The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Dear attendees!

We have reached an important point in our consideration of the Apocalypse. What more is to be said about it should lead us even deeper into certain hidden truths. We will see how this difficult-to-understand work expresses the theosophical truths in a magnificent form. When we look back at what has already been said here, we have to describe the Apocalypse as the “secret revelation” of what the human spirit is to experience in its future development. But it would be quite wrong for anyone to think that such a predestination suppresses the will of the human being, or to believe that everything must come about in a certain way, regardless of what the human being does. No, that is absolutely not the case. The great universal laws of the spirit are not given in such a way that they are imposed on man from without, but for the purpose of man inwardly absorbing them and developing himself in their spirit. According to a very definite natural law, oxygen and hydrogen must combine to form water; but human will can bring about the conditions for them to combine, and can thus be the reason why the laws take effect. When he immerses himself in the laws of nature, he himself becomes the executor of these laws. He takes them into his spirit and thus becomes a co-creator of nature himself. It is no different with spiritual laws. It is ordained in the world that it should develop in accordance with spiritual laws, as it is grounded in nature, that it should shape itself according to natural laws. And just as man can only become a worthy co-creator of nature by acquiring knowledge of natural laws, so too can he only be active in spiritual life if he makes spiritual laws his own. If we know nothing of the laws of oxygen and hydrogen, we cannot participate in the way they combine. We fulfill our human task through the knowledge and understanding of natural laws. These would be present and valid even without our knowledge. But without our knowledge, nature would pass over us. We would remain in our dullness and could only be will-less tools in its creation.

The great spiritual laws would also be active in the world without our knowledge. What is said in the Apocalypse would be true even if no human being ever grasped it, just as the law of the connection between chemical substances would be true even if no human being ever knew about it. But it is in the hands of man to approach his divine goal by observing these laws. The light that reveals itself through divine power in the world must shine into his soul. In this highest sense, the “childhood of God” must be understood by man. A father does not keep his knowledge to himself, but shares it with the child so that it may develop in the sense of this knowledge. Of course, the child would also grow older if it did not care about the laws and watched idly as the father acts. But the child would remain undeveloped. But the Father's love consists in developing it. And God's love for man consists in revealing his will in the human soul. God has called man to be perfect. God not only creates, but also reveals himself; and man's will must make the revelations of the Godhead the impulses of his will. What is to happen is certainly determined from the beginning; but it is equally determined that man himself should carry out the revelations of the Godhead. God has not excluded human action from his plan of the world, but has included it in it from the very beginning. Certainly everything necessary would be done by the Father if the child were inactive. But then the child would have no part in anything.

The Apocalypse was added to the Gospel. For the Christian, the Gospel represents the joyful message of the incarnation of God or the divine Word. This “Word” has become flesh to dwell among men. This sacrifice of God means the liberation of man from the bonds of matter. Through Christ, man is to be united in spirit with his God. By adhering to Christ, he carries the Spirit of God in his heart. But this Spirit of God is the guide to the will of the Father. And the will of the Father is revealed in the Holy Scriptures, such as the Apocalypse is one. From Christ, the strength shall flow to the Christian to understand what the Father has decided from the beginning of the world. Christ died so that man may live, live in the Spirit. In the Apocalypse lies the spiritual will of the Father. Those who are initiated through Christ in faith receive the strength to reach the Father through Christ. “No one comes to the Father except through me.” But the Christian should also reach the Father, that is, he should recognize the will of the Father in the Revelation. The Gospel is the joyful message of Christ's sacrifice for the sake of man; the Apocalypse is the revelation of the divine will of the Father. Christ said that after his death he would send the 'Spirit'. And the theologian John only faithfully wrote down what the Spirit promised by Christ revealed to him.

When the Christian looks to Christ, uniting himself with him, he receives the strength and the life to understand the will of the Spirit; when he looks to the Revelation, he knows how to apply the strength received from Christ. The Apocalypse is a book. And every book has value only if one has the strength to understand it. Life in Christ should give the Christian the strength to understand the secret Revelation. This strength is bestowed through grace, as all spiritual strength is a gift of grace. But this strength must be developed. Christ wanted to unite people into a community of children of God; but the spirit of Revelation should bring the children of God to full maturity.

Starting from this point, we will delve even deeper into the Apocalypse next time.

It can be said that the original purpose of festivals was to induce men to look up from their dependence upon earthly things to their dependence upon extra-earthly things; and it is the Easter Festival in particular that can evoke such thoughts. During the last three to five centuries of civilization we have undergone a psycho-spiritual development that has led man farther and farther away from a clear conception of his connection with cosmic forces and powers. He has become ever more reduced to contemplating only his relation to earthly forces and powers, and it is quite true that with the means recognized today as legitimate it could not be otherwise. If someone imbued with the old Mysteries in the pre-Christian or early Christian centuries could learn of our modern knowledge, and if he approached the matter in the frame of mind prevalent in those days, he would not be able to understand how man could live without an awareness of his extra-earthly, cosmic connection.

I shall now merely sketch various matters which you will find dealt with in detail in this or that cycle. As these lectures are intended especially to acquaint you with the Easter idea there is naturally no time to elaborate all the points that I shall merely indicate.

Harking back to the various older systems of religion, we may take as an example the one with which the closest contact still persists: the Hebrew-Jewish system. In certain religious systems of Antiquity, provided they are monotheistic, we find the veneration, the worship, of a single divinity. It is the divinity we speak of in our Christian conception as the First Person of all divinity, as the Father-God.

Now, in all religions embodying the idea of this Father-God there obtained to a greater or lesser degree the connection of this Father-God with the cosmic Moon forces streaming down to Earth; and the Mystery priests in particular were fully aware of it. Nowadays little remains of this old awareness of the connection between the human being and the Moon forces but the inspiration they impart to the poetic soul; and in the realm of medicine, the counting of the ten lunar months of man's embryonic life. But in the older cosmogonies is to be found a clear consciousness of the permeation, the empowering by impulses emanating from the Moon at the time man descends to his physical existence from the spiritual world, where he had lived his pre-earthly life as a being of soul and spirit. When a man seeks that which gives him life, which lives in him as forces of digestion, of breathing and so forth—in short, all forces of growth—he must not look for these among the Earth forces but among extra-terrestrial forces. By examining the Earth forces—well, he can perceive how these act upon him; but if our body were not held together by cosmic forces, if these did not give our body its form, what could Earth forces contribute to its cohesion? The moment the cosmic forces leave the body and the latter is exposed to the terrestrial forces only, it breaks up, disintegrates, becomes a corpse. The Earth forces can only make a man into a corpse; they cannot create his form. It is to the mighty influence of the Moon that we are indebted for the forces so active in man as to lift him out of his physical limitations, to give him a cohesive organization which during life does not succumb to those forces that seize and destroy him at death; forces that combat this destruction during his entire Earth life—and this they must do.

If we know theoretically, on the one hand, that the Moon forces contain the potential human body, we must observe, on the other hand, how the old religions reverenced these forces that introduced man, so to speak, into physical existence through his birth—revered them as the Father forces, the forces of the divine Father. And the ancient Hebrew initiates were clearly aware that from the Moon emanated the forces which lead man into his Earth life, maintaining him there, and from which he severs himself, as physical man, when he passes through the portal of death.

To look up with loving soul to these divine Father forces and to relive them in the ritual and in prayer, that was the substance of certain ancient monotheistic religions. And these old monotheistic religions were more consistent than you might think: such matters are utterly misrepresented in history, because history is dependent upon material documents and has no access to what can be observed in spiritual vision.

The religions that focused on the Moon and the spiritual beings abiding there are really later religions: the primordial ones embraced in addition a clear idea of the Sun forces and even—as we must add here—of the Saturn forces; but particularly of the Sun forces.

You see, this leads to a study of history for which no material documents exist, a period antedating the foundation of Christianity by many millennia; it takes us back to the epoch which, in my Occult Science, I called the Ancient Indian—in order to give it a name and because it evolved in the locality that later became India. The civilization following this was the Ancient Persian. During these civilizations the manner in which man developed was very different from what it became later; and upon this development depended his creed. We human beings have been developing, during the last two thousand years or more, in such a way that we really do not notice any break in the continuity of our earthly development, and indeed, the break is scarcely noticeable. Something that takes place in us around our thirtieth year remains largely in the subconscious, unconscious mind of present-day man. This was by no means the case among those who lived eight or nine millennia before the beginning of our era. At that time a man's development was continuous up to about the thirtieth year, but then a mighty metamorphosis set in. I must express this rather drastically, for thus the facts in the case will best be made clear.

Here is something that could happen in those ancient times: before his thirtieth year, someone had become acquainted with another who was three or four years younger, and who thus passed through the metamorphosis at a later time. Now, if these two people had not seen each other for a certain time and then met again—I am using the language of today that shows the matter in a still more radical way—it could happen that the one who had experienced the metamorphosis would fail to recognize the other when addressed by him. So great was the change that had come over his memory.

In these very old times it was the custom in the small communities such as then existed to register events in the lives of young people, because they themselves forgot it all after passing through the mighty revulsion in their thirtieth year, and had to be informed of what they had experienced previously. And then, when these people realized that in their thirtieth year they had become different beings, that they had to go to the record office—to use a modern expression—in order to learn of their previous experiences—this was actually so—then, through the instruction they received, they became aware at the same time that before their thirtieth year it was exclusively the Moon forces that had acted upon them, and that now the Sun forces entered into the development of their earthly life.

The influence of the Sun forces on man is entirely different from that of the Moon forces; but what does present-day man know of the Sun forces? Only their external physical effect. He knows that they warm him, make him perspire; and he knows a bit about their therapeutic value—sun-baths and the like—but only in quite an external way. He cannot remotely conceive of the effect of the forces that are spiritually connected with the Sun.

Julian the Apostate, last of the pagan Caesars, still knew something of these Sun forces from reminiscences of the Mysteries; and because he tried to revive this knowledge he was murdered on his expedition to Persia. That shows us how strong were the powers that were out to exterminate the knowledge of such matters in the early Christian centuries. It is therefore not surprising that today it is impossible to learn about these things.—While the Moon forces determine man, permeate him with an inner necessity so that he must act according to his instincts, his temperament, his emotions—in fact, according to his whole physico-etheric body, the Sun forces liberate him from this necessity. They melt, so to speak, these forces of necessity, and it is really through their agency that he becomes a free being.

In ancient times these two influences were sharply divided. In his thirtieth year a man simply became a Sun-man, a free man, whereas up to that time he had been a Moon-man, un-free. Nowadays these conditions overlap: even in childhood the Sun forces are active along with the Moon forces, and the latter continue to influence later life, with the result that today compulsion and freedom interact. But as has been said, this was not always the case, and in the prehistoric times with which we are dealing the effects of the Moon and of the Sun were sharply separated in life's course. It was considered pathological, abnormal, when someone failed to experience the metamorphosis, the turning point in his life; therefore it was said of normal people that they were born not once, but twice. And when humanity began to develop in such a way that this second or Sun-birth (the first was called the Moon-birth) became less noticeable, certain exercises, certain cult rituals—in short, certain methods were applied to those who were to be initiated in the Mysteries. These experienced what no longer existed for mankind in general, and they were then the twice-born.

The term “twice-born” which we find nowadays in oriental writings is one of mere tradition. I should really like to ask every orientalist, every Sanscrit scholar, whether our knowledge of the Orient discloses the substance of the term in a clearly definable way. I believe our friend Professor Beckh is in our midst: you can ask him whether or not his studies in this field confirm my doubts. Quantities of formal explanations of the term are available, but the meaning of the substance is not known. Only those can understand it who know that it goes back to a reality such as I have just set forth. In such matters spiritual research alone can speak; and when it has spoken I should like to ask any unprejudiced exponent of external science whether all available documents do not bear out at every step the results of spiritual research. This will prove to be the case, provided things are seen in the right light. But certain matters antedating the science based on documents must be pointed out, for the latter cannot unlock the knowledge of human life.

So we look back to an epoch of Antiquity in which people spoke of the Moon-birth of the human being as the creation of man by the Father; and they understood that in the Sun-birth the rays of the Sun were permeated with the Christ force, the force of the Son, the liberating force. Consider: what does this Sun force effect? It enables us human beings upon Earth to make something of ourselves. Without the liberating Sun forces, without the impulses that break down compulsion, we would be strictly predestined, at the mercy of an inexorable natural necessity—not of the necessity imposed by destiny but by Nature.

When a man imbued with the old cosmogonies looked up to the Sun he knew that this world-eye, from which the power of the Christ streamed forth, released him from bondage in that inexorable necessity into which he had been born through the Moon forces, and subject to which he would otherwise have had to develop throughout life. He knew that these Sun forces, these Christ forces raying down upon him through the cosmic eye of the Sun, enabled him to make something of himself through his inner freedom, something he had not been through the agency of the Moon forces when he entered life.—What the Sun forces gave to man was this consciousness of his ability to transform himself, to make something of himself.

For completeness' sake and parenthetically I should add that the third source to which men looked were the Saturn forces. In these they saw all that sustained the human being after passing through the portal of death; that is, when he experienced the third earthly metamorphosis.

Physical birth—Moon-birth
Second birth—Sun-birth
Third birth (physical death)—Saturn-birth

After death the human being was sustained by the forces of Saturn, which at that time was considered to lie at the extreme periphery of the Earth's planetary system. These were the forces that bore him up and out into the spiritual world, that maintained the cohesion of his being when the third metamorphosis occurred. There is no doubt that this was part of the ancient cosmogonies.

But humanity changed as a result of evolution, and the time came when only the effects of the Sun forces were known in the Mysteries. The knowledge of these survived longest in the therapeutic sections of the Mysteries, because the same forces that give man his freedom, the ability to make something of himself—namely, the Sun forces, the Christ forces—are also found in certain plants and other beings and things of the Earth, and in this form contain healing properties.

For the most part, however, mankind lost just this contact with the Sun. For a long time people were still aware of their dependence upon the Moon forces, the Father forces; but the consciousness of being dependent upon the Sun forces for their liberation disappeared much earlier. And what we today call forces of Nature—about the only ones mentioned in our philosophies—are really nothing but the Moon forces reduced to complete abstractions. But One Who still knew the Sun forces and was able to be guided by them was the Christ Bearer, Jesus of Nazareth. He had to know them because it was His mission to receive them in His own body as they streamed down to Earth, whereas in the old Mysteries they could be reached only by ascending in vision to the Sun.

I explained that yesterday; but the essential point is that in the thirtieth year of His life a transmutation occurred in the body of Jesus of Nazareth; the same transformation that took place in everyone in primeval times, except that then the rays, so to speak, of the spiritual Sun entered into all men, whereas here it was the primal Being of the Sun, the Christ Himself, Who descended to enter human evolution and took up His abode in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. That is what underlies the Mystery of Golgotha as the primal fruit of the whole life of the Earth.

You will now be able to understand the whole context of these matters by considering the manner in which Easter was celebrated in the older Mysteries. Easter, as I might put it, existed as a quite human institution in those days, for it meant initiation. Primarily this comprised three stages; but the first requirement for attaining to true enlightenment, to initiation, was that everything offered the candidate by the Mysteries should engender in him a degree of inner humility such as nowadays hardly anybody can even dimly imagine. Today people consider themselves enormously modest in respect of their achievements, even in cases where one who can see through them knows that they are veritably possessed by vanity. At the inception of an initiation, the most important realization that had to come to the neophyte was that he could not think of himself as a human being at all: that it still remained for him to become one. Today it would be asking too much of anyone to admit that at any given period of his life he was not a human being. But that was the very first requirement, and the neophyte had to meditate as follows: Before descending into an earthly body I was indeed a human being; in pre-earthly existence I was a human being of soul and spirit. In this form I then descended into the physical body, received from my mother, from my parents. I was then—not clothed in a physical body—that would be a wrong term: I was permeated by this physical body.

Of the manner in which, over a long period of time, the spirit and the soul pervade the physical body—the nervous-sensory system, the rhythmic system, the metabolic-limb system—of all this men are completely unaware. They know nothing of it. They are conscious of perceiving with their senses, of seeing their physical surroundings with their eyes. But when soul and spirit have so far permeated a man's physical body that he considers himself a fully developed adult, where has he actually arrived? He can only see out of his eyes, listen out of his ears, perceive warmth and cold, roughness and smoothness, through his skin: he can only perceive outward, not inward. He cannot look into himself with his eyes: the most he can do is to dissect the human corpse and then imagine he is looking into himself. But in reality he is not. Supposing here is a house. It has windows, but I do not look in through them. Instead, I procure some tools, and if I am strong enough I demolish the house. Then I have all the separate bricks before me; but is it not childish to imagine I am looking into the house when I am only looking at this pile of rubbish? Yet that is the way people go to work nowadays. They dissect the human being and cut him up in order to learn to know him; but in that way they do not learn to know him, for that is not at all the human being. If we would learn to know the human being we must be able to look back inward through the eyes, to listen back inward through the ears, just as today we perceive outward through the senses.

All that taken together—eyes, ears, the whole skin as an organ of touch and temperature—was called in the Mysteries the Door to Man, the Gate to Man. The point of departure in the initiations was the candidate's realization that he could know nothing of the human being; and having no human self-consciousness, he could not even be a human being. He must first learn to look inward through his senses as previously he had only looked outward. That was the first stage of initiation in the old Mysteries. And the moment the neophyte learned this looking inward he experienced himself also in his pre-earthly existence, for then he knew that he was in his spirit-soul element.

So the neophyte learned to look inward instead of outward, and in so doing he became aware of what had entered him through eyes, ears, skin, and so forth, as prenatal existence. At this point he was told that only now could he come to understand what today we would call natural science. How do we of today go about studying natural science? We are taught to observe the phenomena of Nature, to describe them, and so on. But this is the same as though I had known someone very well, and I were told to forget, when

I meet him again, everything we had ever had in common. Fancy, if you can, a married couple meeting again after a separation and being obliged to forget everything in the way of their common experiences! Well, I can imagine that occasionally it might be pleasant to do so; but life could not be maintained under such conditions.

Yet those are exactly the conditions imposed upon men of our time by our system of civilization, for they did learn to know the kingdoms of Nature from their spiritual aspect before descending to Earth. And while today men are encouraged to forget all they had learned about the minerals, plants and animals before descending to Earth, the old initiate, in the so-called first Mystery stage, was instructed somewhat as follows: he was shown, for example, a block of quartz; and then everything possible was done to recall to his memory what he had known, before descending to Earth, about quartz—or about the lily, or the rose, as the case may have been. Recognizing was the factor taught as natural science; and when the candidate had learned to study Nature in the light of what he had seen in his prenatal life, he was admitted to the second stage.

