The Rudolf Steiner Archive

If an esoteric wants to make progress he should make certain things increasingly clear to himself meditatively. For example, just as the lungs breathe in air, so the physical and etheric bodies inhale the spirit on awaking in the morning. Our materialistic age only wants to accept what's perceived through the senses, but just as it denies the spirit someone could deny the existence of air, because it's perceived by a finer sensibility. An esoteric should become accustomed to look upon outer happenings as only letters or signs of a world word. For instance an esoteric wouldn't ask whether the b in “about” is the effect of the a, for he knows that this sequence of letters is necessary to form the word. So an esoteric should ask less about cause and effect, but should say that things and events are necessary to form world words.

An exoteric is all too inclined to look at things only from the viewpoint of sympathy and antipathy. He readily accepts and notices what pleases him, and he ignores other things if possible. A form of mental disease that's sometimes observed is that an otherwise normal person suddenly travels from one place to another and finally seems to wake up, but he can't remember what happened while he was travelling. If one investigates the past of such a sick person occultly one can find that he passed by many things in the world with great indifference and thereby weakened his ego a great deal. It's a weakening, almost like an occasional loss of the ego.

Theosophists also often tend to turn away from the outer world. But a loving interest in our surroundings is absolutely necessary if one wants to make progress. One doesn't have to neglect what one is striving for theosophically thereby.

So the ego grasps itself in memory, and high beings gave us the ego and memory. The ego that grasps itself in memory is like a letter that an esoteric must learn and that the Gods have written into world space. The high beings who gave the ego have their seat on the sun; they give us what goes from incarnation to incarnation. We got our physical body from forces that work down through the incarnations, and these forces work on us from the circle that's described by the moon's orbit. What goes from one generation to the next like this is like a second letter. We can draw this schematically. We draw the ego that becomes conscious through memory as the earth or a point, and around it the moon's orbit as a circle. If the moon would be moved to another place by some force, what would result for the earth thereby? The reproductive forces working through the generations would dry up. Men would no longer reproduce and would die out. So a real esoteric must look up to the beings who work on him through moon forces from outside full of reverential thanks and must tell himself that he owes his development through the generations to them. Mankind will have reached the end of its physical evolution when the moon is attracted by the earth's forces so much that it goes into it, as is supposed to happen later. We receive the forces that strengthen our ego from the sun, and we shouldn't just stare at the sun but should let these ideas arise in us: You marvellous world body, it was through you, through your sun-grace forces that I received my ego and all the forces that are connected with it. I thank you in shy reverence.—We can draw the sun forces as another circle. But so that what comes from the series of incarnations and generations can come together forces are at work above the moon forces—the Mercury forces. We also got our intellect that's bound to the brain from them. And when we look towards Mercury and generally whenever we use our intellectual forces we should fill ourselves with thanks to these beings who gave them to us. But there's something still higher than mere intellect. If new, creative ideas hadn't flowed in evolution would always have stayed at the same point. School children learn things today that wise Pythagoreans didn't know yet, and these new things that are continually flowing in come from a sphere above Mercury, from Venus. The creative thoughts that become manifest in inventions flow into evolution through it. This is the only thing that makes progress possible. This thinking isn't brain bound, it's lighter and has more feeling to it.

Then there are sublime forces above the Venus sphere that no longer work on mankind directly. They work through Venus forces and fertilize them. These are Mars forces. To prevent them from working in a warlike way in their interaction with Venus a sublime, divine light force streams in from Jupiter, a spiritual light that's imperceptible to ordinary men and is darkness for them. An esoteric can get a feeling for this when he looks up in thanks to these sublime world beings who let their grace stream down on us. And one feels this inner spiritual light that one can only grasp inwardly, as warmth, if one can concentrate on still more distant heights—on the Saturn periphery, whose beings let warmth stream down through the other spheres. Now between the interaction of Mars and Venus is the circle of the third sun. They spoke about the third sun in all the mysteries. The first is the creative physical one that sends us its warming rays. The second is the spiritual one that stands behind it and that gave us the ego, and the third is the high bearer of the Christ principle, the Christ, who gives us the higher I with his grace-sun forces. This third sun has been making a connection with the earth since the Mystery of Golgotha. It's the sun of which Paul said: “Not I, but Christ in me,” the Christ whom every man since then can receive. This third sun became manifest to Christian neophytes through initiation, and the tragedy that's connected with Julian the Apostate's fate is that he knew about the third sun but couldn't identify it with the Christ.

We should remember these seven spheres when we look at the seven roses of our rose cross; they are a symbol for them. The spheres' effects are divided into two parts by the Christ circle, into a lower one with four circles, whose forces work from below, and an upper spiritual one with three circles that work indirectly. The saying: I'm reborn in the Holy Spirit applies in the spiritual, upper part, Ex Deo nascimur holds for the lower part and Christ makes the connection between the two. In ... morimur.

The last talk should suggest with a few lines that spiritual science can investigate the deeper profundities and the truth of the biblical documents and that it can read that in the right sense again which is written in this document. With some simple lines should be shown how concerning the Bible such a right penetration is possible into the deeper sense of the Bible in a quite unexpected way and how it can lead many human beings to a recapture of this document of humankind. What could be said in the last talk about the position of our newer time, about its research, its criticism, its worldview compared with the Old Testament someone can also say concerning the New Testament. In addition, here we are able again to point to the fact that in the seventeenth, eighteenth centuries a criticism started which has analysed and cut the Gospel to pieces, a document of such an immense significance for countless human beings for centuries, and attacked its bases. One would have to tell a long story if one paid attention to this biblical criticism of the New Testament in detail. How could it be different, because since that time, after the invention of the art of printing, the Bible has come to all hands, and with it, the materialistic thinking got out of control! How could it happen other than that people recognised clearer and clearer that there are contradictions in the Gospels?

For example, you need only compare the genealogies of Jesus in the Matthew Gospel and the Luke Gospel, if one adheres to the external letter of the matter, and you find that already the first chapters of both Gospels are contradictory. Not only that Luke and Matthew differently give the ancestors; also, the names do not comply. If you compare the single facts of the life of Jesus, you can find contradictions everywhere. In particular, people realise how extremely the first three evangelists, the writers of the Matthew, Mark, and Luke Gospels, on one side, and the writer of the fourth so-called John Gospel, on the other side, contradict. The result was that one tried to produce an accordance of the first three Gospels in a certain way. One believed to find that these three evangelists—even if they differ from each other in many details—give a picture of Jesus which is attractive to the whole view and to all ways of thinking of a newer time, at least to many personalities of our time.

However, many people realised long-since concerning the fourth evangelist that there cannot be talk of a historical document at all. Not only that the writer of the John Gospel, who completely brings the facts differently grouped, above all, concerning the miracles that he describes quite differently; it also becomes apparent that his whole standpoint towards the centre of the whole world history is different. This sight has developed more and more. If we want—we cannot go into the details—to turn again to the sense of this research, it is approximately this that one says that the three Gospels could give the image of the superior Jesus, the founder of the Gospel, if one considers them as portrayals of the brilliant time. The fourth Gospel is a confessional document, a kind of hymn of that which the writer wanted to show concerning his faith in the crucified Jesus. He wanted to give no story, but a teaching writing.

In particular, in the nineteenth century, this view settled in the souls of numerous people more and more due to the so-called Tübingen School, which the great Bible scholar, the brilliant Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792–1860) led. Baur's view is approximately this: the John Gospel is late; it was written very late whereas the other evangelists wrote earlier, still after certain reports of those who, perhaps, themselves had experienced or come to know it from persons who had witnessed the story in Palestine. However, the John Gospel originated only in the second century. Not from the original story, but influenced by the Greek philosophy and by that which had already appeared in the Christian communities, it were written, so that John created a picture of Christ Jesus, which could uplift the human beings in such a way that it is lyrical in certain ways. It teaches how one began to think and to feel like a Christian up to the second century, however, it was no longer able to inform about the events in the beginning of our era.

Indeed, there were also souls who vindicated the opposite viewpoint. If one must say on the other side that Christian Baur and his students proceeded with tremendously critical astuteness, nevertheless, we are not allowed to forget a biblical scholar like the historian and academic Gförer (August Friedrich G., 1803–1861) who asserts that the Gospel is due to the apostle John himself. With diligence he shows how just this Gospel shows almost in each sentence that an eyewitness wrote it or that somebody who had received his message from eyewitnesses wrote it. Gförer goes so far that he says in his Swabian way that anybody who cannot believe in the fact that the Gospel is due to John is out of his mind. He is also out of sorts with those who say that it is not historical and who bear down on this Gospel with all possible arguments.

The question that interests here is this: did really research, history cause this view in spite of all astuteness, in spite of all scholarship, which is never denied a moment?—Someone who can thoroughly explore not only the outside of history, but is able to immerse with his thinking and feeling, and with his whole view in the mental undergrounds of human development, notices something else. It was not only the historical sense, it was not only the so-called objective research, but they were the ways of thinking of the newer time, the beloved views that were spread more and more since the last century.

They did not accept that the confidence and the ideas of the figure of Christ Jesus survived which prevailed for centuries, that not only a superior being was included in Jesus of Nazareth, but a universal being, a spiritual-divine being that is not only related to the whole humanity but to the whole development of the world generally. The confidence and the idea got lost that this spiritual-divine being worked in the mortal body of Jesus of Nazareth, and that we face a unique event there. This contradicts the ways of thinking so much that they had to be directed against such confidence. The critical research slipped in unconsciously to justify what the habitual ways of thinking wanted for the time being. More and more the sense came up, which could not endure that anything topped the normal human-personal, the sense that says to itself, yes, there have been great human beings in the world evolution: Socrates, Plato, or others. Indeed, we have to admit that Jesus of Nazareth was the greatest. Nevertheless, we must remain within this human level.—The fact that something could have lived in Jesus that one can compare to the normal human being contradicts the materialistic mental images, which settled down more and more. We can see this sense slipping in unconsciously and combining with that which the so-called historical research ascertained.

Why did the first three evangelists become more and more the respected ones and the writer of the John Gospel the mere lyricist and confessional writer? Because they could say to themselves, the three evangelists, the Synoptics, describe an ideal human figure that does not top the human level, even if Jesus is an elevated one. It flatters the modern sense if one says what a modern theologian said: if we subtract everything supersensible and spiritual from Jesus of Nazareth, if we take the simple man of Nazareth, we are closest to Jesus.

That is not possible with the John Gospel. It immediately begins with the words: “In the beginning the Word already was. The word was in God's presence,” before a material world existed. What there was in the spiritual primeval grounds became flesh; it walked around in Palestine in the beginning of our calendar.—The writer of the John Gospel applies the highest wisdom to understand this event and to bring it to understanding. In view of this matter, it is not appropriate to speak of the simple man of Nazareth. Hence, he was never allowed to deal with a historical document. These are not only scientific reasons, it is the development of the usual thoughts, emotions and sensations which have found their expression in that which the Bible criticism of the New Testament and the historical research claim today to have the unconditional or at least relative authority of these matters.

However, there emerges another question from spiritual science. Let us position ourselves really on the ground on which some new researchers have positioned themselves. The ones wanted to portray an event that took place in the beginning of our calendar. They added mythical and legendary aspects. Assume that we positioned ourselves on this ground. There we must ask ourselves, is it yet possible to speak about Christianity as such under these conditions? Is it possible to speak about Christianity if we understand the documents, which tell about this Christianity, purely materialistically? Is it possible to behave towards the whole Bible in such a way?—Two things should be stated at first that prove that the question cannot be put different than it was put, and that it can be answered in outlines. Let us assume that Christian Baur's view is right that something took place in Palestine that one has to explain as the external historical, and that in the course of time the writers delivered that out of the prejudices of their time to the future generations what was in them. Let us assume that we have to presuppose such a research while we believe in the descent of a spiritual being from spiritual spheres that lived in Jesus of Nazareth, resurrected, won the victory of life over death—what we regard as the real essence of the Mystery of Golgotha. One has to break this doctrine, Baur says. One considers this view as a dogmatic one. This view must be cancelled. One has to investigate an event in Palestine like another historical event.

Is it then possible to speak generally in the true sense of the word of Christianity, of the Bible as such a work which reports what has to appear? On the other hand, I would like to point to two facts. What is the first big and enclosing effect of the Christian worldview based on, an effect that nobody can deny? What is the sermon of Paul based on? Is it based on the interpretations of the Gospels by a new sober research? Never Paul's strength is based on an announcement of that which is to be exhausted by the means of history. Paul's whole efficacy is based on an event that you can understand only from supersensible, never from sensuous causes. Someone who checks Paul's writings sees that his whole teaching is based simply on the fact that he could win the conviction and the experience that Christ has risen, and that in the Mystery of Golgotha the life in spirit carried off the victory over death.

Wherefrom does Paul take his conviction of the true nature of Christ Jesus? He does not take it, as for example the others who were round Christ Jesus, from an immediate instruction. He takes it, as you all know, from the event by Damascus. He takes it from this fact and he could say, I have seen Him who lived, suffered, and died in Palestine, I have seen Him living.—Paul means nothing but that he has seen Christ in spirit and has won the truth from the spiritual view that Christ lives. He announces Christ, whom he got to know in his spiritual view. In addition, he equates this appearance to the other phenomena, because he says to us, after death, Christ appeared to various persons, to the twelve disciples and others, and in the end to me as a mistimed birth.—With it, he thinks that he really beheld Him in a higher view, who carried off the victory over death, and that he knows since that time that Christ lives for someone who rises in the spiritual world.

Here we already stand concerning the New Testament where the new spiritual science must separate from any only literal view of the Bible. What do you find as a rule in the writings of the so-called new research about the event of Damascus? Saul became Paul in an ecstatic condition, a condition into which one cannot look really. This escapes from the human research. Yes, it escapes from the external human research. We have emphasised this so often in spiritual science that the human being—what we can learn in the following talks—can ascend to the knowledge of a higher world which is round him in such a way, as the colours and the light are around a blind person. The human being can behold this higher world as the operated blind-born can learn to see colours and light. This takes place by the spiritual-scientific methods in the soul of the true pupil of spiritual science and enables him to behold into the spiritual worlds, to behold what is there. What takes place with this pupil, what every pupil can bear witness today and at all time, that took place with Paul. He received it: to hear with ears which are not sensuous ears to see with eyes, which are not sensuous eyes. Then he could also perceive Him who lived in Jesus of Nazareth. So Paul's whole strength extends into the supersensible realm. If you take the whole Paul as he is, you can say, what he said is set aglow by “Christ was raised. Hence, our faith is not futile” (1 Corinthians 15:17).

If one goes just into the effects of Paul's sermons how he spread that form of Christianity, which went through the world, then one can never say, it does not depend on going back to any supersensible facts to investigate the facts about Jesus. One says that one must apply the usual scientific forms. Then one forgets not only the original facts in Palestine not only that which happened during 33 years, but also what happened for the dissemination of Christianity. One forgets that it is based on a supersensible event, and that this supersensible event is to be understood at first.

However, in quite similar way we also find if we consider the matters only seriously and really that the Old Testament, at least its most important document, the Law, is based on something similar. We find that the whole mission of Moses, the whole strength of Moses by which he provided big services to his people is also based on a supersensible event. We had to say the day before yesterday that if the spiritual researcher develops higher, so that he becomes sighted in the spiritual world and is able to behold into the spiritual undergrounds of the things that he can survey the facts of the spiritual world in pictures, in imaginations. Yes, you can express the processes, which happen in you if you ascend to the spiritual fields, only in pictures, however, you must get clear that somebody who speaks in such pictures does not want to speak about the pictures as those, but thinks that one has these pictures as expressions of his supersensible experience.

The supersensible experience by which Moses got his mission was clearly described in the phenomenon of the burning bush. There we see Moses, the leader of the people, facing his God, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, who issued the order to Moses to act for his people what we find happening then as the action of Moses. While we use this, we already face a basic issue of the whole Bible, namely the question: how have we generally to position ourselves in order to penetrate deeper into this document to these two supersensible facts, which make any merely external research impossible? How have we to behave to this basic issue of the Bible in the spiritual-scientific sense? We can penetrate if we bring the contents of the revelation or the experience of Moses home to ourselves.

The most important traits are only cited. Moses faces the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. God gives him the order at the same time to lead the people from Egypt, to increase it to a certain size and to teach it a certain attitude.

If then Moses wants to have something by which he can exculpate himself before the people, so that he can say who he is and who sends him, God reveals his name: “I am the I-am.” Nobody can understand the word who is not able to go into the whole sense and the being of old naming. Old naming is unlike the modern naming. Old naming should absolutely express the being of the personality, the being of that who faces us. In “I am the I-am” the being of the God had to express itself in particular who faced Moses, and who calls himself “the Lord the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.” Why does he call himself the Lord the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? There is a secret hidden behind it, which must be unravelled. We can unravel it only if we move up to it with the help of spiritual science. We have to emphasise it over and over again at various places that the human being consists of the members of his being, that we only face one part of the human being as the physical body, that we have higher members which are supersensible, which are the real bases, the creative principles. We must add the etheric body or life body, then the astral body and as the fourth the bearer of the ego.

The human being has the physical body in common with the apparently lifeless beings, with the minerals, the etheric body with the plants and all living beings, the astral body with the animals, which can have passions and desires. Because of the ego, the human being towers above all sensuous beings, which surround him. Spiritual science has always recognized these four members of the human being.

We have to point to the physical body that also has its spiritual primal ground and is only condensed from the spiritual. As well as ice originates from water, the physical originated from the spiritual. We must go far back in the view of the spiritual development if we want to look for the first spiritual origins of the physical human body. This fourth member is absolutely the oldest of the human members. Today the physical body is the densest. It emanated from the spirit in the distant past. It has become denser and denser, has experienced some changes, and has thereby taken on its physical figure. This is the oldest in the human being. A younger member is the etheric body or life body. It came later; hence, it is less condensed. The astral body is even younger.

The ego is the youngest member, the bearer of the human self-awareness. All these members originated from spiritual primal grounds and spiritual beings, from divine-spiritual beings. We can say, spiritual science shows that this ego, by which the human being became the modern self-conscious being, immersed in the body. It was composed, before he became an ego-being, of the physical, etheric and astral bodies. The Bible also distinguishes those beings now who are the creators of these three human members. The teaching of Moses speaks about the creator of the human ego, of the creator of the bearer of the human self-awareness. Hence, the Bible also sees in the God who let the ego flow into the human being, so to speak, that God who was the last to come concerning the evolution of the human being. The divine beings, the Elohim, whom we have strictly distinguished from the God Yahveh or Jehovah, are the creators of the physical, etheric and astral bodies. They are exactly distinguished in the Bible from the God appearing last in our evolution, from the Yahveh God, from that who brought the ego to the human being.

If we ask, where does the human being find the being of this God, this youngest of the creative gods about which the Bible starts speaking in the fourth verse of the second chapter of the Genesis? Spiritual science shows that where the human being finds his ego in himself, which differs so substantially, already after its name, from all other beings round us, that he there finds a drop of this divine being in himself. This is no pantheistic teaching, also no explanation of the fact that the human being has to find his God in himself. Asserting this would be like someone who asserts that a drop of water is the same being like the sea—and says: this drop of water is the sea.

If we speak in the sense of spiritual science, we speak about something infinite, comprising, universal that is connected with the earthly development and the other things that belong to this earthly development. In our ego, we find a spark of this God Yahveh as we find the same being in the drop of water as in the sea. Nevertheless, it was a very long way the human development had to cover, while the God Yahveh started forming the human being in such a way that he could grasp the ego consciously. The strength of the ego had to work in the human being already well before, before he got the consciousness of the ego. Moses became the great precursor bringing the consciousness of the human being to the ego. However, these forces work and form in the human evolution already long before. They form in such a way that we can recognise their way if we deal with the evolution of the human consciousness itself.

Let us look somewhat back in the development of the human consciousness. One uses the word development very often today, but as drastically, as intensely as spiritual science takes the word development seriously, it is the case with no other science. This human consciousness, as it is today, developed from other forms of consciousness. If we go back far to the origin of the human being, not in the sense of materialistic science, but in such a way, as I have explained it the day before yesterday, then we find that the human consciousness appears more and more different, the farther we go back. The consciousness that connects the various intellectual concepts, the external sensory perception in the known way originated firstly, even if in the far-off past, but it originated firstly. We can find a condition of the consciousness at that time, which was completely different from today because memory was completely different in particular. The memory of the modern human being is only a dilapidated rest of an old soul force, which existed quite differently. In old times when the human being did not yet have the inferring force of his today's mind, when he was not yet able to count in the today's sense, when he had not yet developed his intellectual logic, he had another soul force for it: he had developed a universal memory. This had to decrease, had to withdraw, so that at its cost our today's mind could develop. This is generally the way of development that a force takes a backseat, so that the other can appear. Memory is a decreasing force; mind and reason are increasing soul forces.

