The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In the present group of lectures I have wanted particularly to indicate that the entire constitution of the human soul is undergoing transformation. This becomes evident to anyone who observes the evolution of humanity carefully from a spiritual scientific point of view, of humanity even in historical times, which is what we have been chiefly considering. People's way of comprehending their conception of the world, their impulses to act: everything pertaining to the human soul-constitution is changing in such a way that the slightest idea of it is beyond the understanding of external science. For science works in this realm with utterly inadequate means. Yesterday we tried to show that especially what may be called the center of human soul-life, real ego-consciousness, appears to more intimate observation to have been entirely different in ancient times from the ego-consciousness of later epochs, and that again from our present. I tried to characterize these differences by saying that in ancient times, particularly the pre-Christian, man's consciousness of self still possessed elements of reality, while in our own era, which involves principally the development of the consciousness-soul, there is only a reflection of the true ego in what we consciously call our ego. I have referred to this fact in public lectures by saying that a man of our time, especially if he thinks he is a philosopher, does not arrive at the truth because he is confused by a philosophic maxim that plays a great role in today's world view, a role that is becoming disastrous, namely, the maxim “I think, therefore I am.” This Augustinian and Descartian maxim is not true for present-day man. The true form should now be: “I think, therefore I am not.” A human being in our time should be fully conscious of the fact that in all he includes in the word “I” or “I am,” in all he holds in his consciousness when he observes his inner soul-being, he possesses only a reflection. This reflection even includes all the concepts directly connected with his ego, concepts that must be worked through by his ego. As humanity of this present age we no longer have anything of reality in our inner soul-life. The reality, our true being, only shines into us—I explained yesterday how it shines in—and what we bear within us is merely the reflection. This fact will only become clear when we inquire into the science of initiation and observe the difference between the way a human being in ancient times could penetrate into the supersensible worlds on paths of supersensible training, and the way this is accomplished in our day. We will then be able to see that as we move on from the present into the future the paths into the supersensible world will be completely different from those of ancient times. This is especially what I wanted to make clear yesterday.

Some time ago I pointed to the objective fact underlying this whole evolution. I pointed out that if we ask what impulses, what forces are active in the evolution of the earth and the evolution of humanity, we learn that certain divine- spiritual Beings are active whom the Bible calls the Creators, the Elohim. (One could just as well take their title from another source.) We call them the Spirits of Form. I have shown, however, from various points of view that these Spirits of Form have to a certain extent—if I may use a trivial expression—finished playing their role on behalf of the most important concerns of mankind, and that other spiritual beings have taken it over.

Anyone with sufficient feeling for this fact that presents itself to supersensible research, namely, that the time- honored Gods, or God, must now be replaced in human consciousness by other impulses, will realize that indeed very much has happened in the evolution of mankind, even during historical times. Such an inner transformation of the whole human consciousness as is now taking place, and which will become more and more apparent, has certainly never occurred within historical times. As you know, I am not inclined to agree with the oft-repeated phrase: we live in a time of transition. I have often remarked that anyone can say of any time that one lives in an age of transition; and if he fancies the notion, he can consider the transition he has in mind the most important in world evolution. That is not the meaning intended in what I have said. Any time is a time of transition, but the important thing is to know what is in transition, what is undergoing metamorphosis. From other points of view other transitions may have been more significant; but for the inner soul-life of man the transition to which I am now referring, directed toward our immediate future, is the one most fraught with meaning of any in historical times.

Let us consider this further from a somewhat different point of view. When we call to mind clearly the soul-constitution in the time of ancient Greece, ancient Egypt, ancient Chaldea, it appears first of all not to have had a twofold structure as does the soul of present-day man. Perhaps we would better say that a twofold structure is now in preparation; indeed, it is in vigorous preparation, and can already be recognized in objective facts. What was formerly a mingling of soul-forces, so to speak, that worked together in the human soul, has been dividing since the fifteenth century. To a critical observer of human evolution this is quite evident. The conceptual life and the will-life were much more closely united in former times than they are now. They will separate more and more. The conceptual life, which is absolutely all we can lay hold of with our present consciousness (the ordinary, not the clairvoyant consciousness), is nothing more than a reflection of reality; and this life of conceptions also comprises all that we can grasp of our ego. On the other hand, we experience our will-life as in sleep. A man is as unconscious of what actually pulsates in his will as he is of events during sleep; but just as he knows that he has slept, in spite of knowing nothing about himself during sleep, so he knows about his will with his ordinary consciousness even though he sleeps through everything that he wills. If you have a white surface that reflects light, with some black spots on it that do not reflect the light, you see the black spots too, even though they do not reflect the light. Similarly, if you follow your life in retrospect, not only do you see your waking periods, but the periods of sleep appear in the course of your life as black spots. It is correct to say that you know nothing of yourself in sleep; but in a survey of your entire plane of consciousness the intervals of sleep may be said to appear as black spots. A person deceives himself if he thinks he knows more of his will than he does of his sleep. Man is conscious of his life of conceptions, and into this life of conceptions slip the black spots; these are the impulses of will. But man experiences these will-impulses as little as he experiences the sleep periods.

The will-life was less obscure to the consciousness of pre-Christian ancient times than it is today. Man was not so sound asleep with regard to his will; the instinctive will functioned, illuminated by the life of conceptions. On this account conceptions were not such pale reflections as they are today. Now we have on the one hand the conceptual life, which is only a reflection of reality, and on the other hand the will-life, which is a sort of sleep-condition punctuating our conscious life.

I said that what is contained in man's soul-constitution is also apparent objectively. Let us consider two phenomena that are extreme opposite poles. The rest of human life, so far as it is influenced by the human soul-constitution, resembles these phenomena. One of them is to be found today in the views which are especially developed in the so- called secret societies of the English-speaking peoples. (Such societies existing among other peoples, for instance, the Freemasons and similar organizations, depend entirely upon their original founding among the English-speaking peoples.) This is one extreme phenomenon. The other is to be found in the so-called Christian Church, wherever this has dogmas and rituals. These are two extreme, diametrically opposed phenomena.

There are other phenomena that are similar: for instance, what we call modern science resembles the secret-society view of the English-speaking peoples. Humanity is hardly aware that modern science is essentially similar to the views existing in these secret societies. I do not say influenced by them, but similar to them—for these things develop from different roots and then the trees become similar. It is the same with much that one finds in popular world conceptions. Today many people whose thinking does not conform to any kind of scientific world view have nonetheless similar aims. Among the scientific conceptions, philosophy alone—from an inner view—is still dependent upon the view of the Roman Catholic Church. Even the organization of man as body and soul, which philosophers regard today as unprejudiced science, is (as I have often stated) merely an outcome of the eighth Ecumenical Council of Constantinople,¹⁴ when the spirit was abolished by the Roman Catholic Church. Thus, “unprejudiced” philosophy is nothing but the elaboration of a Church Council resolution. There are individuals who do not look at things as they are painted by the universities of our time, but who really penetrate to the facts. To them, a philosophy that accepts this dualism of body and soul, and fails to stand for the true organization of man as body, soul, and spirit, is nothing but abstract superstition originating in that Church Council—unconsciously, of course. Now if you take these two opposite views, you may find them in modified form in science and in the popular world view—as the cold of the North Pole is modified in the Temperate Zone—but if the extremes are kept in mind, the matter will become perfectly clear. You see, the secret-society view of the English-speaking people, looking up to what it considers as underlying the whole cosmic process, emphasizes particularly the so-called Architect of the worlds, the great Master Builder of the worlds. These people picture to themselves in all sorts of symbols and rites the way the great Architects of all worlds work within the cosmic process. No one recognizes that this view persists as a ghost in modern science; but it does. It is a view tending to focus exclusively upon a mere reflection of the world, upon what is only a reflection of reality.

There you have the one extreme, which takes into account only the reflection of reality and when it becomes a dogmatic world conception, it is really something entirely outside reality. That is why so much mischief can be done with these things; it is why rites and symbols, very seriously intended, or seriously proclaimed, can become a masquerade or mere ostentation. It is something a human being consciously enjoys; it gives him a lively sensation, just because it takes account of the present-day consciousness, the consciousness that is a reflection of reality, that contains the reflection of reality.

The other extreme is offered by the Church. It is radically different from the world-conception “nerve” of the secret-society view. What the Christian Church offers reckons with the other pole, the pole of the will, with those human impulses that enter the consciousness only as sleep does at night. It reckons with a reality, to be sure, but a reality that is slept through. That is the reason also for the curious development of the Christian churches, which consists in their having gradually resolved the very different concepts of ancient times into their so-called concept of faith. Anyone who knows how the followers of almost all Christian views constantly turn away from knowledge and toward faith will feel something of sleep in this practice of faith. Their desire is to prevent at all costs any clearly conscious illumination of what strives to enter the human soul from those regions where sleep also originates. Therefore, what I have described as the content of the ancient Gnosis was reduced in earlier centuries to completely abstract dogmas, which were not intended to be comprehended but only to be accepted. And in Protestantism, knowledge has been reduced to a mere subjective belief, which has its special characteristic in its being based on something that cannot be proved, something beyond the province of science. There you have the two extremes that developed in the human soul-constitution as they are now related to objective facts.

Now we may ask what really underlies this splitting of the human entity into two-poles: the conceptual life, which has become a mere reflection of images; and the will-life, which has been forced down into realms of unconsciousness where it is asleep? The underlying cause is this, that in the historical evolution of humanity the impulse for freedom is struggling upward in the development of the human being. Even freedom, dear friends, is a product of evolution! Earlier times were not ready to awaken humanity to a real impulse for freedom.

This present time in which we live can be characterized on the one hand as I have just indicated: by the fact that the Spirits of Personality are replacing the Spirits of Form. Subjectively the struggling forth from the human soul of the impulse for freedom accompanies this outer, objective fact of evolution. Whatever course events may be taking externally, however chaotic all outer happenings may become, still at the same time we have in the present and the near future the struggle of the human being, in this very age of the consciousness soul (in which we have been living since the fifteenth century) the struggle of the human being to win through to an experience of the impulse for freedom. An understanding of this impulse is being sought by modern humanity, and will be sought more and more.

But this impulse can only break out of the human soul if the soul is capable of it. In earlier times freedom in its full range was not possible, for the simple reason that before the age of the consciousness soul every impulse was instinctive. Man cannot be free if he can only take into his consciousness what plays in from an instinctively conscious reality. Modern science still reckons on this absence of freedom, on inner necessity, because it is ignorant of the fact that in our consciousness as it is developed today, in the only kind of consciousness that can be developed through modern science, no real impulses can exist. (The contemporary scientific concepts show this reflection-consciousness to the highest degree.) Nothing exists in our consciousness that springs from some reality of our own body, soul, or spirit. Reality exists in it, to be sure—especially if we develop what in my The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity I have called pure thought—but it only exists in reflection. As soon as you find yourself within a reality, you are impelled by it, for reality is something; even if it acts upon you quite feebly, it is an element of necessity, it constrains you, and you must follow it. This is not the case when a reflection works upon your soul, for a reflection contains no activity, no force; it is a mere image that does not urge the soul or compel it. In this age in which the consciousness tends to have reflections, the impulse for freedom can be developed at the same time. By anything else a man would be urged to do something; but when his conscious conceptions are images and nothing but images, which reflect a reality but are not the reality, there is no reality to oppress him. He is able in this age to develop his impulse for freedom. This is a mysterious fact that underlies the life of our present time. That people have become materialists in this age can be traced to their feeling, when they contemplate their inner life, that they find no reality there, only images. And, of course, everything else is sought in the sense-world. It is true that we can find no reality, either spiritual or physical, within our soul; we find only images. This was not always so; it is only true for our age. Our age is suited to develop materialism because it has become nonsensical to say, “I think, therefore I am.” We should say, ‘‘I think, therefore I am not.” That means that my thoughts are only images. In the act of conceiving myself in thinking, I am not, I am only an image. This being-an-image, however, is what gives me the possibility of developing freedom.

This is another fact revealed by outer phenomena to those who survey life, may I say, according to certain leitmotivs; but its truth will only be fully revealed when we again take up initiation science, true spiritual science. You must realize, however, that today whenever people are active in philosophic or scientific pursuits, they are living very much on concepts inherited from an earlier time.

This can be seen very clearly in one of the contrasting phenomena we were considering. You can observe how the secret-society ideas of the English-speaking peoples have spread over the earth; and you will find that in these secret societies what is ancient is emphasized with a certain partiality. The more the age of any rite or dogma in this realm can be played up, the more—pardon the expression—they lick their fingers with pleasure. And when someone wants especially to captivate people with some sort of occult science, he at least announces that it is Rosicrucian, or even Egyptian—but surely old; it must be something or other old. That corresponds pretty well to the fact that in those societies knowledge that has been obtained in the immediate present is not cultivated. (Some direct research is carried on, to be sure, but only according to the rules of ancient, antiquated occult science.) On the contrary, anything such as we do here—spiritual science acquired by working directly out of the impulses of the present—anything of this sort is opposed with might and main. Opposition to anything modern is the fixed tradition of these extreme phenomena. And—leaving aside Goetheanism, which is something entirely new—if one considers thoughtfully the customary, trivial natural science and its mode of conception, one knows that all the real concepts with which it works, even all ideas (not the single laws of nature, but the forms of the laws of nature) are, fundamentally, inherited concepts. The experiments contain something new, the observations also; but the concepts are new in no sense whatever: they are inherited. And when we call the attention of one or another scientist to this fact, they become really indignant, fearfully angry, and they deny this source of their concepts.

Whence, then, comes modern thought that fancies itself so enlightened? My dear friends, it is merely the child of an ancient religion! To be sure, the religious conceptions have been discarded. People no longer believe in Zeus or in Jahve—many not even in Christ—but the mode of thought from the age when Zeus, Jahve, Osiris, Ormuzd, were believed in, the manner of human thinking has remained. It is applied today to oxygen, hydrogen, electrons, ions, Herzian waves; the object makes no difference, the mode of thought is the same. Only through spiritual science can a new kind of thinking be employed for the supersensible world and for this world as well. As I have often said, Goethe provided an elementary beginning in natural science with his morphology, which consequently is also combatted by the antiquated views. With his physics too Goethe created a beginning, but the fruitfulness of that beginning is still hardly recognized. Thus people work with what is left over—which, of course, is comprehensible. For in an age when the consciousness is filled, not with elements of reality, but with only reflected images, it is unable, if it is thrown entirely on its own resources as ordinary, everyday consciousness, to acquire much in the way of content.

On the other hand, how were the religious conceptions acquired? It is childish to suppose that the ancient theologians thought up the contents of the Old Testament, or more recent theologians those of the New Testament, in the way present-day philosophers turn out their inherited concepts. That is a childish way of thinking. What stands in the Old Testament and the New Testament, and in the other religious books of the various peoples, came from supersensible visions, but only from the very ancient supersensible visions. It was all revealed through supersensible knowledge; and as the revelations were accepted from the supersensible world, the thought-forms were accepted too. So that today a good zoologist or a good surgeon is—unconsciously—using the thought-forms, the kind of concepts, that the seer of the Old Testament or New Testament had gained in his way by his own effort. And from the visions he obtained, the seer also developed his mode of forming concepts. Naturally it angers people today when we say to them: Even though you are zoologists, or physiologists, and certainly work in a different field, you are nevertheless using the thought-forms that originated from the visions of the ancient prophets or the evangelists. In the course of the last four hundred years, since the rise of Copernicanism and Galileism, very few new concepts have been acquired, and still less concept-forms of any sort, or trends of thought. The little that has been gained is precisely what provides the foundation for again finding supersensible paths of knowledge—through the real, anthroposophically oriented science of the spirit. Therefore, as early as the eighties of the last century I indicated clearly in my introduction to Goethe's Morphology—and I had the words printed in italics—that I considered Goethe the Kepler and Copernicus of organic science. I intended in this way to point out the path that leads directly into supersensible realms, and that starts from the good elementary foundation which he created. Thus the kind of thoughts that continue to haunt human heads today came from ancient vision, that is, from atavistic supersensible perception. During this entire evolution of human consciousness the Creators of old, the Spirits of Form, were active; they revealed themselves to the supersensible consciousness. Now it is no longer these Spirits who are revealed to one who stands within the modern life of spirit: it is the Spirits of Personality.

You may ask, what is the difference? This is shown precisely in initiation science. The modern spiritual scientist is still someone very strange to the popular consciousness, even to the general scientific consciousness, because the latter contains only a spark of Galileism, Copernicanism and Goetheanism, and even that in very elementary form, for it is still commonly dominated by the mode of thought of the ancient seers. It was the Spirits of Form who had furnished the ancient visions, who then brought to life in man the conceptions that were active in the ancient religions and even in Christianity up to the present time. These Spirits of Form, whom we call Creators, manifested themselves, to begin with, in imaginations that arose in man involuntarily. That was their initial mode of revelation; then out of the imaginations grew the conceptions of all the ancient religions. You know that imagination is the first stage of supersensible knowledge, then comes inspiration, and then intuition. All those who wanted to reach supersensible knowledge in the ancient sense started from imaginations; they had to find their way to the Spirits of Form.

Today the way has to be found to the Spirits of Personality. Here, then, is a tremendous difference. For the Spirits of Personality do not give imaginations to whoever wants them: a man must work them out himself; he must go to meet the Spirits of Personality. It was not necessary to go to meet the Spirits of Form. Formerly a man could be what one may call favored by divine grace, because the Spirits of Form gave him their imaginations in the form of visions. Many still seek this path today, because it is easier—but it is only attainable now in a pathological condition. Mankind has evolved, and what was psychological in earlier times is pathological now. Everything in the nature of visions, everything that depends upon involuntary imaginations, is pathological in our time and pushes a man down below his normal level. What is demanded today of anyone who wishes to push forward to initiation science, or actually to initiate vision, is that he shall develop his imaginations in full consciousness. For the Spirits of Personality will not give him imaginations; he must bring the imaginations to them. And something else occurs today. When you develop, when you elaborate valid imaginations, then you meet the Spirits of Personality on your supersensible path of knowledge, and you find the power to verify your imaginations, to bring them to objectivity for yourself.

The most elementary course for the spiritual researcher today will usually be to seek imaginations from the soundest results of modern knowledge. I have pointed out that modern science is the best preparation for spiritual research, because it offers the possibility of rising to fruitful pictorial concepts, especially if it is carried on in the Goethean sense. Of course anyone can invent images that are merely fantastic; one can patch together all sorts of stuff into arbitrary imaginations. The images one makes must first be verified by the approach of the Spirits of Personality bringing inspirations and intuitions. These are really received from the Spirits of Personality. One knows with certainty that one is in communication with those Spirits, who reveal themselves to present-day humanity from remote depths of spirit; but they will remain unproductive for one unless one brings a language to them. They keep the imaginations for themselves. Earlier, the Spirits of Form placed imaginations before a person who had supersensible vision; but the Spirits of Personality keep them in their possession, and one must come to an understanding with those Spirits—just as one would with another human being with whom one should be having thoughts in common and interchange of these thoughts. One should have free converse in the same way with the Spirits of Personality. The entire inner structure of spiritual life has been changed. The involuntary character which was the basis of the ancient revelations has been transformed into an impulse which is experienced in free activity. Someone who is not superficial, who wants to find out what really can occur, will become aware as he follows world events today (perhaps at first from something quite superficial) that a new world-plan is seeking to be realized, that behind outer events something is trying to take place spiritually. This may be sensed from world- happenings, but thoughts about it are still very vague.

Especially in social life many people may have the feeling that something is trying to be realized, something wills to happen. But if one wishes to understand what it is that wills to occur, he must approach it with something that only he himself can bring to it. What I have indicated as one kind of social impulse that is needed—but only one kind, because it is not a program, but reality—has been learnt in this way. I can say, therefore, that it is not something thought out, or fashioned from some ideal (what is called an ideal today), but it is a conception of something that presses to be realized, and that will be realized. One can only put it into concepts if one has first acquired the ability to form imaginations, and then has had them verified, proved, confirmed by the Spirits of Personality who are weaving the new world-plan.

This present-day development demands of us that we strip away all that is out of date in current science, and really find our way into new thought-forms, so that in them we may reach not antiquated visions, but imaginations built up with all our will, which we may then offer to the objective process of the spiritual world and receive back verified. This is so completely, so radically different from all earlier methods of gaining supersensible knowledge that the numerous individuals who depend upon the earlier methods resist it with all their might. For something is demanded of persons seeking to gain supersensible knowledge, something that is radical, primal, elementary, that intends to penetrate to sources, something that must be reconciled with all that is, consciously or unconsciously, antiquated. That is the reason why the spiritual science presented here attaches so little value to all that is traditional. These traditional things are certainly worthy of respect, but the fact remains that we stand at the turning-point of human evolution; and we must fully recognize that the traditional is obsolete, and that something new must be won. Hence, in a spiritual science that takes today's conditions into account, there can be no thought of faith in the old sense, nor any inclination toward the so-called Master Builder of all worlds. For both pertain only to external consciousness. When one attains a consciousness that is outside the body and outside the course of life, that is really in the spiritual world, then will and conceptions flow together again into one reality. And what was mere architecture, mere form—lifeless forms and lifeless symbols—receives inner life. Empty, obscure faith becomes knowledge, concrete self-transforming knowledge. The two unite and become a living thing. This is what must be experienced by humanity. The ancient symbols and ancient rites must be felt to be out of date. The whole earlier mode of thought must be felt as something antiquated; and the rigid forms in that mode of thought must be given life.

Just think how much use is still made today of those antiquated concepts! Certainly something useful can be done with them in many fields; but humanity would become stiff and paralyzed and withered if our antiquated ideas did not yield to something else, something containing inner life. We can no longer continue to work under the symbol of world-architecture, with rigid forms, traditional symbols, traditional dogmas. Something must bring mankind and the world together, and it must be a spontaneous, living thing.

At the beginning of our Christian era, for example, it was not yet true even of Christianity that its development was founded on something living. I have often called attention to the fact that those who first wrote about Christianity did so from the standpoint of the ancient Egypto-Chaldean science. Even the dates were not historically established. Festival dates, for instance, were determined astrologically, also the dates of the birth and death of Christ Jesus. The whole Apocalypse rests on astrology. The latter was alive in ancient times, but today it is dead, it is simply mathematical reckoning. It will only come to life again when things are comprehended with living insight: when, for instance, the birth-year of Christ Jesus is not figured out by the stars, but is seen with the vision that can be gained today in the way described. With that, things come to life. There is no life today in a calculation that determines whether some star is in opposition or in conjunction with another, and so on; but there is life when the nature of the opposition is experienced, when this is experienced livingly, inwardly—not simply externally through mathematics. In saying this, no particular objection is intended to external mathematics; it can even shed light on many things—darkness on many things, too!—but it has nothing to do with humanity's real, immediate necessity. Nor can these things be perpetuated in the old way; they would bring nothing but aridity and paralysis to the development of mankind. Of course, in judging such things people are influenced by the thought that although they themselves need not become seers—for just healthy commonsense can grasp spiritual science—yet even this kind of thinking can only be acquired with effort, while on the other hand they can easily adopt the ancient traditions and methods, and still more easily believe the church dogmas.

Now we come to a fact that we have treated repeatedly from various points of view: namely, the change that is taking place in the constitution of the human soul. It indicates on the one hand the streaming forth of the revelation of the Spirits of Personality; on the other hand, it indicates the liberation within the depths of men's souls of the impulse for freedom—a fact reflected now so urgently in the great demands mankind is raising. Today's social demands can only be understood if one is able to perceive this evolution in the constitution of the human soul. Call to mind a remark I made yesterday: that people are beginning—at least beginning, I said—to sense their true ego when they come in contact with other people. The man of old understood “Know thou thyself!” in the external world. For supersensible cognition it is different; but the man of ancient times, when speaking of his ego, had something real in the external world, the world in which the human being lives with his ordinary consciousness between birth and death. Modern man has only a reflection of his true ego; but something of his true ego shines into him when he comes in contact with other people. Another person who is connected with him karmically, or in any other way, gives him something real. To express it radically: it is characteristic of human beings of our present age to be inwardly hollow—and we should acknowledge it. If we practice life-retrospection honestly and faithfully, we find that the influences other people have had upon us are much more important than what we ourselves have supposedly acquired. Present-day man, of himself, gains extraordinarily little unless he obtains knowledge from supersensible sources. He need not be clairvoyant. A person is driven to daily social intercourse because actually he is only real in someone else, in his relation to another person. As we approach the sixth post-Atlantean epoch, of which embryonic impulses are now present in Russia, this fact will become so potent that a current axiom will be: No happiness is possible for one individual without the happiness of all—just as a single organ in man can only function if the whole functions. In the future this will be recognized as an axiom simply because it will be a fact of consciousness. We are still far from it—you may make your minds easy!—for a long time to come you will be able to consider your own personal happiness even though it may be built upon much human misery. But that is the direction in which humanity is developing. It is simply a fact, as when a man has a cold he must cough. He finds that unpleasant. Just so, a few thousand years from now, there will be unpleasant soul-conditions aroused when a man wishes as an individual to have any sort of happiness in the world without its being shared by others. This interdependence of mankind is inherent in human evolution, and is making itself felt today in the social demands. This is simply the direction in which the human soul is developing.

