The Rudolf Steiner Archive

On Easter Monday I want to talk to you about the Mystery of Golgotha. Today we may perhaps prepare a little for this. What I have to say today will relate mainly to a New Testament passage which many people find it impossible or at least difficult to understand. At the least it is easily seen that people do not perceive these words to have the deep meaning which they certainly should be given if one considers esoteric Christianity. From another point of view, these words will take us even more deeply into the spirit and the meaning of Christianity. They are words you know well: ‘All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto man: but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven him.’⁹⁸

Such words do indeed tell us the meaning of the mission given to Christianity, and essentially the only proper instrument to help us reveal their deep meaning is the view of the world gained through the science of the spirit. Those who come to this world view will have to get used to coming to know the great world mission of the spiritual scientific movement from many different points of view. The world will have to realize more and more that this movement clearly does not exist in order to found some kind of new faith, let alone a new sect or the like. The times when new faiths and new special religions could be founded in the course of human evolution have passed. The future of religious development lies in making the existing religions into one great religion for the whole human race. The movement for spiritual insight does not aim to preach a new religion. It merely wants to be an instrument for gaining insight into the profound religious truths contained in the original religious writings.

I have said on several occasions before that today the tendency in theological and other religious circles is to reduce religious truths to the commonplace, and not take them deeply enough. Just think how it satisfied people to have Christ Jesus considered ‘the simple man of Nazareth’,⁹⁹ a figure people are certainly pleased to consider one of the great ideals of humanity, like Socrates or Plato or Goethe or Schiller, but they do not want to put him too far beyond the level of common humanity. People never think of asking today if it is not true that something that went beyond all common humanity dwelt in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. modern humanity seems to have gone far beyond that ancient Gnostic question. The intention had been to call on the whole of human wisdom to understand what really happened in the year 1 of our time. And so people are also satisfied to cover a truth as great as the sin against the holy spirit in a few moralistic phrases, a few, rather commonplace words.

But the original religious writings do not exist to be explained in commonplace terms. No depth is deep enough and no wisdom wise enough to remove the veil that covers them. It is also important not to add anything when we seek to understand the deep meaning. This is none too difficult for a non-academic, non-scientific person; but it is also true that the religious document is so profound that no wisdom suffices to decipher its meaning completely. No mind is so simple that it cannot gain great and sublime impressions from the true original religious writings. Nor should wisdom ever be considered to be so elevated that it goes beyond the limits of a true religious document. This is the point of view and these are the convictions from which we are going to consider those words.

Let us first of all be clear in our minds as to what is meant by the Holy Spirit in true esoteric Christianity and what is meant by the other two aspects of the godhead—the Son, the Word, or Logos, and the Father. It would be wrong to try and penetrate such things by means of speculation or by thinking about them. They do not exist so that anyone may put in whatever meaning suits them. The meaning was given by individuals who are called Christian initiates, and we must go by the things taught in their schools. It is therefore wrong to take the Bible in a superficial way, speculating about the meaning of one passage or another. A true occultist would never do this. He sets about things in a different way, for he knows that there have been esoteric Christian initiation schools where the deep meaning of the original Christian writings was taught. It has never been taught in any other way, and so there are no different points of view with regard to it.

If there is one thing we want to go by, something which in this respect has perhaps come most to the surface of external history, it is the great esoteric Christian school which Paul the apostle himself founded in Athens, the School of Dionysius the Areopagite.¹⁰⁰ Academics have come to speak of a pseudo-Dionysius because writings that bear his name can only be traced back to the 6th century. Academics cannot know the truth in this respect unless they realize that customs have changed enormously through the ages. Today, someone who has a bright idea cannot wait to get it down on paper and into print so that it may flutter out into the world. In earlier times it was the custom to preserve the most sacred truths carefully from the public at large, not to bombard people with them. The only people permitted to receive those truths were people one knew and who had given evidence that they would receive such truths in a worthy manner, having a sense of truthfulness. Initially they were only passed on by mouth, for the intention was that anyone passing on such truths, or indeed revealing the facts relating to them before the eyes of their pupils, would let the words enter only into genuine feelings, into warm hearts that were truly alive. The disciples at those schools had to develop a certain mood, a certain attitude to the most sublime truths.

Today people think a truth may be received whatever one’s mood. This is not a criticism—it is part of evolution. In those days, people took a different view. It did matter then if one received a mathematical or physical truth in one mood or another. People understood that this mood mattered, and even the simplest truths, which ultimately also reveal truths, were received in an exalted mood. They would be received as a revelation of the divine cosmic spirit. Even the mathematical truths representing the divine revelations relating to space would be received in this mood. The school was very much concerned with creating the right attitude, the right sphere of feeling.

In Paul’s school, too, the most sublime truths would only be revealed after intimate preparation. Whilst Paul was preaching to the world at large, his disciples went through their esoteric experiences in Athens. The spirit of that school continued through long periods of time, and because of this the individual who bore the esoteric truth would always be given the same name. The School of Athens continued for centuries and the highest of the teachers was always called Dionysius. This is why the one who wrote the things down in the 6th century, when writing had become more of a custom, also bore that name. You have to know this to understand what this means for the Dionysius school.

Let us now consider the three words ‘Father’, ‘Son’ and ‘Spirit’ in the truly Christian sense. We went into what lies behind these words from another point of view when speaking of the Lord’s Prayer.¹⁰¹ We then came to see what speaks of the divine in the three higher principles of human nature—atman, buddhi, manas. We heard that these three higher principles of human nature are connected with the words ‘name’, ‘realm’ and ‘will’ in the Lord’s Prayer. Today we’ll consider these three human principles from another point of view, as was done in esoteric Christian teaching. Let us briefly recall the relationship between the lower and higher nature of man. In that Christian initiation training it was always taught that man consists of physical body, ether or life body and astral body, and that the I lives within these three human bodies as the inmost part of essential human nature. That was the ‘sacred tetrad’ of which people would speak in the past—physical body, ether or life body, astral body and I.

We have also come to know that the three bodies are transformed by the I in the course of human evolution. We have seen that the I must first of all transform the astral body, the bearer of affects, drives, passions and inner responses. We might also call this astral body the awareness body. Esoteric Christian teaching was that the I has the task of progressively improving and purifying the astral body. And as much of the astral body in a person as has been thus cleansed, purified and improved is called the ‘holy spirit’ in that person in esoteric Christian terms. To use theosophical terms we might also say that the part of the astral body which has been purified through the I is in esoteric Christian terms called ‘the part of the astral body which has been taken hold of by the holy spirit’.

We also know that the I influences the ether or life body to transform, improve and purify it. Whilst in everyday material and non-material life our moral cultural life ennobles the astral body, only the things people take in through religion and art—sensing the eternal in the time form—will change and improve the ether body. The impulses that come from the arts are more powerful than moral teaching, more powerful than the life of rights and government among human beings, for the eternal, immortal shines through in a true work of art. Religious impulses have the most powerful influence on the ether body. Under this influence part of the ether body differentiates out and is transformed into buddhi, the logos, the word. This is known as 'the Christos' in esoteric Christian teaching.

One thing we must always keep in mind when looking at these things is that with the science of the spirit we are not pursuing some kind of grey theory, nor anything removed from the world and alien to life. We are seeking the element in the spirit through which we can have a direct ennobling and purifying influence on these bodies. We must be able to grasp the spiritual principle, live it, and bring it down into life. Only then can we let the insights gained in the realm of the spirit flow through all life, from moment to moment, and make it spiritual. This is practical perception of the spirit. It is not a matter of thinking things out but of letting the spirit flow into our civilization. And so it is also meet and right, at a point where we are speaking of the transformation of the bodies, to draw attention to a practical aspect, namely, what the contemplation of such passages is really meant to convey to us.

When you are in ordinary life with your conscious mind, walking along the streets and crossing the market square, letting life’s influences and impressions come to you, the things you find there will be only part of the whole of your experience. If we do not consider this, we will never come to understand life and perhaps also fail to perceive certain important secrets of our most everyday life. Someone seeking insight in the spirit has to look deeper than someone else would be able to see with the ordinary means our civilization provides today. Our different bodies, the ether and the astral body, also differ in that the outside world influences them in different ways. Everything you take in consciously, giving it your attention, knowing it as you go past it in life, so that it comes to awareness, everything you see outside or in your room that makes an impression on the astral body, creates surges and movements in the astral body. An occultist is able to perceive everything which you experience in full awareness in looking at the movements and currents and everything that shows itself in the astral body.

You can see the infinite importance here of something which people do not really take into account at all in their conscious minds. Beneath the surface of our civilization, things are continually influencing present-day human senses, acting directly on the ether body that is bypassing the astral body and calling up images that are of lasting significance. Beneath the surface of our civilization, such things are all the time having an influence on us. And this is where the science of the spirit needs to draw attention to the more subtle elements that lie beneath our civilization, and has to show how insight can be gained into everyday life by gaining insight into the world of the spirit.

It is simply like this. The people of one age think and do things very differently from those of another. If the former produce horribly bad posters and joke magazines that focus merely on low things, pure sensuality and calculated sensationalism, and the latter do not have such magazines, this reflects for the occultist the things that live in their inclinations and generally also temperaments and character traits. Even conscience mirrors the hidden influences on human beings. If we wanted to study the consciences and also the temperament, mood and inclinations of central Europeans, or Europeans altogether, in the 12th, 13th and 14th centuries, proceeding by occult methods, we would have to go back to the building styles, the kind of paintings and other cultural elements that were around people in those times. A person would have been in a very different mood walking down streets where everything seen to the left and the right had a relationship to the inner life from the mood you have today when you cross the market square and see quite different things around you. We certainly must not ignore the things that live deeper than conscious awareness, for the very impulses which are connected with the major periods of human civilization have a profound influence. And so we must not underestimate all kinds of things present beneath our present-day civilization that are like the ones I mentioned just now, for there lie the true and real foundations of materialistic feelings and inner responses. That is where we must look for them. And so people should not simply consider one a reactionary when one wants, from a deeper point of view, that nobility and significance should come to expression exactly in these things which have such a profound influence on the human soul, and indeed right down to the form-giving powers of the ether body.

As you can see, therefore, there is a way of looking at things where one is guided not by the prejudices of the age but by spiritual truths. And if we also extend this way of looking at things to the harmful elements in our daily environment which give rise to materialistic views without people having paid them real attention, do you think we shall get far with theories and teachings unless these theories and teachings go right down as far as this? If you know how the more sublime teaching in Christian thinking came to be reflected in paintings, you will not be surprised that they were also reflected in the things that were around people all the time, even if they did not focus their attention on them.

Let us now consider the principle which in Christian esoterics was called ‘the Father’. We know that not only the astral body, but also the ether body and the physical body are transformed through the I. They are transformed unconsciously by people, but consciously so by an esotericist or occultist or someone undergoing esoteric training. Everything that influences only the astral body is mere preparation for the actual esoteric or occult training. Occult training begins when we learn to work into the ether or life body, when the human being is enabled, through the instruction given by the occult teacher, to transform temperaments, inclinations and habits, thus becoming a different person. This alone will give insight into the true higher world—that the person changes. You can study the theory of physics and this will only affect your astral body. You can learn all kinds of things, and they will only affect the astral body. It is only when teachings have such power that they are able to transform the human being that organs develop from inside that allow us to look into the higher world. Then the ether body is transformed and also the physical body. And because the transformation of the physical body comes from the breathing process, bringing rhythm into breathing, a physical body illumined by conscious awareness is called atman. The Christian esoteric term is ‘the Father’.

Within Christian esotericism we have to distinguish between the Holy Spirit—the Christ has as much of the Holy Spirit in him as he has ennobled his astral body; the Son, Logos, Word—the Christ has as much of the son, the Logos, the word in him as he has transformed of the ether body; and thirdly the Father—the Christ has as much of the Father in him (only an initiate can consciously have the Father in him) as he has transformed the physical body, making it eternal. To understand sin or blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, the Son or the Father, and learn the Christian way of saying these things, we have to recall the mission of Christianity as the esoteric Christian teachers saw it. I have on some occasions said that the deeper mission of Christianity is given in the words: ‘If anyone comes to me who does not disregard his father and mother, his wife and children and his brothers and sisters as well as his own soul-bearing life, he cannot be my disciple.’¹⁰² Mark also put it in other words: ‘His mother and his brothers came and stood outside and sent to call him. But a crowd was sitting round him. So when they said to him: See how your mother and your brothers and your sisters are outside looking for you, he answered them: Who is my mother, and who are my brothers? Looking round at those sitting in the circle he said: See here my mother and my brothers. Whoever does the will of God is my brother and my sister and my mother.’ In Luke’s gospel we also find: ‘My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and do it.’

Such words speak of Christianity’s real mission. We can understand them if we consider the evolution of the human race, and this will also be the best possible preparation for our discussion of the Mystery of Golgotha next Monday.

Going a long way back in human history we come to a time we call the Lemurian age. As you know we go back through Atlantean times to the Lemurian age. There we find the fourfold human being who we may say was half animal, a human being who did have four bodies—physical body, ether body, astral body and the potential for an I—but was not yet in a position to do any work on the three outer bodies. For the power human beings need to work on their outer bodies in the above-mentioned way first had to enter into those vessels for man’s true essential nature. The I as you know it today, veiling your soul, your deepest nature which already contains as much of the three outer bodies as has been transformed—this did not yet exist then, it was still waiting to enter into the process of evolution. The I was still a hollow space that would receive what today is our deepest, inmost part, our immortal part, as we call it, that goes through all incarnations and can go with the earth when it enters into a different planetary existence. This came down into the human vessel at that time. Before, it had been in the keeping of the godhead, part of divine nature.

On a previous occasion I gave you a picture for the way man was ensouled at that time, with the divine droplet poured into each individual human vessel. I then said that one might take a glass of water—many drops are in it, a mass of fluid. We might then take a thousand tiny little sponges and let each absorb one drop of water. We have then taken many drops from the glass, and something which had been united in the glass has then been distributed among all the small sponges. Something which is now in us and had previously been in the keeping of the godhead as in an element where everything flowed into one, distributed itself at that time among the individual human bodies, so that today each has a drop of this one divine substance in it. This element, which until then had been part of general divine nature, thus became individualized. Just as my ten fingers are part of my organism, so are the souls which are in human bodies today part of the godhead. And just as every finger would become individualized, every finger would receive a life of its own if it were to surround itself with other outer elements, so did the drops resting in the keeping of the godhead become human inner natures.

These human inner natures lived in the human bodies which had been prepared for them at that time. Human bodies looked very different at that time compared to today. Perhaps no one would believe it if I were to describe those bodies which walked about, waiting to be ensouled by the godhead. People who listen to these lectures may be used to some things, but some would be quite surprised, really, if I were to tell them what those bodies were like and how those shapes, grotesque as they would be in our eyes today, gradually changed into the bodies we have today. Who made them look the way they do today? The inner soul itself has done this. The figure, the form of this human soul influenced the body from inside. You get an idea of how this soul was working if you consider the last bits of configuration the soul still does on the human body today.

Consider feelings of shame, anxiety, fear, fright. A feeling of shame makes the blood rush up to make us go red. The colour of the face also changes with anxiety, fear or fright. In the one case it turns red, in the other it grows pale. In my lecture on the blood as a very special fluid,¹⁰³ I showed that the blood is an outer reflection of the inner work of the individual person. Our most intimate nature shoots into the blood—someone who has blood has an I, and someone who has an I has blood. It is therefore a very special fluid. This only applies to warm blood, however, and not to creatures whose blood is sometimes warm and sometimes cold. Today the I influences the blood when we feel shame, fear and fright, changing the body in this definite, subtle way when we feel shame or grow pale from fear, and it also acted like this in those times. The influence which the blood had in the earliest time of human evolution was great and powerful. It reflected, subtly and exactly, the inner power that had entered into the I as its divine content. And because of this the I came to be reflected through the races. Just as people may grow pale or turn red today, so did the inner feeling shape the human body from the inside. When the human being was still soft—he did not yet have fingers—the I created the form from inside, through the blood. Blood is still brought to expression today. The sculpting power comes from the I, via the blood, and develops the human body. In the many different shapes and forms we thus get to know the blood as the vehicle for the I.

In other lectures I spoke of a secret that lies in the earliest Bible stories. I spoke of the image given by saying that Adam grew to be hundreds of years old.¹⁰⁴ This was due to something we call intermarriage, marriage between blood relations. We find it in the early times of every nation, though ve have to go back a long, long way. Then we find small groups everywhere within the earth’s population who are blood-relatives, marrying only within the group. This has an important result. To make it easier for you to understand what needs to be said I once referred to a conversation between Anzengruber and Peter Rosegger.¹⁰⁵ You’ll remember that Rosegger, a good and popular writer, describes the country people in his books the way he sees them; that’s how he presents them to us. Anzengruber describes them in a more living way, his countrymen stand firmly and securely on their feet, as though hewn from wood, absolutely true and sure. The two writers once went out together. Rosegger then said to Anzengruber: ‘You’d be able to give a much better description of the country people if you went into the country and took a look at them there.’ Anzengruber’s reply was: ‘I have never seen such a countryman. But I describe them the way I do because it is in my blood. My father, grandfather, great grandfather and my uncles, too, were country people. And that’s in my blood.’ There was no need for Anzengruber to have seen the country people. The blood had an influence through generations, and this showed itself in the way he wrote about country people.

So you see how the spirit works through the blood, and an I limited to an individual does not stop there but grows strong and spreads through father, grandfather and so on. That’s how it was with Anzengruber, because those country people had only married among themselves. Some level of awareness of this remained. This level of awareness was much higher at the times written about in the first parts of the Bible. People then still had a real memory of things that had happened to their ancestors. There was a time when people remembered not only the things that had happened to themselves in childhood and youth but also had memories of what their father and grandfather had done. This may seem unbelievable to people today, but it is true that in those early times when blood relationship was strictly maintained within a small group and one could not marry outside the community without committing a sin, the I not only had awareness of the character of country people but the son would say of things that had happened to his father, grandfather and so on that they had happened to him. People who after nine hundred years had descended from Adam would say: ‘That has happened to me’, when speaking of things that had happened to Adam. It was a kind of group self that went through generations. And the term Adam, or Abraham, was used to refer to the way the I had thus continued through generations.

This is also what lies behind the stories in the first chapters of the Old Testament You realize that the blood may be seen as an outer reflection of the inner creative soul. How did humanity lose this way of looking upwards into the generations? What caused conscious awareness and memory to be limited to the life of the individual? They were limited because the bond of blood relationship was broken. The old form of blood relationship loosened, small groups became larger ones. A family group became a tribe, the tribe a nation. Humanity could not have developed in any other way but by families coming to be part of tribes, and tribes of nations, breaking the close blood bonds. Memory used to go back up through the generations.

If you recall the many times I’ve said that memory is sustained by the ether body, which reproduces the things that make up memories, you’ll know the connection between blood and ether body. The I impresses itself into the ether body by coming to outward expression in the surges of the blood, in the element that enters into the blood. You’ll recall, however, that someone wanting to be an initiate has to work into the ether body, and here we come close to something that is deeply connected with the mysteries of pre-Christian times. Those mysteries also had to do with the blood. Today we want to see what all this has to do with the blood.

We know that someone who was to be given the pre-Christian initiation had first to be prepared. We know how such an initiation went. The candidate was instructed to transform his qualities and habits and this would make him the kind of human being he needed to be for initiation. I also said that the initiates went back to the adepts of ancient Atlantean times and that the candidate, once suitably prepared, was put into a sleep state for the whole of three and a half days. This was the kind of sleep in which it was possible to lift not only the astral body but also the ether body out of the physical body. The wise individual who initiated the disciple would guide the whole process. The ether body would be lifted out and this made it possible for the initiator to give the disciple the power to experience things in the spirit and have a real perception and experience of the higher world. The ether body would have been set in motion through the preparations that were made, and the disciple would then be able to see into the higher worlds. When he had been brought back, he would be able to bear witness to the truth and reality of the spiritual world. The essential point was that the individual’s conscious mind had to be dimmed, tuned down, and this was connected with lifting out the ether body. He would be wholly under the influence of the initiator.

Let us consider the situation. All existing laws, institutions and social structures ultimately went back to initiation. At the pinnacle of the social structure would be the great initiator. All goals and trends would depend on this. The disciples would take the wisdom that had been revealed out into the world, and those who heard them out there would take their guidance from them and also arrange their social life accordingly. Everything was under the authority of initiation, of the initiator. Everything depended on these. The principle was one of authority based on truth and wisdom, lived out to the highest degree and in the best possible sense. Only the great, wise leaders of humanity were allowed to have such authority. And it was like this without causing any kind of harm to humanity.

What mattered then was to lift the ether body out of the physical body in the right way. This could not be done with just anybody. Anyone who says that this could be done with anybody, is talking in an abstract way and not out of the truth. It needed long preparation to achieve these things. Essentially the blood had to be the right mixture. This is also why great care was taken to see that the generation of priests did not mingle with others. Preparations would continue for centuries to ensure that one of the right descendants would always be available, who might one day be made a true initiate. It was a way of treating the human body in a grand style, in a tremendously mysterious way, a way that was mysterious in the best possible sense of the word. The greatest initiates had been prepared for through centuries to get the right physical principle, the right blood mixture. This whole process of preparing for initiation is the key characteristic of pre-Christian initiation. Yet it could continue for ever in the course of human evolution. For what was this initiation principle about? It had to do with having a clear view of the blood community. The closer we come to understanding community, the more do we come across principles of this kind.

In those very early times, therefore, initiation was based on the blood principle. This came to be broken more and more, from family to family, tribe to tribe, nation to nation. And now the future was making itself felt, with all such blood bonds broken. For where did the community principle reside for human beings when they had come down from the keeping of the godhead? We might say that it flowed through the blood, and the blood therefore had to be taken into account when one wanted to initiate someone.

When the possibility was given, with the warm blood, for the I to make the divine soul quality its own, that divine soul quality flowed through the blood: ‘I’ am he who was, who is and who shall be.’¹⁰⁶ This was indeed the one who spoke as the god Jehovah, saying: ‘I am he who was, who is and who shall be.’ And where did he show himself to be most powerful? In the blood. And how did they guide a human being to initiate him? They would guide him by treating his blood.

These are profound, far-reaching mysteries of ancient times. Someone who only considers Christianity on the surface does not understand it properly. Much thought went into the title of my book, calling it not ‘The mysticism of Christianity’ but Christianity as Mystical Fact. It means that Christianity itself is a mystical fact and can only be understood if one knows that the whole spiritual configuration of the planet earth changed with the coming of Christ Jesus.

Put yourself on a distant planet and imagine you are a seer looking down on to the earth, the earth atmosphere, the earth’s astral body, the bubbling, boiling, billowing mass of animal and human astral bodies. And then imagine you were able to look down on it some centuries before the Christ was born and follow events on into a far distant future. If you were able to follow this you’d see something strange. You would see the astral atmosphere changing profoundly with the coming of Christ Jesus, a tremendous sudden change, so that its shade, its colour, would be different for all future times. Something new entered into the earth’s spiritual atmosphere. Anyone who does not admit that something now exists in the spirit on earth which was not there millennia ago, does not understand Christianity and the preparations that preceded it. You have to consider that something absolutely real came in, something new, and then you know what happened at the beginning of the Christian era.

Looking at it this way you’ll also find the right words for the transformation of the planet earth in the realm of the spirit and have to say to yourself: ‘All close blood bonds broke, everything that kept people together in small blood-based communities gradually disappeared. The small brotherhoods were gradually extended, ultimately to become the large brotherhood that is to include all human beings on earth, with everyone calling everyone else “brother”, and human beings “leaving their mother and father and brother and sister.’” Everything the blood has prepared within a kind of group I, an I that goes beyond the ordinary I, has to vanish from this earth. And when the earth will be ready to be a new astral sphere, the fruit will have germinated, all bonds will have been broken and a single large bond will bring the whole of humanity together. Christ Jesus made it his mission to give the impulse, the power to create this brotherhood. His mission and the ideal of Christianity are thus given in the words: ‘If anyone comes to me who does not disregard his father and mother, his wife and children and his brothers and sisters ... he cannot be my disciple.’ And the rejection: This is not my mother; my mother and my brothers are those who do my father’s will. That is the new spirit that is to come, different from the blood bond.

Please take what I am going to say now not as an image or a symbol, but as something that is real. It is difficult for the materialistic thinking of today to see the reality of such things, but they are real. Let us look on the cross raised up high, and above all the blood flowing from the wounds. Of this blood that flows from the wounds—be clear in your minds of its significance in world history! Why is it flowing? Why do we actually speak of the flowing blood of Christ Jesus? What was the foundation of all close communities? What brought the small tribes together? What must lose its significance within these narrow limits if the whole of humanity is to grow into a brotherhood? The blood. The element that influences the I, pulses in the I, can no longer depend on the blood when the whole of humanity has matured to make brotherhood possible. And so the excess I blood, the blood that causes human beings not to extend their I and let it be universal, must flow out, for it is self-seeking blood, egoistical blood. Consider this not as an image but a reality. Consider the amount of blood that flowed from Christ’s wounds to have been the amount that had to flow so that the blood would lose the tendency to create close communities and thus gain the ability to spread brotherhood over all the earth.

No one perhaps ever came as close to the mystery as Richard Wagner did exoterically in his essay on his conception of Parsifal.¹⁰⁷ Here an exoteric thinker touches on the most profound esoteric mystery truths. If you see things in this light you’ll find that the purpose of Christianity is on the one hand to dissolve the bonds of tribe, family and closely limited communities and on the other to split humanity apart into individuals, so that each feels himself to be an individual and yet also a member of the human race. These are polar opposites that run side by side. In the early times, when groups were small and based on blood relationship, the individual felt himself to be a member of the family, a member of the tribe. And as blood relationship dies out individual independence will grow and increase to the same degree.

This happens because of the event on Golgotha. You can see this from the fact that from that time onwards, when the event happened that was to embrace the whole earth, the religious impulse came to be of the greatest significance. Everything that happened there had been prepared for, and was preparation. The effect of it began when the Holy Spirit was poured out at Pentecost. Speaking in such a way that we speak out of the soul of the other person, that is, no longer egoistically—this was shown in the best possible way in the place where the apostles spoke to all people in all tongues. The Holy Spirit thus prepared the way for the new impulse that was to come through the blood of the Son, the logos, the Christ.

Let us now go back to the ancient initiation principle. This was based on authority. Everyone would look up to the initiates and receive impulses from them. This authority principle is gradually coming to an end. Here we have an apparent contradiction. Humanity is being split up into individuals, with the ancient authority principle no longer valid, and yet brotherhood is to be established in its fullness. By what means is it to be established? By people getting a grasp of what has come as Spirit. What is the nature of this? For the initiate of old it was enough to have the whole wisdom, the truth, and let it flow into the whole of humanity. Now the individual person, with individuality taken to its highest level, must have the truth. Every individual must have truth and wisdom. In those early times, truth came to the individual from the highest pinnacle, and he had to make it his own. The spread of wisdom must go hand in hand with development, and human individualization with the creation of the great human brotherhood. These two things cannot go in parallel; they must go together.

