The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Dear attendees! Since I have often been allowed to speak here about spiritual science and its results, may I be allowed to speak this evening about a special chapter that undoubtedly lies infinitely close to many souls: the Christ-question - not only because circles in our time there is an ever-increasing need to approach this question, but also because spiritual science in particular has something to say about this question, about how the Christ-question has to be integrated into our culture. Spiritual science does not want to be a germ of a new religion, but to show the way how to penetrate into areas that are not accessible to the ordinary senses, to modern science. It will not be possible to talk about what we want to deal with without briefly pointing out the many changes that have taken place in human hearts with regard to this question. For this, a brief review is necessary.

If we simply visualize Christianity's emergence into the world, we can initially say that at the beginning of our era something happened that gave the whole development of humanity a new impetus, a turn upwards. Even the non-believer will have to admit, for historical reasons alone, that the impulse that came through Christianity was a powerful one. At the time when the Christ Impulse entered the world, the human soul was in a very different condition than it is today, and a change in this condition will have to occur in the future simply because new powers of knowledge will awaken in the human soul. One thing is of historical significance: The most enlightened minds of the Occident, equipped with the deepest knowledge, had to recognize - under the highest tension of the powers of knowledge, through the greatest that they could muster in mental acuity - that something powerful had entered into the life of humanity through the Christ impulse. Let us first consider the view of the Gnostics, who are called “religious geniuses” by the most highly qualified and outstanding scholars of the present day. We do not want to talk about the cognitive value of Gnosticism, but we want to ask: What did the Gnostics think about Christ? We want to try to characterize the Gnostic attitude towards Christ. Gnosticism is a theory of evolution that must seem fantastic to people today. When we talk about evolution today, we ask: How did the human body develop through the various stages? - The Gnostic, on the other hand, said: “If you think impartially, you are led not to a material but to a spiritual origin; if you focus on the point where man came down from the spiritual into matter, you find that something was left behind in the purely spiritual heights in order to later penetrate into the development of mankind. Man could only progress by becoming more and more entangled in matter. If he had not done so, he would never have attained freedom. He had to become estranged from the spiritual in order to find his possibility of freedom in matter. Then, at the point in time when man was most deeply entangled in matter, that which had been held back earlier in the spiritual world at the origin of man had to pour into earthly development in order to prevent man from completely sinking into matter. That which flowed down from the spiritual worlds has been connected with the earth ever since, and Christ lives on with the development of mankind.

If we ask, with the means of spiritual science, how the Gnostics arrived at such ideas, we see on careful examination that these ideas, which the Gnostics brought forth from the deepest spiritual powers, come from an epoch when there was still direct vision, because in previous times the human soul was still attuned quite differently. From this original knowledge, ideas such as the Gnostic ones developed. Gnosticism seems like an heirloom of ancient knowledge. Here we encounter a lofty concept of Christ, which even those who consider Gnosticism fantastic must acknowledge: the Gnostic idea is bold and grandiose. We can quickly pass over the first Church Fathers who worked to establish the [Christian] dogmas. What the Fathers dared to do in those days, men later completely abandoned. In the middle of the Middle Ages, this view was completely abandoned. It was said: Human knowledge is not sufficient to reveal the heights to which Christ's entry into the earthly sphere could reach. Faith was substituted for real knowledge. Thus we see how the conception of Christ changes over the centuries, just as the character of the times changes with culture.

In the sixteenth century, we enter the age of great advances in the natural sciences. A [new] knowledge had to arise for this - a [new] kind of knowledge, which was primarily concerned with recognizing the material world and its laws. This knowledge emerged as an important developmental factor that transformed all commercial and industrial life. Medieval humanity still fully surrendered to faith; the Middle Ages believed what the Gnostics once recognized. The external world, which is our physical environment, shaped the new era. Thus, the whole concept of Christ was transformed: While the Gnostics could speak of a divine being that had only taken up residence in a human being, in more recent times it became increasingly impossible to imagine God incarnate. It would be interesting to show how, in the individual phases, the earlier conception increasingly recedes in favor of a [more outwardly] tangible Christ. Due to their inner state of mind, people were forced to refrain from seeing God incarnate and instead to see in him more and more the human being, albeit one of the most outstanding kind. In a human soul, in the man of Nazareth, one seeks today the starting point of Christianity, instead of seeing in this man only the gate through which the Christ entered [into the earthly sphere].

Enlightened minds, far removed from all theology, have wrestled with the question: How can a modern person relate to the Christ event? It is interesting, though, that the three personalities, who were all born in the same year just over a hundred years ago, endeavored to come to terms with this Christ event. Otto Ludwig wrestled with the material in order to shape it into a drama; Friedrich Hebbel noted the plan for a Christ drama. What they both wrote down shows that they could not cope with the problem, it was too big for them. We also know that Richard Wagner worked on this task and could not finish it.

As for this materialistic view of the mere human being Jesus, it must be said that it has not remained unfruitful; Jesus theology has also produced beautiful blossoms. Rittelmeyer's little booklet “Jesus” is just one example: it is something that can deeply touch the heart and soul. Modern theology has produced much of the same kind. Peter Rosegger, a justly popular poet of the present day, constructed a Jesus for himself. If you imagine Rosegger himself, highly idealized with all his beautiful, sympathetic qualities, you have his idea of Jesus of Nazareth.

Despite all the tremendous achievements of theology in recent times, a remarkable discovery has been made: that if you look at the Gospels with an open mind, Christ Jesus cannot have been a human being at all. Benjamin Smith, for example, claimed that all interpretations of the Christ as the simple man of Nazareth are a slap in the face of any scientific approach, that it is not possible, that it is incompatible with all tradition, to want to see only a human being, even if it is the most ideal, in the Christ; so one sees that the Christ Jesus must be a god. This realization comes at a time when humanity no longer has any conception of what a god is. And so the conclusion is drawn: since there can only be human beings on earth, but the Christ must be a god, he cannot have existed on earth at all. Under such circumstances, from such premises, there has been accomplished what for years has caused so much sensation: the denial of the personality of Jesus of Nazareth.

In brief, this is the course of the conception of Christ through the centuries. How does spiritual science relate to the Christ event? How can it relate to the most important problem of human development? Spiritual science starts from the premise that the human being not only has knowledge based on observation of the external world, but that he can also ascend to higher knowledge by developing dormant powers.

Just as the chemist, by separating hydrogen and oxygen, makes something completely new out of water, producing a substance with very different properties, so too can something completely new arise in the human being through the use of appropriate methods. Just as we cannot see what is in the water, we cannot see what powers a person has within them. Through a kind of spiritual chemistry, using exercises that are described in more detail in my books, something new can be developed in a person; the soul can work beyond the body and become aware of itself in the spiritual world. This is still quite foreign to many people and will only gradually become more common. Today, at the beginning of an epoch in which this knowledge will gradually become common property, it is possible to recognize the spiritual world, [as was once the case with the] Copernican world view, which was also laughed at at first, but which nevertheless became established. Today they no longer burn heretics who speak of a body-free perception of the soul, but they ridicule them and make them look foolish.

If we approach gnosis from this point of view, something emerges that is not just a further development and revival of gnosis: namely, that the human soul carries over what has been achieved in earlier epochs into later ones. If we embrace the doctrine of repeated earthly lives, we arrive at a more precise characterization of the earthly epochs themselves. Historical progress must be observed by spiritual scientific means. Then it becomes clear that just as man comes to hunger and thirst [in a natural way], so in ancient times he came to recognize the inner secrets of existence in images and visions from his own organization. Then the human soul lost this ability; man had to develop the ability to create concepts himself. This ability only arose later - on the basis of ideas (of a pictorial-visionary kind). Only out of shortsightedness can one deny that conceptual knowledge also had to develop first.

The epoch in which the human soul underwent this transformation is the time when the Christ entered into evolution; as a result, the human soul has become something other than it was before the Christ event. In ancient times, man received through images that which was hidden behind sensual existence. That is the characteristic of the old world view, that man attained knowledge in the form of images of how he was connected to the cosmos and the gods. This is still the view of ancient Hebrew times, in which a connection existed between the spiritual and the sensual world through the prophets and seers, as it were. But this connection was felt to be growing weaker and weaker the closer it came to the moment of the Mystery of Golgotha. If a special impulse had not come into the development of the earth at that time, the human soul would have felt more and more isolated, because man was left to his own resources, but at the same time man became isolated from that moment on. It is no exaggeration to say that we are heading towards the age of individualism. But with that, the possibility arose of finding something new that souls in the pre-Christian era could not yet find: the Christ presence. Since the emergence of Christianity, what was previously found in nature can be found in the spirit. Before the Christ event, man could no longer find the connection with the divine powers that he had in ancient times. The development of Christianity so far is only a preparation for the Christianity of the future; people will see that after a relatively short time the world situation will change completely.

There may be many who are satisfied with what is given by Bible and tradition; that is a selfish point of view. In rapid succession, souls will develop in such a way that they will no longer be able to approach the Christ in the old way. Man will stand more and more alone with [conventional] concepts and ideas. Man once felt as a spirit among spirits; the modern man can only feel as a body among bodies. But the souls that long to come to the inexplicable in themselves will ask themselves: How am I, how is my self connected to a spiritual world? If we look at these processes with understanding and soulfulness, a comparison suggests itself: When certain animals prepare for something special, they tend to go hungry. As a result, such processes take place within them that the forces of the organism that are released as a result flow in a different direction. And when we look at people, we see that they have acquired more and more knowledge about matter and its laws, but spiritually they have starved in terms of soul knowledge. At the same time, the direct perception of Christ was being prepared in the spiritual world. Over the centuries, the human soul has deprived itself of spiritual nourishment and thus, through starvation, developed those organs that will unfold in the future.

People are approaching a goal of development where they will find the Christ as they find a law of nature [today]. But they will not find him as a dead law, but as a living entity, and they will know: Since the Mystery of Golgotha, an entity has entered into the development of the earth that was not there before. Laws cannot comfort, they cannot help with pain, but the connection with the Christ can help, and this will be felt in the soul as strength. It will not be possible to find the Christ by dogmatic means; it will be possible to find the Christ in a completely different way; in a completely different way one will find the truth of the word: “I am with you until the end of the earthly days.” A time will come when it will not be considered impossible from a scientific point of view that since the Mystery of Golgotha the Christ Spirit has been living in the earth, in the earthly development of mankind. Until now, only those who know something about the Christ are recognized as Christians. In the future, people will know that the Christ did not come to Earth only to bring a teaching, but to accomplish an act. Then one can also find the Christ-germ in the Hindu, the Japanese, the Mohammedan.

I am fully aware that I am not speaking from a medieval point of view, but from one that fully recognizes everything that science has achieved. But just as one recognizes the laws of electricity, radioactivity and so on, one will recognize that the mystery of Golgotha is a superphysical matter. In order for people to be able to find the Christ, he had to undergo birth, baptism, and death, and by conquering death, he has been poured out into the evolution of the earth.

We have gone through a preparatory time in which Christianity was [merely] taken as a teaching. A time will come when the Christ can be found by those souls who seek him because he is on earth. He always worked through his existence, and people will find his existence as something that can reunite humanity, because he will be the one [for all people], for every [individual] person, as people are becoming more and more individualized. This is the Christ idea [in a time when] man is heading for a future that is even more de-deitified than monism would have dreamed of.

Just as we relate to external substances through physical nourishment, so we relate to the Christ spirit through our soul life. A great spirit, a distinguished thinker of the present day, Eliot, has said that the old religion is a sad, painful one; in the future, a religion will arise that gives joy. There is no denying that pain and death are in the world, and because they affect man, he needs a strong impulse to overcome pain and death - [the Christ impulse]. Modern philosophy suffers from the fact that it cannot find a balance for pain and death. And humanity will advance from the learned Christ, the Christ as a world teacher, to the seen Christ. Those involved in spiritual science will not be afraid of being called a monist; it is not the one who denies the spirit who is a monist, but the one who recognizes the spirit as the origin of being, who finds the monistic principle in the spirit.

Spiritually and psychically, the human being is immortal. In pre-Christian times, the soul was still known to be connected with the gods of nature. It is only in the twentieth century that we will become aware of the spiritual connection between the soul and the spiritual world, with Christ. Angelus Silesius is absolutely right when he says:

A thousand times may Christ be born in Bethlehem, but if he is not born in thee, thou art still lost for ever.

The mystical Christ [of whom Angelus Silesius speaks] has only become possible through the historical Christ. [Just as Goethe says:] If the eye were not sun-like, how could we behold the light? [so one can say:] If Christ were not there for our souls, how could we rise up to him, how could the sense of Christ arise in our soul? The historical Christ Jesus is as real as the sun is in the universe. Without disregarding the [biblical] traditions, one cannot overlook the fact that Christ is a God. According to the evolutionary theory of the Darwinists, man is merely a link in the chain of development of living beings. But the Darwinists have a great opponent, the great Darwin himself, who writes that it is unmistakable that a God infused life into the beings at the beginning. He writes:

I believe that all organic beings that have ever lived on this earth have descended from a primal form into which the Creator breathed life.

This is something that the modern Darwinian would like to deny – in fact, this sentence is missing from the German translations. But the person who claimed this is none other than Charles Darwin.

If you look at these things, you can come to a surprising insight: the monistic natural philosophy actually had to deny the spirit, because [according to it] everything depends on natural laws. But then the difference between good and evil basically ceases. That is what one should actually draw as a consequence, but one does not do it. However, however one may think about the great symbol [of the scene of temptation] in Genesis, where Lucifer speaks to man: “You will be like God and know what is good and evil,” something meaningful is said with these words. It is not important to call our time a time of transition; it is only significant to recognize what makes it a time of transition. If humanity did not come to the realization that the Christ is the most significant force in the evolution of the earth, it would come to believe that the experiences of the human soul are only the most highly intensified animal soul forces. If one were consistent, the soul's ability to distinguish between good and evil would cease. Yet another tempter speaks in our time, but one does not have the courage to hear him murmur: You will be made of animals, and no longer distinguish between good and evil.

But there is such a thing as the Christ impulse, which lives to show us that we are of the spiritual world and are in contact with spiritual beings, that our moral world order is intimately connected with the Christ in that with him the principle of love has come into the earth. And his voice says: You will not be of the animals, you will be with me, with me you will distinguish good from evil.

The sonship will be felt effectively. That the son comes from the father is scientifically based. But the father does not necessarily have the son. The moral world is related to the natural world order like the son to the father. Just as the father does not have to have the son, so [from the rule of natural laws, morality does not follow by itself]. The concept of the son makes clear in a wonderful way [the transformation of the natural into a moral world order through Christ].

Spiritual science feels in harmony with what the best, leading spirits of humanity have fulfilled. Schiller, whom people no longer love as much as they used to, but whom they will love again, once said:

Now the dull barrier of animality fell,
And humanity stepped onto the cloudless brow!
And the exalted stranger, the thought
Leaped from the marveling brain.

Thought will find the way to the one who is meant here: to the Christ of the twentieth century.

My dear friends! Today we need to pursue what we had started yesterday, by adding details to some of the requests. Above all questions, as difficult as they may be—be it in the religious sense, or anthroposophic sense—will be those related to knowledge which reaches into the future. Such knowledge into the future can only be understood if one is able to discuss all prerequisites for such knowledge, so to speak. You know, of course, that outer materialistic science also has certain knowledge of the future which is quite possible.

Solar and lunar eclipses can be predicted to the second, and these predictive calculations depend upon having a definite insight into the details of the phenomena. In outer materialistic science it relates to this insight of the context of the phenomena being hidden, because it is presented in formulae; the formulae are learnt and one no longer really knows where they came from; they actually originate from observations made in the very same area to which they are applied. Nobody would be able to calculate the solar and lunar eclipse predictions if solar and lunar eclipses were not originally observed, forming a basis for observation and formulas obtained from these, which now continue as based on the belief of a regularity applied to these phenomena. The psychological process which takes place here is far more complicated than one is often aware of today. Things start becoming particularly complicated if they are not applicable only to outer, spatial mechanical or mathematical kinds of laws, but if they deal with what happens inwardly, in the intrinsic sense, in the course of the world. Because these questions are based on the prerequisites of modern consciousness they can barely be studied, that's why we find modern Bible explanations—and the priest must also be a Bible explainer—so difficult, like chapter 13 of the Mark Gospel and everything relating to this chapter. Besides that, in later translations this particular chapter has become extraordinarily difficult to understand because it relates to circumstances which have become the most corrupt.

Now I would like, before I proceed into the situation of this chapter, to say something about the predictions in the Christian sense. You have the feeling that within the development of Christendom there had already been, especially in olden times, references to future events, and future events of the most important kind had already played a major role. You also get the feeling that present day people hardly believe such indications, and that they actually can hardly reckon with such indications being anything but illusion. One always gets the feeling, when such things do happen—in modern language use it would be called prophesy—that something else must play along, other than real knowledge of what will happen in the future. You must however make yourself familiar with it, it is after all also present in our time, in the time of intellectualism—and rightly so in this time—it has eradicated certain traditional, inherited, atavistic clairvoyance. There are clairvoyant people of the older kind who are still serving certain theorists, also of the 19th century, as examples from which they wanted to prove the existence of a supernatural world they could not experience for themselves. We only need to consider such a type of prediction, then we will see—quite equitably, whether we believe it or not—what is actually meant. Such cases could happen, and it has, if I take it as typical, and still occurred numerous times in the course of the last century, whereas in the present time it shows a certain decline. Such abilities are still common in country people. It could happen that someone sees in an advantageous moment in a dream, how he, riding a horse, falls and hurts himself. Such seeing is certainly a sight into the future and one can, even by being careful, find out everything with all the scientific chicaneries that exclude an influence on following events, one cannot speak otherwise but admit a true looking into the future exists. This is something which had been recorded by the most earnest theorists everywhere, up to the middle of the 19th century. You can find this writing originating from otherwise quite serious natural scientists from the first half of the 19th century, discussed in numerous journals. As I've said, whoever observes people today must see that such atavistic abilities have gone backwards and become drowned out by intellectual life; a condition which completely excludes looking into the future.

Now, as we've said, we must at least familiarise ourselves with such abilities which can be called looking into the future, abilities present in ancient times and certainly understood in the surroundings of Christ Jesus, when he spoke in a certain way about the future. In order not to be misunderstood, I want to call your attention straight away to something else. When you take literature which appears as Christian literature according to the actual Gospels, according to the letters of Paul and others, of direct disputes attributed to the disciples, and you take the later literature of the so-called church fathers—under 'church father' it is meant those who were still students of disciples or at least scholars or the apostles not too long ago—when you take the literature of the church fathers, then you will often discover three characteristics.

The first characteristic is that these writings have become dried up of an actual living understanding for the Old Testament. You will clearly notice how everywhere in these writings, up to the "Shepherd of Hermas," the craving comes to the fore to depict the Old Testament intellectually, in this case interpreting it allegorically, therefore it is pulled out of a real encounter to a mere concept, into what is, so to say, intellectual. The restyling of concepts into allegory puts up with the tradition of the Old Testament as a tradition of facts, told as facts—in reality these are to be understood through the intellect. That is the first essential characteristic. The second essential characteristic is that the Second Coming of the Christ is clearly mentioned everywhere in the writings, that is to say, exactly what is referred to in the 13th chapter of Mark's Gospel in the most delicate sense of the word. It was certainly, one must admit, the belief in the entire spirit of the church fathers' writings from the 4th century that the Second Coming of Christ can be predicted in the near future. They called people's attention to how the old world would fall apart and how the Christ would reappear, and added to this, the imagination was created that Christ would appear in a similar way, in the most wonderful way, strolling over the earth, as it had been the case before.

The third element in the writings of the church fathers is what actually contributed a great deal to the church doctrine. Everywhere a kind of legal element developed, a warning to obey the bishops, the dogmas, to submit to the constitution in the developing church. So everywhere something was taking place which one could be referred to as this: To the believers it was said that they will fall into bad luck if they develop anything which comes from within themselves, while they are searching for a religious path.—The religious path given by the church's constitution and the legal constitution, which ordered obedience to the church, was something that has continued particularly in Catholicism to the widest extent, which even as an experience today can still oppose one very forcefully.

I once, for example, had a conversation in Rome with a priest brought up in quite the Jesuit manner—it was very hard, to get this conversation going—indicating all the sources which gave him the basis of his teaching and also showing the way in which he was to arrive at the teaching content. He pointed out that one then had the written words containing the dogmatic church content, and those were all things which needed no proof, they simply had to be believed, in as far as dogma was concerned. He pointed out that only interpretation was allowed, one was not to criticise or prove anything in the Gospels, while reading them again and again; one had the church tradition which flowed into the breviary, and then one had a living example of the life of the saints.

The former could not very well form the subject of a discussion involving this cleric because one had to admit that what the Catholic Church wanted to protect was presented in such an ingrained sense, that there was no way around it. But the latter, the relationship of the Catholic clerics to the saints, that of course is something which creates certain difficulties even with the Catholic clergy when they think about it, and here an objection could be used. Saints are fixed personalities valued by the church for their faultless manner in their direct, vital relationship to the supersensible worlds, either through the understanding of how they had found the revelation out of the supersensible world through their inner experience, or that they performed deeds which can only be understood through accepting these deeds as having been performed with divine assistance.

You may know that such a canonization in the Catholic Church requires a very detailed ceremony, preceded by the exact determination of how the relevant person lived and what he thought, a process which should not last years, but centuries. Further, this examination must end with a ceremony which exist of all those who come forward, who have something well founded to present regarding the living exchange the personality has in relation to the divine, and to some extent always enter into what is said in such a way, that the so-called Advocatus diaboli, the representative of the demonic world, who has to refute everything that the other side has to say for the relevant canonisation, is brought to attention. So there will be an extensive trial, at which the being who should be regarded as the Diabolus, the devil, will have on the other side, the Christ representative, for the Christ-like will always be drawn into the discussion with the devilish representative, when a saint is to be recognised.

Now of course I could have interrupted this conversation with him, regarding the church always admitting to the possibility of lively exchanges with the divine, so that supersensible experiences were possible. It is however the dogma of the Catholic Church that such supersensible experiences which could take place, are devilish and that they must be avoided, one must be forced to flee from them. Of course, it is certainly the Catholic Church's dogmatism which says that all of Anthroposophy is objectionable from the basis that it claims to touch on insights in the supersensible worlds. For this reason, Anthroposophy is rejected because such an insight can only be arrived at with the help of the Devil; it is therefore evil. That is something which is judged by the Catholic Church as quite necessary, quite consistent. Things are already such that they must not be blurred. Whoever thinks reconciliation between Anthroposophy and the Catholic Church can without further ado be brought about, is mistaken. The Initiate knows, for the Catholic Church to be consequent from their side, it will regard Anthroposophy as devilish, and more than ever, the Catholic church today has allowed such consequences to become its custom.

As an answer from the priest I received his claim that any exchange with the supersensible worlds may in no way be wished for; if it happens in this world it must be made clear that the divine principle has been besieged by the devil.—So, I said to him: If you now have such an exchange with the supersensible worlds, would you consider that as devilish?—He answered: Yes, he has on his side the talent to merely work with literature of the saints in order to know that something like that exists; but he doesn't desire to become a saint himself.—This is now the last sentence which would be expressed by these people, this person also did not express it because if he did, then the last sentence would be that he says: To regard me as a saint, the church has the right to wait for two to three centuries.

