The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Before coming to our main theme I want to make a brief addition to something that was said in the lecture yesterday. I spoke of the fact that really significant happenings in the evolution of humanity can be characterized by expressions derived front processes in the Cosmos. I also emphasized how impossible it is to speak intelligibly and adequately in the words of ordinary language about the great mysteries of existence.

The best way to characterize the deeply significant inter-action between Hermes and Moses, the two great pupils of Zarathustra, is to present it as a repetition, a re-enactment, of a cosmic process, viewed in the light of occult science.

In order to picture this cosmic process, let us again look back to the time when our Earth had separated from the Sun, when each with an independent centre was pursuing a further life of its own in the Cosmos. We can picture that in the far, far distant past, the substantiality of Earth +Sun formed a single whole, one great cosmic body which then divided into two. In saying this it must be remembered that other, parallel cosmic happenings—the splitting off of the other planets belonging to our solar system—are being left out of consideration here. For our immediate purpose the time sequence of these other severances need not be taken into account; it is enough to say that a separation once took place, as the result of which the Sun became an entity and the Earth another.

It must also be remembered that this separation took place in an age when the globe now called ‘Earth’ still contained within it the substantiality of the present Moon. Earth + Moon on the one side confronted Sun on the other. All the forces, both spiritual and physical, that had been at work before this separation, divided: the coarser elements, the coarser, cruder activities, remained with thc Earth, whereas the higher, spiritual-ethereal activities accompanied the Sun. We must picture to ourselves that for long ages Earth and Sun continued their evolution separately. To begin with, everything going forth from the Sun to the Earth was entirely different in character from the forces streaming from the Sun to-day. Earth-existence, Earth-life, was inward, enclosed, receiving little life from the Sun, little of what rayed down spiritually, taking physical expression, from the Sun.

In this first period of separation from the Sun, the Earth threatened to become barren, arid, mummified. And if the Moon had continued to remain in thc Earth the life that is present on our planet to-day would never have been possible. While the Moon was still contained in the Earth, the life pouring from the Sun could not be fully effective; this was only possible at a later time, when the Earth had separated from itself the substantiality of what is now Moon, and with it the spiritual Beings connected with the Moon.

But very much else is connected with the separation of the Moon from the Earth. It must be realised that everything we call life on our Earth to-day evolved by slow degrees, and Spiritual Science indicates the successive conditions or states of existence which made life possible. Previously there was the Old Saturn-existence, then the Old Sun-existence, then the Old Moon-existence, and finally our Earth-existence. The separation of the Sun and also the earlier union of Earth and Sun were therefore preceded by other, quite different evolutionary processes. And when the Earth began to exist in its present form, it was still united with the substance of all the planets that belong to our solar system and were not separated off until later—the process of separation and differentiation being brought about by forces previously operating during the three preceding evolutionary periods of Old Saturn, Old. Sun, Old Moon.

We know that during the Old Saturn-existence there was no matter, no substance, such as is present to-day; there were no solid bodies, no fluids, even no gaseous, vaporous or aeriform masses. Old Saturn was composed solely of warmth—differentiated warmth. We can therefore say: the body of ancient Saturn consisted of warmth only; everything evolved within the element of warmth. I need not emphasize here that one who ventures to make such a statement is fully aware of how impossible it is for modern physics to conceive of a body consisting solely of warmth; he is also aware that ‘warmth’ is for modern physics a state or condition only, not anything having the character of substance. However that may be, we are not concerned to-day with modern physics but only with the truth.¹

Evolution advanced from the warmth-body of Saturn to the next stage—the stage of Old Sun. There, as described in the book Occult Science, the warmth-body of Saturn densified. Some of the warmth remained, but the warmth-body densified, in part, to the gaseous, aeriform sate of Old Sun. The process was not only one of densification but also of rarefication—a development upwards, to light. Hence we can say: passing from the warmth-condition of Old Saturn to the stage of Old Sun, we have a cosmic body comprising air, warmth and light.

When the Old Sun-existence advanced to the stage of the Old Moon-existence which preceded that of our Earth, again there was densification and again rarefication. The fluid or watery condition was added to the gaseous, but a change also took place on the other side, in the direction as it wry or spiritualisation, etherealisation. During the Old Moon stage, not only was there light but also the sound-ether or chemical ether. What is here called sound-ether is not to be identified with what we call physical sound or tone. The latter is only a reflection of what is experienced by clairvoyant consciousness as the 'Harmony of the Spheres', as etheric sound or tone weaving as a living power through the Universe. In speaking of this ether and of this sound we are therefore speaking of something far more spiritual, far more ethereal than ordinary sound.

Densification to the solid state took place when Old Moon evolved to Earth. On Old Moon there were no solid bodies such as exist on Earth, where the solid condition came into existence for the first time. On the Earth, therefore, WC now have, on the one side, warmth, the gaseous and watery states, and solid bodies; and on the other side, light-ether, sound-ether, and then life-ether. Evolution on the Earth has reached this stage. Thus on the Earth there are seven elemental states or conditions, whereas on Old Saturn there was only the one state—that of warmth.

When our Earth emerged from the cosmic night at the beginning of its existence, when it was still united with the Sun and with the other planets, we must picture it living and weaving in these seven elemental conditions. But with the separation from the Sun something very remarkable took place.

Warmth and light are present for external life to-day since it is affected by the influences that stream from the Sun to the Earth and belong to the whole domain of sense-perception; but the sound-ether and the life-ether do not belong to this domain. The workings of the sound-ether manifest themselves only in chemical combinations and dissolutions, that is to say, in processes operating in material existence. What we call the working of the life-ether as it streams in from the Sun cannot be directly perceived by man in the sense that light is perceptible when through the senses he distinguishes light from darkness. The active workings or effects of life are perceived in living beings, but not the in-streaming life-ether itself. Hence science too is compelled to admit that life per se is a riddle.—

Thus the two highest kinds of etheric manifestation—the life-ether and the sound-ether—although they proceed from the Sun as extremely delicate emanations—are not directly manifest in Earth-existence. Although these emanations ray down from the Sun, they are hidden from ordinary perception. Yet in modern existence too, something corresponding to what lives in the sound-ether and life-ether is perceptible on the Earth in the inner nature of man. The direct influences and effects of the life-ether and the sound-ether (the harmony of the spheres) are not externally perceptible on the Earth, but what takes effect in the constitution of man is perceptible.

The easiest way in which I can explain this will be to re-mind you of the process of human evolution on Earth. In very ancient times and on into the Atlantean epoch, man was endowed with a faculty of clairvoyance enabling him to behold not only a material world as he does to-day but also the spiritual backgrounds of material existence. This was possible for man because in those ancient times there was an intermediate state between the waking consciousness that is ours to-day and what we call the sleeping state. In the waking state man perceived the things of the physical world of the senses; in the sleeping state to-day he neither perceives nor is aware of anything at all; he simply goes on living.—That at any rate is true of the great majority of people. If you were to investigate clairvoyantly man's life during sleep you would make startling discoveries—although only those people who look no deeper than the surface of things would be taken aback by them.

While man is asleep his astral body and Ego are outside his physical and etheric bodies. But it must not be imagined that astral body and Ego during sleep are like a misty cloud hovering in the vicinity of the physical body. What an inferior kind of astral clairvoyance sees in the form of a cloud and which we call the astral body, is only the very crudest beginning of what the human being reveals during sleep. If anyone were to regard this cloud-like formation near the physical and etheric bodies as the only phenomenon of importance he would simply be basing himself upon the lowest forms of astral clairvoyance. The truth is that during sleep man is a being of vast magnitude. At the moment of going to sleep, the inner forces in the astral body and in the Ego actually begin to expand over the whole solar system, to become part of it. From every direction man draws into his astral body and into his Ego forces which strengthen this life during sleep, and on waking he contracts into the narrower confines within his skin and pours into these what he has absorbed during the night from the whole solar system. That is why medieval occultists too called this spiritual body of man the ‘astral’ body, because it is united with the worlds of the stars and draws its forces from them. During sleep at night, then, man actually expands over the whole solar system.

What is it that permeates the astral body during sleep when it is outside the physical and etheric bodies? It is the weaving life of the harmonies of the spheres, forces that can otherwise operate only in thc sound-ether. Just as when a violin bow is drawn across the edge of a metal disc strewn with sand the vibrations pulsing through the air also pulsate through the sand and produce the well-known Chladni sound-figures, so do the harmonies of the spheres vibrate through the human being during sleep and bring order again into what has been cast into disorder during the day through his sense-perceptions. The weaving forces of the life-ether also permeate him during sleep, but he is entirely unaware of this inner life of his sheaths when he is separated from the physical and etheric bodies. In the normal state, man has the power of perception only when he again plunges down into the physical and etheric bodies, using the outer organs of the etheric body for thinking and those of the physical body for sense-perception.

But in ancient times there were intermediate states between waking life and sleep, states which can be induced to-day only by abnormal means and because of the dangers inseparable from such conditions, ought never to be induced. In Atlantean times, however, these faculties of perception that functioned normally in the intermediate states between waking and sleeping, enabled man to be transported into the domain of the forces living and weaving in the sound-ether and the life-ether. In other words: through clairvoyance in its old form, man was able in that distant past to be aware of what was being radiated to him by the Sun as the harmony of the spheres and the life that pulses through cosmic space—although the earthly effects of the sound-ether and the life-ether were perceptible only in living beings in the external world.

Such experiences gradually ceased to be possible; with the loss of the old clairvoyance the door closed against these perceptions and something different came into being, namely the inner power of cognition. Only then did man learn to reflect, to ponder, to cogitate. What we to-day call reflection about the things of the physical world, in other words an inner activity, began to develop only when the old clairvoyance was fading away. In the early epochs of Atlantis, man had no inner life such as he has to-day—an inner life of feelings, sentient experiences, thoughts and mental concepts, which actually constitute the creative impulse in culture and civilization. In the intermediate states between waking and sleeping his whole being was outpoured in a spiritual world and the material world of the senses seemed to be veiled in mist.

With the gradual disappearance of the old clairvoyance, external life increased in importance. A faint reflection of the harmony of the spheres and of the working of the life-ether was present in man's inner nature. But the reflection of the harmony of the spheres faded away to the same extent as man became inwardly aware of feelings and perceptions which mirrored the external world to him and constitute his inner life to-day. To the extent to which he felt himself an ‘I’, an Ego-being, his perception of the divine, all-pervading life-ether vanished from him. His condition had to be acquired at the cost of being deprived of certain aspects of external life. As an earthly being, man felt that the life he could no longer experience as streaming directly from the Sun was enclosed within him; and in his inner life to-day He has only a faint reflection of the sublime cosmic life, of the harmony of the spheres and the life-ether.

The development of man's faculty of cognition was also a kind of repetition of the Earth's own evolution. The Earth, when it separated from the Sun and became self-enclosed, would have hardened completely if all the substances left within it after the separation had been retained. The Sun's influence could not, to begin with, find entrance into the process of thc Earth's evolution and this state of things lasted until the Moon was separated from the Earth, together with all those substances and qualities that were making it impossible for the Earth to receive direct influences and forces from the Sun. Thus it was through having cast out the Moon that the Earth was able to receive the influences and forces of the now separated Sun. The Earth sent part of itself, the Moon, towards the Sun, in the opposite direction to that in which it had itself separated from the Sun, and the Moon then reflected back to the Earth the influences of the Sun, just as outwardly it reflects its light. The separation of the Moon from the Earth was an event of untold significance: the Earth had opened itself to the influences and forces of the Sun.

A cosmic event of this kind had necessarily to be re-enacted in the life of man as well. It was only when the Earth had long since opened itself to the workings of the Sun that the right point of time arrived for man to shut himself off from the direct influences of the Sun. The direct influences and forces of thc Sun were still active in the clairvoyance of Atlantean man. And just as there had come a time when the Earth began to harden, so too there came a time for man when he withdrew into his own inner nature, developed an inner life and could no longer receive the direct workings of the Sun. This process of the development of an inner life, when man could no longer be open to the Sun's influences and could receive only faint reflections within himself of the workings of the life-ether, the sound-ether, the harmonies of the spheres—this process lasted for long ages, right on into the post-Atlantean era.

In the earliest epochs of Atlantean evolution men had been directly aware of the Sun's influences. Then they shut them-selves off; and when these influences could no longer penetrate into them and their own inner life asserted itself strongly, it was only in the sacred Mysteries, through the practice of what may be called ‘Yoga’ that the spiritual powers of the pupils could be trained as it were to defy the normal conditions of Earth-existence and become directly aware of the workings of the Sun. Thus in the second half of the Atlantean epoch there were sanctuaries, appropriately called ‘Oracles’, where from among a humanity no longer able in a normal way to be aware of the direct workings of the sound-ether and the life-ether, pupils and dedicated disciples of the sacred wisdom were so trained that by first suppressing all perception through the senses, they could become aware of the manifestations of these higher ethers.

In places where genuine spiritual science was cultivated, this possibility actually remained in the post-Atlantean epoch—so persistently indeed that even external science, without understanding the meaning of it, has preserved a tradition originating in the School of Pythagoras to the effect that the harmonies of the spheres can become audible. But external science immediately turns anything of the nature of the harmony of the spheres into an abstraction—which of course it is not—and has no inkling of the reality. In the Pythagorean Schools the power to become aware of the harmony of the spheres was understood to be the re-opening of man's being to the sound-ether and to the divine life-ether.

It was Zarathustra or Zoroaster who had proclaimed with the greatest power and splendour that behind the Sun radiating its light and warmth to the Earth there is something which as the activity of the sound-ether and indeed of the life-ether is only feebly reflected in man's inner life. If we endeavour to translate his teaching into modern language, we can say that he taught his pupils as follows.—He said to them: When you look upwards to the Sun you are aware of the beneficial warmth and light streaming from it to the Earth; but if you develop higher organs, if you develop your faculty of spiritual perception, you can become aware of the Sun Being behind the physical Sun and its life; and then you become aware of the workings of the sound-ether and within these the essence of life!

Zarathustra spoke to his pupils of Ormuzd, or Ahura Mazdao, the great Sun Aura, as the spiritual reality behind the physical workings of the Sun. ‘Ahura Mazdao’ can therefore also be translated as the ‘Great Wisdom’ in contrast to the meagre wisdom evolved by men to-day. Man becomes aware of the Great Wisdom when he beholds the spiritual essence of the Sun, the great Sun Aura.

A poet, gazing back to the remote past in the evolution of humanity, was able to point in the following words to what the spiritual investigator knows to be a truth:

‘The sun-orb sings, in emulation,
'Mid brother-spheres, his ancient round:
His path predestined through Creation,
He ends with step of thunder-sound.’
(Faust: Prologue in Heaven. Tr. Bayard Taylor)

Disciples of aestheticism regard this simply as euphony and quote it as an outstanding example of poetic licence. They have no inkling that a poet of Goethe's calibre is describing actual realities when he writes: ‘The sun-orb sings his ancient round’—that is to say, in the way known to ancient humanity, and known even to-day to one who is initiated.

Zarathustra had imparted this mighty truth to his pupils, particularly to the two among them who can be said to have been his most intimate disciples and were incarnated later on as Hermes and Moses. But Zarathustra gave the instruction on what lies behind the radiant body of the Sun in two quite different forms. The instruction given to Hermes enabled him to receive the influence streaming directly from the Sun. Moses, on the other hand, was inspired in such a way that he preserved the secret of the Sun-wisdom as though in a memory.

If in the light of what is said in the book Occult Science we picture the Earth after its separation from the Sun, and then the departure of the Moon-forces from the Earth after which the Earth opened itself to the Sun, we find Venus and Mercury between Earth and Sun. Dividing the whole space between Sun and Earth into three, we can say: the Earth separated from the Sun and sent forth the Moon towards the Sun. Then Venus and Mercury separated off from the Sun and came towards the Earth. Venus and Mercury, therefore, move from the Sun towards the Earth; the Moon goes from the Earth towards the Sun.

Conditions in the evolution of humanity reflect conditions in the Cosmos. The Sun-wisdom contained in the revelations of Zarathustra had been transmitted by him on the one side to Hermes and on the other to Moses. In Hermes there lived the Sun-wisdom radiating from the astral body of Zarathustra that had been transmitted to him; the wisdom living in Moses was like a separate planet that had still to develop towards what radiated directly from the Sun. Just as the Earth, by relinquishing the Moon, opened itself to the influence of ,the Sun, so did the wisdom of Moses open itself to receive the Sun-wisdom radiating directly from Zarathustra. And these two forms of wisdom, the Earth-wisdom of Moses and the Sun-wisdom of Zarathustra as imparted to Hermes, came into con-tact in Egypt, where the teachings of Moses encountered those of Hermes. What Moses had received from Zarathustra in the far distant past, he wakened to life within his own being and transmitted it to his people. We have to conceive of this as a process analogous to the emergence of the Moon-substantiality from the Earth.

The wisdom transmitted by Moses to his people can also be called Jahve- or Jehovah-wisdom—the name which, if rightly understood, epitomises it. We can also understand why old traditions speak of Jahve or Jehovah as a Moon God. This is frequently stated but is comprehensible only when these profound connections arc known. Just as the Earth cast out the Moon, sending it towards the Sun, so too the path of the Earth-wisdom of Moses inevitably led towards Hermes who possessed the direct wisdom of Zarathustra in the astral body that had been bequeathed. The wisdom of Moses, having made contact with Hermes, had then itself to evolve, and we have already described how its development continued until the age of David, when in David himself, the royal warrior and psalmist of the Hebrew people, Hermetic or Mercury-wisdom arose in a new form. We have also heard how the wisdom of Moses made still closer contact with the Sun-wisdom during the time of the Babylonian captivity, when Zarathustra himself, then bearing the name of Zarathas or Nazarathos, was the teacher of the Hebraic Initiates during the captivity. In the wisdom of Moses, therefore, we see a re-enactment of the cosmic process of the separation of Earth from Sun and of subsequent happenings on the Earth.

The wise men among the ancient Hebrews and all who were aware of these connections were filled with deepest reverence. They felt as though direct revelations were being vouchsafed to them from cosmic spaces and cosmic existence. And a personality such as Moses seemed to them to be a messenger of the cosmic Powers themselves. This they felt—and We too must feel something of the kind if we desire genuinely to understand ancient times. Otherwise, all our learning is no more than empty abstraction.

It was essential that what had streamed from Zarathustra and had been transmitted to posterity through Hermes and Moses should also evolve to a higher stage and appear again in a different, more advanced form. To this end it was necessary that Zarathustra himself, the Individuality who had previously bequeathed only the astral body and the etheric body, should be able to appear on the Earth in a physical body, in order that this too might be offered up. Here we have a beautiful illustration of progress. In his life in the very distant past, Zarathustra had given the impulse to post-Atlantean evolution in ancient Iranian culture. Then he bequeathed his astral body in order to inaugurate a. new form of culture through Hermes, and he bequeathed his etheric body to Moses. He had thus bequeathed two of his sheaths. Opportunity had now to be afforded him to offer up his physical body as well, for the great mystery of the evolution of humanity demanded the offering of the three bodies by one single individual. The third act still ahead of Zarathustra was the offering of the physical body, and this required very special measures of preparation. I have already indicated how the particular kind of life lived by the Hebrew people throughout the generations made possible the preparation of the physical body that could eventually be offered up by Zarathustra as his third great act. This preparation demanded that what elsewhere had been direct, outwardly oriented spiritual perception—the astral vision which in the Turanians had become decadent—should be trans-formed into an inner activity.

This is the secret of the Hebrew people. Whereas in the Turanians the forces inherited from ancient times produced organs of external clairvoyance, in the Hebrew people these forces turned inwards, organising the inner constitution of the body. Hence the Hebrews were the people destined to feel and to experience inwardly what during the Atlantean age men had seen outspread behind the single physical objects. Jahve or Jehovah—the name consciously uttered and proclaimed by the Hebrew people—was the ‘Great Spirit’ revealed to ancient clairvoyance behind all things and beings and now concentrated into a unity. And it is also indicated that in a very special way the progenitor of the ancient Hebrews had been endowed with this inner organic constitution.

Let me again repeat that the pictorial accounts of ancient happenings contained in sagas and legends are nearer to the truth than the picture of evolution pieced together by modern anthropological research from evidence provided by excavations and fragments of monuments. In most eases the old legends are corroborated by spiritual-scientific investigation. I say ‘in most cases’ and not ‘in all’ because I have not investigated every one of them; but it is very probable that the above holds good for all genuinely ancient legends. Thus when we enquire into the origin of the Hebrew people, we are led back, not to what modern anthropologists surmise, but to an actual progenitor named in the Bible. Abraham or Abram is a living figure and what the Talmud legend says of this original ancestor is true.

According to the story, the father of Abraham is a captain in the service of that legendary but nevertheless real personality called ‘Nimrod’ in the Bible (Genesis X, 8-9). It is announced to Nimrod by those who understand the signs of the times as revealed in dreams that many kings and rulers will be overthrown by his captain's son. Nimrod is seized with fear and orders that the child be killed. Such is the legend, and its truth is confirmed by occult investigation. Abraham's father resorts to subterfuge and presents another man's child to Nimrod. His own child, Abraham, is reared in a cave.—Abraham is the first in whom the forces formerly operating as the faculties of external clairvoyance turned inwards to become the powers that were to lead to inner consciousness of the Divine. This complete reversal of forces is indicated in the legend by saying that by thc grace of God the child was able to suck milk from the fingers of his own right hand during the three years he lived in the cave. This process of self-nourishment, in other words the penetration of the forces formerly used for the old clairvoyance into the inner constitution of man, is illustrated in a wonderful way in Abraham, the progenitor of thc Hebrew people.—If their real foundations are understood, legends of this kind are so convincing that we realise why old narratives could only convey in pictures what lay behind their contents. But these pictures were able to evoke feelings—even if not actual consciousness—of the great truths. And that sufficed in those ancient times. Abraham, then, was the first man in whom the faculties of divine wisdom, divine vision, were reflected inwardly in an entirely human form, as thought of the Divine. In actual fact, and as occult investigation will always insist, the physical constitution of Abram, or Abraham as he was called later on, was entirely different from that of everyone living around him. The organic constitution of other human beings was not such as would have enabled them to unfold inner activity of thinking through a special instrument. Thinking was possible for them when they were free of the body, when forces were activated in the etheric body; but they had not yet developed the instrument for thinking in the physical body itself. Abraham was actually the first in whom the physical instrument for thinking had been elaborated in the real sense. Hence—although this must not be taken too literally—he is not incorrectly called the inventor of arithmetic, the science dependent primarily upon the instrument of the physical body. Arithmetic is something that in its form, and because of its intrinsic certainty, comes near to clairvoyant knowledge, but it is essentially dependent upon a bodily organ.

Thus there is a deep and intimate connection between a faculty in which external forces had hitherto been used for clairvoyance and one which now made use of an inner organ for the activity of thinking. This is indicated when Abraham is spoken of as the inventor of arithmetic. He is therefore to be regarded as the first personality into whom was implanted the physical organ of thinking, the organ through which man, by means of physical thinking, could rise to actual thought of the Divine, whereas formerly it was only through clairvoyant vision that he could have any knowledge of God and of the Divine. All such knowledge in ancient times was the outcome of clairvoyance. To rise to the Divine through thought required a physical instrument and Abraham was the first into whom it was implanted. And as here it was a matter, of a physical organ, the whole relation of this thought or concept of the Divine to the objective world and to the subjective being of man was different from what it had formerly been, when a physical instrument was not involved.

The thought of the Divine had formerly been grasped through the wisdom preserved in the Mystery Schools and could be conveyed to one who had developed to the stage of being able to have perceptions in the etheric body, free from the organs of the physical body. But the only means for the transmission of a physical instrument to another human being is physical heredity. Thus if what was of salient importance for Abraham, namely the physical organ, was to be preserved on the Earth, it had to be transmitted from generation to generation through heredity. It is therefore understandable that the element of racial heredity, the transmission of this physical attribute through the blood flowing down the generations, was of very great importance in the Hebrew people.

But a physical attribute that appeared for the first time in Abraham, resulting from the crystallization and shaping of a physical organ for comprehension of the Divine—such an attribute had to be established. Transmitted by heredity from generation to generation, it penetrated ever more deeply into the nature and constitution of man and took firmer and firmer hold there as the effect of heredity grew progressively stronger. Hence we can say: it was necessary that what had been imparted to Abraham in order that the mission of the Hebrew people might be fulfilled, should reach greater perfection in the course of being transmitted from generation to generation through heredity. And in thc case of a physical organ this was the only possible means.

If the Individuality we have come to know as Zarathustra was to be provided with as perfect a physical body as possible—that is to say, a body containing an organ capable of grasping, in a human physical body, the thought or concept of the Divine—the physical instrument once implanted in Abraham had to be brought to the highest attainable degree of perfection; it had to be inwardly consolidated through heredity and to develop in such a way that a body suitable for Zarathustra might be produced, with all the qualities needed by him in his physical body. But a physical body that was to be of use to Zarathustra could not have developed to greater perfection by itself, separated from the rest of man's constitution; all the three sheaths, physical, etheric and astral, had gradually to be perfected through what physical heredity flowing down the successive generations was able to impart to them.

There is a certain law in evolution of which we have often heard in connection with the development of the individual human being. A particular period of this process is from birth until the sixth or seventh year of life, during which the main development is that of the physical body. The period of the development of the etheric body is from the sixth or seventh year until the fourteenth or fifteenth. The period of the development of the astral body is from then until the twenty-first or twenty-second year. Such is the law, based on the number seven, governing the development of the individual human being. The development of the outer sheaths of humanity in general through the generations is governed by a similar law and the deeper aspects of this process have still to be considered.

Whereas in the course of every seven years the individual completes a stage of development, until his seventh year that of the physical body, which becomes more and more perfect during this period—so the whole structure of the physical body of mankind in general, developing as it can do through the generations, reaches a certain completion after seven generations. But heredity works in such a way that the qualities transmitted do not pass from one human being to his nearest descendant in the immediately following generation; the salient qualities and attributes cannot be transmitted directly from father to son, from mother to daughter, but only from father to grandson—thus to the second generation, then the fourth, and so on. The number seven is basic in the process of heredity through the generations; but as every other generation is skipped, we have, in reality, to do with the number fourteen.

The special physical constitution established in Abraham could reach the peak of its development after fourteen generations. But for this process to take effect in the etheric body and the astral body as well, the development which in the case of the individual proceeds during the period from the seventh to the fourteenth year would have to continue through a further seven, or in reality, fourteen generations, and then through a still further period of seven (or fourteen) generations, starting from the fourteenth year in the case of the individual human being. In other words : the physical constitution established in Abraham, the racial progenitor, had to develop through three times seven or rather three times fourteen generations; the development had then taken place in all the three sheaths—physical body, etheric body and astral body. Thus the process of heredity through three times fourteen generations, i.e. through forty-two generations, made it possible for a man to receive in the physical body, etheric body and astral body in a state of perfected development, what had been imparted to Abraham in its first rudiments.

Thus after three times fourteen generations, beginning with Abraham, we find a human body impregnated with what had been present in Abraham in its earliest rudiments. Only a body of this kind was suitable for Zarathustra in his incarnation. This is also made clear by the writer of the Gospel of St. Matthew. In the table of generations, fourteen generations are expressly enumerated from Abraham to David, fourteen from David to the Babylonian captivity, and fourteen from the captivity to Jesus Christ. Through these three times fourteen generations—in the sequence of which one is always skipped—the complete development has been achieved of what was imparted to Abraham for the mission of the Hebrew people. This was now fully impressed into the principles of human nature and thence could arise the body needed by Zarathustra for his incarnation in the epoch when a completely new impulse was to be brought to mankind through him.

The wisdom underlying the beginning of the Gospel of St. Matthew is indeed profound. It is essential, however, to understand what is indicated by these three times fourteen generations. In the body that it was possible for Joseph to provide for Jesus of Nazareth there was contained the essence of what had been present, in its rudiments, in Abraham; this had streamed into the whole Hebrew people and could then be concentrated in a single instrument, in the sheath used by Zarathustra by whom the incarnation of Christ was to be made possible.

• 1. See Occult Science—an Outline, p. 21. From Rudolf Steiner's Preface to the first edition. (1909).

My dear sisters and brothers,

New members have again come to this School today. It isn't possible to repeat every time the introduction which describes the duties and meaning of this Michael School. Therefore, I ask the members who wish to give the verses to the new members, to do so in the manner I will describe at the end of the Lesson, and to give them the introduction, which everyone who wishes to be a member of this School must necessarily know.

*

And so, we will also begin directly today to inscribe in our souls the words which sound forth, to those who are open-minded enough, from all the kingdoms of nature and the hierarchies of the world which surround us as human beings. In the past, these words sounded forth to man from all the stones and plants, clouds, stars, from the sun and the moon, from the springs and the rocks. They sound forth to him in the present; they will sound forth to him in the future.

O man, know thyself!
So resounds the Cosmic-Word.
You hear it strong in soul,
You feel it firm in spirit.

Who speaks with such cosmic might?
Who speaks with such depth of heart?

Does it work through distant radiant space
Into your senses' sense of being?
Does it ring through weaving waves of time
Into your life's evolving stream?

It's you yourself who,
In feeling space, in experiencing time,

Create the Word, feeling foreign
In space's soulless void
Because you lose the force of thought
In time's destroying flow.

My dear sisters and brothers, in the description of the path of knowledge we have reached the place where we stand before the Guardian at the abyss of being. The Guardian of the Threshold has made clear to us that what surrounds us in the exterior world can never reveal our own being to us; how our observation of nature, what on and from the earth lives and moves, what shines and speaks from the realm of the stars—to the extent we can perceive it with the senses and with our reason—all that offers nothing to clarify the being of our own self; that the brightness, this glistening in the sunshine, this living and interweaving which is so grand and powerful, so beautiful and magnificent in the outer world, remains dark and gloomy for our true self-knowledge.

Then it was described how we approach the Guardian little by little, who appears to us in the figure of a spiritual cloud, thus showing us an image of ourselves, which in turn shows us what we should strive for as human beings in order to achieve self-knowledge.

Then we reached the Guardian of the Threshold. He showed us what the true shape of our willing, feeling and thinking is before the countenance of the gods. He showed us how being fainthearted and having fear of knowledge lives in us, as hate for knowledge, as doubt about the knowledge that is nevertheless in us, because the character of our times has driven it into us. He showed us the animal form of our willing, feeling and thinking. It must be a shattering experience for us when the Guardian of the Threshold awakens the forces which lead to true self-knowledge in our souls.

