The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In the course of the last few weeks I have drawn your attention to many different kinds of Mysteries, and we have especially attempted to obtain an insight into those Mysteries which were, so to say, the last of the great Mysteries which connected man s inner being directly with the life of nature, with the spirit of nature. These were the Mysteries of Hibernia; and we have seen how, through insight into man himself, an insight which was, however, of an intimate spiritual as well as an individual personal nature, the Mysteries of Greece also penetrated into the inner being of man. One can indeed say that as in the world of external nature the different regions of the earth bring forth this or that kind of vegetation, so in the course of human evolution there streamed down into the different regions of the earth the most manifold influences from the spiritual world, and these worked upon mankind.

If we were to pass over to the East, the Orient—as we are to do shortly in a historical connection—we should find there many other kinds of Mysteries; but today, as all our visitors are not yet present with us, I will link on rather to what we have already studied in preference to beginning something new.

If we look back at the course of human evolution, we may say that there appears before our Imaginative consciousness, with all possible clearness, a threefold evolution. I say “before our Imaginative consciousness,” because of course if we extend those epochs of which I am now speaking further back still, towards still earlier times, we naturally get a greater number than three, and this is also the case if we go further on into the future; but we will today take these middle stages of human evolution, which appear not through Inspiration but already in all clearness before our Imagination; these we will place before our souls today and study them from one particular point of view.

Now, even down to the Egyptian time it was still the case for humanity that, as regards the consciousness of that time—and this applies to the African and European races as well as to the Asiatic races—what we today call matter simply did not exist. Human consciousness did not even grasp the external coarse substances, let alone those abstractions which we today describe as carbon, hydrogen, sulphur, and so on. These things simply did not exist for them; but everything which was spread out externally in nature was seen directly as the body of divine spiritual beings, who revealed themselves in the whole of nature. Today we can go out into the mountains, we can tread on the rocks, we can even throw stones, and all these things we regard as indifferent neutral substances. In our consciousness today there is nothing in any way similar to what was in the consciousness of the ancient, Egyptian or the ancient Oriental.

When we confront a human being today and take hold, let us say, of his hand, that which we touch as a human hand we do not regard as something indifferent. We regard it as something belonging to an entire human organism, and if we observe the tip of the index finger of a human being, we cannot do otherwise than say: this is part of a complete organism.

This was also the case with the ancient Egyptians and the ancient Easterns as regards their consciousness. If they trod on a stone or picked up a stone, that was not to them an indifferent object as it would be to us today; it was not for them just an ordinary earthly substance, it was part of a divine body which was what the earth appeared to them to be. These ancient peoples related themselves consciously to the entire surface, the external surface of the earth, just as we relate ourselves in our consciousness to our skin. If today we approach a human being, and through something or other which comes to our consciousness he reminds us of another human being whom we know, but who is not there, and when it transpires that this human being is the brother or the sister of that other, then we realize that there exists between these two human beings a common flesh and blood, they belong together in a certain bodily way. And when an ancient Greek or an ancient Oriental directed his gaze to Mars, Jupiter and Saturn and then looked down to the earth, he saw in this earth the divine body of the earthly God; but he saw at the same time in this earth the sister or perhaps the brother, in short, a relation of those planets, Jupiter, Mars and Saturn, which travel in their orbits round the earth.

Thus there was amongst the ancients something completely of a soul-spiritual nature in their perception of the whole cosmos and of the earth as part of this cosmos.

You must realize clearly and deeply what an utterly different significance this had for those souls as compared with the man of today. It meant a great deal to look at the earth as a divine body and to see in it a relative, a sisterly relation, as it were, to all the other planets of the cosmic system; for the ancients conceived the entire cosmos as filled by the gods. They conceived not only the whole earth as being filled with gods, but beyond the planetary bodies they saw each single member of the planetary beings filled with gods. In stones, in trees, in the rivers, springs, clouds, in lightning, in all these things some sort of spiritual beings revealed themselves to them. This consciousness was awakened far and wide among the races over the earth, and was specially deepened in the various Mystery-Centres which were to be found here and there upon the earth.

If we trace the development of Greek life to that time when the external greatness of Greece gradually diminished into simply a kind of chaos of its various peoples, at the time when the Macedonian nation arose, we find how at that time there flowed over into human knowledge what we learned to know in the last lecture here in the form of Aristotelianism, that which Alexander the Great, in a spiritual sense, regarded as his racial task. But when we come on the one hand to this culminating point in the history of Greece, and on the other to the downfall of Greece and the rise of the Macedonian nation, we see how, besides what outer history relates, which is legendary compared with the reality, out of the depths of the consciousness of the deeper spirits there came an impulse received from those Mysteries of which Aristotle does not speak, but to which he was closely related. These were the Mysteries which in the deepest sense aroused into the full life of consciousness in the pupils the fact that the whole cosmos is a Theogony, an evolution of the Gods, and that one only regards the cosmos in an illusory way if one believes that anything else exists in the cosmos but the Gods, the divine beings, those Gods who stand there as the Essences, the life and essence of the cosmos. It is the Gods, the Divine Beings, who have experiences in this cosmos, they it is who bring about the deeds. What man sees as cloud formations, what he hears as thunder, what he perceives as lightning, what he perceives on earth as rivers, and as mountains, and the mineral kingdom, All these are simply manifestations, expressions of the destiny of the Gods who conceal themselves behind these. Even that which appears outwardly as cloud-formations, thunder and lightning, trees, rivers and mountains is nothing but what divine existence reveals; just as the skin of man reveals the inner being of a soul behind the skin. If the Gods are everywhere, then man has to distinguish—and this was taught to the Mystery pupils in Northern Greece—between the lesser Gods, those who revealed themselves in the different beings and processes of nature, and the great Gods, who expressed the beings of Sun, Mars, and Mercury, and of a fourth which cannot be made visible through any picture or form. These were the great Gods, the great Planetary Spirits, those great Planetary Gods who were regarded in such a way that when man turned his gaze outwards towards the cosmic spaces, it was not only his eye which was kindled but also his entire heart learnt to perceive what lived in the Sun, Mars and Mercury, and not only lived externally in this small circle of the cosmos, but everywhere in cosmic space, and above all draws near to man.

Then after a majestic impulse was awakened in the pupils of the Northern Greek Mysteries through his gaze having been first directed towards the planetary orbits themselves, it was then deepened, in a human sense, so that his vision was taken possession of as it were by the heart; and he learnt to see psychically, with the soul. Then the pupil understood why on the altar there were placed before him three symbolic vessels, pitchers.

We once made use of a copy of these vessels here in an Eurhythmy presentation of Faust, and as you saw these three vessels, so they were seen in the Samothracian Mysteries, the Northern Greek Mysteries; but the essential thing was that through these vessels, these pitchers, in their whole symbolic form, a sacrificial ritual, a ritual of consecration took place. A kind of incense was put into these three vessels, which was then kindled, and when the smoke poured out, three words of which we shall speak further tomorrow were uttered with mantric power by the celebrant. These words were uttered into the smoke which rose up above the vessels, and then there appeared the forms of the three Kabiri. They appeared because the human breath breathed out through the mantric words, fashioned itself, and then imparted its form to the rising smoke, the incense arising from the substance which was incorporated into these symbolic vessels. While the pupil learnt to read in this way what was written in the smoke by his, own breathing, he learnt to read, at the same time, what the mysterious planets spoke to him from out of the great universe. Now he knew that the form assumed by the first of the Kabiri through the mantric word and its power represented the reality behind Mercury; in the form assumed by the second Kabiri he learnt the reality of Mars; and in that of the third Kabiri he learnt the reality of Apollo, the Sun.

Now when you look at those fashion-plate figures (and you must pardon me for using this strong expression) which are unfortunately mostly to be seen in picture galleries of the later Greek sculpture, and which are greatly valued because people have no idea from what these forms have arisen—if one considers these fashion-plate figures of Apollo, Mars and Mercury, one should look at them with, as it were, the gaze of Goethe, that gaze which Goethe applied during his Italian journey in order, through these fashion-plate forms, to get some idea of what Greek art really was in its freshness, that Greek art which was destroyed with so much else during the first few centuries after the foundation of Christianity. If one is able as it were to look through those later Greek plastic forms, which in one sense are rightly valued because they are signposts, but which being simply descendants from what lived before, should not be considered great—if one looks back to that from which they came, one sees that in the older Greek Art, copies were made of sacrificial revelations, revelations which arose in a much earlier epoch in a much more majestic and mighty way than we find them later in Samothrace, in these Mysteries of the Kabiri. One looks back to those times in which the mantric word was uttered into the sacrificial smoke, and the true form of Apollo, of Mars and of Mercury then appeared.

Those were times in which man did not say abstractly: “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and a God was the Word;” those were times when man could say something else, when he could say: “My out-breathing fashions itself, it takes form; and while this expiration takes form in a regular way, it reveals itself as an image of cosmic creation, because it creates for me from the sacrificial smoke forms which for me are a living script, a living writing; and this writing reveals to me what the planetary worlds desire to say to me.”

When the pupil of the Kabiri Mysteries in Samothrace approached the portals of these temples of initiation, then, because of the instruction he had gone through, he had this feeling: “Now at last I am entering something which reveals to me the magical deeds of the sacrificial Father;” for in these Mysteries the initiating Celebrant was called “Father.” What did the magical powers of this celebrant Father reveal to the pupil? Through that which the Gods laid down in man (i.e. the power of speech) this priestly magician and sage, this Hierophant, was able to write certain signs in the sacrificial smoke) certain characteristics; and these uttered the secrets of the universe.

Therefore the pupil, when he approached the temple of initiation, could say in his heart: “I am now entering something which reveals to me a mighty spirit, the great Gods, those great Gods who through these sacrificial rites, reveal on the earth the secrets of the cosmos.”

That was a speech which was there spoken, a writing which was there written, which truly did not appeal to the intellect of man, but which made a claim on the whole being of man. In the Samothracian Mysteries there still existed something of a knowledge which today has quite disappeared. Man is today capable of saying, with truth, what a quartz crystal feels like, what a hair feels like, what the human skin feels like, what the skin of an animal feels like, what silk or velvet feel like. Man is today capable of that. He can realize all these things vividly in his feeling. In the Samothracian Mysteries something else existed by means of which man could realize with truth how the Gods could be felt. For the sense of touch in these ancient times was still such that man was capable of feeling, of contacting the Gods. The most marvelous thing is really the following, and one has to go back to these ancient times if one ventures to say that man could assert with truth: “I know through my finger tips how the Gods contact one another.” In these Samothracian Mysteries there existed another method by which one could touch, contact the Gods, and this consisted in the following.

While the priestly magician spoke into this sacrificial smoke the mantric words, while he caused these words to resound forth in his expiration, he felt in his outgoing breath just as man usually feels when he stretches out a hand to touch something; and just as we know the different feeling in our finger-tips when they are contacting say silk, to what they feel when they contact velvet or touch the fur of a cat or the skin of a human being, in the same way the Samothracian priestly magician felt with the air he breathed out, which went forth into the sacrificial smoke, an utterance of something which came from himself. He felt his expiration as an organ of touch, which went into the smoke. He felt the smoke; and in the smoke he felt these great Gods, the Kabiri, streaming towards him. He felt how the smoke took form and that those forms which developed in the smoke came from outside to the expiration of breath. These out-breathings formed here into curves, there into angles, while at times something as it were grasped him; thus the whole divine form of the Kabiri was experienced by means of the mantric words in which the breath was clothed. Through the words which came out of the heart the sacrificing Hierophant contacted these great Gods, the descending Kabiri, who came to him in the sacrificial smoke. There was a living interchange between the Logos in man and the Logos outside in the cosmic spaces.

Thus while the initiating Father led the pupil before the sacrificial altar and gradually instructed him in the way in which he learnt to feel while speaking, and while the pupil progressed more and more and learnt to feel himself in this element of speech, he finally came to that stage of inner experience in which he had a clear consciousness of how Hermes, or Mercury was fashioned, of how Apollo was fashioned, and of how Aries or Mars was fashioned. It was as though the entire consciousness of man was lifted out of his body and what the pupil formerly knew as the content of his head was lifted out and remained above it. It was as though the forces of his heart were pressed into a different place, as though the forces of the heart were driven into the head. And in this human being really transcending, going out of himself, there arose something which formed these words: “It is thus that the Kabiri, the great Gods desire you to be.” From that moment the pupil knew that Mercury lived in his limbs, the Sun in his heart, and Mars in his speech.

You see it is not only the processes and being of nature in the external world that were brought before the pupil in these ancient times; what was brought before him was neither one-sided naturalistically nor in a moral way. It was something in which morality and nature flowed together in unity; and that was just the secret of these Samothracian Mysteries, that the pupil received this consciousness directly: “Nature is spirit; spirit is nature.”

In the times which found their last echo in the Samothracian Kabiri service, arose the insight which can bring earthly substances into harmony with the entire heavens. In these ancient times a man could not say, when he looked at that reddish-brown material which has the shining appearance of copper, at that substance which we today call copper, he could not say as one does today: “That is copper; that is a constituent of the earth.” At that time such a thing would have been inconceivable. Copper was no constituent of the earth for these ancient peoples, but the deed of Venus in the earth which revealed itself as copper. The earth only allows stones such as sandstone, chalk, to arise, in order to receive into her bosom what the heavens imprinted into the earth. Just as little as we today are able to say that the seed simply grows out of the earth, so little at that time could one say, in regard to the surface of the earth, and copper ore in the earth, “This copper ore is a constituent of the earth.” What one had to say then was: “The earth here with its sandstone or other soil is simply the basis, the soil; and what exists by way of metal inside it has been placed in the earth by the planets.” This is a seed implanted in the earth by a planet, and everything which exists in this way on the earth was then seen as something impelled into the earth from the heavens.

We today describe the earth with the substances in it, as we may see in any book on mineralogy or geology; but the ancient science would not have described things in the same way. At that time a man could let his gaze roam over the earth, but when he saw the substances with it he had to take the heavens into consideration; and it was in the heavens that he saw the real beings of substances. It is only apparently that copper, tin, lead, etc., lie in the earth. In reality they are simply the seeds which have been implanted into the earth during the ancient Sun and Moon existence, implanted from the heavens into earthly existence.

Now this was still the teaching of the Kabiri in the Samothracian Mysteries, and that finally was something which gave at any rate the atmosphere of the knowledge in which Aristotle and Alexander the Great worked. And then the beginning was created for something quite different.

Humanity did not descend at once with this insight on to the earth: humanity had first to pass through a transitional period in these ancient times. Now even in these echoes of the ancient times which we find in the Samothracian Mysteries, when the metals of the earth or even other substances of the earth such as sulphur or phosphorus were to be described, then the heavens were described as we describe the plant when we seek to know the nature of the seed. We cannot recognise a seed, we cannot get to know the nature of a seed, unless we know the plant. What should we do, for instance, with a seed which appears like this _ unless we knew, at the same time, what the aniseed plant looks like? The ancients would have said: “What can you make of the copper which is found in the earth unless you know how Venus appears spiritually, psychically, and bodily, up above in the heavens?”

Out of this knowledge of the heavens there gradually arose what I must call a knowledge of the atmosphere, wherein men in studying the earth no longer described the stars in their living essence, but when they saw an earthly being, they said: In this there lives first of all that which we see in solid earth, then also there is that which we see tending towards the drop-form of the liquids. Then there lives that which seeks to expand itself on all sides, that which is airy, that which lives, for instance, in the human organism in breath and in speech. Finally there lives the fiery element, which dissolves each individual being, so that out of the dissolved constituents new beings can arise. These elements live in every earthly formation.

Now, as formerly in the ancient Mysteries man could look to the salt element which is of course fashioned cosmically, but into the fashioning of which the earth intervenes, they saw in that salt element that which Mother earth brought to the metals and in the mercurial element, everything which streamed out of the cosmos in order to become metal.

Indeed it is infinitely childish when people begin today to give descriptions of what Mercury was still supposed to be in the Middle Ages. Behind all those descriptions there stands in the background the idea that Mercury in the Middle Ages was something similar to quicksilver, or at any rate that some particular metal was understood by that; but that is absolutely not the case. Mercury is every metal in so far as it stands under the influence of the entire cosmos; for how would copper come into being if the cosmos from its periphery alone worked on this metal? In that case copper would be of a drop-form quicksilver. How would lead appear if the cosmos alone worked? Lead would also appear in drop-formation, as quicksilver also. How would tin appear if the cosmos alone worked? Tin also would be in drop-form. Each metal, if only the cosmos worked, would be quicksilver; for all metals are mercury in so far as the cosmos works on them; only the actual present day quicksilver still takes the drop-form on earth. What then is quicksilver really? The fact is, the other metals—lead, copper, tin, iron—have transcended the drop-form. When the whole earth still stood under the influence of the spherical cosmos, all metals were mercury, but they have transcended the mercurial form and so today they are crystallized in other shapes. Only the actual quicksilver, what we today know as such, has remained stationary at that early stage.

What then would the ancients and even the medieval alchemists have said of quicksilver? They would have said: “Copper, tin, lead are the good metals, because they have progressed with evolution. Quicksilver is the Lucifer among the metals, because it has remained stationary in an earlier form.” That was the way in which in these ancient times men spoke of the earth; for at the same time, in truth, they spoke of the heavens.

From then on they gradually came to speak of that which lies between the environment and the earth. Now between the environment and the earth there lies below first the earth itself, then the watery element, then the airy element, then the fiery element. Thus the ancient peoples saw everything which was on the earth in the aspect of the heavens; and then came a middle epoch, which passed away in the first third of the 14th century, when people saw everything in the aspect of the environment, of the atmosphere. Then in the 14th and 15th centuries came the great transformation, when man dropped with his percept ions wholly on to the earth. The elements of water, air, fire, were separated in man's consciousness. They were split up into sulphur, carbon, hydrogen. Man then saw everything in an earthly aspect.

Therewith begins an epoch which I indicated when we spoke about the Hibernian Mysteries. There begins that epoch when man embraces the earth with his knowledge and heaven becomes for him something mathematical. He begins to calculate the size of the stars and their movements and distances, and so on; the heavens become an abstraction for him.

Not only had the heavens become an abstraction to man in this third period. The image of the heavens in the living man is his head, and what he can know of the heavens lives in his head; thus since man learnt only to know of the heavens mathematically, which means logically and abstractly, there lives in his head only the logical and abstract; but from that time on there existed no further possibility for man of drawing down the spiritual into his concepts and ideas. So where man sought the spirit, there began that great conflict between what he, can acquire with the intellectual content of his head and that which the Gods sought to reveal to him of the heavens; and most intensely and gigantically was this conflict fought out, in the true forms of the Rosicrucian Mysteries in the Middle Ages. There, in preparation for true knowledge, man was made to feel the powerlessness of modern man.

This was indeed something which could be felt as mighty in the circles of the true Rosicrucian initiation. What was so mighty consisted in the fact that it was made clear to the pupil, not in an abstract way, but in an inner living way: “You as modern man can only enter the world of ideas; but in so doing you lose the living nature of your own humanity.”

When the pupil felt that that which characterized this new epoch could no longer lead him to what his true being really is, he felt: “You must either doubt your own knowledge or you must pass through a kind of death, a kind of killing of the pride of abstraction.” The Rosicrucian pupil felt—that is, the true Rosicrucian pupil felt as if the master had struck him a blow in the neck, to indicate to him that the abstraction of the modern head is not adapted for entering the spiritual worlds, and that the pupil must renounce what is merely abstract, if he wishes to enter the spiritual worlds. That was one mighty preparatory moment, in what we may call the Rosicrucian initiation.

You often hear, especially from the learned or, let's say, from the progressive side: Yes, spiritual entities are present for those who still cling to old childish beliefs, who live in their imagination and their feelings. But for people who have clear, logical concepts, such spiritual entities are not there. I would like to remind you of what the Leipzig university professor Wundt wrote, in which he fights against all spiritual facts. He says: Those people who believe in such spiritual entities from the outset see these things, but those who do not believe in them do not see them. For them, it remains something that must always be doubted. But that is the decisive factor.

Now let us ask ourselves whether those who see the world with clear logical concepts are really decisive in their statements about the phenomena of a higher world. Here we must take into account a little of what is a condition of life for a whole series of initially elementary phenomena in the higher world.

We are not only constantly surrounded by sensual things and beings, but we are also always surrounded by a world of supersensible entities. One should not think that these supersensible entities have no relation to the visible nature. Just as man consists of visible and invisible parts, of his visible physical body and of his invisible spirit and soul, so also other entities consist of a visible and an invisible part. The relationships can then, however, be very different from those in humans.

The simplest supersensible beings we have to deal with are the so-called elementary beings. These are entities that surround us at every turn. The whole space around us is filled with such entities. Just as plants, animals and people live around us, so do supersensible beings. But they are not always fully developed; they are in a more or less imperfectly developed state. If you look at the natural world around us, you will recognize the same thing in the visible world of the senses. If you have a bean here, a bean seed, and there a bean plant that has shot up, winding around the stick and unfolding bean blossoms, then you can say to yourself: In a certain respect, the bean seed and the bean plant that has shot up and is winding around a stick in many turns are basically the same from a certain point of view. If you put the bean in the ground today, it can sprout up in exactly the same way on the vine in a while, and can be exactly the same as the fully-grown bean plant standing before you today. So here in the world of the senses you seemingly have two entities. From a different point of view, however, they are in fact the same. It is the same in the spiritual world. There you actually have beings that, like beans in the seed state, exist as spiritual germs that surround us all the time in the spiritual world. Just as you give the bean the opportunity to be the expressed bean plant, you can also give these spiritual germs, which constantly surround us in the astral realm, a soil in which they can take root. If you keep the bean on the surface of the earth, on stony ground, it will never be able to develop. But if you sink it into suitable soil, it will sprout. It can be the same with a spiritual seed. There are beings around us, such seed beings, that simply grow through what we develop, that thereby have a breeding ground in which they grow and flourish. Suppose there are spiritual beings around you who, just as the bean plant needs physical soil, salts, physical light and so on to build a physical body, want to build an astral body out of astral matter.

What is astral matter? These are, for example, human passions, urges, desires. Astral matter is greed, generosity, which develops love. All this relates to a being that is not rooted in the physical in its entire nature and wants to make an astral body for itself [like the ground for seeds]. What a person emits, develops in desires and instincts, is necessary for certain entities, so that one can say: Here in the astral realm is a spiritual seed, and there a person develops a pronounced instinct for greed. That is a spiritual soil for a certain spiritual being that is in its environment; it finds an opportunity in it to grow, so you give spiritual beings the opportunity to live in it. In fact, that is present.

For example, it is also known that people seek to discharge their pain in tears. No one will deny that the tears have something that alleviates the pain. A certain pain-relieving agent is the tears. An astral substance causes this peculiar soothing effect that lies in tears. This astral substance, which comes about because the pain is discharged in tears, causes certain entities to incarnate, to embody themselves. In fact, the person who cries draws in spiritual entities from the environment. These cause the pain to become less and less.

Now, however, pain is often, when we experience it ourselves without it discharging in tears, a significant increase in strength, which can have an even stronger effect if we accumulate it as a good experience and do not seek the voluptuousness of tears. Then they are a source of wisdom. Painful experiences are a source of wisdom. Time and again, the one who knows something, who sees something in the world, will gladly give up his pleasures; but he will not gladly give up his pains, because painful experiences reveal what we should and should not do. If something has caused pain, then we know that it is not life-promoting, and we know how to behave in later times.

Great idealists in previous incarnations were often martyrs. From these painful experiences, which they bore with dignity and equanimity, an ideal sense arose. From this you can see that bitter experiences are connected with wisdom. You will also have to admit that when a person cries out the painful experiences, he then also dulls their effects. That is indeed the case. He who wants to see into higher worlds must, above all, understand how to bury pain in his soul, how to turn it into an active ferment and not let it disappear in outwardly flowing tears. In addition to all the figurative interpretations, the word in “Light on the Path” is also to be taken literally as a real truth:

Before the eye can see, it must wean itself from tears.

This is not to say anything against tears in people at a certain stage of development. So you see how this provides a breeding ground for spiritual beings who are constantly present, and from which astral beings sprout like plants from sown soil.

What then are these astral germs? Where do they exist? If you ask yourself these questions very carefully, you will understand many things in nature that would otherwise be difficult for you to grasp. For those who seek to fathom the world in this way, the things of nature are not purely physical entities, as one would usually assume, but they are permeated with spiritual life. All of nature is alive, truly alive with spiritual entities. The ancients knew this and still know it today. Paracelsus, for example, said that spiritual entities rest everywhere in plants and stones.

Now let us try to explore the nature of such spiritual entities that are different from the entities that surround us. First, I have to discuss some concepts that will help you understand the whole supersensory nature. Some of you already know these things, but I believe I can put them in a different context. Besides, it is good to hear them from time to time.

People know their environment and act out of their consciousness. What does that mean? When they are asleep, they do not act out of their consciousness, because then their actual higher self, their actual higher being, is separated from the body. The body is on its own. When you look at a sleeping person, what are you actually looking at? The human being consists of the physical body, [which you see with your eyes,] then of an etheric body, which is similarly constructed and forms a kind of model for the physical body, then of the astral body with the life of feelings, instincts, desires and passions, and finally of the I, in which I combine the higher parts.

When a person is awake, the following parts are present: physical body, etheric body, astral body and I. The physical body is in the sensory world, the etheric body, the astral body and the I are in the supersensible world. So we have a being that has its consciousness in the supersensible and only the body on the physical plane. During sleep, it discards the physical body and lives in the higher worlds. What the human being represents here in the state of sleep can be seen as a constant state in the other physical beings that surround you. With plants, you can say – and not just figuratively – that they sleep. What man is during the night – approximately – that is what the plant always is: it is a sleeper, has a sleeping consciousness. It is important to realize this correctly. You see, just as man, when he sleeps, does not have his consciousness in the physical body, so the plant also does not have its consciousness in the physical body, and therefore it is a sleeper.

This is how man differs from the plant, in that man has his consciousness within his body, while the plant has its consciousness outside of its body. The plant is not without consciousness, it just has it outside of its body; it has it on the mental plane. The animal has its consciousness on the astral plane, but the plant has it on the mental plane.

We now come to the description of the external sensory world, of sensory nature. I will try to present it to you schematically. When you look at this whole world, it comes to you through your senses, through your eyes, ears, through sensation and feeling. We call this the physical plane. Just as a sponge is permeated by water, so this world is permeated by the astral world; it permeates the physical world. The astral plane, however, does not have objects and entities that can be touched and seen with the eyes. The “matter that is present on it is made of the same stuff as your desires and longings.

If you have a candle here and light it, it will burn on the physical plane. The fire is therefore the result of a physical process. But if you curse your neighbor, fire will burn on the astral plane. He is in pain, and that is visible on the astral plane in a kind of flame. Lust is something similar on the astral plane.

An even more refined substance is that from which your thoughts are woven, we call that the mental substance.

Then there is an even higher plane, that is the higher mental plane. The substance on this plane is the same as that from which the thoughts consist, which are completely free of sensuality, the highest thoughts that a person can have at all.

Now we have the following beings on earth: minerals, plants, animals and human beings. When a person is awake, his consciousness is here on the physical plane; his consciousness dwells in the physical body. The animal's consciousness is not in the physical body, but on the astral plane. This means that the animal is not able to express its self on the physical plane. It lacks the ability to think for itself. There is a so-called generic soul in animals; this lives on the astral plane. The plant has its self-awareness on the mental plane. Thus man, animal, plant and finally mineral are in their duality as form and consciousness. From this we can see what mineral, plant, animal and human being are. The animal is not able to grasp the ego. There is no instrument through which it can work. On the astral plane, animals are like human beings on the physical plane; they are beginning to speak to you. And on the mental plane, plants are like human beings on the physical plane. The animal is on the physical plane and rooted in the astral plane with its consciousness. It can also be the other way around, namely, the consciousness is on the physical plane and the body is on the astral plane, which then reaches into our world with its consciousness. What would such a being mean? Such a being would move up in the astral realm, it would go for walks in the astral realm. And just as we experience the animal down here, the “animal that has its consciousness in the physical realm expresses itself in physical action, that is, in the form of an attraction.

For example, the physicist has a magnet here, and if he brings something iron close to it, it is attracted. The physicist then speaks of an attraction. Of course, that is just a word. What is the truth here? The truth is what I have described. In truth, the magnetic force that is at work and visible here is based on an astral entity. All natural forces are based on astral entities. The forces of nature are based on astral beings. There are beings walking on the astral plane, and here they express themselves as natural forces. Natural forces are nothing more than actions on the physical plane of beings that live on the astral plane!

Therefore, anyone who approaches nature with their entire sensitivity will be able to perceive such beings from the natural forces.

Take a highly sensitive person who approaches such forces. He will not only be able to say when the iron is there and is attracted: magnetic force is present here, but his eye will see the magnetic forces - and that is the same as the consciousness of the animal on the astral plane. These magnetic forces have their body on the astral plane, and this can be seen by the sensitive person in question.

A piece of sulfur is not only a piece of sulfur, but it is also a force, and this force corresponds to an astral being on the astral plane. This is a being, an organism on the astral plane.

From this you can see that we are actually constantly dealing with entities that have their being on the astral plane, as with the forces of nature. A person can find one plant lovely and another one repulsive. The clairvoyant can see that the reason for this is that one plant has forces that express themselves in a beautiful astral body, while the other has forces that express themselves in a hideous astral body. The smell that the physical human being can smell, the astral human being can perceive, you can see in an astral form. When you begin to really develop the powers to see what is not perceptible to the physical senses, you will be surrounded by light effects in the plant. We have two entities in the plant, one inside the other, belonging together. The plant sprouts from the ground. It has its consciousness on the mental plane and its physical body down here. Another entity is placed in it, which has its body on the astral plane and its consciousness down here.

Follow with me the path that the animal takes through its life. When the animal is alive, when it is born, the astral body of the animal arises first, then the etheric body, and then they clothe themselves with physical matter. The animal gets the physical body, the astral lives in the physical body. Now take this animal's life. It can only exist as long as there is oxygen in the air. The moment the air does not have enough oxygen, the animal dies. The moment you bury the animal alive, it also dies because it does not have enough oxygen. So you see that the mere physical body cannot hold the animal's astral body unless the appropriate air of life is present. If you cover the whole animal with earth, then that animal cannot live.

You can do something similar with the astral beings I have been talking about. Suppose you have the astral body of an entity that accompanies a plant that belongs to it; you are now confronting this entity. When you confront it, it is often the case for such an entity as if you were planting a bean in the ground. You offer it the opportunity to root, to grow and to flourish through your own spirit. It takes on an outwardly visible form. This is a very important process. You stand in front of a plant, it begins to be surrounded by fire sparks; a being is formed that is connected to the plant; this being's body is formed.

Now you begin to think about this being. When you think, it is really like a kind of soil in which the being is sunk. But as beneficial as the soil is for the plant when it envelops part of its organs in the right way, it is as pernicious for it when you cover the whole plant. And just as the soil kills the plant when you cover the whole plant with soil, so does the soil of thought act on such entities. If you completely cover them with thought material, it has a killing effect. They lack the air of life. This is why the elemental spirits of nature die when their life air is taken from them through thoughts.

This is one reason why caustic thinkers, people who spin out everything and want to surround everything with their thoughts, actually kill the delicate beings that surround us. This will explain to you what it means for such beings to 'die'; they actually die many times over in people. Just as a landslide buries all the plants below and causes them to die, so human thinking, by spreading, kills a whole series of nature entities.

Myth and legend have expressed this beautifully in symbolic language; you can find it expressed in the myth of the brownies: in the past, when man did not think so much, they were there. Then came the time when man began to think; then the nature spirits withdrew. This is expressed symbolically, but corresponds to a hidden reality. Just as man, in his physical body, is consigned to the earth when he dies, so these nature spirits, in their elemental bodies, are sunk into the mental earth in the upper worlds, and there they die. Man dies in the physical earth, the nature spirit dies in the “earth of the spiritual world”! There they have their grave, and it is prepared for them by the megalomaniac, clever thinking of men.

