The Rudolf Steiner Archive

So, my dear friends, we have finally come to the end of our meeting, but we can highlight one fact in all of this. You see, my dear Theosophical friends, something extraordinarily important seems to have taken place. One might ask: Was it a general assembly? What was it actually? When it is talked about later, it will be said, “Once upon a time...” — just as it is said in fairy tales. We were still members of the Theosophical Society in Adyar when we arrived here, but now we are no longer members. Something earth-shattering seems to have happened, but in terms of the matter, one has not actually noticed it. We are again diverging in terms of the matter, as we used to diverge, and precisely this fact, that we can do that, that we do that, is a very important one. Perhaps this does testify to how serious we were about the spiritual, about the cultivation of spiritual culture, about the content of our cause; and if we were serious about that, no form will break this content, but this content will seek its new form if the old one is challenged.

As for myself, my dear Theosophical friends, I must confess that, with regard to the external events that have occurred, I have been so touched by the matter that I must say again: things actually only differ in degree. You see, Mrs. Besant has found it necessary to make the claim, which defies all facts, that I was educated in a Jesuit school. It is so that one must take it seriously, because it is a very strong accusation in the present, and effective if it were believed in relation to the inner, to the hateful motives.

And with regard to the other underlying motives of Mrs. Besant, I find only a slight difference compared to another accusation that came across my eyes, from a letter that is one of a whole series of letters. I received a letter from Hamburg in which a lady writes that she had always been persuaded not to go to the lectures, but now she had seen for herself, because before she never went because a pastor had said that I was a Satan. I have not yet read the other letters, but there is one coming every day, sometimes two. Shortly before the lecture here in this hall, a letter was brought to me – I should definitely read it before the lecture. In the letter, a lady wrote to me that she had heard some of my lectures that she liked. But now she looked me up in the dictionary of writers to find out how old I actually am, and she discovered that I carefully dye my hair, because people my age don't have black hair anymore! So she can't come to my lectures anymore, because it would be outrageous and speak to the prevalence of such a thing.

You hear all kinds of things and finally, the accusations are to be distinguished according to the motives for how they are made effective. The motives are human, all too human, whether one or the other makes them, whether one is accused by Mrs. Besant of having been educated in a Jesuit school or by another lady because of something else. That's how people act. There are many more stories I could tell.

Something that really did meet with the enthusiastic support of our friends – the printing of the cycles – is also being made the target of attacks. I am being reproached for the fact that it says: “According to a postscript not checked by the speaker.” But there is a very simple reason for this; I don't have time to check the postscripts. They would never see the light of day if I had to read them first. The person concerned says: He – Dr. Steiner – has not looked at the matter, so he always leaves himself a back door open if he were to be caught making mistakes.

In this way, one can suspect everything, while we have really only taken into account the energetic wishes of the members. We are dealing with serious, profound, and meaningful things, and so we must be able to fully distinguish between what is a serious and sacred matter and what is an external form, and we must not sleep and believe that we can always dream and talk about the content to get ahead. The worst things could happen to us if we were not on guard, if we did not take into account the need to remain vigilant. And in this respect, I was also able to tie in with what Dr. Peipers said today, the word about keeping watch. There is also a productive way of keeping watch. That is in our nature and not in that of our opponents.

I hope that we will part peacefully, with the feeling that we will remain united intellectually.

Goodbye!

Today it's my duty to speak out of my occult experiences about the progress that we make through our exercises. Someone may do his exercises correctly for years and is also able to create that quiet that's indispensable if thoughts, feelings or visions are to enter our soul as a result of meditation, and may yet have the feeling that he's at the very same place that he was at the beginning. But this is not so. The main thing for an esoteric is for him to pay attention to his soul life, for this is so intimate that one's attentiveness must be very great if one wants to perceive anything.

If after doing our meditation conscientiously and well, we, for instance, wash and dress ourselves, our consciousness is devoted to this activity. Then we may have the feeling that: I did my things quite mechanically now; my thoughts weren't with them. And when we reflect on what our thoughts did, we can get a feeling of a quiet dream, as if it wasn't we who thought—it was as if what passed through our soul had thought in us. When we observe something like this, we increasingly get the feeling that something happens in us to which we can apply the mantric words: It thinks me. If we say or think these words in everyday life whenever we have a quiet moment, we'll find that they help and promote us in our soul life. But we must strictly observe one thing. When we say or think them to ourselves, a feeling of piety will arise in us, and we must connect this feeling with it every time we say the words. It would be wrong if someone didn't say the words at all so as not to say them with the wrong soul mood; instead, one must practice connecting them with the feeling of piety each time. Then we get the feeling that what thinks in us is related to the I, that the sublime beings who gave it to us are thinking in us. This is clarified for exoterics in our third mystery drama in the words: In your thinking world thoughts are living.

A second word that's mantric and that can help us if it's used correctly is It works me. We know that all the hierarchies work in us and through us, that we would be nothing without them, and so it's good to become increasingly clear that we're their work entirely. This is in the mantric words: It works me. We should think and say them with a feeling of holy devotion and shy reverence. In the Bhagavad-Gita, that sacred text, we have a conversation between Krishna and Arjuna that graphically tells us that we should do our duties and yet keep a feeling for the Gods' work alive in our soul. No other sacred text, no Christian one either, points to this in such a way. Krishna says: “You should be a warrior, priest or merchant, depending on which caste you belong to, and do your work conscientiously, for your destiny has placed you in your activity. But you should stand over your work with your I and feel that you're connected with the divine.”

A third word arises from the feeling that we must acquire when we make it clear to ourselves that forces stream into us out of the whole world space, that we get our head from here, our limbs from there, all our organs from various sides, and that they're also directed from there. We express this in the mantric word: It weaves me. We should always say and think this with a feeling of deep thankfulness when we return to our physical body in the morn by saying: I'm returning to something that I didn't weave myself; I couldn't become conscious again if you, Father Spirit, hadn't created my body for this, and I thank you for it in shy reverence.

We can do our meditation in such a way that we get the feeling: I'm not thinking it—it thinks me. Just as we dive into our bodies to become conscious in the morn, so we must dive down into something at death to get a consciousness—and that is the Christ.

That's what the verse tells us: Ex Deo nascimur—in the morning we dive down into the physical body through the Father Spirit; in Christo morumur—at the portal of death we must dive into the Christ-Spirit; Per Spiritum Sanctum reviviscimus—to come to life in the Holy Spirit.

I

Dear reader, I cannot find the words to describe to you the impression that the poems that came to me today have made on me. Listen to the poet himself:

Year after year...
In the park
I tease the young girls,
who no longer blush, no longer smile.
Don't make a bad face!
They just keep quiet, look past me.

Cross their arms.
The distant sound of
chattering happiness.

Here,
where my sweetheart fell into my arms,
loud

Love sobbed
the red mouth of a flower is silent,
it was quiet around me.
My mother's coffin collapses under the earth!

And if you still haven't had enough, dear reader, I'll give you a second sample:

This morning I sang three love songs
over the melting snow
into the soft air.

At noon I was so hungry;
my dreams almost fell into my peas.
I stuffed.

Now the moon is shining.

From my heart
three hundred cats are screaming.

But now I won't bring you another sample. I love you too much, dear reader. But I had to tell you about the latest volume of poetry, “Neues Leben” by Georg Stolzenberg, which has just been published in Berlin by Johann Sassenbach. If you think it is intended to compete with the “Kladderadatsch”, which contains many a cheerful stylistic experiment in its “Correspondence of the Editorial Office”, you are mistaken. It is really and truly serious “modern poetry”, and the booklet is dedicated to no less a person than Mr. Stolzenberg's “friend” Arno Holz.

Mr. Georg Stolzenberg has truly discovered the new lyricism with his singing. On May 7, 1898, he announced this in the “Zukunft”, which is so suitable for “self-advertisements”. He says that he has been searching for many years to be able to put his feelings into the appropriate form. “Then I read some of the newest poems by Arno Holz. As soon as I grasped their essence, it was clear to me what had held back the development of a truly contemporary art of verse for so long: the thick tangle of words that even those of our poets who have long since been beyond criticism had to stuff by the cartload into their verse buildings so that there were no too large cracks, the compulsion to twist the reluctant thread of thought through the rhyme ear each time, the necessity to constantly make the word dance. With the technique created by Arno Holz, in which, as he himself puts it, ultimate simplicity is the highest law and [possible] naturalness seems to be the most intense form of art, lyric poetry is beginning anew, as it were.” And now enough. Stolzenberg's prose is worthy of his ‘poetry.’

II

Poetry is now blossoming in new ways. The editors of this journal have not yet reformed their tastes enough to be able to pass judgment on this latest artistic direction. Therefore, without passing judgment, they present readers with a few samples of these latest achievements. However, it should be noted that these lyrical creations are meant to be taken seriously by their creators.

The master, Arno Holz, leads the way. In his latest collection, “Phantasus” (Berlin, Sassenbach. Second issue 1899) contains:

I ride my winged steed
I whip my winged steed.
through!

Beyond shattered planetary systems, beyond glaciated
primeval suns, behind deserts of night and nothingness
shimmering new worlds grow - trillions of crocus flowers!

Now the students: Georg Stolzenberg, “Neues Leben” (Second Issue. Berlin 1899):

Spring wind
touches the skirts.
All the girls are beautiful.
They buy little bunches of violets
and laugh for no reason.
I
twirl my beautifully curled
Maikaterbart! [ruffled]

*

Robert Hess writes in his “Fables” (Berlin 1899):

The evening sky is shining metallic.
Under dark branches
a shepherd is blowing.
The goats are still gambolling.
mosquitoes dance.
A sheep looks at the setting sun.
Yuck!

Rolf Wolfgang Martens “Befreite Flügel” (Berlin 1899) contains:

In water boots,
with rolled-up sleeves,
he roams the primeval forests.
His gaze
measures the giant trees.
On the summit of Gaurisankar
he proudly builds himself a castle.
There he carouses with Ramses, Timur and Alexander the Great. I approach
I approach him and show him a colorful, shimmering
Indignant [meadow flowers]
he throws me down the stairs!

Man, who is the center of our cosmos, has four stages, and they are: his being, his life, his feeling and his self-consciousness. One is right to distinguish these stages, because on earth there are beings that have only one stage, only being: the mineral; beings that have two stages, being and life: the plants; and those that have three stages: Being, life and sensation - the animals. The beings that are above man, the gods, have even higher levels in addition. Man has all these four levels on the physical plan. We get to know through sensual perception his being; when man moves and stirs, his life; when he feels, desire and dislike, his sensation; when he speaks: his self-consciousness. All this is on the physical plan.

For the other beings we perceive only the stages indicated for them. But it does not follow that they do not have the other stages. Only their consciousness is not on the physical plan as in the case of man, but it works down from a higher plan. The clairvoyant notices that the animal has its consciousness on the astral plane, and it is not one animal that has the consciousness, but a whole series has it together. This is called a group soul; it is a communal consciousness on the astral plane. It is the regulator, the regent for the whole animal species. The plants have similarly developed a self-consciousness, but on the lower mental plan. From there, like threads, go down the conduits, and these guide the individual plants. The minerals have their common consciousness on the arupa plane.

It presents itself, if we consider a genus of animals, as if threads were reaching down from the astral plan and directing the individual animals. But it is not that astral plan on which we are in the dream [- monkey is probably there]. But all the animals, which have separated from man before the moon split, have their consciousness on the lunar astral plan. Therefore the animals are in a certain relation to the moon. They change with the rising and waning moon. Our plants partly have their group soul on the sun, because they had separated from man when the sun separated from the earth. So that the sun gives not only light and warmth to the plant, but also the regulating consciousness. Thus everything is connected with the whole cosmos. Our solar system is a collective body that exerts magnetic force among itself. These are magnetic lines of force.

Some institutions of our earth can be explained only in an occult way. We find the living together reasonably regulated in the earlier people; this was implanted in them, they could not do otherwise. Then man became freer; what used to be instinct, he now regulates by reason. With the Iroquois this can still be traced in the formation of language. Still with the Mongols there was an instinctive consciousness of cohesion through eighteen generations; then two streams emerged, which in turn united and formed one tribe.

The Greek felt himself a link in the polis in connection with the others. The Roman felt himself a Roman and then a member of a particular race. It was not until the North Germanic peoples that such a strong emphasis was placed on the personal. The future will develop selflessness in community; people will form groups. The foundation was already laid when, at the time of the Lemurian race, people were gifted with manas. Manas, which rises to Budhi, is the society-creating principle. On our earth there are associations of great internal regularity, for instance, in groups of animals such as bees and ants, which build things up in such a way that the greatest human reason could not do better. The dog cannot grasp, where from that comes with the human being, what eludes his consciousness. It is the same with the man who looks at the bee-state: He does not see the associated BudhiManas principle; this seems reasonable. The Budhi-Manas principle, which descended to the Earth, has formed elsewhere, namely on the planet Venus. With the sons of Venus - Manasaputras - came down peculiarly beautiful group souls, namely those of bees and ants. That is the reason why these states are so special. They are merely the terminal members of higher consciousness, like the fingertips compared to the human brain. Our domestic animals are more individual, but their group souls are far behind those of bees and ants.

The Insightful One speaks so much of Maya and illusion because he thinks that things are opaque unless viewed from higher plans: They are here offshoots.

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

In the first lecture of this course we shall try to give, by way of introduction, an outline of the subject before us. We shall not as yet enter fully into this, but will first give an outline of those things of which we shall speak during the next few days. We have a very extensive theme before us; Universe, Earth, and Man, and I propose to give a brief sketch of all the knowledge we can acquire concerning the visible and invisible worlds.

Our feelings are borne into the farthest distance of the cosmos when, in the deepest and most worthy sense, we make use of the expression “Universe.” “Earth” indicates the field of action upon which humanity is now placed, upon which we are to work and live, and the mission of which we ought to understand. Lastly, the word “Man”—a word we here wish to understand in its occult sense indicates that which the mystics of all ages meant when they made use of the expression, “O man, know thyself!”

We also have a sub-title to our subject. Having set ourselves such a highly important task, this sub-title is in a certain way justified; for when we consider the connection between that wonderful pre-Christian civilization—the Egyptian—and our own, we see how mysterious are the forces permeating human life. Three ages of human effort and research, of human development, morals, and life, rise before us when we consider Egyptian civilization and that of our own day. When we speak of Egyptian civilization in the occult sense we mean the civilization that had its seat in the north-east of Africa, on the banks of the Nile, which lasted for thousands of years and terminated in the eighth century before Christ. We know that this civilization was followed by another which we call the Greco-Latin. This was centred on the one hand in the wonderful Greek race, with their highly cultivated sense of beauty, and on the other hand in the powerful state of Rome. We also know that in this age occurred the mighty event in earthly evolution which we know as the advent of Christ Jesus. Then followed the age in which we are now living.

First the Egyptian age with all that belonged to it—and a great deal belonged to it—then the Greco-Latin age with its great results—the rise of Christianity—and then our present age. These are the three ages which come before our mental eyes when we consider the sub-title of these lectures.

It will be shown that there was an interplay of mysterious forces between the age of civilization first mentioned and our own. It is as if in the Egyptian age certain seeds were sown in the breast of gradually developing humanity, seeds which remained hidden during the Greco-Latin age and have reappeared in a special manner in the present one. Much of that which buds in our souls today, much of that which surrounds us, and of which people speak and dream, has sprung like seed from the ancient Egyptian civilization without our people being aware of it.

You are all more or less acquainted with the telegraphic apparatus. You know that wires connecting the different apparatuses extend from one place to another, and without having any deep knowledge of these things you understand that the force which sets the apparatus in motion has something to do with the force which flows through the wires. You perhaps also know that there is a connection down in the earth, that the ends of the wires are connected with the earth; but this subterranean connection is invisible because it is made by more or less mysterious forces produced by the earth itself. Something similar exists as a deep mystery in the development of man. In history we see threads being spun which lie within the invisible world. By means of history and of occultism we can trace out that which took place in ancient Egypt. We see how the threads of culture stretch from the Greek age, the Roman, the Christian, down into our own age. All these are guided by a kind of connection that takes place above the earth, but there is also a hidden, a subterranean force which works more or less directly from the ancient Egyptian age into our own. Many a remarkable secret is revealed to us when we follow these connections and examine them thoroughly.

To begin with I shall indicate briefly the special facts referred to in the sub-title of our theme. When we look back to ancient Egypt and observe a few of the mighty records there we are struck by the Pyramids, for example, and also the Sphinx—that wonderful and enigmatic figure. Then we let our glance pass on to ancient Greece. Here the Greek temple appears with its unique architecture, we can see and admire what we know from history of this wonderful land; we see its sculptures, those great, ideal, and perfect human forms described as gods: Zeus, Demeter, Pallas Athene, Apollo. Then we turn to the ancient kingdom of the Romans. Something remarkable appears when we thus allow our vision to sweep from the ancient Grecian peninsula to the Italian. Before us appear the figures of ancient Rome, many of which are still preserved; we see forms clothed with the toga, which is indeed more than a mere outer dress. What do we feel with regard to these Roman figures? One might say regarding certain of those belonging to the Roman Republic that one feels as if the ideal forms of the Greeks had descended from their pedestals and had appeared before us as men of flesh and blood. What we are made to see is their inner power; we recognize what lies in this inner power when we compare that which developed in ancient Rome with the feeling, the thought, the content of a figure belonging to the Grecian States—that of a Spartan or an Athenian, for example. We feel what this figure contains. The men belonging to Sparta or Athens felt that they were first of all Spartans or Athenians. Being provided in a certain way and to a certain degree with a common soul, the Spartan or Athenian felt more what we might call the Greek spirit than his own personality; he felt himself more as a Spartan or as an Athenian, than as an individual human citizen; he felt the power that worked so strongly in him proceeded more from the common spirit of the people than from his own personal power. The Roman on the contrary appears to us as being placed somewhat more exactly upon the centre of his own personality. Hence in the Roman kingdom there appears something very special, namely the comprehension of the rights of the citizen. All that lawyers dream regarding the origin of “justice” previous to this is very different from what in times of better research was rightly called “Roman Law.”