Considering this, we are following the stages by which the Holy Spirit was brought to bear. For as long as human beings obeyed that one and only authority they could, as individuals, give themselves up to life. They were able to live in close communities. The supreme authority took care of the whole. This is no longer possible when the principle of authority is destroyed. Then every individual must take care that brotherhood is maintained. Each individual must be able to take care of the social life within the brotherhood. They must perceive what exists in general, what every individual is preparing. What may this be? We only have to remember how the ancient religions arose. All initiates had the same original wisdom of humanity. But as this wisdom was given to individuals, the state, the clergy and so on gave it specific characteristics, different forms. Buddhism and Zoroastrianism arose in this way. The smaller the communities, the more specialized did things have to be. Now that the great brotherhood has to be created, the wisdom of the initiate must be able to reach the whole of humanity so that every individual can now take care of the things that used to be the responsibility of the initiates.

Wisdom thus comes to the whole of humanity. It is the same for all. And we can see, therefore, that this wisdom, this insight, is the element that was distributed among the separate individuals who ‘leave their father, mother, brother, sister and child’. They shall have this wisdom again, exactly because it is the same for all. To understand what is said of the Holy Spirit we must understand that wisdom is the same for all.

People have not yet got that far, however, for they’ll still say: ‘That’s the way I see it; someone else may have his own point of view.’ This point-of-view idea must be overcome. Humanity had to be split ip so that there could be I-nature, egoism. They have not yet found the way of coming together in one and the same wisdom. They will be able to do so if they truly apply themselves to this wisdom and grow as individual as possible. If they find the spirit of the wisdom that is the same for all they will get out of the habit of saying: ‘That’s the way I see it; that’s my point of view.’ We have to understand that there is no particular point of view when it comes to the wisdom that is the same for all, that having a point of view means that one has not yet progressed far enough. Only then can we grasp the idea of the Holy Spirit. Only imperfect human beings have a point of view. Individuals who are approaching the spirit of wisdom do not have a point of view. They know that they must give themselves up selflessly to the wisdom that is always and forever the same for all. Just as all plants turn to the same sun, so human beings will unite in turning to the One, for one spirit of wisdom will live in them. The principle which originally held people together in the blood has flowed out of the Christ, and now wisdom brings us together again in brotherhood.

This has been reflected most marvellously in the miracle of Pentecost, when the apostles extended their brotherhood into one that embraced the whole of humanity, speaking in words that all could understand. This must show itself more and more, as individual nature reaches its highest development. We are all united in the spirit of truth. All other aspects of human nature will develop further at a much later time, when our planet goes through different stages of embodiment. The one thing, however, which will be alive and active until the earth comes to its fulfilment, is the wisdom that unites, wisdom revealed to us in the way in which it was only revealed to initiates in the past. Anyone who sins against this wisdom, the wisdom that creates brotherhood, cannot be forgiven, for this delays the earth’s evolution, for the earth will only be able to enter into its astral stage once humanity has come together in brotherhood. The spirit which brings the human race together is the one that has been poured out into the future. If we let our astral body be filled with this spirit of wisdom which exists for all, we can take it up into the astral body of the earth.

So now we are able to see that something exists in which the earth may be united. The content of the wisdom is therefore positive theosophy, something that must be reflected in the view of the world that is taken in the science of the spirit. This will not happen if you just say to people: ‘We must unite.’ It is not enough merely to preach brotherhood; moral sermons are empty words. Just as we have to supply a stove with fuel if we want it to get hot, so we must supply wisdom for humanity; this will unite human beings in brotherhood. To talk to people about brotherhood is like talking to the stove, telling it to get hot. No, what will take us forward is to teach in a very real way, concept by concept, idea by idea, conveying the wisdom of the evolution of the world and the nature of the human being. Preaching compassion, and indeed feeling any kind of compassion, means nothing unless we have wisdom. What good is it to someone who has fallen and broken his leg if fourteen people gather round him in the street, overflowing with compassion and love and not one of them can fix the leg! All fourteen of them are useless. But the one who is able to do it can help when he comes, and he will do so if he lives in the spirit.

Ethical principles will come of their own accord. They do not have to be taught. But the one wisdom which is beyond dispute, beyond points of view, the wisdom of which it is said in Christianity that it transfigures the astral body, cleansing it completely—this must come to humanity through the spiritual scientific movement. This is what the mission of Christianity means, it gives us the mission of Christianity.

People should grow more and more independent of all authority and move towards the truth that is the same for all. The brotherhood of humanity will develop of its own accord if people perceive the truth of the most Christian words, the words that are most free and most sublime: ‘And you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.’¹⁰⁸

If you have two occultists with different views, they do not see the truth. Among true initiates it is not possible to say two different things about one and the same matter. Nor will there be two ways of thinking about it when humanity has reached the path that leads to the unification of the human race, of a brotherliness that is not just a word but an inner power.

• 98. Matthew 12: 31; Mark 3: 28.
• 99. A term used by the Protestant theologian Heinrich Weinel (1874–1936), which Rudolf Steiner would often quote.
• 100. Dionysius the Areopagite (1st century). Greek or Syrian churchman. Mentioned in Acts 17: 34 as a disciple of Paul. At the end of the 5th century On the Heavenly and Ecclesiastical Hierarchies appeared under his name in Syria, translated from Greek into Latin by John Scotus Erigena in the 9th century.
• 101. Lecture of 28 January (in this volume).
• 102. Matthew 19: 29; Mark 10: 29; Luke 14: 26. Second quote from Mark 3: 31-33, third from Luke 8:21.
• 103. Lecture given in Berlin on 25 October 1906. In Supersensible Knowledge (GA 55). See note 95.
• 104. Genesis 5: 3-5.
• 105. 'Another time, going for a walk with Anzengruber... We chatted about creative writing and subjects to write about. I said that he must surely have lived in Upper Bavaria or have had a lot of dealings with the country people of that area. His country figures were very much of that stamp. He put his pince-nez on his strongly hooked nose and said: "Upper Bavaria? No. Actually I never had any dealings with country people. At least not at close hand." Noting my surprise he added: "I don't need that. Just need to see such a one from a distance, hear some ordinary words, observe some gesture of other—and I know the whole chap inside out." "Most peculiar!" "My friend," he said, "you know yourself that all external occasions and opportunities are but midwives. The writer must give birth out of his own resources. Country people? - I'm a city man! But if, as you say, I’m better at writing about country people than city people, it may well be because it is in my blood. Or somewhere in one of my bones, like an inherited kind of gout. My father's family were Upper Austrian farmers. Well, and such things will linger on.'" Gesammelte Werke von Peter Rosegger, Leipzig 1914-16, 36. Band, Gute Kameraden—Personliche Erinnerungen an beruhmte und eigenartige Zeitgenossen, S. 145 f.
• 106. Genesis 3: 14; Rev. 1:8.
• 107. Richard Wagner, Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen hg. von Wolfgang Goiter, Leipzig o. J., 10. Band, 'Ausführungen zu Religion und Kunst', S. 275 ff.; 'Heldentum und Christentum', insbes. S. 281. See Rudolf Steiner's lectures of 29 July 1906 and 16 January 1907 in The Christian Mystery (GA 97). Tr. A. R. Meuss. Gympie, Australia: Completion Press 2000.
• 108. John 8: 32.

I may say that the question of how one should speak about the arts is one with which I have actually wrestled throughout my whole life, and I will take the liberty of taking as my starting point two stages within which I have attempted to make some headway with this wrestling. It was for the first time when, at the end of the 1880s, I had to give my lecture to the Viennese Goethe Society: “Goethe as the Father of a New Aesthetic.” What I wanted to say at the time about the essence of the arts made me feel like a person who wanted to speak but was actually mute and had to use gestures to express what he actually had to point out. For at that time it was suggested to me by certain conditions of life to speak about the nature of the arts through philosophical judgments. I had worked my way out of Kantianism into Herbartianism in philosophy, and this Herbartianism met me in Vienna in a representative personality, in the esthetician Robert Zimmermann. Robert Zimmermann had completed his great History of Aesthetics as a Philosophical Science a long time before. He had also already presented to the world his systematic work on Aesthetics as a Science of Form, and I had faithfully worked my way through what Robert Zimmermann, the Herbartian aesthetician, had to communicate to the world in this field. And then I had this representative Herbartian Robert Zimmermann in front of me in the lectures at the University of Vienna. When I met Robert Zimmermann in person, I was completely filled by the spirited, inspired, excellent personality of this man. What lived in the man Robert Zimmermann could only be extraordinarily and deeply appealing. I must say that, although Robert Zimmermann's whole figure had something extraordinarily stiff about it, I even liked some things about this stiffness, because the way this personality, in this peculiar coloring that the German language takes on in those who speak it from German-Bohemia, from Prague German, from this linguistic nuance, was particularly likeable. Robert Zimmermann's Prague German was exceptionally appealing to me in a rare way when he said to me, who was already intensively studying Goethe's Theory of Colors at the time: Oh, Goethe is not to be taken seriously as a physicist! A man who couldn't even understand Newton is not to be taken seriously as a physicist! And I must say that the content of this sentence completely disappeared behind the flirtatious and graceful manner in which Robert Zimmermann communicated such things to others. I was extremely fond of such opposition.

But then I also got to know Robert Zimmermann, or perhaps I already knew him, when he spoke as a Herbartian from the lectern. And I must say that the amiable, likeable person completely ceased to be so in aesthetic terms; the man Robert Zimmermann became a Herbartian through and through. At first I was not quite clear what it meant when this man entered, even through the door, ascended the podium, laid down his fine walking stick, strangely took off his coat, strangely walked to the chair, strangely sat down, strangely removed his spectacles, paused for a moment, and then, with his soulful eyes, after removing his spectacles, let his gaze wander to the left, to the right, and into the distance over the very small number of listeners present, and there was something striking about it at first. But since I had been intensively studying Herbart's writings for quite some time, it all became clear to me after the first impression, and I said to myself: Oh yes, here we are entering the door to Herbartism, here we are putting down the fine walking stick of Herbartism, here we are taking off our Herbartism coat, here we are gazing at the audience with our glasses-free eyes. And now Robert Zimmermann, in his extraordinarily pleasant dialect, colored by the Prague dialect, began to speak about practical philosophy, and lo and behold, this Prague German clothed itself in the form of Herbartian aesthetics.

I experienced this, and then, from Zimmermann's subjective point of view, I understood well what it actually meant that the motto of Zimmermann's aesthetics on the first page was the saying of Schiller, which was indeed transformed into Herbartianism by Robert Zimmermann: The true secret of the master's art lies in the annihilation of material by form – for I had seen how the amiable, likeable, thoroughly graceful man appeared to be annihilated as content and reappeared in Herbartian form on the professorial chair. It was an extraordinarily significant impression for the psychology of the arts.

And if you understand that one can make such a characterization even when one loves, then you will not take amiss the expression that I now want to use, that Robert Zimmermann, whom I greatly admired, may forgive me for using the word ” Anthroposophie', which he used in a book to describe a figure made up of logical, aesthetic and ethical abstractions, that I have used this word to treat the spiritualized and ensouled human being scientifically. Robert Zimmermann called his book, in which he carried out the procedure I have just described, “Anthroposophy”.

I had to free myself from this experience, in which the artistic, so to speak, appeared to be poured into a form without content, when I gave my lecture on “Goethe as the Father of a New Aesthetic”. I was able to accept the fully justified part of Zimmermann's view, that in art one is not concerned with content, not with the what, but with what is made out of the content of what is observed and so on through the imagination, through the creativity of the human being. And from Schiller we also saw Herbart taking form. I could well see the deep justification for this tendency, but I could not help but contrast it with the fact that what can be achieved as form by real imagination must be elevated and must now appear in the work of art in such a way that we get a similar impression from the work of art as we otherwise only get from the world of ideas. To spiritualize what man can perceive, to carry the sensual into the sphere of the spirit, not to extinguish the material through form, that was what I tried to free myself from at the time, from what I had absorbed in a faithful study of Herbart's aesthetics.

However, other elements had also been incorporated. A philosopher of the time, whom I liked just as much as Robert Zimmermann, who is extremely dear to me as a person, Eduard von Hartmann, he wrote in all fields of philosophy, and at that time he also wrote about aesthetics, about aesthetics from a partly similar, partly different spirit than Robert Zimmermann had written. And again, you will not interpret the objectivity that I am trying to achieve as if I were being unkind for that reason. Eduard von Hartmann's aesthetics can be characterized by the fact that Eduard von Hartmann took something from the arts, which were actually quite distant from him, and called it aesthetic appearance. He took what he called aesthetic appearance from the arts, just as one would roughly proceed by skinning a living person. And then, after this procedure, after he had, so to speak, skinned the arts, the living arts, Eduard von Hartmann made his aesthetics out of them. And the skinned skin — is it wonderful that it became leather under the hard treatment it then received at the hands of the aesthete, who was so far removed from the arts? — That was the second thing I had to free myself from at the time. And I tried to include in my lecture at the time what I would call the mood: the philosopher, if he wants to talk about the arts, must have the renunciation to become mute in a certain respect and only through chaste gestures to hint at that which, when speaking, philosophy can never quite penetrate, before which it remains unpenetrating and must hint at the essential like a silent observer.

That was the mood, the psychological characterization, from which I spoke at the time in my lecture on “Goethe as the Father of a New Aesthetic”.

Then later on I was given the task of making a second stop on the way to the question that I characterized at the beginning of my present consideration. It was when I spoke to anthroposophists about the “essence of the arts”. And now, in view of the mood of the whole environment at that time, I could not speak in the same way. Now I wanted to speak in such a way that I could remain within artistic experience itself. Now I wanted to speak artistically about art. And I knew once more that I was now on the other side of the river, beyond which I had stood at the time with my lecture “Goethe as the Father of a New Aesthetic”. And now I spoke in such a way that I carefully avoided slipping into philosophical formulations. For I felt that slipping into philosophical characterization immediately takes away the actual essence of art from the words. The inartistic quality of mere concepts used to stir up the forces from which speech arises. And I tried to speak about the arts from that mood, which in the strictest sense avoids slipping into philosophical formulations. Today I am supposed to speak about the psychology of the arts again.

It is not particularly easy, after having lived through the other two stages, to stop at any other point. And so I could not help but turn to life with my contemplation. I sought some point through which I could enter into life through my contemplation of the artistic. And lo and behold, I found the amiable romantic Novalis as if he were something self-evidently given. And when, after this glimpse of Novalis, I ask myself: What is poetic? What is contained in this special form of artistic experience in poetic life? — the figure of Novalis stands before me alive. It is strange that Novalis was born into this world with a peculiar basic feeling that lifted him above the external prosaic reality throughout his entire physical life. There is something in this personality that seems to be endowed with wings and floats away in poetic spheres above the prose of life. It is something that has lived among us humans as if it wanted to express at one point in world history: this is how it is with the external sensual reality compared to the experience of the truly poetic. And this personality of Novalis lives itself into life, and begins a spiritual and thoroughly real love relationship with a twelve-year-old girl, Sophie von Kühn. And all the love for the girl, who is still sexually immature, is clothed in the most magnificent poetry, so clothed in poetry that one is never tempted to think of anything sensually real when considering this relationship. But all the fervor of human feeling that can be experienced when the human soul floats freely above prosaic reality, as in poetic spheres, all the fervor of this feeling lives in this love of Novalis for Sophie von Kühn. And this girl dies two days after her fourteenth birthday, at the time when other people are so strongly touched by the reality of physical life that they descend into the sexuality of the physical body. Before this event could happen to Sophie von Kühn, she was transported into spiritual worlds, and Novalis, out of a stronger consciousness than the instinctive-poetic one that had been with him before, decided to die after Sophie von Kühn in his living soul experience. He lives with the one who is no longer in the physical world. And those people who approached Novalis after that time with the most intimate human feelings say that he, walking around alive on earth, was like someone who had been transported into the spiritual worlds, who was talking to something that is not of this earth, does not really belong to this earth. And within this poetic reality, transported into prose, he himself feels that what other people see only in the control of external forces, the fullest expression of the will, merging into reality, already appears within the poetic-ideal world, and he speaks of “magical idealism” to characterize his direction in life.

If we then try to understand everything that flowed from this wonderfully formed soul, which was thus able to love without touching reality, external reality, which was thus able to live with what was truly wrested from it before a certain stage of external reality was reached, if we open ourselves to all that then flowed from this Novalis soul, then we receive the purest expression of the poetic. And a psychological question is resolved simply by immersing oneself in the artistic stream of poeticization that flows from Novalis's poetic and prose writings.

But then one has a strange impression. One has the impression, when one delves psychologically into the essence of the poetic in this way, into a reality of life, into that of Novalis, that one then has something floating behind the poetic that resonates through everything poetic. One has the impression that this Novalis emerged from spiritual and soul spheres, bringing with him what, with poetic radiance, showered the outwardly prosaic life. One has the impression that a soul has entered the world that has brought with it the spiritual and soul in its purest form, so that it has inspired and spiritualized the whole body, and that it has absorbed space and time into the state of mind, which was spiritual and soul, in such a way that space and time, stripping off their outer being, reappeared poetically in the soul of Novalis. In Novalis' poetry, space and time seem to be devoured.

You see, with a strong soul and a strong spirit, poetry enters the world, and out of its strength it integrates space and time. But it overwhelms space and time, melting space and time through the power of the human soul, and in this melting of space and time through the power of the human soul lies the psychology of poetry. But through this process of melting space and time in Novalis, something resounds that was like a deep fundamental element within it. You can hear it everywhere, you can hear it through everything that Novalis has revealed to the world, and then you cannot help but say to yourself: What soul, what spirit is, it came to light there, to remain poetic, to poetically melt space and time by appropriating space and time. But there remained at first something as the foundation of this soul, something that lies most deeply within the human soul, so deeply that it can be discovered as a creative power by shaping the deepest inner conditions of the human organism itself, by living in the innermost being of the human being as soul. Musicality, the musical, the sounding artistic world, was a fundamental element in all of Novalis's poetry. This reveals itself out of the harmony of the world and is also what creates artistically out of the cosmos in the most intimate aspects of the human being.

If we try to enter the sphere in which the spiritual and soul-life in man create most intimately, then we come to a musical form within the human being, and then we say to ourselves: Before the musician sounds his tones out into the world, the musical essence itself has taken hold of the musician's being and first embodied, shaped into his human nature the musical, and the musician reveals that which the world harmony has unconsciously placed in the depths of his soul. And that is the basis of the mysterious effect of music. That is the basis for the fact that, when speaking about music, one can really only say: The musical expresses the innermost human feeling. — And by preparing oneself with the appropriate experiences for contemplation, by entering into this Novalis poetry, one grasps what I would call the psychology of music.

And then one's gaze is drawn to the end of Novalis's life, which occurred in his twenty-ninth year. Novalis passed away painlessly, but surrendered to the element that had permeated his poetry throughout his life. His brother had to play for him on the piano as he died, and the element that he had brought with him to infuse his poetry was to take him back when he died, passing from prosaic reality into the spiritual world. To the sound of the piano, twenty-nine-year-old Novalis died. He was searching for the musical homeland that he had left in the full sense of the word at his birth, in order to take the musicality of poetry from it.

So one settles in, I think, from reality into the psychology of the arts. The path must be a tender one, the path must be an intimate one, and it must not be skeletonized by abstract philosophical forms, neither by those that are taken from rational thinking in the Herbartian sense, nor by those that are a bone from external observation of nature in the Gustav Fechnerian sense.

And Novalis stands before us: released from the musical, allowing the musical to resonate in the poetic, melting space and time with the poetic, not having touched the external prosaic reality of space and time in magical idealism, and then drawing it back into musical spirituality.

And the question may arise: What if Novalis had been physically organized to live longer, if what had musically resonated and poetically spoken in the inner effective psychology of the human soul and human spirit had not returned to its musical home at the age of twenty-nine, but had lived on through a more robust physical organization, where would this soul have found itself? Where would this soul have found itself if it had had to remain within the prosaic reality from which it had departed at the time when it was still time, without contact with outer space and outer time, to return to the spaceless world of music?

I have no desire to give this answer in theoretical terms. Again, I would like to turn our gaze to reality, and there it is; it too has played itself out in the course of human development. When Goethe had reached the age at which Novalis withdrew from the physical world out of his musical and poetic mood, the deepest longing arose in Goethe's soul to penetrate into that artistic world which had brought it to the highest level in the development of that entity which can express itself in space and time. At this stage of his life, Goethe felt a burning desire to go south and to discern in the works of art of Italy something of that from which an art was created that understood how to bring the genuinely artistic into the forms of space and time, especially into the forms of space. And when Goethe stood before the Italian works of art and saw that which could speak not only to the senses but to the soul from out of space, the thought escaped his soul: here he realizes how the Greeks, whose work he believed he recognized in these works of art, created as nature itself creates, and which natural creative laws he believed he was tracking down. And he was overwhelmed by the spiritual and the soul-stirring that met him in the forms of space, the religious feeling: There is necessity, there is God. — Before he had moved to the south, he had searched for God together with Herder in the reading of Spinoza, in the spiritual and soul-stirring expression of the supersensible in the external sensual world. The mood that had driven him to seek his God in Spinoza's God together with Herder had remained. He had not found satisfaction. What he had sought in Spinoza's philosophy about God was awakened in his soul when he stood before the works of art in which he thought he could again discern Greek spatial art, and the feeling escaped him: There is necessity, there is God.

What did he feel? He apparently felt that in the Greek works of art of architecture and sculpture, what lives in man as spiritual and soulful has been created, what wants to go out into space and what gives itself to space, and when it becomes pictorial, also spatially to time. And Goethe has experienced the other thing psychologically, which is on the opposite pole to the Novalis experience. Novalis has experienced how, when man penetrates into his innermost being in space and time and wants to remain poetic and musical, space and time melt away in human comprehension. Goethe experienced how, when the human being works and chisels his spiritual soul into the spatial, the spatial and temporal does not melt away, how it surrenders in love to the spatial and temporal, so that the spiritual soul reappears from the spatial and temporal in an objectified way. How the spirit and soul of the human being, without stopping at the sensory perception, without remaining seated in the eye, penetrates to get under the surface of things and to create the architecture out of the forces that prevail under the surface of things, to shape the sculpture, experienced Goethe in those moments that led him to the saying: “There is necessity, there is God.” There is everything that is of divine-spiritual existence in the human subconscious, that man communicates to the world without stopping at the gulf that his senses form between him and the world. There is that which man experiences artistically when he is able to impress, to chisel, to force the spiritual-soul into the forces that lie beneath the surface of physical existence. — What is it in Novalis that makes him, psychologically, musical-poetic-creative? What is it in Goethe that impels him to feel the utter necessity of nature-making in the plastic arts, to feel the utterly unfree necessity of nature-making in 'the spatial, in the material works of art? What is it that urges him, despite the feeling of necessity, to say: there is God?

At both poles, with Novalis and with Goethe, where at the one pole lies the goal that the path to the psychological understanding of the poetic and the musical must take, and where at the other pole lies the goal that the psychological understanding must take if it grasp the plastic-architectonic. At both poles lies an experience that is inwardly experienced in the field of art, and in relation to which it is its greatest task of reality to also carry it outwardly into the world: the experience of human freedom.

In ordinary mental, physical and sensual experience, the spiritual and soul-like penetrates to the organization of the senses; then it allows the senses to glimpse what external physical and material and in the senses, external physical-material reality encounters inner spiritual-soul existence and enters into that mysterious connection that causes so much concern for physiology and psychology. When someone is born into life with the primal poetic-musical disposition, which is so self-sustaining that it seeks to die out under the sounds of music, then this spiritual-soul-like does not penetrate to the sensory organs Then it permeates and spiritualizes the whole organism, shaping it like a total sensory organ, and then it places the whole human being in the world in the same way as otherwise only the individual eye or the individual ear is placed in the world. Then the soul-spiritual takes hold within the human being, and then, when this soul-spiritual engages with the material world externally, it is not absorbed into the prosaic reality of space and time, but space and time are dissolved in the human perception. That is how it is at one pole. There the soul lives poetically and musically in its freedom, because it is organized in such a way that it melts the reality of space and time in its contemplation. There the soul lives without touching the ground of physical prosaic existence, in freedom, but in a freedom that cannot penetrate into this prosaic reality.

And at the other pole, there lives the soul, the spiritual part of man, as it lived, for example, in Goethe. This soul and spiritual part is so strong that it not only penetrates the physical body of man right down to the sense openings, but it penetrates these senses and extends even beyond the senses. I would say that in Novalis there is such a delicate soul-spirituality that it does not penetrate to the full organization of the senses; in Goethe there is such a strong soul-spirituality that it breaks through the organization of the senses and beyond the boundaries of the human skin into the cosmic, and therefore longs above all for an understanding of those areas of art that carry the spiritual-soul into the spatial-temporal. That is why this spirituality is organized in such a way that it wants to submerge with that which extends beyond the boundaries of the human skin, into the ensouled space in sculpture, into the spiritualized spatial power in architecture, into the suggestion of those forces that have already internalized themselves as spatial and temporal forces, but which can still be grasped externally in this form in painting.

So it is here too a liberation from necessity, a liberation from what man is when his spiritual and soulful self is anchored in the gulfs of the sensory realm. Liberation in the poetic-musical: freedom lives in there, but it lives in such a way that it does not touch the ground of the sensual. Liberation in sculptural, architectural, and pictorial experience: but freedom is so strong that if it wanted to express itself in any other way than artistically, it would shatter the external physical-sensual existence because it dives below the surface.

This is felt when one truly engages with what Goethe so powerfully said about his social ideas, let us say in “Wilhelm Meister's Journeyman Years”. What cannot be entrusted to reality, if it is to be shaped in freedom, becomes musical-poetic; what in contemplation one must not bring to the reality of sensual physical imagination, if it is not to destroy external reality, what must be left in the formation of spatial and temporal forces, must be left in the mere reproduction of the block of wood, because otherwise it would destroy the organic, to which it is death, becomes sculpture, becomes architecture.

No one can understand the psychology of the arts without understanding the greater soul that must live in the sculptor and the architect than in normal life. No one can understand the poetic and musical without penetrating to the more that lives in the spiritual and soul life of a human being, who cannot allow this spiritual more, this spiritual projection of the physical organization to the physical and sensual, but must keep it behind it in freedom. Liberation is the experience that is present in the true comprehension of the arts, the experience of freedom according to its polar opposites.

What is man's form is what rests in man. This form is permeated in human reality by what becomes his movement. The human form is permeated from within by the will and from without by perception, and the human form is initially the external expression of this permeation. Man lives in bondage when his will, his inwardly developed will, which wants to enter into movement, must stop at the sphere in which perception is taken up. And as soon as man can reflect on his whole being, the feeling comes to life in him: There lives more in you than you, with your nervous-sensory organization, can make alive in your intercourse with the world. Then the urge arises to set the dormant human form, which is the expression of this normal relationship, in motion, in such movements that carry the form of the human form itself out into space and time. Again, it is a wrestling of the human interior with space and time. If one tries to capture it artistically, the eurhythmic arises between the musical-poetic and the plastic-architectonic-picturesque.

I believe that one must, in a certain way, remain inwardly within the arts when one attempts to do what still remains a stammering when talking about the arts and about the artistic. I believe that not only is there much between heaven and earth that human philosophy, as it usually appears, cannot dream of, but that what lies within the human interior, when conditions with the physical body enter into, first brings about liberation within the artistic towards the two poles. And I believe that one cannot understand the artistic psychologically if one wants to grasp it in the normal soul, but that one can only grasp it in the higher spiritual soul of the human being, which goes beyond the normal soul and is predisposed for supersensible worlds.

