The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Our present considerations will impress us with their deeper and real meaning only if we do not take them in a merely theoretical way, since they are in the highest sense truths of life. Rather, we must draw from them certain consequences for our feelings and sentiments that may enable us to look upon life differently than is often done by those who have not been prepared to do so by an anthroposophical view. Our minds must be broadened through spiritual science to grasp the truth of life. This means that we must learn to compare the nature of truth as it meets us in life with the one-sided thinking about the truth that so easily befalls people. It is all too easy to get into the habit of forming opinions about this or that, not merely about everyday matters but also about the most important facts of life, and then fortifying our point of view with this opinion, paying no attention to the fact that the world may be viewed from the most varied standpoints. Thus, we can attain to the truth only when we feel and realize how everything, every single fact, can be viewed from many standpoints. I will relate the course of a certain life in order that I may give you an example, a kind of illustration of what I mean. We are now dealing with what we call karma, the passage of the human being through repeated earthly lives, the destiny of man, which is expressed in the course a human life takes. We can learn much through the examples of individual lives if we view them correctly in the light of repeated earthly lives.

In this example, we have to do with a person who was born in the sixteenth century. In order to consider the hereditary influences that people today like to emphasize, let us first look at his father. The father of this man who was born in the sixteenth century was a rather versatile person but also an extraordinarily obstinate one; this was characterized by a certain harshness in the expression of his life. He was well-acquainted with music, played the lute and other string instruments, was also familiar with geometry and mathematics, and his profession was that of a merchant. His harshness may be more readily understandable from the following. He had a certain music teacher who, at that time in the sixteenth century, was a highly respected man. As a pupil of this man, he wrote a book on music, but this did not please his teacher and he took issue with it in a book of his own. The pupil then became really quite angry and wrote another volume in which he included all possible contempt he could muster against the “ancient and rusty views” of his music teacher. Then he dedicated the book to him, saying expressly in the dedication, “Since you deigned to turn against me in such an obtrusive manner, I want to give you an opportunity to experience this pleasure more often. You obviously enjoy this sort of thing and that is why I dedicate this book to you.”

The son of this man is the person whose course of life I wish to tell you about in a slightly disguised way. As was the custom in those days, he at first pursued the study of Greek and Latin with a famous teacher in Italy because his father attached great importance to having him well-instructed. He studied the humanities with a monk, learned mathematics from his father and, in addition, learned drawing, perspective, and the like with other teachers. Possessing an extraordinary capacity for mathematics and mechanics, he continued to excel in these fields and became quite a versatile young man. Even as a boy he had made all sorts of models of machines that were useful at that time. Today, you know, boys make only airplanes, but then other ships were made. At eighteen, the young man went to the university, studying medicine at first—excuse this just after we have heard that passage from Faust.¹⁰⁶ But he had a somewhat different experience than the student who has just been presented to you in that scene of “Mephisto and the Student.” He did not pass through his medical studies as if he were in a dream, nor did he say, “They're not so bad.” No, he really disliked studying medicine since he found that this discipline proceeded in an unsystematic way, one fact simply following after another with no true connection. Then he turned to philosophy. In those days it was the custom of some individuals to attack Aristotle, the Greek philosopher who had hitherto been so greatly honored. Having one of these critics as his teacher, our young man fell into the same habit of criticizing and hating Aristotle. Although his father was an extraordinarily competent man, he was not well-liked because of his various characteristics. So, after his son had studied for a few years, he did not have much money and tried to secure a scholarship for him. He did not succeed, however, and was compelled to provide further instruction for him with the money he earned with sweat and blood.

After the son had struggled through his medical and philosophical studies, he had reason to feel most fortunate. He became a professor at one of the most famous universities of his country, teaching mathematics and also practicing medicine, of which he had a good deal of knowledge from his student days. On the whole, he was a quite popular teacher. But at this university things got a little hot for him. This came about through a book that was published containing a description of a public project, a mechanical project. It was written by an eminent gentleman who was not too intelligent, but who was the son of an actual princely personality of that particular state. Our professor, although still relatively young, had little difficulty in proving it would be impossible to carry out this project. Much hostility was then aroused against him and, although he had already succeeded in attracting attention to himself through his accomplishments, he no longer felt entirely comfortable in that particular city and university. The opportunity arose to go to another university in a republican state. At this university also, he soon became well-known, had many students and, what was then a mere matter of course, gave many private lessons so that he had an excellent income. He needed a good deal of money because his father had died and he had to support his mother and sisters. In order that we may see a little more clearly into the karma of this person let me mention the following authenticated fact; it was related by a contemporary to whom it was told by the man himself. Moreover, no matter with what philological finesse the endeavor is made to get at the fact, it is demonstrably true. This man with whom we are dealing, now teaching in a republican university, once had a dream in which he saw himself walking over burning coals and ashes and knew that they must have come from the burning of the cathedral in the city where he had previously been a professor. He related this dream and also wrote of it in many letters. It was later revealed that the very same night he had this dream, the cathedral had actually burned down.

Now, he was most successful; indeed, he made significant scientific discoveries, for which others claimed part of the credit as was then the custom and is still so to some extent even now, without thanking him. He became fairly prosperous but not sufficiently so in his own mind, especially since he had to drive himself so hard. He had to give many private lessons, earning a little thereby, to be sure, but it required a good deal of work. Now, his Italian contemporaries and later others tell in an interesting way how he was a man so much occupied with his brain that—I simply repeat what was related—he had little time to pay attention to the impulses of his heart. He was, therefore, quite clever but somewhat less lovable. Thus, he never officially married but lived, as his contemporaries say, in a common-law marriage with a certain Marina Gamba by whom he had two daughters, whom he sent into a convent, and a son, whom he later legitimized. Although he became the instructor of many famous people—for example, he taught Gustav Adolf, who later became the king of Sweden—things were not entirely as he wished them. So he applied to the Grand Duke of his native land where he had previously been a professor. This was in 1610. The fact was that he was striving to gain more free time to devote to inventions and discoveries. It is interesting, therefore, to observe the man somewhat more carefully since he was really a sort of child of his age. For this reason I should like to read to you, in a pretty good translation, a letter that he wrote to obtain a more fitting position at the court of the Grand Duke. He writes to a friend about his correspondence with the Grand Duke:

Your grace's letter was heartily welcome, first, because it lets me know that his most serene Highness, the Grand Duke, my Lord, remembers me, and then because it assures me of the continued goodwill of the right honorable Signor Aeneas Piccolomini, infinitely highly treasured by me, as also of the love of your Grace, which causes you to perceive my interest and induces you to write me in such friendly fashion about circumstances of great importance. For this service I remain always under obligation both to the right honorable Signor Aeneas and also to your Grace, render you endless thanks, and consider it my duty, as evidence of the value I attach to such goodness, to speak with these gentlemen concerning thoughts and those life relationships in which it would be my desire to pass the years that still remain to me. I hope that an opportunity might present itself when the right honorable Aeneas, with his keenness and versatility, might give a more definite answer to our august Lord, toward whose Highness, in addition to that reverent relationship and most obedient subjection that is due him from every one of his loyal servants, I feel myself, moreover, inclined with such special devotion and, as I may be permitted to say, so much love. Even God does not require any other feeling of us than that we should love Him, but I would set aside every other interest, and there is no position whatever for which I would not exchange my own state if I should learn that this would please His Highness. This answer might then suffice to realize any decision it might please His Highness to form in regard to my person. But if, as we may assume, His Highness, full of humanity and goodness, which renders him worthy of fame among all others and will ever render him more and more worthy, will unite together with my service to him every other satisfaction for me, I will then not refrain from speaking my mind. For twenty years now, and indeed throughout the best part of my life, I have labored even to minute detail, as it is said, upon the demand of anybody and everybody, to share any small talent that had come into my possession from God or through my own endeavors in my vocation. But now I would really wish to attain sufficient leisure and peace to be able to bring to completion before my life ends three great works I have on my hands so that I may publish these. I would hope to do this perhaps to the honor of myself and also of everyone who might support me in such undertakings, through the fact that I would perhaps bring to those studying in this special field greater, more general, and more lasting service than I could otherwise do for the rest of my life. I do not believe that I could have greater leisure elsewhere than I have here as long as I am compelled to obtain the support of my family out of my official duties as a teacher and from private lessons. Moreover, I would not willingly do such work in another city than in this one, for various reasons that it would be too cumbersome to enumerate. Yet, the freedom I have here is not sufficient, since I must sacrifice, upon the demand of one person and another, many hours of the day and often the best. No matter how brilliant and generous a republic, to retain a remuneration from it without rendering service to its general community is not customary. As long as I am able to give lectures and to render service, no one in a republic can release me from this obligation without ending my income; in short, I cannot hope to receive such a favor from anyone else than an absolute prince. Yet I should not wish, after what I have said, to appear to make unjustified claims upon your Grace, as if I were seeking for support without a corresponding service and obligation. That is not my purpose; on the contrary. As concerns a corresponding service, I have various inventions of which even a single one would suffice to provide a support for my life, if I should meet a great prince who should take pleasure in it. Experience shows me that things that are, perhaps, of far less significant value have a great advantage for their discoverer, and it had always been my thought to place these things before my Prince and natural master rather than before others. He in turn could do with these things and with the inventor as he might see it, and to receive from them, if it should please him, not only the ore, but also the metal. I find new things of this kind every day and would find many more if I had the leisure and more favorable opportunities to secure skillful persons whose help I could utilize in various investigations. So far as concerns further the daily rendering of service—that is, public and private lectures—I have only a distaste against that venal servitude in which I must offer my work in exchange for whatever remuneration pleases any purchaser; but to render service to a Prince or a great Lord, and to anyone dependent upon him, would never cause me any feeling of repugnance. On the contrary, I would earnestly desire this and strive for it, and since your Grace wanted to know from me something about my income here, I will tell you that the compensation for my service amounts to 520 gold gulden, which will be changed to an equal number of scudi within a few months when I receive my new position, of which I am just as good as certain. This money I can in great part save, since I obtain a large supplementary assistance for the support of my household through having private students and through my earnings from private lessons, although I rather discourage than seek to give many such lessons. I have a far greater longing for more free time than for money, since I know that it would be much more difficult for me to acquire a sufficient sum of money to give me any distinction than a certain amount of fame through my scientific work.

This man was then really summoned to this court. The only requirement was that he deliver lectures on the occasions when there were unusual events, brilliant occasions, festival affairs at which the Grand Duke had to appear and where it was necessary to make a good impression on foreign visitors. As for the rest, he was simply to receive his support salary and devote himself entirely to his studies. For a time things went well, indeed. Even poets, noblemen, and princes honored him and held all kinds of festivities because they considered him a great man. He himself—it was on February 3, 1613—composed the text for a masquerade in which he represented himself as Jupiter enthroned on the clouds. He could easily be recognized in his disguise and since the four moons of Jupiter had just been discovered by Galileo¹⁰⁷ and had been given the names of the four princes of the house, even these four princes appeared in the entourage. It was an altogether unusual, festive pageantry.

The kindness of the Prince, however, gradually subsided and after a certain time he actually betrayed this man of learning. The clergy found that his views did not agree with theirs. Moreover, he was impoverished at the close of his life and died in genuine disillusionment. He had thoroughly tasted the ingratitude and fickleness of fate. He had learned fully how some princes behave in the long run, and he had experienced the hatred of the clergy.

I have now given you a factual account of the life of a human being. But now I would like to relate this life story in a different way, from another perspective, as it were.

On February 18, 1564, the great Galileo was born. His father, Vincenzo Galileo, was extraordinarily well-acquainted with music, played the lute and other string instruments well, was occupied with geometry, and at first taught his son music himself. The boy pursued his studies in Latin and Greek with distinguished teachers; he learned the humanities with a monk and then went to the University of Pisa where he studied medicine without much satisfaction, then turned to philosophy, became an anti-Aristotelian under the influence of the contemporary anti-Aristotelian tendency. At that time he was already such a genius that one day as he sat in the Cathedral of Pisa watching the church lamp swing, he discovered the principle of the pendulum's isochronism, a most important discovery that has had significance ever since. This event was told by Galileo's contemporaries. I am constantly being told that this story is a myth, but I will continue to relate it because it is true.

In spite of the importance of Galileo's thoughts upon observing this swinging church lamp, his father could not obtain a stipend for him. Then, after he had pursued his geometrical studies, he became a professor at the University of Pisa. There he lectured on mathematics for sixty scudi a year and also practiced medicine. We know that he actually did practice medicine from a letter he wrote to his father in which he asked that the writings of the ancient physician Galen be sent him as a guide. He sharply criticized the writing of the highly placed but imprudent Cosimo I¹⁰⁸ that was published at that time. Then things became too hot for him in Pisa and since the Venetian Republic invited him to teach there, appreciating him more than his native state, he went to Padua in 1592. Galileo Galilei became a professor at the University of Padua and lectured with great distinction on mathematics and related subjects; he also constructed sun dials according to special principles and perfected the knowledge of mechanics. It was there that Giambattista Doni in his letters on dreams wrote that Galileo had the dream of which I have told you; this was the dream where he was walking over glowing coals and ashes. The Cathedral of Pisa burned at the time Galileo had his dream, and he wrote of this in letters to many contemporaries. About this time he invented the proportional circles and machines for raising water, made important discoveries in connection with the telescope and the thermoscope, and made observations regarding the barometer and other things, credit for which was claimed by other people, whereas in most cases it is to be attributed to him. I have already told you the story of his common-law marriage; it happened as I related it so I need not repeat it. Likewise, his letter was written in the way I have told you. Thus, he was actually transferred from Padua back to his native state and things happened to him there as I have said. It was Galileo who produced that masquerade in which he represented himself as Jupiter enthroned on the clouds, and it was he who gave the names of the Medici to the four satellites of Jupiter, which led to their representing them at this festival. The fact that he was not well-treated by the clergy, and that, in relation to it, he was betrayed by his prince, is known from history. Although all sorts of things in the story of his recantation are true, the assertion made by everybody that he said, “And yet it does move,” is certainly false. I have frequently pointed this out.

So this is the matter when it is reenacted from another point of view. You will observe that even though I did not relate false things the first time, your feelings for the man were probably not the same as when I related the story the second time. And you will also agree that your feelings the second time were definitely those that almost every person has when he or she thinks about Galileo, the astronomer. You will see from this that much knowledge is lacking in what many think. They certainly do not know much about Galileo but think and feel about him, not because of what they know, but because the name Galileo Galilei has a certain significance in history.

We must take into consideration, however, that what a man produces through his genius has meaning for the physical world. The fact that there are satellites around Jupiter was a discovery of immense importance for the evolution of the earth, but it has no significance for the concerns of the spiritual world, that is, for the beings of the higher hierarchies. So it is with the other discoveries of Galileo. They are such that they have a great significance for the earth. What, then, was the substance of what I first related? It was his personal fate. Apart from the fact that Galileo was an important man because of his earthly discoveries, it was his personal fate, the misery he experienced in his vocation, his—well, what shall I say—perhaps his loyalty toward the Prince, and so forth. In other words, I first told you what his daily affairs were, but because it concerns him personally it is also what has significance when he bears it through the portal of death and has to develop it between death and a new birth. We must go into such studies as this to educate ourselves regarding the question of human destiny, which cuts so deeply into life. It is precisely with significant, distinguished human lives that we must do this.

There is much talk about heredity nowadays and many questions are considered solely in connection with it. I first told you the story of the life of Galileo in such a way that you could observe it without any preconception. I related his life to that of his father, so that we perhaps might again have an example of right thinking about the question of heredity. It is certainly impossible to think correctly of it without taking into consideration the teaching of repeated earthly lives. In such a thought process, heredity does not prove to be without meaning, but is, on the contrary, most meaningful. There also appears, however, the connection between the inherited characteristics and what the human being brings down from the spiritual world through his own individuality as a result of his previous earthly life. When we wish to decide what is really inherited, we simply have to look at the facts of life.

On a previous occasion I called your attention to the fact that the period of puberty is not taken into consideration at all by science today, whereas it should be when heredity is discussed. Up to this period a person must carry with him all the impulses of heredity. What comes later must be referred to another point of time. I mentioned this a week ago. But what, then, really is inherited? The unprejudiced observation of the following facts is testimony for the arbitrary manner in which scientists interpret things in this field, but they are utterly incapable of understanding them. Since it is known to anybody who can observe life, it must be known to every psychiatrist that there may be two sons in a family who have the same inherited potentialities. Let us define the two sets of hereditary potentialities that may be similar. First, there is a certain tendency to think out concepts and connections and to apply them to external life; second, there is a certain—what shall we call it?—peppy or fashionable bearing such as a businessman must have. Once there were two sons who both had these traits; that is, a certain self-consciousness and from it a certain boldness in bringing to realization what occurred to them. These were simply inherited characteristics, and it is thus that they must, in general, be conceived. But the question now is: What did each of them become? What course did their karmas take? One of them became a poet whose achievements were pretty respectable. The other became a swindler. The inherited characteristics were applicable to both activities; in one individual, they could be applied to the art of poetry, and in the other, to all kinds of swindles. Whatever comes from physical life was similar in these brothers. These things must really be studied conscientiously and earnestly and not in the way contemporary science often studies them. Indeed, we often find that the people themselves register the facts quite correctly nowadays, but they cannot make anything of them because they do not possess the ability to connect them with the great law of repeated earthly lives.

Influenced by the currents of our time, people in a few regions have begun to think of how it may be possible to assist nature according to the physical line of heredity, the stream of heredity, as the materialist says—they do not say Divine Providence. The brilliant minds of many individuals are especially impelled to reflect on how offspring may be produced in our sad time. But in the minds of most people, this question is identical with that of how families may be assisted to have as many children as possible; that is, how the conditions conducive to producing the greatest number of descendants may be established scientifically. One who can see through things can readily foresee what will come about. Those who are displaying their scientific theories about the best possible conditions for producing future progeny will be completely fooled simply because they refuse to learn anything. All they would have to do would be to observe the results in instances where excellent conditions existed for the production of children. For example, there is the case of the well-known Johann Sebastian Bach,¹⁰⁹ who was cantor in the Thomas School in Leipzig some two hundred years ago, and who played a great deal of music with his ten musical sons. No one can say that this family with ten sons was unfruitful. But you can go all the way back to the great grandfather of Johann Sebastian Bach. He also had sons. There were so many sons throughout the generations that almost the entire family was as prolific as Johann Sebastian himself. That is to say that what constitutes favorable conditions for having descendants was present in this family in the most eminent sense. Nevertheless, by 1850, a hundred years after the death of Johann Sebastian Bach, the entire family had died out; not a single descendant was left. There you have what needs to be studied. Thus, when people with their new method will have come up with their so-called favorable conditions, they will not be able to prevent the possible generation of ten-member families, but after fifty years such families may no longer exist.

We shall speak again tomorrow of how conditions arise under which humanity evolves and how these are quite different from those at which our natural philosophic world conception labors with its utter lack of all wisdom. But this scientific world conception is simply one of the outcroppings of materialism. I have already told you that those who are familiar with the fundamental laws of the occult conception of the world knew that in the middle of the nineteenth century we reached the lowest point—or, as the materialists might designate it, the highest point—of materialistic thinking, feeling, and willing. We have already learned to know much that is connected with this materialistic thinking, and we shall still have to learn much more. But what strikes us time and again is the fact that even well-meaning persons are by no means inclined to become acquainted with the materialistic impulses dominating the depths and heights regarding human perception and will. Here people are really astonishingly little inclined to submit to what has so often been discussed, that is, to seeing the world with open eyes. What will become of the world if the views that have spread over the entire earth in the second half of the nineteenth century continue to develop further? In the course of these lectures we shall have to speak about the deep inner reasons for these things in our time.

We must, however, confront our souls with the question of how far things have really gone in some fields. Indeed, the nineteenth century was the period in which the view was presented that a real scientist could not possibly accept the childish and absurd conceptions of the ancient religions. What has been preserved in them—and we shall later discuss how it has been preserved—was considered mere childishness. It was considered the mark of an enlightened person to have risen above the assumption of a spiritual-psychic organism in the human being and that he is to be especially distinguished from animals. Not only was the endeavor made to establish a physical connection between human beings and animals, but the endeavor was also made to prove that they are nothing but animals, that is, simply a little different from other animals just as other animals differ from one another. That is the very point these people wanted to make, and it was from this point of view that not only natural histories were written, but also psychological texts. Pick up at random what the dominant people of the nineteenth century have written, and you will find at what conceptions man has actually arrived.

I have a book here before me; it is, in a certain sense, a book representing profoundly decisive views of the nineteenth century for it deals with the human soul. Every possible effort is made in this book to prove that this soul is something simply talked about by stupid people of earlier and present times. It was written in 1865, but these views were disseminated, and though some people say today that we have passed beyond that, we have not, but are still deep within it in the life of feeling and of general culture. The book deals with the human soul, but a special effort is made to demonstrate that the animal soul is the same as that of humans. In particular, you will find in it a neat definition of women and men. The author says that women represent in their peculiar characteristics a greater tendency to spirituality, whereas men represent more the tendency to materialism. In other words, according to this statement, spirituality is a weakness of women! The author then finds that certain crazy psychologists still speak about an ego that distinguishes man from animal. But he says in a delicate way that the cat, for example, shows that it also says “I;” that it has the same kind of consciousness of the ego, so the author expresses it, as our vague and super-sensible psychologists because the ego consciousness of the cat is not in the least different from that of the human being. Then comes a passage that is quoted from another book with which, however, the author is in full agreement. I shall read this passage, and I beg you to excuse the fact that the language is a bit off-color, but this is not my fault. It is the fault of the philosophy that has developed under such influences and that proposes to project living impulses into the future, asserting that it is the only philosophy today worthy of the human being. The passage reads:

The theologians and metaphysicians of our age pretend that man is the only religious animal. This is utterly false and the error is entirely in keeping with that made by some travelers who conclude, from the absence of organized cults, that religion is absent among certain savage peoples. Among a great proportion of the entire succession of animals, including even the molluscs, indications are to be found of fetishism and star worship. [ So we find among the molluscs and other animals indications of fetishism and worship of the stars.] Those that most nearly approach the human being live in veritable polytheistic anthropolatry. Our domestic dog barks at the moon and howls in a particular way when it is at the seashore; it may also be seen on certain occasions making use of whatever lustral water is available and carrying out more or less obscure rites. Who would be able to prove that there have never been high priests among dogs? What could have degraded the poor animal to the point of causing him to lick the hand that strikes him if this was not done by religious and superstitious ideas? How is one to explain, except on the basis of a profound anthropolatry, the voluntary submission to man of so many animals stronger and more active than he? To be sure, it will be said that the animal frequently devours his god, but primus in orbo deos fecit timor (fear, first of all things on earth, created gods). ... Besides, the sectarians of most of the religions also eat theirs!

The book in which this view is approved is entitled Materialism and Spiritualism and was written by Leblais¹¹⁰ with a preface by Littré,¹¹¹ a man who produced a whole series of writings. In 1871 he was elected to the National Assembly and in the same year was made a member of the Academy. This same Littré, a man known throughout the entire world, wrote the preface to this book. It deals with the human soul and simply expresses in an emphatic way what in essence is pulsing through many souls today. It is only because people are so little inclined to observe life that they fail to see the important bearing it has upon the course of human evolution, to the sorrow and pain of anyone who sees into these things.

Thus, I wanted to present to you a by no means isolated example of the presence of materialistic views in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Now let us ask whether such views are without significance for external life. Do they not gradually penetrate into this external life? Do they not mold and form this external life? Just yesterday I was sent a book by a member, the young Swiss Albert Steffen,¹¹² in which he could observe various currents of our time, because he is, in a certain sense, permeated by those impulses that are at play in spiritual science. Young Steffen describes a little of what can be experienced by a man who permits the influences of materialism on the molding of the social world to work upon him.

In his novel, which is called The True Lover of Destiny (Der rechte Liebhaber des Schicksals), there is a character named Arthur who records a fragment of his life for a certain purpose. It is, to be sure, a section taken from a novel, but it describes much of what pulses today in life. So this Arthur describes a fragment from that part of his life when materialism takes hold of humanity and forms the social order. Arthur says:

At twenty-one, I went to a metropolis for the first time—not the city in which I now live—in order to begin my studies.

