The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The Gospel of Mark was around centuries before Christianity was founded. It is nothing more than an ancient initiation document about how one was initiated in India, Central Asia and the Iranian regions, how one ascended to occult knowledge, acquired the highest knowledge, how one became an initiate, a sun worshipper, where one was initiated up to what is called the ascension. That was written in these initiation documents.

They were not written in this or that language, they were even very rarely written at all. But they were kept in an imperishable language, in the common language of all occultists, in a symbolic language. To understand them, occult studies must be done. These initiation documents were kept top secret through the millennia. They were kept secret by both the priests of Egypt and the Druid priests in Europe. This was also because they could not be of any use to anyone. They could only be of use to those who could understand them.

Now, a historical fact took place on the stage of history that we call the baptism, suffering, death, and resurrection of Christ Jesus. This outwardly expressed fact is also a mystical fact. It is something that can only be understood as a historical fact if one understands what this particular initiation is, which was in the initiation document I spoke of. In other words, what took place in the years 30 to 33 as the suffering and death of Christ has taken place countless times within the temples. The process became a typical image for all of them after someone had applied the stages of development to an external event.

The first teachers of Christianity therefore approached their students in something like the following manner: “For you and for the sake of you, a great historical process has taken place. But you can only understand this if we tell you about life inside the temples.” And so they preached to them about how one becomes initiated. What had otherwise taken place symbolically inside the temples was now being told so that those who could not see could now believe.

Documents such as the Gospel of Mark are records of this. Now I have explained to you how the Gospel of John relates to all this. John presented himself as the actual executor of Christ's will. The words that Jesus spoke on the cross are not without significance. He hands over to the mother the disciple whom he loves. And the disciple whom Jesus loved was, according to the records of the Akasha Chronicle, Lazarus, who had been initiated by Jesus. Thus the miracle of Lazarus presents itself as an initiation process. This means nothing other than that he was the disciple who had been initiated, who could therefore say the most profound thing that can be said. That is why the Gospel of John is the deepest and why it has also become a message whose explanation can never end. One penetrates deeper and deeper, one finds ever new points, even the scholar.

We find there the transformation of the water of the old covenant into the wine of the new covenant. The “mother” signifies the Jewish people, to whom Jesus transforms the water into the wine of the new Christianity. This is also the reason why the Gospel of John has been regarded as the most occult of the Gospels. From the thirteenth chapter onwards, it is not only intellectually comprehensible, but every sentence that is written is also imbued with occult power.

The Gospel of John has been regarded as an elixir of life, particularly by the disciples of the Rosicrucians. From the washing of the feet onwards, the entire content can be experienced mystically. Anyone who applies it to the whole human being and permeates it with life will experience something within themselves and then understand that much of the Gospel cannot be understood at all without this experience. Every person can mystically go through and live through every single sentence. This is how we should understand the position of the great teacher at the dawn of Christianity. What was new about Christianity was that it revealed what had previously been the wisdom of the mysteries.

A fundamental experience of the theosophist is devotion. The fact that the disciple of Jesus enters the grave to see if he is there or not is not the important thing. What is important is being carried by devotion. There is no path that is not permeated by devotion. And the further one advances on the path of knowledge, the more one will have to acquire devotion. One will become more and more devoted. From this devotion, the power for the highest realizations then flows. Those who manage to refrain from connecting their thoughts will attain the reading of the scriptures in the Akasha Chronicle. But one thing is necessary: to have eliminated the personal ego to such an extent that it no longer claims to connect thoughts itself. It is not so easy to understand this, because man claims the right to connect the predicate with the subject. But as long as he does this, it is impossible for him to really study occult history. If he allows thoughts to arise in selflessness, but also in awareness and clarity, then an event occurs that every occultist knows from a certain point of view, namely the event that the ideas, the thoughts, which he previously formed into sentences and insights from his personal point of view, are now formed by the spiritual world itself, so that he does not judge, but that judgment is made in him. It is then the case that he has sacrificed himself so that a higher self speaks spiritually through his ideas. This is – understood occultly – what was called the sacrifice of the intellect in the Middle Ages. It means giving up my own opinion, my own conviction. As long as I connect my thoughts myself and do not make my thoughts available to higher powers, which then, as it were, write on the tablet of the intellect, I cannot study occult history. It is a contradiction to the higher powers, it is what is usually considered in our time to be particularly remarkable. The theosophist describes what is needed as devotional devotion. This devotion flows from facts such as those related in the Gospel of John.

Questions and Answers

Since a question has been asked here about the brotherhood, I have to say that it is not good to talk about such occult communities because occult powers stand behind them. We are dealing with occult traditions and occult knowledge in more places than we usually realize. There are occult forces and truths in this or that that is really there. And these occult currents have a very specific reason. No one can be drawn into such currents by their own power. It is a matter of how they were introduced, what role they play in it and what and who speaks through them. This is related to the fact that in the whole world it is always ensured that the rivers of divine wisdom never dry up completely. Even if all occultism were to disappear from educated circles, there will always be places where occultism can flow out.

In the fall, I will speak about what are called the apocalypses. First, the Revelation of John; second, the future of thought; third, the future of pneuma; and fourth, the future of harmony.

John, Lazarus, the disciple whom the Lord loved, and the disciple at the cross are one and the same person.

Whether the Christ can only apply to an initiate can be taught by the writing, which can be read in four ways. The first level is where it is read according to the simple naive word, the second level is where one doubts, the third level is where one reads it symbolically, the fourth level is where one recognizes the real meaning of the symbols and thus reaches the real literal meaning of the scriptures.

The descent of the Holy Spirit at the baptism of Jesus in the form of a dove is an important event in the life of Jesus. The parts before and after the baptism can be distinguished as higher and highest. Mark and John therefore tell us only about the highest forms in which the Christ appears to us. The three degrees of discipleship can be distinguished up to the baptism. But then a real transmutation of the being of Jesus takes place through the Christ. This Christ nature is identical with that which is called God in all religions and is often also called the Father Nature. Up to the age of thirty, we have to understand Jesus as every other initiate. But from that point on, the Christ-entity enters into him, and from that point on, the Jesus-Christ personality acquires a cosmological significance. This divine entity was before Abraham was.

If you ask me about the Judas problem, I have to say that Judas was, in a sense, a sacrifice. Someone had to sacrifice themselves so that the main sacrifice could take place. The same person who played the traitor at the time of Jesus of Nazareth was later active in Christianity. It is of great importance to know in which personality Judas has re-embodied himself. But this is a rather complicated and involved problem.

The 'Mother of Jesus' characterizes the Jews as a nation, the Jews who lived in the land and were subject to Jewish law, and those who were scattered throughout the world.

'Galilean' means something like 'heathen mouth'. There was a lot of travel in the place where Jesus was born. A great many foreign people passed through there. You can find the answer to the question regarding Jesus' ascension in the Gospel of John. Jesus' bones were not broken, while the bones of the other robbers were broken. If you understand what the skeletal system is, then you will also understand what it means: resurrection in a glorified body.

A week ago I was saying that we here, as anthroposophists, are able to grasp in a much deeper sense all that is necessary for reaching a judgment on the burning questions of the present day. We can do much more in this way than is possible in wider circles. In a sense we can look on ourselves as a kind of leaven—if I may use the biblical word—so that everyone in his own situation may try to contribute something, out of a strong warmth of impulse, towards the needs of the time.

If we recall what has been said as the keynote of the public lectures, we shall appreciate that the immediate essential is to strive towards a certain differentiation—a certain “membering”—of the social organism. I say always “strive towards”—there is no question of wanting to effect a revolutionary change overnight. We must strive towards a differentiation of a great deal which under modern influences has become centralised. What we must work for—instead of the so-called unitary State—is that a certain realm of society, embracing all that has to do with spiritual life, should unfold freely and independently alongside the other realms. This realm will include the upbringing of children, education, art, literature, and also (as I have remarked already and shall mention in the public lecture tomorrow) everything concerned with the administration of civil and criminal law.

As a second “limb” of the social organism we should recognise, but in a restricted sense, that which has been known as the “State.” It is precisely on the shoulders of this “State” that men nowadays want to pile as much as possible—State schools, State child-care, and so on. That has been the great tendency of the last four hundred years. And to-day, under the influence of social ideas and socialistic thinking, people want to weld economic life into a single whole with political life. These two realms must be separated once more. The political State must stand on its own independent ground, as the second sphere of society; and the same relative independence must distinguish the realm of domestic economy, where commodities circulate—that is, economic life.

Now, my dear friends, we will look at this question from a point of view not easily reached by anyone outside our movement. And we will carry the matter to a certain culmination, so that out of this culmination a deeper understanding of the human situation to-day may spring forth.

Let us look first at what is called, in an earthly sense, spiritual life. Spiritual life in this earthly sense embraces everything which in one way or another lifts us out of our solitary egoism and draws us into community with other human beings. Let us take, as the most important manifestation of earthly spiritual life for most people still, that aspect of it which should bring us into relation with super-earthly spiritual life—I mean the practice of religion, as this takes its course in the various congregations.

In the human soul are needs which cause people to seek each other out; people are united by experiencing similar needs. The upbringing of a child means that one soul is caring for another. Anyone who reads a book is drawn out of the egoistic circle of his individual life, for it is not he alone who absorbs the author's thoughts; even when he is only half-way through a book he is already sharing these thoughts with a great company of other readers. And so, through this kinship of soul-experience, a certain human community is formed. This is an important characteristic of spiritual life: it has its springs in freedom, in the individual initiative of the single human being, and yet it draws men together, and forms communities out of what they have in common.

Here, for anyone who seeks deeper understanding, is a fact to be kept in mind—a fact which brings every kind of human fellowship into relation with the central event of earth-evolution—the Mystery of Golgotha. For since the Mystery of Golgotha everything concerned with human fellowship belongs in a sense to the Christ Impulse. That is the essential thing—the Christ Impulse belongs not to single men but to the fellowship of men. In truth, according to the mind of Christ Himself, it is a great mistake to suppose that the solitary individual can establish a direct relation with Christ. The essential thing is that Christ lived and died, and rose from the dead, for humanity as a whole. Since the Mystery of Golgotha, therefore, the Christ Event is immediately relevant (we shall return to this point) wherever human fellowship unfolds. And accordingly, for anyone who really understands the world, the earthly spiritual life which springs from the most individual source, from personal circumstances and gifts, leads to the Christ Event.

Let us now first consider this earthly spiritual life—religion, education, art and so forth—on its own account. We gain through it a certain connection with other human beings. Here we must distinguish between the connections we form through our individual destiny and karma, and those which in this narrow sense are not dependent on our karma. Some of the connections we establish in the course of life are the direct outcome of relationships formed in earlier lives; some will bear karmic fruit in future lives. Human beings form connections with one another in manifold ways. The connections formed directly through our karma must be distinguished from the wider connections that arise when we meet people through joining a society, or a religious body or a fellowship of belief, and also from those that come through reading the same book or through common enjoyment of a work of art, and so on. The people we encounter in these ways on earth are not always related to us karmically from an earlier life. Certainly, there are communities which point to a common destiny in earlier lives; but with the wider groupings of which I have just spoken it is generally not so. This brings us to a further point.

Towards the end of our time in the super-sensible world, between death and a new birth, when we reach the period just before our next incarnation, we enter into relations—as far as we are ripe for them—with Angels, Archangels and Archai, and with the higher Hierarchies as well. But also we come near to other human souls, due to be incarnated later than ourselves—souls which have to wait longer, one may say, for their incarnations. During this period we have a whole range of super-sensible experiences to go through, according to our individual stage of development, before we are plunged again into earthly life. And the forces we thus receive place us on earth in the situation which will enable us to find our way into those experiences of earthly spiritual life of which I have just spoken.

The essential point to grasp is that our spiritual life on earth—all that we experience through religion, or through upbringing and education, through artistic impressions and so on—is not determined solely by earthly circumstances. Our earthly spiritual life takes its character from the experiences we have had in super-sensible realms before birth. Just as an image in a mirror indicates what is being reflected, so does earthly spiritual life point to what the human being has experienced before entering his physical body.

Nothing on earth stands towards the super-sensible world in so intimate, real and living a relationship as this earthly spiritual life—which indeed shows aberrations, many aberrations ... but these very aberrations have a relation full of meaning to all that we experience—certainly, in a quite different way—in the super-sensible. This connection with pre-earthly life places spiritual life on earth in a quite special situation. Nothing else in earthly life is so closely bound up with our life before birth!

This is a fact to which the spiritual investigator is bound to draw particular attention. He distinguishes spiritual life from man's other earthly activities, because super-sensible observation shows him that spiritual life on earth has its roots and impulse in the life before birth. So for the spiritual investigator this earthly spiritual life marks itself off from other human experiences.

It is different with what can be called, in a strict sense, political life, the life of civic rights, which brings administrative order into human affairs. You see, however hard one may try to discover, with the most exact methods of spiritual science, the deeper connections of political life ... one can find no relation between this political life and the super-sensible. Political life is entirely of the earth! We must clearly understand what this signifies.

For example, what shall we take as a preeminently earthly type of legal relationship? The relation to property, to ownership. If I own a plot of land, then it is solely by political means that I am given an exclusive right and tenure of the land. It is this which enables me to exclude all others from using the land, building on it, etc. So it is with everything that has to do with public law. The sum total of public law, together with the means taken to protect a society from external interference—all that makes up political life in the strict sense.

This is the genuine earth-life—the life connected solely with impulses which take their course between birth and death. However much the State may imagine itself to be God-given ... the truth to which all religious creeds, in their deeper meaning, bear witness is as follows. The first truth was conveyed by Christ Jesus when in the old phraseology he said: “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's.” Faced with the pretensions of the Roman Empire, He wished above all to separate everything to do with political life from all that bears the imprint of the super-sensible. But when the purely earthly State seeks to make itself the bearer of a super-earthly impulse—when, for example, the State seeks to assume responsibility for religious life, or for education (this last responsibility, unfortunately, is taken for granted in our day)—then we have the situation characterised by the deeper teachings of religion, when they said: Wherever an attempt is made to mix the spiritual-super-sensible with the earthly-political, there rules the usurping Prince of this world.

What is the meaning of the “usurping Prince of this world?” You know, perhaps, my dear friends, that people have thought a great deal about this, without getting anywhere. Only through spiritual science can one reach the meaning. The usurping Prince of this world rules whenever an authority which should be concerned only with the ordering of earthly affairs arrogates to itself the spiritual—and seeks also, as we shall see later, to assimilate economic life. The rightful Prince of this world is he for whom the political realm includes only those things which belong wholly to the life between birth and death.

So we have come to an understanding of the second “limb” of the social organism, in the sense of spiritual science. It is the realm orientated towards those impulses which run their course between birth and death.

Now we come to the third, the economic realm. Just think, my dear friends, how economic life draws us into a particular relation with the world. You will readily understand what this relation is if you compel yourselves to imagine that it were possible for us to be entirely absorbed in economic life. If that could happen, what should we be like? We should be thinking animals, nothing else. We are not thinking animals for the reason that besides economic life we have a life of rights—a political life—and a knowledge of the spirit, an earthly spiritual life. Through economic life we are thus plunged, more or less, into the midst of human relationships. And because of this interests are kindled—precisely in this field of human relations we are able to develop interests which in the true sense of the word are fraternal. In no other realm than that of economic life are fraternal relationships so easily and obviously developed among human beings.

In the spiritual life ... what is the ruling impulse in earthly spiritual life? Fundamentally, it is personal interest—an interest arising out of the soul-nature, certainly, but none the less egoistic. Of religion, people demand that it shall make them holy. Of education, that is shall develop their talents. Of any kind of artistic representation, that it shall bring pleasure into their lives, and perhaps also stimulate their inner energies. As a general rule, it is egoism, whether of a grosser or more refined sort, which leads a person—quite understandably—to seek in spiritual life whatever satisfies himself.

In the political life of rights, on the other hand, we have to do with something which makes us all equal before the law. We are concerned with the relation of man to man. We have to ask, what our right should be. No question of rights exists among animals. In this respect, also, we are raised above the animals, even in our earthly affairs. But if we are connected with a religious community, or with a group of teachers, then—just as much as in civic relationships—we come up against personal claims, personal wishes. In the economic sphere, it is through the overcoming of self that something valuable, not derived from personal desires, comes to expression—brotherhood, responsibility for others, a way of living so that the other man gains experience through us.

In the spiritual life we receive according to our desires. In the sphere of rights we make a claim to something we need in order to make sure of a satisfactory human life as an equal among equals. And in the economic sphere is born that which unites men in terms of feeling: that is, brotherhood. The more this brotherhood is cultivated, the more fruitful economic life becomes. And the impulse towards brotherhood arises when we establish a certain connection between our property and another's, between our need and another's, between something we have and something another has, and so on.

This fraternity, this brotherly relation between men which must radiate through economic life if health is to prevail there, may be thought of as a kind of emanation rising from the economic sphere—and in such a way that if we absorb it into ourselves we are able to take it with us through the gate of death and carry it into the super-sensible life after death.

On earth, economic life looks like the lowest of the three social spheres, yet precisely from this sphere arises an impulse which works on into super-earthly realms after death. That is how the third member of the social organism presents itself in the light of spiritual science. Its character is such that in a certain sense it drives us into regions below the human level; yet in fact this is a blessing, since from the fraternity of economic life we carry through the gate of death something which remains with us when we enter the super-sensible world. Just as earthly spiritual life points backward, like a mirrored image, to super-sensible spiritual life before birth, so does economic life, with all that arises from its influence on men—social interests, feeling for human fellowship, brotherhood—so does economic life point forward to super-sensible life after death.

Thus we have distinguished the three social spheres, in the light of spiritual science: spiritual life, pointing back to super-sensible life before birth; political life, bound up with the impulses which take their course between birth and death; and economic life pointing forward to the experiences we shall encounter when we have passed through the gate of death.

Now, just as it is true that the being of man belongs not only to earthly but to super-earthly realms—that he bears in himself the fruits of his pre-natal life in the super-sensible, and develops in himself the seeds (if I may use this image) of the experiences that will be his in the life after death—just as it is true that in this connection human life is threefold, unfolding on earth between these two reflections of the super-earthly, so in truth must the social organism be itself “three-membered,” if it is to serve as foundation for human soul-life as a whole.

For those, accordingly, who through spiritual science understand man's place in the cosmos, there are much deeper reasons for recognising that the social organism must have a threefold structure, and that if everything is centralised, if everything is piled on to a chaotically jumbled social life, then man is bound to degenerate ... as indeed in modern life he has, in some respects, which has led on to the frightful catastrophe of the last four years.

You see: to grasp human life in such a way as to realise that every human fellowship is inwardly related to the whole of humanity and to the wider world—this is what ought more and more to come home to men from the deepening of spiritual-scientific knowledge. This is also the true Christ-Knowledge for our time and the immediate future. That is what we shall learn if we are willing, today, to listen to the Christ. He Himself said—I have often quoted it: “I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.” This means: Christ did not speak only during His time on earth; His utterance continues, and we must continue to listen for it. We should not wish merely to read the Gospels (though certainly they ought to be read over and over again); we should listen to the living revelation that springs from His continued presence among us. In this epoch He declares to us: “Make new your ways of thinking” (as His forerunner, John the Baptist, said: “Change your thinking”), “so that they may reveal to you man's threefold nature which demands also that your social environment on earth shall have a threefold membering.”

You see, it is absolutely true to say: The Christ died and rose again for the whole of mankind; the Mystery of Golgotha is an event which concerns the whole of humanity. At the present time it is particularly necessary to be aware of that—at this time when nation has risen against nation in savage struggle, and when even now, after events have led on to a crisis, we find no thoughtfulness, no consciousness of the community of mankind, but on manifold sides a delirium of victory! Make no mistake: all that we have lived through in the last four years, all that we are experiencing now and have still to experience—to anyone who looks below the surface all this shows that mankind has reached a kind of crisis with regard to knowledge of the Christ. And the reason for this is that the true spirit of fellowship, the true relationship between men, has been lost. And it is very necessary that men should ask themselves: How can we find our way again to the Christ Impulse?

A simple fact will show that the way is not always found. Before the Christ Impulse entered into earth-evolution through the Mystery of Golgotha, the people from whom Christ Jesus was born looked on themselves as the chosen people, and they believed that happiness would come to the world only if all other peoples were to die away, and their own stock to spread over the entire face of the earth. In a certain sense that was a well-founded belief, for Jehovah, the God of this people, had chosen it as his people, and Jehovah was regarded as the one and only God. In the time before the Mystery of Golgotha this was a justified perception for the old Hebrew people, since out of this old Hebrew people Christ Jesus was to emerge. But with the enactment of the Mystery of Golgotha this way of thinking should have come to an end. After that, it was out of date: in place of the recognition of Jehovah should have come the recognition of Christ—the recognition which compels one to speak always of humanity, just as, for those who looked up to Jehovah, one people only was in question. Not to have understood that is the tragic fate of the Jewish people. To-day, however, we are coming up against all sorts of reversions. What is it but a reversion when every nation—though it may suppose itself to be doing something quite different and may use other names—wants to worship a sort of Jehovah, a special national goal of its own!

