The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The Meaning of the Name

Enquirer. Theosophy and its doctrines are often referred to as a new-fangled religion. Is it a religion?

Theosophist. It is not. Theosophy is Divine Knowledge or Science.

Enq. What is the real meaning of the term?

Theo. "Divine Wisdom," (Theosophia) or Wisdom of the gods, as (theogonia), genealogy of the gods. The word theos means a god in Greek, one of the divine beings, certainly not "God" in the sense attached in our day to the term. Therefore, it is not "Wisdom of God," as translated by some, but Divine Wisdom such as that possessed by the gods. The term is many thousand years old.

Enq. What is the origin of the name?

Theo. It comes to us from the Alexandrian philosophers, called lovers of truth, Philaletheians, from phil "loving," and aletheia "truth." The name Theosophy dates from the third century of our era, and began with Ammonius Saccas and his disciples ¹, who started the Eclectic Theosophical system.

Enq. What was the object of this system?

Theo. First of all to inculcate certain great moral truths upon its disciples, and all those who were "lovers of the truth." Hence the motto adopted by the Theosophical Society: "There is no religion higher than truth." ² The chief aim of the Founders of the Eclectic Theosophical School was one of the three objects of its modern successor, the Theosophical Society, namely, to reconcile all religions, sects and nations under a common system of ethics, based on eternal verities.

Enq. What have you to show that this is not an impossible dream; and that all the world's religions are based on the one and the same truth?

Theo. Their comparative study and analysis. The "Wisdom-religion" was one in antiquity; and the sameness of primitive religious philosophy is proven to us by the identical doctrines taught to the Initiates during the MYSTERIES, an institution once universally diffused. "All the old worships indicate the existence of a single Theosophy anterior to them. The key that is to open one must open all; otherwise it cannot be the right key." (Eclect. Philo.)

The Policy of the Theosophical Society

Enq. In the days of Ammonius there were several ancient great religions, and numerous were the sects in Egypt and Palestine alone. How could he reconcile them?

Theo. By doing that which we again try to do now. The Neo-Platonists were a large body, and belonged to various religious philosophies; ³ so do our Theosophists. In those days, the Jew Aristobulus affirmed that the ethics of Aristotle represented the esoteric teachings of the Law of Moses; Philo Judaeus endeavoured to reconcile the Pentateuch with the Pythagorean and Platonic philosophy; and Josephus proved that the Essenes of Carmel were simply the copyists and followers of the Egyptian Therapeutae (the healers). So it is in our day. We can show the line of descent of every Christian religion, as of every, even the smallest, sect. The latter are the minor twigs or shoots grown on the larger branches; but shoots and branches spring from the same trunk — the WISDOM-RELIGION. To prove this was the aim of Ammonius, who endeavoured to induce Gentiles and Christians, Jews and Idolaters, to lay aside their contentions and strifes, remembering only that they were all in possession of the same truth under various vestments, and were all the children of a common mother.⁴ This is the aim of Theosophy likewise.

Enq. What are your authorities for saying this of the ancient Theosophists of Alexandria?

Theo. An almost countless number of well-known writers. Mosheim, one of them, says that: —

"Ammonius taught that the religion of the multitude went hand-in-hand with philosophy, and with her had shared the fate of being by degrees corrupted and obscured with mere human conceits, superstitions, and lies; that it ought, therefore, to be brought back to its original purity by purging it of this dross and expounding it upon philosophical principles; and the whole Christ had in view was to reinstate and restore to its primitive integrity the wisdom of the ancients; to reduce within bounds the universally-prevailing dominion of superstition; and in part to correct, and in part to exterminate the various errors that had found their way into the different popular religions."

This, again, is precisely what the modern Theosophists say. Only while the great Philaletheian was supported and helped in the policy he pursued by two Church Fathers, Clement and Athenagoras, by all the learned Rabbis of the Synagogue, the Academy and the Groves, and while he taught a common doctrine for all, we, his followers on the same line, receive no recognition, but, on the contrary, are abused and persecuted. People 1,500 years ago are thus shown to have been more tolerant than they are in this enlightened century.

Enq. Was he encouraged and supported by the Church because, notwithstanding his heresies, Ammonius taught Christianity and was a Christian?

Theo. Not at all. He was born a Christian, but never accepted Church Christianity. As said of him by the same writer:

"He had but to propound his instructions according to the ancient pillars of Hermes, which Plato and Pythagoras knew before, and from them constituted their philosophy. Finding the same in the prologue of the Gospel according to St. John, he very properly supposed that the purpose of Jesus was to restore the great doctrine of wisdom in its primitive integrity. The narratives of the Bible and the stories of the gods he considered to be allegories illustrative of the truth, or else fables to be rejected." Moreover, as says the Edinburgh Encyclopoedia, "he acknowledged that Jesus Christ was an excellent man and the 'friend of God,' but alleged that it was not his design entirely to abolish the worship of demons (gods), and that his only intention was to purify the ancient religion."

The Wisdom-Religion Esoteric in All Ages

Enq. Since Ammonius never committed anything to writing, how can one feel sure that such were his teachings?

Theo. Neither did Buddha, Pythagoras, Confucius, Orpheus, Socrates, or even Jesus, leave behind them any writings. Yet most of these are historical personages, and their teachings have all survived. The disciples of Ammonius (among whom Origen and Herennius) wrote treatises and explained his ethics. Certainly the latter are as historical, if not more so, than the Apostolic writings. Moreover, his pupils — Origen, Plotinus, and Longinus (counsellor of the famous Queen Zenobia) — have all left voluminous records of the Philaletheian System — so far, at all events, as their public profession of faith was known, for the school was divided into exoteric and esoteric teachings.

Enq. How have the latter tenets reached our day, since you hold that what is properly called the WISDOM-RELIGION was esoteric?

Theo. The WISDOM-RELIGION was ever one, and being the last word of possible human knowledge, was, therefore, carefully preserved. It preceded by long ages the Alexandrian Theosophists, reached the modern, and will survive every other religion and philosophy.

Enq. Where and by whom was it so preserved?

Theo. Among Initiates of every country; among profound seekers after truth — their disciples; and in those parts of the world where such topics have always been most valued and pursued: in India, Central Asia, and Persia.

Enq. Can you give me some proofs of its esotericism?

Theo. The best proof you can have of the fact is that every ancient religious, or rather philosophical, cult consisted of an esoteric or secret teaching, and an exoteric (outward public) worship. Furthermore, it is a well-known fact that the MYSTERIES of the ancients comprised with every nation the "greater" (secret) and "Lesser" (public) MYSTERIES — e.g. in the celebrated solemnities called the Eleusinia, in Greece. From the Hierophants of Samothrace, Egypt, and the initiated Brahmins of the India of old, down to the later Hebrew Rabbis, all preserved, for fear of profanation, their real bona fide beliefs secret. The Jewish Rabbis called their secular religious series the Mercavah (the exterior body), "the vehicle," or, the covering which contains the hidden soul. — i.e., their highest secret knowledge. Not one of the ancient nations ever imparted through its priests its real philosophical secrets to the masses, but allotted to the latter only the husks. Northern Buddhism has its "greater" and its "lesser" vehicle, known as the Mahayana, the esoteric, and the Hinayana, the exoteric, Schools. Nor can you blame them for such secrecy; for surely you would not think of feeding your flock of sheep on learned dissertations on botany instead of on grass? Pythagoras called his Gnosis "the knowledge of things that are," or e gnosis ton onton, and preserved that knowledge for his pledged disciples only: for those who could digest such mental food and feel satisfied; and he pledged them to silence and secrecy. Occult alphabets and secret ciphers are the development of the old Egyptian hieratic writings, the secret of which was, in the days of old, in the possession only of the Hierogrammatists, or initiated Egyptian priests. Ammonius Saccas, as his biographers tell us, bound his pupils by oath not to divulge his higher doctrines except to those who had already been instructed in preliminary knowledge, and who were also bound by a pledge. Finally, do we not find the same even in early Christianity, among the Gnostics, and even in the teachings of Christ? Did he not speak to the multitudes in parables which had a two-fold meaning, and explain his reasons only to his disciples? "To you," he says, "it is given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven; but unto them that are without, all these things are done in parables" (Mark iv. 11). "The Essenes of Judea and Carmel made similar distinctions, dividing their adherents into neophytes, brethren, and the perfect, or those initiated" (Eclec. Phil.). Examples might be brought from every country to this effect.

Enq. Can you attain the "Secret Wisdom" simply by study? Encyclopaedias define Theosophy pretty much as Webster's Dictionary does, i. e., as "supposed intercourse with God and superior spirits, and consequent attainment of superhuman knowledge by physical means and chemical processes." Is this so?

Theo. I think not. Nor is there any lexicographer capable of explaining, whether to himself or others, how superhuman knowledge can be attained by physical or chemical processes. Had Webster said "by metaphysical and alchemical processes," the definition would be approximately correct: as it is, it is absurd. Ancient Theosophists claimed, and so do the modern, that the infinite cannot be known by the finite — i.e., sensed by the finite Self — but that the divine essence could be communicated to the higher Spiritual Self in a state of ecstasy. This condition can hardly be attained, like hypnotism, by "physical and chemical means."

Enq. What is your explanation of it?

Theo. Real ecstasy was defined by Plotinus as "the liberation of the mind from its finite consciousness, becoming one and identified with the infinite." This is the highest condition, says Prof. Wilder, but not one of permanent duration, and it is reached only by the very very few. It is, indeed, identical with that state which is known in India as Samadhi. The latter is practised by the Yogis, who facilitate it physically by the greatest abstinence in food and drink, and mentally by an incessant endeavour to purify and elevate the mind. Meditation is silent and unuttered prayer, or, as Plato expressed it, "the ardent turning of the soul toward the divine; not to ask any particular good (as in the common meaning of prayer), but for good itself — for the universal Supreme Good" of which we are a part on earth, and out of the essence of which we have all emerged. Therefore, adds Plato, "remain silent in the presence of the divine ones, till they remove the clouds from thy eyes and enable thee to see by the light which issues from themselves, not what appears as good to thee, but what is intrinsically good." ⁵

Enq. Theosophy, then, is not, as held by some, a newly devised scheme?

Theo. Only ignorant people can thus refer to it. It is as old as the world, in its teachings and ethics, if not in name, as it is also the broadest and most catholic system among all.

Enq. How comes it, then, that Theosophy has remained so unknown to the nations of the Western Hemisphere? Why should it have been a sealed book to races confessedly the most cultured and advanced?

Theo. We believe there were nations as cultured in days of old and certainly more spiritually "advanced" than we are. But there are several reasons for this willing ignorance. One of them was given by St. Paul to the cultured Athenians — a loss, for long centuries, of real spiritual insight, and even interest, owing to their too great devotion to things of sense and their long slavery to the dead letter of dogma and ritualism. But the strongest reason for it lies in the fact that real Theosophy has ever been kept secret.

Enq. You have brought forward proofs that such secrecy has existed; but what was the real cause for it?

Theo. The causes for it were: Firstly, the perversity of average human nature and its selfishness, always tending to the gratification of personal desires to the detriment of neighbours and next of kin. Such people could never be entrusted with divine secrets. Secondly, their unreliability to keep the sacred and divine knowledge from desecration. It is the latter that led to the perversion of the most sublime truths and symbols, and to the gradual transformation of things spiritual into anthropomorphic, concrete, and gross imagery — in other words, to the dwarfing of the god-idea and to idolatry.

Theosophy is Not Buddhism

Enq. You are often spoken of as "Esoteric Buddhists." Are you then all followers of Gautama Buddha?

Theo. No more than musicians are all followers of Wagner. Some of us are Buddhists by religion; yet there are far more Hindus and Brahmins than Buddhists among us, and more Christian-born Europeans and Americans than converted Buddhists. The mistake has arisen from a misunderstanding of the real meaning of the title of Mr. Sinnett's excellent work, "Esoteric Buddhism," which last word ought to have been spelt with one, instead of two, d's, as then Budhism would have meant what it was intended for, merely "Wisdomism" (Bodha, bodhi, "intelligence," "wisdom") instead of Buddhism, Gautama's religious philosophy. Theosophy, as already said, is the WISDOM-RELIGION.

Enq. What is the difference between Buddhism, the religion founded by the Prince of Kapilavastu, and Budhism, the "Wisdomism" which you say is synonymous with Theosophy?

Theo. Just the same difference as there is between the secret teachings of Christ, which are called "the mysteries of the Kingdom of Heaven," and the later ritualism and dogmatic theology of the Churches and Sects. Buddha means the "Enlightened" by Bodha, or understanding, Wisdom. This has passed root and branch into the esoteric teachings that Gautama imparted to his chosen Arhats only.

Enq. But some Orientalists deny that Buddha ever taught any esoteric doctrine at all?

Theo. They may as well deny that Nature has any hidden secrets for the men of science. Further on I will prove it by Buddha's conversation with his disciple Ananda. His esoteric teachings were simply the Gupta Vidya (secret knowledge) of the ancient Brahmins, the key to which their modern successors have, with few exceptions, completely lost. And this Vidya has passed into what is now known as the inner teachings of the Mahayana school of Northern Buddhism. Those who deny it are simply ignorant pretenders to Orientalism. I advise you to read the Rev. Mr. Edkins' Chinese Buddhism — especially the chapters on the Exoteric and Esoteric schools and teachings — and then compare the testimony of the whole ancient world upon the subject.

Enq. But are not the ethics of Theosophy identical with those taught by Buddha?

Theo. Certainly, because these ethics are the soul of the Wisdom-Religion, and were once the common property of the initiates of all nations. But Buddha was the first to embody these lofty ethics in his public teachings, and to make them the foundation and the very essence of his public system. It is herein that lies the immense difference between exoteric Buddhism and every other religion. For while in other religions ritualism and dogma hold the first and most important place, in Buddhism it is the ethics which have always been the most insisted upon. This accounts for the resemblance, amounting almost to identity, between the ethics of Theosophy and those of the religion of Buddha.

Enq. Are there any great points of difference?

Theo. One great distinction between Theosophy and exoteric Buddhism is that the latter, represented by the Southern Church, entirely denies (a) the existence of any Deity, and (b) any conscious post-mortem life, or even any self-conscious surviving individuality in man. Such at least is the teaching of the Siamese sect, now considered as the purest form of exoteric Buddhism. And it is so, if we refer only to Buddha's public teachings; the reason for such reticence on his part I will give further on. But the schools of the Northern Buddhist Church, established in those countries to which his initiated Arhats retired after the Master's death, teach all that is now called Theosophical doctrines, because they form part of the knowledge of the initiates — thus proving how the truth has been sacrificed to the dead-letter by the too-zealous orthodoxy of Southern Buddhism. But how much grander and more noble, more philosophical and scientific, even in its dead-letter, is this teaching than that of any other Church or religion. Yet Theosophy is not Buddhism.

• 1. Also called Analogeticists. As explained by Prof. Alex. Wilder, F. T. S., in his "Eclectic Philosophy," they were called so because of their practice of interpreting all sacred legends and narratives, myths and mysteries, by a rule or principle of analogy and correspondence: so that events which were related as having occurred in the external world were regarded as expressing operations and experiences of the human soul. They were also denominated Neo-Platonists. Though Theosophy, or the Eclectic Theosophical system, is generally attributed to the third century, yet, if Diogenes Laertius is to be credited, its origin is much earlier, as he attributed the system to an Egyptian priest, Pot-Amun, who lived in the early days of the Ptolemaic dynasty. The same author tells us that the name is Coptic, and signifies one consecrated to Amun, the God of Wisdom. Theosophy is the equivalent of Brahm-Vidya, divine knowledge.
• 2. Eclectic Theosophy was divided under three heads: (1) Belief in one absolute, incomprehensible and supreme Deity, or infinite essence, which is the root of all nature, and of all that is, visible and invisible. (2) Belief in man's eternal immortal nature, because, being a radiation of the Universal Soul, it is of an identical essence with it. (3) Theurgy, or "divine work," or producing a work of gods; from theoi, "gods," and ergein, "to work." The term is very old, but, as it belongs to the vocabulary of the MYSTERIES, was not in popular use. It was a mystic belief — practically proven by initiated adepts and priests — that, by making oneself as pure as the incorporeal beings — i.e., by returning to one's pristine purity of nature — man could move the gods to impart to him Divine mysteries, and even cause them to become occasionally visible, either subjectively or objectively. It was the transcendental aspect of what is now called Spiritualism; but having been abused and misconceived by the populace, it had come to be regarded by some as necromancy, and was generally forbidden. A travestied practice of the theurgy of Iamblichus lingers still in the ceremonial magic of some modern Kabalists. Modern Theosophy avoids and rejects both these kinds of magic and "necromancy" as being very dangerous. Real divine theurgy requires an almost superhuman purity and holiness of life; otherwise it degenerates into mediumship or black magic. The immediate disciples of Ammonius Saccas, who was called Theodidaktos, "god-taught" — such as Plotinus and his follower Porphyry — rejected theurgy at first, but were finally reconciled to it through Iamblichus, who wrote a work to that effect entitled "De Mysteriis," under the name of his own master, a famous Egyptian priest called Abammon. Ammonius Saccas was the son of Christian parents, and, having been repelled by dogmatic spiritualistic Christianity from his childhood, became a Neo-Platonist, and like J. Boehme and other great seers and mystics, is said to have had divine wisdom revealed to him in dreams and visions. Hence his name of Theodidaktos. He resolved to reconcile every system of religion, and by demonstrating their identical origin to establish one universal creed based on ethics. His life was so blameless and pure, his learning so profound and vast, that several Church Fathers were his secret disciples. Clemens Alexandrinus speaks very highly of him. Plotinus, the "St. John" of Ammonius, was also a man universally respected and esteemed, and of the most profound learning and integrity. When thirty-nine years of age he accompanied the Roman Emperor Gordian and his army to the East, to be instructed by the sages of Bactria and India. He had a School of Philosophy in Rome. Porphyry, his disciple, whose real name was Malek (a Hellenized Jew), collected all the writings of his master. Porphyry was himself a great author, and gave an allegorical interpretation to some parts of Homer's writings. The system of meditation the Philaletheians resorted to was ecstacy, a system akin to Indian Yoga practice. What is known of the Eclectic School is due to Origen, Longinus, and Plotinus, the immediate disciples of Ammonius — (Vide Eclectic Philos., by A. Wilder.)
• 3. It was under Philadelphus that Judaism established itself in Alexandria, and forthwith the Hellenic teachers became the dangerous rivals of the College of Rabbis of Babylon. As the author of "Eclectic Philosophy" very pertinently remarks: "The Buddhistic, Vedantic, and Magian systems were expounded along with the philosophies of Greece at that period. It was not wonderful that thoughtful men supposed that the strife of words ought to cease, and considered it possible to extract one harmonious system from these various teachings. . . . Panaenus, Athenagoras, and Clement were thoroughly instructed in Platonic philosophy, and comprehended its essential unity with the Oriental systems."
• 4. Says Mosheim of Ammonius: "Conceiving that not only the philosophers of Greece, but also all those of the different barbarian nations, were perfectly in unison with each other with regard to every essential point, he made it his business so to expound the thousand tenets of all these various sects as to show they had all originated from one and the same source, and tended all to one and the same end." If the writer on Ammonius in the Edinburgh Encyclopoedia knows what he is talking about, then he describes the modern Theosophists, their beliefs, and their work, for he says, speaking of the Theodidaktos: "He adopted the doctrines which were received in Egypt (the esoteric were those of India) concerning the Universe and the Deity, considered as constituting one great whole; concerning the eternity of the world . . . and established a system of moral discipline which allowed the people in general to live according to the laws of their country and the dictates of nature, but required the wise to exalt their mind by contemplation."
• 5. This is what the scholarly author of "The Eclectic Philosophy," Prof. A. Wilder, F. T. S., describes as "spiritual photography": "The soul is the camera in which facts and events, future, past, and present, are alike fixed; and the mind becomes conscious of them. Beyond our every-day world of limits all is one day or state — the past and future comprised in the present." . . . Death is the last ecstasis on earth. Then the soul is freed from the constraint of the body, and its nobler part is united to higher nature and becomes partaker in the wisdom and foreknowledge of the higher beings." Real Theosophy is, for the mystics, that state which Apollonius of Tyana was made to describe thus: "I can see the present and the future as in a clear mirror. The sage need not wait for the vapours of the earth and the corruption of the air to foresee events. . . . The theoi, or gods, see the future; common men the present; sages that which is about to take place." "The Theosophy of the Sages" he speaks of is well expressed in the assertion, "The Kingdom of God is within us."

In these lectures, we have become acquainted with the ascent of man to the summit of knowledge and wisdom. I have shown you that a kind of foreshadowing of the event of Palestine took place over and over again during the initiation into the mysteries. The initiation ceremonies culminated in a three-day death-like sleep, through which the initiate, when he woke up, found within himself that which is called the higher man. Blessed - that is, imbued with the soul - is he who beholds the spiritual worlds. And now should become blessed he who believes and does not see. The time was to come when what had formerly taken place in the soul of the individual within the mysteries would now be enacted before the eyes of mankind as an historical fact. To understand this, let us first speak of the effects of initiation.

The man of everyday, who sinks into sleep tired from the burden and toil of the day, is in a state similar to that of a plant. He feels nothing, he knows nothing of himself. During this time, the astral body works on the physical body to repair the forces it has expended. If the person still has an echo of his night experiences in the etheric and physical bodies, we say: his sleep was animated by dreams. But usually, in the average person, these images are blurred and incomprehensible in memory.

Not so with the disciple. We distinguish between the bright consciousness of the day, the consciousness of dreams, and dreamless sleep. If the disciple patiently carries out the exercises given to him, the time will come when order is brought into the chaotic confusion of dreams. The disciple begins to get to know the real world of sleep. He no longer brings isolated memories into the consciousness of the day, but attains continuity of consciousness, constant awareness. This announces itself gradually. At first, the student has a feeling upon awakening like a swimmer emerging from the water, remembering things that never occur on earth. More and more details emerge from the sea of the astral plane. At first, the student's ability to perceive and remember develops very slowly. Later, he becomes aware of how he can transfer his experiences into his waking consciousness. He can now take what he has perceived throughout the night, the world in which he has lived, and the events in it, into this physical world. The time is now beginning for him when every plant becomes for him the expression of a spiritual essence of the earth, a real member of a great earth spirit. He is an earth man, the inhabitant of this world, and as a spiritual man, the inhabitant of a spiritual world. There live and weave in his soul spiritual currents, spiritual beings that arise and now become conscious to him. His consciousness grows together with the other. He knows that his consciousness is only a part of the earth consciousness. Imagine this earth as a living being with its own consciousness, and now think of the individual consciousness as a mirror image of the one great earth consciousness. It is an illusion to believe that man has a consciousness that is unique to him. Man is only on the way to becoming one with the earth and its consciousness, thus to becoming an earth son; the chela is so to a greater degree. The representative of this one great earth consciousness is the Christ Jesus. As the Word made flesh and blood, He represents the embodied future ideal of earth and human consciousness, to which all men will one day attain. Christ Jesus leads us into this time by allowing this consciousness to work through him as the firstborn, so that people will reach this state more quickly. He who has already reached the summit and draws others up to himself can lead to the summits with particular certainty. He who hung on the cross carried the consciousness of the earth in his own breast. The entire Gospel of John is written in a remarkably imaginative language. Let us take an example. What does it mean when it says, “The disciple whom the Lord loves”? Imagine that the writer of the Gospel of John is speaking of himself when he says, “whom the Lord loves” and “who lies at the breast of Jesus.” This disciple is the external representative of the heart, the organ of Budhi. What the heart is in the human body, that is John in the midst of the twelve disciples.

Let us take the thirteenth chapter: the washing of the feet (13, 1-20). What does this washing of the feet mean? Man is a being bound in two ways, he is a double being: with his head turned towards the sun and with his feet towards the earth. What must still become pure in man? The part assigned to the earth must still be cleansed by the representative of perfected humanity (13:8-10). Peter, that is, the rock, is the part facing the earth. If this is also to become pure, it must be washed by Christ. Hence Christ's words: “If your part of the earth is not washed, you have no part in me.” To Peter's reply: “Lord, not only the feet, but also the hands and the head,” Christ says to him: “He who has been washed needs nothing but to wash his feet, but is completely clean. And you are clean, but not all.” Christ knew well who should bring him death: Judas Iscariot, the representative of the selfish principle.

And further, verse 18: “He who eats my bread has lifted up his heel against me.” How can Jesus, he who has the consciousness of the earth and feels the whole earth as his body, say these words? He can. Put yourself in the consciousness of the earth as in that of a human being. If the earth had consciousness, it would speak to man: “He who eats my bread tramples me underfoot”. Christ has this consciousness, Christ as the representative of all earthly consciousness may say this.

