323. Astronomy as Compared to Other Sciences: Lecture XII
12 Jan 1921, Stuttgart Translated by Unknown Rudolf Steiner |
---|
As you are well aware, to explain all the phenomena, Astronomy today must have recourse not only to the primary notion of a stationary Sun supposed to be at the focus of an ellipse along which the Earth is moving—but to a further movement, a movement of the Sun itself towards a certain constellation. If you imagine the direction of this movement and other relevant factors, then from the several movements of Sun and Earth, you may well be able to deduce a resultant path for the Earth, no longer coincident with the ellipse in which the Earth is said to be going round the Sun, but of a different form which need not be at all like the supposed ellipse. |
323. Astronomy as Compared to Other Sciences: Lecture XII
12 Jan 1921, Stuttgart Translated by Unknown Rudolf Steiner |
---|
I will begin today by pointing out that our studies hitherto have led us to a specific result. We have drawn attention on the one hand to the movements of the heavenly bodies, and, though it still remains for us to do it in more detail, we have at least gained some conception: Here are a number of cosmic bodies in movement, in a certain order and configuration. Meanwhile we have also been drawing attention to the form of man, and incidentally, from time to time, to the forms of animal and plant-nature; this we shall have to do still more, to gain the necessary supports from diverse realms. In the main however, it is the human form and figure we have contemplated, and in so doing we have divined that the formation of man is in some way related to what finds expression in the movement of celestial bodies. We want to formulate it with great care. Yesterday I showed that wheresoever we may look in the human body, we shall find the formative principle of the looped curve or Lemniscate, save for the two outermost polarities—the Radius and the Sphere. Thus in the human body we perceive three formative principles (Fig. 1): The Sphere, with its activity primarily going inward, the Radius, and between these the looped curve or Lemniscate. Truly to recognise these formative principles in the human organism, you must imagine the Lemniscate as such with variable constants, if I may use the paradox. Where a curve normally has constants in its equation, we must think variables. The variability is most in evidence in the middle portion of the human body. Take as a whole the structure of the pairs of ribs and the adjoining vertebrae. True as it is then that in the vertebra the one half of the Lemniscate is very much condensed and pressed together, whilst in the pair of ribs the other half is much extended and drawn apart (Fig. 2), we must not be put off my this. The underlying formative principle is the Lemniscate, none the less. We simply have to imagine that where the ribs are (the drawing indicated those that are joined in front via the sternum) the space is widened, matter being as it were extenuated, while, to make up for this, the matter is compressed and the space lessoned in the vertebra. Let us now follow the human form and figure upward and downward from this middle portion. Upward we find the vertebra as it were bulged out into a wide cavity (Fig. 3), while the remaining branches of the Lemniscate seem to vanish, nestling away, so to speak, in the internal formative process, becoming hidden and undefined. Going downward from the middle portion, we contemplate for instance the attachment of the lower limbs to the pelvis. In all that opens downward from this point, we find the other half of the loop fading away. We have therefore to contemplate a fundamental loop-curve, mobile and variable in itself. This dominates the middle part of man. Only, the formative forces of it must be so imagined that in the one half (Fig. 2) the material forces become, as it were, more attenuated and the loop widens, while in the other it contracts. Further we must imagine that from this middle region upward the portion of the Lemniscate which in the vertebra was drawn together, bulges and widens out, while the other, downward-opening portion vanishes and eludes us. On the other hand, as you go downward from the middle part of man, the closed loop grows minute and fades away, while those portions of the curve which disappear as you go towards the head, run out into the radial principle and are here prolonged. (Fig. 4) We should thus find our way into it, till we are able to see the only moving Lemniscate with perceptive insight. Also we think how the formative principle of the moving Lemniscate is combined with forces which are spheroidal on the one hand and on the other radial—radial with respect to the Earth's centre. We then have a system of forces which we may conceive as being fundamental to the form and figure, to the whole forming and configuration of the human body. (By the word “forces” I mean nothing hypothetical;—purely and simply what is made manifest in the forming of it.) Answering to this , in cosmic space, in the movement of celestial bodies, we also find a peculiar configuration,—configuration of movements. In yesterday's lecture, we recognised in the planetary loops the very same principle outside us which is the principle of form within us. Let us now follow this loop-forming principle in greater detail. Is it not interesting that Mercury and Venus make their loops when the planets are in inferior conjunction, i.e., when they are roughly between the Earth and the Sun? In other words, their loop occurs when what the Sun is for man—so to express it—is enhanced by Venus and Mercury. As against this, look for the loops of Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. These loops we find occurring when the planets are in opposition to the Sun. This contrast too, of oppositions and conjunctions, will in some way correspond to a contrast in the building forces of man. For Saturn, Jupiter and Mars, because their loops appear in opposition, the loops as loops will be most active and influential. Thinking along these lines, we shall indeed relate the loop-formation of Saturn, Jupiter and Mars to that in man which is little influenced by the Sun; for it takes place, once more, when the planet is in opposition. Whilst, inasmuch as Venus and Mercury form their loops when in conjunction, their loop-formation must in some way be related to what is brought about, amid the formative principles of man, by the Sun—or by what underlies the Sun. We shall therefore conceive the Sun's influence to be in some sense reinforced by Venus and Mercury, while it withdraws, as it were, in face of the superior planets, so-called. The latter, precisely during loop-formation, bring to expression something that bears directly, not indirectly, upon man. If we pursue this line of thought and bear in mind that there is the contrast between Radius and Sphere, then we need but recall the form that comes to manifestation in these movements, and we shall say: In Mays, Jupiter and Saturn the essential phase must be when they are forming their loops, that is to say, when, in a manner speaking, the sphere-forming process comes into evidence. Mars, Jupiter and Saturn (not to speak of further planets) will show their influence upon that element in man which is assigned to the sphere-forming process, namely the human head. In contrast to this—they are indeed the polar opposite—the movements of Venus and Mercury will somehow find expression in what in man too is the opposite pole, opposite to the forming of the head,—i.e., what abandons parallelism with the spherical formation and becomes parallel to the radial. Where the one part of the Lemniscate becomes minute and the other grows into the limbs, into a purely radial development, we have to look for the relation to Venus and Mercury. This in turn will lead us on to say: In the superior planets, which make their loop when in opposition, it is the loop that matters; they develop their intensity while they form the loop. Whilst in the inferior planets Venus and Mercury—it is essential that they wield their influence by virtue of what is not the loop,—i.e., in contrast to the loop, by the remainder of the planet's path. Think of a Lemniscate like this (Fig. 5), say in the case of Venus (I draw it diagrammatically). You will understand it if you imagine this part (dotted line) ever less in evidence, the farther you go downward. That is to say, whilst in the path of Venus it closes, in its effects it no longer does so, but, as it were, runs out into parabolic branches, answering precisely to what happens in the human limb, where the vertebra form fades away and loses character (to put it very briefly, omitting details). This loop of the Lemniscate is represented by the path's fading away, not being fully maintained; it only indicates the direction but cannot hold it. So, where it closes in the path of Venus in the Heavens, in man's formation it falls asunder. Thus, to sum up, the building principle of the human form, howsoever modified, is based on this; the metamorphosis emerges between head and limbs—the limbs with the metabolism which belongs to them—and in the great Universe this answers to the contrast between those planets that form them in opposition to the Sun. Between the two is then the Sun itself. Now, my dear friends, something quite definite results from this Namely, we see that also with respect to the qualitative effects we have just referred to, we have to recognise in the Sun's path, even as to its form, something midway between what we find in the forms movement of the superior and of the inferior planets respectively. We must therefore assign, what finds expression in the path and movement of the Sun, to all that in man which is midway between the forming of the head and the metabolism, In other words, we must attribute to the rhythmic system some relation to the path of the Sun. We therefore have to imagine a certain contrast between the paths of the superior and of the inferior planets; and in the Sun's path a quality midway between the two. There is now a very evident and significant fact, regarding both the Sun's path and the Moon's. Follow the movements of the two heavenly bodies; neither of them makes any loop. They have no loop. Somehow therefore we must contrast the relation to man, and to Earth nature generally, of Sun and Moon on the one hand and of the loop-forming planetary paths on the other. The planetary paths with their characteristic loops quite evidently correspond to what makes vortices and vertebrae,—to what is lemniscatory in man. Look simply at the human form and figure and think of its relation to the Earth; we can do no other than connect what is radial in human form and stature with the path of the Sun, even as we connect what is lemniscatory in form with the typical planetary path. You see then what emerges when we are able to relate to the starry Heavens the entire human being, not only the human organ of cognition. This in effect emerges: In the vertical axis of man we must in some way seek what answers to the Sun's path, whilst in all that is lemniscatory in arrangement we have to seek what answers to the planetary paths,—lemniscatory as they are too, though in a variable form. Important truths will follow from this, We must conceive, once more, that through his vertical axis man is related to the Sun's path. HOW then shall we think of the other path which also shows no loops, namely the Moon's? Quite naturally—you need only look with open mind at the corresponding forms on Earth—we shall be led to the line of which we spoke some days ago, the line that runs along the spine of the animal. There we must seek what answers to the Moon's path. And in this very fact—the correspondence of the human spinal axis to the Sun's path and of the animal spinal axis to the moon's _ we shall have to look for the essential morphological difference between man and animal. Precisely therefore when we are wanting to discover what is essential in the difference of man and animal, we cannot stay on Earth. A mere comparative morphology will not avail us, for we must first assign what we there find to the entire Universe. Hence too we shall derive some indication of what must be the relative position of the Sun's path and the Moon's—shall we say, what is their mutual situation, to begin with, in perspective (for here again we must express it with great caution). They must be so situated that the one path is approximately perpendicular to the other. The human vertical therefore—or, had we better say, what answers to the main line and direction of the spine in man—is related to the Sun's path. The rational morphology we are pursuing makes this coordination evident. Mindful of this, we must surely relate the Sun's path itself to what in some way coincides with the Earth's radius. Admittedly, the Earth may move in such a way that many of her radii in turn coincide with the Sun's path. The relation indicated will need defining more precisely in coming lectures. Yet this at least gives us a notion of it: the direction of the Sun's path must be radial in relation to the surface or the Earth. We have no other alternative. In no event can the Earth be revolving round the Sun. What has been calculated—quite properly and conscientiously, of course—to be the revolution of the Earth around the Sun must therefore be a resultant of some other kind of movements. To this conclusion we are driven. The many relevant details as regards human form and growth are so very complicated that in this brief lecture-course not everything can be gone into. But if you really concentrate upon the morphological descriptions given (though they are only bare indications of a qualitative morphology), you will be able to read it in the human form itself: The Earth is following the Sun! The Sun speeds on ahead, the Earth comes after. This then must be the essence of the matter: the earthly and the solar orbit in some way coincide, and the Earth somehow follows the Sun, making it possible as the Earth rotates for the Earth's radii to fall into the solar path, or at the very least to be in a certain relation to it. Now you may very naturally retort that all this is inconsistent with the accepted Astronomy. But it is not so,—it really isn't! As you are well aware, to explain all the phenomena, Astronomy today must have recourse not only to the primary notion of a stationary Sun supposed to be at the focus of an ellipse along which the Earth is moving—but to a further movement, a movement of the Sun itself towards a certain constellation. If you imagine the direction of this movement and other relevant factors, then from the several movements of Sun and Earth, you may well be able to deduce a resultant path for the Earth, no longer coincident with the ellipse in which the Earth is said to be going round the Sun, but of a different form which need not be at all like the supposed ellipse. All these things I am gradually leading up to; for the moment I only wish to point out that you need not think what I am telling you so very revolutionary as against orthodox Astronomy. Far more important is the method of our study,—to bring the human form and figure into the system of the starry movements. My purpose here is not to propound some astronomical revolution, nor is it called for. Look, for example: say this or something like it (Fig. 6) is the Earth's movement, and the Sun too is moving, You can well imagine, if the Earth is following the Sun in movement, it is not absolutely necessary for the Earth always to be running past the Sun tangentially. It may well be that the Sun has already gone along the same path and that the Earth always to be running past the Sun tangentially. It may well be that the Sun has already gone along the same path and that the Earth is following, Nay, it is possible, envisaging the hypothetical velocity that has been calculated for the Sun's proper movement, you may work out a very neat arithmetical result. Work out the resultant of the assumed Earth-movement and the assumed Sun-movement; you may well get a resultant movement compatible with present-day Astronomy,—velocity and all. Let me then emphasise once more: What I am here propounding is not unrelated to present-day Astronomy, nor do I mean it not be. Quite on the contrary, it is related to it more thoroughly and deeply than theories which are so frequently presented, nicely worked out in theoretic garb, selecting certain movements and omitting others. I am not therefore instigating an astronomical revolution in these lectures; let me say this again to prevent fairy-tales arising. What I intend is to co-ordinate the human form—inward and outward form, figure and formation—with the movements of the heavenly bodies, nay, with the very system of the Cosmos. For the rest, may I call your attention to this: It is not so simple to bring together in thought our astronomical observations of the heavenly bodies and the accepted constructions of the orbits. For as you know from Kepler's Second Law, an essential feature, on which the forms of the orbits depend, are the radius-vectors,—their velocity above all. The whole form of the path depends on the functionality of the radius vectors. If this be so, does it not also reflect upon the forms of the paths which actually confront us? May it not be that we are cherishing illusions after all, at the mere outward aspect of them? It is quite possible: What we here calculate from the velocity and length of the radius vectors might not be primary magnitudes at all. They might themselves be only the resultants of the true primary magnitudes. If so, then the seeming picture which emerges must refer back to another and more deeply hidden. This too is not so far afield as you might think. Suppose that in the sense of present-day Astronomy you wished to calculate the Sun's exact position at a given time of day and on a given date. Then it will not suffice you to take your start from the simple proposition, 'the Earth moves round the Sun'. People have thought it strange that in the ancient Astronomy (that of the Mysteries, not the exoteric version) they spoke of three Suns instead of one. So they distinguished three Suns. I must confess, I do not find it so very striking. Modern Astronomy too has its three Suns. There is the Sun whose path is calculated as the apparent counterpart of the Earth's movement round the Sun. This Sun occurs, does it not , in modern Astronomy? The path of it is calculated. Astronomy then has another Sun—an imagined one of course—with the help of which certain discrepancies are corrected. And then it has a third Sun, with the help of which it re-corrects discrepancies that persist after the first correction. Modern Astronomy too therefore distinguishes three: the real Sun and two imagined ones. It needs the three, for what is calculated to begin with does not accord with the Sun's actual position. It is always necessary to apply corrections. This alone should be enough to show you that we should not build too confidently on mere calculation. Other means are needed to arrive at adequate conceptions of the starry movements; others than the science of our time derives from sundry premises of calculation. The broad ideas of planetary paths we have been laying out, it I may put it so, call now for great definition. Yet we shall only come to this if we contrive first to go further in out study of Earth-nature, to see their mutual relation in a certain aspect. The Kingdoms of Nature are commonly thought of in a straight line: mineral kingdom, plant kingdom, animal kingdom, and I will add, human kingdom. (Some authorities would not admit the fourth, but that need not detain us.) The question now is: Is this arrangement sensible at all? Undoubtedly it is implicit in many of our modern lines of thought; at least it was so in the golden age of the mechanical outlook upon Nature. Today I know, in these wider realms of Science, there is a certain atmosphere of resignation, not to say despair. The habits of mind however remain the same as at their heyday, 20 or 30 years since. The scientists of that time would have been content, had they been able to follow up this series—mineral kingdom, plant kingdom, animal kingdom, man,—with the mineral kingdom as the amplest, deriving therefrom, by some combination of mineral structure, the structure of the plant, then by a further combination of plant structure the structure of the animal, and so on to man. The many thoughts that were pursued about the primal generation of living things, generatic aequivocs,—were they not eloquent of the tendency to derive animate living Nature from inanimate and at long last from inorganic or mineral? To this day, I believe, many scientiste would doubt if there is any other rational way of conceiving the inner connection in the succession of Nature's Kingdoms than by deriving them all ultimately from the Inorganic, even where they culminate in Man. You will find countless papers, books, lectures and so on, including highly specialised ones claiming to be strictly scientific, the authors of which—as though hypnotised—are always looking at it from this angle. How, they inquire, can it have happened, somewhere at some time in the course of Nature, that the first living creature came into being from some molecular distribution, i.e. from something purely mineral in the last resort? The question now is, is it true at all to put the kingdoms of Nature in series in this way? Can it be done? Or, if we do, are we doing justice to their most evident and essential features? Compare a creature of the plant kingdom with an animal to begin with. Taking together all that you observe, you will not find in the forming of the animal anything that looks like a mere continuation or further elaboration of what is vegetable. If you begin with the simplest plant, the annual, you may well conceive its formative process to be carried further in the perennial. But you will certainly not be able to detect, in the organic principles of plant form and growth, anything that suggests further development towards the animal. On the contrary, you will more likely ascertain a polarity, a contrast between the two. You apprehend this polarity in the most evident phenomenon, namely the contrasting processes of assimilation: the altogether different relation of the plant and of the animal to carbon, and the characteristic use that is made of oxygen. I may remark, you must be careful here, to see and to describe it truly. You cannot simply say, the animal breathes-in oxygen while the plant breathes oxygen out and carbon in. It is not so simple as that. Nevertheless, the plant-forming process taken as a whole, in the organic life, reveals an evident polarity and contrast (as against the animal) in its relation to oxygen and carbon. The easiest way to put it is perhaps to say: What happens in the animal, in that the oxygen becomes bound to carbon and the carbonic acid is expelled, is for the animal itself and for man too.—an un-formative process, the very opposite of formative, a process which must be eliminated if the animal is to survive. And now the very thing which is undone in the animal, has to be done, has to be formed and builded in the plant. Think of what in the animal appears in some sense as a process of excretion, what the animal must get rid of makes for the forming and building process in the plant. It is a tangible polarity. You cannot possibly imagine the plant-forming process prolonged in a straight line, so as to derive therefrom the animal-formation. But you can well derive from the plant-forming process what has to be prevented in the animal. From the animal the carbon has to be taken away by the oxygen in the carbonic acid. Turn it precisely the other way round, and you will readily conceive the plant-forming process. You therefore cannot get from plant to animal by going on in a straight line. On the other hand you can without false symbolism imagine here an ideal mean or middlepoint, on the one side of which you see the plant—and on the other the animal—forming process. It forks out from here (Fig. 7). What is midway between,—let us imagine it as some kind of ideal mean. If we now carry the plant forming process further in a straight line we arrive not at the animal but at the perennial plant. Imagine now the typical perennial. Carry the stream of development which leads to it still further; in some respects at least you will not fail to recognise in it the way that leads toward mineralisation. Here then you have the way to mineralisation, and we may justly say; In direct continuation of the plant forming process there lies the way that leads to mineralisation. Now look what answers to it at the contrasting pole, along the other branch (Fig. 7). To proceed by a mere outward scheme, one would be tempted to say: this branch too must be prolonged. There would be no true polarity in that. Rather should you think as follows: In the plant-forming process I prolong the line. In the animal-forming process I shall have to proceed negatively, I must go back, I must turn round; I must imagine the animal-forming process not to shoot out beyond itself but to remain behind—behind what it would otherwise become. Observe now what is already available in scientific Zoology, in Selenka's researches for instance on the difference between man and animal in the forming of the embryo and in further development after birth,—comparing man and the higher animals. You will then have a more concrete idea of this "remaining behind". Indeed we owe our human form to the fact that in embryo-life we do not go as far as the animal but remain behind. Thus if we study the three kingdoms quite outwardly as they reveal themselves, without bringing in hypotheses, we find ourselves obliged to draw a strange mathematical line, that tends to vanish as we prolong it. This is what happens at the transition from animal to men, whilst on the other side we have a line that really lengthens (Fig. 8). Here is a fresh extension of mathematics. You are led to recognise a distinction—a purely mathematical one—when you draw this diagram. Namely there are lines which when continued grow longer, and there are lines which when continued grow shorter. It is a fully valid mathematical idea. If then we want to set out the Kingdoms of Nature in a diagram at all, we must do it thus. First we must have some ideal point to start from. Thence it forks out: plant kingdom, animal kingdom on either hand. Thereafter we must prolong the two lines. Only, the plant-kingdom-line must be so prolonged that it grows longer; the animal-kingdom-line so that it grows shorter as we prolong it. I say again, this is a genuine, mathematical idea. We thus arrive at real relationships between the Kingdom of Nature, though we begin by simply placing them side by side. The question now is—and we will only put it as a question,—What in reality corresponds to the ideal point in our diagram? We may divine that as the forming of the Kingdoms of Nature is related to this ideal point, so too must there be movements in the great Universe which relate to something somehow corresponding to it,—to this ideal mean. Let us reflect on it until tomorrow. |
323. Astronomy as Compared to Other Sciences: Lecture XIV
14 Jan 1921, Stuttgart Translated by Unknown Rudolf Steiner |
---|
Assume to begin with,—assume that in some way the forming of the animal is really brought about by relation to the Sun. And now, apart from the constellation that will be effective in each case as between Sun and animal, let us ask, quite in the sense of the Sun's light in the cosmos, not so immediately connected with the Sun itself? |
323. Astronomy as Compared to Other Sciences: Lecture XIV
14 Jan 1921, Stuttgart Translated by Unknown Rudolf Steiner |
---|
Today we will develop the different notes we touched on,—the notes which we were striking yesterday. From the material at our disposal, consisting as it does in the last resort of things observed, the true aspect of which we seek to divine,—from this observed material we shall try to gain ideas, to lead us into the inner structure of the celestial phenomena. I will first point to something that will naturally follow on the more historical reflections of yesterday. We realise that in the last resort both the Ptolemaic system and that used by modern Astronomy are attempts to synthesise in one way or another, what is observed. The Ptolemaic system and the Copernican are attempts to put together in certain mathematical or kindred figures what has in fact been perceived. (I say “perceived”, for in the light of yesterday's lecture it would not be enough to say “seen”.) All our geometry in this case, all of our measuring and mathematizing, must take its start from things perceived, observed. The only question is, are we conceiving the observed facts truly? We must really take it to heart—we must take knowledge of the fact—that in the scientific life and practice of our time what is observed, what is perceivable, is taken far to easily, too cursorily for a true conception to be gained. Here for example is a question we cannot escape; it springs directly from the observable facts—(In the shortness of time these lectures have to be in bare outline and I have not been able to discuss or even to bring forward all the details. I could do little more than indicate directions.) Now among other things I have tried to show that the movements of heavenly bodies in celestial space must in some way be co-ordinated with what is formed in the living human body, and in the animal too in the last resort, we should by now perceive from the whole way the facts have been presented. And I assure you, the more deeply you go into the facts, the more of the connection you will see. Nevertheless, I have not done nor claimed to do any more than indicate the pathway (let me say again), the pathway along which you will be led to the result: The human living body, also the animal and plant body, are so formed that if we recognise the characteristic lines of form (as for example we did in tracing the Lemniscate in various directions though the human body) we find in them a certain likeness to the line-systems which we are able to draw amid the movements of the celestial bodies. Granted it is so, the question still remains however: What is it due to? How does it come about? What prospect is there for us not merely to ascertain it but to find it cogent and transparent, inherent in the very nature of things? To get nearer to this question we must once more compare the kind of outlook which under-lay the Ptolemaic system and the kind that underlies the Copernican world-system of today. What are we doing when we set to working the spirit of the latter system, and by dint of thinking, calculating and geometrising, figure out a world-system? What do we do in the first place? We observe. Out in celestial space we observe bodies which, from the simple appearance of them, we regard as identical. I express myself with caution, as you see. We have no right to say more than this . From the appearance of them to our eye, we regard these bodies (in their successive appearance) as identical. A few simple experiments will soon oblige you to be thus cautious in relating what you see in the outer world. I draw your attention to this little experiment; of no value in itself, it has significance in teaching us to be careful in the way we form our human thoughts. Suppose it trained a horse to trot very regularly,—which, incidentally, a horse will do in any case. Say now I photograph the animal in twelve successive positions. I get twelve pictures of the horse. I put them in a circle, at a certain distance from myself, the onlooker. Over it all I put a drum with an aperture, and make the drum rotate so that I first see one picture of the horse, then, when the drum has totalled, a second picture, and so on. I get the appearance of a running horse, I should imagine a little horse to be running round in a circle. Yet the fact is not so. No horse is running round; I have only been looking in a certain way at twelve distinct pictures of a horse, each of which stays where it is. You can therefore evoke an appearance of movement not only by perspective but in purely qualitative ways. It does not follow that what appears to be a movement is really a movement. He then who wants to speak with care, who wants to reach the truth by scrupulous investigation, must begin by saying, whimsical as this may seem to our learned contemporaries: I look at three successive positions of what I call a heavenly body, and assume what underlies them to be identical. So for example I follow the Moon in its path, with the underlying hypothesis that it is always the same Moon. (That may be right without question, with such a “Standard” phenomenon, keeping so very regular a time-table!) What do we do then? We see what we take to be the identical heavenly body, in movement as we call it; we draw lines to unite what we thus see at different places, and we then try to interpret the lines. This is what gives the Copernican system. The school from which the Ptolemaic system derived did not proceed in this way, not originally. At that time the whole human being still lived in his perceiving, as I said yesterday. And inasmuch as man was thus alive and aware, perceiving with all his human being, the idea he then had of a heavenly body was essentially different from what it afterwards became. A man who still lived thus perceivingly amid the Ptolemaic system did not say. There is the Moon up yonder. No, he did not; the people of today only attribute that idea to him, nor does it do the system justice. If he had simply said, "Up yonder is the Moon", he would have been relating the phenomenon to his whole human being, and in so doing the following was his idea:—Here am I standing on the Earth. Now, even as I am on the Earth, so too am I in the Moon,—for the Moon is here (Figure 1, lightly shaded area). This (the small central circle in the Figure) is the Earth, whilst the whole of that is the Moon,—far greater than the Earth. The diameter (or semi-diameter) of the Moon is as great as what