The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Lecture by Rudolf Steiner at the Giordano Bruno League

Dr. Steiner begins by saying that in the current state of German intellectual life, a man who is worldly-wise in the ordinary sense would not speak publicly on such a topic, because there is hardly any other that would be so likely to compromise him, and then continues: “Theosophy is a name often claimed by people who want to explore their destiny in spiritualistic circles. And yet, even though it has a whiff of fraudulence about it, I am fully aware of the topic when discussing its connection to German intellectual life. I much preferred being in my chemical laboratory to being in any spiritualist circle, and I know that one can get one's hands dirty in such circles, but I have also washed my hands and hope that I will be able to give you an understanding of the word theosophy as a serious worldview. It must be clearly stated that a serious world view can only be sought on the basis of modern natural science. I will never deviate from the idea that only in it is salvation to be found. But science still fills hearts and minds with its materialistic philosophy, and even if individual enthusiasts claim that we have long since passed the age of Büchner and so forth, if we

the materialism of the 1850s will continue to conquer the world. Almost all natural scientists of the present day are materialists, even if they deny it.

Natural science has shown us how gradually beings came into existence and perfected themselves until man appeared. But here, according to Haeckel in the 22nd link of his organic ancestral series, it stopped. David Friedrich Strauß praised the fact that natural science has freed us from miracles, from the miracle in the sense in which Linné said in the 18th century: “

How can we restore the harmony that existed for the ancient religions, and even for the early Middle Ages? With St. Augustine, this discord gradually emerged, leading to the two great dualistic currents in the contrast between scholasticism and Galileo and so on. Science was like a son who returns home from abroad and can no longer be understood by his father, and Protestantism is nothing more than the father's declaration that he wants to disinherit the son, and Kantianism is the conclusion, the last phase of this process!

The first great attempt to overcome this dichotomy was made by the German idealist philosophers Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. Three years after Hegel's death, Fichte's son published a book on human self-knowledge. It deals with this as a task that natural science itself has set. I.H. Fichte says something like: When we observe natural beings, we see their eternal laws. But when we regard the human soul itself as a natural process, we are faced with a change in our understanding. The laws of nature lie outside our personality in the natural basis from which we have emerged, but in our soul we do not see finished natural laws; we are natural law ourselves. There nature becomes our own deed, there we are development. We do not merely recognize, we live. We now have the task of creating eternal iron laws, no longer merely recognizing them. I.H. Fichte then suggests: at this point, man not only lives in his knowledge of nature, at this point he realizes and lives the divine, the creative, at this point philosophy passes over into theosophy!

This is how the concept of theosophy appears in German intellectual life. We can now perhaps see more clearly that theosophy is nothing other than the ultimate demand of a true monism between knowledge of nature and knowledge of the self. This gives us a perspective for reconciling the contradictions between religion and science. We now know that there is no other divine power that can elevate the worm to man; we know that we ourselves are this divine power.

One may ask: But what is the use of such knowledge? Well, I would reply, what significance does the simple recording of facts have, which is usually called knowledge? Those who I would call cosmic loafers are satisfied with that.

Those who understand the concept of theosophy in this way will also understand Fewerbach, who says that man has created God in his own image. We are quite willing to admit that the concept of God is born of the human heart, and that God, as a symbol of an inner ideal, can develop man beyond man.

In this way we shall gain a divine wisdom that will express the divinity of nature. We are now living in a time that could become an important turning-point in the spiritual development of Europe, as it was for the age in which Copernicus, Giordano Bruno and Galileo lived and founded modern natural science. But the latter has not known how to celebrate its reconciliation with religion. We are faced with this task, we must fulfill it. No matter how inadequate these attempts may be, there are currents in modern intellectual life that are moving in this direction. Religions are not founded as such, and so there are no religious geniuses in the sense that there are scientific and artistic geniuses. But there are personalities who express the content of knowledge of their time as religious feeling. I am well aware of the great defects and errors of the theosophical movement. Duboc has called theosophy a feminine philosophy. We can change that by making it a masculine one in critical Germany.

I know that there can be no salvation outside of science, but we must find new methods of soul research based on natural science in order to do what all the old religious views were able to do: establish a great unity between religious need and science. Theosophy in the sense I have characterized it has nothing to do with the reports of facts of hypnotism and somnambulism that are often lumped together with it; indeed, one could reject these and still be a theosophist, but these appearances of abnormal mental life are not to be rejected at all, and in the scientific interpretation of these facts, undertaken particularly by French and English scholars, I see the first tentative attempts at real soul research.

Dr. Steiner concluded his programmatic lecture with a reference to a painting by the Belgian Wiertz, “Man of the Future”. It shows a giant holding cannons and other attributes of the culture of our time, smiling as he shows them to his wife and children, who have shrunk to the size of pygmies in comparison. It will be our task to ensure that we do not appear so pygmy-like in front of the man of the future.

[ 1 ] My dear friends! I sincerely thank Licentiate Bock for his welcoming words, and I promise you that I want to apply everything in my power to contribute at least partly, towards all you are looking for during your stay here.

[ 2 ] Today I would like to discuss some orientation details so that we may understand one another in the right way. It will be our particular task—also during the various hours of discussion we are going to have—to express exactly what lies particularly close to your heart for your future work. I hope that what I have to say to you will be said in the correct way, when during the coming discussion hour your wishes and tasks you ask about, will be heard.

[ 3 ] Anthroposophy, my dear friends, must certainly remain on the foundation of which I've often spoken, when I say: Anthroposophy as such can't represent religious education; anthroposophy as such must limit its task as a spiritual science to fructify present culture and civilization and it is not its purpose to represent religious education. Actually, it is quite far from such direct involvement in any way, in the evolutionary process of religious life. Nevertheless, it appears to me to be certainly justified in relation to the tasks you have just set yourselves, that for religious activity something can be extracted out of Anthroposophy. Indirectly it can not only be obtained through Anthroposophy, but it must be extracted, and this must be said; your experience is quite correct that religious life as such needs deepening, which can come out of the source of anthroposophical science.

[ 4 ] I presume, my dear friends, that you want to actively position yourself in this religious life and that you have looked for this Anthroposophic course because you have felt that religious activity has lead you increasingly towards a dead end, and that through the religious work today—with our traditions, with the historic development and others, which we will still discuss—elements are missing which actually should be within it. We notice how just today even important personalities are searching for a new foundation for religious activity, because they believe this is needed in order to progress in a certain direction. I would like to indicate it as a start, how even the most conscientious personalities ask themselves how one can reach a certain foundation of religious awareness, and how then these personalities actually search more or less for a kind of—one can also call it something else—a kind of philosophy. I remind you only how a home is sought for a kind of philosophic foundation for religious awareness. Obviously, one has to, through the current awareness, recognise something absolutely necessary and one should not ignore that an extraordinarily amount has been accomplished this way. However, one can't comprehend, with unprejudiced observation, what is strived for, and come face to face with this: such an effort, instead of leading into the religious life, actually leads out of the religious life.

Religious life, you will sense, must be something direct, it must be something elementary, entirely connected to human nature, which lives out of the elementary, most inward foundation of human nature. All philosophic thinking is a reflection and is distanced from this direct, elementary experience. If I might express a personal impression, it would be this: When someone philosophises about the religious life and believes that a philosophical foundation is necessary for a religious life, then it always seems to me to be similar to when one wants to turn to the physiology of nutrition in order to attain nourishment oneself. Isn't it true, one can determine the exact foundations of nutritional science but that means nothing for nutrition itself. Nutritional science elucidates nutrition, but nutrition must surely have a sound foundation, it must grow roots in reality; only then can one philosophise about nutrition. So also, the religious life must have roots in reality. It must come to existence out of reality, only when it is there can one philosophise about it. It is certainly not possible at all to substantiate or justify the religious life with some or other philosophic consideration.

[ 5 ] That's the one thing. The other one is something which I can best indicate—I always like referring to realities—through a book which had already came into existed several decades ago in Basle, with the title: The Christian Nature of our Theology Today. It is a book by Overbeck. In it he refers to evidence that the current theology is a kind of theology but that it is actually not Christian any longer. Now, when one takes Harnack's book The Being of Christianity and in its arguments everywhere simply exchanges the word "God" in every instance where he has "Christ," then one will not really change anything in the inner content of Harnack's book. This is already expressed in what Adolf Harnack says, that in the Gospels actually only the proclamation of the Father is needed and not those of Christ Jesus, while naturally during the earlier centuries the Christian development of the Gospels was above all regarded according to the proclamations of Christ Jesus. However, if the Gospels are really considered as the actual proclamations of Christ Jesus, then one has to, beside the Father-experience, that means beside the experience of the world in general being permeated by the Godhead, have the Christ-experience as something extra special. One must be able to have both of these experiences. A theology like Adolf Harnack's no longer has both of these experiences, but only a God-experience, and as a result it is necessary for him that what he finds in his imagination of God, he baptises it with the name of Christ; purely out of a historical foundation, because as he is even a representative of Christianity, he calls his God-experience by the name of Christ.

[ 6 ] These incisive, important things exist already. Certainly, they are not made properly clear but they are felt, and I presume that currently, where nearly everything is shaken up in people's minds, a young theology in particular needs to show itself, in how these things can't really be completed, as is seen to some extent today with theologians, without being permeated by the actual being of Christ. Out of this experience such a book as von Overbeck's was created regarding the current Christianity of theology, where basically the answer is given to why modern theology is no longer Christian because it deals with a general philosophising about a world permeated by God, and not in the real sense of the Christ experience creating the foundation for the entire treatment of religious problems. Religious problems are dealt with based only as Father-problems and not actually the Christ experience.

[ 7 ] Today we basically all have an education inculcated in us, derived from modern science, this science which actually only started in the middle of the 15th century but which has entered into all forms of modern people's thinking. One basically can't be different because one has been educated this way from the lowest primary classes, by forming thoughts according to modern science. This has resulted in theology of the 19th century wanting to orientate itself according to the research of modern science. I'd like to say they feel themselves responsible for the judge's chair of modern science and as a result have become what they are today. One can only find a basis of true religiosity today by, at the same time, considering the entire authorisation and also the complete meaning of the scientific element of life.

[ 8 ] To some of you I have possibly already referred to a man who needs to be taken seriously in relation to religious life, Gideon Spicker, who for a long time studied philosophy at the Münster university. He proceeded from a strict Christian conception of the world, which he gradually developed into his philosophy which was never considered a philosophy but more an instrument for the understanding of religious problems. Modern thinking didn't offer him the possibility to find a sure foundation. So we find in his booklet, entitled At the Turning Point of the Christian World Period the hopelessness of modern man which characterised him so clearly, because he says: "Today we have metaphysics without transcendental conviction, we have a theory of knowledge without objective meaning, we have psychology without a soul, logic without content, ethics without liability and the result is that we can't find some or other foundation for religious consciousness."—Gideon Spicker stood very close to the actual crux which lies at the basis of all religious dichotomies in modern mankind. One can take it like a symptom, to indicate where the actual crux, I could call it, lies. If modern man is discerning, if he tries to create an image through his imagination of the world, then at the same time he clearly has the feeling that this discernment doesn't penetrate the depths. Gideon Spicker expressed it like this: "We have a theory of knowledge without objective meaning", which means we have our insights without being in the position to find the power within us to create something really objective out of our assembled insights. So, the modern discerning man sickens because he fails to find the possibility of a guarantee for his knowledge of objectivity in the world, for existence as such. He finds it in what he experiences subjectively in the knowledge, not really out of the thing itself.

[ 9 ] All of this of course, because it is philosophy, has nothing to do with religious experience. Still, one can say that religious life today is certainly under an influence which heads in a similar direction. The kind of humanity which is not in the position to say about knowledge: "in this realization there exists objective existence for me"—such a type of humanity feels this same insecurity rise up at another point, and that is religious life. The insecurity is situated at the same pivotal point where actual religious life exists today. We will see how other problems will huddle around this pivot point. This pivotal point lies in prayer, in the meaning of prayer. The religious person must feel that prayer has real meaning; some or other reality must be connected to prayer. However, in a time epoch when the discerning person fails to come out of his subjective knowledge and fails to find reality in knowledge, in the same time epoch religious people won't find the possibility, during prayer, of becoming aware that prayer is no mere subjective deed, but that within prayer an objective experience takes place. For a person who is unable to realise that prayer is an objective experience, for him or her it would be impossible to find a real religious hold. Particularly in the nature of current humanity prayer must focus on the religious life. Various other areas must focus on prayer. However, a prayer which only has subjective meaning would make people religiously insecure.

[ 10 ] It is the same root which grows out of us on the one side for the insecurity of knowledge, the Ignorabimus, and on the other side in fear; worry, which do not live in prayer in divine objectivity, but which is involved in subjectivity.

[ 11 ] You see, the problem of faith and the problem of knowledge, all problems, which involve people from the theological side, are connected to the same characteristics. Everything which depresses people from the side of direct religious experience, which needs confirmation, which must be maintained, this all comes from the same source. You can hardly answer this question if you don't orientate yourself historically where it will quite clearly show how far we have actually become distanced with our sciences from what we can call Christian today, while on the other hand today there is the constant attempt to proceed by pushing anything Christian out with science. Take everything in the Gospels which is Christian tradition. You can't but say: in this, there is another conception of the human being than what modern science claims. In modern science the human being is traced back to some or other primitive archetypal creature—I absolutely don't want to say that mankind had perhaps developed out of an animal origin—we are referred back to a primitive Ur-human, which gradually developed itself and, in whose development, existed a progression, an advance. Modern humanity is satisfied to look back according to scientific foundations, to the primitive archetypal beings, who through some inherent power, it is said, they created an ever greater and bigger cultural accomplishment, and to behold the unexpected future of this perfection.

If one now places within this evolution, the development of the Christ, the Mystery of Golgotha, then one can in an honest way hold on to the Gospels and say nothing other than: into this He doesn't fit, what fits here is a historic conception which goes around the Mystery of Golgotha and leaves it out, but the Christ of the Gospels don't fit into this conception. The Christ of the Gospels can't be considered in any other way than if one somehow believes what happened in the 18th century especially among the most enlightened, the most spiritual people as a matter of course. Take for instance Saint Martin—I now want to look further from religious development and want to point out someone who was in the most imminent sense a scientist of the 18th century—and that was Saint Martin. He had a completely clear awareness that the human being at the start of his earthly development came from a certain height downwards, that he had been in another world milieu earlier, in another environment and through a mighty event, through a crisis was thrown down to a sphere which lay below the level of his previous existence, so that the human being is no longer what he once had been.

[ 12 ] While our modern natural science points back to a primitive archetypal being out of which we have developed; this observation of Saint Martin must refer back to the fallen mankind, to those human beings which had once been more elevated. This was something, like I said, which to Saint Martin appeared as a matter of course. Saint Martin experienced this fall of mankind as a feeling of shame. You see, if the Christ is placed in such a conception of human evolution, where the human being, by starting his earth existence through a descent and is now more humble than he was before, then the Christ becomes that Being who would save humanity from its previous fall, then the Christ bears mankind again up into those conditions where it had existed before.

[ 13 ] We will see in what modification this imagination must appear to our souls. In any case this involves a disproportion between our modern understanding of mankind's evolution and the understanding of the Gospels; there is always dishonesty when one goes hither and thither and does not confess that one is simultaneously a supporter of modern scientific thinking and also the Christ. This must actually be clear for every honest, particularly religiously honest sensitive person. Here is something where a bridge must be formed if the religious life is to be healthy once again. Without this bridging, religious life will never ever be healthy again. Actually, there are people who come along like David Friedrich Strauss, and to the question "Are we still Christians?" reply with a No, indicating that they are still more honest than some of the modern theologians, whoever and again overlook the radical differences between what the modern human being regards as pure science and the Gospel concept of the Christ. This is the characteristic of modern theology. It is basically the impotent attempt to treat the Christ conception of the Gospels in such a way that it can be validated in front of modern science. Here nothing originates which somehow can be held.

[ 14 ] Yet, theology still exists. The modern pastor is given very little support for his line of work in the kind of theology presented at his schooling currently, from the foundation which has been indicated already and about which we will still come to in the course of our observations. The modern pastor must of course be a theologian even though theology is not religion. However, in order to work, a theological education is needed, and this educational background suffers from all the defects which I've briefly indicated in our introduction today.

[ 15 ] You see, the Catholic Church knows quite well what it is doing, because it doesn't allow modern science to come into theology. Not as if the Catholic Church doesn't care for modern science, it takes care of it. The greatest scholars can certainly be found within the Catholic ecclesiastics. I'm reminded of Father Secchi, a great astrophysicist, I remember people such as Wasmann, a significant zoologist, and many others, above all one can remind oneself of the extraordinarily important scientific accomplishments, worldly scientific accomplishments of the Benedictine order and so on. But what role did modern science play in the Catholic Church? The Catholic Church wants to care for modern science, that there are real luminaries in it. However, people want this modern scientific way to be applied in connection with the outer sensory world, it wants to distance itself strongly from the conceptions of anything pertaining to spirituality, no statements should be made about this spirituality. Hence it is therefore forbidden to express something about the spiritual, because scientists must not enter into this mix when something is being said about the legitimacy of the spiritual life. So, Catholicism relegates science to its boundaries, it rejects science from all that is theology. That it, for instance in modernism, gradually came into it, has caused Catholicism to experience it as dispensable; hence the war against modernism. The Catholic Church knows precisely that in that moment when science penetrates theology, extraordinary dangers lie ahead, and it is impossible to cope with scientific research in theology.

It is basically quite hopeless if it is expressed in abstract terms: theology we must have but it will be scorched, burnt by modern science.—Where does this come from? That is the next big burning question. Where does this come from?

[ 16 ] Yes, my dear friends, theology as we have it now, is rooted in quite different conditions than those of modern mankind. Ultimately the foundation of theology—if it wants to be correctly understood—is precisely the same foundations as that of the Gospels themselves. I have just expressed a sentence and naturally in its being said, it is not immediately understood, but it has extraordinary importance for our discussions here. Theology as inherited tradition doesn't appear in the form in which modern science appears. Theology is mostly in a form of something handed down, as such it goes back to the earlier ways of understanding. Certainly, logic was later applied to modern theology, which changed the form of theology somewhat; theology no longer appeared as it had been once upon a time. On the other hand, it is Catholicism which actually has something in this relationship which works in an extraordinarily enchanting manner on the more intelligent people and which is firmly adhered to in many Catholic clerics upon studying theology, through what has been handed down as knowledge of the so-called Primordial Revelation (Uroffenbahrung).

[ 17 ] Primordial Revelation! You have to be aware that Catholicism does not merely have the revelation which we usually call the revelation of the New Testament, nor this being only the revelation spoken about in the Old Testament, but that Catholicism—as far as it is theology—speaks about a Primordial Revelation. This Primordial Revelation is usually characterised by saying: that which was revealed by the Christ had been experienced once before by mankind, at that time humanity acquired the revelation through another, a cosmic world milieu. This revelation was lost through the Fall, but an inheritance of this great revelation was still available through the Old Testament and through pagan teachings.—That is Catholic thinking. Once upon a time, before people became sinners, a revelation was made to them; had mankind not fallen into sin, so the entire act of salvation of Christ Jesus would not have become necessary. However, the primordial revelation had been tarnished through humanity falling into the sinful world and in the course of time up to the Mystery of Golgotha the human being increasingly forgot what the primordial revelation had been. To a certain extent in the beginning there still remained glimpses of this primordial revelation, then however, as the generation went further and further away, this primordial revelation darkened, and it had become totally dark in the time of the Mystery of Golgotha which came as a new revelation.

This is what Christianity looks like today—under theological instruction—in Old Testament teaching and above all in the pagan teaching it is seen as a corrupted Primordial Revelation. Catholicism has an insight into what I've often spoken about in Anthroposophy, namely the old Mysteries. In my book Christianity as Mystical Fact I pointed these things out, but, not quite, but only as far as possible because these things are as much unknown as possible in today's world and most people are not prepared for these things. Only, here we can speak about it, and about one point.

[ 18 ] Everywhere in the pagan-religious mysteries there are certain experiences which allowed people to learn more than those communicated outwardly, exoterically, to a large crowd. These experiences didn't happen under supervision but through asceticism, through practice, they happened by the person going through certain experiences; a kind of drama was experienced leading to a culmination, with a catharsis, until the person came to sense the lightening of the divine laws of the world. This is simply a fact and within esoteric Catholicism it engendered an awareness of what existed in the Mysteries. It is even said that modern times are filled with worldly science and that this worldly science must not enter theology with arguments; as a result, we'd rather protect our knowledge of the Mysteries so that worldly science doesn't come in to explain it, because explaining the Mysteries would be a great danger under any circumstances. Catholicism was afraid that scientific involvement would reveal what one could possibly know about such things.

[ 19 ] Now we come to the question: what did the Mysteries actually impart during these olden times? The Mysteries didn't produce a mere theoretical knowledge, it produced an evolution of consciousness, a real transformation of consciousness. A person who had gone through the Mysteries learnt to experience life differently to those people who hadn't gone through them. A person who stands fully awake in the world, experiences outside the sleep state, the outer sense world; he experiences memories, he can through these memories relive his life within himself when after various interruptions he comes to a certain point in his life which lies a couple of years after his birth. With an individual who has gone through hard exercises in the Mysteries, something quite different rises up in his awareness than what he usually can find in his consciousness. In the old Mysteries one expressed this experience as a "rebirth." Why does one call it a rebirth? Because in fact a person goes through a kind of embryonic experience in his consciousness; an awareness comes to the fore in the manner and way the person had lived through during his time as an embryo. During the time of being an embryo, our inner experience is namely of the same kind as are the experiences during thinking, because what is experienced in our senses is only done so through our mother's body. An embryonic experience is woken up, that's why we call it a "rebirth." A person goes back in his embryonic life up to the time of his birth, and so, just like memories rise up, so that what is being experienced also rises up. In this way a person feels himself coming out of a spiritual world, being partially connected to a spiritual world. These were the mysteries of birth, under which time one understood the blossoming of the Mysteries as something which human beings could go through during such an initiation. What he went through during such an initiation was considered a shadowed knowledge of such a state he was in, before he descended into the world of the senses. Thus, through the "rebirth" the human being re-places himself again to a certain extend back into a human form of existence free of sin.

In earlier times, knowledge which was not of this world was called "theology," and this knowledge could be acquired through the return to the wisdom that human beings had had before entering into this world, a wisdom which had been corrupted because people had dragged it into this world.

[ 20 ] I'm sketching these things for you and later we will naturally bring today's considerations to our awareness. Theology in olden times was a gift from the gods, which could only be achieved through such exercises which could lift people out of their senses and bring them at least back to the experience of motherly love, enabling them to take up this wisdom again, this uncorrupted wisdom. This cannot be taken up in the form or modern logical concepts. Within the Mysteries people could not be given logical concepts in the modern sense, they received images. All knowledge which is gained in this way is gained in pictures, images. The more a person actually entered into the real world of existence—not only associated himself with existence—the more he lives into this existence, like when he lives within the existence of motherly love, so much more will consciousness stop living in abstract concepts, so much more will he live in images. Thus, what was designated as "theology" in olden times, in pre-Christian times, visual science, was science living in images. For this reason, I could say: this theology certainly had a similar form of expression as the one living in the Gospels, because in the Gospels we find images, and the further we go back, the more we find that the Gospels are still being expressed in the attitude of the old theology; there is certainly no differentiation between religion and theology. Here theology itself is something which has been received from God, here in theology one looks upon a God, and sees how the theology is given through a communication with God. Here is something which is alive, in theology. Then it came about that theology was experienced differently, somewhat like the conditions in which one lives when you grow older. At that time therefore, in olden times, theology was nourished through the religious life. This particular way of living though-oneself in the world of religious experience, this actually was getting lost to humanity at the same time as the Mystery of Golgotha was occurring.

[ 21 ] So you see, when we look towards the East as it is connected historically to the source of our religious life, we have, we can say, the Indian religious life. What nourishes the Indian religious life? It is nourished through the observation of nature, but the observation of nature was something quite different then to what it is for modern humanity. Nature observation was for all Indians such that one can say: an Indian observed spiritually when looking at nature, but he only observed the spirit which lay beneath the actual being of humanity. The Indian observed the mineral world spiritually, likewise the plant world, animal world; he was aware of the divine spiritual foundation of these worlds; but when he wanted to attain the human world as well, it didn't reveal itself to him. By wanting to access the actual being of the human being in the world, which he had himself, there he found nothing: Nirvana, the entry in nothingness towards what could be perceived in relation to the human being. Thus, the fervour of the Indian's religious life, which certainly was still present at that time, where theology, religion and science were one, was Nirvana. We have an escape from what is perceived from the natural basis of the image-rich consciousness, an escape into Nirvana, where everything that is given to the senses is obliterated. This self-abandonment to Nirvana must be experienced religiously in order to find a possible form for the religious stream of experience for individuals.

[ 22 ] Now, when we consider this religious observation of the world further, with the Persians and later with the Chaldeans, we see how they turn their gaze outward, they don't experience the world like us, they live through a world permeated with spirit, everywhere the spiritual foundation permeates everything, but immobilises it. There is a different disposition with these peoples compared to the Indians. The Indian strived towards mankind and found nothing. The other peoples who lived to the north and west of the Indians didn't strive towards mankind but towards the world, towards the spiritual in the world. They couldn't understand the spiritual world in any other way than to avoid with all their might, what later human evolution could no longer avoid.

[ 23 ] It is unbelievably meaningful, my dear friends, to observe how, on the one hand the old Indian striving came from what he saw, while he, when he strived towards human beings, I might call it, fell into unconsciousness, into Nirvana, while the Old Persian remained in what he was looking at. The divine which is the basis of the mineral, the plant and animal worlds, was understood by the Old Persian and from this came his religious striving; but now he was overcome by fear that he might be urged to seek man, and this turned into abstract thoughts which turned into imagery. This is actually the basic feeling of the near-Asian peoples all the way to Africa. They saw the foundation of nature as being a spiritual world; they didn't see people, but they were afraid to search in people because then they would enter an abstract region, a region into which later, the Romans entered with their religion. Before the Roman time, in the second, third Century there was the aspiration everywhere to avoid entering into abstractions, hence the aspiration to capture what is presented in images. There was even the endeavour to express in images, what one understood, in image form. There was an effort to, in relation to the divine, which one perceives, not to search for it through abstract concepts but in actions made visible; this is the origin of ritual, sacramental action. In this religious area which I'm referring to, is the origin of ritual in worship.

[ 24 ] Now place yourself into this entire development of the old Hebraic peoples; the Judaism which strongly feels the urge for its people's development to enter into what one possesses in one's consciousness. Today I only want to make indications in my presentation in order for us to orientate ourselves. The members of the Hebrew people wanted above all to feel the God on which human nature is based. The Old Indian only sensed God, or the gods, who lay at the basis of sub human nature, and as he tried to penetrate with his consciousness into the human being, there he wanted to rise up into Nirvana. The other, the Persian, Chaldean and Egyptian peoples searched for the connection to the Divine in images and applied these according to their character dispositions, to get up to the human being. So we can see how this urge, as in Judaism, to draw the divine and the human together, to bring the divine in a relationship with the human being, lead to the divine appearing at the same time the foundation of humanity. There was not predisposition to that in the Indian when they sailed into Nirvana; there was no longer a conception that the human consciousness wanted to be reached. For the Indian this personal route to the human soul was to be avoided. This personal route of the human soul had even lead to gradually slipping out of existence into nonexistence, so to speak. The other, the Prussian route, came to a standstill with imagery, remaining in ritual only.

[ 25 ] We see how the Jewish peoples developed, within these strivings, their own special character and this resulted in the impossibility to reach God out of one's own life. One had to wait and see what God himself gave, and it was there that the actual concept of revelation came into being. One had to wait and see what God would give and on the other hand one had to be careful not to search through the route of imagery or symbolism (Bilderweg), which was to be feared. If the route of symbolism was sought, then one arrived at a subhuman God, not at a God who carries humanity. In Judaism the symbolic route was not to be followed, it would not be through ritual an also not through the content of knowledge that one would speak to God. The olden time Jew wanted to meet their god by Him revealing himself, and human beings would communicate in a human way, while from their side, not make outwardly fulfilled sacrifices, but what arises subjectively: the promise—revelation, promise and the contract between both; a judicial relationship one could call it, between the people and their God.