Then the Guardian of the Threshold raised us, first showing us, however, how our thinking, as we use it in normal life, is the corpse of the living thinking which was in us before we descended to physical-sensory existence. He showed us how our body, in earthly existence, is a coffin for the deceased living thinking, which lies in the coffin as a corpse. But we use this corpse for our usual abstract thinkingbetween birth and death in order to understand the things of the physical-sensory world.

Once we grasp how dead this thinking is, we can learn from the corpse that lies before us. We look at this corpse. We say to ourselves: This corpse could never have come into being the way it is now. It is what remains of a human being whose soul and spirit were within it. The living person, the ensouled person, the spiritualized person must have existed beforehand in what lies before us as a corpse. Thus, we approach the reality of our thinking when we become aware of its deadness, and realize that it is the corpse of the living thinking that was in us before we descended into physical-sensory earthly existence.

Then the Guardian reminds us that our feeling is only half-alive, whereas our willing is fully alive, but we are only conscious of this externally.

The Guardian of the Threshold also reminds us that in order to gradually find the transition to living thinking, we should look up to the heavenly heights; that to grasp the nature of feeling we should look out to the cosmic reaches, and to gain an idea of the nature of will we should look to the world's depths, to the earthly depths.

But at the same time the Guardian shows us how we are placed with our thinking—when we look up to the cosmic thinking in which our earthly-physical thinking is rooted—between light and darkness; how the light can be dangerous if we devote ourselves unilaterally to it, how the darkness can be dangerous if we devote ourselves unilaterally to it, how we must seek our direction and goal in the middle between light and darkness if we are to find the truth, how we stand in the middle between warmth and cold with our feeling, and how we can vanish in the sensual embers of feeling if we surrender ourselves to the warmth, and on the other hand harden in the cold.

The Guardian of the Threshold indicates to us how we should walk in the middle between soul-warmth and soul-cold on the Christ-path. The Guardian of the Threshold indicates to us that when we seek willing in the earthly depths we find ourselves in the middle between life and death; how life would have us vanish in timidity; how death would have us cramped in nothingness; that we must findwilling in the Middle Way. That, my dear sisters and brothers, is what the Middle Way is—as it has been described since ancient Mystery times—which the human being must tread if he wants to follow the path to the spirit.

The Guardian of the Threshold, before whom we stand as the earnest first representative of Michael, for the real leader of this School is Michael, gives us further guidance: how we can escape from this apparent thinking, from this dead thinking into the living essence of thinking. For this we must be prepared above all to strictly adhere to the laws which are prescribed for every esotericist in golden letters—he must only seize the gold—which the Guardian of the Threshold now repeats to us.

He makes us attentive to the yawning abyss of being before us, which we must fly over, because with earthly feet we cannot cross; how we will have then entered the spiritual world, for there on the other side of the yawning abyss deep, night-cloaked darkness is still before us. But we must enter beyond the yawning abyss of being into that deep, night-cloaked, cold darkness. Out of it warmth must come to us, out of it must come light which illumines our own Self, which warms our own Self. We cannot find the firm support-point in the spirit if, whenever we are over there, we do not remember the pledge that our soul makes, now that we are in this situation, after having received the previous admonitions from the Guardian of the Threshold, who now says:

Do not forget that as long as you are an earthly human being, even when you have crossed over to the spiritual world, that once you have returned you must adhere to the laws of the earth. When you enter the spiritual world with your thinking, you may not believe that when you return and organize your work and your thoughts in the earthly environment you may fly around dreaming within the earthly environment. You must reserve the flying for your thinking when you are in the spiritual world. You must practice deep, inner, intimate modesty, always wanting to be a man among men when you cross back to the ordinary world of ordinary consciousness. It is precisely by wishing to stay modest in the world, by abstaining from using the laws of the spiritual life in the ordinary world, that you will have the strength to grasp thinking in a way that it can serve you in spiritual worlds.

The Guardian of the Threshold therefore teaches us about thinking thus:

You climb down to the earthly element
With forces of your will unfolding;
As thinker you bestride the earthly realm,
Your animal-likeness will be shown
To you by your own force of thought;
The fear you feel of self you must
Transform into courage of soul.

We must go through this by letting the mantric verse work on us. We must, if we wish to enter into the essential element of the earth, that means in the spiritual element of the earth; we must, my dear sisters and brothers, come to the point where we realize that our thinking is at first animal-like. We must experience fear of our own Self that is still animal-like; then the fear will give birth to its opposite and become the courage we need. That is the Guardian of the Threshold's urgently strong, earnest admonition, which cuts deeply into the heart. He admonishes us that we should feel this way when we tread the earth-element. We have already heard about treading the elements from the Guardian of the Threshold.

He admonishes us further: when, as feeling beings, we enter the fluid element, in the world of the water-beings, that we should not be aware of fear of our own Self, but we should be aware of how we sleep dreaming in this water element, which is our sculptor, as we have seen. And it is just when we become conscious that we live a plant-like existence in our earthly human feeling, that this feeling awakens us, for it shows us how lame our Self is. We will awaken once we have the humility to recognize the lameness of our Self.

Thirdly, when we feel ourselves to be in the air element with our willing—first in the earth-element with thinking, then in the water-element with feeling, then with willing in the air-element—then we will feel in this air-element that we have nothing in willing except what our normal memory gives us: memory-image-forms. We must seize these image-forms, which rest passively in our thoughts, with the will; then we are grasping the air-element in inner images. And our own soul will appear to us as if it were ossified. If we eliminate the earth and the air in thought and imagine ourselves wanting to breathe in the air-element, how ossified will we seem. But just by feeling this death by cold that we pass through, the spiritual fire will come to us, which we need in order to really grasp our willing.

The verses are profound, which the Guardian of the Threshold presents to our souls. Only if we observe them well and have fear of ourselves and know that we are nullified if we only perceive the earth in thought, will we have the courage in our souls for living thinking. When we sense how lame in feeling we are on earth, half living and lame, will the strength grow in us which allows us to awaken, so that we are awake in spiritual life, with the feeling we had before we descended to earthly physical existence. Then, when we have willingly descended into the air-element with our memory, we feel sclerotic and shivering with cold. But it is just when we feel this shivering from the cold the opposite happens, the spiritual fire awakens, showing us that our earthly willing is sleeping, but rooted in the living willing which was in us before we descended to earthly existence. We must learn to remember our existence before we descended to earthly existence.

In respect to feeling, the Guardian of the Threshold admonishes us:

You live with the water-element
Through feeling's weaving dream alone;
To wake pervading water's being
Will show the soul in you
To be a sluggish plant-like being;
But lameness of your Self
Must Lead to self-awakening.

In respect to willing, the Guardian speaks:

You sense in the waves of air
The image-forms of memory only;
Through willing to seize the essence of air,
Your own soul will threaten you
As coldly hardened stone;
But self-hood's death by cold,
It must give way to spirit-fire.

[The mantra is written on the blackboard with the corresponding underlining:]

The Guardian speaks with great earnestness:

You climb down to the earthly element
With forces of your will unfolding
As thinker you bestride the earthly realm,
Your animal-likeness will be shown
To you by your own force of thought
The fear you feel of self you must
Transform into courage of soul.

You live with the water-element
Through feeling's weaving dream alone;
To wake pervading water's being
Will show the soul in you
To be a sluggish plant-like being;
But lameness of your Self
Must Lead to self-awakening.

You sense in the waves of air
The image-forms of memory alone;
Through willing to seize the essence of air,
Your own soul will threaten you
As coldly hardened stone;
But self-hood's death by cold,
It must give way to spirit-fire.

We descend from thinking to feeling in memory when we let this verse work on us. And when we arrive at the depths of memory—where soul-life otherwise vanishesbecause the images of memory arise anew—there is the boundary, just as a mirror is a boundary. What comes to us from without arrives at something like a memory-wall, then it returns again and again. If one does not look behind the mirror, one does not see behind the memory-wall. But here the Guardian of the Threshold advises us that we must push through what is otherwise a boundary in order to enter the realm of spirit.

After the Guardian of the Threshold has referred us more to our interior with his admonishing verses and has left us time to process the contents of the verses in the soul—for when we use these mantric verses in meditation, we must allow ourselves a very long time, especially at this point, so they can work in us with their force and really bring our I downward through thinking, feeling and remembrance to what lies behind all remembrance—then the Guardian tells us how we should comport ourselves in respect to the outer world.

He draws our attention again up to the light, which however only lives in us in what seem to be thoughts. It is light that thinks in us. When the light pervades us, it thinks in us. But in earthly life light is only the appearance of a thinking that thinks itself. If we don't go beyond it, untrue spiritual being will lead us to the illusion of self-hood rather than to true self-hood So we must realize that if we only concentrate on thinking, we will wind up with the illusion of self-hood. But it is just this understanding of ourselves as earthly human beings, after having gone through the delusion of self-hood—through thinking, which, however, is capable of carrying us over the abyss of being to grasp the world's hardships and problems—that will enable us to gradually find support for experiencing existence in thought.

From light's shining force
Your thoughts you retain within;
When shining light in you itself does think,
Will then an untrue spirit-being cause
Illusion of self-hood to arise in you.
Reflecting on the needs of earth
Preserves your human state of being.

Now the Guardian of the Threshold teaches us how in feeling, at first, we only retain the wonderful, all-embracing forms of the world. But when we only retain these forms in feeling, our spiritual experience remains powerless. Self-hood suffocates if we always only stare, feeling, at what has been formed in the world. But if we begin to love all that is worthy in the world around us, we find being in feeling and we rescue our humanity.

The world's forms you only retain
In feelings held fast within;
When world-form feels itself in you,
The powerless experience of spirit
Will stifle in you the sense of self-hood;
But love of all that's worthy on earth
Will rescue for you your human soul.

Generally, we try to hatch thoughts from earthly values. We only retain the illusion of light if we don't consider the earth's weighty problems. We retain what is formed on the earth only in vague feelings if we don't experience this earthly interweaving of forms and gestalt with love.

And what can we retain of the world's life by willing? Our willing exists in the world's life. But if we only retain it by willing, we again fail to reach being. When the life of the world completely engulfs us, destructive spiritual exaltation kills the experience of Self. Immersion in the world's willing causes spiritual exaltation to erupt, which kills us. But if we develop the will in spiritual dedication to the higher worlds, if we think about what we are willing in the physical-sensory world in a way that the gods act in us, who inspire and give impulse to our willing, if we will in the service of the gods, then God lets his being give impulse to us as humans, and we sense real being in godly permeated willing.

You only retain of worldly life
The will within;
If worldly life takes hold in full,
Destructive spirit exaltation
Will kill experience of Self in you;
But spirit-dedicated earthly willing
Allows the God in man to reign.

These are the three admonitions which the Guardian of the Threshold calls out to us in the most earnest moments.

[The mantra is written on the blackboard:]

The Guardian speaks as though the Cosmic-Word itself were resounding:

From light's shining force
our thoughts you retain within;

—It is as though the Guardian wanted to bring our attention to what we are actually doing. He says that we have not yet gotten over forming mere thoughts about light's shining—

When shining light in you itself does think,
Will then an untrue spirit-being cause
Illusion of self-hood to arise in you.
Reflecting on the needs of earth
Preserves your human state of being

The world's forms you only retain
In feelings held fast within

—Once again, the admonition that in our vague, unfocused feelings only what is so wonderfully formed by the world is alive. At first the forming of the world is apprehended in the microcosm through the vagueness of feelings—

When world-form feels itself in you

—that is, not when we sense the world-form with our feelings, but when the world-form penetrates us, the macrocosm into the microcosm—

When world-form feels itself in you,
Experience of spirit is powerless,

—we become aware of our own powerlessness—

When world-form feels itself in you,
Experience of spirit is powerless,
And stifles in you the sense of self-hood;
But love of all that's worthy on earth
Will rescue for you your human soul.

We need this rescuing, for we are about to cross over the abyss. If we only carry over the thoughts instilled by the illusion of light, if we only carry over the vague feelings about world-form, then spiritual exaltation destroys the true light on the other side; powerless feeling, asleep, destroys the experience of the spiritual. We need awareness of the earth's needs, of all that the earth suffers, in order to be worthy to cross over to the spiritual world and not be destroyed by worldly thinking. We need love for what is worthy on the earth in order not to be turned to dust if we cross over with vague feelings. And thirdly, for willing we need this:

You only retain of worldly life
The will within;
If worldly Life takes hold in full,

—and it will do so over there—

Destructive spirit exaltation
Will kill experience of Self in you;
But spirit-dedicated earthly willing
Allows the God in man to reign.

We may not merely carry over to the spiritual world what we have on this side. We must carry over a stronger soul than we have here. We must prepare the soul:

[As the following is spoken, the words between quotation marks are underlined on the blackboard:]

On the other side, we find “light's shining force”. It lives in our thinking. We need “Reflecting on the needs of earth”. Compassion for all the earth's suffering will preserve our “human state of being”.

Over there, because we are coming to the World-formation, we don't only need our “feelings”, we need “love for all that's worthy on earth”; then our “human soul” will be rescued. Here [in the first verse]: preserve our human state of being; here [in the second verse:] the human soul is rescued.

We must enter the full “worldly life”, which in our “willing” is only a weak reflection, is too flimsy to pass over. And we must develop “spiritually developed earthly willing” for the “god in man” to reign.

This is the escalation:

Light's shining force
World-formation
love for all that's worthy on earth

Thoughts
Feelings
Willing

We need:
Reflecting on the needs of earth,
Love for all that's worthy on earth,
Spiritually developed earthly willing;

for we need:
to preserve our human state of being,
to rescue the human soul,
to receive the reigning God within us.

That, my dear sisters and brothers, is what the Guardian places before our souls so that we may develop the wings of soul needed to cross over.

In the next esoteric lesson, to be held on Wednesday, it will be necessary that we receive the mantras through the Guardian of the Threshold—who in this case is Michael's representative at the threshold to the spiritual lands—the mantras which are the first that we speak when we arrive in the spiritual realm, which, however, appears before the human being when receiving these mantras as deep, night-cloaked, cold darkness.

Today, though, after this has been shown to our souls, let us again contemplate what speaks to us from all being, encouraging us toward all that the Guardian of the Threshold has placed before us with such firmness:

O man, know thyself!
So resounds the Cosmic-Word.
You hear it strong in soul,
You feel it firm in spirit.

Who speaks with such cosmic might?
Who speaks with such depth of heart?

Does it work through distant radiant space
Into your senses' sense of being?
Does it ring through weaving waves of time
Into your life's evolving stream?

It's you yourself who,
In feeling space, in experiencing time,

Create the Word, feeling foreign
In space's the soulless void
Because you lose the force of thought
In time's destroying flow.

And what has been placed before our souls by the Guardian of the Threshold's words is Michael's message in this rightfully established Michael School. If we receive them with the right attitude, Michael's being is present in this room, consecrating and strengthening what has been placed before our souls. Therefore, it may be accompanied by Michael's Sign. Michael's Sign is:

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and Michael's Seal, which he has impressed on the Rosicrucian mood for centuries, and which is expressed in the dictum:

ex deo nascimur

In Christo morimur

Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus

The first words, “I revere the Father”, are spoken accompanied by the gesture:

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The second words, “I love the Son” are accompanied by the gesture:

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

The third words, “I unite myself with the Spirit”, are accompanied by the gesture:

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The first gesture means:

I revere the Father

the second gesture:

I love the Son

the third gesture.
I unite myself with the Spirit.

Thus, we may understand what is spoken as having been strengthened by Michael's sign and confirmed by Michael's Seal, which is thus, thus and thus, [indicating the Seal gestures on the blackboard] which is impressed over the Rosicrucian words.

So, should the verses live, which have been given through Michael's Sign, and sealed by the Michaelic Rosicrucian-School for your souls:

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The following is spoken, accompanied by the Seal Gestures:

ex deo nascimur

In Christo morimur

Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus.

My dear sisters and brothers, the mantric verses which are given in this School may only be possessed by the School's rightful members, that is, those who have the blue membership certificate. Someone who could not be present at a lesson after the date of his admittance at which he could have been present, may receive the verses given after the date of his admittance from another member who has rightfully received them here in the School. For this it is necessary to obtain permission from either Dr. Wegman or myself.

This is not an administrative measure, but it is a basis of an occult school that a real action precedes something like this. Only the person who wants to give the verses to another may make the request to Dr. Wegman or to me, not the one who wants to receive them. Therefore, one can request the verses from another. But permission may not be requested by the one who is to receive the verses, but the one who is to give them. It would be useless for the recipient to ask.

Whoever copies something other than the mantras may keep it for a week; thereafter he is obliged to burn it, for what lives in this School should only live within the School and not outside it. This has nothing to do with power or arbitrary measures. It is all based on occult laws. Because if anything falls into the wrong hands, it loses its effectiveness for those for whom it is intended. If misuse prevails in that mantric verses or the contents of what is given here are given to the wrong people, the mantric verses and what is being given here lose their effectiveness for those who are present. These are facts, not some kind of arbitrary measures.

*

The program for tomorrow is: again at 9.30 the Pastoral Medicine lesson, at 12 o'clock the speech-formation course, at 5.30 the course for theologians and at 8 o'clock the lecture for members.

We ventured on rather unusual ground in our last lecture when we turned our attention to certain beings who definitely exist amongst us. They are spiritual beings who in a certain way fall out of the regular course of evolution, and it is just this fact that gives them their significance. We were considering the elemental beings whose existence is naturally viewed by the enlightened mind of today as the utmost superstition, but who will play a significant rôle in a not very far distant time of our spiritual evolution, precisely through the position they occupy in the cosmos. We have seen how such elemental beings come into existence as a sort of irregularly severed parts of group souls. We need only remember what was said at the end of the lecture and we shall have placed the nature of such elemental creatures before our spiritual eyes. We were considering one of the last formed species of these elementary beings. We pointed to the fact that each animal form—or to put it differently—a totality of similarly formed animals is represented by a group soul. We have said that these group souls play the same rôle in the astral world as our human soul—in so far as it is I-endowed—in the physical world. The human ego is really a group ego which has descended from the astral plane to the physical plane, and thus becomes an individual ego. The animal egos are still normally on the astral plane, and what is here on the physical plane as the separate animal possesses only physical body, etheric body, and astral body. The ego is in the astral world, similarly formed animals being members of their group ego. We can realize from this fact how birth and death in human life have not the same significance in the life of the animal. For when an individual animal dies, the group soul or group ego remains alive. It is just the same as if—assuming that it were possible—a man lost a hand and was capable of replacing it. His ego would not say: ‘I have died through the loss of my hand’; it would feel that it had renewed a limb. So the group ego of the lions renews a limb when a lion dies and is replaced by another. Thus we can understand that birth and death have not at all the significance for the animal group souls as they have for the human being of the present cycle of evolution. The group soul of the animals knows changes, metamorphoses; knows, so to speak, the severing of the members which then extend into the physical world, the loss of these members and their renewal.

We have said, however, that there are certain animal forms which go too far in the process of severing, which are no longer in a position to send back to the astral plane what they bring down to the physical plane. When an animal dies what falls away must be entirely exhausted in the surrounding world, while the soul and spirit nature of the animal must stream back into the group soul, to be ex-tended afresh and grow to a new individual entity. There are in fact certain animal forms which cannot send everything back into the group soul; and these parts which re-main over, which are cut loose, torn loose from the group soul, then lead an isolated life as elemental beings. Our evolution has gone through the most varied stages and at each stage such elemental beings have been separated off, so you can well imagine that we have a fairly large number of such elementals around us in what we call the super-sensible world.

When, for instance, the enlightened person says that people talk of elemental beings and call them Sylphs, Lemures, but that such things do not exist—then you must reply that he does not see these things because he has not troubled to develop the organs of cognition which would enable him to recognize them. But just ask the bees, or rather, the soul of the beehive. They could not close themselves to the existence of Sylphs or Lemures! For the elemental beings which are denoted by these names are to be found at quite definite places, namely, where there is a certain contact of the animal kingdom with the plant kingdom. This has not a general application, however; they are to be found only at spots where the contact takes place under certain circumstances. When the ox eats grass there is a contact between the animal kingdom and the plant kingdom, but that is a common-place, normal proceeding; it lies in the regular course of evolution. The contact that occurs between the bee and the blossom stands on quite a different page of cosmic evolution. Bees and blossoms are much farther apart in organization and they come together again in a special way—moreover a quite remarkable force is unfolded in their contact. The peculiar auric sheath which always arises when a bee or similar insect sucks at a flower belongs to the “interesting” observations of the spiritual-super-sensible worlds—if one may use the expression, but we have so few appropriate expressions for these subtle things. The peculiar, unique experience which the little bee has when it sucks at the flower is present not only in the masticators or in the bee's body, but the exchange of taste between bee and blossom spreads out a sort of tiny etheric aura. Every time that the bee sucks there is this aura, and always when something like this arises in the super-sensible world the beings which need it arrive at the spot. They are attracted by it, for there they find their food—to express it crudely again.

I said on another occasion that we should not be concerned with the question: Whence come all the beings of which we have spoken? Wherever the opportunity is given for definite beings, then they are always there. If a person sends out wrong, evil feelings, these live around him and attract beings which are there waiting, just as some physical being waits for food. I once compared this with the fact that there are no flies in a clean room; if there are all sorts of food-remains in the room, then there are flies. So it is with the super-sensible beings: one need only provide them with the means of nourishment. The bee which sucks at the blossom spreads a little etheric aura and then such beings approach, especially when a whole swarm of bees settles on a tree and then moves away with the sensation of taste in the body. Then the whole swarm is ensheathed in this etheric aura and also entirely interpenetrated by the spiritual beings which one calls Sylphs or Lemures. In border-regions where different kingdoms come in touch with one another these beings are present and they really play a role. In fact they are not only to be found where this fine etheric aura arises, they not only approach to satisfy themselves, but they are hungry and they bring the hunger to expression by guiding the particular creatures to the particular places. In a certain way they are little guides.

So we see that beings who, we may say, have severed their connection with other worlds to which they were formerly united, have taken in exchange a strange role. They are beings which can well be used in other worlds. At any rate, when they are so used a kind of organization is established, they come under higher beings.

It was said at the beginning of today's lecture that at a by no means very distant time it will be fully necessary for humanity to know of these things. In a not very distant future, science will take an extraordinary course. Science will become increasingly materialistic, will confine itself simply to a description of external facts of the physical senses. Science will confine itself to the crudely material, although a strange transitional state still prevails today. A time of sheer undiluted materialism in science lies not very far behind us. This crude materialism is at the most still seen as a possibility by people of a purely amateur outlook, though few thinkers trouble to set something else in its place. We see a whole number of abstract theories appear in which a timid reference is made to the super-sensible, the superbodily. The course of events, however, and the power of external physical facts will utterly overthrow these strange, fantastic theories which are set up by those who are dissatisfied today with physical science. And one day the learned will find themselves in a peculiar situation as regards these theories. All that they have spun out about All-Being and All-Ensouledness of this or that world, all their speculations will be overthrown and men will have nothing more in the hand than sheer sense-perceptible facts in the fields of geology, biology, astronomy, and so forth. The theories set up today will be very short-lived, and to the one who is able to look into the special course of science, an absolute desolation of the purely physical horizon is presented.

Then, however, the time will also have come when a fairly great number of representatives of humanity will be ripe to acknowledge the super-sensible worlds of which the spiritual-science world-conception speaks today. Such a phenomenon as that of the bee-life in connection with what can be known of the super-sensible worlds offers a wonderful answer to the great riddle of existence. These things are of great importance from yet another side. It will become increasingly indispensable to grasp the nature of the group souls, and such knowledge will play a great role even in the purely external evolution of humanity. If we go back thousands and thousands of years we find man himself as a being still belonging to a group soul. Human evolution on our Earth is from the group soul nature to the individual soul. Man advances through the gradual descent of his ego-endowed soul into physical conditions, there having the opportunity of becoming individual. We can observe different stages in the evolution of mankind and see how the group soul gradually becomes individual.

Let us go back to the time of the first third of the Atlantean culture epoch. There the life of man was quite different; in the bodies in which we were incorporated at that time our souls had quite different experiences. There is one experience which plays a role in man's life today—whether as individual or member of social group—that has undergone a great change since that time, namely, the alternation of waking and sleeping.

In ancient Atlantean times you would not have experienced the same alternation of waking and sleeping as exists today. What is then the characteristic difference in comparison with present humanity?

When the physical and etheric bodies lie in bed, the astral body with the ego lifts itself out and what one calls the modern consciousness sinks into an indefinite darkness. In the morning when the astral body and the ego draw again into the other members they make use of the physical organs and consciousness lights up. This condition of daily waking in consciousness, nightly sleeping in unconsciousness, did not exist formerly. When it was daytime and man dipped down into his physical body, as far as was the case then, he by no means saw physical beings and objects in definite boundaries as he does today. He saw everything with vague outlines just as you do when you go along the streets on a foggy evening and see the lamps surrounded with a misty aura. That was the way the human being of that time saw everything.

If that was the day condition, what was the night condition? When the human being passed out of the physical and etheric bodies during the night, no absolute unconsciousness came over him, it was only a different kind of consciousness. At that time man was still aware of the spiritual processes and spiritual beings around him, not clearly and exactly as in true clairvoyance, but with a last relic of ancient clairvoyant sight. Man lived by day in a world of hazy, nebulous outlines, in the night he lived among spiritual beings who were around him as we have the various objects around us today. There was thus no sharp division between day and night, and what is contained in saga and myths is not some folk-fantasy but memories of the experiences which early man had in the super-sensible world in his then state of consciousness. Wotan or Zeus or other super-sensible spiritual divinities who were known to various peoples are not fabrications of fantasy as is asserted at the council-board of erudition. Such assertions can only be made by someone who knows nothing of the nature of folk-fantasy. It does not in the least occur to early peoples to personify in that way. Those were experiences in ancient times. Wotan and Thor were beings with whom man went about as today he goes about with his fellow-men, and myths and sagas are memories of the ages of ancient clairvoyance.

We must be clear, however, that something else was united with this living into the spiritual super-sensible worlds. In these worlds man felt himself not as an individual being but as a sort of limb of spiritual beings. He belonged to higher spiritual beings as our hands belong to us. The faint feeling of individuality which man possessed at that time he acquired when he dipped down into his physical body and emancipated himself from the “dance” of the divine spiritual beings. That was the beginning of his feeling of individuality. At that time man was absolutely clear about his group soul, he felt himself immersed in the group soul when he left his physical body and entered the super-sensible consciousness. That was an ancient time when the human being had a vivid consciousness of belonging to a group soul, a group ego.

Let us look at a second stage of human evolution—we will omit intermediate stages—, the stage referred to in the history of the Patriarchs of the Old Testament. What really underlies this we have already related. We have given the reason why the Patriarchs Adam, Noah, and so on, had such a long life time. It was because the memory of early mankind was quite different from that of contemporary man. The memory of modern man has in fact become individual, too. He remembers what he has experienced since birth—many actually from a much later point of time. This was not the case in ancient times. At that time what the father had experienced between birth and death, what had been experienced by the grandfather, the great-grandfather, were as much an object of memory as a man's own experiences. Strange as it seems to the modern man there was a time when memory went beyond the individual and back through the whole blood relationship. The external sign for the existence of such a memory is precisely such names as Noah, Adam, and so on. These names do not denote single individuals between birth and death. Today a name is given to the one individual whose memory is enclosed between birth and death. Formerly the giving of a name went as far as the memory reached back into the generations, as far as the blood flowed through the generations.

“Adam” is merely a name that lasted as long as the memory lasted. One who does not know that the giving of names in former times was quite different from what it is today will not be able to understand the nature of these things at all. A fundamental consciousness mediating quite differently existed in ancient times. Imagine that the ancestor had had two children, each of these two again, the next generation again two, and so forth. In all of them the memory reached up to the ancestor and they felt themselves one in the memory which meets up above, so to speak, in a common point. The people of the Old Testament expressed this by saying—and this applies to each single adherent of the Old Testament—“I and Father Abraham are one.” Each individual felt himself hidden in the consciousness of the group-soul, in the “Father Abraham.”

The consciousness with which the Christ has endowed mankind surpasses that. The ego through its consciousness is connected directly with the spiritual world, and this comes to expression in: “Before Abraham was, was the I—or the I am.” Here the impulse to stimulate the “I am” comes fully into the separate individual.

So we see a second stage of the evolution of mankind: the group-soul age which finds its external expression in the blood relationship of the generations. A people which has particularly developed this lays very special value on continually emphasizing: As folk we have a folk-groupsoul in common.—That was particularly the case for the people of the Old Testament, and the conservatives among them strongly opposed therefore the emphasis of the “I am” of the individual ego. Whoever reads St. John's Gospel can grasp with spiritual hands, so to speak, that that is true. One need only read the story of the conversation of Jesus with the woman of Samaria at the well. Here it is expressly pointed out that Christ Jesus goes to those also who are not related by blood. Read how remarkably it is indicated: “For the Jews had no dealings with the Samaritans.” One who can experience this gradually, meditatively, will see how humanity has advanced from the group soul to the individual soul.

History has become an entirely external matter, very much a “fable convenue,” for it is written from documents. Suppose that something had to be written today from documents and the most important documents are lost! Then whatever documents are accidentally available are thrown together and reports are made. For matters of spiritual reality one needs no documents; they are inscribed in the Akashic Record which is a faithful record and effaces nothing. It is difficult, however, to read in the Akashic Record because the external documents are even a hindrance to the reader of spiritual “scripts.” But we can see how the advance from group soul to individual soul has taken place in times lying very near to our own.

One who observes history from a spiritual aspect will have to recognize a most important period of time in the early Middle Ages. Previously man was still enclosed in various groups if only externally. To a much greater extent than is dreamt of by modern man, people at the beginning of the Middle Ages still received their significance and value even as regards their work, from relationship and other connections. It was a natural consequence for the son to do what the father did. Then came the time of the great inventions and discoveries. The world began to demand more from the purely personal proficiency, and man was increasingly torn out of the old connections. We can see the expression of this throughout the Middle Ages when cities of the same type were founded over the whole of Europe. We can still distinguish today the cities built on this type from those built on other foundations.

In the middle of the Middle Ages there was again an advance from the group soul to the individual soul. If we look into the future we must say: More and more man emancipates himself from the old group soul element and individualizes himself. If you could look back to earlier phases of man's evolution you would see how those cultures were cast in the same mold—as, for instance, Egypt and Rome. This is only in a very slight degree true of today. Humanity has now descended to the point where not only manners and customs are individual but even opinions and faiths as well. There are people among us already who look on it as a lofty ideal for everyone to have his own religion. The idea floats before quite a number that a time must come when there are as many religions and truths as persons.

This will not be the course of human evolution. It would take this course if men were to continue to follow the impulse coming today from materialism. That would lead to disharmony, to the splitting of humanity into separate individuals. Mankind, however, will only not take this course if such a spiritual movement as Spiritual Science is accepted. What will enter then? The great truth, the great law, will be realized that the most individual truths, those that are found in the most inward way, are at the same time those that hold good for all.

