The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The secrets of space and time. The Moses and Hermes Wisdom. Comparison of the Turanians and the Hebrews.¹

In the opening lines of the Gospel of Matthew emphasis is laid on the descent of the physical nature of the Jesus of this Gospel from Abraham. The fact of most importance to the spiritual scientist is that by inheritance throughout thrice fourteen generations this individual bore within him an extract of the whole race of Abraham. He is the same individual who is spoken of as Zoroaster or Zarathustra.

In the last lecture we described the external conditions in which Zarathustra worked. Something must now be said of the opinions and ideas that obtained in his immediate circle.

In that district where in very far-off ages Zarathustra worked, conceptions and ideas flourished that, in their broad outlines, were of profound importance. It needs but a few extracts from what since earliest times has been regarded as the teaching of the first Zarathustra to show how deeply these affected the thought of the whole post-Atlantean period. Even external history relates how the teaching of Zarathustra proceeded from two principles, which we describe as the principle of Ormuzd, the beneficent Being of Light, and Ahriman, the dark Being of Evil. At the same time historical descriptions of this religious system trace the origin of these two principles back to a single common principle Zeruane Akarene. It is customary to translate Zeruane Akarene as ‘Uncreated Time.’ It may, therefore, be said that the teaching of Zarathustra leads back to an original principle, in which we have to recognize quiescent Time, Time flowing on in its universal course. The very meaning of the word shows us that it is unnecessary to question further as to the origin of this Time, this revolution of Time.

True, the external abstract thinking of man will hardly ever refrain from inquiring again and again after the cause of this cause, forever driving his conceptions back, forever seeking the primal cause. But the spiritual scientist realizes through deep meditation that questionings about the beginnings of things must cease somewhere. To continue them beyond a certain point is merely to play with thinking, as is shown clearly in Occult Science. It is stated there that when wheel tracks are seen on a road it may well be asked whence they came. The answer will probably be that they were caused by the wheels of a carriage. A query as to the reason for the wheels on the carriage may produce the information that they were needed to enable it to travel along the road. A further inquiry as to the cause of this may bring the reply that someone wished to travel along the road. Ultimately we arrive at the resolve of the man which led him to travel along the road. Here it is advisable to stop, for further inquiries would inevitably lead to losing one's way in a maze of questions.

It is the same as regards great universal questions—a halt must be made somewhere; made at what lies at the fountain of the teaching of Zarathustra; at Time, calm, onflowing Time. Then, according to Zarathustra, there proceeded from Time, Ormuzd, the principle of Light, and Ahriman, the evil principle of Darkness. The profound meaning underlying this Iranian or old Persian idea is that the wickedness in the world, all that in its physical form is described as darkness, was not originally wicked, dark and evil. In the same way the wolf was originally good, but when left to itself it degenerated so that Ahrimanic forces could be active in it. To the Iranians or Persians evil came to pass through something that at one time—a time suited to it—was good, retaining its form on into a later age with which it was out of harmony. To them, all that was black and evil arose through a form which was good in one age, continuing on into a later age, instead of adapting itself to change. Through the clashing of such forms of being with the more advanced ones of a later time, the struggle between good and evil arose. Evil is therefore not absolute evil, but misplaced good, something that was good in an earlier time. There, where earlier conditions did not as yet come into collision with later conditions, enduring Time rolled on, Time that was undifferentiated, not yet separated into individual moments.

Such is the very important point of view expressed in Zarathustrianism; and this should be recognized as the fundamental principle of the teaching of Zarathustra among the earliest post-Atlantean peoples, and must be associated with the facts given in the first lecture. The people influenced by him had, above all, insight into the necessity for the birth of this duality from out the uniform stream of Time, and for the coming of opposition, which opposition would only be overcome in the course of time. We see the necessity that the new should arise and the old remain behind; that in the balance between the old and the new, the goal of the universe, and especially the goal of the Earth, will gradually be attained. It is this point of view that lies at the root of all that higher development which has sprung from Zarathustrianism.

The impression made by the influence of Zarathustra on subsequent ages was strong and deep. It was possible through the fact, that having reached the highest summit of initiation attainable at that time, he had also trained two pupils. These pupils I have spoken of before. To one he taught everything connected with the mystery of Space as it is spread around us, and therewith the mystery of all things contemporaneous. To the other he imparted the mystery of the flight of Time, the mystery of development and of evolution. I have also already indicated that at a definite point of time of such a discipleship as existed between these two great disciples and Zarathustra, something quite especial enters: the teacher can sacrifice part of his own being to his disciples. And Zarathustra, as he was in his Zarathustra-age, gave up to his pupils something of his own being, he sacrificed his own etheric and astral bodies. His individuality, his own inmost being, he retained for future incarnations; but his remarkable astral ‘garment,’ in which he had lived as Zarathustra in the earliest post-Atlantean periods, which had attained such a degree of perfection, and was so permeated by his whole being that instead of dispersing like that of an ordinary man, it remained intact—he gave this to another. The depth and power of the individuality of this great Initiate made this possible, and this is why the astral body of Zarathustra persisted. Similarly his etheric body remained also intact.

According to occult investigation, one of these pupils, the one who had received knowledge concerning the mystery of Space, of all that fills space contemporaneously, reincarnated as that personality known to history as Thoth, or Hermes of the Egyptians. Hermes had not only to establish in himself what he had received from Zarathustra in an earlier incarnation, but he had to establish it more firmly; this he was able to do in the Holy Mysteries, because he had received into himself the astral sheath of the great Initiate. Permeated by the teaching of Zarathustra, and filled by his astral nature, the individuality of this pupil was born again as Hermes, the inaugurator of the civilization of Egypt. We have, therefore, a direct member or principle of the being of Zarathustra in the Egyptian Hermes. With this principle, and with what he had brought with him of the teaching of Zarathustra, Hermes was able to give the impulse for all that was best and of greatest moment in Egyptian civilization. Naturally, a suitable race was necessary in order that the work of the messenger of Zarathustra might be effective. A race promising a fruitful soil for the development of this work could only be found among those Atlantean wanderers who had taken the more southern way and had settled in East Africa and had retained much of their old clairvoyance. The essential soul-nature of this race was quick to receive the wisdom of Hermes, and in this way Egyptian civilization arose. It was a very special type of civilization. You must try to realize how all that is included in the mysteries of contemporaneous things, of that which exists side by side in space, was contained in the wisdom of Hermes—all this had been entrusted to him as a precious gift from Zarathustra, so that in his own being Hermes possessed the most important teachings that Zarathustra had to impart.

It has often been stated that the most characteristic teaching of Zarathustra referred to the external sunlight and the external physical light-body of the Sun as the outer sheath of an exalted Spiritual Being. What was confided to Hermes was the mystery of that which as Being, underlies all Nature, all space and everything contemporaneous, yet which advances ever in time from epoch to epoch, and reveals itself in certain epochs Hermes knew what comes from the Sun, and what through the Sun continues to develop. This knowledge he implanted in the souls of the Egyptians, who retained a memory of the Atlantean Sun-Mysteries, and were, therefore, specially adapted to receive his teachings. All this, within the advancing line of evolution, was in the soul of Hermes, as well as in all those souls ripe to absorb his wisdom.

The mission of the second of Zarathustra's pupils was very different. Upon him had been bestowed the secrets of the passing of Time. He had to experience within himself the conflict between the old and the new, how in evolution something was active as opposition, as polarity. As already stated this pupil had also received part of the being of Zarathustra; on reincarnating he could therefore receive the sacrifice of Zarathustra.

Thus, while the individuality of Zarathustra remained intact, his sheaths were separated from him, they endured and were not dispersed for they were held together by such a mighty individual. This second pupil—to whom was imparted the wisdom concerning Time in contradistinction to that concerning Space—received at a specific moment of his reincarnated existence the etheric body of Zarathustra, which had been sacrificed in the same way s his astral body. This reborn pupil was none other than Moses. Moses received in quite early childhood the fully preserved etheric body of Zarathustra.

Our religious documents which are really founded on occultism contain all this, though in a veiled form. In them we find suggestions of the secrets revealed through occult investigation. As Moses was the reincarnated pupil of Zarathustra and had received his etheric body, something quite unusual had to take place in him. This is recorded in the Scriptures. Before he could receive the ordinary impressions from his surroundings like another human being, before he could descend with his individuality so as to receive impressions from the external world, there had to percolate into his being that which he was to receive as a marvellous inheritance from Zarathustra. This fact is expressed in the symbolic legend which relates that Moses was placed in a casket and lowered to the river. This should be accepted as indicating a remarkable initiation.

Initiation consists in a man being withdrawn from the world for a certain time, during which he slowly absorbs what has been given to him. While thus withdrawn, Moses was able to be united at the right moment with the etheric body of Zarathustra that had been preserved for this purpose. The wonderful wisdom concerning Time, the gift of Zarathustra in an earlier period, was then able to blossom within him; he gave this wisdom to his people in a series of pictures fitted to their understanding. Hence from Moses we have those mighty pictures of Genesis, those imaginations dealing with the wisdom of Time, of the ages as they succeed one another, received from Zarathustra. This was a re-born knowledge—a re-born wisdom—received by him, and was firmly established in his inner nature since he had received the etheric sheath of Zarathustra himself.

An initiate is not only needed as inaugurator of a new civilization for the advancement of the human race, but he must have a suitable medium in which to work, a race fitted to receive the germ of this new civilization. To understand the folk-soul, the folk-germ in which what had been received by Moses from Zarathustra was to be planted, it would be well to consider more exactly the peculiar wisdom of Moses.

In a former incarnation, Moses as Zarathustra's pupil had received the wisdom concerning Time, and that secret which we referred to as the ‘opposition between the earlier and the later’ that arises in every age. If the wisdom of Moses was to enter human evolution it had to be established as a polarity to that other wisdom, already in existence, the wisdom of Hermes. And this took place.

Hermes had received direct Sun-wisdom from Zarathustra: that is to say, through his astral body he had gained knowledge of the Being dwelling mysteriously within the outer physical sheath of Light—the body of the sun. With Moses it was otherwise. Moses, whose wisdom was connected with the denser etheric body, received the Sun-wisdom less directly. His was not that wisdom which looks up to the Sun asking: “Does not everything come forth from the Being of the Sun?”; but he was the recipient of a contrasting knowledge, the wisdom that understood earthly things, things that had become dense and fixed, and appeared old, though not degenerate—Earth-wisdom in contrast to direct Sun-wisdom. Earth-wisdom was indirect Sun-wisdom. It derived its life from the Sun, yet was of the Earth. Moses declared the mystery of the Earth's origin, of the formation of the solid Earth after the withdrawal of the Sun, and told how man evolved on it. This is revealed to our inward, not our outward, vision; and now we see how and why the teaching of Hermes presents such a vivid contrast to that of Moses.

There are certain people to-day who consider all such problems on the principle that in the night all cows are grey. They can only see resemblances, and are enchanted when, for instance, some likeness between the Hermetic and Mosaic teachings is discovered; here they find a trinity, there a trinity, there a quaternary, and here a quaternary. This leads nowhere. It is like someone training a botanist by pointing out the likeness between a rose and a carnation, but omitting the differences. Through Spiritual Science we learn in what way both beings and forms of knowledge differ. The wisdom of Moses was quite different from that of Hermes, even though both proceeded from Zarathustra. As unity divides and manifests itself in various ways, so Zarathustra imparted to his two pupils revelations of a very different kind.

When we are steeped in the influences streaming from the wisdom of Hermes, we become aware of all that fills the world with Light, of the origin of the world, and how this was affected by the Light; but we do not learn from him how, in all development, the earlier influences the later; how this brings about strife between past and present, and the opposition of Light to Darkness. Earthly wisdom, the wisdom concerning the development of the Earth and of man after the separation from the Sun, is nowhere to be found in the teaching of Hermes. But it was the special mission of Moses to make the development of the Earth, after its separation from the Sun, comprehensible to man. Hermes brought us Sun-wisdom; Moses Earth-wisdom. Moses, with his Zarathustrian inheritance, taught of the dawn of earthly existence and of the earthly evolution of man. He starts from the things of earth, but these earthly things, though separated from the sun, still contained, if weakened, something of the nature of the sun. Therefore the Earth-wisdom of Moses had to encounter the Sun-wisdom of Hermes in concrete existence. These two streams of wisdom had to meet. This is shown most wonderfully in the initiation of Moses in Egypt, where he came in contact with the Hermes-wisdom. In the birth of Moses in Egypt, in the sojourning of his people there, in the conflict between them and the Egyptians, who were the people of Hermes, is seen the reflection in external life of the clashing of the Earth-wisdom with the Sun-wisdom. Both had originated with Zarathustra, and though they followed entirely different courses of evolution they had to work together and to coincide.

There is a certain kind of knowledge, one closely connected with the profound secrets of human and earthly existence, which in accordance with the methods of the Mysteries, is always expressed in a special way. This was referred to in Munich in the lectures on the Biblical Secrets of Creation. There it was shown how unusually difficult it is to speak in ordinary language of such mighty truths, truths comprising not only the deepest mysteries of man but of the universe. We are often hampered by words, for they have their precise meaning determined by long usage; and when endeavouring to express the mighty facts revealed inwardly to the soul, we often find ourselves in conflict with the feeble instrument of speech which is really in a certain respect so extraordinarily inadequate.

The greatest triviality of the newer culture in general that has been uttered in the course of the nineteenth century, is that every truth can be expressed simply, and that the mode of expression is the criterion of whether someone possesses this truth or not. Such a statement only shows that those who use it are not in possession of absolute truth, but only of those truths which, in the course of centuries, have been communicated in words, the form of which they only alter a little. For such people words suffice: they are quite unaware of the great struggle which must sometimes be carried on with words. This struggle becomes apparent whenever the soul strives to express what is grand and exalted. I spoke in Munich of how in the Rosicrucian Mystery Drama, The Portal of Initiation, at the end of the scene in the room provided for meditation, there was for me a very great difficulty with language. What the Hierophant had to say to the pupil could only be expressed in a most restricted way through the feeble instrument of speech.

Within the Holy Mysteries, however, the most profound secrets had to be expressed. There the inadequacy of speech to call up the images of reality was felt most strongly. Hence the age-long effort in the Mysteries to find other means to express the inner experiences of the soul. These feeble means of expression—words—have for centuries been reserved for external intercourse, but the pictures and images seen when men turned their gaze towards the heavenly spaces have proved far more suitable. The constellations, the rising of a star at a certain time, the occultation of a certain star by another at a definite time—such pictures were used to express experiences within the human soul.

Let us suppose that someone desired to say that a great event was to take place at a certain time, because at that particular moment a human soul would be sufficiently ripe to receive a great experience and to pass this on to his people; or that some nation, or a large part of mankind, having reached a certain high stage of ripeness, a certain individuality could appear among them, coming perhaps from a quite other direction. In such a case the climax of development of the individual would coincide with the highest point of development of the folk-soul. No words are sufficiently exalted to convey the full meaning of such an event. Therefore it was expressed in this wise: The coincidence of the climax of power of an individual, with the climax of power of a folk-soul, is as when the sun is in the constellation of Leo and thence sends us its light. The constellation of the Lion is here chosen to represent, in a pictorial way, something that had to be expressed as taking place with utmost power in human evolution. What could be seen thus outwardly in cosmic space was used as a means of expressing something taking place in humanity. Certain expressions found in human history have arisen in this way; they are taken from the movements of the heavenly bodies, and are the method used to denote spiritual facts.

When it is stated, for example, that the sun is in the sign of Leo, or that through some event in the heavens, such as an eclipse of the sun by a certain constellation, a fact in human evolution is symbolically expressed, it may very well happen that people reverse this and suppose, in a trivial way, that all the events relating to mankind's history were myths clothed in the motions of the stars; whereas the truth is that incidents in the life of humanity were expressed by means of images taken from the constellations.

This connection with the cosmos ought to fill us with certain feelings of reverence towards all we are told concerning the great events of human evolution, when we find these expressed in images taken from cosmic existence. But there is, nevertheless, an intimate connection between the existence of the whole cosmos and the life of man this is, that events taking place on earth are a reflection of cosmic events. Thus the meeting of the Sun-wisdom of Hermes with the Earth-wisdom of Moses in Egypt is, in a certain way, a reflection of cosmic activities. Picture to yourselves that certain forces streaming from the sun to the earth meet others streaming from the earth into cosmic space. It is not a matter of indifference where these two forces meet; but according as the meeting be near or far, the result of the outgoing and incoming forces is different.

Now the contact of the wisdom of Hermes with that of Moses was pictured in the Mysteries of ancient Egypt as representing something that, according also to Spiritual Science, had previously taken place in the cosmos. We know that early in evolution the sun separated from the earth, leaving the moon for a period within the earth. Later a part of this globe separate from the earth, and remained as the present moon. Thus the earth sent a portion of itself; as moon, into universal space, towards the sun. We may think of the remarkable occurrence of the meeting of the Earth-wisdom of Moses with the Sun-wisdom of Hermes as comparable with this streaming forth of the Earth-forces towards the sun. One might say: The wisdom of Moses, in its further course, after separating from the Sun-wisdom of Zarathustra, developed as the wisdom of the earth and of men in such a way that it drew again towards the sun, absorbing and filling itself with direct solar wisdom. The earth was destined to receive direct Sun-wisdom only to a certain extent, then to develop further alone and independently. The wisdom of Moses, therefore, only remained in Egypt until it had absorbed sufficient for its needs. Then came the Exodus of the children of Israel from Egypt, in order that the Sun-wisdom taken up by the Earth-wisdom might be assimilated and brought to greater self-dependence.

The wisdom of Moses was two-fold. One part was developed under the sheltering wing of the Hermes-wisdom which it continually absorbed from every side, then, after the exodus from Egypt, it separated from this development, continued further within itself, and later passed through three stages. Towards what should this wisdom evolve? What is its task? Its ultimate task was to find its way back from the earth to the sun. It had become earthly wisdom. Moses was born with all he inherited from Zarathustra, as a wise man of earth. He was to find the way back, and he sought it in three stages, the first being that in which he absorbed the wisdom of Hermes. These stages are again best expressed in the images drawn from cosmic events. When what takes place upon the earth streams back in space from the earth towards the sun, it first encounters what is of the nature of Mercury (in ordinary astronomy the Mercury of astronomy is the Venus of Occult Science), then that of Venus, and ultimately that which is of the nature of the sun. The soul of Moses had to develop his Zarathustrian inheritance in inner experiences in such a way that he might return and find once more what appertained to the Sun. In order to do this he had to attain a certain degree of development. The wisdom Moses had implanted in western culture had to develop according to the way he gave it to his people. The wisdom he had gained from Hermes and which came to him like the direct rays of the sun, he had to develop anew, and reflect it back again in a changed form, after he had absorbed some part of it.

Now we are told that Hermes, who was later called ‘Mercury,’ brought to his people science and art, that is, external knowledge and art, in a form suitable to them. But it was in a different and almost opposite way that the wisdom of Moses attained to the Hermes-Mercury standpoint. Moses had himself to develop the wisdom of Hermes further. This is shown in the progress of the Hebrew people up to the age and reign of David. David, who is presented to us as the royal singer of Psalms and holy prophet, who as a man of God worked both as warrior and harpist, is the Hermes, or Mercury, of the Hebrew people. That stream of the Hebrew folk had now so far evolved that it had developed an independent form of Hermetic or Mercury wisdom. At the time of David the wisdom received from Hermes had reached the Mercury sphere, or Mercury stage, on its return journey. It then continued to the region of Venus. This came to pass for the Hebrews when the Moses-wisdom, or rather that version of it which had endured as his wisdom for hundreds of years, had to unite with an entirely different element, with a stream issuing from another direction.

Just as that which streams back in space from the earth towards the sun encounters Venus, so the wisdom of Moses encountered an Asiatic wisdom that came from another direction during the Babylonian Captivity. The Moses-wisdom came in touch with the weakened form of another wisdom in the Mysteries of Babylon and Chaldea. Like a wanderer who, having acquired knowledge of the earth, leaves it for the Mercury sphere, and thence passes on to Venus desirous of experiencing the sunlight as it is felt there, so the Moses-wisdom, having received the direct Sun-wisdom from the holy teachings of Zarathustra, passed over in a weakened form to the mystery schools of Chaldea and Babylon. The wisdom of Moses experienced this weakening during the Babylonian captivity, where it united with all that had penetrated into the lands of the Tigris and Euphrates. Here something else happened.

In the sanctuaries which the wise men among the Hebrews were obliged to frequent during their captivity, the wisdom of Moses was directly impregnated with the qualities of the Sun-wisdom. For at this time Zarathustra was himself incarnated and taught in the mystery schools of the Tigris and Euphrates, and was known to the learned among the Hebrews. He who had relinquished part of his wisdom so that he might receive it back again, was himself teaching at this time. He had frequently reincarnated, and in this incarnation in which he was known as Zarathos or Nazarathos, he taught the captive Jews in Babylon.

Thus in the course of its further progress, the wisdom of Moses came in touch with what Zarathustra had himself become after he had withdrawn from the more distant Mystery Sanctuaries and had entered those of Asia Minor. Here he became the teacher of the initiate Chaldean disciples, as well as teacher of the Hebrews. They now received a fructification of their Mosaic wisdom by a stream they were now fitter to encounter, because what had once been given to their ancestor Moses by Zarathustra came to them now directly from himself, in his incarnation as Zarathos or Nazarathos. This was the destiny through which Mosaic wisdom passed. Originally it sprang from Zarathustra, but was then transplanted into an alien land. It was as if a Sun-being with bandaged eyes had been brought down to earth, and now, on its backward journey, had to seek all it had lost. Such a wanderer was Moses, the pupil of Zarathustra. His destiny had placed him within Egyptian civilization, so that all the wisdom given him at one time by Zarathustra might be quickened and illuminated in his inner being. He was cut off, as it were, from the sun on the fields of earth, where unaware of the source of his illumination he moved unconsciously towards what once was sun. In Egypt he was attracted towards the wisdom of Hermes, which brought to him direct Zarathustra-wisdom, not an indirect reflection like his own. After absorbing sufficiently of this, the wisdom of Moses continued its development in a more direct way. Having founded an Hermetic wisdom at the time of David, and a science and art of its own, it turned again towards the sun from which it had originally come forth, though in a way that had at first to appear veiled.

In the ancient Babylonian schools of learning where, among others, Zarathustra taught Pythagoras, his teaching was restricted by the type of physical body of the period. If Zarathustra was to give full expression to his Sun-nature through a form suited to those times, as he was able to do in that earlier incarnation when he had passed it on to Moses and Hermes, he would require a bodily instrument fitted to the new age. Restricted by a body such as could be produced in ancient Babylonia, he was only able to convey such wisdom as he passed on to Pythagoras, to the learned Hebrews and wise men of Chaldea and Babylon, who in the sixth century before Christ, were ready and able to hear it. In respect of this teaching it was exactly as if the sunlight were first taken up by Venus and prevented from shining directly on the earth; as if his teaching could not shine with its original splendour but only in a weakened form. Before the Sun-wisdom of Zarathustra could shine forth once more in its pristine power, a body suited to him must first be provided, and in a very special way. This will now be described.

In the first lecture, we told of the three folk-souls of Asia, the Indian in the South, the Iranian, and the Turanian to the North, and we described the connection of these with the Atlantean migrations into Asia. Where the northern stream which came from Atlantis met the southern stream which passed through Africa, an extraordinary mixture of races occurred. From this admixture a race developed from which later the Hebrew people sprang.

Something unusual occurred in the development of these ancestors of the Hebrews. The lower astral-etheric clairvoyance which had become so decadent among certain races because it was the last phase of external perception, had in those people who developed into the Hebrew race, turned inwards and manifested as an organizing force. That which we have described as being externally decadent, as having remained behind in certain races as a last phase of declining clairvoyance, and as being permeated somewhat by the Ahrimanic element, had progressed among the Hebrews in the right direction by becoming an actively organizing force within the human body. Through this, bodies became more perfect. What among the Turanians was decadent worked constructively and progressively in the Hebrews. Within the physical nature of the Hebrews, as propagated from generation to generation in the close bond of blood relationship, all those forces were active which had accomplished their mission in developing external sight. These were no longer required to provide external sight, so could enter on another sphere of action, thus passing into their right element. That which had given to the Atlantean the power to gaze spiritually into space and into spiritual realms, that had run wild in the Turanians, appearing as a last relic of clairvoyance—all this force worked inwardly in the little Hebrew nation. What in the Atlantean had been spiritual and divine, worked inwardly in the Hebrew race to form certain organs. It worked constructively in the body and could therefore flash forth in the blood of this people as and inward divine consciousness. With the Hebrew people it was if all the Atlantean had seen when directing his clairvoyant vision into space was turned inwards, as if it constructed inwardly an organ of consciousness which was the Jahve-consciousness—the consciousness of God within him. This people felt the God Who filled all space to be united with their blood, felt they were filled, impregnated with Him, and that He lived in the pulsation of their blood.

As in the last lecture we contrasted the Iranians and the Turanians we have now considered the Turanians and the Hebrews, and have seen that what in its further progress and in its essence had become decadent in the Turanians, pulsated later in the blood of the Hebrew people. All that the Atlantean had seen, lived on in the Hebrew as an inward feeling, and could be comprised in a single word: Jahve or Jehovah. The consciousness of God lived throughout the generations of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob concentrated as into a single point, invisible but inwardly felt. The God Who had revealed Himself to the Atlantean clairvoyance behind all living things was now the God dwelling in the blood of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and led the generations of their race from destiny to destiny. The outward had thus become inward it was experienced, no longer seen; it was no longer described by different names, but by one single name ‘I am the I am!’ It had taken on an entirely different form. Whereas for the Atlantean this was found where he was not—in the external world—it was now found by man in the centre of his own being; in his ego; he was conscious of it in the blood that coursed through the generations. The mighty God of the Universe had now become the God of the Hebrews; the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and flowed through the generations as the blood of the race.