We can draw all kinds of conclusions from this. You could for example connect all kinds of evil thinking habits to it which is relevant particularly at present, when someone says that everything which can be said about the causes of the war, one would only really know about after decades when all the archives have been combed through. If you have any sense for reality you would know that in a couple of decades everything would be so blurred that no truth would be discovered in the archives in order to determine something as some tradition, and you would know that one, I could call it, very insidious step could renounce what has been said out of the consciousness of the present. This is also something which must be considered more deeply, but it only belongs in parenthesis here: I only want to draw your attention to it, that with the proclamation of a saint, waiting for such a long time, things in question could have become thoroughly blurred, and you can have insight into the Catholic Church's extraordinarily difficult burden towards its real progress.

These three characteristics you will find in post apostolic literature during the first four centuries: the allegoric explanation of the Old Testament, the reference to the Second Coming of Christ and the destruction of the old world, and the admonition of obedience to the superiors. We need to focus our present interest primarily on the middle one, the reference to the Second Coming of Christ, because to this reference we need to link line 6 of the 13th chapter of the Gospel of Mark: Many will come as though they came in my name and say: I am he, and will lead many astray.—In this chapter you find a remarkable reference; many will come and appear in the name of Christ, and they will forthwith be referred to one or another person who also designate themselves as Christ. Here you see something extraordinary. On this basis it is extraordinary to see—I will speak more closely about these things but I'm leading up to it—that already at this point in the Mark Gospel the reference is linked to the view of the church fathers of the post apostolic time. By presenting it thus, that the Christ will reappear in this way, it is at the same time the fulfilment of the prophecy that tempters will come who all want to be designated as Christs; and this is what also happened in the first centuries, in this sense many came to the fore, who actually referred to themselves as Christ. An astonishing amount of literature has been lost in the first centuries—these things can actually only be found through spiritual science.

So we must say - and I have expressly spoken about it—if we look at the totality of facts, the Christian church fathers lived in a misunderstanding of the Gospels, perhaps even a really bad misunderstanding of the Gospels. When we actually bring our feelings into the Gospels, as I have shown you yesterday, when we really with our whole heart and entire soul find ourselves with ever more wonder towards the Gospels, then we would find it inordinately difficult to find our way with our intellect to the first church fathers. We discover with the first church fathers that we relatively early come to the end of understanding because the Gospel itself leads us into immeasurable depths, and we very clearly experience that in a certain way we actually feel uncomfortably touched when after our wonder at the Gospels we now turn to something which appeared in the church fathers.

Now, this leads us on to something else. Later we will talk about the justification of prophecy but now we want to find our way into the situation in terms of contemporary history and so it appears to me, that if we want to understand the 13th chapter of Mark's Gospel, before anything else, we need to pose this important question: Can the fulfilment of the prophecy be asserted from a correct pursuit of the facts? Surely you first need to be able to understand in what way the prophecy should be fulfilled, and then you could ask, what are the facts? Then, isn't it true, that with something like the destruction of Jerusalem it is easy to raise a question, but when it comes to the destruction of the world which we are still expecting, and regarding the coming of the kingdom of God, modern thought only has information that it still has not happened, that under all circumstances it must have been an illusion, that you had in all cases to do with false prophesies; and then you only have the choice to either interpret these things out of the Gospels, or to follow what the first church fathers did with the Old Testament through allegorizing, or even to do anything as long as it is abstract. All of this is being done against the total feeling which is necessary in relating to the Gospels, which does not arise here. The most important question seems to me to be the impact of the prophecy, because that helps towards understanding the process of prophecy.

I tell you, my dear friends, for me, the destruction of the world and the coming of the kingdom of God have simply already been fulfilled. We must swing around to look at the world in such a way that we learn to represent this statement as having been fulfilled. Towards this we certainly must penetrate more deeply with spirit into the words of Christ Jesus, as opposed to what usually happens.

Those who were around Jesus knew exactly, just as the poor shepherds in the fields knew in their inner sight: Christ had arrived. They still knew precisely that the entire life of human beings on earth would have been different in ancient times and it would become something different at this historical moment, even if little by little. Gentle feelings are still around at present, but only gentle feelings. I have such a quiet feeling about it but that must be trained in an intensive manner, for example, as found in the art historian Herman Grimm, and perhaps it will interest you to look into something like this as well because psychologically it leads to what we need to attain, little by little.

The art historian Herman Grimm had roughly the following view: when we go back with our examination of history, from our time to the Middle Ages and further back to the migration of peoples, back to the Roman empire, we still may have the possibility to understand the history. We have such feelings today, we could say, through which we can understand the roman imperial age and roughly the roman republic. We are still capable today, to understand this. When we go back into Greek history with the same kind of soul understanding then we enter into the highest form of illusion if we believe we can understand an Alkibiades, Sophocles, Homer or someone similar. Between grasping the Roman world and the Greek world there is an abyss, and what has been inherited from the Greek world, so Herman Grimm says, is basically a fairy tale; here starts the world of fairy tales, a world into which we no longer can enter with our present day understanding. We must be satisfied with the inherited images presented to us, but we must take these in a general sense as a world of fairy tales, without intellectual understanding.—It still has a soft echo of something which human beings need to create; an inner feeling towards the historical development of mankind.

This sensitivity of feeling will of course become completely distorted by those whose opinions are according to modern evolutionary theories, which simply go back from the present and consider modern human beings as the most perfect now than what was initially achieved. Here one arrives at a perspective from which one no longer can understand those who were around Christ. One also understands why, out of what soul foundations, such experiences and imaginations of today have become clothed in the scientific view when for instance you look at the answers the imminent thinker, Huxley, gave an archbishop; his words are quite understandable according to the modern perspective. The archbishop said the human being descended from this divine being; the godhead placed him without sin in the world, and that's who has descended into the present human condition.—This archbishop's opinion couldn't but let Huxley reply to this sentence with: I would surely be ashamed as a human being if I have descended so far from my divine origin, but I can be very proud from my animal standpoint of how far I have worked towards who I now am.—

Here you can precisely see the moral impulses entering into what we call objective science. The need to revert to moral impulses is everywhere for those who tinker with science, if this tinkering it is to be believed.

You must be very clear about the ancient human being before the time of Christ, the heathen person, who without sin, was aware that everywhere, when he observed nature or when he looked into human life, he encountered the divine and nature simultaneously. In the rock spring he didn't just hear the rushing sound we hear today, but he heard what he perceived and interpreted as the voice of the divine. In every animal he saw something that had, so to speak, been brought about from a supersensible world, but despite its deep fall from the supersensible world, if one really understands it, still totally leads back to the contemplation of this supersensible world. In this way the ancient people could not imagine the supersensible world without the divine, being part of it.

In Judaism, quite an intense feeling came to the fore. It was this: In whatever form or way the divine appears, man may not claim himself to also have the divine appearing in himself in a perfect form, but only at most as an inspiration, but not in its complete form. This was something the orthodox Jew didn't even want to touch in his thoughts; that which he still permitted for the rest of nature, that everywhere the divine may be revealed, and what he considered facts in his Old Testament, this he didn't allow to happen in people. For the surrounding heathen world, for the old way of observation, it was self-explanatory that the mineral kingdom, the plant and animal kingdoms were consequentially built on one another, and so, just like the rest of nature was divine, so also the human being is an incarnation of the divine. At the same time thousands had a firm belief that the human being was ever more losing the possibility through his outer life, to realize God within.

So, it had been an original human ability to create the divine within, but people gradually lost this ability. Those who surrounded Christ experienced that the divine, which had been in humanity earlier and which also appeared in the outer world, this divine element no longer could appear in humanity; it was given to the earth, it appeared everywhere through the Son of God but stopped appearing in mankind and can no longer appear in human children. It must come once again from elements outside the earth so that the last incarnation of the divine, which actually becomes a new time, can catch up, but it must come from outside—if I might express myself roughly—from the stock out of that which the earth had originally loaned.

From this point of view—knowledge, at that time, my dear friends, was filled with feeling, which as such took place in immediate experience—from this point of view those around Christ looked on with feeling at that which had invaded the Roman Empire and was now being fulfilled in Asia. What was this, which was accomplished through the invasion of the Roman Empire into Asia? You need to look at what actually penetrated the consciousness of that time. The ongoing war was at that time outer events which in their final dependency were also derived from divine will. However, this was not the most important aspect; the most important thing was that those who sat on the thrones were Roman Caesars who through religion presented themselves as incarnations of gods, and that, as lawful. Caesar Augustus was according to law a recognised incarnation of the godhead. Some Caesars tried, through ceremonies which had been fulfilled in ancient times, to bring about a ritual action which was so close to human truths, to inner human truths, that the Caesars could allow these ceremonies to be fulfilled but transformed into earthly existence, in order for the divine to actually act, for the divine to be made real.

Penetration of these secret divine mysteries into the world can perhaps not be more strongly symbolized than through relating the story of (the Roman Emperor) Commodus, (son of Marcus Aurelius) when he searched for initiation and allowed the ceremony to be fulfilled, because the ceremony also included the symbolic slaughter of an uninitiated person; at his mystery initiation a man was really killed, murdered. In brief, one felt that by this penetration of the Roman Empire, the divine disappeared, and the divine is presumed to be that, thus in the presumption of the divine there is an incarnation of the ungodly, for man must incarnate into something. The divine was not incarnating, it had stopped, so if the divine was not incarnating then in meant the ungodly was incarnating, the enemy of the divine. You could interpret it as you wish, but you will only be right if you understand that those who surrounded Christ Jesus, had said: In the Roman Empire, which is spreading in the world, is the incarnation of the enemy of the divine.

This is elementary, this is truly a discerning feeling and discernment in Christianity for those who were around Christ Jesus. Never again, from the Christian point of view, would that which had developed further as a dependence on the Roman Empire, be seen as anything other than an earthy bound realm, an empire of the world in opposition to the realm of Heaven. This means in other words: this world which existed then, the divine world, perished, it went under due to the Roman Empire. The downfall was accomplished in the first three centuries up to the middle of the 15th century, as I've mentioned to you. The downfall was accomplished. It is a perished world that now exists, a world that is no longer divine, a world that only gives news of the divine. One must turn to the last, who had become the first, to the divine incarnation of Christ in Jesus, who through his own power gave the possibility, through the handling—if I could use such an expression—through the handling of that which is associated with the fulfilment of the Holy Spirit in one, not by nature, but in a direct way to reach the divine-spirit world, which one can also find in nature when one has found the following of Christ Jesus through the spirit.

The world is coming to an end. The Christ is no longer coming as an earth dweller, but out of the clouds, out of the cosmos he will come again. In this way he comes to everyone who has the awareness of what was meant by the world before, which perished with the Roman Empire.

My dear friends! It is an unpleasant truth for those who want to be within today's consciousness; they don't know what to do about it; it is an unpleasant truth certainly for those who from an erroneous view want to apologize for Christianity before the present time. It is an extraordinary chapter in the involvement of today's world when people come and say Christianity is impractical, Christianity is something which allows escape from the world, Christianity has a mystical atavistic element which makes it unworldly. Then others come along who want to excuse Christianity by discussing away what some are saying who considered the world in a strong spiritual light and who still have a relationship to the world. The excuse is given that things don't need to be understood, they are really not meant so badly regarding fleeing from the world and with it coming to an end, it has continued its progress from the first centuries up to now; the world is just and anything some fanatical priest or fanatical pastor claims about the downfall of the world from God, is really not so seriously meant, it has only come about through the Catholic influence; one must wipe it out.

In brief, my dear friends, the largest part of pastoral and theological work exists in this. Place your hand on your heart and learn through it, feel out of your heart what I have said regarding the necessity for the renewal of Christianity, for the Christian impulse, because the biggest part of what is being preached and discussed exists in the continuous retreat from the recognition of gross intellectualism and the piecemeal eradication of everything out of Christianity, which actually should be understood in a profound way through strong thinking, through such a powerful thinking that the world finds God through Christ, and when God has been discovered through Christ, which can also become practical because in the discovery of the divine, the divine grasped in thought, the godless world can be included to bring about the re-introduction of the divine.

These powers must be carried in those of you who today want to speak about the renewal of Christianity, you must be able to say: Yes, today we have to look at the divinized world which started with the Roman Empire and goes back to the Roman Empire; but in this world we must not look for the divine. The world, however, can't remain without the divine. We must grasp that which does not come from the earth, something—speaking symbolically—which comes from the clouds, in a spiritual manner. We must find the Kingdom of Heaven in the place of the divinized earth kingdom. The Kingdom of Heaven has opened up and is to be found; and for this reason, we must be there to bring the divine into our earthly world. The downfall of the earth has taken place and continues to happen more and more. When we look at this earthly realm, we are then looking at the heavenly realm which Jesus Christ has brought. You must see, my dear friends, the realm of Heaven spiritually. We must see its arrival; we must be able to feel the fulfilling of what Christ meant when he spoke about the coming of his kingdom, the kingdom which he had to bring into the world and which does not speak out of nature; when it can however work into nature, then one can speak about this kingdom. This is primarily the feeling he stimulated in those who directly surrounded him. This is also what we must strive for in our words, when we really want to speak about these things.

We see how it is stated in about the first 3 sentences of the Mark Gospel: After Christ left the temple—the temple in which one also heard something within the outer world of the divine—one of his disciples says to him: 'Look, what magnificent stones, and wonderful buildings.' Jesus however said to him: 'You see only the large buildings. There will not be one stone left on top of another, without man taking part in the process of destruction because from now on, all of the outer, ungodly world begins to become a world of destruction.' And he went away and spoke intimately. On the Mount of Olives, he spoke either intimately by himself through teaching people how to pray, or he spoke only to his most intimate disciples, to Peter, James, John and Andrew. To Peter, James, John and Andrew he only spoke about spiritual events as observed from the perspective of divine realms in contrast to destructive events in the world facing destruction.

You see, I'm neither speaking allegorically, nor symbolically. If you felt that way, you would be putting it in my words. I'm speaking directly out of the situation experienced as it occurred, by me trying, certainly in the words of current speech, to indicate these things. I ask you to now take note of the situation. In order to experience the content of the 13th chapter of St Mark we are taken up the Mount of Olives. It ends with the word: "Awake!"—immediately followed by us being taken to the Last Supper—we are led to the first impetus for the coming of the divine kingdom through Christ placing it in front of us.

Tomorrow we will continue speaking about it. What I'm saying to you is quite new, by addressing our current consciousness. I certainly want to speak honestly, as these things present themselves to me, because I believe that by only pointing to the very first elements can one come to a true and honest conviction of what is necessary today.

If anybody reads a popular book, about astronomy, for example, then probably above all because he wants to inform himself about the mysterious facts of the universe. He finds his satisfaction, perhaps in such a book if the information makes sense to his reason, sensation, and feeling. He also tries perhaps to penetrate into the matters as far as it is possible to convince himself of such truth, such knowledge, visiting popular talks in which one makes experiments or observatories, laboratories et cetera. However, in any case, one fact remains in force. The human being who reads such things has to assume that still other human beings exist who have these abilities with particular research methods, with particular scientific and technical schooling.

Who reads Haeckel's Natural Creation History may possibly say to himself, yes, this makes sense to my intellect, to my reason and to my feeling.—However, he also becomes aware of the fact that it requires a lot of work to ascertain these facts only. Then maybe he assumes that there is a little group of human beings which deals with the finding of such facts. In quite a similar way, a big part of humanity probably behaves towards other writings which want to bring facts of another field home to the human being, namely towards the so-called religious scriptures.

It is no other relation than that I have just described. Also towards the religious scriptures, the human being asks himself at first, does this speak convincingly to my sensation, emotions, and reason?—Also here, he assumes or assumed in past times at least just as for the external, sensuous facts, which we possibly get to know from the Natural Creation History by Haeckel or from popular representations of astronomy, who know the methods, have the key to ascertain these facts. Thus, the human being also assumed concerning the religious documents that there are single human beings who are able not only to read this truth but also to ascertain it. He assumed that there are single human beings who have the key of them and know methods how one can convince oneself of them directly. Briefly, one has to demand from the religious scriptures, as from any other representation of facts that they come from knowledge, from immediate experience.

The human being assumes that there are single people who ascertain the described sensuous facts using telescopes, microscopes, biological and other methods of investigation. Concerning the communications that are included in the religious documents we must also assume that there are human beings who know the methods to penetrate by the experience into the field, which is described in the religious scriptures. Just as in the Natural Creation History the field of the sensuous facts and in the popular talks the field and the facts of astronomy are portrayed, the field of the supersensible, the invisible, the spiritual is portrayed in the religious scriptures. If we who do not research have to offer the same trust, the same confidence to the religious scriptures, we must assume also that there are single persons in the world who made it their particular task to collect experiences in the world of the supersensible, which forms as spiritual causes the basis of the sensuous world. The human being is not allowed to behave differently towards the representation of a natural creation history and the representation of a supersensible creation history.

Not the behaviour of the human beings towards these matters is different, only the fields are different about which the concerning writings tell. With it, one says that there must be knowing people who are able to ascertain the facts in the religious scriptures. Indeed, up to a certain degree this consciousness has got lost just in our time. Just as it would be of little use if anybody were not able to assume that researchers exist behind the popular scientific representations, also it would not make much sense basically if we did not assume that researchers are behind the statements of the religious scriptures. It is the task of theosophy or spiritual science today to renew and animate the consciousness that there is also a research in the supersensible fields. Spiritual science wants nothing else than to evoke the consciousness in the larger circles again that it is in such a way as I have said it now.

One often translates the word theosophy saying that theosophy is knowledge, wisdom of God. This translation is not right; at least it does not describe what theosophy wants. Knowledge of God is something that the theosophist has in mind as an inkling at first, as something that signifies the last purpose of all knowledge. As little as we already have awareness of all means and abilities of knowledge, just as little as we are allowed to say that we can have a comprehensive or final knowledge of the divine primal ground of the universe today. Humanity develops, advances, also its abilities of knowledge. Perhaps, even the most advanced people cannot form an idea of the insights into the mysterious worlds of existence the human being can get on this way. We have to absolutely realise that European civilised human beings have another concept of divinity than, for example, the so-called savages of Africa or the barbarians who invaded the Roman empire from the north at the beginning of the Middle Ages.

We have to assume that a usual educated person also has another idea of the divine being than Goethe had. Thus, we can also imagine that the human being advances further, that abilities develop in him compared with which Goethe's intuitive and imaginative strength was undeveloped. There we can have an inkling how much more elated and more magnificent the concept of God of those human beings will be than ours are. We can say that we exist, work, and live in Him; however, the knowledge of Him can never be completed. Therefore, theosophy does not think that it wants to be knowledge of God. Theosophy is that knowledge, namely, which attains the deepest, innermost being of the human being, in contrast to the usual, everyday knowledge that acquires the external, sensuous, transient nature of the human being.

Let us realise once: we see colours, light, we hear tones, smell and taste, seize objects, feel heat, cold, and so on, everything with the help of our outer senses. We can also imagine that for anybody who has no ear no sounding world, but a dumb world is around him, for anybody who has no eyes no luminous, no colourful world but a dark one exists. All that is only a summary of that which the human being can perceive with the senses. However, the senses consist of material forces that are handed over to the earth again. What we perceive with them is also something transient. With it, we have realised the transient human being. The physicist shows us that a time comes when the earth is dispersed in countless atoms in which it does no longer exist. Then also no colours, lights, tones, the present forms of minerals, plants and animals exist, the human form itself does no longer exist.

Thus, we have characterised the extent of the transient in the human being. What this transient human being recognises is everyday science, is our official science. With it, I say nothing against this official science. However, this whole science is nothing else than preoccupation with transient matters. However, there is still another possibility to look at the world, namely with those abilities in the human being which are imperishable. The human being bears an imperishable core in himself.

The human being bears an imperishable core that we find in ourselves by introspection, by self-observation to a new existence in the times when the earth is dispersed. He carries this imperishable core to other worlds, and carries that which he recognised as the fruit of this life on earth to another world. What the divine core recognises is the content of spiritual science. Theosophy is not knowledge of other matters of the human being but knowledge of the other part of the human being. Hence, theosophy or spiritual science does not come from such people who want to rise with the usual reason, with the usual senses to a consideration of the spiritual from the sensuous, but from such people who have woken the abilities slumbering in the human being and are thereby able to investigate the supersensible, the imperishable. The usual science considers plants, animals, and human beings according to their usual qualities as they present themselves to the senses. In addition, the spiritual research looks only at that which surrounds us in the world. However, it looks at it with other forces and other abilities and, hence, gets to know the everlasting and imperishable qualities of the things. This is theosophy.

Such researchers who have woken such abilities in themselves are able to ascertain the supersensible facts independently which the confessions communicate. As well as the naturalists ascertain in the laboratory and on the observatory using the strength of the senses and their instruments what you can then read in the popular books, the researchers of the supersensible ascertain by their own experience what was communicated to humanity in the religious documents. In the same sense as we speak of the scientific laboratories and astronomical observatories as research sites, in the same sense we speak of spiritual research sites. We call this spiritual research site—the term does not matter—the Lodge of the Masters of Wisdom.

Because all wisdom must be based on a common origin, because all those who are in a spiritual relationship to these teachers are penetrated and irradiated by that wisdom, all researches also go back to the spiritual primary source. They go back, to the big brotherhood of the most advanced sages who have recognised what those religious documents announced from own observation by the means of spiritual research. You may call this basis of all religions the “spiritual laboratory of humanity,” or the “great White Lodge,” it is the same. Now we know what it means. As any popular book goes back to something that has really been investigated anywhere, each of the great religions goes back to that which was investigated in the spiritual sense in this laboratory of the white brotherhood of humanity. Those who founded the religions were great, excellent individualities who experienced the lessons and instructions of that brotherhood in this big spiritual laboratory. They were introduced into the spiritual life, which forms the basis of all phenomena, and were then sent from there to the various peoples to speak to them in their language and according to their characters.

One taught a uniform ground of knowledge, an ancient truth in that spiritual laboratory, and it is possible that those who advance further by internal development learn the methods of research and can use them as Haeckel and other naturalists used the sensuous methods. It is possible that these find access to the researchers of the spiritual laboratory, that they get to know from which central site the great sages came who went to the south and the west, and brought the great messages to humanity. It is possible that they find the way to those from whom they can learn how all that has come about.

The ancient religious teachers were sent out from the same site, the great founders of a religion who brought the first messages to India the echo of which the European researchers admired so much when they faced the wisdom, which is contained in the old Brahmanism. The same site of wisdom sent out the various Buddhas who brought their messages to the single members of the Asian religions. It sent out the Egyptian Hermes, too, who founded that marvellous religion about which anybody said to Solon (~640-~560 B.C., Athenian statesman, lawmaker and poet): what you know is like the knowledge of children compared with the wisdom of our initiates.

Pythagoras (~570-~495 B.C., philosopher, and mathematician) came out of it, the great teacher of the Greek people. That man came out of it who illuminates the future, whose religion becomes more and more comprehensive and spiritual, Jesus himself. There we have the spiritual connection, and we see how the different religions point back to the central site where the loftiest human wisdom is cultivated. Who looks at the different religions can convince himself that their qualities point to such a central site. Our materialistic cultural researchers have also often recognised resemblances of the different confessions. Zarathustrism, the ancient Indian culture, Buddhism, even the religion that lived in the old America contain all components in which marvellous accordance exists. However, one has believed that this accordance comes from external reasons. One has not penetrated deeply enough because one had lost the key of it. Who gets involved, however, really in the core of truth of the religions can obtain the conviction concerning the religions that the accordance cannot come from the outside, but that it arises from a common core of wisdom, and that they were differently organised considering the single peoples and the different epochs.