I have already commented on the fact that today there is really general agreement upon the truths of mathematics alone, for these are the most trivial of all. No one can say that he finds mathematical truths through external experience; we find them through inwardly realizing them. If one wants to show that the three angles of a triangle make 180°, then one draws a line through the apex which is parallel to the base and lays the three angles together fan-wise; then angle a = d, b = e, c = itself, and so the three angles are equal to a straight line, that is, 180°. Anyone who has once grasped this knows that it must be so, once and for all, just as one knows that 3 x 3 = 9 after it has once been grasped. I do not think one would expect to discover that by induction.

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These most trivial of all truths, the arithmetical, geometrical, are found inwardly, and yet people do not dispute about them. They are in absolute agreement about them because man is far enough advanced to grasp them. Agreement of opinion prevails only as long as pure truth is not clouded by passions, sympathy and antipathy. A time will come, though it is still far distant, when mankind will be laid hold of increasingly by the knowledge of the inner world of truth. Then in spite of all individualism, in spite of truth being found by everyone for himself inwardly, harmony will prevail. If mathematical truths were not so simple and obvious then the passions aroused in acknowledging them would lead to many difficulties. For if covetousness entered in then perhaps many housewives would determine that 2 x 2 = 5 and not 4. These things are only so obvious and simple that they can no longer be clouded by sympathy and antipathy. Continually wider regions will be grasped by this form of truth and more peace can come to mankind if truth is grasped in this manner. The human being has grown out of the group soul condition and emancipates himself from it increasingly. If we look at groups instead of the souls, we have family connections, connections of tribe and nation, and finally connected races. The race corresponds to a group soul. All these group connections of early humanity are what man outgrows and the more we advance the more the race conception loses its meaning.

We stand today at a transitional point; race will gradually disappear entirely and something else will take its place. Those who will again grasp spiritual truth as it has been described will be led together of their own free will. Those will be the connections of a later age. The human beings of earlier times were born into connections, born into the tribe, the race. Later we shall live in the connections and associations which men create for themselves, uniting in groups with those of similar ideas while retaining their complete freedom and individuality. To realize this is necessary for a right understanding of something like the Anthroposophical Society. The Anthroposophical Society is intended to be a first example of such a voluntary association, although we may be well aware that it has not yet reached very far. The attempt had to be made to create a group in which men find themselves together without the differentiation of the ancient group soul's nature and there will be many such associations in the future. Then we shall no longer have to speak of racial connections but of intellectual-ethical-moral aspects with regard to the associations that are formed. The individuals voluntarily allow their feelings to stream together and this again causes the forming of something which goes beyond the merely emancipated man. An emancipated human being possesses his individual soul which is never lost when it has once been attained. But when men find themselves together in voluntary associations they group themselves round centres. The feelings streaming in this way to a centre once more give beings the opportunity of working as a kind of group soul, though in quite a different sense from the early group souls. All the earlier group souls were beings who made man unfree. These new beings, however, are compatible with man's complete freedom and individuality. Indeed, in a certain respect we may say that they support their existence on human harmony; it will lie in the souls of men themselves whether or not they give as many as possible of such higher souls the opportunity of descending to man. The more that men are divided, the fewer lofty souls will descend into the human sphere. The more that associations are formed where feelings of fellowship are developed with complete freedom, the more lofty beings will descend and the more rapidly the earthly planet will be spiritualized.

So we see that if man is to acquire any idea of future evolution, he must have a thorough understanding of the character of the group soul element. For otherwise, if his individual soul keeps itself aloof too long on the earth, and does not find the link of companionship, it could come about that it lets the chance of union go by. It would then itself become a sort of elemental being, and the elemental beings originating from man would be of quite an evil nature. Whereas those which have arisen from the earlier kingdoms are very useful for our orderly course of nature, the human elemental beings will by no means possess this quality.

We have seen that such severed beings arise in certain border regions, and they arise also on the boundary made by the transition from the group soul nature to the independent group associations where the connections are of an aesthetic, moral, intellectual character. Wherever such connections arise, group beings are there.

If you could observe certain spots, as, for instance, springs where underneath there is stone overgrown with moss, thus forming a kind of partition between plant and stone, and then water trickles over it—that too is essential—then you would see that what are called Nymphs and Undines are very real, an actuality. Again, where metals come in contact with the rest of the earthy realm there lie whole bundles of the beings we call Gnomes. A fourth species are the Salamanders which form, so to say, the youngest generation in the ranks of elemental beings. They nevertheless exist in large numbers. To a great extent they owe their existence to a process of separating off from animal group souls. These beings too seek opportunities for finding nourishment, and they find it in particular where not quite normal relations sometimes exist between the human and the animal kingdoms. Those who know something about these things are aware that elemental beings—and definitely good beings—develop through the intimate relationship of the rider and his steed. Through the warm connection of certain men with animal groups, feelings, thoughts and impulses arise which provide good nourishment for these elemental beings of a Salamander nature. That can be particularly observed in the united life of the shepherd and his flock, in the case of herdsmen in general who live in close connection with their animals. Certain Salamander-like elemental beings can find their nourishment in the feelings which develop through this intimacy between man and beast, and they remain where this food is to be found. They are quite shrewd too, full of a natural wisdom. Faculties develop in the shepherd through which these elemental beings can whisper to him what they know, and many of the recipes or prescriptions coming from such sources have originated in this way. A man among such conditions may well be surrounded as if by fine spiritual beings who furnish him with a knowledge of which our modern intellectuals have not the slightest idea. All these things are founded on good grounds and can definitely be observed through the methods which occult wisdom can perfect.

I should like to conclude by pointing to yet another phenomenon which can show you how certain things which are explained quite abstractly today have often sprung from a deep wisdom. I have already spoken of Atlantean times and how when men left their bodies in the night, they lived among the spiritual beings whom they called the Gods. These men were descending deeper into a physical corporeality; but the beings whom they revered as the Gods, that is, Zeus, Wotan, are on another path of evolution. They do not descend as far as the physical body, they do not touch the physical world. But even there we find certain transitional states. Man has come into existence through his whole soul and spirit being having hardened to his physical body. In the case of man the group souls in their entirety have come down to the physical plane, and man's physical body became an imprint of the group soul. Let us suppose a being like Zeus—who is a positive reality—has just slightly contacted the physical plane, just projected into it a very little. That is rather as if you dip a ball into water and it is wet underneath. In the same way certain beings in Atlantean times have only been grazed by the physical world. Physical eyes do not see what remains in the spiritual world as astral-etheric. Only the part which projects into the physical world is visible. From such projections arose symbolism in mythology. If Zeus has the eagle as symbol that is because his eagle-nature is the little projection where a being of the higher worlds touched the physical world. A great part of the bird world is severed portions of such evolving beings of the super-sensible world. As with the ravens of Wotan and the eagle of Zeus so is it everywhere where symbolism goes back to occult facts. Much will become clearer to you if you take into account like this the nature and activity and evolution of the group souls in the most varied fields.

When we think of the evolution of humanity advancing from stage to stage as described by Spiritual Science, we shall attach the very greatest significance to the fact that man, incarnating again and again in the course of the different epochs, gradually reaches higher degrees of perfection, until he is finally able to kindle into activity within himself powers befitting the various stages of planetary evolution. On the one side we see man ascending gradually towards his divine goal. But he would never be capable of reaching the heights intended for him if Beings whose paths of development in the Universe have differed from his own, did not come to his aid.

From time to time—for so it may be expressed—Beings from other spheres enter into and unite with earthly and human evolution in order to lift man to their own heights. Even during the earlier planetary embodiments of our Earth, even during Old Saturn, sublime Beings—the Thrones—sacrificed their will-substance in order that the earliest beginnings of the physical human body, might be established. This is only one example of what has taken place on a vast scale. But Beings whose development has advanced beyond that of man do indeed descend to his realm and unite with Earth-evolution by dwelling for a time within a human soul. It is also sometimes said that these Beings ‘assume human form’, or more simply, that they appear as an aspiring power in the soul of a man who since he is ensouled by a god, is able to achieve more in evolution than is possible for others. To hear of such things goes against the grain at the present time when the tendency is to reduce everything to one level and to apply materialistic ideas universally. Only a rudiment has persisted of the conception just referred to. The suggestion that a man is the vehicle of a Being from higher realms would be regarded as sheer superstition nowadays. But a rudiment at least of this truth has been preserved, even in this materialistic age, although it takes the form of a subconscious belief in what is deemed miraculous. People still believe that ‘geniuses’ appear here and there. Even normal modern consciousness recognizes men of genius who stand out from the masses and of whom it is said that they possess faculties differing from those of ordinary human nature. A belief in ‘geniuses’ persists even to-day. But there are also circles where such belief has been abandoned; the very existence of men of genius is refuted because materialistic thinking has lost all sense of the realities of the spiritual life. Nevertheless belief in genius is quite widespread and if this belief is not empty credulity it will admit that a power different from that of the ordinary human faculties comes to expression through a man of genius who is striving to give an impetus to evolution. If attention were given to teachings cognizant of the truth about men of genius, it would be realised when such a person appears suddenly to have become an embodiment of infinite goodness, greatness and strength, that this is a case where a spiritual power has descended and taken possession of the centre from which such Beings must work, namely from the inmost nature of man himself.

It should be clear to an anthroposophist from the outset that there are these two possibilities: the ascent of man to spiritual heights in the course of his evolution, and the descent of divine-spiritual Beings into human bodies or human souls. A passage in the Rosicrucian Mystery Play¹ points to the fact that when something of importance is to take place in the evolution of humanity, a divine Being must as it were unite with and permeate a human soul. This is a necessity of evolution.

To understand this in relation to the spiritual evolution of our planet, we will remind ourselves that in very early times of its existence the Earth was still united with the Sun. In a remotely distant past the Sun separated from the Earth. Anthroposophists know that this was not merely a separation of Earth-substance and Sun-substance in the material sense, but a separation of divine-spiritual Beings who were connected with the Sun or with the other planets. After the separation of the Sun from the Earth, certain spiritual Beings remained united with the Earth, whereas others remained united with the Sun; these latter were Beings who, because their development had progressed beyond the stage attainable in earthly conditions, could not complete their further evolution on the Earth. Thus certain spiritual Beings remained even more closely connected with the Earth, whereas other Beings sent their influences and forces from the Sun into earthly existence. After the separation of the Sun there are, as it were, two arenas—the Earth with its Beings and the Sun with its Beings. The spiritual Beings who can be helpers of man from a higher sphere are those who transferred their arena of activity from the Earth to the Sun. And from thence—from the Sun-sphere—come the Beings who from time to time unite with earthly humanity in order to lead the evolution of the Earth and of Man to further stages.

In the myths of many peoples there are constant references to ‘Sun Heroes’—Beings who work from spiritual spheres into the evolution of humanity. A man who is permeated by a Sun Being is of far greater significance than his exterior appearance at first reveals. The exterior appearance is an illusion, is maya, and the real Being is behind the maya—only to be divined by one who is able to look into the very depths of a nature such as this.

In the Mysteries there was, and there still is, knowledge of this twofold aspect of the evolutionary course of humanity. Distinction has always been made between divine Spirits who come down from the spiritual realm and men who strive upwards from the Earth towards Initiation into the secrets of spiritual reality. What, then, is the nature of the Being we call Christ?

In the lecture yesterday we learnt that ‘Christ, the Son of the Living God’ is a Being who descends. If we were to use a term current in oriental philosophy, we should call Him an ‘Avatar’—a descending God. But it is only from a definite point that we can speak of Him as a descending Being. As such He is described by all the four Evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. At the moment of the Baptism by John this Being came down from the realm of Sun-existence to the Earth and united with a human being. We must realise that according to the views of the four Evangelists, this Sun Being is the greatest Avatar of all, the greatest of all other Sun Beings who have ever descended. Hence it is to be expected that a specially prepared nature in humanity must grow towards His level.

All four Evangelists tell of the Sun Being, of the ‘Son of the living God’, who comes to man to help his evolution forward, but only the writers of the Gospel of St. Matthew and St. Luke tell of the man who developed to the stage where he could receive this Sun Being into himself. From these Gospels we learn that for thirty years the man in question prepared for the great moment when he could become the vehicle for the Sun Being. And because the Being we call Christ is so universal, so all-embracing, the preparation of the bodily sheaths able to receive Him could not be a simple process. Very specially prepared physical and etheric sheaths were needed to receive the descending Sun Being.

From our study of the Matthew Gospel we have learnt how and whence these sheaths were produced. But from these physical and etheric sheaths derived from the forty-two generations of the Hebrew people and prepared for the Sun Being, neither the astral body nor the actual Ego-bearer could be directly unfolded. For this purpose a special measure was necessary, achieved through its instrumentality of a different Being—namely, the Nathan Jesus, whose early history is narrated in the Luke Gospel.² Then, as we heard, the Jesus of the Matthew Gospel and the Jesus of the Luke Gospel became one. The Zarathustra-Individuality, as an Ego, first entered into the bodily sheaths of the Jesus described in the Matthew Gospel; when this Jesus was twelve years old, the Zarathustra-Ego passed over into and continued to live in the Nathan Jesus of the Luke Gospel, in order, within that body, to enrich the astral body and Ego-bearer with the qualities attained in the specially prepared physical and etheric bodies of the Jesus of the Matthew Gospel. The higher members in the Nathan Jesus were then able to mature and in his thirtieth year to receive the Being descending from above.

In relating the course of these events, the writer of the Matthew Gospel directed his attention primarily to the question: What physical body and what ether to make it possible for the Christ Being to tread the Earth? And his knowledge enabled him to answer this question in the following way.—In order that the suitable physical body and the suitable etheric body might be produced through heredity it was necessary that all the qualities once laid as rudiments in Abraham should develop to the full extent through the forty-two generations of the Hebrew people. Then, continuing to answer the question, he said to himself: A physical body and an etheric body of this calibre could become a fitting instrument only if indwelt by the greatest Individuality—Zarathustra—who prepared mankind to understand the Christ. This instrument could harbour the Zarathustra-Individuality for as long as it made development possible, that is to say, until the twelfth year, and the Individuality had then to pass out of the body of the Matthew-Jesus into the body of the Luke-Jesus. The writer of the Matthew Gospel then turned his attention away from the circumstances with which he was at first concerned, to the Luke-Jesus, and followed the life of Zarathustra (in the body of that Jesus) until the thirtieth year. That was the time when Zarathustra had brought the astral body and Ego-bearer to the stage where he could offer up all the members in order that the Sun Spirit coming down from above might take possession. All this is indicated in the scene of the Baptism by John.

If we think again of the separation of the Earth from the Sun³ remembering that Christ was the supreme Leader of the Beings who withdrew from the Earth at that time, we shall realise that there are Beings whose influence spreads only gradually on the Earth, just as it is only in course of time that Christ's influence has been able to make itself felt on the Earth. But something else as well was connected with the separation of the Sun. Here we must remind ourselves that in respect of substance, the old Saturn-evolution was comparatively simple. It was an existence in fire or warmth. On Old Saturn there was as yet no air or water, no light-ether—which first appeared during the Old Sun-evolution. Then during the Old Moon-evolution the watery element was added as a further condensation on the one side, and the sound-ether as a further refinement or rarefaction on the other. During Earth-evolution there was a condensation to the solid or ‘earth’ element, and rarefaction to what we call the life-ether. On Earth, therefore, we have warmth, air or gas, water, and the solid or earth element; and as states or rarefaction: light-ether, sound-ether, and life-ether, this last being the most highly rarefied ether of which we can have any knowledge.

With the separation of the Sun, not only did its material part leave the Earth, but its spiritual part too. After a time the spiritual part returned to the Earth gradually—but not completely. I spoke of this in Munich in the lectures on the ‘days of creation’⁴ and will make only a brief reference to it here. Of higher states of rarefaction, man on Earth perceives only the warmth-ether, and light. What he perceives as sound or tone is a materialization of the real sound which lies in the sound-ether. By sound-ether is meant the bearer of what is called the ‘Harmony of the Spheres’, perceptible only to clairaudience. True, the Sun in its now ‘physical’ state sends its light to the Earth, but this higher state is also present in it.

I have said that those who have knowledge of these things are aware of the meaning of Goethe's words at the beginning of Faust:

The sun, with many a sister-sphere,
Still sings the rival psalm of wonder,
And still his fore-ordained career
Accomplishes with tread of thunder....

These words point to the Harmony of the Spheres, to what lies in the sound-ether. But this can be experienced by man only when he rises to its level through Initiation or when a Being of the Sun descends in order to convey it in the form of actual experience to one chosen to be instrumental in promoting the development of other men. For such an individual the Sun begins to sound and the Harmonies of the Spheres to be audible.—

Above the sound-ether is the life-ether. And just as the word, the meaning, is contained in mere sound as its inner content, as a higher soul-reality, so too, ‘meaning’ and ‘word’ are bound up with the life-ether. ‘Word’ or ‘meaning’ are in this sense identical with what was called ‘Honover’ in later Persian times and the ‘Logos’ by John the Evangelist. Sound or tone filled with meaning belongs essentially to the Sun, and the Beings of the Sun.

In early post-Atlantean times, Zarathustra was among the blessed ones whose ears were not deaf to this articulate, resounding Sun and its Beings. It is no myth, but a literal truth, that Zarathustra too had developed to the stage where he received his teaching through the ‘Sun Word’. The glorious teachings given by the old Zarathustra to his pupils were possible because Zarathustra himself was an instrument through Whom the tone, the very meaning and essence of the Sun Word resounded Hence the Persian legend speaks of the Sun Word proclaimed through the mouth of Zarathustra, of the mysterious Word concealed behind the Sun. The legend is speaking there of the astral body of the Sun, of Ahura Mazda—the Sun Word, the '‘Logos’ in Greek translation.

In those ancient times a personality even of the exalted rank of Zarathustra was not initiated to the stage of being able consciously to receive the message that was to be conveyed to mankind; such a personality was ensouled by a higher Being to whose level he had not yet actually risen. Zarathustra could teach as he did because the Sun Aura was revealed to hi, because Ahura Mazdao resounded within him, because the Sun Word, the great Aura, the Light of Worlds, was proclaimed through him. Ahura Mazdao, the great Aura, was the outer, corporeal nature of the Sun God whose influences were being sent to man in advance, before this Being was actually on the Earth. The Sun Word was then a more inward power.—

Zarathustra spoke to those who were his pupils in somewhat the following way.—‘You must realise that behind the physical light of the Sun there is spiritual light. Just as behind physical man there is his astral body, his aura, so behind the Sun there is the great Aura. The physical Sun is to be regarded as the light-body of a Being who will one day descend to the Earth; it is the outer, bodily raiment of this Being that is perceived through clairvoyant vision and within this bodily raiment there is soul. Just as soul expresses itself through sound or tone, so does the Sun Word, the Sun Logos, speak through the Sun Aura’... And Zarathustra could give this promise to mankind.—One day the great Aura, the Being of Light, will come from divine-spiritual spheres, and the soul of that Being will be the Sun Word.—This was the prophetic wisdom, uttered for the first time by Zarathustra, concerning the coming of the Sun Aura and of the Sun Word.

From epoch to epoch the tradition was preserved in the Mysteries that the coming of the Sun Word, the Sun Logos, had been prophesied to mankind and this was always the hope and the great consolation of those who longed for a nobler and better life. And the less exalted Sun-spirits who linked themselves with the Earth and were actually messengers of the Sun Word—they too were able to give more and more definite teachings about the Spirit of the Sun, the Sun Word, the Sun Aura.

This was the one side of the Mystery-tradition as it lived on through the epochs. The other side was that it behooved men to know both in theory and by dint of effort that they could grow nearer to the Being who was to descend to the Earth. But in pre-Christian times it was not possible to believe that any weak individual man could without further ado approach the greatest of the Sun Beings, the Leader of the Sun Spirits, the Christ. It was not possible for an individual to achieve this through any form of Initiation. Hence the Gospel of Matthew describes how all the vital elements in the blood of the Hebrew people were assembled in order to make it possible for such a human being to come into existence. And on the other side, the Gospel of Luke shows how the best and highest qualities attainable by earthly man were ‘filtered’ through the seventy-seven successive stages in order to produce the body capable of receiving the greatest Being who was ever to descend to the Earth.

The position in the Mysteries was as follows.—Some of those who needed to be instructed or influenced were weak human beings; by no means all of them were capable of grasping the nature of the goal to be attained by humanity or by an individual. Hence those who were to be initiated into the secrets of the Mysteries were divided into classes and the secrets were approached in different ways. The special teaching given to some individuals concerned the outer life and what they must achieve in order to become fitting instruments or ‘temples’ for the descending Sun Being. But there were other pupils of the Mysteries who were taught how the soul must learn in stillness and inner quietude to understand and experience the nature of a Sun Spirit. Can you picture that in the Mysteries there were pupils whose particular task it was to order their outer life in accordance with definite principles and that from early childhood onwards their bodily development was guided in a way that would enable them to become bearers, temples, for a descending Sun Spirit? This was what happened in olden times and it happens in the modern age too, only it escapes the notice of materialistic observers.

Let us suppose that the time is approaching when a sublime Being is to descend from spiritual realms in order again to give a stimulus to human evolution. Those who participate in the Mysteries must wait in expectation for this to happen; their task is to interpret the signs of the times. In calmness and patience, without ostentation, they must wait for a God to descend from heavenly heights and give an impetus to mankind. But it is also their task to observe humanity, to watch for a personality who can be directed and made fit to be the vehicle, the temple, for such a Being. If the Being who is to descend is very exalted, the personality who is to be the temple must be under guidance from earliest childhood. This actually happens, only it is not perceived. Later on, however, in accounts of the lives of such men, certain similar features become apparent. Even if there are differences in the external circumstances of their lives, a certain underlying similarity is evident. Looking back over history we find individuals here and there whose lives, even outwardly, have taken a somewhat similar course. There is no denying this and it has not escaped the notice of certain modern researchers. In current, though not very profound academic writings, tables of similarities in the biographies of such individuals are presented. Professor Jensen (of Marburg), for example, has collected similarities in the life-histories of Gilgamesh, Moses, Jesus, Paul. The tables set out certain comparable features in the lives of each of these individuals and are very convincing. No wonder the materialistic mind of to-day is taken aback by the remarkable similarities. Very naturally the conclusion drawn is that one myth was copied from another, that the writer of the life of Jesus copied from the life-history of Gilgamesh, that the life-history of Moses is nothing but a paraphrase of an ancient epic. And the final conclusion reached is that none of them—neither Moses, nor Jesus, nor Paul—existed as physical personalities! People usually have no inkling of the point to which materialistic interpretations are carried by research today.

The truth is that this similarity in such life-histories is simply due to the fact that personalities into whom a divine Being is to be received must be under direction and guidance even in childhood. Nor will this be a surprise to those who have any insight into the deeper course of the evolution of humanity and of the world. Hence not only comparative mythology but all attempts to find similarities in the myths are really nothing but child's play and lead nowhere. What useful purpose is served by establishing that similar traits are to be found in the lives of the Germanic Siegfried and some Greek or other hero? It goes without saying that this will be so. The important thing is not the covering but the Individuality within the covering! It is the Individuality who is of salient importance, not the particular course taken, let us say, by Siegfried's life. But these things can be established only through occult research.

The point to bear in mind is that men destined to become vehicles, or temples, for a Being who is to lift humanity to a higher level are under very definite leadership and that there will necessarily be similarities in the course and in the fundamental features of their lives. Hence since ancient times directives were always given in the Mystery-centres concerning such men. Directives of the same kind also existed in the communities of the Essenes with reference to Christ Jesus: for example, what the nature must be of those Beings who as the Solomon Jesus and the Nathan Jesus were to provide the temple for the sublime Sun Being, the Christ.

But there were different classes, different kinds of Initiates; aspirants for Initiation were not all of them initiated into everything. To some it was made especially clear what ordeals must be undergone by one who was expected to become a worthy vehicle for a divine Being. And there were others to whom it was made known how a divine Being acts when revealing himself in a man—to put it rather trivially, when revealing himself as a ‘genius’. Again, people fail to perceive to-day that geniuses too show undoubted similarities. Biographies nowadays are not written from the vantage-point of the spirit. If an attempt were made to describe the genius of Goethe, let us say, from such a vantage-point, remarkable similarity would be found, fog example, with the genius of Dante, of Homer, of Aeschylus. But when modern biographies are being written, notes are collected of trivial details in the external lives of such men. That is what interests people. So we have a prolific collection of notes on the life of Goethe but as yet no true presentation of what Goethe really was. Men declare—actually as the outcome of tremendous arrogance—that they are incapable of following the development of genius in the human personality; the tendency is to drag the first, youthful authors of certain poetic works into the limelight and then talk in lordly style about the elemental freshness and originality manifested in their early years, whereas in later life these qualities have been lost and the authors in question have become old. What really lies behind this is that in their arrogance people are willing to understand poets in their youth but are not willing to keep pace with the experiences undergone in later life. Great pride is taken in having remained young; age is despised and people have no inkling that it is not the old who have become ‘old’ but that they themselves have remained children! This is a widespread evil. But as it is so deeply rooted we need not wonder that there is little understanding of the fact that a divine Being can take possession of a human personality and that the way in which such a Being manifests in the different human personalities is fundamentally the same.

Because the acquisition of such knowledge entailed much arduous effort, pupils in the Mysteries were divided into classes. It is not to be wondered at that in certain sections of the Mysteries teaching was given as to how a man prepares himself to grow to the level where contact with the divine Being is possible, whereas in other classes the teaching concerned the actual descent of the Logos, the Sun Word, the essence of Light in the Aura of the Sun Being.

In the case of Christ, the descent was infinitely complex and it could be no surprise if more than four men had been needed to understand such a momentous event. But there were four who made efforts to do so. Two of them, the writers of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, were at pains to portray the nature of the personality who grew towards the descending Sun Being. Matthew concerned himself particularly with the physical body and the etheric body, Luke with the astral body and Ego-bearer. Mark, on the other hand, described the Sun Aura, the spiritual Light that pervades cosmic space and streamed into the figure of Christ Jesus. Hence his Gospel begins immediately with the Baptism, when the Light of Worlds descended. The Gospel of John describes the soul of the Sun Spirit, the Logos, the Sun Word, the inner aspect. The Gospel of John is therefore the mostly deeply inward of the four.

The facts were apportioned and the complex Being of Christ Jesus described from four sides. All four Evangelists tell of the Christ in Jesus of Nazareth. But each of these four writers of the Gospels is impelled to adhere to his starting-point, from whence came the clairvoyant insight enabling him to give some description of this complex Being.—And now we will repeat what has been said in order to impress it more firmly upon our minds.

Matthew directs his gaze to the birth of the Solomon Jesus and follows the gradual preparation of the physical body and etheric body, perceiving how these sheaths are discarded by Zarathustra and how the qualities and faculties he had acquired in the physical body and etheric body of the Solomon Jesus are carried over by him into the Jesus of the Luke Gospel. The writer of the Matthew Gospel must then extend his gaze to what had not concerned him at the beginning. But his attention is directed first and foremost to the features that had formed his starting-point: the destinies of the faculties that passed over from the Solomon Jesus into the Nathan Jesus. His gaze is directed less to the pristine purity of the astral body and Ego-bearing principle in the Luke Jesus and more to what had passed over from the Jesus with whom he is chiefly concerned. And when the writer of the Matthew Gospel is speaking of the Sun Being who has descended, again he is more mindful of the faculties possessed by Jesus of Nazareth because the physical body and etheric body had been developed by the Solomon Jesus. These faculties and qualities were naturally still perceptible in Christ, and the writer of the Matthew Gospel describes with particular exactitude this aspect of Christ Jesus which was of primary importance to him and upon which his attention had been focused at the outset.

The writer of the Gospel of Mark directs his attention from the beginning to the Sun Sprit descending from heaven. His gaze is focused, not upon any being of an earthly nature, but upon the Sun Spirit who lived and worked in the physical body. The physical figure on the Earth is only the means whereby the indwelling Sun Spirit can be portrayed. Hence Mark draws special attention to ho the forces and powers of the Sun Spirit take effect. Therefore although in the Gospel of Matthew and Mark a great deal seems to be identical, their standpoints are different. Matthew deals more especially with the aspect of the sheaths and draws particular attention to the later manifestations of qualities and faculties that were already potentially present in early life; and he writes in a way that reveals the effects produced by these qualities. The writer of the Mark Gospel, on the other hand, uses the physical figure of Jesus merely as a means of showing what can be wrought on Earth by the Sun Spirit. This is everywhere apparent. If you want to understand the Gospels in detail, you must bear in mind that the attention of each Evangelist turns ever and again to the aspect with which he was primarily concerned.

The writer of the Luke Gospel, as would be expected, has particularly in mind the astral body and Ego-bearing principle, that is to say, not what the Being experiences as an outer, physical personality, but in the astral body as the bearer of feelings and sentient perceptions. The astral body is also the bearer of creative faculties, of compassion, of mercy. Bearing as He did the astral body of the Nathan Jesus, Christ Jesus was the very embodiment of these qualities. Thus the eyes of Luke are directed from the beginning to all the manifestations of compassion, to whatever Christ Jesus is able to accomplish because He bears the astral body of the Nathan Jesus.

And the gaze of the writer of the John Gospel is focused upon the very highest Power that can work on the Earth, upon the inmost being and nature of the Sun Spirit, brought down through the instrumentality of Jesus. John is not concerned primarily with the physical body; his eyes are turned to the Highest, to the Sun Logos; and the physical Jesus is for him simply a means for perceiving how the Sun Logos works and acts in humanity. His gaze too is fixed upon those things with which he was concerned at the beginning.

The physical body and the etheric body are sheaths out of which we pass during sleep. Both these members of human nature contain forces outpoured by divine-spiritual Beings who for millions upon millions of years have been working at the building of this temple—the temple of the physical body. We have lived in this temple since the Lemurian epoch, causing its steady deterioration. But it came to us originally as a product of the Saturn, Sun, and Moon periods of evolution. Divine beings were living and weaving in it. We an say of our physical body that it is a temple built by the Gods who have fashioned it out of solid matter to be our dwelling-place.

The etheric body contains the finer substances of man's constitution but owing to the Luciferic and Ahrimanic influences they are imperceptible to him. Elements belonging to the Sun are also present in the etheric body; into it resounds the Music of the Spheres, that which is perceptible behind the physical as a manifestation of the Gods. Hence we can say: Beings of exalted rank lie in the etheric body, Beings who are akin to the Sun Gods—The physical body and the etheric body, therefore are to be regarded as the most perfect members of human nature. When, during sleep, we have passed out of them, when they have fallen away from us, they are pervaded and worked through by divine Beings.