For those who hear these talks already for some years, it cannot be something especially miraculous what I say now. For the others it will seem absurd if one speaks about the nature of memory in the following way. What is the appearance of the human memory? It is that which remembers yesterday, the day before yesterday and so on, until the childhood. Then, however, it discontinues once. The memory did not stop in old far-off past, not in childhood, not even at birth; but like the modern human being remembers what he himself has experienced in his personal life, the prehistoric human being remembered what his father, his grandfather had experienced through whole generations. Memory was a soul force through generations that extended really. For centuries, memory survived in the old far-off past, and another kind of naming was connected with the different formation of memory.

We come to the question now: why is talk of individuals in the first chapters of the Bible who become hundreds of years old like Adam, Noah? Because it makes no sense to limit these human beings. Memory reached through generations up to the primal father. One gave this whole generation one name. It would have made no sense to give the name Adam to a single person. Thus, in those days one gave the name to that which remembered, holding on the same recollection, for centuries from generation to generation—Adam, Noah. What was this? It was that which goes through father, son and grandson, but maintained recollection. So faithfully, the biblical document maintains these secrets, which one can understand only with the help of spiritual science.

If we look at the consciousness of the ego with which we comprehend the being of the Yahveh God, we see that the ego lives in us between birth and death, and that it maintains its kind between birth and death. Thus, the ego maintained for generations at that time, for centuries. As we speak today about the ego and know that it goes back as far as we can remember, the human being of primeval times said to himself: it makes no sense to call myself an ego. I recall my father, grandfather, and great-grandfather.

His ego went through generations, and it had even a name. As we find an expression of God in our personal ego if we become engrossed in this ego, the ancient human being said to himself, looking up through the generations: God who lives in the ego lives for generations,—as a divinity which then Moses recognised in the higher worlds. The God was the same who lived as an ego from generation to generation in ancient times. One declared as ego, in the parlance of the past, what reproduced as an expression of the Yahveh God, with the Yahveh word “I am the I-am.” Moses learnt to recognise this in his spiritual revelation. In contemplating the burning bush this was revealed for the first time. The same God once lived from generation to generation, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He was the force, which lived in the memory and brought everything at the same time that founded the human order. Thus, we look up at the predecessors of Moses. In the biblical sense, we look up at the patriarchs, at those, in whom the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob lived.

These times needed no external commandments, no external laws. For that lived on with the lively memory, quite different from ours, which one had to do. According to what did one act in these primeval times? If you understand the Bible correctly, you find that the human beings did not act after commandments. One acted after that which memory said to one, what the father, the grandfather et cetera had done. With his blood, the human being got the direction to that which he had to do. In these ancient generations was something like a spiritualised instinct that one can compare with “acting instinctively” as we call it today. Not after a commandment the ancient human being acted, no, he acted after the character of his being, after his type. How did Abraham, Isaac and Jacob act? They acted in such a way as the blood running through generations induced them. They had brought down the God Yahveh with their egos, whether they waged war whether they lived in peace. They had no commandments; they had no law. The spiritualised instinct of God lived in them.

At the time when Moses appeared, the human personality was on the first level of its development. There its consciousness broke away from this common generational consciousness. There the generational memory had already stopped quite thoroughly. There one did no longer have the spiritualised instinct of action. There something else had to replace it. The God of Abraham, of Isaac and Jacob—who in his spiritual physical figure gave Moses the law, the commandments because one did no longer have the spiritualised instinct—had to regulate the external order, the social living together by commandments, by laws. It is the same God who worked before as a natural force, who is now efficient as legislator to found the external order with laws. We see that it has a deep sense to read the words at this point: the God of Abraham, of Isaac and Jacob. The God who calls himself the God “I am the I-am” is the same as the fourth member of the human being, the same who let flow the ego into the human being. However, the human beings could not take up the spiritual nature of the ego in their consciousness. A longer preparation was necessary to it, and this takes place at the time, which is portrayed in the Bible as the Old Testament, at the time of Moses up to the Mystery of Golgotha. Hence, this time is a time of promise, which the new Gospel shows, the beginning of the “time of fulfilment.” The God announces himself to Moses as the “I am the I-am.”

He announces himself in such a way that he orders the external order of the human beings, their living together by laws indirectly by Moses's vision. Humankind lived this way in the pre-Christian time in which the God was creating, in which the Yahveh God was forming, in which the “I am the I-am” lived, in which, however, humankind could not yet live consciously but according to the external law coming from the Yahveh God. More and more the time approached when humankind should become completely aware of the ego. For the whole antiquity, there was only one means for the human beings who could not yet behold, could not yet face God in the physical world. There was only one way how this God could become effective for them. This was the law, the order. This applied to the external world.

Moreover, there was a supersensible way to get to know this God, and these were the mysteries or initiation. What was initiation? Everything that was delivered to certain personalities which were regarded as suitable to apply the methods of spiritual-scientific research to develop the forces and abilities slumbering in the human being, so that they could behold into the spiritual world. Hence, for the confessors of the Old Testament it would be in such a way to behold God spiritually from face to face who lives in the “I-am.” If they applied this method, they were able to see and to hear with spiritual eyes and ears independently what Moses had seen, when the God, the “I-am” gave him his mission. Only in the mysteries, only by initiation this was possible.

However, there were also those who recognised the “I am the I-am,” but they had to go through the procedures, the methods with which the human being is transformed into an instrument of the higher vision, the vision in the spiritual world. So the God who already lived in Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was concealed to the physical world. He ordered the world by law. To the initiate, the secret of the mysteries becomes visible in thinking. Then the time came when the Mystery of Golgotha should take place. What happened there, actually? Imagine what the initiate experienced in the old times. Only sketchily, I can describe the process of initiation by meditation, concentration and the other exercises. The soul of the neophyte was prepared for a long time. Then the processes of initiation were finished during three and a half days. There the sages of initiation prepared the neophyte prepared so far, so that he was transported to a state in which his physical body was completely sleeping. It was not only sleeping but it was like dead, so that the neophyte could not use his physical senses, his physical eyes, and ears. For it, however, he beheld with the organs of his spiritual members into the spiritual worlds. He could perceive there if he was outside his body if he was not connected with the physical organs. Then he could behold what lived invisibly in him as the “I am the I-am;” but he could behold it only in the depths of the mysteries. Then he was awoken—as everybody knows who has experienced these things—in his physical body and used the physical senses again. Now he had the full consciousness: I am the I-am, I was in the spiritual world. What has spoken to Moses, the “I am the I-am” faced me, and it is that which refuses eternity to me, which has entered my body. I was connected with it. I was connected with the divine primal bearer of the I-am whose reflection is my I-am.

Thus, the initiate returned to the physical world and bore witness of the fact that something spiritual exists in the ego, because he had beheld it. He could give his listeners news and message of it. However, one could only behold the “I am the I-am” in the spiritual world. By the event of Golgotha, the same being descended to the human beings who had announced himself by Moses in the burning bush with the words “I am the I-am.” This complies completely with the sense of the John Gospel: the ego became flesh in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, lived in it, and walked around among the human beings. This primal force brought the human being to the height on which he stands today. The primal force became a human being; the human being became a divine being and walked around among the human beings. It was possible that on Golgotha that took place as a historical event within the evolution of humankind, which the initiates could behold only in spirit: the fact that the Christ-being carried off the victory over the death of matter.

This is the historical-external-real fact, which the initiates often experienced in the mysteries. This was the course of initiation in the ancient times in the deep darkness of the mysteries with those who left their physical bodies for three and a half days, walked around in the spiritual world and recognised that a spiritual-divine being descends into the physical world, and that this event would take place once as a historical fact. This was the course of initiation. However, the time came now when humankind came to the event of Golgotha turning emotions, sensations, and thoughts to it by faith.

Then the understanding originated from it. It was something new. One got as something external that one could have, otherwise, only by the rapture in the spiritual world. If one assumes this in such a way, we understand why Christ Jesus says: I am the I-am in a completely new figure. He says, look back at the primeval times, at that which lived as the everlasting in the human being that lived in Abraham, Isaac and Jacob that made known itself then in the Law of Moses. Now the time has come when the ego becomes aware in the single person, when the human being has to become aware in his ego, in the divine living in him.

If it was in the old times in such a way that the human being looked up at the God that he beheld and could say to himself: what lives in me lives for generations,—it is now in such a way that he finds the divine in his ego if he beholds into himself. The divine from which any ego originated was embodied in Jesus of Nazareth, and someone understood this who wrote: In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and God was the word.—By these words, the being of the innermost human nature and at the same time the primary source of this innermost being is meant. He lets Christ Jesus say, what lives in me a spark of which is in every human being existed before the Gospel was.—The significant sentence in the John Gospel was “Before Abraham was, I am.”—Before Abraham was, the “I-am” was, this I-am which is not bound to any time which was before Abraham, was already in the spiritual primeval grounds of the human being. While he calls himself the primary source of this I-am, Christ spoke the significant words: “Before Abraham was, the I-am was.”

Therefore, we realise how the sense of human development, which flows through these fundamental books of humankind, the Old and the New Testaments, is brought back to life again by spiritual science. In addition, we realise how to us the most important words become readable first if we fathom the sense of these books, regardless of the words, with the help of spiritual science. I give an example that gives something to think to the materialistic sense. I would like to remind you of the resurrection of Lazarus. There such a man like Gförer says: who asserts that the John Gospel is not written by John, helps himself saying, the writer wrote down a lot, as he experienced and understood it, but the Lazarus miracle must have been told to him. He cannot have been present.

One must understand the Lazarus miracle only correctly. Let us understand it in such a way that Christ when he entered the world took on the body of Jesus of Nazareth. Let us believe, however, that that which prepared in the Old Testaments became expression in the New Testament. He had to have somebody who could understand him completely, who could penetrate in the deepest sense into what he could announce, and that means that he had to initiate a person in his way.

Initiation stories are told to us secretly at all times. The Lazarus miracle is nothing else than the miraculous and tremendous representation how Christ created the first initiate of the New Testament. Christ waked up Lazarus as an initiate recalled the soul of his pupil to the body who was for three and a half days in a state similar to death, after he had walked around in the spiritual world. Someone can simply see through all that who understands something of it, because it is the language in which generally initiation stories are told. “This illness is not to end in death; through it God's glory is to be revealed and the Son of God is glorified” (John 11:4). This means: external appearance as revelation of the inside; so that one has to translate the sentence in truth: “The illness is not to end in death, but that the God manifests as an external appearance, so that He can also be revealed to the senses.”

In Lazarus slumbers the deeper human being who has the ability and the strength that it could be developed in mysterious way in him, could be led up in the spiritual world, so that he could recognise the being of Christ, the Son of God. However, this strength had to develop first. Christ Jesus developed it in Lazarus, so that the divine that rested in Lazarus could be revealed, and could reveal the Son of God. Christ Jesus created in Lazarus the first to know from own inner observation who Christ Jesus is real. At the same time, this miracle shows—because it is to someone a real miracle who wants to accept the external physical principles only—what the pupil concerned has to go through during the three and a half days. Because this can be compared to a real death since the etheric and the astral bodies are raised out of the physical body and only the physical body lies there.

Thus, we have understood even such a miraculous event like the Lazarus miracle—miraculous only to anyone who cannot explain it out of spiritual science. All that reveals itself to you in the Lazarus miracle if you have the light only, which illuminates it with the words: “His illness is not to end in death but to reveal the inside.”—If these abilities are woken in the human being, it is like a birth. As a child arises from the womb, the higher is born by the lower human being. In the same way, the illness of Lazarus is connected with the birth of the new life, of the divine human being, so that the divine human being is born in the physical human being, in Lazarus.

So we could go through the John Gospel step by step and would experience that that which happens in the spiritual initiation had to be described quite different from that which we see in ancient times when with quite different spiritual powers the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is working. If we look into the Bible in such a way, then it is the high universal book again, which lets shine to us what we have now found ourselves. While we must admit—we can say this—that only someone who has developed the higher spiritual forces can come to this truth, we have also to admit and say—if it faces us in the John Gospel—what brought it in these writings. While a new spiritual researcher approached the Gospel and the whole Bible, he learnt to see this and can say: the human beings will come to the true value of this document and recognise that only a materialistic prejudice can speak the words: “the simple man of Nazareth.” However, because of true knowledge we have recognised Christ as an overwhelming world being living in the body of Jesus of Nazareth.

The first three Gospels appear to us in relation to the John Gospel possibly, as if three persons stand grouped on a slope of a mountain and every reports what he sees. Everybody sees a part. Someone who looks down from the higher vantage point surveys more and portrays more from this higher vantage point. We come to know not only what the others below describe, but also what can make the three understandable at the same time. That is why it is not difficult to say, who stood on the higher vantage point, but for us it is in such a way that the first three writers were also initiates in certain respects. However, the deep initiate, who could write much deeper, could look much deeper than the three others could and about the true spiritual facts of the matters, which lie behind the sensuous, this is the writer of the John Gospel. So the Gospels combine harmoniously and show that the Mystery of Golgotha cannot be understood as a usual historical event, but is only explicable by a process as we find it with Paul, who says: “the life I now live is not my life, but the life Christ lives in me” (Galatians 2:20). What the external research shows beside becomes also important in the spiritual research. If we look at Christianity, it is important to us to figure the clairvoyance of Moses out which is shown to us in the vision of the burning bush. It is this what one had to explain. I have to emphasise that this new spiritual science is able to form the picture of the world events of its own accord, to look at Christ, so to speak, spiritually from face to face and to find Him again and, hence, to find Him truly in the Gospels. That biblical scholarship is not really without presuppositions, which says, we want to investigate the Bible like any other story.

For it assumes the dogma that there can be only usual, sensuous, natural facts. Only spiritual science is really without presuppositions, and this leads to a renewed recognition and high esteem of the Bible in all its parts. A time will come when maybe those are disgruntled who want to say today that only the simple mind is able to grasp the Bible. This wisdom must misjudge the Bible. The time will come when just the wisest wisdom estimates the highest what is given to us in the Bible because clairvoyance will face clairvoyance in the Bible. Then some word, which is written in the New Testament, appears in a new light. It will become apparent that a document like the Bible can lose nothing by impartial research. It would be sad if any research cut this Bible of its reputation, of its name. A research that cuts the Bible of its name has only not come far enough. Research that goes until the end will show the Bible again in its greatness.

The human being is allowed to do research freely. Who has the view that by research religion could perish shows with it only that his piety stands on weak feet. The divine being put the impulse of research in the human being, so that he is active. It would be a sin against this impulse if one did not live researching. I recognise God by my research. God recognises Himself in my research. Truth is a good in the human development from which the religious life will never have anything to fear. However, this is a basic truth, which penetrates the New Testament completely.

You should not take those into accounts who want to keep away the human beings from the Bible because of comfort, and who say, if you come to philosophers and interpret the Bible, these say, they want to know nothing about it.—However, such a research is based on comfort. However, that research is justified and right which says: we cannot go deeply enough to understand what is written in the Bible.—That research in the Bible is the right one that goes into it in free research and then understands the Bible in the right sense. These researchers understand the truth of the biblical saying: “you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:32).

The Mystery of The Ego

Enq. I perceive in the quotation you brought forward a little while ago from the Buddhist Catechism a discrepancy that I would like to hear explained. It is there stated that the Skandhas — memory included — change with every new incarnation. And yet, it is asserted that the reflection of the past lives, which, we are told, are entirely made up of Skandhas, "must survive." At the present moment I am not quite clear in my mind as to what it is precisely that survives, and I would like to have it explained. What is it? Is it only that "reflection," or those Skandhas, or always that same EGO, the Manas?

Theo. I have just explained that the re-incarnating Principle, or that which we call the divine man, is indestructible throughout the life cycle: indestructible as a thinking Entity, and even as an ethereal form. The "reflection" is only the spiritualised remembrance during the Devachanic period, of the ex-personality, Mr. A. or Mrs. B. — with which the Ego identifies itself during that period. Since the latter is but the continuation of the earth-life, so to say, the very acme and pitch, in an unbroken series, of the few happy moments in that now past existence, the Ego has to identify itself with the personal consciousness of that life, if anything shall remain of it.

Enq. This means that the Ego, notwithstanding its divine nature, passes every such period between two incarnations in a state of mental obscuration, or temporary insanity.

Theo. You may regard it as you like. Believing that, outside the ONE Reality, nothing is better than a passing illusion — the whole Universe included — we do not view it as insanity, but as a very natural sequence or development of the terrestrial life. What is life? A bundle of the most varied experiences, of daily changing ideas, emotions, and opinions. In our youth we are often enthusiastically devoted to an ideal, to some hero or heroine whom we try to follow and revive; a few years later, when the freshness of our youthful feelings has faded out and sobered down, we are the first to laugh at our fancies. And yet there was a day when we had so thoroughly identified our own personality with that of the ideal in our mind — especially if it was that of a living being — that the former was entirely merged and lost in the latter. Can it be said of a man of fifty that he is the same being that he was at twenty? The inner man is the same; the outward living personality is completely transformed and changed. Would you also call these changes in the human mental states insanity?

Enq. How would you name them, and especially how would you explain the permanence of one and the evanescence of the other?

Theo. We have our own doctrine ready, and to us it offers no difficulty. The clue lies in the double consciousness of our mind, and also, in the dual nature of the mental "principle." There is a spiritual consciousness, the Manasic mind illumined by the light of Buddhi, that which subjectively perceives abstractions; and the sentient consciousness (the lower Manasic light), inseparable from our physical brain and senses. This latter consciousness is held in subjection by the brain and physical senses, and, being in its turn equally dependent on them, must of course fade out and finally die with the disappearance of the brain and physical senses. It is only the former kind of consciousness, whose root lies in eternity, which survives and lives for ever, and may, therefore, be regarded as immortal. Everything else belongs to passing illusions.

Enq. What do you really understand by illusion in this case?

Theo. It is very well described in the just-mentioned essay on "The Higher Self." Says its author:

"The theory we are considering (the interchange of ideas between the Higher Ego and the lower self) harmonizes very well with the treatment of this world in which we live as a phenomenal world of illusion, the spiritual plane of nature being on the other hand the noumenal world or plane of reality. That region of nature in which, so to speak, the permanent soul is rooted is more real than that in which its transitory blossoms appear for a brief space to wither and fall to pieces, while the plant recovers energy for sending forth a fresh flower. Supposing flowers only were perceptible to ordinary senses, and their roots existed in a state of Nature intangible and invisible to us, philosophers in such a world who divined that there were such things as roots in another plane of existence would be apt to say of the flowers, These are not the real plants; they are of no relative importance, merely illusive phenomena of the moment."

This is what I mean. The world in which blossom the transitory and evanescent flowers of personal lives is not the real permanent world; but that one in which we find the root of consciousness, that root which is beyond illusion and dwells in the eternity.

Enq. What do you mean by the root dwelling in eternity?

Theo. I mean by this root the thinking entity, the Ego which incarnates, whether we regard it as an "Angel," "Spirit," or a Force. Of that which falls under our sensuous perceptions only what grows directly from, or is attached to this invisible root above, can partake of its immortal life. Hence every noble thought, idea and aspiration of the personality it informs, proceeding from and fed by this root, must become permanent. As to the physical consciousness, as it is a quality of the sentient but lower "principle," (Kama-rupa or animal instinct, illuminated by the lower manasic reflection), or the human Soul — it must disappear. That which displays activity, while the body is asleep or paralysed, is the higher consciousness, our memory registering but feebly and inaccurately — because automatically — such experiences, and often failing to be even slightly impressed by them.

Enq. But how is it that MANAS, although you call it Nous, a "God," is so weak during its incarnations, as to be actually conquered and fettered by its body?

Theo. I might retort with the same question and ask: "How is it that he, whom you regard as 'the God of Gods' and the One living God, is so weak as to allow evil (or the Devil) to have the best of him as much as of all his creatures, whether while he remains in Heaven, or during the time he was incarnated on this earth?" You are sure to reply again: "This is a Mystery; and we are forbidden to pry into the mysteries of God." Not being forbidden to do so by our religious philosophy, I answer your question that, unless a God descends as an Avatar, no divine principle can be otherwise than cramped and paralysed by turbulent, animal matter. Heterogeneity will always have the upper hand over homogeneity, on this plane of illusions, and the nearer an essence is to its root-principle, Primordial Homogeneity, the more difficult it is for the latter to assert itself on earth. Spiritual and divine powers lie dormant in every human Being; and the wider the sweep of his spiritual vision the mightier will be the God within him. But as few men can feel that God, and since, as an average rule, deity is always bound and limited in our thought by earlier conceptions, those ideas that are inculcated in us from childhood, therefore, it is so difficult for you to understand our philosophy.

Enq. And is it this Ego of ours which is our God?