In earlier times when a man looked within, he could still find something real, even in the life between birth and death. Today, materialism is actually not unjustified in this life between birth and death if we observe man only outwardly; for what the ordinary consciousness can trace within the human being in his earthly life has only to do with material facts. Supersensible facts underlie these, but, as I said yesterday, they cease soon after birth and leave a man to take a material course until his death, when the supersensible struggles forth again. It is not from mere charlatanism that contemporary scientific research is materialistic, it is from taking into account instinctively the conditions actually existing in man today. But the people do not see beyond this life between birth and death. As soon as they begin someday to see beyond it, natural research will end as a matter of course.

Man must for once dive down into this purely material life, so that, independent of it, he may gain the spiritual. Thus, to understand what is pulsating in the most urgent demands of our time, it is absolutely necessary to look into this transformation of the human soul-constitution. And it is only possible to observe it when one is willing to do so through the science of initiation.

• 14. Council of Constantinople: 869 A.D. See Rudolf Steiner, Building Stones for an Understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha, GA 175 (London, Rudolf Steiner Press, 1972).

What we possess as the first fruit of Spiritual Science is in its most practical and noble sense able to lead us to feel that there is within the ordinary outer man an inner man, who to the ordinary idea is really a second man. In this respect all men in reality consist of two beings; one composed more of our physical body and etheric body and belonging to that which is the external world: external in the sense that this physical body and to some extent the etheric body too are forms and images—manifestations—of the divine Spiritual beings by which we are always surrounded. Our physical and etheric bodies are I in their true essence—though not as we as men at first know them,—images, neither of ourselves, nor of our real being, but of the Gods whose whole life is spent in producing our physical and etheric bodies and bringing about their full development; just as we men bring about the actions and deeds we accomplish. The inner man is of such a nature that he is more closely related to the astral body and ego. To the universe the astral body and ego are younger than the physical body and etheric body. This we know, from what has been given out in the book Occult Science. The physical body and etheric body compose that which, as it were, reposes when we sleep and is made ready for us by the divine-spiritual beings that permeate the outer universe and make it manifest; and the ego and astral body, by the experiences, testings and shiftings which they undergo in the physical and etheric bodies, are to ascend gradually through the stages of development with which we have also become familiar.

Now, as I indicated in the last lecture, we are in connection with the universe, with the whole Cosmos; and this connection is such that—as I merely hinted in the last lecture—it can even be reckoned and expressed in numbers. This connection of ours with the universe can of course be expressed and shown in many other ways, but—I might say—to our great astonishment it can be expressed by the fact that the number of breaths a man draws in a day equals the number of years required for the Vernal Point to return to its original point of departure. These discoveries in the realm of numbers can, if we permeate them with feeling, fill us with awe, with a holy awe; if we reflect that we too belong to the divine Spiritual universe which is manifested in all external phenomena.

The fact that we are the Microcosm, the little world formed and manifested out of the Macrocosm, the great world, is felt as still more profound when we visualise such facts as will be brought before our minds today, and which I may enumerate as follows: the three meetings of the Human Soul with the Being of the Universe: and this is the subject I shall speak about today. We all know that as earth-men we bear within us the physical body and etheric body, the astral body and ego. Each of the two beings I have referred to bears within him what I might call two sub-beings. The more external man the physical and etheric body, the more inner man the ego and astral body. Now we know moreover that man is to undergo further development. The earth as such will some day come to an end. It will then evolve further, through a Jupiter, Venus, and a Vulcan planetary evolution. Man during this time will rise stage by stage; to his ego will, as we know, be added a higher being—the Spirit-Self which will manifest within him. This will reach full manifestation during the Jupiter evolution, which will follow that of our earth. The Life-Spirit will attain full manifestation in man during the Venus period; and the actual Spirit-Man during the Vulcan period. When, therefore, we look forward to the great cosmic future of man, to these three stages of evolution, we look forward to the Spirit-Self, Life-Spirit, and Spirit-Man. But these three which in a sense await us in our future evolution are even now in a certain respect related to us, although they are as yet not in the least developed; for they are still enclosed in the bosom of the divine-Spiritual Beings whom we have learnt to know as the Higher Hierarchies. They will come forth to us from out of the Higher Hierarchies; and we today are already in relation with these Higher Hierarchies, who will endow us with the Spirit-Self, Life-Spirit, and Spirit-Man. So that today, instead of using the more complicated expression and saying: ‘We are in connection with the Hierarchy of the Angeloi’; we can simply say: ‘We are in connection with that which is to come to us in the future—our Spirit-Self.’ And instead of saying that we are in connection with the Archangels, we can say: ‘We are in connection with what is to come to us in the future, as our Life-Spirit,’ and so on.

Indeed we human beings are already in a certain respect, though at present only in rudiment—(and in the Spiritual world rudiments are something much higher than they are in the physical world)-more than merely four-principled beings consisting of physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego. We already bear the germ of the Spirit-Self within us, as well as that of the Life-Spirit and Spirit-Man; they will evolve out of us in the future, though at present we only have them in germ within us. This is no mere abstract saying, it has quite a concrete significance, for we have meetings, real meetings with these higher principles of our being. These meetings take place in the following way. We, as human beings, would as time went on feel ourselves increasingly estranged from everything Spiritual—a state of things very difficult to endure—did we not from time to time encounter our Spirit-Self. Our ego must meet that higher Self,—the Spirit-Self which we have yet to develop, and which in a Spiritual respect is of like nature to the Hierarchy of Angels. So therefore we may say in simple language, and speaking in the Christian sense: we must from time to time meet with a being of the Hierarchy of the Angels, a being closely related to ourselves; and when it comes to us, it brings about in us a Spiritual change, which will enable us some day to take in a Spirit-Self. We must also meet with a being of the Hierarchy of the Archangels, for this being then so affects us that something is prepared which will some day lead to our developing the Life-Spirit.

Whether in the Christian sense we place this being in the Hierarchy of Angels, or whether we refer to it in the older sense understood by the ancients when they spoke of their genius as the guiding genius of man, makes no difference. We know that we are living at a time when but few people—though this will soon alter—few can gaze into the Spiritual World and perceive the things and the beings therein. The time has now gone by when the beings and even the various processes of evolution in the Spiritual-world could be perceived in a much wider and more comprehensive sense; for at the time when one spoke of the genius of a man, there was a direct, concrete perception of that being.

In a not very distant past this vision was still so strong that men were able to describe it quite concretely and objectively; describing it in terms now looked upon as poetic fancies, although they were not intended as such. Thus Plutarch describes the relation of man to his genius, as follows,—I should like to quote the passage literally. Plutarch, the Roman writer, says that besides the portion of the soul embedded in the earthly body, there is a purer part outside, soaring above man's head, in appearance like a star, and which is rightly called a man's daimon, who guides him, and whom the wise man willingly follows, In this concrete way does Plutarch describe what he does not wish to be taken as a poetic fancy, but as a concrete external reality. Indeed so concretely does he describe it that he expressly states: ‘The rest of the Spiritual part of man can to a certain extent be perceived at the same time as the physical body, inasmuch as it normally fills the same space; but the genius, the leading and guiding genius of man is something apart and can be seen outside the head of every man'. Paracelsus too, one of the last who, without special training, or without special gifts, was able to give forceful information about these things, said very much the same from his own knowledge of this phenomenon. Many others also said the same.

This genius is none other than the Spirit-Self in process of evolution, though borne by a being belonging to the Hierarchy of Angels. It is of great importance that one should enter somewhat deeply into these things; for when this genius becomes perceptible it has its own special conditions. This subject can be considered from another very different point of view, but we will now consider it from the following one.

Let us take the subject of the mutual intercourse between man and man, for we can learn much from that; it teaches us what is by no means without significance in the perception of the Spiritual principles of the human being.

If a man is only capable of observing the meeting of two persons with his physical, sense vision, he merely notices that they come together, greet one another, and so on. But when he becomes able to observe such an event Spiritually, he will find that each time two human beings meet a Spiritual process is established, which, among other things, is also expressed outwardly in the fact that the part of their etheric bodies which forms the head becomes the expression of every feeling of sympathy and antipathy which the two persons feel for each other; and this continues as long as they are together. Suppose two people were to meet who could not bear each other:—an extreme case, but there are such in life. Suppose two persons meet who dislike each other, and that this feeling of antipathy is mutual. It can then be seen that that part of the etheric body which forms the head projects beyond the head in both cases, and that both the etheric heads incline towards each other. A mutual antipathy between persons meeting is expressed as a continual bowing and inclining of the etheric head of each towards the other. When two persons come together who love each other, a similar process can be observed; but then the etheric head inclines back, it bends backwards. -Now whether the etheric head bends forward as though in greeting when antipathy is felt, or bends backward where love is felt, in both cases the physical head then becomes freer than it is wont to be. This is of course always relative; the etheric body does not entirely emerge but extends in length, so that a continuation can be observed. A more rarified etheric body then fills the physical body than is normally the case, and the result of this, by reason of the exceptional transparency of the etheric body, is that the astral body remaining inside the head becomes more clearly visible to clairvoyant vision. So that not only is there a movement of the etheric body but also an alteration in the astral light of the head. This then, my dear friends,—which is no poetic imagination but an actual fact—is the reason that in places where such things are understood, persons who are capable of selfless love are represented with an aura round their heads, which is known as a halo. When two people meet, with simply a strong tinge of egotism in their love, this phenomenon is not so apparent; but if a man comes in contact with humanity at certain times when he is not concerned with himself and his own personal relation to another, but is filled with a universal human love for all humanity, such phenomena appear. At such times the astral body in the vicinity of the head becomes clearly visible. If there are persons then present who are able to see this in a man clairvoyantly, they can see the halo and cannot do otherwise than paint or represent it as a reality. These things are absolutely in connection with the objective facts of the Spiritual world; but that which is thus objectively present, and which is a lasting reality in the evolution of humanity, is connected with something else.

Man must necessarily from time to time enter into inner communion with his Spirit-Self, with the Spirit-Self which is visible in the astral aura in rudimentary form as I have described; but it still has to be developed; it will be rayed down, as it were, from above, and stream in from the future. Man must from time to time be brought into touch with his Spirit-Self. When does this occur?

We now come to the first meeting of which we have to speak. When does it take place? It takes place quite simply in normal sleep, on almost every occasion, between sleeping and waking. With simple country people, who are nearer to the life of nature, and who go to bed with the setting sun and get up at sunrise, this meeting takes place in the middle of their sleeping time, which as a rule is the middle of the night. With people who have detached themselves from their connections with nature, this is not so much the case. But this depends on man's free will. A man of modern culture can regulate his life as he pleases, and though this fact is bound to affect his life, still he can regulate it as he likes, within certain limits. None the less he too can experience in the middle of a long sleep, what may be called an inner union with the Spirit-Self—that is, with the Spiritual qualities from which the Spirit-Self will be extracted; he can have a meeting with his genius. Thus this meeting with one's genius takes place every night, that is, during every period of sleep—though this must not be taken too literally. This meeting is important for man. For all the feelings that gladden the soul with respect to its connection with the Spiritual world proceed from this meeting with one's genius during sleep. The feeling, which we may have in our waking state, of our connection with the Spiritual world, is an after-effect of this meeting with our genius. That is the first meeting with the higher world; and it may be said that most people are at first unconscious of it, though they will become more and more conscious the more they realise its after-effects by refining their waking conscious life, through absorbing the ideas and conceptions of Spiritual Science, until their souls become refined enough to observe carefully these after-effects. It all depends on whether the soul is refined enough, sufficiently acquainted with its inner life, to be able to observe these. This meeting with the genius is brought to the consciousness of every man in some form or other; but the materialistic surroundings of the present day which fill the mind with ideas coming from the materialistic view of the world and especially the life of today, permeated as it is by materialistic opinions, prevent the soul from paying attention to what comes as the result of the meeting. As people gradually fill their minds with more Spiritual ideas than those set forth by materialism, the perception of the nightly meeting with the genius will become more and more self-evident to them.

The second meeting of which we now have to speak is higher. From the indications already given it may be gathered that the first meeting with the genius is in connection with the course of the day. If we had not, through modern civilisation, become free to adjust our lives according to our own convenience, this meeting would take place at the hour of midnight. A man would meet his genius every night at midnight. But on account of man's exercise of free will the time of this meeting has become movable; the hour when the ego meets the genius is now not fixed. The second meeting is however not so movable; for that which is more connected with the astral body and etheric body is not so apt to get out of its place in the cosmic order. That which is connected with the ego and the physical body is very greatly displaced in present-day man. The second meeting is already more in connection with the great macro-cosmic order. Even as the first meeting is connected with the course of the day, the second meeting is connected with the course of the year. I must here call attention to various things I have already indicated in this connection from another point of view. The life of man in its entirety does not run its course quite evenly through the year. When the sun develops its greatest heat, man is much more dependent upon his own physical life and the physical life around him than in the winter when, in a sense, he has to struggle with the external phenomena of the elements, and is more thrown back on himself; but then his Spiritual nature is more freed, and he is more in connection with the Spiritual world—both his own and that of the earth—with the whole Spiritual environment. Thus the peculiar sentiment we connect with the Mystery of Christmas and with its Festival is by no means arbitrary, but hangs together with the fixing of the Festival of Christmas. At that time in winter which is appointed for the Festival, man, as does indeed the whole earth, gives himself up to the Spirit. He then passes, as it were, through a realm in which the Spirit is near him. The consequence is that at about Christmas-time and on to our present New Year, man goes through a meeting of his astral body with the Life-Spirit, in the same way as he goes through the first meeting, that of his ego with the Spirit-Self. Upon this meeting with the Life-Spirit depends the nearness of Christ Jesus. For Christ Jesus reveals Himself through the Life-Spirit. He reveals Himself through a being of the Realm of the Archangels. He is, of course, an immeasurably higher Being than they, but that is not the point with which we are concerned at the moment; what we have to consider is that He reveals Himself through a Being of the order of the Archangeloi. Thus through this meeting we draw specially near to Christ Jesus at the present stage of development—which has existed since the Mystery of Golgotha—and in a certain respect we may call the meeting with the Life-Spirit: the meeting with Christ Jesus in the very depths of our soul. Now when a man either through developing Spiritual consciousness in the domain of religious meditation or exercises, or, to supplement these, has accepted the concepts and ideas of Spiritual Science, when he has thus deepened and spiritualised his life of impression and feeling, then, just as he can experience in his waking life the after-effects of the meeting with his Spirit-Self, so he will also experience the after-effects of the meeting with the Life-Spirit, or Christ. It is actually a fact, my dear friends, that in the time following immediately on Christmas and up to Easter the conditions are particularly favourable for bringing to a man's consciousness this meeting with Christ Jesus. In a profound sense and this should not be blotted out by the abstract materialistic culture of today—the season of Christmas is connected with processes taking place in the earth; for man, together with the earth, takes part in the Christmas changes in the earth. The season of Easter is determined by processes in the heavens. Easter Sunday is fixed for the first Sunday after the first full-moon after the Vernal Equinox. Thus, whereas Christmas is fixed by the conditions of the earth, Easter is determined from above. Just as we, through all that has just been described, are connected with the conditions of the earth, so are we connected, through what I shall now describe, with the conditions of the heavens—with the great Cosmic conditions. For Easter is that season in the concrete course of the year, in which all that is aroused in us by the meeting with Christ at Christmas, really unites itself with our physical earth manhood. The great Mystery that now brings home to man the Mystery of Golgotha at the Easter Season—the Good Friday Mystery—signifies among other things, that the Christ, who, as it were, has been moving beside us, at this season comes still closer to us. Indeed, roughly speaking, in a sense He disappears into us and permeates us, so that He can remain with us during the season that follows the Mystery of Golgotha—the season of summer—during which, in the ancient Mysteries, men tried to unite themselves to John in a way not possible after the Mystery Of Golgotha.

In that respect we are, as we see, the Microcosm, and we are attached to the Macrocosm in a profoundly significant way. There is a continual union with the Macrocosm in the seasons of the year, and this union, being a more inner process in man, is connected with the year's course. Thus does Spiritual Science endeavour gradually to reveal the ideas, the spiritually scientific conceptions, that man may acquire as to the way in which Christ is now able to penetrate and permeate our earth-life, since the Mystery of Golgotha.

At this point I feel obliged to make an interpolation which is of importance and which ought to be thoroughly understood, particularly by the friends of Spiritual Science. It ought never to be represented that our attempts at Spiritual Science are a substitute for the life and exercise of religion. Spiritual Science may in the highest sense, and particularly as regards the Mystery of Christ, be taken as a support, as a foundation for the life and exercise of religion; but it should not be made a religion, for we ought to be clear that religion in its living form and living practice enkindles the Spiritual consciousness of the human community. If this Spiritual consciousness is to become a living thing in man, he cannot possibly remain at a standstill, stopping at the merely abstract ideas of God or Christ, but must stand renewed amidst the religious practices and activities (which in different people may take various forms) as something which provides him with a religious centre and appeals to him as such. If this religious sentiment is only deep enough, and finds means of stimulating the soul, it will soon feel a longing—a real longing—for the very ideas that can be developed in Spiritual Science. If Spiritual Science may be said to be a support for a religious life, as, objectively speaking, it certainly is—subjectively the time has come today when we may say that a man with true religious feelings is driven by these feelings to seek knowledge. For Spiritual consciousness is acquired through religious feeling and Spiritual knowledge by Spiritual Science, just as knowledge of nature is acquired by Natural Science. Spiritual consciousness leads to the impulse to acquire Spiritual knowledge. It may be said that an inner religious life may today subjectively drive a man to Spiritual Science.

A third meeting is that in which a man approaches the Spirit-Man, which will only be developed in the far future and which is brought near to him by a being belonging to the Hierarchy of the Archai. We may say that the ancients were sensitive to this, as are even the people of the present day, although the latter, in speaking of such things, no longer have a consciousness of the deeper truth of the subject. The ancients felt this meeting as a meeting with that which permeates the world, and which we can now hardly distinguish in ourselves or in the world, but in which we merge in the world as in an unity. Just as we can speak of the second as a meeting with Christ Jesus, so can we speak of the third as a meeting with the Father-Principle, with the Father, with that which lies at the foundation of the world, and which we experience when we have the right feeling for what the various religions mean by ‘the Father.’ This meeting is of such a nature that it reveals our intimate connection with the Macrocosm, with the Divine-Spiritual Universe. The daily course of universal processes, of world processes, includes our meeting with our genius: the yearly course includes our meeting with Christ Jesus: and the course of a whole human life, of this human life of ours, my dear friends—which can normally be described as the patriarchal life of seventy years—includes the meeting with the Father-Principle. For a certain time, our physical earth-life is prepared—and rightly so—by education—at the present day to a great extent unconsciously, yet it is prepared; and most people experience unconsciously, between the ages of twenty-eight and forty-two—and though unconsciously, yet fully appreciated in the intimate depths of the soul—the meeting with the Father-Principle. The after-effects of this may extend into later life, if we develop sufficiently fine perceptions to note that which thus comes into our life from within ourselves, as the after-effects of our meeting with the Father-Principle.

During a certain period of our life—the period of preparation—education ought, in the many different ways this can be done, to make the meeting with the Father-Principle as profound an experience as possible. One way is to arouse in a man, during his years of education, a strong feeling of the glory of the world, of its greatness, and of the sublimity of the world-processes. We are withholding a great deal from the growing boy and girl if we fail to draw their attention to all the revelations of beauty and greatness in the world, for then, instead of having a devoted reverence and respect for these, they may pass them by unobserved. If we fill the minds of the young with thoughts connecting the feelings of their hearts with the beauty and greatness of the world, we are then preparing them for the right meeting with the Father-Principle. For this meeting is of great significance for the life spent between death and a new birth. This meeting with the Father Principle, which normally occurs between the above-mentioned ages, can be a strong force and support to a man, when he has, as we know, to recapitulate his life on earth retrospectively after having passed through the portals of death, and while he passes through the soul-world. This retrospective journey, which as we know, lasts one-third as long as the time spent between birth and death, can be made strong and forceful; as indeed it ought to be, if a man can see himself at a certain point and place meeting with that Being, whom he can only dimly guess at and express in stammering words, when he speaks of the Father of the Cosmic Order. This is an important Picture, which after a man has passed through the gates of death, should always be present with him, together with the picture of death itself.

Now it is natural that a certain question should arise in connection with this. There are people who die before they reach the middle of life, when they would normally have the meeting with the Father-Principle. We must consider the case of those whose death is brought about by some outer cause, such as illness (which is an outer cause) or weakness of some kind. If then, through this early death, the meeting with the Father-Principle has not yet taken place in the subconscious depths of the soul—it will take place at the hour of death. At the moment of death this meeting occurs. Here we may express, somewhat differently, what has indeed already been expressed in another form in a like connection, in the book Theosophy in reference to the always deplorable phenomenon of a man bringing his life to an end by his own will. No man would do this if he could see the significance of his deed; and when once Spiritual Science has really been taken into people's feelings and thoughts, there will be no more suicides. For the meeting with the Father-Principle at the hour of death, when death occurs before middle-life, depends upon that death approaching a man from outside, not being brought about by himself. The difficulty then encountered by the soul and which is described from another standpoint in the book Theosophy, might be described from that from which we are speaking today, and we might say: Through his self -chosen death a man may eventually deprive himself of the meeting with the Father-Principle in this incarnation.

Thus, my dear friends, since the truths which Spiritual Science has to tell us concerning human life as a whole, affect our life so deeply, they are indeed serious in cases of special importance. These truths can provide serious explanations of life, which man needs in an age when he must find his way out of the materialism which rules the present world ordering and the current point of view, in so far as these depend on man himself. Stronger forces will be required to overcome the strong connection with the purely material powers which rule over man today, and to give him once again the possibility of recognising his connection with the Spiritual world from the immediate experiences of life.

If we speak in a more abstract way of the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies we can speak in a more concrete way of the fact that man himself—in the experiences at first passed through unconsciously, but which even during his life between birth and death may be brought to his consciousness—may ascend in three stages: through the meeting with his genius, through the meeting with Christ Jesus, and through the meeting with the Father.

Of course a great deal depends on our gaining as many concepts as possible which force themselves into our feelings, concepts that so refine our inner soul-life that we do not carelessly and inattentively pass things by, which in reality, if we are but attentive, play a part in our lives. In this respect education will have a very great deal to do in the near future. I should just like to bring forward one such concept. Just think how infinitely life would be deepened, if to the general knowledge concerning karma such details could be added, as the fact that when a man's life comes to an end in early youth the meeting with the Father-Principle occurs at the hour of death. This shows that the particular karma of this man made an early death necessary, so that an abnormal meeting with the Father-Principle should take place. For what actually occurs in such a case? The man is destroyed from without; his physical being is undermined from without. In illness, too, this is really the case. For the scene of action of the meeting with the Father-Principle is really here in the physical earth-world. When it happens that this external physical earth-world has destroyed a man, the meeting with the Father-Principle can be seen at that very place, and of course it is always to be seen again in the retrospect. This however makes it possible for a man throughout the whole of his life after death to hold firmly, the thought of the place on earth where, descending from heavenly heights, the Father-Principle came to the meeting which then took place. The recollection of this makes him want to be as active as he possibly can to work down into the physical earth-world from the Spiritual world. Now if we consider our present time from this standpoint and try to arouse the same feeling of solemnity as we have just tried to do with respect to the meeting with the Father-Principle, trying not merely to look upon the numerous premature deaths now occurring in the light of feeling or abstract conception, we shall be driven to admit that these were predestined in preparation for the coming need for a great activity to be directed from the Spiritual world to the physical earth-world. This is another aspect of what I have often said with reference to the tragic events of the last few years: that those who today pass so early through the portals of death will become special helpers in the future development of humanity, which will indeed require strong forces to disentangle itself from materialism. But all this must be brought to men's consciousness; it must not take place unconsciously. Therefore it is necessary that even now, souls here on the earth should make themselves receptive—I have already mentioned this—otherwise the forces developed in the Spiritual world may go in other directions. In order that these forces, these predestined forces, may become fruitful to the earth, it is necessary that there should be souls on the earth permeated with the knowledge of the Spiritual world. And there must be more and more of such souls on the earth. Let us therefore try to make fruitful the content of Spiritual Science, which must once be given out in words. By the help of the language (I mentioned this in the last lecture but one) the language we learn through Spiritual Science—let us try to re-animate the old conceptions which are, not without purpose, interwoven in our present life. Let us try to quicken anew what we have heard from Plutarch: that man, even as mere physical man, is permeated by the Spiritual man, and that in a peculiar but normal way a man has a higher Spiritual principle outside his head which represents his genius and which, if he be wise, he obeys. Let us try, as I have said, to take the feelings acquired by Spiritual Science to our assistance—so that the phenomena of life may not pass us by unnoticed.

In conclusion, we will today take one feeling, one conception, which may be of great help to our souls. Unfortunately many people in our modern materialistic age find it very difficult to feel what I might call the holiness of sleep. (The materialistic life is being somewhat softened by this period of trial, and not only ought it to remain softened thereby—which can hardly be hoped if materialism remains at its present strength—but it ought even to be enormously and increasingly softened.) It is indeed a curious phenomenon of man's intelligence today that he is entirely devoid of respect for the holiness of sleep. We need only consider how many people who spend the evening hours in purely materialistic ways, go to sleep without developing the realisation—which indeed can never become a living thing in a materialistic mind—that sleep unites us with the Spiritual world, that sleep sends us across into the Spiritual world. (These things are not mentioned by way of blame, nor intended to drive people to asceticism: we must live with the world, but we must at the same time have our eyes open, for only thus can we wrench our bodily nature away from the lower and lift it higher.) People should at least become gradually able to develop a feeling which can be expressed somewhat as follows: ‘I am going to sleep; until I wake, my soul will be in the Spiritual world. There it will meet with the guiding-power of my earth-life, who lives in the Spiritual world, and who soars round and surrounds my head. My soul will have the meeting with my genius. The wings of my genius will come in contact with my soul.’