[ 26 ] So the Jewish religion positioned itself and thus the Jewish religion stood in the entire evolution of humanity. therefore, one can say: here already a relationship is the example which is performed in our modern time, where science wants to be beside religion but where science has nothing to say about religion, just like the olden time Jew removed everything which appeared as imagery. This is already performed in Judaism, and precisely in the modern differentiation between knowledge and faith, lies unbelievably much Judaism. In Harnack's The Being of Christianity everything is again based on Judaism. You have to see through this that we get sick with these things.

[ 27 ] Human evolution is penetrated by more and more things. Something is continuously developing which belongs to the Jews in particular: the awareness of personality, which is urged by ego development. With the Greeks there developed a mighty inner world beside the outer world of observed nature but this inner world could raise doubts, because it was observed merely as a world of mythology. Sensing the religious element rising in Hellenism, which lives in Greek mythology, through mythological fantasy, which people are searching for—because it was not to be found in nature—is what rises up in man. The Greek however didn't grasp the actual important point within the human inner life, resulting from mythological fantasy, which the Romans evolved into abstract thinking, which certainly already started with Aristotle, but which was developed particularly in Rome. This abstract way of thinking which is so powerful as to being people to the point of their I, bringing them to self-consciousness, to I-consciousness, this is something which we today still carry in us today and we carry it heavily in us, in the form of modern agnosticism.

[ 28 ] My dear friends, basically there is no spiritual teaching other than modern materialism. This sounds like an extraordinary paradox and yet it is so. What the modern materialistic thinker carries in his head is quite spiritualized, so spiritualised that it is quite abstract and has no connection to reality any more. That's Romanism in full swing. We actually have become unbelievably spiritual in the course of the 19th century, but we deny this spirituality because we maintain that through this spirituality, we can understand matter. In reality our souls are in a spiritualised content, right into our ideas are we spiritualised, but we maintain that through all of this we can only understand a material world. Thus, human beings have grasped their ego through this spiritualisation, but as a result they have become separated from the world. Today humanity must again look for its connection to the world, the search need to be for inner knowledge, there needs to be the possibility to not only have "knowledge without objective meaning" but knowledge with objective meaning, in order for knowledge to reveal the being of the world, and on the other hand to authenticate what is hidden within the human being as objective.

[ 29 ] You see, the Greeks had a great advantage compared to the oriental world, they could to draw together their innermost nature so to speak. From within themselves they could draw a content, but this content could first only attach as filled with fantasy, imagination. However, there was something the Greeks didn't know. They had brought the development of humanity to internalisation but didn't attach it to the inner life. The internalisation and the hardening continued in the Roman times and beyond, and man had to learn—today still we need to learn to understand—how one can attach what is within, what permeates this inner being. The Greeks could think about their gods in grandiose fantasy images but what the Greek could not do, was to pray. The prayer only cam about later and for prayer the possibility had to be found of connecting the one praying, to reality. To this we must connect those times in which prayer was not merely spoken, not merely thought or not merely felt, but in which prayer became one with the sacramental ritual. Then again Catholicism knows quite well why they don't separate themselves from ritual, from the sacrificial act, from the central sacrifice of the mass.

We'll talk more about these things.

We have arrived at an important point in our studies—a sort of climax—hence we may expect to encounter various difficult passages in elucidating the Gospels. I may therefore be permitted at the beginning of these expositions, to preface the continuation of what was said yesterday with a short survey of the salient features thus far treated.

We know that the nature of mankind's development was essentially different in remote times from what it is today, and we know that the human being shows an increasingly different form as our retrospect reaches farther and farther back to earlier conditions. It has already been mentioned that from our own time, which we may call the Central European cultural epoch, we can look back successively to the Greco-Latin time, to the Egypto-Chaldean period, and then to the era in which the ancient Persian people was led by Zarathustra. Beyond that we arrive at the remote Indian civilization, so very different from ours; and that brings us to a period of cultural evolution that followed immediately upon a great and mighty catastrophe. This cataclysm, running its course in tempestuous events in the air and in the water element, led to the disappearance of that continent which mankind had inhabited before the Indian civilization—ancient Atlantis, situated between Europe-Africa, and America—and to the migration of its people, westward to America and on the other side to the lands of Europe, Asia, and Africa, which had gradually taken on their present configuration. This Atlantean age, especially in the early part, produced human beings who were very differently constituted in respect of their soul from present-day mankind; and what interests us primarily in human evolution is precisely what pertains to the soul, for we know that everything corporeal is a result of psychospiritual development.

What was the nature of the soul life in this ancient Atlantean age? We know that at that time human consciousness was very different from what it became later, and that in a certain respect man had an archaic clairvoyance, but that he was not yet capable of any pronounced self-consciousness, of ego-consciousness. This is achieved only by learning to distinguish oneself from outer objects, and people of that time were not quite able to do this.

Let us imagine for a moment what would happen in our time if we were unable to distinguish ourselves from our surroundings—let us consider the matter in a concise way. Nowadays we ask, Where are the confines of my being? And with a certain justification we answer, from our present-day standpoint, The confines of my human entity are where my skin divides me off from my surroundings. People imagine that they consist only of what their skin encloses, and that everything else is made up of outer objects which they perceive and from which they distinguish themselves. They believe this because they know that if some part is removed from within their skin they are no longer a complete human being, nor can be. From a certain standpoint it is quite correct to say that if you cut off a piece of a man's flesh he is no longer a whole human being.

On the other hand, we also know that we inhale air with every breath; and to the question, where is this air, the answer is, all around us—everywhere where our environment makes contact with us: that is the air we will have within us in the next moment. Now it is outside us, now in us. Cut off this air, remove it, and you can no longer exist. You are less whole than you would be if the hand within your skin were cut off. So the truth of the matter is that we are not bounded by our skin. The surrounding air is part of us, it enters and leaves us, and we have no right arbitrarily to fix the skin as our boundary.

If people would come to understand this—it would have to be arrived at theoretically, as perception provides no means of observing it—it would lead them to ponder on matters not forced upon their attention by the outer world itself. If a man were at all times able to see the air current passing into him, spreading, being transformed, and passing out again, it would never occur to him to say, This hand is more a part of me than the air I inhale. He would count the air as part of himself, and would suspect hallucinations if he fancied himself an independent being capable of existing without his environment.

No such delusion could exist for the Atlantean, for his observation clearly showed him a different state of affairs. He saw the objects in his environment not in sharp outline, but surrounded by colored auras. He did not see a plant as we see it, but more as we see the street lamps on a foggy autumn evening: everything was surrounded by a great colored aura. That was because there is spirit—spiritual beings—in and among all things of the outer world, which the dim clairvoyance still existing at that time enabled the Atlantean to perceive. As the fog fills the space between the lights, so there are spiritual beings everywhere in space. The Atlantean saw these spiritual beings just as you see the fog, hence they constituted for him a kind of vaporous aura investing all outer objects. These themselves were indistinct; but because he saw the spirit he also saw everything of a spiritual nature that streamed in and out of him. And for the same reason he saw himself as a component of his whole environment. He saw currents flowing into his body from all sides, currents you cannot see today. Air is merely the densest substance that enters us: there are far more tenuous ones. Man has lost the power of discerning spirit because he no longer has the old dim clairvoyance; but the man of Atlantis saw the spiritual currents streaming in and out, just as your finger, were it conscious, would see the blood coursing through it and would know that it must wither if it were torn off. Just as the finger would feel, if conscious, so the Atlantean felt himself to be a member of an organism. He felt the currents streaming in through his eyes and ears, and so forth; and he knew that if he were to force himself out of their reach he could not remain a human being. He felt as though poured out into the whole outer world.

The man of Atlantis saw the spiritual world, but he could not distinguish himself from it: he lacked anything like a strong ego sense—self-consciousness in its present meaning. The opportunity to develop this was provided by the fading from his view of all that had emphasized his dependence upon his environment. The cessation of that awareness enabled him to develop his self-consciousness, his egoity, and to do this was the task of post-Atlantean man. After the great Atlantean catastrophe people were organized in such a way that the spiritual world receded from their consciousness, and that they gradually learned to see the outer physical world of the senses ever more clearly and distinctly. But nothing that evolves in the world takes place all at once, but step by step; it proceeds slowly and gradually; and thus the old dim clairvoyance vanished slowly and by degrees. Even today, under given conditions, it is still found as an old heritage in certain people and in mediumistic natures. Something that had reached its climax in a certain era gradually becomes extinct. In the earliest period of postAtlantean times, ordinary people still retained a great deal of the gift of clairvoyance; and what these people saw in the spiritual world was continually supplemented, expanded, and animated by the initiates who were guided to the spiritual world by the methods described in an earlier lecture, and who thus became the messengers of what in former times had been seen to a certain extent by all men.

Better than any external historical research, legends and myths—especially those linked with the oracle sanctuaries—have preserved for us what is true of those old times. In the oracle temples specially selected people were thrown into abnormal states—a dream state, or mediumistic state, as one might say—by reducing them to a consciousness state duller and darker than the ordinary waking state. They were in a condition of diminished consciousness, where they were surrounded by outer objects which, however, they did not see. This was not clairvoyance as it had once existed, but an intermediate state, half dreamlike, half in the nature of clairvoyance. Now, if information was sought concerning certain particular circumstances in the world, or the right mode of procedure in some special matter, the oracles were consulted; for in them was to be found the dim clairvoyance as a heritage of the ancient faculty.

At the beginning of his evolution, then, man was endowed with wisdom: wisdom streamed into him. But this wisdom gradually dwindled away: and even the initiates in their abnormal states—of for they had to be led into the spiritual world by the withdrawal of however, those who were not only initiated in the old sense, but who had advanced with the times and were prophets of the future, realized that a new impulse was indispensable for humanity. An ancient heritage of wisdom had been bestowed upon mankind when it descended from divine-spiritual heights, but it became ever more obscured. In the beginning all men possessed it, then but the few who were thrown into special states of consciousness in the oracles, then only the initiates, and so forth.

The day must come—thus spoke the old initiates who knew the signs of the time—in which this ancient heritage will have dwindled to the point where it is no longer capable of leading and guiding humanity; and this would mean that man would fall a prey to uncertainty and doubt in the world. It would express itself in his willing, his acting, and his feeling. And with the gradual dwindling of wisdom men would become their own unwise leaders: their ego would wax increasingly strong, so that with the recession of wisdom every individual would seek truth in his own ego, would develop his own feelings and will—every man for himself—and men would become ever more isolated, more alienated from each other, and they would understand each other less and less. Since each wants his own thoughts—thoughts that no longer flow out of a unified wisdom—none can understand the other's thoughts; and human feelings, no longer guided by universal wisdom, must eventually come into mutual conflict, as must also human actions. All men would act, think, and feel in opposition to each other, and ultimately mankind would be split up altogether into an aggregation of quarrelling and fighting individuals.

And what was the outer, physical sign that appeared as the expression of this development? It was the transformation mankind experienced in the blood. In very ancient times, as we know, endogamy was customary: people married only within the blood-related tribe. But this custom yielded increasingly to exogamy: the blood of mutually alien tribes became mixed; and that explains the decrease, the dwindling, of the heritage deriving from a remote past.

Let us once more recall Goethe's words which we quoted yesterday:

“My father gave my build to me,
Toward life my sober bearing.
From mother comes my cheerful heart,
My joy in storytelling.”

We connected this assertion with the fact that what the etheric body comprises derives from the maternal element, as handed down from generation to generation, so that every man bears in his own etheric body the legacy of the maternal element, and in his physical body, that of the paternal element. Now, by reason of consanguinity the inheritance, perpetuating itself from etheric body to etheric body, was very potent, and from it derived the old faculty of clairvoyance. The offspring of endogamy inherited with the related blood the old capacity for wisdom in the etheric body. But as blood became more and more mixed—as a result of increasing intermarriage among tribes—the possibility of handing down the ancient wisdom diminished; for as we said yesterday, human blood gradually altered, and the mixing of different bloods obscured the ancient wisdom more and more.

In other words, the blood—bearer of inherited maternal attributes—became ever less fitted to transmit the old faculty of clairvoyance. It simply developed in such a way that people became ever less able to see into the spiritual world. Physically considered, therefore, human blood altered in a manner to render it increasingly incapable of bearing the old wisdom that once had guided man so surely, falling instead more and more into the opposite extreme, becoming the bearer of egotism—that is, of a quality that leads men, as egos, to individual isolation and mutual antagonism. And for the same reason it gradually lost its power of uniting men in love.

We are, of course, still involved in this process of deterioration taking place in the human blood because, in as far as it has its origin in an ancient epoch, it will follow its lingering course to the end of Earth evolution. Therefore an impulse was needed in humanity capable of counteracting this condition. Through consanguinity men would have been led into error and misery, as the old wise men tell us in legends and myths, Men could no longer rely on the legacies of an ancient wisdom: even the oracles, asked for information and advice, divulged only what led to savage conflicts and quarrels. The oracle had foretold, for example, that Laios and Jocasta would have a son who would kill his father and wed his mother. Nevertheless, in the face of this legacy of oracle wisdom, nothing could at that time prevent the blood from falling more and more a prey to error: Oedipus does kill his father and does wed his mother. He commits parricide and incest.

What the old sage meant was this: Once upon a time men possessed wisdom; but even had it been preserved, the development of the ego must inevitably have proceeded, and egotism would have grown so strong that blood would rage against blood. Blood is no longer fitted to lead men upwards when it is guided only by the ancient wisdom. And thus the clairvoyant initiate who gave us the original picture of the Oedipus legend wished to set up a warning for mankind, saying: That is what would happen to you if nothing came to supersede the old oracle wisdom.—And in the Judas legend there is preserved even more clearly an indication of what the old oracle wisdom would have led to. Judas' mother, too, was prophetically told that her son would kill his father and wed his mother, thereby conjuring up untold misery; and it all came to pass in spite of the foreknowledge. This means that the primeval, inherited wisdom is not capable of saving man from the abyss into which he must fall unless a new impulse reaches mankind.

If we now look more closely into the causes of all this we must ask, Why was it inevitable that the ancient wisdom should become unfitted to dominate humanity? The answer to this question can be found by examining nature carefully the origin of the old wisdom in its relation to mankind I have already indicated that in the old Atlantean age a connection existed between the physical body and the etheric body of man that differed greatly from the later relation. In regard to two of the principles of man's nature it can be said that the physical and etheric bodies are so related that they approximately coincide, especially in the region of the head; but this is only the case in our own time. Looking back to the Atlantean period we find the etheric head protruding far beyond its physical counterpart: the etheric body extended past the physical body, particularly in the head region. Now, in the Atlantean epoch human evolution proceeded in such a way that the outline of the physical and of the etheric body became more and more coincident, especially in the head: the etheric body kept withdrawing into the physical body, thereby naturally altering this member of the human being.

That, then, is the essential feature of this phase of human evolution: the etheric body of the human head withdraws more and more into the physical aspect of the head until the two come to coincide. Now, as long as the etheric body was outside the physical head it was subject to conditions quite different from the subsequent ones: it was in touch, on all sides, with currents, with other spiritual beings; and the substance of what thus streamed in and out provided the faculty of clairvoyance in Atlantean times. So the capacity for clairvoyance was due to the incomplete coincidence of the physical and etheric bodies in the head region, a condition admitting from all sides currents endowing the etheric head with clairvoyance. Then followed the time when the etheric body withdrew into the physical body. In a certain way—not completely—it tore itself away from these currents; it began to cut itself off from the currents which had provided the capacity for clairvoyantly penetrating the wisdom of the world. Conversely, when in the old initiations a man's etheric body was withdrawn, his etheric head became interpermeated once more with the surrounding currents, and clairvoyance set in again.

Now, had this contact between the etheric body and the outer world been severed at one stroke, in the middle of the Atlantean age, the old clairvoyance would have vanished far more rapidly than was actually the case. No remnants of it would have remained for the post-Atlantean time, nor would mankind of a later age have retained any recollection of it. As it occurred, however, man preserved a certain contact with the outer currents. And something else took place as well: this etheric body that had cut itself off from the currents of its environment retained, nevertheless, certain remnants of the former capacity for wisdom. Keep well in mind that at the end of the Atlantean epoch, after man had drawn his etheric body into himself, there remained in it a sort of fund, the residue of what had once come to it from without—a small saving, if I may use the term: as if a son had a father, the father is earning money, and the son draws upon him according to his needs. In the same way, man drew upon his environment for all the wisdom he needed, up to the time when his etheric body severed the connection. Keeping to our simile, let us now assume that the son loses his father, there remains for him but a certain portion of his father's money, and he earns nothing to add to it. In time he will come to the end of it and have nothing left. That is the position in which the human being found himself. He had torn himself loose from his father-wisdom, had added nothing to it through his own endeavor, and subsisted on it into the Christian era—indeed, even now he is still living on his inheritance, not on anything he has earned. He lives on his capital, so to speak. In the earliest part of post-Atlantean development a bit of the capital was still left, though without his having himself earned the wisdom: he lived on the interest, as it were, and occasionally requested an additional sum from the initiates. But ultimately the coin of ancient wisdom lost its currency; and when it was given to Oedipus it no longer had any value: this old wisdom did not save him from the most frightful transgression, nor did it save Judas.

That is what took place in the course of human evolution. How did it come about that man gradually exhausted his capital of wisdom? Because in the past he had given access to two kinds of spiritual beings: the Luciferic beings, and later, as a consequence of these, the Ahrimanic or Mephistophelean beings. These prevented him from adding, by his own labor, to the store of old wisdom, for they acted upon his being as follows: the Luciferic beings tended to corrupt his passions and feelings, while the Ahrimanic, the Mephistophelean beings were more concerned with outwardly distorting his view of the world. Had the Luciferic beings not intervened in Earth evolution, man would have developed no such interests in the physical world that drags him down beneath his true status; and if, as a result of the Luciferic influence, the Mephistophelian, the Ahrimanic, the Satanic beings had not taken a-hand, man would know, and would always have known, that underlying every object of the senses there is spirit, and he would look through the surface of the sense world upon the spirit. But Ahriman infused into human observation something like a dark smoke cloud that prevents penetration to the spiritual. Through Ahriman's agency man is enmeshed in lies, in maya, in illusion.—These are the two beings that prevent man from earning any increment to the store of ancient wisdom once bestowed upon humanity; and as a consequence, this heritage has dwindled away and gradually become wholly useless.

Nevertheless, in a certain other respect evolution held to its course. During the Atlantean time the human etheric body merged with the physical body; and it was man's misfortune, so to speak—his fate—to be forced to experience the influence of Lucifer and Ahriman in his physical body in this physical world just at a time when he was God-forsaken, as it were. The result was that the old heritage of wisdom became useless precisely by reason of the influence of the physical body, of living in the physical body. How did this happen? Formerly man did not live in the physical body: he gathered his wisdom from his father's treasury, so to speak—from the ancient fund of wisdom. His source of supplies was outside his physical body, because he himself was outside it in respect of his etheric body; and this source finally dried up. In order to augment his fund of wisdom, man would have needed a treasury in his own body. But this he did not have; and consequently, in default of an inner source of wisdom, there remained less and less of it in his etheric body every time he abandoned his physical body at death. After every death, every reincarnation, the sum of wisdom in his etheric body was less: the etheric body became ever poorer in wisdom.

But evolution advances; and just as in the Atlantean age evolution was such that the etheric body withdrew into the physical body, so future development will proceed in such a way that man will gradually emerge again from his physical body. Whereas in a former age the etheric body kept drawing into the physical—ever deeper, up to the coming of Christ—the time then arrived in which the course of evolution changed. At the moment in which Christ appeared the etheric body began to retrace its course; and already in our present time it is no longer as closely bound to the physical body as it was when Christ was present on earth. And as a result the physical body has become even denser than before. The human being, then, is moving toward a future in which his etheric body will increasingly protrude, and in time it will extend as far as it did in the Atlantean epoch.

Here we can pursue our simile a bit further. If the son, who had formerly lived on his father's fund, spends it all and earns nothing additional, his prospects will become increasingly dismal. But if this man now has a son of his own—that would be the grandson—the latter will not be in the same position as his father. The father at least inherited something and could go on spending, but there remains nothing at all for the grandson, nor does he inherit anything: for the time being he is left with nothing whatever. And in a certain way that describes the course of human evolution. When the etheric body entered the physical, bringing along a supply of divine wisdom from the treasury of the Godhead, it still provided wisdom for its physical body. But the Luciferic and Ahrimanic spirits prevented all augmentation of this wisdom in the physical body—contrived that none should be added. When now the etheric body begins to emerge again it takes nothing with it from the physical body, and the consequence is that if nothing else had intervened man would be heading for a future in which his etheric body, though belonging to him, would contain no vestige of wisdom or knowledge. And with the complete desiccation of the physical body the etheric body would be destitute as well, for nothing could be drawn from the dried-up physical body. Therefore, if the physical body is not to desiccate in that future period, the etheric body must he provided with strength, with the strength of wisdom. Before emerging from the physical body the etheric body should have been endowed with the power of wisdom. Within the physical body it must have received something it can take out with it. Then, when it emerges—provided it has acquired this wisdom—it can react on the physical body, giving it life and preventing its desiccation.

The future evolution of humanity can take one of two courses, of which one is as follows: Man develops without Christ. In this case the etheric body could bring with it nothing from the physical body, because it had received nothing from it: it emerges empty. But conversely, the etheric body cannot animate the physical body, having nothing to give: it cannot prevent the attrition, the withering, of the physical body. Man would gradually forfeit all the fruits of his physical life: they could furnish nothing out of his physical body, which he would therefore have to abandon. But the very purpose for which man descended to earth was to acquire a physical body in addition to his other principles. The germ of the physical body originated in an earlier period, but without its actual formation man would never fulfill his mission on earth. But the influences of Lucifer and Ahriman have entered the picture; and if man acquires nothing in his physical body, if his etheric body withdraws again with nothing to take with it—having even used up the old store of wisdom—then the earth's mission is doomed: the mission of the earth within the universe would fail of fulfillment. Man would carry over nothing into the future but the empty etheric skull which had been abundantly filled when he originally brought it into earth evolution.

But now let us suppose something were to occur at the right moment which would enable man, as his etheric body emerges again, to provide something for it, to animate it, to penetrate it with wisdom as of old: the etheric body would continue to emerge just the same; but now, endowed with new life, new strength, it could employ these for vitalizing the physical body. It could send power and life back into it. But the etheric body itself must first possess these: it would first have to receive this strength and life; and if it succeeds in this the fruits of man's earth life are saved. The physical body will then not simply decay, but rather, this corruptible physical body will assume the configuration of the etheric body, the incorruptible; and man's resurrection, with the harvest reaped in his physical body, is assured.

An impulse had thus to come to the earth through which the exhausted treasure of ancient wisdom might be replenished, through which the etheric body might be endowed with new life, thus enabling the physical element—otherwise destined to corruption—to put on the incorruptible and to become permeated by an etheric body capable of rendering it immortal, of rescuing it from Earth evolution. And that is what Christ brought mankind—this pervasion of the etheric body with life. The transformation of the human physical body that would otherwise be doomed to death, its preservation from corruption, its ability to wear the incorruptible—all this is connected with the Christ. Life was infused into the human etheric body by the Christ impulse—new life, after the old had been spent. And looking into the future, man must tell himself: When my etheric body will ultimately have emerged from my physical body, I should have developed in such a way that it is wholly saturated by the Christ. The Christ must live in me. In the course of my earth development I must by degrees completely permeate my etheric body with the Christ.

What I have just described to you are the deeper processes that elude outer observation. They constitute the spiritual principle underlying the physical evolution of the world.

But what outer form did all this have to take? What was it that entered the physical body through the Luciferic and Ahrimanic beings? The tendency to decay, to dissolution—in short, the tendency to die. The germ of death had entered the physical body. Had no Christ come, this death germ would have developed its full power only at the end of Earth evolution, for then the etheric body would be for all time powerless to reanimate man; and at the completion of Earth evolution, that which had come into being as human physical body would fall into decay and the earth's mission itself would end in death. Whenever we encounter death today we can discern in our present life a portent of the universal death that would occur at the end of Earth evolution. Mankind's ancient heritage dwindles but slowly and gradually, and the possibility of being born again and again, of passing from incarnation to incarnation, is due to the life fund originally given man on his way. As regards his purely external life in the successive incarnations, the possibility for life to exist would not be fully exhausted before the end of Earth evolution; but as time goes on the gradual extinction of the race would manifest itself. This would occur piece by piece, and the physical body would continually wither. Had the Christ impulse not come, man would perish member by member as Earth evolution approached its termination.—At present the Christ-Impulse is but at the beginning of its development: only by degrees will it make its way among men; and only future epochs will reveal—and continue to reveal to the very end of Earth evolution—the full significance of Christ for humanity.

But the various human activities and interests have not all been affected alike by the Christ impulse. There are today many such that have not been touched by it at all, that must await a future time. I will give you a striking example of one whole sphere of human activity which at present has not been influenced by the Christ impulse at all. Toward the end of the pre-Christian epoch—say, in the 6th or 7th Century before our era—the primeval wisdom and power were on the wane in so far as human knowledge was concerned. In connection with other phases of life that wisdom long retained a fresh, young forcefulness; but it declined most noticeably in the matter of knowledge. From the eighth, seventh, and sixth centuries B. C. there remained something that may be termed the remnant of a remnant. Were you to hark back even to the Egypto-Chaldean wisdom, not to say that of ancient Persia or India, you would find this wisdom everywhere permeated by true spiritual vision, by the fruits of primeval clairvoyance; and for those endowed to a lesser degree with this faculty the reports of the clairvoyants were available. Such a thing as science other than one based on clairvoyance never existed in the Indian and Persian epochs, nor in still later times; even during the early Greek period there was no science without a basis of clairvoyant research. But then the time approached when this fading clairvoyant research was lost to human science, and for the first time we witness the rise of a human science devoid of clairvoyance—or at least, a science from which clairvoyance was gradually cast out.

Clairvoyance vanishes, as does faith in the revelations of clairvoyants; and during the 6th or 7th Century before the appearance of Christ we see established something we can call a human science, from which the fruits of spiritual research are increasingly eliminated. And this becomes ever more the case: in Parmenides and Heraclitus, in Plato and even in Aristotle—everywhere in the writings of the old naturalists and physicians—you can find ample confirmation that what is known as science was originally permeated by the results of spiritual research. But spiritual science steadily deteriorated and decreased. In connection with our psychic capacity, our feeling and willing, it still endures; but as regards our thinking it is vanishing.

Thus with respect to human thinking, to thinking in terms of science, the influence of the etheric on the physical body had already begun to wane when Christ appeared. Everything of that sort comes about gradually, step by step. Christ came and gave the impulse; but naturally not everyone accepted it at once, and particularly was it rejected in certain spheres of activity. In others it was received, but in the field of science it was positively spurned. Examine for yourselves the science that prevailed in the time of the Roman empire. Look it up in Celsus, where you can read all sorts of rubbish about Christ. This Celsus was a great scholar, but he understood nothing whatever about human thinking as affected by the Christ impulse. He reports:

“There is said to have lived at one time in Palestine a couple known as Joseph and Mary, with whom the sect of Christians originated. But what is told about them is all superstition. The truth is that the wife of this Joseph was once unfaithful to her husband with a Roman captain named Panthera; but Joseph did not know the identity of the child's father.”

That was one of the most popular accounts of the time; and if you follow our contemporary literature you will realize that certain people of the present have not advanced beyond the standard of Celsus. Certainly there are fields in which the Christ-Impulse can take root but slowly, but among those now under discussion it has to this day found no foothold at all. There is one part of man we see withering: it is in the human brain; but when it shall have been influenced by the Christ-Impulse it will revive science in a very different form. Strange as that may sound in this age of scientific fanaticism, it is nevertheless true. That part of the brain assigned to scientific thinking is moving toward a slow death. This illustrates the gradual disappearance of the ancient heritage from scientific thinking. Aristotle still possessed a relatively large store of it, but we see science gradually being drained of it; and science, by reason of the accumulation of external data, will become God-forsaken in respect of its thinking, having nothing left of the old fund. And we see further how it is possible that, no matter how powerfully we experience the Christ, we can no longer establish any contact between the Christ-Impulse and what mankind has achieved in the way of science.