Theo. Not at all; "A God" is not the universal deity, but only a spark from the one ocean of Divine Fire. Our God within us, or "our Father in Secret" is what we call the "HIGHER SELF," Atma. Our incarnating Ego was a God in its origin, as were all the primeval emanations of the One Unknown Principle. But since its "fall into Matter," having to incarnate throughout the cycle, in succession, from first to last, it is no longer a free and happy god, but a poor pilgrim on his way to regain that which he has lost. I can answer you more fully by repeating what is said of the INNER MAN in ISIS UNVEILED (Vol. II. 593): —

"From the remotest antiquity mankind as a whole have always been convinced of the existence of a personal spiritual entity within the personal physical man. This inner entity was more or less divine, according to its proximity to the crown. The closer the union the more serene man's destiny, the less dangerous the external conditions. This belief is neither bigotry nor superstition, only an ever-present, instinctive feeling of the proximity of another spiritual and invisible world, which, though it be subjective to the senses of the outward man, is perfectly objective to the inner ego. Furthermore, they believed that there are external and internal conditions which affect the determination of our will upon our actions. They rejected fatalism, for fatalism implies a blind course of some still blinder power. But they believed in destiny or Karma, which from birth to death every man is weaving thread by thread around himself, as a spider does his cobweb; and this destiny is guided by that presence termed by some the guardian angel, or our more intimate astral inner man, who is but too often the evil genius of the man of flesh or the personality. Both these lead on MAN, but one of them must prevail; and from the very beginning of the invisible affray the stern and implacable law of compensation and retribution steps in and takes its course, following faithfully the fluctuating of the conflict. When the last strand is woven, and man is seemingly enwrapped in the net-work of his own doing, then he finds himself completely under the empire of this self-made destiny. It then either fixes him like the inert shell against the immovable rock, or like a feather carries him away in a whirlwind raised by his own actions."

Such is the destiny of the Man — the true Ego, not the Automaton, the shell that goes by that name. It is for him to become the conqueror over matter.

The Complex Nature of Manas

Enq. But you wanted to tell me something of the essential nature of Manas, and of the relation in which the Skandhas of physical man stand to it?

Theo. It is this nature, mysterious, Protean, beyond any grasp, and almost shadowy in its correlations with the other principles, that is most difficult to realise, and still more so to explain. Manas is a "principle," and yet it is an "Entity" and individuality or Ego. He is a "God," and yet he is doomed to an endless cycle of incarnations, for each of which he is made responsible, and for each of which he has to suffer. All this seems as contradictory as it is puzzling; nevertheless, there are hundreds of people, even in Europe, who realise all this perfectly, for they comprehend the Ego not only in its integrity but in its many aspects. Finally, if I would make myself comprehensible, I must begin by the beginning and give you the genealogy of this Ego in a few lines.

Enq. Say on.

Theo. Try to imagine a "Spirit," a celestial Being, whether we call it by one name or another, divine in its essential nature, yet not pure enough to be one with the ALL, and having, in order to achieve this, to so purify its nature as to finally gain that goal. It can do so only by passing individually and personally, i. e., spiritually and physically, through every experience and feeling that exists in the manifold or differentiated Universe. It has, therefore, after having gained such experience in the lower kingdoms, and having ascended higher and still higher with every rung on the ladder of being, to pass through every experience on the human planes. In its very essence it is THOUGHT, and is, therefore, called in its plurality Manasa putra, "the Sons of the (Universal) mind." This individualised "Thought" is what we Theosophists call the real EGO, the thinking Entity imprisoned in a case of flesh and bones. This is surely a Spiritual Entity, not Matter, and such Entities are the incarnating EGOS that inform the bundle of animal matter called mankind, and whose names are Manasa or "Minds." But once imprisoned, or incarnate, their essence becomes dual: that is to say, the rays of the eternal divine Mind, considered as individual entities, assume a two-fold attribute which is (a) their essential inherent characteristic, heaven-aspiring mind (higher Manas), and (b) the human quality of thinking, or animal cogitation, rationalised owing to the superiority of the human brain, the Kama-tending or lower Manas. One gravitates toward Buddhi, the other, tending downward, to the seat of passions and animal desires. The latter have no room in Devachan, nor can they associate with the divine triad which ascends as ONE into mental bliss. Yet it is the Ego, the Manasic Entity, which is held responsible for all the sins of the lower attributes, just as a parent is answerable for the transgressions of his child, so long as the latter remains irresponsible.

Enq. Is this "child" the "personality"?

Theo. It is. When, therefore, it is stated that the "personality" dies with the body it does not state all. The body, which was only the objective symbol of Mr. A. or Mrs. B., fades away with all its material Skandhas, which are the visible expressions thereof. But all that which constituted during life the spiritual bundle of experiences, the noblest aspirations, undying affections, and unselfish nature of Mr. A. or Mrs. B. clings for the time of the Devachanic period to the EGO, which is identified with the spiritual portion of that terrestrial Entity, now passed away out of sight. The ACTOR is so imbued with the role just played by him that he dreams of it during the whole Devachanic night, which vision continues till the hour strikes for him to return to the stage of life to enact another part.

Enq. But how is it that this doctrine, which you say is as old as thinking men, has found no room, say, in Christian theology?

Theo. You are mistaken, it has; only theology has disfigured it out of all recognition, as it has many other doctrines. Theology calls the EGO the Angel that God gives us at the moment of our birth, to take care of our Soul. Instead of holding that "Angel" responsible for the transgressions of the poor helpless "Soul," it is the latter which, according to theological logic, is punished for all the sins of both flesh and mind! It is the Soul, the immaterial breath of God and his alleged creation, which, by some most amazing intellectual jugglery, is doomed to burn in a material hell without ever being consumed (being of "an asbestos-like nature," according to the eloquent and fiery expression of a modern English Tertullian), while the "Angel" escapes scot free, after folding his white pinions and wetting them with a few tears. Aye, these are our "ministering Spirits," the "messengers of mercy" who are sent, Bishop Mant tells us —

"...to fulfil
Good for Salvation's heirs, for us they still
Grieve when we sin, rejoice when we repent;"

Yet it becomes evident that if all the Bishops the world over were asked to define once for all what they mean by Soul and its functions, they would be as unable to do so as to show us any shadow of logic in the orthodox belief!

The Doctrine is Taught in St John's Gospel

Enq. To this the adherents to this belief might answer, that if even the orthodox dogma does promise the impenitent sinner and materialist a bad time of it in a rather too realistic Inferno, it gives them, on the other hand, a chance for repentance to the last minute. Nor do they teach annihilation, or loss of personality, which is all the same.

Theo. If the Church teaches nothing of the kind, on the other hand, Jesus does; and that is something to those, at least, who place Christ higher than Christianity.

Enq. Does Christ teach anything of the sort?

Theo. He does; and every well-informed Occultist and even Kabalist will tell you so. Christ, or the fourth Gospel at any rate, teaches re-incarnation as also the annihilation of the personality, if you but forget the dead letter and hold to the esoteric Spirit. Remember verses I and 2 in chapter xv. of St. John. What does the parable speak about if not of the upper triad in man? Atma is the Husbandman — the Spiritual Ego or Buddhi (Christos) the Vine, while the animal and vital Soul, the personality, is the "branch." "I am the true vine, and my Father is the Husbandman. Every branch in me that beareth not fruit he taketh away . . . As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself except it abide in the vine; no more can ye, except ye abide in me. I am the Vine — ye are the branches. If a man abide not in me he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered and cast into the fire and burned."

Now we explain it in this way. Disbelieving in the hell-fires which theology discovers as underlying the threat to the branches, we say that the "Husbandman" means Atma, the Symbol for the infinite, impersonal Principle, while the Vine stands for the Spiritual Soul, Christos, and each "branch" represents a new incarnation. (During the Mysteries, it is the Hierophant, the "Father," who planted the Vine. Every symbol has Seven Keys to it. The discloser of the Pleroma was always called "Father.")

Enq. But what proofs have you to support such an arbitrary interpretation?

Theo. Universal symbology is a warrant for its correctness and that it is not arbitrary. Hermas says of "God" that he "planted the Vineyard," i. e., he created mankind. In the Kabala, it is shown that the Aged of the Aged, or the "Long Face," plants a vineyard, the latter typifying mankind; and a vine, meaning Life. The Spirit of "King Messiah" is, therefore, shown as washing his garments in the wine from above, from the creation of the world. (Zohar XL., 10.) And King Messiah is the EGO purified by washing his garments (i. e., his personalities in re-birth), in the wine from above, or BUDDHI. Adam, or A-Dam, is "blood." The Life of the flesh is in the blood (nephesh — soul), Leviticus xvii. And Adam-Kadmon is the Only-Begotten. Noah also plants a vineyard — the allegorical hot-bed of future humanity. As a consequence of the adoption of the same allegory, we find it reproduced in the Nazarene Codex. Seven vines are procreated — which seven vines are our Seven Races with their seven Saviours or Buddhas — which spring from Iukabar Zivo, and Ferho (or Parcha) Raba waters them. (Codex Nazaraes, Vol. III., pp. 60, 61.) When the blessed will ascend among the creatures of Light, they shall see Iavar-Xivo, Lord of LIFE, and the First VINE. (Ibid., Vol. II., p. 281.) These kabalistic metaphors are thus naturally repeated in the Gospel according to St. John (xv., 1).

Let us not forget that in the human system — even according to those philosophies which ignore our septenary division — the EGO or thinking man is called the Logos, or the Son of King of Soul and Queen of Spirit. "Manas is the adopted Son of King — and Queen —" (esoteric equivalents for Atma and Buddhi), says an occult work. He is the "man-god" of Plato, who crucifies himself in Space (or the duration of the life cycle) for the redemption of MATTER. This he does by incarnating over and over again, thus leading mankind onward to perfection, and making thereby room for lower forms to develop into higher. Not for one life does he cease progressing himself and helping all physical nature to progress; even the occasional, very rare event of his losing one of his personalities, in the case of the latter being entirely devoid of even a spark of spirituality, helps toward his individual progress.

Enq. But surely, if the Ego is held responsible for the transgressions of its personalities, it has to answer also for the loss, or rather the complete annihilation, of one of such.

Theo. Not at all, unless it has done nothing to avert this dire fate. But if, all its efforts notwithstanding, its voice, that of our conscience, was unable to penetrate through the wall of matter, then the obtuseness of the latter proceeding from the imperfect nature of the material is classed with other failures of nature. The Ego is sufficiently punished by the loss of Devachan, and especially by having to incarnate almost immediately.

Enq. This doctrine of the possibility of losing one's soul — or personality, do you call it? — militates against the ideal theories of both Christians and Spiritualists, though Swedenborg adopts it to a certain extent, in what he calls Spiritual death. They will never accept it.

Theo. This can in no way alter a fact in nature, if it be a fact, or prevent such a thing occasionally taking place. The universe and everything in it, moral, mental, physical, psychic, or Spiritual, is built on a perfect law of equilibrium and harmony. As said before (vide Isis Unveiled), the centripetal force could not manifest itself without the centrifugal in the harmonious revolutions of the spheres, and all forms and their progress are the products of this dual force in nature. Now the Spirit (or Buddhi) is the centrifugal and the soul (Manas) the centripetal spiritual energy; and to produce one result they have to be in perfect union and harmony. Break or damage the centripetal motion of the earthly soul tending toward the centre which attracts it; arrest its progress by clogging it with a heavier weight of matter than it can bear, or than is fit for the Devachanic state, and the harmony of the whole will be destroyed. Personal life, or perhaps rather its ideal reflection, can only be continued if sustained by the two-fold force, that is by the close union of Buddhi and Manas in every re-birth or personal life. The least deviation from harmony damages it; and when it is destroyed beyond redemption the two forces separate at the moment of death. During a brief interval the personal form (called indifferently Kama rupa and Mayavi rupa), the spiritual efflorescence of which, attaching itself to the Ego, follows it into Devachan and gives to the permanent individuality its personal colouring (pro tem., so to speak), is carried off to remain in Kamaloka and to be gradually annihilated. For it is after the death of the utterly depraved, the unspiritual and the wicked beyond redemption, that arrives the critical and supreme moment. If during life the ultimate and desperate effort of the INNER SELF (Manas), to unite something of the personality with itself and the high glimmering ray of the divine Buddhi, is thwarted; if this ray is allowed to be more and more shut out from the ever-thickening crust of physical brain, the Spiritual EGO or Manas, once freed from the body, remains severed entirely from the ethereal relic of the personality; and the latter, or Kama rupa, following its earthly attractions, is drawn into and remains in Hades, which we call the Kamaloka. These are "the withered branches" mentioned by Jesus as being cut off from the Vine. Annihilation, however, is never instantaneous, and may require centuries sometimes for its accomplishment. But there the personality remains along with the remnants of other more fortunate personal Egos, and becomes with them a shell and an Elementary. As said in Isis, it is these two classes of "Spirits," the shells and the Elementaries, which are the leading "Stars" on the great spiritual stage of "materialisations." And you may be sure of it, it is not they who incarnate; and, therefore, so few of these "dear departed ones" know anything of re-incarnation, misleading thereby the Spiritualists.

Enq. But does not the author of "Isis Unveiled" stand accused of having preached against re-incarnation?

Theo. By those who have misunderstood what was said, yes. At the time that work was written, re-incarnation was not believed in by any Spiritualists, either English or American, and what is said there of re-incarnation was directed against the French Spiritists, whose theory is as unphilosophical and absurd as the Eastern teaching is logical and self-evident in its truth. The Re-incarnationists of the Allan Kardec School believe in an arbitrary and immediate re-incarnation. With them, the dead father can incarnate in his own unborn daughter, and so on. They have neither Devachan, Karma, nor any philosophy that would warrant or prove the necessity of consecutive re-births. But how can the author of "Isis" argue against Karmic re-incarnation, at long intervals varying between 1,000 and 1,500 years, when it is the fundamental belief of both Buddhists and Hindus?

Enq. Then you reject the theories of both the Spiritists and the Spiritualists, in their entirety?

Theo. Not in their entirety, but only with regard to their respective fundamental beliefs. Both rely on what their "Spirits" tell them; and both disagree as much with each other as we Theosophists disagree with both. Truth is one; and when we hear the French spooks preaching re-incarnation, and the English spooks denying and denouncing the doctrine, we say that either the French or the English "Spirits" do not know what they are talking about. We believe with the Spiritualists and the Spiritists in the existence of "Spirits," or invisible Beings endowed with more or less intelligence. But, while in our teachings their kinds and genera are legion, our opponents admit of no other than human disembodied "Spirits," which, to our knowledge, are mostly Kamalokic SHELLS.

Enq. You seem very bitter against Spirits. As you have given me your views and your reasons for disbelieving in the materialization of, and direct communication in seances, with the disembodied spirits — or the "spirits of the dead" — would you mind enlightening me as to one more fact? Why are some Theosophists never tired of saying how dangerous is intercourse with spirits, and mediumship? Have they any particular reason for this?

Theo. We must suppose so. I know I have. Owing to my familiarity for over half a century with these invisible, yet but too tangible and undeniable "influences," from the conscious Elementals, semi-conscious shells, down to the utterly senseless and nondescript spooks of all kinds, I claim a certain right to my views.

Enq. Can you give an instance or instances to show why these practices should be regarded as dangerous?

Theo. This would require more time than I can give you. Every cause must be judged by the effects it produces. Go over the history of Spiritualism for the last fifty years, ever since its reappearance in this century in America — and judge for yourself whether it has done its votaries more good or harm. Pray understand me. I do not speak against real Spiritualism, but against the modern movement which goes under that name, and the so-called philosophy invented to explain its phenomena.

Enq. Don't you believe in their phenomena at all?

Theo. It is because I believe in them with too good reason, and (save some cases of deliberate fraud) know them to be as true as that you and I live, that all my being revolts against them. Once more I speak only of physical, not mental or even psychic phenomena. Like attracts like. There are several high-minded, pure, good men and women, known to me personally, who have passed years of their lives under the direct guidance and even protection of high "Spirits," whether disembodied or planetary. But these Intelligences are not of the type of the John Kings and the Ernests who figure in seance rooms. These Intelligences guide and control mortals only in rare and exceptional cases to which they are attracted and magnetically drawn by the Karmic past of the individual. It is not enough to sit "for development" in order to attract them. That only opens the door to a swarm of "spooks," good, bad and indifferent, to which the medium becomes a slave for life. It is against such promiscuous mediumship and intercourse with goblins that I raise my voice, not against spiritual mysticism. The latter is ennobling and holy; the former is of just the same nature as the phenomena of two centuries ago, for which so many witches and wizards have been made to suffer. Read Glanvil and other authors on the subject of witchcraft, and you will find recorded there the parallels of most, if not all, of the physical phenomena of nineteenth century "Spiritualism."

Enq. Do you mean to suggest that it is all witchcraft and nothing more?

Theo. What I mean is that, whether conscious or unconscious, all this dealing with the dead is necromancy, and a most dangerous practice. For ages before Moses such raising of the dead was regarded by all the intelligent nations as sinful and cruel, inasmuch as it disturbs the rest of the souls and interferes with their evolutionary development into higher states. The collective wisdom of all past centuries has ever been loud in denouncing such practices. Finally, I say, what I have never ceased repeating orally and in print for fifteen years: While some of the so-called "spirits" do not know what they are talking about, repeating merely — like poll-parrots — what they find in the mediums' and other people's brains, others are most dangerous, and can only lead one to evil. These are two self-evident facts. Go into spiritualistic circles of the Allan Kardec school, and you find "spirits" asserting re-incarnation and speaking like Roman Catholics born. Turn to the "dear departed ones" in England and America, and you will hear them denying re-incarnation through thick and thin, denouncing those who teach it, and holding to Protestant views. Your best, your most powerful mediums, have all suffered in health of body and mind. Think of the sad end of Charles Foster, who died in an asylum, a raving lunatic; of Slade, an epileptic; of Eglinton — the best medium now in England — subject to the same. Look back over the life of D. D. Home, a man whose mind was steeped in gall and bitterness, who never had a good word to say of anyone whom he suspected of possessing psychic powers, and who slandered every other medium to the bitter end. This Calvin of Spiritualism suffered for years from a terrible spinal disease, brought on by his intercourse with the "spirits," and died a perfect wreck. Think again of the sad fate of poor Washington Irving Bishop. 1 knew him in New York, when he was fourteen, and he was undeniably a medium. It is true that the poor man stole a march on his "spirits," and baptised them "unconscious muscular action," to the great gaudium of all the corporations of highly learned and scientific fools, and to the replenishment of his own pocket. But de mortuis nit nisi bonum; his end was a sad one. He had strenuously concealed his epileptic fits — the first and strongest symptom of genuine mediumship — and who knows whether he was dead or in a trance when the post-mortem examination was performed? His relatives insist that he was alive, if we are to believe Reuter's telegrams. Finally, behold the veteran mediums, the founders and prime movers of modern spiritualism — the Fox sisters. After more than forty years of intercourse with the "Angels," the latter have led them to become incurable sots, who are now denouncing, in public lectures, their own life-long work and philosophy as a fraud. What kind of spirits must they be who prompted them, I ask you?

Enq. But is your inference a correct one?

Theo. What would you infer if the best pupils of a particular school of singing broke down from overstrained sore throats? That the method followed was a bad one. So I think the inference is equally fair with regard to Spiritualism when we see their best mediums fall a prey to such a fate. We can only say: — Let those who are interested in the question judge the tree of Spiritualism by its fruits, and ponder over the lesson. We Theosophists have always regarded the Spiritualists as brothers having the same mystic tendency as ourselves, but they have always regarded us as enemies. We, being in possession of an older philosophy, have tried to help and warn them; but they have repaid us by reviling and traducing us and our motives in every possible way. Nevertheless, the best English Spiritualists say just as we do, wherever they treat of their belief seriously. Hear "M. A. Oxon." confessing this truth: "Spiritualists are too much inclined to dwell exclusively on the intervention of external spirits in this world of ours, and to ignore the powers of the incarnate Spirit." (Second Sight, "Introduction.") Why vilify and abuse us, then, for saying precisely the same? Henceforward, we will have nothing more to do with Spiritualism. And now let us return to Re-incarnation.

I will have to organize the reflections we are now cultivating here in such a way that today I present the arguments developed yesterday in a broader way, in order to then come to a certain preliminary conclusion tomorrow. Therefore, today's lecture will have more of an episode to it.

In the present, one has a great deal of reason to reflect on this or that, including current events, if one does not intend to oversleep the most important impulses of our time. Particularly striking in the present, and, I would say, challenging questions is the phenomenon, which is well known to you, that in the broadest sense, the most monstrous dishonesty has taken hold in this present time, that precisely where the comprehensive plays out today, dishonesty is present. Such things, such an effective and drastic occurrence of untruthfulness, then also prompts spiritual scientific investigation into all kinds of related matters. And there, one can say, one often encounters in particular the fact, which I have also touched on here several times, that what is usually communicated as human history is a kind of fable convenante. It is not so much a matter of the facts that are communicated not being considered correct to a certain extent, but other facts – you will recall that I recently discussed here how the most profound influences of a person from Roman history have simply been erased – they are simply erased. The Church has erased an enormous amount of facts from history because it was important to the Church that certain facts not come to the knowledge of men.