Yes, my dear friends, as regards the overcoming of the materialistic life, a great deal, a very great deal, depends on whether one can create a strong feeling of what this means, when one thinks over one's relation to sleep. The materialistic life can only be overcome by stimulating intimate feelings such as these, which are themselves in correspondence with the Spiritual world. Only when we intensify such feelings and make them active, will the life of sleep become so intense, that the contact with the Spiritual world will on the other hand be gradually able to strengthen our waking life too. We shall then have around us not merely the sense-world, but also the Spiritual world, which is the true, the truly real world. For this world that we generally call the real one, is, as I expounded in the last open lecture, nothing but a reflection, an image of the actual real one. The real world is the world of spirit. The small community which is today devoted to Anthroposophy or Spiritual Science, will better be able to grasp the earnest signs of the times and undergo the severe trials of the times, if besides all the other trials to which man is subject today, it learns to consider this time as a time of trial, of testing and probation, whether we are able with sufficient strength of soul and warmth of heart to unite our whole being with the Spiritual Science which we must take in through our reason and our intellect.

In these words, I wished once more to emphasise what I have often said here before: that Spiritual Science will only find its right place in the hearts of men, when it is not merely theory and knowledge, but when—symbolically speaking—it constantly permeates and penetrates the soul; just as our physical blood, our heart's blood, constantly permeates and gives life to our bodily nature.

(Continued in Lecture 5).

What we possess as the first fruit of Spiritual Science is in its most practical and noble sense able to lead us to feel that there is within the ordinary outer man an inner man, who to the ordinary idea is really a second man. In this respect all men in reality consist of two beings; one composed more of our physical body and etheric body and belonging to that which is the external world: external in the sense that this physical body and to some extent the etheric body too are forms and images—manifestations—of the divine Spiritual beings by which we are always surrounded. Our physical and etheric bodies are in their true essence—though not as we as men at first know them,—images, neither of ourselves, nor of our real being, but of the Gods whose whole life is spent in producing our physical and etheric bodies and bringing about their full development; just as we men bring about the actions and deeds we accomplish. The inner man is of such a nature that he is more closely related to the astral body and ego. To the universe the astral body and ego are younger than the physical body and etheric body. This we know, from what has been given out in the book Occult Science. The physical body and etheric body compose that which, as it were, reposes when we sleep and is made ready for us by the divine-spiritual beings that permeate the outer universe and make it manifest; and the ego and astral body, by the experiences, testings and shiftings which they undergo in the physical and etheric bodies, are to ascend gradually through the stages of development with which we have also become familiar.

Now, as I indicated in the last lecture, we are in connection with the universe, with the whole Cosmos; and this connection is such that—as I merely hinted in the last lecture—it can even be reckoned and expressed in numbers. This connection of ours with the universe can of course be expressed and shown in many other ways, but—I might say—to our great astonishment it can be expressed by the fact that the number of breaths a man draws in a day equals the number of years required for the Vernal Point to return to its original point of departure. These discoveries in the realm of numbers can, if we permeate them with feeling, fill us with awe, with a holy awe; if we reflect that we too belong to the divine Spiritual universe which is manifested in all external phenomena.

The fact that we are the Microcosm, the little world formed and manifested out of the Macrocosm, the great world, is felt as still more profound when we visualise such facts as will be brought before our minds today, and which I may enumerate as follows: the three meetings of the Human Soul with the Being of the Universe: and this is the subject I shall speak about today. We all know that as earth-men we bear within us the physical body and etheric body, the astral body and ego. Each of the two beings I have referred to bears within him what I might call two sub-beings. The more external man the physical and etheric body, the more inner man the ego and astral body. Now we know moreover that man is to undergo further development. The earth as such will some day come to an end. It will then evolve further, through a Jupiter, Venus, and a Vulcan planetary evolution. Man during this time will rise stage by stage; to his ego will, as we know, be added a higher being—the Spirit-Self which will manifest within him. This will reach full manifestation during the Jupiter evolution, which will follow that of our earth. The Life-Spirit will attain full manifestation in man during the Venus period; and the actual Spirit-Man during the Vulcan period. When, therefore, we look forward to the great cosmic future of man, to these three stages of evolution, we look forward to the Spirit-Self, Life-Spirit, and Spirit-Man. But these three which in a sense await us in our future evolution are even now in a certain respect related to us, although they are as yet not in the least developed; for they are still enclosed in the bosom of the divine-Spiritual Beings whom we have learnt to know as the Higher Hierarchies. They will come forth to us from out the Higher Hierarchies; and we today are already in relation with these Higher Hierarchies, who will endow us with the Spirit-Self, Life-Spirit, and Spirit-Man. So that today, instead of using the more complicated expression and saying: ‘We are in connection with the Hierarchy of the Angeloi’; we can simply say: ‘We are in connection with that which is to come to us in the future—our Spirit-Self.’ And instead of saying that we are in connection with the Archangels, we can say: ‘We are in connection with what is to come to us in the future, as our Life-Spirit,’ and so on.

Indeed we human beings are already in a certain respect, though at present only in rudiment—(and in the Spiritual world rudiments are something much higher than they are in the physical world)-more than merely four-principled beings consisting of physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego. We already bear the germ of the Spirit-Self within us, as well as that of the Life-Spirit and Spirit-Man; they will evolve out of us in the future, though at present we only have them in germ within us. This is no mere abstract saying, it has quite a concrete significance, for we have meetings, real meetings with these higher principles of our being. These meetings take place in the following way. We, as human beings, would as time went on feel ourselves increasingly estranged from everything Spiritual—a state of things very difficult to endure—did we not from time to time encounter our Spirit-Self. Our ego must meet that higher Self,—the Spirit-Self which we have yet to develop, and which in a Spiritual respect is of like nature to the Hierarchy of Angels. So therefore we may say in simple language, and speaking in the Christian sense: we must from time to time meet with a being of the Hierarchy of the Angels, a being closely related to ourselves; and when it comes to us, it brings about in us a Spiritual change, which will enable us some day to take in a Spirit-Self. We must also meet with a being of the Hierarchy of the Archangels, for this being then so affects us that something is prepared which will some day lead to our developing the Life-Spirit.

Whether in the Christian sense we place this being in the Hierarchy of Angels, or whether we refer to it in the older sense understood by the ancients when they spoke of their genius as the guiding genius of man, makes no difference. We know that we are living at a time when but few people—though this will soon alter—few can gaze into the Spiritual World and perceive the things and the beings therein. The time has now gone by when the beings and even the various processes of evolution in the Spiritual-world could be perceived in a much wider and more comprehensive sense; for at the time when one spoke of the genius of a man, there was a direct, concrete perception of that being.

In a not very distant past this vision was still so strong that men were able to describe it quite concretely and objectively; describing it in terms now looked upon as poetic fancies, although they were not intended as such. Thus Plutarch describes the relation of man to his genius, as follows,—I should like to quote the passage literally. Plutarch, the Roman writer, says that besides the portion of the soul embedded in the earthly body, there is a purer part outside, soaring above man's head, in appearance like a star, and which is rightly called a man's daimon, who guides him, and whom the wise man willingly follows, In this concrete way does Plutarch describe what he does not wish to be taken as a poetic fancy, but as a concrete external reality. Indeed so concretely does he describe it that he expressly states: ‘The rest of the Spiritual part of man can to a certain extent be perceived at the same time as the physical body, inasmuch as it normally fills the same space; but the genius, the leading and guiding genius of man is something apart and can be seen outside the head of every man'. Paracelsus too, one of the last who, without special training, or without special gifts, was able to give forceful information about these things, said very much the same from his own knowledge of this phenomenon. Many others also said the same.

This genius is none other than the Spirit-Self in process of evolution, though borne by a being belonging to the Hierarchy of Angels. It is of great importance that one should enter somewhat deeply into these things; for when this genius becomes perceptible it has its own special conditions. This subject can be considered from another very different point of view, but we will now consider it from the following one.

Let us take the subject of the mutual intercourse between man and man, for we can learn much from that; it teaches us what is by no means without significance in the perception of the Spiritual principles of the human being.

If a man is only capable of observing the meeting of two persons with his physical, sense vision, he merely notices that they come together, greet one another, and so on. But when he becomes able to observe such an event Spiritually, he will find that each time two human beings meet a Spiritual process is established, which, among other things, is also expressed outwardly in the fact that the part of their etheric bodies which forms the head becomes the expression of every feeling of sympathy and antipathy which the two persons feel for each other; and this continues as long as they are together. Suppose two people were to meet who could not bear each other:—an extreme case, but there are such in life. Suppose two persons meet who dislike each other, and that this feeling of antipathy is mutual. It can then be seen that that part of the etheric body which forms the head projects beyond the head in both cases, and that both the etheric heads incline towards each other. A mutual antipathy between persons meeting is expressed as a continual bowing and inclining of the etheric head of each towards the other. When two persons come together who love each other, a similar process can be observed; but then the etheric head inclines back, it bends backwards.—Now whether the etheric head bends forward as though in greeting when antipathy is felt, or bends backward where love is felt, in both cases the physical head then becomes freer than it is wont to be. This is of course always relative; the etheric body does not entirely emerge but extends in length, so that a continuation can be observed. A more rarified etheric body then fills the physical body than is normally the case, and the result of this, by reason of the exceptional transparency of the etheric body, is that the astral body remaining inside the head becomes more clearly visible to clairvoyant vision. So that not only is there a movement of the etheric body but also an alteration in the astral light of the head. This then, my dear friends,—which is no poetic imagination but an actual fact—is the reason that in places where such things are understood, persons who are capable of selfless love are represented with an aura round their heads, which is known as a halo. When two people meet, with simply a strong tinge of egotism in their love, this phenomenon is not so apparent; but if a man comes in contact with humanity at certain times when he is not concerned with himself and his own personal relation to another, but is filled with a universal human love for all humanity, such phenomena appear. At such times the astral body in the vicinity of the head becomes clearly visible. If there are persons then present who are able to see this in a man clairvoyantly, they can see the halo and cannot do otherwise than paint or represent it as a reality. These things are absolutely in connection with the objective facts of the Spiritual world; but that which is thus objectively present, and which is a lasting reality in the evolution of humanity, is connected with something else.

Man must necessarily from time to time enter into inner communion with his Spirit-Self, with the Spirit-Self which is visible in the astral aura in rudimentary form as I have described; but it still has to be developed; it will be rayed down, as it were, from above, and stream in from the future. Man must from time to time be brought into touch with his Spirit-Self. When does this occur?

We now come to the first meeting of which we have to speak. When does it take place? It takes place quite simply in normal sleep, on almost every occasion, between sleeping and waking. With simple country people, who are nearer to the life of nature, and who go to bed with the setting sun and get up at sunrise, this meeting takes place in the middle of their sleeping time, which as a rule is the middle of the night. With people who have detached themselves from their connections with nature, this is not so much the case. But this depends on man's free will. A man of modern culture can regulate his life as he pleases, and though this fact is bound to affect his life, still he can regulate it as he likes, within certain limits. None the less he too can experience in the middle of a long sleep, what may be called an inner union with the Spirit-Self—that is, with the Spiritual qualities from which the Spirit-Self will be extracted; he can have a meeting with his genius. Thus this meeting with one's genius takes place every night, that is, during every period of sleep—though this must not be taken too literally. This meeting is important for man. For all the feelings that gladden the soul with respect to its connection with the Spiritual world proceed from this meeting with one's genius during sleep. The feeling, which we may have in our waking state, of our connection with the Spiritual world, is an after-effect of this meeting with our genius. That is the first meeting with the higher world; and it may be said that most people are at first unconscious of it, though they will become more and more conscious the more they realise its after-effects by refining their waking conscious life, through absorbing the ideas and conceptions of Spiritual Science, until their souls become refined enough to observe carefully these after-effects. It all depends on whether the soul is refined enough, sufficiently acquainted with its inner life, to be able to observe these. This meeting with the genius is brought to the consciousness of every man in some form or other; but the materialistic surroundings of the present day which fill the mind with ideas coming from the materialistic view of the world and especially the life of today, permeated as it is by materialistic opinions, prevent the soul from paying attention to what comes as the result of the meeting. As people gradually fill their minds with more Spiritual ideas than those set forth by materialism, the perception of the nightly meeting with the genius will become more and more self-evident to them.

The second meeting of which we now have to speak is higher. From the indications already given it may be gathered that the first meeting with the genius is in connection with the course of the day. If we had not, through modern civilisation, become free to adjust our lives according to our own convenience, this meeting would take place at the hour of midnight. A man would meet his genius every night at midnight. But on account of man's exercise of free will the time of this meeting has become movable; the hour when the ego meets the genius is now not fixed. The second meeting is however not so movable; for that which is more connected with the astral body and etheric body is not so apt to get out of its place in the cosmic order. That which is connected with the ego and the physical body is very greatly displaced in present-day man. The second meeting is already more in connection with the great macro-cosmic order. Even as the first meeting is connected with the course of the day, the second meeting is connected with the course of the year. I must here call attention to various things I have already indicated in this connection from another point of view. The life of man in its entirety does not run its course quite evenly through the year. When the sun develops its greatest heat, man is much more dependent upon his own physical life and the physical life around him than in the winter when, in a sense, he has to struggle with the external phenomena of the elements, and is more thrown back on himself; but then his Spiritual nature is more freed, and he is more in connection with the Spiritual world—both his own and that of the earth—with the whole Spiritual environment. Thus the peculiar sentiment we connect with the Mystery of Christmas and with its Festival is by no means arbitrary, but hangs together with the fixing of the Festival of Christmas. At that time in winter which is appointed for the Festival, man, as does indeed the whole earth, gives himself up to the Spirit. He then passes, as it were, through a realm in which the Spirit is near him. The consequence is that at about Christmas-time and on to our present New Year, man goes through a meeting of his astral body with the Life-Spirit, in the same way as he goes through the first meeting, that of his ego with the Spirit-Self. Upon this meeting with the Life-Spirit depends the nearness of Christ Jesus. For Christ Jesus reveals Himself through the Life-Spirit. He reveals Himself through a being of the Realm of the Archangels. He is, of course, an immeasurably higher Being than they, but that is not the point with which we are concerned at the moment; what we have to consider is that He reveals Himself through a Being of the order of the Archangeloi. Thus through this meeting we draw specially near to Christ Jesus at the present stage of development—which has existed since the Mystery of Golgotha—and in a certain respect we may call the meeting with the Life-Spirit: the meeting with Christ Jesus in the very depths of our soul. Now when a man either through developing Spiritual consciousness in the domain of religious meditation or exercises, or, to supplement these, has accepted the concepts and ideas of Spiritual Science, when he has thus deepened and spiritualised his life of impression and feeling, then, just as he can experience in his waking life the after-effects of the meeting with his Spirit-Self, so he will also experience the after-effects of the meeting with the Life-Spirit, or Christ. It is actually a fact, my dear friends, that in the time following immediately on Christmas and up to Easter the conditions are particularly favourable for bringing to a man's consciousness this meeting with Christ Jesus. In a profound sense and this should not be blotted out by the abstract materialistic culture of today—the season of Christmas is connected with processes taking place in the earth; for man, together with the earth, takes part in the Christmas changes in the earth. The season of Easter is determined by processes in the heavens. Easter Sunday is fixed for the first Sunday after the first full-moon after the Vernal Equinox. Thus, whereas Christmas is fixed by the conditions of the earth, Easter is determined from above. Just as we, through all that has just been described, are connected with the conditions of the earth, so are we connected, through what I shall now describe, with the conditions of the heavens—with the great Cosmic conditions. For Easter is that season in the concrete course of the year, in which all that is aroused in us by the meeting with Christ at Christmas, really unites itself with our physical earth manhood. The great Mystery that now brings home to man the Mystery of Golgotha at the Easter Season—the Good Friday Mystery—signifies among other things, that the Christ, who, as it were, has been moving beside us, at this season comes still closer to us. Indeed, roughly speaking, in a sense He disappears into us and permeates us, so that He can remain with us during the season that follows the Mystery of Golgotha—the season of summer—during which, in the ancient Mysteries, men tried to unite themselves to John in a way not possible after the Mystery Of Golgotha.

In that respect we are, as we see, the Microcosm, and we are attached to the Macrocosm in a profoundly significant way. There is a continual union with the Macrocosm in the seasons of the year, and this union, being a more inner process in man, is connected with the year's course. Thus does Spiritual Science endeavour gradually to reveal the ideas, the spiritually scientific conceptions, that man may acquire as to the way in which Christ is now able to penetrate and permeate our earth-life, since the Mystery of Golgotha.

At this point I feel obliged to make an interpolation which is of importance and which ought to be thoroughly understood, particularly by the friends of Spiritual Science. It ought never to be represented that our attempts at Spiritual Science are a substitute for the life and exercise of religion. Spiritual Science may in the highest sense, and particularly as regards the Mystery of Christ, be taken as a support, as a foundation for the life and exercise of religion; but it should not be made a religion, for we ought to be clear that religion in its living form and living practice enkindles the Spiritual consciousness of the human community. If this Spiritual consciousness is to become a living thing in man, he cannot possibly remain at a standstill, stopping at the merely abstract ideas of God or Christ, but must stand renewed amidst the religious practices and activities (which in different people may take various forms) as something which provides him with a religious centre and appeals to him as such. If this religious sentiment is only deep enough, and finds means of stimulating the soul, it will soon feel a longing—a real longing—for the very ideas that can be developed in Spiritual Science. If Spiritual Science may be said to be a support for a religious life, as, objectively speaking, it certainly is—subjectively the time has come today when we may say that a man with true religious feelings is driven by these feelings to seek knowledge. For Spiritual consciousness is acquired through religious feeling and Spiritual knowledge by Spiritual Science, just as knowledge of nature is acquired by Natural Science. Spiritual consciousness leads to the impulse to acquire Spiritual knowledge. It may be said that an inner religious life may today subjectively drive a man to Spiritual Science.

A third meeting is that in which a man approaches the Spirit-Man, which will only be developed in the far future and which is brought near to him by a being belonging to the Hierarchy of the Archai. We may say that the ancients were sensitive to this, as are even the people of the present day, although the latter, in speaking of such things, no longer have a consciousness of the deeper truth of the subject. The ancients felt this meeting as a meeting with that which permeates the world, and which we can now hardly distinguish in ourselves or in the world, but in which we merge in the world as in an unity. Just as we can speak of the second as a meeting with Christ Jesus, so can we speak of the third as a meeting with the Father-Principle, with the Father, with that which lies at the foundation of the world, and which we experience when we have the right feeling for what the various religions mean by ‘the Father.’ This meeting is of such a nature that it reveals our intimate connection with the Macrocosm, with the Divine-Spiritual Universe. The daily course of universal processes, of world processes, includes our meeting with our genius: the yearly course includes our meeting with Christ Jesus: and the course of a whole human life, of this human life of ours, my dear friends—which can normally be described as the patriarchal life of seventy years—includes the meeting with the Father-Principle. For a certain time, our physical earth-life is prepared—and rightly so—by education—at the present day to a great extent unconsciously, yet it is prepared; and most people experience unconsciously, between the ages of twenty-eight and forty-two—and though unconsciously, yet fully appreciated in the intimate depths of the soul—the meeting with the Father-Principle. The after-effects of this may extend into later life, if we develop sufficiently fine perceptions to note that which thus comes into our life from within ourselves, as the after-effects of our meeting with the Father-Principle.

During a certain period of our life—the period of preparation—education ought, in the many different ways this can be done, to make the meeting with the Father-Principle as profound an experience as possible. One way is to arouse in a man, during his years of education, a strong feeling of the glory of the world, of its greatness, and of the sublimity of the world-processes. We are withholding a great deal from the growing boy and girl if we fail to draw their attention to all the revelations of beauty and greatness in the world, for then, instead of having a devoted reverence and respect for these, they may pass them by unobserved. If we fill the minds of the young with thoughts connecting the feelings of their hearts with the beauty and greatness of the world, we are then preparing them for the right meeting with the Father-Principle. For this meeting is of great significance for the life spent between death and a new birth. This meeting with the Father Principle, which normally occurs between the above-mentioned ages, can be a strong force and support to a man, when he has, as we know, to recapitulate his life on earth retrospectively after having passed through the portals of death, and while he passes through the soul-world. This retrospective journey, which as we know, lasts one-third as long as the time spent between birth and death, can be made strong and forceful; as indeed it ought to be, if a man can see himself at a certain point and place meeting with that Being, whom he can only dimly guess at and express in stammering words, when he speaks of the Father of the Cosmic Order. This is an important Picture, which after a man has passed through the gates of death, should always be present with him, together with the picture of death itself.

Now it is natural that a certain question should arise in connection with this. There are people who die before they reach the middle of life, when they would normally have the meeting with the Father-Principle. We must consider the case of those whose death is brought about by some outer cause, such as illness (which is an outer cause) or weakness of some kind. If then, through this early death, the meeting with the Father-Principle has not yet taken place in the subconscious depths of the soul—it will take place at the hour of death. At the moment of death this meeting occurs. Here we may express, somewhat differently, what has indeed already been expressed in another form in a like connection, in the book Theosophy in reference to the always deplorable phenomenon of a man bringing his life to an end by his own will. No man would do this if he could see the significance of his deed; and when once Spiritual Science has really been taken into people's feelings and thoughts, there will be no more suicides. For the meeting with the Father-Principle at the hour of death, when death occurs before middle-life, depends upon that death approaching a man from outside, not being brought about by himself. The difficulty then encountered by the soul and which is described from another standpoint in the book Theosophy might be described from that from which we are speaking today, and we might say: Through his self-chosen death a man may eventually deprive himself of the meeting with the Father-Principle in this incarnation.

Thus, my dear friends, since the truths which Spiritual Science has to tell us concerning human life as a whole, affect our life so deeply, they are indeed serious in cases of special importance. These truths can provide serious explanations of life, which man needs in an age when he must find his way out of the materialism which rules the present world ordering and the current point of view, in so far as these depend on man himself. Stronger forces will be required to overcome the strong connection with the purely material powers which rule over man today, and to give him once again the possibility of recognising his connection with the Spiritual world from the immediate experiences of life.

If we speak in a more abstract way of the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies we can speak in a more concrete way of the fact that man himself—in the experiences at first passed through unconsciously, but which even during his life between birth and death may be brought to his consciousness—may ascend in three stages: through the meeting with his genius, through the meeting with Christ Jesus, and through the meeting with the Father.

Of course a great deal depends on our gaining as many concepts as possible which force themselves into our feelings, concepts that so refine our inner soul-life that we do not carelessly and inattentively pass things by, which in reality, if we are but attentive, play a part in our lives. In this respect education will have a very great deal to do in the near future. I should just like to bring forward one such concept. Just think how infinitely life would be deepened, if to the general knowledge concerning karma such details could be added, as the fact that when a man's life comes to an end in early youth the meeting with the Father-Principle occurs at the hour of death. This shows that the particular karma of this man made an early death necessary, so that an abnormal meeting with the Father-Principle should take place. For what actually occurs in such a case? The man is destroyed from without; his physical being is undermined from without. In illness, too, this is really the case. For the scene of action of the meeting with the Father-Principle is really here in the physical earth-world. When it happens that this external physical earth-world has destroyed a man, the meeting with the Father-Principle can be seen at that very place, and of course it is always to be seen again in the retrospect. This however makes it possible for a man throughout the whole of his life after death to hold firmly, the thought of the place on earth where, descending from heavenly heights, the Father-Principle came to the meeting which then took place. The recollection of this makes him want to be as active as he possibly can to work down into the physical earth-world from the Spiritual world. Now if we consider our present time from this standpoint and try to arouse the same feeling of solemnity as we have just tried to do with respect to the meeting with the Father-Principle, trying not merely to look upon the numerous premature deaths now occurring in the light of feeling or abstract conception, we shall be driven to admit that these were predestined in preparation for the coming need for a great activity to be directed from the Spiritual world to the physical earth-world. This is another aspect of what I have often said with reference to the tragic events of the last few years: that those who today pass so early through the portals of death will become special helpers in the future development of humanity, which will indeed require strong forces to disentangle itself from materialism. But all this must be brought to men's consciousness; it must not take place unconsciously. Therefore it is necessary that even now, souls here on the earth should make themselves receptive—I have already mentioned this—otherwise the forces developed in the Spiritual world may go in other directions. In order that these forces, these predestined forces, may become fruitful to the earth, it is necessary that there should be souls on the earth permeated with the knowledge of the Spiritual world. And there must be more and more of such souls on the earth. Let us therefore try to make fruitful the content of Spiritual Science, which must once be given out in words. By the help of the language (I mentioned this in the last lecture but one) the language we learn through Spiritual Science—let us try to re-animate the old conceptions which are, not without purpose, interwoven in our present life. Let us try to quicken anew what we have heard from Plutarch: that man, even as mere physical man, is permeated by the Spiritual man, and that in a peculiar but normal way a man has a higher Spiritual principle outside his head which represents his genius and which, if he be wise, he obeys. Let us try, as I have said, to take the feelings acquired by Spiritual Science to our assistance—so that the phenomena of life may not pass us by unnoticed.