What will come to pass when that love which He lived out will one day spread to all mankind and all people will have become brothers? Then there will be one example. People have distributed the goods of the earth among themselves, but one thing, which is the outer shell of the earth, the atmosphere, cannot be shared. And just as this “shell” of the earth cannot be shared, so too will the goods be shared later. This is also expressed symbolically in the crucifixion of Christ in the distribution of his garments among the soldiers (John's Gospel 19: 24). The skirt of Christ Jesus as the covering of Earth consciousness is unstitched and made of one piece. The outer garment, which is divided into four parts, represents the four main continents, the indivisible skirt, that is the indivisible air circle. The sublimity that underlies Christianity, the moral and spiritual cosmic, so magnificently expressed in the Gospel of John, is contained in the fact that all expressions of Christ Jesus point to it: this is how one will live in the future, as Christ Jesus has shown.

What Christ Jesus did when He fulfilled the saying, “I am the bread of life” (John 6:48), this feeding of the five thousand, is not only an event of the present time, but one of deep, lasting significance. The earth is the body of Christ Jesus: the few seeds, the disciples, are multiplied. These are the things that make Christianity so great, because the physical and the moral coincide so wonderfully. The most wonderful monism is reflected in Christianity through the way John gives it.

Nor is there any contradiction between Christianity and karma. Christianity appeared at a time when it had something to offer to humanity, which was dying of death, that brought life then and still lives now. Christianity was preceded by a time when the doctrine of reincarnation was common knowledge. Man at that time regarded his present life only as something temporary: the Egyptian slave, who was afflicted by the hardest fate and bowed down deeply, said to himself: “It is one of many existences. In this he found consolation and strength and hope for the present and the future. He said to himself: “My life is dark now, but later it will be light.” Or: “I have brought this upon myself through my own fault, now I will bear it and make amends.”

We find a high spiritual culture among various primitive peoples who used the simplest tools. At that time, man was not yet so attached to the earth. Humanity first had to be educated in this. The conquest of the material, everything that we have around us today, would not have been possible if man had not learned to love the earth. To achieve this, he had to be deprived of an overview of his repeated lives on earth. It is a wise Christian teaching that the one life was placed at the center for a time. This had to be so in order to later reveal the truth of reincarnation to man at a higher level. That is why Christ does not speak about karma in his discourses to the people, but in the intimate circle with his disciples he speaks of the existence of karma.

In the spiritual world, everything is connected as cause and effect, and judgment belongs to what is exercised by the deepest and purest being on earth. In occult writings, everything a person has done is inscribed in the Akasha Chronicle. Once this has been grasped in the future, there will be no more worldly punishment. The Christ shows how judgment will be administered in the future in chapter 8, verses 1-11, of the Gospel of John: it is the story of the adulteress. What Christ says and does there is meant to show that everything that man has done is written in the Earth Akashic Records. This is the direct transfer of jurisdiction to the self-fulfilling law of karma. The living consciousness of the Earth's Akashic Records is Christ Himself, and so judgment is handed over to Him by the Father, and He has power to forgive sins and take them upon Himself (John 5:21, 22, 23): “For as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, even so the Son also gives life to whom He wills. For the Father judges no man, but has given all judgment to the Son, that all should honor the Son even as they honor the Father. He that honors not the Son honors not the Father who has sent him.

All human earthly karma lives in Christ; He is the living embodiment of earthly karma. That is why the teaching of Christianity is about the personal living relationship of each individual to Christ, which at the same time gives the awareness that Christ forgives sins, that somewhere the balance is to be sought in Christ Jesus. Salvation is to be sought with him, he represents earthly justice. In this subtle way of studying and immersing yourself in it again and again, you will be able to grasp every sentence in the Gospel of John and penetrate deeper into it, at least into the part that you can understand theosophically.

Man slowly ascends to higher consciousness. At first he still differentiates: I have pain, I have pleasure. Once man has risen above this, he ascends through initiation from physical everyday consciousness to the second, to astral consciousness, where the astral world appears as in living images. In Eastern wisdom, a distinction is made between five such levels of consciousness: firstly, physical everyday consciousness = Jagrat; secondly, dream consciousness = Swapna; thirdly, devachan consciousness = Sushupti; fourthly, Turiya consciousness; fifthly, nirvana consciousness.

In the first and second stages, one can do no more than remember what one experienced in the dream; one does not yet have the realization that sets in during the third stage, the devachan consciousness. This stage is reached when one experiences not only the astral but also the purely spiritual world. If you can fill your waking consciousness with it and see the world as spiritually permeated, then you have attained Turiya. If you perceive the essence of the world, you have attained Nirvana.

When Christ says, “Before Father Abraham was, I am,” He points out that a higher consciousness lives in Him. When the crowd wants to stone Him, He “goes out of the temple” (John 8:58, 59), that is, He rises to a consciousness that is not accessible to His persecutors.

Those who ascend must purify all their members and cast out all that weighs them down. Christ, as the Representative of the consciousness on earth that is purifying itself and ascending, casts out what is impure: the spirit of trading and bartering, the spirit of greed for money, will be cast out. This is the meaning of the cleansing of the Temple, which is at the same time a symbol for the future of humanity. After the expulsion of the money changers and merchants, Jesus says: “Destroy this Temple, and on the third day I will raise it up.” “But He was speaking of the Temple of His body,” it continues (2:14-21). In these words you have the clue to the three coming World Days of which we have already spoken. The Christ Jesus is speaking here of the evolution of the whole Earth. The old order shall pass away, and on the third World Day there will come a body that no longer contains the lower self.

Let us also remember that when the chela advances to mastership, he is laid in the tomb for three and a half days. The temple of the body is broken down for him and then raised up again. This is what happens to the individual, and for all mankind it has happened through the death and resurrection of Christ. You must feel in the Gospel of John the radiance of the sentences in many directions, for these sentences are deep and many-sided, encompassing the whole secret of the world.

In initiation, the soul is separated from the body, but it is conscious in the higher worlds. Nicodemus comes to Christ “by night,” that is, outside of daytime consciousness (3:1-21). Christ says to him: “Unless one is born of water” - that is, from the astral world, which one experiences as floods - “and of the Spirit” - the Devachan - “he cannot enter the kingdom of God,” so he does not experience the spiritual world. He speaks of this as long as everyday consciousness has nothing to say, namely during the initiation. Every word in the Gospel of John has a deeper meaning, and there is no end to the explanation of this Gospel.

The purpose of these lessons was to show you how to understand this remarkable book. The way in which it should be used should have become clear. I hope I have been able to make it accessible to you.

Understanding the Gospel of John is only possible through spiritual research and the spiritual-scientific world view. We should become more and more aware of how we have to work towards understanding the Spirit who is the deepest on earth. Christ presents us with a Being such as there has been none else on earth. At the end of His days on earth, the “Word” is once more the last expression of the spiritual Being of the Christ. Christ will then embody Himself in all human beings. In the flesh, the possibility to embody Himself could only be given to Him by a higher being. You could never see the sun if you did not have an eye. But who made the eye of man? The sun made it. Christ is the sun, which is to absorb the human soul with the help of that through which we see the Christ. The Gospel of John is this eye. But this eye could not see without the real Christ Jesus, who first opened this eye to the disciple whom the Lord loved, whom he himself awakened, who was his intimate disciple. Thus, in the Gospel of John, our feeling of thinking, feeling and willing moves up the paths that spiritual knowledge opens up for us.

This evening, too, I would like to take a look at the more general conditions of the German essence within this lecture cycle, because it seems to me that in our great, but also painful and sorrowful time, spiritual-scientific considerations have a kind of ethical obligation in a certain respect, and because, in addition, the truly human feeling is to illuminate the horizon of the fateful events within which we stand from a spiritual-scientific point of view. This evening, however, it will be more a matter of allowing the “light of feeling” given by spiritual science to fall, as it were, on certain processes in German intellectual life and on the understanding that is brought to bear on this intellectual life. Tomorrow I will again take the liberty of dealing with a more specific spiritual-scientific topic.

If we look at those phenomena in German intellectual life that can particularly express the whole character of this intellectual life to us, one of them is the one that has already been these lectures: Herman Grimm, the great German art historian, who viewed art from the deepest sources of what German intellectual life, with all its impulses, has poured into his soul. In one of the lectures this winter, I took the liberty of calling Herman Grimm, so to speak, “Goethe's governor in the second half of the nineteenth century.” In the way he lived with everything he produced, in what – concentrated in Goethe – was contained as German essence, as essence in the German folk soul, and what then poured into the stream of German intellectual life – in this way Herman Grimm is, in a certain respect, a representative personality of German intellectual life from the second half of the nineteenth century.

Not quite two years before Herman Grimm's death, essays from the last period of his life appeared, which he gave the collective title “Fragments”. In the preface to these fragments, he says something extraordinarily characteristic. He points out that these individual, sometimes very short essays on this or that question of German or foreign culture arise from a whole of his intellectual world view. And Herman Grimm mentions that he had intended to combine the lectures he had given on this subject over fifty years at the University of Berlin into a single book, which would present the growth and development of the German spirit. But at the same time, he points out how, each time he moved on to the next lecture, he found himself compelled to rework what he had already written. And now he says that this would have to be done for the last time if these lectures were to be combined into a book on German intellectual life as a whole; he does not know whether he will live to do so, because this reworking requires a lot of effort and time. But – and this is the characteristic thing – this whole of German intellectual life stands before his soul, and he wants the individual essays that he publishes to be understood as if they were individual parts, taken from the whole, that stands before his soul.

Herman Grimm did not live to write the book he had in mind. He died in 1901, not quite two years after publishing these “Fragments”. He had actually planned to write an entire spiritual history of the development of the European peoples during his youth. And if we now consider how he in turn – as he often emphasized – wanted the individual main parts that he had given to be understood from this overall presentation of European intellectual life – his great work on Homer, his biographies or monographs on Michelangelo and Raphael and finally his work on Goethe – if we take this into account, we are confronted with something extraordinarily characteristic. We are actually dealing with something that lived in Herman. . Grimm's soul, which was never really portrayed by him in the form in which it lived in his soul, but from which, one might say, every single line he wrote and every single word he spoke in his life emerged. And if we now consider the whole way in which Herman Grimm speaks about art and German cultural life, something else in addition to what has just been said emerges. Herman Grimm always endeavors to advocate with all his soul, with his entire undivided personality; and anyone who has the urge to have all things clearly “proven,” who loves a line of argument that advances from judgment to judgment in a demonstrative manner, will not find what he is looking for in Herman Grimm's presentation. One would like to say: everything he has written springs directly from his entire soul, and one has nothing as proof of the truth but the feeling that overcomes one: the man, this personality, has experienced a great deal in the broadest sense in the things he presents; and he presents his experience. Thus the individual thing he presents springs from a whole that is not really there at all.

What is it, then, that lives in Herman Grimm? What is it that teaches us the conviction that every single thing arises out of a whole? What do we sense, as it were, as a shadow of the spirit behind all the details that Herman Grimm presents, that he has given to the world?

I would like to describe what one senses and what permeates one as one turns the pages of his books: it is the sustaining power of the German spirit, that German spirit which, for those who truly understand it fully, is not just some abstraction that one categorizes with concepts , with ideas, that one expresses in images, but which is really felt like a living being through all of German history; like a being that one feels as if one were holding a dialogue in one's soul with this being and allowing oneself to be inspired by it for everything one has to say. So that basically, once you have such an experience, you need nothing more than the certainty that this spirit is behind it as an inspirer – and you have given something that has good “proven” reason. This being, which one can say is the living German spirit, is slowly and gradually approaching German development; but it is entering the consciousness of the best minds in the most definite way.

We can find this German spirit, this fundamental German spirit, particularly characteristic in one remarkable place. It is there where one of the best, one of the most brilliant Germans, Johann Gottfried Herder, has tried to depict the overall life of humanity in its development. Herder, this great predecessor of Goethe, basically set out early on to let his gaze wander over all the development of the peoples in order to get an overall picture of the forces, of the entities that live in this development of the peoples. And what he was then able to accomplish as a presentation of his ideas about this process of development, he summarized in his “Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Humanity”. In these “Ideas” we encounter a tableau, a journey through the development of humanity in such a way that we sense that in all the individual phenomena and events, beings and forces live that all have a fully vital effect on Herder's soul. Already in his early youth, Herder turned against Voltaire's historical approach. He fully recognized that Voltaire was one of the most ingenious men; but what he found in his view of history was that this whole view ultimately culminated in a sum of ideas that prevail throughout history, as it were. In contrast to this, Herder objected that ideas only ever give rise to ideas. Herder did not want people to speak only of the “ideas” that are effective in history. He wanted to speak of something less abstract, something more alive and more concrete than the ideas of history. He wanted to speak of how invisible living beings are behind all historical events. He once said, for example: What the outer historical events are is actually only of value to the observer if one takes into account the spirits and spiritual forces at work behind them, from which what can be perceived through the senses first clearly emerges; for what takes place externally is only like a cloud that arises and passes away, but behind which lies the whole activity of the spirit that runs through human history, which one has to observe.

Slowly and gradually, German development rose to such a grandiose historical perspective. It can be said that such a historical perspective was already present in ancient Greece. We find there already echoes of it, longings to give such an overall picture of human development. But such efforts then receded again; and only later, as in Italy in the fifteenth century, do we find new attempts in this direction, as well as in the rest of Western Europe, in France and England. People began to seek connections in the historical development of humanity. But these connections were conceived in a certain materialistic sense. What happens in the course of history is made dependent on climate, geographical conditions and all sorts of other factors. It was only when the German mind took hold of this comprehensive view of history that it was truly brought to life, one might say. And in Herder's soul arose an image that synthesizes natural events and the crowning human events that take place upon them. Herder first turned his attention to how the beings of nature develop and how the spirit, which works in nature at a subordinate level, comes to be more characteristically expressed in man. This spirit, which Herder consciously lets emerge from the essence of the All-Divinity, works in nature, but it also interweaves the human soul. And what man accomplishes in history is not for him merely a sum of successive events, but it has significance in that man on earth himself continues the coherent plan of the divine spiritual entities through what he does.

There is greatness in Herder's calling man an “assistant of the deity” in his earthly work. In this there is again something of the ideas and intuitions and feelings of German mysticism, which seeks God directly in the human soul itself. Herder seeks God in history, as He manifests Himself in the deeds that take place in historical development. God Himself does what historical development is; and man, insofar as he is imbued with God, is God's assistant. For Herder, the whole of nature is built upon the next, then the human kingdom and on that the kingdom of higher spirits; and he makes the significant statement: Man is a middle creature between animal and angel. Herder thus places man in the overall development in such a way that man appears as a direct expression, as a revelation of divine spirituality. And when one examines how Herder, who was not a systematizing philosopher and was far from constructing any abstract ideas, came to sketch out an overall picture of development with inexpressible diligence and truly ingenious foresight, through which the deeds of man can be summarized with the deeds in nature, then one must say: It is a divine power that inspires Herder himself. He is aware that the divine powers that rule in history live in himself. It is the sustaining power of the German spirit in Herder that creates an overall picture of human development and also of natural development.

“Evolution” has become the magic word that seems so significant for the world view of our time. In the days when Herder lived and when Goethe spent his youth, he rose through Herder and others to the world view supported by the German spirit. The idea of evolution entered into German intellectual life. This idea of development was more profound and more profound than it is taken from the materialistic world view. For in what is regarded as “developing”, the German mind saw the mind at work; and in every single natural product, insofar as development is considered, he saw mind as the architect, the carrier, the accomplisher of development. Thus he was able to introduce the idea of the spirit as developing, shown in the becoming of man, fruitfully into the history of ideas, into the whole history of development.

And standing beside Herder as one of the great signposts in the spiritual life is Winckelmann, who first brought art history into that current which can be called: the world view based on the history of development and carried by the German spirit. Goethe says of Winckelmann, the first German art critic: “Winckelmann, a second Columbus, discovered the evolution and destiny of art as bound to the general laws of evolution, keeping pace with the rise and fall of civilization and the destinies of the people.

Thus we see how, through these minds – it has already happened through Lessing – mind is seen in all becoming as the actual bearer, as the actual substance of development. And this world view leads directly to a sense of being carried by the mind, to being carried by the mind. And this permeates the soul with confidence and inner strength. One is tempted to say that all this already contained an inkling that this German spirit, with all its idealism, contains the seeds of a truly scientific spiritual world view that humanity must move towards. For when we consider that spiritual science strives for knowledge of the world, which is attained through the soul developing its inner powers slumbering in its depths, so that it comes to see with the organs of the spirit or — to use Goethe's words — with the spiritual eyes and spiritual ears, to see what, as the invisible, works and lives behind the visible. If one considers this and then recalls a certain saying of Herder's, then a feeling of confidence comes over the soul: humanity will one day partake of spiritual world-view. For how beautifully Herder's saying resounds: “The human race will not pass away until the genius of enlightenment has passed through the earth.” Herder's gaze was always directed towards the intimate weaving and essence of the spiritual that prevails in all sensuality. Herder regards every human being – not just the great historical figures – as thoughts that are not merely thoughts grasped by our brain, but as something living, existing and weaving. And when they are suited to be seized by the spirit of the age and incorporated into the stream of events, then Herder speaks of those people who, through such thoughts, have a formative effect on an entire era: often these people – the geniuses – live and work in the greatest silence; but one of their thoughts, grasped by the spirit of the times, brings a whole chaos of things into good form and order.

When we consider these things, we can never say that they arose out of mere abstract philosophical reflection; for they do not stand in isolation as the impressions of a personality, but stand as if organically with the continuous stream of German intellectual life, and always in such a way that one must regard the personalities who express them, who thereby reveal their convictions, as inspired by the sustaining power of the German spirit. And this sustaining power of the German spirit is deeply felt even in the most recent times by those who have an inkling of it. What is felt as this sustaining power of the German spirit is not only taken up in an abstract philosophy; it is taken up in the deepest feeling of souls.

Thus, for example, when the late Paz! de Lagarde (who died in 1891) – another of the most German minds – once said the following, which is quite characteristic of his whole attitude to this fundamental force of the German spirit: “On one occasion I was requested by a relative of a friend whom I was accompanying to the grave to deliver the funeral oration, and to do so first at the cemetery.” Apparently, Lagarde then spoke of what connects the human soul with the eternal, with the spiritual, what passes through the gate of death as a living being, for now he continues: “Now I actually felt ashamed. What was I then actually? What am I then actually, that I dare to speak of that which is connected with the eternal-spiritual? I was ashamed, but I found that what I had said found fertile soil in the minds that had escorted the dead to the grave.” And now Lagarde says, drawing the conclusion, as it were: “That is how it is for the German when he speaks of love of country: he feels that this speaking of love of country is basically such an intimate, sacred thing that he feels ashamed to speak of it; but he also feels: if he speaks of it, it can fall on receptive minds.”

One need only recall this saying, which truly captures the essence of the German character in the most eminent sense, and one can see from it how the German, when he feels truly at home within the German national character, must to the spirit of his nation, in which he perceives the expression of the divine spirituality of the world in general, and how he feels it to be a living being, which he approaches — even with knowledge — only in reverence. Lagarde is one who, in the second half of the nineteenth century, out of deep learning but also out of deep, soulful feeling, spoke about Germanness in many ways, about the sources of Germanness, about the prospects of Germanness. He is one of those who never tire of pointing out again and again that the essence of Germanness resides in the spiritual, in that which, as the spirit common to all, permeates the entire German evolution. He who wishes to grasp the essence of Germanness at its root is not satisfied with what a materialistic view designates as “blood” or “race” in the nature of a people. Lagarde was not satisfied with this; for he felt that the essence of Germanness can only be expressed through spiritual ideas, through spiritual perceptions. Thus Lagarde says: “Germanness lies not in the blood but in the soul. Of our great men, Leibniz and Lessing are certainly Slavs, Handel, a son of a Halloren, is a Celt, Kant's father was a Scot: and yet, who would call these un-German?” — In which Lagarde, one of the most German of Germans, seeks the German essence, that is the supporting force of the German spirit, in which the one can immerse himself who understands German essence within himself and how to realize it. Time and again, the best Germans never tire of explaining how the essence of the German can only be expressed and revealed through the spiritual.

When one reflects in this way, the German spirit takes on an ever more concrete and real essence. One feels it flowing through the stream of German life, especially through the stream of German intellectual life; and one then understands how the German, in the course of his development, felt the need to enrich his own being in the present more and more with what the German spirit had already allowed to flow from its sources into the German nation in older times.

Thus we find, as the German Romantics, leaning on Goethe, as it were, renewing the old German essence, delving not only into the folk song but into the entire German spiritual being, in order to absorb it and revive it in their souls, so as to allow what is peculiar to Germanness as a whole to take effect in their own souls. And then we see again how the German development in the Brothers Grimm is inspired by what German essence produced in ancient times. We see how the Brothers Grimm descend to the people and have the old fairy tales told to them in order to collect them. And what lies in this collection of German fairy tales, which really convey such a hundredfold impression, taken directly from the people's minds? Nothing else lies in them but the fundamental power of the German spirit!

And how does this fundamental power of the German spirit continue to work?

We have been able to see it particularly in the achievements of the already mentioned Herman Grimm. Often, when one allows these fine, elegant, comprehensive artistic characteristics of Herman Grimm to take effect on the soul, when one especially visualizes some of the extremely intimate subtleties that lie in these writings, one must ask oneself: How did this personality manage to make the soul so elastic, so pliable that it could delve into the deepest secrets of artistic work and artistic creation? And I believe there can be no other answer than the one that follows from the clues as to how Herman Grimm, before he began to contemplate the art of humanity, expressed himself poetically and artistically. For this expression is particularly characteristic of the supporting force of the German spirit. I would like to point out only a few.

The first of the stories and poems collected in the volume Novellen is Herman Grimm's The Songstress. This is a story that, as is usually the case when presenting novellas, is used only to depict events that take place before the eyes of people, that can be grasped directly with the imagination that is tied to the body. Herman Grimm also masterfully presents what takes place in the external world: he presents a female personality that is deeply attracted to a male personality; but through her character and her whole being, this female personality rejects the male one. It would take too long to go into the details now. So it comes about that the male personality commits suicide. The female personality remains behind. And now, after the death of the man who loved her, she feels not only pain and suffering; no, something intervenes in her soul life that is directly supersensible. She spends a night at a friend's house, the friend at whose house the suicide of her lover had taken place. She feels disturbed. At first she does not know the reason for it. But then she says that she cannot sleep alone in the room; the friend should watch over her. And as he watches over her, it turns out that she has a vision, which the poet clearly shows that he wants to express more than a mere play of the imagination. At the door of the bedroom, the ghostly figure of the deceased enters. And if one investigates what Herman Grimm actually wants to express with this apparition, it is that he wants to say: with what is happening here before the eyes of man on earth, the event is not yet exhausted; but spiritual factors, spiritual entities intervene in physical events; and when death has occurred, what has passed through the gate of death is present there in the spiritual world and is effective for those who are receptive to it.

Herman Grimm is thus a novelist who allows the spiritual world to shine through his artistic portrayal. What actually appears to the bereaved lover has often been described in these lectures. It is what the etheric body of the deceased in question can be called, which can show itself in the form of the deceased to those who are receptive to it. But not all people are receptive to this.

Herman Grimm also wrote a novel, “Unüberwindliche Mächte” (Insurmountable Forces), which is of great importance as a cultural-historical novel and also otherwise in the spiritual history of humanity, but unfortunately it has been neglected. Here too, the lover dies. And when she seeks healing in a place in the south, she wastes away more and more in the memory of her lover and finally dies. Herman Grimm describes her death in a very unique way in the final chapter of 'Unüberwindliche Mächte'. He describes how a spiritual figure rises out of her body and rushes towards her lover. Again, Herman Grimm does not conclude the account with the events visible on earth, but brings together what is visible to the senses, what is visible to the mind, with the supersensible, which continues beyond death.

I would not cite such examples if they did not correspond entirely to what spiritual science has to say about these things. Of course one cannot cite artists as proof of spiritual science. But if one cites such examples as proof of what spiritual science has to offer humanity, it can be done to the extent that the nascent spiritual science lies in a spirit like Herman Grimm, who was artistically active in the second half of the nineteenth century. He is not yet able to express spiritual science as such, but artistically he presents things in such a way that one perceives: spiritual science wants to make its entry into the spiritual culture of humanity out of the supporting power of the German spirit.