As he had done from the beginning, the writer of the Matthew Gospel was bound to give his chief attention to the physical body in the case of Christ Jesus too. But the first physical body was no longer in existence, having been abandoned, as we have heard, in the twelfth year of life.⁵ The divine element, the forces and powers, had passed (together with the Zarathustra-Individuality) from that body into the other physical body—the physical body of the Nathan Jesus. The perfection of this physical body of the Being now to be known as Jesus of Nazareth was due to the fact that it was filled with the forces and powers that had passed into it from the body of the Solomon Jesus. Let us now picture the writer of the Matthew Gospel turning his gaze to the dying Jesus on the Cross. His gaze had always been directed to the aspect most important to him, to what he had taken as his starting-point. At the Crucifixion the spiritual forsakes the physical body and therewith also the divine forces that had been taken over into it. The writer of the Matthew Gospel directs his gaze to the separation of the inner nature of Christ Jesus from this divine element in His physical constitution. The words that always rang out in the ancient Mysteries when the spiritual nature of a man emerged from the physical body in order to have vision in the spiritual world, were these: ‘My God, my God, how thou hast glorified me!’—The writer of the Matthew Gospel, with his attention fixed on the physical body, changes these words to: ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me!’ Thou has gone from me, hast abandoned me (XXVII, 46).—The chief attention of the writer of the Matthew Gospel has been fixed upon this aspect.

The writer of the Mark Gospel describes the coming of the outer forces and powers of the Sun Aura, ho the Sun Aura, the body of the Sun Being, unites with the etheric body. The etheric body was in the same situation as our etheric body is during sleep. As in our own case the outer forces pass out with us when we sleep, so did they at the physical death of Jesus. Hence the same words are found in the Gospel of Mark (XV, 34).

The writer of the Luke Gospel also directs his attention at the death of Christ Jesus to what was his concern at the beginning: the astral body and the Ego-bearing principle. Hence the words he uses are different. His chief attention is directed to the astral body in which at this moment compassion and mercy and love reach their greatest intensity. Hence the words: ‘Father forgive them; for they know not what they do’ (XXIII, 34). These words of love that could issue only from the astral body to which the writer of the Luke Gospel has been pointing from the beginning. And it is upon these qualities of humility and resignation to God's will which have here reached their greatest intensity and issue from the astral body, that Luke directs his gaze at the end. Hence the words in the Gospel: ‘Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.’ (XXIII, 46).

The John Gospel describes what must be fulfilled by man in Earth-existence: the ordering of existence according to the Sun Word. Hence his gaze is directed mainly to the ordering of life as proclaimed fro the Cross of Golgotha. He describes how in this hour Christ institutes a brotherhood of a higher kind than that based on blood-kinship. Brotherhood in its earlier forms arose from ties of blood. Mary was the mother of the child through blood-relationship. But soul united with soul in love—that is what was instituted through Christ Jesus. To the disciple whom He loved He gives, not the one who was the mother by blood, but He gives him the one who is his true mother in the spirit. And so the words resound from the Cross with their new meaning: ‘Behold thy son!’—‘`Behold thy mother!’ (XIX, 26, 27). The principle inherent in the life-ether by which the ordering of life is determined and community of a new kind established—that is what streamed into the Earth through Christ's Deed.

There is one supreme reality, the reality of Christ Himself behind everything the Evangelists describe. But each of them writes from the viewpoint he adopted at the beginning. Each had necessarily to direct his seership to what his particular preparation enabled him to understand; and the rest passed him by.

We shall now admit that it is not because this momentous event is described from four different sides that it seems full of contradictions; on the contrary, we realise that we can in some measure come to understand it only through being able gather the four sides into a whole. Why it is that Peter's avowal stands in the Matthew Gospel only and not in the others then seems entirely natural.

Mark describes Christ as the Sun Power, as the universal, cosmic Power working into the Earth—but in a new way. He is therefore speaking of the direct effects wrought by the Sun Aura. And the Luke Gospel describes the inmost nature of Christ Jesus especially, therefore, the astral body, the factor of individuality, how man lives entirely within himself; it is there that he functions in his own essential nature. The urge to cultivate a communal life where a man enters into relationship with other men des not lie primarily in the astral body, but in the etheric body. Hence there is no opportunity or inducement for Luke to write about the founding of any community. And certainly there is none in the case of the writer of the John Gospel who is concerned first and foremost with the Ego-nature.

On the other hand there is every inducement for the writer of the Matthew Gospel who is telling of Christ Jesus as Man, to describe happenings that are possible because God was once present in a human being. What God as Man among men can establish in the way of relationships between human beings, in the way of communities—this would necessarily be described by the Evangelists who tells of Christ Jesus in His essentially human aspect. The attention of this Evangelist has from the beginning been focused upon how Christ works as Man through the faculties derived from the physical body and etheric body. If we have insight into these things it will seem quite natural that the words which have given rise to so much controversy occur only in the Matthew Gospel: ‘Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church’, i.e. my community.

A survey of the endless discussions that take place about these words among theologians of every shade of opinion invariably brings evidence of peculiar and characteristic reasons for their acceptance or rejection, but nowhere of any understanding of their deeper meaning. Those who reject them do so because the external community of the Roman Catholic Church is founded upon them. They may have been misused in this sense but that is no proof that they were, as is sometimes alleged, inserted deliberately for the benefit of the Roman Church. Nor do those who contest their implications really know what to advance against their validity, because they do not perceive the possible distortions and misinterpretations. The theologians find themselves facing a strange dilemma. So one of them declares that the Mark Gospel is the earliest of the four; that the Gospels of Matthew and Luke were copied from it and additions made; furthermore, that because the writer of the Matthew Gospel was particularly intent upon promoting the idea of community, he inserted the Words ‘Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church.’

In the case of many passages the traditional texts do not help because it is impossible to be certain of exactly what they contain. But the words of Peter's avowal in the Matthew Gospel are among the least disputed of any, because there is no philological reason whatever for calling them into question—as there is in the case of many others owing to the complicated history of the tradition behind them. ‘Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.’ ‘Thou Peter, and upon this rock I will build my community; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.’ No objection can be made.to these words—nor indeed is ever made—from the standpoint of philology, for there is no text to justify it. There may have been hopes that a basis for objections would be forthcoming from recently discovered texts, but it so happens that the passage in question is indecipherable in these texts, the relevant portion being very corrupt. That at any rate is the verdict of philology. Naturally we must rely here upon the reports of those who have actually examined the documents.

This particular saying, therefore, cannot even be considered to be a variant of another. According to philology itself these words are among the most authentic of all and in view of the whole character of the Matthew Gospel we can well understand why they occur in it. In this Gospel Christ Jesus is depicted as Man. Once we have this clue we shall by able to apply it everywhere and we shall understand the Matthew Gospel. We shall also understand the parables told by Christ Jesus to His disciples and to those outside His immediate circle.

In the lecture yesterday we heard how man evolves from below upwards: how as a flower of his human nature he unfolds the spiritual or consciousness-soul and develops to the stage where he encounters the Christ Impulse. The five members of human nature—etheric body, astral body, sentient soul, intellectual of mind-soul, consciousness-soul—developing through the five civilization-epochs, evolve from below to higher stages. A man can mature and so imbue them with the content which, when the time comes enables them to be permeated by the Christ Impulse. Humanity evolves in such a way that in future time all men can become partakers of Christ. But they must develop these five members to the appropriate stage. If they fail to do so they will not be ready to receive the Christ. If through their different incarnations they make no efforts to develop these members to the stage where they can receive the Christ, such men cannot be united with Him, even if He comes for they have ‘no oil in their lamps’.—that is, in the five members of their being. Those who have poured no oil into their lamps are depicted in a wonderful and beautiful parable as the five foolish virgins who have not trimmed their lamps in time and cannot therefore unite with Christ; the five, however, who have provided oil for their lamps are able to unite with Him when the hour has come. All the parables that are based on numbers shed profound illumination upon the impulses given by Christ to men.

And further.—Christ brought it home to those who concerned themselves with His teaching from outside that they, too, were accustomed not to regard everything merely in its material actuality but as a sign or token of something different. He wanted to call attention to their characteristic way of thinking. He asked for a coin and pointed to the image of the Caesar upon it. This was done in order to make the people realise that the coin gives expression to something quite apart from the metal itself, namely, the fact of being subject to a particular rulership, a particular ruler. ‘What in this coin pertains to Caesar, render unto Caesar’—and that lies in the image, not in the metal. ‘But learn’—so He wished to imply—‘learn also to regard man as the bearer and temple of the living God. Regard a man exactly as you regard a coin; learn to perceive in a man the image of God and then you will know that he belongs to God.’

In all these parables there is a meaning far deeper than the trivial one that is commonly accepted. And the deeper meaning is discovered when it is known that Christ did not use parables in the way they are so often used in our journalistic age. Christ draws them from human nature itself, giving them in such a form that if a man were to think them out and apply them to his own being, he would be compelled to adopt the attitude appropriate in each particular domain. It had to be demonstrated to man how his thinking must be carried over from one domain to another when it was desirable to show him that certain methods of thought may lead to absurdity.

Here is an example.—When, for the first time, people began to invent all kinds of ‘Sun myths’ in connection with the Buddha, Christ, and others, this finally exceeded the limit of what a certain man could tolerate. Finding the same kind of thing still happening, this man said the following.—‘There is no end to what can be done through this method of applying the imagery of myths and stellar constellations to some important event. If someone comes forward and, in order to prove that Christ Jesus never lived, points out that the story of Christ's life is simply a Sun myth, it can also be proved by the same method that no Napoleon ever existed. Nothing is easier than to say: in ‘Napoleon’ there is contained the name of Apollo, the Sun God. ‘N’ as a prefix to a name in Greek does not detract from but enhances its significance: hence Napoleon—N'Apollo—is actually a kind of super-Apollo. Further remarkable similarities can be discovered. Dr. Drews, the Professor of Philosophy, who has discovered, forsooth, that Jesus never existed, has found similarity in names such as Jesus, Joses, Jason, etc. Again, remarkable assonances can be found between the names of Letitia, the mother of Napoleon, and Leto, the mother of Apollo. Going still further, one can say: Around Apollo, the Sun, there are twelve constellations; around Napoleon there were twelve Marshals who are nothing but symbols of the zodiacal constellations around the Sun. Moreover the hero of the Napoleon myth has six brothers and sisters—making seven. There are seven planets.—Conclusion: Napoleon never existed !’

This is a very witty satire on the symbolic interpretations that are so fashionable nowadays. People never really learn; if they did they could not fail to realise that according to the methods that are again being applied to-day it has long since been proved that Napoleon never lived. Humanity never learns; for by using the same arguments proof is obtained that Jesus never lived either!

These things show how necessary it is to approach with due preparation—with inner preparation too—what the Gospels tell us about the greatest event in history. Let us also realise that in this very respect it is easy for anthroposophists to go wrong. Playing with symbols derived from the stars has been by no means unknown even in the Anthroposophical Movement. In this course of lectures particularly, when I have spoken of the greatest event in the evolution of humanity in connection with its revelation in the language of the stars, my desire has been to show how this language of the stars was used in the true and right way when the happenings were really understood.

And now let us turn our thoughts to the culminating event narrated in the Gospels. I have already spoken of the Baptism and the history of the life and death of Christ Jesus as representing two stages of Initiation, and I will now add only the following.—Christ Jesus had led His disciples to the stage where they were able to see how the innermost core of man's being passes out into the Macrocosm; they saw through death and beyond death. The Resurrection must never be thought of in the usual, rather trivial sense. Think only of the words in the Matthew Gospel and also in the John Gospel where the truth of Paul's subsequent declaration is confirmed, namely that at Damascus he had seen the Risen Christ. He says expressly that he himself had seen what other brethren, the twelve and the five hundred, had also seen. Paul, as well as the others, had seen Him after the Resurrection. (I. Cor. XV, 4-6.)

This is clearly indicated in the Gospel story. Mary Magdalene, who had seen Christ Jesus only shortly before, sees Him after the Resurrection and supposes Him to be the gardener. It would have been impossible not to recognize Him had there been no change in His appearance. You would not believe anyone who told you that he would not have recognized the same person he had seen only a few days before. Quite evidently there had been a transformation. Close study of the Gospels will show clearly that as a result of the Mystery of Golgotha and of all the happenings in Palestine, the eyes of the disciples were opened and they beheld Christ as the Spirit weaving and working through the world; they knew Him as he was after the physical body had been given over to the Earth but they knew too that He would now remain with the Earth, working as powerfully as He did while in the physical body.

This too is brought out in the Matthew Gospel, in words that may well be considered the most significant of any to be found in ancient records. It is made absolutely clear that Christ was once present in a human physical body, that this event was not an event only, but an active cause, an impulse. The Sun Word, the Sun Aura, once spoken of by Zarathustra as a reality outside and beyond the Earth, became through the Christ-Jesus-life a power that is and will remain united with the Earth. Something different from anything that had been present before that life was now united with the Earth:

It behooves anthroposophists to understand this and therewith to realise that it was the Risen Christ who could reveal Himself to the clairvoyant vision of the disciples as the Spirit now pervading Earth-existence. Hence He could say: ‘Go ye therefore and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world’ (i.e. to the end of the Earth's days).

Spiritual Science should enable us to understand that since that time the Sun Aura has been united with the Earth Aura and that this can be seen by one whose eyes of spirit are opened; furthermore that this Sun Aura in the Earth Aura which became visible to Paul, can also be ‘heard’ when the inner ears are open and the Sun Word becomes audible, as it did to Lazarus—the one initiated by Christ Jesus Himself. Spiritual Science exists in order to prepare us to know this in all reality. Spiritual Science is an interpreter of what has come to pass in the spiritual evolution of the world and for this reason will strive to give effect to what Christ Jesus Himself wished to establish, according to the Matthew Gospel.

A beautiful saying in this Gospel is usually quite wrongly translated. In its true form, the saying is: ‘I have not come to send peace away from this Earth but to send away the sword!’ The most beautiful message of peace has in the course of time been distorted into its very opposite! (Matt. X, 24). Christ entered into the spiritual sphere of Earth-existence in order gradually to rescue it from elements that bring about discord and disharmony in mankind. Spiritual Science will establish peace when it is truly Christian, in the sense of bringing about the unity of religions. It can unite not only those in regions immediately around us but can establish peace over the whole Earth, because it understands the nature of the deed wrought by the greatest Bringer of peace. It is certainly not in accordance with Christ's will that fanatical men and women should journey from one part of the Earth to another in attempts to force a narrow, hide-bound Christianity upon human beings who have no aptitude for its teachings when these are presented in a form appropriate for a different people. Proposals to carry Christian teaching to the East in the form it has assumed in some particular region are apt be very mistaken. As anthroposophists we know well that Christ does not belong to the ‘Christians’ only; we know that He is the same Being whom Zarathustra called Ahura Mazdao and the seven Rishis of ancient India, Vishva Karman. We in the West realise that even if in the East men use different names, it is in reality Christ of whom they are speaking.

Our aim is to understand Christ in a way that keeps abreast of the evolution of humanity, of progress among men We realise that no records or forms of knowledge in which Christ is repudiated can shed any light upon His life and nature, but those alone which consciously bear within them His own living influence. If in the truly Christian sense we speak to other, non-Christian peoples of Vishva Karman, of Ahura Mazdao, we know well that they understand us although no name is forced upon them, and that of themselves they will eventually come to understand Christ. We have no wish to force the name of Christ upon them. For if we are not only anthroposophists but occultists too, we are well aware that names in themselves are of no account, that it is the Being alone who of importance. Could we for one moment persuade ourselves that it would be permissible to call the Christ Being by a different name, we should not hesitate to do so. For to us it is the truth that matters and not any predilection due to the fact that we inhabit a particular area of the Earth and belong to a particular people. Let it not be thought that Christ can be understood by means which His influence has not reached. Christ can indeed be found by other nations, but He Himself must be the source of the means for understanding Him.

No reproach should be cast on anthroposophists for being unwilling, in their study of Christianity, to make use of methods and forms not derived from Christianity itself. Christ cannot be understood through oriental terminology; those who use such nomenclature may believe that they understand Him but they do not. What would it mean if in the domain of Theosophy we were expected to hold the oriental view of Christ? We should be obliged to reject the idea of having Christ brought from the East! Such a measure would force us to take the West over to the East and to form our conception of Christ accordingly. This cannot and must not be, not because of aversion but because the oriental concepts, with their more ancient origin, are not capable of yielding any real understanding of Christ. Such understanding is possible only when it is known that Christ belongs to the line of evolution into which Abraham was born and the Moses. But into Moses there passed part of the being of Zarathustra. We have thus to look for Zarathustra in the events resulting from his influence upon Moses. Nor must we look for Zarathustra in the ancient Zoroastrian writings, but where he was reincarnated in Jesus of Nazareth. Account must always be taken of evolution! In the same way we must not seek the Buddha where he lived, and from being a Bodhisattva rose to Buddhahood six hundred years B.C., but where he is described by the Luke Gospel, shining down from the heights of the spiritual world into the astral body of the Nathan Jesus.⁶ There we see the Buddha at a later stage of his activity.

This shows us how the religions work together in order to ensure that mankind shall progress. It is not enough to lecture about anthroposophical principles; what matters is to transform them into feeling; nor should we talk of tolerance and at the same time be intolerant because of predilection for some particular religion. We are truly tolerant only when we measure each religion by its own standard and understand the fundamental character of each.—Naturally, when we speak of the different systems of religion having worked together to bring Christianity into existence, this is not due to our own particular viewpoint. The truth is that in those lofty heights where the great spiritual Beings are at work, events have been different from those caused by the actions of adherents of particular religions on the Earth. For example a Council was summoned in Tibet to establish an orthodox doctrine connected with the name of the Buddha at the very time when the real Buddha had descended from higher spheres in order to let his inspiration flow into the astral body of the Jesus of the Luke Gospel. What happens again and again is that adherents of a religion on the Earth cling to what has continued as an aftermath on Earth. The work of the Gods has, however, been carried meanwhile to further stages in order that progress may be possible for humanity. Progress is best achieved when men endeavor to understand their Gods, to keep pace with the progress made by the Gods who are looking upon them. From this realisation there should grow in us a living understanding of the Gospels.

In our study of the three Gospels we have found something different in each of them. Cosmology of an intimate kind will be revealed when the time comes for us to study the Mark Gospel.⁷ This is because a conception of Ahura Mazdao working through all the realms of space can be yielded by study of the Mark Gospel, just as the secrets of blood-relationship, the link connecting the individuality through heredity with the people from whom he has sprung, have been presented to us in the Matthew Gospel.

I beg you to think of what I have put before you in these lectures as one aspect only of the great Christ Event, for by no means everything has been said. The time may not yet have come to say, even to a very few, what it is possible to say about these profound mysteries. The best outcome of our studies will be that we do not only grasp these things intellectually but make them part of the very fibres of our soul-life, part of our life of feeling and of our hearts, and allow them to live there. If the words of the Gospels are imprinted in our hearts and we truly understand them they become powers and forces which fill our whole being and engender great inner strength. And we shall find that this strength remains with us through life.

To-day, when I have to bring these lectures on the Matthew Gospel to a conclusion, I want to speak in the way I am accustomed to speak at the end of our Summer courses, but in special connection with this text which among original Christian records gives the most beautiful presentation of the human aspect of Christ Jesus.

What is it that strikes us particularly about the Matthew Gospel, where from the very beginning the manhood of Christ Jesus is brought into prominence? Great though the distance assuredly is between an ordinary man on the Earth and the one who was able to receive the Christ Being into himself, nevertheless the Matthew Gospel shows us—when we accept it with all humility—the dignity of man and what he may become. For although our own nature maybe far, far removed from that of Jesus of Nazareth, we may yet say to ourselves that the human nature we bear is able to receive into itself the Son of God, the Son of the living God. Herein lies the promise that the Son of God will henceforth remain united with spiritual Earth-existence and that when Earth-existence has reached its goal all men will be filled with the substance and being of Christ in so far as they themselves have inwardly desired this. We need humility to harbour such an ideal. For if we harbour it without humility it gives rise to arrogance, to pride; we think only about what we can be as men reminding ourselves all too seldom of how little we have hitherto achieved. This ideal must be approached with humility. Then it appears so great, so mighty, so majestic, so impressive in its brilliance, that in itself it is an exhortation to humility. And when we are aware of the truth of this ideal, no matter how meagre our forces may be they will bear us to ever higher stages along the path to our divine goal.

In The Portal of Initiation indications are to be found of the intensity and crescendo of feelings that arise along this path. In the second scene, Johannes Thomasius is shattered in soul under the impression of the words: ‘O man know thyself !’ And then, in the ninth scene, of the words: ‘O man, experience thyself!’ he is transported in exultation to cosmic realms. This brings home to us once again the majesty and grandeur of the figure of Jesus in the Matthew Gospel; humility fills us and our own insignificance becomes doubly apparent. But through the inner truth and reality revealed to us we are rescued from the abyss that seems to stretch between our own littleness and what we should and can become. If at times we feel overwhelmed when contemplating the stature of the Gods in a man, we shall nevertheless, as human beings, feel something of the divine Impulse, some¬thing of the '‘Son of the living God', by turning our minds to Christ Jesus who as the highest representative of the ‘I', Himself exhorts us in words that will ring through all ages to come: ‘O man, experience thyself !’

If we understand the human aspect of Christ Jesus as presented in the Matthew Gospel—and that is why it is closer to us than the other Gospels—there will stream from it courage in life, strength, hope in all our labours. This will be the very best proof that we have understood what these words were intended to convey.

• 1. The Portal of Initiation, Scene 3. (Translation by Adam Bittleston in the American edition, 1961. Rudolf Steiner Publications Inc. Englewood, New Jersey, U.S.A.) Benedictus is speaking:
  
  “ A great step forward in world history
  can only be achieved
  if divine beings unite with man's condition.
  Only then can spirit eyes unfold
  which should develop in the human souls,
  when first a power of heaven has placed the seed
  within one human being.
  ................................
  I had to join a deed of heaven
  unto a human destiny."
• 2. See the Course on The Gospel of St. Luke.
• 3. To be able to picture these cosmic happenings in greater detail, the reader is advised to turn to Occult Science—an Outline, chapter IV, p. 103 onwards.
• 4. See Genesis: Secrets of the Bible Story of Creation, pp. 34-59.
• 5. See also Lecture Five: The Gospel of Luke, p. 106
• 6. See The Gospel of St. Luke, Lectures Two and Five.
• 7. The following two lecture cycles were subsequently given by Rudolf Steiner:
  
  Background to the Gospel of St. Mark, 13 lectures, Berlin and other cities, October 1910 to June 1911.
  
  The Gospel of St. Mark, 10 lectures, Basle, September, 1912.

The basis of our consideration today may seem a weird arrangement to somebody: on one side Tolstoy, on the other side Carnegie, two personalities about whom probably some say, more different, more opposite persons one can hardly find. On one side, the solver of riddles of the highest social and spiritual problems searching from the depths of spiritual life—Tolstoy; and on the other side the steel tycoon, the rich man, the man about whom one knows literally hardly more than that he thought about how the accumulated wealth is to be used best of all—Carnegie. Then again the arrangement of both persons with spiritual science or anthroposophy.

Indeed, with Tolstoy nobody probably doubts that one can illumine the depths of his soul with the light of spiritual science. However, with Carnegie some probably say, what has this man to do generally with spiritual science, this man of the only practical, business work?—Spiritual science would be the grey theory, the unrealistic and life-hostile worldview as one regards it is so often, if it does not care a little about the issues of practical life, as one believes sometimes. Therefore, it could appear weird that just such a man of practical life is adduced to illustrate certain issues. If one has understood that this spiritual science is something that can flow into all single fields, yes, into the most mundane fields of practical life, then one does not consider it as something surprising that also this personality is adduced to illustrate something that should be just illustrated within spiritual science. Secondly—to speak in the sense of Emerson—we have two representative personalities of our time before ourselves. The one like the other expresses the whole striving on the one side, the work on the other side typically, as they prevail in our time. Just the opposite of the whole development of personality and soul is so characteristic with these both men on one side for the variety of life and work in our time, on the other side, nevertheless, again for the basic nerve, the real goals of our present.

We have, on one side, Tolstoy who has grown out of a distinguished class, of wealth and abundance, of a life sphere in which everything is included that external life can offer as comfort and convenience. He is a human being whom his soul development has brought almost to proclaim the worthlessness of all he got with birth, not only to himself, but also to the whole humankind like a Gospel. We have the American steel tycoon on the other side, a personality that has grown out of hardship and misery, grown out of a life sphere where nothing at all exists of that which external life can offer as convenience and comfort. A person who had to earn dollar by dollar and who ascended to the biggest wealth, who got around in the course of his soul development to regarding this accumulation of wealth as something absolutely normal for the present and to thinking only about it how this accumulated wealth is to be used to the welfare and happiness of humankind. What Tolstoy never desired when he had reached the summit of his soul development he had it abundantly in the beginning of his life. The external goods of life that Carnegie had abundantly acquired last were refused to him in the beginning of his life. This is the expression of their natures, even if in exterior way, however, the characteristic of both personalities to a certain extent at the same time. What can take action with a person in our time, what one can reflect of these external processes in and around the personality shows us with both what prevails in our present in the undergrounds of the social and mental existence generally. We see Tolstoy, as said, born out of a sphere of life in which everything existed that one can call comfort, wealth, and refinement of life. Of course, we can deal only quite cursorily with his life, because today it concerns of characterising our time in these representative personalities and of recognising their needs in a certain way.

In 1828, Leo Tolstoy is born in a family of Russian counts about which he himself says that the family immigrated originally from Germany. Then we see Tolstoy losing certain higher goods of life. Hardly he is one and a half years old, he loses the mother, the father in the ninth year. Then he grows up under the care of a relative who is, so to speak, the embodied love, and from her spiritual condition, the marvellous soul condition had to flow in his soul like by itself. However, on the other side, another relative who wants to build up him out of the viewpoints of her circles, out of the conditions of time as they formed in certain circles influences him. She is a person who is completely merged in the outward world activity which later became very odious to Tolstoy and against which he fought so hard. We see this personality striving from the outset to make Tolstoy a person “comme il faut,” a person who could treat his farmers in such a way, as it was necessary in those days, who should receive title, rank, dignity, and medals and should play a suitable role in the society.

Then we see Tolstoy coming to the university; he is a bad student as he absolutely thinks that everything that the professors say at the University of Kazan is nothing worth knowing. Only oriental languages can occupy him. In all other matters, he was not interested. Against it the comparison of a certain chapter of the code of Catherine the Great (1729–1796) with The Spirit of the Laws (1748) by Montesquieu (Charles de Secondat, Baron de M., 1689–1755) attracted him. Then he tries repeatedly to manage his estate, and we see him almost getting around to diving head first into the life of luxury of a man of his circles, diving head first into all possible vices and vanities of life. We see him becoming a gambler, gambling big sums away. However, he has hours within this life over and over again when his own activities disgust him, actually. We see him meeting peers as well as men of letters and leading a life, which he calls a worthless, even perishable one at moments of reflection. However, we also see—and this is important to him who looks with pleasure at the development of the soul where this development manifests in especially typical signs—particular peculiarities appearing with him in the development of his soul which can disclose us already in the earliest youth what is, actually, in this soul.

Thus, it is of immense significance, what a deep impression a certain event makes on Tolstoy at the age of eleven years. A friendly boy once told him that one has made an important discovery, a new invention. One has found—and a teacher has spoken in particular of the fact—that there is no God that this God is only an empty invention of many human beings, an empty picture of thought. Everything that one can know about the impression that this boy's experience made on Tolstoy shows already how he absorbed it that in him a soul struggled striving for the highest summits of human existence.

However, this soul was weird in other ways as well. Those people who like to state outer appearances and do not pay attention to that in the soul, which emerges from the centre as the actual individual through all outer obstacles, they ignore and do not pay attention to anything in such youth experiences that has different effects on the one soul and on the other one. In particular, one has to pay attention if a soul shows a disposition in the earliest youth that one could pronounce with the nice sentence of Goethe in the second part of his Faust: “I love the man who wants what cannot be.” This sentence says a lot. A soul, which desires, so to speak, something that is obvious foolishness to the philistine view, such a soul, if it appears in its first youth as such, shows the width of the scope of view just by such peculiarities. Thus, one must not ignore it, if Tolstoy tells such things in one of his first writings, in which he gives reflections of his own development.

We are not allowed to ignore when he says there things, which were absolutely valid for him, for example, when he shaved off his eyebrows and defaced his not very extensive beauty in such a way for a while. This is something that one can regard as a big outlandishness. However, if one thinks about it, it becomes an indication. Another example is that the boy imagines that the human being can fly if he presses the arms against the knees rather stiffly. If he did this, he would be able to fly, he thinks. He goes up once in the second floor and jumps out of the window, retaining the heels. He is saved like by a miracle and carries off nothing but a little concussion, which compensates one another by an 18-hour sleep again. He proved for his surroundings with it to be a strange boy. However, someone who wants to observe the soul and knows what it means to go out in his soul in the earliest youth from the track, which is predetermined on the left and on the right, does not disregard features in the life of a young person. Thus, this soul seems to be great and to have many talents from the start. Hence, we can understand that he was fulfilled with a certain disgust of himself when he was tired of the debaucheries of life, which were due to his social rank, in particular after a gamble affair.

When he goes then to the Caucasus, we can understand that there his soul becomes fond of the simple Cossacks, of those people whom he gets to know and recognises that they have, actually, quite different souls than all those people whom he had got to know up to now basically. All the principles of his peers appeared to him so unnatural. Everything that he had believed up to now seemed to him so strange, so separated from the original source of existence. However, the human beings, whom he got to know now, were people whose souls had grown together with the sources of nature like the tree by the roots with the sources of nature, like the flower with the liquid of the ground. It impressed him enormously that they were grown together with nature, that they had not become foreign to the sources of existence, that they were beyond good and evil in their circles.

In 1854, when he became a soldier, full of zest for action, to take part in the Crimean War, we see him with the most intensive devotion studying the whole soul life of the simple soldier. However, we see now a more specified feeling taking place in Tolstoy's soul, we see him being deeply moved by the naturalness of the simple human being on the one side, on the other side, also by the misery, poverty, the tortures, and depression of the simple human being. We see how he is fulfilled with love and desire to help, and that the highest ideals of human happiness, human welfare, and progress flash as shades in his mind, how he realises completely on the other side that the natural human beings cannot understand his ideals. This causes a conflict in his soul, something that does not allow him to penetrate to the basic core of his being.

