The Rudolf Steiner Archive

I want to speak to-day¹ about a certain aspect of the Mystery of Golgotha of which I have often spoken before in more intimate anthroposophical gatherings. What there is to be said about the Mystery of Golgotha is so extensive in range, so rich in content and of such significance, that new light needs constantly to be shed upon it before any real approach can be made to this greatest of all Mysteries in the evolution of the earth and of humanity.

The importance of the Mystery of Golgotha can be rightly assessed only when we envisage two streams of evolution in man's earthly existence: the stream which preceded the Mystery of Golgotha and the stream which, following it, will continue for the rest of the earth's existence.

In speaking of the very early period in earth-evolution when thinking of a certain kind—dream-like, imaginative, but still, thinking—was already active, we must be quite clear that in those times men possessed faculties whereby—if I may so express it—they were able to commune with Beings of a higher cosmic order. From the book Occult Science and other works of mine, you know something of these Beings of the higher Hierarchies. In his ordinary consciousness to-day man knows little of these Beings, for his intercourse with them has, as it were, been broken off. In earlier periods of human evolution it was different. To imagine that coming into contact with a Being of the higher Hierarchies in those ancient times in any way resembled the meeting between two men incarnate in physical bodies to-day would of course be a wrong conclusion. Such intercourse had quite a different character. What these Beings communicated to man in the original, primeval language of the earth could be apprehended only by spiritual organs. Momentous secrets of existence were communicated by these Beings, secrets which flowed into the human heart and awakened the consciousness that above and on all sides—where we to-day see only clouds and stars—earthly existence is connected with divine worlds. Super-earthly Beings belonging to these worlds came down in a spiritual manner to the men of earth, revealing themselves in such a way that through them men received what we may call the primal wisdom. The revelations proceeding from these Beings contained an abundance of wisdom which in their earthly life men could not have discovered themselves. For at the beginning of earth-evolution—the period of which I am now speaking—men could discover little through their own faculties. Whatever vision, whatever perceptive knowledge they possessed was received from their divine Teachers. These divine teachings were infinitely rich in content, but one thing they did not include—a thing which it was unnecessary for men of those times to know, but which for the present-day humanity is essential. The divine Teachers imparted many aspects of knowledge, truths in profusion, but they never spoke of the two fundamental boundaries of man's earthly life; they never spoke of birth and death.

Needless to say, in this short hour I cannot attempt to speak of everything that was communicated to the human race in those ancient times by the divine Teachers. A great deal is already known to you. But I want now to stress the point that among all those teachings there were none concerning birth and death. The reason for this was that for the men of those times—and for a considerable period after them—it was unnecessary to have knowledge of the facts of birth and death. The whole consciousness of mankind has changed in the course of earth-evolution. The animal consciousness of to-day, even that of the higher animals, must never be compared with human consciousness, even as it was in those ages of primitive antiquity. Yet we may perhaps find a point of approach by considering the life of the animal to-day. This lies at a level below the human, whereas the earliest form of the life of primitive man lay, in a certain respect, above the present level of the human, in spite of having certain animal-like characteristics. If you think, without preconceived ideas, about the animal to-day, you will say that the animal is unconcerned with birth and death because its existence is wholly passed in the state of life between them. Disregarding birth—although here too, of course, it is an obvious fact—we need think only of the carefree lack of concern with which the animal lives on towards death. The animal accepts death. It is simply transformation of its existence, a transition from individual to group-soul existence. The animal does not experience any such deep incision into life as is the case with the human being.

Now as I said, the primeval man of earth—in spite of his animal-like organisation—was at a higher level than the animal; he possessed an instinctive clairvoyance which enabled him to commune, to have intercourse with, his divine Teachers. But, like the animal of to-day, he was unconcerned with the approach of death. It never occurred to him, if I may so express it, to pay any particular attention to death. And why? With his instinctive clairvoyance, the primeval man was clearly aware of what was still his nature even after his descent through birth from the spiritual world into the physical world. He knew that his own essential being had entered into a physical body; and because he could say with certain knowledge, ‘An immortal, eternal being lives in me,’ the transformation taking place at death was not a matter of interest or concern to him. At most the process was like that experienced by a snake when it sheds its skin and has it replaced by another. The impression of birth and death was taken much more as a matter of course; birth and death were far less drastic incisions in human existence. Men still had clear vision of the life of the soul; to-day they have no such vision.

Even in dreams the transition from the sleeping to the waking state is hardly perceptible and the dream, with its pictures, is regarded as part of the sleeping state, as itself a semi-sleep. But what came to primeval man in his dream-pictures belonged, in reality, to a waking state, not yet fully awake. He knew that what he received in these dream-pictures was reality. In this way he felt and experienced his life of soul. Therefore questions about birth and death could not seem to him as crucial as they must inevitably be to-day.

This condition was very marked in the earliest epochs of human evolution on the earth, but it faded gradually away. As men began more and more to be aware that death makes a drastic incision not only into earthly physical life, but into the life of the soul as well, their attention was inevitably drawn to the fact of birth. On account of this change in human consciousness, earthly life assumed a character of increasing importance for men; and because experience of the life of soul was also growing dim, they felt themselves more and more removed during their sojourn on earth from an existence of soul-and-spirit. This condition became more and more marked as the time of the Mystery of Golgotha approached. Even among the Greeks it had reached the point where they felt life outside the physical body to be a shadow-existence, and regarded death as an event fraught with tragedy. The knowledge received by men from their earliest, divine Teachers did not cover the facts of birth and death. Hence before the Mystery of Golgotha took place, men were exposed to the danger of having to face experiences in their earthly life that would be unknown and incomprehensible to their earthly consciousness—namely, the experiences of birth and death.

Now let us imagine that those early, divine Teachers of humanity had descended to the earthly realm at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. They might have been able, through the Mysteries, to reveal themselves to a few specially prepared pupils or men of knowledge, to communicate to priests trained in the Mysteries the wealth of the ancient, divine wisdom; but in the whole range of these teachings there would have been nothing concerning birth and death. The riddle of death would not have been presented to man through the revelations of this divine wisdom, not even within the Mysteries; and in their outer life on earth men would have observed facts of vital importance and interest to them—namely the facts of birth and death—of which the gods had said nothing! And why?

You must approach this matter with a certain freedom from bias, laying aside many of the conceptions that have become part of traditional religion to-day, and be clear about the following. The Beings of the higher Hierarchies who were the divine Teachers of primeval humanity had never experienced birth and death in their own realms. For birth and death, in the form in which they are experienced on the earth, are experienced only on the earth, and, again, only by human beings on the earth. The death of an animal and the dying of a plant are altogether different matters from the death of a human being. And in the divine worlds where dwelt the first great Teachers of mankind there is no birth or death, but only transformation, metamorphosis from one state of existence into another. These divine Teachers, therefore, had no inner understanding of the facts of dying and being-born.

Now to these divine Teachers belongs the host of beings connected with Jahve, with the Bodhisattvas, with the early interpreters of the world to humanity. Just think how in the Old Testament, for example, the mystery of death as it confronts men, comes to be fraught with an increasing sense of tragedy, and how, in fact, none of the teaching conveyed by the Old Testament gives any adequate or revealing illumination on the subject of death. If, therefore, at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha there had happened nothing that differed from what had already happened in the realm of the earth, and in the higher worlds connected with the earth, men would have faced a terrible situation in their earthly evolution. On the earth they would have lived through the experiences of birth and death, which now confronted them, not as simple metamorphoses but as drastic transitions in their whole human existence, and they could have learnt nothing of the significance and purpose of death and of birth in the earthly life of the human being. In order that there might gradually be imparted to mankind teaching concerning birth and death, it was necessary for the Being we call the Christ to enter the realm of earthly life, the Christ Who indeed belongs to those worlds whence the ancient Teachers too had come, but Who in accordance with a decision taken in these divine worlds, accepted for Himself a destiny different from that of the other Beings of the divine Hierarchies connected with the earth. He lent Himself to the divine decree of higher worlds that He should incarnate in an earthly body and with His own divine soul pass through birth and death on earth.²

You see, therefore, that what came to pass in the Mystery of Golgotha is not merely an inner affair of men or of the earth, but is equally an affair of the gods. Through the Event on Golgotha, the gods themselves for the first time acquired inner knowledge of the mystery of death and of birth on the earth, for they had previously had no part in either. Therefore we have this momentous fact before us: a divine Being resolved to pass through human destiny on the earth in order to undergo the same fate, the same experiences in earthly existence, as are the lot of man.

Many things concerning the Mystery of Golgotha have become known to mankind. A tradition exists, the Gospels exists, the whole New Testament exists, and modern humanity approaches the Mystery of Golgotha for the most part by way of the New Testament and such interpretation of it as is possible to-day. But very little real insight into the Mystery of Golgotha is to be gained from the interpretations of the New Testament current at the present time. It is inevitable that modern humanity should pass through the stage of acquiring knowledge in this external way, but knowledge so gained is itself external. There is no realisation to-day of how differently men in the first Christian centuries looked back to the Mystery of Golgotha; how differently—in a way that became impossible later on—it was regarded by those who understood its import. The reason is that at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, although the change I have described was beginning to take place, vestiges of ancient, instinctive clairvoyance still survived in certain individuals. They were no more than vestiges, it is true, but they enabled men, until the fourth century A.D., to look back to the Mystery of Golgotha in a quite different way from that which was possible later on. It is not without meaning that at that time—and some confirmation of this, although in very many respects wanting, can be found in the historical traditions emanating from the earliest Church Fathers and other Christian teachers—those who came forward as teachers valued more highly than any written traditions the fact that they had received information concerning Christ Jesus from direct eye-witnesses, or from those who had been pupils of the Apostles themselves or again pupils of pupils of the Apostles, and so on. This continued until the fourth century A.D., so that a living connection was still claimed for those who were teaching at that time. As I have said, by far the greater part of the historical records have been destroyed, but those who study attentively what is left, can still discover by these external means what value was placed upon the testimony: I have had a teacher, he too had a teacher ... until at the end of the line was an Apostle who had seen the Saviour face to face.

Even of this tradition a great deal has been lost. But still more has been lost of the genuine esoteric wisdom surviving during the first four centuries of Christendom thanks to the remaining vestiges of the old clairvoyant insight. External tradition had lost wellnigh everything that was known in those days about the Risen Christ, the Christ Who had passed through the Mystery of Golgotha and then, in a spirit-body, like the early teachers of primeval humanity, had taught certain chosen disciples after His Resurrection.³ In the story, for example, of Christ meeting the disciples who had gone out to seek Him there are indications in the New Testament—but scanty indications even there—of the significance of the teachings given by the Risen Christ to His disciples.⁴ And Paul himself regards his experience at Damascus as a teaching which, given by the Risen Christ, made the man Saul into Paul.

In those early times there was full realisation that Christ Jesus, the Risen One, had secrets of a very special kind to impart to men. The fact that later on they were unable to receive these communications was due entirely to their own human evolution. For it was necessary that man should begin to unfold those forces of soul which, later, were to operate in the exercise of human freedom and of the human intellect. Evidence of this is clear from the fifteenth century onwards, but its beginnings can be traced to the fourth century.

The question naturally arises: What was the content and substance of the teachings which could be given by the Risen Christ to His chosen disciples?—He had appeared to them in the same manner in which the divine Teachers had appeared to primeval humanity. But now, if I may so express it, He was able to tell them out of divine wisdom what He had experienced and other divine Beings had not. From His own divine vantage-point He was able to explain to them the mystery of birth and death. He was able to convey to them the knowledge that in the future there would arise in the men of earth a day-consciousness, unable to have direct perception of the immortal element in human life, a consciousness that is extinguished in sleep, so that in sleep too the immortal element is invisible even to the eyes of the soul.

But He was also able to make them aware that it is possible for the Mystery of Golgotha to be drawn into the field of man's understanding. He was able to make clear to them what I will try to express in the following words. They can only be feeble, stammering words because human language has no others to offer, but I will try to express it in these halting words:—

The human body,” He taught, “has gradually become so dense, the death-forces in it so powerful that, although man will now be able to develop his intellect and his own inner freedom, he can do this only in a life that definitely experiences death, a life into which death makes a marked incision, a life from which vision of the immortal soul is obliterated during waking consciousness. But,”—so Christ taught His initiated disciples,—“you can receive into your souls a certain wisdom. It is the wisdom which through the Mystery of Golgotha, my own being has made possible for you, something with which you your selves can be filled if only you can attain the insight that Christ came down from spheres beyond the earth to the men of earth; if only you can come to realise that here on the earth there is something which cannot be perceived by earthly means, but only by means higher than those of the earth; if you can behold the Mystery of Golgotha as a Divine Event set into earthly life; if you can apprehend that a god has passed through the Mystery of Golgotha. Through everything else that comes to fulfilment on earth you can acquire earthly wisdom, but in order to understand the significance of death to humanity it would avail you nothing. Earthly wisdom would suffice you only if you, like the men of earlier times, could feel no intense interest in death. But since you must needs be concerned with death, you must strengthen your perceptive faculty by drawing into it a force stronger than all earthly forces of perception, a force so strong that you can realise that in the Mystery of Golgotha there came to pass something to which all earthly laws of nature are inapplicable. If you can include in your beliefs only the laws of earthly nature, you will, it is true, be able to observe death, but you will never discover its significance for human life. But if you can attain the insight that the earth has now for the first time received its true meaning and purpose, that at this middle point of earth-evolution a Divine Event has taken place in the Mystery of Golgotha, an Event beyond the comprehension of earthly means of perception, then you are preparing a special power of wisdom.”

This power of wisdom is the same as the power of faith; it is a special power of Spirit-Wisdom, a power of faith born of wisdom. Strength of soul is expressed when a man says: “I believe! I know through faith what I can never know by earthly means. This is a stronger force in me than when I claim to have knowledge of what can be fathomed merely by earthly means.” A man is lacking, even were he to possess all the science known on earth, if his wisdom is able to embrace only what can be grasped by earthly means. To perceive the reality of the super-earthly within the earthly, a far greater inner activity must be unfolded.

Contemplation of the Mystery of Golgotha gives a stimulus to unfold such inner activity. And in ever new variations, this teaching that a god had lived through a human destiny and had thereby united Himself with the destiny of the earth—an experience hitherto unknown to the gods in their own realm—was proclaimed over and over again by the Risen Christ to His disciples. And it worked with stupendous power. Try to realise the power of it by thinking of the conditions prevailing to-day. Less is demanded of a man who can grasp what his thinking has extracted from earthly concepts and also out of the generally acknowledged, traditional tenets of religion than of one who is required to attain understanding of the fact that there were some among the gods who, until the Mystery of Golgotha, possessed no wisdom concerning birth and death and then for the first time acquired this wisdom for the salvation of mankind. To penetrate into the realm of divine wisdom needs a very definite strength. No particular strength is required to repeat from some catechism, ‘God is all-knowing, all-powerful, all-divine,’ and so forth. One needs only to use the prefix ‘all’ and there is the definition of the Divine—ready-made, but utterly nebulous. People do not muster the courage to-day to penetrate into the wisdom of the gods. But this must happen. The divine Beings themselves added this wisdom which the gods acquired through the fact that One from among them passed through human birth and human death.

That this secret should have been entrusted to Christ's first disciples after His Resurrection is a fact of supreme moment, and so was the sequel to it, that through this knowledge they were brought to realise clearly that man once possessed the power to behold and understand the eternal nature of his own soul. This understanding, this insight into the eternal nature of the human soul can never be acquired through brain-knowledge, that is, through the intellectual, cogitated knowledge which uses the brain as its instrument. It can never in any real sense be acquired unless, as in earlier times, nature comes to the help of man, through the kind of knowledge that may still be attained through a particular development of the human rhythmic system. Yoga achieved much while the old instinctive clairvoyance could still come to its aid, while the last possessors of instinctive clairvoyance were still practising yoga. But it is a long time since the modern Oriental, the Indian—about whom many Westerners weave such fantastic ideas to-day—has attained any real vision of the eternal essence of the human soul when he engages in his exercises. He lives for the most part in illusions, in that he has a fleeting experience belonging to some elemental reality of earthly life, and then reads into the experience something from his sacred books. Real and fundamental knowledge of the divine nature of the human soul has been possible for humanity only in two ways: either as primeval humanity attained it, or as man can again attain it to-day, in a much more spiritual way, through Intuitive cognition, through cognition which, rising to Imaginative knowledge, and then to knowledge through Inspiration, finally becomes Intuition.