Certainly, the old religious formulae are no longer used, but the outcome of present-day mentality is that every nation wants to set up its own national god and so confine itself within a strictly national existence. And the inevitable result is that nation rages against nation! We are experiencing a reversion to the old Jehovah-religion—with the difference that the Jehovah-religion is breaking up into a multitude of Jehovah-religions. To-day we are really confronted with an atavistic reversion to the Old Testament. Humanity is bent on dividing itself up into separate sections all over the earth—quite contrary to the spirit of Christ Jesus, who lived and stood for the whole of humanity. Humanity is trying to organise itself under the sign of national deities, Jehovah-fashion. Before the Mystery of Golgotha that was quite proper; now it is a reversion. This must be clearly understood: the way of nationalism is a reversion to the Old Testament.

This reversion is preparing heavy ordeals for mankind, and against it only one remedy will suffice: to draw near once more to the Christ by the path of the spirit.

Those concerned with spiritual science are therefore bound essentially to ask the question: How, out of the depths of our own hearts and souls, under the conditions of the present time, shall we find Christ Jesus?

This is a very serious question (I have often spoken of it before from other points of view in this group), as you can see from the fact that many official exponents of Christianity have lost the Christ! There are plenty of well-known parsons, pastors, etc., who talk about the Christ. The burden of their discourse is that men can reach the Christ through a certain deepening of the inner life, a certain inner experience. But if one comes close to what these people mean by the Christ, one finds that no distinction is made between this Christ and God in general—the Father-God, in the sense of the Gospels.

You will agree that Harnack, for example, is a celebrated theologian. He is emulated by many here in Switzerland. Harnack has published a small book, The Nature of Christianity; in it he speaks a great deal about the Christ. But what he says concerning Christ ... why should it apply to Christ? It could apply just as well to the Jehovah-God. For this reason the whole book, The Nature of Christianity, is inwardly untruthful. It would become truthful only if it were hebraicised—if it were so translated that wherever the word ‘Christ’ stands, ‘Jehovah’ were written instead.

This is a truth of which people to-day have scarcely any inkling. From countless pulpits all over the world Christ is spoken of, and people believe, simply because they hear the word ‘Christ,’ that the preacher is really speaking about the Christ. They never come to the point of thinking: “Strike out the word ‘Christ’ from what the pastor says and substitute ‘Jehovah’—that and nothing less will make it right!” You see, a definite untruth lies at the root of the deepest ailments of our time.

Do not think that in saying this I want to accuse or criticise any individual. That is not so. My wish is simply to bring out the facts. For those persons who often fall into the deepest inner untruth—one could even say, into an inner lie—have thoroughly good intentions, in their own way. It is hard to-day for humanity to reach the truth, since what I have called an inner untruth has an exceptionally strong backing of tradition. And this inner untruth, which has come to prevail in immeasurably wide circles, gives rise to another, so that in the most diverse realms of life the question is asked: Is anything still true? Where is any genuine truth left?

For this reason, those who are striving along the path of spiritual science are specially moved to ask earnestly: How shall I find the true way to the Christ—to that unique Divine Being Who may rightly be called the Christ?

Indeed, if here on earth our soul-life follows customary lines of development from birth to death, then we have no inducement to come to the Christ. We may be as spiritual as we like: we have no inducement to come to the Christ!

If, without doing a certain thing—which I will indicate in a moment—we simply pass on from birth to death, as most people do to-day, we remain far from the Christ. How, then, do we come to the Christ?

The impulse to take the way to the Christ—even though it be oft-times an impulse rising from the subconscious or from an obscure realm of feeling—must come from ourselves. Any person who is normally healthy can come to the God whom we have identified with the Jehovah-principle. Not to find the Jehovah-God is nothing else than a sort of illness in mankind. To deny God, to be an atheist, means that you are in some way ill. Anyone who has developed normally and healthily cannot be a denier of God, for it is merely laughable to believe that the healthy human organism can have other than a divine origin. The Ex Deo Nascimur is something which declares itself to a healthily developed man in the course of human life. For if he does not recognise—I am born out of the Divine—then he must have some defect, which expresses itself in the fact that he becomes an atheist. But to come to that generalised conception of the Divine, which out of inner falsehood is called Christ by modern pastors—that is not to come to the Christ.

We come to the Christ only—and here I am speaking with special reference to the immediate present—if we go beyond customary conditions of health, given by nature. For we know that the Mystery of Golgotha was enacted on earth because mankind would not have been able to maintain a worthy human status without the Mystery of Golgotha—that is, without finding its way to the Christ Impulse. And so we must not merely discover our human nature between birth and death: we must rediscover it, if we are to be Christians in the true sense, able to draw near to the Christ. And this rediscovery of our human nature must take place in the following way. We must strive for the inner honesty—we must nerve ourselves to the inner honesty—to say: “Since the Mystery of Golgotha we have not been born free from prejudice with regard to our world of thought—we are all born with certain prejudices.” Directly we regard the human being as perfect, after the manner of Rousseau or in any other way, we can by no means find the Christ. This is possible only if we know that the human being living since the Mystery of Golgotha has a certain defect, for which he must compensate through his own activity during his life here on earth. I am born a prejudiced person, and freedom from prejudice in my thinking is something I have to achieve during life.

And how can I achieve it? The one and only way is this: instead of taking an interest merely in my own way of thinking, and in what I consider right, I must develop a selfless interest in every opinion I encounter, however strongly I may hold it to be mistaken. The more a man prides himself on his own dogmatic opinions and is interested only in them, the further he removes himself, at this moment of world-evolution, from the Christ. The more he develops a social interest in the opinions of other men, even though he considers them erroneous—the more light he receives into his own thinking from the opinions of others—the more he does to fulfil in his inmost soul a saying of Christ, which to-day must be interpreted in the sense of the new Christ-language.

Christ said: “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” The Christ never ceases to reveal Himself anew to men—even unto the end of earthly time. And thus He speaks to-day to those willing to listen: “In whatever the least of your brethren thinks, you must recognise that I am thinking in him; and that I enter into your feeling, whenever you bring another's thought into relation with your own, and whenever you feel a fraternal interest for what is passing in another's soul. Whatever opinion, whatever outlook on life, you discover in the least of your brethren, therein you are seeking Myself.”

So does the Christ speak to our life of thought—the Christ Who desires to reveal Himself in a new way—the time for it is drawing near—to the men of the twentieth century. Not in such a way that people should speak in Harnack's style of the God who may equally well be the Jehovah-God, and is in fact nothing else, but so that it may be known: Christ is the God for all men. We shall not find Him if we remain egotistically bound up with our own thoughts, but only if we relate our own thoughts to those of other men, if we expand our interest to embrace, with inner tolerance, everything human, and say to ourselves: “Through the fact of my birth I am a prejudiced person; only through being reborn into an all-embracing feeling of fellowship for the thoughts of all men shall I find in myself the impulse which is, in truth, the Christ Impulse. If I do not look on myself alone as the source of everything I think, but recognise myself, right down into the depths of my soul, as a member of the human community”—then, my dear friends, one way to the Christ lies open. This is the way which must to-day be characterised as the way to the Christ through thinking. Earnest self-training so that we gain a true perception for estimating the thoughts of others, and for correcting bias in ourselves—this we must take as one of life's serious tasks. For unless this task finds place among men, they will lose the way to the Christ. This to-day is the way through thinking.

The other way is through the will. Here, too, people are much addicted to a false way, which leads not to the Christ but away from Him. And in this other realm we must find again the way to the Christ. Youth still keeps some idealism, but for the most part humanity to-day is dry and matter-of-fact. And men are proud of what is often called practical technique, though the expression is used in a narrow sense. Humanity to-day has no use for ideals which are drawn from the fountain of the spirit. Youth still has these ideals. Never was the life of older people so sharply severed from the life of the young as it is to-day. Lack of understanding among human beings is indeed the great mark of our time.

Yesterday I spoke of the deep gulf which exists between the proletariat and the middle-class. Age and youth, too—how little they understand each other to-day! This is something we ought to take most seriously into account. We may try to reach an understanding with youth on the ground of its idealism ... yes, that is all very well, but to-day efforts are made to drive the idealism out of young people. The aim is to do this by depriving youth of the imaginative education which is given by fairy-tales and legends, by all that leads away from dry external perceptions. All the same—it will not be too easy to drive all the youthful, natural, primitive idealism out of young people! But what is this youthful idealism? It is a beautiful thing, a great thing—but it ought not to be all-sufficient for human beings, for this youthful idealism is in fact bound up with the Ex Deo Nascimur, with that aspect of the Divine which is identical with the Jahve aspect. And that is just what must not remain sufficient, now that the Mystery of Golgotha has been enacted on earth. Something further is required—idealism must spring from inner development, from self-education. Besides the innate idealism of youth, we must see to it that in human society something else is achieved—precisely an achieved idealism: not merely the idealism that springs from the instincts and enthusiasm of youth, but one that is nurtured, gained by one's own initiative, and will not fade away with the passing of youth. This is something which opens the way to the Christ, because—once more—it is something acquired during the life between birth and death.

Feel the great difference between instinctive idealism and achieved idealism! Feel the great difference between youthful enthusiasm and the enthusiasm which springs from taking hold of the life of the spirit and can be ever and again kindled anew, because we have made it part of our soul, independently of the course of our bodily existence—then you will grasp this second idealism, which is not merely the idealism implanted in us by nature. This is the way to the Christ through willing, as distinct from the way through thinking.

Do not ask to-day for abstract ways to the Christ; ask for these concrete ways. Seek to understand the way through thinking, which consists in becoming inwardly tolerant towards the opinions of mankind at large, and developing social interest for the thoughts of other men. Seek also for the way through willing—there you will find nothing abstract, but an inescapable need to cultivate idealism in yourselves. And if you cultivate this idealism, or if you introduce it into the education of young people—which is particularly necessary—then you will have something which inspires men not to do only what the outer world impels them to do. For from this idealism arises the resolve to do more than the sense-world suggests—to act out of the spirit. When our actions spring from this achieved idealism we are acting in accordance with the intentions of the Christ, Who did not descend from worlds above the earth in order to achieve merely earthly ends, but came down to the earth from higher realms in order to fulfil a super-earthly purpose. We shall grow towards Him only if we cultivate idealism in ourselves, so that Christ, Who represents the super-earthly within the realm of earth, can work through us. Only in achieved idealism can there be realised the intention of the Pauline saying about Christ: “Not I, but Christ in me.”

Anyone who refuses to develop this second idealism through a rebirth of his moral nature can say only: “Not I, but Jehovah in me.” But whoever cultivates this second idealism, which must essentially be cultivated, he can say: “Not I, but Christ in me.”

These are the two ways through which we can find the Christ. If we pursue them, we shall no longer speak in such a way that our speech is an inward lie. Then we shall speak of Christ as the Divine Power active in our rebirth—while Jehovah is the Divine Power active in our birth.

People to-day must learn to appreciate this distinction, for it is this which leads also to genuine social feeling, a genuine interest in our fellow-men. Whoever develops an achieved idealism in himself, he will have love for human-kind. You may preach as much as you like from pulpits, telling men they ought to love one another: it is like preaching to a stove. The most excellent exhortations will not persuade the stove to heat the room. It will heat the room all right if you stoke it with coal—there is no need to preach to it that its ovenly duty is to heat the room. In just the same way you can keep on preaching to men—love, love, love ... that is mere sermonising, mere words. Strive rather that men should experience a rebirth of idealism, that besides instinctive idealism they should achieve in their souls an idealism which persists throughout life, then ... then you will kindle a warmth of soul in the love of man for man. For as much as you nurture an idealism in yourselves, by so much will you be led in your soul life away out of egoism towards a concern for other men.

And if you follow this twofold way, the way through thinking and the way through willing, which I have shown you with regard to the renewal of Christianity, there is one thing you will certainly experience and discover. Out of a thinking which is inwardly tolerant and interested in the thoughts of others, and out of a willing reborn through the achievement of idealism, something unfolds. And this can be described only as a heightened feeling of responsibility for every action one performs.

Anyone with an inclination to examine the unfolding of his soul will feel in himself, if he follows the two ways—it is a feeling different from anything encountered in the course of an ordinary life which does not follow the two ways—this heightened and refined sense of responsibility towards everything one thinks and does. This heightened feeling of responsibility will impel one to say: Can I justify this that I am doing or thinking, not merely with reference to the immediate circumstances of my life and environment, but in the light of my responsibility towards the super-sensible spiritual world? Can I justify it in the light of my knowledge that everything I do here on earth will be inscribed in an akashic record of everlasting significance, wherein its influence will work on and on? Oh, it comes powerfully home to one, this super-sensible responsibility towards all things! It strikes one like a solemn warning, when one seeks the two-fold way to Christ—as though a Being stood behind one, looking over one's shoulder and saying repeatedly: “Thou art not responsible only to the world around thee but also to the Divine-Spiritual, for all thy thoughts and all thy actions.”

But this Being who looks over our shoulder, who heightens and refines our sense of responsibility and sets us on a new path—he is the one who first directs us truly to the Christ, Who went through the Mystery of Golgotha. It is of this Christ-Way, how it may be found and how it reveals itself through the Being I have just described, that I wanted to speak to you to-day. For this Christ-Way is most intimately connected with the deepest social impulses and tasks of our time.

My dear friends! The point of today's talk is to clarify some things that you must allow to live firmly in your soul, and on the other hand, to identify a kind of central authority, at least in principle, even if the personal cannot be resolved today. I would like to emphasize first of all that today such things as the [oath] I am talking about here are usually misunderstood. They are understood as if it were a vow that one makes to anyone. Such views have come about particularly through the Catholic Church and the Masonic orders, which have always misunderstood these things and have misunderstood them all the more as time has progressed and different conditions have arisen for the whole being of man than was the case in earlier times. Today it is only possible to understand such things [as the swearing-in ceremony], which I have to give here in a formula, as a kind of examination of oneself, as something that one writes into one's soul when one takes on such an important mission as you want to take on. It will be necessary for those who take on this mission to actually proclaim it before those who are walking with them, so that everyone who walks with them knows with whom they belong. And so it is important that this kind of vow, which one makes to oneself, contains the things that are necessary for the spiritual world today.

The first thing is that it must contain what one should make clear to oneself as one's sense of belonging to the spiritual world. And here it is important that for someone who wants to work as you do, this work must be spiritually linked to the figure of Christ and to the event of Golgotha, in such a way that the spiritual nature of and that one's entire activity is developed as an implementer of that which has been introduced into the order of humanity through the Mystery of Golgotha. One must come to recognize the present and future meaning of earthly evolution as coming from the Mystery of Golgotha.

But now something else is important. It is important not to understand such a matter only in a personal sense or in a narrow human sense, but to understand it as something that one professes before the whole world, and thus also before the higher hierarchies, and to accept the real consequences, that is, to fully recognize in a spiritual way what the Catholic Church, albeit in an externalized way, does recognize. She has indeed externalized everything and only retained the external forms for everything, but at least the external forms are recognized by the Church, even if not by the individual priest. This is shown, for example, by the fact that anyone who leaves the priesthood of the Catholic Church has the skin scraped off his fingers with which he has touched the consecrated host.

Then, of course, it is necessary to keep the most important moral qualities alive in oneself through constant practice, because only under the influence of these moral qualities is it possible to achieve real work from the spiritual world.

This is what the formula that I have to present to you says. It expresses it in the form in which, I would say, the cult of the spiritual world can really be expressed in human words. I would like to make it clear that the way I feel about this movement is entirely consistent with my presentation of this formula. How you then activate it, that is, how you then make such a vow in common - but in such a way that the others are present - that will then depend on you. It must be clearly understood that I shall always maintain the attitude towards this movement which I have defined at the outset, that I can therefore be of service in an advisory capacity for the external organization, but that what is to be done must come from your own ranks. This is not because I want to reject a sense of responsibility, because such a sense is also connected with the advice I give; but because it is really a matter of, once this movement has been established, keeping it independent, so that it can most certainly have the most intimate relationship with the anthroposophical movement, but nevertheless must stand on its own and should not be something like a branch or twig of the anthroposophical movement. And the anthroposophical movement, too, must, because it must remain a movement of knowledge by its very nature, refrain from founding a religion and in turn maintain its independence from this religious movement. The relationships can be the most intimate, everything can be carried and exchanged with each other, but this distinction must be made in certain ways.

So, first of all, I will read this oath of office to you. You can then comment on it yourself if anything in it is not clear to you, but I will not be able to recommend any significant changes.

“I want to direct my I in active yearning for work out of the spiritual world.”

In Christ and in the event of Golgotha I want to recognize how a supreme spiritual lives in the facts of life on earth.

In the recognition of this interweaving I will find the meaning of my activity.

Thus I will fit myself into the human order.

My self shall only feel meaningful in such an integration.

I will acknowledge that to stray from this path means the decay of my ego to the evil powers of the world.

I will always fight the impulses that prepare the way for such aberrations.

of personal vanity and ambition
inner dishonesty of the soul
and impulses of anger, which alienate the soul from itself.
I will continually renew within myself the awareness that I walk before God's gaze in everything I do.
To recognize and cultivate this as the content of my consciousness, I promise
before the Father-God, who is in me
before the Son of God who creates in me
before the Spirit God, who enlightens me."

This contains everything that, if you keep bringing it to your attention, indicates the direction you must set for yourself if you understand yourself correctly in order to find your way into the movement you want. Naturally, the way in which you carry this out depends on you. Before we proceed, I would like to say that I have given the matter a great deal of thought and that I think that, given the circumstances, it would be best if the remaining board of directors were to make its own additions. At the beginning of such a direction, everything that happens should actually be done in full agreement with all the individuals. Nothing should be done that the individual does not agree with. But on the other hand, it cannot be a matter of voting, but only of ensuring that there is a natural agreement, that people simply know what they want in this direction. For voting is often nothing more than something highly forced, while what is, so to speak, copied from the soul of another can actually lead to the right result. Again, I must leave it to you to decide what you will do with this advice.

Now there is a little more to be said. The point is that a certain wall should also be created to prevent someone who has once been accepted into the circle of your soul shepherds from leaving this circle again without further ado. It is really the case that in such a community there can be no flourishing if people enter and leave again. Therefore, in the times before liberalism enslaved spiritual life, all such communities had the means to exercise jurisdiction over those who had become apostates. We can no longer apply the older forms, which were felt somewhat differently, and therefore, since this whole rationale is something new, a new form must be found for it. This form can hardly consist of anything other than the fact that, when the central executive committee is formed, this central executive committee is given the special pledge that in the event of one resigning, one morally recognizes under all circumstances what the executive committee or a wider circle has decreed regarding the resignation.

In this context, the question of how we ourselves shape the hierarchy should of course be decided right at the beginning of our work. Since there are not very many of you so far, it would of course be quite possible for the board of three to exercise full central power. But perhaps that is not what can be considered right under all circumstances. It would perhaps be good to start with a hierarchy right from the beginning. Later on it will have to be the case that there is a considerable difference between those who have been working for some time and those who have only just begun to work, who have only just entered your circle. And there will have to be some kind of advancement. It will even be necessary to give certain names to the individual degrees to which those concerned ascend. The choice of names is a very difficult matter in general. We have already discussed how the older Latin names, which are not suitable in Protestant areas, can be replaced by German ones. The difficulty here is that separate names will have to be created for each language area into which your movement expands. But that must be accepted. It is difficult, however, because the power to create languages for such things has diminished considerably throughout the civilized world since the 15th century, and has now ceased altogether, so that if one wants to find an adequate word for the matter today, it is not that easy.

For example, I would not be able to find a different word for the Mass than “Human Consecration Ritual”, whereby perhaps “Consecration Ritual” could then be used as an abbreviation. What has been suggested – “sacrifice celebration” – would not really capture the inner meaning of the Mass. You can see that from the fact that the word 'Meß-Opfer' (sacrifice of the Mass) is possible; but if you say 'sacrifice ceremony', it would be a celebration of the sacrifice; but that is not what it is. The point is that through the sacrifice of the Mass, the human soul is brought into connection with the higher world. So the Mass itself can be called a sacrifice, but then something must be added. It is not a mere sacrifice, but one that is further defined by the word “Mass.” But everything that the Mass is can be found, at least to a very high degree, in the words “Human Consecration Ritual.” These words also include the concept that is necessarily associated with the Mass: that it is a congregational matter and that it is done at a gathering. The essence lies in the coming together, in the uniting. Of course, one could object that in Catholicism there are “silent” masses in which the priest, who as a Catholic priest is obliged to say mass every day, simply says mass in some corner of his church and there is actually no congregation; and in a monastery where the monks are priests, each one says his mass at an altar and there is actually no congregation either. But that is not really true. From some of what you have encountered in the texts for worship, you will be able to see that for the real Christian there is no distinction made between the living and the dead. Whether the dead, who are embodied in the body, inhabit the Mass or, as one has to assume when a so-called silent Mass is read, the dead, that is no difference in principle for the real Christian. If one were to see a fundamental difference in this, then one would not take the spiritual world in its full reality. You can also see this from a formula that occurs within the mass ritual itself. So one can say that if it were claimed that there are 'silent' masses, this is actually not true; it contradicts the spirit of Christianity. There are no 'silent' masses, but parish masses, and the coming together is part of the mass. This also belongs to those masses that have now become the opposite of a sacred act, to the fairground masses; the fairground mass also presupposes that people come together.