In conclusion, we will today take one feeling, one conception, which may be of great help to our souls. Unfortunately many people in our modern materialistic age find it very difficult to feel what I might call the holiness of sleep. (The materialistic life is being somewhat softened by this period of trial, and not only ought it to remain softened thereby—which can hardly be hoped if materialism remains at its present strength—but it ought even to be enormously and increasingly softened.) It is indeed a curious phenomenon of man's intelligence today that he is entirely devoid of respect for the holiness of sleep. We need only consider how many people who spend the evening hours in purely materialistic ways, go to sleep without developing the realisation—which indeed can never become a living thing in a materialistic mind—that sleep unites us with the Spiritual world, that sleep sends us across into the Spiritual world. (These things are not mentioned by way of blame, nor intended to drive people to asceticism: we must live with the world, but we must at the same time have our eyes open, for only thus can we wrench our bodily nature away from the lower and lift it higher.) People should at least become gradually able to develop a feeling which can be expressed somewhat as follows: ‘I am going to sleep; until I wake, my soul will be in the Spiritual world. There it will meet with the guiding-power of my earth-life, who lives in the Spiritual world, and who soars round and surrounds my head. My soul will have the meeting with my genius. The wings of my genius will come in contact with my soul.’

Yes, my dear friends, as regards the overcoming of the materialistic life, a great deal, a very great deal, depends on whether one can create a strong feeling of what this means, when one thinks over one's relation to sleep. The materialistic life can only be overcome by stimulating intimate feelings such as these, which are themselves in correspondence with the Spiritual world. Only when we intensify such feelings and make them active, will the life of sleep become so intense, that the contact with the Spiritual world will on the other hand be gradually able to strengthen our waking life too. We shall then have around us not merely the sense-world, but also the Spiritual world, which is the true, the truly real world. For this world that we generally call the real one, is, as I expounded in the last open lecture, nothing but a reflection, an image of the actual real one. The real world is the world of spirit. The small community which is today devoted to Anthroposophy or Spiritual Science, will better be able to grasp the earnest signs of the times and undergo the severe trials of the times, if besides all the other trials to which man is subject today, it learns to consider this time as a time of trial, of testing and probation, whether we are able with sufficient strength of soul and warmth of heart to unite our whole being with the Spiritual Science which we must take in through our reason and our intellect.

In these words, I wished once more to emphasise what I have often said here before: that Spiritual Science will only find its right place in the hearts of men, when it is not merely theory and knowledge, but when—symbolically speaking—it constantly permeates and penetrates the soul; just as our physical blood, our heart's blood, constantly permeates and gives life to our bodily nature.

Yesterday I spoke to you about initiation in the sense of the Rosicrucian spiritual world current, about the stages of knowledge, of feeling, of will impulses, of activities that a person has to undergo if they want to move up the path of knowledge and towards higher levels of humanity. Today let us try to deal with a chapter of this Rosicrucian theosophy ourselves. Not that this Rosicrucian wisdom is anything but the common spiritual wisdom of all peoples and times, as must be emphasized again and again. It is only adapted to our modern way of thinking, to the modern temporal need. It is born out of the realization that our epoch needs a special way of speaking in order to proclaim the eternal truths of all times, so that they can live themselves into the very configuration of today's humanity in Europe and America.

It is perhaps a very distant chapter that is chosen here, yet it is one of the most essential. For nothing shows us man's origin and goal as much as the realization of this chapter and at the same time points us to the forces that we are to unfold in ourselves in order to become co-workers in the service of human evolution. We cannot look at the great evolution of the cosmos any other way than by starting with the human being and his or her essence. And I will say nothing other than what is a common theosophical and Rosicrucian wisdom, what anyone would say who speaks from these sources. There is no contradiction. Many already know what I would like to say here again.

We distinguish seven members of human nature. This morning we heard that one could also take another number as a basis: three times three. It does not matter that I will combine the three middle members into one name today, and if you summarize these three members under what I will call the fourth today, then the explanations will be completely consistent.

We divide the human being in such a way that we say that the human being first has his physical body; it is what hands can touch and eyes can see, what the human being has in common with all of nature and what is subject to physical and chemical laws. The second is the so-called etheric or life body. It is that which the chemical and physical forces and substances call to life and which leaves the connection of physical and chemical substances in death. Occultism says: The human physical body is such a combination of substances and forces that it cannot exist as a physical body by itself; only by having an etheric body inserted into it and as long as it is inserted, it is protected from the disintegration of physical substances and forces. In the moment when the etheric body leaves the physical forces, death occurs, the physical body is a corpse. Therefore, it is also said that the etheric body is what protects us from death at every moment. In every moment, there is a great struggle in the etheric body against that which would otherwise cause our chemical substances to disintegrate. The third link is the carrier of pleasure and suffering, joy and pain, feelings and emotions, which we call the astral body. It is the link of the human being that man has in common with animals, just as he has the ether body in common with the plant and animal world and the mineral body with the whole outer world. The name astral body has been in use since the earliest times. There is no more appropriate name for this part of the human being than astral body. And there is perhaps no better definition of why this body is called the astral body than the one given by the great theosophist Paracelsus. Just as the etheric body leaves the physical body at death, so the astral body leaves the etheric body some time after death. But the astral body also leaves the physical and etheric bodies every night. Then it is outside of us. Where is it then?

Paracelsus rightly asks: Where is it, and what does it do during the night? Does it rest, does it have a task? Yes, it has a task. Although those who do not have clairvoyant powers cannot see into the activity of the astral body during the night. But everyone feels the consequences of this activity. They all go to bed tired in the evening. The fatigue is an expression of disharmony in the composition of our physical and etheric bodies. It must arise if the astral body does not have the power to bring harmony into the other two, the physical and etheric bodies. And as man is today, such disharmony must necessarily arise during the waking hours of the day, were our physical and etheric bodies merely under the control of the astral body - how the forces are to be joined together - then there would always be harmony in our etheric and physical bodies. But as it is, not only does the astral body live in the physical body, but at the level of consciousness that humanity has reached on the Earth, the whole environment of physical, sensually perceptible objects has an effect on the human being. Impressions from the eye and ear and the other senses flow into it from the outside. During the waking hours, disharmony will inevitably arise in every person who has not yet reached a certain higher level of spiritual development. If this astral body could never dwell in any other place than in our physical and etheric bodies, it would itself become disordered. Then its power currents would not remain as they should be if a real etheric and physical body is to be formed. During the day, the inner harmony of the astral body is disturbed, and the expression of this disorder is fatigue. The moment you feel tired, the inner disharmony is there. Where is the astral body during the night?

Paracelsus rightly said: When the lines of force that connect it to the physical body during the day begin to loosen, it then comes into contact with the entire harmonious system of forces that flows through the starry sky. At the moment when a person falls asleep, he rests in the harmony of the spheres, and from there he brings the forces to balance what has been used during the day. Thus, the astral body rests during the night in the world of the stars; that is its true home. And when it returns, it brings with it the powers of the stars to help remove the substances that cause fatigue. That is why sleep is a good doctor, because order and harmony can then be restored when the astral body rests again for some time in the world that contains the laws for the starry sky, and these are the laws for the spiritual world in general. If a person does not sleep, their health will be undermined because the astral body has not rested in the starry world for a while. That is why the astral body has been given this name. In the past, names were not given that did not correspond to the essence of the matter. And before we correct occult names and designations, we must first think about the name, why it was given. Today, when a comet or a minor planet is discovered, one opens a mythology encyclopedia and gives the star a name. The principle of naming in spiritual times was to let the essence of the thing itself resonate in a name: it sounded in the name of the connection with the world.

In the fourth aspect of his being, man has something that makes him the crowning of earthly creation of planetary existence. Follow me for a short time in a subtle observation. In the whole range of the German language, there is a name - and in other languages it is similar - that is fundamentally different from all other names. Each of you can say “table” to the table, “picture” to the picture, and so on. But there is one name which we cannot use in the same sense, and that is the name I. None of them can say “I” to another. Each one is a “you” to every other, and you are a “you” to everyone else. If this name is to describe ourselves, no sound in the external world can embody it; it must resound from within ourselves. This has been felt at all times by those religions that had an impulse from the secret teaching. In the secret teaching, therefore, one says the name for the being, and in the Hebrew secret teaching, the unpronounceable name of God, the name of Yahweh, is nothing other than the name for the ego. In truth, the name of Yahweh is the name for that which begins to hold a monologue in the soul - to live in its self. It was felt that in those worldviews and religions that were built on spiritual foundations, one said: In the I, in the innermost part of the soul, God begins to speak. It is a beginning, but it must be made, and this I - this single central point - is what makes up the most essential distinguishing feature of man from all the beings that surround us on this planet. Sensible people have always felt this. Jean Paul tells us how, as a very young child, he stood in the courtyard of his parents' house and he knew exactly how he first felt: you are a self-being! And he adds that there is no possibility of error and that others have added something to this memory. Because at that time, says Jean Paul, I looked into the hidden holy of holies of my inner being; at that time I knew that I was immortal because I had found the connection with God.

If we now go outwards from the I, we come to the point where we can consider the mutual relationships of the human being. Human evolution consists in the I working on the three bodies, within which it appears like the core of a fruit in its shell. And how does this I work?

If we want to understand this, we must remember primitive peoples. Take a people who today stands at a lower level of culture. You see that this people is ruled by its feelings and instincts, by drives and passions, much like the animal: they devour each other. Now compare this savage with the members of a more highly developed culture, with a Francis of Assisi. What is the difference between the two forms of development?

If we want to answer this question, we must be aware that the human being – through the many incarnations through which he develops – does his work from his I: first on the astral body, then on the etheric body and then also on the physical body. This is human development: this emanation of the I into the three bodies. The savage follows all the instincts and passions that live in him. The cultured man says to himself, “I must not follow certain instincts”; he denies himself certain instincts and passions. The still higher idealist not only denies himself, but out of himself generates ideals that add something new to what the instincts of the astral body constitute at a primitive level of culture. Thus, in the clairvoyant view, we see the astral body as consisting of two parts: what was originally in it and then what the ego itself has made of it. If you look at a highly developed idealist, this part [it is drawn] is larger than in others due to the work of the ego, and in a person like Francis of Assisi you can see how little is left of what the person called his own when he embarked on his first incarnation. In Theosophy, this practically transformed part of the human astral body, over which man has gained control, is called the German word “Geistselbst”, which is otherwise referred to in Theosophical literature as “Manas”; it is a transformed part of the astral body.

But the human being also works on his etheric body from his I. What does it mean to work on the etheric body? Let us make this clear with an example. You can do this in your own development. Remember what you knew as a seven-year-old child in terms of concepts and ideas, and what you know today, what you have learned and changed in your imaginative life. You will find a great deal. But now compare what you have learned with what has changed in other things that are also in you, in temperament, memory, certain basic characteristics of human nature. If you were hot-tempered as an eight-year-old child, this hot temper will still show through at times. If your temperament was melancholy, then perhaps this coloring will remain throughout your life. So that we can say comparatively: what a person actually learns moves forward like the minute hand of a clock; but what a person's basic inclinations are, that moves forward more slowly, like the hour hand. And as slowly as the hour hand of a clock, the etheric body transforms. The etheric body is denser than the astral body; therefore, the work of the ego on the etheric body is essentially more difficult than the work on the astral body. And only when the ego not only works on its intellectual ideas but begins to transform its temperament, then this is accompanied by a transformation of its etheric body. For many, this is only possible during the transition from one incarnation to another. But that is precisely the essence of occult training: everything you can learn is only preparation for occult training, and you have done more if you have tried to get rid of any basic mood, for example, if you have transformed your melancholy temperament into a harmonious one. The moment we begin to change not only our feelings and impulses but our fundamental nature, we begin to work on the etheric body. The part of the human etheric body that has been reshaped by the ego in this way is in turn a new link in human nature. Today, very few people can consciously bring about this transformation of the etheric body, but only those who are in occult training. For example, one of the laws of the Pythagorean school was that the astral body must first be completely purified before work on the etheric body could begin. But one must distinguish between conscious and unconscious schooling of the etheric body. The part that is permeated by the work of the ego is called the “life spirit” in the German language; it is the same in its fundamental essence as what is called “buddhi” in theosophical literature.

The third and most significant thing is when the human being not only begins to become master over the forces of his etheric body, but when he begins to work down into the physical body. It might seem as though the work of the I on the physical body is the basest; but it is in fact the highest. And the work on the physical body is more difficult than the work on the etheric body. When a person consciously begins to work on mastering the forces that work in the physical body through the I, then something else occurs to him. What works in the physical body are the same forces that work in the cosmos. When a person learns to control the forces of his blood and his breathing, he learns the magic of the cosmos. Then what he can do flows out of his physical body and into the universe, and that is a real, true work that can only begin when a person has reached a certain level of work on the etheric body. And because we begin with the regulation of our neighbor, with the regulation of breathing, the name breathing is also taken from 'Atma'. The more a person transforms in his inner physical nature, the more there is of the 'spirit man', of 'Atma'; there is a part of spirit matter in him that has been transformed.

This is not an ascetic escape from the physical world; rather, we have the task of entering the physical world in order to transform it into a spiritual one. That is the great law of redemption. This physical body is a part of the spiritual body that has become what it has become so that we could reach our present stage of development. We now have the task of spiritualizing this physical body again, of redeeming it. This principle lies behind the word redemption. There you have the mutual relationship of the seven members of human nature, as one must have them if one wants to utilize them in practical theosophical work.

Now let us consider the evolution of man. A materialist, who, being acquainted only with the physical body, has only an abstract idea of the evolution of man. But he who realizes how complicated man is, also sees how complicated the evolution of man is. Which of these four members is the oldest and most perfect? Some may be surprised to hear that the oldest and most perfect link in the human being is the physical one; it is the one that took the longest time to develop. The etheric body is younger, and the astral body is even younger. The baby is the I. It is only unfair to call the physical body an imperfect part of the human being. Just consider, for example, the structure of the thigh bone: a wonderful work of art. The beams are laid with such wisdom that no human engineering could achieve it, and they are laid in such a way that the upper body is supported with the least expenditure of energy. Let us now move from this limb to the construction of the human heart. Anyone who delves into what our physiologists teach us about the heart and also about the other organs knows that these limbs are so wisely constructed that no human wisdom can even penetrate these physical forms. The physical body would be good for all people. But now let us look at the astral body, which it does throughout life. Through the activity of its astral body, man continually introduces heart poisons to the physical body, for example to the heart; but the heart is so wisely constructed that it can withstand the attacks of the astral body for quite some time. Only in the future will the astral body be found just as wise as the physical body is today. The physical body is the oldest part of the human nature, which required the longest time to evolve. The parts of the human nature are, however, connected with the whole environment. Just as a single finger can only exist if it is a part of the whole hand, so man is only conceivable in connection with the whole cosmos. If you lift him a few miles above the earth, then he will experience the same fate as the finger if you cut it off. And just because man can walk around on the earth, this dependence is not admitted.

Look back at times long past! And when you look ahead to future times, you see that the shape of its limbs is constantly changing. But they can only change if everything around the person changes. Just because man, despite his advanced science, looks back over such a short span of time, he believes that things have always been as they are. But anyone who looks further knows that our planet must change from form to form if we ourselves want to change. But it is not enough just for the changes that the earth itself is undergoing to happen, but in a certain respect man was already there before the earth could be called “earth” in the cosmos. As man progresses in the cosmos, so do the planets or the beings that inhabit them. Our planet is the reincarnation of another planetary state, and we can trace three preceding incarnations of our Earth and look forward to three subsequent ones. What we call planetary evolution is nothing more than an analogy to our human evolution. The three preceding planetary states through which our Earth had to pass are called in Rosicrucian terms Saturn, Sun, Moon, so that we have to imagine: the Earth was, before it became Earth, Moon, and before it became Moon, it was Sun, and before the Sun it was Saturn; and the later states, which we are looking at, are called Jupiter, Venus, Vulcan. What does it mean that the Earth has passed through these states?

We are today in the fourth incarnation of our own planet, and this is intimately connected with human evolution. On the first planetary form - that is, on Saturn - the first structures of the human physical body were already present. At that time, however, the human physical body was such during the entire Saturn development that no independent etheric body was yet incorporated into it. Through the stages of the sun and moon, down to the stage of the earth, this physical body became more and more perfect, so that we can say: the physical human body today stands on the fourth stage of its development, it stands today at the point of the earth's development. It was only in the second incarnation of our earth that an independent ether body was incorporated into this physical body. The physical body became more perfect, as it were, through the working of an etheric body within it. Then the third reincarnation of the earth — the moon — led to the incorporation of the astral body into the two others, so that the inhabitant of the moon, the ancestor of today's earth man, consisted of three bodies — the physical, the etheric and the astral body. And the meaning of evolution on Earth is this: to integrate the I into these three members, the worker, who then begins to transform what has come to him from the past. Thus we see that the physical body is older than the others, and the I is only at the first stage of its development. One can even know from the configuration of the physical body what comes from the state of Saturn in us. The highest part of our physical body is the sensory organs, and the germ of our sensory organs was laid on Saturn. And so limb by limb was built up, becoming more and more perfect in stages with the other limbs of human nature.

What is called Saturn and Sun here is not the present-day Sun and Saturn, but rather denotes phases of development. Nevertheless, what our Earth has gone through in its development is related to present-day Saturn. Present-day Saturn is to the Earth as a boy is to an old man. The same conditions that Saturn is going through today are the same conditions that our Earth went through in the past. This is why in real occultism we do not speak of Saturn, the Sun and so on, but of a Saturn, a Sun and so on. Our Earth is an older Saturn.

Now we must still be clear about the meaning of this whole development. If we look back to that Saturn development, where man was still without etheric body, astral body and I - insofar as they were independent beings -, we get the best difference of those ancient conditions from today's by referring to the “consciousness”. A state of consciousness is connected with every state of development. There are seven states of consciousness. The present human being is in the fourth; no being can have this state that cannot say “I” to itself. Therefore, the human being developed the form of consciousness that he now has only on earth. The purpose of evolution on Earth is to develop the waking consciousness. On the earlier planetary conditions, there were only imperfect states of consciousness for humans. On Saturn, the human ancestor in his primitive form had a consciousness like that of minerals, or rather: the human physical ancestor is that consciousness. We can hardly find words for it easily; we can only hint at it. This consciousness is a very, very dim, deep trance-like, sleepy consciousness, dull and dusky, but which in a way had an advantage: it encompasses a much larger scope, is much more universal; a mineral consciousness knows of the whole solar system.

Then this consciousness was narrowed down to that of the plant. But it is now a somewhat brighter consciousness than that of the mineral. Man was in this consciousness when the earth was in the sun. The third form of consciousness is pictorial consciousness, also called primary psychic consciousness. It differs from the present one in that it works in images, but in such a way that it conveys the psychic of the other. Imagine a being - and the human ancestor on the moon was like that - that does not yet have sensory consciousness and can cover objects with colors when it wakes up: you have a last remnant of such consciousness in the dream world. The dream world is not the astral consciousness. The present dream consciousness is to the moon consciousness what some atrophied limb is to the form it was in when it still had its tasks in the human being; for example, certain muscles that could move the ears have lost their purpose in the human being. The present-day world of dreams has remained as a vestige of the astral pictorial consciousness of the moon; that is why it also works in the same way as the astral imaginative consciousness works. Imagine someone dreaming that he is catching a tree frog. He sees it jump and grabs it. Then the sleeper wakes up and sees that he had the corner of the bed cover in his hand. Or another dream that really happened. A farmer's wife dreams that she is going to church. She listens devoutly. Then the pastor moves his arms violently and, lo and behold, he gets wings. It was not too strange for the pious farmer's wife that a pastor who preaches from heaven occasionally gets wings too. But what happens? The pastor begins to crow loudly in the pulpit. At the same moment, the farmer's wife wakes up and outside in the yard, the cock crows.

What has happened here, where a whole dramatic action is taking place? In the symbolic image, something is expressed that you would have perceived as an external object in the waking day consciousness. Something is formed symbolically that is not present in this way. But if you retain the symbol in form – think that people use it to have perceptions of the real psychic world, then you have what I am talking about now. A symbolic consciousness that is true and real was the consciousness of the moon. Imagine a human being without our present-day object-consciousness. He approached another being. He does not see the limited form in this being, but a color formation appears before him. When there is sympathy, he sees a very definite color, and likewise when there is antipathy. This is something other than color today: it is the expression of sympathy or antipathy for the other being. And someone who has moon consciousness does what corresponds to moon consciousness: he bases his actions on the symbols. If he perceives a certain color, he knows that something hostile is happening, and he will withdraw.

A later stage of development is that which develops under the influence of the ego, where consciousness no longer perceives the psychic phenomenon, but where what has arisen as a coloration is superimposed over the objects. The colors that you see spread over the objects today are the old colors that once arose as psychic phenomena.

If modern man had, in addition to today's consciousness, that of the moon, so that he fully perceives the psychic world as well as the physical, he would have expanded the present consciousness into the imaginative one. A higher form would be if he had added to this the consciousness that plants have today and that humans had dimly and dully during their solar incarnation. And the highest form would be where man would also have the consciousness that the mineral has today, which in turn would enable him to merge into the universal cosmos. This last consciousness hovers before us as the ideal of man, and it is called spiritual consciousness.

The purpose of planetary evolution is therefore that states of consciousness succeed one another; but for this to happen, the planetary arena must also change completely each time. However, we only understand the complete evolution if we know that within each planetary state, seven stages must be traversed. Thus Saturn, Sun, Moon and now Earth had to cover seven stages. These are called “rounds” in Theosophy, “realms” in Christian esotericism. Each of the planets that the Earth passes through has seven smaller cycles; for each consciousness, if it is to ascend, has degrees, from the most imperfect to the most perfect. They are also called states of life. Each of these realms or states of life, however, must in turn pass through seven different states of revelation or seven states of form: arupa, rupa, astral, physical, plastic, intellectual, spiritual (archetypal).

Thus we have 7 times 7 times 7 = 343 states; they describe the 343 planetary incarnations in their entirety. The development of one state of consciousness encompasses 49 of these states. So you can see how we can glimpse into an enormous cosmic development.

When man still lived on the sun and had only developed his etheric and physical bodies, he was still a completely different being. One could not call him a plant, but in a certain figurative sense one could say that he was then in the plant existence. In relation to his position on earth, he was turned around: what today projects freely into the ether, the head, was then directed towards the center of the earth. The development of consciousness is simultaneously linked with the reversal of the entire human form. This is why the sun man is also called a man directed towards the center of the earth, and in the same sense the man of the moon age is called an orbiting man. If one had drawn a tangent to the moon's surface... [gap in the transcript]. And the earth man is the reverse of the sun man.

Thus everything moves forward. When we look back at lunar evolution, we must realize that what we call affects today could only develop on the moon as an astral impact. But at that time the I had not yet developed. Because the ego did not develop until the earth, the moon man did not yet feel pain as his individual pain; it was the pain of the moon. This physical-etheric-astral moon ancestor was not independent. Unindividual passions, affects and pains arose from this. For example, it was so on the moon — one may express it today, even if so few believe it — that at certain seasons of the year the whole world, all living beings, began to scream, to utter sounds, surrounded by an astral body; this was connected with a certain development in animal life. A vestige of this can still be seen in the mating call in the sexual life of certain animals, where cries are associated with it at certain times.

Now the law of evolution is such that in later states certain earlier ones are always repeated. Thus the earth had to go through the repetition of the Saturn, Sun and Moon existence. Now the earth is in its most essential existence. You can get an idea of what was called the sun here if you stir all the beings that are on the sun, moon and earth today into a pulp; all of this once existed on the sun. During the solar age, the sun, moon and earth were one body. Then the sun had developed into the moon's existence and only then were the sun and moon divided. And during the repetition on earth, first the sun and then the moon separated again, and the actual becoming-ego of the human being is linked to the separation of the moon. The moon contains the forces that prevent the other parts of the human being from becoming the carrier of an ego. I can only suggest that the point in time that occurred for our earth's development in the ancient Lemurian period could only occur because first the sun broke away and then the moon. When the earth had become independent, it could only then bring forth the human form from which today's human being has developed.

Thus, human evolution is most intimately connected with cosmic evolution. If you look back to the ancient Atlantean times, the predecessor of our present time, when man lived on Atlantis – which science has at least already discovered for the animal world – you have the human ancestor who does not yet possess the same consciousness as the human being of today, who can calculate and manufacture industrial objects. But another faculty was highly developed. The Atlantean man had an excellent memory, of which one can no longer really imagine today. Something else was connected with this. You would find that physically, too, this old Atlantis differs quite considerably from the configuration of the earth today. What we call air and water today was not yet there. All the air was filled with a fine water vapor. The water was still dissolved. That is why the old German saga has preserved the name 'Nifelheim'. It means that people in those days lived in a kind of water-laden air, and only in such an air could the image consciousness of man at that time live. The myths and legends of Germanic mythology arose out of this consciousness. Anyone who really knows the people knows that they do not create poetry as today's scholarship claims. The myths and legends were the remnants of an ancient ethereal pictorial consciousness, the expression of an ancient, dim clairvoyance, and people have only forgotten their origin after they have advanced to today's bright day consciousness.