One the day of my arrival I took a look at the streets. It was raining. Everything was murky and dirty.The people all showed the same indifferent but hurried pace, one just like another. I felt myself overcome immediately by an inner barrenness. I stopped in front of a billboard to see where I might spend the evening. I read one poster that called for a meeting in favor of prohibition. A man came with a pastepot and brush and pasted a beer bottle poster over it.

The very mark of our age—a poster in favor of anti-alcoholism with a beer bottle poster pasted over it!

Then suddenly I understood the significance of the mood that had taken possession of me since I arrived in this city: it was foolish to wish to improve human beings.

Disabled people stood to the right and left on the streets, yet no one had time to consider their misfortune. Women passed by and offered themselves and nobody showed pity or indignation. Suddenly it seemed to me almost astonishing that the shopkeepers did not come out of their shops to smash everything to pieces and shout, “What does it matter?” But then I perceived that the only reason that people did not despair was because they were already too commonplace, too cunning, too thievish. They were entirely too much at home in these alleys.

And did I then despair? I must confess that I greedily sucked up the mood of this alley. With a shuddering lust for death I took in the certainty that everything was on the way to destruction. The people who met me bore the unmistakable signs of degeneration. The houses reeked of corruption. Even the gray sky seemed to drop something heavy and inevitable from its clouds.

This feeling grew stronger in me. In this state of soul I sought out almost unconsciously darker and darker alleys. I went into courtyards full of refuse. I stared into windows and witnessed dreadful crimes. I read the notices that swindlers and procuresses thrust into my hands. Finally, I climbed aboard one of the buses that roared with terrific power through the streets. I closed my eyes. The thundering noise rumbled through me like a hymn of death.

Suddenly the vehicle stopped. I stooped over and heard a few indifferent words. A child had run across the street, had been caught under a wheel and was carried away dead. We continued our way.

From this moment on something within me was paralyzed. I could now see the horrible thing that this city was, and it no longer horrified, angered, or disgusted me. It seemed to me quite natural.

More: I had to laugh at anybody who wanted to change it.

Could a person move otherwise in this fever of hunger, thirst, and passions?

My father came from a family of pastors. He studied natural science and absorbed its results with great enthusiasm. It made him clear in thought, thorough, broad-minded and, in the truest sense of the word, human. He applied all his powers to the investigation of the sensory world. The super-sensible did not interest him. At least, I learned nothing of it from him.

In my childhood I adopted his view of the world without investigating whether its theories might be one-sided, just as an admiring child receives the truth from his father. But I did not yet possess his steadfastness of character that is acquired in the course of life, nor the religiousness he inherited from his ancestors, which he denied, but which was nonetheless in his nature. I did not have such a stock to live on. No pious practices were taught me in my youth that would have enriched and deepened my soul and could have worked on further in me.

Now bear in mind how often I have said—I have brought this to your attention for years—that the first generation will still be able to live with materialism because it lives under the spiritual influence received from its forefathers, but that the succeeding generation would degenerate under materialism and would go to ruin. It is gratifying—if such a thing can be gratifying—that this truth passes over now even into literature. Steffen's narrator continues:

Perhaps this is why the effect of scientific knowledge on me was different from what it was on my father. That inner inheritance prevented him from carrying over into life what he had attained as knowledge. In my case it was quite different; this single day had the effect of reversing, so to speak, the direction of my will.

My father confessed to an intellectual satisfaction when he reflected that the human being is dissipated after death and no longer exists. The certainty of this, and it seemed certain to me, evoked in me a sort of ecstatic impulse to self-destruction and, as a result, heartlessness and lust for crime.

I recently pointed out to you that modern humanity is cruel even in its use of concepts. Now we read here:

That evening I had become empty, void of feeling, and cruel, and I did not say No to these characteristics. In the succeeding time I lived entirely without scruple. And just because my action arose not from an impulse that I was unable to master, but from a certain logic and strength of will, the effect on me was twice as disastrous. I knew this. I was absolutely wicked.

He now relates how he fell into bad company, led another into bad company, and so forth. This you can read yourselves. But there is another brief passage to which I should like to call attention because it is symptomatic. A number of Arthur's acquaintances are together, all of them persons “worthy of honor,” who intended the best within their group. But Arthur has to slip away on one occasion, and he then sits alone at an empty table. Steffan narrates the incident as follows:

After a while a gentleman sat down opposite him whose face struck him because it bore an astonishing likeness to his own. It was pale, lean, smoothly shaven, but with somewhat more witch-like lines.

A peddlar came, put his glasses on his nose, untied a bundle of picture postcards and, with a sleight-of-hand rapidity, put them first before Arthur, then before the stranger all the while looking into the face of the one under whose nose he held them as if he might see his chances there. Arthur turned away in disgust. The stranger went through them carefully and selected about ten, which he put together and tore to pieces. “These persons should not be given the opportunity to earn anything,” he said to Arthur. “Of course, he will order a double supply of those I purchased. They were the most dreadful of all. But I saw so many decent working class couples here that I was afraid he would show these cards to them.”

“How can anyone look at such pictures?” asked Arthur.

“Surrender yourself for a moment, without resistance, to the fumes in here, and you will see that figures take form in your soul whose movements are just as ugly as is depicted on the postcards. What are our places of entertainment today other than hells? You need only test your feelings after you have left them—smoke, fumes, prostitutes. You do not take anything noble away with you.”

“Why are you, then, in this dangerous place?” asked Arthur.

“Because I consider it necessary that someone should be here who is disgusted. The thought of the necessity for disgust in our time came to me a few days ago at an exhibit of Greek vases. The Greeks did not need to be disgusted in order to attain to beauty. They lived in it from the beginning. But we need this disgust if we wish to stand completely in life, in order to value the world correctly, in order to come to the spirit within us, in order to protect the God within us. It was different with the Greeks. When they surrendered themselves to life, they fulfilled also the laws of the spirit. They did not need to constantly defend and arm themselves. The work of man everywhere made the human being beautiful—the buildings, the art, the customs, the utensils, even to the smallest thing. But we become ugly through everything that surrounds us—streets, posters, movies, popular music—everything makes us barren, everything destroys us ...”

Here is a question we must study: what lives at first in the thought world, and in the world of feeling, how does it flow into the social world? It is not good simply to sleep through life, not knowing what has been working at the bottom of it before it has come to its ultimate consequence. After all, the reason such a man, who has taken into himself something from spiritual science, describes this life well is because he has an eye for it.

• 106. Prior to this lecture, a scene from Faust, Part I, had been performed: Mephisto and the freshman student.
• 107. Galileo Galilei (1564–1642). The letter is quoted from Angelo de Gubernatis, “Galileo Galilei,“ Deutsche Revue (March/April, 1909).
• 108. Cosimo I de'Medici (1519–74), Duke of Florence (1537–69) and Grand Duke of Tuscany (1569–74).
• 109. Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750).
• 110. Alphonse Leblais, Matérialisme et Spiritualisme (Paris, 1865).
• 111. Maximilian Lime (1801–81) was a philosopher, linguist, and follower of the positivist Auguste Comte (1798–1857).
• 112. Albert Steffen (1884–1963), Swiss poet and writer, became president of the Anthroposophical Society after the death of Rudolf Steiner.

Since we have spoken several times about Christianity and its present and future development, we have reached the point where today we have also to consider the meaning of the Cross symbol—not so much historically as factually.

You know, of course, what an all-embracing and symbolical meaning the emblem of the Cross has had for Christianity; and today I would like just to shed light on the connection between the Cross symbol and the significance of Solomon's Temple for world history.

Indeed there exists a so-called holy legend about the whole development of the Cross; in it we are dealing less with the Cross sign or its universal symbolical meaning, than with that very special and particular Cross of which Christ speaks, the very Cross on which Christ Jesus was crucified. Now you know too that the Cross is a symbol for all men, and it is found not only in Christianity, but in the religious beliefs and symbolism of all peoples, so that it must have the same common significance for all mankind. However, what particularly interests us today is how the Cross symbol acquired its basic significance for Christianity.

The Christian legend about the Cross¹ is as follows: we shall begin with it.

The wood or tree from which the Cross had been taken is not ordinary wood, but—so the legend relates—was, in the beginning, a scion of the Tree of Life, which had been cut for Adam, the first man. This scion was planted in the earth by Adam's son, Seth, and the young tree developed three trunks which grew together. The famous rod of Moses² was later cut from this wood. Then, in the legend, the same wood plays a role in connection with King Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem. That is, it was to have been used as a main pillar, in building the Temple. But then something peculiar came to light. It appeared that it would not fit in any way. It would not let itself be inserted in the Temple, and so it was laid across a brook, as a bridge. Here it was little valued until the Queen of Sheba came; as she was crossing it, she saw what the point about this piece of wood was. Here indeed she had for the first time met again with the meaning of the wood [used for this] bridge, which lay there between the two spheres, between the bank on this side and the bank on the other side, for crossing over the stream. So then, the Cross on which the Redeemer hung was made out of this [same] wood, after which it set out upon its various further travels.

Thus you see that the point of this legend is to do with the origin and evolution of the human race. Adam's son Seth is supposed to have taken this scion from the Tree of Life, and it then grew three trunks. These three trunks symbolise the three principles, the three underlying forces of nature, Atma, Buddhi and Manas, which have grown together and form the trinity which is the foundation of all growth and all development. It is apt that Seth—the son of Adam who took the place of Abel, murdered by Cain should have planted the scion in the earth.

You know that on the one hand we are dealing with the Cain current [of evolution] and on the other hand with the descendants of Abel and Seth. The sons of Cain, who work upon the outer world, cultivate the sciences and arts in particular. They are the ones who bring in the stones from the outer world to build the Temple. It is through their art that the Temple is to be built. The descendants of the line of Abel/Seth are the so-called Sons of God, who cultivate the true spiritual part of man's nature. These two currents were always somewhat in antithesis. On the one hand we have the worldly activity of man, the development of those sciences which serve man's comfort and outward life in general; on the other hand we have the Sons of God, occupied with the development of man's higher attributes.

We must make ourselves clear about it: the viewpoint from which the Legend of the True Cross springs, makes a firm distinction between the mere outward building of the World Temple through science and technology, and what as religious warp and woof works towards the sanctification of the whole Temple of Humanity., Only because this Temple of Humanity is given a higher task—only because the outer building, so to speak, serving as it does only our convenience, makes itself into an expression of the House of God—can it become a receptacle for the spiritual inner part in which the higher tasks of humanity are nurtured. Only because strength is transformed into striving for heavenly virtue outward form into beauty, the words of man's ordinary intercourse into the words that serve divine wisdom, and thus only because the worldly is remodelled into the divine, can it attain its perfection. When the three virtues, Wisdom, Beauty and Strength, become the receptacle of the divine, then will the Temple of Humanity be perfected. That is how the viewpoint underlying this legend looks at the matter.

We must therefore picture—quite in the sense of this legend—that up to the appearance of Christ Jesus on earth, there were two tendencies: the one, that built the earthly temple, that had its impact on the doings of men, so that at a later time the Divine Word that had come to earth through the Christ Jesus, could be received. A dwelling had to be prepared for the appearance of the Divine Word on earth. Next, the Divine itself should for a while develop itself upwards over the course of time as a kind of parallel tendency to the second current. Hence a distinction is made between the sons of men, the descendants of Cain, who were to prepare the worldly aspect, and the sons Abel/Seth, who cultivated the divine aspect, until the two streams could be united with each other, Christ Jesus united these two streams. The Temple had first to be built outwardly, therefore, until, in the shape of Christ Jesus, He should arrive Who was able to raise it up again in three days. On the one hand, then, we have the current of the Sons of Cain, and on the other that of the Abel/Seth line, both of which are preparing the development of mankind, so that the Son of God can then unite the two sides, and make the two streams into one. This finds expression in the holy legend in a profound way.

Seth himself is the one who planted the scion that he had taken for Adam from the Tree of Life, and raised a tree with three trunks. What is the meaning of this triple stemmed tree? Nothing else at all than the trinity, Atma, Buddhi and Manas, the threefold higher nature of man which will be implanted in his lower principles. But within man this is veiled at first. Through his three bodies—physical, etheric and astral—man is at first like an outer covering for the real divine trinity, Atma, Buddhi and Manas. You must imagine, therefore, that the trinity of physical, etheric and astral body are like an outer representation of the higher forces of Atma, Buddhi and Manas. And just as the artist fashions outer forms or expresses a certain idea in colours, so these three coverings also express a work of art. If you conceive these higher principles as the idea of a work of art, you will have come half way to grasping how the life of these three bodies is made up.

Now man is indeed living in his physical, etheric and astral sheaths, together with his ‘I’, through which he will so transform his threefold nature that the three higher principles find their appropriate dwelling place and feel at home here on earth. That had to be provided for by the Old Covenant. Through the arts of the race of Cain, it had to bring Sons of Men into the world, and through these Sons of Men were to be produced all the outward things that would serve the physical, etheric and astral bodies. What outward things were these?

The things which serve the physical body are firstly all that is contrived by technology to satisfy the physical body and provide for its comfort. Then, what we have in the way of the social and political institutions which [regulate] men's living together, what relates to nourishment and reproduction [of the race], all serve the development of the etheric body. And working upon the astral body we have the sphere of moral codes and ethics, bringing the instincts and emotions under control, which regulate and raise up the astral nature to a higher stage.

Thus, during the Old Covenant, the Sons of Cain were building the Three-tiered Temple. In all this, since it is made up of our outer institutions—in which you can includeour dwellings and tools, the social and political organs, the system of morals—is the building of the Sons of Cain, that serves the lower members of man's nature.

The other tendency worked alongside, presided over by the Sons of God, their pupils and followers. From this stream come the servants of the divine world order, the attendants of the Ark of the Covenant. In them we find something which, as a separate current, runs parallel to [that of] those who serve the external world. They occupied a special position. Only after Solomon's Temple hadbeen erected was the Ark of the Covenant to be placed inside it; that is to say, everything else had to be made subservient to the Ark of the Covenant, to be arranged around it. Everything which was formerly of a worldly nature was to become an external expression, an outer covering, for what the Ark of the Covenant meant for mankind. The meaning of the Temple of Solomon will best be understood by whoever visualises it as something which expresses outwardly in its physiognomy what the Ark of the Covenant should be, in its soul nature.

What has given life to man's outward three bodies, has been taken by the Sons of God from the Tree of Life. That is symbolically expressed in that building wood later used for Christ's Cross. It was first given to the Sons of God. What did they do with it? What is the deeper meaning of the wood of the Cross? In this holy legend about the wood of the Cross lies a very deep meaning.

For what in general is the task of the human being in his earthly evolution? He has to raise the present three bodies with which he is endowed to a higher stage. Thus, he must raise his physical body to a higher realm and likewise his etheric and astral bodies. This development is incumbent upon humanity. That is the real sense of it: to transform our three bodies into the three higher members of the whole divine plan of creation.

There is another kingdom above that which man has immediately and physically around him. But to which kingdom does man in his physical nature belong? At the present stage of his evolution, he belongs with his physical nature to the mineral kingdom. Physical, chemical and mineral laws hold sway over man's physical body. Yet even as far as his spiritual nature is concerned, he belongs to the mineral kingdom, since he understands through his intellect only what is mineral, Life, as such, he is only gradually learning to comprehend. Precisely for this reason, official science disowns life, being still at that stage of development in which it can only grasp the dead, the mineral. It is in the process of learning to understand this in very intricate detail. Hence it understands the human body only in so far as it is a dead, mineral thing. It treats the human body basically as something dead with which one works, as if with a substance in a chemical laboratory. Other substances are introduced into [the body], in the same way that substances are poured into a retort. Even when the doctor, who nowadays is brought up entirely on mineral science, sets about working on the human body, it is as though the latter were only an artificial product.

Hence we are dealing with man's body at the stage of the mineral kingdom in two ways: man has acquired reality in the mineral kingdom through having a physical body, and with his intellect is only able to grasp facts relating to the mineral kingdom. This is a necessary transitional stage for man. However, when man no longer relies only on the intellect but also upon intuition and spiritual powers, we will then be aware we are moving into a future in which our dead mineral body will work towards becoming one that is alive. And our science must lead the way, must prepare for what has to happen with the bodily essence in the future. In the near future, it must itself develop into something which has life in itself,recognise the life inherent in the earth for what it is. For in a deeper sense it is true, it is the thoughts of man that prepare the future. As an old Indian aphorism rightly says: What you think today, that you will be tomorrow.

The very being of the world springs out of living thought; not from dead matter. What outward matter is, is a consequence of living thought, just as ice is a consequence of water; the material world is, as it were, frozen thoughts. We must dissolve it back again into its higher elements, because we grasp life in thought. If we are able to lead the mineral up into life, if we transform [it into] the thoughts of the whole of human nature, then we will have succeeded, our science will have become a science of the living and not of dead matter. We shall raise thereby the lowest principle [of man]—at first in our understanding, and later also in reality—into the next sphere. And thus we shall raise each member of man's nature—the etheric and the astral included—one stage higher.

What man formerly used to be, we call, in theosophical terminology, the three Elementary Kingdoms [See the chart at the end of the notes to Lecture 10]. These preceded the Mineral Kingdom in which we live today; that is, the Kingdom to which our science restricts itself, and in which our physical body lives. The three Elementary Kingdoms are bygone stages [of evolution]. The three Higher Kingdoms—the Plant Kingdom, the Animal Kingdom and the Human Kingdom—which will develop themselves out of the Mineral Kingdom, are as yet only at a rudimentary stage.

The lowest principle in man, [the physical body,] must indeed still pass through these three kingdoms, just as it is at present passing through the Mineral Kingdom. Just as today man lives in the Mineral Kingdom with his physical nature, so in the future he will live in the Plant Kingdom, and then rise to still higher Kingdoms. Today with our physical nature we are in a transitional stage between the Mineral and Plant Kingdoms, with our etheric nature in transition from the Plant Kingdom to the Animal Kingdom, and with our astral nature in transition from the Animal Kingdom to the Human Kingdom. And finally, we extend beyond the three Kingdoms into the Divine Kingdom, with that part which we have in the Sphere of Wisdom, where we extend in our own nature beyond the astral.

Thus man is engaged in an ascent. But this is not brought about by any outer contrivance or construction, but by the living self which is awakened in us; which does not use mere outward building stones, but works in a creative and growing way. This force of life must enter into evolution and must first take hold of man's innermost being; his religious life must be gripped by living forces. Therefore what the Sons of Cain did for the lower members of man's nature during the Old Covenant was a kind of preparation, and what the prophets, the guardians of the Ark of the Covenant, did was like a prophetic forecast of the future. The Divine should now descend into the Ark of the Covenant, into the soul, so that it may itself dwell in the Temple as Holy of Holies.

Adam, the first man, was already endowed, from the Tree of Life, with these living forces of metamorphosis and transformation, the creatively working forces that re-shape Nature. But [these forces] were entrusted to those not engaged in the work of outward building, to the Sons of God, the sons of Abel and Seth. Through Christianity, these forces should now become common property; the two streams should unite together. And it is basically a Christian attitude today which holds that nothing external, no temple, no house, no social institution, ought to be created, that is not red hot with inner life, with the life-giving force rather than the mineral force that can only manipulate things.

The first attempt which was made to guide the lower nature of man to a higher stage was Solomon's Temple, as we have seen. The pentagon was to be seen at the entrance as the great symbol, for man was to strive towards the fifth principle [of his nature]; that is to say, human nature had to raise itself up from the lower principles to the higher, each member [of man's being] was to be ennobled.

And here we come to the Cross's real meaning, which has led it to acquire such basic and real significance as a symbol of Christianity. What is the Cross? There are three Kingdoms towards which mankind is striving—the Plant Kingdom, the Animal Kingdom and the Human Kingdom. Today man finds his reality in the Mineral Kingdom, to which plants, animals and man belong. You should see it as it is meant in all creeds of wisdom, that man as a being of soul and spirit is a part of the universal soul, the world soul as Giordano Bruno, for example, called it.³ Perhaps the individual soul is like a drop in the world soul which we can imagine as a great ocean. Now Plato said about this, that the world soul has been crucified on the world body.⁴

The world soul, as it expresses itself in man, is spread out over the Mineral Kingdom. It must raise itself above this, and evolve upwards to the three higher Kingdoms. Hence it must become incorporated in the Plant, Animal and Human Kingdoms during the next three Rounds. The fourth Round is nothing else than the incorporation of the human soul into the Mineral Kingdom, the fifth Round into the Plant Kingdom, the sixth into the Animal Kingdom, and finally the seventh Round is the embodiment of man into the Human Kingdom proper, in which man will become wholly an image of the Godhead. Until then man has to take the world body as his sheath three times.

If we take a look at mankind's future, it presents itself to us as threefold materiality—vegetable, animal and human. This human [substance] is not the same, however, as the substantiality we have today; for the latter is mineral, since man has indeed so far only arrived at the mineral cycle [in his evolution]. Only when the lowest Kingdom has [become] the Human Kingdom, when there are no more lower beings, when all beings have been redeemed by man through the force of his own life, then he will have arrived in the seventh Round, where God rests, because man himself creates. Then will have come the seventh Day of Creation, in which man will have taken on the likeness of God. These are the stages in the story of creation.

Now plant, animal and man, as they stand before us today, are only the germ of what they are to become. The plant of today is only a symbolical indication of something which is to appear in the next human evolutionary cycle in greater glory and clarity. And when man has overcome and stripped off animality, he will have become something of which today he is only a hint. Thus the Plant, Animal and Human Kingdoms are the three material kingdoms through which man has to pass; they are to be world body, and the soul has to be crucified on this world body.

Be clear from now on about the respective positions of plant, animal and man. The plant is the precise counterpart of man. There is a very deep and significant meaning in our conceiving the plant as the exact counterpart of man, and man as the inverse of plant nature. Outer science does not concern itself with such matters; it takes things as they present themselves to the outer senses. Science connected with theosophy, however, considers the meaning of things in their connection with all the rest of evolution. For, as Goethe says,⁵ each thing must be seen only as a parable.

The plant has its roots in the earth and unfolds its leaves and blooms to the sun. At present the sun has in itself the force which was once united with the earth. The sun has of course separated itself from our earth. Thus the entire sun forces are something with which our earth was at one time permeated; the sun forces then lived in the earth. Today the plant is still searching for those times when the sun forces were still united with the earth, by exposing its flowering system to those forces. The sun forces are the [same as those which work as] etheric forces in the plants. By presenting its reproductive organs to the sun, the plant shows its deep affinity with it; its reproductive principle is occultly linked with the sun forces. The head of the plant, [the root] which is embedded in the darkness of the earth,is on the other hand similarly akin to the earth. Earth and sun are the two polar opposites in evolution.

Man is the inverse of the plant; [the plant] has its generative organs turned towards the sun and its head pointing downwards. With man it is exactly the opposite; he carries his head on high, orientated towards the higher worlds in order to receive the spirit—his generative organs are directed downwards. The animal stands halfway between plant and man. It has made a half turn, forming, so to speak, a crosspiece to the line of direction of both plant and man. The animal carries its backbone horizontally, thus cutting across the line formed by plant and man, to make a cross. Imagine to yourselves the Plant Kingdom growing downward, the Human Kingdom upward, and the Animal Kingdom thus horizontally; then you have formed the Cross from the Plant, Animal and Human Kingdoms.

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That is the symbol of the Cross.

It represents the three Kingdoms of Life, into which man has to enter. The Plant, Animal and Human Kingdoms are the next three material Kingdoms [to be entered by man]. The whole evolves out of the Mineral Kingdom; this is the basis today- The Animal Kingdom forms a kind of dam between the Plant and Human Kingdoms, and the plant is a kind of mirror image of man. This ties up with human life—what lives in man physically—finding its closest kinship with what lives in the plant. It would take many lectures to confirm that thoroughly; today I can only hint at it. When man wants to maintain his physical life activity, he can best do so with a plant diet, since he would then be consuming what originally had an affinity with the physical life activity of the earth. The sun is the bearer of the life forces, and the plant is what grows in response to the sun forces. And man must unite what lives in the plant with his own life forces. Thus his food-stuffs are, occultly, the same as the plant. The Animal Kingdom acts as a dam, a drawing back, thereby interposing itself crosswise against the development process, in order to begin a new flow.