Coming together is part of the Mass, and that is precisely expressed in the words “Human Consecration Ritual”. But it is a ritual of consecration; the word “consecration” has been retained as a German word for the old word “initiation”. “Consecration” is related to ‘immersion’, to immersing oneself in something; and it has become common to have the feeling that one is immersed in the spirit of the original revelation when speaking of consecration, just as it is designated by the term ‘initiation’, which is of course much more appropriate. Both consecration and initiation lead man back to his divine beginning, to his divine origin. This is what the word “Human Consecration Ritual” may make clear. But it has many syllables, and that is something that can naturally be a stumbling block. In everyday speech, it can be abbreviated to “Weihehandlung”; but “consecration” alone cannot be said, because there are various consecrations, not only consecration of man, but also consecration of priests and even the consecration of utensils. We will manage in the next few days with the other words.

However, I would very much appreciate it if you would express your views on what I have just said. Of course, later on, differences of opinion within your group should not lead to revolutions at every opportunity – although different opinions are perfectly acceptable. But at the beginning, it is possible that consultations may lead to modifications of what is to be created or what was proposed first. So perhaps it would be possible for you to express yourselves at this point, so that we can move forward and arrive at something more definite as soon as possible.

Emil Bock: Perhaps there is already a strong willingness to do this this very afternoon, because after the words that Dr. Steiner spoke to us yesterday, we have prepared ourselves to close our circle with such an inner connection to the matter.

Rudolf Steiner: It was no exception?

Emil Bock: No, no exception has become known. It would only be our task now to find the form for the moment in which we can express this as the content of our souls.

Rudolf Steiner: For the form, it would be necessary to bring a picture of Christ. Therefore, I would think it would be better to start tomorrow. We then bring a picture of Christ that can be taken to this action.

Friedrich Rittelmeyer: Is there no possibility of doing it in front of the Christ figure in the studio?

Rudolf Steiner: That is not really possible because for that it would have to be finished first. It does not depend on which form of Christ it is, it just has to be a Christ form.

Emil Bock suggests a time: tomorrow, Sunday morning. Rudolf Steiner agrees, as Sunday is also the most suitable day.

Emil Bock suggests asking further questions about things that are still unclear.

One participant would like to hear more about the special vow, and then also about whether the reading of the mass, for example, should also take place daily or how that would be handled.

Rudolf Steiner: As soon as you have been constituted, these things will arise from the matter itself. Daily reading of the fair, at least in meditative form, is something that seems necessary to me. The other, the special vow, refers to the exit. The exit must be made more difficult in a certain way. This is only possible if the formula is applied to this withdrawal, which of course can still be agreed upon at the beginning, but which must later be recognized by anyone who wants to join. It must be included in the formula that the leadership has to decide how to define the step that someone takes when withdrawing, and that he recognizes this from the outset. So you don't just generally acknowledge what it means, but what the person leaving thinks about himself in the individual case, but what the leadership thinks about him. Each individual would recognize this from the outset in the event of leaving. Of course, in today's democratic times, this seems a little harsh, but you really won't get anywhere in spiritual life if you don't create such a wall.

The other thing I would ask you to consider is this: first create a central power of three, and around these three create four others who simply replace the length of time in office with the quality you attach to them; in this way you arrive at an original seven and call the three “upper leaders” and the four others “leaders”. For the others, a word would still have to be found for the old term 'priest', which did not seem right to you either; but I don't have one yet. “Leader” and ‘senior leader’ would initially be terms that could be used. We avoid terms such as ‘bishop’, ‘deacon’ and so on. So originally the top ladder would be the three senior leaders and the four leaders; we do not need a further hierarchy. The rest would be designated by the word that is used for the term ‘priest’. I would also have to advise this.

Emil Bock believes that there are no objections to this.

Wilhelm Kelber asks whether the appointment as a leader and senior leader is limited to a certain time.

Rudolf Steiner: This can only be for a limited time until a leader becomes a senior leader, so it can only be a position that is granted for life because it is connected to the whole being of the person.

Then something about the technical side of the matter. The point is that the original inaugurators of the whole movement, in formulating the plan, have already shown an act that has a significance, and on this basis it would be advisable to make, so to speak, original proposals for the questions that have now been raised. These initial proposals, in my opinion, based on how I have seen the matter develop, could be made by Dr. Rittelmeyer, Mr. Bock, Ms. Spörri and Mr. Klein. I think that this very inner circle should come together and make initial proposals to the others after very serious consideration, so that the fact, which is a fact, is taken into account: the original initiation. Then these proposals would have to be presented to the wider circle, which should do with them as it wishes. When one makes such proposals, it is the case that the smaller the circle, the greater the sense of responsibility with which they are made. Therefore it would be good to make them initially only as advice. In this way it can best be determined what is wanted. It would be good if all this could be worked out before we meet tomorrow at 10 o'clock.

Friedrich Rittelmeyer: We have actually agreed that we want to carry out the whole constitution in consultation with you. We would very much appreciate advice on how to proceed in some form before we ask the group.

Rudolf Steiner: Very well, then we shall proceed in that way. We can undertake the action we have spoken of at ten o'clock, and what you have proposed in the closest circle we can then begin tomorrow after the action.

Emil Bock suggests that, in order to reach a conclusion more quickly, the results of the meeting should be communicated to Dr. Steiner that same day, which he agrees to.

The funeral of Kaiser Wilhelm is over; the aged hero, who reunited Germany and raised it to unimagined greatness, has been buried in the mausoleum at Charlottenburg next to his royal parents amidst an enormous crowd of people and an unprecedented attendance of foreign princes. Emperor Frederick, whose serious illness still prevents him from leaving the palace, especially as the temperature in Berlin has remained very low in recent days, watched the funeral procession pass by from the window of his room. A few days later he issued a message to the Reichstag and the Prussian House of Representatives, in which he announced his assumption of imperial and royal power and pledged in writing to uphold the constitution of the Empire and Prussia. At the same time, the proclamation to Alsace-Lorraine also took place, which we have included here as a new historical document of the utmost importance.

We, Frederick, by the grace of God, German Emperor, King of Prussia, hereby proclaim and declare:

After our beloved Lord Father's Majesty, then Emperor Wilhelm, departed from this temporality according to God's decree, the German imperial dignity and thus, in accordance with the imperial laws, the government of the imperial lands has passed to us. We have taken them over in the name of the Empire. Determined to safeguard the rights of the Empire over these German territories, which have been reunited with the Fatherland after a long intervening period, we are aware of the task of cultivating a German spirit and German customs in them, protecting law and justice and promoting the welfare and prosperity of the inhabitants. In our efforts to fulfill this task, we count on the trust and devotion of the population, as well as on the faithful fulfillment of duty by all authorities and officials. We demand and expect conscientious observance of the laws, but we will also grant our imperial protection to everyone's rights. Through the impartial administration of justice and a lawful, benevolent and prudent, but firmly managed administration, the unbreakable connection of Alsace-Lorraine with the German Empire will once again become as intimate as it was in the times of our ancestors, before these German lands were torn away from the ancient and glorious connection with their fellow tribesmen and compatriots.

We order this decree to be promulgated by the Gazette.

Given Charlottenburg, March 5, 1888 Signed: Friedrich | Signed: Prince v. Hohenlohe

The House of Representatives and the Reichstag responded to Frederick III's message with an address of devotion that faithfully reflected the sentiments of the people; the Reichstag was then closed. The Emperor appointed his former highly deserving Chief of the General Staff, General Count Blumenthal, as Field Marshal.

In the meantime, an extremely important change took place in the Austrian Ministry of War, from which Count Bylandt-Rheidt resigned after a long and distinguished career, while the former commander of Vienna, Feldzeugmeister Freiherr v. Bauer, one of the most outstanding Austrian officers, was appointed Imperial Minister of War. The Emperor also systematized the post of Inspector General of the Infantry by special decree and appointed his son, Crown Prince Rudolf, to the same post, thus giving him a major independent post that would be decisive for the future of Austrian military power. In the meantime, the House of Representatives negotiated the extradition of the deputy Ritter von Schönerer, as demanded by the criminal court, which was approved almost unanimously. New municipal elections were held in Vienna, which generally ended in a defeat for the German-Liberal electoral committee.

In France, there was a greater Boulanger hype after all. The vain and ambitious general left his garrison several times against the orders of the Minister of War and went to Paris. As a result of this breach of discipline, the President of the Republic, at the request of the Minister of War, put him on trial; it seems, however, that the insistence of his friends, who certainly want to push him into an active political role, will result in his dismissal or retirement. After Thibaudin, now Boulanger, that is the course of the Republic. Lively debates in the French Chamber concerning Boulanger, particularly those provoked by Paul de Cassagnac, are devoid of political significance and merely arouse the interest of piquancy.

There has been no change in the situation in the Orient, but new Russian steps in the Bulgarian question are expected shortly. In the meantime, Prince Ferdinand is settling in somewhat more comfortably in Sofia.

During a nice September day of this year, I drove with some friends from Zurich to the neighbouring town Einsiedeln. There a Benedictine Abbey was founded in the early Middle Ages and acquired a certain notoriety through diverse circumstances. At that day, just a pilgrimage day took place. Einsiedeln was prepared to welcome many pilgrims. At that time, I myself also wanted to do a kind of pilgrimage, but not directly to that place Einsiedeln, but from there to an adjacent site. A car was taken to drive to the so-called “Devil's Bridge.” Finally, on a quite rough way, uphill and downhill, we arrived there and found a quite modern inn that was built relatively short time ago. In this inn, a board is found: “Natal site of the doctor and naturalist Philippus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, called Paracelsus, 1493–1541.”

This was the goal of my pilgrimage at first: the birthplace of the famous, in many respects also infamous, Theophrastus Bombastus Paracelsus von Hohenheim. At first one saw meadows with many flowers and grazing cows all around in a strange place where many ways crossed. One could feel something particular by the peculiar of nature as you can hardly find it in Europe anywhere but in the Alpine regions. Nature has something there, as if the plants have an own language, as if they wanted to say anything, as if they could become rather talkative. This site is also suitable to grow together with that which the spirit of nature can tell you.

There the picture of a boy emerged before my soul who grew up during the first nine years of his life in that nature who really had his birthplace in a house which stood once there, and which was replaced with the new one. Since the old doctor Bombast von Hohenheim lived in the fifteenth century at this place, and his little son was the future Paracelsus. I tried to put myself in the situation of that boy about whom I knew that he had grown together with the whole nature already from his earliest childhood. I tried to imagine this boy in this nature talking intimately with the plants. In a certain respect, the outer configuration definitely shows what that boy Paracelsus let speak to himself from the early morning to the late evening, except those times in which he went with his father on the ways that this undertook to the adjacent places. One can consider as sure that the father could exchange some interesting thoughts about the interesting questions with the little boy in the midst of nature at that time, questions that that child could already put about what the experience of nature directly shows. Something that matured in that boy that we may come to know in the life of Paracelsus faces us in a childlike figure if we have the picture of the old honest-good, but very expert licentiate, the old Bombastus von Hohenheim taking the inquisitive boy by the hand.

While this picture emerged in my soul, I remembered another picture which I already had many years ago when I stood in Salzburg in front of a house where a board displayed that in this modest house Theophrastus Bombastus Paracelsus von Hohenheim died at the age of 48 years. Between these two pictures this eventful, this unique life is enclosed to me.

If we look a little closer at his life, we find, indeed, still completely with the character of the fifteenth, sixteenth centuries, a deep knowledge of nature arising which became then medical science and philosophy, theosophy. A knowledge of nature, which originates from deeper clairvoyant soul forces whose true figure I have already suggested in the talks of this cycle. What waked up these deeper soul forces and enabled Paracelsus to look within nature behind that what the outer senses and the outer intellect can recognise only, was really caused by the intimately adherence with nature, by feeling his soul forces related to that what germinates, sprouts and blossoms in nature. When the nine-year-old boy moved with his father to Carinthia into a similar nature, he could also feel related with the spirit of nature.

Paracelsus growing up in such a way advanced further and further just in an individual, in a quite peculiar and personal view of nature. How could this be different? Everything was connected that took root in his mind with the forces peculiar to him and with the abilities, with the way as he stood to the things how they were talking to him. Hence, he also especially appreciated throughout his life to have grown together so intimately with nature. If he wanted to stress to his enemies that his inside was related to nature, he often pointed to it later. These were his words: “Give ear how I justify myself: I am not spun subtly by nature, it is also not the habit of my country that one attains something with silk spinning. We are brought up neither with figs, nor with mead, nor with wheat bread; but with cheese, milk, and oat bread, this cannot make subtle fellows. Those are educated in soft clothes and in women's rooms, and we who grew up in pine cones do not understand each other well. This is why someone can even be considered as rude who believes to be subtle and gracious. The same applies to me what I regard as silk, the other call it drill.” He is of such a type, he thinks, as the human beings are who have not completely separated themselves from the topsoil of natural existence but are intimately connected with it. He takes his power and wisdom from this connection. That is why his motto was throughout his life: “Let no man belong to another who can belong to himself.” This penetrated his whole character; it shows us this man mental-plastically. Hence, we can understand that when he came to the university later he could not familiarise himself with the way how he should continue scholarly now what he knew about medical science naturally, only encouraged by the conversations with nature and with his father. He could not cope with this at first actually.

In order to realise what he had to withstand there, we have to look at how at that time medicine was done. There it was authoritative above all what one could have in the old traditions and documents of the old doctors Galen (131-~200 AD), Avicenna (AbÅ« AlÄ« al-Husain ibn AbdullÄh ibn SÄ«nÄ, ~980–1037) and others. The lecturers dealt preferably with commenting and interpreting what one could read in the books. This was deeply antipathetic to the young Philippus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, and he probably thought above all that a big distance was between that which one could get directly and intuitively from the spiritual work of nature and what had gone away so far from it as scholarship, as mere intellectual concepts and ideas. Hence, he wanted to go through another school. He went through this other school thoroughly. We soon see Paracelsus leaving the university and wandering about in Germany, Austria, Western and Southern Europe, Poland, Holland, Lithuania, and Scandinavia, with the intention to get to know something from the way everywhere—to speak with Goethe—“how nature lives in creating.” Since he had the thought in mind, actually: indeed, the whole nature is a uniform, but she speaks in many languages, and just because one learns to recognise how one and the same thing changes its form in the different regions, one advances to the being of the inner unity, to that what underlies as something spiritual everything only sensorily discernible. However, he wanted to get to know not only how any ore, any metal directly results from the configuration of the mountains and of its source to get such a picture how nature lives in creating, he wanted to get to know not only how the plants assume other shapes depending on the climate and the environment, but he had something else still in mind. He said to himself: with its surroundings, the whole human organism is connected. One cannot understand the human body and soul as the same everywhere; at least one does not recognise the human being if one looks at him only at one place.

Therefore, he wandered through the different regions that were accessible to him to recognise with his look deeply penetrating into the spiritual how the human being is related with nature, depending on the different influence of climate and region. Not before one experiences this different influence everywhere, one gets to that what informs us about the nature of health and illness in the sense of Paracelsus. Hence, he was never satisfied to get to know any illness only at one place, but he said to himself, the fine substances are different which compose the human organism, depending on whether the human being lives, for example, in Hungary, in Spain or in Italy, and nobody recognises the human being who cannot pursue the finer substances with penetrating look.

When one reproached him that his “high school” was vagrancy, he referred to the fact that the divine spirit does not come to anybody who is sitting on the fireside bench. He realised that the human being has to go where the divine spirit works in the different shapes of nature. A clairvoyant knowledge developed in him that he could have only because of his connection with nature.

However, Paracelsus also felt that this knowledge had so intimately grown together with his soul that he became more and more aware that, actually, one could bring to mind only by an intimate way of pronouncing what he had learnt directly on the high school of nature. He called nature his “book” and the various areas of the earth the “single pages” of this book which one reads walking on them. He despised those increasingly who studied the old Galen, Avicenna and others only and removed from the book that spreads out with its various pages as the “book of nature” in front of him. However, he also felt that that what he could learn in such a way in his high school could be put only intimately into words. Hence, he wanted to use another language than Latin that had become foreign, actually, to the immediate soul life, which was used in those days only at the universities. Since he believed that he could not succeed in bending the words and in formulating so that they could immediately express what flowed out of all being. Therefore, he felt the urge to express in his mother tongue what he wanted to express. Two things resulted from that. Once, that he had a high self-confidence of the value of his knowledge not because of boasting or arrogance, for he was a humble nature strictly speaking. That is why he said that one could not learn anything from medical science, actually, but one must approach nature directly again while renewing medical science.—Hence, his proud words: “Who wants to follow the truth has to go to my kingdom. Follow me, you Galen, Avicenna (AbÅ« AlÄ« al-Husain ibn AbdullÄh ibn SÄ«nÄ, ~980–1037, Persian polymath), Rhazes (AbÅ« Bakr Muhammad ibn ZakarÄ«yÄ ar-RÄzÄ«, 854–927, Persian polymath), Montagnana (Bartolomeo da M., ~1380–1452) and Mesue (YÅ«hannÄ ibn MÄsawayh, ~777–857, Assyrian physician), I do not follow you. You from Paris, you from Montpellier, you from Swabia, you from Meissen, you from Cologne, you from Vienna, and from the regions of the Danube and Rhine rivers, you from the islands, you from Italy, you from Dalmatia, you from Sarmatia, you from Athens, you Greeks, you Arabs, you Israelites. Follow me and I do not follow you ... I become the king, and the kingdom will be mine, I lead the empire and gird your loins!” Not from arrogance and haughtiness, but from the consciousness that nature speaks out of him, he said, the kingdom is mine.—With it, he meant the kingdom of scientific and medical knowledge of his time.

The second thing that resulted was that he was soon by such a disposition and such a knowledge an opponent of the official representatives of his discipline. First, they could not stand at all that he expressed himself in German what they regarded only as possible to express in Latin language. He was a complete innovator of that. They could also not understand that he walked through the lands and wanted to learn. They could not at all believe that someone who was connected with the whole nature had a living sensation of the fact that the human soul-life is everywhere a fruit of natural existence in the region and that one has not only to observe the plants blossoming and the animals thriving there. Hence, Paracelsus appreciated farmers, shepherds, even knackers who worked in and with nature. He was convinced that in their simple knowledge something would be included of a real knowledge of nature from which he might learn something, so that he learnt as it were as a vagrant from vagrants. Hence, he says about himself: “I followed the art at the risk of my life and was not ashamed of learning from vagrants, headsmen, and barbers. My teaching was tested sharper than silver in poverty, fear, war and misery.”—One could not forgive him this. When he was appointed later at the university of Basel—as it were like by an error of the representatives of his discipline—, one of the scholars noticed with horror that Paracelsus walked in the street not in the costume of the professors, but like a vagrant, like a carter. This was not acceptable; this violated the reputation of the entire profession.

Therefore, it happened then that he encountered the contradiction of his colleagues where he wanted to apply what he had learnt from the big book of nature, and experienced what those have to experience who have to experience envy and opposition the worst. However, what one could least forgive him was that he was successful with his deep insights into nature where others had no success where they had applied everything that was in their power and could reach nothing. It is true if one offered resistance to him there or there he was not sparing with rude words, but if one considers the conditions with which he worked, one knows that it was completely justified. Where he was urged to discuss this or that medical problem with these or those colleagues, the debates became heated. There, for example, the others talked in Latin that he understood rather well, then he shouted back towards them in German what he regarded as proofs, they regarded, as follies. A picture of the whole way resulted how he collided with his contemporaries.

We can briefly explain in the following way what he gained as insight. He said: the human being, as he faces us as a healthy and ill being, is not a single entity, a single species, but he is placed in the big nature. One can assess health and illness in a certain respect only if one knows all effects that originate from the big world, from the macrocosm to pull the human being into their circles.—Thus, the human being appeared to him at first like a single entity in the macrocosm. This was one direction as he looked at the human being. Then he said to himself: someone must attain an intimate knowledge of all events in the big nature outdoors who wants to assess how all phenomena which happen, otherwise, outdoors in wind and weather, in rising and setting of stars and so on flow through the human nature as it were, work into them.—Because Paracelsus did not confine himself to the special knowledge of the human being, but let the clairvoyant gaze wander over the whole macrocosm, over physics, astronomy, chemistry, and collected everything that he could get hold of, the human being was a part of the macrocosm for him.

However, besides the human being appeared to him as a being independent largely, while he processes the substances of the macrocosm and by the way, in which he processes them, he lives either in connection or in opposition with the macrocosm. As far as the human being is a part of the macrocosm, Paracelsus looks at him as the lowest, most primitive, purely physical-bodily human being. But as far as the human being receives a certain circulation of substances and forces in his organisation and develops independently, is active independently in them, Paracelsus saw something included in the human being that he calls the “archaeus” that was to him like an inner master builder whom he also called the “inner alchemist.”

He draws the attention to this inner alchemist who transforms the outer substances which do not resemble what the human being needs as material inside as he changes milk and bread into meat and blood. This was to him a big riddle. In it expressed itself what he saw working as the inner alchemist who adapts himself harmoniously in the universe or opposes it. This was to him the human being in a second direction who can have such an inner alchemist in himself who transforms the substances into poisons destroying the organism, or into those means furthering and developing the organism.