Herman Grimm — this emerges from his entire literary work — never wanted to admit to himself what actually formed the basis for his giving such descriptions. He was somewhat shy about bringing these things, which he only wanted to approach in the most intimate, artistic and spiritual way, into ordinary concepts. But if he was not able to approach these things in the way that spiritual science can speak about them today, and yet these things are properly – one might say “expertly” – presented by him, then what lived in him? The inspiring force was the sustaining power of the German spirit! And so we find this sustaining power of the German spirit to be a very real entity, and we must turn our spiritual gaze towards it if we want to get to know the German character at all.

Now Goethe once spoke a very significant word, which should be taken into account when speaking of the relationship between the German spirit and the individual German, when speaking of how German essence lives directly in German lands – one might say – lives before the eyes of people when they have fixed their eyes on any personalities and any people within the German lands. In a confidential conversation in recent years, Goethe said to his secretary Eckermann: “My works cannot become popular; anyone who thinks and strives for that is mistaken. They are not written for the masses, but only for individual people who want and seek something similar and who are moving in similar directions.”

This is a significant statement. One would like to say: it is in the nature of Germanness — to use this word of Fichte's — to really feel the German spirit as a living thing and to still experience the totality of the German essence, the unity of the German spirit, as something special alongside what appears externally as German life. The totality of the German essence is no less real for that; it can at least be present for each individual. Hence the urge of the German to consider the individual phenomena of the world in connection with the whole development of the world and of humanity. In the second half of the nineteenth century, a poet living in the German-speaking districts of Austria went, one might say, around the whole world to understand the individual human being from the perspective of the overall spirit, despite the most diverse cultural influences. I refer to Robert Hamerling, who in his poem 'Aspasia' attempts to make the collective Greek spirit speak through an individual human being; who then attempts to portray the intensely personal German character in his 'King of Zion'; who further tries to express the actual spirit of the French revolutionary hearth in his drama “Danton and Robespierre” and finally wants to express the spirit of our time in his “Homunculus” in a grandiose, comprehensive way through poetry. Hamerling always feels the need to depict the individual in connection with what, as a spiritual weaving and becoming and as a sum of spiritual entities, animates and permeates the stream of human events. The view of the whole, of a living spiritual reality, interweaves the German intellectual work through the individual phenomena where it appears in its most intense manifestations.

Therefore, for someone who—one might say—does not look much further than a few meters beyond his own nose and considers something in a limited area of German life, it is extremely difficult to grasp the German character; for it can only be grasped by really considering the connection between the German soul and the spiritual entities that are weaving through the world and bringing themselves to revelation in the German spirit. And this is, in addition to much that has already been mentioned in these lectures, the reason why this German spirit, why this fundamental German spirit can be so misunderstood, why it is now so reviled and so insulted. One must ask oneself: How does this German spiritual life relate to the spiritual life of other nations?

I would like to discuss a characteristic example today, tying it in with a specific occasion when it became clear how difficult it is for a German who feels connected to the German spirit to make himself fully understood when the application of what he feels from the German spirit is to be applied to a single phenomenon. Recently, there has been much talk of the fact that the aging, somewhat decadent French intellectual life has undergone a kind of rejuvenation, that there are young French people who no longer go along with official Frenchness. And in many circles, which will hopefully have their eyes opened more by this war than they were previously open, people had begun to see something in this young Frenchness that would now understand the German mind much better than official Paris and official Frenchness. People had pointed to characteristic phenomena within young Frenchness. Indeed, there is much to be found there that one might say is quite significant. There are young French intellectuals who are not satisfied with official France itself – but that is the France that is currently at war with Germany.

What do such young Frenchmen say? – I would like to give just one brief example by quoting what Leon Bazalgette has said:

You can see how they swell with satisfaction when they utter the words: “French Renaissance” (three years of existence – they announce – the child is chubby-cheeked and already playing with little soldiers), “Awakening of national pride”,

These are the men who would divert the entire energy of a people to pour it into the enthusiasm of that still unknown virtue: hatred. In an age when the whole world trembles with activity, ambitious endeavors, dreams and new desires that cross borders, their only thought and aspiration, of which they are proud, is to settle an old neighborhood dispute with a fist fight. Oh, poor conceited people, who are incapable of conjuring up other forms of heroism than the “revenge”. Poor little fools of passion, who have no more appropriate desires to satisfy your hunger for action...

... In the name of what great idea – one of those ideas for which almost no one at all times has hesitated to give up his life – would we go to war with Germany? Is it about our freedom? Do we live under the yoke or are we threatened by it? Is it about countries that need to be civilized by being annexed, or about peoples that need to be snatched from slavery? No, it is solely about trying to reconquer territories that belonged to us and that we lost in a war, territories of which a good half are no more French than German...; and even less is it about reconquering these territories as such as it is about satisfying an old desire for revenge. That is the “idea in the name of which this country, which likes to give itself the title of ‘fighting for noble causes,’ would start a war.

One was — one would like to say — somewhat touched by the charity in certain circles at the sound of some voices that came from the young Frenchmen, those young Frenchmen of whom it was said that they wanted to found a new France. And one of those who, especially before the war, was also counted among these young Frenchmen by certain Germans who would create a new France, is Romain Rolland, who wrote a great novel, “great” in the sense of spatial expansion, because it has very many volumes. It is interesting to note how certain circles here, albeit perhaps smaller ones, viewed this particular novel by Romain Rolland.

One critic could not refrain from saying that this novel “Jean Christophe” — the German name is Johann Christof Kraft — is the most significant act that has been done since 1871 to reconcile Germany and France. In fact, there were quite a number of those who said: This novel 'Jean Christophe' shows how one of those young Frenchmen looks at Germany with love, with intimate love, and how he is one of those who will make it impossible for these two nations to live in discord in the future.

Not only has this proved to be a deceptive hope, but something else has emerged: Romain Rolland is one of those who, with Maeterlinck, Verhaeren and so on, immediately expressed themselves in a rather unmodest way about Germany and the German character when the war began. But now it is interesting to see a little how this man, Romain Rolland, of whom so many of us said that he could understand the German character so well, that he really grasped from the innermost core of the German national soul and the German spirit what is the supporting force of the German spirit – how this man understood the German character. I am well aware that I am not offending any true aesthetic sensibilities by saying what I must say, uninfluenced by the many judgments that have been passed on this novel, especially in the direction I have indicated.

What particularly excited people is that the Frenchman portrays a German, Johann Christof Kraft, who has outgrown the German way of being — we will see in a moment how — and who, after spending his youth in Germany, goes to France to find his further development there. In this, one sees a very special bridging of the contrast between the German and French way of being. Now, in order to fully understand what is to be said, we must first visualize the basic structure of this Jean Christophe.

I know how highly the critics regard this novel, and they have expressed their opinions as follows: the character of Jean Christophe is one that has been taken directly from life; no trait—so they feel—could be different in this drawing. But I must say: this Jean Christophe seems to me to be a rather indigestible ragout, his character welded together rather disharmoniously from the traits of the young Beethoven, Wagner, Richard Strauss and Karl Marx. The admirers of Jean Christophe may forgive me, but that is the impression. This Jean Christophe grows up – he is simply transported to the present – in much the same way as Beethoven grew up. One recognizes all the traits of the young Beethoven – but distorted into caricature – down to the last detail, but in such a way that the life of the young Beethoven appears everywhere as a grandiose work of art, while the life of Jean Christophe appears as a caricature. Now, it is not the poet's task, when he alludes to history, to be faithful to that history. I can make all the objections that critics make in this regard myself; nevertheless, I must say this: Jean Christophe grows up in an environment that, in the opinion of many people, provides a picture of the German character. His grandfather, grandmother, uncle and other friends are presented. He grows up in such a way that the German character, which he outgrows, is perceived as the greatest obstacle to his developing genius. German character, for example, is presented as follows. Like Beethoven, young Jean Christophe is a kind of early composer; he makes compositions at a young age. His father, who is a drunkard, feels compelled to show off this precocious talent to the world. This father is a secretary, servant to a small German prince. The particular Germanic nature of this father is presented in cultural-historical terms when, while planning a concert with the young, seven- to eight-year-old Jean Christophe, at which the prince is also to be present, he reflects on how he should dress the boy. In the end, he comes up with a very clever idea, which is described as “a culturally historical idea of genuine, true Germanism”: he has him put on long trousers and a tailcoat, along with a white bandage, so that the boy looks like an eight-year-old little man. I will not recount how this German undertaking later unfolds, because that would take us too far afield. I will also not describe in detail how he feels disgust for everything that the entire German environment offers, this environment that is marked with “love” — according to some people — and that is supposed to give a true picture of the German character. But when he can no longer stand this environment, he feels compelled — as it says in the book — to be inspired by the Latin spirit. So he goes to Paris. There he finds a friend who is a clear reflection of Romain Rolland himself in many ways. This is the person who expresses what the young, newly emerging French identity promises for the future; it is he who teaches this confused mind, this doll welded together from the young Beethoven, Wagner, Richard Strauss and others, some order of mind. That is the “love” with which, according to certain people, a German character, Jean Christophe, is drawn. Jean Christophe then also goes through various experiences in Paris – we now notice some traits of Richard Wagner. And when he loses his friend, he turns further south, undergoes many experiences that border on the criminal, which even lead him to suicide, which then only fails. And now, after Jean Christophe, who has not been able to flourish in his German surroundings, has gone through Latin ways, he comes to himself, as it were, in a lonely old village; he conquers his own spirit. Eternity opens up for him.

Now let us just take in a few examples of the truly loving immersion in the German character, taken from the novel. For example, the father, who is portrayed as Beethoven's father, Melchior, is characterized. Of course I know that someone might say: You are taking words out of a novel that may not actually reflect the author's opinion. But the artistic composition of this novel is entirely in line with what Schiller demanded in the beautiful words he wrote about “Wilhelm Meister” and what really belongs in the artistic composition of a novel. When Goethe was criticized for the fact that certain traits of the personalities in his novel did not appear entirely morally, Schiller said: “If people can prove to you that the immorality comes from your own soul, then you have made an aesthetic mistake; but if it comes from the characters, then you are justified in every respect.” This golden rule of art is also something that was later incorporated into the sustaining power of the German spirit. The best works of art that we find in Germany were truly written under the influence of this Schiller-Goethe attitude. But in Romain Rolland's work, one constantly encounters, almost on every third page, statements that clearly show that it is the author speaking and not the characters. Therefore, it is only an excuse in this case if one objects that one should not find what the author says on occasion – one cannot even say that it is the characters who express it – but what the author says on occasion of the characterizations characteristic of the way in which the author has immersed himself in the German essence. For example, Father Melchior is described in the following way:

“He was a smooth-talker, well built, if a little plump, and the type of what is considered classical beauty in Germany: a broad, expressionless forehead, strong regular features and a curly beard: a Jupiter from the banks of the Rhine.”

Then, to characterize Melchior's friends, how they gathered at the father's house and played and sang there together:

“Occasionally they would sing together in a four-part male choir one of those German songs that, one like the other, move along with solemn simplicity and in flat harmonies, ponderously, as it were, on all fours.”

What a loving description of the German character! I will only quote it as a characterization. Then there is an Uncle Theodor in the novel who is actually the grandfather's stepson; he is described in the following way. I have nothing to say against the fact that individual persons are presented in this way, but I do object to the fact that this description is supposed to be a cultural image of the German character; for one notices that Romain Rolland continually mixes in what itches him so that he can say it about the German character. Of this Uncle Theodor it is said:

What a loving description! Then Jean Christophe falls in love with a young noblewoman, who is portrayed as the epitome of a young German girl. Her name is Minna:

“Minna, for all her sentimentality and romanticism, was calm and cool. Despite her aristocratic name and the pride that the little word ‘von’ instilled in her, she had the mind of a little German housewife –” and then it continues:

“Minna, this naively sensual German little girl, knew some strange games.”

And now, to explain in cultural-historical terms what is supposed to be particularly characteristic of the German character, it is stated that she also understood how to spread flour on the table and put certain objects in it, which one then had to search for with one's mouth.

Now it will be shown why the German character becomes so unpleasant for Christof; and again, one can only say that the author is itching to express how he himself feels about the Germans. He wants to describe the dishonesty and hypocrisy in German idealism, the idealism that Romain Rolland believes was invented because people find the truth uncomfortable and therefore look to the ideal. They lie about the truth and call it idealism. Thus the Germans have the characteristic of not looking at people calmly, but of “idealizing” them, of lying to themselves about their true characteristics. Christof had also appropriated this characteristic, but it had become increasingly distasteful to him:

“Once he had convinced himself that they” — certain people — “were excellent and that he should like them, he, as a true German, tried hard to believe that he really liked them. But he didn't succeed at all: he lacked that compliant Germanic idealism that doesn't want to see and doesn't see what it would be embarrassing to discover for fear of disturbing the comfortable calm of their judgment and the comfort of their lives.” ‘German idealism’ invented for the sole reason of not disturbing the comfort of life! Now, once again, a young girl is described, with whom Jean Christophe naturally falls in love, an archetype of ugliness, “little Rosa.” One can literally feel from the novel how her nose is hardly in the right place on her face, and much more; but from a loving cultural description of her, it is said:

"The Germans are very indulgent when it comes to physical imperfections: they manage not to see them; they can even come to embellish them with a benevolent imagination, finding unexpected relationships between the face they want to see and the most magnificent examples of human beauty. It would not have taken much persuasion to get old Euler – Rosa's grandfather – to declare that his granddaughter had the nose of Juno Ludovisi.

But after he had tested the mendacity of German idealism on his own person – we have experienced this again and again with well-known “geniuses”; but we did not believe that it should be characteristic of the German character, that it should be a special characteristic of the Germans, that they 'idealize' people, was not believed earlier – he now also comes to the conclusion that basically all German musicians have a catch, something is wrong somewhere; this is also connected with German idealism! And now he comes to the conclusion that he must be more significant than all the rest. As a characteristic example, a few words about Schumann:

Now that he is only a: returned Beethoven – who of course lives according to Wagner – and is supposed to become a genius the like of which has never been seen, he must also vent his anger on Wagner. And so all kinds of affectionate things are then put into his mouth – you really can't say, “Johann Christof,” which would be forgivable; instead, they are always expressed in such a way that they are separate from the person of Johann Christof and become something that the author himself gives the absolute coloration to. So, with reference to Lohengrin and Siegfried, it is said about Richard Wagner:

“Germany revelled in this art of childish maturity, this art of wild beasts and mystically quacking maidens.”

Well, I would like to say that the German character is characterized even more profoundly in such a loving way. Here is another example:

"Especially since the German victories, they did everything to make compromises, to bring about a disgusting mishmash of new power and old principles. They did not want to renounce the old idealism: that would have been an act of courage that they were not capable of; in order to make it subservient to German interests, they contented themselves with falsifying it. They followed the example of Hegel, the cheerfully duplicitous Swabian, who had waited for Leipzig and Waterloo to adapt the basic idea of his philosophy to the Prussian state,” – it may perhaps be said that Hegel's fundamental work, ‘The Phenomenology of Spirit’ – but Romain Rolland probably knows very little about this when he says that Hegel's philosophy was created after Leipzig and Waterloo – was written during the cannonade of the Battle of Jena, that is, in 1806, and already contains Hegel's entire philosophy –

"And now, after the interests had changed, the principles were also changed. When they were defeated, they said that Germany's ideal was humanity. Now that they were beating the others, they said that Germany was the ideal of humanity. As long as the other countries were the more powerful, they said with Lessing that patriotism was a heroic weakness that could very well be dispensed with, and they called themselves citizens of the world. Now that victory had been achieved, there was no lack of contempt for “French” utopian dreams: world peace, brotherhood, peaceful progress, human rights, natural equality; it was said that the strongest nation had an absolute right over the others, while the others, as the weaker ones, had no rights over it. It seemed to be the living God and the incarnate spirit, whose progress was achieved by war, violence and oppression. Now that it was on their side, might was canonized. Might was now the epitome of all idealism and all reason. To give honor to the truth, it must be said that Germany for centuries...

perhaps the only thing people seek in Germany, to do honor to the truth! — “had suffered so much from having idealism without power that after so much trial it was well justified in now making the sad confession that it needed power above all, however it might be constituted. But how much hidden bitterness lay in such a confession of the people of a Herder and a Goethe! And what renunciation, what humiliation of the German ideal lay in this German victory! — And, alas, this renunciation found only too much compliance in the lamentable tendency of all the best Germans to subordinate themselves.

“What characterizes the German,” said Möser more than a century ago, “is obedience.”

And Frau von Stael:

"They obey well. They use philosophical reason to explain the most unphilosophical thing in the world: respect for power and the habituation to fear that transforms respect into admiration.” Christof found this feeling in Germany at all levels, from the greatest to the smallest – from Wilhelm Tell, the deliberate, small-minded bourgeois with the muscles of a porter, who, as the free Jew Börne says, in order to reconcile honor and fear, walks past the post of “dear Mr. Geßler” with his eyes downcast, so that he could appeal to the fact that he who did not see the hat was not disobeying – “up to the honorable seventy-year-old Professor Weiße, one of the most respected scholars in the city, who, when a lieutenant passed by, quickly left the footpath to him and went down to the road.”

And further it says:

“Moreover, Germany did indeed bear the heaviest burden of sins in Europe. When one has won the victory, one is responsible for it; one has become the debtor of the vanquished. One tacitly assumes the obligation to lead the way for them, to show them the way. The victorious Louis XIV brought the splendor of French reason to Europe. What light did the Germany of Sedan bring to the world?”

This is the loving description. But I must not forget anything, and in order not to be unjust, I must not conceal the fact that at one point something of the loving description of the German character from this novel shines through clearly and distinctly. It is where a German professor in a small town – his name is, of course, Schulz – is enthusiastic about the early works of Johann Christof, which are misunderstood by everyone else. Johann Christof is once able to visit the old professor. Two other acquaintances turn up, and then there is – in addition to Johann Christof demonstrating his works to the delight of the three people – a feast, a huge midday feast. Salome (!), the old professor's cook, who has been a widow for a long time, takes particular pleasure in how everyone can eat. And now a piece of German character is described in a truly “historically accurate and loving” way.

Salome, to see how they were enjoying a piece of German culture inside, looked through the crack in the door; and what she saw is described as:

It is not surprising that Johann Christof, after having gone through all that, wants to get out of this environment, because his genius cannot flourish in this environment. But he doesn't really know anything about France, this Johann Christof. He is completely uneducated, just a great musician. But since he knows nothing, his going to France is characterized in the following way:

“Instinctively (since he didn't know France!) his eyes looked towards the Latin south. And first of all towards France. Towards France, the eternal refuge from German confusion.”

In France, he meets his friend Olivier, who enlightens him about the young French. And perhaps it is what these young French say about the Germans that is so appealing on this side of the Rhine. Olivier tells Johann Christof about the young French's particular view of the nature of official Paris and about what he used to polemicize against like the others:

"The best among us are shut out, imprisoned on our own soil... Never will they know what we have suffered, we who cling to the genius of our race, who, like a sacred trust, guard the light we have received from it and desperately defend it against the hostile breath that would extinguish it; and yet we stand alone, feeling the polluted air of those metics all around us, who, like a swarm of mosquitoes, have attacked our thinking and whose disgusting larvae gnaw at our reason and defile our hearts; we are betrayed by those whose mission it would be to defend us, our superiors, our stupid or cowardly critics; they flatter the enemy to obtain forgiveness for being of our generation; we are abandoned by our people, who do not care about us, who do not even know us... What means do we have to make ourselves understood? We cannot reach them... And that is the hardest part. We know that there are thousands of us in France who think the same; we know that we speak on their behalf, and there is nothing we can do to be heard! The enemy occupies everything: newspapers, magazines, theaters... The press shuns every thought or only allows it if it is an instrument of pleasure or a party weapon. Intrigues and literary cliques only leave room for those who throw themselves away. Misery and overwork crush us to the ground. The politicians, who are only concerned with enriching themselves, are only interested in the corruptible proletariat. The indifferent and self-interested citizens watch our dying. Our people do not know us; even those who fight with us, who are shrouded in silence like us, know nothing of our existence, and we know nothing of theirs... Unhappy Paris! It is true that it has also done good by organizing all the forces of French thought into groups. But the evil it has created is at least equal to the good; and in an epoch like ours, good itself turns into evil. It is enough for a pseudo-elite to usurp Paris and ring the immense bell of the public to stifle the voice of the rest of France. Far more than that: France confuses itself; it remains silent in dismay and fearfully pushes its thoughts back into itself... I used to suffer greatly from all this. But now, Christof, I am calm. I have understood my strength, the strength of my people. We just have to wait until the flood has passed. It will not gnaw away at France's fine granite. I will let you feel it under the mud it carries with it. And already, here and there, tall peaks are emerging...

You don't really need more than that to characterize the French character that is now waging war against Germany. But now, I would like to say, there is something even more beautiful. So this novel was published. It has also been translated into German. I would now like to read you a few words from a German critic of this novel, addressed to Romain Rolland in the form of a letter printed in a Berlin newspaper.

"For me, the completion of your 'Jean Christo is even more of an ethical event than a literary one... Gobineau, Maeterlinck, Verhaeren and even Verlaine have had their greatest impact and achieved their greatest fame in Germany rather than in France, and it would be only fair if you too were appreciated earlier in our country than in your homeland, because your book belongs in Germany, in the land of music, more than any other book. In many ways it is a German book, a coming-of-age novel like Green Henry or Wilhelm Meisten. German music, which Germany has given the world, has also made you its advocate. It was music that led you to the German language and made you love Goethe, whom you have memorialized many times in your work with love and admiration.

I find myself at a loss as to how many times I should actually thank you. The human being, the connoisseur, the artist, the German, the world-joyful in me, each of them wants to come forward and say a word to you. But another time the artist will say a word about this novel, another time the connoisseur, and the human being will wait until he can shake your hand again. Today only the German should thank; because I have the feeling that French youth has become closer to us through this book, which has done more than all the diplomats, banquets and associations."

This is a prime example of how the sustaining power of the German spirit can be misunderstood, and how the painfully great events we are having to live through must have an eye-opening effect in many respects, truly: must have an eye-opening effect. And please forgive me if I bring up something at the very end that seems personal, but which only ties in with personal matters because I have only just learned about it today.

The spiritual science movement to which we belong was for many years connected with a theosophical movement based in England and India. This movement gradually became so absurd that anyone with a sense of truth could no longer have any connection with much of this Anglo-Indian theosophical movement. Therefore, many years before this war, we completely separated from it. At that time we were reviled enough, even by German followers of that movement; perhaps stronger words could be used. But one would have thought that the matter was now over and that there would be no reason to return to it now. But the president of this Anglo-Indian movement has found it necessary to refer to this matter again and to characterize us Germans. And she does so with the following words, which are not mentioned here out of personal considerations, but to show how, from a certain point of view, one is capable of characterizing in such a way what we as Germans had to do out of our sense of truth:

”... Now, looking back, in the light of German methods as revealed by the war, I realize that the long-standing efforts to capture the Theosophical Society and place a German at its head, the anger against me when I frustrated those efforts, the complaint that I had spoken about the late King Edward VII as the protector of European peace, instead of giving the honor to the Kaiser – that all this was part of the widespread campaign against England, and that the missionaries were tools, skillfully used by German agents here – in India – to push through their plans. If they could have turned the Theosophical Society in India, with its large number of officials, into a weapon against the British government and trained it to look to Germany as its spiritual leader – instead of standing, as it has always done, for the equal alliance of two free nations – then it could gradually have become a channel for poison in India.

So that is what we are, seen through English-Theosophical eyes, in our spiritual scientific movement. But I may say – forgive this remark; you know that I do not like to make personal remarks – I can give the assurance that I had no intention of doing all this, and especially had no intention of leaving the German spiritual scientific movement. For such a thing did not live in me and, I believe, did not live in many others either, who know that they are connected with the German spirit and its sustaining power – something that lived in Johann Christoph Arnold, who was driven out of Germany by his instinct. For even if it is difficult to find the immediate manifestations of the sustaining power of the German spirit in the immediate phenomena that Rolland, the traveler, with his uncomprehending eye, has focused on, it must be said that the truthfulness of the German spirit will make it more and more possible, especially through the experiences of our fateful time, to build a bridge between what we experience in everyday life and what is the fundamental force of the German spirit. And when we are presented with all the figures in Johann Christian's environment, from which his “genius” drives him out, then perhaps, in conclusion, and without arrogance, something may be said.

I don't want to quote a foreigner now. But I may quote someone who has been dead for a long time, who died in 1230 and who, for his part, also expressed an opinion on whether a German genius must necessarily be driven out of all that lives in it by its environment, out of all the Minnas and Rosas with crooked noses, which German idealism knows as the nose of Juno Ludovisi. Perhaps not with a genius like Johann Christoph, but with one of whom we know from the context with the supporting power of the German spirit that he was a German genius. With such a German genius we may perhaps, without arrogance, think for a moment: with Walther von der Vogelweide. And we may admit to ourselves: it is not with Johann Christof, the hero that Romain Rolland has drawn, that we judge how German men and German women affect a genius, but rather with a spirit like Walther von der Vogelweide. With his words, then, let these reflections be closed, to be followed tomorrow by a special lecture on the humanities.

