as few people as possible exert themselves to see things as they are, when they allow themselves to be lulled to sleep again and again in this realm by maya, by the maya that one can express with these words: there is a war today between the Entente and the Central Powers. There is nothing at all like this in reality. We are concerned here with entirely different things that exist behind this maya as the true realities. The struggle between the Entente and the Central Powers is only maya, is only illusion. One can see what stands side by side in the struggle if one looks behind these things, illuminating them in the way that I, for certain reasons, have only suggested. One must at least endeavor not to accept illusions for realities, because then the illusion will gradually dissolve, in so far as it must be dissolved. One must endeavor today above all to consider the things as they present themselves to truly unprejudiced thinking.

If you consider in a coherent way all that I have developed here, then a seemingly incidental remark that I made in the course of these lectures will not seem to you to be merely incidental. When I quoted a certain remark that Mephistopheles made in confronting Faust, “I see that you know the devil”—he would definitely not have said this about Woodrow Wilson—it was no incidental remark. It is something that should illuminate the situation! One must really study these things without antipathy and sympathy; one must be able to study them objectively. One must be able above all to reflect today about the significance of constellations in something that is at work and the significance of individual strength, because behind individual strength often lies something completely different from what lies behind the mere constellation. Think for a moment upon the problem, “How much would Woodrow Wilson's brain be worth if this brain were not sitting in the Presidential chair of the United States?” Assume that this brain were in a different constellation: there it would show its individual strength! It all depends upon the constellation.

I will now speak abstractly and radically—I will not, of course, characterize the aforementioned case; it would never occur to me to do that in such a neutral country—but independent of that there is a very important insight in relation to the question, for example, about the brain. Does it have value because it is actually illuminated and made active by a particular spiritual soul force—does it thereby have a spiritual weight in the sense that I have spoken in these studies of spiritual weight—or does this brain actually have no more value than would show if one laid it on a scale and on the other side placed a weight? In the moment in which one penetrates beyond the mysteries I presented to you last time concerning the double, one arrives at the point (and I am not speaking of something unreal) of bringing value to the brain, which before had value only as a mass on the scale, because one is capable, if the brain is to be revived, of allowing it to be revived merely by the double.

All these things strike human beings today as being grotesque. What seems to them grotesque, however, must come to be something self-evident if these things are to flow into a healthy stream from an unhealthy one. And what use is it if one only chatters about them constantly? You must accept the idea that all this wishy-washy talk about “cosmic religiosity” or “the extent of the longing for it” or “the movement that undertakes to discover and unveil the circulation of life behind the senses,” and so on, does nothing but spread a fog over things that must come into the world only in clarity. They can be effective only in clarity, and they must be carried in clarity above all as practical, moral-ethical impulses in humanity.

I can only make single suggestions. I leave it to your own meditation to build on these realms further. These things are in many respects aphoristic, but you will have the possibility of gathering a great deal from such a summary as this picture of the Zodiac if you truly use it as the substance of meditation.

When we can meet so seldom, one has naturally the desire to put as much as possible into a lecture, and it may sometimes happen that one gives perhaps too much. I intend nevertheless making the bold attempt to give you today a description from one point of view of what may be called the other side of man's earthly existence; and I want to make clear to you at the same time the importance and significance for our age of this deeper kind of knowledge,—this spiritual knowledge.

How much, after all, does man know ordinarily of his existence here on Earth? What can his senses and his sense-bound intellect tell him? With ordinary consciousness he is conscious only of his waking life, Yet it is surely not without meaning that the guiding Spiritual Powers of the World have inserted into man's life on Earth the condition of sleep.

Between the time of falling asleep and the time of awaking a very great deal takes place. In fact, of all that the Spirit has to accomplish on Earth through man, by far the greater part is accomplished during sleep. As long as we are awake, what happens on Earth through us is limited to what we do,—either to ourselves or to the things that are around us. When we go to sleep, however, another activity begins. Whilst we are asleep, lofty Spiritual Beings work upon the human soul, with the object of bringing man to his full and complete evolution in Earth existence.

It is possible for one who has acquired modern initiation knowledge to have clear and detailed insight into the significant events that take place during sleep. We must not of course make the mistake of imagining that these events take place for the initiate alone; they are experienced by all human beings alike. Indeed, human evolution is entirely dependent upon these events that happen with us between the moment of falling asleep and the moment of awaking. The difference with the initiate is just this,—that he is able to draw our attention to these events. And it is increasingly important that all who give any thought at all to the meaning of existence on Earth should be alive to the significance of what happens in sleep.

Let me now sketch for you in bold outline the influences that play into the sleep of man. Suppose someone goes to sleep. As you know, we describe the process in the following way. His astral body, we say, and his I loosen themselves from the physical body and the ether-body, and are in the Spiritual World; they no longer permeate the physical and etheric bodies as they do in the waking state. But when we try to go a little further and form a picture of what really takes place with man during the condition of sleep, we find that it is necessary first to come to a clearer perception of the nature of man's connection with the Earth during waking hours. How is man connected with the Earth while he is awake? First of all, through his senses. With the aid of his senses, he perceives and cognizes the phenomena of the various kingdoms of Nature. But this is not all. Man is also connected with the Earth through activities he performs unconsciously,—unconsciously, that is, even while he is awake. Man breathes, for instance, and is thus connected with the whole Earth. The whole Earth plays into the air man takes in with his breath. In the air he breathes, countless substances are present in a highly rarefied condition. And the very fact that they are present in this rarefied state enables them to exercise an influence that is of no small importance when they are received through the breath into the organism of man. What man perceives with his senses enters into him consciously; but subconsciously, even during waking life a vast amount enters into man that is more substantial than what enters him by the more tenuous and ideal paths of perception and thought. By way of the breath man's environment comes into him in a more material and substantial manner. Nor need I remind you of how utterly dependent the human organism is on what it receives in the way of earthly nourishment. So that altogether we have to recognise many influences working from the Earth upon the awake human being.

We are not, however, at present pursuing the study of that any further; what concerns us today is the influences that work upon man in sleep. And here we find that whereas during waking hours man stands in connection with external earthly substances, when he passes over into sleep, he comes into a certain connection with the whole Cosmos. I do not mean to imply that man's astral body assumes every night the vastness of the Cosmos. That would be an exaggeration. It is nevertheless a fact that every night man grows out into the Cosmos. Just as here on Earth we are connected with the plants, with the minerals, with air, so are we connected in the night with the movements of the planets, and with the constellations of the fixed stars. From the moment we fall asleep, the starry heavens become our world, even as the Earth is our world when we are awake.

Coming now to describe rather more in detail how we make our way after falling asleep, we find we can distinguish different spheres through which we pass. First comes the sphere where the I and the astral body—that is to say, the soul of man as it finds itself in sleep—feel united with the movements of the World of the planets. When we wake up in the morning and slip into our physical body, we have in us, as we know, our lungs, our heart, our liver, our brain. In the first sphere with which we come in contact after falling asleep—and it will also be again the last sphere we enter before awaking—we have in us the forces of the movements of the planets. This does not mean of course that we receive into us every night the entire planetary movements; we carry within us a little picture, as it were, wherein the movements of the planets are reproduced. And this picture is different for each single human being. That, then, is the first experience every one of us encounters after falling asleep. We follow, as it were, with our astral body all that happens with the planets, as they move out there in the wide spaces of the Universe; we experience it all in our astral body in a sort of planetary globe.

Perhaps you will say: But how does this concern me, if I cannot perceive it? True, you do not see it with your eyes, nor hear it with your ears. But no sooner have you passed over into the condition of sleep than the part of your astral body which belongs in waking life to your heart, becomes for you an eye,—becomes, in very fact, what we may call a heart-eye; and with this heart-eye you ‘see’ what is now taking place. For present-day mankind, the perception is a very dim one. Nevertheless it is more assuredly there; the heart-eye perceives the experiences of this first sphere of sleep.

Very soon after you have fallen asleep, the heart-eye begins also to look back at what has been left lying in bed. Your ego and astral body look back with the heart-eye upon your physical and etheric bodies. And the picture of planetary movements that you are now experiencing in your astral body, rays back to you from your ether-body; you behold a reflection of it in your ether-body.

Present-day man is so constituted that as soon as ever he wakes up, he immediately forgets the dim consciousness that he had in the night by means of his heart-eye. There are however, dreams in which we can catch, as it were, an echo of it. Such dreams are astir with an inner movement that is reminiscent of the planetary movements. Then into these dreams come pictures from real life; but that is only when the astral body has begun to dive down into the ether-body, which latter carries and preserves for us the memory of our life.

Let me describe for you something that can easily happen. You wake up in the morning, having passed again on your return through the sphere of the planetary movements. Let us suppose that you have experienced a particular relationship between Jupiter and Venus. Such an experience must be intimately connected with your destiny, otherwise you would not have it; and if you could bring the experience back into life—into your ordinary day-time life—it would shed a wonderful light on your faculties and capabilities. For the fact is, these faculties of ours are not of the Earth, they have come hither from the Cosmos. According as is your connection with the Cosmos, so are your gifts and talents, so is your goodness,—or, at any rate, so is your inclination to good or to evil. If you could bring back into day-life the experience of which we were speaking, you would be able to see what Jupiter and Venus were saying to one another, for you would see what you had seen in the night with your heart-eye,—I could equally well say, heard with your heart-ear, for these finer distinctions do not exist for the experiences of sleep. Since, however, all this is only very dimly perceived, it is forgotten. But the result of the experience remains in your astral body; the mutual relationship between Jupiter and Venus produces a corresponding movement within your astral body. And now there mingles with it some experience you had long ago, perhaps when you were 17 or 25 years old,—let us say at noon one day, in Oxford, for example, or in Manchester. The pictures of this long-past experience of yours intrude themselves into the cosmic experience; the two get mixed up together. As you will see, therefore, the pictures that are given us in dreams have a certain significance, yet are not the essential part of the dream; they are like a garment that weaves itself around the cosmic experiences.

Now, through this whole experience that comes to you in the way I have described, runs a vein of anxiety. In almost every case it is accompanied by a more or less intense feeling of anxiety,—anxiety, that is, of a spiritual nature; and particularly at the moment when the cosmic experience sounds back, shines back, to the soul from the ether-body. Suppose the influence due to a certain relationship between Jupiter and Venus is raying back to you from your ether-body, and one ray—I call it quite simply one ray, but it tells ever so much to your heart-eye!—one ray comes back from your forehead, while a second, that comes from the region below the heart, mingles its music and its light with the first. In every human soul that is not completely hardened, this will give rise to the feeling of anxiety and apprehension of which I have spoken. The soul will be constrained to say to itself in sleep: The cosmic mist has enveloped me, it has received me into itself. We feel indeed as though we ourselves are becoming as dim and as nebulous as the cosmic mist, as if we are now nothing but a cloud of mist floating in the Mist of the Worlds. Such is the character of the first experience that meets the soul after falling asleep.

And then another feeling begins to arise in the soul. Out of this first experience, where we are anxious and apprehensive, feeling ourselves to be no more than a little wave of mist within the Mist of the Worlds, another mood develops within us, a mood of devotion to the Divine, devotion and surrender to the Divine that fills the Universe and pervades it.

This then is how it is with us, my dear friends, in the first sphere into which we come after falling asleep. Two fundamental feelings live in our soul; I am in the Mist of the Worlds,—I would fain rest in the bosom of the Godhead, that I be safe and protected and dissolve not away in the Mist of the Worlds. This is moreover an experience which the heart-perception must needs carry over into waking life in the morning, when the soul dives down again into the physical and ether bodies. For if this experience were not brought over, then the substances we take as nourishment during the day would assume within us their own completely earthly character and throw our whole organism into disorder. And this applies not only to what we eat but to all the substances that undergo within us the process of metabolism. For even if we go hungry, substances are nevertheless continually being taken—in this case, from our own body—and worked upon through metabolism.

Sleep has, as you see, my dear friends, immense significance for the waking condition. And we can only record our acknowledgment of the fact that in this epoch of evolution it is not left to man himself to see that the Divine forces are carried over into waking life. For it would go hard with human beings as they are in the present age, did it rest with them to bring these influences in full consciousness from the other side of existence and bear them into the waking life of day.

And now man comes into the next sphere. This does not mean, he leaves the first; no, for the heart-perception it is still there. This next sphere, which is a much more complicated one, is perceived by another part of the astral body,—the part which belongs in waking life to the solar plexus, and to the whole limb organisation of man. The part of the astral body that permeates the solar plexus and the arms and legs is now the organ of perception, and with the aid of this organ man begins to feel the forces in his astral body that come from the Signs of the Zodiac. These are of two kinds—the forces that reach him from the Zodiac direct, and the forces that have first to pass through the Earth. For it makes a great difference whether a particular sign is above or below the Earth.

Man has therefore in this second Sphere what we might call a solar or Sun-perception. He perceives with the part of his astral body that is associated with the solar plexus and the limbs,—an organ of perception that can rightly be called a Sun-eye. And by means of his Sun-eye man becomes aware of his relationship, not now merely, as before, with the planetary movements, but with the entire Zodiac. The picture you see, is widening; or rather, man himself is growing out further into the picture of the Cosmos. And here again, man is able to behold a reflection of the experience when he looks back on his own physical and etheric bodies.

Every night it is thus given to man,—that is to say, to the part of him that goes out of the body—to come into relationship with the whole Cosmos; first, with the planetary movements, and then with the constellations of the fixed stars. In this latter experience—which may come half an hour after falling asleep, or rather later, but with many people comes quite soon—man feels himself within all twelve constellations of the Zodiac. And the experiences he encounters with the constellations are exceedingly complicated.

I verily believe, my dear friends, you might have traveled far and wide and visited the most interesting and important regions of the whole Earth, and yet not have had such an amount and variety of experiences as your Sun-eye affords you every night in connection with one single constellation of the Zodiac. For the men of an older time, who still possessed in full force the powers of clairvoyance and could perceive in a dreamlike consciousness very much of what I have been describing to you, the experiences of sleep were less bewildering. In our time it is exceedingly difficult for man to attain with his Sun-eye to any degree of clarity in regard to this complicated twelvefold experience of the night. He needs to do so, even if by day-time he has forgotten all about it; but he hardly can unless he has received, with the understanding of the heart, knowledge of the Christ and of all that the Christ willed to become for the Earth in that He passed through the Mystery of Golgotha. If we have once felt what it means for the life of the Earth that Christ has gone through the Mystery of Golgotha, if in our ordinary waking life we have thought about the Christ, then our astral body is able to receive via the physical and etheric bodies, a certain tincture or quality which brings it about that Christ becomes our Guide and Leader through the Zodiac during sleep. For, as in the sphere of the planetary movements, so here again a feeling of anxiety comes over man. He feels: What if I lose myself in the multitude of the stars, and in all the manifold happenings that take place among them! But if he is then able to look back upon thoughts and feelings and impulses of will that he has directed in waking life to the Christ, then Christ becomes for him a Guide, bringing order into the bewildering events of this sphere. And so the fact is brought home to us that only when we turn our attention to the other side of life, are we able to appreciate the full significance of the Christ for the life of Earth, as it has been up till now; and as for what the Christ has yet to become for the life of Earth,—no one within the ordinary civilisation of the present day can really understand this.

There are of course few among us who can be said to go through the experiences of sleep aright; and these experiences are often given a false interpretation. Human beings who have not come in touch with the Christ Event bring these experiences of the night into the waking consciousness of day-time in a disordered and confused manner. We can understand how this happens when we know what it is that really takes place with us during sleep. As we have seen, when we have passed through the sphere of existence where we are enveloped in mist or cloud, we find ourselves approaching a world that confuses and amazes us. Here it is that the Christ appears before us as a spiritual Sun and becomes our Guide; and then all the confusion resolves itself into a kind of harmony that we hear and understand. That this should be so, that we should have in the time of sleep the Christ for our Guide, is a matter of the very greatest importance for us. For, the moment we enter this sphere and begin to have all around us the living interplay of constellations of the Zodiac and movements of the planets—at this moment we encounter also our Karma. With our Sun-eye we behold our Karma. Yes, it is indeed so, every human being has sight of his Karma—in sleep. All that is left of the perception in waking life, is a kind of faint echo vibrating in the feelings.

Suppose a man has begun to tread the path of self-knowledge. He will find perhaps that his soul is imbued at times with a mood and attitude to life that are like a distant echo of the experience he has had in sleep, where the Christ came forward as his Guide and led him in the night from Aries through Taurus and Gemini, etc., making plain to him the World of the Stars, so that he has returned with renewed strength to the life of day. For that is the marvellous experience that awaits man in this sphere, None other than the Christ Himself becomes his Guide through the bewildering events of the Zodiac, going before him and pointing the way from constellation to constellation, that he may be able to receive into his soul in their right order and harmony the forces he needs for waking life.

Such then is the experience man undergoes every night between falling asleep and awaking,—an experience he owes to the fact that his soul and spirit have kinship with the Cosmos. For, even as he is related to the Earth with his physical and etheric bodies, so with his soul arid spirit, with his astral body and Ego, is man related to the Cosmos. And when he has come away from his physical and etheric bodies and has grown out into the cosmic world, and the experiences he undergoes there shine back to him, in a kind of inner picture, from the part of him that remains in bed, he feels very deeply connected with the Cosmos and would, in fact, be strongly drawn to go still further out, to go out beyond the Zodiac,—were it not for the presence of another force that draws him back. On account of this other element that enters into all the experiences that befall man during sleep, it, is not possible for him, between birth and death, to go out beyond the Zodiac, We have here to do with an influence of an entirely different kind and quality, the influence, namely, of the Moon.

The effect of the influence of the Moon is to tinge the whole Cosmos during the night—and this happens even at the time of New Moon too—with a certain substantiality. This substantiality man experiences, in addition to all else. He feels how the Moon forces hold him back within the world of the Zodiac and bring him again to the moment of awaking. Even in the very first sphere he enters after falling asleep, man already divines dimly within him the presence of this influence; he begins to be acutely sensible of it in the second sphere, where he has a powerful and vivid experience of the mysteries of birth and death. The organ for this experience lies much deeper within man than the heart-eye or even the Sun-eye; it may be said to extend over and involve the entire man. With this organ, man experiences every night how he came down as soul and spirit from the world of soul and spirit, how he entered through birth into a physical existence, and how his body is gradually passing over into death, For the fact is, we overcome death, until the time when death really occurs as a final event. Something else too is associated with this experience. The very forces that enable us to experience how the soul goes on its journey through the earthly and bodily reveal to us also in the same moment our connections with the rest of mankind.

I would have you mindful of the fact, my dear friends, that even a most insignificant meeting or contact with another human being is not without its place and connection in our whole destiny. And whether the souls, with whom we have been together in some past Earth life or with whom we are connected in this present life, are now in the spiritual world or are with us here on Earth, all that we have had to do with one another as man to man, all human ties, intimately related as these are to the secrets of birth and death, show themselves now to the spiritual eye, if I may call it so, of the entire man. And as all this comes before our view, we feel we are indeed standing within the stream of our whole life-destiny.

This has to do with the fact that whereas all other forces—the forces of the planets and of the fixed stars—tend to draw us out into the distant Cosmos, the Moon wants to place us once more into the world of men. The Moon draws us away from the Cosmos. The Moon has forces that are directly opposed to the forces both of Sun and of Stars; it ensures for us our kinship with the Earth. It is accordingly the Moon that brings us back every night,—drawing us away from the Zodiac experiences into the experiences of the planets, and thence into the experiences of Earth, taking us back once again into our physical body.

Here you have the difference, from one point of view, between sleep and death. When man goes to sleep, he remains still in close connection with the forces of the Moon. The forces of the Moon point out to him every night afresh the significance of his life on Earth. This is made possible by the fact that he can see in his ether body the reflection of all his experiences of the night. At death, however, man withdraws his ether body from the physical body. Then begins, as you know, the memory that looks back over the last Earth life. The ether body expands and fills for a few days the cosmic cloud of which I have spoken. I told you how every night we live our way as cloud, as mist, into the Mist of the Worlds. In the night this cloud of mist which we are, is there without the ether-body; but when we die, our ether-body is present with it for the first few days. Then the ether-body gradually dissolves away into the Cosmos, memory fades and disappears, and we have—instead of a reflection of star experiences thrown back from the part of us we left lying in bed—we have now after death an immediate inner experience of the movements of the planets and of the constellations of the fixed stars.

You can read in my book Theosophy a description of these experiences from another point of view. You have there a description of what man finds, as it were, around him between death and new birth. But just as here on Earth you would not have around you colours and sounds, for instance, unless you had in your body eyes and ears, and unless you could breathe and had within you lungs and a heart, so neither could you after death perceive around you what you find described in my book as “soul world” and “spirit land,” unless you had within you Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Aries, Taurus, Gemini, etc. These are within you, they are your organism, your cosmic organism by means of which you experience after death. And the Moon cannot now bring you back, for it could only bring you back to your ether-body, and that has dissolved away into the Cosmos.