Then he distinguished a third one: that what is the human being apart from the outer world. There Paracelsus realised that the human organisation is so designed that in the cooperation of the forces and organs a little world, a microcosm, an image of the big world exists. Notabene: this is something different from the first viewpoint of Paracelsus. After the first viewpoint, the human being is a part of nature. As far as with his third viewpoint the single parts of nature co-operate, he finds a likeness of the mutual relation of sun and moon in blood and heart, in the nervous and cerebral systems and in the interactions of them. In the other organs, he finds an inner kingdom of heaven, an inner world edifice. The outer world edifice is to him like a big symbol that recurs in the human being like a little world. In a mess that can originate in this little world, he sees the third way in which the human being can become ill.

He saw the fourth viewpoint in the passions and desires, which exceed a certain measure, for example, rage and fury. They react then again on the physical organisation.

Finally, he still saw the fifth viewpoint that is by no means admitted today, in the way, how the human being is integrated into the course of the world, and how to him from the whole spiritual development the causes of illness can result.

Paracelsus developed five viewpoints this way which he demanded not theoretically, but which he realised from the nature of the human being in immediate view of the relation of the human being to nature. Because he saw the human being placed in nature, and did not intellectually but clairvoyantly consider the way in which the single parts co-operate Paracelsus could position himself in a particular way to the sick human being. Strangely enough, he related not with one, but with all soul forces to the whole world. Hence, his nice sentence: with the mind we learn to recognise God the Father in the world; by faith we learn to recognise Christ, the Son; and by imagination, we learn to recognise the Spirit.

As the knowledge of the healthy and sick human being results from these three aspects, he wanted to put the human being before his soul. However, he wanted to look not only at the human being, but he wanted to observe how the single things are related in nature with each other and with the human being. Something peculiar could thereby happen: if he faced a sick person, he beheld how nature worked under the just cited viewpoints; the irregularity of the substances and of the organs resulted to his intuitive sight. He had the whole human being before himself.

He could not dress in abstract words what he experienced in front of the sick person, he could not formulate it; but he settled in the sick person. He needed no name of the illness, but while he was like submerged in the illness, he realised something quite new: how he had to combine the substances that he knew in nature, so that he could find means against this illness. However, it was also not only the mental in which he submerged, but also the moral, the intellectual and spiritual. Call him a vagrant if you want, as one did; maybe call charlatanism what he did. Nevertheless, stress also that he was bared of all means that he had to run up debts and so on. But then do not forget that he unselfishly became completely one with the illness he faced.

Hence, one could say, if he used everything that nature gave him for the sick person, the most important remedy would be love above all. Not the substances heal, he said, but love.—Love also worked from him onto the sick person, because he completely saw himself transported in the nature of the other human being. The second what had to arise from him by his especially intimate relation to nature was that he beheld the effective means in any single case that he applied; he beheld it developing its forces in the human organism. From it, the second arose to him: confident hope. He calls love and hope his best healing powers, and he never set himself to work without love and hope. The man who walked around as a vagrant was completely filled with the most unselfish love. However, he often had weird experiences. His love went so far that he cured those free of charge who had no money. However, he also had to live on something. Some people often cheated him out of his fee; then he went on and did not care. However, also collisions happened with the surroundings. Thus, the following occurred to him, for example.

When he was in Basel, because he was later appointed city doctor, also like by a kind of error, he accomplished some famous cures. Once he was called to a Canon Lichtenfels who had an illness that nobody could cure. Paracelsus had stipulated a fee of hundred thalers if he cured him; the canon agreed. Then Paracelsus gave him the remedy, and after three or four times the illness was cured.

There the canon meant if this was done so easily, he also does not pay the hundred thalers,—and Paracelsus was left with nothing. He sued the canon to set an example; but he did not win his case at the Basel court: he should keep to his rate. Then he distributed, as one said, bad flyers against the court and especially against the canon. This bred bad blood. A friend drew his attention to the fact that his stay was no longer safe in Basel. Then he fled in the dead of night from Basel. Had he gone half an hour later, he would have been imprisoned.

Someone who knows the peculiar life of this person understands the impression deeply penetrating into our hearts originating from the picture that comes from Paracelsus' last years: a picture that shows a face in which a lot of spiritual is expressed. He experienced a lot, but at the same time, the life badgered this soul and this body badly. On one side, you notice the suffering, relatively young man with the old features, wrinkles, and baldness and which struggle and striving which essence of the whole time evolution were in Paracelsus and on the other side, how he had to experience the tragic of a human being who confronted his time this way. Even if it is a legend, what should have happened in Salzburg that the Salzburg doctors would have decided once to incite one of his servants to precipitate Paracelsus from a rock who thereby met his death and was carried to his house. Even if that is not true, the life of Paracelsus was already in such a way that one must not split his skull; one worried his life out so that we understand his early death completely.

Such a man like Paracelsus made a deep impression on all who searched the way to the spiritual worlds in the next time. Someone who knows Goethe's life feels that Paracelsus whom Goethe got to know soon made a deep impression on him. Goethe had grown together like Paracelsus as it were with the surrounding nature. On another occasion, I have already told that Goethe showed this emotional attachment as a seven-year-old boy while he built an altar, rejecting everything that he has as religious explanations about nature from his surroundings. He took a music stand, laid minerals of his father's collection and plants on it, waited for the sun rise in the morning, collected the sun beams with a burning glass and lighted a little aromatic candle, which he had put on top, to light a sacrificial fire which was kindled in nature itself, and offered a sacrifice to the God of the big nature that way. This affinity to nature appears with Goethe so early and develops later into the great, also clairvoyant ideas about nature. We see in Goethe who is already in Weimar this way of thinking working on in the prose hymn To Nature: “Nature! We are surrounded and embraced by her, we are unable to escape her, and unable to penetrate deeper into her. Uninvited and unwarned she takes us along in the circulation of her dance until we are tired and fall from her arms ...”

Also in another way, we see a lot of resemblance between Goethe and Paracelsus. He becomes a true student of nature in botany and zoology. We realise how he tries to recognise the being of the objects of nature on his Italian Journey spiritually observing how the single appears in its variety. It is nice as he sees the innocent coltsfoot transformed which he knows from Germany. There he learns how the outer forms can express the same being in various way. Thus we realise that he wanted to recognise—everywhere searching the unity in the variety—the uniform as the spirit. It is significant what he writes from Rome to his friend Knebel (Karl Ludwig von K., 1744–1834) in Weimar on 18 August 1787: “After I have seen many plants and fish near Naples and in Sicily, I would be tempted if I were ten years younger to travel to India, not to discover anything new, but to look at the discovered in my way.” He wants to behold intuitively spiritually what spreads out in the sensory world. Paracelsus headed for the spirit in nature, Goethe headed for the spirit.

No wonder, hence, that Paracelsus' life appeared beside Faust's life vividly in Goethe's soul. If we open ourselves to Goethe's life especially, his Faust stands not only as the Faust of the sixteenth century before us who was a kind of contemporary of Paracelsus in a certain respect, but Paracelsus himself stands before us as he worked on Goethe. We have something in the Faust figure in which Paracelsus played a part. Why did Goethe resort to Faust?—One tells in the legend of Faust that he laid the Bible behind the bank for a while, became a doctor of medicine, and wanted to study the forces of nature.

Indeed, we realise that Paracelsus remained loyal to the Bible and was even a Bible-expert, but we see him laying the old medical authorities, Galen, Avicenna and others “behind the bank,” even burnt them once and went directly to the book of nature. This trait did a big impression on Goethe. And further: do we not see a similar trait when Faust translates the Bible into his “beloved German,” so that that which comes from it can directly flow into his soul, and when Paracelsus translates that into his beloved German which natural science is to him? We could state some other traits that would show that in Goethe something of the reappeared Paracelsus lived when he created the Faust figure. Yes, one would like to say, one sees in the Faust—Goethe translates it only into the ideal—what often happened between Paracelsus and his honest father when they were together, where Faust tells how he had contact with his father. Briefly, we can look at Paracelsus if Faust works as a figure of the Goethean creating on us.

While we have both figures beside ourselves, something faces us that shows in peculiar way how Goethe could make something quite different from the Faust figure as from the Paracelsus figure of the sixteenth century. If we look at the Goethean Faust, he is dissatisfied about what the different sciences, medicine, theology and so on can give him. However, Goethe can present this Faust not in such a way that we see the immediate settling in nature. Goethe could do it, but there had to be something for him, why he did not do it. Why did he not do it?

There it is remarkable at first, what is not only an outer fact that Paracelsus died with a harmonious soul that has grown together with the spirit of nature in the years in which we can imagine Faust saying the words:

I've studied now, to my regret,
Philosophy, Law, Medicine,
and—what is worse—Theology
from end to end with diligence ...
(Verses 355–357)

What now Faust further experiences, he experiences it in an age which Paracelsus did not reach in the physical world. Therefore, Goethe presents a kind of Paracelsus as it were from the age on in which Paracelsus died, but a Paracelsus who could not settle in the living spirit of nature.

How does he present him? Although he shows that Faust found a deep understanding of nature, also a kind of feeling related with nature, it is different than it was with Paracelsus. We feel this, when Faust speaks to the spirit of nature:

Spirit sublime, all that for which I prayed,
all that you now have granted me
you showed your face to me, but not in vain.
You gave me for my realm all Nature's splendour,
with power to feel and to enjoy it. You grant
not only awed, aloof acquaintanceship,
you let me look deep down into her heart
as if it were the bosom of a friend.
You lead the ranks of living beings past me,
and teach me thus to know my fellow creatures
in air and water and in silent wood.
(Verses 3217–3227)

Faust grows together with her in a way, because he was separated from nature before. Nevertheless, Goethe cannot show that Faust penetrates so vividly into the details of nature as Paracelsus penetrated; he cannot show that this happens at once, while he speaks to the sublime spirit of nature. Goethe cannot show how Faust would grow together with nature, but he must show an inner soul development. Faust has to go through a merely mental-spiritual development to reach the depths of the creating of nature and world. Thus, we realise with this way of Faust, although he often reminds of Paracelsus, that everything that Faust experiences is experienced in the moral, in the intellectual, in the emotional life, and not like with Paracelsus with whom as it were the feelers reach nature. It had really to happen that Faust could ascend to unselfishness, to the intimate love of the spiritual at the end of the second part, not while he grows together with nature, but goes even farther away from her. Goethe lets Faust go blind:

The darkness seems to press about me more and more,

But in my inner being there is radiant light.
(Verses 11,499#8211;11,500)

Faust becomes a mystic, he develops the soul in all directions, and he faces the resisting Mephistophelean forces. Briefly, Faust must develop purely inside his soul, has to raise the spirit in his soul. When this spirit is raised inside, the manifest to the senses is destroyed even with Faust because he goes blind: “But in my inner being there is radiant light.”

Faust realises—we recognise this at the end of the drama—that the spirit working in nature forces up the inner soul forces if the human being develops them. If this spirit is developed enough, the human being directly attains what penetrates as something spiritual the human being and nature.

Thus, Goethe let his Faust experience an inner soul path so that his Faust comes to the same goal to which Paracelsus came. If one thinks about what induced it, one realises that the powers of time cause the successive epochs of development, the historical life.

One recognises then what it means that the year of Paracelsus' death is something before that big revolution which the work of Copernicus caused for the outer natural science. Paracelsus' life still falls into the time in which it was right that the earth was stationary in the universe that the sun walks around it, and so on; this still worked beyond Paracelsus. Only after his death, the quite different kind of the view of the solar system and the world system prevailed. People literally lost the ground. Someone who regards the Copernican world system as a matter of course today gets no idea of that storm which broke out when the earth “was set in motion.” One can say, the ground under the feet faltered literally. But that also caused that the spirit did no longer stream immediately like an aroma into the soul as with Paracelsus. If Copernicus had confined himself to that which the senses perceive, he would never have put up his world system. Because he did not trust in the senses, he could put up his world system, while he exceeded the sensory appearance with intellect and reason. The course of development was this way. The human being had to develop his mind and his reason immediately. The times since the sixteenth century have passed not without effect.

While Goethe had to lift his Faust out of a Paracelsus figure of the sixteenth century to a Faust figure of the eighteenth, he had to consider that the human being could no longer be connected with nature in such an immediate and primitive way as Paracelsus was. Hence, Faust became a figure that could not discover the forces of existence, the sense of being by the immediate connection with nature but by the hidden forces from the depths of the soul.

However, at the same time the essentials appear that in the human being the stream of existence does not pass by insignificantly. Paracelsus is a son of his time as a great, superior figure. Goethe created a figure in his Faust poetically, which he made the son of his time in a certain direction which learnt to use reason and intellect in the natural sciences of his time, and which could work out the mystic. Hence, one has to say, because Goethe felt pressured into presenting not a Paracelsus figure but another figure, the deep caesura appears in the development of the European humanity in this period. The importance of such a caesura even appears in the greatest geniuses, and in the difference between these both figures. It is interesting for someone who wants to get to know Goethe to the highest degree to look at his creating in the Faust figure, because his Faust informs us about Goethe more than his other figures.

If we look at spiritual science from these observations, it can feel intimately related with Goethe, but can also feel intimately related with Paracelsus in another way. How with Paracelsus? Paracelsus could receive the deepest insights into nature from the developed forces of his soul by immediate contact with nature. However, this time in which one was able to do this is past since Copernicus, Galilei, Giordano Bruno and Kepler. Another time has begun. In his Faust Goethe showed the type of this time in which one has to work with the hidden soul forces, so that higher sensory forces come into being from the depths of the soul. As the eyes see the colours as the ears hear the tones, these higher senses perceive the spirit in the surroundings and that which one cannot behold as spirit with the usual senses.

Thus, the modern human being has to experience the deeper soul forces, while he does not grow together with nature as Paracelsus did but while he turns away from her. However, if he gets around to bringing up the deeper forces from his soul, to developing an understanding also of what lives invisibly as a spiritual and supersensible behind the visible, behind the sensory nature, if the human being works out the Faustian from himself, then the Faustian becomes the clairvoyant insight into nature. In a way any human being can experience developing the inner spirit that he can say indeed—even if he cannot believe to have solved the riddles of the world by what his eyes and outer senses teach him: “But in my inner being there is radiant light.” This can lead us to the spirit that prevails in everything.

Thus, the way from Paracelsus to Goethe is extremely interesting if one sees reviving in the Faust figure from Goethe's soul what for Paracelsus what also for Faust is the essentials is: the fact that the human being can penetrate into the depths of the world and into the laws with which the everlasting immortal spirit of the human being is related not by the outer senses, but only by an immediate connection with nature, as with Paracelsus, or by a development of higher senses, as Goethe poetically indicated in the continuation of the Faust figure of the sixteenth century. That is why for Paracelsus that became more and more a principle that then Goethe stressed for his Faust with the words:

Nature, mysterious in day's clear light,
lets none remove her veil,
and what she won't reveal to your mind,
you can't extort from her with levers and with screws.
(Verses 671–674)

With it one does not mean—neither in the sense of Paracelsus nor in that of Goethe—that one could not investigate the spirit of nature, but that the spirit reveals itself in nature, indeed, to the spirit woken in the soul, but not to the instruments which we have in the laboratory, not to the levers and the screws. Hence, Goethe says: “What she won't reveal to your mind, you can't extort from her with levers and with screws.” But to the spirit she can reveal it. This is the right interpretation of this Goethean word. Since Goethe agreed absolutely with Paracelsus, while he created a reflection of Paracelsus in his Faust, and Paracelsus together with Goethe would have regarded the spirited words as valid:

to understand some living thing and to describe it,
the student starts by ridding it of its spirit;
he then holds all its parts within his hand,
except, alas! For the spirit that bound them together.

Goethe adds, namely, when he conceived his Faust first, because he himself was still in high spirits in a juvenile way and did not belong to the “extremely clean and superfine” people in the sense of Paracelsus:

which chemists, unaware they're being ridiculous,
denominate encheiresin naturae.
(Verses 1936–1941)

However, this wants to say that nobody who wants to approach nature without developed higher cognitive forces can recognise the primal grounds of nature and cannot recognise how the immortal spirit of the human being is connected with nature, or to speak with Jacob Böhme where it comes into being (German: urständet).

If one covers the way from Paracelsus to Goethe as we have tried to outline it today, then you realise that Paracelsus and Goethe are living confessors of the other principle, not of the principle of those views of nature and world which they wanted to meet with the Goethean saying:

To understand some living thing and to describe it,
The student starts by ridding it of its spirit;
He then holds all its parts within his hand,
Except, alas! For the spirit that bound them together.

No! Paracelsus and Goethe approach nature and the human being in such a way that for them counts:

Who wants to recognise and understand some living thing,
looks for the spiritual light in primal grounds.
There he holds all its parts within his hand,
And never will he misjudge
The truth of the things within the spiritual tie.

WE spoke yesterday about the various incarnations of our Planet, about the Saturn and Sun incarnations, and we will only briefly bring to mind that man on the Sun-planet, the forerunner of our Earth, was developed to the degree of having a physical body and an etheric body, that he had therefore risen to a kind of plant-existence. I have also told you how different this plant existence was from that which you know in the surrounding plant world today. We shall see that plants as they surround you today have only arisen on our planet Earth. We have also to a certain extent described how these human ancestors on the Sun, inasmuch as they had an etheric body, brought to expression in the physical body chiefly those organs which we know nowadays as the glandular organs of growth, reproduction and nutrition. All this was to be seen on the Sun as on our Earth we see rocks, stones and plants. There was in addition a kingdom that we can call a backward Saturn kingdom, which contained the elements of the later mineral. There is no question of mineral as we know it today being present on the Sun, but there were bodies which had not acquired the power of receiving an etheric body and which had therefore in a certain respect remained behind at the mineral stage that man had formerly passed through on Saturn. We must therefore speak of two kingdoms as being formed on the Sun. People have become accustomed in theosophical writings to say that man has gone through the mineral, the plant and the animal kingdoms. You see that is an inexact way of talking, the mineral kingdom on Saturn was quite differently formed. In its formations the first germs, the earliest indications of our sense organs were prefigured. Nor was there a plant kingdom on the Sun like the present one, but all that lives in man today as organs of growth was of a plant-like nature, i.e., all glandular organs; they were plant-like because they were permeated by an etheric body.

Now we must imagine that this Sun-existence passed through a kind of sleep condition, a darkening, a dormant period. You must not think, however, that the passing of a planet through a sleep-condition meant a sort of inactivity, a condition of nothingness. It is just as little inactive as the Devachan condition of man. The human Devachanic state is no inactive one; on the contrary, we have seen that man exists there in continuous activity, and co-operates in the development of our Earth in the most important way. It is only for the modern consciousness of man a kind of sleep state; for another consciousness, however, it appears as a much more active, more real condition. All these transition periods denote a passing through celestial, higher conditions in which important things for the planets are carried out. The theosophical expression for them is “Pralaya.”

We will now imagine that the Sun has passed through such a condition and that from the Sun there has developed the third stage of our Earth, called in occultism the Moon. If we had been able to observe this process, we should have been shown somewhat as follows: We should have seen in the course of millions of years the Sun existence change and disappear, and after further millions of years light up again after a twilight state. That is the beginning of the Moon Cycle.

When the Sun first lit up again there was no question of a division between Sun and Moon, they were still together as in the Sun period. And next there came about what one calls a recapitulation of the earlier conditions; what had taken place on Saturn and the Sun was recapitulated at a certain higher stage. Then a remarkable alteration took place in the condition of this newly emerged Sun. The Moon gathered itself into a globular mass apart from the Sun; two planets, or rather a fixed star and a planet arose from the old Sun system, a larger and a smaller body were formed: Sun and Moon.

The Moon of which we now speak contained not only what the present moon contains, but rather all the various substances and beings contained in the present earth and moon. If you were to stir all this together you would have that Moon of which we are speaking and which at that time had separated itself from the Sun.

The Sun became a fixed Star by reason of taking out the best substances together with the spiritual beings. As long as it was a planetary Sun it still contained all of this within itself. But since it now gave up to an independent planet everything that had hindered the beings in their higher development it became a Fixed Star. And now we have the cosmic scene before us of a higher evolved body as Fixed Star and moving round this in space a planet that is of lesser worth-the Moon-containing in itself the present moon and present earth.

This movement of the Moon round the Sun was quite different from the movement of our present earth. If you examine this you can distinguish two movements. First, the earth revolves round the Sun, and secondly round itself. Through the latter movement which takes place approximately 365 times in a year, arises, as you know, day and night, and through the former arise the four seasons. This, however, was not the case on the Old Moon. That Moon was in a certain respect a more polite body to its Sun than our earth is, for it always moved round the Sun in such a way as to show it the same side, it never turned its back upon it. While it passed once round the Sun it turned only once round itself Such a different kind of movement, however, had a great effect on the beings who were evolving on the planet.