Man and plant, while set against each other, are mutually akin; whereas the animal—and all that comes to expression in the astral body is the animal—is a crossing of the two principles of life. The human etheric body will provide the basis, at a higher stage, for the immortal man, who will no longer be subject to death. The etheric body at present still dissolves with the death of the human being. But the more man perfects and purifies himself from within, the nearer will he get to permanence, the less will he perish. Every labour undertaken for the etheric body contributes towards; man's immortality. In this sense it is true that man will gain more mastery of immortality, the more evolution takes place naturally, the more it is directed towards the forces of life—which does not mean towards animal sexuality and passion.

Animality is a current which breaks across human life it was a retardation, necessary for a turning point in the stream of life. Man had to combine with animality for a while, because this turning point had to take place. But he must free himself from it again and return again to the stream of life.

At the beginning of our human incarnations on earth we were endowed with the force of life. That is symbolically expressed in the legend, where Adam's son, Seth, took the scion from the Tree of Life; this was then further cultivated by the Sons of God, [which expressed] that threefold human nature, which had to be ennobled.

After that, Moses cut his rod from this wood of life. This rod of Moses is nothing else than the external law. But what is external law?

External law is present when someone who has to erect An external building has a plan—that is, a systematic scheme on paper—so that the outward building stones can be shaped and fitted together according to the plan. Thus, the law underlying the plan of a state is external law. Mankind is under Moses' rod. And anyone who follows a moral code out of fear or in hope of reward, is only following the external law. Moreover, whoever looks at science only in an external way, is only following external law; for what else can there [then] be in it but external laws! All the laws we are acquainted with in science are such external laws; through them, however, we will never find that way through to higher human nature, but will only follow the law of the Old Covenant, which is the Rod of Moses. However, this external law should be a model for the inner law. Man must learn inwardly to follow law. This inner law must become for man the impulse of life; out of the inner law he must learn to follow external law. One does not make the inner law reality by concocting a plan; instead one has to build the Temple out of inner impulse, so that the soul streams forth in the work of joining the stones together. He who lives in the inner law is not the one who merely follows the laws of the state, but he to whom they are the impulse of his life, because his soul is immersed in them. And it is not he who follows a moral code out of fear or because of reward who is a moral person, but he who follows it because he loves it.

As long as mankind was not ripe for following the law inwardly, as long as man was under a yoke, and the Rod of Moses was present, in the law, so long would the law lie in the Ark of the Covenant; until the Pauline principle, the principle of grace came to man, giving him the possibility of becoming free from the law. The profundity of the Pauline doctrine lies in its making a distinction between law and grace. When law becomes inflamed with love, when love has united with the law, that then is grace. That is how the Pauline distinction between law and grace is to be understood.

Now we can follow the legend of the Cross still further. The wood was used as a bridge between two riverbanks. because it did not suit as a pillar in Solomon's Temple. This was a preparation. The Ark of the Covenant was in the Temple, but the Word-become-Flesh was not yet there. The wood of the Cross was laid as a bridge across a stream; only the Queen of Sheba recognised the worth of the wood for the temple, which should live in the consciousness of the soul of all humanity. Now the same wood was used for the construction of the Cross on which the Redeemer hung. He who unites the two earlier currents [of evolution], who allows the worldly and the spiritual to flow into each other, the Christ, is Himself joined to the living Cross. That is how He can carry the wood of the Cross as something [external] which He carries on His back. He is Himself united with the wood of the bridge, and can therefore take the dead wood upon Himself.

Man is today drawn into higher nature. Formerly he lived in lower nature. In the Christian sense he now lives in higher nature, and the Cross—the lower nature—he carries forward as something alien, through his inner living forces. Religion now becomes the living force in the world, now the life in external nature ceases, the Cross becomes entirely wood. The outer body [of man] now becomes a vehicle for the inner living force. There the great mystery consummates itself: the Cross is taken on [man's] back.

Our great poet Goethe presented the idea of the bridge in a beautiful and significant way in his ‘Fairy Story of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily,’⁶ where he has a bridge being built, by the snake laying itself across the river as a living bridge. All the more advanced initiates use this same symbol for one and the same thing.

Thus we have become acquainted with the deep inner meaning of the holy legend of the Cross. We have seen how the revolution was prepared for, which Christianity brought about, and which must fulfil itself more and more as time goes on by Christianising the world. We have seen how the Cross, inasmuch as it is the image of the three external bodies, dies; how it is only able to form an external union between the three lower and the three higher Kingdoms, between the two banks divided by the stream—the wood of the Cross could not become a pillar in Solomon's Temple—until man recognises it as his own particular symbol. Only then, when he sacrifices himself, makes his own body into the Temple, and becomes able to carry the Cross, will the merging of the two streams be made possible.

That is why the Christian churches have the symbol of the Cross in their foundations; thereby expressing the secretion of the living Cross in the outward edifice of the Temple. However, these two streams, the living divine stream on the one hand, and the worldly mineral stream on the other, have become united in the Redeemer hanging on the Cross, where the higher principles are in the Redeemer Himself, and the lower ones in the Cross. And henceforth this connection must now become organic and living, as the Apostle Paul expressed particularly deeply. Without [a knowledge of] what has been discussed today, the writings of the Apostle Paul cannot be understood. It was clear to him that the Old Covenant, which creates an antithesis between man and the law, must come to an end. Only when man unites himself with the law, takes it upon his back, carries it, will there no longer be any contradiction between man's inner nature and the external law. Then that which Christianity seeks to achieve, is achieved.

‘With the law sin came into the world.’⁷ That is a profound saying of Paul's. When is there sin in the world? Only when there is a law which can be broken. But when the law becomes so united with human nature that man only does good, then there can be no [more] sin. Man only contradicts the law of the Cross as long as it does not live within him, but is something external. Therefore Paid sees the Christ on the Cross as the conquest of law and the conquest of sin. To hang on the Cross means to be subjected to the law—and that is a curse. Sin and the law belong together in the Old Covenant, the law and love belong together in the New Covenant. It is a negative law which is involved in the Old Covenant; but the law of the New Covenant is a living positive law. He who united the Old Covenant with His own life is the One who has overcome it. He has at the same time sanctified it.

That is what is meant by those words of Paul which are to be found in the Epistle to the Galatians, Chapter 3:11–13.: ‘But that no man is justified by the law in the sight of God, is evident, for the just shall live by faith and the law is not of faith, but the man that doeth them shall live in them. Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us, for it is written: Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree.’

With the word ‘tree’ [literally ‘wood’ in the German Bible] Paul connects the concept with which we have been dealing today. We must indeed keep penetrating deeper into what the great initiates have said. We do not come closer to Christianity by adapting it to what might be termed our demands, by adapting it to the contemporary materialist judgments that deny anything higher—but by continually raising ourselves further into spiritual heights. For Christianity was born of initiation and we shall only understand it and be able to believe that it contains infinite depths, if we abandon the view that we have to bring Christianity nearer to contemporary ideas; but instead raise our anti-spiritual materialist thinking back again to Christianity. The contemporary view must raise itself from what is mineral and dead to what is living and spiritual, if it is to understand Christianity.

I have presented these views so as to arrive at a conception of the New Jerusalem.

Answer to a question^†

Question: Is the legend very old?

Answer (1): This legend existed at the time of the mysteries, but it was not written down. The mysteries of Antioch were Adonis mysteries. In them was celebrated the Crucifixion, the Entombment and the Resurrection as an outer image of initiation. The mourning of the women at the Cross already appeared there; this appeared to us again in [the persons] of Mary and Mary Magdalen. This links up with a version, similar to that in [this] legend, which is also to be found in the Apis and Mithras mysteries and again in the Osiris mysteries. What was still apocalyptic there, is fulfilled in Christianity. The old apocalypses change into new legends, in the same way that John portrays the future in his Revelations.

Answer (2): The legend is historically medieval, but was previously recorded in all its completeness by the Gnostics. The further course of the Cross is given there. Moreover, the medieval version also contains indications of this; the medieval legends indicate the way to the mysteries less clearly; but we can trace them all back. This legend is connected with the Adonis mysteries, with the Antioch legend, in which the Crucifixion, Entombment and Resurrection become an outward image of inner initiation. The mourning women also appear there, and there is a connected version which is very similar to the Osiris legend. Everything that is apocalyptic in these legends is fulfilled Christianity. The Queen of Sheba sees deeper and is versed in the true wisdom.

• 1 . Parts of this legend are to be found in The Golden Legend or Lives of the Saints, a collection of legends from the thirteenth century by Jacobus de Voragine, translated into English by William Caxton (edited by F.S. Ellis, Temple Classics, 1939). In this the death of Adam is described and how he sent ‘Seth his son into Paradise for to fetch the oil of mercy, where he received certain grains of the fruit of the tree of mercy by an angel ...
  
  ‘And then he laid the grains or kernels under his father's tongue and buried him in the vale of Hebron; and out of his mouth grew three trees of the three grains, of which trees the cross that our Lord suffered his passion on was made ...’ In another place in the same work we are told more about the history of the wood of the cross. Under the section headed ‘The Invention of the Holy Cross’ it is stated:
  
  ‘... it is read in the Gospel of Nicodemus that, when Adam waxed sick, Seth his son went to the gate of Paradise terrestrial for to get the oil of mercy for to anoint withal his father's body ...
  
  ‘In another place it is read that the angel brought him a branch, and commanded him to plant it in the Mount of Lebanon. Yet find we in another place that he gave him of the tree that Adam ate of, and said to him that when that bare fruit he should be guerished and all whole. When Seth came again lie found his father dead and planted this tree upon his grave, and it endured there unto the time of Solomon. And because he saw that it was fair, he did hew it down and set it in his house named Saltus. And when the Queen of Sheba came to visit Solomon she worshipped this tree, because she said the Saviour of all the world should be hanged thereon ...
  
  ‘Then, after this history, the cross by which we be saved came of the tree by which we were damned.’
  
  This extract of The Golden Legend by William Caxton differs from the German version in that some details given by Caxton are omitted in the German and vice versa. The fact that the tree was not found suitable for the building and was used as a bridge over which the Queen of Sheba was to pass is not mentioned in the English text.
  
  In Bilder Okkulter Siegel und Säulen. Der Munchner Kongress, Pfingsten 1907, und seine Auswirkungen, Bibl. 284, there is a comprehensive note dealing with the source of the Temple Legend. It is there said that, according to the research of Otto Zockler (Das Kreuz Christi, chapter headed: ‘Medieval Legends concerning the Wood of the Cross,’ Gutersloh 1875—preserved in the University Library, Basle) the legend about the three seeds from the Tree of Life forms part of a complicated series of legends from the twelfth century onwards. The earliest literary mention of Adam being buried on Golgotha is quoted by the Alexandrian Church Father, Origen, from a tradition out of the second century, to which was added the tradition of Seth's journey to Paradise which is recorded in the third century in the Nicodemus Gospel, which originally contained an account of the fetching of the Oil of Mercy for the healing of Seth's sick father, Adam. It was only in later centuries that the genealogical connection between the wood of the Tree of Paradise and the Cross of Christ was established in its various forms.
  
  This legend, including the elaborations concerning Seth's journey to Paradise for the three seeds, was freely quoted by Rudolf Steiner on many occasions including: The present lecture on 29th May 1905, lectures in Leipzig on 15th December 1906 (Bibl. 97), in Berlin on 17th December 1906 (Bibl. 96), in Munich on 21st May 1907 (Bibl. 284), in Cassel on 29th June 1907 and in Basle on 25th November 1907 (both in Bibl. 100) and in Dornach on 19th December 1915 (Bibl. 165).
  
  In his lecture in Cassel, The Golden Legend was characterised as having provided a subject for occult instruction since the most ancient times and, referring to Seth, it interprets his mission as of one who could see ‘into the end times, when the harmony between the two principles of mankind would be re-established.’ By the two principles is meant the two trees pertaining to the red and purple blood which are represented in the two pillars of the Temple.
  
  As is evident from the interpretation of the legend by spiritual science the pictures which it presents are symbolic of the Fourth Degree in the Rosicrucian initiation, which is characterised by the ‘Finding of the Philosopher's Stone’ and is also known as the guldene, or ‘golden degree.’ This gives us an esoteric explanation of why it was usually referred to by Rudolf Steiner as The Golden Legend.
  
  There is a much longer and more detailed version of this legend in an old Cornish legend (The Ancient Cornish Drama, edited and translated by Edwin Norris, Oxford University, 1859).
  
  In this version there is not only the account of the fetching of the Oil of Mercy by Seth, but also of the attempt by Solomon to incorporate the wood from this tree into the Temple and its final rejection.
  
  The portion of this drama relating to the Oil of Mercy is also to be found in Lyra Celtica, an anthology of Celtic poetry edited by E. A. Sharp and J. Matthay Oohn Grant, Edinburgh, 1932).
• 2 . Also, according to a mystic Hebrew source, the rod of Moses inscribed with the unutterable name of God is nothing else than the Tree of Life. In the Midrasch Wojoscha (the smaller Midrasch commentary on the later legends of the Old Testament) it is said: ‘I (Moses) asked her (Zippora) where he (Jithro) obtained this tree? She answered: It is the rod which the Holy One, Blessed may He be! created on the sabbath eve after having created His world. The Holy One, Blessed may He be! handed it to the first man, who handed it to Chanoch, who handed it to Noa, who handed it to Sem, who handed it to Abraham, who handed it to Jacob, who brought it with him to Egypt and gave it to Joseph his son. When Joseph died, the Egyptians plundered his house and brought this roc to Pharoah's palace. My father Jithro was one of Pharoah's great astrologers, he saw the rod, conceived a desire for it, stole it and brought it to his own house. On this rod was inscribed the unutterable name of God and the ten plagues which the Holy One, Blessed may He be! would one day cause to fall on the Egyptians in the land of Egypt ... And how many days and how many years did this rod lie already in my father's house until the day when he took it in his hand, went out into the garden and planted it in the ground. When he returned to the garden to fetch it he found that it had already sprouted and grown blossoms.’ (Quoted from Hans Ludwig Held: ‘Von Golem und Shem.’ from the periodical: Das Reich, January 1917).
• 3 . Philotheus Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) De rerum Principiis Elementis et Causis, Dialogue: ‘Universal reasoning is the most inward, real and individual faculty and a potential part of the World Soul.’
• 4 . See note 10 to the preceding lecture.
• 5 . Second part of Faust, end chorus: ‘All things transitory are but a likeness.’
• 6 . Goethe: Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily, Floris Books, 1979. See also Goethe's Standard of the Soul as illustrated in Faust and in the Fairy Story of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily, Anthroposophical Publishing Company, London, 1925; and Goethe's Secret Revelation and the Riddle of Faust, Rudolf Steiner Publishing Company, London, 1933.
• 7 . ‘With the law sin came into the world.’
  The Epistle of Paul to the Romans, Chapter 5, verse 13 and Chapter 8, verse 2.
• †. Text (1) is taken from Seiler's notes, text (2) from those of Reebstein.

[ 1 ] Numerous facts lead us to perceive that the philosophical wisdom of the Greeks stems from the same basic conviction as does mystical cognition. We can understand the great philosophers only when we approach them with the feelings gained from observation of the Mysteries. How reverently Plato speaks of the “secret teachings” in the Phaedo: “And it appears that those men who established the Mysteries were not unenlightened, but in reality had a hidden meaning when they said long ago that whoever goes uninitiated and unsanctified to the other world will lie in the mire, but he who arrives there initiated and purified will dwell with the gods. For as they say in the Mysteries, ‘the thyrsus-bearers are many, but the mystics few;’ and these mystics are, I believe, those who have been true philosophers. And I in my life have, so far as I could, left nothing undone, and have striven in every way to make myself one of them.”¹⁰—Initiation can be discussed in this way only by someone who has placed his own striving for wisdom entirely at the service of the conviction engendered by initiation. And there is no doubt that a bright light is cast upon the words of the great Greek philosophers when they are illuminated by the Mysteries.

[ 2 ] A saying which has been handed down about Heraclitus of Ephesus (535–475 B.C.) gives a clear indication of his relationship to the essence of the Mysteries, saying that his thoughts are “a path which is difficult to travel,” that anyone who approaches them uninitiated will find only “obscurity and darkness,” but that on the other hand they are “brighter than sunlight” for the person who is introduced to them by a mystic.¹¹ When it is said of his book that he placed the latter in the temple of Artemis,¹² this means that he could be understood only by initiates. (Historical evidence of Heraclitus' relationship to the Mysteries has already been contributed by Edmund Pfleiderer. See his book, Die Philosophie des Heraklit von Ephesus im Lichte der Mysterienidee, Berlin 1886.) Heraclitus was called “The Obscure” because only the light of the Mysteries provided the key to his conceptions.

[ 3 ] Heraclitus strikes us as a personality with the most serious attitude toward life. If we know how to conjure up his appearance, we see in his physiognomy that he bore within him the most intimate experiences of cognition which he knew could only be indicated, not expressed, by words. From the soil of such a conviction sprang his famous saying, “Everything is in a state of flux,” which Plutarch interprets in the following words: “It is impossible to step twice in the same river nor is it possible to lay hold twice of any mortal substance in a permanent state, by the suddenness and swiftness of the change in it there comes dispersion and at another time, a gathering together; or rather, not at another time nor later, but at the same instant it both settles into its place and forsakes its place; it is coming and going.”¹³ The man who thinks in this way has seen through the nature of transitory things. He has felt urged to characterize in the sharpest words the essence of transitoriness. Such a characterization cannot be made unless the transitory is measured against the eternal. In particular this characterization cannot be extended to man unless his innermost being has been penetrated. Heraclitus does extend this characterization to man: “Living and dead are the same and so are waking and sleeping, youth and age. For the one in changing becomes the other, and the other, changing, again becomes the one.”¹⁴ Full cognition of the illusory character of the lower personality is expressed in this sentence. He speaks of this even more forcibly: “There is life and death in our life, just as in our death.” What does this mean except that life can be valued more highly than death only when seen from the point of view of the transitory. Death is decay to make room for new life, but the eternal lives in the new life as in the old. The same eternal appears in transitory life as in death. When man has grasped this eternal he looks upon death with the same feelings as he looks upon life. Only if he is unable to awaken this eternal within himself does life have a special value for him. The sentence, “Everything is in a state of flux” may be trotted out a thousand times, but if it is not spoken with a feeling for this content it is void of meaning. Cognition of eternal creation is valueless if it does not cancel out our dependence upon earthly creation. Heraclitus means to repudiate the lust for life which presses after transitory things with the saying, “How shall we say of our daily life: ‘we are,’ when we know that from the standpoint of the eternal: ‘we are and we are not.’” (Heraclitus, Fragment No. 81)¹⁵ “But Hades is the same as Dionysus,” states another of the Fragments of Heraclitus.¹⁶ Dionysus, the god of lust for life, of germination and growth, to whom the Dionysian festivals were dedicated, is for Heraclitus the same as Hades, the god of annihilation and destruction. Only one who sees life within death and death within life, and in both the eternal which is infinitely above life and death, his gaze alone can behold in the right light the disadvantages and advantages of existence. Then the disadvantages find their justification, for the eternal lives in them also. What they appear to be from the standpoint of the limited lower life is only illusory: “For men to get all they wish is not the better thing. It is disease that makes health a pleasant thing; evil, good; hunger, surfeit; and toil, rest.” “Sea water is the most pure and the most polluted; for fishes it is drinkable and salutary, but for men it is undrinkable and deleterious.”¹⁷ Heraclitus intends primarily to point out not the transitory quality of earthly things, but the splendor and majesty of the eternal. Heraclitus spoke vigorously against Homer, Hesiod and the scholars of his day. He wished to point out the manner of their thought which clings only to the transitory. He did not want the gods furnished with attributes taken from the transitory world. And he could not respect as the highest a science which investigated the laws of the growth and decay of things. For him the eternal speaks through the transitory. He has a deeply significant symbol for this eternal: “The harmony of the world is of opposite tensions, as is that of the lyre or bow.”¹⁸ How much is contained in this pictured Unity is attained by the striving of forces in opposite directions and the harmonization of these diverging forces. One tone contradicts another, yet together they achieve harmony. If we apply this to the spiritual world we have the thought of Heraclitus: “Immortals take on mortality, mortals immortality; death is the eternal life of mortals, earthly life the death of immortals.”¹⁹

[ 4 ] To cling to the transitory with his cognition is the original fault of man. Thereby he turns away from the eternal. Through this, life becomes a danger to him. What happens to him comes to pass through life. But it loses its sting when he no longer values life as absolute. Then his innocence is restored to him. It is as though he could return from the so-called seriousness of life to childhood. How much that is play to the child is taken in all seriousness by the adult! The one who knows, however, becomes like a child. “Serious” values lose their worth when seen from the standpoint of the eternal. Life then appears as a game. Therefore Heraclitus says, “Eternity is a child at play; it is the dominion of a child.”²⁰ Where does the original fault lie? It consists in taking with the utmost seriousness those things to which this seriousness should not be attached. God has descended into the world of things. Whoever receives these things without God receives them seriously as the “Tombs of God.” He should play with them like a child and employ his seriousness to draw out of them the God who sleeps spellbound within.

[ 5 ] Burning, yes, scorching is the effect which contemplation of the eternal has upon ordinary assumptions about things. The spirit dissolves the thoughts of sensuality; it melts them. It is a consuming fire. This is the higher sense of the thought of Heraclitus, that fire is the archetypal substance of all things. Certainly this thought is to be taken first in the sense of an ordinary physical exploration of the phenomena of the world. But no one understands Heraclitus who does not think about him in the way that Philo, who lived at the time of the birth of Christianity, thought about the laws of the Bible. He says, “There are people who take written laws only as pictures of spiritual teaching. They search out the latter with great care and despise the former. I can only censure such people for they should take care of both: the cognition of the esoteric sense and the observation of the exoteric.”²¹—We pervert the thoughts of Heraclitus if we argue whether by his concept of fire he meant physical fire, or whether for him fire was only a symbol of the eternal spirit which dissolves and reforms material things. He meant both and neither, because for him the spirit also lived in ordinary fire. The force physically active in fire lives on a higher plane in the human soul, melting sense-bound cognition in its furnace and allowing contemplation of the eternal to emerge from it.