So you can see how the development of mankind is tied to the cosmos. On a round earth, where the air is saturated with water, man perceives the world quite differently. For the Atlanteans, the sound of the wind was a language they understood. There were no commandments or laws in those days. There were still times when, if man wanted to know how he should behave, he went out and listened to the spring as it trickled: that told him something. And when he went out to listen, he listened to a fundamental and underlying tone that was present like a musical keynote that the Atlantean understood. It is a simple, multi-syllabic syllable; it lived in the entire environment of the Atlantean; it went through everything, and the Atlantean said to himself: “In this fundamental tone, the god speaks to me.” And when he wanted to address his prayer to his God, it was in this fundamental tone. The wisdom of the ancient Atlanteans had to change into our own in order for man to progress. But in the process of development we will again have to gain the consciousness of the Atlanteans, in addition to our own. Sometimes we have to make the sacrifice that the old must lie dormant for a time.

Thus the evolution of man is connected with the evolution of the cosmos. Just think how far man has strayed from the sources of wisdom that lie in the world itself! How far he has strayed from direct contact with nature! But what we have lost we shall regain in what we have conquered. This consciousness that we have arises from the consciousness of the individual, concrete facts that in the Rosicrucian method were designated as the “wisdom of the world”. It permeates the whole life of man. If we imbibe it, we feel what the teacher wanted, to whom the name “Rosenkreutz” is linked, who, as a leading individuality, guides and directs the spiritual movement through the centuries.

It seems far-removed when we consider the human being in the context of the whole world; but if it penetrates our hearts, it becomes a force within us that will bless us if we want to work on the transformation and transformation of the cosmos. One has the duty to integrate oneself into the cosmos. Just as a single stone does not seek to dispense itself from the house, so man must not dispense himself from the Cosmos. One must recognize that it must be one's duty to serve within the great evolution of the world. Then that which is eternal in us will integrate itself into the world existence. There will be a reflection of it in our most everyday life, so that man can express this wisdom in every movement of his hand. Then the Cosmos will truly partake of the human being, for everything is in the process of transformation. Everything must be transformed again through beings who are placed in the movement of the world. If we work in this way, we will feel vividly how true it is. And truth will be the impulse for our actions. Thus a beautiful saying of a highly inspired poet will be fulfilled:

Time is a blooming meadow,
Nature is one great living being,
And everything is fruit, and everything is seed!

Thirteen years ago, almost to the day, in a course of lectures¹ that I gave in Stuttgart between Christmas and New Year, I spoke of the same events that we shall treat of in the present course of lectures. Only we shall have to alter the standpoint somewhat. In the first two introductory lectures we have been at pains to acquire an understanding for the radical change in man's life of thought and feeling that has come about in the course of human evolution, prehistoric as well as historic. In to-day's lecture, at any rate to begin with, we shall not need to go back more than a few thousand years.

You know that from the standpoint of Spiritual Science we have to regard as of paramount importance in its consequences for human evolution the so-called Atlantean catastrophe which befell the Earth in the time commonly known as the later Ice Age. It was the last Act in the downfall of the Atlantean continent, which continent forms to-day the floor of the Atlantic Ocean; and following it we have as we have often described, five great successive epochs of civilisation, leading up to our own time. Of the two earliest of these we have no trace in historical tradition, for the literature remaining in the East, even all that is contained in the magnificent Vedas, in the profound Vedantic philosophy, is but an echo of what we should have to describe, if we wanted to recall these ancient epochs. In my Outline of Occult Science I have always spoken of them as the Ancient Indian and the Ancient Persian.

To-day we shall not have to go so far back as this; we will direct our thoughts to the period which I have often designated as the Egypto-Chaldean, the period preceding the Graeco-Latin. We have already had to draw attention to the fact that during the time between the Atlantean catastrophe and the Greek period, great changes took place in regard to man's power of memory and also in regard to the social life of humanity. A memory such as we have to-day—the temporal memory, by means of which we can take ourselves back in time—was not in existence in this third Post-Atlantean period; man had then, as we have described in an earlier lecture, a memory that was linked to rhythmic experience. And we have seen how this rhythmic memory proceeded from a still earlier memory that was particularly strong in the Atlantean period, namely, the localised memory, where man only bore within him a consciousness of the present, but used all manner of things which he found in the external world or which he himself set there, as memorials by means of which he put himself into relationship with the past; and not alone with his own personal past, but with the past of humanity in general.

In this connection we have not only to think of memorials that were on the Earth; in those ancient times the constellations in the heavens served man as memorials, especially in their recurrences and in the variations of these recurrences. From the constellations man perceived how things were in earlier times. Thus did heaven and earth work together to build for an ancient humanity the localised memory.

Now the man of long past times was different in the whole constitution of his being from the man of a later time, and still more so from the man of our own time. Man to-day, in his waking condition, bears the Ego and astral body within him unnoticed, as it were; most people do not notice how the physical bears within it, along with the etheric body, a much more important organisation than itself, namely, the astral body and the Ego-organisation. You, of course, are familiar with these connections. But an ancient humanity felt this fact of their own being quite differently.

And it is to such a humanity that we must return, when we go back to the third epoch of Post-Atlantean civilisation,—the Egypto-Chaldean. At that time man experienced himself as spirit and soul still to a great extent outside his physical and etheric body, even when awake. He knew how to distinguish: This I have as my spirit and soul,—we, of course, call it the Ego and the astral body—and it is linked with my physical body and my etheric body. He went through the world in this experience of twofold-ness. He did not call his physical and his etheric body ‘I.’ He called ‘I’ only his soul and spirit, that which was spiritual and was in a manner connected downward with his physical and etheric bodies, had a connection with them that he could observe and feel. And in this spirit and soul, in this Ego and astral body, man was made aware of the entry of the Divine-spiritual Hierarchies, even as to-day he feels the entry of natural substances into his physical body.

To-day man's experience in the physical body is of the following nature. He knows that with the process of nourishment, with the process of breathing, he receives the substances of the external kingdoms of Nature. Before, they are outside; then they are within him. They enter him, penetrate him and become part of him. In that earlier age, when man experienced a certain separation of his soul-and-spirit nature from his physical and etheric nature, he knew that Angels, Archangels and other Beings up to the highest Hierarchies are themselves spiritual substance that penetrates his soul and spirit and becomes—if I may put it so—part of him. So that at every moment of life he was able to say: In me live the Gods. And he looked upon his Ego, not as built up from below by means of physical and etheric substances, but as bestowed on him through grace from above, as coming from the Hierarchies. And as a burden, or rather as a vehicle, in which he feels himself borne forward in the physical world as in a vehicle of life—so did he conceive of his physical-etheric nature. Until this is clearly grasped, we shall not understand the course of events in the evolution of mankind.

We could trace this course of events by reference to many different examples. To-day we will follow one thread, the same that I touched upon thirteen years ago, when I spoke of that historic document² which represents the most ancient phase of the evolution we have now to consider,—I mean, the Epic of Gilgamesh.

The Epic of Gilgamesh has in part the character of a Saga, and so to-day I will set before you the events that I described thirteen years ago, as they manifest themselves directly to spiritual vision.

In a certain town in Asia Minor—it is called Erech³ in the Epic—there lived a man who belonged to the conquering type of which we spoke in the last lecture, the type that sprang so truly and naturally out of the whole mental and social conditions of the time. The Epic calls him Gilgamesh. We have then to do with a personality who has preserved many characteristics of the humanity of earlier times. Clear though it is, however, to this personality that he has, as it were, a dual nature,—that he has on the one hand the spirit-and-soul nature into which the Gods descend, and on the other hand, the physical-and-etheric into which substances of the Earth and the Cosmos, physical and etheric substances, enter,—it is none the less a fact that the representative people of his time are already passing through a transition into a later stage of human evolution. The transition consisted in this. The Ego-consciousness, which a comparatively short time previously was above in the sphere of spirit and soul, had now, if I may so express it, sunk down into the physical and etheric, so that Gilgamesh was one of those who began no longer to say ‘I’ to the spirit-and-soul part of their being, in which they felt the presence of the Gods, but to say ‘I’ to that which was earthly and etheric in them. Such was the stage of development in the human soul life of that time.

But along with this condition of soul, where the Ego has drawn down from the spirit and soul and entered as conscious Ego into the bodily and etheric, this personality had still left in him habits belonging to the past; and especially the habit of experiencing memory solely in connection with rhythm. He still retained also that inward feeling that one must learn to know the forces of death, because the death-forces can alone give to man that which brings him to powers of reflection.

Now owing to the fact that in the personality of Gilgamesh we have to do with a soul who had already gone through many incarnations on Earth and had now entered into the new form of human existence which I have just described, we find him at this point in a physical existence that bore in it a strain of uncertainty. The justification, as it were, of the habits of conquest, the justification, too, of the rhythmic memory, were beginning to lose their validity for the Earth. And so the experiences of Gilgamesh were throughout the experiences of an age of transition.

Hence it came about that when this personality, in accordance with the old custom, conquered and seized the city that in the Epic is called Erech, dissensions arose in the city. At first he was not liked. He was regarded as a foreigner and indeed would never have been able alone to meet all the difficulties that presented themselves in consequence of his capture of the city. Then there appeared, because destiny had led him thither, another personality—the Epic of Gilgamesh calls him Eabani⁴—a personality who had descended relatively late to the Earth from that planetary existence which Earth-humanity led for a period, as you will find described in my Outline of Occult Science.

You know how during the Atlantean epoch souls descended, some earlier, some later, from the different planets, having withdrawn thither from the Earth at a very early stage of Earth evolution.

In Gilgamesh we have to do with an individuality, who returned comparatively early to the Earth; thus at the time of which we are speaking he had already experienced many Earth incarnations.

In the other individuality who had now also come to that city we have to do with one who had remained comparatively long in planetary existence and only later found his way back to Earth. You may read of this from a somewhat different point of view in my Stuttgart lectures of thirteen years ago.

Now this second individuality formed an intimate friendship with Gilgamesh; and together they were able to establish the social life of the city on a really permanent footing. This was possible because there remained to this second personality a great deal of the knowledge that came from that sojourn in the Cosmos beyond the Earth, and that was preserved for a few incarnations after the return to Earth. He had, as I said in Stuttgart, a kind of enlightened cognition; clairvoyance, clairaudience and what we may call clair-cognition. Thus we have in the one personality what remained of the old habits of conquest and of the rhythmically-directed memory, and in the other what remained to him from vision and penetration into the secret mysteries of the Cosmos. And from the flowing together of these two things, there grew up, as was indeed generally the case in those olden times, the whole social structure of that city in Asia Minor. Peace and happiness descended upon the city and its inhabitants, and everything would have been in order, had not a certain event taken place that set the whole course of affairs in another direction.

There was in that city a Mystery, the Mystery of a Goddess, and this Mystery preserved very many secrets relating to the Cosmos. It was, however, in the meaning of those times, what I may call a kind of synthetic Mystery. That is to say, in this Mystery revelations were collected together from various Mysteries of Asia. And the contents of these Mysteries were cultivated and taught there in diverse ways at different times. Now this was not easily understood by the personality who bears the name of Gilgamesh in the Epic, and he made complaint against the Mystery that its teachings were contradictory. And seeing that the two personalities of whom we are speaking were those who really held the whole ordering of the city in their hands and that complaints against the Mystery came from so important a quarter, trouble ensued; and at length things became so difficult that the priests of the Mysteries appealed to those Powers Who in former times were accessible to man in the Mysteries. It will not surprise you to hear that in the ancient Mysteries man could actually address himself to the Spiritual Beings of the higher Hierarchies; for, as I told you yesterday, to the ancient Oriental, Asia was none else than the lowest heaven and in this lowest heaven man was aware of the presence of Divine-spiritual Beings and had intercourse with them. Such intercourse was especially cultivated in the Mysteries. And so the priests of the Istar Mysteries turned to those Spiritual Powers to whom they always turned when they sought enlightenment; and it came about that these Spiritual Powers inflicted a certain punishment upon the city.

What happened was expressed at the time in the following way: Something that is really a higher spiritual force, is working in Erech as an animal power, as a terrible spectral animal power. Trouble of all kinds befell the inhabitants, physical illnesses and more especially diseases and disturbances of the soul. The consequence was that the personality who had attached himself to Gilgamesh and who is called Eabani in the Epic, died; but in order that the mission of the other personality might be continued on Earth, he remained with this personality spiritually, even after death. Thus when we consider the later life and development of the personality who in the Epic bears the name of Gilgamesh, we have still to see in it the working together in the two personalities; but now in such a way that in the subsequent years of Gilgamesh's life he receives intuitions and enlightenment from Eabani, and so continues to act, although alone, not simply out of his own will, but out of the will of both, from the flowing together of the will of both.

What I have here placed before you is something that was fully possible in those olden times. Man's life of thought and feeling was not then so single and united as it is to-day. Hence it could not have the experience of freedom, in the sense in which we know it to-day. It was quite possible, either for a spiritual Being who had never incarnated on Earth to work through the will of an earthly personality, or, as was the case here, for a human personality who had passed through death and was living an after-death existence, to speak and act through the will of a personality on Earth. So it was with Gilgamesh. And from what resulted in this way through the flowing together of the two wills, Gilgamesh was able to recognise with considerable clearness at what point he himself stood in the history of mankind. Through the influence of the spirit that inspired him, he began to know that the Ego had sunk down into the physical body and etheric body,—which are mortal; and from that moment the problem of immortality began to play an intensely strong part in his life. His whole longing was set on finding his way by some means or other into the very heart of this problem. The Mysteries, wherein was preserved what there was to say on Earth in those days concerning immortality, did not readily reveal their secrets to Gilgamesh. The Mysteries had still their tradition, and in their tradition was preserved also in great measure the living knowledge that was present on Earth in Atlantean times, when the ancient original wisdom ruled among men.

The bearers of this original wisdom, however, who once went about on Earth as Spiritual Beings, had long ago withdrawn and founded the cosmic colony of the Moon. For it is pure childishness to suppose that the Moon is the dead frozen body that modern physics describes. The Moon is, before all, the cosmic world of those Spiritual Beings Who were the first great teachers of earthly humanity, the Beings Who once brought to earthly humanity the primeval wisdom and Who, when the Moon had left the Earth and sought a place for itself in the planetary system, withdrew also and took up their abode on this Moon.

He who to-day through Imaginative cognition is able to attain to a true knowledge of the Moon, gains knowledge too of the Spiritual Beings in this cosmic colony, Who were once the teachers of the ancient wisdom to humanity on Earth. What they had taught was preserved in the Mysteries, and also the impulses whereby man himself is able to come into a certain relationship with this ancient wisdom.

The personality who is called Gilgamesh in the Epic had, however, no living connection with these Mysteries of Asia Minor. But through the super-sensible influence of the friend who, in the after-death existence, was still united with him, there arose in Gilgamesh an inner impulse to seek out paths in the world whereby he might be able to come to an experience concerning the immortality of the soul. Later on, in the Middle Ages, when man desired to learn something concerning the spiritual world, he would sink down into his own inner being. In more modern times one could say that a still more inward process is followed. In those olden times, however, of which we are speaking, it was a matter of clear and exact knowledge to man that the Earth is not the mere lump of rock which the geology books would lead one to imagine, but that the Earth is a living being,—a living being, moreover, endowed with soul and spirit. As a tiny insect that runs over a human being may learn something of that human being as it passes over his nose and forehead, or through his hair, as the insect acquires its knowledge in this way by making a journey over the human being, so in those times it was by setting forth upon journeys over the Earth and by learning to know the Earth with its different configurations in different places, that man gained insight into the spiritual world. And this he was able to do, whether access to the Mysteries were permitted to him or no. It is in truth no mere superficial account that relates how Pythagoras and others wandered far and wide in order to attain their knowledge. Men went about the Earth in order to receive what was revealed in its manifold configurations, in all that they could observe from the different forms and shapes of the Earth in different places; and not of the Earth in its physical aspect alone, but of the Earth too as soul and spirit.

To-day men may travel to Africa, to Italy,—and yet, with the exception of external details, at which they gape and stare, their experience in these places may be very little different from their experience at home. For man's sensitiveness to the deep differences that subsist between different places of the Earth has gone.

In the period with which we are now dealing, it had not died out. Thus the impulse to wander over the Earth and thereby receive something that should help to the solution of the problem of immortality, betokened something full of meaning for Gilgamesh.

So he set forth upon his wanderings. And they had for him a result that was of very great significance. He came to a region that is nearly the same as we now call Burgenland, a district much talked of in recent times and concerning which there has been a good deal of contention as to whether it should belong to Hungary or not. The whole social conditions of the country have of course greatly changed since those far off times. Gilgamesh came thither and found there an ancient Mystery—the High Priest of the Mystery is called Xisuthros⁵ in the Epic—an ancient Mystery that was a genuine successor, as it were, of the old Atlantean Mysteries; only, of course, in a changed form, as must of necessity be the case after so long a time had elapsed.

And it was so that in this ancient Mystery centre they knew how to judge and appraise the faculty of knowledge that Gilgamesh possessed. He was met with understanding. A test was imposed upon him, one that in those days was often imposed on pupils of the Mysteries. He had to go through certain exercises, wide-awake, for seven days and seven nights. It was too much for him, so he submitted himself only to the substitute or alternative for the test. Certain substances were made ready for him, of which he then partook, and by means of them received a certain enlightenment; although, as is always the case when certain exceptional conditions are not assured, the enlightenment might be doubtful in some respects. Nevertheless a degree of enlightenment was there, a certain insight into the great connections in the Universe, into the spiritual structure of the Universe. And so, when Gilgamesh had ended his wandering and was returning home again, he did in fact possess a high spiritual insight.

He travelled along the Danube, following the river on its northern bank, until he came again to his home, to the home of his choice. But before he reached home, because he did not receive the initiation into the Post-Atlantean Mystery in the other way that I described, but instead in a somewhat uncertain way, he succumbed to the first temptation that assailed him and fell into a terrible fit of anger over an event that came to his notice,—something, in effect, which he heard had taken place in the city. He heard of the event before he reached the city, and burst out into a storm of anger; and in consequence, the enlightenment he had received was almost entirely darkened, so that he arrived home without it.

Nevertheless,—and this is the peculiar characteristic of this personality—he still had the possibility, through the connection with the spirit of his dead friend, of looking into the spiritual world, or at least of receiving information thence.

It is, however, one thing by means of an initiation to acquire direct vision into the spiritual world, and another thing to receive information from a personality who is in the after-death condition. Still, we may say with truth that something of an insight into the nature of immortality did remain with Gilgamesh. I am setting aside just now the experiences that are undergone by man after death; these do not yet play very strongly into the consciousness of the next incarnation, nor did they in those days;—into the life, into the inner constitution they do work very strongly, but not into the consciousness.

You now have before you these two personalities whom I have described and who together bring to expression the mental and spiritual constitution of man in the third Post-Atlantean period of civilisation at about the middle point of its development,—two personalities who still lived in such a way that the whole manner of their life was in itself strong evidence of the duality in man's nature. The one—Gilgamesh—was conscious of this duality; he was one of the first to experience the descent of the Ego-consciousness, the descent of the Ego into the physical and etheric nature in man. The other, inasmuch as he had passed through but few incarnations on Earth, had a clairvoyant knowledge, by means of which he was able to know that there is no such thing as matter, but that everything is spiritual and the so-called material only another form of the spiritual.

Now you can imagine that, if a man's being were so constituted, he could certainly not think and feel what we think and feel to-day. His whole thinking and feeling was indeed totally different from ours. And what such personalities could receive in the way of instruction was of course quite unlike what is taught to-day at school or in the universities. Everything of a spiritual or cultural nature that men received in those days came to them from the Mysteries, whence it was spread abroad as widely as possible among men by all manner of channels. It was the wise men, the priests, in the Mysteries, who were the true teachers of humanity.

Now it was characteristic of these two personalities that in the incarnation that we have described they were unable just because of their special constitution of soul, to approach the Mysteries of their own land. The one who is named Eabani in the Epic stood near the Mysteries through his sojourn in the extra-earthly regions of the Cosmos; the one who is named Gilgamesh experienced a kind of initiation in a Post-Atlantean Mystery, which however only bore half fruit in him. The result of all this was that both felt in their own being, as it were, something that made them kin to the primeval times of earthly humanity. Both were able to put the question to themselves: How have we become what we are? What share have we had in the evolution of the Earth? We have become what we are through the evolution of the Earth; what part have we played in its evolution?

The question of immortality that was the occasion of such suffering and conflict to Gilgamesh, was connected in those days with a necessary vision into the evolution of the Earth in primeval times. One could not think or feel—using the words in the sense of those times—about the immortality of the soul unless one had at the same time some vision of how human souls who were already there in very early phases of the Earth's evolution, during the Ancient Sun and Ancient Moon embodiments, saw approaching them, that which later has become what we call earthly. Men felt they belonged to the Earth. They felt that to know himself, man must behold and recognise his connection with the Earth.

Now the secret knowledge that was cultivated in all Mysteries of Asia, was first and foremost cosmic knowledge; its wisdom and its teachings unfolded the origin of the evolution of the Earth in connection with the Cosmos. So that in these Mysteries there appeared before men in a living way, in such a way that it could become living Ideas in them, a far-spread vision, showing them how the Earth evolved, and how in the heave and surge of the substances and forces of the Earth, all through the Sun, Moon and Earth periods of evolution, man has been evolving together with all these substances. All this was set before men in a most vivid manner.

One of the Mysteries where such things were taught, was continued on into much later times. It was the Mystery centre of Ephesus.⁶ This Mystery had in the very middle of its sanctuary the image of the Goddess Artemis. When we look to-day at pictures of the goddess Artemis, we have perhaps only the grotesque impression of a female form with many breasts. This is because we have no idea how such things were experienced in olden times; and it was the inner experience evoked by these things that was all-important. The pupils of the Mysteries had to go through a certain preparation before they were conducted to the true centre of the Mysteries. In the Ephesian Mysteries the centre was this image of the Goddess Artemis. When the pupil was led up to the centre, he became one with such an image. As he stood before the image, he lost the consciousness that he was there in front of it, enclosed in his skin. He acquired the consciousness that he himself is what the image is. He identified himself with the image. This identification of himself in consciousness with the divine image at Ephesus had the following effect. The pupil no longer merely looked out upon the kingdoms of the Earth that were round about him—the stones, trees, rivers, clouds and so forth—but when he felt himself one with the image, when he entered as it were into the image of Artemis, he received an inner vision of his connection with the kingdoms of the Ether. He felt himself one with the world of the stars, one with the processes in the world of the stars. He did not feel himself as earthly substance within a human skin, he felt his cosmic existence. He felt himself in the etheric. And as he did so, there rose before him earlier conditions of Earth-experience and of man's experience on Earth. He began to see what these earlier conditions had been. To-day we look upon the Earth as a great piece of rock or stone, covered with water over a large part of its surface and surrounded by a sphere of air containing oxygen and nitrogen and other substances,—containing, in fact, what the human being requires for breathing. And so on and so on. And when men begin to explain and speculate on what passes to-day for scientific knowledge, then we get a fine result indeed! For only by means of spiritual vision can one penetrate to the conditions that prevailed in the earliest primeval times. Such a spiritual vision, however, concerning primeval conditions of the Earth⁷ and of mankind was attained by the pupils of Ephesus, when they identified themselves with the divine image; they beheld and understood how formerly what surrounds the Earth to-day as atmosphere was not as it now is; surrounding the Earth, in the place where the atmosphere is to-day, was an extraordinarily fine albumen, a volatile, fluid albumenous substance. And they saw how everything that lived on the Earth required for its own genesis the forces of this volatile, fluid albumenous substance, that was spread over the Earth, and how everything also lived in it. They saw too how that which was in a certain sense already within this substance—finely distributed but everywhere with a tendency to crystallisation—how that which was present in a finely distributed condition as silicic acid was in reality a kind of sense-organ for the Earth and could take up into itself from all sides the Imaginations and influences from the surrounding Cosmos. And thus in the silicic acid contained in the earthly albumenous atmosphere were everywhere Imaginations, concretely, externally present.

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These Imaginations had the form of gigantic, plant-like organisms, and out of that which was, so to speak, ‘imagined’ into the Earth in this way, there developed later, through absorption of the atmospheric substance,—the plant; everything that is of a plant-like nature. At first it was in the environment of the Earth, in volatile, fluid form; only later did it sink down into the soil and become what is known to us as the plant.

Besides the silicic acid, there was imbedded also in this albumen-atmosphere another substance, lime, in a finely-divided condition. Again, out of the lime substance, under the influence of the congelation of the albumen there arose the animal kingdom. And the human being felt himself within all this. He felt one with the whole Earth. He lived in that which formed itself as plant in the Earth through Imagination, he lived too in that which was developing on Earth as animal, in the way I have described. Each single human being felt himself spread out over the whole Earth, felt himself one with the Earth. So that the human beings were all—as I have described it for the Platonic teaching in my book Christianity as Mystical Fact, in reference to the human capacity for ideas—were all each within the other.

Now destiny brought it about that the two personalities, of whom I spoke in Stuttgart and of whom I am speaking to you again here, reincarnated as adherents of the Mystery of Ephesus, and there received with deep devotion into their souls the things that I have here pictured to you in brief outline. Thereby their souls were, in a manner, inwardly established. Through the Mystery they now received as Earth-wisdom what had formerly been accessible to them only in experience,—for the most part unconscious experience.

Thus was the human experience of these personalities divided between two separate incarnations. And thereby did they bear within them a strong consciousness of man's connection with the higher, the spiritual world, and at the same time a strong, an intense capacity for feeling and experiencing all that belongs to the Earth.