In the second stage he learned music and what was then architecture, geometry, surveying, etc.; for this second stage comprised everything the neophyte could perceive when he not only looked inward through his eyes and listened inward through his ears, but actually entered into himself. Then he was told that he was about to enter the human Temple Grotto, and this he came to know. It meant that which was physically permeated by the psycho-spiritual forces that constitute man before he descends to life on Earth. There he penetrated into himself. This Temple Grotto, he was told, was made up of three chambers. The first was the chamber of thought, where one learned everything connected with thinking. Seen from without, the head is small; but if one enters into it and looks at it from within, it is as comprehensive as the world, and there one's spiritual activity becomes manifest. That was the first chamber. In the second chamber one learned to know feeling; and in the third, willing.

In this way the initiate learned how man is organized in respect of his organs of thinking, feeling and willing; he learned about the factors concerned in the Earth life. Knowledge of Nature has significance not only in connection with the Earth: it is acquired before one descends to Earth. Here we must remember that yonder in the spiritual world houses are not built with tellurian architecture. There is music there, but it is spiritual melos. What we know as music is projected down into our air; it is a projection of heavenly music, but as we experience it, it is of this Earth It is the same when we survey: we measure the Earth; and surveying, geometry and the like are earthly sciences. It was important for the candidate for the second stage to have his attention drawn to the fact that all thought of gaining enlightenment or knowledge by earthly means alone is delusive, except in the case of geometry, architecture or surveying; that a genuine science of Nature must consist in recalling prenatal knowledge. That is what he was taught; and he came to understand that geometry, architecture, music and surveying were the sciences that can be learned here on Earth.

Thus the mystic entered into himself and came to know the human being as consisting of three chambers, as opposed to the human being of one particular incarnation, which is all one encounters by knowing him only from the outside.—And in the third stage the neophyte learned the nature of man as it was when he not only entered into himself, comprehending his spiritual self, but when his spiritual self learned about the body as well. In all the old Mysteries this was therefore the stage inevitably called the Portal of Death. There the initiate learned what he was like after laying aside the earthly body. But there was a difference between this actual death and the death of initiation. Why this had to be so I shall explain in the following lectures; at the moment I am merely emphasizing the facts.

When we actually die we discard the physical body and are no longer bound to it. It ceases to respond to Earth forces, and we are free of these. But one who is still bound to the physical body, as was the case in the initiations of old, must obtain by his own strength and efforts what comes to him automatically through death, namely, this freedom from the body; and he must sustain this condition for a certain length of time. Initiation demanded the attainment of these strong inner forces of the soul by which the latter could remain independent of the physical body; and these forces at the same time provided higher cognition of matters not to be perceived by the senses or thought by the intellect. They transported the initiate as a human being into the spiritual world, just as man is placed by his physical body into the physical world.

But at that point the candidate was far enough advanced to recognize himself as a psycho-spiritual human being, as an initiate, while still in his Earth existence. From that time onward he saw the Earth as a star existing detached from man; and in the older Mysteries it was with the Sun in particular that he had to live, instead of with the Earth. He knew what came to him from the Sun and how the Sun forces worked in him.

The stage that followed the one I have just described, the fourth, may be explained in this way: When a man eats on this Earth he knows, this is cabbage, that is game—he drinks various things, and he knows that now these things are outside him, now inside. He breathes the air which is alternately outside and inside. He is connected with the Earth forces in such a way as to carry within him the forces and substances of the Earth that are otherwise outside him. It was made clear to the candidate that before being initiated he was an Earth-carrier, a carrier of cabbage, game, pork, and so forth. But if you have completed the third stage of initiation, so he was told, and if you receive what you are now able to receive by having freed yourself from the body, you will no longer be a carrier of cabbage, pork and veal, but you will be a bearer of what the Sun forces give you.—And this spiritual gift of the Sun forces was called in all the Mysteries christos. Hence the neophyte who had passed beyond the third stage and could now feel himself as a bearer of the Sun forces—just as on Earth he could feel himself to be a cabbage carrier—was called a christophor, a Christ bearer. In the majority of the old Mysteries that was the appellation of a neophyte of the fourth stage.

In the third stage certain things had to be thoroughly understood, in particular, that the craving for the physical body must cease if enlightenment was to enter; and the neophyte had clearly to realize that while he belonged to the Earth as far as his physical body was concerned, yet the function of the Earth was really to destroy that physical body, not to build it up. Now he came to know the constructive forces that derive from the cosmos.

And he learned something else when he became a christophor, namely, that even in the Earth's matter there are spiritual forces at work, only they are not perceptible to earthly senses. Another language was current in those times, but in modern words—and I can use only these—the sense of what was made clear to the candidate was this: if you would know the science of matter, know how different elements combine or separate, you must look to the spiritual forces that permeate matter out of the cosmos. That is impossible if you are not initiated: it is necessary to have passed through the fourth stage. You must be able to see by means of the forces of the Sun existence—then you can study chemistry.

Imagine nowadays confronting a candidate for the doctor's degree in pharmacology or chemistry with the requirement that he must first be able to feel himself in the same relation to the forces of the Sun as he does to the cabbage of the Earth! It would seem quite mad.—But in the old days realities were dealt with, and people came to understand that by means of all the forces active in the body—forces employed for ordinary learning—only geometry, surveying, music and architecture can be studied. Not chemistry. Today chemistry is studied from the outside, and so it has been since the old initiation wisdom was lost. In fact, anyone who seeks genuine enlightenment must despair at the official chemistry of today, for it is based wholly upon data, not upon inner penetration of the subject. And if people were open-minded they would realize that something more is necessary, that other things must be understood if chemistry is to be studied. What stifles such impulses in man is the cowardice of modern cognition in which he has been reared.

Now the neophyte had attained to the still higher stage of astronomus. The external study of the stars, by computation and the like, was considered wholly futile: spiritual beings inhabit the stars, and these can be known only after physical observation has been surmounted—after even geometry has been overcome—so that one can live in the universe and get to know the spiritual nature of the stars. Then the neophyte became a resurrected one; then he could really see the Moon and Sun forces at work upon earthly man.

Today I have described to you from two aspects how Easter was inwardly experienced in the old Mysteries—not at a given season but at a certain degree of human maturity: Easter was the arising of the psycho-spiritual man out of the physical body in the spiritual universe; and those who still knew something of Mystery wisdom saw the Mystery of Golgotha in this light when it took place. They asked themselves: What would have happened to humanity if the Mystery of Golgotha had not intervened? In olden times it was possible to be initiated into the secrets of the cosmos, for in still older times it was a matter of course for a man to experience his second birth in his thirtieth year or thereabouts. And later on there were at least memories, as well as the science of the Mystery schools, that kept alive in tradition what in earlier epochs had been actually experienced. At the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, however, all that had been lost or forgotten; and humanity would have fallen into complete decadence had not that power, to which the initiate attained in becoming a christophor, descended into a Jesus of Nazareth and henceforth remained on Earth, so that man could be united with this power through Christ Jesus.

Undoubtedly, then, the Easter Festival as we know it is linked with a phase of the Mysteries, and we can really become conscious of the substance of our Easter only by reviving this aspect of them. You will readily understand that in this way we can at least approximate a realization of what the ancient neophyte experienced at his initiation. This will be the subject of further consideration. The neophyte could say to himself: Initiation has disclosed to me how Sun and Moon act within me in their mutual celestial relationship. For now I know that as a physical being I am constituted in a certain way. The circumstance that my eyes, my nose—my whole bodily form within and without—are shaped thus and so, that this bodily form could grow and is still growing through being nourished, all this depends upon the Moon forces, as does everything in the way of necessity. But that I can be active within my bodily nature as a free inner being, can transmute and master myself, this is due to the Sun forces, the Christ forces. These I must activate if I would, by conscious effort, build within me what otherwise they would have to bring about by compulsion.

From all this we can understand why even today we look to Sun and Moon and their relative position to determine the date of Easter. Nothing remains of all this but our calculation, When is the first Sunday after the first full Moon after the spring equinox? We place Easter on the Sunday following this first full Moon, thus indicating that in the nature and form of Easter we see something that must be determined from above, from the cosmos. I shall elaborate that tomorrow. But what must be grasped anew is the idea of Easter. This can only be done by contemplating the old Mysteries, which first of all drew attention to what was experienced by introspection—the portal of man; by the achievement of freedom—the portal of death; by moving freely in the spiritual world—becoming a christophor.

The Mysteries themselves, of course, began to disappear when the time came for the development of human freedom to assert itself; but now the time has come to rediscover them. We must find and make them our own again; and we must fully realize that today efforts are necessary to this end.

With this in mind the Christmas Conference was held, for there is urgent need of a sanctuary on Earth where Mysteries can once more be established. The Anthroposophical Society must lead the way in its further development to the modern Mysteries. It will be one of your tasks, my dear friends, to collaborate in this way with the right understanding. But in order to succeed you will have to reflect on human life in its three stages: that of introspection, that of self-penetration, and that of a consciousness such as results in outer reality only through death.

And to remind us of what has been said in this hour, let us carry away with us and meditate upon these words:

Stand at the portal of man's existence,
Read above its arch stones cosmic scripture.

Dwell in the deep of man's inner soul-life,
Feel within its orbit the world's beginning.

Ponder the end of man's earth-chapters,
Find thou there the turning-point of spirit.¹

Steh' vor des Menschen Lebenspforte;
Schau an ihrer Stirne Weltenworte.

Leb' in des Menschen Seeleninnern;
Fühl' in seinem Kreise Weltbeginnen.

Denk an des Menschen Erdenende;
Find' bei ihm die Geisteswende.

• 1. Translation by Barbara Betteridge.

[ 1 ] I attempted to show in my last observations how, in the realm of human evolution, the psycho-spiritual existence is transferred to that of the physical senses. Now it depends on the understanding which man can bring to bear on this transference whether he can gain a relationship, in accordance with modern consciousness, to the event of Golgotha and its reference to man's development on earth.

[ 2 ] If one does not realize in one's own physical nature how something psycho-spiritual has so changed itself from a spiritual form of experience as to become manifest in the physical world of the senses, one will also never know how the Christ spirit coming from spirit worlds was made manifest in the man Jesus on earth.

[ 3 ] But it must be once more emphasized that it is not a case of individual knowledge derived from observation, but rather of understanding with one's whole nature and being what observation has brought to light. Only a few men achieve the former, but the latter is possible to all. The man who realizes the worlds through which the human soul has passed in its pre-earthly existence, learns also to look up to Him who before the event of the mystery of Golgotha had lived as Christ only in those worlds, and who through this mystery and since its occurrence had united His life with mortal humanity.

[ 4 ] Our earthly souls have attained the condition in which they now live only through a gradual development. Ordinary consciousness takes the condition of the soul as it is to-day and constructs a ‘history’, in which things are represented as if man in the grey dawn of time had thought and willed and felt practically as he does now. But that is not so. There have been times in which the soul condition was quite different—times when there was no such sharp distinction between sleeping and waking. Dreams now are the only bridge between the two; and their content has something deceptive and questionable about them. Primitive man knew a stage between full wakefulness and unconscious sleep, which was pictorial and remote from the senses, but revealing something really spiritual, just as the sense-observation reveals something of the actually physical.

[ 5 ] In this life of pictures, and not of thoughts, early man had a dream-like experience of his pre-earthly existence. He felt his pre-earthly soul-nature as an echo of what he had gone through. On the other hand he had not that sense of self which present-day man has. He did not find himself in the same degree as to-day as an ‘Ego’. [ 6 ] This feeling has arisen only in the course of human spiritual evolution, and the decisive epoch of this development is that in which occurred also the event of Golgotha.

[ 7 ] At this time in the ordinary consciousness the psychic experience of an echo from pre-earthly existence grew ever fainter. Man's knowledge of himself became more and more limited to what his physical sense-life on earth told him,

[ 8 ] Moreover from, this moment the perception of death took on a new meaning. Previously man knew, as I have described, of the central point of his being. He knew it through the contemplation of this echo in such case that he was convinced this echo could not be affected by death. At the moment of historical time when the view became limited to the physical nature of man, death became a disturbing problem for the soul.

[ 9 ] The further development of purely inner faculties of knowledge did not suffice to solve this problem. It was solved by the events of Golgotha occurring in the evolution of the earth.

[ 10 ] The Christ came down to earthly existence from those worlds in which man had passed his pre-earthly life. By combining the experience of the ordinary awake consciousness with the contemplation of the acts of Christ, man can find, since Golgotha, what he formerly found through a natural function of his consciousness.

[ 11 ] The ‘Initiates’ of the ancient Mysteries spoke to their followers in such a way that they saw in their considerations of pre-earthly life a gift of grace from that spiritual Sun-Being which has its counterpart in the physical sun.

[ 12 ] The Initiates who at the time of the mystery of Golgotha still continued the ancient initiation-methods, told those who had ears to hear how the Being who had before given to man the echo from spiritual worlds of pre-earthly existence that he could carry into the earthly life, had descended as the Christ upon the physical earth and taken flesh in the person of the man Jesus.

[ 13 ] Those who knew the truth about the mystery of Golgotha always, as in the early days of Christianity, spoke of the Christ-Being as one who had descended from spiritual worlds to an earthly one. The teachers of mankind of that time stressed particularly this aspect of the Christ coming from a higher world down to the earth.

[ 14 ] This view was conditioned by the fact that one still knew enough, from the ancient initiation, about the supernatural worlds, to see in Christ a Being of the spiritual world before his descent to earth.

[ 15 ] The remnants of this knowledge lasted into the Fourth Century, and then faded in man's consciousness. The event of Golgotha thus became an event which was known only through the construction of political history.

The principles of initiation of the old world were lost to the outer world, and took root only in almost unknown places. Only now in the last third of the nineteenth Century has a stage in human evolution been reached again in which the new Initiation, as has been described leads to an aspect of Christ's nature within the spiritual world.

[ 16 ] It was necessary for the complete unfolding of the ego-consciousness, which was to come into being in the development of humanity, that initiate knowledge should disappear for a few centuries, and that man should turn his attention to the outer world of the senses in which the ego-consciousness could be freely cultivated.

[ 17 ] Thus it was only possible for the Christian community to direct the attention of believers to the historical tradition concerning the mystery of Golgotha and to clothe what was once known by spiritual knowledge in ‘Dogmas of Belief’ for the Earth. The content of these Dogmas does not concern us here, but only the manner in which they affect the soul, whether through faith, belief or through knowledge.

[ 18 ] It is again possible to-day to have a direct knowledge of the Christ. The figure of Jesus stood for centuries in front of the ordinary consciousness, and the Christ who lived in him, had become an object of faith. But more and more the inclination to dogmatic faith grew less, precisely among the spiritual leaders of mankind; Jesus was seen more and more only as history made him appear to the ordinary consciousness. The sense of Christ was gradually lost; and so there grew up a modern branch of Theology which concerns itself really only with the man Jesus, and which lacks a living sense of the Christ. But a mere Jesus-Faith is really -no longer Christianity.

[ 19 ] In the consciousness which early man had of his pre-earthly existence, he had also an anchorage for a proper relationship to his existence, after death on earth.

In later times his union with the Christ was to give him in another way what had thus been given him in primæval time by nature, through the sense of his own life-experience concerning the problem of death. The Christ was so to permeate him, in the words of St. Paul, ‘Not I, but the Christ in me’, that He might be his guide through the gate of death. Man now had indeed something in the ordinary consciousness which could develop the complete Ego-sense, but nothing which could give the soul the strength to approach the gates of Death with certain knowledge of its living passage through them. For ordinary consciousness is a result of the physical body, and therefore can give the soul only such strength as must be regarded as extinguished in death.

[ 20 ] To those who could learn all this from their old initiation, the human physical organism appeared out of order, for they had to assume that it could not develop the power to give the soul such a comprehensive consciousness as to enable it to live its full life. Christ appeared as the soul-doctor of the world, as the Healer, the Saviour, and as such in His fundamental relationship to humanity He must be recognized.

[ 21 ] The event of death and its relationship to the Christ is to be the subject of my next study.

[ 22 ] Through the taking-up of the Christ-experience a Philosophy has grown out of what the ancient consciousness, deepened by the saying of the Initiates, had given to man as an experience of eternity, and a philosophy which can include the divine Father principle. The Father in Spirit can be regarded again as the all-pervading Being. Cosmology gains its Christian character through the knowledge of the Christ who, as a Being from outside the earth, assumed mortal shape in the person of Jesus. In the events of human evolution the Christ is recognized as the Being to whose lot has fallen a decisive part in this evolution. And through the re-awakening of the half-forgotten knowledge of the ‘Eternal Man’, the human mind is led out of the purely sense-world in which the ego-consciousness develops, to the spirit, which can be experienced with full understanding by the soul in conjunction with God the Father and the Christ in a renewed perceptive knowledge of Religion.

My dear friends! Today I would like to say a few words about the third area that you have mentioned, namely the actual content of the sermon. Of course, all three areas are intimately connected. We have given some indications about the nature of the cult, which of course must be very much completed and worked into the concrete, into what is needed today. We have at least been able to give some indications of the cultic aspect, and I would like to start by telling you how this cultic aspect is in turn related to the actual content of the sermon in practice.

You see, the sermon element appeals to the parishioner's imaginative understanding. Of course, the sermon must be delivered in such a way that what enters the person through the imagination passes as quickly and as intensely as possible into the feeling, the emotional, and, above all, the will impulse. But nevertheless we must work on the parishioner indirectly through the power of the imagination in the sermon. In all our teaching and instruction we must work on the human being through the power of the imagination.

But the conceptual has something inherently contradictory about the whole human nature. Here we enter a realm where today's science proves powerless from the outset to understand things. If you say something like that: the conceptual has something contradictory about the full nature of man, then you will meet with no understanding at all in today's scientific world view. And yet it is so. The conceptual tends to be absorbed once and then retained by the memory. You will easily see that this does not correspond to human nature.