When we look at two such eminently artistic natures as Novalis and Goethe, I believe the secrets of the psychology of the arts reveal themselves to us phenomenally, out of reality. Schiller once felt this deeply when he spoke the words at the sight of Goethe: Only through the dawn of the beautiful do you enter the realm of knowledge. In other words, only by artistic immersion into the full human soul can you ascend into the regions of the sphere toward which knowledge strives. And it is a beautiful, I believe an artist's saying, when it is said: Create, artist, do not speak — but a saying against which one must sin, because man is, after all, a speaking being. But just as it is true that one must sin against such a word: “Form, artist, do not speak” – it is also true, I believe, that one must always atone for this sin, that one must always try, if one wants to talk about the arts, to form in speaking. Artist, do not speak; and if you are obliged to speak about art as a human being, then try to speak in a creative way, to create through speech.

In these two lectures I should like to speak to you from the point of view of Spiritual Research, on the question so frequently and urgently put: “What is the meaning of life?” If in these two evenings we are to get anywhere near this subject we shall have to create first of all a kind of foundation or basis, on which to construct the edifice of knowledge, and from this deduce the answer in outline.

When we contemplate the things around us, those which exist for our ordinary sense-perception and our ordinary experience, and then turn to our own life, the result is at best the formulation of a question—the presentation of an oppressive, a painful problem. We see how the beings of external nature arise and decay. We can observe every year in spring how the earth, stimulated by the forces of the sun and the universe, bestows on us the plants which sprout and bud and bear fruit through the summer. Towards autumn, we see how they decay and pass away. Some remain indeed throughout the year, some for very many years, for instance, our long-lived trees. But of these also we know that even though in many cases they may outlive us, they also pass away at last, disappear and sink down into that which, in the great world of nature, is the realm of the lifeless. Especially do we know that even in the greatest phenomena of nature there rules this growth and decay: even the continents on which our civilisations develop did not exist in times past, for they have only risen in the course of time, and we know for certain that they will one day pass away.

Thus we see around us growth and decay; we can trace it in the plant kingdom and in the mineral kingdom as well as in the animal kingdom. What is the meaning of it all? Ever an arising, ever a passing away all around us! What is the meaning of this arising and this passing away? When we consider our own life, and see how we have lived through years and decades, we can recognise there also this coming into being and decay. When we call to mind the days of our childhood: they are vanished and only the memory of them remains. This stirs within us anxious questionings about life. The most important thing is that we ourselves have progressed a little through it, that we have become wiser. Usually, however, it is only when we have accomplished something, that we know how it ought to have been done. If we are no longer in a position to do a thing better, we still know how much better it might have been done, so that actually our mistakes become a part of our life; but it is just through our mistakes and errors that we gain our widest experiences.

A question is put to us, and it seems as if that which we can grasp with our senses and our intellect is unable to answer it. That is the position of man to-day; all that surrounds him confronts him with the problem, with the question: “What is the meaning of existence as a whole?” and particularly “Why has man his peculiar position within this existence?”

An extremely interesting legend of Hebrew antiquity tells us that in those old Hebrew times there was a consciousness that this anxious question which we formulated as to the meaning of life, and especially as to the meaning of man, occurs not only to man, but to beings quite other than man. This legend is extremely instructive and runs as follows:—When the Elohim were about to create man after their own image and likeness, the so-called ministering angels, certain spiritual beings of a lower grade than the Elohim themselves, asked Jahve or Jehovah: “Why is man to be made in the image and likeness of God!” Then Jehovah collected—so continues the legend—the animals and the plants which could already spring forth on earth before man was there in his earthly form, and He gathered together the angels also, the so-called ministering angels—those who immediately served Him. To those He showed the animals and plants and asked them what they were called, what were their names? But the Angels did not know the names of the animals and plants. Then man was created, as he was before the Fall. And again Jehovah gathered around him Angels, animals and plants, and in the presence of the Angels he asked man what the animals whom He made to pass by in succession before man’s eyes, were called, what their names were. And behold! Man was able to answer: “This animal has this name, that animal has that, this plant has this name, that plant has that,” Then Jehovah asked man: “And what is thine own name?” And man said: “I must be called Adam.” (Adam is related to Adama, and means: “Out of the earth: earth-being”). Jehovah then asked man: “And what am I myself to be called?” “Thou shalt be called Adonai,” man replied, “Thou art the Lord of all created beings of the earth.” The Angels now began to have an idea of the meaning of man’s existence on the earth. Though religious tradition and religious writings often express the most important riddle of life in the simplest way, there are many difficulties in understanding them, because we have to get behind their simplicity. We must first penetrate into the meaning behind them. If we succeed in this, great wisdom and deep knowledge are revealed. It may well be so with this legend, which we shall just keep in mind for a moment, for these two lectures will give us, in some sort, an answer to the question which it contains.

Now you know that there is a religion which has put the question as to the meaning and value of life by placing it in a wonderful form into the mouth of its own founder. You all know the story of the Buddha, how it tells us that when he left the palace in which he was born, and came face to face with the real facts of life, of which in that incarnation he had as yet learned nothing, he was most profoundly dismayed, and pronounced the judgment: “Life is suffering,” which as we know comprises the four statements: “Birth is suffering—disease is suffering—old age is suffering—death is suffering,” and to which is added “to be united with those we do not love is suffering, to be separated from those we love is suffering, not to be able to attain that to which we aspire is suffering.” We know then that to the adherents of this religion the meaning of life can be summed up by saying: “Life, which is suffering, only acquires a meaning when it is conquered, when it transcends itself.” All the various religions, all philosophies and views of life, are, after all, attempts to answer the question as to the meaning of life. Now, we are not going to approach the question in an abstract, philosophical way. Rather we shall review some of the phenomena of life, some of the facts of life, from the point of view of Spiritual Science, in order to see if a deeper occult view of life furnishes us with something wherewith to approach this question as to the meaning of life. Let us take the matter up again at the point we have already touched—the annual growth and decay in physical nature, the life, growth and decay in the plant world. In Spring we see the plants spring up out of the earth, and that which we see there as germinating, budding life, calls forth our joy and delight. We become aware that the whole of our existence is bound up with the plant world, for without it we could not exist. We feel how that which springs up out of the earth at the approach of Summer is related to our own life. We feel in the Autumn how that which in a certain sense belongs to us, again decays.

It is natural for us to compare with our own life that which we see germinating and decaying. For an external observation based only on what can be perceived by the senses and judged by the intellect, it is very natural to compare the vernal springing up of the plants with, let us say, man’s awakening in the morning; and the withering and decaying of the plant world in Autumn with man’s falling asleep at night. But such a comparison is quite superficial. It would leave out of account the real events with which we can already become acquainted through the elementary truths of occultism. What happens when we fall asleep at night? We have learned that we leave our physical and etheric bodies behind in bed. With our astral body and our ego we withdraw from our physical body and etheric body. During the night, from the moment of our falling asleep to the moment of our waking, we are with our astral body and our ego in a spiritual world. From this spiritual world we draw the forces which we require. Not only our astral body and our ego, but our physical and etheric bodies go through a kind of restorative process during our sleep at night, when the latter lie in bed, separated from the astral body and ego.

When one looks clairvoyantly down from the ego upon the astral, the etheric and physical bodies, one sees what has been destroyed by waking life; one sees that that which finds its expression in fatigue, is present as a destructive process and is made good during the night. The whole conscious life of the daytime is in fact, if we look at it in its connection with human consciousness and in its relation to the physical and etheric bodies, a kind of destructive process as regards the physical and etheric bodies. We always destroy something by it, and the fact that we destroy expresses itself in our fatigue. That which is destroyed is made good again at night.

Now if we look at what happens when we have withdrawn our astral body and our ego out of the etheric and physical bodies, it is as if we had left behind us a devastated field. But in the moment we are out of them, out of the physical and etheric bodies, they begin gradually to restore themselves. It is as if the forces belonging to the physical and etheric bodies begin to bud and blossom, and as if an entire vegetation should arise on the scene of destruction. The further night advances and the longer sleep lasts, the more do the forces in the etheric body bud and blossom. The nearer morning approaches and the more we re-enter our physical and etheric bodies with our astral body, the more a kind of withering or drying up sets in as regards the physical and etheric bodies.

In short, when the ego and the astral body look down from the spiritual world on the physical and etheric bodies, they see at night, at the moment of falling asleep, the same phenomenon which we see in the great world outside, when the plants bud and germinate in Spring. Therefore, to make a real comparison, we must compare our falling asleep and the earlier part of the sleep condition at night with Spring in nature; and the time of our awakening, the time in which the ego and the astral body begin to re-enter the physical and etheric bodies, with Autumn, in external nature. Spring corresponds to our falling asleep and Autumn to our awakening.

But how does the matter stand, when the occult observer, he who really can look into the spiritual world, directs his gaze to external nature and watches what takes place there in the course of the year? That which then presents itself to the occult vision teaches us that we must not compare things in an outward, but in an inward way. Occult observation shows that just as the physical and etheric bodies of man are connected with his astral body and his ego, so is there connected with our earth what we call the spiritual part of the earth. The earth also must be compared with a body, a widespread body. If we consider it only as far as its physical part is concerned, it is just as if we were to consider man with regard to his physical body only. We consider the earth completely when we consider it as the body of spiritual beings, in the same way in which, in the case of man, we consider the spirit as being connected with the body, yet there is a distinction. Man has a single nature controlling his physical and etheric bodies; a single psycho-spiritual nature belongs to that which is his physical human body and etheric human body. But there are a great many spirits belonging to the Earth-body. What in man’s psycho-spiritual nature is a unity, is, as regards that of the earth, a multiplicity. This is the chief distinction. With the exception of this difference everything else is in a certain way analogous. To occult vision is revealed how in the same measure as green plants come forth from the earth in Spring, those spirits whom we call the earth-spirits, withdraw from the earth. Only here again they do not, as is the case with man, absolutely leave the earth; they move round it, they pass in a certain way to the other side of the earth. When it is Summer in one hemisphere it is Winter in the other. In the case of the earth, the spiritual part moves from the northern to the southern hemisphere when Summer is approaching in the north. But that does not alter the fact that to the occult vision of a man who experiences the Spring on any given part of the globe, the spirits leave the earth; he sees how they rise and pass out into the cosmos. He does not see them move to the other side, but he sees them go away, in the same way as he sees the ego and the astral body leave man at the moment of his falling asleep. In the Autumn the earth-spirits approach and re-unite themselves with the earth. During the Winter, when the earth is covered with snow, the earth-spirits are directly united with the earth. In fact something similar then begins for the earth to what is found in man: a kind of self-consciousness. During the Summer the spiritual part of the earth knows nothing of what goes on around it in the universe. But in Winter the spirit of the earth knows what is happening in the universe around, just as man, on waking, knows and beholds what is taking place around him.

The analogy is thus complete, only it is the reverse of that which the outer consciousness draws. It is true that if we wish to go into the question fully, we cannot simply say: “When, in Spring, plants bud and spring from the earth, the earth spirits go away,” for with the budding and sprouting of plants there arise, as if out of the depths, out of the interior of the earth, other and mightier spirits. Therefore the mythologies were right when they distinguished between the higher and the nether gods. When man spoke of the gods who left the earth in Spring and returned in Autumn, he spoke of the higher gods. But there were mightier, older, gods, called by the Greeks the Chthonic gods. These arise in Summer when everything is budding and flourishing, and they descend again when in Winter the real earth spirits unite with the body of the earth.

Now, I should here like to mention that a certain idea, taken from scientific and occult research, is of immense importance for human life. For this shows us that when we consider the individual human being, we have really before us something like an image of the great Earth-being itself. What do we see when we turn towards plants which are beginning to sprout and bud? We see exactly the same as takes place in man when his inner life is active, we see how the one exactly corresponds to the other. How single plants are related to the human body, what their significance is for the human body, can only be recognised when such connections are understood. For it is in fact true that, on close examination, one sees how, when man falls asleep, everything begins to sprout and bud in his physical and etheric bodies: how a whole vegetation springs up in him: how man is in reality a tree or a garden in which plants are growing.

Whoever follows this with occult vision sees that the sprouting and germinating within man corresponds to what is germinating and budding in nature without. Thus you can form an idea of what will be possible when, in the future, Anthroposophy—often considered as foolishness to-day—is applied to life and made fruitful. We have for example, a man who has something wrong in his bodily life-activities. Let us now observe, when he falls asleep, what kind of plants are wanting when his physical and etheric bodies begin to develop their vegetation. When we see that on earth whole species of plants are missing, we know that something must be wrong with the life of the earth. And it is the same with the deficiency of certain plants in the physical and etheric bodies of man. In order to make good the defect we have only to seek on the earth for the plants which are missing in the man in question, and introduce their juices either in the form of diet or medicine and then we shall find the relation between medicine and disease. From this example, we see how Anthroposophy or Spiritual Science will intervene directly in life, but we are only at the beginning of these things.

In what I have just said I have given you, in a comparison drawn from nature, some idea of the composition of man and the connection of his whole being with the environment in which he is placed. We shall now look at the matter from a spiritual point of view. Here I would like to call attention to a matter that is of great importance, namely, that our anthroposophical outlook on life, while letting its gaze range over the evolution of mankind from the point of view of occultism, in order to decipher the meaning of existence, gives no preference to any one special creed, or any one view of life over any other. How often has it been emphasised in our occult movement that we can point to that which our earthly humanity experienced and developed immediately after the great Atlantean catastrophe—the Flood. We passed through, as the first great post-Atlantean civilisation, the sacred civilisation of Ancient India. Here, at Copenhagen, we have already spoken of this old sacred Indian civilisation, and we laid stress upon the fact that it was so lofty, that that which has survived in the Vedas or in written tradition is only an echo of it. It is only in the Akashic Records that we can catch glimpses of the primeval teachings that issued from that time. There we gaze on heights which have not been re-attained.

The later epochs had quite a different mission. We know that a descent has taken place since then, but we know also that there will be again an ascent and that, as already mentioned, Anthroposophy or Spiritual Science has to prepare this ascent. We know that in the seventh post-Atlantean age of civilisation, there will be a kind of renewal of the ancient, holy Indian civilisation. We do not give preference to any religious view or creed, for all are measured with the same measure, in every particular they are described: in each the kernel of truth is sought.

The important thing is that essentials be kept in view. We must not allow ourselves to stray in the consideration of the nature of each separate creed, and if we keep this in mind, in approaching the various points of view, we find one fundamental difference. We find views on life which are of a more oriental nature, and others which have permeated our Western civilisation. Once we make this clear to ourselves, we have something which throws light on the meaning of existence. We then find that the ancients were already in possession of something which we have to regain with difficulty, viz., the doctrine of reincarnation. The oriental stream possessed this as something springing from the profoundest depths of existence. You can still realise how the oriental mind shapes the whole of life from this doctrine, when you look at the relation of the oriental to his Bodhisattvas and his Buddhas. If you keep in view how little it concerns the oriental to select a single figure with this or that definite name, as the ruling power in human evolution, you see at once how he attaches much more importance to tracing the individuality which goes on from life to life. Orientals say that there are such and such a number of Bodhisattvas, high beings who have sprung from men, but who have gradually evolved to a height which we can describe by saying: A Being has passed through many incarnations, and then has become a Bodhisattva, as did Gautama, the son of King Sudhodana. He was Bodhisattva and became Buddha. The name Buddha, however, is given to many, because they passed through many incarnations, became Bodhisattva, and then ascended to the next higher stage, that of Buddhahood. The name Buddha is a generic name. It denotes a degree of human attainment, and has no sense apart from the spiritual being who goes through many incarnations. Brahmanism fully agrees with Buddhism in regarding the individual who goes through the different personalities, rather than the single person. It comes to the same whether the Buddhist says:—“A Bodhisattva is destined to ascend to the highest degree of human attainment, and for this he has to go through many incarnations; but for me the highest is the Buddha.” Or whether the adherent of Brahmanism says: “The Bodhisattvas are indeed highly developed beings, who ascend to Buddhahood, but they are inferior to the Avatars, who are higher spiritual individualities.” You see, consideration of the persisting spiritual entity is what characterises both these oriental points of view.

But now let us turn to the West, and see what is the thing of greatest importance there. In order to enter a little more deeply into this connection, we must consider the ancient Hebrew point of view, where the personal element enters. When we speak of Plato, of Socrates, of Michelangelo, of Charlemagne, or of others, we are always speaking of a person: we place before men the separate life of the personality with all that this personality has done for mankind. In our Western life we do not direct our attention to the life which has gone from personality to personality, for it has been the mission of Western civilisation to direct attention for a time to the single life. When in the East the Buddha is spoken of, it is understood that the designation “Buddha” is an honourable title which may be applied to many personalities. When, on the contrary, the name “Plato” is uttered, we know that this refers only to a single personality. This has been the education of the West.

Let us now turn to our own day. In Western civilisation, mankind has been trained for a time to direct his attention to the personality, but the individual element, the “individuality” has now to be added to the personal element. We stand now at the point where we must reconquer the individual element, but strengthened, vivified, by the contemplation of the personal.

Let us take a definite case. In this connection we look back to the old Hebrew civilisation, which preceded that of the West. Let us turn our attention to the mighty personality of the prophet Elijah. To begin with, we may describe him as a personality. In the West he is seldom regarded in any other way. If we leave aside details and look at the personality from a wider point of view, we see that Elijah was something very important for our evolution. He gives the impression of a forerunner of the Christ-Impulse.

On looking back to the time of Moses, we see how something had been proclaimed to the people; we see that the God in man was proclaimed. “I AM the God Who was, Who is, Who is to come.” He has to be comprehended as in the ego, but among the ancient Hebrews He was comprehended as the Folk-soul of the race. Elijah went beyond Moses, though he did not make clear that the ego dwells in the single human individual as Divinity, for he could not make clear to the people of his time more than the world was then able to receive. While even the Mosaic Culture of the old Hebrews was conscious of the fact that “the Highest lies in the Ego,” and that this Ego found expression in the time of Moses in the Group-Soul of the people, we find Elijah already pointing to the individual human soul. We see a forward leap in evolution. But a further impulse was needed, and again a forerunner appeared, whom we know as the personality of John the Baptist. Once more it was in a significant expression that the quality of John the Baptist as a “Forerunner” found expression. A great occult fact is here indicated that man, as primeval man, once possessed ancient clairvoyance, so that he could look into the spiritual world—into Divine activity—but he gradually approached towards materialism; the vision of the spiritual world was cut off. To this fact John the Baptist alludes when he says: “Change the attitude of your soul; look no longer at what you can gain in the physical world: be watchful, a new impulse is at hand (he means the Christ-Impulse). Therefore I say unto you, seek the spiritual world that is in your midst; there the spiritual element appears with the Christ-Impulse.” Through this saying John the Baptist became a forerunner of the Christ-Impulse.

Now we can direct our gaze to another personality, to the remarkable personality of the painter Raphael. This remarkable personality presents itself to us in an unusual way. In the first place, we need only compare Raphael to—let us say—Titian, a painter of a later period. Whoever has an eye for such things, even if he look at the reproductions, will find the distinction. Look at the pictures of Raphael and at those of Titian! Raphael painted in such a way that he put Christian ideas into his pictures. He painted for the people of Europe as Christians of the West. His pictures are comprehensible to all Christians of the West, and will become so more and more. Take, on the other hand, the later painters. They painted almost exclusively for the Latin race, so that even the schisms of the Church found expression in their pictures.

With which pictures was Raphael most successful? With those in which he was able to demonstrate the impulses that lie in Christianity. He is at his best where he could represent some relationship of the Jesus-Child to the Madonna, where this Christ-relation appears as something that is an impulse to feeling. These are the things which he really painted best. We have for instance, no Crucifixion of his, but we have a Transfiguration. Wherever he can paint the budding and germinating aspect, that which is self-revealing, he paints with joy and there he paints his greatest and best pictures.

It is the same with the impression which his pictures produce. If some day you come to Germany and see the Sistine Madonna in Dresden, you will realise that that work of art—of which it is said that the Germans may rejoice to have such a celebrated picture among them, Yes! that they may even regard it as the flower of the painters’ art—you will realise that this work discloses a mystery of existence.

When Goethe in his time traveled from Leipsic to Dresden, he heard something quite different about the picture of the Madonna. The officials of the Dresden Gallery said something like this to him: “We have also a picture of Raphael’s, but it is nothing particular. It is badly painted. The look of the Child, the whole Child itself, everything to do with the Child, is common. The same with the Madonna. One can only think that she is painted by a dauber. And then these figures down below of which one does not know whether they are meant for children’s heads or angels!” Goethe heard this coarse opinion, so that at first he had no right appreciation of the picture. Everything which we hear about the picture at the present time only came to be understood later on, and the fact that Raphael’s pictures made their triumphal march through the world in reproductions, is a result of this better appreciation. We have only to call to mind what England has done for the reproduction and circulation of these pictures. But what was effected in England by the trouble which has been taken for the reproduction and circulation of Raphael’s pictures, will only be recognised when people have learned to look at the matter from the point of view of spiritual science.

Thus through his pictures, Raphael becomes for us the forerunner of a Christianity which will be cosmopolitan. Protestantism has long regarded the Madonna as specially Catholic; but to-day the Madonna has penetrated everywhere into Protestant countries and we are rising more to the occult interpretation, to a higher inter-denominational Christianity. So it will be more and more. If we may hope for such results as regards interdenominational Christianity, what Raphael has done will also help us in Anthroposophy.

It is remarkable that the above three personalities confront us in this manner: all three have the quality of being forerunners of Christianity. Now let us direct occult observation to these three persons. What does it teach us? It teaches us that the same individuality lived in Elijah, in John the Baptist and in Raphael. However impossible it may seem, it is the same soul which lived in Elijah and in Raphael.

When it is revealed to occult vision—which searches and investigates and does not merely compare in a superficial way—that it is the same soul that is present in Elijah, in John the Baptist and in Raphael, we may ask how it is possible that Raphael the painter becomes the vehicle for the individuality which lived in John the Baptist? One can conceive that this remarkable soul of John the Baptist lived in the forces which were present in Raphael.

Occult research comes in here again, not merely to put forth theories, but to tell us how things actually are in life. How do people write biographies of Raphael to-day? Even the best are so written that they simply state that Raphael was born on Good Friday of the year 1483. It is not for nothing that Raphael was born on a Good Friday. This birth already proclaimed his exceptional position in Christianity and shows that in the deepest and most significant way he was connected with the Christian Mysteries. It was on a Good Friday that Raphael was born. His father was Giovanni Santi. He died when Raphael was eleven years old. At the age of eight years his father sent him as a pupil to a painter, who was, however, not of any special eminence. But if one realises what was in Giovanni Santi, Raphael’s father, one gets a peculiar impression which is further strengthened when the matter is investigated in the Akashic Records. There it appears that there lived in the soul of Giovanni Santi much more than could be expressed in his personality and then we can agree with the duchess, who at his death said: “A man full of light and truth and fervent faith has died.” As occultist, one can say that in him there lived a much greater painter than appeared outwardly. The outer faculties, which depend on the physical and etheric organs, were not developed in Giovanni Santi. That was the original cause why he could not bring the capacities of his soul to full expression; but really a great painter lived in him.

Giovanni Santi died when Raphael was eleven years old. If we now follow what takes place, we see that man certainly loses his body, but that the longings, the aspirations, the impulses of his soul continue to exist, and continue to be active where they are most closely connected.

There will come a time when Anthroposophy will be made fruitful for life, as it can already be made fruitful by those who have grasped it vitally and not merely theoretically. Permit me here to interpolate something before going on with Raphael. What I tell you in the examples I give is not mere speculation; on the contrary, it is always taken from real life. Let us suppose that I had children to educate. Whoever pays attention to the capabilities of children can notice the individual element in every child, but such experiences can only be made by those who educate children. Now if one of the parents of a child dies while the child is still young and the other parent is still living, the following may be noticed: Certain inclinations will show themselves in the child which were not there before and which consequently cannot be explained. But one who has charge of children has to occupy himself with these things. Such a one would do well if he said: “People generally look upon what is in Anthroposophical books as mere folly: I will not take this for granted, but will try whether it is right or not.” Then he will soon be able to say “I find forces at work which were already there and again there are other forces playing into those which were already there.” Let us suppose that the father has passed through the gates of death and there now appears in the child, with some strength, certain qualities which had belonged to the father. If this assumption is made and if the matter is looked upon in this way, the knowledge which comes to us through Anthroposophy is applied to life in a sensible way, and then, as is soon discovered, we find our way in life, whereas before we did not. Thus the person who has gone through the gateway of death, remains united, through his forces, with those with whom he was connected in life. People do not observe things closely enough, otherwise they would see more often that children are quite different before the death of their parents from what they are afterwards. At present there is not enough regard for these things, but the time is coming when they will receive attention.

Giovanni Santi, the father, died when Raphael was eleven years old; he had not been able to attain great perfection as a painter, but powerful imagination was left to him and this was then developed in the soul of Raphael. We do not depreciate Raphael, if, while observing his soul, we say: Giovanni Santi lives on in Raphael, who appears to us as a completed personality, as one incapable of higher attainment because a dead man gives life to his work.

We now realise that in the soul of Raphael are reborn the vigorous forces of John the Baptist and in addition, there live in his soul the forces of Giovanni Santi; that together these two were able to bring to fruition the result which confronts us as Raphael. It is true that to-day we cannot yet speak publicly of such extraordinary things, but in fifty years’ time this may be possible, because evolution is progressing quickly, and the opinions held to-day are rapidly approaching their decline. Whoever accepts such things, sees that in Anthroposophy our task is to regard life everywhere from a new point of view. Just as in the future people will heal in the way to which I have referred, so they will reflect on the strange miracle of life wherein men attract to their assistance, from the spiritual world, the achievements of those who have passed through the gates of death.

I should like to draw your attention to two things, when speaking on the riddles of life; things which so truly can illuminate the meaning of life. One is the fate that has befallen the works of Raphael. Whoever looks to-day at the reproductions of his pictures, does not see what Raphael painted. And if he travels to Dresden or to Rome, he finds them so much spoiled that he can hardly be said to see the pictures of Raphael. It is easy to see what will become of them when we consider the fate of Leonardo da Vinci's “Last Supper,” which is falling more and more into decay. These pictures, in times to come, will fall into dust, and everything which great men have created will disappear. When these things have vanished, we may well ask: “What is the meaning of this creation and decay!” We shall see that really nothing remains of what the single personality has created.

Still another fact I should like to put before you, and that is the following: If when to-day, with Anthroposophy as an instrument, we desire to understand, and must understand, Christianity as an Impulse that works for the future, we have need of certain fundamental ideas through which we know how the Christ-Impulse will continue to work. This we require. And we can point to a development of Christianity for which Anthroposophy is necessary. We can point to a person who presents Anthroposophical truth in special form—namely, that of aphorisms. When we approach him we find much that is significant for Anthroposophy. This person is the German poet Novalis. When we study his writings, we find that he describes the future of Christianity from out of the occult truths it contains. Anthroposophy teaches us that we have here to do with the same individuality as is in Raphael, John the Baptist and Elijah.