Man has however even after death something left in him of the force which he inherits from the Moon, enough to enable him to remain for a season in the soul world, with gaze still fixed upon the Earth. Then he passes on to spirit-land, and here he feels and knows that he is undergoing an experience where he is beyond the Zodiac, beyond the Heaven and the Fixed Stars. Such is the course of man's life in the time between death and new birth.

I could also give you another description of man's nightly journey to the spiritual world, describing it for you in a picture. Only, you must beware of taking the picture too literally, for, as you know, it is well nigh impossible to express these things in earthly concepts. Nevertheless it is a true picture that I am giving you, and it will help you to follow this journey in all its detail.

Imagine before you a meadow. From each single flower on the meadow—from the flowers too that blossom on the trees around—a spiral rises and goes out and out into cosmic space. These circling spirals carry the forces whereby the Cosmos fosters and regulates the growth of plants on Earth. For plants do not grow merely out of their seed; they need also for their growth the cosmic forces that surround the Earth with their spirally directed influences. And the cosmic forces are there in winter too; they are there even in the desert where no plants grow. When night comes for man, he has to use these spiral forces as a kind of ladder whereon he may mount up into the realm of the planetary movements. Man ascends into the movements of the planets on the ladder of the spiral rays that circle upwards from the plants. And then there is another force, the force that makes the plant shoot upwards from its root,—for there must be a force at work, to enable the plant to grow upwards. With the aid of this force man is carried up into the second sphere that I described.

Recall for a moment those experiences I related to you, where man comes into a state of anxiety, and feels: I am no more than a tiny cloud of mist in the great Mist of the Cosmos,—I must rest in the bosom of the Godhead. If we would relate this experience of the soul to the conditions within which we live on Earth, we would have to express it in the following way. It is as if the soul would say: I rest in the blessing of the Cosmos as it hovers over a cornfield that is just opening into flower, I rest in the blessing of the Cosmos as it hovers over a meadow whose blossoms are unfolding to the light. For what is it that sinks down to the plants in spiral lines of force? It is the bosom of the Godhead, quick and instinct with life, the same within which man finds himself sheltered and enclosed every time he falls asleep.

The Moon, on the other hand, leads man back to the animal aspect of his nature. The forces of the plants tend perpetually to carry him out—farther and farther out into the wide universe. But man has also in his make-up something that he shares with the animal kingdom, and because of this the Moon is able to bring him back again every morning,—back into his own animal nature.

Here, then, you have a picture of man's connection with the Cosmos, and of its influence upon him during sleep. We can carry the picture a little further. With the heart-eye, the Sun-eye and the eye that is entire man, we may experience in sleep the kind of feeling to which we are accustomed in waking life when we are drawn into an intimate and near relationship with some other person. It is not said to us in words, nor do we reason it out. The plants it is who tell us of it; we hear of it from the plants that lift us up, as though on a spiral ladder, into the world of the planets, whence we are sent forth again into the world of the Zodiac.

If we wanted to put into words what we experience in this way, we could say: I have a relationship to this person; the lilies tell me so, the roses tell me; the power of the rose, the power of the lily, the power of the tulip has moved me to experience this relationship. Thus does the whole Earth become a book of life which interprets for us the world of the human soul,—that world into which we have to find our way as we go through our life.

Now, these experiences that come to man during sleep have not always been the same, they have varied in different epochs. If we go back to ancient India, we find that in those times men who wanted to learn what sleep could teach them by bringing them into relation with the world of the stars, limited their search to those constellations of the Fixed Stars which were above the Earth—above, that is, at the particular moment of time, for the constellations are, of course, continually changing their places in the Heavens. The ancient Indian had no desire to make connection with the constellations that are below the Earth, whose forces can reach man only through the Earth.

Look at the characteristic posture of a Buddha,—or of any wise man of the East who sets out to perform exercises that shall enable him to achieve spiritual wisdom; He sits with his legs crossed under him. The upper part of his body where he is in relation with the upper constellations,—that he wants to be active, and that alone. Through the Sun-eye, there is also working in him what works through the limbs; but this he does not want to activate. He wants, as it were, to eliminate the forces of the limbs during his spiritual exercises. One can see quite plainly from his posture that the Eastern seeker after wisdom desires to find relation with what is above the Earth, and only that. His whole interest is directed to knowledge that concerns the soul.

The world would however be incomplete if man's quest for knowledge had remained limited in this way, if men had continued to assume always and exclusively the Buddha posture when they set out on the path of knowledge. It was not so. In the age of Greece, men began to feel impelled to make connection also with the forces working from the constellations that are—at the particular moment—below the Earth. Greek mythology contains beautiful intimations of this. Again and again we are told of a kind of initiation where the candidate descends to the underworld. Whenever you read of some Greek hero that he goes down into the underworld, you may be sure the meaning is that he is going through an initiation which yields him knowledge of those forces of the Cosmos that work through the Earth and that were known to the Greeks as the Chthonic forces.

Each epoch of time has, you see, its own task and mission. The oriental initiate had to learn, in order that he might then communicate the knowledge to his fellowmen, about the region of soul and spirit where man was before birth—or I should say, before conception—and about man's experiences there before he descends to the earthly world. All that we feel to be so grand and majestic in the poetry of the East and in its conceptions of the universe, is due to the fact that in those far-off days men were able to look into the life they had lived before they came down to Earth. In Greece, men began to take knowledge of the Earth and of all that belongs to the Earth. The Greek takes Uranus and Gaia—the Earth—as the starting point for his cosmology. He aspires to know also the Mysteries of the Earth itself, which include at the same time the cosmic Mysteries that work through the Earth. The Mysteries of the underworld,—these too the Greeks were wanting to discover, and in this way they developed their true cosmology.

Think how little there is among the Greeks—none whatever among the Orientals—but how little among the Greeks of the study of history in our sense of the word. The Greek is much more interested in the far-off beginnings when the Earth was being formed within the Cosmos, when the interior forces of the Earth, the Titanic forces, waged war on those other forces, those mighty spiritual forces which the Greek conceived as underlying the web of earthly conditions within which man finds himself enwoven. But we men of modern times are called upon to understand history; we must be able to show how man started from an ancient dream-like clairvoyance and has now arrived at a consciousness that is intellectual in character and tinged only with a memory of the mythical, and then go on to show how there is need for man now to work his way out of this intellectual consciousness and learn to look right into the world of the Spirit. For the present epoch of time marks the transition to the attainment of conscious experience in the spiritual world. That is why it is so very important for us that we should turn our attention to history. You will find that in our anthroposophical work we give ourselves again and again to the study of the different epochs of history, going back first of all to the time when men still received their knowledge from higher Beings, and then following the whole development right up to our own age.

The study of history has, of course, become hopelessly abstract in our schools and universities today. Could anything be more abstract then the lines of demarcation that people draw when they are developing some historical theme! For the men of olden time, history was still clothed in the garment of myth and was brought into connection with Nature and with all that goes on in her world. People cannot do this any more. Neither do they show any readiness as yet to enquire more deeply into the times of long ago. They do not feel any need to ask how it was with man in the days when he received wisdom from higher Beings, how it was with him later when less and less of the wisdom came through to him, or how it was with him when a God Himself descended to incarnate through the Mystery of Golgotha in a human body and carry out a sublime cosmic mission with the Earth, so that it was given her at last to have her real meaning.

The whole theology of the 19th and 20th centuries has failed, because it cannot understand the Christ in His spiritual significance. That, my dear friends, is what modern Initiation Science must bring,—understanding of the Christ. We need an Initiation Science that can penetrate again into the spiritual world, that can speak again about birth and death, about the life between birth and death and the life also between death and a new birth, and about the life of the soul in sleep,—can speak of these things in the way we have been speaking of them together today. The possibility must be there for man to come again to a knowledge of the other side—the spiritual side—of existence. Otherwise, he will simply not be able to go forward into the future.

Once, long ago, men directed their search for knowledge to the upper worlds—we see it demonstrated in the posture of the Buddha. Then, in later times, man took the evolution of the Earth as his starting-point and read his cosmology out of the evolution of the Earth; he became initiated in Greece into the Chthonic Mysteries, as we find related in many a Greek myth, where the account of such initiation is often a prominent feature of the story. Our search, has to take a new turn. Having studied in the past the Mysteries of the Earth and the mysteries of the Heavens, we need in our day an Initiation Science that is able to move rhythmically between Heaven and Earth, an Initiation Science that asks of the Heavens when it wants to understand the Earth, and asks of the Earth when it would inform itself of the Heavens.

And this is how you will, find the questions put and answered—insofar as they can be answered today—in my book An Outline of Occult Science. Let me say here in all humility that the attempt has been made in this book to describe the knowledge of which modern man stands in need,—needing it as surely as ever the Oriental needed the Mysteries or the Heavens or the Greek the Mysteries of the Earth, For it is required of us to take note and observe how it stands with initiation in modern times and what is man's relation to it in this present age. Let me endeavour therefore to describe for you quite briefly in the third part of my lecture the tasks that lie before modern initiation.

In order to give you some idea of the tasks of modern initiation, I shall have to repeat here what some of you will have heard me say in Oxford a few days ago,

I was pointing out just now that whereas the initiates of very ancient times laid particular emphasis on the looking upwards into the spiritual worlds whence man descends to clothe himself in an earthly body, while on the other hand for the initiates of a somewhat later time it was what we find described by the Greeks as the descent into the underworld that was of first importance, the initiate of our own time has yet another task. He has to look, in search after knowledge, at the rhythmic relation of the Heavens to the Earth. To this end he has to know the Heavens and the Earth, but he must in his search hold always before him the thought of Man, in whom alone, among all the beings that are around us, Heaven and Earth work together to form a complete whole. Yes, Man himself must be the goal of his study. The heart-eye, the Sun-eye, the spiritual eye (which is formed of the whole human being) must all be turned upon Man. For Man carries within him, my dear friends, infinitely more secrets and mysteries than the worlds we can perceive with our external senses and explain with the sense-bound intellect. To achieve a knowledge of Man as a spirit, to achieve a spiritual knowledge of Man, is the task of modern initiation. On this path of initiation knowledge we have therefore to set out in quest of a universal knowledge, but always with this goal in view,—that, through learning to understand the world, through learning to understand the whole Cosmos, we may attain at last to understand Man.

And now compare the situation of an initiate of out own age with the situation of an initiate of ancient times. The men of those early times had faculties of soul that made it possible for the initiate to awaken within them a memory of the time we pass through before we descend into an earthly body. It was therefore for the initiate of those days a question of awakening cosmic memories. And for the Greeks it was a matter of looking into Nature, of beholding Nature. But the initiate of modern times has to set before him as his goal the knowledge of Man; he is called upon to learn to know Man, directly, as a spiritual being. For this, he must learn to free himself from his present limited and earthly understanding of his connection with the Universe. Let me repeat an example I gave recently to Oxford of how this liberation has to be effected.

One of the tasks undertaken by initiation knowledge, that presents unusual difficulty, is that of making connection with souls who have left the Earth and gone through the gate of death. It is not at all easy to establish such connections, but it can be done by arousing the deeper forces of the soul. It is necessary to realise from the first that one has to accustom oneself, by the careful pursuance of certain exercises, to the only kind of language it is possible to speak with the dead. This language is, in a way, a child of our ordinary human speech. Yet you would fail completely, were you to set out with the idea that ordinary human speech, just as it is, would be of any assistance to you in establishing intercourse with the dead. One of the first things we discover is that the dead can understand only for a very short time what we call nouns. There is in their language no way of expressing a ‘thing,’ an isolated thing, which we denote with a word we call a noun. The words in their language all convey the feeling of movement, they are all full of inner activity. Consequently we find that when a little time has gone by since the soul passed through the gate of death, he is responsive only to words that denote activity,—that is, to verbs. In our intercourse with the dead, we shall, from time to time, want to put questions to them; we must then put our questions to them; we must then put our questions in a form they can understand. If we are able to do this, after a time the answer will come; only, we must know how to be watchful for it, how to give heed to it. As a rule, a few nights will have to elapse before the one who has died can answer the question we put to him. It is, as you see, a matter of finding our way gradually into the language of the dead, and it takes a long time before this language shows itself to us. The dead themselves have had to live their way into it; for they have, as you know, to withdraw their soul-life completely from the Earth. The proper language of the dead bears no relation to earthly conditions, it arises from the heart,—yes, it is verily a language of the heart. It is formed rather in the same manner as exclamations or interjections are formed in earthly languages. You know, for instance, how we say ‘Ah!’ when we are moved to wonder or admiration. The language of the dead takes its origin in the same kind of way. Sounds and combinations of sounds enjoy in this language as in no other their full and real significance. From the moment of death, language begins to change for us altogether. It is no longer something that is uttered forth from the organs of speech. It becomes the kind of language of which I spoke a little while ago, when I told you how what rises up from the flowers, gives tidings to us concerning some fellow human being. We begin ourselves to speak, instead of with speech organs, with that which comes from the flowers. We ourselves become flowers, we blossom with the flowers. We enter, for instance, with the forces of our soul into the flower of the tulip, and express, in the imagination of the tulip, the same that came to expression here on Earth in the formation of the word. We grow again into the spirit, the omnipresent spirit,

You will easily see, from this one example of language, that man has to feel his way into entirely different conditions, when he has gone through the gate of death. In reality, our knowledge of man is small indeed, if we know of him only what we see with our eyes. Modern initiation knowledge has to learn about the other side of man. What I have shown you in the case of language is a beginning. We shall find that the very body of man is something altogether different from the descriptions that are given us in scientific books. As we go farther in initiation knowledge, the human body becomes for us a world in itself. It was the task of the initiate of olden times to re-awaken in man a lost faculty, to bring to remembrance in him what his life was like before he came down to Earth, The initiate of the present day has an altogether different mission. He has to accomplish something new, something that means a new step forward. What he does will continue still to have significance even when man has left the Earth,—yes, even when Earth itself is no longer there in the Cosmos. That is the nature of the task modern initiation knowledge has to fulfil; and in the strength and power of that task, it must stand forth and speak.

It is well-known to you, my dear friends, that initiation science has from time to time taken a part in the spiritual evolution of the Earth. Again and again it has made its appearance among men. The initiation knowledge that has to come into the world today and that cannot but regard all the knowledge of our time as a mere beginning of the whole knowledge man should really possess, will assuredly meet with increasing opposition and resistance. So great are the forces arrayed against it, that you will need all your strength to win through. Even before modern initiation—which opens the way for man to have intercourse again with Supersensible Powers,—even before this modern initiation began to take its true place in the world in the last third of the 19th century, opposing powers were already at work, were at pains to imbue civilisation—quite unconsciously, for the most part, as far as the human beings themselves are concerned—with tendencies that would ultimately destroy modern initiation, would wipe it clean off the face of the Earth.

Have you ever observed how constantly one hears people say, when some new fact of knowledge is brought forward: “This is how I look at it! This is my point of view!” And they say this so easily, without having undergone any special development of mind or soul. It is indeed quite generally accepted that everyone has a right to pronounce his verdict, speaking from the point of view of wherever he stands at the moment. And people are even deeply offended and grow quite angry if one ventures to suggest that there is a kind of knowledge for the attainment of which it is necessary to undergo inner development. I said just now that when in the last third of the 19th century the possibility began to arise for men to seek initiation in the modern way, enemy powers were already in action. As you see, they wanted to carry the principle of equality even into the realm of mind and spirit, so that there too all human beings shall be regarded as on the same level. I could point to many persons in whom this method of resistance to modern initiation has been at work.

My dear friends, do you think that when I have to speak out of the spirit of initiation science, the words will have the same ring as when one is speaking from an ordinary earthly standpoint? I have just been trying to explain to you how language has to change and become something quite different when it is a question of carrying on intercourse with beings of the spiritual world, and I think you will not now misunderstand me if I tell you how initiation science sees, for instance, such a man as Rousseau. Speaking from the earthly standpoint, I shall never fail to recognise the greatness and significance of Rousseau, and I am fully prepared to associate myself with the high praise and favourable criticism to which others have given expression. Should I however make bold to clothe in earthly words how Rousseau appears when one sees him from the standpoint of initiation knowledge, I should have to say: Rousseau, with his spiritual leveling of human beings,—what is he, after all, but one of the many everlasting talkers of our modern civilisation! A prince and a leader, shall we say, among them all! People do not readily understand how it is possible, from an earthly point of view to call a man great, and at the same time, from the point of view of initiation to call him an arch-talker! But if we honestly desire to attain a knowledge of man, and if we recognise that to this end we have, as I said, to take the Heavens and the Earth for our province and then discern the rhythm that beats between them, we shall find that even such a seemingly paradoxical utterance is true and requires to be said. For it is, in fact, as we learn to listen to both,—to what sounds forth from the one side and from the other side of existence, it is as we learn to hear these together, that guidance can come to us in our quest for a true knowledge of Man.

A true knowledge of Man has to build on the same foundation whereon the initiates of olden times built, on the EX DEO NASCIMUR; in recollection it must build on that which meets us when we look out into the universe where—all unconsciously to us—the Christ becomes our Guide, as I have described to you. It is however our task to bring the Christ more and more into our consciousness, so that we may gain knowledge under His guidance of the content of this world, to which death belongs. Then shall we know for a surety that we live our way into this dead and dying world with Christ; IN CHRISTO MORIMUR.

And inasmuch as we go down with Christ into the grave of Earth life, so will there follow for us too, with Him, the Resurrection and the Bestowal of the Spirit: PER SPIRITUM SANCTUM REVIVISCIMUS.

This PER SPIRITUM SANCTUM REVIVISCIMUS the modern initiate has to set before him as the goal of all his strivings. Ponder it well, and compare it with the manner and mood of thought that belongs to the science of the present day; and you will see for yourselves that opposition to modern initiation is inevitable. A terrible resistance will, without doubt, be put up to the new initiation,—perhaps a resistance of which we can have today no conception, a resistance that will take the form of deed rather than word and express itself in drastic attempts to make initiation knowledge utterly impossible and inaccessible.

It was accordingly my earnest desire, speaking as I do now in a smaller and more intimate circle, to give you descriptions of what modern initiation science can attain to know, in the hope that these descriptions may strike home to your hearts and souls and awaken strength within them; so that there may be a few at least in this generation who know how to relate themselves rightly,—on the one hand, to that which is seeking entrance to our world from the worlds of the Spirit, and on the other hand, to that which is doing all it can to prevent and make impossible the permeation of Earth life with spirituality. This is what I wanted to lay upon your hearts, my dear friends; gathered as we are here in a smaller circle, after having had, to my great satisfaction, opportunity in Oxford for lectures of a more public character. I was able in those lectures to deal with the more external aspects, and it was important that here in this smaller circle we should be able to touch on the more esoteric side of initiation knowledge.

And it is surely time we got beyond feeling puzzled and embarrassed because statements about the spiritual worlds seem paradoxical. They are bound to do so. The language of the spiritual worlds is quite another language from the languages that belong to Earth; one has actually to take great pains and put forth all one's strength before one can render in the words of earthly speech truths that should really be expressed in some entirely different way. You must therefore be quite prepared to find that it will often give people a shock when you tell them, quite simply and directly, of something that takes place in the spiritual worlds.

I wanted in this way to draw your attention to the feeling and impulse that lay behind today's lecture, and I would like now to unite what I have said with an expression of deep satisfaction at being able once again to speak to you here in London. It is always a source of satisfaction to me to be able to do this. As we said before, it happens very seldom. But on the rare occasions when we are for a short time together, may it indeed be that we use the opportunity to stimulate anew in our hearts and souls that stronger kind of ‘togetherness’ that should subsist, the world over, without interruption, among those who espouse the cause of Anthroposophia. This has been my endeavour today, and it is in this sense that I would express in conclusion the earnest desire, my dear friends, that we may in future remain together, however far we are in space from one another.

Translated by Dorothy S. Osmond

The importance of Anthroposophy for present and future mankind will only gradually be realised, but insight will come when understanding has been gained of certain things indicated in occult writings though not, as a rule, studied in sufficient depth, Reference could be made to innumerable passages in books on occultism or also in writings on religion in support of what I am referring to here, but I shall mention only this well-known and very significant passage in the New Testament: ‘Unto them that are without, the mysteries are revealed in parables, that seeing they may see and not understand. But unto you’—so says Christ Jesus—‘the mysteries of the kingdoms of heaven shall be revealed in their true form.’¹

The profound significance of such a passage is generally overlooked. What does it really mean? Which are the most important parables in which Christ Jesus speaks to His disciples? They are those which, as a rule, are not considered to be parables at all. What man sees in the kingdoms of Nature around him on the physical plane, he takes to be reality. He looks at an animal or a plant, and pictures to himself that these are realities in the forms in which they appear. But in truth it is not so, for what is actually present as a reality is the spiritual world—that and that alone. And not until we nave recognised the Spiritual in the things around us do we truly know reality.

