The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Those who look at the historical development of humanity only in terms of the sequence of cause and effect, as is customary today, will not be able to gain from history itself that which it can be in terms of forces, of impulses for the individual human being, if one tries to penetrate into the true essence of this historical becoming. Historical development can only reveal itself to someone who is able to perceive a wise working through the succession of facts. Today it is almost the case that one is of the opinion that anyone who sees a wise event in the context of the world and especially in the historical development of humanity is indulging in superstition and attributing to things something that only he himself has thought up. However, one must not impose one's own ideas onto things. One must not force one's way of thinking onto things, but one must try to let things speak for themselves. If one is open enough, one will perceive something like an active wisdom everywhere in historical development, especially at significant turning points in human evolution.

Now, one of the things that has emerged from history is, above all, the establishment of the individual festive days of the year, especially the great festive days. It is striking when we realize that Christmas is a so-called fixed feast, falling every year near the winter solstice, on December 24 and 25. In contrast to this, Easter is a so-called movable feast, which appears to be arranged according to the constellation of the sun and moon, the observation of which is thus, to a certain extent, brought in from the extra-terrestrial cosmos. It is the case that if a person takes these festive days of the year seriously, they have a meaning for their life, they are significant in their life. That is what they should be. Meaningful, penetrating thoughts should arise on these festive days. Profound feelings and emotions should well up from the heart and soul. It is precisely through what we experience inwardly during such festive seasons that we should feel connected to the passage of time and to that which is effective in the course of time.

Now, these festive seasons have been fixed for certain historical reasons, and one has to reflect on such a fact that Christmas is an immovable festival and Easter is a movable one, that Christmas falls at a time when the earth is, so to speak, most closed off from the influences of the extraterrestrial cosmos. When the sun has the least effect on the earth, when the earth, out of its own forces, which it has retained from the summer and autumn season, produces its own covering for the shortest days, when the earth, out of itself, makes what it can with its own forces with the least influence from the cosmos, we celebrate Christmas. |

When the time begins again when the earth experiences the most significant influences from the extraterrestrial cosmos, when the warmth of the sun, the light of the sun, causes vegetation to grow out of the ground, when heaven, so to speak, works together with the earth to weave the earth's garment, then we celebrate Easter. And in that such conceptions have emerged from the thoughts of humanity, not in an abstract way conceived by the one or the other arbitrarily, but from thoughts that have, as it were, permeated humanity through long epochs, that have developed themselves, into the historical evolution something has flowed that, when recognized, at the same time evokes the possibility of deeply venerating it, the possibility of looking back to the times of our ancestors with reverence, devotion, and love. And by drawing attention to something like this, one can indeed say: Contemplation of the active wisdom in historical becoming allows those forces and impulses to emerge from this history that can then, in the right way, become rooted in the human soul and work in the human soul in the right way.

Christmas, as we celebrate it today at the shortest time of the year, on December 24th and 25th, has only been celebrated in the Christian Church since the year 354. It is not usually thought about in a forceful way that even in Christian-Catholic Rome in the year 353, Christmas, the celebration of the birth of Christ, was not celebrated on that day. It is one of the most interesting aspects of historical reflection to see how this Christmas celebration has become established, out of a historical instinct and from deeper sources of wisdom, which may have worked largely unconsciously.

Something similar, but fundamentally different, was celebrated before: January 6, which was the Feast of the Epiphany of Christ. And this Feast of the Epiphany of Christ meant the remembrance of the baptism of John in the Jordan. This Feast of the Baptism of John in the Jordan was celebrated in the first centuries of Christianity as the most important. And only from the time I have indicated does the Feast of the Epiphany of Christ, the Feast of the Baptism of John in the Jordan, so to speak, wander through the twelve holy nights back to December 25 and is replaced by the Feast of the Birthday of Christ Jesus. This is connected with deep, meaningful inner processes of the historical development of Christianity.

What does the fact that in the first centuries of the Christian worldview the memory of the baptism of John in the Jordan was celebrated indicate? What does this baptism of John in the Jordan mean? This baptism of John in the Jordan signifies that from the heights of heaven, for extraterrestrial, cosmic reasons, the entity of the Christ descends and unites with the entity of the man Jesus of Nazareth. This baptism of St. John in the Jordan therefore signifies a fertilization of the earth from cosmic expanses. This baptism of St. John in the Jordan signifies an interpenetration of heaven and earth. And in celebrating the Feast of the Epiphany, we celebrated a supersensible birth, the birth of the Christ in the thirty-year-old man Jesus.

In the first centuries of Christian development, attention was focused primarily on the appearance of Christ on earth, and of less importance, alongside this view of the appearance of an extraterrestrial Christ-being in the earthly realm, was the earthly birth of the man Jesus of Nazareth, who only received the Christ in his own body when he was thirty years old. This was the conception in the early centuries of Christianity. In these centuries, therefore, the descent of the supermundane Christ was celebrated. And an attempt was made to understand what had actually happened in the course of his incarnation.

If we allow the historical development up to the Mystery of Golgotha to take effect on us, it presents itself in such a way that in primeval times humanity was endowed with an original wisdom of a supersensible kind, an original wisdom that one must have the deepest reverence for if one is able to contemplate it in its entire inwardness, in its entire essence. In the first, only externally childlike appearing wisdom of mankind, an infinite amount is revealed not only about the earthly, but above all about the extra-earthly, and how the extra-earthly affects the earth. Then one sees how, in the course of the development of mankind, this light of primeval wisdom shines less and less in human minds, how people increasingly lose touch with this primeval wisdom. And this primeval wisdom has faded and disappeared from the human mind precisely in the time when the Mystery of Golgotha was approaching. All phenomena of historical development in Greek and especially in Roman life show in the most diverse ways that precisely the best of humanity were aware that a new heavenly element must enter into earthly life so that the earth and humanity could continue to develop.

For the unprejudiced observer, the entire evolution of mankind on earth falls into two parts: the time that waited for the Mystery of Golgotha, waited not only in the simple, childlike minds of men, but waited with the highest wisdom — and in the part that then follows on from the Mystery of Golgotha, in which we are immersed and for which we hope for an ever broader and broader fulfillment, again in the supersensible world, again in the influence of the extraterrestrial cosmic reality on earthly events within the evolution of the earth. Thus the Mystery of Golgotha stands at the very center of earthly evolution, giving it its true meaning.

I have often tried to express this pictorially for my listeners by saying that one should look at something like the significant painting by Leonardo da Vinci, The Last Supper in Milan, which unfortunately no longer exists in its artistic perfection. How one sees the Redeemer within His Twelve, how one sees Him contrasted on one side with John and on the other with Judas, and how one then has the whole thing before one in its coloring. And here, precisely with regard to this most characteristic image, when contemplating the Mystery of Golgotha, one must say: If any being were to come down to Earth from a foreign heavenly body, it would in the outer reality, would be amazed, for we must assume that such a being from another planet would have a completely different environment around it, and it would be amazed at all the things that human beings have created on earth. But if he were to be led to this picture, in which this Mystery of Golgotha is shown in its most characteristic form, he would intuitively sense something of the meaning of earthly existence from this picture, simply through the way in which Christ Jesus is placed among his twelve disciples, who in turn represent the whole human race.

One can sense the way in which the Mystery of Golgotha actually gives meaning to the evolution of the earth from the most diverse backgrounds. But one only fully senses that this is the case when one can rise to the vision that with the baptism of John in the Jordan a supersensible being, the Christ, has entered into a human being. This is how the Gnostics saw it, not with the world view that we are again trying to gain today through anthroposophy, but with their world view, which was the last remnant of the ancient wisdom of mankind. One might say that so much of the instinctive wisdom of humanity remained that, in the first centuries after Christ's appearance, a number of people were still able to grasp what actually happened with the appearance of Christ on earth. The wisdom that the Gnostics had can no longer be ours. We must, because humanity must be in a state of continuous progress, advance to a much more conscious, less instinctive view of the supersensible as well. But we look with reverence at the wisdom of the Gnostics, who had retained so much of the first instinctive primal wisdom of man that one could grasp the full significance of the Mystery of Golgotha.

From this comprehension of the full significance of the Mystery of Golgotha and of the central phenomenon of John's baptism in the Jordan, the first great festival was established. But it was already so arranged in the developmental history of mankind that the ancient wisdom was dying out and becoming paralyzed. And it was precisely in the fourth century A.D. that one could do nothing with this ancient wisdom. Yesterday I presented another point of view, showing how this ancient wisdom gradually darkened. In a certain sense, the fourth century is the one in which man made the first beginning of being completely dependent on himself, having nothing around him for his contemplation other than what the senses can perceive and what the combining mind can make of the sensory perception. In order to gain its freedom, which could never have been gained through dependence on unearthly things, if ancient wisdom had not been paralyzed, humanity had to lose ancient wisdom, had to be thrown into materialistic observation. This materialistic outlook first appeared at dawn in the fourth century A.D. and grew stronger and stronger until it reached its culmination in the nineteenth century.

Materialism also has its good side in the history of the development of mankind. The fact that man no longer had the supersensible light shining into his mind, the fact that he was dependent on what he saw with his senses in the world around him, gave rise to the independent power within him that tends towards freedom. It also appeared wise in the developmental history of humanity that materialism has emerged. But precisely at the time when materialism took hold of the earthly nature of man, it was no longer possible to understand how the influence of the extraterrestrial, the heavenly, in the symbol of John's baptism in the Jordan presented itself to humanity. As a result, people lost their understanding of the meaning of the Feast of Epiphany, January 6, and resorted to other explanations. All the feelings and emotions that were related to the Mystery of Golgotha were no longer associated with the supermundane Christ, but began to be associated with the earthly Jesus of Nazareth. And so the Feast of the Epiphany of Christ became the Feast of the Epiphany of the Child Jesus. Admittedly, the development has taken a course that has now reached a peripeteia, which must create new necessities in the striving of humanity for our present-day world view.

We see how, as early as the 4th century, human beings' full and wise comprehension of the impossibility of comprehending the appearance of Christ was already confronted with it. But human feeling, human perception, human emotion and will develop in the course of history at a slower pace than thoughts. While thoughts had long since ceased to be directed towards the appearance of Christ, hearts still turned to this appearance of Christ. Deeply intimate feelings lived on in Christendom. And these profound feelings now formed the content of historical development for many centuries. And these profound feelings expressed it - but as if from instinctive impulses - what a significant event the appearance of Christ was for the development of the earth. The festival of the birthday of Jesus of Nazareth was connected to the Adam and Eve Day, the festival of the beginning of the earth of mankind. Adam and Eve Day falls on December 24, and Jesus' birthday celebration on December 25. In Adam and Eve, people saw the beings with whom the evolution of the earth began, the beings who descended from spiritual heights, who became sinful on earth, who became entangled on earth in material events, who lost their connection with the supersensible worlds. The first Adam was spoken of in the Pauline sense; and the second Adam was spoken of as the Christ: that man can only be fully man in the post-Christian era if he unites within himself the forces that fell away from God through Adam and the forces that through Christ bring him back to God. This was expressed by bringing together the Adam and Eve festival and the Jesus birthday festival. The sense of this connection, which gives earthly life its true meaning, has been preserved in a heartfelt way over the centuries.

One example of this is the occurrence of the very heartfelt 'Paradeisspiele' (Paradise Plays) and 'Christi-Geburtspiele' (Plays about the Nativity), of which we have brought samples to be performed here, which date from the last Middle Ages, from the beginning of the modern era, when German tribes living in the western regions took them with them to the east. In present-day Hungary, such tribes settled. We find such tribes north of the Danube in the Pressburg area, we find them south of the Carpathians in the so-called Spiš area, we see them in Transylvania. We find mainly Alemannic-Saxon tribes in these areas. We then find Swabian tribes in the Banat. All these German tribes took with them the one thing from their original homeland that had been imbued with the most heartfelt sentiments, which united humanity during these centuries with the most important experience on earth.

But human wisdom increasingly took a course that also intertwined the Christ event with the materialistic conception of the world. In the nineteenth century we see the rise of a materialistic theology. The criticism of the Gospels begins. The possibility of having an inkling — as must be the case with supersensible representations — that what appears as an imagination of the supersensible is different depending on whether it is viewed from one point of view or another, is lost. One has no conception of the fact that the sages of former centuries must also have recognized the so-called contradictions in the Gospels and that they did not criticize them in a critical way. One sinks philistinely into these contradictions in the Gospels. One resolves the contradictions, one removes everything supersensible from the Gospels. One loses the Christ out of the story of the Gospel. One tries to make something out of the story of the Gospels, something like an ordinary, profane story. Gradually, one can no longer distinguish what the theological historians say from what a secular historian like Ranke says about the Mystery of Golgotha.

When one looks for the figure of Jesus in the famous historian Ranke, as he presents him as the simple but most outstanding human being who ever walked the earth, when one reads all the lovingly described in Ranke's profane history, one can hardly tell the difference between this and what the materialistic theologians of the 19th century had to say about Jesus. Theology is becoming materialistic. Precisely for enlightened theology, the Christ disappears from the view of humanity. The “simple man from Nazareth” is gradually becoming that which only those who undertake to describe the essence of Christianity want to point to. And Adolf Harnack's description of the essence of Christianity has become famous.

In this book, “The Essence of Christianity” by Adolf Harnack, there are two passages that could be truly devastating for anyone who has a sense for the real essence of Christianity. The first is that this theologian, who wants to be a Christian, says that the Christ does not actually belong in the Gospels, that the Son does not belong in the Gospels; only the Father belongs in the Gospels. And so Christ Jesus, who walked the earth in Palestine at the beginning of our era, becomes simply the human proclaimer of the Father's teaching. The Father alone belongs in the Gospels, says Adolf Harnack, and yet he believes himself to be a Christian theologian! One must say: the essence of Christianity has completely disappeared from this “Essence of Christianity”, I mean that which Adolf Harnack describes, and actually such a view should no longer call itself Christian.

The other thing that can have a devastating effect in this writing “The Essence of Christianity” occurred to me once when I was present at a lecture given in a society called the Giordano Bruno Society. In connection with the remarks of a speaker there, I had to say how the most important part of the essence of Christianity has disappeared from modern theology. I had to point to Harnack's remark in this book “The Essence of Christianity,” where he says: Whatever may have happened in the Garden of Gethsemane, the idea of resurrection, the Easter faith, emerged from this event; and it is this faith that we want to hold on to. — So the resurrection itself has become unimportant to modern Christian theologians. They do not want to concern themselves with this resurrection as a fact. Whatever may have happened in the Garden of Gethsemane, people have begun to believe that the resurrection occurred there, and it is not the resurrection that we want to hold on to, but this belief.

I pointed out at the time that the essence of Christianity had been expressed by Paul, who said, based on his experiences outside Damascus: And if the Christ had not been resurrected, we would all be lost. Not the man Jesus is the essential thing in Christianity, but the supersensible entity, which through the baptism of John in the Jordan entered into the man Jesus, which arose from the tomb at Gethsemane, and which became visible to those who had the capacity for such visibility. Paul, as the latest of them, saw it, and Paul refers to the risen Christ. I therefore had to point out at the time how the remark of one of the most famous modern so-called Christian theologians fails to see the very essence of Christianity, its supersensible nature. The chairman of the society replied to me in a most peculiar way at the time. He said that such a thing could not be contained in Harnack's book, for Harnack was a Protestant theologian, and if Harnack asserted such a thing, it would be on a par with an assertion that could only come from the Catholic side, for example, about the Holy Robe of Trier. For the Catholic, it is not important whether it can be proven that this holy robe in Trier really comes from Jerusalem, but rather that faith is attached to this holy robe. The chairman of this society was so embarrassed that he did not even admit that this remark was in Harnack's book. I told him that since I did not have the book at hand, I would write him the page number on a postcard the next day. This is also characteristic of the modern thoroughness with which books are read that have an importance in the first place. You read a book and believe that it makes a significant impression on life, and you do not even notice one of the most important remarks, but you think it is impossible that it could be in it. It is in it! All this proves to us how the supersensible Christ has been thrown out of the evolution of humanity by a theology that is becoming ever more materialistic, how people have clung only to the outward physical appearance of the man Jesus.

Now, the festive customs and dedications of the simple minds that resorted to Christmas plays were beautiful; they arose from sacred feelings. Even if people could no longer provide each other with more information about the full meaning of the Mystery of Golgotha, they also had it in their hearts where they outwardly adhered to the material appearance of the child Jesus. And in this form, the celebration of the birth of Christ is beautiful and heartfelt.

The thought that destroys the Christ in the man Jesus is not beautiful and, from the highest point of view, it is not true, even from the Christian world view. It is as if the wisdom-filled guidance of humanity had first taken into account what had to happen in order for the materialistic view and thus the development of humanity to freedom to begin and continue. Just as materialism had to come in order to liberate humanity, so the Feast of the Epiphany, which can only be understood through supersensible vision and falls on January 6, had to be moved back to the Feast of the Nativity, December 25.

The twelve holy nights lie in between. In a sense, humanity made its way back through the entire zodiac by going through a twelvefold number, at least in the symbol, when this festival was moved.

Today, by summarizing everything that is connected with the Christ through the man Jesus, we can certainly unfold all the intimacy and depth of feeling for Christmas. And in my Christmas meditation yesterday, I wanted to express in words what is beneficial in this respect for the present time. But we must, after materialism has celebrated its highest triumphs in theology, after Christ Jesus has become, precisely for enlightened theology, only the simple man Jesus, again find our way back to the intuition of the supersensible, extraterrestrial Christ-being.

If you come with this point of view, then you will make enemies of precisely the materialistic theology of today. Just as the sun materially sends down its light from extraterrestrial cosmic expanses, so the spiritual sun of Christ descended to men and united with Jesus of Nazareth. Just as one can see the revelation of the soul and spirit in the outer physiognomy of man, in his facial features and in his gestures, so one can see the outer physiognomy in that which takes place in the cosmos, in the gestures that are into the cosmos through the course of the stars, in that which, as the inner warmth of the soul of the universe, manifests itself externally through the radiation of the sun, in that one can see the outer physiognomy of what permeates the whole world spiritually and soulfully. And in the concentrated spiritual descent of Christ upon the earth, one can see the inward aspect as the outward physiognomy of the concentrated rays of the sun streaming down upon the earth. And one will understand in the right way when it is said: The solar nature of Christ descended upon the earth.

We must come back to this supersensible understanding of Christ. We must learn to direct our thoughts back to the other birth, which took place as an extra-terrestrial birth through the baptism of St. John in the Jordan, despite the heartfelt devotion we wish to preserve for the birthday of Jesus, for which Christmas alone has become. We also want to learn to understand what takes place in the Jordan baptism of John in a meaningful historical symbol before our soul, as well as what happened in the stable of Bethlehem or in Nazareth. We want to learn to understand the words as they are communicated in the Gospel of Luke in the right way: This is my son, today he was born to me. — We want to learn to understand the Christmas mystery in such a way that it becomes for us again the source of understanding for the appearance of Christ on earth. We want to learn to understand the birth of the spirit in addition to the memory of our physical birth.

Such an understanding can only gradually arise from a general spiritual comprehension of the mysteries of the universe. We must gradually struggle towards a spiritual conception of the mystery of Golgotha. To do this, however, we need insight into the origin of such impulses within the earthly development of humanity, as there was in the 4th century AD, when the Feast of the Epiphany of Christ was moved from January 6 to the day of Jesus' birthday on December 25 out of the innermost need of developing humanity. One must learn to see how the wise guidance of human history works there. One must learn to devote oneself to this historical development with one's whole being. Then one will recognize the wise guidance in human history without superstition, and without bringing one's own fantasies into it. One must learn not only to immerse oneself in history with abstract ideas and to look at cause and effect, but one must learn to devote oneself to this historical development with one's whole being. Only then will we understand what makes our time a truly transitional time, a time in which a spiritual world view must again be wrested from the materialistic view, and a natural elevation to the supersensible must again be wrested. And an expression for this elevation to the supersensible will be a new understanding of the appearance of Christ on earth, the mystery of Golgotha.

Thus for the modern man who is really able to delve into the spirit of the time, Christmas has a twofold significance: it is that which has been approaching through recent history since the 4th century AD, that which has produced such wonderful has produced such wonderful beauties precisely in the simple, unadorned folk tradition, and that which still arouses our heartfelt delight today when we see it again in the renewal of folk plays such as we are attempting through our anthroposophical science. It is all that human warmth and affection has poured into life through the centuries during which the idea of Christianity has taken on more and more materialistic forms, until in the 19th century it has come so far that it must turn around through its own absurdity and return to the spiritual. This gives us, as people of today, the second thing about Christmas: in addition to the feeling that we have for the traditional Christmas that has been handed down since the 4th century AD, for this heartfelt feeling that we want to feel with, a new Christmas should be born from our contemporary understanding, a second Christmas to the old Christmas.

The Christ shall be reborn anew through humanity. Christmas is traditionally a celebration of the birth of Jesus; in spirit it shall become a celebration of the birth of a new conception of Christ, not new in relation to the first centuries, but new in relation to the centuries since the 4th century AD. And so Christmas itself should not be just a celebration of the memory of the birth, but, as it is experienced from year to year in the near future, it should become a direct, contemporary birthday celebration, the celebration of a present-day event. This birth of the new Christ-idea must come to pass. And Christmas must become so intense that every year at this very time man will be able to reflect anew and with special intensity on the fact that a new Christ-idea must be born.

Christmas must become a festival not of remembrance but of the present, a consecration of that which the human being experiences as a birth in his immediate present. Then it will truly enter into our more recent historical becoming, then it will strengthen itself more and more in this historical becoming of humanity, also into the future, which will have such need of it. Then it will become a consecration of the world.

Stages of downward penetration of divine nature into a human individuality, and the going forth of this individuality into the cosmos. The spiritual nature of man and the earthly Adam. The superpersonal memory in the blood of the generations. The Essene and Nazarene colonies. The pupils of Jesus ben Pandira: Matthai and Netzer. The two Jesus children

An examination of the descent of Jesus, as given in the Gospel of Luke, shows how the view of the writer of this Gospel is confirmed by the statements made in the last lecture. There it was shown that in the same sense in which an Entity of Divine Force was to permeate the physical and etheric bodies of the Solomon Jesus, so an Entity of Divine Force was also to permeate the astral body and ego of the personality known as the Nathan Jesus of the Luke Gospel. In this Gospel we are clearly told that this Entity of Divine Force is to fulfil itself through the line of heredity streaming in a direct line down through all the generations, from an early stage of human existence before man entered into a physical earthly incarnation. In the Gospel of Luke we find the descent of Jesus is traced back to Adam, and to God. This means that in order to find this divine principle within the astral body and ego of the Nathan Jesus we must go back to man as he was before his descent into physical incarnation; when he still dwelt in the bosom of the Spirit, and may be described as a spiritual being, and as still appertaining to Divinity. All anthroposophical investigation points to the Lemurian Age as that in which man was still in a spiritual sphere, when he had not yet incorporated in the elements of earthly existence. To this period, when man's divine nature was as yet unaffected by Luciferic influences, the Gospel of Luke traces back the lineage of the Jesus of whom it tells.

Those Mysteries which sought to guide their pupils to the initiation already described as ‘the understanding of the mighty secrets of cosmic space,’ leading man to what was super-earthly or rather beyond what man has become through earthly influences, sought to teach man to perceive the world without using the instruments he has acquired since he came under the influence of Lucifer. When a man has freed himself from perception through his physical and etheric bodies, from all that can approach him by earthly means, how does he behold the universe with his clairvoyant perception? This was the great question for the pupils of the Mysteries. Man was naturally in this state before his entrance into earthly incarnation, before he became the ‘earthly Adam,’ using this term in the sense of the Bible and the Gospel of Luke.

There are two ways by which man can reach that which makes him a divine spiritual being; one is the high initiation of the great Mysteries, the other is not realizable at any optional earth period, but was present at an elementary stage of human existence before the descent of divine man into what the Bible calls ‘earthly humanity’ in the Lemurian Age, for Adam means ‘earth man;’ he who is no longer divine, but has clothed himself in the earthly element.

It may be a matter for surprise that in Luke only seventy-seven generations or stages of existence are mentioned; and still more so that in the Gospel of Matthew only forty-two generations from Abraham to Christ are mentioned. Now it can be calculated that with the number of years usually reckoned to a generation, the forty-two could not extend over the period from Christ to Abraham, but it must be remembered that in earlier times, and noticeably in the patriarchal period before Solomon and David, the number of years reckoned to a generation was longer than in subsequent periods. In attempting to fix historical dates for any three generations like those of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the modern reckoning will not suffice; at least two hundred and fifteen years must be allowed for the three generations. This fact is corroborated by occult investigation. The generations were longest in the times from Adam to Abraham, subsequently they were also long, for great age is always ascribed to the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, at the time when they begat their heirs. If we are right to-day in reckoning thirty-three years to a generation, the writer of the Gospel of Matthew was correct in reckoning seventy-five to eighty years and even longer to a generation in ancient times. But it is important to note that in the Gospel of Matthew each generation back to Abraham refers to an individual, whereas the names given by Luke to the generations previous to Abraham do not refer to individuals. Here we must recall something that however true, is not easily believed by the materialistic conceptions of to-day.

What is now called memory, or connecting consciousness, does not extend for normal people beyond the early years of childhood. A person can trace his life back to the point where memory ceases; some can remember more of their early childhood than others. Memory to-day is confined to the single personal life—indeed not even the whole of this, for it does not reach back to birth. Considering the very different qualities of soul and of consciousness prevalent in those ancient times with which we are dealing, when a certain state of clairvoyance was normal, it need not seem surprising that memory also was very different from what it is to-day.

Going back to the times before Abraham, and even farther, during Atlantean times, man remembered not only the events of his personal life, but also experiences before birth—he remembered the experiences of his father, grandfather, and previous ancestors. Memory was something that endured in the blood through a long sequence of generations; it was only later that it became restricted to certain periods or to a single life.

In the distant past a name had a quite other significance than what it has to-day. Names in ancient times require a special study—what philologists say of them is incorrect. In former days names were not associated with things and people externally as they are now. A name at that time was something vital, something connected in a living way with the nature of the being or thing named; it was an expression in sound of the inner character of the being. It had to echo in sound the nature of that being. Modern learning is ignorant of this wisdom. The Kritic der Sprache, by Fritz Mauthner, reviews at great length all the modern learning in regard to speech, but omits what throughout the ages has been the essence of speech. Such a book could not have been written in olden times. A name did not then merely signify an individual with his personal life, but it included all that memory could link together, so that a name was used as long as memory endured. ‘Noah,’ for instance, was not a name for one man, it signified what one man remembered of his own life—then of his pre-earthly life, then of the life of his father, grandfather, etc. So long as the threads of memory endured one name was used for a succession of persons. ‘Adam,’ ‘Seth,’ or ‘Enoch’ are names which comprise as many persons as were united through the retention of retrospective recollection. When we are told in ancient times that a certain person was called ‘Enoch,’ it means that in a person, who was the son of someone otherwise designate, a new thread of memory had arisen, which does not go back to previous personalities. This new thread of memory then is not cut off at death, but is carried on, after the death of the first Enoch, from father to son down through the generations until a new memory arises and with it another name. As long as the thread of memory endured, the same name was used. In a family line several persons had but one name; as for example with the name ‘Adam.’ It is in this sense that names are used in the Gospel of Luke. For Luke wishes to explain that the being of power of divine spiritual existence, he who descended into the ego and astral body of the Nathan Jesus, must be traced back to the time of man's first descent into earthly incarnation.

Thus in Luke we have at first the names of separate individuals, but when we go back beyond Abraham, we arrive at a time when memory lasted longer and one name signifies that which, like an ego, united several personalities. This will help to make it clear how the seventy-seven names could really be spread over very long periods—even so far back as to the time when the being whom we describe as the divinely spiritual essence of humanity first incarnated in a physical human body.

The other point in this Gospel is that anyone, who, having passed through the seventy-seven stages of purification in the Mysteries has purged his soul of earthly taint, attains a condition only possible for man to-day when he can live in his astral body and ego free of his body. He can then expand into that from which the Earth itself has come forth—into our whole cosmic system. This does come to pass. Then he has reached the being of power who entered into the astral body and ego of the Nathan Jesus. In the Nathan Jesus it is sought to exemplify what man receives, not through his earthly but through his heavenly conditions.

Thus the Gospel of Luke describes the divine spiritual being who had permeated and impregnated the astral body and ego of the Jesus of whom it speaks. In the Jesus of the Gospel of Matthew we have described to us that divine spiritual being of power, who, on one side, had called into existence the inner organ of Jehovah-consciousness in Abraham, and, on the other side, had worked on the physical and etheric bodies, holding together in them a line of inheritance through forty-two generations.

To return to the mission of Jesus ben Pandira, it was he who made known—to a few at least—that forty-two generations after Abraham the Hebrews would have advanced sufficiently to make the incarnation of the individuality of Zarathustra possible in the Solomon branch of the House of David. Such teaching was naturally associated at that time with events in the Mysteries. It was not confined to the Schools of the Essenes, but only among them were pupils to be found who had actually passed through the forty-two stages of development, and who were able to perceive clairvoyantly the nature of the being who was to descend through forty-two stages. For knowledge of this being had to be given to the world. It was the mission of the Essenes to see that among a few at least there should be an understanding of what the Christ would be.

Now let us briefly recall the events connected with the particular course of that human being known as Zarathustra or Zoroaster. Under this name he had given out in early days in the East the mighty teaching that had fitted him for the incarnation described in the Gospel of Matthew. It was he who had inaugurated the Hermetic Civilization in Egypt, and to this end had given up his astral body to Hermes; he also had founded the Mosaic Civilization through the sacrifice of his etheric body, which had been preserved for Moses. Zarathustra himself incarnated later in other astral and etheric bodies. The incarnation in the sixth century B.C. is of special interest, when, as Zarathos or Nazarathos, he had instructed the sages and Magi of Chaldea, and had come in touch with the wisest of the Hebrew pupils of the Mysteries, during the Babylonian Captivity. During the following six centuries, this teaching had permeated the traditions, ceremonies, and culture of the Chaldean Mystery Schools. The name of their great master, Zarathustra, in the form of Zarathos or Nazarathos, had been honoured in the highest degree by generations of pupils in the Mystery Schools of Babylon, Chaldea, and Assyria. They looked forward with longing to the next appearance of their great teacher and leader, for they knew the secret of his reincarnation, and expected it to occur at the end of six hundred years. As the time approached when the blood suitable for this incarnation should be ready, three messengers or wise men, went forth from the East. They knew that the honoured name of Zarathustra would guide them, as a star, to the place of his reincarnation. It was the Being of the great Teacher himself which as a least there should be an understanding of what the Christ would be.