In ancient Rome man learned to regard himself as an individual, he stood upon his own two feet, no longer as one belonging to a certain town, but as a Roman citizen; that is to say he felt himself placed upon the centre of his own human nature. With this feeling of individuality the time came when what was spiritual in man descended to earth. Previously it was perceived as hovering, so to speak, above him in spiritual regions. There is something unique in Roman law and in Roman civilization. Let us consider the circumstance that the Greek felt himself primarily as a Spartan or as an Athenian. What was the spirit of Athens or of Sparta? For us Anthroposophists this was no abstraction, but something like a spiritual cloud, which in its turn was the spiritual expression of a spiritual being in which the town of Athens or Sparta was embedded; but this being was not visible upon the physical plane. The Greek looked primarily not to himself, but to something above him, the Roman looked primarily to himself. It was he who first recognized man as the highest creature that can take on fleshly form upon the physical plane. The spirit had come completely down into humanity. This was the time when the Divinity Itself could descend into human evolution and incarnate in Jesus Christ.

The manner in which Egyptian civilization extended into the Greco-Roman age was a very wonderful process. We recall how Moses, when he received in Egypt the commission from higher realms to guide his people to the “One God,” asked God—“What shall I say to my people when they ask who sent me?” And how God answered (and we shall see what deep truth lay hidden in the statement)—“Say to those to whom I send thee, ‘I AM’ hath sent me unto you. Thus ‘I AM’ is the name of an individual God who worked and ruled at that time as the Christ Principle in spiritual heights, and who had not yet descended to the physical plane. To whom did this voice belong which could make itself perceptible to the initiate Moses, saying to him, as it were from spiritual worlds, “I am the ‘I AM’”? It was exactly the same Being (and this is the secret of the ancient Greek Mysteries)—it was the same Being who appeared later in the flesh as the Christ: only afterwards He was visible to those around Him, while previously He could speak only through Initiates from spiritual heights.

Thus we see the Deity—that which was Spiritual—gradually descending after humanity had been prepared, after it had learnt in the Roman age the importance of embodiment in the flesh and its manifestation on the physical plane. We see how a whole series of the results of civilization develop in an exceedingly profound way from out of that which man received as a new gift at that time. We see how the form of the Pyramids and the Temple change to that of the Roman church—another record of inner human creative work. We see how from the sixth century the Cross with the dead Jesus makes its appearance; and how by degrees out of the stream of Christianity a remarkable figure evolves whose mysteries are very deeply veiled. We need only call up this figure before our eyes in the wonderful form given to it by the painter's art in the Sistine Madonna, by Raphael.

Everyone knows this wonderful figure of the Virgin in the centre of the picture, carrying the child in her arms, and we have certainly all experienced a corresponding emotional thrill when confronted by it. I would ask you, however, to note one thing with regard to it which expresses the spiritual striving of humanity at the stage with which we are dealing—the three civilizations mentioned above. It is not for nothing that the artist has surrounded the Madonna with a cloud out of which develop a great number of similar little children, a crowd of angelic forms. Let us now allow our feeling to be completely absorbed by this picture of the Madonna. Anyone whose emotion is sufficiently deep for him to be able to do this will feel and perceive that there is here something very different from what an ordinary profane intellect will see in the picture. Do not these cloud-angels surrounding the Madonna say something to us? Yes, they say something of the greatest significance if we do but consider them deeply enough. When we allow ourselves to sink deeply into this picture, something whispers in our soul, “Here before us is a miracle in the best sense of the word.” We do not think that this child whom the Madonna bears in her arms is born in the ordinary way from the woman. No! These wonderfully delicate angel-forms we see in the clouds seem to be in process of development, and the child in the Madonna's arms seems to be only a more condensed manifestation of them, like something that had crystallized somewhat more than these fleeting angel-forms, which seems as if brought down from the clouds and held fast in her arms. It is thus this child appears to us, and not as if born from the woman. We are directed to a mysterious connection between the child and the virgin mother. If we call up the picture thus before our souls, another virgin mother appears to our mental vision: the ancient Egyptian Isis, with the child Horus, and we may become aware of a mysterious connection between the Christian Madonna and the Egyptian figure on whose temple was written the words, “I AM, which is, and which was, and which is to come my veil no mortal can raise.”

That which we have hinted at as a miracle in the picture of the Madonna is also revealed in the Egyptian myth, for it there describes Horus as not having been born through conception, but tells how a beam of light fell from Osiris upon Isis, a kind of miraculous birth took place, and the child Horus appeared. Here again we see how threads connect one thing with another; what we are here able to investigate is without any earthly connection.

Let us now pass on to where our own age begins. Let us think of the Gothic cathedral with its wondrous construction of pointed arches, let us call to mind what took place there in the Middle Ages, in gatherings where true believers met true priests. Think of the effect of this Gothic cathedral with its many coloured panes of glass through which the sunlight penetrates; think, how many of those who were able to speak of the deeper secrets of the world's evolution could let tones ring forth, whose outward image was the wonderful light split thus into varied colours. Again and again it happened that the priests showed how the common power of the Divine Being was imparted to humanity in separate rays of power, split up like the light which streamed in through the coloured windows. The partition of the light was placed before men's senses, and in their souls was aroused that which lay spiritually at the back of this symbol. In this way the Gothic cathedral pervaded the powers of perception, and of feeling, of the worshippers.

Let us now enter more deeply into what is thus pictured in our minds. Let us first consider the Egyptian Pyramid—a most characteristic form of architecture! We must exert ourselves mentally in order to discover what it has to say to us. By degrees we shall see how in the pyramid the secret of the World, Earth, and Man is expressed; we shall see that there is expressed in it what the Egyptian priest felt according to his form of religion. Later we shall penetrate deeply into all these things; today we will only notice what such a priest felt, and imparted to his people in pictures. The wisdom expressed in the Egyptian form of religion was very profound; it was the direct result of ancient tradition; it was like a memory, and the Egyptian sage in his meeting with Solon could say with truth: “Oh ye Greeks, ye remain children all your lives, and in your childish souls is none of the ancient truth!” He refers here to the age of wisdom in Egypt. From whence came this wisdom?

Our present humanity was preceded, as you know, by another which dwelt upon a continent over which the billows of the Atlantic Ocean now roll. When the great Atlantean flood took place, the knowledge of the Atlanteans was carried towards the East across present-day Europe. The northern myths have remained behind as remembrances of the wisdom of Atlantis. We know that the successors of the Atlanteans carried the wisdom of ancient India and Persia into Asia. We also know that Egyptian wisdom was partly re-animated by Asia, but that it also streamed directly from the West, from Atlantis, towards Africa.

Now what sort of wisdom was it that was referred to by the ancient sage when he spoke of the “ancient truth”? This will be disclosed if for a moment we pause to consider the difference between life today and life in ancient Atlantis. At that time man was gifted with a dim clairvoyance, around him he saw beings who are also around us today, but whom present day man sees no longer. The earth does not contain only plants, minerals, and animals; spiritual beings are also around us, but these are visible only to clairvoyant eyes. In Atlantis at that time man was normally clairvoyant, divine beings were his companions, he lived with them as we now live with human beings. There was not as yet that sharp distinction between day-consciousness and night-consciousness there is now. At the present time when man enters in the morning, with his astral body and ego, into physical life physical objects are around him; and when at night he rises out of his physical body this world becomes dark and dim to him. This is the case today with the normal human being; but in Atlantis it was not so, particularly in its earliest periods. When at night man stepped out of his physical and etheric body darkness did not then spread around him; he entered a world of spiritual beings and he saw these divine spiritual forms just as he now sees fleshly forms. He saw Baldur, Wotan, Zeus, and Apollo—who are not imaginary, fanciful figures, but are the expression of real beings who, at the time of which we are speaking, had not taken on bodies of flesh, but possessed as their densest form transparent etheric bodies. When at night man withdrew from his physical body these were around him as etheric forms; and when in the morning he again drew into his physical body he was in the world of reality which today is for him the only world; he left for a time, one might say, the world of the Gods and dipped down into the world of physical, fleshly existence. There was no strict boundary between his day perception and his night perception, and when in those times the Initiate spoke to ordinary people of these Divine Beings he was not speaking of something that was strange to them. It was the same as when today we speak of men and call them by their names; the Initiate spoke of such Beings as Wotan and Baldur, for they knew them as divine etheric Beings.

The remembrance of that ancient wisdom and of these experiences was carried with them by those who journeyed towards the East; and from them sprang these remembrances which were connected with something else which developed in the peculiar constitution of the Egyptian people—the conviction that an eternal spiritual part dwells in man, and that when his body becomes a corpse it has been forsaken by this divine spiritual part. This conviction is expressed in numerous symbols and teachings which the Egyptian priests gave to the people; it was not merely an abstract truth to them, it was a truth in which they lived, and which they experienced directly.

Let us describe what the Egyptian perceived. He said, “I see here a corpse, the dust of a man who was the bearer of an ego; I know—for I know it from ancient tradition and from the experience of my ancestors—that there is something else, a spiritual part, which passes into other worlds. This could not fulfil its task were it to live solely in that spiritual world. A connecting link must be formed between this spiritual part and the earthly world; we must form a magnetic link for the soul which passes at death into higher realms, in order to arouse in it a feeling of permanence, so that it may return again, and appear once more on this earth.”

We know from the teachings of Spiritual Science that humanity of itself takes care that the soul shall return again and again to new incarnations; we know that when man passes at death into other spheres, during the period in kamaloka (that period during which he weans himself from what is earthly) he is still chained by certain forces to that which is physical. We know that it is these forces which do not allow him to rise at once into the regions of Devachan, and that it is they also which draw him down again to a new incarnation. But we are a people today who live in abstractions, and who represent such things as theories. In ancient Egypt all this lived as tradition. The Egyptian was the reverse of a theorist or mere thinker; he wanted to see with his senses how the soul took its way from the dead body into higher realms, he wanted to have this constructed before him. These thoughts he embodied in the pyramids; the way the soul rises, how it leaves the body, how it is still partly fettered, and how it is led upwards to higher regions. In the architecture of the pyramids we can see the fettering of the soul to what is earthly, we can see how kamaloka with its mysterious forms comes before us, and we can say that, considered externally, it is a symbol of the soul which has left the body and is rising into higher realms.

Let us endeavour to understand these ancient traditions. In the Atlantean age man still saw around him much that is completely hidden from him today. You will recall from previous lectures that in Atlantis the etheric body of man was not so intimately bound up with the physical body as it is now, the etheric head projected far beyond the physical head. In animals this formation has remained to the present day. When a horse is observed clairvoyantly the etheric head may be seen towering upwards as a form of light above the horse's nose and in the case of an elephant a truly remarkable structure can be seen above the trunk. In Atlantean humanity the etheric head was in a somewhat similar position, although not quite so far outside. Later it gradually drew more and more into the physical head, so that now it is about the same size as the latter. On this account the physical head—which was at first only partly governed by the etheric head and still had many forces outside which are today within it—was not yet human to any high degree; it was only in course of development, and still possessed a somewhat lower animal form.

What did the Atlantean see when he looked at a companion during the day? He saw a man with a very receding forehead, very protruding teeth—something that reminded him of an animal but at night when he slept clairvoyant consciousness began, the animal-like form became less distinct, and out of the physical head grew the etheric head, which already had a human form and indeed a very much more beautiful form than we see today. In still more remote times the Atlantean clairvoyant could look back to a period when man's physical form was yet more animal-like though he possessed an etheric body which was entirely human; far more beautiful indeed than the present physical form, which has adapted itself to coarser, denser forces. Now imagine this memory of the Atlantean placed consciously yet symbolically before the people of Egypt. Imagine the Egyptian priest saying to the people: “In Atlantean times your own souls, when you were awake, beheld the human figure with an animal form, but at night there grew out of it an exceedingly beautiful human head.” This memory, presented in sculpture, is the Sphinx. It is only thus that these forms can be understood; we must realize that they are not merely thought-out forms, but realities.

Let us now pass from the Egyptian pyramid to the Greek temple. This temple will only be understood by those who are able to feel that there are forces in space. The Greek possessed this feeling. Anyone studying space from the standpoint of Spiritual Science knows that it is not the absolute void of which our ordinary mathematicians and physicists dream, but that it is differentiated. It is something that is filled with lines, with lines of force in this direction and in that, from above downwards, from right to left, straight and curved lines going in every direction. Space may be felt, it may be penetrated with feeling. He who has such a feeling for space knows why certain old painters could paint the floating angel forms in the pictures of Madonna in a way so wonderfully true to nature; he knows that these angels mutually support each other, just as the planets do in space by their power of attraction. It is quite different when we consider Bocklin's picture “Piety.” Nothing is said here against the excellence of this picture otherwise, but anyone who has preserved the living feeling for space has the sensation that those remarkable angel forms may fall at any moment. The painters of olden times had the perception that belonged to earlier clairvoyance. In modern times this has been lost.

When art still possessed occult traditions these mutually supporting forces which existed in space, which streamed hither and thither, were recognized. They were perceived by those in whose minds the thought of the Greek temple originated. They did not think out these forms, but they perceived the forces streaming through space, and filled them with stone; that which was already there occultly they filled with substance. Hence the Greek temple is a material presentation of actual forces existing in space; a Greek temple is a crystallized space-thought in the purest sense of the word. The result of this was very important; by giving material expression to force forms in space the Greeks gave divine spiritual beings the opportunity of using these material forms. It is no figure of speech but a fact when we say that Gods came down at that time into the Greek temples in order to be among men on the physical plane.

Just as today parents place the physical form, the body of flesh, at the disposal of the child, in order that the spirit can express itself on the physical plane, so something similar took place in the case of the Greek temple. The opportunity was provided for divine spiritual beings to stream down and incarnate in the architectural structure. That is the secret of the Greek temple. God was present in the temple. Those who felt the form of the Greek temple aright felt that there need be no human being anywhere near it, nor in the temple itself, and yet it would not be empty, for God was really present there. The Greek temple is a whole; it is complete in itself, because it has a form which magically draws God into it.

If we now consider a Roman church, especially one with a crypt, we shall see a further development. In the Pyramid we see presented the path the soul takes after death, the outer architectural form for the soul when departing; the Greek temple is the expression of the divine soul which likes to tarry upon the physical plane; the Roman church with its crypt corresponds to the Cross upon which the dead body of Jesus hangs. Humanity at this stage had progressed to an advanced consciousness in spiritual spheres. The bond to what is earthly, the period in kamaloka, is represented by the Pyramids; the victory over the physical form, the victory over death, is expressed in the Cross, and reminds us of the spiritual victory of Christ over death.

Again, a further step is taken to the Gothic Cathedral. Without the pious congregation within, it is incomplete. If we wish to feel it as a whole, then to the pointed arches must be added the folded hands and the upward-streaming feelings they express; not such feelings as are in the crypt, where the memory of the spiritual victory over death is preserved, but victorious feelings, such as the soul perceives who already in the body has felt that it is a victor over death. The soul, victorious over death while in the body, belongs to the Gothic building, which is incomplete if it is not filled with such feelings.

The Greek temple is the body of God; it is complete in itself. The Gothic church is something which requires a congregation; it is not a temple but a “Dom,” a cathedral. The German word “Dom” appears in the English suffix “dom” in the words “kingdom,” “Christendom,” for example. It also lies at the root of the Russian word “Duma.” A dome, or dom, is something in which individual members are gathered together into one congregation. From this we can see how in time human thought and human perception progresses from the Pyramid to the Greek temple, then to the Roman church with its crypt, and afterwards to the Gothic cathedral.

Thus we arrive gradually at our own age, and we shall see how the forces of evolution are at work not only on the surface, but that mysterious occult currents are active also beneath, so that what is taking place today in our civilization appears as a re-embodiment of much that was sown within humanity in ancient Egyptian times.

We will close with a thought which hints at this mysterious connection. What constitutes the materialism of our present civilization? What is the special characteristic of the man who, when he wishes to see something spiritual, has lost the harmony that reconciles faith and knowledge? He sees nothing! He regards the gross, material, physical part of the world; he feels it to be real, that it exists, and he even comes to deny what is spiritual. He believes that man's existence is finished when his corpse lies in the earth; he sees nothing rising up into the spiritual worlds. Can a conception such as this be the outcome of something that was sown at a time when there was a firm faith in the continued life of the soul, such as existed in Egypt? Yes, for it is not in Civilization as in the vegetable kingdom, where like things spring forth again and again from the seed. In civilization one characteristic alternates with another which is apparently dissimilar to it—and yet there may be deeper and more intimate similarities.

The vision of man is confined today to the physical body; he regards this as a reality; he cannot raise himself to that which is spiritual.

The souls who now regard their physical bodies with their eyes, and are unable to rise to what is spiritual, were incarnated among earlier peoples as Greeks, as Romans, and as ancient Egyptians; all that exists in our souls today is the result of what we acquired in previous incarnations.

Imagine your soul back in its Egyptian body. Imagine your soul after death being led up again by way of the Pyramid into higher spheres—but your body held fast as a mummy. This fact had an occult result. The soul had always to look downwards when its mummified body was below; its thoughts were hardened, solidified, they were attracted to the physical world. It was forced to look down from the realms of the spirit upon its embalmed physical body, and in consequence the thought became rooted in it that the physical body had a higher reality than it actually had. Imagine a man, in his soul, looking down at that time upon his mummy. Thought regarding the physical hardened; it passed through repeated incarnations, and now is such that man cannot extricate his thoughts from the physical bodily form.

Materialistic thought is often the result of the embalming of the body.

Thus we see how thoughts and feelings work from one incarnation to another; how civilizations are continued through repeated incarnations, and how they reappear later in entirely different forms. This ought to arouse a faint idea of the countless occult threads which are hidden below the surface.