To those who have not yet been initiated into these things, the matter will seem fantastic. The one who approaches the spiritual world with doubting thoughts will not find this spiritual world. He behaves as if he were walking through a swarm of mosquitoes with a flame of fire when he passes through the spiritual world. Such is the case with a thinker who has no sensitivity. Many slain [spiritual] entities indicate the trace of such thinkers. Therefore, man is often a destroyer of elemental spirits. He is something that wants to develop higher, and these entities, which are in a reverse development, are often destroyed by people. Here you have another practical example that makes a real teaching of occultism seem understandable: that you yourself must offer the spiritual entities that which allows them to appear, which allows them to be there. Hence the ever-recurring demand: one should not think caustically, should not criticize, but should devotedly abandon oneself to one's surroundings. Then the bright spiritual elemental beings emerge from their darkness. These things are all connected with the profound laws of spiritual existence.

Now another example from which you can see how the immediate life becomes explicable through such insights that belong to the hidden worlds. Suppose a person lies to another. If I tell the truth, it means something quite different in the spiritual world than if I lie. When I tell the truth, I create a thought-form. Every thought I express is a form in the supersensible world. Now the fact that I want to communicate also corresponds to something in the spiritual world. Every fact in the external, sensory space also corresponds to something in the spiritual world. The moment I speak the truth, the thought form I have formed connects with what corresponds to the fact in the spiritual world. But if I say or think a lie that does not correspond to the fact, then my thought form will immediately rebound on me when I try to unite it with the spiritual counterpart that corresponds to the fact, and it will stick to me. Those who habitually tell lies are constantly having their lies rebound on them, and they surround themselves with a whole armor of lies. Now imagine such a person, enclosed in such an armor of lies. The forces that could develop him cannot enter, and the result is that he lags behind. Those who lie exclude themselves from the power that they must let flow in and out, and as a result they lag behind. Therefore, everything that is untruthful, that does not correspond to the facts, is an obstacle to development. All truth connects with the facts themselves, and it allows man to enter into the whole stream of facts. If you take this into consideration, you will understand what it means to be a 'truthful person'. To be a truthful person means to make yourself capable of progressing, of going further and further. Only truthful people will progress. On the physical plane, a lie can perhaps be hidden, but on the astral plane, a lie cannot be hidden. Liars are surrounded by thick crusts on the astral plane. Therefore, they cannot develop. For this reason, the biggest stumbling block in the world is the existing lie. 'Lie' in Hebrew is 'Tophel'. And if you imagine the 'spirit of lies' in the world, which wanted to make it its business to put as many obstacles as possible in the way of the world, then it would have to be a 'spirit of lies'. He would have to lie in such a way that a crust would form around all of humanity; he would be the corrupter of humanity. Corrupter is called 'Mephiz' in Hebrew. So you can call such a spirit of lies 'Mephistophel', 'spirit of lies'. His name is chosen because he is the 'father of all obstacles'. Goethe also calls him that.

So here you have something from which you can see that you can only understand the poet by looking at him from the point of view of occultism. You will find exactly the same with most really great poets. You will never find that the great world poets created out of a random fantasy, but out of the occult facts, out of the occult connections!

Now another example, which has been mentioned before. We are in the fifth root race, and within this, in the fifth sub-race. Three sub-races had a priestly culture. In the fourth cultural period, the Semitic peoples came up. From the priestly cultures, a culture developed that was quite different, that was not based on inspiration from above; namely, the priestly culture was based on that. The culture of the fourth sub-race was based on cleverness. The emergence of Greek culture thus means overcoming priestly wisdom through cunning. This is presented to us by a Greek poet and a Greek sculptor. The poet Homer presents this to us in Odysseus, who overcomes the Trojans through cunning by making a wooden horse. The sculptor has the old Trojan priest Laocoön crushed by the snake, the symbol of wisdom and prudence. Real poets have always drawn from the occult. The others are not poets, because nothing in their poetry corresponds to reality. Poetry can only flourish among spiritual peoples. The truth is handed down to people in different ways. The poets were not merely entertainers of mankind; they were seers who wanted to shine beyond our physical reality into the higher worlds. Homer is therefore the “blind seer” because he created his works from the hidden, not from the world of the senses. So you see that true great poetry can only be understood if we look at it on the basis of occult facts. Life and the creation of man only become clear to us when we look at them from the occult point of view. Consider what this means! One can rail against occultism and regard it as something that makes people fantasize. But you see: in truth, occultism leads deeper and deeper into the world. It makes the outer context of the world truly understandable. There is, as Goethe already said, no outside and no inside. “Nature has neither core nor shell, it is all at once.” Apparently the secrets are revealed when people open their minds.

This brings me to something that may seem hard to believe at first, but which is really true, namely the benefit of having an external exoteric, theosophical movement alongside the occult schools. Only those who want to live an occult life should be initiated. “What is the purpose of having a Theosophical Society?” you might ask. Those who approach this matter only with intellectual knowledge will hardly find a satisfactory answer. But those who delve into this spiritual world would have more success. It may take a long time, but what comes of it is a real insight into the world. People do not sit together for nothing. Depending on their karma, it takes longer for some and shorter for others. What one hears there awakens one's powers, leading one into the spiritual world oneself, the beginning of initiation. This must be borne in mind if one is to understand the true purpose and the true reason for the Theosophical movement. The true reason for the Theosophical movement is not only to speak in the broadest circles about the higher worlds, but also, through our words, to awaken in people the gift and ability to live in the higher worlds themselves, by infusing them with the power of the higher worlds. This is absolutely necessary. Indeed, someone who understood everything, who could grasp with his pure conceptual material everything that can be told about the higher worlds, and who approached the matter with impartiality, would have only a fine membrane to break, and the gift of clairvoyance would arise without further ado. There may be individuals who have an abbreviated process. There must always be those who develop a little further than the rest. But all of humanity can be helped in our time. What is taught today can, without fail, produce powers of vision in time, in the following way:

Today people think they are terribly clever in their critical thoughts. To what do they owe this? Suppose you are sitting in a meeting. In front of you stands a speaker who, as they say, proclaims the truth. If such a person had spoken to them in their previous incarnation, they would not have understood him. Not a bit of it! Suppose everyone sitting in such a gathering had been on earth fifteen hundred years ago or more. But then they were told fairy tales by their priests. They were not taught in the way we are today, in an intellectual way, but they were told fairy tales. And these souls embody themselves again: the power with which they have accepted the fairy tales is now coming into its own in that they can show understanding for intellectual speech. And through the understanding that has now been developed, a higher understanding will come about. It will no longer be a matter of understanding with the intellect, but of clairvoyance.

So you can see that the theosophical movement opens up a great perspective. It works in the same way as the priests of centuries ago worked into the supersensible world with their fairy tales. Just as they have sunk something into the soul that is coming forth today, so today's intellectual education will, in the next embodiment, produce the ability to penetrate the world with clairvoyant powers. That is the world mission of the Theosophical Society. That is what it wants to be and what it should be. If you look at it that way, you will realize that you cannot have that in occultist associations. There are many movements that have ethical or other purposes. But movements in which there is talk of the transcendental worlds in order to awaken the spiritual, the spirit, do not exist as popular movements outside of the theosophical movement today. That is the reason why such a current was brought into being by the theosophical movement. The theosophical movement is not something that teaches us dull theories, but leads us directly into life, giving us guidance to look around at the world with open eyes.

Throughout the world, there is a kind of blindness in those who should be taking the initiative in the outside world. Last Thursday, I tried to make this clear in the social sphere. In all areas where a knowledge of the forces should prevail, we see that blindness is actually the hallmark of those who should be awakening. Theosophy wants to bring out the underlying forces.

Man is often an enemy of the elemental beings that surround us constantly. But he becomes their friend when he recognizes them and becomes familiar with them and works in their sense. We become friends with those beings that always surround us in the spiritual world when we enter into the hidden sides of nature; then they work with us, not against us. Everything that occurs in the world and hinders progress and causes much bloodshed in the world has its reason in nothing other than in the awakened elemental beings in the world. They are enemies of man as long as man wants to work without knowing them. They transform into friends when he wants to get to know them, when he wants to face them with familiarity. Externally, physically speaking, it means: Man stands in the world, works and works, and around him things happen that arise from his actions. He sees nothing. He sees absolutely nothing. Then suddenly revolutionary movements break in because he has seen nothing, because he has not seen the hidden things that were there long before they discharged the external hostile storm. If man would see them, he would not be so careless of them as to let them degenerate into revolutionary currents. He would work with them. From this you can see that not recognizing the course of the laws, the spiritual elemental beings, destruction, turmoil and revolutions in the world, and that the more we get to know the forces around us, the more we will see what we call the calm development of people. Thus, on a large scale, knowledge of the elemental nature, knowledge of the spiritual world around us, has great practical value. It allows us to penetrate deeper into our environment and understand it.

Next time, we want to talk about a problem that can affect people very deeply. We have already heard a lot about the forces that work around people. And so we want to ask ourselves: Is a human being a being that can be said to have freedom or not? Are they on a tight rein from the elemental beings or not? These are the questions that we want to address next time.

Consider what is to be the subject of today's lecture only as an insertion into the series of lectures this winter. It is perhaps justified precisely by our fateful time, in which the two Central European empires, so closely connected with each other, must approach the great demands of historical becoming in our present and for the future. I also believe I am justified in saying something about the intellectual life of Austria, since I lived in Austria until I was almost thirty years old and had not only the opportunity but also the necessity from a wide variety of perspectives to become fully immersed in Austrian intellectual life. On the other hand, it may be said that this Austrian intellectual life is particularly, I might say, difficult for the outsider to grasp in terms of ideas, concepts, and representations, and that perhaps our time will make it increasingly necessary for the peculiarities of this Austrian intellectual life to be brought before the mind's eye of a wider circle. But because of the shortness of the time at my disposal I shall be unable to give anything but, I might say, incoherent pictures, unpretentious pictures of the Austrian intellectual life of the most diverse classes; pictures which do not claim to give a complete picture, but which are intended to form one or other idea which might seek understanding for what is going on in the intellectual life beyond the Inn and the Erz Mountains.

In 1861, a philosopher who was rarely mentioned outside his homeland and who was closely connected to Austrian intellectual life, Robert Zimmermann, took up his teaching post at the University of Vienna, which he then held until the 1890s. He not only awakened many people spiritually, guiding them through philosophy on their spiritual path, but he also influenced the souls of those who taught in Austria, as he chaired the Real- und Gymnasialschul-Prüfungskommission (examination commission for secondary modern and grammar schools). And he was effective above all because he had a kind and loving heart for all that was present in emerging personalities; that he had an understanding approach for everything that asserted itself in the spiritual life at all. When Robert Zimmermann took up his post as a philosophy lecturer at the University of Vienna in 1861, he spoke words in his inaugural academic address that provide a retrospective of the development of worldviews in Austria in the nineteenth century. They show very succinctly what made it difficult for Austrians to arrive at a self-sustaining worldview during this century.

Zimmermann says: “For centuries in this country, the oppressive spell that lay on the minds was more than the lack of original disposition capable of holding back not only an independent flourishing of philosophy but also the active connection to the endeavors of other Germans. As long as the Viennese university was largely in the hands of the religious orders, medieval scholasticism prevailed in its philosophy lecture halls. When, with the dawn of an enlightened era, it passed into secular management around the middle of the last century, the top-down system of teachers, teachings and textbooks, which was ordered from above, made the independent development of a free train of thought impossible. The philosophy of Wolff – which in the rest of Germany had been overcome by Kant – in the diluted version of Feder, with a smattering of English skepticism, became the intellectual nourishment of the young Austrians thirsting for knowledge. Those who, like the highly educated monk of St. Michael's in Vienna, longed for something higher had no choice but to secretly seek the way across the border to Wieland's hospitable sanctuary after discarding the monastic robe. This Barnabite monk, whom the world knows by his secular name of Karl Leonhard Reinhold, and the Klagenfurt native Herbert, Schiller's former housemate, are the only public witnesses to the involvement of the closed spiritual world on this side of the Inn and the Erz mountains in the powerful change that took hold of the spirits of the otherworldly Germany towards the end of the past, the philosophical century."

One can understand that a man speaks in this way who had participated in the 1848 movement out of an enthusiastic sense of freedom, and who then thought in a completely independent way about fulfilling his philosophical teaching. But one can also ask oneself: Is not this picture, which the philosopher draws almost in the middle of the nineteenth century, perhaps tinged with some pessimism, some pessimism? It is easy for an Austrian to see things in black and white when judging his own country, given the tasks that have fallen to Austria due to the historical necessities – I say expressly: the historical necessities – that the empire, composed of a diverse, multilingual mixture of peoples, had to find its tasks within this multilingual mixture of peoples. And when one asks such a question, perhaps precisely out of good Austrian consciousness, all sorts of other ideas come to mind.

For example, one can think of a German Austrian poet who is truly a child of the Austrian, even the southern Austrian mountains; a child of the Carinthian region, born high up in the Carinthian mountains and who, through an inner spiritual urge, felt compelled to descend to the educational institutions. I am referring to the extraordinarily important poet Fercher von Steinwand.

Among Fercher von Steinwand's poems, there are some very remarkable presentations. I would like to present just one example to your souls as a picture of this Austrian intellectual life, as a picture that can immediately evoke something of how the Austrian, out of his innermost, most original, most elementary intellectual urge, can be connected with certain ideas of the time. Fercher von Steinwand, who knew how to write such wonderful “German Sounds from Austria” and who was able to shape everything that moves and can move human souls from such an intimate mind, also knew how to rise with his poetry to the heights where the human spirit tries to grasp what lives and works in the innermost weaving of the world. For example, in a long poem, of which I will read only the beginning, called “Chor der Urtriebe” (Choir of Primeval Instincts).

In the boundless expanse
of our ancient mother Night,
hark! there seems to be a struggle
of the most mysterious power!
Do we hear foreboding stride?
Has longing awakened?
Has a flash of inspiration ignited?
Do dreams glide through the vastness?
How the forces of the forces intoxicate each other,
blissful exchange!
Sudden hurrying,
quiet lingering,
revelatory listening
alternates with waving
Amazed fear!
The charm of attainment
Rises, to sink,
Sinks, to hate,
White with the pale
Image of the embrace
Hatred not to grasp.
Dark ramifications
Sprouting affections
Seek for tendrils.
Heavy thoughts
Dawn and falter
Over the expanses,
Seem to guess
Or to guide.
What they prepare
Are they the seeds
Of mighty deeds,
Radiant times?
Who felt the stirred up
Creatively!
Who wandered through it,
Blissfully enjoying,
Or untangled it,
Opening up great things!
Up there it moves like a ghostly embrace,
We in warmth,
We also gain,
search and ponder,
see ourselves lifted,
highest endeavor
happily interwoven.
That blows around us,
arises in us:
“It is you, ideas! -—"

The poet sees how, as he seeks to delve into the “choir of primal urges” that are world-creative, ideas come to him. He seeks to rise up to that world that lived in the minds of the philosophers I had the honor of speaking of last week: Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. But we may ask ourselves how it was possible for that intimate bond to be woven in Fercher von Steinwand's soul, which must have connected him – and it really connected him – between the urge of his soul, which awakened in the simple peasant boy from the Carinthian mountains, and between what the greatest idealistic philosophers in the flowering of German world view development sought to strive for from their point of view. And so we ask: Where could Fercher von Steinwand find this, since, according to Robert Zimmermann's words, Schiller, Fichte, Hegel were not presented in Austria during Fercher von Steinwand's youth – he was born in 1828 – since they were forbidden fruit during his youth there? But the truth always comes out. When Fercher von Steinwand had graduated from high school and, equipped with his high school diploma, went to Graz to attend the University of Graz, he enrolled in lectures. And there was a lecture that the lecturer reading it on natural law was reading. He enrolled in natural law and could naturally hope that he would hear a lot of all kinds of concepts and ideas about the rights that man has by nature, and so on. But lo and behold! Under the unassuming title “Natural Law,” good Edlauer, the Graz university professor, the lawyer, spoke of nothing but Fichte, Schelling and Hegel for the entire semester. And so Fercher von Steinwand took his course in Fichte, Schelling and Hegel during this time, quite independently of what might have been considered forbidden, and perhaps really was forbidden, according to an external view of Austrian intellectual life. Quite independently of what was going on at the surface, a personality who was seeking a path into the spiritual worlds was therefore immersing himself in this context with the highest intellectual endeavor.

Now, when one sets out to follow such a path into the spiritual worlds through Austrian life, one must bear in mind – as I said, I do not want to justify anything, but only give pictures – that the whole nature of this Austrian spiritual life offers many, many puzzles to those – yes, I cannot say otherwise – who are looking for a solution to puzzles. But anyone who likes to observe the juxtaposition of contradictions in human souls will find much of extraordinary significance in the soul of the Austrian. It is more difficult for the Austrian German to work his way up than in other areas, for example in German, I would say, not so much in education, but in the use of education, in participating in education. It may look pedantic, but I have to say it: it is difficult for the Austrian to participate in the use of his intellectual life simply because of the language. For it is extremely difficult for the Austrian to speak in the way that, say, the Germans of the Reich speak. He will very easily be tempted to say all short vowels long and all long vowels short. He will very often find himself saying “Son” and “Sohne” instead of “Son” and “Sonne”. Where does something like that come from? It is due to the fact that Austrian intellectual life makes it necessary – it is not to be criticized, but only described – that anyone who, I might say, works their way up from the soil of the folk life into a certain sphere of education and intellect has to take a leap over an abyss – out of the language of their people and into the language of the educated world. And of course only school gives them the tools to do so. The vernacular is correct everywhere; the vernacular will say nothing other than: “Suun”, quite long, for “Sohn”, “D'Sun”, very short, for “Sonne”. But at school it becomes difficult to find one's way into the language, which, in order to handle education, must be learned. And this leap across the abyss is what gives rise to a special language of instruction. It is this school language, not some kind of dialect, that leads people everywhere to pronounce long vowels as short vowels and short vowels as long vowels. From this you can see that, if you are part of the intellectual life, you have a gulf between you and the national character everywhere. But this national character is rooted so deeply and meaningfully, not so much perhaps in the consciousness of each individual as, one might say, in each person's blood, that the power I have hinted at is experienced inwardly, and can even be experienced in a way that cuts deep into the soul. And then phenomena come to light that are particularly important for anyone who wants to consider the place of Austrian higher intellectual life in the intellectual life of Austrian nationality and the connection between the two. As the Austrian works his way up into the sphere of education, I would say that he is also lifted into a sphere, in terms of some coinage of thought, some coinage of ideas, so that there really is a gulf to the people. And then it comes about that more than is otherwise the case, something arises in the Austrian who has found his way into intellectual life, something that draws him to his nationality. It is not a home for something that one has left only a short time ago, but rather a homesickness for something from which one is separated by a gulf in certain respects, but in relation to which one cannot, for reasons of blood, create it, find one's way into it.

And now let us imagine, for example, a mind – and it can be quite typical of Austrian intellectual life – that has undergone what an Austrian scientific education could offer it. It now lives within it. In a certain way, it is separated from its own nationality by this scientific education, which it cannot achieve with ordinary homesickness, but with a much deeper sense of homesickness. Then, under certain circumstances, something like an inner experience of the soul occurs, in which this soul says to itself: I have immersed myself in something that I can look at with concepts and ideas, that from the point of view of intelligence certainly leads me here or there to understand the world and life in connection with the world; but on the other side of an abyss there is something like a folk philosophy. What is this folk philosophy like? How does it live in those who know nothing and have no desire to know anything of what I have grown accustomed to? What does it look like over there, on the other side of the abyss? — An Austrian in whom this homesickness has become so vivid, which is much deeper than it can usually occur, this homesickness for the source of nationality, from which one has grown out, such an Austrian is Joseph Misson.

Misson, who entered a religious order in his youth, absorbed the education that Robert Zimmermann pointed out, lived in this education and was also active in this education; he was a teacher at the grammar schools in Horn, Krems and Vienna. But in the midst of this application of education, the philosophy of his simple farming people of Lower Austria, from which he had grown out, arose in him, as in an inner image of the soul, through his deep love of his homeland. And this Joseph Misson in the religious habit, the grammar school teacher who had to teach Latin and Greek, immersed himself so deeply in his people, as if from memory, that this folklore revealed itself poetically in him in a living way, so that one of the most beautiful, most magnificent dialect poems in existence was created. I will just, to paint a picture for you, recite a small piece from this dialect poetry, which was only partially published in 1850 – it was then not completed – just the piece in which Joseph Misson so truly presents the philosophy of life of the Lower Austrian farmer. The poem is called: “Da Naaz,” - Ignaz - “a Lower Austrian farmer's boy, goes abroad”. So, Naaz has grown up in the Lower Austrian farmhouse, and he has now reached the point where he has to make his way into the world. He must leave his father and mother, the parental home. There he is given the teachings that now truly represent a philosophy of life. One must not take the individual principles that the father says to the boy, but one must take them in their spiritual context; how it is spoken about the way one has to behave towards luck when it comes, towards fate ; how one should behave when this or that happens to one; how one should behave when someone does one good; how one should behave towards kind people and how towards those who do one harm. And I would like to say: to someone who has undergone his philosophical studies to the extent that he has become a theologian, this peasant philosophy now makes sense. So the father says to the Naaz when the Naaz goes out:

From the first song.
Teach your children on the road.

Naaz, iazn loos, töös, wos a ta so, töös sockt ta tai Voda.
Gootsnom, wails scho soo iis! und probiast tai Glück ö da Waiden.
Muis a da sogn töös, wo a da so, töös los der aa gsackt sai.
I and my mother were dreaming and dreaming, as you know, seeing nothing else.
What we see, work and worry about,
We do it for the children, what we don't do, is not good enough! —
If we are once a little pressed for time and are short of hands, take it easy, but find us a few decent places for the children, preferably under the shade of trees, where the fish spawn. —
If your luck turns around, so live not all the days,
Stay even, in the middle of the river, don't cut the rope too short.
Luck is round and round, so roll it back again soon.
If good luck and misfortune happen, it doesn't lie in sorrows.
Don't let anything get you down, don't let it get to the clouds.
If we're down, we'll pull through, I hope so, he'll do it again!
Mocka'r and hocka'r and pfnotten and trenzen with the kimt nix außa.
Kopfhängad, grod ols won amt' Heana s Prot häden gfressa:
Töös mochts schlimmi nöd guit, gidanka'r ös Guidi no pessa!
Look at the situation we are in, think about the future!
If you give us something, don't be stingy, take this and that: it's good!
Look, my dear, we realize: a little courtesy is not too much to ask for! —
It's getting more chivalrous, foreign people, it's a saying, a word of honor.
Don't be too proud, don't be afraid of a fool.
Don't open your coat, don't let your luck run out.
There are two weeks below and one above, so give an old one. If no one chips what is also often there, give a groden. Look after your health, health is allways good for the soul. What have we, who have everything in this world, if we are not healthy? Our friends and our comrades in arms! Olli, they may know us – and fools, fools is the best!

Translation:

A lesson from my father for the journey

Ignaz, now listen, what I say to you, your father says to you.
In God's name, because it has to be so, and you should seek your fortune in the wide world,
That is why I have to tell you this, and take to heart what I say to you.
I and your mother are old and have stayed at home; you know that you can't make anything out of that.
You slave away, toil, work hard and weaken yourself with worry. You do this for the sake of your children; what wouldn't you do to keep them from going astray. If you have grown weak and sickly later in life, and hard times come, they will also jump in lovingly, but you can find this in proper, righteous children, helping to provide the things that the state and life demand so that we can have some relief.
If you should ever be lucky, don't live like a cavalier.
Stay as you were, in the golden mean of the middle road, don't stray from the right path in life.
Luck is round like a ball; it rolls away from us just as easily as it comes to us. If something doesn't work out or you experience misfortune, don't talk about it to people. Stay calm; don't let anything show on your face; don't be timid; complain about everything to God only; ask him; I tell you, he makes everything better again! Acting sad, withdrawing, making sour faces, being whiny: none of this achieves anything. |
Hanging your head as if the chickens had eaten your bread:
This does not improve anything bad, let alone make the good even better!
Keep the possessions you take with you; plan for the future a little.
If someone gives you something, accept it without being ungracious and say, “May God reward you!” —
Pay attention, Ignaz; and remember this well: no one has ever been punished for being polite! —
Don't be contrary; being away from home makes people modest; that's a saying and it's true.
Don't be tempted into gambling; don't pay too much attention to the dance floor.
Don't have your cards read; and don't seek your destiny in the dream book.
If two paths go in different directions, and one of them is new, then go the old one.
If one of them is uneven, which is often the case, then go the even one.
Guard your health; of all goods, health is the better one.
Admit it: what in the world do you really possess if you don't have your health?
-----
If you come home one day and no longer find us old people in this little room,
then we will be where your grandfather and grandmother are joyfully awaiting us,
where our benefactors will find us and our deceased relatives. Everyone will recognize us immediately – and this, Ignaz, is a very beautiful thing. Now it says:

From the second song.
How the girl leaves her father's house and gives her father's home sorrow and tears.

Vodar and Muidar said: “Good luck for all we hope for,
We wish you a long life and good health!”
“As you wish,” said Muida and wiped the tears from my eyes,
“If you want respect and honor in this world, that's how we pray."
“People set it up earlier and people later,
I and your dad, we pray, child, that no misfortune befalls you.
Go to your niece and nephew and bring them to the Moata; stop by in Piasenrait, don't stay at the Moam's, you'll find a welcome, see everything beautiful, Naaz, and say hello a lot; When you come, we will be very happy to see you, when you come home!"
The old woman cries and gives him a Guglhupf cake, a soapbox and
, in addition, a white, newly washed cloth.
Hoamlih gives him three more in a paper bag.
The Vada gives him an extra two guilders, more can't be given.
“Money, Naaz, is a piglet that won't be viable at will, Naaz."
The door opens, and Naaz looks around the room,
“Main!” says Muida, ‘that's a terrible thing to say!’
He points to the gun rack hanging just inside the door:
“Gootsnom!” Muida says, makes a cross on his forehead with a damar – and then
-----
“I'm serious, Naaz, now goodbye, take care that all is well, Naaz!
Come on, let's go to the barn, so that we know right away
Where or when or what or said that something has fallen. If you come across the Graanitz, don't take a smudge pot full of ears
Drink from a watered well, it helps for the Hungarian crown!»
Godspeed once more and once more and go out into the world with trepidation.
Hunotmal doesn't ring, they look around and beckon to their father. “Look at your sign,” cries the father of the wide world, ‘it's not valid!” “Go to the Moam,’ cries the old mother, ‘we greet you, don't forget us.’

Narration:
How Ignaz leaves his father's house and his parents see him off.

Father and mother, I bid you farewell and God bless you for all the kindness you have shown me.
I hope with all my heart that you live a long life and stay healthy.
As God wills, says the mother and wipes her eyes with the corner of her handkerchief,
If the Lord calls us from the world, we are prepared for it.
For some people it is given up earlier and for some later.
I and your father pray, Ignaz, that no misfortune befalls you.
We will walk with you for a bit and accompany you to the image of the Mother of God.
Once you are in Piasenrait, stop by at your aunt's. You will be welcomed there.
Tell her all the nice things, Ignaz, and give her our warmest regards.
If she can come, we would be very happy if she visited us.
So speaks the old mother and wraps him a crumpet, a pastry, and also a piece of white bread in a freshly washed 'cloth'. She secretly gives him three shiny new twenties, wrapped in paper. The father gives him a two-guilder piece, more he cannot give. We don't have much money, Ignaz, take what you can with good will.
Before the door opens, Ignaz looks around and takes one last look at the room.
“Oh dear,” says his mother, ‘that's a bad sign, as if you'll never see it again,’
and she dips two fingers into the holy water font hanging next to the door.
In God's name, says the mother, and makes a cross on his forehead with his thumb – and they leave. Now it's getting serious, Ignaz, now God keep you, be well, Ignaz, Let us hear from you from time to time so that we always know how you are doing or if you are sick. When you come to Graanitz, take a handful of earth beforehand,
Austrian for: border. Drink it in diluted wine, it helps against fever.
They say goodbye to you, once and again, and part sadly.
A hundred times is not enough for them to look around and wave their hands.
“Mind your ID,” the father calls from afar, ‘don't lose it.” “Go to your aunt,’ the old woman calls, ‘we send her our regards, don't forget that.’

The entire philosophy of the farming community emerges before the friar, and so vividly that one sees how intimately he has grown with it. But he is also connected to something else: to that which is so fundamentally connected to the Austrian character, to the character of the Austro-German peasantry in the Alps: to the direct, unspoilt view of nature that arises from the most direct coexistence with nature. The description of a thunderstorm is owed to what comes to life again in Joseph Misson. It vividly describes how the Naaz now travels and how he comes to a place where heath sheep graze, which a shepherd, called a Holdar there, knows how to observe closely: how they behave when a thunderstorm is coming. Now he tells himself what he sees there:

When a cloud appears in the west and it doesn't come from below, it means a thunderstorm.
“One,” he thinks, ‘is coming, the other is going, now you have to decide which way you're going.’
Get on a donkey and look – now it thunders!
Immediately again – and how it rumbles over the Beringer!
It roars and rushes powerfully into the wood, that it is completely out!
“Oh, where this breaks out, our heaven be gracious!"
Then the Holdar, takes off his hat and ‘if only,’
he looks at the Guirkan, ‘if only it doesn't scare someone!’
“Just as we are,” he says, ‘two thunderstorms are coming together.’ (This convergence of two thunderstorms is now vividly described.)
And the dog sticks its snout up in the air and sniffs the air.
He points to a swallow, which flies quietly to the barn and drinks.
Then it is quiet and sultry and the air thickens.
The birds fall asleep in the nests and the sheep bow their heads.

Reproduction:
How Ignaz gets caught in the weather and doesn't know whether to

Listen, he says to himself, sit down for a moment and think about which way you will go.
He goes to the heath and looks around – suddenly there is a clap of thunder,
followed by another, and how it rumbles over the mountains!
It creaks and hisses mightily in the wood, as if it were completely dead. Well, may the Lord have mercy on anyone this happens to, says the lad to himself, taking off his coat, saying, looking at the clouds, just hoping it doesn't start raining. It seems to me, he says, like two thunderstorms mixed together. And the dog lifts its muzzle to sniff the air, then, sensing no danger, draws its tail between its legs, goes over to the lad and lies down beside him. Now it is quiet and sultry, and the leaves tremble in the trees, the birds sleep in their nests, and the sheep put their heads together.

The good Naaz is aware of all this, and then the poet, who has meanwhile described how the Naaz entered “a Lucka” - a rock cave, a stone cave - waits there until the worst is over. Then he hangs his boots on the other shoulder and continues on his way. But the adventure with the weather is not over yet. Naaz comes to a little stream; which has of course swelled due to the weather. Naaz sees that:

"Look, the stream is so big, now I can't go around! —
Töös owa», sockt a, «wiat toh wos sain? iozt kan ik nid umi!»
He looks like a fool, the stream is too big, now he cannot cross it.
But something like that, he says, what could it be? Now I cannot cross it!

Now, in such a way, Misson, this man who really created from the depths of the folk tradition, wanted to embody the figure of Naaz. When one takes on such a figure, one sees how deeply, deeply in the subconscious soul, I could say, Austrian nationality sits with those souls who have also worked their way up into a high sphere of education. And one sees from such an example what remains of nationality for the soul in the higher sphere of education when one looks at this Austrian nationality.

