The Rudolf Steiner Archive

At the close of yesterday's exposition we indicated the intention to consider next the cardinal issue within the Christ impulse: the Death on the Cross and its significance. But before turning to a delineation of the death of Christ, and thus to the climax of this study cycle, we must discuss today the true meaning and significance of much that we find in the John Gospel itself, as well as its relation to what the other Gospels offer. In the last few days we have been endeavoring to comprehend the Christ impulse and to establish it as an actual event in human evolution by means of quite a different source: by clairvoyant reading of the akashic record; and in a sense we referred only to those passages in the Gospels which appear to confirm what clairvoyant research justifies us in stating as truths.

Today, in order to follow up our studies, we shall consider the John Gospel itself and characterize this important document of mankind from a certain aspect. We said yesterday that the theological research of our time, in as far as it is affected by materialism, can find no points of contact with this John Gospel, is unable to see its historical value; but regarded with the vision of spiritual science this Gospel proves to be one of the most marvelous documents possessed by the human race. It is not too much to say that not only as a religious document but—to use a profane expression—among all purely literary works in existence it is one of the greatest. Let us now approach it from this literary angle.

From the very first chapters—if rightly understood and if one knows what all lies concealed in the words—this Gospel of St. John shows a rounded beauty of style equal to any in the world, although a superficial study does not reveal this fact. What superficial observation discloses first is that in enumerating the miracles the writer of the John Gospel, whose back-ground we now know, mentions precisely seven up to the Lazarus event proper. (The significance of the number seven will be treated in the following lectures.) What were these seven signs?

1. The sign in connection with the Marriage in Cana in Galilee.

2. The sign given in the healing of the nobleman's son.

3. The sign given in the healing of the man who had lain sick for thirty-eight years by the Pool of Bethesda.

4. The sign given in the Feeding of the Five Thousand.

5. The sign given in the vision of Christ walking on the sea.

6. The sign given in the healing of the man born blind. And finally:

7. The greatest of the signs, the initiation of Lazarus, the transformation of Lazarus into the writer of the John Gospel.

These are the seven signs. But now we must ask ourselves, What about these signs, this question of miracles? If you listened attentively to a number of things that were told you in the foregoing lectures you will remember having heard that the state of human consciousness has kept altering throughout the entire course of evolution. We cast our gaze back to remote times and found that men did not issue from a merely animalistic stage of development, but from a form in which they possessed the power of clairvoyance as a congenital endowment. People of that time were clairvoyant, even though their consciousness still lacked the ability to say “I am”. The capacity for self-consciousness was something they had to acquire gradually, and for this they had to forfeit their old clairvoyance. In the future the time will come again when all men are clairvoyant, but without loss of self-consciousness, of the “I am”. Those are the three stages which humanity has in part passed through, in part still has ahead of it.

In Atlantis men still lived in a sort of dream consciousness, but this was clairvoyant. Then they gradually achieved self-consciousness, outer objective consciousness, in exchange for which, however, they gave up the old gift of dim clairvoyance. And finally, what man will have in the future is clairvoyant consciousness coupled with self-consciousness. Thus man traverses the path from an ancient dim clairvoyance through an opaque objective consciousness, finally ascending to conscious clairvoyance.

But in addition to consciousness, everything else about man has changed as well. The belief that conditions must always have been as they are today is due to nothing but human shortsightedness. Everything has evolved. Nothing has always been as it is today, not even men's relation to each other. You have already gathered from intimations in the last lectures that in older epochs—up to the time when the Christ impulse entered human evolution—the influence of soul upon soul was much stronger. Such was human disposition at that time. A man did not merely hear what was told him in externally audible words: in a certain way he could feel and know something that the other felt and thought vividly, livingly. Love meant something quite different from what it does today, albeit in those times it was largely a matter of blood ties. Nowadays it has taken on more of a psychic character, but it has lost its strength. Nor will it regain this until the Christ impulse shall have entered all human hearts. In olden times active love possessed at the same time a healing property, a powerful balm, for the soul of its recipient.

Coincident with the development of the intellect and of cleverness, qualities that came into being only gradually, these ancient direct influences of soul upon soul dwindled away. The gift of acting upon the other's soul, of causing one's own soul force to stream into it, was unquestionably peculiar to the older peoples; and you must therefore imagine the force that one soul could receive from another as much greater, the influence one soul could exert upon another as much stronger, than is the case today. The external historical documents may report nothing of all this, the tablets and monuments may not mention it; but clairvoyant study of the akashic record nevertheless discloses the fact that in olden times the healing of the sick, for example, was extensively accomplished through a psychic influence passing from the one to the other. And the soul possessed many other powers as well. Though today it sounds like a fairy tale, it is a fact that in those times a man's will, if he so desired and had specially trained himself for the purpose, had the power to act soothingly upon the growth of a plant, to accelerate or retard it. Today but scanty remnants of all this are left.
Human life, then, was very different at that time. No one would have been surprised—given the right mutual relationship—at the passing over of a psychic influence from one person to the other.

It must be kept in mind, however, that two or more are needed if the exercise of a psychic influence of that sort is to take effect. We could imagine the possibility of a man imbued with the power of Christ entering our midst nowadays; but those with the requisite faith in him would be very few in number, so that he would not be able to achieve all that can be accomplished by the influence of one soul upon another. For not only must the influence be exerted: someone must be present who is sufficiently developed to be affected by it. Remembering that formerly those who could receive such influences were more numerous, we should not be surprised to learn that for the healing of the sick there indeed existed the means by which psychic influences could take effect; but also, that influences which today can be transmitted only by mechanical means were at that time applied psychically.

We should keep in mind that the Christ event entered human evolution at a very special point in time. Only the very last remnants, so to say, of those soul currents that flowed from man to man were left as a heritage of the old Atlantean age. Humanity was about to descend ever deeper into matter, and the possibility for such psychic currents to be effective constantly diminished. That was the moment at which the Christ impulse had to enter, the impulse which in its nature could accomplish so very much for those who were still sufficiently receptive.

Those who are really familiar with evolution as it applied to mankind will therefore find it quite natural that the Christ Being, having once entered the body of Jesus of Nazareth in about the thirtieth year of His life, could unfold very special powers in this sheath, for the latter had been developing since time immemorial. We mentioned yesterday that this individuality of Jesus of Nazareth had in one former life been incarnated in ancient Persia, and then, passing through one incarnation after another, had continued to rise in its spiritual development. That is why the Christ could dwell in such a body, and why this body could be sacrificed to Him. This the Evangelists knew well, hence they presented the entire narrative in such a way as to be wholly comprehensible for spiritual research. Only, we must take everything in the Gospels literally—that is, we must first learn to read them. As has been said, the deeper meanings of the miracles we shall learn in due time; but here we can ask, for example, why, precisely in the first of the miracles, it is specially emphasized in dealing with the Marriage in Cana of Galilee that this took place in Cana “of Galilee”. Seek as you will, you can find in old Palestine within the radius then known no second Cana; and in such a case it would seem superfluous to specify the locality. Why, then, does the Evangelist tell us that this miracle occurred in Cana "of Galilee"? Because the important point to be stressed was that something occurred which had to take place in Galilee. It means that nowhere else but in Galilee could Christ have found just those people whose presence was indispensable. As I said, an influence implies not only the one who exerts it, but the others as well—those who are appropriately fitted to receive it. Christ's first appearance would not have been possible within the Jewish community proper, but it was possible in Galilee with its mixture of many different tribes and groups. Just because members of so many peoples from various parts of the world were assembled in one spot, there was far less blood relationship, and above all, far less faith in it, than in Judea, in the narrow circle of the Hebrew people. Galilee was a heterogenous racial mixture.

But what was it to which Christ, in view of His impulse, felt Himself particularly called? We have said that one of His most significant utterances was,

Before Abraham was, was the I am

;

and the other,

I and the Father are one

.

By this He meant: among those who cling to the old forms of life the ego is entrenched in a system of blood relationships. The words I and Father Abraham are one aroused a very special feeling in the true confessor of the Old Testament, a feeling nowadays very difficult to share. What a man calls his own self, circumscribed by birth and death, he sees as transitory. But one who had true faith in the Old Testament, who was influenced by the widespread teachings of that time, asserted—not allegorically, but as a fact: As regards myself I am isolated; but I am a member of a great organism, of a great living whole reaching back to Father Abraham. Just as my finger can remain a living member only as long as it is part of my body, so my memory is contingent upon my feeling myself a member of the great folk organism that goes back to Father Abraham. I am part of the great complex, exactly as my finger is part of my body. Cut off my finger and it ceases to be a finger: it is safe only as long as it is part of my hand, my hand part of my arm, and my arm part of my body; it ceases to have meaning if severed from my hand. And in like manner, I myself have meaning only when I feel myself a member of all the generations through which the blood flows down from Father Abraham. Then I feel sheltered. My individual ego is transient and fleeting, but not so this whole great folk organism way back to Father Abraham. When I sense and feel myself wholly embraced by it I conquer my temporally transient ego: I am sheltered in one great ego, the ego of my people that has come down to me from Father Abraham through the blood of the generations.

That represents the conviction of the Old Testament adherents: all the great events narrated in the Old Testament, everything that today seems miraculous, occurred through the power of the inner experience contained in the words, I and Father Abraham are one. But the time came when men were destined to relinquish this state of consciousness for another, hence it gradually disappeared. That is why Christ could not address those who, on the one hand, had lost the magic power of influencing by means of blood ties, and on the other, still believed only in the common bond with Father Abraham. Clearly, among these Christ could not find the faith necessary for enabling His soul to flow actively into other souls; and for this purpose He had to turn to those who, owing to their mixed blood, no longer clung to this old belief: to the Galileans. That is where His mission had to commence. Even though the old state of consciousness was generally on the wane, still He found in Galilee a medley of peoples that stood at the beginning of the era in which blood became mixed. From all quarters tribes assembled here that had previously been governed solely by the forces of the old blood ties. They were on the point of finding the transition. They vividly retained the feeling that their fathers were still endowed with the old consciousness states, that they possessed the magic powers which act from soul to soul. Among these people Christ could inaugurate His new mission, which consisted in endowing man with an ego consciousness no longer bound to blood relationship; an ego consciousness which could say, It is within myself that I shall find the connection with the spiritual Father Who, instead of letting His blood flow down through the generations, radiates His spiritual force into each individual soul. The ego which is within me, and which is in direct communion with the spiritual Father, was before Abraham was. It is for me, then, to infuse into this ego a force that will be strengthened through my being aware of my connection with the spiritual Father force of the world. I and the Father are one. No longer I and Father Abraham—that is, a physical ancestor.

Such were the people to whom Christ turned, people who had arrived at the point of understanding this, people who, having broken away from the blood ties by intermarriage, needed to find the strong force—not in consanguinity, but in the individual soul: the force that can lead men gradually to express the spiritual in the physical.—Do not ask, Why do we not see things happening today as they happened then? Aside from the fact that he who has the will to see them can see them, we must remember that men have emerged from that state of consciousness and descended into the world of matter; that the period in question represented the boundary line; and that Christ used the last representatives of the previous epoch of human evolution in whom to demonstrate the power of spirit over matter. The signs that were done while the old state of consciousness was still present, but disappearing, were intended as an example and a symbol—a symbol of faith.

Now let us turn to this Marriage in Cana of Galilee itself. If I were to develop in detail all the implications indicated in the John Gospel, in the entire Gospel content, fourteen lectures would certainly not suffice: several years would be needed. But such a literal development of the subject would only serve to confirm what I can suggest in brief elucidations.

The first thing we are told in connection with this first sign is:

There was a marriage in Cana of Galilee

.

Here we must stop to realize that the John Gospel contains not one word that has not a definite meaning. Well, then: why a marriage? Because a marriage brings about on a single occasion what the Christ mission effects with such far-reaching results: it brings people together. And then, a marriage “in Galilee”? It was in Galilee that the ancient blood ties were severed, that mutually alien bloods came to mingle. Now, Christ's task was intimately connected with this mixing of blood, so we are here dealing with intermarriages having the object of creating progeny among people who are no longer related by blood.

What I am now about to say will seem very strange to you. What would people have felt in such a case in very old times when there still prevailed the close or endogamous marriage, as one is inclined to call it in the spiritual-scientific sense? We must realize that the transformation of this close marriage into a distant or exogamous marriage is very much a part of human evolution, and that what I have already said explains what an endogamous marriage means. Among all people of ancient times it was contrary to law to marry outside of the tribe, away from consanguinity. People related by blood, members of the same tribe, intermarried; and this custom of marrying within the tribe, within blood relationship, resulted in the marvel of engendering intense magical force. This can be verified at any time by means of spiritual-scientific research. The descendants of a blood-related tribe possessed, as a consequence of such intermarriage of relatives, magical powers that permitted one soul to act upon another.

Let us imagine that in ancient times we had been asked to attend a wedding, and that the customary drink—in this case, wine—had given out. What would have happened? Provided the right relations existed among the blood-related members of this wedding party, it would have been possible, through the magical power of love arising out of consanguinity, for the water—or whatever was offered later in place of wine—to be sensed as wine as a result of the psychic influence of the people present. Wine is what they would have been drinking if the right magical influence had been exerted by the one person on the rest. Do not tell me this wine would still have been but water! A sensible person would reply to that: For the human being, things are of the nature in which they communicate themselves to his organism: they are what they become for him, not what they look like. I believe that even today many a wine lover would like water if, by means of some influence or other, it appeared to be changed into wine; that is, if it tasted like wine and produced the same effect in his organism. Nothing else is necessary than that a man should take water for wine.—What, then, was required in olden times to render possible such a sign as that of the water in the vessels becoming wine when it was drunk? The magical power deriving from blood relationship, that is what was required. And furthermore, those assembled at the Marriage in Cana of Galilee possessed the psychic capacity for sensing that sort of thing. Only, a transition had to be brought about.

The story continues in the John Gospel:

And the mother of Jesus was there: and both Jesus was called, and his disciples, to the marriage.

And since they lacked wine, the mother of Jesus drew attention to this, and said to Him:

They have no wine.

I said that a transition must be effected if such an event is to take place: the psychic force had to be assisted by something. By what, then? Here we come to the utterance which, as it is usually translated, is really a blasphemy; for I believe it will strike any sensitive person as offensive when, to the statement “they have no wine”, Jesus replies: “Woman, what have I to do with thee? mine hour is not yet come.” From any angle it is impossible to accept that in a document of this sort. Imagine the ideal of love, as the Gospels describe the relations between Jesus of Nazareth and His mother, and then try to imagine Him using the expression, "Woman, what have I to do with thee"! It is not necessary to say more: the rest must be felt. But the point is, these words are not in the text. Examine this passage in the John Gospel and then look up the Greek text. This contains nothing more than the words employed by Jesus of Nazareth in indicating a certain event:

Woman, this passeth over from me unto thee.

What He referred to was that subtle, intimate force which passed from soul to soul, from Him to His mother; and that is what He needed at this moment. Greater signs He was as yet unable to perform: for this the time must gradually ripen. Therefore He says: My time—the time when I shall work through my own force—is not yet come.—For the present, that magnetic psychic union between the soul of Jesus of Nazareth and His mother was still indispensable.

“Woman, this now passeth over from me unto thee.” Otherwise—well, after an utterance like “Woman, what have I to do with thee?” why would she turn to the servants and say, “Whatsoever he saith unto you, do it”? She had to possess the old forces of which nowadays people can have no conception; and she knew that He referred to the blood tie between them, to the bond that should then pass over into the others. Then she knew that something like an invisible spiritual force held sway, capable of effectuating something.—And here let me beg you to read the Gospel—really to read it. I ask how anyone can come to terms with the Gospel who believes that something happened at that wedding—I really don't know what—that six ordinary jars stood there “for the purifying of the Jews”, as we are told; and that according to ordinary observation—without reference to anything such as we have just been considering—the water turned into wine. How could such a thing have come about externally?

What is the meaning of this miracle? And what is the belief in it held by him who stands before you—in fact, the only faith anybody can have in a miracle? Can it be that here one substance was transformed into another for the benefit of those present? No ordinary interpretation will get us far.—We must assume that the jars which stood there contained no water, for nothing is said about their being emptied. But it says they were filled, so if they had been emptied and then refilled—assuming the water had really been changed to wine as by a sleight of hand trick—one would really have to believe that the water which had previously been in the jars had been turned into wine. You see, this does not help: nothing squares.

We must understand that the jars must obviously have been empty, because a special significance attached to the filling of them. “Whatsoever he saith unto you, do it,” the mother had told the servants. What sort of water did Christ need? He needed water fresh from the sources of nature; and that is why it was necessary to specify that the water had just been drawn. The only water suitable for Christ's purpose was such as had not yet lost the inner forces that are inherent in any element so long as it is united with nature. As has been said, the John Gospel contains not one word that is not fraught with deep meaning. Freshly drawn water had to be used because Christ is the Being Who had but recently approached the earth and become associated with the forces that work in the earth itself. Now, when the living forces of the water work, in turn, with “that which flows from me unto thee”, it becomes possible for the event described in the Gospel to take place. The governor of the feast is called, and he is under the impression that something unusual has occurred. He does not know what this was—it is specifically stated that he had not seen what happened—only the servants had seen it; but under the influence of what has taken place he now takes the water for wine. That is stated clearly and distinctly, so we know that through psychic force even an outer element—that is, the physical component of the human body—was affected.

And what did the mother of Jesus of Nazareth herself have to possess in order that at this moment her faith might be sufficiently great to produce such an effect? She needed just what she did indeed possess: the realization that He Who was called her son had become the Spirit of the Earth. Then her strong force combined with His, with that which acted from Him upon her, developed so mighty an influence as to produce the effect described.

Thus we have shown, through the whole constellation of conditions surrounding this first sign, how the unison of souls which results from blood ties produces an effect even in the physical world. It was the first sign, and the Christ force is shown at its minimum: it still needed the intensification resulting from contact with the mother's psychic forces, as well as the additional strength residing in certain forces of nature that remained intact in the freshly drawn water. The active force of the Christ Being is here shown at its least; but what is stressed as especially important is its influence upon the other soul and its calling forth from it an activity which the latter is fitted to perform. The essential point is that the Christ force had the power to render the other soul capable of exerting influences: it engendered in the wedding guests as well the ability to taste the water as wine.—But every real force increases through its own exercise, and the second time it is called upon it is already greater. Just as any ordinary force increases with exercise, so is especially a spiritual force strengthened when it has once been successfully applied.

The second of the signs, as you know from the John Gospel, is the healing of the nobleman's son. By what means was he healed? Here again the right answer will be found only by reading the Gospel in the right way and by concentrating on the crucial words of the chapter in question. In the fiftieth verse of the fourth chapter, after the nobleman had told Jesus of Nazareth his story of distress, we read:

Jesus saith unto him, Go thy way, thy son liveth.
And the man believed the word that Jesus had spoken
unto him, and he went his way.

Again we have two souls in accord, the soul of the Christ and that of the boy's father. And when Christ said, Go thy way, thy son liveth, what effect did this have? It enkindled in the other soul the force to believe all that Christ's words implied. These two forces worked together. Christ's utterance had the power so to kindle the other soul that the nobleman believed. Had he not believed, his son would not have recovered. That is the way one force acts upon another: two are needed. And already here we find a greater measure of the Christ force. At the Marriage in Cana it still required the support of the mother's force in order to function at all. Now it has progressed to the point of being able to impart the kindling word to the nobleman's soul. We behold an intensification of the Christ force.

Passing to the third sign, the healing at the Pool of Bethesda of the man who had lain sick for thirty-eight years, we must again seek the most important words that throw light on the whole subject. They are these:

Jesus saith unto him, Rise, take up thy bed, and walk.

Speaking of his being forced to remain prone, the sick man had previously said that he could not move:

Sir, I have no man, when the water is troubled, to put me into the pool: but while I am coming, another steppeth down before me.

But Christ spoke to him—and it is important that it was on the Sabbath, a day of general rejoicing and great brotherly love—clothing His injunction in the words, Rise, take up thy bed, and walk. This utterance we must take in conjunction with the other equally important one in which He tells him:

Behold, thou art made whole: sin no more, lest a worse thing come unto thee.

What does that mean? It means that there was a connection between the man's sickness that had persisted for thirty-eight years, and his sin. We need not enquire at the moment whether the sin had been committed in this life or in a former one. The point is that Christ infused into the other's soul the force to accomplish something that reached right down into his psycho-moral nature. Here again we see an intensification of the Christ force. Previously, all that was involved was something intended to produce only a physical effect; but here it is a question of a sickness of which Christ Himself said that it had to do with the man's sin. At this moment Christ was able to intervene in the sick man's very soul. The previous sign still required the presence of the boy's father, but here the Christ force acts directly on the sick man's soul.

A special magic is lent this event by reason of its having been enacted on the Sabbath. Present-day man no longer has any feeling for such things, but the fact that this happened on the Sabbath meant something to a believer in the Old Testament: it was something out of the ordinary; hence the reason why the Jews were so indignant at the sick man was that he carried his bed on the Sabbath. That is an extraordinarily significant detail—people should learn to think when they read the Gospels. They should not consider it a matter of course that the sick man could be cured, that one now walked who for thirty-eight years had not been able to walk. What they should do is ponder a passage such as the following:

The Jews therefore said unto him that was cured, it is the sabbath day: it is not lawful for thee to carry thy bed.

What struck them was not that the man had been cured, but that he carried his bed on the Sabbath.

So it was an integral part of the healing of this sick man that the whole scene should play on the hallowed day. Christ Himself harbored the thought, If the Sabbath is indeed to be dedicated to God, the souls of men must enjoy special strength on this day by virtue of the divine force.—And it was by means of this force that He worked upon the man before Him; that is, it was transmitted to the sick man's own soul. Hitherto the latter had not found in his soul the force that would overcome the consequences of his sin, but now he has it as an effect of the Christ force. Another intensification.—As I have said, the essential nature of the miracles will be dealt with later, and for the moment we will pass on.

The fourth sign is the Feeding of the Five Thousand. Again seeking the most significant passage, we must bear in mind that an event of this sort should not be viewed in the light of present-day consciousness. Had those who wrote about Christ at the time the John Gospel was written believed what our materialistic age believes today, their narratives would have been very different, for quite other things would have struck them as important. In this case they were not particularly surprised even at the phenomenon of five thousand being fed from so small a supply; but what is most important and specially emphasized is the following passage:

And Jesus took the loaves; and when he had given thanks, he distributed them to the disciples, and the disciples to them that were set down; and likewise of the fishes as much as they would.

Just what is it that Christ Jesus does here? In order to bring about what was to take place He makes use of the souls of His disciples, of those who had been with Him and had by degrees matured to the level of His stature. They are a part of the procedure. They surround Him; and in their souls He can now evoke the power of charity: His force flows forth into that of the disciples. Of the manner in which this event could take place we will speak later, but here we must again observe an increase in the Christ force. At the previous sign He infused His force into the man who had lain sick for thirty-eight years, whereas here it acts upon the force of His disciples' souls. What is active here is the intensification of forces that proceeds from the soul of the master to the souls of the disciples. The force has expanded from the one soul to the souls of others: it has grown.

Already at this point, then, there dwells in the disciples' souls the same principle that dwells in the soul of Christ. Anyone inclined to ask what happens as a result of such an influence should observe the facts, should consider what actually occurred when Christ's powerful force acted not alone but kindled the force in other souls, so that it then worked on. There are none today with such living faith: they may believe theoretically, but not with sufficient strength. But not until they do so will they be able to observe what occurred there. Spiritual research knows very well what occurred.

So we observe a step-by-step increase of the Christ force.—The fifth sign, told in the same chapter, begins:

And when even was now come, his disciples went down unto the sea, and entered into a ship, and went over the sea toward Capernaum. And it was now dark, and Jesus was not come to them. And the sea arose by reason of a great wind that blew. So when they had rowed about five and twenty or thirty furlongs, they see Jesus walking on the sea, and drawing nigh unto the ship: and they were afraid.

Modern publishers of the Gospels assign to this chapter the highly superfluous title, “Jesus walks on the sea”—as though that were stated anywhere in this chapter! Where does it say, “Jesus walks on the sea”? It says, “The disciples saw Jesus walking on the sea.” That is the point. The Gospels must be taken literally. It is simply a case of the Christ force having again increased in strength. So powerful had it become as a natural result of its exercise in the previous deeds that not only could it now act from one soul upon another—not only could the soul of Christ communicate itself, in its force, to other souls—but the Christ could live in His own form before the soul of another who was ripe for it.

The event, then, occurred as follows: Someone who is absent possesses so great a force that it acts upon men at a distance, far away. But the influence of the Christ force is now so powerful that it does more than set free a force in the disciples, as had been the case with those who had sat with Him on the mountain: there the force had merely passed over into the disciples in order that the miracle might be performed. Now, although their physical sight could not reach the Christ, they had the power to see Him, to behold His very form. Christ could become visible at a distance to those with whose souls His own had united. His own form is now sufficiently advanced to be seen spiritually. At the moment when the possibility of physical vision disappeared, there arose in the disciples all the more intensely the ability to see spiritually—and they saw the Christ. But the nature of this seeing at a distance is such that the image of the object in question appears in the immediate vicinity.—Again an increase of the Christ power.

The next sign is the healing of the man born blind; and this narrative, as it appears in the John Gospel, is again particularly distorted. Doubtless you have often read the story:

And as Jesus passed by, he saw a man which was blind from his birth. And his disciples asked him, saying, Master, who did this sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind? Jesus answered, Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents; but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.