For if you have two things that perpetually flow together, so that you cannot keep them apart, then they merge and lose themselves in each other. If, on the other hand, they show themselves clearly distinct, then you can judge the one by the other. And so these two personalities were able on the one hand to judge the spiritual of the higher world that came to them as a result of life-experience and that lived in them as an echo from their earlier incarnations. And now, as the origin of the kingdoms of nature was communicated to them in the Mystery of Ephesus under the influence of the Goddess Artemis, they were able, on the other hand, to judge how the things external to man on the Earth came into being, how gradually everything external to man on the Earth was formed out of a primeval substance, which substance also included man. And the life of these two personalities—it fell partly in the latter end of the time when Heraclitus⁸ was still living in Ephesus, and partly in the time that followed—became particularly rich inwardly and was powerfully lit up from within with the light of great cosmic secrets. There was in them moreover a strong consciousness of how man in his life of soul may be connected, not merely with that which lies spread out around him on the Earth, but with that too which extends upward,—when he himself reaches upward with his being. Such was the inner configuration of soul of these two personalities, who had worked together in the earlier Egypto-Chaldean epoch and then lived together at the time of Heraclitus and after, in connection with the Mystery of Ephesus. And now this working together was able to continue still further. The configuration of soul that had been developed in both, passed through death, through the spiritual world, and began to prepare itself for an Earth life that must needs again bring problems which will now of course present themselves in quite a different way. And when we observe in what manner these two personalities had to find their part later in the history of Earth evolution, we may see how through the experiences of the soul in earlier times—these experiences having their karmic continuation in the next life on Earth—things are prepared which afterwards appear in totally different form in the later life, when the personalities are once more incorporated into the evolution of humanity on Earth.

I have brought forward this example, because these two personalities make their appearance later in a period that was of extraordinary importance in the history of mankind. I indicated this in my lectures at Stuttgart thirteen years ago; in fact, I dealt with all these matters from a certain point of view. These personalities who had first in the Egypto-Chaldean epoch gone through what I may call a widely-extended cosmic life, and had then deepened this cosmic experience within them, thereby in a sense establishing their souls, now lived again in a later incarnation as Aristotle⁹ and Alexander the Great.¹⁰ When one understands the underlying depths in the souls of Aristotle and Alexander the Great, then one can begin to understand, as I explained in Stuttgart, all that was working so problematically in these two personalities, whose lives took their course in the time when Greek culture was falling into decay and Roman rule beginning to have dominion.

• 1. See Occult History. Historical Personalities and Events in the Light of Spiritual Science by Rudolf Steiner, Anthroposophical Publishing Company, London, 1957.
• 2. The Epic of Gilgamesh was discovered in the ruins of a palace of Assurbanipal written in cuneiform characters on twelve tablets. This text is based on older Sumerian documents of which fragments remain.
• 3. Called Erech in the Bible (1 Moses 10, 10), the city is named Uruk in the cuneiform text.
• 4. The cuneiform text has Enkidu or Engidu.
• 5. This is the Sumerian name Ziusudra used by Berossus, priest of Bel in Babylon, who wrote a history of Babylon and Chaldea in Greek around 280 B.C. based on the archives of the Temple in Babylon. In cuneiform script it is Utnapishtim.
• 6. Rudolf Steiner spoke in detail about this place in the 6th lecture of Mystery Knowledge and Mystery Centres, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1973.
• 7. See the 5th lecture in Mystery Knowledge and Mystery Centres.
• 8. Heraclitus of Ephesus, Greek philosopher. He lived around 500 B.C. and deposited his chief work in the Temple of Artemis. See Christianity as Mystical Fact and the Mysteries of Antiquity by Rudolf Steiner, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1972.
• 9. Greek philosopher from Stagira (384–322 B.C.). See Riddles of Philosophy by Rudolf Steiner, Anthroposophic Press, New York, 1973.
• 10. (356-323 B.C.). From 336 King of Macedonia. Died in Babylon.

The lecture yesterday brought our study of the evolution of our planet to the stage known as Old Moon. We heard that the first embodiment of our planet was that of Old Saturn, the second that of Old Sun and the third that of Old Moon. We came to the point in yesterday's lecture where it was made clear that if everything had progressed exactly as hitherto, man would not have been able to keep pace with the tempo of the cosmic evolution of other beings. Hence a kind of severance took place at a certain point during the Old Moon embodiment. The Sun, progressing as it was within the cosmic expanse, separated from the planetary body together with the finest substances and higher beings. The less progressed part of the planetary body, namely, Old Moon itself, still containing all that constitutes our present earth and present moon, remained as a kind of cloud-body. Certain conditions brought about a densification or hardening on Old Moon and the same happened to the beings inhabiting it.

When the Sun had separated, its forces worked upon Old Moon from outside. The subsequent human-animal-plant kingdom that came into existence on Old Moon now received the forces of the Sun from outside. After the separation, the three kingdoms on Old Moon came into existence. As yet there was no mineral kingdom but what took shape, after the hardening process, as the lowest kingdom was a kind of mineral-plant kingdom—mineral substance that was plantlike in character, or, if you prefer, plant substance that was mineral in character. This formed the ground of Old Moon; it was a kind of semi-solid, semi-fluid foundation. On the earth today we walk about on a mineral ground, on Old Moon it was semi-solid, semi-fluid ground, a kind of plant-mineral soil. Think of a mass of spongy, plantlike substance on which human beings walked. This was the character of the lowest kingdom on Old Moon, a kingdom that was at the same time half-living. The ground of our earth today has become comparatively static; volcanic activity is the only reminder of a certain inner life. On Old Moon there were no such conditions. We may perhaps speak later on about what an occultist has to say on the subject of earthquakes and volcanic activity. Just as organs in a plant grow and subsequently die, so did this half-living substance on Old Moon. The Old Moon was like a great organism, living and mobile, on which the beings living might have felt like parasites of today. These Old Moon plants were composed of mineral substance, had life in them and were mobile; they were plant-mineral in character. Nothing would have been found resembling our rocks of today; instead, there were horny or woody formations. In the environment of Old Moon, like a kind of atmosphere, were a few cloud-masses composed of a half-watery, half-living substance in which the beings of the next kingdom, half animal, half plant in character, were embedded. If you were to crush a tree, causing something akin to the feeling experienced by an animal, that would be remotely comparable with what was experienced by this animal-plant kingdom, which could not exist as such on the earth today.

As has often been said, not only are there pupils in school who make no progress but in the whole process of evolution there are always beings who remain at a standstill and who, together with the forms that belong to them and express what they are, become retarded. Thus, on the earth itself there were still certain moon beings who were not sufficiently advanced to keep abreast of evolution on the earth. These beings were obliged to create in their outer expressions the condition that had been essential to their life on Old Moon. As you know, plants on Old Moon were not rooted in mineral soil as they are today but in the half-living ground of the planet. Mistletoe, for example, is a descendant, a straggler, of an Old Moon form; it is obliged to take root in plant-soil. In folk myths there are many indications of this, for example, in the legend of Baldur and Loki. The latter is a being belonging to Old Moon, whereas Baldur is a being inwardly connected with earth and sun evolution. To interpret a legend or myth it is necessary to know in which sphere of occult investigation the connections can be discovered. External science could be so enriched by the fruits of clairvoyance that it would recognize in a legend much more than folk fantasy. Spiritual science must teach one to investigate with the whole soul instead of with the intellect only.

There was still a third kingdom on Old Moon, between the animal and human kingdoms; it was the animal-human kingdom. The forms of those animal-men were quite different from what is pictured by materialistic science today. They were animal-men although certain important members of their constitution were not yet actually within them. While he is asleep today, man's physical and etheric bodies remain in the bed and his astral body is outside. Fundamentally speaking, during sleep he is therefore in the physical world with only the lesser half of his constitution. Man's physical and etheric bodies belong to an earlier, cosmic stage of consciousness. Clairvoyant vision reveals this condition to have been permanent on Old Moon. The astral body then was never entirely within the physical and etheric bodies but was nevertheless connected more fundamentally and definitely with the human being than is the case during sleep today. The head of the man of Old Moon was not self-enclosed as is the case today. A residue of what the organs in the head were at that time is the place at the top of a baby's head that stays soft and open for a long time. On Old Moon the head of the human being was still open. Were you to draw a line vertically downward from this soft area, you would meet the pineal gland. Today it is stunted and withered but it was an important organ during the Old Moon embodiment. It was a kind of sense organ that connected man's physical and etheric bodies with his astral body. Through this organ, which was a delicate, luminous body, man's astral body radiated into the other bodies. His consciousness was neither that of sleep nor of waking life. He did not perceive outer objects. His consciousness might be compared with that of the dream to-day. The pineal gland at that time was a kind of warmth organ, emitting powerful, luminous rays of warmth. When on Old Moon man was moving about, the function of this organ was to show him the direction he must take. Man's perception on Old Moon consisted in something like a dream picture rising up within him. There was as yet no seeing or perceiving objects but man felt an inner up-and-down surge of living pictures of which the dream pictures of today are only a feeble shadow. Everything a man set out to do on Old Moon, how he searched for his food and so forth, was always activated by these pictures that were connected with the outer world. He could allow himself to be directed and led by them. When he was looking for food he was guided by certain pictures that rose up before him, and he was warned of danger also by them. The astral body extended far beyond the physical and the etheric bodies; the form of the physical body alone could be called human.

On Old Moon man's inner warmth was not yet constant. Today, on the earth, this has been achieved. On Old Moon man absorbed warmth from the warmth around him and emitted it again, just as he inhales and exhales air today. The process became visible in his organ of warmth. It gleamed and was luminous when he was absorbing warmth and darkened when he was exhaling it. If you could have seen what was happening, the process would have suggested the image of a fire-breathing dragon. All these happenings have a deep significance. Figures such as the Archangel Michael with the fire-breathing dragon under his feet, or St. George. fighting with the dragon, are pictures reminiscent of those conditions. The fire breather of Old Moon, the ancient Dragon, is a figure that once actually existed. It portrays a stage that would have to be surmounted.

This is the explanation of such matters that is derived from occult knowledge. Later on, when spiritual science is more widely known, there will be a different view of truths that have been preserved in imagery and pictures of this kind. This animal-man form was quite different from that of man today because the astral body did not sink into the physical body as deeply as it did later on the earth. Man is the figure he is today because the astral body eventually sank right down into him. It could be said that what did not, during the Old Moon period of evolution, allow itself to descend into the depths of the physical world, now resolved to do so during the earth period. But if this process in the cosmos had taken place at an earlier time, man would have remained at a much lower evolutionary stage. During the period of earth evolution, he succeeded, with the help of the spirit, in acquiring for himself the noble, godlike form that is now his. If the possibility of developing this stature had already existed on Old Moon, the descent of the astral body would have taken place prematurely. The divine Guides have always chosen the right moment. The essential achievement of Old Moon evolution was that time was left for the evolution of the physical body, and on the earth man was to be permeated by the astral body after having evolved physically on Old Moon at a lower stage. Then again there took place a certain recession of the Moon into the Sun, which had previously separated; the Old Moon globe was again absorbed by the Sun and everything passed into a cosmic sleep, a pralaya. This began at the time when the Moon returned again into the Sun.

Hence the evolution of Old Moon proceeded by the following stages: firstly, a kind of preparation; secondly, separation into Sun and Moon; thirdly, formation of three kingdoms on Old Moon; fourthly, return into the Sun; fifthly, ebb; sixthly, the cosmic sleep.

The fourth metamorphosis of our earth, our own planet earth itself, then came forth from the cosmic sleep. This first configuration of the earth was, of course, quite different from its configuration today. When the earth emerged from the cosmic night, from the darkness of twilight, it was gigantic in size, for again sun and moon were contained within it; the separations took place later on. So enormous was the size of the earth that it reached as far as the Saturn of today. Differentiation in the solar system did not take place until a much later time. As far as is possible in terms of philosophical thinking, the Kant-Laplace theory is an entirely intelligible exposition of this first form of our earth. It speaks of a kind of archetypal nebula in which everything was dissolved and out of which the whole solar system came forth. Through the rotation of this nebula, rings took shape; they densified and then, still as the result of rotation, the planets were formed. In schools this process is often illustrated by means of an experiment. A globule of oil in liquid of equal density is made to rotate by a simple mechanical device. It can then be observed that this globule flattens, that drops separate from it and form themselves again into globules that circle round the central globule. In this way one can see in miniature a kind of planetary system coming into being through rotation. This has an immensely suggestive effect. Why should we not picture the process in this ways This experiment shows how a planetary system comes into existence through rotation; it is there before our very eyes.

But one thing is forgotten. One of us, or the teacher, actually causes the rotation! Nothing is really explained by this external illustration. No cosmic system comes into existence out of nothingness. It does not arise of itself from the nebula, but it comes into existence because many spiritual beings have been working on it and at a certain point in their evolution have drawn out the finest substances from the chaotic root substance and cast out the coarser substances, namely, the moon.

During the first period after pralaya, the earth, in which all the substances and beings were again united, recapitulated the Saturn condition. At the beginning of this phase of evolution the earth was not a globe of gas as has often been falsely assumed, but a globe of warmth. For it (the earth) was re-capitulating the condition of the Saturn embodiment and extended to the sphere of the present Saturn. At a certain stage the spiritual beings involved take their substances with them. Spirit is the foundation of everything, both when the Sun separates and during the evolution of Old Moon. No external factor was responsible here; it was an inner necessity for one section of the beings. The higher beings separate what they need from the chaotic substance. Everywhere it is the spirit that directs the external reality. When the earth first came into existence everything was contained in it; the spiritual beings indwelling it were at different stages of their evolution. We shall bear this in mind during the following studies.

Thus after pralaya the earth first of all recapitulated the Saturn condition; it was a condition of warmth. Then this gigantic globe of warmth condensed to the gaseous state and only when a definite point had been reached was it possible for the globe to form the fluid element and recapitulate the Old Moon condition. At this point on the earth there was a repetition of what had previously happened on Old Moon: the sun separated from the earth and earth-plus-moon became one independent body, containing the substances and beings of earth and moon, as they are still present today. Thus for a time earth and moon, and sun were one united whole. The earth-plus-moon was ejected because man could no longer keep pace with the tempo of the sun. Had the sun remained in the earth man would have been old practically at birth. The beings of the cosmos are at entirely different stages of evolution. It will only be possible to indicate the most important features of this evolution during the fourth period, that of the earth. Even the more mature beings belonged to grades at every possible level. There were some who could neither profit by the rapid tempo of the sun nor by the slow tempo of the earth. These beings departed already before the separation, when sun, earth and moon were still united. They created special arenas for their activity and these were the domains suitable for their rulership. It was thus that the outer planets, Saturn, Jupiter and Mars, were formed.

During the recapitulation of the Saturn embodiment, Uranus, Vulcan and Saturn separated from the earth. During the recapitulation of the sun embodiment, Jupiter and Mars separated. After the sun had left the earth, Mercury and Venus separated from it. After the separation of the sun, the earth cast out the moon. The dispersal of Old Moon was brought about by the forces of the progressed beings who drew out the solar body, while the normal and retarded beings produced the moon circling around it. In all the mysteries these happenings were called the strife in heaven. The detached planetoids are the ruins of that battlefield. It is here that the primal secret of the origin of evil must be sought.

The planetary spirits involved could not have waited until the sun separated from the earth because they would not have found the right soil for their activity; evolution at this time was turning into different channels. The planetary conditions of space and movement are all the expression and effect of the activity of their beings; these conditions indicate the evolutionary rank of the spiritual beings inhabiting the planets. Beings who had believed that they, too, could accompany the sun because this had formerly been possible but who could not now do so, separated from the sun, but only after it had itself separated from the earth. These beings separated from the sun after this event and are at a far higher stage of evolution than men. Venus and Mercury are the two bodies that, having separated from the sun after the latter's separation from the earth, formed the inner planets of our solar system.

After the severance from the sun a difficult, sombre period now began for the earth, in a certain respect its darkest, hardest era. While still united with the moon, the earth drew into itself all the forces that were retarding evolution. To obstruct life is characteristic of the forces principally active in the moon. During this period, these obstructive forces were working far too strongly in the earth. If the earth had remained connected with them, life would not have taken its course in the right tempo. Man would have hardened to the stage of mummification. The earth would have become a veritable cemetery, one vast graveyard containing statues of mummified human bodies. No procreation would have been possible. When the sun had left the earth, fearful desolation and hardening of all life took place. So already at that time there were periods when the human physical body was abandoned by its spiritual members, just as today the physical body is abandoned by its spiritual members at death.

In that past era, withdrawal and emergence of the being of spirit and soul from the physical already took place and a new search for the physical body began, as happens today when incarnations are to take place. But more and more frequently it happened that when the being of soul and spirit desired, while the moon was still united with the earth, to find a human body again, none was to be found, because bodies were no longer fit to receive the being of spirit and soul. Just imagine that great masses of human beings were to have died today and because of the character of the physical substance these bodies had become so decadent that the souls would have said: We cannot make use of these bodies, they are too decadent for us, they offer no possibility of further evolution. Suppose that because of an extensive spread of alcoholism, for example, successive generations had gradually become so degenerate that the bodies were simply useless for the descending souls. This is more or less a picture of the state of the earth at that time, before the exit of the moon. Everything that should have been habitable down below was often hardened, crusted, withered, mummified. There was actually a period when souls were seeking in vain for bodies for their own evolution on earth. The consequence was that certain beings simply could not at that time have returned to the physical plane as men. They could not have incarnated again on the earth. These beings then went to other cosmic bodies that had separated from the sun, namely, to Venus, Jupiter, Saturn and Mars. There was a time when the majority of these beings who should normally have incarnated on the earth according to their nature and their stage of evolution, placed themselves under the protection of the beings of Mars, Jupiter, Venus or Saturn, having ascended to and populated these cosmic bodies. Only the strongest souls found it possible to cope with the stubborn bodies and keep them flexible. Please understand me well. It was only the best soul material that then came again to the earth, because its power to master the stubborn bodies was the greatest. But under such conditions evolution could not have progressed.

The beings of the highest rank belonging to our solar system now adopted a new procedure. The most impermeable substances were extracted and separated from the earth; the severance of the moon was brought about. The result of this was that the forces that had remained behind were no longer frustrated in their evolution. But it was not until later that this moon became what it is today. The time had now come when the physical and etheric evolution of man could find the tempo befitting its stage. The forces both of the sun and the moon now worked upon the earth from outside, maintaining the balance. Gradually, while the moon was emerging, a kind of softening, an amelioration of the bodies of men, again took place. The period just described is called in occultism the Lemurian epoch, the epoch of the separation of the moon during the physical embodiment of the earth. The epoch when the sun left the earth is called the Hyperborean age, and the epoch when the sun, moon and earth were still united is called the Polarian age.

During the whole period when the sun was separated from the earth and the moon produced a hardening process on the earth to begin with and then left the earth during the whole of that period, sublime beings were influencing the differentiation. Their most important servants were the Spirits of Form, called the Exusiai in Christian esotericism, also Spirits of Revelation, Powers.

On Saturn it was the Thrones, the Spirits of Will who made the sacrifice of pouring out from their own substance the material for man's physical body. On Old Sun it was the Dominions or Spirits of Wisdom who provided the substance for the etheric body, and on Old Moon it was the Spirits of Movement or Mights who made possible the formation of the astral body. On the earth the Spirits of Form or Powers instill the ego, bringing it about that in this phase of evolution the ego enters gradually into what had come into existence, namely, man's physical body, etheric body and astral body. This is the work of the Spirits of Form. In order that an ego-man could come into existence at all as the expression of ego consciousness, and that this coordination of the physical, etheric and astral bodies could take place, everything that has now been described was essential. The separation of sun and moon from the earth was necessary; it was also necessary for man to undergo a process of hardening followed by a certain softening. This could take place because the wise beings who guided and directed these happenings undertook it all as probationary measures for the good of evolution. A great deal in the evolutionary process of the earth is still done today by the sublime beings concerned, as probationary measures.

What, then, is the anthroposophical movement? It came into the world because the lofty beings we call the Masters, who live in human physical bodies but have reached the far higher stage of evolution than the average man of today, poured out a certain amount of wisdom from the last third of the nineteenth century onwards. The living influx of this wisdom from higher realms into our culture is the actual basis of our anthroposophical movement. Do not imagine that there was no possibility of the attempted influx of wisdom falling upon deaf ears in humanity. Even if there had been deaf ears, the Masters would have said that an attempt must be made later on, when human beings would be ready to receive the wisdom. In occultism this is known as the test of maturity in men. The fact that wisdom pours into humanity from higher beings such as these is not in itself sufficient; what matters is how it is received; the success of the test depends upon that. Such tests have already been made several times but have not always succeeded. It was often within narrow limits that humanity proved to be ripe for the tests; receptive souls and hearts were not always to be found. When the ego of humanity was to be instilled, the test consisted in gradual attempts to permate what had formerly been astral body only, with the ego. Then it turned out that the astral body, permeated by the ego, was incapable of penetrating the physical body. Adjustment was therefore necessary and this was made possible by the separation of the moon. It was in the middle of the Lemurian epoch that the entry of the ego, the Christ principle, was first achieved.

But the following was connected with this. During and after the separation of the moon, the earth was depopulated. We have heard that the bodies had become so contaminated that they could no longer provide habitations for the souls. Cosmic happenings such as these have been preserved in legend and saga, but occult investigation reveals their true origin and teaches us that while the separation of the moon was taking place, when the earth was depopulated, many souls were searching for suitable embodiment in cosmic space; they departed from the earth and assumed bodies on other planets. But when the moon had finally left, it became apparent that the earth was capable again of providing suitable bodies. Now, the souls, who during the latest Lemurian epoch and thereafter in the Atlantean period had gone to the planets, presented them-selves again on the earth and incarnated in the bodies there. Groups of human beings now formed on the earth. Some provided bodies for souls coming from Jupiter incarnations, or from Mars, Venus or Saturn. These souls now found bodies that were appropriate for them. This grouping of souls gave rise to the birth of races. Hence there is a certain connection between the races and cosmic bodies and thus it was possible to speak of Saturn men, Jupiter men and so on. What can be called the concept of race had now, for the first time, its justification.

On Old Moon, and also on the earth while it was still united with the moon, there were human beings at different stages of evolution. This can be perceived right on into the Lemurian epoch, when owing to the exodus of the moon, differentiation took place in humanity. Thereafter the concept of race arose and from then on began to have a certain meaning, a certain significance. Race is something that comes into being and subsequently passes away again. The epoch of the formation of the races is that embraced by Lemuria and Atlantis. Today only stragglers of the races are present.

It will be my task here to explain to you some features of investigation of the spiritual world, and to indicate what the consequences of such knowledge are for life as a whole. He who has the task of communicating certain things to his fellowmen from the spiritual world cannot test too often their exactitude and absolute spiritual correctness. My aim is to impart something out of such verified knowledge in regard to the soul's life between death and a new birth. Lately, I have been able to test the research that can be made in this field. Particulars of these thorough investigations will be given in the second part of the lecture. This must be prefaced by some preliminary explanations pertaining to the attainment of spiritual knowledge.

A special disposition of the soul is necessary for the acquisition of spiritual knowledge, one to which the usual disposition in everyday life on the earthly plane is radically opposed. In external life, especially in our present day, the soul is in a continual state of unrest. Throughout the day the soul is constantly exposed to new impressions, and since it identifies itself with these impressions it lives in a state of continuous restlessness.

The very opposite must take place if one would penetrate into the spiritual world. The first condition necessary for ascending into the spiritual world and for understanding the experiences gained in that realm is complete inner rest and steadiness of soul. This quietness of soul is more difficult to attain than we might think. All anxiety, all excitement and worry must cease in order to obtain inner calmness. In fact, during the time that we wish to lift ourselves into higher worlds all interests in outer life must be extinguished. We should be as if standing at one point, determined not to move, so that the events of the spiritual world may pass before us. In our everyday life on the physical plane we go from one thing to another while the things themselves remain stationary. This is not so in the spiritual world where we must bring things to us, to the point to which we are fixed, by means of our thinking activity. We must, as it were, go out of ourselves, penetrate the things and then bring them to us from outside. This may lead to alarming experiences for the soul.

We shall discover that during our normal life on earth we are able to change things, to correct what we have perceived or done wrongly. This is no longer so in the spiritual world. There we realize that things present themselves in a true or false aspect according to the condition we are in when entering the spiritual world. Therefore, all preparation for a correct insight into the spiritual world must take place before entering that realm, because once we have passed the threshold we are no longer in a position to correct, but are forced to make the mistakes consistent with our own disposition of character. In order to avoid making certain mistakes in the future, we must return to the physical plane, improve our disposition, and then return to the spiritual world to do better than previously. From this you will understand the importance of a sound and careful preparation before crossing the threshold into the spiritual world.

What I have said is closely connected with the present cycle of human evolution, but conditions for the soul were not always as they are today. In our time we should fear rather than welcome a too forcible appearance of a visionary world on entering the realm of the spirit. When we begin our exercises to rise into the higher worlds it is indeed possible for visionary experiences to penetrate into us. In our time there is only one safeguard against making mistakes in the presence of this visionary world, namely, to say to oneself that to begin with one can only learn certain things about oneself from these visions. The appearance of a whole host of visions around us need be nothing more than the mirroring of our own being. Our own disposition and maturity of soul, all we think and feel, transform themselves in the spiritual world into happenings that appear to be objective realities. For instance, when we see events in the astral world that seem objective to us, they may be nothing more than the reflection of our own virtues or defects, or indeed the effect of a headache. He who seeks genuine initiation, especially in our time, must endeavor to understand by thinking all that reaches him by way of the visionary experience. Therefore, the candidate for initiation will not rest until he has understood what he has encountered in the visionary world as thoroughly as he understands the physical world.