Now during earthly life the thinking part of the soul has poured itself into the human nervous system; it has built up this plastic structure and in it no longer has a separate existence. In the rhythmic system it is only partially absorbed. We can say of this is that there remains here some possibility of independent thought-activity. But the really eternal element of the human soul is hidden in the metabolic system, in the system which, for earthly life, has the most material function of all. Outwardly it is indeed the most material, but just because of this, the spiritual remains separate from it. The spiritual is drawn into, absorbed by the other material parts of the organism, by the brain and the rhythmic system, and is no longer there independently. In the crude materiality, the spiritual is present in itself. But to use it, a man must be able to see, to perceive, by means of the crude outer materiality. This was a possibility in primeval humanity and, although it is not a condition to be striven after, it may still occur to-day in pathological states. It is known by very few, for example, that the secret of Nietzsche's style in Thus Spake Zarathustra lies in the fact that he imbibed certain poisonous substances which brought into play within him a particular rhythm, which is the distinctive style of this work. In Nietzsche, it was a definitely material substratum that was really doing the thinking. This, needless to say, is a pathological condition, although in a certain respect again there is a kind of grandeur in it. If we are to understand these things we must no longer have false ideas, either about them, or about Intuition and the like, which lie at the opposite pole. We must understand what it means that Nietzsche should have imbibed certain poisons—a procedure not to be imitated—which substances work in such a way that they lead to an etherisation, an etherealised mode of experience in the human organism. This irradiates the thinking and produces what we find in Thus Spake Zarathustra. Intuition, on the other hand, is able to perceive the spirit-and-soul as such, separated from matter. Nothing of a material nature is at work in Intuition as described in the books Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment or in An Outline of Occult Science. Here we have two opposite poles of spiritual knowledge.

But in the Mysteries into which Christ sent His message, it was still known that men once possessed a sublime knowledge born of the working of material substances, born of metabolism. No attempt was made to awaken the old matter-born knowledge of spirit-reality in the manner in which this had been done in primeval humanity, nor in the degenerate way subsequently pursued by hashish-eaters and others with similar habits in order to acquire, through the workings of matter, knowledge not otherwise accessible. An attempt was made in quite another way to awaken this matter-born knowledge, namely, by clothing the Mystery of Golgotha in ritual, in mantric formulae, above all in the whole structure of the Mystery as Revelation, Offering, Transubstantiation, Communion, in the administration of the sacrament of the Eucharist in bread and wine. It was not poisons, therefore, but the Lord's Supper, clothed in what arises from the mantric formulae of the Mass, and from its fourfold membering: Gospel, Offering, Transubstantiation, Communion. For the intention was that after the fourth part of the Mass, the Communion, actual communion among the faithful should take place, with the aim of giving an intimation, at least, that thereby a knowledge leading to what was once achieved instinctively by the old metabolism-born knowledge, must be re-acquired.

It is difficult for men to-day to form any conception of this metabolism-born knowledge, because they have no inkling of how much more a bird knows than a man—although not in the intellectual, abstract sense—how much more even a camel, an animal wholly given up to the process of metabolism, knows than a man. It is, of course, a dim knowledge, a dream-knowledge, for degeneration has entered to-day into what was contained in the metabolic process of primeval man. But on the basis of the earliest Christian teachings, the sacrament at the altar was conceived as a means of pointing to the need to re-acquire a knowledge of the eternal nature of the human soul.

At the time when the Risen Christ was teaching His initiated disciples it was beyond men's power to acquire such knowledge by themselves. It was taught them by Christ. And until the fourth century of Christendom this knowledge was in a certain sense still alive. Then it ossified in the Western Catholic Church, because, although the Mass was retained, the Church could no longer interpret it. The Mass, conceived merely as a continuation of the Lord's Supper described in the Bible, can obviously have no meaning unless meaning is imbued into it. The establishment of the Mass with its wonderful ritual, its reproduction of the four stages of the Mysteries, stems from the fact that the Risen Christ was also the Teacher of those who were able to receive these teachings in a higher, esoteric sense. In the centuries following there remained only an elementary kind of instruction about the Mystery of Golgotha. A faculty was developing in man whereby, to begin with, this knowledge concerning the Mystery of Golgotha was veiled, concealed. Men had first to become firmly rooted in what is connected with death. This is the stage of early medieval civilisation.

Traditions have been preserved. The rituals of many secret societies existing at the present time contain formulae which, for those who understand and recognise them, are unmistakably reminiscent of the teachings given by the Risen Christ to His initiated disciples. But the individuals who come together in all kinds of masonic and other secret societies do not understand what their ritual contains, have not the remotest inkling of it. It would be possible to learn a great deal from these rituals because they contain much wisdom, even if it be in dead letters,—but this does not happen. Now that mankind has passed through that period in evolution which as it were shed darkness over the Mystery of Golgotha, the time has come when human longings are reaching out for a deeper knowledge of the Mystery of Golgotha. And that longing can be satisfied only through spiritual science, only through the advent of a new knowledge which works in a spiritual way. The full significance for humanity of the Mystery of Golgotha will then again be acquired. Then men will again come to realise that the most important teachings of all were given, not by the Christ Who until the Mystery of Golgotha lived in a physical body, but by the Risen Christ after the Mystery of Golgotha. Men will acquire a new understanding for words of an Initiate such as Paul: “If Christ be not risen, then is your faith vain.” After the event at Damascus, Paul knew that everything depended upon grasping the reality of the Risen Christ, upon the power of the Risen Christ being united with the human being in such a way that he can affirm: “Not I, but Christ in me.”

It is an all too characteristic contrast to this that there should have arisen in the 19th century a kind of theology which has really no desire to know anything about the reality of the Risen Christ. It is also a significant symptom of our times that a tutor of theology in Basle—Overbeck, a friend of Nietzsche—should have written a book about the Christianity of modern theology, in which he sets out to prove that this modern theology is no longer Christian. He concedes that there may still be a great deal in the world that is Christian, but he declares that the theology taught by Christian theologians is not Christian. That, in effect, is the view of Overbeck, himself a Christian theologian. And this view is brilliantly substantiated in his book. In respect of the understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha, mankind has come to a point where those officially appointed by their Church to tell men something of the Mystery of Golgotha are least of all capable of doing so. As a result of this there is springing up the human longing to learn something about the need for Christ that every individual may experience in his heart.

I have often made it evident that Anthroposophy has many services to render to humanity to-day. One significant service will be that rendered to the religious life.—This is in no sense the founding of a new religion. With the Event of a god passing through the human destiny of birth and death, the earth received its meaning and purpose in such completeness that this Event can never be surpassed. To one who understands the nature of its founding it is quite evident that there can be no question of inaugurating a new religion after Christianity. To believe such a thing possible would be to have a false idea of Christianity. But as men themselves make strides in super-sensible knowledge, the Mystery of Golgotha, and together with it the Christ Being Himself, will be more and more deeply understood. Anthroposophy would fain contribute to this understanding what perhaps it alone, at the present time, is able to contribute. For it is hardly possible anywhere else to hear about the divine Teachers of primeval humanity who spoke of all things, save only of birth and death—of which they had had no experience—and about that Teacher Who appeared to His initiated disciples in the same manner as that in which the divine primeval Teachers had appeared, but Whose momentous teachings included the crucial one of how a god shared the human destiny of birth and death. This revelation was intended to give men the power to regard death—which from that time must inevitably be a matter of concern to them—in such a way that they would realise: “Death indeed there is, but the soul is beyond its reach! The fact that men can assert this is due to the Mystery of Golgotha.”

Paul knew that if the Mystery of Golgotha had not taken place, if Christ had not risen, the soul would be involved in the destiny of the body, that is to say in the dispersion of the elements of the body into the elements of the earth. Had Christ not risen, had he not united Himself with earthly forces, the human soul would unite with the body between birth and death in such a way that the soul would be united, too, with all the molecules which become part of the earth through cremation or decomposition. It would have come about that at the end of earth-evolution, human souls would go the way of earthly matter. But in that Christ has passed through the Mystery of Golgotha, He wrests this fate away from the human soul. The earth will go her way in the universe, but just as the human soul can emerge from the single human body, so will all human souls be able to free themselves from the earth and go forward to a new cosmic existence. Christ is thus intimately united with earth-existence. But the union can be understood only if the mystery is approached in the way indicated.

To one or another the thought may occur: “What, then, of those who cannot believe in Christ?” Here let me give you reassurance. Christ died for all men, for those, too, who to-day cannot unite with Him. The Mystery of Golgotha is an objective fact, unaffected by human knowledge. Human knowledge, however, strengthens the inner forces of the soul. All the means, therefore, at the disposal of human knowledge, human feelings, and human will, must be applied, in order that in the further course of earth-evolution the presence of Christ in this earth-evolution shall be an experienced reality, through direct knowledge.

• 1. See also: Exoteric and Esoteric Christianity. Lecture given at Dornach, 22nd April, 1922. Anthroposophical Publishing Company.
• 2. Cp. Epistle to the Hebrews II, 14, 15.
• 3. “Not baptism alone sets us free, but knowledge (Gnosis): who we are, what we have become, where we were, whither we have sunk, whither we hasten; whence we are redeemed, what is birth, and what is re-birth.”
  Fragment from the Eastern School of Valentinus, copied by his pupil Theodotus.
• 4. See Acts, I, 3.

We describe the features of the earth in accordance with the principles of physical geography. In the same way, the spiritual impulses at work on earth (and already briefly characterized in these lectures) can be described by a kind of spiritual geography—especially the interplay of Eastern and Western impulses in human life, with all their various differences. What I have to say today in this direction is bound to remain rather sketchy; but it is more important to find a specific point of view for looking at much that I have already outlined than to give a detailed description.

The relationship of East and West is often expressed symbolically by saying that light comes from the East. Looking at the East, Western man—the man of recent civilization in general—receives the impression of a dream-like spiritual life. Modern spiritual life is used to sharply delineated concepts, closely linked to external observation; in contrast, the notions of the Orient—shifting, fluctuating, less closely and less sharply linked to externals—show up as dream-like. Admittedly, from this dream-like spiritual life, embodied in the most splendid poems, the Vedas, there did of course then develop the clear-cut concepts of a comprehensive philosophy—Vedanta, for example. These concepts were not gained by examining external data, that is analytically, but emerged from an inwardly experienced and apprehended spiritual life.

When this dream-like spiritual life works on us, however, and we lovingly submit to it without at first noticing how much it differs from our own, it has a curious effect. Once we allow its various configurations to affect our soul, we cannot stop there. We cannot merely take over its concepts and ideas. In absorbing them, whether from the literature or the philosophy (including such forms of these as have survived in the East down to the present), we feel a spiritual need to go beyond these images, ideas and concepts. When an Oriental idea, such as that of man's relation to the secrets and the mysterious workings of nature and the world, affects us, it is often accompanied in our mind by something that symbolizes it for the Orient too: the flower of the lotus, as it folds its petals about what must remain mysteriously hidden. We may immerse ourselves lovingly in shifting concepts that are more fitted gently to touch external phenomena and surround them with a mist, than to perceive them in sharp contours, and we may enter their intertwining branches; and if we do, there will inevitably appear to us all the intertwining, branching vegetation of the East and, with it, all that the human hand, the human spirit and civilization have produced from stone and other materials in line with these flowing, branching concepts. We may say: in immersing itself in these concepts, our soul inevitably sees before it a nature similar in its life, diversity and imaginative working to the soul's experience of the concepts themselves.

There appears to be no objective reason for man to abandon this Oriental spiritual activity in favour of a “faithful observation of nature;” indeed, it seems to me rather that there is in the Oriental concepts themselves an incentive not merely to accept them, but to apply them to the outside world. Europeans may feel that such things cannot be applied to the outside world, because of their vagueness, their (to them) fantastic character. If so, we may ask: How, then, can we track, with sharply delineated concepts, the shapes of clouds, fluctuating and rapidly changing as they are? Yet track them we must, if we wish to observe nature's workings in immediate revelation, as they appear to the human senses and the human soul.

Why is this so? It seems to me that there can be only one reason: that in what reaches us from this Eastern spiritual activity, there survives an element from which it was once directly created.

At the time when the Oriental was developing the finest part of his philosophy of life (which has since come down to his descendants in a partially decadent condition), the East created everything with devoted love. Love lives in each of its ideas, concepts and images and in them we perceive love. The love seeks to flow out into objects. And it flows out according to its nature, and conjures up before our soul the symbols that the Oriental established, with an inner understanding of much that functions supersensibly, in seeking to establish what he perceived as the spiritual dement in things. Of course, this is not to assert that this configuration of spirit, if extended over all the earth, would be an unmixed blessing for the development of the world. But once it has appeared on earth, and exerted its influence over other regions, it must be considered objectively, especially at a time when we need to foster understanding between men.

Against it, we may set the particular outlook that has developed, certainly with no less justification, but in a quite different form, further West—and in this respect we ourselves belong in many ways to the West. Here, we find, it is regarded as an ideal to stand back from what the senses observe directly, what extends in space and time, and to test what nature offers, and what should lead us to the world's secret, for position, motion, dimensions and weight. What presents itself directly to the eye is dissected and placed under a microscope, and gives rise to notions that could only emerge under a microscope.

Let us imagine for a moment that we are in the laboratory: how heavily equipped we are with these concepts, so remote from direct observation! Look how we regard the light flooding through the world! How we regard it by means of abstract concepts! We need them, if we are to reach understanding. But how remote are the observations we record on light and colour from what we encounter in wood and meadow, cloud-shape and sun! We may say: what we formulate in our sharply delineated concepts—with the balance, the measuring-rod, the most varied counting devices—takes us into some of nature's shallows and solves some riddles, but it does not take us to direct observation of nature. It is all very well to say: direct your attention to sensory observation and then try to derive your philosophy of life from it. But this is not what happens at all! The scientific view of life we establish is far removed from what the senses observe.

What we ought to say is this: if we establish our knowledge by using the equipment of learning with which we have harvested perhaps the finest fruits of present-day natural science, we shall have to retune our soul before we can approach nature again. If as botanists we have used the microscope extensively and learnt about cell-life, and formed concepts in the atomistic manner of today, we shall have to retune our soul before we can recapture a love of the immediate world of plants as it grows and flowers. If we have formed a scientific concept of the structure of animal and man, again we shall have to retune if we want to move on to direct observation of the animal's shape and actions, and to enjoy the way it plays in the meadow or turns its melancholy or unmoving gaze upon us or looks at us confidingly. Equally, we shall have to retune our soul to share in what the eye can see when it looks at the human shape, tracing its planes with an artistic eye. The Oriental has no retuning to do. Since what he called his science was shot through with love, it led him out to immediate observation. And this was a direct echo of what he experienced in his soul.

These are differences of temper in the attitude to life of East and West. And these different tempers multifariously combine in the man of the region between. In what we experience scientifically, artistically and religiously, there flows much of the temper I have just been characterizing as the one that comes to us from the Orient. In other respects again, we are moved by something of the way of experiencing the world kindled by that scientific attitude which the West has developed—by youthful science and knowledge, so to speak, as against the old-established ones of the East. And in every soul in the civilization that lies between, these two currents flow together. In the last analysis, the life that surrounds us in Europe is a fusion—and one whose component currents we really need to understand.

The contact between the tempers of East and West in our present spiritual life can be characterized in another way.

From what I have just said of the East, one thing is clear about the Oriental. In growing into his spiritual life, he experiences it as immediate reality; he bears it with him in his soul as the reality self-evident to him. External nature, and indeed the entire external world right up to the constellations, seems to him an echo which is, however, fundamentally the same as what he bears within him. Yet he cannot regard as reality what strikes him as an echo, what seems to him a reflection, as he can regard as reality what he experiences directly in his soul. He is closely linked with what he experiences in the spiritual sphere and can say “It is,” because he feels its existence as if it were his own, and in this way understands its mode of being. When he looks out at the reflection of this existence, he knows that it is not reality in the same sense. If he did not illuminate it with the light that streams from within him, it would be dumb and dark. And in becoming more and more aware of this, he arrives at a temper of soul that says: truth and reality reside in what the soul experiences directly. What is reflected to it from without is illusion, maya, incomplete reality, becoming reality only when it is touched by what must first reveal itself through the human soul.

Thus we see how the East developed the view that the spiritual world is reality, and the outside world, that of the senses, is semblance, the great illusion, maya. It would, however, be wrong to believe on this account that, in the pre-Buddhist period for example, the Oriental averted his glance completely from the outside world. He accepts) it, even if in a higher sense he must admit that in what extends in space and time he is dealing not with complete reality but with an illusion, the great non-being, maya. But this in turn gives a particular temper to the life of the soul in the East: the soul feels a close link with the spiritual world and sees, in all that exists in the external world of the senses, a replica of the original shape of the world as it exists in the spirit. And in the end this grows into the view that one's own human sensuous substance is a replica of a human being whose true existence is in the spiritual world. And here I would say: the Oriental, quite consistently, regards the world as made up of replicas of a spiritual world, just as he regards himself as a replica of what he was before he descended into the physical and sensuous world. From his standpoint, the view of man and the view of nature are in complete harmony.

This harmony is possible; though no longer consonant with our views, it does indeed express a truth, if somewhat one-sidedly, as we can see once again if, with the research methods of spiritual science, which I have been describing in the last few days, we ourselves take a look at this Oriental mode of knowledge.