And then He healed him.

We need only ask, could any Christian attitude interpret the matter as follows? Here is a man born blind; his blindness is not a result of his parents' sin, nor of his own; but he was rendered blind by God in order that Christ might come and perform a miracle for the glory of God. In other words, in order that a miraculous act might be ascribed to God, God had first to make the man blind.

The original passage was simply not read correctly. It does not say at all that “the works of God should be made manifest in him”. If we would understand this miracle we must examine the old usage of the word “God”. You can do this most readily by turning to another chapter in which Christ is positively accused of asserting of himself that He and God were one. How does He reply?

Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are Gods?

What Christ meant by this answer was that in the innermost soul of man there is the potential nucleus of a God: something divine. How often have we not pointed out that the fourth principle of the human being is the potential human capacity for the divine! “Ye are Gods.” That is, something divine dwells in you. It is not the human being but something different, not the person of a man as he lives on earth between birth and death; and it is different also from what man inherits from his parents. Whence derives this element of divinity, this human individuality? It passes through repeated earth lives from incarnation to incarnation: it comes over from an earlier earth life, from a previous incarnation. Hence we read, not the man's parents have sinned, nor has his own personality—the personality one ordinarily addresses as “I”; but in a previous incarnation he created the cause of his blindness in this life. He became blind because out of a former life the works of the God within him revealed themselves in his blindness. Christ Jesus here points clearly and distinctly to karma, the law of cause and effect.

What principle in man had to be worked upon if this kind of sickness was to be healed? Not upon what lives as a transitory ego between birth and death: the forces must penetrate deeper, must enter the ego that continues from one life to another. Again the Christ force has increased. Hitherto we have seen it influencing only what is directly before it; now it acts upon the principle that survives human life between birth and death, that continues from life to life. Christ feels Himself the representative of the I Am. As He pours His force into the I Am—as thus the exalted God of Christ communicates Himself to the God in man—the blind man receives the force enabling him to heal himself from within. Now Christ has penetrated to the innermost being of the soul. His force has acted upon the eternal individuality of the sick man and strengthened it by causing His own force to appear in this individuality, thereby influencing even the consequences of former incarnations.

What intensification still remains for the Christ force to achieve? None but the ability to approach another and awaken in him the capacity for enkindling the Christ impulse in himself, so that his whole being is saturated with it and he becomes another, a Christ-permeated man. And that is what occurred in the Raising of Lazarus, where we find still another increase in the Christ force. It has progressed step by step throughout.

Where else in the world could you find a lyrical document of such glorious composition? No other author has mastered composition on such a plane. Who would not bow down in reverence when reading the marvellous step-wise upbuilding in the narrative of these events! Even contemplating the John Gospel only as an artistic composition we cannot but feel deep reverence. It all grows step by step and rises steadily.

One point remains to be elucidated. We have pointed out a number of isolated features tending to show the intensification in the sequence of signs, of miracles; but the narrative embraces a great deal in between, and we must examine the organization of the whole. Tomorrow it will be our task to show that, in addition to the admirable intensification in the miracles, there is definite purpose in the way all the connecting links are embodied: we realize that these could not possibly have been filled in better than was done by the writer of the John Gospel. Today we have considered its artistic composition and found it unthinkable that a work of art could be more perfectly or beautifully composed than is the John Gospel up to the description of the Raising of Lazarus; but only one who can read aright and knows what is essential senses its great and mighty meaning. It is the mission of anthroposophy to bring this meaning before our souls. But this John Gospel contains more. Our expositions of it will be followed by others imbued with a wisdom loftier than ours; but this wisdom will in turn serve to find fresh truths, just as during the past seven years our wisdom has served to find what cannot be found without anthroposophy.

Continuing the study of man's various illnesses and health that we made a week ago, in the course of this winter we will take up in more and more detail those things with which they are connected. Our studies will then culminate in a generally more exact recognition of human nature than has previously been possible through anthroposophy. Today, because we will need it later, we will have to include a discussion of the nature and meaning of the Ten Commandments of Moses. Then we will have to say something about the deep significance of such concepts as original sin, redemption and so on, and we will see how these concepts gain new meaning in the light of our latest achievements, including those of science. To that end we must first examine more closely the fundamental nature of this remarkable document, which, projecting from out [of] the prehistory of the Israelites, appears to us as one of the most important stones in the building of the temple that was erected as a kind of anteroom of Christianity.

It can become increasingly evident in such a document as the Ten Commandments how little the form in which men know the Bible today corresponds to this document itself. From the details given in the last two lectures on “The Bible and Wisdom,” you will have felt how wrong it would be to say that we are simply finding fault with details in the translation and that there is no need to be so exact. It would be superficial to treat these things in such a way. Recall that we pointed out how the correct translation of the fourth verse of the second chapter of Genesis should actually read, “The following will recount the generations, or what proceeds from heaven and earth,” and that in Genesis the same word is used for “the descendants of heaven and earth” as later on where it reads, “This is the book of the generations—or descendants—of Adam.” The same word is used in both instances. It is of great significance that in the description of man's proceeding out of heaven and earth the same word is used as later where the descendants of Adam are spoken of. Such things are not merely pedantic quibbling that would put right the translation, but rather they touch the nerve not only of the translation but of the understanding of this early document of man as well. We actually speak out of the living sources of our anthroposophic world view when we say that to restore the Bible to man in a true form is one of the most important tasks of this world view, indeed, of anthroposophy itself. Above all, we are here interested in what is generally said regarding the Ten Commandments.

The Ten Commandments are interpreted by the great majority of men today as if they were legal ordinances, that is, like the laws of any modern state. It is conceded, of course, that the laws of the Ten Commandments are more extensive and general, and have a validity independent of their time and place. They are thus held to be more universal, but men are still conscious of them as having the same effect or objective as any modern legislation. So seen, however, they do not contain the actual vital nerve that lives in them. This is borne out by the fact that all translations presently available have unconsciously incorporated an essentially superficial explanation that is not at all in the spirit of their original meaning. When we enter into this spirit, you will see how the interpretation of them forms part of the studies we have just begun, even though it may appear that in discussing them we are creating an inappropriate diversion.

By way of introduction, let us make at least an approximate attempt to render the Ten Commandments into our language, and then try to approach the subject more closely. It will be found that many things in this translation—if we want to call it such—will have to be elaborated, but as we shall soon see, we want above all to touch the vital nerve, the real sense, of them in the idiom of our language. If one translates according to the sense of the text without referring to the dictionary word for word—in such a translation only the worst can result, naturally, for it is the word and soul value that the whole thing had in its own time that is important—if the sense is captured, then these Ten Commandments would run as follows.

First Commandment. I am the eternal divine Whom you experience in yourself. I led you out of the land of Egypt where you could not follow Me in you. Henceforth, you shall not put other gods above Me. You shall not recognize as higher gods those who show you an image of anything that appears above in the heavens, nor that works out of the earth, nor between heaven and earth. You shall not worship anything that is below the divine in yourself, for I am the eternal in you that works into your body and hence affects the coming generations. I am of divine nature working forth. If you do not recognize Me in you, I shall pass away as your divine nature in your children, grandchildren and great grandchildren, and their bodies will become waste. If you recognize Me in you, I shall live on as you to the thousandth generation, and the bodies of your people will prosper.

Second Commandment. You shall not speak in error of Me in you, for everything false about the “I” in you will corrupt your body.

Third Commandment. You shall distinguish work day from Sabbath in order that your existence may become an image of My existence. For what lives in you as “I” created the world in six days and lived within Himself on the seventh day. Thus shall your doing and your son's doing and your daughter's doing and your servants' doing and your beasts' doing and the doing of whatever else is with you be turned for only six days toward the outer; on the seventh day, however, shall your gaze seek Me in you.

Fourth Commandment. Continue to work in the ways of your Father and mother so that the possessions they have earned by the power I have developed in them will remain with you as your property.

Fifth Commandment. Do not slay.

Sixth Commandment. Do not commit adultery.

Seventh Commandment. Do not steal.

Eighth Commandment. Do not disparage the worth of your fellowman by speaking false of him.

Ninth Commandment. Do not look begrudgingly upon what your fellowman holds as possessions.

Tenth Commandment. Do not look begrudgingly upon the wife of your fellowman, nor upon his servants, nor upon the other creatures by which he prospers.

Now let us ask ourselves what these Ten Commandments really show us and we shall see that, not only in the first part but in a seemingly hidden way also in the last part, they show us that the Jewish people were told through Moses that the force that had proclaimed itself in the burning bush to Moses, using the words, “I am the I AM!”—Ehjeh asher Ehjeh—as its name, was to be henceforth with the Jewish people. What is referred to is the fact that the other peoples in the evolution of our earth were not able to recognize the “I am,” the actual original ground of the fourth part of man's being, so intensively and dearly as the Jewish people. The God Who poured a drop of His Being into man so that his fourth member became the bearer of this drop—the ego bearer—this God became known to His people for the first time through Moses.

Therefore we can interpret the Ten Commandments as follows. The Jehovah God had indeed worked in mankind's evolution until that time, but the effect of the work of spiritual beings can only become manifest after it has taken place. Though there was much that was working into the ancient peoples, it was through Moses that it came into being as concept, as idea, and as actual soul force. It was essential that he should make clear to his people how their egohood was going to effect their lives. With these people Jehovah is to be seen as a kind of transition being who pours the drop into the individuality of man but who is at the same time a national God. The individual Jew still felt with a part of himself a connection with the ego of Abraham's incarnation that streamed through the entire Jewish race. This was to change only with the advent of Christianity. But what was to occur on earth through Christ was foretold in the Old Testament—especially through what Moses had to say to his people.

So we see the full power of ego recognition slowly permeating the Jewish people in the account of the Old Testament. The Jewish people were to be made fully conscious of the effect it would have upon man, to feel the ego within himself, to experience God's Name, “I am the I AM!” and its effect upon his innermost soul.

These things are experienced abstractly today. The ego and what is connected with it are spoken of and they remain just words. But when the ego was first given to the Jewish people in the form of the old Jehovah God it was experienced as a new force that entered man and completely changed the structure of his astral, etheric and physical bodies. His people had to be told that the conditions of their lives, of health and sickness, were different before they had an ego that they were aware of than they would be henceforth. That is why it became necessary to tell them that they were no longer to look up merely to heaven or down merely to the earth when they spoke of the gods, but into their own souls. Looking into one's soul with devotion to the truth brings right living—right down into one's health. This consciousness is at the basis of the Ten Commandments—whereas a wrong conception of what entered the human soul as ego causes man to wither in body and soul, destroys him. One need only be objective to observe how these Ten Commandments are not meant to be merely external laws, how they are actually meant to be just what has been discussed, that is, something that is of utmost significance for the health and well-being of the astral, etheric and physical bodies. But where does one read books correctly and accurately these days? One needs only turn a few more pages to find, in a further discussion of the Ten Commandments, what the Jewish people are told about their effect upon the whole person. There it says, “I remove every sickness from out your midst; there will be no miscarriage nor barrenness in your land, and I will let the number of your days become full.”

That means that when the ego has become permeated with the essence of the Ten Commandments, one of the results will be that you cannot die in the prime of life, but rather, through the properly understood ego, something can stream into the three bodies, the astral, etheric and physical, that will cause the number of your days to become full, that allows you to live in good health until old age. This is clearly stated. But it is necessary to penetrate quite deeply into these things, and modern theologians cannot, of course, do this so easily. A popular little book, of a most irritating sort, especially because it can be had for a few pennies, includes in its remarks about the Ten Commandments the sentence, “One can readily see that in the Ten Commandments the basic laws for humanity are laid down. The one half is the Commandments that have to do with God and the other half the Commandments in regard to people.” Not wanting to be too far off the mark, the author adds that the fourth Commandment must still be included with the first half, which concerns God. How he manages to attribute four to one half, and six to the other half is just a small example of how people go about their work these days. Everything else in this book is commensurate with the interesting equation: four equals six.

We are concerning ourselves here with the explanation given to the Jewish people of how the ego must properly indwell the three bodies of man. It is important, above all, that it be said—and we encounter this in the very first Commandment: When you become aware of this ego as a spark of the divine, then you must feel that within your ego there is a spark, an emission of the highest, the most exhalted divinity who is involved with the creation of the earth!

Let us recall what we have been able to say about the history of man's evolution. His physical body was developed on ancient Saturn; gods then worked upon it. Then his ether body was joined with it on the sun. How both bodies were developed further is again the work of divine spiritual beings. Then on the moon the astral body was incorporated—all the work of divine spiritual beings. What made man into man as we now know him was the incorporation on earth of his ego. The highest divinity took part in this. As long as man was unable to be fully conscious of this fourth member of his being, he could have no notion of the highest divinity who helped create him and lives within him. Man must say to himself, “Divine beings have worked upon my physical body, but they are less exhalted than the Divinity who has now bestowed my ego upon me.” The same is true of the etheric and the astral bodies. Thus, the Jewish people, to whom the ego was first prophesied, had to be told, “Make yourselves aware that all about you are peoples who worship gods who, in their present stage of development, can be effective in their astral, etheric and physical bodies, but they cannot function in the ego. This God who works in the ego was indeed always there. He proclaimed his presence through his working and creating, but his name he proclaims to you now.”

Through his acceptance of the other gods man is not a free being, but rather a being that worships the gods of his lower members. When, however, he consciously recognizes the god, a part of whom he carries within his ego, then he is a free being—one who confronts his fellowmen as a free being. Today, man does not stand in the same relation to his astral, etheric and physical bodies as he does to his ego. He is within his ego. He is immediately connected with it. He will only experience his astral body in this way when he has changed it into manas, and his ether body when he has transformed it to buddhi, when by means of his ego, he has evolved it to a divine being. Though the ego was the last to emerge, it is still that within which man lives. When he has a conscious awareness of his egohood, he is aware of that in which he is directly confronted with the divine, whereas the form of his astral, etheric and physical bodies that he currently possesses, were created by gods who came before.

The nations surrounding the Israelites worshiped those divinities who worked upon the lower members of man's being. When they made an image of those lower divinities, it had the form of something that was on the earth, in heaven or between heaven and earth, because everything that man has within himself is to be found in all the rest of nature. If he makes images out of the mineral kingdom, they can only represent for him the gods who worked on the physical body. If he makes images from the plant kingdom, they can represent only the divinities that worked on his ether body because man has his ether body in common with the plant world. Images from the animal world can symbolize for him only those divinities who worked on his astral body. But man is made the crown of earth's creation by what he perceives in his ego. No external image can express it. So it had to be clearly and strongly emphasized to the Jewish nation, “You bear within you what flows into you from the now highest of Gods. It cannot be symbolized with an image from the mineral, plant or animal kingdom, were it ever so sublime; all gods who are served by this means are lower gods than the God who lives in your ego. If you would worship this God in you the others must withdraw; then you have the true, healthy strength of your ego within you.” Thus what we are told right at the start, in the first of the Ten Commandments, is connected with the deepest mysteries of the development of man, “I am the eternal divine Whom you experience in yourself. The power that I put into your ego became the impulse, the force that enabled you to flee from the land of Egypt where you could not follow Me in you.”

Moses, on the instruction of Jehovah, led his people out of Egypt. In order to make this quite clear to us it is especially indicated that Jehovah wanted to make his people a nation of priests. The peoples of the other nations had the free priest-wisemen among them who were apart from themselves. They were the free ones who knew about the great mystery of the ego, who also knew the ego-god of whom there was no image. Thus there were in these lands the few ego conscious priest-wisemen on the one side, and on the other, the great unfree masses who could only listen to what they, under the strictest authority, let flow to them from the mysteries. It was not the single individual who had this direct relationship, but the priest-wiseman, who mediated for him. Therefore, the health and prosperity of the people depended upon these priest-wisemen; their health and prosperity depended on how they organized things and established institutions.

I would have to tell you a great deal to portray for you the deeper meaning of the Egyptian temple sleep and how it affected the health of the people, if I were to describe what emanated from such a cult—the Apis cult, for example—in the way of popular medicines for their general well-being. The direction and guidance of the people depended upon the initiates in these cult centers to provide the elixirs of health. But now that was to change. The Jews were to become a nation of priests. Everyone should feel a spark of the Jehovah God within himself, should have a direct relationship to Him. No longer was the priest to be the sole mediator. That is why the people had to be so instructed. They had to be made aware that the false images, the lowlier images of the highest god are also destructive to health.

Now we arrive at something that will not come easily to the consciousness of present-day man. Quite terrible wrongs are being committed in this connection. Only those who can penetrate into spiritual science know the subtle ways in which health and sickness develop. If you go through the streets of a big city and take into your soul the ugly things that are on display in windows and signs, it has a devastating effect. Materialistic science has no conception of the extent to which the seeds of illness lie in this kind of hideousness. They seek the causes of illness in bacilli, and do not realize in what a round about way illness has its origin in the soul. Only people familiar with spiritual science will know what it means to take various images into himself.

Above all, the first Commandment says that man must henceforth be able to imagine that beyond all that can be spiritually expressed by means of an image there can be an impulse that cannot be made into an image; this connects the ego to the super-sensible.

“Feel this ego strongly within yourself, feel it so that through this ego there weaves and flows a divine essence that is more exhalted than anything that you can portray through an image. Then you will have in such feeling a healthy force that will make your physical body, your ether body and your astral body healthy.”

A strong ego impulse that creates good health was to be given the Jewish nation. If this ego was properly recognized, the astral, etheric and physical bodies would be well-formed and would produce a strong life force in each individual, and this, in turn, would permeate the entire folk.

Since a folk was reckoned as having a thousand generations, the Jehovah God spoke the word saying, “Through a proper inculcating of the ego, man will of himself become a source of radiating health, so that the whole nation will become a healthy people ‘unto the thousandth generation’.” If, however, the ego is not understood in the right way, the body withers, becomes weak and sickly. If the father does not place the ego into his soul in the right way, his body becomes weak and sickly, the ego slowly withdraws itself, the son becomes sicklier, the grandson more sickly and finally there is nothing more than a shell from which the Jehovah God has retreated. That which does not permit the ego to thrive causes the body to gradually wither right up to its fourth member.

So we see that it is the proper functioning of the ego that is set before the people of Moses in the first of the Commandments.

“I am the eternal divine Whom you experience in yourself. I led you out of the land of Egypt where you could not experience Me in you. Henceforth, you shall not put other gods above Me. You shall not recognize as higher gods those who present to you an image of anything that appears above in the heavens, or that works out of the earth, or between heaven and earth. You shall not worship anything that is below the divine in yourself, for I am the eternal in you that works into your body and thus affects the coming generations. I am of divine nature working forth—not ‘I am a zealous God!’; that says nothing here. If you do not recognize Me as your God, I shall pass away as your ego in your children, grandchildren and great grandchildren, and their bodies will become waste. If you recognize Me in you, I shall live on as you unto the thousandth generation, and the bodies of your people will prosper.”

We see that what is meant is not merely an abstraction, but something living and vital that is to work into the very health of the people. The external character of health is traced back to the spiritual, which is at its source, and which is made known to the people, step by step. This is particularly expressed in the second Commandment that says, “You shall not create any false impressions of my name, of what lives in you as ego, for a true impression makes you healthy and strong, whereby you will prosper, whereas a false impression will cause your body to become wasted!” Thus it was inculcated into every member of the Mosaic nation that whenever he uttered the name of God he should let it be as a warning to himself: “I shall acknowledge the name of what has entered into me, as it lives in me, in that it fosters good health.”

“You shall not speak in error of Me in you, for everything false about the ‘I’ in you will corrupt your body.”

Then in the third Commandment there is the strong and specific reference to how man, when he is a working and creating ego, is a true microcosm, just as the Jehovah God created for six days and rested on the seventh, and man in his creating should follow. In the third Commandment it is expressly indicated: “You, man, in that you are a true ego, shall also be an image of your highest God, and in your deeds work as would your God.” It is an admonition to become more and more like the God who revealed himself to Moses in the burning bush.

“You shall distinguish work day from Sabbath in order that your existence may become an image of My existence. For what lives in you as ‘I’ created the world in six days and lived within Himself on the seventh day. Thus shall your doing and your son's doing and your daughters doing and your servants' doing and your beasts' doing and the doing of whatever else is with you be turned for only six days toward the outer; on the seventh day, however, shall your gaze seek Me in you.”

Now the Ten Commandments go more and more into detail. But always in the background is the thought that the evolutionary force is at work as Jehovah. In the fourth Commandment man is led from the super-sensible to the outwardly sensible. Something important is referred to in the fourth Commandment that must be understood. When man emerges as one conscious of his ego, he requires certain outer means to foster his existence. He develops what we refer to as personal property and possessions. If we were to go back to ancient Egypt, we would not yet find this individual property among the masses. We would find that those who presided over property were also the priest-initiates. But now as each individual ego develops, it becomes necessary for man to take hold of what is outside and around him, and provide a proper setting for himself. For that reason it is stated in the fourth Commandment that he who lets the individual ego work in himself acquires possessions, that these possessions remain bound to the power of the ego that lives in the Jewish nation from father to son to grandson, and that the father's property would not have the security of the strong ego power if the son did not continue his father's work with the strength received from his father. It is therefore said: “Let the ego become so strong in you that it continues on, and that the son can inherit, along with his father's property, the means with which to become integrated into the external environment.” That is how consciously the spirit of the conservation of property was inculcated into Moses's people, and it is strongly emphasized in all the following laws that occult powers stand behind everything that happens in the world. While the right of inheritance is received today externally and abstractly, those who have understood the fourth Commandment have been aware that spiritual forces extend themselves through property from generation to generation, live from one generation to the next, that they heighten the ego power, and that the ego force of the single individual thereby derives something that is brought to it from the ego force of the father.

The fourth Commandment is usually translated in the most grotesque possible manner, but its true meaning is as follows. “The strong ego force is to be developed in you that lives beyond you, and this shall be passed on to your son so that what will live on in him through the property of his ancestors will accrue to his ego force.

“Continue to work in the ways of your father and mother so that the possessions they have earned by the power I have developed in them will remain with you as your property.” In addition, it lies at the basis of all the other laws that man's ego power is heightened by the proper application of the ego impulse but that it is destroyed by its improper use.

The fifth Commandment says something that is to be understood in its correct sense only by means of spiritual science. Everything connected with killing, with the extermination of another's life, weakens the self-conscious ego power in man. One can heighten thereby the powers of black magic in man but it is then only the astral forces that are heightened while the ego power is by-passed. What is divine in man is annihilated through every killing. Therefore, this law alludes not only to something abstract, but also to something by which occult power streams to man's ego impulse when he fosters life, making it flourish when he does not destroy life. This is presented as an ideal for the strengthening of the individual ego power.

The same is given in the sixth and seventh Commandments, with somewhat less emphasis, regarding other aspects of life. Through marriage a center for ego strength is created. Whoever destroys marriage thus weakens the strength that should flow into his ego. Likewise does he, who takes something away from another's ego, thereby seeking to increase his own possessions by stealing, etc., weaken his own ego power. Here, too, the guiding thought throughout is that the ego shall not be weakened.

Now it is even indicated in the last three Commandments how man weakens his ego through the false direction of his desires. The life of desire has great significance for ego power. Love heightens the power of the ego; envy and hate cause it to wither. If a man hates his fellowman, if he disparages his worth by speaking falsely of him, he weakens thereby his ego power; he diminishes all that surrounds him of health and vitality. The same is true when he envies another's possessions. The desire for someone else's goods makes his ego power weak. It is the same in the tenth Commandment should a man look with envy at the manner in which another tries to increase his fortune rather than striving after love for the other, whereby he can expand his soul and allow his ego strength to flourish. Only when we have understood the special power of the Jehovah God and hold before us the manner of His revelation to Moses will we comprehend the special nature of the consciousness that should flow into the people. Underlying everything is the fact that it is not abstract laws but healthy and, in the widest sense, healing precepts for body, soul and spirit that are given. He who holds to these Commandments not in an abstract, but in a living way, affects the overall welfare and the entire progress of life. It was not possible at that time to present this without including regulations as to how the Commandments were to be followed. Since the other nations lived in an entirely different way from the Jewish people they did not require such laws with their special significance.

When our scholars today take the Ten Commandments, translate them by dictionary and compare them with the other laws, with the law of Hammurabi, for instance, it signifies that they have no comprehension of the impulse behind the Commandments. It is not the “Do not steal” or “Keep holy this or that holiday” that is important. What is important is the spirit that is streaming through these Ten Commandments and the way in which this spirit is connected with the spirit of this nation out of which Christianity was created. Thus, if one is to understand the Ten Commandments, one would have to feel and experience along with each individual in this nation what he felt as he attained independence. Today is hardly the time in which to feel so concretely what the people of that nation were able to experience. That is why everything in the dictionary is currently being used in translations of them except what the spirit calls for. One can, of course, always read that the people of Moses came from a Bedouin race, and that consequently they could not be given the same laws as a people engaged in agriculture. That is why—so conclude the scholars—the Ten Commandments had to be given later and were then antedated. If the Ten Commandments were what these gentlemen conclude them to be they would be right, but they happen not to understand them. Certainly, the Jews were a kind of Bedouin people, but these Commandments were given them so that they should become capable with their ego strength of moving toward a whole new age. That nations are built out of the spirit is best proved by this. There is hardly a stronger prejudice than that expressed by saying that during Moses's time the Jewish people were still a wandering Bedouin people, but what sense would it have made to give them the Ten Commandments? It made sense to give the Jewish people these laws so that the ego impulse could be impressed into them with the greatest might. They received them because by means of these Commandments their external life was to take on an entirely new form, because an entirely new life was being created, originating in the spirit.