Now as we approach initiation our soul undergoes the same experiences as those during the period between death and a new birth. Recently in my occult research the following question arose. What is the relationship between the visionary world that one can find through initiation or as a result of a loosening of the ether body owing to shock, and the realm in which one dwells between death and a new birth? It was shown that when we turn our attention to the time between death and rebirth, we find, that is, setting aside the period of kamaloca, that we live in an objective world that can be compared to that of the initiate. This should not be taken, however, to mean that immediately after death we do not live in a real world. We live an absolutely real world. We live there with those with whom we were connected on earth, and the connections are very real. But just as on earth we receive our perceptions by means of the senses, so after death we receive them by way of visions.

Let us consider the following instance. Suppose after death we meet someone in the spiritual world who died before us. He is there for us in reality, we stand before him, but we must be able to perceive him, must establish a relationship to him in the visionary world, just as in the physical world we would establish a connection with someone by means of our eyes and ears. Now, however, we encounter a difficulty that exists in the experience of the initiate and also in the life between death and rebirth. As previously explained, the world of visions presents at first only a reflection of ourselves. When a man meets us in the spiritual world a vision appears, but to begin with this vision only reflects the measure of affection or antipathy that we felt towards him on earth, or it reflects some other connection that we may have had with him in the past. We can therefore find ourselves in the presence of a person in the spiritual world and yet perceive nothing more than what was within our own soul before death. It may happen that we meet a person in the spiritual world but remain cut off from him because of our feelings or affection or dislike that envelop us like a visionary cloud. Such meetings after death are accompanied by deep feeling, by a real inner experience, and this is most important. We might feel, for example, that we have not loved someone on earth as much as we should have done and now after death, notwithstanding that we are in his presence and wish to love him more, we find that we can only bring as much affection as we had for him on earth. This is true in spite of our earnest desire to love him more and make amends for what we failed to do on earth. We experience this sense of limitation, this total incapacity to develop further one's inner powers, as an immense weight on the soul after death.

This leads me to some of my recent research. The early experiences during the kamaloca period consist in essence of what the soul has received in its relations with its fellow men before death. After a certain time after death, for instance, we can no longer ask ourselves how we should love a person. We can then only ask ourselves how we loved him during earthly life, and as a result how we love him now. This condition gradually changes as after death we develop the faculty to sense the working of the beings of the spiritual world, of the Hierarchies, on the visions that surround us. Therefore, the situation that I have characterized is only altered as a result of a feeling that develops little by little. Beings of the Hierarchies are working on the mist that surrounds us; they shine upon this mist as the sun's rays irradiate the clouds. We have to take a certain number of memories of our life before death with us. They surround us like a cloud and on the basis of them we must develop the faculty to receive the light of the Hierarchies. Generally speaking almost every soul in our time is prepared in this way to receive the influences of the higher Hierarchies. Today every person who dies and enters the spiritual world will reach the stage where the Hierarchies illumine the cloud of his visions.

The influence of the Hierarchies, this light-giving that occurs in the course of time, is also gradually altered. It changes in such a way that we experience little by little how this breaking-in of the light of higher Hierarchies could dim our consciousness. Then we become aware that the preservation of our consciousness depends upon certain specific things that happened before death. For instance, the consciousness of a person with an immoral soul disposition is more easily dimmed. It is therefore of the utmost importance that we cross the threshold of death with moral strength, for moral consciousness will keep our soul open to the light of the Hierarchies. Recently I have been able to examine the state after death of people with moral sentiments and also the state of those with an immoral disposition of soul, and in every case it could be established that a person with a moral disposition of soul was able to preserve clear, radiant consciousness after death, whereas those with an immoral soul constitution sink into a kind of dim twilight consciousness.

One might well ask what it matters if after death a person should fall into such a sleeping consciousness because then he would not suffer. He would even escape the consequences of his immorality. This argument will not hold because, with such a dimming of consciousness that is the result of immorality, the most terrible conditions of fear are connected. There is no greater fear after death than this darkening of consciousness.

Later, after a certain span of time has elapsed, one has quite other experiences. One compares, for instance, a variety of people during the period between death and rebirth, and one finds that during the later phase after death, in addition to the moral disposition the religious soul disposition plays a part. It is simply an unquestionable fact that souls deficient in religious thoughts experience a dimming of consciousness as a result of this deficiency. One cannot free oneself from the impression one gains in observing the state of men who have had only materialistic thoughts. Shortly after death their consciousness is dimmed, extinguished. This fact demonstrates that materialistic thoughts, however convincing they might appear to be, do not further human development after death.

I have thus described two phases of existence after death. In the first, one sees the effects of moral principles, in the second, the consequences of religious ideas. This is followed by a third period that would mean a dimming of consciousness for every soul were it not for certain cosmic measures that prevent this darkening. In investigating this third phase the total evolution of the whole of humanity through the various cycles of development will have to be considered. In pre-Christian times men could not acquire on earth what would have given them a consciousness in this third period after death. That they nevertheless had a consciousness during this third period was due to the fact that since the beginning of earth evolution certain spiritual forces were bestowed on man that enabled him to preserve his consciousness. These forces, which were inherited by man from the beginning of the world, were preserved by the wise guidance of initiated leaders. We must bear in mind that in pre-Christian times all the various peoples of the world received the influences of the Sanctuaries of Initiation, and there were many ways in which the spiritual life flowed forth from the Mysteries to the people.

These impulses became even weaker as human evolution approached the Mystery of Golgotha. An external proof of this can be seen in the advent of the great Buddha in pre-Christian times. A careful examination of the teachings of Buddha will not reveal any real information about the nature of the spiritual world. In fact, the spiritual world is characterized negatively in the teaching of Nirvana, and yet it is true that Buddha demanded of one who sought entry into the spiritual world that one should free oneself from all attachments to the physical world. But in the whole of Buddha's teachings we do not find any detailed description of the world of the spirit as we do, for instance, in the teachings of the Brahmans that still contain the traditions of ancient times. It must be emphasized that the facts referred to manifested themselves in various peoples until the time the Greeks experienced the meaning of the Mystery of Golgotha. Because during the period of Greek civilization consciousness was dimmed between death and rebirth, the Greeks, who knew this, experienced the spiritual world as the realm of the shades. On earth man could create beauty, art, harmonious social conditions out of his own forces, but he was unable to acquire in the physical world what would give him a light during the third phase of life after death.

This is connected with the fact that in the Greek epoch mankind had reached the point in evolution when the ancient sources of tradition were exhausted. He could not procure by dint of his own powers in the physical world the forces needed after death to maintain the consciousness described. At this point in evolution mankind had to receive from without the impulse by means of which he could gain consciousness during this third phase. Man had lost the power of inheriting the consciousness between death and rebirth, but he could regain it by turning his thoughts to what had occurred at the Mystery of Golgotha. The matter stands as follows. What could be experienced during the Greek epoch during the Mystery of Golgotha has illumined men's consciousness in the third phase between death and rebirth. Understanding the Mystery of Golgotha is the impulse for consciousness in the third period after death.

If we now consider the Greco-Latin period, we can say that for the first phase after death the moral disposition of soul was the determining factor; for the second, the religious inclination; but for the third, the understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha was of prime importance. He who had not acquired this understanding suffered an extinction of consciousness in the third period after death, just as the Greeks experienced it previously. The Mystery of Golgotha signifies the re-enlivening of man's consciousness precisely during the middle period between death and rebirth. The ancient spiritual heritage that mankind had lost was restored to him through this event, and so the Christ event had to occur because of the conditions that prevailed in the lives of men. As evolution progressed mankind continually received new powers. During the first stage of Christian evolution it was the understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha as recounted by those who had lived at the time, and as transmitted by means of tradition, that gave the power to maintain consciousness in the third phase after death. Today, as a result of the further development of man's faculties, a new relation is again necessary, both to the Mystery of Golgotha and to the Christ being.

If we seek to understand the essence of the soul in our time, then we must realize that the deepest part of man's nature can penetrate today to a knowledge of the ego. Such a comprehension was not possible in former times. Among human beings at large we find this drawing-near to the ego in the grossest forms of egoism. It manifests itself in a wide variety of degrees until we reach the stage of the philosopher. In studying contemporary philosophy you will find that a secure standpoint is only reached when the human ego is spoken of. In pre-Christian times, when man attempted to gain knowledge of the world he turned his attention to outer phenomena; in other words, in order to philosophize he went out of himself. Today man looks inward, into himself, and only there, when he finds the ego, does he encounter a firm point of reference. I need only mention the great Fichte and the contemporary philosopher Bergson. Both agree that a man only finds a measure of inner peace if he discovers the ego. The reason for this lies in the fact that in earlier times humanity could not come out of its own powers to a knowledge of the ego. This experience was bestowed upon him during the Greco-Latin age through the Mystery of Golgotha. The Christ gave mankind the certainty that a spark of the divine dwells in the human soul. It continues to live in man, in him who has not only become flesh in a physical sense, but who has become flesh in a Christian sense, and that means to have become an “I.” The possibility of recognizing the divine in a human individuality, namely, the Christ, is being ever more obscured in our time. This is due to the fact that the man of today penetrates increasingly into his personal ego and seeks to find the divine spark ever more in himself. We have seen that in the nineteenth century this way of viewing the ego was intensified to the point that the divinity of Christ was denied. The divine was understood merely as something abstract in the whole of mankind. So, for example, the German philosopher, David Friedrich Strauss, contended that one should not recognize the single historical Christ, but instead acknowledge the divine nature that animates the whole of humanity. Then the Resurrection signifies only what is manifested in all mankind as the awakening of the Divine Spirit.

This is the reason why the more man seeks the divine within himself, the more he will lose the understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. The whole tendency of modern thinking is to seek the reflection of the divine exclusively in man. Because of this, ever greater obstacles prevent recognition that the Divine was incarnated within one personality. This has real consequences for the life between death and a new birth. If already in the Greco-Latin period man was not able by his own strength to maintain his consciousness in the third period after death, then it is all the more difficult in our time due to the general and philosophical egoism that prevails. In our present age, during the third phase after death the soul creates even greater obstacles for itself in its cloud of visions than during the Greco-Latin epoch.

If one considers the evolution of humanity in more recent times without prejudice, one must acknowledge that St. Paul said, “Not I, but the Christ in me.” But modern man says, “I in me, and the Christ as far as I can admit Him. The Christ is only valid inasmuch as I can acknowledge Him through my own powers of reasoning.”

In our present period there is only one way of maintaining a clear consciousness during the third phase after death, that is, by carrying certain memories from the previous life into our existence after death. In fact, during this period we would have to forget everything unless we were able to hold on to one particular recollection. If we have experienced on earth an understanding of Christ and the Mystery of Golgotha and have established a relationship to them, this will implant into us thoughts and forces that maintain our consciousness during this period after death. The facts clearly show that there is the possibility of remembering after death what has been understood on the earth in relation to the Mystery of Golgotha.

Once we have gained ideas and feelings about the Mystery of Golgotha, we shall be able to remember these after death, and also what is connected with them. In other words, after death we must carry our consciousness across an abyss, and this is done by means of the understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha that we have gained on earth. With this knowledge gained out of our memory during this period, we shall be able to cooperate in the correction of the faults that we bear in our soul as a result of our karma. If, however, we have not developed an understanding and deep realization of the words, “Not I, but the Christ in me,” then our consciousness is extinguished and with it the possibility of improving our karma. Other powers must undertake the correction of our defects that ought to be corrected by us in accordance with our karma.

Naturally, every man returns through a new birth to earth, but it is of importance whether the consciousness has been extinguished or whether it has remained intact across the abyss. If we reach this period after death with a knowledge of the Mystery of Golgotha, we are able to look backward and remember that with all that is essentially human in us, we have come from God. We also experience that we have been able to save our consciousness because of our understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha, and that we can develop our consciousness further as we behold this Spirit now drawing near to us. Then we reach a point during this third phase after death when we can remember and say to ourselves that we are born out of the Spirit, ex Deo nascimur. One who has reached a certain stage of initiation never experiences the truth of the words, “I am born out of the Divine Spirit,” as powerfully as when he transposes himself to this particular point. At this moment every soul who has developed an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha experiences it. The significance of the words, ex Deo nascimur, is realized when one knows that their full depth will only be experienced when the soul has reached the middle period between death and rebirth.

When one knows these facts objectively, one would wish that more people in our time knew that the essence of these words can only be understood as characterized above. This saying has been made into a motto within our spiritual-rosicrucian movement precisely in order to awaken what should live within the soul between death and a new birth.

It would not be difficult to interpret this explanation as a preconceived opinion in favor of the Christian way of life. If this were the case, such a view would be entirely unanthroposophical. Spiritual science takes an objective position towards all religious creeds and studies them with equal interest. The facts that have been given here about the importance of the Mystery of Golgotha have nothing whatever to do with any form of denominational Christianity. They are simply objective occult realities. Yet the accusation has been levied against our Western spiritual movement that we speak out of a marked preference for Christianity as compared with other religions. Here, however, the Mystery of Golgotha is treated in the same way as any tangible fact in natural science. To say that the Mystery of Golgotha ought not be placed as a unique event in the evolution of humanity because other religions would not be able to acknowledge this fact shows complete misunderstanding. Let us consider the following. Today we have the sacred religious books of India and a modern Western world-conception. Today in the West we teach the Copernican system, and no one would suggest that we ought not to teach the Copernican theory because it is not contained in the sacred books of India! For the same reason no one can object to the teaching of the Mystery of Golgotha because it is not to be found in the religious writings of the ancient Hindus.

From this we see how unfounded is the reproach that the explanations here given about the Mystery of Golgotha come from a preference for Christianity. We are concerned with objective facts, and if you should ask why I will never modify in the slightest the importance attached to the Mystery of Golgotha, then the above reasons will provide the answer.

We do not study spiritual science for the sake of curiosity, nor from an abstract desire for knowledge, but in order to provide the soul with a necessary form of nourishment. By means of an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha, we give the soul the possibility of developing those feelings that it will need in order to cross the abyss between death and rebirth as just described. One who has understood that the soul after death can suffer a loss of consciousness, so heavy to bear in all future cycles of time, will seek every opportunity to bring the Mystery of Golgotha to the understanding of his fellow men.

For this reason the understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha is one of the most important facts that we must learn through the study of spiritual science.

The more progress we make in our present epoch, the more will the various religions be obliged to accept the facts we have presented today. The time will come when the followers of the Chinese, Buddhist and Brahman religions will find that it is no more contrary to their religion to accept the Mystery of Golgotha than it is to accept the system of Copernicus. In the future it will be considered a kind of religious egotism if this fact is not admitted by religions that are not Christian.

You will notice that in our considerations we have reached the Mystery of Golgotha although our starting point was the conditions between death and rebirth. One can give but a few indications in relation to an area such as we have dealt with here, but I wished at least to impart to you some of the results of my most recent research.

As the next lecture will be related to the present one, we probably will make a brief review of what has been said here, and then pass on to further considerations.

The Etheric Body

[ 1 ] When higher members of man's nature are observed by supersensible perception, the perception is never exactly similar to one that is given by the outer senses. When by the touch of an object we have a sensation of heat or warmth, a distinction must surely be made between what comes from the object—streaming from it, so to speak—and what our soul experiences. The inner experience of the sensation of heat is not the same thing as the heat emitted by the object. Now think of this actual experience in the soul, without the object; think of the soul's experience of the sensation of warmth, without any outer physical object being there to cause it. If such an experience arose without any cause, it would be mere fancy. The student of spiritual science has such inner perceptions for which there is no physical cause, above all no cause attributable to his own body. But at a certain stage of development, from the way in which these perceptions appear, he can know by the very nature of the experience (as was explained in an earlier chapter) that the inner perception is no mere fancy but is due to a being of soul and spirit belonging to a supersensible outer world, just as the ordinary sensation of heat, for example, is due to some physical object.

It is the same with a perception of color. A distinction must be made between the color of the object and the soul's inner experience of the color. Now think of what the soul experiences when perceiving a red object in the physical world. Let us picture to ourselves that we retain a vivid memory of the impression but look away from the object. The memory-picture of the color is an inner experience; we can distinguish between the inner experience evoked by the color and the external color as such. These inner experiences are substantially different from the immediate outer sense-impressions. They bear much more the stamp of feelings of pain or joy than do our normal and immediate sensations. We have to picture an inner experience of this kind arising in the soul without being caused either by an outer, physical object, or by the memory of such an object. Such an experience may come to someone who is on the way to attaining supersensible knowledge. Moreover he will be able to know in a given case that it is no mere figment of the mind, but that a real being of soul and spirit finds expression in it. And if evoking the same impression as a red object of the physical world, the being may be said to be “red.” With a physical object, however, the outer impression will always come first and be followed by the inner experience. In true supersensible vision, for a human being of the present epoch, the process must be the reverse; first the inner experience—shadowy, like a mere memory of color—and then a living picture, growing ever more vivid. Unless it is realized that such must be the sequence, it will be hard to distinguish between genuine spiritual perception and the delusions of fancy (hallucinations, and the like.)

Whether in a spiritual perception of this kind, the picture becomes truly vivid and alive—whether it remains shadowy, like a dim inkling, or its effect grows as intensely real as that of an outer object—depends upon the stage of development which the aspirant has reached.

The general impression which the seer has of the ether-body of man may now be described as follows. If the aspirant for supersensible knowledge has developed such strength of will that even when a physical man is standing in front of him he can turn his attention right away from what is seen by the physical eyes, he will be able to look with supersensible consciousness into the space occupied by the physical man. Naturally, will-power must e greatly enhanced before it is possible to divert attention not only from what is in one's own mind but from something with which one is actually confronted, so that the physical impression is entirely obliterated. But such enhancement of the will is possible and is achieved by means of the exercises for the attainment of supersensible cognition. It is then possible for the student to have, to begin with, a general impression of the ether-body. There arises in his soul the same inner experience which he has at the sight, let us say, of the color of a peach-blossom; this experience then becomes vividly alive, and he can say: the ether-body has a “peach-blossom” color. Then he perceives the several organs and currents of the ether-body. But the ether-body can also be described in terms of other experiences of the soul—experiences which correspond to sensations of warmth, impressions of sound, and so on, for it is not only a color-phenomenon. Moreover the astral body and other members of man's being can be described in like manner. Bearing in mind what has here been said, it will be realized how the descriptions of spiritual science are to be understood. (Compare Chapter II.)

The Astral World

[ 2 ] As long as the physical world alone is being observed, the Earth—man's dwelling place—appears as a separate heavenly body. When supersensible cognition rises to other spheres, there is no longer this separation. Hence it was possible to say that together with the Earth, Imaginative consciousness perceives the Old Moon condition, such as it has become up to the present time. The world thus entered is one to which not only the supersensible nature of the Earth belongs; other heavenly bodies, physically separated from the Earth, are part of it as well. In that realm the knower of supersensible worlds observes the supersensible nature not only of the Earth but of other heavenly bodies too. (It is, once more, the supersensible nature of other heavenly bodies which he observes to begin with. This should be borne in mind by those who feel impelled to ask why the seer does not tell us what it looks like on Mars, and so on. In putting questions of this kind they think of physical and sense-perceptible conditions.) Hence in the course of this book it was also possible to speak of relationships obtaining between the evolution taking place on Earth and simultaneous evolutions on Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, and so on. When man's astral body is drawn away in sleep it belongs not only to the Earth and earthly conditions, but to worlds in which other cosmic realms—stellar worlds—participate. Moreover, these worlds permeate into man's astral body even in the waking state. Therefore the term “astral body” appears justified.

Man's Life After Death

[ 3 ] Reference has been made in the course of this book to the period of time during which the astral body remains united with the ether-body after a man's death. A gradually fading memory of the whole of the life just ended is present throughout this time (see Chapter III.) It varies in duration with different individuals, depending upon the tenacity with which the astral body holds the ether-body to itself—in other words, the power which the astral body has over the etheric. Supersensible cognition can get an impression of this power by observing a human being who, by the state of his soul and body, ought really to be sleeping but keeps himself awake by sheer inner strength. It becomes evident that different people can, if need be, remain awake without being overcome by sleep for different periods of time. The memory of the life just ended—which means that the connection with the etheric body is still maintained—lasts for about as long after death as the extreme length of time for which, if compelled to do so, the individual would have been able to stay awake.

When the ether-body is detached from the human being after death (see Chapter III,) something that may be described as a kind of extract or quintessence of it remains for the whole of his future evolution. This extract contains the fruits of the past life. It is the bearer of the “seed” of his coming life—the seed which is developing throughout man's spiritual evolution between death and a new birth.

[ 4 ] The length of time between death and a new birth is determined by the fact that as a rule the I of man returns into the physical world only when this world has been so transformed as to give opportunity for new experiences. While the Ego is in the spiritual worlds, man's earthly dwelling-place is changing. In one respect this change is connected with the changes that are taking place in the great Universe—changes for example, in the relative position of the Earth to the Sun. Periodic changes involving cosmic repetitions are connected with the development of new conditions on the Earth. They find expression, for example, in the fact that the region of the heavens where the Sun rises at the vernal equinox makes an entire circuit in about 26,000 years. Throughout this period of the vernal point has therefore been moving from one region of the heavens to another, and in a twelfth of this period of time—that is to say, in about 2,100 years—conditions on the Earth will have altered sufficiently for the soul to be able to have essentially new experiences upon Earth. Moreover as these experiences differ according to whether one is incarnating as a woman or as a man, two incarnations will as a rule take place during this time—one as a man, one as a woman. However, these things also depend upon the forces gathered during earthly life—forces the individual takes with him through the gate of death. Therefore all such indications as have been given here are only valid in the most general sense; there will be many and manifold individual variations.

Thus it is only in one respect that the length of the human Ego's sojourn in the spiritual world between death and new birth depends upon the above-mentioned cosmic data. In another respect it will depend upon the stages of the evolution through which the human being passes in the spiritual world. After a time this very evolution brings the I of man into a spiritual condition where he no longer finds sufficiency in the inner experiences of the Spirit. He beings to long for that altered consciousness which is reflected in physical experience and derives satisfaction from this reflection. The re-entry of the human being into earthly life is an outcome of these two factors: the inner thirst of the soul for incarnation, and the cosmically given possibility of finding a suitable bodily nature. Two factors therefore have to work in conjunction. Hence in one instance incarnation may result even before the “thirst” has reached its full intensity, a well-adapted incarnation being within reach; while in another it may have to wait till the thirst has outlived its normal culmination, since at the proper time no opportunity to incarnate was given. In so far as it is due to the whole character and quality of his bodily constitution, a man's prevailing mood and attunement to life will also be the outcome of these conditions.

The Stages of Man's Life

[ 5 ] Fully to understand the life of man and its successive stages between birth and death, it is not enough to consider only the physical body as seen by the outer senses. It is essential also to take into account the changes undergone by the supersensible members of man's nature. They are as follows. At physical birth man is released from the physical integument of the maternal womb. Forces hitherto shared by the human embryo with the mother's body must from now on be functioning independently in the body of the little child. Now the fact is that for supersensible perception other events of this kind are undergone in the further course of life—supersensible events, analogous to that of physical birth as seen by the outer senses. For his etheric body man is enveloped by an ethereal sheath—an etheric integument—until about the change of teeth, the sixth or seventh year, when the etheric integument falls away. This event represents the “birth” of the etheric body. After it man is still enveloped by an astral sheath, which falls away at the age of puberty—between the 12^th and 16^th year. The astral body in its turn is “born.” Then at an even later point of time the I is born. (The very helpful educational points of view arising from these supersensible realities are set forth in my booklet The Education of the Child in the Light of Spiritual Science, where the facts briefly indicated here are described in greater detail.)

With the birth of the I, man's adult life begins. With the three members of the soul (Sentient Soul, Intellectual or Mind-Soul and Spiritual Soul) progressively awakened and activated by the I, he finds his proper place in life amid the prevailing world-conditions, to which he makes his own active contribution. At length however there comes a time when the etheric body begins to decline, reversing the development it enjoyed from the seventh year onward. There is a change in the functioning of the astral body. To start with it unfolded the potentialities brought with it from the spiritual world at birth. After the birth of the Ego it was enriched by all the experiences coming to it from the outer world. But now the moment comes when in a spiritual sense the astral body begins to feed on its own etheric body. It draws on the etheric body and consumes it. And in the further course of life the etheric body in its turn begins to draw upon the physical body and consume it. There facts are closely related to the physical body's degeneration in old age.

The life of man is thereby naturally divided into three epochs. First is the time during which the physical and etheric bodies grow and develop. In the middle period the astral body and the I come into their own. The third and last is the period of bodily decline when the youthful development of the etheric and physical bodies is in a sense reversed. Now in all these events—from birth until death—the astral body is concerned. Moreover inasmuch as it is not spiritually born until the 12^th to 16^th year, and in the final epoch is obliged to draw upon the forces of the etheric and physical bodies, what the astral body has to achieve by virtue of its own faculties and forces unfolds at a slower rate than it would do if it were not inhabiting a physical and etheric body. Hence after death (as explained in Chapter III,) when the physical and etheric bodies have been cast off, the evolution of the astral body through the “time of purification” takes about a third as long as the past life between birth and death.