Yesterday, we again spoke from one point of view about the period that introduced the Greco-Latin cultural period, about the important period in the 8th century BC. It is a time from which not much of the historical traditions speak. The historical traditions are already very, very uncertain, but a personality shines out from the beginning of this epoch, who has wrested considerations of the most diverse kind from very, very many people. The name of Pyzbagoras stands out from the time of origin, that is, after the 8th century BC, and with it the name of the Pythagorean School. And yesterday I pointed out what Pythagoras was able to receive from the remnants of the ancient Egyptian mystery truths, what these things were that Pythagoras was able to receive.

Now it is not only interesting to look at what Pythagoras and his students said and did, which was very incisive, because they not only developed a teaching activity, but also an extensive political activity. What Pythagoras and his students did is interesting, but it is also significant to consider the world that, in a sense, surrounds this Pythagorean activity, the world from which later Greek culture also grew, which had already absorbed a certain influence of that which, illuminated by special splendor, one finds in Pythagoras. If we take the life that later developed into Greek and Latin, in the 7th, 6th, and 5th centuries BCE, and we locate it on the Greek peninsula and the neighboring countries and the Italian peninsula, then, if you look at things not in terms of historical fable convenue, but if you look at them in the light of truth - and spiritual scientific research must always contribute to this - you will notice that one characteristic of humanity was very widespread in this life. There was hardly a time when so much lying occurred as during this period in the Mediterranean countries. The lies that people told one another were a very striking characteristic of the whole of that life out of which the later Greek and Roman civilizations developed.

There is no need to deceive ourselves in such matters. All that we see developing in Roman civilization—the tremendous beauty, the admirable sum of imaginative creations of Greece, the greatest sum of abstractions that the world has ever seen— , all of this grows out of the same soil as the plant world grows out of fertilizer, out of a soil that extends over the Mediterranean countries, out of a soil that is inhabited by people who are full of the addiction, the passion of lying. This is something that is not emphasized by history, but it must be understood if one wants to properly understand the declining third post-Atlantic cultural period. We are dealing with the declining third post-Atlantic cultural period, coming from earlier centuries and millennia to the eighth century BC. And the people who were the cultural bearers of the declining third post-Atlantic cultural period were essentially great liars. This is also the epoch in which the ability I spoke to you about yesterday developed in a very special way, and which is so extraordinarily interesting: the ability to form language out of the cosmic of reason. And the greatest talent was present precisely at that time, in addition to such things as I discussed yesterday in the great addiction to lying.

In these matters, one must not be deceived if one wants to see reality, just as one must not be deceived about the fact that the violet, which blossoms in spring, will wither away again and already carries within itself the forces of the ephemeral while it blossoms beautifully and gloriously. In the violet, one has, so to speak, successive formative and destructive forces. In human life, especially in the great life of humanity, we see this very, very often, even at the same time. We do not grasp reality if we do not grasp the necessity for such things to develop side by side: evolution and devolution, the possibility of having a constructive effect, as in the formation of language, for example, and at the same time that devastating effect, which has a destructive effect on spiritual life.

This is, so to speak, the other side of what I discussed with you yesterday. There is also a bright side. This bright side is of an even more spiritual-scientific nature. I already pointed out yesterday that it would not be possible to speak with such certainty about the things of language formation that we discussed yesterday if the life of man after death did not give one clear proof of it, in that what is composed here in life, for example, from individual word atoms or parts of words, is in turn dissolved. And this disintegration of words, this atomization of words, plays a significant role in the life of the dead. In a sense, the dead person lives from this atomization of words. And the dead person has the most definite feeling that he was cut off from the spiritual world in which he finds himself after his death by forming words out of sounds, out of letters, during his life, that is, before his death. The dead person has the feeling that language is, so to speak, a carpet that was laid in front of the spiritual world during life. And in the disentanglement of this carpet, in the disintegration of words, he has the feeling that he is now entering the spiritual world again. Therefore, one of the characteristics of the dead person is to dissolve, to pull apart, to disintegrate into their component parts the human passions that the person in question has encountered during the time between birth and death. The dead person, for instance, experiences a very solemn, great feeling when he succeeds in acquiring a certain understanding through such dissolution. I have often told you that the moment of death is, in a way, something frightening for the life here in the physical body. People also like to turn their faces away from death. After death the vision of death is always there – I have emphasized this often enough – but it does not mean anything terrible then; but by looking at his own death from the other side of life, there is always the certainty in this vision that he is an ego and remains an ego. I have emphasized this often.

But now it is a matter for the 'dead man to understand that which is revealed to him in the sight of death from the other side of life. He understands this better and better by the fact that, depending on whether he has spoken this or that language, he dissolves these or those words. The ancient Hebrews, and to a certain extent the Romans, had their so-called sacred name, the unutterable name of God, Yahweh. For the Hebrews, this unutterable name consisted of a certain combination of sounds that we perceive as five vowels, which were thought of as connected during physical life. Even in the Roman Jovis, Jupiter, only another form of the name of Jahwe is hidden; fundamentally, in relation to the five vowels, it is connected in a certain way in Jovis. In the dissolution of that which was connected here in this name of God, the dead man lived, and by dissolving the vowels that were composed in life, the meaning of death was also revealed to him at the same time, one could say. One must only try to fathom the revelation of this meaning of death in the right way. One must understand that this meaning of death is revealed to the dead through the dissolution of the holy name into its components, which then fade away and fade away into the world. The dissolution of this holy name is connected with the understanding of the spiritualization of death. It is a concept that is extremely difficult to describe. Death, viewed from the other side, can be called spiritualization. By looking at death from the other side, this sight is connected with the emergence of spirituality. And in the dissection of the word after the vowels, the spiritual reveals itself out of the decay that death signifies. Decay is at the same time the birth of the spiritual, the emergence of the spiritual. While we perceive decay in an unpleasant way, as something ugly, like any destruction, when seen from the other side, this destruction reveals itself as a spiritual illumination, which is then understood in the fading away. It is as if the sacred word resounded and radiated far and wide, and in radiating out dissolved into its vocalic components, which are then audible as if coming from the periphery of the world, and then make audible the meaning of death, the spiritual meaning of death.

This will already suggest to you that it is justified, just as one speaks of the members of human nature here in life – physical body, etheric body, astral body and I – to speak of the members of human nature that human nature has between death and a new birth. For inasmuch as I have, as it were, presented to you the central phenomenon that man continually has between death and a new birth, this unveiling of the spiritual meaning of death itself, the question must arise: What does this world, which is said to be revealed to people after death, actually look like? But this cannot be grasped other than by getting to know something of the nature and essence of the human being itself.

Today, let us first try to describe the dead in the same way as one would otherwise describe the living. We can begin with that part of the dead person that still has a great deal of connection – not kinship, but connection – with what a person experiences here between birth and death. So we are dealing here with the first part of human nature, which we can also call the ego, as we call, so to speak, the highest part of human nature between birth and death. We shall now omit the fact that immediately after death it still has the cover of the etheric body, which is then detached, and still has the cover of the astral body, which is also detached over time; these are components that, so to speak, do not belong. When we speak of the dead person, the only thing that can be recognized as the dead person's very own element is the ego. I said that there is a connection with the ego of earthly life, but not an actual kinship; for in fact, after death, this ego presents itself in a completely different way than the ego is experienced between birth and death. Between birth and death, the ego is, so to speak, something fluid, something that feels the power to change every day. Just think how terrible it would be in your physical life between birth and death if you were unable to grasp the thought: I did something bad yesterday, but I can make amends for it, I can do something good in return. Or if you, even younger, would have to say: I have learned little, but I cannot learn anything new. At no moment in life between birth and 'death is the ego so fixed that it could not, so to speak, be changed from within by its own willpower. That which you experience as the ego after death is something that has become fixed, that has taken on certain characteristics that cannot be changed immediately; it remains as it is. The transformation of the ego, which is in a state of constant flux during life between birth and death, into a fixed entity in which nothing can change, and which remains as it has formed itself during life, is the essential thing that must be grasped in order to understand this ego after death. There can be no question of development after death, which we must indeed speak of for the ego between birth and death. After death, the ego is, so to speak, a fixed spiritual entity that arises out of the vision of death itself, and nothing about this ego can be changed. One could say, if one wanted to express this matter in a more or less banal way: after death, man is condemned to view all the details of his life as something fixed. Just as you, when you look over a field, see the nearby plantings and the distant plantings next to each other, and as you see nothing fluid in them, but a fixed, extensive, and enduring structure, so you see the whole course of your course of your life, but not in such a way that what is in front is always obliterated by what is behind, as it is in the life of the physical body. You see it as a permanent, concrete field in which you cannot change anything at first merely by looking at it. It would also be bad for the dead person if that were not the case; for his gaze, the gaze of the dead person, is actually primarily absorbed by this ego. He is as if transfixed in this ego. And if this ego were to disappear, it would be for the dead person just as if the surrounding world of the senses were to disappear for the living. The individual human being in his ego is actually, if I may express it thus, as important to himself — but in saying this we are speaking an important truth — as the whole world of the senses, which we as human beings have in common, is for the human being here in physical life. A tremendous abyss would open up, an abyss of nothingness, if we were not able to see the frozen ego, the ego frozen from the liquid state, after death.

Secondly, we have a kind of spiritual being that we can also call a spirit self by analogy with what we already know. So, as the second link of the human being after death, we have a kind of spiritual being. This spiritual being is mainly perceived by the human being in such a way that this awareness of the spirit self arises from within. While the I presents a kind of external view, the consciousness of this spirit self arises from within. And to the same extent that one feels that this spirit self comes to life, to the same extent the beings of the higher hierarchies emerge from consciousness so that one knows that they are there. I call this, therefore, the spirit-self. I must define it exactly as I now write it on the blackboard, otherwise I would be writing something inaccurate for you.

What I have written now gives the facts quite correctly. You have the feeling that there is a being from the hierarchy of the Angeloi, from the hierarchy of the exusiai, that is now directing its gaze to your ego. By directing your gaze to the I, either through some being of a hierarchy or through the fact that you know that your gaze is now directed to the I through a being of the other hierarchy, you get to know this hierarchy within the activity of your spiritual self. So you get to know the hierarchies through your own activity. Through your spiritual self you begin to find yourself in the company of the hierarchies. And while before this spirit self lights up, you still have the feeling that only you are dealing with it, directing your gaze at your own ego, you get the feeling more and more clearly that more and more entities of the higher hierarchies are taking care of you and interfering with your looking, directing your gaze. By developing your higher sensory activity, you feel more and more that the beings of the higher hierarchies are co-operating with you in this sensory activity. What would be unbearable for a person in the sense world here, becomes the very element of life for a person in the state after death.

Imagine you are standing here at the window looking out and observing the surroundings. One of you stands there and wants to look at the surroundings, and the first person sitting here goes over, turns your head to one side so that you look at something in that direction; a second person goes over, turns your head up a little so that you look at something else; a third person in turn a little around, so that you look at something else, and so the whole company sitting here would approach you from behind, and you would only have the aspect of your surroundings outside in that what is sitting here inside would constantly turn your head towards it. Do not think of this now from the outside, but as an inner experience, as an inner feeling. Then you have something that is quite analogous to this experience, which you have as your spiritual self. You become more and more immersed in the life of the higher hierarchies by the fact that these higher hierarchies come into your line of vision.

In the dissolution of words, of which we have already spoken, the beings of the higher hierarchies are already at work. That is one aspect of what is experienced. But it is the continuous enrichment of life that arises from gradually becoming more and more familiar with the hierarchies. And in a very similar way, one becomes acquainted with the beings with whom one has been somehow karmically connected before death. And there one feels that one is, so to speak, guided and directed. That is what can be said about the second link of the human being in the life between death and a new birth.

The third link is something that might at first seem a little shocking to a person's understanding. One gradually feels, by living into this life after death, permeated by a certain power, I might perhaps say, by a context of powers. By first feeling that the hierarchies approach and guide one in the supersensible activity of the senses – if I may use the expression – one gradually feels that these hierarchies imbue one with power and give one power. One gradually feels filled with this power, which the hierarchies infuse along with themselves, by implanting themselves in one, by instilling their nature in one. One feels this power gradually. One feels that one is not only directed by the hierarchies to this or that, but one feels that one oneself becomes inwardly filled with power through this activity of the hierarchies, which initially appears as an activity that mediates vision. One feels the forces of the cosmos, really the cosmos within oneself, flowing in like invigorating juices. But now, what is shocking, is that the forces that one now feels flowing into oneself are of a very peculiar kind. They are forces that are not at all constructive at first, but rather dissolving and destructive for what we call life here in the physical world. One gradually feels filled with cosmic, death-bringing world power.

It is important to take in such strange ideas, because only in this way can the spiritual world be truly understood. Imagine for a moment that you, in your spiritual and soul essence, are gradually filled with forces, by becoming aware of them within yourself: Through these powers, everything that lives here on earth would be killed if you were to touch it. — So, thirdly, you clothe yourself in what I can call, in analogy to something we already know, the spirit of life. You clothe yourself in something that can be called the spirit of life, but which derives its main properties from the fact that it is deadly to that which can otherwise be called the power of the life body. And you acquire a third link to your being, through which you are able to kill any etheric body that comes your way. Everything you touch through this link of your being becomes dead in the sense in which one speaks of death here on earth. And by killing through the powers you receive, you awaken spiritual substance from what you have killed, initially actually soul substance. It is a remarkable experience, which consists in the fact that through the touch of the living, the living is killed, but from this killing, soul-like arises, soul-like is released. It is a killing, but at the same time it is a release of the soul-like from the bonds of life. So that one can say: The spirit of life kills earthly life, releasing the soul in it. And one comes to this strange experience through the fact that in life, in the living, the soul is, as it were, enchanted, and that through this process, which is practiced after death, the enchanted soul is released from the living. One might be inclined to see something terrible and unappealing in the killing, in which, after all, the power we are talking about essentially works. This is not the case for life after death, because in killing, in the killing power, lies the continuous illumination of the soul, because through this the continuous arising of the soul is ignited. But the dead must be aware of this: not only must he always look to the death he himself has undergone, but he must also be aware that what is the essence of his death, so to speak, spreads over the foundation of everything he now experiences in the spiritual world. It is as if one now lived in the spiritual world in such a way that one can say: Here in this spiritual world, spiritual forms arise continually, initially actually soul forms; the soul shines forth in the most diverse ways. But if one were to inquire what the soil is from which all these soul forms sprout, it is this killing power that we have just discussed. So this life-destroying power, which is found here on earth, is our essential soul, which we have to acquire between death and a new birth, just as we have to acquire our physical body here in life.

As a fourth link, I can say, again in analogy to what we already know: the spiritual man. This spiritual man is felt to be something that one is inclined to count towards oneself in the time between death and a new birth, in that now, with the forces that are already being instilled through the hierarchies, as I have described, the possibility is now instilled in one, not only to kill, destroy, dissolve life - what one calls life here on earth - but also to destroy forms or to transform them into others. [It is written on the blackboard:]

1. The ego
2. The spiritual self
3. The spirit of life
4. The spiritual man.

directed by the hierarchies to the ego kills earthly life, releasing the soul in him.

It is naturally becoming more and more difficult to describe these things. But essentially the power of this spiritual man, as one has it between death and a new birth, consists in doing the opposite activity - if I may express it this way - of all that could be called: producing forms in the broadest sense. Here, if I want to concentrate on a specific example, I draw triangles, squares, and so on. After death, by virtue of the forces that are developed here, one 'redraws', one dissolves all that has been drawn, the forms. But the peculiar thing is that this does not just mean that one redraws something, but that at the same time it is a cosmic activity. One is now part of the cosmic activity, one is linked to the cosmic activity. For this dis-forming, this dis-solving of forms, is a cosmic activity, and man, by acquiring, after being imbued with the spirit of life, this power of dis-solving, has become part of the cosmic world. He works within the cosmos.

What we call destruction and downfall here on earth has a lot to do with formation and development in the spiritual worlds, and vice versa. What appears here as destruction, as demise, as a dissolving of forms and signs, has much to do with the genesis in the other, in the spiritual worlds. So that when I speak of dissolving of forms and signs, I am not speaking of demise in the spiritual world, but only of demise in the soul world, whereas I am speaking of the emergence of spiritual novelty in the spiritual world.

These things are connected with many secrets in the world. Today they approach southern Italy from central Italy; as you approach southern Italy, you come to areas that are poor, not particularly fertile, where few natural resources are available to people. These are the same areas where Pythagoras worked at the time of the rising of the fourth post-Atlantic period. And Pythagoras' effectiveness was at that time in the midst of the most fertile, richest, lushest areas. As short as the time has been since that epoch: by pointing out this very spot on earth where Phythagoras worked, one has transformed the transformation from a fertility and lushness that went to the degree of Sybatis, the Sybaris into poverty, even to the emergence of worrying disease phenomena. In place of the burgeoning, abundant life that existed in those times, of which only a little history remains, something develops that, compared to that abundant, burgeoning life, is also a poverty of nature. And it is really most interesting to observe such transitions in the outer world. In this outer world, the process of becoming is constantly giving rise to decay. People, in their historical research, do not think far enough to properly link the continuous process of becoming with decay. In the midst of the luxuriant abundance, in which there was a great deal of lying, Pythagoras developed his activity, and this activity continued after his death. And that which Pythagoras and the Pythagorean souls had to do after death is in many ways connected with what manifested itself in the decline of the flourishing, sprouting life in the midst of which Pythagoras was. Pythagoras and the souls of his followers were not entirely uninvolved in the work of destruction that took place in the post-Pythagorean period. And if you want to understand the world as a whole, you just have to realize that from the different aspects here between birth and death and between death and new birth, things look quite different. He who would commit an outrage if he were to artificially undermine abundant, burgeoning life here is, as it were, only doing something that happens in the sense of eternal necessity when he participates in such a work in the life between death and new birth, which here obviously means destruction.

With the third post-Atlantic period, something should also perish, and that left its shadows. Much should perish in a different area than the one just discussed. And it is essentially connected with this decline of the third post-Atlantean epoch that there was so much lying at that time. People lied on earth because, as I explained to you yesterday, they were still in contact with the cosmic powers. But the cosmic powers that were involved in the evolution of the earth before the 8th century BC were often lying powers. Demonic liars were active in the sphere into which the human being's soul developed by developing words in the way I discussed yesterday. He had to, as it were, plunge the head of his soul into a sphere in which he could do so: the sphere of cosmic reason. But when he put the head of his soul into it, there was in it that Ahrimanic power, which expressed itself in the activity of innumerable demons of lies. And out of this same source, out of which the speech-forming power of that time was drawn, out of the same power developed on the soil of Mediterranean culture this enormous power, this gigantic power of lying. Men lied because the demons who were connected with those other demons who inspired the speech-forming faculty were liars. And these demonic liars, who were of an Ahrimanic nature, had the task of bringing to destruction that which had to be destroyed in order that the third post-Atlantean period might go down and the fourth post-Atlantean period might come up.

The world is organized according to necessity, and one must look to this necessity if one wants to answer the great question that we posed yesterday at the beginning of our reflections, the great question of the connection between the moral and the ideal with the natural event. I will talk about this further tomorrow, in order to bring these reflections to a small conclusion for the time being.

Dear friends,

We must now go on from the knowledge we have gained in one direction, of individuals who, although not exactly having intuition, do develop a perception of the spiritual world and who show certain aspects of behavior that to a physician may seem to be pathological but are in fact something quite different, something more. For as you have seen, the pathological condition remains with them in statu nascendi and there is continuous healing coming from the spirit. This is the case with such personalities as St. Teresa and Mechthild of Magdeburg,⁵ as well as with male visionaries.

When we study these individuals, we find that as a first stage the ego organization separates from the rest of the human organism. It then draws the astral body closely to it, in a certain sense away from the physical-etheric organism. This is in the waking state. What is the consequence of this? You can easily see that this puts the individual into a kind of dream condition. From a spiritual-scientific point of view the ego, by drawing the astral body to itself, is not allowing it to enter the physical and etheric bodies completely, and this brings about a kind of dream condition. But because of the special karmic density, both ego and astral body are strong, and they bring into the dream condition receptivity for the perception of the spiritual world. Dream is transformed into a state in which the individual is really able to see into the spiritual world and to feel the presence of spiritual beings.

Now let us look at the extreme opposite condition. Here the ego is weak, and the astral body draws it down too strongly into the rest of the organism—again in the waking state. Then there is not illumination, as with visionaries like St. Teresa, but the opposite: a darkening, a clouding, a lowering of consciousness—in the waking state—to a dream condition.