Now let us briefly recall the events connected with the particular course of that human being known as Zarathustra or Zoroaster. Under this name he had given out in early days in the East the mighty teaching that had fitted him for the incarnation described in the Gospel of Matthew. It was he who had inaugurated the Hermetic Civilization in Egypt, and to this end had given up his astral body to Hermes; he also had founded the Mosaic Civilization through the sacrifice of his etheric body, which had been preserved for Moses. Zarathustra himself incarnated later in other astral and etheric bodies. The incarnation in the sixth century B.c. is of special interest, when, as Zarathos or Nazarathos, he had instructed the sages and Magi of Chaldea, and had come in touch with the wisest of the Hebrew pupils of the Mysteries, during the Babylonian Captivity. During the following six centuries, this teaching had permeated the traditions, ceremonies, and culture of the Chaldean Mystery Schools. The name of their great master, Zarathustra, in the form of Zarathos or Nazarathos, had been honoured in the highest degree by generations of pupils in the Mystery Schools of Babylon, Chaldea, and Assyria. They looked forward with longing to the next appearance of their great teacher and leader, for they knew the secret of his reincarnation, and expected it to occur at the end of six hundred years. As the time approached when the blood suitable for this incarnation should be ready, three messengers or wise men, went forth from the East. They knew that the honoured name of Zarathustra would guide them, as a star, to the place of his reincarnation. It was the Being of the great Teacher himself which as a ‘star’ guided the three Magi to the birthplace of Jesus, as is told in the Gospel of Matthew.

Even external philology confirms the fact that the word ‘star’ was used in olden times to describe the human individuality. It is not only through the revelations of spiritual science, which speaks more clearly than other sources of knowledge, that we learn that the Magi followed the ‘Golden Star,’ Zoroaster, to the place where he was to reincarnate, but by the customary use of the word ‘star’ for the higher human individuality it is clearly revealed that in the star which the wise men followed we have to understand Zarathustra himself.

Six hundred years before our era the Magi of the East were closely associated with the individual who incarnated as the Jesus of the Gospel of Matthew. He himself led the Magi. They followed in his track.

The secret of the coming incarnation of Zarathustra was known in the Chaldean Mysteries; but the secret concerning the blood of the Hebrew people which when the time was ripe was to be prepared for the new bodily-nature of Zarathustra, was taught by those who in the Essene initiation had passed through forty-two stages of development.

There were therefore two sources from which this knowledge came. From the side of Zarathustra, teaching was given by the Chaldean Initiates; they knew of the individuality who was to incarnate in the Jewish race from the external side, that of the body and the preparation of the blood, teaching came from initiates among the Essenes. This teaching was given out for more than a hundred years in the School of the Essenes, the teaching of the coming of the Jesus of the Gospel of Matthew, who in his fulness would satisfy all the needs of which I have spoken, and still others which we will now try to explain.

A pupil of the Essene Mystery Schools, who, after long training, had completed the forty-two stages of initiation, was able to perceive the mysteries of the physical and etheric body. The individual who was to be born, who was to incarnate in this special blood, came from on high, already possessing faculties which were only attained by the Essene after the long and difficult trials of his training. Concerning such a being, one must say, ‘From the beginning he had powers capable of bringing the seed that was in him to fruition.’ ‘They were born with him,’ the Essenes said. That which was fostered among them by means of exercises and purification of the soul was in fact the continuation of a kind of occult training that had existed among the Jews from the earliest days. There had always been those among them who were called Nazarenes. Even before the time of the Therapeutæ and Essenes certain individuals had used special methods for the development of their soul and body, methods still necessary to-day in certain connections when anyone wishes to hasten his soul development. The Nazarenes were especially careful to abstain entirely from meat and wine. This made a certain facility possible—for it is a fact that the consumption of meat can be a hindrance in the path when striving for spiritual development. Without implying any propaganda on behalf of vegetarianism, it is a fact that abstention from meat makes everything easier, for in that case the soul increases in strength and in power of endurance, and is stronger to overcome the oppositions and hindrances arising from the physical and etheric bodies. Capacities for endurance increase by abstaining from flesh though it is not such abstinence alone, but above all by strengthening his soul. It is merely the physical body that is changed by this abstinence; but when certain qualities are absent which should from the soul's side be present, there is no particular object in avoiding meat. All this was included in the teaching of the Nazarenes and was practised by the Essenes in a much stricter form; in particular they cultivated the strictest abstinence from meat. By this, and the strict training I have referred to, a man was able to enhance his memory comparatively quickly; he learnt to extend it over the period of forty-two generations, and he thus acquired the power to read the secrets of the Akashic-Record. He was then given a special name. He was called a ‘bud,’ a bud on the tree of the race, a bud that had endured throughout many generations. Such a man was not in any way isolated from the tree of humanity, but was conscious of his connection with the rest of mankind. He differed from those who severed themselves from the tree, and whose memory had shrunk within a single personality. The special name given to such a man, among the sect of the Essenes, signified ‘a living branch,’ not a severed branch. All such men felt themselves consciously in the line of descent, a part of the tree of the human race. The Essene who had accomplished this and who had completed the forty-two stages of initiation was described as a ‘Netzer.’

Among the class of Netzer there was a special and faithful pupil of Jesus ben Pandira. Among his pupils were five whom he had himself trained; each of these had taken up a special branch of the great general teaching of Jesus ben Pandira, which he then developed further.

The names of these pupils were Mathai, Nakai, Netzer (because he belonged especially to the Netzer class), Boni, and Thona. Occult research reveals the fact that subsequent to the death of Jesus ben Pandira, the teaching concerning the preparation of the blood of the race for the advent of the Jesus of the Gospel of Matthew was particularly the work of Mathai. The teaching concerning the qualities of the inner nature of the soul which was associated with the ancient Nazarene teaching and also with the later Netzerism, was cultivated and spread by Netzer. This pupil was in particular chosen to be the founder of a little colony. Many such colonies existed in Palestine, in each of which some special branch of the Essene teaching was cultivated, and Netzer's teaching was fostered more especially in a little colony, which led a secret existence in a little place named in the Bible, Nazareth or Netzereth.

In this little colony dwelt those who cultivated in fairly strict secrecy the ancient Nazarene teaching. And here, after the events shortly to be dealt with—the flight into Egypt and the return—nothing was more natural than that the Jesus of the Matthew Gospel should be nurtured in the atmosphere of Netzerism. This is referred to in the words of the Gospel when after the return from Egypt Jesus was taken to Nazareth ‘that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophets He shall become a Nazarene.’

Translators, unaware of the real meaning of this phrase, have dealt with it in various ways. In reality it signifies the existence at Nazareth of a colony of Essenes among whom the early years of Jesus were to be passed.

All the facts described in the first part of the Gospel of Matthew lead back to the mysteries taught by Jesus ben Pandira, which subsequently were spread abroad by his pupil Mathai, and indeed the first mysteries of this Gospel point to Mathai. In all that springs from this side which is so characteristic of the Gospel of Matthew we find teaching concerning the preparation for the physical and etheric bodies of the Jesus of the Gospel of Matthew, though naturally during the forty-two generations there were also influences affecting the astral body.

When it is stated that the first fourteen generations are especially concerned with the physical body, the second fourteen with the etheric, and the third period of fourteen, that following the Babylonian Captivity with the astral body, it must be remembered that a physical and etheric body carefully prepared in this way, could only be used by that mighty individuality Zarathustra.

Now recall the oft-repeated facts of the development of a single personality; how the physical body evolves in the first seven years; the etheric in the next seven, between the change of teeth and puberty; and the astral only begins its free development at the age of fourteen. The development of the physical body and etheric body as these passed down through the generations from Abraham, was destined to come to an end, and entered on a new existence when it became the dwelling-place of Zarathustra. But when he had completed the development of the etheric body, that which had been prepared for him no longer sufficed, and he had then to proceed to the development of the astral body. Mighty and amazing events brought this to pass, events which if we have no understanding of them make it impossible for us to grasp the full meaning of the great Mystery of Jesus Christ.

The individuality of Zarathustra evolved during boyhood until his twelfth year, within the physical and etheric body of that Jesus of whom the Gospel of Matthew speaks—for as regards this being and on account of the climate, the period, which in our part of the world occurs about the fourteenth or fifteenth year, was reached earlier. By his twelfth year he had attained everything it was possible to attain in the physical and etheric body fittingly prepared within the line of Solomon. The individuality of Zarathustra did then actually forsake the physical and etheric body described in the Gospel of Matthew and passed over into the Jesus of the Gospel of Luke. In the cycle of lectures on the Gospel of Luke the story of the twelve-year-old Jesus in the temple is explained. There we learn what it meant when the child Jesus was suddenly confronted by his parents who could in no way understand how he had become so changed. This change meant that the entrance of the individuality of Zarathustra into his inner being had taken place; until then this Zarathustra-individuality had developed within the physical and etheric sheaths of the Solomon Jesus.

Such things actually come to pass in life, incredible though they may seem to the untrained and materialistic modern mind. The passing over of an individuality from one body to another does occur. Such a transition occurred when the Zarathustra-individuality, forsaking its original body, passed over into that of the Jesus of the Gospel of Luke, whose astral body and ego-bearer had been specially prepared.

From his twelfth year Zarathustra continued his development in the uniquely prepared astral body and ego of the Jesus of the line of Nathan. This is told in such an imposing way in the Gospel of Luke—the story of the twelve-year-old Jesus sitting in the temple among the Scribes, who were astounded at his words. How was this possible to the Jesus of the Nathan line? He was able to speak thus because the individuality of Zarathustra had entered him. Through that twelve-year-old boy who had been brought to Jerusalem by his parents, Zarathustra had not till then spoken. Hence the change in him was so great that his parents failed to recognize him as he sat among the scribes.

Thus we have two sets of parents, each named Joseph and Mary.¹ And there were two children, each named Jesus; the one we read of in the Gospel of Matthew is the Jesus of the Solomon line of the house of David; the other spoken of in the Gospel of Luke is the Jesus of the Nathan line, and is the son of quite other parents. The two boys grew up near to each other until their twelfth year. You can find this in the Gospels. What is related there is quite correct, but as long as it was undesirable for people to experience the truth, or as long as people did not desire the truth, it was withheld. The Gospels speak the truth we have but to learn to understand them aright.

The Nathan Jesus developed with a strongly developed inward nature. While showing little aptitude for the acquisition of external wisdom, he possessed depth of soul and capacity for love in boundless measure, for dwelling in his etheric body was that force which had come down from a time before man's descent into earthly incarnation, when as yet he led a divine existence. Divinity dwelt in him in a boundless capacity for love. This Jesus of the Nathan line was little fitted for the acquisition of that which men gain in the course of incarnation in a physical body, but he was filled with an infinite warmth of love as regards his soul and inner being. The inward trend of the boy's nature was so marked that those who had understanding of such things tell of something that was brought about through this. What is otherwise only evoked in man by external means was present in a certain sense in the child Jesus of the Gospel of Luke from the beginning. Immediately after his birth he spoke certain words which were comprehensible to his surroundings. Thus this Jesus was mighty in all inward matters though unskilled as regards what is gained by passing through repeated earthly incarnations.

What wonder that the parents were greatly amazed when they suddenly discovered in such a physical nature, a boy filled with great external wisdom that could only be gained by outward means. Such a sudden and amazing change was possible because at that moment the individuality of Zarathustra—the Jesus of the line of Solomon—passed over into the Jesus of the line of Nathan. It was Zarathustra who spoke from the boy at the moment when his parents sought him in the Temple.

Zarathustra had acquired the highest faculties possible to acquire through a physical and etheric body. He had to use the physical instruments prepared in the Solomon line of inheritance, for in them were great and very highly developed forces. He took of this physical nature as much as he could make his own, and blended it with the nature that sprang from the inner force of the Luke Jesus, which had its origin before man's entrance into earthly incarnation. These two natures were now joined in one. Henceforward we have only one being before us.

Though it may seem superfluous, we have our attention now directed to something else; the parents of the Jesus of the Gospel of Luke did not only note an exceptional change in him, but there was also an outward change, for why is it expressly stated that after the child Jesus had been found among the learned Scribes in the Temple ‘He went down with them to Nazareth. ... And Jesus increased in outward beauty of form, in noble habits, and in wisdom.’ Why are these three attributes mentioned? Because now that the Zarathustra individuality had entered into him these were the attributes he could make more particularly his own.

I am quite aware that these words are usually translated ‘and Jesus increased in wisdom, age (stature in the English version), and in favour with God and man.’ Do we require a Gospel to tell us that a twelve-year-old boy increased in age? But in Weizeker's translation we have the words: ‘and Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man.’ This, however, is not the meaning; the real meaning is, that an individuality is now in the Nathan Jesus, who is not, as formerly, only a being of inward feeling unable to express itself outwardly, but, because it has now assumed a complete physical body, it has also passed on into external physical excellence. At the same time those qualities that especially concerned the etheric body—the habits acquired and cultivated by means of the etheric body—were not to be found previously in the Nathan Jesus. In him the seed of a mighty capacity for love was apparent which could now be developed further, but this attribute sprang up spontaneously in him and could not become fixed as habits are. But once the Zarathustra individuality, which possessed the powers of an evolved physical and etheric body, was present, it was possible for external habits to reveal themselves and to imprint themselves on the etheric body. This was the second attribute in which the child Jesus increased.

Thirdly, Jesus increased in wisdom. This is more easily understood. The Jesus of the Gospel of Luke was not wise; he was to a high degree a being capable of love. The entrance into him of the Zarathustra individuality meant an increase in wisdom.

As was explained in the lectures on the Gospel of Luke, it may easily happen that when an individuality has forsaken a person, and only three members, the physical body, and the etheric body and astral body are left, this person may continue to live for a time. That part of the Solomon Jesus, however, which was left behind soon dwindled away and died. This means that the Jesus child of the first chapter of the Gospel of Matthew died comparatively soon after his twelfth year. At first there were two boys; later the two became one.

Ancient records often contain astounding things which we should try to understand; yet this is only possible through a comprehension of the real facts to which they refer. The intimate way in which these two boys were blended into one may be left for later consideration one reference, however, may be permitted here.

In the so-called ‘Egyptian Gospel,’ which even in the first centuries was regarded as heretical, a noteworthy sentence occurs, for even in Christian circles no one wanted to hear the truth, nor wished that it should come to light. In this document which has endured as a kind of apocryphal Gospel, we find it said: ‘that salvation would come to the world when the two had become one and the outer become as the inner.’

This sentence expresses exactly the facts I have explained as the result of occult investigation. Salvation depends on the two becoming one. The two became one when in his twelfth year the individuality of Zarathustra passed over into the Nathan Jesus, and what was inward became external. The soul force of the Jesus of the Gospel of Luke was most powerfully inward, but this inward force became outward when the Zarathustra individuality—whose outward forces had been developed to a high degree in the physical body and etheric body of the Solomon Jesus—entered into this inward nature, permeating it with his highly evolved physical and etheric nature. Thus a power entered the physical and etheric body of the Nathan Jesus, and what was external became an expression of his inwardness—inwardness that was his before the individuality of the Solomon Jesus passed into him. Thus the two became one.

We have now followed Zarathustra from his birth as the Jesus child of the Gospel of Matthew to his twelfth year when he left his original body and took on the bodily sheath of the Nathan Jesus. From this time onwards the physical nature of the Nathan Jesus was developed by Zarathustra to such a high degree of perfection that he was able at a certain climax of his existence to sacrifice his three bodies for acceptance by Him Whom we call the Christ.

• 1. Many people were so named at that time; to deduce anything from the names ‘Joseph’ and ‘Mary,’ as names are understood to-day, is denied by all true investigation.

We have been dealing with the various force currents that shape the human organism and give it form in a manner enabling us to comprehend it. If we really learn to know these formative forces, we must perceive that they could not function otherwise, that our heart, our eyes, inevitably had to become exactly what they are. We have traced the sense image of ourselves back to those super-sensible currents that flow back and forth in different directions, from above downward, from right to left, from the back forward, and so forth. At this point someone may try to catch me out by objecting that while dealing with the currents I had failed to explain a certain significant phenomenon in the human organism, that in addition to the asymmetrical organs (heart, liver, stomach, etc.) there are those that are arranged symmetrically. You might say that my description could at a pinch be accepted if the whole organism were laid out asymmetrically, but not in connection with the symmetrical organs. This objection, however, can be cleared away, too, as follows.

We have learned that the physical and etheric bodies stream from left to right and from right to left respectively, that is, in the plane in which the human being is formed symmetrically. Spiritual science teaches us that the physical body is an ancient entity, stemming from the old Saturn, while the germs of the etheric body, the astral body, and the ego were prepared on the old Sun, the old Moon, and the Earth respectively. In its first appearance on Saturn the physical body was asymmetrical, conditioned by a current corresponding to the one active today from left to right, and the first germ of the etheric body was also asymmetrical, with a current from right to left. Thence development proceeds; the physical body is further formed on the old Sun, the old Moon, and so on. Had this not occurred, the physical body would have remained lopsided, asymmetrical. As it actually happened, however, the further development of the physical body and of the other members continued on the old Moon and on the Earth, during which something occurred that altered the whole previous development and brought about a turnabout, so to speak, a reversal of the direction. If the physical body were to be formed, not into a lopsided but into a symmetrical structure, the Saturn current running from left to right had to be opposed by one running from right to left. How was this brought about? By the separation of the old Sun from the old Moon. The Sun forces, which hitherto had worked on the physical body from within, acted henceforth from without, that is, from the opposite direction. The physical body, as it was constituted up to the time of the old Moon, was then influenced by the Sun from without.

The etheric body experienced a similar transformation. You might ask why it is that this other side of the physical body, the result of Sun forces acting from without, is not much smaller, in a sense stunted, in comparison with the first, the older portion? It is because those beings that left the Moon and passed over with the Sun could develop stronger influences from their new sphere of action, owing precisely to this separation that meant a higher development for them. They had a more difficult task than the Saturn beings, for they had to counteract what was already developed in one direction. This condition obstructed the whole process of formation, so they had to become more powerful if they were to fulfill their task. This, in turn, necessitated their acting from the Sun during the Moon period, whereby their influence was intensified. In this way these younger but more powerful currents—from right to left—balanced the weaker ones—from left to right—and the physical body became a symmetrical structure.

We will now examine more closely some important details of the effects of those force currents, remembering that the sentient body sends its forces into the human organism from the front backward, but that the emanations of the sentient soul run forward from the back. Given the existence of the physical and etheric bodies and the general background, we ask in what manner these forces proceed to build the human organism?

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By being dammed up, stopped by the physical body, the backward-flowing currents of the sentient body could now bore into the human organism and build divers organs into what was already there. At the same time the sentient soul works in the organism from the back toward the front. The currents of the sentient body are dammed by the physical organism and bore their way in. In this way they are obstructed by the physical body, so they really had to bore holes, as it were.

In front (cf. sketch) we have the currents of the sentient body boring their way in. They form the sense organs. In the rear the formative forces are active that build the brain over them; this gives us the diagram of the human head seen in profile. The openings represent the eyes, ears, organs of smell, etc., and the brain is superimposed behind and above them. If spiritual science tells the truth, it is clear that the human head could not possibly appear different from the way it actually does. If a human head were ever to come into being at all it would have to look as it does. It does look that way, and that is evidence proffered by the world of outer phenomena itself.

In that connection there is another point to mention. The work of the sentient body proceeds inward, that of the sentient soul outward, or at least, it has that tendency. As a matter of fact, it is obstructed before emerging; it remains in the physical body of the brain and emerges only at those points where previously the sentient body had, so to speak, bored the holes for the sense organs in the front of the physical body. What we find, then, is that a part of our inner life flows outward as sentient soul.

The intellectual soul would not be capable of this. It is completely dammed up within, and no currents come to meet it from the opposite side. That is why human thinking takes place wholly within. Objects don't think for us; they don't show us the thoughts from without, nor bring them to us. That is the great secret of the relation of human thought to the outer world. With our sense organs we can perceive outer objects, and if these organs are healthy they do not err. The mind, on the other hand, which cannot directly contact objects, is the first inner member of the human being that can err, because its activity is completely dammed up within the brain and does not emerge. From this it follows that our thoughts about the outer world cannot be correct without an inner tendency to permit right thoughts to arise within us. What the outer world can give us is correct sense perception but not right thoughts. Thought is subject to error, and the power of right thinking is something we must have within ourselves.

For the thinker this fact alone points to an earlier, prehistoric existence of man. It is incumbent upon him to form right thoughts concerning the wisdom of the outside world, but his thoughts cannot emerge or come in contact with what he perceives. Nevertheless, that wisdom must be within him as well as without; it must permeate him just as it does in what surrounds him. The two currents, therefore, belong together, though they are now separated.

At some time, however, they must have been united. That was before the human ego had begun to dam up the currents within us, at a time when it still received the wisdom of the world directly. There was a time when the currents of the mental soul were not held up but flowed out, and that was the time when man directly envisioned the wisdom of the world. What is now relegated to the brain as thinking was once in contact with the outer world, like our sense perception, so that man could look at his thoughts. That was a form of clairvoyance, though not a conscious one irradiated by the ego. Man must have passed through earlier stages in which he possessed a dim clairvoyance, and again it is the human physical organization itself that shows us that in bygone times he was differently constituted.

Something important for practical life follows from the foregoing. In all cases involving the sense world, sense perception (apart from illusions) can be taken as truth, for there the human being is in direct contact with the outer world. But concerning all that is within him, his knowledge is limited to what he acquires by thinking. Now, the separation that exists between our intellectual soul and the objects in space, and that makes it possible for our thinking about those objects to err, does not apply to the ego. When the ego streams into us it is within us, and it is natural that we should have a voice in its activity. The meeting of the intellectual soul and the ego is what produces the purest thinking, the thinking that is directed inward. This form of thinking, having itself as the object, cannot be exposed to error in the same way as can the other kind, which is occupied with outer objects and roves about in an endeavor to form judgments by observing them. The only thing they can yield is sense perception. What we must do is meet them with concepts, as though holding up their mirrored reflection to them. Thinking is herein free from error only in so far as it is attracted to the tendency to truth. Out of a right tendency to truth we must let concepts of things, thoughts about things, rise up in us.

In the first instance we can form a judgment only of such things in the outer world as are encountered by the senses. The senses themselves cannot judge what is beyond their reach; no such judgment can be arrived at from the physical plane. If the intellectual soul nevertheless does just that, unless it be guided by the inner tendency to truth, it must inevitably fall into all sorts of errors.

To clarify these conditions by an illustration, let us turn to the various doctrines of the descent of man. Here we distinguish between two kinds of ancestors. You are familiar with one of them from theosophical research, which tells us of the different forms we passed through in former periods, such as the Lemurian. That is disclosed by spiritual science. We have seen how wonderfully comprehensible everything perceived by the senses becomes when we have made this teaching our very own, and it will reveal more and more.

In contrast, we will now consider material research, the materialistic doctrine of descent, the crux of which is the so-called biogenetic law. According to this, man in his germinal states passes through all forms recalling animal stages, thereby repeating, in a sense, the various forms of the whole animal kingdom. At the time when this doctrine was rampant the conclusion was drawn that man really passed through these forms that thus appear in the germ state. In itself that is not erroneous because in prehistoric times man actually did develop through such forms. Fortunately, as we can say in view of the materialistic doctrine of the descent, the foresight of the gods kept this fact secret until such time as the opinions regarding it could be corrected by spiritual science. The development of man before he became outwardly perceptible on the physical plane could not have been observed. It was shrouded by the gods and withdrawn from observation, otherwise people would have evolved even wilder theories regarding it than they do now. The facts are there, but they are frequently misinterpreted because the senses that speak the truth cannot perceive them. In reasoning, however, the power of the intellectual soul becomes active, and this cannot reach what is imperceptible to the senses. In reality, the facts referred to prove the exact opposite of what people try to infer from them. Here we have a striking example of the way the power of judgment can plunge into a sea of errors when its approach to external matters is purely by way of the mind.

What is shown by the fact that on a certain plane man resembled a fish? Precisely that he never was a fish; indeed, that he had no use for the fish nature, that he had to expel it before entering upon his human existence, because it in no way pertained to him. This he did in turn with all the animal forms, because they were not of his nature. He could not have become a human being if he had ever appeared on earth in one of those animal forms. He had to discard these in order to become what he did. The fact that in the germ the human being resembles a fish is the very proof that never in his whole line of descent was he like a fish or any other animal form. He had to expel all these forms because they were inadequate and he therefore must never resemble them. He had to slough off these forms, eject them. They are images he never resembled. All these forms of germinal life show shapes he never bore. Thus we can find out precisely through embryology how prehistoric man never looked. He cannot be descended from something he had expelled. To infer that he passed through these forms would be the same as to imagine that the father is descended from the son. The father is not descended from the son, nor the son from himself, but the son is descended from the father.

That is one of the cases in which the mind has proved wholly incapable of thinking the facts of reality through to the end. It has exactly reversed the order of development. Certainly these pictures of the remote past are extraordinarily important, because they show us how we never looked. But that is something that can be learned even more readily in another way, namely, through realms that lie open in the sense world, that are not hidden from us. There we have all those forms—fishes and so forth—and they can be properly studied with the ordinary means of human observation. As long as men restricted themselves to observing outer objects with the senses, and did not occupy their minds with matters concealed from sense perception, they avoided arriving at false conclusions; they were rightly guided by their natural sense of truth. They would look, for instance, at a monkey and doubtless experience the queer sensation that every normal human being would have, a certain sense of embarrassment. This judgment expressed through feeling means that the monkey is really a retarded being, having remained behind in the evolution of man. This feeling is nearer the truth than is the later judgment of the erring mind because it embodies the realization that the monkey is a being that dropped out of the human current, that had to be divided off from man if the latter was to achieve his goal. The moment our fallible mind approached this fact it inverted it; instead of realizing that the monkey was eliminated from the evolutionary human current it concluded that the monkey was the starting point of human descent.

Here the error comes to light. In judging external things accessible to the senses we should never forget that they are built up from within, through the agency of spiritual currents. Suppose we are observing those parts of the human being that are accessible to perception proper, or we observe part of another person that the eye can see—his face, for example. In studying this face we must not imagine it as having been built up from without. On the contrary, we must realize the need to distinguish between two currents flowing into each other, the current of the sentient body running backward from the front, and that of the sentient soul running forward from the rear. In so far as we perceive the human countenance by means of the senses, the sense image is true. That is given us by sense perception and we will not go astray there. But now the human mind joins in, at first subconsciously, and is at once misled. It regards the human countenance as something merely fashioned from without, whereas in reality, this fashioning occurred from within, through the agency of the sentient soul. What you see is not really outer body; it is the outer image of the sentient soul.

Disabuse your mind of the notion that the human face might be outer body, and you will see that in truth, it is the image of the soul. A fundamentally false interpretation results from reasoning in a way that ignores the true nature of the countenance as being the outer image of the sentient soul acting outward. Every explanation of the human countenance based solely on physical forces is wrong. It must be explained through the soul itself, the visible through the invisible. The deeper we penetrate into theosophy the more we will see in it a great school for learning to think. The chaotic thinking that today dominates all circles, particularly science, finds no shelter in theosophy, which is therefore able to interpret life correctly.

This ability to interpret phenomena correctly will further stand us in good stead when, in the course of our investigations, we come to phenomena that lead us out of the region of individual anthroposophy into the realm of the anthroposophy that concerns the whole of mankind.

Returning once more to the sense of sound and the sense of visualization, let us ask ourselves which of these came into being first in the course of human development? Did man learn first to understand words or to perceive and understand the conceptions that came to him? This question can be answered by observing the child, who first learns to talk and only later to perceive thoughts. Speech is the premise of thought perception because the sense of sound is the premise of the sense of visualization. The child learns to talk because he can hear, can listen to something that the sense of sound perceives. Speech itself is at first mere imitation, and the child imitates long before he has any idea of visualization whatever. First the sense of sound develops, and then, by means of this, the sense of visualization. The sense of sound is the instrumentality for perceiving not only tones but also what we call sounds.

The next question is how it came about that at one time in the course of his development man achieved the ability to perceive sounds and, as a result, to acquire speech? How was he endowed with speech? If he was to learn to speak, not just to hear, it was necessary not only that an outer perception should penetrate, but that a certain current within him should flow in the same direction as that taken by the currents of the sentient soul when they press forward from the rear. It had to be something acting in the same direction. That was the way in which speech had to originate, and this faculty had to appear before the sense of visualization, before man was able to sense the conception contained in the words themselves. Men had first to learn to utter sounds and to live in the consciousness of them before they could combine conceptions with them. What at first permeated the sounds they uttered was sentience.

This development had to take place at a time when the transposition of the circulatory system had already occurred, for animals cannot speak. The ego had to be acting downward from above with the blood system in a vertical position. As yet, however, man had no sense of visualization, consequently no visualizations. It follows that he could not have acquired speech through the agency of his own ego, but rather, he received it from another ego that we can compare with the group ego of animals. In this sense speech is a gift of the gods. It was infused into the ego before the latter itself was capable of developing it. The human ego did not yet possess the organs needed to give the impulse for bringing about speech, but the group ego worked from above into the physical, etheric and astral bodies, and as it encountered an opposing current, a sort of whorl came into being at the point of contact. A straight line drawn through the center of the larynx would indicate the direction of the current employed by the speech-giving spirits, and the larynx itself represents the physical substance, the dam, that resulted from the encounter of the two currents. That accounts for the peculiar shape of the human larynx.

It was under the influence, then, of a group soul that man had to develop speech. In what manner do group souls operate on earth? In animals the current of the group soul passes through the spinal cord horizontally, and these force currents are in continual motion. The force currents running downward from above move constantly around the earth, as they did around the old Moon. They don't remain in one spot but move around the earth retaining their vertical direction of influence. If men were to learn to speak under the influence of a group soul, they could not remain in one place, they had to migrate. They had to move toward the group soul. Never could they have learned to speak if they had remained in one spot.