We have here again to glance into the further development of Christianity. That is a fact of an occult nature, for no one reaches this result by reasoning. Let us once more put the different pictures together. We have the tragic fact of the destruction of the creations and works of single personalities. Raphael appears and allows his interdenominational Christianity to flow into the souls of men. But we have a foreboding that some day his creations will be destroyed, that his works will fall to dust. Then Novalis appears to take in hand the fulfilment of the task and continue the work he had begun. The idea is no longer now so tragic. We see that just as the personality dissolves in its sheaths, so the work dissolves, but the essential kernel lives on and continues the work it had begun. Here once again it is the individual to which our attention is directed. But because we have kept firmly in mind the Western view of life and therewith the personality, we are able to grasp the full significance of the individuality. Thus we see how important it is that the East directed its attention to the individuality, to the Bodhisattvas, who go through many incarnations; and how important it is that the West first directed its attention to the contemplation of the single personality, in order, later on, to grasp what the individuality is.

Now I think there are many Anthroposophists who will say: “Well, this is something we have just to believe, when Elijah, John the Baptist, Raphael and Novalis are mentioned.” For many the main thing is that they must just believe. It is essentially the same as when from the scientific side some fact is asserted that many people have to believe, such as that this or that spectrum appears when certain metals are examined by spectrum analysis, or when for instance, the nebula in Orion is so examined. Some people have certainly investigated it, but the others, the majority, have to believe. But that is after all not the essential point. The essential point is that Anthroposophy is at the beginning of its development, and will bring souls to the point of examining for themselves such matters as we have discussed to-day. In this respect, Anthroposophy will help forward human evolution very rapidly.

I have put before you a few instances, which I submit as resulting from the occult point of view regarding life. Take only the three points which we have considered and you will see that by knowing in what way life is related to the Spirit of the Earth, the art of healing can be given a new direction and supplied with new impulses; how Raphael can only be understood when not only his personal forces are taken into account, but also those forces which came from his father. The third point is that we can educate children when we know the interplay of forces acting on them. Outwardly people admit that they are surrounded by numberless forces which incessantly influence them, that man is continually influenced by air, the temperature, his surroundings and the other Karmic conditions under which he lives. That these things do not interfere with his freedom everyone knows. They are the factors with which we have to reckon to-day. But that man is continually surrounded by spiritual forces and that these spiritual forces must be investigated is what Anthroposophy has to teach men: they will have to learn to take these forces into account and will have to reckon with them in important cases of health and disease, of education and life. They will have to be mindful of such influences as come from without, from the super-sensible world, when, for instance, some one’s friend dies and he then shares those sympathies and ideas that belonged to him. What has been said does not hold good for children only, but for all ages. It is not at all necessary that people should know with their ordinary consciousness in what way the forces of the super-sensible world are active. Their general frame of mind may show it, even their state of health or illness may show it. And those things which signify the connection of man’s life on the physical plane with the facts of the super-sensible worlds have a still wider bearing.

I should like to put before you a simple fact which will show you the nature of this connection, a fact which is not invented, but has been observed in many cases. A man notices at a certain time that he has feelings which formerly he did not know; that he has sympathies and antipathies which formerly he did not know; that he succeeds easily where before he found difficulties. He cannot explain it. His surroundings cannot explain it to him, nor do the facts of life itself give him any clue. In such a case it can be found, when we observe accurately (it is true that one must have an eye for such things), that now he knows things which he did not know before and does things which he could not do before. If we examine matters further and have had experience of the teachings of Anthroposophy, it may be that we shall hear something like the following from him: “I do not know what to think of myself. I dream of a person whom I have never seen in my life. He comes into my dreams, though I never had anything to do with him.” If we follow the matter up it will be found that till now he had no occasion to occupy himself with this person. But this person had died and now first approaches him in the spiritual world. When he had come near enough to him he appeared to him in a dream which was yet more than a dream. From this person, whom he had not known in life, who, however, after death, gained influence on his life, came the impulses which he had not known before. It is not a question of saying: “It is only a dream.” It is far more a question of what the dream contained. It may be something which, although in the form of a dream, is nearer to reality than the outer consciousness. Does it matter at all whether Edison invents something in a dream or in clear waking consciousness? What matters is whether the invention is true, is useful. So also it does not matter whether an experience takes place in dream-consciousness or in physical consciousness; what is of importance is whether the experience is true or false.

If we now summarise what we are able to understand from what has just been said, we may say “It is clear to us when we learn to apply Anthroposophy, that life appears to us in quite a different light from before.” In this respect people who are very learned in materialistic ways of thought are but children. We can convince ourselves of this at any time. When to-day I came here by train I took up the pamphlet of a German physiologist in its second edition. In it the writer says that we cannot speak of “active attention” in the soul, of directing the attention of the soul to anything, but that everything depends on the functioning of the various ganglia of the brain; and because the tracks have to be made by thoughts, everything depends on how the separate brain cells function. No intensity of the soul intervenes, it depends entirely upon whether this or that connecting thread in our brain has been pulled or not. These learned materialists are really children. When we lay our hands on anything of this kind one cannot help thinking how guileless these people are! In the same pamphlet one finds the statement that lately the centenary of Darwin was celebrated, and that on that occasion, both qualified and unqualified people spoke. The author of the pamphlet thought himself of course quite specially qualified. And then follows the whole brain-cell theory and its application. But how is it with the logic of the matter? When one is used to considering things in accordance with truth and then sees what these great children offer people concerning the meaning of life, the thought occurs to one that after all it comes to the same as if someone should say that it was simply nonsense that a human will had any part in the way the railways intersect the face of Europe! For it is just the same as if at a given time one considered all the engines in their varied parts and functions, and said that these are organised in such and such a way and run in so many directions. But the different roads meet at certain junctions and through them the engines can be turned in any direction. What would occur if this were done would be a great disarrangement of trains on the European railways. Just as little, however, can it be asserted that what takes place in the human brain cells as the life of human thought depends only on the condition of the cells. If such learned people then happen, without previous knowledge, to hear a lecture on Anthroposophy, they look upon that which is said as the most utter nonsense. They are firmly convinced that a human will can never have anything to do with the mode and manner in which the European engines run, but that it depends on how they are heated and driven.

So we see how at the present day we stand confronted by questions regarding the meaning of life. On the one side there is darkness, on the other the spiritual facts press in upon us. If we grasp what has been said to-day we can, with this as a basis, put the question before our soul in the way in which it has to be put in Anthroposophy, namely: What is the meaning of life and existence, and especially of human life and human existence?

If we observe with clairvoyant consciousness the present form of a human being, composed as it is of physical body, etheric body, astral body, and ego, there emerges most clearly the important fact that as regards size and shape—at least in the upper portions—the physical and etheric bodies are approximately equal. The head in particular, if we think of it as it appears physically, coincides almost completely with its etheric counterpart: the latter protrudes only slightly beyond the physical head. This is by no means the case in animals. Even in the higher animals there is a tremendous difference between the shape and size of the etheric head and the physical head. If you observe, for example, a horse clairvoyantly, you see that the etheric head extends far beyond the physical head and has a decidedly different shape. If I were to draw a picture of what hovers above the trunk and head of an elephant you would be greatly astonished at the true being of that animal; for all that physical perception sees of such an animal is merely the solidified part in the center.

Let us examine this fact. The degree of man's perfection on our physical plane is basically due to the fact that his etheric body so nearly coincides with his physical body, that they so nearly cover. But that was not always the case. There have been periods in the evolution of our Earth, treated in the foregoing lectures, in which man's etheric body by no means thus coincided with his physical body, as it does today. In fact, man's progress during the course of his development is due to the circumstance that gradually his protruding etheric body crept into his physical body, as it were, until in time the two came to coincide. Here it is essential to keep in mind that this interpenetration of the etheric and physical bodies had to take place at a very special moment in Earth evolution if mankind was to achieve its development in the right way. Had it occurred earlier, man would have reached a certain stage of development too soon: he would have hardened there, and not been able to proceed. But a possibility for him to develop resulted from the fact that his etheric and physical bodies came to coincide at just the right time.

In order to understand this, let us examine more closely evolution as we viewed it in its larger outlines yesterday and the day before. Visualize once more how, at the beginning of our Earth evolution, the earth was united with the sun and the moon. At that time man had arisen again out of the potential germ that comprised the physical, etheric, and astral bodies. He existed, so to speak, in his first earth form, that is, the only form possible for him at a time when the Earth still contained both sun and moon. In spiritual-scientific literature this period of Earth evolution which man passed through, together with his planet, is usually called the Polarian period. It would lead too far afield today to explain this name, so let us simply accept it. Then came the time when the sun prepared to withdraw from the Earth, and when the beings that could not continue, so to speak, with the denser and constantly solidifying substances of the Earth departed with the finer substances of the sun. This period we call the Hyperborean. And then followed an epoch in which only the moon remained united with the Earth, a time in which increasing barrenness spread over our Earth life. Yesterday we learned how human souls abandoned this Earth and only withered human forms remained. In spiritual-scientific literature this period is called the Lemurian. It is the period in which the splitting off of the moon occurred, resulting in a revival on earth of all the kingdoms established there. The mineral kingdom stood least in need of reanimation, the plant kingdom more, and still more, the animal kingdom, while the further development of the human race called for the most outstanding and powerful forces.

This revival commenced with the moon's exit. As mentioned yesterday, only a handful of human beings were left, and these consisted of the three principles acquired during the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions, to which the potential ego was added on the Earth. But at the time of the moon's exit the human being did not bear the flesh substance in which we encounter him later: he was composed of the most tenuous matter of that time. In the Lemurian period the solid minerals of today were still liquid, dissolved in the other substances that nowadays are segregated as aqueous matter, like water. The air was still saturated with dense vapors composed of a great variety of substances. Pure air and pure water, as we know them today, did not exist at that time except in very limited areas of the earth.

It was out of the purest substances of the period, then, that man molded his evanescent, tenuous body. Had he employed coarser substances his body would have acquired a form with definite outline, with sharply defined contours; and these contours would have been inherited by the descendants, and the human race would there have come to a standstill. But it was not intended that man should create his form in matter of that sort: rather had he to see to it that he could freely move his corporeal substance according to the impulses of his soul. The matter forming his body was at that time so soft that it obeyed the impulses of will in all directions. Nowadays you can stretch out your hand, but by no effort of the will can you make it ten feet long. You cannot coerce matter because form, as it is today, is bequeathed. At the time of which we are speaking that was not the case. The human being could be shaped at will, could build the form according to the dictates of his soul. His further development demanded, so to speak, that he incorporate himself, after the withdrawal of the moon, in the softest possible substances, leaving his body plastic and flexible, capable of obeying the soul's every wish.

Then came the time when certain elements, indispensable for our present-day life—air and water—were purged of all they contained in the way of dense matter: what had formerly been dissolved in the water was now precipitated. Just as dissolved substances precipitate in cooling water, so the dissolved matter sank, as it were. The water became pure water and the air was rid of denser matter: air and water were reconditioned, and man was able to use this rarefied matter for his physical development.

From this third age human beings gradually passed over into an evolutionary epoch we call the Atlantean, because during that time the greater part of the human race inhabited a continent, now submerged, situated in the area now occupied by the Atlantic Ocean—between America, and Europe-Africa. So after the Lemurian age had continued yet a while, the human race carried on its evolution on the Atlantean Continent; and that was the scene of all that I shall now describe, as well as of much that was mentioned yesterday.

At the time the moon withdrew from the earth only a small number of the human souls that were to incarnate later were on the earth: most of them were distributed over the various cosmic bodies; but during the last part of the Lemurian and the first part of the Atlantean age these souls descended to the earth. Only few human beings, as I told you, had been able to experience the crisis of the Lemurian epoch, for only the most robust—those capable of living in the ever hardening substance prior to the moon's exit—had survived the moon crisis of the earth. But when everything that had solidified during the moon crisis began to soften again, when descendants appeared who were no longer compressed within fixed outlines through hereditary exigency, but were mobile, then the souls gradually descended from the various planets and moved into these bodies. Those forms, however, that incorporated very soon after the withdrawal of the moon retained their rigid form through heredity, and could not receive human souls even after the separation.

We can visualize the process accurately by imagining the craving of these souls to return to earth. Down there, forms came into being in the greatest variety, descendants of those that had been left over after the separation; and among these, many different degrees of solidification obtained. Those human souls—in fact, all soul beings—that in a certain respect felt as yet the least urge to unite completely with a physical substance now selected the softest forms for occupation, and soon abandoned them again. But the others, those that united at this early stage with the hardened forms, were imprisoned in them and consequently were compelled to remain behind in evolution. In fact, the animals ranking closest to man came into being as a consequence of this impatience on the part of certain souls descending from cosmic space. These souls sought earth bodies prematurely and made definitely bounded forms of them before they could be wholly permeated by etheric bodies. The human form remained plastic until such time as it could adapt itself completely to the etheric body; and it was thus that the physical and etheric bodies came to cover, as explained, approximately during the last third of the Atlantean age. Previously, the human soul principle that descended kept the earthly body in a fluid state and guarded against a complete amalgamation of the etheric body with any part of the physical body. This interpenetration of the etheric and physical bodies came about at a definite point in time. The Atlantean epoch was already under way when the physical human body assumed a definite form and began to harden.

Had nothing else occurred at this point in the Atlantean development, had no other factor intervened, evolution would have taken a different course: man would have passed rather rapidly from an earlier to a later state of consciousness. Before he became a complete unit as regards the principles of body and soul he was a clairvoyant being, but his clairvoyance was dim and dull. He was able to see into the spiritual world but he could not address himself as “I”, could not distinguish himself from his surroundings. What he lacked was self-consciousness, for this only entered during the period of evolution in which the physical body united with the etheric body.

Well, if nothing else had intervened, the following is what would have occurred in a comparatively short time: Hitherto man had had a consciousness of the spiritual world. Plants, animals, and so on, he could not see distinctly, but what he did see was spirit enveloping them. He would not have seen the form of an elephant, for instance, very clearly, but he would have seen the etheric principle extended over its physical body. This form of human consciousness would have gradually disappeared, the ego would have evolved along with the coincidence of the physical and etheric bodies, and man would have seen the world confronting him as though from another side. While previously he had beheld clairvoyant pictures he would thenceforth have perceived an outer world; but at the same time he would have perceived as well the spiritual beings and spiritual forces underlying this outer world. He would not have seen the physical image of the plant as we see it today: he would have perceived the spiritual being of the plant coincident with the physical image.

We may ask why, in the course of evolution, the dim, clairvoyant form of consciousness was not simply superseded by a consciousness of objects which at the same time would have provided perception and knowledge of spirit. That is because precisely during the moon crisis, when man was reviving, he began to be influenced by beings that must be characterized as retarded, although they are on a higher plane than man. We have already acquainted ourselves with a. number of such higher beings and we know that some of them ascended to the sun, others to various planets. But there were also spiritual beings that had failed to complete the tasks they were obligated to perform on the moon. These beings, ranking lower than the Gods and higher than man, we designate Luciferic beings after their leader, Lucifer, the highest and most powerful among them.
At the time of the moon crisis man had evolved to the point of possessing a physical body, etheric body, astral body, and ego. For his ego, he was indebted to the influence of the Spirits of Form; for his astral body, to the Spirits of Motion; for his etheric body, to the Spirits of Wisdom; and for his physical body, to the Thrones. The Spirits of Form—Exusiai, or Mights, in Christian esotericism—were those who made it possible for the germinal ego to join the other principles. Now, if man had been involved only in the normal stream of development, and if all the beings surrounding him had properly absolved their tasks, certain beings would have worked on his physical body, others on his etheric body, others on his astral body, and still others on his ego—as they should have done, to put it that way—each being working on the principle assigned to him. But here were those beings that had lagged behind on the Moon, the Luciferic beings. If they had been able to carry on their work in the right way they would have been appointed to work on the ego; but on the Moon they had only learned to work on the astral body, and that entailed a significant consequence. Had it not been for these Luciferic spirits man would have received his ego principle; and his further development would have taken a course, in the last third of the Atlantean age, involving the exchange of his dim, clairvoyant consciousness for the consciousness of outer objects. As it was, however, the effects of the Luciferic spirits penetrated his astral body like powerful rays.

And the nature of these effects? Well, the astral body is the vehicle of impulses, desires, passions, instincts, and so forth; and in the constitution of his astral body man would have developed quite differently had he not been affected by the Luciferic spirits. He would have developed only such impulses as would have guided him surely and advanced him unfailingly. The spirits would have led him to see the world as consisting of objects behind which the spiritual beings revealed themselves. But what would have been lacking is freedom, enthusiasm, the sense of independence—a passion for these loftier considerations. Man would have lost his former clairvoyant consciousness and would have regarded the glories of the world as a sort of God, for he would have become a component part of divinity. Furthermore, such a view of the world would have induced a perfect reflection of itself in his mind, but in all his perfection he would have remained a reflection of the universe.

But before this could occur the Luciferic spirits filled his astral body with passions, instincts, desires which merged with all that became part of him in the course of his evolution. This meant that he was able not only to perceive the stars, but at the same time to warm to a rapturous enthusiasm in beholding them; not merely to follow the divinely inspired instincts of his astral body, but to unfold impulses of his own through freedom. That is what the Luciferic spirits had infused into man's astral body; but it implied another factor, something else that they had given him as well: the potentiality of evil, of sin. This would not have existed had he been led forward step by step by the more sublime Gods. The Luciferic spirits made man free and endowed him with the capacity for enthusiasm; but at the same time they created the eventuality of base desires. Given a normal course of development, man would in every case have associated the normal sensations with whatever cropped up, so to speak. As it was, however, he derived greater pleasure from things of the sense world than he should, he clung to these with undue interest. And the result was that the process of physical solidification set in at an earlier stage than it would have done otherwise.

So man attained to a solid form sooner than the divine-spiritual beings had intended, so to speak. It was in the last third of the Atlantean age that he really should have descended from a gaseous to a solid form; as it was, however, he descended prematurely and became a solid being. That is what the Bible describes as the “fall of man”.

But during the period just considered there were also lofty spiritual beings at work on the ego with which they had endowed man. In the same measure as these human beings descend again and unite with human bodies, the spiritual beings infuse the forces that advance man on his cosmic path: they hold a protecting hand over him. But on the other hand we have the activity of those beings who failed to learn to work on the ego, who now work on the human astral body, and there develop quite special instincts.

Observing the physical life of man in this period we see an image of these two mutually antagonistic powers: the divine-spiritual powers at work upon the ego, and the Luciferic beings. Let us now trace the spiritual factor of this process. During the time of desolation on earth the human souls ascended to the various cosmic bodies belonging to our solar system. Now they returned in as far as they were able to find bodies in the line of physical heredity. Remembering that the earth was most sparsely populated precisely at the time of the moon's withdrawal, you can imagine that the expansion of the human race started from a mere handful of people. Gradually the number increased, more and more souls descended and occupied the bodies coming into being on earth. Throughout a long period there were descendants only of the few who were present at the time of the moon's exit, and upon these the lofty sun forces themselves acted: these human beings had retained sufficient vigor to present to the sun forces a point of contact, even during the moon crisis. They and their descendants felt themselves to be sun men, so to say.

Let us understand this clearly. For simplicity's sake, imagine that during the moon crisis there existed all told but one human couple. (I do not wish to decide whether this was actually the case.) This couple has descendants, these in turn have descendants, and so on; and thus the human race branched out. Now, as long as there existed only the progeny, in the narrower sense, of the old sun men, all these enjoyed a quite special form of consciousness by reason of their ancient clairvoyance. At that time human memory included not only experiences that had occurred since birth, or as is the case today, since a certain point of time after birth, but everything that the father, grandfather, and even early progenitors, had experienced. Memory reached back to the ancestors, to all with whom a man was related by blood. That was because in a certain sense the sun forces held a protecting hand over those of blood relationship, those who traced their descent to the human beings who had survived the moon crisis. The sun forces had engendered the ego consciousness and maintained it throughout the line of blood generation.

Now the human race multiplied and the souls that had ascended into cosmic space returned to earth. Those souls, however, in whom the sun forces were strong enough still felt these forces, although they had descended and become related to spheres quite different from those of the sun. But then came the time when these souls, as later descendants, lost that connection, and with it the common ancestral memory. The more the human race multiplied, the dimmer became this living consciousness that was connected with blood heredity. This was because the powers that led men forward and implanted the ego in them were opposed by the Luciferic powers that influenced the astral body. The Luciferic powers obstructed everything that cemented men into a unit. What they wanted to teach them was freedom, self-consciousness.

So the oldest survivors of the moon's withdrawal thought of the word “I” as referring not only to what they experienced themselves, but to what their ancestors had experienced. They felt the common sun being that worked in their blood. And even after this state, too, had passed, those who had come down, for instance, from Mars felt the bond that united them with the protecting Spirit of Mars. Having been recruited from Mars souls, the descendants of those who had come down from Mars felt the protecting hand of the Mars Spirit.

It was against this group feeling, in which love held sway, that the Luciferic spirits attempted their attack. They learned how to cultivate the individual human ego, as opposed to the common ego developed by such groups. The farther back we seek, the more firmly we find the community consciousness bound up with consanguinity, and passing on in time we see it decreasing: man's feeling of independence becomes ever stronger, and he senses the necessity for developing an individual ego, as opposed to the common ego.

Thus two realms were at work in the human being, the realm of the Luciferic spirits and that of the divine-spiritual beings. The divine-spiritual powers brought men together, but did so by means of blood ties, while the Luciferic beings sought to separate them, to segregate them individually. These two forces were active throughout the Atlantean age, and they remained so even after the Atlantean Continent perished through the great catastrophies, and Europe, Asia, and Africa on one side, and America on the other, had assumed their present form. They are still active in the fifth earth epoch, right into our own time.

Thus we have described five earth epochs: the Polarian, in which the earth was still united with the sun, the Hyperborean, in which the moon was still united with the earth, and the Lemurian; then the Atlantean; and finally, the post-Atlantean, our own age. We learned how the Luciferic spirits intervened and worked against the divine-spiritual powers that drew men together, and we have come to understand that something very different would have occurred had the Luciferic spirits not taken a hand in human evolution. In the last third of the Atlantean epoch the old form of clairvoyant consciousness would have been exchanged for a consciousness of objects—but an object consciousness permeated by spirit. As it was, however, the Luciferic spirits brought about a premature hardening of the physical body, enabling man to get his bearing in the physical world at an earlier stage than would otherwise have been the case; and the result of all this was that man entered upon the last third of the Atlantean age in a totally different state than he would have done if the divine-spiritual beings alone had guided him. Instead of an outer world aglow and spiritualized by higher beings, he now beheld a physical world only, for the divine world had withdrawn from him.

The Luciferic spirits had taken a hand in the shaping of man's astral body; and now, because he had united with the physical world, Zarathustra's “Ahrimanic spirits”—we can also call them “Mephistophelian” spirits—interfered with his outer perception, with the relation of his ego to the outer world, with his ability to distinguish his ego from the outer world. The constitution of his physical, etheric, and astral bodies is not as it would have been had only the superior Gods worked on them. Beings we term Luciferic gained access to his astral body and expelled him from Paradise sooner than was intended; and the consequence of this Luciferic activity was the interference of the Ahrimanic, or Mephistophelian, spirits in his perception of the outer world, which they now showed him in its physical form only, not as it is in reality. That is why these spirits that dupe mankind with what is spurious are called by the Hebrew People mephiz-topel: mephiz, the corrupter, and topel, the liar. This eventually became Mephistopheles; and it is merely another name for Ahriman.

Now, what did Ahriman effect in man, as opposed to Lucifer? Lucifer brought about a deterioration of the forces of the astral body greater than it should have been, as well as the premature induration of man's physical substance though it must be kept in mind that thereby the attainment of freedom was made possible. The Mephistophelian spirits, on the other hand, prevented man from discerning the spiritual basis of the world, tricking him instead with a mere illusion of it. Mephistopheles induced in men the belief that the outer world is nothing but a material existence, that there is no such thing as spirit underlying and permeating all material substance. The scene so beautifully portrayed in Goethe's Faust has been enacted by mankind throughout the ages. On the one hand we see Faust seeking the path into the spiritual world; on the other, Mephistopheles, who calls that spiritual world “nothingness”, because it is to his interest to represent the sense world as being all that exists. Faust replies, as would every spiritual scientist in this case, “In what is nothingness to thee I hope to find my all”.—Only when we know that in every tiniest particle of matter there is spirit and that the idea of matter is a lie; only when we recognize Mephistopheles as that spirit in the world who vitiates our conceptions—only then can the outer world appear to us as it really is.

What was needed to carry mankind onward, to prevent its succumbing to the fate prepared for it by Lucifer, by Ahriman? As early as in the Atlantean age the influence of the Luciferic beings had to be checked. Even then there were men who worked on themselves in such a way as to counteract the Luciferic influence in their astral bodies, who were on the alert for what emanated from Lucifer, who examined their own souls for Luciferic passions, instincts, and desires. And as a result of eradicating these Luciferic qualities they recaptured the capacity for seeing in its pure form what all men would have seen had they not been exposed to the influence of the Luciferic, and later of the Ahrimanic, spirits. By means of pure living and conscientious self-knowledge certain human beings of the Atlantean epoch sought to rid themselves of this Luciferic influence; and this enabled them, at a time when remnants of the old clairvoyance still survived, to see into the spiritual world and discern loftier things than could the others, whose physical substance had hardened as a result of the Luciferic influence. Such men—those that cast out the Luciferic influence by means of strong-minded self-knowledge—became the leaders of the Atlantean age. We can call them the Atlantean Initiates.

Now what, exactly, was the nature of Lucifer's activity? In the main, Lucifer directed his attack against everything that united human beings, against blood ties that expressed themselves in love. But the leaders just mentioned knew how to resist Lucifer's influence, and by doing so they acquired the ability to envision this connection spiritually: they came to realize that the factor conditioning man's progress lies not in separation, in segregation, but in that which unites men. Hence these initiates endeavored to restore, as it were, the ancient state of affairs in which the upper spiritual world was not yet threatened by Lucifer's power. They aimed at eradicating the personal element: Kill that which endows you with a personal ego! Gaze back to olden times when the ties of blood spoke so eloquently that a descendant experiened his ego as reaching back to his earliest forebear; when the first ancestor, long since dead, was still held sacred!—The age of the primeval human community—that is the age into which the Atlantean leaders endeavored to lead men back. Throughout this whole period of evolution there appeared such leaders of mankind again and again, proclaiming, Endeavor to resist the influences that would drive you to a personal ego; try to learn what it was that bound men together in olden times! Then you will find the way to the divine spirit.

This attitude had retained its purest form among those we know as the ancient Hebrew People. Just recall and try to understand the exhortations of the leaders of this old Hebrew nation. They stood before their people and proclaimed: You have reached a state in which each of you stresses the personal ego in him—each of you seeks his being within himself alone. But development will be furthered only by subduing the personal ego and exerting all those forces that guide you to the consciousness of being all connected, of having descended one and all from Abraham, of being members of a great organism reaching back to Abraham. If you are told, “I and Father Abraham are one”, and you take these words to heart, ignoring all that is personal, then you have the right consciousness that will lead you to the divine; for the path to the divine leads by way of the original ancestor.—The vital impulse determining the leadership of those who contended against the Luciferic influence was preserved longest by the Hebrew People. But man had been entrusted with the mission to develop and cultivate the ego, not to destroy it. The old initiates had no quarrel with the personal ego, but they maintained that the ascent to the old Gods should be made by way of the early forebears.

With the coming to earth of the great impulse, as we characterized it yesterday—the Christ impulse—a new utterance resounded for the first time clearly and distinctly; and it was among the Hebrew People that it could be heard with special clarity and distinctness, because this was the people that had longest preserved what we may consider an echo of the old Atlantean initiate teaching.