Walther von der Vogelweide is not driven out of Germany by his instinct; he must think differently about those among whom he lives. I don't know how they would be described if they were to fall under Romain Rolland's fingers; but Walther von der Vogelweide says of them – and this seems to me to indicate a better understanding than Romain Rolland reveals –:

German men are well-bred,
their women are as pure as angels.
He who scolds them is deceived,
I could never understand it otherwise.
Virtue and pure love,
Whoever seeks them
Shall come to our land, where there is much bliss.
Long may I live in it!

[ 1 ] When leaving thy body behind thee thou soarest up into the ether,
Then thou becomest a god, immortal, beyond the power of death.

In this utterance of Empedocles (cf. p. 46) is epitomized what the ancient Egyptians thought about the eternal clement in man and its connection with the Divine. Proof of this may be found in the so-called Book of the Dead, which has been deciphered by the diligence of nineteenth-century scholars.¹ It is “the greatest coherent literary work that has come down to us from ancient Egypt.” It contains all kinds of instructions and prayers that were put into the tomb of each deceased person to serve as a guide when he was released from his mortal tenement. The most intimate ideas of the Egyptians about the eternal and the origin of the world are contained in this work. These views point to a conception of the gods similar to that of Greek mysticism.

Osiris gradually became the preëminent and most universally recognized of the various deities worshipped in different parts of Egypt. In him were comprized the ideas about the other divinities. Whatever the majority of the Egyptian people may have thought about Osiris, the Book of the Dead indicates that the priestly wisdom saw in him a being that might be found in the human soul herself. Everything said about death and the dead shows this plainly. While the body is given to earth and kept by it, the Eternal in man enters upon the path to the primordial Eternal. It comes before the tribunal of Osiris and the forty-two judges of the dead. The fate of the Eternal in man depends on the verdict of these judges. If the soul has confessed her sins, and has been deemed reconciled to eternal justice, invisible powers approach her and say: “The Osiris N. has been purified in the pool which is south of the field of Hotep. and north of the field of Locusts, where the gods of verdure purify themselves at the fourth hour of the night and the eighth hour of the day with the image of the heart of the gods, passing from night to day.” Thus, within the eternal cosmic order the Eternal in man is itself addressed as an Osiris. After the name Osiris comes the deceased person’s own name; and the one who is uniting with the eternal cosmic order also alls himself “Osiris”. “I am the Osiris N. Growing under the blossoms of the fig-tree is the name of Osiris N.” Thus man becomes an Osiris. Being Osiris is only a perfect stage in human development. It seems obvious that even the Osiris who is a judge within the eternal cosmic order is nothing more than a perfect man, Between being human and being divine there is a difference in degree and number. The mystic view of the mystery of number underlies this. Osiris as a cosmic being is One, yet he exists, nevertheless, undivided in each human soul. Every human being is an Osiris, yet the One Osiris must be represented as a Separate being. Man is in course of development, and at the end of his evolutionary career he becomes divine. In taking this view we must speak of Divine-ness, or becoming divine, rather than of a finished divine being, complete in himself.

[ 2 ] It cannot be doubted that, according to this view, only he can really enter upon the Osiris existence who has reached the portals of the eternal cosmic order as an Osiris. Thus the highest life which man can lead must consist in his changing himself into Osiris. Even during mortal life a true man will live as a perfect Osiris as far as he can. He becomes perfect when he lives as an Osiris, when he passes through the experiences of Osiris. This lends a deeper significance to the Osiris myth. It becomes the ideal of the man who wishes to awaken the Eternal within himself.

Osiris is torn to pieces, killed by Typhon. The fragments of his body are preserved and cared for by his consort, Isis. After his death he let a ray of his own light fall upon her, and she bore him Horus. This Horus takes up the earthly tasks of Osiris. He is the second Osiris, still imperfect, but progressing towards the true Osiris.

The true Osiris is in the human soul, who at the outset is of a transitory nature; but as such she i destined to give birth to the Eternal. Man may there: fore regard himself as the tomb of Osiris. Man's lower nature (Typhon) has killed his higher nature. Love in his soul (Isis) must nurture the dead fragments of his body, and then the higher nature, the eternal soul (Horus) will be born, who can progress to Osiris existence. The man aspiring to the highest kind of existence must repeat in himself microcosmically the macrocosmic universal Osiris process. This is the meaning of Egyptian initiation. What Plato (cf. p. 66) describes as a cosmic process—that the Creator has stretched the soul of the world on the body of the world in the form of a cross, and that the cosmic process is the redemption of this crucified soul,—this process had to be enacted in man on a smaller scale if he was to be qualified for Osiris-existence. The candidate for initiation had to develop himself in such a way that his soul-experience, his becoming an Osiris, blended into one with the cosmic Osiris process.

If we could look into the temples of initiation in which people underwent the transformation into Osiris, we should see that what took place represented microcosmically a cosmic genesis. Man who proceeded from the Father was to give birth to the Son in himself. What he actually bears within him, that is, Divinity under a spell, was to become manifest in him. This divinity is kept down in him by the power of the earthly nature; this lower nature must first be buried in order that the higher nature may arise.

This clarifies what we are told about the incidents of initiation. The candidate was subjected to mysterious procedures by means of which his earthly nature was killed and his higher nature awakened. It is not Necessary to study these procedures in detail if we understand their meaning. This meaning is contained in the confession possible to everyone who went through initiation. He could say: “I envisioned the endless perspective at the end of which lies the perfection of the Divine. I felt that the power of this Divine is within me. I buried what keeps down that bower in me. I died to earthly things. I was dead. I had died as a lower man; I was in the nether-world. I had intercourse with the dead, with those who have already become part of the eternal cosmic order. After my sojourn in the nether-world I arose from the dead. I overcame death, but now I have become a different being. I have nothing more to do with perishable nature. For me this has become saturated with the Logos. I now belong to those who live eternally, and who will sit at the right hand of Osiris. I myself shall be a true Osiris, part of the eternal cosmic order; and the judgment of life and death will be placed in my hands.” The candidate for initiation had to submit to the experience which made such a confession possible for him. It was an experience of the highest kind that the neophite passed through.

[ 3 ] Let us now imagine that a non-initiate hears of such experiences. He cannot know what has really taken place in the initiate’s soul. In his eyes the initiate died physically, lay in the grave, and rose again. What is a spiritual reality at a higher stage of existence appears, when expressed in the form of sense-reality, as an event which breaks through the order of nature. It is a “miracle”. In this sense initiation was a miracle. One who really wished to understand it must have awakened within himself powers to enable him to stand on a higher plane of existence. He must have approached these higher experiences through a course of life specially adapted to that purpose. In whatever way these prepared experiences took place in individual cases, they are always found to be of quite a definite type; so an initiate’s life is a typical one. It may be described quite apart from the single personality. In fact, an individual could only be described as being on the way to the Divine if he had passed through these definite typical experiences.

Such a personality was Buddha, living in the midst of his disciples. Jesus appeared as such a personality to his followers. Nowadays we know of the parallelism that exists between the biographies of Buddha and of Jesus. Rudolf Seydel has convincingly proved this parallelism in his book, Buddha und Christus. We have only to follow out the two lives in detail in order to see that all objections to the parallelism are futile.

[ 4 ] The birth of Buddha is announced by a white elephant that descends from heaven and declares to the queen, Maya, that she will bring forth a divine man who “will attune all beings to love and friendship, and will unite them in a close alliance.” We read in St. Luke’s Gospel: “To a virgin espoused to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David; and the virgin’s name was Mary. And the angel came in unto her, and said, ‘Hail, thou that art highly favoured... Behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name Jesus. He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest.”

The Brahmins, or Indian priests, who know what the birth of a Buddha means, interpret Maya’s dream. They have a definite, typical idea of a Buddha, to which the life of the personality about to be born will have to correspond. Similarly we read in Matthew II, 1, that when Herod “had gathered all the chief priests and scribes of the people together, he demanded of them where Christ should be born.” The Brahmin Asita says of Buddha: “This is the child which will become Buddha, the redeemer, the leader to immortality, freedom, and light.” Compare with this Luke 11, 25: “And, behold, there was a man in Jerusalem, whose name was Simeon; and the same man was just and devout, waiting for the consolation of Israel: and the Holy Ghost was upon him ... And when the parents brought in the child Jesus, to do for him after the custom of the law, then took he him up in his arms, and blessed God, and said, Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word: for mine eyes have seen thy salvation, which thou hast prepared before the face of all people: a light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of thy people Israel.”

It is related of Buddha that at the age of twelve he was lost, and found again under a tree, surrounded by poets and sages of the olden time, whom he was teaching. With this incident the following passage in St. Luke corresponds: “Now his parents went to Jerusalem every year at the feast of the passover. And when he was twelve years old, they went up to Jerusalem after the custom of the feast. And when they had fulfilled the days, as they returned, the child Jesus tarried behind in Jerusalem; and Joseph and his mother knew not of it. But they, supposing him to have been in the company, went a day's journey; and they sought him among their kinsfolk and acquaintance. And when they found him not, they turned back again to Jerusalem, seeking him. And it came to pass that after three days they found him in the temple, sitting in the midst of the doctors, both hearing them, and asking them questions. And all that heard him were astonished at his understanding and answers.” (Luke II, 41-47).

After Buddha had lived in solitude and returned, he was received by the benediction of a virgin, “Blessed is thy mother, blessed is thy father, blessed is the wife to whom thou belongest.” But he replied, “Only they are blessed who are in Nirvana,” that is, who have entered the eternal cosmic order. In St. Luke’s Gospel (XI, 27), we read: “And it came to pass, as he spake these things, a certain woman of the company lifted up her voice and said unto him, ‘Blessed is the womb that bare thee, and the paps which thou hast sucked.” But he said, ‘Yea rather, blessed are they that hear the word of God, and keep it.'”

In the course of Buddha’s life, the tempter comes to him and promises him all the kingdoms of the earth. Buddha refuses everything in the words: “I know well that I am destined to have a kingdom, but I do not desire an earthly one. I shall become Buddha and make all the world exult with joy.” The tempter has to own that his reign is over. Jesus answers the same temptation in the words: “Get thee hence, Satan, for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve. Then the devil leaveth him.” (Matthew IV, 10, 11). This description of the parallelism might be extended to many other points with the same result.

The life of Buddha ended sublimely. On a journey, he felt ill; he came to the river Hiranja, near Kuschinagara. There he lay down on a carpet which his favorite disciple, Ananda, spread for him. His body began to be luminous from within. He died transfigured, his body irradiating light, saying: “Nothing endures.”

The death of Buddha corresponds with the trans: figuration of Jesus. “And it came to pass about eight days after these sayings, he took Peter and John and James, and went up into a mountain to pray. And as he prayed, the fashion of his countenance was altered and his raiment was white and glistering.”

Buddha’s earthly life ends at this point, but it is here that the most important part of the life of Jesus begins—His suffering, death, and resurrection. What differentiates Buddha from Christ exists in the conditions necessitating the extension of the life of Christ Jesus beyond the scope of the Buddha life. Buddha and Christ will not be understood by merely mixing them. (This will become clear in the course of this book.) Other accounts of Buddha's death need not here be considered, even though they reveal profound aspects.

[ 5 ] The agreement in the lives of the two redeemers leads to the same conclusion. The narratives themselves indicate the nature of this conclusion. When the Priest-sages hear what kind of birth is to take place, they know what is involved. They know that they have to do with a God-Man; they know beforehand what kind of personality it is who is appearing. And therefore his course of life can only correspond with what they know about the life of a God-Man. In the Wisdom of their Mysteries such a life is traced out for all eternity. It can only be as it must be; it comes into manifestation like an eternal law of nature. Just as a chemical substance can only behave in a certain definite way, so a Buddha or a Christ can only live in A certain definite way. His life is not described merely by writing a fortuitous biography, but by giving its typical features that are contained for all time in the Wisdom of the Mysteries. The Buddha legend is no more a biography in the ordinary sense than the Gospels are meant to be a biography of the Christ Jesus in the ordinary sense. In neither is the merely accidental given; both relate the course of life marked out for a world-redeemer. The pattern of the two accounts is to be found in the Mystery traditions, not in outer physical history. Jesus and Buddha are, to those who have recognized their divine nature, initiates in the most eminent sense. (Jesus is the initiate by virtue of the Christ Being dwelling in Him.) Hence their lives are lifted out of things transitory, and what is known about initiates applies to them. The fortuitous incidents in their lives are not narrated, but rather it is said of them:

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was a God... And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us.” (St. John I, 1 and 14).

[ 6 ] But the life of Jesus contains more than does the life of Buddha. Buddha’s life ends with the transfiguration; the most momentous part of the life of Jesus begins after the transfiguration. In the language of initiates this means that Buddha reached the point at which divine light begins to shine in men. He faces mortal death. He becomes the light of the world: Jesus goes farther. He does not physically,die at the moment when the light of the world shines through him. At that moment he is a Buddha. But at that very moment he enters upon a stage which finds expression in a higher degree of initiation. He suffers and dies. What is earthly disappears. But the spiritual element, the light of the world, does not. His resurrection follows. He is revealed to his followers as Christ. Buddha, at the moment of his transfiguration, dissolves into the blissful life of the universal spirit. Christ Jesus once more calls the universal spirit into Present existence in human form. Such an event had formerly taken place at the higher stages of initiation in a symbolical sense. Those initiated in the spirit of the Osiris myth attained in their consciousness to such a resurrection as a symbolical experience. In the life of Jesus, this “great” initiation was added to the Buddha initiation, not as a symbolical experience, but as reality. Buddha demonstrated by his life that man is the Logos, and that he returns to the Logos, to the light, when his earthly part dies. In Jesus, the Logos itself became a person. In Him, the Word was made flesh.

[ 7 ] Therefore, what was enacted in the innermost recesses of the temples by the guardians of the ancient Mysteries has been apprehended through Christianity as a historical fact. The followers of Christ Jesus confessed their belief in Him, the initiate; in Him who was initiated in a manner unique in its magnitude. He proved to them that the world is divine. In the Christian community the wisdom of the Mysteries was indissolubly bound up with the personality of Christ Jesus. That which man previously had sought to attain through the Mysteries was now replaced by the belief that Christ had lived on earth, and that the faithful belonged to him.

Henceforward, part of what was formerly only to be gained through mystic methods could be replaced in the Christian community by the conviction that the Divine had been manifested in the Word present among them. Not that for which each individual soul underwent a long preparation was now alone decisive, but what those had heard and seen who were with Jesus, and what was handed down by them. “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which... our hands have handled, of the Word of Life... that which we have seen and heard declare we unto you, that ye also may have fellowship with us.” Thus do we read in the first Epistle of St. John. And this immediate reality is to embrace all future generations in a living bond of union, and as a church is mystically to extend from race to race. It is in this sense that the words of St. Augustine are to be under " stood, “I should not believe the Gospels unless the authority of the Catholic Church induced me to do so.” Thus the Gospels do not contain within themselves testimony to their truth, but they are to be believed because they are founded on the personality of Jesus, and because the Church from that personality mysteriously draws the power to make the truth of the Gospels manifest.

The Mysteries handed down traditionally the means of arriving at truth; the Christian community propaBates truth itself. To the confidence in the mystical forces that spring up in the inmost being of man durIng initiation was to be added the confidence in the One, in the primordial Initiator.

The mystics sought to become divine, they wished to experience divinity. Jesus was divine, we must hold fast to Him, and then we shall become partakers of His divinity in the community founded by Him—this became Christian conviction. What was divine in Jesus became so for all His followers. “Lo, I am with you alway even unto the end of the world.” (St. Matthew, XXVIII 20). The one who was born in Bethlehem has an eternal character. The Christmas anthem rightly sings of the birth of Jesus as if it took place each Christmas “Christ is born to-day, the Saviour has come into the world to-day, today the angels are singing on earth.”

In the Christ-experience we should recognize a definite stage of initiation. When the mystic of pre-Christian times passed through this Christ-experience he was, through his initiation, in a state that enabled him to perceive something spiritually—in higher worlds—to which no fact in the world of sense corresponded. He experienced in the higher world what the Mystery of Golgotha comprises. Now, when the Christian mystic goes through this experience by initiation he at the same time beholds the historical event that took place on Golgotha, and he knows that in that event, enacted within the physical world, there is the same content that existed formerly only in the super sensible facts of the Mysteries. Thus there was poured out on the Christian community, through the Mystery of Golgotha, that which formerly had been poured out on the mystics within the temples. And initiation gives Christian mystics the possibility of discerning what is contained in the Mystery of Golgotha, whereas faith makes man an unconscious partaker of the mystical stream which flowed from the events depicted in the New Testament, and which has ever since pervaded the spiritual life of humanity.

• 1. (Cf. Lepsius, Das Totenbuch der alten Ägypter, (The Book Of the Dead of the Ancient Egyptians.) Berlin, 1842).

In my lecture yesterday, I tried to indicate an important fact related to the Christ problem as a whole—a fact that is no doubt surprising. A great store of wisdom has in fact disappeared, and it is known today only through a few fragments. From one of these fragments, I cited certain passages to you yesterday from the beginning of the Book of Jeû.¹ We must indeed ask ourselves now if it possible that a store of wisdom that once existed can disappear completely. In other words, can the reasons for such a disappearance be completely external? You will recall the analogy I used: I said that it is possible to imagine that everything we publish today and that all our existing writings have been burned, so that only the writings of our opponents remain, and posterity can be reconstructed only from those records and not from what we have said. This is quite possibly what did occur. Nevertheless, this hypothesis cannot be sustained as-is and without qualification. Even if all the writings were to disappear, many of us would still be alive—at least, we could assume this possibility—and we know the content of those writings and would be able to communicate those truths without the help of the works of our adversaries, so that the store of wisdom would continue to grow and spread, in spite of everything.

To bring about a complete disappearance, it would in fact be necessary to eradicate, to a certain extent, the capacity to understand our writings, the ability to preserve them, and the possibility of communicating them from generation to generation. This must be what occurred at that time. It must have happened that people lost the capacity to understand such teachings as the Gnosis of Valentinus, for example, or the content of the Pistis Sophia manuscript, or the Book of Jeû, and so on. In fact, this is what happened.

We must vividly imagine to ourselves that, based on the broad foundation, so to speak, of that ancient inheritance—which had already fulfilled its purpose in the form of a primitive clairvoyance that then gradually grew dim and faded away—a higher form of knowledge evolved. It was nurtured by only the few who were initiated into the Mysteries, yet it was a widespread knowledge nevertheless. And we must imagine further that it was because of the gradual paralysis of the capacity to understand such things that this knowledge was not just forgotten, but it eventually disappeared. People simply no longer had the capacity to understand such teachings. Only this could bring about such a complete loss of a treasure of wisdom.

Thus, we may indeed say that, when we look back at the time just before the period following the Mystery of Golgotha, we can see how ancient capacities disappear, far and wide, and how something new develops out of entirely new and fresh forces. We may say without hesitation that, as human evolution approached the Mystery of Golgotha, we can see a gradual darkening and disappearance of a certain view and way of thinking, which had a spiritual quality and would have enabled human beings to understand the coming of Christ into the world as a spiritual being. But this form of knowledge, as we said, had disappeared.

As a result, at the very time when the Christ united with earthly evolution, humankind lost the kind of knowledge that might have enabled people to understand, in a true and profound way, the nature of the Christ being. This is a very important fact. Furthermore, I have already indicated, several times, something very significant. I stated that the announcement of Christ's coming was not itself a new revelation, made known through the Mystery of Golgotha; in the Mysteries, the Christ had already been mentioned as the “coming one.” There were special teachings in the Mysteries that proclaimed the coming of Christ. One viewed the Christ being, of course, in the light of a past spiritual wisdom, but these Mysteries had gradually degenerated, so that, when the Christ did come, people were less able than ever to speak, as human beings, about the Christ. This is evident not only from all that I have just explained, but also from what remained alive in the souls of those who tried to conceive of the Christ Mystery out of a fresh, new impulse.

Thus, during the very first centuries of the Christian era, we find great spirits arising, such as Clemens of Alexandria, for example, and Origenes—very lofty spirits, both of them. If we want to describe them from one perspective—Clemens, as well as Origenes, who came after the Gnostics when Gnosis itself was already waning—we must say that they did in fact strive for this knowledge. They asked themselves: What is the truth behind the Mystery of Golgotha? On the one hand, we are concerned with the Christ (they still knew this, of course); the Christ can be understood only as a spiritual being connected with spiritual and suprasensory impulses. This Christ descends from cosmic spiritual spheres. They could no longer comprehend how the ancient Gnosis had been able to understand the Christ, but they knew that he could be understood, as a spiritual being, only through spiritual faculties. This was what they knew about the Christ.

On the other hand, they viewed Jesus as a historical personality. For them, the coming of Jesus was a historical fact. Them might have said: A number of years ago, in a certain part of the Middle East, a man named Jesus was born; he carried the Christ, and God lived in that human being. For them, this was the great problem. They thought: During the course of historical evolution, we are concerned with a historical personality; but in the realm of spiritual knowledge, we are concerned with the Christ. How should we conceive the union of these two? Thus we see great spirits like Clemens of Alexandria and Origenes working and struggling with the problem of how the Christ could have lived in the man Jesus.

Now, let us first consider Clemens of Alexandria, the head of the catechetical school of Alexandria, where those who wished to become Christian teachers were trained. When we consider this significant individual, we find something in his teachings that we may describe in this way: The Christ belongs, of course, to the forces that participated in the creation of the earth; he belongs to the spiritual world; he entered earthly evolution through the body of Jesus of Nazareth. In this way, Clemens of Alexandria looked up, first of all, to the Christ as a spiritual being and tried to comprehend him in spiritual realms. But Clemens also knew something else, which we have emphasized often—that the Christ had, in fact, always existed for human beings, but not in the earthly sphere. The only ones who could reach him were those who had developed, through the Mysteries, forces that enabled them to leave the physical body. When human beings left their physical bodies through forces acquired in the Mysteries and ventured into the spiritual realms, they were able to recognize the Christ and felt that he was the “coming one.” Clemens of Alexandria knew this. He knew that the ancient Mysteries spoke of the Christ as the coming one, who was not yet united with earthly evolution. He expressed this by saying that human beings were, of course, inspired to expect the Christ.

Clemens of Alexandria went so far as to say that, especially at two particular points in the spiritual evolution of humanity, something was nurtured as a kind of preparation for Christ's coming. He said, on the other hand, that this took place through Moses and the prophets. What came into the world through Moses and the prophets, said Clemens, was a preparation—humankind first needed to become acquainted with what came through Moses and the prophets, so that they might, through personal experience, come to feel they had found the Christ. This was the concept they had to form.

So we see that Clemens knew nothing about the old Gnostic wisdom—or, at least, he did not use it. But Clemens designated what entered human capacity through Moses and the prophets as a “preparation.” Then, as the second turning point, or “preparation” (and this is very significant), Clemens placed Greek philosophy—Plato and Aristotle—at the side of Moses and the prophets. He said, approximately, that Moses and the prophets as well as the philosophers prepared humanity for the event that took place with the Mystery of Golgotha.

Origenes said, on the other hand, that we are dealing with the Christ—the Christ who can be grasped as a spiritual being with the aid of spiritual forces. And we are dealing with the historical Jesus, who in fact once existed as a real person in the sensory world. How can these two be united, the God and the human being? How does the “God human” come to be? Origenes, accordingly, constructed a view that said: It is impossible for a god, without preparation, to live within an ordinary physical human body; a specially prepared soul, therefore, must have lived in Jesus so that his soul could mediate between God and the human being and might united the God, as a pure spiritual being, with physicality.

Thus, Origenes brought in the soul element and, within Jesus Christ, distinguished between the God, the pure Pneuma-being of pure spirit being—the psyche, or soul—and the physical body of Jesus of Nazareth. He tried to imagine how the Christ could dwell within Jesus of Nazareth. He no longer possessed the early Gnosis, which would enable him to imagine the dwelling of Christ on earth and the union of the Christ with earthly evolution. It was necessary to make up an understanding out of completely new and fresh elements, and his efforts went toward achieving this. So we see that, right at the time when Christ as a real being united with earthly evolution, human beings had the greatest possible difficulty in understanding this fact; the capacity for such understanding had never been so limited.