we now call the distance of the Moon (I must not say, of the Moon's centre) from the centre of the Earth. So large is the Moon, in the original meaning of the Ptolemaic system. Elsewhere invisible, this cosmic body at one end of it develops a certain process by virtue of which a tiny fragment of it (small outer circle in the Figure) becomes visible. They rest is invisible, and moreover of such substance that one can live in it and me permeated by it. Only at this one end of it does it grow visible. Moreover, in relation to the Earth the entire sphere is turning, (Incidentally it is not a perfect sphere, but a spheroid or ellipsoid-of-rotation. The whole of it is turning and with it turns the tiny reagent that is visible, i.e. the visible Moon. The visible Moon is only part of the full reality of it. The idea thus illustrated really lived in olden time. The form at least, the picture it presents, will not seem so entirely remote if you think of an analogy,—that of the human or animal germ-cell in its development (Fig. 2). You know what happens at a certain stage. While the rest of the germinal vesicle is well-nigh transparent, at one place it develops the germinative area, so called, and from this area the further development of the embryo proceeds. Eccentrically therefore, near the periphery, a centre forms, from which the rest proceeds. Compare the tiny body of the embryo with this idea of the Moon which underlay the Ptolemaic system and you will have a notion of how they conceived it for it was analogous to this. In the Ptolemaic conception of the Universe, we may truly say, quite another reality was ‘Moon’—mot only what is contained in the Moon's picture, the illuminated orb we see. This, then, is what happened to man after the time when the Ptolemaic system was felt as a reality. The inner experience, the bodily organic feelings of being immersed in the Moon was lost. Today man has the mere picture before him, the illuminated orb out yonder. Man of the Fifth post-Atlantean Epoch cannot say, for he no longer knows it: “I am in the Moon,—the Moon pervades me”. In his experience the Moon is only the little illuminated disc or sphere which he beholds. It was from inner perceptions such as these that the Ptolemaic system of the Universe was made: These perceptions we can henceforth regain if we begin by looking at it all in the proper light: we can re-conquer the faculty whereby the whole Moon is experienced. We must admit however, it is understandable that those who take their start from the current idea of ‘the Moon’ find it hard to see any such inner relation between this “Moon” and life inside them. Nay, it is surely better for them to reject the statement that there are influences from the Moon affecting man than to indulge in so many fantastic and unfounded notions. All this is changed if in a genuine way we come again to the idea that we are always living in the Moon, so that what truly deserves the name of 'Moon' is in reality a realm of force, a complex of forces that pervades us all the time. Then it will no longer be a cause of blank astonishment that this complex of forces should help form both man and beast. That forces working in and permeating us should have to do with the forming and configuration of our body, is intelligible. Such then are the ideas we must regain. We have to realise that what is visible in the heavens is nor more than a fragmentary manifestation of cosmic space, which in reality is ever filled with substance. Develop this idea: you live immersed in substance—substances manifold, inter-related. Then you will get a feeling of how very real a thing it is. The accepted astronomical outlook of our time has replaced this 'real' by something merely thought-out, namely by 'gravitation' as we call it. We only think there is a mutual force of attraction between what we imagine to be the body of the moon and the body of the Earth respectively. This gravitational line of force from the one to the other—we may imagine it as it turns to get a pretty fair picture of what was called the 'sphere' in ancient astronomical conceptions—the Lunar sphere or that of any planet. This, then, has happened: What was once felt to be substantial and can henceforth be experienced in this way once more, has in the meantime been supplanted by mere lines, constructed and thought-out. We must then think of the whole configuration of cosmic space—manifoldly filled and differentiated in itself—in quite another way than we are wont to do. Today we go by the idea of universal gravitation. We say for instance that the tides are somehow due to gravitational forces from the Moon. We speak of gravitational force proceeding from a heavenly body, lifting the water of the sea. The other way of thought would make us say: The Moon pervades the Earth, including the Earth's hydrosphere. In the Moon's sphere, something is going on which at one place it manifests in a phenomenon of light. We need not think of any extra force of attraction. All we need think is that this Moon-sphere, permeating the Earth, is one with it, one organism all together , an organic whole. In the two kinds of phenomenon we see two aspects of a single process. In yesterday's more historical lecture my object was to lead you up to certain notions,—essential concepts. I could equally well have tried to present them without recourse to the ideas of olden time, but to do so we should have had to take our start from premises of Spiritual Science. This would have led us to the very same essential concepts. Imagine now (Fig. 3): Here is the Earth-sphere,—the solid sphere of Earth. And now the Lunar sphere: I must imagine this, of course, of very different consistency and kind of substance. And now I can go further. The space that is permeated by these two spheres,—I can imagine it permeated by a third sphere and a fourth. Thus in one way or another I imagine it to be permeated by a third sphere. It might for instance be the Sun-sphere,—qualitatively different form the Moon-sphere. I then say I, am permeated—I, man, am permeated by the sun—and by the Moon-sphere. Moreover naturally there is a constant interplay between them. Permeating each other as they do, they are in mutual relation. Some element of form and figure in the human body is then an outcome of the mutual relation. Now you will recognise how rational it is to see the two things together: On the one hand, these different cosmic substantialities permeating the living body; and on the other hand the organic forms in which you can well imagine that they find expression. Form and formation of the body is then the outcome of this permeation. And what we see in the heavens—the movement of heavenly bodies—is like the visible sign. Certain conditions prevailing, the boundaries of the several spheres become visible to us in phenomena of movement. What I have now put before you is essential for the regaining of more real conceptions of the inner structure of our cosmic system. Now you can make something of the idea that the human organisation is related to the structure of the cosmic system. You never gain a clear notion of it if you conceive the heavenly bodies as being far away yonder in space. You do gain a clear notion, the moment you see it as it really is. Though, I admit, it gets a little uncanny to feel yourself permeated by so many spheres,—just a little confusing! And there is worse to come, for the mathematician at least. In effect, we are also permeated by the Earth-sphere itself, in a wider sense. For to the Earth belongs not only the solid ball on which we stand but all the volume of water; also the air,—this is a sphere in which we know ourselves to be immersed. Only the air is still very coarse, compared to the effects of heavenly phenomena. Think then of this: Here we are in the Earth-sphere, in the Sun sphere, in the Moon-sphere, and in others too. But let us single out the three, and we shall say to ourselves: Something in us is the outcome of the substantialities of these three spheres. Here then is qualitatively, what in its quantitative form is the mathematician's bugbear—the “problem of three bodies”, as it is called! It is working in us. In us is the outcome of it, in all reality. We must face the truth: to read the hieroglyphic of reality is not so simple. That we are wont to take it simply and think it so convenient of access, springs after all from our fond comfort,—human indolence of thought. How many things, held to be "scientific", have their origin in this! Let go the springs of comfortableness, and you must set to work with all the care which we have tried to use in these lectures. If now and then, they do not seem careful enough, it is again because they are given in barest outline; so we have often had to jump from one point to another and you yourselves must look for the connecting links. The links are surely there. Now you must set to work with equal care to tackle the same problem from another aspect to which I have referred before, namely the body of man compared to the creatures of the remaining Nature-kingdoms. We can imagine, I said, a line that forks out on either hand from an ideal starting-point. Along the one branch we put the plant-world, along the other the animal. If we imagine the evolution of the plant-world carried further in a real Kingdom of Nature, we find it tending towards the mineral. How real a process it is, we may recall by the most obvious example. In the mineral coal, we recognised a mineralised plant-substance. What should detain us from turning attention to the analogous processes which have undoubtedly taken hold of other realms of vegetable matter? Can we not also derive the siliceous and other mineral substances of the Earth in the same way, recognising in them the mineralisation of an erstwhile plant-life? Not in the same way (I went on to say) can we proceed if we are seeking the relation of the animal to the human kingdom. Here on the contrary we must imagine it somewhat as follows. Evolution moves onward through the animal kingdom; then however it bends back, returns upon itself, and finds physical realisation upon a higher than animal level. We may perhaps put it this way: Animal and human evolution begin from a common starting—point, but the animal goes farther before reaching outward physical reality. Man on the other hand keeps at an earlier stage, man makes himself physically real at an earlier stage. It is precisely by virtue of this that he remains capable of further evolution after birth, incomparably more so then the animal. (For, once again, the processes of which we speak relate to embryo-development.) That man retains the power to evolve, is due to his not carrying the animal-forming process to extremes. Whilst in the mineral, the plant-forming process has overreached itself; in man on the contrary the animal-forming process has stopped short of the extreme. It has withheld, kept back, and taken shape at an earlier stage amid external Nature. We have then this ideal point from which it branches (Fig. 6). There is the shorter branch and the longer. The longer is of undetermined length; the other, we may say, no less so, but negatively speaking. So then we have the mineral and plant kingdoms, and animal and human. Now we must seek to gain a more precise idea: What is it that really happens, in this formation of man as compared to the animal? The process of development, once more, is kept back in man. It does not go so far; that which is tending to realisation is, as it were, made real before its time. Now think how it must be imagined according to what I have told you in these lectures. Study the share of the Solar entity in the forming of the animal body,—via the embryo-development, of course. You then know that the direct sunshine (so to describe it) has to do with the configuration of the animal head, whilst the indirect aspect of the sunlight, as it were the Sun's shadow by relation to the Earth, has in some way to do with the opposite pole of the creature. Strictly envisage this permeation of animal form and development with cosmic Sun-substantiality. Look at the forms as they are. Then you will gain a certain idea, which I shall try to indicate as follows. Assume to begin with,—assume that in some way the forming of the animal is really brought about by relation to the Sun. And now, apart from the constellation that will be effective in each case as between Sun and animal, let us ask, quite in the sense of the Sun's light in the cosmos, not so immediately connected with the Sun itself? There is indeed. For every time the Full Moon, or the Moon at all, shines down upon us, the light is sunlight. The cosmic opportunity is being made then, so to speak, for the Sun's light to ray down upon us. It is so of course also when the human being comes into life—in the germinal and embyonal period. In earlier stages of Earth-evolution the influence was most direct; today it is a kind of echo, inherited from then. Here then again we have an influence, in the other it is indirect, through the raying back of the Sun's light by the Moon. Now think the following. I will again draw it diagrammatically. Suppose the development of the animal were such that it comes into being under the Sun's influence according to this diagram (Fig. 4). This then, to put it simply, would be the ordinary influence of day and night—head and the opposite pole of the creature. This, for the animal, would be the ordinary working of the Sun. Now take that other working of the Sun's light which occurs when the Moon is in opposition, i.e. when it is Full Moon,—when the Sun's light, so to speak works from the opposite side and by reflection counteracts itself. If we conceive this downward arrow (Fig. 5). to represent the direction of the direct Sun-rays, animal formations, we must imagine animal-formation going ever farther in the sense of this direct Sun-ray. The animal would become animal, the more the Sun was working on it. If on the other hand the Moon is counteracting from the opposite direction—or if the Sun itself is doing so via the Moon,—something is taken away again from the animal-becoming process. It is withdrawn, drawn back into itself (Fig. 5a). Precisely this withdrawal corresponds to the shortening of the second branch in Figure 6. We have found a true cosmic counterpart of the characteristic difference between man and animal of which we spoke before. What I have just been telling you can be perceived directly by anyone who gains the faculty for such perception. Man really owes it to the counteracting of the Sunlight via the Moon.—owes it to this that his organisation is withheld from becoming animal. The influence of the Sun-light is weakened in its very own quality (for it is Sun-light in either case), in that the Sun places its own counterpart over against itself, namely the Moon and the Moon's influence. Were it not for the Sun meeting and countering itself in the Moonlight—influences, the tendency that is in us would give us animal form and figure. But the Sun's influence reflected by the Moon counteracts, it. The forming process is held in check, the negative of it is working; the human form and figure is the outcome. Now, on the other branch of the diagram, let us follow up the plant and the plant-formative process. That the Sun is working in the plant, is palpably evident. Let us imagine the Sun's effect in the plant, not to be able to unfold during a certain time. During the Winter, in fact, the springing and sprouting life in the plant cannot unfold. Nay, you can even see the difference in the unfolding of the plant by day and night. Now think of this effect in oft-repeated rhythm, repeated endless times,—what have we then? We have the influence of the Sun and the influence of the Earth itself; the latter when the Sun cannot work directly but is hidden by the Earth. At one time the Sun is working, at another it is not the Sun but the Earth, for the Sun is working from below and the Earth is in the way. We have the rhythmic alternation: Sun-influence predominant, Earth-influence predominant in turn. Plant-nature therefore is alternately exposed to the Sun, and then withdrawn, figuratively speaking, into the Earth—drawn by the earthly, as it were, into itself. This is quite different from what we had before. For in this case the Sun-quality, working in the plant, is potently enhanced. The solar quality is actually enhanced by the earthly, and this enhancement finds expression in that the plant gradually falls into mineralization. Such then is the divergence of two ways, as indicated once again in Figure 6. In the plant we have to recognize the Sun's effect, carried still further by the Earth, to the point of mineralization. In the animal we have to recognize the Sun's effect, which then in man is drawn back again, withdrawn into itself, by virtue of the Moon's effect. I might also draw the figure rather differently, like this (Fig. 6a), —here receding to become human, here on the other hand advancing to become mineral, which of course ought to be shown in some other form. It is no more than a symbolic figure, but this symbolic figure, tends to express more clearly than the first, made of mere lines, the bifurcation—as again I like to call it—with the mineral and plant kingdoms upon the one hand, the human and animal upon the other. We never do justice to the true system of Nature with all her creatures and kingdoms if we imagine them in a straight line. We have to take our start from this other picture. In the last resort, all systems of Nature which begin with the mineral kingdom and thence going on to the plant, thence to the animal and thence to man as if in a straight line, will fail to satisfy. In this quaternary of Nature we are face to face with a more complex inner relationship than a mere rectilinear stream of evolution, or the like, could possibly imply. If one the other hand we take our start from this, the true conception, then we are led, not to a generatic aequivoca or primal generation of life, but to the ideal centre somewhere between animal and plant—a centre not to be found within the physical at all, yet without doubt connected with the problem of three bodies, Earth, Sun and Moon. Though perhaps mathematically you cannot quite lay hold on it, yet you may well conceive a kind of ideal centre-of-gravity of the three bodies—Sun, Moon and Earth. Though this will not precisely solve you the 'problem of three bodies', yet it is solved, namely in Man. When man assimilates in his own nature what is mineral and animal and plant, there is created in him in all reality a kind of ideal point-of-intersection of the three influences. It is inscribed in man, and that is where it is beyond all doubt. Moreover inasmuch as it is so, we must accept the fact that what is thus in man will be empirically at many places at once, for it is there in every human being,—every individual one. Yes, it is there in all men, scattered as they are over the Earth; all of them must be in some relation to Sun and Moon and Earth. If we somehow succeeded in finding an ideal point-of-intersection of the effects of Sun and Moon and Earth, if we could ascertain the movement of this point for every individual human being, it would lead us far indeed towards an understanding of what we may, perhaps, describe as movement, speaking of Sun and Moon and Earth. As I said just now, the problem grows only the more involved, for we have so many points,—as many as there are men on Earth,—for all of which points we have to seek the movement. Yet it might be, might it not, that for the different human beings the movements only seemed to differ, one from another ... We will pursue our conversations on these lines tomorrow. |
326. The Origins of Natural Science: Lecture II
25 Dec 1922, Dornach Translated by Maria St. Goar, Norman MacBeth Rudolf Steiner |
---|
It was a recollection of far older visions, a recapitulation of what wise men of a much more ancient age had beheld when they directed their clairvoyant sight into the cosmic spaces whence the motions and constellations of the stars had spoken to them. To the sages of old, the universe was not the machine, the mechanical contraption that it is for men of today when they look out into space to the wise men of ancient times. |
326. The Origins of Natural Science: Lecture II
25 Dec 1922, Dornach Translated by Maria St. Goar, Norman MacBeth Rudolf Steiner |
---|
The view of history forming the basis of these lectures may be called symptomatological What takes place in the depths of human evolution sends out waves, and these waves are the symptoms that we will try to describe and interpret. In any serious study of history, this must be the case. The processes and events occurring at any given time in the depths of evolution are so manifold and so significant that we can never do more than hint at what is going on the depths. This we do by describing the waves that are flung up. They are symptoms of what is actually taking place. I mention this because, in order to characterize the birth of the scientific form of thinking and research I described two men, Meister Eckhart and Nicholas Cusanus, in my last lecture. What can be historically observed in the soul and appearance of such men I consider to be symptoms of what goes on in the depths of general human development; this is why I give such descriptions. There are in any given case only a couple of images cast up to the surface that we can intercept by looking into one or another soul. Yet, by doing this, we can describe the basic nature of successive time periods. When I described Cusanus yesterday, my intention was to suggest how all that happened in the early fifteenth century in mankind's spiritual development, which was pressing forward to the scientific method of perception, is symptomatically revealed in his soul. Neither the knowledge that the mind can gather through the study of theology nor the precise perceptions of mathematics can lead any longer to a grasp of the spiritual world. The wealth of human knowledge, its concepts and ideas, come to a halt before that realm. The fact that one can do no more than write a “docta ignorantia” in the face of the spiritual world comes to expression in Cusanus in a remarkable way. He could go no further with the form of knowledge that, up to his time, was prevalent in human development. As I pointed out, this soul mood was already present in Meister Eckhart. He was well versed in medieval theological knowledge. With it, he attempted to look into this own soul and to find therein the way to the divine spiritual foundations. Meister Eckhart arrived at a soul mood that I illustrated with one his sentences. He said—and he made many similar statements—“I sink myself into the naught of the divine, and out of nothing become an I in eternity.” He felt himself arriving at nothingness with traditional knowledge. Out of this nothingness, after the ancient wisdom's loss of all persuasive power he had to produce out of his own soul the assurance of his own I, and he did it by this statement. Looking into this matter more closely, we see how a man like Meister Eckhart points to an older knowledge that has come down to him through the course of evolution. It is knowledge that still gave man something of which he could say: This lives in me, it is something divine in me, it is something. But now, in Meister Eckhart's own time, the most profound thinkers had been reduced to the admission: When I seek this something here or there, all knowledge of this something does not suffice to bring me certainty of my own being. I must proceed from the Something to the Nothing and then, in an act of creation, kindle to life the consciousness of self out of naught. Now, I want to place another man over against these two. This other man lived 2,000 years earlier and for his time he was as characteristic as Cusanus (who followed in Meister Eckhart's footsteps) was for the fifteenth century. This backward glance into ancient times is necessary so that we can better understand the quest for knowledge that surfaced in the Fifteenth Century from the depths of the human soul. The man whom I want to speak about today is not mentioned in any history book or historical document, for these do not go back as far as the Eighth Century B.C. Yet, we can only gain information concerning the origin of science if, through spiritual science, through purely spiritual observation, we go farther back than external historical documents can take us. The man I have in mind lived about 2,000 years prior to the present period (the starting point of which I have assigned to the first half of the fifteenth century.) This man of pre-Christian times was accepted into a so-called mystery school of Southeastern Europe. There he heard everything that the teachers of the mysteries could communicate to their pupils concerning spiritual wisdom, truths concerning the spiritual beings that lived and still live in the cosmos. But the wisdom that this man received from his teachers was already more or less traditional. It was a recollection of far older visions, a recapitulation of what wise men of a much more ancient age had beheld when they directed their clairvoyant sight into the cosmic spaces whence the motions and constellations of the stars had spoken to them. To the sages of old, the universe was not the machine, the mechanical contraption that it is for men of today when they look out into space to the wise men of ancient times. The cosmic spaces were like living beings, permeating everything with spirit and speaking to them in cosmic language. They experienced themselves within the spirit of world being. They felt how this, in which they lived and moved, spoke to them, how they could direct their questions concerning the riddles of the universe to the universe itself and how, out of the widths of space, the cosmic phenomena replied to them. This is how they experienced what we, in a weak and abstract way, call “spirit” in our language. Spirit was experienced as the element that is everywhere and can be perceived from anywhere. Men perceived things that even the Greeks no longer beheld with the eye of the soul, things that had faded into a nothingness for the Greeks. This nothingness of the Greeks, which had been filled with living content for the earliest wise men of the Post-Atlantean age,19 was named by means of words customary for that time. Translated into our language, though weakened and abstract, those words would signify “spirit.” What later became the unknown, the hidden god, was called spirit in those ages when he was known. This is the first thing to know about those ancient times. The second thing to know is that when a man looked with his soul and spirit vision into himself, he beheld his soul. He experienced it as originating from the spirit that later on became the unknown god. The experience of the ancient sage was such that he designated the human soul with a term that would translate in our language into “spirit messenger” or simply “messenger.” If we put into a diagram what was actually seen in those earliest times, we can say: The spirit was considered the world-embracing element, apart from which there was nothing and by which everything was permeated. This spirit, which was directly perceptible in its archetypal form, was sought and found in the human soul, inasmuch as the latter recognized itself as the messenger of this spirit. Thus the soul was referred to as the “messenger.” If we put into a diagram what was actually seen in those earliest times, we can say: The spirit was considered the world-embracing element, apart from which there was nothing and by which everything was permeated. This spirit, which was directly perceptible in its archetypal form, was sought and found in the human soul, inasmuch as the latter recognized itself as the messenger of this spirit. Thus the soul was referred to as the “messenger.” A third aspect was external nature with all that today is called the world of physical matter, of bodies. I said above that apart from spirit there was nothing, because spirit was perceived by direct vision everywhere in its archetypal form. It was seen in the soul, which realized the spirit's message in its own life. But the spirit was likewise recognized in what we call nature today, the world of corporeal things. Even his bodily world was looked upon as an image of the spirit. In those ancient times, people did not have the conceptions that we have today of the physical world. Wherever they looked, at whatever thing or form of nature, they beheld an image of the spirit, because they were still capable of seeing the spirit, a fragment of nature. Inasmuch as all other phenomena of nature were images of the spirit, the body of man too was an image of the spirit. So when this ancient man looked at himself, he recognized himself as a threefold being. In the first place, the spirit lived in him as in one of its many mansions. Man knew himself as spirit. Secondly, man experienced himself within the world as a messenger of this spirit, hence as a soul being. Thirdly, man experienced his corporeality; and by means of this body he felt himself to be an image of the spirit.20 Hence, when man looked upon his own being, he perceived himself as a threefold entity of spirit, soul, and body: as spirit in his archetypal form; as soul, the messenger of god; as body, the image of the spirit. This ancient wisdom contained no contradiction between body and soul or between nature and spirit; because one knew: Spirit is in man in its archetypal form; the soul is none other than the message transmitted by spirit; the body is the image of spirit. Likewise, no contract was felt between man and surrounding nature because one bore an image of spirit in one's own body, and the same was true of every body in external nature. Hence, an inner kinship was experienced between one's own body and those in outer nature, and nature was not felt to be different from oneself. Man felt himself at one with the whole world. He could feel this because he could behold the archetype of spirit and because the cosmic expanses spoke to him. In consequence of the universe speaking to man, science simply could not exist. Just as we today cannot build a science of external nature out of what lives in our memory, ancient man could not develop one because, whether he looked into himself or outward at nature, he beheld the same image of spirit. No contrast existed between man himself and nature, and there was none between soul and body. The correspondence of soul and body was such that, in a manner of speaking, the body was only the vessel, the artistic reproduction, of the spiritual archetype, while the soul was the mediating messenger between the two. Everything as in a state of intimate union. There could be no question of comprehending anything. We grasp and comprehend what is outside our own life. Anything that we carry within ourselves is directly experienced and need not be first comprehended. Prior to Roman and Greek times, this wisdom born of direct perception still lived in the mysteries. The man I referred to above heard about his wisdom, but he realized that the teachers in his mystery school were speaking to him only out of a tradition preserved from earlier ages. He no longer heard anything original, anything gained by listening to the secrets of the cosmos. This man undertook long journeys and visited other mystery centers, but it was the same wherever he went. Already in the Eight Century B.C., only traditions of the ancient wisdom were preserved everywhere. The pupils learned them from the teachers, but the teachers could no longer see them, at least not in the vividness of ancient times. But this man whom I have in mind had an unappeasable urge for certainty and knowledge. From the communications passed on to him, he gathered that once upon a time men had indeed been able to hear the harmony of the spheres from which resounded the Logos that was identical with the spiritual archetype of all things. Now, however, it was all tradition. Just as 2,000 years later Meister Eckhart, working out the traditions of his age, withdrew into his quiet monastic cell in search of the inner power source of soul and self, and at length came to say, “I sink myself into the nothingness of God, and experience in eternity, in naught, the ‘I’,”—just so, the lonely disciple of the late mysteries said to himself: “I listen to the silent universe and fetch21 the Logos-bearing soul out of the silence. I love the Logos because the Logos brings tidings of an unknown god.” This was an ancient parallel to the admission of Meister Eckhart. Just as the latter immersed himself into the naught of the divine that Medieval theology had proclaimed to him and, out of this void, brought out the “I,” so that ancient sage listened to a dumb and silent world; for he could no longer hear what traditional wisdom taught him. The spirit-saturated soul had one drawn the ancient wisdom from the universe. This had not turned silent, but still he had a Logos-bearing soul. And he loved the Logos even though it was no longer the godhead of former ages, but only an image of the divine. In other words, already then, the spirit had vanished from the soul's sight. Just as Meister Eckhart later had to seek the “I” in nothingness, so at that time the soul had to be sought in the dispirited world. Indeed, in former times the souls had the inner firmness needed to say to themselves: In the inward perception of the spirit indwelling me, I myself am something divine. But now, for direct perception, the spirit no longer inhabited the soul. No longer did the soul experience itself as the spirit's messenger, for one must know something in order to be its messenger. Now, the soul only felt itself as the bearer of the Logos, the spirit image; though this spirit image was vivid in the soul. It expressed itself in the love for this god who thus still lived in his image in the soul. But the soul no longer felt like the messenger, only the carrier, of an image of the divine spirit. One can say that a different form of knowledge arose when man looked into his inner being. The soul declined from messenger to bearer.