If we look at Asia, we still find the remnants of an ancient religion at first, which one cannot understand, actually, as religion in the modern sense. We find this religion in the strange culture of the Chinese. I do not speak about the religion of Confucius, not about that which spread as Buddhism in India and China, but I would like to speak of the remains of the ancient Chinese religion, of Taoism. This religion points the human being to Tao.

One translates Tao as the way or the goal, the destination. However, one gets no clear idea of the being of this religion if one simply sticks to this translation. For a big part of humanity, Tao expresses and already expressed the highest to which the human beings could look up. They thought that the world, the whole humanity would attain it once, the loftiest that the human being bears in himself as a seed and that develops once as a ripe flower from the innermost human nature. Tao signifies a deep, concealed soul ground and an elated future at the same time. Somebody who knows what it concerns not only pronounces it but also thinks of it with shy reverence. Taoism is based on the principle of development. It says, what is around me today is a stage, which will be overcome. I must be clear in my mind that this development in which I am has an aim that I develop to an elated aim and that a force lives in me that urges me to arrive at this destination Tao.

If I feel this big strength in myself and if I feel that with me all beings strive for this goal, then this strength is to me the steering force which blows from the wind against me, which sounds towards me from the stone, which shines towards me from the flash, which sounds towards me from the thunder. It appears in the plant as force of growth, in the animal as sensation and perception. This force produces form by form repeatedly up to that elated goal by which I recognise myself as one with the whole nature, which streams into me and streams from me with every breath, which is the symbol of the loftiest developing spirit that I feel as life. I feel this force as Tao.—One did not speak in this religion of a transcendent god at all, one did not speak about anything that is beyond the world, but of something that gives strength to the progress of humanity.

The human being felt Tao intensely when he was still connected with the divine original source, in particular in the Atlantean age. Our ancestors still had no such advanced reason, no such intelligence like the modern humanity. In return, however, they had a more dreamlike consciousness, an instinctively ascending imagination and their life of thought was in such a way that they were almost innumerate. Imagine the dream life, but increased, so that it makes sense and is not chaotic, and imagine a humanity from whose souls such pictures arise that announce the sensations which are in the own soul, which echo everything that is external round us. One has to imagine the soul world of these prehistoric human beings quite unlike ours. The human being today strives for forming thoughts and images of the environment as exactly as possible. However, the prehistoric human being formed symbolic images, which appeared in him full of life.

If you face a person today, you try above all to form an idea of him whether he is a good or a bad, a clever or a silly person, and you try to get an idea very soberly which corresponds to the external human being. This has never been the case with the prehistoric Atlantean. A picture arose in him, not a rational concept. If he faced a bad human being, a picture arose in him, which was vague and obscure. However, this perception did not become a concept. Nevertheless, he acted on this picture. If he had a bright, beautiful picture before himself, which appeared dreamlike in his soul, then he knew that he could trust in such a being. He got fear of a picture if it arose in black, red, or brown colours in him. He did not yet grasp realities with reason and intellect, but they appeared as inspirations. He felt as if the divinity working in these pictures was also in him. He spoke of the divinity, which announced itself in the blowing of the wind, in the whispering of the woods and in the pictures of his soul life if he felt the urge to look up to an elated human future. He called this Tao.

The present human being who replaced this ancient humanity relates to the spiritual powers differently. He has lost the strength of the immediate beholding, which was more vague and twilighted than ours in certain respects. He has attained the developmental stage of the intellectual and rational ideation, which is higher in certain respects, however, also lower in certain respects. The modern human being thereby outranks the prehistoric human being because he owns a sharp, pervasive intellect; but he is no longer feeling the lively connection with the divine Tao forces of the world. That is why he has the world as it reveals itself in his soul, and on the other side his intelligence. The Atlantean felt the pictures living in him. The modern human being hears and sees the external world. These two things, outside and inside, are opposing each other, and he is no longer feeling the connection of both.

This is the great sense of the human development. Since the land masses have risen again, after the floods of the oceans had flooded the continents, since that time humanity longs for finding the connection of inner soul life and external sensuous world again. That is why the word religare (Latin)—religion is justified. It means nothing else than to combine again what was connected once and is separated now, the world and the ego. The different forms of the confessions are nothing else than the means, than the ways taught by the great sages to find this connection again. Therefore, they are formed so differently to become understandable in this or that form to the human beings of any cultural level.

The ancient Indian had an excessively growing plant world around himself, which made him dreamy in his soul and did not make it necessary to produce external tools and external culture. He had to get religion in another form than the modern human being. If the human being lives quietly, other images appear in his soul, than if he works with coarse tools and must be technically active. The external nature is different in the different areas of the earth, and the inner soul life of the human beings is different, too. Because the connection should be sought by the different religions, it is only a matter of course that the masters had to determine the way of finding the connection differently for different peoples and different times.

The first way to determine this connection, to look for the ancient Tao of Atlantis, is the religion of the ancient India. This received the instructions of the holy Rishis, great initiates in ancient times whose elated teachings still go on sounding in the marvellous Vedic poems and in the Vedanta philosophy of the ancient Brahmans, which extends to the loftiest levels of human understanding. It was announced to humanity in broad outlines there that there is something that as a uniform world ground serves everything as a base. One called it Brahman, Parabrahman, Bhagavad and so forth.

What we find in the Vedas, which are only an echo of the original old teachings, shows us how great and stupendous and, at the same time, how sublime the concepts were by which that subtle spirituality attempted to reach the divine original source of being. One could circumscribe it as follows: once the spiritual hosts assembled round the original being and asked it who it was, and it said, I am not that who I am if I am able to define myself by anything other than by myself. If you define a thing, you look for a higher concept. You define the single animal beings, the lion, the eagle, the dog, the wolf, while you change over to the superior concepts of the cat species, the dog species, the bird species et cetera. You define the single winds, while you change over to the general concept of wind. Thus, anything in the world has its name that indicates what stands above it. I, however—the Brahman said to the spirit hosts—I have no name which stands above me. I am the I-am.

From this original source, the human being started; he shall come to it again. There was also development in the ancient India. Development was the magic word by which the human being felt his destination. There must have been anything, as the confession says, that leads to the point on which the human being stands today. Once there must have been a longing that leads him from the divine origin down into this world, to the necessary stage on which we stand today. As true and inevitable as it was that there was such a yearning and desire which leads into the world, as true it is that there must be a force that leads the human being again out of it, so that he brings the fruits of this world back again to the divine original source. This force is the overcoming of the desire by the divine desires, the purification of the destinations by the divine destination.

Now it was something else that was felt as a religion than in the ancient times of which we have spoken. Now, it was no longer the god who revealed himself to the inside, now it was the god revealing himself from the outside, because the human being had to create an abyss between himself and the outside world. The word obviously replaces the immediate life and the sheer strength, and Veda means nothing else than “word.” By this word, advanced, wise human beings announced the origin and destination of the human being, which forms the basis of the universe. One had another idea of this word in ancient times than today if one speaks of the word.

I would like to try to give you an idea of that which one felt speaking of the Veda, of the Logos, and later of the Word. The human being gives names to the things. He says, this is this and that is that. However, if his mouth names the things, it is no arbitrariness, but these are the same names, which once the divine original soul of humanity pronounced from itself and thereby created the things. The human being sees the things and pronounces the names afterwards. However, once the original soul spoke the names first and according to the word, the things formed. This is why there an original soul was in the ancient times, which expressed the words of creation. The words became things and the human soul afterwards found the words out of the things, which the god had put into them.

It revived the sleeping words out of the things. The human being behaved to the divinity this way where one had religious sensation, the sensation towards the word, which lived with the ancient Indians really. Therefore, the opinion combined with the word that there are human beings who are able to look deeper into nature and the being of the world, who are able to directly echo in their words and announce what once the divinity breathed out of itself into the world. One perceived such human beings as initiates. The ancient Indian considered his Rishis not as usual human beings, but as such beings who had reached the level of immortality already in the physical body and live not in the sensory world, but with their souls in the higher heavenly world and have contact with the gods, with the spiritual beings who form the basis of the world. While one looked up at the human beings who had developed the Tao in themselves in this way, one was aware that every human being would also attain this stage once.

The doctrine of rebirth, of the repeated return was combined with it. Buddha did not speak out of his imagination but out of his perception when he spoke to his believers and said, I see back at one, two, three, four, ten, hundred lives.—He spoke of these hundred lives as the human being speaks of one life. In these many lives, he obtained everything that enabled him to speak no longer about the experience of the sensuous world, but about the experience of the supersensible worlds and to bring the message of these supersensible worlds to humanity. This supersensible knowledge is an original component of all religions.

If we put ourselves once again in the peoples feeling the Tao. They not only tried to unite in the religion with the divine, but they also considered themselves as embodiments, as covers of the divine. This was their immediate consciousness. There were human beings who could not think correctly; they were not as clever as we are, but had a direct consciousness that they surrounded a divine core as a fruit surrounds the pit. They saw and felt this core, and they looked through it at the past and the future. They thereby felt the doctrine of reincarnation in themselves.

At that time, the immigrants found such a consciousness. At that time, the ancient Indian teachers who gave the first Brahma culture to the Indians still found a lively view of re-embodiment. Hence, all religions, which started from this site, have the teaching of reincarnation. One felt the Tao in its different creation of human activity. It is only a matter of course that the human being of our period who has separated his soul life from the big external powers could not overlook so many lives, but only saw that he represented this limited soul life. From every next stage, which extends northbound then—starting from the ancient Persian religion—the consciousness of the fact disappeared that the human soul is a cover around the core reincarnating forever. The consciousness confined itself to the zenith between birth and death and to how within birth and death “religare“, religion, has to be sought for. There one felt the contrast of a duality instead of the unity for the first time.

Whereas the Taoist human being of the Atlantean age felt his connection with the original source vividly, and the Brahmanic human being still tried to rouse the Brahman, which is thought outside and within the human being as the same, the human being felt a certain duality, a dualism in Persia first. He felt that which has originated from the human being, as an inside and outside, as an original ground and present human figure. He looked up to the original ground from which everything had risen round him, he looked up to the word from which plant, animal, and human being had arisen according to the physical figure. However, he still felt something else: he felt that anything was therein that did not be in accordance with the original harmony that has to become only again like the original divine. He felt the latter as renunciation from the original divine. He faced the contrast, the duality of light and darkness or of male and female. They represent the original ground and that which expects the human soul in the material compression. This is the second level of human development.

The third stage faces us in the prehistorical and historical Egypt; it is preserved for us as the Book of the Dead. There the human being felt a third aspect besides the duality. He saw a light, the sun, illuminating the earth and saw it penetrating this with its beams and enlivening the seeds and beings slumbering in the earth, and saw how the primal ground had to be fertilised. We find this triad original ground, conception, new life, symbolised as Osiris, the sun, the god of light; as Isis, the matter, and as Horus, the life developing from it. These were three Egyptian divinities. The triad appears here. This triad becomes a basic core in all later confessions.

As trinity the divinity faces us in the confessions where it is called Father, Word and Holy Spirit—Isis, Osiris, Horus—atma(n), buddhi, manas. We find the triad everywhere in the religions now. We have recognised the reason. It faces us with pictures or words in Asia, in Egypt with the priests, but also in the Greek-Roman world, with Augustine, then as nuances in the Middle Ages.

If we have got a bigger perfection in the future, that strength will have appeared as a forming one to which we owe our existence and which works today as a concealed primal ground of the being in us. One felt this as the divine, the inexpressible of the human being that is identical with the first essential component of the tripartite world. One felt then what lives in the human being, what strives for this highest as the word active in the present, the son, who originated from the father who rests unutterably in him. As true as this Father's ground forms the future, more perfect human being, he created the developing son, the buddhi, the second human member, which is not yet perfect but is the reason why we strive for perfection. This is the second being. Also in the past this original ground worked. As well as the sensuous human being was created by the universal primal ground in the past, also that which has already assumed and given off shape in him has something that has likewise arisen in the past from the primal ground and is already developed now.

Let us look at the universe, how it makes itself perceptible as colours, tones, smells and tactile sensations, it streamed from the inexpressible primal ground. In such respect, we may call this primal ground, which appears to us, the creatures, spirit, also in the Christian sense. However, the creation of the world is not finished. The world is a germ, something that has a soul that has the impulse of the future in itself. This is the son. Hence, one called this striving the Word, Veda, Edda. The third one is a strength in us that becomes discernible in the future in us: the Father's ground of all being deep set in any of our souls.

Feeling this vividly means feeling the trinity, making it the being of the entire internal imagination. Persona (Latin) signifies mask or external figure, cover. Hence, the religion shows this core of truth, which I have just explained, in three different masks, in three persons. God has three different persons. That means that he appears in three different masks: Spirit, Word, and Father. With it, we have touched that confession at the same time that then led to Christianity. If you understand this really, you find this truth also expressed in it. If you correctly understand the deepest Gospel, that of John, you find the same consciousness of religare, of the connection with a higher consciousness that appeared in human form. It is the teachings of the incarnate Logos, the incarnate divinity, the present divinity that lives in brotherliness with both forms of the divinity, with the active Spirit coming from the past, working in the present, and the Father creating in the present into the future. Thus, the Son originated from the Father, is connected with the Spirit at the same time, and that is why the Son is the great preannouncement that will lead to the Father.

The words no one comes to the Father except by me (John 14:5), by the divine essence of the present, point to this. He says that he sends the Spirit again, the essence of that which is already in the world. As true as Christ said, I will be with you always, to the end of time (Matthew 28:20), it is also true that he will come again that the whole Christianity has been a preparation of the new figure. The Spirit is there provisional, the knowledge, the science, the religions were taught provisionally as they were taught in the past. The religious documents were preserved to us and now the theologians try to interpret them and to teach according to them. This is the way now theology works in place of wisdom. Theosophy means wisdom and truth, theology means the doctrine of wisdom and truth. As well as theology originated from spiritual science, theology has to go back to spiritual science.

I have often drawn your attention to the condition of former research, and that then a reversal took place. Once one trusted in the books of the old sages, in Plato, Aristotle and others at all sites where one taught. Researchers were not there, but interpreters. I have that strange time in mind about which theology tells that one could no longer understand later when one learnt to read in the book of nature. The confidence in the written was almost absolute. If, for example, a naturalist had stated that the nerves do not start from the heart, but from the brain, one said, nevertheless, Aristotle says differently, and Aristotle is right, although one saw the demonstrated phenomena. Today in wide sections of the population, the consciousness does not yet exist that there is a key that there are research sites and research methods that ascertain the facts of the spiritual worlds as the observatories or the laboratories ascertain the facts of the sensuous world.

Since thirty years it has been announced again that there is such a thing like a spiritual central site of humanity, and with it the theosophists say nothing more unbelievable, than if Haeckel says: this is in that and this way.—If Haeckel argues anything, we assume that he has found the proofs of it in his research. We assume also that the statements in the religious documents were proved by the facts to be true, and that there are persons among us which themselves can go back again to the sources. Theosophy or spiritual science means drawing the attention to the spiritual researchers and to the central site. It speaks again from experience about the matters of the supersensible, as those did who originally created the religious documents, from their inner experience. As well as 400 years ago, the natural sciences experienced a revival, theosophy or spiritual science should today signify a revival of the immediate spiritual research.

Thus, we are put in the necessity to return to that core of truth, which I tried to outline from the Tao up to the appearance of the great saviour of humanity. I wanted to generate awareness of the relation of spiritual science to the central point, the core of truth in the different religions. Those who have not yet approached spiritual science maybe come again to hear more. However, some may also say that it is a kind of neo-Buddhism, a new religion, something oriental; it wants to bring in something foreign to our world. However, this is not the case; this would not be spiritual-scientific. Only those speak in such ways who do not have the will to listen to that which spiritual science says. The aspiration of spiritual science is to look for the core of truth in our external confessions, to go back to the sources from which the books existing today were created. It is necessary to go back to the facts, then the books are better understood, then new life flows in humanity.

Christianity is to be understood as a religion that has to prepare humanity for the future, as the religion of the Son by which one finds the Father on the same ways. At the same time, it is one of the most important tasks of spiritual science to get this religion across. Therefore, it searches for the core of truth in all religions to find it in our own. We recognised that religion originated not from childish images, but from the highest wisdom, from spiritual research. However, we also learnt that one can abreast with science and be, nevertheless, a religious person. If this knowledge finds an echo again, the lively feeling awakes for that which one of the theosophists, Goethe, called into the world more than hundred years ago like a program, like a beautiful and marvellous saying to humanity. I would like to close with this saying today, confessing that there can be no true science, no deeper human observation, which shows the religious truth as something childish; and that all religions contain as a core of our highest destination:

Who has science and art,
Has religion, too;
Who does not have both,
Should have religion.

The following question is posed: “Is it important for the theosophist to educate himself about the different parts of man, about the astral and mental world, about the development of the earth and the world, and so on? Is it not enough for him to become aware of the “God-man” within himself, of the unity with all beings, and of the divinity of all things? Why does he need teachings and theories?"

It must be said that it is a fine saying to become aware of one's divine self and of the unity with all beings, but that this remains only a saying as long as one does not really want to recognize the nature and the deeds of the divine in the world. A person who only ever speaks of his divine self is like someone who does not want to know anything about tulips, violets, narcissi, roses, etc., but wants to lump everything together into the vague concept of “plant”. God can only recognize those who understand the world, and self-knowledge can only be attained by those who want to recognize the things around them, both sensual and supersensual. For man is the highest revelation of all things for man, and therefore knowledge of the world is at the same time self-knowledge. Therefore, those who do not want to be content with general phrases must acquire knowledge of the astral, mental, etc. world in order to attain self-knowledge. For all the phenomena of these worlds have a share in the human essence. Therefore, perfect self-knowledge and full God-consciousness are also an unattainable ideal. Only when one would recognize the whole world could one recognize oneself completely. It cannot be a matter of our knowing that a divine element lives in us, for a divine element lives in every stone, in every plant, in every animal. What matters is that we recognize more and more of the revelations of God in the universe. Let us therefore repeat less that theosophy is the consciousness of the unity of God with man, and let us seek to understand more of the secrets of the world, that is, of the divine workings in things. In this way we will also become more modest than if we always emphasize our consciousness of the God-man in us. Of course we carry this within us; but as a rule we know very little about it. It is better to have some real knowledge of what the astral or mental world looks like than to boast of a consciousness of God that remains an empty word without true, certain knowledge. Indeed, it is presumptuous to speak of this unity with God without wanting to delve deeper into the deeds of God in the universe. What use is it to always say: I am the son of this father. Learn from this father, acquire what he can and is able to do, then you will be his worthy son. Theosophy will only be true divine wisdom when it speaks clearly and distinctly of the higher worlds and avoids all vague expressions. How much a person appropriates from the knowledge of the higher worlds is another matter; but it depends on the will to knowledge. All unhappiness in the world comes from ignorance. But this is not overcome by the consciousness of the divine self within oneself. For even the ignorant can justifiably speak of his divine self. He has it; he just cannot recognize it. Theosophy should not be a show of divine consciousness, but a real learning of the divine secrets of the world, which give the key to genuine self-knowledge.

The last lecture dealt with the subject of how the Christ Impulse will unfold in future times, and also, of course, in our own epoch. We heard that sheaths will weave themselves as it were around the Christ Impulse: Wonder into an Astral Body; feelings of love or Compassion into an Ether-Body; the power of Conscience into what corresponds to a Physical Body. Thereby that Ideal Being Whose “ I ”—the Christ Impulse Itself—passed into the Earth through the Mystery of Golgotha, will reach completion in the course of the time still remaining to Earth-evolution. The fundamental character of the future Ideal of humanity was described in one of its aspects and the present lecture will endeavour to add yet another, different picture.

The Christ Impulse came, so to say, in the middle of the epoch following upon the great Atlantean catastrophe. This epoch may be said to extend from the time of the Atlantean catastrophe to the next great catastrophe of which you may read in the lectures on the Apocalypse. (Nuremburg, 1908.) In the middle of this period, the most important of all events in Earth-evolution takes place—the coming of the Christ Impulse. As the last lecture indicated, it is not necessary to turn our eyes to Palestine in order to realise that something of the highest importance was taking place at that time in Earth-evolution. We have only to study the Graeco-Latin epoch of culture, lying as it does in the middle of the Post-Atlantean period, and recall one of its characteristic features; this again can be compared with a similar feature in the preceding Third epoch and in our own epoch.

The essential and fundamental character of a Greek Temple has often been described. Its form stands there as a complete, self-contained, independant whole, even when it is not actually before our eyes, even when we conceive of no human being anywhere near it. Inside a Greek Temple, human beings always seem to be a disturbing element; they do not really belong to it, they do not belong inside it. For what, in reality, is a Greek Temple? We can only understand it in its whole form and structure, if we think of it as the dwelling-place of a living, invisible God who has come down to the physical plane. That is the reason why every Temple is dedicated to one particular God. And when we picture the God in the Temple—with no human beings present—the God for whom a dwelling-place has been built on Earth ... then we have grasped the “idea” embodied in the Greek Temple. Human beings really have no place there. This was the idea underlying the whole architecture of a Greek Temple. Such architecture could only arise in an epoch when the Divine Spiritual was known to pervade all existence on the physical plane. Men whose paths appeared to be everywhere steeped in the Divine could feel all the depth of meaning contained in words uttered by one of themselves: “Better it is to be a beggar in the Upper World than a king in the realm of the Shades!” ... that is to say, in the world lying on the other side of the Gate of Death. It was the period when human beings experienced, in greatest intensity, their union with the physical plane and with the Spiritual pervading the physical plane.

Let us compare a Greek Temple with a building of the same character in the preceding epoch—and with buildings which, in our own epoch, indicate its fundamental attitude and trend. Think of an Egyptian Temple, even of the Pyramids: they become intelligible only when we see them as expressions of man's aspiration to the Divine—to the Divine Godhead who has not yet descended to the physical plane. In the architecture of the Egyptian time, every line, every form, expresses the striving of man towards the Divine-Spiritual. But these mysterious and deeply symbolical buildings indicate in themselves that men must have undergone preparation before the architectural forms could help them to find the way to the Divine-Spiritual. They needed preparation: they must have reached the first stage of Initiation. The same applies to the architecture of Asia Minor. In our own epoch, Gothic architecture gives the keynote. This is an occult fact. It is impossible to have the same conception of a Gothic Cathedral as of a Greek Temple; for a Gothic Cathedral is incomplete without the congregation of believers. It is simply not complete without the human beings within it! All its forms seem to convey that they are there to receive the prayers of the believers—the “believers,” in contrast to the “Initiates” in ancient Egypt. Anyone who can discern what these things mean, realises from the course taken by the evolution of Form from the Egyptian Temple, through the Greek Temple, to the Gothic Cathedral, that the impulse leading to the unfolding of the human “ I ” entered at a certain point into the process of earthly existence. Wherever we look we can perceive how the Christ Impulse lays hold of man, leaves its stamp and signature upon all happenings, all development, and it seems grotesque when philosophical or theological thought declares that acceptance of such an Impulse rests upon the basis of historical records. It does not rest upon any historical record whatever, but simply and solely upon a discerning, clear-sighted observation of human evolution; for no matter where we look, we see that development follows the same course as that revealed in Architecture. The Initiate who alone was capable of understanding the architectural forms of the Egypto-Chaldean epoch—the Third Post-Atlantean epoch—knew that he must raise himself above the level of ordinary manhood: then and only then could he ascend into the region of Divine Spiritual life. The Initiate of the Fourth Post-Atlantean epoch knew that in the physical world he was living together with the Divine, but he had very little connection with what the Greeks called the World of Shades, because by that time man had descended more deeply into physical existence. And when the Gods did not mingle with men in the Temples, the Greeks felt no connection with that other world.