If you look at the other extreme in man, at the purely physical processes, you cannot say: I have eaten or drunk today, so it remains in my organism, so I do not need to eat and drink again tomorrow - but food and drink must be repeated in a rhythmic sequence. What a person does must occur in a rhythmic sequence. And this is basically the actual human nature, to be incorporated into the rhythm in a certain way, while it is already a deviation from human nature when a person absorbs something once and then retains it, when it becomes permanent for him. And this permanence is the character of the conceptual. In the extreme, the conceptual becomes boring when it is repeated too often; and there is a fundamental sin against human nature associated with this theoretical-conceptual, namely not wanting to have repetitions anymore. You can follow this purely externally. Read good translations of the Buddha's discourses; you will find that these discourses have countless repetitions, you progress through nothing but repetitions. In the West, the foolish mistake was made of taking only the content of the Buddha-speeches and omitting the repetitions, because it was not known that Buddha had taken human nature into account.

There we come upon the point where, out of human nature itself, the mere content must of necessity pass over into something to be rhythmically assimilated. Of course, in the past this was done quite instinctively, by inserting prayer as the rhythmic element into the teaching, inserting prayer as the repeatedly recurring content of faith, even though the individual prayer has exactly the same content. The conceptual element merges with the volitional element when repetition occurs. In another way, one does not get a [volitional] content at all. Thus we already have the necessary flow of the doctrinal element into the cultic element. We have to bring the doctrinal content into such forms that we can present pictorial representations to the community members in a certain way. We have to let what we teach gradually become established in pictorial representations and to set the main points in a certain monumental way, so that they can be repeated again and again as a formula. Without this, we will not be able to bring the teaching content beyond the theoretical-conceptual into the practical-volitional, and this is what we must do. The more we stick to merely handing down the teaching content, the less we get to the practical religious exercise.

This is what shows you directly how something like cultic practice is already present in the Buddha-Speeches. The working out of the will element from the mere theoretical element of imagination is actually present in these discourses. While we appeal to people to repeat the Lord's Prayer, we are working our way out of the merely theoretical into the practical religious realm. But we will not be able to do this at all if we ourselves are not completely imbued with the supersensible substance of the world. And here I come today to certain characteristics of the teaching material, which one must nevertheless take into account if one wants to become a practical preacher or if one wants to have an effect on people through the teaching material at all.

You see, the greatest harm in today's religious work lies in the fact that the Gospels are no longer taken seriously. I do not mean any slight by this, but I do mean that people are not aware that the content of the Gospels goes beyond our sensory understanding. It is most significant that we can approach the Gospels again through anthroposophy and say to ourselves: an otherworldly content flows in the Gospels. We must understand them, we must do everything possible to really understand them. Today, however, people only criticize the Gospels; they do not really want to understand them, and this criticism is largely based on the fact that one does not take the content of the Gospels seriously at all, but takes it superficially.

I must refer you to the third sentence of the Gospel of John. In this third sentence, one usually hears the following: All things were made through the Word, and without the Word nothing was made that has been made. - What is all included in this third sentence of the Gospel of John! In reality, one would have to say: All things that came into being came into being through the Word, and without the Word nothing of what came into being came into being. This captures the meaning of this sentence. The third sentence points with all its might to what has come into being in the world, to everything that is subject to becoming. And of that which is subject to becoming, it is said, first, that it is tangible. Everything we see as having come into being is created and passes away. And secondly, it is said of this created and passing away that it is made by the word, by the logos.

This sentence would not be there if it were not based on the awareness of a contrast, if it were not subject to the sentence that there is also something in the world that is not created and does not pass away, namely the eternal foundations that merely transform themselves. In our modern education, we have only lost this contrast between what has arisen on the surface and the powers that lie in the depths, which Plato, for example, calls the eternal ideas. We must presuppose these eternal ideas as that which does not pass away and which underlies what has arisen and is passing away, which does not exist in the arising and passing away in the ordinary sense, but subsists.

We must distinguish between existence and subsistence. That which subsists all things is the foundation, that which refers to the Father. We must speak to the community in all popularity in such a way that we bring this Father-God as the content of the absolutely eternal to the consciousness of our community children. That is not as difficult as you think. It is only difficult because today the world is intensively economizing on ideas. I can assure you that the people who understand it most easily are the farmers in the countryside. They understand it immediately, while only the people who have been educated in the current way do not understand it. They do not understand it.

We can learn a great deal by looking at the last remnants of the elementary spiritual that still exist in [unspoilt] human beings. It is relatively easy to convey the most profound ideas to people with an elementary soul life. These ideas are rejected only by those who are spoilt, who have been spoilt for the most part by our schools.

We must understand how to teach people in a popular way the eternal in all things and how to distinguish between what is transient, what has come into being and what is passing away. And we must evoke the idea, in all possible ways and roundabout ways, that the Father-God underlies what is enduring and the Son-God, the Christ as the creative Logos, underlies what is becoming and what is the process of becoming. Therefore, one must also seek understanding of the Father-God before the created and the working of the Christ in the created.

Such things must be worked out again, then we come again to concepts that lie beyond mere scientific concepts. But, my dear friends, you must also be able to speak about them in the right way. You do not learn this through logical speculation, because logical speculation itself suffers from the one-sidedness that it works towards being absorbed once. Logical speculation – if it remains only a matter of speculation – is the worst possible preparation for a sermon. If you want to preach, it is not enough to prepare yourself for the doctrinal content of the sermon; the only possible supplement to this preparation for the content is meditation for the preacher himself.

Anyone who wants to preach must first meditate, that is, call something into their consciousness that brings them into a feeling inwardness so that they feel the God, the divine within them. Those who do not prepare themselves in this meditative way will not be able to let the word resound with the nuance with which it must resound if one is to evoke understanding for what one has to say. You will have to speak of immortality, you will have to speak of the Fall of Man, of Creation, of Redemption and of Grace. But you must not speak of immortality, the Fall of Man, Creation, Redemption and Grace with the consciousness that you have gained from modern scientific education, but you must speak with the consciousness that you have gained from your feeling of the divine existence within you. Then your words will be given the necessary nuance that you need to reach the hearts of those to whom you are to bring the truths about immortality, the Fall of Man, Creation, Redemption and Grace. This is what must be understood by preachers as deeply as possible. They will not come to a deeper understanding of the teaching content unless they prepare themselves meditatively.

The kind of composure that you first acquire in meditation, which brings you to be alone with your whole being – even if only for a short time – that composure is what also prepares you for the proper mood for reading the Gospels. You must assume that only the meditative life can prepare you, on the one hand, for reading the Gospels and, on the other, for the special tone of preaching. This is what the preacher must make a habit of. One should not believe that an understanding of worship, an understanding of the right nuance of preaching, comes through intellectual considerations, through intellectual comprehension of the content of the gospel, but rather that it comes through meditative immersion in the spiritual and volitional element at the same time, which stimulates the human being, thus stimulates the whole human being, and that is what it is really always about.

It is certainly a good thing for the modern preacher to realize, by means of outstanding examples, what inner soul struggles must actually be fought through if one wants to penetrate from what one absorbs today through external education, including external theological education, and what determines the whole form of thought, to a real grasp of the suggested idea about the supersensible.

It is really useful for anyone who wants to become a religious leader today to study such personalities as, for example, Newman, the English Cardinal who started out from Anglicanism and who thus moved within a more modern world view, half consciously, and then fell back into Catholicism, which, even within Catholicism, because such people are only waiting for such people, could make him a cardinal. It is interesting to observe the struggles of such a personality. You see, in the beginning, Newman's struggle was based on wanting to understand Christian truths. But he could not get anywhere with that. In the end, he could not find a way to understand Christian truths in modern terms. He was honest enough not to want to come to the mere “simple man of Nazareth” in Weinel's manner, but there was in him the urge for the supersensible. He could not get along earlier than until he said to himself: Yes, at the starting point of Christianity are not highly educated, scientifically educated people, but there are the fishermen of Galilee, and they actually understood nothing of the sayings they did; they did these sayings without logic, without being imbued with a logical understanding. And then, in fact, everything that is modern theology, which works so hard to be logical, which comes to the point of negation in its criticism imbued with logic, only emerged from the simple words of the fishermen of Galilee. And then Newman comes to say to himself: If there is logic, it can only be born out of illogic, out of that which is lived in such a simple way as Christianity was lived by the people who surrounded Christ Jesus in Galilee. —

And so he comes to a particular conception of the evolution, of the development of that which is experienced [religiously], into the more elaborate. But now he is obliged to take the whole Catholic Church with him, because he remains in the actuality of the unfolding [of religious experience]. Why does he remain? Because he negates the possibility that today, through the logical, one can arrive at the super-logical through beholding. Thus he could, [standing between Scylla and Charybdis,] run the risk, on the one hand, of falling prey to Scylla through a purely rationalistic interpretation, or, on the other hand, of Charybdis through killing the rationalistic way of thinking, but then having to accept the whole tradition and falling back into Catholicism. In fact, everyone who thinks this way falls prey to Catholicism. You only have to consider that people who cannot go along with the contemporary way of entering the supersensible, such as Scheler, who is characteristic of our German education for this matter, fall back into Catholicism. If people seek the supersensible and reject the path that anthroposophy wants to take, [they fall back into Catholicism].

Today, in order to avoid falling between Scylla and Charybdis, we have no other choice than to follow the anthroposophical path, even to accept anthroposophy as a supporting element of religious life, in order to access the supersensible truths. Then you will also find — and this is necessary for you because it occurs in community building — the popular, simple form for that which we cannot do within anthroposophy because something else must come first. We still have to express ourselves too strongly in modern forms of education [for the presentation of supersensible truths], because we speak to those who belong to modern education. But if you are a number of people, then it is quite possible to find the simple form to speak to the people in such a way that the high concepts of the supersensible that have been hinted at become concrete again.

I will only hint at the following. You see, do not disdain to speak to people in such a way that you say to them: Look at the stone, look at the rock crystal, look at a mineral object shaped like this, and you will be able to say to yourself: This mineral object, how was it formed? It has been formed out of the earth; you have no reason to think otherwise than that it has been formed out of the earth. It is a piece of the earth, the earth can create such forms, that is a piece of the earth. But now look at the plants; look at what you can always see around you. Can you imagine that the earth produces plants [on its own]? No; what the earth has as seeds within itself must wait until spring comes, until the sun's rays penetrate from outside, and when the sun's rays lose their strength, the earth also loses the strength to produce plant growth. Look at the growth of plants, and you will notice that when plants try to survive the winter season, they take on a woody, mineral quality; they become trees, which in turn lose the sprouting and budding power in their wood, and take on something of the mineral world themselves. The Earth could never produce what is plant-like out of itself; for that it needs what surrounds the Earth. It is necessary to rise above this, to really teach people that the earth could only be a rocky body if it had only its own forces, but that it would never have vegetation and would be permeated by it if the earth did not form a unity with the cosmos, if the cosmic forces did not play a role and have an effect on the earth. The earth would not have a plant kingdom without the spatial heaven.

And if it was possible in ancient times to teach the slave masses in ancient Egypt such truths as, for example, the transition from solar power to the power of Sirius, if it was possible to teach people that at that time, then we need not despair that today, when we can speak to the simplest people about the fact that the Earth owes what it has as a vegetative being to the extraterrestrial cosmos with its forces. And so we can rescue human beings from their tendency towards the merely earthly by teaching them to feel what the earth draws from the cosmic heavens.

I therefore believe that we must work towards directing the soul's gaze to the whole of cosmic space, and that this can be achieved simply by considering the plant world in a way that can be understood by everyone. It is of great help to us to realize how completely innocent nature actually is. It is impossible to speak of anything in the mineral or plant world that is guilt or sin. And if we work through these concepts well, if we really present the innocence of nature and the possible becoming guilty of man in a concrete way, then we can work out what leads people to understand that something comes into the world with man that cannot be found in space at all. Once man has understood that plants owe their existence to space and are innocent, then we have a way of realizing that that which can make man guilty cannot come from space at all, that we are all compelled to seek the essential soul of man outside of space. We must seek this way to go beyond space. And you see, when we have found the way to go beyond space, then we will find further ways.

You can see how difficult it has become for people with a modern education to go beyond space, from the fact that the most intelligent people in the 19th century opposed the idea of immortality on the grounds that souls would have no place in the universe. They could not get beyond the spatial with the concept of the soul. With the concept of the soul, one must get beyond the spatial. And when one has come this far, one turns one's attention to the animal world and tries to bring to life a concept that one gets there, which not only seizes our imaginative life but also our deepest feelings.

We find that minerals and plants cannot become guilty, but they cannot suffer either. Man must suffer, but can also become guilty. And then we turn our gaze to the animal world; they cannot become guilty either, but they must suffer. And when we gradually learn to understand repeated lives on earth, especially when it is not a theory but a clear understanding, when we feel that there is a connection between guilt and suffering, even if it is not trivially practical, and we just cannot find this connection because we direct our attention to innocent nature and would also like to harness man to this unity of innocent nature, then the great world tragedy becomes clear to us, which consists in the fact that we have chained the animal world to us, that the animals must suffer with us, although they cannot be guilty. Then one arrives at the tragic realization that the animal world exists because of man, must share in his suffering, although it cannot be to blame. Feel this concept through, empathize that the animal world shares in evil, although it cannot go along with evil.

When we form a vivid picture of evil in this way – a picture that is also intuitive – we come into contact with the world. We only have to feel the tragedy of existence in the world, which consists in the fact that the animals around us suffer with us, and then we come to realize that there are duties that go beyond the ordinary legal obligations. This is a point where you can lead the human being completely out of the immediate sense world. For in the immediate sense world you find nothing but the legal concepts that regulate the sensual, the external relationships between human and human. The obligation to redeem the animals comes to us from a completely different world. We cannot do this at all in our present existence. We cannot do anything in our present existence to redeem the animals that suffer for our sake. We can only redeem them if we look ahead to a final state of the earth that no longer prevents us from intervening in the laws of nature to relieve the suffering of the animal world. And so we are moving towards understanding a final state of the earth, in which physics has no right to interfere. We are expanding that which lives in us humans to include an understanding of the interconnection of the world.

We must speak to the people of today, because if we speak in terms of the old religious ideas, people will object that from a scientific point of view none of this is possible. But we must try to find such a way that simply cannot be said by science. Because the suffering of the animal world is there, without the animal world being able to be guilty. And here we come directly to the transition; the possibility exists of knowing something about supernatural obligations, or rather, extra-terrestrial obligations, about duties that can be fulfilled when the earth has found its end, the end of its present physical state. We will be able to lead [people] to an understanding of this state of the earth by overcoming purely scientific thinking in an appropriate way.

But we cannot do this if we merely appeal to people's selfishness in our preaching. And that is what has gradually arisen in humanity and has actually made religious conviction so difficult that today, with the best sermons, we basically appeal to human selfishness; and that has come about because we only speak of immortality and not of being unborn.

What is the situation regarding immortality? From anthroposophy it becomes clear. It becomes clear through knowledge. But how does today's preacher speak about immortality? He shakes up — look at the facts — the selfish needs of people, and in doing so he speaks entirely to the deepest soul egoisms; and he would not reach the hearts at all if the desire did not beat towards him: I may not perish with death. Of course, man will not perish with death. But this view must not arise from desire. The preacher does stir up these desires; he speaks to desire and fear, even if he does not do so consciously, because that is how he is accustomed to speaking. You cannot speak of life before conception in the same way. You cannot speak of life before birth from an egoistic point of view; you can make a person indifferent to it, because deep down he does not care about it. Since he is experiencing existence, he is not interested in whether he has lived before. This interest must be instilled in man, and that can only be done by awakening in him the consciousness that he has been given a mission with his earthly existence, that he is a co-worker in the divine world order, which could not achieve its goal if it had to work without the sensual world. That the Deity has released man, that is one thing. What can be grasped is that the human being experiences freedom, which he could not experience if he had not descended into the body. We have to present the human being as something that has been sent down by God. Without realizing the pre-existence, you do not come to a sermon that takes hold of the whole person and not just the desiring person. And that is a great defect of our [present-day] preaching, that it appeals to the desiring on the one hand and to the fearful on the other, and not to that which represents man as an image of the Godhead, which has released man to work in earthly existence.

You see, that word that comes to us from ancient times, that plays such a great role in the Catholic Church, the Gloria, is inserted into the mass between the Gospel and the offertory. Gloria in excelsis Deo – Glory be to God in the highest, and peace on earth, and goodwill toward men. – This is how it is translated in modern times. Now this translation is somewhat misleading, because the concept of glory is not based on the concept of being worshipped; rather, it is based on the same concept as the Greek exusiai: the concept of shining outwards, of revealing itself. And the saying actually means: May the Divine in the Heights reveal Itself, and on earth may Its reflection be the peace of men of good will. — We must arrive at a new concept of glory, then we will also come to an understanding of these things.

Just think how terribly blasphemous it actually is when the Gospel of the Blindborn is translated: Why was this man born blind? Did he sin or his parents? — And the answer: Not he has sinned nor his parents, but the works of God shall be made manifest in him. Is this not blasphemy, that the man born blind was healed so that the works of God might be seen in him? While it is always translated that the works of God are revealed through him, the truth lies in the fact that he preformed blindness for himself in a pre-existent life, so that God might be revealed in him.

We must eliminate this erroneous concept, which appears in many forms; then we can begin to make it clear that the human being stands as an image of God, that he is there to allow the Godhead to work in him. We cannot arrive at this understanding if we rely only on the hope of a post-existent life and not on pre-existence. We must grasp radically that we are here on earth the continuation of the pre-existent life, not merely the beginning of the post-existent life, and that human minds cannot find the way to selflessness if we speak only of immortality and not of pre-existence. These things must be the subject of glowing preaching, then there will be a possibility of reconnecting human consciousness to the supersensible; and then the rest will follow of itself.