What direction, then, would men have to take if they were to learn to speak? We know that the etheric currents flow from right to left and the physical ones from left to right, and this is the case not only in man but on the earth as well. Now, where are the group souls that endow man with speech? Let us look at the earth in its peculiar development. Man learned to speak at a time when his outer structure was already complete. Strong currents were therefore needed because the larynx had first to be transformed from a soft substance that in no way resembled a larynx. This called for special conditions on earth. Suppose we stand facing east. There flow in us from left to right the currents connected with the formation of the physical body. This current exists outside us as well; it was present during the formation of the earth. Running from north to south are those strong currents that produce solid physical matter. From the other direction, from the south, flow the etheric currents that lack the tendency to solidify the earth. This explains the lopsidedness, the lack of symmetry on the earth. In the northern hemisphere we find the great continents, in the southern, the vast oceans; the tendency of the earth was asymmetrical.

From the south the current acts that is of the same nature as the one that runs from right to left in man, but while the current from back to front streams outward, the one from front to back originates in the sentient body and enters the sentient soul. With all this in mind we understand why the attainment of speech called for a current passing outward from within; this current had to encounter a group soul current in order that the two could be dammed up in man's own organism. Man had to move toward a current that could act upon his astral element. He could therefore go neither toward the north nor toward the south, but had to take a direction at right angles to these. It was latitudinally that man had to proceed when he was acquiring speech, that is, from east to west. At that time he inhabited ancient Lemuria, where today we have the ocean lying between Asia and Africa. Thence, in order to learn to speak, he migrated westward into old Atlantis, to meet the group soul that was to engender speech in him. There he had to develop the organism suitable for speech, and thus it was in old Atlantis that he learned to speak.

The next step was to develop the sense of visualization by means of the speech man had acquired, but in order to do this he could not continue in the same direction. He had to proceed in a way that would cause the same current to act from the opposite direction. Recall here what was said in the last lecture concerning the origin of sound and of visualization. Sound comes into being when we subconsciously convert a melody into a harmony, ignore the fundamentals themselves, and mentally hear only the harmony produced by the harmonics (overtones); visualization arises when we push back and disregard this harmony of the harmonics as well. So, if we are to develop the sense of visualization, we must destroy on the one hand what we had built up on the other. We must face about and proceed in the opposite direction. One element of speech has to be suppressed, the harmonics must be pushed back, if we are to develop visualization. The old Atlanteans had to face about and migrate eastward; by doing this they were able effectively to develop the sense of visualization. This could not have been accomplished if they had continued westward. It was the tragic fate of the American aborigines to migrate in the wrong direction. They could not hold their ground, but had to yield to those who had migrated properly and returned to them only later.

In this way a great deal becomes clear. When we know the secret of those currents that fashion man and the earth we can understand the organization of the earth, the distribution of oceans and continents, the migrations of men. Anthroposophy leads us into that life through which the outer world becomes transparent and comprehensible.

Evolution proceeds. Humanity was not destined to stop at visualizations but to achieve concepts as well, and in order to accomplish this it had to ascend from mere visualizations to the soul life proper. After the sense of visualization, the sense of concepts had to be developed, and again a new direction had to be taken. In order to gain the life of visualizations, humanity—or as much of it as comes into consideration—moved eastward, but pure concepts could be acquired only by returning in a westward direction. We could similarly present the migrations of peoples in the four post-Atlantean periods from an anthroposophical viewpoint, and you would see a wondrous interplay of spiritual forces at work upon the whole shaping of man, and of what comes to expression in forming the earth.

But this is not the end. We have dealt with the currents running downward from above, forward from the rear, etc., but in a sense we now appear to have reached a dead end. Spiritual science, however, discloses higher forces holding sway above the capacity for visualization and forming concepts, that is, the imaginative, the inspirative, and the intuitive senses. We have learned that as a rule these stream inward, but in clairvoyants, outward. All these currents must operate too, and for that purpose must develop the necessary organs. So we ask how they do this? How do they live and operate in the physical human being?

In order to answer this question we will first consider a force possessed only by the human being, not by animals: the inner soul force of memory. Animal memory is a pure figment of the scientists' imagination. Animals have no memory; they merely manifest symptoms to be explained by the same principle as those of human memory. In order to produce human memory, the main position of animals would have to be raised to the vertical, so that the ego could stream in. Since their principal position is horizontal, they can have no ego. But in certain animals the forward part of the body is in the same position as that of the human being, hence it can act intelligently, although this intelligence is not permeated by an ego.

This is the beginning of a vast region of misconceptions. When an animal manifests a capacity similar to that of memory and acts intelligently, nothing more is proved by these facts than that a being can be guided by an intelligence without being intelligent itself. Phenomena resembling memory can appear in the animal world, but not memory itself.

In memory we see something special, something quite different from what we find in mere intelligent thinking, for example, or in visualization. The essence of memory lies in the retention of a visualization we have had; it is still present after the act of perception has passed. The repetition of an action previously performed is not memory. A clock would in that case be endowed with memory, for it does today exactly what it did yesterday. If memory is to come about, the ego must seize a conception and retain it.

If the ego is to seize a conception in this way, an organ must be formed for the purpose, and this is accomplished as follows. Out of its own essence the ego must engender special currents and must pour and bore these into the various horizontal currents already active minus the ego. The ego must overcome currents. When a current appears running inward from without, the ego must be able to produce within itself a counter-current.

That the ego was originally not capable of this we learned when studying the origin of speech; then the group ego had to co-operate. But when the soul life proper commences, beyond visualization, when a higher faculty such as memory is to be developed, the ego must activate new currents independently, currents that bore into others already there. Of this process the ego is clearly aware. In developing the senses up to and including visualization, this activity of the ego is not required, but when a higher activity is to be brought about, the ego must oppose the currents already functioning. This becomes manifest through the addition of a fourth phenomenon to the three currents at right angles to each other in space. This boring in of the ego becomes perceptible in the consciousness of time, and that is why memory is linked with temporal conceptions. We do not follow time in any spatial direction, but into the past. The direction of the past is bored into the directions of space. That is what occurs in all that the ego develops out of itself. Through spiritual science we can even indicate the current that comes into play when the ego evolves memory. It runs from left to right, and when habits are developed by the ego, the currents run from left to right as well. The ego bores its way into the opposing currents, those that were formed without the ego. Here the law is exemplified that tells us that the higher activities of the soul always have currents running in the opposite direction from that of the next lower activity.

To gain inner contact with the ego, the intellectual soul had to develop up to the ego plane. Now we ascend to the consciousness soul. When this functions consciously its active current runs in the opposite direction from that of the intellectual soul, which is still able to function subconsciously. Under certain earthly conditions the following law in human evolution can be proved. Learning to read is an intelligent activity, but one that does not necessarily proceed from the consciousness soul. The idea of learning to read and write occurred to men before the consciousness soul was developed. Reading by means of the intellectual soul had its inception in the Greco-Latin epoch. Then followed the ascendancy of the consciousness soul, and the direction of the current had to be reversed. Arithmetic could only develop with the consciousness soul. The European peoples read and write from left to right, but they figure from right to left, as in adding. It will be seen from this how the currents of the intellectual soul and of the consciousness soul overlap, and we can actually understand the nature of the European peoples by pondering the matter.

But there have been other peoples with other missions. They were advance guards, so to speak, and their task was to develop, or at least prepare, the feature of the intellectual soul that the European peoples, who had postponed their cultural development, did not evolve until after the consciousness soul had become active. Those were the Semitic peoples, who write from right to left. They were the peoples who were to prepare in advance the later period of the consciousness soul.

In such considerations we find the means for comprehending all cultural phenomena on earth. We shall learn to know everything of that sort, down to the letter formations of the various languages. The reason why peoples write from top to bottom, from right to left or from left to right follows from an understanding of the underlying spiritual facts. It is the mission of spiritual science to see that light dawns in the minds of men, and that the obscure becomes clear.

The soul whose passing we mourn today showed the full, most noble strength to exchange this earthly life with that other into which she was called to enter. And the friend was ready to receive the revelations of that other world, as she was always ready to receive the revelations of this earthly world. We, my dear mourners, raise our souls to this soul, in union with all the loved ones, in the pain for the dearly departed here. We sympathetically unite our souls with the souls of our dear relatives and look up to the soul that has departed from this earthly world and its way of life. And when we try to explore, feelingly, discerningly, what lived in this soul, when we imagine it free from all that was earthly, when we want to listen to it where it speaks from its deepest conviction, from its deepest feeling and will, then we, my dear mourners, may well feel as if we were hearing this dear, this powerful soul speak words like these:

In world-wide expanses I will bear
My feeling heart, that it may become warm
In the fire of sacred activity.

In world thoughts I will weave
My own thinking, that it may become clear
In the light of eternal becoming-life;

I will dive into the depths of souls
With devoted contemplation, that it may become strong
For the true goals of human activity;

In God's peace I strive so
With life struggles and worries,
My self to the higher self preparing;

Longing for a joyful peace,
Sensing the world in my own being,
I would fulfill my duty to humanity;

Then I may live in anticipation
of my soul's star,
which in the spiritual realm grants me the place.

A life full of work, a life full of strength, a life full of lively concern and human duties, which she was assigned in her earthly life, in her present phase of life, has come to an end in our beloved friend, and in such a way that one word comes to mind and to the soul when this life is to be characterized by the nature of her personality, a word in which much, much can be included. But nothing, I think, is in this word that should not be included when looking at the personality who has left us: an “anima magna” in the noblest sense, a beautiful soul in the best sense of the word, and a soul that knew how to pour out what radiated in her in glorious beauty for all those who were close to her or came into the slightest contact with her, so that one became partakers of the love, the goodwill, the strength that emanated from her. Everyone around her could perceive the strengthening and revelation of intimate soul beauty.

Such a soul has passed from us, and we feel our relationship to her, which is truly felt, like the setting of a sun that we have so gladly seen around us.

But again, my dear mourning friends, when we turn our spiritual gaze to this evening of life after a life of work, we are overcome by the most heartfelt consolation from this soul itself, consolation in many respects.

One can think of the life ideal of many ancient souls who, when they came to the realization of the evening of their lives, said that they would not want to come to this evening of their lives without the soul being able to enter in a corresponding way into the spiritual worlds into which they are to submerge when the gate of physical life is closed. Countless spirits in ancient times felt the same way: May I be granted an evening of life so that I may go, feeling, into the spiritual world. Those who had not yet taken in the feeling of their connection with the spiritual world felt, as it were, their purpose in life slipping away. What a beautiful feeling and sensation this woman had been given in what she had around her in her old age, and that is why such a purpose in life, which brought her closer to the spiritual world. It is hard to imagine a more beautiful entry into and life in the spiritual world than was the case with our friend.

When you look back on her life, you see a life dedicated to taking care of the smallest, most insignificant things in life, that powerfully wanted things from the details of life and yet was again inspired to embrace all the details of life in a grand sweep. who had the joy and the good fortune to approach this soul, it was exemplary through its noble, through its strong activity, exemplary through the care in the individual, exemplary in the most loyal action.

And then again, this soul, who has fulfilled her life through work, effort and worry, felt the need to live and immerse her soul in the revelations of spiritual life. She also had this need in an exemplary, truly exemplary way. My dear suffering friends and friends of my dear friend, from the revelation of spiritual life to which we profess, one receives a conviction for spiritual knowledge, admittedly through a saying of Goethe. But standing in this conviction, one feels the truth of Goethe's saying so strongly that one can hardly feel the truth of this saying in any other field: “What is fruitful is alone true!"

Oh, how often one had to think of our dear departed when one contemplated her strong, exemplary life! In her, the connection with the spiritual world proved truly fruitful. With her whole soul and her whole heart she stood in the elements that take hold of us and flow through us when we seek the connection with the spiritual worlds. She repeatedly felt imbued, flooded and strengthened when she really wanted to experience the connection with the spiritual world, and then the forces flowed into her physical upright posture.

Truly, our spiritual current, my dear friends, feels fortunate to be able to be united with such souls. And it can do so, for on the one hand it must tell itself that it receives from these souls as much as a glorious gift of right living as it gives; and on the other hand, when it can be seen what spiritual science can be to such souls, spiritual science also feels strengthened and invigorated, and strength flows to it from such souls. That is why such souls are living stars in the midst of our spiritual current, and we look up to them as we would to certain stars. Because we look up to such living stars, we are comforted in our pain, and we feel this comfort even when we can no longer see the loving eye or hear the dear voice. If it can be a consolation for the dear ones that many souls united with our friend in true friendship unite in outer pain and mourning, then they can truly be sure of this consolation; they can be sure of the consolation that comes from the awareness, at least the outer one, the consolation that turns to a feeling that can be truly consoling, especially for such a soul.

We will consider and feel: Now she has left us, now she will no longer reach out to us, now we will no longer feel the warmth of her heart, no longer have her benevolent gaze resting on us, now we will no longer see her strength in the physical world. When we feel all this, we turn to the other feeling, especially when we are faced with such a soul, to the feeling that this soul is an infinitely precious gift of our life on earth. And let us consider every moment in which she was allowed to devote herself to us in this physical world, which we think back on with love and loyalty, as a gain, and then let us consider every moment in which we can no longer have her in the physical world, as such, in which we want to hold fast to the love and devotion that she so richly deserved.

Let us no longer look at the moments when she will be physically gone from us, but let us look at the moments she gave us and let us cherish those moments in our memories. They will be rich and full of important things. Such was this soul that the memory of her can be more than abundant. If we do not find only sorrow in their absence, we will find strength and power among the many other things. The sight of them shows us a soul in which the value penetrates into one's own soul, into the anima.

Souls of this kind are among those through whom the gods reveal how much they love the world. Lives that flow in this way, blessing, full of work, full of devotion in love, which are then also allowed to reap the fruits in children and children's children, and which, in the insight into this satisfaction from their earthly life, are allowed to look within themselves, such souls are the ones through whom the gods reveal their love for the world to man. And when such a soul departs from us, then our own souls feel as if they are united in spirit with the spirit that flows through all worlds, with the living force that goes through all life. Then we are closer to understanding these words, which are given to the human race, than we are in the ordinary moments of life, when we feel united with the noble soul that hovers over our life, the fleeting life, and then we do not say in a different sense than usual; Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth.

A sense of the world permeated our friend's soul, a sense of the world that constantly spoke from the heartfelt interest she had in intellectual life. And, my dear friends in mourning, you have to resort to the words of a great ancient sage if you want to find words that shape that which filled this anima magna:

“No longer shall your breath alone be in harmony with the surrounding air, but henceforth your mind shall also be in harmony with the rational essence that surrounds everything, for the power of reason is poured out upon us all and permeates everyone who wants to draw it to themselves, just as the air permeates those who can breathe it.”

This world view of the ancient Roman sage lived in our friend's heart. But in addition, she had a living understanding of the union of the individual human soul with the whole; she had everything that the human soul can fulfill in our time, when it seeks the path through the earthly shell up into the spiritual worlds. And when she felt this sense of life in our sense, our friend, that the spirit surrounds us and wants to be breathed in like the air - truly, honestly and sincerely, lovingly and urgently, she often felt through her soul: “I was born of God” - of God, with all that my physical shell, my earthly life, has done.

But then, when such a soul rises into the spiritual world, when it seeks that which can shine forth from the spiritual worlds, then, in its search in the spiritual worlds, an inkling, a belief, a knowledge of those worlds arises in it, which are exalted above space and time, above birth and death and above the stars. Then that feeling begins, which the old Roman sage could not yet have, that feeling that truly makes the sight of death a new birth, that makes the sight of death appear as the birth of the soul for the spiritual worlds.

The soul here felt surrounded by reason, by spirit, by world thoughts in the earthly world. So the soul, which can feel, which has been initiated, feels the soul of the friend. When she delves into her reasons, she feels how she finds the way to the world that is beyond space and time, in which physical death forms the entrance to the connection with the Christ, who reveals Himself through the mystery of Golgotha, who reveals Himself anew in the understanding soul in every moment. And then such a soul finds the true conviction, which no soul can find more sincerely than the soul that hastened ahead of us, the word: In Christ we die. - Everything she gave us in her life, when we saw her among us, for years and especially in the last times, is an affirmation of her being imbued with the Christ impulse. This is an affirmation of what she felt when she constantly turned to the mystery of Golgotha, the wisdom that can flow into all human souls that want to receive it. Thus we find her death, which for her was consciously a new birth, in intimate union with the Christ. She died in the Christ.

But that gives us the strength of thought to know that we are united with her in spirit, to find the main consolation beyond all pain and grief: As true as she hastened into the spiritual world, clothed in the luminous and powerful thought, “In the Christ I shall resurrect,” so true as the word, the powerful word that resounded from her, will it arise in her soul, and we shall resurrect with her and be united with her.

In this union, my dear mourners, we shall plant in our souls the thoughts that should be directed, as often as we are allowed, to the soul of our dear friend, to the exemplary way in which she lived out her time on earth for us, to the strength and heavenly light that radiates from her. When we turn our thoughts to her in loyalty, we vow that when we leave her earthly shell, we want to feel that so strongly in all of us, with our best thoughts united in her, forever, until we see her through the power of the spirit in which we want to live intimately united with her.

Because this soul was so deeply imbued with this spirit, inspired by the longing for the light that speaks from the spiritual worlds, it is, my dear friends, that when I tried to feel so united this morning with the soul hurrying into the spiritual world, that I could hear the words that seem to me that soul would say if it followed the purest impulse of its self, followed that which radiated from the star of life as long as it dwelled among us.

They shall become conscious in our hearts, these words, which seem to me to be words that the hurrying soul calls out to us in this last moment when we are allowed to dwell with its earthly shell, calling out to us, admonishing us, worrying about our own path in our spiritual world. These are words through which we ourselves will feel the strength to sense our unity with the soul and to find our way into the spiritual world. It seems as if this soul were speaking to us in the words that we want to carry faithfully in everlasting remembrance of her:

In the world's expanse I will carry
My feeling heart, that it may become warm
In the fire of sacred power;

In world thoughts I will weave
My own thinking, that it may become clear
In the light of eternal becoming-life;

In the depths of souls I will dive
devoted thinking, that it may become strong
for the true goals of human endeavor;

In the peace of God, I strive
with life's struggles and worries,
preparing my self for the higher self;

Longing for a peaceful peace,
sensing the cosmic existence in my own existence,
I would like to fulfill my human duty;

Then I may live in anticipation
of my soul's star,
which grants me a place in the spiritual realm.

As our subject is arousing the very widest interest everywhere, it seems justifiable to approach it from an anthroposophical standpoint. The manner in which it is being discussed and brought to public notice is, of course, very far removed from this point of view. If it is true that Anthroposophy is little understood and liked to-day, it may be said at once that the treating of this theme in an anthroposophical manner presents peculiar difficulties.¹ It is unusual in our age for the feelings to be so attuned as to appreciate anthroposophical truths bearing on the more obvious matters of spiritual life, and it is directly repugnant to our present-day consciousness when a topic has to be discussed which calls for the application of Anthroposophy or Spiritual Science to the most difficult and holiest subjects.

It may be safely affirmed at the outset that the Being around Whom our thoughts are about to centre has been for many centuries the turning point of all thought and feeling, and moreover that He has called forth widely differing judgments, emotions and opinions. Countless as are those who for centuries have held firmly as a rock to all that is connected with the Name of Christ and of Jesus, beyond number also are pictures of Him which have moved souls and occupied thoughtful men ever since the Event in Palestine. Always the picture has been modified according to the general views of the times, to what was felt and considered true at any given period. Thus, when the way had been prepared by the intellectual currents of thought of the eighteenth century, it came about in the course of the following century that what could be intellectually grasped as “Christ” withdrew into the background as compared with what was called later the “Historical Jesus.” It is around the “Historical Jesus” that the widely extended controversy has arisen, and which has here in Carlsruhe its most important protagonists and its most vigorous combatants. For this reason it is as well to give a short indication of the actual position of the controversy before entering on the subject of “Christ Jesus.”

We might say that the Historical Jesus of nineteenth century thought originated under the influence of the intellectual current that takes a merely external view of spiritual life and judges it by means of external documents: that there is evidence of His having lived at the beginning of our era in Palestine, that He was crucified and, according to the faithful, rose again. It is quite in line with the character and nature of the present era, now approaching its termination, that in the case of theological research, faith limited itself to what it was thought could be confirmed by historical documents in the same way as any ordinary event is confirmed by independent writings. It may be said that all the historical written traditions elsewhere than in the New Testament could, in the opinion of one of the most important judges, be “easily contained in a quarto page.” All the other references to the historical Jesus in any documents whatever, such for example as in Josephus or Tacitus, may be put out of court, for they can never be used from the standpoint of that historical science which holds good to-day. Beyond these there are only the Gospels and the Pauline Epistles. How did the historical research of the nineteenth century examine the Gospels? Regarded purely externally how do they appear? If taken like other records, such as those of military engagements and so forth, they seem to be very contradictory documents of the physical plane, the fourfold presentation of which cannot be brought into harmony. In face of what we call historical criticism these records fall to pieces. For it must be allowed that everything which the earnest and diligent research of the nineteenth century collected out of the Gospels themselves, in order to gain a true picture of Jesus of Nazareth, has crumbled away through the presentation of the kind of research brought forward by Professor Drews. As to all that can be said against the Gospels as facts of history, it is evident that nothing can come to light about the Person of Jesus of Nazareth if we apply the methods whereby accurate science and strict criticism ratify other historical facts. We can only be considered very dilettante scientists if we do not make this concession to the science of the day.

Is it not the case that those who in the nineteenth century presented the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth, and wanted to arrive at an historical portrait of Him, had an entirely false conception of the Gospels? Were the Gospels really intended to be historical records in the sense understood in that century?

Whatever was to be said on this subject I endeavoured to state many years ago in my work, Christianity as Mystical Fact, and our present question, as to what was the real object of the Gospels, was intended to receive its answer not merely through the contents of that book but through the tide itself. For the title was not ‘The Mysticism of Christianity,’ nor ‘The Mystical Contents of Christianity:’ its object was rather to show that Christianity in its origin and its whole being is not an external fact but a Fact of the Spiritual world, and one that can only be comprehended by an insight into a realm lying behind the world of sense and behind what can be corroborated by historical records. It was shown that the forces and causes which brought about the Event of Palestine were not to be found in that region wherein external historical events take place, and thus that possibly not only may Christianity have a mystical content but that Mysticism—the actual gazing into the spiritual—is necessary to disentangle the threads that were woven behind the Event in Palestine and made it possible.

In order to realize what Christianity is, and what it can and must be in the soul of man to-day if he is to understand it aright, let us see how deeply grounded in the spiritual facts of human development were the words of St. Augustine: “That which we now call the Christian Religion already existed among the ancients and was never absent from the beginning of the human race up to the time when Christ appeared in the flesh, from which time forward the true religion which was already there received the name of the Christian Religion.” Thus does a standard authority point to the fact that it was not something new which came into humanity with the events of Palestine, but that in a certain sense a transformation had taken place in that which from time immemorial the souls of men had sought and striven for as knowledge. Something was given to humanity which had always been in existence, though hitherto along other lines than the Christian. If we wish to test the other way in which the preceding ages could come to the truths and wisdom of Christianity, we are referred by the historical development of humanity to the Mysteries of Antiquity or the Ancient Mysteries. What is meant by these expressions is little understood to-day, but it will become clearer the more men grasp the conception of the cosmos as presented by Spiritual Science.

Not merely upon the external religions of the people of antiquity must attention be focused, but upon what was practised in pre-Christian times in those mystic abodes designated by the name of the Mysteries. In the book Occult Science is to be found an explanation from the aspect of Spiritual Science, and there are also numbers of secular writers who have declared publicly what was the secret of mankind in antiquity. We read that only a few were admitted to the schools which were designated “The Mysteries,” and that these schools were the homes of the cults. Also there was a small circle of men admitted to the Mysteries by the priestly sages, and for them this meant a kind of retirement from the outer world: they realized that if they were to reach what was to be attained they must lead a different life than they had so far lived openly, and above all that they must accustom themselves to another way of thinking. These Mysteries existed all over the world, among the Greeks and Romans and other peoples, as may be confirmed by referring to extensive literature which still exists. The pupils admitted to the Mysteries were taught something comparable with what is now called science or knowledge, but they did not receive it in the same way, for by what they experienced they became quite other beings. To them came the conviction that in every man there lives, deeply hidden and slumbering so that the ordinary consciousness knows it not, a higher man. As the ordinary man looks through his eyes upon the world and with his thought-power thinks over what he experiences, so can this other man—at first unknown to external consciousness, but capable of being awakened in the depths of his nature recognize another world unattainable by external sight and thought. This was called “The birth of the inner man.” The expression is still used, though in these days it is dry and abstract in character and regarded lightly, but when the disciple of the Mysteries applied it to himself it stood for a tremendous event to be compared in some measure with being born in the physical sense. As man in the physical world is born out of a dark substratum (be it one of nature according to the materialistic idea, or a spiritual sub-stratum in the view of Spiritual Science) so, physically speaking, there was really born through the processes of the Mysteries a higher man who previously had been as little present as was the human being before birth or conception. The disciple was a new-born being. The present view of knowledge, as given everywhere in answer to a deeply philosophic question, is exactly the opposite of that which formed the central point of the whole idea and outlook of the Mysteries. It is now asked in the sense of Kant and Schopenhauer, “Where lie the limits of knowledge? What is it in the power of man to know?” We need only take up a newspaper to meet the answer that here or there lie the limits and that beyond them it is impossible to go. Certainly it was admitted in the Mysteries that there were problems which man could not solve, but it would never have been held in the sense of Kant or in Schopenhauer's Theory of Cognition that “Man cannot know” this or that! What would have been appealed to was man's capability of development, to the powers lying dormant within him which must be evoked so that he might rise to higher capacities of knowledge. The question in those times resolved itself into what was to be done in order to get beyond that which in normal life is the boundary of knowledge; how to develop deeper powers in human nature.

Something more is needed if we are to feel the whole magic charm of the Mysteries that, like a breath, pervades the works of the exoteric writers, Plato, Aristides, Plutarch and Cicero. Here we must be clear that the kind of mental comprehension present in the forming of the disciples of the Mysteries was quite different from that of the men of to-day when they confront scientific truths. What we now call science is open to anybody and everybody in any condition of receptivity whatever. It is just here that we recognize the characteristic of Truth, that it is independent of mood and feeling. For the pupil of the Mysteries the most necessary thing was that, before he was brought to the great Truths, he should go through something whereby his soul was transformed in his feelings and impressions. What to-day appears as a simple scientific truth would not have been put to him so that he could grasp it externally with his understanding, but his natural temperament would have been prepared beforehand so that he could draw near with reverential awe to what could approach him. Consequently his preparation was not one of learning; it was a gradual and radical transformation and education of his soul. The question was how the soul approached the great Truths and Wisdom and how it reacted to them, and hence arose the conviction that through the Mysteries man was bound up and united with the very foundations of the Cosmos and with what flowed from the springs of all cosmic beginnings. Thus was the disciple prepared for the experiencing of something which is described by Aristides. He who, according to what is to be found in my Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment has lived through what these disciples experienced can himself bear witness. He knows that the words of Aristides correspond with the truth when he writes, “I seemed to be approaching God, I seemed to feel His Presence, and I was in a state between waking and sleeping; my spirit was quite light—so light that no one who was uninitiated could describe or understand it.” There was a way, therefore, to the divine foundations of the Universe which was neither Science nor one-sided Religion, but consisted in a thorough preparation of the soul for the realization of the ideas about the Evolution of the Universe so that it might draw near to God and those spiritual foundations. As we take in the external air with our breath and make it a part of our body, so did the disciple of the Mysteries receive into his soul that which pulsates spiritually through the Universe until he was united with it and so became a new man permeated by the Divinity.

Now, however, Anthroposophy or Spiritual Science shows that what was then possible was only an historical phenomenon in human evolution, and when the question arises as to whether the Ancient Mysteries of pre-Christian times are still possible in the same way it can only be said that historical research verily proves that what has just been described did really exist but that it exists no longer in the same form. The pre-Christian method of Initiation is not now possible. A man must indeed be short-sighted if he believes that the human soul is the same in all epochs, or that the spiritual path of the olden times holds good for the present. The path to the divine and primal sources of the world has now become another, and intellectual historical research shows that it did so in its very essence at the time ascribed by tradition to the Events of Palestine. These Events made a deep incision in the evolution of man. Something entered into human nature in the post-Christian period which entirely differed from what was there before. Such a method of thinking as is possible nowadays—the method of drawing nearer to the Universe through scientific thought—did not exist in pre-Christian ages. The Mysteries did not conduct man in the manner described to the very highest treasures of Wisdom in order that he might do something in secret, or acquire something special for himself as a member of a small circle, but because our modern way of combining thoughts through logic was not possible at that time. A glance at the history of humanity will show that in the course of two centuries, during the time of the Greek philosophers, the present mode of thinking was gradually prepared, and that only now has it reached the point of embracing external nature so wonderfully. Thus the entire form our consciousness takes and the way we create our conceptions of the Universe differ entirely from pre-Christian times. For the moment we are only concerned with this fact as showing that human nature has changed. A careful review of human evolution makes it clear that the entire consciousness has altered in the course of evolution (the results arising from research are to be found in my Occult Science. The men of old did not regard things and think about them as we do with our senses and understanding; they had a kind of clairvoyance, but this was of a dim and dreamlike nature (not such as is described in my The Way of Initiation). Herein lies the import of evolution, that an old clairvoyance which in primitive times was spread over all humanity gave way to that form of thought which we possess to-day. The ordinary inhabitants of every country had this kind of clairvoyant power, and a path leading from that to higher stages was provided in the Mysteries. Thereby development was given to the normal soul-faculties of man.

Observation of the world by what we call reasoning and logic having displaced the old clairvoyance, the latter is no longer a natural faculty, but it lasted right through the historical period and reached its culmination in the Greco-Roman era during which the Appearance of Christ occurred. At that point of time collective humanity everywhere had come so far in its evolution that the old clairvoyance had passed away and the old Mysteries were no longer possible. What then took the place of the old Mysteries and what did man acquire through the Mysteries?