Since the Fourth Post-Atlantean epoch these conditions have changed—changed in the sense that it is possible now for every single soul to find the path to the Divine-Spiritual. It is extremely important to realise this for it is the most concrete expression of the fact that in ancient times men were much nearer to the Spiritual in their consciousness, in their knowledge and in their life of soul. Then came the descent to the physical plane and now there must be a gradual re-ascent. We are living in the age when the re-ascent must be undertaken consciously—whereas, to begin with, the Christ Impulse worked unconsciously in men.

Our own epoch is a kind of recapitulation of the Egypto-Chaldean period. Of the Graeco-Latin epoch there is no recapitulation, for it lies in the middle of the seven consecutive periods. The Third epoch is being recapitulated, in a certain form, in our own age; the Second epoch, that of ancient Persian culture, will be recapitulated in the Sixth epoch by which our own will be followed; and in the far distant Seventh epoch, before a stupendous catastrophe, the First epoch, that of ancient Indian culture, will be recapitulated—not, of course, in the same form, for the recapitulation will everywhere bear the imprint of the Christ Impulse.

A certain consciousness existed, especially in olden times, of what has come to pass in the evolution of mankind. Olden times, of course, were paramountly conscious of the descent of humanity, the descent to the physical plane from the heights of Divine-Spiritual existence. But for every process there must be preparation. There had been preparation, too, for the Impulse given by the Mystery of Golgotha in the Fourth epoch—the Impulse for the re-ascent. This Impulse had its “forerunners”—in Elijah, John the Baptist and others. But consciousness of the fact that mankind has descended from Divine-Spiritual existence and in the future must re-ascend into the worlds of Divine Spirit, was present not only in the culture which eventually made its way into the West; evidences of such consciousness are to be found in every civilisation.

A very widespread and characteristic idea finds expression in the traditions of practically all the peoples—an idea which may, it is true, have very ramified applications, but can finally be associated with a definite and specific tradition. It is a tradition upon which there has been much reflection and upon which occult knowledge alone can shed light, namely, the tradition of the “Flood.” Much that is connected with this tradition refers, of course, to far earlier times, but the following is brought clearly to light by occult investigation. Nearly all the peoples who have left reliable historical records or legends refer to the Flood as having taken place about three thousand years before the Mystery of Golgotha; that is the period indicated by the legends. There is not enough time today to explain why this last Flood which was supposed to have occurred three thousand years before our era, cannot be taken to indicate a great physical catastrophe or deluge. Obviously it does not refer to the Atlantean catastrophe, for that took place very much earlier. The “Flood,” therefore, must mean something entirely different. Yet the fact should not be lost sight of that the traditions of all the peoples in question place the Flood in the fourth millennium before our era. Although the dates vary a little, they tally in the main essentials.

At this point I will ask you to remember that in the First Post-Atlantean epoch, when the Holy Rishis were the great teachers of men, culture was inspired, paramountly, by the human ether-body; during the ancient Persian epoch, culture was inspired by the astral body, the sentient body; in the Egypto-Chaldean epoch by the sentient soul; in the Graeco-Latin epoch by the mind or intellectual soul; in our present epoch by the consciousness soul (or “spiritual soul”). And now the time is approaching when the powers of the Spirit-Self will gradually be imbued into culture. In that development proceeded in this way, the experiences arising in man's life of soul underwent deep and far-reaching change. Just think of it. The picture of the world presented to a man of the earliest Indian epoch, of which even the Vedas have no knowledge, received its essential character and stamp from the working of the ether-body. Through the ether-body man cannot direct his gaze to the outer world in the way that is customary in our time. His perception, his picture of the world cannot be as they are today; where the forces of the ether-body are in operation, everything arises from within. A man of today can only have an idea—dim and lifeless at that—of perception which derives from the ether-body, when he recalls the character of his dreams. But the dreams and visions through which, during the ancient Indian epoch, one human being became known to another, were living and real in the very highest degree. To imagine that when one human being met another, the outer perception of him was the same as it is today, would be quite erroneous. The man of ancient India saw pictures—but in those times the other human being physically before him was enveloped in an auric cloud, shrouded in a kind of mist. The character of perception was altogether different compared with perception as it is at the present day, these pictures, although full of the greatest spiritual import, were blurred and hazy. The forces streaming down from Cosmic Space, from the world of the stars—it was these forces that were seen in such clarity and brilliance in those ancient times. In the Second Post-Atlantean epoch the power to look outwards gradually unfolded but, strangely enough, the faculty for gazing into the great Cosmic Spaces remained. Whereas perceptions of the world below were still hazy and without definition, the ancient Persian gazed with lucid clarity into the world of the stars. It is therefore intelligible that Zarathustrianism should point directly to Cosmic Space, to the light of the Sun, to “Ahura Mazdao” or Ormuzd. This was because the astral body was paramountly active. By the end of the ancient Persian epoch, the faculty of looking outwards into the physical world was already in its preparatory stage. The impulses leading to perception as it is in our day have been developing for long, long ages. Thus the impulse to look out into the physical world was gradually instilled into man, leading him to the entirely new mode of perception which began to light up by slow degrees.

When the ancient Persian epoch was drawing to its close and the next period was glimmering like a dawn of the future, men felt: “We shall no longer be able to experience with such intensity the Divine heritage that has come to us from the olden days of Atlantis, when with their power of inner, clairvoyant vision, men lived in communion with the worlds of Divine Spirit ” ... The gaze was turned back to the past. What mattered most for these men were their remembrances in which living pictures arose like dreams—dreams of how the Gods had fashioned the world through the ages of Lemuria and Atlantis. They felt that these remembrances were withdrawing, were fading away from humanity and that conditions were approaching when man must work with a faculty which tells him of the outer world, clouds the bright light of the inner world of the Spirit, and compels him to look from within-outwards, if he is to master the external world. This age was drawing nearer and nearer. Those who had the deepest, clearest perception of the dawn of the new epoch were men who at that time were the knowers and sages in ancient India. They felt it in the form, as it were, of a Divine Impulse, compelling the human being to think for himself, through inner activity, about what confronts him in the physical world to which he was descending. Picturing this Impulse as a Divine Being, the successors of the first, very ancient Indian culture—those who were living now during the Second Post-Atlantean epoch—called this Being “Pramathesis.” These men felt: “The God Pramathesis is drawing near, snatching human beings away from the guidance given by the ancient Gods; God Pramathesis is causing the disappearance of all that ancient clairvoyance revealed concerning the world and is forcing man to look outwards into the physical plane. Darkness is creeping over the world of the ancient Gods. A time is approaching when in their life of soul men will no longer be able to gaze into the world of the Gods, but when their eyes will be turned to the outer world. Kaliyuga, the ‘Black Age’ is approaching; the bright age of ancient Divinity is giving place to the age when the Gods of old withdraw. It is the age inaugurated by the God Pramathesis!”

Kaliyuga was said to begin at a time which lies 3,101 years before our own era; this is the time of the “Flood” according to Indian tradition. For it was said that the Flood coincides with the coming of Kaliyuga, and Kaliyuga was conceived to be the offspring of the God “Pramathesis”.

Kaliyuga broke in upon the world, reaching its close in our own age. Now that the ascent to the spiritual world must begin, a spiritual science has come to mankind. Kaliyuga began 3,101 years before our era, and ended in the year 1899 A.D. That is why 1899 is a year of such importance. The re-ascent to the spiritual worlds—this must be the ideal of the future.

The age preceding the onset of Kaliyuga was, however, an age characteristic of the ancient Persian epoch when the old remembrances rose up within man via the astral body. Now he was to turn to the world outside. This was a great and epoch-making transition. In the case of many human beings it came about in such a way that for a time all vision departed from them and darkness spread over their souls. This condition of darkness did not last for long periods, actually only for weeks. But men passed into this condition of sleep, and many never came out of it. Many of them perished and only relatively few were left in widely scattered regions. There is not enough time today to describe the conditions actually prevailing at that time. It can only be said briefly that owing to so large a number of human beings having succumbed, conditions were dark and sinister in the extreme and at only a few scattered places did men awaken from the great spiritual deluge that spread over their souls like a sleep. This condition of sleep was felt by most souls as a kind of “drowning” and by only a few as a re-awakening. And then came the “Black Age,” the age devoid of the Gods.

Were these things known to other human beings on the Earth? They were indeed. To our astonishment we find widespread evidence of knowledge among the peoples that a deluge had submerged the consciousness of men and that in the Third Post-Atlantean epoch, through the development of the sentient soul—in other words, outward-turned vision—an entirely new power must have been inaugurated. The Indians divined this when they said: Kaliyuga is the offspring of Pramathesis. And what did the Greeks say? In Greece, “Pramathesis” becomes, “Prometheus”—which is exactly the same. Prometheus is the brother of Epimetheus. The latter represents one who still “looks back” into ancient times. Epimetheus is the one whose thoughts turn backward; Prometheus sends his thoughts forward, to the world outside, to what takes place there. Just as Pramathesis has his offspring in Kaliyuga, so, too, Prometheus has his offspring. The Greek form of “Kaliyuga” is “Kalion.” And because the Greeks felt it to be the age of Darkness, the “ d ” is prefixed and the word becomes “Deukalion”—which is really the same word as “Kaliyuga.” This is not ingenious fancy, but an occult fact. It is clear, therefore, that the Greeks possessed the same knowledge as the Indian sages. This is quoted merely as an example, indicating that in their conditions of old clairvoyance, knowledge of these truths came to men and they were able to express them in majestic pictures. The Greek legend tells how, on the advice of his father Prometheus, Deukalion builds a wooden chest; in this he and his wife Pyrrha alone are saved from destruction, when Zeus proposes to exterminate the human race by a deluge. Deukalion and Pyrrha land on Parnassus, and from them issues the new human race. Deukalion is the son of Prometheus—and in the intervening period comes the flood, denoting among manifold peoples, a condition of consciousness.

These wonderful pictures which have been preserved in the traditions of so many of the peoples, show us how truths concerning the evolution of mankind have survived among them.

As men lived on gradually into the age of Kaliyuga, into the Third Post-Atlantean epoch, the ancient clairvoyant knowledge faded away. We who have to recapitulate the Third epoch, must bring this kind of knowledge to life once again, but in an entirely new form. The lecture given a fortnight ago (The Idea of Reincarnation and its Introduction into Western Culture) dealt with this subject. Western culture, the beginnings of which were mingled with the ancient Hebrew culture, has to concentrate primary attention on the single personality living on the physical plane between birth and death; Western culture cannot focus its main attention on the Individuality who passes through the different epochs, but concentrates upon the existence of the one personality, whose life between birth and death runs its course on the physical plane, not in the higher worlds. Now that Kaliyuga has come to an end, consciousness must be imbued with the forces necessary for the further evolution of the human race; what was lost during Kaliyuga must be raised again from the depths. Our eyes must be directed more and more to the onflowing life of the Individuality. I have spoken of a series of lives in the West—Elijah, John the Baptist, Raphael, Novalis—and have shown how by the addition of knowledge derived from the spiritual worlds, we can perceive the continuous thread of the soul, the onflowing life of the one Individuality in Elijah, John the Baptist, Raphael, Novalis.

In our Movement, development of this insight must be a conscious aspiration, for it is a necessity in the evolution and culture of the Earth. No progress would be possible by the mere continuation of the old experiences, the old knowledge. I have emphasised often enough all that it means for the minds of men to enrich and make fruitful the heritage of ancient times by means of the new knowledge now available. It must, however, be realised that just as the transition from life inspired by the astral body to a spiritual life of soul, primarily in the sentient soul, was fraught with deep significance, so, now, we must work our way from life in the consciousness soul to life in the Spirit-Self. I have intimated how this will take place by saying that during the next three thousand years, an increasing number of human beings will experience the Appearance of the Christ Impulse, will be able to experience the Christ Impulse in the spiritual worlds. But actual realisation of the influences streaming in from the spiritual world will have to unfold in greater intensity in the times lying ahead of us. It will not suffice to know, in theory, that “generally speaking” the human being lives on after death; man's whole picture of life must carry the sure conviction that when the human being passes through the Gate of Death, he lives on still, death being merely a transition. We must realise, not as a theory, but as actual knowledge, that while a human being is alive, he works upon us physically, through his body; after his death he works spiritually, out of the spiritual world, upon our physical world. He is present in very truth. We must learn to see life in the light of such a fact and to reckon with what it involves.

Suppose it is our task to educate children.—Anyone acquainted with these things is well aware that to educate children who up to their twentieth year still have parents living, is a very different matter from having to educate children whose fathers died when they were four or five years old. When education is taken in deep earnestness, and the individuality of the child really studied (it is not a matter of speculation!)—especially in the case of a child whose father is dead, we shall often discern that there is something unusual at work here, something we cannot, at first, quite get hold of. Moreover we shall not succeed in getting to the root of it, if we adopt the modes of thought drawn from materialism. But here and there the thought may occur: “Here is a strange current of the times. Most people regard those who belong to it as fools; but it may be worth while to find out what these Theosophists have to say about the destiny of human beings after death. The Theosophists tell us that although human beings discard their physical bodies at death, the content of their life of soul, their hopes, aspirations and so forth, live on, and are not inactive. Indeed they are often more active after death than when the human being was living on the physical plane, enclosed in his body” ... Those who speak like this, have paid attention to the results of spiritual research and will realise that the father is working upon the child from the spiritual world; moreover that he has definite hopes and longings which make their way into the life of the child! With this knowledge, success may come where it was not possible before, and we know how to deal with sympathies and antipathies which may express themselves in the child. To succeed with children we need to know more than that the air affects them, and that when the air is chilly they may catch cold. We must have knowledge of the influences playing from the spiritual world into the physical, and of the form they take.

These things are still regarded as nonsense, but the time is not far distant when the very facts of life will compel people to take account of them and to reckon with what endures in the form of live and potent impulses after human beings have passed through death. Not until then will the concrete reality contained in the spiritual conception of the world be grasped.

Naturally, these influences from the spiritual world are not at work in the case of children only; influences also come from individualities in the spiritual world who were connected with human beings at a later age of life. To begin with, a man may be quite unaware of these influences. (Again I am not inventing but telling you of actual observations, confirmed by spiritual investigation.) After a time a man may say to himself: “I do not know why I am impelled to this or that action, why I have this impulse; something is urging me to think quite differently now, about certain things.” Subsequently he may have a very striking dream. Little heed is paid to things of the kind nowadays, but men will gradually become aware that it is not the “form” but the content of the dream that is of importance. From this you may conclude that if Edison had made his discoveries in a dream, they would have been just as effective! Suppose a man dreams that some unknown person comes to him, someone he cannot even think of as an acquaintance, indeed cannot place at all. This person comes into his life of dream and various things happen ... Finally he realises that this person whom he cannot recall, who died perhaps fifteen years before, is working into and influencing his life. Whereas previously he felt that certain impulses were urging him on, he is now fully aware that these impulses, in the form of a dream-picture, are working into his night-consciousness. This is often characteristic of the connection between impulses within us and influences working upon us in the shape of dreams. Such experiences will become increasingly familiar.

And now, in conclusion, let us see how they will become familiar.

Suppose someone today reads one of the many biographies of Raphael. He will get the impression that in a certain respect Raphael stands there as a phenomenon, complete in himself, giving forth the highest and best that was in him, but so enclosed within his particular sphere of work that it is difficult to imagine him rising still higher or transcending the level he had actually reached. And again: Raphael's creative genius seems to have been alive in him from the the very beginning ... On the subject of its phenomenal manifestation in Raphael's early boyhood the biographies have nothing to say. And why?

The biographies give the information that Raphael's father was Giovanni Santi who, among other activities, was also a writer; he died when Raphael was eleven years old, but before his death he had placed the boy under the tuition of a painter. It is also known that Giovanni Santi was himself a talented painter but that there was something in him which he could not bring to expression. We feel that there was something in the soul of Giovanni Santi which did not make itself manifest because his outer nature frustrated it. He died when the boy Raphael was eleven years old. From the very way in which Raphael develops we can discern the source of the powers which enabled him to reach maturity and perfection so rapidly they are the influences playing into him from his father, forces coming from the spiritual worlds. Anyone who tries to write a true biography of Raphael in the future will have to emphasise the point that Giovanni Santi, the father of Raphael, died in 1494, when the boy was only eleven years old. Giovanni Santi was a distinguished man, who during his life on Earth aspired to great things. And his aspirations continued when, living on without frustration in the spiritual world, he was sending down to his beloved son—in the form of delicate and intimate spiritual influences—forces which his own constitution had prevented him from bringing to expression in the physical world.

To say this is no disparagement of Raphael's genius, for the ground must naturally have been there. We know that he was the reincarnation of John the Baptist and had only to receive into himself those forces which it was his particular mission to bring into manifestation at that time. Thinking of this, we can perceive the interplay between the spiritual world and the physical plane. Future study of the life of Raphael will have, at every turn, to concern itself with the influences which poured from the Spiritual into the Physical. Then we shall have a picture of “wholeness”—of forces working around us, through us, in us. Thus will spirituality again be instilled into culture. But it must not surprise us if those who are unwilling today to listen to any suggestion of the introduction of spirituality into culture, are contemptuous of this spiritual conception of the world; for it is something completely new. It is a dawning of the new power of the Spirit-Self. And a time will come—I ask you to write this deeply into your souls—when men will think of the materialistic culture which is now on the way to its close, as they once thought about the age preceding the Flood, yearning and longing for the future culture which, when it came, was something wholly and essentially new. Theosophists, however, should not merely strive for this ideal in theory, but receive it into their very souls; they should regard it as their good Karma to know about the course of human evolution and therewith of human culture.

These things will have to be pondered over for a time, because I am not yet in a position to say exactly when the next lecture can take place.¹ But we know well that time is required to make Spiritual Science an integral force and impulse in our hearts and minds; and we know, too, that it is part of spiritual development not only to understand the truths but actually to unfold all that the great ideas born from a spiritual conception of the world can say to our hearts.

• 1. Between the date of this lecture and the next of the series (18th June, 1912), Dr. Steiner had given two lectures in Copenhagen: On the Meaning of Life, 23rd and 24th May, 1912; three lectures in Norrköping: Anthroposophical Ethics, 28th and 29th May, 1912; and two lectures in Christiania: Man in the Light of Occultism, Theosophy and Philosophy, 2nd June to 12th June, 1912.

[Ladies and gentlemen!]

In the previous lectures I have endeavored to show the components of which Christianity is composed. I would now like to note again that I am only trying to present Christianity in the way in which it can be understood as a mystical-theosophical doctrine. I will try to show that the narrative that is before us, on the one hand in the three Gospels, in the Synoptics—Matthew, Mark and Luke—and on the other hand in the Gospel of John, but then also specifically in relation to the Christian doctrine, as we have it in the various creeds of the Western Christian churches—I will try to show how this doctrinal content is nothing other than a result of the so-called Egyptian initiation, the Egyptian initiation process to which every individual who wanted to ascend to a theosophical worldview had to submit.

This is summarized and described as a single historical event, as the life, suffering and death of an individual, a saviour, not as a process to which every human being is subjected. These initiation processes, which were different in degrees, are dumped on a single personality and summarized, merged into a single process. That is what I endeavored to show.

I endeavored to show how the matter has become a historical event. I do not see the initiation process as an allegory. I want to repeat Leadbeater's words here, not as an opinion of mine, but as a theosophically established fact: "Then it happened that one of the most monstrous misunderstandings dawned over the spiritual horizon of the old world, which then spread from there over the whole human race. This allegorically contained the descent of the Logos, which, however, was not an allegory at all, but the bodily descent. Nothing could be more misleading" and so on.

Now that we know what the inner spiritual content was that was handed down to people and was incorporated into people in the initiation process, we see it permeated by a philosophy, with the Philonic philosophy, and then again as a creed, as an external view of life with the therapists and Essenes. In these strange soul-seekers and God-seekers we find on the one hand the preparation and on the other the philosophical deepening by Philo. So, having seen where what we have seen in Jesus of Nazareth comes from, it is up to us to see how Jesus of Nazareth, this personality we are dealing with, takes up his mission himself, how Jesus of Nazareth fits into this whole thing.

Based on the various studies I have made of the Church Fathers, the Gnostics and so on, I have come to the conclusion that it is quite impossible to get away with the view of current theology. [Bunsen] wrote about the Gospel of John. The confession of this scholar corresponds pretty much to the theosophical one, but must be modified somewhat, as it follows here.

The Gospel of John is either a communication from eyewitnesses or a revelation. Those who stand on the standpoint of exoteric Christianity, which is the standpoint of the sensory perceptibility of the personality of Jesus, must base themselves on this sensory appearance. But if one stands on the positive Christian standpoint, then one must have the view [Bunsen's] about the Gospel of John, which concludes something like this: If the Gospel of John is a myth, then there is no historical Christ, and without this the whole of Christianity is a delusion, the worship of God is a hoax, the Reformation a crime.—You see, this scholar cannot get over two things: either the Gospel of John is valid for us, or it is not. If it is regarded as something that was devised afterwards or something similar, then the basic idea, the basic essence of Christianity cannot be upheld.

We have to think of the Gospel of John in relation to the others. From the relationship of John's Gospel to the other Gospels we will get an idea of how this personality [of the evangelist] has positioned himself in relation to the foundation of Christianity. We all know that in the Gospel of John a passage is quoted from which it emerges that the one from whom the messages of the Gospel originate is to be regarded as an eyewitness, as one who was present at the events and knows how to write about them, how to describe them, as one who was chosen to grasp the Master's teachings most deeply.

Note the final passage: "But what is this?"—"If I will that he remain until I come."—"This disciple will not die." The one of whom it is said, "I will that he abide till I come", is the disciple who testifies of these things. He has written this and we know that this "testimony is true." [May] we find the opportunity, through mystical-theosophical immersion, to [understand] the words of this final passage of John's Gospel in such a way that they show themselves to us in the right light.

We must realize that the first three Gospels, when we go through them, show us a very different view of Christianity than the Gospel of John. The Gospel of John shows us a much more spiritualized view of Christianity. One cannot but come to the conclusion that the Gospels emerged from two spiritual currents. Firstly, from what they heard from the Master himself, whom we are dealing with here; and secondly, from what they associated with it. From sentence to sentence, from verse to verse, we can distinguish between the true, deeper teachings, spiritual Christianity, and what has been linked to it. The three authors of the synoptic gospels relate what they heard from the Master and what they took over from the old views, from Judaism. They lived in traditional Judaism and have drawn many ideas from it. Some of these ideas are confirmed to them. But in their blood lives the idea of the Messiah, through whom the Jewish people were to regain their power and glory. They have thrown these two things together, and we must definitely keep these two things or currents apart. This work will also show us which passages of the first three Gospels do not have corresponding passages in the Gospel of John.