Everything else that is revealed to us in surrounding nature is tantamount only to a symbol for the spiritual world behind it. Everything to be seen in the kingdoms of mineral, plant, animal, and also in the physical human kingdom, everything that makes an impression upon the sense-organs, upon intellect and intelligence—all these things are nothing but symbols of the Spirit; and only one who learns how to interpret these symbols reaches the reality, the Spirit.

And so as men pass through the world, observing its beings and its happenings, what they perceive are symbols, nothing but symbols. Nature herself addresses man in parables, in symbols. In the Spirit alone there is reality. When the spirit is being spoken of in images taken from Nature, Christ Jesus is explaining processes pertaining to the Spirit. He speaks in a parable of the seed that is sown and undergoes different forms of destiny. (St Mark, IV, 1–9). The process of which He is speaking belongs to the kingdoms of outer Nature—hence it can only be described in the form of a parable. But when Christ Jesus is making clear to His disciples that He is one with the Father of all existence, that he has to live on the earth and suffer death, that within Him is a Christ-power, a Christ-impulse that must pass through death as a force by which courage and consolation can be given to all men through all time to come—then He is speaking of reality, He is speaking of the Spirit.

Knowledge, therefore, can only be genuine when man has succeeded in penetrating behind the mysterious secrets of the world, so that he learns to recognise symbols which indicate spiritual processes. And in truth the soul will be tremendously enriched when man is able to be aware of his relationship with the outside world.

We will consider a particular example.—Going to sleep and waking is an ever-recurring rhythmic experience. Man must experience in rhythmic sequence the flashing up of the normal day-consciousness and its subsequent darkening into the state of sleep. If we now ask, what may be compared in Nature outside with this rhythmic alternation of sleeping and waking in man, many will think of the rhythmic alternation in the growth and withering of plants in the spring and autumn. Man sees the green foliage appearing, the blossoming, the ripening of the fruits, the forming of the seed; then, during the winter, all this seems to be obliterated and to reappear in the spring. It might come naturally to him to compare the processes of his own waking and going to sleep with the budding of the plants in spring and their withering in the autumn. That would, however, be a fallacy, merely an external comparison.

What is it that we actually experience when we go to sleep at night? Our astral body and our Ego emerge from the etheric body and the physical body. If we now look back spiritually upon the physical body and the etheric body we shall perceive that their activity at night and by day is entirely different. During the day, through our normal consciousness, we wear out our physical and etheric bodies through acts of will, through feeling and through thinking; fatigue is evidence that we have worn out our physical and etheric bodies. In fact our daily life is a process of ruining and wearing out our physical and etheric bodies, and they are most thoroughly worn out in the evening. With clairvoyant sight we shall perceive that during sleep the physical body and the etheric body begin to manifest a plantlike activity. The worn-out nervous system and etheric body begin as it were to bud and blossom at the moment of going to sleep and within the human being something takes place that may be compared with what happens in the spring, when everything buds and sprouts. The moment of going to sleep must be compared with the spring and the deeper our sleep the more do our physical and etheric bodies pass over into a condition of budding, sprouting life. It is then spring and summer within us, and as the moment of waking approaches it is autumn; consciousness lights up, clear day-consciousness. The summer-like condition is brought to its close and, during the course of the day, desolation resembling that of Nature during winter, when the Earth's activity has died away, is brought about in our physical and etheric bodies.

Thus going to sleep must be compared with the season of spring and waking with that of autumn. The Earth-spirits in the plants liberate themselves in spring from the physical element of the plant world and the spiritual beings connected with the plants sink into a kind of sleeping condition during the summer and are awake during the winter; where there is winter on the Earth, there these spirits permeate the planetary body. Admittedly, it might be said in connection with the Earth that it is not possible to speak of sleeping and waking, because conditions are different in each hemisphere. But the rhythmic movement is such that when the Earth-spirits depart from the north they go towards the south; they permeate the planet in rhythmic alternation. A certain comparison is possible here with what takes place within the human being. Man so easily forgets that he is a whole man. He supposes that thoughts and consciousness reside only in the head, and when the astral body and the Ego are outside, he believes that there is nothing within him that thinks. In reality the lower half of his body is all the more active, only he knows nothing of it. The essential point is to realise that we can actually speak of the Earth-spirits beginning to sleep in the spring, that they withdraw from the body of the Earth where it is spring and summer ... Similarly, a vegetative life unfolds in the human being while he is asleep. And in the winter, when the Earth-spirits stream in again, the seeds remain hidden and the Earth-spirits wake; they are then united with the Earth. Thus we may say: When we stand on the Earth in summer we have around us physical Nature; everything buds and blossoms and lower elemental spirits are active on the Earth. Divine life, divine consciousness, penetrate into the Earth in wintertime, not in summertime.

True spiritual science helps us to recognise this because it is able to penetrate into these things with clear, clairvoyant consciousness. Man can say, if only he is capable of feeling it: spring—and summer—forces which cause outer Nature to bud and blossom call forth the lower elemental beings out of the Earth, whereas the highest Spirits who are connected with the Earth have withdrawn from it. And in the middle of the summer the lower elemental spirits, driven forth by the power of the Sun, celebrate a kind of ecstasy of their lower forces.

Then comes wintertime; the warmth and light of the Sun decrease, and with the approach of winter the highest divine forces unite with the part of the Earth on which we live. In winter the Earth feels as though enwrapped in the Beings with whom we are connected in the depths of our nature. We may then feel reverence which takes the form of a prayer to these sublime Beings, to the divine Powers who have been allied to man from the primal beginning.

It is the mission of Spiritual Science or Anthroposophy to teach us to know and understand what is living in our environment. And this it will do, with all clarity. We know that men once possessed this knowledge, although in the form of dreamlike, clairvoyant consciousness; what we reacquire to-day was once primordial wisdom revealed to mankind through dreamlike clairvoyance.

Is there external evidence too for what has been said to-day? Yes, there is. In far past ages men knew well that in the summer season the lower elemental spirits rise up and reach a state of ecstasy at midsummer, that the activity of outer physical life is then at its highest point. Hence the middle of the summer was chosen as the right time for festivals that were intended to be intimations of man's physical connection with Nature. With their ancient clairvoyance men knew that the greatest intensity of physical life, the ecstasy of physical life, is reached when the human being surrenders himself at midsummer to the splendour and glory of outer physical Nature. And it was also known that the approach of winter means an awakening of the divine forces, a union of the divine forces with the body of the Earth. For this reason ancient consciousness placed in midwinter the festival that was meant to betoken man's feeling of union with what is intimately related to the most divine forces of his own soul; it was the festival of the divine Being who would one day become the Spirit of the Earth. This festival could not take place in the summer; it was celebrated in December as the Christmas festival, the festival of the Spirit. The festival of physical Nature, the St John's festival, was celebrated in the summer; Christmas, the festival of the highest Spirits, belongs to the season of winter.

When we realise what intimate messages the festivals have for us, we feel united with the whole spiritual evolution of mankind. What men have established in this way reveals the knowledge they have possessed and the fruits of this knowledge. The external physical light of the Sun, the physical forces of the Heavens, come down to the Earth in the spring. This descent of the physical light and this withdrawal of the Spirit to the heavenly world just as the Spirit withdraws from man during the night, is wonderfully expressed in the Easter festival, which is determined every year by the constellations. Just as in the spring the forces of Heaven and Earth work together visibly, so was the Easter festival fixed according to the visible positions of heavenly bodies, according to knowledge of the stars.

The suggested introduction of a fixed Easter because material considerations seem to require this, is absolutely characteristic of our age. It amounts to taking away from the Easter festival the very feature that gives it meaning, and this for the sake of material, industrial and commercial interests. A movable Easter may be inconvenient for balancing accounts and be troublesome for certain business arrangements but the very fact of the date of the Easter festival being determined by the constellation in the heavens is an expression of the feeling man has of the inter-working of the earthly and the heavenly in the spring.

And just as these forces work in man when he goes to sleep, so in the autumn, and when he wakes from sleep, a spiritual element is active; but when he goes to sleep, and in the spring, physical and spiritual, heavenly and earthly, work together. In fixing the year's festivals this had naturally to be given physical expression too. Herein lies profound wisdom. It is probable that the commercial, materialistic interests of our time will gain the day and Easter will become a fixed festival. But it would fare ill with knowledge that humanity ought to preserve if men were to forget the essential meaning of such a festival. For this reason it will be incumbent upon the anthroposophical Movement always to celebrate Easter as a movable festival. An Easter festival determined by materialistic principles would then exist by the side of the Easter festival fixed according to spiritual principles; and we shall celebrate this festival truly when we have learnt to regard the external world itself as a symbol.

The coming of spring is a symbol of an event performed by the Spirit—namely, that of going to sleep. In the autumn, Nature withers away and the Spirit wakes. The withering away is no reality; it is a symbol of the fact that the divine forces allied with the Earth are waking. And with their wisdom the men of ancient times placed in the winter season the festivals which indicate the connection with spiritual worlds. Infinitely deep wisdom is everywhere in evidence here, wisdom through which man becomes aware that he lives in the flow of Time, together with spiritual Beings to whom he belongs. And so man will gradually learn to know that he belongs to the Spirit of which external Nature is merely a symbol; more and more he will long to experience his relation to the Spirit, not to its outer symbol.

We know that the great Atlantean catastrophe was followed by the period of ancient sacred Indian culture; then came the ancient Persian and the Egypto-Chaldean-Babylonian epochs of culture, then the fourth, the Graeco-Latin epoch, and we ourselves are living in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. But attention has also been called to another rhythm. The Graeco-Latin epoch stands, as it were, by itself; the fifth epoch is a kind of repetition of the third, the Egypto-Chaldean-Babylonian epoch; the sixth epoch will be a repetition of the Persian, and the seventh a revival and renewal of the spiritual content of ancient Indian culture. Qualities and features of Egypto-Chaldean civilisation therefore come into evidence again in a certain way in our own thinking, feeling and impulses of will. During that third epoch men were destined to unfold and intensify their connection with the world of the stars. Astrology was elaborated and cultivated in the third epoch. Men had direct clairvoyant insight into the mysterious connections between the world of stars and human destiny.

There have been highly spiritual men who felt this inwardly, as though through a resurgence of incarnations in that third epoch. It was like a recollection of what they had achieved in ages of the distant past, when there was direct, intuitive astrological knowledge. This was the case with Tycho de Brahe, the reincarnated Julian the Apostate. [See also Occult History, lecture IV, and Appendix; also Karmic Relationships: Esoteric Studies - Volume IV, Vol. IV, lecture V and VII.] Copernicus too, like Kepler, was an astrologer and attached great value to those mysterious connections through which human destiny can become intelligible.

This is naturally regarded as utter superstition by the ‘enlightened’ mentality of to-day and the attitude of a modern man who prides himself upon possessing it will be that Tycho de Brahe was admittedly a great astronomer and in those days it was excusable that he should also have been an astrologer! Enlightened men of the present age see fit to ‘excuse’ a great deal; for example, they excuse Tycho de Brahe for having astonished the whole world at that time by foretelling the death of the Sultan Soliman. They regard this as an understandable weakness of the great man who made the first map of the heavens. Indeed these enlightened minds even find an excuse for the circumstance that the death of the Sultan Soliman actually occurred within a few days of the date foretold by Tycho de Brahe!

So we see how the ancient Egypto-Chaldean wisdom flashed up again in certain individuals. It is present even now, only we must seek it in a new form, and then anthroposophical study of the symbols and parables to be found in the external world will reveal many secrets. We perceive, for example, that in every plant, if a connecting line is drawn between the points around the stalk where the leaves are attached to it, we get a spiral; it is as if the leaves made their way around the stalk in spirals; and in a plant where the stalk is not rigid it follows this law itself, describing spirals as, for instance, is the case in the bindweed. These are everyday phenomena but no attention is paid to them. Some day, however, these things will again be studied and then the striking discovery will be made that these movements of the leaves depend upon forces that are not to be found on the Earth but work down from the planets; and because the planets describe certain spiral movements in the heavens, their forces actually guide the leaves in spirals around the stalk. The stalk grows vertically and the blossom is the culmination. The spiral lines differ in the various species of plants because there are several planets and their effect upon the plants is different in each case.

A time will come when it will be known, for example, how Venus moves, and what species of plant corresponds to this movement. Such a plant will then rightly be regarded as a mirror image in miniature of the movement described by Venus. Other plants mirror the movement described by Mercury in the spiral line connecting the points at which the leaves are attached to the stalk; others mirror the movement described by Jupiter, others again that described by Saturn. The planets impress their scripts upon the plants of the Earth, and the Sun's force regulates the whole process in such a way that the effect produced by the planets culminates in the blossom. Some day men will study the connection of the spiral growth of the plants with the movements of the planets and then they will feel the kinship of the kingdoms of the Earth with the kingdoms of Heaven.

Everything in the external world is a parable, a symbol; the laws of the growth of plants symbolize the movements of the planets, and these in turn are symbols of something even more sublime—deeds of spiritual Beings in the Cosmos. It will eventually be possible to discover how individual physical entities and beings are connected with the Cosmos. A beginning will be made by studying physical matter, and what grows and thrives on the Earth will be connected with the deeds of spiritual Beings in cosmic space. Men will gain knowledge of how minerals, plants and animals and even human destiny, are connected with deeds in the Cosmos. This knowledge will be gained anew during our present epoch but for a long time yet external science will refuse to adapt itself to such ways of approach and those who busy themselves with astrology will continue to cling to old traditions instead of going to the real sources. That is what ought to happen, but it can only do so if men confront the world with an attitude resulting from the stage of occult development appropriate for the modern age—regarding everything in the external world as signs and symbols.

Signs that had meaning for ancient clairvoyant consciousness have been handed down from olden times without being understood. For example, the sign of Aries was full of meaning and living content to the men of old; the sign did not apply to the constellation of Aries as such but indicated that the Sun or the Moon was standing in a certain relationship to this constellation, enabling certain forces to work in a definite way.

What we call ‘space’ at the present time is nothing but fantasy—it too is a ‘symbol.’ There is no space as such; spiritual forces are working from all directions. This is a difficult concept to grasp but the reality of certain facts can be felt instinctively.—On the morning of 21st March the Sun rises approximately in front of the constellation of Pisces, but this is simply the indication that particular spiritual forces—or Beings, to be more exact—are exercising a definite influence upon the Earth at that time. When we feel how this sign—the Sun in the constellation of Pisces—should be interpreted, we can translate it into terms of imaginative knowledge and speak of its inner significance.

An endeavour has been made to indicate these things in the Calendar which has just appeared. In this Calendar will be found signs that differ from those handed down by tradition, because the latter are no longer suitable for modern consciousness. (See note at end of lecture.) These pictures of the Zodiacal constellations are representations of actual experiences connected with the waking and sleeping of particular spiritual Beings. We have in these pictures a renewal of certain knowledge that needs to be renewed at the present time, because the third post-Atlantean culture-epoch must as it were rise again in the fifth epoch.

One must, of course, begin with a correct computation of time, and this brings me to a matter that will be regarded by those outside our Movement as sheer distortion and lunacy. It will be found that the Calendar indicates the year 1879 [i.e., 1879 years after the birth of Ego-consciousness at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. In many other lectures Dr Steiner indicates the year 1879 as the beginning of the Michael Age.]; this is because it is important for people of the present age to regard the year of the Event of Golgotha as the most momentous of all, as the year which determines how time is to be computed. When on a Friday in April in the year 33 A.D. the Mystery of Golgotha took place, Ego-consciousness in the present sense was actually born. It matters not at all on what part of the Earth a man lives, to which nation, race or religion he belongs. Just as the day of Caesar's death is the same for a Chinese or a European, the fact well known in occult life is that the Mystery of Golgotha took place in the year 33 A.D. The birth of Ego-consciousness is a fact of international significance, having nothing whatever to do with nationality.

It is therefore surprising to read in foreign theosophical periodicals that here we are promoting theosophy in a form patterned entirely in accordance with German culture! No credence whatever should be given to this statement for it gainsays the very essence of our Movement. One is little inclined to enter into or discuss these things and would much prefer to ignore them. But it is a duty and a necessity to call attention to them so that friends may be forearmed when sheer misstatements are made. Unfortunately, however, such misstatements are sometimes believed. It is anything but pleasant to have to speak of these things and it is done only because it is a duty to safeguard mankind against fallacy. If it is insisted that equal rights must be accorded to opinions but the interpretation of this is to distort one opinion and connect a particular region of the earth with it, warning is essential. What really matters is that truth must reign among us as a sacred law.

Our desire was to express in the Calendar the objective fact of the birth of the Ego. We reckon from the Mystery of Golgotha, hence from Easter to Easter, not from one New Year's Day to the next. This has been the cause of further derision and mockery, because it compels us to reckon with years of unequal length. But in what is unequal there is life; in what is uniform and fixed there is the impress of death, and our Calendar is intended to be a creative impulse for life.

There still remains the question: how can all this be a matter of actual experience? The answer to this question will be found in the Calendar itself. As its second part you will find the ‘Calendar of the Soul’ which I myself regard as very important. For each consecutive week I have tried to draw up verses for meditation, the effect of which will enable the soul gradually to discover in itself and in its own experiences the connection with the great cosmic constellations. These formulae for meditation do in all reality lead the soul out of its narrow confines to experience of the heavens. I can assure you that the results of long, long occult investigations are contained in these 52 verses which will enable the soul to find access to happenings in the great universe and thereby to experience the Spirits working in the onward flow of Time. But if you ponder on the texts of the verses in the Calendar you will discern an element of Timelessness, in rhythmic alternation, an element that is experienced inwardly by the human being, the laws of which run parallel to those of Time in the outer world. Mere analogies do not suffice here.

Each one of you will be able to use this Calendar of the Soul every year. In it you will find something that might be described as the finding of the path leading from the human soul to the living Spirit weaving through the Universe.

I have thus tried to justify the deed that has taken the form of the Calendar. It is not to be regarded as a sudden inspiration but as something organically connected with our whole Movement.

• 1. A new edition of the Calendar is in course of preparation and will be published by the Rudolf Steiner Press. The first edition of the Calendar (1912) contained reproductions of sketches made by Imme von Eckardstein according to indications given by Dr Steiner and corresponding to each sign of the Zodiac. Subsequent editions have contained only the verses for the 52 weeks of the year, with a short Foreword by Dr Steiner. The Calendar of the Soul is contained in volume No. 40 of the Complete Centenary Edition of Dr Steiner's works, other contents of this volume being as follows: Planetentanz; Zwölf Stimmungen; Das Lied von der initiation: eine Satire; Wahrsprüche und Widmungen; Credo: Der Einzelne und das All.
  An article by Margot Rössler entitled “Rudelf Steiner's Calendar” appeared in the Spring number of Anthroposophical Quarterly in 1958 (Vol. 3, No. 1) and contains information on Imme von Eckardstein's work.

The spiritual content of the gospel should become more and more accessible to people through the theosophical movement in our time. And this is all the more necessary as the biblical records, especially in our time, are beginning to be more and more fragmented and frayed by historical-scientific research, which is a good thing in and of itself. Modern man has lost sight of spiritual realities.

The external historical research in our days has come to the conclusion that the three synoptic gospels must be understood in a certain way as historical events. In view of the contradictions present in them, this research seeks to make it credible that they came about because these gospels were not written by eyewitnesses, but that the stories were passed from mouth to mouth and only later written down. According to one assumption, the Synoptics should come from an Aramaic source and be oral messages about the events in Palestine. The one who wrote the Gospel of John should not want to give a historical event, but only a confession presented in external images.

But the gospels will be lost to humanity if criticism continues on this path. Only through spiritual research can we find the true facts. This research does not ask for some fantastic Aramaic source, but for the real sources from which the gospels emerged.

Only by examining these can we achieve a deeper understanding. We must turn not to any external documents, but to the mysteries of the past if we are to understand the Gospels. In these mysteries there was something that could be called an initiation ceremony. The person's need for development was known to the Hierophant, and the methods used to lead him into the spiritual world were not as well known and described in ancient times as they are in our days. People were at a different level of development then, and therefore needed different methods than the ones we use. Careful instruction preceded every initiation for years. The content of the instruction given in the Egyptian and Pythagorean places of initiation was somewhat similar to what we today call

The first degree, which followed the preparation, was called “imagination” or “knowledge”. The second degree was called “enlightenment” or “inspiration” and the third “completion through ‘intuition’ or ‘direct spiritual vision’.