We have tangible evidence of this. Suppose that a man of the 13th Century had been profoundly affected by the Christ-Impulse and had said: We have the Christ-Impulse; like a flood of mighty new revelations it streams to us from the Gospel, and we can permeate ourselves with it.—And suppose further that this man had made it his mission to create a connecting link between science and Christianity: even as early as the 13th Century he would have found nothing in the current science that could have been used for the purpose. He would have had to hark back to Aristotle. Only by collaborating with Aristotle, not with 13th-Century science, would he have been able to interpret Christianity. Science simply became increasingly incapable of making any contact with the Christ principle; hence the 13th-Century scholars had to revert to Aristotle, who still possessed something of the old legacy of wisdom and could thus provide concepts capable of correlating science and Christianity.

But as science grew richer in data and observations it became ever poorer in ideas, until finally the time came when all concepts emanating from the old wisdom disappeared from it. Even the greatest men are, of course, children of their era as far as their scientific activity is concerned. Galileo, for example, could not think from an absolute background, but only as his age thought; and his greatness consists precisely in his having established God-forsaken thinking as such—pure mechanistical thinking. An important revulsion in thought set in with Galileo: the most commonplace phenomena treated by modern physics had quite a different explanation after Galileo's day from what they had previously. Say, someone throws a stone. Today we are told that the stone retains its motion until the latter is counteracted by the influence of another force, the force of inertia. Before Galileo's time a different opinion was held: people were convinced that if the stone was to keep moving it would have to be propelled—something active must be behind it. Galileo taught people to think in an entirely new way, but in a way implying that the world is a mechanism; and the ideal striven for today is a mechanical, mechanistic explanation of the world with the complete elimination of all spirit. And the reason for this is that those portions of the human brain, of the thought apparatus, which constitute the organ of scientific thinking, are already so shrivelled as to be no longer able to infuse new life into concepts, with the result that the latter become more and more poverty-stricken.

One could easily show that science, for all the isolated facts it keeps accumulating, has not enriched the life of mankind by a single concept. Note well that observations are not concepts! Do not imagine that such things as Darwinism and the like have provided humanity with concepts. That is something that others have done—not the scientists, but men who tapped quite different sources. Goethe was such a man: he enriched man's fund of ideas from altogether different sources; and consequently the scientists consider him a dilettante.

The fact is that science has not grown richer in ideas. Far more alive, loftier, grander are those of antiquity. The Darwinian concepts are like squeezed-out lemons: Darwinism merely collected the results of observation and then linked them with poverty-stricken concepts. This trend in science points clearly to the process of gradual death. In the human brain there is a part that is withering, and this is the part that in our time functions in scientific thinking. The reason for this is that the portion of the human etheric body which should animate this shrivelling brain has as yet not grasped the Christ-Impulse. No life will flow into science until the Christ impulse enters the portion of the human brain that is intended to serve science. That is a fact based on the great cosmic laws. If science continues in this way it will become poorer and poorer in concepts, and gradually these will vanish. And increasingly numerous will be the scientists who keep lining up their data, and who will be frightened out of their wits when someone begins to think. Nowadays it is a sore trial for a professor to discover a bit of thinking in a doctor's dissertation submitted to him by some candidate.

But we now have an anthroposophy, and this anthroposophy will increasingly clarify the Christ-Impulse for mankind, thereby imbuing the etheric body with ever more life—with such a wealth of it, in fact, that the etheric body will be able to restore flexibility to that rigid portion of the brain which is responsible for the present trend of scientific thinking. That is an illustration of the manner in which the Christ-Impulse, having in time laid hold on mankind, will reanimate the dying members of the body. The future of the race would see the withering of more and more members; but the flowing in of the Christ-Impulse will increase proportionately with the dwindling of each part; and by the end of the Earth evolution all the parts that would otherwise have perished will be revivified by the Christ-Impulse, which will have saturated the whole etheric body: the human etheric body will have become one with the Christ-Impulse.

The first impetus for this gradual revitalization of mankind, for the resurrection of humanity, was given at a particular moment during a scene most beautifully described in the Gospel of St. John. Think of the Christ as coming into the world a wholly universal Being, and commencing His great work by means of an etheric body completely saturated with His spirit—for the transformation brought about in the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth enabled it to animate even the physical body. At the moment in which the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth, in Whom the Christ now dwelt, became completely a life giver for the physical body, the etheric body of Christ is seen transfigured. And the writer of the John Gospel describes this moment:

Father, glorify thy name. Then came there a voice from heaven, saying, I have both glorified it, and will glorify it again.

The people therefore, that stood by, and heard it, said that it thundered.

What is said is that those who stood by heard thunder; but nowhere does it say that anyone who had not been duly prepared had heard it.

Others said, An angel spake to him.

Jesus answered and said, This voice came not because of me, but for your sakes.

Why? That what had taken place might be understood by all who were near. And Christ clarifies the event:

Now is the judgment of this world: now shall the prince of this world be cast out.

In that moment Lucifer-Ahriman was cast out of the physical body of Christ. There stands the great example which in the future must be realized by all mankind: through the Christ-Impulse the obstacles placed by Lucifer-Ahriman must be cast out of the physical body; and man's earth body must be so vitalized by the Christ-Impulse that the fruits of the earth's mission may be carried over into the time that is to follow this earth epoch.

On March 13, the fourth lecture evening of the winter took place at the "Freie Literarische Gesellschaft" in Berlin. A one-act drama "Märtyrer" by Georg Reicke and modern Iyrian poems were performed, both by the royal court actor Arthur Kraußneck. The lecture was preceded by a conference held by Dr. Rudolf Steiner. In particular, he sought to derive Nietzsche's Iyrian poems and two ballads by Maurice Maeterlinck, which were presented, from the nature of these two personalities. Nietzsche's poetry mostly emerges from a mood that at first glance makes us wonder at the proud philosopher who, rejoicing, has replaced the God of the hereafter with the superman of this world, who wants to show people that they should be creators, not recipients of divine powers. But Nietzsche, the poet, is Nietzsche, the man on whom individual life weighs heavily, who has known happiness all too little. Nietzsche created an image of the laughing philosopher out of the suffering human being. The greatness of this image crushed Nietzsche, the human being. His poems grew out of such moods. What Nietzsche, the suffering individual, felt towards the lofty image of his superman flows out of his poems. - Maeterlinck is averse to the crude, in-your-face facts of life. Not the big words, not the strong feelings and passions are for him the heralds of the deepest things in the world. When I see a person only fleetingly, something can happen between his soul and mine that is deeper and more divine than what is expressed in the words of a Plato or a Fichte or in the passion of an Othello. Such crude sayings, such passions only obscure for us the deeper things that can be seen in the seemingly most mundane events. The two ballads performed show how simple means Maeterlinck uses to express shocking truths.

Mr. Kraußneck's performance made a deep impression on the audience. Reicke's one-act play depicts the sad situation of the family of a pastor who has to give up his office because his conscience has brought him into conflict with the teachings of the church. The wife is dead. The daughter alone has to earn a living for her father and siblings. She could marry and find happiness. But she is not allowed to leave her position within the family. The way her father tries to keep her in this position and her heartbreaking renunciation of happiness is portrayed in a gripping way in connection with the characters. Mr. Kraußneck found a way to bring out the subtle psychology of the work. No less effective was the expression he gave to the poignant poems of Nietzsche and Maeterlinck.

The final piece was a legend "The Four Robbers" by Ludwig Jacobowski, written in a genuinely folksy tone. This poet seeks the simplest, unaffected tones and thus achieves a height of art that we admire in the perfect folk song.

What we possess as the first fruit of Spiritual Science is in its most practical and noble sense able to lead us to feel that there is within the ordinary outer man an inner man, who to the ordinary idea is really a second man. In this respect all men in reality consist of two beings; one composed more of our physical body and etheric body and belonging to that which is the external world: external in the sense that this physical body and to some extent the etheric body too are forms and images—manifestations—of the divine Spiritual beings by which we are always surrounded. Our physical and etheric bodies are I in their true essence—though not as we as men at first know them,—images, neither of ourselves, nor of our real being, but of the Gods whose whole life is spent in producing our physical and etheric bodies and bringing about their full development; just as we men bring about the actions and deeds we accomplish. The inner man is of such a nature that he is more closely related to the astral body and ego. To the universe the astral body and ego are younger than the physical body and etheric body. This we know, from what has been given out in the book Occult Science. The physical body and etheric body compose that which, as it were, reposes when we sleep and is made ready for us by the divine-spiritual beings that permeate the outer universe and make it manifest; and the ego and astral body, by the experiences, testings and shiftings which they undergo in the physical and etheric bodies, are to ascend gradually through the stages of development with which we have also become familiar.

Now, as I indicated in the last lecture, we are in connection with the universe, with the whole Cosmos; and this connection is such that—as I merely hinted in the last lecture—it can even be reckoned and expressed in numbers. This connection of ours with the universe can of course be expressed and shown in many other ways, but—I might say—to our great astonishment it can be expressed by the fact that the number of breaths a man draws in a day equals the number of years required for the Vernal Point to return to its original point of departure. These discoveries in the realm of numbers can, if we permeate them with feeling, fill us with awe, with a holy awe; if we reflect that we too belong to the divine Spiritual universe which is manifested in all external phenomena.

The fact that we are the Microcosm, the little world formed and manifested out of the Macrocosm, the great world, is felt as still more profound when we visualise such facts as will be brought before our minds today, and which I may enumerate as follows: the three meetings of the Human Soul with the Being of the Universe: and this is the subject I shall speak about today. We all know that as earth-men we bear within us the physical body and etheric body, the astral body and ego. Each of the two beings I have referred to bears within him what I might call two sub-beings. The more external man the physical and etheric body, the more inner man the ego and astral body. Now we know moreover that man is to undergo further development. The earth as such will some day come to an end. It will then evolve further, through a Jupiter, Venus, and a Vulcan planetary evolution. Man during this time will rise stage by stage; to his ego will, as we know, be added a higher being—the Spirit-Self which will manifest within him. This will reach full manifestation during the Jupiter evolution, which will follow that of our earth. The Life-Spirit will attain full manifestation in man during the Venus period; and the actual Spirit-Man during the Vulcan period. When, therefore, we look forward to the great cosmic future of man, to these three stages of evolution, we look forward to the Spirit-Self, Life-Spirit, and Spirit-Man. But these three which in a sense await us in our future evolution are even now in a certain respect related to us, although they are as yet not in the least developed; for they are still enclosed in the bosom of the divine-Spiritual Beings whom we have learnt to know as the Higher Hierarchies. They will come forth to us from out of the Higher Hierarchies; and we today are already in relation with these Higher Hierarchies, who will endow us with the Spirit-Self, Life-Spirit, and Spirit-Man. So that today, instead of using the more complicated expression and saying: ‘We are in connection with the Hierarchy of the Angeloi’; we can simply say: ‘We are in connection with that which is to come to us in the future—our Spirit-Self.’ And instead of saying that we are in connection with the Archangels, we can say: ‘We are in connection with what is to come to us in the future, as our Life-Spirit,’ and so on.

Indeed we human beings are already in a certain respect, though at present only in rudiment—(and in the Spiritual world rudiments are something much higher than they are in the physical world)-more than merely four-principled beings consisting of physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego. We already bear the germ of the Spirit-Self within us, as well as that of the Life-Spirit and Spirit-Man; they will evolve out of us in the future, though at present we only have them in germ within us. This is no mere abstract saying, it has quite a concrete significance, for we have meetings, real meetings with these higher principles of our being. These meetings take place in the following way. We, as human beings, would as time went on feel ourselves increasingly estranged from everything Spiritual—a state of things very difficult to endure—did we not from time to time encounter our Spirit-Self. Our ego must meet that higher Self,—the Spirit-Self which we have yet to develop, and which in a Spiritual respect is of like nature to the Hierarchy of Angels. So therefore we may say in simple language, and speaking in the Christian sense: we must from time to time meet with a being of the Hierarchy of the Angels, a being closely related to ourselves; and when it comes to us, it brings about in us a Spiritual change, which will enable us some day to take in a Spirit-Self. We must also meet with a being of the Hierarchy of the Archangels, for this being then so affects us that something is prepared which will some day lead to our developing the Life-Spirit.

Whether in the Christian sense we place this being in the Hierarchy of Angels, or whether we refer to it in the older sense understood by the ancients when they spoke of their genius as the guiding genius of man, makes no difference. We know that we are living at a time when but few people—though this will soon alter—few can gaze into the Spiritual World and perceive the things and the beings therein. The time has now gone by when the beings and even the various processes of evolution in the Spiritual-world could be perceived in a much wider and more comprehensive sense; for at the time when one spoke of the genius of a man, there was a direct, concrete perception of that being.

In a not very distant past this vision was still so strong that men were able to describe it quite concretely and objectively; describing it in terms now looked upon as poetic fancies, although they were not intended as such. Thus Plutarch describes the relation of man to his genius, as follows,—I should like to quote the passage literally. Plutarch, the Roman writer, says that besides the portion of the soul embedded in the earthly body, there is a purer part outside, soaring above man's head, in appearance like a star, and which is rightly called a man's daimon, who guides him, and whom the wise man willingly follows, In this concrete way does Plutarch describe what he does not wish to be taken as a poetic fancy, but as a concrete external reality. Indeed so concretely does he describe it that he expressly states: ‘The rest of the Spiritual part of man can to a certain extent be perceived at the same time as the physical body, inasmuch as it normally fills the same space; but the genius, the leading and guiding genius of man is something apart and can be seen outside the head of every man'. Paracelsus too, one of the last who, without special training, or without special gifts, was able to give forceful information about these things, said very much the same from his own knowledge of this phenomenon. Many others also said the same.

This genius is none other than the Spirit-Self in process of evolution, though borne by a being belonging to the Hierarchy of Angels. It is of great importance that one should enter somewhat deeply into these things; for when this genius becomes perceptible it has its own special conditions. This subject can be considered from another very different point of view, but we will now consider it from the following one.

Let us take the subject of the mutual intercourse between man and man, for we can learn much from that; it teaches us what is by no means without significance in the perception of the Spiritual principles of the human being.

If a man is only capable of observing the meeting of two persons with his physical, sense vision, he merely notices that they come together, greet one another, and so on. But when he becomes able to observe such an event Spiritually, he will find that each time two human beings meet a Spiritual process is established, which, among other things, is also expressed outwardly in the fact that the part of their etheric bodies which forms the head becomes the expression of every feeling of sympathy and antipathy which the two persons feel for each other; and this continues as long as they are together. Suppose two people were to meet who could not bear each other:—an extreme case, but there are such in life. Suppose two persons meet who dislike each other, and that this feeling of antipathy is mutual. It can then be seen that that part of the etheric body which forms the head projects beyond the head in both cases, and that both the etheric heads incline towards each other. A mutual antipathy between persons meeting is expressed as a continual bowing and inclining of the etheric head of each towards the other. When two persons come together who love each other, a similar process can be observed; but then the etheric head inclines back, it bends backwards. -Now whether the etheric head bends forward as though in greeting when antipathy is felt, or bends backward where love is felt, in both cases the physical head then becomes freer than it is wont to be. This is of course always relative; the etheric body does not entirely emerge but extends in length, so that a continuation can be observed. A more rarified etheric body then fills the physical body than is normally the case, and the result of this, by reason of the exceptional transparency of the etheric body, is that the astral body remaining inside the head becomes more clearly visible to clairvoyant vision. So that not only is there a movement of the etheric body but also an alteration in the astral light of the head. This then, my dear friends,—which is no poetic imagination but an actual fact—is the reason that in places where such things are understood, persons who are capable of selfless love are represented with an aura round their heads, which is known as a halo. When two people meet, with simply a strong tinge of egotism in their love, this phenomenon is not so apparent; but if a man comes in contact with humanity at certain times when he is not concerned with himself and his own personal relation to another, but is filled with a universal human love for all humanity, such phenomena appear. At such times the astral body in the vicinity of the head becomes clearly visible. If there are persons then present who are able to see this in a man clairvoyantly, they can see the halo and cannot do otherwise than paint or represent it as a reality. These things are absolutely in connection with the objective facts of the Spiritual world; but that which is thus objectively present, and which is a lasting reality in the evolution of humanity, is connected with something else.

Man must necessarily from time to time enter into inner communion with his Spirit-Self, with the Spirit-Self which is visible in the astral aura in rudimentary form as I have described; but it still has to be developed; it will be rayed down, as it were, from above, and stream in from the future. Man must from time to time be brought into touch with his Spirit-Self. When does this occur?

We now come to the first meeting of which we have to speak. When does it take place? It takes place quite simply in normal sleep, on almost every occasion, between sleeping and waking. With simple country people, who are nearer to the life of nature, and who go to bed with the setting sun and get up at sunrise, this meeting takes place in the middle of their sleeping time, which as a rule is the middle of the night. With people who have detached themselves from their connections with nature, this is not so much the case. But this depends on man's free will. A man of modern culture can regulate his life as he pleases, and though this fact is bound to affect his life, still he can regulate it as he likes, within certain limits. None the less he too can experience in the middle of a long sleep, what may be called an inner union with the Spirit-Self—that is, with the Spiritual qualities from which the Spirit-Self will be extracted; he can have a meeting with his genius. Thus this meeting with one's genius takes place every night, that is, during every period of sleep—though this must not be taken too literally. This meeting is important for man. For all the feelings that gladden the soul with respect to its connection with the Spiritual world proceed from this meeting with one's genius during sleep. The feeling, which we may have in our waking state, of our connection with the Spiritual world, is an after-effect of this meeting with our genius. That is the first meeting with the higher world; and it may be said that most people are at first unconscious of it, though they will become more and more conscious the more they realise its after-effects by refining their waking conscious life, through absorbing the ideas and conceptions of Spiritual Science, until their souls become refined enough to observe carefully these after-effects. It all depends on whether the soul is refined enough, sufficiently acquainted with its inner life, to be able to observe these. This meeting with the genius is brought to the consciousness of every man in some form or other; but the materialistic surroundings of the present day which fill the mind with ideas coming from the materialistic view of the world and especially the life of today, permeated as it is by materialistic opinions, prevent the soul from paying attention to what comes as the result of the meeting. As people gradually fill their minds with more Spiritual ideas than those set forth by materialism, the perception of the nightly meeting with the genius will become more and more self-evident to them.

The second meeting of which we now have to speak is higher. From the indications already given it may be gathered that the first meeting with the genius is in connection with the course of the day. If we had not, through modern civilisation, become free to adjust our lives according to our own convenience, this meeting would take place at the hour of midnight. A man would meet his genius every night at midnight. But on account of man's exercise of free will the time of this meeting has become movable; the hour when the ego meets the genius is now not fixed. The second meeting is however not so movable; for that which is more connected with the astral body and etheric body is not so apt to get out of its place in the cosmic order. That which is connected with the ego and the physical body is very greatly displaced in present-day man. The second meeting is already more in connection with the great macro-cosmic order. Even as the first meeting is connected with the course of the day, the second meeting is connected with the course of the year. I must here call attention to various things I have already indicated in this connection from another point of view. The life of man in its entirety does not run its course quite evenly through the year. When the sun develops its greatest heat, man is much more dependent upon his own physical life and the physical life around him than in the winter when, in a sense, he has to struggle with the external phenomena of the elements, and is more thrown back on himself; but then his Spiritual nature is more freed, and he is more in connection with the Spiritual world—both his own and that of the earth—with the whole Spiritual environment. Thus the peculiar sentiment we connect with the Mystery of Christmas and with its Festival is by no means arbitrary, but hangs together with the fixing of the Festival of Christmas. At that time in winter which is appointed for the Festival, man, as does indeed the whole earth, gives himself up to the Spirit. He then passes, as it were, through a realm in which the Spirit is near him. The consequence is that at about Christmas-time and on to our present New Year, man goes through a meeting of his astral body with the Life-Spirit, in the same way as he goes through the first meeting, that of his ego with the Spirit-Self. Upon this meeting with the Life-Spirit depends the nearness of Christ Jesus. For Christ Jesus reveals Himself through the Life-Spirit. He reveals Himself through a being of the Realm of the Archangels. He is, of course, an immeasurably higher Being than they, but that is not the point with which we are concerned at the moment; what we have to consider is that He reveals Himself through a Being of the order of the Archangeloi. Thus through this meeting we draw specially near to Christ Jesus at the present stage of development—which has existed since the Mystery of Golgotha—and in a certain respect we may call the meeting with the Life-Spirit: the meeting with Christ Jesus in the very depths of our soul. Now when a man either through developing Spiritual consciousness in the domain of religious meditation or exercises, or, to supplement these, has accepted the concepts and ideas of Spiritual Science, when he has thus deepened and spiritualised his life of impression and feeling, then, just as he can experience in his waking life the after-effects of the meeting with his Spirit-Self, so he will also experience the after-effects of the meeting with the Life-Spirit, or Christ. It is actually a fact, my dear friends, that in the time following immediately on Christmas and up to Easter the conditions are particularly favourable for bringing to a man's consciousness this meeting with Christ Jesus. In a profound sense and this should not be blotted out by the abstract materialistic culture of today—the season of Christmas is connected with processes taking place in the earth; for man, together with the earth, takes part in the Christmas changes in the earth. The season of Easter is determined by processes in the heavens. Easter Sunday is fixed for the first Sunday after the first full-moon after the Vernal Equinox. Thus, whereas Christmas is fixed by the conditions of the earth, Easter is determined from above. Just as we, through all that has just been described, are connected with the conditions of the earth, so are we connected, through what I shall now describe, with the conditions of the heavens—with the great Cosmic conditions. For Easter is that season in the concrete course of the year, in which all that is aroused in us by the meeting with Christ at Christmas, really unites itself with our physical earth manhood. The great Mystery that now brings home to man the Mystery of Golgotha at the Easter Season—the Good Friday Mystery—signifies among other things, that the Christ, who, as it were, has been moving beside us, at this season comes still closer to us. Indeed, roughly speaking, in a sense He disappears into us and permeates us, so that He can remain with us during the season that follows the Mystery of Golgotha—the season of summer—during which, in the ancient Mysteries, men tried to unite themselves to John in a way not possible after the Mystery Of Golgotha.

In that respect we are, as we see, the Microcosm, and we are attached to the Macrocosm in a profoundly significant way. There is a continual union with the Macrocosm in the seasons of the year, and this union, being a more inner process in man, is connected with the year's course. Thus does Spiritual Science endeavour gradually to reveal the ideas, the spiritually scientific conceptions, that man may acquire as to the way in which Christ is now able to penetrate and permeate our earth-life, since the Mystery of Golgotha.

At this point I feel obliged to make an interpolation which is of importance and which ought to be thoroughly understood, particularly by the friends of Spiritual Science. It ought never to be represented that our attempts at Spiritual Science are a substitute for the life and exercise of religion. Spiritual Science may in the highest sense, and particularly as regards the Mystery of Christ, be taken as a support, as a foundation for the life and exercise of religion; but it should not be made a religion, for we ought to be clear that religion in its living form and living practice enkindles the Spiritual consciousness of the human community. If this Spiritual consciousness is to become a living thing in man, he cannot possibly remain at a standstill, stopping at the merely abstract ideas of God or Christ, but must stand renewed amidst the religious practices and activities (which in different people may take various forms) as something which provides him with a religious centre and appeals to him as such. If this religious sentiment is only deep enough, and finds means of stimulating the soul, it will soon feel a longing—a real longing—for the very ideas that can be developed in Spiritual Science. If Spiritual Science may be said to be a support for a religious life, as, objectively speaking, it certainly is—subjectively the time has come today when we may say that a man with true religious feelings is driven by these feelings to seek knowledge. For Spiritual consciousness is acquired through religious feeling and Spiritual knowledge by Spiritual Science, just as knowledge of nature is acquired by Natural Science. Spiritual consciousness leads to the impulse to acquire Spiritual knowledge. It may be said that an inner religious life may today subjectively drive a man to Spiritual Science.

A third meeting is that in which a man approaches the Spirit-Man, which will only be developed in the far future and which is brought near to him by a being belonging to the Hierarchy of the Archai. We may say that the ancients were sensitive to this, as are even the people of the present day, although the latter, in speaking of such things, no longer have a consciousness of the deeper truth of the subject. The ancients felt this meeting as a meeting with that which permeates the world, and which we can now hardly distinguish in ourselves or in the world, but in which we merge in the world as in an unity. Just as we can speak of the second as a meeting with Christ Jesus, so can we speak of the third as a meeting with the Father-Principle, with the Father, with that which lies at the foundation of the world, and which we experience when we have the right feeling for what the various religions mean by ‘the Father.’ This meeting is of such a nature that it reveals our intimate connection with the Macrocosm, with the Divine-Spiritual Universe. The daily course of universal processes, of world processes, includes our meeting with our genius: the yearly course includes our meeting with Christ Jesus: and the course of a whole human life, of this human life of ours, my dear friends—which can normally be described as the patriarchal life of seventy years—includes the meeting with the Father-Principle. For a certain time, our physical earth-life is prepared—and rightly so—by education—at the present day to a great extent unconsciously, yet it is prepared; and most people experience unconsciously, between the ages of twenty-eight and forty-two—and though unconsciously, yet fully appreciated in the intimate depths of the soul—the meeting with the Father-Principle. The after-effects of this may extend into later life, if we develop sufficiently fine perceptions to note that which thus comes into our life from within ourselves, as the after-effects of our meeting with the Father-Principle.

During a certain period of our life—the period of preparation—education ought, in the many different ways this can be done, to make the meeting with the Father-Principle as profound an experience as possible. One way is to arouse in a man, during his years of education, a strong feeling of the glory of the world, of its greatness, and of the sublimity of the world-processes. We are withholding a great deal from the growing boy and girl if we fail to draw their attention to all the revelations of beauty and greatness in the world, for then, instead of having a devoted reverence and respect for these, they may pass them by unobserved. If we fill the minds of the young with thoughts connecting the feelings of their hearts with the beauty and greatness of the world, we are then preparing them for the right meeting with the Father-Principle. For this meeting is of great significance for the life spent between death and a new birth. This meeting with the Father Principle, which normally occurs between the above-mentioned ages, can be a strong force and support to a man, when he has, as we know, to recapitulate his life on earth retrospectively after having passed through the portals of death, and while he passes through the soul-world. This retrospective journey, which as we know, lasts one-third as long as the time spent between birth and death, can be made strong and forceful; as indeed it ought to be, if a man can see himself at a certain point and place meeting with that Being, whom he can only dimly guess at and express in stammering words, when he speaks of the Father of the Cosmic Order. This is an important Picture, which after a man has passed through the gates of death, should always be present with him, together with the picture of death itself.

Now it is natural that a certain question should arise in connection with this. There are people who die before they reach the middle of life, when they would normally have the meeting with the Father-Principle. We must consider the case of those whose death is brought about by some outer cause, such as illness (which is an outer cause) or weakness of some kind. If then, through this early death, the meeting with the Father-Principle has not yet taken place in the subconscious depths of the soul—it will take place at the hour of death. At the moment of death this meeting occurs. Here we may express, somewhat differently, what has indeed already been expressed in another form in a like connection, in the book Theosophy in reference to the always deplorable phenomenon of a man bringing his life to an end by his own will. No man would do this if he could see the significance of his deed; and when once Spiritual Science has really been taken into people's feelings and thoughts, there will be no more suicides. For the meeting with the Father-Principle at the hour of death, when death occurs before middle-life, depends upon that death approaching a man from outside, not being brought about by himself. The difficulty then encountered by the soul and which is described from another standpoint in the book Theosophy, might be described from that from which we are speaking today, and we might say: Through his self -chosen death a man may eventually deprive himself of the meeting with the Father-Principle in this incarnation.

Thus, my dear friends, since the truths which Spiritual Science has to tell us concerning human life as a whole, affect our life so deeply, they are indeed serious in cases of special importance. These truths can provide serious explanations of life, which man needs in an age when he must find his way out of the materialism which rules the present world ordering and the current point of view, in so far as these depend on man himself. Stronger forces will be required to overcome the strong connection with the purely material powers which rule over man today, and to give him once again the possibility of recognising his connection with the Spiritual world from the immediate experiences of life.

If we speak in a more abstract way of the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies we can speak in a more concrete way of the fact that man himself—in the experiences at first passed through unconsciously, but which even during his life between birth and death may be brought to his consciousness—may ascend in three stages: through the meeting with his genius, through the meeting with Christ Jesus, and through the meeting with the Father.