Since the living spirit had been lost to human perception, the body no longer appeared as the image of spirit. To recognize it as such an image, one would have had to perceive the archetype. Therefore, for this later age, the body changed into something that I would like to call “force.” The concept of force emerged. The body was pictured as a complex of forces, no longer as a reproduction, an image, that bore within itself the essence of what it reproduced. The human body became a force which no longer bore the substance of the source from which it originated. Not only the human body, but in all of nature, too, forces had to be pictured everywhere. Whereas formerly, nature in all its aspects had been an image of spirit, now it had become forces flowing out of the spirit. This, however, implied that nature began to be something more or less foreign to man. One could say that the soul had lost something since it no longer contained direct spirit awareness. Speaking crudely, I would have to say that the soul had inwardly become more tenuous, while the body, the external corporeal world, had gained in robustness. Earlier, as an image, it still possessed some resemblance to the spirit. Now it became permeated by the element of force. The complex of forces is more robust than the image in which the spiritual element is still recognizable. Hence, again speaking crudely, the corporeal world became denser while the soul became more tenuous. This is what arose in the consciousness of the men among whom lived the ancient wise man mentioned above, who listened to the silent universe and from its silence, derived the awareness that at least his soul was a Logos-bearer. Now, a contrast that had not existed before arose between the soul, grown more tenuous, and the increased density of the corporeal world. Earlier, the unity of spirit had been perceived in all things. Now, there arose the contrast between body and soul, man and nature. Now appeared a chasm between body and soul that had not been present at all prior to the time of this old sage. Man now felt himself divided as well from nature, something that also had not been the case in the ancient times. This contrast is the central trait of all thinking in the span of time between the old sage I have mentioned and Nicholas Cusanus. Men now struggle to comprehend the connection between, on one hand, the soul, that lacks spirit reality, and on the other hand, the body that has become dense, has turned into force, into a complex of forces. And men struggle to feel and experience the relationship between man and nature. But everywhere, nature is force. In that time, no conception at all existed as yet of what we call today “the laws of nature.” People did not think in terms of natural laws; everywhere and in everything they felt the forces of nature. When a man looked into his own being, he did not experience a soul that—as was the case later one—bore within itself a dim will, an almost equally dim feeling, and an abstract thinking. Instead, he experienced the soul as the bearer of the living Logos, something that was not abstract and dead, but a divine living image of God. We must be able to picture this contrast, which remained acute until the eleventh or Twelfth century. It was quite different from the contrasts that we feel today. If we cannot vividly grasp this contrast, which was experienced by everyone in that earlier epoch, we make the same mistake as all those historians of philosophy who regard the old Greek thinker Democritus22 of the fifth century B.C. as an atomist in the modern sense, because he spoke of “atoms.” The words suggest a resemblance, but no real resemblance exists. There is great difference between modern-day atomists and Democritus. His utterances were based on the awareness of the contrast described above between man and nature, soul and body. His atoms were complexes of force and as such were contrasted with space, something a modern atomist cannot do in that manner. How could the modern atomist say what Democritus said: “Existence is not more than nothingness, fullness is not more than emptiness?” It implies that Democritus assumed empty space to possess an affinity with atom-filled space. This has meaning only within a consciousness that as yet has no idea of the modern concept of body. Therefore, it cannot speak of the atoms of a body, but only of centers of force, which, in that case, have an inner relationship to what surrounds man externally. Today's atomist cannot equate emptiness with fullness. If Democritus had viewed emptiness the way we do today, he could not have equated it with the state of being. He could do so because in this emptiness he sought the soul that was the bearer of the Logos. And though he conceived his Logos in a form of necessity, it was the Greek form of necessity, not our modern physical necessity. If we are to comprehend what goes on today, we must be able to look in the right way into the nuances of ideas and feelings of former times. There came the time, described in the last lecture, of Meister Eckhart and Nicholas Cusanus, when even awareness of the Logos indwelling the soul was lost. The ancient sage, in listening to the universe, only had to mourn the silence, but Meister Eckhart and Cusanus found the naught and had to seek the I out of nothingness. Only now, at this point, does the modern era of thinking begin. The soul now no longer contains the living Logos. Instead, when it looks into itself, it finds ideas and concepts, which finally lead to abstractions. The soul has become even more tenuous. A third phase begins. Once upon a time, in the first phase, the soul experienced the spirit's archetype within itself. It saw itself as the messenger of spirit. In the second phase, the soul inwardly experienced the living image of God in the Logos, it became the bearer of the Logos. Now, in the third phase, the soul becomes, as it were, a vessel for ideas and concepts. These may have the certainty of mathematics, but they are only ideas and concepts. The soul experiences itself at its most tenuous, if I may put it so. Again the corporeal world increases in robustness. This is the third way in which man experiences himself. He cannot as yet give up his soul element completely, but he experiences it as the vessel for the realm of ideas. He experiences his body, on the other hand, not only as a force but as a spatial body.
The body has become still more robust. Man now denies the spirit altogether. Here we come to the “body” that Hobbes, Bacon,23 and Locke spoke of. Here, we meet “body” at its densest. The soul no longer feels a kinship to it, only an abstract connection that gets worse in the course of time. In place of the earlier concrete contrast of soul and body, man and nature, another contrast arises that leads further and further into abstraction. The soul that formerly appeared to itself as something concrete—because it experienced in itself the Logos-image of the divine—gradually transforms itself to a mere vessel of ideas. Whereas before, in the ancient spiritual age, it had felt akin to everything, it now sees itself as subject and regards everything else as object, feeling no further kinship with anything. The earlier contrast of soul and body, man and nature, increasingly became the merely theoretical epistemological contrast between the subject that is within a person and the object without. Nature changed into the object of knowledge. It is not surprising that out of its own needs knowledge henceforth strove for the “purely objective.” But what is this purely objective? It is no longer what nature was to the Greeks. The objective is external corporeality in which no spirit is any longer perceived. It is nature devoid of spirit, to be comprehended from without by the subject. Precisely because man had lost the connection with nature, he now sought a science of nature from outside. Here, we have once again reached the point where I concluded yesterday. Cusanus looked upon what should have been the divine world to him and declared that man with his knowledge must stop short before it and, if he must write about the divine world, he must write a docta ignorantia. And only faintly, in symbols taken from mathematics, did Cusanus want to retain something of what appeared thus to him as the spiritual realms. About a hundred years after the Docta Ignorantia appeared in 1440, the De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium appeared in 1543. one century later, Copernicus, with his mathematical mind, took hold of the other side, the external side of what Cusanus could not fully grasp, not even symbolically, with mathematics. Today, we see how in fact the application of this mathematical mind to nature becomes possible the moment that nature vanishes from man's immediate experience. This can be traced even in the history of language since “Nature” refers to something that is related to “being born,” whereas what we consider as nature today is only the corporeal world in which everything is dead. I mean that it is dead for us since, of course, nature contains life and spirit. But it has become lifeless for us and the most certain of conceptual systems, namely, the mathematical, is regarded as the best way to grasp it. Thus we have before us a development that proceeds with inward regularity. In the first epoch, man beheld god and world, but god in the world and the world in god: the one-ness, unity. In the second epoch, man in fact beheld soul and body, man and nature; the soul as bearer of the living Logos, the bearer of what is not born and does not die; nature as what is born and dies. In the third phase man has ascended to the abstract contrast of subject (himself) and object ( the external world.) The object is something so robust that man no longer even attempts to throw light on it with concepts. It is experienced as something alien to man, something that is examined from outside with mathematics although mathematics cannot penetrate into the inner essence. For this reason, Cusanus applied mathematics only symbolically, and timidly at that. The striving to develop science must therefore be pictured as emerging from earlier faculties of mankind. A time had to come when this science would appear. It had to develop the way it did. We can follow this if we focus clearly on the three phases of development that I have just described. We see how the first phase extends to the Eighth Century B.C. to the ancient sage of Southern Europe whom I have described today. The second extends from him to Nicholas Cusanus. We find ourselves in the third phase now. The first is pneumatological, directed to the spirit in its primeval form. The second is mystical, taking the world in the broadest sense possible. The third is mathematical. Considering the significant characteristics, therefore, we trace the first phase—ancient pneumatology—as far as the ancient Southern wise man. Magical mysticism extends from there to Meister Eckhart and Nicholas Cusanus. The age of mathematizing natural science proceeds from Cusanus into our own time and continues further. More on this tomorrow.
|
218. Planetary Spheres and Their Influence on Mans Life on Earth and in the Spiritual Worlds: Life in the Spiritual Spheres and the Return to Earth
12 Nov 1922, London Translated by George Adams, Mary Adams Rudolf Steiner |
---|
Man goes forth, from the planetary spheres—we mean of course the copy of the planetary spheres—and enters upon an experience of the constellations of the fixed stars. So that between falling asleep and awaking, man actually covers the whole cosmic existence beyond the Earth. |
218. Planetary Spheres and Their Influence on Mans Life on Earth and in the Spiritual Worlds: Life in the Spiritual Spheres and the Return to Earth
12 Nov 1922, London Translated by George Adams, Mary Adams Rudolf Steiner |
---|
You will remember that on the last occasion when I was able to speak to you here, I gave you a description of the experiences of the soul during sleep. Today I would like to carry the subject a little further. It will, I am sure, already be clear to you that one whose knowledge of human life confines itself to daytime existence, knows only half the life of man; for things of the very greatest importance take place during sleep. There is no need for me here to explain first the methods by which one comes to know these things; I assume from the outset that you receive what I say as coming from the exact clairvoyance which you will remember I described in my lectures here in London, a few months ago. [Knowledge and Initiation and Knowledge of the Christ through Anthroposophy. Two lectures, London, 14 and 15 April, 1922.] When man passes from day-consciousness into sleep-consciousness—which is for the man of the present time unconsciousness—he is not in his physical body, nor in his etheric body. During sleep he is a purely spiritual being. On my last visit I gave you a description, from one aspect, of the experience man undergoes as soul and spirit between the times of falling asleep and awaking. Today I want to describe this experience from another side. You will remember how in sleep man goes out into the cosmic ether, and feeling himself in the midst of a vast and vague unknown is at first overcome with anxiety and apprehension; then you will also remember how in this moment something awakens in the soul which one can call—borrowing the expression from conscious life—a yearning for the Divine. And we went on to speak of how in the second stage of sleep man experiences a reflection of the movements of the planets, and how, for one who has already a relation to the Mystery of Golgotha, Christ then appears, to be his Guide through the otherwise chaotic experiences that come to him while he is living his way through a kind of reproduction or copy of the life of the stars and the planets. For now comes the experience of the fixed stars. Man goes forth, from the planetary spheres—we mean of course the copy of the planetary spheres—and enters upon an experience of the constellations of the fixed stars. So that between falling asleep and awaking, man actually covers the whole cosmic existence beyond the Earth. I told you moreover that it is the forces of the Moon (the spiritual counterpart of what reveals itself to us in the various lunar phenomena) that bring man back again in the morning—or whenever he wakes up—bring him back into his physical and into his etheric body. And now I should like, as I said, to describe these experiences from another angle. Unless we have allowed ourselves to become completely involved and imprisoned in the materialistic ideas of modern times, the conscious life that we lead in the daytime has for us a moral and also a religious foundation. We have our knowledge of Nature; but we cannot help feeling that we have in us something more than knowledge and science, that we have as well, moral duties, moral responsibilities, and we feel moreover that our whole being is grounded in a spiritual world. This latter realisation may be described as a religious consciousness. It is, however, only because he is in the physical body, that he is able to have this religious consciousness. It is, however, only because he is in the physical body, that he is able to have this religious consciousness in waking life. For you must understand that in his physical body man is not alone, but with him are spirits of higher cosmic rank; in his physical body, man lives together with higher spirits. And man lives, in his ether-body, with the moral purposes of these higher spirits. Thus, the religious consciousness of man is dependent on his life in the physical body, and his moral consciousness on his life in the etheric body. And this leads us to distinguish two parts in the cosmic ether, from which, as you know, our own ether-body is derived. One part is warmth, light, chemical ether, life ether. But behind all this, behind the warmth and light and chemical processes and life, is a moral element—the moral essence of the cosmic ether. Now this moral essence of the cosmic ether is present only in the neighbourhood of stars and planets. If you are living on the Earth, then you are not only within the cosmic ether, but also within its moral essence, although by day you do not know it. And when you wander through the cosmos, then whenever you are in the environment of a star, you are in the moral essence of the cosmos ether. But in between the stars, the moral element is driven out of the ether by the action of the sunlight. Note that I say the sunlight, not the Sun, which is a cosmic body within which is contained the very source and origin of the moral ether; but when the Sun shines, then by means of its light it drives away the moral essence of the ether. And so it comes about that when we look out through our eyes on to the world, we see flowers, we see springs and brooks, we see the whole face of Nature, but without any moral element discernible within it; the sunlight has killed out the moral element. And when we fall asleep and leave our physical and etheric bodies, then we take with us what we have acquired in this way during waking hours on Earth by beholding Nature; but strange as it may sound, we leave behind us our religious feeling and our moral feeling, we leave them behind with the physical and with the ether-body, and our soul and spirit live as an a-moral being during the time of sleep. This has an important consequence for us. We are living during this time in a world that has been irradiated by the light of the Sun. This means that the moral ordering of the world has gone out of the ether. Consequently the Ahrimanic Being has access to the ether in which we find ourselves as soon as we fall asleep. And this Ahrimanic Being speaks to man while he is asleep. And what he says is most mischievous, for he is rightly called the father of lies; he makes good appear bad to the sleeping human being and bad good. Reference has been made in the newspapers recently to questions that are being investigated by scientists, as to why criminals sleep well, while moral people with a good conscience often sleep badly. The matter is explained when you consider what I have been telling you. In the case of a highly conscientious and devout man, who has a fine moral feeling, his moral sensibility enters so deeply into his soul that he takes it with him into sleep; with the result that he sleeps badly, believing as he does that he has been guilty of many misdeeds. A bad man, on the other hand, whose moral sensibility is very little developed, will carry with him into sleep no such pangs of conscience,—and this will mean of course at the same time that he will have, spiritually speaking, an open ear for the whisperings of Ahriman who makes evil appear good. Hence the quiet and contented sleep of the criminal! People say, it is not fair that criminals should sleep well, while good people often have poor and disturbed slumber. The fact is to be accounted for in the way I have shown. The enticement to evil to which man is exposed during sleep is, in truth, exceedingly great, and it can easily happen that in the morning he brings over with him from sleep terrible demonic forces of temptation. Only when he has come down again into his physical and etheric body, will a man who is not very good and upright begin to feel pricks of conscience,—not before. There is thus abundant possibility for, man to fall a victim to Ahriman during the time of sleep. The danger has by no means always been so great as it is today. In the course of the centuries it has gradually come about that men are so gravely exposed during sleep to the seductions of demonic powers, which make evil appear good. In earlier times of the evolution of mankind things were different. Man had then, as I have often explained to you, nothing like so strong an ego-consciousness as he has now. In the daytime, when he was awake, his ego-consciousness was weaker; and that meant also that during sleep he did not sail so smoothly into evil as he does today. He was protected. The fact is, we are living today in a time that is bringing us to a certain crisis in evolution. It behoves men to arm themselves against the powers of evil that approach them when they fall asleep. In older times men were protected through the fact that when they went to sleep, they entered more into the group-soul. During sleep man lived in the group-soul. We today still live to a certain extent in the group-soul during our waking hours; we feel we belong to a particular nation, often even to a particular clan; or perhaps we are inclined to put on aristocratic airs, and like to feel ourselves as members of a certain family. But sleep takes us right out of the group-soul feeling. It is hardly possible for the man of today to be an aristocrat in sleep. Yes, sleep is a great educator, more than you would think; on the one hand it educates man, it is true, in evil, as we have seen; but on the other hand, it educates him in democracy. The man of olden time passed into the group-soul when he fell asleep; and when he awoke and returned to his physical and to his etheric body, he brought with him a strong feeling of belonging to his group. There you have the one side of man's life,—what he is during sleep. Man, of course, carries in him all the time the part of his nature that is exposed in sleep at the present day to the temptations of demonic forces, he has it in him continuously. Only, when he is awake, he has to let it merge into the moral and religious consciousness. The religious side of man is given to him, as we saw, by the powers that live with him in his physical body, and the moral side by the powers that live with him in his ether-body. The man of an older time, who during sleep lived strongly, as we have seen, in the group-consciousness—it was with the Mystery of Golgotha that all this became changed for the further evolution of mankind—the man of an older time, when he dived down again, on awaking, into his physical and his etheric body, began to live then more in himself, But here we discover another difference between him and us. For when he was waking up and coming down again into his physical and ether body, before he was quite awake, he had a clear consciousness of the life he had lived ere he descended to Earth. And he had the same clear consciousness again just before falling asleep. Whilst, therefore, on the one hand he developed a strong group-consciousness, he had at the same time also a strong feeling of belonging to the life that is beyond the Earth. He knew quite well that he had come down from the spiritual world, had passed through the world of the stars, and had chosen for himself a physical body here on Earth. As time went on, this consciousness became darkened. In compensation, men became ‘clever’—as we understand the word today. They developed powers of judgment and discrimination. This kind of faculty has evolved only in the course of time. It is our physical body that gives us the power of judgment,—and this is the reason we are able to exercise the power best during the morning hours. We enter more deeply in these days into our physical and etheric bodies than men did in olden times. Consequently, while they had a consciousness of their life before birth, we have a consciousness rather of earthly existence. We establish ourselves firmly in our physical and etheric body. They did not do so. They might be said to ‘carry’ their physical and etheric body, they carried it round with them, feeling it as something external to themselves, rather as we feel the clothes that we wear. We have quite lost this feeling. We no longer say as they did, when they were going through a door: I carry my physical being through the door. That was for them an entirely natural way of speaking. We would never say that; we say: I walk through the door. We press our I, our ego, right into the physical body; it is therefore perfectly natural for us to express ourselves in this way. And in consequence of this development, we have lost also the consciousness of our connection with the spiritual world and with the world of the stars. The man of an earlier time knew that he was connected with the world of the stars. He knew quite well that he was connected with the world of the stars, and also with the spiritual world that is behind the world of the stars: he knew that he had descended from these worlds to earthly existence. Modern man will say: In order to live, I need meat, vegetables, eggs, etc. He needs, that is, products of the physical world, and with these he must concern himself from birth to death. Please do not imagine for a moment dear friends, that I mean to speak scornfully or slightingly of the food we eat. It is good in itself and belongs to life; let that be fully recognised. I want only to point out that the men of olden time[s] knew that in order to have strength to live, man needs more than the forces of the Earth that reside in beef and cabbage and egg, he needs also Jupiter and Venus and Saturn, They knew for a fact that just as man, when he is here on Earth, needs to eat eggs, so too has he need to have received, before he came down to Earth, the strength of Jupiter and of Venus; otherwise he could not be earthly man at all. Modern man feels united with the Earth and is very much concerned about what he must eat to keep his body in health. The man of an older time felt a need to be in right relationship with the stars. He said to himself: If I suffer, here on Earth, from some inability or lack of skill, it must be that I did not acquit myself well while descending into the world of the stars; I must put that right next time I make the journey from death to a new birth. It is indeed so that in those times man evolved what might be called a spiritual diet. In the Mysteries there were leaders and guides who were not unlike our modern doctors of medicine. The modern doctor gives his advice about man's body. That is quite understandable, and no reproach is intended. But the leaders in the Mysteries, who were also physicians, would for example, if a man suffered from some physical infirmity, give instruction as to how he could better his relationship to Venus, or it may be to Saturn. It was thus advice for the soul that these leaders in the Mysteries gave. Let us suppose a physician of this kind found that the person who had come to him for healing was too strongly attracted to his physical body. Instead of feeling his body merely as a garment for his soul, he was firmly bound to it, rather like a man of the present day who persisted in sleeping in his clothes. The physician would say to such a person: When the Moon is full, try going out for a walk in its light, when it is rising in the evening; and while you walk, repeat a certain mantram. Why did the physician of the ancient Mysteries give this advice? Because he knew that when a person goes for a walk in the light of the Moon, repeating the while certain mantrams, that will counteract the Saturn force, and so it will come about that Saturn has less power over him. For, you see, this physician of olden times knew that the clinging to the physical body, the being so closely knit with it, was due to the fact that the person in question had held on too strongly to Saturn when he was passing through the world of the stars, on his way from the spiritual world into earthly life. This excessive attraction to the life of Saturn had given him the infirmity from which he was suffering. But now the two heavenly bodies, Moon and Saturn, tend to counteract one another. In order, therefore, to cure an affliction due to the Saturn forces, the physician would have recourse to the forces of the Moon. He would, in effect, prescribe a spiritual diet. We have today a physical diet and that is quite right and suitable for us. In the olden times man felt the need for a diet of a more spiritual kind, and we must now learn to add to our physical diet also a spiritual diet. That is the mission of the present age; we have our physical diet, and we must regain a feeling for the importance of a spiritual diet as well. If we can do this, it will enable us to achieve the tasks that call for fulfilment at this present moment in earth evolution. This is what I wanted to put before you in the first part of my lecture. * It is a satisfaction to me, my dear friends, that I shall be able to give you two more lectures after today, and so I do not need to hurry—as I would otherwise be obliged to do—but can go more fully into that which lies on my heart to say to you on the occasion of this visit. Vision of the pre-earthly life, of the life man lived in the spiritual world before he united himself here on Earth with a physical and an etheric body, was possible to the men of old, for they possessed an elemental clairvoyance. To attain such vision today we need the help of anthroposophical science. When with this help we have learned to look with the consciousness of Inspiration upon the time we pass through before we descend to Earth, we behold how we live for a long while in an entirely spiritual world, a world where there is no mineral kingdom, no plant kingdom, no animal kingdom,—a world where there are not even the stars that we see shining far away in the encircling heavens, a world, where we have around us spiritual beings, beings of the higher hierarchies. Throughout this period of the time between death and a new birth, we live among spiritual beings. And then we begin to travel through the starry heavens on our way back to Earth, passing—now with more, now again with less, sympathy—through the various starry spheres. And this is the time when we prepare our coming earthly life. For according as we relate ourselves to the starry spheres through which we pass, so will be our life on Earth. Let me give you an example of how this preparation takes place. Coming forth from the world that is purely spiritual, we pass first through the sphere of the fixed stars. Of these I will not speak just now; that will come in the next lecture. Then we pass through the spheres of Saturn, Jupiter and Mars, through the Sun sphere, and through the spheres of Mercury, Venus and Moon, and so by gradual stages come down to Earth. You will realise from the description that we approach the spheres of the stars from the other side. When you stand on Earth and look at Jupiter, you are seeing Jupiter from one side. And when a being—in this case, a human being—is descending from the spiritual world and passes, on his way to Earth, through the spheres of the stars, then at the time when we, looking from the Earth, see Saturn, this being, as he approaches Saturn, will be seeing it from the other side. It will be the same with all the stars. Coming from the spiritual world, he approaches the stars from behind, as it were, and sees the reverse of what men see on Earth with physical sight. You will not of course imagine that the human being who is making his journey to the Earth ‘sees’ in the way we do. He has no eyes as yet, he will only get eyes when he has a physical body. What he sees is spiritual. He sees Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, in their spiritual aspect; Venus also, then Mercury and Moon. And according to the measure of the sympathy or antipathy with which he passes through the one or other sphere, so will be the forces he receives in the course of his descent from each sphere in turn,—forces of Saturn, forces of Jupiter, and so on. Let us imagine a particular case. In consequence of the way in which he lived his former life on Earth, a human soul may have the feeling, when the time comes to descend to a new life: It will be good if this time I come to Earth as a woman; if this time I incarnate in a female body. It is an important question for the descending human soul to decide, whether it shall become man or woman. Its whole destiny on earth depends on the decision; for it is by no means a matter of indifference whether in one particular incarnation we go through our life as a man or a woman. But it is not enough for the soul simply to come to the conclusion: I will be a man, or, I will be a woman. Due preparation has to be made. If the soul desires to be a woman, it will approach the Earth at the time of Full Moon. When we, looking from the Earth, see the Moon full, the soul that is approaching from the spiritual world will see it dark. Now what the soul sees is of course, the spiritual aspect of the Moon. Seeing it dark, the soul sees it ‘peopled,’ as it were, with certain beings. And these beings it is who will prepare the soul, so that, when it comes on Earth, it shall be attracted to a female body. On the other hand, when we, looking from the Earth, see New Moon—which means, we cannot see it at all—then the soul that is descending and sees the Moon from the other side, will see it lit up, will see the light that rays forth from it out into cosmic space,—that is, of course, the spiritual in the light. In this case, the soul can become a man. Whether it receives the forces that bring it to a male or to a female incarnation depends, you see, on the manner of the soul's journey through the spheres of the stars. And now, in addition to passing through the sphere of the Moon, the soul has also to go, for example, through the spheres of Mercury and Venus. While the manner of its journey through the sphere of the Moon determines whether the soul is to become man or woman, by its passage through the sphere of Venus the soul is endowed with greater or less sympathy for a particular family. For the soul could, of course, be man or woman in this or that or any other family. This attraction to a family is determined in the following way. A human soul may be descending, for instance, at a time when Venus is right on the other side of the Earth, and the soul may thus be able to disregard the Venus sphere. Such a soul will then have no great connection with his family. Or the soul may, on the other hand, go past Venus, and it can do so in a variety of ways. It will then elect to take the path through the Venus sphere that guides it to some particular family. For the soul has this possibility; it can prepare itself for belonging to a particular family by choosing, as it were, the ‘ray’ that goes from Venus to this family. Coming down from the other side, the dark side, of Venus, the soul then draws near to Earth and finds its way to that family, The same kind of thing may happen in regard to the Mercury sphere. The sphere of Mercury leads the soul to find its way into a particular folk or people. When the region inhabited by this people is receiving rays of Mercury, then the soul, coming from the other side and approaching the dark side of Mercury, will be helped to find its way to this people. Thus are human souls prepared for life on Earth. Through the influence of the Moon—and when we speak of these heavenly bodies, it is always the spiritual in them that we have in mind—through the influence of the Moon, preparation is made for the soul to become man or woman; through the influence of Venus, for the soul to belong to some family; through the influence of Mercury, to belong to some folk or people. The whole life of man on Earth depends, as you see, on the relationship he establishes with the spheres in the course of his descent from the spiritual world. The knowledge of this has been lost. We must regain it. We are accustomed to think of ourselves as composed of hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, sulphur, etc. But we must come also to feel—quite simply and naturally—that we are composed and are created out of the world of the stars. For we are not just physical human beings made up of protein and a few other substances. All the forces of the universe have combined to form us. These forces of the universe work upon us while we are descending. When we come to Earth, we have them within us,—and something of a memory of this remains to us in sleep. Memory is however always, as you know very well, weaker than the actual experience. When someone who is dear to you has died, think how the memory of the event grows less vivid and powerful as time goes on. And it is the same with the memory we still have in sleep, of how it was with us when we had living and present experiences of the spiritual world, and of the world of the stars. The memory grows dim; and that is why man is exposed now in sleep to the temptations I described earlier in today's lecture. Thus a dim and feeble after-image in sleep—a weak cosmic memory—is all that is left of the experience we had with the spiritual world and with the stars during the time between death and our last birth. This, dear friends, is what I wanted to say to you today byway of introduction. We shall continue with it next time we meet. |
316. Course for Young Doctors: Christmas Course III
04 Jan 1924, Dornach Translated by Gerald Karnow Rudolf Steiner |