[ 6 ] Heraclitus in particular may easily be misunderstood. He allows strife to be the father of things,²² but to him it is the father only of “things,” not of the eternal. If there were no polarities in the world, if the most manifold conflicting interests did not exist, the world of growth would not exist, nor would the world of decay. What reveals itself, however, in this, what is diffused in it, is not strife; it is harmony. Just because strife is in all things, the spirit of the sage is to move over all things like fire, transforming them into harmony. This point throws light on one of the great thoughts of Heraclitean wisdom. What is the personal essence of man? The above passage contains the answer of Heraclitus. Man is a mixture of conflicting elements, into which God is descended. This is the condition in which he finds himself. Further, he becomes aware of the spirit within him, the spirit which is rooted in the eternal. This spirit, however, is born for him personally out of the conflict of the elements. This spirit should also pacify the elements. In man, nature creates beyond herself. It is the same unique force which has begotten the conflict, the mixture, which, filled with wisdom, is to remove this conflict again. There we have the eternal duality which lives in man, the eternal contradiction in him between temporal and eternal. Through the eternal he has become something quite definite, and out of this he should create something higher. He is both dependent and independent. He can participate in the eternal spirit which he beholds only to the extent of the mixture the eternal spirit has produced in him. Just because of this he is called upon to form the eternal out of the temporal. The spirit works in him. But it works in him in a special way. It works out of the temporal. It is the peculiarity of the human soul that something temporal works like something eternal, that it leavens and strengthens like an eternal quality. This makes the human soul similar to a god and a worm at the same time. Because of this man stands midway between God and animal. This leavening and strengthening force in him is his daemonic element. This is what strives beyond him from within. Heraclitus points to this in a striking way: “Man's daemon is his destiny.”²³ (Daemon is meant here in the Greek sense. In the modern sense we would say spirit.) Thus for Heraclitus what lives in man extends itself far beyond the personal. This personal element is the bearer of a daemonic element. This element is not confined to one personality and the death and birth of the personality have no significance for it. What connection has this daemonic element with what in the form of personality comes into existence and decays? The personal element is only a form of appearance for the daemonic. The bearer of such cognition looks forward and backward beyond himself. That he experiences the daemonic element in himself is to him evidence of his own immortality. Now he may no longer ascribe to this daemonic element the single task of filling out his personality. For the personality can be only one form of appearance of the daemonic element. The daemon cannot confine itself within one personality. It has the force to animate many personalities. It can go from personality to personality. This premise of Heraclitus gives rise as a matter of course to the great thought of reincarnation. Not, however, to the thought alone, but to the experience of reincarnation. The thought is only the preparation for the experience. Whoever becomes aware of the daemonic element within himself does not discover it to be an innocent primary element. He finds that it has characteristics. How has it come by these? Why have I tendencies? Because other personalities have already worked upon my daemon. And what will become of the effect which I produce on the daemon, if I may not assume that its task is exhausted in my personality? I prepare for a later personality. Something which is not the same as a divinity, something which reaches beyond me, introduces itself between me and the cosmic unity. My daemon introduces itself. As my today is but the result of yesterday, and my tomorrow will only be the result of my today, so my life is the continuation of another, and will be the basis for another. As physical man looks backward on numerous yesterdays and forward to numerous tomorrows, so the soul of the sage beholds numerous lives in the past and numerous lives in the future. What I acquired yesterday in the way of thoughts and accomplishments, I use today. Is it not so with life? Do not men set foot upon the horizon of existence with the most varied faculties? Whence comes this variety? Does it come out of nothingness?—Our natural science congratulates itself on banishing the miracle from our conceptions of organic life. David Friedrich Strauss (see Alter und Neuer Glaube, Old and New Faith) considers it a great achievement of modern times that we no longer think of a perfect organic creature being miraculously created out of nothingness. We grasp perfection when we are able to explain it as an evolution out of imperfection. The structure of the ape is no longer a miracle if we may assume, as ancestors of the ape, primitive fish which have gradually transformed themselves. Let us agree to accept for the spirit what seems to us right with regard to nature. Is the perfected spirit to have the same origin as the imperfected spirit? Is Goethe to have the same disposition as any Hottentot? The spirit of Goethe cannot have the same spiritual predispositions as an aborigine, any more than a fish has the same predisposition as an ape. The spiritual ancestry of Goethe's spirit is different from that of the aborigine. The spirit has grown like the body. The spirit in Goethe has more predecessors than that in the aborigine. Let us take the teaching of reincarnation in this sense. Then we shall no longer find it “unscientific.” On the contrary, what is found in the soul will then be explained in the right way. What is given will not be accepted as a miracle. That I can write is the result of the fact that I have learned to do so. One who has never held a pen in his hand cannot sit down and write. But someone or other is supposed to have a “spark of genius” in some purely miraculous way. No, this “spark of genius” must also be acquired; it must be learned. If it makes its appearance in a personality, we call it a spiritual element. But first this spiritual element also had to learn; in an earlier life it has acquired for itself the “ability” it has in a later one.

[ 7 ] In this way and no other did Heraclitus and the Greek sages conceive the thought of eternity. For them there was no question of the continuance of the actual personality. Let us refer to a saying of Empedocles (490–430 B.C.). Of those who regard something as a miracle, he says:

[ 8 ] “Fools! for they have no far-reaching thoughts—²⁴
Who deem that what before was not comes into being,
Or that aught can perish and be utterly destroyed.
For it cannot be that aught can arise from what in no way is,
And it is impossible and unheard of that what is should perish;
For it will always be, wherever one may keep putting it.
A man wise in such matters would never surmise in his heart
That as long as mortals live what they call their life,
So long they are, and suffer good and ill;
While before they were formed and after they have been dissolved
They are just nothing at all. ”

[ 9 ] The Greek sage did not raise the question whether there is an eternal element in man; he only asked of what does this eternal consist and how can man cherish and care for it within himself. For it was clear to him from the beginning that man lives as a creature midway between the earthly and the divine. There was no question of the divine existing outside and beyond earthly things. The divine lives in man; it lives there, but in a human way. It is the force which urges man to make himself ever more and more divine. Only a person who thinks in this way can say with Empedocles,

[ 10 ] “When, released from the body, you ascend to the free ether,
You will become an immortal god, escaping death.”²⁵

[ 11 ] What can happen to a human life from such a point of view? It can be initiated into the ordered cycle of the eternal. Forces must be present in it which are not brought into development by a purely natural life. And this life could pass by unused if these forces remained lying fallow. It was the task of the Mysteries to open them up, thereby likening the human to the divine. And the Greek sages also set themselves this task. Thus we understand Plato's words: “Whoever goes uninitiated and unsanctified to the other world will lie in the mire, but he who arrives there initiated and purified will dwell with the gods.”²⁶ Here we are dealing with an idea of immortality, the significance of which is determined within the whole cosmos. Everything man undertakes in order to awaken the eternal within himself he does in order to heighten the existence-value of the cosmos. As a cognizant being one is not an idle observer of the whole cosmos when he pictures to himself what would equally well be there without him. His power of cognition is a higher natural creative force. What lights up in him spiritually is a divinity which was spellbound before, and which without his cognition would have to lie fallow and wait for another deliverer. Therefore the human personality does not live within itself and for itself; it lives for the cosmos. Life extends far beyond individual existence when it is regarded in this way. Within the framework of such a conception we can understand sentences such as the following by Pindar, which gives us a glimpse of the eternal: “Happy is he who has seen those Mysteries ere he passes beneath the earth. He knows the truth about life's ending, and he knows that its first seeds were of God's giving.”²⁷

[ 12 ] The proud physiognomy and solitary manner of sages like Heraclitus are understandable. They could say proudly of themselves that much was revealed to them, for they did not ascribe their knowledge to their transitory personality at all, but to the eternal daemon within them. Their pride was of necessity stamped with the attributes of humility and modesty, which are expressed in the words: All knowledge of transitory things is in eternal flux like these transitory things themselves. Heraclitus calls the eternal cosmos a game; he could also call it the most profoundly serious thing. But the word serious has become worn out through being applied to earthly experiences. The game of the eternal grants man a security in life of which he is deprived by the seriousness arising out of the transitory.

[ 13 ] Another form of world-conception, different from that of Heraclitus, grew from the same foundation in the essence of the Mysteries, within a community founded by Pythagoras in lower Italy in the sixth century before Christ. The Pythagoreans saw the foundation of things in numbers and figures, whose laws they investigated mathematically. Aristotle says of them, “They were the first to advance the study of mathematics, and having been brought up in it they thought its principles were the principles of all things. Since of these principles numbers are by nature the first, and in numbers they seemed to see many resemblances to the things that exist and come into being—more than in fire and earth and water, such and such a modification of numbers being justice, another being soul and reason, another being opportunity—and similarly almost all other things being numerically expressible; since, again, they saw that the attributes and ratios of numerical scales were expressible in numbers; since, then, all other things seemed in their whole nature to be modeled after numbers, and numbers seemed to be the first things in the whole of nature, they supposed the demands of numbers to be the elements of all things, and the whole heaven to be a musical scale and a number.”²⁸

[ 14 ] The mathematical-scientific observation of natural phenomena must always lead to a kind of Pythagorean conception. If a string of definite length is struck, a certain tone is sent forth. If the string is shortened in definite numerical relationships, other tones come into being. The pitch of these tones can be expressed by numerical relationships. In physics color relationships also are expressed by numbers. When two bodies combine to form one substance this always occurs in such a way that of one substance one quite definite mass, expressible by number, combines with an appropriate one of the other substance. The Pythagoreans directed their observation upon such arrangements of measure and number in nature. Geometric figures also play a similar part in nature. For instance, astronomy is mathematics applied to the heavenly bodies. The point which became important to the thinking life of the Pythagoreans is the fact that man discovers the laws of numbers and figures entirely by himself, through his spiritual activity alone, and that when he looks out into nature the objects follow these laws he has established for himself in his soul. Man formulates for himself the concept of the ellipse; he establishes the laws of the ellipse. And the heavenly bodies move according to the laws he has established. (Of course we are not concerned here with the astronomical conceptions of the Pythagoreans. What could be said of them also applies to the Copernican conceptions in the connection under consideration here.) From this it follows immediately that the functions of the human soul are not a force apart from the rest of the cosmos, but that these functions are the expression of a law-abiding pattern which is interwoven with the cosmos. The Pythagorean said to himself: The senses show material phenomena to man. But they do not show the harmonious patterns which the objects obey. Rather, the spirit of man must first find these harmonious patterns within himself if he wishes to behold them outside in the cosmos. The deeper sense of the cosmos, that which reigns in it as eternal law-abiding necessity, becomes apparent as a present reality in the human soul. In the soul the meaning of the cosmos dawns. This meaning does not lie in what is seen, heard and touched, but in what the soul brings forth from its deep recesses into the light of day. The eternal pattern therefore lies hidden in the depths of the soul. Let us descend into the soul, and we shall find the eternal. God, the eternal cosmic harmony, is within the human soul. The soul is not confined to the physical body enclosed by man's skin. For in the soul are born the patterns according to which the worlds circle in space. The soul is not in the personality. The personality merely provides the organ through which what is interwoven with the cosmos can be expressed. Something of the spirit of Pythagoras is contained in the saying of the Church Father, Gregory of Nyssa: “It is said that human nature by itself is something small and limited, but the Godhead is infinite, and how has the infinite been embraced by something so tiny? And who says that the infinity of the Godhead was enclosed within the bounds of the flesh as in a vessel? For not even in our life is man's spiritual nature enclosed within the bounds of the flesh; on the contrary the physical body is limited by neighboring parts, but the soul expands freely over the whole of creation by means of the activity of thought.”²⁹ The soul is not the personality. The soul belongs to eternity. Taking this point of view, the Pythagorean also had to admit that only “fools” could suppose the qualities of the soul to be exhausted with the personality. For them also it depended upon the awakening of the eternal within the personal. To them cognition was communion with the eternal. The more a man brought this eternal into existence within himself the higher they valued him. The life of their community consisted in fostering this communion with the eternal. In order to lead the members of the community to such communion, the Pythagorean education was established. This education, therefore, was a philosophical initiation. And the Pythagoreans could very well say that by their mode of life they strove toward the same goal as the Mystery cults.

• 10. Plato, Phaedo, 69 C.
• 11. The anonymous epigram reads: “Do not be in too great a hurry to get to the end of Heraclitus the Ephesian's book: the path is hard to travel. Obscurity is there, and darkness devoid of light. But if an initiate be your guide, the path shines brighter than sunlight.” Anth. Pal. Book IX, 540 (Cf. also Diogenes Laertius IX, 16).
• 12. “Heraclitus lays down his book ceremonially in the temple of Artemis. So some people say, he has purposely written it obscurely, so that only the able would approach it.” (Cf. Kranz: Vorsokratische Denker, p. 84.)
• 13. Heraclitus, Fragments 40, 41. Cf. Note 5
• 14. Heraclitus, Fragment 78.
• 15. Heraclitus, Fragment 81.
• 16. Heraclitus, Fragment 127.
• 17. Heraclitus, Fragment 104, 52.
• 18. Heraclitus, Fragment 56 (Cf. 45).
• 19. Heraclitus, Fragment 67.
• 20. Heraclitus, Fragment 79.
• 21. Philo of Alexandria, De Migratione Abrahami, The Migration of Abraham, 89. (see Note 46 below)
• 22. Heraclitus, Fragment 44.
• 23. Heraclitus, Fragment 137.
• 24. Empedocles, Fragments 11, 12, 15, translated by John Burnet in his Early Greek Philosophy, Adam & Charles Black, London, 1952.
• 25. Empedocles, Fragment 112
• 26. Plato, Phaedo, 69 C.
• 27. Pindar, Fragment 137
• 28. Aristotle, Metaphysica A, Book I, Chapter 5.
• 29. Gregory of Nyssa (c 331–c 396), One of the four great Fathers of the Eastern Church, in Oratio catechetica magna, Chapter 10, modern edition edited by Krabinger, Munich, 1838.

[My dear audience!] There are events in the spiritual life of humanity that, once they have come into existence, never lose their significance for a long, long time, indeed for what, in historical estimation, one will be able to call human becoming. These are events that shine far into the future once they have occurred. One of these events is that through which, in the dim and distant past, that law, or perhaps those laws, was given to man, which then inscribed itself so deeply not only in the human soul as such, but also in all the historical development of mankind, on depends that which is not only engraved in stone tablets in legend and history, but which is engraved above all in those brazen tablets whose material is taken from the soul life of humanity itself.

We shall speak today about an event of this kind, which we call the “Ten Commandments” (Ex 20:2-17; Deut 5:6-21). Only from the spiritual-scientific point of view can we understand why these Ten Commandments have had such a decisive significance for the life of all humanity ever since they came into being. Without exploring the origin and significance of these Ten Commandments from the depths of spiritual life, we still cannot understand their survival and significance for our time. For they are among those events in human history that were only possible at the time they were given in the way they occurred, and acquired their significance from the way they occurred.

This latter significance will never be able to be properly understood by our materialistic view of history. It is one of the many illusions that have been indulged in recently that it has been said: Historical research shows that these Ten Commandments were given to the Hebrew people, but if you look at other peoples, it turns out that they all had similar commandments. Indeed, today people are even glad when they believe that they can weaken the old sacred tradition by showing that such commandments are not only found among the Hebrew people, but also here and there among other peoples.

This point of view completely loses sight of the historical significance of the great moment when those commandments, like the fire of Sinai, also entered into the life of humanity in a spiritual sense. But the profound significance of such an event, as it was the impact of the Ten Commandments in the consciousness of man, one will only be able to understand correctly if one explores the nature of man in such a way that one also draws attention to the supersensible aspects of it.

For those who have heard me speak before, some things will have to be repeated, but we need this so that those who are here for the first time today will also understand. For spiritual science, what is called the essence of man is not as easy to experience as the physical is for external sensory science. What can be perceived with the outer senses of the human being is only a part of his being, and what can be seen with the eyes and felt with the hands is, for spiritual science, only the lowest part of the human being, which the human being has in common with inanimate nature, which is governed by chemical and physical laws.

But the one who has developed the inner spiritual senses, has just as much truth before him as the outer eye has color and light, which for the spiritual scientist is just as perceptible an entity as the physical body, these supersensible members of human nature, which the ordinary person cannot see, but he can at least make them clear to himself through his healthy mind through concepts.

Let us imagine a person standing in front of us: is that all there is, just what the eyes can see and the hands can grasp? Every person knows from their own direct experience that this is not the case. Everyone knows that there is something else there, something that flows through them as joy and pain, pleasure and suffering, and what we know as sensations and perceptions. All this cannot be seen with the outer eyes, but it is nevertheless a reality for the one who experiences it; and its effects are also felt by others. Let us take two primitive experiences of everyday life, the feeling of shame and fear. For example, if something is discussed that offends our aesthetic sensibilities, then the blush of shame rises to our faces. What everyone can see here is that a mental experience triggers a physical process, namely that blood flows out from our center to the periphery. Similarly, but in reverse, when we feel fear or anxiety, the blood withdraws from the body's surface back into the center, which manifests itself in a pallor of the face.

There are people, though, for whom such considerations mean nothing, who want to understand even more tangible consequences in purely materialistic terms, who believe, for example, that if something is going on in our environment, it could cause this phenomenon in us, that the tear water rushes out of our eyes. It is therefore not surprising if, as has actually happened, such a materialistic researcher comes to the strange conclusion: “Man does not weep because he is sad, but he is sad because he weeps.”

For spiritual science, everything material is an effect of the spiritual, except for the substance itself, which is nothing but an effect of the spiritual soul; even the physical body is only an expression of the spiritual soul. Thus, behind the physical, there is another link to the human being, the carrier of pleasure and suffering, drives, desires and passions, and sensations that sink down into a twilight consciousness when falling asleep in the evening and emerge again when awakening in the morning. In spiritual science, this part of the human being is called the desire body or astral body, and humans have this in common with all animals. At night, this astral body leaves the physical body to reenter it upon awakening.

It would be just as nonsensical to claim that what surrounds the skin disappears in the evening and is recreated in the morning as it would to claim that the desires and instincts disappear in the evening and are freshly recreated in the morning.

Why does the astral body, when it leaves the physical body, not perceive what is going on around it in the astral world, just as the physical body perceives what is going on around it in the physical world? This is very easy to understand. Imagine a person without eyes, that person cannot perceive anything that has to do with light and color; it is the same with the ear, with the loss of which all sounds disappear. If all the senses are extinguished, the person can no longer perceive his surroundings.

A person perceives as much of the physical environment as they have organs for. The same applies to our astral body; because at the present stage of development the astral body of the average person has not yet developed organs, it is not possible for him to perceive his environment during sleep, and therefore, during sleep, a person inevitably sinks into unconsciousness, while someone who has already developed these organs also retains consciousness during sleep and lives consciously in this astral world.

Spiritual science, however, distinguishes a second link in the human being, which lies between the physical and astral bodies: the etheric or life body. The physical body has the same powers as the so-called inanimate nature, the mineral world. But only when a person is a corpse does the body follow physical laws; in life, however, it has, like every animal and every plant, a faithful fighter against decay within it, a cohesive force that never leaves it, not even when it is asleep. The physical body would be a corpse at every moment and would disintegrate into its component parts, following the laws of physics, if it did not have this etheric or life body within it, and it alone is what fights every moment to preserve life.

Thus we have three members: the physical, etheric and astral body. In death, the etheric body detaches itself from the physical body; when a person sleeps, the physical body lies in bed with the etheric body. This etheric body is common to humans, animals and plants.

But now man has a fourth element, which elevates him far above all other living creatures and distinguishes him from all others, which makes him the crown of creation: the “I”. This little word has no equal. Any table can be called a “table” and any chair a “chair”, but the word “I” can never reach our ears from a foreign tongue if it is to mean us; only I can say “I” to myself, for everyone else I am a “you”, and that is deeply significant. In the depths of our soul, in our most holy inner being, it must fade away as the expression of what is most hidden in our being.

The mystery that is to be expressed by this has been felt by all religions based on spiritual science, and thus above all by the religion of the ancient Hebrew people. We can therefore only approach the moment when the lightning of the Ten Commandments flashed into humanity by looking closely at this fourth link. It is “the unspeakable name of God” in the human soul, a drop from the ocean of the Divine that floods the world. This is the spark from the Divine that the whole world lives and weaves through. It has often been said that spiritual science makes the world a god with this, but just as a drop of water does not become the sea, this reproach is also not justified. However, just as the drop is of the same substance as the sea, so too is a part of the Divine alive in every human being. Thus the divine lives and moves in the world, and a drop of it is in every human being, and because this divine does not need to penetrate through any senses, it announces itself in the innermost of the holy of holies.

He who is able to feel has always felt something infinitely sacred when he has come to understand what this “I” means. Jean Paul recounts how, as a boy, he stood in front of his father's barn and suddenly realized: You are an “I,” and that from that moment on he knew that an immortal lived in his soul. If people would reflect more on the path that this indicates, they would be able to penetrate ever deeper into spiritual science. Of course, Fichte is absolutely right: most people would rather consider themselves a piece of lava on the moon than an ego.

So we have the human being composed of four limbs of his being; but he has developed to this point over long periods of time. These four limbs were not present in their full sense from the beginning, but have developed little by little into the consciousness of the self. For a long time it slumbered dimly in the other three bodies, and mighty series of development were necessary before it awoke and became conscious of itself.

In this way, we can go back through the centuries in spiritual science and we find that the human soul has also changed, and the further back we go, the greater the change in the soul. The self was not always there either; it was less and less distinct the further back we go, and there was a time when man had developed his astral, etheric and physical body similarly, but the self was still unawakened and slumbering.

Man has developed over time in such a way that he started out from the physical, then the ethereal, then the astral body, and finally his I awakened. The I, which we regard as the divine spark, is the last to awaken in the human being as we see him today. There was once a human being in whom the I had not yet fully awakened. If we want to look for such a person in whom the I was still dormant, we would find such a person in the early days of ancient Greece. It was only with the appearance of the first philosophers that the I awoke, but Greek religion emerged from a time when man was not yet aware of his self, from a world view that was essentially tied to the astral body, and therefore we see the gods of Greece endowed with drives, passions and desires, with perceptions and sensations like those of man himself at that time. What the Greeks strove for and implored spurred them on to recognize the divine in their surroundings, for example the Furies. If we were to go back even further, we would find that man comprehends his surroundings with the etheric body.

Gradually, “I-consciousness” awakened in man, where I-consciousness struck with elemental force into the soul of man. We can eavesdrop on this moment, the moment when the eternal divine is called to him, that moment when he clearly heard the call: “The noblest, divine in you can only be grasped in your I, look into your I and you will find the spark through which you partake in the divine being.” Then there came a moment in human evolution when the God in man spoke: “I, the God, speak to you by giving myself the name you utter when you want to describe the center of your being. That was the great moment in human evolution when Moses, that great sage and initiate, felt this emerging in the course of events in the course of time, when he was in a state of inspiration in which he felt the divine blowing through the world in a completely new form and how this divine wanted to break through into human consciousness. And he asked the God: How can I call You, when I want to tell the people about You? And this Divinity said: Call me Jahve, that is, “I am that I am.” (Ex 3:13-14)

If the Greeks had seen in their gods what man can experience in the astral body, now it was a divinity for which there is only one worthy name, namely, that by which we designate our own innermost being, and the name of Yahweh is nothing other than that which is intended to express the core of our being. And only an individuality such as Moses's could receive that inspiration, which, like a lightning bolt, struck the world with a new knowledge of God.

But it was necessary that Moses should also be able to make this impact effective. The people to whom such a God was to be proclaimed must have no other divinity than this, which arose out of the I.

For an individuality such as Moses, it was not just a matter of receiving that mighty inspiration and proclaiming it to his people, but of permanently consolidating it in the consciousness of that people, and thus completely permeating the soul of the Jewish people with it. How could that happen? Let us ask ourselves how that which we have designated as the four parts of the human being is expressed in the material world. The physical body finds its expression through itself, the etheric body in the glandular system, the astral body in the nervous system, the I in the blood. This is also how Goethe's saying is to be understood: “Blood is a very special juice.”

Hence the importance of blood in all the wide-ranging events of human life. Hence also the great importance of consanguinity among ancient peoples, as it was conditioned by close marriage. For example, the tribal kinship among the Germanic peoples.

Because the same blood flows through their veins, the generations feel they belong together. The I is not only expressed in one's own blood, but it also runs down through the generations, and it is not an individual I as in today's people, but a “group I”. This is also the case with the “group I” of the ancient Jewish people, for example, who could say: “I and Father Abraham are one.” /From here on, other notes]

This divine impulse had to take effect in the blood, reproducing itself from generation to generation. In the past, man had not yet grasped the innermost center of his being. Now he had it. This beyond was translated into laws and commandments. These are the Ten Commandments. Through them, the whole of Yahweh's power had to take effect from grandfather to son and grandson and so on. The right idea had to live in the soul of man.

No ordinary translation is given here. Lexicographic translation does not reflect reality. As the Ten Commandments were understood in those days, so should they now come before the soul.

I. I am the Eternal-Divine. Henceforth you shall not place any other gods above me. I am the Eternal in you and an eternally effective force in you. If you let me work in you, your body will remain healthy, and this will work in you for generations, including children and children's children. Otherwise the body will become desolate.

II. Thou shalt not speak in error of me in thee, for every error in thee will desolate thy body.

III. You shall distinguish between workdays and holidays. That which lives in you as I has formed the world in six days and lives within itself on the seventh day. On the seventh day, your gaze shall find Me in you.

IV. Continue to work in the spirit of your father and your mother, so that the strength they have gathered together and that I have given you may remain in you.

V. Do not kill, that is, do not encroach upon the I of the other.

VI. Do not commit adultery, that is, do not encroach upon the community into which the other person has entered.

VII. Do not steal.

VIII. Do not belittle the value of your neighbor by saying untruthful things about him.

IX. Do not look down on the property of the other.

X. Do not look with envy at the other's wife

The first two chapters of Genesis can be better understood if we are familiar with the various things we have already covered. The first chapter presents the development of our planet through the first three earth rounds into the fourth round, up to the moment when man is created. It thus concludes with the creation of man, with man of the fourth round in the third root race entering into the first incarnation. In a very similar way, the Mosaic Genesis is depicted in Greek mythology. It is only more clearly expressed in Greek mythology, which has three currents flowing from the three Logoi: Uranus, Cronus and Zeus. In the beginning of our earthly development, Uranus represents the first Logos, who brings about the split from the undifferentiated state that existed in the preceding Pralaya. The driving force was Uranus; his opposite was Gaia. The origin of the earthly planet is rooted in them. Thus, Uranus, in connection with Gaia, is the creative force. One could therefore also say: In the beginning were Uranus and Gaia. The second current is the soul current, Kronos, which represents the purely psychic moment of the soul. Then what is referred to as the pilgrimage of the soul occurs, the connection with Zeus, the god of Kama-Manas.