One cannot learn to know this second type of person in the way I have indicated for the first type. Individuals who feel the presence of spiritual beings, who come to such final stages as St. Teresa or Mechthild of Magdeburg, are much more numerous than one would think. One learns to know them if one has some particular opportunity or if one has cultivated the corresponding faculties. One learns to know them best by letting them tell about their conditions. They talk more interestingly than our ordinary contemporaries. Their narratives are much more interesting; above all, they speak of things one does not encounter in everyday life. So they are already interesting in the first stage.

The opposite individuals, those whose astral body is drawing the ego down, are also interesting if one lets them talk about themselves. To understand the first type of person requires the soul depth of the priest. To understand this second type of person—who often is even more interesting than the usual visionaries, who do not develop very far—really requires the sensitivity of a physician who comprehends the world with a good intelligence and a fair amount of intuition. For it is a matter of understanding what they do not tell one: what they do tell one is of little value. It is a matter of grasping what they say or do in such a way that one can think of it in relation to the human organism. Such persons, if one asks them a question, show a certain amount of stupidity, also unwillingness to answer a question. They begin to talk about something quite foreign to what one is asking. But if one catches hold of what they say about themselves—and some of them talk endlessly—one sometimes has the feeling that they possess an inner source of speech that gives them a special association of ideas such as the ordinary person does not have. They'll tell you if you let them ramble on—you mustn't ask questions, you must just snap up what they tell as it were by chance—For example a man might say: “Sure, ten years ago I was in a farmer's house and the wife gave me some coffee. The cup had red roses painted on it. She couldn't give me the coffee right away because she'd forgotten the sugar was in the kitchen and she had to go and get it. And she forgot the milk. She had to get the milk from down in the cellar. And then she poured almost half a cup of milk into the coffee. And she said, ‘My coffee is very good.’ And I said, ‘Yes, I think so too, farmer lady.’” And so he goes on and on. He tells incidents from far in his past, and goes into the most unbelievable details. You think, “If I only had a memory as good as his!”—forgetting that if you did have as good a memory you would be just like him! Now of course I'm telling it this way to portray a type, and to show a typical outcome. You must then think of the corresponding lighter variations that you meet in life, which the physician especially meets. I'm picturing an extreme case so that you can see the chief characteristics.

So when the astral body draws the ego organization in, there comes about a kind of power for reproducing details of memory as though automatically. It is always ready to repeat them; it is indifferent to logical connections and just tells things one after another. As a result one can't help wondering why the person hits upon one thing at one moment and another thing at the next. His tale can go on like this, for instance: “The farmer lady went to get the milk and while she was gone I looked in the corner of the room and there was a Madonna picture and it was the same one I'd seen thirty years earlier in another place but there I didn't have coffee but a very good soup.” It can happen that he comes entirely away from the first part of his narrative, but it can also happen that he returns to it again. One sees that this is not a logical memory but a space-and-time memory, extraordinarily exact, with a compulsive desire to tell everything. It is a memory in which, when one studies it more closely, one sees something very remarkable—one sees its deeper foundation. One notices that the person enjoys the sound of certain words he had associated with certain events while he was experiencing the events themselves, and now he takes pleasure in sounding these words again. He is in fact going back to speech that was kept in his memory while thoughts were pushed out—not completely, but almost so.

One also notices changes in the sphere of the will. To these one must pay attention, for now the beginning of real pathological conditions can be found. One will encounter the following—again, one must pay attention, for nothing much can be acclomplished if, for instance, one approaches such people to do this or that in order to observe them. For they become amazingly stubborn, they don't want to cooperate, won't answer questions, won't do anything. But if one can obtain an earlier case history and put those things together with what can be learned from the person's neighbors or a similar source, then one discovers, for instance, that such a person feels a terrific impulse at a definite time of the year to go wandering off somewhere. Often it is to the same region each year. And this inner impulse of will works so strongly that if one tries at such a moment to counteract it, just to discover what state the person is in, one can, for instance, notice the following.

Take a gourmand (there are gourmands even among such people as these!). Catch up with him while he is wandering and sit him down to a wonderful meal or two—to what gives him his greatest joy in life. You'll find that he will only stay put the first day, possibly a second day if he is still a good distance from the place he is heading for. He becomes restless, for he would love another fine meal, and he knows that the next place he'll reach has frightful food. He knows that, for his memory is unusually well developed. He becomes anxious. He wants to go on, for he cannot adapt his will to sudden external suggestions. Just as on the one hand he cannot adapt himself to immediate sense impressions but brings out every possible gem from his speech coffers, so on the other hand he cannot adapt himself to the necessity of surrendering his will-limb system to life's external circumstances. He wants just to follow his own will-impulses, which drive him from within in a very definite manner. One sees that he has almost completely lost the faculty of the ego organization that unites a human being with the outer world. His senses are dulled; his will-impulses prevent him from having a normal relation to the world, and he wants only to follow these will-impulses. This is the consequence of the ego being drawn down into the astral body.

So you see, such people could be helped very much if our medical understanding and the loving devotion of the theologians would work together—not, however, by some instant therapy, but in the following way. With these people one can observe a very definite situation. First we have to consider their life between the change of teeth and puberty. In that period, from a superficial point of view usually nothing abnormal is to be noticed. Everyone loves to see how clever these children are, how frightfully clever, what clever answers they can give, “just like an adult!” But one should be alert to this clever answering between the seventh and the fourteenth year. The children who are so excessively clever at this age are receiving something in this period before puberty that they should only have for their development after puberty. That is how the condition that I have just been describing comes about. The astral body should only be drawing the ego down after puberty, so that then the ego can completely unfold by the beginning of the twenties. With these children the astral body has already drawn the ego down after the change of teeth or in the ninth, tenth, eleventh year. We observe the abnormal cleverness and are delighted by it. By the time the late teens come, the eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth years, the ego is stuck too deeply in the astral body. Then the condition is present that I have described, along with the symptoms that I indicated. So now if a child worries us in those early years by premature cleverness, it is a matter of giving certain kinds of treatment. First of all, there will be situations where physician and priest will have to confer with the teacher, so that the teacher will realize what should be done for that early life period. When we have finished this general characterization, we will make several detailed suggestions of what can actually be done. But first I'd like to carry this further, to indicate certain clear connections between the various themes we've been discussing.

Now the following can happen: the etheric body on its part can draw the astral body and ego in too strongly, so that they snap to an excessive degree into the physical and etheric bodies—again in the waking state. Then we have the situation that, seen from within, there is too much astrality in the organs; it cannot unite properly with them. This condition is the pathological mirror-picture of a visionary state such as, for instance, that of St. Teresa, such as her “first stage” as I described it, when she felt the presence of spiritual beings. We had there the bringing of waking-sleep into clear consciousness. And now in such persons as I am describing we have the opposite: dreams are carried over into waking life, with the accompanying symptoms I have mentioned. For it really happens in waking life: dreams do not appear, but an active “dream” life that discloses itself in the kind of speech I described, and in that extreme turning inward of the will impulses. That is the pathological mirror-picture of ordinary dreaming. Activity is there instead of the passivity that is the normal condition of dreaming.

Then we have the second stage, the drawing down of the ego and astral organization by the etheric body. The individual snaps too strongly with the ego, astral body, and etheric body into the physical organism, and the physical organism is not able to receive them into its single organs. Every possible organ has excess astrality that could not unite properly with the organ. Now we have the pathological mirror-picture of what we learned was the second stage for the individuals in whom sense impressions were in a certain sense stimulated from within. The direction was from within out to the senses. Now in this mirror-picture the direction is the opposite: it goes inward to the organs, it takes hold of the physical organism. And conditions appear that always appear when a physical or etheric organ is flooded by the astral body and ego organization and they cannot unite so that it could be called a proper saturation of the physical body by the etheric and astral bodies. Something is left over in the physical organs from the higher members of the organism. What in the other type of individuals poured into visions similar to a sense perception, with colors like a sense perception, visions that revealed the spiritual world, is in this case pouring itself inward, wanting to seize a physical organ. In the former situation there was a reaching out more externally, to the spiritual world beyond the sense world. In this case there is a reaching inward to a physical organ, manifesting in so-called “seizures,” all the different forms of real epilepsy or epileptoid symptoms (“temporal lobe seizures”). It can be explained as the snapping down of the ego and astral organization too strongly into the physical organism, which then succeeds in drawing the etheric body to itself. We see how the first condition advances to this second condition.

Hereby we see something in modern life that could be prevented if a real pastoral medicine would come about. People do not realize that the first condition is pathological; they simply find it interesting. And they only become aware of the second condition when seizures or other epileptic symptoms appear. The memory is now no longer expanding into detail, and the inner will-impulses are no longer increasing: now, since the astral and ego organizations are being pulled inward, and therefore the astral organization is failing to relate properly to certain organs, we find the memory is extinguished. Instead of the memory clinging to details as in the previous condition (details with no logical relation, that were just a running stream of unassociated pictures), now we find the memory disrupted, collapsed, a memory with gaps in it. This can become so extreme that the person lives in a kind of double consciousness. For instance, the memory clings to the upper organs—for the whole human being participates in memory—it takes hold of the upper organs, deserting the lower organs. Then this is reversed: the upper organs lose the memory activity and the lower organs receive it again. There is a rhythmic alteration. Such things can happen. And so these people have two streams of consciousness flowing parallel to each other. In one stream they remember everything that occurs when they are in the one condition; in the other stream they remember all the other things. And they never know in one condition of consciousness any of the content of the other condition of consciousness. Thus the memory deteriorates to a pathological level.

There we have the pathological mirror-picture of what we found in the second stage of the saint. Let us use that term, for modern medicine has no word for such a thing. Saints have a world around them that is visionary but that has a spiritual content. They reach into the spiritual world and receive inner impressions of it. People with pathological conditions—because their karma has given them a weak personality—are drawn down into the physical body. Instead of receiving visions of spiritual things they have epileptic conditions, empty gaps in consciousness, a lack of coherence in daily waking life, and so forth.

But now there can be still a third stage. This is the stage at which for karmic reasons the physical body has become even weaker, along with all the other members, so that earlier karmic forces no longer operate sufficiently in the physical body. With such a person it now comes about, not that ego, astral, and etheric body are pulled in by the physical body, but that something quite different happens. I shall have to describe it in the following way.

Think how it is with those who are extremely sensitive in the other direction, in the direction of the senses, that is, in the direction of the ego organization. How painfully sensitive they can be to all that flows in through the senses, to strong colors, lively sounds. Now precisely the opposite is the case with those whose physical body is weak from karmic causes. Such people are not hypersensitive from within outward, but are insensitive to their physical body and yield to an excessive degree to everything from the other side, the side of the will, that is, from the outer physical world. They succumb to heaviness, warmth, cold. All of this affects them not as it normally affects organic beings, but as it affects inorganic things. This then stifles the expression of the astral body and ego. They are hemmed in by the world and because of a weak physical body they cannot confront it with the necessary intensity; they are like a piece of the outer world although they are still inside their physical body. This is clearly the exact opposite of what we described as the third stage for the saint. The saint goes through pain that is then transformed into bliss, and then further to an experience of the spiritual world in its pure spirituality. This is called “rest in God” or “rest in the Spirit.”

But people who develop in the way I am now describing do not come to “rest in God” or “rest in the Spirit.” They come, although they are not conscious of it, to rest in the hidden occult forces of the physical world, forces against which they, as human beings, should actually be maintaining their independence. They develop the pathological mirror-picture of the third stage of the saint: the condition called idiocy, in which the human personality is lost, in which a person rests in outer nature, that is, in the hidden forces of nature. They can no longer manifest as a human being. They live only in the natural processes that go on within them, in what is a continuation of external natural processes, vegetable processes—eating food, digesting food, moving about in whatever way digestion and the food substances give an impulse to move. It is a complete waking sleep given over to the bodily functions, which are not under the control of the weak physical body but are active as processes in the outer world are active. Naturally, since these processes are working in a human being they do give human-like impulses. But these people are isolated from the normal human world because they are pushed into the physical world to too great a degree. Here we have to do with everything that is a pathological mirror-picture of the “rest in God.” We can call it “rest in Nature.” It has to do with the various paranoid states, with what in everyday life is called idiocy, while the previous conditions would be called mental retardation.

So we have seen the progression in the case of the saint from feeling the presence of spiritual beings to a third stage, being present in the spiritual world. And we have seen the opposite pathological states: first, psychopathological impairment as the first stage. We can be particularly aware of this stage when we encounter an abnormal wanderlust, as I described, connected with a memory that lacks logic. We see this progress to states of insanity, of which the early stage will still allow a person to pursue certain activities in external life. Then we see this progress to the third stage—which could also have been present in early childhood in statu nascendi.

The second stage can be due to the fact that no one has been able to recognize and counteract certain conditions in the first life period, between birth and change of teeth. Occasionally young children show, not exactly an excessive cleverness, but rather an unusual desire to learn things—something that should only appear after the change of teeth. This characteristic is normal between change of teeth and puberty. When it appears in the first life period, however, we should be concerned and we should find the means—physical, soul, and spiritual means—to cure what is already pathological. It is of utmost importance to investigate how certain capacities can be prevented from shining down into the first seven years of life that should really only emerge during the second seven years.

The third stage can reveal itself in two ways. In most cases a person brings it along as his or her karma—as you have seen from my descriptions. Already at birth, the person is in an abnormal condition because of some unusual stress in putting together the etheric body before entering the physical body. An etheric body was formed that does not want to penetrate the physical body completely, does not want to enter heart and stomach in the proper way but wants to flood them: in other words, an etheric body that carries the astral body and ego organization too strongly into the various organs. Already at birth or very soon after, we see facial or bodily deformities that can give us deep concern. This is called congenital mental retardation—but there is no such thing! There is only karmic mental retardation, related to the child's entire destiny. We will also speak about this more fully, so that you will see how an incarnation spent in such mental dullness can, under certain conditions, even have a beneficial place in a human being's karma, although it may mean misery in that one incarnation. There is need, after all, to regard things not merely from the point of view of finite life, but sub specie aeterni from the point of view of the immortal life of a human being. Then we would have a compassionate charity (caritas) and a wise one as well.

On the other hand, the second stage I have described can progress to the third stage in the following way. If in the first life period, between birth and change of teeth, not only the second life period shines in but also the third—the period between puberty and the twenties, when our organization should work into our organism—then we see a child in their fourth or fifth year with capacities that often delight the people. They say, “This child talks or acts like a twenty-year-old!” But this is what is happening: the ego organization is developing too early and is overpowering the physical body and making it weak. Idiocy will then appear in the latter part of the person's life. In this case it is not brought on by karma but has been acquired in this very life, and can only be balanced out karmically in later lives. If we observe life intelligently and have a good pastoral medicine to support us, we will be able to prevent it simply by providing the proper education for such a person's early childhood.

Whoever is vocationally drawn to observe such things should do so not only as individual symptoms—where, naturally, they should be studied with special love—but should also cultivate an understanding for them as a general phenomenon. Such a person should also develop an understanding for how these things are brought about.

We have seen how much of the pedagogy of former decades that a healthy pedagogy, such as the Waldorf school pedagogy wants to be, must definitely oppose. Yet these things have become extraordinarily precious to people. Sometimes our Waldorf school education must address certain things with tremendous severity, for instance, the Froebel kindergarten work, which is taken not from life but out of the intellect. Before the change of teeth it occupies children with activities that are not an imitation of life but are invented out of people's heads. This is putting into the child's first years of life something that should not be there until the next period, between change of teeth and puberty. This brings on the first stage of a pathological condition, a mild state of illness that often is not yet regarded as pathological. Also it were better, perhaps, not to label it pathological, otherwise so much else would have to be labeled pathological, which must in any case be recognized as “cultural phenomena.” These things cannot merely be criticized, they must be understood, so that one relates to them in the right way.

What we should see in front of us is wrong education in early childhood. The second life period has been carried into the first. This is the underlying cause creating a person's automatic speech and stirring the will from within outwards without adjusting in any degree to the surrounding world. Think of a situation such as I described as the first pathological stage: a slight tendency, caused by bad education, education going the wrong way. Then what happens? Wanderlust. This impulse is not entirely pathological, but it is characterized by the desire at a certain age to follow none but one's own ideas, not to bother about the world, to get free and away from one's surroundings, to wander at will! It is connected with other contemporary phenomena that also have their origin in a pathological education, or at least an education with a pathological tinge. You can observe this right now. Look at some of these youth groups. Their very existence belongs to the lifestyle of the last decades of the Kali Yuga.⁶ There is an affinity between this slightly pathological condition and the kind of life that the Kali Yuga brought about. These things all belong together. But they must be examined from these two aspects. If you look, you will easily see tinges of what I have been describing. They reveal themselves clearly in wanderlust, but that is an extreme symptom. Listen once in a while to their conversations! One despairs at their indifference to what one says to them. They repeat details eternally, details they describe as their “experience”; they come back again and again to the same thing.

Please don't misunderstand me! I'm certainly not pointing to any of these things in a trivial sense. My intention is to show you that such phenomena can only be really understood if one grasps clearly the connection I've been pointing to during these few days: that there is always a step into spiritual life and its extreme opposite—a step into the physical body. A further step into the spiritual world for the saint; a further step into the body, into seizures, for instance, for the psychopath. And so on. That is the relationship. If you consider how in the external world, in electricity and magnetism, one pole is always dependent upon the other, you will realize that in life too there can be such a relation between two poles of human development.

This, of course, cannot be seized upon clumsily, as happens today so often with the materialistic worldview. This fact, that there are polar opposites here and that there is a connection between the two poles, must be approached with delicacy. Then one will begin to see what can develop in the one and the other direction. One will finally learn in this way to see into the nature of the human being.

We will continue tomorrow.

• 5 . Mechthild von Magdeburg (1210–1286?). Cistercian nun. Her chief work was The Flowing Light of the Godhead.
• 6 . Kali Yuga, “the Dark Age,” reckoned from 3101 B.C. to A.D. 1899 in Steiner's esoteric chronology.

In the last lectures I have already drawn your attention to the way the Science of Initiation must speak of the alternating states of sleeping and waking, which are known to us from ordinary consciousness and through which we can really find a path of approach—one path of approach—to the secrets of human life. It is a life that finds expression while we sleep—soul life, dream life, a life that ordinary consciousness, if free from mystical or similar tendencies, does not take seriously at first. This attitude is certainly justified; the sober-minded man does not take his dream-life seriously and, to a certain extent, he is right, for he sees that it shows him all kinds of pictures and reminiscences of his ordinary life. When he compares his dream-life with his ordinary experience, he must, of course, hold fast to the latter and call it reality. But the dream-life comes with its re-combinations of ordinary experiences; and if man asks himself what it really signifies for the totality of his being, he can find no answer in ordinary consciousness.

Let us now consider this dream-life as it presents itself to us. We can distinguish two different kinds of dreams. The first conjures pictures of outer experiences before our soul. Years ago, or a few days maybe, we experienced this or that in a definite way; now a dream conjures up a picture more or less similar—usually dissimilar—to the external experience. If we discover the connection between this dream-picture and the external experience, we are at once struck by the transformation the latter has undergone. We do not usually relate the dream-picture to a particular experience in the outer world, for the resemblance does not strike us. Nevertheless, if we look more closely at this type of dream-life that conjures outer experiences in transformed pictures before the soul, we find that something in us takes hold of these experiences; we canmot, however, retain them as we can in the waking state, when we have full use of our bodily organs and experience the images of memory which resemble external life as far as possible. In memory we have pictures of outer life that are more or less true. Of course there are people who dream in their memories, but this is regarded as abnormal. In our memories we have, more or less, true pictures, in our dreams, transformed pictures of outer life. That is one kind of dream.

There is, however, another kind, and this is really much more important for a knowledge of the dream-life. It is the kind in which, for example, a man dreams of seeing a row of white pillars, one of which is damaged or dirty; he wakes up with this dream and finds he has toothache. He then sees that the row of pillars ‘symbolises’ the row of teeth; one tooth is aching, and this is represented by the damaged or, perhaps, dirty pillar. Or a man may wake up dreaming of a seething stove and find he has palpitation of the heart. Or he is distressed in his dream by a frog approaching his hand; he takes hold of the frog and fords it soft. He shudders, and wakes up to find he is holding a corner of his blanket, grasped in sleep. These things can go much further. A man may dream of all kinds of snake-like forms and wake up with intestinal pains.

So we see that there is a second kind of dream which gives pictorial, symbolic expression to man's inner organs. When we have grasped this, we learn to interpret many dream-figures in just this way. For example, we may dream of entering a vaulted cellar. The ceiling is black and covered with cobwebs; a repulsive sight. We wake up to fund we have a headache. The interior of the skull is expressed in the vaulted cellar; we even notice that the cerebral convolutions are symbolised in the peculiar formations constituting the vault. If Nye pursue our studies further in this direction we find that all our organs can appear in dreams in this pictorial way.

Here, indeed, is something that points very clearly, by means of the dream, to the whole inner life of man. There are people who, while actually asleep and dreaming, compose subjects for quite good paintings. If you have studied these things you will know what particular organ is depicted, though in an altered, symbolic form. Such paintings sometimes possess unusual beauty; and when the artist is told what organ he has really symbolised so beautifully, he is quite startled, for he has not the same respect for his organs that he has for his paintings.