One must say: mystics, in the sense that the human soul really delves into its inner life, really tries to understand what lives and moves within man, such mystics are not really found in Austria. Mystics who deal a lot with the human ego cannot flourish there. On the other hand, to feel the mysterious forces of nature in a certain way, more than just poetically, I would say, to feel the gnomes, the goblins, the spirits of nature in their liveliness, also with a certain humor, so that at the right moment you do not feel compelled to admit the full reality, but to feel in the co-experience of nature that which lives and moves in nature as a higher spiritual being – that is Austrian again. Therefore, within the Austro-German national character, it is not easy to find mystics who could be successors of Eckhart, Johannes Tauler.

On the other hand, the remarkable peasant philosopher Conrad Deubler is a truly Austrian figure. He was born in 1814 in Goisern, in the middle of the mountains, and died there in 1884 as an innkeeper. He was and remained a true farmer; but a man who so he has grasped it vividly, has penetrated it with his peasant wisdom, with a certain, I would say, curt peasant wisdom, — Conrad Deubler, such a philosopher could flourish; a philosopher who did not get involved in lengthy justifications, but liked this doctrine, and now he took from the Austrian mind everything to make this teaching appear plausible. From a primitive, elementary, rustic understanding he brought about, I might say, a Darwinian conception adapted to the Austrian peasant, by means of which he was able to carry on a copious correspondence with the great theologian and writer David Friedrich Strauss, with Feuerbach, with Ernst Haeckel, and so on. To grasp the whole expanse of nature with the intellect is more to the taste of the Austrian soul than to mystically immerse oneself in it. Therefore, one finds individual people among Austrian farmers who know every little herb in the mountains, who are also spiritually connected to the inner workings of each little herb, who, for example, engage with philosophers such as Ennemoser and Eckartshausen, who want to give a certain deeper picture of nature in its entirety, and who also want to place the human being in this picture of nature. But within this Austrian peasantry and that which arises from this peasantry, one will not easily find a pure mystic who engages in the contemplation of the human soul, averting his gaze from the external world of the senses. For it is the direct connection with that which makes an impression on the senses that characterizes the Austrian mind in the broadest sense for anyone who sees it – the seeing of more than the sensual, but the direct seeing – the seeing that does not need to reflect, that seeing that, I might say, sometimes skips the mind and goes directly to the heart.

Therefore, it can be said that in Austrian poetry, the soul and the landscape resonate with each other directly, sometimes in a way that is so moving, as in the case of Lena; but in general, this absorption of the whole soul in what can be done directly by a person, what can be accomplished by him without it being related to immediate usefulness, - that is something that belongs to the emotional qualities of the Austrian.

I would like to say, on the one hand, on this side of the Leitha, in the Austrian mountains, in the Austrian regions, there is something that can be depicted in a picture, as I attempted with Joseph Misson. On the other side of the Leitha, you are immediately in touch with the wide-open spaces of the Hungarian steppes; but you also live with what resounds in the sensual, I would say, spiritually, which the sensual tries to exhaust spiritually as much as it can be exhausted. Anyone who has ever crossed over to Hungary and listened to a Hungarian band, with all that these people put of their souls into their simple and wonderful playing, in which pain rages demonically, the lust and the exuberance of life at the same time, understands a poem like that of the Hungarian Szäz, which refers to this direct coexistence with the sensual, but which is felt spiritually, deeply spiritually and emotionally:

Listen, oh listen to the violin's song.
How it laments and how it weeps;
So much sorrow in four strings,
So much pain and grief combined!

Like the nightingales' flutes
In the silent, shadowy forest,
How the sobs of the abandoned orphan

That is lament, that is sorrow,
Which oppresses and yet uplifts,
Which weeps for the past, yet hopefully
Lives for a beautiful future.

Listen, a curse is heard – and swords
Mix clashing into the But a little fiddle bow.

Hear, oh hear the violin sounds,
How it spurs and laughs and cries,
In four strings such feeling,
So much joy and pain combined! —

You have to look very closely to understand the relevant things, you have to look very closely at the intimate interweaving of the senses with the outside world, so that the senses, in their interweaving with the outside world within the sensual, can more easily see the spiritual than when this spiritual awakens intellectually in the mind. It can be said that when it comes to making a judgment directly from the heart, to criticizing or approving the world, the Austrian will, under certain circumstances, have a little confidence in himself. He will also, especially if he has learned something, like to move in abstract terms, he will like to give something to the culture of the head, but above all want to be rooted in the culture of the heart. But the way from the head to the heart, the way from the heart to the head, is just so long, and it is so difficult to find! Often one easily stops in the middle!

It is, in a sense, quite characteristic of what, for example, a good connoisseur of Austrian culture, a contemporary, said about an Austrian personality, the former director of the Burgtheater in Vienna, Max Burckhard: that despite all his energy, the most characteristic thing about this quintessentially Austrian man, Max Burckhard, was that he never really wanted to undergo the transition from feeling to understanding or from understanding to feeling. He wanted to keep them both separate. While Max Burckhard was director of the Vienna Burgtheater, Hermann Bahr recounts, and Wilbrandt's play 'The Master of Palmyra' was to be performed at the Burgtheater, a play that is considered by many to be particularly significant and that for many is something tremendously high-minded, Burckhard did not want to stage the play. He could not understand why something so significant was seen in it; he always rejected it. So it was that well-meaning people, that is, people who meant well by Wilbrandt and the “Master of Palmyra,” managed to at least get Burckhard to attend a lecture on the “Master of Palmyra” in a really high-level society. He knew the piece, of course, but it was not to be read to him, but all the beautiful, aesthetic passages, the treatises were to have an effect on him, which the invited real professors and asthetics had to present about the mastery of this piece. Well, Burckhard was really a very clever man who, when it came down to it, was able to dialectically stand his ground and get into the spiritual ideas. He listened to the lecture. He did not just listen to the lectures of the aesthetes and professors, who said that something had been created “from the depths of human nature that points to the highest regions of spiritual life”. He also listened to how the beautiful characteristics are to be understood according to all chapters of aesthetics. He was silent. He did not allow himself to follow these trains of thought in any way. He could understand them, of course. It would have been easy for him to refute the matter from his point of view, to get involved in it. On another occasion, he might have done so, getting involved in long-winded discussions about the matter. He remained silent, he said nothing. Then ladies, especially the lady of the house, approached him: didn't he at least want to say how he related to all the witty remarks about one of the most witty plays ever written. Was it not the duty of the Burgtheater to perform the epoch-making play? But he did not engage in a discussion. He said: “I'm not putting it on!” And why? Why? They wanted to hear from him, the witty man, how he related to all the things that had been discussed wittily for hours. He just said: “Because it's a Holler!” — “A Holler” is something that means the same in Austria as “quatsch” in Berlin. But he did not engage in a discussion. That is to be taken as characteristic. He relied on his immediate judgment of the heart, on what his mind told him, and he did not find it necessary to engage in discussions of dialectics and so on; his whole criticism was that it is a “Holler”.

And so it is interesting to see, actually, how at a time when the most wonderful and glorious discussions were being held within the rest of the German-speaking world about the significance, nature and essence of drama, discussions in which Goethe and Schiller participated in such a profound way – I am referring in particular to the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century – how in this period a discussion of aesthetics, of the meaning and essence of drama, was also ignited in Austria. But how was the discussion of drama ignited there in Austria? In a very strange way, everything that was presented there for and against this way of thinking ignited in Austria; what was discussed in such a well-known profound way within the Schiller-Goethe circle and the broader circles of the whole of German intellectual life, all of this ignited in Austria in a very peculiar way, namely through dance. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, two types of dance were the subject of a very energetic and significant discussion there. At the turn of the century, Noverre was the master of dance; and his student was then Muzzarelli. Muzzarelli represented a dance, a style of dance, in which the main thing was to make beautiful movements, artificial movements, to intertwine artificial movements through their lines, where the external spatial image of presenting oneself was taken into account. Now, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, an opponent of this 'dance form' emerged in the person of Salvatore Vigano. And for this dance form of Salvatore Vigano, whose wife in particular danced the dance form he represented in a masterly fashion, whole texts were written, which did not apply to any other dance form. Whole stories, whole narratives were clothed in the dance form, so that the situations, the gestures, the form of expression, the events, the content to be told, were expressed. And now one should just delve into the far-reaching, passion-stirring discussions that have arisen about which dance is artistically the right one.

There was the Austrian playwright Ayrenhoff, who had already grown old at the time, the author of a large number of plays, who was completely on the side of the Muzzarelli dance, who spoke out most negatively against Salvatore Vigano and against the impossibility of expressing inner feelings through dance in such an unchaste way. Ayrenhoff could not understand that they even wanted to dance entire pieces, such as 'Richard the Lionheart' or 'The Daughter of the Air'. Ayrenhoff had been educated in the appreciation of beautiful form, of the sweep of lines, and his dramas were also constructed in this way. The sweep of lines in the portrayal of characters, seeing how some situation dissolves into a joke, or the transition of a situation into a joke, that was what mattered. These extraordinary forms were what mattered. He saw this in Muzzarelli's dance as well. And he was an important poet for Austria at that time. His importance can be seen from the fact that he received extraordinary recognition from Frederick the Great, who otherwise had no interest in German literature of the time. And “The Stagecoach”, a comedy by Ayrenhoff, Frederick the Great called “the best comedy that is written at all except the comedies of Moliere”. Yes, Frederick the Great went so far as to once show himself at a parade of the field marshal lieutenant - because that was Ayrenhoff and at the same time a poet - because he, Frederick the Great, was so interested in him.

On the other side, on Viganos' side, was Heinrich Joseph von Collin, who came from Belgium; but in a sense, Belgium belonged to Austria at that time. He had written the tragedy “Regulus,” but also other plays. Collin now advocated expression in dance with great enthusiasm. And he now staged his dramas in such a way that they expressed inwardness in what was being portrayed; that it was not so much about the way situations and jokes followed one another, about the external forms, but rather that the inner nature of the human being was expressed in what happened on stage. And Robert Zimmermann, who is deeply rooted in Austrian intellectual life, has spoken very beautifully of this Heinrich Collin, showing that this Heinrich Collin, who is basically also completely forgotten in Austria, but who But who can lead us deep into the course of Austrian intellectual life, who knew nothing of Fichte, and in his dramas revived the same kind of soul-feeling that lay in Fichte's philosophical representations. To make matters worse, Heinrich Collin's brother, Matthäus von Collin, has explicitly shown how Heinrich Collin knew nothing of Fichte, how he arrived at Fichteanism, but in a poetic way, in his Austrian way, entirely out of a strange parallelism of intellectual life, in the way that I have just described.

Without reflecting on the intuition, without merging into the intuition, Fichte comes back to what I described eight days ago. He says: The outer sense world, that which man lives out in the sensual, outer existence, is the sensualized material of our duty. Now that duty confronts him in such a deeply objective way and at the same time becomes related to the divine weaving and being that permeates the world, Fichte comes to say: one must not think in such a way that external sensual happiness could be bestowed on the one who faithfully fulfills his duty, but — even if this is somewhat one-sided, in the way it is presented, the energy of a certain striving of German idealism expresses itself in it; things must not be taken dogmatically – but what Fichte says is: the one who is completely absorbed in his duty must not claim that the reward for it will somehow be found in the external world of the senses. Therefore, the truly tragic – and this was Fichte's conviction – will appear when duty does not find any reward, but rather finds misfortune in the external world.

Heinrich Collin presents the same tendency in his plays. He wants to embody in a dramatic way the human soul that is built upon itself, that can live within itself without combining the happiness of the sensual world with duty. And so a deeply ethical trait emerges, but one that is intimately connected with the direct contemplation of the world as it presents itself to the senses; one that has even emerged from an aesthetics that has been formed through dance.

This close connection with observation, this life in direct perception and also the placing of what the heart experiences in direct perception, the reluctance to seek the way from the head to the heart, must be seen as one of the characteristics that are really deeply connected with this Austrian intellectual life.

And so many things in this Austrian spiritual life appear to us in such a way that contradictions are present in it, but contradictions that, if one lets them take effect in the right way, seem understandable in people who, within Europe, are placed in difficult tasks, in the mediation of the West with the East, and, I would like to say, must feel this placing in every detail of their way of life.

One can say: Wherever we touch this Austrian intellectual life, it appears to us as follows: the innermost is directly fanned in the outer world, without the mediation of a mystical dialectic. And from this underground, a phenomenon as likeable as the Austrian philosopher Bartholomäus von Carneri can be explained – as I said, I only want to present images. He was born in Trento in 1821, the son of an Austrian civil servant; deformed from birth (he was a twin), he already went through a difficult, painful youth, and then, after he had familiarized himself with the diversity of Austrian intellectual life, he became acquainted with Darwinism. For Carneri, Darwinism is not something that he simply accepts, but rather, for him, Darwinism becomes a life riddle itself. That the world, in the sense of Darwinism, can be explained by the externally observable development, is understandable to him, despite the fact that he has immersed himself deeply in German idealism. But in a certain respect, Darwinism becomes a life riddle for Carneri, the Austrian philosopher: If Darwinism is correct, what about human morality, human ethics? And so Bartholomew of Carneri becomes, one might say, the greatest ethicist, the greatest moral teacher of Darwinism. He interprets Darwinism in such a way that he seeks within the purely natural development, how the forces of nature complicate up to man, so that he still sees a spiritualization in this complication of the forces of nature, as they configure themselves. He does not want a rift between nature and spirit, but he does not want to stop at nature. He wants to chase the spirit out of itself in the configuration of the forces of nature. At the same time, he wants to find the connection between human ethics and human moral life and the explanation of nature in terms of Darwinism. Thus, for Carneri, the necessity to create an ethic arises directly from the world that appears vivid to him through Darwinism. I would like to say that what the human heart wants and needs to set before itself must be directly connected to the secrets and mysteries of nature. And it is particularly interesting to see in Bartholomäus von Carneri how he now strives for a unified world view, for a world view that fully embraces Darwinism in the spirit of the times, in the spirit of nineteenth-century materialism, but can only embrace it if if spirituality springs and can spring everywhere in nature itself, but a spirituality that is grasped directly in feeling, that is not first brought down from some transcendental spheres, as with Fichte, but that appears to him directly during the experience of sensuality. It is remarkable how the characteristic of Austrianism appears precisely in such a personality, in a personality like Carneri, who, however, also wants to place himself uniformly in the world in a different way, who everywhere sets out to show how, on the one hand, nature reaches up to the spirit, and on the other hand, the spirit works down to nature, how a unity lives in everything. Carneri also sought to depict this unity in life. He sought to bring it into life. And so one of the personalities arises, who appeared in particular in the 1860s and 1870s in Austria as fine minds, one of the personalities who were then also politically active. Carneri was on the side of the intellectual Austrian politicians of the 1870s, Plener, Beer, Herbst, Berger and so on. But wherever he spoke – and he often spoke – his words were imbued with a lofty idealism, but precisely with an idealism rooted in Darwinism, which was aware of its roots in Darwinism: I may be an idealist because my ideals come to me directly when I immerse myself in the development of nature.

It is the same spirit, in another field, that then again held sway in Robert Hamerling. In Robert Hamerling, in whom, I might say, the Austrian German found expression in the fact that Hamerling's motto was: “Germany is my fatherland, Austria is my motherland,” which combined good Austrian-ness with good German-ness. In this Hamerling everything that can be called the interpenetration of idealism with direct feeling and with intuition found direct expression. Even in Austria, where people might have been better able to understand it, Hamerling's vividly sensual images, I would say sensually imbued images, were often condemned, for example in his “Ahasver,” also in “Aspasia” and in “King of Sion.” But they did not understand that it was precisely Hamerling's idealism, which I would call Austrian idealism, that needed the sensory image to visualize itself in, so as not to suffer from the division of the world into the sensual on the other. And so for Hamerling the spiritualized sensual, the aesthetic idealism, became the goal toward which he directed his whole feeling, his whole perception and his whole thinking as a vision of the future. And in many respects it is precisely in the case of such intellectuals as Carneri and Hamerling that the difficulties of Austrian intellectual life come to light, difficulties which consist in the fact that one is placed in a multiform surging mass of humanity and has to find one's way. Hence the phenomena that so often occur within Austrian intellectual life, where a clear view of this or that remains with mere description and does not somehow find its way into action and then peter out in a certain pessimism. Hence certain phenomena are only possible in Austrian intellectual life.

Is it not really somewhat strange that there was an Austrian in the first half of the nineteenth century who was born near Znaim, who bore the typically Austrian name Karl Postl, who also became a clergyman at his mother's request, but then, like the Barnabite monk Karl Leonhard Reinhold, also cast off the robe of the order and disappeared? He has disappeared. Then a book appears: “Austria as it Is,” from America; it describes Austrian views. That was in 1828. Then, from this same Karl Postl, who called himself not Karl Postl but Charles Sealsfield, appear, for example, descriptions of the decline of the Native Americans, from which one can see how fundamentally sound this man's direct view of nature is. No one at that time had any idea that the simple Karl Postl from Austria was hidden in this Charles Sealsfield. All the stories that otherwise appear on similar subjects – just see for yourself – are written, so to speak, from the point of view of a certain education, written in a certain way, so that you notice the theory. These Postl stories are written in such a way that the eye immediately grows into what it sees; the whole soul grows together with direct perception. He then spends his lifetime from the age of thirty to the age of sixty in the canton of Solothurn in Switzerland, where he is also buried. He returns and describes the life of Germans in America in such a vivid way that it should still have a significant effect on the soul today, if only it were read.

A specifically Austrian phenomenon is also a personality, whom not only the younger, but perhaps the older members of the audience gathered here have met, those books that are written, as is modestly stated on the title page, “for maidens”; “Weihgeschenk für Jungfrauen” it says. A story, a wonderfully vivid story, steeped in a Goethean, one might almost say, Greek spirit. On the title page it says: “Weihgeschenk für Jungfrauen” by Christian Oeser, “Letters on the Main Subjects of Aesthetics.” Published in the first half of the nineteenth century in the first edition, these books experienced many editions. Those who read them today still get something from them that can expand the heart, that can warm the soul. Christian Oeser - yes, who is Christian Oeser? This Christian Oeser is the same man who, for example, had a drama published in Pressburg in 1839 that nobody knew the author of – “Life and Deeds of Emerich Tököly” “by A. Z.”, that is, from A to Z, so that all the letters between A and Z are included. Those who understood something about dramatic characterization saw in the figure of Tököly a Hungarian Götz. It is a portrayal that can be directly compared to Goethe's “Götz von Berlichingen”, which was born out of the struggles that took place in Hungary shortly before the drama was written and that moved many, many souls and the world. The drama went out into the world, and so did several others by the same author. No one knew who it was from. That remained so. In 1869, the German Schiller Foundation took a decision to pay the then support allowance to a Mrs. Therese Schröer in Vienna. The document with which the allowance was paid stated that it had been learned that the widow of one of the most worthy German writers was not living in circumstances befitting her and his merits, and that she was therefore being paid this annual allowance. It was the widow of Tobias Gottfried Schröer, the author of many plays, who had to remain unnamed, the author also of that “Weihgeschenkes für Jungfrauen”, which is imbued with the spirit of Goethe; a quiet man who was a secondary school teacher in Preßburg, but who, as such, wrestled with the highest problems of human life, who was poor and whom no one knew. Even in his own town no one could or might know that this man was the author of these dramas.

Many similar phenomena could be cited. They show that in order to get to know Austrian intellectual life, one must not consider it in terms of what, I mean, goes as a more or less Catholic, as a more or less Protestant current through the development of the times but how one must grasp this Austrian intellectual life where it works out of the root of the people and where it can appear directly in its great significance. One must not look at Austrian intellectual life through the lens of the fact that Austria is a more Catholic country. On the one hand, this Austrian intellectual life works its way to the roots of the nation, as we have seen with Misson; on the other hand, however, it works its way up to great heights in a remarkable way. Consider, for example, the following phenomena: When the Protestant pedagogue Friedrich Dittes, who was brought from Germany during the so-called Liberal Era of Austrian development and placed at the head of the K.K. When the Protestant pedagogue, who had been brought from Germany during the so-called Liberal Era of Austrian development, looked around for important pedagogues of the immediate past, he, the Protestant pedagogue who had been brought from Germany, found the Austrian Vincenz Eduard Milde to be one of the most important pedagogues of the immediate past. In 1811, Milde published an “educational theory”. In Misson, we have come to know a mind that, clothed in the robes of a religious order, worked its way up to what I would call the management of educational life, and then worked its way back down to the roots of folklore, creating his “Naaz”: peasant philosophy! In Milde we see another priest, a good Catholic; a Catholic in whom Friedrich Dittes, the Protestant pedagogue, finds one of his most important pedagogical predecessors. Spiritual life reaches out across the differences of confession in a wonderful way. Instead of a long further description, I would like to read you just one passage from Milde's theory of education, so that you can see how, in this book, published in 1811, educational work is understood in a soul-drenched way; how, in contrast to on, who worked his way down into the people, to the highest views, the most ideal views of general human activity through pedagogy, the Catholic priest Milde works his way up, how seriously, how dignified, how tremendously deep he takes the pedagogical profession. He describes how the teacher should behave in order to gain the right relationship with the pupil; first:

"1. Through diligent study of anthropology; 2. through reading well-written biographies and truthfully portrayed educational histories; 3. through thoughtful interaction with children, through unnoticed, quiet observation of them, especially of their behavior towards other children; 4. by remembering his own youth, by reflecting on the course, the reasons, the means and obstacles his own education, on the difference between his present and former way of thinking and feeling; 5. by reflecting on the success and failure of his efforts in educating the pupil; 6. by observing the methods of other educators and the success of their way of treating the children”; - finally - ‘7. by observing the course of development of nature left to itself.’

The meaning of life should be built on a healthy anthropology, that is, the study of man. Then the teacher should constantly consult with himself, as it were, meditating, in order to always find the way to the child's soul. A truly soul-filled educational vision is also poured out on this quite remarkable work, which arose, so to speak, in the quiet of Austrian intellectual life through a man who was a clergyman in the outer life, who rose to become Archbishop of Vienna and who, in his way, truly represents that Austrian intellectual life to which one attaches such great importance and to which one must attach such great importance; that Austrian intellectual life that is directed towards the general human and basically maintains the connection with the roots of the people everywhere. Yes, I say, in 1811 a leading work on education appeared in Austria that had a great impact and was also highly praised by the Protestant pedagogue Dittes in the 1860s and 1870s. It was published again very recently by the Austrian pedagogue Franz Tomberger in a short outline. One must only consider what that means. In 1811, it had only been a short time since teachers in very, very remote areas of the Austrian lands, namely the German-Austrian lands, had a very strange position, not only in the village but also in the city. Not only did the teacher not have a school building – in many areas, shortly before this “Erziehungslehre” was published, a school building was a rarity; the students gathered around the teacher, the teacher went from house to house, sometimes he was there, sometimes in the next house; wherever there was space, he taught. But that was not the only thing. For example, paying the teacher a salary, yes, that would not have been understood; that is something that must be given freely! But the teacher only needed to teach the students in winter; in summer, the children were needed outside in the fields anyway. Well, so that he doesn't starve, he is granted the right to herd cows during the summer, to be a “Holdar”. But that did not prevent all that I have just described from happening. And that did not prevent a work on the art of education from appearing after such a relatively short time in Austrian intellectual life that it was not only exemplary but also epoch-making. One has to familiarize oneself with this juxtaposition of contradictions that arise from the difficulties of Austrian life.

But this is also why the Austrian needs what appeared in the most diverse forms in Viennese life in the course of the nineteenth century. Actually, a piece of Viennese life is also what you were able to get to know here in Berlin some time ago, although it had been quite “de-Viennified” to a certain extent, as connoisseurs generally admitted – what you were able to get to know through the performance of “Alpenkönig und Menschenfeind” by Ferdinand Raimund, with the character of Rappelkopf, and, what is also well known from the same author, “Verschwender”. I do not want to speak of a well-known matter, but rather show how Austrian intellectual life can be illustrated here and there, as it were, by the splashing of a wave that makes visible in pictures what lives in Austria. Therefore, I want to speak less about Ferdinand Raimund than about the man who replaced him in the hearts of the Viennese in the 1830s and 1840s, when Raimund had become very much a part of their lives: Nestroy. And Johann Nestroy, as a folk dramatist, is, I would say, truly an Austrian product. Indeed, one has even had to hear from some clever people of the present day that Nestroy is even characterized by his fellow countrymen as not being a real Viennese, because in the early days of his career, in particular, he only told the Viennese rough truths, not only created folk plays where honest people are always right, but where he could really, forgive the harsh expression, give the people a piece of his mind. Plays like these made up the content of his first theatrical career. He actually created a great deal; in thirteen years, he wrote around seventy such farces. But they truly contain that Austrian spirit that those who know it recognize as being truly embodied in Nestroy. It is not true that the Austrians of that time wanted to hear honest portrayals of characters from the theater, of people who recognize the simplicity of life. No, that was then and Nestroy grew out of it – what was demanded was that one could say: Now he has given them what for again, that is, he has really given them a telling-off. And with such a scolding, Nestroy, himself playing at the Vienna Karl Theater, actually entertained the Viennese so much that one can say: one sees in the spirit that lives in these Nestroy folk farces, one might say folk city farces, the Austrian spirit that needs to, in the criticism of life as well as in the jokes about life, in the humor of life, to overcome many a difficulty; who needed to let his soul feel at ease after hard work in a light way, and yet in a way that was not entirely free of sympathy and antipathy. And so Nestroy is truly a typical figure of Austrian urban popular theater around the mid-nineteenth century. He had his view of life and of the events of life expressed by a character in the following manner: “I believe the worst of everyone, even of myself, and I have seldom been mistaken!” With this view of life, he, who was personally kind and loving, and who in personal dealings actually had only kind and loving words, really created character figures that easily illustrate the view of life of the Austrians in Vienna at that time , that Austrianness that wanted to be hard at work, but that wanted to build a philosophy of life from the heart, without much dialectic, that also had to have humor, that also should not exaggerate the seriousness of life too much. There was a lot in the way of facing life. So Nestroy created a character that kept reappearing under this name or under a different name; once he called him “Schnofer!” And this Schnoferl also had an attitude towards life. For example, he once talks about how he fared in life with love: “With love, things went splendidly for me, it was all right, but with dislike, things are always bad!” This same Schnoferl, who, as I said, cannot see the funny side of life, once said about what he saw in his own heart: “The pragmatic story of my heart falls into three miserable chapters: futile musings, failed attempts and worthless triumphs.” Those are the three miserable chapters. Nestroy portrayed such characters with great acuity, so much so that an important Viennese critic once said: “In Nestroy, you could see the demonic expression that could intensify to the point of being devilish when he let his eyes play from the stage into the audience.” And so Nestroy expressed well a certain Austrian view of life in need of humor in the years before 1848, or even from the beginning of the forties.

Then came a time when one could not bear this outpouring of good and evil, this Nestroyan world beyond good and evil, of good, over-good and evil people, for a while. One wanted more honest figures, one wanted to be moved more and sworn at less. One had had enough of swearing for a while, one wanted to be moved. Nestroy didn't really like that, and so he said: Yes, in the past people still knew something about what a life story is; in modern times, if you go by those who now create life stories for the stage, if there are only three jokes in it - in Nestroy's plays there was one joke after another - there are only corpses in their blood, gravediggers and blubberers. He didn't really want to go along with that. But then again, he was able to keep up with the times. And so Nestroy found a peculiar, I would even say humanly free point of view, especially during the difficult year of 1848. He was a liberal man, he was a man who was thoroughly on the side of the progressives, who did not depend on anyone in any direction, but at the same time he found the right words for many a cry for freedom, for those who only go so far. And so he managed to maintain Austrian humor even in these difficult times. Just look at this: in a play that was written during one of Austria's most difficult times, “Freedom in Krähwinkel” – he also played in this play himself – this Austrian describes how the mayor of Krähwinkel imagines freedom. He has the constable Klaus express it: “Freedom is something terrible. The Lord Mayor always says: the ruler is the father, the subject is a little child, and freedom is a sharp knife.” And one of those who, in a Nestroyesque way, understands this a little, who also understands the people of Krähwinkel in their pursuit of freedom, characterizes them in the same way: ”No, I know the people of Krähwinkel. I know the Krähwinkler, you just have to let them run riot; once the rapture is over, we'll catch them with our hand in it, and then we'll really tweak the people's nose.” In the role that Nestroy himself played, to which he gave the name ‘Ultra’, a freedom fighter now appears who is really portrayed in such a way that humor can once again take hold of him. Nestroy spoke the following through the Ultra: “Now that the fight that had broken out has ended happily, he proclaims freedom: 'I proclaim freedom of speech, of the press and other freedoms for Crowwinkel, indifference of all classes, free speech, free elections according to previous opinion, an infinitely broad basis, which will gradually extend in length, and in order to avoid all disputes in this matter, no system at all.” Then Ultra comes – one must always imagine him as presented by Nestroy himself – to an opinion about what reaction actually is. What is reaction? “Well,” says Ultra, ‘as it was on a large scale, so we have had it here on a small scale. Reaction is a spectre, but spectres only exist for the timid: so don't be afraid of it, then there will be no reaction at all.’

But in Nestroy's personality itself there is something like a thoroughly correct placing of his own personality in life. A person like Nestroy was thoroughly a personality who was accessible to the depths of the soul. But what he created, he wanted to create from direct life and for direct life. And so Nestroy is not at all inclined to reflect on the ego. Once, he came into contact with the profound, inestimably esteemed poet Friedrich Hebbel, the great poet Hebbel. But Hebbel and Nestroy were like the north and south poles. Friedrich Hebbel, outwardly impeccable in his suit, correct in every gesture, Nestroy naughty in every gesture, with a rustic suit that he wore with particular dignity! Now Nestroy became acquainted with a play like “Judith and Holofernes”, a play in which Hebbel has actually exhausted the infinite depths of the human soul and embodied them in dramatic form so that one must say: It is truly a wonderful struggle with the existential problems of life, reaching the heights of the human spirit, but not for Nestroy, one might be tempted to say, because it cannot be readily and directly taken humorously. But he took it humorously, precisely as a taunt, saying, “No, that's nothing!” He also thought, “That's a nonstarter!” I'll do a Holofernes now, Judith and Holofernes, that must be the right thing; that's not something that Hebbel did.” But now he wanted to create a character in Holofernes who was so completely turned inward, to his human ego. Nestroy was very good at creating a character who acted entirely out of the abundance of the soul's will and wanted something. But he only wanted into this ego in a genuinely Austrian way, so to speak. Yes, not through speculation, not through dialectics, not even through dramatic dialectics! So he presents himself as a figure of Holofernes, full of ego, full of the power of personality, so strong that he wants to see who is stronger, “I” – or, as he said – “I or I!” – so that he feels doubly. So he wants to wrestle with himself, so that he sees who is stronger, I or I. That becomes Nestroy's Holofernes. But he knows how to position himself in life just right. And when he hears that people say that he denies a purely artistic principle with his plays that are directly inspired by folklore, well, he says that he will not allow such an accusation, because people should consider what it actually means to write folk plays. Anyone who writes popular plays and even wants to compare himself to Goethe is just like someone who makes a Zwetschkenkrampus and wants to act as a rival to Canova. A Zwetschkenkrampus is a figure made out of dried plums on St. Nicholas' Day to look like a clown or Santa Claus.