Of course a great deal depends on our gaining as many concepts as possible which force themselves into our feelings, concepts that so refine our inner soul-life that we do not carelessly and inattentively pass things by, which in reality, if we are but attentive, play a part in our lives. In this respect education will have a very great deal to do in the near future. I should just like to bring forward one such concept. Just think how infinitely life would be deepened, if to the general knowledge concerning karma such details could be added, as the fact that when a man's life comes to an end in early youth the meeting with the Father-Principle occurs at the hour of death. This shows that the particular karma of this man made an early death necessary, so that an abnormal meeting with the Father-Principle should take place. For what actually occurs in such a case? The man is destroyed from without; his physical being is undermined from without. In illness, too, this is really the case. For the scene of action of the meeting with the Father-Principle is really here in the physical earth-world. When it happens that this external physical earth-world has destroyed a man, the meeting with the Father-Principle can be seen at that very place, and of course it is always to be seen again in the retrospect. This however makes it possible for a man throughout the whole of his life after death to hold firmly, the thought of the place on earth where, descending from heavenly heights, the Father-Principle came to the meeting which then took place. The recollection of this makes him want to be as active as he possibly can to work down into the physical earth-world from the Spiritual world. Now if we consider our present time from this standpoint and try to arouse the same feeling of solemnity as we have just tried to do with respect to the meeting with the Father-Principle, trying not merely to look upon the numerous premature deaths now occurring in the light of feeling or abstract conception, we shall be driven to admit that these were predestined in preparation for the coming need for a great activity to be directed from the Spiritual world to the physical earth-world. This is another aspect of what I have often said with reference to the tragic events of the last few years: that those who today pass so early through the portals of death will become special helpers in the future development of humanity, which will indeed require strong forces to disentangle itself from materialism. But all this must be brought to men's consciousness; it must not take place unconsciously. Therefore it is necessary that even now, souls here on the earth should make themselves receptive—I have already mentioned this—otherwise the forces developed in the Spiritual world may go in other directions. In order that these forces, these predestined forces, may become fruitful to the earth, it is necessary that there should be souls on the earth permeated with the knowledge of the Spiritual world. And there must be more and more of such souls on the earth. Let us therefore try to make fruitful the content of Spiritual Science, which must once be given out in words. By the help of the language (I mentioned this in the last lecture but one) the language we learn through Spiritual Science—let us try to re-animate the old conceptions which are, not without purpose, interwoven in our present life. Let us try to quicken anew what we have heard from Plutarch: that man, even as mere physical man, is permeated by the Spiritual man, and that in a peculiar but normal way a man has a higher Spiritual principle outside his head which represents his genius and which, if he be wise, he obeys. Let us try, as I have said, to take the feelings acquired by Spiritual Science to our assistance—so that the phenomena of life may not pass us by unnoticed.

In conclusion, we will today take one feeling, one conception, which may be of great help to our souls. Unfortunately many people in our modern materialistic age find it very difficult to feel what I might call the holiness of sleep. (The materialistic life is being somewhat softened by this period of trial, and not only ought it to remain softened thereby—which can hardly be hoped if materialism remains at its present strength—but it ought even to be enormously and increasingly softened.) It is indeed a curious phenomenon of man's intelligence today that he is entirely devoid of respect for the holiness of sleep. We need only consider how many people who spend the evening hours in purely materialistic ways, go to sleep without developing the realisation—which indeed can never become a living thing in a materialistic mind—that sleep unites us with the Spiritual world, that sleep sends us across into the Spiritual world. (These things are not mentioned by way of blame, nor intended to drive people to asceticism: we must live with the world, but we must at the same time have our eyes open, for only thus can we wrench our bodily nature away from the lower and lift it higher.) People should at least become gradually able to develop a feeling which can be expressed somewhat as follows: ‘I am going to sleep; until I wake, my soul will be in the Spiritual world. There it will meet with the guiding-power of my earth-life, who lives in the Spiritual world, and who soars round and surrounds my head. My soul will have the meeting with my genius. The wings of my genius will come in contact with my soul.’

Yes, my dear friends, as regards the overcoming of the materialistic life, a great deal, a very great deal, depends on whether one can create a strong feeling of what this means, when one thinks over one's relation to sleep. The materialistic life can only be overcome by stimulating intimate feelings such as these, which are themselves in correspondence with the Spiritual world. Only when we intensify such feelings and make them active, will the life of sleep become so intense, that the contact with the Spiritual world will on the other hand be gradually able to strengthen our waking life too. We shall then have around us not merely the sense-world, but also the Spiritual world, which is the true, the truly real world. For this world that we generally call the real one, is, as I expounded in the last open lecture, nothing but a reflection, an image of the actual real one. The real world is the world of spirit. The small community which is today devoted to Anthroposophy or Spiritual Science, will better be able to grasp the earnest signs of the times and undergo the severe trials of the times, if besides all the other trials to which man is subject today, it learns to consider this time as a time of trial, of testing and probation, whether we are able with sufficient strength of soul and warmth of heart to unite our whole being with the Spiritual Science which we must take in through our reason and our intellect.

In these words, I wished once more to emphasise what I have often said here before: that Spiritual Science will only find its right place in the hearts of men, when it is not merely theory and knowledge, but when—symbolically speaking—it constantly permeates and penetrates the soul; just as our physical blood, our heart's blood, constantly permeates and gives life to our bodily nature.

(Continued in Lecture 5).

What we possess as the first fruit of Spiritual Science is in its most practical and noble sense able to lead us to feel that there is within the ordinary outer man an inner man, who to the ordinary idea is really a second man. In this respect all men in reality consist of two beings; one composed more of our physical body and etheric body and belonging to that which is the external world: external in the sense that this physical body and to some extent the etheric body too are forms and images—manifestations—of the divine Spiritual beings by which we are always surrounded. Our physical and etheric bodies are in their true essence—though not as we as men at first know them,—images, neither of ourselves, nor of our real being, but of the Gods whose whole life is spent in producing our physical and etheric bodies and bringing about their full development; just as we men bring about the actions and deeds we accomplish. The inner man is of such a nature that he is more closely related to the astral body and ego. To the universe the astral body and ego are younger than the physical body and etheric body. This we know, from what has been given out in the book Occult Science. The physical body and etheric body compose that which, as it were, reposes when we sleep and is made ready for us by the divine-spiritual beings that permeate the outer universe and make it manifest; and the ego and astral body, by the experiences, testings and shiftings which they undergo in the physical and etheric bodies, are to ascend gradually through the stages of development with which we have also become familiar.

Now, as I indicated in the last lecture, we are in connection with the universe, with the whole Cosmos; and this connection is such that—as I merely hinted in the last lecture—it can even be reckoned and expressed in numbers. This connection of ours with the universe can of course be expressed and shown in many other ways, but—I might say—to our great astonishment it can be expressed by the fact that the number of breaths a man draws in a day equals the number of years required for the Vernal Point to return to its original point of departure. These discoveries in the realm of numbers can, if we permeate them with feeling, fill us with awe, with a holy awe; if we reflect that we too belong to the divine Spiritual universe which is manifested in all external phenomena.

The fact that we are the Microcosm, the little world formed and manifested out of the Macrocosm, the great world, is felt as still more profound when we visualise such facts as will be brought before our minds today, and which I may enumerate as follows: the three meetings of the Human Soul with the Being of the Universe: and this is the subject I shall speak about today. We all know that as earth-men we bear within us the physical body and etheric body, the astral body and ego. Each of the two beings I have referred to bears within him what I might call two sub-beings. The more external man the physical and etheric body, the more inner man the ego and astral body. Now we know moreover that man is to undergo further development. The earth as such will some day come to an end. It will then evolve further, through a Jupiter, Venus, and a Vulcan planetary evolution. Man during this time will rise stage by stage; to his ego will, as we know, be added a higher being—the Spirit-Self which will manifest within him. This will reach full manifestation during the Jupiter evolution, which will follow that of our earth. The Life-Spirit will attain full manifestation in man during the Venus period; and the actual Spirit-Man during the Vulcan period. When, therefore, we look forward to the great cosmic future of man, to these three stages of evolution, we look forward to the Spirit-Self, Life-Spirit, and Spirit-Man. But these three which in a sense await us in our future evolution are even now in a certain respect related to us, although they are as yet not in the least developed; for they are still enclosed in the bosom of the divine-Spiritual Beings whom we have learnt to know as the Higher Hierarchies. They will come forth to us from out the Higher Hierarchies; and we today are already in relation with these Higher Hierarchies, who will endow us with the Spirit-Self, Life-Spirit, and Spirit-Man. So that today, instead of using the more complicated expression and saying: ‘We are in connection with the Hierarchy of the Angeloi’; we can simply say: ‘We are in connection with that which is to come to us in the future—our Spirit-Self.’ And instead of saying that we are in connection with the Archangels, we can say: ‘We are in connection with what is to come to us in the future, as our Life-Spirit,’ and so on.

Indeed we human beings are already in a certain respect, though at present only in rudiment—(and in the Spiritual world rudiments are something much higher than they are in the physical world)-more than merely four-principled beings consisting of physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego. We already bear the germ of the Spirit-Self within us, as well as that of the Life-Spirit and Spirit-Man; they will evolve out of us in the future, though at present we only have them in germ within us. This is no mere abstract saying, it has quite a concrete significance, for we have meetings, real meetings with these higher principles of our being. These meetings take place in the following way. We, as human beings, would as time went on feel ourselves increasingly estranged from everything Spiritual—a state of things very difficult to endure—did we not from time to time encounter our Spirit-Self. Our ego must meet that higher Self,—the Spirit-Self which we have yet to develop, and which in a Spiritual respect is of like nature to the Hierarchy of Angels. So therefore we may say in simple language, and speaking in the Christian sense: we must from time to time meet with a being of the Hierarchy of the Angels, a being closely related to ourselves; and when it comes to us, it brings about in us a Spiritual change, which will enable us some day to take in a Spirit-Self. We must also meet with a being of the Hierarchy of the Archangels, for this being then so affects us that something is prepared which will some day lead to our developing the Life-Spirit.

Whether in the Christian sense we place this being in the Hierarchy of Angels, or whether we refer to it in the older sense understood by the ancients when they spoke of their genius as the guiding genius of man, makes no difference. We know that we are living at a time when but few people—though this will soon alter—few can gaze into the Spiritual World and perceive the things and the beings therein. The time has now gone by when the beings and even the various processes of evolution in the Spiritual-world could be perceived in a much wider and more comprehensive sense; for at the time when one spoke of the genius of a man, there was a direct, concrete perception of that being.

In a not very distant past this vision was still so strong that men were able to describe it quite concretely and objectively; describing it in terms now looked upon as poetic fancies, although they were not intended as such. Thus Plutarch describes the relation of man to his genius, as follows,—I should like to quote the passage literally. Plutarch, the Roman writer, says that besides the portion of the soul embedded in the earthly body, there is a purer part outside, soaring above man's head, in appearance like a star, and which is rightly called a man's daimon, who guides him, and whom the wise man willingly follows, In this concrete way does Plutarch describe what he does not wish to be taken as a poetic fancy, but as a concrete external reality. Indeed so concretely does he describe it that he expressly states: ‘The rest of the Spiritual part of man can to a certain extent be perceived at the same time as the physical body, inasmuch as it normally fills the same space; but the genius, the leading and guiding genius of man is something apart and can be seen outside the head of every man'. Paracelsus too, one of the last who, without special training, or without special gifts, was able to give forceful information about these things, said very much the same from his own knowledge of this phenomenon. Many others also said the same.

This genius is none other than the Spirit-Self in process of evolution, though borne by a being belonging to the Hierarchy of Angels. It is of great importance that one should enter somewhat deeply into these things; for when this genius becomes perceptible it has its own special conditions. This subject can be considered from another very different point of view, but we will now consider it from the following one.

Let us take the subject of the mutual intercourse between man and man, for we can learn much from that; it teaches us what is by no means without significance in the perception of the Spiritual principles of the human being.

If a man is only capable of observing the meeting of two persons with his physical, sense vision, he merely notices that they come together, greet one another, and so on. But when he becomes able to observe such an event Spiritually, he will find that each time two human beings meet a Spiritual process is established, which, among other things, is also expressed outwardly in the fact that the part of their etheric bodies which forms the head becomes the expression of every feeling of sympathy and antipathy which the two persons feel for each other; and this continues as long as they are together. Suppose two people were to meet who could not bear each other:—an extreme case, but there are such in life. Suppose two persons meet who dislike each other, and that this feeling of antipathy is mutual. It can then be seen that that part of the etheric body which forms the head projects beyond the head in both cases, and that both the etheric heads incline towards each other. A mutual antipathy between persons meeting is expressed as a continual bowing and inclining of the etheric head of each towards the other. When two persons come together who love each other, a similar process can be observed; but then the etheric head inclines back, it bends backwards.—Now whether the etheric head bends forward as though in greeting when antipathy is felt, or bends backward where love is felt, in both cases the physical head then becomes freer than it is wont to be. This is of course always relative; the etheric body does not entirely emerge but extends in length, so that a continuation can be observed. A more rarified etheric body then fills the physical body than is normally the case, and the result of this, by reason of the exceptional transparency of the etheric body, is that the astral body remaining inside the head becomes more clearly visible to clairvoyant vision. So that not only is there a movement of the etheric body but also an alteration in the astral light of the head. This then, my dear friends,—which is no poetic imagination but an actual fact—is the reason that in places where such things are understood, persons who are capable of selfless love are represented with an aura round their heads, which is known as a halo. When two people meet, with simply a strong tinge of egotism in their love, this phenomenon is not so apparent; but if a man comes in contact with humanity at certain times when he is not concerned with himself and his own personal relation to another, but is filled with a universal human love for all humanity, such phenomena appear. At such times the astral body in the vicinity of the head becomes clearly visible. If there are persons then present who are able to see this in a man clairvoyantly, they can see the halo and cannot do otherwise than paint or represent it as a reality. These things are absolutely in connection with the objective facts of the Spiritual world; but that which is thus objectively present, and which is a lasting reality in the evolution of humanity, is connected with something else.

Man must necessarily from time to time enter into inner communion with his Spirit-Self, with the Spirit-Self which is visible in the astral aura in rudimentary form as I have described; but it still has to be developed; it will be rayed down, as it were, from above, and stream in from the future. Man must from time to time be brought into touch with his Spirit-Self. When does this occur?

We now come to the first meeting of which we have to speak. When does it take place? It takes place quite simply in normal sleep, on almost every occasion, between sleeping and waking. With simple country people, who are nearer to the life of nature, and who go to bed with the setting sun and get up at sunrise, this meeting takes place in the middle of their sleeping time, which as a rule is the middle of the night. With people who have detached themselves from their connections with nature, this is not so much the case. But this depends on man's free will. A man of modern culture can regulate his life as he pleases, and though this fact is bound to affect his life, still he can regulate it as he likes, within certain limits. None the less he too can experience in the middle of a long sleep, what may be called an inner union with the Spirit-Self—that is, with the Spiritual qualities from which the Spirit-Self will be extracted; he can have a meeting with his genius. Thus this meeting with one's genius takes place every night, that is, during every period of sleep—though this must not be taken too literally. This meeting is important for man. For all the feelings that gladden the soul with respect to its connection with the Spiritual world proceed from this meeting with one's genius during sleep. The feeling, which we may have in our waking state, of our connection with the Spiritual world, is an after-effect of this meeting with our genius. That is the first meeting with the higher world; and it may be said that most people are at first unconscious of it, though they will become more and more conscious the more they realise its after-effects by refining their waking conscious life, through absorbing the ideas and conceptions of Spiritual Science, until their souls become refined enough to observe carefully these after-effects. It all depends on whether the soul is refined enough, sufficiently acquainted with its inner life, to be able to observe these. This meeting with the genius is brought to the consciousness of every man in some form or other; but the materialistic surroundings of the present day which fill the mind with ideas coming from the materialistic view of the world and especially the life of today, permeated as it is by materialistic opinions, prevent the soul from paying attention to what comes as the result of the meeting. As people gradually fill their minds with more Spiritual ideas than those set forth by materialism, the perception of the nightly meeting with the genius will become more and more self-evident to them.

The second meeting of which we now have to speak is higher. From the indications already given it may be gathered that the first meeting with the genius is in connection with the course of the day. If we had not, through modern civilisation, become free to adjust our lives according to our own convenience, this meeting would take place at the hour of midnight. A man would meet his genius every night at midnight. But on account of man's exercise of free will the time of this meeting has become movable; the hour when the ego meets the genius is now not fixed. The second meeting is however not so movable; for that which is more connected with the astral body and etheric body is not so apt to get out of its place in the cosmic order. That which is connected with the ego and the physical body is very greatly displaced in present-day man. The second meeting is already more in connection with the great macro-cosmic order. Even as the first meeting is connected with the course of the day, the second meeting is connected with the course of the year. I must here call attention to various things I have already indicated in this connection from another point of view. The life of man in its entirety does not run its course quite evenly through the year. When the sun develops its greatest heat, man is much more dependent upon his own physical life and the physical life around him than in the winter when, in a sense, he has to struggle with the external phenomena of the elements, and is more thrown back on himself; but then his Spiritual nature is more freed, and he is more in connection with the Spiritual world—both his own and that of the earth—with the whole Spiritual environment. Thus the peculiar sentiment we connect with the Mystery of Christmas and with its Festival is by no means arbitrary, but hangs together with the fixing of the Festival of Christmas. At that time in winter which is appointed for the Festival, man, as does indeed the whole earth, gives himself up to the Spirit. He then passes, as it were, through a realm in which the Spirit is near him. The consequence is that at about Christmas-time and on to our present New Year, man goes through a meeting of his astral body with the Life-Spirit, in the same way as he goes through the first meeting, that of his ego with the Spirit-Self. Upon this meeting with the Life-Spirit depends the nearness of Christ Jesus. For Christ Jesus reveals Himself through the Life-Spirit. He reveals Himself through a being of the Realm of the Archangels. He is, of course, an immeasurably higher Being than they, but that is not the point with which we are concerned at the moment; what we have to consider is that He reveals Himself through a Being of the order of the Archangeloi. Thus through this meeting we draw specially near to Christ Jesus at the present stage of development—which has existed since the Mystery of Golgotha—and in a certain respect we may call the meeting with the Life-Spirit: the meeting with Christ Jesus in the very depths of our soul. Now when a man either through developing Spiritual consciousness in the domain of religious meditation or exercises, or, to supplement these, has accepted the concepts and ideas of Spiritual Science, when he has thus deepened and spiritualised his life of impression and feeling, then, just as he can experience in his waking life the after-effects of the meeting with his Spirit-Self, so he will also experience the after-effects of the meeting with the Life-Spirit, or Christ. It is actually a fact, my dear friends, that in the time following immediately on Christmas and up to Easter the conditions are particularly favourable for bringing to a man's consciousness this meeting with Christ Jesus. In a profound sense and this should not be blotted out by the abstract materialistic culture of today—the season of Christmas is connected with processes taking place in the earth; for man, together with the earth, takes part in the Christmas changes in the earth. The season of Easter is determined by processes in the heavens. Easter Sunday is fixed for the first Sunday after the first full-moon after the Vernal Equinox. Thus, whereas Christmas is fixed by the conditions of the earth, Easter is determined from above. Just as we, through all that has just been described, are connected with the conditions of the earth, so are we connected, through what I shall now describe, with the conditions of the heavens—with the great Cosmic conditions. For Easter is that season in the concrete course of the year, in which all that is aroused in us by the meeting with Christ at Christmas, really unites itself with our physical earth manhood. The great Mystery that now brings home to man the Mystery of Golgotha at the Easter Season—the Good Friday Mystery—signifies among other things, that the Christ, who, as it were, has been moving beside us, at this season comes still closer to us. Indeed, roughly speaking, in a sense He disappears into us and permeates us, so that He can remain with us during the season that follows the Mystery of Golgotha—the season of summer—during which, in the ancient Mysteries, men tried to unite themselves to John in a way not possible after the Mystery Of Golgotha.

In that respect we are, as we see, the Microcosm, and we are attached to the Macrocosm in a profoundly significant way. There is a continual union with the Macrocosm in the seasons of the year, and this union, being a more inner process in man, is connected with the year's course. Thus does Spiritual Science endeavour gradually to reveal the ideas, the spiritually scientific conceptions, that man may acquire as to the way in which Christ is now able to penetrate and permeate our earth-life, since the Mystery of Golgotha.

At this point I feel obliged to make an interpolation which is of importance and which ought to be thoroughly understood, particularly by the friends of Spiritual Science. It ought never to be represented that our attempts at Spiritual Science are a substitute for the life and exercise of religion. Spiritual Science may in the highest sense, and particularly as regards the Mystery of Christ, be taken as a support, as a foundation for the life and exercise of religion; but it should not be made a religion, for we ought to be clear that religion in its living form and living practice enkindles the Spiritual consciousness of the human community. If this Spiritual consciousness is to become a living thing in man, he cannot possibly remain at a standstill, stopping at the merely abstract ideas of God or Christ, but must stand renewed amidst the religious practices and activities (which in different people may take various forms) as something which provides him with a religious centre and appeals to him as such. If this religious sentiment is only deep enough, and finds means of stimulating the soul, it will soon feel a longing—a real longing—for the very ideas that can be developed in Spiritual Science. If Spiritual Science may be said to be a support for a religious life, as, objectively speaking, it certainly is—subjectively the time has come today when we may say that a man with true religious feelings is driven by these feelings to seek knowledge. For Spiritual consciousness is acquired through religious feeling and Spiritual knowledge by Spiritual Science, just as knowledge of nature is acquired by Natural Science. Spiritual consciousness leads to the impulse to acquire Spiritual knowledge. It may be said that an inner religious life may today subjectively drive a man to Spiritual Science.

A third meeting is that in which a man approaches the Spirit-Man, which will only be developed in the far future and which is brought near to him by a being belonging to the Hierarchy of the Archai. We may say that the ancients were sensitive to this, as are even the people of the present day, although the latter, in speaking of such things, no longer have a consciousness of the deeper truth of the subject. The ancients felt this meeting as a meeting with that which permeates the world, and which we can now hardly distinguish in ourselves or in the world, but in which we merge in the world as in an unity. Just as we can speak of the second as a meeting with Christ Jesus, so can we speak of the third as a meeting with the Father-Principle, with the Father, with that which lies at the foundation of the world, and which we experience when we have the right feeling for what the various religions mean by ‘the Father.’ This meeting is of such a nature that it reveals our intimate connection with the Macrocosm, with the Divine-Spiritual Universe. The daily course of universal processes, of world processes, includes our meeting with our genius: the yearly course includes our meeting with Christ Jesus: and the course of a whole human life, of this human life of ours, my dear friends—which can normally be described as the patriarchal life of seventy years—includes the meeting with the Father-Principle. For a certain time, our physical earth-life is prepared—and rightly so—by education—at the present day to a great extent unconsciously, yet it is prepared; and most people experience unconsciously, between the ages of twenty-eight and forty-two—and though unconsciously, yet fully appreciated in the intimate depths of the soul—the meeting with the Father-Principle. The after-effects of this may extend into later life, if we develop sufficiently fine perceptions to note that which thus comes into our life from within ourselves, as the after-effects of our meeting with the Father-Principle.

During a certain period of our life—the period of preparation—education ought, in the many different ways this can be done, to make the meeting with the Father-Principle as profound an experience as possible. One way is to arouse in a man, during his years of education, a strong feeling of the glory of the world, of its greatness, and of the sublimity of the world-processes. We are withholding a great deal from the growing boy and girl if we fail to draw their attention to all the revelations of beauty and greatness in the world, for then, instead of having a devoted reverence and respect for these, they may pass them by unobserved. If we fill the minds of the young with thoughts connecting the feelings of their hearts with the beauty and greatness of the world, we are then preparing them for the right meeting with the Father-Principle. For this meeting is of great significance for the life spent between death and a new birth. This meeting with the Father Principle, which normally occurs between the above-mentioned ages, can be a strong force and support to a man, when he has, as we know, to recapitulate his life on earth retrospectively after having passed through the portals of death, and while he passes through the soul-world. This retrospective journey, which as we know, lasts one-third as long as the time spent between birth and death, can be made strong and forceful; as indeed it ought to be, if a man can see himself at a certain point and place meeting with that Being, whom he can only dimly guess at and express in stammering words, when he speaks of the Father of the Cosmic Order. This is an important Picture, which after a man has passed through the gates of death, should always be present with him, together with the picture of death itself.

Now it is natural that a certain question should arise in connection with this. There are people who die before they reach the middle of life, when they would normally have the meeting with the Father-Principle. We must consider the case of those whose death is brought about by some outer cause, such as illness (which is an outer cause) or weakness of some kind. If then, through this early death, the meeting with the Father-Principle has not yet taken place in the subconscious depths of the soul—it will take place at the hour of death. At the moment of death this meeting occurs. Here we may express, somewhat differently, what has indeed already been expressed in another form in a like connection, in the book Theosophy in reference to the always deplorable phenomenon of a man bringing his life to an end by his own will. No man would do this if he could see the significance of his deed; and when once Spiritual Science has really been taken into people's feelings and thoughts, there will be no more suicides. For the meeting with the Father-Principle at the hour of death, when death occurs before middle-life, depends upon that death approaching a man from outside, not being brought about by himself. The difficulty then encountered by the soul and which is described from another standpoint in the book Theosophy might be described from that from which we are speaking today, and we might say: Through his self-chosen death a man may eventually deprive himself of the meeting with the Father-Principle in this incarnation.

Thus, my dear friends, since the truths which Spiritual Science has to tell us concerning human life as a whole, affect our life so deeply, they are indeed serious in cases of special importance. These truths can provide serious explanations of life, which man needs in an age when he must find his way out of the materialism which rules the present world ordering and the current point of view, in so far as these depend on man himself. Stronger forces will be required to overcome the strong connection with the purely material powers which rule over man today, and to give him once again the possibility of recognising his connection with the Spiritual world from the immediate experiences of life.

If we speak in a more abstract way of the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies we can speak in a more concrete way of the fact that man himself—in the experiences at first passed through unconsciously, but which even during his life between birth and death may be brought to his consciousness—may ascend in three stages: through the meeting with his genius, through the meeting with Christ Jesus, and through the meeting with the Father.

Of course a great deal depends on our gaining as many concepts as possible which force themselves into our feelings, concepts that so refine our inner soul-life that we do not carelessly and inattentively pass things by, which in reality, if we are but attentive, play a part in our lives. In this respect education will have a very great deal to do in the near future. I should just like to bring forward one such concept. Just think how infinitely life would be deepened, if to the general knowledge concerning karma such details could be added, as the fact that when a man's life comes to an end in early youth the meeting with the Father-Principle occurs at the hour of death. This shows that the particular karma of this man made an early death necessary, so that an abnormal meeting with the Father-Principle should take place. For what actually occurs in such a case? The man is destroyed from without; his physical being is undermined from without. In illness, too, this is really the case. For the scene of action of the meeting with the Father-Principle is really here in the physical earth-world. When it happens that this external physical earth-world has destroyed a man, the meeting with the Father-Principle can be seen at that very place, and of course it is always to be seen again in the retrospect. This however makes it possible for a man throughout the whole of his life after death to hold firmly, the thought of the place on earth where, descending from heavenly heights, the Father-Principle came to the meeting which then took place. The recollection of this makes him want to be as active as he possibly can to work down into the physical earth-world from the Spiritual world. Now if we consider our present time from this standpoint and try to arouse the same feeling of solemnity as we have just tried to do with respect to the meeting with the Father-Principle, trying not merely to look upon the numerous premature deaths now occurring in the light of feeling or abstract conception, we shall be driven to admit that these were predestined in preparation for the coming need for a great activity to be directed from the Spiritual world to the physical earth-world. This is another aspect of what I have often said with reference to the tragic events of the last few years: that those who today pass so early through the portals of death will become special helpers in the future development of humanity, which will indeed require strong forces to disentangle itself from materialism. But all this must be brought to men's consciousness; it must not take place unconsciously. Therefore it is necessary that even now, souls here on the earth should make themselves receptive—I have already mentioned this—otherwise the forces developed in the Spiritual world may go in other directions. In order that these forces, these predestined forces, may become fruitful to the earth, it is necessary that there should be souls on the earth permeated with the knowledge of the Spiritual world. And there must be more and more of such souls on the earth. Let us therefore try to make fruitful the content of Spiritual Science, which must once be given out in words. By the help of the language (I mentioned this in the last lecture but one) the language we learn through Spiritual Science—let us try to re-animate the old conceptions which are, not without purpose, interwoven in our present life. Let us try to quicken anew what we have heard from Plutarch: that man, even as mere physical man, is permeated by the Spiritual man, and that in a peculiar but normal way a man has a higher Spiritual principle outside his head which represents his genius and which, if he be wise, he obeys. Let us try, as I have said, to take the feelings acquired by Spiritual Science to our assistance—so that the phenomena of life may not pass us by unnoticed.