And what does it say in Genesis?

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
And the earth was without form, and void;
and darkness was upon the face of the deep.
And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

That is the Arupa state; it has no form.

And God said, “Let there be light.” And there was light.
And God saw that the light was good.
Then God separated the light from the darkness
and called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night.
And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.

This is the first form, the beginning of the Rupa state. The second globe has arrived.

And God said, “Let there be a vault between the waters,
and let it be a division between the waters.
So God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament.
And it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven.
And the evening and the morning were the second day. (Genesis 1, 6-8)

When the Book of Genesis speaks of water, it always means astral matter.

And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear.
And it was so.
And God called the dry land Earth, and the gathering together of the waters he called the Sea.
And God saw that it was good.
And God said, Let the Earth bring forth grass, and herb yielding seed, and fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the Earth: and it was so.
And the earth brought forth grass, and herbaceous plants, and the seed-bearing plant after its kind, and the tree bearing fruit, whose seed was in itself, after its kind: and God saw that it was good.
And there was evening, and there was morning, the third day. (Genesis 1:9-13)

This was the time when the plant kingdom came into being. In the beginning, the plant kingdom was a jumbled mass; individual plants had not yet emerged. Therefore, each shall now have its seed according to its kind. Only now are the individual plants emerging.

And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them serve for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years:
And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light on the earth: and it was so. And God made two great lights;

And God set them in the firmament of the heaven, to give light on the earth: and they ruled the day and the night: and they divided the light and the darkness. And God saw that it was good. And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.

This is the astral world, the third globe – the sea of stars, the symbol of the astral existence.

Now we come to the actual earth globe. Here matter formed little by little. First the etheric matter. During the first two epochs we are dealing with etheric matter. This condenses during the third root race, during the Lemurian period. At the same time, a condensation of materiality takes place, so that in the Lemurian period we have an ever-increasing density of physical materiality.

And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.
And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, with which the waters bring forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind:
And God saw that it was good.
And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth.
And the evening and the morning were the fifth day. (Genesis 1, 20-23)

This is not the animal kingdom that natural history tells us about, but what is found in the Dzyan stanzas in the second part of Blavatsky's “Secret Doctrine”.

And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so.

And God made the wild animals of the earth in variety, each according to its kind, and the livestock according to their kind, and all the creatures that move along the ground in their kind. God saw that it was good.

He made the animals separate, whereas they had previously swayed about in confusion.

And God said, “Let us make man in our image, in the likeness of ourselves; let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” And God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; (Genesis 1, 26-27)

And God created him male and female, that is, asexual.

And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

Multiply in a non-sexual way, not by reproduction, but simply by coming apart, as in the astral.

And God saw all that He had made; and behold, it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning, the sixth day. (Genesis 1:31)

We are now at the point in time when the third root race of the fourth round begins, the third main age of the Earth.

Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them.

And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made.

And God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it,... (Genesis 2, 1-3)

"He rested means that he has now transferred the task to man. Before that, he had stimulated everything from within that needed stimulating. Now the cosmic Pentecost occurred: the spirits descended and continued the work.

... therefore by him were all things created, that were created God, visible and invisible,

Thus the heavens and the earth were created, when they were created in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens. And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it had sprung; for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no man to till the ground.

But there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground.

And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.

(Genesis 2: 3-7)

Now man was there.

And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed.

And out of the ground the Lord God caused to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food; and the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

And out of the ground the Lord God caused to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food; and the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

This describes the transition from the ethereal races to the physical races. These are brought together from the four sides, from east, west, south, north, and from the four elements, which correspond to the abilities of the spirit-soul. The tree of life and the tree of knowledge of good and evil is the symbol for the higher self that has connected with man.

And a river went out of Eden to water the garden, and from thence it was parted and became into four heads.
The name of the first is Pison, because all the land of Havilah, where there is gold, is a land of Pison.
And the gold of that land is good: there is bdellium and the onyx stone. (Genesis 2, 10-12)

The other waters are called Gehon, Hiddekel, and Euphrates. The four waters are the symbols for the four astral forms of matter that flow together. Water always means the astral in the esoteric language. In the esoteric language, gold is the symbol of the spiritual; onyx is the symbol of matter that goes deepest down. Onyx is the symbol of how the living must transform before it can be absorbed into the higher principle. The living, the prana, must pass through a state of purification; this is called the onyx state. The transformation of the pug into an onyx can also be found in Goethe's “Fairytales”.

And the Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to tend and keep it.

And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “You shall eat from every tree of the garden;

but of the tree of knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.

And the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper suitable for him.” (Genesis 2:15-18)

Now the fourth round begins; before that there was a small pralaya. When the fourth round begins, the ethereal human races only end. Man is the firstling of the fourth round. And what is now emerging is emerging through man; it is a product of decadence, it is falling away.

For when the Lord God had made every beast of the earth, and every fowl of the air, he brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that should be the name thereof.

And man gave names to every animal, and to the birds of the air, and to the beasts of the field; but for man no helper was found to be with him.

Then the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept. (Genesis 2, 19-21)

Sleep signifies that transition which must be understood very precisely. We imagine a light in the middle [of the room] that is reflected in the most diverse ways all around. Let us imagine that the light in the middle goes out, and the outer lights continue to shine. This is how the sinking of Manas into the bodies, which now begin to glow from within when Manas ceases to irradiate the human beings from without. Dream consciousness forms the transition between the inner radiance and the disappearance of the light in the outer. Sex is the counterpole for Kama-Manas, just as the south pole is the counterpole of the north pole.

So he took one of his ribs and closed up the place with flesh.

And the LORD God built the woman out of the rib he had taken from the man, and he brought her to him.

And Adam said: This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.

For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.

Every man will leave his father and mother, which is to say, he will leave that which formerly constituted him.

The first two chapters of Genesis contain the Egyptian secret doctrine. Moses was initiated in Egypt; he then brought the secret doctrine with him and gave it to his people.

It seems to me that our studies of what I have allowed myself to call the “Fifth Gospel” will have helped us to form a closer conception of what has so often been said regarding the evolution of humanity on the Earth and the influence of the Mystery of Golgotha upon this evolution. From very many angles we have also tried to elucidate what came to pass at the baptism by John in the Jordan, when the Christ being united with Jesus of Nazareth, and this has brought home to us the vital significance of the Mystery of Golgotha in the evolution of mankind. But now, having heard the story of the youth of Jesus of Nazareth as it is revealed to spiritual-scientific investigation, we may be able to picture how Jesus of Nazareth makes his way to John the Baptist when the Christ is to descend into him.

With the knowledge gathered from these detailed studies of the Fifth Gospel, we will now try to enter more deeply still into all that is connected with the Mystery of Golgotha. To-day we will think, primarily, of the figure of John the Baptist and of certain aspects of his mission. To understand John the Baptist and Christ Jesus' relation to him (there are indications of this, too, in the Gospel of St. John) it will be necessary to think of the character of the spiritual life from which John the Baptist had issued. It is, of course, the world of ancient Hebrew culture. And now let us consider once again all the essential features of this culture. It had, as we know, a special mission in the evolution of humanity. We remember that Earth-evolution has proceeded from the Saturn-, Sun- and Moon-evolutions and that during this Earth-evolution the Ego, or “I” is added to those principles of man's being—physical body, etheric body, astral body—which came over from the earlier stages. The “I”, however, cannot unfold as an active principle all at once. Indeed the purpose of the Whole of Earth-evolution is to enable the “I” to develop in such a way that man may find his place in the stream of Eternity. Realising this, we must regard the Earth as the theatre in the Cosmos that is allotted to man for the development of the “I”. Ancient Hebrew culture venerated Jahveh or Jehovah az the Being of the higher Hierarchies under whose influence it had been established. The biblical story of Creation shows very clearly how the first Elohim—Jahve or Jehovah—issues from the sevenfold Elohim, the sevenfold host of the Beings of that Hierarchy. By way of comparison lot us say that just as the whole human organism develops into its highest expression in the head, so are the seven Elohim represented in one of themselves, in Jahve or Jehovah who becomes the leading Being in Earth-evolution. Ancient Hebrew culture recognised this and worshipped Jehovah, seeing in him that Being of the higher Hierarchies with whom man must be related in order to unfold the “I”. Ancient Hebrew culture represented a definite stage, in the process of the development of the “I”' in mankind and the influence of Jehovah was felt to be such that by establishing relationship with him, the “I” could gradually be awakened. This is connected with what I said in the lectures at Leipzig. (Lecture-Course XXXI. Christ and the Spiritual World)

What is the nature of the being Jahve or Jehovah? We must conceive hi as a Being who is most intimately connected with Earth-evolution. He is the Lord, the Regent of the Earth, or better said, he is the Being whom Hebrew antiquity regards as the Lord of Regent of the Earth. The whole of ancient Hebrew culture looks upon Jehovah as the God of the Earth, conceives the this Divine-Spiritual Regent is interwoven with the Earth and that men who aspire to be conscious of their connection with the Universe as beings of Earth must cleave to Jehovah, the God of the Earth. The ancient Hebrew conception that Jehovah had made man out of Earth is expressed by the very name given to the original man—“Adam”—that is to say, the ‘being who was created from Earth’. And whereas the aspirations of neighbouring religious systems were directed to that which does not derive from the Earth but comes into the Earth from higher worlds, whereas these neighbouring religions sought in the higher worlds for the Gods they worshipped, the ancient Hebrews sought and worshipped their God Jehovah in the realm of the Earth and its Elements.

Certain peoples of antiquity looked to the stars—their religion was “'astral” religion. Other peoples observed the forces manifesting in thunder and lightening and asked: How are the Divine-Spiritual Beings expressing themselves here? The religions of the peoples around the ancient Hebrews took their symbols from phenomena connected with the stars or the atmosphere beyond the Earth; they sought in these spheres for the signs indicating man's connection with the super-earthly reality. It was inherent in the nature of the ancient Hebrews to think of themselves as connected wholly and entirely with what comes from the Earth. This is a point to which far too little attention is paid. All the indications show that connection of the ancient Jews with the Earth, with what originates from the Earth. If in a phenomenon produced by the forces of the Earth. If in certain volcanic districts of Italy a piece of paper is lighted, clouds of smoke at once come out of the ground. We must conceive the pillar of fire to be a phenomenon produced by the forces of the interior of the Earth. In the same way the column of water or mist must by thought of as originating in the wilderness, not in the upper atmosphere. We must also look for the origin of the Great Flood itself in forces which surge in and through the Earth; the Flood was the result of tellurian, not of cosmic causes. This was at the bottom of the protest put up by the ancient Hebrews against the neighbouring peoples—for the God of Hebrew antiquity was the God of the Earth. The ancient Hebrews felt that everything coming from above, from outside the earth, did not really belong to the mission of Earth-evolution; they conceived it as having been preserved in Earth-evolution by the Being who had remained at a backward stage during the Old Moon-period, namely, Lucifer. In the other religions men felt: We must look away from the Earth, out in the Cosmos; we must revere and worship that which has its origin in the forces of the Cosmos... But the ancient Hebrews said: We worship the one true God and the one true God is connected with the Earth.—Far too little notice is taken of this because at the present time people assume that a word like “God” must always imply the same. Because, after nearly two thousand years of development under the influence of the Christ Impulse, humanity now rightly looks upwards once again, it is thought that the ancient Hebrews, too, looked upwards. On the contrary! The ancient Hebrews felt that what came from above was symbolised in the Serpent of Paradise.

But the Jews absorbed a very great deal from the neighbouring peoples. This too is comprehensible. Of all religions in antiquity, theirs was the subtlest. They believed—and this is well-nigh incredible to the modern mind that Jehovah is an Earth God, who works in the Moon-forces that are connected with the Earth and who is therefore also a Moon God, as described in the book Occult Science. It seems incredible to-day that men can ever have looked towards the centre of the Earth when they spoke of their God, but it was indeed so. Nevertheless the impulse to look upwards was, in the nature of things, not entirely absent from the Jews, above all when they saw the neighbouring peoples worshipping what comes from above. But the great difference between those who had knowledge of the Jewish secret doctrine and those who had not, was this.—The former knew that it was a temptation to be obedient to laws other than the laws of those forces which work from the Earth as far as the Moon-sphere. (Certain elements that come to light again to-day in our own spiritual-scientific teachings were present in ancient Hebraic wisdom). But as the time of the Mystery of Golgotha approached, Hebrew culture was veering more and more from its original direction and looking upwards for the Gods.

Then came one who felt it his mission to point to the path which the Jews ought, in reality to follow. This was John the Baptist. He felt it his mission to bring home to the Jews, where their true strength lay. And perceiving what the religion of the Jews had become, he spoke the significant words: “You call yourselves children of Abraham! If you were Abraham's children you would know that your God Jehovah who is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, is a God of the Earth—as witnessed by the fact that he formed the first man out of the Earth. But you are no longer children of Abraham; you have allowed yourselves to be led astray by what other peoples believe; you have been led astray by those who look upwards by what belongs to the Serpent. Ye are of the brood of the Serpent.

These words of John the Baptist are of deep significance. If only people to-day would be a little more candid and admit that they do not really understand what they read! What is the expression “generation of vipers” taken to mean to-day? That John was heaping abuse! But if it is desired to make a deep appeal to human souls, no particular purpose is served by invective. Neither can it be said that John the Baptist's words gave vent to a divine wrath within him—for others too may voice their divine wrath. The meaning here is that John the Baptist was striving to bring home to the Jews: “You no longer understand your true mission; you no longer call upon the forces of the Earth but upon the forces of the Serpent, upon what has been made known to you as the Serpent.”

And now let us try to understand the attitude of John the Baptist. Had he not his reasons for speaking in this way to those who came to him at the Jordan? (This is not derived from the Fifth Gospel for in speaking of the content of the Fifth Gospel we have not yet come to the figure of John the Baptist, I am speaking now from other sources). He had his reasons for speaking as he did to those who came to him at the Jordan, for he observed that they had adopted certain customs of the heathen; the very names they gave to these customs were abhorrent to him. In the region where John the Baptist was preaching, certain ancient teachings were prevalent—somewhat to the following effect.—At the beginning of the evolution of humanity, man and the higher animals were endowed by Jahve with the power of breathing air, but in consequence of the deed of Lucifer, this power was contaminated. Only those animals which do not breathe air have remained uncontaminated, namely the fishes. Many people went to the waters of the Jordan (indeed it happens to this very day) at a certain season of the year and shook their clothes in order that their sins might be cast to the fishes and carried away. John the Baptist had witnessed such customs which had been adopted from the heathen peoples and this was in his mind when he cried: “You have understood more of the Serpent than of Jehovah; you call yourselves unlawfully the children of Jahve, the children of Abraham. I say unto you that the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob could return to his original mission and produce from the stones, that is to say, from the Earth, a race of men who would understand him better.”

Let us think of such words in the Bible as:“God is able of these stones to raise up children of Abraham.” In the language of those days many words had more than one meaning and were used with the deliberate purpose of indicating a deeper meaning lying underneath. But we cannot really understand these things, my dear friends, unless we connect what has here been said with the mission of Paul. I have spoken many times of the mission of Paul. Why was it that Paul, who had not allowed his experiences in Jerusalem to convince him of the significance of the Mystery of Golgotha—why was it that the Event at Damascus convinced him of the truth of Christ's Resurrection? We must here consider the manner of Paul's preparation, and his background. Schooled as he was in the wisdom of the Jewish Prophets, he knew that up to a certain point of time the evolution of humanity involved adherence to the God of the Earth; but he also knew that a time must come when the “Above”, that which comes into the Earth from super-earthly worlds, would again assume significance. It is of the utmost importance to realise that before Christ entered into the Aura of the Earth through the Mystery of Golgotha, He dwelt in supersensible regions of the Cosmos. We can study the religions whose worship was directed to the Powers of super-earthly worlds and discover how the Christ worked in those spheres before He passed into the Aura of the Earth through the body of Jesus of Nazareth. Paul knew that this time would come; but before the Event at Damascus he had not perceived Christ's actual presence in the Aura of the Earth. He was, however, prepared for this, and in Corinthians II., Chapter 12, verses 1-5, he says: It is not expedient for me to boast: I will come to visions and revelations of the Lord. I know a man in Christ above 14 years ago... and so on. Paul is, of course, referring to himself. What does he really say in this passage? Nothing else than that 14 years before (chronologically this would be about 6 years before the Mystery of Golgotha) he was already able to look clairvoyantly into the spiritual worlds. He says that there is in him a man who can look into the spiritual worlds; it is of this man he boasts, not of himself. Paul realises now that formerly he had seen Christ while He was still in the spiritual world. The Event at Damascus had revealed to him Christ had now passed into the Aura of the Earth and was living in the Aura of the Earth. That is the great truth concerning which so many who lived in the early centuries of Christianity uttered such strange words. They said: Christ is the true Lucifer. They understood: In former times it was right to adhere to the Serpent; since the Mystery of Golgotha He Who is the Conqueror of the Serpent has come and He is now the Lord of the Earth.

Now all these things are part of the evolutionary process of mankind. For what is the meaning behind the protest put up by ancient Hebrew culture against “astral” religion, against religions which have clouds, lightening, thunder, as their symbols? The meaning is that the human soul must so prepare to receive the “I” that the revelation of the Spirit is no longer received through the starry script, no longer through the forces manifesting in lightening and thunder, but through the Spirit itself. In former times when men strove to look upwards to the Christ, they could only do so by gazing, as Zarathustra had gazed, at what may be called the physical sheath of Christ, the “Ahura Mazdao”, the physical Sun and its forces. Therein dwelt the Christ. But now the Christ had departed from the realm of the physical forces of the Sun, had passed into the spiritual Aura of the Earth. After those who worshipped Jehovah had prepared the way, Christ was able to permeate the Aura of the Earth. In this sense and in this sense only are the words of John the Baptist to be understood.

And now, as the time of the Mystery of Golgotha drew near, Christ Jesus and John the Baptist came face to face.—I shall now speak rather more abstractly.—Bearing in mind what has just been said, we shall understand this meeting between Christ Jesus and John the Baptist. Christ stands before one who knows what it signifies to worship the Spirit of the Earth. The Jews, and others too—for there were others as well as the Jews—were endowed with faculties which enabled them to worship the Spirit of the Earth in the right way. Whence were these faculties derived? Prior to the Mystery of Golgotha these faculties were bound up with physical heredity! What I am going to say will, of course, be considered utter foolishness by modern science, but it may be the kind of foolishness that can be wisdom before God.

Prior to the Mystery of Golgotha, the faculties of knowledge as they are called, were dependent in a certain way upon heredity conditions. And the progress of human evolution is constituted by the fact that intellectual knowledge becomes independent of the factor of heredity. In certain Mysteries therefore, it was a true and right principle to allow an office to pass from father to son. But as evolution progresses, knowledge becomes an affair purely of the soul. The innermost core of the human soul becomes an affair of the soul itself, no longer depending upon the external factors of heredity. Now by what means did it become possible for man to keep intact the innermost core of his being? Let us realise what is meant by saying that man can no longer, in the real sense inherit his faculties from his forefathers.—Certainly many people think that they inherit their faculties and talents from their forefathers—but it is not so, in reality. Goethe was one among countless others whose genius was not transmitted to his descendants. But if man had not derived spiritual power from another source, what would have been the inevitable result? Their faculties of knowledge would have been orphaned! The position of the human being on the Earth would have been such that each according to his karma would have been obliged to wait for what the Earth bestows for the impressions bestowed by the Earth upon his senses. But this would have been of essential or lasting value to him and under such circumstances he would have been glad to slip away from the Earth. Buddha's teachings emphasise this very clearly for they draw man away from the realm of sense-perception and from all connection with the Earth.

Christ, in Jesus of Nazareth, could speak concerning Himself somewhat as follows.—At the Baptism by John something came down from the supersensible world which can be a quickening power in the “I” that has now been left to its own resources, and hereafter the human soul will contain within it forces that are not merely inherited. Whatever knowledge was formerly available to man, came to him through heredity, was transmitted from generation to generation by physical heredity. And the last man who unfolded higher faculties from the soil of heredity is John the Baptist, “the greatest of these born of woman.” This is an indication of how the ancient times are to be distinguished from the now. In ancient times man spoke truly when he said: ‘If I seek for the power which ought to live in my soul and lead me to the heights I must remember Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, for the faculties through which the heights of human existence are attained came down to me in the line of heredity from these ancestors.’ But now these faculties must be derived from regions beyond the Earth. No longer to look to the Earth alone and to find in Christ the God of the Earth, but to be conscious of the inflow of the Heavens—it is this to which Christ points when he speaks of John the Baptist as “the greatest of those born of woman.”

Here, my dear friends, we have the answer to a question of paramount importance for our age. At the time when the Third Epoch began to re-emerge in the life of our Fifth Epoch, the consciousness of men began to turn again to what can be revealed to the earthly human being as super-earthly reality. Men could not, however, experience this re-born “astral” religion as the ancient Egyptians or Chaldeans had experienced it. In this later age it came to them in the form in which it was experienced by on well-qualified to speak. In 1607, the following words were written... (Here followed a long extract from one of Kepler's works. See also: Günther's Kepler und die Theologie. 105-111.) Thus in the 17th century we again find evidence that the soul is gazing upwards, but now the experience is permeated with the Christ Impulse. These words were written by a profoundly spiritual man. By whom were they written? By the one who was the founder of all modern astronomy, without whom our modern astronomy could not have existed, namely, John Kepler. Is there a single Monist who will not sing the praises of Kepler? The attention of those who profess to be Monists should be called to the words just quoted for so much of what is said about Kepler is... well, something to which I prefer to give no name.

These words of Kepler are an indication of the new tendency, the new way of gazing upwards to the heavens, of that reading of the starry script to which we aspire in Spiritual Science. The question indicated at the beginning of the lecture is thus answered, namely:—How can we draw near to Christ? How can we understand Him? How can we make our life of feeling worthy to receive Him? By learning to speak with the same ardour the same depth of feeling as did an ancient Hebrew, when he said: ‘I look up to Abraham, the primal Father when I speak of the foundation of whatever is valuable in me.’ ...but to-day, with the same intensity of feeling, we must look upwards to the Being Who quickens us spiritually—to the Christ! When we ascribe our faculties and gifts, all that makes us truly Man, not to any earthly power, but to Christ, then we enter into living relationship with Him! Just as a Jew in ancient times spoke of being carried by death into Abraham's bosom, so do we truly express the nature of the age after the Mystery of Golgotha when to the ancient “Out of God we are born” we add the “In Christ we die.” Therefore when we understand the Mystery of Golgotha we can enter into a living relationship with Christ, just as in the age of Hebrew antiquity men felt their living relationship with the God who was the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. This relationship was expressed in the avowed belief: ‘I return to Abraham, the primal Father’—In those who live after the Mystery of Golgotha there must live the consciousness; “In Christ we die.”

The last talk should suggest with a few lines that spiritual science can investigate the deeper profundities and the truth of the biblical documents and that it can read that in the right sense again which is written in this document. With some simple lines should be shown how concerning the Bible such a right penetration is possible into the deeper sense of the Bible in a quite unexpected way and how it can lead many human beings to a recapture of this document of humankind. What could be said in the last talk about the position of our newer time, about its research, its criticism, its worldview compared with the Old Testament someone can also say concerning the New Testament. In addition, here we are able again to point to the fact that in the seventeenth, eighteenth centuries a criticism started which has analysed and cut the Gospel to pieces, a document of such an immense significance for countless human beings for centuries, and attacked its bases. One would have to tell a long story if one paid attention to this biblical criticism of the New Testament in detail. How could it be different, because since that time, after the invention of the art of printing, the Bible has come to all hands, and with it, the materialistic thinking got out of control! How could it happen other than that people recognised clearer and clearer that there are contradictions in the Gospels?