As I have shown, by awakening powers dormant in the soul we can attain a view of the spiritual world that yet suits modern man; we can look once more into a spiritual world; and find this spiritual world unfolding before our “mind's eye” just as the physical and sensuous world unfolds before our physical eye. When we develop this vision, however, the spiritual world does not remain a mere pantheistic and nebulous embodiment of universal spirituality; it becomes just as concrete in its individual forms as the world of the senses in those of the realms of nature. There will then follow a view of man that I should now like to characterize.

Let us start with something familiar to us at every moment in our lives: an experience of the outside world. We have entered into this external experience through our sensory perception and perhaps also through setting our will in motion in some activity. We live in conjunction with the data of the outside world. For us, this is an immediate experience. In the last analysis, human existence on earth is composed of such experiences. From them, we retain thought-images, which become our memories. We can look back on our experiences through bearing within us faded, shadowy and, in fact, mental images of them.

Let us be quite honest with ourselves and consider whether, at any moment in life, our consciousness contains very much more than memories of external, factual, sensory experiences. Of course, many a nebulous mystic believes that he can summon up eternal things from the depths of his soul. If he looked more closely and could really test the structures he summons from his soul, he would discover that as a rule they are no more than transformed external perceptions. Within man, memories are not only faithfully preserved; they are also transformed in many ways, and man then fails to recognize them. He thinks that he is acting as a mystic and summoning something from the depths of his soul, when he has only called up from his memory a transformed external experience. Of course, we need only think of mathematical truths to realize that all kinds of mental structures do establish themselves in the life of the soul. But as a rule it is not these structures that the mystic seeks.

However, anyone who simply wishes to accept the everyday life of the soul, as it appears in ordinary consciousness, must say: This life is made up of images that are the remains of our experiences gained-through perceptions, and of other experiences within the external sensuous world. When we look at our soul and at the spiritual element that permeates it, as we have it in physical life on earth, we can therefore say: outside is the physical world extending in space, the world that unfolds its causes and effects in time, the world, that is, of facts. Here within is the world of shadows in the soul; we do indeed experience it in general as something spiritual and vital, but its content we experience only as a replica of the world of facts and of the senses. Now, paradoxical as the outlook of today may find it, for the attitude that I have been expounding in the last few days, the reverse comes about: in empty consciousness, as a result of meditation, the spiritual in the world, the spiritual within natural phenomena, is really experienced; it is observed also as the soul-spiritual element in man himself, as he is before he descends into his physical existence from a spiritual world; the spiritual is observed concretely by the spirit-organ we have developed; the world about us becomes spiritual, just as to our senses it is sensuous and physical. And when all this happens, we begin to perceive—as if in recollection of the times when we lived as spiritual beings in purely spiritual worlds—how in its particulars our physical organism is a replica of the spiritual world that surrounds us. With physiology and anatomy we can observe our lungs, heart and other organs only as outer objects; but when we can see the spiritual world about us, then the lungs and heart as they really are within us will become for us a replica in the physical sphere of what is spiritually prefigured. Just as in our ordinary consciousness the world outside is physical, and our soul creates replicas as its experiences; so now we learn that there is a spiritual world outside and that the replicas of this spiritual world exist in our own organs. We come to know man's structure only in coming to know the spiritual world. What is usually called matter then ceases to have the significance it has assumed in recent civilization, just as spirit ceases to have the significance of something abstract that it has had in recent civilization. We can thus see that in our organic functioning there is in fact a replica of what we were before we descended into our earthly existence.

At this stage, we need no longer be frightened even by materialism, in so far as there is justification for it—and even materialism has done some good and brought us countless discoveries. We look at the human brain and the human nervous system in its physical operation. Of course, we agree that ordinary, everyday thinking is a function of these physical organs. We are entirely in agreement with what exact science must hold about these matters today. But on the other hand we know that the material forms operating within us are themselves simply a transformed reflection of the spiritual sphere. For this reason, the material is acceptable, and because, in transforming itself into mortal man, the spiritual has sought out the capacity of brain and nerves to achieve in a material replica what is spiritually prefigured.

Modern man can see this in his “mind's eye” by developing the powers of cognition of which I have been speaking in the last few days. Yet there is a dream-like anticipation of it, I would say, in the Oriental philosophy of life I have outlined. This philosophy has become old and senile, but certain of its features still work effectively in our heart and soul. In its instinctive clairvoyance, the ancient Orient sensed that the spiritual world is a reality with which it felt closely linked, and that nature, and the natural element in man himself, is a replica of the spiritual; it provides an external garment for the revelation of what is inwardly spiritual.

Yet it would be wrong to say that the Oriental did not observe nature. His organs were finely attuned to its observation. For him, however, from everything that he faithfully observed and lovingly honoured as a replica, something of the spirit shone. Nature revealed spirit to him, shone spirit upon him at every turn. And this spirit was his reality. What lay before him outside was maya.

Even in Buddhism, which gained a far greater influence on Oriental life than we usually think—since it later assumed the most varied forms—we can see how the sense of inhabiting a spiritual world paled as man and world developed. The gaze was increasingly directed upon what was maya, and experience of the great illusion, the great non-being, maya, gradually became predominant. There thus arose an awareness of the need for redemption from what can be experienced within maya—experienced, that is, in the manner of Buddha, who regarded our direct experiences of this maya as a crowd of sorrows that flow in on man.

But it faded, this sense of inhabiting a spiritual world; and this is what justifies us in considering the early Oriental philosophy of life as something instinctive and even partial: if we do return to something like it, we must do so with complete self-possession and lucid consciousness. The impairment of human activity relative to the demands of the physical, external world must not occur a second time in the world's development. Man must never again escape into spiritual activity and so prevent himself from devoting his full strength to earthly tasks—which are what the Oriental perceives as maya, even if in deference to modern concepts he does not say so; whereas he perceives as reality what reveals itself within him. He has within him a light that is a direct reflection of the divine and spiritual elements in the world.

Against what I have thus described as the spiritual geography influencing our modern life, I should now like to set another illustration from the development of the human spirit and the world, but this time from the immediate present. Our civilization, which even in Europe is now of some antiquity, is subject to pressures from certain spheres, whence arise social longings and also social conflicts. Anyone who has moved in these spheres will have come across the phenomenon I am about to describe.

Although no one could properly accuse me of Socialist opinions, I was for some long time a teacher in Socialist circles. My intention was to do something for which in fact the time had not yet come (it is more than twenty years ago now): to propagate a spiritual life that could lead to theories that are in closer accord with reality than those derived from abstract or modified Marxism, which in many respects indeed are not realistic at all. There exists in these circles a basic attitude—something we can recognize as a first step, yet which is as deeply rooted in the soul as was the sense of maya at which the Oriental finally arrived. And in observing this attitude, we are profoundly struck by a word that expresses many unconscious feelings, unconscious ideas and concepts, unconscious longings too, a word that we hear again and again and must recognize as having characterized wide circles of humanity for centuries. Encompassing millions of people is a mood that this word expresses. The word is “ideology,” by which is meant “idealistic theorizing.” It derives from an attitude that the proletarian class in particular has absorbed into its education. The scientific method, with its increasing emphasis on matter, has given rise to the view that historical reality consists simply of economic struggles, economic patterns, class struggles, in short of the immediate material elements, externally sensuous and physical, in human life and history; and that therefore economic forces are the true reality.

This economic materialism, which is far more widespread than many upper-class people today believe, is a consequence of the general materialistic outlook. Nowadays, this is taken to be overcome even in science; yet it has a wide following particularly in the West.

And what is this “ideology?” It is law, morality, the realm of the beautiful, religious concepts, political theory, in short everything that makes up spiritual life. These things are not true reality, but bubbles and baubles arising from true reality, which resides in material struggles and patterns. “Ideology” is a way of indicating that what man experiences within himself—whether it is art or science or law or maxims of state or religious impulses—is maya, to use the Oriental term.

If we do not just take it at its face value, but can feel what millions of people are thinking, then the word “ideology” points to something that must inevitably assume the most formidable dimensions unless it can be set on the right course in good time. What the soul experiences and shapes within is not reality: true reality is only what exists externally in tangible facts.

Inside Western civilization, therefore, there has developed an outlook diametrically opposed to that which long ruled the Orient and still survives even today as a kind of antiquated trimming. There, true reality is what is experienced in the spirit, and maya what proceeds outside in physical actuality; here, maya or “ideology” (which is indeed a translation of the word “maya,” but applied to the spiritual sphere) is what is experienced in the spirit, and reality what is tangibly displayed, palpably there in the world.

In its development, the world aims at complete realization of its various potentialities. Just as the one extreme developed, in the Orient, so too the other was bound in its turn to take hold of humanity. To bring about a fruitful development of man and world, however, and to change the forces of decline into constructive ones, we must understand the significance of this mood, this “ideology.” It is recent and therefore a first step.

Let us look once more at what modern spiritual science can tell us. In the Orient, there was a dreamy, dark, instinctive knowledge that there exists a spiritual reality, with a sensory replica here in the physical realm. Because the soul's attention was devoted primarily to this spiritual reality, sensory reality came to be regarded as unreality, external appearance, maya. Yet this maya is important in more than one way. Although the world may be maya, our efforts, which are a reality for us, must still be applied to it in the first instance. But it is important also for the precept “Know thyself,” for a truly human attitude. Why? Well, it is true that we can now elevate ourselves to a life in the spiritual world, as I have described; that we can see by means of sharply delineated concepts and thus understand what appeared to the Orient like a dream. But the experience of such a world would never have created in human development the impulse to freedom.

When man feels closely linked to the spiritual world, he feels at the same time inwardly determined by and dependent on it. Therefore he and his consciousness had to move out of it and, for a passing phase of history (in which we now are), to turn to a world of mere fact. Confronted with this external actuality, the life of man's soul becomes an image of it. The spirit informing this life turns into abstract concepts and gradually becomes a mere image, to be recognized as a replica.

I have already suggested that, by having images within us, we can be free. Mirror-images do not determine our actions. If we wish to conform to mirror-images, which in themselves are powerless, the impulse to do so must come from us. The same is true of abstract concepts. And in making its appearance in pure thinking, our noblest feature, the moral and religious element, becomes for us an impulse of freedom. It is a most valuable component of human life. But in a period when man finds himself confronted with physical actuality, it makes its appearance in abstract thinking.

At the moment when the moral element, in the shape of moral intuition, makes its appearance in pure thinking, the task of the epoch is fulfilled. The epoch has developed from spirit-reality to the spirit as abstraction and (I would say, exaggerating a little) it now interprets everything spiritual as maya, as mere illusion, as “ideology.” We have a certain right to interpret as “ideology” everything that is a reflection of external natural existence. At the moment when the moral element, in the shape of intuition, enters this maya-thinking, this “ideology,” we reach the first stage at which we can recognize once more that we must awaken this “ideology,” which we experience as mere semblance, to inner life by energizing ourselves and allowing the life that is hidden within us to stream forth. The meaning of the world had to become “ideology” for humanity in order that man himself could infuse it with his own reality.

This was necessary for man's experience of freedom, which is something that has only been attained in the West and in recent civilization. It was necessary that man should first feel himself to be in a sphere of unreality when in contact with everything that is most valuable to him—his art, his science, his moral concepts, in short his entire spiritual life—and that everything transitory that shone on him should appear to be the only reality. For this reality, rightly contemplated, cannot in any way impair his freedom—the freedom that depends on his being himself a spiritual being who creates in physical and sensuous actuality only a replica of the spirit.

We see, therefore, that “ideology” represents in an extreme form an attitude that we really need in face of such concepts of nature as position, motion, dimensions and numbers. If nature were to provide us with anything other than concepts, it would never make us free. Only if we rise to concepts that will then appear as mere “ideology” to someone who is still stranded at the previous stage, can a new and spiritually real form of the higher world infuse these initially unreal concepts. This is the first step, from which must emerge for man a new form of the spiritual world. And when we encounter the exaggerated notion of “ideology,” those of us who are not bogged down in the immediate opinions of the day but can see beyond them to the world's development, must conclude: it was necessary for man to reach a stage of development at which, looking at only one side of the world and himself, he could speak of “ideology;” it is equally necessary now for him to attain the decision, conviction, power and courage to infuse into this “ideology” a spiritually perceived and experienced world. Otherwise, although perhaps it may be discussed philosophically, the “ideology” will remain merely “ideology.” And as we shall see in the second part of these lectures, which will be devoted to Anthroposophy and Sociology, in that case the forces of decline will quite definitely proliferate.

Before us, then, are two pictures: spiritual world as reality and world of the senses as maya—world of the senses as reality and spiritual world as maya. We need a philosophy of life that is capable of injecting the spiritual world, regarded as “ideology,” with spiritual intuition, spiritual imagination and inspiration, so that what today appears unutterably empty is filled once more with spiritual meaning. At the same time, it must be able to perceive that what the Orient regards as illusion and maya is a reality in the sense that it is a true and faithful replica, a transformation of the spiritual world, which was necessary for the development of humanity in freedom. If we are to reach an understanding of these two diametrically opposed world-pictures, we need a philosophy that can combine them and not just add them together mechanically, one that will develop through its own inner life, not from the one or the other, but in a spiritual progression from human substance itself.

And these world-pictures do ultimately affect everything that we experience spiritually. They certainly condition individual features of life and of human attitudes. As a Central European here in Central Europe, I would rather not give my own opinion on this particular point. I prefer to pass on the opinion expressed some years ago by an Englishman who compared Western and

Central Europe in relation to a certain aspect of spiritual life. This Englishman wanted to exemplify the way in which spiritual life has revealed itself in particular phenomena. He referred to the appearance, at the end of the fifties and beginning of the sixties of the last century, of Buckle's important work, The History of Civilization. Buckle, he noted, views history mainly—if not so exclusively as do the Marxists, for example—in terms of economic drives, so that ultimately spiritual life is taken to arise from the action and interaction of economic forces. We do not always have to condemn a view of this kind; we can take a positive attitude, and say: since man is in part an economic being, a historical consideration of human life from this standpoint also was needed at a certain stage in human development. The Englishman then refers to another book that was produced in Central Europe at the same time as Buckle wrote his History of Civilization—Jacob Burckhardt's Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. The Englishman himself observes that a quite different spirit prevails here; Burckhardt describes how men feel, what their attitude to one another is, and how through the opinions they have of each other they enter into certain relationships, which in turn determine other events occurring among them. And the Englishman finally sums up—I am simply quoting his opinion here—by saying that Buckle describes man as he eats and drinks, whilst Burckhardt describes man as he thinks and feels.

And if I may now add something myself: if, as we have heard, the West looks at eternal actuality and derives spiritual life from it, and the Central European looks at what inhabits the realm of the soul, but the soul in its earthly existence, then one would have to add, thirdly, that Eastern man (and in many respects even the East European) describes man as he preaches and sacrifices.

And so we might say, supplementing the Englishman's verdict: in the West, man is described as he eats and drinks (I say this in no pejorative sense); in the Middle region, as he thinks and feels; in the East, as he preaches and sacrifices. In this preaching and sacrificing is operative what I have described as the attitude of the East. Similarly, in the view of history that has become generally familiar today and that is also reflected in the notion of “ideology,” there operates what I have described as the attitude of the West. But we also need to see how in the mode attributed to the Centre, where man is presented as he thinks and feels, the two currents meet. We are called upon today to understand this confluence correctly, by taking a first step that will gradually lead us onward to spirituality.

I will try to sum up in a single image the two attitudes I have sought to represent, in order to show where understanding is really needed between East and West. To do so, I should like to recall that, at a time when the physical and sensuous world, and human existence also, was already felt as maya in the East, he who is called the Buddha encountered in his wanderings the most varied manifestations of human suffering on earth. Among these manifestations was a corpse; death confronted the Buddha, and through contemplation of death he reached his conclusion: Life is Suffering.

This was the tenor of Oriental civilization six hundred years before the establishment of Christianity. Six hundred years later, Christianity was founded, and henceforward we have a significant symbol: the crucifix, the raised cross with the Redeemer, the human body on it. In the West, countless men look at this body, at the image of it; just as countless men, who have become disciples of Buddha, have looked at the body from which Buddha drew his teaching. The East acknowledged: Life is suffering, we long for redemption. Western men, in looking at the image of the dead body, however, did not simply say: Life is suffering! For them, the sight of death became a symbol of resurrection, resurrection of the spirit through inner human power. It became a symbol of the fact that suffering can be redeemed by overcoming the physical; that it is overcome, not by turning away from it in asceticism, but by keeping it in full view, not regarding it as maya, and overcoming it through work, activity, and the vigour of the will. Out of the introspective life of the East arose a contemplation of the dead body, with the conclusion: Life is suffering, man must be redeemed from life. Out of the life of the West, attempting always activity, there arose, at the sight of the body, the view: Life must develop power within itself, so that even the forces of death can be overcome, and human work can do its task in the development of the world.

The one philosophy is old and jaded. Yet it contains things of such great value that, even though we may treat it as senile, we still approach it as something venerable. We honour an old man without expecting him to profess the views of youth. What we encounter in the West, however, has the character of a first step. We have shown what the “ideology” in its attitude must become. It is young, it must develop youthful power in itself so that it may attain spiritual meaning in its own way, just as the Orient did.