In conclusion, we will today take one feeling, one conception, which may be of great help to our souls. Unfortunately many people in our modern materialistic age find it very difficult to feel what I might call the holiness of sleep. (The materialistic life is being somewhat softened by this period of trial, and not only ought it to remain softened thereby—which can hardly be hoped if materialism remains at its present strength—but it ought even to be enormously and increasingly softened.) It is indeed a curious phenomenon of man's intelligence today that he is entirely devoid of respect for the holiness of sleep. We need only consider how many people who spend the evening hours in purely materialistic ways, go to sleep without developing the realisation—which indeed can never become a living thing in a materialistic mind—that sleep unites us with the Spiritual world, that sleep sends us across into the Spiritual world. (These things are not mentioned by way of blame, nor intended to drive people to asceticism: we must live with the world, but we must at the same time have our eyes open, for only thus can we wrench our bodily nature away from the lower and lift it higher.) People should at least become gradually able to develop a feeling which can be expressed somewhat as follows: ‘I am going to sleep; until I wake, my soul will be in the Spiritual world. There it will meet with the guiding-power of my earth-life, who lives in the Spiritual world, and who soars round and surrounds my head. My soul will have the meeting with my genius. The wings of my genius will come in contact with my soul.’

Yes, my dear friends, as regards the overcoming of the materialistic life, a great deal, a very great deal, depends on whether one can create a strong feeling of what this means, when one thinks over one's relation to sleep. The materialistic life can only be overcome by stimulating intimate feelings such as these, which are themselves in correspondence with the Spiritual world. Only when we intensify such feelings and make them active, will the life of sleep become so intense, that the contact with the Spiritual world will on the other hand be gradually able to strengthen our waking life too. We shall then have around us not merely the sense-world, but also the Spiritual world, which is the true, the truly real world. For this world that we generally call the real one, is, as I expounded in the last open lecture, nothing but a reflection, an image of the actual real one. The real world is the world of spirit. The small community which is today devoted to Anthroposophy or Spiritual Science, will better be able to grasp the earnest signs of the times and undergo the severe trials of the times, if besides all the other trials to which man is subject today, it learns to consider this time as a time of trial, of testing and probation, whether we are able with sufficient strength of soul and warmth of heart to unite our whole being with the Spiritual Science which we must take in through our reason and our intellect.

In these words, I wished once more to emphasise what I have often said here before: that Spiritual Science will only find its right place in the hearts of men, when it is not merely theory and knowledge, but when—symbolically speaking—it constantly permeates and penetrates the soul; just as our physical blood, our heart's blood, constantly permeates and gives life to our bodily nature.

Dornach, June 2, 1921

In the past few weeks, I have repeatedly spoken of the great change that took place in Western civilization during the fourth century A.D. When such a matter is discussed, one is obliged to point out one thing again and again, that has already been the subject of discussion here many times. Yet it is necessary to focus on it time and again. I am referring to the metamorphoses of human development, markedly differing from each other on the soul level. When speaking of such a major point in human evolution as the one in the fourth century, one has to pay heed to the fact that the soul life of humanity changed in a sense with one great leap.

This view is not prevalent today. The prevailing opinion holds that the human race has undergone a certain history. This history is traced back to about the third or fourth millennium along the lines of the most recent documented records. Then, going back further, there is nothing for a long time; finally, one arrives at animalistic-human conditions. But in regard to the duration of the historical development, it is assumed that human beings have in the main always thought and felt the way they do today; at most, they formerly adhered to a somewhat more childish stage of scientific pursuit. Finally, however, human beings have struggled upward to the level of which we say today that it is splendid how far we have come in the comprehension of the world. To be sure, a reasonably unbiased consideration of human life arrives at the opposite view. I have had to indicate to you the presence of a mighty transition in the fourth Christian century; I outlined the other change in the whole human soul life at the beginning of the fifteenth century. Finally, I described how a turning point in human soul life occurred also during the nineteenth century.

Today, we shall consider one detail in this whole development. I would like to place before you a personality who illustrates particularly well that human beings in the relatively recent past thought completely differently from the way we think today. The personality, who has been mentioned also in earlier lectures, is John Scotus Erigena,¹ who lived in the ninth century A.D. at the court of Charles the Bald in France.² Erigena, whose home was across the Channel, who was born approximately in the year 815 and lived well into the second half of the ninth century, is truly a representative of the more intimate Christian mode of thinking of the ninth century A.D. It is, however, a manner of thinking that is still completely under the influence of the first Christian centuries. John Scotus Erigena apparently was intent on immersing himself in the prevalent scholarly and theological culture of his time. In his age, scholarly and theological knowledge were one and the same. And such learning was most readily acquired across the British Channel, particularly in the Irish institutions where Christianity was cultivated in a certain esoteric manner. The Franconian kings then had ways of attracting such personalities to their courts. The Christian knowledge permeating the Franconian kingdom, even spreading from there further east into western Germany, was mainly influenced by those who had been attracted from across the Channel by these Franconian kings.

John Scotus Erigena also immersed himself into the contents of the writings by the Greek Church Fathers, studying also the texts of a certain problematic nature within Western civilization, namely, the texts by Dionysius the Areopagite.³ As you know, the latter is considered by some to be a direct pupil of Paul. Yet, these texts only surfaced in the sixth century, and many scholars therefore refer to them as pseudo-Dionysian writings composed in the sixth century by an unknown person, which were then accredited to Paul's disciple.

People who say that are ignorant of the way spiritual knowledge was passed on in those early centuries. A school like the one in which Paul himself taught in Athens possessed insights that initially were taught only orally. Handed down from generation to generation, they were finally written down much, much later on. What was thus recorded at a later time, was not necessarily anything less than genuine for that reason; it could preserve to some extent the identity of something that was centuries old. Furthermore, the great value that we place on personality today was certainly not attached to personality in those earlier ages. Perhaps we will be able to touch upon a circumstance in this lecture that must be discussed in connection with Erigena, namely, why people did not place much value on personality in that age.

There is no doubt about one thing: The teachings recorded in the name of Dionysius the Areopagite were considered especially worthy of being written down in the sixth century. They were considered the substance of what had been left from the early Christian times, which were now in particular need of being recorded. We should consider this fact as such to be significant. In the times prior to the fourth century, people simply had more confidence in memory working from generation to generation than they had in later periods. In earlier ages, people were not so eager to write everything down. They were aware, however, that the time was approaching when it would become increasingly necessary to write down things that earlier had been passed on by word of mouth with great ease; for the things that were then recorded in the writings of Dionysius were of a subtle nature.

Now, what John Scotus Erigena was able to study in these writings was certainly apt to make an extraordinarily profound impression on him. For the mode of thinking found in this Dionysius was approximately as follows. With the concepts we from and the perceptions we acquire, we human beings can comprehend the physical sensory world. We can then draw our conclusions from the facts and beings of this sensory world by means of reasoning. We work our way upward, as it were, to a rational content that is then no longer visually perceptible but is experienced in ideas and concepts. Once we have developed our concepts and thoughts from the sensory facts and beings, we have the urge to move upward with them to the supersensory, to the spiritual and divine.

Now, Dionysius does not proceed by saying that we learn this or that from the sensory things; he does not say that our intellect acquires its concepts and then goes on to deduce a deity, a spiritual world. No, Dionysius says, the concepts we acquire from the things of the senses are all unsuitable to express the deity. No matter how subtle the concepts we form of sensory things, we simply cannot express what constitutes divinity with the aid of these concepts. We must therefore resort to negative concepts rather than positive ones. When we encounter our fellowmen, for example, we speak of personality. According to this Dionysian view, when we speak of God, we should not speak of personality, for the concept of personality is much too small and too lowly to designate the deity. Rather we should speak of super-personality. When referring to God, we should not even speak of being, of existence. We say, a man is, an animal, a plant is. We should not ascribe existence to God in the same sense as we attribute existence to us, the animals, and the plants; to Him, we ought to ascribe a super-existence. Thus, according to Dionysius, we should try to rise from the sensory world to certain concepts but then we should turn them upside down, as it were, allowing them to pass over into the negative. We should rise from the sense world to positive theology but then turn upside down and establish negative theology. This negative theology would actually be so sublime, so permeated by God and divine thinking that it can only be expressed in negative predicates, in negations of what human beings can picture of the sensory world.

Dionysius the Areopagite believed he could penetrate into the divine spiritual world by leaving behind, so to speak, all that can be encompassed by the intellect and thus finding the way into a world transcending reason.

If we consider Dionysius a disciple of Paul, then he lived from the end of the first Christian century into the second one. This means that he lived a few centuries prior to the decisive fourth century A.D. He sensed what was approaching: The culmination point of the development of human reason. With a part of his being, Dionysius looked back into the days of antiquity. As you know, prior to the eighth century B.C., human beings did not speak of the intellect in the way they did after the eighth century. Reason, or the rational soul was not born until the eigth century B.C., and from the birth of the rational soul originated the Greek and Roman cultures. These then reached their highest point of development in the fourth century A.D. Prior to this eighth century B.C. people did not perceive the world through the intellect at all; they perceived it directly, through contemplation. The early Egyptian and Chaldean insights were attained through contemplation; they were attained in the same manner in which we acquire our external sensory insights, despite the fact that these pre-Christian insights were spiritual insights. The spirit was perceived just as we today perceive the sensory world and as the Greeks already perceived the sensory world. Therefore, in Dionysius the Areopagite, something like a yearning held sway for a kind of perception lying beyond human reason.

Now, in his mind, Dionysius confronted the mighty Mystery of Golgotha. He dwelled in the intellectual culture of his time. Anybody studying the writings of Dionysius sees—regardless of who Dionysius was—how immersed this man was in all that the intellectual culture of his time had produced. He was a well educated Greek but at the same time a man whose whole personality was imbued with the magnitude of the Mystery of Golgotha. He was a man who realized that regardless of how much we strain our intellect, we cannot comprehend the Mystery of Golgotha and what stands behind it. We must transcend the intellect. We have to evolve from positive theology to negative theology.

When John Scotus Erigena read the writings of this Dionysius the Areopagite, they made a profound impression on him even in the ninth century. For what followed upon the fourth Christian century had more of an Augustine character and developed only slowly in the way I described in the earlier lectures. The mind of such a person, particularly of one of those who had trained themselves in the schools of wisdom over in Ireland, still dwelled in the first Christian centuries; he clung with all the fibers of his soul to what is written in the texts of Dionysius the Areopagite. Yet, at the same time, John Scotus Erigena also had the powerful urge to establish by means of reason, by what the human being can attain through his intellect, a kind of positive theology, which, to him, was philosophy. He therefore diligently studied the Greek Church Fathers in particular. We discover in him a thorough knowledge, for example of Origen,⁴ who lived from the second to the third century A.D.

When we study Origen, we actually discover a world view completely different from the Christian view, that is from what appeared later as the Christian view. Origen definitely still holds the opinion that one has to penetrate theology with philosophy. He believes that it is only possible to examine the human being and his nature only if he is considered as an emanation of the deity, as having had his origin in God. Then, however, man lowered himself increasingly; yet through the Mystery of Golgotha, he has gained the possibility of ascending once again to the deity in order once more to unite with God. From God into the world and back to God—this is how one could describe the path that Origen perceived as his own. Basically, something like this also underlies the Dionysian writings, and then was passed on to such personalities as John Scotus Erigena. But there were many others like him.

One could say that it is a sort of historical miracle that posterity came to know the writings of John Scotus Erigena at all. In contrast to other texts of a similar nature from the first centuries that have been completely lost, Erigena's writings were preserved until the eleventh, twelfth, a few even until the thirteenth century. At that time, they were declared heretical by the Pope; the order was given to find and burn all copies. Only much later, manuscripts from the eleventh and thirteenth century were rediscovered in some obscure monastery. In the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, people knew nothing of John Scotus Erigena. His writings had been burned like so many other manuscripts⁵ of a similar content from that period. From Rome's point of view the search was more successful in the case of other manuscripts: all copies were fed to the flames. Yet, of Erigena's works, a few copies remained.

Now, considering the ninth century and also taking into account that in John Scotus Erigena we have an expert in the wisdom and insights of the first Christian centuries, we must conclude the following. He is a characteristic representative of what extended form an earlier age, from the time preceding the fourth century, into later periods. One could say that in these later times, all knowledge had ossified in the dead Latin language. All the wisdom of the spiritual world that had been alive earlier became ossified, dogmatized, rigid, and intellectualized. Yet, in people like Erigena lived something of the ancient aliveness of direct spiritual knowledge that had existed in the first Christian centuries and was utilized by the most enlightened minds to comprehend the Mystery of Golgotha.

For a time, this wisdom had to die out in order for the intellect of man to be cultivated from the first third of the fifteenth century until our era. While the intellect as such is a spiritual achievement of the human being, initially it turned only to the material realm. The ancient wealth of wisdom had to die so that the intellect in its shadowy nature could be born. If, instead of immersing ourselves in a scholarly, pedantic manner into his writings, we do so with our whole being, we will notice that through Scotus Erigena something had spoken out of soul depths other than those from which people spoke later on. There, the human being had still spoken out of mental depths that subsequently could no longer be reached by human soul life. Everything was more spiritual, and if human beings spoke intellectually at all, they spoke of matters in the spiritual realm.

It is extremely important for one to scrutinize carefully what the structure of Erigena's knowledge was like. In his mighty work on the divisions of nature that has come down to posterity in the manner I described, he divided what he had to say concerning the world in four chapters. In the first, he initially speaks of the uncreated and the created world (see outline below). In the way Erigena believed himself able to do it, the first chapter describes God and the way He was prior to His approaching something like the creation of the world.

Ancient Legacy

The Human Being

John Scotus Erigena clearly describes this in the way he learned through the writings of Dionysius. He describes by means of developing the most refined intellectual concepts. At the same time, he is aware that with them he only reaches up to a certain limit beyond which lies negative theology. He therefore merely approaches the actual true being of the spirit, of the divine. Among other topics, we find in this chapter the beautiful discourse about the Trinity, instructive even for our age. He states that when we view the things around us, we initially discover existence as an overall spiritual quality (see above). Existence embraces everything. Now, we should not attribute existence as possessed by things to God. Yet, looking upward to existence transcending existence, we cannot but speak summarily of the deity's existence.

Likewise, we find that things in the world are illuminated and permeated by wisdom. To God, we should not merely ascribe wisdom but wisdom beyond wisdom. But when we proceed from things, we arrive at the limit of wisdom-filled things. Now, there is not only wisdom in all things. They live; there is life in all things. Therefore, when Erigena calls to mind the world, he says: I see existence, wisdom, life in the world. The world appears to me in these aspects as an existing, wisdom-filled, living world. To him, these are three veils, so to speak, that the intellect fashions when it surveys all things. One would have to see through these veils, then, to see into the divine-spiritual realm. To begin with, Erigena describes these veils: When I look upon existence, this represents the Father to me; when I look upon wisdom, it represents the Son to me; when I look upon life, it represents the Holy Spirit in the universe.

As you can see, John Scotus Erigena certainly proceeds from philosophical concepts and then makes his way up to the Christian Trinity. Inwardly, proceeding from the comprehensible, he still experiences the path from there to the so-called incomprehensible. Indeed, of this he is convinced. Yet, from the way he speaks and presents his insights we can see that he has learned from Dionysius. Precisely when he arrives at existence, wisdom, and life, which to him represent the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, he would really like to have these concepts dissolve in a general spiritual element into which the human being would then have to rise by transcending concepts. However, he does not credit the human being with the faculty of arriving at a state of mind that goes beyond the conceptual.

In this, John Scotus Erigena was a product of the age that developed the intellect. Indeed, if this age had understood itself correctly, it would have had to admit that it could not enter into the realm transcending the conceptual level.

The second chapter then describes something like a second sphere of world existence, the created and the creating world (see above). It is the world of the spiritual beings where we find the angels, the archangels, the Archai, and so on. This world of spiritual beings, mentioned already in the writings of Dionysius the Areopagite. is creative everywhere in the world. Yet this hierarchical world is itself created; it is begun, hence created, by the highest being and in turn is active creatively in all details of existence surrounding us.

In the third chapter, Erigena then describes as a third world the created world that is noncreating. This is the world we perceive around us with our senses. It is the world of animals, plants, and minerals, the stars, and so on. In this chapter, Erigena deals with almost everything we would designate as cosmology, anthropology, and so forth, all that we would call the realm of science.

In the fourth chapter, Erigena deals with the world that has not been created and does not create. This is again the deity, but the way it will be when all creatures, particularly all human beings, will have returned to it. It is the Godhead when it will no longer be creating, when, in blissful tranquility—this is how John Scotus Erigena imagines it—it will have reabsorbed all the beings that have emerged from it.

Now, in surveying these four chapters, we find contained in them something like a compendium of all traditional knowledge of the schools of wisdom from which Scotus Erigena had come. When we consider what he describes in the first chapter, we deal with something that can be called theology in his sense, the actual doctrine of the divine.

Considering the second chapter, we find in it what he calls in terms of our present-day language the ideal world. The ideal is pictured, however, as existing. For he does not describe abstract ideas but angels, archangels, and so forth. He pictures the whole intelligible world, as it was called. Yet it was unlike our modern intelligible world; instead it was a world filled with living beings, with living, intelligible entities.

As I said, in the third chapter Erigena describes what we would term science today, but he does so in a different way. Since the days of Galileo and Copernicus, who, after all, lived later, we no longer possess what was called cosmology or anthropology in Scotus Erigena's age. Cosmology was still described from the spiritual standpoint. It depicted how spiritual beings direct and also inhabit the stars, how the elements, fire, water, air, and earth are permeated by spiritual beings. What was described as cosmology, was indeed something different. The materialistic way of viewing things that has arisen since the middle of the fifteenth century did not yet exist in Erigena's time, and his form of anthropology also differed completely from what we call anthropology in our materialistic age.

Here, I can point out something extraordinarily characteristic for what anthropology is to John Scotus Erigena. He looks at the human being and says: First, man bears existence within himself. Hence, he is a mineral being, for he contains within himself a mineral nature (see outline above). Secondly, man lives and thrives like a plant. Third, man feels as does the animal. Fourth, man judges and draws conclusions as man. Fifth, man perceives as an angel.

It goes without saying that in our age this would be an unheard-of statement! When John Scotus Erigena speaks of judgment and conclusions, something that is done, for instance, in a legal court where one pronounces judgment over somebody—then, so he says, human beings do this as human beings. But when they perceive, when they penetrate the world in perception then human beings do not behave as human beings but as angels! The reason for pointing this out is that I am trying to show you that for that period anthropology was something different from what it is for our present age. For it is true that you could hardly hear anywhere, not even in a theological seminar, that human beings perceive as angels. Therefore, one is forced to conclude that our science no longer resembles what Erigena describes in the third chapter. It has turned into something different. If we wanted to call Erigena's science by a word that is no longer applicable to anything existing today, we would have to say that it was a spiritual doctrine of the universe and man, pneumatology.

Now to the fourth chapter: This contains, first of all, Erigena's teaching of the Mystery of Golgotha and the doctrine concerning what the human being has to expect in the future, namely, entrance into the divine-spiritual world, hence, what in modern usage would be called soteriology. “Soter,” after all, means savior; the teaching of the future is eschatology. We find that Erigena here deals with the concepts of the Crucifixion and Resurrection, the emanation of Divine Grace, man's path into the divine-spiritual, world, and so on.

There is one thing that truly holds our attention, if we study attentively a work such as the De divisione naturae by John Scotus Erigena about the divisions of nature. The world is definitely discussed as something that is perceived in spiritual qualities. He speaks of something spiritual as he observes the world. But what is not contained in this work? We have to pay attention, after all, to what is not included in a universal science such as Erigena is trying to establish there.

In John Scotus Erigena's work, you discover as good as nothing of what we call sociology today, social science, and things of that kind. One is almost inclined to say it appears from the way Erigena pictures human beings that he did not wish to give mankind social sciences, no more so than any animal species, say the lion, the tiger, or any bird species, would come out with a sociology if it produced some sort of science. For a lion would not talk about the way it ought to live together with the other lions or how it ought to acquire its food and so on; this is something that comes instinctively. Just as little could we imagine a sociology of sparrows. Surely sparrows could reveal any number of the most interesting cosmic secrets from their viewpoint, but they would never produce any teaching about economics, for sparrows would consider this a subject that goes without saying, something they do because their instinct tells them to do it.

This is what is remarkable: Because we discover as yet nothing like this in Erigena's writings, we realize that he still viewed human society as if it produced the social elements out of its instincts. With his special kind of insight, he points to what still lived in the human being in the form of instincts and drives, namely, the impulses of social living. What he describes transcends this social aspect. He describes how the human being had emerged from the divine, and what sort of beings exist beyond the sense world. Then, in a form of pneumatology, he shows how the spirit pervades the sensory world, and he presents the spiritual element that penetrated into the world of the senses in his fourth chapter on soteriology and eschatology. Nowhere is there a description, however, of how human beings ought to live together. I should say, everything is elevated above the sensory world. It was generally a characteristic of this ancient science that everything was elevated beyond the sense world.

Now, if we contemplate writings such as John Scotus Erigena's teaching in a spiritual scientific sense, we discover that he did not think at all with the same organs humanity thinks with today. We simply do not understand him if we try to understand him with the thinking employed by mankind today. We understand him only when, through spiritual science, we have acquired an idea of how to think with the etheric body, the body that, as a more refined body, underlies the coarse sensory corporeality.

Thus Erigena did not think with the brain but with the etheric body. In him, we simply have a mind which did not yet think with the brain. Everything he wrote down came into being as a result of thinking with the etheric body. Fundamentally speaking, it was only subsequent to his age that human beings began to think with the physical body, and only since the beginning of the fifteenth century did people think totally with the physical body. It is normally not recognized that during this period the human soul life has truly changed, and that if we go back into the thirteenth, twelfth, and eleventh centuries, we encounter a form of thinking that was not yet carried out with the physical but with the etheric body. This thinking with the etheric body was not supposed to extend into later ages when, dialectically and scholastically, people discussed rigid concepts. This former thinking with the etheric body, which certainly was the form of thinking employed during the first Christian centuries, was declared to be heretical. This was the reason for burning Erigena's writings. Now, the actual soul condition of a thinker in that age becomes comprehensible.

Going back to earlier times, we find a certain form of clairvoyance in all people. Human beings did not think at all with their physical body. In past ages, they thought with their etheric body and carried on their soul life even with the astral body. There, we should not speak of thinking at all, since the intellect only originated in the eighth century B.C., as I have pointed out. However, certain remnants of this ancient clairvoyance were retained, and it is particularly true of the most outstanding minds that with the intellect, which had already come into being, they tried to penetrate into the knowledge that had been handed down through tradition from former ages. People tried to comprehend what had been viewed in a completely different manner in past times. They tried to understand, but now had to have the support of abstract concepts such as existence, wisdom, life. I would say that these individuals still knew something of an earlier spirit-permeated insight and at the same time felt quite at home within the purely intellectual perception.

Later on, when the intellectual perception had turned into a shadow, this was not felt anymore. Earlier, however, people felt that in past ages insights had existed that permeated human beings in a living way out of spiritual worlds, it was not something merely thought up. Erigena lived in such a divided state. He was only capable of thinking, but when this thinking arrived at perception, he sensed that there was something of the ancient powers that had permeated the human being in the ancient manner of perception. Erigena felt the angel, the angelos, within himself. This is why he said that human beings perceive as angels. It was a legacy from ancient times, extending into his age of intellectual knowledge, that made it possible for a mind like Scotus Erigena's to say that man perceives like an angel. In the days of the Egyptian, Chaldean, and the early ages of the Hebrew civilization, nobody would have said anything else but: The angel perceives within me; as a human being, I share in the knowledge of the angel. The angel dwells within me, he cognizes, and I take part in what he perceives.

This was true of the era when reason did not yet exist. When the intellect had appeared, it became necessary to penetrate this older knowledge with reason. In Scotus Erigena, however, there still existed an awareness of this state of permeation with the angel nature.

Now, it is a strange experience to become involved in this work of Erigena's and to try and understand it completely. You finally arrive at a feeling of having read something most significant, something that still dwells very much in spiritual regions and speaks of the world as something spiritual. But then, in turn, the feeling arises that everything is basically mixed up. You realize that with this text you find yourself in the ninth century when the intellect had already brought much confusion. And this is truly the case. For if you read the first chapter, you are dealing with theology. But it is a theology that is certainly secondary even for John Scotus Erigena, a theology which evidently points back to something greater and more direct. I shall now speak as if all these matters were hypotheses, but what I now develop as a hypothesis can be established by spiritual science as a fact. A condition must once have existed, and we look back on it, when as yet theology was not addressed in such an intellectual manner but was considered to be something one delved into in a living way. Without doubt, it was that kind of theology the Egyptians spoke of, those Egyptians of whom the Greeks—I mentioned it above—report that Egyptian sages told them: You Greeks are like children;⁶ you have no knowledge of the world's origin, we do possess this sacred knowledge of the world's beginnings.

Obviously, the Greeks were being referred to an ancient, living theology. Thus, we have to say: During the time of the third post-Atlantean period, which begins in the fourth millennium and ends in the first millennium B.C. in the eighth pre-Christian century, approximately in the year 747 B.C., there existed a living theology. It now needed to be penetrated by Erigena's intellect. It was obviously present in a much more vital form to the personality who must be recognized as Dionysius the Areopagite. Dionysius had a much more intense feeling for this ancient theology. He felt that it was something that existed but could no longer be approached, that becomes negative as one tries to approach it. Based on the intellect, so he thought, one can only arrive at positive theology. Yet, with the term, negative theology, he was really referring to an ancient theology that had disappeared.

Again, when we consider what appears in the second chapter as the ideal world, we could believe that it is something modern. That, however, is not the case, That ideal world actually is identical with a true idea of what appears in the ancient Persian epoch, just as I described it in my Occult Science, hence in the second post-Atlantean period. Among Plato and the Platonists, this ancient Persian living world of angels, the world of the Amshaspands, and so on, had already paled into the world of ideals and ideas due to a later development. Yet, what is actually contained in this ideal world and is clearly discernible in Scotus Erigena goes back to this second ancient Persian age.

What appears in Erigena's book as pneumatology, as a kind of pantheism is not vague and nebulous such as is frequently the case today, but a pantheism that is alive and spiritual, though dimmed in Erigena's writing. This pneumatology is the last remnant, the very last vestige filtered out of the first post-Atlantean, ancient Indian period.

And what about the fourth chapter? Well, it contains Erigena's living perception of the Mystery of Golgotha and the future of humanity. We hardly speak of this anymore today. As an ancient tradition, it is still mentioned by theologians, but they know of it only in rigidified dogmas. They even deny that man could attain such insight through living knowledge. But it did originate from what was thus cultivated as soteriology and eschatology. You see, the theology of former times was handed over, as it were, to the councils; there, it was frozen into dogmas and incorporated into Christology. It was not to be touched anymore. It was viewed as impenetrable to perception. It was removed, so to speak, from what was carried out in schools by means of knowledge. As it was, exoteric matters were already being preserved like nebulous formations from ancient times. But at least the activities in schools were to be linked with thoughts that emerged in the age of thinking. They were to be connected, after all, with the Mystery of Golgotha and the future of mankind. There, one spoke of the Christ being's rule among human beings; one spoke of a future day of judgment. The concepts that people could come up with were used for that.

Thus, we see that Scotus Erigena actually records the first three chapters as though they had been handed down to him. Finally, he applies his own intellect to the fourth chapter but in such a manner that he speaks of things that far surpass the physical, sensory world, yet have something to do with this world. We realize that he took pains to apply the intellect to eschatology and soteriology. After all, we know the kind of scholarly disputes and discussions Scotus Erigena was involved in. For example, he was involved in discussions of the question whether in Communion, that is, in something that was related to the Mystery of Golgotha, human beings confront the actual blood and the actual body of Christ. He took part in all the discussions of human will, its freedom and lack of freedom in connection with divine grace. Hence, he honed and schooled his intellect in regard to everything that was the subject of his fourth chapter. This is what people discussed then.