These three degrees were not intimate inner experiences as in later times, but purely external actions in which the inner development was reflected. The disciple was prepared by certain sensual models, great symbolic figures that were shown to him in the mystery temples and that were supposed to have a certain magical effect on him. He was also to experience certain dramatic situations and undergo certain physical trials that were intended to awaken and release forces that were still dormant in his soul. These symbolic figures and dramatic situations were intended to make him aware of all the temptations that a person can encounter in the world and show him how far a person can fall if left to his own devices. To escape this, the soul must free itself from everything that binds it. By observing external, often quite drastic situations, the student should be cleansed of all his “urges, desires and passions.” And through this catharsis or cleansing, all that is noblest in the soul should be drawn from the innermost part of the soul. After that, he was ready to enter the first degree, the world of imagination.

This catharsis was all the more necessary because otherwise the pupil would have been exposed to all the dangers in the new world that was opening up to him. The external world was no longer the same, he could no longer live on the account of his surroundings. He could no longer have the help of all these precepts and generally accepted views that build a society, a family. Horrifying images arose in his soul. If he had not been given some firm principles and supporting thoughts through education, he could have fared very badly. From the depths of his soul, quite objective images of all the instincts and desires that he carried within him arose – not only those of which he was aware, but also others that he did not even know. Their effect could make him worse than before if he had not first undergone a process of purification that penetrated to the very core of his soul, a catharsis. In this way, the disciple was slowly led through a number of external means to the second and then to the third degree.

What interests us most is the last degree of initiation, which was the same in the most diverse mysteries. Let us now first look back at the Egyptian mysteries. There we find that the disciple was placed in a lethargic state for a period of three and a half days, during which time he neither saw nor heard with his external senses. He lay as if dead in his coffin or on a cross. During ordinary sleep, as we know, the etheric body remains in the physical body, while the astral body and the ego are drawn out. But in the cataleptic state, the etheric body unites with the other two, and the physical body is left alone. So it was a literal killing of the father principle and a union with the mother principle. This enabled the disciple to have experiences in the spiritual world that underlies the physical, that is, the etheric world, and then, based on his own experience, he could speak of it as its messenger.

But the etheric body was not allowed to move too far away from the physical body, because then it could happen that it could not be recalled at all. The hierophant had to watch over this and recall the disciple at the right time. The disciple then returned to the world with the memory of everything he had experienced, and was then able to put into words what he had seen and heard, and become a witness of the spiritual world. This happened during the Egyptian initiation.

The last act of the initiation took place in a different way in the countries that spread like a broad belt from the Persian Gulf, the Black and Caspian Sea to the west to France and Great Britain. Here it was the Zoroaster religion that left its mark on the peoples. After the disciple had undergone the first two degrees in the Druid or Drotten mysteries, for example, and had been instructed in the mysteries, he was finally introduced to the actual world of ethereal processes, to the spiritual world that surrounds us. The events that are reflected in the cosmos could have a direct effect on him there. Meanwhile, everything that had moved in him before was silenced and poured out into the whole cosmos. [While in the Egyptian initiation the disciple completely stepped out of the context of the outer world and stepped completely into his soul, descended to Persephonaia, the disciple of the Drotten Mysteries was moved up into the cosmic worlds and could pour out his being up to the twelvefold, up to the Zodiac. He knew that the things spoke differently, depending on whether this or that constellation was above the others. Herein lay the difference with the Egyptian initiation. This path was adapted to the different constitution of the people.]

Destined for different peoples, these paths - both the outer and the inner one - led to the same result. In the Christ, they were to unite, flow together into a single path and form the unified Christian initiation. Therefore, anyone who reads the Gospel correctly will find the most important mysteries in it. The Christ Himself had initiated Lazarus and brought him the last act of the Egyptian initiation drama, but He also had him live through the most important part of the Nordic initiation. This can be seen from a passage in the Gospel of John, where something is related that the evangelist could not have seen with his physical eyes, and that only someone who had been initiated by the Christ Himself could have related. “The next day,“ it says, ‘John the Baptist and two of his disciples were standing there with him, and he saw Jesus coming and said, ’Behold the Lamb of God,' and the” - others - “two disciples heard him speak and followed Jesus. Then Jesus turned around... ‘and so on, whereupon the evangelist adds: ’And it was in the tenth hour.”

How should we understand this? Spiritual research is much more realistic than historical research, which, for example, interprets this passage to mean that the evangelist was standing nearby and observed all this. But that is not correct. The words “It was the tenth hour” indicate that the author of the Gospel of John was clairvoyant, so that the positions of the constellations affected him. He was far away, but a certain constellation made it possible for him to turn his clairvoyant gaze to this event. It is impossible to explain this addition in any other way - “It was the tenth hour. Only at this hour was a certain constellation such that he could see this clairvoyantly.

There is nothing in the Gospels that is not based, and the more closely you examine them, the clearer they become. And if we could imbibe the general sense of the incredible depth of the Gospels, we would have gained a great deal.

Now, however, Lazarus and the man who wrote the Gospel of John are the same person. The fact that he becomes clairvoyant through the influence of the constellations indicates that he has undergone the Nordic initiation, and by being raised from the dead he is also an Egyptian initiate. Partly because of this double initiation, and partly because Jesus himself had initiated him, his gospel has such a particularly great significance. The evangelists have all described in their own special way the initiation drama as it takes place in the various temples. Through preparatory scenes and symbolic images, which were different in the various temples, the disciples were introduced to the spiritual world.

But there was something else taught as well. What was depicted in the mysteries, it was taught, should become a reality in the outer physical world. The drama of initiation was to be relived by a son of God, and it was by this very fact that he would be recognized. When Ahura-Mazdao descends and incarnates as a human being, he will experience in real life everything that had previously only been enacted inside the temple. When this happens, the Son of God has come to us. The evangelists knew that this fact had occurred with Christ Jesus. They knew that the mysteries enacted inside the temple had become reality through the event in Palestine. That is why they were also able to describe the initiation ceremony. At the same time, they described it as it had actually occurred. For the event in Palestine coincides with the ancient mysteries and reflects them. It is here, in the ancient mysteries of the past – and not in some Aramaic documents – that we must seek the real source of the Gospel.

The evangelists understood and recognized that once upon a time a man lived on earth whose whole outer life was in everything an image of what was proclaimed in the temples, and that is why they were able to write about it at the same time as they described the ancient methods of initiation.

Writing a biography in the same sense as in modern times was not the point here. You can never find the essence of a person's life in letters and notes that the people concerned have carelessly left behind and that are the main things people look for nowadays. That is not how the story of Jesus was written in those days. The evangelists followed a better method. For them, the essential thing was the events of his life that corresponded to the initiatory drama, and that he, as an historical personality, had really lived through this. For them, he was the greatest of the initiates because he had been awakened to life by virtue of his own divine self, not by the hierophant in an underground temple.

All this was grasped by the three first evangelists and described in connection with their various initiations. Lazarus, who had been initiated by the Christ Jesus himself, had experienced everything as a spiritual eyewitness, and therefore he, who knew best the innermost causes of the great drama, could give the most intimate descriptions of it. He did not need Egyptian documents; the document he followed was given to him by the Christ Jesus himself. We find, therefore, that the Gospels give us, on the one hand, historical reality and, on the other, pictures of the initiation dramas of the mysteries.

When Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, he was actually performing an initiation ceremony before [all] the people, and in this fact we have the reason for the fierce persecution by the Jewish authorities. Otherwise it is impossible to understand why they wanted to kill him precisely because he had raised a man who was thought to be dead, yes, why they even wanted to kill the one who had been raised. “This man does many signs,” they said among themselves, “we cannot live with him.” Conservative as they were with regard to their old teaching, they wanted to keep the secrets of the mysteries.

Until now, only a few had known the way to the spiritual world, but now the secrets of the temple had been brought to light. [Now it should be possible to relive the initiation process. The process should be presented to the whole world. First in an exemplary way through the resurrection of Lazarus, then on the cross.] Outside the temple, the great initiation drama had taken place, and in the sight of the people, the initiate had been called to life; this was clear to all who understood what had happened. In the eyes of the conservatives, it was a betrayal of the mysteries and should be punished by death. It was therefore not surprising that the priests said that they could not live with this man.

[One might object: If the initiation process involves dangers, was it allowed to be published? As it had happened, yes. — If it had only been described up to the Lazarus event, it would have been dangerous; but after the twelfth chapter comes the account of what had to happen so that the public would not be endangered.

If we understand the whole Gospel of John, we find in it what made it possible to hint at the initiation process.

From my book, “Christianity as Mystical Fact,” it can be gathered that the Gospels, when rightly understood, must be accepted in a very special way. As I intend to speak on the Gospels during this winter I would like to say that it is not possible for me always to begin again from the beginning for the sake of the younger members, so that there will certainly be much in these lectures that will be difficult of comprehension for younger members.

It has frequently been remarked on the occasion of the annual meeting how necessary it is that our younger members should take part in the courses of lectures, that these should be arranged so that early teachings are constantly repeated. May I say here something rather strange—it does not seem practical that the younger members should work so very energetically at going over the beginnings of theosophical life. In that case it might happen that the higher realms of spiritual science were incomprehensible to them, and they might for this reason form strange opinions as to what spiritual science is. This is, however, a matter for the individual member.

I showed in the book mentioned above that we have to accept the Gospels as “books of initiation.” This means that they are nothing less than accounts of the ancient ritual of initiation, paraphrased in a certain way. What is stated in these ancient writings? They mainly contain accounts of how the candidate in his training was led step by step along the path to higher worlds. How he gradually went through certain soul-experiences and was finally brought to the point where certain forces slumbering in his soul were awakened. We read how higher stages gradually evolved out of lower ones, up to that stage when the spiritual world dawned within the soul of the would-be initiate and the secrets of the spiritual world were revealed to him. He could then look into the spiritual world. He could behold, for example, the Beings of the different hierarchies as we have described them in other connections on many occasions. Thus the content of such “books of initiation” was what anyone seeking initiation had to carry out.

In studying pre-Christian ages we find that many persons passed through initiation in different centres of the Mysteries; that this was not always exactly the same in form, though similar in character, that the stages were introduced one by one up to the point where the person seeking initiation could see into the spiritual world, where the Beings of the Hierarchies appeared before him spiritually—that is in a different way to a physical appearance.

This was how it was in pre-Christian times. What meaning for Christianity had these initiations into the ancient Mysteries? What was their significance towards the Christ-Impulse? Their significance was that a Being, outwardly visible on the physical plane and known as “Jesus of Nazareth,” disclosed the secrets of the spiritual world in a way that was not customary, in a way not in accordance with the methods of pre-Christian times. An individual initiated in accordance with ancient ritual (when the events just described had taken place in his soul) could come before men and speak of the secrets of the spiritual kingdoms. But in the case of Christ Jesus something was present by which this personality, Jesus of Nazareth, could speak of these hidden matters without having been led to them in the ancient customary manner.

Jesus of Nazareth had been led to them through what is called the baptism in Jordan. The Spirit of Christ then entered into him. From this moment—that is from the moment of an historic event when the person of Christ Jesus was initiated in so open a way—the Spirit of Christ spoke to the people around Him of the Mysteries of the spiritual realms, but in a higher way than had been done before. Something had there-fore been accomplished on the physical plane, open for all the world to see, which formerly had been attainable—and to a certain extent only by initiates in the depths of the Mysteries, so that they might then go forth and speak of these mysteries to their fellow men. To put the matter pictorially we might say:—We look back to the ancient temple of the Mysteries, we see the Heirophant performing the rites of initiation, so that the person initiated can look into the spiritual world, and can then go forth and teach others of this world. This had always been carried out gradually and in the secret depths of the Temple. Any talk of such things in the world outside the Mysteries, any talk concerning the spiritual world, was an utter impossibility. But now, what had often and often taken place in the depths of the Mysteries, had been transferred to the outer world, it took place in Palestine. There it was enacted as an historic fact, as the development of Jesus of Nazareth; it was enacted historically in the Mystery of Golgotha. And we have to accept this Mystery, set forth as it was historically before all the world, as forming the link between the Mystery of Golgotha and those ancient Temple-Mysteries of the past.

Writings descriptive of initiation, though dealing in essence with the same stages of development differed in certain particulars in different parts of the earth, and were suited to the differences in human individuals according to space and time. Knowing this let us endeavour to enter into the soul of one of those, generally called Evangelists, who concerned themselves with the writing of our Gospels. These men, through their own occult schooling, had some knowledge of the initiation literature of the various peoples and Mysteries. They knew what men had to pass through before it was possible for them to speak of the secrets of spiritual realms and spiritual Hierarchies. And now through the events that had occurred in Palestine, and through the Mystery of Golgotha, they were aware that what formerly had only been seen by initiates in the temple of the Mysteries, had been enacted openly on the plane of history before all the world, and that it would henceforth enter ever more and more deeply into the minds and souls of men.

The Evangelists were not biographers in the ordinary sense of the word when things are written which really do not concern the world, and which no one requires to know about any actively creative personality. They were not biographers like those who ferret out each private concern of the person they write of, but they were biographers in so far as they described the life of Christ by saying:—“Something happened at a certain time to Jesus of Nazareth, into whom the Christ entered, which we have seen happen again and again in the Mysteries; but there it was not compressed as a historic event into a few short years; here, on the contrary, it has become an event of history, yet is at the same time a repetition of Temple-ritual; we can therefore describe this life by describing the different stages formerly passed through during initiation.”

Thus were have to regard the Gospels as books of instructions concerning initiation. In them are found again the ancient directions for initiation, but so that we are shown in a certain way the reason why that which formerly occurred in the depths of the Mysteries now emerges on to the great plane of history. The Evangelist who begins his Gospel by stating the reason for this, who tells from the beginning why he is in a position to write of an historic event which, transformed into something greater, fulfils the instructions given for initiation, is the writer of the Gospel according to Mark. He tells from the first how man has evolved so that this great fact of the removal of initiation from the secret depth of the temples and the setting of it openly on the plane of history, might come to pass. He tells us from the beginning that this is connected with an event of immeasurably great importance to human evolution; an event foretold by the Hebrew Prophets. For what occurred in Palestine as the Mystery of Golgotha had been seen and spoken of prophetically by Hebrew Initiates and Prophets.

If we try to enter into the soul of such a man as the Prophet Isaiah, with whose words the Gospel according to Mark begins, we find that he declares somewhat as follows:—A time will come when the souls of men will perceive differently than they do now; this time is now being prepared for. (Isaiah refers here to his own day.) What is it he wishes to tell us? You know that the Gospel according to Mark begins with the introduction of a mighty saying of this Prophet. You know the words well, and how they are employed. I make use here of the ordinary translation of C. Weizsäcker:—

Behold I send my messenger before thee, he shall prepare thy way. Hark to the cry in the wilderness: Make ready the way of the Lord. Make his path straight.

Thus, it is fairly well translated in our Gospel literature. The Prophet refers in these words to the greatest event in history—to the Mystery of Golgotha.

You, know that in our studies of the other Gospels great trouble has been taken to translate important passages in a comprehensible way. What matters most in this, is not the giving of a correct verbal translation according to the dictionary, but in choosing words that reproduce the deep significance of the original and convey this to us in our own language; not only in presenting them theoretically to our understanding, but so that the whole feeling that accompanied the peculiar quality of the language of that day is also passed on to us. For speech at that time was totally different from the present manner of speech. I would like to impress this fact on you, that speech was then not so abstract, so trivial as it is to-day.

The whole manner of expressing anything was such that an ever deeper meaning, a richer significance and feeling-content was imparted to the listener along with the actual words, yet he knew most unmistakably what this feeling-content was. A whole WORLD was then heard in the spoken word compared with what is ordinarily heard to-day. This is a special quality of the Hebrew tongue, it is exceedingly rich in this power of concealing a very great deal behind the words, because the images employed were taken altogether from the sense-world. Expressions such as “prepare the way” or “make straight the path” are pictures drawn from the sense-world. It is as if the path were prepared with spades and shovels. But when such words were used, the peculiarity of this language compared with others was that behind the expressions employed to denote outward things, a whole spiritual world stood—it stood there so clearly and incontestably that no one could interpret it to their own liking, as is so often done with poetry, where all kinds of things are sometimes read into it. The reason for this was that in the ancient Hebrew language, in the personal use of the language, which cannot be shown in the script, it was possible for whole hidden worlds to be given in the tone. A feeling for such secret things existed.

In Greek, the language of the Gospel text, this is not nearly so much the case. All the same it was still possible, without occult knowledge, to obtain far better translations from the Greek than from the language used by the Evangelists.

As a matter of fact, one translator has merely copied another in this without going into the matter philologically or proving how the original compared with the Greek text. I will give you later a single example of how great were the errors that arose through this. To-day I will not interrupt the course of our studies, but will try, not philologically, but with the help of what can be learnt through spiritual investigations, to put before you some important things concerning the beginning of the Gospel of Mark.

I will start with this important passage from the prophecies of Isaiah, wherein he tries to show what is to come to pass through the Event of Palestine, so that you may discover through your feeling what it means.

The Greek text is as follows:

We must in the first place clearly understand that the word messenger or angel was only used in olden times in the sense employed by us when describing the Hierarchies, that is when we describe those Beings who stand immediately above man in the ranks of the hierarchies. We must feel when we read the words “his angel” that a Being belonging to this realm is meant. If this is not felt then the meaning of the whole passage is lost. Spiritual science alone can provide a foundation for such an understanding, and also for all it has to tell us about the Christ-Event.

What is the fact of greatest importance in the Christ-Impulse? The fact that through it full consciousness first entered the human soul so that a place might be prepared there for a self-conscious ego. So that there might gradually arise within this self-consciousness ego in the further course of earthly evolution, all the secret things (Geheimnisse) which formerly arose by a kind of natural clairvoyance within the astral body.

The present epoch was preceded by one in which men still carried over with them into post-Atlantean culture a natural clairvoyance which enabled them to look into the spiritual world. In certain abnormal conditions of soul the secrets of the spiritual world still poured down into men, and they were able to look up to the Hierarchies. They naturally saw more often, and for a longer period, the Hierarchy which stands nearest to man—The Hierarchy of Angels. They saw them as the Beings standing immediately above man. In the time of this ancient clairvoyance men were not aware that they possessed something within them that was to lead them to the spiritual world. They looked on it as a grace accorded to them from without, as something granted to their souls by spiritual powers. Therefore the Prophets looking to the future could speak as follows:—“A time is coming when man will be aware of his ego; he will then know that it is through the self-conscious ego that the secrets of the spiritual world will come to him.” All this was to come. A time was to come in which man would say: “When I have my ego in me, I shall be able through the power it brings, to penetrate to the secrets of the spiritual world.” This had, however, first to be prepared for.

Thus man, who is as it were, the lowest of the Hierarchies, had to he prepared for what he was to become by being equipped with something which as yet he did not possess. The messenger or Angel, announced that man would become an ego-being in the fullest sense of the word. While the mission of former Angels had been to reveal to man the spiritual world, a special Angel was now to receive a special mission. This Angel was to carry revelation a stage further, and make known to man that he was to enter consciously into his ego, while the revelations of former Angels had not been suited to a self-conscious ego.

So Isaiah announces:—“The age of the Mystery of the Ego is to come, and from among the host of Angels one will be specially chosen to declare to you this Mystery!” Only in this way can we understand what is meant when it says that the Messenger or Angel was sent before. Before whom was the Messenger sent? He was sent beforehand to those who were to attain their self-conscious ego, and was to come as a Being from the Hierarchy of Angels. No angel had as yet announced generally to men that it was foretold they were to receive a self-conscious ego. So this messenger of whom the Prophet Isaiah spoke came to tell them to prepare themselves inwardly, to create within their souls a place for the ego, to prepare for the full validity of the ego. What is most important in this passage is the reference to the great change in the evolution of the human soul; whereas formerly men had to go out of themselves in order to enter the spiritual world, from this time onwards they could continue within their ego, and could, through it, discover the secrets of that world.