You see, if you want to arrive at a concept such as that of Creation, then you have to evoke in people an awareness of the following: if you look at the mineral nature today, you see that the law of the conservation of matter and of force prevails in it. And this world that we are looking at seems to be eternal. But if you realize that this world is only in space and that only minerals from the earthly and plants from the extra-earthly space have been added to space, that something is already coming in with the animal from a pre-earthly state – because what is natural law on earth today cannot of course, cannot make the animal into a human being – if you realize that the laws of nature themselves have a beginning, then you will be able to understand that the concept of creation also includes the emergence of the laws of nature, whereas today we simply extend the laws of nature forward and backward into infinity. This is how we arrive at the concept of creation. It is intended to draw attention to something that can prove to you that, when speaking to simple minds, one can always find a certain understanding for the highest things. When I was young, if one went to an Austrian farmer who had not been educated at school but had only learned to read and write in his village school and spoke to him about nature as one had learned at school, he would stare at one. He could not reconcile this concept of nature with what he knew at all. You couldn't say to him in the usual way, you look at nature, it produces plants and animals, it is beautiful, nature appears in the light - and so on; you might as well have said something Chinese. There was an Austrian dialect poet who used the word “d'Naduar”. But when the Austrian farmer, who had only learned to read and write, who had no sense of the concept of nature as it appears in modern science, spoke of nature, he had a different concept of nature. For him, “nature” was the male seed and without this connotation he could not understand the word nature. He understood that what lives innocently in nature is in him, but it is drowned out in him by what can become guilty. He regarded nature as a part of himself, which is connected with it if one can speak of birth, and he also had the concept that something else enters into man at birth than nature, which is why he calls the male seed nature, the natural thing, however, that is connected with being born. He had this mysterious connection between our being born and being a work of nature.

And as is the case with this striking concept, if one only seeks, even if one wants to move on to the concept of creation, one can still find the possibility of connecting to concepts that are understandable to the simplest mind. The concept of creation can become something thoroughly understandable, but one must really try to move beyond what modern education gives us with good will. And so one gradually comes to make man understand that the creation of man comes before the creation of nature, that man has entered the world at a time when nature had not yet taken effect, when there was no such thing as heredity, fertilization and so on. One returns to a state where heredity and fertilization did not yet exist, where our present world was not yet an external world order, where the apostasy of the spiritual beings could take place, which then later dragged man along with them; one returns to a state in the pre-natural time, where the fall into sin was not yet a possibility for man.

One can and must come to these things if one wants to find a content for the sermon. For this it is not enough for you to present these concepts of the Fall, redemption, and so on, to people in a theoretical way. You will see that if you only count on formal understanding, if you count on mere doctrinal content and not on varied repetition, then you will not be able to hold the community together. If you count on varied repetition, then you can hold the community together. Then you also bring them to an understanding of grace, then you also bring them to the possibility of understanding a new sense of freedom, and you can teach people that man can come to develop, at least in his consciousness, concepts of the innocent and of non-evil [...] gap], freedom [... gap], and that through all our efforts we can indeed become good people inwardly, but that we can only find our connection to the world of the good when grace is at work, when grace comes to meet us.

I can only hint at this, because I don't have the time to discuss these things properly. But to put it briefly: there are ways, if only they are sought, to get out of the conceptual system of today's education and into a fully human system of ideas that has access to the supersensible world; and to do all this, it is absolutely necessary to allow oneself to be fertilized by anthroposophy in a certain sense. People are quite capable of understanding what you say if you find the right tone by first putting yourself in a meditative state.

In recent times, there has been too much abstract, lifeless preaching. And you see, I can say this to you for further reflection — I do not want to impose it on you like a dogma — I can only say: the worst manner of preaching is to stick to abstractions and then become unctuous. To believe that one speaks to the heart by presenting the abstract in a very inward way is poison for the heart. If one speaks of the “simple man of Nazareth”, if one tries to preach about Christ without taking the supersensible into account, if one allows everything Christian to rest, as it were, on his humanity, and wants to teach this to people by adopting an untrue sentimental tone, then one poisons the minds, because then one lives untruthfully about that which should permeate the sermon.

What should permeate the sermon through the feelings is the connection between the preacher and the supersensible content and impulse of the world itself, and the supersensible content and impulse is never given through the abstract. The preacher must be deeply imbued with the humility that the mere use of logical reason is itself a sin, and that the pursuit of science in modern times is killing the religious, that we must redeem the world from the scientific view through religion, that it belongs to the religious to overcome science, and that it is a commandment of Christ Jesus himself to overcome science, that Christ Jesus lives among us precisely for this reason, and that we express his mission to overcome science when we connect with him.

On the one hand, we must be clear about one thing: the human being must work in the world, and so he must already sin by grasping the world with his senses. We see sin as being necessary. And we see that the pendulum, because there is rhythm in the world, must swing to the other side, to the side of redemption from natural science. We will not be able to eradicate it, because we recognize the necessity for man to make the acquaintance of Ahriman, but we must realize that the pendulum must swing to the other side. But we must realize the rhythm, that only in a state of equilibrium can the two things work together. And for that, you see, I must draw your attention to something that may surprise you, but which must enter your consciousness if you want to find the necessary tone for a future sermon.

You see, we actually live today in a consciousness that is a kind of continuation of the ancient Persian world consciousness, which lived in Ahriman and Ormuzd. In Ahriman, he sees the evil god who opposes Ormuzd, and in Ormuzd he sees the good god who destroys the works of Ahriman. It is not known that the ancient Persian was aware that one must follow neither Ahriman nor Ormuzd [alone], but their interaction. And their interaction manifests itself in a figure such as Mithras. Ormuzd is a Lucifer-like figure who frees us from the world when we surrender to her, who wants to snatch us from heaviness and let us burn in the light. Man must find the way between light and heaviness, between Lucifer and Ahriman, and therefore we must have the possibility to think not in any dualism, but to think in the Trinity. We must have the possibility to say: the Persian duality of Ormuzd and Ahriman is today Lucifer and Ahriman, and the Christ stands in the middle of them, the Christ is the one who brings about the balance. Now all religious development so far, especially the theological, has set up a very pernicious equation, it has brought the Christ-figure as close as possible to the Lucifers. It is almost a resurrection of the old Persian Ormuzd when one experiences how Christ is spoken of today. One always thinks only of duality, thus of evil in contrast to good. The world problem is not solved by duality, but solely and exclusively by the Trinity. For as soon as you have duality, you not only have good and evil, but you have the battle between light and darkness, the battle that must not end with the victory of one over the other, but must end with the harmonization of the two. That is actually what must be brought into the concept of Christ. It is not for nothing that Christ sits with the tax collectors and sinners.

You see, my dear friends, the world in which we live has come about in such a way that it was originally formed by all the influences that were at work in the configuration that we experience as the echoes of race, as the echoes of the individual peoples and the like. Consider this world as it emerges from the element of birth, and consider the mission of Christ. The mission of Christ is to overcome all this naturalness, to plant the love of universal humanity in the place of racial life. That which was there at the beginning of the earth, the Adamite, is to be eradicated by Christ. The particularism of a nation, the national egoism, is to be overcome by the Christ, by the general humanity. Redemption does not consist in being in an equally real way as the natural itself, working against the natural, but in taking up the natural and bringing about a balance between the purely spiritual and the natural.

The concept of Christ has not yet been worked out in its purity between Ormuzd and Ahriman, between Lucifer and Ahriman. The concept of the Christ must be grasped as that which leads us to harmonize the opposing poles. For general humanity, human love, is something other than what arises out of families, peoples, races, nations, and so on. But the one is not to be eradicated by the other; rather, race and individual must be harmonized. The mission of Christ on earth will only be understood when it is known that the Father God is connected with the eternal alone, not with the created and the passing; the Christ impulse has come into temporality because it is connected with the created and the passing, and it makes the temporal into the eternal.

We must learn to take literally again what is written in the Gospels: Heaven and Earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away. - Let us translate it into a language that can be spoken today. That which the expanse of space - heaven in the external spatial sense - evokes through the stars in the plants of the Earth, that which the Earth itself brings forth in the minerals, that is, the whole earthly world, will pass away. But when it has passed away, when plants and stones have passed away, then, after this earth has disappeared, that which has come to earth in the Christ will live, that which lives on in the word. And when the Christ is taken up in our word, then, after the destruction of the earth, that which is alive in us through the Christ will continue to live in time, according to the Pauline word: “Not I, but the Christ in me.”

We must rise to the belief that the laws of nature are not eternal, but that the earth will come to an end, and that what exists can only continue to exist because a creative force will carry it beyond when our earth has perished. Stone and plant will perish, but what is in us must not perish, it must be carried out, and that can only be done if the Christ is in us. Only the animals will come with us, and we will then have to release them. Because they are on earth because at the moment when the possibility of becoming sinful entered the world, they were at a stage of development where they had to be seized by that which was only suitable for people. Before this possibility of sin entered the world, there could be no suffering in the world. Minerals and plants do not need to suffer as such, but minerals and plants will pass away. Animals were at a stage of development when they were dragged along by people into suffering. They must be released from it again when this stage of development is over and the earth no longer exists. The laws that now rule our natural world will then rule the world of the soul, which we now only experience inwardly. We cannot comprehend this if we do not also know that man came before the earth.

We must open up access to understanding of these things to people. This must be reflected in our preaching. You do not need to believe that what I have said today you have to say to the congregation in similar words. But you must understand it, then it is already alive in your sermon, even if you preach in the simplest way. For there is not only the ponderable understanding of things, which consists in your mouth speaking and your ear listening, but there is also the imponderable understanding that works from person to person.

Unfortunately, I could only give you these few hints, my dear friends, but I hope that you will have heard many things in my words that want to come from the human being. Without this will, we will not make any progress. It is not a matter of merely stimulating our intellect; we must stimulate the whole human being.

[Ladies and gentlemen!]

I tried last time to show how Philo of Alexandria introduced a new influence into Platonic philosophy and how Philo then formed the transition from the Mysteries, from Jewish mysticism to Christianity. And at the end I drew attention to the fact that both Philo and Jesus made use of parables to illustrate the hidden wisdom acquired in the mystery schools.

We have an illustrative example in the explanation Philo gives of the fourteenth chapter of the first book of Moses. There we will see how Philo goes about it. It is the story you are familiar with, which reads: “And it came to pass at that time that Kedor-Laomor king of Elam and the kings of Shinar and Ellasar and the king of the Gentiles fought with the kings of Sodom, Gomorrah, Adama, Zeboim and Bela, whose name is Zoar.” Abraham puts his opponents to flight, rescues Lot and is finally blessed by Melchizedek.

There are five kings with whom Abraham fights against the four other kings. There is a mystical meaning in this. The four kings are four vices: lust, desire, fear and sadness. The other five kings must be understood as the five senses, which are connected to them. Abraham, however, points to the Logos. When he trains his virtues, he conquers those powers victoriously. In the struggle of the five kings against the four others [Philo] sees the struggle of the Logos. He sees the power seizing the five senses. With the help of the five senses, that is wisdom and knowledge, the Logos fights against lust, desire, fear and "sadness. This human process, which can be recognized when we climb into the soul, is exactly the same as when we face the plants. It is the same lawfulness. The regularity of spiritual human creation can also be explained by the fact that man has taken these laws from human nature. The myth is not to be explained in an external way, but by the fact that it underlies the deepest mystical process.

So we see that Philo applied to the Old Testament myth for the first time something that we have come to know from the mystics and Greek popular religion. The Greek mystics certainly imagined it in the same way. We must refrain from what is unscientific in it, or what contradicts precise self-knowledge. Now, it is only a matter of saying what is going on in man. And what happens in man must be understood from the original, human forces. It is not to be understood as if it were an allegorical expression, but one feels it as an objective, spiritual lawfulness, which the spirit uses to produce the myth. One grasps the myth and behaves towards it in the same way as the naturalist behaves towards nature.

In these deepest driving forces in the human soul, which create an external existence for themselves by transforming themselves into myths, by [living out] themselves in the mythological world, so that what deeper forces have been at work in them is no longer visible in the external world, [Philo] sees the Logos, the eternal world spirit, reigning in the human spirit. And this world spirit reigning in the spirit of man, which he calls Logos, which, insofar as it lives itself out in man, is not a merely abstract conceptual world, but something directly alive, this world spirit he designates at the same time with the word “Sophia”—reason I would like to translate it—“the Word” and “the Wisdom”. These are the two components into which general wisdom is transformed into human spirit. This is the deeper truth that underlies the whole Old Testament myth. This is, as I said, what we see expressed by Philo.

So we see that what is distributed in the Greek myth among manifold figures of gods and what the Greek myth could more or less put together in the figure of Dionysus is put together by Philo in this single figure. It is the same thing that was also contained in Judaism. What was previously sought in the diversity of the world, Philo traces back to a single primordial spirit as a single divinity and calls it a “logos”.

In these few words, he says, wisdom was led in deeper souls to that which in Jewish mysticism at the time remained stuck in symbolism. It is what they called the masculine-feminine. For Philo, male logos and female wisdom is the state of consciousness that corresponds to the outer symbol I spoke of the other day. Thus Philo says: Everything that appears as spiritual in the world leads back to the God-man, to the divine in human nature.

We may say—and this is speaking in the Philonic sense, and passages could be cited for this if we delve deeper into the ancient scriptures—that nothing else reveals itself to us but the divine-human.

This is what Philo's philosophy brings to the Western intellectual world as a new component. He was aware that he had not given something of which he was the first author. Philo was aware that he had predecessors. He also gives a description of them, in which he reveals how he had predecessors. He describes not only personalities, but entire sects. From an early age, he knew the 'therapists' as hermits in various parts of Egypt and North Africa. He describes them as hermits who lived in seclusion from the world, withdrawn from all sensuality, from all worldly things, in order to awaken in themselves what Philo refers to as the God-human. They spent a large part of the week, six days, in a purely contemplative life, using the seventh day to come into contact with the world at communal meals.

The therapists practiced scriptural interpretation using Old Testament and Egyptian writings. It was by no means a different one, but the same one that we discovered in Philo as his own. He had already written "On the contemplative life" before he had reached the age of thirty. In the book "On the Contemplative Life" we can see how the therapists searched for the God-man behind every fact. However, they were treated tendentiously in the most diverse ways in Western philosophy.

Here we can see how we are often the father of the thought. First of all, they were hermits, whom the Catholic priests regard as ancestors in the most eminent sense. There has been an interest in seeing in these forerunners of Christian monks in order to be able to say that contemporaries of Jesus had already formed a kind of monasticism. Catholicism saw this writing as proof of how old monasticism was. Protestantism has sought to prove that this writing is spurious and has been foisted on Philo. This view has recently been shown to be completely erroneous. The philological investigation cannot really sort anything out; but from the use of language and from individual phrases it has been proved that it is a Philonic writing.

There can be no doubt that we are dealing with a truly Philonic writing. However, this cannot be proof of the existence of Christian monasticism. There is only talk of hermit-therapists. This way of life was certainly the cause of the development of certain ascetic trends in Christianity. But they must not be regarded as institutions of Christ.

Thus we have become acquainted with an entire sect from which Philo received his inspiration. Just in the writing [by Mead] on the Gnostics, which has now appeared and which contains a translation of the writing "On the Contemplative Life", you can read how this has been proven by English [philology]. But even in Germany there has long been no doubt about the authenticity of this writing. If you read it, you will see that Philo describes a sect in the Therapeutae that comes close to what Philo himself taught.

If we want to clarify the difference between the two, then we can say that Philo is more philosophical and the therapists are more religious. Philo's approach is more geared towards translating the esoteric interpretation of the [Old] Testament into philosophical language. Just as Philo interpreted the first book of Moses, so could a follower of the Therapeutic sect have interpreted it. But Philo goes beyond this by showing that one has a right to resort to such a view. This soul is given power in no other way than by the fact that the God-man is in the human being itself. Thus a second divine is added to the hidden divine, to the deepest part of the spirit of the world in Philo.

We cannot yet say that Plato has a clear awareness of how his world of ideas relates to the divine. In Philo, however, we find precise philosophical thoughts about this. The divine, the infinite in every direction, is that which can never be exhausted. It is that which man can look up to, but which can also completely enter the human soul. But only the God-man, wisdom, can do this. And that is what lives itself out in the human soul, and that is what lived itself out in the content of the Old Testament.

From there, Philo comes to the conclusion that the divine-human is expressed in the human soul, that there are, as it were, two divinities that are accessible to human beings, related to human beings, and that there is, in essence, a hidden, infinite divinity. There he comes to the conclusion that where the appearance of Jehovah is spoken of, it is not the infinite God himself, but the divine-human that he has discovered. Thus he arrives at a kind of personification of the divine where the divine appears to Moses in the form of the burning bush.

If I were to turn the divine-human that appeared to Moses - Philo said to himself - into the unattainable divine, into that which can never be exhausted, I would not be able to comprehend anything, since the deepest knowledge can only be guessed at. In order not to drag it down into the earthly-worldly, in order to leave it the divine, even though it cannot be penetrated, Philo contrasts the highest divine with the divine-human. And he contrasts this divine-human with the "Father as Son". He therefore says: "Wherever the divine appeared in the Old Testament, it was the Son. Wherever God gives help or punishment, for Philo it was the "Son of God who intervened. He is the one who only now becomes comprehensible to man for those who look deeper into the structure of the world.

In the [Logos], according to Philo's view, the Jews understood the mediator between the Father and the world. Now, however, humanity has become spiritually imbued with him. Philo regarded such sects as that of the therapists as the nurturing place of human personalities who wanted to ascend to that elevated human entity in which the God-man within them could come into existence.

So Philo regards the life of the therapists as a preparation for the appearance of the Son of God in human nature. He regards the life that the therapists aspired to as one that accomplishes the immediate influx of the divine nature into the sensual nature.

Something similar happens in another sect. Over in Asia - you can read about it yourself in Philo's writings - you will find the same view among the Essenes as among the therapists. This sect, which Philo visited and, as he himself admits, learned from it the interpretation of Scripture as he practiced it, was just like the sect of the therapists, it endeavored to seek out the divine-human in the Old Testament myth. This Logos, which was destined to do so and which sought to live itself out in the human, was to take shape, to really live in the human spirit. And this teaching lived in the sect of the Essenes two or three centuries before the birth of Christ.

The therapists are doctors of the soul. If we research the origin of the name, we find a sect that derives its name from "healing", and this healing means something like "being a physician of the soul". These therapists were those who wanted to raise the soul to a higher level. They were of the opinion that the sensual is something that leads away from God, something that causes illness, something against which man must undergo a healing process. The therapists were people who wanted to free people from the sensual. It was the same with the Essenes. They had a kind of communist state. There is evidence to see in the Essenes the same thing that the therapists were, and it can be shown that the Chaldean word "Essene" means nothing other than "healer". But that is less important.

According to the allusions in Josephus, Philo and Pliny, however, we can say that the teaching of the Essenes is in fact exactly the same as that of the therapists. Only in their external life did the Therapeutae, the hermits and the Essenes differ. There was a communist state near the Dead Sea. There was a complete community of goods and a strictly regulated, ascetic life. Describing the external form of government has little significance for the course of spiritual life. What is particularly important is that those who wanted to be accepted had to commit themselves through the so-called great vow: firstly, to actually submit to everything that was demanded of the Essenes so that they could ascend to the highest level; secondly, not to betray anything outwardly of that by which the Essenes came to the top.