It was in this way that the race was founded whose special inner mission for humanity we shall consider in the next lecture. We have thus far only been able to indicate the very earliest stage of the composition of the blood of this people, in which was concentrated everything that in the age of ancient Atlantis, humanity had allowed to be impressed upon it from without. We shall see later what mysteries were fulfilled in that which had here its beginning, and shall learn to recognize the peculiar nature of that people from which Zarathustra could take his body to become the being we call Jesus of Nazareth.

• 1. In a footnote to this lecture the reader is recommended to study these early lectures in conjunction with the author's lectures on St. Luke, in order to understand the events in the life of Christ Jesus.

[ 1 ] We saw yesterday how the facts of the Cosmos proceed from the spiritual life of Beings who stand above man. Especially such a phenomenon as the one we introduced towards the end of our last lecture, the fight in heaven, which has left, so to speak, so many ‘corpses’ on the field of battle between Jupiter and Mars, which as planetoids are still being discovered by physical science in ever-increasing numbers; such a phenomenon must be of particular importance to us, and we shall have to return to it again: We shall see how this event is also reflected in certain processes of the earth's evolution, and how precisely in the beginning of the Bhagavad Gita we find the earthly reflection of this fight in heaven.

[ 2 ] But to-day we shall continue our studies so as to describe, though in a sketchy way, those other beings of the spiritual Hierarchies, whom we have indicated already, but whom yesterday we omitted. These are the Beings who, counting upwards, stand nearest to man, and are called in Christian Esotericism: Angels, Archangels, Primeval Beginnings or Primeval Forces; also Angeloi, Archangeloi, and Archai. In theosophical literature the Archangels are also called Spirits of Fire, and the primeval Beginnings, spirits of Personality.

[ 3 ] These Beings who stand, as it were, in between man and those others to whom we referred yesterday as reaching up to Jupiter, Mars, etc., naturally stand in a nearer relation to man on the earth itself. First we have the Angels or Angeloi. They passed through their human stage during the evolution of the ancient Moon, and are fundamentally speaking, only as far on during our present earth evolution as man will be during the Jupiter evolution. They stand one stage higher than man. What is the task of these Beings? Their task can be realised when we take into account the development of man upon earth.

[ 4 ] Man develops from incarnation to incarnation. Our human evolution as it is now, reaches back through the ancient Atlantean time, through the Lemurian time and really begins in the ancient Lemurian time. This evolution through all these incarnations will continue for a long time yet, till towards the end of earthly evolution when other forms of human development will have come in. Now you know that what we call the eternal nucleus or kernel of the human being, the individuality, continues from incarnation to incarnation. But you also know that the greater number of people have to-day no recollection, no consciousness, as yet of their incarnations, and men do not as yet remember what happened to them during their former incarnations. Only those who have developed a certain degree of clairvoyance can look at their past incarnations.

[ 5 ] What sequence would there be between a man's incarnations upon earth when he cannot remember his former incarnations, if certain beings were not there to connect the separate incarnations, and watch the progress of the individual from one incarnation to the other? We have to assign one of these Beings to each man, a being who, being one stage higher, can lead the individuality over from one incarnation to the other. These are not the beings who rule Karma [but] preserve the memory from one incarnation to the other, so long as the man is not himself aware of it. These Beings are the Angels. Each man is a personality in each incarnation, and over each man a being watches, who has a consciousness which passes from one incarnation to the other. This makes it possible that in certain inferior grades of initiation, man is able, even if he does not himself know anything about his past incarnations, to ask his Angel about them. This is quite possible for certain lower degrees of initiation. The Beings who, as Angels, are one stage higher than men, have to keep watch over the whole human thread of life, which is spun for each single individuality from one incarnation to another.

Now, we pass on to the next group of Beings, to the Archangels — Archangeloi or Fire Spirits. These do not occupy themselves with separate men, with the single individual, but have a wider task; they bring single lives into harmonious order with the life of larger human groups, as, for instance, nations, races, etc. Within our earth's evolution the Archangels’ task is to bring into certain harmonious relationship each single soul with the national or race-soul. For those who penetrate into spiritual knowledge, the souls of races are something quite different from what they are for the lovers of the abstract in the science of to-day, or for present day culture in general. On a certain territory, (let us take Germany, France or Italy) live so and so many people, and because the physical eye sees only so many external human forms, such lovers of the abstract can imagine what is called the Soul of a nation or Spirit of a nation only as a comprehensive general idea of a nation. For the lover of abstractions the separate man only is real, not the soul of the nation, not the spirit of the nation. For one who truly sees into the inner working of spiritual life, that which is called the nation's soul or spirit, is a reality. In the soul of a nation there lives and weaves what we call a fire-spirit or an Archangel; he regulates, so to speak, the relation between separate men and the nation or races as a whole

[ 6 ] Then we rise to those beings whom we designate the Spirits of Personality, primeval beginnings, primeval forces, or Archai. These are still loftier Beings, who have a still higher task in the continuity of human existence. Fundamentally speaking, they regulate the earthly relations of whole human generations on earth, and they live in such a way that, on the waves of time, from epoch to epoch, they transform themselves at certain definite periods, they assume other spiritual bodies. Here again, you all know something of that which for the lovers of the abstract, is merely an idea, but which is a reality for those who can look into actual spiritual existence; it is that which is given a truly ugly name — the spirit of the time. You have here to do with that which represents the meaning and the mission of an epoch of humanity; picture to yourselves that we could describe the meaning and the mission of, for instance, the first thousands of years immediately after the Atlantean catastrophe. This ‘Spirit of the Age’ comprises something which reaches beyond single nations, beyond single races. Such a spirit is not limited to this or that nation, it goes beyond the limits of nations. That which one really calls a ‘Zeitgeist’ or Spirit of an epoch is the spiritual body of the Archai or the Primeval Beginnings or Spirits of Personality. It is to these Spirits of Personality that one has to ascribe the fact that within certain epochs, certain definite personalities appear on our earth. You understand, do you not, that earthly tasks have to be solved by earthly personalities; in a definite epoch, some epoch-making personality has had to appear. A strange muddle would come into the evolution of the earth if it were all left to chance, and Luther or Charlemagne were placed within any epoch, no matter which. This must be thought out first, the connexion with the whole evolution of humanity over the whole earth, has to be thought out; the right soul has to appear in harmony with the meaning of the whole earth's development. This is regulated by the Spirits of Personality, the Archai or primeval origins.

[ 7 ] And when we get beyond the Archai, we reach to those Beings whom we touched on yesterday, the so called Powers, — Exusiai, whom we also call the Spirits of Form. Here we have to do with tasks that reach beyond the earth. We differentiate in the course of human development a Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth, Jupiter, Venus, and Vulcan evolution. We have now seen how all that happens within the earth itself is regulated by the Angels as regards the individual men, by Archangels as regards the relation between individuals and the large masses of humanity, and by the Spirits of Personality for the whole development of man, from the Lemurian period up to the period when man will again be so largely spiritualised that he will hardly belong to the earth. But something else has yet to be regulated. Humanity will have to be guided from one planetary condition to another. Spiritual Beings must also exist, whose care it is during the whole earth evolution to see that when that evolution will have come to an end, humanity may pass in the right manner through a Pralaya and find its way to the next goal, to the Jupiter goal. These are the Powers or Spirits of Form; yesterday we characterised their task from above downwards, now we characterise them from below upwards. The spirits whose care it is to see that the whole of humanity should be led from one planetary condition to another, are the Powers, Exusiai or Spirits of Form.

[ 8 ] We must now make a certain disclosure about the Cosmic position of these Beings. In spiritual science, in that which it is desired to continue to-day in Anthroposophy, and which is at bottom [of] the Wisdom of the Mysteries, these different Beings of the heavenly Hierarchies have always been spoken of as we have spoken of them to-day. We heard yesterday that the present Saturn represents the limit up to which reached the action of the Thrones or Spirits of Will; Jupiter, the limit up to which the Dominions, Spirits of Wisdom, acted; and Mars, the boundary line up to which reached the influence of the Mights, Dynamis or Virtutes, or Spirits of Motion.

[ 9 ] We may now characterise in a similar way how the Beings we named to-day divided specially the realms over which they held sway within our solar system. We must here touch on something which will perhaps call forth a certain amazement, even in you, who are already in a certain way schooled Anthroposophists, but which is absolutely in accordance with the truth. In the school curriculum of the present day, it is indicated that once upon a time, in grey antiquity, before Copernicus, there had been a conception of our Solar system which is known as the Ptolemaic System. People then believed that the earth stood in the centre of our system, and that the planets coursed round it, as they appear to do to our ordinary physical sight. Since Copernicus one knows — at least so people say — what people did not know formerly, that the Sun stands in the middle and that the planets circle around it, in their respective ellipses. But that which ought to be made quite clear and precise to people by such a description of our solar system, if one sincerely and honestly expounds it in the present day sense, is still something quite different. One ought to say: up to Copernicus, people knew only certain forms of movement in Universal space, and according to these, they judged how it could be with our solar system. What Copernicus did is not that he, so to speak, took a chair and gazed into space to see how the sun stands in some point of a circle or ellipse and how the planets turn around it; but he made a calculation, and this calculation explains what is seen in a simpler way than the former calculation did. The Copernican world system is nothing but the result, the product, of thought. [ 10 ] Let us look at it once from the point of view of the Ptolemaic. Let us consider that the Sun stands in the middle, let us calculate where the places of the planets must be, and then search whether it coincides with experience. Certainly, for mere physical observation, it coincides at first completely. Certainly one has built upon it all sorts of world systems, the Kant-Laplace system, for instance; but there one reaches a point where there were continual discoveries, a point which is no more scientifically quite honest. For later on, by purely physical observation, two planets have been added to it — we have not touched on them yet, but later we will show what they signify for our system — these are Uranus and Neptune. When one describes this world system one certainly should turn people's attention to the fact that in reality these two planets Uranus and Neptune, very much impair the truth of the calculation. [ 11 ] If one accepts the Kant-Laplace system, then, according to it, Uranus and Neptune should move with their moons as the other moons move around the other planets. But they do not; we even have among those outer planets, these two lately discovered planets, one which behaves in a very strange way. In reality, if the Kant-Laplace system is correct, somebody must, after having split off the rest of the planets, [have] turned the axis in such a way that it revolved at 90°, for its course is different from that of the other planets. These two differ greatly from the other planets of our solar systems. We shall see later how it is with them, but now we simply call attention to the fact that with the Copernican system we have only to do with a calculation, with something established as an hypothesis, as an assumption, at a time when man had gone completely adrift from the perception of spiritual co-relations and of what lies spiritually at the foundation of external happenings. But the old Ptolemaic system is not merely a physical system, it is one which was still derived from spiritual observation, when one knew that planets are boundary marks for certain realms where the higher Beings held sway. We must design our whole solar planetary system in a different way if we are to characterise these realms of control correctly. I shall draw this planetary system for you as it was expounded in the Mystery Schools of Zarathustra. We could just as well turn to other Mysteries for counsel, but we shall specially select this system for the explanation of our solar system with its planets, in respect of the spiritual Beings who are active within.

[ 12 ] In the System of Zarathustra something was accepted which differs from our observation of the heavens. You know that one can observe a certain progress of the Sun—call it apparent or otherwise: through the Zodiac during the course of long years. It is generally said—and it is correct—that from about the year 270 B.C. the sun in spring rose at the first point of spring in the Zodiacal sign of Pisces. But every year the sun advanced a little further, so that in the course of long, long epochs of time, it traverses, as regards its point of rising through the whole of one Zodiacal sign. Before 270 B.C. it did not rise in Pisces but in Aries, with its rising point in spring-time, it travelled through the whole sign of Aries during 2150 years. Before that, Taurus had been the Zodiacal constellation in the spring during the previous period of 2150 years. So, if we go back to five or six thousand years B.C., we find the spring-point in the Zodiacal sign of Gemini. That was the time in which the Mystery Schools of Zarathustra flourished.¹

Far back into hoary antiquity these Schools flourished and, when speaking of the appearance of the heavens, they calculated everything according to the constellation of Gemini, so that if we wanted to draw the Zodiac in the way we characterised it yesterday, we should have to place the constellation of Gemini here at the top. Then one would have to draw, in direct connection with the Zodiac, that which bounds the realm of the Thrones or Spirits of Will, the boundary of which is Saturn. Then we come to the boundary limit of the realm of those spiritual Beings whom we call the Spirits of Wisdom — the utmost boundary being Jupiter. Then we reach the limit of the realm of the Spirits of Motion of which the limit is Mars. We have seen that between these lies the battlefield which the fight in Heaven has left behind. Now if we want to divide the realms of power correctly, we must draw the boundary line of the Sun. Thus, just as we draw Mars as the boundary point up to which is the domain ruled by the Mights and Spirits of Motion, we must draw the Sun itself as marking the limit to which the Lordship of the Powers or the Spirits of Form extends. And then we come to the boundary which we designate with the sign of Venus. The realm of the Spirits of Personality or Archai reaches to Venus. Next we come to the boundary of the realm, the limit of which is marked by the sign of Mercury, and is the realm of those Beings, whom we call Archangels or Fire Spirits. And now we come very near the earth. We can now designate the realm which has the Moon for a landmark, and here we draw the earth.

[ 13 ] You must look on the earth as the Starting Point surrounded by a region under the dominion of certain Beings which reaches to the Moon. Then comes a region extending as far as Mercury, then one extending to Venus, and then one to the Sun.

You may be astonished at the sequence in which I have placed the planets. When the earth is here, and the Sun there, you would have thought that I should draw Mercury in the vicinity of the Sun, and Venus here. But no! For these Planets have had their names interchanged, in later Astronomy. That which is called Mercury to-day was called Venus in all ancient teachings, and that which is called Venus was called Mercury. Thus, note it well, one does not understand the ancient writings when one takes that which in them is called Venus or Mercury for the Venus or Mercury of the present day. That which is said about Venus has to be applied to the Mercury of to-day, and what is said about Mercury to Venus. For those two designations were later interchanged. On the occasion when man turned the world system topsy-turvy, when the earth was deprived of its central position, the perspective was not only changed, but the designations of Mercury and Venus were also changed.

[ 14 ] Now you will very easily bring into harmony what is drawn here with the physical or Copernican theory. You need only think: here is ☉, the Sun; around it turns Venus; further around it circles Mercury. Then the Moon turns round the earth. Then Jupiter revolves around it, then Saturn. You must think of the physical movements of each planet revolving round the Sun; but you can imagine such a position when the earth ♁, so to say, stands here and the other planets have revolved so, that on their way they find themselves behind the Sun. Thus if I drew it, it would be so; we draw our usual physical system, we draw the Sun as the one burning point, and let Venus, Mercury and the Earth with her Moon revolve round it. These are Earth, Venus, Mercury, according to the ancient designation. The next following is Mars, then after the Planetoids comes Jupiter, then Saturn. Now imagine it so that whilst ♁, the earth stands below, and Mercury and Venus follow, that then Mars ♂, stands there above, Jupiter ♃, there, and so on. Now you have the Sun, and Mercury, and the Venus of to-day ♀, here. It is plausible, that if those planets can take all sort of positions towards each other, they might also have once stood thus. This is how the Copernican system is drawn, only a point of time is chosen, when the Earth, Mercury and Venus are on the one side of the Sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, the other planets, on its other side.

This is what I have drawn, and nothing else. Here are Earth, Mercury, Venus, on the one side, and on the other side, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. Thus, we have to do only with a change of perspective. This system is quite possible but only when this constellation was there. It is a fact that it was there at a certain epoch, when Gemini was above Saturn. Then one could observe clairvoyantly with particular exactness the connections between the regions in which the Spiritual Hierarchies hold sway. It was then revealed that around the Earth, up to the Moon, was the sphere of the Angels. In fact when one does not use the physical system as a foundation, one gets around the earth up to the Moon, the sphere of the Angels, up to Mercury the sphere of the Archangels, up to Venus that of the Archai or Spirits of Personality, and lastly up to the Sun is the realm of the Exusiai or Spirits of Form. Then comes the sphere — as I characterised it yesterday — of the Virtutes or Mights, then the sphere of the Dominions, and then that of the Thrones.

[ 15 ] When one speaks of the Copernican and of the Ptolemaic systems, one must have it clear in one's mind that in the Ptolemaic system something still remains of the constellation of ruling Spirits, and there the Earth must be taken as the starting point of the perspective. A future will come when this world system will again be the correct one; because Man will again know about the Spiritual World. It is to be hoped that men will be then less fanatical than they are to-day

To day, it is said: ‘Before Copernicus, people all talked nonsense, they all had a primitive world system. Since Copernicus we at last know what is right. All else is false, and because the Copernican system is the right one it will be taught in all ages, even if it were for millions of years.’ This is more or less the talk of the day. There hardly ever existed such superstitious folk as are the modern astronomical theorists; and there hardly ever was such fanaticism as there is in this domain of science. It is to be hoped that future generations will be more tolerant and that they will say: ‘From the fifteenth or sixteenth century men ceased to be conscious of the existence of the spiritual world, and that one must have other perspectives in the spiritual worlds, that there, one must arrange the heavenly bodies into a different order than when one observes in a merely physical way.’ Formerly that was done, but the time came when men considered the order and regulation of the heavenly bodies only from the physical point of view. ‘We can do this also,’ will cry the men of the future, and from the sixteenth century onwards it was quite correct. ‘Men had for a time to overlook the spiritual world but then people bethought themselves again and recollected that there was a spiritual world, they then returned to the original spiritual perspective.’ It is to be hoped that the men of the future will comprehend that there also was once an astronomical Mythology, and will not look upon our times with the same disdain with which the men of the modern superstitions look upon their forefathers.

[ 16 ] We see that the Copernican system became different, simply because merely physical standpoints were taken into account in relation to it. Before that, in the Ptolemaic system, there were still remnants of a spiritual point of view. Only through taking into consideration the other system, can one form any idea of the rulership and the action of the spiritual Beings within our solar-planetary-system. We keep to physical conditions when we say: Up to the Moon the Angels exercise their power, up to Mercury the Archangels, to Venus the Spirits of Personality, up to the Sun the Powers, as far as to Mars the Mights. Then come the Beings we call the Dominions, and here lastly the Thrones. We need only draw in other lines to designate the physical system, then we have in these lines the limits of the realms of power of the Hierarchies. As regards spiritual activities it is not our Sun at all which stands in the centre of the system, but the earth. Therefore, all the ages which have regarded spiritual development as the most essential part, have said: Certainly the Sun is a far nobler heavenly body, Beings have evolved upon it who stand higher than man; but that with which evolution is concerned is man, who lives upon the earth. And when the Sun withdrew from the Earth, it did so in order that man should develop in the right way. If the Sun had remained united to the earth man could never have been able to progress at the right tempo. This was possible only because the Sun withdrew along with those Beings who could bear quite different conditions. It left the earth to itself, so to speak, so that man might find his tempo for his own development. [ 17 ] A world system grows into this or that according to the point of departure — the perspective chosen. If one asks, where is the centre of our world system, seeing in it only what the purely physical senses can observe, then it is found in the Copernican system. If one asks about the arrangement of our solar system as it depends on the regions ruled over by the spiritual Hierarchies, we must place the earth as its centre, we then get other boundary lines; the planets then become something quite different, they become limits for the region over which each spiritual Hierarchy holds sway.

[ 18 ] And now you will easily be able to see the correspondence between what has been just said about the spacial distribution of each sphere of influence, with that which has been said about the task and mission of each group of Beings.

The Beings who are nearest to the earth, who hold sway in the immediate surroundings of the earth up to the Moon, are the Angels. From that region they guide the life of each single Individual as it progresses from incarnation to incarnation.

But something more is needed in order that whole masses of nations may be distributed in accordance with their mission upon earth. A little thought will reveal that co-operation with the cosmos is here necessary. It really depends on cosmic, not earthly conditions, whether a nation has one sort of character or another. Only think how a race with different qualities, for instance in hair and in skin, acts otherwise than another race would do; here we have the interactions of conditions which must be regulated from heavenly spaces. This is done from a region whose lordship extends up to Mercury, to the boundary of the Archangel's sphere of action.

Further, when the whole of humanity as it develops upon earth has to be guided and led, this has to be effected from still wider heavenly spaces, from that which extends as far as to Venus by the Archai.

When further, the task of the earth itself has to be led and guided, this must be done from the centre of the whole system. [ 19 ] I have said that our humanity evolves through Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth, Jupiter, Venus, and Vulcan. The Beings of the spiritual Hierarchies, who direct the mission of humanity carrying it on from one planet to another, are the Powers, the Spirits of Form. They must dwell in a very special place, they are of such a nature that their sphere of power reaches up to the Sun. The Sun already existed as a special, a particular globe alongside the ancient Moon; it is now near the earth, in the future it will be near Jupiter. Its realm of power extends beyond the single planets. Therefore the existence of the Sun must be bound up with those spiritual Beings whose realm of action also extends beyond the single planets. The Sun is a very special and perfect globe for this reason, that up to it extends that realm of power which stretches beyond the single planets.

Thus you see that in reality we do not find the outer spheres or dwelling places of the Hierarchies so much on the single planets as in the regions which are limited by the orbits of the planets. If you think of the whole surrounding space from the earth up to the Moon, it is filled with Angel-activities; and if you think of the spheres from the earth to Mercury, it is filled by the activities of the Archangels, and so on.

[ 20 ] Thus we have to do with the spheres of space; and the planets are the landmarks for realms of the spacial activities of the higher Beings. We see that a continual, progressive line of perfection is to be sought from man upwards. Man himself is chained to the earth. That eternal part of him which goes from incarnation to incarnation is guided by Beings who are not bound only to the earth, but who traverse the surrounding air and that which lies beyond it up to the Moon. And so on further.

[ 21 ] Now, man has been engaged on his evolution upon earth since primeval times, and his relationship towards his whole evolution upon earth, is exactly similar to the relationship between the small child and the grown-up person. The latter teaches the small child. It is the same as regards the Hierarchies in the cosmos. Man, who is chained to the earth, only gradually struggles through to the knowledge he needs, to the cleverness which is necessary to him upon earth. Higher Beings must teach him. What must happen so that this object can be gained? In the beginnings of the earth's existence, Beings who were otherwise not bound to the earth, had to come down from higher spheres. And that really happened. Beings who otherwise needed only to live in the surroundings of the earth had to come down so as to communicate to men what they already knew as the older, more perfect members of the Hierarchies. They had to incarnate into human bodies, not for their own development, for they did not need it, just as a grown-up man does not study the A.B.C. for his own progress, but so as to teach it to these small children. Hence, we look back into old Atlantean and old Lemurian times, when Beings descended from the surrounding realms of the earth to which they belonged and incarnated in human bodies and became the teachers of mankind. These are Beings who belonged to higher Hierarchies, to Mercury and Venus. The sons of Venus and of Mercury descended from above and became the teachers of young humanity, so that these men, wandering in the midst of that young humanity, really represented Maya or illusion. There have been such men. Let us suppose, in order to explain it more precisely: some normally developed man of the Lemurian times met such a man. Externally he did not appear very different from others, but a spirit had entered into him whose realm extended as far as Mercury or Venus. Thus, the exterior of such a man represented in reality Maya, an illusion. He looked like other men, but he was something quite different: he was a son of Mercury, or of Venus. In the early dawn of humanity there were such apparitions. The sons of Mercury or of Venus came down and wandered among men, so that they now received within them the character of the Beings of Mercury and Venus. We have said that the Beings of Venus are the Spirits of Personality. Such Beings walked the earth as men, being outwardly limited to narrow human personalities, but who with their mighty power guided humanity. These were the great conditions of lordship in Lemurian times, when sons of Venus guided the whole of humanity. The sons of Mercury guided parts of humanity. They were as powerful as those are now whom we call spirits of nations or of race.

[ 22 ] Maya or illusion does not only exist in the world but also as regards men. A man as he stands before us can have an external appearance which is a truth, which corresponds precisely to his soul; or else it may be a Maya; he has in reality a task, which corresponds to the task of the sons of Mercury or of the sons of Venus. This is what is meant, when it is said, that fundamentally the great guiding individualities of ancient times as they walked the earth with their ordinary names, represented a Maya, and that was what H. P. Blavatsky meant when she pointed out that the Buddhas represented Maya. You can find this very word in the Secret Doctrine. These things are derived in every respect from the teachings of the holy Mysteries: we have only to understand them.

[ 23 ] We are now obliged to ask: How does it happen then that such a son of Venus descends to us? How does it happen that a Bodhisattva can live upon earth? The Being of a Bodhisattva, the Being of a son of Mercury, forms an important chapter in the evolution of our earth which has to do with its connexion to the Cosmos itself. Therefore, tomorrow we shall have to consider the nature of the sons of Mercury and of Venus, of the Bodhisattva or Dhyani-buddhas.

• 1. The following tabulation is not Steiner’s chronology, but common chronology as accepted by the astrologers.
  In order to make this paragraph of use to the ordinary student it has been necessary to depart from the version as it stood in the reported text. The difference lies in the calculation of the dates. The conclusion to be drawn is approximately the same. We know Christ came during Pisces, which began 270 B.C. Add 2150 years and we get the following:
  2420 B.C. as the beginning of Aries,
  4570 B.C. as the beginning of Taurus,
  6720 B C. as the beginning of Gemini.
  Since our year 1881 we are under Aquarius. In other words:
  Gemini begins 6720 B.C. down to 4570 B.C.
  Taurus begins 4570 B.C. down to 2420 B.C.
  Aries begins 2420 B.C. down to 270 B.C.
  Pisces begins 270 B.C. down to 1881 A.D.