Let us now compare a soul of olden times with one from the time when the Christ-Impulse was drawing near; picture a man of the earlier pre-Christian centuries. If wishing to enter the spiritual world he could not to do so and maintain his self-consciousness however highly he was developed. To do this he had to divest himself of his self-consciousness, had to pass into an unconscious condition; he had to rise into the world of the Hierarchies—the world of the spirit. His consciousness was lowered. This was an old feeling belonging to pre-Christian times. What then was the position of a man who did not altogether belong to the age when it was natural for him, on the withdrawal of self-consciousness, to find himself in the spiritual world; and what was the position of the man who did not live at a time when humanity was at the stage when his ego could be developed? The ego existed already in Atlantean times, but complete certainty that the greatest mystery of the spiritual world could well up within it came first to man through the Impulse of Christ. This was the feeling that caused men in the days of the old initiation to say:—“When I desire to enter the spiritual world and learn what these worlds can reveal to me, I have to suppress a certain part of me and stimulate and bring life to another part of my soul.” What had to be suppressed? And what had to be made especially alive? That part of his soul which was gradually to develop into the “I” had to be suppressed; this is what had to become darker, heavier. It could retain no memory. It had to become void and empty. On the other hand the astral body, the body which can give a certain degree of clairvoyance, had to be specially stimulated. When this happened ancient clairvoyant powers of perception entered the astral body.

I have said that the ego was already present to a certain extent, but man could not make use of it when he desired to investigate the secrets of the spiritual world. The ego had in this case to be suppressed and the astral body stimulated. This stimulation of the astral body had become ever more and more impossible. In ancient times suppression of the ego and stimulation of the astral body so that the secrets of the spiritual world could pour into it, was something that belonged to the elemental attributes of man. Advance in evolution consisted in the increasing incapacity of the astral body to receive the secrets of the spiritual world. At this stage men acknowledged:—“My astral body will become ever less able to attain what once was mine through the old form of clairvoyance, my ego also will cease to pass out of me in the way it was wont to do, and as yet it is unable to rise to anything of itself.” The most gifted clairvoyant was at most aware of something empty, something void, within his soul. Such was the ego to which as yet no Impulse had been imparted. At the same time men were aware it was not possible for them to enter the spiritual world through the ego.

From this you can gather what was the soul-attitude of those who desired to look into the spiritual realms at the time when the Christ-Impulse was approaching. They might have said:—“I can no longer develop in my astral body what formerly it was possible to develop; and no impulse has yet come to my ego; my soul is chaotic, I feel unable to rise to the spiritual world.”

Then as the time for the coming of the Christ-Impulse drew near certain methods were employed, men underwent a certain training, with the result that they made the acquaintance of those who were not as yet filled with the spirit. When seeking entrance into higher worlds they were told:—“Realise that thou canst not rise to these worlds through thy astral body; thou must first of all enter that inward place where thou feelest thyself as man, where thou art no longer conscious of the smallest connection with the outer world.”

This was how men felt as the time for the coming of the Christ-Impulse drew near. Everyone who sought for initiation realised that his astral body was no longer fitted to be the means for his entrance into the spiritual world; that the time for this was past; and that the ego was not as yet ready for it. But those who desired to receive the Impulse, who longed to leave the body and penetrate to spiritual worlds, divined (more than divine they could not) that there was some-thing in them that strove with all its might towards that Spiritual Impulse. This soul-experience which all passed through who sought at that time the path to spiritual illumination was called “the path of loneliness.” What, then, had the messenger to do who prepared the way for the Christ-Event? He had to tell those who desired to know of the approaching Impulse, about “the path of loneliness.” He had to know loneliness fundamentally. He had to be the preacher of this loneliness of soul. You will come to know, as you study the Gospel of Mark further, that in certain cases great Spiritual Beings through whom some important advance in human evolution was to be carried out found the instruments they required in living men, and that they entered into them so as to live within a soul in bodily incarnation. The “messenger” spoken of by Isaiah, who must not be accepted as a man quite in the ordinary sense, took possession of the soul of the re-incarnated Elias, lived in him and announced the approach of the Christ-Impulse. It was this messenger who spoke from the soul of John the Baptist. Whence came this voice? It sprang from what I have just described as a great loneliness of soul. We read of this in the Gospel according to Mark, it says:—“Listen to the cry of soul-loneliness.” The Greek word “ὲντηὲφήμ ω” should not be translated in a symbolic sense by “wilderness,” thus giving them an external meaning. In these words an image is presented to us by which the whole spiritual world may be grasped. Their real meaning is “in loneliness.”

To understand this expression better, we must occupy ourselves a little with the true meaning of what is felt by the word “κνφιος” or Lord, as it is usually translated in the lines “prepare the way of the Lord.” The true meaning is something we can still divine in the Greek, and is confirmed when we associate it with ancient tradition. In ancient usage this word had not the trivial meaning it has to-day.

In this materialistic age man has become a great Philistine in respect of language. Words are no longer “the bodies of soul-beings,” so that it is possible to sense a whole world in them.

What was felt in the Greek word “κνφιος” or Lord when spoken in the connection I have indicated? Men felt that it was an image of what went on within them, of what they sensed was happening in their soul-life. The uprising of the “I am” from the depths of the soul was felt as the coming of the “Lord” and “Ruler,” he who regulated and ordered the soul-forces and is used in the sense employed to-day when we say the various soul-forces possessed by man—thinking, feeling and willing, are the servants of his soul. But within the soul there is a master, the ego.

This is shown by the fact that whereas in old times men said “it thinks,” and in respect of feeling and willing “it feels,” “it wills within me”; men now say when the ego, the Lord of the soul-forces is in command and the mighty change in human evolution is felt, “I think,” “I feel,” “I will.” In earlier days the soul was to a certain extent unconscious, it was imprisoned and submerged within the forces that served it. But now the ego, the Lord of the soul-forces was to be born! The cry went forth:—“He who is Lord of the soul is coming!” No person or Being is meant by these words, but only the emergence of the ego as “Lord” of the soul.

This was taught in the Temples where preparation was made for what was to come to pass in human nature. With holy reverence and deep humility it was made known:—For a time the condition of souls was such that they had in them only the serving powers of thinking, feeling and willing; but now the “Ruler” was to be born.

This mighty fact is now proceeding; its development will go slowly on until the end of the earth-age, when it will have gained ever more and more power. Yes, this will come to pass! And it is the Christ who gives the first impulse to this development. This is the “Great Hour,” the turning point of the world's time-piece, the hour when Christ lived on earth. The hands of the world clock now point to the moment of the coming of the ego. As Lord of the forces of the souls it now begins to evolve ever greater power and will have reached its goal when the earth perishes and man passes on to still higher stages of development.

It is only when we try to feel, as people must have felt in those early days, that it is possible for us to form some idea of what Isaiah desired to say, and John the Baptist to repeat. Isaiah referred to the great event that was to take place within the souls of men, and to the course of the further development of these souls. But then we must not translate the word “λνφιοσ,” as “straight” as is usually done, nor as “level,” but as “open,” so that the road could be used.

It is then the “Lord” comes, he takes his way towards the human soul. But man must do something so that he can really take possession of the soul. The way must be made free, open. In short, if we translate this passage so that it means something, and if at the same time we hold to tradition, it must be done some-what as follows:

Take heed,¹ I send my Angel before the ego in thee, he shall prepare the direction (Richtung).

Hark to the cry in the (souls) loneliness, (the cry of longing for the Lord of the soul): prepare the direction for the (soul's) ruler; work that the way be open for him.

In this form of words you have approximately an idea of what can be felt in the words of Isaiah. These words or their content, was carried over by the Angel into the soul of the Baptist. Why could the Angel do this? To answer this question we must consider for a little the nature and method of the initiation of John the Baptist, and how this initiation affected his soul.

From former lectures you know that a man can either be initiated by descending into his own soul or by going forth from his soul, by liberation from the body and uniting his soul-forces with the cosmos. These two paths were followed by different peoples in the most varied manner. When a man desired to pour out his soul into the macrocosm, the twelve stages through which he had to pass to attain to this were “marked” by the twelve signs of the Zodiac; for his soul had to expand in certain clearly defined directions of the Macrocosm. Now a very great deal was already attained—something important that is for the historical evolution of the world—when any soul had evolved so far as to be able to receive into it all the macrocosmic forces springing from those hidden things which are the meaning of each of the constellations. As a rule the ancient rites of initiations were conducted so that the soul-expansion of one Initiate was directed to the macrocosmic secret, say of Capricorn, another to those of Cancer, of the Balance, and so on. I have explained on other occasions that there are twelve different possible ways of expansion into the Macrocosm, and that these are indicated symbolically by the twelve signs of the Zodiac. Anyone attaining initiation through expansion of his soul into the macrocosm, and who does not attain at once to the highest—the Sun initiation—but only to a partial initiation, would have his soul-vision directed to the mysteries connected with some special constellation. To attain this he would have to turn his gaze away from everything of a material nature. This means, care would have to be taken that his gaze was directed, either through the rites of the Mysteries, or through John the Baptist by “Grace from above,” in such a way that he would have the earth between him and the special constellation. In other words, his glance had to be directed at night to the constellation through the earth. When a constellation is seen with physical eyes it is the physical constellation that is seen. But when a man's gaze can penetrate the substance of the earth, which is between him and the physical constellation, he does not see the physical but the spiritual part of the earth; that is he sees the mysteries (Geheimnesse) which the constellation expresses.

The training that John the Baptist had passed through had made it possible for him to gaze at night through the material earth upon the constellation Aquarius, the Waterman. He had received therefore (after the Angel had entered into his soul) the initiation of Aquarius. Thus, through all he knew and had felt, John the Baptist was able to put himself in touch with the faculties of the Angel, so that through this Being he could make the content of the “Waterman-initiation” known; and the information he gave respecting this was: that the lordship of the ego, the “Lord,” would enter men's souls. This is what the initiation of the Waterman gave.

But simultaneously the Baptist declared that the time had now come when a change was to take place in this initiation, it was to be replaced by another, one by which men would be able to understand the approaching lordship of the ego. Therefore he said to his disciples:—“I am he who, through the initiation of the Waterman has all the powers of his Angel at his disposal. But after me ONE will come who has at his command all the subsequent powers of his Angel!”

If you advance by day toward the sun from the constellation of Ares, through that of the Bull, the Twins and so on to Virgo, you must advance at night from the direction of the Waterman (Aquarius) to the constellation of the Fishes, that is, you must advance in the direction of the Spiritual Sun. John had received the Waterman-initiation, and he pointed out that he who was to come after him would be an Initiate of Picis, the initiation which follows on the initiation passed through by John, and was therefore of a higher order. The Baptist told his intimate disciples:—“Through the initiation of Aquarius I have only those powers at my disposal by which I can announce through my Angel that the Lord—the ruler—is coming, but after me One will come who has powers symbolised by the initiation of the sign of the Fishes. Into him the Christ will enter!”

In these words John the Baptist refers to Jesus of Nazareth. Ancient tradition has on this account assigned to Christ Jesus the symbol of the Fish; and as everything that occurs outwardly is symbolic of in-ward events—though these may occur outwardly—the helpers appointed to Him were fishermen. This is an external historic fact, at the same time as regards spiritual secrets it is profoundly symbolic. John declared “a higher initiation is to come to humanity,” and he described himself as a “Waterman.” This is absolutely clear. But we must learn to see ever more clearly how the images employed to express the hidden things of men are at the same time connected with astronomical and cosmic mysteries.

“I have baptised you with water,” said John. Water baptism was specially the baptism within the power of those who had received from heaven the initiation of the “Waterman.” But in that the Spiritual Sun progresses in the opposite direction to the physical sun, which advances from the sign of the Virgin to that of the Balance; the Spiritual Sun (as in the advance from John the Baptist to Jesus of Nazareth) progresses from the Waterman to the Fishes. And were anyone to appear in the world having experienced the initiation of the Fishes and able therefore to receive into him those spiritual forces, those spiritual impulses, which are the instruments of the Fish-initiation, then it would be possible for him to baptise not only as John did with water, but to baptise in the higher sense described by John as the Baptism of the Holy Spirit.

In this lecture I have put before you in a certain way a two-fold conception:—Firstly, I have shown that in the Gospel according to Mark facts of human evolution, historical events, are dealt with in which mention is made of a higher Power, of an “Angelic,” not a human power; and that this Power spoke through John the Baptist. On the other hand I have shown that in the accounts given here reference is made to heavenly events; namely, to the progress of the Spiritual Sun from the sign of the Waterman to that of the Fishes. Indeed the Gospel according to Mark contains in every verse something which can only be read aright, when, in the sequence of the words, we keep before us both their human and their cosmic, astronomical meaning, and when we realise that something lives in man, the true significance of which is only to be found in heaven. Only when this is done can the connection between the mysteries of the cosmos and the mysteries of human nature be more clearly understood. To-day, at the close of my lecture, I can but hint at what lies behind such things. I merely wished to-day to give you some premonitions of what lies in this direction. For we shall have to dive to very great depths in studying the Gospel of Mark, and you will have to ponder long and deeply if you are to attain to something more than “premonitions.” In what follows I will try to make clear to you the way this Gospel has to be read.

You all know the rainbow. To a child it appears as something real in the firmament. Until explained to him, he believes he can grasp it with his hands. Later, man learns that the rainbow does not depend on itself, but that it only appears when rain and sunshine stand related to each other in a certain way; when this relationship is changed it disappears. Thus it is not a reality; it is but an illusion. The realities as regards the rainbow are rain and sunshine.

If anyone has made a little progress on the path of occult development something is revealed to him which quite of himself he compares with the rainbow. Of this he says:—It is actually not true, it is but an appearance held together by things outside it. Do you know what this “appearance” is? It is man himself!

Man is only an appearance, a semblance, and if with his physical senses he regards himself as reality, he has given himself over to illusion—to Maya the great “Non est.” For the word “Maya” is compounded of “Mahat aya.” (Mahat=great, ya = Being, and a= not); signifying the great non-being. On the path of occult development man reaches a point where he compares himself with something resembling a rainbow; he realises he is but a semblance, a delusion, and that everything that is perceived by the senses is delusion also. The sun as physical globe is a delusion. What physical science describes as a ball of gas in space is quite correct for practical purposes, but anyone who regards this as reality is giving himself over to delusion—to Maya. The truth regarding the sun is that it is a meeting-place of the spiritual Hierarchies, whose deeds are expressed in warmth and light, and who approach us in the warmth and light of the sun. The warmth and light we perceive is illusion. All appearance is illusion.

A man thinks he has a heart in his breast, but this heart is a delusion, nothing more. It is like the rings we see round street lamps on a misty autumn evening. These rings are not reality, but are produced by clearly defined forces. So is the human heart. You can perceive this in the following way. Suppose that this circle I have drawn represents the vault of the heavens one kind of force streams into us from one side, other forces from other sides, these forces split up here in the centre where I have drawn a small circle.

Nothing of the forces that stream into man from heaven and split up there (sich schneiden) really exist where he thinks they do, in his heart. Think everything else away except the forces that meet in you, as light meets in the rainbow—what remains is the human heart. It is the same with our other organs: they are fragments of forces (Schnittkräfte) caused by the breaking up of world forces.

When you move from one place to another you say “There is an impulse in me to move from here to there.” In saying this you say something that appertains to Maya. Why? Because forces come from the Macrocosm, which are split up down here (sich schneiden), and these broken-up fragments give rise to: illusion concerning the power and direction in walking. The results met with down here are but fragments of cosmic forces. If we desire to know the truth we must ask:—What takes place in the Macrocosm? What do cosmic forces bring about, both the upper and the lower? They bring that about in us that makes it appear as if we had a heart, a liver, etc., or that has such an appearance that we say: I walk from here to there. If the truth regarding this were to be described, we would have to describe cosmic forces.

If we wish to describe what John the Baptist did when he baptised, we must describe what the Macrocosm, that is the forces represented by the sign of the Waterman, charged him to do. This was determined at one time within the great cosmic lodge, and the forces necessary for it were sent down into John. It is thus, in the language of the Cosmos, we must read what took place at a certain point of time. It was thus the writer of the Gospel according to Mark read the heavenly events corresponding with the earthly events that occurred in Palestine. He describes astronomical occurrences when he says:—“Understand what I have to say to you in this way: suppose there is here a wall on which visible shadows play. If you wish to know the real cause of these shadows you must consider the things of which they are the reflections. I describe what took place at Jordan, all the same they are but the instruments of something else; in reality I am describing what was brought about on earth through the astronomical forces of the Macrocosm!”

The writer of the Gospel of Mark describes cosmic forces. He describes the shadow-pictures or projections thrown by mighty macrocosmic events on to the screen provided by the small district of Palestine. We must realise this clearly if we are to enter into the full greatness and importance of the document we call the Gospel of Mark; but we must first try to form something of the nature of a divination of what it is that is here presented to us. We must endeavour to understand what it is we are told in the beginning of the Gospel. The Prophet Isaiah had foretold that the Lord of the soul-forces of mankind would come, that in John the Baptist the “messenger” would dwell, who would prepare man for the reception of this ruler of his soul-forces. This messenger had first to take as his dwelling place the body of one who had passed through the initiation of the Waterman, who was able therefore to lead men on the path that is connected on earth with such an individuality as Jesus of Nazareth; one who because he had received the Fish-initiation had prepared himself for the reception of the Christ.

All the events that take place on earth are the reflections of cosmic events, and are connected with cosmic conditions in the same way as the rainbow is connected with rain and sunshine, and as, if we wish to describe the rainbow, we must study rain and sunshine. If we wish to know what was in the heart of John the Baptist or of Jesus of Nazareth, in whom the Christ dwelt, we must study cosmic conditions. So far as man is concerned, the whole world is explained by what took place in Palestine and on Golgotha. He who does not read the Gospel of Mark otherwise than merely as a document, which provides him with groups of letters descriptive of great world events, is on a level with one who says:—“Here I have one group of lines and strokes, there another;” he has no conception of what is referred to in the word “Lord,” but thinks only of the black letters. It is mostly in this way that the Gospel of Mark is read in our day. For what is told in it is but the outer lettering of what it really contains. To understand this Gospel we must rise to the level of those things to which, as in a shadowy reproduction, the events in Palestine refer.

Try to get at the meaning of the words:—“Earthly events are the shadows of macrocosmic events.” When you have done this you will have taken the first step in the understanding of one of the greatest documents in the world—the Gospel according to St. Mark.

• 1. “Behold” is no longer correct.

Some time ago, we spoke here, at least in some allusions, of what is called occult reading and occult hearing, and today and tomorrow I will take up these considerations of those discussions about occult reading and occult hearing, because then I will be able to develop some important ideas about our structure in connection with them.

If we look at the outer scientific consideration, insofar as it concerns the life of the soul, today, we find many difficulties in this outer scientific consideration, as soon as we want to come to a reasonably satisfactory overview of the relevant concepts. Among the many difficulties, the one that arises when we consider the outer science of human memory is truly no small one.

Now I would have to cite a lot here if I wanted to talk about this or that that external psychology or the doctrine of the soul has to say about human memory. But it would not get us very far if I wanted to explain all of that. I just want to draw your attention to the difficulty for this external science when it comes to understanding memory and its peculiarities.

Human memory presents itself to us in such a way that we can recall to our consciousness at a later time perceptions, concepts, and ideas that we have absorbed at some time in the past. So there is the psychological fact that, for example, we have some kind of perception or experience today, and that after some time, without being confronted with the same fact that caused the perception or experience, we can vividly recall the idea of the fact, of the experience, from within.

This seems to indicate that the human soul stores everything it takes in from the outside. For example, when we meet someone, we get an impression of them. We transform this impression into a mental image and then store this mental image in our subconscious; when we need it, we retrieve it.

Wouldn't it then be the case that our soul, insofar as it develops the power of our memory, would be, let's say, a box in which all ideas and experiences can be placed and stored, and from which they can be taken out when needed to be brought up into consciousness. So all kinds of experiences would be stored down there in this soul cabinet, and they could be retrieved from there.

When you read books about memory today, you get the impression that the authors often believe that the soul is a kind of storage cabinet for all kinds of experiences. Now imagine walking around with your soul and carrying a cabinet for all your impressions and experiences with you in this soul. It must be freely admitted that there is a difficulty here. Various scientific concepts have been used to try to bridge this difficulty, but nothing particularly satisfactory has emerged from them. This difficulty will only be overcome when we acquire a deeper insight into the structure of the human being in the physical body, in the etheric body, in the astral body and in the I. For this etheric body of man must indeed be studied if one is to gain a real knowledge of the nature of human memory, and the astral body must be studied no less for this purpose.

Let us assume that we can at least form some kind of idea, comparatively speaking, of what this astral body of man actually is. In the waking hours of everyday life, the human being does not experience himself in his astral body, any more than he experiences himself in his ether body. The human being experiences himself in his I from waking up to falling asleep, and all experiences are I-experiences. In the astral body, the human being does not experience himself. This astral body is, as I have emphasized on other occasions, fundamentally infinitely wiser than the I-human being. It can do much more than the I-human being can do. This astral body can actually read what I have indicated to you as occult writing. The astral body can read this occult writing; it can really read it.

Among many other ideas through which one can evoke an understanding of the astral body, one can also have the idea that it is a reader of occult writing. And the etheric body, on the other hand, is, among many other qualities it has, something like a writing tablet in which the occult writing is continually being inscribed through the processes of the world.