We also need to be thoroughly familiar with this side of Austrian identity. Because it is deeply, deeply interwoven with what the Austrian soul seeks in a certain view of life, which I would characterize in the following way: Because of the difficulties of his life, the Austrian feels the need to rest in a view of life that makes one forget the seriousness of life and yet, in turn, brings strength in the subconscious soul to be prepared for life. Nestroy is certainly deeper than those who took over from him at the end of the nineteenth century. You cannot compare Nestroy's farces with those of Berg, who certainly wrote more in the same period, but had sunk to a much lower level. But this peculiar view of life, which in turn goes back to a general human one, is part of the overall shaping of this Austrian's soul. And this view of life also shows that in Austria something comes from much deeper human sources and shapes the life of the soul than all that which is usually conceived of as ideas that draw together human development. One must not think of the Austrian as being wrapped up in this or that prejudice, but to get to know him, one must consider Austrian national character. |

I have only been able to present it to your minds in a few images today; I have not really chosen them with the aim of making the Austrian lovable, but simply to describe him as he is. I did not want to summarize anything special, but only to show individual traits, of course very individual lost traits, but which can nevertheless illustrate this or that, illustrate above all how a special note, a special tone, lives in this Austrian character, over the whole of this Austrian culture, from such figures as I have described to you today, to the Magyar Emmerich Madách, the man who created the well-known “Tragedy of Man”. Out of a life of suffering, and truly out of a life of suffering, Madách rose to create a form of human philosophy that suited him. He shows the creation of man, Adam and Eve. He shows how Adam and Eve are placed in the world by the divine creator, perceiving this world as a mystery. Now Lucifer shows them what will follow. Adam is shown how he will live again, how he will return in Egyptian times, how he will live as an Egyptian, as a pharaoh; how Eve will be his slave. The Egyptian culture with all that it can trigger in the soul of the re-embodied Adam is presented by the poet. And further, we are led into the Roman period; Adam is reborn in the time of the Roman Empire. In the time of Christianity, in turn, in the time of the Franco-English culture, in the time of the German culture; at the end of the earth time, he is placed in an embodiment. The whole of human life is led past him.

As one can see, there are many paths that lead up from the depths of joy and suffering that can arise in the Austrian soul, up to the peaks of human world and life views. And it is a special note that one must say: It is precisely through the contemplation of this special note, this special 'tone in Austrian folklore that it already corresponds to an inner necessity that, for example, the German-Austrians were separated for a time from the general German intellectual life. It was precisely through this separation that they developed their innermost selves properly, that they emphasized what was truly their own in the right way. But such a separation does not destroy what connects the peoples. And what we see today, this interaction of the two Central European empires into a great overall concept of Central Europe, into an overall being of Central Europe, is firmly anchored in both the inhabitants of the one and the inhabitants of the other empire, if one looks straight into the depths of the soul. This can be seen in the depths of the national character, for example, where the will of Austria is realized, and again in the heights of Austrian achievement. When, as it seemed, a deep rift had opened up in 1866 between the hearts of the great German Empire and the hearts of the best Austrians, there was not a mood at the height of humanity after that year 1866 that cried out for revenge. There was not a mood that was later in other places, after a people had been defeated, where it was said that one must always and again and again bring the thought of revenge to life in one's soul. No, but an 'Address was delivered to the throne immediately after 1866 in Austria, which contained the words; 'It is not the secret thought of retaliation that guides our steps; a nobler satisfaction is granted to us if we succeed more and more in transforming disfavor and enmity into respect and affection through what we achieve and what we create.

These words also express the bond between the Austrian and German hearts that has been so beautifully realized today. That bond, which is expressed so beautifully in a poem by von Hamerling that truly springs from the Austrian soul: Germany is my fatherland, but in Austria I feel my motherland. I feel a sense of belonging to my mother country. This sense of belonging was so vividly experienced that it can be expressed in a few words that originated in Austria. These are strange words, perhaps not in a completely satisfactory form, but they are words that may be read aloud, especially in our time. I will say afterwards in which period these words were written. In a poem entitled “Austria and Germany” it says:

Let Russia and England prudently confer,
Perhaps not even unhappily find it,
If we here engage in a little battle,
If they try to take away our just rights!

You, German brothers, will not advise here –
The enemy's attack will only unite us
And among us every ambition will fade
Before the: One people in word and deed.

And if one among us has failed,
If discord has existed anywhere in German hearts,
There is only one thing that now inspires us:

What we have in common, our joys and our sorrows!
So let us also have in common:
A German war, if not a German peace!

They could be words written in our time. But they were written in April 1859 by the son of that Tobias Gottfried Schröer I mentioned, by Karl Julius Schröer, who worked in Vienna, having come from Zisleithania, in Austria. He worked in a way that can be said to have been suitable for, on the one hand, connecting the soul with what lives and weaves in the people and, on the other hand, carrying the souls up to the heights of spiritual life – Karl Julius Schröer, who first developed a beneficial activity as director of the Viennese Protestant schools and then as professor of German literature at the Technical University. I myself feel — please excuse this personal remark — deeply connected with this activity, because Karl Julius Schröer was once my dear teacher. This Karl Julius Schröer, on the one hand, he carried his popular research into the really deep foundations of folklore. First of all, he had Christmas plays printed that were performed among the farmers during the Christmas season but that had emerged from the people themselves. Then he was a dialect researcher, a researcher who studied the peculiarities of the Austrian dialect in the Gottschee region in Carniola, among the Germans of Spiš in Slovakia, among the so-called Heanz in western Hungary, who also researched the dialect of Lower Austria and everywhere pointed out the close connection between all Austrian intellectual life and its roots in the folk tradition; and who, on the other hand, carried the soul up to the heights of Goethe's world view through research into Faust, and in this sense again had a beneficial effect on his students. In 1859 this man expressed Austria's unity with Germany in this way. I have quoted his words to show how the Austrian national character leads to that beautiful and glorious ideal towards which we must strive today and which must develop out of the great demands and devoted deeds of our time: a Central Europe in which everything that has long been working together in our hearts will finally be united. And especially by considering the special tone that prevails in Austrian nationality and Austrian intellectual life, one can say that what should be achieved there in separation will be able to combine with the wider Germanic character in a more intimate way for the benefit and blessing of Central European development. And so we see, I would say, even if we look with an understanding of the essence of nationality at what is developing out of blood and suffering and pain in our time as a future ideal for Central Europe, we see that something is developing that must be created by the devoted and courageous deeds of arms, but which is firmly rooted, so firmly rooted that the guarantee of its durability can be seen in the hearts and souls of those who are drawing closer together and have joined forces for common action.

In conclusion, let me say: what is now coming together historically is not only coming together through external necessity, it is coming together through the inner bonds of the souls, the hearts of the peoples of Central Europe.

Eight days ago I was allowed to speak to you about the esoteric core, about the spiritual contents of those great legends in which Central European thinking and feeling express themselves in the first third of the Middle Ages with the renewal of which Richard Wagner achieved something prophetic for our art at the same time. Today another legend type has to occupy us, two legends that Richard Wagner also renewed and which were made accessible to art significantly in our time. The Parzival and the Lohengrin legends should occupy us today. With both these legends we touch a land different from that was which occupied us eight days ago. I want to characterise in a few words once again, what takes, actually, the Siegfried and the Nibelungs legends up and what lives in them. The old spiritual experience of the ancestors expresses itself in the consciousness of the Central European population. This consciousness is sunken in the darkness of the time, and the usual sensory view has already substituted it in the epoch in which these legends originated. It was the old spiritual experience, which still lived like an echo, just as the world of the gods or legends.

The legends of the Nibelungs and of Siegfried are echoes of the ancient pagan time with its secret doctrines, with its views of the initiation of the old leaders of the people, and we have found Siegfried as such a great initiate of the Teutons. However, Lohengrin and Parzival are individualities of quite different type. We enter that time with them when Christianity, a worldview completely new to Central Europe, had spread out and won influence. Now the whole being of the newly emerging Christianity and everything that is connected as a result with it lives in these both legends, in the Parzival and in the Lohengrin legends. We want to imagine how the being of medieval-European development expresses itself in this legend world at first. We have emphasised eight days ago that to us the legends of Siegfried and the Nibelungs point to an ancient prehistoric time in which a kind of natural ties of love connected the single tribes, the single parts of the population. Something like an echo of this time is contained in that which Tacitus reports when he says that the Germans still revered an old tribal god at whom they looked up like at a father with whom they were connected by family ties, which extended to tribal communities.

The blood, the natural relationship gave that love. Every single tribe had such a tribal divinity that had a kind of ancestor again. This natural love is a result of the blood relationship, resting like a breath on these old times, and just the recollection of these old times and tribal communities, of this old love, based on blood relationship, is expressed in the legend type of the Nibelungs. We have seen that the legend type of the Song of the Nibelungs originated in a time in which the tribal love had already withdrawn. Something else replaced it: greed, everything that is symbolised by the gold that is connected with egoism and is based on it. The old love based on blood relationship was no longer authoritative, but new connections that were based on statutes, contracts and laws. This reversal is reflected in the legend of the Nibelungs.

Later, other aims replaced these old communities, which were based on gold, so to say, on possession and mere warlike knightly bravery, which were out for possession. Other ideals gradually appeared with Christianity. The inner being of Christianity maybe was nowhere expressed as magnificently and tremendously as in the legends into which we settle down bit by bit and in which the task of Christianity within Central Europe is represented allegorically: in the Lohengrin and Parzival legends.

What did Christianity have as its elixir of life? The absolute equality of all human beings. One felt Christianity that way at least at that time. One felt freedom, equality before the highest that the human being can imagine as the jewel, as the real mission of Christianity. The ancestors of the Teutons were proud of the name of their ancestors, of the name of a tribe or of a family name. They referred to it if they wanted to assign value to themselves in the world. They referred to the law, to titles and names in the time, which had superseded the family love. Now both should no longer be valid, but simply the human being had to be important who felt intrinsically in his core. The human being without title, without name was the Christian ideal. Something great was said with it. The Lohengrin and the Parzival legends express this.

How do both legends express this? If we take the Parzival legend, we need only to visualise the structure of the Parzival legend how it lived in the Middle Ages, lived in Wolfram von Eschenbach (~1170-~1220). We have to deal with a young person who grows on, torn out from any community, torn out from that which gave distinction and weight to the human beings at that time. The mother Herzeloide experienced that sufferings, pains could be connected with the old order that was based on titles, distinctions, and names. In the old order, her husband was led to the East where he had an accident. Now she wants to bring her son up far from all those things. He should know nothing about the striving of the worldly knights. However, one day he sees such worldly knights. There he decides to depart, and he starts hiking. We know that this hike leads him to two places that we must consider as something particularly important for the spiritual perception in the middle of the Middle Ages.

The first place to which the Parzival comes is the Round Table of King Arthur; the other place is the castle of the Holy Grail. What are these? In the Middle Ages one imagined the Round Table of King Arthur as a community from which all spiritual strength goes out for that which existed in the Middle Ages before the influence of Christianity as worldly knighthood, generally as all worldly. We come back to ancient times, to those times to which we could point already last time in the talk on the Song of the Nibelungs. We know that the Teutons, the ancestors of the German and Anglo-Saxon tribes took an area in possession that other tribes inhabited, the Celts in primeval times. The Celts: one only knows a little about them; history tells a little only about these past times of Europe in which these strange people had big influence which was pushed then by the invading Teutons to the west, but was also forced back there as people. The Celts were forced back as people. Their influence has remained. A spiritual sediment of this old Celtic time exists in Europe. In this Celtic time people still beheld clairvoyantly into the spiritual regions. Ideas of the spiritual world remained from that.

Among the Celts, the old clairvoyance was preferably home, the immediate consciousness that one could have experiences in the divine-spiritual world. The stories and dramatic actions are an echo of the instructions that the initiate Celtic priests gave to their pupils and via the pupils to the whole people. There we refer to those primeval times of Europe, when there were real initiates, initiates of the old Celtic paganism on European territory.

What I have told to you about the initiation of Siegfried, of Wotan and so on, all that leads back to the old initiations of the old Celtic priests. These old Celtic priests were of the same spirit as in ancient Egypt, in ancient Chaldea or ancient Persia the priest sages were as rulers. They were the rulers. Everything that happened in the world that belonged to the external organisation was done according to the instructions of the priest sages. Everything public, everything common was controlled by the wisdom of these original scholars of Europe.

King Arthur about whom one says that he withdrew with his Round Table to Wales and lived there was nothing else than the learnt lord of these sages who formed a spiritual centre, a kind of spiritual monarchy. One felt that this spiritual centre, I would like to say of “original scholars,” with his choice twelve companions was there. This has good reasons. Thus, one tells that King Arthur was nothing else than the successor of that directing scholar of the old Celtic priests in Wales. With it, we immediately recognise that there was something in Europe that we call a Grand Lodge in spiritual science.

Let us now realise the concept of a Grand Lodge. You know that we think seriously of development, that humanity develops, that humanity ascends higher and higher, that every single human being can ascend the path of knowledge up to those stages where he himself beholds into the spiritual worlds, where the primal ground behind the world manifests to him.

If we speak of the possibility of development of humanity, it is also not abstruse to realise that there are higher developed individualities in humanity already today who have run ahead of the remaining humanity and have walked the paths of knowledge and wisdom due to a life full of renunciation, so that they can be leaders of modern humanity. Today where one levels everything, where one does not want to recognise anything, where one talks of development, but does not want to believe in development, one does not accept this. However, in the times when one knew something of it one really spoke of the existing development.

According to a natural principle, we find twelve different forces of the spirit. I have said about Goethe that he himself talks about such a secret brotherhood that he considers as Rosicrucians. One spoke of such a Grand White Lodge in the Middle Ages. From this, the strands went out which controlled life. One recognised that who directed all that in King Arthur, who lived concealed in Wales. Around him were his knights who were, indeed, no longer at the height of the priests of the old Celtic time for whom the time of love had transformed into a time of egoism when one attempted to conquer countries with the sword in the hand. However, they were still under the guidance of the White Lodge.

Indeed, the question immediately suggests itself: if there are such lodges—also even today—, why do they not appear?—I have said often enough that it depends not only on the fact that somebody appears, but also on the fact that he can be recognised. Today also, Jesus would probably not be recognised. It is hard to recognise a sage within his time. It belongs just that to it which theosophy or spiritual science wants to bring again to humanity. If it finds its way, one understands such a thing as the Round Table of King Arthur, the directing white lodge.

This was the one: Arthur. The other is the castle of the Holy Grail. Only by way of a hint, we can deal with it. One says that the Holy Grail is the chalice in which once Christ Jesus with his disciples took the Last Supper, the wine, and in which his blood was then collected. Then the lance was also brought to Europe with which the side of Jesus was pierced. The chalice of the Holy Grail is on monsalvaesche (mons salvationis = mountain of salvation) where a holy castle was built up. The Holy Grail has the capacity to give everlasting youth, the force of everlasting life generally to somebody who is familiar with its miracles who lives with its sun of grace.

Again, these are twelve, but Christian spiritual knights now. The old Templars guard the Holy Grail, and they used the forces, which they suck from this guard to pour out the spiritual knighthood of the heart, of the inner life, over Europe. Thus, one countered the white lodge of the worldly knighthood that moved to Wales with the spiritual knighthood in the castle of the Holy Grail, which is placed on the Spanish mountain monsalvaesche.

Which task did the knights have who were in the castle of the Holy Grail? The task of the knights of the Holy Grail was not to make conquests, not to acquire external possession, not to appropriate seigneuries; their task was to make the conquest of the soul life. One tells to us about the treasure of the Nibelungs, about the gold as a symbol of possession, as an aim worth striving for by the Nibelungs, the Holy Grail is the spiritualised treasure of the Nibelungs, the treasure of the soul. What is the strength that goes out from the Holy Grail in reality? What do those twelve knights work who are in its castle? A spark of the divine lives in every human being, as often the theosophical worldview emphasises. The mystics of the Middle Ages had their great ideas in the same time in which also these legends originated. They spoke of the fact that the human being is a fourfold being. There is at first the external physical human being who lives here in this world who strives for possession who is on the lookout for gold. The second one is the mental human being who suffers and is glad who has instincts, desires, and sensations who must be gradually improved. The third human being is an even more internal one. He is a spiritual human being who attains admission to the spiritual world bit by bit. The innermost human being is the divine human being. This is that who today and this was felt in particular in the Middle Ages—is only in the earliest stages. To develop this disposition of the divine spark more and more, to raise the human being to the higher worlds, this one had aimed at in the initiation of the old paganism. One aims at this now within the Christian world in a new way. In addition, the Christian initiation was internalised.

You remember from the former talks how the initiation ceremonies were in the old times how the human being had to go through procedures that lifted out the internal soul from the physical body, so that the human being was enraptured to the higher world and could witness the qualities of the higher world. An external procedure belonged to it to go through all that. Christianity should bring an initiation that takes place only in the deepest inside, in the concealed sanctum of the soul. There the god should be searched for, the god, who brought salvation to Christianity by pouring his blood; every single human being in his soul should find this god. The single human being should really be able to attain that which Angelus Silesius, the great Christian mystic, later expressed with the words: “If you rise above yourself and allow God to prevail, then ascension takes place in your mind.” The task of the knights of the Holy Grail was to develop the internal vital spark in the human being.

The Holy Grail was nothing else than the deepest inside of the human nature, and it was something uniform because the internal human nature is a uniform one, because a life spent in the pursuit of wisdom raises hope that one could understand what is meant with the big unity, with the big divine spark. They were there as the brothers of the Holy Grail. Parzival wanted to find the way to the Holy Grail. The legend tells now that when he came to the Holy Grail, he found King Amfortas bleeding at that time. One had said to him to ask not much and nothing wrong. Hence, he did not ask for the wounds of the king and not for the meaning of the Holy Grail. That is why he is cast out. He should ask for the qualities of the Holy Grail and the wounds of the king. This belongs to the experiences that are to be done in the divine life that one must ask for it. He must long for it. The Holy Grail exists; one can find it, it is bestowed on everybody, but it does not impose itself. It does not come to us; we must feel the longing for the Holy Grail, the internal sanctum, the divine vital spark in the human soul. We must have the desire to ask for it. If the human soul has found the path up to the god, the god descends to it. The secret of the Holy Grail is the descent of the god who descends, if the human being develops up to the divine.

John the Baptist shows this following the baptism of Jesus: a dove came down and sat down on the head, and a voice spoke from heaven: “You are my beloved Son; in you I take delight” (Mark 1:11). The Holy Grail is shown in the figure of a dove allegorically.

Parzival was not yet ripe with his first visit in the Grail castle to experience what we have just described. When he felt cast out, something came to his soul that must come to every soul once if it should really become ripe for the last stages of knowledge. Doubt, disbelief, inner mental darkness come to Parzival's soul. Indeed, someone who wants to ascend to knowledge must go through the hard school of doubt once. Not before one has doubted and has gone through the tortures and everything that doubts may bring along, he has acquired that certainty in his inside that he will never lose knowledge again. Doubt is a bad brother, but a purifying brother. Parzival goes through these doubts now, and he brings himself to that knowledge which consists of something else than of intellectual knowledge. Richard Wagner expresses this knowledge with magnificent correctness, maybe not quite philosophically or psychologically correctly but analogously, while he calls Parzival (Parsifal) the “pure fool” who becomes knowing by compassion.

Thus, we come to the description of the way that someone has to go through who still has to struggle through to the stages of higher knowledge. You know that it is the path of the pupils and that one distinguishes there three stages. If anybody has acquired the qualities that constitute the preparatory path, if he has purified himself of the uncontrolled ideas and leads a pure life, then he becomes ripe for chelahood, then he becomes ripe to get the guru, the spiritual leader. The first stage of the path to higher knowledge consists of the fact that one learns to behave quite impartially to the world, to practice love without the slightest trace of any prejudice from the inside. Why do the human beings love in the usual life at first?

Because they have a blood relationship, because they have been connected by any ties for long. This is right. However, who wants to go the path of knowledge must penetrate to another form of love. Nothing that ties me together with a human being in a special way is allowed to prefer him regarding my love. I am only allowed to ask for that which is outside me. Has my brother or my brother-in-law any advantage? No! With it, I say nothing against the love for our relatives; it should concern only the traits of the human being. Even if he is quite foreign to us, we recognise that he is worthy of our love, then we love him like one who is connected with us for long. Such a human being is on the first level of chelahood. We call him the homeless human being because he has lost what one calls home in the ideal sense. This is also meant by the sentence you find in the New Testament: “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, even his own life, he cannot be a disciple of mine” (Luke 14:26). This sentence means the same, and one felt Christianity that way in Central Europe. No name and no title should give a preference of love. Someone who ascends the path of knowledge should found love for any human being on his innermost worthiness and value.

If the human being has climbed up the first steps of the path of knowledge, the hard moments of doubt come. While we get to know the world more and more and delve into love more and more, the more we also get to know the black and bad side of the world. These are the hard days of the initiates. The initiate struggles upwards bit by bit. Then there awakes that soul light which like an internal sun illuminates the spiritual things and beings. We see the objects round ourselves with eyes because the light shines on these objects. Actually, we see the rays only which are reflected by the objects to us. We do not see the spiritual things because no spiritual light shines on them.

However, who has advanced so far that the so-called kundalini light shines to him is on the second stage of the path of knowledge. Someone has arrived at the third stage who has succeeded in feeling his ego without preference, who does not esteem himself higher than other human beings, who finds his higher ego in the love to all beings. Who does no longer hope for his own selfish ego, but hears the properties of the beings speaking has arrived at the third stage of the path of knowledge. We call him a swan in the secret doctrine, and this is a term that is used all over the world where there is spiritual research.

What does this degree bring? It brings the effluxion about all beings. There we are no longer concluded like within a skin from the world. Foreign pain is our pain, foreign joy is our joy, and we live and are active in the whole existence. The whole earth belongs to us. We feel in everything. Then one does no longer know that one looks at the objects from the outside, then it is, as if one is in them, as if one had penetrated into them by love and thereby knows them. By compassion, by this empathy all knowledge has originated.

A hermit, Trevrizent, initiated Parzival in this wisdom. The fact that he is a hermit is typical. He is somebody who is lifted out of the remaining humanity who has really left everything behind: father, mother, brother, sister, and has become a disciple of that who does not know such differences. There Parzival is informed of the higher virtues, and there he becomes ripe for entering the castle of the Holy Grail and for asking which the miracles of the Holy Grail are. He is taken up; he releases the wounded Amfortas and becomes Grail King. An internal, human way, the way that the secret doctrine prescribes all over the world, transferred into the Christian, a way on which Parzival is described. Lohengrin belongs to the Grail Table. He is the son of Parzival. Whereas the passageway of the human being to the higher self is described in Parzival, a historical-social mission of the middle of the Middle Ages is described in Lohengrin.

Initiates led the medieval folk consciousness, it was not blind as the scholars imagine. This folk consciousness recorded an important epoch in the middle of the Middle Ages. What happens there? Briefly: an important historical event happened, the so-called urban civilisation started. The old feudal time experiences a mighty revolution. Whereas one dealt once only with land ownership, only with a rural population, now we see in Germany, France, Belgium, in Russia everywhere single cities originating. Cities are founded; one notes a jerk forward in the human development. What had happened there in these foundations of cities? The human beings were torn out from the connections to which they have belonged once. Everybody who felt enslaved went to the city. There he was on his own. There he was only as much worth as he could achieve. The bourgeoisie came into being in the middle of the Middle Ages. This mighty reversal is expressed in the legend of Lohengrin.

Whereas Parzival shows how the human being finds a higher ego in himself, how he dedicates himself to the pilgrimage to the higher ego, Lohengrin shows how the medieval folk goes through a tremendous epoch of human development, namely the human being is freed and his personality comes to light from the old organisations.

If we want to understand the connection of this historical event with the legend of Lohengrin, we have to know that in all mysticism this stage is symbolised by a female personality. Therefore, Goethe also spoke at the end of the second part of his Faust of the fact that the everlasting-female draws us upwards. This must not be interpreted trivially. In truth, the human soul is meant which pulls up the human being. In the general, the soul is shown as female and that which surrounds the human being from without as male. The striving soul is always shown as female.

In the secret doctrine, one knows that the great leaders of humanity, the initiates, further humanity always to a higher stage. Lohengrin is the herald of the Holy Grail. The medieval consciousness regards him as the great initiate leader who furthers humanity to a higher stage in the middle of the Middle Ages. He was the bringer of the urban civilisation, who inspired the bourgeoisie in its originating. This is the individuality of Lohengrin. Elsa of Brabant is nothing else than the symbol of the medieval folk soul which has again to make a developmental step forward under the influence of Lohengrin. This progress in the history of humanity is nicely and tremendously shown in the legend.

We have seen that the pupil initiated in the third degree is called a swan. The master who is deeply initiated rises higher, he rises into the transcendent world, in those worlds, to which the human consciousness does not extend. He knows everything that expresses itself in humanity only in his inside. One cannot ask him, where from you are, which name do you have?—It is the swan that brings him from even higher spheres. Hence, the swan brings Lohengrin into the epoch of urban civilisation. Look at the progress, which has been made in the old Hellenism. The gods in Greece are nothing else than deified initiates. Take Zeus, who consorts with Semele; from this affair Dionysus originates. The Greek culture arises from it. All great proceedings of humanity are shown in this way. Elsa should not ask for the name and origin of that who leads her and becomes her husband. It is with all great masters that way; they go unrecognized and unnoticed through humanity. If one asked them, they would be shooed away from humanity. It is necessary that they save the sanctum from profane looks and questions. This would be also the case if one gave people an understanding of the being of such an initiate. At such a moment, such a being would also disappear as Lohengrin also did. Lohengrin is called a son of Parzival. That means that the liberation of the medieval bourgeoisie took place under the influence of Christianity.

Thus, we look into the legends of the Middle Ages and see how nicely the facts of the spiritual life are expressed in both legends. The mission of Christianity for the medieval culture became with it the mission of the liberation of the human being from the earthly human body. This mission was shown in both legends. It worked on Richard Wagner in particular. He always tried to show the pure love that makes the human being clairvoyant. Already in 1856, he started a drama, called The Victors: a Jandala girl loves Ananda, a Brahmin young man. However, Ananda is far separated from the love of the Jandala girl because of the caste division. He is not allowed to pursue the love of the Jandala girl. He becomes a victor about his nature becoming a pupil of Buddha. As adherer of Buddha, he finds the victory, there he finds himself again, and there he overcomes the human affection. One tells that the Jandala girl was a Brahmin girl in a former life and rejected the love of a Jandala young man. Then she also becomes a victor and is spiritually united with Ananda, the Brahmin. Later, Wagner wanted to use the figure of Jesus of Nazareth in a drama.

He had in mind the complete inner nature of Christianity and the teaching of the free human being who is not bound to title and to anything else. The Holy Grail seeks in the inside of the human soul. In 1857, on Good Friday—Wagner tells—he faced a wonderful nature in Zurich. There something flowed out to him for a moment that expressed the whole mood in him that penetrated the whole knighthood and the Christian knighthood. He says to himself, like by an inspiration, at that day when Christ Jesus died, no one is allowed to bear weapons.

At that time, he realised the whole greatness of the figure of Parzival who attained knowledge becoming engrossed in humanity and in all beings. Now he resumes his incomplete piece The Victors in a Christian-modern way. He shows Parzival as somebody who leaves his home who knows nothing about names and titles, about ties and nothing of father and mother. He meets, on one side, the magic castle of Klingsor and the enchantress Kundry. Meeting Kundry he experiences the whole significance of the earthly sensuous life and what it means if the human being gets to know it only by desires. On the other side, he realises in that moment when Kundry kisses him that this sensuous appears in its true acceptation in the human being only if it is free of desires. Richard Wagner nicely shows the sensuousness free of desires how it is gained by the internal strength of the spirit, the Parzival spirit that he calls the Christian one. He shows how it is gained on one side by the Holy Grail and on the other side in the magic castle. On one side by overcoming it, on the other side by deadening it. These are two sides, which are used to ascend to the spirit. The ones deaden the sensuous living ascetically; they take the organs away from themselves in order not to become addicted to weakness.

The others remain human beings, they do not want to ascend to higher knowledge this way, but they want to develop the higher to a bigger strength in themselves. Parzival recognised this way as the right one. One has to become stronger as strong as the temptations may be. Then it is that time to be taken up in the Holy Grail. Now he asks correctly and is initiated into the secrets of the Holy Grail, he is ripe for becoming the Grail King.

Wagner endeavours to show the Holy Grail. For years, he pursued studies, not academically, but fulfilled with artistic and visionary gifts. He pursued studies, while he complied with the spirit of the medieval legends, so that he really expresses that guidance caused by initiates of the Middle Ages where the old order is represented by Ortrud, the new order by the emerging consciousness of the people which wants to free itself. This consciousness, which the swans introduce, the chelas of the third degree, is symbolised quite appropriately by Elsa of Brabant and Lohengrin.

Wagner appropriately shows the greatness that is in it. The renewal of art was crucial to Wagner. He wanted to make something out of art again that came close to religion, he wanted to embody moods with his pieces of art that lead the human beings again to the divine by which he wanted to make the artists religious leaders. Wagner needed topics that led beyond the usual life. He also wanted to represent the spirit of Christianity, the spirit of love for humanity artistically. He felt deeply and seriously, how in the newer time the spirit of egoism, the spirit of the external possession, substituted the spirit of love. He describes that which developed as social order and with which he went along intensively and radically, as pursuit of gold, as a time the real Christian spirit of love must supersede again. He wanted to represent something like love flowing in a world where the gold rules in his music dramas with the means of the supernatural and divine living in the human being. Hence, he also resorts with these questions to the great legends of the Middle Ages. This lived in Richard Wagner.

You can realise how theosophy or spiritual science approaches with its view of the myths the art of Wagner. The theosophist realises above all that we have to see in the legends nothing else than pictures and expressions of great truth. The pictures of the development of the external life and the soul were given to the ancient peoples. In the Lohengrin legend, something is made clear, so that the human being knew what happens to him if he has arrived at certain stages. Truth is announced to people in such a way that they can grasp it. There were and there are tribes and peoples that can grasp the great truth only in legend form. Today we are no longer talking pictorially. Spiritual science contains the same truth that was put before the folk in magnificent legends, which Wagner tries to renew. Spiritual science speaks in another way, but what it lets stream into the world is the same spirit. Thus, we feel that not only that is true which Schopenhauer says that the great spirits like Plato and Spinoza, Buddha and Goethe, Giordano Bruno and Socrates, Hermes and Pythagoras understand each other, talk with each other, communicate mentally. Not only this is true, not only the choice individualities understand each other, but also that which lives as truth in the spirit of the people. This sounds together for a big historical sound of the spheres, and we feel this if today we realise what lives in the legends and myths, if we let it rise for the higher soul of the present. Truth lives at all times and expresses itself in the most various forms. If we penetrate into this truth, we understand how the peoples and times speak in these single forms, and we hear it echoing how in the manifold tones the one truth announces itself to all peoples, to all human beings.

How a person lives, whether they are satisfied or dissatisfied, depends on the degree of understanding they have of their own nature. When looking up at the starry sky, the medieval person felt comfort and hope, full of admiration for its size and beauty, because the medieval person felt part of the universe, part of the spirit that permeates the world. He recognized his origin and his goal, which would lead him back into the bosom of the Godhead.

Compared to the mighty structure of the world, the infinity of the universe, today's man feels so small, so tiny, that he thinks he must scatter like a speck of dust. Man is certainly tiny compared to the universe, and yet one thing is greater than all creation: the soul, the spiritual part in man. The highest divine reality, to which his journey leads him back, lives within himself. This knowledge, this belief was not taken from people in the Middle Ages.

This has now changed significantly in our time. Popular writings never tire of emphasizing the smallness of man. Just as the earth appears in space only like a grain of sand, so man on earth is only a grain of sand that passes away. Thus, the present time emphasizes man's smallness, the Middle Ages his greatness. It is difficult for today's man to find his way between these considerations of the smallness and the greatness of man. Schiller, who had more of a theosophical way of thinking than most people suspect, says:

You astronomers, do not talk about nebulae and
suns, the Sublime does not dwell in space.

Theosophy brings new light into this confusion; it opens up depths for us that provide new insights into the nature of man. The theosophical world view is not reactionary; it knows and recognizes that the material world view was necessary because it led to the knowledge of the external world. But the consequence of this was that the deeper knowledge about man was neglected. The material view has conquered the globe. Now it is time to gain a deeper understanding of the soul and spirit, and the teachings of Theosophy can provide us with this.