The Ten Commandments have continued to have this effect, and those who understood them in early Christian times spoke of the Laws of Moses in this way. Therefore they came to know that through the Mystery of Golgotha the ego impulse became something different from what it was during the time of Moses. They told themselves that the ego impulse had become infused with the Ten Commandments, and that people became strong by following the Ten Commandments. Now something else is there. Now the form is there that is at the basis of the Mystery of Golgotha. Now the ego can gaze upon what lay hidden through the ages. It can see the greatest that it is capable of attaining—that that makes it powerful and strong through the example of Him who suffered at Golgotha, Who is the greatest archetype of developing man in the future. In this way the Christ took the place, for those who truly understood Christianity, of the impulses that served as a preparation in the Old Testament.

Thus we see that there is, in fact, a deeper interpretation of the Ten Commandments.

We will now take a closer look at the connection between the act of consecration of man and apocalyptic things, so that we will then be able to approach the Apocalypse and to see its significance for the present and future activities of priests.

Yesterday we had to point to three past epochs of the mysteries, in so far as these mysteries tried to give each priest experiences which put him into an apocalyptic mood. We pointed out that there was a very ancient mystery period during which the gods descended into the mystery centers in order to work with human beings, and a semi-ancient mystery period when the gods sent down their forces, so that the men who lived in this sphere of forces were able to work with the gods in the cosmos.

One could say that the path was completely reversed during the third epoch when the mysteries were partly renovated. At that time man shaped and developed forces so that they could lead him up to the gods. We saw that man looked for a way up to the world's divine, spiritual forces through the intonation of magical words in cultic ceremonies. These words either worked directly upon the auditor's whole soul mood, so that he became aware of the spiritual activities of the gods in the words, or else magical words were spoken into the smoke in the way which was indicated yesterday, and the smoke drew Imaginations out of the words.

This development of a certain religious feeling, which one can really only describe separately, always went parallel with a certain condition or a certain kind of transubstantiation which was the center of the holy act of consecration of man. Priests are now being called upon to experience this transubstantiation and everything else that is connected with their activities in a new way. They will not be able to do this very well without an understanding of what transubstantiations and apocalypses were really like in each of these four successive periods of human evolution.

One thing we have already seen is that the act of consecration of man and its transubstantiation process involves a working together of human beings and the gods in the spiritual world. Priests cannot really work properly unless they're aware that men and the gods can work together.

If we take another look at the oldest form of transubstantiations and acts of consecration of man we find that the gods found the way to men at certain times that are really differences between what one can calculate in the course of time and what the cosmos does. The gods descended during such blank or holy times when men must add something to the times they calculated because their calculations are incorrect. In these times men had to expose themselves to cosmic influences directly in order to carry our transubstantiations, and they saved what had occurred in the substances during such times in order to carry out transubstantiations with the preserved things that had been transformed by forces from the cosmos.

The right place for priests and lay brothers to be in for these transubstantiations at that time was a cave or a grotto. And in fact, wherever people were fully aware of the presence of the gods and of the significance of transubstantiations in the ancient mysteries, we see that they tried to carry out the sacred rites in subterranean rock temples or caves.

The fact that they tried to do this is connected with the experiences which priests had during the transubstantiations. A transubstantiation consists of a transformation of the given earthly materials. If one wants to understand the process completely one should add the communion or the ingestion of the transformed substances by the human being to it, so that actually the two last parts of the act of consecration of man, transubstantiation and communion, constitute a unity, whereas the gospel reading and the offering are a preparation for them. Taking transubstantiation and communion as a unified priestly or cultic act, let's look at a view which the initiates we call fathers had in the oldest mysteries.

The “fathers” refers to the father grade of initiation, and this name is still given to priests in many confessions today,—pater. Now when a priest carried out a transubstantiation in his earth or rock temple, he experienced the union of his physical organism with the whole earth. This is why they had the temple underground or in a rock. Today we can also feel united with the surrounding cosmos in our ordinary earthly consciousness as we live between birth and death, and this has been the case during the whole time that mankind has been evolving on earth.

The air which is in your body now was outside it a moment ago, and it will soon be outside again. The air which is outside your body and the air inside your body constitute a whole. The real state of affairs is that there is an aery ocean, and when man inhales, one part of this aery ocean becomes transformed in the human being. The air is absorbed, and it penetrates and fills man and thereby assumes a human form. Then this form immediately dissolves again in the ocean of air. An aeriform man is continually being created and destroyed, although one is usually unaware of it.

However, Indian yogis knew about it whenever they did their conscious breathing exercises. They didn't feel separate from the earth's ocean of air; they felt that they were united with it, and they felt this creation and destruction at each systole and diastole. One can easily experience this by doing these breathing exercises, although they are no longer appropriate for men today.

However, man is not just a man in connection with physical, earthly things. Although he is an earthly man where the so-called physical, body is mainly active, he is also a fluidic man. The whole human being is filled with circulating fluids which work upon each other. This fluidic man is mainly dependent upon the ethers. For the forces in the etheric body work more upon fluids and not so much upon solids.

We also bear an aery man and a warmth man in us. This aery man, which takes care of respiration, is controlled by the forces of the astral body. And the warmth man: you need only recall that if you measure some place on the surface of your body or inside it with a thermometer, you get different temperatures. This crude procedure already shows one that man is a differentiated warmth organism. The latter is mainly under the influence of the ego—organization or ego.

Thus, we find four elements in man. Earth is under the influence of the physical body, water is influenced by the etheric body, air is under the influence of the astral body, and warmth or fire is under the influence of the ego.

The transubstantiations and communions which the ancient fathers carried out made them feel that their physical body was connected with the earth, when they had gone into their rock temple or earth temple, in order to unite themselves with these earthly developments. What actually happened here? Alan's supposedly scientific view of himself today is really wrong; it is really complete nonsense. We must rethink all of our ideas about human beings. The ancient fathers received the right ideas about man through direct perception when they carried out transubstantiations during sacrificial rites which consecrate human beings.

They knew that we don't just breathe air in through our respiratory organs, but that we are continually taking in all kinds of substances from the cosmos through our sense organs. All kinds of substances are continuously being taken in through our hair and skin. Just as someone who is watching his breathing feels that air is entering his respiratory organs, so the ancient priest felt that substances passed over from the siliceous environment of the consecrated subterranean temple and penetrated his nerve-senses system just as aery man feels the air which is going through him, for when he breathes in a conscious way he can feel that these substances permeate his entire organism. The priests knew that none of the substances in the metabolic-limb man come from what we eat. Nothing of what one eats becomes part of the metabolic-limb man. One takes in substances from the cosmos. The whole modern nutritional theory is really wrong. The celebrating father felt that what is eaten and then transformed by the digestive system passes over from the metabolic man to the nerve-senses man and especially to the head. He knew that what you eat is transformed into the substances of your head and what is connected with it. But the substances which become the organs that take care of your metabolic functions are taken in from the cosmos by a finer breathing. Thus he felt that his metabolic-limb man consisted of cosmic substances which are taken in from all sides through the senses and nerves. And he felt that the food that one eats and transforms goes the opposite way and becomes the upper man.

When a father carried out a transubstantiation he had a current in him which flowed upwards and another one which flowed downwards. Then when he took communion he knew that he was connected with the cosmos, because he had become aware of his physical body by means of these streams. He had become united with the earth and he united what he had prepared at the altar with his body, with currents that belong to both the earth and his body, and with divine things on the earth which are a reflection of the universe.

He knew that he was united with the outside universe. He knew that the meal which he had taken in in this way was a meal which his cosmic man had completed. He felt that his divine man arose through what streamed into the current which went upwards and the one which went downwards, and that it could be a companion of the gods who had descended. He felt that the gods had transformed him into a divine human being in his physical body, that is, he felt that he had been transubstantiated. And at this moment he could say from the depths of his heart: Now I am not the one who walks around in the physical world; I am he in whom the descended god lives; I am he whose name includes all sounds and who was at the beginning, is in the middle and will be at the end. I am alpha and omega.

The extent to which he could really participate in the secrets of the cosmos, in the divine working and creating in the cosmos, and in the manifestation of forces, substances and beings there while divine, spiritual work was being done, depended on the way his inner life was shaped by this feeling. This is the way priests worked in the ancient mysteries.

If we go on to the semi-ancient mysteries we find that holy water and washing and sacrificial actions which are connected with water had become very important, and also that the temples had been moved aboveground. They were no longer put into subterranean caves out of the same longings as before, or if they were placed there it occurred through tradition and it was no longer understood in a living way, and it was precisely for this reason that the tradition lived on, even though it had lost its living content.

Such traditions also remained with regard to the dipping of people into the dew, as it were. What the priest did at baptisms was less dependent upon the actual watery element than upon the Inner force which he applied during the sacrificial action in order to unite the fluidic man in whom the forces of the etheric body were active with the universe.

When a transubstantiation was being carried out and one observed things which involved the fluidic element before or after it in the act of consecration, one felt that the etheric organization was working in a temporal way. While the transubstantiation was being carried out one felt that one's growth since childhood had occurred under the influence of the fluidic element in one, and that the etheric body was active in this streaming from the past through the present and into the future.

In ancient times priests felt that their physical body was connected with the earthly element, and during the less ancient mysteries the one who performed transubstantiations felt united with the watery element which exists in the whole universe. He felt the growth forces of all creatures sprouting, germinating, growing and unfolding in him into fully developed organisms and then contracting into seeds again. He felt this sprouting, shooting living and dying activity whenever he carried out a transubstantiation.

At every moment he could say to himself: Now I know how creatures come into being in the world and how they die. For both ascending and descending etheric forces were active in him. He could, as it were, feel eternity in the sacred transubstantiation.

The priest who was performing a communion in conjunction with a sacred act of transubstantiation knew that the substances which were transformed in the way we described yesterday were absorbed by his etheric, fluidic man. He felt that he was united with everything which preserves immortality in the universe and with everything which is created and born or is killed and destroyed. Birth and death wafted over the altar and from there into the faithful who were assembled. The priest became permeated with feelings of eternity. This permeation with feelings of eternity had replaced the previous feeling of being united with the whole cosmos through the earth.

Then when the third epoch of holy acts of consecration arose, man was to experience his union with the aery element and thereby with the cosmos. Oriental yogis could become aware of the streaming of divine, supersensible world forces in inhalation and exhalation in a different way and for their own personal development. They took hold of breathing in a direct way.

People intoned magical words into their breath in Europe, and to a lesser extent in Asia Minor, but they didn't take hold of the undifferentiated breath directly. Thereby the breath or the air streaming in and out of them was taken hold of by magical, cultic words. The striving up of magical forces towards divine ones became manifest indirectly in what was spoken into the sacrificial smoke, or directly in what was experienced in the intonation of the magical, cultic words. Whenever someone prays, he is basically trying to ascend to divine, spiritual regions with his forces, and these people felt that when they intoned magical, cultic or prayerful words they were ascending to a region where they met the gods. When someone intones things, the godhead becomes manifest and speaks in the cultic words, so that it's not he who is speaking anymore. The godhead was now revealing itself in the aery element. Man felt that he was in something which controls the forces in the air from his own astral body.

The transition from the second, semi-ancient mystery epoch to the third, partly new mystery epoch was a large one. In ancient times fathers experienced things in their physical body. This involved an intensification of its activities. The sun priests of the second epoch experienced an enhancement of their etheric or fluidic body. When a priest intoned cultic words in the third epoch he experienced the streaming of divine spiritual forces in his astral body. The astral body of the average person was only a mediator of consciousness to a very slight extent. At the beginning of the third epoch a priest could still say: when I speak magical cultic words, a god is speaking in me. However later on this awareness diminished. The new consciousness which arose was unaware of the astral body's activities. Today, ordinary consciousness is completely oblivious to the latter. The verbal content of the ritual gradually became something which made qualified people aware of the gods' presence, whereas unqualified people were unaware of what was connected with the intoned words. The latter was increasingly the case for a large number of priests who were active in Catholicism.

Hence it gradually came about that the act of consecration of man or mass became something that the priest celebrated, although he himself was not present in it. However, one cannot celebrate with words or intone words which have aery beings incorporated in them in such a way that there is no spirituality there. Spiritual things immediately appear whenever something material is being shaped. And so if an act of consecration is celebrated with real cultic words by even the most unworthy priest, his soul, may be absent but something spiritual is present. So the fact is that if the liturgy is correct, the believers who are listening to it are participating in a spiritual event under all circumstances.

While things were developing like this at the end of the third epoch, some of the Protestant confessions which were working in a more rationalistic way thought that they could throw the mass out altogether. They were no longer aware of the significance of cultic rites or of a real collaboration between gods and men.

This inner circumstance then led to the time in which we are living. There was less and less understanding for the act of consecration of man which brings the divine, spiritual life right down to earth. People no longer understood the apocalyptic things which the rites were supposed to take one experience. This is basically the experience you had when you came one day and said: A Christian renewal must occur. You felt that the religious life of all the confessions and other things that exist in our civilization had become separated from real spiritual things in the real spiritual world. You were looking for the path to the real spiritual world again. This impulse can show us the way and can lead us into the depths of the mysteries, which are connected with apocalyptic things.

So we saw that in the first epoch transubstantiation was connected with experiences with the physical body, in the second epoch the connection was through experiences with the etheric body and in the third epoch through experiences with the astral body. The grasping of apocalyptic things and of the act of consecration by the ego of mankind depends upon you and your inner experience of the working and weaving of spirituality in the world. Therewith we only have a right view of what should be done by this movement for religious renewal if we look upon what is to be done as the carrying out of a task which has been given us by the supersensible world and as a task which places what one does at the service of supersensible powers. For if you don't take your task seriously enough, what you do will come to nothing in the present evolution of the world, and it will only have been a kind of disturbance. Or else you will see how deep and profound your task is and you will Immediately feel that this task is connected with the activity of the gods throughout earth evolution, and not just with human activities. In that case you can say: we are called upon to help with the shaping of the fourth mystery epoch in human earth evolution. This task will only be placed in the service of the powers in the spiritual world from whom the content of the ritual flowed two years ago when we were assembled here, if you have the courage, strength, seriousness and perseverance to find your way into your task in this way. Only then will what you took upon yourselves through the content of this ritual, which is a revelation from the spiritual world and which radiated down upon you as such, become real.

Then you will increasingly sense and feel: it's really the case that Christ came into earth life in a real cosmic and tellurian ritual. The Mystery of Golgotha is present as a real ritual. In our time man must first unite this ritual with his ego; for the first commemorations of the Lord's Supper were still immersed in the third mystery epoch, when the astral body took in and controlled the cultic activities which occurred in the aery element. But now it's a question of connecting one's innermost core with the Christ so that each human being can begin to understand apocalyptic things in a new way.

How did one look upon apocalyptic things in the first mystery epoch? One experienced them as the presence of the gods, which are the beginning, the middle and the end, alpha and omega.

How did one look upon the presence of divine forces in the second mystery epoch? One experienced them as something which resounds through the world as the music of the spheres, and which lives in the cosmic word that created everything and that creates in everything, and which streams from the heavens to the earth. One experienced what is at the beginning, in the middle and at the end of time simultaneously, as it were. One experienced the alpha and the omega in the cosmic, world word. Whenever the subject of the Greek alpha and omega, the first and the last, came up in this or that epoch, people always tried to find out what the first and last letters of various alphabets really contain.

And how did one understand apocalyptic things during the third mystery epoch? One understood apocalyptic things in such a way that people were developing cultic words which were still half conscious. Apocalyptic things were perceived during the third epoch when these half-conscious cultic words transubstantiated themselves as they were being intoned and when things were as follows. Most of you have probably heard some music on a day when your soul and senses could be entirely receptive to the impressions of the outer world, and then you fell asleep and woke up in the middle of your sleep. It was as if you lived in a surging back and forth, but in a transformed surging of the symphony you heard during the day. This is the way it was for priests in the third mystery epoch.

What happened to them is comparable to the trivial thing I just mentioned. They celebrated the act of consecration with cultic words, and they experienced that the godhead appeared in them. They had sent the cultic words up and the godhead had streamed into them. Then they left the sacred ritual in an appropriate mood. They not only experienced the presence of divine spirituality in human, cultic words during the act of consecration of man, but afterwards, they experienced a supersensible echo of what they had spoken in the liturgy of the mass. These transubstantiated, transformed words streamed towards them and revealed apocalyptic things.

The god revealed apocalyptic things as a counter present for an appropriately celebrated sacrificial rite. This is how one experienced apocalyptic things during the third mystery epoch.

The one who felt that he had been made into a priest, by Christ Jesus himself, namely, the author of the book which we want to study, the Apocalypse, was more or less the first to feel that an apocalyptic content merged with his ego,—and only very few people have experienced this since. For it was the astral body which received the echo that. I mentioned, where the god gave apocalyptic things as a counter present for words. However, the one who wrote John's Apocalypse felt that his fully conscious ego was united with the content which he had given the Apocalypse.

The priest who wrote the Apocalypse and who felt that he had been anointed by Christ Jesus himself, was inspired by the afterglow of ancient Ephesian rituals, and he felt as if he were continuing frequent celebrations of this ancient act of consecration up to an advanced age. One day he felt that the ego which had been completely filled with the significance of the sacred ritual was now also completely filled with an apocalyptic content.

Hence John expressed his Apocalypse in the same way that one says the single word “I” in one's ordinary consciousness. When a human being says “I” he is expressing his inner nature with a single sound. The only thing which can be meant by this is what the individual human being is. But this one thing has a large content. This large content is the content of apocalyptic things.

If everything which religious feeling can give a meditating soul and if all the enlightenment which is gained by energetic effort and by a striving towards an understanding of the supersensible can work in men's spirits,—if all of this is oriented in the way it can be oriented and if we let ourselves be stimulated by everything that can stimulate us through a contemplation of the three past mystery epochs which can become the inspirer of the fourth one, and if we let ourselves be stimulated by what was outlined in an introductory way yesterday and today, that is, by what lived in the first, second and third mystery epoch which was the living inspirer of the fourth, and if we let the power of the Spirit God—which is possible again today work in our souls—we will be able to experience that there is not just one Apocalypse but that there are numerically just as many apocalypses as there are human, God-fearing, priest's egos in the priest-renewal who speak to the Christ who is to be found again through this Christian renewal.

There is only one apocalypse from a qualitative point of view, but from a numerical viewpoint it can become the content of the soul of each individual priest. Conversely, every single soul that undergoes the act of consecration of man, so that it prepares the ego to become identified with the content of the apocalypse, can become a proper priestly soul. We are egos as human beings. We become priests in the modern sense of the word if the ego becomes aware that it is creating a copy of the Apocalypse at every moment in life, so that it isn't just something which is finished and printed in the bible, and it isn't just memorized by heart. Take the following analogy. Someone gives the content of a book. It is sent to the printers. This might seem like a pedantic, philistine analogy, but it's useful nevertheless. The book is printed and a large number of copies go through the world which are different, although they all have the same content. What you are referred to right at the beginning of the Apocalypse is a single thing and what Christ revealed to John is a single thing. For this is “The revelation of Jesus Christ” which was received by “his servant John.” There is only one content, but it is multiplied by those who recreate this content in themselves after they have been prepared through the wisdom of supersensible worlds.

This is an understanding of John's apocalyptic things. In the deeper sense of the word, this also amounts to an understanding of the words: Christ has ordained us to be priests. You have felt how the Apocalypticer says that Christ Jesus anointed him to be a priest; one becomes anointed as soon as one feels how the content of the Apocalypse arose in John and as soon as one feels that people want to become priests today by creating the Apocalypse in themselves so that they experience that their ego is in the Apocalypse. If the ego becomes apocalyptic, the ego is priestly. We will take this up again tomorrow.

It is well known that the Gospel of St. Mark begins with the words: “This is the beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”

A man of today who seeks to comprehend this Gospel of St. Mark is at once, in the very first words, faced with three riddles. The first is to be found in the words: “This is the beginning.” The beginning of what? How can this beginning be understood? The second is: “the beginning of the Gospel ...” In an anthroposophical sense, what does the word “Gospel” mean? The third riddle we have often spoken of: the figure of Christ Jesus Himself.

Whoever is seriously seeking for knowledge and a deepening of himself must recognize that mankind is evolving and progressing. For this reason what we may call the understanding of any revelation is not fixed once and for all, or confined to any particular epoch. It progresses, so that anyone who attaches a serious meaning to the terms “evolution” and “progress” must necessarily believe that as time goes on, mankind's deepest problems will be ever better, and more thoroughly and profoundly, understood. For something like the Gospel of St. Mark, as we shall demonstrate by means of these three riddles, a certain turning point in our comprehension has been reached only at the present time. Slowly and gradually, but distinctly, there has been prepared what can now lead us to a real understanding of the Gospel and enable us to understand that “the Gospel begins.” Why is this the case?

We need only glance back a little to what filled human minds a comparatively short time ago and we shall see how the very nature of comprehension may, indeed must, have altered in relation to a subject like this. If we go back further than the nineteenth century, we shall find that in the eighteenth and seventeenth centuries we approach ever closer to a time when those persons whose spiritual life was at all concerned with the Gospels had to start from a very different basis of comprehension than that of the man of today. What could an ordinary man of the eighteenth century say to himself if he wished to place himself in the general line of the evolution of humanity, and was not one of the few who were connected in some way with an initiation or some occult revelation—assuming that he had assimilated within himself everything offered by external exoteric life? Even the most cultivated man, one who stood on the highest pinnacle of the culture of his age, could not look back on more than three thousand years of the life of mankind; and one thousand of those years was before the Christian era and nearly lost in misty dimness. The other two thousand years since the founding of Christianity were not yet quite completed. He might look back three thousand years, shall we say? When one looked back at the earliest of these millennia one was confronted with a completely mythical, dim, prehistoric epoch of humanity, the age of old Persia. This, and what still remained of the knowledge of the ancient Egyptian epoch, preceded what “actual history” related, which began only with Hellenism. This Hellenism, to a certain extent, formed the foundation of the culture of this age. All those who wished to look more deeply into human life started with Hellenism; and within Hellenism appeared all that Homer, the Greek tragedians, and all the Greek writers have written concerning the primeval history of this people and their work for mankind.

Then one sees how Greece began to decline, how it was stifled by Rome, though only externally. Generally speaking, Rome overcame Greece only politically, while in reality it adopted Greek culture, Greek education and Greek life. It might be said that politically the Romans conquered the Greeks, but spiritually the Greeks conquered the Romans. During this latter process, while Hellenism was conquering Rome spiritually, it poured into Rome through hundreds and hundreds of channels what it had itself acquired. From Rome this streamed forth into all the other civilizations of the world, while during this time Christianity streamed more and more into the Greco-Roman civilization and was to a large extent transformed when the northern Germanic peoples took part in the spreading of the Greco-Roman Christian culture. With this intermingling of Greece, Rome, and Christianity, the second millennium of the world's history passed away, which to the men of the eighteenth century was the first Christian one. Then we see the beginning of the second Christian millennium, the third historical civilization of man. We see how everything goes on apparently in the same way, although, if we have deeper insight, we shall see that in this third millennium everything is really different. Two figures only need be cited, a painter and a poet, who, although they appear some two centuries after the end of the millennium, nevertheless show how something essentially new began for Western civilization with the second Christian millennium, something which these two men carried further. These two figures are Giotto and Dante.¹ Giotto as painter and Dante as poet represent the beginning of all that followed, and what they gave was embodied in later Western cultures. Those were the three thousand years that could at that time be surveyed.

Then came the nineteenth century. Only someone who can look more deeply into the whole formation of the culture of the age is able now to perceive all that took place in the nineteenth century, and how for that reason everything had to become different. It is all contained in the minds and souls of men, but only a very few can as yet understand it.

The perspective of the man of the eighteenth century went back only to Hellenism; the age before that was somewhat nebulous. What happened in the nineteenth century—and this is little appreciated or understood today—is that the East played its part in the culture of the West, indeed very intensely so. This intervention of the Oriental influence in its own peculiar way is what we must bear in mind when considering the transformation that took place in the civilization of the nineteenth century. This penetration by the Orient threw light and shade upon everything that poured into the culture and will increasingly do so. For this reason a new understanding was required concerning things that up to that time humanity had regarded in a different light.

If we wish to choose single figures and individuals who have influenced the culture of the West, in whom we could find nearly everything that a man felt in his soul at the beginning of the nineteenth century if he concerned himself with spiritual life, we may mention David, Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe,² who was just beginning to penetrate into life. Future historians writing of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries will be very clear about one thing, that the intellectual and spiritual life of that era was determined by these five figures. There lived then, more than anyone can imagine now, even in the most delicate stirrings of the soul, what we may call the feelings and truths of the Psalms. There lived also fundamentally what is to be found in Homer as well as what took such magnificent form in Dante; then, even if it did not live in Shakespeare himself, there was what is nevertheless so beautifully expressed by him in the form in which it now lives in men of modern times. Added to this is the striving of the human soul after truth which Goethe expressed in Faust, something that in reality lived in every human soul in such a way that it was often said, “Every man who seeks the truth has something of the Faust nature in him.”