This great vow makes a person an actual [Nazirite], as they were called in the Essene community. At least two centuries before the birth of Christ, we are dealing with views that we cannot characterize in any other way [...], because Philo would undoubtedly not seek evidence for his doctrine in the teachings of the Essenes. He takes for granted something that the Essenes themselves have from the Old Testament myths. He would not take anything for granted if it were not the case that the Essenes would have had the same basic view as Philo did.

Philo lived around the same time as the life of Jesus of Nazareth. The same teachings, the doctrine of the incarnate Logos, the doctrine of the mediator between God the Father and the world, which Philo himself taught, were also found among the Essenes. They existed among the Essenes for two centuries, undoubtedly more than a century before the birth of Christ. We can assume nothing other than that this teaching came to them in a roundabout way via Egypt. Any other possibility is out of the question. No matter how much effort has been made to establish that such an interpretation of the Scriptures emerged from Judaism, we are actually dealing with nothing other than the transfer of the Greek mystical way of thinking to the consideration of the Old Testament by individual sects when we consider the entire view of the Essenes.

The reason for this is that Greek philosophy arrived there by way of a detour via Platonic philosophy via the School of Alexandria in northern Egypt and that this philosophy led to the extension of Greek methods to the Old Testament. This led to a view that can serve us as confirmation of this process, a view that already prevailed before Philo. They believed that the whole of Greek philosophy was nothing other than a process of development that emerged in particular from Greek-Jewish philosophy. Plato is seen as a disciple of Moses and the prophets. They transformed the myths of the Old Testament into Greek myths; and now Greek philosophy is related to them in such a way that it is nothing but something that is derived from the Old Testament.

This view prevailed in Alexandria. Philo in particular advocated it. The esoteric method was then applied to the Old Testament, in particular to Pythagorean philosophy. Plato also dealt with the latter. They had to go through long trials. This method led to therapists introducing similar methods. The actual [esoteric] content of the Jewish myth was found through the fact that Greek mysticism was led to seek out this content. The actual esoteric core of the Old Testament myth was sought through them. This is why the Essenes are a sect that practises esotericism.

It is the Logos who actually represents God in the world. The Logos is the mediator between the Father and human beings. The Logos is the Son of God. This is Essene doctrine. Philo merely deepened this doctrine. He was the philosopher of this doctrine. He admits that he found this teaching, that it was already there. Among the Essenes and therapists, such views were already commonplace centuries before our era. There must have been someone who was looking for the [divine-human] in the Old Testament. Great teachers lived within the Essene community who taught them this ancient worldview, that the All-Spirit lives itself out in the human Logos. Fulfilling oneself [with the Logos] is what man has to strive for. This was what the Essene sect wanted and what formed the core of the Essene sect's deepest aspirations.

So we must assume from the external testimony a great personality whose name could not have come down to us. He could not have been named because every Essene only reproduced within his Essene community, only within his own brotherhood, what it was all about in the deepest sense. The actual penetration of the deeper core was only practiced in the Essene community. Taking it out into the world held back the vow. We may assume that there was a founder, that he summarized all mystical interpretations of the deepest essence of mythology in a central figure of the God-human Logos, and that he taught that this Logos is that on which all knowledge, all truth depends. It must have been a conviction of the Essene community that all the wisdom of man is worthless if this Logos does not permeate this wisdom.

It is a folly of naturalists and a presumption to want to know God directly. The only way in which man can look at God is this: "I and the Father are one." This realization is the deepest core of the Essene doctrine. This is how we see the deepest spiritual core of esoteric Christianity, roughly outlined, taking shape in the Essene community two centuries before the birth of Christ.

The need for a savior was present within the Jewish community in the most diverse ways. We see that teachers of the Old Testament, alongside this view, alongside this "Greekness", sensed something from the Jewish writers. We therefore find allusions to a Greekization of the Essenes and certain schools. Jewish writers speak of Greekness with shyness and disgust. Individual schools and the Essene community in particular were aware that something foreign had been absorbed. In this Judaism, a lively need developed for a Messiah who could free the Jews from the terrible political situation in which they found themselves. We must imagine that alongside the Essene esotericism, there was also an exoteric interpretation [of the Old Testament] all around, which was understood to mean that a Messiah was to come who would redeem the Jewish people from the weakness and shame into which they had fallen in worldly life. This view ran parallel to that of the Essenes.

If we follow the circumstances closely, we see that all the conditions were present in Judaism for a good reception of such personalities who were able to free the Jews from the situation they had got into. It was easy to turn them into messiahs. The most diverse personalities are seen as such messiahs. There is not enough time to illustrate this relationship with the personality of John the Baptist and other personalities. I only wanted to draw attention to the fact that those who lived within the Essene community were no longer able to uphold this vow when Philo had made this teaching the basis of his philosophy and something of it leaked out. Now it was no longer possible to close oneself off. Now everything was open to those who sought the path in a philosophical way. Now you could no longer be an Essene just by joining the Essene community.

If we want to understand the emergence of Christianity itself, we have to realize that something essentially new was created through the Philonic philosophy, through this act of acceptance. People were equipped with new tongues of fire, so to speak. Now it was possible to speak again as it had been spoken in the ancient Greek mysteries, namely to represent in myth what had presented itself to them as an [inner] experience through [the description of] external sensual facts. They were able to learn this through the currents that developed from Greek philosophy.

Protagoras believed that all people share a sense of virtue, morality and social coexistence, but that only a few people have the ability to ascend to the highest levels. This is why in Platonic times this is represented by the myth that once only gods lived on earth as fire. Animals and humans no longer had the ability to live in fire. Therefore, they had no possibility of life. That is why Prometheus was given the task of implanting life into them. However, Epimetheus transferred everything to the animals, so that nothing was left for humans.

[Prometheus] gave fire to mankind. That means the gift of the arts, the gift of wisdom. I think this legend mythically illustrates an inner process. This shows us the way in which the legend is continued. The abilities are distributed, one has more, the other less. Hermes was sent with the ability to distinguish between good and evil. They all have this in the same way. The Greek philosopher expressed inner human facts of the soul in myths.

The person who considered himself capable of doing this was the apostle John. The most important thing for us is given in his Gospel - despite modern theological research. He gives us - from the standpoint of [Philonic] philosophy according to practical esoteric methods - the life story of the God-man. He translates the inner God-man for us. He himself knows the teachings of the Essenes and he gives us what he learned in the Essene community. What he could not say openly, he gives us in mythical form. He shows us how the Christian idea grew out of the philosophy of Philo, the Therapeutae and the Essene sect. The Gospel of John] has been regarded as the last, as the least certain. But that is not tenable.

We shall see, if we compare it with the other Gospels, that we must say that it presents to us the sacred legend as it must have been formed. But the one who was initiated in the deepest sense into the teaching of the Essene community, who was therefore able to let [the] idea of the God-man grow out of [the] Logos made flesh, who was able to explain this, was John. Therefore it also begins with the words: "In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and a God was the Word" and so on. These are ideas that form the basis of Philonic philosophy. The idea of the Father and what can be associated with it, the Logos made flesh. The words: "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us" cannot be interpreted in any other way than that he had the Essene concept and was aware of the significance of the Essene doctrine.

There are all sorts of external reasons why it can be maintained that [the Gospel of John] is a later product. But basically the whole tenor, the whole presentation of the Gospel, shows that it grew directly out of the deepest conception of Christianity. This is also shown by the very modest way in which John [concludes the Gospel by saying that he was present at these things, that he was, so to speak, an ear and eye witness, but that he is not interested in communicating what he personally experienced, what was apparent, but the deeper core, that is, what was taught in the Essene community. Therefore, we can understand the matter in such a way that we find an esoteric Christianity centuries before Christ and that we have the exoteric interpretation of it in the Gospel of John.

Question answer:

Philo did not know Jesus. There is nothing about it in his writings. Hints can be found in his book Quod omnis probus liber. These allusions say - they are quite clear - that the "what or "how he taught was common practice among the Essenes. Nowhere is there any mention of any personality whom he knew as a contemporary. On the other hand, there is a continuous tradition, apart from internal reasons. This completely different way of explaining the Old Testament. This leads back to certain personalities, with regard to whom it must be conceded that they must have lived before our era. I think there is an ongoing tradition. This is most beautifully developed among the Druze people. They have a peculiar kind of religion, a form of religion that contains all these things that can be described as essential Christianity. - In addition, this people has also absorbed a certain shade of Mohammedanism. - In this sect there is a legend of Christ, who lived at about the time of the [gap in transcript] according to this legend. This is a view of the Druze. But we have no historical basis at all, apart from the well-known passage from Josephus, for the assumption of a Jesus of Nazareth in the years 1 to 33. The Gospel of John cannot be taken in any other way, otherwise it becomes what it has become for fifty years with Protestant theologians, a complete nothing. The first three Gospels then represent only a sacred legend. I would like to elaborate on the origin of the Gospel of John and Philo. One might think that Philo takes a polemical stance against this new worldview. But no, the new doctrine does not appear in such a way that he, as a philosopher, would have felt compelled to fight it. They are based on what later became Christianity. The life of John, Moses' view of the creation of the world, also some elements from Persian, influences from Judaism, his demonology, which is ancient Jewish. Many things can also be traced back to Persian influence.

With the Apocalypse we enter into the deepest depths of the Christian world view. Every great religion has had its secret teachers, and so has Christianity. Above all, we must be clear about the nature of the secret teaching. The Apocalypse is nothing other than the Christian secret teaching. We only have to understand the key words: “Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.” This is the core of Christianity. Believing and seeing are two opposites. Christianity should also bring bliss to those who believe even if they do not see. The great mystery at Golgotha had its harbingers in the earlier human races. Even in the ancient mysteries, as long as our root race is on earth, something was celebrated in secret temple sites, something was shown to people that was nothing other than the mystery of God's deeds in the world.

We accompany our ancestors to the places that were most sacred to them. There they were shown how the God Himself descends to Earth, how He merges with material existence. This is called the crucifixion of the deity in the earthly. This was depicted in such a way that a human form was placed in a kind of coffin; this meant that the deity entered matter. It was then shown that the human being must perfect himself; then he would find God within himself. This is the same power that is crucified in matter and can therefore be reborn out of matter.

Everything that has become religion, art and science has emerged from the mysteries. The mysteries were a pictorial representation of what later took place at Golgotha. The drama of God developed more and more in its details. If one could follow what the temple priest said to the temple student, one would hear roughly the same thing that is written in the Gospel of John. It had condensed into a canon. The Christian gospels are ancient temple records. The teaching was taken from the depths of the temples. It is nothing new. This is hinted at in the gospels, especially in John. What the disciple saw in the temple was intended to depict what had happened in the world. This was depicted in this one testament. What was depicted in the temple site is expressed by John:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not.

The student who was admitted to the mysteries could see in them an image of the great mystery of the world. What had been presented in the mysteries had actually taken place in Palestine. Christianity is a fulfillment. It has emerged onto the historical stage; the temple documents were kept secret. Those who were admitted to the mysteries had to take a sacred oath not to reveal any of it to the uninitiated. Today, any science can appropriate knowledge, but the ancients said: Only a pure heart may know, in an impure heart knowledge becomes an evil power. Only those who could communicate the word of knowledge from a worthy heart and feeling to others were allowed to know. Only the word of knowledge that was warmed through by good, pure and noble feeling was respected. The temple records were the secret revelation for the disciples of the mysteries.

Now Christ had truly been revealed. Through this, Christianity was brought out of the temples and onto the world stage for the whole world. Those who believed without looking into the temples were also to be blessed. For thousands of years, a secret teaching was proclaimed in the temples; this was revealed through the appearance of Christ.

The initiates were to work in such a way that people would be prepared for the future. The prophets were initiated into the mysteries. Every content of initiation is revealed later. At that same moment, new content is given for a new future. Christ himself performed such an initiation in the miracle of Lazarus. The Gospel had been revealed through Christianity, it had become a message. A new secret teaching now developed in early Christianity. Outside, the content of the Gospels was proclaimed, the suffering, the resurrection. But in the mysteries, events of the future were presented. Even today there are still Christian mysteries. They depict what is to happen in the distant future.

Christ is what is called in Theosophy the second entity of the divine Trinity. This consists of the three entities: God the Father, the Word and the Holy Spirit. The Father is that towards which everything strives, the entity towards which the whole unknown universe is moving. The Word is the guide to the Father. It was seen in all worlds as that which leads to the Father. 'Veda' means 'the Word'. The most ancient records of the Indians were called the 'Vedas'. The Indian knew that his Rishis - his teachers - were inspired; they imparted the 'Vedas', the 'Word', which was inspired by the Deity, the Word from which the world originated. In ancient India the Word was not something external. It reflected the essence of the object.

The ancient Germans had a runic writing system; in ancient times, when a person pronounced the name of a thing, he knew that the thing had come into being from the word. That is why we find the unpronounceable name of God among the Jews, because it was the essence itself. That is why the actual name of God - Yahweh - was only used on the most solemn occasions and for the most solemn actions.

The ancient peoples said to themselves: The world was created by the word, the Logos. The word once excited world vibrations, rhythmic movements from which the world emerged. The third divine essence is that which the word can grasp, which gives strength to strive up to the Father. The Word, the divine power of creation, the second link in the divine trinity, has taken on human form.

And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.

Man will not always appear in this coarse material form; the development of man in the flesh is the fourth round or cycle. Before that, man was in a freer material form and remained in a completely different kind of existence for three cycles. But the abilities he now has, he could only acquire in the flesh. He must now develop upwards again through finer materials.

The sixth cycle will be special. He will then be in a more refined matter. Today we can only embody the word in physical air vibrations. Only insofar as I express my being in the word does it come to another. But in the sixth cycle we will consist of a finer substance, so that we will reproduce our whole being outwardly in vibrations and reveal our whole being to all people. Today, the human being can hide much through gross materiality. But then, in the sixth round, we will be entirely vibration, entirely sound, beings that communicate with the environment in rhythmic or non-rhythmic waves. Then the word, the name of the human being, is external physicality. Now the human being cannot communicate his entire being to the outside world. But there have always been beings who are superhuman, like the word itself; these can be in the flesh in the fourth cycle, which the others will be in the sixth cycle. The word has already become flesh in Christ. What can take place for human beings in the sixth cycle has been realized in the fourth cycle through Christ in humanity. This is the mystery of the Incarnation of the Logos.

The goal of man is: You shall develop to such an extent that you can turn your whole being outwards. That is the following of Christ. In the sixth cycle, man is to become what Christ exemplified in the fourth cycle. Clement Alexandrinus, Origen, were Christian initiates and imbued with the full significance of the goal, that a millennium, a cycle, must come when man will have the opportunity to be an outward seal imprint of Christ living in the flesh. Thus, a dormant Christ principle is hidden in man. In order for this to become manifest, the human being must pass through various states. This was presented in the first Christian mysteries. We find this in the first chapters of the Apocalypse. The “firstborn from the dead” means that he was the model in the fourth round of what it means to live the whole word in such a way that it will be revealed.

Human development is much older than history. Our present root race - [the Aryan,] the fifth - developed in its first sub-race in present-day India. The Indian religious books were written only in much later times. In the beginning, nothing external about the development of humanity was entrusted to man. This was guided by the old Rishis to a religious belief that was wonderfully monotheistic. The second sub-race - the Persians - developed a religion based on the principle of duality; however, this was not written down until much later. In the third sub-race, a three-part deity was recognized, especially in Egypt. This had an effect on the preceding races. Only now were the Vedas written down. The mysteries were shown in the Egyptian pyramid temples, and the gospels were taken from there. The flight to Egypt indicates this.

The third sub-race is followed by the fourth, the Greco-Roman sub-race, in which Christianity developed; then the scientific world view developed in place of the religious one; the culture of the intellect developed from the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Like a swan song, something of the old world view still lies in that time, with which the new world view was linked at that time.

The emergence of the innermost being of man before other people is what the creed of Christ must become. Those who can fully understand that Christ belongs to the world will be the twenty-four elders who worship the Lamb, Christ. In the future, in the sixth root race, some will be able to worship the Lamb in all its significance. Then man can mingle with those who worship the Lamb. This is represented by the symbol of the four beasts – lion, cow, man and eagle – who worship among the elders.

In addition to the physical body, man also has an astral body. This is not as developed as the physical body. In relation to the physical body, man is similar to God; the human race will only become more beautiful. The further perfection will be that he will perfect the astral body. Sensation, feeling and the like will become more perfect. This happens in the fifth cycle. We are still facing this cycle. Now the human being's astral body is not yet so far developed. Only the physical body is developed now. In the astral body, he only becomes a human being in the fifth cycle. There, where the human being lies before the Lamb, adoring, he does not yet stand as a complete human being. There he has one of the forms of animality. He has gained this astral form of man through earlier stages of development. Certain qualities of animality are expressed in the races. Courage is represented by the lion, sensual creativity by the ox, the cow; man represents the lower man, the Kama-Manas man, who rises above the earthly. These are not yet god-like. Men mingle with the god-like and are symbolized by the four animals; that is the point at which man will have arrived in the sixth root race, after a destruction has once more swept over the earth.

Now John describes more distant, later conditions. The messages are sent to the seven churches. The races not only live one after the other, but also next to each other. They also all have leading personalities, of whom history tells nothing.

The various schools that have fulfilled their task and now still rigidly and conservatively adhere to their task, but which must hand over their mission to humanity, are the seven communities. These receive the seven letters. The apocalypticism first clears away the old secret teachings to make way for the new secret teaching. The message to the seven churches is: You can no longer be guides, now a new revelation must come, a new church.

The apocalyptic also described the three subsequent rounds. These rounds cannot be seen with astral clairvoyance, but only when a person enters the world of Devachan, the mental world. When a person has reached that stage, he sees in spirit. When a person enters this world of Devachan, he does not see, but he hears. He is clairaudient there. 'Clairaudient' is the term we use for the spiritual world. There he hears the music of the spheres, which was spoken of in the schools of the Pythagoreans. Goethe also alludes to the sounds when he speaks of the spirit. 'The sun resounds', says Goethe. This indicates the audible state, as it is in Devachan. “The sight of it gives strength to the angels.” The angels are the spiritual beings who preside over the planets. If you want to see how a cycle unfolds, you have to recognize in the world that which resounds; the apocalypticist indicates these world cycles in the trumpets of the angels.