How can the nature of man be fathomed? Today's science seeks to understand man, like everything else, through dissection. It uses the external senses to gain insight into the nature of man. The value of the science thus acquired is by no means to be belittled, but there is another way of research.

In old mystical writings (this word has an unpleasant ring for many, of course), you will find descriptions of the inner being, of the human spirit. They say that man has inner organs with which he can pursue a completely different kind of research than the one carried out with the outer senses. The result of these investigations with the inner, finer senses is now not at all fundamentally different from the materialistic investigation; it only provides further, deeper insights than the external method of investigation.

This spiritual wisdom now has different names. The name “Theosophy” is only one among many. Paul was the first to use it. This wisdom is ancient, it is nothing new; it is only being brought to people today in a way it has never been before. Higher or deeper knowledge used to be the property of secret schools. The word should not be misunderstood. The teachings are secrets only in the sense that mathematics is a secret for a simple farmer, for example. It remains a secret to him until he has learned it. Anyone who is willing to learn it can. Over the millennia, many have learned the wisdom. In the past, greater demands were placed on the student. Today, schools mainly teach intellectually and train the minds of students. In the wisdom schools, the aim is to develop the whole person with all their powers of mind and soul. And before the student was introduced to the deeper teachings of wisdom, he had to pass certain tests.

Some who read about the secret Pythagorean school may find it quite simple. Only those who put themselves in the same state of mind as the people were in at the time will recognize its true meaning. They will recognize its value.

We can understand this by considering a work of art. Two people stand before a painting by Raphael. One sees only the colors on the canvas and passes by the work of art quite untouched. The other, an art connoisseur with understanding, is opened to the wonders of the soul and spiritual worlds, which left the other quite untouched. This different perception of the work of art depends on the different development of the inner powers. In the one, only the intellect had been developed; in the other, soul and spirit had undergone a development that created the right mood to understand and enjoy the work of art.

Anyone who wants to live a life in the spirit must be clearly aware of one thing: that thoughts and feelings are real things. It is not the person who grasps the books who reads them with the intellect alone, but the person who grasps them with the spirit. Just as a brick falling from a roof kills a person just as surely as if it were a fact of nature, so does a feeling of hatred wound the soul of the one at whom it is directed. The soul is wounded by hatred just as surely as the body is wounded by the brick. The teaching of the invisible can only be grasped by the one who always realizes that the invisible is much more real than the visible.

It is also worthless to read only in books; it is life that matters, life in the spirit. The whole person must immerse themselves in the teachings, not just their minds. This must be said in advance to enable the understanding of what is to be said. It is not enough to say yes to the theosophical teachings; the person must transform themselves if they want to come to knowledge.

It is clear that man is part of the external world. Born of women, he appears on earth; the external sciences, chemistry, anatomy and so on show that the same forces, the same substances, make up the human body as they do in the rest of the world. Man is, therefore, first of all, a physical being. That much external science teaches us. Beyond that, it can investigate nothing; only that which dies can be investigated by it; theosophy gives us information about that which is immortal. That is a simple thought. Just as the human being, the external man, is grasped by looking with the external senses, so the spiritual man can be grasped by the inner senses.

What is meant by this is not difficult to understand. Look at my hands. It is conceivable that a skilled artist could create an exact replica of such a hand so that it could not be distinguished from mine; on the outside, let us assume, there would be no difference; and yet there is a word that shows the enormous difference between the artificial and the natural hand. The artificial hand remains as it is, unchanged; it can stand alone. But if you cut off the natural hand, it withers or decays. The one word is life. Science does not teach us this.

My whole body is flooded with life. Man has not only the physical body, but also, secondly, an etheric body – I ask the scholars not to take offense at this expression. Every living being has an etheric body that makes the being live. It is not perceptible to the external senses. But there is a way to see it, just as we see the physical body. There is a method that allows us to see life, not just see colors and hear sounds.

A doctor, with whom I discussed this matter, said: “It is quite natural that the hand withers when it is cut off; the blood no longer flows through it.” Quite right, but what does it need the blood for? What does it need the invisible for? To be what it is!

With death, the physical body decays and the etheric body dissipates; it returns its components to the life-giving ether that permeates the world.

We now come to the third aspect of human nature. Imagine a person standing before you; you can see and touch them. You recognize their weight and observe their life. But only the material can be felt by the hand. But there is still something else living in him: pleasure and pain, passions and desires, instincts and inclinations, which no hand can touch, no sensual eye can see. But all this is a reality for man, even if it cannot be perceived by any physical eye or other sense. The part of man that includes the instincts, desires, passions, and so on, is called the third, the astral body.

Those who have developed spiritual eyes, who have become able to see, can also perceive this body. It is also called an aura. This astral body is something that humans have in common with all animals. But beyond that, something that no animal can achieve, humans possess something that makes them human in the first place. The word “I” expresses this. In this word lies a very powerful difference from all other names. “I”, a powerful, great word. Anyone can say table, chair, dog, lion, but only you can say “I” about yourself. No other person can say “I” to you; only you can say it about yourself. I am me, everyone else is “you.” You have to delve into this thought to understand it.

All religions are based on wisdom; even Judaism; the Jews knew and recognized the God, the ego within man, the hidden God, whose name was unutterable for the people. Only the high priest was allowed to pronounce it once a year before the people: Jeoah — only a breath sounded from his mouth, and then the divine spark flashed through the hearts of the community in undulating motion. And this I is the fourth link in the human being.

Everything a person does and pursues contributes to the development of this I. In primeval times, man could not yet say “I”. He was still half animal. Instincts, desires and drives are the driving forces in the development of the animal, but through the I these instincts are ennobled; the I works into the astral body. In this way, man changes and ennobles his animal instincts. Anger and rage are transformed into calm reflection; hatred and feelings of revenge are transformed into love, as the I works into the soul. The wild is civilized, instincts become ideals, urges become duties, selfishness becomes sacrifice. This transformation of the astral body produces the growth of the “Manas”. What man has thus created for himself is permanent. This is the point where immortality begins. Every cause we build into the Manas remains, and the effects appear in the next re-embodiments.

Small children usually resemble their parents at first, and naturalists ascribe all their characteristics to their parentage. To a certain extent, they may be right. Raphael also appeared as the child of his parents, and many of his characteristics and his appearance can be explained by the nature of his ancestors. But what about when something suddenly comes to life in him, his genius, which he has inherited from neither his father nor his mother? Then one says to oneself: This must either have no cause at all or a cause other than descent. Often one also sees a great diversity among the children of a family. Where does that come from? This diversity has its basis in the fact that the individual has laid the foundation for it in previous lives. I do not owe my nature only to the similarity to my parents. Perhaps thousands of years ago I myself laid the foundation for it. The differences in human nature can thus be explained by reincarnation, by repeated lives on earth, in which each life brings to the fore what the person has laid the foundation for in previous embodiments.

What was it that made the ancient Egyptian slaves do their hard work, their forced labor, with devotion, even with joy in some cases? It was the fact that he knew that in the next incarnation the tables would turn, that the quietly obedient servant would then perhaps rule and the cruel oppressor would be enslaved; for that is how the law of retribution, karma, works. The man of the West has no idea what a feeling of bliss arises from this [law], how it produces cheerful serenity. “God is not mocked; what a man sows, that shall he also reap.” (Gal. vi. 7.) Reincarnation and Karma are the great facts which enable and impel man to work at improving his astral body.

When he has done so to a certain extent, he has undergone a catharsis. In the secret schools he is then taught how to develop not only his astral body but also his etheric body. When he has succeeded in doing this, when the etheric body is completely transformed and better, more fully formed, he no longer dissolves. He becomes immortal. This is the resurrection to life, that is, awakening Christ in us.

When a person returns, he brings with him, in addition to the astral body and the etheric body, the sixth part of the human being, the Budhi.

What lies beyond that or even deeper hidden within him is, seventhly, the Atma. It is difficult to say anything about this in a few words.

Once these higher basic parts have been developed, it is possible to become master of the whole body.

Only now, after we have become acquainted with the basic parts or bodies of the human being, can we become clear about the origin.

Natural science cannot provide any information about the origin of the human being. It is only concerned with the forms of manifestation that can be perceived by the senses. The origin of the human being can only be perceived by occult, supersensible means, through the organs of the finer bodies.

What do these reveal to us? If we look back a million years, what do we see? Something completely different from what we see now. Where Germany is now, there was a tropical climate back then; giant animals, giraffes, elephants roamed the swamps. There are hardly any traces left of this time; but theosophical wisdom can trace them back further and further through the changes brought about by the Ice Age, back to ever simpler and simpler conditions. Man, who lived thousands of centuries ago, looked quite different than he does now. There are hardly any remains from that time. The forehead was receding far, the forebrain was actually missing. He had no intelligence, no mind.

Materialistic science says that man has evolved. In his infancy, in the Stone Age, he was more similar to an animal and only gradually did he develop into today's man. There is only one difference between animals and humans that is immediately apparent. When an animal is born, it is already complete, for example a chicken; when it hatches from the egg, it can eat immediately and so on; it grows, but it does not change any further. A child undergoes major changes before reaching adulthood.

The simile of the childhood of man also applies to the theosophical science, and we are now in our youth. Natural science traces man back to his childhood, when he was similar to an animal; it cannot go beyond that. The theosophical science goes beyond that; it asks about father and mother. Why does one child of the same parents become a good-for-nothing, while the other becomes an intelligent being? Why did the animal-like being give rise, on the one hand, to animals that do not change any further, and, on the other hand, to human beings with unlimited developmental capacity? Natural science has no answer to this. Without the parents, the child would not be there; the natural scientist cannot go further, because he cannot go further than his senses reach, and there is no objection to this.

Usually, one infers from the child to the parents. In the spiritual view, research into the origin of man takes a completely different form. When asking about the parents, we must proceed very carefully. When we look at the anthropoid ape, can we see primitive man in it? Two possibilities present themselves here: Man developed from the anthropoid ape, as was concluded at the time, then science rejected this hypothesis and said to itself that, given the still too great difference between the two, it would be more likely to assume that there must have existed a being from which both the anthropoid ape and the gibbon descended, as well as the evolving man. So there we have the father of the good-for-nothing and the good, noble son. But this being could not be found anywhere, and so the naturalists placed this primeval man in the sea.

The theosophical research actually points to an area that is now covered by the sea.

How is such research conducted? How can one learn this type of research? Today, young people are taught to look into the external world. A person is considered educated if they have learned a lot and absorbed a lot.

Another teaching method was adopted in the old schools, which had the attainment of knowledge of the hidden forces as their goal. When a pupil came and desired to learn, the teacher gave him a sentence that contained power for the soul, and then he sent him away. The pupil had to repeat this sentence silently within himself for hours every day, letting it live in his soul. We find such sentences, for example, in the little book 'Light on the Path', written by Mabel Collins. The student continued this exercise for months until he had experienced the eternal content of the sentence within himself. In this way, the instruction continued until the inner sun shone in the heart, not only illuminating one's own soul but also sending rays of light to the other souls, illuminating them as well. This light, this sun, now not only illuminates the life and soul of the person living now, but the practiced disciple also learns to throw its rays back to the earliest past, like a spotlight.

You can find more details about this kind of research in my “Lucifer” No. 14-18 in the essay “Akasha Chronicle”. So there are three kinds of chronicles: the Akasha Chronicle, the written book chronicle that we have had for about 6000 years, and the chronicle of nature. Where the Atlantic Ocean now flows, the continent of Atlantis lay a long, long time ago. Our ancestors living there had not yet developed minds. They were able to use other powers that are now dulled in humans. Just as we are now able to develop a driving force from coal, or rather, how coal is converted into a driving force, so the people who lived at that time understood the seed power, that is, the power that lies in the seed, which enables it to sprout through the shell, to use it and to convert it into a forward-driving power. The powers of will were strongly developed. Where did that come from? The I, which has now taken possession of the physical brain, could not work in it at that time, because there was no brain yet. It worked much more in the etheric body, just as powerfully and mightily in the etheric body as it does now in the physical brain. The etheric body was impregnated with the divine I.

So we have the human parental pair. He comes from the spiritual father and the physical mother.

Egyptian wisdom beautifully symbolizes this eternal truth. Osiris, the spirit, the father, Isis, matter, the mother. From these two, Horus, the young human being, was born. The physical body was endowed with the I. The non-fertilized beings developed downward into the animal kingdom, while the I-fertilized primal beings developed into ever more highly educated humans.

Before the Atlantean period, the etheric body was not yet fertilized either. Only the astral body was I-fertilized.

The land inhabited by these people, who were animated only by their instincts and passions, is usually referred to as Lemuria. Science regards the Lemurian as a human being who has degenerated into an animal; the development that the spirit teaches us regards him as a being working his way out of the animal state. There was a time when there were no warm-blooded creatures on earth. Only at the moment when man descended to earth as a spiritual being, at the great moment when the astral body was endowed with the ego, did man become warm-blooded. The divine spark of the spirit, the Father-Spirit, united with Mother-Matter, and man emerged from this. Humanity consists of spirit and matter. The descent of the manas, the Manasputras, is the descent of the human ego.

The origin of man from the Father-Spirit and the Mother-Matter is the starting point for the knowledge of God and the world.

The word “I” in its entire essence of recognition is the recognition of the divine being. Self-knowledge leads to the knowledge of God because the I originates from the divine. The recognition of the divine essence of the human being is the key to the recognition of the whole, including the physical human being. The poet says:

One succeeded,
He lifted the veil from the goddess Bild at Sais.
What did he see? Wonder upon wonder – himself.

When man finds himself, he finds God: through self-knowledge to God-knowledge!

Final remark

Until recently, there were no books about these things; these divine wisdom teachings were only passed down orally from ancient times, from generation to generation. Now the time has come when people in the midst of active life should learn these things, so they are now being published in elementary form.

Today I'd like to add a few things to our various spiritual scientific discussions relating to Christianity. In the first place we are going to consider the interpretation and explanation of Christian parables. Then I'd like to say a few things, just touching on the subject lightly, on the Book of Revelation, which I also spoke of in the public lectures.¹¹⁷

The first parable I want to consider is the one of the untrustworthy agent.¹¹⁸ As you know, this parable is a puzzle to many people. Let us look at it, at least in so far as we want to consider it today. I am going to present it in the literary translation¹¹⁹ and we'll then consider it in esoteric terms.

He also said to his disciples: ‘There was a rich man who had an agent of whom he heard complaints that he was wasteful with his property. So he called him and said to him:” What is this that I hear about you? Render an account of your management, as you cannot be agent any longer.” The agent said to himself: “What shall I do now that the lord takes the management away from me? I have not the strength to dig and I am ashamed to beg. I know what to do so that when I have been dismissed as agent they will accept me into their homes.” And he called his lord's debtors, one at a time, and said to the first: “How much do you owe my lord?” And he answered: “A hundred measures of oil.” So he said to him, “Sit down at once, take your account and write fifty.” Then he said to another: “And you, how much do you owe?” And he answered: “A hundred measures of wheat.” So he said to him: “Take your account and write eighty.” And the lord praised the untruthworthy agent because he acted with forethought, and said: “The sons of this age show more forethought in their own generation than the sons of light.” ’

This parable has been a great puzzle to many people, and rightly so. Before we go into it, let us just consider that parables like this have been explained in all kinds of different ways through the ages. We have known people to say that there is profound meaning behind such a parable. Many have tried to find explanations according to their own ideas. It is perfectly clear that if people come and explain such parables according to their own ideas, something intelligent will result if the individual concerned is intelligent, and something unintelligent if he's not. If people bring in their own ideas, there can of course be no guarantee that theirs is the right interpretation. The situation is completely different from the spiritual scientific point of view. What matters to us is to explain such parables the way it was done in the original Christian mysteries; that we know the profound significance which they hold and out of which they have arisen.

Such Christian mysteries existed and I have referred to them on several occasions. I said that Paul went forth to speak of Christianity, and that he founded the esoteric Christian school under Dionysius in Athens. We are going to explain the parables in the way they were explained at that time. We are not going to speak of our own ideas but of things we are truly able to know. The teachers at those Christian schools drew on the things they had received from Christ Jesus himself.

It is especially today that parables of this kind have suffered greatly because people's—and even theologians'—thinking is generally materialistic. To demonstrate what is actually possible in this regard, let me read you something about this parable from a small book published as part of a series.¹²⁰ The author is considered to be one of the most outstanding representatives of the Hamack approach; he was appointed associate professor at Jena University and a few days ago to the chair of New Testament studies. These are therefore the ideas presented by a university professor. What is more, his wisdom is available to everyone, for the book only costs a few pence. The best way of disseminating ideas like these is to present them in cheap books of this kind. Everything suggests that the matter is more important than one would generally think, for that is how the materialistic thinking of theologians reaches the hearts and minds of people.

The way of explaining such a parable is more or less like this: ‘The things people say regarding a deeper meaning to these parables are nothing special; it is something which simply is not there behind the parables. We need to go back to our original, childlike way of thinking.’ It is as if the Christ merely intended to tell an artfully composed story. What he said in the story is of so little importance that it is entirely in accord with modern thinking, where things cannot be reduced low enough, to bring them down to the level of the most ordinary commonplace.

His actual words are: 'Let us take the parable of the untrustworthy agent, for this often causes problems. We'll take it on its own, up to the words: "The lord praised the untrustworthy agent because he acted with forethought." The reason why we leave away the rest of the verses will be clear later on; one thing is certain and that is that they can no longer all be used for the interpretation, for they are about completely different ideas. If we take the parable as a parable again, all it is intended to say is that the agent knew that there would be an accounting followed by dismissal. He therefore considered what he might do in this situation, and right away took the only course he could think of. That was an intelligent way of doing things. Even his lord, whom he had cheated, had to admit this.

Now to what it was meant to tell Jesus' contemporaries: "You, too, know and believe that God will call you to account one day. Be intelligent, therefore, and prepare for this!' 'At least be intelligent about if, the parable is meant to say. Jesus was not concerned in this case with goodness, nor with the longing in human hearts. A harsh, ironical mood prevails. Nothing here of 'Blessed be they who bear pain, blessed those of a pure heart!' Instead we have: 'If you won't listen to everything, at least be as intelligent as that untrustworthy agent!' There's a note of sharpness in this parable, and this is why we have such a strange choice of image. Jesus did not consider it necessary to add that we cannot prepare for God's judgement by committing further villainies the way the agent did.

You see that Weinel himself compared the lord in the story with God. The last three lines clearly show that the parable could be seen to relate to this, for the author says that God might one day call the soul to account. So there should surely be the words: 'at least be good'. But if we then read what the lord says to the untrustworthy agent, using the words 'you should at least be as intelligent as such an untrustworthy agent', it means we have not understood the parable.

Such ideas are presented in popular books today and implanted in the minds of young students. It is not the kind of materialism which explains the outside world in materialist terms which is worst, but the materialism of people who do not want to know of any deeper insight into theological things. It is the kind of materialism which is the cause of the other, scientific materialism. Here materialism enters deeply into human souls, and then one cannot help oneself but interpret the facts of modern science in a materialistic way. We'll have to learn again to understand things of the spirit And this can only happen through the approach where it is truly possible to explain the Bible and other religious documents.

We come to understand such a parable if we enter more deeply into its meaning. One thing to be considered from the beginning is that it is in Luke's gospel and does not appear in the other gospels. What does it mean to say it is only in Luke's gospel? It means a great deal. If you study the gospels, for instance those of Mark and Luke, and compare them, you'll find that each has a particular mood. In yesterday's lecture I said these were canonical works coming from different initiation centres. Luke goes back to the initiation gone through by the Essenes and Therapeutists. You therefore have a medical aspect to it, seeking to restore balance for people, to bridge differences between them and make it come true that in the eyes of the world of the spirit, all human beings are equal. Luke's gospel often seems like a gospel for people who are oppressed and burdened. It will help them to stand up straight, for they are equal in the eyes of the world of the spirit. This needs to be considered, and then we shall find the basic note, the mood, which is to be found in the gospel of Luke.

In earlier times, the different gospels were in fact declared to be different even in tone. Let us hold on to this for a bit. Here we have to consider an important basic quality of Christianity, which you'll remember from earlier lectures. You know that I often reminded you of the words: ‘Anyone who does not disregard his wife, child, mother and brother, cannot be my disciple.’¹²¹ You know that these words refer to a major step forward in the evolution of the human race. It refers to the fact that in earlier times we had a love in the world that was founded on blood bonds; this love had to go, however, as soon as the bonds of blood were broken. In earlier times, in the past, blood relative loved blood relative. The Christ taught the love which will be such that one human being loves the other, irrespective of how their blood relates. This bond of brotherhood will mean that people are equal not in the greatest possible external sense, but in what Christianity teaches to be equality in the worlds of the spirit.

The coming of the Christ thus brought a decisive change in human evolution on earth. It gave the impulse for humanity to progress towards a great bond of brotherhood that encompasses the whole world. Christ Jesus has made it possible for human beings to be guided by the power that comes from his words, guided to that all-encompassing love for which we use the term 'bond of brotherhood'. The gospels give us the strength and power we need to establish this bond. This is something we need to understand clearly.

Seeing things in this way, we perceive the great profundity of a word we find in the gospels in many ways, a word which always refers to the old law, the law pertaining to the early times described in the Old Testament. Jesus did say¹²² that neither the dot on an i nor anything else should be gone against in this law, but he put something completely new in place of this law, something which has not yet become real. He put the free, loving attitude people have to one another in place of things that are governed by law today. Laws regulate the ways people live together and the things one person has to do for another. A time will come, however, when each individual will know, having an immediate feeling for this, what he needs to do for, and give to, his human brother.

Let us now consider the parable from the point of view of Christianity. If we take it seriously we'll grasp the profound significance and understand that the rich man may indeed be compared to the divine regent of this world. The analogy does indeed exist—rich man and divine regent of the world. But how? Putting the question like this, one might easily be asking why the agent was untrustworthy. It is generally assumed that it is because he let people put down 80 instead of 100 measures, and so on. People think the agent was untrustworthy because he put something down for people that was not in accord with their debt certificates. This was veiy wrong. Truth is that he was called untrustworthy because he had demanded excessively high prices for the grain and other produce which he had sold to the people. We can now understand why people would not support the agent if his lord dismissed him. If that were not the case, we'd have to assume that the rich man himself wanted to be untrustworthy. But the parable says nothing of the kind. And if we take the sentences that follow—the ones Weinel was arbitrarily leaving out—we'll find that we have no need to think the rich man to have been someone who would ask his agent to cheat people. The agent thought he'd serve his lord well by getting the best possible prices for him. Yet in spite of this he stood accused of not having acted in his lord's interests.

Let us approach the parable in the light of the above and get a clear picture. It was said of the agent that he had wasted his lord's property. He knew that people would not stand by him because of the way he had done things, asking high prices. So he thought: 'What am I to do? My master wants an accounting, and he'll dismiss me from my office. The others, he said to himself, won't accept me into their homes.' So what did he do? He made up for some of the things he had done wrong earlier, as an untrustworthy agent. He let people off a bit, that is, he now asked more humane prices. He let some of the mammon go which he had wrongly demanded for his lord.

If we take the parable like this, we may indeed compare the rich man with the divine regent of the world, and the agent with someone who was appointed to govern the old world at the behest of the divine regent, when life was regulated by laws. We may then also say that there was to be an accounting as to how affairs had been managed. It was found that the agent had grown untrustworthy. The same may be said of the law. It had been good originally, but had gradually become unfair. Class distinctions were made and rights established that could no longer be upheld. And so someone who had said that neither the dot of an i nor anything else should be gone against in this law, now had to demand an accounting from the Pharisees and Scribes who were administering the law. The parable was about the Pharisees; they were the untrustworthy agents, administrators of the law. It was they who must not imagine that if they were not accepted by the one they thought to be their god they would be welcome in the huts of those who were subject to the law.

We can now also see why there is no need to make the rich man in the parable untrustworthy. He actually praised the agent for having cut prices. If a rich man wants to cheat people, surely he's not going to praise someone who returns some of the money where prices have been too high. The agent thought to serve his lord and grew unjust towards others. In the same way the people whose task it was to guard the law believed they were serving their lord and grew unjust towards other people.

This changed the moment the Christ came. We also see that those who have been handling those laws needed to restore to rights anything they have done wrong in the process. The law had grown unjust. Now, when love of all people was demanded, those who wanted to gain the huts—meaning the souls—of people must put the just law in place of a law which in specific areas had become unjust. They have to write something off where things had become unjust. In the gospel, therefore, the old Scribes and Pharisees are divided into those who in rigid orthodoxy go on calling themselves ‘children of God’. They are the ones whom Christ Jesus condemns, saying he wants to have nothing to do with them. They are the ones of whom he says that they continue to be far removed from him; who say: ‘We serve God who has given us the laws.’ They were the ‘children of light’ because they held fast to the law, which was a technical term for the servants of God who were later compared to the untrustworthy agent The others, who lived among the people, who had to be involved with human inclinations, were the ‘children of the world’. They did not insist on the letter of the law; they let people off because one could no longer do things in an unjust way. They are people who were unjust before, but having to be in close touch with life they were forced to change. Because of this the 'children of the world' were wiser than the 'children of light'.

The parable refers to the way the world is ruled. What was good before may become a torment, and something else must take its place. So what is the situation now concerning the law, and the honesty of those who administer it? Where are the people who no longer base themselves on the old law? And those who have reason to fear that they will not be welcome in the huts of others, because they have been unjust? The parable is now easily understood, for we have given the old esoteric interpretation from which the parable originally arose. One should not interpret the parable in a materialistic, theological way, but very simply. These parables exist in order to show the profound significance of humanity’s great mission.

The other parable is the parable of the lost son. You know it. It also presents difficulties for some. It would be taking us too far to read out the whole parable. You know what it is about. A father had two sons. One asked for his inheritance so that he might go out into the world; the other stayed at home, was a good boy and helped to run his father’s affairs. The one who had gone out into the world lost everything, grew poor, and ended up in the greatest misery and dire want. When he came home, his father received him most lovingly. When the older son heard this, he grew angry and would not enter the house. His father went outside and asked him to come in. But he said to his father: 'Look, I have been serving you for so many years, but you've never given me a ram so that I might have a pleasant time with my friends. But now that this son of yours has come, having wasted his inheritance on bad girls, you have killed a fatted calf for him.' He said to him, however: *My son, you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. But you should be happy and delighted for your brother was dead and has come to life again. He was lost and has been found again.'

Imagine now that someone plays a part in the parable of the lost son today and that it is not covered with the dust of millennia of venerable tradition. Don't think that there aren't also people today who consider it to be extremely unfair that the father receives his runaway son with open arms, putting his other son at a disadvantage. Don't think that people are going to say anything else! And they do say it. There are people who do not venerate the Bible the way the faithful do. To some, the Bible is an ordinary book known the world over. A few lines from someone who sees it like this, a thoroughly bourgeois freethinker, will show you. The book is entitled Finsternisse (darknesses).¹²³ It says: 'Our sympathies are entirely with the older son... The way the father treats his younger son is extremely unfair to the older son,' and so on.

This is uninspired, but many people would think the same if the parable were to be written today. Consider, however, that there's something behind these things. Consider that we can understand the whole nature of these things out of what lies behind them. We can see, therefore, that we merely have to give them a deeper meaning. The most important of these parables may also be found in a kind of canon of the mysteries, taking different forms among different nations. Let me tell you one from the Hebrew Canon,¹²⁴ and then you can make the comparison.

A king had to accept the fact that his son left him and went away. He sent the tutor who had power over his son, that he might bring him home. The tutor did soften the son's heart. But the son said: 'How am I to face my father again?' And his father sent word: 'Surely it is me, your father, whom you'll be facing,' and so on. But it also says something else, and that is: 'This also happened to the people of Israel who had grown sinful and turned away from their father, the regent of the world. They had lost faith.' The story then goes on: The King sent messengers after his son. The son said, however: How can I face my father? His father replied: Surely it is your father whom you'll be meeting face to face?

The parable is not the same as in the gospel but it came into existence centuries before the Christian era, with definite similarities, and has been preserved in Hebrew tradition. The difference is merely that a deeper explanation is given. It is spelled out for people that the story refers to the nation which needs to return to the father. Jesus merely gave the images in the parables, interpreting them only for the disciples. The Jewish parable relates to the nation, a single nation connected by blood bonds; the Christian parable relates to the evolution of the whole of humanity.

Let us now remember how souls came down from the keeping of the divine spirit in ancient Lemurian times, how the soul entered into the human being, and how it was only because of this that he became an individual person. Let us follow the way the soul grew more and more individual; let us remember that animals still have group souls today and not individual souls—a group soul on the astral plane. If we go back in the evolution of the human race we find that humans also had group souls once, being closer to the divine spirit then than they are today. Human beings had not yet descended and entered into bodies at that time. They brought about what the god in them brought about. Once they had entered into human bodies they grew more and more individual, their own masters in the habitation of a human body. Others remained behind at the original level and at other early stages. Because of this we have the different types of human beings side by side. We have people who today still have almost a generic soul. We cannot perceive individual impulses in them, and they act less of their own accord and more in a generic way. The god instilled the group soul. It continued like this until the independent human being evolved who seeks the way back to his god again.

The process of evolution was such, therefore, that originally the human being was a group soul in the keeping of the divine spirit. Looking at an individual today and at human evolution, we are able to say: Primitive man still remains with the father; he has not left his father’s habitation. The other one, however, has gone out into the world, has asked for his inheritance, so that he may develop freely. A moment comes when the developing human being feels isolated, deprived of spiritual goods. He then seeks to find his way back to God again. That is the process of evolution—descent from the god into matter and then the re-ascent, returning to his father’s house. If we find the way back out of our own resources, we return having first grown poor, hungering for spiritual goods. We do, however, return as independent individuals, and the higher we advance in the spirit the more do we return home. Candidates felt themselves to be returning to the house of their divine father. What they said came from the group soul. It will become clear to us if we consider this in its occult sense.

It is not easy to study the human organism esoterically. The way people are today, they have a physical body, an ether body, an astral body and the actual I. All these bodies do not exist on their own; they are not yet independent entities. Please forgive the not very appetizing comparison, but it will show things a bit more clearly. Spirits that are more or less alien by nature are present in all these bodies, like maggots in a cheese. They move in and out. The influences to which human beings are subject come from the outside and from very different spirits. The spirits that move into and out of the physical body are called 'phantoms'. The human being becomes unfree because of this. The spirits present in the ether body are called 'spectres'. And the spirits present in the astral body are called 'demons'. As you know, people who were not superstitious but knew something of these things, were familiar with this. And the entities that have to do with the I are called 'ghosts'.

How does the human being grow individual? By purifying himself. He is most powerfully purified by becoming a companion to the world of the spirit. He then works on his astral body to free it from demons. When he is working on his ether body he frees himself from spectres. Working on the physical body he gets rid of his phantoms. Once this is done, he returns to the pure, divine realm. He will have won something in the process. He had been unfree. But now, having freed himself, he returns to his father’s house a free man. This will make it easier for you to understand the reports of Jesus driving out demons.

In the parable of the lost son, you need to think of the whole of human evolution. The spirits will be delighted at the soul's return, for it will not have remained the way it was when it went away. The individual has changed, has become free. This delights his companions. We should not see the sphere to which the parable relates as something lowly or small; we need to see it as the great cosmic tableau. You will penetrate even more deeply if you recall that everything is the other way round on the astral plane, as I told you. Remember I said that even figures have to be read the other way round in the astral world, in their mirror images. So if we come to the figure 64, we should read 46, not 64. When your passions take their leave of you, it seems to you that they are all kinds of spirits rushing towards you. If you want to create a parable with a profound, ethical core for the most sublime worlds, you use numerous images that appear the other way round in the physical world. This shows you the deeper reason why some parables, ethical in the world of the spirit, will sometimes offend in the physical world. You have to think of many things in parables. You are driven by them, through your feelings, into the world of the spirit. And that is also the mood, the tone, which lives in such parables. And it is in fact characteristic of such parables that they offend in their physical form.