In honouring the Orient for its spirituality, there is something we still need to be clear about: we must build up our own spirituality from the first step we have taken here in the West. We must so shape it, however, that we can achieve an understanding with any view that may exist on earth, especially old and venerable ones. This will be possible if, as Central and Western men, we come to understand that, although our philosophy of life has faults, they are the faults of youth.

If we do understand this, it is a summons to have the courage to be strong. If for all our respect, love and admiration for its spirituality, we take what we need from the East, not with passive receptivity, but with a busy activity rooted in what, today, is still perhaps unspiritual in the West, yet contains the germ of spirituality—if we add strength to respect, then we shall do the right thing for human development.

As you know from the spirit of our anthroposophical work over the years, our work is not based on a striving for sensations. Instead, we want to calmly examine the facts of spiritual life that are important in our lives. It is not by speaking of what lies on the surface of daily life that we serve our age spiritually, but by gaining knowledge of life's larger connections. Our individual lives are closely connected with the great events of existence, and only when we judge our own life on the basis of the greatest phenomena of life can we assess it rightly. That is why we have tried in the last three years to deepen our fundamental views in relation to universal questions. We spent the first four years in this first seven-year cycle in the existence of the German Section of the Theosophical Society establishing our views and insights. From what you heard in the various lecture cycles, you will have realized that the lectures on the Gospels are part of the work of these last three years. Those lectures not only helped us understand the contents of the Gospels, but also showed what we can learn from them about human nature. Today, we will talk more about how the Gospels can be applied to our personal lives.

Conventional science is less and less willing to consider the Gospels historical documents about the greatest individuality ever to intervene in human evolution, Christ Jesus. The attitude toward the Gospels in the first Christian centuries and even in the Middle Ages was quite different from what it has become in modern times. These days, the Gospels are indeed seen as four mutually contradictory documents, and nothing seems more natural than to ask how they can be considered historical records when they contradict each other as much as they do in giving an account of what happened in Palestine at the beginning of our era.

Now, if people did not love to overlook the most important things, their thinking would inevitably have to lead them to the following realization. They would have to admit that it does not really take much to see that the Gospels contradict each other in our modern sense of the word. One could say that even a child can see the contradictions. But we could also add that nowadays the Gospels are available to everybody, and everybody can read them. However, before the invention of printing, they were not available to all people but were read only by a few people. These few were spiritual leaders. The content of the gospels was then taught to other people in a way they could understand. Now we have to ask if those few people who read the gospels, the spiritual leaders, were really such tremendous fools that they did not realize what every child can see these days, namely, that the gospels contradict each other.

When we investigate this matter, we soon notice that people's whole world of feeling toward the Gospels was different in the past. Today it is the critical intellect, trained in outer sensory reality, that has a field day with the Gospels. It has no problem at all finding the intellectual contradictions there; this is, after all, child's play.

How, then, did those leaders of spiritual life, who were reading the Gospels, come to terms with these contradictions? On account of the Gospels, people in ancient times had a tremendous reverence we can't even imagine today for the great Christ event. Indeed they felt that precisely because they had four Gospels they should revere and appreciate the Christ event all the more. This is because these early readers of the Gospels thought quite differently than we do today. Modern readers are no cleverer than somebody who photographs a bouquet of flowers from one angle. Then he has a picture of the bouquet and shows it around. People look at it and remember the picture, thinking they now have a clear idea of what the bouquet looked like. But then someone takes a picture of the same bouquet from another angle and gets quite a different picture. He also shows it to everyone but now people say it cannot possibly be the same bouquet because the two photographs contradict each other. And if the bouquet is photographed from all four sides, the four pictures will not be at all similar; yet they will be four pictures of the same thing.

This was how the early readers of the four Gospels felt. They believed the four Gospels are four different representations of one event, each taken from another point of view. They provide a complete picture of the event precisely because they are not alike. It is only when all four sides are combined that a complete idea of the event in Palestine emerges. People back then felt they had to look up to the Christ event with even more humility precisely because it was presented from four perspectives, for clearly this event is so great that it cannot be understood if it is presented from only one point of view. They felt they had to be grateful to have four Gospels describing this event from four points of view. However, they saw they had to understand how these four different points of view originated. Then they could develop an idea of what the individual can derive from the four Gospels.

What we call the Christ event is a tremendous, mighty event in the spiritual evolution of humanity. What place does that event in Palestine have in this evolution? We can say that everything humanity had previously experienced spiritually merged in this event in Palestine and from then on continued in one common stream. For example, the ancient Hebrew teaching, as it is recorded in the Old Testament, is one part of this common stream. It flowed in as the event in Palestine took place. Another stream proceeded from Zarathustra. This, too, entered into Christianity, which then flowed through the world as a kind of mainstream. Likewise, what we might call the oriental spiritual stream, which found its most significant expression in Gautama Buddha, also joined the one great mainstream. All these various streams are now contained in Christianity. You do not learn what Buddhism is nowadays from people who warm over the teachings of Buddha from 600 B.C. Those teachings have flowed into Christianity. Likewise, you do not learn what Zarathustrianism really is from people who want to explain its nature on the basis of ancient Persian documents. For the one who taught in ancient Persia what was recorded in these ancient documents has evolved further. He has let his contribution to the spiritual life of humanity flow into Christianity, and we will have to look for it there.

To get a clear picture of the facts, let us consider how these three streams, Buddhism, Zarathustrianism, and the ancient Judaic stream, flowed into Christianity. To understand how Zarathustrianism flowed in, we should remember that the individuality we call Zarathustra was the great teacher of the second post-Atlantean epoch who first taught among the ancient Persians and was then incarnated again and again. Through each incarnation he ascended higher and higher, and finally he appeared around 600 B.C. as a contemporary of Buddha. He appeared in the secret schools of the ancient Chaldean-Babylonian culture and was the teacher of Pythagoras, who had gone to Chaldea to perfect himself. Then this Zarathustra, who in 600 B.C. was known as Zarathas or Nazarathos, was reborn at the beginning of our era to parents called Joseph and Mary, as described in Saint Matthew's Gospel. This child of Joseph and Mary, the so-called Bethlehem parents, was one of the two Jesus children born at the beginning of our era. Thus, we see the individuality who was the bearer of Zarathustrianism—one of the significant streams mentioned above—transplanted to ancient Palestine.

This was not the only spiritual stream that was to revive and in a new form flow on in Christianity. Many different things had to come together to bring this about. For instance, Zarathustra had to be born in a body so organized that it was possible for him to develop further the faculties he had acquired through ascending from incarnation to incarnation. We must keep in mind that no matter how highly developed an individuality is, if it descends into an unsuitable body because it cannot find a suitable one, this individuality cannot express his or her soul-spiritual faculties because it lacks the necessary physical instruments. It takes a certain kind of brain to express such faculties as Zarathustra possessed. That is, he had to be born into a body that had inherited the qualities making it an appropriate instrument for such faculties. Thus, the Jesus child described in Saint Matthew's Gospel had to have a high soul-spiritual organization in his reincarnating I, which would allow him to have the powerful effect that was necessary, and he also had to have a perfect physical organization, which was inherited, for his soul to be born into. Zarathustra had to find a suitable physical brain.

This perfectly adapted physical organization was the contribution of the ancient Hebrews to Christianity. A suitable physical body for Zarathustra, a body with the most perfect imaginable physical instruments, had to be created in the Hebrew people through purely physical heredity. This had to be prepared far back in the past through many generations so that the right qualities were passed on and then inherited by the body that was born at the beginning of our era.

Let us look at how this life flowed into the mainstream of our present spiritual life. Just as we have seen the mission of Zarathustra in relation to Christianity, so we will now find out about the mission of the ancient Hebrews. Here I must tell you that the more spiritual-scientific research progresses, the more it has to admit that the Bible, not outer cultural history, is right. What cultural history digs up appears childish in comparison with what is written in the Bible and what only needs to be read properly to be understood. For spiritual science the Bible is more correct than historical research. For example, it is true that Judaism descended, in a sense, from a common forefather called Abraham or Abram. It is indeed absolutely correct that as we trace the generations back into the past, we come to a forefather who was endowed with very special powers by the spiritual world. What were these powers? To understand what special capabilities were given to Abraham, we must recall various things we have already spoken about here.

As we have said, when we look at ancient times, we find that people had other faculties of soul than we have today; these can be called a kind of dim clairvoyance. Back then, people could not look at the world in the self-confident, intellectual way we do, but they were able to perceive the spiritual around them, spiritual phenomena, facts, and beings. Since this seeing took place in a state of dimmed consciousness, it was like a living dream, but a dream that had a vital connection to reality. This ancient clairvoyance had to become weaker so people could develop our modern way of thinking and our intellectual culture.

Human evolution is a kind of education through which the various faculties are gradually developed. For example, in our present way of seeing, we perceive, let's say, a flower without seeing its astral body winding all around it. The ancients, however, still saw the flower and its astral body. We had to be trained in our modern perception that sees objects with the sharp contours of the intellect; this training required that the ancient clairvoyance vanish. Now, there is a certain law that prevails in spiritual evolution. According to this law, every capacity humanity acquires must have its beginning in one individuality. Faculties that are to become common to a large number of people must first appear in one person. Thus, the faculties having to do with reasoning not related to clairvoyance, with evaluating the world by measure, number, and weight—faculties that aim not at seeing into the spiritual world but at understanding sensory phenomena—were first implanted by the spiritual world in the individuality known as Abraham or Abram. He was chosen to be the first to develop the powers that are especially bound to the physical brain. It is not for nothing that Abraham is called the discoverer of arithmetic, that is, of the capability to quantify the world and calculate it according to measure and number. In a sense, he was the first of those in whose soul the ancient dreamy clairvoyance was extinguished and whose brain was prepared so that the faculty using the brain as instrument could become effective. Thus, the mission given to Abraham was a significant and profound one.

Now this faculty that had been given to Abraham in rudimentary form was to become more and more perfect. As you can imagine, everything in the world must develop, and the ability to perceive the world through the physical brain was no exception. This faculty was developed through being transmitted from Abraham to the succeeding generations. However, something different had to happen in this case than is usual when a mission is passed on from the older generation to the younger. After all, other missions, especially the greatest ones, were not connected to a physical instrument, the physical brain.

For example, let us look at Zarathustra. He gave his disciples a higher, more advanced clairvoyant vision than other people had. It was not bound to a physical instrument but was transmitted from teacher to pupil. The pupil then in turn became a teacher and gave this higher clairvoyant vision to his pupils, and so on. Abraham's mission, however, was not a teaching or method of clairvoyant perception but something bound to the brain. Thus, it could be transmitted to later generations only through physical inheritance. The mission given to Abraham depended on being transmitted physically from one generation to the next, that is, the perfected organization of Abraham's brain had to be inherited by his descendants generation after generation. Because Abraham's mission consisted in perfecting the physical brain, the latter became more and more perfect from generation to generation. In other words, the mission of Abraham depended on procreation for its gradual perfection in the course of physical evolution.

There was yet something else connected with this contribution of the ancient Hebrew people, and we will understand what it was when we consider people in other civilizations who had dim clairvoyance. We can ask how they received what was most important to them, what they revered most in all the world. They received it as inspirations that lit up within them. They did not have to do research as we do. Nowadays, we establish sciences by investigating the world outside us, by experimenting and deducing laws from the external facts. The ancients did not gain their knowledge in this way; rather, it lit up within them as an inspiration like a flash of lightning. They received their knowledge in their inner being; their souls had to give birth to it within them. They had to turn their gaze away from the outer world in order to allow the highest truths to blossom forth within them as inspirations.

This was to become different for those who derived their mission from Abraham. Abraham had to bring to humanity precisely the results of observation and reasoning. When people in those civilizations that were built on ancient clairvoyance looked up to the highest, they felt, “I am grateful to the God who reveals himself to me within me. I turn my gaze away from the outer world, and the Godhead is most present to me when, without looking at the outside world, I let his inspirations light up within me.”

However, the descendants of Abraham were to renounce inspirations coming from within themselves and prepare themselves to turn their gaze to the world around them. They were to observe what is revealed in air and water, in mountain and plain, and in the starry world, and to ponder how all things exist side by side. They were to connect external things with one another and to gain an all-embracing thought from this. When they condensed what they saw in the outer world into one single thought, they called what the outer world told them Yahweh or Jehovah. They were to receive the highest through a revelation that speaks through the outer world.

In contrast to what other peoples were to contribute, the mission of the Abrahamic people was to give humanity what came as revelation from outside. Therefore, the instrument of spiritual life had to be inherited so that its organization was appropriate for the revelations from outside, just as earlier the inner powers of soul had to be adapted to the revelations from within.

Let us look at what happened when the clairvoyants of ancient times yielded to revelations from within themselves. They turned their gaze away from the outer world because what was revealed there could tell them nothing about the spiritual world. They even turned their gaze away from the sun and stars and listened only to what was within. There, a great inspiration about the secrets of the world was revealed, and they had a picture of the structure of the cosmos. What these ancient clairvoyants knew about the stars and their movements, about the laws of the starry world, and about the spiritual worlds was not acquired through external observation. Rather, the ancients knew something about Mars, Saturn, and so on because they had revealed themselves within these people. The laws of the universe, which are inscribed in the stars, were also inscribed within the human soul and revealed themselves there in inspirations. Just as the laws of the universe, which rule the stars, were revealed in the soul, so the laws that rule the world were now to be revealed to the Abrahamic people through outer reasoning and deduction—that is, those laws had to be grasped through outer revelation.

For this purpose, heredity had to be guided in such a way that the brain could acquire the qualities enabling it to perceive the right relationships between things. This wonderful lawfulness was implanted into the predispositions transmitted to Abraham, predispositions that developed through the generations in such a way that their organization corresponds to the great cosmic laws. The brain had to be transmitted so that its inner capabilities and its structure developed like the laws of numbers in the stars in the universe. This is why Jehovah said to Abraham, “You will see generations descend from you that will be ordered and arranged in accordance with the numbers of the stars in the heavens.” The generations following Abraham were to be arranged in harmonious numerical relationships just as the stars in the sky are ordered in harmonious relations. In other words, these generations were to bear within them laws that are like the laws of the stars in the heavens.

In the heavens, there are twelve constellations. An image of this was to appear in the twelve tribes of descendants of Abraham so that the faculties that were implanted in rudimentary form in Abraham could be carried down through the generations. In the organic structure of this people, developing further from age to age, an image was to be created of number and measure in the heavens. In one Bible translation this is rendered as, “I will multiply your descendants as the stars of heaven and as the sand which is on the seashore.” In truth, however, the passage should read, “Your descendants shall be grouped regularly in their blood relationships so that their arrangement is an image of the laws of the stars in the heavens.” The Bible is profound, but the way it is presented these days is colored by the modern view of the world. Thus, we read, “I will multiply your descendants as the stars of heaven and as the sand which is on the seashore,” while a true translation would be, “Your descendants shall be so regularly grouped that, for example, twelve tribes will arise that correspond to the twelve constellations.”

Thus, the individual characteristics had to express that the Abrahamic people was to realize that their mission was a gift from outside, not something that came to life within them. They had to know that what they have to bring to the world is given to them from the outside. The Bible wonderfully expresses that Abraham's mission comes to him from outside in contrast to the old revelations that were given from within. What was this mission? Abraham's mission was to provide what flows through the blood up to the time of Christ Jesus. The entire spirituality of a certain stream had to be placed into this. It was to work as if it came as a gift from outside. Abraham had to give to the world the ancient Hebrew people. That was his mission.

If this people was to be in keeping with this mission, it had to be given to Abraham as a gift from outside. Abraham had a son, Isaac, and he was asked to sacrifice this son, as the Bible tells us. As Abraham was about to carry out the sacrifice, his son was given back to him by Jehovah. What was Abraham given there? The entire Hebrew people descended from Isaac. If Isaac had been sacrificed, it would not have come into being. Thus, the whole Hebrew people was given to Abraham as a gift. The sparing of Isaac wonderfully expresses the nature of this gift. It was Abraham's mission to father the Hebrew people, and with Isaac he received it as a gift from Jehovah.

This is how profound the stories in the Bible are; all of them correspond in their impressive details to the inner character of the progressive development of humanity. The Old Testament Hebrews gradually had to relinquish the ancient clairvoyance that continued within the other civilizations. This clairvoyance was connected to faculties coming from the spiritual world, which were designated according to their nature by expressions taken from the names for the constellations. The last faculty to be given up in exchange for the gift of the Hebrew people was connected with the sign of the Ram. Therefore, a ram was sacrificed in place of Isaac. This is the external expression of the sacrifice of the last clairvoyant power, making it possible for Abraham to receive the Hebrew people as a gift. The Hebrews were chosen to develop the faculties for observation of the outer world. Nevertheless, every new development contains also atavistic remnants of earlier things. That is why everything that was not purely in the blood and still recalled ancient clairvoyance had to be excluded for the sake of the transmission of the new outer-directed faculties. Thus, the Hebrews always had to exclude what came as an inheritance from other peoples.