For example, you need only compare the genealogies of Jesus in the Matthew Gospel and the Luke Gospel, if one adheres to the external letter of the matter, and you find that already the first chapters of both Gospels are contradictory. Not only that Luke and Matthew differently give the ancestors; also, the names do not comply. If you compare the single facts of the life of Jesus, you can find contradictions everywhere. In particular, people realise how extremely the first three evangelists, the writers of the Matthew, Mark, and Luke Gospels, on one side, and the writer of the fourth so-called John Gospel, on the other side, contradict. The result was that one tried to produce an accordance of the first three Gospels in a certain way. One believed to find that these three evangelists—even if they differ from each other in many details—give a picture of Jesus which is attractive to the whole view and to all ways of thinking of a newer time, at least to many personalities of our time.

However, many people realised long-since concerning the fourth evangelist that there cannot be talk of a historical document at all. Not only that the writer of the John Gospel, who completely brings the facts differently grouped, above all, concerning the miracles that he describes quite differently; it also becomes apparent that his whole standpoint towards the centre of the whole world history is different. This sight has developed more and more. If we want—we cannot go into the details—to turn again to the sense of this research, it is approximately this that one says that the three Gospels could give the image of the superior Jesus, the founder of the Gospel, if one considers them as portrayals of the brilliant time. The fourth Gospel is a confessional document, a kind of hymn of that which the writer wanted to show concerning his faith in the crucified Jesus. He wanted to give no story, but a teaching writing.

In particular, in the nineteenth century, this view settled in the souls of numerous people more and more due to the so-called Tübingen School, which the great Bible scholar, the brilliant Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792–1860) led. Baur's view is approximately this: the John Gospel is late; it was written very late whereas the other evangelists wrote earlier, still after certain reports of those who, perhaps, themselves had experienced or come to know it from persons who had witnessed the story in Palestine. However, the John Gospel originated only in the second century. Not from the original story, but influenced by the Greek philosophy and by that which had already appeared in the Christian communities, it were written, so that John created a picture of Christ Jesus, which could uplift the human beings in such a way that it is lyrical in certain ways. It teaches how one began to think and to feel like a Christian up to the second century, however, it was no longer able to inform about the events in the beginning of our era.

Indeed, there were also souls who vindicated the opposite viewpoint. If one must say on the other side that Christian Baur and his students proceeded with tremendously critical astuteness, nevertheless, we are not allowed to forget a biblical scholar like the historian and academic Gförer (August Friedrich G., 1803–1861) who asserts that the Gospel is due to the apostle John himself. With diligence he shows how just this Gospel shows almost in each sentence that an eyewitness wrote it or that somebody who had received his message from eyewitnesses wrote it. Gförer goes so far that he says in his Swabian way that anybody who cannot believe in the fact that the Gospel is due to John is out of his mind. He is also out of sorts with those who say that it is not historical and who bear down on this Gospel with all possible arguments.

The question that interests here is this: did really research, history cause this view in spite of all astuteness, in spite of all scholarship, which is never denied a moment?—Someone who can thoroughly explore not only the outside of history, but is able to immerse with his thinking and feeling, and with his whole view in the mental undergrounds of human development, notices something else. It was not only the historical sense, it was not only the so-called objective research, but they were the ways of thinking of the newer time, the beloved views that were spread more and more since the last century.

They did not accept that the confidence and the ideas of the figure of Christ Jesus survived which prevailed for centuries, that not only a superior being was included in Jesus of Nazareth, but a universal being, a spiritual-divine being that is not only related to the whole humanity but to the whole development of the world generally. The confidence and the idea got lost that this spiritual-divine being worked in the mortal body of Jesus of Nazareth, and that we face a unique event there. This contradicts the ways of thinking so much that they had to be directed against such confidence. The critical research slipped in unconsciously to justify what the habitual ways of thinking wanted for the time being. More and more the sense came up, which could not endure that anything topped the normal human-personal, the sense that says to itself, yes, there have been great human beings in the world evolution: Socrates, Plato, or others. Indeed, we have to admit that Jesus of Nazareth was the greatest. Nevertheless, we must remain within this human level.—The fact that something could have lived in Jesus that one can compare to the normal human being contradicts the materialistic mental images, which settled down more and more. We can see this sense slipping in unconsciously and combining with that which the so-called historical research ascertained.

Why did the first three evangelists become more and more the respected ones and the writer of the John Gospel the mere lyricist and confessional writer? Because they could say to themselves, the three evangelists, the Synoptics, describe an ideal human figure that does not top the human level, even if Jesus is an elevated one. It flatters the modern sense if one says what a modern theologian said: if we subtract everything supersensible and spiritual from Jesus of Nazareth, if we take the simple man of Nazareth, we are closest to Jesus.

That is not possible with the John Gospel. It immediately begins with the words: “In the beginning the Word already was. The word was in God's presence,” before a material world existed. What there was in the spiritual primeval grounds became flesh; it walked around in Palestine in the beginning of our calendar.—The writer of the John Gospel applies the highest wisdom to understand this event and to bring it to understanding. In view of this matter, it is not appropriate to speak of the simple man of Nazareth. Hence, he was never allowed to deal with a historical document. These are not only scientific reasons, it is the development of the usual thoughts, emotions and sensations which have found their expression in that which the Bible criticism of the New Testament and the historical research claim today to have the unconditional or at least relative authority of these matters.

However, there emerges another question from spiritual science. Let us position ourselves really on the ground on which some new researchers have positioned themselves. The ones wanted to portray an event that took place in the beginning of our calendar. They added mythical and legendary aspects. Assume that we positioned ourselves on this ground. There we must ask ourselves, is it yet possible to speak about Christianity as such under these conditions? Is it possible to speak about Christianity if we understand the documents, which tell about this Christianity, purely materialistically? Is it possible to behave towards the whole Bible in such a way?—Two things should be stated at first that prove that the question cannot be put different than it was put, and that it can be answered in outlines. Let us assume that Christian Baur's view is right that something took place in Palestine that one has to explain as the external historical, and that in the course of time the writers delivered that out of the prejudices of their time to the future generations what was in them. Let us assume that we have to presuppose such a research while we believe in the descent of a spiritual being from spiritual spheres that lived in Jesus of Nazareth, resurrected, won the victory of life over death—what we regard as the real essence of the Mystery of Golgotha. One has to break this doctrine, Baur says. One considers this view as a dogmatic one. This view must be cancelled. One has to investigate an event in Palestine like another historical event.

Is it then possible to speak generally in the true sense of the word of Christianity, of the Bible as such a work which reports what has to appear? On the other hand, I would like to point to two facts. What is the first big and enclosing effect of the Christian worldview based on, an effect that nobody can deny? What is the sermon of Paul based on? Is it based on the interpretations of the Gospels by a new sober research? Never Paul's strength is based on an announcement of that which is to be exhausted by the means of history. Paul's whole efficacy is based on an event that you can understand only from supersensible, never from sensuous causes. Someone who checks Paul's writings sees that his whole teaching is based simply on the fact that he could win the conviction and the experience that Christ has risen, and that in the Mystery of Golgotha the life in spirit carried off the victory over death.

Wherefrom does Paul take his conviction of the true nature of Christ Jesus? He does not take it, as for example the others who were round Christ Jesus, from an immediate instruction. He takes it, as you all know, from the event by Damascus. He takes it from this fact and he could say, I have seen Him who lived, suffered, and died in Palestine, I have seen Him living.—Paul means nothing but that he has seen Christ in spirit and has won the truth from the spiritual view that Christ lives. He announces Christ, whom he got to know in his spiritual view. In addition, he equates this appearance to the other phenomena, because he says to us, after death, Christ appeared to various persons, to the twelve disciples and others, and in the end to me as a mistimed birth.—With it, he thinks that he really beheld Him in a higher view, who carried off the victory over death, and that he knows since that time that Christ lives for someone who rises in the spiritual world.

Here we already stand concerning the New Testament where the new spiritual science must separate from any only literal view of the Bible. What do you find as a rule in the writings of the so-called new research about the event of Damascus? Saul became Paul in an ecstatic condition, a condition into which one cannot look really. This escapes from the human research. Yes, it escapes from the external human research. We have emphasised this so often in spiritual science that the human being—what we can learn in the following talks—can ascend to the knowledge of a higher world which is round him in such a way, as the colours and the light are around a blind person. The human being can behold this higher world as the operated blind-born can learn to see colours and light. This takes place by the spiritual-scientific methods in the soul of the true pupil of spiritual science and enables him to behold into the spiritual worlds, to behold what is there. What takes place with this pupil, what every pupil can bear witness today and at all time, that took place with Paul. He received it: to hear with ears which are not sensuous ears to see with eyes, which are not sensuous eyes. Then he could also perceive Him who lived in Jesus of Nazareth. So Paul's whole strength extends into the supersensible realm. If you take the whole Paul as he is, you can say, what he said is set aglow by “Christ was raised. Hence, our faith is not futile” (1 Corinthians 15:17).

If one goes just into the effects of Paul's sermons how he spread that form of Christianity, which went through the world, then one can never say, it does not depend on going back to any supersensible facts to investigate the facts about Jesus. One says that one must apply the usual scientific forms. Then one forgets not only the original facts in Palestine not only that which happened during 33 years, but also what happened for the dissemination of Christianity. One forgets that it is based on a supersensible event, and that this supersensible event is to be understood at first.

However, in quite similar way we also find if we consider the matters only seriously and really that the Old Testament, at least its most important document, the Law, is based on something similar. We find that the whole mission of Moses, the whole strength of Moses by which he provided big services to his people is also based on a supersensible event. We had to say the day before yesterday that if the spiritual researcher develops higher, so that he becomes sighted in the spiritual world and is able to behold into the spiritual undergrounds of the things that he can survey the facts of the spiritual world in pictures, in imaginations. Yes, you can express the processes, which happen in you if you ascend to the spiritual fields, only in pictures, however, you must get clear that somebody who speaks in such pictures does not want to speak about the pictures as those, but thinks that one has these pictures as expressions of his supersensible experience.

The supersensible experience by which Moses got his mission was clearly described in the phenomenon of the burning bush. There we see Moses, the leader of the people, facing his God, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, who issued the order to Moses to act for his people what we find happening then as the action of Moses. While we use this, we already face a basic issue of the whole Bible, namely the question: how have we generally to position ourselves in order to penetrate deeper into this document to these two supersensible facts, which make any merely external research impossible? How have we to behave to this basic issue of the Bible in the spiritual-scientific sense? We can penetrate if we bring the contents of the revelation or the experience of Moses home to ourselves.

The most important traits are only cited. Moses faces the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. God gives him the order at the same time to lead the people from Egypt, to increase it to a certain size and to teach it a certain attitude.

If then Moses wants to have something by which he can exculpate himself before the people, so that he can say who he is and who sends him, God reveals his name: “I am the I-am.” Nobody can understand the word who is not able to go into the whole sense and the being of old naming. Old naming is unlike the modern naming. Old naming should absolutely express the being of the personality, the being of that who faces us. In “I am the I-am” the being of the God had to express itself in particular who faced Moses, and who calls himself “the Lord the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.” Why does he call himself the Lord the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? There is a secret hidden behind it, which must be unravelled. We can unravel it only if we move up to it with the help of spiritual science. We have to emphasise it over and over again at various places that the human being consists of the members of his being, that we only face one part of the human being as the physical body, that we have higher members which are supersensible, which are the real bases, the creative principles. We must add the etheric body or life body, then the astral body and as the fourth the bearer of the ego.

The human being has the physical body in common with the apparently lifeless beings, with the minerals, the etheric body with the plants and all living beings, the astral body with the animals, which can have passions and desires. Because of the ego, the human being towers above all sensuous beings, which surround him. Spiritual science has always recognized these four members of the human being.

We have to point to the physical body that also has its spiritual primal ground and is only condensed from the spiritual. As well as ice originates from water, the physical originated from the spiritual. We must go far back in the view of the spiritual development if we want to look for the first spiritual origins of the physical human body. This fourth member is absolutely the oldest of the human members. Today the physical body is the densest. It emanated from the spirit in the distant past. It has become denser and denser, has experienced some changes, and has thereby taken on its physical figure. This is the oldest in the human being. A younger member is the etheric body or life body. It came later; hence, it is less condensed. The astral body is even younger.

The ego is the youngest member, the bearer of the human self-awareness. All these members originated from spiritual primal grounds and spiritual beings, from divine-spiritual beings. We can say, spiritual science shows that this ego, by which the human being became the modern self-conscious being, immersed in the body. It was composed, before he became an ego-being, of the physical, etheric and astral bodies. The Bible also distinguishes those beings now who are the creators of these three human members. The teaching of Moses speaks about the creator of the human ego, of the creator of the bearer of the human self-awareness. Hence, the Bible also sees in the God who let the ego flow into the human being, so to speak, that God who was the last to come concerning the evolution of the human being. The divine beings, the Elohim, whom we have strictly distinguished from the God Yahveh or Jehovah, are the creators of the physical, etheric and astral bodies. They are exactly distinguished in the Bible from the God appearing last in our evolution, from the Yahveh God, from that who brought the ego to the human being.

If we ask, where does the human being find the being of this God, this youngest of the creative gods about which the Bible starts speaking in the fourth verse of the second chapter of the Genesis? Spiritual science shows that where the human being finds his ego in himself, which differs so substantially, already after its name, from all other beings round us, that he there finds a drop of this divine being in himself. This is no pantheistic teaching, also no explanation of the fact that the human being has to find his God in himself. Asserting this would be like someone who asserts that a drop of water is the same being like the sea—and says: this drop of water is the sea.

If we speak in the sense of spiritual science, we speak about something infinite, comprising, universal that is connected with the earthly development and the other things that belong to this earthly development. In our ego, we find a spark of this God Yahveh as we find the same being in the drop of water as in the sea. Nevertheless, it was a very long way the human development had to cover, while the God Yahveh started forming the human being in such a way that he could grasp the ego consciously. The strength of the ego had to work in the human being already well before, before he got the consciousness of the ego. Moses became the great precursor bringing the consciousness of the human being to the ego. However, these forces work and form in the human evolution already long before. They form in such a way that we can recognise their way if we deal with the evolution of the human consciousness itself.

Let us look somewhat back in the development of the human consciousness. One uses the word development very often today, but as drastically, as intensely as spiritual science takes the word development seriously, it is the case with no other science. This human consciousness, as it is today, developed from other forms of consciousness. If we go back far to the origin of the human being, not in the sense of materialistic science, but in such a way, as I have explained it the day before yesterday, then we find that the human consciousness appears more and more different, the farther we go back. The consciousness that connects the various intellectual concepts, the external sensory perception in the known way originated firstly, even if in the far-off past, but it originated firstly. We can find a condition of the consciousness at that time, which was completely different from today because memory was completely different in particular. The memory of the modern human being is only a dilapidated rest of an old soul force, which existed quite differently. In old times when the human being did not yet have the inferring force of his today's mind, when he was not yet able to count in the today's sense, when he had not yet developed his intellectual logic, he had another soul force for it: he had developed a universal memory. This had to decrease, had to withdraw, so that at its cost our today's mind could develop. This is generally the way of development that a force takes a backseat, so that the other can appear. Memory is a decreasing force; mind and reason are increasing soul forces.

For those who hear these talks already for some years, it cannot be something especially miraculous what I say now. For the others it will seem absurd if one speaks about the nature of memory in the following way. What is the appearance of the human memory? It is that which remembers yesterday, the day before yesterday and so on, until the childhood. Then, however, it discontinues once. The memory did not stop in old far-off past, not in childhood, not even at birth; but like the modern human being remembers what he himself has experienced in his personal life, the prehistoric human being remembered what his father, his grandfather had experienced through whole generations. Memory was a soul force through generations that extended really. For centuries, memory survived in the old far-off past, and another kind of naming was connected with the different formation of memory.

We come to the question now: why is talk of individuals in the first chapters of the Bible who become hundreds of years old like Adam, Noah? Because it makes no sense to limit these human beings. Memory reached through generations up to the primal father. One gave this whole generation one name. It would have made no sense to give the name Adam to a single person. Thus, in those days one gave the name to that which remembered, holding on the same recollection, for centuries from generation to generation—Adam, Noah. What was this? It was that which goes through father, son and grandson, but maintained recollection. So faithfully, the biblical document maintains these secrets, which one can understand only with the help of spiritual science.

If we look at the consciousness of the ego with which we comprehend the being of the Yahveh God, we see that the ego lives in us between birth and death, and that it maintains its kind between birth and death. Thus, the ego maintained for generations at that time, for centuries. As we speak today about the ego and know that it goes back as far as we can remember, the human being of primeval times said to himself: it makes no sense to call myself an ego. I recall my father, grandfather, and great-grandfather.

His ego went through generations, and it had even a name. As we find an expression of God in our personal ego if we become engrossed in this ego, the ancient human being said to himself, looking up through the generations: God who lives in the ego lives for generations,—as a divinity which then Moses recognised in the higher worlds. The God was the same who lived as an ego from generation to generation in ancient times. One declared as ego, in the parlance of the past, what reproduced as an expression of the Yahveh God, with the Yahveh word “I am the I-am.” Moses learnt to recognise this in his spiritual revelation. In contemplating the burning bush this was revealed for the first time. The same God once lived from generation to generation, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He was the force, which lived in the memory and brought everything at the same time that founded the human order. Thus, we look up at the predecessors of Moses. In the biblical sense, we look up at the patriarchs, at those, in whom the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob lived.

These times needed no external commandments, no external laws. For that lived on with the lively memory, quite different from ours, which one had to do. According to what did one act in these primeval times? If you understand the Bible correctly, you find that the human beings did not act after commandments. One acted after that which memory said to one, what the father, the grandfather et cetera had done. With his blood, the human being got the direction to that which he had to do. In these ancient generations was something like a spiritualised instinct that one can compare with “acting instinctively” as we call it today. Not after a commandment the ancient human being acted, no, he acted after the character of his being, after his type. How did Abraham, Isaac and Jacob act? They acted in such a way as the blood running through generations induced them. They had brought down the God Yahveh with their egos, whether they waged war whether they lived in peace. They had no commandments; they had no law. The spiritualised instinct of God lived in them.

At the time when Moses appeared, the human personality was on the first level of its development. There its consciousness broke away from this common generational consciousness. There the generational memory had already stopped quite thoroughly. There one did no longer have the spiritualised instinct of action. There something else had to replace it. The God of Abraham, of Isaac and Jacob—who in his spiritual physical figure gave Moses the law, the commandments because one did no longer have the spiritualised instinct—had to regulate the external order, the social living together by commandments, by laws. It is the same God who worked before as a natural force, who is now efficient as legislator to found the external order with laws. We see that it has a deep sense to read the words at this point: the God of Abraham, of Isaac and Jacob. The God who calls himself the God “I am the I-am” is the same as the fourth member of the human being, the same who let flow the ego into the human being. However, the human beings could not take up the spiritual nature of the ego in their consciousness. A longer preparation was necessary to it, and this takes place at the time, which is portrayed in the Bible as the Old Testament, at the time of Moses up to the Mystery of Golgotha. Hence, this time is a time of promise, which the new Gospel shows, the beginning of the “time of fulfilment.” The God announces himself to Moses as the “I am the I-am.”

He announces himself in such a way that he orders the external order of the human beings, their living together by laws indirectly by Moses's vision. Humankind lived this way in the pre-Christian time in which the God was creating, in which the Yahveh God was forming, in which the “I am the I-am” lived, in which, however, humankind could not yet live consciously but according to the external law coming from the Yahveh God. More and more the time approached when humankind should become completely aware of the ego. For the whole antiquity, there was only one means for the human beings who could not yet behold, could not yet face God in the physical world. There was only one way how this God could become effective for them. This was the law, the order. This applied to the external world.

Moreover, there was a supersensible way to get to know this God, and these were the mysteries or initiation. What was initiation? Everything that was delivered to certain personalities which were regarded as suitable to apply the methods of spiritual-scientific research to develop the forces and abilities slumbering in the human being, so that they could behold into the spiritual world. Hence, for the confessors of the Old Testament it would be in such a way to behold God spiritually from face to face who lives in the “I-am.” If they applied this method, they were able to see and to hear with spiritual eyes and ears independently what Moses had seen, when the God, the “I-am” gave him his mission. Only in the mysteries, only by initiation this was possible.

However, there were also those who recognised the “I am the I-am,” but they had to go through the procedures, the methods with which the human being is transformed into an instrument of the higher vision, the vision in the spiritual world. So the God who already lived in Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was concealed to the physical world. He ordered the world by law. To the initiate, the secret of the mysteries becomes visible in thinking. Then the time came when the Mystery of Golgotha should take place. What happened there, actually? Imagine what the initiate experienced in the old times. Only sketchily, I can describe the process of initiation by meditation, concentration and the other exercises. The soul of the neophyte was prepared for a long time. Then the processes of initiation were finished during three and a half days. There the sages of initiation prepared the neophyte prepared so far, so that he was transported to a state in which his physical body was completely sleeping. It was not only sleeping but it was like dead, so that the neophyte could not use his physical senses, his physical eyes, and ears. For it, however, he beheld with the organs of his spiritual members into the spiritual worlds. He could perceive there if he was outside his body if he was not connected with the physical organs. Then he could behold what lived invisibly in him as the “I am the I-am;” but he could behold it only in the depths of the mysteries. Then he was awoken—as everybody knows who has experienced these things—in his physical body and used the physical senses again. Now he had the full consciousness: I am the I-am, I was in the spiritual world. What has spoken to Moses, the “I am the I-am” faced me, and it is that which refuses eternity to me, which has entered my body. I was connected with it. I was connected with the divine primal bearer of the I-am whose reflection is my I-am.

Thus, the initiate returned to the physical world and bore witness of the fact that something spiritual exists in the ego, because he had beheld it. He could give his listeners news and message of it. However, one could only behold the “I am the I-am” in the spiritual world. By the event of Golgotha, the same being descended to the human beings who had announced himself by Moses in the burning bush with the words “I am the I-am.” This complies completely with the sense of the John Gospel: the ego became flesh in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, lived in it, and walked around among the human beings. This primal force brought the human being to the height on which he stands today. The primal force became a human being; the human being became a divine being and walked around among the human beings. It was possible that on Golgotha that took place as a historical event within the evolution of humankind, which the initiates could behold only in spirit: the fact that the Christ-being carried off the victory over the death of matter.

This is the historical-external-real fact, which the initiates often experienced in the mysteries. This was the course of initiation in the ancient times in the deep darkness of the mysteries with those who left their physical bodies for three and a half days, walked around in the spiritual world and recognised that a spiritual-divine being descends into the physical world, and that this event would take place once as a historical fact. This was the course of initiation. However, the time came now when humankind came to the event of Golgotha turning emotions, sensations, and thoughts to it by faith.

Then the understanding originated from it. It was something new. One got as something external that one could have, otherwise, only by the rapture in the spiritual world. If one assumes this in such a way, we understand why Christ Jesus says: I am the I-am in a completely new figure. He says, look back at the primeval times, at that which lived as the everlasting in the human being that lived in Abraham, Isaac and Jacob that made known itself then in the Law of Moses. Now the time has come when the ego becomes aware in the single person, when the human being has to become aware in his ego, in the divine living in him.

If it was in the old times in such a way that the human being looked up at the God that he beheld and could say to himself: what lives in me lives for generations,—it is now in such a way that he finds the divine in his ego if he beholds into himself. The divine from which any ego originated was embodied in Jesus of Nazareth, and someone understood this who wrote: In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and God was the word.—By these words, the being of the innermost human nature and at the same time the primary source of this innermost being is meant. He lets Christ Jesus say, what lives in me a spark of which is in every human being existed before the Gospel was.—The significant sentence in the John Gospel was “Before Abraham was, I am.”—Before Abraham was, the “I-am” was, this I-am which is not bound to any time which was before Abraham, was already in the spiritual primeval grounds of the human being. While he calls himself the primary source of this I-am, Christ spoke the significant words: “Before Abraham was, the I-am was.”

Therefore, we realise how the sense of human development, which flows through these fundamental books of humankind, the Old and the New Testaments, is brought back to life again by spiritual science. In addition, we realise how to us the most important words become readable first if we fathom the sense of these books, regardless of the words, with the help of spiritual science. I give an example that gives something to think to the materialistic sense. I would like to remind you of the resurrection of Lazarus. There such a man like Gförer says: who asserts that the John Gospel is not written by John, helps himself saying, the writer wrote down a lot, as he experienced and understood it, but the Lazarus miracle must have been told to him. He cannot have been present.