To all this there was added a quite new perspective, which extended beyond the three thousand years covered by these five persons. It came in ways that are at first quite unfathomable by external history. This was the first entry of an inner Orient into the mental and spiritual life of Europe. It was not only that to the poems of those writers mentioned earlier was added what was given in the Vedas and the Bhagavad Gita, nor the fact that by learning to know these Eastern poems a different emotional nuance about the world was aroused, differing fundamentally from that of the Psalms or from what is to be found in the poetry of Dante or Homer, but something appeared in a mysterious manner which became ever more visible during the nineteenth century. One name alone will suffice, a name which made a great stir in the middle of the nineteenth century, and this will convince us that something came from the East to Europe along mysterious paths. We need but mention the name of Schopenhauer. In Schopenhauer what is it that strikes you most of all, if you leave aside the theoretical elements of his system? Isn't it the content of feeling and sentiment that pervades his whole thought? In the profound relationship between this nineteenth century man and the Oriental-Aryan mode of thought and feeling, in every sentence we might say, in the emphasis of feeling in Schopenhauer, lives that which we might call the Eastern element in the West; and this passed on to Eduard von Hartmann³ in the second half of the nineteenth century.

This penetrated along mysterious paths, as we have just said. We gradually come to better understand these mysterious paths when we see that in the course of the developments of the nineteenth century a complete transformation, a metamorphosis of all human thinking and feeling took place—not however in only one part of the earth but in the intellectual and spiritual life of the whole earth. As to what took place in the West, if anyone would take the trouble, it would be enough to compare anything written about religion, philosophy, or any aspect of spiritual life with something that belongs to the eighteenth century. He will then see that a complete transformation took place, that all the questions regarding the highest riddles asked by mankind had become more vague, that men were striving to formulate new questions, to look for new sentiments and modes of perception, that nothing belonging to religion and what it formerly gave to man could still be given through it to the human soul in the same way. Everywhere there was a longing for something deeper and more profoundly hidden in the depths of religion.

This was not true of Europe alone. It is characteristic of the beginning of the nineteenth century that all over the civilized world men, through an inner urge, were compelled to think differently. If we wish to form a more exact conception of what we are discussing, we must see that there was a general convergence of the peoples and their folk cultures and folk beliefs, with the result that people belonging to entirely different creeds began in the nineteenth century to understand each other in a quite remarkable way. We shall quote a characteristic example which lies at the heart of what we are trying to indicate. In the thirtieth year of the nineteenth century, a man appeared in England who was a Brahmin, an adherent of what he considered to be true Brahminism, that is, the Vedanta teaching. Ram Mohun Roy, who died in London in 1836, exercised a great influence on those of his contemporaries who were interested in such things, and made a great impression. The remarkable thing about him was that on the one hand he stood there as a reformer of Hinduism, though a misunderstood one, while on the other hand everything he said could be understood by all Europeans who were familiar with the advanced thought of their age. He did not put forth ideas that could be understood only through orientalism, but ideas that could be understood by ordinary human reason.

What was Ram Mohun Roy's attitude? He said something along these lines, “I live in the midst of Hinduism, where a number of different gods are worshipped. If the people of my country are asked why they worship these gods, they say, ‘it is our custom, we know nothing else. It was done by our fathers and their fathers before them.’ And because the people were influenced in this way,” Ram Mohun Roy continued, “the crassest idolatry became the rule, an appalling idolatry which disgraces the original greatness of the religion of my fatherland. There once was a belief that, although partly contradictory, is to be found in the Vedas. It is the purest form of human thought, and it was brought into the Vedanta system by Viasa.”

This was the belief professed by Ram Mohun Roy. For this reason he had not only made translations from various incomprehensible idioms into the languages that are understandable in India, but he also made extracts of what he considered the correct teaching and spread them among the people. What was his intention when he did this? He thought he recognized behind all that comes to expression in the various gods and all that is worshipped in the different idols a pure teaching of a primal divine unity, the spiritual God who lives in all things but can no longer be recognized in the idols. This God must once more penetrate into the minds of men. When this Indian Brahmin spoke in detail about what he believed to be the correct Vedanta teaching, the true Indian creed, it did not sound strange. To those who understood him rightly, it was as though he preached a kind of rational belief that can be attained by everyone who by using his rational mind turns to the universal unitary God. And Ram Mohun Roy had followers: Rabindranath Tagore and others.⁴ One of these followers, and this is especially interesting, gave a lecture in 1870 about Christ and Christianity. It was indeed extraordinarily interesting to hear an Indian speak about Christ and Christianity. The actual mystery of Christianity was quite remote from the Indian speaker—he did not touch upon that at all. From the whole course of the lecture we can see that he is quite unable to grasp the fundamental fact that Christianity does not proceed from a personal teacher but is founded on the Mystery of Golgotha, a world historical fact, on death and resurrection. But that which he can grasp and is so clear to him is that in Christ Jesus we have a figure of tremendous significance, one that is of importance to every human heart, a figure that must stand there as the ideal figure for the whole history of the world. It is remarkable to hear this Indian speaking about Christ and to hear him say, “If a man goes deeply into Christianity, he will see that Christianity must, even in the West, go through a further evolution, for what the European brings to my fatherland as Christianity does not appear to me to be the true Christianity.”

We see from the examples quoted that it was not only in Europe that people's minds began to look behind the religious creeds, but also in distant India. It is true also of many parts of the earth where minds began to awake, and men approached in a new way and from an entirely new point of view something they had possessed for thousands of years. This metamorphosis of souls in the nineteenth century will be fully perceptible only in the course of time. Only in later times will history recognize that impulses of this kind, although apparently affecting only a few people, streamed through thousands of channels into our hearts and souls, so that today all those who participate in any way in spiritual life have them within their souls. This had to result in a total renewal. All older questions were transformed, and a new kind of understanding came into being in relation to all views that had hitherto been held. So it is that in the world, even today such questions are already taking on a greater profundity. What our spiritual movement desires today is the answering of these questions.

This spiritual movement is convinced that these questions cannot in their present form be answered by the old traditions, by modern natural science, or by that conception of the world which reckons only with the factors of modern natural science. Spiritual science, research into the spiritual worlds, is necessary. In other words, mankind today, in accordance with the whole trend of his evolution, must ask questions that can be answered only through super-sensible investigation. Quite slowly and gradually there have emerged from the spiritual life of the West things that are once more in harmony with the most beautiful traditions that have come over from the East. You know that we have always stressed the fact that the law of reincarnation comes out of Western spiritual life itself, and that it need no more be taken as something historical coming from Buddhism than for example Pythagorean doctrine needs to be taken over from historical traditions. This has always been emphasized, but the fact that the idea of reincarnation arose in modern souls formed a bridge which extended across the three thousand years of which we have been speaking (during which the doctrine of reincarnation was not the center of thinking) to the figure of Buddha. The horizon, the perspective of the evolution of mankind, was extended beyond the three thousand years. This gave rise to new questions, which can be answered only through spiritual science.

Let us begin with the question to which the beginning of this Gospel of Saint Mark gives rise, this Gospel which begins with the words, “the beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.” Let us remember that these introductory words are immediately followed not only by a characterization of a passage of the old prophets but by the announcement of Christ by John the Baptist. This proclamation was stated by him in such a way that it may be comprised in these words: “The time is fulfilled; the kingdom of the divine is extending over the whole earth-existence.” What does all this mean?

Let us endeavor with the light that modern spiritual science can give us to view retrospectively those past ages in the center of which is contained “the fulfillment.” Let us try to understand what it means that “an old era is completed and a new one is beginning.” We shall best be able to understand this if we first turn our attention to something belonging to more remote times and then consider something belonging to the modern era; between the two lies the Mystery of Golgotha. Let us take something before the Mystery of Golgotha and then something later, and then endeavor to enter deeply into the difference between the two epochs, so that we may recognize how far the old epoch had been completed and a new one begun. In this way we shall not enter into abstractions or definitions, but consider the concrete.

I should like you to turn your attention to the first millennium of human evolution, as it was thought to be in earlier times. There in the remotest period of this first millennium stands the towering figure of Homer, the Greek poet and singer. Hardly more than the name remains to mankind of him to whom are ascribed those two great poems which are among the greatest accomplishment of mankind: the Iliad and the Odyssey. Scarcely more than his name is known, and in the nineteenth century doubts were cast even on that—but we need not dwell any further on that now. The more we know of the figure of Homer, the more we admire him. For a person who studies such things, the characters created by Homer whom we meet in the Iliad and the Odyssey seem more alive than all the purely political figures of Greece. Many different people who have studied Homer over and over again have said that because of the precision of his descriptions and his manner of presentation he must have been a doctor. Others say he must have been an artist, a sculptor, or a craftsman. Napoleon admired the way Homer described tactics and strategy; still others think he must have been a beggar wandering through the land.

However all this may be, it certainly does demonstrate the unique individuality of Homer. Consider one of his characters, Hector. If you have any time available, you ought to study the figure of Hector in the Iliad—how plastically he is described so that he stands as a complete personality before us; how we see his affection for his paternal city, Troy, his wife Andromache, his relationship to Achilles, and to his armies; and how he commanded them. Try to call up this man before your minds, this man who possessed all the tenderness of a husband, and who clung in the ancient way to his home city of Troy, and who suffered such disillusions as only really great men can. Remember his relation with Achilles. Hector, as presented by Homer, is a towering figure from very ancient times, a man of great all-embracing humanity, for of course what Homer is describing belongs to a period well before his own, in the darkness of the past. Hector stands out above all the others, all those figures who seem mythical enough in the eyes of modern men.

Now take this one figure. Skeptics and all kinds of philologists may indeed doubt that there ever was a Hector at all, in the same way as they doubt the existence of Homer. But anyone who takes into consideration what may be understood from a purely human viewpoint will be convinced that Homer describes only facts that actually occurred. Hector was a living person who strode through Troy, and Achilles and the other figures were equally real. They still stand before us as personages of real earthly life. We look back to them as people of a different kind from ourselves, who are difficult to understand but whom the poet is able to bring before our souls in every detail. Now let us place before our souls a figure such as Hector, one of the chief Trojan commanders, who is defeated by Achilles. In such a personage we have something that belongs to the old pre-Christian age, something by which we can measure what men were before the time when Christ lived on earth.

I will now draw your attention to another figure, a remarkable figure of the fifth century B.C.: the great philosopher Empedocles,⁵ who spent a large part of his life in Sicily. It was he who was the first to speak of the four elements, fire, water, air, and earth, and who said that everything that happens in the material realm caused by the mingling and disintegration of these four elements results from the principles of love and hate ruling in them. It was he also who by his activity influenced Sicily by calling into being important political institutions, and he went about trying to lead the people into a life of spirituality. When we look back to Empedocles we find that he lived an adventurous as well as a deeply spiritual life. Perhaps the truth of what I am about to say will be doubted by some, but spiritual science knows that Empedocles went about in Sicily not only as a statesman, but as a magician and initiate, just as Hector, as depicted by Homer, walked in Troy. In order to characterize the remarkable attitude of Empedocles toward the world the fact confronts us—and it is true and no invention—that in order, as it were, to unite himself with all existence around him, he ended by throwing himself into Mount Etna and was consumed by its fire. In this way a second figure of the pre-Christian age is presented to our souls.

Now let us consider such figures as these in accordance with the methods of spiritual science. First of all we know that these individualities will appear again; we know that such souls will return to life. We shall not pay any attention to their intermediate incarnations but look for them in the post-Christian era. We then see something of the change brought about by time, something that can help us to understand how the Mystery of Golgotha intervened in human evolution. If we say that such figures as Hector and Empedocles appeared again, we must ask how they walked among men in the post-Christian era. For we shall then see how the intervention of the Mystery of Golgotha, the fulfillment and beginning of a new age, worked on their souls. As serious anthroposophists assembled here together we need not shrink from the communications of true spiritual science, which can be confirmed by external facts.

I should now like to turn your attention to something that took place in the post-Christian era, and perhaps again it may be said that the person concerned was a poetical personage. But this poetical personage can be traced back to a real individuality who was once alive. I direct your attention to the character created by Shakespeare in his Hamlet. Anyone who knows the development of Shakespeare, insofar as it can be known externally, and especially someone who is acquainted with it through spiritual science, will know that Shakespeare's Hamlet is none other than the transformed real prince of Denmark, who also lived at one time. I cannot go into everything underlying the historical prototype of the poetical figure of Hamlet, but through the research of spiritual science, I can offer you a striking example of how a man, a spirit of ancient times, reappears in the post-Christian era. The real figure underlying Hamlet, as presented by Shakespeare, is Hector. The same soul that lived in Hamlet lived in Hector. It is just by such a characteristic example as this, and the striking way the two different souls manifest themselves, that we can interpret what happened in the intervening time. A personality such as that of Hector stands before us in the pre-Christian age. Then comes the intervention of the Mystery of Golgotha in human evolution, and the spark it kindled in Hector's soul causes a figure, a prototype of Hamlet, to arise, of whom Goethe said, “This is a soul that is unable to deal with any situation and is not equal to its position, who is assigned tasks but is unable to fulfill them.” We may ask why Shakespeare expressed it in this way. He did not know. But anyone who can investigate the connections through spiritual science knows that behind these things forces were at work. The poet creates in the unconscious; before him stands, so to speak, first the figure which he creates, and then, as in a tableau of which he himself knows nothing, the whole individuality with which the figure is connected. Why does Shakespeare choose particular qualities in Hamlet and sharply emphasize them, qualities that perhaps Hamlet's own contemporaries would not have noticed? Because he observes them against the background of the era. He feels how different a soul has become in its transition from the old life to the new. Hamlet, the doubter, the skeptic, who has lost the ability to cope with the situations with which he meets in life, the procrastinator and waverer, this is what Hector, once so sure of himself, has become.

Let me direct your attention to another figure of modern times, who was also first presented to mankind in a poetic picture, in a poem whose protagonist will certainly live on in humanity for a long time to come when for posterity the poet, like Homer or Shakespeare, no longer is in existence. About Homer we know nothing at all, and about Shakespeare we know very little indeed. What the various compilers of notes and biographers of Goethe have written will long since have been forgotten. In spite of the printing press and other modern inventions, what interests people in Goethe at the present time will likewise have been long forgotten. But large as life, and modelled from life, there will stand the figure of Faust which Goethe has created. Just as men today know nothing of Homer, so will they some day know but little of Goethe (which will be a good thing); but they will know much about Faust. Faust again is a figure who, as he is presented to us in a literary form by Goethe, can be recognized as one brought to a certain conclusion by Goethe. The poetical picture refers back to a real sixteenth century figure who lived then as a real person, though he was not as Goethe described him in his Faust. Why then did Goethe describe him in this way? Goethe himself did not know. But when he directed his attention to the traditional Faust that had been handed down to him, a Faust with whom he was already acquainted through the marionettes of his boyhood, then the forces that stood behind Faust, the forces of his previous incarnation, the forces of Empedocles, the old Greek philosopher, worked within him! All these radiated into the figure of Faust. So we might say, since Empedocles threw himself into Etna and united himself with the fire-element of the earth, what a wonderful spiritualization of pre-Christian nature mysticism was accomplished in fact in the final tableau of Goethe's Faust, when Faust ascends into the fire- element of heaven through Pater Seraphicus and the rest. Slowly and gradually a totally new spiritual tendency entered into the deeper strivings of men. Already some time ago it began to become evident to the more profound spirits of mankind that, without their knowing anything about reincarnation or karma, when they were considering a great comprehensive soul whom they wished to describe from the depths of their inner life, they found themselves describing what radiated over from earlier incarnations. Although Shakespeare did not know that Hamlet was Hector, he nevertheless described him as such, without being aware that the same soul had lived in both of them. So too Goethe portrays his Faust as though Empedocles with all his peculiarities were standing behind him, because in his Faust there lived the soul of Empedocles. It is characteristic that the progress of the human soul should proceed in this way.

I have mentioned two characteristic figures, in both of whom we can perceive that when great men of earlier times reappear in a modern post-Christian age, they are shaken to the very depths of their souls and can only with difficulty adjust themselves to life. Everything that was within them in the past is still within them. For example, when we allow Hamlet to work upon us, we feel that the whole force of Hector is in him. But we feel that this force cannot come forth in the post-Christian era, that it then meets with obstacles, that something now works upon the soul that is the beginning of something new, whereas in the figures of antiquity something was coming to an end. So do these figures stand plastically delineated before us; both Hector and Empedocles represent a conclusion. But what is working on further in mankind must find new paths into new incarnations. This is revealed with Hector in Hamlet and also with Empedocles in Faust, who had within him all the abysmal urges toward the depths of nature. Because he had within him the whole nature of Empedocles, he could say, “I will lay aside the Bible for a time and study nature and medicine. I will no longer be a theologian.” He felt the need to have dealings with demonic beings who made him roam through the world leaving him marveling but uncomprehending. Here the Empedocles element had an after-effect but was not able to adjust itself to what a man must be after the new age had begun.

I wanted to show you through these explanations how in well-known souls, about whom anyone can find information, a powerful transformation shows itself, and how the more deeply we study them the more perceptible this becomes. If we inquire what happened between the two incarnations of such individualities, the answer always is the Mystery of Golgotha, which was announced by the Baptist when he said, “The time is fulfilled, the kingdoms of the spirit, or the kingdoms of heaven, are passing over into the kingdom of man.” Yes, the kingdoms of heaven did indeed powerfully seize the human kingdom, but those who take this in an external sense are unable to understand it. They seized it so powerfully that the great men of antiquity, who had been in themselves so solid and compact, had to make a new beginning in human evolution on earth. This new beginning showed itself precisely with them, and lasted until the end of the old epoch, with the Mystery of Golgotha. At that time something that had been fulfilled ebbed away, something which had presented men in such a way that they appeared as rounded personalities in themselves. Then came something that made it necessary for these souls to make a new beginning. Everything had to be transformed and altered so that great souls appeared small. They had to be transformed into the stage of childhood, for something quite new was beginning. We must inscribe this in our souls if we wish to understand what is meant at the beginning of the Gospel of St. Mark by the words “a beginning.” Yes, truly a beginning, a beginning that shakes the inmost soul to its foundations and brings a totally new impulse into human evolution, a “beginning of the Gospel.”

What then is the Gospel? It is something that comes down to us from the kingdoms we have often described, where dwell the higher hierarchical beings, among whom are the angels and archangels. It descends through the world that rises above the human world. So do we gain an inkling of the deeper meaning of the word Gospel. It is an impulse that descends through the realms of the archangels and angels; it comes down from these kingdoms and enters into mankind. None of the abstract translations really covers the matter adequately. In reality the word Gospel should indicate that at a certain time something begins to flow in upon the earth which formerly flowed only where there dwell the angels and archangels. Something descended to earth that shook the souls of men and shook the strongest souls most. It is here noted that this was the beginning, and the beginning has a continuation. The beginning was made at that time, and we shall see that fundamentally the whole development of humanity since then is a continuation of that beginning when the impulse began to flow down from the kingdom of the angeloi, or what we call the “ev-angel” or Gospel.

We cannot seek or investigate deeply enough if we wish to characterize the different Gospels. We shall see that especially the Gospel of St. Mark can be understood only if we understand in the right way the evolution of humanity with all its impulses and all that has happened in the course of it. I do not wish to describe this externally, but to characterize actual souls, showing how it is only the recognition of the fact of reincarnation, when it becomes a matter of real research, that can bear witness to the progress of such souls as those of Hector and Empedocles. Only in this way can the deeper significance of the Christ Impulse be brought before our souls. Otherwise we may discover beautiful things, but they will all be superficial. What lies behind all the outer events in the history of the Christ Impulse is discovered only when we can throw light upon life through spiritual research, so that we can recognize how a single life passes not only in its separate phases but also in the sequence of incarnations. We must look upon reincarnation as a serious matter and apply it to history in such a way that it becomes an element that gives life to it. We shall then perceive the working of the Event of Golgotha, the greatest of all impulses. It is especially in souls that this impulse, which we have described often enough, will become visible.

• 1. Giotto di Bondone (c. 1266–1337), Florentine painter and architect, noted especially for his frescoes on the life of St. Francis.
  
  Dante Alighieri, 1265–1321, Italian poet, author of the Divine Comedy.
• 2. David, second king of Israel, ruled about the beginning of the first millennium B.C. Many of the most beautiful Psalms were attributed to him, and it was their influence of which Rudolf Steiner was evidently thinking in this passage.
  
  Homer, Greek poet who lived probably in the 8th century B.C., author of the Iliad and the Odyssey.
  
  Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 1749–1832. German poet, author of Faust.
• 3. Schopenhauer, Artur, 1788–1860. German philosopher, author of The World as Will and Idea.
  
  Hartmann, Eduard von, 1842–1906 German philosopher, author of The Philosophy of the Unconscious.
• 4. Ram Mohan Roy, 1772–1836, founder of the Brahmo Samaj.
  
  Tagore, Rabindranath, 1861–1941. Indian poet and philosopher, winner of Nobel Prize for Literature, 1913.
  
  One of these followers—reference is to Keshab Chandra Sen, 1834–1884.
• 5. Empedocles of Agragas, c. 495–435 B.C., Greek philosopher.

The Gospel of John differs in many respects from the others. Thus, nothing is presented there [in direct] narrative. It always says that one or the other has seen something, that one or the other has been seen. How are we to understand this?

A large part of what is described in the Gospel of John is to be regarded as abstract, inner experiences, as instances of spiritual clairvoyance. When it says, for example, that Nicodemus “came to Jesus by night, this should not be taken literally. It is trivial to interpret it as if he came at night because he was ashamed to come during the day. We are dealing here with an astral experience. Nicodemus went to Jesus in his astral body at night, while his physical body slept, to receive instruction. This event took place not as a physical personality, not with physical steps, but in the astral world; Nicodemus experienced it as a sleeper. He had the conversation that is described to us in the night in the astral. Nicodemus was exceptionally clairvoyant. He was able to travel astrally to Christ Jesus and have that conversation. That which Christ was could therefore take place in a special experience for those who were meant to perceive it.

In this way, through strange experiences, it became clear to many who Jesus actually was. Thus, John the Baptist had also clairvoyantly seen Jesus as the Lamb of God - as the sacrificial animal of God - that is, the ego in man. This ego in the symbol of the lamb had been sacrificed unceasingly in pre-Christian times; in other words, man had to sacrifice his ego in order to do God's will. This I or Lamb of God was now to be transformed through Christ into the Son of Man.

[Using the Nicodemus narrative as a model, we need to understand why, upon the testimony of John the Baptist, it is revealed that Jesus is the Christ, the God of our cosmos. Therefore, the Gospel of John does not tell us that the Spirit descended upon Jesus, nor does it vividly describe the baptism, but rather says that John the Baptist describes his experience in such a way that he saw clairvoyantly how the dove descended. - Otherwise one would not understand why the Gospels seemingly contradict each other if they are not understood to mean that seers describe their spiritual experiences here.]

The gospel of John does not describe the baptism, but only the astral experience of the Baptist, when he, as a seer, saw Jesus inspired by the spirit in the form of a dove. This must be particularly taken into account if one wants to understand the spiritual meaning of this gospel. The Baptist was only clairvoyant at times, he could not look back on his previous incarnations. His mission was to show people that they should now acquire their clear sense of self, because now was the time to do so. But John the Baptist had to pay for this mission by having his own sense of self limited to the time between birth and death. Hence his strange answers to the questions of the Jews. When they asked if he was the Christ, he replied, “I am not.” And when they asked if he was Elijah, he said, “No.” Contrary to these words of his, Jesus solemnly testifies that John the Baptist was the reincarnated Elijah.

What is the source of this contradiction? John did not know people by their past lives, he did not know that he was Elijah returned. To fulfill his mission in the world, he had to sacrifice that dark, half-dreaming clairvoyance through which people in former times were directly connected to the spiritual world and could look back on their past forms of existence. Therefore, true to his mission, he pointed to Jesus as a human being in whom a higher consciousness was already developed and who therefore carried the Heavenly Kingdom within himself and could help people to regain the consciousness they had had before.

In order for the ego to develop, it was necessary for people to concentrate their energies and learn to make the most of their lives on earth and understand its great significance. Therefore, a veil had to fall over the past so that people could no longer see their earthly lives as a small link in a long chain. By the time of the Baptist, however, self-awareness had been fully developed and was now to be developed into an even higher consciousness.

In the Gospel of John, we can follow step by step how Jesus himself rises from direct self-awareness to God-awareness by uniting with and merging into all other living beings. The power of his insight and will comes across to us here as in no other gospel. Significant in this regard are Jesus' words to Nathanael when he is first led to him. Jesus calls him a “true Israelite.” What did he mean by that? To understand this expression, we have to go back to the ancient mysteries for a moment.

For example, if we examine the Persian Mithraic mysteries, we find that the three great stages of initiation were divided into seven degrees. The initiates of the first degree were called the “messengers of the raven” – “raven” corresponds to “messenger”;

- the initiates of the second degree, the 'occult man';
- the initiates of the third degree, the 'soldier';
- the initiates of the fourth degree, the 'lion';
- the initiate of the fifth degree, a 'true Persian';
- the initiate of the sixth degree, the 'solar hero';
- the initiate of the seventh degree, 'father, magician'.

The initiate of the first degree had to learn everything there was to learn; he still had one foot in the outer world. Through his studies in the spiritual world, he could be a messenger between this world and the outer world. That is why it is said of Wotan that he was always accompanied by his ravens.

The initiate of the second degree, the <«occult man», had experiences in the spiritual world through imaginations, but he did not have the right to share his occult experiences with others. In general, the various degrees and the legitimacy of the students were strictly observed. Thus, for example, the occult man had to mature before he was given the opportunity to share with others what he had learned through occult means. Only after he had matured spiritually could he enter the third degree and become a “warrior,” an enunciator, an apostle of the spiritual world.