Clemens of Alexandria still preserved at least some idea of why this was so. He wondered what it was that inspired humankind in the ancient Mysteries. He thought that they were inspired through the Christ's influence, although from suprasensory worlds while they were out of their physical bodies. Clemens of Alexandria expressed this clearly when he said that Christ sent the angels to humankind. Indeed, he said openly that, when the Old Testament mentions the appearance of an angel, this means that the angel was sent by the Christ. He states explicitly that, when Yahweh appears to Moses as the burning bush, it is in reality the Christ who appears in this earthly, soul-spiritual manifestation. Clemens of Alexandria thus states clearly that, in the past, before the Mystery of Golgotha, the Christ appeared to human beings through angels. If people developed the capacity to understand the message of the angel, they were capable of standing as disembodied initiates in the presence of the Christ and in the presence of the spiritual world.

Thus Clemens of Alexandria was still able to go as far as this. Further, he said—and this was also part of the knowledge retained by Clemens—that clearly, over the course of time, the Christ passed from the nature of angel to the “Son nature”; he became “Son.” Previously, he was able to manifest and reveal himself through angels or as a host, or multitude, of angels. When it so pleased him, he appeared to one person in one angelic form, and to another as a different angel. Thus he appeared to human beings in many and various forms. Later, however, he appeared in the one form as the “Son.”

Here we come to a very important element, which I must ask you to note carefully, because it is extremely important. Clemens of Alexandria still held to the view that the Christ already existed before the Mystery of Golgotha in the spiritual realms. The Christ had already reached the point where he could reveal himself through angels, or messengers. But now, he came even further by being able to fulfill himself as the Son. His ability to fulfill his mission as the Son has the greatest imaginable importance. What was it that now entered human understanding?

When we go through the entire ancient Gnosis, we find a peculiar trait. If, for example, I were to outline it in the form of a diagram, I might say something like this: The Gnosis conceives, in evolution, the existence of a human “person” as proceeding from the Father—from the primal Father, the so-called Stillness, or primal Spirit. These ancient Gnostics indicated thirty different stages, and named them “Aeons,” and now I could name thirty of these. And then comes the second current, or stream. Whereas the first stream is spiritual, they also spoke of a second stream that belongs to the realm of soul. Within these streams they saw the Christ and the Sophia as the two principal Aeons, and as the source of all being. Then there were numerous other Aeons besides. Moreover, the Gnostics indicated yet a third stream—that of the Demiurge and matter. These all united and formed humankind. It is possible to form such an outline out of the way those Gnostics thought. Such concepts as theirs are not entirely unreal, because human beings are complicated. In a lecture once, I explained how many groups, or stages, containing seven parts make up the human being, our friends were very surprised to hear that so many differentiations must be looked for in the human being.² Yet it is just these differentiations that remind us of what the Gnostics, from their perspective, knew already.

On the other hand, we always find, when we approach the Gnosis, one particular point that impresses us—that the concept of time plays a very minor role. Gnostic ideas may be expressed spatially; the role of time as an idea is unimportant. Or we could say that Gnostic understanding is not capable of understanding it completely. And to this extent we may indeed call it progress from the Gnosis to Clemens of Alexandria. Although the whole encompassing fullness of spiritual wisdom had been lost, it was nevertheless a step forward that led to Clemens of Alexandria, since he brought the concept of time into the evolution of the Christ. He taught that the Christ had already existed earlier—that he had previously revealed himself through angels and later on as the Son; this was his evolutionary course.

Thus, the concept of development, or evolution, was introduced. This, you can see, is the significant point. Indeed, we cannot emphasize too often that the development of civilization in the West occurred in order to bring an understanding of the concept of time to the human worldview in the right way. This is what is so important, so radically important—to view the course of evolution and to realize that the Christ was first able to manifest only through angels, and that afterward, when he passed through the Mystery of Golgotha, he is able to manifest as the Son. Through the angels, he is the messenger of something outside the world. It is true that it permeates the world completely, but to understand it correctly, we must nevertheless recognize that it comes from outside the world, as the messenger. Later, however, he appears as Son; he imbues all things.

Just as the Son is one blood—one with the Father in the physical world—we must also conceive the spirit as one and the same being with the Father in the spiritual world. To be a Son is something other than being merely an angel. So, when this being reveals itself as Son, it is an evolutionary progress, in contrast to the earlier manifestations, whereby he was able to appear only as an angel, or messenger. There was, as it were, a kind of understanding of the Christ that went further than the understanding of the ancient Gnosis. Yet, the effects of the Gnosis were needed in order to say even what Clemens could say. When the Gnosis gradually disappeared altogether, it was no longer possible to say even what Clem- ens of Alexandria and Origenes had said. People became increasingly familiar with those impulses that belonged to a later period: purely materialistic impulses.

So it came about that the teachings of Origenes were condemned. They were pronounced heretical. The element in them that caused them to be declared heretical was the fact that people wished to renounce any form of understanding that came from humanity itself and its own forces. This was what they wanted to renounce; they felt that such an understanding was no longer possible. And how do matters appear to us now? What aspect must they assume for us? We see, in fact, that an ancient form of spiritual wisdom had established itself extensively on the foundation of ancient clairvoyance. It was there, but it gradually disappeared. Contained in this spiritual wisdom—though it dealt with a supra- sensory being—was wisdom related to the Christ. Just at the time when the Christ descended to earth, however, the wisdom had disappeared. The real Christ was now united with the earth; knowledge about the Christ, however, had disappeared by this time.

Here you have an example, on a grand scale, that I must ask you to please consider in the right way. We can cast our glance over the earth that was known to humanity at that time—the earth as it was before the Mystery of Golgotha. The further back we go, the more knowledge we find about the Christ, who must be thought of as existent in suprasensory realms. The farther back we go, the more knowledge we find, but it is knowledge that can be communicated only through angels. This constitutes evolution. This knowledge, this view of Christ, is made known to many people. The Christ lived as the inspiration of many human beings: evolution.

This knowledge slowly fades away and disappears, and its influence weakens. And in one being, Jesus of Nazareth, we find everything concentrated that had previously been distributed among many. Imagine, in the course of evolution, a drop of the inner being of the Christ as living in a priest of the Mysteries, another drop in a second priest, yet another drop in a third, and so on. In the case of each of these initiates, you would find that, when he went out of his body—when his spirit abandoned his body—he had some portion of the Christ within him. The Christ is thus multiplied in them. All of this disappears, because everything that had once been distributed is drawn together and concentrated in a single point, in the body of Jesus of Nazareth: involution.

Involution is the very principle or being that was taken away from all the others and appeared in one body. Thus, we see that what had lived in evolution in a distributed form had to disappear from the earth by becoming concentrated into one point—the body of Jesus of Nazareth. This is the important fact. Evolution ceases within the most significant involution. Now begins the time, therefore, when the Christ himself lives with the earth, but when the knowledge of the Christ no longer lives in the earth; knowledge of the Christ must evolve anew.

At this point, the very difficulties we spoke of appeared. On the one hand, we have Jesus of Nazareth, and on the other, we have the Christ. Keep in mind that the ancient wisdom concerning the connections of things in human beings themselves were now completely lost. During that entire period, there was no longer the slightest knowledge of anything concerning humankind. Not until now are we beginning again to differentiate in the human being our physical body, ether body, sentient soul, and so on. Only now are we beginning this. Now, in a single individual, we again differentiate between the physical earthly part, which continues the line of heredity, and the higher spiritual part, which has descended again from spiritual worlds.

Origenes did not know this, nor did Clemens of Alexandria. They did not know about the spiritual soul and the physical part in each individual human being who walks on the earth. This was why they found it so difficult to understand the single members of the being of Jesus Christ. The knowledge related to the Christ became more and more at variance, and it is infinitely important for an understanding of our own age to realize how all of this, in turn, influences our own time, inasmuch as it was necessary for the knowledge of spiritual science to appear today. It is extremely important to keep in mind this separation of Jesus and the Christ. This is a very serious and important matter. And we encounter in a myriad of forms.

The Christmas event was entirely unknown at that time. It entered human hearts only gradually. This was the outer aspect: People came to know in images what had occurred in Palestine; only gradually, with the aid of dramatic performances, did they begin to form an idea of what took place there. This was the aspect, I might say, of the Jesus Mystery. We have seen the Christmas plays performed for us here. We could still feel something of the Christ in one of them, the second. And we could feel Jesus in his purity of form in the first play, which is so primitive and simple. We could say that the child Jesus—the first appearance of “Jesus”—gradually conquered human hearts. Around the middle of the Middle Ages, we find that people began to look up to the child; before then, Christians participated in the Mass and heard about the Mystery of Christ. They heard that he had passed through the experience of death, about St. Paul's teachings, and so on, but the Bible, as we know, was not allowed to become popular; it was kept entirely in the hands of the priests. Believers were expected to participate in the Mass, which was, moreover, celebrated in Latin. But there was no real participation in the events of the holy rite itself. The essence of the Gospels conquered human hearts and souls only very gradually. So it happened that only after the middle of the Middle Ages could such plays portraying the appearance of Jesus and so on be given to ordinary people. Today, the actual view that we maintain is that the Mystery of Golgotha once took place and that, after that event, people knew something of this Mystery of Golgotha. Yet, what they really knew was simply this: Christ had died on the cross; it was mainly the Easter event that people felt.

We must keep in mind that all of this took place at the same time when mystics such as Tauler, Meister Eckhardt, and others were seeking the Christ through mysticism. Thus, on the one hand, we have the first appearance of the Christmas plays; Jesus is sought in the most external form possible—in the form of a direct physical portrayal—whereas the mystics sought the Christ. They worked to develop the soul to such an extent that they could experience the Christ arising within them; they sought to apprehend the Christ in completely changed form, within the soul, a Christ far removed from the world, existing as pure spirit. Mysticism, on the one hand, and the Christmas plays on the other—Jesus and the Christ being sought simultaneously along two different and widely separated paths. What was a theoretical difficulty in the case of Origenes—the impossibility of uniting the Christ with Jesus—appears directly before us out in the villages. There, among the simple folk, Jesus is shown as a child, whereas the deep- natured mystics looked for the Christ by trying to guide their own souls to an inner experience—to inner contact, so to speak—of the Christ.

But where can we find the connecting link? Where is it? Events follow their course, side by side. Just consider the wide gulf between the childlike gaze of the villagers and what they see in the Christmas plays and the deep mysticism of a Meister Eckhardt or a Johannes Tauler. And yet, the beginnings of these Christmas plays actually appear at the same time. In fact, mysticism also continues to live. And today, in our own time, just think what the whole event of the Mystery of Golgotha has become for many theologians. Among the most advanced theologians, what is it that draws their attention? They consider that, once upon a time, at the beginning of our era, a man was born in Nazareth, or Bethlehem, or somewhere else—a chosen one, chosen especially to experience gradually within himself the human connection with the spiritual world. He was a noble man, the noblest of all—so noble, in fact, that one might say that he was almost ... but here, you see, they are somewhat at a loss. Here they are not so sure of themselves. What is there to add to the fact that he was viewed absolutely as a god during the evolutionary course of Christianity? And so they turn backward and forward, until all the theories and teachings of Euken and Harnack come along. Isn't it true that they cannot understand it al all, yet they wish, in one way or another, to appear smart and to be able to view Jesus as something special—and to be able to conceive of the Christ. Then they consult the Gospels, and as modern persons, of course, they are ashamed to admit the truth of the miracles, so they struck out whatever can be struck out, and construct from the Gospels something as natural as possible—something that may be explained away.

Then we come to the event of Jerusalem and the death on the cross. Theologians can pursue things as far as this death, you see, but they are unable to go so far as the resurrection. And then we see examples such as Harnack's statement that this resurrection, the grave from which Jesus Christ supposedly arose—indeed, this Easter Mystery—allows us to penetrate only the knowledge that this Easter Mystery took place in the garden, near the Place of the Skulls. It was there that the Easter Mystery arose, and the idea of the resurrection comes from there. We are expected to hold to this, without concerning ourselves with what actually occurred there, because the conviction of the resurrection proceeded from there.

This is indeed very strange, is it not? If you read Harnack's book The Essence of Christianity, you will find this extraordinary idea of the resurrection. I once pointed this out in a certain city at a meeting of the Giordano Bruno Union by saying that this is a strange thought indeed. If you wish to solve the problem of the resurrection with such a statement, it is better to leave the actual event untouched and to point our simply that the resurrection belief—the belief in the Easter Mystery—arose from that grave. A certain gentleman who was present objected by saying that Harnack could not have written this, since this would in fact be almost Roman Catholic—a Roman Catholic superstition. It would be no different than believing that the holy garment of Treves had some hidden meaning. This would indeed be superstition, and Harnack could not have written it. Yet it is a fact that he did write it, and since I did not have the book handy, I had no choice but to send that gentleman a post card the next day, stating that the passage could be found on such and such a page. This are the sort of thing that leads to many difficulties. People are at a loss when they try to find the path leading from Jesus to the Christ. Someone once said to me, “We modern theologians can no longer do anything with a Christology. The only thing that is of any real use to us is a ‘Jesuology.’” And it was that same person, not I, who added this statement: “What a pity that the name Jesuits is already taken, since the followers of modern theology really ought to be called ‘Jesuits.’” Please note that it was not I who said this, but a modern theologian.

Now this is one side of the historical picture. The other side is this: A number of modern theologians are, in turn, holding more to the Christ. They study the Gospels, but they do not interpret certain passages in the Gospels, as do the other theologians I've mentioned. They do not speak of what one is able to believe, as a rational person might believe about another human being, even if that human being is divine. Yet, when describing this individual as a divine being, they are not at all clear in their minds about how far they should go in their application of divine status. “A noble man,” they say, more noble than Socrates, certainly, but here they go no further.

Thus we have the one class of people, the “Jesuolgians,” since it would be difficult indeed to apply to them the name theologians. The word theology means “wisdom of God,” but it is just this godly element that they wish to eliminate. And then there is the other group, who take things more seriously and who find, after studying certain Gospel passages, that it is impossible to view the one who pronounced such words as an ordinary human being. There are passages in the Gospels, as we know, that cannot, if we are honest, be so lightly attributed to a mere human being. Furthermore, such people take the story of the resurrection seriously. They consider themselves “Christologians,” in contrast to the “Jesulogians.” At the same time, they come to yet another conclusion. For example, just read the book Ecce Deus, among others. In this book, they say, “If you read the Gospels honestly, it is impossible to believe that they refer to an ordinary human being. They speak of a God—of a true and real God.” Hence, these people, for their part, lose Jesus; they lose him very seriously, because here they say, “Throughout the Gospels, certainly, we find the mention of God; but God can not possibly have existed—in fact, he could not have lived on earth. Therefore, we must hold on to the Christ. But the Christ is the one of whom people have said that he never lived on earth.” Christology without Jesuology; this is the other direction. Yet these two directions find no way to unite. This is true today; those who speak of the Christ have lost Jesus, and those who speak of Jesus have lost the Christ. Christ has become an unreal god, and Jesus an unreal man. And it would have to continue this way, inevitably, if something new could not be added.

The new element to be added must be spiritual science, which is capable of understanding anew how the Christ could live in Jesus. In fact, one of the most important points in the spiritual scientific teaching is this: It can lead us to understand how the Christ, by way of the two Jesus children, could actually become the one who assumed the position at the center of earthly and human evolution. Spiritual science can do this, because it has a new vision of what the human being really is and how the spirit, soul, and body are united in the human being. Consequently, if we build on this, we can understand once again how the Christ united with Jesus. This is complicated, of course, and it is not easy to understand. Nevertheless, it can be understood. You will thus be able to see how what humankind has lost can, with the help of spiritual science, be built up again from its original source. This is also true of our comprehension of the Mystery of Golgotha. When the Christ appeared in the world, it was impossible for people to understand him. Such understanding can be acquired only gradually. His achievements took the form of actual facts. The points of departure that can lead us to an understanding can be found everywhere. Even the simplest Christmas play can help us find such points.

What do such plays show us? So far as the Paradise Plays are concerned, the following fact is placed before us: A human being enters the world, and we realize, merely through incidental occurrences, that this human being is Jesus. We enter the world as children. I said that the Paradise Play—the beginning of earthly evolution—was connected with this, the Mystery of Golgotha.

Certainly, we must consider the fact that, at the beginning of earthly evolution, human beings were exposed to luciferic temptation. Consequently, their normal progress of evolution was changed. Thus we are faced, symbolically, with Adam cast out of paradise; his being is other than what it was destined to be before luciferic temptation. How does this manifest? Imagine that Lucifer had never approached humankind, and that human beings had lived without the luciferic impulse. In that case, human beings would have lived in a different way in their ether body. When we pass through the portal of death, we still retain our ether body, and then we cast it off. Nevertheless, this ether body more or less continues its existence. As a result of luciferic temptation, it caries the impressions of everything we do and think. We know that human beings die; that they pass through the portal of death; that the physical body is surrendered to the elements; that, after a few days, the ether body detaches itself from the human being; and that human beings then continue along whatever path them must take. At the same time, in this etheric part are the impressions of what the ether body had become as a result of thinking, feeling, and actions, in an inevitable accordance with luciferic temptation.

Now imagine the earth. The human physical body enters this earth; it is given over to the earthly elements, but the ether body remains connected with the earth. Thus, we have the ether bodies of human beings; they are present in the atmosphere of the earth. And they are different from what they would have been had the luciferic temptation never taken place. Everything I've said thus far about ether bodies in general refers, of course, to these ether bodies. But what I am saying today also refers to them. So we may repeat: Human beings are embedded in the earth; what we leave behind on the earth—all that our ether body has become during earthly life—has become more dry, more “woody,” than it would have become had the luciferic temptation not occurred. More wood-like, drier—in fact, this difference does exist. Imagine that the luciferic temptation had never taken place; after death, human beings would leave behind a far more rejuvenated ether body, a much “greener” ether body, as it were. Because of the luciferic temptation, human beings leave behind a far more dried-up ether body than would have otherwise been the case.

This was expressed in the legend that tells us a dried-up Tree of Paradise arose from Adam's grave. But what lives in the earth actually lived before the Mystery of Golgotha in the human ether body, infected by Lucifer. It was precisely this element into which the body of Jesus of Nazareth entered as a healer, or as a “phantom,” as I explained in my lectures at Karlsruhe.³ Imagine that Adam's grave—Adam surrendered as a physical body to the earthly elements. Arising from his grave is the dried-up ether body, the representative of the human past that was infected by Lucifer and remains intact after death. This is, at the same time, the tree upon which one may be crucified. In fact, such a crucifixion actually does take place when the “phantom” of Jesus of Nazareth remains behind on earth after the Mystery of Golgotha, and through it unites with the earth. This is expressed in the legend that tells us this tree was handed down from generation to generation and became, in turn, the cross on Golgotha. This is a pictorial view that corresponds to the fact—that, through the crucifixion, the phantom of Jesus of Nazareth united with what lived in the earth etherically, as a totality of ether bodies infected by Lucifer. Those bodies were, of course, scattered, rarified, and dissolved, but they were nevertheless existent in the form of forces. This is very significant and infinitely profound fact that we must keep in mind, and it illuminates for us the mysteries of the earth.

But what is it, in fact, that brings about our connection with the ether body infected by Lucifer? It is the fact that we enter the physical world as children. We still do not, of course, find the whole answer in that point were one becomes a child, because if we look with the right feeling, we see in the child a being free of Lucifer. And if we are able to do this—to look at a child with the right feeling, seeing how one enters the world—we can see the human relationship to the Christ.

This, it was expected, would be the feeling experienced by those seeing Jesus thus portrayed in the Christmas plays: They were expected to feel what I have described in the first pages of my little book on the progress of the human being and humanity.⁴ There I spoke of the first three years of human life and about our entrance into the world. If the same thing that permeates the human being during those first years were to permeate one in the middle of life (as I mentioned in the book), one would have some idea of the way the Christ lived in Jesus. This opportunity to see something in children that is not yet infected by Lucifer is also possible when we see the Christmas plays.

Now let's consider what all of this means. It is indeed tremendously important when we look at the child. In that little book I explained that during our earliest years we are far wiser than we are later on—although unconsciously—because we must then build up the body; later, we can no longer do that. We are far smarter and wiser than we are later on, and we are much better at penetrating our human nature, but we do not yet posses the Luciferic element. In working on ourselves inwardly in this way, during our earliest infancy—before that time we can recall later on—we work on the most delicate shaping of the body, and we work according to infinitely wise laws. Once Lucifer and Ahriman have permeated our knowledge later on, we haven't the faintest notion of those laws. While we are at work within this infant being, we are free of everything we enter later on, when we experience the world through the body; we are still unhampered by all differences, even by the difference of the sexes. We do not live during early infancy within the male or female element; we are not yet involved in the differences created by social position and race; we are not yet involved in national differences. We are human beings, pure and simple. We are then, in reality, within the same element inhabited by those who face one another in war, impelled by something they experience externally for the first time: hatred.

The fact that it is possible for human beings in the world to face one another in hatred, just because they belong to different nationalities, is something that develops through forces into which we enter through the connection with our physical body. Before acquiring such a connection through the physical body, children still live in an element that transcends all national and social differences. They live in an element where all souls could live, no matter where they were born on earth. Consider this: Human beings may face one another as bitter enemies and kill one another, yet those who have killed may pass through the portal of death, mutually united in the Christ who belongs to them all, the Christ in whom they live, if they have remained unaffected by the differences that exist among humankind. What makes people fact one another in hatred is something that they acquire only through the physical body; but this has no connection whatsoever with what lies outside the physical body.

Our age has much to learn—especially this age. It must find its way back to veneration for the infant Jesus, when he is portrayed as a child and not yet as one who has entered the element that brings differences among human beings, leading them into conflict and strife. It is only when their experiences change human beings from the child, about whom we are told at Christmas, that war and strife arise. It is human beings themselves who are portrayed in the Christmas play, human beings as they really are in their connection with cosmic powers—but portrayed in such a way that it reveals, in a unique way and on the physical level, something that does not become involved in strife; it is something that may even be carried, in a similar way, in the hearts of those who are fighting a physical battle to the death with one another.

It is profoundly significant that this is presented to humankind in particular relation to the “Nathan” Jesus Child. We connect with the side of our being, so to speak, through which we enter the world, without the slightest trace of discrimination, because we have not yet become involved in distinguishing nationality and so forth. We develop such discrimination only through our life in connection with the physical body. The Jesus idea, which is expressed fully only in the Jesus child, unites with the Christ idea, which is fulfilled when human beings are able go clearly recognize the spiritual also in Jesus as a man, when he was between thirty and thirty-three years of age—in other words, the Christ being. In a twofold way, through the “Nathan” Jesus and the “Solomon” Jesus, a body is prepared, which is able to remain apart from all that causes discrimination among human beings. The Christ is able to reveal himself only in such a body.⁵

Thus we see, according to spiritual science (and I have explained this in a similar way in my little book on the progress of the individual and humanity), the coalescence of the Jesus idea and the Christ idea. This is the greatest, most meaningful human need of our time. Until now, human beings have had a Christmas festival and an Easter festival, but these two festivals remained unrelated. Easter is a Christ festival, and Christmas a Jesus festival. Easter and Christmas eventually become related as we gain the ability to understand how the Christ and Jesus are interrelated. It is spiritual science that builds the bridge between the Christmas festival and the Easter festival. From the simple “Shepherd Play,” a bridge will lead us to the finest attainable comprehension if we cultivate spiritual science to the degree that we have the mentality of the shepherds rather than that of the innkeepers. The contrast between materialism and spiritualism is wonderfully described in the characters of the innkeepers and the shepherds. In fact, the great problem of our time is whether we wish to be innkeepers or shepherds. Many of today's events may be traced to the fact that people prefer to be innkeepers. The innkeeper nature is widespread in the world today; we must again work to become the shepherds. Naturally, there are many disbelievers, even among the shepherds. When one of the shepherds says, “I think I see a light yonder” (which means, “I perceive something of a spiritual nature.), there will always be another shepherd who will be slow to agree, saying it is just a fantasy.