We come now to a subject that is difficult to discuss because it contains a truth far removed from modern thinking. Nevertheless, it is a truth, and those who have worked for a while in anthroposophical groups may be able to accept a truth that is foreign to the conventional modern thinking. We must be aware that certain classes of people in ancient times retained their earlier faculties into later ages, especially faculties related to knowing. Clairvoyant powers lived in human souls, and people were closely connected with spiritual beings who revealed themselves in their souls. In certain people, who were the products of the decline of these ancient times, there developed ultimately a lower form of this connection to the spiritual world around them. While the actual clairvoyants were connected with the whole universe through spiritual intuition and inspiration, those who were part of the process of decline and who developed this connection to the spiritual in a phase of decadence were actually lower types of people. They were not independent because their I was undeveloped, and at the same time their clairvoyant faculties were already declining. Such individuals appeared throughout history, and in them we can see the relationship between certain physical organs and the clairvoyant organs.

Now we arrive at the truth that will sound strange to you. What we call ancient clairvoyance, this lighting up of the cosmic secrets within human souls, had to enter the soul somehow. We have to picture this as streams flowing into human beings. The ancients did not perceive them, but when these streams had occurred and lit up within them, people perceived them as their inspirations. In other words, certain streams flowed into people from their environment; in later periods these streams were transformed. In the distant past, these streams were purely spiritual, and clairvoyants could perceive them as purely astral-etheric streams. But later these purely spiritual streams dried up, as it were, and condensed to etheric-physical streams. What became of them? They developed into hair. Our hair is the result of these ancient streams. The hair on our body was formerly spiritual streams that flowed from outside into human beings. Our hair is nothing else but dried up astral-etheric streams.

Such facts are preserved only where the old truths have been retained externally in writing or through tradition. In Hebrew the characters for the words “hair” and “light” are approximately the same because people were conscious of the kinship between the light streaming in astrally and hair. In general, the greatest truths are contained in ancient Hebrew literature in the words themselves.

So, we can say human evolution is progressive. However, in those people whose ancient faculties were declining the incoming streams changed and dried up, but no new faculties appeared to take their place. Those people were connected with the new in an old way, yet unconnected because the streams were dried up. Such people were very hairy, while those who developed further were less hairy because new powers replaced those that later condensed into hair.

It will take a long time for science to arrive at these significant truths. Nevertheless, they can be found in the Bible. The Bible is far wiser than our science, which is still at the stage of a child beginning to learn his ABC's. Read the story of Jacob and Esau. Jacob was the one who progressed a step further and developed the new faculty; Esau, on the other hand, remained at an earlier stage, and compared to Jacob he was a simpleton. When they were presented to their father Isaac, their mother had covered Jacob with false hair to make Isaac confuse his younger son with Esau. This shows us that the Old Testament Hebrews still had retained something that was inherited from other cultures and that had to be discarded. Esau is cast out, and what was to live on as sense-based reasoning is transmitted through Jacob. Here, what had remained in a retarded form was expelled in Esau. Similarly, the ancient clairvoyant faculties, an atavistic inheritance, appeared in Joseph, who was consequently expelled by his brothers to Egypt. Joseph had dreams through which he could interpret the world—this faculty was not to be developed in the mission of the Abrahamic people. Therefore, Joseph was cast out and had to go to Egypt.

There we see how a stream evolved in the Hebrew people that is built on the blood relationships of generations and from which the remnants of the old inheritance are gradually expelled. It was the special faculty of the ancient Hebrews to turn what is inherited down through the generations into a more and more perfect instrument so that finally a body could be produced that could be the instrument for Christ who would incarnate in it. If the Hebrews could no longer receive revelations from within, they had to receive them from without. They had to receive through external revelation even those things other peoples received through direct inspiration. That is, the Jews, led by Joseph, had to go to a people that still possessed the old inspiration. There, Joseph was initiated into the Egyptian mysteries, and the Jews attained through external means the knowledge they needed about the spiritual worlds. They even received their moral laws from the outside rather than as something lighting up within them. After they had assimilated what they had to take in from outside, they returned to Palestine.

We must now show how the Hebrews gradually developed from generation to generation so that finally the body of Jesus could be produced, and the ancient Hebrew stream flow into Christianity. Remember our discussion of the development of rudimentary characteristics in individuals. The life of an individual can be divided into periods of seven years. The first period, in which the physical body simply builds its forms, extends from birth to the change of teeth at the age of seven. The second period, in which the etheric body is active in growth and forming, continues until puberty. The forms are defined until the age of seven and the already-defined forms are then enlarged. From fourteen to twenty-one the astral body is especially predominant, and at twenty-one the true I is born and becomes independent. The life of the individual runs its course in certain periods until the birth of the human I.

In the same way the gifts of the people that was to provide a body for the most perfect I had to develop gradually. What takes place over years in an individual, however, develops in a people over generations. Each successive generation must further develop the characteristics of the preceding one. To explain the occult reasons for this would lead us too far afield, but you might recall a quite ordinary phenomenon. Just remember that certain qualities are inherited not directly, but skip a generation. For example, it is the grandson who resembles the grandfather in those characteristics. It was the same in the inheritance of qualities in successive generations of the Hebrews; every other generation was skipped.

What is one period of seven years in an individual's life corresponds in the successive generations of a people to two periods or fourteen generations. We can therefore say the Hebrews developed in twice seven or fourteen generations, which corresponds to the period from birth to the change of teeth in the individual. The following period corresponds to that between the change of teeth and puberty and again comprises twice seven generations. A third period of twice seven generations corresponds to the years between fourteen and twenty-one, when the astral body is especially prominent. It was then possible for the I to be born in the Hebrew people after three times twice seven or three times fourteen, that is, forty-two generations.

To describe the body that became Zarathustra's instrument, I had to show how the seed given to Abraham developed through thrice fourteen generations so that the I could be born, just as in the individual the I is born into the threefold corporeality after thrice seven years. The writer of Saint Matthew's Gospel shows this. He describes thrice fourteen generations—the generations from Abraham to David, from David to the Babylonian Captivity, and from the Babylonian Captivity to the birth of Jesus. Here, from the profundity of knowledge Saint Matthew's Gospel points to the mission of the Hebrews, showing how the forces were gradually developed that made it possible for the perfect I attained by Zarathustra to be born in a body produced by this people.

Looking at the destiny of the Hebrews, we find that the Babylonian Captivity occurred at the period when the individual, after the age of fourteen, prepares for life, when the hopes of youth to be realized later take root. The Babylonian Captivity was the time when the astral body of the Hebrews developed, and what gives this astral body its impulse in the final fourteen generations of the forty-two was implanted into it then. That is why the Hebrews were led into the Babylonian Captivity where, six hundred years before our era, Zarathas or Nazarathos was incarnated as the teacher in the Mystery schools of the Babylonians. There, the most prominent Hebrew leaders came in contact with Zarathas, the great teacher of that era. Zarathas joined them and became their teacher. From him the Hebrew leaders received the impulse that, in their last fourteen generations, prepared them for the birth of Jesus.

History as we know it then unfolded, and we see the writer of Saint Matthew's Gospel take into account a law in the spiritual sphere that will be recognized more and more as significant for all life. This is the law that whatever has happened earlier is repeated at a higher stage. This is expressed in science in a somewhat distorted form in the axiom that what occurs at a lower stage of the species throughout long epochs is repeated in brief in each individual. The writer of Saint Matthew's Gospel shows this in a magnificent way by saying that the I of Zarathustra was to incarnate in a body that was gradually developed within the Abrahamic people.

Abraham proceeded from Ur in Chaldea, the place where Babylonian civilization originated, through Asia Minor to Palestine. Through the dreams of Joseph, his descendants were led farther south to Egypt, and after they had received the Egyptian impulse, they returned to Canaan. This was the fate of the whole people. First, they were led through Canaan to Egypt, and then back again to Canaan. This fate of the whole people was to be repeated in brief. After all that had originated in Abraham had been developed, after the sheaths had been prepared, Zarathustra's I again took Chaldea as its point of departure. His spirit was connected with Chaldea, and in his last incarnation he was the Mystery teacher there.

What path does Zarathustra's soul take when it incarnates in Bethlehem? He had remained connected with the Magi, who had been initiated in the Chaldean Mystery schools. They remembered that they had heard him say he would reappear and that his soul, which had always been called “the golden star,” would proceed at a particular time to Bethlehem. When the time came, they followed the path his soul took, thus repeating the path of the Old Testament Hebrews. As Abraham traveled the road to Canaan, so this star, the soul of Zarathustra, also followed it. The three Magi followed the star of Zarathustra, and he led them to the place where he was born into the body from the Abrahamic people that was destined for him. Thus, the I of Zarathustra repeated in spirit the path Abraham had taken to Palestine.

The Old Testament Hebrews then had to seek the way to Egypt. They were led there by Joseph's dreams. Now the I that was born in the Jesus-child of Bethlehem was led through the dreams of another Joseph to Egypt along the same path the Abrahamic people had followed earlier. Zarathustra's I repeated in Jesus' body the ancient Hebrews' destiny, going first to Egypt and then returning to Palestine. Here, we have a recapitulation in spirit through the I of Zarathustra, reflecting the earlier fate of the Hebrews.

Based on his knowledge of the spiritual law that what appears at a higher stage is a brief repetition of what has occurred earlier, the writer of Saint Matthew's Gospel faithfully describes all this. How profoundly these Gospels record the event that inaugurated our era! That event is so great that the four evangelists found that each of them could only describe it from his own standpoint. Each of them has described this event according to his own limited powers. When we see someone from one of four sides, we get only one picture, and only by combining mutually contradictory pictures do we get an overall idea of the person. Similarly, the writer of Saint Matthew's Gospel described what he knew through initiation about the law of thrice twice seven, the law of forty-two, and about the preparation of the body for the great I of Jesus of Nazareth. Through his initiation, the writer of this gospel knew the Mysteries according to which Jesus’ body was prepared as the mission of the Hebrews. The writer of Saint Luke's Gospel described, on the basis of his initiation, how the stream of the Buddha flowed into Christianity. The other evangelists have described the event on the basis of their initiations. The event they recorded is so profound that we must be grateful to find it described from the point of view of four initiates.

Today I just wanted to mention a few details of the spiritual origin of Christianity to show how our knowledge of the world and of humanity grows when we study this greatest of human events. I wanted to give you an idea of how deeply this event should be taken and how the Gospels really are when we know how to read them.

Erected by Eugen Reichel in Memory of Gottsched

I

A book ¹ to stir up the minds lies before us. Eugen Reichel has undertaken to redraw the picture of his East Prussian compatriot Gottsched. He considers the image that the world has created of this man to be a distorted one. “The Germans think they know Gottsched; they imagine that they have judged him exhaustively when they repeat what his opponents and their short-sighted or frivolous epigones have said, namely that he was a schoolmaster who, although he may have striven for the good with inadequate strength , but a narrow-minded, conceited schoolmaster who was completely out of touch with life, art and poetry and who knew how to talk eloquently about literature when we still had no literature of our own.» With the boldest courage of thought, Reichel contrasts this judgment with his own, that Gottsched was “not only not a narrow-minded schoolmaster, but rather a thinker and poet who was at the height of life, far ahead of his contemporaries, who were floundering far below him in powerlessness and intellectual narrow-mindedness; a revolutionary in all areas of intellectual life, a courageous fighter, equipped with the sharpest intellectual weapons, against the rigid, dead formalism that prevailed around him in art and literature, in the pulpits and lecture halls, in the schools and intellectual salons; a bold, far-sighted representative of free thought, free research and free speech.» As you can see, this is a re-evaluation on a grand scale!

What spiritual science calls the mystery of death faces us in our times so significantly. Everything is in close or more distant interrelation with them. Above all, through spiritual science we receive not only the basic conviction, but the basic knowledge of the world in the physical body and of the world, into which we enter through the gate of death. However, this world is always alive also in the sensory life and surrounds us. It is only not recognizable for the human being engaged in the sensory life, because he does not have the necessary attention for it. If such drastic events flow through the time which demand so manifold sacrifices of the human beings as they surround us now, we must be woven with our whole souls in it. Hence, it is obvious to inform you about some matters by means of spiritual science.

We want to turn our glance to fields of life that show us how humankind has come to something fatefully illogical concerning its surroundings because of the materialistic way of thinking. We hear, for example, in the way usual today the individual nations accusing each another: I have not wanted the war; it is you who has incited it.—The question is legitimate and one can now already answer it—for the facts speak clearly—where the external causes are. But for the spiritual-scientific seer it is different. In this question he has to realise that the war is basically the last phase in the course of events, or at least a later phase of matters that were there already before. One commits a mistake in the judgment also with illness processes where one often still speaks of such, whereas these are already health processes, which must take place to recover. The external processes, which take place to paralyse the illness and to recover, have happened before and are not to be observed. The war also is an apparent illness process. It is an effort of humankind to come beyond certain processes which were there before. The illness lies already before in the really unhealthy relations between the peoples. If anyone investigates the external causes with reason, he ignores the internal ones. In the area where we are crowded together like in a fortress and are surrounded with a ring, it must seem reasonable to especially raise the question which the internal causes are, or of which kind the single cause is by which this encirclement was caused. One speaks of such an encirclement for the last years, for the last decades, but if you look at the great connections, it begins much sooner. It sounds peculiar, but one can give the year 860 A. D.—not 1860, but 860. For such a long time, the process is going on, which finds expression now in a way we can call the most dreadful war of humankind, since it inhabits the earth.

In the deeper interrelation of European history one finds the extremely strange fact that in Central Europe something of spiritual substance was crowded together. If anyone investigates this deeper interrelation, he sees that it was crowded together there for a particular purpose. It concerns not the external determinations of blood or race, but the fact that something like a spiritual substance permeates the world. Something like a snake-shaped ring contracts in Central Europe coming down from the distant north. Two currents of the east and west go to the south and meet forming a ring. From a centre, the Normannic tribes move in the 9th century down who are related by blood to so many things that later exist in Central Europe. But they push their way into the Romance element, which comes from Southern Europe, and flow together with it. In 860, they stand in front of Paris; there the Normans were overpowered by the Romance people. The western France came into being from that. More than the Angles and Saxons could bring to the British islands, the Normans brought back from France to England. In the east, the Normannic people moved down, they got from the north to the Volga and the Black Sea into the Slavic regions. Later the Tartar current coalesces. The Slavic element overpowers the Normans and gives them the Christian religion in its eastern form. They become Slavic as “Ros”—they are called in Finland that way—nothing has remained except the name Russia. This name is of Germanic origin. The name Rurik has the same origin.

About these relations one has rather doubtful views. In the west of Europe many people speak that the French are appointed to resurrect the old Celtic element in a kind of Renaissance. One has the idea that in Central Europe are mainly Teutons and that in the west the Celtic element predominates. However, it is vice versa, in the French population is much more Teutonic blood, in Central Europe is more Celtic blood, this is true. Thus maya stands against truth. Only the inhabitants of the west are completely overpowered by the Romance element. In the east the Norman and with them the Teutonic elements are overpowered by the foreign race element. Still today there a religion prevails that is foreign to the Russian folk-soul.¹ Thus the people in Central Europe are encircled as it were. The Romance element reaches to Constantinople, and on the other side the Slavic Normans reach to Constantinople as well. There we have the snake, the ring.

If we consider that what was crowded together there spiritually, we get the view that it has an especially important task. Yesterday, I have only indicated it, but, nevertheless, I have spoken of the fact that here a certain familiar contact of the folk-soul with the individual soul should take place and just thereby the nicest blossoms are produced with the best relatives. The ego should immediately be seized, not the single members of the soul like in the West, should be immediately living in the ego. From that arises—this would already have to be clear to the exoteric consideration—that in Central Europe basically complete hostility could never hold sway against idealism that always a certain tendency to the spiritual world was there to a high degree. When we began our spiritual movement, karma ordained that we had to act at first in association with the British movement. But externally everything was only a symptom of that what had to happen internally with a certain necessity. If we consider what the theosophical movement represents, from which we had to separate, you will notice that there the cultural life has split in two parts. The external life takes a purely materialistic way, and the spiritual element is coupled to it. They always fall apart.

Compare to that which must be our spiritual life for us. As in the organism the head cannot be thought without body, our spiritual life grows out of the general cultural life. You only need to start with Tauler, Eckhart, Angelus Silesius, then with Herder, Lessing, everywhere we have to develop what should become higher spiritual culture. We cannot couple our spiritual view to anything, we must have it as an organism, must raise it. We have to discover internally that the return of Christ is a spiritual affair. Hence, we cannot make the slightest concession. We are able to look at Christ as a figure only with the spiritual eye, approach Him with the internal experience. In the West that had to be dogmatised and materialised. People could not imagine it differently, as that He would come in the physical body. Hence, the absurd idea to present Christ in the body on the salver.² This happened in connection with what was encircled there.