The initiate of the fourth degree - or of the “Lion” - had to be completely free of all self-assertion; in relation to the truth, he was not allowed to have his own point of view or his own opinion. This view is in complete conflict with what is considered correct in our days, since everyone has to have their point of view and their opinion. Mathematics is currently the only field in which individuals no longer believe that they can assert their own opinions. The initiate of the fourth degree, on the other hand, was never allowed to let his own thoughts and feelings interfere when it came to spiritual truths; because only those who do not have their own opinions can penetrate to the truth, as an old sage says. Considering himself as the instrument of the truth, as the vessel of the truth, he should not speak his own thoughts, but only what he had been taught. His standard should be: What does the truth think about it?

Then he was ready to ascend to a higher degree, the fifth degree. Until then, he had only been an expression of the feelings and thoughts of individual people. The initiate of the fifth degree should embody the spirit and soul of the people. The astral, the etheric and the ego in the individual human being are, so to speak, embedded in the national spirit, which is a concrete individuality, although without an outer physical body. The national spirit gives expression to everything that happens in a single nation, to all its feelings and characteristics – just as Buddha's Nirmanakaya gives its etheric body to various individualities and lives in them. In the Mithras Mysteries, such an initiate was called a “true Persian”. He was, so to speak, a mouthpiece for the entire nation, and those who heard him knew that the national spirit was speaking through him. But when such a high individuality has had all the experiences that he can have through a particular nation, he withdraws from that nation, which then falls into degeneration and decline. The spirit of a nation actually lives a more real life than the individual human being, but it usually speaks only through the whole nation. But if it ever speaks through an individual human being, it is always through someone who is not expressing his or her own individual opinion. The initiate in Palestine was called a “true Israelite” in the fifth degree, like Nathanael.

The initiate of the sixth degree was called a “solar hero” because not only the spirit of a people, but the spirit of an entire solar system spoke through him. He could not deviate from his path any more than the sun itself could, and he was subject to the solar system, to the laws of the solar spirit, just as the initiate of the fifth degree was subject to the laws of the spirit of the people.

Those who had penetrated the farthest came to the father of the solar system. Through them spoke the Father Spirit - the Spirit of the All-Father and they were an expression of his will and his law. There were places where these initiation methods were strictly followed, but even in the time of Jesus much of it had degenerated into empty ceremonies. Therefore, when Jesus said to Nathanael that he was a true “Israelite”, we learn not only that Jesus knew that Nathanael was a fifth-degree initiate, but also that at the time of Jesus there was a temple of initiation in Israel. But to know that Nathanael was an initiate, Jesus himself had to be an even higher initiate, which he also confirms when he says that he had met Nathanael under the fig tree.

What is meant by this statement? The fig tree or buddhi tree is a symbol of the family tree of humanity, whose branches, twigs and leaves are symbols of the individual ethnic groups, families and human souls. To sit under the fig tree means to identify with one's tribe, to feel at one with one's people, and indicates the initiate's position in relation to his people.

On the astral plane, that is, by clairvoyant means, Jesus had seen Nathanael as a fifth-degree initiate, and that is why he said he had seen him under the fig tree. Nathaniel immediately understands that no one other than a high initiate could have known this about him, and that is why he calls Jesus “the Son of God” and “the King of Israel.” But not only was Nathaniel allowed to see the souls of the people afterward, but he also saw angels ascending and descending from heaven. This means that his eyes were opened to the spiritual reasons and all the secrets of the cosmos.

This story thus suggests that there was indeed spiritual knowledge in Israel at the time of Jesus, and that this people had their mysteries, but also that Jesus knew about them and had this spiritual knowledge himself.

But the Gospel of John not only shows us that Jesus knows everything, but also that his will is strong enough to merge with others and work in them. Basically, every human being is a limited and isolated being. It was Christ who gave humanity the first impulse towards spiritual brotherhood. Through this impulse, people were to be brought closer together, and a bond was to be formed between souls that would gradually awaken a sense of belonging between different peoples over the centuries. Before Christ, nothing like this had been possible. Love did exist, but it was in the blood and never extended beyond the family and tribe within which all marital ties were formed. But if self-awareness was to be developed, this point of view had to be abandoned.

The blood ties that had so strongly bound people to tribes and peoples gradually began to dissolve as people increasingly entered into “distant relationships” outside of their tribe and people. As a result of the fragmentation that arose from this, people increasingly fell into unkindness and selfishness. In this case, the history of Rome gives us a typical picture of the prevailing situation. If the Christ had not come at that time and given the world a mighty impulse of spiritual brotherly love, people would have become more and more separated from each other and ultimately quite estranged from each other. With the Christ, however, the world received a new impulse. The blood tie was not to be dissolved, but love for father, mother and brother was no longer to be the only tie between people. Something new had been added, something much higher and more powerful than the old, namely, universal love for one's fellow man, the kinship of souls that unites souls with each other. “He who cannot value spiritual love more than love for father and mother cannot be my disciple.”

But in order for this new impulse of love to flow into and permeate people, it was necessary for Jesus to have the greatest willpower. At the wedding at Cana, he gave proof for the first time of this willpower, which was so strong and so pure that it could, as it were, pass into other people and determine the impressions [of those] who received it. How should we understand this? Let us assume that two people are standing next to each other and one of them drinks a glass of water. If the other person is capable of a strong volitional impulse, he can influence the taste organ of the other person in such a way that the water in his mouth tastes like something completely different, like wine, for example. For our experiences do not depend so much on the material that conveys the impressions, but rather on our way of reacting to the impressions we receive. Thus, wine or water becomes something completely different for us, depending on whether we look at it from a materialistic or a spiritual point of view.

In my book Grundlage einer Erkenntnistheorie (The Foundation of an Epistemology), I thoroughly discuss my thoughts on this question. Behind matter stands the spiritual.

Therefore, if a powerful will imbued with love were to make people taste wine in the water of a well, they would drink this water as willingly as wine. Matter is only a maya – an illusion. The spiritual content that we give to matter is the main thing. In everything that surrounds us, we therefore find not only coarse matter, but also the spirit that is the content of the world. (Changing sensations, that is the content of our world.)

This cannot only be stated by anyone who is clairvoyant, but can also be proven completely logically through theosophy. In the Gospel of John, this spirituality is particularly emphasized. The spirit that works in the God-man Christ Jesus is so strong that it can not only influence other people, but also command their feelings. That is why it is said that Jesus, through his willpower, influenced the water that was poured into the jugs in such a way that it had the same effect on the guests as wine. The guests really felt it – they drank wine. This story shows us what a powerful will, transformed into love, is at work in Christ, for only such a will can shine in others in this way.

It may be said, in a way, that the Gospel of John is full of mystery and can only be fully understood with the help of occult research. For example, it is never mentioned who wrote it, it only speaks of him as a “disciple of the Lord”. Nor does one learn the name of Jesus' mother.

In the story of the wedding at Cana, it is stated that Jesus' mother was there; and she is also mentioned in other places by the name of “Mother of Jesus”. She is never called Mary. If we read the passage about the crucifixion carefully, we see that three women were standing under the cross: Jesus' mother, the sister of his mother, Mary, the wife of Cleophas, and Mary Magdalene. So the sister of Jesus' mother was called Mary, and it is hardly credible that two sisters would have the same name.

If we then turn to the Christian mysteries, we do not find 'Mary' as the name of Jesus' mother there either. There she was always called 'Sophia', which means 'wisdom'. There is a mystery behind this fact. At the wedding at Cana, Jesus makes a strange comment to his mother: “Woman,” he says, “what is this that you have brought me?” The usual translation, “Woman, what have I to do with you?” is wrong and directly offensive to the Christian sensibility.

Jesus' words point to a mysterious bond that existed between him and his mother and that he felt strongly at that moment. His mother's words, “Do whatever he tells you,” also suggest a mutual understanding. Just as it takes only a half-hint for two friends to understand each other when there is a secret between them that no one else knows, so it was in Jesus' relationship with his mother.

We have already heard how a change took place in Jesus of Nazareth through baptism. The words that were spoken then, “This is my beloved and faithful Son; in him I am well pleased,” mean in the occult language, which is probably the only language that gives a reasonable explanation of this passage, that the individuality of Christ emerged at that moment in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.

At the same time, however, a change also took place in the stepmother of Jesus, the mother of the child Solomon. The father of this child had died early. When the ego of Zarathustra passed into the child Nathan and the child Solomon died, the mother of the child Nathan died shortly afterwards. The mother of the Solomonic child then moved with her children to the father of the Nathanic child and thus became the stepmother of Jesus. At the moment when the individuality of Christ took possession of the body of Jesus, a transformation also occurred in his mother. She was enlightened and radiant through the deceased, spiritualized mother, who entered the Solomonic mother as a spiritual individuality. Thereby she regained her virginity. This mother, who lives without birth, is Sophia.” The

Virgin Mary - is the Sophia of the mysteries, the divine wisdom or the Virgin Mary - Madonna.

This is the mystery of the mother of Jesus. It was this Mother Sophia, the divine wisdom, who was in Cana. Between her and Jesus there was a bond of love, a power of love that could be transferred to others and could influence them. At the basis of this bond between Jesus and his spiritualized mother, his own power of life and will could be transmitted to other people. Consequently, the Madonna is the union of the ego of the Solomon-like mother with the pure and spiritualized etheric and astral body of the Nathan-like mother. The old masters were right when they depicted the Madonna as childlike and absolutely pure, for example, in Michelangelo's Pietà.

At the end of St. John's Gospel, the writer says that Christ did many other things that are not contained in this book. We must also say that even a much longer series of lectures would not suffice to explain all that is written in the Gospel. In this lecture we will examine into the ideas of “the Father” and “I”. These two ideas will give us an explanation of the evolution of humanity, of which we have spoken in previous lectures. Humanity started out from an ego-consciousness that was quite different from the one we know to-day. By “Adam” we have to understand not a single human being, but an ego-consciousness that embraced several generations. The one who begins such a generation is the “Father.” The Hebrews of the Old Testament actually felt Abraham to be their father, and the single personalities in the Hebrew people said to themselves: I am not an independent ego; there is one that flows down from Abraham and branches out into all who belong to my people, and also into me.” Just as in a large tree the saps flow from the root into all the branches, in the same way the sap of Abraham, the common ego of the Hebrew people, flows through the whole tribe. When a Hebrew in Old Testament times uttered the name “father” he referred to the whole line of his ancestry, and this ego consciousness which embraced all the generations he called the divine consciousness. When he called upon the ego as God, he called it Jahve or Jehovah. When the name “Jahven” rang out, the people were reminded that a common ego which began with the ancestor of their race flowed down through the whole people. Through the intermingling of blood this condition became different in course of time; the consciousness of the “I am” became individualised, and Christ is the power which was to bring the consciousness of this change to humanity. When the man of ancient times said “I am,” he meant something that flowed down through generations; the man of more recent times meant by it something that flows through his own inner being. The first meant the God who flows through the whole community as the divine ego-consciousness; the other feels in himself a spark or a drop of the divine substance.

Now let us imagine that there is transposed to the Earth a Power which makes men clearly conscious that this “I am” can live in each individual human being, a Power which enables one to realise that God has sunk a drop of His own substance into each human being. This Power would say:—“This ‘I am’ is something that is in each one of you, it is a part of the one divine force. What you perceive as your individual ‘I am’ is one with the ‘I am’ of the Father. Whichever of you has developed within him the consciousness of this fact, can say: ‘I and the Father are one.’ If you look back as far as to Adam, you see the ego-consciousness flow through generations for hundreds and thousands of years. But there is a still higher human consciousness, which was given to man in his primal quality as Man. This is the consciousness of humanity, the consciousness which embraces not only a few generations, but the whole of humanity.” Then came the consciousness which belongs to generations, lasts for generations, and was finally individualised by man to his “I am”. Man, therefore, already possessed the foundations for the “I am” earlier, and for this reason Christ could say: “Before Abraham, was the ‘I am.’ ” That is the correct teaching of the occult school; it ought to read: “Before Abraham was the ‘I am.’ ”

In order to explain the teaching of the “I am” a little more, we will make use of the “Golden Legend”, which is known in all Christian Schools. It relates that when Seth, whom Jehovah had given as a substitute for Abel, came one day to the Gate of Paradise, the Cherub with the fiery sword allowed him to enter the garden out of which man had been driven. There he saw two trees that were intertwined with each other; the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge; and the Cherub told Seth to take three seeds from these trees that were intertwined. When Adam, his father, died, Seth laid these three seeds in his mouth, and from the grave grew a threefold tree, which revealed itself to many in radiant fire, and its glow then formed itself into the words: “I am he who was, who is, and who is to come.” The wood of this tree which had grown out of Adam's grave was used for many things. Out of it was fashioned the staff with which Moses accomplished his miracles. The wood was also used for the pillars standing at the door of Solomon's temple. With it was built the bridge over which Jesus passed when He was led to death. Finally, from this wood was made the Cross to which Jesus was nailed on Golgotha. In the Occult School the following explanation of this legend was given. Within man we see two trees: the tree of red blood and the tree of blue-red blood. The tree of red blood is the expression of “knowledge,” the tree of blue-red blood is the expression of “life.” The two trees were separated from each other. That was taught in the ancient occult schools. There was a time when man did not yet possess red blood, it was not until the ego sank into the body of Man that red blood arose. The life, which is expressed in the blue-red blood, had long been there; it originated through a higher development from the life-saps and, according to Christian teaching, the time when it was given to man was in the time of Paradise, when the first dawn of the ego appeared in the human soul, when the Deity descended and man was gifted first of all with the group-soul; but in the group-soul he possessed the first germ out of which the individual ego could arise. The legend of Paradise says that when man had received red blood he became a being who possessed knowledge, he learned to look up, his eyes were opened; he learned to distinguish between man and woman.

But this knowledge had to be bought at a price. The ego-consciousness can only originate through the blood dying. In the human body there is a continual consumption of life and renewal of life. The blue blood has fulfilled its task when it is used up, and out of the destruction of the blue blood arises the ego-consciousness. In the soul of man will be developed the forces through which he will learn to control and unite the two trees. Man only feels the ego by bearing about within him a process of murder and death. Man on the Earth is dependent upon the Plant, for it alone gives him the possibility of life. Think how man continually breathes in air which contains oxygen, and he breathes out air that is used up, air that contains carbon dioxide: he consumes oxygen and changes it into carbonic acid. The oxygen, which is necessary to his life, he obtains only through the plant, which changes back again into oxygen the carbonic acid produced by man, and this makes the air such that it can be used again by man. The plant retains the carbon which it separates from the carbonic acid, and it is given back again to man thousands of years afterwards in the form of coal.

The Earth is a complete organism, and if but a small part of it were to be missing, life, as it now exists, would be impossible. From a certain point of view we may look upon plant, animal, and man as one being, for if we were to take away the plants, the others would be unable to live. In the far-distant future this relationship will be altered. The men of the present day do not know this, but the seer can look into the time when the current of carbonic acid will be changed into oxygen not with the aid of the plant, but by man himself.

This is the great future ideal of the occult schools, that man shall accomplish consciously within himself that which is now done for him by the plant, that man will learn to take up the activity of the plant into his own activity. Within him will be developed the organs which will enable him to transform the carbonic acid for himself. The initiate can already see in advance that the two trees, the tree of carbonic acid and the tree of oxygen, will one day blend their crowns together. Then will the “I AM, He Who is, and Who was, and Who is to come,” live as something Eternal in each human being. The ego lived even in Adam, but it had first to be fertilised. In the beginning the Tree of Life had to be made into the Tree of Death. It could not be given at the same time as the Tree of Knowledge, therefore the two trees had to be parted; the plant was placed in between. The consciousness of eternity had first to be gained. Christ Jesus bore it within Him, and He transplanted it into the Earth. The three seeds are the three divine parts; Spirit Self, Life Spirit and Spirit Man. That which is eternal in all, was laid in the grave together with Adam. The consciousness of eternity was announced from the grave: out of the grave grew, the tree which bore a flaming device, “I AM, he Who was, Who is, and Who is to come.”

Christ teaches man to enkindle this “I am an individual man” in human nature, when He says; “Try to support yourselves more and more on the being of the ‘I am,’ then you will possess that which constitutes your communion with Me. Only through this ‘I am’ can you reach the Divine Father, for the father and ‘I’ are one.” A seer alone could grasp this, and the writer of St. John's Gospel was a seer. It was not his intention to record something of historical significance only, but he desired to record that which can be known when one looks into the spiritual world.

When a seer of the time of Christ wished to see what was going on in the spiritual world, he had to enter into the state of sleep. This we find indicated in the third chapter. Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews, came to Christ by night. He came to Christ because he wished to become a seer, because he had reached the state in which he could become a seer; and he came by night because his day-consciousness was then obliterated. In the fifth verse of this chapter we also find the important teaching that man can be born of the Spirit.

In John XIV, 6. Christ says: “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” Where is this way that leads to the highest Deity through Christ? The “I am” works on the astral body and forms out of it the Spirit Self; it works on the etheric body and forms out of it the Life Spirit; it works on the physical body and forms out of it the Spirit Man. When, therefore, the ego of man works on the astral body, the Spirit Self is formed, and in it then arises the Life Spirit. In this way man comes to the true life. In the “I am” lies the way to the truth and to the truth life, because the “I Am” works upon the lower bodies and enables the true life to arise in them. We may represent this in the following way:—

The “I am” shows the direction man must take in order to unfold Spirit Self, Life Spirit, and Spirit Man.

In the Gospel of St. John we can also find, direct Anthroposophical truths. The writer of this Gospel relates (in Chapter 9:3) the fact that in each human being there is an individual ego, that in this ego there is a spark of divine substance, and that this spark must develop to the “God within us.” In most of the translations of the Bible, Christ's answer to the question: “Who did sin, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” we read: “Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents; but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.” But is this a view worthy of a Christian, that God makes a man be born blind, in order that God may make His Glory manifest in him? What an incredible conception of God, that can arrive at such a conclusion: This passage is much more simple and clear when we view it with the knowledge of Spiritual Science. Christ replied: “Neither has this man sinned, nor his parents; he is fulfilling his karma, in order that the divine spark in him shall become visible, in order that the works of “The God in him” shall be made manifest. That is the way in which Christ's answer should be translated: “He was born blind in order that the works of the God in him may be made manifest.” Each human being through repeated incarnations on Earth. It is not necessary that he should have sinned in this life; it is possible that he has brought from a former life the guilt which has led to this fate in this life. Here we have the teaching of karma, quite in the anthroposophical sense, karma which works over from one incarnation to another. The fact that Christ's teaching was opposed to the general views of the Jews is apparent, and this also explains the discord into which He comes with them (John 9:22).

There is another passage in the Gospel which reminds us of the teaching of karma. In the eighth chapter we read that when the Pharisees asked His opinion of the adulteress, Jesus bent down without speaking a word, and wrote with His finger on the ground. But the earth, as we have seen, is His own body. He does not condemn the adulteress, but He writes her deed into his own organism. By this He indicates that, just as seed planted in the ground grows up and bears fruit after its kind, so does each seed of man spring up in a later life and will bear the fruit corresponding to it and that there is no power on Earth that can take away the consequences of a deed. Theologians believe in thc propitiatory death: they believe that Christ has died for us and that therefore they cannot accept the teaching of karma, as this contradicts the view that Christ, through His death, has taken upon Himself the sins of the world. But when this matter is rightly grasped, the disharmony between the anthroposophical and the theological view dissolves into harmony.

The teaching of karma signifies for life in the world that which the ledger signifies for the merchant. According to the law of karma we must assume that the effect of what I have done in a former life approaches me in the present life, and that what I now do will come forth again in a later life. Thus we have a complete life-balance: on the one side the good deeds are entered, on the other side the bad ones. Now if someone believes that under the dominion of the law of karma he cannot perform any voluntary acts, as his mode of acting is always the result of his former deeds, he is like a merchant who would say: “I have just balanced my books, I cannot do any more business, for this would make my balance wrong.” For a merchant this would be a wrong way of thinking, and the opinion we have described above in respect of the result of karma is equally wrong.

When rightly understood, the teaching of karma is not fatalistic; freedom of will and karma can be united with one another in the most beautiful manner. When rightly understood, karma is never something that is unchangeable. And if a man refused to help another in misfortune, saying that he must not interfere with his karma, he would be acting just as wrongly as a merchant who refuses a loan, or a gift of a sum of money, when this can save him from bankruptcy. Just as a merchant enters a loan like this as a debt which he has to pay later, while the lender writes it down in his books as a loan so will the one who does a good deed write it as an entry to his credit, while he to whom it is done will write it down as a debt. Thus the rendering of help is not excluded by the law of karma, and it seems quite in order to lighten the karma, of one's neighbour by deeds of mutual help. A man can by his good deeds show kindness to one of his fellow-men; but there are also deeds which can benefit a large number of people, that is to say, it can lighten their karma and can thus be inscribed in the life-account of many. And when a deed is so mighty as the deed of Christ, it is inscribed in the karma of all men, because this deed lightens the karma of all those who allow it to work in them.

We see, therefore, that the law of karma is also mentioned in St. John's Gospel, and that its existence does not interfere with freedom of action in any way. Through His act of self-sacrifice Christ Jesus connected Himself with the whole of humanity. In accordance with the law of karma, each act is inscribed in the ledger of life: It is brought into connection with the body of Christ, with the Earth, and for this reason He does not at once condemn the adulteress, but inscribes the act in His own body. He receives into His own body all that man does; for karma must always express itself again in the earthly world. This story points, in a very significant manner, to the fact that Christ, through His deed, has connected Himself with the karmic development of the whole of humanity. He guides the future evolution of humanity.

When we examine into the five ages of civilisation again, the Indian, Persian, Egyptian, Greco-Latin, and European, we find that in the third age the foundations were laid for the Christ Power which will become fruitful for the whole of humanity. What was then placed in human evolution will only come forth to life in the Sixth Age. In that Age the Spirit Self, which will have developed out of the Spiritual Soul, will unite with the Life Spirit. The Christ-power shone forth prophetically from the Third to the Fourth Age. In the Sixth Age will take place the great Marriage of Humanity, when the Spirit Self unites with the Life Spirit. Humanity will then be united into a great bond of brotherhood, and ego will stand beside ego and brother beside brother; that bond of brotherhood we find foretold in the description of the Marriage at Cana of Galilee, which is not only an historical fact but symbolically represents how the sons of men will unite in the Sixth Age into a great bond of brotherhood that embraces the whole of humanity. From the Third Age there are still three Ages to go through before this event will come: the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth. In esoterisism an Age is called a day; therefore we read at the beginning of the second chapter: “And on the third day was a marriage at Cana,” which indicates that in the description about to be given, something that will take place in the future is referred to. The Mother of Jesus (the Spiritual Soul) is present at the marriage, and Christ says to her: “What have I to do now, and what have you to do? My hour is not yet come.” Here it is clearly said that in this marriage of Cana something is indicated which will only take place in the future. And as this hour is not yet come, what does Jesus do?

He changes the water into wine. Again and again we find the explanation given, that this action indicates new fire, new life-force was to be given to the Jewish people which was falling into decline; for the “insipid” water is changed into “fiery” wine. One might presume that the wine drinkers have thought out this explanation to justify their action. But if we are able to grasp the significance of this deed, we can look very deeply into the evolution of the world and humanity.

Men have not always used alcohol. All that develops in the Spiritual has its corresponding expression in the Material, and conversely, everything material has also its counterpart in the Spiritual. Wine, alcohol, only appeared at a certain time in the history of humanity and the world; and it will disappear from it again. Here we see a profound truth of occult investigation. Alcohol was the bridge which led from the group-ego to the independent, individual ego; without the material effect of alcohol man would never have made the transition from the group-ego to the individual ego; it produced the individual, personal consciousness in man. When humanity has reached this goal, it will no longer require alcohol, and this will then disappear again from the physical world.

From the above it may be seen that all that happens has its significance in the wise guidance of the evolution of humanity. For this reason, a man who drinks alcohol should not be scolded; but on the other hand, those who have hurried on before the rest of humanity and have developed so far that they no longer require alcohol, should avoid it. Christ appeared on Earth to give humanity the forces which will enable men to achieve the highest ego-consciousness in the Sixth Age; He desires to prepare men for the “time which is not yet come.” Had He let things remain at the stage of the “water sacrifice” only, mankind would never have obtained the individual ego. The changing of the water into wine signifies the raising of man to individuality. Humanity has reached a point in its evolution where it required wine, therefore Christ changed the water into wine. When the period comes when man no longer requires wine, Christ will then change the wine back again into water. How was it possible for the power to appear in Christ which enabled Him to change water into wine? As the Earth itself is the Body of Christ, He could make the forces of the Earth active within Himself. On the Earth the water that flows through the wine is changed into wine; Christ could accomplish as a personality all that takes place in the Earth, because all the forces of the Earth must also be in Him, as soon as the Earth is His Body and is ensouled by His astral body.

What does the Earth accomplish with its forces? If we plant a seed in the Earth, it germinates and grows and bears fruit. It is multiplied; from one come many. Through reproduction the, animals also bring forth many. The same power of increase, the power to multiply, also works in Christ, and this is indicated in the Feeding of the Five Thousand. Christ possesses the power which is natural to the Earth, to multiply the seed. If we bear in mind the thought that the Earth with the forces is the Body of Christ, and apply it to what we find recorded in St. John's Gospel, many details will become comprehensible to us. What are the Gospels on the whole? In St. John's Gospel we have a presentation of the principles of initiation, such as were to be found in various places in ancient times. What the pupil for initiation did outwardly was not the essential thing for the school to which he belonged; the essential thing was what he experienced from stage to stage, from degree to degree of initiation.