These two kinds of dream can be easily distinguished by one who is prepared to study the world of dreams in an intimate way. In one kind of dream we have pictures of experiences undergone in the outer world; in the other, pictorial representations of our own internal organs.

Now it is comparatively easy to pursue the study of dreams as far as this. Most people whose attention has been called to the existence of these two kinds will recall experiences of their own that justify this classification.

But to what does this classification point? Well, if you examine the first kind of dreams, studying the special kind of pictures contained, you find that widely different external experiences can be represented by the same dream; again, one and the same experience can be depicted in different people by different dreams.

Take the case of a man who dreams he is approaching a mountain. There is a cave-like opening and into this the sun is still shining. He dreams he goes in. It soon begins to grow dark, then quite dark. He gropes his way forward, encounters an obstacle, and feels there is a little lake before him. He is in great danger, and the dream. takes a dramatic course.

Now a dream like this can represent very different external experiences. The picture I have just described may relate to a railway accident in which the dreamer was once involved. What he experienced at that time finds expression now, perhaps years afterwards, in the dream described. The pictures are quite different from what he had experienced. He could have been in a ship-wreck, or a friend may have proved unfaithful, and so on. If you compare the dream-picture with the actual experience, studying them in this intimate way, you will find that the content of the pictures is not really of great importance; it is the dramatic sequence that is significant: whether a feeling of expectation was present, whether this is relieved, or leads to a crisis. One might say that the whole complex of feelings is translated into the dream-life.

Now, if we start from here and examine dreams of this (first) type, we find that the pictures derive their whole character chiefly from the nature of the man himself, from the individuality of his ego. (Only, we must not study dreams like the psychiatrists who bring everything under one hat.) If we have an understanding of dreams—I say, of dreams, not of dream-interpretation—we can often learn to know a man better from his dreams than from observing his external life. When we study all that a person experiences in such dreams we find that it always points back to the experience of the ego in the outer world.

On the other hand, when we study the second kind of dream, we find that what it conjures before the soul in dream pictures is only experienced in a dream. For, when awake, man experiences the form of his organs at most by studying scientific anatomy and physiology. That, however, is not a real experience; it is merely looking at them externally, as one looks at stones and plants. So we may ignore it and say that, in the ordinary consciousness of daily life, man experiences very little, or nothing at all, of his internal organism. The second kind of dream, however, puts this before him in pictures, although in transformed pictures.

Now, if we study a man's life, we find that it is governed by his ego—more or less, according to his strength of will and character. But the activity of the ego within human life very strongly resembles the first kind of dream-experience. Just try to examine closely whether a person's dreams are such that in them his experiences are greatly, violently altered. In anyone who has such dreams you will find a man of strong will-nature. On the other hand, a man who dreams his life almost as it actually is, not altering it in his dreams, will be found to be a man of weak will.

Thus you see the action of the ego within a man's life expressed in the way he shapes his dreams. Such knowledge shows us that we have to relate dreams of the first kind to the human ego. Now we learnt in the last lectures that the ego and astral body are outside the physical and etheric bodies in sleep. Remembering this, we shall not be surprised to learn that Spiritual Science shows us that the ego then takes hold of the pictures of waking life—those pictures that it otherwise takes hold of in ordinary reality through the physical and etheric bodies. The first kind of dream is an activity of the ego outside the physical and etheric bodies.

What, then, is the second kind of dream? Of course it, too, must have something to do with what is outside the physical and etheric bodies during sleep. It cannot be the ego, for this knows nothing of the symbolic organ-forms presented by the dream. One is forced to see that it is the astral body of man that, in sleep, shapes these symbolic pictures of the inner organs, as the ego the pictures of external experience. Thus the two kinds of dreams point to the activity of the ego and astral body between falling asleep and waking up.

We can go further. We have seen what a weak and what a strong man does in his dreams; we have seen that the weak man dreams of things almost exactly as he experienced them, while the strong man transforms and re-arranges them, colouring then by his own character. Pursuing this to the end, we can compare our result with a man's behaviour in waking life. We then dis-cover the following intensely interesting fact. Let a man tell you his dreams; notice how one dream-picture is linked to another; study the configuration of his dreams. Then, having formed an idea of the way he dreams, look at the man himself. Stimulated by the idea you have formed of his dream-life, you will be able to form a good picture of the way he acts in life. This leads us to remarkable secrets of human nature. If you study a man as he acts in life and learn to know his individual character, you will find that only a part of his actions proceeds from his own being, from his ego. If all depended on the ego, a man would really do what he dreams; the violent character would be as violent in life as in his dreams, while one who leaves his life almost unchanged in his dreams, would hold aloof from life at all points, let it take its course, let things happen, shaping his life as little as he shapes his dreams.

And what a man does over and above this—how does that happen? My dear friends, we can very well say that it is done by God, by the spiritual beings of the world. All that man does, he does not do himself. In fact, he does just as much as he actually dreams; the rest is done through him and to him. Only, in ordinary life we do not train ourselves to observe these things; otherwise we would discover that we only actively participate in the deeds of life as much as we actively participate in our dreams. The world hinders the violent man from being as violent in life as in dreams; in the weak man instincts are working, and once more life itself adds that which happens through him, and of which he would not dream.

It is interesting to observe a man in some action of his life and to ask: what comes from him, and what from the world? From him proceeds just as much as he can dream, no more, no less. The world adds something in the case of a weak man, and subtracts something in the case of a violent man. Seen in this light, dreams become extraordinarily interesting and give us deep insight into the being of man.

Many of the things I have been saying have, it is true, dawned upon psycho-analysts in a distorted, caricatured form. But they are not able to look into what lives and weaves in human nature, so distort it all. From what I have put before you today in a quite external way, you can see the necessity of acquiring a subtle, delicate knowledge of the soul if one wants to handle such things at all; otherwise one can know nothing of the relations between dreams and external reality as realised by man in his life. Hence I once described psycho-analysis as dilettantism, because it knows nothing of man's outer life. But it also knows nothing of man's inner life. These two dilettantisms do not merely add, they must be multiplied; for ignorance of the inner life mars the outer, and ignorance of the outer life mars the inner. Multiplying d x d we get d-squared: d x d = d². Psycho-analysis is dilettantism raised to the second power.

If we study the alternating states of waking and sleeping in this intimate way, we can perceive and understand so much of the essential nature of man that we are really led to the portal of the Science of Innitiation.

Now consider something else that I told you in these lectures: the fact that man can strengthen his soul forces by exercises, by meditations; that he then advances beyond the ordinary more or less empty, abstract thinking to a thinking inherently pictorial, called ‘imagination’. Now it was necessary to explain that man, progressing in ‘imagination’, comes to apprehend his whole life as an etheric impulse entering earthly life through conception and birth—strictly speaking, from before conception and birth. Through dreams he receives reminiscences of what he has experienced externally since descending to earth for his present life. ‘Imagination’ gives us pictures which, in the way they are experienced, can be very like dream-pictures; but they contain, not reminiscences of this earthly life, but of what preceded it. It is quite ridiculous for people who do not know Spiritual Science to say that imaginations may be dreams too. They ought only to consider what it is that we ‘dream of’ in imaginations. We do not dream of what the senses offer; the content represents man's being before he was endowed with senses. Imagination leads man to a new world.

Nevertheless there is a strong resemblance between the second kind of dream and imaginative experience when first acquired through soul exercises. We experience pictures, mighty pictures—and this in all clarity, we might say exactness. We experience a universe of pictures, so wonderful, so rich in colour, so majestic that we have nothing else in our consciousness. If we would paint these pictures, we should have to paint a mighty tableau; but we could only capture the appearance of a single moment just as we cannot paint a flash of lightning, but only its momentary appearance, for all this takes its course in time. Still, if we only arrest a single moment we obtain a mighty picture.

Let us represent this diagrammatically. Naturally, this will not be very like what we behold; nevertheless, this sketch will illustrate what I mean.

Look at this sketch I have drawn. It has an inner configuration and includes the most varied forms. It is inwardly and outwardly immense. If, now, we become stronger and stronger in concentrating, in holding fast the picture, it does not merely come before us for one moment. We must seize it with presence of mind; otherwise it eludes us before we can bring it into the present moment. Altogether, presence of mind is required in spiritual observation. If we are not only able to apply sufficient presence of mind in order to seize and become conscious of it at all, but can retain it, it contracts and, instead of being something all-enibracing, becomes smaller and smaller, moving onward in time. It suddenly shrinks into something; one part becomes the human head, another the human lung, a third the human liver. The physical matter provided by the mother's body only fills out what enters from the spiritual world and becomes man. At length we say: what the liver is we now see spiritually in a mighty picture in the pre-earthly life. The same is true of the lung. And now we may compare it with the content of the second kind of dream. Here, too, an organ may appear to us in a beautiful picture, as I said before, but this is very poor compared to what imagination reveals.

Thus we gain the impression that imagination gives us some-thing created by a great master-hand, the dream something clumsy. But they both point in the same direction and represent, spiritually, man's internal organisation.

It is but a step from this to another and very true idea. When, through imagination, we discern the pre-earthly human being as a mighty etheric picture, and see this mighty etheric picture crystallise—as it were—into the physical man, we are led to ask what would happen if the dream-pictures, those relating to the inner organs, began to develop the same activity. We find that a caricature of the inner organs would arise. The human liver, so perfect in its way, is formed from an imaginative picture that points to the pre-earthly life. If the dream-picture were to become a liver, this would not be a human liver, not even a goose-liver, but a caricature of a liver. This gives us, in fact, deep insight into the whole being of man. For there is really some similarity between the dream-picture and the imaginative picture, as we now see quite clearly. And we cannot help asking how this comes about.

Well, we can go still further. Take the dream pictures of the first kind, those linked to outer-experiences. To begin with, there is nothing resembling these in imaginative cognition. But imaginative cognition reaches back to a pre-earthly experience of man's, in which he had nothing to do with other physical human beings. Imaginative vision leads to an image of pre-earthly experiences of the spirit. Just think what this implies.

When we look into man's inner life we receive the impression that certain symbolic pictures, whether they arise through imagination or in dreams [of the second kind], refer to what is within man, man's internal organisation; on the other hand, the imaginations which refer to outer experiences are connected, neither with man's internal organisation nor with outer life, but with experiences of his pre-earthly state. Beside these imaginations one can only place dream experiences of the first kind, those relating to external experiences of earthly life; but there is no inner connection here between these imaginations and these dreams. Such a connection only exists for dreams of the second kind.

Now, what do I intend by all these descriptions? I want to draw your attention to an intimate way of studying human life, a way that propounds real riddles. Man really observes life in a most superficial manner today. If he would study it more exactly, more intimately, he would notice the things I have spoken about in this lecture. In a certain sense, however, he does notice them; only, he does not actually know it. He is not really aware how strongly his dreams influence his life. He regards a dream as a flitting phantom, for he does not know that his ego is active in one kind of dream, his astral body in another. But if we seek to grasp still deeper phenomena of life, the riddles to which I referred become more insistent. Those who have been here some time will have already heard me relate such facts as the following: There is a pathological condition in which a person loses his connection with his life in memory. I have mentioned the case of an acquaintance of mine who one day, without his conscious knowledge, left his home and family, went to the station, bought a ticket and travelled, like a sleep-walker, to another station. Here he changed, bought another ticket and travelled further. He did this for a long time. He commenced his journey at a town in South Germany. It was found later, when the case was investigated, that he had been in Budapest, Lemberg (Poland), etc. At last, as his consciousness began to function again, he found himself in a casual ward in Berlin, where he had finally landed. Some weeks had passed before his arrival at the shelter, and these were quite obliterated from his consciousness. He remembered the last thing he had done at home; the rest was obliterated. It was necessary to trace his journey by external inquiries.

You see, his ego was not present in what he was doing. If you study the literature of this subject you will find hundreds and hundreds of cases of such intermittent ego-consciousness. What have we here? If you took trouble to study the dream-world of such a patient you would discover something peculiar. To begin with, you would find that, at least at certain periods of his life, the patient had had the most vivid dreams imaginable, dreams that were especially characterised by his making up his mind to do something, forming certain intentions.

Now, if you study the dreams of a normal person you will find intentions playing a very small part, if any. People dream all sorts of wonderful things, but intentions play no part, as a rule. When intentions do play a part in a dream, we usually wake up laughing at ourselves for entertaining them. But if you study the dream-life of such people with intermittent consciousness, you will find that they entertain intentions in their dreams and, on waking, take these very seriously; indeed, they take these so seriously that they feel pangs of conscience if unable to carry them out. Often these intentions are so foolish in the face of the external physical world that it is not possible to carry them out; this hurts such people and makes them quite excited. To take dreams seriously—especially in regard to their intentions (not wishes)—is the counterpart of this condition of obliterated consciousness.

One who is able to observe human beings can tell, in certain circumstances, whether a person is liable to suffer in this way. Such people have something which shows they never quite wake up in regard to certain inner and outer experiences. One gradually finds that such a person goes too far with his ego out of his physical and etheric bodies in sleep; every night he goes too far into the spiritual and cannot carry back into the physical and etheric bodies what he has experienced. At last, because he has so often not brought it completely back, it holds him outside—i.e. what he experiences too deeply within the spiritual holds the ego back and he passes into a condition in which the ego is not in the physical body.

In such a radical case as this it is especially interesting to observe the dream-life. This differs from the dream-life of our ordinary contemporaries; it is much more interesting, but of course this has its reverse side. Still, objectively considered, illness is more interesting than health; from the subjective side—i.e. for the person concerned, as well as from the point of view of ordinary life, it is another matter. For a knowledge of the human being the dream-life of such a patient is really much more interesting than the dream-life of an ordinary contemporary.

In such a case you actually see a kind of connection between the ego and the whole dream-world; one might say, it is almost tangible. And we are led to ask the following questions: What is the relation of the dream pictures that refer to internal organs, to the imaginations that also refer to internal organs?

Well, viewed ‘externally’, the pictures of man's inner organisation that are given in imagination, point to what was within man before he had his earthly body, before he was on the earth; the dream-pictures arise when once he is here. The imaginations point to the past, the dream-pictures to the present. But though an ordinary dream-picture that refers to an internal organ would correspond to a caricature of that organ, while the imagination would correspond to the perfect organ, nevertheless the caricature has the inherent possibility of growing into a perfect organ.

This leads us to the studies we shall be pursuing tomorrow. They centre in the question: Does the content of such an imagination relate to man's past life, and is the dream the beginning of the imagination of the future? Will a dream-picture of today evolve into the imagination to which we shall be able to look back in a future life on earth? Is the content of the dream perhaps the seed of the content of the imagination?

This significant question presents itself to us. What we have gained through a study of dreams is here seen in conjunction with the question of man's repeated lives on earth. You see, moreover, that we must really look more deeply into the life of man than we usually find convenient; otherwise we shall find no point of contact with what the Science of Initiation says about the being of man.

By such a lecture as this I wanted especially to awaken in you some idea of the superficial way man is studied in the civilisation of today, and of the need of intimate observation in all directions. Such intimate observation leads at once to Spiritual Science.

In the last lecture, we observed some spiritual beings who are standing below the human being, some of which have abilities that are comparable with human abilities, but they are lacking any feeling of responsibility. We have seen how they are to be considered detritus of evolution, that would be obstructive if left to their own devices, but how they, used by a higher wisdom, will be transformed out of harmful into good beings.

Today, we want to widen the multitude of entities we observe by adding some more, to show how humans are interacting with them. We want to assume initially, that at nightfall each time the human being will experience a change from waking state to sleeping state. We know that when someone is in a state of day consciousness his four bodies are connected with and are mutually penetrating each other. Further, let us remember that each night the astral body and the ego raise themselves out of the physical and the etheric body. Now we have seen how at night, out of this human connection, out of the four-bodied human entity, two separate beings, different from each other, arose. The physical body and the etheric body stay back lying on the bed—outside remain the astral body and the ego.

Modern man experiences completely different states of consciousness at night than during the day. We can compare his state of night time consciousness with the consciousness of plants. A plant has the state of consciousness of ‘dreamless sleep’. During sleep, a kind of plant consciousness adheres to human beings too—at night, during the dreamless sleep, man is also in the spiritual worlds.

To these concepts we add that every element of the human being finds expression in the physical body. The physical body is, so to say, the result of all basic elements of a human. The ego has its expression in the blood, the astral body is expressed in the nervous system, the etheric body finds its expression in the lymphatic system, and the sensory system represents the expression of the physical body. If we perceive the human physical body as an expression of the manifestation of its different parts, then we have to say to ourselves that the blood circulation is there because of the individual ego. No nervous system can exist without the astral body structuring and creating it. At night, we draw the astral body and the ego out of the physical body, but not the nervous system and the blood. However, the blood and the ego belong together, and the astral body and the nervous system belong together.

At night, man behaves extremely disdainfully towards his corporeality. In order for the human being to have tools for the ego and the astral body, the blood and the nervous system had to emerge. Now he deserts the blood and the nervous system at night. It is impossible for a physical body with blood and nervous system to exist even for one second without the astral body and the ego. The plant is able to exist without these, because it has neither a nervous system nor a blood circulation. If we would at night solely be dependent upon ourselves, we would find the physical body dead in the morning. We take away those higher powers, the astral body and the ego, which must provide for the physical body at night. What we don’t do during the night, other beings must do. At night such beings penetrate into the physical and etheric body and lower themselves into them. Every night, higher spiritual beings enter into the human being’s physical and etheric bodies and carry out the work, that during the day is performed by the individual’s own ego and astral body. They are high, noble beings, who once created the physical and the etheric bodies of the human being, who take care of them again at night. At night the astral body and the ego stay in the higher world above, and down below remain the physical body and the etheric body. They have been abandoned at night by the astral body and the ego. To the same extent that the physical and etheric bodies are being deserted by the astral body and the ego, the powers of higher beings enter into them.

The etheric human body is not the same as the etheric body of a plant. Higher powers from a higher world stream into the physical and the etheric body of a human being at night. The following could happen: During the day, man constantly influences the physical body and the etheric one. When someone thinks and feels, then this happens in the astral body, but it reaches beyond into the etheric body and the physical body. It impresses itself into these.

In the past, the physical and the etheric body emerged purely by will of higher beings. But once a human being becomes conscious of its ego, the influences of the higher beings exit out of the physical and etheric body. That which lives in the soul is not without impact on these bodies. An anatomist, of course, cannot establish what kind of changes are taking place in a person’s physical and etheric body, but they are taking place. A large effect happens in these bodies when someone lies. Lies and hypocrisy are processes within the soul and the ego. From a materialistic perspective one could believe that lies only happen on the inside. But the occult observer knows that through lying, changes happen inside the physical body that affect the bodily structure. Such changes also come about through the countless conventional lies that live in the world.

Surveying the material reality, we know that our life is riddled with all sorts of untruths. If people tell each other something they do not mean, then this is like an impression of a signet in sealing wax. This imprint stays. All hypocrisy, untruths, slander remain like an imprint in the physical body. When someone leaves his physical and the etheric body at night, such imprints can be seen. Now the beings from the higher worlds come and find these. This is incompatible with the higher worlds. Through this something new occurs, something completely new is being created. The higher beings will now excise ‘beings’ through the physical body, which will then lead an independent life between our worlds. In the occult science these are called phantoms. They are called phantoms, because they are closest to physical perception. Furthermore, they are beings with physical regularity. They are swarming through our space. They are obstructing human development and evolution. They make what lives in the world worse than it would be if they would not exist. The phantoms are beings that mankind creates by way of lies, hypocrisy and so on, which hold back evolution.

Learning to know about the impact of the spiritual beings is much more helpful than preaching morals. Mankind in the future will know what it creates by lies, hypocrisy and slander. The most effective morals are created by learning to know the facts, not through moral principles. By existence based on the science of the spirit, the strongest moral drives and impulses are created. Phantoms are also a kind of nature beings who exist—created by the activity of man. In the evening, the human being deserts the physical body and leaves in it the signet imprints of lies, hypocrisy and so on. When he returns in the morning, then these phantoms first stream out of the physical body.

The etheric body too can be manipulated so that it creates excised beings. Once again, certain processes in the human world are causing such excisions to come into existence through the etheric body. Like all unjust things, such as unjust laws that punish in the wrong way, bad arrangements in a social community work back onto the etheric body, so that from them beings are created. In today’s superstitious time such entities are only ridiculed. These beings are spectres, ghosts. They are real and thus can be categorized as true spectres and ghosts. Mankind should make an effort to make its arrangements as well as possible, so that they are not creating such beings.