While we live - and we always live, whether we are awake or asleep, between birth and death, and from death to a new birth - processes and events are constantly taking place in the universe, in the cosmos. There is essence in the cosmos. All this is imprinted and written into the etheric body. The etheric body of the human being is indeed a true reflection of the entire cosmos. There is nothing in the cosmos that is not impressively imprinted in the etheric body of the human being and, if one wants to use the expression, imaginatively mirrored. And the human astral body is constantly reading what the world inscribes into the etheric body. This takes place in the subconscious, so that the human astral body reads what the world inscribes into the etheric body.

But now, when we ourselves, in our conscious, waking day-life, encounter an event or even an object that makes an impression on us, we form a mental image of this object. When we form this mental image of the object, the astral body is the first to be involved. It is in a state of vehement movement while we form a mental image of an object or form the mental image of the impression of an external event. What we form as an idea, what we experience as soul, is also written into the etheric body of the human being and remains there. Just as the world with its events continually inscribes itself into our etheric body, we also inscribe into our etheric body what we ourselves experience as soul. It remains there inscribed. When we remember something, a complicated process actually takes place. Our astral body reads what has been written into our etheric body, and the result of this reading is the emergence of an image that we call a memory.

Now, in this way, memory would be traced back to a kind of reading of our astral body in the etheric body. And indeed, as soon as we know this, we will no longer arrive at the naive idea that the soul is a kind of storage cabinet for what we have experienced, but we will see: there are in fact few habits - I say explicitly habits, we will understand the word even better tomorrow - into which the astral body repeatedly places itself when it has experienced something, and which it then impresses into the etheric body. Just as our writing has few letters, so our astral body has few, very few habits. And just as we communicate the whole infinite abundance of what human beings have to say to each other about themselves and the world through various groupings of our few letters in writing, so what memory retains is formed from a few habits through their combinations.

If we know that it is a matter of reading, then we will no longer believe that every single experience has to be written down. Instead, a few habits of the astral body are combined and then fixed in the etheric body. Just as we can fix a new word with the old letters when we hear it, so we can fix each new experience in the etheric body with a few habits of the astral body. This is because both our etheric body and, in particular, our astral body are connected to the entire cosmos. We must not take what an older wisdom teaching has emphasized from the cosmos as something that was emphasized by chance, but rather it has a deep meaning and importance.

If we take the twelve constellations of the entire zodiac, we can say that our astral body is indeed in living connection with these twelve constellations. These twelve constellations really do mean twelve certain habits for our astral body, twelve certain ways of moving. And then our astral body is also connected with the seven planets, as we have often discussed. These in turn determine certain habits in him. Through these habits – I say expressly 'habits' – which are ignited in our astral body by the planets of our solar system, something similar arises in the astral body to the vowels; and through the habits that are stimulated in it by the influence of the zodiac, something similar arises to the consonants.

What I mean to say is this: Let us assume that at some moment in our lives – and such moments are always present because we are always in contact with the world – our astral body is in contact with the forces that stream out of the constellation of Aries. Because our astral body is in connection or under the particular influence of that which radiates out of the constellation of Aries, the possibility develops in this astral body to close itself in its particular form, to give itself a boundary; while if the astral body is more under the influence of Libra, a movement develops in it that allows it to be more open to the rest of the world.

Thus a definite tendency of motion develops under the influence of each constellation. Under the influence of this or that constellation, the astral body particularly stretches its upper part upwards, and under the influence of one of the other constellations, it particularly stretches its lower part. Twelve such special movements correspond to twelve such habits, and in turn seven special habits under the influence of the planets. These are more inner movements under the influence of the planets, whereby the inner parts move or bring themselves into a relationship with each other. Thus, our astral body has, in fact, 12 + 7 = 19 habits, implanted by the cosmos.

Just as we can write anything with our characters, with the signs for the vowels and consonants by combining them, if we want to express what we bring to light with our wisdom, so our astral body forms everything it has to form through the combinations of these nineteen habits. When a person comes up to us with a face that looks at us in a certain way, good or evil, our astral body makes certain movements that are combined from these nineteen habits. This is then written into the etheric body, and at a later time the astral body can read what is written into the etheric body. And that is what memory is based on! As soon as you go beyond what the senses and the mind bound to the senses reveal, you immediately come to the relationship of the human being to the cosmos. The physical body only conceals this relationship of the human being to the cosmos.

We therefore have a continuous inner reading, and if we could go back, also historically, to the origin of writing, we would find that in fact in the oldest pictographic writings, man is imitated in this inner reading of man. It is not the case that writing came about by chance, but the original consonant signs were imitations of the signs of the zodiac and the original vowel signs were imitations of the planetary images. The outer reading was nothing more than a reproduction in the outer world of what man had as an inner reading.

This is connected with the attitude that people in ancient times had towards the art of writing. It was considered to be something tremendously sacred because it was taken from cosmic secrets. And it is still known from Egyptian culture that the copyists, if they made mistakes, exposed themselves to the most severe punishments, even the death penalty, depending on the magnitude of the mistake they made, under the strict laws there, if the mistake was big enough. It was considered something infinitely high and sacred to write down what man could know of the sacred secrets, because one still had a sense of the context of these characters and all the sacred secrets of human nature and their connection with the divine.

That is the important thing, as we gradually absorb spiritual science within us, to regain the sense of the sacredness of the hidden pages of human nature. This sense is much more important than the mere theoretical absorption of spiritual-scientific things. But it is also connected with the fact that at the moment when, in the course of the development of humanity, one had to give up all connection with the sacred of Scripture, one also felt that, basically, I would say, something creepy was taking place in the history of humanity. Take a book from a library from the early Middle Ages and try to imagine how such a book came into being, how a monk, I would say, spent years, even decades, writing this book, how he spent a long, long time painting a single letter. Then one knew that writing was considered something sacred. One knew that through writing one was connected to the good gods, and in a sense what one entrusted to writing was a carrying out into the outer world of what comes from the good gods.

But you know, it is a sign of evolution that everything that comes from the good gods can be distorted in the world by Ahriman or Lucifer. The moment when the very ordinary art of printing was created, which then developed into that from which man mainly draws his wisdom today, by bending his head over the paper on which there are horrible signs, which are only the ape-like old characters that reveal to him what people thought or did not think about the world and its secrets, the art of writing was shifted. As a result, the written word has indeed entered a new stage, the stage where it has lost all nimbus of the sacred, where the Ahrimanic stage of written communication has begun, so to speak. And so, just as the ancient characters are the externalization of hidden secrets, albeit in a reproduction, in symbolism, just as these characters are the externalization of hidden secrets into the outer world, and just as these secrets correspond to the nature of the entities of the spiritual world that progress in the good sense. What we have today, especially in the form of printed matter – but in a broader sense it also applies to handwriting – is of a distinctly Ahrimanic character. And the people sensed this when they attributed the art of printing to the 'black forces', calling it a 'black art', and even attributing its invention to the devil.

There is a deeper connection when one associates the invention of the art of printing with Faust, just as Goethe associates the art of printing with what Faust goes through in a certain phase of his life. The Ahrimanic epoch of the art of communication has arrived with the invention of printing. We know, of course, that we must rightly unlearn to make a sign of the cross before all things that are called Ahrimanic. But we also know that we must call things by their right name and understand them. We, as spiritual scientists, must not be among those who say: the art of printing is Ahrimanic, so we must therefore eradicate it. We will not do that, it would never occur to us, because we understand that the Ahrimanic is also necessary in world evolution, that it also belongs to world progress. But we must also see things as they are. We must not reinterpret things in order to make it easier for ourselves, to allow ourselves to live in the world without Lucifer and Ahriman. It is more pleasant not to know that Ahriman stares at us from almost every book we read today. But it is necessary for those who see the world in its true light to endure this state and not to reinterpret it into something else. To understand the world is the task of those who feel more and more drawn to spiritual science.

In our time, we see an external natural science that would like to reduce everything to a kind of mechanical movement of the smallest mass particles. I have often spoken about this world view that external natural science is creating of our world. We are told: Oh, colors - red, yellow, green, violet, blue - are nothing but vibrations in reality! Color is only something that the eye causes. From so and so much vibration of the ether, red arises, from so and so much vibration yellow, from so and so much blue, from so and so much vibration violet. - And one would like to say that the modern world observer has the tendency to erase from the world picture that which he perceives with his senses in the world and to replace it with a material vortex.

One of the last great minds to have rebelled against this, which can be called a whirling dance of material particles, especially in the field of the theory of colors, is Goethe. And because the modern world has increasingly embraced this materialistic view, this obliteration of the manifold world around us, it has not been able to understand what Goethe actually wanted to say in his theory of colors.

Spiritual science will restore some order here, and Goethe's theory of colors will be appreciated to the extent that spiritual science permeates people. For Goethe, it undoubtedly seemed like a kind of madness - I say “madness”, but given his particular expressions, he might also have said “great madness” - to think that the colors flooding the world are nothing more than what the eye evokes from a vortex of vibrations, from a vibrating cosmos.

This vibrating cosmos – I have often referred to it as a fantasy of modern science – was simply not present for Goethe; for him, it was one of Mephistopheles's temptations. With his alert senses, Goethe was truly devoted to the full range of colors and the flood of colors in the world, and he lived in the flood of colors. It would have seemed to him the most desolate gray theory if he had had to replace this flooding sea of colors with the horrible vibrations of modern physics.

Why was that? Because Goethe - one may say the word in the deepest sense - had a universally developed, healthy human nature and through this healthy human nature always strove to place himself in the right relationship to the world. Such a healthy nature - I will now say something seemingly very trivial, but it is not trivial, rather it contains a significant wisdom - such a nature as Goethe's also sleeps healthily. Yes, a trivial truth! But for the spiritual researcher, healthy sleep actually means a great deal. During sleep, the human being is outside of his physical and etheric body, present in his I and his astral body. There he is truly immersed in the experiences that bring his astral body into connection with the entire starry cosmos, for example. Everything that can be influenced by the zodiacal constellations and the planets lights up in the astral body. Just as the human being lives with the external world in a state of wakefulness, so the human being lives with the world of the stars in a state of sleep. But you all know that: the human being does not know very much about this life with the world of the stars, and that is important to understand why the human being does not know much about this coexistence with the world of the stars. Why is that?

You don't overlook a landscape when it is covered with fog. The fog moves across the landscape and the parts of the landscape, the rivers, mountains, plains and so on, do not appear to us when they are interspersed with fog. In the same way, when a person sleeps, they are permeated by a fog, a mental fog. What is this mental fog? It is a fog of desires, consists of desires, and these desires are formed by the longing for the physical body. When the person is out of the physical body and etheric bodies, that is, in the time from falling asleep to waking up, he continually has the desire for the physical body; he wants to return to his physical body. He is taken out of the physical body by the forces of the cosmos, and only when these forces release him does he slip back into the physical body when he wakes up. There his desire for the physical body is satisfied again.

In a person like Goethe, healthy sleep is present because the desire for the physical body is less than in some other people, and therefore the influences from the cosmos are greater than in other people during sleep. You can easily imagine a person like Goethe being more receptive to the influences of the cosmos during sleep, and that is his healthy sleep. The desire for the physical body is there, but healthier than in other people. And why is it healthier? It is healthier precisely because Goethe is so healthily devoted to the impressions of the outside world while awake, because, for example, he did not allow himself to substitute something theoretical, such as vibrations, for colors, but because he observed colors themselves in their reality, in their full-bodied reality. There is a difference between a person like Goethe, who, although full of wisdom, walks through nature and sees green as green, violet as violet, and the relationship of green to violet or to yellow and so on, and thus sees the content directly as color, or whether a dry theorist walks through the field and does not see the colors, but speculates about what kind of a trillion or a million vibrations correspond to green or red or yellow.

Why does he then go through the world as such a dry theorist? Because he is not devoted to the world of colors, but because he is too strongly devoted to his physical body, even if it is initially his physical brain. All gray theory arises from being too devoted to the physical body during the waking hours. We would not have any materialistic theories today if people had not been so strongly devoted to the physical body. The more a person selflessly devotes himself to the things of the world during waking life, the more he has the opportunity to be devoted to the influences of the extraterrestrial cosmos during sleep, and then to bring back the healthy after-effects of these impressions into daily life. Then he will not, like the dried-up physicist described above, see swirling atomic vortices behind the flowing colors, but spirit, elementary spirituality, real spiritual activity.

Thus, to know that behind the impressions of the senses is the living spiritual world is an after-effect of healthy sleep. For when one cannot, during the waking hours, selflessly surrender to what is flowing outside in the world, but instead forms horrible theories about it, which are actually phantasms, then when one falls asleep one has a stronger overpowering urge for the physical body and not only darkens one's consciousness towards the impressions during sleep, but also lessens, besides one's consciousness, the intensity and strength of these impressions themselves. This is connected with the fact that, in fact, the more spiritual science is taken to life the human soul life, the more precisely such wisdom as Goethean physics will take hold of people again, compared to the dull theories that are now wreaking havoc in external science.

The assimilation of spiritual science in humanity is connected with many things. It will truly mean a tremendous change when the general consciousness is once imbued with the truth: at night, you as a human being are in the extra-terrestrial universe in a spiritual way and in the daytime you immerse yourself in your physical and etheric bodies. There is much that we will learn to feel and sense together with this knowledge.

For example, let us now turn to something more spiritual. We will have to learn that what we call life with the folk spirit, with the folk soul, to which we count ourselves in the narrower sense, is present when we enter the physical and etheric bodies of the human being. Thus, we are in contact with the national soul from the moment we awaken until we fall asleep, for that which the national soul is, the forces and activities it develops, are poured into the physical body and the etheric body: into the physical body more the racial aspect, into the etheric body more the national aspect. It is poured into the veils we enter when we awaken. In this way we are actually continually exchanging forces with our own folk soul. The science that is universally human, that has nothing to do with the configurations and differentiations that are poured into people through the folk souls, this science must indeed be won by that part of human nature that can free itself, can become independent of the physical, just as a person is independent of it when asleep. This science is necessarily general and human because it is gained through those members of human nature that are independent of the physical body and the etheric body.

If one were to assume that someone who can truly see into the spiritual world and gain knowledge of it could be bound by popular prejudices, then one would simply not take the secrets of initiation into due consideration. Just as life in sleep is quite different from waking life in the cases mentioned above, but the two are related, so it is also with regard to the relationship between the human being and the nature of the folk soul. From the moment a person falls asleep until they wake up, they are not together with the forces that come directly from the folk soul, for these can only be sent into the physical and etheric bodies alone. Thus, anyone who has attained conscious inner experience of their ego and their astral body is, while experiencing this, experiencing what they then have to form into spiritual science, yes, outside of the physical and etheric body; they experience outside of the physical and etheric body. But one is nevertheless not outside the world. While one is with one's folk spirit as soon as one slips into one's physical body and thus also into one's etheric body, one is outside one's own folk soul when one slips out of the physical and etheric bodies, as it is when sleeping or in initiation, which works into the physical and etheric bodies. One is outside, but one is not outside the realm of folk souls in general, because they are spiritual beings. And when one is outside one's physical and etheric body in the spiritual world, one is actually only outside of one folk soul that has a particular significance for one at the present time, namely, one's own folk soul, the one that is active in the physical and etheric bodies. By being in community with it or coming into community with it during waking hours, interest in it is lost during sleep and during initiation. The peculiar fact emerges that during sleep and during initiation one is essentially with all other folk souls, only not with one's own.

So if you imagine the round dance of contemporary folk souls, then as a human being, when you are in your physical body and perceive it while you are awake, you are together with your own folk soul; but when you are asleep or in a state of initiation, you are together with all the other folk souls, except your own. That is an objective truth.

Now you can see how nonsensical it would be for someone who can consciously be with other folk souls to fail to recognize the other folk souls, or to treat them with sympathy or antipathy. It is as if one did not want to recognize the folk souls. Only for the one who has not progressed to initiation does it make sense to feel sympathy or antipathy for this or that folk soul, because he does not know that he is really together with the other folk souls for the sleeping half of his life. But there is a difference now. While in waking life one is connected, so to speak, with one national soul, with one's own, in sleeping life one is connected with the other national souls, thus not with the effects that emanate from one, but with the interaction of the others, so to speak with what the other national souls perform as a round dance in harmony.

So you can easily imagine life with one folk soul and life with the other folk souls. The former is life when awake, the latter is life when asleep. During sleep or during initiation, you are with the interaction of the other folk souls. A person cannot be alone with their own folk soul unless they are constantly awake. It is quite impossible for him to do so, because he would have to be constantly awake. The difference is that when we are awake, we exchange forces with our own folk soul; when we are asleep, we do not exchange forces with our own, but with the totality, with the roundelay of the other folk souls.

But there is a way to be with a particular folk soul even in sleep, to be more influenced by the forces emanating from one folk soul rather than from the totality of folk souls. Then, in sleep, one is, as it were, spellbound by this one folk soul. The remedy for this is to particularly hate this folk soul when awake. A folk soul that one particularly hates while awake is torn out of the dance of the other folk souls and it captivates and fetters one to its particular characteristics. If I may express myself in a trivial way, my dear friends, it must be said - you will not hold it against me in this case: to really hate a national soul in the waking state is to condemn oneself to having to sleep with that national soul! This is truly an occult truth, albeit a distressing one, a truth about which there is really nothing to laugh. This must be faced if one also wants to gain an understanding from a certain point of view of how spiritual science must influence by spreading itself throughout the world, the attitudes of people, how it must permeate all feeling and sensing.

I have deliberately formulated what I have to say about the relationship between the human being and the folk soul in a way that makes you laugh. I had to do that because very often, as an occultist, one has the tendency to help people through what is most harrowing, most tragic, not by saying it in all its tragic gravity, since that would crush people, but by saying it in such a way that it helps people to be able to absorb it like any other scientific idea.

However, it should not be forgotten that spiritual science shows us in a very thorough way to what extent we want to accept the world as Maja. Because as soon as we penetrate into spiritual science with the deepest seriousness, it becomes serious, I would say, it becomes really deeply serious with it and with all that it should be for man. It may be said that most people today still have something against spiritual science because they cannot understand with their intellect what spiritual science is actually supposed to make of man. People today do not understand the basic nerve of spiritual science. But it is not only that they cannot understand it with their intellect, there is something much deeper. When we penetrate deeper into the wisdom of spiritual science, we find that it also makes demands on our minds and wills. It shows us the human being in a light that we usually do not want to have ourselves. Not only does our mind prefer to turn to Maja than to reality, but so does our will.

If I may speak in a trivial way again, I can say: it is extremely uncomfortable to live with the deeper wisdom of spiritual science, because life must take on a different face under the influence of spiritual science. In the moment when one knows what it means when Capesius and Strader stand opposite each other in their spiritual forms and exchange words, but in truth these words cause tumult and turmoil in the most elementary forces of the world, in that moment, when one knows what is is going on in the world, in the whole cosmos, when a person experiences this or that in his soul, then the full seriousness of spiritual science becomes apparent, and only then do we realize how people not only want to live in maya with their minds, but also with their wills. We need only develop this or that sympathy or this or that antipathy, and what we do there then becomes the cause of being driven as a sleeping or dead human being into the realm of this or that being of the cosmos and effecting this or that there. For through our being with this or that being of the cosmos, cosmic events happen again.

With such words, one would like to evoke a feeling of how spiritual science really wants to speak not only to people's minds, but to grasp the whole person, the whole soul, because people's lives today are at a stage from which the signs of the times clearly show us how this life must be grasped if it is to continue, by that wave which encompasses the spiritual secrets and does not merely leave man in Maya, but leads him into true reality. These are the things we must consider if we want to come to a deeper understanding of our spiritual scientific will. And tomorrow we will continue to speak of such things and will probably end up with something that is connected with a fundamental idea of our structure.

Our task here is to talk about some things that will lead to an understanding of our own era. We know that the development here on earth takes place in such a way that man can undergo new experiences and gain new insights in each of his embodiments on earth. Therefore, the events of our earthly development are arranged in such a way that man does not encounter the same conditions twice in two successive incarnations; that is to say, the earth changes in the epoch between the two incarnations. But external knowledge does not look at this in sufficient depth to see how everything changes fundamentally over long periods of time. But from this we can also conclude that we can only understand ourselves thoroughly if we know what the age of the development of the earth is in which we live, and if we can form a picture of the near future of the earth. We will have to take into account that man, as he faces us in life, having developed over infinitely long periods of time, is a very complicated being.