In the sixth round, the whole being will now be clearly revealed before everyone. But even before the sixth round begins, man can develop the Christ principle out of himself. What used to be external has become an ability in man through internalization, involution. Externalization, the evolution in the great world laws, and internalization, involution, are related to each other as exhalation and inhalation. As man passes through the races, he assimilates that which lives around him. All have passed through the ancient Indian period, then through all the other sub-races, and so they will live in the time when they will lie in adoration at the feet of the Lamb. The seven seals will be broken when man has come to the knowledge of himself, to the worship of Christ. Then the book will be unsealed. Because John indicates that this is still before the seventh race, he first has six seals opened; only later the seventh seal, when man has progressed even further in his development.

We will turn our attention to-day to manifestations of the life of soul able to lead us to a kind of self-observation in which a vista of our personal karma, our personal destiny, flashes into life like lightning. When we reflect upon the nature of the life of soul even with more or less superficial self-knowledge, we realise that sense-impressions and the thoughts we form about them are the only clear and definite experiences in the life of soul in which, with ordinary consciousness, we are completely awake. As well as these thoughts, sense-impressions, sense-perceptions, we also have, of course, the life of feeling. But just think how indeterminately our feelings surge through us, how little we can speak of inner, wide-awake clarity in connection with our life of feeling. Anyone who faces these facts with an open mind will certainly admit that as compared with thoughts, his feelings are indeterminate, lacking in definition. True, the life of feeling concerns us in a more intimate, personal way than does the life of thought, but for all that there is something undefined in it and also in the way it functions. We shall not so readily allow our thoughts to deviate from those of other people when it is a question of reflecting about something that is alleged to be true. We shall feel that our thoughts, our sense-impressions must somehow tally with those of others. With our feelings it is different. We allow ourselves the right to feel in a more intimate, more personal way. And if we compare feelings with dreams, we shall say: dreams arise from the night-life, feelings from the depths of soul into the light of day-consciousness. But again, in respect of their pictures, feelings are as indeterminate as dreams. Anyone who makes the comparison, even with such dreams as enter quite distinctly into his consciousness, will realise that their lack of definition is just as great as that of feelings. Therefore we can say: it is only in our sense-impressions and thoughts that we are really awake; in our feelings we dream—even during waking life. In ordinary waking life, too, our feelings make us into dreamers.

And still more so the will! When we say: ‘Now I am going to do this, or that’—how much of the subsequent process is actually in our consciousness? Suppose I want to take hold of something. The mental picture comes first, then this picture completely fades away and in my ordinary consciousness I know nothing of how the impulse contained in the ‘I want’ finds its way into my nerves, into my muscles, into my bones. When I conceive the idea, ‘I want to get hold of the clock,’ does my ordinary consciousness know anything at all of how this impulse penetrates into my arm which then reaches out for the clock? It is only through another sense-impression, another mental picture, that I perceive what has actually happened. With my ordinary consciousness I sleep through what has happened intermediately, just as in the night I sleep through what I experience in the spiritual world. I am as unconscious of the one as of the other. In waking life, therefore, there are three different and distinct states of consciousness. In the activity of thinking we are awake, completely awake; in the activity of feeling we dream; in the activity of willing we are asleep. We are in a state of perpetual sleep as far as the essential core of the will is concerned, for it lies deep, deep down in the region of the subconscious.

Now there is something that in waking life too, is always rising up from the depths of the soul, namely, remembrance, memory. When we contact immediate reality, we have thoughts. This immediate reality makes a definite impression upon us. But the past of this earthly life plays all the time into present reality in the form of thoughts and memories, of recollected thoughts. As you know, these recollected thoughts are much dimmer, much less distinct than the impressions of present reality. Nevertheless they do well up and make their way into ordinary waking life. And when we give memory free play, letting it recall all that we have passed through in life, we realise: here is our own life of soul, rising up once again. We feel that in this earthly life we are that which we can remember. Think only what becomes of a man who cannot remember some period of his life, whose memory of that period is completely obliterated. We may come across such cases and I will give just one example.—There was a man in a respectable position who while his life was pursuing its normal course, remembered his past, what he had done in childhood and during his education, what he had experienced as a student, and then in his profession. But one day his memory was suddenly blotted out. He no longer knew who he was.—I am telling you of an actual case.—Strangely enough it was not the reasoning faculty, not the mental grasp of immediate reality that failed; the memory was completely blotted out. The man no longer knew who he was as a boy, as a youth, as a grown-up; his mind could grasp only what was making an impression upon him at the moment. And because he no longer knew who he was in boyhood, youth or maturity, he could not link his present with his past life; this was impossible from the moment his memory faded.

A case like this makes it easy for us to realise just why we do one thing or another at a particular time; it is not because of the pressure of immediate circumstances but because of certain experiences we have had in the past—primarily in the past of our earthly life. Just think of all that you might do or leave undone if memory played no part in your actions! Man is dependent upon memory to a far greater extent than he imagines. The misfortune that befell the man of whom I told you, was that after the sudden obliteration of his memory he was guided only by the impulses of the present moment, not by any promptings of memory. He put on his outdoor clothes and left his home and family. He was tied to them only through memory—and now this memory was blotted out. Impulses worked in him that had nothing whatever to do with memories of his family. His reason and intelligence remained; and so—because it would have been senseless to do these things while other people were there—he waited until they happened to be absent. He had lived with his family as a sensible, rational individual, but his memory had gone. He went to the railway station and took a ticket for a place a long way off. His mind was absolutely clear in a matter where reason came into play. He got into the train and went off; but the memory of what had happened, even the memory of having taken the ticket was blotted out. He was aware only of the immediate present. The extinction of memory was a pathological condition. But he was so intensely engrossed with the present that he knew when he had arrived at his destination; he could compare this with the timetable. The ability to read—something that had already become habit and was therefore no longer a matter of memory—that too had remained. He alighted and took another ticket to a distant destination. And so he went on, travelling about the world without knowing who he was. One day his memory returned, but he knew nothing of what he had been doing since buying the first railway ticket. When his memory returned and he was himself again, he found himself in a Casual Ward in Berlin. It was only the things that had happened in the trains and the places where he had been that were blotted out, for they did not belong to the present. Just think what a state of confusion! How utterly uncertain of himself such a man must be! You will realise from this how closely our ‘I,’ our Ego, is bound up with our store of memories. We know nothing of the self within us if we are bereft of the store of memories.

What is the nature of these memories? Memories are of the nature of soul. But in the whole range of man's life and being they are present in another form as well. They work purely as soul-forces only in a human being who has reached the age of twenty one or twenty two, and continues living. Before then the memories do not work purely as forces of soul. We must be very conscious of what I have said in these lectures, namely that during the first seven years of earthly existence our physical corporality is an inheritance from our parents. At the change of teeth it is not only the first, milk teeth that are expelled—that is only the final act; the whole of the first body is discarded. We build up the second body—the body we bear until the onset of puberty—out of the soul-and-spirit we brought with us when we came down from the spiritual world to physical existence on the Earth. But from birth until the change of teeth we have received a host of impressions from the environment; Our being was absorbed in what flowed into us through having learnt to speak. Think of all the wonders that stream into us together with the power of speech! Any unprejudiced observer will agree in this respect with the statement made by Jean Paul to the effect that he had learnt more in the first three years of his life than in the three academic years. The meaning of this is clear. For even if the academic years are extended to five or six—not, presumably, because one learns too much but because one learns too little—even if this period is considerably extended we learn only the merest trifle in comparison with what we assimilate during the first three years of life, and thereafter through the years following the first three until the change of teeth. After a certain time all this remains in the form of hazy, indefinite memory. But just think how pale and indistinct are these memories of our first seven years compared with the events of later life. Just try to make the comparison. The memories often seem to loom up like erratic boulders without any obvious connection. And why? What we take in during the first seven years of life and what we take in later on have entirely different tasks to fulfil. What we take in during the first seven years works with intense activity at the plastic moulding of the brain, passes into the very organism. There is a great difference between the relatively undeveloped brain we possess when we come into earthly existence and the beautifully developed brain that is ours by the time of the change of teeth. And the result of this work penetrates from the brain into the whole of the rest of the body. This inner artist we bring with us from pre-earthly existence works in a most wonderful way upon our physical body during the first seven years of life. It is miraculous to see the facial expression, the look, the mobility of the features, the purposeful movements of arms and limbs beginning to appear in a child after the lack of definition characterising early babyhood. We see how spirit begins to permeate the child's being and the impressions he absorbs. The way in which spirit permeates the child during the first seven years of life is one of the most wonderful sights imaginable. When we observe how the physiognomy and gestures of the child develop from birth until the change of teeth, when we read and decipher it all just as we decipher something in a book from the single letters, when we know how to connect the forms of the gestures and the facial expressions appearing in succession just as we can connect the letters of a word and so read the word—then we are gazing at the workings of the brain which has been kindled into activity by the impressions received; these can form themselves only into sparse and scattered memories, because the plastic development of the brain and therewith of the physiognomy has primarily to be provided for.

As life continues its course from the time of the change of teeth to the onset of puberty, the forces working in this way are more or less lost to sight. As I said, until the beginning of the twenty-first year, work continues upon the shaping and elaboration of the organism; but from the seventh year onwards this work is less concerned with the bodily nature—and still less from puberty until the beginning of the twenties. But something else comes to our help. If we have any aptitude for this kind of observation and mellow it by contemplating the marvellous phenomenon of the child's physiognomy which reveals itself month by month, year by year in greater clarity, above all if we can perceive what the child's gestures reveal, how the awkward, unskilful movements of the limbs turn in a most wonderful way into movements filled with intelligence and purpose—this sensitive perception can be deepened and finer organs of sense will develop. Then, when we have before us a child between the ages of seven and fourteen, that is to say between the second dentition and puberty, when the changes in the physiognomy and the gestures are less marked and the development less obvious, it is possible through inner feeling which has all the certainty of an eye of soul to perceive how the child's development is proceeding in a more hidden way. And from this delicate, intimate observation of the bodily development of a child between the seventh and fourteenth years, there can arise the faculty to gaze into the life preceding the descent to earthly existence, the life between death and a new birth.

These things must again be within our reach, enabling us to affirm of a child between the ages of seven and fourteen: around you there is not only the sense-world of nature; in everything that is revealed in sense-perceptions, in colours, in forms, lives the spirit! It is truly wonderful to see the spirit becoming articulate in all things and then, as it were in a mirror-image, to perceive a reflection of this in the way in which spirituality reveals itself more and more distinctly in the physiognomy of a child. If we feel this deeply and inwardly and with a certain reverence make the experience a living power in the soul, then, as we observe the child between the ages of seven and fourteen, this reverence will lead to an understanding of how the pre-earthly existence of a human being between death and a new birth works into him here on Earth. And we shall feel that this bodily development is governed, not by the forces of the earthly environment but by the second physical organism which we ourselves mould according to the model provided by the first.

This can be of great importance in life. Humanity will have to learn to perceive the essential nature of Man. Life will then undergo the deepening without which the further progress of civilisation is simply no longer possible. Our civilisation has become totally abstract! In our ordinary consciousness we are no longer able to think in the real sense; we can only think what has been inculcated into us. We are no longer capable of perceptions as delicate as those of which I have been speaking. Hence men to-day pass each other by in ignorance. They learn a great deal about animals, plants, minerals, but nothing whatever about the subtle, impalpable processes of the development of the human being. The whole life of soul must become more intimate, more delicate, purer, and then we shall again perceive something of the real nature of human development itself; and this will lead us eventually to a vista of pre-earthly existence.

Next comes the period immediately following puberty, the period between the onset of puberty and the twenty-first or twenty-second year. Just think of all that a human being reveals to us in this phase of his life! Even with our ordinary consciousness we see evidence of a complete change in his life, but it takes a crude form. We speak of the hobbledehoy years, of the ‘awkward’ years and this in itself indicates our awareness that a change is taking place. What is actually happening is that the inner being is now emerging more clearly. But if we can acquire sensitive perception of the first two life-periods, what emerges after puberty will appear as a ‘second man,’ actually as a second man, who becomes visible through the physical man standing there before us. And what expresses itself in the awkwardness, but also in very much that is admirable, appears like a second, cloudlike man within the physical man. It is important to detect this second, shadowy being, for questions on the subject are being asked on all sides to-day. But our civilisation gives no answer.

The turn of the nineteenth/twentieth century was accompanied by momentous changes in the spiritual and physical evolution of the Earth. Men of the ancient East had divined this and said that Kali Yuga, the Age of Darkness, would come to an end at the close of the nineteenth century when an Age of Light would begin. This Age of Light has begun in very truth but men are still unaware of it because in their minds they are still living in the nineteenth century and their ideas flow on lethargically. Nevertheless around us there is clear, radiant light and if we pay heed to what will reveal itself from the spiritual world, we can become aware of this light. And because youth is peculiarly sensitive, with the turn of the century an undefined longing arose in the hearts of the young for a more intimate knowledge, a much more intimate perception of Man. Human beings born about this time—at the turn of the nineteenth century—have the instinctive feeling: we need to know a great deal more about Man than people are able to tell us. Nobody tells us what we long to know! There was this striving, this urgent, insistent striving for an understanding of Man. Children and young people were ill at ease with their elders for they longed to hear from them something about Man, and these elders knew nothing. Modern civilisation can say nothing, knows nothing about the spirit of Man. But in earlier epochs people were able, speaking with real warmth of heart, to tell the young very much about Man. When thoughts were still quick with life, the old had a very great deal to say—but now they knew nothing. And so there came an urge to run, run no matter where, in order to learn something about Man. The young became wanderers, path-finders; they ran away from people who had nothing to tell them, seeking here, there and everywhere for something that could tell them something about Man.

There you have the real origin of the Youth Movement of the twentieth century. What is this Youth Movement really seeking? It is seeking to find the reality of this second, cloudlike man who comes into evidence after puberty and who is actually there within the human being. The Youth Movement wants to be educated in a way that will enable it to apprehend this second man.—But who is this second man? What does he actually represent? What is it that emerges as it were from this human body in which one has observed the gradual maturing of physiognomy and gesture, in connection with which one is also able to feel how in the second period of life from the change of teeth to puberty, pre-earthly existence is coming to definite expression? What is making its appearance here, like a stranger? What is it that now comes forth when, after puberty, the human being begins to be conscious of his own freedom, when he turns to other individuals, seeking to form bonds with them out of an inner impulse which neither he nor the others can explain but which underlies this very definite urge. Who is this ‘second man?’ He is the being who lived in the earlier incarnation and is now making his way like a shadow, into this present earthly life. From what breaks in upon human life so mysteriously at about the age of puberty, mankind will gradually learn to take account of karma. At the time of life when a human being becomes capable of propagating his kind, impulses to which he gave expression in earlier earthly lives also make their appearance in him. But a great deal must happen in human hearts and feelings before there can be any clear recognition, any clear perception of what I have just been describing to you.

Think of the great difference there is in the ordinary consciousness between self-love and love of others. People know well what self-love is, for every individual holds himself in high esteem—of that there is no doubt! Self-love is present even in those who imagine that they are entirely free from it. There are very few indeed—and a close investigation of karma would be called for in such cases—who would dream of saying that they have no self-love in them. Love of others is rather more difficult to fathom. Such love may of course be absolutely genuine, but it is very often coloured by an element of self-love. We may love another human being because he does something for us, because he is by our side; we love him for many reasons closely connected with self-love. Nevertheless there is such a thing as selfless love and it is within our reach. We can learn little by little to expel from love every vestige of self-interest, and then we come to know what it means to give ourselves to others in the true and real sense. It is from this self-giving, this giving of ourselves to others, this selfless love, that we can kindle the feeling that must arise if we are to glimpse earlier earthly lives. Suppose you are a person who was born, let us say, in the year 1881; you are alive now; once upon a time, in an earlier earthly life, you were born, say, in the year 737 and died in 799. The man, personality B, is living, now, in the nineteenth/twentieth century; formerly this personality—you yourself—lived in the eighth century. The two personalities are linked by the life stretching between death and the new birth. But before even so much as an inkling can come to you of the personality who lived in the eighth century, you must be capable of loving your own self exactly as if you were loving another human being. For although the being who lived in the eighth century is there within you, he is really a stranger, exactly as another person may be a stranger to you now. You must be able to relate yourself to your preceding incarnation in the way you relate yourself now to some other human being; otherwise no inkling of the earlier incarnation is possible. Neither will you be able to form an objective conception of what appears in a human being after puberty as a second, shadowy man. But love that is truly selfless becomes a power of knowledge, and when love of self becomes so completely objective that a man can observe himself exactly as he observes other human beings, this is the means whereby a vista of earlier earthly lives will disclose itself—at first as a kind of dim inkling. This experience must be combined with the kind of observation I have been describing, whereby we become aware of the essential, fundamental nature of man. The urge to apprehend the truth of repeated earthly lives has been present in humanity since the end of Kali Yuga and is already unmistakably evident. The only reason why people do not speak about it is because it is not sufficiently clear or defined. But let us suppose that a thoroughly sincere member of the modern Youth Movement were to wake up one morning and for a quarter of an hour be vividly conscious of what he had experienced during sleep—and suppose one were to ask him during this quarter of an hour: what is it that you are really seeking?—he would answer: ‘I am striving to apprehend the whole man, the being who has passed through many earthly lives. I am striving to know what it is within me that has come from earlier stages of existence. But you know nothing about it; you have nothing to tell me!’

In human hearts to-day there is a longing to understand karma. Therefore this is the time when the impulse must be given to study history in the way I have illustrated by certain examples; it is this kind of study which, if earnestly and actively pursued, will lead human beings to an understanding of their own lives in the light of reincarnation and karma. That is why in these lectures I am combining studies of historical personages with indications that will gradually lead to perception of man's own individual karma. By the time we come to the last lecture we shall have gained a clear idea of how man can begin to glimpse his own karma. But the only way to achieve this is to observe things first of all in the great setting and structure of world-history. The primary aim of this lecture was to shed light on the inner nature and being of man and it has also been possible to elucidate the inner aspect of the strivings of a promising Movement of the times.—And now let me conclude with a picture drawn from world-history.