First and foremost, we must mention the one important fact that we have no passages in the Gospel of John for various passages in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke. In chapter 24, verses 32-33 of the Gospel of Matthew it says:

"Learn a parable from the fig tree. When its branch now becomes lush and puts forth leaves, you know that summer is near. So also, when you see all these things, know that the kingdom of God is near."

These words, which are found in the Synoptics, have no corresponding passage in the Gospel of John. The parable of the fig tree symbolizes the decline of Judaism and the rise of the new teaching. This passage could easily be taken to mean that a world order, as it lives in the exoteric teaching, would be replaced by a new purely earthly world order. As I said, I believe that individual passages of this kind can be understood in this or that way, more or less deeply. [However, we may well assume that the "Master" of Nazareth is concealed in these words, if they are understood in the right way.] Let us take another passage, Matthew chapter 16, verse 28:

"Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom."

This passage is found in all three synoptics, but not in John. These words shed a deeply meaningful light on the relationship of John's gospel to the others. John is referred to [by the disciples] as the one—[not] by Jesus himself—who does not die. "This disciple does not die." But Jesus does not say, "He does not die," but rather, "I want him to remain until I come." John was Jesus' favorite. He was seen as the one who would not die before the Messiah came. So when John wrote the Gospel, he refuted the external fact—not outwardly—but John did not die before he saw the kingdom of God coming. So what was previously said in the earlier gospels, for example in Luke, was actually fulfilled in John:

"The children of the world are free and will be free. But those who are resurrected will neither be free nor let themselves be free. They are like angels and children of God." [Luke 20:34-36]

There is again no place in John for this. John is therefore described as the one who experiences the resurrection, in which there will no longer be talk of people with earthly bodies, but of people who will be like angels.

[The end of John's gospel was written after John had written his gospel]. And it all sounds like a jubilant song throughout the gospel. John does not need to report on these prophecies, he had a much more significant event to report on. He had experienced the hour that is said to come like a thief in the night, which only the Father—according to Jesus' own words—knows about.

John did not have to tell of a prophecy, but of an experience. Therefore, he only had to describe a fact. He only had to say: What Jesus predicted has been fulfilled in me; I have experienced the new kingdom and the spiritual resurrection. He could therefore say that the kingdom had really come. Therefore, the relationship of the Gospel of John to the three earlier ones is that of the spiritual view as opposed to the view of the three synoptics, which is saturated with Jewish elements.

When the times are fulfilled, he can say:

"Verily I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it is alone. But if it dies, it bears much fruit. He who loves his life will lose it, and he who hates it will keep it until eternal life." [John 12:24-25]

John had recognized this. He had recognized the word of the Master: "The kingdom will come, and I have nothing to proclaim to you but what must be fulfilled in you. He who believes in me does not believe in me, says the Master. He has true faith who does not believe in me, but in the one who sent me.—It can only be born in each one of you, prompted and inspired by me. "And he who sees me sees the one who sent me."—[The Father] has built into me what I am to say and do.

"Truly I tell you, whoever believes in me will also do the works that I do, and he will do even greater ones, because I am going to the Father." [John 14:12]

It is clear that the Master who spoke this did not teach: I am one with the Father.—Rather, he taught: I am sent by the Father to teach you the path that can lead you to infinity, to teach you to do works that lead to infinity.—It would make no sense at all to say that he is able to take away sin from the other, whom he himself says will do greater works than I.

We stand before a great awakener who has shown the disciples the path. So we see in the Master an initiator who led his disciples along a certain path, and we see how everyone wanted his Master's words to be understood. They should continue to have an effect like powers behind which there is a deeper meaning. Then the higher powers will arise in human souls. Some will experience the kingdom of God, especially the favorite disciple John. And when he had experienced it, he let out a shout of joy that he had recognized the truth. That's when he wrote his gospel. He had understood what it meant to follow Christ. He had understood what it meant to really be a Christian. He had understood that you can only get on the path that Christ has laid out if you celebrate the resurrection in your spirit.

"He who loves his life will lose it, but he who hates it will not lose it." [John 12:25]

Jakob Böhme says:]

"He who does not die before he dies, perishes when he dies."

[Goethe says]:

"And as long as you do not have this, this dying and becoming, you are only a gloomy guest on the dark earth."

This is the relationship between the Gospel of John and the three synoptic gospels. John understood how to grasp the word not exoterically, but esoterically as a story of consciousness.

We also understand how John set out his esoteric view right at the beginning of this Gospel, as if to show that his teaching can only be interpreted in an esoteric way. It speaks of the building of the temple in three days. Jesus speaks of the temple of his body. [When John has Jesus speak of the temple, he has him speak of the relationship between the divine and the worldly.] He has him speak of a parable, of something that symbolically expresses that the divine power descended to the material in order to then find its way back to the divinity. John wants everything he says to be understood esoterically.

We will see what it means why John is called the true eyewitness who has to confirm what he has seen as a witness.

The existence of Christianity depends on the Gospel of John. Christianity had to admit that it was a mere spiritual conception when the predictions were not fulfilled. This explanation can be found among the shallow enlighteners. With John we will still see the kingdom of God come, or so they thought. But even with John, we would not have experienced it, and so we would inevitably have arrived at a spiritual view. What was meant was the esoteric view of Christianity. The kingdom of God will come unexpectedly. Watch and pray so that you do not miss out when the kingdom of God comes. When he tells us about experiencing the coming of the kingdom, we have to admit that John understood what the Master was saying. He knew that it was something spiritual that the Master was telling him and not an exoteric view of Judaism.

Now I would like to lay another foundation that will lead us to the deeper, the more spiritual side of Christianity. I would like to point out facts that are basically simple but are usually ignored. We have seen that at the time when Christianity was spreading, there were the Therapeutae in northern Egypt and the Essenes in Palestine, and we have come to know the teachings and also the way of life of the Essenes. The Essenes undoubtedly exerted a profound influence on the teachings of early Christianity with all their views. And if we go through the gospels that have been handed down to us as synoptic gospels, if we hold them up to ourselves, then you will see that in the individual synoptic gospels we are definitely dealing with teachings that have their origins in the Essene sect.

One example of this is the tenth chapter of Matthew:

"But go and preach, saying, 'The kingdom of heaven is at hand. Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out devils. You have received it freely, give it freely. You shall not have gold or silver or brass in your belts. Nor shall you have a bag to carry away, nor two coats, nor shoes, nor a stick. For a laborer is worthy of his food." [Mt 10:7-10]

These words become particularly interesting when we combine them with a passage from the Jewish historian Josephus, where the way of life of the Essenes within their community formation is described as follows. "They do not have one city. In fact, everyone lives in many cities. The house of every friar is open to them as their own. So they go to live with people they have never met before, as if they had known them for a long time. They do not change clothes or shoes, they do not buy and sell among themselves. Each gives and takes what he has and needs."

If we compare this passage with this and further compare it with the passage in Luke, ninth chapter:

"And he called the twelve together, and gave them power and authority over all devils, and to cure diseases, and sent them forth to preach the kingdom of God, and to heal the sick. Take nothing for your journey, neither staff, nor bag, nor bread, nor money. Nor shall any man have two coats, shoes or a staff. For a laborer is worthy of his food." [Luke 9:1-5]

We see that the way of life Josephus describes to us is the one that Jesus recommends the disciples to adopt. At the same time, we know that among Jews such a way of life cannot originate from Judaism. This is therefore a reproduction of Essene teachings. He speaks to them as one of the Essene community who was striving to spread Essene life among his disciples.

But there are many other things we can compare. There is one fact that we also know about the Essenes. They did not take part in the Jewish sacrificial service. They did send sacrificial animals to the temple to pay tribute to the political power, but they themselves did not go to the Jewish temple. They did not participate in the Jewish religion insofar as it was represented by the Pharisees and the Sadducees. They themselves had stone halls in which their teachers taught the doctrines, but there too we find the teachings that we find in the Gospel of John. There we hear talk of the temple and know that this refers to the body of man. And then again the sense of togetherness, the community feeling of the Essenes. The Essenes considered it idolatry to have a temple other than this one.

We could take a whole series of passages from the Essaean teachings. The Essenes had an aversion to the sacrifices of the Jews because they saw the body of man and mankind as the temple of God. We encounter this in the Gospel of John. We can also find in the Pauline letters that Essene influences were at work and that the body should be understood as the temple of God.

We also find strange allusions in various writers of the first century, which we can hardly explain, which are taken for granted and for which the first Christian writers no longer have any real feeling because they no longer know their origin. We are told that Christians do not turn their faces to the Temple of Jerusalem at morning prayer, as the Jews do, but to the rising of the sun. The Christian church writers take it for granted that Christians turn their faces to the east. The Essenes did not sacrifice to Judaism. They did not turn their faces towards the temple in Jerusalem, but towards the east. From here to Jakob Böhme's book "The Dawn", to "Faust", where he admires the dawn, all these ideas lead back to the old Essene idea of turning the face to the east in prayer.

Another thing. In Clement of Alexandria we find an omission about the clothing of the first Christians. We hear that the colorfulness of clothing corrupts people, promotes opulence, because it stimulates the lust of the eyes. But those who are pure are permitted to wear white, uncolored clothing. This passage regarding the wearing of white garments can also be traced back to the customs of the Essenes among the first Christians.

Then baptism with water and the Lord's Supper are also descendants of genuine Essene customs. The Essenes baptized with water; they knew no other sacrifice than the communal meal. In the sacrifice that Jesus instituted, we see nothing other than the Essene meal that we see the Essenes celebrating every Sabbath.

Then there is the idea of the holiness of the oil, which led to a sacrament and the anointing with oil. It corresponds entirely to the view of the Essenes. They believe that anointing with oil is a mystical act that gives mystical power to the person to whom it is given. The peculiar shyness towards oil in our time can definitely be traced back to an Essene view and can only be understood from this perspective.

And now, in order to bring this consideration of the relation of Essaeanism to Christianity at least to a certain conclusion, and thereby to have gained a basis for the consideration of the Master himself, I would like to point out-what might at first appear to be an allusion-namely, some ancient communications which we find in writers of the first Christian centuries.

In particular, I would like to point to a passage in Eusebius, to an old tradition from the brother of Jesus, James. We have not received these messages directly, but in a roundabout way. We are told that he led a special kind of lifestyle. This is then described to us in more detail. It is none other than exactly the way of life that Philo describes to us of the Essenes. He lived like them. We can only understand this whole narrative if we assume that such a way of life was a matter of course for the Essenes. We see Jesus himself speaking to his disciples as if he wanted to give them instructions like those given everywhere in the Essaean community. John the Baptist baptized in the spirit of the Essaean community. The first Christian teachings and views were like those of the Essenes.

Furthermore, we find a clear awareness of personalities who exerted a deeper influence on the first Christianity. In Epiphanius we find a new passage that seems more significant to me than many others. We read there: In the beginning all Christians were called "Nazirites, but for a short time they had the name [Judeans] before the term "Christians" came into use at Antioch.—So here we have a hint, which we will explore further, of how there was an awareness there that the Christians, or Christians as they were called, were nothing other than a continuation of the Essenes. We are therefore dealing with the first times of our era and with the view that in Palestine the Essene influence within Judaism grew and grew and developed into a new religious current. We have the awareness that the Essenes were the first Christians and then the later ones took the name Christians.

Now there is a testimony [on which everyone can form their own opinion], but which should not [go completely unnoticed]. It is clear that there were Essenes. That cannot be denied. It is also clear that they had a great influence on Christianity. We hear about Pharisees and Sadducees in the New Testament. The entire New Testament contains not a word about the Essenes. The writers of the first centuries, even Philo, contain nothing about the Christians. We have nothing, we read nothing there about a Christianity and in the first writings of Christianity nothing about the Essenes. That is an important fact. This fact cannot be explained other than by the simple fact that the first to write in the spirit of Christianity were aware that they were only speaking of others, not of themselves. This explains why the first Christians did not use the name of the Essenes and Philo did not use the name "Christians". They spoke of others, but not of themselves.

If we live in any time and hear that something is said about this or that person, we must think to ourselves that he has told us this, but he will not speak of himself in such detail. We will become convinced that he is not talking about himself, but that he is this third party. So we can conclude that at that time there was an awareness that Essenism and Christianity were one and the same. And this will open up the source of Christianity for us next time.

In the evolution of mankind, as I have recently been showing, inner spiritual connections prevail, which send their influences through the soul of man. I showed this in relation to Goethe's endeavours in his Faust, where he relates Faust to the impulse of the fifth post-Atlantean age by associating him with Mephistopheles, an Ahrimanic power. I then tried to show how Faust had to dive down into the impulses of the fourth post-Atlantean age, which I tried to describe in their real essence. All this is necessary, so that there takes place in the soul of Faust a conscious interpenetration of that which prevails unconsciously in human souls by virtue of the laws of evolution.

I said that the fifth post-Atlantean epoch—our epoch—will have to do with the great and significant life-question of Evil,—the mastery of Evil in all directions. Human beings will have to learn to know all that the soul must rouse and bring forth within itself in order partly to overcome the powers of Evil, partly to transmute them into impulses of Good. All this has arisen on the foundation of the impulses of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, which had to do especially with the problem of Birth and Death,—a problem which it had received as heritage from Atlantean time. We need only turn our gaze to the Christ-Impulse itself, entering in as it did in the first third of the fourth post-Atlantean period. This period began with the founding of Rome in the year 747 before the Birth of Christ. Thus, of the 2160 years of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, 747 years had to run their course before the main impulse—the Christ-Impulse could enter in, as indeed it did precisely in this fourth post-Atlantean epoch. Has not the Christ-Impulse to do with the great and important question that summons into the evolution of mankind problems of Birth and Death in their supersensible significance? How much discussion, how much thought and feeling has there not been on Christian soil about the Birth of Christ! How infinitely significant a part is played by the Death of Christ! In the Birth and Death of Christ we see most pregnantly this wrestling of the soul of man with the problem of Birth and Death. It was a wrestling in the soul, because the same struggle had already been there in a more elemental, in a more physical form in the great Atlantean epoch. Notably in the fourth civilisation-epoch of Atiantis-in the middle of Atlantean time, and as an after-effect in the fifth period also,—forces connected with Birth and Death were subject to the power of individual human beings. I have already described some aspects of this fact. Forces there were in the Atlanteans—forces that could be developed and that had influence on Birth and Death in a far more than merely natural degree. The good and evil forces in the human being had a far-reaching influence upon the health and sickness of their fellowmen, and thereby also upon Birth and Death. In Atlantean time one saw an actual connection between the things one did as human being and what took place in the so-called “course of Nature,” as Birth and Death.

In post-Atlantean time—in the fourth civilisation-epoch of post-Atlantean time—this problem of Birth and Death was transplanted more into the region of the soul. But in our epoch, in the fifth, human beings will have to grapple with the forces of Evil in an elemental way, just as they did with Birth and Death in Atlantean time. Notably through the quite different mastery over the forces of Nature, the impulses of Evil will work into the world on a grand scale, in a gigantic way. In the resistance which human beings will have to summon forth from spiritual depths, the opposite forces—the forces of Good—will have to grow. And in particular, already during the fifth epoch it will be possible for men to bring Evil over the Earth, by exploiting the force of Electricity, which will assume far greater dimensions than hitherto. Even directly out of the force of Electricity itself, Evil comes over the Earth.

We need to place these things before our consciousness. He who desires to receive the spiritual impulses will then find points of resistance; he will find the starting-points for those impulses which must evolve by the very resistance of Evil. It is difficult as yet to speak in any detail in this connection; for in the widest spheres as yet, these details touch on interests of human beings which they do not wish to have molested. In this respect, human beings are divided. On the one hand are those who suffer greatly, because they cannot clearly realise how they are interwoven with World-Karma; how they simply must take part in this thing or that, and cannot become abstractly pious all at once. On the other hand are those who in many ways are caught up in this World-Karma of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. They would rather not hear of what is really contained in the impusles that are going through the world, for it is often to their interest to represent as constructive the very impulses that are destructive. We have described, how since the last third of the nineteenth century there have been working among human beings those Beings whom I characterised as fallen Spirits of Darkness—Beings of the hierarchy of Angeloi. In the fourth post-Atlantean period, these Beings were still ministering members of the good, progressive Powers. They served in the creation of those orders which, as I told you, are derived out of the blood-relationship of men. Now they are in the realm of men, and as Angel-beings who have remained behind, they work into the inner impulses of human beings, to make effective in a retrogressive way—and thereby in an Ahrimanic way—all that which is connected with relationships of blood and clan, nation and race. Thereby they work to mar and to hinder those other social structures of mankind which should now arise out of quite other foundations than for example the bonds of blood, of family and race, clan and nation. To-day a very serious beginning of the work of these Spirits consists precisely in the abstract emphasis that is laid on the principle of Nationality. This abstract emphasis on Nationality, this setting up of programmes on the foundations of a national principle, is among those endeavours which we must attribute to the Spirits of Darkness who will stand far nearer to man—who will approach man in a far more intimate way—than did the backward Spirits of the fourth post-Atlantean period. The latter belong to the hierarchy of Archangeloi. Precisely this will be the significant aspect of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. These Beings who stand immediately above the hierarchy of Man—these Angel-beings—are able to approach the individual human being very nearly and intimately. They do not merely approach the groups. The individual will believe that he is representing things out of his own personal impulse, where in reality—for we can truly put it so—he is possessed by the kind of Angel-being of whom we have been speaking.

Let us once more make clear to ourselves, what was the nature of the efforts of the backward retrogressive Spirits of Darkness of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. For we shall then be more able to understand what is the nature of their efforts in our present, fifth post-Atlantean epoch. In the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, as I have told you, it was the normal thing to build all the social structure of humanity upon the bonds of blood—blood-relationship. During that time—that is, during the Graeco-Latin civilisation-epoch—the Ahrimanic-Luciferic backward Beings rebelled precisely against the bonds of blood. They were the inspirers of that rebellion which wanted to loosen human beings from blood-kinship. You can derive it even from the general teachings of Spiritual Science. And above all, it was in a sense the descendants of individualities who in the Atlantean time had still been working in a magical way,—it was the descendants of these, who as rebelling individualities, became the “Heroes” in the recapitulation of Atlantean time, in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. I beg you now to observe how the Graeco-Latin epoch met these rebel-beings. For in that time, after all, there was still the wise guidance of mankind out of the Mysteries. They did not say to human beings: “Avoid these rebel natures! Avoid the Ahrimanic, Luciferic spiritual Beings!” They did not say this to them; they knew that it lay in the wise plan of cosmic evolution to place these Beings where they were and to use them. It is a weakness of many people to-day, when they hear of Lucifer and Ahriman, to explain: “For Heaven's sake, let us avoid them!” As though they could avoid them! I have often spoken of this. Knowledge was brought to the human beings of the fourth post-Atlantean time in the form in which it had to be at that time. The influence of the good Gods was there in the bonds of blood. Human beings gave themselves up to it, in the mutual love which was founded in the blood-relationships (for so it was at that time; to-day it must be more purely spiritual.) Yet, for the sake of progress, rebellions always had to take place. This way of cosmic evolution had to be explained to the people in myths and legends. To the Initiates they were communicated in another form—in a way more similar to the way in which these truths are being taught to us to-day. But in the widest circles, human beings of that time would not have been ready to receive the explanations of the myths. Therefore the exoteric myths were told to them. In these, however, deep significant truths of evolution lay concealed.

Let us consider an outstanding myth, connected with the very thing I have just been placing before you. It tells how an oracle prophesied to Laius of Thebes at his betrothal with Jocaste. It prophesied that from this union a son would be born who would become his father's murderer and live in incest with his mother. Laius did not let this deter him from the contemplated union; but when the son was born, he pierced his heels and had him exposed on Mount Cithaeron. To a shepherd the boy became entrusted. The shepherd's wife called him Oedipus on account of his pierced heels. You know how the story goes on. The boy Oedipus grew up; his talents developed. At an early age his soul was beset by doubts concerning his descent, for his companions drew his attention to many things. Then the Delphic Oracle pronounced an important saying, painful to study nowadays, if you can study it in its whole context. The saying is: “Avoid thy home-country; otherwise thou wilt become thy father's murderer, thy mother's husband.” This was said to Oedipus.

Now he was under a complete illusion. He did not know who his father and his mother really were. He could not but think Corinth, where he had grown up, his home. At last he wandered from Corinth in order not to bring about disaster there by killing his father and marrying his mother. But the very fact that he set out and took the way to Thebes became his doom. On the way he met a chariot in which his father Laius was travelling with a companion. A conflict arose; he killed his father and continued on his way to Thebes, and his first deed was, as you know, to solve the Riddle of the Sphinx. So we hay e Oedipus placed in the very fullest way into the evolutionary nexus of the fourth post-Atlantean age. For in a certain sense the Riddle of the Sphinx—the Riddle of Man—belonged to the fourth epoch. Oedipus was one of those who knew. Far from replying to the Sphinx: “I am reluctant to unveil a higher secret”; he solved the secret. Something was thereby implanted in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. It was an impulse that worked on and on, and in which Oedipus played an essential part. For we Wright speak for many hours about the solving of the Riddle of the Sphinx by Oedipus; but we need not do so to-day. To-day we will only make clear that this deed reveals him as a characteristic Hero of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch.

Now he went on to Thebes, married his mother, whom of course he did not hold to be his mother, and was comparatively happy—till a plague arose. At length it was the seer Tiresias who revealed the truth. Jocaste, suddenly knowing herself tobe the wife of her son, killed herself by suffocation. Oedipus blinded himself and was driven away by his own sons. Another one, Theseus, then protected him in the Grove of Attica until his death, and he was buried in Attic soil. We need only call to mind the Oedipus-drama up to this point.

What does it represent? It represents an individuality—the Oedipus individuality—taken out of the blood connection, growing up outside the bonds of blood and then transplanted back again into the blood-connection, to his own detriment. We have before us no mere subjective rebel against the bonds of blood, but one who by the very laws of Nature becomes a rebel against the bonds of blood and thereby kindles and enflames them even against himself.

Look through the Greek mythology, and you will often find such human beings—Heroes who are placed into the blood-relationship in such and such a way, but who are then exposed so that they undergo their evolution outside the blood-relationship. Through the very fact that they are removed from the old order, from the normal order, they then bring in quite other impulses of evolution. Such an Hero is Oedipus; such too is Theseus who protects him in the wood of Attica.

No wonder if in ancient Greece they could not tell the people who was really behind these Heroes! They could not tell them that they were the great rebels, who were none the less necessary in the wise course of World-evolution. Think, for example, of Theseus himself. Here, too, it was an oracular saying that reached the ears of his father, so that he had his son educated far away. The mother, who had given birth to Theseus far from his father's home, was told: When the youth grows up so that he can wield a certain sword, then and then only let him return. Here again, Theseus is removed, transplanted away from the blood-connection. He too has to solve important riddles of the fourth post-Atlantean time. You know the legend of how he liberated Athens from the tribute of the youths who had to be sacrificed to the Minotaur, and of how he saved himself by means of Ariadne's thread. Theseus became the protector of Oedipus; yet Theseus is the very one who carries Helena away when she is ten years old, and keeps her in hiding. Theseus is brought into close connection with Helena.