These were of two kinds: the one proceeded from that centre of civilization which was afterwards occupied by the ancient Persians, and the other was to be met with in its purest form in Egypt and Greece. They were entirely different throughout those times. It was the endeavour of all the Mysteries to produce in man an extension of his soul-powers, but this was achieved in a different way in Greece and Egypt, than in Persia. In the two former, which agreed essentially, the object was to effect in the disciples a transformation of their soul-powers. This transformation took place under a certain supposition which must be understood before anything else. It was that in the depths of the soul there slumbers another, a divine man; that from the same sources whence the rock forms into crystal and the plants break forth in the Spring the hidden man originated. Plants, however, had already utilized all that was contained within them, whereas man, in so far as he had understood himself and worked with his own powers, had remained an imperfect being, and that which was within him had only come to the fore after much endeavour. Appeal, therefore, in the Egyptian and Greek Mysteries was made to a spiritual, a divine inner man, and when this was referred to, allusion was made also to the powers within the Earth. For according to the views held the Earth was not regarded as the lifeless cosmic body of modern astronomy, but as a spiritual planetary being. In Egypt reference was made to the wonderful spirit-forces and nature-forces, called by the names of Isis and Osiris, when it was desired to contemplate the origin and source of what could be experienced as manifestation in the inner man. In Greece this primal source was referred to under the name of Dionysos. As a consequence of this, profane writers asserted that the nature and being of things were the objects sought for, and in the Greek Mysteries they called what was found of the forces of human nature the “sub-earthly” portion of man, not the “super-earthly.” The Nature of the great “Daemons” was spoken of, and under this tide was represented all that worked on the Earth of the nature of spiritual forces. The nature of these daemons (in a good sense) was sought for through that which man was to bring forth from himself. Then the disciple had to go through all the feelings and perceptions that were possible for him in the course of evolution. He had to experience what was meant by “going down into the depths of his soul;” to learn that a fundamental feeling so dominated all soul-being that in ordinary life no conception of it could be formed, and that that feeling was a deep egoism—the almost unconquerable selfishness lying within the inner recesses of a human being. By means of struggling against and conquering all selfishness and egoism the disciple had to go through something for which we have to-day only an abstract expression, i.e., the feeling of all inclusive love and sympathy for men and beings. Sympathy, in so far as the human soul was capable of it, was to take the place of selfishness. It was clearly understood that if the disciple evoked this sympathy, which belonged in the first place to the hidden forces of the world of feeling, it could draw out from the depths of his soul the divine powers slumbering therein. It was held moreover that as he looked out upon the world with his ordinary understanding he must soon become aware of his powerlessness as a man with reference to the Cosmos, and that the further he projected his conceptions and ideas the stronger this feeling grew until in the end he was led to doubt what indeed could be called knowledge, i.e., Gnosis. Arrived at that point he must then overcome this feeling of emptiness in his soul whenever he desired to encompass the Cosmos with his ideas. This consciousness of a void was accompanied by fear and anxiety, and consequently the Greek disciple of Mysticism first filled himself with a dread of the unknown and then by coupling this with sympathy drew forth the divine powers lying within him. So did he learn to transform fear into awe and reverence, and to realize how the highest kind of awe and reverential devotion for all the phenomena of the Universe was able to penetrate every substance and conception that lay beyond the scope of ordinary knowledge.

Thus the Greek Mysteries, as also those of Isis and Osiris in the Egyptian Mysteries, worked outwards from the inmost nature of man and sought to lead him into the spiritual worlds. It was a living apprehension of the “God in Man.” A real acquaintance was formed between man and God, and immortality ranked not as mere abstract theory and philosophy but as something known, something as firmly grounded as the knowledge of external colours, and this was experienced as an intimate connection with external things. With no less certainty was this experienced also in the Persian or Mithraic Mysteries. Whereas man was led in the Greek and Egyptian Mysteries through the unfettering of his soul-powers, he was confronted at once with the Universe itself in the Mithraic Mysteries; not only did the Universe work upon him through the great and mighty Nature which is overlooked by those who regard the world in its external aspect, but by gaining a deep intimacy with Nature, he could gaze upon phenomena that lay outside the limits of the human understanding. By the methods then used the most terrible and magnificent powers were brought before the pupil from Universal Space. Whereas the Greek disciple was affected by a deep feeling of reverence, to the Mithraic disciple alone was given the knowledge of the terrible and awe-inspiring powers in Nature so that he felt himself infinitesimally small in comparison. So powerful was this impression, consequent upon his alienation from the primal source of being, that he felt that in its vastness the Universe could at any moment overwhelm and annihilate him. The first impulse came from his being led through a comprehensive astronomy and science away from external things to the greatness of the phenomena of the Universe, and what he further developed in the Mysteries was then more a consequence of the Truth in all its ramifications when Nature in her details (science in the old sense of the word) worked upon his soul. The Greek disciple became fearless through the setting free of his powers. The Mithraic disciple was brought so far that he drank in the greatness of Cosmic Thought, and thereby his soul also became strong and courageous. A knowledge of the dignity and value of a human being was gained, and with it a feeling for truth and fidelity; the disciple learned to recognize that man must always hold himself under control during his earthly existence.

Such were the benefits obtained especially through the Mithraic Mysteries, and whereas the Greek and Egyptian Mysteries are to be found spread over Greece and Egypt, the Mithraic are diffused from Persia as far as the Caspian Sea, along the Danube into Germany, and even to the South of France, to Spain and to England. Europe was indeed permeated by the Mithraic Mysteries, and everywhere it was seen clearly that something streamed into man from the Universe if only he could learn to understand it, and this that could be received was Mithra, the God that streams through the world in all worlds. It was through this power of action that courage was aroused: the warriors, the Roman legionaries, were filled with the Mithraic service or cult of Mithra. Both leaders and men were initiated into the Mysteries. Thus was God sought on the one hand by the freeing of the individual soul-powers, and it was quite evident that through this process something streamed out from the depths of the soul. On the other hand, however, it was equally evident that when man sought God by devoting himself to the great cosmic phenomena, something streamed into his soul as the essence, the finest life-sap contained in the world. There were found the primordial forces of the Universe. God came as it were into human souls through this development which was attained in the Mystery schools. A veritable process is to be seen here: each soul became a door for the entrance of the Godhead into human evolution on earth. Few were able to undergo such a development, and a special preparation for it was necessary. The teaching consisted in showing that what was hidden in external nature (Mithra) as also in the inner man of the Greek, poured through the world as a stream of divine consecration.

The evolution of man has now changed, and the entire method of Initiation is different. Here we touch upon what must be called the Mystical Fact of the Christ Event. To penetrate deeply into history is to see that the early Christians were more or less dimly conscious that the same force which entered the soul only through devotion to the Mysteries, to the Divine Principle of the Universe (streaming forth from Cosmos as the Mithra or out of the depths of the soul as the Dionysos), was as the deed of a unique Cosmic Divinity in one single Fact in the evolution of the Earth. That which was sought for beyond this, and was not to be found except by those who alienated themselves from outer life in the Mysteries, was at a given time incorporated into the Earth by the Divinity. No human effort was needed, for the Divinity once and for all permeated the Being of the Earth, and henceforth even those who had lost the power to penetrate to the Divine Principle of the Cosmos could meet Him in another way. The God Who could now penetrate into the human soul (neither as Mithra from without nor Dionysos from within) was Himself a fusion of Mithra and Dionysos, and also was related to human nature in its depths. He was embraced and encompassed by the Name of CHRIST. Mithra and Dionysos were united in the Being Who entered humanity in the Event of Palestine, and Christianity was the confluence of both Cults. The Hebrews, who were chosen that they might provide the necessary body through which this Event might take place, had become acquainted with the Mithraic and Dionysian Cults, but they remained far removed from either. The Greek thought of himself as a weak man who must develop deeper powers before he could penetrate into the depths of his soul, while the follower of Mithra felt that by letting the whole surrounding sphere of the air work upon him he might become united with the divine qualities of the Universe. The Hebrew, on the other hand, held that the deeper human nature, with all that was hidden within it, was already there in the first Man, and the ancient Hebrews called this Primal man Adam. According to old Hebraic ideas that which man could seek, and which joined him with the divine, was present originally in Adam, but in course of evolution the descendants of each generation became further and further removed from the Source of Existence. Being “subject to original sin,” as they put it, meant that man had not remained as he was and had been ejected from the sphere of the Divine; regarding himself as standing below Adam he sought the reason in original sin. But though less than that which lived in the depths of human nature, he could unite himself with the deeper powers and thereby be raised again. This point of view, that once man had stood higher and that through the qualities connected with the blood-ties he had lost something, was an historical one. What the adherent of the Mithraic Mysteries saw in humanity as One Whole the Hebrew saw in his own nation and was conscious that its original source had been lost. So that while among the Persians there was a kind of training of the consciousness, there was among the ancient Hebrews a consciousness of a historical development; Adam, by falling into sin, had fallen from the heights where he once stood. Consequently the Hebrews were the best prepared for the thought that that which had happened at the initial point of evolution (and which had brought about a deterioration in humanity) could only be raised again through an historical Event, i.e., by something actually taking place in the spiritual sub-strata of the Earth's being. The ancient Hebrew who rightly understood evolution felt that the Mithra God, equally with the God Who is evoked from the depths of the human soul, could come down without man going through a development in the Mysteries.

Thus in these people, and above all in the case of John the Baptist, there arose a consciousness of the fact that the same which the Mysteries had handed down in the form of Dionysos and Mithra was born at one and the same time in One Man. Those of them who felt this in a deeper sense held that even as through Adam the descent of man into the world was brought about (all men having descended from one forefather and inherited from him all the deeper forces that lead to sin and error) so, through One Being Who descends from the spiritual worlds as the union of Mithra and Dionysos, must the initial point be formed to which men can look when they have to rise again. As in the Mysteries human nature was developed through the setting free of the deeper soul forces or through a view of the Cosmos, the Hebrews now saw in the God Who came down into physical being Him on Whom the soul must look and believe, for Whom it must develop the deepest love, and Who as the Great Example could lead them back to their divine origin.

He who had the profoundest knowledge of this fact of Christianity was Paul. The Apostle recognized that as men looked to Adam as their physical progenitor they could, through the Christ Impulse, look to the Christ as the Great Example, and so attain to what was striven for in the Mysteries and must be born again if they were to know their own original nature. The knowledge that was kept within the recesses of the Temples, and could only be attained after ascetic training, was set forth neither in mundane document nor as some external fact but as having been accomplished as a mystical fact, the God Who pervaded the world having actually appeared in one single Form. What the disciples of the Mithraic Mysteries acquired through looking upon the Greatest Model had now been attained through Christ. The courage, self control and energy acquired by those disciples had also to be acquired by those who could no longer be initiated in the old Mithraic sense; through the Model of the historical Christ and the gazing upon Him the impulse towards this fortitude was now to pour itself out upon the soul. In the Mithraic Mysteries, as has been shown, the whole Universe was in a certain sense born in the soul of the disciple, and the courageous soul was fired with all the inner forces of initiative. In the Baptism of John something was poured down from above of which human nature could be the vehicle; when a man was permeated with the thought that his nature was capable of assimilating the profoundest harmony of the Universe, the view of the Baptism aroused within him the understanding that Mithra could be born in human nature. Those, therefore, who grasped the original meaning of Christianity, acknowledged that the end of the Mysteries had come: the God Who formerly had poured Himself into the Mysteries had now flowed directly into the being of the Earth through the Personality Who stood at the beginning of a new era (our present one).

The connection with the Greek or Dionysian Mysteries has now to be considered. Through the fact that the human gaze was guided to Jesus of Nazareth in Whom Mithra lived and Who then passed through death, an indication was given that Mithra (the bestower of courage, self control and energy) had Himself died with the death of Jesus. It was further seen that because Mithra had so vanished that which man found in his deepest nature, and had attained earlier through the Dionysian Mysteries, had now become in Jesus of Nazareth the immortal conqueror over death. Herein lies the true Christian meaning of the Resurrection if it is grasped in its spiritually scientific sense. The Baptism by John in [the] Jordan demonstrated that the old Mithra had entered into man, that thereby human nature had won the victory over death, and that by the example so created the soul could unite itself in the deepest love in order to come to that which lived in its own depths. In the Risen Christ was seen the fact that man, by living according to the event that had taken place in history, could rise above the level of ordinary humanity.

Thus in the centre of the history of the world was set an historical event in the place of that which had been sought in the Mysteries times without number. The great revelation that came to St. Paul was that human nature had thereby become different, and this was concealed within what is known as “The Event of Damascus.” Writing of what he experienced before Damascus, the Apostle relates how he learned to understand, not from external documents but through a purely spiritual clairvoyant experience, that the moment when the Incarnation itself should take place in an historical personage had already passed. The existence of Christ as a real man could never be experienced by Paul through an external fact, and what he could learn in Palestine did not convince him that the Union of Mithra and Dionysos had lived in Jesus of Nazareth. But when, before Damascus, his spiritual sight was opened, it became clear that a God Who could be called by the Name of Christ not only worked through the world as a super-sensible Being but had actually come to earth and conquered death. Henceforth he preached that what for the Initiates had previously been a streaming substance was now to be found as continuous historical fact. This lies at the basis of his words, “If Christ be not risen then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain.”

Such was the path by which Paul came to Jesus by the indirect way of Christ, it being clear to him that something had taken place in Palestine which previously could only be experienced in the Mysteries. And this still applies to-day. Because Christ is the focus of all human development and the highest example for the inmost powers of the soul the bond established with Him must be of the most intimate kind. To become a disciple it is required of a man that he set little value upon his own life, and so it must be regarded as of small importance to lay aside all documentary evidence and historical traditions in order to come to Christ. Indeed there is cause for thankfulness that the fact that there ever was an historical Christ Jesus cannot be established, for no document could prove that He was the most significant of all that has passed into humanity.

The connection between Christ and the ancient Mysteries is therefore quite clear. The disciples of the latter had to go through what may be called intimate soul experiences in order to come to God; their inner feelings and sensations were more lively and intense than those of the ordinary man, and so they became aware that they were set fast in a lower nature which hindered them from arriving at the Sources of Being. This lower nature was indeed a seducer leading them away from the upward path, and that which so allured them had also become their own lower nature, and herein lay the “Temptation” that came to every disciple of the Mysteries. At the moment when God awoke within them they became aware also of their lower or sensual natures. It was as though some strange unknown being were urging them not to follow the unsubstantial and airy heights of the spiritual world, but to seize the coarse and material things that lay close at hand. Each disciple had to pass through a time when everything spiritual seemed unreal in comparison with the ordinary way of looking at things, and all that was connected with the senses appeared alluring as against the stress of spiritual effort. At another stage in mystic development these lower forces were overcome, a higher outlook being attained with the growth of invigorated powers of courage and so forth. All this teaching was clothed in certain instructions that may be verified from the writings of exoteric authors, as also in the methods of Initiation given by Spiritual Science and set forth in Occult Science. There were various methods both in the Greek and the Mithraic Mysteries. Finally the disciples experienced the “at-one-ment” with Him Who was the Divine Man, but here the methods were different and varied widely in the many countries where Initiation existed.

In my Christianity as Mystical Fact the purpose is to show that in the Gospels nothing is to be met with but a rebirth of old Initiation instructions. What took place externally had already taken place similarly in the course of the Mysteries, and therefore the Divine Being Who was in Jesus of Nazareth after the descent of the Mithra Being had to experience the “Temptation.” As the Tempter came on a small scale to the pupil of the Mysteries so did he also confront the God become man. All that was true in the Mysteries is to be found repeated in the Gospel records which were new versions of the old inscriptions and instructions given in the Initiations. The writers of the Gospels saw that once that which hitherto had lain only in the Mysteries had been enacted on the plane of Cosmic History, it was permissible to describe it in the same words as those in which their directions for Initiation were recorded. It is for this very reason that the Gospels were not intended to be biographies of Him Who was the vehicle for the Christ. This is just the mistake of all modern criticisms of the Gospels. At the time they were written the sole object was to lead the human soul to a real love for the Great Soul, the Source of the world's existence. Strangely enough a clear consciousness of this prevailed almost to the end of the eighteenth century. It is pointed out in isolated writings of remarkable interest that through the Gospels the soul can be so transformed as to find the Christ. Old Meister Eckhardt writes, “Some people want to look at God with their eyes as they look at a cow, and want to love God as they love a cow. They love God as an outward possession and an inward comfort, but these people do not love Him aright ... Simple folk imagine they ought to see God as if He stood there and they here; it is not so; God and I are One in recognition.” In another passage he writes, “A Master says, ‘God has become man, and thereby the whole human race is raised in dignity. We may rejoice that Christ our Brother has through His own power passed beyond the choir of angels, and sits at the right hand of the Father.’ This Master has spoken rightly, but verily I do not pay much attention to it. What help would it be to me if I had a brother who was a rich man, and I was at the same time a poor one? How would it help me if I had a brother who was a wise man, and I myself a fool? ... The heavenly Father begat His only Son in Himself and in me. Why in Himself and in me? I am one with Him, and it is not possible for Him to exclude me. In the same work the Holy Ghost received His Being, and is from me as from God. Why? I am in God, and if the Holy Ghost does not receive His Being from me neither does he receive it from God. I am in no way excluded.”

That is the point: that man through mystic development, without external mysteries but through the simple evolution of the soul, will in later times be able to experience that which was once experienced in the Mysteries. This, however, will only be possible because the Christ Event took place. Even if there were no Gospels, no records and no traditions, he who experiences the Christ in himself along with the being filled with Christ has the certainty, as St. Paul had it, that at the beginning of our era Christ was incarnated in a physical body. An historical biography of Jesus of Nazareth can never be gathered out of the Gospels, but through the right unfolding of his soul powers man can and must raise himself up to the Christ, and through the Christ to Jesus. Thus only can be understood what was the aim of the Gospels and what was lacking in the whole of the nineteenth century researches on the subject of Jesus. The picture of the Christ was allowed to recede into the background in order to present a tangible Jesus quite externally from the historical records. The Gospels were misunderstood, and consequently the methods of investigation crumbled to pieces.

Herewith the way is at the same time made clear to Spiritual Science. Its object is to show what are the deeper powers that have lain in man since the coming of Christ, and which he can develop. Not in the depths of externally appointed Mysteries, but in the stillness of his room, man can attain by devoting himself to what happened in Palestine that which was attained by the disciples of the Mysteries. By experiencing the Christ within himself he gains in courage and energy and in a consciousness of his dignity as man, and comes to the knowledge of how he has to take his place in humanity in the right sense. And at the same time he experiences, as could the adherent of the Greek Mysteries, the Universal Love which lives in Christ and embraces all external creatures. He learns never to be afraid or to despair in face of the world, and in full freedom and at the same time humility is sensible of devotion to the secrets of the Universe.

All this comes to the man who permeates himself with the Mystical Fact of Christianity, the successor of the old Mysteries. Simply through a cognitional development of these fundamental thoughts the Historical Jesus becomes a fact for those who have a deep knowledge of Christ. In Western philosophy it was said that without eyes none could see colour nor hear without ears; the Universe would be without light and sound. True as this is with regard to seeing and hearing, it is equally true that without light no eye could have come into existence nor could man have had any perceptions connected with it. As Goethe says, “If the eye were not born of like nature to the sun it could never look upon the sun,” and “The eye is a creation of the light.”

The Mystical Christ, spoken of by those whose spiritual sight is opened and who behold Him as Paul did, was not always in man. In pre-Christian times He was unattainable in any development through the Mysteries in the way in which He was to be found after the Mystery of Golgotha. That there might be an inner Christ and that the higher man could be born an historical Christ was needed, the Incarnation of the Christ in the Jesus. As the eye can originate only through the effect of light, so in order that there could be a Mystical Christ the historical Christ must have been there. Had there been no documents containing a biography of Jesus of Nazareth this could still be said and felt, for Jesus is not to be recognized through external writings. This fact was long known in the evolution of the West and will again be known. Spiritual Science will so formulate that it can draw together from out its various spheres what will lead to a real understanding of the Christ, and thereby to an understanding of Jesus. It has come about that Jesus has been actually alienated from the world and the methods of the Jesus investigations have melted away, but the deepening of ourselves in the Christ Being (in the Christ as a Being) will lead to a recognition of the greatness of Jesus of Nazareth.

This path, by which the Christ is first recognized through inward soul experience, leads through what really has developed out of the soul to the understanding of the Mystical Fact of Christianity, and of the gradual development of humanity, as being such that the Christ Event must take place within it as the most significant point in the evolution of man. The way leads through the Christ to Jesus. The Christ Idea bears fruitful seed that will bring humanity not merely to the apprehension of a general pantheistic Cosmic Spirit, but the individual man to the understanding of his own history; as he feels his Earth to be bound up with all cosmic existence so will he recognize that his past is bound up with a super-sensible and super-historical Event. This Event is that the Christ Being stands as a super-sensible Mystical Fact at the middle point of human evolution, and that so will He be recognized by the humanity of the future apart from all external historical research and documents. Christ will remain the strong cornerstone of mankind's evolution. Man will bring the forces out of himself to renew his own history, and therewith also the history of the evolution of the world.

• 1. Theosophy was the original term, but in later lectures Dr. Sterner changed the word to Anthroposophy.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

There are world riddles which not only meet us when we turn our attention to the great events of life, but which meet us at every touch and turn in everyday life. We could bring forward many such riddles of life, one such is that which shall occupy us today: the question of the origin of evil. It is one of those riddles which meet us in everyday life but which can only find an answer if we go back to the sources and origin of life. Such a question especially shows us in the way it has been treated by man since ancient times that really it can only fruitfully be approached by what we call spiritual science or the theosophical world view. Without that important insight in the world, without that penetration to the sources of existence which can flow to us through this stream of cultural life, an answer is not possible. Hence you will have to undertake with me a really wide path to the sources of existence in order to penetrate this, in a certain connection, everyday enigma. He who only regards the world with that mood flowing out of materialism which follows the course of actions only with the senses cannot find an answer to this question in the remotest degree.

Evil arises for us, but of course not in its real sense, in the inferior being in human life. The wise person who is also a believer asks how it is reconcilable with a wise ordering of the world which one also calls providence, that this providence lets man sink to what we call evil—that the Godhead lets man become evil in order then to punish him. Not merely the simple believer understands it thus but we hear the same in a poem which the young Goethe composed when he calls these words to a divine spirituality:

Thou let'st the poor man come to grief,
Then leavest him to his pain.

This question becomes really impenetrable to one who stands on less religious ground. Without a soul-spiritual basis we come to no ordered concept of evil, let alone any connection with the cosmic spirit. Since man was able to think, the leaders of man, the thinkers, have tried to solve the question: Whence comes evil? What meaning has it?

We must look back for once into that past age of Persian myths and the continuous conflict of Ormuzd against the evil powers already designated as Ahriman, a continuous fighter against the good. Ahriman is there shown us as the force which in conflict causes a strengthening of the good spirit. If with a great leap we immerse ourselves in the deep meaning of a German thinker, Jakob Böhme, then we find his writings and the continuous course of his life entirely filled with the question as to the origin of evil. Jakob Böhme says that a multiplicity only arises out of a unity, but the multiplicity must be guided however only by the will of the unity, as for example the two hands, which if they are not directed by one will are separate members. Without this guiding unity we can create no great work. These hands can storm against each other, they can mangle each other. The possibility is just then given when that which we call freedom is given to the two. As long as the two hands are determined by the personality, and as long as one will rule them, they will not turn against each other.

And here a feeling already flows into Jakob Böhme that evil has something to do with love. When the Divine Being flowing through the world so loves the world that it extends Being to everything and holds nothing back, in order to give to the multiplicity as great a freedom as possible then the many can strive against each other.

We could speak at length about this if we let the thinkers pass before us, we could bring forward many examples from the great epochs but we would always get only a kind of philosophical answer. Today however we do not want philosophical answers, and so without deviation we would occupy ourselves with the spiritual world in order to get a firm point for the answering of our question. In order not to expand our mode of observation too far I should like at once to go to the heart of the matter, and for this we must bring quite briefly the nature of man before the soul. We are clear that evil must have something to do with human nature.

If we consider man from the standpoint of what the eyes see and the hands grasp then we only have but one part of human nature in the sense of spiritual science. We only see the physical part of man which he has in common with all apparently lifeless beings. Everything to be found in the human body is also existing there, only of course these mineral forces exist in man in quite a special manner. They are so complicatedly interwoven) so manifoldly built up that the physical body would fall asunder through its own physical laws unless something penetrated it like water penetrates a sponge, something which combats in each man in each moment all disturbances in the physical body. We call this fighter the etheric or life body. In each one of you the physical body would be exposed in every moment to decay unless that fighter, that victor which we call the etheric or life body were in you. Man has this in common with the whole of living nature, this fighter is there in everything that lives. In the moment when at death the physical body is separated from the etheric body then it follows physical laws, it decays and passes over into lifeless nature. The etheric body is something that is regarded by science today as something impossible. Yet we cannot enter further into that but must bring forth the matter only sketchily. Besides the etheric body man has a third member of his being. For one whose spiritual eyes are opened this third member is always visible. You can present this third member logically to yourselves.

We ask ourselves—Are the physical and etheric bodies everything? A simple consideration is enough to show that there is really something existing which stands far nearer to man than his bones, muscles, blood and nerves. Something lies quite close as a reality that is the sum of what we call feelings, instincts, passions. That belongs to us in reality and is existing in the same space where blood, muscles, nerves, exist. We have this part of human nature in common only with the animals, not with the plants.

Now there is a fourth member through which man is the crown of creation. The fourth member of his being is that which enables him to comprise everything which is in him, in the name ‘I’. This name ‘I’ is a name which already hides the secret nature of his being in the distinction which it shows compared with all other names which we have in language. Each person can call a chair “chair”, a table “table” etc., yet the name ‘I’ no one can hear from outside, it must come from one’s own soul. Each object can have its name resounding to us from outside, the ‘I’ can only be heard coming from oneself. All world views which were built on what we call spiritual science have always felt this. In the old Hebraic religion you find for this intimate name of the soul the unutterable Name of God. Why is it so called? If the soul is to hear her true name then something speaks in the soul which can be united with the soul without penetrating it through any organ from outside. The ‘I’ must resound from out of the soul itself. A spark of divine being is in the soul in which it utters its own name ‘I’.

That which a distorted philosophy has also wanted to find is the true significance of the word “Jahve”, the unutterable name of the divine soul-part in man. This was also meant when, in ancient Egypt, the veiled image of Sais was referred to. We can read the inscriptions: “I am Who was, Who is, and Who will be. My veil no mortal has lifted.” An investigator, a German romanticist said something correct out of an extraordinary instinct although he did not go deep enough: “No mortal has lifted the veil, we must become immortal.”

It was the view of the great Egyptian priestly magi that the ‘I’ was veiled but that the coverings must fall away. No other can solve the nature of the ‘I’ than the ‘I’ itself when it becomes conscious of its true nature by descending into its own depths where it grasps itself in its own immortality; then it knows what is concealed behind the veil. Of course only the very few today are inclined to gaze into the nature of the ‘I’, the utterance of Fichte still holds good: Most people would sooner regard themselves as a piece of lava in the moon than as an ‘I’. Since Fichte we have seen the coarse materialism flow into the culture of the 19th century. People today are very satisfied when they can partially know something physical and demonstrate it materialistically. They regard themselves as being more like a piece of lava in the moon than an ‘I’. It would be nonsensical to speak of the higher members of man's nature if in the sense of spiritual investigation one were to speak of the fourth member as a mere phenomenon of the physical body. Naturally spiritual investigation must have something in this sphere which must appear very stupid to a person who so often thinks today that everything must rest on the basis of scientific facts. That which occurs in the etheric body, the astral body and the ‘I’ is not the effect of the physical body but the reverse. What transpires in the physical and etheric bodies is the work of the astral body. Only when one gradually raises oneself to this view is one able to answer this question.

Just consider for example processes which meet us every day. Something arouses in us the feeling of shame. There is something in me of which I desire my environment should see nothing—I blush. Another process is the feeling of fear, noticeable through pallor. With shame a stream of blood rises to the head. With fear the blood recedes back from the head into the inner part of the body. What has happened? A soul process works on the body. Each of these events appears as the result of a soul process. They are indications of how soul working plays into the material. These effects in what is material are not so easily perceptible today. They have more or less withdrawn because of the mighty transformations which the physical body has undergone (as compared with earlier forms of existence). But the further we go back in human evolution all the more do spiritual influences get the upper hand.

There are indeed people today who go so far as to deny the working of the soul on the material body. One might not think that people exist with such materialistic views but there is in America a theological school which calls itself pragmatism. They have brought their views to an expression which reveals the grotesqueness of the materialism advocated therein. We need merely bring this utterance for once to our mind: “Man does not weep because he is sad, but he is sad because he weeps.” It is obvious here how the materialistic world view comes into contradiction with the healthy human understanding.

It is a fact that must appear natural to us that such consequences are drawn, and they appear today in numerous spheres; only they do not come to the surface in such grotesque fashion. If we now keep firm that physical processes are effects of the spiritual-psychic then it will no longer appear wrong to us if, going back into very ancient times of human evolution we find these effects are all the more significant the further we go back, so that we have to reckon with far-reaching spiritual influences in ancient times of human evolution which today are concealed.

You know perhaps that the theosophical view says that human existence runs its course in repeated earth lives. We will only bring that forward briefly. Man goes through many earth lives in his evolutionary path to ever higher perfection. We say in spiritual investigation that everything that lives is subject to transformation. Everything in the world is subject to such transformation, not only man but also mighty worlds are subject to continual change. Just as when we regard the single human being and say “That which transpires in the present life between birth and death is the result of former incarnations,” so we can look to a whole heavenly body and we only understand such a body in the sense of spiritual science when we know that it has acquired in former lives that which it has become today. We also say of the earth and planets that they have passed through other incarnations. As the spiritually highly developed man can look back to former earth lives so earlier planetary conditions can be perceived from the standpoint of spiritual science. We point back to the previous planetary condition of the earth, and this pre-earth is called in spiritual science Cosmos of Wisdom.