Now let us focus on the ego and the astral body during the night. Keep in mind that also the human astral body and the ego are in a special situation. They have aligned themselves to the blood and nervous system. During the night, higher powers from a higher world stream down onto the astral body and the ego. If a human being takes along certain things from his daily life, so again an excision process will occur. Again, the things that cause the excision process are things of the soul life. Let’s imagine two people have opinions that differ. One tries to convince the other and feels a longing to convince him. This longing is nowadays widely spread amongst humans. People should present their opinion to one another and wait to see if some forces stir within the other through which he would accept the opinion. There are so many opinionated fanatics, who are not at all content if they are unable to force their opinion on someone else. If something like this happens, then it is detrimental to both astral bodies. They pick up persuasions and wrong advice. Whatever is imprinted into the astral body from these persuasions and ill advice, will at night cause beings to be produced. Such beings are called demons.

These demonic beings exert particularly unfavourable influence on our human development. They whizz through the spiritual room and prevent people from developing their personal ideas. Imagine how much will be sinned in this regard in many coffee shops, at the beer table! Continuously, forces are collected for the creation of demons. These creep into the human soul. Ask yourself how many appear at this or that court hearing, when people act as witnesses. They are convinced, and therefore are not really committing perjury, because they are convinced. Once an ”experiment” was conducted and it went according to plan. Thirty people were asked to describe it. Two described the process correctly, all other twenty-eight people added things that had not happened. In this way, demonic beings are created that exert all sorts of influences. There is no other remedy for the human being than the recognition of this fact, to know what to do to free himself from the influences of these detrimental spiritual entities. They are present everywhere where there is opportunity to exert their destructive influences. The occult observer can see this in the courtroom. The beings always work into the direction from which they have emerged. Such beings that have come about through bad laws will again work so that they entice people to make more bad laws.

The human being should look into the spiritual world, so that he will become practical and not continually create obstacles. When we look across that which we have just examined, we have to say that during the waking hours of daily life people create a lot of causes for the emergence of all sorts of spiritual beings—elemental beings. We have to ask what significance they have in regard to the future development of mankind. We take a look back into ancient times, when our ancestors were living in the Atlantean world. If we would go back far enough into the old Atlantean development, then we would gradually arrive at humans in a totally different shape. Imagine back, approximately in the middle of the Atlantean time. We must imagine the human beings as follows: the part of the etheric body which today is within our head, was at that time widely extended out across the physical head, as it can be perceived even today by a clairvoyant in the horse. The same is still particularly noticeable in an elephant, who currently has a large protrusion in front of and above its physical head, just like this was the case for human beings in the old Atlantis. Evolutionary progress consisted of these parts moving closer together, so that today a human’s etheric head and the physical head are almost covering each other.

In earlier times, the human being had a twilight clairvoyance. When he would, during the day, dive into the physical body, he did not see distinct contours, but he would perceive the objects surrounded by an aura. At night, he would not recognise any boundaries at all, but only the spiritual element of things. Since the post-Atlantean time we differentiate thus far five cultural ages. In the ancient India, the first of the post-Atlantean ages, the connection of the etheric head of a human being with his physical head was very light. Increasingly, the fusion of the etheric with the physical head became stronger. During our time, the fifth post-Atlantean age, it became the strongest, as mankind descended into the physical, material world, and where they penetrated most deeply into the material substance. Throughout these many incarnations during the various epochs, people learned a lot until today in their present incarnation. Everything that happens in the world, does so in a descending and an ascending line. As truly as the etheric head always connected itself more and more strongly with the physical head, it is also true that little by little a loosening occurs. We have already arrived at a point in time where the etheric head begins to loosen again. Here we must differentiate between development of races and the development of the soul. In the future, there will be souls who have not done enough whilst the etheric head was united with the physical one. Because of the fusion of the etheric head with the physical head, many people are reluctant nowadays to embrace spiritual truths. Human beings who accept spiritual truths now, will when they return later, have absorbed enough in this incarnation, to be able to make a connection to incarnate. But those, who fail to do now what needs to happen, will not be able to find suitable bodies in the future. This is because the development of the races will create normal bodies, that are fit for those souls who have not neglected anything. Other bodies will be so that the loose etheric body cannot absorb anything. These people will be a special kind of human being, who will drop out of the progressive development of mankind.

It takes quite something to find your bearings within a future body. Imagine a soul that will live in a physical body with a loose etheric body. This soul would no longer understand if one would tell it about demons and so on. Today is the point in time where one can talk about those things. When the etheric body has loosened up again, one can no longer do this. Currently, the etheric body has a calling to quite different perceptions. The etheric body will later live in the spiritual world. This is populated with demons, and so on. Then this world of spiritual beings will be around the human being, and if he is not prepared for this now through the teachings, then he will be at a loss when he faces these beings. However, those that carry with them the knowledge obtained in this incarnation about these beings, will understand how to behave towards them. In the future, these knowledgeable individuals are destined to transform these beings into servants of the ongoing evolution. So, we understand how people can fail to complete their task to further the development of humanity and that of other beings.

All these demons, ghosts and phantoms are harmful today, but in the future they will be transformed by us into servants to human development. For this to happen human beings must prepare themselves. The development of the soul and the development of the race do not run side by side.

In the future, humanity will separate into the good and the bad. By one part developing in the proper ascending way to transform the demons, ghosts and phantoms in the future, they will push down another part. These will be the bad ones. What the human spirit creates has a real meaning—this has always been so during the development of mankind.

Another example will demonstrate how the human being co-creates in today’s world. We will focus on the fourth cultural period—on the Greek temple. The idea about the temple arose initially from the human soul. The concept for the temple is based on what we call a column, and on what this column carries. Never again has humanity achieved what it did at the time when humans succeeded to put themselves into the ‘supported space’ of the Greek temple. Let us compare a Greek temple with a modern building. Once a column becomes decorative it is no longer the true column that it is when it is free standing and really load-bearing. The human being must feel that the column consists of the right material. If we paint a thin iron column, that carries the same load as a thicker stone column, then it lies to us.

A Greek temple is a Greek spatial idea. This would be understood by people who can imagine that forces are moving from top to bottom and from right to left. We can imagine three painted angels, suspended in the air, so that one knows they are carrying each other. We find this spatial feeling with the old painters. Nowadays we can't find it anymore, not even by Boecklin.¹ On his Pietà there is an angel, that we feel could fall down any moment.

This is something that even the greatest genius might be missing when spiritual culture is lacking: a sense of space. Each time a person creates a real spatial concept, then this creates an opportunity for a higher being to fill this room. We are then ‘captivating’ higher beings to descend into the room. Quite different beings are enticed to descend by a Greek column and the horizontal beams resting upon it—quite other beings by the Gothic cathedral and its pointed arcs. The Gothic cathedral differs spiritually from the Greek temple in the following way: In the Greek temple humans have worked the spatial sense into it in an occult way, so that the temple is a crystallised spatial thought. In this way, the temple, being the way it is, is the home of a higher being, a god, even if it has been deserted by people. But to the Gothic cathedral belong people. It must be complemented by the devotions of the human beings and the folded hands they raise up. The Greek temple is an abode of a god. The Gothic cathedral is a cultural site, and an abode of a god when human beings are present. The Greek temple is, even if it has been deserted, the abode of a spiritual entity. So we can see, that people, by being in harmony with the spiritual world, are working together with it. So we can see in the spirit, how, through human deeds, more and more can be done to entice higher beings to descend.

Once again the Whitsuntide thought steps in front of our soul. The Whitsuntide thought expresses symbolically what we are able to recognise through such observation: that people through their work create sites for spiritual beings to descend to, that people are working on the spiritualisation of the world.

We must understand the spiritual science thought in such a way that it permeates into all branches of life. In our materialistic time the outer life is only in a small way an expression of the inner life. In the past, every door lock, every key was an expression of something spiritual. Now everything is comparatively insignificant. The human being will once again learn to work in such a way that the outside will be a replica of the inside. Then a railway station too will emerge as a thought, like the Greek temple and the Gothic cathedral came about. Our time too has a building style that corresponds to our time. This is the warehouse. It is the replica of the ‘utility’ thought, the replica of the human egoism. The time of usefulness has brought forth as the only original style that of the warehouse.

Previously, people put their spiritual feelings into a building style. The warehouse is an expression for the feelings of the 19th century. But already now there is a spiritual movement underway, that prepares for a later spiritualisation. Those humans who understand the anthroposophical movement in this way will make the Whitsuntide thought a reality. In the future we will see the anthroposophical thoughts crystallised in what the Earth will be covered with.

• 1. Arnold Boecklin, Swiss Painter, 1827-1901. His painting Pietà was in the National Museum in Berlin until 1945, and has since been missing.

[ 1 ] Protein is that substance of the living body which best lends itself to the various transformations brought about by the body's formative forces, so that what results from the transformed protein substance appears in the structures of the organs and of the whole organism. To be suitable for such use, protein must have the inherent capacity to lose whatever form may result from the nature of its material constituents the moment it is called upon, within the organism, to be of service to a form the organism needs.

[ 2 ] We thus perceive that in protein the forces proceeding from the natures and mutual relationships of hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon, disintegrate. The inorganic chemical bonding ceases and in the disintegration of the protein, organic formative forces begin to work.

[ 3 ] Now these formative forces are dependent on the etheric body. Protein is constantly on the point of being taken up in the activity of the etheric body or of being precipitated out. Removed from the organism to which it once belonged, it assumes the tendency to become a compound, subject to the chemical forces of hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and carbon. Protein that remains a constituent of the living organism suppresses this tendency in itself and aligns itself to the formative forces of the etheric body.

[ 4 ] Man consumes protein as a constituent of the food he takes. The Pepsin of the stomach transforms the protein which is taken in from outside, to peptides, these, to begin with, are soluble protein substances. This transformation is continued by the pancreatic juice.

[ 5 ] The protein ingested as a constituent of food is, to begin with, a foreign body in the human organism. It still contains residual activities from the etheric processes of the living being whence it was derived. These must be entirely removed from it. It now has to be absorbed into the etheric activities of the human organism.

[ 6 ] Hence, as the human process of digestion takes its course, we are dealing with two kinds of protein substances. At the beginning of this process the protein is foreign to the human organism. At the end it belongs to the organism. Between these two conditions there is an intermediate one, where the protein received as food has not yet entirely discarded its previous etheric actions, not yet entirely assumed the new. At this stage it is virtually completely inorganic. It is then subject to the influences of the human physical body alone. This physical body of man, in its form a product of the ego organization, is the bearer of inorganically active forces. It thus has a lethal effect on anything that is alive. Everything that enters the realm of the ego-organization dies. Hence, in the physical body the ego-organization incorporates purely inorganic substances. In the human physical organism these do not work in the same way as in lifeless nature outside man; but they work inorganically, that is to say, causing death. This deadening effect upon the albumen takes place in that part of the digestive tract where trypsin, a constituent of the pancreatic juice, is active. That inorganic forces are concerned in the action of trypsin, may be gathered also from the fact that it unfolds its activity with the help of alkali.

[ 7 ] Until it meets the trypsin in the pancreatic fluid, the albuminous nourishment continues to live in a manner foreign to the human organism, namely, according to the organism from which it is derived. Meeting the trypsin, it becomes lifeless. [ 8 ] But it is only for a moment, as it were, that the protein is lifeless in the human organism. Then it is absorbed into the physical body in accordance with the organization of the ego. The latter must have the force to carry over what the albumen has now become, into the domain of the human etheric body. In this way the protein constituents of food become formative material for the human organism. The foreign etheric influences, pertaining to them originally, leave the human being.

[ 9 ] For the healthy digestion of the protein constituent of food, man must possess a sufficiently strong ego-organization to enable all the protein, which the human organism needs, to pass into the domain of the human etheric body. If this is not the case, the result is an excessive activity of this etheric body. The quantity of protein prepared by the ego organization, which the etheric body receives, is insufficient for its activity. The consequence is that the activity orientated towards enlivening that protein absorbed by the ego-organization overwhelms that protein still containing foreign etheric effects. The human being receives in his own etheric body a multitude of influences that do not belong to it. These must now be excreted in an abnormal manner. This results in a pathological process of excretion.

This pathological excretion appears in albuminuria. The albumen which should be received into the domain of the etheric body is excreted. It is albumen, which, owing to the weakness of the ego-organization, has not been able to assume the well-nigh lifeless intermediate stage.

[ 10 ] Now the forces in man which bring about excretion are bound up with the domain of the astral body. In albuminuria, the astral body is forced to carry out an activity for which it is not properly adapted, its activity becomes atrophied in those regions of the organism where it ought properly to unfold. This is in the renal epithelia. The degeneration of the epithelia in the kidneys is a symptom showing that the activity of the astral body which is intended for these organs has been diverted.

[ 11 ] It is clear from all this where the healing process for albuminuria must intervene. The power of the ego-organization in the gland of the pancreas, which is weak, needs to be strengthened.

It is a prominent trait of the human being to want to orient himself in the human development to get a certain view of the position of his own personality within the present life. The human being has often to put questions to himself how the past was from which everything developed that surrounds us in the present, which life guilt we have incurred and which life work we have accepted, what according the course of the human development may originate from his desires and longings, from his hopes and ideals for the future. It is certainly healthy to put these questions. Since the human being differs thereby from the other, earthly beings that he recognises the position that he has got within the development not only as such from its conditions and from its causes, but that he can also influence it from the consciousness of his task. We realise this way that for the purposes of modern time the consideration of the human development accepts a form that starts from the mentioned viewpoints.

We realise, for example, that at the beginning of the modern cultural direction Lessing (Gotthold Ephraim L., 1729–1781) writes his Education of the Human Race as the ripest document of his mental development. He tries to show there that a certain continuous plan exists in the development of humanity. One can distinguish an old period in which humanity had to follow moral impulses and commandments which were given from without, while the continuous education by the spiritual-divine forces intends that humanity gets around more and more to grasping the good as an own impulse of its being to do the good from the mere concept—doing the good for the sake of the good.

We also realise how Lessing comes from such a consideration to the necessity to accept repeated lives on earth for the human soul because for him the human development is advancing. So that for him the question had to arise: if a human soul lives in a former period and takes up certain impulses during it, how does it comply with the sense of human development if this soul had died for the development forever when it dies? Only thereby he could connect a sense with the development while he said to himself, the soul returns repeatedly to the life on earth and in these lives, the soul is educated by the leading powers to the summit of development. This is Lessing's basic idea when he was stimulated to his Education of the Human Race. Then we see again how from a profound insight of nature and human being Lessing's successor, Herder (Johann Gottfried H., 1744–1803), tries to show humanity as a whole in his Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind (1784–1791) and to show how in certain times other factors have worked on the human being than in later times, so that Herder also realises a sensible plan in the development of humanity. Actually, the deeper human consideration of the following times has never again left the ideas that Lessing, Herder and others stimulated. But the trait of the nineteenth century which was only directed to the outer appearance also seized history, so that that what one has thought and reflected about the continuous plan of human development stayed more in the background with those who directed their attention upon the spiritual, while the official science of history was not courageous enough to investigating the real effective forces and factors in the human development.

Of course, spiritual science tries again to recognise the concrete, actual sense of human history. However, there one has to say that in various fields prejudices tower up repeatedly which are not due, indeed, to the present research results, but to the present thoughts about these research results. This happens in particular if one wants to investigate the big laws of human history and that what should arise as a force for the present and as hope and as ideals for the future. One likes very much to regard the nature of the human being as something that could have experienced no inner development in a certain respect, but that it has been, actually, always in such a way as it is today.

At most, one admits that the present human being has experienced a development his animal nature. One traces back them either really up to those prehistoric men whom we have dug out of prehistoric graves or other places of finding, who show less perfect figures than the civilised humans of today who show such only with the outer physical form. One can trace back the descent of the human being hypothetically even further and believes to have something in any animal form from which the human being could have developed. The fact that a sensible consideration of the usual history already shows that the human soul life has changed since millenniums very much, one wants to pay little attention to it in the present, and one hardly admits that three, four, five millenniums before our calendar the whole spiritual condition was quite different from that in the present. One has to mention one fact only at first that should just strike those who academically consider the development of the human soul whose basic significance one does not properly appreciate.

Today one speaks of the fact that the human being has to think logically that he has to connect his concepts, his mental pictures logically with each other, nay that he can only judge in logical way. With it one proves that one has the view that the formation of mental pictures is subjected to inner logical laws, and that one can reach truth as it were only by logic. But now one also knows from the historical development that the Greek philosopher Aristotle founded this logic as science only few centuries before our calendar.

One may say: if one really knows the spiritual development of humanity, one has also to realise that the human being became aware of the logical laws, actually, only after the time when the Greek philosopher Aristotle had brought these laws into a certain form. Would it not be a matter of course and appropriate that one thinks about such a fact and asks himself, how does it happen that the thinking about logical laws has come into the human development only in a certain age?—If one thought appropriately about this fact, one would come to the result which absolutely corresponds to truth that the human beings have developed their consciousness relatively late in such a way that they could realise the logical laws in their souls. So the logic originated only in a certain time because before the whole constitution of the human soul was in such a way that it could not become aware of the logical laws. Humanity has developed only gradually to logical thinking, has developed towards the Greek-Roman age.

However, the present human being has if he does not want to get involved with the deeper results of spiritual research, only one possibility to gain a mental picture of that which is, actually, a consciousness that is not filled with logic laws. If the human being wants to form a mental picture of a pre-logical consciousness by the outer materialistic observation of nature, it can happen only in such a way that he turns to the instincts of the animals.

What can he learn from these instincts of the animals? I have repeatedly drawn your attention to the fact that it would be quite impossible to speak of the animal instincts in such a way as if in the life and activity of the animal realm logic, inner reasonableness did not exist. Everything that happens in the life of the animal realm makes us aware of this reasonableness. We see that insects live under certain conditions that make it to them impossible to get to know the circumstances under which their descendants have to develop in the first time of their existence. Although the full-grown insect lives in quite different conditions than the caterpillar needs them, still, we realise that the insect lays its eggs with big wisdom where then the hatching caterpillar finds the proper conditions. There we see that reason really works in it. Everywhere we see reason and logic in the realm of animals prevailing with which we cannot speak of the fact that they have something of it in their consciousness. If we see the miraculous dens of the beavers and other performances of the animals, if we look at the whole instinctive life of the animals and see, for example, that animals feel treacherous weather, earthquakes, volcano eruptions and other elementary events partly long ahead and behave according to them—but this is only a metaphor, because it happens by the reason prevailing in the animals that they “foresee” such things—we have to say, the instinctive life of the animals shows that the animals are enmeshed in a kind of logic and reason that everywhere objective reasonableness and objective laws interweave the environment.

Thus, the human being can get an idea how that what happens by him can still happen in another way. It needs not only to happen beccause the human being if he wants to do this or that says to himself, this is my goal, it has to look that way, and the tools have to look that way. But something similar can develop without doing these conscious considerations out of other forms of consciousness, out of subconscious forms in the world coherence as human conscious reasonableness develops in the human being. Spiritual science now points to the fact that our kind of reasonableness has developed only gradually that by no means the human being was an animal being with only animal instincts before but a being which had a form of consciousness different from the present logical consciousness but also different from the animal instinct. If you look at this what I have already said here about the possibility to develop slumbering forces of the human soul and about a kind of clairvoyant consciousness, then we can turn our view to the possibility to educate ourselves to forms of consciousness different from the today's only logical consciousness that sets itself only reasonable goals.

I have drawn your attention to the fact that by meditation and concentration someone who wants to become a spiritual researcher and wants to behold deeper into the undergrounds of the soul has to attain another consciousness, so that spiritual research aims at another kind of consciousness that is developed educationally from the present form. Such a clairvoyant consciousness can perceive in the spiritual world independently from the body and its senses. It becomes also apparent that in former times humanity had a form of consciousness different from the present logical, intellectual one. Our present consciousness has only developed since the Greek-Roman age. The human being had to be educated for it at first. We have now exceeded the Greek-Roman period, and today spiritual-scientific research shows that the form of our consciousness can be further developed to higher forms. The hypothetical idea may arise from it at first that that consciousness which Aristotle brought as it were in laws has developed again from other forms of consciousness, so that we would discover other forms of consciousness, of the soul life going back in human history.

Those who believe to stand on the firm ground of science, but stand only on their own prejudices cannot yet search such different forms of the soul life. Since they cannot imagine that at the starting point of humanity, with the primeval human beings a consciousness existed different from the instinctive consciousness like that of the present animals. But if we trace back the development of humanity not only up to a point where the human being would have been an animal and would have developed animal forms only, but if we trace back him to that point where he existed only as a wholly spiritual being, then one can no longer look for such forms of consciousness which are similar only to the animal instinct. Then we come to such forms of consciousness that correspond to an old human form that we have to imagine more and more as a spiritual-mental one, the further we go back. So that we have to imagine the human development in such a way that also the soul life was involved more and more in the material. Thus, we have to ascend in the development of humanity to forms of consciousness that correspond to a more spiritual inwardness.