In this lecture we have indicated briefly the subjects to be dealt with in subsequent lectures. In them our vision shall sweep upwards to the highest regions of those worlds beheld by the Egyptian priests; we shall have to direct our attention to the nature, the goal, and the destiny of man; and we shall understand how such problems as these are solved when we realize that the fruits of one age of civilization reappear in a wonderful and mysterious manner in a subsequent one.

Ancient Wisdom and the new Apocalyptic Wisdom. Temple sleep. Isis and the Madonna. Past stages of Evolution. The bestowing of the Ego. Future Powers.

We shall enter best into our subject if in the first place we try to form a clear conception of the two extremes which have to be considered when Universe and Man are brought into relationship with each other. These two extremes are the spirit-soul and the psycho-material. We will endeavour to discuss these, starting with a phenomenon which, to the man of the present day, is more or less of a riddle, but which is found in the ancient Egyptian conception of the world and life. I mean what is called “temple-sleep.”

The unique fact lying at the foundation of temple-sleep is that among the Egyptian priests, and in ancient civilizations in general, wisdom was held to be very closely bound up with the art of healing and with health.

The man of today has but a dim conception of those ancient ideas regarding the inner relationships between wisdom and health, between science and the art of healing; and it will be the task of the Anthroposophical movement to direct humanity once more to that conception of the spiritual through which wisdom and the art of healing will be brought again into close connection. This recalls what was said in the last lecture. It recalls that ancient figure of which we were reminded when we looked at the picture of the Madonna and child, as painted by Raphael—it reminds us of Isis with the child Horus, the Goddess on whose temple was inscribed the words: “I AM, who was, who is, who will be; my veil no mortal can raise.”

This Goddess was mysteriously connected with the art of healing; she was regarded as the teacher of the Egyptian priesthood in this respect. There is a remarkable statement taking us back to the very earliest ages of antiquity that shows how Isis was particularly interested in the health of mankind at the time when she was placed among mortals.

This points to a very mysterious fact.

We must now sketch in a few words, and bring before your souls, the nature of temple-sleep, which was one of the remedies employed by the priests of Egypt. Anyone who had suffered loss of health in any way in those days was not treated as a rule with external remedies; there were only a few of these, and they were seldom used. Sufferers were in most cases taken to the temple and there put into a kind of sleep. It was not an ordinary sleep, but a kind of somnambulistic sleep which was so intensified that the patient became capable of having not chaotic dreams merely but of seeing orderly visions. During this sleep the patient perceived etheric forms in the spiritual world, and the wise priests understood the art of influencing these etheric pictures which passed before the sleeper; they could control and guide them.

Let us suppose that an invalid was put into a temple-sleep. The priest skilled in medicine was at his side when he fell into this somnambulistic sleep, the invalid then entered a world of etheric forms, and the priest, because of the power he possessed through his initiation (and which was only possible in those ancient times when conditions of existence were such as no longer or very seldom exist today), was able to control the entire sleep. He formed and fashioned the etheric visions and beings in such a way that there actually appeared before the sleeper, as if by magic, those forms which at one time the ancient Atlanteans had looked on as their Gods. These Divine forms—concerning which the various peoples still possessed a remembrance, in the German and Norse, and the Greek mythologies—were now placed before the soul of the person who was in the temple-sleep. He saw in particular certain figures which were connected with the healing principle.

Had the patient remained conscious, as in the waking consciousness of today, it would not have been possible for such forces to act upon him; this was only possible in somnambulistic sleep. The wise priest guided this dream-life in such a way that powerful forces were liberated during the etheric visions, and these restored to order and harmony the forces of the body which had fallen into disorder and discord. This was only possible when the self-consciousness of the patient had been suppressed. Temple sleep had therefore a very real significance, and we can see how the healing art of the priests was connected with knowledge only accessible to man through initiation. The connection lies clearly before us. It was the priests who, through the revival of the ancient vision of higher worlds, possessed in their wisdom the forces which came from these worlds, whereby spirit could work upon spirit. They acquired the capacity of allowing spirit to work upon spirit, and through this wisdom was brought into inner connection with health.

In the uplifting of the self to what was spiritual there was, in ancient times, a healing element, and it would be well if man were to learn to understand this again, for he would then understand the great mission of the Anthroposophical movement, which is to lead man up to the spiritual world, so that he may again enter those worlds from which he has descended. It is true that in future people will not be put into a somnambulistic condition; self-consciousness will be fully maintained, all the same, strong spiritual forces will become active in man, and the possession of wisdom and insight into higher worlds will then be capable of acting on human nature to harmonize and heal. Today this connection between spirituality and the healing art is hidden, those who are not initiated into the deeper wisdom of the Mysteries cannot discern the connection, they cannot even observe the more subtle facts that confront them. Those who look more deeply know upon what profound inner conditions a case of healing may depend. Let us suppose for example that a certain illness befalls a person and that it has an inner cause, not a fractured thigh-bone or a disordered stomach, for these are external causes.

Anyone wishing to go deeply into this will very soon find that in the case of a person who occupies himself much with mathematical ideas conditions of health are very different to the case of another who does not occupy himself with such things. This fact indicates the remarkable connection between the mental life of a person and the state of his external health. It is not, of course, as if mathematical thinking healed the man. Let us look at this more closely: that different conditions of healing are necessary in the case of one applying himself to mathematics and one who does not. Suppose two people have exactly the same illness—in reality this never happens, but we may suppose it. One of them does not care to know anything about mathematical ideas; the other is intensely interested in them. It might happen that it was quite impossible to cure the non-mathematical person whereas it might be possible to heal the other with suitable remedies. What I have stated is an actual fact.

Take another example. We have two people before us; one is an Atheist in the worst sense, the other a deeply religious man. Again it might happen that if both have the same disease and the same remedy is used that the religious man can be cured and the other not. These are things which to modern thinking—at least to the greater part of humanity—will seem absurd; however, they are not so. How is this? It depends on the fact that an entirely different influence is exercised upon human nature by so-called “sense free” ideas, and by those filled with sense perception. Think for a moment of the difference between a man who likes mathematics and one who does not. The latter says: “I ought to think about these things! but I only want to think of things which I can perceive with my senses!” Nevertheless, it is of great use to the inner being of man to dwell on conceptions of that which cannot be seen. Hence it is useful to have religious conceptions, for these also relate to things which cannot be grasped with the hands, nor have any connection with outer, material things—in a word with things which are sense-free. These are matters which one day, when man will look up more to that which is spiritual, will have a great influence on educational principles.

For example, let us take the simple conception 3 x 3=9. Children form such a conception best when they do it without the help of anything material. It is not good when they put 3 x 3 beans next each other for too long, for then they do not rise at all above the sense conception; but if you accustom children, to begin with, not for too long, to count on their fingers, and then follow it with pure mathematical thinking, such thought has a curative, harmonizing effect upon the children. How little people of the present day understand such things can be seen from the fact that in their system of instruction the exact opposite occurs. Has not the abacus been introduced into our schools whereby addition, subtraction, etc., are made clear to sense-eyes by means of different coloured balls? In this way that which ought to be comprehended purely in the mind is said “to be made clear” to the senses. It may be convenient, but those who consider this to be educational know nothing of that deeper curative education which is rooted in the power of the spirit. A man who from childhood has been accustomed to live with sense conceptions will not, because his nerve system has lived under sickly conditions, be able to be cured as easily as one who from his youth has been accustomed to sense-free ideas. The more a person is accustomed to think apart from objects the easier it is to cure him.

In ancient times when a person was ill it was customary to place before him all kinds of symbolic figures, triangles, and combinations of numbers. The object, besides the other value these things possessed, was to uplift him from the mere outward vision of things. If I place a triangle before me and merely look at it, that has no particular value but if on the other hand I see it as the symbol of the higher triad of man it becomes a healing conception of the mind.

Observe how the conceptions of Spiritual Science lead us to the vision of things Spiritual. We are led from what takes place on earth to what has taken place on the ancient Sun, Moon, and Saturn. With physical eyes we cannot see the events of those times, nor with sensely hands can we reach up to the ancient Moon or ancient Sun; but without the aid of the external crutches of our senses we can uplift ourselves to the things which existed once upon a time; we can acquire conceptions which have an equalizing and harmonizing effect upon our whole life and likewise upon our body.

Spiritual Science will again prove to be a great, a universal remedy, as it was formerly in the hands of the Egyptian priests; at that time, however, it necessitated the suppression of the ego, as in temple-sleep. The spiritual conception of the world is a curative conception.

Many people will say in answer to this assertion: Are all Anthroposophists healthy people? Are there no invalids among them?

We must understand that fundamentally the individual can do very little for his health and his sickness. A large proportion of the causes of disease lies outside the individual personality. A person may have the healthiest ideas, which, if he were to live under quite healthy conditions, would result in his never being ill from internal causes; but there are other causes lying outside the power of the individual of today, the secret causes of heredity for example, the influences passing from one human being to another, the influences of unnatural environment, etc. All these influences, which, in a hidden way, are external causes of disease, can only be done away with gradually by a healthy Anthroposophical method of thought. Although we may observe that a person who is inwardly most healthy may fall ill, even dangerously ill, we must not regard this as a sign that Spiritual Science will fail to act curatively upon humanity in the course of centuries—I say centuries, not thousands of years. There is a future before spiritually thinking men, in whom no inner cause of sickness will exist for those able to provide the inward and outward conditions of Spiritual wisdom. External causes there will always be, these can only be eradicated as a spiritually scientific art of healing gains more and more ground.

When we rightly understand the effect of that which is Spiritual we find that temple-sleep is not unintelligible to us. What was it that was conjured up before the sleeper in the temple in his etheric visions? It was the picture of the Atlantean Gods whom we once knew as etheric forms; among whom we once lived, when we were able to be conscious outside the physical body and could exercise etheric clairvoyance. If we go still farther back in human evolution, far beyond the Atlantean epoch, we reach a period in which man first became what he now is, when he first appeared as the individual personality he is today. This period is called the Lemurian epoch. The Atlantean continent, from which the people spread to Africa, Europe, and Asia, came to an end through mighty water catastrophes.

Lemuria, which was that portion of the earth upon which humanity dwelt before the Atlantean epoch, was destroyed through the forces of fire, by volcanic catastrophes. It was during the Lemurian epoch that man first gained consciousness of his ego. This was a mighty impulse in the evolution of man.

How was it that man attained to his “I” or ego consciousness?

It is very difficult for the materialist thought of the present day to imagine this ancient condition of humanity. Were you to imagine the man of that time as similar to the man of today, with flesh and blood, bones and muscles, your idea would be entirely wrong. At that time man possessed a far more impermanent, a far softer form; his body was comparatively fluidic. That which later became muscles and bones has only grown hard in the course of time. At that period also the propagation of humanity was entirely different. Man lived more in the surroundings of the earth—in the atmosphere, which at that time was not pure air as it is today, but was filled with all kinds of vapours. In this man lived as a true airy form, and the currents surrounding the earth passed in and out of him. Man's form was almost the same as some cloud we see today which continually changes its form, only the form of man at that time was firmer and more defined. There appeared then, also for the first time, what are now described as the sexes; at that period of evolution an ancient, non-sexual kind of propagation was replaced by a sexual one.

This took place, however, millions and millions of years ago.

Simultaneously with sexual reproduction came the embodiment of the earliest germ of the ego. Previous to this man was impelled to produce his like from himself through external influences which lay in the sphere around him. That was the form of reproduction at a time when man did not as yet possess an ego, when he still had a dim clairvoyant consciousness, when he rested “Entirely in the bosom of the Deity,” and could not say, “I am.” His perception was somewhat as follows: he was aware that when he did anything it made an impression upon his spiritual environment, and he felt his existence to be within this environment. He was not able to say: “I am here,” but “my environment lets me be here.” He lay within the bosom of the living earth, and the living forces of the earth streamed out and in of him. At that time there were no unhealthy forces; disease did not exist; there was no death such as we know it. It was only when, with sexual reproduction, man was endowed with his ego, that sickness and death entered. At that time the human being was not fertilized by his like but just as today he breathes, so he then absorbed substances from his environment, and in this environment the fertilizing forces were to be found; that which then entered into him fertilized him, and caused him to bring forth his kind.

These forces in man were healthy, and so was that which, as his kind, he produced.

The priests of ancient Egypt knew this, and they said: The further we guide man's vision back into previous conditions the more do we bring him into conditions in which there is no disease. The vision of the old Atlantean Gods acted curatively, and this was still more the case when the priests guided these visions so that the temple-sleeper had before him those primeval forms which were fertilized, not from their like, but from that which was in their environment. The invalid who lay in the temple-sleep beheld the form of her who was the mother of her kind without having received fertilization from her kind. Before him stood the generating woman, the woman with child, yet who is virgin; the Goddess who in the Lemurian epoch was the companion of man, and who has since disappeared from the sight of man. In ancient Egypt she was called Holy Isis.

Isis could only be seen by men in a normal way when death had not as yet appeared on earth. At that time men were, in normal consciousness the companions of such forms as floated around them, and they brought forth their kind virginally.

When Isis was no longer the visible companion of humanity, when she was withdrawn into the circle of the Gods, she continued to interest herself in the health of man from the Spiritual World so said the priests—and when a person was raised to the vision of those ancient forms in an abnormal way, as in temple-sleep, the pictured Isis still acted curatively on him. She is that principle in man which was present in him before he received his mortal covering. HER veil has no mortal raised, for she is the form which was there when death had not as yet come into the world. She is the ONE ROOTED IN THE ETERNAL; she is the great HEALING PRINCIPLE to which humanity will again attain, when it steeps itself anew in Spiritual Wisdom.

We see what has remained of this in the wonderful symbol of the Virgin Mother with the child; speaking from the standpoint of Spiritual Science we say with emphasis that we see it in many pictures of the Madonna. We assert these pictures have a curative effect; for, within the limits which have been discussed, a picture of the Madonna is a means of healing. When it is viewed and studied in such a way that it has an after effect upon the human soul, when this human soul can dream during sleep about the Madonna picture, it then possesses a healing power even today.

Let us now ask what were the fertilizing forces at a time when the human being was not fertilized by his own kind?

Think of our earth at that time as being a solid kernel surrounded by all kinds of viscous, seething, substances, mingled with vapour, and in this half-watery structure dwelt Lemurian humanity. The earth was shone upon by the sun, which could not then be perceived by human eyes, because our sense organs had not developed; the sun's influence, however, penetrated through the veils of mist and cloud, and with the power of the sun's rays the earth received also powers of fructification. The earth did not only receive the forces of warmth, but at the same time the forces which today live in the power of fructification. That which the human being absorbed streamed to the earth from invisible Spiritual Sun-beings. Such was the relationship between sun and earth. The power which acted at that time upon those sexless self-propagating human forms was perceived as a masculine power. This was poured out over the whole earth as a product of the sun. Such were the conditions during the early part of the Lemurian epoch.

Let us now go back still further, to a period in which the conditions were again quite different, to a primeval past when the sun, which is now separate, was bound up with our earth. At one time the earth and the sun formed a single body. All the finer and more etheric parts were still within this common body. We will consider this body at the time when the two were connected as somewhat resembling in shape a fancy biscuit, one part, a smaller globe (namely the earth-plus-moon) hanging as it were on to the other.

We must imagine the sun as a vast etheric body on which earth-plus-moon hung. The rays of force from the sun still mingled with the earth, they passed from the sun to the earth and back from earth to sun—for the two were in a certain way one body. We shall best understand the purpose of this development if we enquire: What would have happened if, without anything further taking place, the sun had turned entirely away from the earth after the separation, and had no longer sent its beams and currents to the earth? All life upon the earth would in this case have dried up and hardened. It was necessary to the earth that the fertilizing influences from the sun should remain. We have to regard this interaction between sun and earth as the interaction between two principles: one leading to destruction, the other giving life. This was also the case later; invigorating life flowed continually from the sun to the earth.

We have now briefly recapitulated the various stages in the evolution of our earth. First there was a primeval past when the earth was still within the sun-body; then a second stage in which the earth was more loosely connected with the sun; then a third, when the two bodies were completely separated from each other. It was only in this third epoch that the ego really entered into man and at this stage sexual reproduction began. Then followed the fourth epoch, the Atlantean, and lastly the post-Atlantean epoch, that in which we are now living. To those who look more deeply into the structure of the world, all that happens visibly, all that is external, takes place under the influence of Spiritual Beings. At one time the sun and the earth were one. (We will go into the Moon development later.) This common body was then permeated with harmoniously working Divine Spiritual Beings. Such lofty beings were necessary to govern the forces that at that time were still undifferentiated.

Now think of development as having progressed: the sun withdrew. What took place then? With the sun went forth the highest beings and the finest substances; henceforward they worked upon the earth from outside. Beings who represented truly living ever-accelerating life, dwelt upon the sun; and on the earth the beings who, if they had been left to themselves, would have suffered stiffening, darkness, destruction. At this second stage of evolution light and darkness were both at work.

At the third stage of evolution the earth-man is endowed with his ego, and the time begins when his self-conscious “I” dwells within him. He becomes aware of this ego by its opposite, and he gradually passes into one condition in which he has a clear consciousness, and into another in which he has a dim consciousness; the first comes to him from the sun, and the other preferably from the earth. The ego, the eternal germ, has to alternate between two forms, one an eternal form, and the other a form which can be born and can die. Those beings, who always possess what man has only occasionally, have forsaken their earth bodies. First that being who brings about fertilization, who lives principally on the sun, went forth from the moon-earth, then the being who makes the human form static or more permanent goes forth with the moon.

Sun and moon gradually separated from the earth. With the sun went forth the beings who, had they remained united with it, would have brought a too precipitate life to earth; and with the moon all those forces withdrew which would have brought about a hardening and stiffening; everything which would have tended to make form permanent. The earth remained in the midst, as it were between the two. Man on earth alternates between these two, he is influenced on the one hand by the sun, and on the other by the forces of the moon. The beings who were previously man's companions had now withdrawn, some to the sun and some to the moon.