Deep evolutionary riddles of the fourth post-Atlantean age are concealed beneath these things. The Court lady of the sixteenth century naturally had no more inkling of them than to exclaim: “From her tenth year onward she was nothing worth.” Yet in this line again, Goethe is hinting at sometning deeply significant. Goethe was well aware that that which stands behind Helena is in reality worthy of reverence, even as Faust revered her. But with regard to Helena of all people, the worst forces of calumny have been at work. Mankind might learn from such things; it can very easily happen that that which is worthy of true recognition—that which perhaps is highest—can be the most calumniated!

I only wished to point this out, to show how Helena herself stands in mysterious connection with those individualities who were the rebels of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, and who at that time had the task—for the wise guidance of the Universe—to break through the blood-relationship.

How does it stand with Paris, who is presented to us by Goethe in the Invocation Scene—forgive the trite expression, I do not mean it trivially—as Faust's competitor or rival? How does it stand with Paris? Here too we are told; he was the son of Priam and of Hecuba, and his mother had a dream when she was pregnant with him. In this case it began not with an oracle but with a dream—albeit a dream containing deeper wisdom. It prophesied to Paris' mother that she would give birth to a burning torch that would set fire to the city of Troy. Therefore the parallel legend tells also of an oracle which announced to the father that this his son would serve in Troy's destruction. Whether for the one reason or the other, the father had Paris exposed. Paris, therefore, was also among those who were put outside the blood community. He was brought up in Parion, far from the bonds of blood; and it was there that there took place what the legend tells: how Eris assigned the apple to the most beautiful, and how Paris was called upon by the Goddesses, Hera, Pallas and Aphrodite, to determine which of them was the fairest. It was even said that Hera promised Paris Asia, that is the ruler- ship over the Earth, for ‘Asia’ at that time signified the rulership of the entire Earth. Pallas Athene promised him fame in battle; Aphrodite the fairest of women. Paris gave Aphrodite the prize of beauty.

Nov the great Song of Homer describes how significantly Paris thereby entered into the whole course of the affairs of Greece. In Paris himself we have an individuality rebelling against the bonds of blood. He takes Helena out of the Grecian bonds,of blood and tries to transplant her to Troy. He wants to break the bonds of blood. These things are always connected in this way; in the Greek Hero-legends we always see how there is placed into the midst of evolution that which is meant to break the bonds of blood. For the bonds of blood—in themselves strong, mighty and powerful—they are the thing that really brings about the social structure in that time.

There is one question which can come before us very clearly in this field, and it shall occupy us now for a few minutes. Someone might easily raise the following question: How does it stand with human freedom if such important deeds as the rape of Helena by Paris are accomplished by something taking place in the Spiritual World above, as in this case the rivalry of the three Goddesses? The human being then appears as the mere tool to execute what is not only prepared, but actually worked-out, in spiritual realms above. Now in a certain sense we must truly say: That which takes place through human beings here below is the reflected image of what happens in the Spiritual World. This is a point where the great riddle of freedom mightily knocks upon the doors of human knowledge. Are we really automata, who by their actions reveal the mere reflected image of what happens in the Spiritual World above? And again, how would the Spiritual World, which is the guide and leader in all that happens,—how would the Spiritual World stand there if, so to speak, it had nothing to do, if it were actionless? Two things must be understood: First, the universal course is really led and guided by spiritual forces, spiritual Powers; and nothing happens that does not happen down from the Spiritual World. And the second is, that the human being has Free Will. The two things seem diametrically opposite. We are here touching a great riddle, a problem that gives men very much to do, and they can never get beyond it lightly. For it is truly so: If we look up into the Spiritual World, what the Gods do there represents the deeds of Gods; and the human beings here below carry out the impulses of Gods. So indeed it is. How then can human beings be free?

Let me now place these problems before you with a few brief strokes. Of course one can only indicate a little of this problem at a time. Let us assume therefore: Up yonder are the three Goddesses with the conflict that is taking place among them. As a result of their conflict, there comes clown on to the Earth the impulse that proceeds from these their actions. We need not consider for our present purpose how these actions are in turn connected with still higher Hierarchies. That which takes place up yonder takes place with absolute Necessity; and as to that which Paris does, this also happens because the three Goddesses above have had this conflict with one another. How then is any freedom possible for Paris? It is practically out of the question, you will say. Yet it is not. For the ray falls down, as it were, on to the Earth; and here on Earth there is not one whom it can reach, but there are many. Assume, for example, that there are an hundred. Ninety and nine do not do the deed; the hundredth does it. Here in effect once more the Mystery of Number plays its part. These things are always confused. Paris does the deed, it is true, but the point is that Paris only becomes fully Paris inasmuch as he finds himself prepared to put himself in the very place where this impulse was able to he fulfilled. In short, the Gods would have found another one if Paris had not done it; and in that case the legend would be told of another.

It is through Number that you will come to the solution of this Riddle of Freedom. And if so be, at any given point of time, among the hundreds who stand here below no one is found, then the Gods wait till one arrives. He then accomplishes what the Gods place before him. Be that as it may, Paris it is who has accomplished the deed. It does not mar his freedom in the very least, for he could perfectly well have left the deed undone. Think of this aspect of the problem of Number, and you will find that the divinely necessary, wisdom-filled guidance of the Universe stands not in contradiction to human Freedom. Needless, to say, this does not exhaust the problem of freedom; this again is only a part.

You see, therefore, how in the total evolution of mankind the Heroes of ancient Greece, of whom we are told that they were exposed in childhood, are of great significance. And you may also call to mind (you will find it in one of my lectures; I do not know, I may even have said it several times) there is a similar legend of exposure in connection with Judas. Of Judas Iscariot we are also told that he was put out in his youth. This is a typical feature; it signifies in the language of myth and legend the entry of the rebel Powers, who rebel against the bonds of blood of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch.

Now the region out of which these impulses proceeded in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch is the region wherein the Archangel-Beings rule. Therefore the narratives are always such that the human being stands rather remote from the influences that take place out of the Spiritual World. Either it is an oracle that brings the message from the Spiritual World, or else it is the direct intervention of the World of the Gods Themselves. Helena, you know, is a daughter of Leda and Zeus; here too the Spiritual World works in directly. In our time it is the dark and backward Angel-Beings, and they naturally work through a far more intimate intercourse with human beings. I have already told you, if one would discuss or even only hint at many things that are connected with this working of the Dark Powers since the last third of the nineteenth century, one treads on very thin ice indeed! But you can tell from the whole context; the seeking of social structure through the bonds of blood, which was the right and normal evolution for the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, represents, where it remains behind in the fifth epoch, one of those impulses with which the human beings of this epoch will have to battle. We must however add another thing which I have also told you. Something entirely new is now occurring. The fourth post-Atlantean epoch—its wrestling with Birth and Death—was a repetition of Atlantean time. Now something new makes it appearance—something created directly out of Maya or Illusion. Yet this Illusion we must also understand; we must only understand it rightly. It goes without saying, Maya was always there. As I explained in the essay which you will shortly be able to read in the Reich, in relation to the Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreuz, all consciousness originates out of Illusion. Yet since the fifth post-Atlantean epoch began, Illusion is present in a more than usual degree. Illusion will appear increasingly in this form:—Human beings will give themselves up to illusions. Illusions there always were, but they were always connected with other powers in the third post-Atlantean epoch, with the forces of “elective affinity”; in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch with the forces of Birth and Death; in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch with the forces of Evil. Illusion, Maya itself, will be seized upon by Evil. Moreover, it will all be permeated by that element of which I have also told you—by cleverness, intelligence.

It sounds paradoxical when one asserts that it is good for men that they can learn to know all these things. But the fact is, the human being can only come to spiritual freedom by growing strong against resistance. This, one can readily see.

Moreover, precisely that which is connected with the number Five is always connected in this way with the unfolding of Evil. Human beings will have to accustom themselves to one thing: to regard the inrush of the forces of Evil as an inrush of very laws of Nature, forces of Nature. Then they will learn to know them, and they will know what lives and moves in the very depths of things. We must not regard Evil from the outset as one would, who in the fulness of his egoism merely wanted to get away, to flee from it. We cannot do so. But we must penetrate it with consciousness; we must learn to know it,—really learn to know it. Above all, in our time already a force is preparing in the realm of human beings,—a force which tends to create illusions that are harmful and destructive. I will give you a little example of one such illusion. In giving this example, once again I do not wish in any way or in the very least to take sides in one direction or the other; I simply wish to give you an example of this entry of Illusion.

Assume that a politician appears upon the scenes to-day, wishing to speak out of his inmost impulse of his own attitude to the wheel of the world—to the various things that are being said and done to-day, from one quarter or another. Suppose that this politician found occasion to express himself about the part that is being played in the events of our time by the British State system (I say the State system; for with the nations themselves we are not concerned in this connection) and by the hidden powers that are behind it,—powers of which we have often spoken. Assume that a politican feels called upon to speak of this. He wishes to make plain how he considers that a right relationship to the British impulses can be established.

Suppose now that such a politician were to say the following. Suppose he were to say: It would be an unfriendly action against the Power that rules the Sea, to paralyse or lessen its superiority. What would you say? This politician notes the fact that there is a Power that rules over the Sea. One must take some attitude towards it. Since, after all, this Power rules the Sea, it would be an unfriendly act, he says, to hinder its development. Therefore one should refrain from such unfriendly action.

What could one say of such a politician? I think the very least that one could say would be that he stands for a policy of Power—Machtpolitik. Is is not so? Wherever the Power is, in that direction let us turn. This, at the least, seems to emerge from his words. But to-day one does not say so. One does not take one's stand in such a case and frankly say: “I stand for a policy of Power; I will attach myself to the Power which happens to have power.” But on the contrary one says, one defines it thus: “I stand for Right and Freedom and for the Independece of Nations.”

One says these two things side by side. One says that one stands for Right and Freedom of the Nations, and directly side by side with this, one says: “Let us above all attach ourselves to the particular Power which has the power, and commit no unfriendly act in relation to it.”

You see from this how human beings involve themselves in illusions. For I have here put before you the case of the Swedish politician Branting. He, a neutral politician, is the man who spoke in this way. That is the way one carries on a neutral policy, of course. I do not say it as a reproach or to take sides with one or another party. I say it as a pure description of how such things must take their course to-day. One is enthusiastic, needless to say, for Right and Freedom of the Nations, and yet—one stands for a such a policy. One does not confess that one stands for it for the simple reason that one can do no other,—that would be the truth,—but on the contrary one says that one stands for it inspired by the impulses of Right and Freedom for all Nations.

With such things as these we must indeed concern ourselves. It is not enough for anyone to give himself up to the fairy-tales that are going through the world to-day; we must take these things into our consciousness. Only by this means is it possible to attach oneself to the real impulses of evolution which I have described. No age was ever so little enlightened about itself as is the present. No other age stands in such dire need of enlightenment about itself. Think only how proud it was of its great progress in every kind of human thought. Why, they had even succeeded in finding impulses for Social Science, out of Natural Science! I have often spoken to you of the science of social life.

Think for a moment, what is so often said in official quarters to this day on educational and social questions, questions of right and justice and so forth. Try to transplant yourself into the frame of mind in which these people bring forward their supposed infallible truths, while at the same time they would suppress absolutely everything that resounds from any other quarter. Part of what modern humanity believed thus fondly, has led to the event that through the impulses of this humanity,—impulses of Illusion upon the one hand, of Nationality upon the other—five million human beings have been consigned to death during two years and three to three-and-a-half million have been permanently wounded. It was so after two years, and now, considerably more than three years have elapsed. This is only the consequence of the false thoughts that were entertained,—thoughts in which illusion was allied with destructive power. From many another thing that is spoken nowadays about education or questions of right and justice, similar consequences will evolve if it goes on in this way, uninfluenced by spiritual life and being. For in the last resort everything depends on this. To kindle the spiritual forces in the consciousness of mankind is an absolute need for the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. Our criticism of the opposite, materialistic opinion is but a part of the zeal with which we call to life the spiritual impulses within us. This is the thing that matters. Whatever has to happen among men must also be undertaken by men. If we have made ourselves ready to take our stand where the ray falls, the ray will come in good time; of that you may be certain. This preparation, this making-ready, can, however, only take place through the community. It will be for the individual human beings, in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, only so far as the ideas are concerned; but it will depend on the understanding with which communities will receive these ideas.

Hold to this thought, my dear friends.

[ 1 ] The mystic sought forces and beings within himself which are unknown to the human being as long as he clings to the ordinary attitude towards life. The mystic puts the great question about his own spiritual forces and laws that transcend the lower nature. A man of ordinary views of life, bounded by the senses and logic, creates gods for himself; or when he realizes that he has made them, he repudiates them. The mystic knows that he creates gods, he knows why he creates them, he has discovered the natural law that makes man create them. It is as though a plant suddenly became conscious and learned the laws of its own growth and development. As it is now, it develops in serene unconsciousness. If it knew about the laws of its own being, its relation to itself would be completely changed. What the lyric poet feels when he sings of a plant, what the botanist thinks when he investigates its laws, would hover about a conscious plant as an ideal of itself.

This is the case of the mystic with regard to his laws, to the forces working within him. As one who knew, he was forced to create something divine beyond himself. And that is the attitude the initiates: took toward that which the people had created beyond nature; that is, toward the world of popular gods and myths. They wanted to penetrate the laws of this world of gods and myths. Where the people beheld the form of a god, or conceived a myth, they looked for a higher truth.

Let us take an example. The Athenians had been forced by the Cretan king Minos to deliver up to him every eight years seven boys and seven girls. These Were thrown as food to a terrible monster, the Minotaur, When the mournful tribute was to be paid for the third time, the king's son Theseus accompanied it to Crete. On his arrival there, Ariadne, the daughter of Minos, became interested in him. The Minotaur dwelt in the labyrinth, a maze from which no one could extricate himself once he was within it. Theseus Was anxious to deliver his native city from the shameful tribute. For this purpose he had to enter the labyrinth into which the Minotaur’s booty was usually thrown, and kill the monster. He undertook the task, OVercame the formidable foe, and succeeded in regaining the open air with the aid of a ball of thread which Ariadne had given him.

The mystic had to discover how the creative human mind comes to weave such a story. Just as the botanist watches the growth of plants in order to discover its laws, so did the mystic watch the creative spirit. He sought for a truth, a nucleus of wisdom, where the people had invented a myth.

Sallust discloses to us the attitude of a mystical sage towards a myth of this kind. “We might call the whole world a myth,” he says, “which contains bodies and things visibly, and souls and spirits in a hidden manner. If the truth about the gods were taught to all, the unintelligent would disdain it, because of not understanding it, and the more capable would make light of it. But if the truth is given, veiled in a myth, it is assured against contempt and serves as a stimulus to philosophic thinking.”

[ 2 ] When the truth contained in a myth was sought by an initiate, the latter was conscious of adding something to what existed in the consciousness of the people. He was aware of being above that consciousness, as a botanist is above a growing plant. Something was expressed which was different from what was present in the myth-consciousness, but it was looked upon as a deeper truth, symbolically expressed in the myth. Man is confronted with his own sense-nature in the form of a hostile monster. He sacrifices to it the fruits of his personality, and the monster devours them and continues to do so till the conqueror (Theseus) awakes in man. His knowledge spins the thread by means of which he finds his way again when he repairs to the maze of sensuality in order to slay his enemy. The mystery of human cognition itself is expressed in this conquering of sensuality. The initiate knows that mystery. It points to a force in human personality unknown to ordinary consciousness, but nevertheless active within it. It creates the myth, Which has the same structure as mystic truth. This truth finds its symbol in the myth.

What, then, is to be found in the myths? In them is a creation of the spirit, of the unconsciously creative soul. The soul follows well-defined laws. In order to create beyond herself she must work in a certain direction, At the mythological stage she does this in images, but these are built up according to the laws of the soul. We might also say that when the soul advances beyond the stage of mythological consciousness to deeper truths these bear the same stamp as did the myths, for one and the same force was at work in their formation.

[ 3 ] Plotinus, the philosopher of the Neo-Platonic school (204–269 A.D.), speaks of this relation of mythical representation to higher knowledge in reference to the priest-sages of Egypt. “Whether as the result of rigorous researches, or whether instinctively when imparting their wisdom, the Egyptian sages do not use for expressing their teaching and precepts written signs which are imitations of voice and speech, but they draw pictures, and in the outlines of these they record in their temples the thought contained in each thing so that every picture comprises knowledge and wisdom and is a definite truth and a complete whole, although there is no explanation nor discussion. Afterwards the contents of the picture are extracted from it and expressed in words, and the cause is found why it is as it is, and not otherwise.”

[ 4 ] If we wish to find out the relation between mysticism and mythical narratives we must see what attitude there is toward the latter in the views of those who knew their wisdom to be in harmony with the methods of the Mysteries. We find such harmony in Plato to the fullest degree. His explanations of myths and his application of them in his teaching may be taken as authoritative (cf. p. 65 et seq.). In the Phedrus, a dialogue on the soul, the myth of Boreas is introduced. This divine being, who was seen in the rushing wind, one day saw the fair Orithya, daughter of the Attic king Erechtheus, gathering flowers with her companions. Seized with love for her, he carried her off to his grotto. Plato, through the mouth of Socrates, rejects a merely rationalist interpretation of this myth. According to such an explanation, an outward, natural occurrence is poetically symbolized in the narrative. A hurricane seized the king's daughter and hurled her from the rock. “Interpretations of this sort,” says Socrates, “are learned sophistries, however popular and usual they may be... For anyone who has pulled to pieces one of these mythological forms must, to be consistent, elucidate sceptically and explain naturally all the rest in the same way... But even if such a task could be accomplished, it would in any case be no proof of Superior talents in the one carrying it out, but only of facile wit, boorish wisdom, and snap judgment... Therefore, I leave on one side all such inquiries, and believe what is generally thought about the myths. I do not examine them, as I have just said, but I examine myself to see whether I too may perhaps be a monster, more complicated and therefore more disordered than the chimera, more savage than Typhon, or whether I represent a more docile and simple being, to whom some particle of a virtuous and divine nature has been given.”

We see from this that Plato does not approve of a rationalistic and merely intellectual interpretation of myths, This attitude must be taken in conjunction with the way in which he himself uses myths as a means of expression. When he speaks of the life of the soul, when he leaves the paths of the transitory and seeks the Eternal in the soul where images borrowed from sense-perception and reasoning thought can no longer be found, then Plato has recourse to the myth. Phedrus treats of the Eternal in the soul, and the latter is portrayed as a car drawn by two horses winged all over, and driven by a charioteer. One horse is patient and wise, the other wild and stubborn. If an obstacle comes in the way of the team, the troublesome horse takes the opportunity to impede the docile one and defy the driver. When the car arrives where it has to follow the gods up the celestial steep, the intractable horse throws the team into confusion. Upon the strength or weakness of the stubborn horse depends the possibility of the good horse conquering it, and of the team overcoming the obstacle and reaching the supersensible realm. So the soul can never ascend without difficulties into the kingdom of the Divine: Some souls rise more to the vision of Eternity, some less. The soul that has seen the world beyond remains unscathed until the next journey. One that, on account of the intractable horse, has seen nothing must try again on the next journey. These journeys signify the various incarnations of the soul. One journey signifies the life of the soul in one personality. The wild horse represents the lower nature, the wise horse the higher nature; the driver, the soul longing for union with the Divine.

Plato resorts to the myth in order to describe the course of the eternal soul through her various transformations. In the same way he has recourse, in other writings, to the myth, to symbolical narrative, in order to portray the inner nature of man which is not perceptible to the senses.

[ 5 ] Plato is here in complete harmony with the mythical and allegorical manner of expression used by others. For instance, there is in ancient Hindu literature a Parable attributed to Buddha:

[ 1 ] A man very much attached to life, who seeks senSuous pleasures and would not die under any circumStance, is pursued by four serpents. He hears a voice commanding him to feed and bathe the serpents from time to time. The man runs away, fearing the serpents. Again he hears a voice, warning him that he is pursued by five murderers. Once more he escapes. A voice calls his attention to a sixth murderer who is about to behead him with a sword. Again he flees. He comes to a deserted village. There he hears a voice telling him that robbers are shortly going to plunder the village. Continuing to flee he comes to a great expanse of water. He feels his position very unsafe, so out of straws, sticks, and leaves he weaves a basket in which he is able to reach the other shore. Now he is safe, he is a Brahmin.

[ 1 ] The meaning of this parable is that the human being has to pass through the most various conditions before attaining to the Divine. The four serpents represent the four elements, fire, water, earth, and air. The five murderers are the five senses. The deserted village is the soul that has escaped from sense-impressions, but is not yet safe when alone with herself; for if her lower nature takes hold of her, she must perish. Man must construct for himself the boat which is to carry him from one shore, the sense-nature, over the flood of the transitory to the other, the eternal, divine world.

[ 1 ] Let us look at the Egyptian mystery of Osiris in this light. Osiris had gradually become one of the most important Egyptian divinities; he supplanted other gods in certain parts of the country; and a significant cycle of myths formed round him and his consort Isis.

[ 1 ] Osiris was the son of the Sun-god, his brother was Typhon-Set, and his sister, Isis. Osiris married his sister, and together they reigned over Egypt. The wicked brother, Typhon, sought to kill Osiris. He had a chest made which was exactly the length of Osiris' body. At a banquet this chest was offered to the person whom it exactly fitted. This was Osiris and none other. He lay down in the chest. Typhon and his confederates rushed upon him, closed the chest, and threw it into the river. When Isis heard the terrible news she wandered far and wide in despair, seeking her husband’s body. When she found it, Typhon again took possession of it, and dismembered it into fourteen pieces which were scattered in many and various places. Numerous tombs of Osiris were shown in Egypt. In many Places, up and down the country, parts of the god, Osiris, were said to be buried. Osiris himself, however, @me forth from the nether-world and vanquished Typhon. A beam shone from him upon Isis, who in consequence bore a son, Harpocrates or Horus.

[ 1 ] And now let us compare this myth with the view of the universe taken by the Greek philosopher, EmPedocles (490–430 B.C.). He assumes that the one Primordial being was once divided into the four eleMents, fire, water, earth, and air, or into the multiplicity of being. He presents two opposing forces, love and Strife, which within this world of existence bring about 8towth and decay. Empedocles says of the elements:

[ 1 ] They remain ever the same, yet by uniting their forces
Become transformed into men and the numberless beings besides.
These are now joined into one, love binding the many together;
Now once again they are scattered, dispersed through hatred and strife.

[ 1 ] What, then, are the objects in the world from Empedocles' point of view? They are the elements in various combinations. They could only come into being through the breaking up of primeval unity into the four natures. This primordial unity was thus poured into the elements. Anything confronting Us is part of the outpoured Divinity. But this Divinity is hidden in the object; it had first to die that objects might come into being. And what are these objects? Mixtures of divine constituents effectuated by love and hatred. Empedocles says this distinctly:

[ 1 ] See, for a clear demonstration, how the limbs of a man are constructed,
All that the body possesses, in beauty and bloom of existence,
All joined together by love are the elements there forming one.
Hatred and conflict come after, and fatally tear them asunder,
Once more they wander alone, on the desolate confines of life.
So it is with the bushes and trees, and the water-inhabiting fishes,
Wild animals roaming the mountains, and birds swiftly borne by their wings.