One must understand the Lazarus miracle only correctly. Let us understand it in such a way that Christ when he entered the world took on the body of Jesus of Nazareth. Let us believe, however, that that which prepared in the Old Testaments became expression in the New Testament. He had to have somebody who could understand him completely, who could penetrate in the deepest sense into what he could announce, and that means that he had to initiate a person in his way.

Initiation stories are told to us secretly at all times. The Lazarus miracle is nothing else than the miraculous and tremendous representation how Christ created the first initiate of the New Testament. Christ waked up Lazarus as an initiate recalled the soul of his pupil to the body who was for three and a half days in a state similar to death, after he had walked around in the spiritual world. Someone can simply see through all that who understands something of it, because it is the language in which generally initiation stories are told. “This illness is not to end in death; through it God's glory is to be revealed and the Son of God is glorified” (John 11:4). This means: external appearance as revelation of the inside; so that one has to translate the sentence in truth: “The illness is not to end in death, but that the God manifests as an external appearance, so that He can also be revealed to the senses.”

In Lazarus slumbers the deeper human being who has the ability and the strength that it could be developed in mysterious way in him, could be led up in the spiritual world, so that he could recognise the being of Christ, the Son of God. However, this strength had to develop first. Christ Jesus developed it in Lazarus, so that the divine that rested in Lazarus could be revealed, and could reveal the Son of God. Christ Jesus created in Lazarus the first to know from own inner observation who Christ Jesus is real. At the same time, this miracle shows—because it is to someone a real miracle who wants to accept the external physical principles only—what the pupil concerned has to go through during the three and a half days. Because this can be compared to a real death since the etheric and the astral bodies are raised out of the physical body and only the physical body lies there.

Thus, we have understood even such a miraculous event like the Lazarus miracle—miraculous only to anyone who cannot explain it out of spiritual science. All that reveals itself to you in the Lazarus miracle if you have the light only, which illuminates it with the words: “His illness is not to end in death but to reveal the inside.”—If these abilities are woken in the human being, it is like a birth. As a child arises from the womb, the higher is born by the lower human being. In the same way, the illness of Lazarus is connected with the birth of the new life, of the divine human being, so that the divine human being is born in the physical human being, in Lazarus.

So we could go through the John Gospel step by step and would experience that that which happens in the spiritual initiation had to be described quite different from that which we see in ancient times when with quite different spiritual powers the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is working. If we look into the Bible in such a way, then it is the high universal book again, which lets shine to us what we have now found ourselves. While we must admit—we can say this—that only someone who has developed the higher spiritual forces can come to this truth, we have also to admit and say—if it faces us in the John Gospel—what brought it in these writings. While a new spiritual researcher approached the Gospel and the whole Bible, he learnt to see this and can say: the human beings will come to the true value of this document and recognise that only a materialistic prejudice can speak the words: “the simple man of Nazareth.” However, because of true knowledge we have recognised Christ as an overwhelming world being living in the body of Jesus of Nazareth.

The first three Gospels appear to us in relation to the John Gospel possibly, as if three persons stand grouped on a slope of a mountain and every reports what he sees. Everybody sees a part. Someone who looks down from the higher vantage point surveys more and portrays more from this higher vantage point. We come to know not only what the others below describe, but also what can make the three understandable at the same time. That is why it is not difficult to say, who stood on the higher vantage point, but for us it is in such a way that the first three writers were also initiates in certain respects. However, the deep initiate, who could write much deeper, could look much deeper than the three others could and about the true spiritual facts of the matters, which lie behind the sensuous, this is the writer of the John Gospel. So the Gospels combine harmoniously and show that the Mystery of Golgotha cannot be understood as a usual historical event, but is only explicable by a process as we find it with Paul, who says: “the life I now live is not my life, but the life Christ lives in me” (Galatians 2:20). What the external research shows beside becomes also important in the spiritual research. If we look at Christianity, it is important to us to figure the clairvoyance of Moses out which is shown to us in the vision of the burning bush. It is this what one had to explain. I have to emphasise that this new spiritual science is able to form the picture of the world events of its own accord, to look at Christ, so to speak, spiritually from face to face and to find Him again and, hence, to find Him truly in the Gospels. That biblical scholarship is not really without presuppositions, which says, we want to investigate the Bible like any other story.

For it assumes the dogma that there can be only usual, sensuous, natural facts. Only spiritual science is really without presuppositions, and this leads to a renewed recognition and high esteem of the Bible in all its parts. A time will come when maybe those are disgruntled who want to say today that only the simple mind is able to grasp the Bible. This wisdom must misjudge the Bible. The time will come when just the wisest wisdom estimates the highest what is given to us in the Bible because clairvoyance will face clairvoyance in the Bible. Then some word, which is written in the New Testament, appears in a new light. It will become apparent that a document like the Bible can lose nothing by impartial research. It would be sad if any research cut this Bible of its reputation, of its name. A research that cuts the Bible of its name has only not come far enough. Research that goes until the end will show the Bible again in its greatness.

The human being is allowed to do research freely. Who has the view that by research religion could perish shows with it only that his piety stands on weak feet. The divine being put the impulse of research in the human being, so that he is active. It would be a sin against this impulse if one did not live researching. I recognise God by my research. God recognises Himself in my research. Truth is a good in the human development from which the religious life will never have anything to fear. However, this is a basic truth, which penetrates the New Testament completely.

You should not take those into accounts who want to keep away the human beings from the Bible because of comfort, and who say, if you come to philosophers and interpret the Bible, these say, they want to know nothing about it.—However, such a research is based on comfort. However, that research is justified and right which says: we cannot go deeply enough to understand what is written in the Bible.—That research in the Bible is the right one that goes into it in free research and then understands the Bible in the right sense. These researchers understand the truth of the biblical saying: “you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:32).

Play in three acts by E. von Keyserling
Performance for the anniversary of the Freie Bühne, Berlin

The "Freie Bühne" in Berlin celebrated its tenth anniversary on November 12. When it was founded, it set itself the task of paving the way to the stage for playwrights who, despite being mature or matured artists, needed such support because the prevailing taste had passed them by. The performance on November 12 did little to refresh the memory of the laudable intentions of the Institute's founders. The "Spring Offering" is a bundle of concessions - nothing more. One concession to naturalism, the second to romanticism, the third to the prevailing taste in theater.

The illegitimate daughter of the drunkard Kappel, half child, half blossoming into a virgin, lives in her father's house. The woman who has married the lousy man is a good creature. She has taken the child, who is disregarded by the whole world, into her home. Here it is also mistreated by the father. The stepmother is dying; she has just received the priest's consolations. This is where the drama begins. The child of sin is faced with the prospect that the father will remarry after the death of his wife and chase the daughter out of the house. While the mother struggles with death, passionate love flares up in the maiden for the first time for a young farmer, who at first seems to reciprocate, but soon returns to his Madda. The girl has gone through all the sensations of a suddenly flaring affection in a few hours. She must soon also experience the pain of abandonment. She has glimpsed the world of happiness, and now that her lover has left her, she is doubly unhappy. Not only will she now be despised because of her mother's sin, but she will also be regarded as a creature who throws herself away on the next best thing. A naturalistic drama could have been created from these premises. The author adds a romantic leaven to this material. An old grandmother lives in the house. She tells the girl that there is a black chapel in the forest with a picture of the Virgin Mary. There, a woman once prayed for the recovery of a child and sacrificed her own life for it. Now the girl wants to do the same for her stepmother. She wants to die so that her benefactress may live. She goes there and receives an answer from the Mother of God. On the way back it happens to her that she falls in love. Now she does not want to die again. She regrets what she has done. But the course of providence continues. When the maiden returns home, she finds the sick woman on the road to recovery. Then she learns of her lover's infidelity. Now she wants to die again. However, she does not wait for the miracle of the Virgin Mary, but takes - again in a completely naturalistic way - poison in the form of the drops that the doctor has prescribed for the sick woman.

I know, of course, that everything in the play has its natural course, and that the romanticism of superstition only resides in the minds of the old grandmother and the girl. The mother recovers, not because the stepdaughter prayed, but because she took the drops the doctor gave her. But why does the girl poison herself? If she believes in the miracle, she could be quietly expecting her death, which seems certain to her. But this could not happen if the poet himself had not made the course of "providence" the driving motif of the drama. The girl's suicide is therefore not motivated by anything. It is a concession to theatrical machinations. There are many more of these in the play.

One would have to be sad about contemporary dramatic production if associations such as the "Freie Bühne" were unable to find better plays. But it will probably not be due to this production that we saw this mishmash of all possible styles parading before us on November 12.

Yesterday we reached the point of discussing the change which takes place in the human astral body through Meditation, Concentration and other practices which are given in the various methods of initiation. We have seen that the astral body is thereby affected in such a way that it develops within itself the organs which it needs for perceiving in the higher worlds and we have said that up to this point, the principle of initiation is everywhere really the same—although the forms of its practices conform wholly to the respective cultural epochs. The principal difference appears with the occurrence of the next thing which must follow. In order that the pupil may be able actually to perceive in the higher worlds, it is necessary that the organs which have been formed out of the astral part, impress or stamp themselves upon the ether body, be impressed into the etheric element.

The re-fashioning of the astral body indirectly through Meditation and Concentration, is called by an ancient name, “katharsis,” or purification. Katharsis or purification has as its purpose the discarding from the astral body all that hinders it from becoming harmoniously and regularly organized, thus enabling it to acquire higher organs. It is endowed with the germ of these higher organs; it is only necessary to bring forth the forces which are present in it. We have said that the most varied methods can be employed for bringing about this katharsis. A person can go very far in this matter of katharsis if, for example, he has gone through and inwardly experienced all that is in my book, The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, and feels that this book was for him a stimulation and that now he has reached the point where he can himself actually reproduce the thoughts just as they are there presented. If a person holds the same relationship to this book that a virtuoso, in playing a selection on the piano, holds to the composer of the piece, that is, he reproduces the whole thing within himself—naturally according to his ability to do so—then through the strictly built up sequence of thought of this book—for it is written in this manner—katharsis will be developed to a high degree. For the important point in such things as this book is that the thoughts are all placed in such a way that they become active. In many other books of the present, just by changing the system a little, what has been said earlier in the book can just as well be said later. In The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity this is not possible. Page 150 can as little be placed fifty pages earlier in the subject matter as the hind legs of a dog can be exchanged with the forelegs, for the book is a logically arranged organism and the working out of the thoughts in it has an effect similar to an inner schooling. Hence there are various methods of bringing about katharsis. If a person has not been successful in doing this after having gone through this book, he should not think that what has been said is untrue, but rather that he has not studied it properly or with sufficient energy or thoroughness.

Something else must now be considered and that is that when this katharsis has taken place, when the astral organs have been formed in the astral body, it must all be imprinted upon the ether body. In the pre-Christian initiation, it was done in the following manner. After the pupil had undergone the suitable preparatory training, which often lasted for years, he was told: The time has now come when the astral body has developed far enough to have astral organs of perception, now these can become aware of their counterpart in the ether body. Then the pupil was subjected to a procedure which today—at least for our cultural epoch—is not only unnecessary, but is not in all seriousness feasible. He was put into a lethargic condition for three and a half days, and was treated during this time in such a way that not only the astral body left the physical and ether bodies—a thing that occurs every night in sleep—but to a certain degree the ether body also was lifted out; but care was taken that the physical body remained intact and that the pupil did not die in the meantime. The ether body was then liberated from the forces of the physical body which act upon it. It had become, as it were, elastic and plastic and when the sensitory organs that had been formed in the astral body sank down into it, the ether body received an imprint from the whole astral body. When the pupil was brought again into a normal condition by the Hierophant, when the astral body and ego were again united with the physical and ether bodies—a procedure which the Hierophant well understood—then not only did he experience katharsis, but also what is called “Illumination” or “Photismos.” The pupil could then not only perceive in the world around him all those things that were physically perceptible, but he could employ the spiritual organs of perception, which means, he could see and perceive the spiritual. Initiation consisted essentially of these two processes, Purification or Purging, and Illumination.

Then the course of human evolution entered upon a phase in which it gradually became impossible to draw the ether body out of the physical without a very great disturbance in all its functions, because the whole tendency of the post-Atlantean evolution was to cause the ether body to be attached closer and closer to the physical body. It was consequently necessary to carry out other methods of initiation which proceed in such a manner that without the separating of the physical and ether bodies, the astral body, having become sufficiently developed through katharsis and able of itself to return again to the physical and etheric bodies, was able to imprint its organs on the ether body in spite of the hindrance of the physical body. What had to happen was that stronger forces had to become active in Meditation and Concentration in order that there might be the strong impulse in the astral body for overcoming the power of resistance of the physical body. In the first place there was the actual specifically Christian initiation in which it was necessary for the pupil to undergo the procedure which was described yesterday as the seven steps. When he had undergone these feelings and experiences, his astral body had been so intensely affected it formed its organs of perception plastically—perhaps only after years, but still sooner or later—and then impressed them upon the ether body, thus making of the pupil one of the Illuminati. This kind of initiation which is specifically Christian could only be described fully, if I were able to hold lectures about its particular aspects, every day for about a fortnight instead of only for a few days. But that is not the important thing. Yesterday you were given certain details of the Christian initiation. We only wish to become acquainted with its principle.

By continually meditating upon passages of the Gospel of St. John, the Christian pupil is actually in a condition to reach initiation without the three and a half day continued lethargic sleep. If each day he allows the first verses of the Gospel of St. John, from “In the beginning was the Word” to the passage “full of devotion and truth,” to work upon him, they become an exceedingly significant meditation. They have this force within them, for this Gospel is not there simply to be read and understood in its entirety with the intellect, but it must be inwardly fully experienced and felt. It is a force which comes to the help of initiation and works for it. Then will the “Washing of the Feet,” the “Scourging” and other inner processes be experienced as astral visions, wholly corresponding to the description in the Gospel itself, beginning with the 13th Chapter.

The Rosicrucian initiation, although resting upon a Christian foundation works more with other symbolic ideas which produce katharsis, chiefly with imaginative pictures. That is another modification which had to be used, because mankind had progressed a step further in its evolution and the methods of initiation must conform to what has gradually been evolved.

We must understand that when a person has attained this initiation, he is fundamentally quite different from the person he was before it. While formerly he was only associated with the things of the physical world, he now acquires the possibility likewise of association with the events and beings of the spiritual world. This pre-supposes that the human being acquires knowledge in a much more real sense than in that abstract, dry, prosaic sense in which we usually speak of knowledge. For a person who acquires spiritual knowledge, finds the process to be something quite different. It is a complete realization of that beautiful expression, “Know thyself.” But the most dangerous thing in the realm of knowledge is to grasp these words erroneously and today this occurs only too frequently. Many people construe these words to mean that they should no longer look about the physical world, but should gaze into their own inner being and seek there for everything spiritual. This is a very mistaken understanding of the saying, for that is not at all what it means. We must clearly understand that true higher knowledge is also an evolution from one standpoint, which the human being has attained, to another which he had not reached previously. If a person practices self-knowledge only by brooding upon himself, he sees only what he already possesses. He thereby acquires nothing new, but only knowledge of his own lower self in the present meaning of the word. This inner nature is only one part that is necessary for knowledge. The other part that is necessary must be added. Without the two parts, there is no real knowledge. By means of his inner nature, he can develop organs through which he can gain knowledge. But just as the eye, as an external sense organ, would not perceive the sun by gazing into itself, but only by looking outward at the sun, so must the inner perceptive organs gaze outwardly, in other words, gaze into an external spiritual in order actually to perceive. The concept “Knowledge” had a much deeper, a more real meaning in those ages when spiritual things were better understood than at present. Read in the Bible the words, “Abraham knew his wife!” or this or that Patriarch “knew his wife.” One does not need to seek very far in order to understand that by this expression fructification is meant. When one considers the words, “Know thyself,” in the Greek, they do not mean that you stare into your own inner being, but that you fructify yourself with what streams into you from the spiritual world. “Know thyself” means: Fructify thyself with the content of the spiritual world!

Two things are needed for this namely, that the human being prepare himself through katharsis and illumination, and then that he open his inner being freely to the spiritual world. In this connection we may liken his inner nature to the female aspect, the outer spiritual to the male. The inner being must be made susceptible of receiving the higher self. When this has happened, then the higher human self streams into him from the spiritual world. One may ask: Where is this higher human self? Is it within the personal man? No, it is not there. On Saturn, Sun and Moon, the higher self was diffused over the entire cosmos. At that time the Cosmic Ego was spread out over all human kind, but now men have to permit it to work upon them. They must permit this Ego to work upon their previously prepared inner natures. This means that the human inner nature, in other words, the astral body has to be cleansed, purified and ennobled and subjected to katharsis, then a person may expect that the external spirit will stream into him for his illumination. That will occur when the human being has been so well prepared that he has subjected his astral body to katharsis, thereby developing his inner organs of perception. The astral body, in any case, has progressed so far that now when it dips down into the ether and physical bodies, illumination or photismos results. What actually occurs is that the astral body imprints its organs upon the ether body, making it possible for the human being to perceive a spiritual world about him; making it possible for his inner being, the astral body, to receive what the ether body is able to offer to it, what the ether body draws out of the entire cosmos, out of the Cosmic Ego.

This cleansed, purified astral body, which bears within it at the moment of illumination none of the impure impressions of the physical world, but only the organs of perception of the spiritual world is called in esoteric Christianity the “pure, chaste, wise Virgin Sophia.” By means of all that he receives during katharsis, the pupil cleanses and purifies his astral body so that it is transformed into the Virgin Sophia. And when the Virgin Sophia encounters the Cosmic Ego, the Universal Ego which causes illumination, the pupil is surrounded by light, spiritual light. This second power that approaches the Virgin Sophia, is called in esoteric Christianity—is also so called today—the “Holy Spirit.” Therefore according to esoteric Christianity, it is correct to say that through his processes of initiation the Christian esotericist attains the purification and cleansing of his astral body; he makes his astral body into the Virgin Sophia and is illuminated from above—if you wish, you may call it overshadowed—by the “Holy Spirit,” by the Cosmic, Universal Ego. And a person thus illuminated, who, in other words, according to esoteric Christianity has received the “Holy Spirit” into himself, speaks forthwith in a different manner. How does he speak? When he speaks about Saturn, Sun and Moon, about the different members of the human being, about the processes of cosmic evolution, he is not expressing his own opinion. His views do not at all come into consideration. When such a person speaks about Saturn, it is Saturn itself that is speaking through him. When he speaks about the Sun, the Spiritual Being of the Sun speaks through him. He is the instrument. His personal ego has been eclipsed, which means that at such moments it has become impersonal and it is the Cosmic Universal Ego that is using his ego as its instrument through which to speak. Therefore, in true esoteric teaching which proceeds from esoteric Christianity, one should not speak of views or opinions, for in the highest sense of the word this is incorrect; there are no such things. According to esoteric Christianity, whoever speaks with the right attitude of mind toward the world will say to himself, for instance: If I tell people that there were two horses outside, the important thing is not that one of them pleases me less than the other and that I think one is a worthless horse. The important point is that I describe the horses to the others and give the facts. In like manner, what has been observed in the spiritual worlds must be described irrespective of all personal opinions. In every spiritual- scientific system of teaching, only the series of facts must be related and this must have nothing to do with the opinions of the one who relates them.

Thus we have acquired two concepts in their spiritual significance. We have learned to know the nature of the Virgin Sophia, which is the purified astral body, and the nature of the “Holy Spirit,” the Cosmic Universal Ego, which is received by the Virgin Sophia and which can then speak out of this purified astral body. There is something else to be attained, a still higher stage, that is the ability to help someone else, the ability to give him the impulse to accomplish both of these. Men of our evolutionary epoch can receive the Virgin Sophia (the purified astral body) and the Holy Spirit (illumination) in the manner described, but only Christ Jesus could give to the earth what was necessary to accomplish this. He has implanted in the spiritual part of the earth those forces which make it possible for that to happen at all which has been described in the Christian initiation. You may ask how did this come about?

Two things are necessary for an understanding of this. First we must make ourselves acquainted with something purely historical, that is, with the manner of giving of names which was quite different in the age in which the Gospels were written from the way in which it is done at present.

Those who interpret the Gospel at present do not at all understand the principle of giving names at the time the Gospels were written and therefore they do not speak as they should. It is, in fact, exceedingly difficult to describe the principle of giving names at that time, yet we can make it comprehensible, even though we only indicate it in rough outlines. Let us suppose, in the case of someone whom we meet, that instead of holding to the name which does not at all fit him, and which has been given to him in the abstract way customary today, we were to harken to and notice his most distinguishing characteristics, were to notice the most prominent attribute of his character and were in a position to discern clairvoyantly the deeper foundations of his being, then were to give him his name in accordance with those most important qualities which we believe should be attributed to him. Were we to follow such a method of giving names, we should be doing something, at a lower more elementary stage, similar to what was done at that time by those who gave names in the manner of the writer of the Gospel of St. John. In order to make very clear his manner of giving names, let us consider the following:

The author of the St. John's Gospel regarded the physical, historic Mother of Jesus in her most prominent characteristics and asked himself,—Where shall I find a name for her which will express most perfectly her real being? Then, because she had, by means of her earlier incarnations, reached those spiritual heights upon which she stood; and because she appeared in her external personality to be a counterpart, a revelation of what was called in esoteric Christianity, the Virgin Sophia, he called the Mother of Jesus the “Virgin Sophia;” and this is what she was always called in the esoteric places where esoteric Christianity was taught. Exoterically he leaves her entirely un-named in contradistinction to those others who have chosen for her the secular name, Mary. He could not take the secular name, he had to express in the name the profound, world historic evolution. He does this by indicating that she cannot be called Mary and what is more, he places by her side her sister Mary, wife of Cleophas and calls her simply the “Mother of Jesus.” He shows thereby that he does not wish to mention her name, that it cannot be publicly revealed. In esoteric circles, she is always called the “Virgin Sophia.” It was she who represented the “Virgin Sophia” as an external historical personality.

If we now wish to penetrate further into the nature of Christianity and its founder, we must take under consideration yet another mystery. We should understand clearly how to make a distinction between the personality who, in Esoteric Christianity, was called “Jesus of Nazareth” and Him who was called “Christ Jesus,” the Christ dwelling within Jesus of Nazareth.

Now what does this mean? It means that in the historical personality of Jesus of Nazareth, we have to do with a highly developed human being who had passed through many incarnations and after a cycle of high development was again reincarnated; a person who, because of this, was attracted to a mother so pure that the writer of the Gospel could call her the “Virgin Sophia.” Thus we are dealing with a highly developed human being, Jesus of Nazareth, who had progressed far in his evolution in his previous incarnations and in this incarnation had entered upon a highly spiritual stage. The other evangelists were not illuminated to such a high degree as the writer of this Gospel. It was more the actual sense-world that was revealed to them, a world in which they saw their Master and Messiah moving about as Jesus of Nazareth. The mysterious spiritual relationships, at least those of the heights into which the writer of the Gospel of St. John could peer, were concealed from them. For this reason they laid special emphasis upon the fact that in Jesus of Nazareth lived the Father, who had always existed in Judaism and was transmitted down through the generations as the God of the Jews. And they expressed this when they said: “If we trace back the ancestry of Jesus of Nazareth through generation after generation, we are able to prove that the same blood flows in Him that has flowed down through these generations.” The evangelists give the genealogical tables and precisely according to them they also show at what different stages of evolution they stand. For Matthew, the important thing is to show that in Jesus of Nazareth we have a person in whom Father Abraham is living. The blood of Father Abraham has flowed down through the generations as far as Jesus. He thus traces the genealogical tables back to Abraham. He has a more materialistic point of view than Luke. The important thing for Luke was not alone to show that the God who lived in Abraham was present in Jesus, but that the ancestry, the line of descent, can be traced back still further, even to Adam and that Adam was a son of the very Godhead, which means that he belonged to the time when humanity had just made the transition from a spiritual to a physical state. Both Matthew and Luke wished to show that this earthly Jesus of Nazareth has His being only in what can be traced back to the divine Father-power. This was not a matter of importance for the writer of the Gospel of St. John who could gaze into the spiritual world. The important thing for him was not the words, “I and Father Abraham are one,” but that at every moment of time, there exists in the human being an Eternal which was present in him before Father Abraham. This he wished to show. In the beginning was the Word which is called the “I AM.” Before all external things and beings, He was. He was in the beginning. For those who wished rather to describe Jesus of Nazareth and were only able to describe him, it was a question of showing how from the beginning the blood flowed down through the generations. It was important to them to show that the same blood flowing down through the generations flowed also in Joseph, the father of Jesus.