Another parable I would like to mention briefly is the one of the wise and foolish virgins.¹²⁵ This also makes us think. Let us recall. The realm of heaven will be like ten virgins who took their lamps and went forth to meet the bridegroom. Five of them were foolish, however, and five were wise. The foolish virgins took their lamps but no oil with them. The wise virgins carried oil in their vessels as well as their lamps. The bridegroom was delayed and they all grew sleepy and went to sleep. At midnight, however, voices were heard: “Lo, the bridegroom is coming; go forth to meet him!” The virgins all rose and prepared their lamps. The foolish ones then said to the wise ones: “Give us of your oil, for our lamps are going out.” The wise virgins replied: “No, for then both we and you will not have enough; but go to the merchants and buy some for yourselves.” Yet as they went away to buy some the bridegroom came, and those who were ready went in with him for the wedding, and the door was closed. Finally the other virgins also came and said: “Lord, lord, open up for us!” He said, however: ‘Truly, I tell you I do not know you. Watch and wait, therefore, for you will know neither the day nor the hour at which the Son of Man will come.”'

Here an indication is given that the parable has something to do with the Christ's future coming. Let us make this clear. We can do this if we once again consider the parts of the human being. If I work on my astral body, the Holy Spirit arises in Christian terms. If the I works on the ether body, budhi arises, or Christ, the logos. In my Theosophy, the Holy Spirit is called ‘spirit self,’ the Christ, the logos, is called ‘budhi’ or ‘life spirit’.

We look at people today and see the way they are living now that they have developed physical body, ether body, astral body and I. If the I works on the astral body, the Holy Spirit, spirit self, manas develops from the astral body. And because the I has already done some work on the astral body, people also have some manas, some Holy Spirit. This manas acts into the human being in the pouring out of the Holy Spirit A time will come when humanity will enter into the sixth of the root races. Manas will then have developed in those who have really done something for their development They will have developed manas. They will be ready to receive budhi, the Christ, the sixth basic part.

In the sixth race human beings will develop the Christ, and that will be the majority of people. We are moving towards that time. It will be the time when Christ Jesus will come. At that time human beings will be given the power to move to the place where they can receive the Christ in a new form, as a fruit, the place where the Christ laid down the seed, as it were, like a mustard seed that will grow ii the soul. The Christ will be visible to them, that is, to those who have developed the inner Christ eye.

A parable, a symbol, is used to describe what human beings are inwardly developing. Just as the physical human being comes into existence through the male and female principles coming together, so the idea is that the other parts of the human being were also inseminated, that the different parts were inseminated in a particular way. This was during the Saturn period. Then the ether body developed, and then the astral body. The coming of these new developmental aspects was thought to be like an insemination. This example can also show you how deeply the words of the Bible must be taken. It is not for nothing that it says in the Bible: 'And Adam knew his wife,'¹²⁶ when referring to an insemination, for at the back of it all is the idea of insemination out of the spirit. To know1, 'gain insight', is to be inseminated with the divine self. 'Know yourself means 'Let yourself be inseminated with the divine self which is present throughout the world'.

Something similar to this lies behind the parable of the foolish and wise virgins in Christian esotericism. The image of insemination is the lamp which has been given oil. Thus each of these parts of the human being is seen as a virgin who has not yet been inseminated, and the inseminated bodies of the human being are the virgins who have poured oil into their lamps. The undeveloped part of humanity remains where it is, with no oil in its lamp, and does not take its bodies up to the budhi level. The developed part has allowed the spirit to influence its bodies, pouring oil into the lamp, as it were. The others have poured no oil into their lamp, they have not developed their five bodies. The others did develop them, preparing for the important moment of the Christ's coming. The time of the Christ's coming then arrives. Some will have poured oil into their lamps; their souls will be illumined and ready to receive the Christ. Others, who have remained dark in themselves, will see that others have developed and they'll go to receive the wisdom from the others. They will need to go to the merchants to get their oil. But they'll be too late. And what will the Christ say to the wise virgins? ‘I know you.’ And what will he say to the foolish virgins? 'I do not know you.'

Applied to insemination the parable thus means: He will come to inseminate the sixth basic part, and he'll enter into the sixth basic part. 'Adam knew his wife, and she came to be with child.' And then the bridegroom says to the unwise virgins: 'I do not know you.' Such words taken from the profundity of Holy Writ will always be true. If we were to proceed in this way we would find that letter by letter the Bible contains the science of the spirit, and that we can learn the truths of that science by studying it. We need no other book. Anyone who says that the Bible contradicts the science of the spirit, does not know the Bible, and it does not matter if they are theologians who consider themselves to be at a very high level. Life in the spirit has to be found again in this ancient document.

Now a few comments on the things I was referring to in my public lectures on the Book of Revelation. You know that the sun once separated from the earth, and that it will unite again with the earth in the far distant future. The quality which makes it possible for human beings to become so spiritual that they are able to reunite with the sun is in occult terms called 'the sun's intelligence'. This good spirit in the sun has an adversary, the demon in the sun. The two are not only active in the sun but also send their influences down to the earth. The powers of the good sun spirit enter into plant, animal and human being; they bring forth life on earth. The adversary principle of the sun demon, the power which opposes the union of earth and sun, is active in man's evil powers.

Occult symbols of this have existed through the ages.¹²⁷ A seven-cornered sign is the symbol of the good sun spirit. The seven corners symbolize the seven planets. The pentagram is the symbol for the human being. In occultism, the stars are drawn into the figure [heptagram] in the form of seven eyes. They bind it all together. At the same time we also have the days of the week if you follow this line here (Fig. 21).¹²⁸

In the distant past, time could not yet be measured by external methods based on the way the sun moves around the earth. Early occultists thought of special regents for the orbit of the sun, and they were right in their thinking. The whole system was orbiting, and time was determined in relation to the twelve signs of the zodiac—Ram, Bull, Twins, Crab, Lion, Virgin, Scales, and so on. As you know, one cycle in the evolution of a cosmic system is called a manvantara, and this is always followed by a pralaya, a state of rest. They alternate like day and night, with both night and day of 12 hours duration. Those 12 hours correspond to the vast periods of time in the cosmic day that were regulated by the ancient rulers of the circling of the zodiac. I would need to draw 24 masters of rotations around this sign. If I were to draw it for you, you'd have the heptagon here (Fig. 21), then the seven eyes for the seven stars, and the 24 ancient rulers, 12 for the night and 12 for the day.

The good sun spirit is also called 'the lamb'. We have already referred to the pentagram as the symbol of the human being. A black magician uses it with the two 'horns' pointing upwards and the single peak pointing down. On completion of this development, the 'good' will have developed seven 'horns'. That is the sign of the Christ spirit.

Having gained this occult insight, read the passage where John receives the book sealed with seven seals. Let us read it as it is given in chapter 4 of the Book of Revelation. 'And immediately I was in the spirit And behold, a throne was set in heaven, and one sat on the throne. And he that sat was to look upon like a jasper and a sardius stone ... And round about the throne were four and twenty seats: and upon the seats I saw four and twenty elders sitting'—I have presented them to you in the twenty-four hours of the cosmic day, night and day. And then, moving on to chapter 5: ‘And I beheld, and lo, in the midst of the throne and of the four beasts and in the midst of the elders, stood a lamb as it had been slain, having seven horns and seven eyes, which are the seven spirits of god sent forth into all the earth.’ This occult sign forms the background to John's writing of the secrets of cosmic existence in his Book of Revelation. You need to know these if you are to have some feeling for the profundity of this work, and what it signifies when the adversary of the lamb is spoken of as the two-homed beast. The symbol of the sun demon is drawn like this:

The Book of Revelation is all in occult writing, which is given expression in words.

One of its secrets also lies in the 'number of the beast', 666,¹²⁹ also 'the number of a man'. According to Aramaic occult teaching, the figure should be read like this: 400, 200, 6, 60. These four figures¹³⁰ are represented by the Hebrew letters:

Hebrew writing is read from right to left:

These letters symbolize the four principles that cause man to harden completely unless he is able to transform them. Sameh represents the principle of the physical body, vav that of the ether body, resh that of the astral body, and tav the lower I which has not developed into higher I. The whole word reads ‘Sorat’, which is the occult name of the sun demon, the adversary of the lamb.

This is the secret which in more recent theology has been turned into: It means ‘Nero’.¹³¹ I can’t think of anything more fanciful. The individual who invented this Nero story is considered to be one of the greatest theological thinkers. Vast volumes have been written on the subject. People thus misunderstand the meaning of those symbolic signs. Works like the Book of Revelation can only be understood by someone who is able to read the occult writing.

The prophetic significance of such signs and symbols may also make you realize that the spiritual science movement has an important mission. In choosing the seven seals from the Book of Revelation for the auditorium in Munich, we are also giving an outward indication of the direction we want to take. The spiritual principle is to come to face us again also in the outside world.

• 117. See Steiner R. Supersensible Knowledge (GA 55), lecture of 26 April 1907. Tr. R Stebbing. Hudson: Anthroposophic Press 1987.
• 118. Luke 16: 1-8.
• 119. Weinel H. Die Gleichnisse Jesu in Aus Natur und Geisteswelt. Sammlung wissenschaftich-gemeinverständlicher Darstellungen 46. Band, 2. Auflage Leipzig 1905, S. 130.
• 120. Ibid S. 23.
• 121. SGenesis 3: 14,Rev. 1: 8.
• 122. Matth. 5:17-18.
• 123. Zurich 1896; quoted by Weinel (see note 119).
• 124. Free rendering of story of Absalom according to 2 Samuel.
• 125. Matth. 25: 1-13.
• 126. Genesis 4: 1.
• 127. The sketches have not survived. See The Apocalypse of St John (Book of Revelation) (GA 104). Tr. rev. M. Cotterell. London: Anthroposophical Publishing Co. 1958; Occult Seals and Columns. London: Anthroposophical Publishing Co. 1924.
• 128. See also lecture given on 4 March 1907, in this volume.
• 129. Rev. 13: 18.
• 130. The Phoenician and later the Hebrew alphabet had a fixed sequence of letters, and this also made it possible to use the letters as numerals. This happens on several occasions in the Old Testament, in both the Hebrew and the Greek versions. The numerical value of letters is of considerable importance in occult writings.
• 131. The interpretation which Rudolf Steiner had shown to be wrong may still be found in reference works today, e.g. in Lexikon der Bibel, von Fritz Rienecker herausgegeben, 3. Auflage, Wuppertal 1961.

The Mystery of Golgotha is one of the profoundest secrets of the evolution of the world. In order to understand it, we must shed light upon the occult wisdom of thousands of years ago, on the remote past of the world's development. It is not a plausible argument against a more penetrating knowledge of the Mystery of Golgotha to say that the life and work of Christ Jesus should be accessible to the simplest mind. This is indeed the case. But a full, encompassing comprehension of this greatest event on earth must be drawn out of the depths of Mystery-wisdom.

In this lecture we shall penetrate into the depths of Mystery-wisdom in order to understand how an event such as the Mystery of Golgotha could take place. In this connection we should bear in mind that with the appearance of Christ Jesus upon the earth something occurred which divided mankind into two parts. We can grasp this best of all by seeking an answer to the question: Who was Christ Jesus?

For the occultist this question is a double one: For we must distinguish between the personality who lived at that time in Palestine and reached the age of thirty, and what became of him afterwards. In the 30th year of his life Jesus became Christ.

In the case of ordinary people, only insignificant portions of the astral body, the etheric body and the physical body are transformed into Manas, Buddhi and Atma, or into Spirit Self, Life-Spirit and Spirit-Man. Jesus of Nazareth was a Chela of the third degree, and his bodies were therefore in a state of high purification.

When a Chela has absolved the purification of his three bodies, then he acquires at a certain moment of his life the capacity to sacrifice himself. In his 30th year, the Ego of Jesus left his three bodies and passed over into the astral world, so that the three sanctified bodies remained behind on earth, emptied as it were of their Ego, so that room was made for a higher individuality. In the 30th year of his life, the Ego of Jesus of Nazareth made the great sacrifice of placing his purified bodies at the disposal of the individuality of Christ. Christ filled out these bodies. And from that time onwards we speak of Christ-Jesus who lived upon the earth for three years and fulfilled all his great deeds within the body of Jesus.

In order to understand the true being of Christ, we must go far back into the history of the development of the earth and of mankind. Before the earth became Earth, it was the old Moon, and the present moon is only a fragment of the old Moon. Before the Earth was Moon, it was Sun, and at a still earlier stage it was Saturn. We should bear in mind that milliards of years ago there existed in the cosmic spaces a heavenly body, Saturn. Also planets develop through different incarnations: Before the Earth was EARTH, it existed as Saturn, Sun and Moon.

Let us now transfer ourselves upon the Sun. There, the so-called Fire-Spirits had the same rank which human beings now have upon the earth. Of course, they did not have the same appearance, they did not look like men of to-day; these high individualities passed through the human stage upon the Sun under conditions which were quite different from the present human conditions. Also upon the Moon a host of Beings passed through the stage of humanity, and they came down to the Earth as higher Beings, as Lunar Pitris or Moon-Spirits, that had reached a higher stage than that of man upon the Earth. In Christian esotericism they are called Angeloi = Angels. Only upon the Earth the human being became MAN. The Lunar Pitris are Beings one degree higher than man, and above them stand the Fire-Spirits, who are one degree higher than the Lunar Pitris. The Fire-Spirits have reached a very high stage of development.

Now we come to the Earth, to the Lemurian race which lived upon a continent situated between present-day Asia, Africa and Australia. There, man took on his present form through the fact that below, upon the physical earth, there lived highly developed beings, but physical beings, higher than the present animals and less developed than present-day man. These physical beings formed a kind of shell, a dwelling-place and they would have been condemned to decadence had they not been fructified by higher Beings. Only at that time the human souls entered the physical human bodies, and then began to shape the Subsequent form of the human body. In the past, the human soul was an integral part of higher Spiritual Beings. The physical shells of human bodies were upon the earth, and into these streamed the souls of higher Beings coming from above, from the spiritual worlds. In the spiritual worlds the souls were connected like drops of water in a sea, which were then poured into a number of vessels.

The beings who poured out the souls from above were those who had passed through their human stage upon the Moon, the Moon-Spirits, whose stage of development was one degree higher than that of Man so that they could pour one part of their being into mankind, thus enabling it to develop further, Man could then transform his organism more and more. He could lift himself up from the earth and stand upright, he learned to walk, to speak and to become independent.

There was a certain relationship between all these souls, for they came from a common spiritual chorus. All those who had received a drop from the same being, greatly resembled each other. Members, of the same tribe first had such related souls, then the members of a race or nation, for example, the whole Egyptian or the whole Jewish nation. They had souls that had come from a common source. From the Moon-Spirits man had received the Spirit-Self and this enabled him to become an independent being, an Ego.

But something which man could not obtain from the Moon Spirits, could only be given to him by a still higher Being, common to all men, who had already completed its humanity upon the Sun: a Fire-Spirit. Many Fire-spirits had developed upon the Sun and exercised their influence upon the Earth, for they were high spirits. One of these Fire-Spirits was called upon to pour out his being upon the whole of mankind. A Spirit who belonged to the whole Earth was able to pour out over the whole of mankind, into each one of its parts, the element of the Sun or Fire-Spirits, the Buddhi, or the Spirit of Life. But in the Lemurian and in the Atlantean age the human beings were not ripe enough to receive this from the Sun-Spirit.

When we read the Akasha Chronicle (See Rudolf Steiner's bookThe Akasha Chronicle) we find that something very strange took place at that time: The human beings consisted of physical body, etheric body, astral body and Spirit Self, but this only lived in them in a very weak form. The Buddhi or Life-Spirit soared above every human being—it could be perceived in the Akasha spaces. In the astral space every human being was surrounded by Buddhi, but it remained outside and was not strong enough to enter man. This Buddhi was a part of the great Fire Spirit who had poured out his drops on the human beings, but these drops could not enter the human beings.

Christ's deeds on earth gave man the capacity to absorb into his Manas what we designate as Buddhi.

What Christ fulfilled upon the earth, was prepared by other great teachers who had preceded him, by Buddha, by the last Zarathustra, by Pythagoras, who all lived about 600 years before Christ, and who were men who had already absorbed a great deal of what lived in the surroundings of man. They had absorbed the spark of Christ. Also Moses belongs to them. But the Ego of the other people had not yet absorbed this spark.

Into the physical, etheric and astral body of Jesus of Nazareth had entered the whole Fire-Spirit, the one source of all the different sparks that lived in the human beings. This Fire-Spirit is the Christ, the only divine Being who lived on earth in this form. He entered the body of Jesus of Nazareth and as a result, all those who feel united with Christ Jesus are able to absorb Buddhi. The possibility to absorb and take in the Buddhi begins with the appearance of Christ Jesus. St. John the Evangelist designates it as the Divine Creative Word. The Fire-Spirit that poured his sparks into men is this Divine Creative Word.

As a result, the following took place: Whereas the Moon-Spirits could create differentiated tribes among men by sending down their drops, Christ was a uniting Spirit for the whole earth, and the human beings were thus united into a family all over the world. Whereas the differentiations among men were brought about by the drops poured out by the different Moon-Spirits, the unity among men was brought about by the Spirit poured out by Christ Jesus. What unites men came down to the earth through Christ Jesus.

When speaking of the last Judgement, Christ says in his prophecy: “When the Son of Man shall Come in his glory” (he means by this: when the drops of Christ shall all have entered into the human beings, when all shall have become brothers) “he shall say unto them on his right hand: Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world: For I was hungred and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty and ye gave me drink.” (St. Matthew 25, 35) Then the only difference among men will be that between good and evil.

Christ says to His disciples: “What ye have done unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done unto me.” This signifies: Christ Jesus indicates the time when the drops poured out by Him will all be absorbed, so that when one man faces another, this drop of Christ within him will face the drop of Christ in the other. The power whereby the Buddhi could be called into life in man, this power went out from the life of Christ upon the earth. We should therefore look upon Christ as the uniting Spirit of the Earth.

If we could look down upon the earth from a distant star, through an epoch of many thousands of years, we would find a moment when Christ was active on the earth, so that the whole astral substance of the earth was permeated by Christ. Christ is the Spirit of the Earth, and the Earth is His Body. Everything that grows upon the earth is Christ. He lives in every seed, in every tree, all that grows upon the earth. That is why Christ indicated the bread and said: “This is my Body.” And of the juice of the grapes (at the LAST SUPPER the juice of grapes was passed round, not fermented wine) he had to say: “This is my Blood,” for the juice of the fruits of the earth is his blood. Consequently mankind must appear to him like beings who walk about upon his body. That is why he told his disciples after having washed their feet: “He that eateth bread with me, lifts up his heel against me.” (Treads on me). This must be taken literally, in the meaning that the earth is the body of Christ Jesus. Because he took upon himself the evolution of the earth, a distant spiritual being might see that more and more of Christ's spirit flows into the human beings; the single drops of Christ Jesus penetrate into the individual human beings. Finally the whole earth will be peopled by transformed, Christianised men, by men who have become divine through Christ. Only those who do not participate in this, will be put aside as evil; they must wait for a later time in order to follow a course of development leading to goodness.

All the different nations had Mysteries, before Christ appeared on earth. The Mysteries revealed what was to take place in the future. After a long training, the pupils had to undergo a preparation which consisted in a sepulchre. The hierophant was thus able to transfer the pupil into a higher state of consciousness which made his body lie inert in a kind of deep slumber. In ancient times, the consciousness always had to be abated in order that the divine essence might enter man. In this lowered state of consciousness, the soul was led through the spheres of the spiritual world and after three days the hierophant called the pupil back into life. Through this experience he felt that he had become a new man and he obtained a new name. He was called Son of God. The whole process took place upon the physical plane, when Christ appeared and passed through the Mystery of Golgotha. In the ancient initiations the life-drops of Christ's spirit first called the pupils back into life and they were told: “He who will Christianize all men, will appear one day. And He will truly be the Incarnated Word. You can only experience this for three days, when you travel through the kingdoms of heaven; but One will come, Who will bring the Kingdoms of Heaven down to the physical world.”

The Initiate experienced upon the astral plane what Christ lived through upon the physical plane, namely that from the very beginning there existed a Divine Word that poured out its drops over the human beings; but the Ego-men could not absorb these drops. St. John, the herald of the Christianized Ego-man who has taken in the Christ, or the Word, reveals this. St. John speaks of the Word that existed upon the earth from the very beginning:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.

The same was in the beginning with God.

All things were made by him and without him was not anything made that was made.

In him was life and the life was the light of men.

And the light shone in the darkness, but the darkness comprehendeth it not.

There was a man sent from God, whose name was John.

The same came for a witness, to bear witness of the light, that all men through him might believe.

He was not the light-, but a witness of the Light.

For the true Light that lighteth every man was to come into the world.

He was in the world and the world was made by him and the world knew him not.

He came to each man (to the individual Ego-man) but the individual men (the Ego-men) received him not.

But as many as received him, to them he gave power to manifest themselves as children of God.

Those who believe in his name, are born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.

And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us and we have heard his teaching, the teaching of the only begotten of the Father full of grace and truth.

The word “grace” in verse 14 has for St. John the same meaning as Buddhi; “truth” is Manas, the Spirit-Self.

John bare witness of him and cried saying: This was he of whom I spoke. After me cometh one who existed before me. For he is my predecessor.

And of his fullness have we all received grace upon grace.

For the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ.

No man hath at any time seen God with eyes. The only begotten Son who lived in the bosom of the Cosmic Father hath become our guide in this vision.

[Dr.Rudolf Steiner's rendering of the text.]

All initiations into the Mystery of the Spirit pointed to the coming of Christ Jesus. This initiation was attained in the Yoga sleep, in the Orphic sleep, in the Hermes sleep. When the initiate woke up again and returned into his body, so that he could again hear and speak with his physical senses, he uttered the words which are rendered as follows in the Hebrew language: “Eli, Eli, lama sabathani.” The pupil of the Mysteries woke up with the words: “My God, My God, how thou hast raised me!”

This was the initiation during the ancient Jewish epoch. During his three days' sojourn in the higher worlds, the initiate experienced the whole course of mankind's future development, all that awaited him in the future development of humanity. As a rule, these future stages of human development were not perceived abstractly in his vision.. Each stage was represented by a personality. The seer saw twelve individualities. They represented twelve stages of soul-development. The soul-forces thus appeared in the external form of twelve persons. At a certain moment, the initiate saw a certain scene: His own individuality became transfigured—the stage which the whole of humanity will reach when it shall be filled by Buddhi, when it shall be Christianized. He identified himself with God and behind him he saw the twelve soul-forces. John was immediately behind, he was the last of the twelve who announced his fulfilment. And he saw himself transfigured, he saw the stage which he would reach when perfection will be attained; he saw his soul-forces in the external form of persons, and perceived St. John, the herald of the Christ-stage of development. During the Yoga-sleep, these twelve figures grouped themselves around him, and the scene arose which was designated as the Mystical Supper. This image had the following meaning: When the initiate sits there surrounded by his soul-forces, he says to himself: These are one with me; they have led me through the development of the earth; the feet of this apostle enabled me to walk on along my path, the hands of that apostle gave me the power to work. ... The Holy Supper is the expression of man's fellowship with the twelve soul-forces.

Human perfection consists in the falling away of the lower soul-forces, so that only the higher forces remain behind; in future, man will no longer have the lower forces; he will, for example, no longer have the forces of procreation. John's soul-power above all will raise those lower forces to the loving heart. It will send out streams of spiritual love. The heart is the most powerful organ, when Christ lives in man. The lower soul-forces are then raised from the abdominal regions to the heart.

Every initiate experienced this in the Mysteries of the heart. It re-echoed in the words: “My God, my God, how thou hast raised me!” With the appearance of Christ Jesus, the whole Mystery, the whole experience, became reality upon the physical plane. At that time there were brotherhoods in Palestine which had developed out of the old order of the Essenes. Among their institutions, they also had a meal symbolizing the mystical Holy Supper. “To eat the Easter Lamb” is a general expression for something which took place at Easter. Jesus sat down with the Twelve and inaugurated the Holy Supper with the words: “At the end of the evolution of the earth, all men will have absorbed what I brought down to the earth, and the words, ‘This is my Body, This is my Blood,’ will then be true.” Afterwards he said: “There is one among you who will betray me.” This is brought about by the power of egoism. But as surely as this power of egoism is the source of treason, so surely will this lower soul-force be raised to a higher stage. One of the disciples rested upon Jesus' bosom, he rested upon Jesus' heart. This means that all the lower forces, every form of egoism, will be raised to the heart. At this point Jesus repeated to his Disciples the words: “Eli, Eli, lama sabathani”—“Now the Son of Man is glorified, and God is glorified in Him!”

The same event which took place upon Golgotha took place in the ancient Mysteries. Under the Cross stood the Disciple “whom the Lord loved,” the Disciple who had rested upon his bosom and had been raised to his heart. Also the women are there under the Cross: the mother of Jesus, his mother's sister Mary, and Mary Magdalene. John does not say that the mother of Jesus was called “Mary,” but that this was the name of his mother's sister. His mother's name was “Sophia.”

John baptises Jesus in the river Jordan. A dove descends from heaven. At this moment a spiritual act of conception takes place. But who is the mother of Jesus who conceives at this moment.

The Chela, Jesus of Nazareth, at this moment divests himself of his Ego, his highly developed Manas is fructified and the Buddhi enters into it. The highly developed Manas that received the Buddhi is Wisdom—Sophia, the Mother who is fructified by the Father of Jesus. Maria, which is the same as Maya, has the general meaning of “Mother name.” The Gospel records: “The Angel came in unto her and said: Hail thou that art highly favoured,—behold thou shalt conceive in thy womb and bring forth a son—the Holy Ghost shall come upon thee and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee.” The Holy Ghost is Jesus' father: the descending dove fructifies the Sophia that lives in Jesus.

The Gospel should therefore be read as follows: “Under the Cross stood the mother of Jesus, Sophia.” To this mother Jesus says: “Woman, behold thy son.” He himself had transferred the Sophia that lived within him to the Disciple John; he transformed him into a son of Sophia and said: “Behold, thy mother.” “Henceforth you should recognise the divine wisdom as your mother and dedicate yourself to her alone.” John had recorded this divine wisdom; Sophia is embodied in the Gospel of St. John. Jesus had given him this wisdom, and he was authorized by Christ to transmit it to the world.

The highest Spirit of the Earth had to incarnate in a physical body; this body had to die, it had to be killed and its blood had to flow. A special meaning is attached to this. Wherever there is blood, there is Self. The Self rooted in the blood had to be sacrificed in order that the old communities based on Self might come to an end. All individual forms of egoism flow away with the blued of the Crucified Christ. The blood of racial communities changes into a blood which is common to the whole of mankind, because the blood of Christ was sacrificed at the moment when he hung upon the Cross.

Here too something took place which might have been observed by an astral observer in the astral atmosphere. When Christ died upon the Cross, the whole astral atmosphere changed, so that events could take place which could never have taken place before. This has become possible because by shedding His blood, Christ gave the whole of mankind a Self that is common to all. The blood that streamed out of the wounds of Christ Jesus gave to the whole of humanity a Self which is shared by all. His three bodies remained hanging upon the Cross and were then revived by the Risen Christ. When Christ abandoned his physical frame, the three bodies were so strong that they could utter the words of initiation which follow the transfiguration: “Eli, Eli, lama sabathani!”

To all who know something of the Mystery-truths, these words must have revealed that a Mystery had been enacted. A small correction in the Hebrew text therefore gave rise to the words contained in the Gospel: “Eli, Eli, lama sabathani!” “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me!”

My dear Friends:
A special festival has long been celebrated on this particular day of the year by a great number of those seeking higher wisdom; and many friends of our anthroposophical movement here in this city have wished this series of lectures to commence on this day, St. John's Day.

The day of the year bearing this name was a festival as far back as the time of ancient Persia. There, on a day corresponding to a June day as we know it, the so-called Festival of the Baptism by Water and Fire was celebrated. In ancient Rome the Festival of Vesta was held on a similar day in June, and that again was a festival of the baptism by fire. Going back to the time of pre-Christian culture in Europe and including the period before Christianity had become widely disseminated, we find a similar June festival coinciding with the time when the days are longest and the nights shortest, when the days start to become shorter again, when the sun once more begins to lose some of the power that provides for all earthly growth and thriving. This June festival seemed to our European forefathers like a retrogression, a gradual evanescence, of the God Baldur who was thought of as associated with the sun. Then in Christian times this June festival gradually became the Festival of St. John in memory of the Forerunner of Christ Jesus. In this way it can form the starting point, as it were, for our discussions during the coming days of that most significant event in human evolution which we call the deed of Christ Jesus. This deed, its whole significance for the development of mankind, the way it is revealed primarily in the most important Christian document, the Gospel of St. John—and then a comparison of this with the other Gospels—a study of all this will form the subject of this lecture cycle.

St. John's Day reminds us that the most exalted Individuality that ever took part in the evolution of mankind was preceded by a forerunner. This touches at once an important point which—again like a forerunner—we must place at the beginning of our lectures as a subject of discussion. In the course of human evolution there appear again and again events of such profound import as to throw a stronger light than others. From epoch to epoch we see history recording such vital events; and ever and anon we are told that there are men who, in certain respects, know of such events in advance and can foretell them. This implies that such events are not arbitrary, but rather, that one who discerns the whole sense and spirit of human history knows how such events must unfold, and how he himself must work and prepare in order that they may come to pass.

We shall have occasion in the next few days to refer repeatedly to the Forerunner of Christ Jesus. Today we will consider him only as one of those who, by means of special spiritual gifts, are able to see deep into the relations within the evolution of mankind, and who thus know that there are pre-eminent moments in this evolution. For this reason he was able to clear the path for Christ Jesus. But if we turn to Christ Jesus Himself, thus coming to the main subject of our discussions, as it were, we must understand that not without reason does a large part of mankind divide the record of time into two epochs separated by the appearance of Christ Jesus on earth. This discloses a feeling for the incisive importance of the Christ Mystery. But all truth, all reality, must ever be proclaimed to humanity in new forms, in new ways, for the needs of men change from one epoch to another. In certain respects our epoch calls for a new revelation even of this greatest event in the earthly evolution of man, the Christ Event; and it is anthroposophy's aim to be this revelation.

As far as its content is concerned, the anthroposophical presentation of the Christ Mystery is nothing new, not even for us today; but its form is new. All that is to be disclosed here in the next few days has been known for centuries within certain restricted circles of our cultural and spiritual life. Only one feature distinguishes today's presentation from all those that have gone before: it can be addressed to a larger circle. Those smaller circles in which for centuries the same message was proclaimed within our European spiritual life, these had recognized the same symbol that confronts you here in this lecture hall today: the Rose Cross. For this reason it is fitting that today, when this message goes forth to a larger public, the Rose Cross should again be its symbol.

First let me characterize once more in a symbolical way the basis of these Rosicrucian revelations concerning Christ Jesus. The Rosicrucians are a brotherhood that has fostered a genuinely spiritual Christianity within the spiritual life of Europe ever since the 14th Century. This Rosicrucian Society which, ignoring all outer historical forms, has endeavored to bring to light the deepest truths of Christianity, always called its members “Christians of St. John.” If we come to understand this term the whole spirit and trend of the following lectures will be—if not mentally comprehended, at least imaginatively grasped.

As you know, the Gospel of St. John—that mighty document of the human race—begins with the words:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and a God was the Word.

The same was in the beginning with God.