The lectures I have now been giving under the impression of the presence of so many friends who have come here from different countries, have followed a certain main purpose. Out of karmic sources, I have tried to give a description which should lead, at any rate in a few broad outlines, to a spiritual understanding of the spiritual life of the present time. In a certain respect these lectures will after all form a totality, a single whole, which I will bring to a conclusion in my lecture next Tuesday.

To-day I will give an example to show how difficult it can be to carry into this present time a spiritual science which should really be suited to this time. I will not try to answer the question to-day by reference to external circumstances, but I will answer it by a karmic example. The individuality to whom this example will refer is not exactly typical. It is indeed a very peculiar individuality. Nevertheless this example will serve to show how difficult it is to carry into an earthly life in the present time, what every human being does after all bring with him from his former lives on earth. I mean what he brings with him in the sense that with the possible exception of his very last incarnation, he did after all still stand in original relationship of one kind or another to the spiritual world, or if not in reality, then at least by tradition. And yet in spite of this it is so difficult to carry into the bodily nature of the human being of to-day, into the conditions of present-day education and culture, anything spiritual that was received and absorbed in former time.

To this end I will now unfold before you a succession of earthly lives of an individuality which will reveal to you all manner of hindrances that can indeed arise to prevent the carrying of spiritual contents into the present time. This example will also show you how such difficulties were already prepared in many cases during former earthly lives.

To begin with, we will consider a human individuality incarnated in the 6th century B.C. It was the time when the Jews were led into the Babylonian captivity, and a little after that. In studying that period I was struck by an individuality who was incarnated as a woman belonging to the Jewish race. When the Jews were led into captivity, however, that is to say, before they actually arrived in the Babylonian captivity, this woman made her escape. And in the time that followed (she attained a considerable age in that incarnation) she received in Asia Minor all manner of teachings which could be received there at that time. She received among other things what was then living with great intensity, with great impressiveness, even in Asia Minor, elaborating in various directions what we may call the Zarathustrian world-conception with its intense dualism. You remember the description in a chapter of my Occult Science: the dualism recognising on the one hand Ahura Mazdao, the great Spirit of Light, who sends his impulses into the evolution of mankind, so as to be the source of the good and great and beautiful, who is surrounded by his ministering spirits, the Amschaspands, even as the sun is surrounded in the glory of the manifestation of the countenance of heaven by the twelve signs of the zodiacal circle. These then are the light aspects in the dualism which originated in ancient Persia. On the other hand there was the Ahrimanic opposing power, bearing into the world-evolution of mankind all that is dark, and not only dark but all that is evil, all that hinders and creates disharmony.

This teaching was bound up with the deep and impressive knowledge of the constellation of the stars in the sense of the astrology or astrosophy of ancient times.

All these things, the individuality of whom I am speaking, in her incarnation as a woman in that time, was able to receive because she had as her teacher in a sense, and as her friend, a man who was initiated into many of these doctrines of Asia Minor, and especially also into the Chaldean knowledge of the stars.

Thus we have to begin with a lively interchange of thought between these two, in the period following the abduction of the Jews into captivity. And we have the following remarkable phenomenon. Through the powerful impressions she received, through all the teachings which she absorbed with extraordinary interest and receptivity, powers of seership were awakened in the woman's inner life. She became able to behold the universe in visions which portrayed in a very real sense the cosmic order.

In this case we have to do with a really remarkable individuality. All that had been discovered and experienced between her and the semi-Initiate of Asia Minor who was her friend, all this sprang into life, as it were, within her. And a feeling came over her which we may express in these words: What were all the ideas I received during my instruction as against the mighty tableau of Imaginations that now stand before my soul? How great and mighty is the universe itself, how rich in inner content!—For she realised this through her visionary Imaginations.

This mood gave rise to a certain feeling of estrangement between the two, for the man was more inclined to value the tracing of world-conceptions along the lines of thought, while the woman tended more and more to the pictorial element. Then the two personalities went through the gate of death almost simultaneously, but with a certain feeling of estrangement between them.

Now the results of these two earthly lives became in a strange way fused together. The two individualities went through the most intense experiences in looking backward over their life, in passing backward through their life after their death, and in elaborating their karma between death and a new birth. The result of their life together upon earth was an intense life in community with one another after death.

In the one who had been a woman we find the feeling of preponderance of visionary Imaginations which she had had towards the end of her life no longer present so intensely after her death. Indeed there springs forth in her a kind of longing that in her next earthly life she may comprehend these things more in the form of thought. For in her past life which I have just described she had comprehended them more in the form of speech. From having been livingly experienced in speech they had passed over into the life of visionary Imaginations.

The two individualities, intensely connected as they were with one another in their karma, were reborn in the first Christian centuries at a time when the spiritual substance of Christianity was gradually becoming informed with a certain scholarship and scholarly activity. I have mentioned once before that many of the souls who out of a sincere impulse have since found their way into Anthroposophy, partook in the Christianity of those early Christian centuries. But at that time they could experience Christianity in a far more living form than it afterwards assumed.

Now in this case a peculiar thing appears. There comes before us a man who, as far as karma was concerned, has nothing directly to do with the two individualities of whom I am speaking. But he has to do with them through the history of the time in which they were now living. I refer to Martianus Capella, a dominant personality in the spiritual life of that time. It was he who first wrote the fundamental work on the Seven Liberal Arts, which were to play so great a part in all teaching and education throughout the Middle Ages. The Seven Liberal Arts were: Grammar, Rhetoric, Dialectic, Arithmetic, Geometry, Astronomy and Music. In their combined activity and influence they provided what was then felt as knowledge both of Nature and of the Universe.

Martianus Capella's work appears at first sight somewhat dry and matter-of-fact. But we must know that such books, especially in the early Middle Ages, none the less proceeded from spiritual foundations. Indeed this was the case even with those later descriptions which went forth from the School of Chartres, whose apparent character is also dry, enumerating things in categories and the like. In Martianus Capella's descriptions concerning the Seven Liberal Arts and Nature that works behind them, matter-of-fact as they appear to us, we must be able to recognise the outpouring of certain instructive conceptions about higher things. For the Seven Liberal Arts were indeed conceived as real living Being, even as Nature herself was described as a living Being. However apparently dry in their writing, such personalities as Martianus Capella were, none the less, well aware that all these things can be seen in the spirit. Dialectic, Rhetoric, etc. are living Beings, inspirers of human skill, of human spiritual activity. Moreover, as I have explained in these lectures, Nature in her reality, the goddess Natura, was conceived in a similar way to the Proserpina of antiquity.

Now the woman of whom I have just spoken was reincarnated in this time and stood within this stream—within all that arose for mankind under the influence of what was contained in the Seven Liberal Arts, and in the conception of Nature that held sway over them. This time, however, she became a man, who, though in a man's body and a man's intellect, bore within him from the outset the tendency to elaborate whatever was to become his knowledge, not so much in thought, but once more in visionary conceptions.

It may perhaps be said that there were very few at that time, in the beginning of the 6th or at the end of the 5th century A.D.—there were few among those who might be called the pupils of Martianus Capella, in whom the spiritual content of that time lived in a fully vivid, pictorial and living way. But the personality to whom I refer, living now in a male incarnation, could actually speak of his intercourse with the inspiring powers, Dialectic, Rhetoric, and so forth. He was filled with the perception of living, spiritual activities.

And now once more he met the other individuality who had been a man in his former incarnation and who was now a woman, gifted with great intelligence. And once again (we can well imagine how this was karmically conditioned for we witness here the working of karma)—once again there arose an intense spiritual intercourse between them, an interchange, I cannot say of ideas, but of perceptions, a living and powerful assimilation.

But a strange thing arose in that personality who in the pre-Christian centuries had been a woman and was now a man. Because his perceptions and ideas were so vivid, there arose in the man an intense knowledge of how that visionary life which he possessed was connected altogether with the feminine nature. I do not mean to say that the visionary life is in general connected with a woman's personality, but in this case, the whole fundamental character of the visionary life had come over from the former incarnation of the individual as a woman. Thus innumerable secrets were revealed to this man, secrets relating especially to the mutual interaction of Earth and Moon, secrets relating, for instance, to the life of reproduction. The individuality living in this incarnation as a man became remarkably well versed especially in these domains.

Now we see the two individualities passing once more through the gate of death, undergoing the life between death and a new birth, and in their life approaching, in super-sensible regions to begin with, the dawn of the Age of Consciousness. For they were still in the super-sensible worlds when they experienced the first dawn of the age of the Spiritual Soul. Then the one whom I first described as a woman and in her subsequent incarnation as a man, was reborn as a man once more. It is very interesting that both of them were born once more together, but the other one, who in the former incarnation, i.e., in the second, had been a woman, was now once more a man. Thus both of them were now incarnated simultaneously as men. The one who will interest us especially, who was a woman in ancient time, and a man during the early Christian centuries, who on the first occasion had been of the Jewish race, and on the second had been of extraordinarily mixed blood according to his physical descent, this one was born again in the 16th century as the Italian Utopianist, Thomas Campanella, a very remarkable personality.

Let us now look closely at the life of Thomas Campanella in so far as is necessary for an understanding of his karma. He was born with a truly remarkable receptivity for the Christian education which he received. Thus at an early age he began to study the Summa of St. Thomas Aquinas. Out of the very moods and feelings which he had acquired through his former visionary life, which became transformed ever more and more into their counterpart—into the impulse to learn to know things in their very forms of thought—he entered with full life into the strong element of thought which is to be found in the Summa of St. Thomas Aquinas. Thus he studied with enthusiasm and so became a Dominican in the 16th century.

But into his thinking life which he tries to hold most strictly in the direction in which thought is held in the Summa of St. Thomas Aquinas, there enters continually a certain restlessness of that atavistic visionary spiritual life which he had lived before. Thus it is remarkable to see how Campanella actually looked for supports and points of contact in order to bring some inner order and connection into that element which he had once commanded when he had been a visionary in his perceptions of the world. It is remarkable to see how on the one hand Thomas Campanella became a Dominican with full inner enthusiasm. And yet even in the monastery at Cozenza he makes the acquaintance of a very brilliant Jewish Cabbalist. He now combines the study of the Jewish Cabbala with that which emerges as an echo of his former visionary life, and combines it on the other hand with the Thomism which had evolved in the Dominican Order. All these things were living in him with a kind of visionary longing. He wants to do something to bring to appearance outwardly the full inner light of all his spiritual life. You will not find it in the biographies, but so it appears to spiritual vision. There is a perpetual feeling in his soul: Verily the spirit is everywhere behind all things. Surely then in the human life as well there must be a spirit, the same spirit that is in the universal All.

And these things influenced the sphere of his emotions. He lived in Southern Italy. The country was oppressed by the Spaniards. He took part in a conspiracy for the liberation of Southern Italy. For this conspiracy he was taken prisoner by the Spaniards and pined away in the dungeon from the year 1599 till 1626, thus living a life excluded from the world, a life of which one may really say that for twenty-seven years his earthly existence was blotted out.

Now let us place the two facts together.—When he was imprisoned, Thomas Campanella was at the beginning of the thirties of his life, at the very beginning of the thirties. He spent the ensuing time in prison. That is the one thing. But what kind of a spirit was he? What kind of a personality? He set up the idea of a Sun-State, a Solar State. Can you not see shining through from former incarnations into the soul of Thomas Campanella all those astrological conceptions, those visions of the spiritual world? In his work on the Solar State, he conceives and describes a social Utopia, wherein he imagines that by a rational configuration of the social life, all men may become happy. What he thus described as the City of the Sun, or as the Solar State, has about it a certain monastic severity. A good deal of what he has absorbed from the Dominican Order enters into the way he conceives the structure of the State. And extraordinarily much of his former spirituality finds its way through. At the head of this would-be ideal State, there is to be a single leader, a kind of head Metaphysicus who shall discover out of the spirit the guiding lines for the configuration and administration of the State. Other officials shall stand at the side of this Prime Minister, officials who should carry out even to the smallest detail the rules and regulations which a man of that time could only have had in mind if they arose out of his soul through karmic forces as reminiscences of far earlier conceptions of the earth. But in him all these things arose. In effect he wanted to have his Sun-State administered according to astrological principles. The constellations of the stars were to be carefully observed. Marriages were to take place according to the constellations. The acts of conception were to take place in such a way that births might coincide with certain constellations, which were to be calculated. Thus according to the constellations of the heavens the human race with all its destiny should as it were be born on to the earth.

Certainly the man of the 19th or 20th century, the neurologist or psychiatrist of the 19th or 20th century, coming across such a work would say: It is fit for the bibliography of lunatic asylums. Indeed, as we shall presently see, the psychiatrist of the 20th century did in a certain respect pronounce a very similar judgment.

Place the two things before your minds. Here is a personality with all the antecedents, the pre-disposing conditions from former earthly lives which I have now described. Out of the power of the sun and stars he wants to bring down and find on earth the guiding lines of the administration of the State. He wants to bring the sun itself into the earthly life, while he himself for more than twenty years pines away in the dark dungeon, and is only able to look out through narrow slits into the sunshine of nature, while in his soul, in very painful feelings and emotions, all manner of things which entered into him in former earthly lives come forth and find expression.—But at length he was set free from prison by Pope Urban. He went to Paris and found favour with Richelieu. He received a pension and lived for the rest of his life in Paris.

And this is the strange thing. The Jewish Rabbi whose acquaintance he had made at Cozenza, through whom his thinking had been coloured in a Cabbalistic way, so that far more became living in him than could otherwise have come to life—this Jewish Cabbalist was the other individuality reborn, the one who had been a man in the first incarnation I described, and in the second a woman.

Thus we see the co-operation of the two individuals, Thomas Campanella and his friend the Jewish Rabbi. And when they have both gone through the gate of death once more, there rises in the individuality who was Campanella in his last life, an extraordinary opposition to what he received in his former lives on earth. His feeling is somewhat as follows. He says to himself: What might not have become of all that if only I had not pined away in the dark dungeon through all those years, looking out through narrow slits into the sunlight of nature? Yet accordingly there comes over him a kind of antipathy and rejection of what he had before as a spiritual vision, a spiritual conception in the pre-Christian times and in the early Christian centuries. This is the strange thing. While the age of the Spiritual Soul approaches, an individuality goes on evolving in the super-sensible, becoming really hostile to the former spirituality which he possessed. Now it happened thus with very many souls. Even before their earthly life, while they lived through the age of the Spiritual Soul in super-sensible worlds, they became hostile to their former spiritual experience. For in effect it is really difficult to carry into a present earthly body what was experienced spiritually in former ages. The present earthly body, the present earthly education, lead the human being into rationalism and intellectuality.

Now this individuality, living on after his life as Campanella, could see no other possibility of creating a true balance than by returning, more or less prematurely, into a new life on earth. Yet the given conditions did not make this easy, for on the one hand even within the super-sensible he grew with extraordinary intensity into the element of the Spiritual Soul—I mean the rationalism and intellectualism of the first period in the epoch of the Spiritual Soul. On the other hand, especially when living through again the time of his captivity, his former visionary life and spiritual conception forced its way through ever and again.

Thus the soul of this individuality was laden, as it were, on the one hand with the strong tendency to intellectual enlightenment, repudiating his former spiritual life. Moreover this repudiation gradually assumed a peculiarly personal and individual form. For there arose in him an antipathy to his pre-Christian incarnation as a woman and withal an antipathy to women in general. This antipathy to women found its way into his personality, into his individual life. For so it is with karma. Instead of its being theoretical it becomes a personal concern, personal temperament, personal sympathy and antipathy—in this case, antipathy.

And now the possibility arose for him to live over again in free and open intercourse with the world that earthly life which in his former life on earth as Campanella he had spent in captivity.

Please understand this clearly. On this occasion the other individuality did not accompany him, for the other had no cause to come to earth. In the three preceding earthly lives the Campanella individuality had always had the other one with him to help him to support and guide his life. Now the opportunity arose for him to live once more in an earthly life through all that he had missed by his long years of imprisonment in the life as Campanella. What he had lived through in the darkness of imprisonment gave rise to the possibility of being lived through again in a new life on earth.

What was the consequence, after all the other things had gone before? Imagine for a moment, when Campanella was thirty years old, or thereabouts, this imprisonment came over him. Imagine the relative maturity of a man in the age of the Renaissance in the thirties of his life. Imagine that what he missed at that time is working again. And at the same time all the other elements, spiritual and rationalistic, are shining in, are raying in from without. Everywhere else and all around is light, only these years of imprisonment are darkness. All these influences are raying in and intermingling: clairvoyance, misogyny, born of the experiences which I described, and in addition, very great cleverness. All these things work into one another in the way they would do as a result of the stage of maturity of a man of the Renaissance in the thirties of his life.

All this is then reborn in the last decade but one of the 19th century or just a little earlier. In the childlike body there is born what is really predestined for a later epoch in man's life. No wonder that the boy—this time it is a male incarnation, for it is indeed only a repetition of the time of his imprisonment; such is the language of karma in this instance—no wonder that the boy is reborn with extraordinary precocity. Of course it is only the forces of growth of a child but working precociously, with the maturity of the thirties of life.—Such is the play of karma, working with all that was missed out of the time of his imprisonment.

And a peculiar inclination arises in this belated recapitulation of life, if I may call it so. The old astrological conceptions begin to dawn again, the old conceptions of spiritual life in all Nature which was so wonderful in him in the first Christian centuries. True, these things arise in a childlike way but they live in him so strongly that he has a veritable antipathy to the modern mathematical form of science. In the eighteen nineties he enters the Gymnasium or Grammar School. He learns languages and literature magnificently; he does not learn the sciences or mathematics. But the very curious thing is this, so curious as to overwhelm with surprise and joy one who can understand the karmic connections when he sees it—in the twinkling of an eye, beside the other modern languages, French and Italian, he learns Spanish so as to bring into his mentality all that roused his opposition and rebellion against the Spanish dominion in his former life, so as to refresh all this.

See how strangely karma works, how it works into this individuality! It is indeed striking how rapidly the boy learns Spanish, a language remote, outside of his school work, merely because his father happens to have a liking for it. This again is a working of karma. And it signifies a deep influence on the whole mood and attunement of his soul. The fundamental note of imprisonment when anger and indignation against the Spaniards fill his soul emerges in his soul once again now that the Spanish language becomes alive in him and permeates his thoughts and ideas. The very thing that was most bitter for him during his imprisonment now enters the subconscious region where language does in fact hold sway.

Only when he comes to the University does he begin to work at natural science because, in fact, the age demands it. If you would be an educated man in our age you must know something of natural science.

Now I must tell you who it is, for I must relate what happened afterwards. It is none other, then, than the unhappy Otto Weiniger. [Otto Weiniger, 1880–1903.] He makes up for lost time by studying natural science at the University. He studies philosophy at the University of Vienna and takes the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. And in his dissertation he brings forth all that is fermenting in him, fermenting in a way that is only possible when an earthly life is the repetition of an actual gap in the former one. So he writes his dissertation which after attaining his degree he elaborates into a big volume Sex and Character.

In this book Sex and Character, all that was there before is boiling and fermenting. Occasionally we see Campanellean utopianism flashing out with ancient primeval conceptions expressed in a most wonderful way.—What is morality? Weiniger answers the question thus. The light that shines forth in Nature is the manifestation of morality. He who knows light knows true morality. Hence in the deep-sea fauna and flora which lives without the light we must seek the source of all immorality on earth. And you find wonderful intuitions in his work. For example, he says: Look at the dog, look at its extraordinary physiognomy. What does it show? It shows that the dog has lost something, something is lacking to him; in effect he has lost freedom.

Thus in Weiniger you do indeed find something of spiritual vision combined with the extremest rationalism and hatred of what came to him in a former incarnation. Only this hatred now comes forth not as a hatred of his former knowledge but as a hatred of his incarnation as a woman which finds vent in the misogyny carried to a point of absurdity in the book, Sex and Character.

All this will show you how much spirituality can be latent in a soul, how much can have come together with intellectualism in the super-sensible world towards the age of the Spiritual Soul and yet it cannot come forth in the present age. It wants to come forth but cannot, even when the present life is no more than the repetition of a period of life that was lost, as it were, in former times.

Strange inclinations arise in Weiniger, extraordinarily significant once more for him who can grasp the karmic threads. His biographer tells us that he acquired the habit towards the end of his life of looking out through very narrow slits which he made for himself from a dark space on to a lighted surface. He took a special delight in doing so. Here you have the time spent in the dungeon, raying in once more into the inmost and most immediate habits of his life.

Think again how Southern Italy was connected with this life, for it was in Southern Italy that all these things had taken place which led him into the present life on earth.

But there is another item which I must mention which is always very important for the student of karma. Needless to say, Weiniger too was among the readers of Nietzsche. Imagine the mood and feeling that lived in his soul as he read Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil and like a bombshell there fell into his soul Nietzsche's statement and further explanation that Truth is a woman. Here indeed what I described to you before comes together coloured by his misogyny.

And now he is twenty-two years old, in the twenty-third year of his life. All these things have worked upon him. Strange habits are evolving in his soul. Is it to be wondered at that a life which is recapitulating a long time of imprisonment is painfully affected by the sunset which reminds him of the oncoming darkness? Thus Weiniger always feels sunsets quite unbearable. And all the time, in his youthful body he has the maturity of the thirties of man's life. I admit that when less talented men are arrogant and vain, it is not beautiful. But here the whole karma can make us understand that he thought much of himself. He had of course various abnormalities, for this life was the repetition of a life of imprisonment when one does not always do the ordinary, normal things, and when one finds karma being fulfilled one may well make the impression of an epileptic on an ordinary psychiatrist. Weiniger did make this impression, but his epilepsy was the repetition of the life of imprisonment. His attacks were acts of repulsion and defence. Without meaning in his present life of freedom, they were the karmic repetitions of a life of imprisonment. He was no ordinary epileptic.

Nor need we wonder that in the beginning of the twenties of his life he suddenly and quickly felt impelled all at once and for no reason, to go to Italy. During this journey he writes a wonderful little book, Über die letzten Dinge, containing descriptions of elemental Nature which seem almost like an attempt to caricature the descriptions of Atlantis, magnificent, but of course entirely mad from the standpoint of the psychiatrist.

Yet these things must be considered karmically. He suddenly rushes off to Italy, then he returns and spends a short time in the Brunner mountains near Vienna. Having returned from Italy he still writes down a few thoughts that came to him during his journey, magnificent ideas about the harmonies of the moral and the natural world. Then he takes a room in the house where Beethoven died. He lives on for a few days longer in Beethoven's death chamber and now he has finished living through his former imprisonment. He shoots himself. His karma is fulfilled. He shoots himself out of a deep inner impulse, having the idea that if he were to live on he would become a thoroughly bad man. There is no more possibility for him to live, for his karma is fulfilled.

From the point of view which is thus opened out, look at the world of Otto Weiniger, my dear friends. You will see all the hindrances in a soul who is placed so abnormally from the Renaissance age into the present time. You will see all the hindrances that stand in the way and prevent his finding the spiritual, though in the unconscious foundations of the soul he has so much. Now you may draw the conclusion, how many hindrances there are in the Age of Michael to hinder a man from doing full justice to this Age.

For of course it is by no means unthinkable that if the soul of Weiniger had been able to receive a spiritual world-conception he would have been able to continue in his evolution. He need not have put an end to his life by suicide, thus closing the repetition of his life of imprisonment. It is indeed significant to trace in this way how ancient spirituality evolves in souls of men down into modern time and then comes to a standstill. It is just in such interesting phenomena as this that we can see how it is brought to a standstill.

I think indeed that this will illumine certain karmic connections in the spiritual and intellectual life of the present time. It will enable us to look more deeply into the karmic relationships, now that we have placed before us these four successive incarnations of an extraordinarily interesting individuality, incarnations extending from the 6th century before the Mystery of Golgotha until to-day. That indeed is the span of time including all that we must study if we would understand the life of our own time.

To-day we have taken a case which teaches us how many things a soul can undergo during this age. I would far rather describe these things by the concrete experiences of the soul than by abstract explanations.

I will close the present cycle of lectures next Tuesday evening which will indeed be the last of these lectures to Members.

Rudolf Steiner: Good morning, gentlemen! Perhaps someone has a question?

Question: Why does lightning not come in a straight line?—instead of zigzag. Should it not take a straight line?

Dr. Steiner: So—the questioner thinks that when lightning is released from the air, as I described last time, it ought to come in a straight line. But it takes a zigzag form and can that be explained? Yes, one can indeed explain it.

Let us consider again the explanation I gave of how lightning actually comes about. I told you that lightning comes out of the overheated air, the overheated universe, the overheated cosmic gas. I said that there is no question of lightning arising from some sort of friction of the clouds. Clouds, of course, are wet, and if you want to produce miniature lightning with laboratory apparatus, everything must first be wiped absolutely dry. It must not be supposed, therefore, that lightning is a true electrical phenomenon that comes about from the friction of dry elements. It is known that when one rubs glass or sealing wax one produces electricity and so people think that if clouds rub together—well, then there'll be electricity there too. But that is not so. What happens is this: As a consequence of the inner overheating of the cosmic gas, the warmth living in the cosmic gas comes out in the way I have described. Through the fact that the air exerts less pressure toward one side or another, the radiation of the overheated force goes toward that side and lightning flashes.

Now let us imagine that we have this happening somewhere. In consequence of the greatly overheated cosmic gas—not clouds—the lightning flashes out. And it is quite correct to think that it should stream out in a straight line.

But you see, it is like this. Picture to yourselves: If an accumulation of heat is present somewhere, it is generally not alone; there are similar accumulations in the neighborhood. In fact, if the earth is here, let us say, and one looks up there and lightning begins where a concentration of heat exists, then in the neighborhood there are other accumulations: they are not all at one single place. You can imagine, of course, that these accumulations of heat are connected with the sun's radiations to the various places. Now there are these heat accumulations along the entire path of the lightning and while it is streaming out it snatches up these other accumulations in its course. So it shines here, then over there, and so on. It takes all the other accumulations with it, and so it moves quite irregularly, and gets this seemingly zigzag formation. The lower it descends, the more it does move in a straight line. There are no longer these heat accumulations; they were higher up. The zigzag of the lightning comes about because it does not arise in one single spot, but from where the heat accumulations are strongest and then it carries the others along on its way. That's similar to when you're out walking and you meet an acquaintance and take him along with you, then the two of you pick up another one, and so on. So that's the story of the lightning.