Hence, the question must touch us objectively: how has the Central European civilisation to relate to the future culture?—Truth is something general, but it is something different how it arises. In the Central European civilisation are the springs for the whole spiritual culture of the future. We have to find the way from the German idealism to the spiritual culture. For that is necessary that here in the centre an ego-culture is founded. You can see that easily on the esoteric field. The human ego has to enkindle itself in the outside world, there only it is awake and realises internally. Thus the ego-culture of Central Europe is aroused from without. You need to look only at the last events, the standardisation of the German being. It is typical that the German empire was founded in 1871 on foreign ground. So many examples could be given that also show in the external events that there is an ego-culture in Central Europe.

It seems reasonable to ask: which meaning do the deaths have for the spiritual world?—Countless human beings go in the prime of life through the gate of death. At first the connection of ego, astral body, etheric body with the physical body is separated. The physical body is handed over apparently to the earth, the etheric body to the etheric world; astral body and ego go on. However, this must strike us: are the etheric bodies of the human beings of normal age going through the gate of death different from those of the young men? As to the physical body one understands this, as to the etheric one will understand it now. The etheric body could still have supplied the physical body for decades, and could have worked on it. It goes with these unused forces through the gate of death, coalesces there with the folk-soul, and the work of the folk-soul will be impregnated in future with the unused forces of these etheric bodies. It is our task to understand that. Human beings will be there who will know: the folk-soul is an active element. Only if one knows that the unused etheric bodies will work as a spiritual force in concrete way in the spiritual world, then one can understand what takes action really. The consciousness of this concrete relationship with the spiritual world will be important. Thereby, namely by creation of such a consciousness of the spiritual world, spiritual science becomes more and more life in the souls and does not only remain doctrine. The human being knows that he is in a spiritual aura as he knows here that the air is in his surroundings. Like he distinguishes clean and dirty air here, he will feel good and bad spirits, experiencing and feeling the spiritual aura.

Only this is the right fruit of spiritual science. We see it if we consider events that are close to us and can teach us. One of them just happened in the place of our construction. In this case it was a child whose etheric body was unused. The forces are there; somebody who beholds them who knows how to behold them sees that they have gone over into the aura of our Dornach construction and live in it. This is an example I am responsible for. The etheric body which belongs with its forces more to the community is really working on. Since that time it tries to do something by means of inspirations nearby the construction. These are supporting forces.

Such matters are obvious to us, we can be taught through them how mysterious the connections are in the spiritual world. Just in the last time we experienced in the karma of our society that dear friends have died off. What I said in the Vienna cycle³ about the life between death and new birth became completely clear just in some of these souls. One of these souls has found so surely the way into our movement when the physical body was already worn-out. Since it was in our movement, it was a being whose soul faced me like through a body that had become bright and transparent as glass. After death the picture of this soul, as it was already before, grew together with that which it presented after. I was not able to help myself to give the obituary which shows that I was so surely together with this soul. The following words made themselves audible for about three days, after death had occurred:

You came to us.
The gentleness of your being
Spoke out of the calm strength of your eyes—
Calmness of your soul
Flowed in the waves
With which your glances
Carried your internal weaving
To things and human beings;—
And the soul penetrated your voice
Which revealed—more through the kind of word
In its eloquent manner—
What was working as a secret
In your lovely soul
Than it was contained in the word;
However, without saying a word
It revealed itself
To the compassionate love of human beings—
This being that told of noble, calm beauty
Of the world-soul's creation
To receptive feeling.

The consciousness is dampened after death, just because a flooding consciousness is there. This happens by the review you have on death first—not in the case of suicide,—as it were a solar point. That belongs to the most beautiful, highest experiences. You resume it there, you say to yourself: there you have lived,—and you orientate yourself that way in the spiritual world.

Our friend was out of the stage of the etheric review, so that I spoke to the present, but not yet conscious being. Then a moment of consciousness occurred as a result of the heat, and she saw the cremation. Time there becomes space.

The events in the physical and spiritual worlds correspond to each other. In such a case, calling does not return like an echo from the spiritual world, but converts itself to an answer, giving the gist, from the not yet conscious soul. By such examples we recognise feeling and feel recognising the spiritual world. The result must be to experience the reality of the spiritual world. It is especially important to get this definite feeling in our time, so that the physical welfare and the mental welfare arise for the whole humankind out of the seriousness of the present. For always the big, significant world events were, also for a superficial knowledge, the clear expression for the fact that there are not only sensory beings, but that the spiritual beings are working into the sensory world.

It is difficult to break through the veil which separates the physical and spiritual worlds. This makes self-knowledge difficult to the greatest possible extent; one imagines that as something too easy. It is sometimes difficult already in the external physical sense. The significant philosopher Ernst Mach⁴—not Ferdinand Maack, otherwise, I would not have spoken of a significant philosopher—gave a grotesque example of it. Mach describes in one of his works that when he was a young man a disagreeable countenance struck him once in a mirror of a shop-window, which he had immediately to recognise as his own to his dismay. He experienced something similar later again. While getting into a bus he saw a man with an ugly face who met him from the other side, and recognised only afterwards that he had seen himself in the mirror. The human being is still even more uncertain about the being or form of the soul. People do not dream of what one has to do to get self-knowledge. In the subsoil of the soul, maya has often large dimensions. A human being has the impulse of cruelty; he lives together with people whom he torments every now and then et cetera. He looks for an external cause for it; he often uses an ingenious gift of invention to veil the structure of his soul. I myself knew somebody who spoke repeatedly how many great sacrifices his activity demanded. But I had to say that it was only a lust of his soul, which he satisfied. When he spoke of sacrifices that way, only egoism stood behind that. Real self-knowledge is only accessible if one advances in spiritual science gradually, in so far as he experiences by himself what is in the world.

There are chatting people in the world who organise chat hours. Apparently, that is even the case when men go to their sundowners. If they are asked, why they chat, people have all kinds of important reasons for that. But if we glide with our hand over velvet or silk, we have a feeling of pleasure. While somebody is chatting, his etheric body knocks perpetually against the air set in motion, and in doing so it is stroked. This is nothing bad. You understand what goes forward with chatting, only if you know that the human being has an etheric body.

Humankind goes towards a time when it must face such matters more and more. Spiritual science must arouse the consciousness for it more and more. Then people who state today in their materialistic mind that everything spiritual is daydreaming will look as if anybody wanted to say where the air is, is nothing at all. Like one discovers that the air is real, humankind will find out that the spirit is something real. If you consider the biggest mystery, Christ's Death and Resurrection, you may believe that Christ, after he has gone through the Mystery of Golgotha, would have worked on humankind particularly by means of teaching. However, what people knew about Christ was the least.

The theologians have quarrelled, but very few understood something right. Only a part of historical events happens in the consciousness. An example of that is the battle between Maxentius and Constantine at the Milvian Bridge on the 28th October 312 A. D., which was decided not by some external circumstances, but by effects of non-physical kind. With an army which was far stronger than that of his adversary Constantine Maxentius had to defend Rome. Questioning the Sibylline Books he got the advice to lead his troops out of Rome and then he would destroy the enemies of Rome that way. He was still encouraged in that by a dream. Also Constantine had a dream that his soldiers should bear banners with the monogram of Christ instead of the old field signs. Thus it happened, and the army of Maxentius, which had been led out of Rome contrary to reason, was defeated by the weaker armed forces of Constantine, and Maxentius himself found his death on the run. The Christ Impulse had here worked in the subconsciousness of the people.

The impulse lives in the subconsciousness, as if ships go on the sea, but the important matters would take place in submarines. An important point in time is again in the 15th century. At that time, the Maid of Orleans intervened in the course of history in such a way that everything that happened later was determined through it. The whole map of Europe would be different, also the spiritual life if the English had won. The Maid was a servant of St. Michael. Schiller was deeply touched by the figure of the Maid of Orleans: “the world likes to blacken the beaming.” Whereas Voltaire vented his rage against her, even Shakespeare could not understand her, Anatole France pressed her down into the materialistic view, all Western people of intellect did not understand her, and Schiller embodied this sublime figure in his drama.

It was necessary that the Maid of Orleans went through a kind of unaware initiation to fulfil her historical mission. It concerned an initiation as it is described to us in the legend of Olaf Åsteson. Such initiations, for which certain karmic conditions were necessary, could take place in the time of the thirteen nights between the 25th December and 6th January. If the external light has the slightest strength, an inner enlightenment is possible. Thus Olaf Åsteson had real spiritual experiences in the sleeping state during thirteen nights, which he then reports before the portal of a church, as it is shown in the Dream Song. Also the Maid of Orleans spent thirteen nights as it were in the sleeping state, namely in the body of her mother. In the last time before birth the human being is especially accessible to unaware influences from the spiritual world. On the 6th January the Maid of Orleans was born. During this day all the inhabitants of her birthplace gathered because something quite unusual was to be felt in the aura of the village. It was the birth of the Maid of Orleans, to whom the Christ Impulse was implanted just before she saw the physical sunlight.

The proper purpose of all our attempts and that what depends on us is to gain a living connection between the physical and spiritual worlds. People will recognise that the time of twilight of this war means a turn of an era. Human beings should know that the souls of those who have sacrificed themselves are working on and that this war has the task to close the materialistic age.

It is necessary that souls are there who send thoughts into the spiritual world like extending arms and bring down the consciousness from the spiritual world, souls conscious of spirit. The more such souls conscious of spirit send their thoughts upwards—a lot depends on the fact that our spiritual atmosphere is penetrated by such thoughts,—the more the fruits which come from the sacrificial deaths can mature. Thus we summarise our consideration in the words:

From the courage of the fighters,
From the blood of the battles,
From the grief of the bereaved,
From the nation's sacrifices
Will grow up the fruits of spirit
If souls aware of spirit turn
Their senses to the spirit land.

• 1. From Symptom to Reality, third of nine lectures (Berlin, 1918), volume 185 of Steiner's Collected Works (Rudolf Steiner Press, 1976)
• 2. the Indian boy Krishnamurti was propagated as the reincarnated Christ by Annie Besant, the president of the Theosophical Society (Adyar).
• 3. Inner Nature of Man and Life Between Death and Rebirth, eight lectures (Vienna, 1914), Steiner's Collected Works volume 153
• 4. Ernst Mach (1838–1916), Austrian physicist and philosopher

What may be most comforting to us Germans in the hard-pressed situation in which we currently find ourselves is the awareness that our nation rests on foundations that can never be damaged by any external power. The German nation is one that is not dependent on physical means of power alone for its development. The "strong roots of our power" rest in the depths of the people's soul, which is not accessible to any opponent. And so we experience the joy that, while the external power and living conditions are decidedly unfavorable to us, German poetry is flourishing among us in a way that we have rarely experienced since classical times. The Germans of Austria have the good fortune to possess a poetic phenomenon whose poetry reaches the highest level of art and at the same time must be regarded as the most wonderful outflow of the German national spirit. The fact that we are dealing with a female poet is of no consequence. Those who do not know from the outset are simply like almost all critics: they consider M. E. delle Grazie - the name of our poetess - to be a pseudonym, and it does not even occur to them to think that the powerful Germanic figures of the epic "Hermann" - which is the most important achievement of the brilliant poetess - that this powerful language did not originate from a poet in her prime. We are dealing here with a powerful phenomenon. Delle Grazie is as original as only a spirit formed from the never-ending source of German essence can be, she is as powerful and deep in her characterization as only the German spirit with its loving immersion in the human heart and mind can be. She depicts the Roman depravity that confronts noble German morality with such bitterness as only the noble-minded German is capable of, who on his moral high ground knows no mercy for the unfair, for the bad, but only contempt. The poet has succeeded in creating characters in "Hermann" that are truly of the flesh and blood of our people. The whole poem is borne by the majesty of German sentiment, by the most beautiful idealism.

The sweet hope of all German sons
United in this heroic song;
I wrote it with the bold vigor of youth
You know the hot all-powerful urge,
My deepest love and my deepest love,
My own feeling rests in this song!

This is how the poet praises her work. She wants to send this deepest longing and feeling of hers to all German lands:

Go forth, O song, and glide boldly determined
Through all the tides that blue in the sea,
Welcome also those German shoots,
Who build their hut far away in the jungle.
Proclaim to them that in the homeland
The last chain breaks weak and powerless -
From the Alpine summit to the northern edge
Awaken the German courage, the German spirit!

It is the collapse of Roman rule through the youthful strength of the German people that the epic describes to us. Treachery and deceit fight against German nobility and German manly virtue. Struggle and victory are described with a poetic power that is unique to genius. The poet finds the right tone for every situation. No less for the scenes of battle than for the wonderful depictions of nature, which, when inserted in the right place, give the poetry its greatest advantage. It thus becomes a reflection of Germanic folk life, which also unfolded in an intimate alliance with nature. The crown of the poem, however, is the last song: Peace. Up to this point, Hermann has been presented to us as the hero with the highest martial virtues. Here, in the last canto, we get to know the other side of the German man. He immediately sheds all the roughness of the hero when selfless love pours into his heart. After the brilliant victory, Hermann's union with Thusnelda takes place.

The priest lifts his piously transfigured eyes
And now blesses the blissful couple...

"In autumn you fought with a bloody shield,
But today you are adorned with Freia's oak wreath!"

Surrounded by his warriors, the hero celebrates his marriage.

In battle he fought like a fierce warrior,
But now love transfigures his face
He gazes at the star-studded sky,
He raises the polished sword and speaks:
"May the Star of Concord never fade,
Its holy glimmer nourish our glow.
Freedom float over these lands
And direct our gaze heavenward,
Let the spirit of the ancestors tie all bonds
And sweeten our blurred ore of arms! Let love spread its golden wings,
Loyalty increase her gods' hoard
And victoriously through the wide fields ring
The German song, the free German word!"

The beautiful song concludes meaningfully with a dream of Hermann's: Germania, "the proud, shining Germania", appears to our hero and reveals the future to him. Here, the poet's brilliant imagination is revealed in the wonderful addition and interpretation she gives to the Balder saga. Our ancestors have created an uplifting divine figure in Balder. Balder is the god of love, of peace, who perished in the battle against evil. Germania announces to Hermann that this Balder will reappear:

"The god of peace will rise from death! He comes with his ether-bright shield,
When all the princes of heaven perish!"

She lets Balder, our dearest god, awaken again before his eyes "in the green legendary grove of the Orient".

Christus, then, is Balder, once overcome by evil, for whose return the German people longed because they already knew him, because they were prepared for him by their own legend of the gods. Is there a more beautiful way of expressing the idea that it was precisely the German people who were most receptive to pure, unadulterated Christianity, that this noblest of all cultural creations could never take root in the depraved world of the south because they were simply not receptive there? Christianity, transfigured by the Germanic essence, then appears to Hermann as the champion of a new culture that unites German love and the German spirit with the "beautiful form of the Greeks". The goddess then prophetically predicts to him:

"As long as the oaks lift their crowns,
The larks sing and the roses bloom
As long as you walk on light paths,
Surrounded by a golden ray of sky,
As long as the freedom of the Teutons lives,
As long as the German ideal triumphs!"

Delle Grazie is the singer of that love which expresses itself most purely in the selfless nature of the German. Her poetic mission is to show how pure human love is the source of all that is great, to show how all that is noble and good can ultimately be traced back to the victorious power of this love. What is so far apart in terms of subject matter, such as "Hermann" and the Old Testament story of "Saul", which she turned into a tragedy, is united by this fundamental trait of her poetry. Many objections have been raised against "Saul". But the most important thing has been little noticed. It is the tragic trait of a very special kind that delle Grazie knew how to put into the figure of Saul. In the midst of a people whose religion knows no freedom of spirit, Saul wants to unfurl the banner of love. He wants to oppose the dark Jehovah, the God of revenge and slavery, who does not love his people but only punishes them and is therefore not loved but only feared by them, with the God of nobler humanity. Saul senses Christianity, he senses the basic trait of it, which later found its symbol in the Redeemer, the "image of love-declared humanity". The hero must perish as a result. "Hermann" and "Saul" complement each other; they show how pure love unfolds in different times. That is what is significant about our poet, what is genuinely artistic, that it is problems that reach deep into the workings of the world that she seeks to solve in these, her two most important poems. The latter are followed by a small volume of "Poems". Of these, "The Nile", "Adam and Eve", "Thirst" and "Hashish" can be regarded as masterful. It is always a sign of a poet's original power when the imagination works in such a powerful way, as is the case with delle Grazie. The mere contemplation of a photograph of the ancient colossal statue "The Nile" in the Vatican allows the whole history of Egypt to pass before the poet's mind in the most marvelous poetic images. "Adam and Eve" is a magnificent myth that depicts the longing of the sexes for each other and the delight of the first meeting of man and woman, culminating in a thought of the most far-reaching significance. The voice of God resounds to the first human beings who find each other and see themselves in the midst of the most glorious creation:

I, I called this wonderful becoming,
I created the beautiful world, the vast sea.
I lifted the dark globe from the depths,
I gave the sun its golden glow,
Without me everything would lie lifeless and sleep,
Without me everything would be desolate and dark,
Everywhere are my blessed impulses,
Everywhere is the trace of my goodness.
I am the pure everlasting love,
I am the noble spirit of nature! But even if my works are beautiful and glorious,
You alone show all my power:
In your breast dwells all my strength,
In you I have kindled the holy spirit.