---|
The in-streaming is essentially modified according to the position of the constellation from which it comes. This is a thought around which there is nothing but dilettantism today, but in olden times it was the basis of great astronomical wisdom. |
316. Course for Young Doctors: Christmas Course III
04 Jan 1924, Dornach Translated by Gerald Karnow Rudolf Steiner |
---|
From tomorrow onwards I want you to think about what questions you would like to ask, and then give these questions to me so that I may remember them as these lectures go on. Today I want to say something in direct continuation of what was said in the two preceding lectures about the nature of the human being and his relation to the world. In our anthroposophical studies here it is useless to bother about the ‘views’—in reality they are not ‘views’ at all—that are held by modern science in connection with the human being. It would be equally useless to make up our minds to deviate as little as possible from things that have become customary and habitual. For the state of affairs at present is that in certain great and significant directions the truth deviates very considerably from what has become customary. It deviates in an extraordinarily high degree. And so those who are striving after truth today will also need to have the courage to acknowledge many things that modern science would consider quite absurd. On the other hand, if you really want to heal, it will be necessary for you—not here, but in other places—to mix with those who set out to heal today by the methods customary in the external world. You will have to have dealings with science as it is in the modern world. Otherwise, among all the errors of the times, you will feel insecure with the truth you possess. The current idea today is that there are about seventy to eighty substances on the earth, with certain forces of attraction and repulsion. These forces are supposed to work through certain atomic weights and the like. A number of theoretical laws of nature are then evolved according to which people try to find out how the substances are formed, and then, out of the different forces whose origin is looked for in the substances, a phantasmal picture is built up which is supposed to represent “man.” But the truth is that neither in his form nor in the forces which maintain his processes of growth and nourishment is the human being subject only to the influences proceeding from the substances of the earth. In speaking of the etheric body, we found that it is entirely under the influence of forces which stream in from the periphery, from the cosmos. Taking these two kinds of forces—those which proceed from the substances of the earth, and those which stream in from the periphery—you will realize that a balancing, a harmonizing of these two kinds of forces, is necessary for each organ in the body. The several systems of organs in the human being differ very considerably in the way in which this balance is established. Let us now consider the human head from this point of view. To begin with, attention must be called—and I have often done this—to the weight of the human brain which is very largely eliminated because the brain, with its definite outline, floats in the cerebral fluid. The brain floats in the cerebral fluid which circulates through the spinal column. The actual weight of the brain is about thirteen hundred to fifteen hundred grams. But when it is within the human being, it weighs much less—at most, twenty grams. This is because it floats in the cerebral fluid, and, according to the Law of Archimedes, every body, when it floats in fluid, loses as much of its weight as is equivalent to the weight of the volume of fluid displaced. In the fluid, the brain is subject to buoyancy so that only about twenty to twenty-five grams of its weight remains, and this is the weight with which the brain presses downwards. If it were to press downwards with its full weight there could be no blood vessels underneath it; they would be crushed. The earthly quality of heaviness is actually taken away from the brain. It is not the earthly quality of heaviness that enables us to be alive in the brain, but the buoyancy, the force that is in opposition to heaviness. In the case of the brain, this earthly heaviness amounts to, at most, twenty grams. The force of attraction exercised by the earth upon the human head is very little. We see from this that the earthly characteristic of the brain vanishes—vanishes because of the way man is organized. The human organization is such that the earthly forces vanish. The Law of Archimedes has taught humanity about buoyancy, but it is not always taken account of in technical contrivances. I am not sure whether people realize it, but it is quite obvious that they acknowledge laws which happen to suit them and ignore those which do not. What I have told you about heaviness disappearing applies not only to the human head but to the whole inner structure of the head. Something else happens as a result of the special arrangement of the breathing process, of certain static conditions which hold sway between in-breathing and out-breathing. When we draw a breath, a force is exercised, and then comes a counter force when we breathe out again. The relationship between this force and counter force in breathing is similar to the relationship between gravity and buoyancy. The curious thing is that when we are walking, the head, the brain, remains at rest. On account of buoyancy, the brain is not heavy, and its inner condition of rest, its inner static condition, is not changed when we are walking. Nor is this true only of our walking, but, in a curious manner, it is especially true also of the movement we make together with the earth. We only share in the movement with the rest of the body, not with the brain. The movement is quashed, so far as the brain is concerned. We may move the head itself as rapidly as the rest of the body, but even then the brain remains at rest. It is harder to conceive that something that is momentarily in movement is, in reality, at rest, than to conceive that something that is subject to gravity is, in reality, not heavy. But it is so, nevertheless. Thinking of the inner organization of the human being, we must say that the head remains at rest all the time. All the forces adjust themselves; there is a slight pull of gravity in the downward direction, in a proportion of twenty to fifteen hundred, and in the forward direction there is a very slight propelling force of movement. In essentials, however, the movement is balanced out. We can, therefore, say that the human head, as regards its inner existence, is like a person who is sitting quietly in an automobile and not moving at all while the car moves forward. The experience of the human head is just as it would be if it had no weight. Neither does it move when the human being moves and when the earth is moving together with the human being. The head is, therefore, a very special organ, for it excludes itself, exiles itself from what is happening on the earth; the earth only participates to a small extent in the activities of the head. The head is an image of the cosmos. In its essential nature, it has nothing to do with the forces of the earth. The inner structure of the brain is an image of the cosmic forces. Its form cannot be explained from anything of an earthly nature but only from the in-working cosmos. I must speak rather crudely here, but you will understand me. The earth works only to this extent, that it breaks through the cosmic formation and inserts into the human being that which tends towards the earth. You can see this readily by looking at a skeleton. Take away the skull and you have taken away the part of the skeleton that is an image of the cosmos. The arrangement of the ribs is only half cosmic for here the skeleton is already impressed by the earthly forces. In the long bones of the legs and the long bones of the arms, you have a purely earthly formation. The spinal vertebrae to which the ribs are connected have arisen from the condition of equilibrium between the cosmic and the earthly. In the head, with its covering skull you have a form in which the cosmos deprives the earthly forces of the possibility of taking shape; this form of the skull is an image of the cosmos. In this way we must study the forms of the human body. When we study the forms of the human body in this way, knowing that the inner life of the head, the soft substances and fluids of the head remain at rest and in this state of rest are an image of the cosmos, we shall realize that anatomy and physiology, as presented today, cannot really be said to be true because they do not acknowledge the existence of cosmic influences. I have spoken of forces which proceed from the periphery and stream inwards. They stream in from all sides upon the human head. But it makes a difference if these forces are intercepted by the moon, by the sun, or by Saturn. There peripheric forces are modified by the planetary bodies standing in the heavens. The directions from which these forces stream in are, therefore, not without significance. The in-streaming is essentially modified according to the position of the constellation from which it comes. This is a thought around which there is nothing but dilettantism today, but in olden times it was the basis of great astronomical wisdom. The dreadful treatises that exist on such subjects today give no picture at all of the reality. Understanding of what I have said is essential before we can have insight into the structure and make-up of the human being. For the fact that in his head the human being is subject entirely to the cosmos, and in the long bones of arms and legs entirely to the earthly forces, is an expression, right down into substance, of how the cosmic formative forces behave. You know that human bone contains calcium carbonate. But it also contains calcium phosphate. Both substances are very important for the bones. Through the calcium carbonate the bones become subject to the earth. If the bone substance was not permeated by calcium carbonate, the earth could not approach the bones. The calcium carbonate constitutes the substantial point of contact for the earth which is thereby able to shape the bones in accordance with its formative forces. The thigh bones could not have their extension from above downwards if this was not made possible by the calcium carbonate. But there would be no femoral head without CaPO3. This fact is not changed by the objection which anatomists will raise, that the quantities of CaCO3 and CaPO3 do not essentially differ in the shaft of a long bone and its neck or head. To begin with, this statement is not quite accurate, for minute research will reveal a difference, but something else comes into consideration here. The human organism must have within it both up-building processes and processes of demolition—processes out of which something is built up and processes by means of which what is not used in the up-building is separated off. A very decided difference between these up-building forces and forces of demolition in substances themselves is shown, for example, by fluorine. The physiologist would say that fluorine plays a part in the up-building of the teeth and is also present in the urine. Fluorine, therefore, exists here and there in the human body. But that is not the point of importance. In the up-building of the teeth, the activity of the fluorine is a positive one. The teeth could not develop without fluorine. In urine, there is fluorine which has been broken down and is excreted. The essential thing is to distinguish between whether a substance is being eliminated at some place in the body or whether it is an absolute necessity in the up-building process. If part of a bone is built in from the cosmos, as it were, CaPO3 has here an up-building activity. In another part of a bone the CaPO3 is being eliminated. In the shafts of the long bones, CaCO3 builds up, but it is being eliminated in that part of the bone which is built in from the cosmos (head of the bone). The essential thing is not the actual presence, here or there, of a substance. The point of importance is what the substance is doing, what significance it has at some particular place in the organism. I once tried to give a picture of these things by saying the following: Suppose I am going for a walk one morning at nine o'clock and see two men sitting together on a bench. At three o'clock in the afternoon I pass the bench again and the two men are together there again. These two facts in themselves really tell me nothing, because it may be that one of the men had taken his lunch with him and had remained sitting on the bench from nine o'clock until three o'clock, while the other had gone off for a walk and had come back again just before three o'clock. One of them is quite rested, the other terribly tired. In this respect there is an inner difference between them. The point of importance is not the presence of the one person or the other, but what each of them has been doing, how has life brought him to this particular place. Therefore, so far as understanding of the human being is concerned, the presence of some substance in an organ is not really a matter of importance. It is a question of knowing in what kind of process the substance is involved—a process of up-building or a process of demolition. We shall never find the transition from the quality of a substance that is necessary to the human organism, to a remedy, unless we keep this process in mind. This is the only way which will lead to the realization that the distribution of substances in the cosmos is quite different from what is usually thought. It is a striking fact—a fact to which no thought has been given for five or six centuries—that while certain analytical processes prove the existence of iron in the human organism (it can be said quite certainly that there is iron in the blood), attempts to prove the existence of lead in the human organism will fail, if the organism is in a normal state. Lead is only known in the form of lead ores, or heavy lumps. But just think of it—all metals which exist in the coarse, lumpy form as earthly substances were once present during the epochs of Saturn, Sun and Moon, in the fluid condition, even in the condition of warmth ether. Now, the human being—in a different form of course—was already in existence on Old Saturn. He has been involved in all these processes, among them the process whereby, out of a fluid, delicate etheric condition, iron has become what it is today. Man has been involved in the whole process of the world's evolution. The strange thing is that the human being has taken iron and also magnesium into his own structure, but not lead. He has united the magnesium process with his own being. But he threw out the lead process. So far as the magnesium is concerned, therefore, we see that there are working, within the human being, the same forces as are working in magnesium in the external world; the human being has to master them inwardly. But before man was enclosed in his skin, when he was still a structure that was involved in a process of metamorphosis and united with the cosmos, he overcame the lead process and still has within him the forces for the elimination of the lead process. He has within him the up-building forces of magnesium and the forces for the elimination of the lead process. What does this mean, in reality? You need only study what happens to the human organism in lead poisoning. It becomes inwardly brittle, sclerotic. It is therefore correct to say that the organism cannot tolerate lead and when there is lead poisoning there is lead within the organism. The organism begins to fight against the process that is contained in the lead substance—substances are always processes. Lead spreads out within the organic process, and the organism, exerting itself in opposition, tries to drive out the lead. When it succeeds it gets well. If the lead proves itself to be the stronger, the organism does not get well, and the well-known process of decay that is connected with lead poisoning sets in, because the organism can only tolerate those processes which overcome the lead process. It cannot tolerate the formative forces of lead. If we now try to find out what it means to the human being that he will not put up with having lead in his organism, we are led to the following: man is a being of sense. He perceives things around him and then thinks about them. He needs both forms of activity. He must perceive things in order that he may be connected with the world; he must also think about them. He must repress the act of actual perception and then unfold his own, independent activity. If we were only to perceive, we should lose ourselves all the time in acts of external seeing. But by retreating from the things themselves, by thinking about them—thereby, we become a personality, an individuality. We do not lose ourselves in the things. If we study the human etheric body, we find that it has within it a center for the forces which throw out lead. This center, approximately, lies where the hairs grow in a kind of vortex at the back of the crown of the head. That is the center of the forces which overcome lead. They stream into all parts of the organism in order that the formative forces of lead may not get into the organism. The forces which the body has developed for the overcoming of lead have great significance, for they are the same forces which enable me, when I am looking, say, at this piece of chalk, not to be entirely caught up in the simple act of looking at the chalk. Otherwise I should identify myself with the object of perception. But I make myself independent, I dampen down the perception of the object observed by means of those forces which overcome lead. It is due to these forces that the human being can be a self-contained personality; these forces enable the human being to separate himself from the world. I will now speak of something that is very striking in connection with the forces which overcome lead. Not only have they a physical-etheric significance but also a psychical and moral significance. The human being takes certain metallic substances into himself, unites them with his own bodily organism; other metallic substances he overcomes and has them within him only in the form of processes of rejection, processes which are master of these substances. Now why is it that in the course of his long evolution from the Saturn period and the Sun period, man has separated off certain external substances and has received others into his organism? In that man has this process of elimination within, he is able to receive into himself independent moral forces. We can imagine that the human organism, as constituted presently, may be unable to make use of lead but contains certain forces which compensate for lead; we can imagine the organism containing lead in the same way as it now contains iron. If this were so the human being would bring into himself semi-moral qualities; for it is so with lead. He would then have a morbid affinity (we should call it a 'morbid' or pathological affinity) to the impurities existing in the outside world. Such a person would always be on the lookout for vile-smelling substances and like to smell them. If we notice that some child has perverted instincts of this kind—and there are children who are partial to everything that smells,—they will sniff petroleum, for instance—then we may be sure that the quality of the blood that rejects lead is not present. And it is then a matter of calling up this lead-rejecting power by clinical methods or even by medicaments. It is possible to do this. And now let us think of magnesium, a substance which plays a significant role in the human organism. There is something very interesting about magnesium. When speaking about education I have said many times that the first period of life, the period which lasts to the time of the change of teeth, must be sharply differentiated from the following periods. The second period lasts from the change of teeth until puberty. Magnesium, as well as fluorine, is necessary for the development of the teeth. But the process of the development of the teeth is not localized in the upper and lower jaws—the whole organism participates in it. The magnesium process takes place over the whole organism. And this is the most important process of all up to the time of the change of teeth. After the teeth have changed, magnesium has no longer its former significance. For the magnesium forces in the human being harden the organism; they enclose it in itself. This consolidation of the organism, this incorporation of the forces and substances, comes to an end at the second dentition. Until then, the magnesium forces are exceedingly important for the organism. This organism, so far as its development is concerned, must now be considered a self-contained whole. It must contain and it must enfold the magnesium process, for if this process were absent the organism would lack the necessary forces of consolidation. The organism cannot cease generating the magnesium forces. This goes on after the change of teeth just as it did before. The magnesium forces must be worked upon in the organism, and after the change of teeth the essential thing in regard to magnesium is that it must be overcome, must be thrown out. It enters particularly into the secretion of milk, is excreted with the milk. The secretion of milk is connected with puberty, so you have here a periodic process. Up to the change of teeth magnesium is consumed, as it were, by the organism; after the change of teeth, up to the time of puberty, it is thrown off, separated. And magnesium, now a substance to be secreted, is one of the forces which form the milk. After puberty there is a kind of rebound and the magnesium forces are used for the more delicate consolidation of the muscles. Substances are only a combination of processes. Lead is only in semblance the heavy, gray substance—with which we are familiar. It is nonsense to say that lead is a piece of coarse substance. In reality, lead is the process that goes on within the boundaries which mark the extent of the spread of lead. Everything is a process. One cannot say, once and for all, that certain 'substance processes' are worked up in the human being, and certain others, like the lead process, for which we must always have the power of elimination, are thrown off. It is not correct to say this because there are other processes, like the magnesium process, in connection with which there is rhythmic alternation; in periods which alternate rhythmically we have to consume the magnesium process, and then again throw it out. This will show you that it means nothing to say, as the result of mere analysis: the human organism contains magnesium. It means nothing, for in the twelfth year of life these substances have quite a different significance than they have in the fourth or fifth year of life. We unfold a real knowledge of the human being when we know the period during which certain substance processes are important in the human organism. If we want to know how substances outside in nature can work further within the human organism, it is of very little importance to study the chemical composition of these substances. We must study something that is hardly studied at all today. If we trace back the study of substances to the thirteen or fourteenth century, we find the beginnings of modern chemistry. These beginnings are to be found in the alchemical processes which are so often scoffed at nowadays. But alchemy contained something else too, of which there has been no continuation. It is what might be called today the doctrine of signatures. This Doctrine of Signatures was applied especially in the study of plants but also of minerals, and it has not been developed or continued. The characteristic quality of antimony is its well-known spiky, crystalline formation. If you apply a certain metallurgical treatment to antimony, you get the familiar “antimony mirror” when the volatilizing antimony is precipitated on a cold surface. Antimony has the tendency to develop forms which reveal themselves very clearly as forms of the etheric body. The shapes taken by antimony are very similar to the forms of certain simple plants which have an affinity to the etheric body. When one studies antimony one has the feeling at once that this antimony is very sensitive to etheric forces. It has an affinity with etheric forces. Everyone can confirm this by bringing antimony to the cathode. There will be a series of slight explosions which show the relation of antimony to the etheric forces. This is a striking case, but at one time people had a great faculty for understanding these things. This faculty is now quite lost and no attention or respect is paid to such indications as I have given. And for this reason, certain significant observations leave people in complete perplexity. Think of diamond, graphite, anthracite, common coal. They are all carbon, but yet so different from each other. Why are they different? If people were capable of not limiting their investigations to the chemical composition but of finding out about the ‘Signature’, as it was called in olden times, they would begin to understand what the difference is between common coal and graphite. Common coal came into being during the Earth evolution, graphite during the preceding Moon evolution. Diamond came into being during the Sun evolution. When you study these things in the cosmic aspect, you realize once again that what is of essential importance is not the substance itself but the conditions and times under which and during which a substance assumed a definite form. Physical reality is subject to the element of time, and time has a definite significance. If you think of what I have said, you will realize: common coal is a child, it has as yet no great age; graphite is a youth, but older than common coal; diamond, though not exactly ancient, is very mature. If you have to set a task which demands the power of maturity, you will not give it to a child. Everything depends on the age. So you will realize that simply because of its cosmic age, coal, in whatever form it appears, has a different task from graphite which is more mature. Insight into cosmic processes is necessary if we want to understand the relationship of the human being to what is out there in the cosmos. Antimony has a particular connection with the human etheric body, and if you introduce it into the human organism as a medicament, you must understand what antimony is outside the human being before you can know what is stimulated in the etheric body by the use of antimony. You must study the delicate processes in nature if you want to understand how a medicament is to act within the human organism. |
The Festivals and Their Meaning I: Christmas: The Christmas Festival: A Token of the Victory of the Sun
24 Dec 1905, Berlin Translated by Dorothy S. Osmond Rudolf Steiner |
---|
In those remote ages—and this is contrary to what modern science teaches—certain constellation of Earth, Moon and Sun was in existence. It was not until then that the Sun assumed the significance it now has in the process of man's growth and life upon the Earth and of the other creatures belonging to the Earth—the plants and animals. |
The Festivals and Their Meaning I: Christmas: The Christmas Festival: A Token of the Victory of the Sun
24 Dec 1905, Berlin Translated by Dorothy S. Osmond Rudolf Steiner |
---|
How many people are there to-day who, as they walk through the streets at this season and see all the preparations made for the Christmas Festival, have any clear or profound idea of what it means? How seldom do we find evidence of any clear ideas of this Festival, and even when they exist, how far removed they are from the intentions of those who once inaugurated the great Festivals as tokens of what is eternal and imperishable in the world! A glance at the ‘Christmas Reflections’ as they are called, in the newspapers, is quite sufficient proof of this. Surely there can be nothing more dreary and at the same time more estranged from the subject than the thoughts sent out into the world on printed pages in this way. To-day we shall try to bring before our minds a kind of summary of the knowledge revealed to us by Spiritual Science. I do not, of course, mean any kind of pedantic summary; I mean a gathering-together of all that the Christmas Festival can bring home to our hearts if we regard Spiritual Science not as a dull, grey theory, not as an outer confession, not as a philosophy, but as a real and vital stream of life pulsating through and through us. The man of to-day confronts Nature around him as a stranger. He is far more of a stranger to Nature than he thinks, far more even than he was in the time of Goethe. Is there anyone who still feels the depth of words spoken by Goethe at the beginning of the Weimar period of his life? He addressed a Hymn, a kind of prayer to Nature with all her mysterious powers: “Nature!—we are surrounded and embraced by her; we cannot draw back from her, nor can we penetrate more deeply into her being. She lifts us unasked and unwarned into the gyrations of her dance and whirls us away until we fall exhausted from her arms ... All men are within her and she in all men ... We are obedient to her laws even when we would fain oppose them ... She (Nature) is all in all. She alone praises and she alone punishes—herself, Let her do with me what she will; she will not cherish hatred for her created work. It was not I who spoke of her, Nay, it was she who spoke it all, true and false. Hers is the blame for all things, hers is the credit ...” Verily, we are all Nature's children. And when we think we are least of all obedient to her, it may be that just then we are acting most strictly in accordance with the great laws which pervade the realm of Nature and stream into our own being. Again, there are so few who really feel the depth of other pregnant words of Goethe in which he tries to express the feeling of communion with the hidden forces common to Nature and to the human being. I refer to that passage in Faust where Goethe addresses Nature, not as the dead, lifeless being conceived of by materialistic thinkers of to-day, but as a living Spirit:
This was the mood of soul which Goethe's knowledge and feeling for Nature awakened in him and these words were an attempt to bring to life again a mood which filled men's hearts in an age when wisdom itself was still organically united by living ties to Nature. And it was as tokens of this ‘feeling at one’ with Nature and the universe that the great Festivals were inaugurated. The Festivals have become abstractions, matters of indifference to modern people. The word as a medium of strife and blasphemy often means more than the Word conceived as the power by which the world itself was created. Yet the alphabetical word ought to be the representative, the symbol of the Word Creative in Nature around us, in the great universe and within us too when self-knowledge awakens, and of which all mankind can be made conscious by those who truly understand the course of Nature. It was for this that the Festivals were instituted and with the knowledge we have gleaned from Spiritual Science we will try to understand what it was that the wise men of old set out to express in the Christmas Festival. Christmas is not a Festival of Christendom only. In ancient Egypt, in the regions we ourselves inhabit, and in Asia thousands and thousands of years before the Christian era we find that a Festival was celebrated on the days now dedicated to the celebration of the birth of Christ. Now what was the character of this Festival which since time immemorial has been celebrated all over the world on the same days of the year? Wonderful Fire Festivals in the northern and central regions of Europe in ancient times were celebrated among the Celts in Scandinavia, Scotland and England by their priests, the Druids. What were they celebrating? They were celebrating the time when winter draws to its close and spring begins. It is quite true that Christmas falls while it is still winter, but Nature is already heralding a victory which can be a token of hope in anticipation of the victory that will come in spring—a token of confidence, of hope, of faith—to use words which are connected in nearly every language with the Festival of Christmas. There is confidence that the Sun, again in the ascendant, will be victorious over the opposing powers of Nature. The days draw in and draw in, and this shortening of the days seems to us to be an expression of the dying, or rather of the falling asleep of the Nature-forces. The days grow shorter and shorter up to the time when we celebrate the Christmas Festival and when our forefathers also celebrated it, in another form. Then the days begin to draw out again and the light of the Sun celebrates its victory over the darkness. In our age of materialistic thinking this is an event to which we no longer give much consideration. In olden times it seemed to men in whom living feeling was united with wisdom, to be an expression of an experience of the Godhead Himself, the Godhead by Whom their lives were guided. The solstice was a personal experience of a higher being—as personal an experience as when some momentous event forces a man to come to a vital decision. And it was even more than this. The waxing and waning of the days was not only an expression of an event in the life of a higher Being, but a token of something greater still, of something momentous and unique. This brings us to the true meaning of Christmas as a Festival of the very highest order in cosmic and human life. In the days when genuine occult teaching was not disowned as it is today by materialistic thought but was the very wellspring of the life of the peoples, the Christmas Festival was a kind of memorial, a token of remembrance of a great happening on the Earth. At the hour of midnight the priests gathered around them their truest disciples, those who were the teachers of the people, and spoke to them of a great Mystery. (I am not telling you anything that has been cleverly thought out or discovered by a process of abstract deduction but was actually experienced in the Mysteries, in the secret Sanctuaries of those remote times). This Mystery was connected with the victory of the Sun over the darkness. There was a time on the Earth when the light triumphed over the darkness. And it happened thus: in that epoch, all physical, all bodily life on Earth had reached the stage of animality only. The highest kingdom upon the Earth had only reached a stage at which it was preparing to receive something higher. And then there came that great moment in evolution when the immortal, imperishable soul of man descended. Life had so far developed that the human body was able to receive into itself the imperishable soul. These ancestors of the human race stood higher in the scale of evolution than modern scientists believe, but the higher part of their being, the divine ‘spark’ was not yet within them. The divine spark descended from a higher planetary sphere to our Earth which was now to become the scene of its activity, the dwelling-place of the soul which henceforward can never be lost to us. We call these remote ancestors of humanity the Lemurian race. Then came the Atlantean race and the Atlantean race was followed by our own—the Aryan race. Into the bodies of the Lemurian race the human soul descended. This descent of the divine ‘Sons of the Spirit,’ this great moment in the evolution of mankind was celebrated by the sages of all times as the victory of the light over the darkness. Since then the human soul has been working in the body and bringing it to higher stages of development but not at all in the way that materialistic science imagines. At the time when the human soul was quickened by the Spirit, something happened in the universe, something that is one of the most decisive events in the evolution of mankind. In those remote ages—and this is contrary to what modern science teaches—certain constellation of Earth, Moon and Sun was in existence. It was not until then that the Sun assumed the significance it now has in the process of man's growth and life upon the Earth and of the other creatures belonging to the Earth—the plants and animals. Before that time, the beings on Earth were adapted to the conditions then obtaining upon the planetary body. Only those who are able to form a clear idea of the process of the development of the Earth and of mankind will understand the connection of Sun, Moon and Earth with the human being as he lives upon the Earth. There was a time when the Earth was still united with Sun and Moon, when Sun, Moon and Earth were still one body, The beings who dwelt upon this planet were different in appearance from those who inhabit the Earth to-day; they lived in forms which were suited to the conditions of existence as they were on the planetary body consisting of Sun, Moon and Earth. The form and essential being of everything that lives upon our Earth is determined by the fact that first the Sun and then, later, the Moon separated from the Earth. The forces and influences of these two heavenly bodies henceforward played down upon the Earth from outside. This is the basis of the mysterious connection of the Spirit of man with the Spirit of the universe, with the Logos in Whom Sun, Moon and Earth are all contained. In this Logos we live and move and have our being. Just as the Earth was born from a planetary body in which the Sun and Moon were also contained, so is man born of a Spirit, of a Soul which belongs alike to Sun, Moon and Earth. And so when a man looks up to the Sun, or to the Moon, he should not only see external bodies in the heavens, but in Sun, Moon and Earth he should see the bodies of Spiritual Beings. This truth is utterly lost to the materialism of the age. Those who do not see in Sun and Moon the bodies of Spiritual Beings cannot recognise the human body as the body of the Spirit. Just as truly as the heavenly bodies are the bodies of Spiritual Beings, so is the human body the bearer of the Spirit. And man is connected with these Spiritual Beings. Just as his body is separate from the forces of the Sun and Moon and yet contains forces which are active in the Sun and Moon, so the same spirituality which reigns in Sun and Moon is contained within his soul. Man has evolved on Earth into the being he is, and he is dependent upon the Sun as the heavenly body from which the Earth receives her light. And so in days of old, our forefathers felt themselves to be spiritual children of the great universe and they said: “We have become men through the Sun Spirit, through the Sun Spirit from Whom the Spirit within us proceeded. The victory of the Sun over the darkness commemorates the victory of the Sun when it shone down upon the Earth for the first time. The immortal soul has been victorious over the forces of the animal nature.” It was verily a victory of the Sun when, long, long ago, the immortal soul entered into the physical body and penetrated into the dark world of desires, impulses and passions. Darkness preceded the victory of the Sun and this darkness had followed a previous Sun Age. So it is with the human soul. The soul proceeds from the Divine but it must sink for a time into the darkness, in order, out of this darkness, to build up the vehicle for the human soul. By slow degrees the human soul itself built up the lower nature of man in order then to take up its abode in the dwelling-place of its own construction. You have a correct simile for the entry of the immortal soul of man into the human body if you imagine an architect devoting all his powers to the building of a house in which he then lives. But in those remote ages the soul could only work unconsciously on its dwelling-place. The descent is expressed by the darkness; the awakening to consciousness, the lighting-up of the conscious human soul is expressed in this simile as a victory of the Sun. And so to those who were still aware of man's living connection with the universe, the victory of the Sun signified the great moment when they had received the impulse which was all-essential for their earthly existence. And this great moment was perpetuated in the Christmas Festival. And now try to think of the course of human life in connection with the harmony of the universe. Man seems to become more and more akin to the great rhythms of Nature. If we think of all that encompasses the life of the soul, of the course of the Sun and everything that is connected with it, we are struck by something that closely concerns us, namely, the rhythm and the marvellous harmony in contrast to the chaos and lack of harmony in the human soul. We all know how rhythmically and with what regularity the Sun appears and disappears. And we can picture what a stupendous upheaval there would be in the universe if for a fraction of a second only the Sun were to be diverted from its course. It is only because of this inviolable harmony in the course of the Sun that our universe can exist at all, and it is upon this harmony that the rhythmic life-process of all beings depends. Think of the annual course of the Sun.