The Word, then—or the Logos—was in the beginning with God. And we are further told that the light shone in the darkness, and that the darkness at first comprehended it not; that this light was in the world among men, but that these men counted but few among their number who were able to comprehend the Light. Then the Word made flesh appeared as a Man, a Man Whose forerunner was the Baptist John. And then we see how those who had some understanding of this appearance of Christ on earth endeavored to make clear what Christ really was. We see the author of the John Gospel pointing directly to the fact that what dwelt in Jesus of Nazareth as profoundest essence was nothing different from that in which originate all other beings that surround us: the living Spirit, the living Word, the Logos itself.

And the other Evangelists as well, each in his own way, have been at pains to characterize what it really was that appeared in Jesus of Nazareth. We see, for example, the writer of the Luke Gospel endeavoring to show that something quite special manifested itself when, at the Baptism of Christ Jesus, the Spirit united with the body of Jesus of Nazareth. Then the same writer tells us that this Jesus of Nazareth was the descendant of ancestors reaching far, far back; that His genealogy went back to David, to Abraham, to Adam—even to God Himself. Note well that the Luke Gospel points emphatically to this line of descent:

Jesus of Nazareth was the son of Joseph, Joseph was the son of Heli.

... he was the son of David ...

he was the son of Adam, and Adam was the son of God.

This means that the author of the Luke Gospel considers it of special importance that a direct line runs from Jesus of Nazareth, with Whom the Spirit united at the Baptism by John, to Him Whom he calls the Father of Adam, to God. Such things must be taken entirely literally.

In the Matthew Gospel, on the other hand, the attempt is made to trace the descent of this Jesus of Nazareth back to Abraham, to whom God revealed Himself.

In this way and in many others—through many statements we can find in the Gospels—the Individuality that is the vehicle of the Christ, as well as the whole manifestation of Christ, is set before us not only as one of the greatest, but as the very greatest of all events in the evolution of humanity. Clearly this means, does it not? what can be expressed quite simply as follows: If Christ Jesus is regarded by those who divined something of His greatness as the most significant phenomenon in the evolution of man upon earth, then this Christ Jesus must in some way be connected with what is most vital and sacred in man himself. In other words, there must be something in man himself that can be brought into relation with the Christ event. Can we not ask, If Christ Jesus, as the Gospels maintain, is really the most important phenomenon in human evolution, does it not follow that always, in every human soul, there is something that is related to Christ Jesus?

And that is precisely what the Johannine Christians of the Rosicrucian Society deemed of greatest import and significance: that there is in every human soul something directly related to the events in Palestine as brought about through Christ Jesus. If the coming of Christ Jesus can be called the greatest event for mankind, then what corresponds in the human soul to the Christ event must be the greatest and most significant as well. And what can that be? The disciples of the Rosicrucians answered: There exists for every human soul something that is called awakening, or rebirth, or initiation.

Let us see what is meant by these terms. Looking at the various things around us—things we see with our eyes, touch with our hands—we observe them coming into being and perishing. We see the flower, the whole annual plant life, come up and then wither; and though there are such things in the world as rocks and mountains that seem to defy the centuries we need only consider the proverb, "a steady drip hollows out the rock" to realize that the human soul senses the laws of transience as governing even the majestic boulders and mountains. And we know that there comes into being and perishes even what is built of the elements: not only what we call our corporeality, but what we know as our perishable ego is engendered and then passes. But those who know how a spiritual world can be reached know also that this is not attained by means of eyes or ears or other senses, but by the path of awakening, of rebirth, of initiation.

And what is it that is reborn? When a man observes his inner self he finally comes to realize that what he sees there is that to which he says “I”. Its very name differentiates it from anything in the outer world. To everything in the outer world a name can be applied externally. Everyone can call a table a table or a clock a clock; but never in the world could the name “I” fall on our ear if it were intended to denote ourself, for “I” must be spoken within us: to everyone else we are “you.” This in itself shows us that our ego-being is distinct from all else that is in or around us.

But in addition, we now come to something that spiritual scientists of all times have emphasized from their own experience for the benefit of mankind: that within this ego another, a higher one, is born, as the child is born of the mother. A man as he appears in life is first encountered as a child, awkward in his surroundings but gradually learning to understand things: he gains in sense, his intellect and his will grow, and his strength and energy increase. But there have always been people who grow in other ways as well, who attain to a stage of development beyond the average, who find, so to say, a second I that can say “you” to the first one in the same way that the I itself says “you” to the outer world and to its own body—that looks upon this first I from above, as it were.

As an ideal, then, for the soul of man, and as a reality for those who follow the instructions of spiritual science, we have the thought: the ego I have hitherto known takes part in the whole outer world, and together with this it is perishable; but there slumbers within me a second ego of which men are unaware but can become aware. It is linked with the imperishable, just as the first ego is bound up with the perishable, the temporal; and by means of rebirth this higher ego can behold a spiritual world just as the lower ego does perceive the physical world through eyes and ears.

This awakening, rebirth, initiation, as it is called, is the greatest event for the human soul—a view shared by those who called themselves confessors of the Rose Cross. These knew that this event of the rebirth of the higher ego, which can look from above on the lower ego as man looks on outer forms, must have some connection with the event of Christ Jesus. This means that just as a rebirth can occur for the individual in his development, so a rebirth for all humanity came about through Christ Jesus. That which is an inner event for the individual—a mystical-spiritual event, as it is called, something he can experience as the birth of his higher ego—corresponds to what occurred in the outer world, in history, for all mankind in the event of Palestine through Christ Jesus.

How did this appear to a man like, for instance, the author of the Luke Gospel? He reasoned as follows: The genealogy of Jesus of Nazareth goes back to Adam and to God himself. What today is mankind, what now inhabits a physical human body, once descended from divine heights: it was born of the spirit, it was once with God. Adam was he who had been sent down out of spiritual heights into matter, and in this sense he is the son of God. So there was at one time a divine-spiritual realm—thus the argument would continue—that condensed, as it were, into an ephemeral, tellurian realm: Adam came into being. Adam was an earthly image of the Son of God, and from him are descended the human beings that dwell in a physical body. And in a special way there lived in Jesus of Nazareth not only what exists in every man and all that pertains to it, but something the essence of which can be found only when one is aware that the true being of man derives from the divine. In Jesus of Nazareth something of this divine descent is still apparent. For this reason the writer of the Luke Gospel feels constrained to say, Behold Him Who was baptized by John! He bears special marks of the divine out of which Adam was originally born. This can come to life again in Him. Just as the God descended into matter and disappeared as such from the human race, so He reappears. In Jesus of Nazareth mankind could be reborn in its innermost divine principle. What the author of the Luke Gospel meant was this: If we trace the genealogy of Jesus of Nazareth to its source, we find the divine origin and the characteristics of the Son of God appearing in Him in a new way, and in a higher degree than would hitherto have been possible for mankind.

And the writer of the John Gospel emphasizes even more strongly the existence of something divine in man, as well as the fact that this appeared in its most grandiose form as the God and the Logos themselves. The God Who had been buried, as it were, in matter is reborn as God in Jesus of Nazareth. That is what was meant by those who introduced their Gospels in this way.

And those who endeavored to perpetuate the wisdom of these Gospels—what did they say? How did the Johannine Christians put it? They said: In the individual human being a great and mighty event can take place that can be called the rebirth of the higher ego. As the child is born of the mother, so the divine ego is born of man. Initiation, awakening, is possible; and when once this has come to pass—so said those who were competent to speak—a new standard of values will arise.

Let us try to understand by a comparison what it is that henceforth becomes important. Suppose we have before us a man seventy years old—an "awakened" man who has attained to his higher ego—and suppose he had been in his fortieth year when he experienced rebirth, the awakening of his higher ego. Had someone approached him at that time with the intention of describing his life he could have reflected: I have before me a man who has just given birth to his higher ego. It is the same man I knew five years ago in certain circumstances, and ten years ago in others.—And if he had wanted to portray the identity of this man—if he had wanted to show that this man had a quite special start, even at birth—he would trace back the forty years with his physical existence in mind and describe the latter as far as pertinent, in the spirit of one who sees matters from the spiritual-scientific viewpoint. But in his fortieth year a higher ego was born in this man, and henceforth this higher ego irradiates all the circumstances of his life. He is a new man. That which existed previously is of no further importance. What is now important is to understand, above all things, how the higher ego grows from year to year and develops further. Now, when this man had arrived at the age of seventy, we would enquire into the path taken by the higher ego from the fortieth to the seventieth year; and if we believe in what was born in the soul of this man thirty years before, it would be of importance that it is the true spiritual ego he presents to us in his seventieth year. That is the way the Evangelists went about it; and it was thus, and in connection with the Gospels, that the Johannine Christians of Rosicrucianism dealt with the Being we know as Christ Jesus.

The Gospel writers had set themselves the task of showing, first of all, that Christ Jesus had His origin in the primordial World Spirit, in the God Himself. The God that had dwelt unseen in all mankind is specifically manifested in Christ Jesus; and that is the same God of Whom the John Gospel tells us that He was in the beginning. What the Evangelists set out to do was to show that it was precisely this God that dwelt in Jesus of Nazareth. But those whose task it was to perpetuate the eternal wisdom right into our own time had to emphasize the fact that man's higher ego, the divine spirit of mankind—born in Jesus of Nazareth through the event in Palestine—had remained the same and had been preserved by all who approached it with true understanding. Just as in our comparison we described how the man bore his higher ego in his fortieth year, so the Evangelists pictured the God that dwells in man up to the event of Palestine—how the God developed, how he was reborn, and so forth. But those upon whom it was incumbent to demonstrate that they were the successors of the Evangelists, these had to point out that the time was ripe for the rebirth of the higher ego, when we have to do only with the spiritual part, irradiating
all else.

Those who called themselves the Johannine Christians and whose symbol was the Rose Cross held that precisely what was reborn for mankind as the secret of its higher ego has been preserved—preserved by the close community which grew out of Rosicrucianism. This continuity is symbolically indicated by that sacred vessel from which Christ Jesus ate and drank with His disciples, and in which Joseph of Arimathia caught the blood that flowed from the wound—the Holy Grail which, as the story is told, was brought to Europe by Angels. A temple was built to contain this vessel, and the Rosicrucians became the guardians of what it contained, namely, the essence of the reborn God.

The mystery of the reborn God had its being in humanity. It is the Mystery of the Grail, a mystery propounded like a new Gospel, proclaiming: We look up to a sage such as the writer of the John Gospel who was able to say:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and a God was the Word.

That which was with God in the beginning was born again in Him Whom we have seen suffer and die on Golgotha, and Who is arisen.—This continuity throughout all time of the divine principle and its rebirth, that is what the author of the John Gospel aimed to set forth. Something known to all those who endeavored to proclaim this truth was that what was in the beginning has been preserved. In the beginning was the mystery of the higher ego; it was preserved in the Grail; with the Grail it has remained linked. And in the Grail lives the ego united with the eternal and immortal, just as the lower ego is bound to the ephemeral and mortal. He who knows the secret of the Holy Grail knows that from the wood of the Cross there springs ever new life, the immortal ego, symbolized by the roses on the black wood of the cross.

The secret of the Rose Cross can thus appear like a continuation of the John Gospel; and in reference to the latter and to its continuation it can truly be said:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and a God was the Word. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by It;¹ and without It was not any thing made that was made. In It was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in the darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.

Only a few men—those who possessed something of what is not born of the flesh—comprehended the light that shone in the darkness. But then the light became flesh and dwelt among men in the form of Jesus of Nazareth. Here we can say, wholly within the meaning of the John Gospel: That which dwelt as the Christ in Jesus of Nazareth was the higher divine ego of all humanity, of the reborn God Who, in Adam, as His image, became earthly. This reborn human ego was perpetuated as a holy secret, was preserved under the symbol of the Rose Cross, and is now proclaimed as the secret of the Holy Grail, as the Rose Cross.

The principle which can be born in every human soul as the higher ego points to the rebirth of the divine ego, in the evolution of mankind in its entirety, through the Event of Palestine. Just as the higher ego is born in the individual, so the higher ego of all mankind, the divine ego, was born in Palestine; and it is preserved and developed in what lives concealed in the sign of the Rose Cross.

But if we study the evolution of man we find not only this one great event, the rebirth of the higher ego, but a number of lesser ones as well. Before the higher ego can be born, before this mighty, comprehensive, pervasive experience can come to the soul—the birth of the immortal ego in the mortal ego—extensive preparatory stages must have been passed through. A man must prepare himself in many different ways. And after the great experience has come to him that enables him to say to himself, Now I feel within myself something that looks down from above on my ordinary ego, just as my ordinary ego looks upon the things of the senses; now I am a second being within my first; now I have attained to the realms in which I am united with the divine beings—when the human being has had this experience, then he faces further stages that must be passed through, stages differing in their nature from the preparatory ones, but which none the less must be traversed.

Thus there is for each individual the one great incisive event, the birth of the higher ego; and there is a similar birth as well for the whole of mankind: the rebirth of the divine ego. Also, there are stages leading to this incisive event and others that must follow it. To find the former, we look back in time beyond the Christ event. There we encounter other great manifestations in human evolution. We become aware of the gradual approach of the Gospel of Christ, as indicated by the writer of the Luke Gospel when he says, In the beginning there was a God, a spirit-being in spiritual heights. He descended into the material world and became man, became humanity.—True, one could discern in man, as he developed, his origin in the God, but the God Himself could not be perceived by observing human evolution with outer physical eyes alone. He was behind the earthly-physical world, as it were; and there He was seen by those who understood where He was, by those who could behold His kingdom.

Let us turn back for a moment to the first civilization that followed upon a great catastrophe, to the ancient Indian civilization. There we find seven great and holy teachers known as the Holy Rishis. They pointed upwards to a higher being of whom they said, Our wisdom can divine the existence of this being, but it suffices not to perceive it.—The vision of the Holy Rishis was great, but the exalted being they called Vishva Karman was beyond their sphere. Vishva Karman, though permeating the spiritual world, was a being beyond what the clairvoyant human eye of that time could reach.—Then followed the civilization called after its great leader, Zarathustra, and Zarathustra spoke as follows to those whom it was his mission to guide: When the clairvoyant eye contemplates the things of this world—minerals, plants, animals, men—it perceives behind these things all sorts of spiritual beings. The being, however, to whom man is indebted for his very existence, who in the future is destined to dwell in man's deepest self, remains hidden as yet even from the clairvoyant eye when it contemplates the things of this earth. But by raising the clairvoyant eye to the sun, said Zarathustra, more than the sun is seen: as an aura is perceived surrounding man, so, in contemplating the sun, the great sun aura is discerned—Ahura Mazdao.—And it was the great sun aura that once brought forth man, in a manner to be characterized later. Man is the image of the sun spirit, of Ahura Mazdao; but as yet Ahura Mazdao did not dwell on earth.—Then came the time in which clairvoyant men began to see Ahura Mazdao in what surrounded them on earth. The great moment had arrived when something could take place that had not been possible in Zarathustra's time. When Zarathustra discerned clairvoyantly what was manifested in earthly lightning and thunder, it was not Ahura Mazdao, the great sun spirit who is the prototype of mankind, that he saw; but when he turned to the sun he saw Ahura Mazdao. When Zarathustra had found a successor in Moses, Moses' clairvoyant vision could see in the burning bush and in the fire on Sinai the spirit who proclaimed himself as ehjeh asher ehjeh, as the “I am,” as He Who was, as He Who is, as He Who shall be: Jahve, or Jehova.

What had taken place? During that remote period between the appearance of Zarathustra and that of Moses upon earth, the Spirit Who previously had dwelt only on the sun had moved downward to earth. He flamed up in the burning bush and shone in the fire on Sinai: He was in the elements of the earth. And then another period passed; and the Spirit Whose presence the great holy Rishis felt, but of Whom they had to say: Our clairvoyance does not suffice to see Him—the Spirit Whom Zarathustra had to seek in the sun, Who revealed Himself to Moses in thunder and lightning—this Spirit appeared in a human being: in Jesus of Nazareth. That was the evolution: first a descent from the cosmos into the physical elements, then into a human body. Only then was reborn the divine ego from which man descended, and to which the writer of the Luke Gospel traces the genealogy of Jesus of Nazareth. This was the great event of the rebirth of the God in man.

That is a retrospect of the preparatory stages, and it shows us that mankind, too, passed through these. And those who had advanced with mankind as its early leaders were also destined to progress until one of them had achieved the capacity to become the bearer of the Christ. Such is the evolution of mankind as seen through spiritual eyes.

And there is another point. What the holy Rishis revered as Vishva Karman, what Zarathustra addressed as the Ahura Mazdao of the sun, and what Moses reverenced as ehjeh asher ehjeh—this had to appear in a single human being, in Jesus of Nazareth, in physically circumscribed humanness. This consummation was fore-ordained. But to enable so exalted a being to dwell in such a man as Jesus of Nazareth, many circumstances had to contribute. For one thing, Jesus of Nazareth Himself had to have arrived at an exalted level. Not every man could be the vehicle of such a being that came into the world as described. Now, we who have made contact with spiritual science know that there is reincarnation, so we must realize that Jesus of Nazareth—not the Christ—had experienced many incarnations and that He had passed through the most manifold stages in His previous incarnations before He could become Jesus of Nazareth.

What this means is that Jesus of Nazareth had Himself to become a high initiate before He could become the Christ bearer. Now, when a lofty initiate is born, how do such a birth and the subsequent life differ from the birth and life of an ordinary man? In a general way it can be assumed that when a man is born he bears the characteristics, at least approximately, of what derives from a previous incarnation. But that is not the case with an initiate. The initiate could not be a leader of mankind if he bore within him only what wholly corresponds with his outer self, for that he must build up according to the conditions of his external environment. When an initiate is born there must enter his body a lofty soul that in past times has had mighty experiences in the world. That is why legend so often tells of the strange births of initiates.

As to why and how this is so, we have already touched upon the answer to the first of these questions. It is because a comprehensive ego that had already passed through significant experiences in the past now unites with a body, but this body is at first unable to receive what seeks to incarnate in it as spiritual nature. For this reason it is necessary, in the case of a lofty being incarnating as a high initiate in a perishable human being, that the reincarnating ego should from the start envelop the physical form more intensely than in the case of other men. While in the ordinary human being the physical form resembles and adapts itself soon after birth to the spiritual form, or human aura, the human aura of a reborn initiate is luminous at birth. It is the spiritual part that here indicates the presence of more than can be seen in the ordinary sense. What does this indicate? That not only has a child been born in the physical world, but that something has occurred in the spiritual world. The stories that attach to the birth of all reincarnating initiates express the idea, not only is a child born: something is born in the spirit as well, something that cannot be encompassed by what is born down below.

But who can discern this? Only one who himself has a clairvoyant eye for the spiritual world. Hence we are told that in the birth of Buddha an initiate recognized an event differing from an ordinary birth; and hence also it is related of Jesus of Nazareth that His coming was to be foretold by the Baptist. All who have insight into the spiritual world know that the initiate must come and be reborn; and they know that this is an event in the spiritual world. The Three Kings from the East who came to offer sacrifice at the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, these knew it, too. And the same truth is indicated when the initiated Priest of the Temple says:

Now I can die gladly, since mine eyes have beheld the One Who will be the salvation of mankind.

Clearly, then, we must here differentiate accurately. We have an exalted initiate reborn as Jesus of Nazareth, of Whose birth it must be said that a child was born; but with this Child there appeared something that will not be encompassed by His physical body. This discloses at the same time something in this Jesus of Nazareth that has significance in the spiritual world, something that will gradually develop this body upward to the point at which it will be fit to receive this spirit. And when this was fulfilled, we have the event in which the Baptist approaches Jesus of Nazareth, and a loftier spirit descends and unites with this Jesus of Nazareth: the Christ enters Jesus of Nazareth. And then the Baptist, the Forerunner of Christ Jesus, could well say: I came into the world. It was I who prepared the way for a loftier one. With the words of my mouth I proclaimed the coming of the Kingdom of God, the Realm of the Heavens, and I exhorted men to change their hearts. I came among men, and it was vouchsafed me to bring them tidings of a special impulse that is to come to mankind. As in the springtime the sun mounts higher to announce the budding of something new, so did I appear to bring tidings of what is burgeoning in mankind as the reborn ego of humanity.

Then, when the human principle had reached its height in Jesus of Nazareth, His human body having become an expression of His spirit, He was ripe to receive within Himself the Christ at the Baptism by John. The body of Jesus of Nazareth had unfolded like the bright sun on St. John's Day in June. That had been foretold. Then the spirit was to be born out of the darkness, just as the sun steadily gains in strength and power up to St. John's Day, and then begins to decline. That was what the Baptist had to proclaim. He had to continue to bear witness until—pointing to the sun's ever-increasing splendor—he could say, He of Whom the old Prophets told, He Who in the spiritual realms has been called the Son of the Spiritual Realms, He has appeared.—Up to this point John the Baptist was active. But then—when the days become shorter and darkness begins to gain the upper hand—then the inner spiritual light is to shine as a result of right preparation, is to become ever brighter as the Christ shines in Jesus of Nazareth.

That is the way John the Baptist saw the approach of Jesus of Nazareth; and he felt the growth of Jesus of Nazareth as his own diminution and as the increase in the power of the sun. From now on I shall wane, he said, even as the sun wanes after St. John's Day. But He will wax—He the spiritual sun—and shine out of the darkness.—Thus was the Christ heralded; and thus began the rebirth of the ego of mankind, upon which depends the rebirth of every individual higher human ego.

This characterizes the most important event in the development of the individual human being: the rebirth of what can proceed from the ordinary ego as the immortal principle. It is linked with the greatest event, the Christ event, to which the next lectures will be devoted.

• 1. St. John I, 3 and 4.—Luther's translation differs here from the King James Version: "it" (the Word) remains the subject throughout the passage, not "he" (God), as in the English. That this is the correct translation is specifically stated by Dr. Steiner in the first lecture of his other cycle on the St. John Gospel (Basel, November 16, 1907), and it is therefore incorporated in this translation.

As a contribution to studies connected with the Gospel of St. Matthew, something was said in the last lecture about the mission of the ancient Hebrew people and how Christ-Jesus sprang from this people. In studying the Gospels our aim is to understand little by little how the different streams of spiritual life converged, in order, eventually, in the great Christian stream, to provide in common for the further evolution of the earth. All that could be done in a brief study was to indicate in merest outline the part played by the ancient Hebrew people in the general evolution of mankind But it is not possible to understand the Gospel of St. Matthew unless we at least give some consideration to certain other aspects of this people.

For the sake of clarity, let us once more remind ourselves of the soul-nature of the Hebrews, upon which their whole mission was dependent. We have seen that their mission differed from that of the other pre-Christian peoples. To the latter, that which they had inherited of the ancient clairvoyance of mankind was still an essential factor. Evidence of this clairvoyant knowledge is to be found among all the peoples of antiquity. We may speak of it as a ‘primeval wisdom.’ It can be described more exactly in the following way.—In old Atlantis, vision of the spiritual world was still the common heritage of men. Although the higher experiences were accessible only to Initiates, every human being had, at the very least, a definite conception of the spiritual world, because in certain intermediary states of consciousness the men of that epoch were still able to see into the spiritual realm. But this faculty had to be replaced by one that to-day is uppermost in man, that of intellectual reasoning, comprehension of the outer world by means of the physical senses; in other words, experience of the outer physical world. This faculty developed slowly, and by degrees, in the course of the pre-Christian era. A considerable residue of the old clairvoyance still survived in the people of ancient India. The teaching imparted by the Holy Rishis was a primeval wisdom, inherited from the far past. So too, in the second Post-Atlantean epoch of culture, what was known to the pupils and followers of Zarathustra in ancient Persia was a legacy of this old clairvoyance. Chaldean astronomy, and also the knowledge possessed by the ancient Egyptians, were both permeated with the ancient wisdom. A science derived from the faculties typical of later Post-Atlantean humanity would have been entirely unintelligible to the Egyptians and the Chaldeans. No science, expressing itself in the form of concepts and ideas of a physical nature, existed in those days. There was no reflective thinking such as we know it to-day.

It is by no means unimportant to be clear in our minds about the difference between a genuine seer of our own time and a seer, let us say, of ancient Chaldea or ancient Egypt. There is a very marked difference. One who in the life and conditions natural in our time unfolds genuine seership, must bring to bear upon the revelations, inspirations and experiences coming to him from the spiritual world, the logical reason he is able to acquire here in the physical world, through the exercise of normal, earthly thinking The experiences of a seer in modern times can never be completely intelligible if they are not received by a soul thoroughly schooled in logical, reasoned thinking. In the modern age these inspirations and revelations from the spiritual world demand that logical thinking shall be brought to bear upon them. A person who has such inspirations to-day, but lacks the will to unfold logical thinking, to develop his earthly faculties healthily and selflessly, can never achieve more than what is called ‘visionary clairvoyance’, which remains obscure and incomprehensible, and is for this reason bound to be misleading. Only a soul possessed of the resolute will to exercise reason can provide the right conditions for inspirations from the spiritual world in the modern age. That is why in a spiritual movement such as ours the greatest possible importance must be attached to the fact that seership shall not be developed, nor the revelations from the spiritual world proclaimed, in an amateurish, unbalanced way. The aim for which we must work is that the soul itself shall bring something to meet the inspirations and revelations. The development of seership demands the effort and exertion required in rational thinking. In our time the two cannot be separated.

For an Egyptian or Chaldean seer it was an entirely different matter. Together with the inspirations—which arrived by quite another path—came the principles of thinking; hence he needed no separate system of thinking. When he had undergone spiritual training the principles of thinking were given to him complete, along with the inspirations themselves. The organism of modern man is no longer suited for this, it has grown out of it; for humanity is always moving on.

Only by bearing this difference clearly in mind can we fully understand what is implied by saying that vestiges of the old clairvoyance still survived in pre-Christian times, with the one exception of the ancient Hebrew people. They were chosen from the first, in order to develop a human organism possessing the faculty of comprehending the outer physical world according to number, measure and weight, so that by this means they might gradually rise from knowledge of the physical world to knowledge of the spiritual reality comprised in the concept of Jahve or Jehovah. The all-essential point here is that in Abraham there had been chosen a man possessing a brain so constituted as to enable him to become the progenitor of a whole people, who would inherit these qualities from him and transmit them to their descendants. Spiritual promptings must be received, not merely as arising from within man, but as a gift from without. All that was derived from Abraham came, primarily, not from within, but as a revelation from without. This is a factor of immense importance, radically distinguishing the character of this people from that of the other peoples of antiquity.

You can well imagine that the old inherited faculties could not disappear all at once, but that vestiges remained, even in this people. It was so in the case of Joseph who in this respect still had much in common with the other peoples. For this reason he could be the link between the ancient Hebrews and the Egyptians, who were the latest to remain in the spiritual stream of the pre-Christian peoples. The development of the new faculties was bound to be only very gradual.

Why was a people prepared in this definite way? Why had a people to be chosen for separation from all the other forms of pre-Christian spiritual life, and why had they to be endowed with faculties of a special kind? All this had to take place to make it possible for mankind to be prepared for that great point of time—already drawing near—when Christ-Jesus was on earth. It was the point of time when all the old clairvoyance, all the conditions determined and restricted by blood-relationship had lost their significance and when something new entered into the life of man, namely, the full activity of the Ego. Through the widespread intermingling of blood, conditions which in earlier times had great meaning and purpose, passed away, but in their place came the possibility of the full activity of the human Ego. Thus the true kingdom of mankind—the Kingdom of Heaven—was added to the other kingdoms.

Now, speaking generally, when anything is born, men are not immediately prone to recognise it as what it really is. They certainly do not immediately recognise happenings of the spiritual life. They are very ready to speak of prophets who will come in the future—this was quite usual in the times both preceding and following the birth of Christianity. In the 12th and 13th centuries there was a veritable mania for prophecy. Here, there and everywhere people came forward proclaiming the imminent return of Christ, pointing to the places where He would appear. In other times, too, isolated phenomena of the kind have occurred. There has been talk about one person or another being the new incarnation of Christ.—No words need be wasted on the subject of such prophecies because even when they are made they bear evidence in themselves of their own defect. One defect they all have: they speak of an event that is to come, but neglect so to prepare men's hearts and minds that they are capable of recognising and understanding it. The position of these people reminds one of the incident of the teacher which Hebbel gives in his diary.—The teacher gives a severe thrashing to a particular pupil because he cannot understand Plato. Hebbel adds, jokingly, that the pupil was the reincarnated Plato himself! This is the sort of thing that happens to people who are constantly talking about a Christ who is to come again. They would be little prepared for the reality, even were it to appear; they would take the Christ for something altogether different from the Christ.

Preparation for the Christ had therefore to be made in advance. This must be realised, before it is possible to understand the Gospel of St. Matthew. Preparation was necessary in order that there might at least be a few human beings capable of understanding the Christ Event, which—to characterise one aspect only—consisted in knowing that Christ was the One Who made it possible for men thenceforth to receive from without, not physical impressions only, but also the Spirit. For this, individual men had to be prepared.

In point of fact, right through Hebrew history, some individuals were, by certain methods, prepared to be able to understand the Christ Event. In the earliest times there were only a few of these men, but they and their way of life must be closely studied if we are to realise what careful preparations were made for the coming of Christ, how the Hebrew people, with the qualities they had inherited from Abraham, were rendered capable of a prophetic understanding of how the human Ego would be brought to man through the Saviour. Those men who were prepared so as to be able to recognise and understand, by clairvoyance, the significance of the Christ, were called Nazarenes.¹¹ These men were able to perceive clairvoyantly all that had been prepared from the earliest days of the Hebrews, in order that, out of and through this people, the Christ might be born and understood. In a mode of life compatible with the development of clairvoyant insight, these Nazarenes were bound by strict and strenuous rules. These rules, since they belonged to quite another age, differ considerably from those essential for the attainment of spiritual knowledge to-day, although in some respects there is a certain similarity. Much that was of primary importance in the Nazarene training is subsidiary to-day, and much that was subsidiary then would now be essential. Nobody should imagine that methods which in earlier times led to clairvoyant knowledge of Christ would have the effect of leading a man of the modern age to the same momentous recognition.

The first demand made of a Nazarene was total abstention from all alcohol; indeed, the taking of any food prepared with vinegar was most strictly forbidden. Those who obeyed the prescribed rules to the letter were obliged to refrain from consuming anything whatsoever derived from the grape. This was because it was held that in the grape the plant-forming principle has overstepped a certain point, namely the point where the sun-forces alone are working on the plant. In the grape there are at work, not the sun-forces alone, but something that develops inwardly and has already matured by the time the sun-forces are weakening in the autumn. Hence anything deriving from the grape might be drunk only by those who did not aspire to the higher form of clairvoyance, but who worshipped the god Dionysos and were content that their faculties should rise up as it were out of the earth. Further, as long as his preparation and training lasted, the Nazarene was committed never to touch or come into contact with anything that has an astral body and can die; briefly, the Nazarene must avoid anything of an animal nature. In the strictest sense of the word he must be a vegetarian. Therefore in certain regions the strictest Nazarenes fed only on the carob bean, the so-called ‘St. John’s bread; this was a very common food among them. They also fed on the honey of wild bees—not cultivated bees—and other honey-seeking insects. John the Baptist, in later days, adopted this way of life, feeding on the carob bean and wild honey. In the Gospels it is said that his food was locusts and wild honey, but this must be regarded as a mistranslation.—I have elsewhere called your attention to other mistranslations of the same kind.¹²

Another of the main stipulations in the preparation for seership was that during the period of their training the Nazarenes must not allow their hair to be cut. The reason for this is intimately connected with the whole process of human evolution. This relationship of hair to human evolution is a fundamental fact. All in man that concerns his true being can be understood only if we try to see it against its spiritual background. Strange as it may sound, in our hair we have a relic of certain rays by which the sun-forces were once instilled into man. What the sun in earlier times thus instilled into man was something living. We find clear illustrations of this in times when man still had consciousness of deeper realities. For example, in many ancient sculptures of lions it is clearly evident that the sculptuor's aim was not simply to copy a lion as we know it to-day with its mane. A sculptor, still cognisant of the traditions born of ancient knowledge, portrayed a lion in such a way as to convey the impression that the hairs in the mane seem to be inserted into the body as if from outside, like instreaming rays of the sun which have, as it were, hardened into hairs. One can therefore well imagine that in ancient time it might have been quite possible, by leaving the hair uncut, to receive certain forces into one's being, especially if the hair was young and healthy.—But even in the times of Hebrew antiquity this was, in point of fact, regarded among the Nazarenes as hardly more than a symbol.