We could say that the content of the first three chapters was an ancient tradition. One did not change it much but simply communicated it. The fourth chapter, on the other hand, was a living striving; there, the intellect was applied and schooled.

What became of this intellect that was schooled there? What happened to the concepts of soteriology and eschatology arrived at by people like Scotus Erigena in the ninth century? You see, my dear friends, since the middle of the fifteenth century this has become our science, the basis of the perception of nature. Once, people employed the intellect in order to consider whether bread and wine in the Sacrament are transformed into the body and blood of Christ. They pondered whether grace is bestowed on man in one way or another. This same intellect was later used to consider whether the molecule consists of atoms and whether the sun's body consists of one form of substance or another, and so on. It is the continuation of the theological intellect that inhabits natural science today. Precisely the same intellect that stimulated Scotus and the others who were involved with him in the dispute over Communion—and the discussions were indeed very lively in those days—survived in the teachings of Galileo and Copernicus. It survived in Darwinism, even, say, in Strauss's materialism. It has lived on in a straight line. You know that the old is always preserved alongside the new. Therefore, the same intellect that in David Friedrich Strauss hatched the book The Old and the New Faith, which preaches total atheism, occupied itself in those days, with soteriology and eschatology; it continues in a straight line.

We could therefore say that if this book had to be written today based as much on modern conditions as Scotus Erigena based what he wrote on the conditions of his age, then, here (referring to outline above), total atheism would not appear, but rather our natural science. For, naturally, complete atheism would contradict the first chapter. In the ninth century soteriology and eschatology still appeared there, for then the intellect was applied to other things. But here, (see p. 281), materialistic science would emerge today. History reveals to us nothing else but this. Now, we can perhaps see what becomes evident from the whole conception of this work.

Basically, what is listed here (outline above) would have to appear in a different sequence. The third chapter would have to read: world view of the first post-Atlantean age. The second chapter, would have to read: world view of the second post-Atlantean age, and the first chapter: world view of the third post-Atlantean age. In the sense of Scotus Erigena—who lived in the fourth post-Atlantean age that only came to an end in the fifteenth century—the last chapter applies to the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. The sequence (in the outline) would therefore have to be: III, II, I, IV. This is what I meant when I said earlier that one receives the impression that things are actually mixed up. Scotus Erigena simply possessed bits of the ancient legacy but he did not list them in accordance with their sequence in time. They were part of the knowledge of his age, and he mentioned them in the order in which they were most familiar to him. He listed the nearest at hand as the highest; the others appeared so nebulous to him that he considered them to be inferior.

Yet, the fourth chapter is nevertheless most remarkable. Let us try to understand from a certain viewpoint what it should actually be. Let us go back into pre-Christian times. If we were to seek among the Egyptians a representative mind such as Scotus Erigena was for the ninth century, such a person would still have known something concerning theology in a most lively way. He would have had even more alive concepts of the ideal or angelic world, of the sphere that illuminates and permeates the whole world with spirit. He would still have known all that and would have said: In the very first age, there once existed a human world view that beheld the spirit in all things. But then, the spirit was abstractly lifted up into the heights. It became the ideal world, finally the divine world. Then, the fourth epoch arrived. It was supposed to be even more spiritualized than the theological epoch. This Greco-Latin period was really supposed to be more spiritualized than the third epoch. And above all, the fifth which then followed, namely our time, would have to be an even more spiritualized era, for with materialistic science in place of soteriology or eschatology it would have to be listed in fourth place, or we would have to add a fifth listing with our natural science, and the latter would have to be the most spiritual view.

Yet, in fact, my dear friends, matters are buried. We hear Scotus Erigena saying that man exists as a mineral being, lives and thrives as a plant, feels as an animal, judges and draws conclusions as a human being, perceives as an angel—something Erigena still knew from ancient traditions. Now, we who aspire to spirit knowledge would have to go even further. We would have to say: Right, human beings exist as mineral beings, live and thrive as plants, feel as animals, judge and draw conclusions as human beings, perceive as angels and, sixth, human beings behold—namely, imaginatively, the spiritual world—as archangels. When we speak of the human being since the first third of the fifteenth century, we would have to ascribe to ourselves the following. We perceive as angels and develop the consciousness soul by means of soul faculties of vision—to begin with, unconsciously, but yet as consciousness soul—as archangels.

Thus, we face the paradox that in the materialistic age human beings actually live in the spiritual world, dwelling on a higher spiritual level than they did in earlier times. We can actually say: Yes, Scotus Erigena is right, the angel experience is awakening in man, but the archangel experience is also awakening since the first third of the fifteenth century. We should rightfully be in a spiritual world.

In realizing this, we could really look back also to a passage in the Gospels that is always interpreted in a most trivial way, namely, the one saying: The end of the world is near and the kingdoms of heaven are at hand. Yes, my dear friends, when we have to say of ourselves that in us the archangel is developing vision so that we can receive the consciousness soul, then there results a strange view of this approach of the heavens. It appears that it is necessary to revise such conceptions of the New Testament once more from the standpoint of spiritual science. These views are very much in need of revision, and we really have two tasks: First, to understand whether our age is not actually meant to to be different than the age when Christ walked on earth and whether the end of the world of which Christ spoke might not be something we have behind us already? This is the one task we confront. And if it is true that we have the so-called end of the world behind us and we therefore already face the spiritual world, then we would have to explain why it has such an unspiritual appearance, why it has become so material, arriving finally at that terrible, astounding life that characterizes the first third of the twentieth century? Two mighty and overwhelming questions place themselves before our soul. We shall continue speaking about that tomorrow.

• 1. Johannes Scotus Erigena, 810–877, Irish philosopher of scholasticism in Paris.
• 2. Charles the Bald, 828–877, king of the Franconians, emperor from 875–877.
• 3. Dionysius the Areopagite: connected Christianity with neo-Platonic philosophy. Had strong influence on medieval mysticism.
• 4. Origen, around 185–254, Greek Church Father in Alexandria, later presbyter in Caesarea; basis of his philosophical theology: De principiis (“Peri archon”). Under Justinian I, during the fifth ecumenical council in Constantinople in 553, his teachings were condemned as heretical.
• 5. After the Church had forbidden the reading of Scotus Erigena's texts, all editions were ordered burned in 1225.
• 6. These words are reported by Plato in Timaios, 22 B.C.

Today I'd like to consider the question as to how far religious confessions can be seen, using specific examples, to have their foundation in the science of the spirit, or, as we may also put it, in occult science. I only want to consider a very small part of this subject concerning the spiritual scientific foundation of religions. You are going to see that this concerns a fact known to everyone in our civilization, even the most naive individuals, a spiritual fact that holds the most profound truths and fundamentals of the science of the spirit, and one only has to look for it to see how mysterious and full of wisdom are the connections that exist in cultural life.

Let us start with the question of Christian prayer. You all know 'Christian prayer’, as it is called today. We have spoken of it before and some people may well have asked themselves: ‘How does Christian prayer relate to the view of the world we have in the science of the spirit?’ Through this view of the world, members of the spiritual scientific movement have heard something about another way in which man, the human soul, can rise to the divine spiritual powers in the universe; about meditation, about that particular way of inwardly living with a spiritual thought; also something or other about what the great spirits that guide humanity have given us; or about the spiritual reality that lived and lives in the great civilizations. If we consider those civilizations we are given the means of entering for a short time in our souls into the divine and spiritual streams in this world.

Someone who meditates, even in the simplest way, using one of the meditations given by the spiritual guides of humanity; someone who meditates and thus lets one of the formulae, one of the significant thoughts, be present in his mind—you know it cannot be any kind of thought, but has to be something given by the Masters of Wisdom and of the Harmony of Inner Feelings—someone who meditates and lets these formulae come alive in his heart, finds he has entered into the stream of a higher spirituality; a higher power flows through him. He lives in it. First he creates the ability to strengthen his ordinary powers of mind, to elevate them and give them life, and with sufficient patience and perseverance, perhaps having let this power flow into him to strengthen him morally and intellectually, the moment will come when deeper powers are aroused that lie dormant in every human soul, powers awakened by such a meditative thought. From the simplest way of gaining moral strength up to the highest regions of clairvoyant potential, all kinds of stages can be reached by meditating like this. For most people it is just a matter of time, patience and energy to reach the higher levels. Meditating like this is usually considered a more Eastern way of going to higher levels to meet one’s god. In the West, and especially in the Christian world, we have prayer instead, the prayer in which the Christian goes to higher levels, to his god, prayer in which the Christian seeks to gain entrance to the higher worlds in his particular way.

Now above all else we must be clear that much of what is thought to be prayer today would not have counted as such at all in the early Christian sense, and least of all in the view of the founder of the Christian religion, Christ Jesus himself. In truly Christian terms it never is prayer if someone asks his god for something to satisfy his own personal and egoistical desires. When someone pleads or prays for his own personal wishes to be met, he will soon reach the point where he completely forgets the universal and comprehensive nature of anything which is granted in answer to prayer. He thinks the divine spirit will specifically meet his own desires. A farmer who is growing a particular crop may need rain, perhaps, whilst his neighbour needs the sun to shine. One of them prays for rain, the other for sun. What is divine providence to do? And this quite apart from anything divine providence is supposed to do when two armies face one another in the field and each is praying for victory, each considering its own victory to be the only just and fair one. You can see immediately how little universality and general humanity lies in such prayers, and that if a god were to grant them, only one party would be satisfied.

Praying in that way people forget the prayer in which Christ Jesus set the basic mood that should prevail in any prayer, the prayer that says: ‘Father, let this cup pass; but not my will but your will be done.’⁹¹ That is the basic mood of Christian prayer. Whatever people intercede or pray for, this basic mood must be a bright note sounding again and again in the soul as someone seeks to offer Christian prayer. The prayer formula then becomes a means of raising ourselves to higher regions so that we may feel the god within us. The formula will then also drive away any egoistical wish and will impulse, so that the words ‘not my will but your will be done’ will have real meaning. We then give ourselves up to and enter deeply into the divine world. When we achieve this basic mood as the true mood for prayer, Christian prayer is exactly the same—only with more of a feeling note to it as meditation. And this Christian prayer originally was exactly what meditation also is. It is only that meditation is more at the level of thought, seeking to be in harmony with the divine streams that go through the world and doing so by means of the thoughts of the great guides of humanity. The same thing is achieved, but more at the level of feelings, in prayer.

We see therefore that in both prayer and meditation people seek to achieve something which we may call oneness of the soul with the divine streams that go through the world, something which at its highest level is known as ‘mystic union’ with the godhead. Prayer and meditation, are the first step towards this. Human beings could never unite with their god, they could never make connection with the higher spiritual entities if they themselves were not an outflowing from this divine spirit.

As we all know, man is dual by nature. He has the four bodies that make up his essential human nature, bodies we have often mentioned before—physical body, ether or life body, astral body and I. Within the I lies the potential for the future—manas, buddhi, atman, or spirit self, life spirit and spirit human being.

To gain the right insight into the way these two essential realities of human nature are related, we have to go back for a moment to the time when man came into existence. You all know from earlier lectures that man as he is today is a symphony of the two essential realities—threefold potential for the future in manas, buddhi and atman, his three higher principles on the one hand, and physical body, ether body, astral body and I as the four lower principles on the other. We also know that he evolved to be like this in a far, far distant past which we call the Lemurian age of the earth.

Going back from our present age, through the Graeco-Latin, then the Egyptian, Assyrian and Chaldean, the Persian and also the Indian civilizations, we gradually come, as we go further and further back, to the great Atlantean flood that lives on in the mythologies of all peoples, and to our ancestors who lived in the land that lay between Europe and America, a land which we call Atlantis. Further back we come to ancestors who lived in primordial times in a land which then lay between Australia and India. The higher trinity of man—spirit self, life spirit and spirit human being—did not unite with the four lower bodies, as we call them—physical body, ether body, astral body and I—until the middle of that period.

We have the right idea if we see it like this. During Lemurian times on this earth, the highest life form was not the physical human being we know today. There was just a kind of highly developed animal form which today envelops our present-day human being. At that time it consisted of the four lower bodies. Higher human nature, the eternal in man, with the three potential elements that will develop further in the future through manas, buddhi and atman, had until then been in the keeping of the godhead. To imagine what happened at the time, in a way that may be rather commonplace but does help us to see it, think of all the people who today make up the whole of humanity having developed bodies by then that would enable them to absorb the human soul rather the way a sponge is able to absorb water.

Think of a vessel filled with water. You’ll be unable to tell where one drop of water ends and another begins. And then think of a number of tiny little sponges dipped into the water. What had been a uniform mass of water in the vessel, is now divided up among many tiny sponges. That is how it was with the human soul at that time, if we may use such a commonplace analogy. Before, they rested in the care of the divine prime spirit, and they were dependent, having no individuality; then they were absorbed into human bodies and thus made individual, like the water in the tiny sponges. The principle which was then absorbed by the individual bodies, which are the four lower principles, has continued on into our time, developing all the time, and it will continue to develop in the future. In the science of the spirit, or occult science, it was always called the upper trinity, and triangle and square were chosen, above all by the Pythagorean school, to represent this human being who came into being in the middle of the Lemurian age.

But as you can easily imagine, this upper, eternal principle which goes through all incarnations can be considered from two points cf view. On the one hand we may see it as part of humanity for ever and all eternity, and on the other hand as part of the divine spirit which that great spirit gave away at the time as a part or droplet of its own content, which is now down in the fourfold human vessel. A droplet of divinity became individual and independent as it came to rest in us human beings. You can see, therefore, that you may consider the three higher principles of human nature, the eternal in us, to be not only the three highest principles in human nature, but also as three principles in the godhead itself. If you wanted to enumerate the principles of the gods who gave humanity the soul droplet at that time, you would have to start with man and his physical body, continue with the ether body, astral body and I, go on up from manas to atman, beginning with manas, continuing with buddhi and atman, and go on to the principles that lie above atman and of which present-day human beings will only be able to have a idea when they become pupils of the initiates. So you see that we can also consider these three principles, which man has within him as his content, to be three divine principles.

Let us now look at them not as human but as divine principles, and describe them in their essential nature. The highest principle in the human being, atman, something we will develop at the end of this earthly, or, shall we say, present planetary evolution, can be characterized in terms of spiritual or occult science by comparing its essential nature with something of which present-day human beings have only a vague notion, and that is the will element in man. The basic character of this, the highest divine principle in us, is will-like by nature, a kind of will intent. The will, which is least developed in our inner nature today, will be our most outstanding principle at a future time, when we shall ascend higher and higher.

Today man is essentially a creature who seeks insight, with the will really still limited in all kinds of directions. We can grasp the universal nature of the world around us up to a point. But just consider how few of the things we are able to grasp are things we are able to will; how little power we have over the things we are able to grasp. The future will bring what we do not yet have. The will is going to grow mightier and mightier, until we reach our great goal, which in the science of the spirit is called 'the great offering' or 'sacrifice'. This consists in a power of the will where the spirit which wills is able to give itself up completely, not just giving the little a human being is able to give out of the weakness of his powers of feeling and will, but giving one’s whole existence, letting oneself flow out as an essential spirit right down to the level of material nature.

You’ll get an idea of what is meant by 'the great sacrifice', the highest form of the will in divine nature, if you look at it in the following way. Imagine you are standing in front of a mirror and your image is looking at you from this mirror. This image is an illusion but it is your perfect counterfeit. Now imagine you have died, giving up your own existence, your feeling, thinking and your very essence in order to give life to this image, making it into what you yourself are. To give up oneself and one's life to the image—this is something which in the science of the spirit has always been called the emanation, the flowing out. If you were able to do this you would find that you yourself are no longer there, for you have given away everything in order to resurrect life and conscious awareness in the image.

When the will has reached a level where it is capable of performing ‘the great sacrifice’, as it is called, then it makes, it creates a universe, large or small, and this universe is a mirror image that has been given its mission through the essential nature of its creator. We have thus characterized the creative will in the divine spirit.

The second principle we have to characterize in divine nature, in so far as it has entered into humanity, is already contained in the analogy we have made—it is the mirror image itself. Enter as actively as you can into a divine spirit that is the creator of a world and the centre of the universe. If you think of a point in this room and imagine that rather than by these walls, of which there are six, it is surrounded by a hollow sphere, the inner surface of which is a mirror, you will see yourself, the centre, reflected on all sides. You have the image of a divine spirit as a will centre that is reflected on all sides, and the mirror is the image of the godhead itself and also of the universe. For what is a universe? It is nothing but a mirror reflecting the essential nature of the divine spirit.

The universe is alive and active. And this is because the godhead emanates in making its great sacrifice, in reflecting its universe, which is like the enlivening of the mirror image we tried to imagine. The whole universe is given life out of the universal will that comes to expression in infinite variety. This process of infinite variety, infinite replication, this repetition of the godhead is known as the ‘realm’, as distinct from the ‘will’, in every occult or spiritual science. The will is thus the centre; its mirror is the realm, so that you may compare the will with atman or spirit man, and the realm, or mirror image of the will, with buddhi or life spirit.

Now this realm is such that it reflects the essential nature of the divine in infinite variety. Just look at this realm all around, in so far as it is our realm, our rich variety, our universe; look at its visible part in minerals, plants, animals and human beings. The realm manifests in every individual form, and something of this still lives on in the German term Reich [meaning 'rich' as well as 'realm'; tr.], with the major divisions of our universe called the mineral, plant and animal worlds or realms. But if we also go into detail, then every detail, too, is divine by nature. Nature is reflected in all of it, just as the centre would be mirrored in the hollow sphere. And someone who looks at the world in the terms of occult research sees the god, an image and expression of the divine, in every mineral, every plant, every animal and every human being.

The divine spirit shows itself in infinitely many different forms of life in all their variety. If one has reached the level of perception in the science of the spirit that enables one to see the individual entities as having originated in the godhead, they are told apart by giving them a ‘name’. It is the name which the human being thinks of as the individual entity; it serves to distinguish the individual entities in this vast variety from one another. It is the third of the greatest three human principles that flow from the godhead and may be said to correspond to the manas or spirit self. The occult teaching of different religions also used to teach, naively, what had flowed from the godhead and flowed into you, becoming your eternal image.

If you wish to rise to the realm to which you are ultimately destined to rise, you will find that it is will-like by nature.

If you wish to rise to the buddhi, the bearer of this will, of this atman, its realm is of the divine.

And if you wish to rise to that which you perceive to be names, concepts or ideas of things—this is what name is within the realm of the divine.

What we have been considering is the ancient wisdom which tells us that name, realm and will make up the part of the godhead that has flowed into essential human nature to be the eternal part of it. We thus see that the three higher principles in man are part of the divine.

To complete our study, let us now take a look at the four lower principles of mortal man. We know of the three higher principles that they can actually be considered from the other aspect, since we consider them to be parts of the divine principle. In a similar way, the four lower principles of essential human nature can be considered to be parts of the transitory world and parts of human nature.

Consider the physical body. It is made up of the same material and the same forces as the seemingly lifeless world all around it. This physical body could not exist unless matter and energy were continually flowing into it from the physical world that surrounds it, building it up over and over again. Everything we have in the physical body is really in transit within it. Materials flow into and out of it which make up the outer universe as well as being inside us for a time. Mention has been made here on several occasions that the whole material content of the human body is renewed in the course of seven years. None of you have any of the matter in you today that you had in you ten years ago. Human beings renew the substance of their physical bodies all the time. The matter which was in us before is now somewhere else, distributed in the natural world outside, and other matter has come into us. The life of the body requires matter to come in and go out all the time.

Just as we considered the three higher principles in the essential human being to be parts of the godhead, so we can consider the four parts of lower human nature to be parts of the divine natural world.

We may consider the physical body to be part of the material part of our planet; its substance has been taken from this material planet and goes back again to it. If we consider the ether body, we must also see it as part of the world that surrounds us here, and the same holds true for the astral body.

Let us consider the life body or ether body and the astral body in context. You know that the astral body sustains everything we have by way of drives, desires and passions, everything that moves the human soul—joy and suffering, pleasure and pain, whilst the life or ether body relates to qualities of soul that are more lasting, of longer duration and sustains them.

On some occasions when speaking to you I compared the development of the life or ether body and the astral body with the hour and minute hands of a clock. I made you aware that when you recall things which you knew and which happened when you were eight and the things you know and that happen now, you'll notice a great difference. You have learned infinitely many things, taking up many ideas; as to the things you did when you were eight, many feelings of joy and pain may have come to mind again; not only come to mind, but also passed through it. But if you now compare this with your temperament, your character, your lasting tendencies, you will realize that if you had a violent temper as a child you will probably still have a violent temper today. Most people keep these basic characteristics for the whole of their lives. As we have stressed a number of times, occult training is not a matter of theory but of directing evolution to the structures in the ether body, which otherwise tend to be unchanging. A disciple has done more if he has changed one of these temperamental characteristics, his basic inclination, and thus made the hour hand move a little faster than would otherwise have been the case. All the things that evolve so slowly—our lasting habits and basic temperament—are embodied in the ether or life body. Everything that changes relatively more quickly, like the minute hand on the clock, is embodied in the astral body.

If you now apply this to our human environment, to our life in the outside world, you will see that your habits, temperaments and lasting inclinations connect you with your era, your nation and your family. The lasting, unchanging qualities which people have will be found not only in them but in everyone with whom they are in some way connected—family, nation and so on. Individual members of a nation can be seen to have the same habits and temperaments. This basic set of habits and inclinations which need to be changed if we want to go through higher development make up our higher nature. Because of this such an individual is called a 'homeless' person, for he must change his ether body which normally connects him with his people.

If we consider the communities we live in, into which we are born, we find that the character qualities through which we belong to a family, a nation, and through which we feel we have a connection with the members of this nation, are also similar to the character qualities that live in our era. Just think how little you’d have in common with a member of the ancient Greek nation. His ether body would have been very different from the ether body of someone living today. People understand one another because of the common qualities in their ether bodies. The quality that makes people stand out from the common characteristics, making them unique within the family or the nation, so that they are individuals and not just a French or a German person, a quality that can also transcend the sum of gender characteristics, is anchored in the astral body; the astral body sustains it. The astral body thus holds more the individual, personal aspect.

If someone errs through his ether or life body, he is more liable to be a sinner among the people he lives or works with, failing to play his proper role in the social sphere that enables people to have a social life. Sins of a more individual nature, so that a person errs in a personal way, are due to the qualities of the astral body.

Sins against the community that come from a faulty ether body have always been called ‘faults’ in occult science. The way the term ‘fault’ is used for a physical defect is close to its use in a moral sense. The problem is due to a defect in the ether body. Defects in the astral body, on the other hand, are called ‘temptations’. Temptation causes people to commit individual sins. The I can also fall into its own kind of error, as shown in the story of paradise. When the human soul came down, out of the keeping of the godhead, and for the first time entered into an earthly body, it was taken up into that body the way a drop of water is absorbed into a sponge, and the higher soul then developed I-nature.

This higher soul, I-nature, can commit errors within the I. Man does not fall because of faults in his ether and astral bodies, but there is a basic way of falling into sin and this is due to the fact that man has gained his independence. Humanity had to go through selfishness and egoism so that they might gradually gain freedom and independence in full awareness. Man came down as a soul that was part of the godhead, and the godhead cannot fall into egoism. Nothing that is part of an organism would ever imagine itself to be independent of it. If a finger were to think so, for example, it would tear itself away from the body and shrivel up. Human beings could never have gained the independence which they need to develop if they had not first gone through selfishness; this independence will only gain its true meaning once selflessness has become its basic characteristic.

Selfishness entered into the human body and this made man a selfish, egoistical creature. We see, therefore, that the I follows all the drives and inclinations of the body. The human being devours his neighbour, he gives in to all kinds of drives and desires and is wholly caught up in the earthly vessel, just as a drop of water is absorbed by a small sponge.

The paradise story refers to the sins man was able to commit once he had become such an I-creature, a truly independent creature. Before that he drew on the common source, like a drop that is still in water and takes its energy from the common body of water; now he has all impulses within himself. This is indicated by biting into the apple in the paradise story, and not for nothing, for in occult science, all true meanings of words have a deep inner connection. So the Latin malum means both ‘evil’ and ‘apple’. In occult science, the word ‘evil’ is only used for errors arising out of the I.

Evil thus is to do wrong out of the I. A fault is the kind of error the ether body falls into in social life, in the life that human beings live together. Temptation is something that may affect the astral body in so far as it may be defective on the personal, individual level. And so the error which the ether or life body falls into is ‘fault’, that of the astral body is ‘temptation’, and the I is capable of ‘evil’.

When we consider the way the four lower bodies of man relate to the environment, to the surrounding planetary body, we see that the physical body is all the time taking up physical matter to feed and maintain itself. We see that the life of the life or ether body here on earth comes into existence in that the individual maintains community with the people of the community into which he has grown. We see that the astral body maintains itself by not falling into temptation. And finally we see that the I maintains itself and develops in the right way by not succumbing to what we call ‘evil’.

Now imagine you have before your mind’s eye the whole of this human nature with its lower four and higher three principles and are then able to say: ‘A drop of the divine lives in the individual human being, and man is developing towards the divine, to let his deepest, inmost nature come to fruition.’ Once he has done this, he will have gone through a gradual process to transform his own nature into what is called the ‘Father’ in Christian terminology. The great goal of humankind which lies hidden in the human soul is the ‘Father in heaven’. To develop in that direction, we must have the power to develop our higher three and lower four principles to the point where they maintain the physical body in the right way. The ether or life body must then live in such a way with other human beings that compensation is made for anything that lives in it by way of faults; the astral body must not perish in temptation and the I not in evil.

Through the three higher principles, man must seek to rise to the Father in heaven—through the name, the realm and the will. The name should be seen as something holy. Behold all things around you; they reflect the godhead in their manifoldness. Saying their name you must once again know them to be parts of the divine world order. Let everything there is around you be sacred; and see something in the name you give it that will make it part of the divine. Let it be sacred to you, grow into the realm that has come forth from the godhead, and progress to achieve the will that shall be atman, but at the same time also part of the godhead.

Now think of someone who enters deeply in meditation into this aim of evolution, and needs to express this aim in seven petitions in a prayer. How will he put it?

To say what the aim of the prayer is, he will say: ‘Our Father, who are in heaven,’ before he says the seven petitions. This refers to the deepest part of the human soul, the inmost nature of man which according to Christian esoterics belongs to the realm of the spirit. The first three petitions relate to the three higher principles in the human being: ‘Let your name be holy. Let your realm come to us. Let your will be done.’ We now move on from the realm of the spirit to the earthly realm: ‘Let your will be done in earth as it is in heaven.’

The last four petitions relate to the four lower principles in human nature.

What shall we say of the physical body, so that it may be maintained in life on the planet? ‘Give us today our daily bread.’

What shall we say of the ether or life body? ‘Forgive us our faults, just as we shall forgive those who commit faults against us.’

What shall we say with regard to the astral body? ‘Lead us not into temptation.’

And what shall we say with regard to the I? ‘Deliver us from evil.’ You see, therefore, that the seven petitions in the Lord’s Prayer speak of how the human soul, if it rises to this in the right way, asks the divine will to guide the development of the individual principles of the human being in such a way that he may develop all aspects of his essential nature in the right way. The Lord’s Prayer thus helps the human being to rise in moments of need to the true purpose of developing his sevenfold nature. And even for the most naive of individuals who is quite unable to understand them, the seven petitions reflect human nature as it is seen in the light of spiritual science.

Any meditation formulas that ever existed with the major religions have come from occult knowledge. You may take all real prayers and analyse them word by word—you’ll never find them to be words put together at random. It has not been a matter of following a vague impulse and putting together nice words; no, the great initiates took the prayer formulas from the wisdom of old, something we call the science of the spirit today. There is no true prayer formula that has not come to life out of profound wisdom. Christ Jesus, the great initiate and founder of Christianity, had the seven principles of essential human nature in mind when he taught this prayer, which reflects those seven principles.

All the prayers thus show a particular order. If they did not they would not have had the power which they have had for thousands of years. Prayers have to show this kind of order if they are to be a power also for simple people who may not even understand the meaning of the words.