In the fourth epoch of the earth's evolution, those companions of man were met with who had condensed so far as to an etheric body, and they were in certain respects subject to human weaknesses. These were the etheric Gods with whom men lived during the Atlantean period. In post-Atlantean times he lost his connection with these etheric Gods, he entered entirely into the physical world and the door leading to spiritual worlds was shut.

There remained to man, however, from these ancient times something that was like a remembrance of the spiritual worlds, and, in accordance with the law of repetition everything he had passed through in life at one time woke up within him later as knowledge.

Man had lived through numerous epochs in which he was variously related to the Gods. He now passed through the same stages again, but with knowledge.

After the great Atlantean flood, in the first holy ancient Indian civilization, man passed once again in soul and spirit through that epoch when earth and sun were united. The very exalted Deity who guided and adjusted everything that man experienced in the first post-Atlantean civilization was called by a name which remained, as a tradition, into later times. Man called this Deity Brahman, the All-One.

This Deity actually dwelt among men at one time—in the first epoch of the evolution of our earth man was the companion of Brahman, who was reverenced in the ancient Indian civilization, and was known to man when in a higher state of abstraction.

Then followed the Persian civilization during which mankind experienced consciously the second epoch, when the sun with its all-invigorating forces separated itself from the forces of darkness. Therefore man perceived a duality in the Godhead in the second age of civilization, and this duality is represented as the opposition of Ormuzd, the good Deity, and Ahriman, the destroying Deity. This was nothing but a repetition—but in knowledge—of that which man had passed through in fact in earlier ages.

We then come to the memory of the epoch when the sun and moon went forth from the previously united celestial body, the sun with its fertilising forces and the moon with forces which gave form: to man a transitory form, and to the Gods a permanent one. In the Egyptian age this difference was perceived in the opposition of earlier forces to those still at work, but now their opposition was in a different form. In Egypt the solar forces were perceived as the forces of Osiris. Osiris was the power of the sun as it worked in the third epoch of earthly evolution, and the religion of Osiris arose and flourished in this age. Isis represents the power of the moon before its complete separation from the earth, before the division of sex, when the virginal power of reproduction was still operative. Later Isis escaped to the moon, where she became numb—congealed.

In the fourth age, that of the Greco-Latin civilization, humanity experienced in polytheism a remembrance of the Atlantean epoch with its numerous etheric figures of the Gods.

In our age of civilization, the fifth, we have nothing to repeat. Let us bring this thought before our minds: we have nothing to repeat, no ancient remembrances. We have given birth to a fifth age of civilization, one whose results will be seen in the future, while the four previous ages were repetitions of the four preceding cosmic epochs. Our age must give birth not merely to an ancient wisdom, but to a new wisdom, a wisdom which points not only to the past, but which must work prophetically—apocalyptically—into the future. In the mysteries of past ages of civilization we see an ancient wisdom preserved, but our wisdom must be an apocalyptic wisdom, the seed for which must be sown by us. Once again we have need of a principle of initiation so that the primeval connection with spiritual worlds may be renewed.

The task of the Anthroposophical movement is to supply this principle. No wonder that wisdom has been lost to so many, for without the principle of initiation it is very difficult nowadays to obtain wisdom, more difficult than formerly, when the memory of ancient experiences had only to be refreshed, and when the results of earlier development could be brought to the consciousness of man. Today this is difficult; therefore we can understand that the sense-world seems to be without a God, and to be barren and empty; but although it appears as if the ancient spirit-world had died out, it is there; it is working and fructifying, and if man wills he can find connection with the spiritual world.

Care was taken, precisely at the moment when the ancient memories seemed to be disappearing during the Greco-Latin age, that a wonderful new seed for all future time should be laid within the cold ground of the earth; this seed is what we describe as the Christ-Principle. The apocalyptic wisdom, the true new Spiritual Wisdom, will be found in conjunction with this Christ Principle, which does not point back only to memories of past epochs, but prophetically to the future, and precisely through this it summons man to action, to creative work. This productive wisdom has sprung freely from seed that was sown in the past. So we see a far horizon of the future rise before us when we speak of Universe, Earth, and Man. In what follows we shall have to speak not merely of the past, but also of the forces of the future. The world is not merely concerned with what is past, it evolves towards the future, and our epoch has still a long period to pass through before it comes to an end. Man will, however, live on after the earth has disappeared, and, if we are to know him completely, we must look not to the past alone, but must study what is active today, and what will go on working into the great tomorrow of the world.

The sacrifice of the substance by the Thrones, Kyriotetes, Dynamis, and Exusiai. Jehovah and the Elohim, and their co-operative activity in the stages of human development.

In earlier lectures we have seen that the conditions of our earth have gradually developed out of the cosmos; that in a far distant past the earth was one with the orb which shines in the heavens today as the sun, and that at a certain period this body separated off from the earth.

Now, I have already stated that the Beings who at first sent their own forces down from the sun to the earth, thus bringing about the evolution of humanity, are the Spirits of Form. They are the Beings nearest to earthly evolution. After the separation of the sun the leader of the Spirits of Form remained with the earth, and later departed from it with the moon. We can therefore speak of a moon-deity; he is that deity who in the Biblical records is called Jehovah, and the Sun Powers, those who sent light to earth from outside, are called in the Bible the Elohim, or Spirits of Light. Under the influence of the Elohim on one hand and Jehovah on the other, balance was maintained in the evolution of man. You have learnt that not only man goes through development, but that all the Beings in the cosmos are undergoing development also. Those exalted Beings who sent down their forces to us with the light—the Spirits of Form—have also passed through a development; previously they were at a lower stage and have gradually struggled upwards to their present position.

What was said just now regarding the Elohim and Jehovah applies to the most mature of these spirits, those who have made themselves fully capable of carrying on their development from the genesis of the earth, either upon the sun or the moon; but there are Beings everywhere who have fallen behind at some stage. Yesterday we heard that planets, such as Venus and Mercury, owe their existence to the circumstance that Beings have remained behind, between man on the one hand and exalted Sun-Spirits on the other. They required a dwelling-place more exalted than the earth, but were unable to inhabit the sun because they were not sufficiently mature. These beings are far beyond the evolution of humanity, but have not yet reached the condition of the Sun spirits. They form a very important group of beings as regards human evolution. On one hand we have very mature Beings, on the other, between them and mankind, are others whom we designate generally the Luciferic Beings, after their leader Lucifer.

Now we must try clearly to understand how Jehovah and the Elohim on one hand, Lucifer and his hosts on the other, are concerned with the evolution of man. Through the cooperation of the Sun-Gods with the Moon-God a duality arose, and we shall best understand what entered evolution at this point if we consider what the evolution of man had been previously.

Once more we will remind ourselves that the earth passed through an incarnation, that of Saturn, when conditions were primeval; then, after having passed through a state of rest, it entered the Sun incarnation, then the Moon incarnation, and lastly that of our Earth.

Man in the course of his evolution has been connected with all these embodiments of the earth. As we know him he is a very complicated Being; he consists of physical body, etheric body, astral body, and ego, and these four principles play one into the other in a very complicated manner.

If any Being in our physical world had only a physical body it would be a stone—a mineral; in fact our mineral kingdom here on the earth does only possess a physical body. A Being possessing in addition to a physical body an etheric body has a plant-nature; our vegetable kingdom consists of such Beings. A Being having physical etheric, and astral bodies is at the animal stage; and only that Being which in addition to these possesses an ego is at the stage of human existence on earth. Now it is only a rough way of speaking to say that man has these four principles within him; and we shall understand how sketchy it is if we cast a glance over his long, very long, evolution.

Let us enquire which of these four principles is the oldest? It might easily be supposed that as the human ego is the highest, that which first makes man, man, it would be the oldest principle; but this is not the case. Neither the ego nor the astral body nor the etheric body was owned first by man, but the physical body—it is the oldest. The first rudiments of the physical body were formed as far back as on ancient Saturn, but you must not imagine that this body looked then anything like the body of today. When you consider the present physical body you observe in the first place something solid, a skeleton, that firmly constituted part described as “solid”; next you observe fluid constituents of many kinds; further, the physical body is permeated by air or gas; lastly, you find in it something which, considered occultly, is substantial—namely, warmth, inner warmth.

Let us now consider man as regards this inner warmth and his outer environment. His warmth does not depend upon his environment, in a cold environment he does not, like the minerals, become cold, he is not forced to regulate himself according to his environment, he has within him the source of his own heat. Were you now to think everything solid away from man, also everything liquid and everything gaseous; if you imagine his physical body formed only of warmth, such warmth as pulses in your blood, you will have what was present on ancient Saturn. But that body was not formed as it is now, it had only the most rudimentary germs of a form. This was particularly the case in the middle of the Saturn period, for Saturn had initial, middle, and final conditions. It would be very difficult to describe the early condition of Saturn, because few people have developed the capacity which would enable them to think of the conditions of Saturn before it became condensed to the consistency of warmth.

When in spirit you transport yourselves to those times of a primeval past, you must not imagine that had you been able to observe Saturn from somewhere in space you would have seen anything. Saturn had no light, it did not shine; only towards the end of its development did it begin to do so. Had you approached it in the middle of its evolution you would only have perceived its warmth, it was like an oven without external limits, but which limited itself: you would have entered an area of warmth.

You must not imagine this body of warmth as being uniform or homogeneous; if you had been sensitive to differences of warmth you would have found that there were lines of warmth within it in all directions, that they stretched on every side; you would have “felt out” warmth formations. The whole of Saturn consisted of forms of warmth alone, and these were the original foundations of the human physical body. Saturn did not go beyond this in any way that was fruitful for human evolution.

We will now pass on to the Sun evolution. After a period of rest Saturn changed into the Sun formation. Externally it is the case that in the middle of the Sun period a condensation of its substance took place. The Sun consisted not only of warmth, but also of gas and air (in the occult sense), and everything within the Sun passed through its evolution under conditions only possible in warmth and air.

To begin with, the following took place: The human being, who as he consisted only of warmth could not assume an etheric body, was permeated on the Sun by an etheric body; he now consisted of two principles, namely, a physical body and an etheric body. Man's physical body on the Sun was, however, quite different to what it is now. Let us try to form an idea, if only a rough one, of the physical body upon the ancient Sun. Imagine that we have breathed in air and that the breathed-in air has passed into us. This air is now permeated with a certain degree of warmth. Now think away everything but the in-breathed air, which in effect forms an image of the whole human body; think away all the solid and the liquid parts, keeping only the air and the warmth in mind. You then have in imagination a form before you such as would appear if you considered merely the in-breathed air and its activity. If you observed the form of this in-breathed air and the warmth the human being contains you would have approximately the form man had at the middle of the Sun period.

You might now ask: If we have lines of warmth and, in addition to these, currents of gas which form the physical body, how does the clairvoyant see this gas in the Akashic Record? He perceives it in a special way. When the warmth condenses into air and no other conditions are present (as is the case now on earth, where the sun pours in from outside) the moment this gas or air separates from the form of warmth it begins to shine. Hence upon the Sun the physical body was a kind of germinal body of warmth, composed of gaseous or airy currents, which glittered in the most wonderful way and shone with varied colours. The entire Sun-globe consisted of shining warmth-bodies, which were the primary rudiments of our human physical bodies. On the Sun man rose a stage higher; he added an etheric body to the physical body. It was man himself who, as part of the structure of the Sun, radiated forth the illuminating power of light into space; his physical body, through taking into itself the etheric body, became luminous. The physical body was now at the second stage of its progress towards perfection, but the etheric body, which first became luminous on the Sun, was only at its first stage.

Let us now follow man's further progress. The Sun gradually passed over into the Moon incarnation, having meanwhile entered into a condition of rest. On the material side the airy formation condensed to a watery one, and thus the fluid element arose. The ancient Moon was in fact a fluidic body, in it you might again have found physical human bodies as plastic structures, consisting now of flowing sap, or watery constituents, in which currents of air coursed just as breath and warmth intermingle in man's body today. The physical body now consisted of three parts water, gas or air, and warmth; and the etheric body which it had previously possessed now passed over with it into the Moon period. Man was now in a position to assimilate an astral body, and from this time onwards he consisted of three principles: the physical body, the etheric body, and the astral body.

During the Moon period it was not possible for all the Beings connected with it to maintain the same rate of progress in their development. It was not only during the development of our Earth, but also earlier, during the Moon development, that the Sun separated off from the common world-body; so that in the middle of the Moon period we have two spheres—the Moon (earth plus moon) and the Sun, which as you know had departed along with the most advanced of the Spiritual Beings. Through the withdrawal of the finer forces and higher Beings the grosser had been left behind upon the Moon; this planet therefore (Earth plus Moon) began to densify and harden. You must realize that even during the ancient Moon period the Sun with its Beings worked for a time from outside upon the backward Moon-body.

It will now be necessary to describe more in detail these bodies which had remained behind after the departure of the Sun, for we went through a portion of our evolution upon them.

On Saturn there was only the physical body of man; he was at the mineral stage. Upon the Sun he raised himself to the vegetable stage, he had then physical body and etheric body, but at this stage certain beings became backward, they did not rise so high as to the human-plant existence upon the ancient Sun, they remained at the Saturn stage. These were the forerunners of certain animals of the present day. Man's past reaches back to ancient Saturn, whereas the forerunners of a certain portion of our present animal kingdom had its origin only on the Sun as a second kingdom to that of man. From the same cause (the remaining behind of certain beings) man, when he had worked himself upward on the Moon to a condition when he was the possessor of three principles, was surrounded by two other kingdoms; one a kingdom which on the Moon had remained behind at the stage of plants, and one that was still at the stage of minerals, these last were the forerunners of our present plants.

Our mineral kingdom did not as yet exist on the Moon. It came into existence last, as a sort of deposit from the other kingdoms. Of course anyone who affirms such things knows very well that it seems nonsense according to present ideas to say that plants could originate without the basis of a mineral kingdom, but formerly conditions were entirely different. In fact, upon the ancient Moon man developed in the animal kingdom; animals in the vegetable kingdom; and at the time when the Moon was separated from the Sun all the kingdoms were arranged in the following way:—

1. The human kingdom (really animal kingdom, consisting of physical body, etheric, and astral bodies).
2. The animal kingdom (really vegetable kingdom, consisting of physical and etheric bodies).
3. The vegetable kingdom (really mineral kingdom, because it consisted only of a physical body).

Our present mineral kingdom did not as yet exist.

Now, when the Moon and Sun separated the Beings and forces of the Sun were completely liberated from the gross material of the Moon, so that they could act all the more strongly. The result was that all three kingdoms were raised about half a stage higher. The human astral body was lifted out of its close connection with the lower principles, so that viewing man at the beginning of the Moon period with his physical, etheric, and astral bodies, one would later have perceived a change. Through the Sun having departed and having begun to shine from outside, the astral and etheric bodies were partly liberated. The consequence was that something happened which we must try to picture in the following way: Imagine that the man of today consisted only of physical body, etheric body, and astral body; and that there now came an external force which pushed out man's etheric and astral bodies; to the clairvoyant these would now exist outside him, but through these two bodies being liberated from the weight of the physical body man could be raised about half a stage upward in evolution.

Something like this took place at the time of which I am speaking; man was lifted up, he became a Being standing midway between the present man and the present animal. In a Spiritual sense he was, however, guided and directed by the exalted Sun-Powers.

In like manner the two other kingdoms were raised about half a stage, so that about the middle of the Moon period we do not find our present kingdoms, but intermediate ones: we have a human-animal kingdom, an animal-vegetable kingdom, and a vegetable-mineral kingdom.

We on the earth walk upon a solid mineral ground; the Beings of the ancient Moon walked on what was the lowest kingdom of the Moon—the vegetable-mineral. This basic substance of the Moon was not a mineral substance such as we have on the earth, but something that was half-alive. One has an approximate idea of what this basic substance of the Moon was if we think of something resembling a mossy bog or boiled spinach, a kind of mush, but living, bubbling. There were no rocks projecting out of this mass, but there was something like dense, woody, vegetable masses, horny structures; and these took the place of our present rocks. To clairvoyant vision it appears as if man moved upon a vegetable-mineral foundation which later underwent condensation and became the stones of today. From out this substance grew the animal-plants. These were more or less firmly rooted; they were more movable, it is true, than plants are now, but they grew out of this viscous element and had a certain degree of sensation when touched. Animal-man rose from out the finest substances; he by no means reached down into the grossest, but formed his physical body from the finest substances.

This physical body, which was in a continual state of transformation, had a very strange appearance: the clairvoyant is unable to discover upon the ancient Moon a human head such as man possesses today. Although the physical body was still soft and fluidic, he can find only animal-like heads, and from out this animal-head formation the etheric and astral bodies projected.

To physical sight all these animal-men had various forms that recall our present animals, but they only remind us of these; it is only when we rise from physical sight to astral vision that we perceive the higher nature of the animal-man of the Moon. Such were the denizens of the ancient Moon.

When we examine closely the course of human development and culture, in so far as it is of a mental and spiritual nature, we find in many instances that the myths and legends that have been handed down to us are in many respects wiser than our present-day science. When more is known about the spiritual foundations of the world men will recognize in many of the myths, legends, and fairy tales a truly deep wisdom, deeper than science, which has apparently progressed so far.

Let us return for a moment to the ancient Moon, in the basic substance of which only the ancient animal-plants could flourish, and let us leave the study of the further development of the Moon itself. We must clearly understand that all these Moon-beings were the forerunners of the present Earth-beings. Our present mineral kingdom has sprung from the vegetable-mineral of the Moon epoch, from the animal-plants have sprung our present plants, and from the backward animals, men. From those men who do not progress have sprung the largest portion of our present day animals. Thus we see that our minerals, our plants, our animals, and our human beings are really the descendants of the Beings of the ancient Moon.

There is today a remarkable plant which does not thrive in a mineral soil, namely, the mistletoe. It is remarkable because when observed clairvoyantly it is seen to be different from other plants. It exhibits rudiments of an astral body passing into the mistletoe, as is the case with animals. Although this plant has no sensation it has something appertaining to the outer form of animals. This is because it belongs to those backward plant-animals of the Moon period, which were unable to become plants, and on this account cannot thrive on a mineral soil, but require other plants on which to take root.