There is one detail, however, that must not be ignored. Of course, we must be able to distinguish between the nature of an innkeeper and a shepherd; after all, don't innkeepers surround us on all sides? Wherever we go, they surround us, yet we convince ourselves that we are shepherds. This is natural, but we must not ignore this: We must investigate, at least in a small way, the innkeeper's nature within ourselves, and not view ourselves too certainly as the shepherds. We must occasionally ask ourselves, “Are we already able to see the approaching light, which will proclaim what must come through the new spiritual science?” We should cultivate inwardly everything that can keep alive the inner feeling for celebrating Christmas in our hearts through this new spiritual direction; this feeling will help us seek the light in the midst of darkness. We must seek and truly be willing to seek, however, in the right way. While we are seeking, we must truly have the feeling that we cannot reach our goal by trying only once; we must return again and again as the shepherds did, for they promised that they could come again and would not be satisfied to come only once.This is a fact; yet, people can become shepherds if they can begin now to develop within themselves the side of their nature that is not derived from earthly experience—if they can find, instead, a connection with what they brought to earth with them in their innermost being from the heavenly realms. People today stand far too firmly within the “house” where they can get what the innkeeper has to offer—what was brought from the earthly realms, and this can be evaluated only through earthly discrimination. On the other hand, those who still have a certain relationship with everything spiritual that surges and pulses through the world—those who have kept their shepherd nature—will be able to find the paths; they are able to discover that, in reality, ordinary knowledge finds only the outer appearance. People will gradually begin to understand Christmas when they learn to distinguish the innkeeper's nature from that of the shepherd, and when they come to realize how predominant the innkeeper's nature is today.

There is still much to be learned through the simple Christmas play, and because of this it seems to me a good idea to cultivate among us and to experience the Christmas mystery in this simplest of all forms. There are many and diverse hard battles ahead, my dear friends. They must be faced in the near future by just this sort of spiritual scientific work. To find the path, we must truly learn to be shepherds through spiritual understanding of the Christmas mystery—possessing all the humility of the shepherds, but at the same time, all the wisdom in seeking that belongs to the shepherds who are united with the universe. Let us engrave this in our hearts and souls at this Christmastime, so that we may continue to become seeking shepherds, and so that we may eventually learn to find what is holy within the human soul, just as it was found in the ordinary, everyday atmosphere of the simple folk. I have explained how this most sacred form of Christmas play arose, little by little, out of a carnival holiday mood, not from any sort of holy recreation. If we look for the spiritual in connection with what the Christmas plays show us, we find it in the right way as shepherds, not as innkeepers who have already lost their connection with the Christmas child, just as the play shows us symbolically. This is sorely needed in our age, when materialism has conquered such broad and far-reaching areas of life, both outer and within the human life of feeling. There, a spiritual worldview finds it difficult even to rediscover the right words—in contrast to the misused words that people use to express themselves—so that it may say what the right words mean.

• 1. The two books of Jeû are contained in the Bruce Codex. The first is considered speculative and cosmological, the second practical and related to overcoming the hostile world powers and securing salvation by practicing certain rites. The latter book is called “The Book of the Great Logos according to the mystery.” See G.R.S. Mead's introduction to Pistis Sophia (Spiritual Science Library, 1984, p. xxxv). The Bruce Codex was translated into German by C. Schmidt in 1892 and is probably the source quoted by Rudolf Steiner.
• 2. This reference is to a course of lectures by Rudolf Steiner in Oslo, Norway, June 2–12, 1912, Man in the Light of Occultism, Theosophy, and Philosophy, Rudolf Steiner Press, 1964 (GA 137).
• 3. Steiner refers to his 11 lectures in Karlsruhe, October 4–14, 1911 (GA 131), From Jesus to Christ, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1973.
• 4. See The Spiritual Guidance of the Individual and Humanity: Some Results of Spiritual-Scientific Research into Human History and Development, written in 1911 from 3 lectures, Copenhagen, June 1911 (GA 15), Anthroposophic Press, Hudson, NY, 1991.
• 5. For more about Steiner's views on the two Jesus children, see his course of 10 lectures in Basel, September 1909 (GA 114): According to Luke: The Gospel of Compassion and Love Revealed, Anthroposophic Press, Great Barrington, MA, 2001.

After Parzival stood before Titurel and had the experiences of which we spoke, an intimate and deep feeling of shame arose in him. This feeling of shame permeated him completely. He had gone through catharsis and had thought that he was now so good and pure that he could become one of the followers of the Master of all masters, the Christ. In this feeling of shame he was reminded of Christ's words: “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God.” He now knew how very imperfect he was still and how much he still had to take into his striving for the good, how much he was still lacking in order to be good.

And a second feeling, a feeling of fear overcame him. He thought that he had gotten rid of that a long time ago. But it was a different kind of fear from the ones he'd known previously. It was a feeling of his own smallness and weakness as a man compared with the sublime Godly being when he let a second word of Christ live in his soul: “Become perfect even as your Father in heaven is perfect.” These two words should live in the soul of every esoteric.

An esoteric should kindle full devotion for divine beings in his soul. Thereby the consciousness develops that what one does isn't so good, but that one should always try to become more perfect. We should look at what's developing in one's soul. God lives in developing things. If we get to the point where we're acting in a good and noble way, then it's God in us who's good. The God who lets us act in a good and noble way is our archetype itself, that created us. We must become a complete copy of this archetype.

Be it ever so hidden, there's a selfish motive in everything we do. We must realize that we can't be selfless. It's a world karma that lets us act egoistically. But world karma is God. Everything that God is and does in the way of good is better than we could do it. An esoteric should tell himself: Let me do something that I have made it my duty to do, let me do it as hard as I can and in such a way that I tell myself that the divine element that's at work in me is doing this and I'm only the instrument of this godly element—then the higher self in its striving towards perfection is revealed to him.

There are three revelations of the higher self: Through a dream, an inkling, and through meditation. If an esoteric has lived in his meditations, if he has tried to repeatedly live in his thoughts, words and deeds in accordance with the perfection principle, if he has repeatedly tried to be good—then at some point he'll realize: If I would place all the joy and suffering that I previously thought was in me outside me, then it would be as if it surrounded me like a soul-spiritual thing; I no longer live in what I have placed outside, I'm no longer touched by the waves of pain and joy. Then a pupil must learn to stand fast in the center of his existence by living entirely in the power of the mantra: Ex Deo nascimur. Thereby the pupil inserts the higher self into his humanness; this second I isn't in us and can't be found by brooding into oneself but only by growing out beyond oneself.

Through the exercises we stimulate a force in us that otherwise works more as a memory force in us and reawakens the ideas, feelings and sensations that were aroused by past things and happenings in the outer world. The pupil gets to know this as a force only; he learns how to organize it up into the brain, so that it eventually grows toward the higher self that floats above us. The pupil now lives in this newly acquired force. All outer pains and joys now seem to be outside of his center. He stands there firmly enclosed in himself against all outer influences; he feels free in himself and free of all external things.

And the pupil feels something else. Previously he had learned the teachings about karma. Now he knows that he stands under the necessity of the effects of karma. He experiences the higher self that places him into existence through birth in this newly attained force, and he sees how what develops in his destiny in the outer world must be brought about through the active necessity of karmic force. This gives him a certain joy with respect to pain and suffering. He confronts everything with equanimity.

If a pupil has progressed this far, he then gets to contemplation and thereby to consomatio of the higher self. And now spiritual eyes and ears are organized into him and begin to function when he devotes himself to the exercises with patience, persistence and concentration. He learns to see the light world of spiritual beings and the spiritual will being who resounds towards him, audible to his opened spiritual ears. And he knows that he can't have these spiritual experiences by means of his physical organism. In his experience of the pentagram (8–27) he feels that he's placed into the whole etheric and spiritual world This drawing and occult script has a soul-awakening and a spirit-liberating effect. The pupil should repeatedly place it before his soul and he'll experience that every new forces grow in his soul thereby. We saw that Parzival who stood before Titurel in solitude had the experiences that come to expression in this occult script. The whole Christian wisdom and mystery that winds around the Grail is expressed in it. The mystery wisdom is like a greenhouse plant that was only revealed to a few mature people; what the rest of mankind received was the faith content of the various religions. The Christian wisdom of the Grail is a mystery that was revealed to all as knowledge but to no one as a content to be taken on faith. All pupils of western esotericism are Parzivals.

Lohengrin is a son of Parzival. He's a personality that doesn't come fully to expression in a body. The swan is the expression of the higher individuality that radiates above him. Lohengrin unites himself with Elsa, the human soul. She doesn't ask him where he comes from, she doesn't ponder about his nature—she takes him the way he is with thanks and humility for his gifts. But when someone maliciously suggests that he's not of noble birth, she asks him about this. Thereupon, Lohengrin has to withdraw from her. He disappears up into the spiritual world. A pupil should mainly have a feeling of thankfulness for what is given to him from higher worlds in this incarnation. He should not investigate and search or interpret these talents with his ordinary intellect. For this induces the higher self to withdraw from his soul. There's a big warning for us in Elsa's fate. We shouldn't let any outer thoughts, no feelings and sensations from the outer world into the sanctuary of our mediation and concentration, otherwise that source of strength through which we attain the growing out and up of our human forces to the higher self isn't stimulated, we can't find the higher self, it repeatedly retreats before us. We should observe the projection of the spiritual world's effects into us in contemplation, closed off from all outer impressions, alone in the deepest quiet and immersion; resting in the deepest solitude we should let them work in us quietly and chastely in order to eventually become knowers of truth, to become an instrument for the work of spiritual beings.

We saw last time that the initiatory process is the antithesis of the great world doctrines of the origin of the cosmos in the spiritual sense, and that there is a strict correspondence between the small and the great world, so that we can almost see how the images of Genesis, which have to do with cosmological views, with contemplations of the universe, recur in the history of the Redeemer.

The personality of Christ is to be placed at the center in such a decisive way that it was not only a consequence of the Messiah-consciousness of Christ himself, but that it was also something that lay in the whole time at that time. The whole time had the need to place a personality, a person reborn on the heights of spiritual development, at the center of the whole world view, so that there was a profound need not only among those who founded Christianity, but also in the spirit of the time, not only in the expectation of the Messiah among the Jewish people, but also among the pagan peoples. So there was also an urge to come face to face with this personality, to see him. We see that one or the other could be mistaken for him. Paganism virtually created a counter-image in Apollonius of Tyana. He is perhaps as interesting a figure in paganism as Socrates, Plato and so on. But he still has a special interest in that a pagan-human deity was to be tendentiously created, which was to be contrasted with Christ. There is, however, a clear difference between the world of thought associated with Christ and that associated with Apollonius of Tyana. Apollonius is seen more as a man loved by God. Basically, it is the same view that emerged from the Jewish consciousness. I would say, from the pagan point of view, while the deity is emphasized more in Christ, in Apollonius it is said more that he is a man who has come to divinity, a man loved by God, not a god.

And this man loved by God appears to us only as a later development of Socrates, of Plato. [Just as Plato had a special relationship with the god of medicine, Asclepius, the son of Apollo, so did Apollonius:] He was a healer, a sage, and likewise prophecy is said to have been one of his gifts. These ideas were formed from Pythagorean ideas. Just as these live on in the people, following in secret, mystical connection, Apollonius was imagined to be the reborn Plato, a savior.

We are told of Apollonius that he traveled far and wide, seeking less to enrich his own wisdom - which was available to him as he was at a higher stage of reincarnation - than to connect the various religions through a spiritual bond. A cosmopolitan [religion-uniting activity] is attributed to him. He is said to have been with the Indians, Persian magicians and Egyptian priests. Among the Indian sages he was immediately recognized as a deified personality. We are also told that he got to know the Egyptian religion in its various forms, but that he was able to tell the Egyptian priests more than they could tell him. He was able to tell them that they should have their religious ideas about India. He was able to show them their own in the Indian. Thus we see how Apollonius endeavored to see the common ground in the various religions, and so he appears to us at this time as the bearer of a real theosophical striving. He set himself the task of searching for the common ground in all religions. Therefore, when we delve into his teaching, it appears to us as an extract from all the religious teachings existing at that time. He had collected the extract from all of them. It is also a mature teaching. The idea of reincarnation appears to us to have been fertilized in the old Pythagorean sense.

He speaks of the popular religions as an external symbol of what it is really supposed to be. Apollonius draws attention to a very important idea that he can only have drawn from pagan mysticism. He draws attention to the fact that in the various acts of worship performed with the mystic, we are not only dealing with events that represent the world process, but that we are also dealing with the representation of phenomena of nature in symbolic acts. Apollonius therefore presents us with a highly important concept that leads us into the relationship that exists between Christianity and the time. He shows that everything we can see around us and also what is in the starry sky, the stars, can be regarded as a symbol, that all this is nothing other than a symbol of spiritual processes that dominate the world cosmos. Those who heard my lecture on Goethe's "Faust" the day before yesterday will remember that something similar was said there: Everything external, "everything transient is only a parable". This is what Apollonius says. But it is the common view of the entire age at that time.

I must draw attention here to a misunderstanding which consists in the belief that this great symbolism between the small and the great world, between man and the small world occurrences and the great world mysteries is a product of the imagination. In our nineteenth century this doctrine has developed. We see in the popular religions the fairy tale that creates religion, the imagination that creates religion, which personifies the processes [in nature] in the circle of air, lightning, thunder and so on in manifold ways and forms gods for itself. The laws that the stars obey are seen as the expression of a divine-spiritual world order. But within the actual priestly theosophy there was the conviction that when the sun is followed as it moves across the celestial vault, it is not only the process of moving across the celestial vault that is to be seen. This process is only a symbol for the process taking place behind it. That which the popular imagination originally possessed in an exoteric way was later taught as a symbol by the priest. But he saw in the laws - we know that there was a highly developed astronomy in the Assyrian empire - he did not see in the laws the dry naturalistic law, he saw in them the language of the deity, only a symbol for the deeper spiritual process.

For Apollonius of Tyana, the subordinate folk symbolism was only one stage. The initiate was later given a higher parable. David Friedrich Strauss, Darwin and so on were wrong in saying that the imagination [of the people] had imagined the lightning passing through the clouds as a divine fact, that it had then progressed from that to the gods, to the god Zeus and so on. But these were only ideas of the imagination, of popular mythology. In this way they have stripped away everything religious. The [scientific] truth has taken its place. But this matter has never been represented [in this way] within the mystical teachings. Even if there was an ascent from [the ideas of] popular religion to the scientific investigation of the course of the stars, the divine was first sought behind the phenomena. Not that which man absorbed within himself was to be a symbol for the external process, no, just the opposite. The whole of nature itself became a parable. In the mysticism of those centuries we have to do with exactly the opposite of what the materialistic scholars of the nineteenth century imagine. They believe that what the ancients thought up was only a parable. No, it is just the opposite. The scientific idea is only a parable for what lies behind it.

Oriental scholars knew that Christianity drew from the same source as they did. They therefore long regarded Christianity only as a Persian sect.

However, this whole context of the theosophical doctrine of the whole world as a parable for the eternal divine [...] confronts us clearly and particularly deeply in the Apocalypse, which is nothing other than an interpretation of the older mysteries in Christian terms.

But first I have to say something in advance. I said that the whole of external nature was regarded as a parable, as was the case with Assyrian-Babylonian or Persian scholars. They had a precise idea of the laws to be observed in the course of the stars. This will also be clear to other circles because you have heard Professor Delitzsch's lecture on "Babel and the Bible". I could have started from Asian ideas, you find the same thing everywhere. If science now unearths things of which Theosophy must claim otherwise for other reasons, we will nevertheless see confirmation through the excavations of Babylonian antiquities. One finds the results of the excavations compiled in an easy and fine manner by this Professor Delitzsch. I said that from Oriental priestly religions a part of the views emerged which regarded nature as a parable for the eternal divine. You can understand this if you look at the oriental religions. The Egyptians attached more importance to great monuments and laid them down on the outside, while the Orientals sought the parable more in the [theoretical].

When we follow the literature of the pagan writers, we see how the awareness becomes clearer and clearer that in the teachings of astronomy we are dealing with a language for the eternal word of the gods in the world. I only wish to draw attention to a few facts which will make the whole matter clearer. [In the writer Apollonius of Rhodes], then also in Plutarch - although there only sparsely - one finds precise references to this and to the world of legends - such as the legend of Heracles, the legend of the Golden Fleece - and so on, which I have already dealt with earlier. But we can also see from their writers that these legends also presented themselves to the first Christians in such a way that they concealed great world truths.

We see that the sun, in its annual course, in its annual movement, is a symbol of the eternally changing, sinking and renewing world. Given the brevity of time, I can only hint at what the main point is. It is not without reason that the twelve labors of Heracles have been related to the twelve constellations of the zodiac. It is a repetition of what happens in the sky above. The upper and lower correspond to each other.

When we follow these views, we find that great importance is attached to the fact that the sun, the god of light, was worshipped with the annual arrival of spring - just as in theosophy, which sees light symbolized in the sun and truth in the light. It was not the sun itself that was worshipped, but the sun was only a symbol. With the rejuvenating sun, it was seen as a symbol of eternally reborn nature, of spiritual rebirth, of the God who renews himself again and again.

What the Egyptians saw in the firmament is also seen in the sun renewing itself in spring. And the fact that the sun [in spring] is in the sign of the lamb, the ram, means that the sun gains power in the world order through the lamb. This becomes a symbol for the world redeemer. This is why we encounter the lamb, which signifies the rebirth of the sun in spring, the rebirth of the new God. This is why the beginning of spring was also referred to as the point at which the young god is born. The virgin at Sais gives birth to the new god Heracles.

Where the legends are not completely correct, we can prove where the changes came from. The same legends are interpreted by pagan writers in the same way, namely that nothing else can be found in them than what can also be read in the sky. The mystics of that time saw the serpent in the sky as a symbol of the downfall of the god in dark matter. The passage of the sun in the snake symbolizes this. On December 21, in the middle of winter, when the days are getting longer, the sun enters the constellation of Sagittarius. In the middle of winter, Virgo receives the child. Easter is actually the resurrection, the redemption. There the sun enters the constellation of the Lamb of Aries. In summer we have the lion reflected in the course of the sun. What takes place in the individual personalities first took place in the celestial vault. Seen in this way, the course of life of the individual personalities is a mystery of the eternal course of the world. Also in the Greek mysteries, also in the Orient and in Persia, [Zeus] transforms himself into the Golden Fleece at this time.

So we see that the passage of the sun through Aries is given to us as a resurrection festival. Nonnos] mentions a relationship between Zeus and his son Dionysus. He is to ascend to his father and sit at his father's right hand. Here you have the pagan version of the Christian creed. Christianity means the new form of the teachings of paganism. A large number of Christians can be shown to have been inspired by pagan mysticism. These ideas appear again and again in Christianity. There is an indication even in Christianity that isolated spirits of paganism have turned to Christianity and then sought a symbolic expression for the fact that they were able to understand Christianity all the more. The expression can be found in the Gospel, namely that magicians follow the stars to find Christ. They read the stars, and all they had to do was follow what they read in the stars. After following [the star], they see what is given to Christianity. Christianity is represented there in a single person. That is why the Indian scholar said: "In Christianity, we are dealing with nothing other than a Persian sect."

If you take the sun myth and try to translate it into the personal as the course of life of a single personality, then you can say nothing other than that the Christians sought the truth in a humanized way, which was previously sought in the firmament.

The fact that at Easter time the sun passes through the constellation of the Lamb, the Ram, is quite natural [for that time]. At other, earlier times, the Lamb was replaced by Taurus, Gemini, Cancer and so on. This has to do with the fact that these ideas were formed at a time when the position of the constellations was different [from today]. They are always shifting. Our astronomical data is also no longer correct today. So we can say that this Christianity was actually born out of the ancient mysteries and religions. This is not a degradation, but merely shows that it was a necessity of the times.

I have shown how the individual teachings in the Orient are already pre-formed. What interests us in particular, however, is how they are incorporated into the Apocalypse. If one does not grasp the basic idea in this way, it cannot be understood. It cannot be understood that the world of imagination, the sum of [religious] feelings, was already present and reappears in a new form in Christianity. The author [of the Apocalypse] was aware of this. He did not want to reproduce anything other than the old mystical mysteries. He says that everything he has read from the starry world has now taken place as a direct experience in the life of an individual personality. What you previously only saw as cosmic-historical events has become the life of an individual person. That is the basic idea of the Apocalypse. We see how the old priestly concepts confront us in all the descriptions: the seven trumpets, the seven seals and so on. In all this we see nothing other than the expression of ancient, long-existing mysteries, and what is presented to us in the Apocalypse is nothing other than the fulfillment of these things in Christianity. At one point I will show how this old teaching is presented to us there and how the new teaching is then brought into connection with it, how the new teaching develops out of the old. I will deal with the earlier chapters later. First the whole passage from the middle.

The 11th chapter: Measuring the temple of God. Two witnesses killed and alive again. [Gap in the transcript] The seventh trumpet.

"1 And there was given me a reed like a rod, and he said, Arise, and measure the temple of God, and the altar, and them that worship therein. (2) But the court outside the temple, throw it out and do not measure it. For it has been given to the nations, and they will trample the holy city underfoot for forty-two months. 003 And I will give unto my two witnesses, and they shall prophesy a thousand two hundred and threescore days, clothed in sackcloth. 004 These are the two olive trees and the torches that stand before the Lord of the earth: 005 And if any man will hurt them, fire shall proceed out of their mouth, and shall devour their enemies: and if any man will hurt them, he shall be put to death. 006 These have power to shut heaven, that it rain not in the days of their prophecy: and they have power over waters to turn them to blood, and to smite the earth with all plagues, as often as they will. 007 And when they shall have finished their testimony, the beast that ascendeth out of the bottomless pit shall make war with them, and shall overcome them, and kill them. 008 And their dead bodies shall lie in the street of the great city which is spiritually called Sodom and Egypt, where also their Lord was crucified. 009 And some of the nations and kindreds and tongues shall see their dead bodies three days and an half, and shall not leave their dead bodies in graves. 10th And they that dwell on the earth shall rejoice over them, and shall live well, and shall send gifts one to another: for these two prophets tormented them that dwelt on the earth." - Being born again is nothing other than being born again in the initiation process. - 11 "And after three days and a half the Spirit of life from God entered into them, and they stood upon their feet; and great fear fell upon those who saw them. 12 And they heard a great voice from heaven saying to them, 'Come up here! And they ascended into heaven in a cloud, and saw their enemies. 013 And the same hour was there a great earthquake, and the tenth part of the city fell: and in the earthquake were slain seven thousand names of men: and the rest were afraid, and gave glory to the God of heaven. 014 The second woe is past; behold, the third woe cometh quickly. 015 And the seventh angel sounded, and there were great voices in heaven, saying: The kingdoms of the world are become the kingdoms of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign for ever and ever."

It is to be described here that, whereas previously only the individual was permitted, now the Good News is to be brought to all people through Christ.

The 12th chapter: The woman clothed with the sun and the dragon. Michael's conflict with him: "1 And there appeared a great sign in heaven, a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars. 002 And she was with child, and cried out in travail, and was in great pain in childbirth. 003 And there appeared another sign in heaven; and behold a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads. 004 And his tail drew away the third part of the stars of heaven, and cast them to the earth. Then the dragon stood before the woman who was to give birth, so that when she gave birth he might devour her child. 005 And she brought forth a son, a little child, which should feed all nations with a rod of iron. And her child was caught up to God and to his throne. 6 And the woman fled into the wilderness, where she has a place prepared of God, that she may be nourished there a thousand two hundred and threescore days. 007 And there was a battle in heaven: Michael and his angels fought with the dragon; and the dragon fought with his angels. 008 And they prevailed not, neither was their place found any more in heaven. 009 And the great dragon was cast out, that serpent of old, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him. 010 And I heard a great voice saying in heaven, Now is come salvation, and strength, and the kingdom of our God, and the power of his Christ; because that accuser of our brethren is cast down, which accused them before God day and night. 011 And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony, and loved not their lives unto the death. 12 Therefore rejoice, ye heavens, and ye that dwell therein. Woe to those who dwell on the earth and on the sea! For the devil cometh down unto you, having great wrath, because he knoweth that he hath but a short time. 013 And when the dragon saw that he was cast unto the earth, he persecuted the woman which brought forth the man child. 014 And the woman was given two wings like a great eagle, that she might fly into the wilderness to her place, where she would be nourished for a time and times and half a time before the face of the serpent. 015 And the serpent cast out of his mouth water like a flood after the woman, that he might drown her. 016 But the earth helped the woman, and opened her mouth, and swallowed up the flood which the dragon cast out of his mouth. 17 And the dragon was wroth with the woman, and went to make war with the remnant of her seed, which keep the commandments of God, and have the testimony of Jesus Christ."

The stream from the serpent's mouth symbolizes nothing other than the element through which man must return in order to find his way back to God.

The 13th chapter: Seven-headed beast from the sea. "001 And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy. 002 And the beast that I saw was like a pardel, and his feet were like the feet of a bear, and his mouth like the mouth of a lion. And the dragon gave him his power and his throne and great authority. 003 And I saw one of his heads as if it had a deadly wound, and his deadly wound was healed. And the whole earth marveled at the beast, 4. and they worshiped the dragon that gave power to the beast, and worshiped the beast, saying: Who is like the beast, and who can war with him? 005 And there was given unto him a mouth speaking great things and blasphemies; and it was given unto him to continue with him forty and two months. 006 And he opened his mouth to blaspheme against God, and to blaspheme his name, and his tabernacle, and them that dwell in heaven. 007 And it was given unto him to make war with the saints, and to overcome them: and power was given him over all kindreds, and tongues, and nations. 008 And all that dwell on the earth shall worship him, whose names are not written in the book of life of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world. 009 If any man have an ear, let him hear. 010 If any man lead into prison, he shall go into prison: if any man kill with the sword, he shall be killed with the sword. Here is the patience and faith of the saints."