The human being as a waking being is fundamentally different from the human being in a state of sleep. We know that during sleep the four elements of his being are split into two groups, so that the physical and etheric bodies lie in the repository and the astral body and the I move out into the spiritual world to live according to the laws of that spiritual world. We have already learned that the physical and etheric bodies could not exist in their present form if they were completely abandoned by the astral body and the I, without something else being able to replace them. Without this possibility, the sleeping human being would be of no more value than a plant. A plant is indeed capable of life as a self-contained organism, but not the sleeping human being, because the latter has arranged his physical and etheric bodies in such a way that they must be permeated by his astral body and his ego. So while the human ego and the astral body leave the person, during this time another entity of the same value, a divine spiritual astral body and a matching ego, permeates the physical and etheric body at night. That which remains dormant in the human being is left to the external spiritual powers of the world. That which is in the physical world is thus incorporated into the great spiritual powers of the macrocosm, and all spiritual beings belonging to it work unimpaired by the human ego and astral body.

Today we want to get to know some of these forces of the great world that affect human beings. These conditions are intricately complicated in their interaction between the spiritual forces of the world and the human being. The latter is indeed a small world, and during sleep something flows from the great world into this small world like a mirror image. We can only understand all this if we penetrate into the deep secrets of the world.

In today's humanity, this or that truth is found by science, and one then believes that one possesses this truth as such securely. But the anthroposophist should also develop a feeling for the weight of this or that truth, whether one or the other is essential or inessential, whether it is a cheap, obvious truth or whether it leads us deep into the secrets of the world. This lack of understanding can be seen when undoubted truths are presented that are supposed to be decisive for important conclusions, for example, in the number of bones and muscles of humans in comparison to higher animals. Whether this truth is important or unimportant for the position of humans in relation to animals is not readily apparent from the fact itself. Another important truth, which we should actually come across directly every day, is that, in comparison to all other creatures on earth and in contrast to them, man can look freely into space with his face in the physical sense, to raise himself with his thoughts, his ideas, to what does not belong to the earth. The animals cannot rise from the earth, cannot free themselves from it. And no matter how much the similarity of the development of apes to that of man is emphasized, it is immediately apparent that the ape has not succeeded in straightening its posture when walking and standing. Therefore, we must regard this rising of man from the earth as a very important truth in a spiritual sense. Everything we find in man is a microcosmic imitation of the great world. Man's free elevation is expressed in the relationship of the head to the other limbs of the human being, as a relationship in a microcosm. But the same thing can be found outside in the great world, namely in the relationship between the sun and the earth. By letting this sink in, we get the feeling that the animal is already determined in its organization by the earth alone, but that the sun has determined man in his free outlook, in his feeling and thinking. This contrast cannot be understood at first go, so let us approach it slowly.

We feel our belonging to the universe when we know that it is the sun that sends certain forces to the earth so that man could develop into the organization he now has. From the forces of the sun, he is directed with his head upwards, while the earth pulls him downwards with his limbs. The limbs receive their orders from the head, just as the earth receives its guidance from the sun.

Today we want to highlight another contrast. In what has been said so far, all people are equal. There is no distinction between women and men. But the human organism does show the contrast between man and woman. In view of the analogies we have indicated, we ask: Is there in the great universe a contrast such as that between man and woman, just as there is between the head and the limbs? It must be particularly emphasized here that spiritual science has nothing to do with the representations that would like to extend the contrast between the masculine and the feminine to the whole great world. These are emanations of a schematic materialism of our time. Our present remarks are not meant that way; it is only a naughtiness of our present science. What is meant here is that the opposition between man and woman is only the lowest expression of an opposition in the macrocosm. In earthly existence, we must first point out that when we speak of the opposition between man and woman, we can only speak of the two outer covers, the physical and etheric bodies. For the astral body and I have nothing to do with this opposition, and therefore nothing to do with the following discussions.

Let us first note the fact established by clairvoyant insight, that basically only the head and limbs can give a true impression of a person. Since the spiritual is involved in everything physical, we must pay attention to the extent to which the physical can be an expression of the spiritual, and whether a true or false picture is given. Only the head and limbs give a true picture. Everything else does not correspond to the spiritual; this also applies to the male and female in man. Only the head and the limbs are recognized by the spiritual researcher as a true reflection of the spiritual; everything else is distorted. This is due to the fact that the separation into man and woman can be traced back to the Lemurian period, when a single form united within itself all that we now see as separate. This separation occurred in order to make it possible to connect an ever more material becoming with further development. Thus, man has increasingly materialized his form from an original spiritual form. For in the form of the neutral sex, he was still a form closer to the spirit. With the further development that then occurred in the direction of the feminine, this retained, as it were, an earlier form in which man was still more spiritual. The female form retained this more spiritual form and did not descend as deeply into the material as would have corresponded to the normal development. Thus woman has retained a more spiritual form from an earlier stage of development. She has thus preserved something that is actually untrue. She is also supposed to be the image of the spiritual, but she is distorted in the material sense. It is exactly the opposite with man. He has skipped the normal point of development, thus reaching beyond it, and forms an outer shape that is more material than the shadowy shape behind him, which corresponds to the normal mean.

Woman stands before this true mean; man has gone beyond it. Neither of them represents the true human being. Therefore, it is not the highest, most perfect thing we find in the human form. That is why people tried to add to it what is formed in the old priestly robes to make the human form, especially the male one, appear more true than it is by nature. They had a sense that nature can also record something. The female form leads us back to an earlier stage of existence on earth, to the old lunar age. The male form leads us beyond the earth's time into the Jupiter existence, but in a form that is not yet viable for it.

Now there is also an opposite in the macrocosm that corresponds to the opposite of the masculine and feminine, namely in what we see in the cometary and lunar, which shows itself as the opposite between the comets and the moon. The moon is a piece of the earth that separated from it later than when the sun broke away. What the earth could not use was eliminated, because otherwise the human form would have ossified and become woody in its development. The moon would have closed human development too quickly. It now represents, completely withered and frozen, that which will only be viable again later as a Jupiter being, but which is now as good as dead.

The comet represents something that protrudes from the old moon existence into our earth existence, something that is held back in its development and thus has not developed as far as the earth, something that remained at a higher, more spiritual level. The moon, on the other hand, emerged from our earth and went beyond it. The earth itself stands between the two. Thus, comets and moons, like female and male forms, are to be regarded as having remained behind and progressed beyond the normal process of development. In a certain sense, the comet behaves like the female nature in the human being. We can make ourselves still more clearly understood by comparing what the comet means for the development of the earth. If we realize that this follows the development of the moon and precedes the existence of Jupiter, we must be aware that the laws of nature on the old moon were different from those on the earth, and we can see this to some extent in the comets. Incidentally, it should be mentioned that the existence of comets is an example of how science later confirmed what I said in my lecture at the Theosophical Congress in Paris in June 1906: that comets preserve the earlier natural laws of the old moon. Among other things, certain carbon compounds, cyanic and prussic acid compounds, played a role on the old moon. It should therefore be possible to detect these cyanic and prussic acid compounds in the comet. And indeed, spectral analysis has since proved that there are prussic acid compounds in the comet. Thus the indications of spiritual science agree with the facts found by material science.

What does the cometary existence mean for the earth? What mission is associated with it? The answers to these questions should at least be given comparatively, and it should be pointed out that two different lives take place on earth in the contrast between man and woman. First, there is the course of everyday events in the family from morning to evening, with a regularity like summer and winter, like sunshine and storms and weather and hail. This can go on for a while. But then something happens that makes a significant and lasting change, and that is when a child is born. This interrupts the conventional course of things, and something new remains in the lives of the man and woman. We can compare this with the task that the comet has as a task for life on earth. It brings into our earthly life what comes from the female element of the cosmos. When the comet appears, it causes a jolt in the further development of humanity. Not so much in the actual progress itself, but in everything else that is instilled into humanity. We can observe this in Halley's Comet, in the spiritual forces behind it. Something new for the development of the Earth has always been associated with its appearance. At present it is about to reappear. With this, a new stage in the materialistic sense will be initiated and born. This can be seen from the last three appearances in the years 1682, 1759 and 1835. In 1759, the forces and spiritual powers that brought the spirit of materialistic enlightenment were at work. What had developed in this sense, at the suggestion of the spirits and powers behind Halley's comet, was what, for example, so annoyed Goethe about the “Système de la nature” by Baron von Holbach and the French encyclopedists. When Halley's Comet reappeared in 1835, materialism was quite conspicuously reflected in the views of Büchner and Moleschott, and these were then adopted in the materialism of the second half of the 19th century in the widest circles. In the present year, 1910, we are witnessing a new apparition of the old comet, and that means a year of crisis with regard to the view just discussed. All the forces are at work here to give birth to an even more superficial, worse sense in the human soul, a materialistic swamp of world view. Humanity is facing an enormous test, a trial in which it will be a matter of humanity proving that, in the face of the threat of the deepest fall, the impulse to ascend is also strongest in all respects. Otherwise it would not be possible for man to overcome the resistance that materialistic views place in his way. If man were not exposed to materialism, he could not overcome it by his own efforts. And now the opportunity arises to make a choice between the spiritual and the materialistic direction. The conditions for this year of crisis are being sent to us from the cosmos.

Spiritual science is something that is read from the great signs of heaven and brought into the world by those who know how to interpret these great signs, these mighty characters. So that humanity is warned against taking the materialistic path, which is outwardly recognizable in the appearance of Halley's Comet, a counter-impulse must be given by spiritual science. Thus, the forces for the upward path are also sent to us from the cosmos through other signs.

At the time of the event of Golgotha, the vernal point of the sun had been in the sign of Aries for some time. This point moves through all twelve constellations of the zodiac in the course of 25,920 years. The advance has now occurred in such a way that we have now entered the constellation of Pisces with the vernal point. By the middle of the twentieth century, we will have reached a certain point in this constellation. The constellation of Aries now marks the end of the Kali Yuga, the Dark Age, which, according to Oriental philosophy, began in 3101 BC. At that time, the vernal point of the sun passed through the constellation of Taurus. This event was depicted in the Persian Mithras bull and the Egyptian Apis bull. We find depictions of the passage through the constellation of Aries in the legend of the Argonauts with the Golden Fleece, and then in Christ as the Lamb, as the first Christians usually depicted him at the foot of the cross.

The age of Kali Yuga came to an end in 1899. It lasted from 3101 BC to 1899 AD, for 5000 years, during which time people had to rely on their physical senses alone to observe what was happening on the physical plane, without the ability to use clairvoyance to help them. Now the abilities are beginning to prepare themselves, which will be able to lead human nature back to spiritual development. It was only in the Kali Yuga that the ego could and had to develop into the consciousness that is its own, in the only way possible during this time. From now on, a clairvoyant consciousness can join this sense of self, which will develop within the next 2500 years, whereby a spiritual grasp of the world will then be added to the physical-sensual one. To make this possible, the powers will be sent to us around the middle of the 20th century, so that people will then begin to see the etheric and astral bodies, and in such a way that this will already occur as a natural ability in some exceptional people. When a person then wants to carry out a preconceived plan, an intention of some kind, a kind of vision will appear to him, which is nothing other than a preview of the karmic fulfillment of the deed that has been done. In the meantime, humanity can plunge into the quagmire of materialistic worldviews and views of life. But then it will easily happen that the weak abilities of clairvoyance that show up during this time will be ignored as such, and people who already possess them will be regarded as fools and fantasists. For anyone who has never heard of spiritual science will not recognize these delicate abilities. But nevertheless these signs are true. However, if the spiritual world view triumphs, humanity will carefully cultivate the abilities hinted at, so that the persons endowed with them will be able to bring spiritual truths down from the spiritual world.

Under such circumstances, we can say: We are standing before an important point in the evolution of the world, which we must prepare, so that in its arising, our Earth will not be trampled to death with rough feet, when it wants to cover itself with a new faculty. What will then be seen as the spiritual world, with spiritual organs, as a spiritual atmosphere, is something that today only the initiated can recognize. But it will take a considerable time before the first tender abilities have developed to this degree or even to the height at which ancient humanity knew them in their ecstatic states, albeit only in their dream-like clairvoyance. But like a spiritual shell, this constantly developing ability will be spread around our earth. The Oriental scriptures, especially the Tibetan, speak much of a land which has disappeared, and they speak with sadness of Shamballa, a land which disappeared in the age of Kali Yuga. But it is rightly said that the initiates can withdraw to Shamballa to get from there what they need to further humanity in their development. All Bodhisattvas draw strength and wisdom from the land of Shamballa. For the average person, it has disappeared. But there are prophecies that this land of Shamballa will return to humanity. When the delicate powers of clairvoyance show themselves and become more and more intensified and widespread, and when these, as the good forces that come from the sun's existence, are received and allowed to work instead of the forces from Halley's Comet, then Shamballa will return. We are in the period of preparation for Humanity for this unfoldment of a new clairvoyance, which will take place during the next 2,500 years, a preparation which will steadily continue both in the time between birth and death and in the time between death and a new birth. What will then take place will be the subject of the next lecture.

At the conclusion of what was said yesterday on the subject of the deeper mystical path, it was necessary to speak of the chief danger encountered on this path by anyone who attempted to tread it without a leader in times before the methods of Initiation now available, were in existence. In order to indicate still more explicitly how great these difficulties were, I want to add the following.-

We have heard that the difficulties are mainly due to the fact that on descending into his inner being, a man becomes almost entirely filled by his egoistic impulses. The Ego awakens with a strength that would place everything in its service; everything would be viewed in accordance with the colouring given it by this reinforced Ego. For this reason it was essential in the process of the ancient Initiation that the strength of the, Ego-feeling, the Ego-consciousness, should be subdued. The Ego had as it were to be given over to the spiritual leader or teacher. This subjugation of the Ego was effected in such a way that through the power emanating from the spiritual leader, the Ego-consciousness of the candidate for Initiation was reduced, to begin with, to one-third of its ordinary strength. That is a very considerable reduction, for it can be said, broadly speaking, that with the exception of the very deepest stage of all, our consciousness in sleep is reduced to about one-third. But in the ancient Mysteries the process was carried further than that; the consciousness was reduced to a quarter of a third (that is, to one-twelfth), so that finally the candidate was actually in a condition resembling death. To outer observation he was exactly like a dead man.

But I must emphasise that this Ego-consciousness did not fade away into nothingness. That was not the case. On the contrary, only then was it possible to realise through spiritual perception the intense strength of human egoism; for even when Ego-consciousness was reduced to one-twelfth, a powerful force of egoism still came forth spiritually from the individual. And strange as it may sound, in order to hold in check this outpouring egoism, to keep a spiritual hold on the man whose Ego was thus subdued, twelve helpers were needed for the teacher or leader.—That is one of the so-called secrets of higher Initiation in certain ancient Mysteries. It has been mentioned here only in order that a man may know what is found when he descends into his own inner being. Left to his own resources he would develop traits twelve times worse than those he possessed in ordinary life. These traits were held in check in the ancient Mysteries by the twelve helpers of the priest of Hermes.—This is said merely to supplement the references made at the end of the lecture yesterday.

Today we will turn our minds to the other path that a man may take, not by descending into his inner self at the moment of waking, but by consciously experiencing the moment of going to sleep, consciously experiencing the condition during which he is given over to sleep. We have heard how man has then expanded as it were into the Macrocosm, whereas in his waking state he has plunged into his own being, into the Microcosm. We also heard that what a man would experience if his Ego were to pour consciously into the Macrocosm, would be so dazzling, so shattering, that it must be regarded as a wise dispensation that at the moment of going to sleep man forgets his existence altogether and consciousness ceases.

What man can experience in the Macrocosm opening out before him, provided he retains a certain degree of consciousness, was described as a state of ecstasy. But it was said at the same time that in ecstasy the Ego is like a tiny drop mingling in a large volume of water and disappearing in it. Man is in the state of being outside himself, outside his ordinary nature; he lets his Ego flow out of him. Ecstasy, therefore, can by no means be considered a desirable way of passing into the Macrocosm, for a man would lose hold of himself and the Ego would cease to control him. Nevertheless in bygone times, particularly in certain parts of Europe, a candidate who was to be initiated into the mysteries of the Macrocosm was put into a condition comparable with ecstasy. This is no longer part of the modern methods for attaining Initiation, but in olden times, especially in the Northern and Western regions of Europe, including our own, it was entirely in keeping with the development of the peoples living there that they should be led to the secrets of the Macrocosm through a form of ecstasy. Thereby they were also exposed to what might be described as the loss of the Ego, but this condition was less perilous in those times because men were still imbued with a certain healthy, elemental strength; unlike people today their soul-forces had not been enfeebled by the effects of highly developed intellectuality. They were able to experience with far greater intensity all the hopefulness connected with Spring, the exultation of Summer, the melancholy of Autumn, the death-shudder of Winter, while still retaining something of their Ego—although not for long. In the case of those who were to become initiates and teachers of men, provision had to be made for this introduction to the Macrocosm to take place in a different way. The reason for this will be evident when it is remembered that the main feature in this process was the loss of the Ego. The Ego became progressively weaker, until finally man reached the state when he lost himself as a human being.

How could this be prevented? The force that became weaker in the candidate's own soul, the Ego-force, had to be brought to him from outside. In the Northern Mysteries this was achieved by the candidate being given the support of helpers who in their turn supported the officiating initiator. The presence of a spiritual initiator was essential, but helpers were necessary as well. These helpers were prepared in the following way.—

Through a special kind of training, one individual underwent with particular intensity the experiences arising from inner surrender, for example to the budding life of nature in Spring. Certainly, any human being can have something of the same feeling, but not with the necessary intensity. Therefore individuals were specially trained to place all their forces of soul in the service of the Northern Mysteries, to forgo all the experiences connected with Summer, Autumn and Winter, and to concentrate their whole life of feeling on the budding life of Spring. Others again were trained to experience the exuberant life of Summer, others the life characteristic of Autumn, others that of Winter. The experiences which a single human being can have through the course of the year were distributed among a number, so that individuals were available who in very different ways had strengthened one aspect of their Ego. Because they had cultivated one force in particular to the exclusion of all the rest, they had within them a superfluity of Ego-force, and now, in accordance with certain rules, they were brought into contact with the candidate for Initiation in such a way that their superfluity of Ego-force was transmitted to him. His own Ego-force would otherwise have become progressively weaker. Thus the one who in the process of Initiation was to experience the whole cycle of the year, lived through all the seasons with equal intensity; the Ego-force of these helpers of the initiating priest streamed into him so effectively that he was led on to a stage where certain higher truths connected with the Macrocosm were revealed to him. What the others were able to impart poured into the soul of the candidate for Initiation.

To understand such a process we must be able to form an idea of the intense devotion and self-sacrifice with which men worked in the Mysteries in those olden times. The exoteric world today has very little conception of such fervent self-sacrifice. In earlier times there were individuals who willingly developed one side of their Ego with the object of placing it at the service of the candidate for Initiation and thus being able eventually to hear from him a description of what he had experienced in a condition that was not ecstasy in the usual sense, but—because extraneous Ego-force had poured into him—a conscious ascent into the Macrocosm.

Twelve individuals-three Spring-helpers, three Summer-helpers, three Autumn helpers and three Winter-helpers were necessary; they transmitted their specialised Ego-forces to the candidate for Initiation and he, when he had risen into higher worlds, was able to give information about those worlds from his own experience. A team or ‘college’ of twelve men worked together in the Mysteries in order to help a candidate for Initiation to rise into the Macrocosm. A reminiscence of this has been preserved in certain societies existing today, but in an entirely decadent form. As a rule in such societies special functions are also carried out by twelve members; but this is only a last and moreover entirely misunderstood echo of acts once performed in the Northern Mysteries for the purposes of Initiation.

If, then, a man endowed with an Ego-force artificially maintained in him, penetrated into the Macrocosm, he actually ascended through worlds. [* See Note on terminology (at the end of this work) with reference to the different terminology employed for these worlds.] The first world through which he passed was the one that would be revealed to him if he did not lose consciousness on going to sleep. We will therefore now turn our attention to this moment of going to sleep as we did previously to that of waking.

The process of going to sleep is in very truth an ascent into the Macrocosm. Even in normal human consciousness it is sometimes possible, through particularly abnormal conditions, to become conscious to a certain extent of the processes connected with going to sleep. This happens in the following way.—The man feels a kind of bliss and can distinguish this consciousness of bliss quite clearly from the ordinary waking consciousness. It is as though he became lighter, as though he were growing out beyond himself. Then this experience is connected with a certain feeling of being tortured by remembrance of the personal faults inhering in the character during life. What arises here as a painful remembrance of personal faults is a very faint reflection of the feeling a man has when he passes the Lesser Guardian of the Threshold and can perceive how imperfect he is and how trivial in face of the great realities and Beings of the Macrocosm. This experience is followed by a kind of convulsion—indicating that the inner man is passing out into the Macrocosm. Such experiences are unusual but known to many people when they were more or less conscious at the moment of going to sleep. But a person who has only the ordinary, normal consciousness loses it at the moment of going to sleep. All the impressions of the day—colours, light, sounds, and so on—vanish, and the man is surrounded by dense darkness instead of the colours and other impressions of daily life. If he were able to maintain his consciousness—as the trained Initiate can do—at the moment when the impressions of the day vanish, he would perceive what is called in spiritual science the Elementary or Elemental World, the World of the Elements.