—Picture to yourselves that it is the Sun which charms forth the plants in spring time and then think how difficult it is to make the violet or some other plant flower out of due season. Seed-time and harvest, everything, even the very life of animals is dependent upon the rhythmic course of the Sun. And in the being of man himself everything that is not connected with his feelings, his desires and his passions, or with his ordinary thinking, is rhythmic and harmonious. Think of the pulse, of the process of digestion and you will feel the mighty rhythm and marvel at the wisdom implicit in the whole of Nature. Compare with this the irregularity, the chaos of man's passions and desires, especially of his ideas and thoughts. Think of the regularity of your pulse, your breathing, and then of the irregularity, the erratic nature of your thinking, feeling and willing. With what wisdom the powers of life are governed where the prevailing rhythmic forces meet the challenge of the chaotic! And how greatly the rhythms of the human body are outraged by man's passions and cravings! Those who have studied anatomy know how marvellously the heart is constructed and regulated and how wonderfully it is able to stand the strain put upon it by the drinking of tea, coffee and spirits. There is wisdom in every part of the divine, rhythmic Nature to which our forefathers looked up with such veneration and the very soul of which is the Sun with its regular, rhythmic course. And as the wise men of old looked upwards to the Sun, they said to their disciples: ‘Thou art the image of what the soul born within thee has yet to become and what it will become.’ The divine cosmic Order was revealed in all its glory to the sages of old. And again, in the Christian religion we have the ‘Gloria in excelsis.’ The meaning of ‘gloria’ is revelation, not ‘glory’ in the sense of ‘honour.’ Therefore we should not say: ‘Glory (honour) to God in the highest,’ but rather: ‘To-day is the revelation of the Divine in the heavens!’ The birth of the Redeemer makes us aware of the ‘Glory’ streaming through the wide universe. In earlier times this cosmic harmony was placed as a great Ideal before those who were to be leaders among their fellow-men. Therefore in all ages and wherever there was consciousness of these things, men spoke of Sun Heroes. In the temples and sanctuaries of the Mysteries there were seven degrees of Initiation. I will speak of them as they were known in ancient Persia. The first stage is attained when a man's ordinary feeling and thinking is raised to a higher level, where knowledge of the Spirit is attained. Such a man received the name of ‘Raven.’ It is the ‘Ravens’ who inform the Initiates in the temples what is happening in the world outside. When medieval poetic wisdom desired to depict in the person of a great Ruler an Initiate who amid the treasures of wisdom contained in the Earth must await the great moment when newly revealed depths of Christianity rejuvenate mankind—when this poetic wisdom of the Middle Ages created the figure of Barbarossa, ravens were his heralds. The Old Testament, too, speaks of the ravens in the story of Elijah. Those who had reached the second stage of Initiation were known as ‘Occultists’; at the third stage they were ‘Warriors,’ at the fourth, ‘Lions.’ At the fifth stage of Initiation a man was called by the name of his own people: he was a ‘Persian,’ ‘Indian,’ or whatever it might be. For that man alone who had reached the fifth degree of Initiation was regarded as a true representative of his people. At the sixth stage a man was a ‘Sun Hero’ or one who ‘runs in the paths of the Sun.’ And at the seventh stage he was a ‘Father.’ Why was an Initiate of the sixth degree known as a Sun Hero? To reach this level on the ladder of spiritual knowledge a man must have developed an inner life in harmony with the divine rhythms pulsating through the cosmos. His life of feeling and of thinking must have rid itself of chaos, of all disharmony, and his inner life of soul must beat in perfect accord with the rhythm of the Sun in the heavens. Such was the demand made upon men at the sixth degree of Initiation. They were looked upon as holy men, as Ideals, and it was said that if a Sun Hero were to deviate from the divine path of this spiritual harmony, it would be as great a calamity as if the Sun were to deviate from its course. A man whose spiritual life had found a path as sure as that of the Sun in the heavens was called a ‘Sun Hero,’ and there were Sun Heroes among all the peoples. Our scholars know remarkably little about these things. They are aware that Sun myths are connected with the lives of all the great Founders of religions, but what they do not know is that at the Initiation Ceremony it was the custom for the leading figures to be made into Sun Heroes. It is not really so surprising that materialistic research should rediscover these things. Sun myths have been sought for and found in connection with Buddha and with the Christ. The Sun-Soul was the great example for the way in which a man's life must be ordered. How did the ancients conceive of the soul of a Sun Hero who had reached this inner harmony? They pictured to themselves that no longer did a single individual human soul live within him, but that forces of the cosmic Soul were streaming into him. This cosmic Soul was known in Greece as Chrestos, in the sublime wisdom of the East as Budhi. When a man no longer feels himself a single being, as the bearer of an individual soul, but experiences something of the universal Soul, he has created within himself an image of the union of the Sun-Soul with the human body and he has attained something of the very greatest significance in the evolution of mankind. If we think of these men with all their nobility of soul, we shall be able to some extent to visualise the future of the human race and the relation of the future to the ideal of mankind generally. As humanity is to-day, decisions are arrived at by individuals who amid quarrelling and strife finally reach a measure of unity in majority-resolutions. When such resolutions are still regarded as the ideal, this is evidence that men have not realised what truth really is. Where in us does truth exist? Truth lives in that realm of our being where we think logically. It would be nonsense to decide by a majority vote that 2 x 2 = 4, or that 3 x 4 = 12. When man has once realised what is true, millions may come and tell him it is not so, that it is this or it is that, but he will still have his own inner certainty. We have reached this point in the realm of scientific thinking, of thinking upon which human passions, impulses and instincts no longer impinge. Wherever passions and instincts mingle with thinking, men still find themselves involved in strife and dispute, in wild confusion, for the life of instincts and impulses is itself a seething chaos. When, however, impulses, instincts and passions have been purged and transmuted into what is known as Budhi or Chrestos, when they have developed to the level at which logical, dispassionate thinking stands to-day, then the ideal of the ancient wisdom, the ideal of Christianity, the ideal of Anthroposophy will be realised. It will then be as unnecessary to vote about what is held to be good, ideal and right as it is to vote about what has been recognised as logically right or logically wrong. This ideal can stand before the soul of every human being and then he has before him the ideal of the Sun Hero, the ideal to which every aspirant at the sixth stage of Initiation has attained. The German Mystics of the Middle Ages felt this and expressed it in the word ‘Vergöttung’—deification. This word existed in all the wisdom-religions, What does it signify? Let me try to express it in the following way.—There was a time when those whom we look upon to-day as the ruling Spirits of the universe also passed through a stage at which mankind as a whole now stands -the stage of chaos. These ruling Spirits have wrestled through to the divine heights from which their forces stream through the harmonies of the universe. The regularity with which the Sun moves through the seasons, the regularity manifested in the growth of plants and in the life of animals—this regularity was once chaos. Harmony has been attained at the cost of great travail. Humanity stands to-day within the same kind of chaos but out of the chaos there will arise a harmony modelled in the likeness of the harmony in the universe. When this thought takes root in our souls, not as a theory, not as a doctrine, but as living insight, then we shall understand what Christmas signifies in the light of anthroposophical teaching. If the glory, the revelation of the divine harmony in the heavenly heights is a real experience within us, and if we know that this harmony will one day resound from our own souls, then we can also feel what will be brought about in humanity itself by this harmony: peace among men of good-will. These are the two thoughts or, better, the two feelings which arise at Christmastide. When with this great vista of the divine ordering of the world, of the revelation, the glory of the heavens, we think of the future lying before mankind, we have a premonition even now of that harmony which in the future will reign in those who know that the more abundantly the harmony of the Cosmos fills the soul, the more peace and concord there will be upon the Earth. The great ideal of Peace stands there before us when at Christmas we contemplate the course of the Sun. And when we think about the victory of the Sun over the darkness during these days of Festival there is born in us an unshakable conviction which makes our own evolving soul akin to the harmony of the cosmos—light over the darkness had always been commemorated.1 And so Christianity is in harmony with all the great world-religions. When the Christmas bells ring out, they are a reminder to us that this Festival was celebrated all over the world, wherever human beings knew what it signified, wherever they understood the great truth that the soul of man is involved in a process of development and progress on this Earth, wherever in the truest sense man strove to reach self-knowledge. We have been speaking to-day, not of an undefined, abstract feeling for Nature but of a feeling that is full of life and spirituality. And if we think of what has been said in connection with Goethe's words: “Nature! we are surrounded and embraced by thee ...” it is quite obvious that we are not speaking here in any materialistic sense, but that we see in Nature the outward expression, the countenance of the Divine Spirit of the Cosmos. Just as the physical is born out of the physical, so are the soul and the Spirit born out of the Divine Soul and the Divine Spirit. The body is connected with purely material forces and the soul and Spirit with forces akin to their own nature. The great Festivals exist as tokens that these things must be understood in their connection with the whole universe; our powers of thinking must be used in such a way that we realise our oneness with the whole universe. When this insight lives within us, the Festivals will change their present character and become living realities in our hearts and souls. They will be points of focus in the year uniting us with the all-pervading Spirit of the universe. Throughout the year we fulfil the common tasks and duties of daily life, and at these times of Festival we turn our attention to the links which bind us with eternity. And although daily life is fraught with many a struggle, at these times a feeling awakens within us that above all the strife and turmoil there is peace and harmony. Festivals are the commemoration of great Ideals, and Christmas is the birth feast of the very greatest Ideal before mankind, of that Ideal which man must strain every nerve to attain if he is to fulfil his mission. The birth festival of all that man can feel, perceive and will—such is Christmas when it is truly understood. The aim of Spiritual Science is to stimulate a true and deep understanding of the Christmas Festival. We do not want to promulgate a dogma or a doctrine, or a philosophy. Our aim is that everything we say and teach, everything that is contained in our writings, in our science, shall pass over into life itself. When in all that pertains to his daily life man applies spiritual wisdom, life will be filled with it and from all pulpits, far and wide, godlike wisdom, the living wisdom of the Spirit will resound in the words that are spoken to the ‘faithful.’ It will then be unnecessary to utter the actual words ‘Spiritual Science’ at all. When in Courts of Law the deeds of human beings are viewed with the eyes of spiritual perception, when at the bed of sickness the doctor spiritually perceives and spiritually heals, when in the schools the teacher brings spiritual knowledge to the growing child, when in the very streets men think and feel and act spiritually, then we shall have reached our Ideal, for Spiritual Science will have become common knowledge. Then too there will be a spiritual understanding of the great turning-points of the year and the everyday experiences of man will be truly linked with the spiritual world. The Immortal and the Eternal, the spiritual Sun will flood the soul with light at the great Festivals which will remind man of the divine Self within him. The divine Self, in essence like the Sun, and radiant with light, will prevail over darkness and chaos and will give to his soul a peace by which all the strife, all the war and all the discord in the world will be quelled.
|
121. The Mission of the Individual Folk-Souls: The Five Root Races of Mankind
12 Jun 1910, Oslo Translated by A. H. Parker Rudolf Steiner |
---|
Even at the time when) especially under the influence of the new planetary constellation, the cooperation of the Jupiter or Zeus forces with the universal Elohim forces took place, they felt themselves to be the people of Zeus. |
121. The Mission of the Individual Folk-Souls: The Five Root Races of Mankind
12 Jun 1910, Oslo Translated by A. H. Parker Rudolf Steiner |
---|
It is a very complicated matter, as you may well imagine, when the Spirits of the different Hierarchies have to coordinate their forces in such a way that the mission of the Earth can be fulfilled and ultimately a state of balance or equilibrium be achieved. You will understand therefore that statements such as those made in our last lecture are valid only in so far as they refer to a definite period in evolution and that the whole picture changes immediately one depicts evolution at another period. Hence in order to arrive at a fuller understanding of these complex problems a particular course of lectures cannot be isolated from the rest. I shall here draw attention to one point only and what I am about to say is to be taken as footnote or addendum to the lectures on the Spiritual Hierarchies.1 In creating the harmony or equilibrium of our Earth the whole cooperation of the Hierarchies is involved and we must envisage the Spirits of Will, the Cherubim and Seraphim, which we described yesterday as the highest Hierarchy, as raying outward from the Earth. We must envisage these Beings as originally working inward from the Universe towards the centre of the Earth. Man does not become aware of these forces in the former aspect but only in the latter aspect when they are reflected from the Earth's centre. You will only be able, therefore, to form a complete picture of the very intimate processes which here take place if you compare what was said in my last lecture with the more detailed information about the Hierarchies in the lecture-course given at Dusseldorf, in which a comprehensive picture was given of the cosmic activity of the three Hierarchies. These things are by no means so simple, and in order to make the mission of the Earth comprehensible we must approach this problem in such a way that we are prepared to accept that the Spirits of these Hierarchies are reflected in the elements of Earth existence. If you bear this in mind then you will also sense the infinite wisdom inherent in a universe of relationships. To a certain extent you will also feel that the field of knowledge must be continually enlarged, that it is unlimited, since things are so complicated that when we imagine we have grasped one point of view we immediately reject it in favour of another which throws light on the problem from a different angle. We can only advance step by step in our knowledge: Nevertheless from the indications given in the last lecture) especially at the close of that lecture, you will have a clearer understanding of the cooperation between the normal and abnormal Spirits of Form, a cooperation which ensures that the population of the Earth should not be limited to a single homogeneous species spread over the whole Earth, but that a diversity of individual races should be possible. In order to achieve that corporate humanity, which is only possible to man in the course of Earth-evolution, it would have been necessary for the normal Spirits of Form to act independently. These are the same spiritual Beings who in Genesis are called the Elohim. In the whole Universe which surrounds the Earth and together with the Earth forms a single whole, we can distinguish seven of these normal Spirits of Form. There are therefore seven Spirits of Form or seven Elohim. If we wish to form a conception of these seven Elohim with their various missions and their task of establishing Harmony or Love as the ultimate mission of the Earth, we must clearly understand that these seven Spirits of Form cooperate in such a way that what we described in Lecture Four as “man in the second third of his life” would become a reality. Thus, if all these seven Spirits of Form could work in accordance with their declared intention, then collectively they would fashion the real Ego-being. But as other spiritual Beings cooperate with them and diversify this uniform humanity, it was found necessary to make special preparations in the Cosmos. If today you wish to find in the Cosmos the sphere of activity of the normal Spirits of Form—those Beings who, as I described yesterday, shine down upon us in the light from our present Cosmos—then you must seek for them in the Sun. You must always look towards the Sun sphere for that cosmic “Lodge”, that community in the Universe, where these Spirits of Form plan to establish the earthly harmony and to fulfil the mission of Earth-evolution. Lest the activity of the abnormal Spirits of Form should provoke too great a disharmony amongst mankind, one of the Spirits had to detach Himself from the community. In reality, therefore, only six Spirits of Form or Elohim work from the Sun; one of these Spirits had to detach Himself lest the simultaneous activity of the abnormal Spirits of Form, who are really Spirits of Movement should disturb the balance or harmony. It was the Spirit who in the Bible, in Genesis, is called Jahve or Jehovah. If you wish to follow His activity in the Universe you must look for it, not in the Sun sphere, but in the Moon sphere at a particular epoch. I have touched upon this in my Occult Science—an Outline from another angle, where I have shown that the Spirits of Form withdraw with the separation of the Sun, but in the special disposition following upon the separation of the Moon, the preliminary conditions were first established for the further evolution of man. For if the Moon had remained united with the Earth the evolution of man could not have taken place. This further evolution of man has only been made possible because one of the Elohim, Jahve, accompanied the separation of the Moon—while the other six Spirits remained in the Sun—and because Jahve cooperated with His six colleagues to counteract the forces of the backward Spirits of Movement. Now the separation of the Sun was a necessity for the following reasons: after certain older Spirits of Movement who possessed more potent forces than the Spirits of Form—for they stand higher in the rank of the Hierarchies—had decided to remain behind, the normal Spirits of Form were obliged to modify their activity by detaching one of their members, otherwise they would not have been able to establish the balance or harmony necessary for further evolution. If we wish to have a clear idea of the activities of these normal Spirits of Form it is best to think of them as streaming down to us in the sunlight. If, however, we wish to understand how the abnormal Spirits of Form cooperate with the normal Spirits of Form who are centred in the Sun (for Jahve withdrew towards the Moon sphere solely for the purpose of establishing the equilibrium), then we must imagine that a certain Sun-force, which streams towards us in the normal Spirits of Form is modified by the force that rays down to us from the abnormal Spirits of Form who are really Spirits of Movement. These have their centre in the other five planets, in Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus and Mercury, speaking in terms of the seven heavenly bodies of ancient astronomy. When you look out into the Cosmos you have now a picture of the distribution of the normal and abnormal Spirits of Form. Six of the normal Spirits of Form are centred in the Sun and one of them, Jahve or Jehovah, from the sphere of the Moon acts as a counterpoise by virtue of this function as Regent and Guide of that sphere. The activities of these Spirits of Form are influenced by the activities proceeding from Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus and Mercury. The forces of the abnormal Spirits stream down upon the Earth are arrested by the Earth and ray outward again from the Earth-centre as was described at the close of the last lecture. Thus if the Elohim or normal Spirits of Form, operating from the Sun, are active in a particular region of the Earth's surface, then only the normal ‘I’, that which determines man's normal being, his general make-up, would come into existence in that particular region. Now the forces of Mercury, for example, mingle with these forces of the normal Spirits of Form which, but for the state of equilibrium, would “dance” upon the surface of the Earth. Hence in that which here manifests in the potent forces of the Spirits of Form, there dance and vibrate not only the normal forces but also that which intermingles with the normal forces of the Elohim or Spirits of Form, namely that which emanates from the abnormal Spirits of Form who are centred in the several planets. Thus we see that through these abnormal Spirits of Form there are five potential centres of influence where these reflected planetary forces are concentrated and produce in effect what we know as the five Root Races of the Earth. Let us now look more closely into the centre which, in Lecture Four, we situated in the interior of Africa. If we state that the Negro race was born of the cooperation between the normal Spirits of Form and the abnormal Spirits of Form centred in Mercury) then from an occult standpoint we are perfectly correct in describing the Negro race as the “Mercury race”. Let us now continue along the line joining the centres or focal points from which the individual races spread outward. We then come to Asia, which is the seat of the “Venus race” or the Malayan race. We then move northward across the wide expanse of Asia and we find the Mongolian race, which is formed by the Mars forces. Then we cross over into Europe and find the Europeans who in their original racial character are “Jupiter men”. If we cross the ocean to America which is the centre where civilizations or races die, we find there dark “Saturn's race”, the original Red Indian race. The American Indian race is the “Saturn race”. Thus if you look into the matter more closely from an occult standpoint you will become aware of the five centres where the planetary forces are concentrated and are manifested in the external world. With a progressively more definite and concrete conception of this racial distribution you will develop an inner understanding of the racial characteristics peculiar to the peoples spread over the Earth, an understanding of this unique cooperation of the normal and abnormal Spirits of Form. We have thus sketched the picture, as we are able to capture it at a definite moment in time. But what I have said about the different centres on the Earth is again only valid for a specific epoch of evolution. It is valid for the epoch when, at a definite moment of time in the old Atlantean evolution, the peoples began to migrate from a centre in Atlantis and sought the particular centre where they could receive the: training appropriate to their race. Hence in my book Occult Science, I pointed out that in old Atlantis specific Mystery Centres called the Atlantean Oracles were responsible for directing this distribution of peoples over the Earth, so that in effect that state of balance or equilibrium could be achieved which led to the proper distribution of the races. In one such Mystery Oracle the truths of which we are now speaking were always investigated and originally man took his direction entirely from them. In this manner the events on Earth were determined in accordance with these spiritual centres. The wave of peoples who swept across Africa and crystallized into the Ethiopian race is an expression of an impulse from the Mercury Oracle in which one could clearly observe the cooperation of the normal Spirits of Form (the six Elohim and Jahve or Jehovah) and also the participation of the abnormal Spirits of Form working from the Mercury Centre. The Centre of equilibrium on Earth was selected in accordance with the right astrological conjunction of planetary forces at the various centres and the point of radiation for the race in question was determined thereby. The formation of the other races was determined in a similar way. In accordance with these determining factors the grand design is drawn up, charting the cosmic influences in relation to peoples, families, etc. It is an image of cosmic activity and reflects the planetary forces which stream down into the Earth, ray outwards from the Earth and determine man's destiny. Now how do we look upon a member of the Ethiopian race, of the Mercury race? We see him as one who was originally chosen, who was predestined by the Elohim to express the quintessence of the all-human. But from the Mercury Centre the potent influences of the abnormal Spirits of Form intervened and modified the form of man to such an extent that the Ethiopian race arose. And such was the case with each individual race. The migrations of the peoples were specifically directed from the original centre; this is indicated by the line linking the focal points or centres in my diagram a few days ago. You must therefore imagine the Spirits of Form radiating from a centre, which, we must assume, existed at a definite moment of time in old Atlantis. These Spirits of Form rayed down into the Atlantean continent and fashioned it in such a way that the human souls were brought under the dominion of the corresponding abnormal Spirits of Form. In this way the broad foundations of the races were laid, and when man looks up into the infinite expanse of the Macrocosm he must seek there the forces out of which he was built up. He is fashioned by their spiritual rays reflected from the Earth-centre. And when he looks up to the normal Spirits of Form, the Elohim, he is looking up to that which actually makes him into man. When he looks up to the forces concentrated in the individual planetary Spirits (with the exception of the Sun and Moon) he perceives the forces which determine his membership of a particular race. Now how do these Race Spirits work in and upon man? They work in a very unique way; they permeate his vital energies, they penetrate even down into his physical body. Now you know that the four fundamental members of man find their impress and are reflected in corresponding parts of the physical body: the ‘I’ finds its impress in the blood, the astral body in the nervous system, the etheric or life-body in the glandular system. Only the physical body is self-sufficient; it is a reflection of its own inner being which for the man of the present is subject to its own fixed laws. Now those spiritual Beings who are stirring in man and determine his racial character cannot at first work directly into his higher vehicles. They are active first of all in these reflections of the higher vehicles in the physical body. They cannot as yet enter directly into the physical body, but they are active in the three other members, in the blood which is the reflection of the ‘I’; in the nervous system, the reflection of the astral body; and in the glandular system which is the reflection of the etheric body. The Race Spirits, the abnormal Spirits of Form, are active in these three systems, which are part of man's organic system, but are reflections of the higher vehicles. Thus the physical body of man is determined from within. These various spiritual Beings invade those members of the physical body, which are the preliminary drafts, the suggestions of the higher vehicles. Now where, for instance, does Mercury make his influence felt? Under Mercury, I include all the abnormal Spirits of Form to be found in Mercury. He makes his influence felt by cooperating with others, especially in the glandular system. He is active in the glandular (or lymphatic) system where are manifested the forces born of that preponderance of the Mercury forces which are present in the Ethiopian race. Everything which gives the Ethiopian race its distinctive character stems from the ferment of the Mercury forces in the glandular system of this people. What transforms the undifferentiated universal human from into the distinctive Ethiopian type with his black pigmentation and woolly or frizzy hair is the consequence of their activity. If you now move over to Asia you will find there likewise the planetary forces of Venus, an abnormal development of the Spirits of Form. By transferring their point of attack principally to what we call the impress of the astral body, these Venus forces work in the nervous system. They work upon the nervous system however in a peculiar way, not directly as Venus spirits. For the nervous system can be worked upon indirectly in two ways. One way is through the respiration. By working especially upon the respiration, these activities of the Venus Spirits are localized in the respiratory and nervous system and give it a definite form. In this indirect way the abnormal Spirits of Form whom we may call Venus Beings work through the respiratory and nervous system in the Malayan race, in the yellowish-brown races found in Southern Asia and in the direction of the Malay Archipelago. Just as the glandular type is found distributed over Ethiopia, so in these regions is found the type of man in whom the abnormal Spirits of Form work upon the nervous system indirectly through the respiratory system. In the nervous system is prepared that which, with special modifications, produces the more or less yellow skinned racial types. The transformation wrought in these races manifests itself more in that part of the nervous system covered by the term ‘solar plexus’—not in the higher or central nervous system therefore, but in that mysterious part of the nervous system which runs in two cords parallel with the spinal medulla and branches out in various directions to form a network. This part of the nervous system therefore which from our point of view is not yet associated with higher mental activity, is worked upon indirectly through the respiratory system. The unconscious organism is deeply stirred by these Venus forces which work in these racial types. Let us now move northward to the wide Mongolian plains where are largely concentrated those Spirits of Form who work indirectly through the forces of the blood. In this geographical area is prepared in the forces of the blood that which brings about a modification of the human species and determines the basic character of the race. There is however a very peculiar feature attaching to the Mongolian race; the Mars Spirits enter into the blood. But they work in the blood in a specific manner. They are able to counteract the influence of the six Elohim who are centred in the Sun. In the