Now perhaps someone has another question?

Question: Could we hear something about the origin of volcanoes?

Dr. Steiner: That's a question that can't be answered quite so quickly. I will lead you to the point where you can find an answer to it. For if you read present-day books you can certainly find all sorts of ideas on the origin of volcanoes, but if you read older books, lying farther back in time, you find other views, and in still earlier books again other views. People have never inquired into the real origin of the earth and so views on volcanic phenomena have changed in the course of time. As a matter of fact, no one has been able to form a true idea of how these fire-erupting mountains originated.

One must go very far back if one wants to understand this. Otherwise one cannot grasp how it happens that at certain spots on the earth fiery, molten masses come out. One will be able to form an idea of it only if one first of all rejects the dictum that the earth was once a balloon of gas, that it became more and more solid, and that there is fire in the interior which for some reason or other comes out here or there. That is a convenient explanation, but it brings us no nearer to an understanding.

I'll tell you a little story. It's a long time ago, more than forty years, that we made a certain experiment in the laboratory of the geologist Hochstetter²⁶ of Vienna. He is long since dead. We produced a substance that contained—among other things—a little sulphur. We didn't put it all together, but this is what we did: here someone had a bit of the stuff, there someone had a bit, over there a bit, and so on, and we hurled, we shot the substance, all of us, toward a certain point. In this way there arose a little globe with all sorts of hills which was curiously like the moon seen through a telescope. Thus at that time in Hochstetter's geological laboratory an experiment was actually made by which a small moon was created. The surface of the moon as it is seen through a telescope had come out quite wonderfully. The whole thing looked just like a little moon. Above all one could realize that a cosmic body need not originate as gas, but can actually be flung together from all corners of the universe. Nor can we explain our earth in any other way than by its being thrown together out of the universe.

Now in connection with this I want to explain something that is little spoken of today but which is nevertheless true. You hear it said everywhere, don't you, that the earth is a globe, has formed itself as a globe. Now actually it is not true that the earth is a globe! I will explain to you what the earth really Is. It is only fantasy that the earth is a globe. If we picture the earth's true form as a regular solid, we come to what in science is called a tetrahedron. I will draw it for you, naturally only in perspective. A tetrahedron looks like this. [see diagram]

You see there are one, two, three triangles and here in front the fourth triangle. Can you picture it? It stands on a triangle, a triangle is underneath; and on that triangle, the base, are three other triangles; that forms a little pyramid. That is how we picture a tetrahedron. We must be clear that four triangles are joined to one another. We must stand it up on one triangle and the other three range upward like a pyramid. That is a perfectly regular solid.

But now imagine that I round out the surfaces of these triangles a little, then it becomes a little different. Now it stands on what has become rounded but yet is still free. And the sides of the triangles which formerly were straight lines are now rounded too. Can you picture that? So now there arises a form which is actually a tetrahedron become round! And you see, our earth is actually such a rounded tetrahedron.

This can even be established to the extent of finding the edges, the sides of this earth-tetrahedron. It is like this: suppose I draw the earth as it is often drawn, on a flat plane—then here would be North America, here South America, between them, Central America; over here we have Africa; here we have Europe. And there is Asia Minor, the Mediterranean, Greece, Italy, Spain, France, in fact Europe. Up here we have Scandinavia. There is England and over there is Asia. So we have Asia here, Africa here, Europe here and America here.

Now the South Pole is here, and around the South Pole in particular there are many volcanic mountains. There is the North Pole. And now it is like this: we can trace a line that goes from Central America, from the Colima volcano²⁷ down through the mountains that are called the Andes, down to the South Pole. It is rounded, but actually though rounded it is this edge of the earth. Then it goes on from the South Pole, goes over here past Africa to the volcanic mountains of the Caucasus. Then the same line comes over here, past Switzerland, over the Rhine and arrives here.

If you follow this line, which looks like a triangle, you can compare it with this triangle here. And so, if you take this portion of the earth, it is the base of a tetrahedron.

Just think, the base of a tetrahedron! Now: how do we come to that point there? Well, we have to go through to the other side of the earth. But I cannot draw that, I would have to make everything round. If I were to make it round, I would come to the point just over there in Japan. Thus if I mark the tetrahedron, here we have Central America, here the South Pole, here the Caucasus, and over there, which one cannot see, would be Japan.

If we picture the earth in this way, we have it existing in the universe as a rounded-out pyramid that sends its apex over there to Japan and has its base here, containing Africa, South America and the whole Southern Ocean. So the earth stands in the universe, curiously, as such a rounded-out tetrahedron, as a kind of pyramid. That, gentlemen, is actually still the form of the earth!

And now if you take these lines that I've drawn forming the tetrahedron, you find that most of the volcanic mountains are located along the lines. You have these frightful fire-belching mountains of which you've often heard, over in South America, in Chile and other places, then around the South Pole; and then you have the mighty ones in the Caucasus. And when you come over here, we don't have so many in our part of the continent, and yet it can be shown that the fiery mountains were once here, but are now extinct. For instance, when you drive along the stretch of road from northern Silesia to Breslau, you see a mountain standing conspicuously alone which is still feared by the people of today. If you examine its rocks, you find this dreaded mountain standing there is simply an extinct volcano. Similarly we have extinct volcanoes in many parts of Germany.

And now let us go further. We have only marked out the base. Then we have lines everywhere that go over toward Japan. Yes, and you see, along all these lines one would always be able to find volcanoes on the earth's surface! You can see that if someone would sit down and draw the most important volcanoes, not on a flat surface, but so that they formed a solid, he would get this shape of the earth. Strangely, the volcanic mountains give us the lines that make the earth into a tetrahedron.

So now, if you do not picture the earth as originally a ball of gas which then became condensed—that's the convenient opinion which people hold—if you explain it as having been formed by substance flung from all sides, then you must admit something else. If the earth is a tetrahedron, a regular solid, you'll have to explain it by imagining that a great master geometrician with plenty of knowledge had actually pushed the earth together from outside, along the lines which we still see today. Now imagine that I draw this tetrahedron, that I first fling this triangle in here from the periphery, then this triangle, then this, and then the one up above. I make it as small boys do: they cut out four triangles, tilt them together from outside and then glue them together to form a tetrahedron. And the earth too has originated like that, it has been flung together as triangles from outside.

Now watch the boys when they paste the triangles together: where they join the sides they must be careful to apply the paste or the glue evenly. As to the earth, at the places I've shown you—South America, then here toward the Caucasus and over here through the Alps, and so on—there the earth was originally “cemented” together! But one finds when one examines the mountains that there it has, so to say, been joined rather badly; the sides don't quite fit together. If in particular we trace the mountains that go over here from the Caucasus through our Carpathians and Alps, we can show from the form of the mountains that they have not yet quite grown together. The earth actually consists of four pieces flung out of cosmic space and joined together, four pieces which then form a tetrahedron, and along the edges there are still, as it were, places not tightly closed. At these leaky places it is possible for the cosmic heat from the sun to get into the earth more than at other places.

Now when the sun's power enters into these places beneath the surface of the earth, they become hotter and get soft—as is always the case when things, even metals, are consumed by fire—and they make an outlet for themselves in the direction of those places which are not properly fastened together. Then through the combined cosmic action of the sun and the “cemented” places of the earth there arise these regular volcanoes, the fire-belching mountains.

However, volcanoes are found at other places too. Etna, for instance, and Vesuvius do not, it is true, lie along these edges; where they are, no such line passes through. In fact, the very volcanoes that are not located along the principal lines are especially instructive, for one can learn from them what causes the eruptions to occur.

You see, it can always be shown that when things like fiery eruptions happen on the earth, they are connected with the constellations, the relation of the stars to the sun. An eruption can never occur unless at some particular place the sun is able to shine more strongly than usual because it is not covered by other stars. If it is covered by other stars as is generally the case, then the sunshine is normal. Starlight is everywhere; one must not think that the stars are not up there during the day, it is just that we don't see them. In the old city of Jena where people had time to do such things, where so many German philosophers taught, where Haeckel²⁸ lived too, there is a deep cellar with a tower²⁹ above it, open at the top. If you go down into this cellar in the daytime and look up through the tower it is all dark inside, but you see up above the most beautiful starry sky. When it is daytime, and clear and bright outside, you can see the most beautiful star-lit heavens, with stars everywhere.

But when the stars are in such a position that the sun can develop its heat to full strength, when they do not obstruct the sun, then the sun's forces of warmth shine down upon some special places. These are the places where, after the earth had been fastened together, later volcanoes arose. They came about later. On the other hand, those that lie along the edges of the tetrahedron are the original volcanoes.

Now sometimes a man who has no place in the ordinary life of science discovers quite useful things in this direction. Perhaps you've heard, or at least the older ones among you, of a certain Falb?³⁰ He was neither an astronomer nor a geologist nor geographer nor natural scientist, but a former priest who had given up his calling—run away from it! He devoted himself especially to a study of star constellations and whether they really have an influence on the earth. He came to the opinion that constellations are connected with volcanoes, that when the influence of the sun is supported by the stars in a certain way, a volcano erupts. He maintained further that floods also come about for the same reason, because the situation attracts water: beneath, the heated mass; above, the water.

And he contended still more: that in the mines the miners suffer most of all from so-called firedamp, that is, when the air in the mines catches fire of itself. He asked himself how this could happen. He decided that for this to happen the stars must aid the sun activity by giving it full play. Then the sun shines too strongly into the mine and the air in the mine ignites. Therefore, said Falb, if one knows about mining conditions, one ought to be able to say when firedamp may be expected in the course of the year. So he made a calendar and indicated when according to the constellations firedamp must occur somewhere. Those were the so-called critical days which he marked in his calendar.

This calendar has been printed many times and Falb's critical days are still there. Now what was to be expected when these days were reached? Either the eruption of a volcano, or an earthquake (an earthquake is a subterranean wave, subterranean overheating), or a flood, or firedamp. Now, gentlemen, I was present once at an amusing little incident. You see, this Falb was very clever, he had been able to light upon these facts, but he was also very conceited, frightfully conceited. As you know, to be learned is no protection from vanity. And the following happened. About forty years ago I was at a lecture given by Falb. He went with great pompousness and a well-pleased expression up to the podium and began his address. He said: Yes, this very day the stars are in a position from which one can expect the occurrence of considerable firedamp. At that moment the door opened and a messenger from the “New Free Press” entered and handed him a telegram. Falb stood up there with his long patriarchal beard and said: “It must be something important if they send it to me straight to the lecture room!” He took out his knife and cut the telegram open and read: “A terrible firedamp has occurred!” Now you can imagine the publicity he got! Falb had just said, “Firedamp could happen today” and the messenger brings the telegram! “You see”, he said, “one gets proofs laid on the table!” Those were his words. But the whole thing smelled of show business. Falb knew quite well that firedamp was due: that was correct. But he went early in the day to the office of the “New Free Press” and left word that if such a telegram came, they should send it immediately to the lecture hall.

That is one of the tricks to which bad speakers gladly resort—though usually in a milder form! I am quite pleased to relate the story so that audiences may be warned to be a little cautious and not simply to accept everything. The clientele that Falb had at that time rustled with silk dresses and tuxedos: it was a very distinguished one. But you should have seen how impressed they were by his performance! However strongly he might have voiced his opinion in words, the audience would never have been so convinced as they were by the entry at exactly the right moment of the messenger with the telegram. People would much rather be convinced through external events than by what can be put into words.

So one can say that at certain places, namely, at the edges of this tetrahedron, the earth is actually not quite joined together. It is exposed therefore to the cosmic warmth of sun and stars, and the consequence is that those lines showing active volcanoes can be drawn. Outbursts of volcanic fire can, of course, occur at other spots too.

But now does this imply that the interior of the earth must necessarily be molten fire? That is what is constantly maintained. Actually there is no other proof of it than the fact that it becomes warmer and warmer the deeper one sinks a shaft into the earth. Still one cannot go very deep. Moreover, with this increase of warmth as one descends into the earth there is likewise an increase of pressure. Whatever might be dissolved by the heat and become fluid is pressed together again by the pressure in the interior. If the earth were really molten inside then something else would not be in accord. One can consider, for instance, the weight of the earth. It is naturally hypothetical, since the earth floats freely in the universe and cannot be weighed. In order to weigh it, one would have to have it on top of another, gigantic earth, for if there is to be weight there must be something that attracts, that develops gravity. One could calculate how much it would weigh from how it attracts other bodies; in fact, such a calculation has been made. But if it were possible to weigh the earth one would find that it is far, far heavier than it would be if it were fluid inside. Goethe³¹ for this reason vigorously attacked the idea that the earth was molten fire inside.

Now when one knows how the earth has been created, when one sees that it is really an incompletely fastened tetrahedron, there is then no need to picture it as molten inside and to suppose that at certain times, one wouldn't know why or wherefore, it must suddenly erupt fire—like a moody, hysterical person! If the earth were molten inside, one would have to fancy that it is actually a little crazy—like a man who is insane and at any sudden moment begins to rage; one doesn't know when the moments will occur. But this is not true of the earth. You can always show where the warmth comes from: that it comes from outside, that at this moment such powerful heating occurs, not at all very deep in the earth, that it forces an outlet for itself.

So the fire when Vesuvius or any other volcano erupts originates only when the cosmic temperature has become fiery. It always takes a little time before the effect is seen. The particular constellation of stars, for instance, must first work upon the earth for a time.

But that also follows from certain facts which I have already related here in quite a different connection. Suppose here is a part of the earth, the sun's rays strike upon it powerfully, and underneath, something develops that later seeks an outlet through an eruption or an earthquake.

You see, what I drew first, the powerful warmth going down into the earth: people don't feel that because they don't pay attention. At most, a few people go about the place where as yet there is no hint of volcanic activity though the effects of the sun's activity are already present in the air, and these few have violent stomach aches, others have headaches, migraine, others find that their heart is disturbed. But people put up with all that in a vague fashion and take no notice. But the animals, as I have said in another connection, which have more delicate noses, finer organs in this respect, perceive what is happening and break away. The people, in spite of their stomach aches and headaches, don't know why the animals have become so restless and are running away. But after a few days the earthquake comes, or the volcanic eruption. The animals have fled because they already scented what was coming; human beings are so coarsely organized in this respect that they are not aware of the event until the whole business is on top of them.

You can see from this that something is already happening a long time in advance before the final event takes place. What is happening is the streaming in of a bit of cosmic heat. But you can still put a question. You can say, this cosmic heat only heats the ground, and where the earth contains substances that are easily inflammable, there could of course be ignition ... but why should it all flare up instantly? Here I'll tell you something else. When one goes to Italy, to the places between Rome and Naples, particularly to the neighborhood of Naples, and to the islands and peninsulas on the coast, the guides always delight in showing one the following experiment. They take a piece of paper and light it and hold it so—in a moment smoke begins to come out of the earth! The earth smokes—why? Because the air becomes warm from the burning paper and so becomes lighter and expands. The warmth caused by the sun's heat streams out of the earth as smoke. This is very interesting to see. One lights a piece of paper and instantly the earth smokes at that spot.

Now think of that enlarged to giant proportions: the sun heating not only the ground below, but also the air above—and you have Vesuvius. And when the latter has once established itself—well, then the beginning has been made, and the process continues in places that are especially favorable to it. It is interesting to realize that those very things that take place on earth irregularly are caused by the whole of cosmic space.

Now I told you that when we flung out that sulphur substance during those days in the geological laboratory, we produced something that really looked like a little moon. And so when one observes the real moon, whom our little moon actually resembled, one gets the idea that it too has been flung together out of the universe. That is one idea one gets.

The other idea is established through spiritual scientific investigation, namely, that the moon has actually been thrown together in the cosmos, mainly from the earth. What does that imply? Well, we did that too in the laboratory. First we threw together such a cosmic body out of substances. Then we attacked it from all sides, flinging material against it from outside, and lo and behold—it became more and more like a moon. And what has one got then? Well, one has the whole process. The main mass of the moon was cast out from the earth, and once it was there, fine matter from every part of space was flung against it. Fine matter is always present in the universe—it falls down in the meteors—it is always being flung out. And so one has the origin of the moon. These things are all connected.

The development of science, you know, is sometimes remarkable. A monument stands today in Heilbronn—certainly it is rather dreadful as a work of art, but still it stands there and represents Julius Robert Mayer.³² If you hear about him in science today, you learn that he was a pioneering genius through his researches in the 40's of the last century into the nature of the action of heat. Julius Robert Mayer was born in Heilbronn, practiced there as a doctor and went about without being particularly noticed. The scientists of the time paid no special attention to him. And although today he is described everywhere as a highly gifted pioneer in physics, at that time when he sat for his medical examination at Tubingen he failed it. If you made investigations, you would come on the remarkable fact that the majority of men who later became geniuses failed earlier in their examinations. And this was also the fate of Julius Robert Mayer. By the skin of his teeth, he managed to get through and become a doctor. But no one considered him remarkable during his lifetime—in fact, quite the contrary. He became so enthusiastic about his discovery that he talked of it everywhere. Then people said that his mind was wandering and put him in an asylum. His own generation put him in a madhouse while posterity looks upon him as a great genius and puts up a monument to him in his native town.

It was Julius Robert Mayer who as a result of thought and investigation asked how it was that the sun which gives us so much heat does not become cold. He said to himself that it does not become as cold as it ought to become after always giving out warmth. He thought therefore that comets, an immense number of comets, must continually rush into the sun, hurled toward it from the universe. They are very fine, tenuous bodies, but they rush into it. It is true that they rush into the sun. The sun is very different from what the physicists of today imagine. They would be very astonished if they were to approach it: they would not find fiery gas but they would find something that causes any earthly substance to be sucked in and disappear. The sun is an empty space that exerts suction. It is not a globe of gas. It resembles a pearl in the universe, a suction globe with nothing in it that one looks for, but which continuously absorbs this mass of comets. The fine etheric structures of the universe, which are almost spiritual, are continuously being sucked in by the sun as nourishment. We still see today, therefore, this dashing against the sun. This should draw our attention, gentlemen, to something important.

You see, when one arrives at the fact that the earth is really a tetrahedron,—well, if one has been obliged to study such forms and to note the number of sides and corners, one realizes that a certain knowledge of geometry is necessary to understand how to construct them. They don't come about so simply. Boys enjoy doing it, making these tetrahedrons, cubes, octahedrons, icosahedrons, dodecahedrons, the five regular solids. The boys like to put them together from sheets of cardboard, gluing the pieces together, but one needs geometry for it. Now the earth is formed in this very way out of the universe—formed from knowledge of geometry, in this sense, not formed through calculation, but with knowledge—for it is regular! You can infer from this that there is really geometry in the world, that everything is in accord with geometry. That is true. Real science shows us something that I have always stated, namely, that thoughts are spread out in the world, thoughts are everywhere and only those people don't find them who have none themselves!

It is very praiseworthy, is it not, to be a free and independently thinking person? And yet it is slightly ridiculous to find the expression “freethinker” which has appeared in modern times, in the 19th century. Thinking independently: that is very good, but many in their freedom have misused this expression “freethinker.” And the men who have felt themselves to be the freest thinkers were just those who had the fewest thoughts, who simply repeated what other people had said. An Englishman made a delightful remark: he said, “Free thought does not mean that people have thoughts, but that they are free from thought”—a remark that has been much quoted. What is a freethinker? A freethinker is one who is free from thinking! Well, in science one must endeavor not to develop such freedom from thought or else nothing will be achieved. The actual form of the earth could long ago have been discovered—the fact that it is not a completely spherical cabbage-head, but that it has something of the shape of a tetrahedron!

Knowledge of the earth is related to knowledge of man. Man imitates the universe in his own form. He copies the universe in his head, and so the head is round up above like the round universe. Below, where the jaws begin there are quite remarkable structures: they come from the triangular earth. In the jaw formation you find triangles everywhere, they come from below, from the triangular earth. With both, men copy the universe: they have more or less rounded heads above, and the earth-forces reach up from below.

Look for it sometime. You will find in most varied ways man's tendency (and animals) to triangular formation in the jaws; this comes from the earth. Forces work upward from the earth and imprint the triangle into him. And the universe works downward from above and molds the rounded form. It is very interesting!

That is knowledge that may be gained if one penetrates genuine science correctly. If one is free from thought, then one talks all sorts of nonsense. And in our time all sorts of nonsense is talked; that cannot lead to an understanding of what things are in their reality.

So, gentlemen, let us speak further about this next Saturday.

• 26. Ferdinand Hochstetter, 1829–1884. Geographer and geologist
• 27. Active volcano in Mexico.
• 28. Ernst Haeckel, 1834–1919. Biologist and philosopher.
• 29. The so-called “little Weigel house,” built in 1647, demolished in 1898 when Weigelstrasse was constructed. One of the “Seven Wonders of Jena”. It was 7 stories high and contained a circular staircase through which one could look up by day and see the stars shining in the heavens.
• 30. Rudolf Falb, 1838–1903. See “Grundzüge der Theorie der Erdbeben und Vulkanausbrüche,” Graz 1870; “Gedanken und Studien über den Vulkanismus,” Graz 1875.
• 31. Goethe fought vehemently the ideas on volcanoes held by Leopold von Buch and others, which were at that time becoming well-known, and which in his opinion lacked a central idea that could have illumined the individual facts. See his letter to Nees von Esenbeck, June 13, 1823.
• 32. Julius Robert Mayer, 1814 – 1878. See “Beiträge zur Dynamik des Himmels,” Heilbronn, 1848.

Many of the lectures I have given over the years in anthroposophical groups to friends—some of whom are sitting here today—have dealt with the gospels of John, Luke, and Matthew.¹ In those lectures, we have tried to recreate in our minds the great event in Palestine, the Mystery of Golgotha, from three different angles—in three different ways, so to speak. We hope these lectures could establish an ever-increasing appreciation of this unique event in our souls. I have already pointed out that we have four gospels because their authors were inspired occultists and each wanted to represent this great event from one perspective only, just as we take pictures or photograph external objects from only one point of view. When we then take the pictures from various angles and combine them, looking at all of them together, we can have the actual reality before our souls. Thus, each of the evangelists gives us the opportunity to consider the great event of Palestine from one particular standpoint.

The Gospel of Saint John gives us an insight into these events from a perspective we may call a revelation of the highest human and occult aims, as well as of the highest world principle. In Saint Luke's Gospel, on the other hand, we are given an insight into the secrets surrounding the personality of Jesus of Nazareth—the Solomon and Nathan Jesuses—up to the moment when his inspiration through the Christ took place. As you know from my lecture cycle on the Gospel of Saint Matthew—if you missed the lectures you can read them later—this gospel shows how the physical body in which Christ was to be incarnated for three years was prepared in the Hebrew people.

In a certain way, the Gospel of Saint Mark leads us to the highest summits of the spiritual-scientific, Christian world view. It gives us the opportunity to look into many things that are imparted to us through the gospels but are not touched upon in the same way by the other evangelists. Today, therefore, I have set myself the task to speak about this gospel.

We must be aware that it is necessary to consider many things that the superficial world of our time does not really want to look at. If we want to understand Saint Mark's Gospel in all its depth, we must familiarize ourselves with the different way of expressing things that prevailed at the time when Christ Jesus walked the earth. Do not take it amiss, then, if in order to convey what I have to tell you, I paint it in strong colors.

We express what we want to say in language, which is to bring out what lives in our souls. The expression of soul content in language differs from one epoch of human development to another. In the Hebraic epoch, the ancient Hebrew sacred language provided a wonderful way of expressing things. It was very different from our way of clothing the secrets of the soul into words. When a word was spoken in old Hebrew, it contained not merely an abstract idea, as it does today, but a whole world. The vowels were not written because the speaker expressed his innermost being through his way of vocalizing, whereas the consonants contained the description—the picture, so to speak—of what was outside. We can say that when the Hebrews wrote, for example, what corresponds to our B, they always felt something like a picture of outer conditions, something that formed a warm, hut-like enclosure. The letter B always evoked the image of something that can enclose a being like a house; the letter could not be pronounced without this image living in the speaker's soul. When A was vocalized, there was always something of strength and force, even of radiating power, living within it. That is how the soul lived on; the spiritual-psychological content flowed out with the words, soared into space, and touched other souls. Obviously, language was then a far more living affair and entered more fully into the secrets of existence than our contemporary language.

That is the light in the picture I mentioned. The shadows are in our having become, to a great extent, philistines. Our language expresses only abstractions and generalities, and we no longer even notice this—so our language at bottom expresses only the philistine. It could not be otherwise in an age when people begin to write literature long before they have any spiritual content to express, when an infinite amount of printed material goes to the general public, when everyone thinks he must write something, and when everything can be a subject to write about. I have even seen authors turning up at the founding of our society out of curiosity, hoping to find material for a novel in it and looking for protagonists that can be dished up in the popular style.

We must be aware, then, that our language has become abstract, empty, and philistine, in contrast to the way it was when people still thought of language as something holy, something that must be handled responsibly, and through which God would speak. That is why it is so infinitely difficult to squeeze the tremendous facts imparted to us by, and resounding in, the gospels into modern words. Why shouldn't people these days believe that everything can be expressed in contemporary language? They cannot understand that this language is empty of what even the Greeks expressed with one word. Furthermore, reading the Bible today, we find something that, compared to its original content, has been sifted once, twice, even thrice, but in such a way that not the best but only the worst remains. It is therefore rather cheap to refer to the modern wording of the Bible. We go most astray, however, when we turn to the Gospel of Mark as we have it in the Bible today.