Now I will describe to you the Moon planet itself. Here I must say, first of all, that the human being was again a little more advanced than on the Sun or Saturn. He had come so far as to consist not only of physical body and etheric body, but there was now the astral body in addition. We therefore now have a human being formed of physical body, etheric body, and astral body, but as yet no ego. The consequence was that the Moon human beings progressed to the third state of consciousness we have described, the picture consciousness, the last relic of which we have in the dream-picture-consciousness of man today. By virtue of the incorporation of the astral body into the other bodies, changes took place in these, and especially in the physical body. We have seen that on the Sun the glandular organs were the most highly developed part of the physical body, and that certain places were interpenetrated by currents which later hardened to the present solar-plexus. Through the work of the astral body upon the physical body on the Moon arose the first beginnings of the nervous system; the nerves attached themselves in a way similar to what you have today in the nerves of the spine.

Now consider one thing; man had as yet no independent. Ego, only the three other bodies were independent. This human ego was in the atmosphere surrounding the Moon, just as formerly the etheric body had been on Saturn and the astral body on the Sun, and from there this ego, embedded in its divine origin, worked upon the physical body. If we remember that at that time the ego still worked as a companion of divine beings, that it had not yet emancipated itself, fallen out from this divine spiritual essentiality, then we see that the ego in its path to earth has undergone in a certain way a kind of deterioration and in a certain way also an advance. An advance inasmuch as the ego has become independent, a deterioration, however, since it has now become exposed to all doubt, errors, wickedness and evil.

The egos worked from the divine-spiritual substance. If an ego works down today from the astral plane on to the physical body, it is a group-soul of the animals. The ego worked at that time into the three bodies from outside as these group-souls today work into the animals. It could, however, create higher bodies than those of the present animal kingdom since it worked from the divine substance. There were living beings on the Moon which in appearance and in their whole nature stood higher than the highest apes today, but not so high as the present man. There was an intermediate kingdom between present man and the animal kingdom. Then there were two more kingdoms, both of which had remained behind. One of these had not been capable of taking up the astral body after the Sun existence and had therefore remained at the stage in which the glandular organs were on the Sun. This second kingdom of the Moon stood between the present animals and the present plants; it was a kind of plant-animal. There exists today on earth no directly similar creature, we can only recognise rudiments of it. There was still a third kingdom, which had preserved the Saturn condition, even on the Sun; it stood between mineral and plant. Thus on the Moon we have three kingdoms: plant-mineral, animal-plant and man-animal.

The minerals of today on which we walk about did not exist on the Moon; there were not as yet what we call rocks, arable land, humus. The lowest kingdom stood between plant and mineral. The whole substance of the Moon consisted of this kingdom. The Moon surface somewhat resembled a peaty soil, on which there were also plants forming a kind of pulpy plant-mass. The Moon-beings went about on a vegetable-mineral mass of a pulp-like consistency. This was the state on the Moon during certain periods of its development-one could also compare it with a boiled lettuce. There were no rocks in the present sense, the nearest approach were certain formations occurring here and there which you can compare with the growths formed by the wood or the bark of certain trees. The Moon-mountains consisted of such lignification, such wooden masses of lignified plant-pulp. It was like a kind of aged plant grown dry. This was the earliest beginnings of the mineral kingdom and upon it flourished those plant-animals; they could make no independent movements, they were fixed to the ground, as the corals are today.

In our myths and sagas, in which lies deep wisdom given by initiates, a memory is preserved of this, and above all in the legend of the death of Baldur. The Germanic Sun-god or god of Light had once a dream in which his approaching death was foretold to him. That made the gods, the Asen, who loved him, very sad; they pondered over means of saving him. The Mother of the gods, Frigga, put all the beings of the earth on solemn oath that not one of them would ever kill Baldur; they all swore and so it seemed impossible that Baldur should ever fall a victim to death. On one occasion the gods were at play, and during the game they threw every possible sort of thing at Baldur without hurting him, they knew that he was invulnerable. Loki, the god of darkness, the opponent of the Asen, cogitated, however, on how to kill Baldur. Then he heard from Frigga that she had made all beings swear not to kill him. Quite outside, however, there was a plant, the mistletoe, which was unaffected, this she disclosed to him; she had administered no oath to it. The crafty Loki took the mistletoe, brought it to the blind god, Hödur, and he, not knowing what he did, killed Baldur with it. So the evil dream was fulfilled through the mistletoe. It has always played a special role in popular custom, something sinister, ghostly, was expressed through it. What was taught about the mistletoe in the old Trotten and Druid Mysteries passed over to the populace as legend and custom.

These are the facts: On the Moon there was this mineral-plant pulp and upon it flourished the plant-animals of the Moon. Now there were some who evolved further and reached a higher condition on the Earth; others, however, had stayed behind at the Moon stage, and as the Earth arose could only assume a stunted form, they had to preserve the habits they had on the Moon. On Earth they could only live as spongers, parasites, on a plant-like foundation. So the mistletoe lives on other trees, since it is a relic left behind of the old plant-animals of the Moon.

Baldur was the expression of what evolves further, of what brings light to the Earth; Loki, on the contrary, the representative of the dark forces, the backward forces, hates what has progressed, has gone on developing; therefore Loki is the opponent of Baldur. None of the creatures of Earth could undertake anything against Baldur, the god who gave light to the Earth, for they were his equals, they had undergone evolution. Only a being still at the Moon-stage and feeling itself united with the ancient god of darkness was capable of killing the god of light. The mistletoe is also a definite curative remedy, as are poisons in general. Thus do we find deep facts of cosmic wisdom in the old folklore and customs.

Now we call to mind the beings on Saturn who had the Ego as the outermost body, and remember that on the Sun there were such as had the astral body as their external sheath. On the Moon there were beings whose external sheath was the etheric body. They consisted of etheric body, astral body, ego, Spirit-self, Life-spirit and Spirit-man and of one member more, the eighth, of which we cannot yet speak in the case of man, the Holy Spirit. We could only have seen them as phantom-like beings in their etheric body; they had at that time the same degree of evolution as man today possesses. Christian esotericism calls them Angels. They are beings who today stand directly above man since they have evolved to the stage of the Holy Spirit; one also calls them Spirits of Twilight or the Lunar Pitris. The Spirits of Ego-hood on Saturn had as their Leader a Being whom man calls the Father-God. The Spirits of Fire on the Sun had as their Leader the Christ, or in the sense of St. John's Gospel, the Logos. On the Moon the Leader was the same Spirit as is known in Christianity as the Holy Ghost. Those beings who had passed through the human stage on the Moon had no need to descend as far as the physical body here on the Earth.

The planetary formations had become ever denser and denser. Old Saturn in its densest state had only a warmth consistency. The Sun in its densest state consisted of what we see today in gases, in air. You must, to be sure, picture these substances as somewhat denser than the present warmth-substance and the gases. And in the Moon-stage the gaseous substances of the Sun had so far densified that they produced that pulpy, thickish, fluid flowing mass of which all the beings, even the highest, the animal-men, consisted on the Moon. You have more or less this substance if you imagine the white of a hen's egg, somewhat thickened, and into this substance of the human being the nervous system was incorporated.

The Moon was surrounded by a kind of atmosphere formed quite differently from that of the Earth. We understand its character if we think of a passage in Goethe's Faust; it is where he wants to conjure up the spirits, he wants to make fire-air—air in which watery, mist-like substances are dissolved, which would then enable spirit beings to incorporate in it. This air permeated by watery substances (one calls it Fire-air, or Fire-mist) was breathed by the beings of the Moon. They had no lungs, even the highest beings breathed through something akin to gills, as present-day fishes do.

This fire-air, called “Ruach” in the Hebrew tradition, can actually be made manifest in a certain way. “Ruach” has been lost to modern man, the old alchemists could, however, set up the necessary conditions for it, and could bring elemental beings into their service by its means. This fire-mist was thus something fully known in the old alchemical times, and the farther back we go, the more power had man to produce it. Our forefathers on the Moon breathed fire-mist. It has evolved further, has differentiated itself into our present air and into whatever has arisen on the Earth under the influence of fire.

The smoke-like, steam-like Moon atmosphere, which had a certain degree of heat, was interpenetrated, at certain times more, at others less, by currents which hung down from the air somewhat like cords, and sank into the human bodies and permeated them. The human body on the Moon hung on a kind of strand, which extended into the atmosphere, as today the child in the maternal body hangs on the navel-cord. It was like a cosmic navel-cord and out of the fire-mist substances entered the bodies comparable to what man himself creates today with the blood. The “I,” however, was outside man and sent through these cords into the bodies something similar to blood, and this substance streamed in and out of them. The beings never came in contact with the Moon-surface, they hovered and circled around it, as if they were flowing and floating. The Moon men-animals moved as the present water animals move in water. It was the work of the angels, the Spirits of Twilight, to let these blood-juices flow into the human beings.

These very different conditions had another consequence. On the Moon a kind of blood-system began. From the cosmos there streamed in and out a substance resembling blood, as now the air streams in and out of the body, and there also arose for these Moon-men a capacity which only appears with the blood. This was the first sounding of inner tones for experiences of the soul. It is only when beings possess an astral body, that sensation arises, and they could express this sensation in tones, and indeed in a remarkable way. They were not definitely formed sounds, they could not have cried out with pain, there was no independence of giving vent to sound, of crying out, but it occurred simultaneously with certain experiences. At definite seasons there took place on the Moon what one could call a development of the propagation impulses, and the inner experiences of the beings at those times could be expressed in sound; otherwise they were silent. At a definite position of the Moon to the Sun, in a certain season, the Old Moon sounded forth into the cosmos. The beings upon it cried out their germinative power into the cosmos. We have relics of this preserved in the cries of certain animals, of the stag, for instance. The cry was more the precipitation of general processes, not of individual experiences which are voluntarily expressed. A cosmic event was finding its expression.

We must take all this as but approximate description, for we are bound to words which are coined for things only come into existence in our Earth period. We should first have to invent a language if we would express what is seen by the eye of the Seer. All the same these descriptions are important, for they are the first way of coming to the truth. Only through pictures, through imagination do we find the way to vision. We should make no abstract concepts, mechanical schemes, nor draw up diagrams of vibrations, but let pictures arise within us; that is the direct path, the first stage of knowledge. For as surely as man was present at that time with his forces, so true is it that if he pictures things to himself, this will guide him to the conditions in which he then existed.

After all the beings on the Moon had passed through their evolution and could ascend to higher stages, the time came when Moon and Sun again united, reverted to one body and so entered into Pralaya. And then after they had gone through this dormant state together, a new existence shone out, the earliest proclamation of our Earth-existence.

Now followed a short recapitulation of the first three conditions on a higher level. First the Saturn existence, then the Sun, and then the Moon once more split off and circled round the other body. But this Moon still had the Earth within it.

Then comes a further highly important change. All that is Earth threw out of itself the present moon. That means the worst substances and beings, the unserviceable, and these are contained in the present moon. All that was flowing watery substance in the Old Moon, is frozen on the present moon (that can be proved by physical means); and what was capable of developing further remained behind as Earth. Higher development takes place on the Earth through the separation of the Old Sun into these three bodies: Sun, Moon and Earth.

This separation happened millions of years ago, in the old Lemurian time. And from those ancient Moon-beings, which have been described as plant-mineral, plant-animals and animal-men have arisen the present mineral, the present plant, the present animal and the man who has become able to receive into himself the Ego which formerly hovered around him and was united with the Godhead. The union of the I with the human being took place after the separation of Sun, Moon and Earth, and from this point of time onwards Man has been capable of developing the red blood in himself, and of ascending to the level he has reached today.

The Christmas festival which we are about to celebrate is given deep significance again and a new life in the spirit with the anthroposophical view of the world. Spiritually, the Christmas festival is a sun festival, and it is as a sun festival that we shall meet it today. To begin with, let us hear the most wonderful apostrophe⁸¹ addressed to the sun, words Goethe wrote for his Faust:

The throb of life returns, with pulses beating Soft to ethereal dawn. O steadfast earth,
True through the night, you waited for my greeting,
Breathing beneath my feet in glad new birth,
And, clothing me afresh in joy of living,
In high resolve that banishes misgiving,
You stir my soul to prove life’s utmost worth.—

In gold of dawn the quickened world lies gleaming,
The forest is alive with myriad voices,
Through dell and vale the misty shapes are teeming,
But nature’s deepest heart in light rejoices;
Now burgeon, freshly quivering, frond and bough,
Sprung from the fragrant depth where they lay dreaming;
On flower and blade hang trembling pearls, and now Each colour stands out clear, in glad device,
And all the region is my Paradise.

Look up on high!—The giant peaks that stand In joy of light above the mountain-brow,
Are heralds of the solemn hour at hand,
That brings the blessing down upon our land.
Already, down the soft eternal stair,
The shine has reached the lower Alpine sward,
Where clarity and brilliance are restored,
As downward, step by step, the light is poured—
The dazzling sun strides forth, and fills the air.
I turn, from greater power than eyes can bear.

And thus it is, when hope with earnest striving Has toiled in aims as high as man may dare,
Fulfilment’s open gates give promise fair,
But from those everlasting depths comes driving,
A fiery blast that takes us unaware:
We thought to light life’s torch, but now, depriving Our highest hope, a sea of fire surrounds us.
Such fire! Of love? Or the fierce glow of hate?
The blend of joy and sorrow that confounds us Sends us to earth: to veil our troubled state,
For benefice of Spring we supplicate.

And so I turn, the sun upon my shoulders,
To watch the waterfall, with heart elate,
The cataract pouring, crashing from the boulders,
Split and rejoined a thousand times in spate;
The thunderous water seethes in fleecy spume,
Lifted on high in many a flying plume,
Above the spray-drenched air. And then how splendid To see the rainbow rising from this rage,
Now clear, now dimmed, in cool sweet vapour blended.
So strive the figures on our mortal stage.
This ponder well, the mystery closer seeing;
In mirrored hues we have our life and being.⁸²

These are the tremendous words Goethe lets his representative of humanity utter as the sun rises in the morning. It is not this sun, however, awakening anew every morning, which we are considering in connection with the festival of which we want to speak today. We want to let the true nature of the sun influence us in a much deeper sense. And the reality of that sun shall be our lodestar today.

We shall now hear the words that reflect the most profound meaning of the Christmas mystery. These words sounded as the pupils listened in deep devotion in the mysteries of all ages, hearing them before they were permitted to enter into the mysteries themselves.

Behold the sun
At the midnight hour!
In the lifeless ground
Build thy rocky tower!

So, when in depths thou mourn,
Find thou in death’s dark night
Creation’s pulse new-born With living morning light.

The powers on high make known
The eternal word divine;
The deeps must guard their own—
Peace, in their sacred shrine.

In gloom thou livest—
Create anew a sun!
In matter weaves—
Know spirit-bliss begun!⁸³

The Christmas festival was known and celebrated in all the mysteries of earliest times everywhere. It is not a mere sun feast but one that takes humanity to true perception or at least an idea of the wellsprings of existence. It was celebrated annually by the highest initiates in the mysteries at the time when the sun sent the least energy to the earth, gave the least warmth. It was also celebrated by those who could not yet take part in the whole of it, but knew only an outer reflection of the most sublime mysteries, a reflection in the form of images. And these secrets from the mysteries have survived through the ages and assumed a different garb among different peoples, depending on their beliefs. Christmas is the name given to the solemn night, this holy night celebrated in the great mysteries. These were occasions when the initiator would let the higher human being be resurrected in those who had been adequately prepared, or, to put it in present-day terms, when the living Christ was born in the inner human being.

People who do not know that spiritual principles are at work as well as chemical and physical principles, and that like chemical and physical principles these have their particular seasons in the cosmos, people like this are the only ones able to believe that it does not matter when the higher self is awakened. The essence of the great mysteries was that human beings lived through an event in which they were allowed to see the creative powers in the glory of colour, in bright light; were permitted to see the world around them filled with spiritual qualities, with many spirits; were permitted to see the world of spirits around them, and had the greatest experience a human being can have. One day this moment will come for all and everyone. All will know it, though perhaps only after many incarnations—but the time will come for all and everyone when the Christ will rise within them and new seeing, new hearing will awaken in them.

Mystery pupils who were being prepared for the awakening would first be taught what this awakening meant in the great universe. After this the final acts would come to bring awakening, and these acts were performed at the time when the darkness was greatest, when the sun was at its lowest in the outside world—at Christmas, for those who knew the true facts in the spirit knew that powers moved through cosmic space at this time that were helpful for such an awakening. During the preparation the pupils would be told that those who truly wished to know must know not only what had been happening on this globe through millennia but must also learn to have an overview of the whole of human evolution. They also had to know that the great festivals had been made part of the year and its seasons by leading spirits and that they must devote themselves to looking up to the great eternal truths.

The eye was guided to roam over millions of years. Look to the time, the pupils would be told, when our earth was not yet the way it is now, when there was no sun as yet, no moon, but the two were still one with the earth; when the earth was still one body with the sun and the moon. Human beings were there at that time, but they did not yet have a body. They were spiritual entities, and no light of the sun fell on those human souls and spirits from outside. The light of the sun was in the earth itself. It was not like the sunlight of today, which falls on creatures and objects from the outside. It was a light that had power of spirit in it, and shone forth at the same time in the inner life of every human being. Then came the time when the sun moved away from the earth. It separated from the earth and its light then fell on the earth from outside. The sun had withdrawn from the earth. Darkness had come to the inner human being.

This was where the human race began to evolve towards the future point in time when they would find the inner light shining again within them. Humanity had to gain knowledge of the things of this earth, using the outer senses. Human evolution tended towards the time when the higher human being, the spirit human being, would once again be aglow and alight within. From the light through the darkness to the light—that is the course of human evolution.

When the pupils had been prepared they would be guided towards awakening at the moment in time when as a chosen group they were to have an inner experience of something which the rest of humanity is only to experience in the distant future. Then they would see the light of the spirit with eyes that had been opened in the spirit. This solemn moment was to come when outer light was weakest, on the day when the sun shone least in the outside world. Then, on that day, the pupils of the mysteries would be brought together, and the inner light would open up for them.

Others who were not yet able to take part in this celebration were to have at least an outer image that would tell them: ‘You, too, shall one day know this great moment. Today you see an image. Later you shall experience the event you now see in the image.’

Those were the lesser mysteries. They would show a reflection of what the initiate would experience at a later time. Today we’ll share in the experience of what happened in the lesser mysteries around the midnight hour. It was the same everywhere—in the Egyptian mysteries, the Eleusinian mysteries, the mysteries of Asia Minor, in the Babylonian and Chaldean mysteries and also in those of Persian Mithra worship and the Indian Brahma mysteries. Everywhere the pupils of those mystery centres would have the same experience around the midnight hour of that solemn night.

They would gather in good time on the eve of the event. In quiet thought they had to gain insight into the significance of this, the most important event. They would sit in absolute silence, having gathered in the dark. When midnight approached they would have been sitting in the dark room for hours. Thoughts of eternity went through their inmost minds. Then, towards midnight, mysterious sounds would arise, flooding the room, growing louder and then softer again. Hearing these sounds the pupils would know it to be the music of the spheres. Profound, solemn devotion filled their hearts. Then a faint light would come from a dimly lit disk. Those who saw it would know that this disk represented the earth. The luminous disk would then grow darker and darker until finally it would be quite black. At the same time the room around them would grow progressively lighter. Those who saw it knew that the black disk was the earth. The sun, which otherwise shone through the earth had been obscured. The earth could no longer see the sun. Then halo upon halo would develop around the earth’s disk, in rainbow colours, going outwards. Those who saw this would know that it was the iris.⁸⁴ And around midnight, a luminous reddish violet halo would arise in place of the black earth disk; a word was written on this. The word would be a different one, depending on the nations whose members were allowed to experience the mystery. In our present-day language it would be Christos.⁸⁵ Those who saw it would know it to be the sun. It appeared to them in that midnight hour when the world all around was lying in profound darkness. The pupils would be told that they had now experienced something in images which in the mysteries was called ‘to see the sun around midnight’.

A true initiate truly learned to see the sun around the midnight hour, for the material principle in him had been extinguished. The sun of the spirit alone lived in him, its light shining out over all the darkness of matter.

This was the most blessed moment in human evolution when the human being found himself released from darkness and living in the light of eternity. It was shown as an image in the mysteries, year after year, around the midnight hour of that solemn night. The image showed that there is a sun of the spirit as well as the physical sun, and like the physical sun this must be born from deep darkness. To make it even clearer to them, the pupils were taken to a cave after their experience of the rising sun, the Christos. The cave appeared to contain nothing but rock—dead, lifeless matter. They would then see ears of corn arise from the stones, a sign of life, a symbolic picture of life arising from apparent death, life being born in dead mineral. They would then be told that just as the power of the sun will wax again from this day onward, the day when it appeared to have died, so new life was forever rising from life that was dying.

The same event is referred to in the words ‘He must wax but I must wane’ in the New Testament.⁸⁶ John, herald of the coming Christ, of the light of the spirit when it is at its greatest height in the course of the year at midsummer, this John must wane, and as he wanes the power of the light that is coming waxes, growing more and more powerful as John wanes. Thus the new, the coming life is preparing in the seed which must perish and die so that the new plant may arise.

The inner feeling pupils were meant to develop was that life lies dormant in death, that new, magnificent flowers and fruit arose from death and putrefaction, that the earth was filled with the power to give birth. They had to come to believe that something happens in the inner earth at this time—the overcoming of death through life. When they were shown the conquering light they were shown the life that was present in death. They experienced this inwardly, they lived through this when they saw light arise and shine out in the darkness. They now saw sprouting life in the rock cave, life arising in glorious abundance from something that was seemingly dead.