The mistletoe has preserved the condition of the ancient Moon. The ancestors of some of the European peoples knew this fact and embodied the knowledge in a wonderful legend. The Germanic and Norse peoples recognized in Loki a power still belonging to those forces which passed from the field of activity on ancient Moon to the Earth. When the earth became Earth it came under the influence of other forces, which these ancient peoples symbolized in the God Baldur. He represents all those forces which work upon mature earth-beings, but those who had remained at the Moon stage felt an inner relationship to Loki, the Moon-God. Hence arose the wonderful legend telling how once upon a time when the Gods were playing, all creatures swore an oath that they would not injure Baldur; the mistletoe alone did not take this oath. Why? Because it is not related to the earth forces incarnated in Baldur, but is a backward Moon-creation, and so has power to injure the basic earth-force—Baldur. Loki had to be served by a being belonging to himself. This legend has its origin deep down in the hidden foundations of the world. Further, when we know that in many respects what is opposed to healthy development must be of service to unhealthy development, we understand the wise intuition of our forefathers which led them to look to the mistletoe for special curative forces and juices. They knew that of which we have just spoken, hence the role they gave to the mistletoe. From this example we can see that profound wisdom regarding the evolution of the world is frequently hidden in myth and legend.

Through the withdrawal of a part of the etheric and astral body of the animal-man upon the Moon the necessity arose, even at that time, for a change of consciousness. But we must first speak of another development which ran parallel with this.

Each of the stages of development—that on Saturn, Sun, Moon, and Earth—was at the same time a stage in the development of consciousness. Upon Saturn, consciousness was dim ... it was at the first stage. Such consciousness as we have in dreamless sleep—the consciousness possessed by eternally sleeping plants—is clearer than that which man had upon Saturn, which may be compared to the consciousness of minerals. Only on the Sun did man rise to a consciousness such as is possessed by plants; through the astral body, which he received upon the Moon, his consciousness rose one degree higher, to that which we designate picture-consciousness. This may be compared in a certain sense with our present dream-consciousness, although our dreams have meaning only in exceptional cases. Upon the Moon this was different, the pictures which then rose and disappeared signified something. When another being approached a man he was unable to perceive its outer form and colour, but he perceived something which rose within himself (much as is now the case in dreams); a picture rose within him of the inner nature of the approaching being, and in accordance with the colour and character of this picture he knew whether this being was friendly towards him or the reverse—whether he should remain or flee.

As already stated, a change of consciousness took place upon the Moon during the time when the Sun was outside; there were periods of alternating consciousness, times when consciousness was more vivid, and times when it was dimmer. Today we have interchanging periods of day and night. In the morning man draws into his physical body and etheric body, and the eternal world with its beings and objects rises before him. Everything around him becomes light and clear because he makes use of his senses, but at night when he goes forth with his ego and astral body, he has no instruments wherewith to perceive; everything is dark around him.

In the same way, dreamless-sleep consciousness, which was first given to man on the Sun, alternated with the waking, earth-consciousness. These conditions were already prepared for on the ancient Moon. At that time the etheric and astral bodies were not continuously outside man, there were periods when they sank into his physical body; for the ancient Moon already moved round the Sun, and this rotation brought about conditions in which man was shone upon by the Sun at certain times, and not at others. Through this an exit and entrance of the etheric and astral bodies into the physical body were brought about. The change was certainly not so strongly contrasted as at present.

During the periods of the withdrawal of these bodies from the Moon, when man was shone upon by the forces of the Sun, he was in clear consciousness—in spiritual consciousness he perceived that which was spiritual clearly, and when his etheric and astral bodies sank back into the physical body his consciousness became darkened. You see, it was the reverse of present conditions.

For long, long periods of time, alternating states of clear and dim consciousness occurred upon the Moon, and it was in the dim state of consciousness that—without man being aware of it—what is called fructification took place. In order that the powers of reproduction might be developed, and that man might bring forth, his higher being had to sink down into the physical body, and when it was released it rose again into the higher world. At that time preparation was gradually made for what has since been fully developed upon earth. Through the separation of the Sun, and because of its having given stronger forces to its creatures, man along with all the other beings was able to develop more highly. If the Sun had been limited for a longer period by the ancient Moon it could not have acted so powerfully; but once it was released from the hindrance of the Moon-substances, the Moon and all its denizens were advanced rapidly. After a time the Moon had attained such maturity that it could again be absorbed by the Sun. This was followed by a condition when all the planets which had been separated could also be again absorbed, when they all reentered the spiritual state of rest which we call Pralaya.

After this pause there came forth once more what we may call the first etheric germs of the Earth-body, out of which at a later period—everything was again differentiated.

Now let us enquire: Whence came the physical body upon Saturn, whence came the etheric body on the Sun, and the astral body on the Moon?

These questions go to the very root of the matter. Anthroposophists do not enquire like many who imagine they are enquiring philosophically. For there are people who ask: Whence comes this or that? and when answered they ask further and further without end. This is only done as long as the inquirer has not risen to a spiritual observation of the world. Reasonably, one must come at last to a point where the significance of questions ceases. One might ask: Whence come these furrows on the road? The answer is: A cart passed this way. Then comes the further question: Whence came the cart? And one might answer: A man on certain business was using it. They then ask: What kind of business? At length the questions would come to an end; you would have been led so far that you would have arrived in quite different realms. If the subject of the interrogation is concerned with an idea, one only arrives if one remains in abstractions, at endless questions. But in concrete observations one arrives at last at Spiritual Beings, and one then inquires no longer: Why are they doing this? But one asks: What are they doing? It is necessary that one should educate oneself to see the limitations of questions.

Occult observation reveals that in the beginning, when ancient Saturn began to be formed, certain Spiritual Beings poured forth the fundamental substance of Saturn—warmth—from their own substance as a sacrifice. They had matured so far that they did not need to absorb anything as nourishment, they were even in a position to sacrifice themselves to pour out their own substance. These Beings are the Thrones. It is they who through their sacrifice formed the foundations of the human physical body. One who can occultly observe the physical body on Saturn can say: It has flowed forth from the substance of the Thrones. The physical body changes from stage to stage, it develops ever higher, but that which we bear within us is always the transformed substance of the Thrones.

We will now pass on to the Ancient Sun. Here the etheric body was added to the physical body. Here again are Spiritual Beings lower than the Thrones, whom we call Spirits of Wisdom. They had not developed far enough on Saturn to be able to pour out their own being, but on the Sun they had progressed far enough, and there now flowed from them the substance of their etheric body. Since the Sun period we carry within us our etheric bodies; these are of the substance of the Spirits of Wisdom.

Upon the Moon the astral body was added to us. Here again there were Spiritual Beings who sacrificed their substance. These were the Spirits of Motion. Lastly we pass from the Moon to the Earth.

Here other Beings pour their force into us—we receive the Ego. To the three members we already possess is now added the “I.” This is bestowed on us by the Spirits of Form or Exusiai; they are the Elohim, who give to us their Sun-light, also Jehovah, who, from the moon, gives form to the human spirit. Herein we see the cooperation of the two categories of Spirits of Form who from outside endow man with the rudiments of his Ego.

Thus we find that from stage to stage Spiritual Beings incorporate within human evolution: on Saturn the Thrones; on the Sun the Spirits of Wisdom; on the Moon the Spirits of Motion or Dynamis; and on the Earth the Spirits of Form—Jehovah and the Elohim. From all these Beings man has received his present shape and formation, they have allowed their own Being to pour into him. In the Bible we are clearly shown how the Being of one of the Spirits of Form streamed into the Being of man. Profound secrets lie behind what is found in the Torah.

Imagine that one of the Spirits of Form united himself to the Moon as Jehovah, that from thence he worked as a Spirit of Form upon man, and, bestowing on him that which gave to him his divine form, “God made man after His Own image.” He gave to him the form of the Gods. The Spirits of Form gave to man the human form, that is, the divine form. The Elohim poured the sun-force as light upon the earth. The God Jehovah renounced the outer form of light; he streamed to earth as a darker God, thus limiting Himself to the period between birth and death. Through the air, which the light penetrates, the Spirits of the air made themselves his companions. If we wish to form a picture of what streams physically and spiritually from the sun to the earth we have to see the sun's rays caught by the moon and returned to man; we have to see these rays bringing with them that which streams to us from the Jehovah Spirit; and how with them comes also that which exists spiritually in the air.

The moment in which Jehovah poured forth His principle of force, permitting part of His Being to flow into man, is indicated in the Bible in the words: “Jehovah poured into man the living breath, and he became a living soul.”

Such a statement ought to be taken quite literally, and we must try to understand what it really contains. A thrill of awe pervades us when we begin to understand such a statement, and when we learn its meaning; telling as it does that after the Thrones on Saturn, the Spirits of Wisdom on the Sun, the Spirits of Motion on the Moon had poured their principles into man, then—on the Earth—the Spirits of Form pervaded him. It is this mighty moment that is referred to in words of the Bible quoted above.

In the next lecture we shall learn further of the Elohim and Jehovah, and how they cooperated with Luciferic Beings throughout the Atlantean epoch and on into our own.

In the last few hours we talked about various myths and legends and characterized how in these myths and legends of different peoples that comes to light, which we have also come to know through the theosophical world view, that which we refer to as the appearance of the astral and spiritual world. We have also spoken of various signs and symbols, and we have repeatedly emphasized that there is nothing in these various signs and symbols that could be speculated upon, philosophized about, or reflected upon in any way, that could be interpreted one way or another, but that they must be said to be real renderings of processes in the higher worlds. Now, I always ask you to bear in mind that we have signs, fairy tales and legends from the broad currents of spiritual development on earth that express nothing other than what the seer, who is familiar with supersensible phenomena, can experience in the higher worlds. I need only refer to the simple sign of the so-called Swastika, the hooked cross, the sign that you all know and about which you have so many more or less ingenious explanations. Most of the explanations are nonsense, however ingenious they may be. Someone can be very clever, think a lot, and yet say something tremendously stupid if he does not know what it is all about. This swastika is nothing more than the reproduction of what are called astral sense organs - they are also called lotus flowers - which begin to stir when a person does certain exercises; they begin to stir when he undergoes a certain development. I have said time and again that one should think of a flower just as little as one thinks of wings when hearing the word lung. That is a word; and you have given no more in the Lotus Flowers than a pictorial description of what develops in the seer when he gradually brings the astral sense organs out of his astral organism. If we take this principle of explanation to heart, we will never be tempted to apply any speculation or the like to what we find in religious and other documents. Rather, we will endeavor to consult the real secret science or occult wisdom to let it tell us what one or the other means in each case. Much about Persian and Germanic mythology has already become clear to us in the last Monday lectures.

Today I would like to point out to you some things that you can find in a document much closer to you, in the Bible. I would like to draw your attention to the Bible today for the very reason that you can see how, from the point of view of spiritual science, the Bible coincides with the most diverse legends and myths of the peoples in many ways, and how deeply we can also look into the biblical document if we simply ask occult wisdom for information about it. Today we will place something from the beginning chapters of the Bible before our soul.

You know that it tells of the creation of the earth, of the world in general, in connection with man. You will find the most diverse explanations precisely about this so-called Genesis, about the secrets hidden behind the first, the introductory chapters of the Bible. We should preferably remember that when man first became an earth dweller in his present form, the conditions on our earth were quite different from those later on, which today's man knows. We know that after the earth had gone through earlier stages of development - a Saturn state, a sun and a moon state - that it then emerged again, initially in connection with the sun and moon. What looks at us today as the sun or the moon was once one body with our Earth. We know that the sun then separated with all its entities, that the moon then separated, also with certain substances and entities, and that our Earth remained behind in a period of time that we are accustomed to calling the Lemurian period. At that time, the Earth consisted of fiery liquid substances, which were basically the same as today's substances. The Earth was a fiery, fiery nebulous world body in which all the metals and minerals that are solid today were dissolved, and in which such beings as are on Earth today could not live. On the other hand, beings of a completely different nature and character could live there, and at that time man already belonged to them, whose existence was always connected with the development of our planet.

Now let us take a look at man himself. If you were to imagine man in his early stages, that is, at the time when the sun and moon had just separated from the earth, as he is today, listening with his ears and seeing with his eyes, you would be imagining him quite wrongly. Rather, you have to imagine that man in the early stages of the earth had a very different consciousness from that of today's man. Our present day consciousness, which perceives through the instruments of the outer senses, was not yet there. What kinds of consciousness do we know besides the day consciousness? You know the consciousness that for most people today is an unconscious one, the consciousness in deep sleep. You know that besides man, the plants living around man also have this consciousness. Plants have this consciousness all the time, whereas humans only have it when they are asleep. Today's human being, when looking at the plant, must therefore say to himself: the plant represents the consciousness that he himself has when he sleeps. One could say that when he sleeps, the human being is also a plant-like being. The plant has only a physical body and an etheric body. Man also has a physical body and an etheric body, and these lie in bed. Now comes the difference: the human being who lies in bed has an astral body with the I that belongs to him; these are in a certain way separate from the physical body and etheric body; but a single astral body belongs to the physical and etheric bodies that lie in bed. However, no individual astral body belongs to the individual plant, but the whole earth has an astral body, and you have to look at the individual plants as embedded in, as incorporated into, this common astral body of the earth. It is absolutely true that if you harm the individual plant or do anything to the individual plant, it does not feel it, but feels the earth as a whole in the common astral body. I have already pointed out that the seer knows: When you pick a flower, when you take the seeds of the plants in the fall or even mow the grain, then it is as if you take the milk from the cow for my sake, or when the calf sucks the milk from the cow. It is a feeling of well-being for the earth's astral body. A feeling of pain only occurs if you uproot the plant; then it is similar to tearing a piece of flesh out of the body of the individual animal. You must also be aware that there is a state of being similar to that of sleeping and waking for the earth, not for the individual plant. The individual plant is only aware of the state of consciousness that you have when you lie in bed with your etheric body and physical body. Between these two states of sleeping and waking, there is another state of consciousness that is little known to modern man; it is the state of dream-filled sleep, so to speak, as the last memory, like an atavism, an heirloom, where the consciousness of sleep is filled with the most diverse symbolic images that we have often described. Most of the animal world has such consciousness. Anyone who is familiar with these conditions can tell you that most of the animal world has a kind of dream consciousness; and it is complete nonsense to raise the question of whether animals have a similar sense of self as humans have. You describe to people exactly how a human being has to go through the time between death and a new birth, and then someone comes along and asks: couldn't a person go through this time on a completely different planet? Or someone asks: could this or that be? “Could be” can mean anything in the world. It is never about what could be, but about what is. This must be borne in mind above all. Some people today fall for it when, for example, a plant's love life is attributed to it. The craziest humbug is done with such things; and when the matter is called “science,” anything goes that would not otherwise be considered.

We have a kind of pictorial consciousness as a third state of consciousness, which is only present in a shadowy form in dreams, and this consciousness is present with increasing distinctness at the beginning of man's existence on earth. When man began his career as an inhabitant of the earth, he had no eyes to see with, nor could he have used his ears as he does today to perceive the outside world with his senses, although everything was present in the layout. The human being of that time did not experience physical forms and colors as they are experienced today through the senses; his consciousness was one of: image consciousness, through which primarily spiritual states were perceived. Certainly, there could also be objects similar to this rose in a person's environment. When a person approached these objects, he did not perceive the red color, not these shapes, not these green leaves, none of it in that way. But when he approached the object, an image arose in him that showed him a red shape at this point, where there is now green, and a greenish-bluish shape where there is now red; it appeared in colors that do not actually occur in the physical world, but which only expressed that it was a shape that was emotionally and spiritually pleasing to the person. When a person approached a well-disposed creature from the animal world, for example, certain colors arose before him that expressed the sympathy that the animal felt for him. If he approached an animal that wanted to eat him, it was expressed in a different color pattern. The friendship between two beings was expressed through colors and shapes. Now imagine that at that time, man himself was not at all able to see his own physicality, because that also belongs to everything for which one needs sensory instruments to perceive oneself. Man could see his soul itself, he saw the colors flowing out of him. What the seer sees today, he could see in an original, dull, dusky clairvoyant consciousness. But there was no question of his being able to see his own bodily forms; these were completely closed to him.

Let us now imagine this moment vividly. Man comes down from the bosom of the Godhead to plunge into the earth, which has just broken away from the sun and moon. Man comes down there. He does not have the slightest ability to see the sun and moon and the earth itself as physical bodies. But the moment has come for him when the ego, which dwells in all of you today, which used to be united with the divine substance, descended into the three bodies. Since the existence of the Earth, there was the physical body, since the existence of the Sun, the etheric body, and since the existence of the Moon, the astral body. The astral body, the etheric body and the physical body had come over from the Moon. When the Earth was Saturn, the I was in the sphere of Divinity. Even when the Earth was a sun and a moon, the I was in the sphere of divinity. Now let us clearly imagine the state of the Earth that has just come into being. We have the human being consisting of a physical body, an etheric body and an astral body, and, one might say, a hollow in the astral body, a constriction. Into this cavity the I literally drips in and first connects with the astral body, and in this astral body it acquires a consciousness of images, as I have just described. Thus man has become a four-part being. The I has united with that which had prepared itself through the three stages of Saturn, Sun and Moon, when the I of man was up in the bosom of the Godhead. During the Saturn, Sun and Moon states of the Earth, the I, which now dwells in all of you, was united with the Godhead above, and below, your bodies were formed in preparation: your physical body on Saturn, your etheric body on the Sun and your astral body on the moon. That was preparing itself below. One could say that the Godhead looked down and saw how the bodies were preparing themselves for it, so that when the Godhead lowered these drops of egoity, they would be ripe to receive the egoity. What dwells in you today dwelled in the Godhead then and looked down on the three bodies. If at that time your soul, your ego, could have felt its existence as it does today, they would have sensed it by calling their home the “heavens.” For they were “in the heavens”; they had only a dull, dim consciousness, but they were in the heavens.