Modern scholars are very astonished to discover in the story of Buddha's life occurrences that are similar to those recorded in the story of the life of Christ Jesus. This is explained by the fact that the writers of these accounts did not record the outer circumstances in the life, but the inner spiritual facts. These are the same in all true initiates; for all have traversed the same path and on the way have had the same experiences. What the initiate had to experience on the path of initiation was laid down in the writings on initiation, and all initiates of the same degree had to go through the same experiences. The biographers, therefore, only wrote a biography of the various stages of initiation. The Gospels are nothing more than old records of initiation of various depth; but what in former times was accomplished in a lower state of consciousness, took place publicly in the Mystery of Golgotha. The death which hitherto had been overcome in initiation in the etheric body, was now overcome in the physical body. The Event on Golgotha is the initiation of a highest Initiate, who was not initiated by anyone else.

Therefore the writer of St. John's Gospel could only describe the life of Christ in the way it is described in the codex of initiation. This Gospel is a book of life, and whoever lives it through will awaken within himself the power to see spiritually. It is a seer's book, and was written for the training of spiritual vision. Whoever lives it through, sentence by sentence, will experience the great and mighty result, that he meets Christ spiritually face to face. It is not so easy to convince people; they must themselves work up to the stage at which the knowledge dawns upon them that the Christ is a reality.

St. John's Gospel is the way that leads to Christ, and the writer desired to give everyone the opportunity to understand it. Whoever develops the Spirit Self will experience within himself the dawning of that wisdom through which he can understand what Christ is. Christ Himself indicates this: He hangs on the Cross; at His feet stand His mother and His initiated pupil, whom He loves. This pupil is to bring to men the knowledge of the significance of Christ, therefore Christ Jesus points to the mother Sophia with the words: “This is thy mother, whom thou art to love!” The spiritualised Mother of Jesus is the Gospel itself; it is the wisdom that leads men up to the highest knowledge. This disciple has given us the mother Sophia; that is to say, he wrote for us the Gospel which enables those who search into it to know Christianity, and to comprehend the origin and goal of this great movement.

The Gospel of John contains the wisdom of “the God in man,” Theosophia, and the more that men devote themselves to the study of this document, the more will they receive wisdom and enlightenment from it.

Today, it is our turn to explain the relationship between the Bible and wisdom in more detail, but first we need to discuss the “Old Testament” some more. Yesterday, we only mentioned the creation of man and the important passage: God breathed into the man and so on. (Genesis 2:7) Today, we want to try to penetrate the content of the original source of the Bible. So let us first consider what may arouse wonderment in people. It is useful to pick out individual facts. The long lives of the patriarchs in the Bible can arouse amazement. The material scientist would of course say: that is not possible. A theosophy that indulges in generalizing a concept says: Adam, Seth and Enoch are not to be understood as individual people, but as tribes; thus, they are names of tribes. It is not that simple. We have to go deeper into the laws of life. We have to refrain once and for all from symbolizing and allegorizing, and not ask: What does it mean?

I have already spoken to you about the cause of this old age in another context. At the time, I cited a conversation between two poets, Anzengruber and Rosegger. You know Rosegger's charming description of the mountain people. Everything he presents to us has been carefully observed. When you see Anzengruber's plays, you see farmers who stand firmly on their feet. Now something very strange. Anzengruber never lived among farmers. He lived in the city and didn't like to go out. Rosegger said to him: If you would observe the farmers more closely, you would be able to describe them much better. Anzengruber replied: I have never seen farmers, but my father, mother, grandparents were farmers, and that has remained in my blood and rumbles in me.

Direct inheritance seems much more vivid than when the blood is mixed. This is still the case today when a son comes from unmixed blood. In the past, this was the case to a high degree; it was not only in the imagination. In the old days, people did not marry outside their tribe. It was considered a great sin to step outside the blood. In all ancient peoples you find sagas and structures where breaking this commandment had to be atoned for. No blood brotherhood existed among ancient peoples, and what was in the blood was a completely different power. In those days, consanguinity brought with it a kind of clairvoyance. Today that has passed, today it would even cause harm. This clairvoyance was expressed in such a way that one not only lived in the imagination, but one had real memories that went back a long way. Just as you remember your youth today, so one remembered events from the life of the father, grandfather and great-grandfather. Today's man does not believe that. At that time, what the father had done was felt as: I have done it. For today, this is a highly wonderful situation. Thus, what was the experiences of the fathers, as in Anzengruber, passed into the memory. You could have felt your father as your self at that time, so that you did not say “I” to yourself, but you took father, mother, grandfather and great-grandfather all together as “I”, you felt the whole generation as “I”. So Adam was everything that people felt for centuries as a common consciousness, patriarchs are a whole generation embracing self-awareness. You have to know that consciousness arose through blood-brotherly memory. This is how we understand those statements in the Bible, and a great wisdom is revealed to us. So I could explain from chapter to chapter how theosophy is based on our religious feeling.

And now from the “Old Testament” to the “New”, to the actual Gospel. We distinguish the time before Christ Jesus and the time after Christ Jesus. The coming of Christ Jesus into this world is the most significant, most powerful event in the development of humanity. Something completely new occurred there. Recent research has gradually unraveled the Gospels. Contradictions were sought and these have done little to further understanding. What confusion would such a dissection of the Apocalypse create, for example? I will mention only one fact here: the secret revelation of John was seen by Bible researchers as a prophecy of future events of humanity, or even of past ones. For example, some said that the presbyter John lived after Nero and only wrote what happened in terms of earthquakes, plagues and so on. Now I still want to point out a remarkable passage where great events and upheavals were brought about by a beast. The number of this beast is a human number, “666”. The researchers have heard something ringing here; they have heard that things have been expressed through numbers, certain names, forms. There was a possibility of using the alphabet as numbers. This was the practice in certain secret schools. Now researchers have found out, diligent, hard-working researchers, that Nero is supposed to mean the beast, just to avoid believing that there is something spiritual behind it. They simply did not know what it was. The true theosophist must first learn wisdom to understand the meaning of the Bible.

666 is composed of 400, 200, 60 and 6. This means or is called: Sorat. This also has a specific sign: a staff with two wings or ram horns. (Rev 13:11) That is the sign for this being. Spiritual science sees in everything not only a material but also a spiritual essence; for example, the sun is the body of the sun soul. For spiritual science, it is the spirit that moves people forward; its opponent is Sorat – 666. The Book of Revelation says: This beast has two horns, like a lamb or a ram. If you know these things, then you also know what the writer says. You see that you first have to know what it is about, and this requires wisdom.

Augustine, the recognized church teacher of various denominations, said an important sentence regarding the secular position of Christianity: “What is called Christianity has always been there, only that the true religion, which has always existed, has been understood in different ways.

But where did Christianity live before Christ Jesus appeared? In the mystery. What was mystery? That which is today called a church, school or art institution. The knowledge of things was used as a preparation to then serve as an introduction to understanding, just as the divine spirit bent down and ascended again. There one also learned to listen to the secrets of world existence expressed in sounds. Richard Wagner felt this again and tried to reproduce it. Such schools existed, and each person was first tested to see if they were capable of being gradually introduced to a tangible self-awareness through their comprehension, feeling, and understanding. This was the initiation or initiation. There were different levels, because people progressed to different degrees. One thing was necessary: that one went through a prescribed course of development, and this was passed on in the schools of the initiated. The different levels had different names:

1st stage: the Ravens.
2nd degree: the Occultists.
3rd degree: the fighters.
4th level: the lions.
5th stage: had a national name, for example, Persians. Christ says of Nathanael: true Israelite. (John 1: 47)
6th stage: the sun hero (son). 7th stage: one did not say (father).

Let us take one of the 6th stage, a sun hero. His life was as it has been for thousands of years. He could no more stray from his prescribed path than the sun can step out of its orbit, and so he follows the strictly harmonious world orbits. If he were to step out, an unimaginable disaster would occur, as if the sun were to step out. In ancient, ancient legends, there is talk of solar heroes: Hermes, Buddha, Zarathustra, Pythagoras; even in Germanic countries: Siegfried, with a few changes, a basic type. Why is that? Because in those days the process was exactly the opposite of what it is today. The old principle was: not to concern oneself with everyday matters, but to seek the essential. At that time, one described what one had to go through for initiation. The prescribed life of a thousand years was the description of life. Hermes had lived according to this prescription, and thus, when he described his life, he described what others had already experienced before him.

We will better understand the matter if we understand the meaning of the stages: one was used to form the character, another brought the phenomena of the astral world closer, and others brought explorations of even higher worlds. When one had grasped that at the time, then something special occurred. Then there was a final act of initiation. The initiate, through the initiated hierophant, was brought into a state in which the body was dead for three and a half days. The etheric and astral bodies were drawn out and wandered around in the spiritual worlds, guided by the high priest-hierophant. Then they were led back into the body and the person received a new name. Now he knew from his own experience what happens in the spiritual worlds, and was now reborn. He could bear witness that the spiritual life conquers death. Every time a person came back into the body, he woke up with the cry: “My God, my God, how you have glorified me.

Only those who achieved the victory of life over death could attain knowledge. This has happened over and over again in the secret schools of spirituality. This process has been veiled.

Compare this with the description of the life of Christ Jesus. In his case, what happened within in the mysteries took physical appearance. First came the test by the wise man, then came the baptism, and finally he was placed in a coffin similar to a cross. Outwardly, this took place historically in the Mystery of Golgotha. Some do not want to understand this and say, “You interpret it that way and take it as a historical event.”

The hanging on the cross is the outer representation of what previously applied prophetically to the initiated; a deep meaning that is mystically and historically true at the same time. It is as if you were entering a temple of art, where a drama depicts the year 1920 and what was seen would later come true. Before that, the mysteries depicted what later happened in the life of Christ Jesus. Those who described this life brought over ancient initiatory traditions from prophetic mysteries. Such a solar hero had to live according to the rules of initiation. They existed for thousands and thousands of years and therefore the same applied to the Gospels. Hence the great agreement, the exclamation: my God, my God, how hast thou glorified me, or: how hast thou forsaken me, looks very similar in writing and pronunciation. So Augustine could say: Christianity is the true religion.

The saying, “Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have come to believe” (John 20:29), referred to the vision of the initiates. Thus the Gospels are the same as the ancient books of initiation. They existed before Christ Jesus. But He lived through them in the physical world, because the mighty power of this unique personality made it possible. Thus Christianity appears to us as the fulfillment of ancient wisdom, and in the Bible we have what could be experienced in the initiations, the wisdom of the initiates.

The simple person who simply approaches the Bible builds his heart on it, and with fervor he feels the wisdom that underlies it all. No one would feel this wisdom if wisdom did not bring the Bible about.

Today, with a few exceptions, people are no longer able to approach it with faith. A new understanding of the Bible must now be opened up. I will give you a comparison here. In the Middle Ages, people swore by the books of Aristotle. Galileo could not do that. He was the first to perform an autopsy on a human body and to show that certain nerves originate in the brain and not, as Aristotle taught, in the heart. At that time, things really contradicted each other, and Galilei said: Get rid of the whole of Aristotle. — What about today? What Aristotle called a nerve was not a nerve at all, and so Aristotle was proved right again. First you have to go to the things themselves, then you come back to Aristotle.

The same thing must happen with regard to the Bible. What he himself sees, imagined inspiration – figuratively presenting inspiration, independent of any book, describes the spiritual researcher, and we can thus assume that what he himself sees is literally written correctly. When we understand this, great reverence for this book arises, and we feel that this Redeemer's life was truly written by inspiration.

Through such an achievement, our relationship to the spiritual worlds will change, and we will learn to look up to the inspired with great reverence. First, a bridge must be found to those who are exploring the wisdom of the Bible. The teacher will be wiser, the listener more fervent – the hearts of teachers and believers will resonate. That will be the success of Theosophy:

two things will come:

1. wisdom independent of the Bible,
2. How

Thus the book that used to be sacred will become sacred to us again, and so a true spiritual movement will be the reconquest of the ancient wisdom taught by the Bible. Through the Bible, the most free knowledge and true progress must be made fruitful again for religious life through theosophy. Questions

Question: [Not handed down].

Rudolf Steiner: Everything is in development, including the I. This I has emerged from a group I. Just as the finger of your hand does not feel itself as an I, so the human being at that time felt itself as a group I.

Question: [Not handed down].

Rudolf Steiner: There are personalities who were contemporaries of Christ Jesus. There are no historical sources about him. One passage in Josephus is a forgery; and so is one in Tacitus. Historians therefore say: There is no testimony of this Christ Jesus.

In our time there are deeply initiated people; but if someone wanted to prove historically whether there were initiates after 1900 years, they would find nothing about the initiates. But today there are personalities who were contemporaries who know and can testify that they stood eye to eye with Christ Jesus.

Question: Does keeping silent develop certain powers?

Rudolf Steiner: Through the suppression of certain words that are not said. Certain religious communities are led according to certain basic laws. The Trappists know full well that whoever is a good man of silence now will be a good speaker in the next incarnation.

When, as we saw yesterday, man has reached the stage in the spiritual world in which he has, so to speak, transformed everything which he possessed in the form of capacities and talents acquired during his earthly life, then the time has come for him to prepare for a new incarnation. But we must realise that two things should be dealt with in that which comes towards us from the human being. One thing is that which reproduces itself in the course of physical heredity, and the other is that which the human being brings along into the world from his earlier lives on earth.

To-day we shall have to describe man's descent into the world, but you need not object to the word “descent”, for it is not a spatial descent, but a gradual process of development whereby man comes out of the world which is round about us and enters into the physical world.

Yesterday we saw that the spiritual world should not be sought in a “Beyond”, but that it is also round about us; modern man, however, is not able to perceive this spiritual world.

Out of this spiritual world develops that which we designate as a new embodiment. We saw that from his former life man retains an essence of his etheric and of his astral body, a survey of his experiences, and that he also took with him into the spiritual world that part of his astral body which he had been able to transmute, casting off the unrefined part.

It will be easier to form an idea of reincarnation if we bear in mind a few other things concerning the life after death. We saw that immediately after his physical death man lives for about three and a half days within his etheric body and that his past life rises up before him in these three and a half days like a kind of picture. The etheric body dissolves and then comes the Kamaloka time; this is the time of purification, in which the astrality still requiring purification is cleaned and purged.

But now I must mention another experience. When this memory picture arises immediately after death, man has a significant experience. He has the experience as if he suddenly grew in size, quickly breaking through his own surface and growing out into space. This feeling does not vanish until he is born again. Man feels that he is as large as the whole world to which he belongs, as large as the whole space of the universe. This will enable you to realise that man can look upon his body and experience it as something which does not belong to him, for he sees his passions as if they were outside his body. He has the strange feeling of being spread out over the whole universe.

Then comes something which is more difficult to understand. During the whole time of Kamaloka man feels as if he were really split up into space. You may understand this better if you bear in mind the following: During the time of Kamaloka, when man lives through his life backwards as far as his childhood, in the manner described, he passes through all his experiences as if they were reflected in a mirror. If he once slapped someone's face it is he who now feels the slap, for he feels that he is a part of the world once occupied by the other person. For example, if you died here in Kassel and the other person whom you slapped lives in Paris, then you feel as if one part of your being were in Paris. Thus you feel as if you were split up over, the whole world; parts of you live, so to speak, wherever you have to look for something. But you should understand this in such away that you cannot feel anything in the space between Kassel and Paris. If you thus bear in mind all the events of your life, you really feel split up into many many places during your passage through the period after death.

The following may serve you as a simile: A wasp. consists of two parts, a front and a back part, with a very thin connection. Now imagine that the back part were completely severed, but that the wasp nevertheless, drags it along with it. This is more or less the way in which you can picture to yourself what I have just described: You feel that you consist of single parts and that there is no connection between them. But when the human being enters Devachan, he once more feels as he did immediately after death, namely as if he filled up the whole space of the universe.

Now, when in Devachan man has transformed all his dispositions into talents and capacities, the Ego once more feels attracted towards the physical earth and endeavors to descend to the earth in a physical incarnation. First of all the Ego surrounds itself with an astral body. This process takes place through the fact that Ego attracts everything astral; the astral substance comes shooting towards it, as it were. It is just as if you were holding a magnet in front of iron filings; even as these filings are attracted in definite forms, so the Ego attracts the astral substance. But while passing through the soul and spirit realms the Ego has gained impressions through its experiences and all these form the fundamental forces which help to build up the new astral body. The new astral body thus takes along with it everything that the human being has experienced during his former life and in Kamaloka. All the impressions which he has had there, have a definite influence upon the way in which the new astral body enters into him.

The human being has now acquired an astral body; but he must also have the other members. The astral body has only been formed through its own forces of attraction. Before conception, man is enfolded only by this astral body. The seer therefore continually sees these astral germs of human beings waiting to be born—that is to say, waiting to be conceived. He sees them flying about with a tremendous speed; bell-like shapes move about. through space with enormous speed; distances play no part whatever; they move so rapidly that distances play no part at all.

Now comes the enfolding with an etheric body; but that a process in which the human being does not become enfolded with his own forces alone. His own forces, which lie in him, can no longer care for the etheric body; for that purpose, man needs the help, of certain spiritual Beings who must cooperate in this.

You may have an idea of these Beings if you bear in mind that you sometimes use words which you do not generally connect with any definite thought; for instance, the word Folk-spirit, Folk-soul. To-day we have no definite idea in connection with this word, but only something quite abstract. But the clairvoyant seer connects with it something quite different. There really are Beings of a higher nature, who exist even as we ourselves exist, but who never incarnate in the flesh, and these beings are the souls, or the souls of tribes and races. We do not use a vague expression when speaking of the Folk-soul: The Folk-soul is a real being, except that it does not possess a physical body, for its lowest member is the etheric body. Then the Folk-soul has an astral body, the Ego, Manas, Budhi, Atma, and a still higher member which man does not attain and which Christian Esoterisism calls the Holy Spirit, and which Theosophy generally designates as the Logos.

The clairvoyant seer may therefore address the Folk-Soul even as he addresses other human beings. To-day we have no real conception of such things and believe that this word designates characteristics of single nations. But this is not true—a reality is connected with it. The understanding for such things was necessarily lost through the materialistic conception, but it will be reached again. To-day men are inclined to dissolve such things into empty concepts. This had to come. For this same reason a book had to be published in our modern epoch which constitutes, so to speak, the very opposite of a theosophical conception. This book had to appear and has been greatly admired. It is Fritz Mauthner's “Kritik der Sprache” (The Critique of Language). Mauthner is a thinker who dissolves everything which lies beyond sensory things. Only a radical thinker who had been abandoned by every good spirit, could have the courage to write as Mauthner did, breaking with everything that is spiritual and real. In centuries to come, men will turn to this very book when they wish to know how people used to think at the beginning of the 20th century.

The Folk-Soul is a reality; it spreads out like a mass of fog, and in it are embedded all the etheric bodes of the individual human beings belonging to a definite nation and its forces stream into the etheric bodies of individual men.

Now there are spiritual beings having the rank of these Folk-souls, who cooperate in the building up of the etheric body of the new soul. These spiritual beings bring about the fact that the human being is led towards the nation which is most suited to him. The etheric body does not always fit quite perfectly; all the disharmonies which you often encounter in life often depend upon the fact that man is unable to build up his etheric body through his own forces. A complete harmony will only be reached upon a much later stage of development of the earth.

The enfolding with the etheric body takes place with great rapidity—a speed which you cannot conceive of if you compare it with physical conditions. Still higher spiritual beings then lead man towards the parents who are able to supply him with the substance which he needs for his physical body.

The modern materialist who sees that the son resembles his parents, will not be able to believe that something else is also connected with the body inherited from the parents. Of course, as regards our body we resemble our ancestors, but this does not contradict the facts explained above.

Let us observe a definite case—the family of Bach In the course of two hundred and fifty years, over 29 more or less significant musicians have come out of that family. Materialists will say: This clearly proves that there is such a thing as heredity!—In the same way the family Bernoulli produced eight mathematicians in a short time. How can we explain this? We can understand this best of all if we bear in mind hereditary conditions. As this is easier to grasp in the case of a musician lot us observe the family of Bach.

Let us suppose that a young Bach had lived in Rome during his former incarnation, that he had elaborated his dispositions and was ready to reincarnate. Supposing he had brought with him, as the result of his former incarnations, the greatest musical gifts; he could do nothing with these gifts if he were not able to find a well developed ear. Without such a well developed ear, he would be just as helpless as a great artist without an instrument. Necessarily such an individuality would have to incarnate in a body supplying a good organ for his dispositions. But the external form of the inner and outer organs is hereditary and if this individuality wished to become a musician, a well developed ear would be essential! Where can he most easily acquire such an organ? In a family of musicians. So he is led towards a family where he can find the best organ for his further development and the unfolding of the talents reposing in him. At that time, the best which could be found in that direction were the parents of Johann Sebastian Bach.

And how do matters stand with the brothers Bernoulli? Mathematical thought does not depend upon the structure of the brain (for mathematical logic does not differ from any other), but the mathematical gift is based upon the specially exact development in the structure of the three semicircular canals. This is an organ not larger that a pea, embedded in the middle of the ear and consisting of three semicircular canals, exactly corresponding to the three-dimensional space. If one canal lies exactly horizontally, then the second one stretches from right to left, and the third one from the front to the back. [Note 1] They all face one another in an angle of 90 degrees The essential thing is therefore this exact position: The more exact the right angle is, the better does the organ function. If the organ is in any way injured, giddiness arises; you can no longer orientate yourself in space. The mathematical talent, that is to say, the possibility of using it, is based upon a specially fine elaboration of these canals. And this organ is inherited in the same way as, the musical ear.

The brain forms thoughts concerning space in exactly the same way in which it forms thoughts on philosophy. But the fact of having an understanding for the forms in space depends upon these three semicircular canals. Thus an individuality with highly developed mathematical gifts will incarnate in a family in which this organ has reached the most perfect development and this was the case in the family Bernoulli.

A suitable instrument is also needed in order to be morally efficient. An individuality with a high morality therefore seeks parents who promise to supply the best instrument for this purpose. The proverb, which is often used so superficially and trivially: “one cannot be too careful in the choice of one's parents”, is true in the deepest and most earnest sense, for a child chooses its own parents, so to speak.

Many people might object to this and ask: How can we explain mother-love, if that is so? For mother-love depends on the fact that the mother knows that the child is part of her own self. But viewed in the right light, mother-love does not suffer in any way—on the contrary, we learn to know it better.

Why is a child born to a certain mother? Because its spiritual qualities lead it to a mother who is spiritually related to it, and the child loves its mother even before it is conceived; mother-love is, as it were, the counter-part of this primary love and attraction. Consequently this insight even deepens the idea of mother-love.

Now the occasion for incarnate is essentially dependent on the qualities of father and mother; and there, father and mother work differently. When a human being descends to a new birth, the Ego, which possesses more volitional forces, feels more attracted by the father, and the more astral forces by the mother. The father has a greater influence upon the Ego, the will and character, and the mother has more influence upon the astral body—that is to say, more in the direction of thought. Of course, it is best of all if both parents are suited to the individuality seeking to incarnate.

When man descends, those forces are also active which were impressed upon him when he ascended to the spiritual worlds. All this develops forces of attraction and he is drawn into the sphere which was related to him from the very beginning. He is consequently led towards those human beings with whom he was already connected before.

Let me give you an example based on real fact. It once happened that a man was sentenced to death by a vehmgericht of four or five judges and executed. The former life of these six men was investigated through spiritual science and it appeared that they had formerly all been together on earth, but that the executed man had been their chieftain and that the others had been sentenced to death by him. The last execution was therefore a kind of atonement. This case in particular brings into clear evidence the law of Karma.

Thus the various forces which man attracted during his former life exercise a determining influence when he is born again, both in regard to the structure of his body and the place of birth, and in regard to his later destiny. Disharmonies appear in the physical body even more strongly than in the etheric body.

All these things show how man becomes enfolded by the three bodies when he is born again. And in every incarnation one Ego works upon the astral body, the etheric body and the physical body. Later on we shall see how man ascends to this high degree of perfection, for he transforms the astral body and the etheric body more and more. Out of the purified astral body develops Manas, out of the purified etheric body Budhi, and out of the purified physical body Atma. We are therefore able to imagine the ever growing perfection of man from incarnation to incarnation.

This appears most beautifully in the Lord's Prayer. But we can only understand it in the right way if we grasp it in the truly Christian meaning, as it was grasped in the Occult School of St. Paul. In this School the Lord's Prayer was explained according to its true Christian meaning, and the pupils were told: Imagine the higher members of human nature, which develop, through the fact that man more and more refines his three lower members. Early Christianity used to look upon these three higher members (Manas, Budhi, Atma) as man's higher nature. By developing the three higher members more and more, man gradually approaches the Godhead. From this standpoint, the esoteric Christians of the past used to call the three highest members the Divine Nature, and they called the highest Atma, i.e. the Father. This is the deepest divine essence in man: the Father in Heaven.

The Father is the essence towards which all men develop. He is the centre of the world's creation. The creation in the Christian meaning, can be best imagined if we bear in mind the sacrifice. Think of your mirrored-image, and assume that you could be just as selfless as this mirrored image, to the point of being able to sacrifice your own life. This is how we must think of a selfless creative activity: We ourselves must become completely one with the created object.