That is how the pupils were trained to develop this belief in life, and belief in what may be called the greatest human ideal was made to grow in their hearts and minds. They learned to look up to this, the greatest human ideal, to the time when earth will have completed its evolution, when light will be radiant in the whole of humanity. The earth itself will then fall to dust, but its spiritual essence will remain, with all the human beings who have grown inwardly luminous through the light of the spirit. And earth and humanity shall awaken to a higher form of existence, a new stage of existence.

When Christianity arose in the course of evolution, this was its ideal in the highest possible sense. It was inwardly felt that the Christos, being the immortal spirit of the earth, was to appear as the foundation not only of all material, sprouting life, but also of spiritual rebirth, the great ideal of all humanity; that he was born around Christmas time, the time of greatest darkness, as a sign that a higher human being can be born out of the darkness of matter in the human soul. Before people came to speak of a Christos, they would speak of a sun hero in the earlier mysteries; he was seen to be connected with the same ideal as the Christos of Christianity. The individual connected with the ideal was called the sun hero. Just as the sun completes its cycle in the course of the year, as its light increases and decreases, just as its heat seems to be withdrawn from the earth and then radiates again, just as its death holds life, letting it stream forth once again, so the sun hero has become lord over death and night and darkness because of the power of his life in the spirit.

Seven degrees of initiation were known in the Persian Mithras mysteries. The first was the ‘raven’, someone able only to go as far as the portal of the temple of initiation. The ravens became mediators between the material life of the outside world and the spiritual life of the inner world; no longer belonging to the material world they were not yet part of the spiritual world. We find these ravens come up again and again, always playing the same role as messengers going to and fro between the two worlds and conveying knowledge between them. We also have them in our Norse and German myths and legends—Odin’s ravens and the ravens flying around the Kyffhäuser mountain. The second degree, that of the ‘occult person’, took the disciple from the portal into the inner initiation temple. There he matured until he reached the third degree, the ‘protagonist’ who would go out and make known to the world the occult truths he had experienced in the temple. The fourth degree, that of the ‘lion’, was gained when his consciousness was no longer limited to the individual but to a whole tribe. Hence the Christ was known as the ‘lion of Judah’. Someone whose consciousness extended even further, embracing a whole nation, would have reached the fifth degree. He would no longer have a name of his own but would bear the name of the nation. Thus people spoke of a ‘Persian’, or an ‘Israelite’. We can see why Nathanael⁸⁷ was called a ‘true Israelite’; it was because he had reached the fifth degree of initiation. The sixth degree was the ‘sun hero’, and we need to understand what this means. We shall then come to see that pupils in the mysteries would feel a shudder of veneration if they knew something about a sun hero and were able to share in the festival to celebrate the birth of a sun hero at Christmas.

Everything in the cosmos takes its rhythmic course. All the stars follow a great rhythm, as does the sun. If the sun were to abandon this rhythm for even a movement, if it were to leave its orbit for just a moment, this would cause a revolution of unheard-of importance in the whole of the universe. Rhythm governs the whole of nature, from lifeless nature all the way to the human being. We see it in the plant world—a violet, a lily flowering at the same season. Animals are on heat at given times in the year. This changes only in humans. Rhythm, active in powers of growth, reproduction and so on all the way up to the animal world, comes to a halt in human beings.

Humanity is meant to be embedded in freedom, and the more civilized people are the more is this rhythm on the decrease. Just as the light vanishes at Christmas time, so has rhythm apparently completely disappeared from human lives, and chaos prevails. But human beings are meant to bring this rhythm to birth from within and do so on their own initiative. They are meant to shape their lives of their own free will so that they run within rhythmic boundaries. Life’s events are meant to follow one another as firmly and securely as the sun’s orbit. And just as it is unthinkable that the sun’s orbit should ever change, so it should be unthinkable that the rhythm of such a life could be broken.

The sun hero was the embodiment of such a life rhythm. With the strength of the higher human being who had been born in him he gained the strength to govern the rhythm of his own biography. This sun hero was also the Christ Jesus for the first two centuries, and this is why the celebration of his birth was moved to the time when the birthday feast of the sun hero had been celebrated from time immemorial. Hence also everything connected with the life story of Christ Jesus, hence also the midnight mass, celebrated in caves by the early Christians in memory of the sun festival. At this mass, a sea of light shone out in the darkness of midnight in memory of the spirit sun that rose in the mysteries. Hence the story goes that Jesus was born in a stable, in memory of the rock cave out of which life was born in those ears of com that were the symbol for life.

Just as life on earth was born out of dead rock, so was the highest—Christ Jesus—born out of the lowest. The legend of three priestly sages, the three kings from the east, was connected with his birth. They brought gold, the symbol of external power full of wisdom, myrrh, the symbol of life vanquishing death, and incense, symbol of the cosmic ether in which the spirit lives.

In the deeper meaning of the Christmas festival we can therefore sense echoes from man’s earliest times. And this has come down to us in the particular quality which Christianity has. Its symbols reflect the earliest symbols known to humanity. The tree with its candles is such a symbol. It is an image of the tree of paradise for us.⁸⁸ That tree represents the life-giving principle and the gaining of knowledge in paradise. Paradise itself is the whole, complete sphere of material nature. Spiritual nature is represented by the tree in the midst of it, the tree that encompasses knowledge and the tree of life. Knowledge can only be gained at the cost of life.

A story tells us the significance of the tree of knowledge and the tree of life. Seth stood before the gates of paradise and asked to come in. The cherub guarding the entrance let him enter. This is to indicate that Seth became an initiate. When Seth was in paradise he found that the tree of life and the tree of knowledge were firmly intertwined. The archangel Michael, he who stands before god, allowed him to take three seeds from the intertwined tree.

This tree prophesies the future of humanity. When the whole of humanity has gained insight and has been initiated, it will bear within it not only the tree of knowledge but also the other tree, that of life. Death will then be no more. For the time being, however, the initiate was only allowed to take three seeds, the three seeds that signify the higher principles of the human being.

When Adam died, Seth placed the three seeds in his mouth and a flaming tree grew on Adam’s grave. This had the property that new shoots and leaves would grow from any wood cut from it. In the bush’s circle of flame were written the words ehjeh asher ehjeh, meaning ‘I am the one who was, who is and who shall be’. This signifies the principle that goes through all incarnations, the power of man to renew himself, come into existence again and again, descending from the light into the darkness and ascending from the darkness into the light.

The rod Moses used to perform his miracles was cut from the wood of this bush. The gate of Solomon’s temple was made of it. Wood was taken from the bush and put into the pond at Bethesda and gave it the power of which the story tells. And the cross of Christ Jesus was made of this wood, the cross which shows life dying away, life perishing in death which nevertheless has the power in it to bring forth new life. Here we have before us the great symbol for the world—life that overcomes death. The wood of the cross had grown from the three seeds that came from paradise.

The same symbol—of the lower principle dying and the resurrection of the higher principle sprouting forth from it—is also shown in the Rose Cross, and the red roses. Goethe put it in these words:

For as long as you do not have
this word ‘die and become’,
you are but a troubled guest
in the darkness of this earth. ⁸⁹

This is a wonderful connection between the tree of paradise and the wood of the cross! The cross may be a symbol for Easter, but it also deepens the Christmas mood for us. We can feel the new life welling forth in the Christ idea as we contemplate it in the night when Christ Jesus was born. We see the idea reflected in the living roses decorating our tree here. They tell us that the tree of holy night has not yet become the wood of the cross but the power to be this wood is beginning to arise within it. The roses growing among the green are a symbol of the eternal conquering the temporal.

The square of Pythagoras (Fig. 12) is a symbol for the fourfold nature of man—physical body, ether body, astral body and I.

Above it is the tao (Fig. 16), the sign reminding us of the image our earliest ancestors had of God. Before Europe, Asia and Africa were cultivated land, those ancestors lived on Atlantis, which has gone down beneath the waves. Norse mythology still holds memories of Atlantis in the legends of Niflheim, home of mists. For Atlantis did not have clear air. Vast, mighty masses of mist rolled and boiled above the soil, similar to the experience we may have today walking in the clouds and mists at high altitudes. Sun and moon were not clearly visible in the sky. On Atlantis they appeared surrounded by rainbow haloes the sacred iris. People were then still much more able to understand the language of nature. The lapping waves, the sound of the wind in the trees, the whispering leaves, the rumble of thunder still speak to us today, but we no longer understand them. The ancient Atlanteans did. They felt that a divine element was speaking to them in all these things. In the midst of all those speaking clouds and water and leaves and winds a sound reached the ears of the Atlanteans: tao—it is I. The essence of the whole natural world lived in that sound. Atlantis heard it. The tao later became the letter T. The circle at the top is the sign for the all-encompassing nature of God the Father.<.p>

Finally the principle which is present in the whole of the universe and exists as the human being is shown in the symbol of the pentagram (Fig. 17) which we see at the top of the tree. It is not permissible to speak of the deepest sense of the pentagram here and now. It does show us the star of evolving humanity. It is the star, the symbol of the human being which is followed by all who have wisdom, as the priestly wise men did in the distant past. It is the meaning of the earth, the great sun hero who is born in holy night because the most sublime light shines out in the deepest darkness.

Humanity will live on into a future when the light will be born in them; when words pregnant with meaning will give way to others and it will no longer be said that the darkness cannot comprehend the light. Truth will sound out in cosmic space, and the darkness will comprehend the light that shines out for us in the star of humanity. Darkness shall yield and comprehend the light, that is, will be taken hold of by it. And this is meant to sound out for us from our inmost being in the Christmas festival. Only then will we be celebrating Christmas in the right way, for it will then tell us that one day the light of the spirit will shine out from the inmost human being into the whole world. And we’ll then be able to celebrate Christmas as the feast of the most sublime ideal for humanity. It will then have real meaning again, be alive again in our souls, and the Christmas tree, too, will once more have its true meaning as a symbol of the paradise tree, truer than the meanings it is given today, however thoughtful. In our hearts, celebration of holy night will lead to joyful hope and to understanding that yes, I too shall experience within me what we must call the birth of the higher human being; in me, too, the birth of the saviour, of the Christos, will come.

• 81. In rhetoric, a passage where the speaker specifically turns away from the main discourse and addresses a present or absent person or thing.
• 82. Goethe, J. W. Faust 2, Pleasing landscape. Faust speaking. Translated by Philip Wayne. London: Penguin Classics, Penguin Books Ltd 1959.
• 83. Version as found in a notebook entry Rudolf Steiner made in 1906. Different versions appeared in later years. English version given here taken from Steiner R. Verses and Meditations. Translated by F. Melland. London; Rudolf Steiner Press 1979.
• 84. In Greek mythology, Iris was the messenger of the gods. In another set of notes it says: 'an image of St Iris'.
• 85. The Greek ὁ Χριστός means ‘the anointed’, corresponding to the Hebrew ‘the Messias’. The ‘χρηστος’, Chrestos, used by Gnostics and Manicheans means 'the good one'; according to Marcion (early Christian Gnostic, c. 100–165 AD), the most sublime good god as distinct from the demiurgos, the creator god who was merely just. 'Chrestos' was introduced in the 3rd edition of the special German booklet Zeichen und Symbole des Weihnachtsfestes, for Rudolf Steiner used it in the lecture he gave on 14 December 1905 (in GA 54; English in Christmas). The context was a different one, however, and a further review of the original records shows that 'Chrestos' does not appear in any of the sets of notes available to us (Literary Estate Administration in Dornach).
• 86. John 3: 30.
• 87. John 1:47.
• 88. See 'Der Baum des Lebens und der Erkenntnis des Guten und des Bosen. Die Geheimnisse der Kunst' in GA 162.
• 89. In ‘Selige Sehnsucht’, Westöstlicher Diwan.
• 90. Lully (or Lull), Raymond (c. 1232–1315). See Steiner R. World History in the Light of Anthroposophy (GA 233), lectured dated 5 January 1924. Tr. G. & M. Adams. London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1977.

[The beginning of the statement is missing.]

When the selfless stream returns to its starting point in two cyclical outpourings and matter dissolves again, nothing has happened but that it returns enriched to its origin. Only by absorbing and overcoming the selfish current will the unselfish current develop such a strongly vibrating power that it must go beyond itself, that is, beyond the cosmic circle that forms the first meeting of the two currents. A new region will be born out of the selflessness, called forth by it: Paranirvana, the negative matter, because in contrast to matter held within the cosmic circle by attraction, it spreads outwards. One can visualize the process by imagining the swinging of a pendulum. The pendulum swinging forward will immediately swing back and, if it is not stopped by obstacles in its path, will swing so strongly that it goes beyond its starting point – just as a cart rolling forward cannot suddenly stop, but must roll a little further.

With this preparation and gradual development of matter, the material components for a planetary formation would now have been created, but planetary life itself cannot yet arise. So the Logos could not remain in paranirvana; he had to return, and on this return journey he formed the maha-paranirvana region. From here, the Logos had to make the sacrifice and begin the cycle through matter again, so that other life, besides himself, but out of him, could arise.

All life in manifold forms has emerged from the unity, the one Logos. In him, all diversity still rests undivided, undifferentiated, hidden. As soon as he becomes recognizable, perceiving himself as self, he emerges from the absolute, from the undifferentiated, and creates the non-self, his mirror image, the second logos. He animates and invigorates this mirror image; it is his third aspect, the third logos.

Thus, the first Logos would be the undifferentiated, in which life and form rest undivided, to be regarded as the Father. Time begins with his existence; he separates his reflection from himself, the form, the feminine, which he fills with his life, the second Logos; and from this inspiration, the third Logos emerges as son, as animated form. Thus, all religions have conceived of their God in threefold form, as Father, Mother and Son. Thus Uranus and Gäa, the maternal Earth; and Kronos, Time, emerged from her womb as a son; Osiris, Isis and Horus and so on.

The sacrifice of the Logos is: the spirit descends into matter, animating its reflection, and thus the world of animated forms is also given its existence, all of which lead their special existence and go through the cycle of evolution in order to become one again with the Logos as the most highly developed individualities, who receive the wealth of experience through them. If He had not poured Himself out to animate all these forms, there would be no independent growth and development. All movement, all becoming would have no life of its own; it would only stir and move according to the direction of God.

Just as people are only interested in the unknown, the individual, about people, and are indifferent to anything they can calculate and understand, so too the Logos can only take joy in independently developing life that emerges from it, for which it sacrifices and devotes itself.

The process of development of matter begins, in which the qualities of the being are reflected and are effective until these reflections begin their activity as separate forms and thus spiritualize and animate matter more and more until it becomes one again with the being Atma, Budhi, Manas... [space]

First, the cosmic basis was created by the coming together of the two qualities of selfhood and selflessness of the first Logos. Through the second current of the same, guided by harmony, the atomic essence was formed. This enveloped itself with the already existing mother substance, and the atom was formed. These atoms, with their shells of varying degrees of density, gradually formed matter, which could serve as a medium for the second Logos, which is the mirror image of the first, to give up its mirror image of the same. The second Logos now flows into this matter, which, on its first, the nirvana level, is of such a fine texture that it can flow through it unhindered and unchanged. It now reaches the region of Budhi; here it is detained, and even if in this region selflessness is so strong that it does not want to retain the Logos for its realm, it still claims it for its entire cosmos. Here the sacrifice of the Logos begins, the voice, the sound emerges from it: it wants to animate matter with its spirit, so that its thoughts shall have their existence as independent forms. Here, where the divine thought becomes sound and voice, in the sphere of Budhi, is the divine realm for the Middle Ages. Enveloped in Budhi, the Logos now flows into the mental region, which is divided into the stages of Arupa and Rupa; the divine world of thought now pours into this region, the exemplary ideas surge through each other. What later becomes a special being and still rests enclosed in the Logos in the Budhi sphere is called into existence here as an exemplary idea. This Arupa level of the mental sphere is the world of ideas of Plato, the world of reason of the Middle Ages. On the Arupa level, these ideas take on their first forms. As divine geniuses, they begin their special existence and float around together, still penetrating each other as similar spiritual beings. This is the heavenly realm of the Middle Ages.

These spiritual beings now enter the astral sphere; here, enveloped in a denser substance, they awaken through touch; only now do they feel themselves as separate beings, they feel the separation. It is the elemental realm, the world of the elemental. Having descended into the etheric sphere, this sensation is pushed out from within, it swells up, expands and grows through the etheric vegetative power, only to be enclosed and crystallized by physical matter, because here the ego is still striving mightily for limitation. Thus is the sensation enclosed in the mineral kingdom and the divine ideas sleep in sublime calm in the chaste rock. The stone - a frozen thought of God: “The stones are mute. I have placed and hidden the eternal creator word in them; chaste and shameful, they hold it locked within themselves.” So reads an old Druid saying, a prayer formula. In the Middle Ages, the etheric and physical realms, or mineral kingdom, were called microcosm or the small realm.

As it flowed in, the Logos surrounded itself with ever denser shells until it had learned to define itself firmly in the rock. However, the stones are mute; they cannot reveal the eternal creative word. The rigid physical shell must be cast off again; it remains in its realm, while now the crystalline forms in their soft etheric shell expand, growing from within, that is, being able to live, because life is growth; the stone becomes a plant. And ascending further, the Logos also sheds this etheric shell and arrives at the astral sphere of sensation. Here, through the interaction of touch and perception, activity unfolds; the sentient animal existence is formed out of sensation and will. In this way, the animal gradually develops its organs of perception, with the stimulus from outside acting as a sensation within. The types are formed. Crossing over into the mental realm, this sensation perceives itself, and with the consciousness of self, the stage of humanity is reached.

From the cosmic point of view, the Logos' descent into the mineral kingdom marks its deepest descent into matter, and the casting off of the first shell marks the beginning of the Logos' ascent. Seen from the point of view of man, however, in the anthropocentric sense, as adopted, among others, by the ancient Druid priests, the resting of the spirit in the chaste rock would be an exalted stage of existence. Untouched by selfish will, the stone obeys only the law of causality. For the human being at the lower mental level, at which we now stand, the rock would be a symbol of higher development. Through lower, earthy passions and trials, we develop into an ethereal plant existence, living and growing from within in selfless self-evidence, in order to later live in our causal body, untouched by anything outside, as pure spirit resting within ourselves, like the crystallized spirit enclosed in stone.

The second Logos, as the mover and animator of the matter in which it is enclosed, has only reached as far as the lower mental sphere. Through self-awareness, the sentient animal has reached the human stage of existence. It is able to relate the external world to its personality; it perceives itself. Nature has led and guided him so far, but here she leaves him alone and in freedom. The further development of man now depends solely on his will. He must make himself the vessel, strip off the outer shell of the lower mental sphere, so that he can now receive the inflow of the first Logos, just as the seed opens and waits for fertilization, without which it cannot grow and bear fruit.

The first logos is the eternal in the universe, the immutable law according to which the stars move in their orbits, the basis of all things. The individual forms are subject to destruction and change. We perceive colors with our sensory vision that may appear different to another vision. The external, solid object, which is held together by its parts in a certain form, can disappear at a certain temperature, its parts can dissolve, but the law according to which it has become remains and is eternal. Thus the whole universe moves according to eternal laws, the first logos flows spread out in it. Man must raise himself up to him with his will. He must develop in himself the selfless lower soul knowledge (Antahkarana). He must perceive through pure contemplation this eternal immutable law in the transitory; he must learn to distinguish what is only a transitory phenomenon in a particular form and what is its essential core; he must absorb and preserve what he has seen as a thought. Thus he gradually becomes acquainted with the unreal in the world of phenomena; the thought becomes for him the real; he gradually ascends to the stage of Arupa, he lives in the pure world of thought. The many dissolves for him and merges in the One; he feels himself one with the All. Thus he has raised himself so high that he can receive the inflow from the first Logos directly as intuition. But not to every individual soul does a single soul flow in this way; no, it is the All-Soul, it is the soul of Plato and others, in which he shares, with whom he becomes one in thought. Gradually, the higher man develops from the lower.

At this turning point, where he is to rise up in freedom through his will, he needs a teacher, and that is why the Sons of Manas descended and incarnated in the third race of the fourth round, the Lemurian period, to serve as guides. With the simple act of counting, with the understanding of numbers, mental development began and distinguished the thinking human from the animal, which only senses through the senses.