Christ transmuted that teaching of the old initiates, and said: It is possible for man to cultivate his own personality. He need not obey the physical bonds of blood brotherhood alone: he can look into his own ego and there seek, and find, the divine.—What we have characterized as the Christ impulse bears within it the force which, if we unite with it, offers us the possibility of establishing a spiritual bond of brotherhood among human beings, in spite of the individuality of the ego. Thus the Christ force was very different from the one prevailing in the community into which He was placed. There the idea was, I and Father Abraham are one. That is what I must know if I am to find the way back to the divine.—But Christ said: There is another Father through Whom the ego will find the way to the divine; for the ego, or the I am, is one with the divine. There is something eternal thou canst find if thou remainest within thyself.

That is why Christ could characterize the force He would transmit to men with the words we find in the Gospel of St. John, Before Abraham was, was the I am. And the “I am” was nothing other than the name which Christ called Himself. If men can enkindle the thought within them: Within me there dwells something that existed long before Abraham; I have no need to go back to Abraham, for I find the divine Father Spirit within me—then they can turn into good all that Lucifer contributed to the cultivation and fostering of the ego, which had proved an obstacle in the path of humanity. The transformation of Lucifer's influence into good: that was the deed of Christ.

Supposing that only the high divine-spiritual beings had been at work, those who had restricted love to blood ties, who kept demanding of men that they go back through the whole line of descent if they would find the way to the Gods. Had that occurred, mankind would have been herded together into one human community without enjoying full consciousness; and never would men have risen to a complete awareness of their freedom and independence. But that is what the Luciferic spirits inoculated in man's astral body before the advent of Christ. They segregated men, tried to make them independent of each other. But Christ turned to good the evil that would inevitably have resulted had the Luciferic influence become extreme. If the latter had run its full course mankind would have lost its capacity for love. Lucifer endowed man with freedom and independence; Christ transmuted this freedom into love. And the bond Christ brought mankind is what will lead men to spiritual love.

This point of view throws a different light on the deeds of the Luciferic spirits. Are we still justified in thinking of their once having lagged behind as due to indolence and laziness? No indeed, for it was done in order to fulfill a definite mission in Earth evolution: to prevent men from becoming fused into a mere mass through purely natural ties, as well as to prepare the way to Christ. It is as though they had said to themselves on the Moon: We will renounce our present goal in order to be able to work on the Earth in conformity with progressive development. This is one of the examples that show how an ostensible evil, a seeming error, can turn out for the best in the whole context of world events. To enable the Christ to intervene in Earth evolution at the right moment, certain Moon spirits had to sacrifice their Moon mission and prepare for Him. This shows us that Lucifer's retardation on the Moon can also be regarded in the light of a sacrifice.

In this way we come ever closer to a truth which should be engraved in the human soul as a lofty moral maxim: When you see something evil in the world, do not say, Here is evil—that is, imperfection; ask, rather, How can I attain to the enlightenment which will show me that on a higher plane this evil is transformed into good by the wisdom of the cosmos? How can I learn to tell myself: Here you see naught but imperfection because you are as yet unable to grasp the perfection of this imperfect thing?

Whenever man sees evil he should look into his own soul and ask himself, Why am I not yet able to recognize the good in this evil that confronts me?

The intellectual life of the present would have a completely different physiognomy if two books had not been published in this century: Darwin's "Origin of Species" and Lyell's "Principles of Geology". The professors in the lecture halls of the universities would be talking about many things differently than they do, the religious consciousness of educated mankind would be different from what it is, Ibsen would have embodied other ideas in his dramas than those we hear from them: if Darwin and Lyell had not lived. Dramatic and narrative literature would have lived a different life if we had not had these books. The content of these books is an important part of the intellectual air we breathe. We cannot easily imagine how we would think if Darwin and Lyell had not inoculated their thoughts into the mental organism of mankind. One need never have read a line in the "Origin of Species" and in the "Principles of Geology", and yet one is under the influence of these books. Not only our thinking, but also our emotional life has received its characteristic imprint from them. A young person who reads these books today believes he will find nothing in them that he does not already know. Many of us grow up with the ideas of Darwin and Lyell before we know more than the names of these great observers of nature. Many of us have to speak a very different language to people who have not grown up with these ideas than the one they are used to. We begin to look at people who don't understand our language as beings who are remnants of a past historical era. How many of them think this way is not important. The main thing is that we see in ourselves, who think this way, the real and true people of the present. We know that we are the young and others are the old. We look forwards, the others look backwards. The future cultural historian will have to let our ideas begin a new epoch of thought. The thought of the future evokes joy and delight in us, because those to come will regard us as their forerunners. These future people will know more and be able to do more than we do, but they will have feelings that are similar to ours. We are closer to these people than to the pulpit orator who was born at the same time as us. The first, the greatest, the leaders among us are Lyell and Darwin. We are infinitely grateful to them, because we believe that without them we would belong to a dying part of humanity. Our sentient life canonizes them. We shudder at the spiritual experience we would have lived if they had not preceded us. We have even lost the "right judgment" of the greats of older times, because they are the most important to us. We do not grieve about this. We do not want to take things objectively as they are; we want to live, and we want our life to become something; it should carry the forces of growth within it. We would rather look at what has not yet been done than lose ourselves in contemplations about what has happened. If we were more just, we would be less fruitful. We have the injustice of the son who loves his parents more than others who are far away from him. We love Darwin more than Aristotle, Lyell more than Plato, because Darwin and Lyell are our well-known fathers, Plato and Aristotle are ancestral images that we have hung up in our mental castle. When we read Lyell and Darwin, it is as if someone were giving us a warm hand; when we study Plato and Aristotle, it is as if we were walking in a hall of ancestors. We live with Darwin and Lyell, we learn about Plato and Aristotle.

We do not always agree with Darwin and Lyell, we disagree with them on many things, but we feel that they speak in our language even when we disagree with them. We count among our own some who oppose Darwin and Lyell in the sharpest terms, but we know that even our opposition, if it is fruitful, could only have been so through those two minds. Great minds also produce their opponents, and together with their opponents they move humanity forward. Even if future mankind should come to substantially different ideas than Darwin and Lyell had, these sons of the future will still have to honor their fathers in these two men.

Lyell gave a new character to thinking about the formation of the earth. Before him, this thinking was dominated by ideas that seem childish to us today. We do not see why the enormous mountain formations should have been caused by forces other than those that still prevail today. Lyell saw that in the course of verifiable periods of time, the flowing water detaches the rock masses from the mountains and deposits them elsewhere. As a result, formations disappear in one place and others reappear in another. This happens slowly. But if we imagine such effects continuing over immeasurable periods of time, we can imagine that the entire surface of the earth has taken on the shape it has today as a result of these forces that still prevail today. In addition, there are the transformations that the earth's surface is undergoing today through floating icebergs, through moving glaciers that carry debris and boulders with them. Think also of earthquakes and volcanic phenomena that raise and lower the ground, think of the wind that raises dunes and the slow, gradual weathering of rocks. Everything that has happened up to now to form the earth may have happened in such a way that these effects were present over long periods of time. Today we have no doubt that this is the case. But before Lyell, people thought differently. They believed that the mighty mountain formations were caused by extraordinary forces acting instantaneously. When a form of the earth's surface was ripe for destruction, the creative power intervened anew to give our planet a new face; so thought our ancestors. When we examine the earth's crust, we realize that a number of earth epochs have been there and have perished again. We find the submerged earth epochs as layers of the earth's crust piled on top of each other. In each layer we discover fossilized animal and plant forms. Our ancestors assumed that over and over again the creative power had caused the life of an epoch to perish and put a new one in its place. Lyell showed that this is not the case. Through the gradual action of the forces which are still active today, one epoch has developed from another; and in each succeeding epoch those living beings have lived which have survived from the previous one and which have been able to adapt themselves to the new conditions of life. The creatures of the more recent periods of the earth are the descendants of those who lived in older ones.

This idea was of infinite fertility for Darwin. He recognized that animal species can change over the course of time. That animal species are not each created separately, but that they are related to each other, that they have diverged. If this realization is taken together with Lyell's thoughts, it becomes clear that all life on earth, past and future, forms a great natural unity. The processes that we see today with our eyes and understand with our minds have always taken place. No others have ever been there. What is happening today is happening without miracles and without supernatural influences. Darwin and Lyell have shown that it has always been so miraculous on earth. This makes them the creators of a whole new world view, a whole new way of feeling, a new way of life.

They have the greatest influence on our ethical life. They have freed us from the feelings we should have towards beings that dwell in the wind and weather. Those who see the approaching God in the thunderstorm feel differently than those who believe that thunderstorms and earthquakes are as natural as the effect of a stone falling to the ground. Those who believe in the ideas of Darwin and Lyell have a different attitude to the forces of nature than those who believe in the supernatural gods. The gods can no longer help him, they can no longer harm him, they cannot reward or punish him. He has become free of fear and hope in the face of inscrutable powers. The natural is the universe to him, and the natural can be explored. It can also be conquered and placed at the service of human ideas. One can consciously make oneself master of the earth. Reverence diminishes, but pride increases. One wants to rule wisely, but no longer humbly obey and submit to impenetrable counsels. Darwin and Lyell have replaced the world view of pride, of self-confident man, with the world view of humility, of submissiveness. They have done unspeakable things for the liberation of mankind. They taught us not to erect an altar to the "unknown god", but to offer our services to the known spirit of nature. They taught man not to regard himself as a dwarf, but to act as a hero. They have created a free path for action, for will, because they have freed it from the heavy weight that is attached to it by the will working on the other side. They have shown knowledge where it has its field, and have thus given it real power. It is only since Lyell and Darwin that it can be perceived as truth that knowledge is power. Before Lyell and Darwin, people had to tell themselves to submit to what they were destined to do; today they can tell themselves to do what they realize is valuable.

All relapses into an old world view will not be able to stop the development described. What Ernst Haeckel said at the founding of the Ethical Society in Berlin, that modern morality, modern religiosity and modern action are based on the modern world view: it is an incontrovertible truth. I cannot speak of Lyell or Darwin without thinking of Haeckel. All three belong together. What Lyell and Darwin began, Haeckel continued. He developed it in the full awareness that he was not only serving the scientific need, but also the religious consciousness of mankind. He is the most modern mind, because his world view is free of old prejudices, as was the case with Darwin, for example. He is the most modern thinker, because he sees the natural as the only field of thought, and he is the most modern perceiver, because he wants life to be organized according to the natural. We know that he celebrates Lyell's birthday with us as a feast day, because for him it must be the day that brought the one founder of the new world view. The feast day dedicated to Lyell makes us realize that we belong to the Haeckel community. When Haeckel talks to us about the processes of nature, every word has a secondary meaning for us that is related to our feelings. He is at the helm; he steers powerfully. Even if we don't exactly want to go past some of the places he leads us to, he still has the direction we want to take. He got the helm from Lyell and Darwin's hands; they couldn't have given it to anyone better. He will hand it over to others who will lead in his direction. And our community sails swiftly forward, leaving behind the helpless ferrymen of the old worldviews.

These are the ideas that November 14, when Lyell's birthday returned for the hundredth time, stirred in me.

We have attempted so far to throw light from many different points of view upon the characteristic features of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch in which we are now living and which began in the early fifteenth century (1413) and will end in the middle of the fourth millennium. Now many of the symptomatic events of today are closely associated with the events which occurred at the beginning of this epoch. For reasons which will become evident in the course of the following lectures and which are connected with the whole of human evolution, the fifth post-Atlantean epoch can be subdivided into five stages. We have now reached a moment of particular importance, the decisive turning point when the first fifth of this epoch passes over into the second fifth.

I propose to give you a general survey of the impulses which have determined the history of religions, in so far as they are symptomatic of this fifth post-Atlantean epoch. Many things which I shall say in the course of this survey cannot be more than pointers or indications. For when we embark upon a serious study of the religious impulses of mankind the facts we have to consider are so difficult to convey owing to the limitations of language that we can only discuss them approximately; we can only hint at them. And you must therefore endeavour to read between the lines of what I shall say today and tomorrow, not because I wish to be a mystery monger, but because language is too powerless to express adequately the multiplicity and variety of impulses of spiritual reality. Above all I must call your attention today to the fact that he who studies these things from the standpoint of spiritual science must really be prepared to think and reflect. Today mankind has more or less lost the habit of thinking. I do not mean, of course, the thinking that is the proud boast of modern science, but the thinking which is capable of distinguishing precisely between different forms of reality. In order to be able to study what we are now called upon to examine, I must remind you that I have already spoken of the two currents in the evolution of mankind. I do not know whether all those present here listened so carefully to the expressions I coined in the course of my previous lectures that they have already noticed what I wish to underline especially today, so that no misunderstanding shall arise in the following observations.

In the evolution of post-Atlantean humanity I emphasized one thing in particular, namely that mankind of the postAtlantean epoch matures progressively at an ever earlier age. In the first post-Atlantean epoch, that of ancient India, men remained capable of developing physically up to the age of fifty; in the ancient Persian epoch development ceased at an earlier age, and in the Egypto-Chaldaean epoch at an even earlier age. In the Graeco-Latin epoch development was only possible up to the age of thirty-five and in our present epoch, as a consequence of natural development, men cease to develop beyond the age of twenty-eight. Any further development must be derived from spiritual impulses. Then, in the sixth post-Atlantean epoch, mankind will be unable to develop after the age of twenty-one—and so on. With the passage of time, therefore, mankind matures physically at an ever earlier age.

It is important to bear in mind that this evolution I have just mentioned involves the whole of mankind. In relation to this first current of evolution, as I shall call it, we can say that mankind is at the stage of development which the individual experiences between the ages of twenty-eight and twenty-one. These are the years when the Sentient Soul especially is developed. We are therefore at a stage in evolution when mankind as a whole is in process of developing especially the Sentient Soul. Such is the one current of evolution.

Now I have already spoken of another current of evolution. In this second evolution, in the first post-Atlantean epoch, that of ancient India, the individual developed his etheric body; in the second post-Atlantean epoch, that of ancient Persia, he developed the sentient body; in the Egypto-Chaldaean epoch the sentient soul, in the Graeco-Latin epoch the intellectual or mind soul, and in the present epoch the consciousness soul. Such is the second current of evolution. The first current of evolution which concerns the whole of mankind runs its course concurrently with the second evolution which concerns the isolated individual within the body of mankind. To repeat, the isolated individual develops the Consciousness Soul in the present epoch.

The third current of evolution to be considered is that which shows the development of the different peoples over the whole earth. In this context I have already pointed out that the Italian people, for example, develops in particular the Sentient Soul, the French people the Intellectual or Mind Soul and the English speaking peoples the Consciousness Soul. This is the third current of evolution. These currents are loosely intermingled and I am unable to point to any particular principle that is characteristic of our present epoch.

These three currents of evolution meet and cross in every human being; they invade every individual soul. The world order is by no means simple! If, for your benefit, you want the world order to be explained in the simplest terms, then you must become either professor or King of Spain. You will recall the legend of the King of Spain who declared, when a much less complicated cosmic system than the one envisaged here was explained to him: had God entrusted the ordering of the world to him he would not have made it so complicated, he would have simplified things. And certain textbooks or other popular encyclopaedias have always followed the principle that truth of necessity must be simple! This principle is not adopted of course on rational grounds, but solely for reasons of convenience, I might even say, out of general human indolence. By systematic arrangement where everything is classified or catalogued one comes no nearer to reality. And those facile, I might even say, slick concepts much favoured today in the domain of the official sciences are light-years away from true reality.

If we wish to understand all that plays into the souls of men of this fifth post-Atlantean epoch we must bear in mind the part-evolution that intervenes in the total evolution of mankind. For this part-evolution proceeds slowly and gradually. In order to examine briefly the religious development of this epoch it will be necessary to keep this threefold evolution to some extent in the background. About the time when the fifth post-Atlantean epoch began, not only many things, but also the religious life of mankind was caught up in a movement that has repercussions, a movement that is by no means concluded today. We must have a profound understanding of this movement if men really wish to make use of the Consciousness Soul. For only when men arrive at a clear insight and understanding of what is happening in evolution will they be able to participate in the further development of mankind on earth.

Towards the beginning of the fifteenth century the first stirrings of the religious impulses are perceptible. Let us first look at these religious impulses in Europe for having seen them at work in Europe we shall also have a picture of their impact upon the rest of the world. The first religious stirrings had long been prepared—since the tenth century or even the ninth century in the spiritual life of Europe and the near East. And this was due to the fact that the after effect of the Christ impulse manifested itself in the civilized world in a very special way. This Christ impulse, as we know, is a continuous process. But this abstract statement—that the Christ impulse is a continuous process—says in reality very little. We must also ascertain in what way it acquires a distinct and separate character, in what way, in its differentiations, it is then modified, or better still, in what way it is metamorphosed and assumes widely different forms.

That which began to awaken at the beginning of the fifteenth century and which still exercises a profound influence on men today—often unconsciously and without their suspecting it—is related to the catastrophic events of the present time. And this is explained by the fact that from the ninth and tenth centuries onwards it was possible for the ‘people of the Christ’ to emerge in a certain territory within the civilized world, a people that was endowed with the special inborn capacity to become the vehicle of the Christ revelation for future generations. We express a profound truth when we say that in this epoch and in readiness for later times a people had been specially prepared by world events to become the People of the Christ.

This situation arose because, in the ninth century, that which continued to operate as the Christ impulse acquired, to some extent, a separate character in Europe and this differentiation is seen in the fact that certain souls showed themselves capable of receiving directly the revelation of the Christ impulse (i.e. this particular form of the Christ impulse), and that these souls were diverted towards Eastern Europe. And the consequence of the controversy between the Patriarch Photius¹ and Pope Nicholas I was that the Christ impulse in its particular intensity was diverted to the East of Europe.

As you know this led to the famous filioque controversy—the question whether the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father and the Son, or from the Father only. But I do not wish to enter into disputes over dogma. I want to discuss that which has a lasting influence—that differentiation, that metamorphosis of the Christ impulse which is characterized by the fact that the inhabitants of Eastern Europe were receptive to the continual influx of the Christ impulse, to the continuous presence of the ‘breath’ of Christ. This particular form (or metamorphosis) of the Christ impulse was diverted to the East and in consequence, the Russian people, in the widest sense of the term, became, within the framework of European civilization, the People of the Christ.

It is particularly important to know this at the present time. Do not say in face of present events^T1 that such a truth seems strange, for that would be to misunderstand the fundamental principle of spiritual wisdom, namely, that, paradoxically, external events often contradict their inner truth. That this contradiction may occur here and there is not important; what is important is that we recognize which are the inner processes, the true spiritual realities. For example, we have here the map of Europe (points to a diagram on the blackboard); we see sweeping eastwards since the ninth century that spiritual wave which led to the birth of the People of the Christ.

What do we mean by saying that the People of the Christ arose in the East? We mean by this—and it can be verified by studying the symptoms in external history; you will find, if you bear in mind the inner processes and not the external facts which often contradict reality that this statement is fully confirmed—we mean by this that a territory has been set apart in the East of Europe where lived men who were directly united with the Christ impulse. The Christ is ever present as an inner aura impregnating the thinking and feeling of this people.

One cannot find perhaps any clearer or more direct proof for what I have said here than the personality of Solovieff, the most outstanding Russian philosopher of modern times. Read him and you will feel—despite the peculiar characteristics of Solovieff which I have already discussed from other points of view—you will feel how there streams into him directly what could be called the Christ inspiration. This inspiration acts so powerfully within him that he cannot imagine the entire structure of social life otherwise than ordained by Christ the King, the Invisible Christ as sovereign of the social community. To Solovieff everything is imbued with the Christ, every single action performed by man is permeated with the Christ impulse which penetrates even into the muscular system. The philosopher Solovieff is the purest and finest representative of the People of the Christ.

Here is the source of the entire Russian evolution up to the present day. And when we know that the Russian people is the People of the Christ we shall also be able to understand, as we shall see later, the present evolution in its present form. That is the one metamorphosis prepared by the People of the Christ one example of the differentiations of the Christ impulse.

The second differentiation of the Christ impulse was the work of Rome which, having diverted the authentic and continuous metamorphosis of the Christ impulse towards the East, transformed the spiritual sovereignty of Christ into the temporal sovereignty of the Church and decreed that everything relating to Christ had been revealed once and for all at the beginning of our era, that it had been a unique revelation never to be repeated. And this revelation had been entrusted to the Church and the task of the church was to bear witness to this revelation before the world. As a consequence, the Christian revelation became at the same time a question of temporal power and was taken over by the ecclesiastical authorities. It is important to bear this in mind because it meant no less than that the Christ impulse was thereby in part emasculated. The Christ impulse in its totality resides in the People of the Christ who transmit it in such a way that the Christ impulse actually continues to exercise a direct influence at the present time. The Church of Rome has interrupted this continuity, it has concentrated the Christ impulse upon a historical event at the beginning of our era and has attributed everything of a later date to tradition or written records, so that henceforth everything will be administered by the Church.

Thus, amongst the peoples over whom the Church of Rome extended its influence, the Christ impulse was dragged down from the spiritual heights (in the East it had always remained at this level) and was put at the service of political intrigue and was caught up in that tangled relationship between politics and the Church which, as I have already described to you from other points of view, was characteristic of the Middle Ages. In Russia, although the Czar had been nominated ‘father’ of the Russian Orthodox Church, this troubled alliance between politics and the Church did not really exist, it was only apparent in external events. An important secret of European evolution is here concealed. The real confusion of questions of power and problems of ecclesiastical administration originated in Rome.

This confusion of Power politics and ecclesiastical administration, by reason of inner grounds of historical evolution, had reached a critical stage for the Christ impulse towards the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. As you already know this epoch is the epoch of the Consciousness Soul when the personality asserts itself and seeks to become self-reliant. Consequently it is particularly difficult, after the birth of the autonomous personality, to come to terms with the question of the personality of Christ Jesus himself. Throughout the Middle Ages and up to the fifteenth century the Church had maintained its dogmas concerning the union of the divine and spiritual with the human and physical in the person of Christ. These dogmas of course had assumed different forms without provoking hitherto deepseated spiritual conflicts. In those countries where Roman Catholicism had spread, these conflicts arose at a time when the personality, seeking to arrive at inner understanding of itself, also sought enlightenment upon the personality of Christ Jesus. In reality the controversies of Hus, Wyclif, Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, of the Anabaptists Kaspar Schwenkfeld, Sebastian Frank and others revolved round this question. They wanted clarification upon the relationship between the divine and spiritual nature of Christ and the human and physical nature of Jesus. This was the central question and of course it created a great stir. It raised many doubts about that current of evolution which had blunted the unbroken influence of the Christ impulse to such an extent that the Christ impulse was limited to a single event at the beginning of our era and was to be transmitted henceforth only by the Church authorities. And so we can say: ‘all those who came under the influence of Rome became the People of the Church.’ Churches and sects, etcetera, were founded which had a certain importance.

But sects were also founded in Russia you will reply. Now to employ the same word which has different connotations in different areas is to lose all sense of reality. A study of Russian sects shows that they do not bear the slightest resemblance to the religious sects in the territories which at one time had been under the influence of the Church of Rome. It is not a question of designating things by the same term; what matters is the reality pulsating through them.

For reasons I have already mentioned, the life and aspirations of men at the beginning of the fifteenth century are characterized by a spirit of Opposition to the uniformity of the Roman Church which operated through suggestionism.

This assault of personality again provokes a reaction—the counter-thrust of Jesuitism which comes to the support of the Romanism of the Church. Jesuitism in its original sense (though everything today, if you will forgive the brutal expression, is reduced to idle gossip and Jesuitism is on everyone's lips) is only possible within the Roman Catholic Church. For fundamentally Jesuitism is based on the following: whilst in the true People of the Christ the revelation of the Christ impulse remains in the super-sensible world and does not descend into the physical world (Solovieff wishes to spiritualize the material world, not to materialize the spiritual world), the aim of Jesuitism is to drag down the Kingdom of God into the temporal world and to awaken impulses in the souls of men so that the Kingdom of God operates on the physical plane in the same way as the laws of the physical world. Jesuitism, therefore, aspires to establish a temporal sovereignty in the form of a temporal kingdom of the Christ. It wishes to achieve this by training the members of the Jesuit order after the fashion of an army. The individual Jesuit feels himself to be a spiritual soldier. He feels Christ, not as the spiritual Christ who acts upon the world through the medium of the Spirit, but he feels Him—and to this end he must direct his thoughts and feelings—as a temporal sovereign whom he serves as one serves an earthly King, or as a soldier serves his generalissimo. The ecclesiastical administration, since it is concerned with spiritual matters, will, of course, be different from that of a secular military regime; but the spiritual order must be subject to strict military discipline. Everything must be so ordained that the true Christian becomes a soldier of the generalissimo Jesus. In essence this is the purpose of those exercises which every Jesuit practises in order to develop in himself that vast power which the Jesuit order has long possessed and which will still be felt in its decadent forms in the chaotic times that lie ahead. The purpose of the meditations prescribed by Ignatius Loyola² and which are faithfully observed by Jesuits is to make the Jesuit first and foremost a soldier of the generalissimo Jesus Christ.

Here are a few samples. Let us take, for example, the spiritual exercise of the second week. The exercitant must always begin with a preliminary meditation in which he evokes in imagination ‘the Kingdom of Christ.’ He must visualize this Kingdom with Christ as supreme commander in the vanguard leading his legions, whose mission is to conquer the world. Then follows a preliminary prayer; then the first preamble.

‘1. It consists in a clear representation of the place; here I must see with the eyes of imagination the synagogues, towns and villages which Christ our Lord passed through on His mission.’

All this must be visualized in a complete picture so that the novice sees the situation and all the separate representations as something which is visibly present to him.

‘2. I ask for the grace which I desire. Here I must ask of our Lord the grace that I should not be deaf to His call, but should be prompt and diligent to fulfil His most holy will.’

Then follows the actual exercise. (What I have quoted so far were preparatory exercises.) The first part again includes several points. The soul is very carefully prepared.

‘ Point 1. I conjure up a picture of a terrestrial King chosen by God our Lord Himself to whom all Christians and all princes render homage and obedience.’

The exercitant must hold this before him in his imagination with the same intensity as a sensory representation.

‘Point 2. I observe how the King addresses all his subjects and says to them: “It is my will to conquer all the territories of the infidels. Therefore whosoever would go forth with me must be content with the same food as myself, the same drink and clothing, etcetera. He must also toil with me by day and keep watch with me by night so that he may share in the victory with me, even as he shared in the toil.”’

This strengthens the will, in that sensible images penetrate directly into this will, illuminate it and spiritualize it.

‘Point 3. I consider how his faithful subjects must answer a King so kind and so generous, and consequently how the man who would refuse the appeal of such a King would be deserving of censure by the whole world and would be regarded as an ignoble Knight.’

The exercitant must clearly recognize that if he is not a true soldier, a warrior of this generalissimo, then the whole world will look upon him as unworthy.

Then follows the second part of this exercise of the ‘second week.’

‘The second part of this exercise consists in applying the previous example of the terrestrial King to Christ our Lord in accordance with the three points mentioned above.