This World of the Elements is, to begin with, hidden from man while he is in process of going to sleep. Just as man's inner being is hidden on waking through his attention being diverted to the impressions of the outer world, so, when he goes to sleep, the nearest world to which he belongs, the first stage of the Macrocosm, the Elementary World, is hidden from his perception. He can learn to gaze into it when he actually ascends into the Macrocosm in the way indicated. To begin with, this Elementary World makes him conscious that everything in his environment, all sense-perceptions and impressions, are an emanation, a manifestation of the spiritual, that the spiritual lies behind everything material. When a man on the way to Initiation—not, therefore, losing consciousness while passing into sleep—perceives this world, no doubt any longer exists for him that spiritual Beings and spiritual realities lie behind the physical world. Only as long as he is aware of nothing except the physical world does he imagine that behind this world there exist all kinds of conjectured material phenomena—such as atoms and the like. For the man who penetrates into the Elementary World there can no longer be any question of whirling, clustering atoms of matter. He knows that what lies behind colours, sounds and so forth is not material but the spiritual. Certainly, at this first stage of the World of the Elements the spiritual does not yet reveal itself in its true form as spirit. Man has before him impressions which, although in a different form from those known in waking consciousness, are not yet the spiritual facts themselves. It is not yet anything that could be called a true spiritual manifestation but to a considerable degree it is something that might be described as a kind of new veil over the spiritual Beings and facts.

The form in which this world reveals itself is such that the designations, the names, which since olden times have been used for the Elements are applicable to it. We can describe what is there seen by choosing words used for qualities otherwise perceived in the physical world: solid, liquid or fluid, airy or aeriform, or warmth; or: earth, water, air, fire. These expressions are taken from the physical world for which they are coined. Our language is after all a means of expression for the physical world. If therefore the spiritual scientist has to describe the higher worlds, he must borrow the words from the language that was coined for the things of ordinary life. He can speak only in similes, endeavouring so to choose the words that little by little an idea is evoked of what is perceived by spiritual vision. In depicting the Elementary World we must not take the terms and expressions that are used for circumscribed objects in the physical world but those used for certain qualities common to a category of objects. Otherwise we shall lose our bearings. Things in the physical world reveal themselves to us in certain states which we call solid, liquid, aeriform; and in addition there is also what we become aware of when we touch the surfaces of objects or feel a current of air which we call warmth.

Things in the everyday world are revealed to us in these states or conditions: solid, liquid, aecriform or gaseous, or as warmth. These, however, are always qualities of some external body, for an external body may be solid in the form of ice or also be liquid or gaseous when the ice melts. Warmth permeates all three states. So it is in the case of everything existing in the outer world of the senses.

The fact is there are not objects in the Elementary World such as are found in the physical world, but in the Elementary World we find as realities what in the physical world are merely qualities. We perceive something there that we feel we cannot approach. The feeling might be described as follows: I have before me something—either an entity or an object of the Elementary World—which I can observe only by going round it; it has an inner and an outer side. Such an entity of the Elementary World is called ‘earth’. Then too there are things and entities which may be described as ‘liquid’ or ‘fluid’. In the Elementary World we can see through them, we can penetrate into them, we have a sensation similar to the sensation in the physical world of dipping the hand into water. We can plunge into them, whereas what is called ‘earth’ is something that offers resistance, like a hard object. The second state is described in the Elementary World as ‘water’. Whenever mention is made of ‘earth’ and ‘water’ in books on spiritual science, this is what is meant; physical water is only an external simile for what is seen at this stage of development. ‘Water’ is something that pours through the Elementary World, not, of course, perceptible to the physical senses, but intelligible to the higher senses, to the faculty of spiritual perception, of the Initiate.

Then there is something in the Elementary World comparable with what we call ‘airy’ or ‘aeriform’ in the physical world. This is designated as ‘air’ in the Elementary World. Then, further, there is ‘fire’ or ‘warmth’, but it must be realised that what is called ‘fire’ in the physical world is only a simile. ‘Fire’ as it is in the Elementary World is easier to describe than the other three states for these can really only be described by saying that water, air and earth are similes of them. The ‘fire’ of the Elementary World is easier to describe because everyone has a conception of warmth of soul as it is called, of the warmth that is felt, for example, when we are together with someone we love. What then suffuses the soul and is called warmth, or fire of excitement, must naturally be distinguished from ordinary physical fire which will burn the fingers if they come into contact with it. In daily life, too, man feels that physical fire is a kind of symbol of the fire of soul which, when it lays hold of us, kindles enthusiasm. By thinking of something midway between an outer, physical fire that burns our fingers, and fire of soul, we reach an approximate idea of what is called ‘elemental fire’. When in the process of Initiation a man rises into the Elementary World, he feels as if from certain places something were flowing towards him that pervades him inwardly with warmth, while at another place this is less the case. An added complication is that he feels as if he were within the being who is transmitting the warmth to him. He is united with this elementary being and accordingly feels its fire. Such a man is entering a higher world which gives him impressions hitherto unknown to him in the world of the senses.

When a man with normal consciousness goes to sleep his whole being flows out into the Elementary World. He is within everything in that world; but he takes his own nature, what he is as man, into it. He loses his Ego as it pours forth, but what is not Ego—his astral qualities, his desires and passions, his sense of truth or the reverse—all this is carried into the Elementary World. He loses his Ego which in everyday life keeps him in check, which brings order and harmony into the astral body. When he loses the Ego, disorder prevails among the impulses and cravings in his soul and they make their way into the Elementary World together with him; he carries into that world everything that is in his soul. If he has some bad quality, he transmits it to a being in the Elementary World who feels drawn towards this bad quality. Thus with the loss of his Ego he would, on penetrating into the Macrocosm, transmit his whole astral nature to evil beings who pervade the Elementary World. Because he contacts these beings who have strong Egos, while he himself, having lost his Ego, is weaker than they, the consequence is that they will reward him in the negative sense for the sustenance with which he supplies them from his astral nature. When he returns into the physical world they transmit to him, for his Ego, qualities they have received from him and made particularly their own; in other words they strengthen his propensity for evil.

So we see that it is a wise dispensation for man to lose consciousness when he enters the Elementary World and to be safeguarded from passing with his Ego into that world. Therefore one who in the ancient Mysteries was to be led into the Elementary World had to be carefully prepared before forces were poured into him by the helpers of the Initiator. This preparation consisted in the imposition of rigorous tests whereby the candidate acquired a stronger moral power of self-conquest. Special value was attached to this attribute. In the case of a mystic, different attributes—humility, for example—were considered particularly valuable.

Accordingly upon a man who was to be admitted to an Initiation in these Mysteries, tests were imposed which helped him to rise above disasters of every kind even in physical existence. Formidable dangers were laid along his path. But by overcoming these dangers his soul was to be so strengthened that he was duly prepared when beings confronted him in the Elementary World; he was then strong enough not to succumb to any of their temptations, not to let them get the better of him but to repel them. Those who were to be admitted into the Mysteries were trained in fearlessness and in the power of self-conquest.

Once again let it be said at this point that no one need feel alarmed by the description of these Mysteries, for nowadays such tests are no longer imposed, nor are they necessary, because other paths are available. But we shall understand the import of the modern method of Initiation better if we study the experiences undergone in the past by very many human beings in order to achieve Initiation into the secrets of the Mysteries.

When the candidate in those ancient Mysteries, after long experiences connected with the Elementary World, had become capable of realizing that ‘earth’, ‘water’, ‘air’, ‘fire’—everything he perceives in the material world—are the revelations of spiritual beings, when he had learned to discriminate between them and to find his bearings in the Elementary World, he could be led a stage further to what is called the World of Spirit behind the Elementary World. Those who were initiates—and this can only be described as a communication of what they experienced—now realised that in very truth there are beings behind the Physical and the Elementary Worlds. But these beings have no resemblance at all to men. Whereas men on the Earth live together in a social order, in certain forms of society, under definite social conditions, whether satisfactory or the reverse, the candidate for Initiation passes into a world in which there are spiritual beings—beings who naturally have no external body but who are related to each other in such a way that order and harmony prevail. It is now revealed to him that he can understand the order and harmony he perceives in that world only by realising that what these spiritual beings do is an external expression of the heavenly bodies in the solar system, of the relationship between the Sun and the planets in their movements and positions. Thereby these heavenly bodies give expression to what the beings of the spiritual world are doing.

It has already been said that our solar system may be conceived as a great cosmic clock or timepiece. Just as we infer from the position of the hands of a clock that something is happening, we can do the same from the relative positions of the heavenly bodies. Anyone looking at a clock is naturally not interested in the hands or their position per se, but in what this indicates in the outer world. The hands of a clock indicate, for example, what is happening here in Vienna or somewhere in the world at this moment. A man who has to go to his daily work looks at the clock to see if it is time to start. The position of the hands is therefore the expression of something lying behind. And so it is in the case of the solar system. This great cosmic clock can be regarded as the expression of spiritual happenings and of the activity of spiritual beings behind it.

At this stage the candidate for the Initiation we have been describing comes to know the spiritual beings and facts. He comes to know the World of Spirit and realises that this World of Spirit can best be understood by applying to it the designations used in connection with our solar system; for there we have an outer symbol of this World of Spirit. For the Elementary World the similes are taken from the qualities of earthly things—solid, liquid, airy, fiery. But for the World of Spirit other similes must be used, similes drawn from the starry heavens.

And now we can realise that the comparison with a clock is by no means far fetched. We relate the heavenly bodies of our solar system to the twelve constellations of the Zodiac, and we can find our bearings in the World of Spirit only by viewing it in such a way as to be able to assert that spiritual Beings and events are realities; we compare the facts with the courses of the planets but the spiritual Beings with the twelve constellations of the Zodiac. If we contemplate the planets in space and the zodiacal constellations, if we conceive the movements and relative positions of the planets in front of the various constellations to be manifestations of the activities of the spiritual Beings and the twelve constellations of the Zodiac as the spiritual Beings themselves, then it is possible to express by such an analogy what is happening in the World of Spirit.

We distinguish seven planets moving and performing deeds, and twelve zodiacal constellations at rest behind them. We conceive that the spiritual facts—the courses of the planets—are brought about by twelve Beings. Only in this way is it possible to speak truly of the World of Spirit lying behind the Elementary World. We must picture not merely twelve zodiacal constellations, but Beings, actually categories of Beings, and not merely seven planets, but spiritual facts.

Twelve Beings are acting, are entering into relationship with one another and if we describe their actions this will show what is coming to pass in the World of Spirit. Accordingly, whatever has reference to the Beings must be related in some way to the number twelve; whatever hag reference to the facts must be related to the number seven. Only instead of the names of the zodiacal constellations we need to have the names of the corresponding Beings. In Spiritual Science these names have always been known. At the beginning of the Christian era there was an esoteric School which adopted the following names for the Spiritual Beings corresponding to the zodiacal constellations: Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, Kyriotetes, Dynameis, Exusiai, then Archai (Primal Beginnings or Spirits of Personality), then Archangels and Angels. The tenth category is Man himself at his present stage of evolution. These names denote ten ranks. Man, however, develops onwards and subsequently reaches stages already attained by other Beings. Therefore one day he will also be instrumental in forming an eleventh and a twelfth category. In this sense we must think of twelve spiritual Beings.

If we wanted to describe the World of Spirit we should have to attribute the origin of the spiritual universe to the co-operation among these twelve categories of Beings. Any description of what they do would have to deal with the planetary bodies and their movements. Let us assume that the Spirits of Will (the Thrones) co-operate with the Spirits of Personality (Archai) or with other Beings—and Old Saturn comes into existence. Through the co-operation of other Spirits the planetary bodies we call Old Sun and Old Moon come into existence.

We are speaking here of the deeds of these spiritual Beings. A description of the World of Spirit must include the Elementary World, for that is the last manifestation before the physical world; fire, air, water, earth, must also be considered. On Old Saturn, everything was fire or warmth; during the Old Sun evolution, air was added; during the Old Moon evolution, water. In describing the World of Spirit we must begin with the Beings. We call them the Hierarchies and pass on to their deeds which come to expression through the planets in their courses. And to have a picture of how all this manifests in the Elementary World we must describe it by using terms derived from this world. Only in this way is it possible to give a picture of the World of Spirit lying behind the Elementary World and our physical world of sense.

The Beings, the spiritual Hierarchies, their correspondences with the zodiacal constellations, the planetary embodiments of our Earth described by using expressions connected with the Elementary World-all this is presented in detail in the chapter on the evolution of the world in the book Occult Science—an Outline,¹ and we can now understand the deeper reasons for that chapter having been written in the way it has. It describes the Macrocosm as it should be described. Any real description must go back to the spiritual Beings. I tried in the book Occult Science to give guiding lines for the right kind of description of the World of Spirit—the world entered when there has been an actual ascent into the Macrocosm.

This ascent into the Macrocosm can of course proceed to still higher stages, for the Macrocosm has by no means been exhaustively portrayed by what has here been said. Man can ascend into even higher worlds; but it becomes more and more difficult to convey any idea of these worlds. The higher the ascent, the more difficult this becomes. If we want to give an idea of a still higher world it must be done rather differently. An impression of the world that is reached after passing beyond the World of Spirit may be obtained in the following way.—In describing man as he stands before us we may say that his existence was only made possible through the existence of these higher worlds. Man has become the being he is because he has evolved out of the physical world but above all out of the higher, spiritual worlds. Only a fantasy-ridden, materialistic mind can believe that it would be possible for a man to originate from the nebula described by the Kant-Laplace theory. Such a nebula could have produced only an automaton—never a man!

Around us, we have, firstly, the physical world. The physical body of man belongs to the world we perceive with our senses. With ordinary consciousness we perceive it only from outside. To what world do the more deeply lying, invisible members of man's nature belong? They all belong to the higher worlds. Just as with physical eyes we see only the material aspect of man, so too we see of the great outer world only what the senses perceive; we do not see those super-sensible worlds of which two—the Elementary World and the World of Spirit—have been described. But man, with his inner constitution, has issued from these higher worlds. The whole of man's being, his external, bodily nature too, has become possible only because certain invisible spiritual Beings have worked on him. If the etheric body alone had worked on man, he would be like a plant, for a plant has a physical and an etheric body. Man has in addition the astral body; but so too has the animal. If man had only these three members (physical body, etheric body, astral body) he would be an animal. It is because man has his Ego as well that he towers above these lower creatures of the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms of nature. All the higher members of man work on his physical body; the physical body could not be what it is unless man also possessed these higher members. A plant would be a mineral if it had no etheric body. Man would have no nervous system if he had no astral body; he would not have his present structure, his upright gait, his over-arching brow, if he had not an Ego. If he had not his invisible members in higher worlds, he could not confront us as the figure he is.

Now these different members of man's organism and constitution have been formed out of different spiritual worlds. To understand this we shall do well to remind ourselves of a beautiful, profoundly wise saying of Goethe: “The eye is formed by the light for the light.” [* See Goethe's Studies in Natural Science. (Kürschner, Nationalliteratur, Vol. 35, p. 88). “The eye owes its existence to the light. Out of indifferent animal organs the light produces an organ to correspond to itself; and so the eye is formed by the light for the light so that the inner light may meet the outer.”] Schopenhauer, and Kant too, want to present the whole world as man's idea; this philosophy seeks to emphasise that without an eye we should perceive no light, that without an eye there would be darkness around us. That, of course, is true, but the point is that it is a one-sided truth. Unless the other side is added a one-sided truth is being regarded as the whole truth—than which there is nothing more pernicious. To say something that is incorrect is not the worst thing that can happen, for the world itself will soon put one right about it; but it is really serious to regard a one-sided truth as the absolute truth and to persist in so regarding it. That without the eye we could see no light is a one-sided truth. But if the world had remained forever filled with darkness, we should have had no eyes. When animals have lived for long ages in dark caves they lose their sight and their eyes go to ruin. On the one side it is true that without eyes we could gee no light, but on the other side it is equally true that the eyes have been formed by the light, for the light. It is always essential to look at truths not only from the one side but also from the other. The fault of most philosophers is not that they say what is false—in many cases their assertions cannot be refuted because they do state truths—but that they make statements which are due to things having been viewed from one side only. If you take in the right sense the saying that “the eye is formed by the light, for the light”, you will be able to say to yourselves that there must be something in the light that admittedly we do not see with our eyes but that has developed the eyes out of an organism which at first had no eyes. Behind the light there is something hidden. Let us say here: The eye-forming power is contained in every ray of sunlight. From this we can realise that everything round about us contains the forces which have created us. Just as our eyes are created by something within the light, all our organs have been formed by something that underlies everything we see in the world outside as external surfaces only.

Now man also has intellect, intelligence. In physical life he is able to use his intelligence because he has an instrument for it. Remember, we are speaking now of the physical world, not of what becomes of our thinking when we are free of the body after death, but of how we think through the instrument of the brain when we have wakened from sleep in the morning; after waking we see light through the eyes. In the light there is something that has formed the eye. We think through the instrument of the brain; thus there must be something in the world that has formed the brain in such a way that it could become an instrument of thinking suitable for the physical world. The brain has been made into an organ of thinking for the physical world by the power which manifests externally in our intelligence. Just as the light we perceive with the eye is an eye-forming power, our brain is the surface manifestation of a brain-forming power or force. Our brain is formed from out of the World of Spirit.

One who has attained Initiation recognises that if only the Elementary World and the World of Spirit existed, man's organ of intelligence could never have come into being. The World of the Spirit is indeed a lofty world but the forces which have formed the physical organ of thinking must have streamed into man from a yet higher world in order that intelligence might manifest outwardly, in the physical world.

Spiritual science has not without reason figuratively expressed this frontier of the world we have described as the world of the Hierarchies, by the word “Zodiac.” Man would be at the level of the animal if only the two worlds that have been described were in existence. In order that man could become a being able to walk upright, to think by means of the brain and to develop intelligence, an in-streaming of even higher forces was necessary, forces from a world above the World of Spirit. Here we come to a world designated by a word that is totally misused today because of the prevailing materialism. But in a past by no means very distant the word still conveyed its original meaning. The faculty man unfolds here in the physical world when he thinks, was called ‘Intelligence’ in the spiritual science of that earlier period. It is from a world lying beyond both the World of Spirit and the Elementary World that forces stream down through these two worlds to build our brain. Spiritual Science has also called it the World of Reason (Vernunftwelt). It is the world in which there are spiritual Beings who are able to send down their power into the physical world in order that a shadow-image of the Spiritual may be produced in the physical world in man's intellectual activity. Before the age of materialism no one would have used the word “reason” for thinking; thinking would have been called intellect, intelligence. “Reason” (Vernunft) would have been spoken of when those who were initiates had risen into a world even higher than the World of Spirit and had direct perception there. In the German language “reason” is connected with perception (Vernehmen), with what is directly apprehended, perceived as coming from a world still higher than the one denoted as the World of Spirit. A faint image of this world exists in the shadowy human intellect. The architects and builders of our organ of intellect must be sought in the World of Reason.

It is only possible to describe a still higher world by developing a spiritual faculty transcending the physical intellect. There is a higher form of consciousness, namely, clairvoyant consciousness. If we ask: how is the organ evolved which enables us to have clairvoyant consciousness?—the answer is that there must be worlds from which emanate the forces necessary for the development of this clairvoyant consciousness. Like everything else, it must be formed from a higher world. The first kind of clairvoyant consciousness to develop is a picture-consciousness, Imaginative Consciousness. This Imaginative Consciousness remains mere phantasy only for as long as the organ for it is not formed by forces from a world lying beyond even the World of Reason. As soon as we admit the existence of clairvoyant consciousness we must also admit the existence of a world from which emanate the forces enabling the organ for it to develop. This is the World of Archetypal Images (Urbilderwelt). Whatever can arise as true Imagination is a reflection of the World of Archetypal Images.

Thus we rise into the Macrocosm through four higher worlds: the Elementary World, the World of Spirit, the World of Reason and the World of Archetypal Images. In the next lectures I will deal with the World of Reason and the World of Archetypal Images and then describe the methods by which, in line with modern culture, the forces from the World of Archetypal Images can be brought down in order to make possible the development of clairvoyant consciousness.

• 1. Chapter IV, Man and the Evolution of the World, pp. 102-221 in the 1962-3 edition.