Esteemed attendees! It is my responsibility today to conclude the lectures on the so-called Devachan plan or, as we have to call it in German, the spiritual realm. If you read about Devachan or the Land of the Spiritual Entities in theosophical books, you will find the description that this realm of the spiritual world is a realm of contentment, a realm of bliss. You are told that Devachan is the “land of delights,” the “land of happiness.” Well, honored attendees, it is very easy to misunderstand such a description and to imagine something quite wrong under these words. We must be clear about the fact that very many people do not know what the happiness of the spiritual realm is, that the vast majority of people seek happiness and satisfaction in things that are no longer found in Devachan. Even what people usually imagine in religious concepts as paradise, as a land of happiness and bliss, is still so closely tied to ideas of immediate sensual reality, to ideas taken from our physical environment, that we must not apply these ideas to the land of spiritual beings. What people hope for in terms of paradisiacal joys, what they call paradise, based on sensual perceptions, they already find before entering devachan, they find it in the fifth realm of Kamaloka, in the fifth realm of the fire of purification, and they find it precisely for the purpose of stripping away this tendency towards sensual pleasures and sensual desires. What the Indian, for example, imagines as paradisiacal hunting grounds, where he can indulge all his hunting desires, he finds already in the fifth realm of Kamaloka. But man must be cleansed of precisely that before he can enter the spiritual world. On the other hand, many people say that if they hear that none of what they experience here on earth as sensual reality remains in the spiritual realm, then the spiritual realm is nothing more than an illusion, a kind of dream that we dream between two incarnations. Both require a correction. The ideas that a person takes from their directly experienced reality need to be guided to completely different and higher ideas. One can gain a corresponding idea of what is actually meant by the land of delights, the land of bliss, what is meant by that deep intimacy and spiritual satisfaction that we experience between two incarnations, if one listens to what students of the great masters already know from their experience in this life.

Those who reach initiation in this life, experience something of this heavenly bliss, of this true spiritual satisfaction, through insight into the spiritual realm in this very life. You may ask: Is there or has there been something in our countries that is called initiation? Have there really been disciples in our Western culture who have been blessed with the highest vision that spiritual land has to offer? There has always been the possibility of receiving initiation in secret or occult schools. A current of occult wisdom came to Europe in the 14th century. This current, which is called the Rosicrucian current, was misunderstood by many; it must be misunderstood by all those who only get to know it from the outside. Only those who have been allowed to see through occult training should get to know it from the inside. When Christian Rosenkreutz brought the wisdom of the Orient to Europe, he founded schools in Europe where disciples were trained to reach the stages where vision in the Devachan, the vision of the higher secrets, became possible. Only those who have undergone training themselves know how to tell about it. All external research, everything that is written in books, cannot give you any information. Until 1875, the year of the founding of the Theosophical Society, these things were never spoken of at all, except in the most secret of teaching centers. It was only since 1875 that the Masters of Wisdom felt the duty to convey some of these deepest spiritual truths to mankind.

Initiations still take place today. However, they can only take place within the spiritual realm, the region I have described to you. Today, every person to be initiated must come to the Devachan plane to see these higher secrets for themselves. This forces me to give at least a small idea of how the person who receives the initiation on the Devachan plane feels and how he is transformed. What I have described to you of those highest entities that come from completely different worlds, first to enjoy their embodiment in Devachan and then to descend into the lower regions, into the three worlds, these entities can be seen by those who come for initiation in this field. When a person has attained initiation, he begins to gain a completely new faith, a completely new vision. He has truly become a different person. And what is not present at all for many people living around him, of which they never have an inkling, he sees with the spiritual eye.

Allow me to give you a brief summary of the creed that the initiate makes his own. You will recognize some of the phrases. All deeper truths have always come into the public domain and have been exoterically propagated in the public domain.

The person who is initiated gains a higher overview of what is happening here in our physical reality. He gains this higher overview by placing himself outside of this physical reality. While we live in the world of the senses, we are enclosed in the physical organization and can only see through our eyes, hear through our ears, and perceive through our other sense organs. We are dependent on what our senses convey to us. This is stopped by the higher training that the person to be initiated receives. Before the person to be initiated lies, I can only describe it, his own physical reality completely spread out. He sees himself objectively next to himself, and just as we look at any other object in the environment of our sensory reality, so we look at our own physical body when we are initiated. Our organism lies before us like our own corpse. But also our astral body, our desires, instincts, our whole sensual life of drives, lies before us, and we speak in the sense of the quoted Vedanta wisdom: “That is you”. We see ourselves completely objectively, with all our faults, with what we have achieved in life through the various incarnations. This is what is described to you as the passage through the gate of death, which every person to be initiated has to go through. He then no longer sees through the senses what he otherwise has around him in the sense world; he sees into the outer world from the spiritual plane, and not through the senses. But he also sees into the world of instincts, into the world of Kama, of passions, into the world where human drives are, into that which brings people into conflict and quarrel, what delights them and what gives them pleasure in this physical reality; there he sees into it as a pedestrian standing on a high mountain and looking into a mountain landscape.

And because he has risen above sensuality, because he has only a world of pure spirit around him, that is why he sees on the other side those entities that are spiritual in nature, and he perceives something of what is called divine wisdom. The divine essence itself is the Father-Spirit of all religions; no one can see him in his very own form. The Highest remains unrevealed, even to the opened spiritual eyes. But the initiate receives an idea of what creates and works in the world. He is led before the creating, divine powers. Then, for the first time, he utters the word out of conviction, out of direct contemplation, the word that was previously taught to him as a belief: [“I am Brahman”]. When the person to be initiated is now led through the narrow gate, where the physical and astral life is objectively shown to him, the word of the initiating priest is heard: To those who have, much will be given, and from those who have not yet, even that which they have will be taken away. — This is the initiation saying that is heard at the first gate of initiation. You will also find it in the Bible, like many a saying taken from Egyptian priestly wisdom. Those who have, are those who have already awakened to spiritual feeling and perception. But those who come to this gate without faith and without spiritual perception will also be deprived of their desire for spiritual knowledge. Woe to him who comes unworthily to this place, who has pushed his way in with curiosity; to him another voice is heard, which again has a symbolic meaning.

Man now experiences what universal spirit is, universal soul. We humans reflect on sensual things, but the spirit that lives in us, that we experience as thoughts within us, that forms the object of our reflection, is the same as the wisdom from which the world is built. We could not recognize the world with its laws if it were not built from these spiritual laws. Theosophy teaches that what lives in man as spirit, as manas, is essentially the same as what lives in the great universe, as Mahat. Man's manas draws wisdom from the manas of the universe, from Mahat. Or should a man believe that the laws we see operating in the heavens, by which the stars move, have meaning only in his mind? The Mahat of the starry sky is the element of intellect and reason out in the great world, and what you learn from it is manas, the element of intellect and reason of the small world.

Now the All-Spirit, the Universal Spirit, descends upon the initiate. The initiation priest speaks the words: “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” The person concerned, now an initiate, knows what the spirit of the world is. Then he can express his belief in the creative spirit of the world out of his own conviction and say: “I believe in the divine Father-Spirit, which has made the spiritual, which is also called the heavenly, and the physical, the earthly.” In the Christian creed it says: I believe in God, the almighty Father, who created heaven and earth. — And then one thing has become clear to man: that in truth and reality he himself has taken his origin from the same universal world spirit that confronts him here in the spiritual realm. He knows that he has descended into the depths of sensual-physical matter; but he also knows that he has descended from divine worlds and comes from the spirit. He knows that the spiritual essence he bears within him he has received from the very source of the divine Father-Spirit, that he is a ray from the sun of the divine Father-Spirit. He becomes aware of this as a real divine power, as something he experiences and of which he has direct certainty. He begins to gain a new faith in humanity. Humanity becomes for him the only begotten Son of God, the Son of whom he speaks in his creed: “I believe in the divine origin of humanity — in the God in man himself, as the Egyptian priestly wisdom expressed it — or in the Christ in man, who has descended from heavenly worlds. And then it becomes clear to him that before these times in the evolution of the earth had arrived, these times in which we now live, these times in which people perceive through their senses, in which their sensual urges cause them to act — it becomes clear to him that before man descended into this sphere of the senses, he was in another, in a purely spiritual sphere.

The disciple has now come to know the spiritual land, and he knows that this land was the land where man was in his time as the only begotten Son of God, he knows that man is born of virgin spiritual matter – Mary or Maya – and he knows that the spiritual man Christ descended into sensual matter, he knows that this spiritual man is contained in each of us and develops little by little through the various incarnations, he knows that this spiritual man lives surrounded by sensual corporeality, lives in the physical body. The things of the outer world impinge sensually upon our body and build up our eyes, our ears and the other sense organs. Within this bodily sensuality we live and let the world penetrate into us. Through the sense organs we look as through windows upon the outer world; we are enclosed in sensual matter and therefore limited by it.

Pure and spiritual is the Christ who enters into people; he is virgin spirit-matter. Now he has descended into the contracted, sensual matter. Those who speak esoterically call this the water or the sea. Thus it says, for example, in Genesis: “The Spirit of God hovered over the waters.” This means that the spirit hovers over matter. In Greek, this matter is also called “Pöntos Pyletös”, literally contracted sea. Man has moved into this contracted matter, which has formed his organs. Thus, the active being in the spiritual realm has become a being that passively receives impressions from outside through the sense organs: Man has become passive, a Pöntos Pyletös. This is the difference between beholding in the spiritual world and beholding in the world of the senses. If we want to have an object before us in the spiritual world, we first have the thought, and the spirit forms this thought in the spiritual world, that is, man finds the images for all creation in the spiritual world. In the sensual world, man perceives passively, having become passive. We have all become passive, as it were suffering in the contracted matter. That was the original confession of the Egyptian priesthood. This is the symbol that the Christ has descended to mankind, that he has taken on matter and become passively suffering in the contracted sea, in the Pöntos Pyletös. In the course of time this was transformed into Christianity, and because the word Pöntos Pyletös was thoroughly misunderstood, the misleading passage in the Christian creed arose, which reads: “suffered under Pontius Pilate,” which is nothing other than the quoted passage from the creed of the Egyptian priests. Man has become suffering; he is no longer active, but passive. This is the article of faith which in the Occult Symbol signifies the so-called Incarnation.

When the person to be initiated has realized what is meant by these profound truths, he then searches in the objective, sensory reality until he has become clear within himself that he can now descend into this sensuality in order to work out of duty and in devoted self-sacrifice within the sensual reality. When he has reached the point where he no longer seeks to satisfy the sensual drives, but uses them only to work within the sensual world, then he is an initiate, then he is initiated, then he has the firm certainty that he can see through the general cosmic justice. He used to live locked in the sensual world, and the riddle of birth and death, the riddle of eternal becoming, was unclear to him. Now it is clear to him that he is eternal and above birth and death. He sees that which is changeable and at the same time the eternal cosmic justice, which in theosophical language we call karma. He has become a sage in the justice of the cosmos, he can judge between life and death, or, as it is said by the Egyptian initiates, between birth and death. And now he believes in the exalted community of spirits freed from the body. We are only separated in the sensual world; in Devachan we are a community of spirits freed from the body. The Christian creed expresses this when it says: “I believe in the communion of saints.” The Christian Creed grew out of the esoteric confession of the Egyptian adepts, which speaks a very esoteric language. It is partly translated from misunderstood symbols, partly from esoteric sayings, which the candidates for initiation received as direct knowledge in the land of Devachan.

From this discussion, you will now have a somewhat clearer idea of what is meant by the land of delight and bliss. It is the delight of infinity, of eternal activity, of eternal work. Why can none of the things that oppress us in the physical world oppress us in Devachan? Devachan is a land of bliss not because we experience delights there that man desires and craves in his sensual world, but because we are free from the material, free from what craves for sensual desires, but also free from what limits us, and because it makes it possible for us to react to what would otherwise affect us from the outside. What limits us in the sensual world is removed, what can cause us pain is no longer there. For what causes pain? Because impressions are made on our astral body or on our physical body. We have discarded these bodies when we are in Devachan; the reason for the pain and the feelings of discomfort that we experience in the physical world has ceased to exist. Because no one can be selfish anymore, no one can demand selfish pleasures; because no one has an astral body anymore, one is free from anything that can oppress one's own personality. That is why devachan is known as the “land of bliss,” the “land of happiness.”

I said that in the third region of Devachan, all pain and sighing of the creature is revealed to us, that we can perceive all the pain and suffering that takes place here on earth, all the passions and desires. But we perceive it as we perceive the objects here in the sensual world – a perception that is not so strong and not so glaring that it causes us pain. It is also not like touching an object that has a high temperature, so that we burn ourselves – in short, we perceive without feeling selfish pain or personal pleasure. We see the totality of all pain and suffering, and as spiritual beings we feel that we have to help alleviate or reduce this pain. It makes no difference to us whether this pain or pleasure belongs to us or to others. Our personality has been stripped away; the pains are no longer personal. The cause for personal suffering to arise for us has ceased to exist. Because we are disembodied and thus free from everything that could oppress us, devachan is called the land of bliss. The bliss in devachan must therefore be described as being incomparable to anything that happens here in the sensual reality. Only he knows what these “delights” of Devachan mean who, as an initiate, has already had experiences here in this physical-sensual embodiment and has received knowledge and wisdom of this Devachan.

Everything we are told about the realm of Devachan comes from the experiences and direct observations and insights of such initiates who have learned to be actively engaged in spiritual existence themselves. They have also learned that it would be the greatest illusion to speak of the life in Devachan between two embodiments as an illusion. It is precisely the illusion that we regard the life in Devachan as an illusion, as a dream. And in fact, all real life comes from Devachan. And only because the task of earthly existence is to lead people in their spiritual activity down to the earthly world, the Christ must appear in man, in sensual embodiment. That is why, according to the saying of Plato, the great Greek philosopher, the soul of the world is laid out in the shape of a cross through the universe and stretched over the earthly body of the world. That is what Plato said. It is a symbol that the initiate knows in its deepest meaning.

Just as the instrument needs the tool, the workman, so our physical existence needs the spiritual world, so that the spiritual world can be the architect of the physical body. Just as a hammer would never have been invented without the influence of spiritual reflection, nor could it ever have been used by a being that had only physical powers and was incapable of reflection, so too could man not fulfill his task if he did not repeatedly ascend into the spiritual realm and draw strength from there to work in the material world. He ascends to the land where he receives knowledge of pure spirituality, where he learns how spiritual forces work without them becoming passive within the senses, where he learns to freely unfold his wings and work. Then he can in turn become embodied again, suffering in the contracted matter of earthly existence, in the Pöntos Pyletös. From incarnation to incarnation, man wanders; again and again he moves into the Pöntos Pyletös; again and again the spirit is crucified in matter.

The theosophist can never be materialistic – not even to the slightest degree – and see the whole of existence in the physical world. And especially when he is able to make his own observations in the spiritual realm, he will come to the realization that asceticism would be hostile to reality. What kind of task man has as a spiritual being becomes clear to us in the spiritual realm. The earthly world in which we live is our assigned place of residence during our present evolution. And what we bring from the spiritual realm, we should use to benefit this earthly world. So that we can work on this earth, we are provided with new assignments from the spiritual realm again and again between two incarnations. Dear audience, we have now covered the three worlds. Man lives in three worlds: the material world, the world of soul or astral world and the spiritual world or Devachan. In this existence man lives in all three worlds. Every material human being also contains a soul and a spirit. However, man is only conscious within the sensual, but the astral and spiritual man also work in him; the soul and the spirit are also effective in every human being. Man's consciousness awakens between two incarnations in Kamaloka, in the soul's country; then man becomes enlightened, he is awakened between two incarnations – according to the level of development, according to what he brings with him from this earthly incarnation — in Devachan, in the spiritual realm, in order to return to the astral world, to clothe itself with astral matter and to be incarnated again in the physical reality. That is the path, the pilgrimage of the human spirit.

The human being comes from the spiritual realm. It was originally virgin matter from which man, when he still lived in the pure spiritual realm, formed a body for himself. Long ago, another life on our earth preceded this earthly state of ours. Then men were still pure spirits, then only spiritual reality existed. Then man descended first into the astral existence, not yet to the physical reality. He was then still the Adam Kadmon, that “pure” entity in which the physical world of instincts did not yet exist.

Then came that which is so wonderfully and symbolically expressed in Genesis: “Jehovah formed man out of the dust of the ground and breathed into him the breath of life.” The spirit met with sense-proof matter and with that, at the same time, the whole existence of physical and sense reality. Until then, man had been in a kind of subconscious state. The waking consciousness that we have today, this mind through which we consider things and with which we orient ourselves in the physical world, only came to man with the descent into the sensual world; at the same time as the lower sensual reality, man received reason. This is again symbolically represented in Genesis as the snake; it bestows the earthly mind on humanity.

The lowest point in human development is that where birth and death take place, where the immortal part of man must always pass through the gate of death. This will be replaced in the next epoch, when man, similar to the preceding epoch, will only be an astral being; and then the last epoch will come, when man will only have a spiritual existence.

Thus, the contemplation of Devachan teaches us, like everything in the world, on a large and small scale, that everything is in a state of development, that all existence comes from the spirit, passes through the sensual reality, and then ascends to the spiritual again. Contemplation of this higher, spiritual realm shows us that what we call death, what we call decay, is nothing more than a temporary, almost illusory state of an epoch of the world, that it is not something that can last. The conviction, the clarity, the knowledge that man has come from higher realms and that he will go to higher realms again, that is what gives us the strength to gradually, as we progress in theosophy, feel everything that an initiate of early Christianity – Paul – felt and expressed with the words: “Death, where is thy sting?”

On the other hand, we should never disdain our earthly existence. Just as the bee carries honey into the beehive, so we have to suck the honey out of the earthly world and carry it up into the spiritual world. But we can only find our way if we know what the basic forces of our existence are. For this reason I have given the lectures on the Devachan region. There was only one thing that could have induced me to give these lectures, and I know that they can easily be misunderstood. The author of the theosophical textbook “Light on the Path” wrote:

And once you have recognized the truth, you must not keep it to yourself. — Anyone who has recognized the truth must not keep it to themselves. And anyone who feels called to speak it must speak it, regardless of how it is received. Higher than everything else is the call from the spiritual world, once we have heard it. This call awakens in us a consciousness that is completely different from all consciousness that we know from our sensual existence. And then, from the perspective of the spiritual realm, we can make a saying of Solomon our motto:

Therefore I begged for insight, and it was given to me.
I called upon the Most High, and wisdom was given to my spirit.
I value truth more than anything that
lives in the sensual world around me.

The wise man values wisdom more than all the sensual realms around him. That is why he tries to proclaim this wisdom. This is to justify what has moved me to speak about this subtle area of existence, although I know how these things can be misunderstood and how difficult it is to talk about them in a reasonably understandable language. But if we have felt this call, then, in the spirit of Solomon's wisdom, let us express it in the words:

Propter hoc optavi et datus est mihi sensus
et invocavi et venit in me spiritus sapientiae
et praeposui illam regnis et sedibus et divitias nihil esse duxi
in comparatione illius.

[ 1 ] The importance of the Mysteries to the spiritual life of the Greeks may be realized from Plato’s conception of the universe. There is only one way of understanding him completely. It is to place him in the light which streams forth from the Mysteries.

Plato’s later disciples, the Neo-Platonists, credit him With a secret doctrine which he imparted only to those Who were worthy, and which he conveyed under the “seal of secrecy”. His teaching was looked upon as Mysterious in the same sense that the wisdom of the Mysteries was viewed. Even if the seventh Platonic letter is not from his hand, as is alleged, it does not signify for our present purpose, for it does not matter whether it was he or another who gave utterance to the view expressed in this letter. This view is of the essence of Plato’s philosophy. In the letter we read as follows: “This much I may say about all those who have written or may hereafter write as if they knew the aim of my work, that no credence is to be attached to their words, whether they obtained their information from me or from others, or invented it themselves. I have written nothing on this subject, nor would anything be allowed to appear. This kind of thing cannot be expressed in words like other teaching, but needs a long study of the subject and a making of one’s self one with it. Then it is as though a spark leaped up and kindled a light in the soul which thereafter is able to keep itself alight.” This utterance might only indicate the writer's powerlessness to express his meaning in words—a mere personal weakness—if the idea of the Mysteries were not to be found in them. The subject on which Plato had not written and would never write must be something about which all writing would be futile. It must be a feeling, a sensation, an experience not gained by instantaneous communication, but by “the making of one’s self one with it,” in heart and soul. The reference is to the inner education which Plato was able to give those he selected. For them, fire flashed forth from his words, for others, only thoughts.

The manner of approach to Plato’s Dialogues is not a matter of indifference. They will mean more or less to us according to our spiritual condition. Much more passed from Plato to his disciples than the literal meaning of his words. The place where he taught his 1isteners thrilled in the atmosphere of the Mysteries. His words awoke overtones that vibrated in sympathy, but these overtones needed the atmosphere of the Mysteries, or they died away without having been heard.

[ 2 ] In the centre of the world of the Platonic Dialogues stands the personality of Socrates. We need not here touch upon the historical aspect. It is a question of the character of Socrates as it appears in Plato. Socrates is a person consecrated by his dying for truth. He died as only an initiate can die, as one to whom death is merely a moment of life like other moments. He approached death as he would any other event in existence. His attitude towards it was such that even in his friends the feelings usual on such an occasion were not aroused. Phædo says this in the Dialogue on the Immortality of the Soul: “Truly I found myself in the strangest state of mind. I had no compassion for him, as is usual at the death of a dear friend. So happy did the man appear to me in his demeanor and speech, so steadfast and noble was his end, that I was confident that he was not going to Hades without a divine mission, and that even there it would be as well with him as it is with any one anywhere. No tender-hearted emotion overcame me, as might have been expected at such a mournful event, nor on the other hand was I in a cheerful mood, as is usual during philosophical pursuits, and although our conversation was of this nature; but I found myself in a wondrous state of mind and in an unwonted blending of joy and grief when I reflected that this man was about to die.” The dying Socrates instructs his disciples about immortality. His personality, which had learned by experience the worthlessness of life, furnishes proof far stronger than any logic or arguments founded on reason. It seems as though it were not a man speaking, for this man was passing away, but as if it were the voice of Eternal Truth itself which had taken up its abode in a perishable personality. Where something temporal dissolves into nothing there seems to be the medium in which it is possible for eternal harmonies to resound.