The view expressed in the poem "Thirst" is just as magnificent. It describes a journey through the desert. Merchants accompanied by slaves move across the vast sandy expanse. They are longing for an oasis. Not a drop of water has touched their tongues for a long time.

Full of sorrow and fear of death
The rich merchants look to the earth.

The whole terrible situation of the people is now described.

"O Allah, Allah, have mercy!"
O they cry out involuntarily, for already
They see in their minds their pale carcasses
Adorning the glowing ground of the desert.
...
"O joy, honor, happiness and wealth,
What are you in the face of death?" ...
"Oh how beautiful, oh how glorious
It is up here in the realm of golden light,
But you must go down
Into the cold, eerie darkness."

>

So the rich merchants. But there are beings in the course who do not fear death, who see it as salvation. They are the slaves. They are not attached to earthly life, because: "What is life for them without freedom?" They feel a different "thirst" than their masters, they thirst for freedom.

Welcome to them is pale death,
They do not fear it, oh no,
They rejoice and cheer him! Perhaps that over there in his kingdom
The beautiful freedom blooms for them too.

The last of the poems in the collection, "Hashish", truly contains all the qualities of the highest poetic power. It shows us how the poet receives poetic consecration at the throne of God himself. The whole thing is a dream that leads her through infinite space directly to the seat of the divine. Poetic talent is revealed above all when the poet succeeds in transforming real objects into images of extraordinary beauty. For example, when she addresses the moon, which she reaches on her journey:

We are already near you, friendly moon,
And wonderfully, you seem quite different to me now
Than otherwise seen from a lofty vantage point
And scientifically described in many a book! [...] you are just a small gondola,
Shimmering through infinite space,
And all rapturous, enamored poets
To the beautiful realm of divine dreams!

The reader will have seen from the above where delle Grazie's significance lies: in the grandeur of his vision, in his German idealism and in a rich imagination that moves primarily in the regions of the spiritual. We must now mention a fourth of the poet's works, "The Gypsy Woman", a novella. It does not occur to us to defend the deficiency of form and the improbability of the situations in this little work. The son of a landowner is enchanted by the beauty of a girl from this gang at a party where a band of gypsies is providing music and dancing. This girl, an orphan, is not a real gypsy, even according to her comrades. They don't really know how she got into the gang. A rare phenomenon in a gypsy society: a very noble girl, capable of the most beautiful feelings, who has been passionately in love with the landowner's scion ever since they met. After some time, they meet again. The relationship continues, the girl is seduced and then abandoned. The unfaithful man marries Etelka, the daughter of a magistrate. When the couple is blessed by the priest, the gypsy woman appears, mad to assert the rights of her heart. She is thrown into prison. An old gypsy, whose fatherly advice she usually listens to, but not when the seducer approaches, frees her. The madwoman grabs the old man's dagger, rushes into the unfaithful man's house and murders him. She and her liberator flee, pursued by the lord of the manor's people. The old man is killed by a stone thrown at him, the girl plunges the dagger into her own heart.

In spite of all the shortcomings of this little work, if you want to be unbiased, you will find the heartfelt tones with which the poet knows how to depict human relationships and the conflicts they entail, even when they take place within a despised, neglected class of people.

If we consider that the creator of all this is only at the beginning of her twenties, then no assumption we make about the glorious things she will yet give our people will be too bold. In any case, it is the duty of every German who has a heart and mind for the education of his people to follow the development of this spirit. A nation that produces such blossoms has nothing to fear. Not of the present, not of the future. When we are told from some quarters that the German people have played their part and that it is now the turn of younger peoples, we reply: we have nothing ageing about us as long as such youthful life is developing in our midst.

[ 1 ] As individual man has to pass through different stages after his birth, as he must ascend from infancy through childhood and so on to the age of the mature adult, so too must mankind as a whole go through a similar process. Humanity has developed to its present condition by passing through other stages. With the methods of the clairvoyant one can discern three principal stags of this development of mankind which were passed through before the formation of the earth took place and before this sphere became the scene of that development. Therefore at present we are concerned with the fourth stage in the great universal life of man. For now we shall relate the relevant facts here. The deeper explanation will appear in the course of the description, insofar as is possible in the words of ordinary language, that is, without having recourse to the form of expression of mystery science.

[ 2 ] Man existed before there was an earth. But one must not imagine—as has already been suggested—that perhaps he had previously lived on other planets and then at a certain time migrated to earth. Rather, the earth has developed together with man. Just as man has passed through three main stages of development, so has the earth, before becoming that which one now calls “earth.” For the time being, as has been indicated above, one must completely liberate oneself from the significance which contemporary science connects with the names “Saturn,” “Sun,” and “Moon,” if one wants to see the explanations of the scientist of the spirit in this area in their proper light. For the present one should connect with these names no other significance than that directly given to them in the following communications.

[ 3 ] Before the heavenly body on which the life of man takes place became “earth,” it had had three other forms which one designates as Saturn, Sun, and Moon. On can thus speak of four planets on which the four principal stages of the development of mankind take place Moon, before that Sun, and yet earlier, Saturn. One is justified, as will appear from the following communications, to assume three further principal stages which the earth, or better the heavenly body which developed into the present earth, still has to pass through. In mystery science these have been named Jupiter, Venus, and Vulcan. Thus the heavenly body with which human destiny is connected has passed through three stages in the past is now in its fourth, and will in the future have to pass through three more until all the talents which man has within himself are developed, until he arrives at the peak of his perfection.

[ 4 ] One must realize that the development of man and of his heavenly body does not proceed as gradually as for instance the passage of an individual human being through infancy, adolescence and so forth, where one condition goes over into another more or less imperceptibly. Rather there are certain interruptions. The Saturn condition does not go over immediately into the Sun stage. Between Saturn development and Sun development, and similarly between the subsequent forms of the heavenly body inhabited by man, there are intermediate conditions which can be compared with the night between two days or with the sleeplike condition of a plant seed before it again develops into a full plant.

In imitation of oriental descriptions of this state of affairs, contemporary theosophy calls a stage of development in which life is externally furthered, Manvantara, the intermediate condition of rest, Pralaya. In accordance with the usage of European mystery science, one can use the word “open cycle” for the former condition, and on the other hand, “hidden or closed cycle” for the latter. But other designations are also in common use. Saturn, Sun, Moon, earth, and so forth, are “open cycles,” and the periods of rest between them are “closed” ones.

[ 5 ] It would be quite erroneous to think that in the periods of rest all life is extinct, although today this idea can be encountered in many theosophical circles. Just as little as man ceases to live during his sleep, so little does his life and that of his heavenly body become extinct during a “closed cycle” (Pralaya). It is only that the conditions of life in the periods of rest cannot be perceived with the senses which have been developed during the “open cycles,” just as during his sleep man does not perceive what is taking place around him. Why one uses the expression “cycle” for the stages of development will become sufficiently clear in the course of the following discussion. Only later can we speak about the enormous periods of time which are required for these “cycles.”

[ 6 ] One can find a thread through the course of the cycles by following for a moment the development of human consciousness through them. Everything else can suitably arise out of this consideration of consciousness.

The consciousness which man develops during his life-course on earth will be called—in accordance with European mystery science—the “clear consciousness of day.” The latter consists in the fact that through his present senses, man perceives the things and beings of the world and that he forms conceptions and ideas concerning these things and beings with the help of his understanding and of his reason. He then acts in the world of the senses according to these perceptions, conceptions, and ideas. Man formed this consciousness only in the fourth principal stage of his cosmic development; on Saturn, Sun, and Moon it did not yet exist. There he lived in other conditions of consciousness. As a result, one can describe the three previous stages of development as the unfolding of lower conditions of consciousness.

[ 7 ] The lowest condition of consciousness was passed through during the Saturn development; the Sun condition is higher, then follows the Moon consciousness and finally that of earth.

[ 8 ] These former consciousnesses are primarily distinguished from the earthly one by two characteristics: by the degree of clarity, and by the area over which the perception of man extends.

The Saturn consciousness has the lowest degree of clarity. It is entirely dull. It is difficult to give an exact idea of this dullness, since even the dullness of sleep is somewhat clearer than this consciousness. In abnormal, so-called deep states of trance, modern man can still fall back into this state of consciousness. The clairvoyant in the sense of mystery science can also form a correct conception of it. But by no means does he himself live in this state of consciousness. On the contrary, he ascends to a much higher one, which however in certain respects is similar to the original one. In the ordinary man at the contemporary terrestrial stage, this condition, through which he once passed, has been effaced by the “clear consciousness of day.” The “medium” who falls into a deep trance, however, is transported back into it, so that he perceives in the same way in which all men perceived during the “Saturn period.” Either during the trance or after awaking, such a medium can then tell of experiences which are similar to those of the Saturn stage. One must be careful to say that they are “similar,” not “identical,” for the events which took place on Saturn are once and for all past; only events which have a certain affinity with them still take place in the environment of man. These can only be perceived by a “Saturn consciousness.”

Like the medium, the clairvoyant in the above sense acquires such a Saturn consciousness, but in addition to it he keeps his “clear consciousness of day,” which man did not yet have on Saturn, and which the medium loses in the state of trance. Such a clairvoyant is not in the Saturn consciousness itself, but he can form a conception of it.

While this Saturn consciousness is by some degrees inferior to the one of today with respect to clarity, it is superior to the latter with respect to the extent of what it can perceive. In its dullness it can not only perceive everything which takes place on its own heavenly body down to the last detail, but it can also observe the objects and beings on other heavenly bodies which are connected with Saturn. It can also exercise a certain influence on these objects and beings. (It hardly need be said that this observation of other heavenly bodies is quite different from that which contemporary man can undertake by means of his scientific astronomy. This astronomical observation is based on the “clear consciousness of day” and therefore perceives other heavenly bodies from the outside. The Saturn consciousness, on the other hand, is immediate sensation, an experiencing of what takes place on other heavenly bodies. One does not speak altogether accurately, but still fairly so, if one says that an inhabitant of Saturn experienced objects and events of other heavenly bodies—and of his own—as a man of today experiences his heart and his heartbeat or something similar in his own body.)

This Saturn consciousness developed slowly. As the first principal stage in the development of mankind it passed through a series of subordinate stages, which in European mystery science are called “small cycles.” In theosophical literature it has become customary to call these “small cycles,” “rounds,” and their further sub-divisions—still smaller cycles—“globes.” These subordinate cycles will be dealt with in subsequent discussions. For the sake of greater clarity, we shall first follow here the principal stages of development. For the moment we shall speak only of man, although the development of subordinate and superior entities and objects proceeds concurrently with his own. That which concerns the development of other entities will then follow the discussion of man's progress.

[ 9 ] When the development of the Saturn consciousness was completed, there occurred one of the long rest periods (a Pralaya) mentioned above. After this there developed out of the heavenly body of man what in mystery science is called the “Sun.” On the Sun, the human beings again emerged from their sleep. The previously developed Saturn consciousness was present in them as a predisposition. First they again developed it from this germ. One can say that on the Sun man repeated the condition of Saturn before ascending to a higher one. However, it is not a simple repetition which is meant here, but one in another form. These transformations of forms will be discussed later when we deal with the smaller cycles. At that time the differences between the individual “repetitions” will also become apparent. Now we shall describe only the development of consciousness.

After the repetition of the Saturn condition, the “Sun consciousness” of man appears. This is somewhat clearer than the preceding consciousness, but on the other hand it has lost something with respect to broadness of vision. In the deep, dreamless sleep of his present life, man has a condition of consciousness similar to that which he once had on the Sun. However, he who is not a clairvoyant or a medium cannot perceive the objects and beings corresponding to the Sun consciousness. With the trance of a medium reduced to this condition, and with the higher consciousness of the true clairvoyant, the case here is similar to what has been said with respect to the Saturn consciousness.

The extent of the Sun consciousness is limited to the Sun and the heavenly bodies most closely connected with it. It is only these and their events which the inhabitant of the Sun can experience as—to use once again the simile employed above—man of today experiences his heartbeat. In this way the inhabitant of Saturn could also participate in the life of those heavenly bodies which did not belong to the immediate sphere of Saturn.

[ 10 ] When the Sun stage has passed through the appropriate subordinate cycles, it also enters a period of rest. From this the heavenly body of man awakes to its “Moon existence.” Before ascending higher, again man passes through the Saturn and Sun stage in two smaller cycles. Then he enters his Moon consciousness. One can more easily form an idea of the latter, for there is a certain similarity between this stage of consciousness and a sleep filled with dreams. It must be explicitly stated that here again one can only speak of a similarity, not of an identity. It is true that the Moon consciousness is composed of images such as appear in dreams, but these images correspond to the objects and events around man in a way similar to the ideas of the present “clear consciousness of day.” But everything in this correspondence is still dull, in fact, image-like. One can represent this state of affairs to oneself in approximately the following way. Assume that a Moon-being comes near an object, let us say near salt. (Of course, at that time there was no “salt” in its present form, but after all, in order to be understood, one must remain in the area of images and similes.) This Moon-being—the precursor of present-day man—does not perceive an object with spatial extension and a definite coloring and form outside itself; instead, the approach to this object causes a certain image—similar to a dream image—to arise as it were within this being. This image has a certain coloring which depends on the characteristics of the object. If the object is agreeable to the being and useful for its existence, the coloring is light in yellow nuances, or in green; if the object is disagreeable or is one which is harmful to the being, a blood-like, reddish color nuance appears. The clairvoyant also sees in this way today, only he is fully conscious during this seeing, while the Moon inhabitant had only a dreamlike, dim consciousness. The images appearing “within” these inhabitants had an exactly defined relationship to the environment. There was nothing arbitrary in them. It was possible to direct oneself by them; one acted under the impression of these images as today one acts under the impression of sensory perceptions.

The development of this dreamlike consciousness—the third principal stage—was the task of the “Moon cycle.” When the “Moon” had passed through the appropriate “small cycles,” a period of rest (Pralaya) again occurred. After this, the “Earth” emerged from the darkness.

If you ask people outside of their everyday consciousness: What is it that can be called the self? — the answer would be that you have to look for this self-awareness within the boundaries that the skin encloses. Our view can be proven by the fact that the seat of the soul is to be found in the head and heart. But in the sense of spiritual science, it is different, only this is not easy to recognize.

One comes closer to spiritual reality when one tries to make the supersensible facts clear. With the concepts and words that man uses without these researches, he does not come closer to the truth. One will get a good concept if one ties into a unified picture.

Let us think of a sailor navigating the seas. All external factors form the essentials, the determining factors; for the purpose of navigating the ship, it is important to know whether the sea is calm or agitated, whether islands are emerging in the sea, whether the sky is clouding over, and much more. The captain and the sailors take action based on all these external facts; all external facts are the essential ones for them. Now some might think that when the ship has entered the harbor, it is at rest and all work is over for a while. But that is not the case. Another kind of work begins. The ship no longer performs work, but work is done on the ship. What has suffered during the voyage is repaired. The hold is filled with a new cargo and so on. In this way, the voyage and the ship's layover in port can be compared to human life, to life during the day and to life during the night. There is only one major difference, and that is that people do not care about the night work. During the work in port, the ship must be made useful for the onward journey by workers and sailors. But everything that drives man to act through the senses during the day, ceases to work at night. Our senses, which have carried out the work in our body during the day, rest during the night. The work of the day rests like the ship in the harbor. And yet a work is going on in man that enables him to start a new day's work.

This brings us closer to the concept of what the actual spiritual part of a person is. It is not enclosed by the skin of the person, but extends beyond the physical person. The actual spiritual part extends its feelers into the person; it sends the essential, the spiritual part into the person.

Where is the actual I located in the human being? Outside of the human being, around the physical human being, one finds the spiritual human being, the supersensible I-human being. And if we look at the human aura, which is shaped like an egg, then the I-consciousness will be most effective in the shell, in the auric egg. This fact leads to the correct solution of the problem.

I have pointed out twelve points on the horizon. The occultist must know them. They exist there even if they are not recognized by everyone. These twelve points continuously send their forces into man; he is attacked by these twelve points in the various points of his aura. Only by surrounding himself with his ego is he able to make the cosmic forces one with himself. Man must feel that he belongs to the universe. Through this he enters into the faculty of perception, and through this it becomes possible for him to acquire the abilities to perceive that correspond to the points mentioned. He is embedded in these twelve points. The divine spiritual forces work through these points on man. If you can bear this in mind, you will understand the ways and aims of the spiritual man.

Man must be able to integrate this feeling into his life. Through spiritual science he will become acquainted with a sum of forces through which he can accomplish these transformations in himself. Let us think for a moment about everyday life. People rush through the world, and many things come their way that they could reflect on, that they could process in their minds, but they make no effort whatsoever to put their experiences into practice or even to reflect on them more deeply. They just want to experience and chase from one sensation to the next.

There are other people who go through life without paying the slightest attention to the external world. They brood and speculate about their own thoughts. They do not notice what is going on around them; they brood over and over again. Neither of these extremes is good for a person. But there is a middle way, and that is to interweave everything you experience with your own thoughts. This middle state is the most beneficial for the human being of the external world.