Now imagine the Father as the centre of a reflecting hollow sphere: The Father's image will in that case be reflected a thousand-fold. The esoteric Christian of olden times said to himself: Look at the world: All the Beings in it are, after all, the reflected images of God. And in their esoterisism they used to call this reflection of the Godhead's own image “the Kingdom”, that is to say: God, reflecting Himself everywhere.

“Continue now to develop your feelings,” was the instruction given to the pupil of esoteric Christianity in olden times, “continue to develop, your feelings. and if you can perceive God in everything, if you have dissolved the Godhead in an infinite number of single objects, and if you wish to distinguish these objects you must give each a name. This name: must be sanctified, it must be hallowed, for every single creature is a mirrored image of' the Godhead.”

In the course of his development, aiming at the attainment of God, man enters into these three elements. But you must not think that man becomes God. Take a drop out of the ocean: In its essence it is akin to the ocean, but it is not the ocean. In the same way the drop of divine nature within us is akin to God, to be sure, but it is not “the Godhead.” By developing the three highest members more and more, man gradually becomes united with the Kingdom; for the spiritual world comes down to him.

Here you have the three first entreaties in the Lord's Prayer: the first place, the appeal to the Father; in the second place, the entreaty that the Kingdom should come to us; in the third place, the Hallowing of the Name.

If we develop those three highest members within us, we shall always endeavour to avoid acting in a way which is not in harmony with the Spirit of the Father, from Whom we descend and to Whom we go in our development.

In contrast to the three higher members esoteric Christianity then considers the four lower members of man which must also become more and more perfect.

The physical body consists of the same substances which are also to be found outside in Nature, and these substances continually go in and out of our physical body. Indeed, if the physical body is to remain healthy, they must continually go in and out.

The etheric body has forces which are inter-related with the whole Folk-soul, even as the physical body's forces are inter-related with the whole of Nature. If the physical body is to remain sound, physical substances must go in and out of it day by day. If the etheric body is to remain sound, it must not develop upon an individual basis, but enter into harmony with the whole Folk-soul and with all the higher Beings.

The word “trespasses” is connected with the word “debts.” Debts clearly show that you do not stand there isolated, but that you live within social connection with your fellow-men.

That which brings disorder into the astral body of man was considered in early Christian esotericism as something connected with man's inclinations, passions, impulses and desires. Everything which can bring disorder into these is expressed by the word “temptation”. “Trespasses” are something which brings man into connection with the social community, whereas “temptation” is something into which every man may fall, in so far as he is an individual being.

If physical substances did not go in and out of our physical body, this body would come into disorder. Hence, we pray: this day our daily bread.

If the etheric body did not enter into a harmonious relationship with the Folk-soul, that is to say, if it did not insert itself harmoniously into the whole social structure, this body too would come into disorder. Hence we pray: Forgive us our trespasses.

If man fell into the error of giving way to every temptation which approaches him, this would bring disorder into his astral body. Hence we pray: Lead us not into temptation.

The Ego can commit errors which we designate as “evil”. Everything which transforms a normal, sound self-consciousness
into to evil, that is to say, into selfishness, belongs to these errors of the Ego (which is our own Self). To these errors belong all the aberrations of selfishness and egoism. Hence we pray: Deliver us from evil.

The physical body can thus develop soundly if we nourish it in the right way with daily bread.

The etheric body can develop soundly, if we bring it into a right harmony with the social structure in which we live.

The astral body can develop soundly, that is to say, it can be purged and purified, if we overcome all temptations.

The Ego can develop soundly, if we endeavour to transform every form of egoism into altruism, every form of selfishness to selflessness. Thus we may see in the Lord's Prayer a prayer encompassing the whole development of man.

Someone might now object—and you will often come across this objection: The Lord' s Prayer is one that was given by Christ Jesus for every man. Of what use are explanations such as the above, since the majority of men knows nothing about them?

The naive' person need not know anything about them. Look at the rose. The greatest wisdom has built up the rose, and yet even the simplest man may rejoice in it! It is not necessary to know anything of the wisdom contained, in the rose. It is the same with the Lord' s prayer. A power goes out from it and influences the human soul, even if the soul in its simplicity does not know this . But the Lord's Prayer could never contain this force had it not been drawn out of the deepest wisdom. Every great prayer, such as this greatest of all prayers, has been drawn out of the deepest wisdom, and the power of such prayers is based upon this fact. If you think that this is simply a thought-out explanation, you will be wrong, for the Being Who gave us the Lord' s Prayer laid into it this deep power.

You may therefore see that only with the help of spiritual science can we understand that which we practice daily the power of which has been experienced by mankind for nearly two thousand years.

Now we have reached a stage in the development of humanity where it is no longer possible to proceed without such a deepening of our understanding. Formerly, that is to say, up to that moment, humanity was able to feel the spiritual forces contained in this prayer without knowing its deeper meaning. But now humanity has progressed so far in its development that it must ask after this meaning, and an answer has to be given now.

The Christian religion will not lose any of its value thereby, but it will, on the contrary, manifest itself in its whole depth. Religious truths will be gained anew through the greatest wisdom. The esoteric explanation of the Lord's Prayer is an example of this. (See Rudolf Steiner's booklet: The Lord's Prayer) It shows us the path which man must tread through many incarnations. If he walks in the spirit of the four petitions referring to the four lower members, they will help him to fulfil the work leading to the development of his higher members, as expressed in the first three petitions of the Lord's Prayer.

Notes:

Note 1.In regard to the human head, and the directions “above, below”, “right and left”, “in front and at the back”, the organ as a whole stands like a cubus poised on its point.

We began to characterize the Apocalypse last time. It represents a late product of the various views that developed around the time of Christ's birth, especially in the schools from which the deeper theological teachings of Christianity emerged, which only later took on a popular form. We can imagine the process that took place in the first and perhaps also in the second century after Christ in such a way that the old teachings that came from the Mysteries were cultivated in the most diverse ways in the most diverse places of learning, in the most diverse mystery schools, and in particular experienced a spiritual, that is, a theological deepening; these old teachings and this theological deepening are undoubtedly the basis of later Christian theology. With this later Christian theology, it is the case that ecclesiastical Christianity, under the leadership of the spiritual world, the bishops and so on, then tries to popularize it. Now I believe that we can gain an insight into the way in which what is now presented to us as Christian mystical theology was formed in the first centuries [after the birth of Christ] if we follow how Christian dogma was formed in its actual spiritual quality. One then gets the impression that it was formed essentially under the influence of the most diverse mystery cults. What is the relationship between the Apocalypse and this world of mystery cults and later theology? It can still be seen in the Apocalypse that it emerged from the endeavor to absorb and process the teachings of the ancients and to teach them as a preparation, as it were, as something that is ordered towards the new Christianity, as something that is called to replace the old mysteries and to proclaim the deeper content of the same as a world gospel.

If you follow the Apocalypse in its entire composition, you can clearly see this twofold character. You can clearly see the old views precisely represented in the basic components and then you can also see them shimmering through: Now the time is fulfilled, a new way of salvation has come into the world. This new way is the one that has been lived out in Christianity.

So we can trace the two interwoven components of the Apocalypse, which are presented to us in a double number seven, a number seven with a view to the past and a number seven with a view to the future. Everything that is told to us at the opening of the seven seals refers to the past, and everything that is told to us at the sounding of the seven trumpets refers to the future. The fact that the book with the seven seals only refers to the past is clear from the solution to it. If you want to understand the whole situation, you have to visualize it: What has been taught in the theosophical-mystical schools? One must also have an idea [of] who the writer of the Apocalypse was. It is not the specific personality that matters, but what these views arose from, what they were formed from. It was only in the middle of the second century that they were worked together into the form in which we have them now. The author emerged from Gnostic schools that still flourished everywhere in the second century AD. They were a continuation of the old Gnostic schools, which did nothing more than further develop the mysteries. It is difficult to find out what was taught in these Gnostic schools. There are only a few documents that can give us the necessary clues about the actual spiritual world [of these schools]. These Gnostic schools, which were widespread throughout the world at that time, had a spiritualized view of the ancient mystery cults. I do not mean to say that it was a higher level. The spiritual in knowledge does not have to be a higher level than that when one penetrates down into life and grasps the spiritual there. The actual Gnostics, on whom the Christian doctrine is based, were essentially theologians and philosophers who cultivated a very intellectual doctrine. The main thing with the Gnostics - the basic nerve that we can distil from the various schools - was in fact a kind of longing to connect the world of man with the great world of the cosmos. Last time I showed that the Christ doctrine is the cosmic conviction that the redemptive history of humanity is a model of what takes place in the individual human being.

I would like to give a summary of the world view, which perhaps has not really been cultivated in any Gnostic school, but which emerges as an average conception. We must imagine that it is a matter of showing a strict parallelism between the course of the great world and the life of the individual human being. The Gnostic wanted above all to depict the individual human life as that which repeats the macrocosmic microcosmically on its path at the various stages of development, just as the historical aspects of world life are also repeated.

[To show how the historical world life lived in the Gnostic view - to illustrate how it was expressed - I will use the "Exodus from Egypt"). It is an allegory of the inner development of the soul. The land is to be understood as the body of the individual. [The exodus from Egypt thus corresponds to the entry into the "Garden of Eden and the exodus from the sensual body" in the story of the Israelites.] The Gnostic seeks to overcome this, to move out, as it were. By approaching the higher, he is led out [from the sensual nature] by the Initiate. He is not immediately led to Palestine, to the "Promised Land". He must first go through various stages of development. We have a symbol in the 'brazen serpent' set up by Moses as a remedy against the many snakes. Anyone who was bitten by a snake had to die. At the sight of the brazen serpent, however, he was to remain alive. The brazen serpent was nothing other than the prophetic foretelling of redemption through Christ Jesus. The serpent has always been an important symbol. The people then reached the inner world, the life of the soul, the Promised Land, where the Messiah must appear. This is how the Gnostics understood this event: as an allegory of the inner life of the soul. The serpent is regarded everywhere as a symbol of the development of spiritual life passing through matter. The [brazen] serpent symbolizes the destruction of the last material manifestation. The very last stage, the coarsest stage, is precisely that in which the Logos, the highest spirit of God, expresses itself, from which man, human individuality, must [wriggle] out. The turning back, the return of the earthly to the divine must be undertaken. The bronze serpent is the symbol for the exemplary human being who is so far advanced that he can contribute to the spiritualization of the rest of the world through his spiritualization. The Gnostics interpreted all historical events in this way. They saw them as allegories for individual soul processes of the actual human being and thus grew into the divine world processes.

I would like to present one such idea, in which the cosmological grows out [from the depths]: the idea of the initial state of the world. Formed out of the general nothingness, the Gnostic imagines the beginning of the world. Two great world lights then appear: [the Father and the Son; the eternal world spirit and the image of the eternal world spirit]. The All-Mother then appears as the third. The All-Mother is the material principle, and here the non-existence of matter triumphs. The Gnostics imagined matter as something that must be overcome. The highest of these is the Father with the Son. These divine entities work to recognize themselves in order to become life. This is what the development of the world means, what the actual becoming is.

When the world spirit - Father and Son - merges in the womb of the All-Mother, what is called the four elements - fire, earth, air and water - comes into being. These four elements represent in their spiritual essence what the Gnostics thought of as the highest Christ. They envisioned a supreme being that emerged through the marriage of the spiritual and the material. The material, as dark matter, was initially the primordial principle under the image of the All-Mother [who was just as primordial as the Father]. The two supreme spiritual entities unite with these four elements: Father and Son, and produce a spiritual-material entity: [the Christ]. The Christ strives back to the primordial ground of existence.

Then we find that [the Gnostics] thought of heaven as a kind of closed circle. However, they did not imagine the vault of heaven as such. Heaven with Father and Son is first of all the Logos, the spiritual-material entity that is now hidden in the universe and represents the Christ: As the highest celestial, spiritual-etheric entity, they thought of him as the cosmological entity of the universe. In addition to the fertilization of the "All Mother, however, a droplet of light flowed out into the chaos under the name of Sophia, Wisdom. Through this secondary light, which as a lost one in the world space has entered into a different kind of connection with matter than that which is represented in Christ, through this secondary light, through this Sophia, everything has come into being that has led to the formation of humanity - according to the view of the Gnostics. This is the lower, that which we will get to know further. Because it also originates from the two primordial lights, there will be a kind of parallelism with the Upper. Through the connection of Sophia with the chaotic, with the material element, that which is actually described to us in Gnosis comes into being. The whole doctrine of the origin of the world, as it is found in Gnosis, first arose from these small secondary planets of the "great light". The 'Sophia-World-Mother' - in contrast to the "All-Mother" - has fertilized matter once again. From this union of the droplet Sophia emerged the son Jaldabaoth. He produced seven more sons, and these are the seven powers, the seven spheres. We have before us the seven basic forces of the visible world, that is, that from which the world nature is built up, from the actual matter, from the life principle, from the astral body, from the animal soul and from the upper three spiritual forces. The whole human being is built up from these [seven basic forces]. But these emerged from the marriage of Sophia with the elements, so that Gnosis renewed the origin of the world. While Christ represents the actual product of the marriage of the earthly light, Jaldabaoth represents a kind of sub-deity that [worked] down to human existence and brought forth man. This is therefore a cosmological doctrine that reaches down to man.

How does the Gnostic now imagine the formation of man? He has man built up from the seven basic parts. But they are formed through the marriage of Sophia in such a way that they take the downward path. We have to make our way back again. So we have to find our way back. This is how the Gnostics imagined it: Jaldabaoth had gotten into some kind of argument with Sophia, who is from the heavenly lights themselves. If Jaldabaoth had formed man alone, then man would undoubtedly have been lost. It was only because the dispute resulted in a continuous cooperation between Jaldabaoth and Sophia that man was able to find his way back to God.

We have to imagine the story of creation in connection with the story of man in mystical allegorical form. The divine spark of light, the "Sophia", remained with mankind. They led it back, as it was a descent from the spiritual to the material. But the way back was not possible through their own strength. It was only possible because help came to man from the next sphere. This happened through the connection of a perfect human being with that which had previously developed into the highest sphere. This is symbolized in a gnostic way. The return of man to God was envisioned by the Gnostics in such a way that man was able to enter and complete the path to heaven, that he could gradually approach the divine in the course of the various lives. When man has then come so far that he has developed his memory to such an extent - this is gnostic - that in retrospect he can survey the whole cosmological development, as I have now presented it as a general gnostic conception, in such a way that he has it before him not merely as a doctrine but as a fact, when man has again traveled a part of the path in such a way that he sees the rest lying clearly before his spirit, then he is the one who is able to make the waters of the Nile flow upward.

Such people - so the Gnostics assume - exist. The Gnostics knew such people. These are the "messiahs". Now comes something that [the Gnostics] see in Christianity. There is a beginning, a connection halfway between Jesus and Christ. A personality is embodied in Jesus who is able to ally himself with the Christ of the upper region. This is how the Gnostics saw the emergence of the "Son of Man" - and also the emergence of the Buddha - on the one hand; and on the other, the descent of the Christ, the world spirit, and its connection with these "gods" developing from below.

I hope that I have at least evoked a general idea [of gnosis]. [In its essence] gnosis consists in the fact that man can reach this high degree of development in the course of various re-embodiments, and that he has reached the highest when not only his personal life lies before his memory, but when he can look back in this way, when his memory is so far extended that he is able to embrace all embodiments in his memory. This is how far Jesus was, who emerged from the small droplet of sidelight. He is ripe to receive the Christ from the upper regions as "Vahän", as a "vessel". The human being becomes the bearer of the Christ. Thus we have the Christ born out of the spiritual world and the Jesus Christ of the Gnostics.

This is the concept of Christ that gradually emerged in the first two centuries. It is the Christ [who develops an initiated person up to higher levels]. An initiated human being is the one who is developed. An initiated human being is the one who has developed to the highest human state, and a Christ is the one who has ascended to the highest spiritual. According to the Gnostics, it was a halfway connection.

We see this view again in the Apocalypse, only now it interprets the matter in the following way - I would like to present it in the following manner: The person who is on the path of perfection goes back step by step the elemental forces. One by one, the seven seals are unsealed. In this way he follows the initiatory path of the ancients. This path is there at the turn of the Christian world age. But there is also something higher, the gospel of Christ, which consists in the fact that through the long preparatory study man has become mature in his entirety to receive the gospel within himself. Thus what used to be a place of worship is now to be replaced. It is now to be replaced by the entirety of humanity. It is to be the temple of God.

Later it was said that it would be the church that took the place of the temple, and the cult of the past would be replaced by the new sacrifice of the Mass.

In the four parts of the Mass we see the spiritual life and its transformations expressed. First the spiritual, the Gospel - the way back is proclaimed. It goes through two parts of the Mass; bread and wine are offered. It then goes on to the consecration, in which the body and blood are actually transformed into the divine. And in communion, where man receives the divine, Christ is received through Jesus.

Later Christianity only externalized what was cultivated in the Gnostic schools. The person who sees and understands a Catholic mass will see nothing but an embodiment of what the Gnostics saw from their point of view as man's path to Christ, nothing but a popularization of the old mystery teachings. Whereas previously the individual had to be initiated, this initiation is now built up for the whole community, every day this symbolism is repeated for the community, and this repetition is intended to awaken those who are called to it.

Later Christianity endeavored to blur the old. It wanted to emphasize that it was something new, that a new era had dawned. Nevertheless, it will also be possible to rediscover many Gnostic views in the external symbolism, and thus to find old mysteries. But at the same time it will be seen that only those to whom the real meaning of the matter will dawn will be able to penetrate and reveal Christian symbolism. But it is a matter of popularization, and therefore [the Mass] must be repeated over and over again.

The Church Fathers - in their standpoint against the Gnostics - are almost on the same [standpoint]. Their endeavor was to blur what came over from the "old", and yet we can still find all the teachings expressed in symbolism, in the new church, which should be and wants to be "universal". In essence, the Apocalypse represents this replacement of the former, of the mysteries by the general communion of saints. The Apocalypse is nothing other than the paraphrase of the one sentence: The mystery is to become popular. Nothing else is to be achieved than that in the idea of the one-time original initiation - in the repetition of the mass action - it is pointed out again and again that everyone should walk the path and that he will find it when he is ripe for it.

I would just like to draw attention to one passage in the final chapter. The angel says to John: "Do not seal up the words of the prophecy in this book, for the time is near..." and so on. These things will show us that for us the Apocalypse is a paraphrase of the sentence: The mystery is to become popular. It is to revive as a church.

We only need to look at the whole skeleton of the Apocalypse to see that it is nothing other than a popularization of the stages of the Gnostic view. The seven seals signify the return path of man. At the opening of the first seal we are symbolized: the overcoming of the material. At the opening of the second seal: how man develops the higher spiritual forces within himself. At the opening of the third seal: how the understanding of the measure, order and harmony of the universe arises in him, how the spirit-matter becomes clear to him, where the great mystery of the world reveals itself to him.

So at first man is caught up in the material, then he comes to the principle of life.

On the fourth stage, matter is overcome, spirit and matter, through death. At the opening of the fifth seal, we see the spiritual powers of man emerge, the spiritual soul of man is unsealed, "the souls of those who were strangled for the word of God". After they were born again, "they cried out with a loud voice, saying, "Lord, holy and true, how long have you not judged and avenged our blood on those who dwell on the earth!"

At the opening of the seventh seal, the day of wrath breaks out, the day on which the wrath of God is poured out on all material things, where the higher is born out of the lower, the Budhi powers, the wisdom. Man becomes mature enough to sense what is actually divine. He becomes mature enough to sound the actual trumpets. This proclamation happened in the Gospel, and there we see how this maturity is expressed in the new message: Christ has come into the world and resounds through nature.

The seven trumpets represent the spiritualization, the coming to Christ of all human principles. While the Apocalypse initially follows the old mystery path, the sounding of the trumpets is intended to show us a new path that we are to find. In the Apocalypse we also see a kind of 'Exodus from Egypt' - in the second part. This is why we always have a reference to the plagues of animals, frogs and locusts. The Exodus of the Hebrews from Egypt to Palestine can be read as a parallel.

The exodus from Egypt is tailored to individual people. Where the writer then comes up to cosmological primal spirits, where he is in the midst of the heavenly world powers and what is represented in the higher heaven - in the middle the Lamb, the Christ - there he sees these cosmological ideas.

The book with the seven seals opens up the views of the ancient mystery cults to him. He imagines that I am being led before the Savior, Christ Jesus. The seven seals of the book are unsealed for me. That means nothing other than: It becomes clear to me that the world is built on the basis of seven principles that have flowed out of the Eternal. New things will now be proclaimed after man has reached the highest level, after wisdom and spiritual powers have developed, when the first trumpet sounds, the voice of the Lamb. Then Christ leads man further. In a larger human community, humanity is led back to the divine. We can see particularly clearly that this is the case when we see how the seventh vision [that of the New Jerusalem] is described last. This is nothing other than the new, larger community compared to the earlier, narrower community. The New Jerusalem is the new church, the new community. "And I saw a new heaven and a new earth." In the past, heaven and earth were also depicted: The light of dawn shone into the burial chambers.

Christ once called himself the cornerstone, the highest point of the pyramid. He is the one who has reached the highest. - "And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband." She is the new bride who is to be married in the new spirit. The Spirit is to unite with the church and it is to present the temple. "And he who sat on the throne said, 'Behold, I am making all things new! And he said to me, 'Write, for these words are true and certain. And he said to me: "It is done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. I will give to the thirsty from the fountain of living water freely." The living water is the way up. Man has to make his way upwards through material things, he has to turn upwards. "He who overcomes will inherit all things, and I will be his God and he will be my son." The new Jerusalem, the bride of the Lamb is the new church.

Four roads lead to the new city. It "had twelve gates, and on the gates were twelve angels and names written on them, namely the twelve families of the children of Israel". Each path leads through three gates. "From the morning three gates, from midnight three gates, from noon three gates, from evening three gates." The twelve gates and twelve angels are twelve powers. The length, width and height of the city are the same - like the pyramid. The wall measures "one hundred and forty-four cubits, according to the measure of a man, which the angel has". ... "The wall of the city had twelve foundations, and on them the names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb." ... "The foundations of the wall were adorned with precious stones." ... "The twelve gates were twelve pearls." ... "I saw no temple in the city, for the Lord God Almighty is its temple and the Lamb." - This states that the outer place is replaced by the spiritual temple. "The city has no need of the sun or the moon." These old lights are replaced. "The lamp is the Lamb." All the old symbols have merged into the Lamb, who brought the actual Gospel. But they prepared Christianity.

I would like to briefly summarize once again the basic character of what the Apocalypse wants to say: the Christian church has absorbed the ancient mysteries. What the ancient mysteries tell us is the doctrine of the sevenfold path of man. What Christianity tells us is presented in a generally understandable way. In place of the former temples, the Church places the return of the microcosmic to the macrocosmic. We can only understand the Apocalypse if we understand it from the gnosis: that we see in Jesus Christ the Paschal Lamb who has overcome the world, that through his religion he has made himself the bearer of all humanity and then the mystery temples are replaced by the Church. And this is the main proposition to be expressed by the Apocalypse.

Good morning, gentlemen! I will now continue with the considerations we have begun. Don't you see the situation quite clearly: over there in the east is Asia. In ancient times, people came over from Asia to Europe, to Greece, directly along a whole series of islands. So the thing was like this (it is drawn): here Asia ended; here it went over to Africa; there was the Nile, of which I have spoken to you a lot. Here is Greece, here is the Adriatic Sea, and here is Italy, here then the island of Sicily. So there would be a lot of islands here, Samos, Rhodes, Cyprus and so on, and on these islands one came from Asia over to Greece. Here is Greece, here is the Roman Empire, today's Italy.

Now you have to remember the following, gentlemen. You see, in Greece, from about the year 1000, 1200 BC, one might say, everything I have told you about developed, and through that people learned to look at the world. But already, one might say, from the 4th, 3rd century BC, the rule in Greece was gradually lost, and it passed to Rome. After all, that was the capital. The way it happened was that in the most ancient times more and more Greeks, those who were more or less dissatisfied in Greece, emigrated and settled here, both in Sicily and here in southern Italy. As a result, over a period of half a millennium, four to five hundred years, Greek culture spread across the sea, so that southern Italy and Sicily were then called: Greater Greece. Even the ancient Greek homeland was referred to merely as Greece, and the other was referred to as Great Greece. It was not just the dissatisfied who turned to it, but people went there like the great philosopher Plato, who wanted to found a model state there. And actually the most important people who created the culture lived in southern Italy. And it must be said that in southern Italy, here in the south, there was a refined, educated life, while from above the brutal rule later called Romanism spread.

You know that the original population of Rome came into being in a very strange way: all the scoundrels in the surrounding area were summoned by the chiefs, of whom Romulus is particularly well known, and All the scoundrels in the area were summoned to Rome, and with them the first Roman robber state was originally formed. It is then that the robber mentality was continued under the first Roman kings. But very soon, under the fourth and fifth kings, the settlement and immigration of a northern tribe, the Etruscans, became established. These were again people, one can already say so, who then mixed with the descendants of the robbers, and through this again a human trait was introduced into the Roman culture. But all that which Rome later established as world domination, and which has been passed down to our time in the form of mankind's desire for power, actually comes – and we should have no illusions about this – from this original colony of scoundrels, which was founded on the seven hills of Rome. Only that everything possible has been poured over it; the thing has of course been terribly refined, but one does not understand the thing, how it was done later, if one does not know that an original robber colony had been gathered together from the forests. And all the lust for power and the like that spread throughout Europe and still play such a great role today came from this. In Rome, too, what then increasingly intertwined the church with secular rule was formed. And that is how the times of the Middle Ages came about and so on.