[ 1 ] Clearly it was Empedocles’ belief that the sage finds again the divine primordial unity, hidden in the world by a spell, and entangled in the meshes of love and hate. But if man finds the Divine he must himself be divine, for Empedocles takes the point of view that only like recognizes like. This conviction of his is expressed in Goethe’s lines:

[ 1 ] “If the eye were not of the nature of the sun, how could we behold light? If divine force were not at work in us, how could divine things delight us?”

[ 1 ] These thoughts about the world and man, transcending sense-experience, were found by the mystic I the myth of Osiris. Divine creative force has been Poured out into the world; it appears as the four elements; God (Osiris) is killed. Man is to raise him from the dead with his cognition, which is of divine Nature, He is to find him again as Horus (the Son of God, the Logos, wisdom), in the opposition between strife (Typhon) and Love (Isis). In Greek form Empedocles expresses even his fundamental conviction by means of thoughts that suggest myth. Love is Aphrodite and Strife is Neikos. They bind and unbind the elements.

[ 1 ] The portrayal of the content of a myth in the manner followed here must not be confused with a merely symbolical interpretation of myths, and still less with an allegorical one. This is not intended. The symbols forming the content of a myth are not invented symbols of abstract truths, but actual soul-experiences of the initiate. He experiences the images with his spiritual organs of perception just as the normal man experiences the mental images of physical things with his eyes and ears. But just as a mental image is nothing in itself, if it is not aroused in perception by an outer object, so the mythical image is nothing unless it is excited by real facts of the spiritual world. Only, in regard to the physical world man is at first outside the stimulating causes, whereas he can experience the images of myths only if he is within the corresponding spiritual occurrences. In order, however, to be within them, he must have gone through initiation, as the ancient mystics had always believed. Then the spiritual occurrences within which he is perceiving are, as it were, illustrated by the myth-images. Anyone who cannot take the mythical element as an illustration of real spiritual occurrences has not yet attained to the understanding of it. For the spiritual events themselves are supersensible, and images reminiscent of the physical world are not themselves of a spiritual nature, but only an illustration of spiritual things. One who lives merely in the images lives in a dream. Only the one who has come to the point of sensing the spiritual element in the image just as he senses a rose in the physical world through the conception of a rose, really lives in spiritual perceptions. This is the reason why the images of myths cannot be unequivocal. On account of their illustrative character the same myths may express several spiritual facts. It is therefore not a contradiction when interpreters of myths sometimes connect a myth with one spiritual fact and sometimes with another. From this standpoint we are able to find a thread to conduct us through the labyrinth of Greek myths. Let us consider the legend of Heracles. The twelve labors imposed upon Heracles appear in a higher light when We remember that before the last and most difficult of these he seeks initiation into the Eleusinian Mysteries. He is commissioned by King Eurystheus of Mycenæ to bring the hell-hound Cerberus from the infernal regions and take it back there again. In order to undertake the descent into hell, Heracles had to be initiated. The Mysteries conducted the neophite through the death of perishable things, that is, into the nether world; and through initiation they rescued his eternal principle from perdition. As an initiate he could vanquish death; as an initiate he overcomes the dangers of the nether-world. This justifies us in interpreting his other ordeals as stages in the inner development of the soul, He overcomes the Nemæan lion and brings him 1o Mycenæ. This means that he becomes master of purely physical force in man; he tames it. Afterwards he slays the nine-headed Hydra. He overcomes it with firebrands and dips his arrows in its gall, so that they become deadly. This means that he overcomes lower knowledge derived through the senses. He does this through the fire of the spirit, and from what he had gained through the lower knowledge he draws the power to look at lower things in the light that belongs to spiritual sight. Heracles captures the hind of Artemis, goddess of the chase: everything nature offers the human soul Heracles makes his own: His other labors may be interpreted in the same way. We cannot here trace out every detail and only wish to show how the general sense of the myth points to inner development.

[ 1 ] A similar interpretation is possible of the expedition of the Argonauts. Phrixus and his sister Helle, children of a Bœotian king, suffered much at the hands of their stepmother. The gods sent them a ram with a golden fleece, which bore them through the air. When they passed over the straits between Europe and Asia, Helle was drowned. Hence the strait is called the Hellespont. Phrixus came to Aeëtes, King of Colchis, on the east shore of the Black Sea. He sacrificed the ram to the gods and gave its fleece to the King, who had it hung up in a grove and guarded by a terrible dragon. The Greek hero Jason undertook to fetch the fleece from Colchis in company with other heroes, Heracles, Theseus, and Orpheus. Aeëtes laid heavy tasks upon Jason in his effort to obtain the treasure, but the king’s daughter Medea, who was versed in magic, aided him. He subdued two fire-breathing bulls. He ploughed a field and sowed it with dragon’s teeth from which armed men grew up out of the earth. On Medea’s advice he threw a stone into their midst, whereupon they killed each other. Jason lulls the dragon to sleep with a charm given him by Medea and is then able to obtain the fleece. He leaves with it to return to Greece, Medea accompanying him as his wife. The king pursues the fugitives. In order 1o detain him, Medea slays her little brother Absyrtus and scatters his severed limbs into the sea. Aeëtes stops to collect them, and thus the pair are able to reach Jason’s home with the fleece.

[ 1 ] Each of these incidents requires a deep elucidation. The fleece is something belonging to man, and infinitely precious to him. It is something from which he was sundered in times of yore, and for the recovery of which he has to overcome terrible forces. This is true of the Eternal in the human soul. It belongs to man, but man is separated from it by his lower nature. Only by overcoming the latter, by lulling it to sleep, can he recover the Eternal. This becomes possible when his own consciousness (Medea) comes to his aid with its magic power. Medea is to Jason what Diotima, as a teacher of love, was to Socrates, (cf. p. 72). Man’s own wisdom has the magic power necessary to attain the Divine after having overcome the transitory. From the lower nature there can only arise a lower human principle, the armed men who are overcome by spiritual force, the counsel of Medea. Even when man has found his Eternal, the fleece, he is not yet safe. He must sacrifice part of his consciousness (Absyrtus). This is exacted by the physical world which we can only apprehend as a multiple (dismembered) world. We might go still deeper into the description of the spiritual events underlying the images, but it is only intended here to indicate the principle according to which myths originate.

[ 1 ] Of special interest, when interpreted in this way, is the legend of Prometheus. He and his brother Epimetheus are sons of the Titan Iapetus. The Titans are the offspring of the oldest generation of gods, Uranus (Heaven) and Gæ (Earth). Kronos, the youngest of the Titans, dethroned his father and seized control of the world. In return, he and the other Titans were overpowered by his son Zeus, who became the chief of the gods. In the struggle with the Titans, Prometheus was on the side of Zeus. By his advice, Zeus banished the Titans to the nether-world. But in Prometheus there still lived the Titan spirit: he was only half a friend to Zeus. When the latter wished to exterminate men on account of their arrogance, Prometheus espoused their cause, taught them the art of numbers writing, and other things that lead to culture, especially the use of fire. This aroused the wrath of Zeus against Prometheus. Hephaistos, the son of Zeus, was commissioned to create a female form of great beauty whom the gods adorned with every possible gift. She was called Pandora, the all-gifted one. Hermes, messenger of the gods, took her to Epimetheus, the brother of Prometheus. She brought him a casket as a present from the gods. Epimetheus accepted the present although Prometheus had warned him against receiving any gift from the gods. When the casket was opened all sorts of human ills flew out. Hope alone remained, and this because Pandora quickly closed the box. Hope has, therefore, been left to man as a doubtful gift of the gods. By order of Zeus, Prometheus, on account of his relation to man, was chained to a rock in the Caucasus. An eagle perpetually gnaws his liver, which is constantly renewed. He has to pass his life in agonizing loneliness till one of the gods voluntarily sacrifices himself, that is, gives himself up to death. The tormented Prometheus bears his sufferings steadfastly. He had been told that Zeus would be dethroned by the son of a mortal woman unless Zeus consented to wed her. It was important for Zeus to know this secret. He sent the messenger Hermes to Prometheus in order to learn something about it. Prometheus refused to divulge anything.—The legend oF Heracles is connected with that of Prometheus. In the course of his wanderings Heracles comes to the Caucasus. He slays the eagle that was devouring the liver of Prometheus. The centaur Chiron who cannot die, although suffering from an incurable wound, sacrifices himself for Prometheus, who is thereupon reconciled with the gods.

[ 1 ] The Titans are the force of will, proceeding as nature (Kronos) from the original universal spirit (Uranus). Here we must think not merely of will-forces in an abstract form, but of actual will-beings. Prometheus is one of them, and this characterizes his nature. But he is not altogether a Titan. In a certain sense he is on the side of Zeus, the Spirit who enters upon the rulership of the world after the unbridled force of nature (Kronos) has been subdued. Prometheus is thus the representative of those worlds that have given man the progressive urge, half nature-force, half spiritual force: will. The will points on the one side towards good, on the other towards evil. Its fate is decided according as it leans toward the spiritual or the perishable. This fate is that of man himself. He is chained to the perishable, the eagle gnaws him, he has to suffer. He can reach the highest only by seeking his destiny in solitude. He has a secret, which is that the Divine (Zeus) must marry a mortal woman (human consciousness bound up with the physical body), in order to beget a son, human wisdom (the Logos) that will deliver the deity. By this means consciousness becomes immortal. He must not betray this secret until an initiate (Heracles) comes to him and eliminates the power that was perpetually threatening him with death. A being half animal, half human, a centaur, is obliged to sacrifice itself to redeem man. The centaur is man himself, half animal, half spiritual. He must die in order that the purely spiritual man may be delivered. That which is disdained by Prometheus (human will) is accepted by Epimetheus (mind, intelligence). But the gifts offered to Epimetheus are only troubles and sorrows, for the mind clings to the transitory and perishable. Only one thing is left—the hope that even out of the perishable the Eternal may Some day be born.

[ 1 ] The thread running through the legends of the Argonauts, of Heracles, and Prometheus, holds good in Homer’s Odyssey. The method of interpretation here may seem forced; but on closer consideration of everything which has to be taken into account, even the sturdiest skeptic must cease to doubt. Most startling of all must seem Odysseus’ report that he, too, descended into the nether-world. Whatever we may think about the author of the Odyssey in other respects, it is impossible to imagine his representing a mortal descending to the infernal regions without bringing him into relation with what the journey into the nether-world meant to the Greek world conception. It meant the conquest of the perishable and the awakening of the Eternal in the soul. It must therefore be conceded that Odysseus accomplished this, and thereby his experiences and those of Heracles acquire a deeper significance. They become a delineation of the non-sensuous, of the soul’s progress of development. Furthermore, the narrative in the Odyssey iS not in the manner demanded by a series of outer events. The hero makes voyages in enchanted ships. Actual geographical distances are dealt with in most arbitrary fashion. It is not in the least a question of what is physically real. This becomes comprehensible if the physically real events are only related for the sake of illustrating a spiritual development. Moreover the poet himself says at the opening of the book that it deals with a search for the soul: “O Muse, sing to me of the man full of resource, who wandered very much after he had destroyed the sacred city of Troy, and saw the cities of many men, and learned their manners. Many griefs also in his mind did he suffer on the sea, although seeking to preserve his own soul, and the return of his companions.”

[ 1 ] We have before us a man seeking for the soul, for the Divine, and his wanderings during this search are narrated. He comes to the land of the Cyclops. These are uncouth giants with only one eye, and that in the centre of the forehead. The most terrible, Polyphemus, devours several of Odysseus’ companions. Odysseus himself escapes by blinding the Cyclops. Here we have to do with the first stage of life’s pilgrimage. Physical force or the lower nature has to be overcome. It devours any one who does not wrest from it its power, who does not blind it. Odysseus next comes to the island of the enchantress Circe. She changes some of his companions into grunting pigs. She also is subdued by Odysseus. Circe is the lower mind-force that cleaves to the transitory. If misused, it may thrust men down even deeper into bestiality. Odysseus has to overcome it. Then he is able to descend into the nether-world. He becomes a mystic. Now he is exposed to the dangers that beset the mystic on his progress from the lower to the higher degrees of initiation. He comes to the Sirens Who lure the passer-by to death by sweet magic sounds. These are the forms of the lower imagination, which are at first pursued by one who has freed himself from the power of the senses. He has achieved freedom of Action for his spirit, but not initiation. He pursues illusions from the power of which he must break loose. Odysseus has to accomplish the awful passage between Scylla and Charybdis. The neophite wavers between spirit and sensuousness. He cannot yet grasp the full significance of spirit, yet sensuousness has already lost its former value. All Odysseus’ companions perish in a shipwreck; he alone escapes and comes to the nymph Calypso, who receives him kindly and takes care of him for seven years. At length, by order of Zeus, she dismisses him to his home. The mystic has arrived at a stage at which all his fellow-aspirants fail; he alone, Odysseus, is worthy. He enjoys for a time, which is defined by the mystically symbolical number seven, the tranquility of gradual initiation. Before Odysseus arrives at his home he comes to the isle of the Phaaces, where he meets with a hospitable reception. The king's daughter gives him sympathy, and the king himself, Alcinous, entertains and honors him. Once more does Odysseus approach the world and its joys, and the spirit that is attached to the world, Nausicaa, awakes within him. But he finds the way home, to the Divine. At first, nothing good awaits him at home. His wife: Penelope, is surrounded by numerous suitors. Each one she promises to marry when she will have finished weaving a certain piece of fabric. She avoids keeping her promise by undoing every night what she has woven by day. Odysseus is obliged to vanquish the suitors before he can be reunited with his wife it peace. The goddess Athene changes him into # beggar so that he may not be recognized on his entrance to his home; he then overcomes the suitors: Odysseus is seeking his own deeper consciousness, the divine powers of the soul. He wishes to be united with them. Before the mystic can find them he must overcome everything which sues for the favor of that consciousness. The band of suitors springs from the world of lower reality, from perishable nature. The logic applied to them is a spinning of fabric which is always undone again after it has been spun. Wisdom (the goddess Athene) is the sure guide to the deepest forces of the soul. It changes man into a beggar, that is, it divests him of everything of a transitory nature. Wholly steeped in Mystery wisdom were the Eleusinian Festivals, celebrated in Greece in honor of Demeter and Dionysos. A sacred road led from Athens to Eleusis. It was bordered with mysterious signs intended to bring the soul into an exalted mood. In Eleusis there were mysterious temples served by families of priests. The dignity and the wisdom bound up With this dignity were inherited in these families from 8eneration to generation.¹ The wisdom that qualified for service was the wisdom of the Greek Mysteries. The festivals, which were celebrated twice a year, presented the great world-drama of the destiny of the Divine in the world, and of that of the human soul. The lesser Mysteries were observed in February, the greater in September. With the festivals, initiations were connected. The symbolical presentation of the cosmic and human drama formed the final act of the initiations of the mystics that took place here.

[ 1 ] The Eleusinian temples had been erected in honor of the goddess Demeter. She was a daughter of Kronos. She had given Zeus a daughter, Persephone, before his marriage with Hera. Once while at play, Persephone was carried away by Pluto, god of the nether-world. Demeter wandered far and wide over the earth, seeking her with lamentations. Sitting on a stone in Eleusis, she was found by the daughters of Keleus, ruler of the place. In the form of an old woman she entered the service of his family, as nurse to the queen’s son. She wished to endow this boy with immortality, and for this purpose hid him in the fire every night. When his mother discovered this she wept and lamented. Henceforth the bestowal of immortality was impossible. Demeter left the house. Keleus then built a temple. The grief of Demeter for Persephone was limitless. She spread sterility over the earth. The gods had to appease her in order to prevent a great catastrophe. Thus Zeus induced Pluto to release Persephone into the upper world, but before letting her go he gave her a pomegranate to eat. This obliged her to return periodically to the nether-worldHenceforward she spent a third of the year there, and two-thirds in the world above. Demeter was appeased and returned to Olympus; but at Eleusis, the place of her suffering, she founded the cult which should keep her fate in remembrance.

[ 1 ] It is not difficult to discover the meaning of the myth of Demeter and Persephone. That which lives alternately above and below is the soul. The immortality of the soul and her perpetually recurring transformation by birth and death are presented in pictures. The soul derives from the immortal—Demeter. But she is led astray by the transitory and is even condemned to share its destiny. She has partaken of the fruits of the nether-world: the human soul is satisfied by the transitory, therefore she cannot permanently live in the heights of the Divine. She has always to return to the realm of the perishable. Demeter is the representative of the being out of which human consciousness arose; but we must think of it as the consciousness capable of coming into being through the spiritual forces of the earth, Thus Demeter is the primordial essence of the earth, and her endowment of the earth with the Seed-forces of the fruits of the fields points to a still deeper aspect of her being. This being wishes to give man immortality. Demeter hides her nursling in the fire by night. But man cannot bear the pure force of fire (the spirit) . Demeter is obliged to abandon the idea. All she can do is to found a temple service through which man can participate in the Divine to the extent of his ability.

[ 1 ] The Eleusinian Festivals were an eloquent confession of the belief in the immortality of the human soul. This confession found pictorial expression in the Perscphone myth. Together with Demeter and Persephone, Dionysos was commemorated in Eleusis. Just as Demeter was worshipped as the divine creatress of the Eternal in man, so in Dionysos the ever-changing Divine in the world was venerated. Dionysos, the god, poured into the world and torn to pieces in order t0 be spiritually reborn, (cf. p. 74) had to be worshipped together with Demeter.²

• 1. Instructive information about the organization of these sanctuaries will be found in Karl Bötticher's Erginzungen zu den letzten Untersuchungen auf der Akropolis in Athen, Philologus, Supplement, vol. III, part 3.
• 2. A brilliant description of the spirit of the Eleusinian Mysteries is found in Edouard Schuré’s book, Sanctuaires d’Orient. Paris, 1898.

All the prayer formulas and words of wisdom that have come down to us from the great religions contain many of the profound secrets of existence. Only we have to understand that all the different religions had prayer but differed in so far as with some of them prayer took more the form of meditation, as it is called, whilst Christianity and some other religions had prayer in the true sense, as we know it today. Meditation is above all part of Oriental religions. It means to enter deeply into a spiritual content, and this is done in such a way that by entering deeply into this the individual concerned finds himself in accord with the worlds divine and spiritual ground and origin. Please understand me rightly. Some religions give their members formal meditations, which may be prayer-like formulas into which people enter deeply, so that they become aware of the stream of divine and spiritual life present in their souls, giving themselves to the divine ground and origin of the spirit at such moments. The formulas are essentially based on thoughts, however. Basically speaking, Christian prayer is no different, only the content is more based on inner responses and feelings. A Christian enters into the essence of the divine that streams through the world more by way of inner responses and feelings.

It should not be thought, however, that Christian prayer has always been, or indeed can be, taken the way it often is today. There is an exemplary Christian prayer in which Christ Jesus himself showed, as clearly as anyone can possibly show, what the mood of a Christian should be in prayer. It is simply this: ‘Father, if it can be done, let this cup pass away from me, but not my will but your will be done.’¹⁰³ Let us consider these words. In the first place it is a genuine petition―to let the cup pass, but at the same time wholly given up to the will of the divine spirit: ‘But not my will but your will be done.’ This mood, where we let the will of the divine spirit be alive in us as we pray, giving ourselves up to it, not wanting anything for ourselves but letting the divine spirit have its will in us, this mood must be present as an undertow, the basic note in our prayer if it is to be Christian.

It is quite clear that with this it is impossible to have an egotistical prayer. It is also impossible for other reasons to offer an egotistical prayer to God, for then one of us would ask for rain, his neighbour for sunshine, and both would be asking for purely egotistical reasons, not to speak of situations where two armies face each other about to do battle and each asks that it may be victorious, which is of course quite impossible. But if there is a basic mood of ‘not my will but your will be done’, we can ask for anything, for we are then giving ourselves up to the will of the divine spirit. I would like to ask for this, but I leave it to the divine spirit to decide if it shall come to be or not.

That is the basic mood of Christian prayer, and it is in this aspect that the most comprehensive, most universal prayer of Christian tradition arose—the Lord's Prayer, which tradition says was taught by Christ Jesus himself. It is indeed one of the most profound prayers in the world. Today we are no longer able to know the profound depths of the Lord's Prayer in its original language. But the thoughts it contains are so tremendous that it does not lose anything in any language.

When you consider the prayers of other nations, you will find prayers to have been of the kind I have characterized wherever religions are in their prime, have reached their peak. However, once the religions had come down in the world those prayers assumed a character that was no longer entirely right. They have become magic formulas, means of idolatry. At the time when Christ Jesus taught his people to pray, many, many such magic formulas were in use, all of them having had profound meaning at their origin. Such magic incantations would always refer to things people liked in outward ways, asking for things in an egotistical way governed by personal wishes. The lord taught that Christians should not pray like that. That kind of prayer has to do with superficial things. A Christian should say his prayer in seclusion, that is, in his inmost soul, the part of it where the human being can make the connection with the divine spirit. We must understand, of course, that something lives in every human being that may be compared to a drop from the ocean of the divine, that there is something in every human being that is like God. It would be wrong, however, to think that a human being in himself is like God. When we say: something in the human being is like God, this does not mean the human being himself is equal to God, for a drop taken from the ocean is the same as the ocean in substance, but it is not the ocean. And so the human soul is a drop from the ocean of the divine, but it is not God, and just as the drop can unite with its own substance when you pour it into the sea, so does the soul, being a drop of divinity, unite with its God in a spiritual way during prayer or meditation. This union of the soul with its God is called ‘to pray in private’ by Christ Jesus.

As a first step we have characterized the mood of Christian prayer, the Christian human mood needed for this prayer. We can now contemplate the contents of the Lord's Prayer itself. The words were that the Lord's Prayer is the most comprehensive prayer. You will therefore feel the need, as I do, to take a very comprehensive look at the world in order to understand the Lord's Prayer. We'll have to take a long roundabout route to understand it. We need to consider the nature of the human being from a particular point of view. You know that we do this the way it has been done in spiritual research through the ages. Let us briefly consider it once more.

When we have a human being before us, we have first of all the physical body which has its substance and forces in common with all minerals and seemingly lifeless products of nature. But this physical human body is not the only thing we have in the space before us, which is what materialists may think; it is only the lowest principle of human nature. The next principle we discern is the ether body or life body of the individual, and this he has in common with the plants and the animals, for every plant, every animal and every human being must call the chemical and physical matter into life; they cannot give life to themselves. The third principle is the astral body, the bearer of pleasure and pain, drives, desires and passions and the notions we have in everyday life. Man could not have any of these if it were not for the astral body. He only has it in common with the animals. Animals, too, feel pleasure and pain, have drives, desires and passions, and so they also have this body. And so the human being has his physical body in common with the seemingly lifeless minerals, and his ether or life body with all things that grow and reproduce themselves, the whole plant world. He has his astral body in common with animal nature. Then he has one more thing and this is something that takes him beyond the three natural worlds of this earth, making him the apotheosis of creation. This is the fourth principle of his essential nature.