A glance at what is around you can make clear to you why we look back to this pre-earth as the cosmos of wisdom. Just regard man’s physical body. Look at one piece. Take a piece of the thigh bone which is composed of countless scaffoldings and members. It is an artistically constructed structure built with wonderful wisdom. It is so constructed through engineering art full of wisdom that the thigh bone, in spite of its relatively small strength, is able to carry the upper body. No engineer is able to construct such a bridge-like structure with such wisdom, and whoever looks at this wonderful human structure knows what great wisdom is contained in it. We know however also that other members of man are not yet so wise. We need merely think how the passions and impulses of the astral body work. What we eat and drink often contain heart poisons, and yet the heart is built so full of wisdom that it can bear these attacks for decades. Everywhere we find this Wisdom spread out. In the structure of the body we find this wisdom everywhere, in each blossom, in each animal, and we see how the world is penetrated by this wisdom.

Let us look at the beaver and his dam, building it with marvellous art—if one measures the angles then one will find they are quite exactly measured. So we could observe bit by bit everything that surrounds us. Could we now extract this wisdom from out the world unless it were there within it? The materialistic mood denies that the wisdom which man draws out is in the phenomena. But a natural thinking would tell you that something which man extracts from nature must be contained in it. As little as one can drink water from a glass if none is in it, just as little can one extract wisdom from the world if none is in it. But this wisdom is there and spiritual science knows that this wisdom was in all things at the beginning of earth evolution. Thus in a plant seed for example was a beech; as a proof of this we see a beech tree grows from it and not an oak. The earth carried the wisdom which meets us today already when the things around us were still in germ. Just as truly as the seed comes not from the earth but from the plant, so truly the seed from which our earth was born arose from what the earth was previously. That was the cosmos of wisdom. That which you see today in each leaf, in each organ in man's form, in everything spread out around you, slowly and gradually arose, formed itself member by member and only appeared after wisdom had struggled with wisdom. We had an embodiment on the previous stage of our earth where the wisdom of things was worked out in which, so to say, the things in their wisdom were worked over. What has our earth, to which this Wisdom has come over, for a task? It has its special mission. Just as its predecessor developed the wisdom which surrounds us today bit by bit, similarly our earth today develops bit by hit another cosmic force, and this force is love. Therefore in spiritual investigation we call the earth the Cosmos of Love. The evolution of the earth so runs its course that love appears as a force becoming more and more dominant, and when the earth will have reached its goal then everything will be penetrated by the force of love. Hence we call the earth the cosmos of love. Just as on the previous cosmos the beginning was made with un-wisdom and only gradually was the form of wisdom worked out, so this earth runs its course so that gradually love is worked out. Then when the earth has reached its goal love will be spread out everywhere, everything will be permeated with love, and the earth will have beings on it who will find love just as we find wisdom in everything that surrounds us. Those who will be on the new embodiment of the earth will stand wonderingly before love, just as we stand in wonderment before wisdom. Our earth has the holy mission of letting flow the impulse of love into things. The impulse is here to fulfil this mission, to make it deed. Thus we have to think of the structure of our earth as the cultivation of love going through the entire earth evolution of man. If we see this then we have a handle for understanding today's question, only we must be clear that man is not the only being around us. You know the spiritual investigator does not speak of the spiritual worlds as of something far off in the clouds, but he speaks of them in a natural and self understood way. A person born blind who has his eyes opened suddenly sees everything flooded with light and radiance. He sees a new world around him which was existing before just as light and colours existed before his eyes were opened. In this world which only an unlogical thinking can deny, other beings are existing with other forms of spirituality than man has. We can form an idea of these spiritual beings by bringing to mind that man is in a continual evolution. He must ascend ever higher and higher. In each incarnat-ion he experiences something, he becomes an ever more perfect being.

What perspectives thus open out? We see the great ideals of Man, the Man of the future elevated like a God. We see that as man today stands higher than animal and plant thus will the future man stand to his present existence. Spiritual science knows already today that beings stand above man at his present stage in evolution who are as perfect as we will be in a far future. They are beings highly exalted above man and who long ago passed through the stage we are at today, who have a purely spiritual life and no longer have need to descend to a physical body. Thus we see as man begins his earthly existence, as he leads over what was existing of him from the cosmos of wisdom, then not only he enters the cosmos of love but also higher spiritual guiding beings.

Who are these? The same as those who let their wisdom flow into the cosmos of wisdom. The same as those who built that cosmos of wisdom out of their creative wisdom. What we have finished before us today has been created by these beings. They are the possessors of productive wisdom. They have put in their wisdom. Because previously in the cosmos of wisdom they developed creatively in reference to wisdom, they have acquired the power of letting love trickle as it were on the earth to all earth men, and bit by bit this love flows to the earth. We need merely cast a brief glance at this earth, then we see how love gradually developed. It appears to us in ancient times in the narrowest limits. Who loved each other in ancient times? At first only small groups of those blood-related. Then we see love spread beyond the narrowest blood relationship. The circle love draws together becomes ever wide. At first we see marriage only between those closely related. Then love spreads to a whole tribe, and then in the Old Testament the whole people is loved, and he who does not belong to the people is foreign. The way is far but we have taken the great step where love is led over from the principle of blood relationship into the spiritual, to the great brother-bond which should span the earth to the Christ-Principle. This is referred to in the utterance: Who does not forsake father and mother, brother and sister and follow Me … etc.

This utterance is not to be taken literally. It refers to the fact that love should leave the narrow circle of blood relationship and become spiritual. It should embrace each soul; that is the great mission of Christianity, to make love more and more spiritual until it reaches the form of an all embracing love with which the whole earth should be permeated, so that the beings of the next world will find this love in all things as we have found wisdom. So we see that during earth existence the mission is fulfilled in that what man has brought over from the pre-earth is permeated with love. The assimilation of love is the task man has to develop in the earthly course of the human race. Thus we can see that a whole force which leads men together, progresses ever further into ever widening circles.

That is possible only to love. Let us go back once more from the cosmos of love to the cosmos of wisdom. What was existing of man at the transition? That which I described as the four members of his being making man the crown of creation was not yet existing at the beginning of our earth evolution, only the beginnings of the physical, etheric and astral bodies. But just as a seed decays and yet rises again letting a plant arise, so man disappears at the transition from the cosmos of wisdom to the cosmos of love, to arise again on our present earth and gradually the ‘I’ develops. This I must be there as the counterpart to the force of love. Love has other conditions of existence than wisdom. Wisdom can run where all the single members are dependent on each other. Wisdom can rule where a being in love holds sway. But if love is to pass from one being to another that can only happen where it is a free gift which must be there as a Father force.

Only such beings have the force for love who have the divine force for the ever greater acquirement of freedom.

The I is the counter-pole of love. The I impressed itself in the same measure as love impressed itself. That could only happen gradually in evolution. In the beginning blood speaks, the blood which is related to the loved being. Here love appears to us at the most primitive stage. Love develops more and more to a soul-spiritual force, and therewith the ‘I’ makes itself free. But in order to understand the true evolution of man within the cosmos of love we must keep one thing in mind. We must see that in the cosmos things go on as in a school. Here some always remain behind. similarly this happens in the cosmos. Those beings of whom we have spoken who stand exaltedly above man, those created in productive wisdom could pass over to love. But some remained behind who did not reach the final goal of the cosmos of wisdom, who did not finish their task. They still had to work at wisdom and could not yet stream out love which was not yet given to them.

They are beings who stand between the exalted beings and man. Spiritual science calls them the Luciferic beings under the dominion of Lucifer. One may laugh but just as, for example, magnetic forces are around us, so are the luciferic. They extend into the cosmos of love from out of the cosmos of wisdom. They were the beings who endowed man with their small wisdom. They created the subjective, intellectual wisdom of man in the ‘I’ which first became impregnated as it were therewith. An independence was given to this I which only suited it on the cosmos of wisdom if this love-filled wisdom had reached a definite stage. Thus the ‘I’ got a force which it should now transform in independence. Only in the measure in which the Christ principle illuminated it did the ‘I’ become capable of placing itself in harmony with all the forces of its environment on the earth. Before this approach to the Christ ideal is attained such beings again and again take firm hold in man, who are the opposing powers of the ‘I’. Their force is a separating force which will separate the ‘I’ too soon. The Luciferic beings lead a conflict against everything which brings men together.

This force has also its good task. It hinders man falling into, as it were, a primeval mash of love. Just as man had to be prepared for love, so earlier they had to be prepared for wisdom. Thus this luciferic principle is to be seen as the principle of illumination of independence. So we have two forces which lead humanity in two different directions and therewith we have the principle of the independent I which consolidates itself out of this conflict. Without this independence love would not be possible; without this independence the origin of evil would not be possible; love makes evil necessary. Hence comes the principle of love which arises from the spirits of love, and the principle of wisdom which arises from the spirits of wisdom. Both lead us from soul to soul, spirit to spirit, I to I. Evil rests on this spiritual fact. The possibility of evil was given with the possibility of love. Only because the God of the earth is the God of Love, and beings became independent I-men was the origin of evil possible. Love made evil possible.

Man first attains free love and true greatness through the Luciferic powers, and only thereby he takes the forces of evil into himself. The forces of love must penetrate the whole earth, must have overcome evil, have converted it as it were by the end of the earth's course. We see that what man owes to evil is a good. He owes to evil freedom. The origin of evil lies in the Luciferic principle as lies also the origin of freedom, with which is given the possibility of the development of love.

If we think of the earth without everything evil then only a tiny force of love is necessary to overcome the forces of evil. The forces of love grow because they have the task of transforming the existing evil in love. Thus we really see something of what Böhme felt, that evil strengthens the mission of love. Thus we see together with the origin of evil the meaning of evil, and if we consider evil spiritually scientifically then we see evil justified in a certain way. Then wherever it meets us we regard it with other feelings.

If this penetrates our feelings then it makes quite a different impression on us, not for one who just grasps it speculatively but for one who grasps it theosophically. If we have quiet hours and elevate our spirit to the great riddles then we must experience something so mighty that in evil we yet feel the good. Thus we permeate ourselves with feelings which then go with us in life at every step. We face the whole world thinking, feeling and acting, and that is most essential. Oh, we will become mild if we see what formerly enraged us. These feelings which result as the foundation from those quiet hours constitute the theosophical life. We shall consider this tomorrow even more applied to daily life. Today we have only been able to indicate the function of evil in fleeting outline.

We have attained the view that we are short-sighted if we bring forward as an objection to the evil, the wisdom, the love, the spirit of the world. We have seen that this spirit of love powerfully flows through the world, and is such a good spirit that once it brought evil into the world in order to bring about the most effective, beneficial good.

There are some occult and spiritual-scientific truths I want to consider in connection with Richard Wagner's Parsifal.¹⁸⁵A strange, deep link exists between the phenomenon of the great artist Richard Wagner and the spiritual movement called Theosophy today. People are gradually beginning to realize that Richard Wagner and his works represent a great sum of occult power. But something else will also emerge in future, and that is that there is much more to the Richard Wagner phenomenon than he himself could possibly know. It is a mystery connected with many important figures, particularly artists, that a power lives in them of which they themselves have no knowledge.

If on the one hand we understand that there was much more to Richard Wagner than he himself was aware of, we must not forget, on the other hand, that he was not able to reach the ultimate level of wisdom, and that Richard Wagner's art therefore shows itself in quite a peculiar light to the occultist. When it comes to his works, one has to say to oneself that there is much more to them, something mysterious which lies behind it all.

It is indeed interesting to see the deeper currents in the background. Richard Strauss¹⁸⁶ said on one occasion that it was possible to see much more in Richard Wagner than people usually do. He put it more or less like this: ‘People who insist one should not look beyond Richard Wagner's work seem to me to be like people who also do not want to go beyond the flower they see. They will never know the secret of the flower. And is much the same with people who cannot think of anything further in the case of a great artist.’

Richard Wagner tackled subjects of tremendous significance. You keep finding names in his works that relate to very ancient sacred traditions. In Parsifal he achieved something that is closely bound up with the power that had such a strange influence in the last third of the 19th century.

To understand his figures and themes we must first cast an eye on profound secrets of human evolution, going back a few thousand years in history. All his life Richard Wagner made profound studies of human affairs and the secret of the human soul. In his youth he sought to explore the secret of reincarnation. The draft of a play he was working on in 1856 shows this. It was called The Victors.¹⁸⁷ Wagner stopped work on it later on, for he could not find a musical solution to the problem of the ‘victors’. A dramatic solution would have been perfectly possible. The story of the play was as follows. A young man in far distance India, Ananda by name, a Brahmin by caste, was loved by a girl called Prakriti who belonged to the lowest caste. Ananda became a pupil of the Buddha. He did not return Prakriti's love, which cast her into deep sorrow. Ananda withdrew from the world to dedicate himself to the religious life. A Brahman then told the girl why her fate was the way it was. In an earlier life she, a member of the Brahman caste, had rejected the love of this same young man, who was then of the lowest caste. Hearing this she, too, turned to the Buddha, and both of them were then pupils of the same teacher.

Wagner had intended to work on this theme in 1856. A year later the subject he had failed to deal with came to him in another way. He conceived the great idea of his Parsifal in 1857. It is a strange story of how the whole mystery of Parsifal came to Richard Wagner at one particular moment.¹⁸⁸ It was on Good Friday 1857 in the Wesendonk Villa on the Lake of Zurich. He saw nature outside growing, shooting and sprouting. And at that moment he understood the connection between nature coming to new life and Christ's death on the cross. That is the secret of the holy grail. From that moment, Richard Wagner lived with the idea of presenting the secret of the holy grail to the world in music.

To understand this unusual experience we must go back a few thousand years in history. Richard Wagner put down his beautiful thoughts on human evolution in writing under the title ‘Heroism and Christianity’.¹⁸⁹ Let us first of all consider the kind of teaching given in occult societies in the 16th or 17th century. There have been mystery centres at all times. The knowledge taught there was at the same time religion, a religion that was also wisdom. It is not possible to really understand the mysteries unless one understands that there is a world of the spirit.

The different realms of nature lie spread out around us—minerals, plants, animals and human beings. We consider the human realm to be the highest of the four. Just as there are realms around man that are lower than he is, so there are higher spirits above him, at many levels. The different levels of spirits that are above man have always been called ‘gods’. Wisdom was taught in the mystery centres in a way that made human beings able to commune with the gods at a conscious level. Such people would always and wherever mystery centres existed be called ‘initiates’. They were not merely given words of wisdom but experienced realities within those mysteries. Today's mystery centres are of a different kind than those of antiquity and medieval times.

An important mystery centre existed in a region of northern Spain at the time when the crusades began and a little before that. The mysteries of those times were called ‘late Gothic mysteries’. Their initiates were called Tempelisen or Tempeleisen or Knights of the Holy Grail. Lohengrin was one of them. The community of these Knights of the Grail was rather different from another knightly community. This had its seat in Britain, in Wales. All the stories of King Arthur and his Round Table have to do with this other initiate community.

In very early times, long before Christianity, a large population moved from west to east on this earth. This was a very long time ago. There was a time when Atlantis existed in a region that is now part of the Atlantic Ocean. Our far distant ancestors, the Atlanteans, lived there. The whole population of Europe and Asia, all the way to India, were descendants of the Atlanteans. Conditions of life on Atlantis were very different from those in which people lived later on. Atlanteans lived in a completely hierarchic system guided by such initiates. All government and rule came from the initiates in those times. One famous initiate school was in the north of present-day Russia. Its initiates were called trotts. Other schools were in western Europe, their initiates known as druids. All social institutions to control the masses of humanity came from these initiates.

Let us take a look at those very early schools. What kind of secret was taught in them? It is only the form of the teaching that changes with time. It is truly remarkable that the mystery which Richard Wagner experienced inwardly was taken to its highest development in those schools. It is the connection between nature coming alive in spring and the mystery of the cross.

The first thing pupils had to understand was that all power of bringing forth that lies outside the animal and human realms may also be seen in the plant world. In spring, the divine power of creation sprouts forth from Mother Earth. It had to be understood that there is a connection between the power that comes forth when the earth covers itself with a green carpet and the power of divine creation. The pupils would be told: ‘Out there you see a power in the flowers as they open that condenses in the seed. Countless seeds will come from the chalice of the flower, and put in the soil they will bring forth something new. One can now feel with the whole of one's being that the events that happen out there in nature are nothing else but the processes that also happen in the human and animal worlds, but in the plant this happens without desire and is wholly chaste.’

The infinite innocence and chastity slumbering in the flower chalices of plants had to live in the hearts of the pupils. They were then told: ‘The sunbeam opens the flowers. It brings forth the power from those flowers. Two things come together—the opening flower and the sunbeam. Other realms—the animal and human worlds—are between the plant world and the divine realm. All these realms are only the transition from the plant world to the divine realm. In the divine realm we see once again a realm of innocence and chastity, as in the plant world. In the animal and human worlds we see a realm of desire.’

And then the teachers would speak of the future: ‘The time will come when all lusts and desires shall vanish. Then the chalice will open from up above, just as the chalice of a flower opens, and it will look down on the human being. Just as the sunbeam enters into the plant, so will man's own purified power unite with this divine chalice.’

We can invert the flower chalice in our minds, letting it bend down from above, from heaven, and we can invert the sunbeam, so that it rises from the human being to the heavens. This inverted flower chalice was shown to be a reality in the mysteries and called the holy grail. The real chalice of a plant is the inverted holy grail. Everyone who gains occult knowledge comes to know that the sunbeam represents something known as the ‘magic wand’. The magic wand is a superstitious version of a symbol that represents a spiritual reality. In the mysteries this magic wand was known as the bloodstained lance. We are shown the origin of the grail on the one hand and of the blood-stained lance on the other, the original magic wand known to true occultists.

I am just touching on things of great profundity, significant truths that took place in that belt in northern and western Europe. Richard Wagner sensed a great deal of all this, as did his friend the Comte de Gobineau,¹⁹⁰ a deep thinker.

To say what lies at the base of the mysteries of which I have been speaking, it was knowledge of the fluid that streams in animal and human veins. Quite rightly, Goethe wrote ‘Blood is a sap of very special kind’ in his Faust.¹⁹¹ Many things are connected with the blood. We shall understand what blood signifies if we grasp and understand the tremendous revolution that has occurred in the mysteries. In earlier times, it was known among the European people that important things depend on the way people are related by blood. Because of this, progress and development was never left to chance in those times. All these things were arranged out of occult wisdom. It was known that if the development of small tribal communities was limited to that community, with no one coming in from outside, individuals born within that community would have special powers. The consequences of letting different kinds of blood come together were known in the mysteries. They also knew exactly which tribe was right for a particular area. They knew that common blood was the source of specific human powers.

When the ancient bonds of blood relationship were broken, something also happened in the mysteries. Purposes which before had been achieved by means of blood relationship were now replaced with two specific spiritual preparations in the great mysteries. The lesser mysteries had the outward symbols of these—bread and wine. The two preparations were substances which had an effect in the spirit that was similar to the physical effect of the blood in our veins. When the ancient clairvoyance had gone, these two preparations took its place. Having learned all of theosophical wisdom, initiates would then be given these symbols from the chalice of Ceridwen.¹⁹² The purified blood could then be given to human beings from the chalice opening up from above. This is the true mystery, which at the time remained with a very small body of people.

In other parts of Europe the mysteries fell into decline and were then made profane in a disgusting, repulsive manner. Their symbol of the offering was a dish in which a bleeding head was placed. It was thought that something might be aroused in a human being on seeing this head. It was black magic that was being performed, the opposite of the mystery of the holy grail.

It was known at that time that the element which streams upwards in the chalice of the flower also lived in the human blood. It had to become pure and chaste again, like the sap of a flower. In the degenerate mysteries this was given a crude, materialistic form. In the north, people needed the sublimated blood as a symbol, and in the Eleusinian Mysteries the wine of Dionysus and the bread of Demeter. The cup of the grail made into something abhorrent, with the bleeding head, may be found again in the story of Herodias and the head of John. She was laughing at the mystery made profane.

The true secret of the great mysteries went to the Tempeleisen in northern Spain, guardians of the Grail. King Arthur's knights were more concerned with worldly affairs, but it was possible to prepare the Tempeleisen to receive an even more sublime secret, the great secret of Golgotha, the mystery of world history.

Christianity had its origin in the most mixed of nations, the Galileans, who were wholly alien to and outside all blood community. The redeemer founded his kingdom entirely outside the old blood community, beyond all blood bonds. The sublimated blood, purified blood, sprouts from the sacrificial death, the purification process. The blood that gives rise to wishes and desires must flow, it has to be sacrificed, it must run.

The sacred vessel with the purified blood was taken to Spain, to the Tempeleisen on Montsalvatch. Titurel, the ancestor, received the grail; before, it had been longed for. Now the overcoming of the blood had happened. The purely physical nature of the blood had been overcome by the spirit.

You can only understand what happened on Golgotha if, unlike a materialist, you know blood to be composed not only of material elements. It is indeed highly remarkable that Richard Wagner was only able to find the sacred mood for his Parsifal because he knew that it was not only a matter of the Redeemer's death but of the blood which had been purified and was a little bit different from ordinary blood. He himself spoke of the connection between the Redeemer's blood and the whole of humanity: ‘Having seen that the blood of what is known as the “white race” had a special capacity for conscious suffering and pain, we must now recognize the saviour's blood as the essence of suffering consciously willed, divine compassion that flows for the whole human race as its source and origin.’¹⁹³

Richard Wagner also wrote: ‘The blood in the redeemer's veins must thus have flowed forth as the result of the utmost endeavour of the will, a divine sublimate of the human race itself to save that race which in its noblest parts was falling into decline.’

It was because the redeemer had come from the greatest mix of nations that his blood was the sublimate of all human blood, human blood in its purified form.

Richard Wagner approached the great original mystery in a way hardly anyone else had dared to do. It is the very vigour he brought to this that made him a great artist. He should not be taken for an ordinary musician but someone with profound insight who sought to recreate the deep secrets of the holy grail for modern humanity. Before Richard Wagner wrote his Parsifal, people in Germany knew little about the mysteries and the figures which Richard Wagner then presented.

The initiation into the mysteries was in three stages, through which the individual had to go. The first stage was known as ‘dumbness’, the second ‘doubt’, the third ‘godliness’. In the first stage the human being would be taken away from all prejudice in the world, and told of the power in his own soul, his own power of love, so that he might see the inner light shine out. The second stage was that of doubt. This state of doubting everything came at the second stage of initiation. At a higher level it was then elevated to become inner godliness. In this third stage the initiand was guided to be consciously with the gods.

Perceval—pass through the vale—that was the name given to such initiands in medieval times.¹⁹⁴ Parsifal had to learn all this from experience. Richard Wagner's strange genius made him feel this on that Good Friday in 1857, feel the thread that had to run through the whole of Parsifal's development.

The Tempeleisen represented the inner, the true Christianity as against the Christianity of the Churches. It is evident everywhere in Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzifal that he wanted to show the spirit of that inner Christianity side by side with the Christianity of the Churches.

Remnants of the old profaned mysteries still existed in the Middle Ages. Everything that comes under this heading was epitomized in the name Klingsor. He was the black magician, in opposition to the white magic of the holy grail. Richard Wagner also showed him in opposition to the Tempeleisen.

Kundry is Herodias brought back to life. She symbolizes the power that brings forth nature, a power that can be both chaste and unchaste, but without direction. Chastity and lack of chastity have the same root, and it is a matter of ‘as the question, so the answer’. The productive power that shows itself in the flower chalice of the plant, going up through the other realms, is the same as in the Holy Grail. It merely has to go through purification in the purest, noblest form of Christianity, as we see it in Parsifal.

Kundry had to remain a black magician until Parsifal redeemed her. The whole confrontation between Parsifal and Kundry has the odour of the most profound wisdom. More than anyone else, Richard Wagner made it possible for people to take this in without knowing it. Richard Wagner was a missionary whose mission it was to give something full of significance to the world, without humanity being aware of this truth.

Wolfram von Eschenbach wrote his Parzifal as a plain and simple epic. That was sufficient in his day. People who had some degree of clairvoyance at that time understood Wolfram von Eschenbach. In the 19th century it was not possible to show the profound significance of the process in dramatic form. But there is a way of helping people's understanding without words, without concepts or ideas. This is through music. Wagner's music holds all the truths contained in Parsifal. The strange music written by Wagner would create quite specific vibrations in the ether bodies of those who listened to it. The ether body is connected with all the profound motions of the blood. Richard Wagner understood the secret of the purified blood. His melodies hold the vibrations that have to be in the human ether body when it becomes purified in the way that is necessary so that the secret of the grail may be received.

The strange way in which Richard Wagner was writing his books can only be understood if one goes into the realities that were behind Wagner. He knew very well that the human will receives a very special illumination from the spirit. He wrote that initially the will was a crude, instinctive element, but it gradually came to be refined. The intellect casts its light on the will and the human being becomes aware of pain and suffering, and this leads to purification. Referring to the ideas of his friend the Comte de Gobineau he wrote: "One cannot fail but realize the unity of the human race when reviewing its parts, and we are justified in saying that at its noblest it is the capacity of bearing pain and suffering in full awareness. In the light of this we ask where the outstanding nature of the white race lies, since we certainly must put it high above the others. With beautiful certainty, Gobineau perceives it to lie not in any exceptional development of its moral quality as such, but in a greater store of the fundamental characteristics from which those qualities arise. It would have to be sought in the fiercer yet also more delicate sensitivity of the will which reveals itself in a rich organization, in conjunction with the more astute intellect this requires; it will then be a matter of whether the intellect, under the impulses of a will that has great need, advances to clairvoyance, casting its own light back on to the will, and in this case subjugate it to become moral drive?

Richard Wagner was here speaking of the actual process in which the intellect casts its reflection on the will, and the human being become clairvoyant in the process.

Richard Wagner's work was to give religious depth to art and ultimately profound understanding of Christianity. He knew that Christianity was best presented through music. By rising to the inmost secrets of the world order we will on the one hand gain knowledge, but on the other also true godliness. There is a way of human development that teaches us the significance of this fact relating to Christianity.

• 185. See Rudolf Steiner's lectures given in Berlin on Richard Wagner and mysticism (in German, in GA 55) and on 22 and 19 March 1906 (in German, in GA 54).
• 186. Strauss, Richard (1864–1949). See Thomas, W. Richard Strauss und seine Zeitgenossen S. 46, 72, 75; München 1964.
• 187. Die Sieger. Entwurf, Zurich, Mai 1956, in Richard Wagner, Sämtliche Schriften und Dichtungen Band 11, Leipzig 1911. Wagner wrote to Mathilde Wesendonk from Paris in early August 1960: 'Only deep-thinking assumption of the transmigration of souls showed me the comforting point where everything finally comes together at one level of redemption, when the different lives lived, running separately but side by side in time have touched one another in understanding. According to the beautiful Buddhist belief the simple explanation of the absolute purity of Lohengrin is that he is a continuation of Parsifal who fought to gain his purity. In the same way Elsa would be at Lohengrin's level when reborn. The scheme for my Sieger has just presented itself to my mind as the final conclusion of Lohengrin. Here Savitri (Elsa) is wholly at Ananda's level. All the terrible tragedy of life would thus lie merely in the separateness of time and space. These, however, live only in our minds and have no reality beyond them. Someone with perfect clairvoyance would thus be able to explain even the greatest most tragic pain as mere error on the part of the individual. I believe this to be so. And in all truth it is wholly a matter of the pure and noble, which in itself is painless? Richard Wagner an Mathilde Wesendonk. Tagebuchblätter und Briefe 1853–1871. 36. Auflage S. 242. Berlin 1909.
• 188. ‘Lovely spring weather came; on Good Friday I woke up for the first time in this house to full sunshine. The small garden had grown green, the birds were singing, and I was finally able to sit on the parapet of the little house and enjoy the much longed-for quiet that held such promise. With my heart full of this, I suddenly said to myself that it was Good Friday and recalled the significance this reminder had held for me once before, in Wolfram's Parsifal. I had never taken the poem up again since that time in Marienbad when I developed the ideas for Meistersinger and Lohengrin. Now its ideal content came to me overwhelmingly, and with the Good Friday idea in mind I rapidly produced the outline for a whole dramatic piece, in three acts, and immediately made a few quick notes of it.' Wagner R. Mein Leben III. Band S. 133f Miünchen 1915.
• 189. Wagner R. Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen in 10 Banden, hersg. W. Golther. 10. Bd S. 275ff: ‘Ausfiihrungen zu Religion und Kunsf, 2. 'Heldentum und Christentum’. Leipzig o. J.
• 190. Gobineau, Joseph Arthur, Comte de (1816–82), considered the 'intellectual father, of Nietzsche and the actual inventor of ‘super-man’ and ‘supermorality’. His Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines, 4 vols, was published in 1853–55; translated in 1915 and published in English as The Inequality of Human Races.
• 191. Faust 1, verse 1740.
• 192. Ch. W. Heckethom wrote in Geheime Gesellschqften, Geheimbilnde und Geheimlehren S. 60 (Leipzig 1900): Druid culture encompassed all religious and philosophical study known in those lands at the time. The principal deities may be said to have been male and female, the great father and the great mother Hu and Ceridwen, in every respect the same as Osiris and Isis or Bacchus and Ceres, etc. See Rudolf Steiner's public lecture given in Berlin on 6 May 1909, ‘The European mysteries and their initiates’ (GA 57) (Anthroposophical Quarterly 1964: 9:1).
• 193. See ref. 189, 10. Bd S. 282.
• 194. Wolfram von Eschenbach (c. 1170–1220) interpreted the name he gave to the hero of his epic poem V. 140.16 f. in this way.

The theme on which I propose to speak in these lectures seems to me of peculiar importance in view of present conditions. At the very beginning let me emphasise that there is no element of sensationalism or anything of that kind in the choice of the title: The Fifth Gospel. For I hope to show that in a definite sense and one that is of particular importance to us in the present age, it is possible to speak of such a Fifth Gospel and that in fact no title is more suitable for what is intended.

Although, as you will hear, this Fifth Gospel has never yet been written down, in future times of humanity it will certainly be put into definite form. In a certain sense, however, it would be true to say that it is as ancient as the other four Gospels.