In the translation by Weizsäcker, which is generally considered excellent—and because it is considered so excellent nowadays, we can assume that it is not all that good—the first lines of the Gospel of St. Mark are rendered as follows:

As it is written in the prophet Isaiah, behold, I send my messenger before thee, who shall prepare the way for thee; listen how it calls in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord, make straight his paths.

Honest people must really admit that if Weizsäcker begins the Gospel of Saint Mark like this, they do not understand a single word of it; those who claim to understand this are fooling themselves. People who work honestly will not be able to understand the lines, “Behold, I send my messenger before thy face, who shall prepare thy way; the voice of one crying in the wilderness: Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.” For they express either a triviality or something that cannot be understood. The concepts that make it possible to understand what Isaiah says here must first be acquired. For Isaiah pointed to the great, tremendous event that was to be the most significant event in human evolution. What was he really referring to?

Based upon what we already know, we can say what Isaiah prophesied. We can say that in ancient times humanity had a kind of clairvoyance that allowed people to grow into the divine-spiritual world with their soul forces. But what really happened when people grew thus into the spiritual world? They ceased to make use of the I, insofar as they had developed it at that time. Instead, they used their astral body, with its forces of vision and seership—whereas the forces rooted in the I were gradually awakened in the process of perceiving the physical world. It is the I that uses the senses as instruments. When the ancients sought enlightenment about the world, they employed their astral bodies. They saw and perceived in their astral bodies. Further evolution consisted in the transition from the use of the astral body to the use of the I. In regard to the I, the Christ impulse was the most intense impulse. If Christ is taken into the I in the sense of St. Paul's words, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me,” then the I will have the power to grow into the spiritual world through its own efforts. Formerly, only the astral body could do this.

Thus, we can say of human evolution that human beings formerly used their astral body as an organ of perception, but gradually lost the ability to develop organs of perception in the astral body. As humanity approached the time of the Christ event, it entered an evolutionary stage in which people had to realize that their astral body was less and less able to see into the spiritual world. The astral body's connection to the spiritual world came to nothing, and the I was not yet forceful enough to get any enlightenment from the outer world. That was the time when Christ drew near.

Now in the evolution of humanity, certain great steps forward are gradually prepared before they actually take place. This was the case with the Christ impulse, but there had to be a transition. The development I just described could not have gone so far that human beings would have seen their astral body gradually becoming dulled toward the spiritual world and would have felt an utter desolation and dreariness in themselves until the I would have been kindled later through the Christ impulse. Things were not to turn out that way. Rather, a few individuals developed so far that through a particular influence from the spiritual world they saw with the astral body something similar to what people were to see and know later through the I. In other words, the I was prepared in the astral body.

Indeed, it is through the I and its development that human beings have become earthly beings. The astral body really belonged to the ancient moon when the angels, the Angeloi, were at the human stage. The angels were human on the old moon; we are human beings on the earth. On the old moon, human beings appropriately used their astral body, and everything else was just preparation for the evolution of the I. The beginning of our earth evolution was a repetition of our moon evolution on a higher level. After all, had we remained limited to the astral body, we could never have become fully human. Only angels on the moon could become human in the astral body. Therefore, just as Christ lived in earthly human beings in order to inspire the I in them, so for the preparation of the I there had to be prophets from the angels of the moon, the moon-humans, to inspire the astral body so that the I-hood of human beings could be prepared. A prophet could have characterized it in the following way. “There will come a time in human evolution when humanity will be ripe for the development of the I. Only the angels of the moon were raised to the highest in their astral bodies, but for human beings to be prepared for this I-hood, certain people on earth had to be so inspired through grace and under exceptional conditions that they could work as angels even though they were humans. They were angels in human form.”

Here we arrive at an important occult concept that is indispensable to the occult understanding of human evolution. It is naturally easy to say that all is Maya, but that is an abstraction. We must really take it seriously and be able to say, “A human being stands before me, but he or she is Maya. Who knows, he or she may not really be human. Perhaps the humanness is only an outer veil employed by quite another being, not a human one, to bring about something that cannot yet be effected by humanity.” I have indicated something of this in my The Portal of Initiation.²

Such an event occurred when the individuality who lived in Elijah was reborn in John the Baptist. An angel entered his soul and used his body and soul to do what would have been impossible for a human being to accomplish. An angel lived in John who had to announce the true I that was to live in Jesus of Nazareth. It is extremely important to know that John the Baptist is only Maya and that an angelic messenger lived in him. This is found also in the Greek version of the Bible: “Behold, I send my messenger [i.e., Angeloi or angel].” Thus, a profound cosmic mystery connected with John the Baptist was prophesied by Isaiah. As we have seen, Isaiah characterized John as Maya or illusion, but in truth John encompassed the angel who had to announce what humanity really was to become through receiving the Christ impulse. Angels proclaim beforehand what humanity is to become later. So, this passage in the Bible should really read, “Behold, what gives I-hood to the world sends the angel before thee to whom I-hood will be given.”

Now we go on to the third sentence. What does it mean? Here we must call to mind the whole historical world situation. What happened after the astral body gradually lost the ability to extend its forces like tentacles to look clairvoyantly into the spiritual world? Formerly, when the astral body became active, it could see into the spiritual world. This possibility gradually disappeared, and it became dark within human beings. While they could spread their astral body over all the beings of the spiritual world in former times, now they were alone in themselves. Their souls now lived in solitude. That also is in the Greek text. “Behold, what speaks in the solitude—or, if you like, wilderness—of the soul when the astral body could no longer extend out to the divine spiritual world. Listen to what calls in the wilderness and loneliness of the soul.”

What is it that announces itself? Here, we must be clear about the meaning of one particular word when it is used in reference to spiritual or soul phenomena. This was true, above all, in Hebrew, but also in Greek. The word is Kyrios. To translate it as “the Lord,” as is usually done, produces absolute nonsense. What does this word mean? In ancient times everyone who spoke this word knew it meant something that was connected with the progress of the human soul. People knew that the word Kyrios referred to secrets of the soul.

Looking at the astral body, we see that our soul has three distinct forces we call thinking, feeling, and willing. The soul thinks, feels, and wills. These are the three forces working in the soul. They are the serving forces in the soul. Formerly, they had been the lords of humanity, and human beings had been subject to them and had to wait for their thinking, feeling, or willing to be called into action. As human beings evolved, however, these soul forces became subject to the Kyrios, the Lord of the soul forces, the I. When the term Kyrios referred to the soul, nothing else was understood by it than the I. This I no longer believed that the divine spiritual thinks, feels, and wills in it, but “I think, I feel, I will.” The Lord makes himself felt in the forces of the soul. “Prepare yourselves, you human souls, to follow paths that lead you to let the strong I—Kyrios, the Lord—awaken in your souls. Listen to the call in the solitude of the soul. Prepare the force or direction of the Lord of the soul—the I. Make open his forces!” That is roughly how this passage should be translated. “Open up, so that the I can enter and does not become the slave of thinking, feeling, and willing. Open up its forces!” When you translate these words, “Behold, the I sends its angel before you that is to give you the possibility of understanding the calls in the solitude of the astral soul: Prepare the directions of the I, and open the forces for it,” you then have a meaning in these significant words of the prophet Isaiah and a reference to the greatest event in human evolution. You then understand that Isaiah speaks of John the Baptist, that he points out that our soul solitude longs for the approach of the Lord in the soul, the approach of the I. The words have force and weight only when we understand them this way.

Why was John the Baptist able to be the bearer of the Angeloi? He could do this because he had had a certain initiation. Each initiation is specialized. Initiations are not just general, but specialized. Individuals who have a very special task need a particular kind of initiation. Now for everything that occurs in the spiritual world precautions have been taken so that the starry script in the heavens reveals spiritual facts. For example, people could have a sun-initiation and enter into the secrets of the spiritual world that is the realm of Ahura Mazdao, the world for which the sun is the external expression. There are, however, twelve different ways to be initiated into the secrets of the sun; each of these initiations was a “solar initiation,” yet different from the other eleven. Depending upon what a person has to accomplish for humanity, he or she receives an initiation that can be described as a solar initiation but, for example, one where the forces flow in as though the sun were standing in Cancer. This differs from the initiation where the forces flow in as though the sun were standing in Libra. This is how different specialized initiations were designated.

Individuals who have as important a mission as John the Baptist must be initiated in a very special way. Only then will they have the necessary strength to accomplish their mission in the world even in a rather single-minded way if circumstances require that. So, in order for John the Baptist to become the bearer of the Angeloi, he had to undergo the sun-initiation that can be called the initiation in the sign of Aquarius. The sun in Aquarius is a symbol for the initiation John the Baptist received to become the bearer of the angel. He received the force of the sun as it streams down when its relation to the other stars is characterized with the words, “The sun stands in the constellation of Aquarius.” That was the symbol. John had undergone the Aquarius initiation.

The constellation was given the name Aquarius because those who underwent this initiation had the power to do with human beings what John did as the Aquarian, the Baptist. Through immersion in water, he brought people to the point where their etheric bodies were freed sufficiently for them to gain the self-knowledge that allowed them to realize what was most important in their time. People were immersed and their etheric bodies were freed for a moment. Through baptism in the Jordan, people could feel the special importance of this epoch in the history of the world. Therefore, John underwent the baptism initiation. To express symbolically the flowing in of the rays from the constellation in which the sun stood, this sign was called Aquarius. In this way the name of the human capacity is carried over to the heavens.

Today many learned ignoramuses try to interpret spiritual events by bringing the heavens down to earth. They say, “Now, that indicates a forward movement of the sun.” These learned people, who really do not know anything, interpret human events from the heavens. However, it was the other way around. What lives in humanity spiritually was transferred to the heavens; the heavens were used as a means of expression. Thus, John the Baptist could say, “I have baptized you with water,” which was the same as saying, “I baptize you with water: I am endowed with the initiation of Aquarius.” That is what John could have said to his closest disciples. With our senses we see the constellation of Virgo opposite Aquarius, and from there the sun moves to Libra. However, in terms of initiation, the sun proceeds in the opposite direction, not as it appears to our senses. Thus, we have to look at the sun's path from Aquarius to Pisces. John could say, “Something will come that will no longer work in the way that corresponds to the sun's influence in Aquarius; instead, it will work in a way corresponding to the sun's effect in Pisces. One will come who will bring a higher baptism.”

When the spiritual sun rises higher, then the Aquarian baptism becomes a baptism with spiritual water. The sun ascends in the spiritual realm from Aquarius to Pisces, hence the well-known ancient fish symbol for the bearer of Christ. Through special spiritual influences, John had an Aquarian initiation. But the initiation that came about mysteriously through the Mysteries around Jesus, of which I have spoken several times, was a Pisces initiation. It resulted from the sun advancing to the next constellation, and Jesus of Nazareth was integrated into his time through being subjected first to a Pisces initiation.

This is sufficiently indicated in the Gospel of Saint Mark, but such things can only be shown in images. Christ Jesus draws together all those who are fishing, so his first apostles are all fishermen. The advancing of the sun from Aquarius to Pisces is obvious when John tells us, “I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.” When Christ walked along the Sea of Galilee—which means, when the sun was so far advanced that one could see its counterpart coming up from Pisces—the fishermen Simon, Simon's brother, James, and James's brother, were inspired. This can be understood only when we look more closely at the way people expressed things at that time.

Our modern way of expressing ourselves is pedantic. If a person stands before us, we say there is a human being. If a second person stands before us, we again say there is a human being. A third, another, and so on, but we have merely Maya before us. If a being has two legs and a human countenance, then in our pedantic way of expressing ourselves we have only one term, “human being.” However, what is a human being to occultism? Nothing but Maya! He or she is about the same as a rainbow, which lasts only so long as the necessary relationships between rain and sunshine exist. When these relationships change, the rainbow disappears.

It is the same with human beings. A human being is only the streaming together of forces of the macrocosm, forces we find in the heavens, here or there in the macrocosm. Where we usually assume a human being somewhere on earth, there is nothing for the occultist. In fact, forces stream down from above and up from below and intersect. Then, just as the peculiar relationship of rain and sunshine produces the rainbow, so forces streaming out of the macrocosm from above and below result in the phenomenon that looks like a human being. People are nothing as they stand before us. In truth, they are a phantom, Maya, an illusion. It is the cosmic forces, intersecting where our eyes think they see a human being, that are real. Try to take the statement seriously that a human being is nothing as he or she stands before us. A human being is but the shadow of many forces. The being who reveals himself in a person can easily be elsewhere than at that point where the individual in question is walking around on two legs.

For example, consider three men, first, an ancient Persian whose work was plowing. He looked like an ordinary man but actually was one of the souls whose forces were nourished from this or that world, above or below. The second man was an ancient Persian official. He was formed by forces from another world that intersected in him. To know him, we must look at these forces. All of you sitting here are in your reality somewhere else, and only the forces of your real being radiate into this room. Our third example is a Persian of whom we have to say he was really a complete illusion, a phantom. What was there in reality? We must go all the way up to the sun to find the forces that nourished this phantom. There, among the mysteries of the sun, we find what can be called the Golden Star, Zarathustra. It radiates down, and here below stands a figure called Zarathustra. In truth, however, his being is not there at all. This is our third example.

Now, it is important to realize that in ancient times people were aware of the meaning of such designations. Names were not given as they are today. People were named according to what lived in them rather than on the basis of their external, illusory appearance. We must be quite clear about this. We can say that at the time of Christ people would have easily understood what was meant when John the Baptist was referred to as the angel of God. Such a statement would have taken account of what really happened there; it would have focused on the main thing and disregarded secondary considerations.

Let us assume people had spoken about Christ Jesus in the same way. How would they have had to speak of him if they had understood such things? They would not have dreamt of naming the physical body walking around among them Christ Jesus. Rather, the name was the sign that what was streaming down spiritually from the sun was received in a very special way at the point where this physical body was. As this body of Jesus wandered from one place to another, it made visible the sun force as it moves from place to place. This force could also move around alone, and at times it was said that Christ Jesus was in his “home,” that is, in his physical body, but what was in him moved on without his body. Particularly in Saint John's Gospel this expression is used in such a way that, at times, the writer speaks of this being moving purely spiritually exactly as though he were describing this sun force dwelling in a physical body.

It is therefore important that the deeds of Christ Jesus are always seen in relation to the physical sun, which is the external expression of the spiritual world that is received at the point where Christ's physical body is walking around. When Christ Jesus heals, for instance, it is the sun force that heals. However, the sun must be at the right place in the heavens: “That evening, at sundown, they brought to him all who were sick or possessed with demons.” It is important to indicate that this healing power can flow down only when the external sun has set but still works spiritually. And when Christ again needed a certain force for his work, he had to take it from the spiritual rather than from the physical, visible sun. “And in the morning, a great while before day, he rose and went out to a lonely place, and there he prayed.” Here, the path of the sun and the solar force is expressly indicated. It is this solar force that is at work here, and fundamentally Jesus is only the external sign, making the path of the sun forces visible to the physical eye.

Whenever Christ is mentioned in Saint Mark's Gospel, the sun force is meant, which, in that epoch of human evolution, was especially active in Palestine. The sun force could be seen as Christ went from one place to another. We could just as well say that at that time, the spiritual force of the sun, as though focused in one point, went from one place to another. The body of Jesus was the external sign that made the movements of the sun force visible. The paths Jesus took in Palestine were those of the sun force come down to earth. If you trace his steps on a map, you have a diagram of a cosmic event: the influence of the sun force from the macrocosm on the land of Palestine. That macrocosmic aspect is what matters here. The writer of Saint Mark's Gospel points out this macrocosmic connection. He knew that the body serving as the vehicle of a principle such as that of Christ had to be overcome by its principle in a special way. Thus, this gospel points to the world whose existence behind the world of the senses Zarathustra had so powerfully announced; it points to that world as it works on our human world. Through Christ Jesus it was indicated how these forces now work on the earth. Therefore, a kind of repetition of the Zarathustra events had to occur in the body of the Nathan Jesus because it was in a certain way influenced by the individuality of Zarathustra.

Let us recall the beautiful legend about Zarathustra. At his birth, Zarathustra accomplished his first miracle when he showed his famous smile. Later, Duransarun, the king of the district where Zarathustra was born, resolved to murder him because of what some retrograde Magi had told him about the child. However, when the king attempted to stab the child, his arm was paralyzed. That was a second miracle. Then, because the king could not stab him, Zarathustra was left among the wild beasts of the desert. Thus, in earliest childhood Zarathustra experienced what we see when we look out into the world through our impurities. Instead of noble group-soul and higher spiritual beings, we see emanations of our wild fantasy. That is what is meant when we are told that Zarathustra was left among the wild beasts, but remained unharmed. That is the third miracle. The fourth occurred also among the wild animals, and so on. It was always the good spirit of Ahura Mazdao who served Zarathustra and ministered to him.

We find these miracles repeated in the Gospel of Saint Mark. “The Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness [Actually the word is solitude]. And he was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels ministered to him.” This shows us that the body was prepared that was to be the focal point to receive what transpired in the macrocosm. What had happened to Zarathustra had to be repeated, among other things, the time he spent among the wild beasts. This body took in what came from the macrocosm.

Even the first lines of Saint Mark's Gospel take us into the greatest cosmic context. I wanted to show you that if we understand the words in the right sense—not in the sense of our modern philistine language but in that of the ancient languages where living worlds were behind each word—then the Gospel of Saint Mark comes alive again and receives new force. With our modern language, however, it takes many circumlocutions to find again what was simply present in the words in ancient languages. When we say that human beings live on the earth and develop their I, and that they formerly lived on the moon where the angels went through the human stage, we are expressing what lies behind the words, “Behold, I send my angel before human beings.” These words cannot be understood without prior knowledge of what spiritual science offers. People in our time should be honest and admit that the words at the beginning of Saint Mark's Gospel are incomprehensible. Instead, in petty pride they declare spiritual science a fantasy that reads all kinds of things into what they supposedly just know. However, they do not really know it.

Today the principle of rewriting sacred documents for each epoch, as was done in ancient Persia, is no longer practiced. Thus, the divine spiritual word, as presented in the Zend-Avesta, was transformed again and again. The Persian bible was rewritten seven times and what exists today is the last form. Anthroposophy has to teach people how necessary it is to rewrite the books containing the holy secrets in each epoch. For especially if we want to preserve the grand old style, we should not try to stay as close as possible to the ancient wording. That can't be done; the old words are no longer understood. Instead, we must try to translate the ancient wording into the immediate understanding of our time. That is what we have tried to do this summer with the Book of Genesis. You saw that many of the words had to be changed. Perhaps today you have got an idea of how the words must also be changed in the Gospel of Saint Mark.

• 1. See Rudolf Steiner, The Gospel of St. John, vol. 103 in the Collected Works, repr. (Hudson, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1988), The Gospel of St. John and Its Relation to the Other Gospels, The Gospel of St. John and Its Relation to the Other Gospels, vol. 112 in the Collected Works (Spring Valley, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1982), The Gospel of St. Luke, vol. 114 in the Collected Works, repr. (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1988), and The Gospel of St. Matthew, vol. 123 in the Collected Works, repr. (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1985).
• 2. Rudolf Steiner, The Portal of Initiation: A Rosicrucian Mystery Drama (Blauvelt, NY: Steinerbooks, 1981).

[ 1 ] In the spatial cosmos there stand in opposition to one another: World Expanse, and Earth-Centre. In the World-Expanse, strewn abroad as it were, are the Stars. From the Earth-Centre, forces radiate forth in all directions to the World-Expanse.

[ 2 ] As Man stands to-day in the world, in the present cosmic age, the Stars in their shining, and the Earth-forces in their working, can only appear to him collectively as the accomplished work of the divine spiritual beings, with whom his link is in the inner man.

[ 3 ] But there was once an age of cosmic history when this shining of the stars and these earth-forces were still a direct spiritual revelation of the divine spiritual beings actively at work within his own being.

[ 4 ] Then came another age. The Star-Heaven separated as a corporeal existence out of the divine spiritual tide of activity. There arose what may be called World-Spirit and World-Body. The World-Spirit is a multiplicity of divine Spirit-Beings. They send their influences, in the earlier age, from the places of the stars upon the earth within. What there rained down in light from the regions of the world-expanse, what radiated forth as forces from the earth-centre, was in actuality the Intelligence and the Will of those divine spirit-beings who were shaping Earth and Earth's Manhood.

[ 5 ] In the alter cosmic epoch—after the evolution of Saturn and Sun—this Intelligence and Will of the divine Spirit-Beings became ever more spiritually inward in its workings. What they had actively been present in, present with their very Being, became now the ‘World-Body,’ an harmonious ordering of the stars in cosmic space. Looking back upon these things in spirit, comprehending them in a spiritual world-conception, one may express it thus: Out of the original Spirit-Body of the world-creative Beings there arose World-Spirit and World-Body. The World-Body marks in stellar order the stellar movement the way in which the Gods were working, long long ago in their Intelligence and Will. For the present age of the Cosmos, what once lived in the stars as freely moving, freely shaping divine intelligence and will, is now set fast in them as fixed Law.

[ 6 ] What shines therefore from out of the star-worlds to-day, to Man upon earth within, is not the immediate expression of divine will and divine intelligence, but a sign, left stationary, to mark what this divine will and intelligence were long ago, even in the stars. In the marvelous star-configuration of the heavens, waking wonder in the human soul, we may behold therefore a past manifestation but not the present manifestation of the Gods.

[ 7] But what is thus ‘past’ in the glory of the shining of the stars, is ‘present’ in the world of the spirit. And Man lives with his own being in this ‘present’ world-spirit.

[ 8 ] In the evolving forms of the world, we must look back upon an ancient epoch of cosmic history, when world-spirit and world-body worked together as a unity. We must keep before our eyes the intermediate epoch, during which they develop as a duality. And we must think forward into the future—into the third epoch, when the world-spirit will once more absorb the world-body into its sphere of action.

[ 9 ] For the ancient epoch there could have been no ‘calculating’ the constellations and the courses of the stars, for they were an expression of the free intelligence and the free will of divine spiritual beings. In the future, there will again be no calculating them.

[ 10 ] ‘Calculation’ only has any meaning for the intermediate epoch of the Cosmos.

[ 11 ] This, which is true of the constellations and the courses of the stars, applies also to the action of the forces which radiate from the earth-centre into the world-expanse. What there spring forth ‘from the depths’ also becomes ‘calculable.’

[ 12 ] Everything tends from the earlier cosmic epoch towards the intermediate one, when the worlds of Time and space become ‘calculable,’ and when Divine Spirit, in its manifestations as Intelligence and will, must be sought ‘behind’ the ‘Calculable.’

[ 13 ] This intermediate epoch alone affords the conditions under which Mankind can progress from a dull, dim consciousness to a clear, free consciousness of Self—to free intelligence and free will of his own.

[ 14 ] There had to come the time when Copernicus and Kepler ‘calculated’ the world-body; for the cosmic forces that served to bring about this moment were necessary to that development of human Self-consciousness. The disposition for this Self-consciousness was laid in an older age; then came the time when it was advanced so far as to be able to calculate the distant world-expanses.

[ 15 ] ‘History’ begins to be played out upon earth. There would have been no History, had not the world-expanse with all its stars become set in ‘fixed’ constellations and orbits. In the ‘course of history’ upon earth, we have a reproduction—though a quite transformed one—of what, once on a time, was ‘heavenly history.’

[ 16 ] The peoples of olden time continued to carry this ‘heavenly history’ still in their consciousness, and turned their eyes rather upon this than upon ‘earthly history.’

[ 17 ] In Earthly History there lives the intelligence and will of Man, at first in connection with the cosmic, divine will and divine intelligence, and then independently.

[ 18 ] In Heavenly History there lived the intelligence and will of the divine spirit-beings connected with mankind.

[ 19 ] Looking back over the spiritual life of the various peoples one finds, in the far remote past, such a consciousness amongst men of their being together and willing together with the divine spirit-beings, that their own human history is still a heavenly history. In his narration of first ‘origins,’ man's tale is not of earthly proceedings but of cosmic. Indeed, even for his own times—the times in which he is presently concerned—that which goes on in his earthly surroundings seems to him so insignificant in comparison with what is going on in the Cosmos, that he disregards the former and only pays attention to the latter.

[ 20 ] There was an age when the consciousness of mankind beheld the Heaven's history in mighty impressions, in which the divine spirit-beings themselves stood before Man's soul. The divine Beings spoke, and Man heard their speech in dream-like Inspiration; they revealed their forms, and Man beheld them in dream-like Imagination.

[ 21 ] This Heavenly History, which for a long while filled men's souls, was followed by Mythical History, now for the most part regarded as old poetic fiction. This Mythical History links together heavenly doings and earthly doings. ‘Heroes’ for instance came upon the scene—super-human beings. These are beings who stand higher than men in their evolution. Men at a particular time, for instance, have only developed the different parts of Man's being as far as the Sentient Soul. The Hero however has already evolved what will one day take its place in Man as ‘Spirit-Self.’ The Hero cannot directly incarnate in a physical body under earthly conditions; but he can do so by going down into the physical body of a human being, and thus enabling himself to work as a man amongst men. In the ‘Initiates’ of earlier ages we have beings of this kind.

The actual fact, with regard to all these things which occurred in the course of the world, is not simply that mankind in the successive periods of history ‘pictured’ things in one way or another in their own minds. What actually took place between the more spiritual, ‘incalculable’ world and the corporeal ‘calculable’ one, itself underwent a change. Only this much may be said: long after the actual conditions had changed in the world, human consciousness, in one or another other of the peoples, still clung to a ‘view of the world’ which corresponded to a far earlier reality. At first it was so, that human consciousness—which does not keep pace with the progress of cosmic events—still really saw the things of old. Then came a time when spiritual sight grew dim, and the old things were only maintained by tradition. Thus in the Middle Ages people still traditionally ‘pictured in their minds’ an intervention of the heavenly in the earthly world, which was no longer seen, since the power of pictorial vision no longer existed.