‘Point 1. If we regard an appeal of the terrestrial King to his subjects as deserving of our consideration, then how much more deserving of our consideration is it to see Christ our Lord, the Eternal King, and the whole world assembled before Hirn, to see how He appeals to all and each one in particular saying:

“It is my will to conquer the whole world and to subjugate my enemies and thus enter into the glory of my Father. Whoever therefore will follow me must be prepared to labour with me, so that, by following me in suffering, he may also follow me in glory.”’

‘Point 2 To consider that all who are endowed with judgement and reason will offer themselves entirely for this arduous service.’

‘Point 3 Those who are animated by the desire to show still greater devotion and to distinguish themselves in the total service of their eternal King and universal Lord will not only offer themselves wholly for such arduous service, but will also fight against their own sensuality, their carnal lusts and their attachment to the world and thus make sacrifices of higher value and greater importance, saying:

“Eternal Lord of all things, with Thy favour and help, in the presence of Thy infinite Goodness and of Thy glorious Mother and of all the saints of the heavenly Court, I present my body as a living sacrifice and swear that it is my wish and desire and my firm resolve, provided it is for Thy greater service and praise, to imitate Thee in enduring all injustice, all humiliation and all poverty, both actual and spiritual, if it shall please Thy most holy Majesty to choose me and admit me to this life and to this state.”

‘This exercise should be practised twice a day, in the morning on rising and one hour before lunch or dinner.’

‘For the second week and the following weeks it is very beneficial at times to read passages from The Imitation of Christ or from the Gospels and lives of the Saints’ to be read in conjunction with those meditations which train especially the will through visualization. One must know how the will develops when it is under the influence of these Imaginations—this martial will in the realm of the Spirit which makes Christ Jesus its generalissimo! The exercise speaks of the ‘heavenly Court which one serves in all forms of submission and humility.’ With these exercises, which through the imagination train especially the will, is associated something which exercises a powerful influence upon the will when it is continually repeated. For the schooling of Jesuits is above all a schooling of the will. It is recommended to repeat daily the above meditation in the following weeks as a basic meditation and where possible in the same form, before the selected daily meditation, before the ‘contemplation.’ Let us take, for example, the fourth day. We have the normal preliminary prayer then a first preamble.

‘We visualize the historical event—Christ summons and assembles all men under His standard, and Lucifer, on the other hand, under his standard.’

One must have an exact visual picture of the standard. And one must also visualize two armies, each preceded by its standard, the standard of Lucifer and the standard of Christ.

‘2. You form a clear picture of the place; here a vast plain round about Jerusalem, where stands Christ our Lord, the sole and supreme commander of the just and good, with His army in battle order; and another plain round about Babylon where stands Lucifer, chief of the enemy forces.’

The two armies now face each other—the standard of Lucifer and the standard of Christ.

‘3. I ask for what I desire: here I ask for knowledge of the lures of the evil adversary and for help to preserve myself from them; also for knowledge of the true life of which our sovereign and true commander is the exemplar, and for grace to imitate Him.’

Now follows the first part of the actual exercise: the standard of Lucifer; the exercitant therefore directs his spiritual eye of imagination upon the army which follows the standard of Lucifer.

‘Point 1. Imagine you see the chief of all the adversaries in the vast plain around Babylon seated on a high throne of fire and smoke, a figure inspiring terror and fear.’

‘Point 2. Consider how he summons innumerable demons, scattering them abroad, some to one City, some to another and thus over the whole earth without overlooking any province, place, station in life or any single individual.’

This despatch of demons must be visualized concretely and in detail.

‘Point 3. Consider the address he makes to them, how he enjoins upon them to prepare snares and fetters to bind men. First, they are to tempt men to covet riches, as he (Lucifer) is accustomed to do in most cases, so that they may the more easily attain the vain approbation of the world and then develop an overweening pride.’

‘Accordingly, the first step will be riches, the second fame, the third pride. And from these three steps Lucifer seduces man to all the other vices.’

Second Part. The standard of Christ

‘In the same way we must picture to ourselves on the opposing side, the sovereign and true commander, Christ our Lord.

‘Point 1. Consider Christ our Lord, beautiful and gracious to behold, standing in a lowly place, in a vast plain about the region of Jerusalem.’

‘Point 2. Consider how the Lord of the whole world chooses so many persons, apostles, disciples, etcetera, and sends them forth into all lands to preach the Gospel to men of all stations in life and of every condition.’

‘Point 3. Consider the address which Christ our Lord holds in the presence of all His servants and friends whom He sends on this crusade, recommending them to endeavour to help all, first urging upon them to accept the highest spiritual poverty, and, if it should find favour in the eyes of His divine Majesty and if, should he deign to choose them, to accept also actual poverty; secondly to desire humiliation and contempt, for from these two things, poverty and humiliation, springs humility.’

‘Accordingly there are three steps: first, poverty as opposed to riches, secondly, humiliation and contempt as opposed to worldly fame, thirdly, humility as opposed to pride. And from these three steps the ambassadors of Christ shall lead men to the other virtues.’

The spiritual exercises are practised in this way. As I have already said, what matters is that a temporal kingdom, and organized as such, must be represented as the army of Christ Jesus. Jesuitism is the most consistent, the best, and moreover extremely well organized expression, of what I referred to as the second current—the impulse of the People of the Church. We shall find in effect that fundamentally this impulse of the People of the Church is to reduce the unique revelation which occurred at Jerusalem to the level of a temporal Kingdom. For the end and object of the exercises is ultimately to bring the exercitant to choose himself as soldier serving under the banner of Christ and to feel himself to be a true soldier of Christ. That was the message entrusted to Ignatius Loyola through a revelation of a special kind. He first performed heroic deeds as a soldier, then as he lay on a sick bed recovering from his wounds was led as a result of meditations (I will not say by what power) to transform the martial impulse which formerly inspired him into the impulse to become a soldier of Christ. It is one of the most interesting phenomena of world history to observe how the martial qualities of an outstandingly brave soldier are transformed through meditations into spiritual qualities.

Where the continuous influence which the Christ impulse had exercised within the People of the Christ had been blunted, it is clear that Jesuitism had to assume this extreme form. And the question arises: is there not another form of Christianity diametrically opposed to that of Jesuitism? In that event a force would have to emerge in the territory occupied by the People of the Church. From the different reactions of Lutheranism, Zwinglianism,³ Calvinism, Schwenkfeldism and the Anabaptists, from this chaos and fragmentation, a force would have to emerge which not only follows the line of Jesuit thought (for Jesuitism is only an extreme expression of Catholic dogma)—but which is diametrically opposed to Jesuitism, something which seeks to break away from this community of the People of the Church, whilst Jesuitism seeks to be ever more deeply involved in it. Jesuitism wishes to transform the Christ impulse into a purely temporal sovereignty, to found a terrestrial state which is at the same time a Jesuit state, and which is governed in accordance with the principles of those who have volunteered to become soldiers of the generalissimo Christ. What could be the force which is the antithesis of Jesuitism?

The counter-impulse would be that which seeks, not to materialize the spiritual, but to spiritualize the material world. This impulse is a natural endowment amongst the true People of the Christ and finds expression in Solovieff⁴ though often tentatively. Within the territory of the true People of the Church there exists something which is radically opposed to Jesuitism, something which rejects any direct intervention of the spiritual in power politics and external affairs, and wishes the Christ impulse to penetrate into the souls of men, and indirectly through these souls to operate in the external world. Such an impulse might well appear in the People of the Church—because, in the meantime, much might tend in this direction; but it would seek to direct evolution in such a way that the spiritual Christ impulse penetrates only into the souls and remains to some extent esoteric, esoteric in the best and noblest sense of the term. Whilst Jesuitism wishes to tranform everything into a temporal kingdom, this other current would simply regard the temporal kingdom as something which, if need be, must exist on the physical plane, something, however, which unites men so that they can lift up their souls to higher realms. This current which is the polar opposite of Jesuitism is Goetheanism.

The aim of Goetheanism is the exact opposite of that of Jesuitism. And you will understand Goetheanism from a different angle if you consider it as by nature diametrically opposed to Jesuitism. That is why Jesuitism is, and ever will be the sworn foe of Goetheanism. They cannot coexist; they know each other too well and Jesuitism is well informed on Goethe. The best book on Goethe, from the Jesuit standpoint of course, is that of the Jesuit father, Baumgartner.⁵ What the various German professors and the Englishman, G. H. Lewes,⁶ have written about Goethe is pure dilettantism compared with the three volumes by Baumgartner. He knows what he is about! As an adversary he sees Goethe with a more critical eye. Nor does he write like a German Professor of average intelligente or like the Englishman, Lewes, who depicts a man who was indeed born in Frankfurt in 1749; he is said to have lived through the same experiences as Goethe, but the man he depicts is not Goethe. But Baumgartner's portrait is reinforced with the forces of will derived from his meditations. Thus Goetheanism, which is destined to play a part in the future, is linked to something which is directly associated with the epoch beginning with the fifteenth century and leading via the Reformation to Jesuitism.

I will discuss the third current tomorrow. I have described to you today the People of the Christ, the People of the Church and the third current which interpenetrates them and then the reciprocal action of these currents, in order to give you an insight into recent religious developments through a study of their symptoms. I will say more of this tomorrow.

• 1. Photius (815–869). Patriarch of Constantinople and author of the great schism between the Orthodox Church and the Church of Rome. This schism finally centred on the ‘filioque’ controversy. The Western Church added filioque (‘and the Son’) to the Constantinopolitan Creed, the so called double Procession of the Holy Ghost. Photius refused the insertion of filioque in the Nicene Creed. The Orthodox Church sees in Photius the champion of their cause against Rome. The addition of filioque became a dogma of the Roman Church in the fourth Lateran Council 1215.
• T1. i.e. the Russian Revolution.
• 2. Ignatius Loyola(1491–1556). Wounded at siege of Pamplona 1521 and during convalescence read devotional books. 1522 retired to Manresa, devoted himself to prayer and meditation. Sketched the fundamentals of the Spiritual Exercises. Took the monastic vows, gathered a few companions (e.g. Francis Xavier, Peter Favre) who became nucleus of the Society of Jesus. The Spiritual Exercises is a book of devotion and a training manual. Approved by Pope Paul 1540. Loyola beatified 1609, canonized 1622. See R. Fülop Müller, Power and Secrets of the Jesuits, 1930; Father J. Brodrick, The Origin of the Jesuits, 1940; and Ignatius Loyola, the Pilgrim rears, 1956.
• 3. Zwingli and Calvin—see notes to Lecture VI.
  
  Kaspar von Schwenkfeld (1489–1561). An Evangelical sectarian. His followers formed communities in Silesia and Pennsylvania.
  
  Anabaptists. A Christian sect of the Reformation which rejected infant baptism and believed in the establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth. Associated with the peasant revolts in Saxony 1521. Leaders executed, banished or expelled.
• 4. Vladimir Solovieff (1853–1900). Russian theologian, philosopher and poet. His philosophy has a profound mystical quality. Opposed to Slavophil nationalism and the despotic state. See N. Berdyaev, The Russian Idea, 1947. (This book useful on the interpretation of the Russian make-up, cf. Lecture I of this course); N. L. Lossky, History of Russian Philosophy, 1953.
• 5. Alexander Baumgartner (1841–1910). Catholic literary historian. Member of the Jesuit Order. His book Goethe 1885 emphasizes the Catholic point of view.
• 6. George Henry Lewes (1871–78). Best known for the Life and Works of Goethe, 2 voll, 1855.

What is written at the end of the Gospel of John is a relief for me when I speak about the Fifth Gospel today. We remember at the end it states that in no way is everything that Christ Jesus did told, for if one wanted to tell of all the events there wouldn't be enough books in the world to contain them. So it cannot be doubted that in addition to what is described in books, much more can have occurred.

I would like to tell you about Jesus of Nazareth from the time he was twelve years old. As you know, it was the time when the I of Zarathustra, which was incarnated in one of the two Jesus children transferred, be means of a mystical act, into the other Jesus child, into the Jesus child described at the beginning of the Gospel of Luke. [See Note 1] So we will begin with the year in Jesus of Nazareth's life when the Jesus of the Luke Gospel received Zarathustra´s I. We know that the Gospel of Luke describes the moment when Jesus is said to have been lost and he is found again sitting with the scribes and how all were so astonished by the powerful answers he gave. We know, however, that these meaningful, powerful answers came from the fact that the spiritually veiled memory of the I of Zarathustra acted in a way to enable Jesus to give such surprising answers. We also know that due to the mother's death in one of the families and the father's death in the other, both families joined together and the Jesus boy who bore Zarathustra's I grew up in that unified family.

According to the Fifth Gospel it was a very special growing up period. At first his immediate neighbors had a most favorable opinion of him because of the surprising answers he gave in the temple. They saw the potential scholar (scribe) in him, one who could reach a high level of scholarship. They had great hopes for him and hung on his words. Nevertheless, he became ever more silent – so much so that they became ill-disposed to him. He, however, was engaged in an inner struggle, a mighty struggle in himself between his twelfth and eighteenth years. In his soul there was something like a rising up of the treasures of wisdom, as if the sum of the former Zarathustra-knowledge was rising in the form of Jewish scholarship.

At first the boy listened attentively to everything the many scribes/scholars said who came to his home in Nazareth, and was able to give exceptional answers. In the beginning he astonished those scribes who looked upon him as a wunderkind. But then he became more and more silent and listened without speaking to what the others said. At the same time great ideas, meaningful moral impulses arose in his soul. What he heard from the scribes at that time made an impression on him, but it was an impression which often left a trace of bitterness in his soul, because he had the feeling – already in those young years, mind you – that there was much uncertainty, things that could lead to error in what the scribes spoke based on the old tradition, from the old scriptures which are collected in the Old Testament. It was always depressing when he heard that in ancient times the spirit came over the prophets, that God himself had spoken to the old prophets and that now inspiration had abandoned the succeeding generations. But he paid special attention to one thing, because he felt that it would happen to him.

“Yes, that great spirit, that powerful spirit which came to Elias, for example, no longer speaks.” What did still speak, however, which many believed to be an inspiration from the spiritual heights, what still spoke was a weaker voice which some believed to hear as coming from the spirit of Jahveh himself. “Bath Kol” was the name given to that inspiring voice, although a weaker, lesser voice than that which inspired the ancient prophets, but nevertheless something similar. Some in Jesus' surroundings spoke thus of Bath Kol. Later Jewish scriptures also tell of this Bath-Kol. [See Note 2]

Now I will insert something into this Fifth Gospel which doesn't really belong, but will help to explain Bath Kol. Later on there was a conflict in two rabbinical schools, because the famous Rabbi Elieser ben Hirkano formulated a teaching and as proof of the teaching – the Talmud also describes this – he claimed that he could work miracles. He had a Carob tree rise from the earth and replant itself a couple of hundred feet away; he made a stream flow backwards, and as the third miracle he invoked a “voice from heaven” that his teaching would be made manifest. But this was not believed in the opposing rabbinical school of Rabbi Josia, who replied: “However much Rabbi Elieser has carob trees transplant themselves from one place to another, however much he makes streams flow upwards, or invoke Bath Kol – it is written in the Law that the eternal laws of being must be lain in the mouths of men and in the hearts of men. And if he wants to convince us, this Rabbi Elieser, he should not invoke Bath Kol, but he should invoke what human hearts can apprehend.”

I tell this story because we can see from it that soon after the introduction of Christianity Bath Kol was still held in a somewhat lesser esteem in certain rabbinical schools. But she [Bath=daughter; Kol=voice – ed.] had bloomed as an inspiring voice amongst rabbis and scribes.

While the young Jesus heard and felt all that, he was receiving inspiration through Bath Kol. What was remarkable was that by means of fecundation of his soul with the I of Zarathustra, Jesus was in fact capable of assimilating what the others around him knew. Not only that he could give the scribes such strong answers in his twelfth year, but he could also hear the Bath Kol in his own heart. But it was just the fact of this inspiration through Bath Kol that caused him to experience bitter inner struggles when he was sixteen, seventeen years old. For the Bath Kol revealed to him – and he believed it to be true – that in the continuation of the stream of the Old Testament, the same spirit which had spoken to the Jewish teachers of long ago would no longer do so. One day – and it was terrible for his soul – he believed that Bath Kol revealed to him the following: I no longer reach to the heights where the spirit can reveal to me the truth about the future of the Jewish people. It was a terrible moment when the Bath Kol seemed to reveal that she could not continue the old revelations, that she was incapable of continuing to inspire the old Judaism. Jesus of Nazareth felt the ground under his feet swept away, and many times he said to himself: All the soul powers with which I thought myself to possess only allow me to understand that in the evolutionary substance of Judaism no capacity remains to ascend to the revelations of the spirit of God.

Imagine ourselves for a moment in the soul of Jesus of Nazareth when such he experienced this. It was at the same time – in his sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth years – when he traveled, partly because of his trade, partly for other reasons. On those travels he got to know various regions of Palestine, and probably various places outside Palestine. At that time an Asiatic cult was propagated over the Middle East, and even in Europe, an Asiatic cult which was a mixture of many other cults, but which was mainly the Mithras cult – one can see this clearly when one clairvoyantly absorbs the Akasha Record. In many places in various regions temples for the Mithras rituals existed. In many places it was similar to the Attis ritual, but it was essentially the Mithras ritual. In a certain sense it was ancient paganism, but penetrated by the Mithan or Attis ceremonies. An example of the extent to which it spread is the fact that St. Peter's Cathedral in Rome stands on the same spot where a Mithras cult was previously celebrated. Yes, one must say what for many Roman Catholics will seem blasphemous: that the rituals of St. Peter's cathedral and everything which derives from them is in its outer form not unlike the old Attis ritual, on whose site St. Peter's stands.

Jesus of Nazareth learned about what was done in those sites when he began traveling around during his sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth years. And he continued doing so later. He learned to know the souls of the pagans through physical, outer observation. Because of the incorporation of the I of Zarathustra into his soul the capacity to do this developed in a natural way, something that others could only attain with great effort: clairvoyant power. He experienced in those pagan religious rituals something which others did not – shocking things. It may sound fantastic, but I must emphasize that when Jesus was present at certain pagan rituals as the priests carried out the ceremonies at the altars, he saw that demonic beings were attracted to them. He also discovered that many idols which they prayed to were not images of good spiritual beings, but of demonic powers. Yes, he also discovered that the demonic powers often merged with the faithful who were attending the services. It is not difficult to understand why these things are not described in the other gospels. And it is only now possible to speak about them in the confines of our spiritual movement, for human souls can only now, in our times, understand the enormously profound experiences which played out in the young Jesus of Nazareth.

His wandering continued into his twentieth, twenty-second, twenty-fourth years. He always felt bitterness in his soul when he saw the force of demons spawned by Lucifer and Ahriman and how paganism had gone so far as to take the demons for gods, even to depict wild demonic powers in idols, and the powers were attracted by these images and rituals and merged with the praying people, possessed them. They were bitter experiences, and they came to a climax when he was about twenty-four years old.

It was a new, difficult experience added to the Bath Kol disappointment. I must say that at this time I am not able to indicate at which place in his travels this experience took place, although it was possible for me to decipher the scene correctly to a large extent. Only the place is still unknown to me. It seems to me that the scene took place outside Palestine. Although I cannot say that with certainty, I must describe the scene.

In his twenty-fourth year Jesus of Nazareth came to a place where sacrifices were being made to a certain god at a pagan place of worship. Around it, however, were sad people affected by all kinds of terrible mental and physical illnesses. The place of worship had long since been abandoned by the priests. And Jesus heard the people wailing: “The priests have abandoned us and the blessings of the sacrifice do not come to us and we are leprous and sick because the priests have abandoned us.” Those people cried out to Jesus. Infinite love for these aggrieved people flared up in his soul. The people must have noticed something of this infinite love; it must have made a profound impression on those lamenting people who had been abandoned by their priests and, as they believed, by their gods. And then arose, instantaneously, in the hearts of most of them who saw the expression of infinite love on Jesus' face, the need to say: “You are the new priest sent to us.” They pushed him to the altar, they placed him at the pagan altar. He stood there and they demanded of him that he perform the offering in order that they receive the gods' blessings. While that happened, while they were pushing him to the altar, he fell down like dead, his soul left him and the people around him who thought their god was to come back saw that the one they took to be the new priest sent from heaven fell down as if dead. But Jesus of Nazareth's soul felt itself carried up to a spiritual height, to the realm of the sun. And now he heard, as if coming from the realm of the sun, words which he had previously often heard through Bath Kol. But now Bath Kol was transformed, had become something completely different. The voice also came from a different direction, and what Jesus of Nazareth heard, translated into our language, may be summarized by the words I was first able to pronounce when we recently laid the foundation stone of our building in Dornach. [See Note 3]

Occult obligations exist! And following one such occult obligation I disclosed what Jesus of Nazareth heard from the transformed voice of Bath Kol. He heard the words:

AUM, Amen!
Evil rules,
Witness of the severing I,
Selfhood's guilt by others owed,
In daily bread now felt,
In which heaven's will be not done,
For man deserted your kingdom,
And forgot your names,
You fathers in the heavens.

I cannot otherwise translate these words which Jesus of Nazareth heard from the transformed voice of Bath Kol. [See Note 4] Not otherwise! It was what the soul of Jesus of Nazareth brought back when he awoke again. And when he looked for the crowd of troubled and burdened people who had carried him to the altar, they had fled. And when he directed his clairvoyant gaze to the distance he could only see a horde of demonic beings united with those people.

That was the second meaningful event, the second meaningful climax of the various periods which Jesus of Nazareth lived through since his twelfth year. No, my dear friends, the events which made the strongest impression on the maturing Jesus of Nazareth were not of the pleasant kind which could have a happy effect on his soul. He had to encounter the depths of human nature before the baptism in the Jordan took place.

Jesus of Nazareth returned home from his travels. It was when his father, who had remained at home, died – when Jesus was about twenty-four years old. When Jesus came home his soul contained the powerful impression of the demonic forces which deeply influenced the pagan religions. But it is the case that one only reaches certain stages of higher knowledge by encountering the depths of life, and it was also so for Jesus of Nazareth that he – in a place that I don't know – when he was around twenty-four years old, saw so deeply into human souls, in souls in which were concentrated all the human sorrows of that time; he had also delved deeply into wisdom, which is like a red hot iron penetrating the soul. But it makes the soul so clairvoyant that it can see into the spiritual reaches of space. Thus was the relatively young soul of Jesus equipped with a calm, vivid ability to read the spirit. Jesus of Nazareth had become a person who could look more deeply into the secrets of life than any other earthly being, because no one previously had been able to observe how profound human misery can be. He had seen concentrated misery – how through religious ceremonies one can conjure all the demonic powers. Surely no other person on the earth had so deeply observed this human misery as Jesus of Nazareth had, none had such an infinitely deep feeling in his soul as he had when he saw those people possessed by demons. Surely no other was so prepared for the question: How, how can the spreading of this misery be prevented?

Thus Jesus of Nazareth became an initiate not only through the ability to see, and through wisdom, but also through life itself. That became known to people who at that time had come together in a certain order, which is known the world over as the Essene Order. The Essenes were people who cultivated a kind of secret rite and teachings at certain places in Palestine. It was a strict order. Whoever wanted to enter it had to first pass through a strict probation year, mostly longer. He had to show by his conduct, his culture, by his dedication to the highest spiritual powers, by his sense of justice and human equality, by his disregard for earthly possessions and so forth, that he was worthy to be initiated. Then there were various degrees which one passed through to reach a life determined by separation from normal humanity in a strict monastic discipline and by certain purification exercises through which all that was physically and spiritually unworthy was meant to be eliminated in order to approach the spiritual world. This was expressed in various symbolic laws of the Essene Order. Deciphering the Akasha Record shows that the word Essene derives from, or is at least related to the Hebrew word “essin” or “assin”, which means “shovel” or “trowel”, because the Essenes always carried a small trowel as an insignia, something that in many of today's orders has been retained. The Essenes' objectives were also expressed in certain symbolic practices – that they never carried coins, that they could not pass through gates which had been painted or were even close to graven images. As the Essene Order at that time enjoyed a certain degree of recognition, unpainted gates were made in Jerusalem so they could enter the city. If an Essene came to a painted gate he would have to turn back. The Order possessed ancient manuscripts and traditions, about whose contents the members were obliged to maintain strict silence. They could teach, but only what they had learned in the Order. All who entered the Order had to give all their possessions to the Order. The number of Essenes was four to five thousand. People came from all over the known world and observed the strict rules. Even if it was far away, in Asia Minor, or even farther, all property, a house for example, had to be given to the Order. So the Order possessed small properties from many places – houses, gardens, acres of land. None was admitted to membership who did not contribute everything he owned to the Essene community. Everything belonged to all, there was no personal ownership. A very strict rule for our present day mentality – but what was understandable was that the Essene could care for the needy with the goods belonging to the Order, except those who belonged to his own family.

There was an Essene community in Nazareth, made possible by a donation, so the Order was known to Jesus. At the Order's center they were aware of the wisdom which Jesus' soul possessed – especially among the most important members. They had what we can call a prophetic view that a Messiah must come to the world. Therefore they were on the lookout for especially gifted people. They were deeply impressed when they learned about Jesus of Nazareth. It is no surprise, then, that they accepted Jesus of Nazareth in their community – not as a member of the Order proper – more as a guest, without him having to pass the trials of the lower degrees. And the wisest Essenes were, in a certain sense trusting, open-hearted towards this wise young man in respect to their secrets. In fact Jesus of Nazareth heard more profound things about the secrets which were kept in that Order than from the scribes and scholars. He also heard much that he had previously learned through Bath Kol as an enlightenment which shone in his soul. In short, a lively exchange of ideas took place between Jesus of Nazareth and the Essenes. And Jesus of Nazareth learned almost everything that the Essenes were able to give during his 25^th, 26^th, 27^th, 28^th years, and beyond. For what was not communicated to him by words was expressed by all sorts of clairvoyant impressions. Jesus of Nazareth received important clairvoyant impressions either within the Essene community or a short time later at home in Nazareth, where a more contemplative life was possible; they penetrated his soul from powers which had come to him and which the Essenes had no idea, but which were experienced in his soul.

One of these experiences, these inner impressions, must be particularly emphasized, because it can cast light on the whole spiritual course of human evolution. It was a meaningful vision manifested by a kind of separation from his body in which the Buddha appeared to him directly. Yes, the Buddha appeared to Jesus of Nazareth as a consequence of the exchange of ideas with the Essenes. One can say that a spiritual conversation took place between Jesus and Buddha. We may and must touch upon this meaningful secret of human evolution today. In this meaningful spiritual conversation Jesus heard that the Buddha said something like this: "If my teaching, as it is, is completely fulfilled, then all men on earth must be like the Essenes. But that cannot be. That was the error in my teaching. The Essenes can only progress if they separate themselves from the rest of humanity; other human souls must be there for them. The fulfillment of my teaching would mean nothing but Essenes. But that cannot be." That was a meaningful experience, which Jesus of Nazareth had through his association with the Essenes.

Another experience was that Jesus of Nazareth made the acquaintance of a slightly younger man who had joined the Essene Order, but in an entirely different way than Jesus had, but who nevertheless did not completely become an Essene. He was John the Baptist, who lived as a lay brother within the Essene community. He dressed like the Essenes, who used clothing of camel's hair in winter, but he never completely exchanged Jewish teaching for Essene teaching. But the teachings and life of the Essenes made a great impression on him, so he lived the Essene life as a lay brother. He was stimulated and inspired and by and by became the John the Baptist described in the Gospels. Jesus of Nazareth and John the Baptist conversed often. One day – I know what it means to simply tell these things, but nothing can stop me; I also know that these things must be told – One day when Jesus of Nazareth was talking with John the Baptist, the physical body of the Baptist seemed to disappear and Jesus had a vision of Elias. That was the second meaningful experience in the Essene community.