In order that I may be able to speak about this Fifth Gospel, we shall have, by way of introduction, to study certain matters which are essential to any real understanding of it. Let me say, to begin with, that the time is certainly not very far distant when even in the lowest grade schools and in the most elementary education, the branch of knowledge commonly called History will be presented quite differently. It is certain—and these lectures should be a kind of confirmation of it—that in times to come the concept or idea of Christ will play quite a different and much more important part in the study of history, even the most elementary, than has been the case before. I know that such a statement seems highly paradoxical, but let us remember that there were times by no means very far distant, when countless human hearts turned to Christ with feelings of immeasurably greater fervour than is to be found to-day, even among the most learned Christians in the West. In earlier times these feelings of devotion were incomparably more intense. Anyone who studies modern writings and reflects on the main interests of people to-day will have the impression that enthusiasm and warmth of feeling for the Christ Idea are on the wane, especially so in those who claim an up-to-date education. In spite of this, I have just said that as this age of ours advances, the Christ Idea will play a much more important part than hitherto in the study of human history. Does this not seem to be a complete contradiction?

And now we will approach the subject from another side. I have already been able to speak on several occasions in this very town about the significance and the content of the Christ Idea; and in books and lecture-courses which are available here, many deep teachings of Spiritual Science concerning the secrets of the Christ Being and of the Christ Idea are to be found. Anyone who assimilates w hat has been said in lectures, lecture-courses and indeed in all our literature, will realise that any real understanding of the Christ Being needs extensive preparation, that the very deepest concepts and thoughts must be summoned to his aid if he desires to reach some comprehension of Christ and of the Christ Impulse working through the centuries. If nothing else indicated the contrary, it might possibly be thought that a knowledge of the whole of Theosophy or Anthroposophy is necessary before there can be any true conception of Christ. But if we turn aside from this and look at the development of the spiritual life of the last centuries, we are met from century to century by the existence of much profound and detailed knowledge aiming at a comprehension of the Christ and His revelation. For centuries and centuries men have applied their noblest, most profound thought in attempts to reach an understanding of Christ. Here too, it might seem as if only the most highly intellectual achievements of men would suffice for such understanding. But is this, in fact, the case? Quite simple reflection will show that it is not.

Let us, as it were, lay on one scale of a spiritual balance, everything contributed hitherto by erudition, science and even by theosophical conceptions towards an understanding of Christ. On the other scale let us lay all the deep feelings, all the impulses within men which through the centuries have caused their souls to turn to the Being called Christ. It will be found that the scale upon which have been laid all the science, all the learning, even all the theosophy that can be applied to explain the figure of Christ, will rapidly rise, and the scale upon which have been laid all the deep feelings and impulses which have turned men towards the Christ will sink. It is no exaggeration to say that a force of untold strength and greatness has gone forth from Christ and that erudite scholarship concerning Him has contributed least of all to this impulse. Truly it would have boded ill for Christianity if, in order to cleave to Christ, men had had to resort to all the learned dissertations of the Middle Ages, of the Schoolmen, of the Church Fathers, or even to what Theosophy contributes to-day towards an understanding of Christ. This whole body of knowledge would be of very little help. I hardly think that anyone who studies the march of Christianity through the centuries with an unprejudiced mind can raise any serious argument against this line of thought; but the subject can be approached from still another side.

Let us turn our thought to the times before Christianity had come into existence. I need only mention something of which those sitting here are certainly aware. I need only remind you of the ancient Greek dramas, especially in their earlier forms. When portraying a god in combat or a human being in whose soul a god was working, these dramas make the sovereignty and activity of the gods concretely and perceptibly real. Think of Homer and of how his great Epic is all inwoven with the workings of the Spiritual; think of the great figures of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle. These names bring before our mind's eye a spiritual life that in a certain domain is supreme. If we leave all else aside and look only at the single figure of Aristotle who lived centuries before the founding of Christianity, we find there an achievement which, in a certain respect, has remained unsurpassed to this very day. The scientific exactitude of Aristotle's thinking is something so phenomenal, even when judged by present-day standards, that it is said: human thinking was raised by him to an eminence unsurpassed to this day.

And now for a moment we will take a strange hypothesis, but one that will help us to understand what will be said in these lectures. We will imagine that there were no Gospels at all to tell us anything about the figure of Christ, that the earliest records presented to man to-day in the form of the New Testament were simply not in existence. Leaving on one side all that has been said about the founding of Christianity, let us study its progress as historical fact, observing what has happened among men through the centuries of the Christian era ... In other words, without the Gospels, without the story of the Acts of the Apostles, without the Epistles of St. Paul, we will consider what has actually come to pass. This, of course, is pure hypothesis, but what is it that has really happened?

Turning our attention first of all to the South of Europe in a certain period of history, we find a very highly developed spiritual culture, as represented in Aristotle; it was a sublime spiritual life, developing along particular channels through the subsequent centuries. At the time when Christianity began to make its way through the world, large numbers of men who had assimilated the spiritual culture of Greece were living in the South of Europe. If we follow the evolution of Christianity to the time of Celsus—that strange individual who was such a violent opponent of Christianity—and even on into the second and third centuries after Christ, we find in Greece and Italy numbers of highly cultured men who had absorbed the sublime Ideas of Plato, men whose subtlety of thought seems like a continuation of that of Aristotle. Here were minds of refinement and power, versed in Greek learning; here were Romans who added to the delicate spirituality of Greek thought the element of aggressive personality characteristic of Roman civilisation. Such was the world into which the Christian impulse made its way. Truly, in respect of intellectuality and knowledge of the world the representatives of this Christian impulse seem to be uncivilised and uneducated in comparison with the numbers and numbers of learned Romans and Greeks. Men lacking in culture make their way into a world of mellowed intellectuality. And now we witness a remarkable spectacle. Through these simple, primitive people who were its first bearers, Christianity spreads comparatively quickly through the South of Europe. And if with an understanding of the nature of Christianity acquired, let us say, from Theosophy, we think of these simple, primitive natures who spread Christianity abroad in those times, we shall realise that they knew nothing of these things. We need not think here of any conception of Christ in His great cosmic setting, but of much simpler conceptions of Christ. Those first bearers of the Christian impulse who found their way into the world of highly developed Greek learning, had nothing to bring into this arena of Greco-Roman life save their own inwardness, their personal connection with the Christ Whom they so deeply loved; for this connection was as dear to them as that with their own kith and kin. Those who brought into the Greco-Roman world in those days the Christianity that has continued to our own time, were not well-informed theosophists, were by no means highly educated people. The Gnostics who were the learned theosophists of those times had, it is true, risen to sublime ideas concerning Christ, but even they contributed only what must be placed in the rising scale of the balance. If everything had depended upon the Gnostics, Christianity would certainly not have made its victorious headway through the world. It was no highly developed intellectuality that came over from the East, causing the comparatively rapid decline of the old Hellenic and Roman culture. There we have one side of the picture.

We see the other side when we consider men of intellectual distinction, beginning with Celsus—the opponent of Christianity who even then brought forward all the arguments that are still valid to-day—down to Marcus Aurelius, the philosopher on the throne. We think of the Neo-Platonists with their subtle scholarship, whose ideas make those of philosophy to-day seem mere child's play, so greatly do they surpass them in loftiness and breadth of vision. Thinking of all the arguments against Christianity brought from the standpoint of Greek philosophy by these men of high intellectual eminence in the world of Greco-Roman culture, the impression we get is that they did not understand the Christ Impulse. Christianity was spread by men who understood nothing of its real nature; it was opposed by a highly developed culture incapable of grasping its significance. Truly, Christianity makes a strange entry into the world—with adherents and opponents alike understanding nothing of its real nature. And yet ... men bore within their souls the power to secure for the Christ Impulse its victorious march through the world.

And now let us think of men like Tertullian who with a certain greatness and power entered the lists on behalf of Christianity. Tertullian was a Roman who, so far as his language is concerned, may almost be said to have re-created the Latin tongue; the very certainty of aim with which he restored to words a living meaning lets us recognise him as a personality of real significance. But if we ask about his ideas, there is a very different story to tell. In his ideas and thoughts he gives very little evidence of intellectual or spiritual eminence. Supporters of Christianity even of the calibre of Tertullian do not accomplish anything very considerable. And yet as personalities they are potent—these men like Tertullian, to whose arguments no highly educated Greek could attach much weight. There is something about Tertullian that attracts one's attention—but what exactly is it? That is the point of importance.

Let us realise that a real problem lies here. What power is responsible for the achievements of these bearers of the Christ Impulse who themselves do not really understand it? What power is responsible for the influence exercised by the Church Fathers, including even Origen, in spite of all their manifest ineptitude? Why is Greco-Roman scholarship itself unable to comprehend the essential nature of the Christ Impulse? What is the reason of all this?

But let us go further. The same spectacle stands out in still stronger relief when we study the course of history. As the centuries go by, Christianity spread over Europe, among peoples like the Germanic, with quite different ideas of religion and worship, who are, or at least appear to be, inseparable from these ideas and who nevertheless accepted the Christ Impulse with open hearts, as if it were part and parcel of their own life. And when we think of those who were the most influential missionaries among the Germanic peoples, were these men schooled theologians? No indeed! Comparatively speaking, they were simple, primitive souls who went out among the people, talking to them in the most homely, everyday language but moving their very hearts. They knew how to put the words in such a way as to touch the deepest heart-strings of those to whom they spoke. Simple men went out into regions far and wide and it was their work that produced the most significant results. Thus we see Christianity spreading through the centuries. But then we are astonished to find this same Christianity becoming the motive force of profound scholarship, science and philosophy. We do not undervalue this philosophy but we will focus our attention to-day upon the remarkable fact that up to the Middle Ages the peoples among whom Christianity spread in such a way that it soon became part of their very souls, had lived hitherto with quite different forms of thought and belief. And in no very distant future, many other features will be stressed in connection with the spread of Christianity. So far as the effect produced by this spread of Christianity is concerned, it will not be difficult to agree with the statement that there was a period when these Christian teachings were the source of fervent enthusiasm. But in modern times the fervour which in the Middle Ages accompanied the spread of Christianity seems to have died away.

And now think of Copernicus, of the whole development of natural science on into the nineteenth century. This natural science which since the time of Copernicus has become an integral part of Western culture, might appear to run counter to Christianity. The facts of history may seem, outwardly, to substantiate this. For example, until the 'twenties of the nineteenth century the writings of Copernicus were on the so-called Index of the Roman Catholic Church. That is an external detail, but the fact remains that Copernicus was a dignitary of the Church. Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake by the Roman Church but he was, for all that, a member of the Dominican Order. The ideas of both these thinkers sprang from the soil of Christianity and their work was an outcome of the Christian impulse. To maintain that these teachings were not the fruits of Christianity would denote very poor understanding on the part of those who claim to hold fast by the Church. These facts only go to prove that the Church did not understand the fruits of Christianity. Those who see more deeply into the roots of these things will recognise that what the peoples have achieved, even in the more recent centuries, is a result of Christianity, that through Christianity, as also through the laws of Copernicus, the gaze of the human mind was turned from the earth out into the heavenly expanse. Such a change was possible only within Christian culture and through the Christian impulse. Those who observe the depths and not merely the surface of spiritual life will understand something which although it will seem highly paradoxical when I say it now, is nevertheless correct. To this deeper observation, a Haeckel, for all his opposition to Christianity, could only have sprung from the soil of this same Christianity. Ernst Haeckel is inconceivable without the base of Christian culture. And however hard modern natural science may try to promote opposition to Christianity, this natural science is itself an offspring of Christianity, a direct development of the Christian impulse. When modern natural science has got over the ailments of childhood, men will perceive quite clearly that if followed to its logical conclusions, it leads to Spiritual Science, that there is an entirely consistent path from Haeckel to Spiritual Science. When that is grasped it will also be realised that Haeckel is Christian through and through, although he himself has no notion of it. The Christian impulses have given birth not only to what claims to be Christian but also to what appears on the surface to run counter to Christianity. This will soon be realised if we study the underlying reality, not merely the concepts and ideas that are put into words. As can be seen from my little essay on “Reincarnation and Karma,” a direct line leads from the Darwinian theory of evolution to the teaching of repeated earthly lives.

But in order to understand these things correctly we must be able to perceive the influence of the Christian impulses with entirely unprejudiced eyes. Anyone who understands the doctrines of Darwin and Haeckel and is himself convinced that only as a Christian movement was the Darwinian movement possible (although Haeckel had no notion of this, Darwin was aware of many things)—anyone who realises this is led by an absolutely consistent path to the idea of reincarnation. And if he can call upon a certain power of clairvoyance, this same path will lead him to knowledge of the spiritual origin of the human race. True, it is a detour, but with the help of clairvoyance an uninterrupted path from Haeckel's thought to the conception of a spiritual origin of the Earth. It is conceivable, of course, that someone may accept Darwinism in the form in which it is presented to-day, without grasping the life-principles which in reality are contained in it. In other words, if Darwinian thought becomes an impulse in someone who lacks any deep understanding of Christianity—which nevertheless lies in Darwinism—he may end by understanding no more of Darwinism than he does of Christianity. The good spirit of Christianity and the good spirit of Darwinism may alike forsake him. But if he has a grasp of the good spirit of Darwinism, then—however much of a materialist he may be—his thought will carry him back over the earth's history to the point where he recognises that man has not evolved from lower animal forms but must have a spiritual origin. He is led to the point where man is perceived as a spiritual being, hovering as it were over the earthly world. Darwinism, if developed to its logical conclusion, leads to this recognition. But if someone has been forsaken by the good spirit of Darwinism and happens to believe in the idea of reincarnation, he may imagine that he himself once lived as an ape in some incarnation of the planet Earth. [The reference here is to certain assertions made by the theosophists Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater.] Anyone who can believe this lacks all real understanding of Darwinism and of Christianity and must have been forsaken by the good spirits of both! For Darwinism, consistently elaborated, could lead to no such belief. In such a case the idea of reincarnation has been grafted into the soil of materialism. It is possible, of course, for modern Darwinism to be stripped of its Christian elements. If this does not happen, we shall find that on into our own times the impulses of Darwinism have been born out of the Christ Impulse, that the impulses of Christianity work even where they are repudiated. Thus we find that in the early centuries, Christianity spreads quite independently of scholarship or erudition in its adherents; in the Middle Ages it spreads in such a way that the Schoolmen, with all their learning, can contribute very little to it; and finally we have the paradox of Christianity appearing in Darwinism as in an inverted picture. Everything that is great in the Darwinian conception derives its motive power from the Christian impulses. The Christian impulses within it will lead this science of itself out of and beyond materialism.

The Christian impulses have spread by strange channels—in the absence, so it appears, of intellectuality, learning, erudition. Christianity has spread irrespectively of the views of its adherents or opponents—even appearing in an inverted form in the domain of modern materialism. But what exactly is it that spreads? It is not the ideas nor is it the science of Christianity; nor can we say that it is the morality instilled by Christianity. Think only of the moral life of men in those times and we shall find much justification for the fury levelled by men who represented Christianity against those who were its real or alleged enemies. Even the moral power that might have been possessed by souls without much intellectual education will not greatly impress us. What, then, is this mysterious impulse which makes its victorious way through the world? Let us turn here to Spiritual Science, to clairvoyant consciousness. What power is at work in those unlearned men who, coming over from the East, infiltrated the world of Greco-Roman culture? What power is at work in the men who bring Christianity into the foreign world of the Germanic tribes? What is really at work in the materialistic natural science of modern times—the doctrines of which disguise its real nature? What is this power?—It is Christ Himself Who, through the centuries, wends His way from soul to soul, from heart to heart, no matter whether souls understand Him or not. It behoves us to leave aside the concepts that have become ingrained in us, to leave aside all scientific notions and point to the reality, showing how mysteriously Christ Himself is present in multitudinous impulses, taking form in the souls of thousands and tens of thousands of human beings, filling them with His power. It is Christ Himself, working in simple men, Who sweeps over the world of Greco-Roman culture; it is Christ Himself Who stands at the side of those who in later times bring Christianity to the Germanic peoples; it is He—Christ Himself in all His reality—Who makes His way from place to place, from soul to soul, penetrating these souls quite irrespectively of the ideas they hold concerning Him.

Let me here make a trivial comparison. How many people are there who understand nothing at all about the composition of foodstuffs and who are none the less well and properly nourished? It would certainly mean starvation if scientific knowledge of foodstuffs were essential to nourishment. Nourishment has nothing whatever to do with understanding the nature of foodstuffs. Similarly, the spread of Christianity over the earth had nothing to do with men's understanding of it. That is the strange fact. There is a mystery here, only to be explained when the answer can be found to the question: How does Christ Himself wield dominion in the minds and hearts of men?

When Spiritual Science, clairvoyant investigation, puts this question to itself, it is led, first of all, to an event from which the veils can really only be lifted by clairvoyant vision—an event that is entirely consistent with what I have been saying to-day. This above all will be clear to us: the time when Christ worked in the way I have described, is past and gone, and the time has come when men must understand Christ, must have real knowledge of Christ.

It is therefore also necessary to answer the question as to why our age was preceded by that other age when it was possible for the Christ Impulse to spread independently of men's understanding. The event to which clairvoyant consciousness points is that of Pentecost, the sending of the Holy Spirit. Clairvoyant vision, quickened by the power of the Christ Impulse, was therefore directed, in the first place, to this event of Pentecost, the sending of the Holy Spirit. It is this event that presents itself first and foremost to clairvoyant investigation carried out from a certain standpoint.

What was it that happened at the moment in the earth's evolution described to us, somewhat unintelligibly to begin with, as the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the Apostles? When with clairvoyant vision one investigates what actually happened then, an answer is forthcoming from Spiritual Science as to what is meant when it is said that simple men—for the Apostles themselves were simple men—began to utter in different tongues, truths which came to them from the depths of spiritual life and which none could have thought them capable of uttering. It was then that the Christian impulses began to spread, independently of the understanding of those human beings to whom they made their way. From the event of Pentecost pours the stream that has been described. What, then, was this event of Pentecost? This question presented itself to Spiritual Science and with the spiritual-scientific answer to it begins—the Fifth Gospel.

Eight days ago, I spoke about the composition of the human being and about the different parts of his entity. If you refrain from the finer gradation which we have discussed at that time, we can say that the human being disintegrates into three members: body, soul and mind. A consideration of these three human members leads to the big principles of human life, to the same laws of the soul and of the mind as the consideration of the outside world leads us to the principles of the physical life. Our usual science only knows the principles of the physical life. It knows nothing to say about the principles of the soul-life and the spiritual life on the higher fields. But there are the same laws in these higher fields, and these laws of the soul-life and the spiritual life are undoubtedly more important for the human being than what happens externally in the physical space. But the lofty determination of the human being, the comprehension of our destiny, the understanding why we are in this body which sense this life has the answers to these questions can be found solely in the higher fields of the spiritual life.

A consideration of the soul-life shows its big basic law to us, its developmental law, and the law of reincarnation. And a consideration of the spiritual life shows us the law of cause and effect, the law which we exactly know in the physical world that any effect has its cause. Any action of the spiritual life has its cause and must have its cause, and this spiritual law is called the law of karma. The law of reincarnation or re-embodiment consists in the fact that the human being lives not only once, but that the life of the human being proceeds in a whole number of repetitions which had started once and will once find an end. Starting from other conditions the human being as we will still see in later talks enters in this law of reincarnation and he will overcome this law later again to move on to other phases of his development. The law of karma says that our destiny, what we experience in life is not without cause, but that our actions, our experiences, our sufferings and joys in a life depend on the preceding lives that we have made our destiny to us in the past lives. As well as we live now, we create the causes of the destiny which meets us when we are re-embodied; this is the cause which forms the destiny of our future life.

Now we want to get involved a little more exactly in these ideas of the soul development and the spiritual causing. The law of reincarnation or re-embodiment deals with the fact that the human soul appears and lives on earth not once but many times. Of course, only somebody can completely realise the immediate factuality of this law who advances so far using mystic, theosophical methods that he can study in the psychic fields of existence as the everyday human being in the external fields of the sensuous life and facts. Not before the higher facts take place before his soul-eyes as for the sensuous human being the facts of the physical world take place before his physical senses, reincarnation is a fact to him. There is also still a lot that the human being does not yet realise today according to its real being, but he can see it in its effects and, therefore, he believes in it. Reincarnation is something that most people cannot regard as a fact and are not accustomed to consider it as an external effect, and, therefore, they do not believe in it. Also the phenomena of electricity are such that every physicist says that the real being of electricity is unknown to us; but people do not doubt that something like an entity of electricity exists. They see the effects of electricity, light and movement. If people were able to see the external effects of memory with their physical eyes, then they would not doubt that there is reincarnation. One can still recognise memory. Nevertheless, one has to make oneself familiar with the external expression of reincarnation to get used to the idea gradually to be able to correctly see that which theosophy calls reincarnation.

Hence, I would like to consider those facts purely externally which are accessible to everybody which everybody can observe to which he is not used only to take the right points of view. However, if he did so, he would say to himself: I do not yet know reincarnation as a fact, but I can assume like with electricity that there is such a thing. Who wants to see the external physical facts in the right light, must carefully pursue the law of development which we perceive everywhere in the outside world thanks to the scientific research of the 19th century. He has to ask himself: what happens before our eyes in the realm of life? I note from the start that I want to touch this fact only in general because I speak on Darwinism and theosophy in the next talks. All those questions which are connected with this part of this lecture are connected with doubt and ideas whether theosophy would be disproved by modern Darwinism. I answer these questions in the talk which I hold a week from today.

We have to understand this development correctly. In the 18th century the great naturalist Linnaeus (Carl L., 1707–1778, the father of modern taxonomy, Systema naturae, 1735) still said that as many botanical genera and animal genera exist side by side as have been made originally. This opinion is no longer shared by any naturalist. The more perfect living beings one assumes have developed from more imperfect organisms. Thus natural sciences have transformed that which one once could observe only side by side into a temporal succession. If now we ask ourselves: by which means is it possible that development occurs by which means is it possible that in the sequence of the different species and genera in the animal and plant realms an interrelation does exists? Then we get to a law which is darkish for our natural sciences, but is connected with the law of physical development. This is the fact which expresses itself in the so-called heredity. As everybody knows, the descendant of an organism is not different from its ancestor.

So the similarity of ancestor and descendant confronts us. The variety originates from the fact that a difference is added to this similarity in the course of time. It is, so to speak, a result of two factors: of that in what the descendants are like their ancestors, and of that in what they are different. The variety of the animal guise and plant guise comes into being from the most imperfect up to the most perfect one. Never would anybody understand why the difference exists unless the law of heredity were there. One could also not understand why the descendant is different, so that this difference is added to the similarity. This connection of similarity and difference gives the concept of physical development. You find it in the plant life, in the animal life and in the human life. If, however, you ask: what develops in the physical realm, what in the plant life, what in the animal life and what in the human life? Then we receive a drastic difference between the human life and the animal life. One must have realised, one must have completely thought through this difference, then one does not stand still where the physical researcher stands still. One feels constrained to advance; one has to extend the idea of development substantially. Only the old habitual ways of thinking cause that the human beings cannot come to higher levels of development.

I would like to make this difference of humanity and the animal realm clear to you now. It expresses itself in a fact which is unquestionable, but is not enough taken into consideration. If, however, one has conceived it, it brings light and absolutely clarifying. One can express this fact with the catchword: the human being has a biography, the animal has no biography. Of course, the owners of dogs, horses or monkeys will argue that an animal has peculiar, individual inclinations and an individual existence in certain respect, and that one can write, hence, also a biography of a dog, a horse or a monkey. This should not be doubted. But in the same sense one can also write the biography of a quill. However, nobody denies that it is not the same if we speak of a human biography. Everywhere are only transitions, gradual differences, and that is why that which preferably applies to the human being also applies to subordinate beings in the transferred sense, it can even be applied to external matters. Why should we not be able to describe the qualities of an ink-pot? But you will find that a radical difference exists between the biography of a person and the biography of an animal. If we want to speak of that which of the animal interests us to the same extent as the biography of the individual human, then we have to deliver the description of the species. If we describe a dog, a lion, then our description applies to all dogs or lions. In doing so, we do not need to think of biographies of excellent human beings. We can write the biography of a Mr. Lehman or a Mr. Schultz. However, it differs substantially from any animal biography, and it is for the human being of the same interest as the description of the species for the animal life.

With that is said for everybody who thinks that way completely exactly: the biography signifies for the human being what the description of the species signifies for the animal. Hence, in the animal realm one speaks of an evolution of the species and the genera; with the human being one has to set in with the individual. The human being is a species for himself, not in the physical sense, as far as the human being is on the highest level of animality, for it is the same with the human being as with the animals concerning the generic : if we describe the human being as a species, we describe him in such a way, as we describe the lion species, the tiger species or the cat species. The description of the individual of the human being is substantially different. The individual of the human being is a species for himself. This sentence, completely understood, leads us to a higher concept of describing the evolution within the human realm. If you want to inform yourselves about the generic of the human being, about his exterior guise for this is the generic of the human being , then you will resort to the concept of heredity like in the animal evolution. Then you know, why Schiller had a particular form of the nose, a particular physiognomy; then you derive his guise more or less successfully from his forefathers. The biography of the human being goes beyond that. It only concerns the radical difference of a human being from all other human beings. Of these two fields the generic is not important for the idea of reincarnation or re-embodiment. The other field matters which we distinguish from the generic as the real soul, as the inner life of the human being, in what one differs human beings from anyone.

You all know that everybody has a particular soul-life and that it expresses itself in sympathies and antipathies, in our characters, in that which we recognise as the peculiar way how we are able to live out emotionally. As well as performances of the lion have the specific imprint of the lions, of the lion species, the specific performance of Mr. Miller or Mr. Lehman has the specific imprint of these individual souls. We can only consider the temperament and the character of a person as the individual of a human being. However, we already find the same everywhere in the animal realm what we have considered as characteristic of the human soul. There we also find sympathies and antipathies, inclinations, desires, even particular characters. Ignoring finer differences again, we call the sum of the animal habits the manifestation of the animal instincts.

The natural sciences of the 19th century tried to explain this instinct, this soul element in the animal like the external guise, namely by means of heredity. One said that the animals accomplish certain activities, and because they have done many activities often and often these activities imprint themselves on their beings, so that they become habitual; then they appear transmitted to the descendants as particular instincts, for instance, if one coerces certain dogs to run fast, because one uses them for hunting. Because of this exercise the descendants of these dogs are already born with the instinct of fast running as such disposed hunting dogs. Lamarck tries this way to explain the instincts of the animals; they should be inherited exercises.

However, a real consideration shows very soon that just the intricate instincts cannot be transmitted and connected with any inherited exercise. Just the most intricate instincts show in their very nature to the observers that they are impossibly due to heredity. Take a fly which flies away if you come close to it. This is an instinctive reaction. By which means should the fly have acquired this instinct? The ancestors did not have this instinct. They would have to get the aware or unaware experience that not getting up is injurious to them under certain circumstances, and thereby they would have got the habit of flying away to avoid the damage. Who has a real overview of the interrelationship is hardly able to say that so and so many insects got to be used to fly away to not be killed because they have experienced that they are killed. They would have to stay alive in order to pass these experiences to their offspring.

So, you see, it is impossible to speak of heredity that way without getting involved in the gravest contradictions. We could speak of hundred and thousand cases where animals do something just only once. Take the pupation, for instance: this is done only once in life, and from it follows strikingly that it is not possible to speak of heredity in the soul-life like in the physical life. Hence, the naturalist puts the sentence completely aside that the instincts are inherited exercises.

Here we do not deal with a transmission of direct experience in the physical life, but with an effect of the animal soul-world. We speak a little more exactly about this animal soul-world in the next talks. Today we can be content with the statement of the impossibility to speak of the transmission of soul qualities of ancestors to descendants in the same sense as one speaks of heredity in the physical realm. However, the human being has to bring an interrelationship into the world if he generally wants to see sense and reason in the world; he must be able to refer any effect to its cause. He must be able to refer to causes what appears in the individual soul-life what appears within the human individual as sympathies and antipathies, as manifestations of temperament and character.

The human beings have different qualities. Hence, we have to explain the difference of the human individuals. We cannot explain them in another way than that we introduce the same idea of development in psychic fields as we did it in the physical. How senseless would it be if one wanted to believe that a perfect lion has grown as a species suddenly out of the earth or that an imperfect animal has suddenly developed? How impossible is it that the individual of the human being has developed from the uncertain? We have also to derive the individual as we derive the perfect genus from an undeveloped genus. Nobody will honestly explain the qualities of the human soul like the bodily qualities if he really does think.

What is connected with the body, what is caused by the fact that I have weaker hands than my fellow man is physical heredity. Because I have a weak body, my hands will be weaker than those of another who has a stronger body. Everything that is connected with the physical body and its development is inherited, but not that which belongs to the internal soul-life. Who would attribute Schiller's (Friedrich S., 1759–1805, German classic poet) characteristic, his talent, his temperament et etcetera, or Newton's talent to their ancestors (Isaac N., 1642–1727, English physicist, mathematician and philosopher)? Someone who closes his mind is able to do this. But somebody who does not close his mind cannot come to such a consideration. If the human being is his own species as a soul-being, the intricate soul qualities which face us with this or that being must not be attributed to his physical ancestors, but to other causes in the past which were somewhere else than with the ancestors. Because the causes are only assigned to the individual human being, they have only to do with the individual human being. As we cannot find the lion in the bear genus, the individuality cannot be derived from another human being, but only from the human being himself because the human being is the individual of the own species. That is why he can be derived only from himself. Because the human being brings certain qualities with him which determine him also like the species determines the lion, they have to be also derived from the individual itself. We get that way to the chain of different incarnations which the individual person must have already experienced just as the lion species. This is the external approach. If we look around in the physical life, it appears to us only understandable if we are able to go beyond mere heredity and to think a law of reincarnation which is the principle on the soul level.

For someone who is able to observe spiritually no hypothesis but a conclusion exists here. What I have said is only a conclusion. The fact of reincarnation exists for somebody who can rise to direct observing with the methods of mysticism and theosophy. In the last talk, we wanted to learn to microscope theosophically, so to speak. Today we want to state that theosophists are so far advanced that sympathies and antipathies, passions and wishes, briefly, the character exists as fact there before the soul-eyes like the external physical body stands before the eyes of the physical observer. If this is the case, the soul observer is in the same situation as the external researcher, then the soul observer has the same facts, then he observes the intricate structure, that light guise, which is embedded in the external guise, also as external reality, like the external guise is reality for the physical observer. This auric structure expresses the fact for him that he deals with a lofty, perfect living soul-being, with a differentiated, organised aura equipped with many organs like we deal with the lion as a being, which has many organs.