Two-horned beast from the earth.

"11 And I saw another beast come up out of the earth, having two horns like a lamb, and speaking as a dragon. 012 And he exerciseth all the power of the first beast before him, and causeth the earth and them which dwell therein to worship the first beast, whose deadly wound was healed. 013 And he doeth great signs, so that he maketh fire come down from heaven in the sight of men: 014 And deceiveth them that dwell on the earth by the means of those miracles which he had power to do in the sight of the beast, saying to them that dwell on the earth, that they should make an image to the beast, which had the wound by a sword, and did live. 015 And it was given unto him to give the spirit to the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should speak, and cause that as many as would not worship the image of the beast should be killed. 016 And he made the small and the great, the rich and the poor, the free and the bond, all put a mark on their right hand or on their foreheads, 017 so that no one could buy or sell unless he had the mark, that is, the name of the beast or the number of his name. 18 Here is wisdom! Let him who has understanding consider the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man, and his number is six hundred and sixty-six."

The secret of the mysteries was generalized, was brought to all people. This can be clearly seen in the symbol in the Apocalypse of the four beasts and the three powers that are above the beasts, so that we are confronted by seven powers. We are then told that ten kings, the kings of the new kingdom, will overcome these seven old powers. Now we have to see what all this means.

First I would like to develop it as it has been stated in the ancient mysteries. Then you will realize it for yourself. The Apocalypse sees the world and man as made up of seven principles. The four lower or inferior principles or powers are represented by the four beasts. These must be overcome. By overcoming the lower, the three upper ones are built up. After this has been presented to us, we are shown how the entire seven-membered nature of the world and of man is scorched in fire, that the divine lightning strikes and that the entire material, in which the seven-membered nature is immersed, is once again overcome. The eighth stage is when the actual material, the evil, really perishes. We are then shown that in addition to the three spiritual elements, the fourth physical element appears as an overcomer; the fourth physical element is seized by the three spiritual elements and then also the three lower ones. The fourth element is man himself. Eagle, [bull], lion and man. Man represents nothing other than KamaRupa. The fourth, the human being, combines the three lower physical elements and the three upper ones and gives birth to three new ones from the three physical elements. The physical elements are spiritually reborn, as it were. So we have ten elements instead of seven. This is what the Apocalypse wants to depict with the ten kings.

These are ancient mystical teachings, nothing other than what pagan ideas already knew. From the transformation and victory of the ten kings, we can see that they represent nothing other than the victory of the spiritual over the material, the victory of the Mystery Doctrine.

At the opening of the first six seals, John saw four horses, a white horse, a red horse, a black horse and a pale horse. Death and hell followed them. "And when the fifth seal was opened, I saw under the altar the souls of them that were slain for the word of God, and for the testimony which they held." This killing symbolizes being born again in the spirit and the killing of the lower nature. Man must devour the book, he must become one with the book. The same is also indicated by a Christian mystic, Angelus Silesius. He said: ["Friend, it is enough. If you want to read more, go and become the scripture and the being yourself."] - With this he concludes his "Cherubinischer Wandermann".

The ancient mysteries were a preparation for Christianity. They were reborn through the Lamb. Those who cannot fully comprehend that they have to go further, that they actually have to seek bodily death and spiritual resurrection in Christ, are not yet mature. They are the ones who are to be admonished.

The Apocalypse is one of the most important books of the New Testament. It must not and cannot be understood in any other way than that we see in it a fusion of the Christian mystery truths with the ancient mysteries. It contains the ancient mysteries born out of Christianity.

We saw yesterday that the Gospel of John contains something that can only be experienced on higher levels of consciousness. Before such experiences are possible, the human being must first develop higher.

The human being is a developing creature. We can observe this from subordinate to ever higher states. This is already shown by the difference between a savage and a civilized European, or between an ordinary person and a genius like Schiller, Goethe or Francis of Assisi. An unlimited potential for development is open to every human being. To understand this, let us take up yesterday's lecture and use a diagram to clarify the theosophical basic teachings on the development of the human being:

During the following explanations, the diagram below will be drawn on the “board, starting from the bottom left.

We have thus seen that man has his physical body in common with all inanimate beings, the etheric body with all plants in our physical world, and the astral body with all animal creatures in his environment. We then saw that man, in terms of his development, differs from all other beings in that he can say “I” to himself.

The “I” is by no means a simple entity. On closer inspection, it is also something that is structured. The animal feels, has desire and passion, the plant does not; the animal because it already possesses an astral body. In this, the I develops in man. But this I has been at work long before man became clearly aware of it. A look at the development of humanity teaches us more about this.

The earth has not always been as it is today. Its face has repeatedly changed; the present continents have not always been there. During the penultimate earth period, a continent called Atlantis was located where the Atlantic Ocean now rages. Traces of it and the story of its downfall have been preserved in ancient legends. In the Bible, the Flood is meant by this. The ancient fathers of a different nature, whose descendants we are, experienced this. In this old Atlantis, the air and water conditions were quite different from what they are now. The whole thing was shrouded in a dense fog. In the words Nebelheim, Niflheim, we still have a hint of this. There was no rain and no sunshine; instead of rain, only fog currents; instead of sun, only diffuse illumination. Only after long periods did the fog condense as water. The sun only penetrated a little, like a faint premonition, through the constant fog. In such an environment, people also lived a completely different mental and spiritual life than today. It was only towards the end of the Atlantic period, roughly in the area of present-day Ireland, that people began to show self-awareness for the first time, and to think clearly and logically. In the mists there was no possibility of distinguishing objects as we do today. Man only develops a consciousness like ours in relation to his surroundings. As the objects emerged from the mists, so did the physical eye; and in the same measure the consciousness soul developed, and within it the self-aware ego. Even then, man could speak.

If we go back even further to the earliest times of Atlantis, we find that man looked significantly different. He had no external vision at that time, but a different way of perceiving, in images. To understand this state of consciousness, imagine a very vivid dream that reflects something of your surroundings. The following “dream” may serve as an example. A student dreams that he is standing at the door of the lecture hall, and another student deliberately brushes against him, which is a serious offense that can only be atoned for by a duel. He challenges him, they drive into the forest, the duel begins, the first shot rings out. Then our student wakes up – he has pushed over the chair next to his bed. Had he been awake, he would have noticed that a chair had fallen over. But because his consciousness soul had descended into sleep, he perceived with a deeper, less developed soul power. The dramatic action of the dream is a pictorial transformation of an external process.

The processes of consciousness in the ancient Atlanteans were similar. Although the images were more regulated and ordered, they did not have a clear perception of their surroundings. The life of feeling expressed itself quite characteristically in fine perceptions of touch and color. If the early Atlantean perceived a warm mist that symbolized itself to him in red, he knew that something pleasant was approaching him. Or if he encountered another person who was unpleasant to him, this was also indicated to him by a very specific sensation that became an image, an ugly color tone. But warmth, for example, was symbolized to him in a beautiful red cloud. This happened in many degrees and variations. The early Atlanteans thus had visual perceptions. We only have such perceptions in the case of pain, which is obviously only within us, however much it is caused by the outside world and can become loud. Our pain is also experienced inwardly, spiritually, and is thus truer than the external facts.

The Atlanteans, however, already developed ordered ideas. Not so the Lemurians. The Atlantean period was preceded by the Lemurian period. Man was not yet able to express language. He was merely able to internalize what the animal also feels. Thus, what we call the sentient soul developed in him. The continent of Lemuria, which was destroyed by the forces of fire, we have to imagine between Africa, Australia and Asia.

But now back to our scheme: IIIa sentient soul, IIIb intellectual soul, IIIc consciousness soul are all three transformations, ennobled transformations from the astral body. It is only towards the end of the Atlantean period that man becomes capable of consciously working on himself. What does he do now?

Up to now, cosmic forces have lifted man up in his development. Now man begins to consciously take his development into his own hands, to work on himself, to educate himself. On which body does he now begin his work? It is important to pay strict attention to the sequence here. First, man was and is able to work on and in his astral body. And on this level of ability, the human being of the present day is still standing today. In general, we can say of today's human being: He uses his experiences and experiences to transform his astral body. Later we will see that a higher level of development consists of working into the lower bodies. Let us first stay with the first: with the ability to transform the astral body.

To do this, let us compare the civilized man with the savage. The savage first follows his instincts, desires and passions, every craving, without restraint. But then he can begin to work on his self. To certain instincts he says: remain; to others: leave. Thus, for example, the man-eater ceases his habit of eating his own kind; in so doing, he leaves a certain stage of civilization and becomes another. Or he learns to act logically, learns, for example, to plow. Thus his astral body becomes more and more structured. Formerly external powers determined man, now he does it himself. The astral body of a Hottentot circles in wild dark red vortices, in a person like Schiller in bright green and yellow, in Francis of Assisi in wonderful blue. This is how the astral body is worked on. That which is consciously worked into the astral body from the I is called the spirit self or manas. With the conscious working in of the I, something very special begins. Before that, however, before one comes to the formation of this manas, that part which the animal also has remains completely unchanged in the astral body. Despite the growth of intellect, the astral body can remain essentially unchanged, full of animal desires. But there are influences that do transform the sentient body: conscious religiosity and art. From these we draw strength to overcome and ennoble ourselves, which is a much stronger power than mere morality. Man has as much of the spirit or Manas as he has worked into his astral body. This is not something external, it is a transformation product of what used to be the sentient soul.

As long as I am merely working on my sentient body, I use my achievements to transform this my astral body. All the morality in the world cannot achieve more, nor can all intellectuality. But if true religiousness is at work in me, this stronger power expresses itself through the astral body and works its way into the next lower one, the etheric body. This is naturally a much greater achievement than when the ego merely works with the astral, because the raw material of the etheric body is much coarser and more resistant than the finer astral body. We call the result of this transformation the spirit of life or Budhi. The spirit of life is thus the spiritualized life body. In the Orient, someone who had brought it to the highest level was called a Buddha. This tremendous moral power proceeds from consciousness when the three souls are governed by a strong ego. These are preparatory steps for humanity in general. Only the chela works consciously in his etheric body. The chela aims to spiritualize everything, even into his etheric body. The chelaship is concluded when he has allowed Budhi to stream completely into his life body, so that the life body, which he ennobles from the I, has become a life spirit.

In the third stage, man reaches the highest principle that is currently accessible to us. He is able to work down to his physical body. In doing so, he rises above the level of the chela and becomes a “master”. When, on the second step, Budhi glows through his etheric body, the human being gains control not only of moral principles but also of his character. He can change his temperament, his memory, and his habits. Today's human being has only a very imperfect command of all these. To understand the task of the chela, compare yourself as you are now with yourself when you were ten years old. How much knowledge have you gained since then, and how little your character has changed! The content of the soul has changed quite radically, but the habits and inclinations only very slightly. Those who were hot-tempered, forgetful, envious, inattentive as a child are often still so as adults. How much our ideas and thoughts have changed, how little our habits! This gives you a clue to estimate how much tougher, firmer, more difficult to shape the etheric body is compared to the astral body. Conversely, how much more fruitful and consequential an improvement achieved in the etheric body!

The following sentence can be used as an example of the different speeds at which transformation is possible: What you have learned and experienced has changed like the minute hand of the clock, your habits like the hour hand. Learning is easy, unlearning is difficult. You can still recognize yourself from the writing of yesteryear, because that is also a habit. It is easy to change views and insights, but difficult to change habits. Changing this tenacious thing, habit, little by little, is the task of the chela. This means becoming a different person by creating a different etheric body, thus transforming the life body into the life spirit. This puts the forces of growth in your hands. Habits are among the manifest growth forces. If I destroy them, the vis vitalis, the power of growth, is released and placed at my disposal, to direct my consciousness. Christ says: “I am the way, the truth and the life.” Christ is the personification of the power that changes the life body.

Now to the third stage. There is something that is even more difficult to bring under the control of free will than our habits and emotional stirrings: the physical body in its animal and vegetative, mechanical or reflexive dependency. There is a stage of human development in which no nerve is activated, no blood corpuscle rolls without the human being's conscious will. This self-transformation reaches into conditions and states that were fixed long, long before Atlantis and Lemuria, and are therefore the hardest to reverse: into cosmic primeval states. In this work, man develops Atman, the spiritual man. The potential for this is present in every human being today. This whole cycle depends on the attainment of fully clear self-awareness.

The most powerful and potent laws are those of the breathing process. The entire spiritual being depends on lung breathing, because it is the outer expression of the gradual drawing in of the I. In ancient Atlantis, this potential emerged through the saying of the I. In Lemuria, man did not breathe through lungs, but through gill-like organs. Nor did he walk as we do today, but floated or swam in a more fluid element, where water and air were not yet separated. To maintain his balance, he had an organ analogous to the swim bladder of a fish. As the air gradually separated, the swim bladder was transformed into our present lungs. The development of the sense of self runs parallel to the development of the lungs. This is still expressed in the words: “And God breathed into the man his breath of life, and he became a living soul.” Atman means nothing other than “breath”. The regulation of the breath is therefore one of the most powerful tools in the work of yoga, which teaches the control of all bodily functions. Here we look into a future in which human beings will have transformed themselves from within.

Conscious work in the etheric body is therefore a mastery.

Conscious work in the physical body: mastery.

The human being perceives the growth into these two stages as an opening up of new worlds, new environments, comparable only to the feelings of the child when it emerges from the dark, warm womb into the cold, light world at birth. The moment of generating Budhi is called second birth, rebirth, awakening in all mysteries. As man formerly left an inner world, of which only echoes remain in dreams, so he enters a new world as one awakened to the same world on a higher level. In those ancient times, man perceived the world with the help of his own inner images. On the future level of higher clairvoyance, man steps out of himself and sees behind the essence of things; he sees their souls. It is a kind of clairvoyance that is directed outwards and highlights the 'inherent essence' of things. The seer penetrates, for example, below the surface of the plant or stone. This outward-directed clairvoyance, with full mental alertness, not only illuminates the very basis of his own soul, but also that of the beings and things outside of himself. This is how development takes place.

Modern man lives in the manasical state, that is, he is able to change something in his astral body, but not yet in his etheric body, and least of all in his physical body. Therefore, man takes in from another only as much as corresponds to his stage of development. “You are like the spirit you understand, not like me!” This saying also applies here.

According to Christian terminology, the designations correspond:

Why is Budhi called the “Word”? This brings us to the edge of one of the great mysteries, and we will see the great significance of the term “Word”.

We have seen that man spiritualizes his life body through the Budhi. What does the life body do in man? Growth and reproduction, everything that distinguishes the living being from the mineral. What is the highest expression of the life body? Reproduction, growth beyond itself. What becomes of this last expression of the life body when man consciously covers the path back to spiritualization? How is this reproductive power transformed, what becomes of it when it is purified, spiritualized? — In the human larynx you have the purification, the transformation of the reproductive power, and in the articulated vowel sound, in the human word, you have the transformed reproductive capacity. Analogous to the law “All is below as above”, we find the corresponding process in the physical: the breaking of the voice, the mutation at the time of sexual maturity. All that becomes spirit emanates from the word or the content of the word. This is the very first glimpse of Budhi, when the first articulated sound emerges from the human soul. A mantram has such a significant effect because it is a spiritually articulated word. A mantram is therefore the means for the chela to work down into the depths of his soul.

Thus, in the physical, we have the power of reproduction, through which life is generated and passed on beyond the physical body, becoming something permanent. And just as the physical generative organs transmit bodily life, so the organs of speech — tongue, larynx and breath — transmit spiritual life like an ignition device. In the physiological, the close connection between voice and procreation is obvious. We encounter it in the song of the nightingale, in courtship display, voice change, vocal magic, in singing, cooing, crowing, roaring. We can truly call the larynx the higher sexual organ. The word is the power of procreation for new human spirits; in the word, man achieves a spiritualized creative power. Today, man rules the air with the word, by shaping it rhythmically and organically, by stirring it and enlivening it. On a higher level, he is able to do this in the liquid and finally in the solid element. Then you have transformed the word into the creator's word, for man will achieve this in his development because it was originally so. The life body, emanated from the word of the primal spirit, - this is to be taken literally. That is why Budhi is called the “word”, which means nothing other than: I am.

Thus we see with geometrical clarity the words of the miracle in St. John's Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. In him was life, and the life was the light of men.” The astral body, which is radiant as the stars, becomes the Word-light; the Primordial God, the Life and the Light, these are the three fundamental concepts of the Gospel of John. John had to develop to the point of Budhi in order to grasp what was revealed in Christ Jesus. The other three Evangelists were not so highly developed. John gives the highest, he was an awakened one. John is the name given to all who are awakened. This is a generic name, and the resurrection of Lazarus in the Gospel of John is nothing more than a description of this awakening. The writer of the Gospel of John, whose name we will hear later, never calls himself by any other name than “the disciple whom the Lord loves”. This is the term for the most intimate disciples, for those in whom the teacher and master has succeeded in awakening the disciple. The description of such an awakening is given by the author of the Gospel of John in the resurrection of Lazarus: “the Lord loved him,” he could awaken him.

Only if we approach such religious documents as the Gospel of John with the deepest humility can we hope to arrive at a literal understanding and to grasp at least a small part of its sacred content.

According to Spiritual Science man, as he stands before us, is divided—from one point of view—into seven parts, of which the physical body perceptible to our senses is only one part of the human being. Man possesses this physical body in common with the whole of the mineral kingdom surrounding us; the forces at work in our physical body are the same as those operating in the whole of so-called inanimate nature.

This physical body is, however, permeated by still higher forces, just as a sponge may be permeated by water. The difference between inanimate and animate bodies is that in inanimate bodies the materials of which they are constituted follow physical, chemical laws only; but in animate bodies the various materials are combined with one another in a very complicated manner, and only under the influence of the etheric body can they be held together in this form, which to-them is unnatural and is forced upon them. The physical materials have the constant tendency to group themselves according to their own nature; this signifies the destruction of the living body and the etheric body fights continually against this destruction.

When the etheric body withdraws from the physical body, the substances of the physical body group themselves in the manner natural to them, and the body becomes a corpse and falls to pieces. The etheric body, therefore, continually combats the destruction of the physical body.

Each organ of the physical body has behind it this etheric body. Man has an etheric heart, an etheric brain, etc., which holds together the corresponding physical organ. One is naturally tempted to picture the etheric body in a material way, somewhat like a thin cloud, but in reality the etheric body consists of a number of currents of force. The clairvoyant sees in the etheric body of man certain currents that are exceedingly important. Thus, for example, there is a stream which rises from the left foot to the forehead (see diagram), to a point which lies between the eyes, about half an inch down within the brain; it then returns to the other foot; from there it passes to the hand on the opposite side; from thence through the heart into the other hand, and from there back to its starting-point. In this way it forms a pentagram of currents of force.

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This current is not the only one in the etheric body, there are very many of them. It is to this stream of force that man specially owes his upright position. We do not find this current in animals, they are bound to the earth by their front limbs. In respect of the form and size of the human etheric body we may say that in its upper part it is an exact image of the physical body. The lower parts are different; here they do not coincide with the physical body. There is a great secret underlying the relationship between the etheric and physical bodies, one which throws a strong light upon human nature. The etheric body of a man is female, that of a woman is male. This explains the fact that in each man's nature there is much that is feminine, and in each woman's nature there is much that is masculine. In the animals the etheric body is larger than the physical body. Thus, for example, in the case of the horse the clairvoyant sees that his etheric body projects above his head like a cap.

There is something in man that is much closer to him than his blood, muscles, nerves, etc., namely, his feelings of joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain,—all that he calls his inner being. In Spiritual Science this is called the astral body, and man possesses it in common with the animals only.

A man who is born blind only knows the world around him imperfectly; for him the world of colour and light does not exist. Man is in the same position in respect of the astral world; it exists just as truly, it surrounds and permeates the physical world, but he does not perceive it. When a man's astral senses are opened the astral world becomes visible to him. The significance and importance of this moment in the development of a human being is, however, very much greater than when a man who is born blind recovers his sight through an operation. Every human being knows this astral world, although imperfectly, for his astral body is transposed into it each night.

We repose in the astral world in order to restore the harmony of the astral body, for from the standpoint of Spiritual Science tiredness is only disharmony in the physical and astral bodies. The relationship between the physical and astral bodies may be illustrated in the following way. If we take a sponge, cut it into a thousand small pieces and place them in a glass of water, so that the water is absorbed into these tiny pieces, this represents the waking condition of the average man. If we squeeze out the little sponges and collect the water again in its container, it flows together into one common mass: In the same way the human astral bodies, which during the day were individualised, like the drops of water which were absorbed into the tiny sponges, enter into the common astral substance and are strengthened by it. This we recognize each morning by the fact that our tiredness has gone. Until a person becomes a seer his astral body during the night mingles with the others; but in a seer the conditions are different.

The various plants do not possess an astral body of their own, but the whole world of plants has one astral body in common, namely that of the earth. The earth is a living being and the plants are part of it,—just as the hair belongs to the human body:

The fourth principle of man is the ego. The word “I” can only be uttered by a man with reference to himself; this word can never strike our ear from outside with reference to ourselves. When this “I” sounds in a being, then God is expressing Himself in him. In respect of the ego, the animal, plant and mineral worlds are in a different position. For example, an animal can no more say “I” to itself than a finger on our hand can say “I” to itself. If the finger desired to name its “I,” it would have to point to the “I” of the human being; in the same way the animal would have to point to an ego which belongs to a being living in the astral world. All lions, all elephants, etc., have a group-ego in common; thus there is a lion group-ego, an elephant group-ego, and so on.

If the plants wished to point to their ego they would have to point to a common ego in the centre of the earth, in the lower spiritual world. When an animal is injured it feels pain. In the plant it is different, and the seer is able to say that the plucking of a flower or the cutting of the corn gives to the earth the same pleasant feeling that a cow experiences when her calf draws the milk from her. But when a plant is torn out of the earth by the root this is just as though one were to tear a piece of flesh out of an animal. It is felt in the astral world as pain.

Were we to seek for the ego of the minerals, we should not find it in a being forming a centre in the spirit world, for the ego of the minerals is to be found in the higher spiritual world outspread everywhere as a force of the whole cosmos.

In the Christian occult doctrine the world in which the egos of the animals are found—the astral world—is called the world of the Holy Spirit, and the world which contains the egos of the plants—the lower spiritual world—the world of the Son. When the seer begins to have perceptions in this world, the “Word,” the “Logos” speaks to him. In the same occult teaching the world of the mineral egos—the higher spiritual world—is called the world of the Father Spirit.

Man is involved in a process of continuous development. We have now become acquainted with all four principles of his nature; they are what Pythagoras referred to in his school as the lower quaternary. The savage, the civilised man, the idealist, the saint—all possess these four parts. But the savage is the slave of his passions; the civilized man no longer follows indiscriminately all his passions and desires; the idealist does this still less, and the saint has fully mastered them.

The ego works upon the astral body and separates a portion from it. In the course of human evolution this part grows larger and larger, whereas the inherited portion becomes ever smaller. In Francis of Assisi almost the whole of the astral body was worked upon by the ego and transformed. This transformed part forms the fifth principle of human nature: the Spirit Self.

But the ego can also become master of the etheric or life-body. The part of the etheric body which has been transformed by the ego is called Life Spirit. The etheric body is transformed under the influences of art and religion. The influence of religion is especially strong because it is repeated day after day, and this repetition is the magic power which transforms the etheric body. But the conscious work in occult training acts most strongly upon the etheric body, and meditation and concentration are the means here used.

The relative speed in the transforming of the etheric body and the astral body may be compared to the movement of the hour and minute hands of a clock. If a man succeeds in changing his temperament ever so little, which depends on the conditions of his etheric body, this is of more value to him than the acquisition of many clever theories.

It requires the very greatest strength to change the physical body consciously. The means for this are only given in the occult school. We can only indicate here that the regulation of the breathing forms the beginning of this transformation. The physical body that has been consciously transformed by the ego is called Spirit Man or Atma. The force for the transformation of the astral body flows to us from the world of the Holy Spirit; the force for the transformation of the etheric body flows to us from the world of the Son or the Word; the force for the transformation of the physical body flows to us from the world of the Father Spirit or the Divine Father.