Study of history in the future must be concerned with the whole man, must realise that man himself carries over from one epoch into the next the impulses that work in history, in the development of world-history. Let us think of the days when Charlemagne was reigning in Europe—it was from 768 to 814 A.D.. Just recall for a moment everything you know about Charlemagne and what he accomplished. As so much about him is taught in school, I am sure that countless details will come into the minds of my listeners! At the same time as Charlemagne, a very important personage was living in the East, namely, Haroun al Raschid. He was a product of the scholarship associated in those days with Mohammedanism and he was fired with the will to foster and promote this oriental scholarship at a centre of learning and culture. Extraordinary results were achieved at his Court, for the highest attainments of the physical sciences, of astronomy, alchemy, chemistry, geography, as they were in those days, converged, so to speak, in him. Art, literature, history, pedagogy—all these branches of culture flourished at the Court of Haroun al Raschid. When one can perceive what was actually accomplished at this Court, the spectacle is far grander, far more impressive than that of the achievements of Charlemagne's Court, above all in respect of spiritual culture. Moreover there is a great deal in the campaigns of Charlemagne that the modern mind will not exactly admire! Living at the Court of Haroun al Raschid was another personality, one who in those days was simply a very wise man, but who in a much earlier incarnation, a long time previously, had been an Initiate. I have told you that the results of Initiation in an earlier incarnation may recede into the background in a later epoch. A most wonderful academy was established over in the East at that time and this other personality of whom I am speaking possessed real genius as an organiser. Scholarship, art, poetry, architecture, sculpture, the sciences—all were organised and brought together by this man at the Court of Haroun al Raschid. Both Haroun al Raschid and his wise Counsellor passed in due course through the gate of death and their evolution proceeded. This was the time when Arabism was spreading over Europe. The spread of Arabism came to a halt, but Haroun al Raschid himself, as well as his Counsellor, continued to be associated with its influence. Whereas the gaze of Haroun al Raschid in his life between death and rebirth was directed to Arabism as it swept through the North of Africa, across to Spain and further upwards to Western Europe, the attention of the other, the wise Counsellor, was directed from the East across the regions North of the Black Sea and from thence towards Middle Europe. It is strange that in following the life of a man between death and a new birth, one can also follow those things upon which his gaze is directed as he looks downwards. As I have told you, what he is actually beholding are the deeds of the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones whose workings are connected with what is happening on the Earth. In the life between death and a new birth we look downwards to the Earth, just as on the Earth we look upwards to the Heavens. The work of these two souls continued long after the close of their physical lives. Outwardly, they were reborn as men of very different characters. Haroun al Raschid appeared again as Lord Bacon of Verulam, the originator of the modern scientific mentality. Those who are capable of unprejudiced observation can see in everything that was forced upon the world by Bacon, a new edition of what was once cultivated over in the East. In the East men had turned away from Christianity. Bacon was outwardly a Christian, but inwardly, in his real aims, unchristian. The other man, the one who had once been the wise Counsellor, followed the path which led across to Middle Europe via the regions North of the Black Sea. It was he who as Amos Comenius brought Arabism over in a quite different form—a much deeper, more inward form than that in which it was introduced by Bacon—but who did, nevertheless, bear Arabism into the modern age.

And so at the dawn of modern spiritual life, two streams intermingled. We can perceive this development of history quite clearly—it is a phase when Christianity is temporarily forgotten, when on the one side scientific culture is externalised, but on the other becomes all the more inward. In his incarnation which had its roots in the East and then ran its course amid the deeper spiritual life of Middle Europe, much of the Eastern element persisted. It is not by casually opening some book ... in a certain dialect there is an expression ‘ochsen’ (to ‘swot’) and I can think of no other word at the moment ... and then swotting up Bacon and Amos Comenius, that we can discern the inner evolution of the human race; we must rather begin to perceive how the development of the several epochs is brought about by men themselves, how the impulses are carried over from earlier into later times. Try for a moment to picture quite clearly what happened here. Christianity has spread, has taken a certain hold in the regions of Middle and Northern Europe. But through men like Bacon of Verulam, the reincarnated Haroun al Raschid, and Amos Comenius, the reincarnated Counsellor, something creeps in that is not genuine Christianity, but merges nevertheless with all that is working like so many spiritual streams in world-evolution. Only in this way is it possible to grasp what is really happening and to understand the great world-processes in which man is rooted.

If we go back to the time preceding Haroun al Raschid, to a man who was an immediate disciple of Mohammed, we must be quite clear about what it was that had been indoctrinated into oriental spiritual life through Mohammedanism. Study of original Christianity reveals the deep significance of the fact that it has the Trinity. When we think of the Spiritual in nature, the Spiritual Power which places us in the world as physical human beings and operates in the laws of nature, namely, the Father Being, we may ask ourselves: What should we be if the Father Being alone worked in us? Through the whole of life from birth till death, we should be under the same sway of necessity as prevails in the world around us. But in point of fact, at a certain age in life we become free beings, not in any way losing our manhood but awakening to a higher form of it. The principle that is working in us when we attain our freedom, when we release ourselves altogether from the sway of nature, this principle is the Son Being, the Christ—the Second Form of the Godhead. But it is the Power of the Holy Spirit that quickens within us the recognition that we live not in the body alone but having been associated with the body through its phases of development, we awaken, we are awakened as beings of Spirit. Man in the fullness of his being can be understood only through the Trinity; it is there that we perceive the concrete reality. But over against the Trinity, Mohammedanism proclaims an abstraction: There is no other Divine Being save the Father God, the one and only God. The Father is all; it is not lawful to speak of a threefold Godhead. In Mohammed himself, and in his followers, this doctrine of the one Father God was personified.

In an epoch when the highest human faculty capable of development was that of thinking in cold, barren abstractions, when men knew only the one, abstract God, they began more and more to identify this God with thinking, to deify the life of thought and the human intellect—forgetting that real thinking has an essentially altruistic tendency. In Mohammed's followers, this talent for thinking about the world in pure abstractions was expressed with a certain originality and grandeur. One of these followers was Muawija. I wish you could look him up in history. You would find there a strange mental configuration, the prototype, as it were, of men who think in pure abstractions, who want to shape the world according to tenets contained in a few simple paragraphs. Muawija, one of Mohammed's followers, appeared again in our time as Woodrow Wilson. A revival of the abstract thinking of Mohammedanism gave rise to the view that it is possible to shape a whole world by applying the principles set forth in fourteen prosaic, abstract paragraphs, void of any real substance. Truth to tell, there has been no greater illusion than this in all world-history; no other illusion has proved such a pitfall for well-nigh the whole of mankind. Before the war, when I spoke in the Helsingfors Lecture Course¹ of Woodrow Wilson's shortcomings—his fame was then just beginning—people were unwilling to understand when over and over again, wherever I had the opportunity of speaking, I indicated that the calamity looming ahead was by no means unconnected with the idolisation of Woodrow Wilson then going on in the world. Now, since the impulse of our Christmas Foundation, the time has come when such things will be spoken of openly and without reserve, when our studies of history will also be connected with matters that are potent impulses at this very time. Esotericism must permeate the whole Anthroposophical Movement in order that what lies hidden beneath the shroud of external history may be brought into the light of day. Men will not be equal to the task of coping with world-events nor of doing what needs to be done until they begin to study karma and until individuals learn to observe their own being, as well as world-history, in the light of karma.

• 1. The Occult Foundations of the Bhagavad Gita. 28th May–5th June, 1913.

My dear friends!

For the kind of striving you are involved in, it is of primary importance to cultivate a true impulse for feeling yourselves within the spiritual world as well as striving towards the achievement of such an impulse, but taken from the viewpoint of your Movement, of which I intend speaking to you today. You see it really involves establishing a connection with a definite point to enable you to link to a spiritual impulse, if you want to be a sure, broad minded, active person, which you all want to be. It involves enlivening the appropriate impulses for this particular activity. From my observations in the spiritual world as such, it appears that the following will be helpful to you.

A connection can be established with the manifestation of the spirit of speech, the wielding of the speech genius. We must firstly be very clear, my dear friends, how far we are removed as a rule from the real spiritual, inner self-activation of grasping speech within ourselves. We basically are involved with speech but without its divine quality. We take up speech in such a manner that by the very act of applying it to ordinary life, we actually profane it. We allow ourselves as contemporary people to use speech by not venerating it in any way at all. We basically speak in sinfulness and this can awaken the awareness that our speaking sinfully enables us to acquire an attitude, I may say, to develop a relationship with speech towards obtaining a spiritual impulse. Examples to confirm this arise of course from all areas.

How many people today have obtained some guidance which empathises with any of the sounds in speech? This naturally means a large number of sounds are spoken conventionally and inhumanely, without comprehension, uttered as if without human input. Who feels at the moment the word “harden” is spoken, that in expressing the word the speaker's mood is permeated by something which hardens it like a mineral and simultaneously cools down his mood? Who feels, when the word “Word” is spoken that it is linked to life from ancient times, a past spiritual weaving which has been killed in the present time, the past crystallized in the present, and so on? We have absolutely no experience of the most important words any more. I would like to know how many people today have the experience with the word “thinking,” how many people have an experience with the word “feeling,” the word “willing.” This I'm only saying to you with reference to what I really want to entrust you with today.

You may of course name yourself in the most varied expressions of language. You can call yourself “I” as one does usually, or you can start to theorise about it and say to yourself you can be called a “human-being” (Mensch).¹ Then you substitute the speech genius and determine your own being out of the being of the language. However today a person has the feeling when he does something like that, he is applying a word which he designates to himself. When a person of today says to himself he can be called a “human-being,” he thinks that under all circumstances he has in a comprehensive way with a word, he believes, described an idea.

Now, when the starting point is feeling, it is good: in the true sense of the word language is so little understood, making the description which a person as a human-being applies to himself actually something whose understanding must first be wrestled with, whose understanding must first be arrived at. Feeling should actually always be a starting point so that when I believe I can describe myself in some or other words, even in my mother tongue, they designate an infinite pride in me. When we permeate ourselves with the feeling that we believe we can manage a language, even our mother tongue, so far removed from the spirit that we can legitimately name ourselves with the word “human-being,” if we consider this belief as terribly proud then we start to draw courage for the preparatory feeling towards a specific spiritual impulse such as I am indicating today. We should much more often be able to say: ‘I am placed on the earth as a human-being through some or other divine circumstances unknown to me and this leads me to call myself a “human-being,” but the basis for this description lies high above my horizon. It is the will of God who prevails here, who has lead me out of the unconscious deep substrate, to describe me as “human-being.” I have as a human-being, as this human individuality standing on earth, actually not the right to characterize myself.’ Then the next step must be to say to oneself: Before I can become capable at all of understanding the entire preliminary stages in existence which leads to me saying “I” to myself, I must undergo three developmental steps—right up to the judgement which I may express as the following: I have no right to call myself “human-being,” I need to first go through three steps of development, I must push through three tests. When I have passed these three tests to satisfy my own judgement, will I have earned the right to say to myself: ‘You are a human-being.’

This we should actually feel toward every spoken word: an extraordinary noble humility towards the point of origin for the development of spiritual impulses. We need to say to ourselves: Just like we as human-beings stand on earth today in our 5^th Post-Atlantean period, we may, if we are honest people, start by falling quiet, name nothing and then start to conquer the three steps which will give us the right to rename things out of ourselves. Through this can we first get a feeling for how extraordinary a meaningful cosmic experience it had been, as indicated in scripture, that in the presence of God Adam was permitted to name animals and things, which only God's proximity could enable. We come through such experiences which need indeed to be concrete personal experiences, to the necessary depths of the scripture, so that it, through its inner power which we can give it, reach the necessary nuances and coloration and out of every word in each verse let it ring out, to which we can't merely say: ‘We don't have the right to name things’—but we could say: ‘Through God the right has been given to us, to name things out of ourselves.’

These things must firstly be experienced through the depths of our soul in a priestly way to really encounter the world. Outer gestures do not make a priest, because the priest expresses what comes out of the deepest depths within. When we designate the words “human-being” as such to ourselves, we should only be able to do so when we have gone through these three stages:

The being to whom I want to ascribe the word “human-being”
has depths which I must first need to fathom;

The being to whom I want to ascribe the word “human-being”
has heights to which I need to rise first;

The being to whom I want to ascribe the word “human-being”
has widths which I first have to look at and grasp.

These three sentences contain something meaningful: being a human-being. By deepening these sentences through meditation, they can take you a long way.

In truth it is so: by the human-being placing himself in earthly existence he places himself outside spiritual heights. Solely through the fact that our earth existence is a cooperative task towards human development, cosmically validated, do we contribute a part of our totality as earthlings. Earth shapes us while we walk on it between birth and death, as earthlings, and everything which is shaped out of the earth come out of the depths which cooperates in everything, even in the most minute parts of the smallest organs in us. Just imagine the earth as a being in space has endless secrets within it which work creatively. How your eyes, your ears are formed, how every singular, how every smallest member of your body is formed and fashioned, for all this the creative forces lie within the earth. If we succeed in gradually grasping what the earth's expression of its inner being is in its countenance, with thinking, feeling and willing as an unveiling of her inner secrets, so we meditatively, gradually come to search for an answer to the question: How do I fathom the depths of the being of man?

When we succeed in placing ourselves into our bodies as the multitudinous ways of crystallised earth, which dissolves the crystallisation again, atomised to a powder, when we succeed in observing this development, pulverising and re-crystallising which in the course of time was characterised for the sensitive human-being, for example with Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva; if we succeed in experiencing this entire process which will be for us a kind of bed of the Godhead, by us being embedded in it, so that the bedding within this Brahma-Vishnu-Shiva process becomes something like a cosmic sleep for us during our earth existence, if we experience this crystallisation and dissolving as something which weaves through us with a cosmic urge for sleep, so that we could say: the human-being is so profound, so deeply fashioned in earthly existence that the depths of consciousness doesn't endure but with the entire created earth as a physical body it expires into a cosmic sleep—then we gradually approach the feeling of what it means: what it is for the human-being to be connected to the depths of the earth. If we can finally say to ourselves: the earth forms us out of its depths, permeates us out of its depths with earthly sleep, while out of the depths of earthly sleep the archetypal divine works fully consciously, then we experience something of this earthly depths within the human-being. If we could say something like: the harder the earth appears to us, diamond hard, the harder in its parts, just so more true, so powerfully speaks from this diamond hard heart the condition of sleep of the spiritual world, the light filled spirituality which works in the earth as awakened, active divinity.

Thus we need to go through our meditation in an ever more deepening feeling way and transfer the earthly foundation and say:

‘Oh man, before you can name yourself, before you can establish your depths, you need to ever more deepen yourself into the foundations of the earth.’ When we observe plants sprouting out of the earth, we may acquire a more lofty feeling of piety, a feeling of reverence, that in every plant morsel we can behold something of ourselves, something like a revelation of what is happening below in the earth. We must really clearly understand the exchange of activities taking place between the earth's depths and the breadths of the heavens. See how the blossoming roses grow out of the earth, look at the particular way the rosebud pinches its petals so tightly together as to complement the ground of the earth, counter positioned to the central point of the earth as a mighty rose of light, permeated with divine thought gestures which need to wait until the rose unfolds its bud upwards. Every sleeping rosebud you empathise with the waiting, creating, living light rose in the earthly depths. So it is with all plants. Look at the green cover of plants over the earth and experience that which sprouts out of the earth as green, in the depths of the earth, as quite light-filled but permeated with deep violet, which appears in the world, weaving through it with life. Then you have something which I have said to you: ‘I may only call myself a human-being, when I have explored myself in the earth's depths.’

So the feeling must be reached towards becoming worthy through such meditative penetration, through the conquering of this first step, for the word “human-being” to be used for people. When one takes what the profane person takes as obvious, as a level hovering high above and think one can only reach this level by climbing up to it; through humbling yourself three times more than an ordinary person, becoming three times more humble than an ordinary person believes himself to be, then one is only starting to sense oneself gradually approaching the calling of a priest.

When one has gradually in such a way led oneself to reach the first step, then one takes on the second step which lets us look into the infinite widths of the worlds and one says to oneself at the present moment: Oh, how trivial this world has become, where humanity has only developed trivial images of the wide world. Yes truly, wiser than the wisest student was Stifter's grandmother who was asked about the evening red glow and answered it was the mantle of God's mother, which is hung out in the heaven to be aired. This naive, picturesque imagination is in contrast to scientific knowledge much wiser, much wiser than the most learned astronomy.

This one must be able to absorb: To actually see the shining stars in wide space, stars with essentially the eyes of divine spiritual beings who glance down at us, children of the earth, while their spiritual hands reach out to us, while our spiritual hands reach up to their spiritual hands because we were with them before we came down to an earthly existence. The gods look after us out of space, out of the heights above worlds, in order to explore how we feel towards their predisposition while our spiritual hands reached their spiritual hands. When we are able to possibly develop many imaginations of the heights and become more and more empathic, how the being of humanity originate out of the heights, towards which it needs to climb up once again, then we will be able to come one step closer to earn the right to, as people, call ourselves ‘human beings.’

The word ‘human-being’ must first be dipped into the depths of the earth, as I have indicated, so that its absorption during this immersion becomes part of our minds and enable us to say: We understand this. Now this word ‘human-being’ need to rise up with the mists into the heights and give us the feeling that it will come again in the falling rain, when the word “human-being” will carry within itself the possibility of learning to understand it. We really must initially be clear about everything which works between the depths of the earth and the heavenly heights. In a lively way we must follow the haze rising from woods and mountains. We must not believe that the haze is rising from an area which belongs to the earth. We must develop every kind of modesty towards those people who see in a drop the dragon rising in a thermometer or a barometer, to facilitate measurements. The tendency is to immerse everything in earthly images only. We must reach a point where we can say: ‘How foolish to believe thunder develops out of the friction between clouds; clouds consist of water as every child knows, all moisture is completely kept away from a glass rod if electricity is to be created.’—Naturally this foolishness comes to the fore when a person tries to experience something in the heights of heaven which he experiences on earth for he has descended down from the heavenly heights and now he needs to feel related to it again before he can truly call himself a human-being. We must clearly understand that while the fog rises out of the mountains and forests, where water is somewhat different than it is on earth, in regions where water itself becomes spiritualised, it is ‘de-watered’ and goes through spiritual processes so that it can materialise once again until it descends again as rain out of spiritual spheres. We must know that if we rise up into such regions then we need to be familiar with these regions of our origination, out of which we descended from in a previous existence. We need to know that lightening is something which rules and weaves in spiritual regions and take the imagination of ancient times, where lightening was the arrow of the Gods, as an imagination far more wise than we can ever make today.