If we observe the soul, the aura of imperfect savages, it seems to be relatively simple; it appears in simple colours, appears in such a way that one can compare the contrast of this simple aura, this undifferentiated aura poor in colours of a savage and the intricate aura of an European civilised human being with that of an imperfect snail or amoeba and the perfect lion. Then we exactly pursue the development in the realm of the soul even as the aura. Then we see that a perfect aura can only originate on the way of development, while we see that the aura if we go backward was a more imperfect one. Somebody who is able to observe in this realm can get an immediate observation of the soul-life itself.

If we ascend to the spiritual life, the physical law of cause and effect faces us in the higher life, the law of karma. This law of karma means exactly the same for the spirit as the law of cause and effect, the law of causality, for the external, physical phenomena. If you see any fact in the outer physical world if you see a stone falling down, then you ask: why does the stone fall? And you do not rest, until you have found the cause. If you have spiritual phenomena, you have to ask also for the spiritual causes. The spiritual facts are close to us! The one is a person whom we call a happy one, another is condemned to misfortune for his whole life. What we call human destiny is included in the question: why is this and that?

Before this “why” the whole external science stands completely helplessly because it does not know how to apply its law of cause and effect to the spiritual phenomena. If you have a metal ball and you throw it into water, a particular fact happens. But the fact becomes another if you have made the metal ball glowing first. You will try to get the different phenomena clear in your mind concerning cause and effect. You also have to ask in the spiritual life: why is one person not successful compared to another person? Why do I succeed in this but not in that? This results in recognising the cause that a certain fact shows a particular characteristic in reality. Because I have heated the metal ball first, the water starts boiling. It does not depend on the water, it depends on the change which the metal ball has experienced before and that causes the destiny of the metal ball. Thus the destiny of the metal ball depends on the conditions it has gone through before. It depends on which phenomena approach the ball with a following experience in order to keep to the example.

We have to say: any action which I do contributes also to my spiritual human being, changes my spiritual human being as the heating-up has changed the physical metal ball. An even finer thinking is necessary here than in the realm of the soul. One has to realise here with patience and rest that an action changes the spiritual human being. If today anybody steals anything, this is an action which stamps the spiritual human being with a lower quality as if I do a good action to a human being. It is not the same whether I do a moral action or a physical one. What the heated up metal ball is for the water, this is the moral stamp for the human being. Just as little as something physical remains without effect for the future, just as little the moral stamp remains without effect for the future. Also in the spiritual realm there are no causes without corresponding effects. From that results the big law that any action must necessarily produce an effect for the spiritual being in question. The moral stamp must express itself in the spiritual being, in the destiny of the spiritual being.

This law that the moral stamp of an action must come into effect at any rate is the law of karma. With it we have got to know the concepts of reincarnation and karma. People argue various things against these concepts; however, nothing can be argued against their general character by the real thinker. The human life shows us in all its phenomena, and the external facts prove that development exists also in the spiritual life that cause and effect also exist in the spiritual life. Also those who do not stand on the theosophical point of view have attempted to find cause and effect also in the spiritual fields, for example, a philosopher of recent time, Paul Rée (1849–1901, German philosopher, The Origin of Moral Sensations, 1877), the friend of Friedrich Nietzsche. He attempted to explain a spiritual phenomenon externally by means of development. He asks: has conscience always been there in the evolution? Then he shows that there are human beings who do not have what we call conscience in our evolution. He says that there were times in which such a thing like conscience was not developed in the human soul. In those days, the human beings different from us made particular experiences. They found that if they carry out certain actions these actions result in punishment that the society takes revenge on those who are injurious to the society. Within the human soul a feeling developed of that which should be and of that which should not be. This was transformed in the course of time to a kind of heredity, and today the human beings are already born with the feeling which just expresses itself in their conscience something should be or something should not be. Conscience developed that way, Rée thinks, within the whole humanity. Rée showed here nicely that we can also apply the concept of development to the soul qualities, to conscience. If he had advanced a step more, he would have come in the field of theosophy.

I would like to tell a phenomenon in addition, this is the phenomenon that we can exactly indicate the point in the European history of civilisation where one speaks of conscience first. If you follow the whole ancient Greek world and trace the descriptions and accounts, you do not find a word, not even in the ancient Greek language, for conscience. One had no word for it. It may be especially remarkable to hear what Plato tells about Socrates. In all Socratic dialogues the word is not yet included which appeared in Greece later only in the last century before Christ. Some think that the daimonion is conscience.

However, this can easily disproved, and, hence, it cannot be considered seriously. We find conscience only in the Christian world. There is a drama trilogy, the Oresteia by Aeschylus. If you pursue these three dramas, you see that Orestes stands under the immediate impression of the matricide. He has murdered his mother because she killed his father. Now it is shown to us how Orestes is persecuted by the Furies, and it is shown how he turns to the court and the court acquits him. Nothing else appears than the concept of the gods taking revenge externally. There the process expresses itself in the fear of external powers. Nothing of that exists which the concept of conscience includes.

Then Sophocles and then Euripides follow. With them Orestes faces us quite differently. Why he feels guilty this faces us here in another way. With these poets Orestes feels guilty because he now owns knowledge to have done something wrong. And from it the word conscience forms in Greek and also in Latin. Having a knowledge of one's own action, being able to observe oneself, being with one's own action this must have developed first. If now Paul Rée were right that conscience is a result of general human development that it develops out of that which the human being observes, because he is punished for that which harms to the fellow man, and, hence, harms to himself if he does anything that is not for the purposes of a reasonable world order. If this were the cause, this conscience would had undoubtedly to appear also in general. Because the external inducement takes place in the same sense, it would have to appear with bigger human masses; it would have to appear in a tribe at the same time, would develop as a general quality of the human species. Here one would have to study the Greek history as a soul history. At that time when in Greece with individual persons the concept developed which we do not yet find in older Greece, there was a period in which really the public unscrupulousness was the order of the day. Read the accounts of the time of the wars between Athens and Sparta! We cannot consider conscience as a general quality of the human species like the qualities of the animals.

Another objection is made: if the human being lived repeatedly, he would remember his former lives. However, one cannot understand this from the start why this is mostly not the case. One has to realise what memory is and how it comes into being. I already explained last time that the human being lives in the present developmental stage, indeed, in the astral and spiritual worlds but that he is not aware of these two worlds that he is only aware of the physical world and attains in the future and on higher levels what some human beings have already attained today. The average human being becomes aware of soul and spirit only later. The average human being is aware in the physical world and lives in the worlds of soul and spirit. This is due to the fact that his real force of thinking, the brain, needs the physical world to be able to work. Being physically active means becoming aware in the physical life. In sleep the human being is not aware. Who develops with mystic methods, develops his consciousness also in sleep and in the higher states. It makes the remembrance possible of that which the human being experiences in the course of life. Because his brain exists in the physical world, he remembers what meets him physically. The remembrance of the human being extends farther who works not only with the physical brain but can make use of the soul material to be aware also within the soul like the everyday human being is aware within his physical body. Even as the imperfect animal does not yet have the ability of the developed lion, but will have this quality once, also the human being who does not yet have the ability to remember the former lives will gain it later.

In the even higher fields it is difficult to get spiritually to the insight into the interrelation of cause and effect. This is possible only in the spiritual world if the human being is able to think not only in the physical and astral bodies, but in the purely spiritual life. Then he is also able to say of every occurrence why it has happened. This field is so lofty that a lot of patience is necessary to acquire those qualities so that one can understand cause and effect in the spiritual life. Who is aware in the physical and lives only in the astral and the spiritual worlds has only the recollection of his experiences between birth and death. Somebody who is conscious in the astral world remembers his birth up to a certain degree. However, who is conscious in the spiritual world sees the law of cause and effect in its real interrelation.

Another objection is included in the question: do we not come there to fatalism? If everything is caused, the human being is subjected to fate saying to himself time and again: this is my karma, and we cannot change our fate. One can say this just as little as one can say: I cannot help my fellow man, and it makes me so hopeless that I cannot help him; I must despair to make him better, because it is his karma. Somebody who compares the law of life with the laws of nature and knows what a law is will never come to such a wrong view of the law of karma.

The way how sulphur, hydrogen and oxygen combine to sulphuric acid is subjected to an unalterable law of nature. If I act against the law which lies in the qualities of these substances, I never achieve sulphuric acid. My personal performance belongs to it. I am free to combine the substances. Although the law is absolute, it becomes effective with my free action. This also applies to the law of karma. An action which I have done in the past lives entails its effect in this life. But I am free to work against the effect, to do another action which possibly cancels injurious results of the former action lawfully. As according to the unalterable law a glowing ball, put on the table, burns the table, I can cool the ball and put it then on the table. It does no longer burn the table. In the one and in the other case I have acted according to the law. An action in the past induces me to an action; the effect of my action in the past life cannot be removed, but I can carry out another action and change the injurious effect to a useful effect, only that everything takes place according to the laws of spiritual causes and effects. The law of karma can be compared with an account management. On the left and on the right we have certain amounts. If we add on the left and on the right and subtract them from each other, we receive the account balance. This is an unalterable law. Depending on my preceding transactions the account balance is positive or negative.

Even if this law works definitely, I can still add new items and the whole balance changes as lawfully as it has changed once. I am caused by karma particularly, but at every moment the account balance of my life can be changed by new registrations. If I want to add a new item, I must only have added both sides to see whether I have a cash flow or debts. It is also the same with the experiences in the account balance of life. They adapt themselves to life. Who can see how his life is caused can also say to himself: my balancing is active or passive, and I have to add this or that action to cancel the bad in life to be gradually relieved of that which I have accumulated as my karma. We regard this as the big goal of human life: the relief of karma which was caused once. It depends on every single human being to find goals to balance the account of life.

Thereby we have the two big laws, the law of the soul-life and the law of the spiritual life. Today the question already arises: what does originate between two lives, how does the spirit work between death and the next birth? We have to look at the human destiny in the time during two lives and want to go through the stations between death and a new life. Then we see what of faith, knowledge and religiousness can penetrate the western knowledge. The big laws address not only to the senses but also to the spirit and to the soul, so that the human being understands to speak of cause and effect not only in the physical but also in the spiritual life. For that which the great spirits said will come true; time will tell that we understand the world only partly if we only take what we hear, see and feel. We have to ascend to completely understand the world and investigate the laws. That is the very striving of the human being. We have to learn where from the human being comes and to which future he goes. These laws must be searched for in the spiritual world, and then we understand Goethe's saying, who was a representative of theosophy, and recognise what he wanted to say with the following:

Nature, mysterious in day's clear light,
Lets none remove her veil,
And what she won't discover to your understanding
You can't extort from her with levers and with screws.

Faust I, verses 672-675

Not until the human being advances beyond the merely personal if he is aware of the overweight of the individuality, of the higher personal if he understands how to become impersonal how to live impersonally how to let prevail the impersonal in himself, he lives from the civilisation involved in the external form to a future culture full of life. Even if it is not that which theosophy regards as its highest ideal, it is also not the last ethical consequence which we draw from theosophy. It is a step to the ideal which the human being learns to live only then if he does not look at the personal, but at the eternal and imperishable. This eternal and imperishable, the buddhi, the core of wisdom which rests in the soul has to replace the very rational civilisation. There are many proofs that theosophy is right with this view of the future human development.

However, the most important matter is that forces make themselves noticeable in life which should be really understood to fulfil us with their ideal. This is the great thing with Tolstoy (Leo T.,1828–1910, Russian writer) that he wants to lift out the human being from the close circle of his thoughts and deepen him spiritually that he does not want to show him the ideals of our material world, not of our anyhow arranged social life but the ideals which are able to appear in the soul only. If we are right theosophists, we recognise the forces which work in the world evolution, we do not remain blind and deaf towards that which shines to us as theosophy in our present, but we recognise these forces of which is normally spoken in theosophy prophetically. This must be just the typical of a theosophist that he overcomes darkness and errors that he learns to correctly evaluate and recognise life and world. A theosophist who withdraws and faces life cool would be a bad theosophist, even if he preached about a lot of theosophical dogmas.

Such theosophists who guide us from the sensuous world to the higher worlds who themselves behold in the super-sensible worlds, should also teach us, on the other side, to observe the super-sensible on our physical plane and to not get lost in the sensuous. We investigate the causes which come from the spiritual to completely understand the sensuous which is the effect of the spiritual. We do not understand the sensuous if we stand still within the sensuous, because the causes of the sensuous life come from the spiritual. Theosophy wants to make us clairvoyant in the sensuous.

That is why it talks of the “ancient wisdom.” It wants to make us receptive to the spiritual. It wants to transform the human being so that he can see the higher super-sensible secrets of existence clairvoyantly. But this should not be obtained by lack of understanding of that which exists directly round us. Someone would be a bad clairvoyant who is blind and deaf to the events of the sensuous world, to that which his contemporaries are able to accomplish in the direct surroundings. Moreover, he would be a bad clairvoyant if he were not able to recognise that of a person by which in our time the human beings are guided to the super-sensible. What is the use in us becoming clairvoyant without being able to recognise what lies as our next task directly before us?

Answers to Questions

Question: In which relation are the single animals and their type to the human being?

The animal as a type being corresponds to the human being. The animal as a type is not subjected to reincarnation, just as little the single animal. The lion type, for example, is individualised gradually and in connection with higher beings it experiences phases in its future development that we can anticipate but cannot call human-like because they are not similar to the human being and least of all to the future human being. Read up with Haeckel in his Wonders of Life about the point in time when life originated first on earth. Animals cannot become human beings. The single animal can never become a human being.

Question: Is the prayer anyhow justified according to the theosophical view?

The prayer existed at all times of evolution. It signified to the first Christians not only the means of communion with God. The prayer should completely evoke in the Christian what Tolstoy describes as a mood in the human soul and feels that he is penetrated by it. The higher the things are for which the human being asks, the better it is. Prayers in order to get exterior things are not in the sense of early Christianity. “Yet not my will but yours.” What is the will of the Father in the old Christian sense? It is that will which shows the primal law of all world evolution. I want that my results and wishes are so perfect that they correspond to the sense of the Father's will, to the spiritual world law that they do not differ from the big spiritual world law.

If I have any prayer by which I aim at an arbitrary petition which arises from my everyday nature, from my arbitrariness, then the prayer is not held in the sense: “Yet not my will but yours.” However, a prayer of this kind exists unless the object of the petition is drawn down to us, unless our will should go through, but if our will is lifted up, if one strives for apotheosis with it, for the divine, the Christian resurrection of the soul. Because theosophy only wants the understanding of all religions, it agrees to that. The human being may thereby get to conflict with theosophy because he does not understand his own religion. Someone who knows Christianity and its methods and the prayer belongs to the methods of Christianity, because it is a means of the communion with the divine universal soul knows that it is not contradictory to theosophy.

Question: What does the theosophist think of the Christian baptism?

If we want to understand baptism correctly, we have to go back to its original significance. Baptism originally signified one of the first stages, which the human being gradually passed to the higher knowledge. It existed as a so-called trial by water in the ancient mysteries. It belonged to the ceremonial actions which were connected with the fact that the human beings were taken up step by step to the highest profundities. These ancient mysteries were nothing else than cult sites and schools of wisdom. Baptism was the first trial of initiation. It was not only an external form, but connected with particular degrees of knowledge.

The person to be baptised had to have developed certain virtues in himself; then the baptism was given to him. Above all one demanded from the persons to be baptised of the ancient mystery religions that they had acquired in life what one calls firm self-confidence, the capability to rely always on themselves. This trait of character was connected with the fact that one sought internally for the kingdom of God in the human being in the deeper mystery religions, and that only those were allowed to belong to the higher community who had found direction and goal in themselves, who were able to trust themselves. The internal transformation was the keystone of a curriculum to these pupils.

This was the case in the mysteries. Then there came Christianity and put what had been taught in the mysteries as a truth before the whole humanity. This is a quite significant mystic fact that now not only those can become blessed who are initiated into the mysteries, but also those who only believe. With it the baptism became a so-called sacrament of the church. This baptism is the continuation of an ancient rite, the trial by water in the mysteries. Here is a point where we have to believe in spiritual knowledge or we do not progress. The actions which are carried out integrating somebody into the community are in such a way that something spiritual is connected with them that is not only an external formality, but something that is connected with the whole spiritual life of the community, so that something really takes place from the spiritual point of view with the person to be baptised.

This is a quite fantastic thing to the materialist. But for that who knows something about the higher planes of existence it is also a fact. The external Christianity also destroyed a lot of internal spirituality. However, we must not forget if we want to understand such an action that we are not allowed to draw down it to our present materialistic world view.

It cannot be denied, even by those who have made only a slight study of spiritual life, that the subject chosen for our consideration to-day has aroused an interest in the widest circles, and we might add, that this desire for knowledge is of a scientific character. On the other hand, there seems to be an ever increasing tendency toward the formation of a world-philosophy, in which such questions as are associated with the name of Christ find no true and proper place.

A previous lecture that I gave some few weeks ago in this building under the title, ‘The Origin of Man’, and a continuation of the same, upon ‘The Origin of the Animal World’ (delivered in the Architektenhaus) will doubtless have made clear to you a point to which I shall now again draw your attention. In every age, including the present period, the general conceptions and sentiments concerning such fundamental questions as ‘The Origin of Man’ and others of a similar nature, including those relative to that Being to Whom the name of Christ has been given, are directly rooted in, and dependent upon the accepted concepts of some prior age.

We have already seen while considering various matters connected with man’s origin, that as a matter of fact, those theoretical ideas and conceptions which have sprung from the general mode of thought prevailing in our time are fundamentally at variance with the actual results of scientific research. On the other hand, it is just in this relation that we find the conclusions arrived at through the medium of Spiritual Science, which traces man’s origin back to spiritual forms, and not merely to that which is external and physically perceptible, are in full harmony with the results obtained in the field of Natural Science. Perhaps nowhere do we find this want of accord so marked between that current cosmic concept, which is so general in the thoughts and hearts of the people of our day, and that which science has been constrained to adopt, as in the case of the Christ-conception. This divergence may well be due to the fact that the questions involved belong to the greatest of all those concerning the cosmos. However, since the coming of the Christ-Movement into the world’s history, man’s power of conception concerning the Christ-Being and the form which it has taken, has ever been such as was best adapted to a particular period, or as one might say, was best suited to that section of humanity which was occupied with such thoughts.

During the first centuries which followed the advent of Christianity into the world’s history, we realize in connection with a certain trend of ideas and spiritual tendency which has been called Gnosis [a term denoting a higher spiritual wisdom claimed by the Gnostics], that grand and mighty concepts were formed with regard to that Being whom we term The Christ. We find, however that the universal acceptance of these exalted gnostical conceptions continued for only a relatively short period as compared with that idea of The Christ which was, as one might say, generally approved and spread among the people, and later became the essence of the Church movement. It will be enlightening to consider briefly those lofty Christ-concepts which were evolved in the form of gnostical conceptions during the first centuries of the Christian era—not, be it understood, because Spiritual Science would seek to cloak those ideas which it has to put forward with regard to The Christ beneath a mantle of gnostic notions; such an assertion could only be made by those who because of the immaturity of their development in the field of Spiritual Science, are wholly incapable of truly differentiating between the nature of the various events and conditions which are met with in spiritual life.

In many ways the concepts of the Spiritual Science of to-day, which will be recapitulated in this lecture, extend far beyond the ancient gnosis of those early Christian times; but this very fact makes it the more interesting that we should at least touch upon these old spiritual conceptions. There are many different points of view in connection with this by-gone higher wisdom, and various degrees of light and shade in that olden spiritual trend of thought, and we will draw attention to one of its most important aspects and which harmonizes best with the teachings of Spiritual Science in our time. During the first few centuries of the Christian era, this ancient gnosis put forward the most profound ideas concerning the Christ-Being—momentous indeed in relation to that enlightenment which came with the dawn of Christianity. This higher spiritual wisdom maintained that the Christ-Being was eternal, and not alone associated and concerned with the evolution and development of humanity, but with the surrounding world of the cosmos taken in its entirety.

When considering the question of the Origin of Man we found that we were taken back to a form of humanity which floated or hovered, as it were, entirely in spiritual heights and which was not yet familiar with, nor embodied in, an outer material covering. We have seen that during the process of the earth’s evolution, mankind, starting from a purely spiritual state, gradually changed into that of a lower and denser form which we now call man; and that owing to the materialistic outlook of the present theory of evolution, which merely follows man’s earthly history backwards, his beginning has been traced to external animal forms. Spiritual Science, on the other hand, leads us directly to previous states which approach ever nearer and nearer to the immaterial soul, and finally points definitely to a spiritual origin.

The old gnosis sought the Christ-Being in that region in which mankind hovered before he had assumed his material existence, and where he felt himself surrounded alone by spiritual life and spiritual reality. If we understand this ancient gnosis rightly, then must we look upon it from the gnostic point of view, that when man had so far developed as to have reached a point when his Etheric Body should be enclosed within a material covering in order that he might take part in the general course of physical evolution, there remained behind in the purely spiritual realms what might be termed a by-gone companion of man or ‘alter ego’, in the form of an element of the Christ-Being, which did not descend with him into the physical world. Further, according to this conception, mankind was destined to undergo a process of continued development in the material plane, and it was his mission to show evidence of achievement and progress. Hence, according to the gnosis, this Christ-Element continues to dwell in the spiritual realms while mankind undergoes his period of material evolution, so that during the whole time of man’s earthly history, the Christ-Being is not to be sought in that region to which man is related as a physical perceptual entity, but alone in the realms of pure spirit.

That particular period which we call The Birth of Christianity, the ancient gnosis considered of especial import in the evolution of mankind upon Earth. It was regarded as that glorious moment when the Christ-Being entered the physical perceptual world in order to give an impulse to spiritual activity, for man had of himself retarded the soul’s development after he had descended upon the material plane. The gnosis looked upon primeval man during the very beginning of his evolution as a spiritual being bound to a world in which The Christ was then active, and it considered that He again descended upon our earth, where already for a long space humanity had been undergoing material evolution, at that particular period from which we now reckon our time.

The question now arises—How did the ancient wisdom actually look upon this descent of a purely spiritual being into the evolution of humanity? It was regarded in the following manner:—According to the gnosis, an especially highly developed human individuality to Whom historical research has given the name of Jesus of Nazareth, had achieved such exceptional spiritual maturity that at a particular period definite soul conditions had come about, in virtue of which this singular personality had the power to absorb certain Divine qualities and wisdom from the Spirit-World, which up to then no man could acquire. From this time on, so the gnosis states, the soul of this especially selected personality felt itself sufficiently advanced to surrender to the indwelling of that Divine Being, Who up to that moment had had no part in the actual progress and development of humanity—namely, The Christ. That event which took place on the banks of the Jordan when Jesus of Nazareth was baptized by John, and which is recorded in the Bible (Mark i, 9 to 11), was regarded by this ancient gnosis as a manifestation of the entering of the Christ-Being into the course of human evolution. The gnosis further declared that some very singular spiritual condition had been engendered with regard to Jesus through this sacred baptism, which event we may consider as wholly symbolical or otherwise.

We can obtain an idea of what underlies this gnostic concept if we pursue a line of thought somewhat as follows:—We begin with a realization of the fact that if we carefully observe the lives of other people, using those methods of thought which lead us to the very depth of the soul, and not the superficial mode so general in our time, we shall often find in the experience of such persons moments fraught with epoch-making events, when they feel that they stand at a turning-point in their lives. A situation of this nature may arise through some deep-lying sorrow or other trial of earthly origin. Then indeed they may say:—‘That which has now befallen me differs from all my previous experiences, for it causes me to look upon myself as a man transformed.’ Certain it is that in the case of many people there occurs at times something in the nature of a crisis, such as might be described as an awakening and renewing of special and distinctive forces of soul-life.

If we imagine an experience of the above kind as representing in very imperfect and elementary manner an inner event similar to that which the gnosis regarded as having taken place at the time of the baptism of Jesus in Jordan (St. Mark i, 9), we can then readily conceive an entirely different form of happening hitherto unknown in connection with human existence, and quite unlike any which may break in upon men’s souls and is born merely of earthly trials and vicissitudes. That Divine power and supreme spiritual quality which flamed up in the soul of Jesus of Nazareth manifested in wholly new indwelling attributes, and therefrom arose a Godlike inner life shedding fresh light upon all forms of human culture quickened by its example. It was that Divine Essence which entered into the innermost being of Jesus of Nazareth—that glorious and most Holy Spirit creating in Him a new-born life, that the ancient gnosis termed THE CHRIST.

The gnosis clearly realized that through The Christ there had come to mankind something in the nature of a new impulse, an impulse differing utterly from any that had been before. For all that Godlike stimulating power which was brought forth and unfolded in Jesus during the three years subsequent to His baptism by John was such as had never up to that time found place in the evolution of humanity. The gnosis states quite definitely that we must not consider a particular man [Jesus of Nazareth] as The Christ [as is oft-times done], but that we must realize and look for The Christ in the Divine Spirit which manifested IN Jesus, through those sublime and singular qualities that were latent within his innermost being.

We have characterized this ancient spiritual wisdom concerning The Christ in the above manner, in order that it may be easy of comprehension. In the example previously cited of a special turning-point occurring in the life of a human soul, we have an instance at least in some ways analogous to the Christ-Event expressed in its most elementary form. It is especially difficult for mankind in these modern times to realize that circumstances of fundamental historic significance are directly connected with this outstanding incident, and which are of such momentous import as to form what might be termed the true centre of human evolution. When we compare this gnostical concept with various statements of Spiritual Science brought to your notice during these lectures, we find that it has in truth, no matter how we regard the facts, not only a grand and glorious conception of the Christ-Being, but it also evinces an exalted idea of man’s being, for it regards him as involved in an impulse, coming directly from the spiritual realms, and brought to bear upon the actual course of his historic growth and development. It is therefore not to be wondered at that this ancient gnostical conception was unpopular. Anyone who has obtained even a slight insight into the circumstances connected with the progress of mankind during the early centuries of the Christian era and onwards, the existing state of the human soul and the various conditions of social life at different periods, must at once admit that such concepts imply a loftiness of sentiment that was certainly not destined to find favour among the people. In order to appreciate this point we have only to consider the spiritual life of the present day.

Whenever conversation turns upon any idea similar in character to this ancient higher spiritual wisdom, the majority of people at once say:—‘That is all an abstraction, a purely visionary notion—what we want is reality, something which directly affects our actual material life.’ Thus it is that even in our time mankind for the most part regards the old gnostical conception, as outlined, merely in the light of a wholly abstract impression. Humanity is still far from experiencing the feeling of greater satisfaction which comes of spiritual thought, and of realizing how much more true is the substantiality of all that underlies those spiritual concepts to which we may raise ourselves, than is that of things which most men regard as perceptual, concrete, and as having absolute reality. If it were otherwise we would not find, as is the case in the arts and professions, that man is ever urged toward what may be touched and seen, while all that is of the spirit, and calls for inner upliftment of the soul for its apprehension, is pushed aside and regarded as abstract and visionary.

It is not possible in a few words to explain just how the popular conception of the Christ-Being evolved in the minds of the people. But it may be said that an echo of the true Christ-Concept, which pictures a Divine Being incarnate and abiding in the man Jesus of Nazareth, has lived on through the centuries side by side with that simple idea of Jesus, which looks upon Him as born in marvellous manner and as ever approaching mankind with divine tenderness and love; a theme which is developed even in the story of his childhood. In this concept we find Jesus of Nazareth hailed by humanity as its loving Saviour. And it is in that holy sense and feeling evoked by the deeds of this beloved Redeemer that we find a dim echo of the ancient gnostic Christ-Concept. During the whole course of what we might call the external history of Jesus, there is found an upturned vision which realized the presence of some great secret truth, some awe-inspiring mystery, which even as Jesus walked the earth endowed His personality with superhuman attributes. And this superhuman quality has been termed The Christ. Further, we find that as time went on humanity became ever less and less capable of understanding that bold concept, The gnostic Christ, and this ever-increasing inability of comprehension has continued even up to the present day.

Already in the Middle Ages we note, that Science only dared to reason concerning that which is external and directly apparent to the senses, or about those things which it conceived as lying beyond our sense-perception in a kind of world governed by natural laws. It did not feel itself called upon to probe into those factors and influences which have entered into and played their respective parts in man’s evolution, in the form of noble and uplifting spiritual impulses. Thus it was that in the Middle Ages, questions concerning the origin and evolution of man in which the Christ-Impulse made itself felt, became solely objects of belief. This spiritual faith, however, continued on among the people from that time, side by side with all that was regarded as Science and absolute knowledge, but which took heed only of the lower order of cosmic matters and events.

At this point it is of interest to note, that from the sixteenth century onward, this twofold method of thought has ever more and more tended toward a crisis, and for the reason that mankind was always prone to direct and confine his powers of cognition to the perceptual world alone, and to assign all matters of spiritual origin and dependent upon spiritual progress and evolution to the category of mere dogma.

We cannot, however, enter upon this subject at the present time, for it is more essential that I now draw your attention to the fact that in the nineteenth century the course of development led mankind to a point where, as one might say, all true conception of The Christ was wholly lost, at least to a very large proportion of the people. But, nevertheless, we must admit that among a small section of the community the ancient gnostic concepts still lived on, and were yet further developed after a manner which we might regard as bringing about a deeper insight into the Christ-Impulse. In the case of the majority, even among the scientific theological circles, there was a general renunciation of the true Christ-Concept. An attempt was made to centre all in the personality of Jesus of Nazareth, and to look upon Him as One possessed of singular attributes, and especially chosen because of His profound and all-embracing comprehension of the laws and conditions of human evolution, and the Divine inner nature of mankind—but even so, to be considered as a man—although a man transcendent in all things. Thus it came about that in those days in place of the old Christology, there grew up what might be called a mere Jesus-life-research. The results of this mode of thought and study became ever more and more incredible, when considered in the light of all those Divine qualities which dwelt within the being of The Chosen One, Jesus of Nazareth. For according to these investigations Jesus was to be regarded as One specifically selected as endowed with supreme and unique spiritual attributes, but nevertheless possessed of human individuality.