Thus, he is thrown back repeatedly from that life he leads and in which he is thrown just with the Danube army from one extreme to the other. A superior says, he is a golden human being whom one can never forget again. He works like a soul that pours out goodness only and, on the other hand, has the ability to amuse the others in the most difficult situations. Everything is different if he is there. If he is not there, everybody hangs his head. If he has plunged into life, he comes back with a terrible remorse, with awful regret to the camp. Between such moods, this great soul was thrown back and forth. From these moods and experiences those views and pictorial descriptions of his literary career come, which caused, for example, the most accepting review even from Turgenev (Ivan T., 1818–1883, Russian author), and which have found recognition everywhere. However, we see at the same time how in a certain way beside the real centre, the centre of his soul, always he looks at the big strength, at the basic spring of life, how he struggles for the concepts of truth and human progress. However, he cannot help saying at a being together with Turgenev: you all do not have, actually, what one calls conviction. You talk, actually, only to hide your conviction.

One can say, life made his soul feel low, bringing it into heavy, bitter conflicts. Indeed, something most serious should yet come. At the end of the fifties, one of his brothers fell ill and died. Tolstoy had often seen death in war, had often looked at dying human beings, but he had not yet realised the problem of life to such extent as at the sight of the beloved dying brother. Tolstoy was not so fulfilled at that time with philosophical or religious contents that these contents could have supported him. He was in such a basic mood that expressed itself towards death possibly in such a way that he said, I am incapable to give life a goal. I see life decreasing, I see it running in my peers worthlessly; they do things which are not worth to be done. If one strings up an event to the other and forms ever so long rows, nothing valuable results.—At that time, he could also not see any contents and life goal in the fact that the lower social classes were in distress and misery.

He said to himself at that time, such a life whose sense one searches in vain is finished by the futility of death and if the life of everybody and any animal ends in the futility of death, who is generally able to speak about the meaning of life? Sometimes, Tolstoy had already set himself the goal to strive for perfection of his soul, to search contents for the soul. He had not advanced so far that any contents of life could be roused in the soul even from the spirit. Therefore, the sight of death had put the riddle of life in such horrible figure before his spiritual eye.

We see him travelling in Europe just in the same time. We see him visiting the most interesting cities of Europe—in France, Italy, Germany. We see him getting to know some valuable persons. He gets to know Schopenhauer (Arthur Sch., 1788–1860, German philosopher) personally shortly before his death, he gets to know Liszt (1811–1882, Austrian-Hungarian composer) and still some others, some luminaries of science and art. He gets to know something of the social life, gets to know the court life at Weimar. Everything was accessible to him; however, he looks at everything with eyes from which the attitude looks that has just been characterised. From all that he had gained only one: as well as it is at home, in the circles, which he has grown out of, it is also in Western Europe.

Now a goal faces him in particular. He wanted to found a kind of model school, and he founded it in his hometown where every pupil should learn after his talents where it should not be a stencil. We cannot get involved with the description of the pedagogic principles, which one used there. However, this must be stressed that he had an ideal of education in mind, which should meet the individuality of the child.

We see a kind of interregnum taking place, where in certain way the stormy soul experiences a kind of standstill, that soul in which the problems and the questions followed in rapid succession, into which the sensations and emotions have flowed in contradicting way. A calmer life prevails in it. This time begins with the marriage in the sixties. It was the time from which the great novels come in which he gave the comprising tremendous pictures of the social life of the present and the previous time: War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1873–1877). So much has flowed in from that which he had learnt onto these works.

Thus, he lived until the seventies of the last century. Then comes a time of his life where he faces a crucial decision where all qualms, doubts, and problems come to life again which prevailed once like from dark spiritual depths.

A comparison, a picture that he forms is rather typical of what his soul experienced. One needs to visualise this picture only and to know that it means quite another matter to a soul like Tolstoy's soul, as for another soul that is much more superficial. You need to visualise this picture only, and you can deeply look into the mind of Tolstoy. He compares his own life to an Eastern fable, which he tells possibly in such a way:

There is a man, pursued by a beast. He flees, finds a dried out well and plunges into it to escape from the beast. He holds fast onto the branches, which have grown out on the sides of the well wall. In this way, he thinks he is protected against the pursuing monster. However, in the depth, he sees a dragon, and he has the feeling, he must be devoured by it if he gets tired only a little or if the branch breaks, onto which he holds fast. There he also sees on the leaves of the shrub some drops of honey from which he could feed himself. Nevertheless, at the same time he also sees mice gnawing away at the roots of the shrub onto which he holds fast.

Two things to which Tolstoy adhered were family love and art. For the rest, he considered life in such a way that all tantalising worries of life pursue him. He escapes one and is welcomed by the other monster. Then one sees mice gnawing away the few things that one still.—One must take the picture deeply enough to see what goes forward in such a soul, what is shown there and what Tolstoy experienced in all thinking, feeling and willing in the most extensive way. The branches still pleased him. However, he also found various things, which had to gnaw away at the delight in them. If the whole life is in such a way, that one cannot find sense in it, that one looks for the meaning of life in vain, what does it mean to have a family, to build up descendants to whom one transfers the same futility? This was also something he had in mind. And art? If life is worthless, what about art, the mirror of life? Can art be valuable if it only is able to reflect that in which one looks for sense in vain?

That just stood before his soul and burnt in him after an interregnum again. Where he looked around with all those who tried to fathom the meaning of life in great philosophies and in the most various worldviews, he nowhere found anything that could satisfy his searching. Recently it was in such a way that he turned his look to those people who were originally connected with the springs of life according to his opinion. These human beings had preserved a natural sense, a natural piety. He said to himself, the scholar who lives like me, who overestimates his reason finds nothing in all researching that could interpret the meaning of life to him. If I look at the usual human being who unites there in sects: he knows, why he lives, he knows the meaning of life. How does he know this, and how does he know the meaning of life? Because he experiences the sensation in himself, there is a will, the everlasting divine will as I call it. What lives in me devotes itself to the divine will. What I do from morning to evening is a part of the divine will. If I move the hands, I move them in the will of the divine. Without being brought by reason to abstractions, the hands move.—That faced him so peculiarly, that grasped him so intensely: if the human is deeply grasped in the soul. He said to himself, there are human beings who can answer the question of the meaning of life to themselves that they can use.

It is even magnificent how he contrasts these simple human beings with those who he got to know in his surroundings. Everything is thought out of the monumental of the paradigms. He says, I got to know people who did not understand to give life any meaning. They lived by force of habit, although they could gain no meaning of life, but I got to know those who committed suicide, because they could not find any meaning of life.—Tolstoy himself was before it.

Thus, he studied that category of human beings about whom he had to say to himself, it could not be talk of a meaning of life and of a life with a meaning. However, the human being, who is still connected with the sources of nature, whose soul is connected with the divine forces as the plant with the forces of life, can answer to the question: why do I live?—Therefore, Tolstoy came so far to search for a community with those simple human beings in the religious life. He became religious in certain way, although the outer forms made a repellent impression on him. He went to the Communion again. Now it was something in him that one can explain in such a way: he strove with all fibers of his soul to find and to feel a goal. Nevertheless, again his thinking and feeling impeded him everywhere in certain way. He was able to pray together with these human beings, who were believers in the naive sense and answered to the question of the meaning of life to themselves.

He could pray—and this is tremendously typical—up to the point of a uniform way of feeling. However, he was not able to go further when they prayed: we confess ourselves to the Father, to the Son and to the Holy Spirit.—This made no sense to him. It is generally typical that he was able to come up to a certain point, looking for a religious life, which was based on brotherly feelings. This life in devoutness should produce a unity of feelings, unity of thoughts. However, he could not rise to the positive contents, the knowledge of the spirit, to the spiritual view, which gives reality. The traditional dogmatics meant nothing to him. He could not connect any sense with the words, which are given in the Trinity.

Thus, he came, while all these things flocked together, to the mature period of his life, to the period in which he tried to delve completely into that which he could call true, real Christianity. He strove in such a way, as if he had wanted to comprise, to penetrate the liveliness of Christ's soul with his own soul. With this spirit of Christ's soul, he wanted to penetrate himself. A worldview should arise from it, and from this something like a transformation of all present life should result which he subjected to harsh criticism. Because he believes now to feel in his soul, what Christ had thought and felt, he feels strong enough to issue a challenge to all ways of life, to all ways of feeling and thinking of the present. He criticised harshly that out of which he has grown and which he could see in the farther environment of his time. He feels strong enough to put up the demand, on the other side, to let the spirit of Christ prevail and to get out a renewal of all human life out of the spirit of Christ. With it, we have characterised, so to speak, his maturing soul and have seen this soul having grown out of that which many of our contemporaries call the summits of life. We have seen this soul getting around to harshly criticise the summits of life, and to putting as its next goal the renewal of the spirit of Christ which it finds strange to everything that lives presently, in the renewal of Christ's life which it nowhere finds in reality. Therefore, in certain sense, Tolstoy says no to the present and affirms what he calls the spirit of Christ, which he could not find in the present but only in the first times of Christianity. He had to go back to the historical sources, which came up to him. There we have a representative of our present who has grown out of the present, saying no to this present.

Now we have a look at the other man, who affirms most intensely, what Tolstoy denies most intensely, who reaches the same formula but applies it quite differently. There we see Carnegie, the Scotsman, growing out of that dividing line of modern times which we can characterise by the fact that trade, large-scale industry and the like sweep away the small trade from the social order. We really see Carnegie growing out of that dividing line of modern life, which a newer poet so nicely characterised with the words (poem by Heinrich von Reder, 1824–1909, Bavarian officer, poet, and painter):

Gone to rack on a mule track

a smithy stands in woodland solitude;

no longer does the hammer blow

accompanied by merry songs.

Not far away the buildings rise

where sooted blacksmiths

are working so hard.

With the steam mill's nails

the coffin is closed,

it carries the nail-smith

impoverished to grave.

One needs to wake only such a mood, and one illuminates brightly that dividing line in the cultural development of modern times, which has become so important to life. Carnegie's father was a weaver who had a good living at first. He worked for a factory. This went well up to the time when the large-scale industry flooded everything. Now we see the last day approaching, when Carnegie's father can still deliver the produced to the trader. Then poverty and misery enter in the weaver's family. The father does no longer see any possibility to make a living in Scotland. He decides to emigrate to America, so that both sons do not live in misery and die.

The father finds work in a cotton factory, and the boy is employed as a bobbin boy in his twelfth year. He has to perform hard work. However, there is after one week of hard, heavy work a happy day for the 12-year-old boy. He gets his first wage: 1 dollar and 20 cents. Never again—so says Carnegie—he has taken up any income with such delighted soul as this dollar and twenty cents. Nothing made more joy to him later, although many millions went through his fingers. We see the representative of practical pursuit in our present that grows out of distress and misery that is natured in such a way to immerse himself in the present, as it is, and to become the self-made man in it. He struggles. He gains his dollar every week.

Then somebody employs him in another factory with a better wage. Here he has to work even more, he must stand in the basement and has to heat and maintain a small steam engine with big heat. He feels that as a responsible post. The fear to turn the tap of the engine wrongly what could lead to an accident for the whole factory is dreadful to him. He often catches himself sitting in his bed at night and dreaming of the tap the whole night which he turned taking care of turning it in the right direction.

Then we see him employed as a telegraph messenger in Pittsburgh after some time. There he is already highly happy with the small wage of the telegraph messenger. He has to work at a place where also books are which he had hardly seen before. Sometimes he also has newspapers to read. He has now only one worry: telegraph messengers are not to be needed in the city if they are not able to know all addresses of the companies by heart, which receive telegrams. He really manages to know the names and addresses of the Pittsburgh companies. He also already develops a certain independence. His consciousness is paired exceptionally with cleverness. He goes now a little earlier to the telegraph office, and there he learns to telegraph by own practicing. Thus, he can aim at the ideal that any telegraph messenger is allowed to have in a young, ambitious community: to become a telegraph operator once. He even succeeds in a special trick. When one morning the telegraph operator was not there, a death message comes in. He takes up the telegram and carries it to the newspaper to which it was determined. There are connections where one regards such an action, even if it succeeds, not as favourable. However, Carnegie thereby climbed up to the telegraph operator.

Now something else presented itself to him. A man who dealt with railways recognises the talents of the young man and one day he makes the following proposal to him. He said to him, he should take over railway stocks of 500 dollars that had just become available. He can win a lot if he pursues these matters. Carnegie tells now—it is delightful how he tells this—how he raised 500 dollars really by the care and love of his mother, and how he bought his stocks. When he got the first revenue, the first payment of more than five dollars, he went with his fellows out to the wood. They looked at the payment and thought and learnt to recognise that there is something else than to be paid for work, something that makes money from money. That aroused big viewpoints in Carnegie's life. With it, he grew into the characteristic of our time.

Thus, we see him immediately understanding when another proposal is made. It is typical how he grasps with complete presence of mind what appears before his soul for the first time. An inventive head shows him the model of the first sleeping car. Straight away, he recognises that there is something tremendously fertile in it, so that he takes part in it. He emphasises now again by what this consciousness, actually, grew. He did not have enough money to take part in suitable way in the enterprise of the first sleeping car society of the world. However, his ingenious head caused that he got money already from a bank: he issued his first bill of exchange. This is nothing particular, he says, but this is something particular that he finds a banker who accepts this bill of exchange. This was the case.

Now he needed to develop this only to become completely the man of the present. Hence, we have not to be surprised that he became a steel tycoon when he got the idea to replace the many wooden bridges with iron and steel bridges, that he became the man who set the tone in the steel industry and acquired the countless riches. Thus, we really see the type of the human being in him who grows into the present, the present, which unfolds the most exterior life. He grows into the most outward of appearance. However, he grows into it by his own strength, by his abilities. He becomes the extensively rich person out of distress and misery, while he himself really acquired everything from the first dollar on. He is a pensive person who associates this whole impulse of his life with the progress and life of whole humanity.

Thus, we see another strange Gospel growing out of his way of thinking, a Gospel that follows Christ. However, Carnegie immediately says at the beginning of his Gospel, it is a Gospel of wealth (essay Wealth or Gospel of Wealth, 1889). That is why his book shows how wealth is applied best of all to the welfare and to the progress of humanity. He opposes Tolstoy immediately about whom he says: he is a person who takes Christ in such a way as it is not suitable at all to our time, who regards him as a strange being of old past. One must understand Christ in such a way that one transfers Him to the present life.—Carnegie is a person who affirms the whole life of the present completely. He says: if we look back at the times when the human being were more alike than today, they were still less divided into those who had to assign a job and those who have to take a job, and if we compare the times, we see how primitive the single cultures were in those days. The king was not able in that old time to satisfy his needs in such a way as today the poorest person can satisfy them now. What happened had to happen. That is why it is right that one distributes the goods in such a way.

Carnegie establishes a strange doctrine of the distribution or application of wealth. Above all, we find with him that ideas of the purely personal efficiency, of the nature of the efficiency of the human being originate in his soul who has worked his way in life up to that which he becomes in the end. At first Carnegie sees outward goods only, then also that the human being must be efficient, externally efficient. Someone has to apply his efficiency not only to acquire wealth but also to manage it in the service of humanity.

Carnegie intensely draws the attention to the fact that quite new principles would have to enter, so to speak, in the social construction of humanity if welfare and progress should originate from the new progress and the distribution of goods. He says, we have institutions of former time that make it possible that by inheritance from the father to the son and the grandchildren goods, rank, title and dignities go over. In the life of the old time, this was possible.—He regards it as right that one can substitute with routine what the personal efficiency does not give: rank, title, dignities.

Nevertheless, he is convinced by that life he has experienced that it requires personal, individual efficiency. He points to the fact that one had ascertained that five of seven insolvent houses became insolvent, because they demised to the sons. Rank, title, and dignities devolved from the fathers upon the sons, however, never business acumen. In those parts of modern life, where commercial principles prevail, they should not be transmitted simply from the testator to the descendants. It is much more important that someone builds up a personally efficient man, than to bequeath his wealth to his children. That is why Carnegie concludes in the absurd sentence: someone has to make sure that he applies the accumulated wealth to such institutions and foundations by which the human beings are promoted to the largest extent.—The sentence with which he formulates this, which can appear grotesque, which originates, however, from Carnegie's whole way of thinking is this: “Who dies rich dies dishonourably.” One could say in certain sense, this sentence of the steel tycoon sounds even more revolutionary than many a sentence of Tolstoy.

”He who dies rich dies dishonourably” means: someone dies dishonourably who does not apply the accumulated goods to endowments by which the human beings can learn something, can get the possibility to do further studies. If he makes many human beings efficient with his wealth during his life and does not hand it down to descendants, who can use it their way lacking any talent and only to their personal well-being, he dies not dishonourably.

Thus, we see with Carnegie a very strange principle appearing. We see that he affirms the present social life and activity, that he gains, however, a new principle from it: the fact that the human being has to advocate not only the use of wealth, but also its management, as a manager of the goods in the service of humanity. This man does not at all believe that anything can devolve from the parents upon their descendants. Even if he knows the outward life only, he realises, nevertheless, that inside of the human being the forces have to originate which make the human being efficient to do his work in life.

We see these two representatives of our present: that who harshly criticizes what has developed bit by bit and who wants to lead the soul to higher fields out of the spirit. On the other side, we see a man who takes the material life as it comes, and who is pointed to the fact that within the human being the spring of work and of the health of life is to be found. Nevertheless, one may find something just in this teaching of Carnegie that allows me to remark the following. If anybody does not look thoughtlessly and pointlessly at this soul life, but looks at the forces pouring out of the souls bit by bit, does look at the individual, and is clear in his mind absolutely that it is not handed down,—what has one then to look at? One has to look at the real origin, at that which comes from other sources. One finds if one comes to the sources of the present talents and abilities that these are caused in former lives. By the principle of reincarnation and of spiritual causing, karma, one finds the possibility to process such a principle meditatively that it has forced the practical life upon a practical person.

Nobody can hope that from a mere externalisation of life anything could come that the soul satisfies, can bring the civilisation to the highest summits. Never can one hope that on those roads anything else would come than a distribution of wealth salutary in the external sense. The soul would become deserted, it would overexert its forces, but it would find nothing in itself if it could not penetrate to the sources of the spirit, which are beyond the external material life. While the soul is rejected by a material approach to life, it must find the spring, which can flow only from a spiritual approach to life. With such a life praxis, as Carnegie has it, that deepening and spiritualisation coming from spiritual science have to combine, so that the souls do not become deserted. On the one side, Carnegie demands that from the single soul, which makes it fit for the external life, on the other side, Tolstoy wants to give the single soul what it can find from the deep well of the spiritual being.

As well as Carnegie grasps the being of the present with sure look from the material life, we find Tolstoy on the other side with sure look grasping the characteristic of the soul. Up to a certain limiting point, we see Tolstoy coming who affects us, indeed, strangely if we compare everything that lives in Tolstoy's worldview to that which faces us in particular in the West-European civilisation.

One can examine work by work of Tolstoy and one sees one fact emerging above all. The matters, which one has gathered here in the West with an immense expenditure of philosophical reflection, academic pondering, and moving conclusions from pillars to post, appear to Tolstoy in such a way that they occur in five to six lines like flashes of thought and become conviction to that who can understand such a thing. Tolstoy shows, for example, how we have to find something in the human soul that is of divine nature that can visualise the divine in the world if it lights up in us. Tolstoy says there, around me, the academic naturalists live; they investigate what is real outdoors in the material, in the so-called objective existence. They search the divine primal ground of existence. Then such people try to compose the human being from all principles, substances, atoms et cetera that they search spread out outdoors in the space. Then in the end, they try to understand what the human being is, while they believe to have to combine all external science to find the primal ground of life. Such human beings, he says, appear to me like human beings who have trees and plants of the living nature round themselves. They say, this does not interest me. But there is a wood far away, I hardly see it; I want to investigate and describe this wood, then I also understand the trees and the plants which are around me, and I am able to describe them.—People appear to me that way who investigate the being of the animals with their instruments to get to know the nature of the human being. They have it in themselves; they only need to see what is in close proximity. However, they do not do this. They search the faraway trees, and they try to understand what they cannot see, the atoms. However, they do not see the human being.

This way of thinking is so monumental that it is more valuable than dozens of insights and theories that are written out of old cultures. This is typical for the whole thinking of Tolstoy. To such things, he came, and in such things, one must look. To the West European this is extremely unsatisfactory; only by a devious route via Kant he gets around to it. With the assurance of his soul, Tolstoy is driven to pronounce what is not proved, but is true, what is recognised by immediate view and of which one knows if it is pronounced that it is true. His work On Life (1887) shows this monumental original springing of the deepest truth like from the spring of life, which he searched. His last writings just show this and what is in such a way that it can shine like an aurora to a rising future.

Therefore, we have to say, the less we are inclined to take Tolstoy dogmatically, the more we are inclined to take up the gold nuggets of a primitive paradigmatic thinking, the more he becomes fertile. Of course, those who accept a personality only in such a way that they swear on their dogmas, who cannot allow to be fertilised by it, they do not have a lot from him. Something does not agree with them. However, someone who can allow to be fertilised by a great personality may receive a lot from Tolstoy. We see truth working in him, paradigmatically, and that this truth flows with strong forces onto his personal life. How does it flow in there? It is rather interesting to see that different views live in his family and tolerate each other. How was he able, however, to introduce his principles in the everyday life? By working, and not only with principles. Thereby he becomes a true pioneer of something that only must sprout in future. On the other side, Tolstoy is also a child of his time, even though he is a pioneer of the future.

Perhaps, one can nowhere feel more impressively how he puts himself in the present than in that strange picture of the year 1848, when he was twenty years old. One looks only at the face of the 20-year-old, which expresses energy and willpower, also reticence at the same time. However, the spirited twinkle in the eyes reveals something that faces the riddles of life quizzically. He is volcanic inside but not able to cause the volcano to erupt. Indeed, we see mysterious depths of the soul expressing themselves in his physiognomy, and we get the expression of the fact that something tremendous lives in him but that he cannot yet express it completely in this hereditary organism.

It is also that way with the variety of the forces which live in Tolstoy, and which could not be expressed so really. It is in such a way, as if they are expressed as caricatures, distorted in certain respect. One has also to recognise the character in him that is sometimes distorted grotesquely. Hence, it is quite wonderful if he is able to point to that which one calls something transient with the human beings normally: look at the human body. How often its substances have been exchanged! Nothing material is there that was there in the ten-year-old boy. Compare the usual consciousness to the image life of the fifty years old man: it has become completely different, until the soul structure. We cannot call it permanent, but everywhere we find the centre in it, which we may imagine possibly in the following way. The objects of the outside world are there. There is this, there is that, there a third one. Two human beings face the objects. The eyes see the same things, but they are to the one this way, to the other that way. The one says, I like this; the other says: I do not like this.—If in the outside world everything is the same, and if the one soul says, I like it, and the other says, I do not like it, if the way of life is different, a centre is there that is different from all appearance that remains constant, in spite of all change of consciousness and body. Something is there that was there before birth and is there after birth, my particular ego. This my particular ego has not begun with birth. It is not the point that anybody positions himself with the west-European habits to such a remark, but it matters that one has the sensation: one can do such a remark. Therein the greatness of the soul appears. It becomes apparent that the soul lives and how it lives. Immortality is guaranteed therein.

Tolstoy just approaches the border of that which we get to know as the innermost being of the soul by spiritual-scientific deepening. He is wedged by the world against which he himself fights so much and cannot penetrate to true cognition of that which is there before birth, and of that which comes after death. He does not come to the teaching of reincarnation and karma. Just as little, he gets to the inner impulse of the soul like Carnegie who almost demands it. Therefore, we see whether now a human being is in contradiction to everything that lives and works in the present or whether someone complies with all life forms of the present: he is led to the gates of the anthroposophic approach to life. Tolstoy would be able to find the way to Carnegie, Carnegie never to Tolstoy.

With this talk, I wanted to show that a worldview and an approach to life could be given which introduces into the immediate life praxis, which can transfer the newfound to the known, to the performed. Moreover, we see if we familiarise ourselves deeper and deeper with spiritual science that it brings that to the human beings of the one and the other view which, in the end, Tolstoy has found his way and Carnegie has found his way: a satisfying life. However, it does not depend on it that the immediate viewfinder finds the satisfactory life, and that those who search with him can find it. What Tolstoy and Carnegie have found for themselves as adequate, this can be found for all human beings only impersonally and spiritually if true spiritual knowledge of that is found which goes from life to life, which carries the guaranty of eternity in itself.

The upward development of man, and the descent of divine beings into human souls and bodies. The four points of view of the Evangelists in accordance with the Initiation of each. The Baptism in Jordan and the life and death of Christ Jesus as two stages of Initiation. The Resurrection revealing Christ as the Spirit of earthly existence. The Sun-Aura in the Earthly-Aura. The divinity of Man. Human quality of the Gospel of Matthew

Studying the evolution of mankind in accordance with spiritual science, and watching its progress step by step, we are bound to acknowledge that the most important fact of this evolution is that man, because he incarnates again and again in different epochs, advances to ever higher degrees of perfection, and thus gradually reaches the goal where he has developed, in his inner being, certain active powers corresponding to the different stages of planetary development. We see, on one hand, the man who progresses upwards, who keeps his divine goal before him, but who would never be able to evolve to the heights he should attain if beings whose whole path of evolution is different did not come to his assistance. From time to time beings from other spheres enter our earthly evolution and unite with it, so as to raise men to their own exalted realms. Even as regards earlier planetary conditions we may express this in a wide sense by saying: Already during the Saturn stage of evolution, exalted beings—the Thrones—offered up their will-substance so that from it the earliest beginnings of man's physical body might be formed. This is but a general example; but beings whose evolution is far in advance of that of men, have ever bent down to them and united with their evolution, by dwelling for a time within a human soul. Such beings have ‘assumed a human form’ as is often said, or to put it more trivially, have entered a human soul as an inspiring power, so that a human being who has been ensouled in this way by a god might accomplish more in human evolution than he could otherwise have done.

Our age, permeated as it is with materialistic conceptions, levelling everything, does not accept such facts willingly; indeed I might say that it retains only the crudest notion of accepting the descent of beings from higher regions, beings who enter into man and speak to him. Modern people regard such beliefs as the wildest superstition. Rudiments of such beliefs have, however, remained to our day, though people are for the most part unaware that they hold them; they have retained, for instance, a belief in the occasional appearance of persons of ‘genius.’ Men of genius rise high above the great mass of mankind even in the opinion of ordinary individuals, who say of such persons: Other qualities have come to fruition in their souls than are to be found in average humanity. Such ‘geniuses’ are at least still credited. But there are also circles where there is no longer such belief; the materialistic thought of to-day discredits them, it has (no belief in facts concerning the life of the spirit: Belief in genius does, however, continue in wide circles, and if this is not to be an empty belief we must acknowledge that in a genius through whom human evolution has been advanced, a power, other than the ordinary power of men, works through a human agency. Looking to the teaching that knows the true facts concerning men of genius, one realizes that when such men appear who seem as if suddenly possessed by something extraordinarily good, or great, or powerful, that a spiritual power has descended and taken possession of the place from which this being of power must now work, namely, the inner nature of the man himself.

To people who think in accordance with Anthroposophy it should be clear from the beginning that there are two possibilities; the upward evolution of men to spiritual heights, and the descent from above of divine, spiritual beings into human bodies or human souls.

In one part of my Rosicrucian Mystery Play it is pointed out that whenever something important is to take place in human evolution a divine being must unite with a human soul and permeate it. This is a necessity of human evolution.

To understand this in connection with our spiritual evolution on earth, we must recall how in the time of its early beginnings the Earth was united with the Sun, from which it is now separated. Anthroposophists know, of course, that this does not refer merely to a separation of the substance of the Earth from the substance of the Sun, but with the going forth of divine beings who were associated with the Sun or with the other planets.) After this separation of the Sun, certain spiritual beings remained connected with the Earth, while others remained with the Sun, because they had evolved beyond earthly connections, and could not complete their further cosmic evolution on the Earth. Thus we have the fact that one kind of spiritual being remained connected with the Earth, while other spiritual beings sent their active forces down to Earth from the Sun. After the departure of the Sun from the Earth we have, as it were, two spheres of activity, that of the Earth with its beings and that of the Sun with its beings. The Spiritual Beings who served mankind from a higher sphere are those who chose the Sun as their dwelling-place, and from this realm come the beings who have united themselves from time to time with earthly humanity so that they might aid the further evolution—both of Earth and man.

In the myths of various peoples we constantly find reference to such ‘Sun-heroes’ who have descended from spiritual realms to participate in human evolution; and a man who is filled by such a Sun-being is something far more than from outward seeming he would appear to be. The outward appearance of such a man is deceptive—it is Maya; but behind the Maya is the real being who can only be guessed at by those who can penetrate to the profoundest depths of such a nature. In the Mysteries people knew, and still know, of this twofold fact concerning the path of human evolution. People distinguish now, as they distinguished in the past, divine beings who descend to Earth from spiritual spheres, and men who strive upwards from the Earth towards initiation into spiritual mysteries. ‘With what kind of Being then are we concerned in the Christ?

In the last lecture we learnt that in the designation, ‘Christ, the Son of the living God,’ we are concerned with a descending Being. If we wish to describe Him by a word drawn from Oriental philosophy He would be called ‘an Avatar,’ a God who had descended. But we have only to do with such a descending Being from a certain moment; and we must accept what is described by all four Evangelists, by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, as such an appearance. At the moment of the Baptism of John, a Being descended to our Earth from the realms of Sun-existence and united with a human being. Now we have to realize clearly that according to the meaning of the four Evangelists this Sun-Being was greater than any other Avatar, than any other Sun-Being who up to that time had ever come to Earth. They, therefore, take trouble to explain that a specially prepared being had to advance from the side of humanity to meet this great descending Being.

All four Gospels, therefore, tell of the Sun-Being—the ‘Son of the living God’—who came towards men to aid their further progress; but only the Gospels of Matthew and Luke speak of the man who evolved towards this Sun-Being so that he might receive Him into himself. They narrate how the human being for thirty years prepares for the moment when he can receive the Sun-Being into himself. Because the Being we call the Christ is so universal, so all-comprising, it did not suffice that the bodily sheaths that were to receive Him should be prepared in any simple way. A quite specially prepared physical and etheric sheath had to evolve, meet for the reception of this descending Being. Whence these came we have seen in the course of our study of the Matthew Gospel. But out of this same being whose physical and etheric sheath had been prepared in accordance with the teaching of Matthew, out of the forty-two generations of the Hebrew people, there could not spring an astral garment or a bearer of the ego suited to that Sun-Being. For this, special arrangements were necessary, and these were carried out by means of another human being. This being we read of in the Gospel of Luke, where the writer of that Gospel describes the early years of the so-called Nathan Jesus. There we read of how the two became one.