[ 22 ] Moreover, the evolution of the various peoples in the earthly sphere is such that they retain one or other view of the world, with its corresponding picture, for varying lengths of time; so that there are living alongside one another, views of the world which by their essential character should be living after one another.

The different views of the world however, existing amongst the different peoples, did not proceed only from this, but also from the fact that these different peoples, according to their dispositions, saw different things. Thus the Egyptians saw that world in which there are beings who long ago stopped short on the road to human evolution and never became earth-men; and they saw Man, after his earth-life, in all that he had to do with beings of this kind. The Chaldean peoples saw rather, how spiritual beings—both good and evil—from beyond the earthly sphere entered into earth-life to influence its course.

[ 23 ] To the ancient Heavenly History, properly speaking, which extends over quite a long period of time, there then succeeds the Mythological History, which is shorter, but still long in comparison to the subsequent period of ‘history proper.’

[ 24 ] As I described, men in their consciousness leave go but reluctantly of the old views, in which gods and men are pictured as fellow-actors in a common field. Proper, earthly history had long been in existence—ever since the development of the Intellectual or Mind-Soul—whilst men were still ‘thinking’ in the sense of what had been in former times. Only with the first opening flower of the Spiritual Soul did men begin to turn their eyes upon ‘history’ in the proper sense.

[ 25 ] Now in the human spirit working in earthly history, loosed from its tie with the Divine Spirit, men have the possibility to realize within themselves free intelligence and free will.

[ 26 ] So the weaving of the world-process in which Man is interwoven moves on, between the altogether calculable and the workings of free intelligence and free will. Under the joint action of both, the world-process is manifested—in every variety of shade betwixt the two.

[ 27 ] In his life as he leads it between birth and death, Man has ready-laid for him in the Calculable, as a foundation, the bodily groundwork upon which to unfold the free Incalculable of his inner, spiritual soul-life. His life between death and new birth is passed in the Incalculable—yet in such a way that in his inner life of soul and spirit, the Calculable is revealed to him in thought. Thereby—out of this Calculable—he becomes the architect of his next earth-life.

[ 28 ] In ‘history,’ the Incalculable is played out on earth—an Incalculable with which however the Calculable is interwoven, if only in feeble measure.

[ 29 ] Against this order established between Calculable and Incalculable by the divine spiritual beings who have been associated with Man from the beginning of all things, against their harmonizing of the Cosmos through ‘Measure, Number and Weight,’ stands the opposition of the Luciferic and Ahrimanic Beings. Lucifer can combine with his own form of being, as he has made it, nothing calculable. His ideal is the cosmic unconditioned action of intelligence and will.

[ 30 ] This Luciferic tendency is one fitly suited to the world's order in those fields where freedom should rightly rule events. And there Lucifer is justly the spiritual helper of Mankind in their evolution. Without his aid, freedom would never make its way into Man's spiritual and soul life, built as it is upon a calculable, bodily basis. But Lucifer would like to extend this tendency to the whole Cosmos. And here his activity becomes a war against that divine spiritual order to which Man originally belongs.

[ 31 ] Here Michael intervenes. With his own being he stands in the Incalculable; but he dresses the balance between the Incalculable, and that Calculable which he bears within him as a World-thought received from his Gods.

[ 32 ] The Ahrimanic Powers stand otherwise in the world. They are the complete opposite of the divine spirit-beings with whom Man is originally connected. These latter are at the present day purely spiritual beings, who bear within themselves perfectly free intelligence and perfectly free will, but who create, in this their free intelligence and will, a wise insight into the necessity of the Calculable and Unfree, as a World-Thought from whose sheltering lap Man may grow up into a free being. And with all the Calculable, with this World-Thought of the cosmos, they are united in Love. This Love streams from them throughout all the universe.

[ 33 ] In complete opposition to all this is the grasping greed of the Ahrimanic powers, in which lives cold Hate of everything expanding in freedom. Ahriman's aim and endeavour, in all that he pours forth into world-space, is to make a cosmic machine. His ideal is, ‘simply and solely,’ Measure, Number and Weight. He was called into the Cosmos prepared for the service of human evolution, because it was necessary that this, his special department—Measure, Number and Weight—should be developed.

[ 34 ] He who comprehends the world as everywhere Spirit-in-body, he alone really comprehends it. This must be carried down into the world of Nature with regard to the powers at work there, such as the Divine Spiritual Powers who work in Love, and the Ahrimanic Powers who work in hate. In the natural, universal warmth, as it sets in with the spring and tends on into summer, we must behold the natural love of the Divine Spirit-Beings. In the freezing blasts of winter we must recognize the workings of Ahriman.

[ 35 ] In the height of midsummer, Lucifer mingles his power with the Love, the Warmth of Nature. At Christmas-tide, the Divine Spirit-Beings with whom Man is from his origin united turn their power against the frozen Hate of Ahriman. And ever more and more towards the springtime, Natural Divine Love is mildly at work, mitigating Natural Ahrimanic Hate.

[ 36 ] The yearly sign of this Divine Love, new-manifested as it is year by year, is the time of Remembrance, when we recall how with the Christ the free element of God entered into the calculable element of Earth. Christ works in perfect freedom within the Calculable. In so doing, He renders harmless that which craves the Calculable only—Ahriman and his forces.

[ 37 ] The unique Event of Golgotha is the free, cosmic act of Love within Earth's history. It is to be comprehended too only by the Love that Man brings to its comprehension.

Leading Thoughts

[ 38 ] The cosmic process with which the evolution of mankind is interwoven, and which reflects itself in human consciousness as History (in the most comprehensive sense,) may be distinguished into: a lengthy period of Heavenly History; a shorter one of Mythological History; and the comparatively short Earthly History.

[ 39 ] This cosmic process, at the present time, falls apart into: the ‘not-to-be-calculated’ working of divine spirit-beings, who freely create in free Intelligence and Will, and the ‘calculable’ processes or the world-body.

[ 40 ] To the Calculable of the world-body are opposed the Luciferic Powers; to the creating in free intelligence and free will, the Ahrimanic Powers.

[ 41 ] The unique Event of Golgotha is a free cosmic act, which originates in World-Love and can only be comprehended by Man's Love.

[ 1 ] In the spatial Cosmos we have the contrast of the Universal spaces and the Earthly centre. In the Universal spaces the stars, as it were, are scattered wide, while from the Earthly centre forces are streaming out in all directions into the far spread Universe.

[ 2 ] To man as he stands in the world in the present cosmic epoch, it is only as a great totality that the glory of the stars and the working of the earthly forces can represent the finished work of the Divine-Spiritual Beings with whom he in his inner being is connected.

[ 3 ] But there was once a cosmic epoch when the glory of the stars and the forces of the Earth were still a direct spiritual revelation of the Divine-Spiritual Beings. At that time, man in his dim consciousness felt the Divine-Spiritual Beings actively working in his own nature.

[ 4 ] Another epoch of time ensued. The starry heavens became severed, as a corporeal existence, from the Divine-Spiritual working. There originated what we may call the ‘World-spirit’ and the ‘World-body.’ The World-spirit is a multitude of Divine-Spiritual Beings. In the former epoch these Beings had worked from the starry places inward to the Earth. All that had shone forth from universal space, all that had radiated by way of forces from the earthly centre, was in reality Intelligence and Will of the Divine-Spiritual Beings, who were working creatively upon the Earth and Earth humanity.

[ 5 ] In the later cosmic epochs—after the Saturn and Sun evolutions—the working of the Intelligence and Will of the Divine-Spiritual Beings became more and more spiritually inward. That in which They had been actively present in the beginning became the ‘World-body’: the harmonious arrangement of stars in universal space. Looking back on these matters with a spiritual world-conception, we may express it thus: From the original spirit-body of the World-creative Beings, the World-spirit and the World-body were evolved. And in the ordering and movement of the stars, the World-body now shows what the Intelligent and Will-imbued working of the Gods once upon a time was like. For the cosmic present however, what was once the Divine Intelligence and Will living and moving freely in the stars, has become fastened in the fixed Laws of the starry universe.

[ 6 ] Today, therefore, that which shines inward from the starry worlds to man on Earth is no longer an immediate expression of Divine Will and Divine Intelligence, but it is a sign that has come to stand:—a sign of what the Divine Will and Intelligence was, once upon a time, even in the very stars. Potent as it is to call forth wonder in the human soul, we must recognise in the sublime formation of the starry heavens a revelation of the Gods which is of the past; we cannot perceive in it their present revelation.

[ 7 ] That, however, which in the shining of the stars is ‘of the past,’ is ‘present’ in the Spirit-world. And in this ‘present’ Spirit-world, man with his own true being dwells.

[ 8 ] Studying the formation of the world, we must look back to an ancient cosmic epoch when the World-spirit and the World-body still worked as an undivided unity. Then we must envisage the middle epoch, in which they unfold as a duality. And at length we must think into the future—into the third epoch when the World-spirit will once again take up the World-body into its active working.

[ 9 ] For the old epoch, it would have been impossible to ‘calculate’ the constellations and the courses of the stars; for these were then the expression of the free Intelligence and free Will of Divine-Spiritual Beings. Moreover, in the future they will once again become ‘incalculable.’

[ 10 ] ‘Calculation’ has a meaning only for the middle cosmic epoch.

[ 11 ] And this holds good, not only of the constellations and the movements of the stars, but of the working of the forces which radiate from the earthly centre to the far-spread Universe. That which works ‘out of the depths’ also becomes ‘calculable.’

[ 12 ] Everything strives from the older cosmic epoch towards the middle epoch, when the Spatial and Temporal becomes ‘calculable,’ and the Divine-Spiritual as manifestation of Intelligence and Will must be sought for ‘behind’ this ‘calculable’ world.

[ 13 ] Only in this middle epoch are the conditions given for man to progress from a dim state of consciousness to one of free and bright self-conscious being, with a free Intelligence and a free Will of his own.

[ 14 ] Thus there had to come the time when Copernicus and Kepler could ‘calculate’ the body of the world. For it was through the cosmic forces with which this moment was connected, that the self-consciousness of man had to take shape. The seed of man's self-consciousness had been laid in an older time; and now the time was come when it was far enough advanced to ‘calculate’ the far-spread Universe.

[ 15 ] On the Earth, ‘History’ takes place. What we call ‘History’ would never have come about if the far spaces of the Universe had not evolved into the ‘hard and fast’ constellations and starry courses. In ‘historic evolution’ on the Earth we have an image—albeit thoroughly transformed—of what was once upon a time ‘heavenly History.’ [ 16 ] Earlier peoples still had this ‘heavenly History’ in their consciousness, and were indeed far more aware of it than of the Earthly.

[ 17 ] In earthly History there lives the intelligence and will of men—in connection, to begin with, with the cosmic Will and Intelligence of the Gods; then, independent of them.

[ 18 ] In heavenly History, on the other hand, there lived the Intelligence and Will of the Divine-Spiritual Beings who are connected with mankind.

[ 19 ] When we look back into the spiritual life of nations, we come to an age of far-distant antiquity when there was present in man a consciousness of being and willing in communion with the Divine-Spiritual Beings—so much so that ,the History of men was heavenly History. The man of that age, when he came to speak of ‘origins,’ did not relate earthly events but cosmic. And even in relation to his own present time, that which was going on in his earthly environment seemed to him so insignificant beside the cosmic processes that he gave his attention to the latter only, not to the former.

[ 20 ] There was an epoch when humanity was conscious of beholding the history of the heavens in mighty and impressive revelations, wherein the Divine-Spiritual Beings themselves stood before the soul of man. They spoke, and man in Dream Inspiration hearkened to their speech; they revealed their forms, and in Dream-Imagination man saw them.

[ 21 ] This heavenly History, which for a long time filled the souls of men, was followed by the mythical History, generally regarded in our time as a poetic creation of the ancients. Mythical History combines heavenly events with earthly. ‘Heroes,’ for instance,—super-human beings—appear on the scene. They are beings at a higher stage in evolution than the human being. In a given epoch, for example, man had developed the members of human nature only so far as to the Sentient Soul, but the ‘Hero’ had already evolved what will one day appear in man as Spirit-Self. In the existing conditions of the Earth, the ‘Hero’ could not incarnate directly, but he could do so indirectly by diving down into the body of a human being, and thus becoming able to work as a man among men. Such beings are to be seen in the ‘Initiates’ of an earlier time.

[ 22 ] To understand the true position of the facts in this world process, we must not imagine that in the successive epochs mankind ‘conceived’ of the processes and events in just this way. But that which actually took place, as between the more spiritual, ‘incalculable’ and the corporeal, ‘calculable’ world, underwent a change. Long after the world-relationships had actually changed, human consciousness in this or that nation still held fast to a world-conception corresponding to a far earlier reality. To begin with, this was due to the fact that the consciousness of men, which does not keep pace exactly with the cosmic process, really continued to behold the old condition. Afterwards there came a time in which the vision faded, but men still held fast to the old by tradition. Thus in the Middle Ages an in-playing of the heavenly world into the earthly was still conceived out of tradition, but it was no longer seen, for the force of Imaginative picture-seeing was no longer present.

[ 23 ] In the earthly realm, the different peoples evolved in such a way as to hold fast to the content of one or other world conception for varying periods of time. Thus, world conceptions which by their nature follow one upon the other are found living side by side. Albeit, the variety of world conceptions is due not to this alone, but also to the fact that the different nations, according to their inner talents, did really see different spiritual things. Thus the Egyptians beheld the world in which beings dwell who have come to a premature standstill on the path of human evolution and have not become earthly Man. The Egyptians too saw man himself, after his earthly life, in the midst of all that he had to do with beings such as these. The Chaldaean peoples, on the other hand, saw more the way in which extra-earthly spiritual Beings, both good and evil, entered into the earthly life to work there.

[ 24 ] The ancient ‘Heavenly History’ properly speaking, which belonged to a very long epoch of time, was followed by the epoch of Mythological History, shorter, but, in comparison to the subsequent period of ‘History’ in the accepted sense, none the less very long.

[ 25 ] It is, as I explained above, only with difficulty that man in his consciousness takes leave of the old conceptions wherein the Gods and men are thought of in living interplay and co-operation. Thus the period of Earthly History in the proper sense has long been present; it has in fact been present since the unfolding of the Intellectual or Mind-soul. Nevertheless for a long time men continued to ‘think’ in the sense of what had been before. It was only when the first germs of the Spiritual Soul evolved, that they began therewith to pay attention to what is now called ‘History in the proper sense.’ And in this Human-Spiritual element, which, loosed from the Divine-Spiritual, becomes ‘History,’ the free Intelligence and the free Will can be experienced consciously by men.

[ 26 ] Thus the World-process in which man is interwoven, runs its course between the fully calculable and the working of the free Intelligence and the free Will. This World-process manifests itself in all conceivable intermediate shades of co-operation between these two.

[ 27 ] Man lives his life between birth and death in such a manner that in the ‘calculable’ the bodily foundation is created for the unfolding of his inner soul-and-spirit nature, which is free and incalculable. He goes through his life between death and new birth in the incalculable, but in such a way that the calculable there unfolds, in thought, ‘within’ his existence of soul and spirit. Out of this calculable element he thereby becomes the builder of his coming life on Earth.

[ 28 ] That which cannot be calculated is manifested forth on Earth in ‘History,’ but into it the calculable is incorporated, though only to a slight extent.

[ 29 ] The Luciferic and Ahrimanic beings oppose themselves to the order which is established between the incalculable and the calculable by the Divine-Spiritual Beings who have been united with man from the very beginning; they oppose the harmonising of the Cosmos by the Divine-Spiritual Beings through ‘measure, number and weight.’ Lucifer cannot unite anything calculable with the nature that he has given to his being. His ideal is a cosmic and unconditioned activity of Intelligence and Will.

[ 30 ] This Luciferic tendency is in keeping with the cosmic order in the realms in which there should be happenings that are free. And Lucifer is there the competent spiritual helper of the unfolding of humanity. Without his assistance freedom could not enter into the human life of spirit and soul which is built on the foundation of the calculable bodily nature. But Lucifer would like to extend this tendency to the whole Cosmos. And in this, his activity becomes a conflict against the Divine-Spiritual order to which man originally belongs.

[ 31 ] At this point Michael steps in. With his own being he stands within the incalculable; but he balances the incalculable with the calculable, which he bears within him as the cosmic Thought that he has received from his Gods.

[ 32 ] The position of the Ahrimanic Powers in the world is different. They are the exact opposite of the Divine-Spiritual Beings with whom man is originally united. At the present time these latter are purely spiritual Powers who possess absolutely free Intelligence and absolutely free Will, but in this Intelligence and Will they create the wise insight of the necessity of the calculable and the unfree—the cosmic Thought out of whose lap man is to unfold as a free being. And in the Cosmos they are united in love with all that is calculable—with the cosmic Thought. This love streams from them through the Universe.

[ 33 ] In complete contrast with this, there lives, in the greedy desire of the Ahrimanic powers, cold hatred against all that unfolds in freedom. Ahriman's efforts are directed towards making a cosmic machine out of that which he allows to stream forth from the Earth into universal space. His ideal is ‘measure, number and weight’ and nothing else than these. He was called into the Cosmos that serves the evolution of humanity, because ‘measure, number and weight,’ which is his sphere, had to be unfolded.

[ 34 ] The world is truly understood only by one who comprehends it everywhere with respect to spirit and body. This must be carried right into Nature, with respect to such Powers as the Divine-Spiritual who work in love and the Ahrimanic who work in hatred. In Nature's cosmic warmth which comes in spring and works more strongly towards summer, we must perceive the love of the Divine-Spiritual Beings working through Nature; in the icy blast of winter we must become aware of Ahriman's working.

[ 35 ] At midsummer, Lucifer's power weaves itself into the love that works in Nature:—into the warmth. At Christmas the power of the Divine-Spiritual Beings with whom man is originally united is directed against the frost-hatred of Ahriman. And towards spring the Divine Love working in Nature continually softens down the Ahriman-hatred there.

[ 36 ] The appearance of this Divine Love which comes each year is a time of remembrance, for with Christ the free element of God entered into the calculable element of Earth. Christ works in absolute freedom in the calculable element, and in this way He renders innocuous the Ahrimanic which craves for the calculable alone.

[ 37 ] The Event of Golgotha is the free cosmic deed of love within Earthly History, and it can only be grasped by the love which man develops for its comprehension.

(About Christmas, 1924)

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society (in connection with the foregoing on the subject of Heavenly History, Mythological History, Earthly History, the Mystery of Golgotha)

[ 38 ] 140. The cosmic process in which the evolution of mankind is interwoven—reflected, in the consciousness of man, as ‘History’ in the widest sense—reveals the following successive epochs: a long epoch of ‘Heavenly History’; a shorter epoch of ‘Mythological History’; and the epoch, relatively very short, of ‘Earthly History.’

[ 39 ] 141. Today, this cosmic process is divided, into the working of Divine-Spiritual Beings in free Intelligence and Will which none can calculate, and the ‘calculable’ process of the World-body.

[ 40 ] 142. Against the calculable order of the World-body the Luciferian Powers stand opposed; against all that creates in free Intelligence and Will, the Ahrimanic.

[ 41 ] 143. The Event of Golgotha is a cosmic deed, and free. Springing from the Universal love, it is intelligible only by the love in Man.

Let us take as a starting-point these words in St. Mark's Gospel: ‘Behold I send my Angel (messenger) before thee who shall prepare thy way before thee. The voice of one preaching (crying) in the wilderness.’ In the original text the words are: It is a voice of one crying in the solitude.

Anyone who reads these words with an open mind will at first be at a loss for an explanation. He will regard them more or less as a phrase or at most as allegorical. For what would be the point of preaching in a wilderness? It would be usual, surely, to go where there are plenty of people, not into a wilderness!

In the light of Spiritual Science the depth of the wisdom contained in every word of the Holy Scriptures is revealed in this passage. We shall find that every word in the original text is at its proper place, and moreover is only then intelligible.

What is meant by the words: ‘I send my Angel before thee, who shall prepare thy way before thee’? We know that the Bible is here referring to John the Baptist. But to understand why the word ‘Angel’ is used we must go back to conditions in an earlier period of our Earth's evolution and consider what ranks of Beings belonged to it. We know that on our physical Earth too there is a certain hierarchical order of which the mineral kingdom is the lowest stage; then come the plant and animal kingdoms and, at the highest stage, man. Beyond man is the hierarchy of the Angels, Archangels and Archai (Spirits of Personality, or Principalities); then the hierarchy of the Exousiai (Spirits of Form, or Powers), the Dynameis (Spirits of Movement, or Mights, also Virtues), and the Kyriotetes (Spirits of Wisdom, or Dominions); then the highest hierarchy of Thrones, Cherubim and Seraphim.

All these hierarchies too are involved in a constant process of evolution. Just as we are nowadays passing through the human stage of evolution on the Earth, the Angels passed through the human stage (though in a different form from ours) during the Old Moon evolutionary period, the previous condition of our planet. They are therefore a stage ahead of us. Just as one of our tasks on Earth is to lead and guide our children, so the task of the Angels is to lead and guide humanity. But because it is impossible for them to incarnate in the forms of earthly existence, to be able to help us they must allow their wisdom to flow into the bodies of the purest, most highly developed men, in order that the divine truths may be proclaimed to humanity through their mouths. In such a case we may say: the Angels clothe themselves in maya.

This becomes still more intelligible if we go back to times of remote antiquity and picture the seven Rishis of India. If we had looked at their outer forms we should have seen simple men, perhaps peasants. The essential core of their being was concealed within them. Clairvoyantly, however, we should have seen them in flaming auras, from which warmth radiated into their surroundings. But in order that the greatest cosmic wisdom might penetrate into them it was necessary for all the seven to be together. Divinity played upon them as if they were a scale of seven tones. The language they spoke would have seemed to us nothing but unintelligible sounds.

It is hardly possible nowadays to form any idea of the nature of language in those ancient times because our own, by contrast, is a conglomeration of lifeless ideas which we employ to reach a logical conclusion. In the days of the Rishis it was the sound that caused pictures to rise up before the inner eye. What, then, was the original source of language? The wise men, the sages, of ancient times, brought it down from the stars. For them the Zodiac was the script of the Godhead in the heavens. The zodiacal constellations created the consonants, the planets created the vowels, and according to how the planets altered their courses in the Zodiac the sages interpreted the various meanings of the heavenly wisdom.

The bodies of the Rishis were maya, enshrining the inmost core of Divinity.

If we direct the light gained from Spiritual Science upon the words of the Bible, all the bleakness with which materialists are so prone to invest them, disappears. We understand the real meaning of the words which say that God sent an Angel in advance, to prepare the way of the one who was to come. The Angel is a more highly developed Being of the hierarchy of the rank immediately above man, a Being who sheathed his spirit in the maya of a human body—in this case in the body of John the Baptist, the reincarnated Elijah. If we are to understand the words of the Bible truly, it is only a matter of shedding the right light upon them and interpreting them literally.

Theologians are baffled by the words about the voice of a preacher in the wilderness, the voice of one crying in the wilderness. What can this mean?

John the Baptist baptised with water. In this baptism the whole body was plunged into the Jordan as part of the rites of Initiation. Why was this done? Because the etheric body of a spiritually developed man was to be loosened for a short time from the physical body; the man then experienced what one who is dying experiences when his etheric body is loosened from the physical. A picture of his present incarnation back to his birth is unrolled before him in all detail as a kind of panorama and he feels and knows that outside his body of flesh he is a spiritual being.

Anyone who had returned to his physical body after this experience during baptism was henceforth inwardly different from other men: he felt as if he were standing alone with this expansion of knowledge, separated from the rest of humanity; he felt that men could no longer understand him, that he was isolated, as it were in a ‘wilderness’, in solitude. And in this state of deepest inner isolation he became aware of the ‘voice of one crying’—his Angel. In this case the guiding Angel was clothed in the person of John the Baptist. That is the meaning of the passage in the Bible about the voice calling, or crying, in the wilderness.

Later in St. Mark's Gospel, where Christ is proclaiming the highest wisdom in the schools, the words are: ‘And they were astonished at His teaching: for He taught them as one that had authority, and not as the scribes.’ What does speaking ‘with authority’ mean? Just as Angels are the guides of individual men and Archangels of whole peoples, so there are other, still higher Beings who are the guides of the forces and powers of nature. These are the sources upon which men of genius draw to create their masterpieces. The works of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, give expression to the powers of nature.

To picture where these powers of nature are made manifest let us imagine that we are standing on the heights of a Swiss mountain. If we are fortunate enough to be there at sunrise, we shall be overwhelmed by the magic and sublimity of this spectacle of nature, and we shall feel pervaded through and through by the mighty forces radiating from it and revealing to us the power of Almighty God. We watch how from the glimmering grey of dawn the first delicate colours of the rising sun appear, how the peaks of the snowcapped mountains are suffused with rosy mauve, and our eyes are dazzled by this spectacle of greater and greater brilliance. We see how the rays call forth colours which seem to stream from every side, filling more and more of the space around us, until finally the sun appears in all its splendour, kindling life and radiating warmth into the lowest valleys. In this majestic manifestation of nature we are actually beholding the confluence of spiritual forces and these forces are the Beings of the Hierarchies we have learnt to know as the Exousiai, the Powers, or Spirits of Form. In the original text the words are: ‘He taught as the Exousiai teach.’ Christ spoke with the powers of these Beings. In John the Baptist it was the Angel, the Being of the rank immediately above man, who spoke. In Christ it was the Exousiai, who as I have said, speak through events of nature. It was their forces in the body of Christ which enabled Him to teach ‘with authority’.