Higher Regions of the Spiritual World

[ 6 ] Through Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition supersensible cognition gradually reaches up into the regions of the spiritual world where it can apprehend the Beings who participate in the evolution of the World and Man. There too it can perceive and, in perceiving, find intelligible the life of man between death and a new birth. Now there are even higher regions of existence, though we can do no more than briefly allude to them here.

>Having once risen to the stage of Intuition, supersensible cognition lives and moves amid a world of spiritual Beings. But the spiritual Beings too are evolving. The concerns of present-day mankind reach up, as it were, into the spiritual realm accessible to Intuition. True, in the course of his development between death and a new birth man receives influences from yet higher worlds, but he does not experience them directly; the Beings of the spiritual world convey them to him. In the Intuitive contemplation of these Beings we perceive all that they are doing in and on behalf of man. Their own concerns however—what they require for themselves to enable them to guide human evolution—can only be apprehended by forms of cognition higher than Intuition.

In saying this we refer to worlds among those lower functions are the highest that are known to us on Earth. Reasoned resolves for example are among the highest things on Earth; the actions and reactions of the mineral kingdom among the lowest. For the sublime worlds to which we are now referring, reasoned resolves have approximately the same value as have the mineral reactions on Earth. Beyond the realm of Intuition is the region where the great cosmic plan is being woven out of purely spiritual causes.

The Members of Man's Being

[ 7 ] Toward the end of Chapter II it was described how the I or Ego works upon the members of man's being to transform them—the astral body into Spirit-Self, the etheric body into Life-Spirit, the physical body into Spirit-Man. This was in reference to the working of the Go on man's nature by virtue of the highest faculties—faculties, the development of which has only been beginning during the successive stages of Earthly evolution. Now there is also a preliminary transformation on a lower level, whereby the Sentient Soul, the Intellectual or Mind-Soul and the Spiritual Soul are developed. AS in the course of man's evolution the Sentient Soul comes into being, far-reaching changes are going on in the astral body. So too the development of the Intellectual Soul and of the Spiritual Soul involves a transmutation of the ether-body and of the physical body respectively. Much of this was incidentally described in the chapter on the evolution of the Earth.

Thus in a sense it is true to day that the Sentient Soul is due to a transmuted astral body, the Intellectual Soul to a transmuted ether-body, and the Spiritual Soul to a transmuted physical body. But it may equally well be said that all three members of the soul are part and parcel of the astral body. The Spiritual Soul, for example, can only come into being as an astral entity in an appropriate physical body. It lives an astral life in a physical body molded and worked upon to be its proper habitation.

The State of Consciousness In Dreaming

[ 8 ] In some respects the dream has been described in the third chapter of this book. Dream-consciousness is on the one hand a relic of the picture-consciousness which man enjoyed on the Old Moon, and -for a long time too—in former periods of Earth evolution. Earlier conditions generally go on working even while evolution is advancing to fresh stages. Dreaming is thus a relic of the normal state of consciousness of former times. And yet the dream-condition of today differs essentially from the old picture-consciousness, for the Ego, which has since developed, influences what goes on in the astral body during sleep while we are dreaming. It is therefore a picture-consciousness transmuted by the presence of the Ego. Yet inasmuch as the Ego's influence on the dreaming astral body is unconscious, nothing deriving from the dream-life can be a direct source of spiritual-scientific knowledge of higher worlds. The same applied to what is often spoken of as visions, premonitions and second sight. In all of these the Ego is more or less eliminated, in consequence of which, relics of earlier states of consciousness can supervene. They have no direct spiritual-scientific application; what man perceives in such conditions cannot be included among the valid researches of true spiritual science.

The Way to Supersensible Cognition

[ 9 ] The way to the attainment of knowledge of higher worlds, of which a fairly detailed account has been given in this book, may be described as the “direct path” of knowledge. There is also another way, known as “the path of feeling.” Not that the former way leaves feeling undeveloped; quite on the contrary, it leads to an immeasurable deepening of the life of feeling. But the other path—the “path of feeling”—appeals to the feeling-life directly, seeking to rise from thence to detailed spiritual knowledge. The fact is that a feeling to which a man unreservedly devotes his inner life for a sufficient length of time becomes transformed of its own accord into cognition—into Imaginative vision. If, for example, the soul is deliberately steeped for weeks and months or even longer in feelings of humility, the feeling-content is transformed into spiritual perception. A gradual ascent through this and other feelings of this kind can thus become a pathway into the supersensible. But it is very difficult to carry out in ordinary present-day surroundings. Seclusion—withdrawal from the prevailing conditions especially of modern life—is well-nigh indispensable for this spiritual pathway. For above all in the initial stages, the impressions one is constantly receiving from everyday life in our time disturb and interfere with what the soul would otherwise achieve by dwelling on deliberately chosen feelings. The path of knowledge here described is different; it can be carried through no matter what one's situation is amid the typical conditions of our time.

The Observation of Particular Events and Beings

[ 10 ] It may be asked whether by meditation, contemplation and kindred methods of attaining supersensible cognition described in this book, we arrive at the general realities—say, of the life between death and rebirth, and other spiritual facts—or whether we are also enabled to perceive particular events and beings, for example an individual human soul after death. The answer is that one who has thus acquired the ability to see into the spiritual world also becomes able to perceive in detail what is going on there. He does indeed become capable of communication with individuals living in the spiritual world between death and new birth. But in accordance with true spiritual science it can only be done after a regular and proper training has been undergone, for this alone makes it possible to distinguish truth from illusion as to the several beings and events. Those who would claim to recognize the spiritual details, without have undergone a proper training are liable to countless illusions. Even the most elementary requirement, namely the true interpretation of the impressions one receives, presupposes spiritual training—training the more advanced where the impressions relate to detailed facts and individual beings.

Thus the same training which enables one to see the facts of higher worlds described in this work on Occult Science, also enables one to perceive an individual human soul during his life after death, or severally to observe and understand the diverse spiritual beings who influence the manifest from hidden worlds. Yet the reliable observation of the particular is only possible against the background of a more universal knowledge—namely a spiritual knowledge of the great facts of the Universe and Man, facts which relate to all mankind in common. Craving the former without the latter, one will go astray. In observation of the spiritual world it is an unavoidable experience. Into the very regions for which a man is most apt to long, entry is only granted when he has gone along the stern and exacting path of knowledge, where interest is focused upon universal questions and he gains insight into the deeper meaning of all life.

When he has walked along these paths in the sincere and unselfish quest of knowledge, then and then only is a man fit to observe the details, the premature exploration of which would but have satisfied in him a hidden egoism. For in the longing to see into the spiritual world it is only too easy to persuade oneself that one is actuated by pure love—such as the love of an individual friend who has died. Unalloyed insight into the single facts and beings is only possible for those whose sincere interest in the universal truths of spiritual science enables them to receive the detailed revelations too in a scientific spirit and without selfish longing.

After I said a few esoteric words last Friday, what I have to say today will not seem so strange to you. I would like to discuss a piece of history from the last few centuries from the Akashic Records. You know that all events that have happened are recorded in a certain way in an eternal chronicle, in the Akasha substance, which is a much finer substance than the substances we know. You know that all events of history and prehistory are recorded in this substance. What is usually called the Akashic Records in theosophical language, however, are not the original records, but reflections of the actual records in the astral realm. In order to be able to read these, certain preconditions are necessary, of which I will at least give you one.

To be able to read the Akashic Records, it is necessary to make one's own thoughts available to the forces and beings that we call the “Masters” in theosophical language. The Masters must give us the necessary instructions to be able to read in the Akashic Records, which is written in symbols and signs, not in words of any existing language or one that existed in the past. As long as you are still using the power that a person uses in ordinary thinking – and every person who has not explicitly learned to consciously switch off their ego uses this power – you cannot read in the Akashic Records. If you ask yourself, “Who is thinking?” you will have to say to yourself, “I am thinking.” You connect subject and predicate when you form a sentence. As long as you yourself connect the individual concepts, you are unable to read in the Akashic Records because you connect your thoughts with your own ego. But you have to switch off your ego; you have to renounce all self-will. You must merely present the ideas and let the connection of the individual ideas be established by forces outside of yourself, through the spirit. It is therefore necessary to renounce - not thinking - but to connect the individual thoughts on your own. Then the master can come and teach you to let the spirit from outside connect your thoughts to what the universal world spirit is able to show about events and facts that have taken place in history. When you no longer judge the facts, then the universal world spirit itself speaks to you, and you provide it with your thought material.

Now I have to talk about something that may perhaps create prejudices. I have to say something that is a good preparation for learning to read in the Akashic Records by eliminating the self-willed ego. You know how today what the monks cultivated in the Middle Ages is despised: they made the sacrifice of the intellect. The monk did not think like today's researchers. The monk had a certain sacred science, the revealed sacred theology, the content of which was given and about which one had no say. The theologian of the Middle Ages used his reason to explain and defend the given revelations. That was - however one may feel about it today - a strict training: the sacrifice of the intellect to a given content. Whether this was something admirable or reprehensible according to modern concepts is not our concern here. The sacrifice of intellect that the monk made, the elimination of judgment based on the personal ego, led him to learn how to put thought at the service of something higher. In a later incarnation, what was brought forth through this sacrifice comes to fruition and enables the person to think selflessly, making him a genius of insight. When higher insight, intuition, is added, then he can apply these abilities to reading the facts in the Akashic Records.

It is particularly interesting to look again at the period in Europe's spiritual development that we considered eight days ago from this point of view, I mean the period from the 9th to the 13th, 14th, 15th century. When one has achieved this selflessness in relation to the content of thoughts and, united with it, the right sense of reverence, of devotion, as the mystic must also have had it, then the time when great spirits appear in world history often appears quite differently than in profane historiography. When we look at this period in the Akashic Records, our gaze is drawn to a great figure who can teach us an enormous amount about that time, a figure who presents himself to the observer as great and who presents himself to the occultist even more powerfully than to the ordinary researcher: Wolfram von Eschenbach.

Wolfram von Eschenbach adapted German, Romance and Spanish legends. He is one of the great inspired poets who were selfless enough to work with great material that had already been given to them, and who did not believe that they had to invent material themselves. Great poets such as Homer, Sophocles, Euripides and Aeschylus never had to search for material. Wolfram von Eschenbach also belongs to these great poets. In his works he presents us with the inner spiritual history of the period from the 9th to the 15th century, which presents itself externally as the preparatory period of our new time, in which, as we have seen, everything that belongs to the external world of the senses is preferably studied. This begins with Copernicus. People began to take the physical plan seriously, not as a symbol for the higher planes as in the past. The world view of the ancients was not a false one, but a world view that started from a different point of view: it regarded the phenomena of the external world as symbols for devachanic states. Copernicus said, “We no longer want to regard the physical world as a symbol, but we want to look at the physical world itself.” Of course, this changed the entire world view of mankind. During this time, the focus was on the practical, physical and material. The earlier cultures, in which our physical life was dependent on traditions and authorities, changed into one in which personal ability was important. In the past, a farmer's son was respected because he was the son of a farmer; the son of a knight inherited the rights of his fathers. This changed during this period. It is the time of the founding of cities. Everywhere the people flocked together from the countryside and founded cities; the bourgeoisie came up, practical inventions emerged: the pocket watch, the art of printing were invented. But that is only the external aspect of the matter. The souls were directed towards the practical side of science, as can be seen from Copernicus, which was further developed in the Age of Enlightenment and politically in the French Revolution. The commercial class looked after practical interests, personal efficiency was necessary. It was no longer so important whether one descended from this or that man. For those who follow events in the Akashic Records, the situation is such that what happens on the physical plane is directed from the higher planes. The leading spirits are influenced by initiates working on the higher planes. Genius personalities lead up to entities working behind the scenes, right up to the White Lodge. The physical aspect is only the outside. The inside is the work of the highest initiates of the White Lodge and their emissaries who go out into the world.

I would like to briefly characterize this occult hierarchy. We have such beings who never show themselves: the masters. For people on the physical plane, they are not perceptible at first. Below them are chelas, secret disciples who take on the great tasks of the masters on the physical plane. The first to teach there are called “hamsas”, which means “swans”. Those chelas who are called “homeless people” are so called because they do not have their home in this world, but are rooted on higher planes. They give the people the lessons that they themselves have enjoyed from the hamsas. They are the messengers for the geniuses of world history. For example, it can be shown that the leaders of the French Revolution were connected with this spiritual side of world history.

The Great White Lodge had to send its emissaries to prepare and teach people so that they could become the organs on the physical plane to carry out the will of the Masters. So it was with Wolfram von Eschenbach. In the Middle Ages it was known that there was a White Lodge, at that time it was called the “Castle of the Holy Grail”. In it was the White Brotherhood. He who was sent out at that time to spread the founding of the city to the physical world was called Lohengrin; he was directly instructed by a Hamsa, and he taught Henry I, who is referred to as the founder of the city. This means that the time-souls were to receive a new impact from the “homeless people”.

In the occult language, the soul is always symbolized by a female personality. Elsa of Brabant represents the soul of the time. She is to be married to a knight who belongs to the old tradition, to Telramund. But an envoy of the Grail comes and woos the soul of the time, Elsa of Brabant. This period is characterized by Wolfram von Eschenbach in such a way that Henry is led to Rome, where the inner, esoteric Christianity fights the enemies of Christianity, the Saracens. Lohengrin is a “homeless person” whom one dare not ask where he comes from. To ask him would be against his monastic vows. He is afflicted with a kind of Janus face; on the one hand he must look towards the occult brotherhood and on the other hand towards the people he must lead in the physical world. Richard Wagner often found poignant words, for example when he has Lohengrin sing: “Now thanks be given, my dear swan.” That is the moment when the swan leaves him and he becomes dependent on physical conditions. He is transported into a world that is not quite appropriate for him; it is not his true world. His world is the world of the other side, so that he must be regarded as a homeless person. When his mission is fulfilled, the homeless man disappears again to where he came from. When his origin is discovered, he must disappear again. This is difficult for him who has entered into relationship with the physical plane. Therefore Elsa of Brabant must ask three times whence he came.

Thus we see that this time is characterized by the initiate Wolfram von Eschenbach in its connection with the higher planes. Lohengrin is the envoy, the messenger of the Grail knights. The Grail knights are the White Lodge on Montsalvatsch. It was the task of the Grail's emissaries, the Grail knights, to renew the old traditions of genuine, true Christianity again and again. This was also the meaning when they spoke about the Grail Castle and the Holy Grail itself. They imagined the Grail Knights as the guardians of that which had come into the world through true Christianity. This is also hinted at in the Gospel of John: “The Word was made flesh.” What has been transfigured by the Christ is physical existence itself; He has entered into the physical world. The other great personalities were teachers of humanity: Buddha, Zarathustra, Pythagoras, Moses - they were all teachers. They are the “Way and the Truth”; the “Life” in the occult sense is only Christ; hence it is said: No one comes to the Father except through me. - Life could only find its sanctification when the Word moved directly into the human body. This descent of the Divine into the physical plane was to be renewed again and again by the White Lodge. Therefore, the Grail Cup is depicted as the same cup from which Jesus dispensed the Holy Communion and in which Joseph of Arimathea caught the blood at Golgotha. Thus the principle of Christianity is to be preserved and live on, and new strength is to be given to it by the fact that, in continuation of the apostles, twelve knights of the Grail are sent out as messengers to take on new tasks.

That was the view of the entire Middle Ages, that when an important stage of civilization is to be reached, a chela, a “swan” should teach people. In this way, Wolfram von Eschenbach viewed and presented history. Those who are able to read between the lines in Richard Wagner's Lohengrin will find that Wagner felt, if not intellectually, then intuitively, that something great was at hand. Therefore, he believed in a renewal of art by connecting to the superhuman. In the Middle Ages this was depicted in such a way that when Elsa of Brabant wanted to banish Lohengrin from this world, he withdrew, and as Wolfram von Eschenbach says, to India. Finally, the castle of the Holy Grail is also imagined as being in India. It is also said of the Rosicrucians that when they withdrew at the end of the 18th century, they went to Asia, to the Orient. That is the story of the founding of cities in the Middle Ages, according to the records in the Akashic Records. Details might perhaps be presented somewhat differently by others, but on the whole they will always agree with it.

When we consider the successive Planetary evolutions we find that each one is a stage of a particular condition of evolution, which has 7 Rounds, 7 x 7 Globes and 7 x 7 x 7 Races. The purpose of every such Planetary evolution is to lead one condition of consciousness through all its stages. In the different esoteric religions these stages are named in various ways. In Christian esotericism

a condition of Consciousness is called Power
a Round is called Kingdom, Wisdom
a Globe is called Splendour, Glory

When in Christian esotericism we speak of Power we mean ‘going through a condition of consciousness’. Going through a Round is going through a Kingdom. In the successive rounds man experiences seven Kingdoms:

1. First Elemental Kingdom
2. Second Elemental Kingdom
3. Third Elemental Kingdom
4. Mineral Kingdom
5. Plant Kingdom
6. Animal Kingdom
7. Human Kingdom

Going through the seven conditions of Form or Globes is called Glory. Glory signifies what has external appearance, what takes on shape and form. The Lord's Prayer gives us in its final words: ‘For Thine is the Kingdom, the Power and the Glory,’ a gazing upwards to Cosmic events. When once again this will be present in consciousness, a knowledge of God will be possible.

Today all religions, exoteric religions in particular, have fallen away from the true knowledge of God. They are the bearers of egoism for they are not conceived in connection with the whole world, with the Power, the Kingdom and the Glory. When these words regain their meaning through living consciousness, then once more religions will be what they ought to be.

The Saturn condition was there in order to develop in man a deep trance consciousness; this he hardly knows today. He only knows dreamless sleep like the plant and the dream filled sleep such as existed on the Moon—a picture consciousness. Man no longer knows deep trance consciousness for the following reason: When someone sleeps, only the astral body frees itself and the physical body and the etheric body remain lying in the bed. If in sleep he were able to take the etheric body with him as the Chela can, then the physical body alone would remain behind; a dull consciousness. In the case of mediums this comes about in an abnormal manner and quite remarkable things are brought to light in this way. Such people then can draw remarkable cosmic pictures. For example, a girl was put into a trance by a glassful of port wine and in this condition drew remarkable pictures, in which one could see caricatures of our cosmic system; she also found approximations of our names for them.

Mediums have their visions because they are able to take the etheric body also out of the sleeping physical body and in the sleeping physical body to perceive consciously. They are then still able to make use of the physical body; the physical body becomes clairvoyant in a remarkable way. The Chela achieves this consciously, whereas the medium does so unconsciously. It is through such a clairvoyant consciousness that the planetary systems have been discovered. All the conditions into which the Chelas and Adepts are able to transpose themselves are nothing other than consciousness through the physical body; they experience all this in full consciousness.

On the future Venus a complete consciousness in the etheric body will develop. Then, while man sleeps, he will gain a consciousness concerning the other side of the world. On Vulcan the spirit is completely detached; he has then taken the etheric body also with him. This condition endows man with an exact knowledge of the entire world.

We distinguish:

1. On Saturn—Trance consciousness, universal consciousness
2. On Sun—Dreamless sleep, consciousness limited to what is living
3. On Moon—Picture consciousness
4. On Earth—Waking consciousness
5. On Jupiter—Astral consciousness, further extended
6. On Venus—Etheric consciousness, still further extended
7. On Vulcan—Universal consciousness

Each one of such conditions of consciousness must go through all the Kingdoms, through seven Rounds or Kingdoms, in each Round gaining in complexity as it passes through the seven Globes. The lesser forces become further developed in the so-called Races. Thus gradually creation exteriorises from within outwards what was present as inner potential.

Today it is the mineral kingdom that man knows best because he lives in it. Everything that takes place in the higher kingdoms is not understood by the intellect. This has been a necessary phase of evolution. Now however one can no longer be satisfied with mere science. Everything is understood to be in a continuous evolution.

If we consider in the mineral kingdom any kind of stone—what we see there is a space with definite boundaries, a definite form. Of the mineral kingdom as such we see absolutely nothing, but we see only the reflected light. The rays of the sun are reflected in a certain form. If we strike a bell we hear a sound: an effect of a bell goes into our ear. All that we perceive in the world as mineral kingdom is a whole compressed together to a spatial form. If one takes away the colour of an object, the sound, the taste, nothing remains. It is due to the mineral kingdom that light and sound appear through such forms. Let us think of a world in which only the qualities of perception stream through space and are not perceived in connection with definite forms. Let us think of coloured clouds floating through the world, sounds resounding through the world, all our sense impressions filling space without being bound to a form; then we have the Third Elemental Kingdom. These are the elements light and fire, permeating space. Man himself in the Astral Kingdom is a coloured cloud.

We will now take a further step forward. When we see a thought form, it is such a coloured cloud, a movement vibrating in itself. If one wishes to conjure up a thought, one must draw the figure in question into astral space. On this depends the conjurings of magicians. They draw the forms into space and then surround them with astral substance. They direct astral substance along these figures. The Third Elemental Kingdom is not arbitrary, but a flying hither and thither in interpenetrating lines: everything expressing beautiful forms having the power of light within themselves. They are like bodies of light flying hither and thither in space, shining from within.

The tones that resound through space are ordered according to numbers. What one must specially bear in mind is that from the outset things stand in a definite relationship to one another. One figure could work upon another in such a way that it did no harm, or so that it was utterly destroyed. This was called the measure of things. Everything was ordered according to measure, number, form. It is possible to think away the qualities induced by the senses and the world filled with such thought-figures. This would then be the Second Elementary Kingdom which underlies the Third. Here we only have forms woven by thoughts, the World-Ether-Thoughts.

The first Elementary Kingdom is difficult to describe. Let us assume for example that we conceive the thought of such a figure as a spiral, then the thought of a lemniscate. We now transfer ourselves into the intention before the form has actually arisen, thus first into the intention of a spiral and then into the intention of a lemniscate. One imagines a world filled with such thought-seeds. This formless world is the First Elementary Kingdom.

The Fourth Elementary Kingdom is the mineral kingdom which reflects what it receives from outside. The plant kingdom not only reflects sense-qualities, but these reflections are inwardly endowed with life. The Second Elementary Kingdom is the formative element of the Third Elementary Kingdom. The mineral kingdom is condensed out of qualities belonging to the Third Elementary Kingdom. The plant reflects the form of the Second Elementary Kingdom and thus develops the form out of itself. The animal kingdom also reflects the intentions which lie in the First Elementary Kingdom.

In the First Round man was in the First Elementary Kingdom. When at that time he became physical, he was in the first Round and in the First Elementary Kingdom at the stage of physical form. In the physical condition of the First Elementary Kingdom of the First Round, the thought-seeds became physical. At that time the Earth consisted only of physical globules, so small that one would not have been able to see them; they were simply points of force. These points of force gradually condensed; they were not yet differentiated. At that time the condensed Elementary Kingdom was already physical. When one imagines the human being as merely a being of thought, then one can easily go through such a being even though one does not see it, but even though one cannot see it, one cannot go through it when it has become physical. Later the physical points of force once more became astral and passed over to the following Round.

In the Second Round the Earth consisted only of forms. The Earth was a very beautifully formed sphere in which all the things that developed out of it were present as types. It was the prophetic shaping of everything that emerges in the other Kingdoms. On the Earth the colours and forms were prototypes of present-day man. On the next Planet the colours and forms will be prototypes of what man will then be.

In the Fifth Round, the plastic-astral man will no longer need to retain his hand. The hand will only be formed when it is needed. It will be something like a tendril, because then everything will have taken on the nature of a plant. Then too all that develops separate existence will be a plant-product. Likewise everything that proceeds from man will be plantlike. We shall then be living in the plant kingdom.

In the Sixth Round we shall live in the animal kingdom. Then everything that proceeds from man, which streams out from him, will be a living product that has within it life and sensation. A word will then be a living being—a bird that one sends out into the world.

In the Seventh Round man will create himself. He will then be able to duplicate, to reproduce himself. In the Seventh Round everyone will have reached the stage at which our Masters stand today. Then our ego will be the bearer of all earthly experiences. To begin with this will be concentrated in the Lodge of the Masters.⁶⁷ The higher ego then will draw itself together, become atomic and form the atoms of (future) Jupiter.

The White Lodge will be looked upon as a unity, an ego comprising everything. All human egos and all separateness will be given up and will flow together into the all-comprehensive universal consciousness; great circles, expanded from within, each having a special colour, all assembled together in one single circle. When one thinks of them as laid one upon the other the result is an all-inclusive colour. All the egos are within it, making a whole. This immense globe, contracted, constitutes the atom. This multiplies itself, creating itself out of itself. These then are the atoms which will form Jupiter.⁶⁸ The Moon Adepts formed the atoms of the present-day Earth. One can study the atom when one studies the plan of the Adepts Lodge on the Moon.

Summary:

Each kingdom must go through seven Forms:

1. Arupa—Approach to Form
2. Rupa—Form
3. Astral—Shimmering and shining from within outwards.
4. Physical—impenetrable in space
5. Plastic-astral—forming itself out of itself
6. Intellectual
7. Archetypal

• 67. See Note 31.
• 68. A few days before, on 21.10.1905 Rudolf Steiner spoke on this subject but only very scanty notes exist.