And now the important moment had arrived when the uniformly continuing earlier state was divided into two. At the beginning of their existence on earth, there was a state for human beings in which they were still in the heavens as actual consciousnesses, as I-ness. Then the I dripped down into the bodies. Thus was created the difference between where human beings used to be and where they are now: heaven and earth. That is the experience of your ego as it descends. What does it say at the beginning of Genesis?

In the beginning, God created heaven and earth.

While still in the bosom of the Godhead, your ego had been unable to see anything. Now, on earth, it is destined to see for the first time, although at first with a dull awareness of images. Before that, it had not yet seen anything; it first had to become familiar with the astral body in order to learn to see.

And the earth was waste and confusion.

This is again a subjective experience of your soul. What she experienced is described. The earth itself was still “desolate and confused,” and everything was liquid, because the earth was in a fiery, liquid state.

And the spirit of the deity

which you had just left,

brooded over the waters.

You see, what is described in Genesis, are the real experiences of your self. And what has now struck into the whole? Now comes the moment when the self begins to see astral, it became aware that there are other beings all around. From the darkness, the astral light sprouts on all sides.

And God said: Let there be light! And there was light.

This does not refer to physical light, but to astral light. Here too, facts are described that the human

ego experienced. And God saw the light, that it was beautiful, and God separated the light from the darkness.

What does that mean? You will learn more about this in the course of the lectures, that wherever an astral body is present, fatigue must occur. The life of an astral body cannot proceed otherwise than that fatigue occurs. Therefore, there must also be a compensation for the fatigue. A being that tires must undergo conditions in which this fatigue is made good again. Do not imagine anything external, but only the experiences of the ego. The ego is lowered into the astral body, it becomes tired by unfolding its image consciousness. It must then return to a state in which it can compensate for the fatigue. We have two states of consciousness into which the ego comes: one state in which the ego lives in images, in which spiritual experiences present themselves in images, and another in which everything plunges back into the darkness from which the ego is born, and where fatigue is carried away, but also where the state of light that surrounds the ego is interrupted. The Godhead had divided the life of the ego into two parts, one where there was light and the other where there was darkness. Imagine the life of the light beings on earth like this.

And God divided the light from the darkness and called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night.

This has nothing to do with the orbit of the sun or the moon, it has only to do with the spiritual difference between the astral illumination of consciousness and the dark state where there is no illumination. You must fully bear in mind that these are descriptions of inner facts, experiences of the I. Imagine very vividly how the sleeping person lies in bed according to his physical and etheric bodies, outside of the physical and etheric bodies are the astral body and the I. This was the case all the time in the initial state of the earth. The astral body was never completely within the physical and etheric bodies as it is today, not at all, but only in such a way that it filled part of the etheric body. It was more or less as it is with modern man when he is asleep, when the astral body has left the physical body but has not yet completely left the etheric body. You must imagine that the I, which has just come down from the bosom of the Godhead, belonged to a physical body and an etheric body with its astral body, but does not yet completely permeate them. The modern-day scientist would say that such a life is not possible at all. But it was possible, under different laws.

Let us imagine how it was by means of an image. Let us again imagine our Earth, but now flooded in a fire nebula, this fire nebula in perpetual motion, the astral bodies with the I's as spiritual beings floating above. Imagine that you would all suddenly fall asleep now. Then your astral bodies would come out. Only the physical bodies are inert; when the astral bodies come out, the physical bodies retain their shape. At that time, when the earth was in the fire mist, it was different, everything was in lively motion. It was similar to when you stand today at a mountain valley and see the masses of fog moving back and forth and taking on the most diverse shapes. Now your physical body remains inert in its fixed form. Then everything was in motion. The physical body of that time dissolved and reassembled. All this was caused by the forces that emanated from above. Thus, the existence of that time was different from today. When the earth was still liquid, all forms were dependent on the spiritual forces, to which you yourself belonged. Imagine what happened down there. The solid gradually prepared itself. From a completely liquid-watery state, these solid bodies gradually prepared themselves. More and more rigid forms settled. Just as in the mountains the moving mists take on solid forms and crystallize, so the first human forms gradually emerged from the swirling fire mist.

And God said, “Let there be a vault in the midst of the waters, and let the waters be separated from the waters.”

If you can visualize it correctly, you have the process that I have just described.

And God made the division of the waters, and divided the waters which were under the expanse from the waters which were above the expanse. And what was above he called heaven. This was the second day.

There is profound wisdom in this again. What are the two “extensions”? These refer to the two parts of human nature, which are always mixed together: man's lower nature and man's spiritual nature. The spiritual nature, which finds expression in what is inclined towards the sun, and the lower nature, which is inclined towards the center of the earth. These are the two natures that all religious documents describe as being dominated by two very different powers, by heavenly powers and by powers of the underworld. God separated the heavenly expanse from the earth expanse. What was not yet visible on the moon became visible here on earth. An immensely deep wisdom, which corresponds to a complete truth, is also expressed in this. On the old moon, individual human figures did not yet walk around as they do on earth now; that did not exist on the moon. The human ancestors, the ancestral bodies of human beings on the old moon, consisted of a physical body, an etheric body and an astral body. They only had an extension, an extension to the planet, not to the heavens. They were animal-like, no I yet dwelled in them. The animal has remained at this earlier stage of development. This can still be clearly seen today in the way it cannot raise its face to the sun, how it does not have free working organs in its front limbs to realize intentions and ideas of the spirit. The animal is like a beam standing on four pillars. Man has brought this beam out of the horizontal position into the vertical. Through the upward-facing countenance, he is not only a citizen of the earth, but a citizen of the world. The two front supports, the two front limbs, have become tools of the spirit. This is expressed in the separation of the part of the human form that belongs to the earth from the part that belongs to the universe.

And God made an expanse between the lower waters and the upper waters.

This diversity of the human form is meant by this; it is again an experience of the original human being.

Now the part of the human form that was to serve the ego had to have a center, a center. And this it did. The first center of this still soft human body came about through the fact that all the currents converged in the upward-facing part. The most diverse currents pass through it, which you have to imagine as the beginning of nerve and blood currents. They all gathered at the top in mighty tongues of fire, which used to dart out of the human being at the top of the head - but when the body was still completely soft. That organ, which man had then and of which the last remainder is the pineal gland, was the first organ with which man began to perceive physically. If he came near something dangerous for him, this organ perceived it and through it man felt that he was not allowed to go there. Through this organ he found his way. You should not imagine this organ as an original eye – such an idea gives rise to all kinds of errors – but you should imagine that it was a kind of heat organ, by means of which man, even at great distances, could distinguish cold and warm conditions, and those that were harmful or beneficial to him. At the same time, this organ was connected to the organs we call the lymph organs, which are related to the currents in the human body that are connected to the white blood cells. The well-being or distress of a person, who still had mainly white blood cells, depended on what this organ perceived. This was therefore a center in which everything that was present as a formation in the expanse of the heavens was collected.

And God said: Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land become visible! And it was so. And God called the dry land Earth, and the gathering of the waters he called the Sea. And God saw that it was good.

Here you see a reference to another confluence of currents; these are in the lower currents, in the earthly nature of man. They relate to human reproduction, to procreation. But procreation in these ancient times – and this is very important – was completely covered by the most absolute unconsciousness. This is a profound secret of the evolution of the world. One could say that it is the original divine commandment that the deity gave to the earthly beings: You shall not know how you reproduce on earth. The entire act of reproduction was shrouded in profound unconsciousness. During the times when consciousness emerged on earth, no reproduction took place. So you can imagine that man's nature in this respect consisted in his starting out from a complete innocence or unconsciousness about this process on earth. So what did man know at the beginning of his existence on earth? He only knew his spiritual descent, he knew that he had descended as an ego from the bosom of the Godhead. Where he came from in a physical sense, where his bodies came from, was completely closed to him, he knew nothing about it, it was covered by a complete state of innocence. Let us imagine exactly what happened at that time.

People came into being in the way we have just described. People who had developed their physical body, their etheric and astral body on the moon, now received their ego. These people were completely innocent about everything that was going on in the physical world. They could not see that either; they did not see their own physical body. They saw spiritual conditions; they knew that they descended from the divinity. But there were other entities, not human beings, but entities, which had remained behind on the old moon, which could not become gods. What had reached a higher level on the moon now had its setting on the sun, where the Elohim are, who dwell on the sun as man dwells on earth. Now there was a parallel development of beings on the sun and on the earth. After the sun and the moon had come out of the earth, the earth was placed between the sun on one side and the moon on the other. The highest being that developed on Earth was a being with a physical body, etheric body, astral body and I: man. On the Sun, the highest being had a physical body but in a completely different form than the human one - etheric body, astral body, I, spirit self (Manas), life spirit (Budhi), spirit man (Atma), and in addition an eighth part, beyond Atma. Thus higher beings who had already developed an eighth limb are the Elohim, the sun spirits, who, when the earth and the sun had separated, took a different path. Human beings had taken the earthly path. The sun spirits had already developed their Atma on the moon; they went to the sun to develop there at a higher level. But now there were beings on the old moon who could not go with the sun because they had remained behind. Of course, they were much more highly developed than humans. They had something that humans had yet to achieve. They already had the consciousness through which one sees external physical objects. They could already use tools that humans could not yet use. Humans still had blind eyes and deaf ears. His eyes and ears were only developed in the beginning; they were to become seeing and hearing later. But lower animals of that time had retained forms from the moon that they could use in a certain way earlier than humans could use their bodies. And in that, those beings who had come over from the moon were actually embodied on earth first, and who were not yet ready to go with the sun, but who were further along than humans. They embodied themselves in forms that have long since disappeared, in beings that enabled them to see into the physical environment. These beings, who were between humans and gods, inspired and spiritualized such lower forms, for the higher human bodies were still too clumsy, just as a child is much clumsier than a young chicken when it is born. These lower beings were dragons or serpents, which at that time were provisionally inhabited by these beings between the gods and men. These beings were closely related to that which belongs to the earth in man; they had nothing of what lived in man from the part directed to the sun. But they had something the people who still lived in dull image-consciousness: They could already perceive the physical objects that were on the earth. Man lived in complete innocence about the physical process of sexuality; that was shrouded in darkness for him. These beings saw him as the gods saw him, and so they could approach man and say: You can become like the gods, you need only do one thing, you need only extend your desire into the lower regions; as soon as your desire extends into the lowest regions, you will see as the gods see; if you do that, you will see your own form.

In a sense, humanity's state of innocence was thereby taken away. That is one side of it. The other side is the freedom that man has gained as a result. [Gap in the transcription.] Entities that were between the inhabitants of the sun and the inhabitants of the earth, who could not gain the right to the sun, wanted to open people's eyes; they approached people as seducers and said:

Your eyes will be opened, and you will know good and evil.

You will see what is around you, and you will get to know the tree of knowledge of good and evil and the tree of life.

Thus the religious documents are literally true. We just have to learn to understand them literally again. Today's reflection will have shown you that one must not speculate about these things. One must ask the real secret science, then light comes in a wonderful way into the religious documents.

From many studies on the subject of the forming of human destiny or karma you will have realised that human life is not viewed in its entirety if sleep is left out of consideration. When a man reflects about himself with the ordinary consciousness of to-day, he looks back only upon the days because the nights are passed in unconsciousness. In the case of normal sleepers, therefore—as nowadays there are no Seven Sleepers—a third of life is disregarded. But for experience of the super-sensible and of man's participation in the spiritual world, it is this very third of life that is of essential importance. When a person has reached a definite age he looks back over the days he remembers, as far back as his memory goes. The nights are between the days but in his recollection the nights are left entirely out of consideration. A true retrospect is really not possible for a man of modern times because his observation of life is far too superficial. But if he were capable of carrying out such a retrospect, then precisely through what he does not see in the ordinary way he would have an indication of karma. Observation of the life of sleep gives significant hints of individual karma. Attention must above all be paid to the essential difference between the two moments of waking and going to sleep.

Ordinary consciousness can feel this difference instinctively, but Initiation-Science alone can throw light upon it. The difference between the moment of waking and the moment of going to sleep is particularly evident to people who are sick or ailing. They notice more readily than do those in good health that the moment of going to sleep is often accompanied by at least a slight feeling of pleasure. The moment of waking, on the other hand, has something slightly unpleasant about it; waking is accompanied by happiness only if the attention of the person concerned is at once turned to the outer world and when his consciousness of the outer world drowns what is rising up from within him. For many people the moments both of waking and of going to sleep are shrouded in a certain dimness. At the moment of going to sleep a man has the feeling that he is somehow dragging the past day's experiences along with him, that these become more and more nebulous and that he then abandons them. The moment of waking is accompanied by a slight feeling of oppression, a feeling of lifting oneself out of certain depths, bringing from them something that is carried over into the day and is got rid of only during the course of it. The result is that a certain feeling of unpleasantness may be associated with the experience of waking. An unpleasant sensation of taste may intensify into an equally unpleasant sensation of a stupefied head. People do not as a rule distinguish between these delicate experiences but they are unmistakeable indications of a great deal in human life. For what is really taking place? We describe quite correctly and from a certain standpoint very exactly what is taking place if we say: during sleep the physical and etheric bodies lie in the bed and the ego and astral body pass out into the spiritual world, returning into the physical and etheric bodies in the morning on waking. But how does this process take place? In order to make progress in our study of karma we will envisage the whole process which, to begin with, it is justifiable to describe in a rather abstract way.

This emergence of the ego and astral body from the physical and etheric bodies can be sketched like this. Let us suppose this figure to be the human being and here are the physical body and the etheric body. In the evening, when sleep begins, the ego and astral body move outwards. We will draw quite diagrammatically how the two members widen out, expand, but describe a kind of circle. In the morning, on waking, the ego and the astral body pass into the physical body again through the limbs, actually by way of the fingers and toes. The fact is that a circle is described and this statement must be taken more literally than is usually imagined. In reality, when a normal human being wakes in the morning, the picture seen by clairvoyance is not of the whole astral body and the whole ego being immediately within the physical and etheric bodies; on the contrary, ego and astral body pass only slowly and by degrees into the physical body from morning onwards until towards midday and afternoon. You will say that if this were really the case we should feel our ego and astral body moving only gradually from the tips of the fingers and toes towards the head. To very exact clairvoyant observation this is actually the case, only the person concerned does not inwardly feel it to be so, for the reason that the way in which these higher principles work is different from any kind of physical activity. You see, if a locomotive is propelling a carriage, it pushes forwards from the spot where it is at the moment. And if a railway line is, say 30 metres long and the engine is pushing forward, as long is needed for the first metre, then so long for the second, and so on, at a certain point there may be no effect from the engine if it has not yet reached thus far. But with spiritual conditions it is different; spiritual conditions are effective at other places as well as where they happen to be centred. So the waking hours of the day are used for the purpose of bringing our ego and astral body slowly into our physical and etheric bodies from the tips of our fingers and toes. But the ego and astral body begin to be active from the very beginning, from the moment of waking, so that one has the feeling of being completely filled by them. To clairvoyant sight, however, it is clear that an actual revolution takes place through the day; the complementary revolution takes place during the night. But a revolution also takes place—one that is less dependent upon time—when you have an afternoon nap. Here again the ego and astral body leave the physical and etheric bodies and the process adapts itself to your need of sleep. Sleep is a prophet and knows when you will wake although you yourself do not; your astral body under all circumstances knows it. It knows when you will wake even if as the result of some disturbance you sleep for a shorter time than you intend, even if before going to sleep you say that you want to sleep for only half-an-hour but you lie asleep for three hours instead. The astral body knows exactly how long you will sleep. It is an accurate prophet because the inner, spiritual circumstances are, in fact, different from the external circumstances experienced at the time.

You will certainly have realised that there is a very great difference between the process of going to sleep and that of waking. When we wake we have just been in the spiritual world and when we go to sleep we pass out of the physical world and into the spiritual world. A stream bears us along in the spiritual world between sleeping and waking and we also have experiences then—experiences which are, however, wrapt in unconsciousness. We have experiences during sleep which are, in fact, similar to those of the daytime, only they are of much greater intensity.

If you observe the soul's waking life you will find there, in the first place, the thought-experiences evoked by the various impressions made by life. But memories of the earthly life already past are always intermingled with these experiences. Try for once to consider how in every situation memories mingle with the momentary impressions made by life. In fact, if close attention is paid, one can get a picture of how, at different moments, life is a veritable hodge-podge, a mingling of memories and instantaneous impressions. There are two quite different factors: the thoughts which rise up from within and the thoughts which enter via the senses. These are quite different currents of the inner life and during sleep they are also in evidence. The stream of what is present (impressions of the daily life) on going to sleep continues during the night and perpetually flowing towards this is what we experience on waking.

These two currents stream towards each other: the one stream, experienced particularly on going to sleep, is the one already mentioned, the one that is experienced consciously, vividly and powerfully during the first decades after death when life is lived through again in reverse order. As I put it to you rather drastically: if you give someone a box on the ear, then, in living through the event after death you do not experience the anger which you consciously felt on Earth when giving the blow, or maybe the satisfaction at being able to express the anger. Instead, you undergo what the other person experienced, his physical pain and also his moral suffering. This is what you would experience, but in a picture, not yet in reality, if you could consciously continue your life when it is already becoming dim at the approach of sleep. If you were to pass into sleep with full, clear consciousness, you would live through the day's experiences in reverse, but in pictures. Whereas during the first decades after death it is all experienced as reality.