John the Baptist had received the highest Initiation connected with the constellation of Aquarius. In old maps of the Zodiac the sign depicting Aquarius is a man stooping down with the arms held in a particular position. This illustrates the words in St. Mark's Gospel: ‘There cometh after me one mightier than I, the latchet of whose shoes I am not worthy to stoop down and unloose.’

During my last visit here I spoke about man's life between death and rebirth and how that life is connected with the great realm of the cosmos. I wanted to show how the path traversed by the human being between death and a new birth actually leads through the cosmic spheres. Let us now briefly recapitulate what was said then.

The first period after a man's death is filled with experiences connected in some way with his recent life on earth. He is emerging from, growing away from, his last earthly life, and during the first period after death the emotions, passions and feelings that affected his astral body all continue to exist. Because during physical incarnation man is conscious of these feelings only when he is actually within his physical body, it is natural that his experiences of all these forces in the astral body is essentially different when he is passing through the region of existence between death and a new birth. In normal cases, although there are many exceptions, a sense of deprivation is present during the first period after death. This is due to the fact that man must live through the experiences in his astral body without having a physical body at his disposal. He still longs for his physical body, and in normal cases this longing holds him back in the sphere of the earth for a longer or shorter period. Life in kamaloca takes its course in the sphere between the earth and the orbit of the moon, but experiences in kamaloca that are of essential significance take place in a realm nearer the earth than, let us say, the orbit of the moon.

Souls who have unfolded only few feelings and sentiments transcending the affairs of earthly life remain bound to the earth sphere by their own cravings for a considerable time. Even outwardly it is easy to understand that a man who for a whole lifetime has cultivated only such feelings as can be satisfied by means of bodily organs and earthly conditions can but remain bound to the earth sphere for a certain time. Impulses and desires quite different from those ordinarily imagined can also cause a soul to remain bound to the earth sphere. Ambitious people, for instance, who cultivate an inordinate longing for certain things within earthly conditions and who depend on the appreciation of their fellow men, thereby develop an emotional disturbance in their astral body that will result in their being bound to the earth sphere for a longer time after death. There are many reasons for which human souls are held back in the earth sphere. By far the greater majority of communications from the spirit world made by mediums stem from such souls and consist essentially of what they are striving to cast off.

Although the motives binding these souls to the earth are mostly ignoble, it need not invariably be so. It may also be due to anxiety for those who have been left behind on earth. Concern for friends, relatives and children may also act as a kind of gravity that holds souls back in the earth sphere. It is important to pay attention to this because by taking it into account we can also help the dead. If, for instance, we realize that the departed soul feels anxiety for a living person—and much can come to our knowledge in this respect—it will help the dead person in his further development to relieve him of this anxiety. We ease the life of someone who has died by relieving him, for example, of anxiety about a child whom he has left behind unprovided for. By doing something for the child, we relieve the dead person of anxiety, and this is a true service of love. Let us picture such a situation. The dead person has not available the means to rid himself of anxiety. From his realm he may be unable to do anything that would ease the circumstances of a child, a relative or a friend. He is often condemned—and in many cases this weighs heavily upon the seer—to bear the anxiety until the situation of the one left behind improves of itself or by circumstances. Therefore, if we do something to better the situation we will have performed a real deed of love for the dead one.

It has frequently been observed that a person who had planned to do something definite in life died and then continued to cling to the plan after his death. We help him if we ourselves attempt to do what he would have liked to do. These situations are not difficult to grasp. We should take account of them because they tally with clairvoyant observation.

There are many other facts that may keep a soul in the etheric sphere of the earth. Eventually he grows beyond this sphere. This process has already partly been described. Our concepts must be recast if we wish to gain an understanding of the life between death and rebirth. It is not really incongruous to speak about the dead in words taken from the conditions of earthly existence because our language is adapted to these conditions. Although what can be expressed in words about life after death tallies only in a pictorial sense, it need not necessarily be incorrect.

Descriptions are never quite accurate that convey the idea that the dead are confined to a definite place like a being who is living in a physical body. What is experienced both after death and in initiation is that one is emerging from the body and one's whole soul-being is expanding. When we follow a soul who has reached the Moon sphere as we call it, the “body” denotes the expansion of the range of experience. In actual fact the human being grows, in a spiritual sense, to gigantic dimensions. He grows out into the spheres, but the spheres of the dead are not separate from each other as in the case of men on earth. They are spatially intermingled. A sense of separateness arises because consciousness is separate. Beings may be completely intermingled without knowing anything of one another.

The feeling of either isolation or community after death of which I spoke during my last visit is connected with the interrelationships of consciousness. It is not as if a dead person were on some isolated island in a spatial sense. He pervades the other being of whose existence he is totally unaware although they occupy the same space.

Let us now consider what comes about mainly when the period of kamaloca is over. When an individual enters upon his devachanic existence after passing through the Moon sphere, kamaloca is not yet entirely at an end. This does not preclude the fact that it is within the Moon sphere that adjustments take place that are of significance not only as kamaloca experiences, but also for the later life of the individual when he again enters existence through birth. We can characterize in the following way what is added to the kamaloca experiences. A man may be so active in life that he brings all his talents to expression. But there are many men of whom we have to say, when we observe them with the eyes of the soul, that according to their faculties and talents they could have achieved in life something quite different from what they have in fact achieved. Such people have lagged behind their talents.

Something else comes into consideration. There are people who nurture a great number of intentions in the course of their life. It need not be a question of talent, but of intentions connected either with trivial or important aims. How much in life merely remains at the stage of intention without being fulfilled!

There are things in this category that need not be considered blameworthy. In order to show how significant such things may be I will mention an instance already known to some friends. Goethe embarked in his Pandora upon a poetical work and at a certain point he came to a standstill. I once explained what happened to Goethe when writing Pandora in the following way. The very greatness that had conceived the plan of the poem prevented him from completing the work. He was incapable of unfolding the power whereby the plan could have turned into reality. It was not because of shortcomings but in a sense because of his greatness that Goethe was prevented from completing Pandora. This is the case with some of his other works, too. He left them unfinished. The fragment of Pandora shows that Goethe made such considerable artistic demands upon himself that his powers, even in respect of the outer form of the poem, were simply not able to carry out the entire mighty plan with the same ease as in the fragment with which he was successful. This is obviously an example of an unfulfilled intention.

Therefore, on the one hand, a man may lag behind his talents owing to laziness or to defects in character or intellect, but the other possibility is that he may not be able to carry out his intentions in small or important matters. Now there is something great in a poet who does not complete a work such as Pandora, but every imperfection in man is inscribed by him into the Akasha Chronicle in the Moon sphere, and thus an abundance of shortcomings and imperfections come before the eye of the seer in the realm between Earth and Moon. Human imperfections, be they noble or no, are faithfully recorded there. Instances can be found in which, through physical health, through a bodily constitution, providing a good foundation for intellectual gifts, a man would have been capable of achieving certain things, but failed to do so. What he could have become but had not become when he passed through the gate of death—this is inscribed in the Akasha Chronicle.

Do not imagine that the end of Pandora is in some way inscribed in the Moon sphere. What is inscribed has to do with Goethe's astral body, namely, that he had conceived a great, far-reaching plan and only fulfilled a part of it. All such things, including trivial matters, are inscribed between the spheres of Earth and Moon. A person who forms a resolution but has not carried it out before his death, inscribes the fact of non-fulfillment in this sphere. A fairly accurate characterization can be given of what is disclosed to the eye of seership in this realm. A promise that has not been kept, for example, is not inscribed until later, actually not until the Mercury sphere is reached. An unfulfilled resolution, however, is inscribed in the Moon sphere. Anything that affects not only ourselves but also others is not immediately inscribed in the Moon sphere, but only later. Anything that affects us as individuals, that keeps us behind our proper stage of evolution and thus denotes imperfection in our personal development, is inscribed in the Moon sphere.

It is important to realize that our imperfections, especially those that need not have been inevitable, are inscribed in the Moon sphere.

It should not be thought that in all circumstances such an inscription is a dreadful thing. In a certain sense it can be of the greatest value and significance. We will speak in a moment of the meaning and purpose of these inscriptions in the Akasha Chronicle. First it must be emphasized that as the person expands into other spheres, all his imperfections are there inscribed. He expands from the Moon sphere into the Mercury sphere; I am speaking entirely from the aspect of occultism, not from that of ordinary astronomy. Something is inscribed by him in all the spheres, in the Mercury sphere, the Venus sphere, the Sun sphere, the Mars sphere, the Jupiter sphere, the Saturn sphere and even beyond.

Most inscriptions, however, are made within the Sun sphere, for as we heard in the last lecture, outside the Sun sphere a man mainly has to adjust matters that are not just left to his own individual discretion.

Thus after having cast away more or less completely what still draws him to the earth, man journeys through the planetary spheres and even beyond them. The contact thus established with the corresponding forces provides what he needs in his evolution between death and a new birth. When I spoke in the last lecture of man coming into contact with the higher hierarchies and receiving the gifts they bestow, that was the same as saying that his being expands into the cosmos. When the expansion has been completed he contracts again until he has become minute enough to unite as a spirit-seed with what comes from the parents. This is indeed a wonderful mystery. When the human being passes through the gate of death he himself becomes an ever-expanding sphere. His potentialities of soul and spirit expand. He becomes a gigantic being and then again contracts. What we have within us has in fact contracted from the planetary universe. Quite literally we bear within us what we have lived through in a planetary world.

When I was here last I said certain things about the passage through the Mercury sphere, the Venus sphere and the Sun sphere. Today I wish to speak about certain aspects of the passage through the Mars sphere. When a man passes from the Sun sphere into the Mars sphere, the conditions of existence into which he enters are quite different in our present age from what they were a comparatively short time ago. To the eyes of the seer it is quite evident that there was good reason for the statements, originating from the clairvoyance once possessed by humanity, about the several bodies composing the planetary system. It was entirely in keeping with the facts that Mars was considered to be the member of our planetary system connected with all warlike, aggressive elements in the evolution of humanity. The fantastic theories advanced by physical astronomy today about a possible form of life on Mars are without foundation. The nature of the beings who may be called “Mars men,” if we wish to use such an expression, is altogether different from that of the men on earth, and no comparison is possible. Until the seventeenth century the character of the Mars beings had invariably been one of warlike aggressiveness. Belligerency, if one may use this word, was an inherent quality of the Mars “culture.” The basis of it was formed by the rivalries and clashes between souls perpetually battling with each other. As an individual was passing through the Mars sphere between death and rebirth, he came into contact with these forces of aggression and they made their way into his soul. If when he was born again his innate tendencies made him specially able to develop and give expression to these forces, it was to be attributed to his passage through the Mars sphere.

This subject is full of complications. On the earth we live among the beings of the three kingdoms of nature, and among men. By various means we come into contact with the souls who in their life after death still retain some connection with the earth but we also encounter beings who are utterly foreign to the earth. The more an initiate is able to widen his vision, the more souls are found who are strangers on the earth, and the more it is realized that wanderers are passing through the earth sphere. They are beings who are not connected with earthly life in the normal way. This is no different for us as men of earth than it is for the moon dwellers through whose sphere of life we also pass between death and a new birth. When we are passing through the Mars sphere, for example, we are ghosts, specters, for the Mars dwellers. We pass through their sphere as strangers, as alien beings. But the Mars beings, too, at a certain stage of their existence, are condemned to pass through our earth sphere and one who possesses certain initiate faculties encounters them when conditions are favorable.

Beings of our planetary system are continually streaming past each other. While we are living on earth, often imagining that we are surrounded only by the beings of the different kingdoms of nature, there are itinerants from all the other planets in our environment. During a certain period between death and a new birth we, too, are itinerants among the other planetary “men,” if one might speak in this way. We have to develop in our lives on earth the essentials of our particular mission in the present epoch of cosmic existence. Other beings are allotted to the other planetary worlds, and between death and rebirth we must contact these worlds, too. Therefore, when reference is made to one region or another of life in Devachan, it is actually the case, although it is not expressly stated, that the happenings are taking place in some sphere of our planetary system. This should be borne in mind. Thus at a certain time in life between death and a new birth we pass through the Mars sphere.

Just as the process of the earth evolution is a process of descent until the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, and of ascent from then onwards, so also do the other planets undergo an evolution in their own way. From the year 33 A.D. the date is approximately correct, the earth entered upon an ascending process of evolution. That year was the pivotal point in the earth's evolution. On Mars the pivotal point was at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Until then, the evolution of conditions on Mars had been a process of descent and from that time onwards a process of ascent has occurred because an event of the greatest significance for that planet then took place.

In connection with earth evolution we know of the remarkable personage Gautama Buddha. He was a Bodhisattva until in the twenty-ninth year of his life he rose to the rank of Buddhahood and was then destined never to be incarnated again in a physical body on earth. From other lectures you will have heard, however, that later on the Buddha still worked into the earth sphere from the spiritual world. He sent his forces into the astral body of Jesus child of the Gospel of St. Luke. But in another way, too, he influenced earthly life without incarnating into a physical body. In the seventh and eighth centuries there was a mystery school in the southeast of Europe for those who at that time were endowed with some degree of seership. The teachers in that school were not only individualities in physical incarnation but there were also those who work from spiritual heights only as far as the etheric body. It is possible for more highly developed men to receive instruction from individualities who no longer, or never, descend into a physical body. The Buddha himself was a teacher in the mystery school. Among his pupils at that time was the personality who was born later on in his next incarnation as Francis of Assisi. Many of the qualities so impressively displayed in that later life are to be traced to the fact that Francis of Assisi had been a pupil of Buddha.

Here we see how the Buddha continued to work from spiritual heights into the earth sphere after the Mystery of Golgotha, and how he was connected with the life of man between birth and death.

Then, in the seventeenth century, the Buddha withdrew from earthly existence and accomplished for Mars a deed that, although not of the magnitude of the Mystery of Golgotha, nevertheless resembled it and corresponded on Mars to the Mystery of Golgotha on earth. At the beginning of the seventeenth century the Buddha became the redeemer, the savior of Mars. He was the individuality whose mission it was to inculcate peace and harmony into the aggressive nature of Mars. Since then the Buddha impulse is to be found on Mars, as the Christ impulse is to be found on the earth since the Mystery of Golgotha.

The destiny of the Buddha on Mars was not death as in the Mystery of Golgotha. Yet in a certain respect, it, too, was a kind of crucifixion inasmuch as this wonderful individuality, who in keeping with his life on earth radiated universal peace and love, was transferred into the midst of what was completely alien to him, into the aggressive, warlike element on Mars. It was Buddha's mission to exercise a pacifying influence on Mars. For the gaze of seership there is something tremendously impressive in the picture of two collateral events. The Buddha had risen to the highest point attainable in his earthly existence, to the rank of Buddhahood, and had lived on earth as the Buddha for fifty years. Then in his eightieth year, on October 13, 483 B.C, on a glorious moonlit night, he breathed out his being into the silvery radiance glimmering over the earth. This event, which even outwardly seems to be a manifestation of the breath of peace emanating from the Buddha, bears witness to the fact that he had attained the zenith of development within his earthly existence. It is deeply impressive to contemplate his wonderful happening in connection with that moment at the beginning of the seventeenth century when, with all his abounding powers of peace and love, the Buddha went to Mars in order that those powers might stream from him into the aggressiveness prevailing there to gradually inaugurate the process of Mars' ascending evolution.

When a soul passed through the Mars sphere in times before the Buddha Mystery, it was endowed primarily with forces of aggressiveness. Since the Buddha Mystery a soul undergoes essentially different experiences if it is fitted by nature to gain something from the Mars forces. To avoid any misunderstanding it must be emphasized that as little as the whole earth today is already Christianized, as little has Mars become entirely a planet of peace. That process will still take a long time so that if a soul has any aptitude for receiving elements of aggressiveness there is still ample opportunity for it. Nevertheless, we must not lose sight, spiritually, of the event of which we have spoken. The more deeply the earth enters into a phase of materialism, the less will anyone who really understands the evolutionary process admit that it would be natural for a man in his life between birth and death to follow Buddha in the way that men followed him in pre-Christian times. The development of natures such as that of Francis of Assisi will gradually become less and less possible on earth, less and less suitable for external civilization. Nevertheless, between death and rebirth the soul is able to pass through this experience. Grotesque as it may seem, yet it corresponds to the facts, for a certain period between death and a new birth, during the passage through the Mars sphere, every human soul has the opportunity of being a Franciscan or a Buddhist and of receiving all the forces that can flow from feeling and experience of this kind. The passage through the Mars sphere can therefore be of great importance for the human soul. Man, however, inscribes his perfections and imperfections into whatever sphere he enters according to their affinity with the characteristic qualities of that sphere.

Between death and rebirth our perfections and imperfections are faithfully recorded in the Akasha Chronicle. Certain attributes are inscribed in the Moon sphere, others in the Venus sphere, others in the Mars sphere, others in the Mercury sphere, others in the Jupiter sphere, and so on. When we are returning to an incarnation in a physical body and our being is slowly contracting, we encounter everything that was inscribed on the outward journey. In this way our karma is prepared. On the path of return we can inscribe into our own being the record of an imperfection we ourselves first inscribed into the Akasha Chronicle. Then we arrive on the earth. Because there is within us everything we inscribed into our being on the return journey, and we are obliged to inscribe a great deal even if not everything, because of this our karma unfolds. Up above, however, everything still remains inscribed.

Now these inscriptions work together in a remarkable way. They are engraved into the spheres, into the Moon sphere, Venus sphere, and so on. These spheres are involved in certain movements so that the following may happen. Let us say that a man has inscribed one of his imperfections into the Moon sphere. While passing through the Mars sphere he has inscribed there a quality of his character through the fact that he acquired in that sphere a certain element of aggressiveness that was not previously in him. Now on the return journey he passes through the Mars sphere again and comes back to the earth. He lives on the earth and has received into his karma what he has inscribed in the Mars sphere but at the same time it stands recorded above him. Up there is Mars, in a certain relationship to the Moon. (The outer planets indicate the relative positions of the spheres.) Because Mars stands in a certain relationship to the Moon, the inscription of the aggressive element and the man's imperfections are, as it were, in the same constellation. The consequence is that when the one planet stands behind the other they work in conjunction. This is the time when the individual in question will tackle his imperfections with the aggressive quality acquired from Mars. So the position of the planets really does indicate what the man himself has first inscribed into these spheres.

When in astrology we ascertain the positions of the planets and also their relative positions to those of the fixed stars, this gives some indication of what we ourselves have inscribed. The outer planets are in this case a less important factor. What actually has an effect upon us is what we ourselves have inscribed in the several spheres. Here is the real reason why the planetary constellations have an effect upon man's nature. It is because he actually passes through the several planetary spheres. When the Moon stands in a certain relationship to Mars, and to some fixed star, this constellation works as a whole. That is to say, the Mars quality, Moon and fixed star work in conjunction upon the man and bring about what this combined influence is able to achieve.

So it is really the moral inheritance deposited by us between death and rebirth that appears again in a new life as a stellar constellation in our karma. That is the deeper basis of the connection between the stellar constellation and man's karma. Thus if we study the life of a man between death and a new birth we perceive how significantly he is connected with the whole cosmos.

An element of necessity enters into a man's connection with the realms lying beyond the Sun sphere. Let us consider the Saturn sphere in particular. If during his present earth life a man has made efforts to master the concepts of spiritual science, the passage through the Saturn sphere is of special significance for his next life. It is in this sphere that the conditions are created that enable him to transmute the forces acquired through the knowledge of spiritual science or anthroposophy into forces that elaborate his bodily constitution in such a way that in his coming life he has a natural inclination towards the spiritual. A human being may grow up today and be educated as a materialist, Protestant or Catholic. Spiritual science approaches him. He is receptive to it and does not reject it. He inwardly accepts it. He now passes through the gate of death. He enters the Saturn sphere. In passing through it, he absorbs the forces that make him in his next life a spiritual man, who shows even as a child an inclination to the spiritual.

It is the function of every sphere through which we pass between death and rebirth to transform what our souls have assimilated during an incarnation into forces that can then become bodily forces and endow us with certain faculties. Yesterday I could only go as far as is possible in a public lecture when I said that the true Christian impulses were already in Raphael when he was born. This must not be taken to imply that Raphael brought with him some definite Christian concepts or ideas. I have said impulses, not concepts. What has been taken into the conceptual life in one incarnation is united with the human being in quite a different form. It appears as impulses or forces. The power that enabled Raphael to create those delicate, wonderful figures of Christianity in his paintings came from his earlier incarnations. We are justified in speaking of him as a “born Christian.” Most of you know that Raphael had been incarnated previously as John the Baptist, and it was then that the impulses that appeared in the Raphael existence as inborn Christian impulses had penetrated into his soul.

It must always be emphasized that conjectures and comparisons may lead far off the mark when speaking about successive incarnations. To the eyes of seership they present themselves in such a way that in most cases one would not take one life to be the cause of the next. In order that something assimilated in the life of the soul in one incarnation may be able to unfold forces in the next incarnation that work upon the bodily foundation of talents, we must pass through the period from death to rebirth. On earth and with terrestrial forces it is impossible to transform what our souls have experienced in earthly life into forces capable of working upon the bodily constitution itself. Man in his totality is not an earth being, and his physical form would have a grotesque appearance according to modern ideas if only those forces present in the earth sphere could be applied to his bodily development.

When an individual comes into existence through birth he must bear within him the forces of the cosmos, and these forces must continue to work within him if he is to assume human form. Forces that build up and give shape to such forms cannot be found within the earth sphere. This must be borne in mind. Thus in what he is man bears the image of the cosmos in himself, not merely that of the earth. It is a sin against the true nature of man to trace his source and origin to earthly forces, and to study only what can be observed externally in the kingdoms of the earth through natural science. Nor should we ignore the fact that everything a man receives from the earth is dominated by what he brings with him from those super-earthly spheres through which he passes between death and rebirth. Within these several spheres he becomes a servant of one or the other of the higher hierarchies.

What is inscribed in the Akasha Chronicle between the earth and the moon is of special importance because it is there that among other things all imperfections are recorded. It should be realized that the inscribing of these imperfections is governed by the view that every record there is of significance for the individual's own evolution, either furthering or hindering his progress. Because it is there inscribed in the Akasha Chronicle between earth and moon, it also becomes significant for the evolution of the earth as a whole. The imperfections of really great men are also recorded in that sphere. One example of tremendous interest for clairvoyant observation is Leonardo da Vinci. He is a spirit of greatness and universality equaled by few others on earth, but compared with what he intended, his actual achievements in the external world in many respects remained incomplete. As a matter of fact, no man of similar eminence left as much uncompleted as Leonardo da Vinci. The consequence of this was that a colossal amount was inscribed by him in the Moon sphere, so much indeed that one is often bound to exclaim, “How could all that is inscribed there possibly have reached perfection on the earth!”

At this point I want to tell you of something that seemed to me quite significant when I was studying Leonardo da Vinci. I was to give a lecture about him in Berlin and a particular observation made in connection with him seemed to be extremely important. It fills one with sadness today to see on the wall of the Church of Santa Maria della Grazie in Milan the rapidly disappearing colors that now convey no more than a faint shadow of what the picture once was. If we remember that Leonardo took sixteen years to paint this picture, and think of how he painted it, we gain a definite impression. It is known that he would often go away for a long time. Then he would return to the picture, sit in front of it or many hours, make a few strokes with the brush and go off again. It is also known that many times he felt unable to express what he wished in the painting and suffered terrible fits of depression on this account. Now it happened that a new prior was appointed to the monastery at a time when Leonardo had already been working at the picture for many years. This prior was a pedantic and strict disciplinarian with little understanding of art. He asked impatiently why the painter could not finish the picture, reproached him for it and also complained to Duke Ludovico. The Duke repeated the complaint to Leonardo and he answered, “I do not know whether I shall ever be able to complete this picture. I have prototypes in life for all the figures except those of Judas and Christ. For them I have no models, although in the case of Judas, if no model turns up I can always take the prior. But for the Christ I have no prototype.” That, however, is digressing.

What I want to say is that when one looks today at the figure of Judas in the picture that has almost completely faded, a shadow is to be seen on this figure, a shadow that cannot be explained in any way, either by the instreaming light or by anything else. Occult investigation finds that the painting was never as Leonardo da Vinci really wanted it to be. With the exception of the figures of Judas and the Christ he wanted to portray everything through light and shadow, but Judas was to be portrayed in such a way as to give the impression that darkness dominated the countenance from within. This was not intended to be conveyed by external contrasts of light and shadows. In the figure of Christ the impression was to be that the light on His countenance was shining from within, radiating outwards from within. But at this point disharmony beset Leonardo's inner life, and the effect he desired was never produced. This affords a clue when one is observing the many remaining inscriptions made by Leonardo in the Moon sphere. It is an example of something that could not be brought to fulfillment in the earth sphere.

When the period following that of Leonardo da Vinci is investigated, it is found that Leonardo continued to work through a number of those who lived after him. Even externally there can be found in Leonardo's writings things that later on were demonstrated by scientists and also by artists. In fact, the whole subsequent period was under his influence. It is then discovered that the inscribed imperfections worked as inspirations into the souls of Leonardo's successors, into the souls of men who lived after him.

The imperfections of an earlier epoch are still more important for the following epoch than its perfections. The perfections are there to be studied, but what has been elaborated to a certain degree of perfection on the earth has, as it were, reached an end, has come to a conclusion in evolution. What has not been perfected is the seed of the following divine evolutionary process. Here we come to a remarkable, magnificent paradox. The greatest blessing for a subsequent period is the fruitful imperfection, the fruitful, justifiable imperfection of an earlier period. What has been perfected in an earlier epoch is there to be enjoyed. Imperfection, however, imperfection originating in great men whose influences have remained for posterity, helps to promote creative activity in the following period. Hence, there is obviously tremendous wisdom in the fact that imperfections remain in the neighborhood of the earth, inscribed in the records of the Akasha Chronicle between earth and moon.