The progress of mankind however, did in fact depend to some measure upon his allowing the spiritual reality behind the sun to stream into his being. The fact that as time went on man was born as a less and less hairy being was symptomatic of his advance from the old, upwelling gift of clairvoyance to reasoned thought concerning the outer world. We must picture the men of the Atlantean and earliest Post-Atlantean epochs with a copious growth of hair—a sign that spiritual light was still shining down upon them in great strength. As the Bible tells, the choice was made between the smooth-skinned Jacob and the hairy Esau. In Esau we must see a descendant of Abraham in whom the last residue of an ancient phase of human evolution still survived, manifesting in his growth of hair. The man possessed of faculties leading him outward into the world around, is represented in Jacob, who was gifted with the qualities of cleverness with all its darker sides. Esau is ousted by Jacob.

Thus in Esau another offshoot of the main line of development is cast aside. From him sprang the Edomites, in whom old, inherited faculties continued to be propagated.—All these things are accurately and beautifully expressed in the Bible.

But now there had to arise in man a new consciousness of the spiritual life, and it had to arise, in a new way, in the Nazarene, through keeping his hair uncut during the time of his preparation. The relation of hair to the light of the spirit in the ancient world is confirmed by the fact that with the exception of an insignificant cipher, “light” and “hair” are expressed in the ancient Hebrew language by the same word. The ancient Hebrew tongue is full of indications of the deepest secrets of human evolution and must be regarded as a momentous revelation of wisdom through language. Such, then, was the purpose underlying the Nazarene custom of allowing the hair to grow long.—To-day, of course, this is no longer essential.

During the time of his preparation the Nazarene had to be led to a very definite clairvoyant experience which would reveal to him that the approach of Christ to mankind was drawing near. The last great Nazarene lived at the time of Christ. His name was John the Baptist. Not only had he himself experienced the complete experience of the Nazarene training but he enabled all those whom he aspired to bring to their true manhood, to experience it likewise.¹³ This complete experience is nothing else than the Baptism of John. It is important to understand exactly what its effect was upon their inner development. What was this Baptism, and to what did it lead? In the first place a man was plunged under water, the effect being that his etheric body in the region of his head was loosened somewhat from the physical body, whereas normally the etheric body is firmly knit with the physical body. It is well known that if a man is on the point of drowning, the whole tableau of his life flashes before him as a result of the loosening of his etheric body. This was what happened in the Baptism given by John. A man beheld his life-tableau, events of his life otherwise completely forgotton. Moreover the nature and constitution of the human in that particular epoch was also revealed to him. The physical body evolves out of the shaping and moulding which it receives from the etheric body, but this member of man's being which gives form to the physical body can be perceived only if it is loosened from the physical body, as happened in the Baptism of John.

If a man had undergone such a baptism three thousand years before our era, he would have become conscious that the highest spiritual condition that can be bestowed upon the human being can only come to him as a heritage from the ancient past—for whatever was given to man out of the spiritual worlds in very ancient times was essentially a heritage. This heritage of the past was portrayed in the etheric body and acted as a formative force upon the physical body. Even to those who had developed beyond the normal stage, such a baptism would have revealed that all their knowledge was founded upon ancient spirit-inspiration. This experience was described as the vision of the soul-nature of the etheric body, in the form of the Serpent. Those who had had this experience were called Children of the Serpent, because they had seen how the Luciferic beings had descended into the being of man; how the etheric body which had given the physical body its form and shape was itself a creation of the Serpent.

Now, however, in a baptism, not three thousand years before John the Baptist, but in his own day, something quite different came to light. Among those who were baptised there were some whose very nature gave evidence of the progress in human evolution: namely, of the vastly increased power of the Ego, derived from its experience of the outer visible world. Moreover the picture arising for them was entirely different from that revealed at the earlier baptisms. Men now beheld the creative forces of the etheric body, no longer in the image of the Serpent, but in the image of the Lamb. (See Appendix III, p. 76) This etheric body was no longer permeated from within by what issued from the Luciferic forces, but was wholly surrendered to the spiritual world which shines into the souls of men through the phenomena of the outer world. In the Baptism of John this vision of the Lamb came to those who were able to understand what at that time Baptism signified. Moreover they knew from what they themselves experienced, that man had become an altogether different, a quite new being. The few who experienced this at the Baptism of John were able to say: A great and momentous event has come to pass; man has become a different being; the Ego has now the rulership on earth!—Among those whom John baptised there were some who had been made ready to understand the signs of the times, to recognise that so supreme an event had come to pass.¹⁴

This had always been the goal of the Nazarenes. Through the experience brought by this Baptism they recognised that the coming of Christ was near at hand. This they knew from the form in which the etheric body appeared before them, when loosened in the baptism. It was the mission of John the Baptist to reveal that now the time had come when the Ego could express itself fully in man's nature; thereby he brought the ages of antiquity to their fulfilment. He gathered around him a community to whom he was able to reveal that now, through the emergence of the Ego in the real sense, the Christ Principle could draw into mankind. John the Baptist brought the Nazarene movement to such a height, that, out of his prophecy alone, it found its fulfilment. He gathered around him a community able to understand the approaching Christ Event.—Only in this light are the words spoken by John the Baptist intelligible. Such words must be taken in their deepest meaning. It is quite wrong that students of these matters to-day should regard John the Baptist merely as a raging fanatic, a man who storms at the Pharisees, calling them “a generation of vipers”, and cries out to them: “Think not to say within yourselves, We have Abraham to our father; for I say unto you, that God is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham.” (St. Matthew III, 9).—John the Baptist would have been no more than a brawler, had he not rejoiced when Pharisees and Sadducees came to him to be baptized. Nevertheless when they come, he inveighs against them. Why is this?

When the inner meaning of these things is understood it is at once obvious that the words are not just outpourings of fanatical abuse, but have profound significance. This, however, can only be understood by reflecting upon a certain feature in the history of the ancient Hebrew people.

From what has been said it will be clear to you that in Abraham there had been chosen a man whose constitution was such that at the right time the Christ could be born of his descendants. But this required the development and elaboration of faculties which had been present in Abraham as rudiments only. We must realise that if these rudiments were to be unfolded it was constantly necessary for certain elements to be eliminated. We have already seen how this happened in the case of Joseph, but there were even earlier examples, such as Esau, from whom the Edomites descended, because in him too an ancient heritage had remained. Only such qualities as were compatible with the goal described were to be preserved. This is indicated in a wonderful way.—Abraham had two sons: Isaac, the son of Sarah, and Ishmael. The Hebrew nation were the descendants of Isaac. In Abraham, however, there were other qualities as well. If these other qualities had been transmitted through the Hebrew generations, the right conditions would not have been achieved. Hence this different element must be radically thrust away into another line of descendants, into the descendants of Ishmael, the son of Hagar, the Egyptian bond-woman. Therefore two lines of descent go out from Abraham, the one through Isaac, and the other through the outcast Ishmael, who having the blood of an Egyptian in his veins, must have in his constitution elements unfitting for the mission of the Hebrew people.

But now something momentous comes to pass! The task of the Hebrew people was to propagate in the direct line of heredity the qualities that were intrinsically their own, and everything that was an ancient heritage, ancient wisdom, had to be imparted to them from without. Hence they had to go to Egypt in order to receive what could be given to them there. Moses was able to impart this to his people because he was an Egyptian initiate. But he certainly could not have done so had he possessed wisdom merely in its Egyptian form. It would be erroneous to imagine that the ancient Egyptian wisdom could be simply grafted on to what flowed down from Abraham. This would not have been compatible with the intrinsic character of the Hebrew people and would have produced an abortive form of culture. Moses brought with him to the wisdom he acquired from his Egyptian initiation something of a quite different nature. Hence he could not simply impart to the Israelites what came from the Egyptian initiation. His first real gift to them was made after the revelation on Sinai, and made outside Egypt.

What, then, is the revelation on Sinai? What was vouchsafed to Moses there, and what was it that he imparted to the Israelites? He imparted something that could well be grafted into the stem of this people because it was related to them in a very definite way. In times past the descendants of Ishmael had wandered away from their country and had settled in the regions now traversed by Moses and his people. Moses found in the Ishmaelites, among whom there was Initiation of a certain kind, those attributes and qualities which had been transmitted to them through Hagar, qualities which were derived from Abraham, but in which were preserved many elements inherited from the ancient past. Out of the revelations that he received from this branch of the Hebrew people, it became possible for Moses to make the revelation of Sinai intelligible to the Israelites. In regard to this there is an ancient Hebrew legend that in Ishmael a shoot of Abraham was cast out into Arabia, that is, into the desert. What sprang from this stock is contained in the teaching of Moses. On Sinai, the ancient Hebrew people received back again, in the Mosaic Law, what had been cast out from their blood: they received it back from without.

Here we also see how in the wonderful mission of the Hebrew people everything had to be given to them; had to be received back at a later stage as a gift. As a gift from without Abraham had, in Isaac, received the whole Hebrew nation. Again, Moses and his people received back from the descendants of Ishmael what had once been thrust out from their midst. During the period of their isolation in the wilderness they had to build up their own constitution, and also receive back as a gift from their God, what they had cast out. So, too, Jacob was in the end reconciled with Esau, thus receiving again what, in Esau, had been cast away.—The Bible must be read with scrupulous attention if the import of the words it contains is to be rightly understood.

The whole history of the Hebrew people is full of significant happenings such as these. The giving of the Law by Moses is connected with something that springs from the descendants of Hagar, whereas the Hebrew blood, which represents the specific Israelitish faculties, springs from Sarah. Hagar or Agar in Hebrew is the same as Sinai, which means the ‘stone mountain’, the great stone. One might say that Moses received the revelation of the Law from the ‘great stone’—a material representation of Hagar. The Law given to this Judaic people did not spring from the highest faculties in Abraham, but from Hagar, from Sinai. Those, therefore, who are followers merely of the Law as given on Sinai—that is, the Pharisees and the Sadducees—are exposed to the danger of their development coming to a standstill. They are those who at the Baptism of John will see, not the Lamb, but the Serpent.

Viewed in this light, what would otherwise seem to be mere abuse on the part of the Baptist becomes a righteous warning to the Pharisees and Sadducees when he cries out to them: ‘Ye who are followers of the Serpent, take heed that in the baptism ye have the true vision’;—that is to say, the vision of the Lamb, not of the Serpent! He also tells them that they must not rely upon the fact that they have Abraham as their father. For this came to their lips as a mere phrase; they were swearing by what had proceeded from the Sinai stone, but had now ceased to have significance. ‘Now’—said the Baptist—‘out of the universe there is drawing near the newborn Ego, and this Ego I make known to you. I declare to you how out of Judaism there will spring the true inheritance which has been carried down the generations, and to which men will swear allegiance, not now by the stone of Sinai, but by that which is everywhere round about us. The children of God will be made manifest, when, behind the material, the spiritual will be visible. Out of these stones God's word is able to raise up children unto Abraham. You speak without understanding when you say: “We have Abraham as our father”.

Only in the light of what has here been said is meaning imparted to these words of the Baptist. Nor are such things disclosed by the Akasha Chronicle alone; they stand in the Bible itself. Compare the words of the Apostle Paul in his Epistle to the Galatians (IV, 24, 25). What I have told you here is confirmed by St. Paul. He too says that the word Hagar or Agar is identical with Sinai and indicates that what was given on Sinai is a covenant which must be outgrown by those who, through the development of the essential qualities of Abraham in the successive generations, are now to realise what has come into the world through Christ.

This again points to a saying which must in future be understood. It is pitiful indeed that in an age when intelligence has reached such heights, men have yet given so little reflection to such words as: “Repent ye!”According to the real meaning, the translation should be somewhat as follows: ‘Change the tenor of your minds!’ In many passages it is said that John baptised unto repentance, that is to say, he baptized with water in order that a change might take place in the tenor and attitude of the soul. When those who had been baptized came out of the water, it behoved them so to change the tenor of their souls that they no longer looked back to the old traditions, but forward to what the freed Ego, which Christ would give, should contain. The hearts and minds of men were to be turned from the direction leading to the ancient gods into the direction leading to the new divine-spiritual Beings. It was in this sense that the Baptism of John was to bring about a change of heart and soul. John baptized with water in order that there might be called forth in some human beings the power to recognise the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven, and with that recognition to understand who Christ-Jesus is.

Herewith something more has been added to what we have already come to know of the mission of the ancient Hebrew people. All these things will lead step by step to a better understanding of Christ. We have seen how the mission of the Hebrews takes shape with most wonderful inner coherence. We have seen how there were present in Abraham, faculties which developed in the Hebrew people through successive generations. This required that many elements should be discarded and that the suitable elements should develop further in the blood, through propagation. That for which this people from Abraham onwards were specially gifted and chosen, was concentrated in one single Being, in Jesus. The Jews had to be maintained in their mission by a teaching; but that teaching had to come from without, and, in point of fact, from what they themselves had once cast out. The elements derived from Ishmael might not remain in the blood, but must be present purely in the domain of knowledge. This the Hebrew people received back again in the giving of the Law by Moses on Sinai. This Law had fulfilled its purpose at the point of time when what had come from the “stone” was no longer needed, but when men possessed what was to be bestowed upon mankind from the universe. Thus slowly and gradually preparation was made for the time when out of the stones, the sons of God—that is, the race of Man—could arise, when, behind all ‘stones’, behind all the earth, the spiritual world should be made manifest.

These are but fragmentary contributions towards an understanding of the mission of the Hebrew people. Only when we fully understand this mission can we begin to comprehend the majestic figure of Christ-Jesus as presented to us in the Gospel of St. Matthew.

• 11. According to Biblical commentaries, Nazarene means ‘branch’, or ‘separated one’. In lecture VI of the Course entitled The Gospel of St. Matthew, Rudolf Steiner refers to a community of the Essene sect connected particularly with Netzer, a pupil of Jeshu ben Pandira, in Nazareth, or Netzereth.
• 12. Locust—the fruit of the carob-tree; a locust-bean. The Greek name äxeis, properly denoting the insect, is applied in the Levant to the carob-pod, from some resemblance in form: and from very early times it has been believed by many that the “locusts” eaten by John the Baptist were these pods. Oxford English Dictionary.
• 13. This statement is corroborated by a passage in Origen's work, Concerning Prayer. “John the Baptist knew certain secret teaching about prayer, which he imparted, probably not to all who were being baptized, but to those who were being instructed in the secret doctrine as a preparation for baptism.” This throws light on the words of the disciples to Christ: “Lord teach us to pray, even as John also taught his disciples.” (St. Luke XI, 1). Rudolf Steiner's statement that John had instructed his disciples about the Lamb also throws light upon the seemingly abrupt announcement by John the Baptist to his disciples, “Behold the Lamb of God.” (St. John I, 29).
• 14. Cp. Romans, VIII, 19. “The earnest expectation of the created world waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God.”

[ 1 ] “When released from the body you ascend to the free aether, you will become an immortal god, escaping death.” In these words Empedocles epitomizes what the ancient Egyptians thought about the eternal in man and its connection with the divine. Evidence of this is provided by the so-called Book of The Dead which has been deciphered by the diligence of nineteenth century research workers. (See Lepsius, Das Totenbuch der alen Ägypter, Berlin, 1842.) It is “the greatest coherent literary work of the Egyptians which has been preserved to us.” It contains all kinds of teachings and prayers, which were put in the grave with each dead person to guide him when he was released from his mortal frame. The Egyptians' most intimate conceptions about the eternal and the genesis of the world are contained in this literary work. These conceptions indeed indicate ideas of the gods similar to those of Greek mysticism. Of the various deities worshiped in different parts of Egypt, Osiris gradually became the favorite and most universally acknowledged. In him the ideas about the other divinities were summarized. Whatever the Egyptian populace may have thought about Osiris, the Book of the Dead indicates that according to the ideas of priestly wisdom he was a being which could be found in the human soul itself. This is expressed clearly in everything they thought about death and the dead. When the body is given up to the earth, preserved within the earthly element, then the eternal part of man sets out upon the path to the primordial eternal. It is called to judgment before Osiris, who is surrounded by forty-two judges of the dead. The fate of the eternal in man depends upon the verdict of these judges. If the soul has confessed its sins and is found to be reconciled with eternal righteousness, invisible powers approach it, saying, “The Osiris N. has been purified in the pool which is south of the field of Hotep and north of the field of Locusts, where the gods of verdure purify themselves at the fourth hour of the night and the eighth hour of the day with the image of the heart of the gods, passing from night to day.” Thus within the eternal cosmic order the eternal part of man is addressed as an Osiris. After the title Osiris, the individual name of the person concerned is mentioned. The person who is uniting himself with the eternal cosmic order also calls himself “Osiris.” “I am Osiris N. Growing under the blossoms of the fig tree is the name of Osiris N.”⁶⁰ Thus man becomes an Osiris. The Osiris-existence is only a perfect stage of development of human existence. It seems obvious that even the Osiris who judges within the eternal cosmic order is none other than a perfect man. Between human existence and divine existence is a difference in degree and number. At the root of this lies the conception of the Mysteries concerning the mystery of “number.” The cosmic being Osiris is One; nevertheless he exists undivided in every human soul. Each man is an Osiris, yet the one Osiris must be represented as a special being. Man is engaged in development; at the end of his evolutionary course lies his existence as a god. Within this conception one must speak of divinity rather than of a perfected, completed divine being.

[ 2 ] There is no doubt that according to such a conception only one who has already reached the gate of the eternal cosmic order as an Osiris can really enter upon Osiris-existence. So the highest life man can lead must consist in changing himself into an Osiris. In the true man an Osiris must already live as perfectly as possible during mortal life. Man becomes perfect when he lives as an Osiris, when he experiences what Osiris has experienced. In this way the Osiris myth receives its deeper significance. It becomes the example of a man who wishes to awaken the eternal within him. Osiris had been torn to pieces, killed by Typhon. The fragments of his body were cherished and cared for by his consort Isis. After his death he let a ray of his light fall upon her, and she bore him Horus. Horus took over the earthly tasks of Osiris. He is the second Osiris, still imperfect but progressing toward the true Osiris.—The true Osiris is in the human soul. The latter is of a transitory nature at first. However, its transitory nature is destined to give birth to the eternal. Therefore man may consider himself to be the tomb of Osiris. The lower nature (Typhon) has killed the higher nature in him. Love in his soul (Isis) must cherish and care for the dead fragments; then will be born the higher nature, the eternal soul (Horus), which can progress to Osiris-existence. Whoever strives toward the highest existence must repeat in himself, as a microcosm, the macrocosmic, universal process of Osiris. This is the meaning of the Egyptian “initiation.” The process Plato describes as cosmic,—i.e., that the Creator has stretched the soul of the world upon the body of the world in the form of a cross, and that the cosmic process is a redemption of this crucified soul—on a small scale this process had to happen to man if he was to be capable of Osiris-existence. The neophyte had to develop himself in such a way that his soul-experience, his development as an Osiris, became identified with the cosmic Osiris process. If we could look into the temples of initiation where people were subjected to the transformation into Osiris, we would see that what happened there represented microcosmically the creation of the world. Man, who is descended from the “Father,” was to give birth in himself to the Son. The spellbound god, whom he actually bore within him, was to be revealed in him. The power of earthly nature suppressed this god within him. First this lower nature had to be buried in order that the higher nature might rise again. From this it becomes possible to interpret what is told of the processes of initiation. The candidate was subjected to secret procedures. By means of the latter his earthly nature was killed and his higher nature awakened. It is not necessary to study these procedures in detail. One must only understand their meaning. And this meaning is contained in the acknowledgment which everyone who has been through initiation could make. He could say: Before me floated the endless perspective, at the end of which lies the perfection of the divine. I felt the power of the divine within me. I buried what holds down this power within me. I died to earthly things. I was dead. As a lower man I had died; I was in the netherworld. I communicated with the dead, that is, with those who already have become part of the circle of the eternal cosmic order. After my sojourn in the nether world I arose from the dead. I overcame death, but now I have become different. I have nothing more to do with transitory nature. My transitory nature has become permeated by the Logos. I now belong to those who live eternally, and who will sit at the right hand of Osiris. I myself shall be a true Osiris, united with the eternal cosmic order, and judgment over death and life shall be placed in my hand. The neophyte had to undergo the experience which could lead him to such an acknowledgment. The experience which thus approached man was of the highest kind.

[ 3 ] Let us now imagine that a non-initiate hears that someone has undergone such experiences. He cannot know what has really taken place in the soul of the initiate. In his eyes, the initiate has died physically, has laid in the grave and has risen. When expressed in terms of material reality an occurrence which has spiritual reality at a higher stage of existence appears to break through the order of nature. It is a “miracle.” Such a “miracle” was initiation. Whoever wished really to understand it must have awakened within himself powers which would enable him to reach a higher stage of existence. He had to prepare the whole course of his life in order to approach these higher experiences. However they might take place in individual lives, these prepared experiences always had a quite definite, typical form. So the life of an initiate is a typical one. It may be described apart from the individual personality. Or rather, an individual personality could be characterized only as being on the way toward the divine if he had gone through these definite, typical experiences. As such a personality the Buddha lived with his followers; as such a personality Jesus at first appeared to his community. Today we know of the parallels which exist between the biographies of Buddha and of Jesus. Rudolf Seydel has pointed out these parallels strikingly in his book, Buddha and Christ. We need only follow up the details to see that all objections to these parallels are futile.

[ 4 ] The birth of Buddha is announced by a white elephant who descends to Maya, the queen. He declares that she will bring forth a divine man who “attunes all people to love and friendship and unites them in an intimate company.” In Luke's Gospel is written: “... to a virgin espoused to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David: and the virgin's name was Mary. And the angel came in unto her and said, ‘Hail thou that art highly favored ... Behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name Jesus. He shall be great and shall be called the Son of the Highest.’” Maya's dream is interpreted by the Brahmins, the Indian priests, who know that it signifies the birth of a Buddha. They have a definite, typical idea of a Buddha. The life of the individual personality will have to correspond to this idea. Correspondingly we read in Matthew 2:1, et seq., that when Herod “had gathered all the chief priests and scribes of the people together, he demanded of them where Christ should be born.”—The Brahmin Asita says of Buddha, “This is the child which will become Buddha, the redeemer, the leader to immortality, freedom and light.” Compare this with Luke 2:5: “And behold there was a man in Jerusalem whose name was Simeon; and the same man was just and devout, waiting for the consolation of Israel: and the Holy Ghost was upon him ... And when the parents brought in the child Jesus to do for him after the custom of the law, then took he him up in his arms, and blessed God, and said, Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word: for mine eyes have seen thy salvation, which thou hast prepared before the face of all people; a light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of thy people Israel.” It is related of Buddha that at the age of twelve he was lost, and was found again under a tree, surrounded by minstrels and sages of ancient times, whom he was teaching. This corresponds to Luke 2:41–47: “Now his parents went to Jerusalem every year at the feast of the passover. And when he was twelve years old, they went up to Jerusalem after the custom of the feast. And when they had fulfilled the days, as they returned, the child Jesus tarried behind in Jerusalem, and Joseph and his mother knew not of it. But they, supposing him to have been in the company, went a day's journey; and they sought him among their kinsfolk and acquaintance. And when they found him not, they turned back again to Jerusalem, seeking him. And it came to pass that after three days they found him in the temple, sitting in the midst of the doctors, both hearing them, and asking them questions. And all that heard him were astonished at his understanding and answers.”—After Buddha had lived in solitude and had returned, he was received by the benediction of a virgin: “Blessed is the mother, blessed is the father, blessed is the wife to whom thou belongest.” But he replied, “Only they are blessed who are in Nirvana,” i.e., those who have entered the eternal cosmic order. In Luke 11:2–28 is written: “And it came to pass, as he spake these things, a certain woman of the company lifted up her voice and said unto him, ‘Blessed is the womb that bare thee, and the paps which thou hast sucked.’ But he said, ‘Yea rather, blessed are they that hear the word of God, and keep it.’” In the course of Buddha's life the tempter approaches him, promising him all the kingdoms of the earth. Buddha will have nothing to do with this, answering, “I know well that a kingdom is appointed to me, but I do not desire an earthly one; I shall become Buddha and make all the world exult for joy.” The tempter has to admit, “My reign is over.” Jesus answers the same temptation in the words: “Get thee hence, Satan, for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve. Then the devil leaveth him.” (Matthew 4:10,11)—This description of parallelism might be extended to many other points: the results would be the same. The life of Buddha ended sublimely. During a journey he felt ill. He came to the river Hiranja, near Kuschinagara. There he lay down on a carpet spread for him by his favorite disciple, Ananda. His body began to shine from within. He died transfigured, a body of light, saying, “Nothing endures.” The death of Buddha corresponds with the transfiguration of Jesus: “And it came to pass about eight days after these sayings, he took Peter and John and James, and went up into a mountain to pray. And as he prayed, the fashion of his countenance was altered, and his raiment was white and glistening.” At this point Buddha's earthly life ends, but the most important part of the life of Jesus begins here: Passion, Death and Resurrection. The difference between Buddha and Christ lies in what necessitated the continuation of the life of Christ Jesus beyond that of Buddha. Buddha and Christ are not understood by simply throwing them together. (This will become evident in the subsequent chapters of this book.) Other accounts of the death of Buddha need not be considered here, although they also reveal profound aspects of the subject.

[ 5 ] The conformity in the lives of these two redeemers leads to an unequivocal conclusion. What this conclusion must be, the narratives themselves indicate. When the priest sages hear about the manner of the birth they know what is involved. They know that they are dealing with a divine man. They know beforehand what conditions will exist for the personality who is appearing. Therefore his career can only correspond with what they know about the career of a divine man. Such a career appears in their Mystery wisdom, marked out for all eternity. It can be only as it must be. Such a career appears as an eternal law of nature. Just as a chemical substance can behave only in a quite definite way, so a Buddha or a Christ can live only in a quite definite way. His career cannot be described as one would write his incidental biography; rather, it is described by giving the typical features contained for all time in the wisdom of the Mysteries. The legend of Buddha is no more a biography in the ordinary sense, than the Gospels are intended to be an ordinary biography of the Christ Jesus. Neither describes an incidental career; both describe a career marked out for a world-redeemer. The patterns for both must be sought in the traditions of the Mysteries, not in outward physical history. To those who have perceived their divine nature, Buddha and Jesus are initiates in the most eminent sense. (Jesus is an initiate because the Christ Being incarnates in him.) Thus everything transitory is removed from their lives. What is known about initiates can be applied to them. The incidental events of their lives are no longer described. It is said of them, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God ... And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” (John 1:1,14)

[ 6 ] The life of Jesus, however, contains more than the life of Buddha. Buddha's life ends with the transfiguration. The most significant part of the life of Jesus begins after the transfiguration. In the language of the initiates, Buddha reaches the point where divine light begins to shine in man. He stands before the death of the physical. He becomes the cosmic light. Jesus goes further. He does not die physically at the moment the cosmic light transfigures him. At that moment he is a Buddha. But at the same moment he enters upon a stage which finds expression in a higher degree of initiation. He suffers and dies. The physical part of him disappears. But the spiritual, the cosmic light does not vanish. His resurrection follows. He reveals himself to his community as Christ. At the moment of his transfiguration, Buddha dissolves into the hallowed life of the universal Spirit. Christ Jesus awakens this universal Spirit once more to present existence in a human form. Such an event had formerly taken place in a pictorial sense at the higher stages of initiation. Those initiated according to the Osiris myth attained to such a resurrection in their consciousness as a pictorial experience. In the life of Jesus this “great” initiation was added to the Buddha initiation, not as a pictorial experience, but as reality. Buddha demonstrated by his life that man is the Logos and that he returns to this Logos, to the light, when his physical part dies. In Jesus the Logos itself became a person. In him the Word became flesh.

[ 7 ] What was enacted for the ancient cults of the Mysteries within the Mystery-temples, through Christianity has been grasped as a world-historical fact. His community acknowledged the Christ Jesus, the initiate, initiated in a uniquely great way. He proved to them that the world is divine. For the community of Christ, the wisdom of the Mysteries was indissolubly bound up with the personality of Christ Jesus. The belief that he lived and that those who acknowledge him, belong to him, replaced what would have been attained previously through the Mysteries. Henceforth for those in the community of Christ a part of what previously was only to be attained by the methods of the mystics, could be replaced by the conviction that the divine is given in the Word which had been present. The determining factor was no longer only that for which each individual spirit had to undergo a long preparation, but also the account of what they had heard and seen, handed down by those who were with Jesus. “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we ourselves have beheld, which our hands have touched, concerning the Word of life ... that which we have seen and heard, we proclaim to you, that you may have fellowship with us.” Thus it is written in the first Epistle of John. This immediate reality is to embrace all future generations in a living bond; as a Church it is to extend mystically from generation to generation. In this way we may understand the words of Augustine, “I should not believe the Gospel except as moved by the authority of the Church.”⁶¹ The Gospels, therefore, contain in themselves no evidence of their truth, but they are to be believed because they are founded on the personality of Jesus, and because in a mysterious way the Church draws from this personality the power to make them appear as truth. The Mysteries handed down through tradition the means of coming to the truth; the Christian community propagates this truth itself. Faith in the One, the primordial Initiator was to be added to faith in the mystical forces which light up in man's inner being during initiation. The mystics sought apotheosis; they wished to experience it. Jesus was made divine; we must cling to him; then we are participants in his apotheosis within the community established by him:—This became Christian conviction. What was made divine in Jesus, is made divine for his whole community. “Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.” (Matthew 28:20) The one born in Bethlehem has an eternal character. Thus the Christmas antiphon is able to speak of the birth of Jesus as if it took place every Christmas: “Today Christ is born; today the Saviour has come into the world; today the angels are singing on earth.”⁶²

In the Christ-experience a quite definite stage of initiation is to be seen. When the mystic of pre-Christian times went through this Christ-experience, then, through his initiation, he was in a condition enabling him to perceive something spiritual—in higher worlds—for which the material world had no corresponding fact. He experienced what comprises the Mystery of Golgotha in the higher world. Now when the Christian mystic goes through this experience, through initiation, at the same time he beholds the historical event on Golgotha and knows that in this event, which took place in the world of the senses, is the same content as formerly existed only in the supersensible facts of the Mysteries. What had descended upon the mystics within the Mystery temples in earlier times thus descended upon the community of Christ through the “Mystery of Golgotha.” And initiation gives the Christian mystic the possibility of becoming conscious of this content of the “Mystery of Golgotha,” while faith causes mankind to participate unconsciously in the mystical current which flowed from the events depicted in the New Testament and has been permeating the spiritual life of humanity ever since.

• 60. The Egyptian Book of the Dead, Chapter 125, 19–22. Papyrus of NU.
• 61. Augustine, St., one of the four great Fathers of the Latin Church, born 354 in Tagaste, Numidia, and died as Bishop of Hippo during the siege of that city by the Vandals in 430. Steiner's reference is to Augustine's work, Against the Epistle of Manichaeus called Fundamental, par. 6.
• 62. The Christmas Antiphon to which Steiner refers is found in the Breviarium Romanum, and appears just before the end of the Christmas section, In Nativitate Domini, headed Ad Magnificat Antiphona:
  
  Hodie Christus natus est;
  hodie Salvator apparuit:
  hodie in terra canunt Angeli,
  laetantur Archangeli:
  hodie exultant justi,
  dicentes: Gloria in excelsis
  Deo, alleluia.