This mystery occurred when the ego-entity, forsaking the body of the twelve-year-old Jesus of whom the writer of the Gospel of Matthew tells, namely, the Zarathustra individuality, passed into the Nathan Jesus of the Gospel of Luke. In this body he continued to dwell, carrying on in it the further development of those qualities acquired through his having assumed the physical and etheric sheaths of the Jesus of the Gospel of Matthew. In this body his higher principles ripened, until in his thirtieth year they were ready for the reception of the mighty Being who descended into them from higher worlds.

When seeking to describe the whole course of these events as related in the Gospel of Matthew we should have to say The writer first directs his attention to answering the question: What kind of physical and etheric body could serve such a Being as the Christ for His life on earth? And because of what the writer had experienced he could answer: In order that a suitable physical and etheric body could be prepared it was necessary that they should pass through forty-two generations of the Hebrew people so that the attributes laid down in Abraham might be fully developed. He could then continue to answer the question further by telling us: Such a physical and etheric body could only provide a fitting instrument if the greatest individuality humanity had so far produced for the comprehension of the Christ—that is the Zarathustra individuality—made use of them up to his twelfth year, at which time he had to leave this body and enter another. This was the body of the Jesus of whom the writer of the Gospel of Luke tells. From this point, the writer of the Gospel of Matthew, turning from that to which he had given his attention at first, deals exclusively with the Jesus of whom we read in the Gospel of Luke, and follows the life of Zarathustra until his thirtieth year. The moment had then come, when the astral body and ego-bearer had been so far evolved by Zarathustra that he could sacrifice them to the mighty Being—the great Sun-spirit—who descended from spiritual spheres and took possession of them. This was the moment of the baptism by John in Jordan.

If we recall once more the time when the earth was separated from the sun, and the beings whose supreme Leader is the Christ withdrew from the earth, we must say There were beings who let their influences spread gradually over the earth, just as the Christ, in the course of time, has allowed His influence to be felt on earth. But we must not forget something else, which is, that the nature of ancient Saturn as regards substantiality was relatively much simpler than that of the planetary bodies that arose later. It consisted of fire or warmth, there was neither air nor water there, neither was there light-ether. This light-ether came with the Sun-evolution. Then, when later this passed over into the Moon-evolution, the watery element appeared as a further densification, on one hand, and sound or tone-ether as a further refinement on the other. Solid substance was added to these during the evolution of the Earth; this condition arose as a further densification; life-ether being added at the same time as a further refinement. We have therefore on the earth—warmth, air or gaseous substance, water or fluid substance, and solids or earthly substance. Opposed to these as finer conditions we have light-ether, tone-ether, and life-ether, this last being the finest etheric condition known to us.

Now with the departure of the Sun from the Earth, not only the material part of the Sun left but the spiritual part left also. It was only later, and by degrees, that this returned to the earth, and it did not return entirely. I spoke of this at Munich when lecturing on the Six Days of Creation, so I will only touch on it here.

Of the higher etheric substances man is only aware of warmth and light-ether. What he perceives as ‘sound’ is but a reflection, a materialization, of the real tone that is in tone-ether. When tone-ether is spoken of we refer to the bearer of what is known as ‘The harmony of the spheres,’ and is only to be heard clairaudiently. The Sun certainly sends its light to the earth, in so far as this is physical, but a higher condition also lives in the Sun. People who know of these things do not speak in empty phrases when with Goethe they say:—

‘The sun-orb sings, in emulation,
Mid brother-spheres, his ancient round:
His path predestined through Creation,
He ends with step of thunder-sound.’

FAUST—Prologue in Heaven.

This refers to sphere-harmony, to that which lives in the sound-ether, and can only be heard by man when he has attained initiation, or when a Sun-being descends in order to hold intercourse with one who has been chosen to become an instrument for the further evolution of others. For such a one the Sun begins to resound, and the sphere-harmonies to be heard.

Above the tone-ether lies the life-ether. Just as the ‘word’ lies within mere tone, as something possessing an inward soul-like content, so associated with the meaning of the life-ether is that which in later Persian times was called ‘Honover.’ The writer of the Gospel of John calls this the ‘Logos,’ which as meaning-filled tone belongs to the Being of the Sun.

Among those blessed ones whose nature did not remain entirely deaf to this ‘resounding Sun,’ we have to reckon Zarathustra, who lived in the early part of our post-Atlantean civilization. It is no myth, but a fact that can be proved documentarily, that Zarathustra received instruction through the ‘Sun-word.’ He had become capable of hearing this. For what was the overwhelmingly majestic teaching given by the original Zarathustra to his pupils?

We might describe it thus: Zarathustra was an instrument through whom the sound, the meaning of the Sun-Word itself spoke. A Persian legend tells how the ‘Sun-Word’ spoke by the mouth of Zarathustra, how the secret or hidden word behind the Sun spoke through him. This legend, in referring to the astral body of the Sun, speaks of ‘Ahura Mazdao,’ but also of the ‘Sun-word,’ translated later into Greek as the ‘Logos.’

When thinking of this ancient Zarathustra, we realize that even so exalted a person could not in those early times have been initiated so as consciously to receive what he could afterwards pass on to others, but that he must have been ensouled by a Higher Being.

Zarathustra could teach of Ahura Mazdao, because the Aura of the Sun enfolded him, because the Spiritual-Being, Ahura Mazdao, resounded in him, because the World-Light—the great Aura—spoke through him. He was, as it were, the external bodily garment of the Sun-god, who thus sent His influence in advance down to man, though not as yet on earth Himself. At that time the Sun-word was more inward.

It might be said—speaking altogether in the sense of Zarathustra—that he taught his disciples: ‘You must understand that behind the physical sunlight there is a Spiritual Light, just as behind physical man there is something astral—his aura—so behind the sun there is the “Great Aura”. You must regard the physical sun as the light-body of a Being who will one day come to earth it is the external bodily form of something known to clairvoyant perception, and has an inner soul-nature within it. Just as the soul expresses itself in sound, so the Sun-word—the Logos—makes itself known by means of the Sun-Aura!’

Zarathustra gave to mankind the promise that one day the Light-being would come down from the spheres of the Great Aura, and that the soul of this Being would be the Sun-word. This is something we find for the first time in Zarathustra; it is the source from which his teaching springs. In it we have to see a prophetic wisdom, which tells of the coming of the Sun-aura and the Sun-word.

This teaching continued to live from epoch to epoch in the mysteries. It was the great consolation and hope of those who within human evolution longed for higher things. And the less exalted Sun-spirits, those associated with the earth, were able ever and again to give more precise teaching concerning the Spirit of the Sun-light, or Sun-aura, for they were really messengers of the Sun-word.

This was one side of the Mystery-tradition that passed down through the ages. The other side was, that men should learn to know, and by practice should be able to evolve upwards to meet, that which was to descend to earth. In pre-Christian times it was not yet possible for men to believe that without something further a feeble individual could evolve to meet the Sun-being, the Leader of the Hosts of the Sun, the Christ. It was not possible for anyone to attain this by any form of initiation. Hence the Gospel of Matthew describes how all the life-giving forces of the Hebrew people were called upon to produce such a man. On the other hand the Gospel of Luke explains how through seventy-seven successive stages the best that human nature could attain to was, as one might say, filtered, in order that a fitting body might evolve to meet the greatest Being Who was to come down to the earth.

In the Mysteries, as was natural, the men who had to be instructed, who had to be worked on, were ordinary feeble men, and were quite unable to grasp what it was that now faced humanity or that might be attained by single individuals. Therefore, those who were to be initiated were graded into different classes, and they approached the secrets of the Mysteries in different ways. Some, for instance, were taught more how men should live in the external world, what they ought to do there in order to fit themselves to become a temple for the descending Sun-being.

There were other pupils of the Mysteries who were instructed more in what was to evolve in the stillness of the soul if it wished to gain an understanding, a feeling for and perception of the Sun-spirit. Is it not natural that there should have been certain pupils whose task it was, so to direct their outer lives, so to be trained from childhood that their bodies became temples for the descending Spirit? This was the case in olden times; it is also the case to a certain extent to-day, but the ordinary materialistic consciousness passes it by.

Suppose the time drew nigh when some great Being was to descend from spiritual realms to give humanity a forward impulse in evolution.

Those who serve the Mysteries have to await such a moment; they have to interpret the signs of the times. In quiet and retirement, and without making any disturbance, they awaited the moment when a God is to come down to Earth to give an upward impulse to humanity. It was their duty also to watch humanity carefully, to see if among men there were any who could be trained and guided to fit them to receive such a Being into themselves. When the descending Being is of exceptional greatness such a man would have to be trained and prepared from earliest childhood that he might be a temple fit to receive Him. This also happens, and is also unnoticed. If the life of these men is described, it is found that they follow certain fundamental rules; even in outer concerns there is a certain resemblance in their lives. When we glance back over the course of human evolution we have to allow that here and there we find individuals whose lives take a similar course—even as regards external biographical facts. This cannot be denied, and has even been remarked on by those carrying out more recent research. Popular but not very profound works have been produced lately showing similarities in the lives of such persons. In the writings of Prof. Jensen (Marburg) you find, for instance, comparisons between the lives of the ancient Babylonian Gilgamesch, Moses, Jesus, and Paul. The tables are beautifully drawn up; he takes certain incidents from the lives of these individuals and compares them, with the result that quite wonderful resemblances are revealed, puzzling to the materialistic mind. The conclusions drawn are natural; it is stated that in these biographies one myth is copied from the others, that the writers of the Life of Jesus copied the biography of Gilgamesch, that the story of the life of Moses is but an old Epic, served up in a new form, and the final conclusion arrived at is: none of them has existed as a physical personality, not Moses, nor Jesus, nor Paul. People have no idea how far these so-called ‘researches’ lead them in respect of materialistic explanations.

Similarity of this kind in the biographies of great individuals rests on nothing more than the fact that in childhood they were already trained to become the bearers of a Divine Being; this causes no astonishment when we understand the deeper lying paths of human and universal evolution. Not only comparisons with Mythology, but all those searchings after similarities in regard to mythical sources is, in fact, fantasy. It leads nowhere. What does it benefit us to prove resemblances in the life of Siegfried to some Greek hero? They do certainly contain similarities. But the appearance of a house is not what matters, but who lives in it! It matters not that such and such things occurred in the life of Siegfried, but who the individuality was that dwelt in him.

Such things can, however, only be established with the help of occult research. What we have to bear in mind is that the lives of men who were to become fitting temples for higher Beings coming to the aid of humanity were guided in a special way, and that their lives show therefore a similar course as regards certain fundamental features.

In the temples of the Mysteries there have always been precepts regarding what had to come about with such men. Similar precepts were preserved by the association of the Essenes concerning Christ Jesus; telling what the nature of those human beings had to be who as the Solomon and the Nathan Jesus evolved upwards towards the great Sun-being, the Christ.

But those seeking initiation were not initiated into everything. There were different classes and degrees of initiates. Thus to some it was shown with special clearness what a man had to undergo who was evolving towards the God, so that he might be worthy to receive the God into himself. To others it was given to know how a God acted when He revealed Himself in a man; or to put it trivially, when he revealed Himself as a ‘genius.’ It is not generally remarked to-day that genius is apt to reveal itself in similar ways when appearing in different people. Nowadays people do not write biographies from out the spirit. If the genius of Goethe were to be described from the aspect of the spirit, a wonderful similarity would be found for instance between his genius and that of Dante, Homer, and Aeschylus. People do not now write biographies, but stick placards and tickets on a person and repeat all kinds of trivialities concerning the person's external life, which interests most people much more. So we are presented with a vast accumulation of ticketed rubbish concerning the life of Goethe, but not a real account of what Goethe actually was. Mankind to-day declares itself to be in some respects, and actually with pride, incapable of describing the evolution of genius in a human personality. There is a desire to-day to bring to light the earliest efforts of our great poets, stressing the fact that in the freshness and originality of their early works something elemental lived which is lost to the man in later life. But the real fact underlying this is that in their arrogance men only wish to understand the young poet, and not to take part in all he goes through in later life. Men pride themselves on the fact that they understand ‘youth,’ they trouble little about the ‘old,’ and have no idea that it is not the old who have become ‘old,’ but that they themselves have remained mere children.

This evil is widely spread. Seeing it is so deeply rooted, we need not wonder at the little understanding there is of the fact that a divine being can enter into a human personality, and that the life-course of such divine beings in any person and in any age must be fundamentally the same.

As there was necessarily much to be learnt as regards these profound relationships, this domain of knowledge was divided into classes. In a certain division of the Mysteries, teaching was given concerning the preparation of a man so that he might rise towards a divine being, whereas in others teaching was given concerning the descent of the inner Light-being, the Logos, the Sun-word, contained in the Aura of the Sun-being. In Christ we see this gradual descent in its most complex form. We need not wonder if more than four men had been needed for the understanding of these mighty facts; four, however, took it as their task. Two of these, the writers of the Gospels of Matthew and of Luke, undertook to relate the nature of the personality who grew towards the descending Sun-being—Matthew telling of this in respect of the physical and etheric bodies, Luke in respect of the astral-body and the bearer of the ego.

Mark on the other hand does not concern himself with that which advanced towards the Sun-being; but tells us of the Sun-Aura, the great body of light, the Spiritual Light whose power and activity streamed through space and was active within the form of Christ Jesus. He therefore begins his Gospel with the Baptism of John, when the Light of the World came down to earth. In the Gospel of John we are told of the soul of this Sun-spirit—of the Logos or Sun-word—its most inward essence. This is why the Gospel of John is the most inward of all the Gospels. The facts are distributed, and the complicated nature of Christ Jesus described from four different sides. All the four Evangelists tell of the Christ in Jesus of Nazareth, but each of them feels constrained to keep to the point from which he makes his start, the point concerning which he first attained clairvoyance so that he might be able to describe this very complicated Being.

It is well that we should review this once more, so that it may really penetrate the soul. Matthew's attention is directed to the birth of the Jesus of the Solomon line he describes the development of the forces of the physical and etheric bodies, and tells how these sheaths were later discarded by Zarathustra, and how he passed on to the Jesus of the Nathan line all he had acquired while in the physical and etheric body of the Solomon Jesus. Matthew has then to trace further what he does not describe at the beginning, the fate of all that which as qualities and consequences had passed over from the Solomon Jesus to the Nathan Jesus. His attention is not so much directed to what was elemental in the nature of the astral body and ego-bearer of the Nathan Jesus, but to that which had been passed on to him from his own, the Solomon Jesus. And as he describes the Sun-being Who came from above, he is mainly concerned with telling of the qualities that could only be possessed by Jesus because he had an etheric and astral body that had been built up by the Solomon Jesus. These qualities could naturally be remarked in the Christ, for they were there, but that part of Christ Jesus which had attracted his attention from the first, he continues to describe most exactly, for this was for him the most important.

The writer of the Gospel of Mark tells from the first of the great descending Sun-spirit; he describes no earthly Being; that which walked the earth in human form provided for him only the means by which the nature of the Spirit that worked within it might be revealed. He draws our attention to the facts that appeal most to him, namely, the way in which the forces of the Sun-spirit worked. Hence many of the things related in the Gospels of Matthew and of Mark are the same, but they are told from different points of view. The first describes more the character of the sheaths, showing especially how qualities which were apparent in later years had already been present in early youth, and describing these so that we see how they worked. The writer of the Gospel of Mark, on the other hand, only makes use of the physical Jesus in order to reveal to us the earthly activities of the Sun-spirit. This he does to the smallest detail. If you wish really to understand the Gospels in these details you must bear in mind that the Evangelists fixed their attention on that which had attracted them from the beginning

Hence the writer of the Gospel of Luke keeps his eyes fixed on what is important to him, namely, the astral body and the bearer of the ego. What Christ Jesus experienced as a physical person does not interest him so much, but rather the feelings and perceptions of the astral body and the ego-bearer. All tenderness and compassion come from the astral body, and Christ Jesus could only be the Being of compassion He was, because He possessed the astral body of the Nathan Jesus. So this writer draws attention from the first to the compassion of Christ Jesus, and all the things He could accomplish, because He bore within Him this special astral body.

The writer of the Gospel of John turns his attention to the most exalted Power working on earth—the inner force of the Sun-Spirit, brought down through the instrumentality of Jesus. Neither does the physical life interest him particularly, but he looks to the Highest, to the pure Sun-Logos; the physical Jesus is for him only the means by which he can trace the relationship of the Sun-Logos to man. That which attracts his attention in the beginning, holds it to the end.

When we look on sleeping humanity we see our external sheaths, our physical and etheric bodies. In these two members live all the forces that have come to us from divine beings who, through mi1licns and millions of years have worked at erecting this temple of the physical body. In this temple we have lived since Lemurian times, and have defiled it ever more and more. It was constructed for us originally during the Saturn, Sun, and Moon ages of evolution. In it divine beings have lived and worked constructively. Looking at our physical body we can say: This is a temple provided for us by the gods; gods who have constructed this temple for us out of solid substance. And in the ether body we have that which contains the finer substances of our being; we are only unable to see these because through the influences of Lucifer and Ahriman we have become incapable of doing so. In this ether body lives also that which appertains to the Sun in it resound the actively formative Sphere-harmonies which the gods perceive behind all purely physical nature. So of the ether body we can say: Exalted Beings live in it, Gods that are closely related to the Sun-Spirits.

In this way we must regard our physical and etheric bodies as the most perfect members of our being. When we have forsaken them in sleep, when they slip from us, they are at once filled with the life and activity of divine beings.

The writer of the Gospel of Matthew keeps the physical body of Christ Jesus before him as his main object through all the Gospel, as it was his main object from the first. The materially physical body, however, no longer existed, this had been given up in its twelfth year; but the divine part—its forces—passed over into the other physical body, that of the Nathan Jesus. The reason why the physical body of Jesus of Nazareth was so perfect was that he had filled it with the forces he derived from the body of the Solomon Jesus.

Let us now try to picture in what way the writer of this Gospel regarded the Jesus dying on the cross. He had always kept his attention fixed on that which it was his special mission to describe, that of which he tells in the beginning; but now the spiritual part forsakes the physical body, and what is godlike departs with it. So the attention of the writer of the Gospel is directed to the separation of the inner being of Christ Jesus from this Divinity in His physical nature. And the ancient cry which was always heard in the Mysteries when the spiritual nature of a man forsook his physical body to gaze into spiritual worlds—‘My God, my God, how hast thou glorified me!’—is altered by Matthew; so that with his attention fixed on the physical body he says, ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me!’ ‘Thou has gone from me! This is what he exclaims. It is on this ‘forsaking’ that the writer of the Gospel of Matthew fixes his attention at this moment.

The author of the Gospel of Mark, on the other hand, describes the approach of the external forces of the Sun-Aura, and tells how the Sun-Aura, the body of the Sun-Being unites with the etheric body. This etheric body is in the same situation as ours when we sleep. As our external powers go forth from us when we sleep so they went forth from Jesus at His physical death. Hence we find the same cry in the Gospel of Mark.

The writer of the Gospel of Luke also directs his attention at the death of Christ Jesus to that which claimed it in the beginning: to the astral body and ego-bearer. Therefore he does not make use of the same words. His attention is directed mainly to other facts, to facts connected with the astral body, which at this moment attained its climax of compassion and love. Hence he renders the cry as ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do!’

This is an expression of tenderness that could only come from such an astral body as the writer of the Gospel of Luke directs our attention to from the first; and the highest development of humility and devotion resulting from this is what claims his attention at the last. Therefore he gives the last words of Christ Jesus as ‘Father, into Thy hands I commend My Spirit!’

John tells us of what, though certainly derived from the earth, was to be realized by man in the ordering of the earth, the meaning of earthly organization as it is contained in the Sun-Word. His attention is, therefore, directed mainly to what, as organization, was accomplished from the Cross on Golgotha. He describes to us how at this moment the Christ establishes a higher Brotherhood than that of blood-relationship. The former brotherhood arose through the blood. Mary was the mother of the child according to the blood. But that which was to unite soul with soul in love was inaugurated by Christ Jesus.

He gave to the disciple whom He loved not his mother according to the blood, but He gave to him his true mother in Spirit. Thus, renewing old bonds which had been lost to humanity, the words heard from the Cross come down to us in a new sense: ‘Behold thy Son!’ and ‘Behold thy Mother!’

That which as organizing quality lay here at the foundation of a new kind of fellowship is contained in the Life-ether, which organizes life, and which streamed into the earth in the Deed of Christ. Thus, behind all that the Evangelists tell us, we have a single act—the Deed of Christ; but each tells of it from the point of view which he took up from the beginning. The reason is that each of the Evangelists was absorbed in what his clairvoyant vision revealed to him and which he was fitted to receive; the rest passed him by. We now realize that this all-comprehensive event, which is described to us from four sides, is not full of contradictions. Once we are able to gather these different points of view into one we learn to understand it just because it is so described. It then also seems quite natural that the confession of Peter, with which we dealt in the last lecture, is only found in the Gospel of Matthew, and not in the others.

Mark describes the Christ as the Sun-Force, as a universal cosmic force at work in the world, which is now to work in a new way. It is the majestic power of the Sun-Aura in its elemental activity of which he tells. Luke, in speaking of the inner nature of Christ Jesus, describes preferably the astral body, the single human individual, man as he lives in himself; for it is in the astral-body that man lives in himself, here in his deepest individuality, here he develops within his inner self. Man does not form fellowships primarily by means of his astral body; the community-building capacity by which he enters into relationship with other men appears in the etheric body. Luke has, therefore, no inclination to tell us of the founding of any fellowship. Neither has the writer of the Gospel of John, who describes to us the ego-being. But Matthew, who describes Christ Jesus as man, has special inducement to speak of those human relationships established by the God Who once and only once dwelt within a human form. He is constrained to lay special stress on the relationships, the fellowships that God, as man, was able to establish among men, a relationship which could be regarded as a ‘Community,’ as an association in which many dwell together. The human aspect of Christ Jesus is what he describes, because this was the aspect to which he turned his attention in the beginning, and he shows how Christ worked as man through the physical and etheric body he had assumed.

When we have gained an inner understanding of this, we find it natural that the expression which has stirred up so much controversy, ‘Thou art Peter, and on this rock will I establish my community’ could only be found in the Gospel of Matthew. When we look at all the discussions of modern theologians of most varied schools concerning these words, we really only find particular and unique reasons for accepting them or rejecting them; nowhere, however, do we find an understanding for their deeper meaning. Those who reject them do so because the external community of the Catholic Church upholds them; for the external organization of this church is founded on them. That they are misused in this sense is no proof that they were originally introduced to support the Catholic Church. Those who reject them do not really know what to bring forward against them, for they do not see the misinterpretations. These gentlemen are in a strange position. Some state that the Gospel of Mark is the original Gospel, that to it was then added those of Matthew and Luke, which, they say, are to some extent copied and enlarged from it, and that it had occurred to the writers of the Gospel of Matthew, and of Luke, to insert these words. They specially state this with regard to the Gospel of Matthew, because they say he wished to support the idea of the community by inserting the words: ‘Thou art Peter, on this rock I will found my community.’

In any case parts of the text are of little help in the rendering of certain passages, because it is impossible to say regarding some ancient texts that this or that is the word actually used; but as regards these words in the Gospel of Matthew it is a fact that they belong to what is most certain in it, for here we have no possible philological reason for doubt. Many sayings may be open to doubt in such complicated communications, but from the standpoint of philology no objections can be brought against these two statements ‘Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God,’ and the other, ‘Thou art Peter, on this rock will I build my community, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.’ No text exists to which objections can be made in respect of these sayings. Perhaps it was hoped that from texts more recently discovered some contradiction of these words might be found, but the passages to which I refer are not found in these texts, portions of which are very much perished.

This at least is the outcome of philological research. Naturally you must rely on what is reported by those who have seen these documents. Of this passage we can state that no other rendering of it is possible, and from the whole nature of the Gospel of Matthew we can well see that this must be so. Christ Jesus is here described as a man. Once we have this key we can understand the Gospel of Matthew and we can also understand the parables told by Christ Jesus to His disciples and to those who were outside his immediate circle.

In the last lecture we showed how man evolves upwards from below until he unfolds the spiritual-soul like a blossom, until he has developed so far that the Christ-impulse comes to meet him.

The five principles of human nature which developed in man during the five epochs of civilization—the ether body, astral body, sentient-soul, rational-soul, and spiritual-soul evolve upwards from below. These can be so used, trained, and developed that they acquire what makes it possible for them—when the time is ripe—to be permeated by the Christ-impulse. In future ages all humanity will be able to develop so that they can participate in the Christ, but they must first develop fittingly these five principles of their being from below. If this is not done, if through succeeding incarnations they do not concern themselves with the development of these principles, then the Christ can come to them; but they cannot unite themselves with Him. They have no oil in their lamps These five. principles may be left without oil. Those who have poured no oil into their lamps are represented very beautifully in the parable of ‘the five foolish Virgins.’ Those who had not attended to their lamps in time could not unite themselves with Christ; but the other five who had put oil in their lamps could in the right hour do so.

All the parables founded on numbers are profoundly illuminating as regards the impulse brought by Christ to men.

Further, He makes it clear to those who regard His teaching outwardly, that many external thing must not be considered merely in a material sense, or in the most obvious way, but rather as symbols for something else. He wishes to point out to them the nature of their own thoughts. He asks for a coin, and showing them the likeness of Caesar imprinted on it, points out that something more is expressed by the coin than is merely contained in the metal, namely, its connection with a certain ruler, with a certain Empire. ‘What in this belongs to Caesar, render to him; it is his, and is contained in his likeness on the coin, not in the metal itself.’ ‘But learn,’ He also wished to teach them, ‘to regard men, and what is in them, in a like manner, for they are the temples of the living God. Look on men as you would look on a coin, learn, that in them you see the image of God; you will then know that they belong to God.’

All these parables have a much deeper meaning than the trivial one generally accepted. We learn this when we know that Christ did not make use of parables as is customary in the literature of the day. In making use of them He directs them to the whole nature of man, obliging people when they think them out to apply them to their whole nature, not to its separate parts. In this way He shows how, if they are to be shown that something is irrational, they must learn to pass with their thoughts from one realm to another.

For example, people have thought out all kinds of Sun-myths in connection with Buddha, Christ, and others. It became at last too much for one person. He said therefore: ‘With these methods of applying Myths and Constellations to any great event, it is possible to do anything. If someone comes and points out that in the life of Christ we have a Sun-myth, in order to show that Christ Jesus never lived, one can also assert by such methods that Napoleon never lived, and can easily prove it. We might say: In the name of Napoleon we have a rendering of “Apollo”, the initial “N” does not represent a negative in Greek but an intensification; hence Napoleon is N'Apollo—a kind of “Super-Apollo”. The resemblance can be carried still further by the individual who sets out to prove the non-existence of Jesus. A resemblance is found by the German Prof. Drews between the names Jesus, Joses, Jason, etc., etc. Marvellous connections can also be discovered between the name of Napoleon's mother, Letitia, and Leto, the mother of Apollo; further, that Apollo—the Sun—had twelve constellations around him; Napoleon had twelve Marshals, who are nothing more than symbolic expressions for the Zodiacal signs surrounding the sun. It is not unimportant that the hero of the Napoleon myth had six brothers and sisters, he making the seventh, just as the planets are seven in number. Behold, therefore, Napoleon did not live!

This is a very clever satire on the symbolic explanations so frequently employed. Men never really learn, otherwise they would have known that according to these methods—which they even employ to-day—it would have been proved long since that Napoleon, for example, never lived. But humanity never learns, for according to the same methods it is proved again to-day that Jesus never lived.

Such things show how necessary it is that we should not approach what the Gospels have to tell concerning the greatest Event in all the world, without preparation. We must realize also that it is exactly here that Anthroposophy ma so easily go wrong. For even our movement is by no means free from playing with all kinds of Symbolism drawn from the world of the stars.

I wished, therefore, especially in this cycle of lectures, where I have spoken of the greatest Event in human evolution as having been revealed in the language of the stars, to point out the true way in which this language is employed when what is referred to is really understood.

With this preparation, let us approach the scene in which the Gospels culminate. I have already referred to the baptism and the history of the life and death of Christ Jesus as two stages of initiation. To this I have only to add that after He had led His disciples to.the point where they could perceive the going forth of the innermost being of a man into the Macrocosm, where they could see beyond death, He accomplished a resurrection before them, but not in the trivial sense in which it is often understood. This took place absolutely as told in the Gospel of Matthew. Let us take the words just as they stand—and as clearly stated also in the Gospel of John—and understand that what Paul says is true when he tells us: Through what he had experienced on the way to Damascus, he had seen the Christ, as the Risen One!

Paul lays special stress on the fact that what was revealed to him was the same as was revealed to the other brethren, to the twelve, and to the five hundred also, at one time. The Christ was seen by him, as others saw him after the resurrection. This is amply indicated in the Gospels, where we read that Mary of Magdala, who had seen the Christ a few days before, seeing Him after the resurrection takes Him to be the gardener, for she finds no resemblance to Him she had known before. If He had really looked as He had a few days before, it would have been impossible for in this case it would have been an abnormal fact.

No one would believe you if you said that you could not recognize someone you had seen a few days before, if he reappeared in the same form a few days later. We have, therefore, to realize clearly that a change had in fact taken place. Reading the Gospels closely we arrive at the necessary conclusion, that through all that had taken place in Palestine, through the Mystery of Golgotha, the eyes of the disciples had been opened, and that they were able to recognize the Christ as He was, as the Spirit penetrating, and working, through the whole world. They recognized Him for what He was, after He had given over His physical body to the earth, and saw that He remained just as powerfully active for the earth as He had been before.

All this is made amply clear to us in the Gospel of Matthew, in words perhaps the most remarkable to be found in any document. We are clearly shown that the writer of this Gospel desires to inform us: Christ appeared once upon a time in a human physical body, but this event is not merely an event, it is an Impulse—an Original Cause. It has results, it has an effect.

The Sun-Word or Sun-aura, of which Zarathustra once spoke as being outside the earth, has through the life of Christ Jesus become united with the earth, and has remained so. Before this, what was later united with the earth was not so united with it.

It is fitting that we Anthroposophists should understand this fact. We then also understand that it was the risen Christ Who revealed Himself to the eyes of the disciples, now become clairvoyant, and showed them how as Spirit He was now interwoven with the earth and could say to them: ‘Go forth and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to observe all things whichsoever I commanded you! and lo! I am with you always, even unto the end of the Earth-age!’