But there were still other experiences. For a long time Jesus of Nazareth had observed something noteworthy. When he came to a place where imageless Essene gates were, Jesus of Nazareth couldn't pass through those gates without again having a bitter experience. He saw those imageless gates, but for him there were spiritual figures on the gates. To him appeared on both sides of those gates what we have learned to know from many spiritual scientific explanations under the names Ahriman and Lucifer. And gradually he became convinced that the Essenes' aversion to images on the gates had to have something to do with the attraction of such spiritual beings to them, that images on the gates were images of Lucifer and Ahriman. Jesus of Nazareth noticed this often.

When one experiences such things he doesn't dwell on them overmuch, for they are too shocking. One also soon feels that human thoughts are insufficient to understand them. One considers thoughts incapable of penetrating these things. But the impressions not only engrave themselves deeply on the soul, but become a part of the soul's life. One feels himself united to the part of his soul in which such experiences have been stored and carries them through life.

Thus Jesus of Nazareth carried through life the images of Lucifer and Ahriman which he had seen on the Essene gates. He also became aware that a secret existed between those beings and the Essenes. Since that experience, Jesus and the Essenes could no longer understand themselves well. For something lived in Jesus' soul about which he couldn't speak to the Essenes. What he had seen on the gates always injected itself into the conversations.

One day after an important conversation in which many sublime spiritual themes were discussed, as Jesus of Nazareth was leaving through the gates of the Essenes' main building he encountered the figures who he knew were Lucifer and Ahriman. He saw them fleeing from the gates of the Essene monastery ... and a question entered his soul, not as though he asked it himself, but a strong elemental force instilled in his soul the question: Where are Lucifer and Ahriman fleeing to? For he knew that the sanctity of the Essene monastery had caused them to flee. But the question remained: Where to?

The question burned like fire in his soul and he lived with it continuously during the following weeks. After that spiritual conversation when he left through the gates of the Essenes' main building, the question burned in his soul: Where did Lucifer and Ahriman flee to?

What he did under the influence of this question in his soul and having fallen on the pagan altar and heard Bath Kol's changed voice, and what it means – we'll speak of all that tomorrow.

Some time ago, a highly peculiar book was published that shares the fate of receiving far too little attention with similar literary phenomena of its genre in the present day: "Chaos in Cosmic Selection" by Paul Mongré. But it deserves a different fate. Anyone who goes through the book without being blinded by contemporary prejudices will find that there is little today that is so stimulating, indeed, for those who are intensely interested in the highest questions of existence, even exciting. The author confesses to being a dilettante in philosophical matters. He does not have a thorough knowledge of philosophical literature. That is why he does not approach his task with the same bias as many of our philosophically trained contemporaries. This gives the book something philosophically naive. Paul Mongré admits that it is not his personality that has driven him to the problem, but that the problem has, so to speak, overwhelmed him, that it has approached him and has not let go until he has gained a position, a relationship to it. There is something much more natural about this than when someone comes to such a task through a philosophical education. If we start from philosophy as such, we all too often have to ask ourselves: would this man have come to his questions at all if he had happened to become a physician or chemist rather than a philosopher? And when we read the writings of such a personality, we are reminded of this question again and again by all sorts of things. This is not the case with Paul Mongré. Rather, we are constantly reminded of how powerfully the questions raised weigh on the human soul, how they torment us no matter what else we do in life, and how the relationship we develop with them is infinitely influential for our happiness in life.

The author comes from mathematics. This is evident in every sentence. His whole way of thinking is mathematical. Now this way of thinking has just as many advantages as disadvantages. The conclusions of mathematics have an exemplary reliability. Anyone who is trained in mathematics will also strive for the same reliability when thinking about other things as he is used to from his science. But mathematical thinking has its pitfalls. As such, it has nothing directly to do with reality. It rests on assumptions that are purely ideal. If a point in a plane moves in such a way that its distance from a fixed point always remains the same, then a circle is formed. And all the laws that we get to know through mathematics apply to the circle. All these laws would also be correct if there were no circle anywhere in reality. In any case, the reasons why we consider these laws to be correct are quite different from those on the basis of which we assert the correctness of any real process. In a way, mathematics is a great poem. If I want to prove the Pythagorean theorem, I do not measure the two sides of a right-angled triangle and then the hypotenuse to prove that the square over the latter is equal to the sum of the two over the former. I prove this by mathematical means using a purely ideal structure. Nevertheless, on a real right-angled triangle, what I have established purely intellectually must be justified. In mathematics, I decide on relationships in reality without asking them first. And it always proves me right with regard to all conclusions if it fulfills my assumptions. If there is a right-angled triangle or a circle somewhere, then they fulfill the laws that I have established about them without first asking reality. This seems so self-evident to most people. But if you go deeper, a big question is revealed here. Everyone is convinced that the mathematical laws he has devised here with his earthly mind also apply on Mars. But he did not even ask about the conditions on Mars. We invent mathematical laws, and reality is always good enough to fulfill them for us.

I don't want to talk about what it is that actually distinguishes mathematical judgments from those about real things. Nor do I want to talk about whether there is anything else in our lives that carries the same or similar certainty as mathematics. But I wanted to talk about the subjective habits of thought that distinguish the mathematician from those who work in another branch of knowledge.

The mathematician is accustomed to asking only himself, only his own mental necessities, when he makes decisions. And he is also used to finding his truths absolutely valid in reality. With such feelings, he basically enters every sphere into which life leads him.

And with such feelings, Paul Mongr& steps onto the ground of the great question of existence. That is his danger. It is doubtless that his conclusions will be decisive for these highest questions of existence, just as the Pythagorean theorem is decisive for reality, if the presuppositions of reality are just as true for those conclusions as they are for the Pythagorean theorem. Yes, if it weren't for this "if"!!! Construct mathematical relationships. There are two possibilities for you. Either in reality there are somewhere such presuppositions as you make, then you can also spin the conclusions that reality draws from these presuppositions into your mathematical web. If, however, reality does not fulfill your presuppositions, then your mathematical inventions will float in the void. But neither the one nor the other does any harm to the truth of your assertions. The Pythagorean theorem would remain true even if it were not fulfilled in any reality. The truth of the mathematical is therefore not at all dependent on reality in this respect. The mathematician is therefore only dealing with himself.

In no other case than the right-angled triangle towards the mathematician is the human being towards the mathematical thinker. A mathematical thinker is too inclined to overlook this. He easily believes that he can talk about the world problem as if it were a mathematical problem. Paul Mongré falls into this error. An example. He puts forward the following idea, which has already been asserted elsewhere: "Because of the relativity of our measurement, the absolute dimensions of the spatial formations do not fall into our consciousness - we would not notice anything if the universe suddenly increased or decreased its real dimensions a hundredfold, since both the objects to be measured and our scales participate in this overall change. Does this mean that the universe is really, in the transcendentally realistic sense, a rubber ball that swells or shrinks at will? No, but only that beyond our relative perception of size, the concept of spatial size becomes irrelevant." That is mathematical thinking. But suppose someone were to go further and draw the conclusion from this undoubtedly true thought: if everything outside our consciousness loses its validity in the same way as the determinations of size seem to do, then it could also be correct that within our consciousness we rightly regard ourselves as descended from lower organisms; outside, however, a demon could be at work that apes human formations. For mathematical thinking there is no objection to drawing such a conclusion. If it were valid, then I would only ever be dealing with conclusions, with truths that apply to me - within my consciousness; outside of it would lie endless possibility - for me chaos, about which I know nothing, about which I am not even allowed to talk without having to make it clear to myself that I am going beyond what I am allowed to assert. Two things would then be certain. I would have truths; these would apply to me. But they apply to nothing but me. I seek the laws according to which the things that are spread out before my senses work; I seek the laws of my own working. But apart from me, none of this could be as it appears to me. Instead of the laws of light, there could be a demon at work, instead of my psychological and physiological laws, according to which I direct my foot to move forward, there could be a demon pushing it forward. That is one thing. The other is: I know the limits to which my truths extend. I build a lawful world for myself within these limits. And yet I say: this far and no further. The mathematician says: I measure things. They have this certain size in relation to my scale. If everything and therefore my scale grows, then I am at the end. I can't go any further. And for me, we are at a crucial point. Is there any point in talking about size if we can't measure it? What does it mean to say that the universe is getting bigger if nothing retains its former size? Has the universe really become larger if nothing has retained its original size? Does a size exist at all without being compared with another? But if it makes no sense to talk of increasing size where there is no measurement, does it not also make sense to allow measurement to apply unconditionally where there is measurement? Or, from a broader perspective: if it makes no sense to speak of an animal descent of man outside our world, is it not also correct to say that it makes absolute sense within this world and cannot be otherwise?

If I wanted to discuss all the mathematically conceived details that Paul Mongré presents, I would have to write a book myself, at least as comprehensive as his. But I only want to characterize his way of thinking. To do this, it will suffice to deal with as simple a matter as possible in the sense that dominates his entire way of looking at things. In the world of experience in which we live, we see the son following the father, the son following the grandson. This succession occurs in the course of time. If we now look at this time sequence, no other sequence is conceivable in it than this: Father - son - grandson? Another is also conceivable. We can imagine that there is some observer of the world who does not see forwards as we do, but backwards, that is: grandson - son - father. We could think of another observer who sees the following sequence: son - grandson - father, another one: grandson - father - son. Thus, what we see is only a special case of other possible, abstractly conceivable cases. If we now extend this observation in the most manifold way to the whole world of experience before us, we can imagine that all the regularity which we perceive as a cosmic connection is only a special individual case of an infinite number of conceivable worlds. All laws, all concepts that we apply to our world are only special cases. Where do we end up if we imagine all cosmic lawfulness in this way as a special case? We come to the conclusion that in the vast number of general worlds none of the laws that apply in ours apply, that none of our concepts apply in them. We come to the conclusion that when we leave our world and enter another, we enter into lawlessness and lawlessness, into chaos. And finally we go even further. Nothing compels the various possibilities that exist apart from us (in our example: son - grandson - father; grandson - father - son and so on) to take on the particular form of existence given to us (in our example: to become father - son - grandson). Indeed, none of the conceivable possibilities need exist at all. And since for thinking ours has no preference over the other conceivable ones, ours does not necessarily have to exist either. Our entire world, which we perceive, therefore does not need to exist before a higher instance (in the transcendental sense, as Paul Mongré's terminology puts it). "Why shy away from the name? Our idealism here, if the last consequence applies, runs out into the sharp and dangerous point of a transcendental nihilism" (p. 188).

Paul Mongré's mathematical thinking has now led him to such extravagances of the concept. The mathematician separates time and space from the other content of the world in his thoughts and then deals with them as abstract entities. He can speak of the passage of time that exists alongside the sequence: father - son - grandson. But in reality, this passage of time does not exist as such at all. It is not separate from the content of the sequence: father - son - grandson. The son is only possible as a consequence of the father and the grandson only as a consequence of the son. They give themselves the time sequence. And the latter has no meaning at all without them, is an empty abstraction. Another observer of the world may, for my sake, see the grandson first, then the son, then the father. This does not change the fact that the order which he does not give to the three members, but which they give to themselves, remains the same. Paul Mongré first separates his many conceivable worlds from our real one through abstraction. They are conceivable. But that does nothing. They are only conceivable as abstractions from the real one. They are nothing without it. No matter how boldly we speculate, we cannot leave our world. We remain within it. We cannot be dealing with a majority of worlds, but only with the one, with our cosmos. And because this is the case, this cosmos is also necessary, it has its lawfulness in itself through itself. It is not a single case out of an immeasurable number; it is the unity, the direction and cause, which also has the reason for its existence in itself. Paul Mongré's conclusion can also be illustrated by the following comparison. A ruler governs his people according to certain laws, which have grown out of the feelings, habits and so on of the people. They only endure because of the latter. Now someone comes along and says: Let us detach the ruler from the laws. These can now also be others. We can think of countless possibilities; how he governs his people is just one case of countless possible ones. Here everyone immediately sees the inadmissibility of the conclusion. We can indeed think of infinite possibilities for the ruler, but such thinking takes place in a complete void. How this ruler rules is only possible in one way due to the peculiarity of the people. Paul Mongré's entire conclusion is inadmissible. It must not be drawn at all.

As you can see from my "Philosophy of Freedom" published several years ago, I agree with Mongré to the extent that I, too, restrict all observation of the world to the world of experience given to us, as I, too, reject any thinking about another (transcendent) world. But for me, our world is also the only one we are entitled to talk about. Paul Mongré rejects metaphysics because its content is chaos; I reject it because nothing leads out of our world and one does not talk about what there is no reason to talk about. But I also do not arrive at nihilism because I do not say to myself: since none of the conceivable worlds has anything ahead of another, ours must not exist either, and can therefore stand out from the chaos of nothing as an appearance and dream image, but I say to myself: because there is none conceivable to us apart from ours, ours is necessary, must be as it is through itself, not through selection from an infinite number of worlds.

Our task to-day will be to bring the knowledge gained in these lectures on the Gospel of St. Luke to the culminating point indicated by spiritual investigation—the culminating point we know as the Mystery of Golgotha.

Yesterday's lecture endeavoured to convey an idea of what actually took place at the time when for three years Christ was on Earth, and the preceding lectures indicated how the convergence of streams of spiritual life made this event possible. The writer of the Gospel of St. Luke gives a wonderful account of the mission of Christ Jesus on the Earth, as we shall realize if the light of knowledge derived from the Akashic Chronicle can be brought to bear upon what he describes.

The following question might be asked: As the stream of Buddhism is organically woven into Christian teachings, how is it that in the latter there is no indication of the great Law of Karma, of the adjustment effected in the course of the incarnations of an individual human being? It would, however, be sheer misapprehension to imagine that what the Law of Karma enables us to understand is not also implicit in the words of the Gospel of St. Luke. It is indeed there, only we must realize that the needs of the human soul differ in different epochs and that it is not always the task of the great emissaries in world-evolution to impart the absolute truth in abstract form, because men at different stages of maturity simply would not understand it; the great pioneers and missionaries must speak in such a way that men receive what is right and suitable in a particular epoch. The teaching received by humanity through the great Buddha contains, in the form of wisdom, everything that in conjunction with the teaching of compassion and love and the synthesis of this in the Eightfold Path, can enable the doctrine of Karma to be understood. Failure to achieve this understanding only means that no effort has been made to use faculties in the soul leading to knowledge of the teaching of Karma and Reincarnation.

In the lecture yesterday it was said that in about three thousand years from now, large numbers of human beings will have progressed sufficiently to unfold from their own souls the teaching of the Eightfold Path and—we may now add—that of Karma and Reincarnation. But this must inevitably be a gradual process. Just as a plant cannot unfold its blossom immediately the seed has been sown but leaf after leaf must develop according to definite laws, so too the spiritual development of humanity must progress stage by stage and the right knowledge be brought to light at the right time.

Anyone possessed of faculties that can be kindled by spiritual science will realize from the voice of his own soul that the teaching of Karma and Reincarnation is indispensable. It must be remembered however that evolution is not fortuitous and in point of fact it is only now, in our own time, that human souls have become sufficiently mature to discover these truths through their own insight. It would not have been a good thing to give out the teaching of Karma and Reincarnation exoterically a few centuries ago; and it would have been detrimental to evolution if the present content of spiritual science—for which human souls are longing and with which research into the foundations of the Gospels is connected—had been imparted openly to mankind a few hundred years earlier. It was necessary that human souls should be yearning for it and should have developed faculties able to accept such teaching; it was essential that these souls should have passed through earlier incarnations, even in the Christian era, and have undergone the available experiences before reaching a degree of maturity capable of assimilating the teaching of Karma and Reincarnation. Had this teaching been proclaimed in the early centuries of Christendom in the form in which it is proclaimed to-day, this would have meant demanding of human evolution the equivalent of demanding a plant to produce the blossom before the green leaves.

Humanity has only now become sufficiently mature to assimilate the spiritual content of the teaching of Karma and Reincarnation. It is therefore not surprising that in what has been imparted to humanity for centuries from the Gospels, there is much that gives a quite erroneous picture of Christianity. In a certain respect the Gospel message was entrusted prematurely to men and it is only to-day that they are becoming mature enough to develop all the faculties that could lead to an understanding of the actual content of the Gospel records. It was absolutely necessary that what was proclaimed by Christ Jesus should take account of the conditions and the attitude of soul prevailing in those days. Therefore Karma and Reincarnation were not taught as abstract doctrines, but feelings were cultivated through which human souls would gradually become ready to receive this teaching. What was needed at that time was to speak in a way that could lead by degrees to an understanding of Karma and Reincarnation rather than any enunciation of the teaching itself.

Did Christ Jesus and those who were around Him speak in this way? In order to understand this we must study the Gospel of St. Luke and interpret it rightly. If we do so we shall realize in what form the Law of Karma could be made known to men at that time.

“Blessed be ye poor; for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are ye that hunger now; for ye shall be filled. Blessed are ye that weep now; for ye shall laugh. Blessed are ye when men shall hate you, and when they shall separate you from their company, and shall reproach you, and cast out your name as evil, for the Son of Man's sake. Rejoice ye in that day and leap for joy; for behold your reward is great in heaven”—i.e. in the spiritual worlds. (Luke VI, 20–23.)

Here we have the teaching of ‘compensation’. Without going into the subject of Karma and Reincarnation in an abstract way, the aim is to let the feeling of assurance flow into the souls of men that one who for a time is still hungering will eventually experience the due compensation. It was necessary that these feelings should flow into the souls of men. The souls then living, to whom the teaching was given in this form, were not, until they were again incarnated, ready to receive, as wisdom, the teaching of Karma and Reincarnation.

What was to ripen in human souls had to flow into these at that time. For a completely new epoch had begun, an epoch when men were preparing to develop their Ego, their self-consciousness, to maturity. Whereas revelations had hitherto been received and the effects made manifest in the astral, etheric and physical bodies of men, the Ego was now to become fully conscious but be filled only gradually with the forces it was eventually to acquire. Only the one Ego¹ which came to the Earth as the Nathan Jesus and into whose bodily constitution, when this had been duly prepared, the Individuality of Zarathustra passed this Ego-Being alone could bring to fulfilment within itself the all-embracing Christ-principle.

The rest of humanity must now, in imitation of Christ, gradually develop what was present for three years on the Earth in the one single Personality. It was only the impulse, as it were the seed, that Christ Jesus was able to implant into humanity at that time and the seed must now unfold and grow. To this end provision was made that at the right times there shall always appear on Earth individuals able to bring the truth that humanity will not be ready to assimilate until a later period. The Being who appeared on Earth as Christ had to take care that His message would be accessible to men immediately after His appearance, in a form that they could understand. He had also to make provision for Individualities to appear later on and care for the spiritual needs of human souls at the stage of maturity reached in the course of time.

In what manner Christ made such provision for the ages following the Event of Golgotha is related by the writer of the Gospel of St. John. He shows us how, in Lazarus, Christ Himself ‘raised’, ‘awakened’, that Individuality who continued to work as ‘John’, from whom the teaching proceeded in the form described in the lectures on the Gospel of St. John.² But Christ had also to provide for the appearance, in later times, of an Individuality who would bring to humanity in a form compatible with subsequent evolution, that for which men would by then be ready. How an Individuality was ‘awakened’ by Christ for this purpose is faithfully described by the writer of the Gospel of St. Luke. Having declared that he would describe what ‘seers’ endowed with the vision of Imagination and Inspiration could say about the Event of Palestine, he also points to what would one day be taught by another—but only in the future. In order to describe this mysterious process the writer of St. Luke's Gospel has also included an ‘awakening’, a ‘raising’, in his account (Luke VII, 11–17.) In what we read concerning the ‘awakening’ of the young man of Nain lies the mystery of the progress of Christianity. Whereas in the case of the healing of the daughter of Jairus, to which brief reference was made in a previous lecture, the mysteries connected with it were so profound that Christ admitted only a few to witness the act and charged them not to speak of it, this other ‘raising’ was accomplished in such a way that it might immediately be related. The former healing was an act presupposing in the healer a profound insight into the processes of physical life; the latter healing was an ‘awakening’, an Initiation. The Individuality in the body of the young man of Nain was to undergo an Initiation of a very special kind.

There are various kinds of Initiation. In one kind, immediately after the process has been completed, knowledge of the higher worlds flashes up in the aspirant and the laws and happenings of the spiritual world are revealed to him. In another kind of Initiation it is only a seed that is implanted into the soul, and the individual has to wait until the next incarnation for the seed to bear fruit; only then does he become an Initiate in the real sense.

The Initiation of the young man of Nain was of this kind. His soul was transformed by the event in Palestine but he was not yet conscious of having risen into the higher worlds. It was not until his next incarnation that the forces laid in his soul at that earlier time came to fruition. In an exoteric lecture names cannot now be given; all that is possible is an indication to the effect that the Individuality awakened by Christ in the young man of Nain subsequently appeared as a great teacher of religion; in later time a new teacher of Christianity arose, equipped with the powers implanted into his soul in a previous incarnation.

Thus Christ provided for the subsequent appearance of an Individuality able to bring Christianity to a further stage of development. Moreover the mission of the Individuality who had been awakened in the young man of Nain is destined to permeate Christianity later on, and to an ever-increasing extent, with the teachings of Karma and Reincarnation—teachings which when Christ was on Earth could not be proclaimed explicitly as wisdom, because the human soul had first to receive them into the life of feeling.

Christ indicates clearly enough (according to the Gospel of St. Luke too) that an entirely new factor had now entered into the evolution of humanity, namely, Ego-consciousness. He shows—it is only a matter of being able to read the meaning—that in earlier times the spiritual world did not flow into the self-conscious Ego, for men received this spiritual stream through the physical, etheric and astral bodies; a certain degree of unconsciousness was always present when, as in previous epochs, divine-spiritual forces flowed into men. In the stream in which Christ Jesus was actually working, men had had formerly to receive the Law of Sinai, which could be addressed only to the astral body. The Law was imparted to man in such a way that it did indeed work in him, but not directly through the forces of his Ego. These forces could not operate until the time of Christ Jesus because it was not until then that man became conscious of the Ego in the real sense. This is indicated by Christ in the Gospel of St. Luke when He says that men must first be made ready to receive an entirely new principle into their souls. He indicates this when speaking of His forerunner, John the Baptist. (Luke VII, 18–35.)

How did Christ Himself regard this Individuality? He said that before His own coming the mission of John was to present in its purest and noblest form the old teaching of the Prophets that had been handed down, unadulterated, from bygone times. He regarded John as being the last to transmit, in its pure form, the teaching belonging to past ages. The ‘Law and the Prophets’ held good until the coming of John. His mission was to set before men once again what the old teaching and the old constitution of soul had been able to impart. How did this old constitution of soul function in the times preceding the advent of the Christ-principle?

Here we come to a subject—incomprehensible as it may seem at the present time—that will some day become a teaching of natural science as well, when it allows itself to be inspired to some extent by spiritual science. I must now refer to a matter of which I can touch only the very fringe but which will show you what depths spiritual science is destined to illumine in the domain of natural science. If you survey the branches of natural science to-day and perceive the efforts that are made to penetrate the mysteries of man's existence with the limited faculties of human thought, you will find it stated that the whole human being comes into existence through the intermingling of the male and female seeds. One of the basic endeavours of modern natural science is to establish this theory. Searching microscopical examination of substances is made in order to ascertain which particular attributes proceed from the male or from the female seed, and the researchers are satisfied when they believe, it can he proved that the whole human being is thus produced. But natural science itself will eventually be compelled to recognize that only one part of the human being is determined by the intermingling of the male and female seeds and that however precisely the product of the one or the other may be known, the whole nature of man in the present cycle of evolution cannot be explained by this intermingling.

There is in every human being something that does not arise from the seed but is, so to speak, a ‘virgin birth’, something that flows into the process of germination from a quite different source. Something unites with the seed of the human being that is not derived from father and mother, yet belongs to and is destined for him—something that is poured into his Ego and can be ennobled through the Christ-principle. That in the human being which unites with the Christ-principle in the course of evolution is ‘virgin-born’ and—as natural science will one day come to recognize through its own methods—this is connected with the momentous transition accomplished at the time of Christ Jesus. Before the Christ Event there could be nothing that did not enter into man's inner being by way of the seed. Something has actually happened in the course of the ages to bring about a change in the development of the Ego. Humanity has not been the same since the Christ Event; but the element that has been added since then to what is produced by the seeds must be gradually developed and ennobled by assimilating the Christ-principle.

We are here approaching a very subtle truth. To anyone conversant with modern natural science it is extremely interesting that already to-day there are domains where investigators are faced with the fact that there is something in man not derived from the seed. The preliminary conditions for realizing this are already there, only the investigators are not yet intellectually capable of recognizing what is present in their own experiments and observations. More is at work in the experiments than is known to modern natural science and little progress would be made if it were entirely dependent upon the ability of the investigators. While one or another is working in a laboratory, in a clinic, or perhaps in his own study, there stand behind him the Powers which direct and guide the world, and these Powers allow that to come to light which the researcher himself does not understand and for which he is merely the instrument. It is therefore also true that even objective investigation is guided by the ‘Masters’, that is, by higher Individualities. The facts now indicated are not usually observed; but they certainly will be when the conscious faculties of researchers are permeated by the spiritual teachings of Anthroposophy.

As a result of the fact of which I have just spoken, a great change has taken place in connection with the faculties of the human being since Christ came to the Earth. Previously, the only faculties available to man were those derived from the paternal and maternal seeds, for these faculties alone were able to develop in him. Between birth and death we develop through our physical, etheric and astral bodies such faculties as we possess. Before the time of Christ Jesus the instruments employed by man for his own life could be developed only from the seed. After the appearance of Christ Jesus that element was added which is of ‘virgin birth’ and does not in any sense arise from the seed. This element can of course be gravely impaired if a man is entirely given over to materialistic thought; but it can be sublimated if he lets his being be suffused by the warmth issuing from the Christ-principle and he then brings it into his following incarnations in an ever higher and higher form.

What has now been said necessarily implies that in all the proclamations made to humanity prior to that of Christ, there was an element bound up with faculties originating from the line of descent and from the seed; and it also imparts the conviction that Christ Jesus addressed himself to faculties that have nothing to do with the seed arising from the Earth but from out of the divine worlds unite with the seed. Teachers before Christ Jesus could speak to men only by using the faculties transmitted to their earthly nature through the seed. All the prophets and forerunners, however exalted, even when they descended as Bodhisattvas, were obliged to use faculties transmitted by way of the seed. Christ Jesus, however, spoke to that in man which does not pass through the seed but comes from the realm of the Divine. He indicates this when He speaks to His disciples of John the Baptist (Luke VII, 28): "For I say unto you, among those that are born of women there is not a greater prophet than John the Baptist"—that is to say, among those who, as they stand before us, can be explained as having come into existence through physical birth from male and female seeds. But then Christ adds words to the effect that the smallest part of that which is not born of women and which unites with the man from the kingdom of God is greater than John. Such are the depths hidden beneath these words! Some day, when study of the Bible is illumined by spiritual science, it will be found to contain physiological truths of far greater significance than any finding of the blundering thinking applied in modern physiology. Words such as those just quoted can lead to recognition of one of the very deepest physiological truths. Profound indeed is the Bible when it is truly understood!