This brings us to the point where we can begin to understand the principle that perfection signifies for the different epochs the end of a stream of evolution, and imperfection, the beginning of an evolutionary stream. For imperfection in this sense men should actually be thankful to the gods.

What is the purpose of studies such as are contained in this lecture? The purpose is to make man's connection with the macrocosm more and more comprehensible, to show how men bear the macrocosm compressed within them and also how they can be related to their spiritual environment. Realization of what these things mean can then be transformed into a feeling that pervades a man in such a way that he combines with this knowledge a concept of his dignity that does not make him arrogant, but fills him with a sense of responsibility, prompts him to believe not that he may squander his powers, but that he must use them.

It must, of course, be emphasized that it would be futile to say, “I had better leave imperfect such faculties as I possess.” Nothing whatever could be gained by such an attitude! If a man were deliberately to ignore his imperfections, he would, it is true, inscribe them as described, but they would have no light nor would they be capable of having any effect. Only those imperfections that are inscribed because they were due to necessity and not to result of laziness can work in the way that has been described.

To-day I want to make various comments on matters that have been mentioned lately, and to fill in certain gaps. If you follow with attention current trends, you will have noticed a feeling that the thoughts and impressions and impulses which for a long time have led to such “splendid progress” are no longer capable of helping us to cope with the immediate future. Yesterday one of our members gave me a copy of the Frankfurter Zeitung for last Wednesday, November 21st. There speaks a very learned gentleman ... he must be very learned, for he is not only a Doctor of Philosophy but also a Doctor of Theology, and also a Professor, so naturally he is a very clever man. He has written an article which deals with all sorts of spiritual needs of the present time, and in the course of it he says:

“The experience of the form of being which lies behind things does not require pious dedication or a religious evaluation, for it is itself religion. We are concerned not with feeling and grasping a particular content, but with the great Irrational which lies hidden behind all existence ... Anyone who makes contact with this, so that the divine spark leaps across, goes through an experience which is of primal character and may be called the primordial experience. Anyone who experiences this one thing, together with all that is stirred by the same flow of life, is imbued with—to use a favourite modern phrase—a feeling of cosmic existence.”

Excuse me for reading this to you: I am quoting it not in order to arouse in you any magnificent ideas, but so as to bring before you a sign of the times:

“A cosmic religiosity is coming to birth among us, and how strong is the demand for it is shown by the evident spread of the theosophical movement, which undertakes to discover and unveil the phases of this life beyond the range of the senses.”

It is really difficult to stumble through all these wishy-washy ideas, but you will agree that the article is remarkable as a symptom of the times! He goes on: “In this cosmic piety there is no question of a mysticism which turns away from the world ...” and so on.

It would be hard to discover anything intelligent in all this, but since it is written by a man with all these degrees, one must suppose that some intelligence is there! Otherwise we should have to take it as the obscure stammering of a learned man who has reached a dead end on his own path and now feels impelled to call attention to something which certainly exists and evidently appears to him as not wholly unattainable.

There is no cause for satisfaction in such remarks; we must above all take care not to let them lull us into a comfortable slumber just because it has again been noticed, from some point of view or other, that something lies behind the spiritual-scientific movement. That would be really harmful. People who write in this way are often quite satisfied with having written it. With these misty thoughts they point to something which is trying to make its way into the world, but they are far too complacent to go in for the serious study that Spiritual Science requires. Nothing less than that must lay hold of men's minds if some reality is to be brought into the trends of the times, so that healing can come of it. Of course it is easier to talk of this “surge” of “cosmic feeling” than to give serious attention to those things that are demanded by the signs of the times and must be made known to mankind. For this reason it seems to me necessary to repeat here the remarks I have made in public lectures and shall make again, with particular emphasis now on the distinction between the worn-out ideas which have led into these catastrophic times and those which must take hold of human souls if any sort of progress is to be accomplished.

The old wisdom, through which mankind has been guided up to our time, may give rise to thousands of congresses, world-congresses, people's congresses and so on; thousands and thousands of societies may be founded; but we must be clear that all these congresses and societies will accomplish nothing unless the life-blood of Spiritual Science flows through them. What is lacking among people to-day is the courage to embark on real research into the spiritual world. Strange as it may sound, it must be said—as a first step nothing else would be needed than to spread the little booklet, Human Life in the light of Anthroposophy, in the widest circles. Something would thereby be done to evoke knowledge of a connection between man and the cosmic order. The booklet calls attention precisely to this knowledge by showing in concrete terms how throughout the year the earth undergoes changes in its state of consciousness—and so on. What is said in that booklet and in this lecture is said with full consideration for the needs of our time. Acceptance of it would signify more than all this wishy-washy talk on cosmic feeling and surges and I know not what. I have just read this to you and I can't bring myself to repeat it—it is all put in such a senseless way.

This should of course not prevent us from taking note of such things: they are important and real. What I want to bring home to you is that we must not befog ourselves: we must be absolutely clear as to what we wish to do on behalf of Spiritual Science.

Now I will turn again to the fact that in this fifth post-Atlantean epoch humanity will have to find ways of dealing with great life-problems which in a certain sense were veiled by the wisdom of the past. I have already called your attention to them. One of these great problems will be concerned with finding out how to place the spiritual etheric forces at the service of practical life. I have told you that in this epoch we have to solve the problem of how the radiations from human states of mind are carried over into machines; of how human beings are to be brought into relation with an environment which must become increasingly mechanised. A week ago I pointed out how superficially this mechanisation is treated in a certain part of the world. I gave you the example of how an American way of thinking tries to extend the realm of the machine over human life itself. I told you of the rest-pauses which were used in order to enable a given number of workmen to load up to 47½ tons, instead of a much lower figure; this involves simply the application of Darwinian natural selection to human life.

Where this kind of thing goes on, the wish to yoke up human strength with the strength of machines is always involved. It would be quite mistaken merely to oppose these things. They are not going to fade away; they are on the march. The only question is whether in the course of world-history they are going to be brought on to the scene by men who are unselfishly aware of the great aims of earth-evolution and wish to shape these developments for the healing of mankind, or by groups of men who want to use them for their own or the group's selfish ends. That is the issue. The point is not what is going to happen, for it certainly will happen, but how it happens—how these things are handled. The welding together of human beings with machines will be a great and important problem for the rest of the earth-evolution.

I have often pointed out, even in public lectures, that human consciousness depends on destructive forces. During public lectures in Basle I twice said that in our nerve-system we are always in process of dying. These forces of death will become stronger and stronger, and we shall find that they are related to the forces of electricity and magnetism, and to those at work in machines. A man will be able in a certain sense to guide his intentions and his thoughts into the forces of the machines. Forces in human nature that are still unknown will be discovered—forces which will act upon external electricity and magnetism.

That is one problem: the bringing together of human beings with machines, and this is something which will exert ever-increasing influence on the future.

The other problem is concerned with calling in spiritual relationships to our aid. This can be done only when the time is ripe, and when a sufficient number of people are rightly prepared for it. But we must come to the stage when spiritual forces are brought into action for the governance of life in relation to illness and death.

Medicine will be spiritualised—very highly spiritualised. These things will be caricatured from various standpoints, but the caricatures only show what has to come. Again, the question is whether or not this problem—like the other problem I have mentioned—is handled in an egotistic way by individuals or by groups.

The third great question concerns ways of thinking about human birth and upbringing. I have told you how congresses on this subject have already been held, and how a materialistic form of science will be brought to bear in the future on procreation and the union of man and woman. These things indicate the great significance that attaches to this process of becoming. It is easy enough to ask why those who have the right knowledge in these matters do not apply it. In the future it will be clear enough what the state of affairs is regarding this application, and what are the forces which are even now opposing, for example, a more generous provision for a spiritualised medicine or a spiritualised economic life. All that can be done at present is to speak of these things, until people—I mean those who are ready to accept them selflessly—understand them sufficiently. There are many who think they have already got as far as that, but many hindrances arise from the circumstances of life to-day. These will be overcome in the right way only if understanding goes deeper and deeper, and if we actually refrain, for a time at least, from attempting practical applications on any large scale.

Things have developed in such a way that one can say: Little is known of all that lay behind the old atavistic searchings which continued up to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. People talk a great deal about the old alchemy; sometimes they call to mind the creation of Homunculus and so on. But most of this talk misses the point. If people would come to understand what can be said about the Homunculus scene in Faust, for instance, they would be better informed: the essential thing is that a mist has been spread over these subjects since the sixteenth century. They have receded into the background of human consciousness.

The law which prevails here is the same law which governs the rhythmic alternation of waking and sleeping in man. Just as a person cannot do without sleep, so mankind could not dispense with the sleep regarding spiritual knowledge which has marked the whole period since the sixteenth century. Man had to fall asleep to the spiritual, so that it could reappear in a new form. These necessities must be clearly seen, but without letting them depress us. We must realise clearly that the time for awakening has now come, that we have to play our part in it, that events often run ahead of our knowledge and that we shall not understand the events going on around us unless we are willing to receive the knowledge and to act in accordance with it.

I have repeatedly told you that certain groups are working esoterically in the direction I have indicated. It was first of all necessary that certain forms of knowledge—called nowadays by such misunderstood words as alchemy, astrology, etc.—should fall into abeyance, so that men should no longer be able to discern the soul-element in outer Nature and should rather be thrown back on themselves. And in order that they should awaken their inward forces, certain things had to appear as abstractions. Now these things must again take on a concrete spiritual form.

During the last centuries three ideas have gradually emerged in abstract guise. They were incorrectly named by Kant, and correctly by Goethe. Kant called them God, Freedom and Immortality; Goethe called them God, Virtue and Immortality. If we look into what lies behind these three words, we find that the same words are taken abstractly by modern man and were taken more concretely—but also more materially in the old atavistic sense—up to the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries. Experiments in the old style were carried out: the alchemists sought to observe processes in which the working of God could be seen. And they tried to produce the Philosopher's Stone.

Something concrete lies behind all these things. The Philosopher's Stone was to enable men to become virtuous—but this was thought of in a more material sense. It was also to lead to an experience of immortality: to bring a man into such a relationship to the cosmic whole that he would experience in himself what lies beyond birth and death. All the nebulous ideas by which people nowadays try to grasp these things no longer correspond with what was really intended. It has all become abstract, and it is of abstract ideas that modern men speak. They want to understand God through an abstract theology, and virtue also as something abstract—the more abstract it is, the better people like it. And it is the same with immortality. Speculation turns on what in man could be immortal. In my first Basle lecture [23rd November, 1917. (Not translated into English.)] I said that the kind of learning which under the name of philosophy occupies itself with such questions as that of immortality is a starveling, under-nourished kind of learning. That is merely another way of describing the abstract terms in which such matters are pursued.

In certain Western brotherhoods, however, a connection with the old traditions has been retained, and endeavours are made to use it for the egotistic interests of the group. It is time to call attention to these things. Of course, if from this Western quarter anything is said about God, virtue or freedom, and immortality, the words are given an abstract sense, but in the circle of initiates it is well known that all this is not mere abstract speculation. For their own part, they look for something much more concrete behind these abstract formulae, and in their own schools these terms are accordingly translated. God is translated as gold, and an endeavour is made to arrive at what lies behind the secret of gold, as it may be called. For gold, the representative of the sun-like within the earth's crust, does in fact enshrine an important secret. Gold stands in the same material relationships to other substances as the thought of God does to other thoughts. The only question is what is made of this secret.

This is linked up with the egotistic use of the mystery of birth, and here, real cosmic understanding is sought. All such understanding has been replaced for modern men by a purely earthly understanding. If someone wants to investigate, for example, how the embryonic life-cell of animal or man develops, he studies it through a microscope and is concerned only with what lies there directly under his lens. But that is far from being the whole thing. It will be realised—and some groups are very near this already—that the forces at work are not contained in the cell but come from the cosmos and its constellations. When a seed of life arises, it does so because the living creature which harbours the seed is receiving forces, cosmic forces, from all sides of the cosmos. And when fertilisation occurs, the results depend on which cosmic forces enter actively into the process.

One thing, not yet seen, will be recognised. To-day the idea is that we have a living creature, a hen, let us say. When a new seed of life appears in the hen, the biologist investigates how the egg arises out of the hen; he looks within the hen itself for the forces which cause the seed to grow. That is nonsense. The egg does not grow out of the hen; the hen is merely the substratum for it. The growth-forces work from out of the cosmos on to the soil which has been prepared in the hen for engendering the egg. The biologist to-day believes that the relevant forces are all to be found within the field of his microscope. Actually, what he sees there depends on stellar forces which work together in a certain pattern at a given point. When we discover the cosmic at this point, then for the first time we shall have got at the reality and the truth: it is the cosmic whole which conjures up the egg in the hen.

All this is connected especially with the secret of the sun, and in earthly terms with the secret of gold. To-day I can give you only a sort of schematic indication of it; these things will become much clearer in the course of time.

When “virtue” is discussed in these same schools, they call it simply “health,” and try to learn how the cosmic constellations are connected with health and sickness in men. By this means they come to know the particular earthly substances, the juices and so on, which are in their turn connected with sickness and health. We shall see develop increasingly from a certain direction a more material form of medical knowledge, but it will rest on a spiritual foundation.

From this side also will be spread the idea that man cannot be made good by learning all sorts of ethical principles, but by ingesting copper, for example, under a certain constellation, and arsenic under another. You can well imagine how ideas of this kind can be used by egotistic groups for enhancing their own power. They need only withhold this knowledge from others, and this will be the best means of dominating large numbers of men. They will not need to talk about such things; it will be enough to bring forward some new titbit. Then they will find openings for this titbit, having first flavoured it appropriately, and they will achieve their purpose when these novelties are accepted in a materialistic sense. We have only to remember that spiritual potencies are hidden in everything material. Only he who knows that in a true sense there really is nothing material, but only the spiritual—only he will penetrate behind the secrets of life.

Similar endeavours are made from the same quarter to transpose the problem of immortality into a materialistic frame, and this, too, can be done by making use of the cosmic constellations. This method certainly does not yield the immortality that is the subject of so many speculations, but immortality of another sort. Given a brotherhood lodge, then—at least so long as life cannot be lengthened by working on the physical body—preparations are made for subjecting a soul to such experiences as will enable it to remain within the lodge after death, so that it may contribute its forces to those at the disposal of the lodge. In these circles, accordingly, immortality is called simply “lengthening of life.”

External signs of all this can indeed be seen. I don't know if some of you may have noticed a book which also came from the West and caused a little stir for a while; it was called “On the Nonsense of Death.” These things all move in the same direction. They are still at their beginnings, for everything beyond that is kept as a closely guarded esoteric secret by the egotistic groups. But these things are really possible if they are given a materialistic colouring; if the abstract ideas of God, virtue and immortality are turned into the concrete ideas of gold, health and lengthening of life, and if what I have called the great problem of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch is utilised for the purpose of an egotistic group. You see, this “cosmic feeling,” which the learned Professor and Doctor of Theology talks about, is already being widely presented to people—and often, unfortunately, in an egotistic sense—as cosmic knowledge. For centuries science has kept its eyes fixed on earthly processes, and has ignored all the most significant influences that come from beyond the earth, but it is precisely in our fifth post-Atlantean epoch that extra-terrestrial forces from the cosmos will be put to use.

And so, just as it is essential for an orthodox professor of biology to have the most powerful microscope available and the most efficient laboratory methods, so, in the future, when science has been spiritualised, it will be of the utmost importance whether certain processes are carried through in the morning or in the evening, or at midday, and whether what has been done in the morning is allowed to be further influenced by an evening activity, or whether the cosmic influences are cut out, paralysed, from the morning until the evening. Processes of this kind will of necessity come to light and will run their course. Naturally, a great deal of water will have to flow under the bridges before the professional chairs and laboratories, at present organised on purely materialistic lines, are handed over to spiritual scientists, but this replacement must come about if humanity is not to sink into utter decadence. For example, if the question is one of doing good in the immediate future, existing laboratory methods must give way to methods whereby certain processes take place in the morning and are interrupted during the day, so that the cosmic stream passes through them again in the evening and is in turn rhythmically withheld again until morning. So the processes would take their course: certain cosmic workings would always be interrupted by day, and the cosmic morning and evening processes would be brought in. All sorts of arrangements would be necessary for this. You will realise that if one is not in a position to take any public action about these things, all one can do is to speak of them.

However, just as gold, health and the prolongation of life are put in the place of God, virtue and immortality, so from the same quarter efforts will be made to work not with the morning and evening processes, but with others. Last week I told you how an attempt will be made to set aside the impulse of the Mystery of Golgotha, while for the West another impulse, a sort of Anti-Christ is introduced; and from the East an attempt will be made to paralyse the twentieth-century manifestation of the Christ Impulse by diverting attention from the coming etheric Christ.

Those concerned to present an Anti-Christ as the real Christ will try also to make use of something that works through the most material forces, but in this very way can work spiritually. Above all they will strive to make use of electricity and earth-magnetism in order to produce effects all over the world. I have shown you how earth-forces rise up into what I have called the human Double, the Doppelgänger. This secret will be opened up. An American secret will be to make use of earth-magnetism, with its north-south duality, and by this means to send over the earth guiding forces which will have spiritual effects. Look at the magnetic chart of the earth and compare it with what I am now saying. Observe where the magnetic needle deviates to East and West and where it does not deviate. I can give only hints about all this. From a certain direction in the heavens, spiritual beings are continually active, and they have only to be put into the service of the earth, and—because these beings working in from the cosmos can mediate the secret of the earth's magnetism—it will be possible for egotistic groups to get behind this secret and to accomplish a great deal in connection with gold, health and the prolongation of life. It will be necessary for them only to pluck up their faltering courage—and in certain circles that will be done readily enough!

From the East an endeavour will be made to strengthen what I have already explained: to place in the service of the earth the beings which work in from the opposite side of the cosmos. In the future there will be a great battle. Human science will stretch out to the cosmic, but will try to get there by different paths. It will be the task of good, healing science to find certain cosmic forces which can reach the earth through the co-operation of two cosmic streams, those of Pisces and Virgo. The great secret to be discovered will be how the influence which works from the direction of Pisces as a power of the sun unites itself with the influence working from the direction of Virgo. It will make for good when it is learnt how the morning and evening forces from the two sides of the cosmos can be brought into the service of humanity. (See diagram at end of lecture.)

These forces, however, will be left aside by those who try to achieve their whole purpose through the polaric duality of positive and negative forces. The forces which enable the spiritual to stream down to earth with the aid of positive and negative magnetism come from Gemini; they are the midday forces. In ancient times it was known that cosmic influences were involved in this, and to-day even exoteric scientists are aware that in some or other way positive and negative magnetism lie behind Gemini in the Zodiac. The aim will be to paralyse all that could be gained through a revelation of the true duality in the cosmos—to paralyse it in a materialistic, egotistic way by means of the forces which stream in particularly from Gemini and can be placed entirely at the service of the human “Double.”

Other brotherhoods, concerned above all to divert attention from the Mystery of Golgotha, will try to make use of the duality in human nature—the duality which in our epoch embraces man as a unity, but includes within him his lower animal nature. A human being is really a centaur in a certain sense: his humanity rests on his lower animal nature in its astral form. This working together of the duality in man gives rise to a duality of forces. This duality of forces will be utilised particularly by certain egotistic brotherhoods, chiefly from the side of India and the East, in order to mislead eastern Europe, whose task it is to prepare for the sixth post-Atlantean epoch. And this will be done with the aid of the forces which work in from Sagittarius.

Whether to conquer the cosmic for mankind in a wrong, twofold way, or rightly in a one-fold way—that is the question facing mankind. From this will come a true renewal of astrology, which in its old form is atavistic and cannot survive. The wise Beings of the cosmos will enter into the struggle; one side will use the morning and evening processes in the way I have indicated; the West will prefer the midday processes, shutting out the morning and evening ones; and the East will prefer the midnight ones. Men will no longer manufacture substances on the basis merely of chemical attraction and repulsion; they will know that different substances arise according to whether they are made with morning and evening processes, or with midday and midnight ones. It will be known that such substances act in a quite different way on the triad, God, virtue and immortality—gold, health and prolongation of life. When the forces of Pisces and Virgo act in co-operation, nothing wrongful can be brought into being. Men will achieve something through which the mechanism of life will be detached, in a certain sense, from man himself, but will not give any one group power and rulership over another. The cosmic forces drawn from this direction will create remarkable machines, but only those that will relieve man of work, because they will carry a certain power of intelligence within themselves. And a Spiritual Science which itself reaches out towards the cosmic will have to see to it that all the great temptations which come from these machine-animals, created by man himself, are not allowed to exercise any harmful influence upon him.

With regard to all this, the essential thing is that people should prepare themselves for it by not treating realities as illusions and by coming to a genuine spiritual conception and understanding of the world. To see things as they are—very much depends on that! But we can see them as they are only if we are in a position to bring the ideas of Spiritual Science to bear on reality. For the rest of the earth's existence the dead will be co-operating actively in the highest degree, and it is how they co-operate that will matter. Here, above all, a great distinction will arise. On one side the attitude of men on earth can rightly lead the co-operation of the dead in such a direction that the dead will be active out of their own impulse, an impulse coming from the spiritual world which the dead are themselves experiencing. But from the other side many endeavours will be made to introduce the dead into human existence by artificial means. Along the indirect path through Gemini the dead will be led into human life, with the result that human vibrations will pass over into the mechanism of machines and will continue to vibrate there in a quite definite way. The cosmos will impart motion to the machines by the indirect path I have indicated.

It will thus be essential, when these problems emerge, that no improper methods should be applied to them, but only those elemental forces which belong to nature on their own account, and great care will have to be taken not to introduce improper forces into the realm of machines. In this occult sphere the human element must not be related to machinery in such a way that the Darwinian natural selection theory is used to determine the working capacity of human beings, in the way of which I gave you an example last week.

I am making these remarks—obviously they cannot exhaust the subject in so short a time—in the belief that you will meditate on these things and will try to build a bridge between them and all those experiences of life which can be encountered, particularly in this difficult time. You will see how things become clear to you if you contemplate them in the light that can come from such ideas as those I have been placing before you. The real point is not that in our time powers and constellations of powers are standing opposed to each other, as we are always being told in external exoteric life. The real point is quite different. It is that a kind of veil is now meant to be spread over the true impulses at work. Certain human powers are intent on saving something for themselves—what is it? Their aim is that impulses which up to the time of the French Revolution were justified, and were represented also by certain occult schools, shall now be taken charge of in an Ahrimanic-Luciferic sense, so as to maintain a form of society which is generally thought to have been overcome since the end of the eighteenth century.

Two powers, especially, stand in opposition to each other: the power representing the principle that was overcome at the end of the eighteenth century and the power representing the new age. A great many people, of course, are instinctively supporters of the new age. Therefore the representatives of the old impulses, those of the eighteenth, seventeenth and sixteenth centuries, must be yoked by artificial means to the forces which emanate from certain brotherhoods who are working for group-egotistic ends. The most effective principle for extending power over as many men as may be needed is to-day the principle of economic dependence. But that is only an instrument: the real thing is quite different. The real issue you can gather for yourselves from all the various hints I have given. The economic principle is connected with everything which seeks to enlist a great number of men all over the world as a kind of army in the service of these principles.

These are the powers which stand opposed to each other. And this indicates what it is that is really battling in the world to-day. In the West we have the principle which is really rooted in the eighteenth, seventeenth and sixteenth centuries, but which passes unnoticed because it clothes itself in the phrases of revolution and democracy. It wears them as a mask and by this means strives to gain all possible power for itself. These endeavours are favoured if as many people as possible do not exert themselves to see things as they are, and in this field allow themselves to be lulled to sleep again and again by the illusion that to-day there is a war between the Entente and the powers of Central Europe.

In reality there is no such war; only by going behind this illusion can one get at the real struggle, but light can be thrown on it if it is approached along the lines which, for certain reasons, I only hint at. At least we should endeavour not to take illusions for realities: then gradually the illusion will be dispelled as far as it need be. Above all we must strive to see these things objectively, as they really are.

If you bring together all that I have been saying, you will see that an apparently casual remark I made in the course of these lectures was not so at all. When I quoted something that Mephistopheles said to Faust, “I see you know the Devil” (he would certainly not have said this to Woodrow Wilson), it was by no means a casual remark: it can throw a great deal of light on the present situation. We must really look at these things objectively, without sympathy or antipathy; above all, we must be able to see how much in a particular case depends on the setting and how much on the capacity of an individual, for behind an individual's capacity there often lies something quite different from what lies behind the setting. Ask yourselves without prejudice—how much would Woodrow Wilson's brain be worth if it were not throned on the Presidency of the United States? Consider how it would be if this brain had a quite different setting: then its individual capacity would be revealed! The setting is what matters.

Let me now speak abstractly and radically, of course without discussing in detail the particular case I have mentioned—in a neutral country that would not be appropriate. If you take any individual brain, it can be revealing to ask whether it is worth something because it is illuminated and activated by a particular spiritual soul-force—whether it has the kind of spiritual significance I have been speaking of here—or whether it is worth no more than its weight, measured on a pair of scales.

In the eyes of people to-day, all this is grotesque; but what seems grotesque to them must come to seem obvious, if certain things are to be diverted from an unhealthy stream into a health-giving one. And what good is it to be always talking about them? You must come to see that there is no point in wishy-washy talk about “cosmic religiosity” or “how strong the striving for it is,” or of “the movement which aims at discovering and revealing the circulation of the life behind the senses,” and so on. All this does is to spread a mist over things which must be brought out clearly in the world, and should above all be carried as practical moral-ethical impulses into human life.

I can give you only indications. I leave you to build on them in your own meditations. I have been speaking aphoristically in many respects. But you will have the possibility of drawing a great deal out of the relationships shown in this picture of the Zodiac, if you truly use it as a subject for meditation.