It is the mission of Spiritual Science to help us to understand what was then beginning; that the Aura of the earth has been united with the Sun-Aura, and that it can be seen by those whose spiritual eyes are opened, that this Sun-Aura, in the Earth-Aura, which was visible to Paul, can also be heard when our inward ears are opened to hear the Sun-word as it was heard by Lazarus, he who had been initiated by Christ Jesus Himself.

The purpose of Spiritual Science is to interpret these facts to us. It has also to interpret for us what has taken place with regard to the spiritual evolution of the world. In doing this Spiritual Science actually establishes that which Christ Jesus desired to establish, and does so in the sense of the Gospel of Matthew.

There is one very beautiful saying in the Gospel of Matthew that is generally wrongly translated. The saying: ‘I am not come down to remove peace from earth, but to remove the sword.’ This most beautiful message of peace has unfortunately in the course of time been changed into its very opposite. In order gradually to deliver the earth from that which brings strife and disharmony among men, the Christ-Being had impressed Himself—His own nature—on the spiritual life of the Earth. Spiritual Science will establish peace when, in this sense, she has become so truly Christ-like that she unites all religions. She can then unite not only what is in our immediate neighbourhood, but when the act of the greatest of all Peacemakers is understood, she can establish peace over the whole earth.

It is certainly not in accordance with the greatest Peacemaker that fanatical people should go from one part of the earth to another and impose a narrow Christian teaching on a people whose conditions make such a teaching unsuitable in the form it has taken among another people.

Great mistakes were made when teaching concerning Christ was carried over to the East in our time, and imposed on people here and there.

It has often been pointed out to you as Anthroposophists that the Christ does not belong only to Christians; that in reality the same being was referred to by Zarathustra when he spoke of Ahura Mazdao, and by the seven Indian Rishis when they spoke of Vicva Karman. We live in the West, and we know that it is Christ who is spoken of, when in the East other words are used. We strive to understand the Christ so that this understanding is in accordance with human evolution—with the further progress of humanity. And we clearly realize that neither discernment nor revelation can give us information concerning Christ which turns men from Him, that only those things vouchsafe information to us concerning Him, which consciously bear within them the living content of Christ Himself. And we know when we speak in the right way of Vicva Karman and Ahura Mazdao to those who deny Christ—when we do not force names on them—that they can attain of themselves to an understanding of the Christ. We do not wish to force the Christ on them in name, we realize clearly when we are not only Anthroposophists but Occultists that names mean little, that it is the Being that matters. Were we convinced but for a moment that we could express the being who is in the Christ by any other name we would do so What we are concerned with is the truth, not with our prejudices because of living in one corner of the earth and belonging to one people. It must not be said of us that we understand the Christ through means not fitted to an understanding of Him, because outside His influence, this would be impossible for anyone. Christ can be found also by other nations, but He must be sought by means derived from Himself. People should not reproach Anthroposophists for wishing to study Christianity in forms not derived from Christianity itself. Christ can not be comprehended by Oriental names. He is not understood through them at all; such people look close past Him, thinking perhaps that they have seen Him.

What does it mean when people put forward the objection that we view Christ from a theosophical or oriental standpoint? Have we to deny that the Christ came to us from the East? We have no such wish, but people seek in this way to force us to take the West to the East, and to form a conception of Christ in accordance with the East. This must not and cannot be, not from any aversion, but because Eastern ideas, which have a very ancient origin, cannot reach out to grasp the idea of Christ, and because the Christ can only be absolutely and entirely understood through that line of evolution into which first Abraham and then Moses entered. But the being of Zarathustra passed on into Moses, and we have to seek him there, to where his influence has extended.

Further, we must not seek Zarathustra in the ancient Zarathustrian literature, but where he reincorporated in Jesus of Nazareth! We must consider evolution!

In the same way we must not look for the Buddha as he was six hundred years before our era, but where the writer of the Gospel of Luke tells us he is to be found, where his light streamed from on high, after he had evolved from Bodhisattva to Buddha, and shone down into the astral body of the Jesus of the Gospel of Luke. Here the Buddha is to be found, and here we learn to know him in his further progress.

It can be seen from this how religions absolutely agree, and work together to bring about the advance of humanity. It is not a matter of preaching the tenets of Anthroposophy, but that we place them in a setting of living feeling—that we do not merely talk of tolerance and remain intolerant because we have a prejudice in favour of one religious system or another. We are only tolerant when we measure each with its own standards and understand each for itself.

It is certainly not our fault nor the fault of our special prejudices that many religious systems have apparently co-operated to bring Christianity about. In spiritual realms, where the great spiritual beings have worked, things have progressed in a different way from on Earth, where those who confess these various religions are active. Some of these earthly confessors, for example, summoned a conference in Tibet to establish an orthodox teaching in the name of Buddha at the very time when the actual Buddha had come down to inspire the astral body of the Jesus spoken of in the Gospel of Luke. So it always is. The confessors of a faith hold fast to that which has continued working on earth; meanwhile divine beings have carried the work on further so that mankind may advance. Humanity makes most progress when men try to understand their Gods, when they try to advance with them. Such a thought ought to give us a living feeling, a living understanding, of what we glimpse in the different Gospels.

You have seen that in studying the three Gospels so far dealt with we have to recognize something different in each of them. When to these we shall have added the study of the Gospel of Mark we shall find that it reveals a very intimate knowledge of Cosmology. Ahura Mazdao, who is active in all space, can be described in a right connection in this Gospel, just as the secret concerning the blood, concerning the connection of the individual with the race from which he has sprung is described in the Gospel of Matthew.

Accept what I have ventured to describe in these lectures as one side of the great Christ Event, and realize that far from everything has been said concerning it. The time is perhaps not yet come when all that might be said concerning this Great Mystery can be said, even in small circles such as ours. The best result that can come from the presentations of these facts is that we accept them not only with our understanding and intellect, but that we associate them with the innermost phases of our soul life—with the deepest feelings of our hearts—and there let them live on.

The words of the Gospels are words that, when we receive them into our hearts and really understand them, become powers; powers that fill us and develop a marvellous life-force within us. To-day, when I have to say the final words in connection with this course of lectures on the Gospel of Matthew, I should like to say something I have frequently said before, and which I should like especially to associate with this humanly beautiful document of our Christian records—the Gospel of Matthew.

What strikes us most when reading the Gospel of Matthew which from the very first brings before us the manhood of Christ Jesus?

Though recognizing the great difference between any other earthly man and that man who could receive the Christ, yet in all humility we would say that what strikes us most forcibly is the value of man, what he is worthy of. Then, although our nature is far far removed from that of the nature of Jesus of Nazareth, we may yet venture to say: We bear our human nature within us, and this human nature shows itself to be such that it can receive into it the Son of God, the Son of the living God; so that from this acceptance the promise can spring that the Son of God will from this time forward remain connected with the earth, and that when the earth will have reached its goal all men will be permeated with the substance and nature of Christ, in so far as they have desired to receive this into themselves. We have need of humility if we are to cherish such an ideal. If not so cherished it develops pride and conceit in us; we then think only of what we may become as men, and do not sufficiently keep in mind how little we have so far to show. This ideal must be experienced with humility. When understood in this way it rises before us with such majesty and power, and is so overwhelming in its splendour that we are forced to be humble. Our humility need not overwhelm us, however, for we have the Reality of this ideal before us, and when we understand the Reality, however small our power may be, yet it will bear us ever higher and higher towards our Divine Goal.

The Rosicrucian Mystery Play strikes the entire scale in tones as we need them in ascending progress—firstly in the second scene where Johannes Thomasius stands shattered under the overwhelming impression from the words, ‘O man, know thou thyself;’ secondly, where in the ninth scene, under the impression of the words, ‘O man, feel and experience thou thyself;’ he feels exultingly raised to the wide spaces of Heaven. Keeping this before us, and with help from it, we can understand the majesty and grandeur which meets us in the Jesus of the Gospel of Matthew, revealing as it does our own littleness and demanding our humility, but at the same time pointing to the inner truth and inner reality which lift us out of all that seems like an abyss of our own littleness, compared with what we should be and can become.

If frequently we are conscious of feeling crushed when comparing what we are with the human divine greatness that can be in man, yet if we have but the goodwill we can experience something of the divine Impulse coming from the ‘Son of the living God,’ we can call to mind Christ Jesus, who Himself exhorts us, here where as men we experience the ego of which He is the most exalted Representative, crying to us in clear-cut tones for all the ages to come, ‘O man, experience thyself.’

When we understand the humanity of the Gospel of Matthew in this way—and hence it is the Gospel which lies most near to us—there streams to us from it the courage to live, the power and hope to stand fast, whatever our life-work may be. If we do so, we shall have best understood what it was intended that these words should convey to us.

Rudolf Steiner often visited Edith Maryon in her sickbed. During these visits, he kept her up to date on the content of his lectures and on events in Dornach. He conveyed to her the contents of the esoteric lessons and informed her about the development of the constitution and the events in the Anthroposophical Society. He also read the daily newspaper to her or commented on articles from the newspaper. It is therefore understandable that political events were also discussed.

The verses and drawings with which Rudolf Steiner helped Edith Maryon to distract her from her pain also bear witness to these visits. Here, too, the close connection to everyday life on the “hill” becomes clear.

On the following pages, a selection of such verses and drawings is shown in a reduced format.

It goes without saying that these verses and drawings were not made with the intention of being published; this should always be borne in mind by the viewer.

After an absence of eighteen months, our esteemed Annie Besant returned to Europe in May from the scene of her work in India to spend a few months among us in Europe working to spread the theosophical teachings and theosophical life.

As you all know, we will also have an opportunity to hear Annie Besant here in Berlin in a few days. When Annie Besant comes to Europe, even if it is only for a short time, it is a celebration for the members of the Theosophical Society on our continent and in England. It is a celebration especially for those who, out of full knowledge and insight, appreciate the greatness and significance of this unique personality. There are many people in Europe who are attached to this personality with a love built on knowledge and insight.

In the arena of her activity, where she is mostly active now, Annie Besant is particularly well understood. One understands why Annie Besant is so extraordinarily well understood and loved in India. You understand it when you read the words, which are on the one hand full of deep wisdom and on the other hand full of strength, in the lecture that Annie Besant gave two years ago at the annual meeting of the Theosophical Society in England and which is now also available in print. The lecture that Annie Besant gave at the time on the task of her own, the English people, in India was – if I may use the worn-out word – it was an act. For it was based on what I would call the deepest historical insight into the needs, the true, heartfelt needs of a people.

Annie Besant, if I may say so, spoke to the conscience of her compatriots at the time. And they were words of love - because only words of love can come from true theosophy - but at the same time they were words that sound quite different from what England, what English imperialism, is still doing in India today. They were words that were entirely appropriate for a theosophist.

What Annie Besant called for was nothing less than a modern fulfillment of what Christians call the miracle of Pentecost. You all know that this Pentecost miracle expresses in a powerful symbolism that at that time the apostles, the messengers of Christianity, began to speak in all tongues. They began to speak in all tongues for the reason that this is necessary for someone who wants to bring the message of the divine world order into the world. God speaks to all hearts. But only with one's own tongue can a member of a nation hear the divine word. If you go to a nation and try to interest them in the spirit of divine wisdom or to teach the spirit of human comfort, then you must, above all, be understood by that nation. You must speak in the tongue of that nation. You must take the words, the ideas, the feelings in which you express yourself from this people. The Theosophist sets himself the goal of respecting and appreciating the peculiarities of each people if he wants to contribute to the spread of human and divine wisdom.

And that is what Annie Besant demands of her people with such fervor, one might say, when she says: If you go to this country, then do not be strangers, not rulers, not conquerors, but loving friends who want to learn the language – at least the spiritual language – of the one to whom you want to speak, to whom you want to convey a culture other than your own.

You see, that is the understanding that Annie Besant has been showing the Indian people for years, the active understanding that has led her to work in India for the benefit of the education of this people, for the development of the extraordinarily high spiritual culture to our present day there. Because she knows how to speak to each person in his own tongue, in the sense of the symbolic miracle of Pentecost, and because the Indian people in particular have an understanding of it, Annie Besant is so very much loved there. Those who understand this spirit of genuine theosophical sentiment in the West as well, who do not just know it intellectually, but have grasped it with the depth of their hearts, so that it is the very principle of their lives, are equally devoted to Annie Besant, and for them Annie Besant is currently the soul of the theosophical movement. She is because the spiritual life, which the theosophical movement wants to bring to modern humanity, flows through each of her words, can be felt in each of her words, so that each of her words, although it comes from a complete mastery of all present sciences, at the same time sinks deeply into the hearts of her listeners, can sink deeply into their hearts.

Now, esteemed attendees, Annie Besant may be called the soul of the theosophical movement, and we may greet it with particular satisfaction that this year's season, our work this year, may begin with the work of Annie Besant within our section.

I would like to say that the theme of Annie Besant's lecture in Berlin next Friday is indicative of the whole task of the Theosophical movement and of the importance of the Theosophical Society in our time. The theme is “The New Psychology”, the new doctrine of the soul. We will prepare ourselves for the lecture, which is to be a celebration for us, by realizing what this lecture, in the sense of the Theosophical movement, is actually supposed to convey. Psychology, as you know, is the study of the soul. A “new psychology” is what will be discussed here. The word “new” indicates that we are dealing with a doctrine that was not there before. And if it was not there, then in relation to which doctrine of the soul is the one that Annie Besant is talking about a new doctrine of the soul? That we can speak today of a new doctrine of the soul is something that is connected with the whole task, with the whole meaning of our Theosophical movement. And probably if we could not speak today of a new doctrine of the soul, the Theosophical movement would not have attained any importance, would not have solved its task in such a way, as is already the case today to a high degree.

What was the old doctrine of the soul? We shall understand this if we look back half a century in the development of our cultural life. What I am about to say applies not only to Germany, but to all civilized countries. If we look back to the middle of the nineteenth century, we find that peculiar thoughts about the nature of the soul and the nature of the human spirit prevailed at that time. At that time, so-called materialism was at its peak. Those who had the ear of their contemporaries, such as Ludwig Büchner, Vogt, Moleschott and others, spoke for materialism. The words spoken by the natural scientists Vogt in Germany and Clifford in England resounded throughout the world: “Thoughts are secreted by the brain just as bile is produced by the liver.” So that was the time when people wanted nothing to do with a special soul. Those who wanted nothing to do with a special soul were those who placed the physical above the soul, those who wanted nothing to do with it were those who believed at the time that they were at the cutting edge of science. The flowering of science in the modern age had just begun.

If we take a look at the science of more recent times, we have to say that tremendous developments and discoveries were made in the world at that time. The new science of life was invented under the microscope. It was at that time that people first looked through the microscope at the smallest living creatures, the so-called cells. The doctrine of the origin of the earth, which we now call geology, was still very young. The gale-force winds of Darwinism swept through the educated world. Discovery followed discovery, and the discoveries in the scientific field meant that our external life was changing as industry made its great conquests in the field of natural science, of natural forces. Man had completely settled in the physical world. He had celebrated his great triumphs in the physical world. At the same time, this was the epoch in which man – at least the man who had immersed himself in it – became disoriented about the truths of thousands of years, by denying what the fathers and the fathers of our fathers had regarded as the principle of their existence, as the support of their lives.

We may say that not all of the educated, perhaps only a small number of them, had embraced this materialistic worldview. But that is not the point in the development of the human race. What matters is not whether only a few or the masses grasp some new idea, but whether that idea has the potential to be absorbed into the development of culture, whether it is suitable for being absorbed into the hearts of people, into the minds of those who reflect. There have always been only a few in the world who were knowledgeable. Go back to ancient times and you will always see that there were only a few spiritual leaders. And it is true that the spiritual possessions of the spiritual leaders later become the almost universal possessions of a large part of humanity. Go back to the times when Christianity spread, when the gospel that we call Christian first came into the world, and of which we must say that at first only a few people adhered to it. Then more and more people did so, and later there were millions. And if you go back to the time of the dawn of new eras, to the time of humanity's scientific discoveries, and do some research, you will find that only a few people believed in what are now scientific facts that are common knowledge to countless people – our views of the starry sky, for example, the so-called Copernican worldview. Look at how few people confessed to this belief centuries ago. You will see that there were only a few. And then the current flooded into the minds of a large number of people. This is the case with ideas that have the power to fill people's hearts. With them, it does not matter whether they are initially held by a few or a large number. What matters is who they are held by. Whether they are those who are at the summit of the times or not.

If you follow the times and go back to the first decades of Christianity, you will find that a large number of people, namely the best within European culture, who were at the height of their time in terms of spirituality, were seized by the principles of Christianity. And if you go back to the sixteenth century, you will find that a large number of people, inspired by the few, were convinced by the ideas that Copernicus, Galileo, Giordano Bruno and others brought into the world. They are the leaders of humanity, and the question is whether these leaders of humanity will find the ear of their contemporaries. It was an important question in the mid-nineteenth century as to whether the few whose convictions found expression in the words “The brain sweats out thoughts as the liver does bile” would find the ear of their contemporaries. It was, I say, a big question. For those who spoke in this way, we must realize, were not the worst of their age in those days. They were the ones who spoke from erudition, from science. And science itself had taken on a form that was quite capable of instilling such views in the hearts of many. You can imagine what would happen if, instead of the spiritual, the spiritual world view, the purely materialistic doctrine I have mentioned were to become common knowledge among mankind. Anyone who has an inkling of the devastating effects that the materialistic doctrine would have to wreak on humanity, anyone who is able to observe how the destructive, devastating forces of human nature are connected with this world view in particular, also knows that there was a danger within our education, within our development at that time; but they also know that it is people themselves who are leading history.

Our revered first teacher, Mrs. Blavatsky, once said in her “Secret Doctrine” - and it is a profound truth: Certainly, what is necessary happens in the world. And when an age needs a teaching, a wisdom, a truth, then it will come. But people are called upon to receive it. Although the higher forces must flow into human nature, human resistance, the destructive, evil forces of human nature, can delay the inflow of the higher forces for a long time. Man is not a weak-willed tool of the divine world order, but through thought and human feelings, this divine world order speaks. If we realize this, then we must say to ourselves: Much depends on how humanity in the second half of the nineteenth century positions itself in relation to the materialistic world view, and what it will say to those who are at the height of the materialistic world view. It was close – and the one who cannot observe the times cannot imagine how close it was – that the materialistic worldview would have completely found the ear of its contemporaries. In 1875, that stream of spiritual wisdom was sent into the world, that stream of spiritual wisdom that comes from the same beings from whom spiritual wisdom has spread through all times.

Our first teacher, Mrs. Blavatsky, was commissioned to make herself the mouthpiece for this spiritual wisdom, and those who listened to the messenger of higher beings, to Mrs. Blavatsky, were the first to vigorously counteract the materialistic flood. But do not think that the stream I spoke of was only active within what we call the Theosophical movement or Theosophical Society. Oh no, in the last third of the nineteenth century a mighty spiritual wave began to sweep over all of civilized humanity. Everywhere, the longing arose to recognize the spirit again. Everywhere, the longing arose to gain clarity in the face of the materialistic shaping of science. Only the standard-bearers, the pioneers of this spiritual direction, wanted to be theosophists. Look at all countries and see how all countries long for a new spiritual life, and how this spiritual life lives as a longing in all souls that often deal with the riddles of human life. This longing lives in people who today can call themselves the best of culture, and more than anything else lives in this urge for a new idealism, for a new spirituality. This spiritual wave has also had an effect in science, and there has been a mighty change in science, especially in recent years. Whoever knows that what is decided by the so-called authorities is only a relatively small wave, but one that spreads in all directions and affects humanity, and who also knows how the materialistic movement was aroused at the time, also knows what significance this new wave will have for humanity. Mankind must surely look up to those who have the opportunity to study science and truth. Where should the ordinary person turn when they ask: What is the smallest living thing? They can only turn to science. What priests were in the broadest sense in the past, men of science have become for modern, cultured humanity. But with the psychology that Vogt expresses with the words “The brain sweats out thoughts like the liver sweats out bile,” science, which is at the cutting edge today, has broken thoroughly.

Those who fifteen years ago proclaimed with certainty materialistic science, who denied any life that extends beyond birth and death, precisely those who, just fifteen years ago, did this but seriously engaged with science, who did not remain with prejudices and opinions, who developed further, it is precisely they who today speak a completely different language.

Those who once said that man descended from the mere animal, that the human soul is nothing more than an expression of the mechanically acting organism, just as the activity of a machine is an expression of the mechanical nature of that machine, those who spoke or speak like that, are no longer considered by the truly insightful to be at the level of science. Those who have developed further have at least come to the one thing, they have come to admitting: With materialistic science, there can be no question of attaining the soul, of knowing about the soul, of real psychology. Take a look around Germany. Natural scientists who have done their studies in the last fifteen years and are beginning to talk about these questions: how cautiously they speak compared to the materialistic certainty that could be heard fifteen years ago. Compare what was said about Darwin in the past with what is being said about him today. There is a tremendous difference. And if you look at books that come from infinite erudition, such as those by [Fresnel] – I could also name some German naturalists in this field – you will see the turnaround that has occurred in scientific thinking. Fifteen years ago, you could still hear the same mechanical science at work in the laboratory and the dissecting room, examining tissues under the microscope, and so on. It cannot provide any insights into the soul. Laplace, who originated the doctrine of the movement of the heavenly bodies, once made a remarkable statement to the great Napoleon. Napoleon said: “I find that in your explanations about the movement of the heavenly bodies, there is no God.” To which Laplace replied: “I don't need this hypothesis!” Just as Laplace, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, believed that he did not need the “God” hypothesis, so science believes that it does not need the soul hypothesis. It says: We have examined and dissected the brain, and we have not found a soul.

Today, only a natural scientist whose insights are outdated would say this. No natural scientist at the cutting edge of his or her field would say this. Today, the natural scientist who is not yet ready to embrace the new paths of a new soul doctrine will at least cautiously say: My science must stop at the problems of the soul, at the riddles of life.

That is what the natural scientists say: it is agnosticism, that is, non-science or non-knowledge. For many, this is a buzzword. The conviction that materialistic science must be modest and must be agnostic with regard to the higher realms of existence is becoming more and more widespread. From this you can see that the psychology of fifty years ago, which is not a psychology at all but a denial of everything spiritual, is on the way to being completely overcome.

But this materialistic doctrine of the soul has brought us one thing: for centuries and millennia there was a doctrine of the soul that priests taught and that comforted people when they were dying. At that time, many people were able to doubt this doctrine of the soul and they believed that they had to doubt it in honest conviction because, in their opinion, their research demanded it. Certainly, the eternal truths proclaimed by the religions of all times are unshakable, they stand firm. They have not been shaken, not even by the fact that individual people have lost their way with them. It is no proof that the materialistic doctrine of the soul has spread, that at that time this doctrine of the religions did not have the power to bring about the conviction of its truth. But the spirit had become weak, especially in the inquisitive and striving seekers of truth. And because it had become weak, the spirit, through the floods of new physical truths that had befallen it under the splendor of the new cultural achievements, because it had achieved another, external, physical greatness, therefore it lagged behind in spiritual life, therefore it could not comprehend the truths in the old form. A new form for the teaching of the soul has therefore become necessary. And a completely new method of research has also become necessary. And while the natural scientists I have been talking about have become more modest over the last fifteen years, while they have moved towards non-knowledge, towards agnosticism, others are working on developing a new teaching of the soul.

They are working on it and investigating what does not present itself to external research, what only presents itself to the spiritual and soul view. Thus we see that within the last twenty years a new psychology has flourished, quite independently of all occultist movements. We see that within the circles of scholars, natural scientists, researchers, a new psychology is emerging. And while the Theosophists want to be the pioneers and standard-bearers for a spiritual deepening of humanity, here you see the work beginning from a completely different side. You see how the same results are being sought on a much larger scale, which the Theosophical Society wants to bring to the world. The spiritual forces work uniformly. Do not imagine that it is other forces than the spiritual beings who stand behind the Theosophical movement that are inspiring modern scholars to a new psychology. These beings choose many paths. They choose them unconsciously in human terms in order to advance humanity in the knowledge of the spirit and in the study of the soul. One of the paths that runs parallel to Theosophy is the path that the new psychology is taking. The theosophist already knows where this new psychology will lead in years to come. He knows that it is a tributary that will flow into the great stream of spiritual movement, which is represented by the theosophical teaching and by the theosophical life. In full foresight of what must come, and in order to truly bring humanity to an understanding of what must come, the theosophical movement has been called into the world by beings who transcend far beyond the measure of what the most highly educated person can achieve within our culture. Anyone who does not believe in all modesty that his wisdom is the sum of all wisdoms, that his judgment represents the highest judgment, will soon be able to observe that there are other people besides him who have more wisdom and more judgment, and he will listen to these personalities, will let himself be taught by them. When he gains some insight, he will come to say to himself: I still have the way to go that others have already gone. The more insight a person gains, the more humble he becomes in this regard, the more clearly he realizes how much he still has to learn, and the more likely he is to find those who have something to teach him from their spiritual heights, which he has not yet reached. If someone believes that they cannot learn anything from anyone, it is a sure sign that they have not progressed very far. The more advanced a person is, the more he comes to the certain knowledge that people are at different stages of development, and that there have always been those who have been spiritual guides to humanity and who have progressed further in their development than their fellow brothers, the most advanced brothers. They are the ones who are most difficult to understand, indeed, to be recognized, by their less developed fellow brothers. It was from such highly developed entities, difficult to understand and recognize, that the great spiritual stream emanated in 1875, which, with the help of the Theosophical movement, poured out over humanity, which longed for it.

People often ask why these highly developed entities do not show themselves, why they only make themselves felt to a limited extent. The answer can be found in one of the most profound works produced by the Theosophical movement, in the small booklet, which, however, encompasses a world of wisdom, in “Light on the Path”. What is said there, that the guiding beings, these highly developed individualities that tower far above their fellow human beings, can be there, yes, can be in the midst of a crowd without being recognized, that they can be in St. Petersburg, in Berlin, in London, in Paris, without anyone - except for a very few - knowing about it. This is literally true. There are reasons, certain reasons, why the advanced leader of humanity must

remain hidden. We cannot deal with such reasons today. But it is necessary for the highest teachers to build a kind of wall around themselves, and that only those who are prepared by a suitable way of life should have access to them. Such entities were and are continually the source of the movements we call theosophical. Such entities, in their infinite benevolence, also have great power, and much of what happens in humanity comes from these beings without humanity suspecting it.

When we speak of new currents in spiritual life, of a new psychology, which seems to be apart from the great theosophical stream, it is only seemingly so. The same entities and forces are at work there too, and they speak the language that can be understood in the circles of scholarship, in the circles of scientific research. For the observation of the miracle of Pentecost, of speaking in all tongues, is the principle of the theosophist, that is what completely fulfills him. That is why it speaks to each race, each people and each tribe in its own language. That is why it speaks in the language of the Hindus in India and in other tongues in other places, to the hearts of people who are accustomed to thinking and speaking in scientific terms, these beings are also able to speak to them in their language. And gently and mildly and slowly, Theosophy will also guide science in its paths.

This is the perspective for the future. The theosophist knows that what is to be will be. He knows that even though we have to speak of it today as a very young plant, he knows that this new teaching of the soul will grow into a mighty light in a short time, that it will radiate and fill people with a completely new consciousness of the times.

This new psychology has been established by the scholars and will continue to be developed by the scholars. But if we want to learn about its significance and its mission in the future, then we must hear about this new psychology from the theosophists, and our dear and esteemed Annie Besant will speak about the significance and essence of this new psychology in Berlin on Friday. You see how a single act of a theosophist is connected with the whole task of theosophy, and how in turn the whole task of theosophy is connected with the task of our time. We do not believe that the theosophical movement is called upon to explore the souls of people for new truths, as is happening in the field of new psychology, nor do we believe that these truths can be found in ancient wisdom. We are clear about one thing: wherever new life is sprouting in the present, wherever something new is emerging, it needs to be imbued with a spiritual breath, to be directly revitalized with new spiritual life. And this spiritual life, this breath, which should blow through the souls and hearts of our present-day humanity, this direct life in the face of the new truths, is what the theosophical movement wants to bring.

You will hear about the new truths in a new form from all lecterns and from all sides in the future. The theosophical movement wants to give the deepest life, which must permeate it, the soul itself of this new spiritual life. And he who is imbued with this life, who is imbued with this attitude, wants that all our new souls striving for truth be inspired, that what we explore from a warm heart penetrates into hearts, so that it gives us strength to live and comfort for our gaze into the farthest future for that which would have to remain a dead letter, dead science, if it remained merely scientific, the one who wants to bring it to life, he is a theosophist. For those who hear the inner voice speaking in quiet moments, for such men and women, the Theosophical Society is only the outer instrument. It does not depend on whether something is more or less good or bad in the Theosophical Society. It is built on human weakness and with human judgment, like all human institutions. The greatest masters themselves, who have brought us the theosophical wisdom, who speak to those who imbue the theosophical movement with life, cannot deal with external social foundations. They leave that to those who carry out their orders, who place themselves in their service as their messengers. It is not the external framework that matters. But we want to preserve it precisely because we do not overestimate it and because we need it, and because we would be disturbed and prevented from working if we did not have this external framework as an all-encompassing one that covers Europe, America, Asia, Africa and Australia. We want to draw attention to the fact that it is not this framework, but the spirit that humanity needs, and that through the theosophical movement flows to those who want it.

Thus, a society in which Theosophists are gathered is something different from a society in which others are gathered in the present time, something essentially different. Everyone seeks out societies, geographical, anthropological, philological, philosophical, and so on. They find that all cultural products must spread through society. But one thing is different in the theosophical movement. Where theosophists are united, they do not all want to be united by common truths, not all by common convictions, by dogmas, they want to be united in that which cannot be grasped by the mind, not by the intellect, but by the heart, the heart that comprehends and is filled with wisdom, which is at the same time the heart that loves. The theosophists want to be filled with a common spiritual life. When they are united, this common spiritual life should flood their souls. And wherever there is a theosophical lodge, wherever more or less theosophical personalities of the present have united, they want to form a center where they gather these powers of soul and spirit, this power from which this spiritual life then radiates in all directions. Every meeting and every branch should be such a center, and something invisible should radiate out from it. What matters in these gatherings is not what this or that person says, whether he is more or less learned, not whether he is this or that, but whether those who are gathered are filled with this true spiritual life that radiates from their center, so that the humanity of the present can grasp it more and more. What matters is not what I say here, not my words, but each and every one of us who is gathered here. What passes through all our souls at the moment we have gathered here is what matters. It is only by chance that one person speaks and only by chance that one person puts into words what needs to be said. What one person says is no more important than what is going on in the souls of the others, in the eyes of those who lead the theosophical movement. What is important is the spiritual life, which should flourish in all souls at this moment and radiate out to the rest of the world, to the present-day human civilization. That is the true teaching of our society. That is what is embodied in our Annie Besant, and that is why we can call her the soul of the Theosophical Society. That is why she embodies the task of the Theosophical Society before the others. That is why what she does is specifically Theosophical work. And if today we have tried to immerse ourselves for an hour in the spirit of the Theosophical Movement and in the task of the Theosophical Society, if we have tried to understand what will be embodied for all of us in the near future, as if alive, next Friday and Sunday, then this task of ours should stand before our soul, shining before us as the best Theosophical light in the present. Hopefully we will get beyond the preparations to what it has to say to us about important questions of the present in the theosophical movement.