Suppose a young man is preparing for an exam. He has been working hard, the exam time is approaching and with it the exam anxiety. Again and again, the young person realizes that on the day of the exam, the questions could be about the things he is least sure about, the things he does not know for sure. This works in his thoughts. The exam went well, it is crucial for the whole of life. It is the gateway to his future life. Now it may happen that he is haunted by an 'I' space in the further course of his existence, and in this dream the exam anxiety of his youth emerges in him, everything that he did not believe he knew at the time. The soul is intimately connected with it, and the occult observer sees the fabric that is woven in the dream. What is woven into it did not contribute to the life that has passed. But the occultist knows that it can become a useful force in the next life.

It can also happen differently. From the age of forty-five, dreams cease. The one who observes himself finds that completely new character traits emerge. For example, it may be experienced that in advanced years he has far more courage than he ever possessed in his youth. The states of fear in his youth and the will to conquer them have done their quiet work in the inner man; after forty-five years these forces have been transformed into reverse forces. Something is always weaving and working within the human being, and what works there is the astral body. It works in the etheric body until the experience has spun itself into the etheric body and really become a quality. Under ordinary circumstances, it only appears as a quality in the next life, but there may also be quite abnormal cases, such as the one just mentioned.

This is how a person processes his external experiences, and it is the same with the extrasensory circumstances of life, which demand that we process them with the ego. How does the spiritual person work in relation to his external circumstances? The external circumstances approach us, but the fabric that transforms our abilities is spun from within. We weave into the person what comes from the eternal spiritual. We must go to the external, but the spiritual comes to us.

Let us assume that a person, for one reason or another, takes an interest in something, for example, that he wants to take a closer look at a tree. He must then approach the tree, he must go to the tree to get a result. But it is different with spiritual results. These come to us, we have to wait for them to come.

The essential thing about external experiences is that they are of a transitory nature. But those that come to us through the path of 'Theosophy are grounded in spirituality. We weave them into our inner being as something imperishable. We must go to the external, but the spiritual must approach us, and the more we make ourselves capable of receiving the spiritual within us, the more it comes to us from the spiritual worlds and becomes our property. Those people who live among us as poets and have created and produced something are always those who in times gone by have allowed the supersensible to flow into them. We must learn to reflect more. We must be able to think logically and reasonably and then keep our soul completely still. Then we will not have to wait in vain. The corresponding spiritual substance will flow into our soul, for which we ourselves have paved the way. We must learn to maintain the expectant mood. Not what we brood over is best. We should want to attain everything through our thought work, not through ourselves. Only through sharp thinking and subsequent waiting can we fertilize our spirit. It must flow to us when we have learned to observe the right processes, and these processes must work together with thinking, feeling and willing.

There are three aspects to our soul life: thinking, feeling and willing. A person sees a rose. Through his thought life, he recognizes it as such. He admires the shape and the color; this awakens certain feelings in him. He stretches out his hand to grasp the rose, thereby expressing an act of will. However, important results, which can be decisive for a person's entire life, depend on how he or she treats these qualities.

For example: A person meets another who instills a pronounced antipathy in him. He sees that he cannot free himself from the person who arouses antipathy in him, and the feeling that is caused him by the compulsion makes him angry. Thinking, feeling and willing are involved in this process.

In our daily lives, we can often observe how differently these processes unfold. The anger of one person quickly disappears; they may not dwell on such feelings for long, and the better feelings gain the upper hand in them. Another person, on the other hand, carries their anger around with them all day long; they cannot find the resilience to shake it off. The first person, who quickly fights his emotions, will remain mentally healthy and may reach a ripe old age. The other person, who flies into a rage over every trifle and carries this rage around with him for a long time, will age prematurely. The constant emotions will take their toll on his body.

A proverb says: “Don't take anger to bed with you.” This is where the affects begin to weave in the soul, and we weave the passions into the human being. What we experience from the spirit will have an effect on our soul, and it makes a significant difference whether our experiences remain only in theory or whether they pass over into feeling.

Let us assume that a person absorbs much that is spiritual, and that what is absorbed penetrates into the person. It will only bear fruit for the spiritual person when he embraces what he has absorbed with enthusiasm and love. Only then does the work also become a work of the inner man, only then does he extract the spiritual and make it part of his spiritual self. It is feeling that helps us to make the spiritually acquired our own.

Man lives in his aura, and when the theosophical truths are absorbed by the spiritual man, the aura is strongly agitated. The I is the motor of this movement. How does this process present itself to the clairvoyant eye? When love and enthusiasm for great spiritual thoughts take hold of man, everything in the aura comes to life, and the result of this higher thought life is that it has a purifying effect on the aura. All material desires and thoughts, which are expressed in the human aura, clump together into balls, and with increasing spiritual work these balls condense more and more, becoming smaller and smaller, until the purifying light of spiritual thinking has dissolved and driven them away.

When the clairvoyant eye observes a person watching a sunrise, similar phenomena can be observed. The devout joy that a person can feel at the natural spectacle causes a similar process to take place in the aura of the person watching. As long as such a person allows beauty to affect his inner being, the effect of this process is a dissolving one in the aura, and much that is bad is transformed into good. The ability to rejoice and to immerse oneself has a purifying effect on the soul, and in such moments the soul is capable of absorbing new spiritual things because the stream of higher forces has found an entrance.

But the opposite can also take place. If a person does not dwell on a great natural spectacle that has affected him in his thoughts, if none of the beauty remains within him and he turns to other things after a fleeting enjoyment, the following can occur: everything in the aura of such a person becomes concentrated. A spiritual-soul task that came his way has been carelessly set aside and is now working itself out in the dark. It may happen that lies find their way into his inner being. To develop the ability to let something resonate and to empathize is the work of a spiritual person.

If we all learned this, spiritual science would lead to paths and goals that would create widespread blessings. If only intellectual work were done, if quarrels and discord prevailed among the theosophists, little would be transformed from bad to good. The law of karma will show man how to work in the right way.

For those who can feel Theosophy with enthusiasm and know how to draw comfort from it, the higher spiritual sciences are beneficial, for they bring comfort and strength in all circumstances. No one leaves these sciences without consolation. The greater our aims, the more our striving will be imbued with ideals, and man carries them out into the world. We pursue spiritual science and interweave it with our inner being. It permeates us, and we can carry it out to others.

We must work towards these goals as much as we are able. We have no right to ignore the paths and goals of the spiritual human being. It is our duty to weave the soul into the physical world. The human being is the gateway, the only gateway of spirit into the physical-material world, into which heaven is to flow. We can loosen the lead of materialism by allowing spiritual truths to penetrate it. Only by working on the development of humanity does man contribute to life and not to death. To walk in the ways and to strive for the goals of the spiritual man means to pursue the task of making the supersensible soul-like.

We still have one question: What is the relationship between Earth and the other planets? Mars and Mercury can shed some light on this, but because erroneous ideas have been formed about them, it is a difficult subject. From the very beginning, the Masters of the Wisdom have not willingly answered questions.

Some words of a great master, which are found in the Secret Doctrine: “Do not give the great wisdom!” And so on. They express a clear warning. There are reasons why it is not allowed to talk about this until man is mature enough.

The relations of the earth to Mars and Mercury.

Before they inhabited this Earth, people lived on the moon. The moon that can be seen today is only a piece of it. Before that, they were on the sun, and before that on Saturn. Three planets in a row. The days of the week are named after them. Colorless: Saturday.

Now to Earth: a globe in metamorphosis, which it completes in seven times seven cycles.

Moon orange, then darker, then green - Earth - colored, then over to the next state darker again, so the successive states.

So after the moon – which had turned orange – had completed its 49 metamorphoses and man had developed as far as the goal set for him here on the third round, all life contracted into the germinal state in order to flourish again on earth. The earth had to go through the Saturn state in seven cycles, then the sun state, then the moon state, and is now becoming physical in its fourth round, which is where we are now in the most solid matter and have the color green, the previous phase was orange.

The moon was only astral at the beginning, then it became dense ether. The earth was first ether and then solid, then astral and so on.

We will only truly understand our Earth when we familiarize ourselves with what has happened on our Earth. The Earth goes through seven stages of development, which are the seven races.

I. The polar root race. Etheric substance. Then denser, not like our air, the
II. root race, the Hyperboreans. The
III. Race, the Lemurians, air-fire nebula, not yet dense. Up to the Lemurians, humans were bisexual, but from then on they became unisexual. IV. Race, the Atlanteans, who perished in the flood. V. The Aryan race, our present race.

Then the sixth and seventh races, whose names will be given later. From the seventh race, then, over to the next cycle. Here in this fourth round, the earth has come to its full development. In the Lemurian race, man has come to his full destiny. If man cannot reach another level, he descends from the moon, because he was in a high level of dream consciousness.

He came down from the moon because he was in a highly dream-conscious state.

The Lemurians are similar to the state of the moon people. The most mature fruit of the moon development was bisexual. When he had then gone through all the rounds of the earth to become a Lemurian (gap in the transcript).

The soul of the Lemurians was different from our present one. He also had only two senses. Hearing and touch. But it was not the sense of touch as we have it, to touch solid objects, but it was a feeling of warmth and cold, of air. Man was like a soundboard. The air was denser, the water thinner. A mass of fog was the air.

Man lived in the fire fog. Everything around him resounded, he heard as if clairaudient. He heard the air crackle like the rumble of a thunderstorm. He could then arrange his life and activities accordingly. Through the sense of touch he could feel his way to the food. There were not images that were like pictures, but like dream images, but regularly in colors, it was an inner seething and weaving. When he felt red, it was his life itself and was not directed towards external objects, but it had a magnetizing effect, for example: when he felt fear, it was ugly images. These had been brought by people from the moon. The human of the Lemurian race would not have been able to progress if the other impact had not occurred.

The facility for this further training was not available. But in addition to these average people, higher beings were already there. For example, there were beings who had already risen to such a high level on the sun; they no longer needed to go through the moon phases. These are the solar Pitris. On the sun, they had already attained this superhuman nature. This nature is also much further advanced and more perfect in its soul life. While the average human being only saw images in his surroundings, these Pitris saw true revelations in the images, a higher kind of images. This was the expression of a high spiritual entity. It was a different kind of knowledge than our present-day knowledge, it was like intuition. They did not study natural laws, but perceived nature. Such entities had to reveal themselves to people.

Before the Lemurians, man would have become a statue, a cinder – he now needed a new influence. He would not have been able to develop the life of thought. These guides were there, they had a lot of power, quite unlike the masters today. They could intervene in development – just as chemists use substances. They formed the astral-inserted human body, which was taken from somewhere else. These high guides were never connected to the earth, these solar beings could come together with other planets. The first three races - earth - were important, where that could be supplied; and that had to be studied on [other] celestial bodies. The leaders have studied it, they have brought it from Mars, which was just about to darken. Mars has different inhabitants than the earth. The earth is physical in nature, but Mars is astral, but frozen, and in this state it is in the same low sphere as our earth. Mars has two higher planets. This astral one is in the same sphere as the earth is now in the physical. Mars is astral, but the Martians have become physically tangible directly from the astral state. And this astral covering has been brought down from Mars and incorporated into the human being, thereby enabling the human being to develop further.

A second impact of the highest spirituality has become the earth through correspondence with Venus, since the ingredients are fetched, which man still needed. Through studies of the beings of Venus. These sons of Venus have come down to bring to earth what they - the sons of Venus - have studied on other planets.

A third impact was now coming. Man, who now had the spark of the spirit, had to be led further. First he had to go through fear and striving, through passion, through desires and wishes, but now he had to be led to a desireless spirituality. Mercury is in the stage of brightening, which shows a highly developed astral being, from where the manasic bodies were fetched.

The first race on our Earth had the development of Mars and Mercury. Actually, we owe our properties to the moon and the sun, but then to Mars and Mercury.

Saturn stage = Saturday
Moon stage = Monday
Mars impact = Tuesday
Mercury impact = Mercury day

So much for the present, but they point to the future. The Mercury stage is attained by our Earth in the next planet. The Earth is not designated by the days of the week because it is itself, it lies in between.

Today, man already has the beginning of the higher purest wisdom within him, on the next devachan; but will only become physical in the future.

If we observe Jupiter, we learn how people, how the beings of Jupiter become. There is a relationship with Jupiter. The beings are an example to us.

Jupiter = Zeus state. Minerva = Pallas Athene, who sprang from the head of Jupiter.

The beings are no longer connected to the Kama-Rupa, but are beings of the highest spirituality.

Then finally with Venus. This planet is so far away from us that the beings only have an indirect effect on us. These planets also have their own chains. With Venus, one speaks of Kronos - Uranus - Jupiter - Jeudi, Venus - Friday - Freya - Vendredi.

The days of the week are written down, the wise men have taken them down from the sky. We have learned a secret here, how the great leaders descended to inspire us.

That is why it is said: God Jupiter descended to marry human women.

Zeus and Dionysus. Mercury in Greek. Myth = Mercury, son of Zeus and Maya, a Hellenic nymph. But esoterically connected to Mercury.

Hellenic nymphs. Ares has descendants who have dragon teeth.

German myth Wotan = Mercury = Wednesday

Mercury connects with Erda, she is clairvoyant, she can see the future. Brunhilde was born of her - of Erda. Brunhilde = wish girl, passion.

The initiated sages therefore went to remind people of their current situation. Time had to be given a name to remind them. Thursday will now be a holiday for people because they are developing into a Jupiter being.

The Earth from Mercury and Mars.

The lower beings are abandoned and pushed back into animality to further the development of man, and with the next race the lower ones are eliminated again, so with the Lemurians the reptiles were rejected.

With the Atlanteans, the mammals were split off. Our savages today are degenerated beings.

Man has been pushed down, but the guilt will be redeemed once again. Karma has come about because man had to descend and become physical.

Such a solar being is embodied in Hermes; the hermaphroditic time. When we were on the sun, the sun was spatially another sun; so today's sun is in a different place. But the clairvoyant sees the sun in the place where it was then. The old place is still on the mental plan. The moon has also suffered a shift.

In the Middle Ages, the Ptolemaic system was still known. According to astronomical observations, the earth was at the center, and esoterically this is indeed the case.

Copernicus only showed the sky externally, physically.

The fifth race begins in the twelfth century.

Additional information from a typewritten transcription of Camilla Wandrey's notes:

The Solarpitris were superhuman beings, they had a fundamentally different disposition, especially in their spiritual life, than humans. These exalted beings took young humanity under their protection. They were able to experience revelations of higher spiritual powers and beings, they perceived the gods, they possessed a knowledge that lived into the gods through intuition, they perceived the living divine beings directly.

Man needed a new impetus to keep him from ossifying; he could not develop a spiritual and soul life of his own accord. These mighty Solarpitris had the vision that could truly connect them with other planets. They studied the other beings on the other planets in order to utilize the fruits of their studies for human beings. Thus they observed the development of beings on Mars. Mars now has the astral state, not the physical state, as its deepest. They studied the sheaths of the beings on Mars, and a kind of 'downward pulling' of the astral sheaths of the Martian beings took place. That was the impact. Through this impact from Mars, people were able to receive the passions, the desires, the sexual - KamaRupa.

The second impact, that which as spirituality, as pure, virginal spirituality, can also underlie the passionate, the covetous, the spiritual-covetous, became possible for these Solarpitris through the same study taking place in relation to Venus.

Then man received the third impact, which came a little later. Man now had the spark of the spirit on the one hand, and the passions on the other. He now had to be led further. He had to be given something so that he would not sink into the depths of the Kama-Rupa brought from Mars.

The more delicate Kama-Rupa, which serves the thought life and enables man to pacify his passions, was brought by the Solarpitris from Mercury. Thus mankind received spiritual impregnation through the Solarpitris from Mercury, Mars and Venus: the two Kama-Rupa and that which is to establish the balance between the two.

From Jupiter, the Solarpitris then brought what we now want to develop, the spiritual essence of man, which can attain wisdom, manas. Jupiter gave man the opportunity to attain wisdom, while from Venus flow the virgin heights of the spirit, which we can only sense, which are still far from our reach, even if we have the potential, the ability to accept this divine inheritance from the Solar Pitris within us.

The esoteric week, which we as true esotericists should relive again and again in our thoughts and feelings, is an earthly reflection of the effectiveness of the Solarpitris for humanity.

We have listed Saturn, Sun, Moon-day. Then comes Mars-day - Tuesday. Here Mars is thought of as identical with the first half of the earth's development. Then Mercury. Mercury or Wotanstag, Wednesday - Wednesday, Wotan is the same as Mercury. Then Donars-day. Donar is Jupiter. There should always be Jupiter Day, Thursday, the day of the future, a festival and a holy day for every esoteric and also for everyone who wants to become an esoteric. And finally, the day of Venus, of Freya. Venerdi in Italian, Vendredi in French, these words evoke the ancient knowledge of the future secret of humanity, which is commemorated by the day of Venus, Friday.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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