Christ Jesus exemplifies in manifold ways, and also in a different form, what I have now told you. His purpose is to indicate that the element which is to come into the world through Him is something altogether new, a truth differing from any hitherto proclaimed, because it is connected with faculties derived from the kingdoms of Heaven—faculties that have not been inherited. He points out how difficult it is for men to learn to understand such a teaching, and that they will demand to be convinced in the same way as formerly. He tells them that they cannot be convinced in the old way of the new truth that has now come; for what could be proof of truth in the old form could not bring conviction of the new. The old truth was presented in comprehensible form when symbolized by the ‘Sign of Jonah’. This symbolized the old way in which man gradually attained knowledge and penetrated into the spiritual world, or how—to use biblical terms—he became a ‘Prophet’.

The old way of attaining Initiation was this: first the soul was brought to maturity and every necessary preparation made; then a condition lasting for three-and-a-half days was induced in the candidate, a condition in which he was completely withdrawn from the outer world and from the organs through which that world is perceived. Those who were to be led into the spiritual world were carefully prepared and their souls trained in knowledge of the spiritual life; then they were withdrawn from the world for three-and-a-half days, being taken to a place where they could perceive nothing through their external senses and where their bodies lay in a deathlike condition; after three-and-a-half days their souls were summoned back again into the body and they were awakened. Such men were then able to remember their vision of the spiritual worlds and to testify of those worlds. The great secret of Initiation was that the soul, prepared by long training, was led out of the body for three-and-a-half days into an entirely different world, was shut off from the environment and penetrated into the spiritual world. Men who could bear witness to the realities of the spiritual world were always to be found among the peoples; they were men who had undergone the experience referred to in the Bible in the story of Jonah's sojourn in the whale. Such a man was made ready to undergo this experience and then, when he appeared before the people as an Initiate of the old order, he bore upon him the ‘sign of Jonah’ the sign of those who were able themselves to testify of the spiritual world.

This was the one form of Initiation. Christ said, in effect: ‘In the old sense there is no other sign save the sign of Jonah.’ (Luke XI, 29.) And He expressed Himself even more clearly according to the meaning of words in the Gospel of St. Matthew. ‘As a heritage from olden times there remains the possibility that without effort of his own, without Initiation, a man can develop a dim, shadowy kind of clairvoyance and through revelation from above be led into the spiritual world.’ The indication here is that there were also Initiates of a second kind—men who went about among their fellows and who, as a result of their particular lineage, were able to receive revelations from above in a kind of sublimated trance condition, without having undergone any special Initiation. Christ indicated that this twofold manner of being transported into the spiritual world had come down from ancient times. He bade the people to remember King Solomon—thereby pointing to an Individuality to whom, without effort on his own part, the spiritual world was revealed from above. The ‘Queen of Sheba’ who came to King Solomon was also the bearer of wisdom from above; she was the representative of those predestined to possess, by inheritance, the dim, shadowy clairvoyance with which all men were endowed in the Atlantean epoch. (See Luke XI, 31.)

Thus there were two kinds of Initiates: the one kind typified by King Solomon and the symbolic visit paid to him by the Queen of Sheba, the Queen from the South; the other kind typified by those who bore upon them the ‘sign of Jonah’, meaning the old Initiation in which the candidate, entirely cut off from the outer world, passed through the spiritual world for a period lasting three-and-a-half days. Christ now added: ‘A greater than Solomon, a greater than Jonah is here’—indicating thereby that something new had come into the world. The message was not to be conveyed to the etheric bodies of men from outside, through revelations, as in the case of Solomon, nor was it to be conveyed to etheric bodies from within through revelations imparted by the duly prepared astral body to the etheric body, as in the case of those symbolized by the sign of Jonah. ‘Here is something which enables a man who has made himself ready for it in his Ego, to unite his being with what belongs to the kingdoms of Heaven.’ The forces and powers from those kingdoms unite with the virginal part in the human soul, the part that belongs to the kingdoms of Heaven and that men can destroy if they turn away from the Christ-principle, but can cultivate and nurture if they receive into themselves what streams from the Christ-principle.

As indicated in the Gospel of St. Luke, Christ's teaching is imbued with the new element which came to the Earth at that time, and we see how all the old ways of proclaiming the kingdom of God were changed through the Event of Palestine. Christ says to those from whom, because of their preparation, He could expect some measure of understanding: ‘Of a truth there are some among you who are able to see the kingdom of God, not only in the manner of Solomon, through revelation, or through the Initiation symbolized by the sign of Jonah; if any among you had attained nothing further than that they would never see the kingdom of God in this incarnation before their death.’ The meaning is that before their death they would not have seen the kingdom of God unless they had attained Initiation in some form; but then they would also have had to pass through a condition similar to death. Christ wished to show that because of the new element now present in the world there can also be men who, even before they die are able to behold the kingdom of Heaven. The disciples did not at first understand what this meant. Christ wanted to convey to them that they were to be the ones who would come to know the mysteries of the kingdoms of Heaven before natural death or the death experienced in the old form of Initiation. The wonderful passage in the Gospel of St. Luke where Christ is speaking of a higher revelation, is as follows: "But I tell you of a truth, there be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the kingdom of God." (Luke IX, 27.) The disciples did not understand that it was they themselves who, being closely around Him, were chosen to experience the tremendous power of the Christ principle which would enable them to penetrate directly into the spiritual world. The spiritual world was to become visible to them without the sign of Solomon, and without the sign of Jonah. Did this actually happen?

Immediately after these words in the Gospel comes the scene of the Transfiguration, when three disciples—Peter, James and John—are led up into the spiritual world. The figures of Moses and Elijah appear before them in that world and, simultaneously, Christ Jesus in Glory. (Luke IX, 28–36.) The disciples gaze for a brief moment into the spiritual world—a testimony that insight into that world is possible without the faculties designated by the sign of Solomon and the sign of Jonah. But it is evident that they are still novices, for they fall asleep immediately after being torn out of their physical and etheric bodies by the stupendous power of what was happening. Christ finds them asleep. This account was meant to indicate the third way of entering the spiritual world, apart from the ways denoted by the signs of Solomon and of Jonah. Anyone capable in those days of interpreting the signs of the times would have known that the Ego itself must develop, that it must now be directly inspired, that the Divine Powers must work directly into the Ego.

It was also to be made evident that the men of that time, even the very best among them, were not capable of taking the Christ-principle into themselves. The event of the Transfiguration was to be a beginning but it was also to be shown that the disciples were not able, at the time, to receive the Christ-principle in the fullest sense. Hence their powers fail them immediately afterwards, when they want to apply the Christ-power to heal one who is possessed by an evil spirit but are unable to do so. Christ indicates that they are still only at the beginning, by saying: I shall have to stay a long time with you before your forces are able also to stream into other men. (See Luke IX, 41.) Thereupon He heals the one whom the disciples could not heal. But then He says, again hinting at the mystery behind these happenings, that the time has come when “the Son of Man shall be delivered into the hands of men”. This means: the time has come when the Ego, which is to be developed by men themselves in the course of their Earth-mission, is gradually to stream into them, to be given over to them. This Ego is to be recognized in its highest form in Christ. “Let these sayings sink down into your ears; for the Son of Man shall be delivered into the hands of men. But they understood not this saying; it was hid from them, that they perceived it not.” (Luke IX, 44–45.)

How many have understood this saying? Greater and greater numbers will, however, eventually understand that the Ego, the ‘Son of Man’, was to be given over to men at that time. And the explanation that was possible in those days, was added by Christ Jesus. He spoke to the following effect: As he stands before us, man is a product of the old forces that were active before the Luciferic beings had laid hold of human nature; but the Luciferic forces drew man down to a lower level. The results of all these processes have passed into the faculties possessed by him to-day. Everything that comes from the seed, as well as all human consciousness, is permeated by the influence that dragged man to a lower sphere.

Man is a twofold being. Whatever consciousness he has developed hitherto is permeated by the Luciferic forces. It is only the unconscious part of man's being, the last remnant of his evolution through the Saturn, Sun and Moon periods when no Luciferic forces were at work—it is only this that streams into him to-day as a virginal element of his nature; but it cannot unite with him without the qualities and forces he is able to develop in himself through the Christ-principle. As he stands before us, man is primarily a product of heredity, a confluence of what derives from the male and female seeds. From the beginning he develops as a duality—a duality already permeated by Luciferic forces. As long as a man is not illumined by self-consciousness, as long as out of his own Ego he cannot fully distinguish between good and evil, he reveals to us his earlier, original nature through the veil of his later nature. Only the part of man that is ‘childlike’ still retains a last remnant of the nature that was his before he succumbed to the influence of the Luciferic beings.

Hence there is a ‘childlike’ part and also a ‘grown’ part in man. It is the latter part of his being that is permeated by the Luciferic forces but its influence asserts itself from the very earliest embryonic stage onwards. The Luciferic forces also permeate the child, so that in ordinary life what was already implanted in the human being before the Luciferic influence, cannot make itself manifest. The Christ-power must re-awaken this, must unite with the best forces of the child-nature in man. The Christ-power may not link itself with the faculties that man has corrupted, with what derives merely from the intellect; the link must be with that which has remained from the child-nature of primeval times. That is what must be reinvigorated and must thereafter fructify the other part (of man's nature).

“But there arose a reasoning among them, which of them should be the greatest,” that is, which of them was most fitted to receive the Christ-principle into his own being. "But Jesus, perceiving the thought of their heart, took a child and set it by them and said unto them. Whosoever shall receive this child in my name"—that is, whosoever is united in Christ's name with what has remained from the times before the onset of the Luciferic influence “receiveth me; and whosoever shall receive me receiveth him that sent me” (Luke IX, 46–48)—that is, He who sent this (childlike) part of the human being to the Earth. Emphasis is there laid upon the great significance of what has remained ‘childlike’ in man and should be fostered and nurtured in human nature.

We may say of a human being standing before us that he has the rudiments of very good qualities. We may try our hardest to develop those qualities of his so that he makes real progress, but the methods usually adopted to-day take no account of what is present in the foundations of man's being. It is essential to pay heed to what has remained ‘childlike’ in man, for it is by way of this childlike nature that warmth can be imparted to the other faculties through the Christ-principle. The childlike nature must be developed in order that the other faculties may follow suit. Everyone has the childlike nature within him and this, when wakened to life, will also be responsive to union with the Christ-principle. But forces—of however lofty a kind—that are dominated by the Luciferic influence will, if they alone work in a man to-day, repudiate and scoff at what can live on Earth as the Christ power—as Christ Himself foretold.

The Gospel of St. Luke, brings home very clearly the purport and meaning of the new proclamation. When a man who bore on his forehead the sign of Jonah went about the world as an Initiate of the old order, he was recognized—but only by those who were knowers—as one who had come to testify of the spiritual worlds. Special preparation was needed before the sign of Jonah could be understood. But a new kind of preparation was now necessary in order to understand what was greater than anything indicated by the signs of Solomon and of Jonah—a new preparation which was to pave the way for a new understanding, a new way of maturing the soul. The contemporaries of Christ Jesus could at first understand only the old way, and the way preached by John the Baptist was the one known to most of them. That Christ was now bringing an entirely new impulse, that he was seeking for souls among those who did not in the least resemble men who would formerly have been considered suitable, was utterly incomprehensible to them. They had assumed that He would associate with those who practised the old kind of disciplinary exercises and would impart His teaching to such men. Hence they could not understand why He sat among those whom they regarded as ‘sinners’. But He said to them: If I were to impart in the old way the entirely new impulse I have come to give to mankind, if a new form of teaching were not to replace the old, it would be as if I were to sew a piece of new cloth on an old garment or pour new wine into old wine-skins. What is now to be given to humanity and is greater than anything indicated by the sign of Solomon or the sign of Jonah, this must be poured into new wine-skins, into new forms. And you must rouse yourselves sufficiently to understand the new teaching in a new form! (See Luke V, 36–37.)

Those who were to understand must now do so through the powerful influence of the Ego—not through what they had learnt but through what had poured into them from the spiritual Christ-Being Himself. Hence the chosen ones were not men who according to the old doctrines were properly prepared but men who in spite of having passed through many incarnations, proved to be simple human beings, able to understand through the power of Faith what had streamed into them. A ‘sign’ was to be placed before them as well, a sign now to be enacted before the eyes of all mankind. The ‘mystical death’ that had been a ceremonial act in the Mystery Temples for hundreds and thousands of years was now to be presented on the great arena of world-history. Everything that had taken place in the secrecy of the Temples of Initiation was brought into the open as a single event on Golgotha. A process hitherto witnessed only by the Initiates during the three-and-a-half days of an old Initiation was now enacted before mankind in concrete reality. Hence those to whom the facts were known could only describe the Event of Golgotha as being what in very truth it was: the old Initiation transformed into historical fact and enacted on the arena of world-history.

That is what took place on Golgotha! In former times the three-and-a-half days spent in deathlike sleep had brought to the few Initiates who witnessed it, the conviction that the spiritual will at all times be victorious over the bodily nature and that man's soul and spirit belong to a spiritual world. This was now to be a reality enacted before the eyes of the world. An Initiation transferred to the outer plane of world-history such was the Event of Golgotha. Hence this Initiation was not consummated only for those who witnessed the actual Event, but for all mankind. What issued from the death on the Cross streamed into the whole of humanity. A stream of spiritual life flowed into mankind from the drops of blood which fell from the wounds of Christ Jesus on Golgotha. For what had been imparted by other Teachers as ‘wisdom’ was now to pass into humanity as inner strength, inner power. That is the essential difference between the Event of Golgotha and the teachings given by the other Founders of religion.

Deeper understanding than exists to-day is necessary before there can be any true conception of what came to pass on Golgotha. When Earth evolution began, the human Ego was connected physically with the blood. The blood is the outer expression of the human Ego. Men would have made the Ego stronger and stronger, and if Christ had not appeared they would have been entirely engrossed in the development of egoism. They were protected from this by the Event of Golgotha. What was it that had to flow? The blood that is the surplus substantiality of the Ego! The process that began on the Mount of Olives when the drops of sweat fell from the Redeemer like drops of blood, was carried further when the blood flowed from the wounds of Christ Jesus on Golgotha. The blood flowing from the Cross was the sign of the surplus egoism in man's nature which had to be sacrificed. The spiritual significance of the sacrifice on Golgotha requires deep and penetrating study. The result of what happened there would not be apparent to a chemist—that is to say to one with the power of intellectual perception only. If the blood that flowed on Golgotha had been chemically analysed it would have been found to contain the same substances as the blood of other human beings; but occult investigation would discover it to have been quite different blood. Through the surplus blood in humanity men would have been engulfed in egoism if infinite Love had not enabled this blood to flow. As occult investigation finds, infinite Love is intermingled with the blood that flowed on Golgotha. The writer of the Gospel of St. Luke adhered to his purpose, which was to describe how, through Christ, there came into the world the infinite Love that would gradually drive out egoism. Each of the Evangelists describes what it was his particular function to describe.

If these things could be explained in still greater depth we should find that all contradictions alleged by materialistic research would be invalidated, as they are in the case of the antecedents of Jesus of Nazareth when the true facts of his early childhood are known. Each Evangelist describes what concerned him most closely from his own standpoint. St. Luke describes what his informants, who were ‘seers’ and ‘servants of the Word’ were able to perceive as the result of their special preparation. The other Evangelists are concerned with different aspects—the writer of the Gospel of St. Luke perceives the out-streaming Love which forgives the most terrible of all wrongs the physical world can inflict. Words expressing this ideal of Love, words of forgiveness even when the most terrible of wrongs has been committed, resound from the Cross on Golgotha: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do!” (Luke XXIII, 34.) Out of His infinite Love, He who on the Cross on Golgotha accomplishes the Deed of untold significance, implores forgiveness for those who have crucified Him.

And now we turn once again to the doctrine of the power of Faith. Emphasis was to be laid upon the fact that there is something in human nature that can stream from it and liberate man from the material world, no matter how firmly he may he bound to that world. Let us think of a man embroiled in the material world through every imaginable crime, so that the forum of that world itself inflicts the punishment; let us conceive, however, that he has saved for himself something that the power of Faith can cause to germinate within him. Such a man will differ from another who has no Faith, just as the one malefactor differed from the other. The one has no Faith, and the judgment is fulfilled. In the other, however, Faith is like a faint light shining into the spiritual world; hence he cannot lose the link with the spiritual. Therefore to him it is said: ‘To-day’—since you know that you are connected with the spiritual world—‘you shall be with me in Paradise!’ (See Luke XXIII, 43.)

Thus do the truths of Faith and Hope, as well as the truth of Love, resound from the Cross in the account given in the Gospel of St. Luke.

There is still something else, belonging to the same realm of the soul's life, upon which the writer of this Gospel wishes to lay emphasis.

When a man's whole being is pervaded with the Love that streamed from the Cross on Golgotha he can turn his eyes to the future and say: Evolution on the Earth must make it possible for the spirit living within me gradually to transform the whole of physical existence. We shall in time give back again to the Father-principle which existed before the onset of the Luciferic influence, the spirit we have received; we shall let our whole being be permeated by the Christ-principle and our hands will bring to expression what is living in our souls as a faithful picture of that principle. Our hands were not created by ourselves but by the Father-principle, and the Christ-principle will stream through them. As men pass through incarnation after incarnation, the spiritual power flowing from the Mystery of Golgotha will stream into what they achieve in their bodies—which are the creations of the Father-principle—so that the outer world will eventually be imbued with the Christ-principle. Men will be filled with the confidence that resounded from the Cross on Golgotha and leads to the highest Hope for the future, leads to the ideal that can be expressed by saying: I let Faith germinate within me, I let Love germinate within me and I know that when they grow strong enough they will pervade all external life. I know too that they will pervade everything within me that is the creation of the Father-principle. Thus Hope for humanity's future will be added to Faith and Love, and men will understand that in regard to the future they must acquire firm confidence, saying: If only I have Faith, if only I have Love I may entertain the Hope that what has come into me from Christ Jesus will gradually find its way into the outer world. And then the words resounding from the Cross as a sublime ideal will be understood: “Father, into Thy hands I commend my spirit!” (Luke XXIII, 46.)

Words of Love, of Faith and of Hope ring out from the Cross according to the Gospel which indicates how spiritual streams that had previously been separate united in the soul of Jesus of Nazareth. What had formerly been received in the form of wisdom, streamed into men as an actual power of the soul, exemplified by the sublime ideal of Christ. It is incumbent upon human beings to acquire deeper and deeper understanding of what is communicated in a record such as the Gospel of St. Luke, in order that the three words resounding from the Cross may become active forces in the soul. When with the faculties that the truths of spiritual science can develop in them men come to feel that what streams down to them from the Cross is not lifeless exhortation but vital, active force, they will begin to realize that a truly living message is contained in the Gospel of St. Luke. It is the mission of spiritual science gradually to unveil what is enshrined in such records.

In this course of lectures we have tried to penetrate as deeply as possible into the content of St. Luke's Gospel. In the case of this Gospel too, one course of lectures cannot possibly unveil everything and you will realise at once that a very great deal has inevitably remained unexplained. But if you pursue the path indicated by lectures such as have been given here you will be able to penetrate more and more deeply into these truths and your souls will be better and better fitted to receive and assimilate the living Word hidden beneath the outer words.

Spiritual science is not a body of new teaching. It is an instrument for comprehending what has been given to humanity. Thus for us it is an instrument for understanding the Christian revelation. If you have this conception of spiritual science you will no longer say: ‘It is Christian theosophy or just another form of theosophy!’ There is only one spiritual science and we apply it as an instrument for proclaiming the truth, for bringing to light the treasures of the spiritual life of mankind. It is the same spiritual science that we apply in order to explain the Bhagavad Gita on one occasion and on another the Gospel of St. Luke. The greatness of spiritual science lies in the fact that it is able to penetrate into every treasure given to humanity in the realm of spiritual life; but we should have a false conception of it if we were to close our ears to any of the proclamations made to humanity.

It is with this attitude of mind that you should listen to the proclamation made in the Gospel of St. Luke, realizing that it is pervaded through and through by the inspiration of Love. And then the increasing knowledge that can be acquired from this Gospel with the help of spiritual science will contribute not only to insight into the mysteries of the surrounding Universe and of the spiritual ground of existence but to an understanding of the momentous words in the Gospel of St. Luke: ‘And peace be in the souls of men in whom there is good will.’ When thoroughly understood, the Gospel of St. Luke is able, more than any other religious text, to pour into the human soul that warmth-giving Love through which peace reigns on Earth—and that is the most beautiful mirror-image of divine mysteries revealed on Earth. What can be revealed must be mirrored on Earth and, as mirror-image, rise up again to the spiritual Heights. If we learn to understand spiritual science in this sense it will be able to reveal to us the mysteries of the divine-spiritual Beings and of spiritual existence, and the mirror-image of these revelations will live in our souls. Love and Peace—here is the most beautiful mirror-image on Earth of what streams down from the Heights.

In this way we can receive and assimilate the words of the Gospel of St. Luke which resounded when the forces of the Nirmanakaya of Buddha streamed down upon the Nathan Jesus-child. The revelations pour down from the spiritual worlds upon the Earth and are reflected from human hearts as Love and Peace to the extent to which men unfold the power, the ‘good will’, which the Christ-principle enables to flow from the centre of man's being, from his Ego. The proclamation rings out clearly and with the glow of warmth when we truly understand the meaning of these words in the Gospel of St. Luke:

The revelation of the spiritual worlds from the Heights and its answering reflection from the hearts of men brings peace to all whose purpose upon the evolving Earth is to unfold good will.

• 1. See references to the nature of this Ego in Lectures Four, Five and Seven.
• 2. See the lecture-courses given at Hamburg, in May 1908, and at Cassel, in July 1909;
  also the book Christianity as Mystical Fact, Ch. VIII.

Notes by Mathilde Scholl

The esoteric disciple has only one condition to fulfill when entering the school, namely that he applies his reason, his intellectuality, fully to the teachings he receives, that he asks himself when listening to the teachings: Is it reasonable for me to go this way? That he recognizes and grasps with his reason and mind what is given to him. This is absolutely necessary if the esoteric work we have to do on ourselves is to have the right effect. Only under this condition can our esoteric work bear the right fruit. The school, on the other hand, has to fulfill the condition that everything that flows through it comes only from the great teachers whom we call the Masters of Wisdom and of the Harmony of Feelings. What purpose do they serve in these esoteric schools? A small group of people are to be educated, who are to be endowed with the knowledge of the development of the world and of humanity, and who bring with them the right attitude for the great spiritual truths that lie behind world events. These truths they should then let flow into the development of humanity, for the benefit of the same. How is it that this spiritual movement has emerged just now? This is based on important events in the spiritual worlds, for everything on earth is only a reflection of them. We have seen that great spiritual hierarchies carry out the commands of the Godhead and direct the destinies of humanity. Eight centuries before our era it was necessary to prepare the Mystery of Golgotha from one side, to send hindering forces into the evolvement, and the hosts of a leader, who in occultism is called Mammon, were released for this purpose. They increasingly obscured man's consciousness of his connection with divinity. The old clairvoyance was lost to men and the science and philosophy of Occidental civilization blossomed. The old Oriental philosophy still has its origins in the old clairvoyance, while Greek philosophy grows entirely out of the material. Thales' saying, “All things come from water,” was gradually interpreted in a purely material sense. The spiritual aspect of water was forgotten. But even in these times of darkness, great teachers were active who reminded people of their spiritual origin. But suppose a man of that time had no opportunity whatever to listen to the teachings of a Buddha, a Zarathustra, and so on, what would have become of such a man after death? You know that the life between two incarnations is subject to change just as is the historical life in the physical.

Of course, the darkening of human consciousness had only occurred gradually, as everything only occurs gradually in evolution. These spirits of Mammon had only gradually been able to assert their influence and each time the son was less clairvoyant than the father, the grandfather even more clairvoyant and so on. When a person died whose consciousness of the Divine was completely dark, he took this darkness with him and had to work his way out of this cloud very gradually, by passing from hand to hand, so to speak, figuratively speaking, up the line of his ancestors to the great-grandfather who still had the full, old clairvoyance. In this way the cloud gradually lifted for him. Of course, this took a lot of time, and it could happen that such a person no longer met his ancestor because he had since incarnated again, and so he had to return to a new incarnation in an immature state. This path was called the 'Fathers' Way' or 'Pitri (Fathers) Yana' in Eastern wisdom. But whoever took up the teachings of a Zarathustra, a Buddha, followed a great teacher, was received over there by his hand and the teacher shortened the Pitriyana for him, parted the cloud for him and led him to his divine origin. In Eastern wisdom, this path was called the “Devayana” (path of the gods). In the time of deepest darkness, the Mystery of Golgotha shines forth as the Light. The esoteric disciples know or should know that with the moment the blood flowed from the wounds, the Christ began the journey into the spiritual world, that he appeared in Devachan. That was the spiritual reflection of the physical events below. What the Mystery of Golgotha has brought to Humanity is there; but the understanding of it can only dawn very gradually in human souls; indeed, even today it cannot dawn universally. The guiding power in human destinies had, at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, passed from the hands of Michael to Oriphiel, who is one of the leaders serving the hosts of Mammon and who has to hold up the obstacles and hindrances to development.

Michael replaced Gabriel, who returned in the 16th century after four other archangels had followed Oriphiel, and took up the reigns again. Gabriel is in charge of human births, which is why he is the one who, for example, announces the birth of John the Baptist. In the 16th century, he prepared the human brain, the forehead, by selecting births in such a way that an organ developed in it that cannot be discovered by the means of material science, but which makes today's brain appear different from that of a person from the 13th or 14th century, for example.

Since the 16th century, the human brain has clearly changed in a way that is perceptible to the clairvoyant, with the purpose of enabling people to gradually learn to understand Christianity in its full meaning.

We have seen that during the 4th to 14th centuries, copies of the etheric and astral bodies of Christ were given to personalities who, in this way, kept the spirit of true Christianity alive. Augustine, who had received an impression of the etheric body, arrived after many aberrations at the mystical realizations that bear so much similarity to our theosophical teachings. The division of man into seven parts, for example, was a well-known fact to him, even though he had different terms for it. All those gifted with the etheric or astral body were characterized by deep humility because they were aware that the great truths they proclaimed came to them like revelations, like a grace, that they could not understand them with their ego. When such cosmic events occur, such as the bestowal of an etheric or astral body of Christ to a human being, they are usually accompanied by natural phenomena that we are inclined to interpret as coincidence, but which are in fact deeply connected with the spiritual events. To cite just one example, when Thomas Aquinas received an astral body of Christ as a young child, a bolt of lightning struck and killed Thomas's baby sister, who was lying in a cradle in the same room, but made the boy's astral body resilient enough to absorb the higher astral body.

Through the preparation of the people in the 16th century by Gabriel to develop a new organ in the forebrain, it has become possible that in the last third of the 19th century, after Gabriel had again ceded the government to Michael, what we call theosophy could flow in from the great masters of wisdom and the harmony of sensations, to gradually bring to humanity the meaning of the mystery of Golgotha in all its effects. When man now passes through the gate of death, each individual can find his great master, who allows himself to be found by every person living in the physical.