This will be clearer if we compare what happens in the human soul with something that happens in the natural world. Consider a plant. It delights you and there is no need to know anything about the great universal laws that have made it grow. The plant is there and can lift up your hearts. It could not have been created if it had not been for those original and eternal laws. Naive minds need not understand those laws, but a plant can only come into existence on the basis of these laws. To be effective, a prayer cannot just be invented at will but must have arisen out of the eternal laws of wisdom just as a plant arises on the basis of the eternal laws of wisdom. A prayer can have no real significance for those who understand and those who do not understand unless it has come from that wisdom.

We now live in an age when people who have looked at the plant for so long, letting it lift up their hearts, can be guided towards discovering the wisdom-filled content of those laws. For two millennia, Christians have prayed the way naive people may look at a plant. In future they will perceive how the power of the prayer comes from that profound original wisdom that has given rise to it. All prayers, and especially the Lord’s Prayer as the central, focal prayer of Christian life, reflect that original wisdom. And just as light comes to expression in this world in seven colours, and the tonic in music in seven notes, so does human life, rising to its god in seven ways in the seven different feelings relating to the sevenfold nature of the human being, come to expression in the seven petitions of the Lord’s Prayer.

The Lord’s Prayer, as we contemplate it in our souls, thus reflects the sevenfold human being.

• 91. Matthew 26: 39.

No place or date given, memoranda by Elisabeth Vreede

In the Gospel of Matthew, we are told how the three Magi come from the East to offer their incense, gold and myrrh to the newborn child Jesus, the reborn Zarathustra. They pay homage to their re-embodied Master, who has worked in his various incarnations in the three previous cultural epochs. They are, as it were, the keepers of the ancient treasures of wisdom from the ancient Indian, ancient Persian and Egyptian-Babylonian epochs. And by laying these at the feet of the Christ Child in the symbolic form of incense, gold and myrrh, they point out, as it were, how that which has been effective as cultural seeds in these periods of time can only be saved for humanity if it is permeated by the power of Christ, which will one day inspire this child. They themselves will not live to experience the resurrection of the wisdom treasures of their cultural epochs. “They returned to their own country by another way”.

But we can ask ourselves: Where do these three wise men go later, what actually becomes of their wisdom? And we must remember that the cultures that arise and pass away here on earth contain a germ within them that can be fertilized by the Christ impulse and that will come to renewed bloom in the periods of time that follow the mystery of Golgotha. What the three Magi from the Orient sacrificed to the Christ Child as cultural seeds will be awakened by the Christ; it contains the forces that can truly permeate these three later cultural periods with the Christ impulse. The third post-Atlantean epoch will be resurrected by the Christ in all that it contains as wisdom, so that it can fertilize our fifth epoch. The second age, that of Zarathustra, is resurrected so that in the sixth post-Atlantean age there can be a true understanding of the Christ. And the first, the ancient Indian age, experiences its resurrection in the seventh post-Atlantean age with the help of the power of the Christ.

And in every case, the Christ must resurrect a particular personality, a human soul who, through her destiny, is called to be the special bearer of this cultural seed from ancient times, and who is at the same time the soul who can ensure that what the Christ has brought as gifts to humanity is also continued, that the understanding of the Christ and His mission can also be taught to humanity in the appropriate way in later times.

We will consider these resurrections in turn.

Firstly: In the Gospel of Luke (chapter 7), the resurrection of the young man of Nain is described in moving words. Every word of this story is significant, pointing out how the youth of Nain lived through the entire third post-Atlantean epoch, the Egyptian-Chaldean culture, as it developed under the influence of the forces that were then active in the human soul.

The youth at Nain in the Gospel of Luke is none other than the youth at Sais; the difference between the spiritual environment of the third and fourth cultural epochs is even hidden in the names.

He is reborn, he grows up as the youth of Nain, he is again a “son of the widow”, again he dies in his youth. And the Christ Jesus is approaching as the dead is carried out of the city gate. And “many of the city” were with his mother; it is the crowd of Egyptian initiates. They are all dead, and they are burying a dead man. “And when the Lord saw him, he had compassion on him.” He had compassion on the mother, who stands there as Isis, who was the sister and wife of Osiris. And he said, “Young man, I say to you, arise!” “And the dead man sat up and began to speak, and he gave him to his mother.” She has descended upon the earth, the former Isis; her powers can now be experienced on the earth itself. The son is given back to the mother; it is now up to him to fully reconnect with her. “And those standing by praised God and said, ‘A great prophet has risen among us’. For in the youth of Nain, the Christ Jesus had planted a seed through the kind of initiation that this resurrection represents, which could only come to fruition in his next incarnation.

A great prophet, a mighty teacher of religion, has become of the youth of Nain! In the third century A.D., Mani or Manes, the founder of Manichaeism, first appeared in Babylonia. A peculiar legend tells the following about him.

Scythianos and Therebinthus or Buddha were his predecessors. The latter was the disciple of the former. After Scythianos' violent death, he fled with his books to Babylonia. He also fares badly; only an old widow takes on his teachings. She inherits his books and leaves them to her foster son, who is twelve years old and whom she adopted as a seven-year-old slave boy. This man, who can also be called a “son of the widow,” appears at the age of 24 as Manes, the founder of Manichaeism.

His teaching contained a summary of all the wisdom of the ancient religions, illuminated by a Christian gnosis that made it possible for the followers of the Babylonian-Egyptian wisdom of the stars, the religion of the ancient Persians, and even the Buddhists of India to become imbued with an understanding of the Christ impulse in this form.

This soul, which had previously lived in the youth of Nain, had been initiated by the Christ in this way for later times, when that which was contained in Manichaeism and which had not fully developed, will be realized for the benefit of the peoples of the ancient Orient, this soul, in its incarnation as Manes, has worked in preparation for its actual later mission: to bring about the true harmony of all religions.

In order to do this, it had to be reborn as the soul that has a very special relationship to the Christ Impulse. Once again, everything that had emerged from this soul in that incarnation as Manes, in the form of old and new knowledge, had to be submerged, as it were. As a “pure fool” he had to face the external knowledge of the world and the working of the Christ Impulse in the depths of his soul. He is reborn as Parsifal, the son of Herzeleide, the tragic figure abandoned by her husband. As the son of this widow, he too now leaves his mother. He goes out into the world. After many wanderings, he is chosen to become the guardian of the Holy Grail. And the continuation of the Parzival saga tells us how he again goes to the East, how he finds his brothers in the members of the dark races, and how the blessings of the Holy Grail will one day come to them too. Thus, in his life as Parzival, he prepared himself to later become a new teacher of Christianity, whose task it will be to increasingly permeate Christianity with the teachings of karma and reincarnation when the time is ripe.

Secondly: the second post-Atlantean era is that of Zarathustra. It has a special relationship to the Christ because of this. For Zarathustra pointed to the sun god, Ahura Mazdao, who approached the earth and who was none other than the future Christ. And in his entire mission, Zarathustra was a forerunner for the Christ in that he taught to appreciate and work the earth, not to flee from evil forces but to overcome them and thereby redeem them. Thus the Ego of Zarathustra, the highest developed human Ego, could be chosen to dwell for eighteen years in the sheaths that were to receive the Christ. His Ego left the sheaths shortly before the baptism of St. John in the Jordan. Thus he was not embodied in the flesh when the Christ walked on earth. He himself incarnated soon after leaving the three shells of the Nathanic Jesus; his ego united with the etheric body of the Solomonic Jesus, which had been taken into the spiritual world by the mother of the Nathanic Jesus at the time of his death.

Thus, Christ Jesus could not resurrect Zarathustra as the appointed representative of the second post-Atlantean age. However, another individuality was embodied on earth at that time, as it were vicariously, whose development and most significant mission for humanity ran in a remarkable parallel to that of Zarathustra. This was Lazarus, the reborn Hiram Abiff, the most significant of Cain's sons, who had also worked on the earth mission of the human ego, as Zarathustra had done in ancient Persia. He becomes “ill”, “dies” and is laid in the tomb. The Christ Jesus learns of his illness and speaks to his disciples of the death of Lazarus. “Then Thomas, who was called the Twin, said to his fellow disciples, ‘Let us go with him so that we may die with him’ (John 11:16).”

In this resurrection, which is to take place with Lazarus, the souls that belong to the second post-Atlantean era are represented like the “people from the city” at the resurrection of the young man of Nain the third post-Atlantean era - represented by Thomas, the “twin”. For the second post-Atlantean period was the period of the twins. His otherwise completely meaningless words testify that the second post-Atlantean period is ready to be awakened by the Christ. That which lived as the cultural germ in the ancient Persian epoch did not die. It is not about the resurrection of a dead person, but about the initiation of a living being. That is the great difference between the story of this resurrection and the other two. Therefore, the Christ Jesus says: “I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in me, even though he die, yet shall he live.”

And the Christ Jesus comes to the tomb where Lazarus, who was believed to be dead, has been laid, and He speaks the sacramental words before all the people: “Lazarus, come forth!”—And the deceased came forth, bound hand and foot with graveclothes, and his face covered with a sweat cloth. And the Christ Jesus speaks the words that hint, as it were, that from this hour on this initiate will begin to work. “Dissolve him and let him go.”

He is not a youth like the youth at Nain, he is a man in full possession of his mental faculties. And the resurrected Lazarus becomes the scribe of the Gospel of John. He is the one who stands at the cross and to whom Christ Jesus speaks from the cross, pointing to the mother Sophia-Maria: “Behold, this is your mother!” Thus, once again, his peculiar representative relationship to the ego of Zarathustra is manifested, who, as the Solomonic Jesus child, was really born as the son of this mother.

With this power within him, he can work even before the sixth post-Atlantean age; already in the fifth cultural age, he prepares the sixth, the one that will show the deepest understanding of the Christ impulse, the one that will best understand the Gospel of John.

(Among the twelve apostles, Lazarus-John himself is, as it were, represented by another. John, the brother of James and son of Zebedee, is not an apostle in the strict sense. James and John are, as it were, one; among the more intimate disciples of Christ Jesus, they represent the power of the mind or emotional soul, which has a dual function in man but is nevertheless a unity. That is why they are called “sons of thunder,” for thunder is macrocosmically the same as thought in the human microcosm. But when Lazarus becomes John, he takes the place of one of the sons of Zebedee, and as such he is the one who lay at Jesus' breast at the Last Supper.

Thirdly, when Jesus the Christ walked the Earth, only the degenerate descendants of the third post-Atlantean cultural epoch remained. The second post-Atlantean epoch had almost completely disappeared as a cultural force, with only a few followers of the often-degenerate Zarathustra religion scattered here and there. But the first, the ancient Indian cultural epoch, the oldest and most spiritual, had its descendants both at the time of Christ Jesus and still in ours, even if the culture had become sick and frail from materialism. It is the age that will rise last of all, that must wait the longest.

And in a mysterious way, this resurrection is told to us in the story of the raising of Jairus' twelve-year-old daughter and the preceding healing of the woman who had had the blood-gland for twelve years.

The girl is close to death, but Christ Jesus is supposed to heal her. But the woman is also alive, whose illness began at the birth of this girl. The blood, the life, is flowing out of her. She is what has become of the once-thriving spiritual culture of ancient India, what could not be cured by the doctors, for no method of yoga, no Vedanta philosophy, in all its sublimity, could save Indian culture from destruction.

It is karmically connected with the girl who is twelve years old, that is, the development of the etheric body is almost complete. The ancient Indian cultural period was the time of the development of the etheric body. What was placed as a germ in this etheric body in ancient Indian culture is to be awakened and preserved for the last, seventh age.

But this awakening can only take place after the woman has been healed. She comes up to Christ from behind, from the crowd (Luke 8:44), touches the hem of his garment and is healed, for “your faith has made you well” (Mark 5:34). She is healed because she had faith in the spirit embodied in the flesh on earth. And when she is healed of the haemorrhage, through her voluntary act of touching the robe of Christ Jesus, that which was once a living force in her and which is now dying, indeed is already considered dead, can be resurrected: It is the daughter of Jairus, a “chief of the school”, because the first cultural period was that of the Brahmins, the priests. A large crowd is around the dead girl, “weeping and wailing”; they are again the relatives of the first post-Atlantic age, mourning what is gone. Matthew mentions the pipers (9:23) playing at the dead girl; Krishna also played the flute and the people followed this sound.

But Christ Jesus expels everyone. A great mystery will be accomplished, for the resurrection of the first age, with its development of the etheric body, has to do with deep secrets of human nature. He takes only Peter, John, James, the father and mother of the child. Thus, together with Christ Jesus and the child itself, there were seven persons: the three soul powers, the three spirit powers and the Christ as the cosmic ego. Thus, the age of the ancient holy Rishis was reflected in these seven persons. Just as the Rishis could only work when they were together in sevens, so the girl could only be raised when the number seven of forces was present. And she is healed and Christ Jesus says they should give her food. For before, the ancient Indian culture did not need to eat, she received her knowledge directly from the spiritual world through the wonderful development of the etheric body. But this nourishment has run out for her. From now on she is to eat from what her surroundings can give her. “And the Christ Jesus strictly forbade them that no one should know.” A commandment that obviously cannot be understood in a physical, real sense. But the secrets that took place with this awakening were to remain unknown and hidden for a long time.

Besides these three resurrections of the three cultural periods preceding the age of Christ Jesus, there are some more remarkable stories in the Gospels that can be linked to the integration of the Christ impulse into the development of humanity.

Fourthly: In the Gospel of John (ch. 4, 47-54) it is told of the son of the royal centurion, that is, of the Roman, who was fatally ill. In him, the fourth post-Atlantic age, the Greco-Roman age, is wasting away. And the Christ heals him at the request of the father, because the father has believed even without “signs and wonders”. The son is not raised, he did not die, because the fourth age was still alive at the time of Christ Jesus, it is only sick and can only be healed through faith. For only in the form of faith could the Greco-Roman era absorb the power of Christ.

Five: Immediately after this story in the Gospel of John, there follows the account of the healing of the sick man at Bethesda, the pool with five porches. These indicate the fifth post-Atlantic period, with all the forces of the preceding cultural periods that live in it. The people who are lying ill there do not have the right relationship to the spiritual world; they have become too deeply enslaved to matter. From time to time an angel descends who touches the water: a new revelation from the spiritual worlds heals those who are closest to it, but it no longer helps those who come later. And so there was a person who had waited for 38 years without getting to the water in time. 38 = 2 x 19, and nineteen years is the time after which the sun, moon and earth are again in the same relationship to each other, or in other words, the time in which the thinking, feeling and willing of man have passed through all possible shades in their relationship to each other. Thus nineteen years stands for one incarnation, and thirty-eight years indicates the two incarnations which on the average man has experienced since the appearance of Christ Jesus and which brings us up to our time, when a new Christ-revelation from the spiritual world will take place. The Christ does not heal this sick man by letting him into the water when the angel descends, but He speaks to him the words: “Rise, take up thy bed and walk!” That is, He strengthens in the man that power which can overcome sickness. But the man did not know who had healed him, “for the Christ Jesus had fled because there were so many people in the place.” (John 5:13). The Christ had indeed worked in him, but the man did not know about it in his conscious mind. That is how it has been all the time since the Mystery of Golgotha until our days. But after that, “Jesus found him in the temple and the man went and proclaimed that it was Jesus who had made him whole.”

Now he knew that the word is true, which the Christ Jesus spoke to the Jews: “My Father is still working and I am also working.” And again, the Christ says, “The hour is coming, and now is, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God; and those who hear will live.” This hour is now upon us, the hour when the Christ will assume the office of judge over the dead and become Lord of Karma. Thus this account of the healing of the sick man at Bethesda points to our time in many ways.

Sixth: A parable is mysteriously woven into the Gospel of Luke, which points to the spiritual conditions of the sixth post-Atlantic period. We have seen that this period, which signifies the resurrection of the second post-Atlantean period, is prepared by Christ Jesus raising Lazarus. And in the Gospel of Luke, immediately after speaking of good and evil, of “serving God and serving mammon,” Christ Jesus tells a parable (ch. 16). He says: There was a rich man and also a poor man named Lazarus. The latter is doing badly on earth, but after his death he enters Abraham's bosom, while the rich man, who lived in abundance, goes to hell.

Thus, in the sixth cultural period, good is separated from evil and that which indicates the true circumstances takes place in the spiritual world. The name of the poor man from the parable points to the connection with Lazarus in the Gospel of John. And the fact that we are dealing with the sixth post-Atlantic cultural period is expressed in the parable of the rich man when he says, “I still have five brothers,” who are then all unconverted. They are the part of humanity that has not yet received the Christ within them in the sixth period and must therefore fall prey to evil.

Seven: The seventh cultural period is no longer mentioned in particular, since this is already indicated in the relationship that exists between the woman with the issue of blood and the twelve-year-old girl. The woman has already been healed when the girl is raised; one cannot happen without the other.

In this and similar ways the Gospel writers have woven the historical course of human development into their writings. ¹⁴

• 14. See also the lecture Munich, August 31, 1909; and on Manes and his teachings, the lectures Berlin, November 11, 1904 and April 19, 1917.

We have been asked to say something about Freemasonry. This cannot be understood, however, until we have examined the original spiritual currents related to Freemasonry, which can be seen as its sources. An even more important spiritual current than Rosicrucianism was Manicheism. So first we need to speak about this much more important movement and then, at a later time, we can shed a light on Freemasonry.

What I have to say on this subject is connected with various things which influence the spiritual life of today and will influence it in time to come. And to illustrate how one who is actively engaged in this field constantly comes across something—if only obliquely—I would point out, by way of introduction, that on many occasions I have described the problem of Faust¹ as of particular importance for modern spiritual life. And that is why the modern spiritual movement is brought into connection with the problem of Faust in the first number of Luzifer.² The allusion I made to the problem of Faust in my essay in Luzifer is not without a certain reason.

In order to bring the things with which we are concerned into connection with one another, we must start from a spiritual tendency which first manifested in about the third century A.D. It is that spiritual movement whose great opponent was St. Augustine,³ although before he went over to the side of the Catholic Church he was himself an adherent of this faith. We have to speak about Manicheism, which was founded by a person who called himself Mani⁴ and lived about the time of the third century A.D. This movement spread from a part of the world which was then ruled by the kings of the Near East; that is to say, from a region of Western Asia Minor. This Mani was the founder of a spiritual movement which although at first only a small sect, became a mighty spiritual current. The Albigenses, Waldenses and Cathars⁵ of the Middle Ages are the continuation of this current, to which also belong the Knights Templar, of whom we shall speak separately,⁶ and also—by a remarkable chain of circumstances—the Freemasons. Freemasonry really belongs to this stream, though it is connected with others, for instance with Rosicrucianism.⁷

What outer history has to say about Mani is very simple.⁸

It is said that there once lived a merchant in the Near East who was very learned. He compiled four important works: first, Mysteria, secondly, Capitola, thirdly, Evangelium, and lastly Thesaurus. It is further related that at his death he left these writings to his widow who was a Persian. This widow, on her part, left them to a slave whose freedom she had bought and whom she had liberated. That was the said Mani, who then drew his wisdom out of these writings, though he was also initiated into the Mithraic mysteries.⁹ Mani is called the ‘Son of the Widow’, and his followers are called the ‘Sons of the Widow.’ However, Mani described himself as the ‘Paraclete’.¹⁰ the Holy Spirit promised to mankind by Christ. We should understand by this that he saw himself as one incarnation of the Holy Spirit; he did not mean that he was the only one. He explained that the Holy Spirit reincarnated, and that he was one such reincarnation.

The teaching which he proclaimed was opposed in the most vigorous fashion by Augustine after he had gone over to the Catholic Church. Augustine opposed his Catholic views to the Manichean teaching which he saw represented in a personality whom he called Faustus.¹¹ Faustus is, in Augustine's conception, the opponent of Christianity. Here lies the origin of Goethe's Faust, and of his conception of evil. The name ‘Faust’ goes back to this old Augustinian teaching.

One usually hears it said about Manichean teaching that it is distinguished from western Christianity by its different interpretation of evil. Whereas Catholic Christianity regards evil as an aberration from its divine origin, the defection of originally good spirits from God, Manicheism teaches that evil is just as eternal as good; that there is no resurrection of the body, and that evil, as such, will continue for ever. Evil, therefore, has no beginning, but springs from the same source as good and has no end.

If you come to know Manicheism in this form it will seem radically unchristian and quite incomprehensible.

Now we should like to study the matter thoroughly according to the traditions which are supposed to have originated from Mani himself, and so see what it is all about. An external clue is given us in the Manichean legend; just such a legend as the Temple Legend, which I recounted to you recently. All such spiritual currents connected with initiation are expressed exoterically in legends, but the legend of Manicheism is a great cosmic legend,¹² a super-sensible legend.

It tells us that at one time the spirits of darkness wanted to take the kingdom of light by storm. They actually reached the borders of the kingdom of light and hoped to conquer it. But they failed to achieve anything. Now they were to be punished—and that is a very significant feature which I beg you to take account of—they were to be punished by the kingdom of light. But in this realm there was nothing which was in any way evil, there was only good. Thus the demons of darkness could only have been punished with something good. So what happened? The following: The spirits of light took a part of their own kingdom and mixed it with the materialised kingdom of darkness. Because there was now a part of the kingdom of light mingled with the kingdom of darkness, a leaven had been introduced into the kingdom of darkness, a ferment which produced a chaotic whirling dance, whereby it received a new element into itself; i.e. death. Therefore, it continually consumes itself and thus carries within itself the germ of its own destruction. It is further related that just because of this, the race of mankind was brought into existence. Primeval man represents just what was sent down from the kingdom of light to mix with the kingdom of darkness and to conquer, through death, what should not have been there; to conquer it within his own being.

The profound thought which lies in this is that the kingdom of darkness has to be overcome by the kingdom of light, not by means of punishment, but through mildness; not by resisting evil, but by uniting with it in order to redeem evil as such. Because a part of the light enters into evil, the evil itself is overcome.

Underlying that is the interpretation of evil which I have often explained as that of theosophy. What is evil? Nothing but an ill-timed good. To cite an example which has often been quoted by me, let us assume that we have to do with a virtuoso pianist and an excellent piano technician, both perfect in their sphere. First of all the technician has to build the piano and then hand it over to the pianist. If the latter is a good player he will use it appropriately and both are equally good. But should the technician go into the concert hall instead of the pianist and start hammering away he would then be in the wrong place. Something good would have become something bad. So we see that evil is nothing else than a misplaced good.

When what is especially good at one time or another strives to be preserved, to become rigid and thus curb the progress of further development, then, without doubt, it becomes evil, because it opposes the good. Let us suppose that the leading powers of the lunar epoch, though perfect in their way and in their activity, were to continue to intermingle with evolution though they ought to have ceased their activity, then they would represent something evil in earth evolution. Thus evil is nothing else than the divine, for, at that other time, what is evil when it comes at the wrong season, was then an expression of what is perfect, what is divine.

We must interpret the Manichean views in this profound sense, that good and evil are fundamentally the same in their origin and in their ending. If you interpret it in this way you will understand what Mani really intended to bring about. But, on the other hand, we still have to explain why it was that Mani called himself the ‘Son of the Widow’¹³ and why his followers were called the ‘Sons of the Widow’.

When we turn back to the most ancient times, before our present Root Race, the mode in which mankind acquired knowledge was different. You will perceive from my description of Atlantis—and also, when the next issue of Luzifer appears, you will see from my description of Lemuria¹⁴—that at that time, and to a certain extent up to the present day, all knowledge was influenced by what is above mankind. I have often mentioned that that Manu¹⁵ who will appear during the next Root Race will for the first time be a real brother to his fellow men, whereas all earlier Manus were superhuman, divine beings of a kind. Only now is man becoming ripe enough to have one of his brother men as his Manu, who has passed through all stages with him since the middle of Lemuria. What is really taking place then, during the evolution of the fifth Root Race? This, that the revelation from above, the guidance of the soul from above, is gradually being withdrawn, so that man is left to go his own way and become his own leader.

The soul was always known as the ‘mother’ in all esoteric (mystical) teachings; the instructor was the ‘father’. Father and mother, Osiris and Isis, those are the two forces present in the soul: the instructor, representing the divine which flows directly into man, Osiris, he that is the father; the soul itself, Isis, the one who conceives, receives the divine, the spiritual into itself, she is the mother. During the fifth Root Race, the father withdraws. The soul is widowed. Humanity is thrown back onto itself. It must find the light of truth within its own soul in order to act as its own guide. Everything of a soul nature has always been expressed in terms of the feminine. Therefore the feminine element—which exists only in a germinal state today and will later be fully developed—this self-directing feminine principle which is no longer confronted by the divine fructifier, is called by Mani the ‘Widow’. And therefore he calls himself ‘Son of the Widow’.

Mani is the one who prepares that stage in man's soul development when he will seek for his own soul-spirit light. Everything which comes from Mani is an appeal to man's own spirit light of soul, and at the same time is a definite rebellion against anything which does not come out of man's own soul,out of man's own observation of his soul. Beautiful words have been handed down from Mani¹⁶ and have been the leading theme of his followers at all later times. We hear the words: You must lay aside everything which you have acquired as outer revelation by means of the senses. You must lay aside all things which come to you via outer authority; then you must become ripe to gaze into your own soul.

St. Augustine, on the other hand—in a conversation which made him into an opponent of the Manichean Faust—voiced the opinion: ‘I would not accept the teachings of Christ if they were not founded on the authority of the Church’.¹⁷ The Manichean Faust said,¹⁸ however: ‘You should not accept any teaching on authority; we only wish to accept a doctrine in freedom.’ That illustrates the rebellious self-sufficiency of the spirit light which comes to expression so beautifully in the Faust saga.¹⁹

We meet this confrontation also in later sagas in the Middle Ages: on the one hand the Faust saga, on the other, the Luther saga.²⁰ Luther carries on the principle of authority.²¹ Faust, on the other hand, rebels, he puts his faith in the inner spirit light. We have the saga of Luther; he throws the inkwell at the devil's head. What appears to him to be evil he thrusts aside. And on the other hand we have Faust's pact with the devil. A spark from the kingdom of light is sent into the kingdom of darkness, so that when the darkness is penetrated, it redeems itself, evil is overcome by gentleness. If you think of it in this fashion you will see that this Manicheism fits in very well with the interpretation which we have given of evil.

How do we imagine the interworking of good and evil? We have to explain it as the harmonisation of life with form.²² How does life change over into form? Through coming up against resistance, through not manifesting all at once in one particular shape. Take note, for instance, how life in a plant—let us say a lily—speeds on from form to form. The life in the lily has fashioned, has elaborated, the form of the lily.

When this form has been created, life overcomes it and passes over into the seed to be reborn as the same life in a fresh form. And so life strides onward from form to form. Life itself is formless and could never perceptibly manifest its vital forces. The life of the lily, for instance, exists in the first lily and progresses to the second, third, fourth and so on. Everywhere there is the same life which appears in a limited form, spreading and interweaving. The fact that it appears in a limited form is a restriction imposed upon this universal flowing life. There would be no form if life were not restricted, if it were not arrested in its flowing force which radiates in all directions. It is just what remains behind, which, from a higher stage, appears like a fetter; it is just out of this that form evolves in the great cosmos.

What comprises life is always set in the framework of a form which was life in an earlier time. Example: the Catholic Church. The life which existed in the Catholic Church from St. Augustine until the fifteenth century was the Christian life. The life therein is Christianity. Ever and again this pulsating life emerges anew (the mystics). Where does the form come from? It is no less than the life of the old Roman Empire. What was still alive in the old Roman Empire has frozen into form. What was at first a Republic, then an Empire, what lived in outward appearance as the Roman State, surrendered its life, frozen into form, to the later Christianity; even its capital city, Rome, was previously the capital city of the Roman Empire, and the Roman provincial officers have their continuation in the presbyters and bishops. What was previously life later becomes form for a higher stage of life.

Is it not the same with human beings? What is human life? The fructification from above (Manas fructification), implanted into man in mid-Lemurian times, has today become his inner life. The form is what is carried over, as seed, from the lunar epoch. At that time, in the lunar period, the life of man consisted of the development of the astral body; now this has become the sheath, the form. Always the life of a former epoch becomes the form of a later epoch. In the harmonisation of form and life that other problem is expressed too: the problem of good and evil, through the fact that the good of a former epoch is joined to the good of a later epoch, which is fundamentally nothing but a harmonisation of progress with the things which hinder progress. That is what, at the same time, makes material existence possible, makes it possible for things to appear in outward form. It is our human existence on the solid mineral plane: soul life and what remains of the life of an earlier epoch hardened into a restrictive form. That, too, is the teaching of Manicheism regarding evil.