Mongolian race, therefore, they work in opposition to these six Elohim. At the same time they actively oppose the influence of Jahve or Jehovah who has withdrawn His field of action from that of the six Elohim. But apart from this interaction of the Mars Spirits with the six Elohim and Jahve which produces the Mongolian race there is another factor of paramount importance which must be taken into consideration. Just as in the one case, the Mars Spirits in opposition to the six Elohim from the Sun and Jahve from the Moon create the Mongolian race, so in another case, we must assume that the Jahve forces from the Moon sphere meet and cooperate with the Mars Spirits and thus a special kind of modification arises, namely, the Semitic race. Here is the occult explanation for the origin of the Semites. The Semitic people are an example of a modification of collective humanity. Jahve or Jehovah shuts Himself off from the other Elohim and invests this people with a special character by cooperating with the Mars Spirits, in order to bring about a special modification of his people. You will now understand the peculiar character of the Semitic people and its mission. In a profound occult sense the Biblical writer was able to claim that Jahve or Jehovah had made this people his own. If you add to this the fact that Jahve cooperated with the Mars Spirits who worked principally in the blood, you will understand why racial continuity through the blood-stream was of particular importance to the Semitic-Hebrew people and why Jahve describes Himself as the God who is present in the blood of the generations, in the blood of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. When he declared himself to be the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, He proclaimed that He was present in the blood stream of the Patriarchs. Whatsoever works in the blood, whatsoever must be determined through the blood—the cooperation with the Mars Spirits—that is one of the mysteries, which give us a deep insight into the wise guidance of all mankind. The blood of mankind is thus subject to a twofold influence; two races emerge, the Mongolian race and the Semitic race. This points to the existence of an important polarity in mankind and we must emphasize the immense importance of this polarity if we wish to plumb the depths of the Folk Souls. We must now turn our attention to the Western centre and trace the way in which dynamic forces of the Spirits and Beings who are centred in Jupiter operate in man. These elect to work directly upon the nervous system via the outer life of the senses. This is the one way. In the other, the planetary forces work into the sympathetic nervous system, entering indirectly into the solar plexus through the respiratory system. Now the Jupiter forces work indirectly through the sense-impressions and from there radiate to those parts of the central nervous system which are situated in the brain and spinal cord. Here is the seat of those forces which determine the particular racial character of those races belonging to the Jupiter humanity. This applies more or less to the Aryans, to the peoples of Asia Minor and Europe whom we regard as members of the Caucasian race. In these peoples the modification of the generic character which stems from the abnormal Spirits of Form is accounted for by the influence upon the senses of the abnormal Spirits whom we may describe as Jupiter Spirits. The Caucasians therefore are determined through the senses. Now you will also understand why a people like the Greeks who were consciously under the special influence of Jupiter or Zeus and who felt themselves to be a focal point for the Zeus influence, were predominantly determined by what flows into the nervous system via the senses. The Greeks, of course, were also influenced by the forces of the Elohim, which stream in from the Sun. But the Greeks dedicated everything that acts upon the senses to the service of Jupiter or Zeus and so achieved greatness. To them all external forms, all forms of external life were imbued with deeper meaning. They perceived the spiritual in the physical and hence became the chief exponents of sculpture and architectonic forms. We have here indicated the very special mission of the Greek people who are so preeminently the people of Jupiter or Zeus. Even at the time when) especially under the influence of the new planetary constellation, the cooperation of the Jupiter or Zeus forces with the universal Elohim forces took place, they felt themselves to be the people of Zeus. All the peoples of South-West Asia, and especially the European peoples are, on the whole, modifications of this Jupiter influence and you can well imagine that as man has many senses, many modifications are possible and that in the formation of the individual peoples within this root race, peoples who were formed by the influence of the senses upon the nervous system, one or other of the senses may predominate. Consequently the various peoples may assume the most diverse forms. According as the eye or the ear or one of the other senses predominates, so will the different peoples respond in this or that way to the particular national tendency within the racial character. In consequence of this they are faced with quite specific tasks. The particular task of the Caucasian race is to find the way to the spirit through the senses, for this race is orientated chiefly towards the sense-world. Here is disclosed something that introduces us to the deeper secrets of occultism; it shows how, in those peoples who are subject to the Venus forces, the initial steps in development, even in occult development, must be concentrated on the respiratory system. Amongst the peoples living more in the Western Hemisphere, on the other hand, the initial steps must start from an enrichment and a spiritualisation of the life of the senses. This is experienced by those peoples inhabiting countries more towards the West in their stages of higher cognition, in Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition, in so far as the Jupiter Spirit originally modified the character. Hence these two geographical centres were always present in human evolution; the one presided over by the Spirits of Venus, the other by those of Jupiter. The Jupiter Spirits in particular were perceived in those Mysteries in which—as those of you will know who attended my lecture-course in Munich last year2—the three Individualities ultimately came together, the three spiritual Beings, Buddha, Zarathustra or Zarathas in his later incarnation, and that great leader of humanity, Skythianos. This is the “Council” or spiritual conference which, under the guidance of One still greater, set itself the task of investigating the mysterious forces which must be developed for the evolution of humanity, forces which originated from that centre initially connected with the Jupiter forces and which was pre-ordained in the chart of the cultural centres already mentioned. Finally, the abnormal Spirits of Form who have their centre in Saturn work indirectly via all the other systems into the glandular system. In the Saturn race, therefore, in everything to which we must ascribe the Saturn character, we must expect to find the combination of the forces leading to the twilight of mankind, forces which set the seal upon its development and sow the seeds of its ultimate decline. This action and its effect upon the glandular system can be seen in the American Indian race and was the cause of its ultimate extinction. The Saturn influence finally works via all the other systems into the glandular system which secretes the hardest parts of man. This slow decline is characterized by a kind of ossification which is clearly reflected in the external form. If you look at the pictures of the old American Indians the process of ossification described above is evident in the decline of this race. In a race such as this everything pertaining to the forces of the Saturn evolution has become realized in a special manner; then Saturn withdrew into itself, abandoned man to his bony system and thus hastened his decline. One feels something of this truly occult activity if one observes how, in the nineteenth century, a representative of these old American Indians still preserves a memory of that great Atlantean civilization which could not adapt itself to later evolution. There exists a description of a beautiful scene in which a chieftain of this moribund Red Indian race confronts a European colonist. Imagine the conflicting emotions when two such men confront each other, the one representing those who came from Europe, and the other those who, in the earliest ages, at the time of the separation of the races, moved Westward. The Red Indian brought over to the West all that was great in the Atlantean culture. What the Red Indian valued most highly was that he was still able dimly to sense something of the former greatness and majesty of a period which existed in the old Atlantean epoch when the separation of the races had hardly begun, when man could look up to the Sun and perceive the Spirits of Form through a sea of mist. Through an ocean of mist the Atlantean was clairvoyantly aware of the seven Spirits of Form acting in concert. And this cooperative activity was called by the Atlanteans the Great Spirit who revealed himself to man in ancient Atlantis. The Atlantean had not assimilated all that the Venus, Mercury, Mars and Jupiter Spirits brought about in the East, to whom we owe all the civilizations which reached their zenith in Europe in the middle of the nineteenth century. The descendant of the brown race did not participate in this development. He held firm to the Great Spirit of the primeval past. He became aware of achievements of the Europeans (who, in a remote past, had also known the Great Spirit) when a piece of paper was laid before him on which were many little symbols, letters, of which he understood nothing. All that was alien to him, for in his soul still dwelt the Great Spirit. The speech he made has been preserved to us and it is noteworthy because it provides evidence of what we have already indicated. It runs somewhat as follows: “Here in the soil, trampled beneath the feet of the conquerors the bones of my brothers lie buried. Why are the feet of our conquerors allowed to desecrate the graves of my brothers? Because they are in possession of that which makes the White Man great. But there is something else which makes the Brown Man great; it is the Great Spirit who speaks to him in the soughing of the wind, in the murmuring of the forest, in the surging of the waves, in the purling of the brook, in thunder and in lightning! That is the Spirit who to us speaks truth. Yes, from the lips of the Great Spirit comes truth. But your spirits here on paper and who express what to you is great, they do not speak the truth.” Thus spoke the Indian chieftain from his point of view. “Redskin is servant of the Great Spirit; Paleface is servant of the spirits who, in black shapes resembling pygmy beings”—he was referring to the letters—“dance on the paper; they do not speak the truth”. This dialogue of historic importance was exchanged between the conqueror and the last of the great chieftains of the Red Indians. Here we have an example of the Saturn forces and their activity and of what follows from the cooperation between Saturn and other Spirits at such a moment as this when two contrasting civilizations meet. Thus we have seen how here on Earth the birth of universal humanity was prepared by the Elohim or the normal Spirits of Form, how then the five principal races of human evolution detach themselves from the collective body of mankind, from the teaming mass of humanity, and how these five races are related to the guiding Spirits in the Hierarchy of the abnormal Spirits of Form, races whom we must name after the five planets, whereas the normal Spirits of Form are centred in the Sun and in the Moon. From here we shall pass on to something which will be easier to understand, because we shall be able to relate it to something familiar to us, namely, to tribes and peoples.
|
108. A Chapter of Occult History
16 Dec 1908, Nuremberg Translated by Dorothy S. Osmond Rudolf Steiner |
---|
They looked up to the stars and saw in their constellations and movements a script of the Gods. They saw revelations of divine-spiritual Beings in physical manifestation. |
108. A Chapter of Occult History
16 Dec 1908, Nuremberg Translated by Dorothy S. Osmond Rudolf Steiner |
---|
Today we shall be concerned with a chapter of Anthroposophy which links on to many things we were able to study in the last Lecture-Course here but in a certain respect is quite independent.1 Again today we shall be considering matters for those who are more advanced—I do not mean advanced in respect of intellect or knowledge, but in respect of the attitude of soul, the feelings, that are necessary for the assimilation of higher truths which so often seem paradoxical, weird and fantastic to the materialistic mind—truths which must be accepted, not as if they were everyday matters, but as something that is not only possible, but reality. We shall turn our attention to a certain chapter of occult history. Everybody knows what external history means; everybody knows that history presents the successive happenings and facts of the outer physical world as far as they can be followed with the help of documents, original manuscripts and records, traditions, and so forth. But in Anthroposophy, by means of those spiritual records that are accessible to us, we go still farther back, even in this external history, to the time of the great Atlantean Flood. We observe the successive culture-epochs following it, but we go even farther back into the distant past, to times preceding this great Flood which has been preserved as tradition in the legends of different peoples. All this is history, investigated, it is true, by occult means, but in a certain sense it is still an external, physical—more or less physical—history of facts and events. But there is also an occult history, and you will understand what this means if you think of the following. Before entering into the bodies of our present civilisation, all your souls lived in bodies of the old Indian, Persian, Egypto-Chaldean, Greco-Roman epochs, and so forth—leaving aside still earlier times. When, through birth, these souls entered into existence on the physical plane they saw and experienced what can be experienced on this plane. These souls beheld the creations of the old Indian culture, the great pyramids built by the Egyptians, the Greek temples, and so on. From this we can picture the flow of events through which man passes in the course of history on the outer physical plane during life between birth and death. The question may now be asked : What, then, is happening when, through the Gate of Death, the soul passes into its life between death and a new birth? The souls now incarnated passed through death in ancient India, ancient Persia, and so on. Have conditions in the life between death and rebirth always been the same through the ages? Is there anything comparable with ‘history’ in that life? Were the experiences different when souls passed through the Gate of Death in the times of ancient India or ancient Persia, and are they again different in our present age? Is there in that life anything like a successive course of happenings? When we speak of the experiences of the periods spent in Kama-Loca and in Devachan until the time of a new incarnation, we describe them as they are today. Many people may imagine that these experiences are similar in all epochs, but this is not so. For just as when souls have passed through the Gate of Birth they have different experiences in the different epochs, so there is also a ‘history’ of what happens between death and rebirth. These happenings in our present age are rightly described as we describe them, but they have not been the same in all the ages. Today we shall consider, briefly, something of the history of that other side of existence, particularly during Post-Atlantean epochs. For this purpose we do well to think, to begin with, of the old Atlantean epoch. In this Atlantean epoch, life was very different from what it came to be later on. When in the night the soul of the old Atlantean had gone out of the physical and etheric bodies and was living in the spiritual worlds, it was not enveloped in darkness as is the case today. During the night-consciousness the soul was in divine-spiritual worlds—divine-Spiritual Beings were its companions. The alternation between day and night was quite different in the old Atlantean epoch. When the Atlantean awoke in the morning, that is to say, when his astral body and Ego came down again into the physical and etheric bodies, then, in the earlier periods of Atlantis, man did not see external objects with sharp outlines as he does today, but the objects were hazy—as when we go out at night in a thick November fog the lamps seem to be surrounded by an aura instead of emitting clear light. To the early Atlantean, every object on the physical plane was indistinct and indefinite, and only gradually assumed sharp contours in the day-consciousness. When, at night, he rose in his astral body and Ego out of the physical and etheric bodies, he was not in a realm of unconsciousness, but he had definite, even if hazy, experiences of the divine-spiritual worlds. And the figures preserved as the Gods, the names and ideas of Gods such as Wotan, Baldur, Zeus, Apollo, Thor—are not figures of fantasy but Beings who were actually experienced by man in the times of old Atlantis. Then came the great Flood. The less advanced Atlanteans went from West to East, settling in the lands of Europe. The most advanced of all went towards Asia and founded in Central Asia the great colony of the Manu. The Manu was the lofty Being who was the leader of this handful of the most advanced Atlanteans who went with him to Central Asia and from there called the different cultures to life. It must here be borne in mind that in Asia and Africa, as the result of earlier and later migrations, and through other peoples who were descendants of still earlier epochs, the countries were inhabited, and these pupils of the Manu went out in various directions in order to spread new streams of culture. The first mission went from Central Asia to India. The Manu sent his first pupils to India; he himself, for certain reasons, withdrew into the background. The first pupils of the Manu became the teachers and leaders of the first Post-Atlantean culture—that of the ancient Indian peoples. The first form of Post-Atlantean culture therefore arose under the influence of these Teachers—the holy Rishis. We already know the basic character of this culture. The pupils of the Rishis had a kind of memory of ancient times, of how in Atlantis they themselves had been companions of the Gods. Their real homeland then had been in the spiritual world. Now they were in the physical world. And so in ancient India men had an intense longing for their primeval, spiritual homeland. They felt that they were strangers in the physical world. For them this world was illusion, maya, merely an external expression of the Spiritual. Hence their longing for the Spiritual and their view that the physical world was illusion, deception, maya. They had as yet no love for the physical world; they still longed for the spiritual world. They saw the stars, the rivers, the mountains, but felt no interest in any of these things. What happened between birth and death was regarded as illusion, as maya, for men knew that they lived in their real homeland between death and rebirth. Such was the fundamental mood of the old Indians. But ever and again they received information and tidings of the spiritual worlds through the holy Rishis, who were the pupils of the great Manu. It is a good thing to try to form definite ideas of the nature of these great Indian Teachers. A feeling of reverent awe arises in those who can envisage in some small measure what took place spiritually between the Rishis and their pupils in Northern India at this starting-point of Post-Atlantean humanity. Without Spiritual Science it is hardly possible for anyone today, when humanity has descended so deeply into the physical plane and has adopted such a materialistic way of thinking, to form a true idea of the kind of knowledge that was brought by the Manu from the West to the East as a heritage of the Atlantean age. For if the Book with the Twelve Chapters, the Book in which the Manu had preserved the ancient traditions of the earth, in which was written down what could be made known of the laws and conditions prevailing in ancient times when humanity lived in the bosom of the Gods—if that Book could be laid before men today it would be utterly incomprehensible to them. Nevertheless it contained the instructions that were given by the Manu to his most intimate pupils and through which the seven holy Rishis prepared themselves for their mission. Some idea of what the holy Rishis were like can be formed in the following way.—Anyone who saw them in life would have seen utterly simple men. And such indeed they were, for a great part of their life. But there were times when the Rishis were anything but ordinary men. They were not learned in the modern sense, but at such times they were the mouthpiece and instrument of higher spiritual Beings. Higher spiritual Beings ensouled the Rishis and then, when they spoke, they were not giving utterance to what they knew, but to the speech of the Spirit who had entered into them, right down into the physical body. Thus the Seven Planetary Regents themselves were present during this first epoch of Post-Atlantean civilisation. The Seven Planetary Spirits of the universe spoke through the mouths of the holy Rishis, who were merely their instruments. And the words spoken had stupendous power; they were magical words, not merely teachings but commands for what men were to do. Revelations from the cosmos itself were spoken forth by the seven holy Rishis. The later Vedic literature is no more than a faint echo of the wisdom that streamed to humanity out of the cosmos itself through the holy Rishis. This was the first Post-Atlantean manifestation and revelation of the Divine. It was only at certain times that the Rishis were inspired by the Planetary Spirits and then they could impart great and mighty things to men. Far greater things were spoken through them to humanity between birth and death in this first Post-Atlantean epoch than in the other world, for all the secrets to which men could no longer look up from the physical world could be made known to them by the Rishis. Initiates are able to work and teach not only in the physical world, but in alternating states of consciousness they are able, while still maintaining connection with the physical body, to pass over into the spiritual world and to become the teachers of the souls living between death and rebirth. The great teachers give instruction here, in physical life, and also in the life between death and rebirth. The Rishis too were teachers of man in the world beyond death. There they could, it is true, proclaim the same great spiritual truths of which they spoke in the physical world, but they could say nothing of particular value to the Dead about the other side of existence, i.e. about the physical world. There was nothing in this physical world that could be of value for the life after death. The ancient Indian yearned for the life between death and rebirth; he was happy there, and had no inclination whatever for physical life. And so when the ancient Indian passed into the other world, he was not merely a knower in some degree, he was not only able to see, up to a certain level, what was happen ing there, but he was also able to act with skill—for man has to act in the other world too. The souls of the ancient Indians were far better fitted to work in that world than in the physical world. The instruments available in the physical world at that time were simple and primitive, and men were not skilled on the physical plane. But as souls in that other world they were able to work with skill that was a heritage from an earlier epoch. Men's life between death and rebirth was more intense, more active, than it was in the physical world. The spiritual world afforded them deep happiness; everything was light and clear after death. World-history continued its course and the epoch of ancient Persian culture approached. Man had progressed, inasmuch as he now began to love the physical plane; he wanted to work on the physical plane and felt that his spiritual forces should be applied to the cultivation of the earth. The culture inspired by the Manu had grown dearer to the ancient Persians. Zarathustra now became their great Teacher. The teachings that had flowed from the inspirations of the Rishis were now, in the second Post-Atlantean epoch, transmitted through Zarathustra. The task of this great Teacher was to create a counterweight to existing conditions. Man must come to love the physical plane, the physical earth, to become more conscious of it, to discover the means of promoting culture, to live more and more intensely on the physical plane, not merely regarding it as illusion, maya, but as a revelation of the Divine Powers. Zarathustra said to the people : In the material world there is something that is opposed to the Spiritual; the power of Evil is mingled with matter. But if you unite yourselves with the beings who are servants of the good Spirit, then, in union with them, you will overcome the Evil that is mingled with matter.—There was inevitably the danger, the first glimmering of the danger, that connection with the Spiritual might be lost. Hence as well as narrating the truths of the spiritual world, it was the special task of the teachers to emphasise to the people that the Spiritual reveals itself in the material; and those who had fallen prey to matter owing to an exaggerated belief in it, had to be brought back again to belief in the Spiritual, to the belief that God reveals himself in matter.—That was what Zarathustra had to proclaim, and he spoke with mighty power. In terms of modern language it is no longer possible to convey any adequate idea of the words of fire with which he proclaimed what he himself was still able to behold, because he was the successor of the pupils of the Manu. For example, he still saw in the Sun not merely the external, physical phenomenon, but the spiritual: Beings whose abode is the Sun, for whom the physical Sun is merely their bodily vehicle, and he called these spiritual Beings in their totality: Ahura Mazdao, the great Sun-, Aura-, Ahura Mazdao, or Ormtizd. From this source came the inspiration for all the teachings he was to inculcate into the second Post-Atlantean culture-epoch which was already in danger of falling prey to the attacks of Ahriman. In mighty words Zarathustra spoke to humanity somewhat as follows. I will speak ‘Give heed and hear me, ye who from near and far long for this. Mark well my words! For no longer may the false teacher corrupt the world, he, the Evil One, whose mouth has proclaimed wrong beliefs. I speak of what is greatest in the world, of what He, the Mighty One, has revealed to me. Whoever does not follow my words, as I mean them, woe will befall him at the end of days.’ In words of power such as these, it was proclaimed that He, the all-pervading Spirit, is revealed in what is external, and that the one who believed he could mislead humanity by making men believe that the material alone has reality, must not conquer. And Zarathustra announced that when the time was fulfilled, One would come in human form as the embodiment of all the Powers working and weaving through the world, One Whose coming could at that time be only a prophecy.—Zarathustra called Him by the name of Saoschra. He, the Power Who resides in the Sun, Who could be seen at that time only through external veils—He would come one day in human form. Zarathustra proclaimed the Christ Who was to come in the future. Zarathustra had two pupils whom he did not instruct for the purpose of sending them out to teach the Persians. They were pupils such as are always to be found with the great Initiates and who prepare in quietude for their missions, refraining, to begin with, from going out into the world to teach. These two pupils, in later incarnations, were : Hermes, the great Teacher of the Egyptians, and Moses. The wisdom outpoured in the second Post-Atlantean epoch had necessarily to take the form it did, because humanity had advanced a stage and men had a greater love for the physical plane. But because this was so, experiences between death and rebirth were darkened. Men could still see in the spiritual world, but no longer with the clarity of vision that prevailed in the old Indian epoch. When the souls from Persian bodies passed into Devachan, their experiences were less vivid, less intense, and the more skilful they became in their work on the physical plane, the less skilful were they in their actions in the spiritual world. In the outer world there is an ascending line of progress; in the world after death, however, there is a decline. When the Initiates passed into that other world—it was, of course, a spiritual journey and the Initiates remained united with the physical body—when they passed into that world to be with human souls living between death and rebirth, they could say much about the momentous things which men had formerly seen there but which now were darkened. They could give teachings concerning the higher spiritual realities that had gradually faded from man's vision between death and rebirth, but they could impart nothing as yet about happenings in the physical world. Nor would this have been of any great significance for the other world. If the Initiates had related the doings of men (in the physical world) this would have had no inspiring effect in the life between death and rebirth. To tell of any happenings on the physical plane would have had no value for that other world. Then came the Egyptian epoch. Men now had an even greater love for the physical plane and had become still more skilful there. They no longer regarded it as maya or illusion. They looked up to the stars and saw in their constellations and movements a script of the Gods. They saw revelations of divine-spiritual Beings in physical manifestation. And they worked upon the earth with knowledge acquired through their human forces.—We need think only of how the Egyptians cultivated the soil.—Man had now brought his spiritual forces from the spiritual into the physical, and the link between these spiritual forces and the physical world became steadily firmer. The first great Teacher of the Egyptians was Hermes, in his new incarnation. We will try to form some idea of the kind of teachings he gave. For this purpose it will be especially helpful to think about that aspect of the figure of Osiris which can be of interest to us today.—Osiris was the central God of Egypt, the God who was honoured above all other Gods. The Egyptian Gods were worshipped under many names by the people, priests and initiates. The legend of Osiris is known to you. Osiris ruled over mankind. Then his brother Typhon laid him, by cunning, in a casket which he threw into the sea. Isis, the sorrowing spouse, sought for and found the corpse but could not bring Osiris back again into this world. From the other world a ray from Osiris fell upon Isis who then gave birth to Horus, the successor of Osiris on the earth. Osiris remained in the other world. The Egyptians were told: Osiris is a Being who stands close to man. He is one of the last Beings with whom men were in communion when they lived consciously in the spiritual world. Men have descended into the physical world in order that they may develop further here, and then they ascend again, enriched by the experiences gained in the physical world. Osiris is one of those Beings who no longer needed to descend to the physical world, because they had already reached such a height that this was not necessary for them. They had moved to a higher level and were not created to dwell in a physical body—the casket. Such Beings can have only a fleeting contact with the physical world. Osiris can be found only when man passes over into the other life. He is the last Figure you can still experience—so said the Initiates to the Egyptians—if you make yourselves worthy, if you follow the commandments. Then, after death, when you are judged, you will be together with Osiris; you will feel yourselves to be members of Osiris. Those who aspired to be united with Osiris had therefore to be referred to the life after death. But as the experiences accessible after death had now become still less intense, even when men were united with Osiris they were only able to experience faintly and weakly that which constituted their highest bliss—the union with Osiris. But through the belief implanted in them by the priests, they knew and firmly hoped that they would indeed be united with Osiris, and in solemn moments after death they felt themselves as members of the Osiris-soul. This consciousness of belonging to Osiris gradually faded away. While culture was progressing to higher stages on the physical plane, a decline was taking place in the spiritual world between death and rebirth. Man's vision of the world of Devachan became steadily fainter. And when the Initiates came over into that world, they still could not tell of happenings in the physical world that would have had any special significance for that other world. What happened in the spiritual world was entirely the result of its own prevailing conditions. Happenings in the physical world could be of little interest to the souls of the Dead. What man could do in the physical world was a preparation for the Osiris-experience, but it was a preparation for something that could be experienced only in the deepest spiritual depths of yonder world. Then came the Greco-Roman age, the fourth Post-Atlantean culture-epoch. The marriage between the human spirit and external matter became closer, more intimate still, and the splendour of Greek culture stems from this marriage between the spiritual capacities of men and external physical life. When we have before us a Greek temple with its wonderful forms—even in aftermath as at Paestum in Southern Italy—we Can see what the human spirit has achieved in the conquest of external matter. In the lines and distribution of forces in the Greek temple, architecture has reached its zenith. The reason why a Greek temple is such a wonder-work of architecture and of art is because everything in it is the expression of the Spiritual. That is why it is so inspiring to contemplate the harmony presented in a Greek temple. One peculiarity that is discovered by clairvoyant consciousness in connection with a Greek temple must here be made known.