What I have described applies, approximately, to life by day in the waking state, when we are given up to outer life merely with our thoughts. But there is also the other current and this has something stupendous in it. We experience it on waking, as I have explained, but there is an element of heaviness in it which is carried into the day and is only gradually overcome; later in the day we become free of it. When this second stream is fully perceptible to Initiation vision it is seen to be a repository of the whole karmic past which passes before the human being every time he sleeps. Whereas a person can experience something of the karma that is taking shape for the future, when he wakes from sleep he has in the feeling I have described a faint, admittedly a very faint, glimpse of his present karma. The moment of waking brings a faint indication of what an individual bears within him from his past earthly lives. This is of course taken into what the astral body and the ego radiate when from the tips of the fingers and toes they spread through the body. A very burdensome karma, a karma that is difficult to bear, radiates unhealthy material deposits into the head, whereas a good karma radiates health-bringing deposits. And it is here that the spiritual and the natural make contact. The good in a man's karma radiates the healthy states of the organism into the head in the morning and clarifies it; healthy elements radiate upwards from good karma. From bad karma, from the residue of whatever guilt has been incurred, unhealthy deposits in the human organism are reduced to a kind of vapour which rises up into the head. The head then feels dull and heavy. The weaving of karma right into the physical can be perceived from the condition prevailing on waking in the morning. Karma takes shape through the alternating effects of sleeping and waking life. Now just as the karma that takes shape from what we have done every day of our life until its end, signifies in sleep during the night what the momentarily formed thoughts signify during the day, so does that mighty spectacle encountered when we have slept from evening to morning signify the cosmic memories of our past karma. Just as we have personal memories when we wake, from going to sleep until waking we have our karmic memories, if our consciousness extends so far. Memories of the different lives through which we have passed on Earth come to meet us. Soon after going to sleep there can be revealed to one who is able to understand such experiences through Initiation wisdom and Initiation insight, the last Earth-life, the last Earth-life but one and so on, right back to lives which become indefinite because the individual himself was then still living in the universal All, with a dreamlike, plant-like consciousness. Thus sleep is actually the window through which man looks at his karma. He becomes familiar with his karma and works at its further shaping during sleep through the deeds and thoughts which fill his waking life. This is the first weaving of karma: it takes place during sleep. We have already considered a second weaving that takes place during the first decades after death.

We shall acquire a more serious conception of life when the significance of sleep has been grasped in this way, when we realise that we sink into sleep every night because it is then that we work at the formation of our karma, and because it is during sleep that our karma from previous earthly lives finds the way whereby it can play a part in our daily life. From the night, karma gradually enters into our daily life and we bring something quite definite with us into the day. An individual who can recollect clearly how at one point in his life a particularly significant event occurred to him, will, if he has a more intimate, finely developed faculty of introspection, easily perceive that if, let us say, this event took place in the afternoon, ever since morning an inner restlessness was impelling him towards it. Most people who can perceive something of the sort will have had the feeling that from the morning onwards they had been moving towards an event that was to be significant in their life. Such an event—if it was a really fateful although entirely unexpected event—affected all the preceding hours of the day. On days when something important is to happen to us we do not wake up exactly as we do on days that take their usual course—only we do not notice it. Those who used to lead the life of peasants on the land—such people knew about these things and did not like to be torn suddenly out of sleep, because when there is no gradual transition into the waking life of day one is wrested away from such intimate experiences. Peasants say that on waking one should never look at the window at once but away from it, so that while the light is still dim one can become aware of what is emerging from sleep. The peasant will not at once look at the window nor does he like to be startled into waking suddenly; he likes to be wakened naturally, at the same time every morning by the church bell, so that he can prepare himself for this through the whole period of sleep. Then the day dawns, the church bell sounds into his life and then, in the early morning he has inklings of his destiny, of events of destiny, not those resulting from acts of free will. This is what he likes to happen and unlike people claiming to be highly civilised he would hate to be wakened by an alarum clock, for that drives one with dead certainty away from everything spiritual—much more forcibly, of course, than the window looked at immediately on waking. But our modern culture has introduced materialism into all the circumstances of life and will continue to do so. There is a great deal in modern life which makes it impossible for men to perceive the spirit living and weaving in the world. The more aware they become of that indefinite, half mystical influence which can radiate from sleep, the more clearly is their attention directed to their karma.

And now you will understand why I was able to say that we readily dream of individuals whom we meet in life and to whom we at once feel drawn or the reverse, quite independently of whatever outer impression they make. What is happening in such cases? These are individuals with whom we were together in earlier lives on Earth. Let us say that in the afternoon of 14th June, 1924, we have had the experience of meeting someone we perhaps dislike. We now carry into sleep the experience that gave rise to the feeling of dislike. But there, in sleep, the karma is revealed; this person stands before us as he was in the last earthly life or in the last but one, and so on; we meet him as he was in his earlier life. We encounter everything we experienced in connection with this individual who has now appeared and who simply reminded us of something—we meet him as a bodily figure, but in a spiritual way. No wonder that we begin to dream of him; with ordinary consciousness we cannot do otherwise. But if we come across an individual for the first time, however beautiful or ugly his features may be or however strongly he interests us, in our sleep we never meet him, for he was never with us in earlier lives on Earth. No wonder we cannot dream of him! You see how transparent such things become when he facts are examined spiritually.

Now what transpires between sleeping and waking in the forming of karma may follow a normal, perfectly normal course. Then a man will experience how his destiny takes shape as the fulfilment of what he brought upon himself in earlier earthly fives. Or he will experience the ultimate karmic value of what he thinks or does in this present fife. It will as a rule live itself out in what he thinks or does. But something quite different may come about.

Suppose a man who is living on the Earth today achieved in deed or thought something of real importance in an earlier life. The karmic result of this does not lie in the physical body or in the etheric body which are inherited from the parents, but it lies in the astral body and ego—the members which are outside the physical and etheric bodies during sleep at night. But suppose that this karmic load has such strength that it cannot wait until the age of life when the astral body may be weak, for in old age muscles and bones have already become brittle. Let us take seventy years—the patriarchal age—to be the normal length of a man's life on Earth. In these seventy years man's astral body and ego also undergo development. The astral body of a child can work strongly and forcefully upon the whole physical and etheric organism; it can hammer, as it were, upon muscles and bones. In old age this is no longer possible, for the astral body then becomes relatively weak. The strength of the ego increases but it withdraws into the weaker astral body and hence works with less power. The astral body, however, is particularly responsible here, for in old age it is no longer able to hammer effectively upon muscles and bones. Now imagine that someone is living at the present time, in the twentieth century, having lived before in the fourteenth or eleventh century. During his life in the eleventh century he performed a really significant act, one that made very strong impressions on the astral body. The ensuing result remains in the astral body and when the man comes again in the twentieth century it wants to be finally fulfilled and from this astral body to give the necessary stimulus. When the result of the experience in the eleventh century is of such significance that it cannot make use of a feeble, aged astral body hardly capable of performing important deeds, then it must use an astral body in the early years of life. And if the event has been so important as to eclipse all other events of life, a great deal must be compressed into the period while the astral body is still youthful. What does this mean? It means that the individual concerned will have a short life in the twentieth-century incarnation. Here you see how the length of life is determined by the consequences of former earthly thoughts and deeds being anchored in the astral body.

We now go further. Think, for instance, of an astral body that is positively inflated as the result of important deeds—particularly evil deeds—in an earlier incarnation; such deeds inflate the astral body and it makes a strong impact upon the physical and etheric bodies. This strong impact is not healthy; only a certain normal relation of the astral body to the physical and etheric bodies is healthy. The strong impact which can, for instance, be caused by bad karma, batters the organs, softens them and causes disease. Now comes the second incarnation. Such action or thinking in the eleventh century can inflate the astral body, thereby condemning the individual to death at an early age. But he may fall ill in any case, apart from this violent impact; he may have a severe illness and die from it. That is the physical aspect. For when we see what is going on in the person's physical body, we say: he is ill and the illness ends in death; he falls ill at the age of twenty-five and dies at thirty in consequence of the illness.

Is this also the spiritual aspect? Is this also what would be said by Initiation Science? No! Initiation Science would say the opposite. For it is precisely the earlier significant action or thought that brings about the death in the next earthly life; the deed in the eleventh century brings about the death in the twentieth century. And the death sends the illness on in advance ... a man becomes ill so that he may die at the right moment. The consequence of the later death, which is a karmic necessity, is, as you now realise, the illness which is sent in advance. That is the spiritual aspect. When one rises from the physical world to the spiritual world everything is in fact reversed; it takes the opposite course and we see how the illness is karmically brought into man. That is the karmic aspect of illness. This karmic aspect of illness can be an extremely important factor for diagnosis. It need not immediately be discussed with the patient but it may certainly be important. If you bear in mind that what is contained in karma has its own definite place, you will certainly discover it.

Now if the significant incident, action or thought affecting another human being or some particular matter occurred in an immediately preceding incarnation, let us say in the eleventh century, when we are asleep we encounter what took place in that century before anything dating from a still earlier incarnation, let us say in the second century B.C. Thus we gradually encounter what has happened to us in earlier earthly lives. But if one begins here (pointing to the sketch) then what is encountered first is what has made the way from here to here. The karma comes to meet us; but this means that what is above here has come from what is below, perhaps from the heart; something that is low down in the organism and was affected in the previous incarnation comes, however, from the head. In the case of illness, therefore, when we see how far back the influential events lie, karma can indicate to us that an affection, let us say, of the legs, comes from incarnations in the relatively near past, whereas a symptom of illness in the head comes from incarnations in the relatively far distant past. Thus the transition from the spiritual into the physical can also be indicated by karma.

What results from this is extremely important for therapy. For where must we seek the remedy for illness affecting the head and for illness affecting the legs? The remedy for illness affecting the head will be found in what existed far, far back in the evolutionary process of Nature, in what is reminiscent of very early Nature-processes, for instance, mushrooms, which in their present imperfect form recapitulate an earlier plant formation, or in algae and lichens, or, in the case of the fully developed plant, in the root, since that is the part that has remained at the earliest stage. Illness in the lower body and more towards its periphery will have to be healed with what appeared at a later stage in the evolution of Nature, namely, blossoms, flowering plants or also with later formations in the mineral kingdom. Whatever is a late development in man must be healed with what is also a late development in Nature. In the head, too, there are, of course, organs which are comparatively late formations. When the Earth was still recapitulating the Moon-evolution and Sun-evolution, man existed without his present eyes, in general without sense-organs, although the first rudiments of them were already present during the Saturn-evolution. As they are today, mirroring the outer world inwardly, they are a relatively late product of evolution, appearing at the same time, for instance, as siliceous substance in its present form on the Earth. Silica as it is today is a late product in the evolution of the world of Nature, although its rudiments were laid in the far, far past.

Hence when silicic acid is correctly administered as a remedy it acts upon everything belonging to the nerves-and-senses system, especially the senses, through the whole organism. In their present form the senses developed in an age when rocks containing silica also appeared in their present form. In the first incarnation which can still be called an incarnation, when with our whole bodily make-up we were a more integral part of Nature, we lived, simply in accordance with our karma, an existence shared with different forms of plant and animal life, the successors of which are here to-day. The mushrooms and the roots of plants are unlike what they were in that early epoch but in a certain way what is present to-day in the mushrooms, lichens, algae and roots of plants is reminiscent of the conditions prevailing in our first definite incarnation. In the blossoms and flowering plants of today and in minerals at a corresponding stage ... (a gap in the transcript here). I bring this before you only to show how a true observation of karma leads to stages in the evolution of Nature. And from the relation of Nature to Man we can recognise how to heal. Every branch of life must ultimately be widened in such a way that it gradually becomes spiritual knowledge. Everything else is so much groping and fumbling, an existence in spiritual darkness, and it is this that has brought mankind into the present situation. If men are to emerge from it again they must grasp the reason for it in clear consciousness, that is to say, knowledge of the physical must be widened to knowledge of the spiritual. And nothing can lead more positively to realisation of the spiritual than the study of karma.

When we picture how the forming of karma proceeds from sleep, how again it passes into and through sleep, how the normal forming of karma impels a man to action, makes his action again subject to karma and how he thus lives out the ordinary karma of life—from all this we see how karma works. When again we see how the life of an individual is shortened and he dies at an early age, indicating that karma has inflated his astral body and must make strong demands upon it as the result of past deeds, thus contributing to illness—everywhere the working of karma is in evidence. Or let us suppose a man has an accident and is ill as a result; then, under certain circumstances, such an accident—which is possibly, but not necessarily, determined by karma—can continue to be a factor in the further course of karma through the following lives on Earth. Illness may also be the beginning of karma and then it will be found that such illnesses make going to sleep an unwelcome and difficult process. But when illnesses are the beginning of karma they have something consoling about them.

In the case of many illnesses the following must be said: illnesses that are a fulfilment of karma, that make waking unpleasant, point to previous experiences; illnesses that are an augury of future karma and make going to sleep an unwelcome and difficult process are the beginning of good karma. For there will be compensation for what is suffered in such an illness. We have the pain now and afterwards the compensation for the pain, the uplifting, joyous experience. A great deal in life looks different when viewed from the spiritual and not from the physical standpoint. It is sometimes a thoroughly painful physical experience not to be able to sleep, but true observation of the spiritual aspect can be comforting. And if we do not value the momentary physical effect above the spiritual life we can actually say: Thank goodness that I so often have difficulty in going to sleep, for that is a sign that I shall experience much that will be uplifting in my future earthly life; a great deal from my present life will pass into the next one.

Sleeplessness can sometimes be a good comforter and if it were not karmically beneficial in its spiritual aspect, it would be much more harmful than it actually is. Many people tell one such legends about their long bouts of sleeplessness that from the medical point of view one might well ask how comes it that they are still alive! Normal sleep is essential for normal life. People tell one for how long they have not slept; one can only wonder that they are still alive for they really ought to be dead and yet they are not! But in such circumstances the vivifying spiritual element contained in the ego penetrates into life as compensation. To a brief survey of life it is obvious that really restful sleep after hard struggles and hard work is also at times desirable. But to lie in complete restfulness without sleeping and to pass the night quietly and fully awake is nevertheless the more desirable because when it is done of set purpose a person then becomes more and more aware of the Eternal. But the will must be in operation; the condition must not, in essentials at least, be due to physiological causes. Nevertheless there is karmic consolation for difficulty in going to sleep and in sleeplessness, for this really points to future karma, points to the future in certain respects.

The Christmas festival can be the occasion for comparing the Mystery upon which it is based with Mysteries that were the outcome of different conditions in the evolution of humanity. The Christmas Mystery—when it is conceived as a Mystery—belongs paramountly to Winter. It arose from conceptions of the spiritual world that had primarily to do with the link established between man and the scene of his life on Earth at the beginning of Winter.

When we turn our attention to Mysteries that were celebrated in certain parts of Asia long before the founding of Christianity and in which many sublime cosmic thoughts were given expression, or when we compare the Christmas festival with Mysteries that were celebrated also in pre-Christian times, in Middle, Northern and Western Europe, we are struck by the fact that they were preeminently Summer Mysteries, connected with the union between man and all that takes place in earthly life during the time of Summer. To understand the essential meaning of these Mysteries we must think, first of all, of that part of the evolution of humanity which preceded the Mystery of Golgotha.

Looking back into very ancient times we find that the Mysteries were institutions of men still possessed of the faculty of instinctive clairvoyance. In certain states of consciousness between those of full sleep and waking, in states where dreams were expressions of reality, the men belonging to that ancient humanity were still able to gaze into the spiritual worlds whence the human being descends into his physical body on the Earth. Every human being in those times could speak and think about the spiritual worlds, just as a man today can speak about the ordinary knowledge he has learnt at school. I have, as you know, often said that what the men of those olden times beheld of the spiritual-supersensible world presented itself to them in pictures—not the pictures of dreams but somewhat resembling them. Whereas we know quite well that the pictures in our dreams are woven from our reminiscences, that they rise up from the organism and, unlike our thoughts, do not mirror reality, through the very nature of the Imaginations of the old clairvoyance men knew that they were the expressions—not, it is true, of any external, material reality nor of any historical reality, but of a spiritual world lying hidden behind the physical world. Thus the spiritual world was revealed to men in pictures.

But it must not be imagined that those men of an earlier epoch had no thoughts. They had thoughts, but they did not acquire them as man acquires his thoughts today. If a man of the modern age is to have thoughts, he must exert himself inwardly; he must elaborate his thoughts by dint of inner effort. A similar kind of activity was, it is true, exercised by the men of old in connection with the pictures which mirrored for them a spiritual form of existence; but the thoughts came with the pictures. One may well be amazed at the power and brilliance of the thoughts of that old humanity; but the thoughts were not formulated by dint of effort; they were received as revelations.

Now just as we today have schools and colleges, so in those times there were Mysteries—institutions in which science, art and religion were undivided. No distinction was made between belief and knowledge. Knowledge came in the form of pictures; but belief was based securely on knowledge. Nor was any distinction made between what men fashioned out of various materials into works of art, and what they acquired as wisdom. Today the distinction is made by saying: What man acquires in the form of wisdom must be true; but what he embodies in his materials as a painter, sculptor or musician—that is fantasy!

Goethe was really the last survivor of those who did not hold this view. He regarded as truth both what he embodied in his materials as an artist and what he took to be science. The philistinism expressed in the distinction between the artistic and the scientific did not, in fact, appear until comparatively late, indeed after Goethe's time. Goethe was still able, when he saw the works of art in Italy, to utter the beautiful words: “I have the idea that in the creation of their works of art the Greeks proceeded by the same laws by which Nature herself creates and of which I am on the track.” In Weimar, before going to Italy, he and Herder had studied the philosophy of Spinoza together. Goethe had striven to deepen his realization that all the beings in man's environment are permeated by the divine-spiritual. He also tried to discover the manifestations of this divine-spiritual in details, for example in the leaf and flower of the plant. And the way in which he built up for himself a picture of the plant form and animal-form in his botanical and zoological studies was identical as an activity of soul with the procedure he adopted in his artistic creations.

Today it is considered unscientific to speak of one and the same truth in art, in science and in religion. But as I have said, in those ancient centres of learning and culture, art, science and religion were one. It was actually the leaders in these Mysteries who began gradually to separate out particular thoughts from those that were revealed to men with their instinctive clairvoyance and to establish a wisdom composed of thoughts. On all sides we see a wisdom composed of thoughts emerging in the Mysteries from clairvoyant vision. Whereas the majority of men were content with pictorial vision, were satisfied to have the revelation of this spiritual vision presented to them in the form of myths, fairy-tales and legends by those who were capable of doing so, the leaders of the Mysteries were working at the development of a wisdom composed of thoughts. But they were fully aware that this wisdom was revealed, not acquired by man's own powers.