We find it if we give the matter a little thought. There is one name that differs from all others. You cannot say ‘I’ to anyone else. To everyone else I am a ‘you’, and everyone else is a ‘you’ to me. ‘I’ is a name the meaning of which can only arise in the inner soul itself. It can never come to you from outside if it refers to you yourself. People who lived with the more profound religions always knew this, at all times, and they would therefore say: ‘When the soul begins to give this name to itself inwardly, the god in man begins to speak, the god who speaks through the soul.’ The name ‘I’ cannot come from outside, it has to arise in the soul itself. This is the fourth principle of human nature.

Occultists of the Hebrew faith called this ‘I’ the name of God that may not be spoken. ‘Yahweh’ actually means ‘I am’. Whatever interpretation scholars lacking inner knowledge may give, in reality it meant ‘I am’, and that is the fourth principle of the essential human being. These are the four aspects that make up man in the first place. We also call them the four members of man's ‘lower’ nature.

Now to understand the whole nature of man you will have to go back a little in human evolution. This takes us to many different peoples that preceded us—ancient German and central European development, the Graeco-Latin and Chaldean peoples, Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians and Hebrews, the Persian peoples and all the way back to the people with whom our present civilization started, the Indians. They, too, had ancestors but those lived somewhere quite different, on the continent which now is the bottom of the sea between Europe and America, on Atlantis. This was washed away by tremendous floods, the land went down in a mighty natural event that lives on in the myths and legends of all nations as the Flood.

But even Atlantis was not the earliest civilized land on earth. Going back a long way we come to the region where man developed his present-day form, a land that lay more or less between today's Indochina, Australia and Africa. This was ancient Lemuria, a land where conditions were very different from those we know today. People do not usually realize how great and comprehensive the changes have been that occurred on earth in the course of human evolution. There we come to a time when man's lower nature did already exist. Creatures consisting of the four members—physical body, ether body, astral body and I-nature—went about on earth then. They were organized at a higher level than the highest animals of today, but they were not yet human—animal-humans, but definitely not like today's animals. Our animals are degenerate descendants that have developed from those animal-humans by lagging behind and by involution. Something very special happened among those animal-humans which lived at that time.

They were ripe at that time to receive the power into them which is our higher power of soul. We might put it like this: lower human nature united with the human soul at that time. This human soul had until then rested in the keeping of the godhead, being an inherent part of the godhead itself. Up above, therefore, in the realm of the spirit, there was the divine spirit, and down below were the fourfold human forms, which had been maturing up to this point and were now ready to receive droplets of this divine spirit. We can get an idea of what happened then by using a picture. Think of a glass of water. You take a hundred tiny sponges and try gradually to take up a drop of the water with each of these sponges. You then have a hundred drops which previously had been completely one with the water and are now distributed among one hundred small sponges. This is a simple image to show you how the process of ensoulment went at that time. Until then the soul had rested within the great universal divine spirit like a drop in our glass of water. The physical human forms then acted the way our small sponges do. Droplets of the spirit separated out from the universal divine substance; they became individual, and as souls were like drops in those enveloping forms. They then began to develop the human being as he is today, an entity with soul and body. Those souls incarnated for the first time then. Afterwards they went through many, many incarnations, developing their human body into the form it has today. The event which happened at that time, however, was that parts of the divine principle united with the lower members of human nature. They progressed with every incarnation, became more perfect with every incarnation, to reach a certain culmination at a future time.

We call this part of higher nature which came in as a power at that time, changing lower nature and in the process of change rising to a higher level itself, the core of man's essential nature: spirit self, life spirit and spirit man, or manas, buddhi, atman. These are the elements of the divine spirit through which man gradually transforms his lower into his higher nature, step by step. With his power of manas he restructures the astral body, with buddhi the ether body, and with the power of atman he restructures the physical body. He has to transfigure them all, making them spiritual, if he is to reach the goal of his evolution one day. And so we once had four members—physical body, ether body, astral body and I—and at that time were then given the seed potential for higher development which is really something that flows from the highest spirit—the threefold higher nature of man, the divine core of our being, the divine potential in man. We can look at this higher part of human nature in two ways. One is to say: that is the higher nature of man, and man is developing towards it in the course of evolution. Or we consider it to be part of the divine spirit from which it has come, the divine element in the human being. A Christian will primarily consider it in this second way, and we are going to do this as well now and see if we can discern the essence of these higher powers in human nature. We'll start with the highest principle, the element which in man is called the power of atman. What I am going to tell you now is not some kind of external definition, for I want to characterize the true nature and essence of this higher principle of human nature. The principle that becomes power of atman is, in so far as it is a power that comes from the divine spirit, will-like by nature. Think of your own powers of will, of the part in you that is able to will, and you have a shadowy reflection, a shadowy picture of the element that comes from the power of atman, from the divine. The human will is the human being's least developed power today. The will is, however, able to develop more and more, until the time comes when it reaches its culmination and is able to achieve what is known in all religions as ‘the great offering’ or ‘the great sacrifice’.

Imagine yourself standing before a mirror and looking into it. Your image is exactly like you in every aspect of your physiognomy, your gestures; it is like you in everything, but it is a dead image of you. You stand in front of it as a living entity and come face to face with your dead image which is like you in everything except for your livingness, your substance and content. Imagine now that your will has developed to the point where it would be capable of deciding to give up your own existence, your own essential nature and give it over to your mirror image. You would then be able to sacrifice yourself wholly, so that your mirror image may be given your life. Such a will is said to ‘emanate’, to let its own essence go. It is the highest development of the will, known to Christians as the ‘divine will of the father’.

The human will, then, is today the least developed of our soul powers. It is, however, in the process of developing such power that it will be able to achieve ‘the great sacrifice’. That is the true nature of the potential which lies in the power of atman—will-like nature in so far as it is an out-flowing of divine essence.

Let us now consider the second principle of man's higher nature—the buddhi or life spirit—looking at it as an out-flowing of the divine spirit, which is the view taken in Christianity. You will find it easiest to get an idea if it if you now consider not the power that flows out to give life to the mirror image but to the mirror image itself. In the mirror image the original being is perfectly repeated; it is the same, and yet not the same. If you apply this to the world, to the whole universe—how the divine world will in one point is reflected in all directions.

Think of a hollow sphere, as it were, that is reflective inside. The one point inside is reflected inwards infinitely many times. Everywhere, in infinite recapitulation, the divine world will; mirror images everywhere, aspects of the divine.

Look at the cosmos, the universe like this, as a mirroring of the infinite world will. The divine world will is not in any one entity that exists but is it reflected everywhere in infinitely many ways. The mirroring of the godhead—with the godhead remaining at the point where it is but at the same time giving life to every point in which it is reflected by making ‘the great sacrifice’―that is the ‘kingdom’ in Christian terminology. And this term ‘the kingdom’ refers to the element which in man is the buddhi. If you consider the universe with regard to the creative, productive principle that flows from the divine origin, then the element that comes immediately next to the atman is the buddhi, the divine spark. As a ‘kingdom’ it is universal and cosmic.

And let us now turn our attention from this to the details of the kingdom. We first considered it as a whole. Now we come down to detail. In what way do we distinguish the one from the other? With the ‘name’, as it is called in Christian terminology. Each is given a name, and that is how distinction is made between the many different things, the individual aspects of the kingdom. To a Christian, the ‘name’ is something which is often called the ‘idea’, the particular nature of a thing. Just as an individual person is distinguished from another by name, so the name is felt to be such that it also holds part of the mirrored divine essence. A Christian has the right relationship to this name if he understands that every aspect of the kingdom is an out-flowing of the divine, and knows with every bite of bread that it is an out-flowing, a mirror and a part of the godhead. A Christian should clearly understand this in relation to even the least of things. In human nature, the individual spirit brings it about that each becomes an individual compared to others. What the name is in the kingdom, man has in his individual spirit self or manas because he is a separate part of the godhead, has a separate name, a name which for each individual goes through all incarnations.

So we now have this threefold nature before us as an out-flowing of the divine spirit, and in this sense atman is the will of the godhead, buddhi or the life spirit the kingdom of the godhead, and manas or the spirit self the name of the godhead.

Let us now consider the four lower members of human nature, beginning with the physical body, which is the lowest. It has the same material substances and forces as outer physical nature, but is also constantly converting those substances and forces. These move in and out of the human physical body, and its very existence depends on their moving in and out. It can only continue by continually renewing and changing itself using the outer physical substances. It forms a whole with the rest of physical nature. Just as you cannot cut off this finger and have it remain what it is—it will shrivel up as soon as you separate it from the rest of the body and is what it is only because it is part of the whole organism—so you cannot separate the physical human body from the earth and have it remain as it is. Man thus is an entity that is connected with the elements of the earth. Physical substances and forces move in and out, and this makes him such that he can only maintain his essential nature through them. This characterizes the physical body.

The second member is the ether or life body. Here we must understand that it is the principle which calls the merely physical substances and forces to life. It bears the powers of growth and reproduction, the signs of life altogether, and also something entirely different—all the qualities of the human being that are of a more lasting nature than his short-lived drives, desires and passions. What makes him different from them? If you want to grasp this difference, think back to the time when you were eight years old. Think of everything you have learned since then, all the concepts and ideas, experiences and events that have enriched your soul—it is a tremendous amount. But now you need to think about something else, and that is how slowly, at a snail's pace, something else is going. Remember that you had a violent temper as a child, and consider if this temper does not still come through at times, with your inclinations or your temperament still largely the same. All this has not changed as much as your experiences have. You might compare the things you learn, experience, with the minute hand of a clock, and the changes in character, temperament and habit with the hour hand. This difference exists because the former are sustained by the astral body, whereas the latter, which move so slowly, are sustained by the ether body. If your habits change, that is a change in your ether body. When you have learned something, it is a change in your astral body.

For someone who becomes a pupil of genuine occultism in the higher sense, training is not a matter of external learning, for all occult training takes place in the ether body. You therefore have done more for your actual occult training if you have managed to change just one deep-rooted character trait than if you have gained any amount of external knowledge. Distinction is therefore made between the exoteric, which is sustained by the ether body, and esoteric, which is what the ether body needs. The ether body also sustains memory as a quality, not as the memorizing of things. If your memory is to get clearer, for instance, this involves changing the ether body; if it gets less good, this is a change in the ether body, a change in your power of memory. Something else is also of infinite importance for us. The way human beings are now, they live in two directions. Each belongs to a family, a tribe, nation and so on, and has certain qualities in common with others, qualities that relate him to that context. French people have different ones from Germans, these again others than the English, and so on. They all have certain tribal characteristics in common. But apart from this each has his own individual characteristics, and with these goes beyond nation or tribe, becoming an individual person. You are part of a community because of particular qualities of the ether body. The ether body has the qualities through which you are a member of a nation, a race, and humanity as a whole. But to find the things that take you outside this community, you have to look to the astral body. This makes people individual.

A person's whole life in the community therefore depends on his ether body finding the right balance with the ether bodies of the people with whom he has to live. If it cannot find it, the person cannot live in that community, something will go wrong and he'll be on the outside. The human ether body thus has the task of adapting to other ether bodies. The astral body gives the individual aspect; it must above all live in such a way that the person does not commit personal sins. The astral body goes astray in one direction or another because of personal sins; those are the failings of the astral body. Being out of harmony with the community, those are failings of the ether body. When esoteric Christians were accurate in their use of words they would call the failings of the ether body ‘trespass’ or ‘fault’, something that upsets the balance in relation to others. A failing of the astral body, which arises from one's individual nature, was called ‘falling into temptation’. The astral body is subject to temptation in its drives, passions and desires. It falls into error by falling to temptation within itself. That was the distinction made between ‘fault’ and ‘falling into temptation’ in esoteric Christianity.

Now to the fourth member of the essential human being—the I. We spoke of the physical body, which exists on the basis of metabolism, exchange of substances; the ether body, which may have committed faults; the astral body which may fall into temptation. Now the I. It is the very source and origin of self-seeking, of egotism. It was the I which brought it about that the element which was at one in the great divine spirit has entered into many individuals. It was due to the I that it fell away from oneness and entered into individual. Christian gnosis therefore considered the I to be the actual origin of egotism and selfishness. For as long as the individual entities were at one in the godhead, they could not go against one another. They could only do this when the ‘I’s had become separate. Before, they could only will as the godhead willed. This way of developing in opposition to others which is egotism is called the failing of the I, and in Christian tradition the moment when this soul descends into the body is exactly defined as the Fall, biting into the apple. The actual failing of the I is called ‘evil’. The failing of the fourth member thus is evil. Only the I can fall into evil, and this came about when the bite was taken of the apple. In Latin, the word malum means both ‘apple’ and ‘evil’.

So, to sum up once more, the physical body is the same as the physical elements all around it and sustains itself in the continual exchange of substances and forces, in metabolism. The ether body is the principle which maintains the balance with other members of the community; it may commit faults. The astral body, which should not fall to temptation, and the I, which must not fall victim to egotism, to evil.

This fourfold principle unites with the threefold higher principle which is the divine core of being:

Think of prayer as the human being uniting himself with the godhead, doing so in seclusion. The original concept in Christendom was that the soul was seen as divine, a droplet from the ocean of the godhead. And this soul must plead that it may return again to its origin. This origin of divine human nature is given the name ‘father’. And the goal towards which the soul strives, where it will be united again with the principle that is called the ‘father’, is the devachan or heaven.

And now we think of the prayer of prayers—an appeal that individual human nature may find the way to divine father-nature.

This prayer had to plead that the three higher principles of human nature might be able to develop, ask that the ‘will’, the highest out-flowing of the divine, might come to realization in man; that the second principle of divine nature, the ‘kingdom’, might spread in the human being; that the third principle, the ‘name’, might be felt to be holy. This would therefore relate to the three higher principles, the divine nature in man. And for the four lower members of human nature one would ask: let my physical body be given the substances it needs to sustain itself. Let the ether body find the balance between its fault and the fault of others, so that it may live in harmony with the others. The prayer would have to be a plea that temptation would not drag down the astral body, and that the I might not fall into the evil that flows from egotism.

In a prayer of prayers, you must ask to be united with the father. You should do this in such a way that the individual aspects of your sevenfold nature are there before you in your prayer:

‘Our father, who are in heaven.’

You first invoke the father, then make the petitions that relate to the three higher principles:

‘Hallowed be your name, let your kingdom come to us.’

‘Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.’

Then the four petitions that relate to the other four members of the essential human being:

‘Give us today our daily bread.’

‘Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.’

That is coming to terms with the people among whom we live.

‘Lead us not into temptation.’

Our astral body.

‘But deliver us from evil.’

Meaning from any out-flowing of egotism.

The seven petitions of the Lord's Prayer thus relate to the evolution of sevenfold human nature. From the depth of wisdom, going beyond the human being, the Lord's Prayer has been given to Christians as a Christian prayer, and in it lies everything that is known about the human being in theosophy. You only have to understand it and you have the whole of theosophical wisdom, in so far as it relates to man.

Prayers that do not just have a short-term effect but take hold of human souls through millennia, lifting up human hearts, have all arisen from the most profound wisdom. No such prayer has ever been given by someone putting together beautiful or uplifting words at will. They have been taken out of the most profound wisdom, for this alone gives them the power to influence human souls through millennia.

The objection that a simple mind will know nothing of this wisdom is pointless. The mind does not need to know any of this, for the power of the Lord's Prayer comes from that wisdom, and this influences human beings even if they do not know about it.

It merely has to be understood in the right way. Someone sees a plant and is delighted by it. Even the most naive mind will be delighted, though it knows nothing of the divine wisdom that lies in the plant. It is the same with the great prayers. You need not know the wisdom, and yet the prayer will have the power, the wisdom, the ability to lift us up, the sanctity of prayer. It may be born out of the greatest wisdom, but what matters is not to know that wisdom but to experience its power.

It is only in our time that the possibility exists to discover the things which Christ Jesus put into prayer and know again the power he put into it, especially the Lord's Prayer. It has been taken from the greatest depths of wisdom and knowledge about man and his sevenfold nature, and because of this it is great and powerful for even the simplest of minds, and even more uplifting for someone who is also able to gain the wisdom that lies in it. And it does not lose any of its power in the process, a power it has always had, touching us deeply and lifting our spirits. For the whole of theosophy, divine wisdom, lies in the Lord's Prayer.

The lord often spoke to the multitudes in parables. But when he was alone with his disciples he would explain the parables to them, for they had to gain the strength from the wisdom-filled explanation of the parables that would make them his messengers, make them know the means by which he himself gained the magical power that would make his work have the influence it was to have for millennia.

So this is something that can help us enter into the meaning of the Lord's Prayer.

• 103. Matthew 26: 39.

Soul of Man!
Thou livest in the limbs
Which bear thee through the world of Space
Into the ocean-being of the Spirit.
Practise Spirit-recollection
In depths of soul,
Where in the strength sublime
Of world-creative life
Thine own I grows to full being
In the I of God.
Then in the being of the World of Man
Thy Life will be true.

For the Father-Spirit of the Heights
Reigns in the depths of the World, begetting life.
Spirits of Strength!
May there ring forth from the Heights
The call that is re-echoed in the Depths,
Saying:
From the Divine springeth Mankind.
Spirit-beings hear it in East and West and North and South:
May human beings hear it!

Soul of Man!
Thou livest in the beat of heart and lung
Which guides thee through the rhythm of the Ages
Into the feeling of thine own Soul-being.
Practise Spirit-meditation
In the balance of the soul,
Where the surging deeds
Of cosmic evolution
Unite thine own I
With the I of the World.
Then in the working of the Soul of Man
Thy Feeling will be true.

For the Christ-Will in this horizon's Round
Reigns in the rhythms of the World, blessing the soul.
Spirits of Light!
May there be kindled from the East
The flame that is moulded by the West,
Saying:
In Christ Death becomes Life.
Spirit-beings hear it in East and West and North and South:
May human beings hear it!

Soul of Man!
Thou livest in the resting head
Which from the well-springs of Eternity
Unlocks for thee the Thoughts of the World.
Practise Spirit-penetration
In restfulness of thought,
Where the eternal aims of God
Grant light of cosmic being
To thine own I
For free and active Will.
Then in the spiritual founts of Man
Thy Thought will be true.

For the Cosmic Thoughts of the Spirit
Reign in the being of the World, praying for light.
Spirits of Soul!
May there ascend from the Depths
The prayer that is heard in the Heights,
Saying:
In the cosmic Spirit-Thoughts the Soul awakes.
Spirit-beings hear it in East and West and North and South:
May human beings hear it!

At the turning-point of time,
The Spirit-Light of the World
Entered the stream of Earthly Evolution.
Darkness of Night
Had held its sway;
Day-radiant Light
Poured into the souls of men:
Light that gave warmth
To simple shepherds' hearts,
Light that enlightened
The wise heads of kings.

O Light Divine!
O Sun of Christ!
Warm Thou our hearts,
Enlighten Thou our heads,
That good may become
What from our hearts we would found
And from our heads direct
With single purpose.

—George Adams (1927)

Soul of Man!
Thou livest in the limbs,
Which bear thee through the world of space
Into the ocean of spirit being:
Practise spirit-recalling
In depths of soul,
Where in empowering
World-Creator-Being
Thine inmost I
In God's own I
Takes being,
And thou shalt truly live
In human world-all being.

For the Father-Spirit of the heights reigns
In the depths of the world, begetting being;
Ye Spirits of Strength,
Let out of the heights ring forth
What in the depths finds its echo,
Speaking thus:
Out of the Godhead is created mankind.

This is heard by the Spirits in East, West, North, South;
May human beings hear it!

Soul of Man!
Thou livest in the pulse of heart and lung,
Which leadeth thee through the rhythm of time
Into the feeling of thine own soul being:
Practise spirit-communing
In the soul's fine balance
Where the on-surging,
World-Evolving Deeds
Thine inmost I
With the World's own I
Unite,
And thou shalt truly feel
In human soul inner-working.

For the Christ-Will reigns in the spheres encircling us
In the rhythms of the world, shedding grace upon souls;
Ye Spirits of Light,
Let from the East be enkindled
What through the West takes on form.
Speaking thus:
In Christ death becomes life.

This is heard by the Spirits in East, West, North, South;
May human beings hear it!

Soul of Man!
Thou livest in the quiet of the head
Which from out eternal foundations
Lays open before thee the world-all thoughts:
Practise spirit-beholding
In thought, stilled through,
Where the eternal aims of the gods
Cosmic-Being's-Light
On thine inmost I
For thy free willing,
Are shedding,
And thou shalt truly think
In human spirit foundations.

For the Spirit's World-All Thoughts reign
In the being of the world, light-beseeching.
Ye Spirits of Soul,
Let out of the deeps be entreated
What in the heights may be heard,
Speaking thus:
In the Spirit's World-All Thoughts the soul awakens.

This is heard by the Spirits in East, West, North, South;
May human beings hear it!

At the turn of time
Cosmic-Spirit-Light descended
Into earthly stream of being;
Darkling night
Had run its course;
Day-clear light
Streamed within human souls;
Light
That enwarms
The humble shepherds' hearts;
Light
That enlightens
The wise heads of kings.

God-given light,
Christus-Sun,
Enwarm
For us our hearts,
Enlighten
For us our heads,
That good may be
What we
From our hearts do found,
What we
From our heads
Direct with single will.

—Arvia MacKaye Ege

Soul of Man!
You live within the limbs,
Which bear you through the world of Space
Into the ocean-being of the spirit:
Practise spirit-remembering
In depths of soul,
Where in the sovereign
World-Creator presence
One's own I
Within God's I
Gains Being;
And you shall truly live
In cosmic Being of Man.

For the Father-Spirit of the heights holds sway
In the depths of worlds begetting existence:
Ye Spirits of Power
Let from the heights ring out
What in the depths is echoed;
This resounds:
From the Divine mankind has Being.
This the spirits hear in east, west, north, south.
May men hear it.

Soul of Man!
You live within the beat of heart and lung,
Which leads you through the rhythms of Time
Into your own soul-nature's weaving feeling:
Practise spirit-awareness
In balance of the soul,
Where the on-surging
Deeds of world-becoming
One's own I
And I of world Unite;
And you shall truly feel
In the soul-working of Mon.

For the Will of Christ in all around holds sway
In the world rhythms bestowing grace on souls:
Ye Spirits of Light
Let from the east flame up
What through the west takes form;
This resounds:
In Christ death becomes life.
This the spirits hear in east, west, north, south.
May men hear it.

Soul of Man!
You live within the resting head,
Which from the grounds of eternity
Reveals the universal thoughts:
Practise spirit-beholding
In the calm of thought,
Where the eternal aims of Gods
World-Being's light
On one's own I
Bestow
For will in freedom;
And you shall truly think
In spirit-foundations of Man.

For the Spirit's cosmic thoughts hold sway
In world Being beseeching light:
Ye Spirits of Soul
Let from the depths be entreated
What in the heights finds hearing;
This resounds:
In the Spirit's cosmic thoughts the soul awakes.
This the spirits hear in east, west, north south;
May men hear it.

At the turning of the times
Cosmic Spirit Light descended
Into the earthly stream of Being;
Darkness of night
Had run its course;
Day-bright light
Shone forth in human souls;
Light
That warms through
The humble shepherds' hearts;
Light
That illumines
The wise heads of kings.

Godly Light,
Christ-Sun,
Warm through
Our hearts,
Illuminate
Our heads,
That may be good
What we
From hearts would found,
What we
Would from our heads
Guide in true-aimed willing.

—By Richard Seddon