—Let us suppose that clairvoyant consciousness has before it the last echoes of a Greek temple built in the Doric style as are the temples at Paestum, and is able to feel the aftermath of what the Greeks felt on the physical plane; let us assume that clairvoyant consciousness, while beholding the physical form of such a creation, experiences all the rapture and enchantment that it is still possible to experience at the sight. Then clairvoyant consciousness will make a certain discovery. When it frees itself from the body and, without using the physical organs, sees in the spiritual world, then the Greek temple, with all its splendour, has vanished. What was so perfect, so great and glorious in the physical world, cannot be carried over into the spiritual world—not even for modern clairvoyant consciousness. At the place in space where the glorious temple stood, there is nothing corresponding with it in the spiritual world. It was so in the case of all the great masterpieces of that wonderful Greco-Latin epoch, and in another connection too. This was the same epoch when, in Rome, man's consciousness of personality came to its strongest expression in the physical world. The Roman felt himself first and foremost as a personal citizen of the earth, firmly rooted on, this earth. To the same degree to which man felt himself standing firmly on the earth, he felt weak between death and rebirth, feeble and ineffectual in that other world. Life between death and rebirth had faded in intensity even more than before. Above all, what was experienced in its splendour in the physical world could not be carried into yonder world. It is no mere legend passed on from the Greek epoch, that one of the great Heroes, when visited in the nether world of the Shades by an Initiate, said: ‘Better it is to be a beggar in the upper world than a king in the realm of the Shades’—because man felt shadowy and empty between death and rebirth, and longed for the life between birth and death with its beauty and its grandeur. Life had surrendered itself to the most perfect and complete marriage between the human spirit and external form, and at the cost of this marriage, life between death and rebirth had fallen into decline. In this epoch fell the Event for which preparation had been made by that other Initiate who had been Zarathustra's pupil—namely, Moses. Moses was chosen to proclaim—to begin with in the only form in which this was possible—a God Who could also reveal Himself in the physical world, Who would be actually present in the physical world. Naturally, this revelation was to the effect that the one and only true image of God Who weaves through the world could not, at the time the revelation was given, be apprehended by the senses. And when, at the starting-point of his mission, the ‘EJE ASCHER EJE’ (I am the I am) was proclaimed through Moses, this was the first announcement of the God Who henceforward would not be found only in the other world but Who had passed into this world and was to be experienced here. The Jahve-Being was proclaimed through this second pupil of Zarathustra, and thereby preparation was made for the coming of Christ, for the Mystery of Golgotha. You know, to some extent, what the Mystery of Golgotha signifies for the physical plane: it is actual proof that life in the spirit is victorious over death. This victory was achieved through the fact that the One Who had been proclaimed by the prophets, the One Who was there at the creation of all the kingdoms of Nature, walked upon the earth. This Archetypal Being of the world, Who is the Spirit of the Sun, is rightly given a Greek name, for He could, and indeed had to, appear in the Greek age, when mankind needed the impulse for re-ascent. And in eternal memory of this, the Being Who incarnated in the sheaths of Jesus of Nazareth was called by the name of CHRIST. This name derives from the epoch when it was necessary that Christ should appear. At the moment when the Jesus of Nazareth-sheath died on Golgotha, something happened that is not a mere legend but can still be confirmed today on the path of spiritual science by one who is adequately prepared. At the moment of the Death on the Cross, at that same moment Christ appeared in the other world among the Dead, among those who were living between death and rebirth. And this appearance of Christ was like a lightning-flash in that other world. It was as though the life in that world which had faded into shadow, was lit up by lightning. Now, for the first time, something could be made known in the world after death that was different from anything of which the earlier Initiates had been able to tell when they passed into that world. Even an Initiate of the Eleusinian Mysteries would at most have been able to tell of the beauties of the physical world which the Dead could no longer behold; at most he could have awakened a longing for the physical, but nothing of real importance would have been brought to the Dead by making known to them what was taking place in the world of flesh. The first tidings brought by Christ to the Dead were that in the world between birth and death something had come to pass that has meaning not for this physical world only, but also for the life in the other world. This Event in the physical world was one that works on into the spiritual world itself. Actual examples of this can be found. When in the physical world we contemplate the most beautiful temple or any one of the loveliest creations of the age of ancient Greece and are enchanted by the sight of it, in that other world it has faded away, is not to be found. If, however, we steep ourselves in the Gospel of St. John or in the Apocalypse, where the happenings connected with the Mystery of Golgotha are made known, we can have wonderful experiences if, with clairvoyant consciousness, we then pass over into the spiritual world. These feelings and experiences do not fade, but they live on, becoming still more glorious, still more comprehensible, in the spiritual world. Everything that is connected with the Event of Golgotha becomes even more sublime in the spiritual world. This is by no means the case with everything. However deep your wonder may be at the sight of the Pyramids, only a faint echo of them can be experienced in yonder world. A Greek temple or a Greek tragedy may enthrall one but nothing goes over into the other world, either for an Initiate or for those who are not initiated. But if you contemplate a picture by Raphael in which the Christian truths are expressed, you carry much of the picture with you into the spiritual world, and things which in the physical world you cannot even glimpse, will dawn upon you there. In yonder world they become a light which lightens the spiritual world anew. And so it was when Christ appeared in the world of the Shades. For the first time, that world was flooded with light. And more and more, through everything that Christianity has brought into the world, the spiritual world will be illuminated. So culture descends, as it were, from the heights of the Atlantean world to the Greco-Latin world, when in the spiritual world it was in decadence and had sunk most deeply into the material world. That was when the greatest desolation prevailed in the spiritual world. And now, with the appearance of Christ in the underworld, comes the great impulse of Light. Existence between death and rebirth becomes ever brighter, ever clearer. The ascent begins in the history of life in that other world. Christianity is only at its beginning today. More and more it will become evident that man grows in spirituality through what he can experience in this world; and he takes with him into the other world what he experiences here in connection with the Event of Golgotha. Thus in the spiritual world, too, there is an ascent. And so we may also speak of history in the life between death and rebirth, and when we study this history of the hidden side of the world, we realise the infinite significance of the Mystery of Golgotha, not for the physical world alone but also for all three worlds in which man lives. The Being Who is united with our evolution, Who has created everything that is around us, Who dwelt in Jesus of Nazareth, once said: ‘Had ye believed Moses, ye would have believed me, for he wrote of me. But if ye believe not his writings, how shall you believe my words?’ (John, V, 46.)—clearly indicating thereby that it was He of whom Moses was speaking when he proclaimed the Divine Being Who was announcing Himself as the ‘I am the I am.’ The Being Who was in Jesus of Nazareth accomplished something in our world that has significance not only for the physical plane but, as the most momentous of all events, spread through the three worlds, from the physical right up into the spiritual world. Such is the mighty vista of the Event of Golgotha brought before our souls by occult history.
|
214. The Mystery of Golgotha
27 Aug 1922, Oxford Translated by Unknown Rudolf Steiner |
---|
Looking up to the stars, he saw them not in the mere abstract constellations which we see to-day. He saw them in dreamlike Imaginations. In a dreamlike way he saw the whole Universe filled with spiritual pictures or Imaginations, and as he saw it thus he could exclaim: “This is the last reflected glory of the spiritual World from which I am come down. |
214. The Mystery of Golgotha
27 Aug 1922, Oxford Translated by Unknown Rudolf Steiner |
---|
Mankind is reaching out to apprehend the Mystery of Golgotha once more with all the forces of the human soul; to understand it not only from the limited standpoint of present-day civilisation, but so as to unite with it all the forces of man's being. But this will only be possible if we are ready to approach the Mystery of Golgotha once more in the light of spiritual knowledge. Intellectualistic knowledge can never do justice to the full World-impulse of Christianity. For such knowledge only takes hold of the thinking life of man. So long as we have a Science whose only appeal is to our life of Thought, we must derive the sources of our Will (and these for Christianity are the most important) from our instinctive life, and cannot realise their true origin in spiritual Worlds. Thus it will be indispensable to turn attention in our time once more to this the greatest question of mankind, inasmuch as the essence and meaning of the whole evolution of the Earth lies in the Mystery of Golgotha. I would fain express it in a parable, however strangely seeming. Imagine some Being descending from another planet to the Earth. Unable to become an earthly man, the Being would in all likelihood find the things on Earth quite unintelligible. Yet it is my deepest conviction, arising from a knowledge of the evolution of the Earth, that such a Being—even if he came from distant planets, Mars or Jupiter—would be deeply moved by Leonardo da Vinci's picture of the Last Supper. For in this picture he would discover that a far deeper meaning lies hidden in the Earth,—in earthly evolution. Beginning from this deeper meaning which belongs to the Mystery of Golgotha, the Being from a distant world could then begin to understand all other things on Earth. We men of to-day little know how far we have gone in intellectual abstraction. We can no longer feel our way into the souls of those who lived a little while before the Mystery of Golgotha. They were very different from the souls of men to-day. We are apt to imagine the past history of mankind far too similar to the events and movements of our day. In reality the souls of men have undergone a tremendous evolution. In the times before the Mystery of Golgotha all human beings—even those who were primitive, more or less uncultured in their souls,—perceived in themselves something of the essence of the soul, which might be thus described: They had a memory of the time the human soul lives through, before he descends into an earthly body. As we in ordinary life remember our experiences since the age of three or four or five, so had the human soul in ancient time a memory of pre-existence in the world of soul and spirit. In a deeper psychological sense, man was as if transparent to himself. He knew with certainty: I am a soul, and I was a soul before I descended to the Earth. Notably in still more ancient times, he even knew of certain details of the life of soul and spirit which had preceded his descent to Earth. He experienced himself in cosmic pictures. Looking up to the stars, he saw them not in the mere abstract constellations which we see to-day. He saw them in dreamlike Imaginations. In a dreamlike way he saw the whole Universe filled with spiritual pictures or Imaginations, and as he saw it thus he could exclaim: “This is the last reflected glory of the spiritual World from which I am come down. Descending as a soul from yonder spiritual World, I entered the dwelling of a human body.” Never did the man of ancient time unite himself so closely with his human body as to lose this awareness of the real life of soul. What was the real experience of the man of ancient time in this respect? It was such that he might have said: “I, before I descended to the Earth, was in a world where the Sun is no mere heavenly body spreading light around, but a dwelling-place of higher Hierarchies, of spiritual Beings. I lived in a world where the Sun not only pours forth light, but sends out radiant Wisdom into a space not physical but spiritual. I lived in that world where the stars are essences of Being—Beings who make felt their active will. From yonder world I descended.” Now in this feeling two experiences were joined together for the man of ancient time: the experience of Nature, and the experience of Sin. The old experience of Sin: the modern man has it no longer. Sin, for the man of modern time, lives in a world of abstract being. It is a mere transgression, a moral concept which he cannot really connect with the necessities or laws of Nature. For the ancients the duality was non-existent, of natural law upon the one hand, and moral on the other. All moral necessities were at the same time natural, likewise all natural [necessities] were moral. In those ancient times a man might say, “I had to descend out of the divinely spiritual World. Yet by my very entry into a human body—compared to the World from which I am descended—I am sick and ill.” Sickness and Sin: for the man of olden time these two ideas were interwoven. Here upon Earth man felt that he must find within himself the power to overcome his sickness. Increasingly the consciousness grew on the souls of olden time: We need an Education which is Healing. True Education is Medicine, is Therapy. Thus there appear upon the scene shortly before the Mystery of Golgotha such figures as the Therapeutæ, as the healers. Indeed in ancient Greece all spiritual life was somehow related to the healing of humanity. They felt that man had been more healthy in the beginning of Earth-evolution, and that he had evolved by degrees farther and farther from the Divine-spiritual Beings. “The sickness of humanity” was a widespread conception, forgotten as it is by modern History, in that ancient world in which the Mystery of Golgotha was placed. It was by turning their gaze into the past that the men of those ancient times felt the reality of spiritual things. “I must look back beyond my birth, far into the past, if I would see the Spiritual. There is the Spirit; out of that Spirit I am born; that Spirit must I find again. But I have departed far from Him.” Thus did man feel the Spirit from whom he had departed, as the Spirit of the Father God. The highest Initiate in the Mysteries was he who evolved in his heart and soul the forces whereby he could make manifest the Father in his own external human being. When the pupils crossed the threshold of the Mysteries and came into those sacred places which were institutions of Art and Science and of the sacred religious Rites at the same time, and when at length they stood before the highest Initiate, they saw in him the representative of the Father God. The “Fathers” were higher Initiates than the “Sun-Heroes.” Thus, before the Mystery of Golgotha the Father Principle held sway. Yet it was felt how man had departed ever more and more from the Father, to whom as we look up we say. Ex Deo nascimur. Mankind stood in need of healing, and the seers and initiates lived in expectation of the Healer, the Hælend the healing Saviour.1 To us the conception of Christ as the Healer is no longer living. But we must find our way to it again, for only when we can feel His presence once more as the Cosmic Physician, shall we also realise His true place in the Universe. Such was the deep-seated feeling in human souls before the Mystery of Golgotha, of their connection with the spiritual world of the Father. A strange saying coming down to us from ancient Greece—“Better to be a beggar upon Earth than a king in the realm of shades”—bears witness, how deeply humanity had learned to feel the estrangement of their being from the world of Spirit. Yet at the same time their souls were filled with a deep longing for that World. But we must realise that if a man had gone on evolving with the old consciousness of the Father God alone and unimpaired, he could never have attained the full self-consciousness of the “ I ” and inner spiritual Freedom. Before he could attain true spiritual Freedom, something had to take place in man, which, in relation to his primæval state, appeared as sickness. All humanity was suffering as it were the sickness of Lazarus. But the sickness was not unto Death; it was unto liberation and redemption, unto a new knowledge of the Eternal within man. Men had increasingly forgotten their past life of soul and spirit before birth. Their attention was directed more and more to the physical world around them. The physical environment was now the real thing. The souls of olden time, looking out through the body into their physical environment, had seen in all the stars the pictures of the world of spiritual Being which they had left behind when they descended to this life through birth. In the light of the Sun they saw the radiant Wisdom which they had indwelt, which had been their very breath of life. In the Sun itself they beheld the choirs of Divine Hierarchies by whom they had been sent down to Earth. These things mankind had now forgotten, and as the Mystery of Golgotha approached—in the 9th, 8th, 7th, 6th centuries B.C.—they felt that it was so. If external History says nothing of these things, that is its failing. He who can follow History with spiritual insight will find it as I have said. He will see at the beginning of human evolution a wonderful consciousness of the Father God; he will see this consciousness gradually weakened and paralysed, till man at length should only see around him a world of Nature, void of spiritual Beings. Much of these things remained unspoken in the unconscious depths of the soul. Strongest of all, in the unconscious depths, was a question unexpressed in words, but felt the more deeply by the human heart. Around us is the world of Nature, but where is the Spirit whose children we are? In the best of human souls, in the 4th, 3rd, 2nd and 1st centuries B.C., this question lived, unconscious and unformulated. It was a time of questioning, when mankind felt their estrangement from the Father God,—when human souls knew in their very depths: “It must be so indeed: Ex Deo nascimur. But do we know it still? Can we still know it?” If we look still more deeply into the souls of those who lived in the age when the Mystery of Golgotha was drawing near, the following is what we find:—First there were the more primitive and simple souls who felt, deeply in their subconscious life, their present separation from the Father. They were the descendants of primæval humanity, which was by no means animal-like as modern Science conceives; for within the outer form, however like the animal, primæval man had borne a soul, in the ancient dream-clairvoyance of which he knew full well: “We have come down from the Divine-spiritual world, and have assumed a human body. Into this earthly world the Father God has led us. Out of Him we are born.” But not only so; the souls of primæval humanity knew that they had left behind them, in the spiritual worlds, That which was afterwards called and which we now call the Christ. For this reason the earliest Christian authors said that the most ancient souls of humanity had been true Christians, for they too had looked up to the Christ and worshipped Him. In the spiritual worlds in which they dwelt before their descent to Earth, Christ had been the centre of their vision—the Central Being to whom they had looked with the vision of the soul. It was this communion with Christ in the pre-earthly life which they afterwards remembered when on Earth. Then there were the regions of which Plato speaks so strangely, where pupils were initiated into the Mysteries—where the vision of super-sensible Worlds was awakened and the forces in the human being were liberated to gaze into the spiritual Worlds. Nor was it only in dim memory that the pupils of the initiates learned to know the Christ, with whom indeed all human beings lived before their descent to Earth. For by this time Christ was already a half-forgotten notion in the souls of men on Earth. But in the Mysteries the pupils learned to know Him once again in His full stature. Yet at the same time they knew Him as a Being who, if we may put it in these words, had lost His mission in the Worlds beyond the Earth. It was so in the Mysteries of the second and first centuries before the Mystery of Golgotha, that as they looked up to the Being in super-sensible worlds who was afterwards called the Christ, they said: We still behold Him in the spiritual worlds, but His activity in those worlds grows ever less and less. For He was the Being who implanted in the souls of men what afterwards sprang forth within them as a memory of the time before their birth. The Christ-Being in the spiritual worlds had been the great Teacher of human souls, for what they would still bear in memory after their descent to Earth. Now that the souls of men on Earth were less and less able to kindle these memories to life, He who was afterwards called Christ appeared to the initiates as One who had lost His activity, His mission. Thus as the initiates lived on, ever and increasingly there arose in them the consciousness: “This Being whom primæval humanity remembered in their earthly life—whom we can now behold, though with ever lessening activity, in spiritual worlds—He will seek a new sphere of His existence. He will come down to the Earth to re-awaken the super-sensible spirituality in man.” And they began to speak of the Being who was afterwards called Christ, as of Him who would in future time come down to Earth and take on a human body—as indeed He did, when the time was fulfilled, in Jesus of Nazareth. In the centuries before the Mystery of Golgotha it was one of the main contents of their speech, to speak of Christ as the Coming One. And in the beautiful picture of the Wise Men of the East—the three Kings or Magi—we see the typical figures of initiates who had learned in their several places of Initiation that Christ would come to Earth when the time should be fulfilled, and the signs in the Heavens would proclaim His coming. Then must they seek Him out at His hidden place. Indeed, there resounds throughout the Gospels what is made manifest as a deeper secret, a deeper Mystery in human evolution, when we approach it once more with spiritual vision. Meanwhile the simple and primitive among mankind felt as it were forlorn when they looked up to Worlds beyond the realms of sense. Deep in the subconscious they said to themselves, we have forgotten Christ. They saw the world of Nature around them, and there arose in their hearts the question of which I spoke above: “How shall we find the spiritual World again?” But in the Mysteries the initiates knew that the Being who afterwards was called Christ, would come down and would take on a human form. And they knew that what human souls had formerly experienced in their pre-earthly life, they would now experience on Earth by looking up to the Mystery on Golgotha. Thus, not in an intellectual or theoretic way, but by the greatest fact that ever took place on Earth, answer was given to the question: How shall we come once more to the Supersensible—to the Spiritual that transcends the world of sense? The men of that time, who had a certain feeling for what was taking place, learned from those who knew, that a real God dwelt in the human being Jesus. He had come down to Earth. He was the God whom mankind had forgotten because the forces of the human body were evolving towards Freedom. He, whom man on Earth had forgotten, appeared again in a new form, so that man could see Him and behold Him, and future History could tell of Him as of an earthly Being. The God who had only been known in yonder spiritual World, had descended and walked in Palestine, and sanctified the Earth inasmuch as He Himself had dwelt in a human body. For those who were the educated men according to the culture of that age, the question was. How did Christ enter into Jesus, what path did He take? In the earliest times of Christianity the question about Christ was indeed a purely spiritual one. Their problem was not the earthly biography of Jesus. It was the descent of Christ. They looked up into the higher Worlds and saw the descent of Christ to Earth. They asked themselves, How did the super-sensible Being become an earth Being? And the simple men who surrounded Jesus Christ as His disciples were able to converse with Him as a spiritual Being even after His Death. Nay, what He was able to tell them after His Death is the most important of all. Only a few fragments have been preserved, but spiritual Science can re-discover what Christ said to those who were nearest to Him after His Death, when He appeared to them in His purely spiritual being. Then it was that He spoke to them as the great Healer—the Therapeut, the Comforter—to whom the great Mystery was known, how human beings had once upon a time remembered Him, because they had been with Him in super-sensible spiritual worlds before their earthly life. Now He could say to His disciples upon Earth: In former times I gave you the faculty to remember your spiritual life, your pre-earthly existence in higher worlds. But now, if you receive Me into your hearts and souls, I give you power to go forward through the Gate of Death, conscious of immortality. And you will no longer merely recognise the Father—Ex Deo Nascimur—you will feel the Son as Him with whom you can die and yet remain alive: In Christo morimur. Such was the purport—though not of course expressed in the words I am now speaking—such was the meaning of what He taught to those who were near Him after His bodily Death. In primæval ages men had not known Death. Since ever they came to consciousness on Earth, they had an inner knowledge of the soul within them; they were aware of that which cannot die. They saw men die, but to them this Death was a mere semblance among the outer facts around them. They felt it not as Death. Only in later years, as the Mystery of Golgotha drew near, did men begin to feel the real fact of Death. For by degrees the soul within them had grown so closely united with the body that doubt could arise in their minds: How shall the soul live on when the body falls into decay? In olden times there could have been no such question, for men were aware of the living, independent soul. But now there came the Christ Himself, and said: I will live with you on the Earth, that ye may have power to kindle your souls to life again, that ye may bear them, once more a living soul, through Death. This was what St. Paul had not understood at first. But he understood it when the spiritual worlds were opened out before him and he received here upon Earth the living impressions of Christ Jesus. For this reason the Pauline Christianity is less and less valued in our time, for it requires us to recognise the Christ as One who comes from real worlds beyond the Earth, uniting with earthly man His cosmic power. Thus in the course of human evolution, in the consciousness of man, the “Out of God—out of the Father God—we are born,” was supplemented by the word of life, of comfort and of strength, “In Christ we die”—that is to say, in Him we live. In order to bring before our souls what came upon humanity through the Mystery of Golgotha, I shall best describe the present evolution of mankind, and that which we must hope for the future, from the standpoint of the initiate of modern time. I have already sought to place before you the standpoint of the initiate of olden time, and of the initiate of the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. I will now try to describe that of the initiate of our own time. The initiate is one who does not approach life with external natural Science alone, but in whom those deeper forces of knowledge have been awakened which can be kindled from depths of the human soul by proper methods. Such methods are indicated in the spiritual literature,2 and I have referred to them in my other course of lectures in this College. When the modern initiate enters into the Sciences of our time (which are the glory and triumph of the age, and in the study of which so many people, possessed even of a certain higher consciousness, feel the greatest satisfaction) he finds himself in a tragic situation. For when he unites his soul with that form of Science which is valued above all by the world to-day, the initiate feels it as a slow process of Death. A sphere of existence higher than all earthly things has risen up before his soul. And yet, the more he imbues himself with that which all the world to-day calls Science, the more he feels his soul to die within him. For the modern initiate, the Sciences are indeed the grave of the soul. While he acquires knowledge about the world in the manner of modern Science, he feels himself bound up, even in life, with Death. Again and again he feels this Death deeply and intensely. Then he may well seek the reason why, whenever he acquires knowledge in the modern sense, he dies. Why is it, he asks himself, that he has a feeling comparable even to the presence of a corpse—the odour of decay—just when he rises to the highest points of modern scientific knowledge, the greatness of which he is truly able to appreciate, though to him it is the premonition of Death. From his knowledge of spiritual worlds he finds the answer, which I will try to convey to you this evening, my dear friends, in a picture. Before we come down to Earth, we human beings live in a life of soul and spirit. Now of that life in full reality of soul and spirit, in yonder pre-earthly realms, here upon Earth we retain only our Thoughts—our concepts and ideas. These are in our soul: yet how are they there? Look at the human being as he stands before you in the life between birth and death. He is fully alive, filled with the living flesh and blood. We say, he is alive. Then he passes through the gate of death. Of the physical man, the corpse remains behind, and this is given over to the Earth—to the elements. We see the dead physical man; we have the dead corpse before us, all that is left of the man who was filled with living blood. Physically he is dead. Now we look back, with the vision of Initiation, into our own souls. There we behold our thoughts—the thoughts we have in the present life between birth and death—the thoughts of modern Science, modern wisdom. And we recognise; These thoughts are the dead corpse of what we were before we descended to the Earth. As the dead body is to the human being in the fulness of his life, so are our thoughts (the thoughts which we respect above all things in this age, which bring us knowledge of external Nature)—so are our thoughts to what we were in soul and spirit before we came down to Earth. This is what the modern initiate discovers, and it is a very real experience. He experiences in Thought, not his real life, but the dead corpse of the soul. I am stating a simple fact. It is not uttered out of any sentimental feeling: on the contrary, it comes before the soul in modern time with all intensity, just when the soul's knowledge is active and courageous. It is not what the sentimental mystic says to himself out of some dark and mystic depths of his being. He who passes to-day through the Portals of Initiation discovers in his soul the real nature of the thoughts of man. For the very reason that they are unalive, they can make way for living spiritual Freedom. These thoughts are in truth the only ground on which man's spiritual Freedom grows. Because they are dead—because they are not alive—they have no power to compel. Man can become a free Being in our time because he has to do, not with living thoughts, but with dead ones. He can take hold of the dead thoughts and use them towards Freedom. And yet, it is with all the tragedy of Worlds that we experience these thoughts as the dead corpse of the soul—of the soul that was, before it came down to Earth. For in the pre-earthly life all this, which is a corpse in man to-day, was alive and filled with movement. In spiritual Worlds it lived and moved among other human souls—those who had passed through the gate of death and were now dwelling in those Worlds, and those who had not yet descended to the Earth. It lived and moved among the Beings of the Divine Hierarchies above humanity, and in the sphere of the elemental beings that underlie all Nature. There, everything in the soul was alive, while here, the soul possesses Thought as its heritage from spiritual worlds, and Thought is dead. Yet if as initiates of modern time we fill ourselves with Christ, who made manifest His life in the Mystery of Golgotha; if we take hold in its deepest, inmost sense, of the word of St. Paul: Not I, but Christ in me,—then will Christ lead us even through this Death. We penetrate into Nature with our thoughts, yet as we do so Christ goes with us in the Spirit. He sinks our thoughts into the grave of Nature. For Nature does indeed become a grave, inasmuch as our thoughts are dead. Yet if, with these dead thoughts, accompanied by Christ Himself, we approach the minerals, the animals, the world of stars, the clouds, mountains and streams, then we experience in modern Initiation the resurrection of dead Thought as living Thought out of all Nature. With the dead Thought, we dive down into the crystal quartz, letting Christ be our companion, according to the word: Not I, but Christ in me. Then the dead Thought arises again as living Thought out of the crystal quartz, out of all Nature. As from the tomb of the mineral world, Thought is lifted up again as living Thought. Out of the mineral world the Spirit is resurrected. And as Christ leads us through the plant-world of Nature, here too, where otherwise only our dead thoughts would dwell, the living thoughts arise. Truly we should feel that we are sick and ill as we go out into Nature, or gaze into the Universe of stars with the restricted calculating vision of the astronomer, thus sinking our dead thoughts into the world. We should feel that we are sick, and indeed it would be a sickness unto Death. But if we let Christ be our companion, if accompanied by Him we carry our dead thoughts into the world of the Sun, the Moon, the clouds, mountains and rivers, the minerals, plants and animals and the whole physical world of man, then in our vision of Nature it all becomes alive, and there arises from all creation, as from a tomb, the living, healing Spirit who awakens us from Death: the Holy Spirit. Accompanied by Christ, in all that we have hitherto experienced as Death we feel ourselves called to Life again. We feel the living and healing Spirit speaking to us out of all the creatures of this world. These things must be regained in spiritual knowledge, in the new Science of Initiation. Then only shall we take hold of the Mystery of Golgotha as the true meaning of all Earth-existence. Then shall we know that in this age, when through the dead thoughts human freedom must be evolved, we need the Christ to lead us into a true Knowledge of Nature. For He not only placed His own destiny upon the Earth in the Mystery of Golgotha, but gave to the Earth the mighty liberation of Pentecost, in that He promised to mankind on Earth the living Spirit, which can arise through His help from all things on the Earth. Our Science remains dead—nay, our Science itself is Sin—until we are so awakened by the Christ that from all Nature, from all existence in the Cosmos, the living Spirit speaks to us again. It is no formula devised by human cleverness: the Trinity of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. It is a reality deeply bound up with the whole evolution of the Cosmos, and it becomes for us a living, not a dead, dogmatic knowledge, when we bring to life within ourselves the Christ who as the Risen One is the Giver of the Holy Spirit. Then do we understand how it is like an illness if man cannot see the Divine out of which he is born. Man must be secretly diseased to be an atheist, for, if he is healthy, his whole physical being will find as it were its summation in the spontaneous inner feeling which exclaims: Out of God I am born. And it is tragic destiny if in this earthly life he does not find the Christ who can lead him through the Death that stands at the end of life's way, and through the Death in Knowledge. But if we thus feel the In Christo morimur, then too we feel what is seeking to come near us through His guidance; we feel how the living Spirit arises again out of all things, even within this earthly life. We feel ourselves alive again even within this life on Earth, and we look through the gate of Death through which the Christ will lead us into yonder Life that lies beyond. We know now why Christ sent us the Holy Spirit, for if we let Christ be our guide we can unite ourselves to the Holy Spirit already in this life on Earth. If we let Christ become our leader, we may surely say: We die in Christ, when we pass through the gate of Death. Our experience here on Earth, with our Science of the world of Nature, is indeed prophetic of the future. By the living Spirit, what would otherwise be a dead Science is resurrected. Thus we may also say, when the Death in Knowledge is replaced by that real Death which takes away our body:—Having understood the “Out of the Father we are born,” “In Christ we die,” we may say as we look forward through the gate of Death: “In the Holy Spirit we shall be reawakened.” Per Spiritum Sanctum Reviviscimus.