We must try to transport ourselves into this quite different attitude of soul. I will put it in the following way.—When the man of today conceives a thought, he ascribes it to his own activity of thinking. He forms chains of thoughts in accordance with rules of logic—which are themselves the product of his own thinking. The man of olden times received the thoughts. He paid no heed at all to how the connections between thoughts should be formulated, for they came to him as revelations. But this meant that he did not live in his thoughts in the way we live in ours. We regard our thoughts as the possession of our soul; we know that we have worked to acquire them. They have, as it were, been born from our own life of soul, they have arisen out of ourselves, and we regard them as our property. The man of olden time could not regard his thoughts in this way. They were illuminations; they had come to him together with the pictures. And this gave rise to a very definite feeling and attitude towards the wisdom-filled thoughts. Man said to himself as he contemplated his thoughts: “A divine Being from a higher world has descended into me. I partake of the thoughts which in reality other Beings are thinking—Beings who are higher than man but who inspire me, who live in me, who give me these thoughts. I can therefore only regard the thoughts as having been vouchsafed to me by Grace from above.” It was because the man of old held this view that he felt the need at certain seasons to make an offering of these thoughts to the higher Beings, as it were through his feelings. And this was done in the Summer Mysteries.

In the Summer the Earth is more given up to its own environment, to the atmosphere surrounding it. It has not contracted because of the cold or enveloped itself in a raiment of snow; it is in perpetual intercourse with its atmospheric environment. Hence man too is given up to the wide cosmic expanse. In the Summer he feels himself united with the Upper Gods. And in those ancient times man waited for the Midsummer season—the time when the Sun is at the zenith of its power—in order at this season and in certain places he regarded as sacred, to establish contact with the Upper Gods. He availed himself of his natural connection in Summer with the whole etheric environment, in order out of his deepest feelings to make a sacrificial offering to the Gods who had revealed their thoughts to him.

The teachers in the Mysteries spoke to their pupils somewhat as follows. They said: “Every year at Midsummer, a solemn offering must be made to the Upper Gods in gratitude for the thoughts they vouchsafe to man. For if this is not done it is all too easy for the Luciferic powers to invade man's thinking and he is then permeated by these powers. He can avoid this if every Summer he is mindful of how the Upper Gods have given him these thoughts and at the Midsummer season lets his thoughts flow back again, as it were, to the Gods.” In this way the men of olden times tried to safeguard themselves from Luciferic influences. The leaders of the Mysteries called together those who were in a sense their pupils and in their presence enacted that solemn rite at the culmination of which the thoughts that had been revealed by the Upper Gods were now offered up to them in upward-streaming feelings.

The external rite consisted in solemn words being spoken into rising smoke which was thus set into waves. This act was merely meant to signify that the offering made by man's inmost soul to the Upper Gods was being inscribed into an outer medium—the rising smoke—through form-creating words. The words of the prayer inscribed into the rising smoke the feelings which the soul desired to send upwards to the Gods as an offering for the thoughts they had revealed.

This was the basic mood of soul underlying the celebration of the Midsummer Mysteries. These Midsummer festivals had meaning only as long as men received their thoughts by way of revelation.

But in the centuries immediately preceding the Mystery of Golgotha—beginning as early as the 8th and 9th centuries B.C.—these thoughts that were revealed from above grew dark, and more and more there awakened in man the faculty to acquire his thoughts through his own efforts. This induced in him an entirely different mood. Whereas formerly he had felt that his thoughts were coming to him as it were from the far spaces of the universe, descending into his inner life, he now began to feel the thoughts as something unfolding within himself, belonging to him like the blood in his veins. In olden times, thoughts had, been regarded more as something belonging to man like the breath—the breath that is received from the surrounding atmosphere and continually given back again. Just as man regards the air as something which surrounds him, which he draws into himself but always gives out again, so did he feel his thoughts as something which he did not draw into himself but which was received by him through revelation and must ever and again be given back to the Gods at the time of Midsummer.

The festivals themselves were given a dramatic form in keeping with this attitude. The leaders of the Mysteries went to the ceremonies bearing the symbols of wisdom; and as they conducted the sacrificial rites they divested themselves of the symbols one by one. Then, when they went away from the ceremonies, having laid aside the symbols of wisdom, they appeared as men who must acquire their wisdom again in the course of the year. It was like a confession on the part of those sages of olden times. When they had made the solemn offering it was as though they declared to the masses of those who were their followers: “We have become nescient again.”

To share in this way in the course taken by the seasons of the year, entering as Midsummer approaches into the possession of wisdom, then passing into a state of nescience (Torheit) before becoming wise again—this was actually felt by men to be a means of escape from the Luciferic powers. They strove to participate in the life of the cosmos. As the cosmos lets Winter alternate with Summer, so did they let the time of wisdom alternate in themselves with the time of entry into the darkness of ignorance.

Now there were some whose wisdom was needed all the year round, and who for this reason could not act or adopt the same procedure as the others. For example, there were teachers in the Mysteries who practised the art of healing—for that too was part of the Mysteries. Naturally it would not do for a doctor to become ignorant in August and September—if I may use the present names of the months—so these men were allowed to retain their wisdom, but in return they made the sacrifice of being only servants in the Mysteries. Those who were the leaders became ignorant for a certain time every year.

Reminiscences of this have remained here and there, for example in the figure described by Goethe in his poem Die Geheimnisse as the ‘Thirteenth,’ the one who was the leader of the others but was himself in a state of dullness rather than wisdom.

All these things are evidence that the attitude towards the guiding wisdom of mankind was entirely different from what it afterwards became when men began to regard their thoughts as produced by themselves. Whereas formerly man felt that wisdom was like the air he breathes, later on he felt that his thoughts were produced within himself, like the blood. We can therefore say: In ancient times man felt his thoughts to be like the air of the breath and in the epoch of the Mystery of Golgotha he began to feel that they were like the blood within him.

But then man also said to himself: “What I experience as thought is now no longer heavenly, it is no longer something that has descended from above. It is something that arises in the human being himself, something that is earthly.”—This feeling that the thoughts of men are earthly in origin was still significantly present at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha among those who were the late successors of the leaders of the ancient Mysteries. Those who stood at that time at the height of cultural life said to themselves: Man can no longer have such thoughts as had the sages of old, who with their thoughts lived together with the Gods; he must now develop purely human thoughts. But these purely human thoughts are in danger of falling prey to the Ahrimanic powers. The thoughts that were revealed to man from above were in danger of succumbing to the Luciferic powers; the human thoughts, the self-produced thoughts, are in danger of succumbing to the Ahrimanic powers.

Those who were capable of thinking in this way in the epoch of the Mystery of Golgotha—by the 4th century, however, the insight was lost—such men experienced the Mystery of Golgotha as the true redemption of mankind. They said to themselves: The spiritual Power indwelling the Sun could hitherto be attained only by superhuman forces. This Power must now be attained by human faculties, for man's thoughts are now within his own being. Hence he must inwardly raise these thoughts of his to the Divine. Now that he is an earthly thinker, he must permeate his thoughts inwardly with the Divine, and this he can do through uniting himself in thought and feeling with the Mystery of Golgotha.

This meant that the festival once celebrated in the Mysteries at Midsummer became a Winter festival. In Winter, when the earth envelops herself in her raiment of snow and is no longer in living interchange with the atmosphere around her, man too is fettered more strongly to the earth; he does not share in the life of the wide universe but enters into the life that is rooted beneath the soil of the earth.—But the meaning of this must be understood.

We can continually be made aware of how in the earth's environment there is not only that which comes directly from the Sun but also that which partakes in the life of the earth beneath the surface of the soil. I have spoken of this before by referring to some very simple facts.—Those of you who have lived in the country will know how the peasants dig pits in the earth during Winter and put their potatoes in them. Down there in the earth the potatoes last splendidly through the Winter, which would not be the case if they were simply put in cellars. Why is this?—Think of an area of the earth's surface. It absorbs the light and warmth of the Sun that have streamed to it during the Summer. The light and the warmth sink down, as it were, into the soil of the earth, so that in Winter the Summer is still there, under the soil. During Winter it is Summer underneath the surface of the earth. And it is this Summer under the surface of the earth in Winter time that enables the roots of the plants to thrive. The seeds become roots and growth begins. So when we see a plant growing this year it is actually being enabled to grow by the forces of last year's Sun which had penetrated into the earth.

When therefore we are looking at the root of a plant, or even at parts of the leaves, we have before us what is the previous Summer in the plant. It is only in the blossom that we have this year's Summer, for the blossom is conjured forth by the light and warmth of the present year's Sun. In the sprouting and unfolding of the plant we still have the previous year and the present year comes to manifestation only in the blossom. Even the ovary at the centre of the blossom is a product of the Winter—in reality, that is, of the previous Summer. Only what surrounds the ovary belongs to the present year. Thus do the seasons interpenetrate. When the earth dons her Winter raiment of snow, beneath that raiment is the continuation of Summer. Man does not now unite himself with the wide expanse but turns his life of soul inwards, into the interior of the earth. He turns to the Lower Gods.

This was the conception held by men who were in possession of the heritage of the ancient wisdom at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. And it was this that made them realize: It is in what is united with the earth that we must seek the power of the Christ, the power of the new wisdom which permeates the future evolution of the earth. Having passed to the stage of self-produced thoughts, man felt the need to unite these thoughts inwardly with the Divine, to permeate them inwardly with the Divine, in other words, with the Christ Impulse. This he can do at the time when he is most closely bound to the earth—in deep Winter; he can do it when the earth shuts herself off from the cosmos. For then he too is shut off from the cosmos and comes nearest to the God who descended from those far spaces and united Himself with the earth.

It is a beautiful thought to connect the Christmas festival with the time when the earth is shut off from the cosmos, when in the loneliness of earth man seeks to establish for his self-produced thoughts communion with divine-spiritual-supersensible reality, and when, understanding what this means, he endeavors to protect himself from the Ahrimanic powers, as in ancient times he protected himself from the Luciferic powers through the rites of the Midsummer Mysteries.

And as under the guidance of the teachers in the Mysteries the man of olden time became aware through the Midsummer festival that his thoughts were fading into a state of twilight, the man of today who rightly understands the Christmas Mystery should feel strengthened when at Christmas he steeps himself in truths such as have now once more been expressed. He should feel how through developing a true relation to the Mystery of Golgotha, the thoughts he acquires in the darkness of his inner life can be illumined. For it is indeed so when he realizes that once in the course of the earth's evolution the Being who in pre-Christian ages could only be thought of as united with the Sun, passed into earthly evolution and together with mankind indwells the earth as a Spiritual Being. In contrast to the old Midsummer festivals where the aim was that a man should pass out of himself into the cosmos, the Christmas festival should be the occasion when man tries to deepen inwardly, to spiritualize, whatever knowledge he acquires about the great world.

The man of old did not feel that knowledge was his own possession but that it was a gift bestowed upon him, and every year he gave it back again. The man of today necessarily regards his world of thought, his intellectual knowledge, as his own possession. Therefore he must receive into his heart the Spirit Being who has united with the Earth; he must link his thoughts with this Being in order that instead of remaining with his thoughts in egotistic seclusion, he shall unite these thoughts of his with that Being of Sun and Earth who fulfilled the Mystery of Golgotha.

In a certain respect the ancient Mysteries had what might be called an ‘aristocratic’ character. Indeed the principle of aristocracy really had its origin in those old Mysteries, for it was the priests who enacted the sacrifice on behalf of all the others.

The Christmas festival has a ‘democratic’ character. What modern men acquire as that which really makes them man, is their inner store of thoughts. And the Christmas Mystery is only truly celebrated when the one does not make the sacrificial offering for another, but when the one shares with the other a common experience: equality in face of the Sun Being who came down to the Earth. And in the early period of Christian evolution—until about the 4th century—it was this that was felt to be a particularly significant principle of Christianity. It was not until then that the old forms of the Egyptian Mysteries were resuscitated and made their way via Rome to Western Europe, overlaying the original Christianity and shrouding it in traditions which will have to be superseded if Christianity is to be rightly understood. For the character with which Christianity was invested by Rome was essentially that of the old Mysteries. In accordance with true Christianity, this finding of the spiritual-supersensible reality in man must take place at a time not when he passes out of himself and is given up to the Cosmos, but when he is firmly within himself. And this is most of all the case when he is united with the Earth at the time when the Earth herself is shut off from the cosmic expanse—that is to say, in Midwinter.

I have thus tried to show how it came about that in the course of the ages the Midsummer festivals in the Mysteries changed into the Midwinter Christmas Mystery. But this must be understood in the right sense. By looking back over the evolution of humanity we can deepen our understanding of what is presented to us in the Christmas Mystery. By contrasting it with olden times we can feel the importance of the fact that man has now to look within himself for the secrets he once sought to find outside his own being.

It is from this point of view that my Occult Science is written. If such a book had been written in ancient times (then, of course, it would not have been a book but something different!) the starting-point of the descriptions would have been the starry heavens. But in the book as it is, the starting-point is man: contemplation, first of the inner aspect of man's being and proceeding from there to the universe. The inner core of man's being is traced through the epochs of Old Saturn, Old Sun, Old Moon, and extended to the future epochs of the Earth's evolution.

In seeking for knowledge of the world in ancient times, men started by contemplating the stars; then they endeavored to apply to the inner constitution of the human being what they learned from the stars. For example, they contemplated the Sun which revealed a very great deal to the Imaginative cognition of those days. To the orthodox modern scientist, the Sun is a ball of gas—which of course it cannot be for unbiased thought. When the man of ancient time contemplated the Sun externally, it was to him the bodily expression of soul-and-spirit, just as the human body is an expression of soul-and-spirit. Very much was learnt from the Sun. And when man had read in the Cosmos what the Sun had revealed to him, he could point to his own heart, and say: Now I understand the nature of the human heart, for the Sun has revealed it to me!—And similarly in the other heavenly bodies and constellations, man discovered the secrets of his organism.

It was not possible to proceed in this way in the book Occult Science. Although it is too soon yet for all the relevant details to have been worked out, the procedure is that we think, first, of the human being as a whole, with heart, lungs, and so on, and in understanding the organs individually we come to understand the universe. We study the human heart, for example, and what we read there tells us what the Sun is, tells us something about the nature of the Sun. Thus through the heart we learn to know the nature of the Sun; that is to say, we proceed from within outwards. In ancient times it was the other way about: first of all, men learnt to know the nature of the Sun and then they understood the nature of the human heart. In the modern age we learn what the heart is, what the lung is ... and so, starting from man, we learn to know the universe.

The ancients could only give expression to their awareness of this relation of man to the universe by looking upwards to the Sun and the starry heavens at the time of Midsummer, when conditions were the most favorable for feeling their union with the Cosmos. But if we today would realize with inner intensity how we can come to know the universe, we must gaze into the depths of man's inner being. And the right time for this is in Midwinter, at Christmas.

Try to grasp the full meaning of this Christmas thought, my dear friends, for there is a real need today to give life again to old habits such as these. We need, for example, to be sincere again in our experience of the course of the year. All that numbers of people know today about Christmas is that it is a time for giving presents, also—perhaps, a time when in a very external way, thought is turned to the Mystery of Golgotha!

It is superficialities such as these that are really to blame for the great calamity into which human civilization has drifted today. It is there that much of the real blame must be placed; it lies in the clinging to habits, and in the unwillingness to realize the necessity of renewal—the need, for example, to imbue the true Christmas thought, the true Christmas feeling, with new life.

This impulse of renewal is needed because we can only become Man again in the true sense by finding the spiritual part of our being. It is a ‘World-Christmas’ that we need, a birth of spiritual life. Then we shall once again celebrate Christmas as honest human beings; again there will be meaning in the fact that at the time when the Earth is shrouded in her raiment of snow, we try to feel that our world of thought is permeated with the Christ Impulse—the world of thought which today is like the blood within us, in contrast to the old world of thought which was like the breath.

We must learn to live more intensely with the course of the seasons than is the custom today. About 20 years ago the idea occurred that it would be advantageous to have a fixed Easter—a festival which is still regulated by the actual course of time. The idea was that Easter should be fixed permanently at the beginning of April, so that account books might not always be thrown into confusion owing to the dates of the festival varying each year. Even man's experience of the flow of time was to be drawn into the materialistic trend of evolution. In view of other things that have happened as well, it would not be surprising if materialistic thought were ultimately to accept this arrangement. For example, men begin the year with the present New Year's Day, the 1st of January, in spite of the fact that December (decern) is the tenth month, and January and February quite obviously belong to the previous year; so that in reality the new year can begin in March at the earliest—as indeed was actually the case in Roman times. But it once pleased a French King (whom even history acknowledges to have been an imbecile) to begin the year in the middle of the Winter, on the 1st of January, and humanity has followed suit.

Strong and resolute thoughts are needed to admit honestly to ourselves that the saving of human evolution depends upon man allying himself with wisdom. Many things indicate that he has by no means always done so but has very often allied himself with ignorance, with nescience. The Christmas thought must be taken sincerely and honestly, in connection with the Being who said: “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.” But the way to the Truth and to the Life in the Spirit has to be deliberately sought, and for this it is necessary for modern humanity to plunge down into the dark depths of midnight in order to find the light that kindles itself in man.

The old tradition of the first Christmas Mass being read at midnight is not enough. Man must again realize in actual experience that what is best and most filled with light in his nature is born out of the darkness prevailing in himself. The true light is born out of the darkness. And from this darkness light must be born—not further darkness.

Try to permeate the Christmas thought with the strength that will come to your souls when you feel with all intensity that the light of spiritual insight and spiritual vision must pierce the darkness of knowledge of another kind. Then in the Holy Night, Christ will be born in the heart of each one of you, and you will experience together with all mankind, a World-Christmas.