The present lecture is to be a short preparation for the study of the Mystery of Golgotha, which will be more fully explained on the second day of our Easter Festival. As the basis for our study, let us take a text which to many appears incomprehensible, or, at any rate, difficult, and can only be understood when connected with the deepest esoteric meaning. This text will lead us to-day still deeper into the spirit and meaning of Christianity: ‘All sins may be forgiven except the sin against the Holy Spirit.’

These words really contain the purpose and mission of Christianity, and Anthroposophy is the right instrument with which to reveal and express the profound meaning hidden in these words. Anthroposophy does not wish to inaugurate a new faith or found a new sect; the time is past when new faiths or new special religions can be founded. The task of the future is the formation of the already existing religions into one great common religion of humanity. Anthroposophy does not wish to preach a new religion; it is rather the means for teaching the various religions how to comprehend the profound truths contained in them, and which fundamentally are one and only one!

The tendency of the age is to make trivial the religious truths. From the modern standpoint people like to consider Christ Jesus as ‘the simple Man of Nazareth’; they like to look upon Him as a sort of higher ideal man, in somewhat the same manner as Socrates, Plato, Goethe and others are also looked upon as ideals; they do not wish to uplift Him too far above the level of humanity; they are far from recognising that in this Christ Jesus there lived something which towered far above humanity.

But in order to have at least some small perception of the Mystery of Christ Jesus we must throw a strong light upon the old Gnostic questions. We must bring to our help all human wisdom to understand what happened between the first and thirtieth years of our era.

The religious records are certainly not there to be explained by trivialities, and there is no wisdom deep or wise enough to unveil the deep meaning in this Mystery. It is certainly true that the understanding of this Mystery ought also to be brought down to the simple mind, but it is also true that it is so profound and full of wisdom that no wisdom reaches far enough to measure all its depths! From this standpoint and in this frame of mind we may first explain what is understood in Christianity—in true esoteric Christianity—by the Holy Spirit, the Son—also called the Word or Logos—and the Father. We shall not penetrate into the meaning of these conceptions by means of philosophic speculations; we shall not give them an arbitrary meaning. The meaning was attached by the initiates, and we have to keep to what was taught in the schools of the Christian Initiates. It is bad when one probes into the Bible and speculates as to what this or that means. We know that there are schools in which the meaning has been taught from very ancient times and it is always the same meaning, there was never a different knowledge; there were never at any time different standpoints in it.

If we hold to what has come most to the surface of history, we find the esoteric school which St. Paul had at Athens, the school of Dionysius. The learned are accustomed to speak of a pseudo Dionysius, because the existence of these schools is not sufficiently indicated by documentary evidence; only in the sixth century a.d. do we find written traditions of them.

We must clearly understand that as regards writing the custom has radically changed. When at the present day a person has a clever thought he cannot wait, but must have it printed at once and scattered over the world. But the earlier custom was otherwise. The profoundest thoughts were strictly withheld from publicity; they were not thrown at everybody’s head; they were only given to one who was known, only to one who had been found worthy to receive them. Only he who had a sense of truth was allowed to receive the truths. They were only given to one who devotedly and with a true feeling towards the truths, opened his heart to receive them. What the pupil had to acquire was calmness, a deep longing, a feeling of devotion towards the higher truths. This was quite a different view from that of the present day, for now everyone may receive the truths, quite irrespective of the frame of mind in which he approaches them. In those days, however, it was held that one might not receive indifferently a truth, for example, about the starry heavens. It was clearly understood that the frame of mind was important if the truths were really to influence: only in a pure and uplifted frame of mind were even simple truths received, such as the truths of mathematics, and the student’s preparation before he was allowed to receive the truths consisted in the production of the right frame of mind.

This was also the case in the school of St. Paul: the pupils were most strictly prepared before they were allowed to receive the highest truths. This preparation—as well as the subsequent training—was given by word of mouth; the living spirit passed on from teacher to pupil, for a long period of time, and the highest Initiates who were the vehicles of the esoteric truths, always bore the same name. Thus in the sixth century the recorder of the Dionysian training was still known as Dionysius. One has to know this in order to be able to judge correctly when a pseudo Dionysius is spoken of.

Now to-day let us investigate according to esoteric Christianity into the profound meaning of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. In our lecture on the Lord’s Prayer we have already discussed this meaning. We have learned how the Godhead is expressed in the three higher principles of man. We have heard that behind the ‘Father’ stands the Divine Will, behind the ‘Kingdom’ there is the Word, the Logos, and behind the ‘Name’ the Holy Spirit.

We shall now consider these three principles from a different point of view, in the manner taught in Christian esoteric training. Let us briefly recall the relations between the higher and lower parts of man. We have always learned that man consists of the physical body, the etheric body, and the astral body, and within the astral body dwells the ‘I’; this was once the so-called sacred quaternary. We have also learned how in the course of human evolution the three bodies are transformed. The ‘I’ transforms the astral body, which is the vehicle of passions, impulses and desires; it may also be called the consciousness- body. In esoteric Christianity one is also taught to ennoble, cleanse and purify this body; and as far as this takes place in man it is called the work of the Holy Spirit. One might say that that part of the astral body which is purified by Manas or Spirit-Self, is called in Christianity: ‘To be seized by the Holy Spirit.’

We know that the ‘I’ also works transformingly on the etheric body. Now this is much more difficult. What man receives from art and religion alone works in a transforming, ennobling way upon the etheric body. Art sees and perceives the Eternal; the Eternal shines through it, and the impulses of art act more strongly on the ennobling of mankind than all the laws of ethics. But the religious impulses work the most strongly! One who with deep devotion looks up to the Eternal, who opens himself towards It and allows It to stream in, receives Buddhi or Life-Spirit—in a Christian sense, the Logos, Christ. In esoteric Christianity this is known as ‘taking the Christ into oneself.’ In order to explain to you the third principle, the process of taking in the Father, you must allow me to make a slight digression.

I beg you always to remember that Anthroposophy is absolutely not a colourless theory, for then it would run into the danger of forming a sect; no, it is to act upon the daily life, it is to ennoble and spiritualise it—then it is practical Anthroposophy. It does not wish to weave fancies, to excogitate anything, it intends that the spirit shall flow into the whole of our civilisation, and therefore it also draws attention to the practical side.

When you are in the midst of life, when the multitude of impressions press in upon you from life, then what you experience in this way is but a portion of the sum-total of your experiences. One who does not take this into account cannot unravel the secrets of life! The anthroposophist looks deeper; he knows that the etheric body and the astral body are influenced in various ways by his daily experiences. What you take into yourselves consciously, what attracts your conscious attention, for example, as you go along the street, is expressed in ebullitions and currents in the astral body. The occultist can observe these ebullitions and movements. But there are other impressions which do not usually engage one’s full attention. I will give an example to explain what I mean. We walk along a street and pass numberless things which do not arouse our strict attention; we know that we have passed shop windows left and right, that there were buildings left and right, and that we met human beings and carriages, but our attention was not directed to them, we have not consciously received anything from them. However, it does not on this account pass by us without leaving a trace; it makes a certain impression upon us. When we look at a placard or skim through a comic paper, not only what we follow consciously remains within us, but the things of which we are unconscious also make an impression upon us. One is wont to say that these impressions remain below the threshold of consciousness; but in truth it is different. Many things act upon a human being without coming to his consciousness, and in the meantime they act upon him deeply and produce an important effect. To begin with, they act on the etheric body. This body is continually taking in impressions, and from this we may gather how tremendously important to human development is also that to which a person pays no attention.

Everything that takes place on the surface of civilisation acts upon human beings; all these things call forth pictures in them. But Anthroposophy indicates the undercurrents of our civilisation; again and again it emphasises the need of understanding the spiritual world which lies behind the physical, it draws attention to the deep connection between the external world and spiritual things.

One age thinks differently from another and has different inclinations; in one age the spiritual movements are higher and in another lower, depending more upon sensation. To the occult investigator all this which makes an impression upon the etheric body is reflected as secret influences which act upon human beings. When in an occult manner one investigates the temperament, inclinations and sentiments of the people in central Europe in the eleventh or twelfth century one has to trace back the results to the style of architecture, the art, the means of civilisation which at the time surrounded them. The effect upon a man of that particular age in passing along the street of his town was different from the effect produced upon a man of the present age; other objects surrounded him and other sentiments filled him.

One must not leave out of account the fact that what lies more deeply down than the consciousness, is profoundly influenced by such impulses. And on this account one must not undervalue the seriousness of the statement when I say that just at the present time it is in the underground of our civilisation that the real foundation for materialism is found. I should not on this account be considered as a reactionary. The one who guides his method of observation by spiritual truths knows that the profound and noble things which act upon the etheric body also provide it with constructive forces; and when he extends this method of observation to what is produced by the materialistic way of looking at things it is then clear to him that nothing can be done by theories and teachings if they do not come down to these things. A change for the better cannot be expected until the spiritual truths are reflected in what surrounds man and influences him, even though his attention may not be continually directed towards it. With these remarks as a basis we may now consider the part of the higher man called the Spirit Man, Atma, Father.

We know that, starting from ‘I,’ the physical body also can be transformed. This transformation takes place consciously through what is taught in esoteric training. All that the pupil can learn with the intellect, all that influences his astral body is only the preparation; the training begins when the ‘I’ begins to work upon the etheric body, when he conquers his temperament, his inclinations and habits, when he becomes a different man. Through this he gains insight into the higher worlds. All that he learns, all that gives him a theoretical insight, all sciences, only influence the astral body; but all that works upon his etheric body gives such an impetus to his development that gradually the spiritual organs are formed in him and he begins to see in the higher worlds. Thus we see how the astral body and etheric body are transformed. That which transforms the physical body comes from the breathing process; this purifies and spiritualises the physical body. Christian esotericism calls this the Father. We have to distinguish that as much as a person has within him of what purifies and transforms the astral body, so much has he of the Holy Spirit within him.

As far as a person has within him that which purifies and transforms the etheric body, so far has he the Son, the Logos, within him.

As far as a person has within him (this is only known to an Initiate) that which ennobles and transforms the physical body, so far has he the Father within him.

If we wish to distinguish between the sins or blasphemies against the Holy Spirit, against the Son, and against the Father, we have to remember what the esoteric teachers understood as the mission of Christianity. You will find this mission expressed in the words which Christ Jesus uttered when He was told that His mother and His brethren were outside: ‘He who does not leave father and mother, etc., has no part in Me,’ or ‘He that loveth father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me’ (Matt. 10, 37).

In Mark and Luke it is somewhat different. There He says: ‘My mother and My brethren are those who hear God’s word and do it’ (Luke 8, 21; Mark 3, 33; Matt. 12, 46-50).

In all these statements we have the true mission of Christianity; let us now go into this more closely and we shall gain at the same time the best preparation for our Easter Festival—the Mystery of Golgotha.

If we go a long way back along the path of the development of humanity we arrive at the Lemurian epoch. We know that ancient Lemuria lay south of present-day Asia, in the part now occupied by the Indian Ocean. In ancient Lemuria we find the four-membered, half-animal man, who indeed was already gifted with his fourfold nature, the physical body, etheric body, astral body and the germ of the ‘I,’ but he was not yet able to work even to the very tiniest extent, on the three lower coverings, for the forces necessary for the work on these coverings had first to come into the vehicle of these coverings. That which is the content of your soul did not at that time exist in man! The ‘I’ was, as it were, a hollow space into which these forces could come, and this hollow space still exists within man. That which at the present time is called the depth of his inner being was formerly outside him, and at that time it sank into the human shell. Previously it was a part of the Divine Nature, it still rested in the Bosom of the Deity. We have often represented the outpouring of this divine part by saying that it was as if a number of little human sponges had each absorbed a drop, as it were, of this divine spiritual substance, which we pictured as a body of water. What is now within you, which forms your soul and which formerly rested in the Divine Bosom, was divided up among the several human bodies so that each one received a drop of this common divine substance. This common substance thus individualised itself into parts of the Deity. Just as each finger has its own life and still belongs to the whole human organism and from it receives its life, so each drop in each human being received its own life and dwelt in the human bodies which had prepared themselves to receive it and which waited to be ensouled by the Deity.

Now those human beings looked very different from what they do at present. You would be much astonished if I were to describe those grotesque bodies which absorbed the souls! Who worked so that these grotesque bodies developed into our present human bodies? Who did this? It is the work of the soul which is active within I From within, it shapes and forms the human body.

One may gain an idea of this work of the soul-forces by observing the remains of this self-out-shaping of the soul in the body of a human being of the present day; for example, when we consider the feeling of shame. The soul drives the blush of shame to the face; what is in the soul, namely, shame, expresses itself in the body in the blush of shame. Anxiety, fear, terror—these psychic experiences express themselves in the body as pallor. We all know that this is connected with the blood; the blood is the expression of the being that works within. But this only applies to warm blood! Just as it is true that at the present day in the feeling of shame, fear, anxiety and terror the ‘I’ acts on the blood and expresses itself in the body in a very limited way, so it is also true that in the remote past the effect was very great; at that time the blood expressed the inner force very accurately and minutely; it formed and fashioned the human figure through the several races. The inner experiences and feelings fashioned the human body when it was still soft and plastic, and their activity, their constructive forces, worked indirectly through the blood. The creator, the inner being, the power which shaped the body plastically, worked from the ‘I,’ indirectly through the blood, at the construction of the human being. Thus we may recognise that the blood is the vehicle of the ‘I.’

In this thought we have an explanation of the statement in the Bible that Adam was hundreds of years old. This depends upon endogamy or near marriage. In the earlier days of human evolution we find in every race smaller groups who were related to one another by blood, for they married exclusively within their groups and tribes. This had an important result, which is indicated in the following conversation between the authors Anzengruber and Rosegger. Rosegger describes his peasants in a dry matter-of-fact way, but Anzengruber describes them much more vividly, his peasants truly live before us. Once when these two authors were together, Rosegger gave Anzengruber the advice that he ought to go to the country and there live for a time amongst the peasants in order to see them and thus be able to describe them more vividly. But Anzengruber answered: ‘That I would never do, for then I should forget all my art. I have never seen a peasant, but the understanding of them is in my blood; I do not need to have seen them to be able to describe them, for the blood of generations of peasants flows through my veins. The spirit which lives in the peasants Eves in me, it passes through my father, grandfather and great-grandfather to me—for all my ancestors were peasants.’

Thus in Anzengruber there was still a degree of the peasant consciousness. And this was much more the case in ancient times! In those days a son did not merely feel in the same way as his father and grandfather had felt, but in him there was actually a vivid remembrance of the experiences of his ancestors.

There was a time when man had in his memory not only what he himself, but also what his father and grandfather had experienced. And therefore in those ancient, strictly limited communities a son said in regard to what his father had experienced: ‘I have experienced’ it. This was also the case in the generation of Adam, his ‘I’ was preserved for nine hundred years.

The ‘I’ continued through the generations; it was a common ‘I,’ a group ‘I.’ This ‘I’ which passed through several generations was called ‘Adam,’ and for this reason it is said that Adam lived for so long. This fact is hidden behind the statements in the Bible regarding the longevity of the persons mentioned at the beginning of the Bible.

From this we see how the blood, which was common to these narrowly limited groups, comes into consideration as the expression of the inner creative soul of man and how it binds these people to a certain extent into unity.

Now how was this broken through? By what means was the memory of the human being limited to his own life? It was through exogamy! By this means the narrowly limited tribe was loosened and expanded into a nation. Man would have been unable to develop if this strict community had not been broken through. The memory of the members of these blood-related communities extended up through the generations. Now we must remember that the vehicle of the memory is the etheric body. And here we have the intimate connection between the blood and the etheric body. The ‘I’ imprints itself into the etheric body, and is expressed in that which shoots into the blood.

Let us remember what he who is to be initiated has to accomplish in his etheric body and we shall to-day learn what this has to do with his blood. We know whence these schools of initiation originated; they can be traced back to the ancient Turanian Adept-Schools of Atlantis. And let us now call to mind how initiation took place. We know that when the pupil was sufficiently prepared he was put into a sleep by the Initiator for three days, and this made it possible for the Initiator to lift the etheric body of the pupil out of his physical body. The etheric body then lived in the higher worlds; the pupil consciously experienced the higher worlds; he knew their reality from his own experience. Only through his being prepared did he gain this power. When he returned again into his physical body he could bear witness to the reality of the higher worlds in which he had lived.

We see that this initiation depended upon one thing. The pupil had to suppress his consciousness, which was absolutely under the control of the Initiator. The Initiators worked through the Initiates into life, to a certain extent they were at the head of the social structure, they were there like a social pyramid, everyone believed them, everyone looked up to them. Through acting upon the impulses of the Initiates they had everything under their authority. And this authority was founded upon truth and wisdom, for only wise ones might exercise this authority without harm coming to humanity.

In Initiation all depends upon leading out the etheric body in the right way. The Initiator could not do this with everyone. In order to initiate a person in this way long and careful preparations were necessary. It depended upon the blood of the neophyte being of the right composition. This was the reason for the great value attached to the priestly caste or tribe which might not be mixed with other blood. For centuries they were prepared; people were brought together who were necessary for this right mixture of blood, until one was produced who could become an Initiate. This was handling human life in grand style! The greatest Initiates were prepared for centuries with respect to their mixture of blood. This was the method of initiation of pre-Christian times. But this could not remain the same for ever in the course of human development; for with what is it connected? It is connected with the small blood-communities. The further we go back the more do we come to this principle of initiation. Then this blood principle was broken through; the family expanded to the tribe and the tribe to the nation. It was then proclaimed that all such limited blood-ties had to be broken through; for where dwelt the communal principle in man? It came through his blood. When in ancient times it was made possible by means of warm blood for the Divine to be implanted in the developing humanity—how did this implantation take place? It surged through the blood. Where did He work most powerfully Who said: ‘I Am He Who is, Who was and Who will be’? In the blood running through the veins. When one led a human being to the highest, to initiation, one led him by handling his blood!

He who only considers the Mystery of Christianity externally understands it badly! Christianity itself is a mystical fact! We can only understand it as we understand the mystery of blood.

With the advent of Christ Jesus a new configuration of our planet came about! If someone on another planet had been able to observe ours, from a few centuries before Christ, if he had directed his attention to it through the centuries and right into the distant future, if he saw it, not with his physical eyes, but directing his attention to the astral and etheric atmosphere of our planet, he would have seen that from the sixth century before Christ our planet slowly changed. Then it made a sudden leap, it gained a new impulse; something else entered into the spiritual atmosphere of the earth.

Only he who admits that there is something spiritual around the earth, and who considers this as something real and actual, can understand what this means! He who considers it in this way will find the expression for this transformation in the spiritual, and to such an one we say: All that holds people together in small blood communities gradually breaks asunder. There comes the time when a person leaves father, mother, etc. All that which acts upon the blood as a kind of ‘group “ I ”’ has to disappear from the earth! When it is ready to become a new, astral planet all this must have disappeared and in the place of what has disappeared something new will come I A great bond of brotherhood will then bind humanity, and the impulse for this brotherhood is given by Christ Jesus! He is the spiritual fact which effects this transformation. Hence the ideal which He presents when He says, ‘He who does not leave father and mother cannot be My disciple,’ and the indication which He gives: ‘They who believe in the Divine Spirit are My brothers and My sisters !’ Hence the non-recognition of those related to Him, for these ties of blood were something which had been overcome. It is from this standpoint that we have to consider these words of Christ, not as a symbol, not as a comparison, but as reality I For they are a reality!

Now consider the uplifted cross and the blood which flows from the wounds 1 Understand well the profound significance of this in the course of the world’s history I Why does it flow? Why is the blood spoken of? It is that which has to lose its importance in this narrow sense if humanity is to broaden out to the coming ideal, to the common brotherhood! That which is to make all humanity one is no longer to depend upon the blood which pulsates in the ‘I.’ Therefore the superfluous ‘I’-blood flows through the wounds of Christ. All egoistic, self-seeking blood which unites a man with mother, father, brother, sister—all this has to flow! This is the real fact! With the amount of blood which flows there is lost the tendency to form limited communities, and there originates the tendency for the whole of humanity to be united into one great community. No one has come so close to this as Richard Wagner in his ‘Parsifal’ I Never did an exoteric person approach so closely to the deepest truth of the esoteric secrets of Christianity!

When we learn to understand it in this way, we shall see that the deepest purpose of Christianity is to unloose that which binds mankind within narrow egoistic limits. It will split up mankind into individuals who feel themselves to be separate, and who unite again in love of their own free will; who increase in individuality to the same extent that they feel themselves to be part of the whole world. This you see in the Mystery of Golgotha, in this religious impulse. which is of the very greatest importance. Here everything that is to come about in the future is prepared! It begins to work at Whitsuntide when the Holy Spirit is poured forth, that is, when the understanding of this tie of brotherhood begins to stir. This is expressed in a most beautiful symbol when we are told that the Apostles spoke to all nations in every tongue! That which had flowed through the blood of the Logos is there spread abroad by the Holy Spirit!

Let us go back to the ancient principle of initiation. At that time everything depended upon the Initiates. The whole of civilisation received its impulses from them. This now ceased. The splitting up of mankind into individuals had to take place and thereby the impulse towards brotherhood was created at the same time. The ancient principle of initiation exercised by the Initiators of truth and wisdom no longer sufficed if humanity was to mature to this brotherhood. Each human being must himself be in possession of truth and wisdom. We then see the spreading abroad of this wisdom step by step and its co-operation with the individual, in the activity of the Holy Spirit, how it worked from then onwards in humanity. As long as man listened to authority he could live quietly in the narrowest circles, for this authority took care of the whole group; but this now ceases, the limited community is broken through, each one must now take care of himself; each individual has now to receive that which holds good for each human being. What can this be?

The wisdom which was poured into humanity through the Initiates was One; when, however, it was to be given to the individual human being it was specialised. Thus originated the teachings which Buddha, Zoroaster, Hermes and others brought to mankind; the smaller the community the more it was specialised.

When brotherhood was founded there had to flow down into the whole of humanity that of which the Initiates had formerly taken care. In this wisdom we have that which unites, that which will unite the human beings who have left father and mother. But so far removed are people from this universal wisdom that they talk about ‘their own opinions,’ and they say, ‘I find this,’ ‘I believe that.’ They have passed over to egotism; they are in a condition of separation, but they have not yet made their connection with universal wisdom. They are as individual as possible! They must first disaccustom themselves from saying, when they are speaking about the knowledge of wisdom, ‘This is my standpoint.’ That is a childish position! There is no special standpoint in regard to wisdom. He only has comprehended the idea of the Holy Spirit who has comprehended that truth and wisdom are one I He who presses forward along the path knows that there is no such thing as different standpoints in truth; he knows that he is dealing with a fundamental unity. He no longer needs to attach himself to an authority, because the universal common Spirit of Wisdom and Truth joins mankind together into the great brotherhood I That is the experience at Whitsuntide, when the Apostles speak from the hearts of all men to all men. The festival of Whitsuntide is the indication that with the development of the highest authority, the Spirit of Truth unites us all. That which from that time on will live and work is the unifying wisdom which can be revealed to us as soon as we open ourselves to it and wish to receive it!

And he who sins against this wisdom which forms humanity into one brotherhood, he who sins against this universal Spirit of Truth and Wisdom, commits the great sin against the Holy Spirit which cannot be forgiven him, because he is sinning against the development of the earth, because he is teaching the spirit of division and not the Unifying Spirit who will form the brotherhood of the future.

What teaches us this Unifying Spirit? Anthroposophy! Therefore positive Anthroposophy is also positive wisdom. It does not wish to preach in general ethical terms, for it is unnecessary to preach brotherhood to humanity; it wishes to give humanity wisdom, concrete wisdom which must lead to brotherhood. It gives this wisdom by teaching people to understand their own being, by answering the profound riddles of existence as to the whence and whither of man, by teaching the evolution of the world! He who thus penetrates into the wisdom, he who thus gathers knowledge, he who is prepared in this way by the positive teachings of Anthroposophy, comes entirely of himself to the union with humanity, for people are united into a brotherhood when the Sun of Wisdom unites them in the spirit; it completely ennobles them, completely transfigures them, completely unites them.

That is the mission of Christianity. Christianity is the expression of the connection between human beings who are becoming freer and freer, and it is the union in perfect freedom into a brotherhood in the light of the one truth I This brotherhood develops entirely of itself when you pay heed to those sublime words of Christ: ‘Ye will know truth by means of truth and the truth shall make you free.’

There will not be two thoughts about one and the same thing when humanity has come to this brotherhood in the spiritual; that is the profound meaning of this statement.

When humanity has known the truth, when it has lived the truth, it will have found the truth, through itself; it will then be truly free and will know the depth of the statement: ‘Ye will know the truth by means of truth and will make yourselves free!’