I have asked you to attend a short discussion on occult questions, because one must acknowledge that anyone participating in the theosophical movement should be clear not only about the outward things that are dealt with in the programme, but also about the direction in which this theosophical movement can lead. Now those occult streams which are living in the theosophical movement are in fact akin, in a particular respect, to earlier occult currents. The topic we mean to broach today concerns precisely one of these, which still persists to the present day: Freemasonry.

You know that, at least until the late seventeenth century, any kind of female member was, for Freemasonry, strictly taboo.¹ At that time, there was a good reason for this. When the reason for the Freemasons having no female members ceases at some point in world evolution to exist, then the time will have come for the work of Freemasonry on the physical plane to be taken over by the work of theosophy. Pro tem, the work of theosophy is preparatory work. Men and women will participate in the theosophical work on the same basis.

If I were now to be permitted to say briefly why women had to be excluded from the activities of Freemasonry, I could only say that one does not exactly give away one's secrets to the opponent; one hardly sends him one's plan of campaign. That is not done in the conduct of any war. And we will see that Freemasonry is in a particular respect in opposition to the female world.

Freemasonry is the continuation of very ancient secret societies and brotherhoods. Such secret societies—at least in the form in which they survive in Freemasonry originated just at the very beginning of our fourth Post-Atlantean epoch, that is to say in the same epoch in which Christianity later began.

You know that the outward compilation of the Bible is rightly ascribed to only a few hundred years before the birth of Christ.² But the biblical revelation was a [living] tradition for thousands of years before that. It was not the custom in antiquity to write such things down; they were instead passed on from mouth to mouth. Therefore it can be assumed that the secrets which Moses entrusted to the priesthood were only later written down.

Now in the same period as that when the Bible first made its appearance in world history as a document, what is known as the Freemasonry legend also came to be compiled and to be circulated.

In world evolution it is always to be regarded as a law, that what happened earlier is later briefly recapitulated. Every human being recapitulates, in the maternal womb, the stages through which the [human] race has already passed. Every planet repeats, in its initial stages, the previously completed steps of its evolution. What has already gone before is always briefly recapitulated. So is it with the races, too. Hence, the first, second and third Post-Atlantean races [epochs] are the recapitulation of earlier earthly conditions, only in a specific higher realm.

What began with Lemuria, developed itself throughout Atlantis, and was recapitulated in our three cultural epochs in a specific higher realm. So that we thus have a recapitulation of what occurred earlier, in Lemurian times, in a less-developed realm. Before the system of two sexes originated, there was a kind of bisexuality, a single [combined] sex, in so far as in each individual both sexes were represented. For the separation into two sexes only came later; only then did male-female become male and female. On a spiritual level something similar is recapitulated in our epoch. Actually, that kind of knowledge and wisdom which pertained to pre-Vedic ancient India had a male-female quality, and thereby, at the same time, something quite unconnected with any kind of duality or with any kind of outward principle. Then came the civilisation of the second cultural epoch; this was pre-eminently a spiritual culture having two sexes. Dualism then appeared—Ormuzd and Ahriman, Good and Evil. All this now merged with man's cognition.

Now we want to clarify how that came about. It came about thus: in the beginning, before there was a separate male and female sex, there was a twofold sexuality within each single individual. We must now ask: What was it that could become fertilised, and what was it that did the fertilising, in the one single individual? In ancient Greek mythology Zeus is portrayed with ample female breasts.³ A truth expresses itself therein, which was known in the old mysteries and which we also learn from the records, that the sex—if I may call it that—which immediately preceded our own, outwardly and physically resembled not the male but the female gender. So that, before the outward separation, we have thus both sexes in one individual that outwardly—in physical expression and in all perceptions and being—was female. Therefore at the beginning of the human race, we have to do with a bisexual individual tending towards the female. Only later did the male sex follow. Now we must be clear that in this individual, which had both sexes in it, a fertilising agent, or male seed, was also present. Woman contained man within her. When we have grasped the fact that the woman had the male principle within her, then we can conceive, with our ordinary scientific concepts, that reproduction was ensured. We want to bear in mind that at this time this happened via the woman.

Now came the time when things had to go their separate ways. What character did the fertilising principle in the woman then have, which on the physical plane would fertilise the female nature? What worked in the female [body] as a seed, was the male; and that was the spiritual, the wisdom. Woman contributed the substance; the spirit gave [it] form. Any structuring of the physical plane is a realisation of wisdom. Wisdom worked in the female. Now the two differentiated themselves, in that the two things which had previously worked as one now appeared as two separated poles. What was previously united in a single human organ, divided itself, whereby a duality in human development originated. This duality came about thus: first, the fertility—the ability of the female egg to fertilise itself—within the one individual, ceased [to function]. The female egg lost the possibility of becoming fertilised from its own body. So we are now dealing with a female which has become infertile and, above everything, the spiritual. The division of the two sexes came about through the separation of the physical organs, and the other sex was now endowed with the possibility of fertilisation. Two individuals appeared, one with physical femininity and the other with physical masculinity. With the man, wisdom has a female character, with the woman, it has a male character.

The separation is a very definite event, that one can follow; we will now have to be satisfied, however, with [just] indications. We are dealing, then, with male-tinged wisdom in the woman and female-tinged wisdom in the man. This female-tinged wisdom is passive, suited to receiving, listening, watching—to taking in from the surroundings. The male-tinged wisdom, the active wisdom, [is suited to] being productive. Thus we have a two-fold wisdom; the female wisdom that is active and that naturally will also be transferred to the men. So that there may indeed be plenty of men who take over the female wisdom, the race [propagates] itself below [on the physical plane]; and above, we are dealing with an active intuition stemming from women, and with a passive cognition, decidedly male in character.

This figures in the old mystery teaching as the antithesis between the Sons of Abel, or Sons of God, and the Sons of Cain, or Sons of Man. Abel represents the female, active intuition. Therefore he is unable to take hold of anything from the outside world which needs to be worked upon. He takes up the divine, which streams through him, that flows into his intuitiveness. The ‘Herdsman’ symbolises that. He tends and nurtures life, while intuition nurtures the divine life of wisdom. Cain has the male wisdom that receives the outward. This [wisdom] espouses the earth in order to till it; the material is outside [himself]. He is the ‘Field-builder’ [Literal meaning of German der Ackerbauer = ‘agriculturalist’]. What does the wisdom of Cain now achieve? This science of Cain's that, being a passive science, only receives—what does it accomplish?

Now there is a very interesting and important legend in which these truths are symbolically expressed for the Freemasons. That is the Temple Legend. And the reason for it is as follows:

The Bible itself, the Old Testament, derives from the female, the intuitive wisdom, and bears its stamp. The Old Testament is female wisdom. Male wisdom was not able to attain to intuition. It confined itself to building and work. It took stones and constructed buildings. It took metals and made implements. The Temple Legend puts it thus:

One of the Elohim impregnated Eve and Cain was born. Afterwards, another of the Elohim, Jehovah, also known as Adonai, created Adam. And Adam begat Abel by Eve. This legend counterposed the wisdom of Cain and the Biblical wisdom, so that, by the beginning of the fourth Post-Atlantean epoch, we have two opposing currents: the Bible, representing womanly wisdom, and the Temple wisdom as its opposing male counterpart. Already, in pre-Christian times, what the man [male wisdom?] wanted stood in opposition to the female wisdom. Moreover, Cain slew his brother Abel. That too comes into the Temple Legend. Jehovah caused strife between the race of Cain and the race of Abel, and Cain killed Abel. That means nothing else ... [Some very obscure sentences follow here in the (German) transcript.]

What was the consequence of the appearance of this Cain wisdom? The outcome of it all was that the fruitfulness that propagated itself through its own wisdom was killed. By killing Abel the male knowledge in Cain killed the possibility of self-propagation, that had been brought into being by the gods. That means it is because knowledge has been transferred to the man, that the Abel in man has been killed.

That is a process in man himself.⁴ Through male knowledge the creative force, the Abel [within], has been killed. There now stand in hostile opposition to one another, the descendants of Cain and the race of those who were put in the place of Abel, the descendants of Seth. The descendants of Cain are those who use their masculine wisdom to build up the external world; the passive wisdom is applied to external construction. The divine wisdom does not stream down into it. Out of what is free, it must build in the world. It has no divine intuition. Through trial, through experience, results the harmonising of the purely mineral products of the earth. Thus Tubal-Cain is born out of the race of Cain and thus, later on, will Hiram-Abiff or Adon-Hiram be born from the same lineage.

I have reserved to myself …[See note].⁵

Among the Abelites, you find the strongest representative in Solomon. During the third cultural epoch all the representatives of the Abel line were priests. The ancient priestly wisdom was the intuitive wisdom which formerly worked in woman as the power of fertilisation, but was then transformed, at a higher level, to spiritual wisdom. Out of this priestly wisdom came the Bible; in this way the Bible came to be a feminine wisdom. This feminine wisdom is able to make great revelations about the Divine; and to say how this relates to the angels and spirits. The business of the Sons of Cain is to shape the earth. Thus the original father of all smiths is indeed Tubal-Cain. Therefore Solomon had to send for Hiram-Abiff, who could build the Temple for him. He built it for King Solomon, the inheritor of the ancient priestly wisdom; for him, for Solomon, who transformed this priestly wisdom into external power. Kingship, as an outward institution, derives from the rule of the priests.

Thus Solomon sent for Hiram-Abiff. And thus Solomon's Temple was built. But now the Queen of Sheba came to Solomon's court and a kind of betrothal was celebrated there between the two. Now the temple was shown to the queen, and she desired to be introduced to the builder of this marvelous temple. When she was introduced to Hiram-Abiff, something quite special happened in her. A glance from Hiram-Abiff fell on her, and that worked in her like fire. And then a second thing happened, as follows: She wanted to see the workers and to be shown how all this was accomplished on the physical plane, so Hiram-Abiff took the Tau Symbol, held it aloft and the workers all came streaming together like ants. Through this she [was so impressed that she] deserted Solomon [for Hiram]. Some of Hiram's apprentices, whom he had refused to make into Masters, came to Solomon's aid. Now they sought to spoil Hiram's masterpiece, the casting of the Molten Sea. Instead of it coming out as a work of art, streams of fire spurted out in every direction. Hiram-Abiff tried to quench it all with water, but all he achieved by this was a complete wreck. A rain of fire sprayed down on everything, including Hiram-Abiff. A voice called to him, however, not to be afraid, for out of this would come his greatest success. Then he was led by a figure to the centre of the earth. There he met Cain himself, to whom he had been led by Tubal-Cain, who founded the art of metal-working. Here an important wisdom was revealed to him. He was told: Now know the true Jehovah, who is the cause of your being here. Jehovah hates the Sons of Fire, and wants to destroy them; he wants to destroy his own creation. But you need have nothing to fear. To you will be born a son, whom you will not yourself see, but from whom shall spring a race, out of which a new fire worship will develop on the earth.—With the hammer which Tubal-Cain gave him, he was able to complete the projected Molten Sea, thereby rising still further in the Queen of Sheba's affections. During a walk, a bird appeared in the air, showing her the mystical Tau sign. From this the Queen's nurse realised that the wisdom of the future was hidden under this sign of the Tau. During a feast, at which Solomon became intoxicated, the Queen of Sheba took the betrothal ring back from his hand. Hiram-Abiff was however set upon by the apprentices and killed. He was only just able to write the secret word on a golden triangle and hide it. It was later retrieved and enclosed in a stone shaped in the form of a cube. The Ten Commandments are inscribed on this stone that conceals the hidden word.

That is the temple wisdom, which male science has counterposed to the female wisdom. These are things that need only to be clarified, to be examined as to their occult meaning, for their deep significance to be recognised.

Consider that Hiram-Abiff was brought before the original father of his race. He was told that Jehovah was the enemy of the Sons of Fire. Who are the Sons of Fire? They are those who could only come into existence after the separation of the sexes, through the penetration of a physical female by a physical male. Fire is the active principle in the male semen. In male semen lives fire, in the occult sense. Jehovah had to create this basic force, so that the race could propagate itself. Jehovah created the Sons of Fire, which was only possible on the basis of this [occult] fire. Hence he is the opponent of change. He it was, who cherished [?] the old kind of propagation. For it was an expedient [?] which had been created, and therefore he turned again to the priests and made them into his preachers. He caused the power and the glory of his own wisdom to be proclaimed through the priestly wisdom; through the priestly wisdom, Jehovah's wisdom came to be made known.

Hiram-Abiff is thus appointed to undertake the Molten Sea, which means the transformation of mineral kingdom through art. He was also told that a son would be born to him, who—even though he would not himself be able to see him—would bring forth a new race. This son is nothing else than the new race which will one day take the place of the old, the present one; the new race for whom it will no longer be necessary for two sexes to unite with one another, but will again be able to bring about propagation through the one human individual. This refers to a far distant future. The old female culture will be relieved by a male culture. The female, as a physical form, will die out. The male must then have the power in itself to produce another individual out of itself. And where is this power located?

Male and female used to be in one individual. And when these two separated themselves, an unfolding of today's individual took place. The upper part [of the human being] was formed. What [today] is the upper part was at that time combined with the sexual organs. The sexual organs of today are only half of the then [procreative] force. The power in the larynx is indeed the other half. Speech is not as yet creative, today. It has to be penetrated by the wisdom of Cain first, and then it must produce. When man has attained the power for his larynx so to develop that his word will be creative, so that he will produce his own kind through the Word, then the whole of the productive force will be transferred to the male. Then [the work of creation] which was once done by the gods, will be given over to man. When did the word come to be lost? When the system of two sexes originated. It was buried, hidden. The Sons of Cain had it only through the original father of their race. Hiram-Abiff was at least to have received the prophecy about it. However, he was killed immediately afterwards.

The Word lies buried, but it is still there. If it were not buried, man would be self-creative, just as the Elohim are self-creative. Therefore the ‘Word,’ of present-day Freemasonry is not the true Word but the false one. The true Word is concealed. The Ten Commandments are inscribed on the stone which contains the hidden Word. What are the Ten Commandments? They are the laws of the moral world order. They regulate the outer intercourse [of mankind], just as it now is—subject to the influence of a race having two sexes. Such laws will not be needed, when there are no longer two sexes. They are that human code which originated in the context of two sexes.

Thus we have, in Freemasonry, the preservation of the remembrance of the Lost Word, that those who work in Freemasonry must strive for, and which can only be gained when the passive male wisdom awakens activity in itself. The Freemasons therefore say: Everything which does not arise out of that generalised knowledge about the world, and proper to it, must then stem from the female priestly rule of ancient times. Rather than contenting ourselves with merely taking this over [conquering it?], we actually want to start on a new spiral of existence; we ourselves must give intuition to the male wisdom of Cain. That would be impossible if one took the female into the secret, which would take man's power from him. It would all be useless, the instant it was discussed in front of women.

It thus became necessary for the whole female sex to be excluded from Freemasonry. This hangs together with the link between the organ of speech and gender or sexuality. Therefore the man changes when he reaches puberty. The change [of voice] is nothing else than the expression of the former connection between the organs of speech and of sexuality. Now you too can grasp what the Freemason is saying: It is only the man who is appointed to utter the Lost Word at all and to re-establish it; only the male form of the larynx is in a position to say, to know, what can be regained through the Lost Word. When we grasp it in this way, one will understand why woman was not permitted to let the new pass her lips.—It is comic to see scholars give as the reason for this that women were not admitted because they blabbered out everything. The female larynx has remained, as a rudiment. It is the male larynx which will however form the organ of the future.

You see that deep and meaningful relationships are involved, and that the expression ‘Mason’ has to be taken as literally as possible. That is why the masons of Greek and Roman times were the builders of things made to express beauty. Cathedrals, temples and other significant buildings were built by these master builders.

The matter rests thus, that a part of what came to be accomplished by the Order of Freemasons had naturally to be taken over again from the old priestly wisdom. So, once again, we have an intermingling of womanly wisdom and male striving. In essence, the secret of Freemasonry is something which has not yet been revealed, which is not even there yet, so that it cannot be revealed, precisely because it does not yet exist. It is something which will be uttered when the word is once more imbued with productive force.

Those are a few words which will clarify the thinking of Freemasonry for the occultist. Up to the eighteenth century it was known that things were so. Only when the connection with higher worlds was lost did the consciousness of what was lost fade from Freemasonry too. And yet again, not so. One watered Freemasonry down, one said that one no longer knew its meaning. One must be clear, however, that everything which existed as symbols, was derived from the old priestly wisdom and that what is implanted therein, in the symbols, must still first come into the open. The true female wisdom is gradually becoming quite lost. Because of that, the so-called Higher Degrees of Freemasonry, which preserved the female wisdom, have been allowed to vanish. All that is still left is what is called Craft Masonry, which only concerns itself with worldly things, and only understands a little about them, in any case.

But that is, after all, quite natural; as materialism developed itself, then the priestly wisdom did indeed have to fade away. What can happen now? The old wisdom has gone away. We have to live in the external. What follows from that? This—that something better can come along again, only when a wisdom arrives which is again asexual, which is connected neither with the male nor with the female wisdom, neither with the female Bible, nor with the male Temple Legend. We find this wisdom in theosophy. In this wisdom both sexes understand each other. In it, the man that is in woman is at work on woman, and what is once more asexual is working on man. Male and female meet each other there in the knowledge of higher planes. It is therefore quite natural that the proper occult basis has come about in Freemasonry, and that a new start has been made. Something such as this is called a ‘vortex:’

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In our time these things are thus intertwining in their influence. We must therefore think of them as interacting. Thus, theosophy has relied neither on the Biblical legend, nor on the Temple Legend, but asexually seeks the kernel of wisdom, that has to be restored again, in everything. Now you see how theosophy is the bringer of peace, the harmoniser.

How does this work together in our Root Race? Our Root Race recapitulates what already was there before. It brings the antithesis of what was already there in Lemurian times to meaningful expression in the spiritual realm. An opposition had therefore to come about, because the female sex was there originally, and follows a falling curve, whereas the male sex is in a rising curve, and is seeking in itself the procreative force which the female already has. When we remain in lower spheres, we have to make an exact distinction, through occultism: Whoever is racially an Atlantean man, need not also be Atlantean in his soul [qualities]. Hence, the soul is not tied to [a particular] sex either. The souls of the female gender work themselves through [this] until they can live equally with men in the bodies the latter have made out of and for themselves, and there will [then] be one sex on earth.

As long as men still stood in opposition to the female, they had to hold their tongues. The founding of the Adoption Lodges in the eighteenth century paved the way for the sexes to come together.⁶ The first of these was founded in 1775. A Freemasonry was practised in them, which had different symbols from the male Freemasonry. However, the induction of women in such Adoption Lodges of the male Freemasons did pave the way for the sexes to come together. The founder of our Society was indeed a [female] member of such an Adoption Lodge.⁷ What must be pointed to as the beginning of theosophy did indeed thus play a part in the matter. So, theosophy is a world task, connected with occult currents, and must take over where Freemasonry left off. Freemasonry could indeed still be reawakened, and could help us.

But the more profound thought is this: these one-sided male endeavours must be vanquished in theosophical circles. Throughout the Middle Ages there was a sublime preparation for spiritually engendering the opposite sex in man. Man developed in himself, by concentrating, at first as a thought, what had to become a reality in him later on. Therefore, as a preparation for this, the Cult of Mary resulted during the Middle Ages. This is nothing else than concentrating to engender the female in the male, while for the female the Cult of Jesus served the parallel purpose. The Cult of Mary had its origin in this foundation.

You will now see what confusion must result when an Order arose which broke with all this and sought to regain the female wisdom. It is world dominion which is at stake in this; if anyone wants to leave the old wisdom as it is, he will have to conquer the world for the old powers. There is such an Order: it is the Jesuit Order. It has consciously set itself this task. That is why the Jesuits and the Freemasons confront each other so sourly.

• 1 . See note 6.
• 2 . This was at the time of the return of the Jews from the Babylonian captivity in the fifth century B.C. by the Hebrew scribe Ezra.
• 3 . There is a Zeus type, several examples of which are still preserved in Asia Minor, in which the upper part of the body is covered by a number of breasts or humps similar to the famous statue of Artemis Ephesia: e.g., relief sculpture of the ‘Stratios Zeus’ and the figures on coins, among which is the ‘Labrandeus Zeus’ from daria.
• 4 . See in this connection the later descriptions which Rudolf Steiner gave in: The Effects of Occult Development Upon the Sheaths of Man. (Rudolf Steiner Publishing Company, London, and Anthroposophic Press, New York, 1945).
• 5 . The shorthand report is unclear at this point. The conclusion of the sentence has two possible renderings:
  
  1. ‘I have reserved to myself confessing (erzihlen) a bias (eine Neigung) about those of Abel's race and those of Cain's race.’
  
  2. ‘I have reserved to myself achieving (erzielen) a unification (eine Einigung) between those of Abel is race and those of Cain's race.’
• 6 . In Secret Societies of all Ages and Countries by Charles William Heckethorn (Book 8, Section 2 1) we learn that:
  
  ‘According to one of the fundamental laws of Masonry—and a rule prevailing in the greater mysteries of antiquity—women cannot be received into the order ...
  
  ‘But we have seen that Cagliostro admitted women to the Egyptian Rite; and when at the beginning of the eighteenth century several associations sprang up in France, which in their external aspect resembled Freemasonry, but did not exclude women, the ladies naturally were loud in their praise of such institutions, so that the masonic brotherhood, seeing it was becoming unpopular, had recourse to the stratagem of establishing “adoptive” lodges of women, so called because every such lodge had finally to be adopted by some regular masonic lodge. The Grand Orient of France framed laws for their government, and the first lodge of adoption was opened in Paris in 1775 ...
  
  ‘Similar lodges spread over Europe, Great Britain excepted; but they soon declined and are at present confined to the place of their origin.’
• 7 . This refers to H.P. Blavatsky (1831–1891) who was awarded the highest adoption degree of the Memphis-Misraim Freemasonry in 1888 by John Yarker (see note 16 to lecture 9 of 16th December 1904) after she had published her first great work: Isis Unveiled.

What every esoteric is heartily interested in is success for his meditative efforts. Everyone is successful, even if he doesn't notice it. Budding esoterics often complain about pains. These pains are disorders that arise in the body because the physical and etheric bodies aren't in the right contact with each other. These pains were already there before, except that the man hadn't felt them since he was coarser and more robust. He feels them now as an esoteric since he's finer and more sensitive. An esoteric must learn to bear such pains. Of course one has to know whether or not the disease should be treated.

Why is it that one knows one's physical body so little? Because one lives in it and only perceives it with one's feelings. One sees with one's eyes and so one can't observe them. Once an esoteric gets to the point where he withdraws from the physical with his soul and spirit he'll be able to observe his physical body. We're helped to do this if we concentrate our thoughts on a point as much as possible and then immerse our self in this point and live in it for awhile. A strengthening of thought power occurs through such concentration and thereby one can gradually get to the point of observing one's physical body.

Then we must become familiar with our etheric body. This is more difficult, for the etheric body does not have a skin like the physical body—it's a fine tissue that sends out its streams everywhere into the outer world and it's imprinted by everything that goes on in the outer world, often without the man's knowledge. One learns to feel the etheric body by doing the second auxiliary exercise. It's outer impressions that ordinarily drive a man to act. He sees a flower on a meadow, and he stretches out a hand to pick it because it pleases him. But as esoterics we must get to the point of doing this or that out of an impulse that we give ourselves. Then one will see that it's the etheric body that induces the hand to move. One feels that one's etheric body awakens in this way. Through this awakening etheric body one gradually learns to experience oneself in an etheric world. Every time I grab something or bump into it this is really an attack on the outer world. A non-esoteric has no inkling of this for the Guardian of the Threshold protects him from this knowledge, but an esoteric makes his etheric body increasingly independent so that it experiences itself in the etheric world. His organs get finer and he gets the feeling that spaces aren't only filled with physical objects but by countless elemental beings who make themselves noticed through bumping, pricking and burning. One must make room for oneself everywhere in this elemental, etheric world by stretching out, withdrawing, pushing, striding forwards, etc., and such movements must occur with the full consciousness that one wants to make them out of one's own being. That's the second thing: initiative actions. One without an initiative will who can't make room for himself in the etheric world can do just as little there as one who wants to dance on a stage that has chairs standing all over it. The chairs must be removed first. That's what one learns in the spiritual realm through the second exercise. We must do just the opposite to become aware of our astral body. We must hold back desires that are living in the astral body, we must develop equanimity with respect to them. We must create absolute calm in us. Only then do we feel the outer astral world bumping into our inner astral world. Just as we bump into the etheric world by reaching into it by ourselves in our will, so we feel the outer astral world by remaining quiet in ourselves, by quieting all wishes and desires. Before the astral body gets to this point it stuns itself with a cry. We know that pain arises when the physical and etheric bodies aren't in the right contact with each other. The astral body feels this as pain. A small child cries when he feels pain. He tries to drown out the pain by crying. An adult might say “ouch.” If a man could let his pain stream completely into the sound's vibrations changes would arise in the etheric body's formation through sound oscillations so that he would become unconscious and feel no pain. But the good Gods made men weaker, and that's good, otherwise there would be no pain and also no articulated speech. An esoteric must get to the point where he can bear pain and everything else that's stimulated in him from outside with equanimity. Then he won't attack the outer world, but it'll attack him. Since he has developed complete calm the attacks only touch his physical and etheric bodies, and the astral body remains untouched. It becomes free and one can observe it. So I get to know my astral body through the equanimity exercise. Finally I must also get to know my ego. I can't feel my ego, because I'm living in it. That's why we must pour it out into the world. I become familiar with my ego through what we call positivity. If we look at a rotting dog's beautiful teeth like Christ Jesus did then we don't see the ugliness, but we dive down so far into everything that we arrive at the good. Thereby we get away from our ego and can observe it. The ego is love and will. Through the developed will we get to know the substance of all things that originate in the divine world. Through love we learn to experience the essence of things. Thus through will and love we press forward to cognition that's free of the personal ego. As a spiritual ego we learn to dive down into the being and substance of all things that come from the spiritual Father ground; that includes our own ego. Our ego looks at us from all created things. The pupil attains the swan stage when he can experience that. At the fifth stage we develop spirit self or manas. There we mustn't cling to what we previously saw, heard and learned. We must learn to ignore all of that, to receive what approaches us as if we were completely emptied of previous things. Manas can only be developed if one learns to feel that everything that we acquired through our own thinking is of little value in comparison with what we can acquire when we open ourselves to the thoughts that stream in out of the cosmos that was woven by the Gods. Everything that surrounds us arose from these thoughts of the Gods. We hadn't been able to find them through our previous thinking. The things concealed them for us. Now we get an inkling of the divine that's behind everything like a hidden riddle. We begin to see how few of these riddles we had fathomed. And we find that we really have to remove everything that we've learned so far from our soul, that we must approach everything quite open-mindedly, like a child—that the divine riddles that surround us are only given to the open-mindedness of the soul. The soul must become childlike to be able to press into the kingdoms of heaven. Then hidden wisdom or manas streams towards the childlike soul like a gift of grace from the spiritual world.

A man doesn't have to go further, since he makes contact with the spiritual world through these five stages. Through continual repetition of these five exercises a harmony of interaction between the various capacities that are to be attained through them must now be produced. This is brought about by the sixth exercise.

These exercises are of the very greatest importance. A soul can find its way into spiritual worlds through them. You'll find references to these five exercises everywhere in the books and lectures. And no esoteric class would have to take place if everyone read them attentively and awakened the forces of these exercises to life in his soul. They serve as a support for the specially given exercises.

An esoteric must be very attentive even to the smallest things. He must observe everything conscientiously in a quite different way than it's done in the physical world, as soon as he approaches spiritual worlds. For things in the spiritual realm are much more subtle and fine than in the physical one. That's why an esoteric must keep on doing these exercises and repeatedly rouse himself to new efforts and observations, for otherwise he can't get insights into the spiritual world. And an esoteric must especially be patient. Many people think that after they've exercised for a short time they should then get into the spiritual world, that all portals to it will be open to them. But just consider that a significant impulse or idea takes 19 years to be inwardly well grasped and understood. If an esoteric thinks that after some exercising he'll soon be mature enough for entry into spiritual worlds, then it's as if a child who'd just learned to speak would say: It's boring to have to wait for years until I become a man. I want to be a man right away.

Another thing that one has to learn in esoteric life is truthfulness. One who hasn't already learned it in physical life will have a lot of trouble in his ascent into the spiritual world since he must leave his logical thinking and everything that's connected with the intellect behind, and he's not corrected by facts in the spiritual world as he is here in the physical world. The good Gods wanted to educate man to be truthful when they placed him in the physical world, where every lie—that is, everything that doesn't correspond to the facts—is corrected by facts. The inclination for truthfulness can only be acquired in the physical world and not in the spiritual one. Finally an esoteric must try to habitually acquire a good memory. The etheric body is the preserver of memory, but without the physical body it wouldn't be able to preserve it very well. The nerves get an impression and this must be written into the physical body. The latter is as it were the recording apparatus for what a man wants to retain. And when he wants to remember something he penetrates the physical body with the etheric body to the place where what's supposed to be remembered is inscribed, the memory picture becomes alive and the man reads it from the physical body. Students repeat something they have to memorize until it has been inscribed. Then it may happen that when they for instance learn: “There stood a castle so high and grand” ... they press it forcibly into the physical body with the help of the sounds.

Such inscribing and reading must become habitual in the sense that it becomes an inner habit to permeate all of one's deeds with attentiveness and reflection.

One can't use the physical body as a memory organ for spiritual experiences; habitual activities must replace it. We must summon the nuance of feeling that belongs to this before our soul.

The content of what flows to a meditator when he makes himself empty after a meditation—also of the meditation's influence—is a matter of merit. A meditation will never be the same twice. What flows to us will depend upon our morality, love of truth, and on how we've lived since the last meditation. If we didn't remain entirely truthful or if we've let anger or aggravation arise in us, then nothing from the spiritual world can stream into us. We get what we deserve. If we trace these things attentively we'll always find the reason why we weren't graced with the spirit in some untruth, in some surging up of anger, or the like.