If we could speak quite esoterically it would naturally be necessary to speak of the idea of the so-called “virgin birth,” but this can be discussed only in the most intimate circles. It belongs to the deepest mysteries that exist and the misunderstanding connected with this idea arises because people do not know what is meant by the “virgin birth.” They think that it means there was no fatherhood. But it is not that; a much more profound, a more mysterious something lies at the back of it which is quite compatible with what the other disciples wish to show, that is, that Joseph is the father of Jesus. If they were to deny this, then all the trouble they take to show this to be a fact would be meaningless. They wish to show that the ancient God exists in Jesus of Nazareth. Luke especially wished to make this very clear, therefore he traces the whole ancestry back to Adam and then to God. How could he have come to this conclusion, if he really wished only to say: I am showing you that this genealogical tree exists, but Joseph, as a matter of fact, had nothing to do with it. It would be very strange if people were to take the trouble to represent Joseph as a very important personality and then were to shove him aside out of the whole affair.

In the event of Palestine, we have not only to do with this highly developed personality, Jesus of Nazareth, who had passed through many incarnations, and had developed himself so highly that he needed such an extraordinary mother as the Virgin Sophia, but we have also to do with a second mystery. When Jesus of Nazareth was thirty years of age, he had advanced to such a stage through what he had experienced in his present incarnation that he could perform an action which it is possible for one to perform in exceptional cases. We know that the human being consists of physical, ether and astral bodies and an ego. This fourfold human being is the human being as he lives here among us. If a person stands at a certain high stage of evolution, it is possible for him at a particular moment to draw out his ego from the three bodies and abandon them, leaving them intact and entirely uninjured. This ego then goes into the spiritual worlds and the three bodies remain behind. We meet this process at times in cosmic evolution. At some especially exalted, enraptured moment, the ego of a person departs and enters into the spirit world—under certain conditions this can be extended over a long period—and because the three bodies are so highly developed by the ego that lived in them, they are fit instruments for a still higher being who now takes possession of them. In the thirtieth year of Jesus of Nazareth, that Being whom we have called the Christ, took possession of his physical, ether and astral bodies. This Christ Being could not incarnate in an ordinary child's body, but only in one which had first been prepared by a highly developed ego, for this Christ-Being had never before been incarnated in a physical body. Therefore from the thirtieth year on, we are dealing with the Christ in Jesus of Nazareth.

What in reality took place? The fact is that the corporality of Jesus of Nazareth which he had left behind was so mature, so perfect, that the Sun Logos, the Being of the six Elohim, which we have described as the spiritual Being of the Sun, was able to penetrate into it. It could incarnate for three years in this corporality, could become flesh. The Sun Logos Who can shine into human beings through illumination, the Sun Logos Himself, the Holy Spirit, entered. The Universal-Ego, the Cosmic Ego entered and from then on during three years, the Sun Logos spoke through the body of Jesus. The Christ speaks through the body of Jesus during these three years. This event is indicated in the Gospel of St. John and also in the other Gospels as the descent of the dove, of the Holy Spirit, upon Jesus of Nazareth. In esoteric Christianity it is said, that at that moment the ego of Jesus of Nazareth left his body, and that from then on the Christ is in him, speaking through him in order to teach and work. This is the first event that happens, according to the Gospel of St. John. We now have the Christ within the astral, ether and physical bodies of Jesus of Nazareth. There He worked as has been described until the Mystery of Golgotha occurred. What occurred on Golgotha? Let us consider that important moment when the blood flowed from the wounds of the Crucified Saviour. In order that you may understand me better, I shall compare what occurred with something else.

Let us suppose we have here a vessel filled with water. In the water, salt is dissolved and the water becomes quite transparent. Because we have warmed the water, we have made a salt solution. Now let us cool the water. The salt precipitates and we see how the salt condenses below and forms a deposit at the bottom of the vessel. That is the process for one who sees only with physical eyes. But for a person who can see with spiritual eyes, something else is happening. While the salt is condensing below, the spirit of the salt streams up through the water, filling it. The salt can only become condensed when the spirit of the salt has departed from it and become diffused into the water. Those who understand these things know that wherever condensation takes place, a spiritualization also always occurs. What thus condenses below has its counterpart above in the spiritual, just as in the case of the salt, when it condenses and is precipitated below, its spirit streams upward and disseminates. Therefore, it was not only a physical process that took place when the blood flowed from the wounds of the Saviour, but it was actually accompanied by a spiritual process; that is, the Holy Spirit which was received at the Baptism united Itself with the earth; that the Christ Himself flowed into the very being of the earth. From now on, the earth was changed, and this is the reason for saying to you, in earlier lectures, that if a person had viewed the earth from a distant star, he would have observed that its whole appearance was altered with the Mystery of Golgotha. The Sun Logos became a part of the earth, formed an alliance with it and became the Spirit of the Earth. This He achieved by entering into the body of Jesus of Nazareth in his thirtieth year, and by remaining active there for three years, after which He continued to remain on the earth. Now, the important thing is, that this Event must produce an effect upon the true Christian; that it must give something by which he may gradually develop the beginnings of a purified astral body in the Christian sense. There had to be something there for the Christian whereby he could make his astral body gradually more and more like a Virgin Sophia, and through it, receive into himself the Holy Spirit which was able to spread out over the entire earth, but which could not be received by anyone whose astral body did not resemble the Virgin Sophia. There had to be something which possesses the power to transform the human astral body into a Virgin Sophia. What is this power? It consists in the fact of Christ Jesus entrusting to the Disciple whom He loved—in other words to the writer of the Gospel of St. John—the mission of describing truly and faithfully through his own illumination the events of Palestine in order that men might be affected by them. If men permit what is written in the Gospel of St. John to work sufficiently upon them, their astral body is in the process of becoming a Virgin Sophia and it will become receptive to the Holy Spirit. Gradually, through the strength of the impulse which emanates from this Gospel, it will become susceptible of feeling the true spirit and later of perceiving it. This mission, this charge, was given to the writer of the Gospel by Jesus Christ. You need but read the Gospel. The Mother of Jesus—the Virgin Sophia in the esoteric meaning of Christianity—stands at the foot of the Cross, and from the Cross the Christ says to the Disciple whom He loved: “Henceforth, this is thy Mother” and from this hour the Disciple took her unto himself. This means: “That force which was in My astral body and made it capable of becoming bearer of the Holy Spirit, I now give over to thee; thou shalt write down what this astral body has been able to acquire through its development.” “And the Disciple took her unto himself,” that means he wrote the Gospel of St. John. And this Gospel of St. John is the Gospel in which the writer has concealed powers which develop the Virgin Sophia. At the Cross, the mission was entrusted to him of receiving that force as his mother and of being the true, genuine interpreter of the Messiah. This really means that if you live wholly in accordance with the Gospel of St. John and understand it spiritually, it has the force to lead you to Christian katharsis, it has the power to give you the Virgin Sophia. Then will the Holy Spirit, united with the earth, grant you illumination or photismos according to the Christian meaning. And what the most intimate disciples experienced there in Palestine was so powerful that from that time on, they possessed at least the capacity of perceiving in the spiritual world. The most intimate disciples had received this capacity into themselves. Perceiving in the spirit, in the Christian sense, means that the person transforms his astral body to such a degree through the power of the Event of Palestine that what he sees need not be before him externally and physically-sensible. He possesses something by means of which he can perceive in the spirit. There were such intimate pupils. The woman who anointed the feet of Christ Jesus in Bethany had received through the Event of Palestine the powerful force needed for spiritual perception, and she is, for example, one of those who first understood that what had lived in Jesus was present after His death, that is, had been resurrected. She possessed this faculty. It may be asked: Whence came this possibility? It came through the development of her inner sense-organs. Are we told this in the Gospel? We are indeed; we are told that Mary Magdalene was led to the grave, that the body had disappeared and that she saw there two spiritual forms. These two spiritual forms are always to be seen when a corpse is present for a certain time after death. On the one side is to be seen the astral body, and on the other, what gradually separates from it as ether body, then passing over into the cosmic ether. Wholly apart from the physical body, there are two spiritual forms present which belong to the spiritual world.

Then the disciples went away again unto their own home. But Mary stood without at the sepulchre weeping; and as she wept she stooped down and looked into the sepulchre, and seeth two angels in white sitting.

She beheld this because she had become clairvoyant through the force and power of the Event of Palestine. And she beheld something more: she beheld the Risen Christ. Was it necessary for her to be clairvoyant, to be able to behold the Christ? If you have seen a person in physical form a few days ago, do you not think you would recognize him again if he should appear before you?

And when she had thus said, she turned herself back and saw Jesus standing and knew not that it was Jesus.

Jesus saith unto her, Woman why weepest thou? Whom seekest thou? She, supposing it to be the gardener . ...

And in order that it might be told to us as exactly as possible, it was not only said once, but again at the next appearance of the Risen Christ, when Jesus appeared at the sea of Gennesareth.

But when the morning was now come, Jesus stood on the shore: but the disciples knew not that it was Jesus.

The esoteric pupils find Him there. Those who had received the full force of the Event of Palestine could grasp the situation and see that it was the Risen Jesus who could be perceived spiritually. Although the disciples and Mary Magdalene saw Him, yet there were some among them who were less able to develop clairvoyant power. One of these was Thomas. It is said that he was not present the first time the disciples saw the Lord, and he declared he would have to lay his hands in His wounds, he would have to touch physically the body of the Risen Christ. You ask: What happened? The effort was then made to assist him to develop spiritual perception. And how was this done? Let us take the words of the Gospel itself:

And after a week His disciples were again within, and Thomas with them: then came Jesus the doors being shut, and stood in their midst, and said, Peace be unto you.

Then saith He to Thomas, reach hither thy fingers and behold My hands, and reach hither thy hand and thrust it into My side: and be not faithless, but believing. And thou shalt behold something if thou dost not rely upon the outer appearance, but art impregnated with inner power.

This inner power which should proceed from the Event of Palestine is called “Faith.” It is no ordinary force, but an inner clairvoyant power. Permeate thyself with inner power, then thou needest no longer hold as real that only which thou seest externally; for blessed are they who are able to know what they do not see outwardly!

Thus we see that we have to do with the full reality and truth of the Resurrection and that only those are fully able to understand it, who have first developed the inner power to perceive in the spirit world. This will make the last chapter of the Gospel of St. John comprehensible to you, in which again and again it is pointed out that the closest followers of Christ Jesus have reached the stage of the Virgin Sophia, because the Event of Golgotha had been consummated in their presence. But when they had to stand firm for the first time, had actually to behold a spiritual event, they were still blinded and had first to find their way. They did not know that He was the same One Who had earlier been among them. Here is something which we must grasp with the most subtle concepts; for the grossly materialistic person would say: “Then the Resurrection is undermined!” The miracle of the Resurrection is to be taken quite literally, for He said: “Lo, I remain with you always, even unto the end of the age, unto the end of the cosmic age.”

He is there and will come again, although not in a form of flesh, but in a form in which those who have been sufficiently developed through the power of the Gospel of St. John, can actually perceive Him and possessing the power to perceive Him, they will no longer be unbelieving. The mission of the Spiritual Science Movement is to prepare those who have the will to allow themselves to be prepared, for the return of the Christ upon earth. This is the cosmo-historical significance of Spiritual Science, to prepare mankind and to keep its eyes open for the time when the Christ will appear again actively among men in the sixth cultural epoch, in order that that may be accomplished for a great part of humanity which was indicated to us in the Marriage at Cana.

Therefore the world-concept obtained from Spiritual Science appears like an execution of the testament of Christianity. In order to be lead to real Christianity, the men of the future will have to receive that spiritual teaching which Spiritual Science is able to give. Many people may still say today: Spiritual Science is something that really contradicts true Christianity. But those are the little popes who form opinions about things of which they know nothing and who make into a dogma: What I do not know does not exist.

This intolerance will become greater and greater in the future and Christianity will experience the greatest danger just from those people who, at present, believe they can be called good Christians. The Christianity of Spiritual Science will experience serious attacks from the Christians in name, for all concepts must change, if a true spiritual understanding of Christianity is to come about. Above all, the soul must become more and more conversant with and understanding of the legacy of the writer of the Gospel of St. John, the great school of the Virgin Sophia, the St. John's Gospel itself. Only Spiritual Science can lead us deeper into this Gospel.

In these lectures, only examples could be given showing how Spiritual Science can introduce us into the Gospel of St. John, for it is impossible to explain the whole of it. We read in the Gospel itself:

And there are also many other things which Jesus did; and I suppose that were they all written down one after the other, the world could not contain all the books that would have to be written.

Just as the Gospel itself cannot go into all the details of the Event of Palestine, so too is it impossible for even the longest course of lectures to present the full spiritual content of the Gospel. Therefore we must be satisfied with those indications which could be given at this time; we must content ourselves with the thought that through just such indications in the course of human evolution, the true testament of Christianity becomes executed. Let us allow all this to have such an effect upon us that we may possess the power to hold fast to the foundation which we recognize in the Gospel of St. John, when others come to us and say: You are giving us too complicated concepts, too many concepts which we must first make our own in order to comprehend this Gospel: the Gospel is for the simple and naive and one dare not approach them with many concepts and thoughts. Many say this today. They perhaps refer to another saying: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” One can merely quote such a saying as long as one does not understand it, for it really says: “Blessed are the beggars in spirit, for they shall reach the kingdom of heaven within themselves.” This means that those who are like beggars of the spirit, who desire to receive more and more of the spirit, will find in themselves the kingdom of heaven!

At the present time the idea is all too prevalent that everything religious is identical with all that is primitive and simple. People say: We acknowledge that Science possesses many and complicated ideas, but we do not grant the same to Faith and Religion. Faith and Religion—so say many “Christians”—must be simple and naive! They demand this. And many rely upon a conception which is little quoted perhaps, but which in the present is haunting the minds of men and which Voltaire, one of the great teachers of materialism, has expressed in the words: “Whoever wishes to be a prophet must find believers, for what he asserts must be believed, and only what is simple, what is always repeated in its simplicity, that alone finds believers.”

This is often so with the prophets, both true and false. They take the trouble to say something and to repeat it again and again and the people learn to believe it, because it is constantly repeated. The representative of Spiritual Science desires to be no such prophet. He does not wish to be a prophet at all. And although it may often be said: “Yes, you not only repeat, but you are always elucidating things from other sides, you are always discussing them in other ways;” when they speak thus to him, he is guilty of no fault. A prophet wishes that people believe in him. Spiritual Science has no desire to lead to belief, but to knowledge. Therefore let us take Voltaire's utterance in another way. He says:—“The simple is believed and is the concern of the prophet.” Spiritual Science says:—the manifold is known. Let us try to understand more and more that Spiritual Science is something that is manifold—not a creed, but a path to knowledge, and consequently it bears within it the manifold. Therefore let us not shrink from collecting a great deal in order that we may understand one of the most important Christian documents, the Gospel of St. John. We have attempted to assemble the most varied material which places us in the position of being able to understand more and more the profound truths of this Gospel; able to understand how the physical mother of Jesus was an external manifestation, an external image of the Virgin Sophia; to understand what spiritual importance the Virgin Sophia had for the pupil of the Mysteries, whom the Christ loved; again to understand how, for the other Evangelists—who view the bodily descent of Jesus as important—the physical father plays his significant part when it was a question of the external imprint of the God-idea in the blood; and further, to understand what significance the Holy Spirit had for John, the Holy Spirit through which the Christ was begotten in the body of Jesus and dwelt therein during the three years and which is symbolized for us in the descent of the Dove at the Baptism by John.

If we understand that we must call the father of Christ Jesus the Holy Spirit who begot the Christ in the bodies of Jesus, then if we are able to comprehend a thing from all sides, we shall find it easy to understand that those disciples who were less highly initiated could not give us so profound a picture of the Events of Palestine as the Disciple whom the Lord loved. And if people, at present, speak of the Synoptics—which are the only authoritative Gospels for them—this only shows that they do not have the will to rise to an understanding of the true form of the Gospel of St. John. For everybody resembles the God he understands. If we try to make into a feeling, into an experience, what we can learn from Spiritual Science about the Gospel of St. John, we shall then find that this Gospel is not a text-book, but a force which can be active within our souls.

If these short lectures have aroused in you the feeling that this Gospel contains not only what we have been discussing here, but that indirectly, through the medium of words, it contains the force which can develop the soul itself further, then what was really intended in these lectures has been rightly understood. Because in them, not only was something intended for the understanding, for the intellectual capacity of understanding, but that which takes its round-about path through this intellectual capacity of understanding should condense into feelings and inner experiences, and these feelings and experiences should be a result of the facts that have been presented here. If, in a certain sense, this has been rightly understood, we shall also comprehend what is meant when it is said that the Movement for Spiritual Science has the mission of raising Christianity into Wisdom, of rightly understanding Christianity, indirectly through spiritual wisdom. We shall understand that Christianity is only in the beginning of its activity, and its true mission will be fulfilled when it is understood in its true spiritual form. The more these lectures are understood in this way, the more have they been comprehended in the sense in which they were intended.

Notes from Alice Kinkel Notes from various hours of the first, second, and third degree

When we turn the right angle, this significant sign, and then feel the repulsion of the forces in the etheric body, as well as in the thumb that was bent in this position, we begin to sense the forces that are at stake here.

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Every word of the legend and every object in this room is of the highest importance: the image of the divine eye, the three candelabras, the carpet - everything, everything has significance.

In the current that is represented here, we have the transition of leadership and culture from the East to the West.

If we want to become discouraged, we have to realize how small and insignificant our own concerns are compared to the concerns the gods have for humanity.

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The divine eye, that is, his image.

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is not the name of God, but it means the presence of God.

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is the divine as it flows in the universe.

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is the divine as man becomes aware of it within himself.

Recordings B from the estate of Elisabeth Vreede

It is understandable that people strive to enter the spiritual world. Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, this was very difficult, which is why we find so few direct communications from the spiritual world from that time. In our time and since the last third of the nineteenth century, however, it has been even more difficult to make the leap that takes a person out of their physical body and into the spiritual world. But once they have made it, it is easier to experience a lot in the spiritual world today than it was in the past.

In exoteric life, a person goes through the world and looks at water, for example. He can then describe it purely externally as a composition of hydrogen and oxygen and the like. But the esotericist, who begins to have some experience in the spiritual world, can feel the true nature of water quite differently. We know that the plant has an etheric body and is also surrounded by the astral. Water does not have an etheric body like plants, but consists of a vast number of elemental beings that permeate the water and actually constitute the water.

When an esotericist sees water rise in the form of fog vapor, or when he sees water being heated, he notices how these elemental entities are paralyzed, even killed. When the water cools down again, or when the rising mist forms clouds, from which lightning strikes and rain falls to the earth, he sees these entities revive and even reform. When they become sluggish or die off due to warming or vaporization, the elemental beings release seeds that in turn sprout when they cool down or condense. The countless births of elemental beings are associated with rain pouring down on the earth.

Therein also lies the secret of healing through water. Where warm water is used, there is the need to anesthetize, to neutralize the effect of the elemental beings. When cold water is used, the underlying need is to feel the stimulation of the life of all these emerging beings.

In the rising fog, the clairvoyant sees dying; as they become lighter to the physical eye, they become darker to the spiritual eye. And when lightning strikes the rain cloud and the rain pours down, the clairvoyant sees it as light pouring onto the earth. This is what the ancients experienced when they drank the Soma; they were in contact with the elemental world and saw the rain streaming down to earth like light.

Man breathes in and out air in such a way that for ordinary perception the inhaled air is the living air and the exhaled air is the killing air. But spiritually considered, inhalation is the death of the elemental beings of air, and with exhalation they come to life again. In the respiratory organs are the speech organs. Man uses these to express his soul or even just for ordinary conversation, but this is only so in a materialistic age. In the age that preceded the materialistic one, the speech organ was also a perception organ; it not only expressed what was in man, but while it pronounced the vowels A, I, U, man sensed the teeming elemental world around him. So too when he pronounced the word “Tao”; then he knew of the great spirit. This word, which was at the same time a spiritual perception, has been lost since the respiratory and speech organs became more independent from each other than they were back then.

Not only do we have a respiratory process in the lungs, but also in the eyes. Only that there is no air inhaled and exhaled, but warmth. When we see a red color, warmth is inhaled (red, orange, yellow). If a cold color such as blue, indigo or violet is perceived, then the eye [exhales]. That which underlies the eyes ethereally – just as air underlies the physical lungs – is warmth and is inhaled and exhaled. Basically, every sense organ is a respiratory organ.

Higher beings, who stand directly above man, have neither such eyes nor such language as man. They direct warmth somewhere, and a color lights up at that point. They express their essence in this way, and this is how they talk to each other. Anyone who has ever perceived colors in this vivid form feels pain when they see the solid colors that adhere to physical objects, just as the whole physical world initially pains them. The pain only stops when one learns to perceive colors morally. Then one perceives punishment for selfishness in red and the reward for overcoming selfishness in blue. Then the colors begin to speak a language that will also be the future language of people.

As people approach the Jupiter existence, their speech will increasingly become a form of perception; then the processes of breathing and speech will no longer be as separate as they are today. Vision and the sensation of warmth will also merge. It was necessary for the development of the independent self that these processes were separate for a time. If this had not happened, then the human being would always have perceived what was happening in his environment, but would not have come to self-awareness.

In the future, people will begin to feel a connection between the spoken word and colors. They will feel green when talking about unimportant things; yellow will arise when speaking selfishly; red will be there when fighting egoism.

This unity of the organs can basically only be achieved by understanding the mystery of Golgotha. Only that can enable us to feel the whole of nature morally. If you then look up at the clouds and see lightning shooting out of them, you will be able to see Christ in them in his etheric form. With the “clouds”, that is, with the elements, he comes in his spiritual form. This vision will occur to every person at some point, sooner or later. Only the Father knows the day and hour, as the Gospel says.

Recordings C by Alice Kinkel

Water is teeming with elemental spirits; when water is heated by fire, the elemental beings die.

People love cold water – for treatment and exercise – because they want to be stimulated by quite a few elemental spirits (when using cold water). When the water is heated, the elemental spirits die, but they deposit their germs in the water during heating, and when the water is then cooled, these germs come to life.

When fog or water vapor rises, the elemental beings withdraw from the earth.

When lightning strikes, fire is driven out (from the clouds). And then, when the rain pours down, the clairvoyant sees the rain streaming onto the earth like flowing light: a birth of numerous elemental spirits takes place.

We distinguish between coarser and finer breathing processes in humans: the larynx, skin breathing, speech and seeing. The human eyes are organs that also carry out breathing processes.

When we feel warmth, it is like inhaling red, orange, yellow (the opposite of what we experience in everyday life); blue and indigo are what we exhale, these are cold colors. If we experience colors in this clairvoyant way, they can cause us pain, these outer colors and the world.

The color red is felt like punishment for evil, which should be overcome; yellow indicates the selfishness of man, and blue indicates the heavenly, which we envision.

The human lungs are the organs with which we breathe air in and out; when we breathe in, we kill the elemental spirits; when we breathe out, we revive them.

Our eyes are also respiratory organs. They breathe out warmth and light; and that is what we then see as color in the objects and surfaces that the eye can see.

We will then experience the elemental world (as clairvoyants) in the flickering colors. We have to learn (recognize) how the gods speak. The gods speak in colors. We should gradually develop a sense for this language so that when we speak more for entertainment, we feel immersed in green; in yellow when we say very selfish words; in elemental red as a punishment for evil; and in blue when we turn to the spiritual. The elemental spirits thus admonish us to use language properly.

The Christ will later be seen in lightning and thunder, in the clouds of heaven; and so it will be when we first see him.

Water is water for the ordinary person, but for the esotericist it becomes a certainty that it is permeated and animated by elemental spirits. When there is fog or mist, the esotericist should feel that the elemental spirits withdraw from the earth. When water vapor rises, the clouds become darker and darker for the clairvoyant until they are completely black (these are the elemental spirits). Physically, however, the clouds appear light.

Holy service or esotericism gradually leads to vision. Only a few are called by grace, as elect, to see through Christ; the others must develop this through meditation and holy service. Day and hour for each one only the Father knows, but it will come for everyone.

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