|
199. Spiritual Science as a Foundation for Social Forms: Lecture XV
10 Sep 1920, Dornach Translated by Maria St. Goar Rudolf Steiner |
---|
Likewise, these individuals who could read the course of the stars said to themselves, “This or that constellation of the stars signifies to us one or the other intention on the part of those divine spiritual beings who guide and direct everything we may call human destiny.” |
199. Spiritual Science as a Foundation for Social Forms: Lecture XV
10 Sep 1920, Dornach Translated by Maria St. Goar Rudolf Steiner |
---|
If we make a survey of what takes place in the civilized world today, of what is present in it, we actually find—indeed, we may say this after the many explanations which have already been given—that civilization is increasingly falling into ruin. If we understand what spiritual science can tell us about the secrets of the universe, we must realize quite clearly that everything that takes place outside in the physical world has its source in the spiritual world. The causes for what takes place at any time in the historical development of mankind also lie in the spiritual world. Another truth, which cannot be called to mind too frequently, is that in the present moment of time, humanity's condition requires each individual to contribute something toward the reconstruction of culture from his own inner being. We no longer live in an age in which it suffices to believe that the gods will help. In the present time, the gods do not count on human beings recognizing them and their intentions, and much that a short time ago was not yet left to mankind is left to men's decisions today. Such a truth must be grasped in all its gravity, and basically by each one individually. To do this it will be necessary, above all, to understand a number of things that we have outgrown. Gradually, in the course of the materialistic age, one might say that the human being has reached the point of grasping everything from a certain absolute standpoint, a standpoint, moreover, that differs according to the human being's age. When a person is twenty-five years old today, he feels called upon to judge everything. He believes that it is possible to have a final opinion about everything without undergoing any kind of development. Perhaps when he reaches the age of fifty, he may Look down with a certain sense of superiority upon his faculty of judgment twenty-five years ago. At age twenty-five, however, he will in no way feel drawn as a result of his upbringing to seek and reckon with the more mature judgment of a man of fifty. Among the causes underlying our present chaos, the one just outlined is by no means the least important; instead, it is one of the most significant, though admittedly one that had to exercise its influence upon the whole evolution of mankind. Only by man's feeling completely emancipated in a certain sense from the whole world context; by adopting an absolute standpoint not only personally in the life between birth and death, but at any given moment of this life; by assuming the standpoint that he is able to judge everything in a sovereign manner; only because this illusion was added to the many other illusions of life—and in the merely physical world everything is in a sense illusion—the course of human development will gradually lead the single human being toward freedom. We should bear in mind, however, the great difference between our present epoch, which sets out from this standpoint, and the past epochs in which entirely different life impulses lay at the foundation of human existence. We must pay heed to the life impulses of former times, which in turn are intended to become those of the future, to which all efforts in the present should be directed again. Indeed, such earlier life impulses must be observed. They only disappeared slowly and gradually in the course of human evolution, and we underestimate the whole tempo of modern spiritual development if we do not perceive the speed with which, in a few centuries, materialistic impulses have melted away a tremendous amount of the spirituality that once existed. In order to gain some starting points for a real study of the present, which we shall pursue tomorrow, let's turn our minds back to, say, the best period of ancient Egyptian life. Naturally, in the life of ancient Egypt or ancient Chaldea, there certainly existed social institutions in the outer world as well. These social structures were inaugurated and implemented by certain human beings. However, these individuals did not make judgments by pursuing thoughts in their wise heads on how to come up with the best social arrangements, or by following their opinions on what might be right for the communal life of people. Instead, they turned to the initiation centers. In actual fact, the sage who was initiated into the mysteries of the universe in these centers was the actual leading advisor of the highest social rulers, who, depending on their rank and maturity, were in large part themselves initiates into the cosmic secrets. When one was supposed to make provisions concerning the affairs of the social order, one did not consult the clever human brain—in the literal sense of the word—but one consulted those who were capable of interpreting the heavenly signs. For one knew that when a stone falls to the ground this is connected with the forces of the earth; when it rains that has to do with the forces of the air—the atmosphere. If, on the other hand, human destinies should be fulfilled that are supposed to interact with each other, this has nothing to do with any natural laws that can be figured out in the above manner. It has to do with those laws that could be traced in the cosmos by means of what makes the course of the stars evident. So, the course of the stars was read in the same way we read the time of day from a clock. We do not say, “One hand of my clock is down here on the right, the other is on the left.” Rather, we say, “We know that this position indicates that the sun has set so many hours ago, and so forth.” Likewise, these individuals who could read the course of the stars said to themselves, “This or that constellation of the stars signifies to us one or the other intention on the part of those divine spiritual beings who guide and direct everything we may call human destiny.” One beheld the intentions of those accompanying spiritual beings of the cosmos by looking up to the course of the stars. One was clearly aware that not everything that man has to know reveals itself here on earth; indeed, the most important things he has to be aware of, the forces that work in his social life, reveal themselves in manifestations observable in the cosmos outside the earthly sphere. One knew that the concerns of humanity here on earth cannot be managed unless one investigates the intentions of the gods in the realm outside earth. Therefore, everything that was to be accomplished here within the social order was connected with the sphere outside the earth. Where do we find any inclination today to investigate these great signs visible in the cosmos outside the earth, when here or there the belief arises again that some reform movement should be introduced? A far more important symptom than materialism, than anything which has arisen in the form of natural scientific materialism, is the fact that man no longer consults the cosmos outside the earth in regard to his earthly concerns. One does not become spiritual by setting up theories concerning the human being or anything in the universe; one will only become spiritual if one understands how to connect humanity's earthly concerns with the cosmos outside the earth. In that case, however, one has to be convinced, above all, that the affairs of this world do not allow themselves to be arranged according to the judgments acquired by mere natural scientific education. Then, one has to be able to introduce into the whole civilizing education the capacity to connect the sphere transcending the earth with earthly concerns once more. Then, it was necessary, above all, to discern more clearly how this capacity was lost in the course of human evolution, and how we gradually arrived at the point of wanting to judge everything only from an earthly standpoint. Let us consider something that is now prevalent in the world, a component of social agitation. You have all heard of the effort appearing everywhere to introduce compulsory labor—to require a person to work by means of some social order based on the legal decrees of this social order—no longer to appeal merely to what obliges man to work, namely, hunger and other motivations, but in fact to establish compulsory labor legally. We see how, on one side, this compulsory labor is demanded by socialistic agitation. We note how, in Soviet Russia, this compulsory labor has already led to a downright rigid form, with human life taking on the aspect of life in the barracks. We also find that radical socialists enthusiastically uphold compulsory labor. We see also how the sleeping souls of the present receive news such as this, how government officials here or there have even determined to introduce compulsory labor. One reads this like any other news item, and does not pay it much attention. One rises in the morning as one usually does, eats breakfast, has lunch, goes into the country for the summer holidays, returns again and, in spite of the fact that the most important and fundamental events are taking place in the world, one behaves as one has always been accustomed to behave. Yet, mankind should not insist on clinging to old habits. Mankind should take seriously what it is that matters today, namely, having to relearn about all conditions of life. Even when we see that the demand for compulsory labor is being opposed, what are the viewpoints from which these matters are attacked? We have to admit that the opponents are as a rule not much brighter than those who advance these demands. For the most part, they will ask, “Well, can a person still find joy in his work?”—or something like that. All the reasons cited for and against the above are worth more or less the same, because they arise from the same judgments that are limited only to what takes place here between birth and death; they do not originate from a sufficient insight into life. When the spiritual scientist comes and says, “Go ahead and introduce compulsory labor, but in ten years you will have terrible results, for suicides will increase at an alarming rate,” people will view such a statement as fantasy. They will not recognize that this conclusion is derived from an inner knowledge of the relationships existing in the universe. They will not be willing to study spiritual science and to discover the basis from which one can find such a judgment justified. Instead, people will go on living as usual—some getting up in the morning, breakfasting and lunching, traveling into the country for the summer and more of the same, others sleeping away their time in some other manner, refusing to take these questions seriously. Still others will found clubs, social associations, women's associations, and so forth—things that are admittedly quite nice—but when such efforts are not connected to the actual cosmic order, they lead nowhere. Our age is much too conceited to abandon absolute standpoints which assume that, at any age, one definitely has a conclusive judgment about all things. During these days and in the last few weeks I explained the way in which the various branches of the threefold social organism have originated in the different territories of earth evolution. I said that, fundamentally speaking, all our spiritual life is only a transformation of what originated a long time ago in the orient. But when we look into what was described on numerous occasions in the past few weeks from one aspect, and investigate it in regard to the standpoints which I have indicated just now, we find that, insofar as it referred to human destiny, all this knowledge of the Orient was deciphered from the course of the stars, from what exists outside the earth, and the Greek concept of destiny was the last ramification of such extraterrestrial wisdom. Then came the knowledge arising from the Middle region. As we indicated, this was a more juristic knowledge; it was something that man drew more out of his own being. It was not linked with observations of the cosmos outside the earth. I told you that the higher-world outlook of the Occident has been permeated with a juristic element, how the events that run their course in humanity's development were placed under juristic concepts. Punishment is meted out by a cosmic judge just as the human judge hands down a penalty for some external misdeed. It was a juristic view, a juristic manner of conception, that permeated the entirely different form of the Oriental conceptions concerning the spiritual world. This view of the spiritual world was connected with the fact that in the initiation centers those who were found to be sufficiently mature were initiated into the nature of that which was sent down to earth from invisible realms by what was revealed in the visible. Then, the events that were to take place on earth were guided according to the intentions of initiation. Naturally, in the case of such a knowledge it is necessary to take into consideration more than the singular standpoint of any given age, by which one believes oneself able to make an absolute judgment on all sorts of matters. From the viewpoint of initiation, the whole evolution of man must be considered, also what the human being brings into earthly existence through birth, and what can reveal itself to him when, in earthly life, he beholds a revelation of the super-sensible existence. In recent times, something that was basically a science of the heavens has become permeated with a juristic element. This celestial science itself and its fate must be considered a little now. The sacred knowledge of the Orient was something that was cultivated in its purest form in the initiation centers perhaps 10,000 years ago in the Orient. Later on, although no longer in such pure form, it was cultivated in Egypt in a still relatively pure manner. Having become popularized in a certain sense, it was used by swindlers and conjurers on the streets of the later imperial Rome, although transformed into visible magic tricks. This is, after all, the course of world events; something that is sacred in one epoch can turn into the most unholy thing in a later age. While the highest Oriental knowledge belonged to the streets in the later imperial Roman time, juristic thinking was developing out of Romanism itself on the basis of the Tate Egyptianism, and subsequently dominated the world. In the ages that followed, but only slowly and gradually, what had once been brought down from the stars as human wisdom in the Orient grew dim and finally died out. For, even in the thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas91 still said, “Human destiny, all of destiny occurring in the sublunar world, is guided by the Intelligences of the stars. It is, however, by no means something inevitable for man.” So this Catholic-Christian church father of the thirteenth century does not refer to stars, to planets, merely as physical planets; instead, he speaks of the Intelligences that dwell in these planets who are the actual rulers of what should be called human destiny. What had once arisen in the Orient was really still present in the twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth centuries, although in its last ramifications, as an aspect of the Christian Catholic Church. It is simply a terrible misrepresentation of the present Catholic Church to withhold these matters from the faithful, so that the church can declare it a heresy, for example, to assume that the individual stars and planets are ensouled and permeated with spirit. By doing this, the Church not only denies Christianity; it even denies its last teachers who still had a more direct connection with the sources of the spiritual life than does the present age in any sense. Therefore, one must point out that it was not so very long ago that the conception was completely abandoned which still pictured the world as permeated with spirit. If people would teach the truth today concerning what still held sway in the spiritual life of the eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; if, following preconceived opinions, they would not distort what prevailed in those times, then even this would still have a fructifying effect for a spiritualization of the present world-view. The materialism, the natural scientific materialism, or the materialism of the mystics or theosophists, particularly the materialism of the Catholic Church, could not exist. For what is contained in the dogmas of the Roman Catholic Church originated from the purest spiritual science; and this pure spiritual science beheld the spirit everywhere in the universe. All that was beheld as spirit in the universe by the eye of the soul has been discarded. The universe became pervaded with materialism. For that reason, naturally, nothing remains except words of faith. For example, behind the Trinity, the doctrine of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, stand the most profound mysteries. On the other hand, there is nothing contained any longer in what is taught today as the dogma of the Trinity. On one side, there is the doctrine, the belief of the religious denominations, on the other side, natural science devoid of spirit. Neither can save humanity from the misery into which it has fallen. In order to render rescue possible, it is necessary that a sufficiently large number of people rouse themselves inwardly. For, particularly in the present epoch, the possibility exists in man's inner being to pick up those threads of a soul-spiritual kind which, if their power is inwardly experienced in the proper way, lead to an understanding of what can be gathered from spiritual science for an illumination of the life of nature as well as the social life. One should not wish to retain at all costs the bad habits of one's inner life, however they have developed during the past few centuries. These bad habits are based on the opinion that if one can keep quiet and be passive, the gods will eventually enter into one, reveal everything within, and mystical depth will be illuminated by an inner light, and so forth. The present age is not suited for that. It demands an inner activity of soul and spirit from the human being; it demands that man turn and look at what is trying to reveal itself within. Then, he will find under all circumstances what wishes to reveal itself within, but he must be willing to unfold such inner spiritual activity. One must not believe, however, that much can be gained by some inner pseudomystical doings; above all else, one has to trace the spirit in the external things of the world. I have called your attention to what happened, for example, in the East, in Asia. Once upon a time, so I told you, conditions in Asia were of a kind that the human being felt his heart expand, felt his soul grow warm, when, guided by the thought of the sacred Brahman, he directed his glance to the mighty external symbol of the swastika, the hooked cross. It made his inner life unfold. This inner mood of soul meant a great deal to him. Today, when an Oriental receives an ordinary Russian 2,000 ruble note—which is not worth much, for small change will no longer do for buying anything, only thousand ruble notes—he sees on it the beautifully printed swastika. Those thousand-year-old feelings that once upon a time inwardly beheld the sacred Brahman when the eye was directed to the swastika are certainly stirring. Today, the same emotional qualities arise on seeing the 2,000 ruble note. Do you believe that one has a spiritual view of the world if one does not look at something like that and say to oneself, “Those are the Ahrimanic powers who are at work here; herein lies a super-earthly intelligence, even though it is an Ahrimanic intelligence?” Do you believe that it suffices merely to say, “Oh, that is the external material world! We direct our glance heavenward to spiritual things; we don't pay any attention to things for which people only have words?” If you seek for the spirit, you must look for it even where it turns up in the mighty aberrations of external world evolution itself, for there you can find the starting point for other aspects. It is the tragedy of modern civilization that people believe that only human forces are at work everywhere, forces which arise between birth and death. Actually, our world is permeated all over by super-sensible forces, spiritual powers which manifest themselves in the various events that take place. If one wishes to do something, if one tries to realize intentions so that this or that result may come about, one needs to look to those benign spiritual powers capable of working against other spiritual powers; and the spiritual powers that can oppose the others have to be born in man through his own inner activity. In regard to all this, however, one actually does need to look up into the spiritual world. This is something that is most inconvenient to many people. This is why the great majority of people in the world find even talk of initiation science unpleasant. For there is one thing that initiation science must make clear, under all circumstances, to the human being. Man is organized, in the first place, in the direction of his intellect. Certainly, there are other aspects to his organization such as digestion, metabolism, heartbeat, breathing, and physiological processes. He bears instincts within, hence, soul entities, and so forth. In addition, he bears within him what is termed intelligence, and the present age is especially proud of this intelligence. But where does our intelligence come from? Materialism believes that our intelligence is derived from those processes that occur below in the liver, in the heart; they then become more refined and turn into the processes within the brain. These processes in the brain are just a little different from those that take place in the liver or the stomach, but these same processes produce thinking. We know that this is not so. Those processes that run their course in the brain just as those in the liver or the stomach would cause no thinking at all. Up in the brain something takes place; out of the constructive processes destructive ones are constantly developed. Here, not only upbuilding, but disintegrating processes are at work; matter is forever falling out into nothingness. Thus, we are not dealing with an upbuilding in the brain. Any constructive process only serves to nourish the brain, not to produce thinking. If you wish to focus on those brain processes that have something to do with thinking, and you wish to compare them to the remaining organism, you must not compare them to the constructive processes, the processes of growth, but to the processes of elimination. The brain is constantly involved in elimination, and, as I said, the processes of destruction, of disintegration, of death, are the accompanying phenomena of intelligence. If our brain were incapable of elimination, we would be unable to think. If our brain would only contain upbuilding processes, we would exist in a dull, instinctive condition; at most, we could attain to quite dir dreams. We arrive at clear thinking precisely because the brain secretes and eliminates substances. Thinking only functions parallel to processes of elimination. It is only because the human organization eliminates what is useless to it that thinking establishes itself out of the spiritual world. Now take the thinking that has developed especially since the middle of the fifteenth century, the thinking of which modern man is so proud. It comes into being because we destroy our brain, because we bring about in it processes of disintegration, of elimination. Suppose that you are Trotsky or Lenin, traveling to Russia—transported there on orders of Ludendorff92 in a sealed railway carriage and escorted by Dr. Helphand93 (it was such a train, going from Switzerland through Central Europe, which brought Lenin accompanied by people like Dr. Helphand to Russia under Ludendorff's protection)—suppose you are such a person and you believe that out of the processes representing intelligence—the only processes from which natural scientific thinking of the past few centuries has emerged—the social order could be developed. What kind of a social order will that turn out to be? It will be a reproduction of what takes place within the brain during the thinking processes. Do not think that what we develop without is different from what we develop within, if the only processes employed are thinking processes! If you try to establish a social order with them, it will be something destructive, just as thinking processes in the brain cause destruction—exactly the same thing. Thinking, applied to reality, destroys. One can gain insight into such matters only when one Looks into the deeper secrets of the being of man and the whole world. This is why humanity needs to pay attention to these things if any sort of valid judgment concerning public affairs is to be rendered. It does no good at all today to base discussions about any social concerns on the suppositions of the past few centuries, for they no longer hold water. It is important here to realize that completely different processes must come to pass in the human spiritual life; again, the science of initiation must step in and draw from spiritual resources what can never be gleaned from mere sources of human intelligence. A social science of the present can only emerge as a consequence of spiritual science. This can and must be grasped from its very foundation. This is what is in fact important for modern man, namely, that he does not attain a relationship with spiritual science merely in some superficial manner, but that he learns to recognize how completely spiritual science is linked to human destiny for the future. In order that a person can gauge something like this, a feeling must develop in the human being for what is asserting itself with profound earnestness out of the spiritual resources. For such a feeling to come about, however, much must be eliminated, above all else the generally prevailing frivolity. Recently, in a lecture that I gave for local teachers, I indicated a Symptom in which such frivolity appears today. One of our friends in London made efforts to arrange a gathering of a number of artists here in August. It was for the purpose of their becoming acquainted with our building and forming a sort of center from which the impulse could go out that is now so necessary if the building is ever to be completed. An English journalist was informed, not one from an ordinary daily paper but from a magazine that calls itself “Architect,” in other words, a publication that wishes to be taken more seriously. The journalist was even given a description in writing of what was intended. This fellow was so flippant and frivolous, however, that he wrote, “A visit to Dornach is anticipated by such and such persons. Dr. Steiner himself has promised to acquaint the visitors with what is going on there, and it is believed that ten days will suffice for this excursion. Of this time, four days will be spent on travel, and during the remaining six days, the visitors will be able to recuperate from the shock they will have experienced following their first impression of Dornach.” So, this frivolous character has no idea what he is supposed to write about, and for his penny-a-line, is only capable of making a stupid joke so that his readers can accordingly continue to maintain a frivolous mood. Things have gone so far that the general mood of people is spoiled from the very outset, spoiled by this kind of journalist; there is no longer any question of anything being accomplished. The only thing such journalists can do is seize the opportunity to make some stupid, frivolous joke. No progress will be made if the earnestness with which such matters should be discussed is not understood. One will get no further if such matters are considered to be insignificant; if, from a certain jaded standpoint, one says, for example, “Oh, one cannot take such a journalist so seriously!” From a certain point of view, one certainly need not give much credit to such penny-a-lining, but it must be evaluated according to what effect is has in the world. These matters are indeed serious and of such a nature that they induce us again and again to say, “This building here is intended to be a Landmark for what should take place for the sake of mankind's ascent!” To be sure, from certain quarters, no effort has been spared to make the building what it is now. Destiny, too, contributed its necessary share. It is, alter all, true that at the outset this building was erected here chiefly as the result of efforts made by the Central European countries. But when Central Europe's financial resources began to touch rock bottom, the neutral countries were ready in a most significant, commendable manner to do something for this building. Those from Central Europe who were able to do something for the building spared no effort throughout the time of the war psychosis, stirred up by hate and opposition, to maintain this site in such a manner that people from every part of the world, from all nationalities, could gather together here. This building was saved and maintained throughout all the years of chauvinism; nobody was denied the opportunity here to encounter others in a spirit of friendship, no matter what part of the world he came from. All this, however, demonstrates the impossibility of completing this building by relying on the earlier resources; it shows the necessity for efforts by those countries that are in a financially favorable position, for they are at the beginning of a period where they are not encumbered by financial disaster and are certainly in a position to do something for the building. One would hope that a message like the following will not one day spread through the world: A landmark for the dawning spiritual life was to be erected. Those people who were swept away by the cataclysmic world events and then perished left behind as a last legacy as much as they could accomplish. Those, on the other hand, who were not swept away, who could have begun the new life, did not realize what those who were doomed left for them.
|