Now, you see, the Mystery of Golgotha happened at the beginning of our era. Roman rule was established, as I have described to you now, in the 8th century BC. So at that time, seven centuries after the establishment of Roman rule, this rule had spread far and wide, forming entire areas all the way over to Asia. Even where the Mystery of Golgotha took place, Roman rule was everywhere. The Jews living in Palestine, among whom Jesus of Nazareth appeared, were also under Roman rule. After all that we have said about the Mystery of Golgotha, it will be good to also take a little consideration of what has actually happened on the Italian peninsula since ancient times.

It is a fact that one must say: Europe actually only understands that which goes back to Roman times. Our so-called educated people have always studied Greek, but very little of Greek culture has actually been understood in Europe. You see, it is now very interesting that one hundred years after the Mystery of Golgotha took place, one of the most important Roman writers, namely Tacitus, writes a single sentence about Christ Jesus in his extensive historical works! This Tacitus described the ancient Germans, the ancestors of the Germans, in a way that could no longer be written at all later, for example, a hundred years after the Mystery of Golgotha. In his writings, there is only one sentence about Christ Jesus, which is: “The so-called Christ founded a sect among the Jews and was then executed according to court judgment.” That is all that the educated Roman Tacitus said, a hundred years after Christianity was founded in Palestine! So you can imagine: the ships went back and forth continuously, all kinds of trade relations developed, and in Rome, a hundred years later, no more notice was taken of Christianity than that a sect had been founded and the founder had been executed after a proper legal judgment!

Now, it must be added that, although the Roman Empire cannot yet be called a state – the correct concept of the state did not actually arise in Europe until the 16th century – but I would like to say that the state ethos is already there. Actually, what later became the state ethos had grown out of Romanism. So one can say: Tacitus was already so imbued with such a state ethos that the most important thing about Jesus Christ seemed to him to be that he was executed according to the proper judicial judgment. That is one thing.

But then you must also consider that Christianity was not at all what it later became. It originally had a truly free spirit. And it can be said that there were the most diverse views, all of which found expression only in that they saw something special in Christ Jesus; but otherwise they held the most diverse views.

Now, gentlemen, you will only understand what actually came into the world with Christ Jesus, and why it was necessary in the end that I pointed out to you how the earthly environment has an influence on the earth, even in language, you will understand it only when I now attempt to show you how Christianity has actually formed as a doctrine, as a view, as a world view, as a view of life, and how the Christ Jesus has intervened in this formation of Christianity. It is something very special to see: there in Jerusalem, Christianity is being founded; a hundred years later, the most educated Roman does not know more about it than what I have told you! But now people are constantly migrating from Asia through Africa to Italy. And beneath the surface, I might say, of what is considered humanity in Rome, this Christian sect is spreading. And when Tacitus wrote what I have told you, the Christians, as they were called, had long since spread among the people in Rome, who were not bothered by a noble Roman.

But what did they do with the Christians? Yes, you see, the descendants of Romulus, the robber, had also arrived at a point in time where they had become “properly educated”. Namely, their education consisted of building large arenas, among other things; there, fights with wild animals took place. There was a great desire to throw those who were not considered part of humanity in the Roman sense to the wild beasts and to enjoy watching them being devoured after they had first had to fight with them. That was a 'refined' enjoyment, for example. Now, the despised sect of Christians was particularly suited to being eaten by wild animals, when people in Rome thought the way I have indicated to you; they were also particularly suited to being covered with pitch so that they could be set on fire and then used as torches in the circus. But the Christians found ways to live anyway. And they could achieve this by holding their ceremonies and so on without being noticed. They spread what they thought was right for the purpose of spreading it underground, in the catacombs. Catacombs are wide spaces under the earth. In these wide spaces under the earth, the Christians buried the dead they loved. There were graves, and services and religious ceremonies were held on the graves. It was a custom at that time to hold religious services over the graves. That is why you can still see today, when you look at an altar in a Catholic church, that it is actually a tomb (it is drawn) and inside there are, for example, so-called relics, the bones of saints and so on. In the earliest times, the altar was actually a real tombstone, and the religious services were held on it. But under the ground, in these catacombs, the Christians in the first centuries were able to hide what they had done.

And if you look a few centuries later, the picture changes quite significantly. Here is what happened. You see, the Romans, in the first centuries after the founding of Christianity, were sitting at the top and enjoying themselves as I have told you, and down in the catacombs were the Christians. After a few centuries, the Romans had disappeared and the Christians took over the world. Whether they did better or worse, we will discuss on another occasion; but they took over world domination. And that is precisely what has done the greatest harm to Christianity, that it has become associated with world domination; for religious life can tolerate less and less in world history the amalgamation with the external state and world domination.

The matter is now the following: The formation of Christianity, the participation of Christ Jesus in the formation of Christianity, can only be understood if one knows what religious life, which permeated everything in the ancient times, was like. I have already told you: in the ancient times there existed the so-called mysteries. Well, you see, the mysteries were – if I were to use a modern word, one would say they were institutions – the mysteries were the institutions where everything that a person could learn was learned. But at the same time they were the religious and artistic institutions. All spiritual life emanated from the mysteries. And learning in the most ancient times was not the same as it is today. What is learning like today, after all? Learning today is like this, isn't it, that you are drilled in high school or in secondary school; afterwards you go through university years, and you have not become a different person as a result. But in the mysteries, there you became a different person. There you had to gain a different relationship to the whole world. In the mysteries, there you had to become wise. Today, through the institutions that exist in the world, no one becomes wise at all; at most, they become learned. But two things are compatible, and two things are incompatible: wisdom and stupidity do not go well together, but erudition goes very well with great stupidity. So that's one thing: in the ancient mysteries, people were made wise; they became people who were imbued with the spiritual. You became a person who could take the spiritual seriously. And you had to go through seven stages. Only a few people reached the highest level. These seven stages had names that you first had to understand in order to know what the people at these stages had to do.

If you translate what the one who was first initiated into the mysteries had to do, you come up with the term “raven”. So the first level were the so-called ravens. So anyone who was initiated into the mysteries became a raven. What did the raven have to do? Well, the raven had to mediate between the outside world and the mysteries. Newspapers didn't even exist back then. The first newspapers only came about thousands of years later, when the art of printing had been invented. Those who had the mysteries as their teaching profession had to be taught by trustworthy people whom they could send out and who observed the world. So you could also say that the ravens were simply the trusted representatives of those who were in the mysteries. And you had to learn to be a real trusted representative first. Today many people are employed as trusted representatives, especially in parties and so on, but you wonder if these trusted representatives are always trustworthy! Those who were employed here - in the mysteries - as ravens were only considered trustworthy after they had been tested. Above all, they had to learn to take what they saw very seriously and to report it truthfully in the mysteries. So in those days one also had to learn what truth actually means in the human being. It is certainly true to say that people in ancient times were not less dishonest than people are today. But today dishonesty is introduced everywhere, whereas in those days one first had to learn to be a truthful person. And this had to be acquired by being a raven, a trusted messenger of the mysteries, for years.

The second step, however, is something that is quite unappealing to today's man: the second step is that of the so-called “occult”. Occult means hidden, secret. They were no longer sent out, but now had to learn something over a period of time, something that modern people do not like to learn, namely, silence. And that was one of the teaching levels in these old mysteries, learning to be silent. Yes, it may seem quite grotesque to you, quite ludicrous, that one had to remain silent for at least a year, or even longer! But it is true. You learn an enormous amount through silence; you learn an awful lot through silence. Today, that is no longer feasible. Because think if it were imposed in our schools – which would really be quite useful for attaining wisdom – on young people between the ages of eighteen and twenty to remain silent for a year instead of joining the military, then they would indeed become terribly wise through this silence! But that is no longer feasible today. However, something else is feasible. Of course, you can't get people out of the habit, they don't want to be silent today, they want to prattle on, and every person knows everything very well, and when you meet a person today, above all they have what is called a point of view. Everyone has a point of view. Of course everyone has a point of view; but from each point of view the world also looks different, and that is nothing new to anyone who knows life, it is quite natural: if you stand here, this mountain looks different than if you were to stand over there. It is the same in the spiritual life. Everyone has their point of view and everyone can see something different. And when a dozen people are together, well, today, of course, they have thirteen opinions! That is not necessary. But that they have twelve points of view is not surprising; it is just that it should not be taken as so important. But each person usually takes their own point of view very seriously, terribly seriously! But in the early days, people in the mysteries had to remain silent about what they were to learn; they were only allowed to listen. In the occult, they could only be called 'listeners' because they had to listen. Today, those who come to our universities are no longer called 'pupils', but rather, by leaving out the 'to', 'listeners'. But often they are no longer listeners, but chatterers. And some people consider chatting with their friends to be much more important than listening in the lecture halls. Sometimes even listening is no longer something that engenders particular seriousness. That was the second stage. Then people could learn silence. And in silence it becomes particularly clear – and this is connected like cause and effect – that the inner being of the human being begins to speak to him. That is where the person comes to it. Imagine you have a basin of water; if you now attach a hose and drain the water that is in the basin, then the water just runs away – if it is not a spring but just a basin – and there is nothing left in it. And so it is when a person constantly prattles: everything flows out with the words, nothing remains inside. The ancients realized this, and that is why their listeners were initially instructed to remain silent. So after people had developed an appreciation for the truth, they learned to remain silent; only then did they learn to remain silent.

And the third stage was that which, if translated, could be called the “defenders”. Now people were allowed to start talking. Now they were allowed to defend the truth they had learned in the mysteries through silence. In particular, they were obliged to defend the spirit. The word “defense” is precisely one that can already be used for this third stage. Those who belonged to this third degree must know enough so that what they could say about the spiritual had weight, real weight. So one could not just talk about the spiritual in these mysteries, but one had to have learned it first and become a real defender. Then one ascended to the fourth degree.

The fourth level can be translated as “lion”. That is how it is usually translated. It would be even better to translate it as “sphinx”. Sphinx is a word that roughly means having become a spirit oneself. Of course, you still walk around with a human body, but you behave among people as gods behave. The ancients did not make any great distinction between men and gods, but in the mysteries one gradually became a god. That is the much freer point of view of the ancients. The moderns, yes, they see the gods standing above humanity everywhere. But that was not the view of the ancients. Today one says: Well, man comes from the ape. The famous naturalist Du Bois-Reymond even went so far as to say that there was once a giant leap in the development of nature between the ape and man, a giant leap even in the enlargement of the brain. The brain suddenly became larger than in the ape. You see, it is a strange statement from a modern scholar! Because one would actually have to assume that if he says that the brain of modern man is much larger than that of the ape, he would have dissected the ape and would know how large its brain was. But if you read up on it again, you will find that these scholars had to say: the ape has not yet been discovered in reality! – So the famous naturalist Du Bois-Reymond spoke about that which has not yet been discovered, which no one has yet seen: the ape, which has a much smaller brain than humans. This is the kind of “conscientiousness” that characterizes science today. And people do not even think that the famous naturalist Du Bois-Reymond is talking about something he has never seen, but they think: Oh, that's the famous naturalist, he knows everything! - because today humanity is much more gullible than the ancients were.

Now, the ancients certainly had the opinion that man can develop to the point of divine consciousness.

The one who was at the fourth level, who was a sphinx, no longer spoke like a defender of the third level, but spoke in a language in which he expressed himself in such a way that it was actually difficult to understand him; one had to think first about how to understand him. It is difficult for today's man to form a conception of this language, which was spoken by the Sphinxes, because he no longer looks at the matter correctly, as it was looked at there. But still in the Middle Ages, for example still in the 17th century, so that is only two hundred years back, there was still something present as a tradition of that language. For example, two centuries ago there were so-called Rosicrucian schools. There, too, certain initiates spoke in a language that was somewhat veiled and that had to be studied first; they spoke in a pictorial language. And so, for example, two centuries ago you can still find a picture - this may interest you - that was intended to explain something to people everywhere. This image was (it is drawn): a human figure with a lion's head, and here next to it a human figure with an ox's head. Among the people who were to be taught, it was said that the relationship between these two beings was expressed by “the being with the ox's head, the being with the lion's head” - they meant man and woman. But they did not speak the two words man and woman, but said: the being with the ox head - and meant the man; and they said: the being with the lion head - and meant the woman, because they saw something in the relationship between ox and lion that was the relationship between man and woman. Today, of course, this seems quite paradoxical and funny to people, but it has been preserved as tradition. And the sphinxes used animal names everywhere to express more clearly and characteristically what lives in man. And in such a language, you see, with which one spoke more out of the spiritual, the sphinxes then spoke. So they were already such that they spoke more out of the spirit.

But then came the fifth stage. In the fifth stage there were those human beings who had the obligation to speak only out of the spirit. Now, depending on whether they belonged to this or that nation, they were called “Persians” or “Indians” or “Greeks”. In Greece it was only the real Greeks. Because they said to themselves: Yes, when someone belongs to a people, they have their private interests, they want this or that, they want something different from someone who belongs to a different people! Only when they have reached the fifth level do they no longer want something special, but what the whole people want; that is also in their interest. He has become like the spirit of the people. In other words, he has become a spirit of the people. These spirits of the people were, in fact, in the ancient mysteries, even in Greece, very, very wise people. They did not think: If something comes, I will stand my ground and have my point of view, I know everything. They prepared themselves for a long time, even though they had already ascended to the fifth level, through exercises to help them reach a judgment in any matter. You see, if someone is a statesman today, well, then an interpellation may be brought before the Reichstag, and then he has to answer. Just imagine if that were done as it was in the past! If the person who had to answer said, “I must first withdraw from the world for eight days, come completely to myself in order to have an opinion about it.” Well, I would like to know what the parties in the Reichstag would say, say, to Mr. Stresemann or to other bodies, if an interpellant were to get the answer, In order to give a mature judgment on what you have asked me, I must first withdraw for eight days! But that was the case back then. Because in those days people believed in the spiritual world, and they knew that when you are in the hustle and bustle of life, the spiritual world does not speak; the spiritual world only speaks when you can withdraw. Of course, you then develop the ability to withdraw even when you are in the midst of the hustle and bustle of the world; but you first have to learn that. And once you had learned it, in the old days you ascended to the sixth level.

The sixth step was that the person no longer had an earthly point of view at all, not even that of the people, but said to himself: “I am a ‘Greek’; my brother initiate over there in the fifth step in Assyria is an ‘Assyrian’; the one further over there is a ‘Persian’. But that is a one-sided point of view. The sun comes over from Persia to Greece; it shines over us all. And so those who were initiates in the sixth degree no longer wanted to learn from what a people says, but they wanted to learn from what the sun says. They became “sun people” - no longer earth people, but sun people. You see, such sun-men sought to investigate everything from the standpoint of the sun. What was done in those days, people today have no conception of, because people today know nothing of the secrets of the world.

If you want to have an insight into such things, then you have to consider the following, for example. Some time ago a man came to me who said: “A strange book has been published, in which it is proven that the Gospels are written according to a numerical code. Namely, if there is any word in the Gospel, let us take the ‘primal beginning’ in the Gospel of John: ”In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was with God, and the Word was God», then if you divide the word, and you get out, any division is twice as long as the other, and each word has a numerical value: there is a word where the numerical value is 50, then 25, another word, 50, another word, 25. And you can calculate what kind of word must be in a certain place.

Now it is interesting, gentlemen, to see how such things are true. So let us take, for example, any word, let us say - I will make it clear to you with a word still used in German -: let us take the word Eva. Now let us assume that the E has the same value as one, the v as two, the a as three. Let us assume that this is the case. In ancient times, every letter had a numerical value; it was not just a letter, but it was known that if, for example, you had an L, that L meant this or that number. You can still see how the numerical values are included in the Roman letters:

I = one, V = five, X = ten.

they are also letters, but the letters have numerical values.

Let's take as an example – it's not right with 1, 2, 3 for Eve, but as an example to make it clear, we can take it that way.

1 2 3 = Eve

is the mother of all life. Now let's turn it around:

3 2 1

Yes, then we get the word Ave, which means the end of life. Going in opposite directions, read in reverse from the back:

Going in opposite directions, read in reverse from the back:

1 2 3 = Eva; 3 2 1 = ave

So, if you change the numbers, you can find how numbers and letters match everywhere.

And so there is a numerical key. And one can say: Now let us look at the first line of the Gospel of John. These are the numbers. Let us look at the second: the numbers are only rearranged, and the fact that they are rearranged means something. - You see, people today are very surprised at such things. But, gentlemen, I knew a man named Louvier who tackled the “Sphinx”: “The riddle is solved”; he applied Goethe's “Faust” to this numerical relationship, and it was also true. Goethe did not think at all about using any numerical law to write his “Faust”. But it is true nevertheless, because in every piece of poetry there is something numerical in it. But if you endeavor to say something to someone and I endeavor to use a numerical key, then I can also apply it to what you say; that is already inherent in the speech itself. There is already a spiritual element in what you say. And that, gentlemen, is the extraterrestrial: that is what the influence of the sun gives. That is why these sun people have researched the secrets of the sun. The pyramids, for example, were certainly not built just to be royal tombs, but the pyramids had very specific openings to which the sunbeam could only come at a very specific time of the year. The sunbeam has described a figure on Earth. These people have observed this figure and have been inspired by it. In this way they explored the secrets of the life of the sun. So a person who had become a sun person could say that he no longer followed earthly things at all, but followed the sun. And then, when he had been a sun person for a while and had taught people what was extraterrestrial, he was elevated to the dignity of “father”. That was the highest honor, and only a few attained it. These were the ones who had matured completely, who were obeyed and followed. They were obeyed because they had grown older, because by the time one had passed through these seven stages, one had truly grown older, and they were obeyed because they had wisdom of life and, in addition, wisdom of the world.

Mysteries:

1. Raven
2. Occult: listener
3. Defender – Defense of the Spirit
4. Sphinx
5. Greeks: Spirit of the people
6. sun people
7. Father

Now, gentlemen, just imagine that Christ Jesus, Jesus of Nazareth, did live in a time when, over in Asia, people still knew something about these mysteries. And it was still known, for example, that there were people who proclaimed solar wisdom. And what Jesus of Nazareth wanted was that people could no longer be enlightened only in the mysteries, but outside of the mysteries, that it could be made clear to people: What the sun does to people is also already within people, is within every person. And that is the most important thing about Christ Jesus, that He is the Sun-Truth and that He teaches the Sun-Word, as it was called, as something that is common to all people.

Now you only have to consider the great difference between the Christ Jesus and the other sun people. If you do not grasp this, you will never come to an understanding of the mystery of Golgotha. Because, you see, this is the way it is: what did one have to do in ancient times to become a sun person? One had to become a raven first, then an occultist, a defender, a sphinx, a folk soul - then one could ascend to a sun person. There was no other way. One had to be initiated into the mysteries. What did Jesus of Nazareth do? He was baptized, according to the custom of the Jews of that time, in the Jordan; and on this occasion, that is, after he had not been initiated into the mysteries, the same wisdom that otherwise belonged to the sun-men came to him. What could he say? He could say: This wisdom has come to me from the sun itself. He was therefore the first to enter into a relationship with heaven without the mysteries. What did he say, who had been a sun-person in the mysteries, when he looked up at the one who had stood on the seventh step? He said: “Behold, this is the Father.” He stood on the altar in a white robe, in the priestly vestments. That was the Father. That was the “Father” among those who had gone through these various stages in the mysteries. The Christ Jesus had not gone through this in the mysteries, but had received it from the Sun itself. That is why he said, “My Father is not on earth” - he meant, not in the mysteries - “but my Father is above in the spiritual world.” He thus pointed first to the Father in the spiritual world in the most eminent sense. So the Christ Jesus wanted to point out to people, who had previously received all spiritual from the earth, to the sources of the spiritual in the extraterrestrial itself. That is why people have always misunderstood what the Christ Jesus actually meant. Because, you see, it was said, for example, that the Christ Jesus taught that the earth would now perish, as it was said, and that a spiritual millennial kingdom would come very soon. Today's clever people, who in their cleverness sometimes also want to be benevolent towards the ancients, and also want to be benevolent towards Jesus, say: Well, that's what Jesus adopted from his time; he was also a child of his time and adopted it.

But all the things that people talk about are nonsense, because the millennial kingdom has really come - it just didn't look the way people in the world imagined it would, but the thing was like this: in ancient times, through the way I have described it to you, people had gained ideas about the spiritual world, and had also had experiences. That was the custom in ancient times, when people were different. That ended in the time when Christ Jesus lived, and people had to find the spirit in a different way. The spirit had to be found directly. That is what Christ Jesus did. And if Christ Jesus had not done what he did, then humanity would have completely degenerated. Life would have become meaningless. This does not contradict the fact that in later times, precisely through many Christian institutions, much that was senseless came about; but that was not originally natural in it. And people would have become dull. The mysteries would have perished just as they did there; but people would have known nothing of what was taught in the mysteries. Because, take now the old sun-man. What did they say about the sun man? They knew that he knew what came from the standpoint of the sun; he was dead to earthly life. When they spoke of the sun man, they meant someone who was dead to earthly life. And that is why, before a sun-man was initiated into the mysteries, a ceremony was always performed that imitated death and burial. And Christ Jesus outwardly presented death and burial before the whole world; and what happened at the death of Christ was, before all the people of the world, only a repetition of what had always happened in the cultus through the mysteries. Only in those days it was a mystery secret, and then it stood at Golgotha before the whole world. You see, it was really the case with the solar man that he had died to the earth. But through this he was also in between, between the setting world of death and the world of resurrection, the world of the eternal.

Sometimes things remind you of the old things, of which you can no longer understand the meaning. Imagine, for example, that a canonization is taking place in Rome. Someone is being canonized in Rome. It is a great ceremony when someone is canonized after dying hundreds of years ago. How does this ceremony take place? This ceremony takes place in such a way that first the Advocatus Dei, the divine defender, appears. He emphasizes all the good qualities of the person to be canonized. And then the so-called Advocatus diaboli, the devilish accuser, appears; he emphasizes all the bad qualities that the saint had. And then a decision is made between these two – I do not want to say that it is always a fair decision, but a decision is made. This ceremony is still being carried out today. When someone, like the Maid of Orleans, for example, is canonized, then the devil's advocate and the devil appear. Between the one who represents all that is good and the one who represents all that is evil, stands the saint himself, spiritually. You know that the image of Golgotha is always depicted with Christ Jesus on the cross in the middle, with the two so-called robbers, they are called robbers, next to him. But the strange thing is that Christ says to one of them: “Today you will be with me in paradise.” So he goes up, and the other goes down. These are Lucifer and Ahriman - devil and devil.

And so it was with the old solar man. He made the acquaintance of Lucifer and Ahriman, of that which wants to draw man up into the spiritual world, so that he becomes entirely spiritual – which is also not suitable for man – and of that which wants to bring man down to the earthly, which again is not suitable for man, because man belongs in the intermediate stage.

And so, through the Mystery of Golgotha, what used to be only implicit in the mysteries, and was only carried out figuratively, because one did not really die, is now standing before the whole world. One became a father there. The Christ really dies. But He says: My spirit does not die; it goes to the Father, because the Father now does not work down here as the Primordial Father, but works in the spiritual world. This view has come entirely out of the Mysteries. And if one wants the concept of the Father, one must seek it in the old Mysteries. Only then does one understand correctly how Christianity was actually formed.

Now, you see, gentlemen, all that I have described to you was very common over there in Asia. It was still part of the foundation of Christianity. The Greeks knew very little about it because they built the outer culture. And only the Romulus people, who descended from a colony of scoundrels, knew nothing about it at all; they only knew external world domination. They only knew external world domination so well that the Roman Caesars, the Imperators, even behaved externally as initiates; but it was at a time when the mysteries had already fallen into decline. For example, there was a Roman Caesar of the very first imperial period, his name was Caligula. Now, you see, a German historian once wanted to describe the German Kaiser Wilhelm in the 1890s; but you couldn't, because it wouldn't do; you would have been locked up if you had written it down! So the good man wrote a little book called 'Caligula'. He described the Roman Caligula, but every trait applied to Wilhelm II! Everyone who understood such things knew: Caligula is our Wilhelm II; it could only be done that way. This Caligula was at the same time an initiate, because everything had already become external. Of course, what the ravens had to do when it was not taken very seriously could be understood from what the princes also did. So Caligula had become a sun person, but of course only on the outside, like someone who, let's say, is a “general” who puts on military robes at the age of five or six. So Caligula had become an initiate. He had only taken the outward appearance. But he was even supposed to initiate others! During a ceremony, the story happened to him where the symbolic blow is struck with the sword at one of the sphinxes, that he actually killed the person concerned with the sword! But of course that didn't bother Caesar at all. With the Romans, everything had become so externalized that they no longer understood any of it inwardly. No wonder they couldn't understand Christianity at all.

And so Christianity in Rome passed to the secular ruler. In the times when Christianity came to Rome, there was the secular ruler who, however, saw himself as a god – of course, because one became a god when one was an initiate. Augustus was seen as a god; his successors as well. But in addition, there was the Pontifex Maximus, the “great bridge builder”. That was the spiritual ruler. But he had gradually become a shadow in Rome, had no significance, and the only significance was the worldly ruler. So it was, of course, more in line with a people who had the Romulus as their ancestor, who had gathered together all the scoundrels from the surrounding area. And now, you see, it was precisely through Rome that Christianity was secularized.

And that is what I wanted to tell you today about the outer form of Christianity. Next time, next Wednesday, I will discuss the inner form, how the sun really influenced Jesus.