Now not only the facts of spiritual research but also the outer facts show that we get to another kind of soul-life the farther we go back, even to prehistorical times explorable in historical way as it were. We do no longer find such mental pictures as we develop them today, by which we reflect the outside world if we go back beyond the Greek-Roman age. Not without good reason the Western historical philosophers have always begun their histories of philosophy with Thales five to six centuries before the Christian calendar because they recognised that one can generally only speak of a reasonable, logical reflection of the world. Only our present has managed to break this. Today where one measures everything with the same yardstick, one also wants to begin the history of philosophy far in the oriental thinking not paying attention to the fact that the soul conditions of experiencing the things was quite different within the pre-Greek cultures than it has become later from the Greek culture on. It needs the superficiality of the “profound” beholders of the East, for example, of Deußen (Paul D., 1845–1919, German Orientalist and Sanskrit scholar) to lead the history of philosophy beyond Thales. This can happen only if one has no notion of the development of the human soul, and that the oriental spiritual life has contents different from that what begins from the Greek-Roman age on for the inner life of human history. If we examine what faces us in ancient times, we have to say, the human being felt pressured more or less into thinking vividly about the world, not in the intellectual forms in which we live today, but in thought structures facing us as myths. That faces us as Imaginations what the human being takes up in his soul to get any explanation of the world. Images are contained in the myths. The strange appears that we find images on the bottom of all cultures very soon if we go back to the pre-Greek times, and the farther we go back, the more a kind of Imaginative worldview faces us.

Someone attains a kind of Imaginative knowledge as the first level of clairvoyant knowledge who makes his soul an instrument of spiritual research by that self-education which I have characterised in my book How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds? Someone who opens himself to this Imaginative knowledge which presents itself again in a kind of images in his soul, says to himself, if I compare this Imaginative knowledge to the miraculous imaginations of the Greek and pre-Greek myths, something faces me that, on the one side, is the same or similar, but, on the other side, is totally different.

If the modern spiritual researcher rises to Imagination, he keeps his logical thinking in his Imaginations that reflect the spiritual processes that are behind the sensory phenomena, he keeps it and aims almost at the logical thinking.

That means that he brings all connections of reason, the whole character of the present consciousness into it and an Imaginative knowledge would not be right which could not give some indication in what way the images are connected, in what way everything forms a whole within the Imaginative world. Just in this respect, I made a rather strange experience quite recently. In my book Occult Science. An Outline. you find the attempt to show not only the human development on earth Imaginatively, but also the former embodiments of our earth in other, preceding heavenly bodies. You find everything that was shown in this respect represented in such a way that it corresponds to the logical consciousness and the facts of sensory life. Now a theologian who had read this book said to me once, what I have read there is absolutely logical and rational, so that one could deign to remember that the author got around to writing this book completely out of the today's cultural life only by logical conclusions.—This made me wonder and I said to myself, then the whole representation has not come about maybe by clairvoyance but by mere logic.—He said this, although he had to admit that he could not find by his own logic what is given in this book as knowledge. One meets this fact often today that such representations are put up by mere logic, even if the results are pieced together from trains of thought to make them comprehensible. However, everything that you read in the Occult Science is not found by logical conclusions. It is hard to find these matters by logic. However, after they have been found, they are interwoven with logic. They are found of course also not without logic, but not at all on the way of logical conclusion, everything does absolutely correspond to Imaginative knowledge.

I have given this as an example what one can aim at by self-education of the present consciousness as a kind of Imaginative knowledge that can lead us to the undergrounds of the things. If we compare such a knowledge to myths and legends, we have found that it is important to recognise these clairvoyant experiences that the human beings had in the undergrounds of natural existence. However, it was necessary that they were cleverer than the human beings of the logical epoch were to be able to express what they investigated by such tremendous images. Since compared with some myths of nature or creation is that what our modern science is often only bungle and dilettantism, because an Egyptian or Babylonian myth about the work of good and evil outranks the modern monistic interpretation of the world. One feels in the thoughts of those human beings that they lived together with the forces of nature that the modern human being visualises laboriously in mental pictures. However, one realises that neither mind nor usual imagination but Imagination formed the myths, as they appear great and full of sap evenly in a certain respect with all peoples on earth. Only not that Imagination about which we talk spiritual-scientifically but an Imagination that was still free of the intellectual element. It was an original clairvoyant, not yet completed Imagination, no mere imagination. It did not resemble something animal even if it was dark and dreamlike, but it was not yet impregnated with logical thinking. Thus, we see the peoples intimately connected with that what prevails in the depths of the beings and expressing the immediate co-operation with the everlasting existence without applying logic in the great tremendous pictures of the myths. That is not academic in the modern sense, but it was the science of ancient times.

In this sense, we come to the rise of our present intellectual human attitude in the Greek-Roman culture. We see another kind of soul life preceding it which—because it was not yet logical because it was still dreamlike, but at the same time was more intimately connected with the spiritual basic facts of any working—could now vividly express this working. Hence, one can maybe find no other word that characterises the being of the immediately preceding culture of the Egyptians or Chaldeans than with the term culture of revelation. Against it, we can characterise the Greek-Roman culture in such a way that it experiences a kind of gradual dusk of the old culture of revelation. Indeed, in the older time of the Greeks, the revelations still arose vividly from the things, but then, in particular with Socrates, the intellectual culture dawned, and those things gradually disappeared which originated from the old culture of revelation, so that the human being made that the contents of his soul life which presents itself to him by his senses.

Before the human being had looked at the things, so that he saw the rushing spring that he saw what happened in wood and meadow. Everywhere he turned his glance to the things, but from every plant something emerged that spoke spiritually to him like a revelation. He formed this then in the images, for example, of the nymphs et cetera. What worked in the depths of the things what was shown to the old dreamlike clairvoyant consciousness disappeared gradually and a full, wholehearted recognition of that what the human being perceived with his senses replaced it. The culture of perception appeared where the human being positioned himself with that what he is and what he perceived in the world. He grew fond of it because of his whole physical organisation in such a way that Hellenism was like penetrated by the saying which is delivered to us by a great Greek who says there, I prefer to be a beggar on earth than a king in the realm of shades.

In the old culture of revelation, one could not have said this way. This was only possible when the world had advanced up to the culture of perception, to that what the senses see and what the intellect develops on basis of the senses as an intellectual view, because one only knew that behind the sensory world a spiritual world exists. One could speak only that way after this spiritual world had disappeared which is behind the sensory world.

One also felt this dawning of a quite new age. In the Greek-Roman epoch one felt the impulse that prompted the human being to produce an intellectual culture from himself.

Once one felt secure in a being of revelation to which one felt spiritually related. But now one felt that one entered into a new element where one was on his own. For that who observes the finer nuances of historical development this trait becomes especially clear. It becomes even clearer if we think that, indeed, such a life in a culture of revelation showed to the human being that he was secure as a spiritual being within the spiritual world, which he perceived clairvoyantly, but that at the same time he was less aware of his ego. Only a people of the culture of perception could completely shift for its own personality. Hence, in the Greek-Roman age with the possibility of processing the perception internally with this intellectual element, the reflection of the human being about his ego arises at the same time, which at first one experienced only in the mind as a concept, as an idea, as something invisible within the usual reality. Hence, one less appreciated the ego in the ancient times. Someone who investigates the ancient cultures deeper always recognises that the old myths and legends speak of gods, and if the human being did his work, he was aware that a god worked with this activity, another god with that activity, and motivates him.—The human being felt penetrated with spirit, but not yet with an ego. The human being attains the ego-consciousness only by the intellectual culture.

Even in the language development, we can prove that something gradually appeared that did not exist in the cultures of revelation where the human being considered himself as a vessel of the gods. The Greek had to experience the big tragedy at first that his view darkens and he had to say to himself, this is the tragic. I prefer to be a beggar on earth than a king in the other world that is uncertain to me.—However, it has become uncertain only in the Greek-Roman age. Because still in this strange age the old mysteries played a role, one could think about this transition of the soul still mythically while a quite new consciousness came into being.

What would have the human being said who already thought quite intellectually at that time if he had turned his glance to this important point of human history where the soul was torn out from the old culture of revelation to be educated to the ego-consciousness? He would have said to himself, in ancient times the human being was in the body in such a way that he beheld the spiritual-mental everywhere.—He did not behold an ego in this spiritual-mental, but he beheld the spiritual beings outranking him and would have said to himself, they live in my actions; they live in my perception, in my life, everywhere.—Now, the human being turned his glance to the world, and asked himself in this time of transition, “who I am?” The answer to this question fulfilled him with shudder, so that he had to say to himself, I do no longer receive the answer that gods are penetrating me, but I feel penetrated with an isolated ego.

A human being would have said this to himself who was penetrated with the intellectual consciousness. However, someone who would still have brought over something from former times who would have imagined from the point of view of the ancient consciousness would have said, the river god Cephissus and a nymph had a son, called Narcissus. This appears in the human soul as a picture. Narcissus saw himself in a spring in the Mount Helicon. One had forecast to him that he must die when he sees himself. That means, the human ego loses its connection with the divine when he realises his connection with the divine. There Narcissus sees himself and is condemned with it to death. The transition of the old culture of revelation is described to that of perception only in another way.

Somebody who would have imagined the transition to the new consciousness still in the way of the old consciousness would have said to himself, if the human being once looked at the environment, he beheld spiritual-divine forces everywhere, indeed, with his old Imaginative view. This old Imaginative consciousness gradually disappeared, and what last remained, actually, were the worst forces of the spiritual, spiritual beings that worked outdoors. The human being who imagined the new in the old kind became aware of them as Gorgons. There the new human being, Perseus, rises, mutilates the Gorgons, the Medusa, that means that consciousness which existed like the last rest, shown as Medusa's head with poisonous snakes in place of hair. Then it is shown how from the mutilated Medusa two beings originate: Chrysaor and Pegasus.

I am no friend of the allegorical-symbolic interpretation of myths. I mean it—also not in the sense of an allegorical-symbolic interpretation—in such a way that someone who has experienced the rise of the new to which humanity should develop with the old consciousness has still clairvoyantly beheld the birth of Chrysaor and Pegasus by Medusa. What did he behold? Chrysaor is the image that the human being received as an instalment for the lost old clairvoyance. Pegasus is the personification of imagination. Since the imagination is caused because the old Imagination disappeared, and the human beings do no longer have the power to enter the new epoch with a force of the old consciousness. They replace the old Imagination which beheld the spiritual reality by something that does not go into the spiritual reality but into the everlasting working of the human soul and that wants to show the new constitution of the human soul. Pegasus is nothing but the ego-culture. This develops further. Hence, we hear how that what has led to the ego-culture, Chrysaor, marries Kallirrhoe. Geryoneus originated, the modern intellectual culture of which the Greek felt that it led the human being from the old clairvoyant culture, but that it had to do this, because he would never have been able to attain the self-consciousness otherwise. Again the figure of Chrysaor has something tragic in itself, it characterises what the intellectual culture experiences. Someone who felt this the deepest, the poet Robert Hamerling (1830–1889), said about this intellectual culture, we see the conscious intellectual culture developing in the course of the human evolution from the ancient unconscious mythical culture. However, this culture leads like every development to its death. If the mere intellectual culture advanced in its way only—Hamerling and everybody who is able to assess the peculiar intellectual culture—recognises that it would dry out, would extinguish any liveliness and energy.

While spiritual science draws the attention to the fact that the intellectual culture must not remain an intellectual culture, it shows that humanity had to get necessarily to the intellectual culture to develop the ego-consciousness, but that it can get again to something that can be more than an intellectual culture. What does the intellectual culture give to the human being? It gives a picture of the world. What does the human being care about today in particular? Take the highest ideal which people have in mind that the concepts do not all deviate from the outer reality. They call everything impossible that does not comply immediately with the sensory-material reality. However, for spiritual research the intellectual culture is not only something that can depict reality but something that can educate the soul that brings up the forces of the soul. The humanity of the future will thereby get again to an Imaginative culture by which it is connected with the spiritual backgrounds of the things.

Thus, the intellectual culture is the necessary element to form the human ego in the course of human history. We see that the old clairvoyance had to be blunted by the intellectual culture, so that the ego flashes and can settle in those incarnations which the soul had in the Greek-Roman culture, and which it has and will still have for some time. Then we realise how in the future a new Imaginative culture is kindled with which humanity again is taken up in the spirit and in the spiritual life. Thus, the present is connected with the past, and the present teaches us what has to develop for the future. The consciousness of this transformation of the consciousness faces us greatly at a place of human history. However, I would like before to draw your attention still to the fact that with the old culture of revelation also a certain epoch of humanity was reached. The culture of revelation is completely penetrated with an old Imaginative life. If we went back even farther, we would meet an old culture which points everywhere in the Near East not to the culture which is described in history as the Persian one, but to a much older one from which the Persian culture originated. This older culture for their part followed again the ancient Indian culture. That is why we find the ancient Persian and the ancient Indian cultures as the precursors of the culture of revelation.

If we survey these cultures, we find the language that had arisen from the spiritual, but from the not yet conscious spiritual that is not penetrated with reason and logic. As even today the child learns speaking, before it learns thinking, humanity learnt speaking before thinking. From the deep undergrounds of the Imaginative consciousness, not from the animal instincts, a language developed from a clairvoyant consciousness that was still a higher one than the revelation consciousness of the ancient Egyptian culture. Beyond the ancient Indian culture the element of language developed. The language is a pre-conscious creation of the human mind. This points back to even older times in which the language gradually developed from a still subconscious spiritual activity.

Then we see that ancient Indian culture maturing which we admire just because we can call it a culture of unity in the best sense of the word. This is not the culture of the Vedas. These are an echo of the real ancient Indian culture only and originated not much longer before our Christian calendar than we live today after its beginning. One may characterise this ancient Indian culture while one says, the ancient Indian did not yet generally feel the difference of the material and the spiritual when he looked at nature. He did not yet see the spiritual separated from the material, he did not see at all the colours and the forms as we do today, but for him the spiritual bordered directly on the material. He saw the spirit as real as he saw the outer material colours: a culture of unity. He still saw the spiritual just as the material.

Hence, he felt the supreme spirit everywhere in the things that one later called Brahman, the world soul that one felt prevailing everywhere. However, this culture, which faces us in primeval times as a starting point of human history, did not enable the human being to be active in the material, to develop his forces in the material really. Hence, in the north in the area of the later Persian empire another culture spread out which was completely penetrated by the attitude that the human being belongs, indeed, to the spiritual world, but has to work on the material here on earth.

The ancient Persian people were a diligent working people compared to the ancient Indian people. They wanted to combine with the spiritual forces to impress the spirit in the material configuration of the earth by own power and work. Hence, the Persian felt united with his god of light and said, he penetrates me, because the human being lost the connection with the divine only in the time of the culture of perception, in the Greek-Roman epoch. The spirit of light, Ahura Mazdao, lived in the ancient Persian. Against it, he considered that which he had to overcome as the resisting matter, as interspersed with the forces of opposition, Ahriman, the dark spirit. Thus before the revelation culture that is connected with the Persian which we can call the culture of Mithra enthusiasm. We can imagine Ahura Mazdao who is symbolised by the sun in the following way: while later the human being still felt spirit-filled, and even later ego-filled, an enthusiasm in the spirit existed in these ancient Persian times, really an existence in God and a working of God by the human being. The ancient Ahura Mazdao culture was an enthusiastic culture preceding the culture of revelation.

One can observe such a thing just by spiritual science wonderfully as the poet especially feels, for example, when Robert Hamerling imagines something similar at the end of his writing The Atomism of the Will. He does not yet recognise spiritual-scientifically but with elementary intuitions that humanity has developed from an elementary connection with the spiritual forces of nature, that humanity formed language and myths on this elementary level. However, the intellectual culture is destined to lead the human being to a point where he completely realises his ego, his central spiritual-mental essence.

Another culture pointed to that magnificently. At that time, one pointed to it when one knew prophetically: a time comes, when that lives consciously in the human being—but it develops only in his innermost core—what lives and weaves in the world as the highest spiritual-divine. However, this time must be expected, it will come. Then something enters in the human being that penetrates his core spiritually. The spiritual forces approach as it were to prepare this impetus of the human ego. However, we are not yet allowed to speak of that now which still exists in the human being in such a way, as if the highest divine-spiritual already penetrates him. The divine is still unpronounceable. The ancient Hebrew culture felt that way; it felt the ego-culture, the intellectual culture approaching, while it possibly said to itself, the God who lives in the human soul can be characterised only with an unpronounceable name.—Hence, their view of the unpronounceable name of Jahveh. Jahveh or Jehovah is even a substitute with the unpronounceable name of the divine, because what was composed with these letters, indeed, is not to be vocalised, is not to be pronounced, because as soon as one pronounces it, it becomes something different from that what develops only in future as the spiritual being of the human being. The human being had to descend to the sensory-material world in the course of development, whereas he rises to the spiritual again in future times.

Then the Christian culture entered with necessity into that age which has produced the ego-culture. It regards the Christ impulse as that by which the human ego receives the impulse to settle in the spiritual in future again as the human being has once descended from the spiritual. Someone who can realise why Plato, Socrates and others were possible only in Greece, and why at that time the ego-consciousness emerged in a determining point, also understands why the Mystery of Golgotha had to take place just in the Greek-Roman culture as the main focus of the whole human development. Only someone who does not think about these connections and does not know what human consciousness means and how it changes can also not realise how the Christ impulse—characterised from another viewpoint in the previous talk—positions itself in the course of human development from the past through the present to the future. Just in the ancient Hebrew culture, the being of that appears what appears in the human ego. Now one can go into the details if one surveys history that way. Philosophers often stated that the Greeks said, any philosophy begins with marvelling.

Yes, it has to begin with the astonishment, as well as it has appeared in Greece. We can prove this if we look at history and at present in the right light. There something of the old clairvoyant consciousness has remained that does no longer work in such a way as it worked once. This is the dream. The dream is the last, decadent heirloom of the old clairvoyance, because already the conditions of the ego-consciousness work on it. What does the dream lack? Pursue the visions how they surge up and down, you will realise that one thing is absent. We would never accept the way they come and go in the awake consciousness. Why? Because the human being cannot be astonished in the dream, because astonishment appears only with the ego-consciousness in the culture of perception, and because something is contained in the dream that comes from times without ego-consciousness. The Greeks gave what appears as an ego-worldview with a miraculous characteristic saying, it begins with marvelling. However, the dream still lacks another thing. While dreaming we can do the most unbelievable things, and never conscience torments us. Conscience belongs to the ego-consciousness. It appeared only when the ego-consciousness developed. One can prove this, while one compares, for example, the dramas of Aeschylus and Euripides. With Aeschylus there is never talk of conscience, but with Euripides the conscience already plays a role. Conscience appears together with the ego-consciousness in the human development, and the dream lacks conscience, it is only an heirloom of the old clairvoyant consciousness.

We realise, while human history changed into the present, how from the old clairvoyant consciousness—from which language and myths have arisen—the intellectual consciousness gradually develops which is now at a climax of its development.

That is why spiritual science appears anticipating the necessary forces for the future in our time. It has to point to the fact that humanity has not to die away as awfully as Robert Hamerling may show the killing of a mere intellectual culture, but that the intellectual culture opens a new way of familiarising ourselves again with the spirit. Spiritual science knows what a poet and philosopher of modern time expresses so wonderfully at the end of his work where he pronounces his pain about the intellectual culture that has darkened the old elementary being together with the world undergrounds, but let the ego arise. There the poet says, “The divine kingdom, the golden age that is set in the legends at the world end to be aimed at, only means the withdrawal of any life into the spirit that can be also carried out individually.” Thus, a work of Robert Hamerling closes in hope for the future that any life develops back to the spirit as any human life arises from the spirit. Past, present, and future move together, so that the ego-consciousness is in the middle, in the present, which he did not have before. However, he will keep this ego-consciousness as an heirloom and take it with him into spiritual heights, so that we can speak again of a spiritual age of humanity. No oppressive future ideal arises if we understand human history spiritual-scientifically. How are we put in life that often is so full of suffering and pains how can we relate to the world goals in our ideas? We can answer this big human question in such a way in particular from spiritual science with certainty which gives us vitality and confidence for all human future at the same time, as the poet about whom I have just spoken answers it anticipating and with imagination.

In 1856, he inserted nice words in his Venus in Exile that touch past, present, and future of humanity, which, indeed, he did not yet speak out of the consciousness of spiritual science. But that what the human soul expected and is renewed later in another form faces us in the old myths and legends so wonderfully. What spiritual science can say reasonably, the poetic mind expressed it in an anticipating way:

Why did I throw myself in the abyss of earthly being,
Threatened by grief and death's fury,
Why do I float in the sea of coloured appearance,
Why do I swim through waves of pain to the goal?
I do not know it. One thing is only certain to me:
In my deepest inside the voice sounds
That consents joyfully to the lot of life
And shoulders this earthly destiny.
(Literal translation)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Greek text is as follows:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 1. “Behold” is no longer correct.