[ 3 ] We hear no logical proofs of immortality. The whole discourse is designed to lead the friends where they may behold the Eternal. Then they will need no proofs. Would it be necessary to prove that a rose is red to one who has a red rose before him? Why should it be necessary to prove that spirit is eternal to one whose eyes we have opened to behold spirit? Experiences, inner events are what Socrates points to, and first of all to the experience of wisdom itself.

What does he desire who aspires to wisdom? He wishes to free himself from what the senses offer him in every-day perception. He seeks for the spirit in the sense world. Is not this a fact which may be compared with dying? “For,” according to Socrates, “those who occupy themselves with philosophy in the right way are really striving after nothing else than to die and to be dead, without this being perceived by others. If this is true it would be strange if, after having aimed at this all through life, when death itself comes they should be indignant at that which they have so long striven after and taken pains about.” To corroborate this, Socrates asks one of his friends: “Does it seem to you befitting a philosopher to take trouble about so-called fleshly pleasures, such as eating and drinking? or about sexual pleasures? And do you think that such a man pays much heed to other bodily needs? To have fine clothes, shoes, and other bodily adornments,—do you think he considers or scorns this more than utmost necessity demands? Does it not seem to you that it would be such a man’s whole preoccupation not to turn his thoughts to the body, but as much as possible away from it and towards the soul? Therefore this is the first mark of the philosopher, that he, more than all other men, relieves his soul of association with the body.”

This justified Socrates in saying that the search for Wisdom has this much in common with dying, that it turns man away from the physical. But whither does he turn? Towards the spiritual. But can he demand from spirit the same that his senses offer? Socrates thus expresses himself on this point: “But how about reasonable knowledge itself? Is the body a hindrance or not, if we take it as a companion on our search for knowledge? I mean, do sight and hearing procure for us any truth? Or is what the poets sing meaningless, namely, that we see and hear nothing clearly? ... When does the soul catch sight of truth? For when it tries to examine something with the help of the body it is manifestly deceived by the latter.”

Everything we perceive by means of our bodily senses appears and disappears, and it is this appearing and disappearing that is the cause of our being deceived But when with our reasonable insight we look deeper into things, the eternal element in them is imparted to us. Thus the senses do not offer us the eternal in its true form. The moment we trust them implicitly they deceive us. They cease to deceive us if we confront them with our thinking insight and submit what they tell us to its examination.

But how could our thinking insight sit in judgment on the declarations of the senses unless there were something living within it that transcends sense perception? Therefore the truth or falsity in things is decided by something within us that opposes the physical body and is consequently not subject to its laws. First of all, this something cannot be subject to the laws of growth and decay, for it contains truth within itself. Now, truth cannot have a yesterday and a today; it cannot be one thing one day and another the next, like objects of sense. Therefore truth must be something eternal. And when the philosopher turns away from the perishable things of sense and towards truth, he approaches an eternal element that lives within him. If we immerse ourselves wholly in spirit we live wholly in truth. The things of sense around us are no longer present merely in their physical form. Says Socrates: “And he accomplishes this most perfectly who approaches everything as much as possible with the spirit only, without either looking round When he is thinking, or calling in the aid of any other Sense when reflecting; but who, making use of pure thought only, strives to grasp everything as it is in itself, separating it as much as possible from eyes and ears, in short from the whole body, which only disturbs the soul and does not allow her to attain truth and insight when associated with her... Now, is not death the release and separation of the soul from the body? And it is only true philosophers who are always striving to release the soul as far as they can. This, therefore, is the philosopher’s vocation, to deliver and separate the soul from the body... Therefore it would be foolish if a man, who all his life has taken measures to be as near death as possible, should, when it comes, rebel against it... In truth the real seekers after wisdom aspire to die, and of all men they are those who least fear death.” Moreover, Socrates bases all higher morality on liberation from the body. He who follows only what his body ordains is not moral. Who is valiant? asks Socrates. He is valiant who does not obey his body but the demands of his spirit even when these demands imperil the body. And who is prudent? Is not this he who “does not let himself be carried away by desires, but who maintains an indifferent and moral demeanor with regard to them? Therefore are not those alone prudent who set least value on the body and live in the love of wisdom?” And so it is, in the opinion of Socrates, with all virtues.

[ 4 ] Thence Socrates goes on to characterize rational cognition itself. What, after all, is knowledge? Undoubtedly we arrive at it by forming judgments. I form a judgment about some object; for instance, I say to myself: the object before me is a tree. How do I come to say that? I can only say it if I already know what a tree is. I must remember my conception of a tree. A tree is a physical object. If I remember a tree, I remember a physical object. I say that something I behold is tree, if it resembles other things which I have previously observed, and which I know are trees. Memory is the medium for this knowledge. It makes it possible for me to compare the various objects of sense. But this does not exhaust my knowledge. If I see two similar things I form a judgment and say: these things are alike. Now, in reality two things are never exactly alike. I can only find a likeness in certain respects. The idea of a perfect similarity therefore arises within me without its having any counterpart in reality. And this idea helps me to form a judgment, as memory helps me to a judgment and to insight. Just as one tree reminds me of others, so am I reminded of the idea of similarity by looking at two things from a certain point of view. Thus, there arise within me thoughts like Memories which are not due to physical reality.

All manner of knowledge not borrowed from sense-reality is grounded on such thoughts. The whole of mathematics consists of them. He would be a bad geometrician who could only bring into mathematical relations what he can see with his eyes and touch with his hands. Thus we have thoughts which do not origiNate in perishable nature, but arise out of the spirit. And it is these that bear in them the mark of Eternal Truth. What mathematics teaches will be eternally true, even if tomorrow the whole cosmic system should fall into ruins and an entirely new one arise. Conditions might prevail in another cosmic system to which our present mathematical truths would not apply, but these would be none the less true in themselves.

It is only when the soul is alone with herself that she can bring forth these eternal truths. She is at these times related to the true and eternal, and not to the ephemeral and deceptive. Hence Socrates says: “When the soul returning into herself reflects, she goes straight to what is pure and everlasting and immortal and like unto herself; and being related to this, cleaves unto it when the soul is alone, and is not hindered. And then the soul rests from her mistakes, and is like unto herself, even as the eternal is, with whom the soul is now in touch. This state of soul is called reason... Look now whether it does not follow from all that has been said that the soul is most like the divine, immortal, reasonable, monogeneous, indissoluble, what is always the same and like unto itself; and that on the other hand the body most resembles what is human and mortal, unreasonable, multiform, soluble, never the same nor remaining equal to itself... If, therefore this be so, the soul goes to what is like herself, to the immaterial, to the divine, immortal, reasonable. There she attains to bliss, freed from error and ignorance, from fear and undisciplined love and all other human evils. There she lives, as the initiates say, for the remaining time truly with God.”

It is not within the scope of this book to indicate all the ways in which Socrates leads his friends to the Eternal. They all breathe the same spirit. They all tend to show that man finds one thing when he goes the way of transitory sense perception, and another when his spirit is alone with itself. It is to this characteristic nature of spirit that Socrates points his hearers. If they find it, they see with their own spiritual eyes that it is eternal. The dying Socrates does not prove immortality; he simply lays bare the nature of the soul. And then it comes to light that growth and decay, birth and death, have nothing to do with the soul. The essence of the soul lies in the true, and this can neither come into being nor perish. The soul has no more to do with becoming than even has to do with odd. But death belongs to becoming. Therefore the soul has nothing to do with death. Must we not say of what is immortal that it admits of mortality as little as even admits of odd? Starting from this point, Socrates adds: “Must we not maintain, if the immortal is imperishable, that it is impossible for the soul to come to an end when death arrives? For from what has been already shown she does not admit of death, nor can she die any more than three can be an even number”

[ 5 ] Let us review the whole development of this dialogue, in which Socrates brings his hearers to behold the Eternal in human personality. The hearers accept his thoughts, and they search within themselves to see whether or not they can find in their inner experiences something that assents to his ideas. They make the objections which strike them. What has happened to the hearers when the dialogue is finished? They have found something within themselves which they did not possess before. They have not merely accepted an abstract truth, but they have gone through a development. Something has come to life in them which was not alive in them before. Is not this comparable with an initiation? And does it not throw light on the reason for Plato’s setting forth his philosophy in the form of conversation? These dialogues are nothing else than the literary form of the events which took place in the sanctuaries of the Mysteries. We are convinced of this from what Plato himself says in many passages. As a philosophical teacher Plato wished to be what the initiator into the Mysteries was, as far as this was compatible with the philosophic manner of communication. It is evident that Plato feels himself in harmony with the Mysteries. He thinks he is on the right path only when this leads to the initiate’s goal. He expresses himself on the subject in the ,em>Timæus as follows: “All those who are of right mind invoke the gods for their small or great enterprises; but we who are engaged in teaching about the universe—how far it is created and uncreated—have the special duty, if we have not quite lost our way, to call upon and implore the gods and goddesses that we may teach everything first in conformity with their spirit, and next in harmony with ourselves” And Plato promises those who follow this path: “that Divinity, as a deliverer, will grant them illuminating teaching at the conclusion of their devious and wandering researches.”

[ 6 ] It is especially the Timaeus that reveals to us the Mystery character of the Platonic cosmogony. At the very beginning of this dialogue there is mention of an initiation. Solon is initiated by an Egyptian priest into the evolution of the worlds and the way in which eternal truths are expressed in the imagery of traditional myths. “There have already been many and various destructions of part of the human race,” says the Egyptian priest instructing Solon, “and there will be more in the future; the most extensive by fire and water, other lesser ones through countless other causes. It is related in your country that Phaeton, the son of Helios, once mounted his father’s chariot, and as he did not know how to drive it, everything on the earth was burnt up, and he himself slain by lightning. This sounds like a fable, but it contains the truth of the change in the movements of the celestial bodies revolving round the earth, and of the annihilation of everything on the earth by much fire. This annihilation happens periodically, after the lapse of certain long periods of time.” This passage in the Timæus Contains a plain indication of the attitude of the initiate towards folk-myths. He recognizes the truths hidden in their images.

The drama of the evolution of the world is brought before us in the Timaeus. Anyone who will follow up the traces which lead to this genesis of the cosmos arrives at a dim apprehension of the primordial force from which all things proceeded. “Now, it is difficult to find the Creator and Father of the universe, and when we have found Him, it is impossible to speak about Him so that all may understand.” The initiate knew what this impossibility means. It points to the drama of God. God is not present for him in what belongs merely to the senses and understanding. In those He is only present as nature. He is under a spell in nature. The ancient mystic was convinced that only one who awakens the Divine within himself is able to approach Him. Thus He cannot at once be made comprehensible to all. But even to one who approaches Him, He does not appear Himself. The Timaeus stresses that. The Father made the world out of the body and the soul of the universe. He mixed together, in harmony and perfect proportions, the elements which came into being when He, pouring Himself out, sacrificed His separate existence. Thereby the body of the world came into being, and the soul of the world is stretched upon it in the form of a cross. She is what is divine in the world. She suffered the death of the cross so that the world might come into being. Plato “may therefore call nature the tomb of the Divine, a grave, however, sheltering not what is dead but the Eternal, to which death only gives the opportunity of bringing to expression the omnipotence of life. And man sees nature in the right light when he approaches her in order to release the crucified soul of the world. The soul of the world must rise again from her death, from her spell. Where can she revive? Only in the soul of initiated man. Then wisdom finds its right relation to the cosmos. The resurrection, the liberation of God, that is knowledge.

In the Timaeus the development of the world is traced from the imperfect to the perfect. An ascending Process is represented imaginatively. Beings are developed. God reveals Himself in their development. Evolution is the resurrection of God from the tomb. Within evolution, man appears. Plato shows that man stands for something special. It is true, the whole world is divine, and man is not more divine than other beings. But in other beings God is present in a hidden way, in man He is manifest. At the end of the Timaeus we read: “And now we might assert that our study of the universe has attained its end, for after the world was provided and filled with mortal and immortal living beings, it, this one and only begotten world, has itself become a visible being embracing everything visible, and an image of the Creator. It has become the God perceptible to the senses, and the greatest and best world, the fairest and most perfect which there could be.” [ 8 ] But this one and only begotten world would not be perfect if the image of its Creator were not to be found amongst the images it contains. This image can only be engendered in the human soul. Not the Father Himself, but the Son, God’s offspring, living in the soul, and being like unto the Father, Him man can bring forth.

[ 9 ] Philo, who was said to be the resurrected Plato, characterized as the “Son of God” the wisdom born of man that lives in the soul and contains the reason existing in the world. This cosmic reason, or logos, appears as the book in which “everything in the world is recorded and delineated.” It also appears as the Son of God, “following in the paths of the Father, and creating forms, looking at their archetypes.” The platonizing Philo addresses this logos as Christ: “As God is the first and only king of the universe, the way to Him is rightly called the ‘Royal Road.' Consider this road to be philosophy... the road which the company of the ancient ascetics took, who turned away from the entangling fascination of pleasure and devoted themselves to the noble and earnest cultivation of the beautiful. The law names this Royal Road, which we call true philosophy, God’s word and spirit.”

[ 10 ] It is like an initiation to Philo when he enters upon this path, in order to meet the logos that to him is the Son of God. “I do not shrink from relating what has happened to me innumerable times. Often when I wished to put my philosophical thoughts in writing, in my accustomed way, and saw quite clearly what was to be ascertained, I nevertheless found my mind barren and rigid, so that I was obliged to desist without having accomplished anything, and seemed to be caught in idle speculation. At the same time I could not but marvel at the power of the reality of thought, with which it rests to open and to close the womb of the human soul. Another time, however, I would begin empty and arrive, without any trouble, at fulness. Thoughts came flying like snowflakes or grains of seed invisibly from above, and it was as though divine bower took hold of me and inspired me, so that I did not know where I was, who was with me, who I was, or what I was saying or writing; for just then the flow of ideas was given me, a delightful clearness, keen insight, and lucid mastery of material, as if the inner eye were able to see everything with the greatest distinctness.”

This is a description of a path to knowledge so expressed as to show that anyone following it is conscious of flowing in one current with the Divine, when the logos becomes alive within him. This is also expressed clearly in the words: “When the spirit, moved by love, takes its flight into the most holy, soaring joyously on divine wings, it forgets everything else and itself. It only clings to and is filled with him whose satellite and servant it is, and to whom it offers the incense of the most sacred and chaste virtue.”

There are only two ways for Philo. Either man follows the world of sense, that is, what perception and intellect offer, in which case he limits himself to his personality and withdraws from the cosmos; or he becomes conscious of the whole cosmic force and experiences the Eternal within his personality. “He who wishes to escape from God falls into his own hands. For there are two things to be considered, the universal spirit which is God, and one’s own spirit. The latter flees to and takes refuge in the universal spirit, for one who goes beyond his own spirit says that it is nothing and connects everything with God; but one who avoids God, abolishes the First Cause, and makes himself the cause of everything which happens.”

[ 11 ] The Platonic view of the universe sets out to be knowledge that by its very nature is religion. It brings knowledge into relation with the highest to which man can attain through his feelings. Plato admits the validity of such knowledge only when feeling may be completely satisfied in it. It is then not abstract knowledge, it is the substance of life. It is a higher man within man, that man of which the personality iS only an image. Within man himself is born a being who surpasses him, the archetypal man; and this is another secret of the Mysteries brought to expression in the Platonic philosophy. Hippolytus, one of the Church Fathers, alludes to this secret: “This is the great secret of the Samothracians (who were guardians of a certain Mystery-cult), which cannot be expressed and which only the initiates know. But these latter Speak in detail of Adam, as the primordial, archetypal man.”

[ 12 ] The Platonic Dialogue on Love, or Symposium, also represents an initiation. Here love appears as the herald of wisdom. If wisdom, the eternal word, the Logos, is the Son of the eternal creator of the cosmos, love is related to the Logos as a mother. Before even a Spark of the light of wisdom can flash up in the human soul, a dim impulse or desire for the Divine must be present in it. Man must unconsciously be drawn to what afterwards, when raised into his consciousness, constitutes his supreme happiness. What Heraclitus calls the daimon in man ¹ is associated with the idea of love. In the Symposium, people of the most various ranks and views of life speak about love—the ordinary Man, the politician, the scientist, the satiric poet Aristophanes, and the tragic poet Agathon. They each have their own view of love in keeping with their different experiences of life. The way in which they exPress themselves shows the stage attained by their daimon. By love one being is attracted to another. The multiplicity, the diversity of the things into which divine unity was poured aspires to unity and harmony through love. Thus love has something divine in it, hence every man can understand it only as far as he participates in the Divine.

After those of different degrees of maturity have given utterance to their ideas about love, Socrates takes up the word. He considers love from the point of view of a man in search of knowledge. For him it is not a divinity, but something that leads man to God. Eros, or love, is for him not divine, for a god is perfect and therefore possesses the beautiful and good; but Eros is only the desire for the beautiful and good. He thus stands between man and God. He is a daimon, a mediator between the earthly and the Divine.

It is significant that Socrates claims not to be giving his own thoughts when speaking of love. He says he is only relating what a woman had imparted to him as a revelation. It was through mantic ² art that he came to his conception of love. Diotima, the priestess, awakened in Socrates the daimonic force that was to lead him to the Divine. She initiated him.

This passage in the Symposium is highly suggestive: Who is the “wise woman” who awakened the daimon in Socrates? She is more than a mere poetic mode of expression, for no wise woman on the physical plane could awaken the daimon in the soul unless the daimonic force were latent in the soul herself. It is surely in Socrates’ own soul that we must also look for this wise woman. But there must be a reason why that which brings the daimon to life within the soul should appear as a being of external reality. The force cannot work in the same way as the forces that may be observed in the soul as belonging to and native to her. We see that it is the soul-force which precedes the conception of wisdom that Socrates represents as a “wise woman.” It is the mother-principle that gives birth to the Son of God, wisdom, the Logos. The unconscious soul-force that brings the divine into consciousness is represented as the feminine element. The soul that as yet is without wisdom is the mother of what leads to the Divine. This brings us to an important conception of mysticism. The soul is recognized as the mother of the divine. Unconsciously she leads man to the divine With the inevitability of a natural force.

This conception throws light on the view of Greek mythology taken in the Mysteries. The world of the gods is born in the soul. Man looks upon what he creates in images as his gods (cf. p. 29) . But he must Advance to another conception. He must transmute into divine images the divine force that is active within him before the creation of those images. Behind the Divine appears the mother of the Divine, which is nothing but the original force of the human soul. Thus side by side with the gods man sets up goddesses.

Let us look at the myth of Dionysos in this light. Dionysos is the son of Zeus and a mortal mother, Semele. Zeus wrests the undeveloped child from its mother when she is slain by lightning, and shelters it in his own side till it is ready to be born. Hera, the mother of the gods, incites the Titans against Dionysos, and they tear the boy in pieces. But Pallas Athene rescues his heart, which is still beating, and brings it to Zeus. Out of it he creates his son for the second time.

In this myth we can accurately trace a process enacted in the depths of the human soul. Interpreting it in the manner of the Egyptian priest who instructed Solon about the nature of myths (cf. p. 65 et seq.), we might say: It is related that Dionysos was the son of a god and of a mortal mother, that he was torn in pieces and afterwards born again. This sounds like a fable, but it contains the truth of the birth of the Divine and its destiny in the human soul. The Divine unites itself with the earthly, temporal human soul. As soon as the Divine, the Dionysiac element stirs, the soul feels a violent desire for the true spiritual form of that element. Ordinary consciousness, which now appears in the form of a female goddess, Hera, becomes jealous at the birth of the Divine out of the higher consciousness. It arouses the lower nature of man (the Titans). The undeveloped divine child is torn in pieces. In man the divine child is present as intellectual science broken up. But if there be enough of the higher wisdom (Zeus) in man to be active, it nurses and cherishes the immature child, which is then born again as a second son of God (Dionysos). Thus from science, which is the dispersed divine force in man, is born undivided wisdom, which is the Logos, the son of God and of a mortal mother, of the perishable human soul that unconsciously aspires to the divine. As long as we see in all this merely a process in the soul and look upon it as a picture of this process, we are a long way from the spiritual reality enacted in it. In this spiritual reality the soul is not merely experiencing something in herself, but she has been completely detached from herself and takes part in a cosmic event that is not enacted within the soul at all but outside her.

[ 13 ] Platonic wisdom and the Greek myth are closely linked; so, too, are Mystery wisdom and myth. The created gods were a feature of popular religion, the history of their origin was the secret of the Mysteries. No wonder that it was held to be dangerous to betray the Mysteries, for thereby the origin of the gods of the People was betrayed. A right understanding of that origin is salutary, a misunderstanding is pernicious.

• 1. Daimon is used here in the Greek sense. Today we would say spirit.
• 2. Everything that relates to knowledge gained through the eyes of the spirit is called by ancient mysticism mantic. Telestic, on the other hand, is the indication of the ways that lead to initiation.