In total stillness we must be able to develop such meditative imaginations in the depths of our minds, enabling us to be the leaders turning a completely de-spiritualised world culture towards the Spirit. When we turn towards the hard earth, we must also turn towards the gentle, flowing water, combining with one another in the depths, right into the most concentrated minute matter, which expands in the heights and must atomise, then coalesce to become rain again in their descent to earth. We must discover all the secrets of water, everything relating to water and draw it all together in our minds. We must meditate over it, we must ask ourselves: ‘How does the sun's warmth come out of the world expanse during summer and into the earth to enable plants to bear fruit which turn ripe? How does this warmth of the sun sink into the earth to enable the farmer to entrust his seeds in the earth's warmth during winter?’ At the end of winter it is this warmth which expands again into the vastness of existence. This warmth, found in all areas of existence, working in all cosmic undertakings, is a communion of the opposites between the heavenly heights and the earthly depths. As human-beings we originate from both. We must fathom the earth's depths before we can enter into the world's expanse.

By increasingly entering into such meditations we come to a kind of feeling, a mindfulness, towards the second step, which gives us the right to apply the word ‘human-being’ to ourselves. We must achieve an awareness that all languages can only be provisional, until through the third step we have reached that union with the linguistic genius who actually speaks unconsciously within us while we, when we have made ourselves the tool of God's Word, only then need to have the right to apply the word ‘human-being’ to ourselves.

As a third step we must try and observe the world's expanse. This we can perceive when the rising and the setting sun becomes a reality in our minds. Similarly with the rising and sinking stars when we learn to understand the great journey of the sun chariot going through the world, then we are really able to recognise what the variations are between East and West, what is different from Southeast compared to Northwest and so on. This we can observe when we are able to say to ourselves: You as human-being may take five steps and so change your position on the earth's surface. For you to be able to do so, like the animal as well, is as a result of forces which draw from East to West in width and breadth, also working on you. You are also shaped out of the earth's depths. While the heights of heaven throw light on you from above and forms and enlivens you, you are all given the ability to be formed into beings able to walk on the earth's surface. The world's expanse you should sense and you can sense this by placing yourself in some distant landscape and experience the air as becoming something increasingly more real. In your immediate surroundings the air appears transparent to you, you don't see it; when you look at a mountain you can paint the air with it because it appears as dew on the surface; when you look at the air in the distance then you see the blue sky. Drenched with it you experience the beings of light as a feeling which becomes real because the experience is bound to actions of will. Thus you rise to the third step in your meditation which leads you to earn the right to name yourself a ‘human-being.’

When you deepen this step in the secret of breathing, you start to understand what the air and the widths of the world are; what is working in the heights and depths and in the horizon and you admit: what permeates your breathing lives in the wide world—it is how the wide world experiences you—and it is this that you must sense in your breath. Further, you must sense in your breathing that an act of will is the basis of penetrating your entire being with the powerful impulses of breathing. You get an inkling of how the depths of the earth give material cohesion to your entire body which you transform according to thoughts given to you from the wide world. So they work together in the whole person:

Depths of earth in your Physical
World widths in your Astral
Heavenly heights in your Etheric

Thus you can feel entire cosmic dimensions in yourself. You can sense when you enter with your feeling into the diamond hard earth how you are a sleeping being. You can feel, when you raise your gaze to the heavenly heights, you are snatched from sleep and become a dreaming being. Yet you can also feel how you are a being who is awake in the width of the world. Gradually you learn to recognise the comic human in the earthly human-being.

In this way you learn to recognise how the human-being is actually formed by God out of the entire cosmos, placed by God on earth. Thus you sense the threefold positioning in the cosmos. This is how you learn to feel how the Father God works out of the earth, whose lively activity must preferably be looked for in the past because what has remained is the firm ground on which we stand, the fixed forms repeated in the world, all that has remained appears to us in fixed images. By meditating with our mind sunk into the earthly depths we hear the words of the Father God sounding up to us. Out of the heavenly heights we hear how the presence of God speaks to us but the words are more profound and more complicated that human speech. God has descended from the heavens down to earth and had to go through the Mystery of Golgotha to allow heavenly speech to penetrate our words. The actual communion of the earthly with the heavenly we can depict in the rising water vapour, in the rain which falls down again, in the rising and again descending warmth of the world. When we allow that to work in us it will permeate us with spirit and we will sense the presence of Christ in those who we feel are under the influence of the heavenly heights. When we penetrate into our breath as coming out of the widths of space and we humbly link our feeling to what happens at every instant, when we in our physicality, ruled by the forces of earthly depths, feel formed and shaped under the leadership of Christ Jesus out of the heavenly heights then we come to really experience, and are permeated by, the activity of the Holy Ghost as the fulfilment of the Trinity and thus out of this our meditation could be:

The Father God has given me the strength which lies in my material existence, as solidified Spirit.

The Son God is always the heavenly which lives in me, which works and weaves like a watery cosmic existence, which is a symbol, an image of it. I sense Christ-God in all my weaving and living, in all which has made me from a child to an adult, in all which grows in me daily and needs to perish again, enabling me to be an earthling through my becoming.

I feel the Spirit God carry into the future that which Christ Jesus has become in us, in the past.

You see, when you meditate like this on the content born out of a word, a word previously only used provisionally, then you have earned the right to call a person a ‘human-being.’ We must begin by developing reverence towards the genius of speech because through such a meditation real reverence is cultivated. Our starting point must not be to refer to the outer impression of the human form only but as a human-being created by God, as a thought from God, as a God-filled human-being, when we speak.

When we prepare ourselves as we have through our meditation on a word such as ‘human-being,’ then the impulse is born for these three steps to be applied to some other words and for the human speech on earth to be implemented in this way. The genius of speech will teach us how we can become living tools for the Word of God when we allow the congregation to experience this Word of God. The Word of God is always there, and what we are doing, is but a moment's experience of the continuous spiritual cosmic weaving Word of God. In the very first beginnings the word existed, in ancient beginnings it was already divine. When we are however not in the position to sense the holiness in the words ‘human-being’ for the people, then our approach is not right, we do not have dignity to also express the first words of the St John's Gospel in the correct way. The priest today has not yet come so far as to be able to say these words in this way.

In our time the primary importance for priests, if they continue in their calling, is to further such things. What has actually been left over from the ancient words revealed from the holy heights above the earth? What has remained from the words such as “Deus,” “Christus,” “Spiritum”? Earthly sounds they now are, hardened by dogma. The truth within words need to be awakened in us, the truth of these words must live in us. We may not neglect anything which will still make it possible for the old, hardened and therefore dogmatic words to become alive again within us. We may no longer turn and twist in the way it was done with God's words in past times in which the Catholic Church extracted the Mystery of the Mass.

In the Old Mysteries priests were far more humble than those of today, when they are like I have just described them. The priest of old said to himself he couldn't be a priest if he was just as he was. As a result, before he was allowed to speak, those things were performed in which the last remainder of incense was still held. As a result of the sensing, which has come to its right in our Consecration of Man ritual, there is indicated that in the Mysteries of old, outer substances were used to shift the consciousness of the priests. This resulted in them feeling shifted out of their bodies and enchanted by the genius of speech, taking them to the higher Genius so that the priest of old, out of his body, experienced the Being of God. No priest was of the opinion that he could move his tongue when he expressed the Word of God; he knew he had to first go out of himself and allow his tongue to be moved from outside. We can no longer do this today and nor should we try. We should through inner spiritual means, with internalized feeling and will work towards the understanding of the foregoing, when we can call ourselves ‘human-beings.’

Just consider, my dear friends, what the Act of Consecration will become under your handling when you start from today taking these things I've spoken about into your priest meditations. These things can also just gradually be taken in by us. Mankind has distanced itself from the divine and must find its way back again. We have absorbed the Act of Consecration into the Christian Movement for Religious Renewal like religious artists. Today we have come to the point where what can only be accepted like a religious art must be taken up in such a way that we are in the position to make it into a lively organism, in order for the Act of Consecration to become really alive and in this way be experienced within the Christian Community as ever new at each fulfilment of the ritual, just like the physical body experiences something new each time it takes in nourishment.

My dear friends, take this into your souls: the Act of Consecration is to become alive. Through this you will earn the right to place yourselves in the earth's becoming and through the Act of Consecration be present within the earth's becoming. Then may you express the following truth: If this Act of Consecration is not performed then the earth will waste away and remain without nourishment. It would be just as if no plants would grow. Plants grow in the physical world; the Act of Consecration of Man must grow in the spiritual realm. If it was not enacted there on this higher level it would be the same as if on the lower level of the physical earth no plants would grow. A human-being only has the right to say this when he or she succeeds in continuously enlivening the Act of Consecration so that this self-expressed word ‘human-being’ has been achieved in the correct manner and being and weaving, within the earthly existence, through achieving the three steps of inner soul development.

Only then, my dear friends, when you have experienced it in this sensitive way can you really place yourself in the right way in our present time. According to your need to gather again after a certain time, I may say this to you, because it belongs to the entire development of the Christian Community. Thus you have taken something full of life into yourselves which can work in an enlivening way in yourselves. I wish that today's words are taken in all seriousness, in the right way.

• 1. Translator's note: “Mensch” has no English equivalent. Collins Dictionary considers mensch used in English as “a well-meaning person.” Reverso suggests ‘human,’ ‘person’ and ‘man.’ Google adds ‘individual’ to this list. The word ‘human’ is seen in contrast to ‘animal’ or ‘robot.’ To translate “Mensch” as ‘human-being’ is not quite correct, nor is ‘individuality’—the latter indicating a person being different from others in some way. “Mensch” has a humane as well as individual character so the best solution is using the expression “human-being” in this translation. As “the Word” is under examination, a hyphen is an attempt at forming a single inseparable concept.

Due to Dr. Rittelmeyer's indisposition, we are only able to discuss the ceremony today that we would otherwise have completed. It is in the nature of things that, as long as not all the equipment and robes are in place, we cannot do some things in full. But that is not the main thing either; for us, the main thing is that the spirit should prevail in what we accomplish here, and so today I would like to give you a kind of preliminary discussion of it.

It is, after all, a ceremony that is to take place for each individual in front of the entire audience; and if I am to present the meaning of this ceremony, I must say that these ceremonies, which we perform step by step, signify the gradual becoming a priest. Today would be the first stage of contemplation. It should be noted first of all that in the cultus that will be incumbent upon you, the sacrifice of man's consecration forms the center everywhere, so that everything always tends back to the sacrifice of man's consecration. You must be aware that in the modern conception of religion, the more external conception of man's consecration is the usual one. There one actually grasps the Act of Consecration of Man only as an after-effect of the Lord's Supper, which Christ Jesus practiced with his disciples, while the Mass, the Act of Consecration of Man, is basically a continuous event that flows from the Mystery of Golgotha. For in the proclamation of the gospel, in the sacrifice, in the transubstantiation, in the communion lie all the spiritual events - expressed through external cultic acts - which are a continuation, a perpetuation of the working of the Mystery of Golgotha.

Now, every truly Christian activity should be connected to and placed within the Mystery of Golgotha. Therefore, it is quite natural that the human sacrifice includes everything that otherwise happens within the Christian community. In a sense, the human sacrifice is the envelope for everything that happens validly. This also applies to the ordination of priests. One could say that one celebrates a Mass in which the ordination of a priest is included, of which the ordination of a priest is a component. For this Mass is based on this four-part structure of Gospel reading, offertory, transubstantiation and communion, and within these parts the most diverse acts of consecration can now take place, including the ordination of a priest. So that when the priestly ordination is complete, one has said a mass that in its own substance contained the priestly ordination. The human consecration sacrifice must also be understood in this sense. It encompasses everything. It encompasses all the mysteries of Christianity in a spiritual but real presence.

And so the first part of the consecration would be to begin in the way that has already been shown before you, in front of the altar with the relay prayer:

Let us worthily perform the Act of Consecration of Man out of the Revelation of Christ, in the veneration of Christ, in devotion to the deed of Christ.

May the Father-God be in us
The Son-God create in us
The Spirit God enlightens us.

If the consecration had already begun today, it would be necessary for Rittelmeyer to receive it from the spiritual world, so to speak, directly through my mediation; he would then pass it on to the others. So Dr. Rittelmeyer would have been sitting here, facing the altar. I would have received from the spiritual world, as it were, what would otherwise have been performed in person. From the second part onward, everything is performed in person. One of the guides would have ministered.

[Now the Act of Consecration of Man is read aloud up to the Gospel, combined with the words of the ordination (see pages 53ff. and the facsimiles on pages 97-99, as well as GA 343, page 414f.), then:]

The celebrant: It is now proclaimed for the first time, out of this Spirit, through your mouth, the Gospel of John in the first chapter.

The ordinand then reads the Gospel, “In the beginning was the Word...” to “...has become the leader in this vision.”

The celebrant: We lift up our soul to You, O Christ.

The one to be consecrated: The words of the Gospel extinguish whatever is impure in our words.

My dear friends! That would be the essential content of the first part of the consecration. The second part would follow when the Credo is spoken and the Offertory is spoken, immediately before the Transubstantiation. We will then, when the matter can become real, transfer the consecration first to Rittelmeyer, and then Rittelmeyer will transfer it to the others. In this way we will make the process a real one.

We will leave it at that for today.

Today I would like to talk about the formation of the cosmos according to Annie Besant's “Ancient Wisdom”. I would like to show how to try to read the relevant passage. It starts on page 325, where Annie Besant attempts to describe how the transition from the lunar epoch took place, in which our ancestors underwent their development and then came to our earth. During the lunar Manvantaras, evolution produced seven classes of beings, who were called Father because they produced the beings of terrestrial evolution.

Just as we have the task during our earthly epoch to bring the mind and so on to the highest development, these beings on the moon had to bring the sentient being to the highest refined form. That is the chemical principle, so that they had developed the sentient life in the idealized way. When the seventh round had been completed, these beings entered into a state of Nirvana. That was the full image of Yahweh, the being that was their ideal. As seeds overwinter, so they overwintered through a pralaya. They thus developed soul.

There were also two other races. Solar Pitris were those who had progressed further than the ordinary lunar development. They had reached the highest level of similarity with their deity. But even during the lunar epoch there were Moon Pitris, Moon Pithakas. The more developed beings were solar Pitris. Those who had already become masters on the moon were, in terms of the development of the human mind, higher than the moon gods. The moon gods did not develop the element of reason. It would be futile for the deity to only come as far as it was in the beginning. Something must be produced that goes further than the beginning. If the Masters are looked upon as the end of our life development, they are found to be of a much higher wisdom than that which has been incarnated as Earthly Wisdom. The wisdom that has been incarnated is only sufficient to guide the Earthly development to its end. Therefore, it must be realized that the Master is, under certain circumstances, much higher than the Deva.

Yahweh only became the first person of the Trinity through an error. He is the god of earthly forms, who therefore forms the Adam out of matter. Of course, the Jews have the Father-God. But they don't talk about him. That is namely the one who was never spoken of.

People are called such lunar-age beings who advance the Pitris - Dhyanis. No one had developed the causal body on the lunar epoch. Those who had causal bodies had progressed beyond the lunar epoch into the earthly, human epoch. Plato will bring the highest development of the causal body into the next round.

The lunar Pitris had a certain intelligence, similar to that of animals. The earth is the fourth incarnation. The first incarnation is the planetoids, the second is at the position of Mars, the third at the position of the moon. The fourth incarnation of the planetary chain is the earth. The elementary essence is what I have described as world dust. Just as seeds absorb substances from the earth, the Pitris absorbed earthly materiality. [...]

Sphere a) is the archetypal world. The red sphere emerging from the archetype, developing out of the darkness. The archetypal world. The archetype of all understanding. The mind must be shaped. It must be formed into the body. There was only a solar plexus, no nerve plexus that emanated from the head. The planetary spirits are above the corresponding development. The planetary spirits are at work from the outside; they have the highest task. They determine the succession; they have a task that stands above the individual. They never enter.

The mental world is limited to one kind of sphere. Instead of the stars and constellations, the Akasha Chronicle appears. The formers are not active in the mental sphere, they are active in the realm of Budhi, so the planetary formers can only be found in the sphere of Budhi. At first, the thought is only a point, then it takes shape. The archetype of the plant and the archetype of the minerals arise. On the sphere b) the forms of lower-level formers are reproduced until they have matured into a denser matter. There are small signs and colors in it. The color is the astral matter. The sphere, which was red, has turned orange, and now it is turning yellow. Now it is filled with astral matter.

And now sphere c). On sphere c) the form reaches its densest consistency. From this point on, the nature changes. Spheres e), f), g) follow. On spheres e) and f), consciousness first manifests itself on the ethereal plane. On the blue sphere f), the beings begin to will from within, they begin to move. So the first automatic mind manifests itself. The Lunarpitris are the soul forces of form; they bring it to maturity and later inhabit it. That which they have here in black is the soul. That they think is spirit.

The earthly epoch is destined to make the marriage between spirit and soul complete. Fire is the element of the first round. It is actually fire air, ether fire. In the second round, the first-class Pitris continue their involution. In the second round, the archetypal forms of the plants come into being, which then take on their completion in the fifth round. The mineral is at the stage of highest perfection. The human brain, as a mineral substance, is only a carrier. The mineral kingdom is already dissolving. In the next round, the plant kingdom dissolves, followed by the animal kingdom. And only in the seventh round will man reach his perfection. The mineral has developed seven principles. It is the most perfect of what we have. We have three spiritual realms: the first, second and third logos; then the first elemental realm, the arupic realm; secondly the rupic realm; thirdly the astral, fourthly the physical, the mineral. The mineral is perfect in the fourth round. The plant will have reached its perfection when it has become astral. Genesis, with its seven days, indicates the seven rounds. The first four days are the first four rounds, the seventh day is the resting. The fourth day is the present round. The fifth, sixth and seventh days are yet to come.

The more you get to know Genesis, the more you will have to understand it literally. When you are ready to take the meaning of Genesis literally, then you have really understood it. Air is the element of the second round. The Pitris reach the beginning of the human stage here. The Solarpitris make their first appearance here, on sphere d), to take the lead in human evolution. The beings are always ready four rounds later. The archetypes of human forms were already given in the fourth round.