If we now pose the question from this point of view: What are Mani's intentions, what is the meaning of his statement that he is the Paraclete, the Spirit, the Son of the Widow? It means no less than that he intends to prepare for the time in which the men of the sixth Root Race will be guided out of their own being, by their own soul's light, to overcome outward forms and convert them to spirit.

Mani's intention is to create a spiritual current which goes beyond the Rosicrucian current,²³ which leads further than Rosicrucianism. This current of Mani's will flow over to the sixth Root Race and has been in preparation since the founding of Christianity. It is just at the time of the sixth Root Race that Christianity will be expressed in its most complete form. Its time will truly have come. The inner Christian life, as such, overcomes every form, it is propagated by external Christianity and lives in all forms of the various confessions. Whoever seeks Christian life will always find it. It creates forms and destroys forms in various religious systems. It does not depend upon a search for conformity in the outward forms in which it is expressed, but it depends upon experiencing the inner life stream which is always current under the surface. What is still waiting to be made is a form for the life of the sixth Root Race. That must be created beforehand, it has to be there so that Christian life can be poured into it. This form has to be prepared by human beings who create an Organisation, a form, so that the true Christian life of the sixth Root Race can find its place therein. And this external form of society must derive from the intention which Mani has fostered, from the small group whom Mani has prepared. That must be the outer form of Organisation, the congregation in which the spark of Christianity will first be truly kindled.

From this you will be able to conclude that Manicheism will endeavour, first and foremost, to preserve purity in outer life; for its aim is to produce human beings who will provide an adequate vessel in the future. That is why such great stress was laid on absolute purity of mind and of life. The Cathars were a sect which rose like a meteor in the twelfth century. They called themselves Cathars because ‘cathar’ means ‘pure one’. They strove for purity in their way of life and in their moral attitude. They had to seek catharsis (purification) both inwardly and outwardly in order to form a community which would provide a pure vessel. That is what Manicheism was striving for. It was less a question in Manicheism of the cultivation of the inner life—for life will flow onwards through other channels—but rather the cultivation of the external form of life.

Now let us look at what is to come about during the sixth Root Race. Good and evil will then contrast very differently from the way that they do today. What will be evident to all mankind in the fifth Round²⁴—that the outer physiognomy which each one acquires will directly mirror what Karma has made out of him—that will express itself spiritually in the sixth Root Race like a prelude to this event. Among those on whom Karma has bestowed an excess of evil, it will become particularly evident on a spiritual level. On the one hand there will be human beings possessing mighty inner forces of good, who will be gifted with great love and goodness; but, on the other hand, the opposite will also be seen. Evil will be present as a disposition without any disguise in a great many people, no longer cloaked or hidden from view. The evil ones will extol evil as something of particular worth. A glimmering of this delight in evil and the demonic pertaining to the sixth Root Race is already in evidence in certain men of genius. Nietzsche's ‘blonde beast’,²⁵ for example, is a portent of this.

The unalloyed evil must be cast out of the stream of world evolution like dross. It will be relegated to the eighth sphere.²⁶ Today we stand immediately at the threshold of a time when good must consciously come to terms with evil.

The sixth Root Race will have the task of drawing evil back into the continuing stream of evolution through kindness. Then a spiritual current will have been born which does not oppose evil, even though it manifests in the world in its demonic form. The consciousness will have been established in the successors to the ‘Sons of the Widow’ that evil must be included again in evolution and be overcome, not by strife, but only through charitableness. It is the task of the Manichean spiritual stream forcefully to prepare for this. This spiritual stream will not die out, it will make its appearance in many forms. It appears in forms which many can call to mind but which need not be mentioned today. If it were to function merely in the cultivation of an inner mood of soul, this current would not achieve what it should do. It must express itself in the founding of communities which, above all, will look upon peace, love and passive resistance to evil as their standard of behaviour and will seek to spread this view. For they must create a receptacle, a form, for the life which will continue to exist even without their presence.

Now you can understand how it is that Augustine, the leading spirit of the Catholic Church, who developed the form of the Church very precisely in his City of God, who worked out the form for contemporary life, was of necessity the most violent opponent of that kind of form which is preparing for the future. Two polar opposites confront one another, Faust and Augustine: Augustine, who based his work on the Church, on the form belonging to his day, and Faust, who strives to prepare in man a sense for the form of the future.

That is the contrast which developed in the third and fourth centuries A.D. It is still present and finds expression in the struggle of the Catholic Church against the Knights Templars, the Rosicrucians, Albigenses, Cathars and so on. All of them are eliminated from the physical plane, but their inner spirit continues to be active. This contrast manifests again later in modified but still violent form in two currents born out of Western culture, that of Jesuitism (pertaining to Augustine) and that of Freemasonry²⁷ (Manicheism). Those who lead the battle on the one side are all conscious of what they are doing—they are the Catholics and Jesuits of the higher degrees. Of those, however, who are on the other side, who lead the battle in the spirit of Mani, only very few are conscious; only those at the head of the movement are conscious of it.

Thus Jesuitism (belonging to Augustine) and Freemasonry (Manicheism) confront one another in later centuries. They are the offspring of ancient spiritual currents. That is why you have in both these currents a continuation of the same ceremonies connected with initiation that you find in the old currents. The initiation into Jesuitism has the four degrees: Coadjutores temporales, Scholares, Coadjutores spirituales, Professi. The degrees of initiation in the true occult Freemasonry are similar. The two run parallel to one another but they point in quite different directions.²⁸

• 1 . See: Goethe's Standard of the Soul, Anthroposophical Publishing Co., 1925; Goethe's Secret Revelation and the Riddle of Faust, Rudolf Steiner Publishing Co., 1933; The Problem of Faust, (R. 55)—especially lecture of 3rd November 1917.
• 2 . The first number of Rudolf Steiner's Luzifer, a periodical concerned with soul life, spiritual development and theosophy, with its opening article on Luzifer, appeared in June 1903.
• 3 . The famous Church Father (354–430 A.D.) was, according to his own confession, a disciple of Manicheism for nearly nine years until his ‘conversion.’ See lecture of 26.12.1914, in Festivals of the Seasons.
• 4 . Originally Mani is said to have been called ‘Corbicius.’ ‘Mani’ was the name which he gave himself and, according to Schmitt (see note concerning the text), this has the significance: ‘an Aeon of the Mandeans: Mana raba, which is as much as to say: the promised Comforter, the Paraclete.’ The date of Mani's life is usually considered to be 215/16–276/7 A.D.
• 5 . According to Charles William Heckethorn (see note to lecture 3 of 30th September 1904): ‘The sect of the Albigenses, the offspring of Manicheism, fructified in its turn the germs of the Templars and Rosicrucians, and of all those associations that continued the struggle and fought against ecclesiastical and civil oppression.’ The relationship between Manicheism and Freemasonry is expressed thus by Heckethorn: ‘Masons in this degree call themselves the “children of the widow”, the sun on descending into his tomb leaving nature—of which Masons consider themselves the pupils—a widow; but the appellation may also have its origin in the Manichean sect, whose followers were known as the “sons of the widow”.’
  
  According to Joseph Schauberg in his book (Vergleichendes Handbuch der Symbolik der Freimaurerei mit besonderer Rucksicht auf die Mythologien und Mysterien des Altertums) on the symbolism of Freemasonry, a copy of which was in Rudolf Steiner's library: ‘... nearly all Freemasonry symbols show that the Masons of old believed in and dedicated their service to a worship of the light after the manner of the Oriental sects of the Parsecs, Sabaeans, perhaps also of the Manicheans.’
• 6 . There is no evidence to show when this could have taken place in this context. See also sixth lecture (25th September 1916) in Inner Impulses working in the Evolution of Mankind, (R. 45), and lecture of 2nd October 1916 (Z 425).
• 7 . The origin of Freemasonry and its connection with Rosicrucianism is a much debated and unsolved theme, even in the literature of Freemasonry itself, whereas it has hardly even been touched on in serious historical studies. A first attempt in this direction, if exclusively from a rational and a spiritual point of view, is the work of Frances A. Yates: The Rosicrucian Enlightenment.
• 8 . At this point the contents of Rudolf Steiner's lecture seem to have been very inadequately reported. He based what he had to say on a legend which he later repeated in a lecture for members (according to notes lacking date or indication of locality). In the aforementioned notes the literal transcript is as follows: ‘Mani, or Manes, the founder of Manicheism appeared in the third century A.D. in Babylon. An unusual legend has the following to say about him: Skythianos and Terebinthus, or Buddha, were his predecessors. The latter was the pupil of the former. After the violent death of Skythianos, Terebinthus fled with the books to Babylon. He also suffered misfortune; the only one to accept his teachings was an elderly widow. She inherited his books and left them, at her death, to her foster child, a twelve year old boy whom she had adopted out of slavery when he was seven years old. The latter, who might also be called a “Son of the Widow”, came to public notice at the age of 24 as Manes, the founder of Manicheism.’
  
  This legend is dealt with at length and with full references as to source in the work of D. Schwolsohn: Die Ssabier und der Ssabismus, Petersburg and Leipzig, 1856. (The detailed source references are not quoted in what follows):
  
  ‘Now that it has been established that Manicheism has been derived from Mandaism, we shall attempt to throw light on the account given of Mani by another of the Church Fathers. According to Epiphanius, Cyrillus Hierosolymitanus, Socrates and the author of the Acta Disputationis S. Archelai (Acta Archelai) with whom Theodoretus Suidas and Cedrenus in part agree, Mani was not the real founder of Manicheism but had as his predecessor a certain Scythianus and the latter's pupil, Terebinthus, who afterwards called himself Buddha. It goes on to say that anyone who wished to make a denial of the heresy of Manicheism, must at the same time abjure Zarades (Zoroaster), Buddha and Scythianus. According to the Acta Archelai, the last-named was a Scyth from Scythia—which accounts for his name, which was not really Scythianus—and he appeared at the time of the Apostles, when he started to spread his doctrine of the two principles. He is said to have been a Saracen by birth and married a woman from upper Thebes, for whose sake he settled in Egypt, where he became acquainted with the wisdom of the Egyptians. Epiphanius, Socrates and Cyrillus, Hierosolymitanus give similar accounts, only the first of these says that he was a Saracen by birth, was educated in Arabia and journeyed to India and Egypt, and the last mentioned says emphatically that his teachings had nothing in common with either Judaism or Christianity. He, or his pupil Terebinthus, was the author of four books, which the latter, after his emigration to Babylon, left to a widow when he died. Mani, the slave of this widow, inherited these writings from her and proclaimed their doctrines as his own. Theodoretus, Suidas and Cedrenus have the same to say of Terebinthus and Mani, only they identify the latter with Scythianus; Theodoritus even goes so far as to say that the reason why Mani was called Scythianus was that he was a slave, and Suidas and Cedrenus say that by birth he was a Brahmin. Bauer maintains that these two predecessors of Mani, Scythianus and Terebinthus-Buddha could not possibly be held to be historical personages: “Alone the obvious anachronism that Scythianus is reckoned as belonging to the time of the Apostles, and then to make his successor, Mani, appear soon after, is enough to make us suspicious of the historical truth of the whole story”. This, however, is quite a wrong supposition. The time of the Apostles lasted until Trajan, who died in 117, for, according to Eusebius, John the Evangelist only died during Trajan's reign. When it is said that Scythianus appeared during the time of the Apostles, it is only the last years of the said Apostle which are meant. As proof of this a point made by Suidas will serve, to the effect that the Emperor Nerva (who reigned from 97 A.D. for 1 year and 4 months) recalled the Evangelist, John, from Patmos, where he had been in exile, to Ephesus; at that time, adds Suidas, the dogma of the Manicheans became known through the public proclamation of Mani's heresy. The latter statement, however, is almost certainly founded on mistaken identity: for, in another place, Suidas himself says that Manes lived at the time of the Emperor Aurelian (reigned from 271–275). Without doubt, Suidas gleaned from his source that Scythianus proclaimed his dualistic doctrine at the time of Nerva and as he, as mentioned above, confused Manes with Scythianus, he substituted the former for the latter. According to that Scythianus started proclaiming his doctrine at the time of Nerva, that is to say, in 97 A.D. His pupil, Terebinthus-Buddha, may therefore have lived until 170 or 180 A.D., or even longer. Mani appears to have been born about 190 A.D. En-Nadim informs us (on the authority of Mohammed ben Is'haq Sahrmani, who is otherwise unknown) that Mani came before Schabur Ardsir (Sapores I) in the second year of the reign of the Roman Emperor Gallus (Trebonianus), who commenced his rulership November 251 A.D. As en-Nadim further adds, this took place on April lst, according to the Manicheans; that is to say, on April lst 253 A.D. But as Mani, according to en-Nadim, had been wandering the land and gathering pupil@ for forty years before he came before Schabur and was already twenty-four years old before he started to preach his doctrines, it follows from this that he must have been born around the year 190 A.D. According to the reports of the above mentioned Church Fathers, Mani did not come into direct personal contact with Terebinthus, but arrived as a seven year old boy at the house of the widow, in whose possession were the writings of the already deceased Terebinthus. The chronology therefore fits in very well and Scythianus and Terebinthus-Buddha can very well both be historical personages; only Bauer makes the conjecture, for reasons which have much in their favour, that Scythianus and Terebinthus-Buddha are identical, which could be so, as Mani, as stated above, never came into personal contact with either of them. But the questions remain: who was Scythianus and whence did he obtain his dualistic teaching? The Acta Archelai states specifically that he was a Scyth from Scythia and yet he is generally called a Saracen. We explain this contradiction in the following way: he was born in a northeastern province of Parthia, which in later times went under the general name of Scythia. Afterwards he wandered to the Near East, namely southern Mesopotamia and north-eastern Arabia (whence the name “Saracen”) and, at the time of Nerva, he was proclaiming his dualistic teaching and became the precursor of Mani. Bauer expressed himself likewise. El'hasai'h, or Elchasai', or Elkasai' (founder of the sect of the Ssabiers or Sabians, mentioned in the Koran—otherwise Mandaeans) also came from northeastern Parthia and proclaimed his dualistic doctrine in the same region and at the same time as Scythianus and was also, in certain respects, a precursor of Mani, as has been shown above. Does it not appear to be a reasonable conjecture to suppose that Scythianus, who was named after his birth place, is identical to the El'hasai'h of en-Nadim, the Elchasai' of the Pseudo-Origines and the Elkasai' of Epiphanius and Theodoretus?
  
  After what has been said there can be no further doubt about the influence of Parsism on Mendaeism, a fact which was already suspected by Lorsbach. Bauer would see indications of the spread of Buddhism—with its consequent influence on Manicheism—in the accounts of Scythianus and Terebinthus-Buddha, whom he identifies, but to whom he attaches no historical reality. This he would see substantiated in many ways, one of which is the abjuration formula of the Manicheans who, on conversion to the Church, were required to denounce Buddha among others. An influence of Buddhism in the Near East at such an early date is certainly a possibility; for enNedim states specifically that Buddhism had penetrated into Transoxiana even before Mani's time. Weber also finds it “highly probable that Buddhist missionaries, urged on by their fresh religious zeal, had spread over the further parts of western Iran” at the time of which he was speaking (the time of the Greek rulership of India). Weber adds, however, that data on the subject are wanting. In another place he remarks: “the important influence which Buddhism had on the teaching of Mani is easily explained by the flowering of the same under the Yueitchi-Princes of Indo-Scythia, whose rulership spread temporarily over a large part of the eastern provinces of Iran”. We are also of the opinion that the account which Mas'udi gives of the journeys of Budasp (Buddha) to Seg'estan, Zabulistan and Kerman point to an early spread of Buddhism in Persia. If, then, according to this, Scythianus, who in our opinion is a well-authenticated historical personality, was the disseminator of Buddhist doctrines, so, according to the above arguments, we would have to look for Buddhist elements and Buddhist influences among the Mendaeans. Perhaps the many assertions of Mohammedan writers to the effect that Budasp (Buddha) was the founder of the cult of the Ssabiers arose out of an actual historical influence of Buddhism on the Mendaeans, who were originally called Ssabiers by the Mohammedans. The genetic origin of both Buddhism and Mendaeism is still insufficiently known for us to be able to form conclusive views about the influence of the former on the latter. We will therefore content ourselves with gentle hints and indications to future investigators, which may perhaps help towards clearing up the problem.’
  
  Even though the latest research no longer pays heed to this legend, because it ascribes a different origin to Mani, it is not thereby invalidated as a description of Mani's ‘spiritual’ origin. Compare note 13: ‘why it was that Mani called himself the “Son of the Widow”’—and Rudolf Steiner's ninth lecture of the cycle given in Munich in 1909: The East in the Light of the West, Rudolf Steiner Publishing Co., and Anthroposophic Press
• 9 . According to Franz Cument: The Mithras Mysteries, Manicheism was the inheritor of the Mithras Mysteries and the continuator of their mission.
• 10. Compare once more with lecture 9 of The East in the Light of the West, quoted above.
• 11. In his writing: Contra Faustum. Regarding Faustus, compare Bruckner: Faustus von Mileve, Basle, 1901, where Faustus is described as an important representative of Manicheism in Roman cultural circles.
• 12. The legend is given as follows by Eugen Heinrich Schmitt (see notes referring to text above referring to Schmitt).
  
  ‘“While the Powers of Darkness were chasing and devouring one another in a wild rage they arrived one day at the borders of their territory. Here they glimpsed a few beams of the Kingdom of Light and were so struck by the 'splendid sight that they decided to relinquish their quarrels among themselves and took counsel together as to how they could gain mastery over the Good which they had just seen for the first time and of which they formerly had no notion. Their desire thereafter was so great that all of them, as many as there were, armed themselves for battle.” This is the description of events given by Titus of Bostra. In a similar way Alexander of Lycopolis presents it to us: “In the Hyle (Matter) desire arose to climb to the upper regions; there was espied the Divine Ray of Light which engendered so much amazement that a decision was immediately formed to get the same into its power.” Of the measures taken by the threatened Kingdom of Light we are informed by the Acts of Archelaus (Acta disputationis cum Maneta, Chap. 7): “As the Father of Light became aware that the Darkness was about to attack his holy Domain, he allowed a force to emanate from him which is called the Mother of Life, this, in its turn, produced from itself Archetypal Man who, arrayed with the five pure Elements; Light, Fire, Wind, Water, Earth, descended to the earth like an armed warrior to do battle against Darkness.” Manes himself gives the name of the Universal or World-Soul to this force which emanates from God. We can recognise here the same force which is called the Heavenly Mother or Holy Spirit by Bardesanes and other Gnostics (According to Titus of Bostra 1. 29. Compare Bauer: Manicheism).
  
  ‘When Hyle made its attack, God held counsel to decide on a punishment, says Alexander of Lycopolis. But, as he had no means of punishment—there being no Evil in the House of God—he sent forth a force, a Soul-Force, against Matter, so that Matter was penetrated through and through and death consumed it with the force of this separation, with the force of this inner division and confusion which resulted from being mixed together in this way. It reminds us of the saying of Christ: “Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation.” (Luke 11. 17). The latter interpretation contains the deeper esoteric meaning of the above battle. Not force against force, not evil against evil can be the recompense of the gentle light of heaven of which the moral was proclaimed by Christ. His victory must be achieved in quite a different way: in the form of a quiet disintegration in which the Forces of Light act as a kind of ferment to leaven the dough of matter; thus the Gospel describes the battle of the Light in such a wonderfully meaningful fashion. The pictures which Mani gives describe exactly the same event as the Gospel, but in more detail and with a depth which corresponds to the more mature historical setting.
  
  ‘Therefore it is exactly the same thought which is expressed in the further unfolding of this Manichean hero-tale. In the struggle against the opposing forces of Hyle the heavenly hero is not able to prevail, although, like Proteus of the Greek saga, he constantly disguises himself and takes on the shape of the various elements. The Demons overcome him and gain possession of his armour; yes, they appropriate many pieces of his radiant, sun-like nature to themselves and he would have been entirely at their mercy had he not called out to the Father, the Primeval Source of Light! The latter sent him the help of the Spirit of Life (pneuma zoon), who stretched forth the succour of his right hand and drew him up again out of darkness into the Heights of Light. “That is why”, adds the Acta Archelaus Chapter 7, “when Manicheans meet one another they give each other the right hand, as a token that they have been rescued out of darkness; for, in darkness, says Mani, live all heresies.” This point is of particular interest, because it quite openly states the object of this allusion, “heresy”, which in this case refers to the Ecclesiastical, Satanic doctrine, which has known how to appropriate the Garment of Light, the outward form of Christianity, to itself to deceive and captivate the nobler souls. These are the plundered sun-like parts of Archetypal Man, which have come under the dominion of depravity-seeking mankind; a depravity which took on the appearance of sanctity through this act of plunder. It is, however, only one aspect of the meaning of this myth, which embraces both evolution and history. The noblest parts of Archetypal Man, his Sons, as it were, were fixed in the heavens as Sun and Moon by the Spirit of Life. These are the symbols of the all-illuminating Light and Life of Christ and the Paraclete, whereas the other stars, as scattered, expired light, are fixed in the heavens as the Demons of the Night. This Spirit of Life makes his appearance as the tamer of material existence, as the Spirit who brings measure and sets a limit to matter. He was therefore given the name “Architect of the Universe” by the Manicheans and essentially he plays the part of Horos, or Horothathos, the boundary-marker of Valentius. That part of divine Life and Light, however, which is held captive in the nature forms of the plants, animals and Man, is given the name: suffering Jesus: the Man of Sorrows: Jesus Patibilis. In the sense of Manicheism, however, Jesus only represents this divine figure when he surmounts the restricted sufferings within the narrow limits of the body, when it was nailed to the Cross on the hill near Jerusalem. He becomes the Saviour of the World only when he identifies his Divine Life with that of all the suffering beings of a world yearning for his redeeming, light-shedding thoughts. And nothing is more characteristic of the crudity of the basic views of the Constantinian Church than that its chief exponent, the great Augustine, was morally unable to find anything in these thoughts but a calumny and defilement and humiliation which would have been sufficient to make the Manicheans blush. On the other hand, we have seen with what delicacy Mani discharged himself of his task of rendering tangible a struggle between the forces of the Divine and the forces of Matter, of Evil, of Violence and the Demonic, and how beautifully he is able to honour the holy majesty of powerless mildness and to bring forth the dawning of a more noble culture of which the rough Roman mind of an Augustine had no inkling.’
• 13. The Manicheist scholar, Hans Heinrich Schaeder, writes in his study of Origin and Development of the Manichean System, from his collection of lectures, 1924–1925, from the Warburg Library: ‘We do not know what “Son of the Widow” means.’ Rudolf Steiner, by contrast, explains the meaning still more profoundly than in the lecture under consideration as being a ‘Mystery’ title. (The Mysteries of the East and of Christianity, Rudolf Steiner Press, 1972).
• 14. His description in the periodical Luzifer. Contained in: Cosmic Memory, Rudolf Steiner Publications, 1971.
• 15. See note 2 to lecture 4 of 7th October 1904.
• 16. Rudolf Steiner here gives a free rendering of a quotation from Eugen Heinrich Schmitt: Die Gnosis, already mentioned at the beginning of these notes. Schmitt's text is as follows: ‘It would therefore be a notable test of the fact that Manicheism, as understood by initiates and as inner secret doctrine, is not just a re-telling of Persian fables, but a genuine Gnostic teaching based on spirit-vision, if we could only prove in a single case that the Manicheans sought the source of their knowledge and warranty for their truth, not in outward belief in authority (Mani said this or that), but directly through inner soul-vision. And this evidence is actually forthcoming. Mani himself introduces his foundation letter (epistola fundamenti) with the following words:
  
  ‘“These are the words of healing and the eternal fountain of life. He who hears them and believes in them first of all and keeps their message will nevermore be prey to death but will enjoy a truly immortal and splendid life. For truly he is blessed who, through this divine doctrine, partakes of the knowledge (Gnosis) which sets him free to pass over into eternal life. The peace of the Invisible God and a knowledge of Truth will be with their brothers and loved ones who believe in the laws of heaven even as they put them into practice in their daily lives. And they will behold you sitting on the right hand of the Light and will take away from you all malevolent attacks and all snares of this world; the gentleness of the Holy Spirit will in truth open your inner sense, so that you shall behold your own soul with your very eyes”. The last words of this sentence, “Pietas vero Spiritus Sancti intima vestri pectoris adaperiat, ut ipsis oculis videatis vestras animas”, appear in the Latin of Augustine (De actis cum Felixe L. 1 C. 14 Migne Aug. Opp. omnia Tomas V-III).’
• 17. (Contra epist. Manich 5).
• 18. (In Augustine's work: Contra Faustum, VI, 8). After Augustine (basing his statement on John XX, 29) calls those blessed who have not seen and yet have believed, Faustus makes the reply: ‘If you imagine that we are called upon to believe without reason or reckoning, then you may well be happier without reasoning, but I prefer to get my blessedness through insight.’ Quoted from Eugen Heinrich Schmitt: Die Gnosis—Grundlagen der Weltanschauung einer edleren Kultur, and marked in Rudolf Steiner's copy.
• 19. Compare Herman Grimm: ‘Die Entstchung des Volksbuches von Dr. Faustus,’ in Fifteen Essays, third edition, Berlin, 1882.
• 20. It is a well-known legend that Luther, while staying in hiding at the Wartburg in Thuringia under the protection of Frederick the Wise (1521–22), threw an ink-bottle at the Devil.
• 21. Martin Luther, 1483–1546. The great inaugurator of the German Reformation was an Augustinian monk prior to leaving the monastic life. See Rudolf Steiner's two lectures: ‘Luther’ and ‘Luther the Janus-head,’ in The Karma of Materialism, C 47.
• 22. Rudolf Steiner had spoken on several occasions about the concepts, life and form, at the time he gave this lecture. See lecture of 3rd November 1904: ‘Theosophy and Tolstoy’ copy Z 332. Also twenty-seventh lecture in Foundations of Esotericism, Rudolf Steiner Press, 1983.
• 23. In a note of 1907 Rudolf Steiner writes that, within the Rosicrucian current, the initiation of Manes was looked upon as one of the Higher Degrees which consisted of understanding the true function of Evil.
• 24. See diagram in connection with lecture 10 of 23rd December 1904. Compare also: The Apocalypse of St. John, Rudolf Steiner Press, 1977.
• 25. ‘blonde beast’ in his Zur Genealogie der Moral, which was widely praised. However, Rudolf Steiner said in his lecture of 6th October 1917, Elemental Spirits of Birth and Death,’ copy Z 400: ‘people understood very little about it ... It was the Devil himself who inspired people with the wish, as Nietzsche devotees, to become “blonde beasts” themselves ... but even though people never became “blonde beasts” in Nietzsche's sense—something took place in this century as a result of this socially disturbing impulse of the nineteenth century.’
• 26. This difficult occult concept had already been explained by Rudolf Steiner, shortly before this time, as for instance on 31st October 1904, in the following way: ‘In the first half of the fourth Round mankind developed the capacity for adapting his senses to the mineral kingdom for the first time. In the second half of the fourth Round he redeemed the mineral kingdom. But a part of this remained behind and was excluded, because it was no longer of any use to mankind. That constitutes the eighth sphere, which is no longer of use to the development of man, but can be used by higher beings.’ (From previously unpublished notes). In the year 1915, Rudolf Steiner again went very thoroughly into the concept of the eighth sphere. See: The Occult Movement in the Nineteenth Century, especially fourth and fifth lectures, Rudolf Steiner Press, 1973.
• 27. Rudolf Steiner spoke in much more detail on this subject, which is here only briefly mentioned, in his lecture given in Dornach on 3rd July 1920 (as yet untranslated); but he also spoke about Jesuitism on 20th May, 3rd and 6th June: ‘Roman Catholicism.’ Copy Z 65.
• 28. In the shorthand version of Franz Seiler a few sentences occur at the end. It is not quite clear if this is the answer to a question: ‘Christ appears in person during the sixth Root Race (Great Epoch)—the Thousand-Years Reign, originally it was Aeon, in Latin saeculum saeculorum. In the sixth Root Race, therefore, both the Bad and the Good will have evolved ... [Gap] ... The Keely Motor came too early, no doubt. An individual will possess so much power during the seventh Root Race, that he will be able to kill thousands and thousands at a stroke.’ Compare this with note 29 to lecture 20, the last lecture in this volume.