The crowning point in this class of conception is reached in such works as that entitled The Nature of Christianity, by Adolf Harnack, and other similar attempts in the direction of what we have termed Jesus-life-research, and which have appeared in many and varied forms. For the present, however, it is only necessary to merely draw attention to the results obtained from deep and earnest study along these lines, and since this subject is the most modern of any with which we are concerned we can do so very briefly. We would say that the methods employed during the nineteenth century in order to authenticate historically those events which occurred at the beginning of the Christian era, have led to no actual positive conclusions.

It would take us much too far to enter into any kind of detail respecting this particular trend of thought; but anyone who will make a careful investigation into the results achieved in modern times in this connection, will know that an endeavour has been made to apply the ordinary methods of external research, to prove that the personality of Jesus of Nazareth actually lived at the beginning of our Christian spiritual life. Now this attempt to demonstrate the existence of Jesus by such historical means as may be applied in other cases has merely led to the following admission:—‘It is impossible to confirm the personality of Jesus of Nazareth by external material methods.’ But it by no means follows that the negative assumption, which claims that Jesus never lived, is thereby proved. These material investigations have simply shown that we cannot employ the same historical means in order to verify the life of Jesus of Nazareth, as may be used to demonstrate the existence of Aristotle, Socrates or Alexander the Great. But that is not all, for of late this field of inquiry has led to serious difficulties being experienced in quite another direction.

It is only necessary to refer to such works as those by William Benjamin Smith, published by Diederich of Leipzig, to realize that the result of painstaking and exact research into Biblical and other documentary records relating to Christianity has again revealed the fact that [in many instances] these venerable documents cannot be referring to those matters to which, during the greater part of the nineteenth century, it was generally supposed they had reference. A special attempt was made to reconstruct the life of Jesus of Nazareth from the results of philological investigations into these ancient chronicles; but in the end it was found that in the very writings themselves there was evidence of an underlying significance of quite a different nature from that which appeared upon the surface. It became apparent that in spite of every effort to picture the life of Jesus by employing the most carefully chosen and exact methods, the Biblical records, those Christian documents wherein mankind feels itself upon a firm and truly Christian foundation, hardly mention Jesus of Nazareth as a human being. External science is thus driven to the following statement:—‘The ancient records scarcely ever allude to Jesus of Nazareth as a man, they refer to Him as a God ‘; and again to this remarkable anomalous assertion: ‘It is an error to believe that any proof may be found in the original Christian documents of the existence of Jesus of Nazareth as an actual human personality. Rather do we come to the conviction that what the evangelical and other olden sacred writings state is, that in the very beginning of the Christian era was a Deity, and only when we recognize this fact, does all that is written in these aged chronicles become of true significance and import.’

Now is not this all very extraordinary? According to the investigations of our period, when we allude to Jesus of Nazareth, we must speak of a Deity; but this same period and same line of research admits of no reality in this God or purely Spiritual Being. How, then, does present-day science regard The Christ? He is looked upon as a visionary creation, a mere ideal concept which insinuated itself into the history of mankind, and was called into being by a folk fantasy born of mental impulse. According to the latest investigations in this field, The Christ is to be regarded not as a reality, but as a kind of imaginary god. To put it plainly, we would say:—Modern scientific research is brought face to face with something for which it has absolutely no use; for what can it do with a God in Whom it has no faith? External science has merely proved that the Bible records speak of a Deity, but it knows of naught else to do with this Deity, than to ascribe to Him a place in the category of visionary concepts.

We will now compare the attitude of external Science as characterized above, with what Spiritual Science has to say upon the matter. At this point I should like to mention a book entitled Christianity as Mystical Fact, of which I am the author. The fundamental idea underlying this work has been but little understood. I have therefore endeavoured to set forth its object more clearly in a preface to the second edition. My intention was to show that the history of mankind—World History—is not complete in that picture which we can generally obtain from external history and external documents, and for this reason:—Throughout all human evolution spiritual impulses are at work, spiritual factors are present, and these we must attribute to the agency of spiritual beings. If with this concept we compare the whole nature and method of the historic world-conception put forward by Leopold von Ranke and others, we can only say:—The highest point to which the Science of History has as yet reached is, that it actually speaks of historical ideas as if they were subject to the intrusion of abstract impressions coming, as one might say, from without during the course of human evolution and the development of Nations and of Peoples. That is the utmost extent of general belief in this direction. But ‘ideas’ are not what historians consider them to be, and do not develop force and exhibit power. The whole process of human evolution would be lifeless and spiritless if it proceeded merely historically, and if it were not that those ideas which enter into the souls of mankind are the expression of invisible and supersensible impulses, which rule and govern the whole field of human growth and development. Behind all that is revealed in this external progression, there still remains something which can only be unveiled by those supersensible means at the disposal of Spiritual Science, where the methods are applicable to things which are beyond the powers of our sense-perception. Attention has already been drawn to this subject in a previous lecture, and we shall again refer to it at some future date.

I could demonstrate to you how the Christ-Impulse entered historically into the evolution of humanity in such manner that it proved itself to be an actual continuation of that self-same influence which played its part in the spiritual development of mankind in the by-gone days of the ancient mysteries; the actual nature of which is even yet but little understood. A true comprehension of all that was accomplished in pre-Christian times by the olden mysteries in connection with the laying down of spiritual foundations for the development of nations and of peoples can only come, when, through the methods of modern Spiritual Science, man has gained an understanding of that particular form of development through which the soul is transformed into an instrument capable of apprehending that Spirit-World which lies behind all things material and perceptual. In these lectures I have many times referred to transformations of this character.

We now know that mankind, who in these days is in a sense confined and only interested in the immediate experiences of his intimate soul-life, may verily raise himself above his present state and assume a more perfect form of soul-being which can live in the Spirit-World, even as the human counterpart lives in the physical world. Through the study of history in the light of Spiritual Science, we learn that the possibility of thus raising the soul-being to spiritual heights through a process of purely intimate individual soul development, has come about gradually during the evolution of mankind, and was not known in primeval times. Whereas the soul may now through its own effort and measures rise freely, and while still possessed of its individual quality acquire the power of spiritual discernment, in pre-Christian times such was not the case; for the soul was then dependent upon an impulse born of certain modes and procedures, which were a part of the rites performed in the Sanctuaries of the Mysteries.

In my book entitled Christianity as Mystical Fact, I have presented a somewhat detailed account of those ancient rites which were conducted by the priests in connection with the soul. These ceremonies took place in the various Temples of the Mysteries, as they were then considered to be, but which in this lecture we will regard more as Temples assigned to spiritual instruction. What actually took place in these sanctuaries may be briefly outlined as follows:—By means of certain methods and observances the soul was freed from its bodily covering, and it was made possible for it to remain for a time in a condition similar to, though in many ways differing from, the ordinary sleep-state.

When we consider the sleep-state in the light of present-day Spiritual Science, we look upon it that while the human frame remains quiescent and sleeping, the actual centre of man’s Etheric Being is situated outside the recumbent figure, and that during such state the power of the true inner essence of this etheric nucleus is so low that unconsciousness supervenes, and the nucleus becomes, as it were, enveloped in darkness. The methods employed during these ancient mystic rites in order to affect the human soul were as follows:—Through the influence of certain advanced personalities, who had themselves passed through similar mystical initiation, a species of sleep-state was first induced. This was of such nature that the inner forces of the soul were thereby strengthened and intensified. When a certain stage was reached the soul left the body, which was then in a condition of deathlike sleep, and for a time entered upon a psychic existence, a kind of sleep-life, during which it could look upon the Spirit-World with full consciousness. While this sleep-life continued, the soul was able to realize its true position as an inhabitant of the spiritual realms. When, in due course, the soul was brought back once again to ordinary mundane conditions, there came to it recollections of all those things which it had observed and experienced while freed from the body. It was then that it could [while active within the human form] come before the people and stand forth as a prophet, bringing to them proofs of the existence of a Spirit-World and of an eternal life to come. In those olden days it was in the manner above indicated that the soul was enabled to take part in the life of the spiritual realms; and in the mysteries were found the canons to which it must submit, and for a long period, in order that the supreme spiritual leaders in the ancient Mystery Sanctuaries might bring about the final consummation of the soul’s desire.

We will now ask this question:—Whence came those ancient standards of human conduct which have been passed on by peoples spread throughout the world during the course of man’s evolution; and those flashes of spiritual enlightenment proclaiming his Godlike origin and the eternity of the soul? The answer comes through Spiritual Science; from it we learn that this olden wisdom originated with those who had themselves undergone initiation after the manner we have outlined. There is a reflection of these primeval moral precedents, manifested in strange and curious fashion, in connection with Myths and Legends and various graphic portrayals of the past; for in these very fables we find depicted many of the same experiences which came, as if in a living dream, to the initiates in the Mystery-Sanctuaries. Indeed, we first begin to understand Mythology rightly, when we regard the forms and figures there presented, as pictorial representations of things which appeared to the spiritual vision of the Initiates during the time of their participation in the secret rites. If we would establish a relation between the mythological conceptions of olden times and the religious teachings of an earlier age, we must hark back to the ancient mysteries and ponder upon all that lay concealed therein, deep hidden from a profane external world. Mysteries revealed to those alone, who, through severe trials and unswerving observance of that secrecy and restraint imposed upon all, had truly fitted themselves to take part in the dark ceremonies of initiation. We cannot, however, at this point enter into the actual circumstances which led to the close veiling of the mystic rites performed in that now remote grey past. But when we turn our gaze backward and follow the course of spiritual development in pre-Christian times, we realize that it was ever in the dim obscurity enshrouding the inscrutable observances of that by-gone age, that man’s soul unfolded and was strengthened.

The souls of men were not so fully developed in the past that they could of themselves and of their own efforts rise upward and enter the realms of the spirit, while merely dependent upon their immediate powers and unaided by the ministrations of the temple priests. In my book, Christianity as Mystical Fact, I have pointed out that even while external history ran its course a change was taking place; and it has there been my object to show how the whole plan and design underlying human evolution was such, that when the turning-point was reached which marked the birth of Christianity mankind was already prepared to enter upon a new era. This change had come about because of all that man had experienced and absorbed through repeated reincarnations, and through knowledge gained from initiates concerning the Spirit-World. From then on he would have the power of upliftment to spiritual heights within his own innermost soul, which could henceforth rise of its own effort, free from all external influence and unaided by those means which it was the custom to employ in the by-gone days of the mysteries.

According to the views which we now hold, the most outstanding event that came to pass in Palestine, in connection with the spiritual progress of mankind was the final perfecting of the soul, so that it should be fitted for what we might call Self-Initiation. This ultimate consummation had been approached gradually and the necessary preparation had extended over possibly hundreds of years; yet the end came just about the very time when that special turning-point was reached which marked the beginning of the Christian era. The soul was then so far perfected that it was ready for self-initiation, during which act it would be merely guided by those having knowledge of the true path and of the trials that must be endured; henceforth self-initiation might be achieved without external aid rendered by Temple priests, or by leaders having understanding of the mysteries. And further, through the founding of Christianity all those other rites and observances which were performed time and time again in the innermost sanctuaries of the Temples, memories of which are still preserved in Legends, Myths and Mythologies connected with folklore, are found to have a place in that Grand Plan which underlies the world’s history.

If we would indeed understand the Gospels, we should ask ourselves the following question:—‘What experiences were essential to a candidate for initiation in the days of the ancient Persians or Egyptians, who desired so to uplift his soul that it might gaze directly upon the Spirit-World?’ Injunctions concerning such matters were clearly set forth and formed the basis of what we might term a Ritual of Initiation. These commands and instructions covered a time extending from a certain event designated by some as The Baptism, and by others as The Temptation, up to that moment when the soul was led forth and blessed with a true discernment of the spiritual realms. When we compare such Initiation Rituals with the most important statements contained in the Gospels, then (as I have shown in the book to which I have just referred) we find that in the Gospels there appear once again detailed narratives concerning ancient initiation ceremonies, but here the descriptions have reference to that great outstanding historical character, Jesus of Nazareth. It further becomes clear that whereas in previous times an Initiation Candidate was raised to spiritual heights in the seclusion of the Temples of the Mysteries, Jesus of Nazareth, because of the course which history had taken, was already so far advanced that He not only remembered His experiences in the Spirit-World and thus brought enlightenment to humanity, but He became unified in spirit with One, to Whom no earthly being had as yet become united, namely, The Christ-Being. Thus we find a great similarity between the narrative of the spiritual development of Jesus of Nazareth up to that moment when The Christ entered into His soul and during the following three years when He drew inspiration and wisdom from this Divine source, and the descriptions of the wonted course of the ancient forms of initiation.

In the accounts which tell us of all the trials and experiences which Jesus of Nazareth underwent in those olden days, we find the events connected with His initiation clearly marked by the magnitude and Godlike nature of the spiritual facts which underlie the historical descriptions. This is especially noticeable in the Gospel of St. John. While in previous times countless aspirants had taken part in the sacred rites, they had only advanced to that point when they could testify as follows:—‘The spiritual world is a reality, and to such a world does the human soul belong.’ But when it came to pass that Jesus was Himself initiated, He became actually unified and at one with the most significant and outstanding of all spiritual beings ever remembered by former initiates; and it was toward this supreme initiation that the ordered plan underlying all ancient forms and ceremonies had its trend.

Thus do we behold The Mystery of Golgotha emerging from those secrets which were hidden in the dark mysteries of the past, to take its place in that grand design so fundamental to the world’s history. As long as man refuses to believe that in a certain locality and at a definite time Jesus of Nazareth was blessed with Divine initiation, and imbued with the spirit of The Christ in such manner that this Almighty influence could stream forth and act as an impulse upon all future generations—just so long will he remain unable to realize the true import and meaning of the Christ-Impulse in its relation to the evolution of mankind. When through the study of the basic principles of Spiritual Science the reality of great spiritual events such as we have portrayed is admitted, then will first dawn a true comprehension of all that has come to human evolution through the advent of the Christ-Impulse; and we shall no longer degrade the Gospels by discovering in them four separate rituals of initiation in which matters and circumstances concerning Jesus of Nazareth are hidden away and mysteriously concealed. When we come to understand these things rightly we shall realize that everything which followed as a result of the event in Palestine, held a deep significance for all later periods in human evolution.

Now, although what we may term man’s deepest life-centre has always been, so to speak, near at hand, nevertheless this very life-centre was something the awareness of which had not up to the time of that great happening really penetrated into the consciousness of mankind. It was ordained that through The Mystery of Golgotha men’s eyes should be opened and a new era entered upon, in which it would be realized that in the life-centre, the Ego, there manifests an element which is common to both individual man and the entire cosmos.

If we would know in what manner that great and vital change which was wrought in the world’s history by the coming of the Christ-Impulse, is regarded when viewed in the light of Spiritual Science, then we must first realize that:—Man, in respect of his being, consists of a Physical Body, an Etheric or Life Body, an Astral Body, and deep within and underlying all is the veritable Ego¹—that true I, which continues on from incarnation to incarnation. Now, an awareness of the presence of this ultimate centre of life broke in upon man’s consciousness last of all. So that in pre-Christian times he had no thought of its existence. Even as the Physical Body is directly united and in contact with the Physical World, and the Astral Body with the Astral World, so is man’s deepest life-centre, the Ego, born of that Spirit-World which passeth man’s uttermost understanding. Hence, that great message which Christianity and the Christ-Impulse brought to mankind may be thus expressed:—Seek not the Deity and the Godlike primordial principle in the Astral Body, but in man’s innermost being, for there abideth the true Ego.

Previous to the advent of Christianity man would exclaim:—‘My soul is indeed rooted in the Divine. It is the Divine quality alone which can extend the vision and bring unto me true enlightenment [through the powers of those who have a deeper knowledge of spiritual matters].’ But now he is learning to say:—‘If thou would’st truly know where thou canst unveil the profoundest depths of all that is Divine and active throughout the world; then look of thyself within thine Ego, for therein lieth the channel through which cometh unto thee the Word of God. His voice will break in upon thy conscious state if thou but rightly understandest that because of the Mystery of Golgatha, the powers which are of God have entered into mankind; and if thou wilt but realize that then indeed was a glorious initiation truly consummated—to stand forth as a grand historical event. But especially does God speak unto thee, if thou but exaltest thyself and makest thy soul to be as an instrument, able and fitted, to apprehend that which is of the spiritual realms.’

Before that supreme act came to pass at Golgatha, the way of those who would enter upon the life of the spirit, lay through the deep mysteries of the Temple Sanctuaries. The actual awakening of the Divine consciousness which speaks through the Ego is the very essence of the Christ-Impulse; and the growth and development of the ancient Initiation-Principle paved the way and made it possible that this great impulse should come to humanity. During the whole future course of evolution, because of the Mystery of Golgatha, there will enter into men’s souls an ever-increasing clarity of understanding and discernment of the Divine Spirit to which man is so truly united. That same Holy Spirit which even now speaks through the Ego, when man has indeed freed himself from all earthly conditions and circumstances.

He who can understand the Gospels from this point of view will realize the wonderful evidence of racial development and preparation for those coming events which were brought about in the past by the powers of the Spirit-World. It will be apparent that throughout the ancient Hebrew evolution, mankind was ever being made ready to hear the voice which would later speak through the deep centre of man’s being, the Ego-centre; even as the spirit of the old Hebrew race spoke to Judaism. But the people of other nations had heard no such voice, for they were only conscious of the Divine Spirit as it held converse with the soul in the case of those who were truly initiated.

It had become clear to Judaism that the evolution of mankind is a continuous process of development and progress, and that deep within man’s Ego there dwell those mystic forces which appertain to his innermost being. Hence the Jew became conscious of this thought:—‘When as an isolated personality, a part of the ancient Hebrew race, I look back upon the course of man’s evolution from the time of Abraham, and realize that Supreme Deity who has ruled over all things from generation to generation, there comes over me a vague undefinable feeling that everything which is Divine and of that Holy spiritual power which has fashioned the individual qualities of mankind, lives in me.’ It was in this way that the separate members of the old Hebrew race felt that they were united and at one with Abraham—their father. But Christianity definitely states that all such thoughts and conceptions concerning the Godlike qualities in man are lacking in completeness and fail to picture him in his most perfect form; even though he believe within himself that – ‘I AM THAT AM’. A true realization of those Divine attributes and forces which are active deep within mankind can only come when there is a clear apprehension of those things which are of the spirit and lie beyond all human generations.

Therefore if we would give the above words their fuller and truer meaning we should say:—Before Abraham, was the I AM. This implies that man’s Ego is eternal; and that in the beginning was the same Godlike element which has continued on throughout all generations and will be for evermore. To this the Hebrew would add:—‘Look not upon that which fadeth away and is of man’s material being, but regard only the Divine Essence which has lived and flowed in the blood of all descendants of Abraham, who was indeed our father. See to it that ye shall know and discern this Holy Spirit in each one of God’s children. But seek it not in the bond which uniteth brother and sister, but in that which abideth in each one of you and cometh to the light when man, in very solitude, shall know himself in his innermost soul, and cry out, I AM.’

Christ Jesus uttered words of similar intent and which we must interpret in like manner; with one modification they are as follows:—‘If any man come to me, and forsaketh [‘Hate’, see Luke xiv, 26] not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple:² We must not regard the significance of the above passage as in any way conflicting with the just claims of relationship and child love, but rather as indicating that The Christ had brought into the world that Principle of Divine Spirit which each individual man, because he is man, may find if he but seek steadfastly in the very centre of his being. It was because of this transcendent deed that, henceforth, mankind would enter into ever closer contact with the very heart of Christianity. Then would this most sacred principle rise up supreme, and while overcoming all diversity and error, bring about the realization of that universal quality which all may discern who but look deep within.

The Gods of old were national gods—gods of the peoples—and had relation to certain racial peculiarities. We still find something of this nature in the East among the Buddhists. But the God who stands revealed through Christianity is One who will raise mankind above all human discord and divergence, and lead him on to that which he truly is, because he is indeed MAN. He who would gain knowledge of the fundamental character of the Christian Doctrine must necessarily regard those spiritual powers and impulses which have guided supreme events in world history as realities [he cannot aver that all was begotten of mere chance actions and purely human mental activity]. He must break away from previous concepts of what is basic and of primary historic import; for happenings which have long been so regarded are in reality but upon the surface of the world’s actual growth. Underlying and controlling all human progress and development are beings far above man’s normal powers of sense-perception who are just as real as is the animal and the man in our material world. Supreme and preeminent among those spirit mentors who govern and direct the growth and development of mankind is THE CHRIST—that Christ, who, according to the ancient gnosis, was active in the body of Jesus of Nazareth during a period of three years.

Once again do we realize that Spiritual Science has attained to a concept and an understanding that enables it to throw light upon matters which have already claimed the attention of external science. The latter has been forced to admit that [in respect of The Christ] we are not merely concerned with a man, but with a Divine Being who, while He ruled and gave guidance must, nevertheless, in a certain sense, be considered as active within the man, Jesus. Here, however, we come upon a situation with which external science is unable to cope. Spiritual Science, on the other hand, leads us to the direct contemplation of beings thus acted upon and made subservient to divine spiritual powers, in the manner indicated, and regards such states as of actual occurrence; hence it can approach this sphere of modern investigation in a proper and logical manner. An amazing feature of twentieth-century spiritual development will be that external science will recognize and acknowledge that the concepts of the nineteenth century were in error, in so far as an attempt was then made to reduce the life of Christ Jesus to a life of Jesus of Nazareth only. Further it will be found that the final result of all research in this field will prove that in Christ Jesus we are concerned with a God; and when any science proclaims this truth it is a sign that it has begun to follow the true path. Spiritual Science would merely add that if mankind once admits the verity of the above statement, it may go forward ever assured that it is upon a certain and absolute foundation. The concept expressed in the above assertion is certainly in direct opposition to that material monistic cosmic conception, which has been formed in modern times.

In two of my previous lectures to which I have already referred, namely, ‘The Origin of Man’, and ‘The Origin of the Animal Kingdom’, we have seen that Spiritual Science was in complete accord with the actual facts brought to light by external Science. We would here say that in the matter we are now considering, Spiritual Science is again disposed to associate itself with the results of conscientious scientific research; but where there is doubt and divergence, it will be found that external Science will fall short of that goal which may be reached through the methods of Spiritual Science. In these days man regards human life and human understanding, as they appear to him in the physical world, as if they were irreconcilable with a closely associated and actual outer spiritual realm. He further believes that at the uttermost, man’s greatest fault can only lie in forming wrong conceptions of the material world, or in doing something which is looked upon as detrimental or malicious, and which does not conform with outer and apparent progress.

It is the custom at the present time in connection with the existing cosmic concept, to seek the origin of phenomena only in that which is close at hand; and it has become more and more clear the further man penetrates into spiritual life, that a point has now been reached with regard to this method where a complete change in ideas has become necessary. Both natural science and history have come to a stage where there is a definite scepticism concerning all spiritual matters, and these external sciences are now merely employed in collecting and associating outer perceptual facts, wholly regardless of that underlying spiritual reality which may be apprehended in all phenomena capable of sense-perception. One might almost say, that our present period has reached a point where scientific thought must be reversed, and assume a directly opposite attitude. The soul, through its constant inner striving, will in the end lead ultra materialism and ultra materialistic monism to adopt a concept, which as yet has played but a small part in man’s ideas concerning the cosmos. But in future investigations into the origin of things there will enter thoughts and ideas, so far, not generally accepted.

In my two works, Philosophy of Spiritual Activity and Truth and Science, I have explained that man has been compelled to assume that the position in which he finds himself relatively to the world, is not his true position; and that he must first undergo a development of inner-life so that he may recognize reality in natural phenomena, in order to be able to place himself in just and ethical relation to such phenomena. Further, in the mind of man there must dawn a clear understanding of the fundamental idea in redemption in addition to mere apprehension of causative factors in life. It will be a task of the twentieth century to gain general acceptance of the concepts pertaining to Redemption, Deliverance and Reincarnation, among the external sciences. The position which man has himself assumed as expert and judge of the world does not represent reality; for he can only arrive at true concepts after he has freed himself from his present false ideas, risen to a higher standard of thought, and overcome those barriers which cause him to view all things in distorted and unreal form—such a consummation would be Perceptive-Redemption.

Moral-Redemption comes about when man feels that the position which he occupies in his relation to the world is not his veritable standing, and when he realizes that he must seek a path leading over those obstacles which tower above him, blocking the way to all things appertaining to his true place in life. Concepts of the soul’s rebirth upon a higher plane, will yet be evolved from the wonders which come to light through the investigations of natural science, and the results of historical research. Man will then know, if he pictures the world as in a photographic image and conjures forth a vision of the scientific and historic progress of mankind, that this vision does not represent the material world alone, for underlying all human advancement there is clear evidence of a mighty spiritual plan of earnest training and development. He will no longer believe that the world as depicted by science is a mere physical creation, for he will realize that God’s laws are ever operative in such manner as to bring about his gradual unfoldment. If only natural science would extend its sphere of action beyond a mere portrayal of the perceptual world and rightly educate mankind, so that the human soul might break away from a position which is untenable, and rise to a state which would permit of its rebirth into a more exalted life—and if man could but know how glorious would then be the freedom from that restraint which ever hinders his upward progress, he would indeed have developed within himself those things fundamental to a true world concept of the Christ-Impulse. He would realize that he has power to look back into the grey mists of the past, to a period to which we have often referred, when his true being dwelt in a purely spiritual realm, later to descend into the material world that he might there of his own effort further his growth and advancement. Then would mankind understand the reason why it became imperative, that at a certain definite period in earthly progress a complete change of thought, a reversal of ideas, be brought about; he would know that it was in order that all might be empowered to tear themselves away from those false deceptive material concepts, which have entered so deeply into man’s consciousness. It is the Christ-Impulse which has checked man’s fall, and has saved humanity from being utterly immersed in those things which are but of the material world [and have neither value nor reality].

With respect to the evolution of humanity, The Christ is to be regarded objectively as the [Divine Principle] which is the source of our experience of a sacred power and quality entering the soul when reborn, and freed of all those primal transgressive tendencies which seek to find expression when man is associated with external earthly progress. It is this most holy essence, flowing in upon the world, which is indeed that manifestation we know as The Christ.

If the twentieth century would but regard the glorious realities of man’s inner life in a serious light it would understand the Christ-Event, and no more be in conflict with the concept and verity of those happenings which take place during the soul’s rebirth into a higher sphere. Spiritual Science would then prove that the same actual principles underlie all historic progress and development, as obtained in the case of external natural phenomena and occurrences. With regard to man’s ideas concerning the cosmos, he has fallen into that very error which finds expression in the words of Schopenhauer:—‘The world is my own conception.’ This statement implies that we are surrounded by a universe of colour, sound, and so forth, dependent entirely upon the action of the eye and other sense organs for its being. But if we seek to comprehend the world in its totality, it is not true to say:—‘All colour has existence only in virtue of the physical constitution of the eye.’ For the organ of sight would not be there, if the light had not first conjured it into being. If, on the one hand, it is true that the sensation of light be determined by the eye’s structure, then, on the other hand, it is equally true that the eye has been created by the light through the sun’s action. Both of these verities must therefore be involved in one incomprehensible reality. Thus do we realize the truth underlying Goethe’s words, when he says:—

‘The eye must thank the light for its being.’

From animal matter the light has brought forth a corresponding instrument suitable to receive its impressions. Thus has the eye formed itself in the light, so that it may be sensible of its touch in order that the illumination which is within may meet and blend with the rays which come from without. Even as the eye has been fashioned through the light’s action, and apprehension of the latter comes through the agency of this organ of vision, so was the fulfilment of man’s inner Christ-Experience and rebirth of soul, brought about by that supreme Christ-Event—The Mystery of Golgatha.

Spiritual Science tells us that before the advent of the Christ-Impulse, such inner experience could occur only under the stimulus of an external influence wrought through the agency of the mysteries, and not as is now the case, through a form of self-initiation induced within man’s very being.

There is a certain similarity between the relation of the colours and the light waves to the eye, and the profound mystery of the inner Christ-Experience; for as the eye apprehends the bright radiance of the light, so in man’s deepest being does he become conscious of the Divine Essence—The Christ. That his soul can rise up, and of its own effort transcend all previous limitations, is now possible because the resplendent sun—that grand Mystery of Golgotha—has shed its glorious rays upon the world’s history. If it were not for that supreme objective event, and the objective Christ, there could be no such mysterious subjective inner experience as will enter into the life of mankind during the twentieth century, to be regarded earnestly and from a truly scientific stand-point.

The twentieth century will see the dawn of those conditions necessary to a veritable understanding of the Christ-Impulse. It will be proved how absolute was its reality as a Divine centre of spiritual radiance, shining forth with a light which awakens an inner realization of that great truth reflected in Goethe’s words:—

‘Who overcomes himself, doth conquer that dread power
Which holds all beings closely bound –‘

Now, because of that spiritual bond between man’s latent capacity to overcome self, The Mystery of Golgotha, and the glorious Christ-Impulse, it follows that only by thus conquering can man know his being as it truly is, and knowing, he will henceforth regard his earthly nature as a quality from which he must be wholly freed. Further, he will realize that the attainment of a true standard of conduct and all genuine cognition and discernment can alone come to one who has sought and found redemption. It will be through an understanding of inner salvation that mankind will at last learn the true meaning of the concept of redemption as related to life’s historic evolution.

Finally, we would say, that during the twentieth century there will spread abroad a great illumination which will bring to humanity a clear comprehension of the Christ-Impulse, and this new knowledge will be in complete accord with the significance of Goethe’s fuller message³:—

‘Who overcomes himself, doth conquer that dread power
Which holds all beings closely bound—and he shall rise.
First dawns the glorious truth in that glad hour;
That truth by which, through Christ, mankind shall gain God’s prize.’

Notes for this lecture:

1. See lecture on Moses; footnote 2.

2. What is here implied is that the longing to be at one with the Christ Spirit which came into the world through Jesus of Nazareth, should be so intense that each of His disciples must be ready to sacrifice all ties of human love so that he may devote his life and being to the absolute service of THE CHRIST Who manifests within. Judging from the context the word ‘Hate’ which is in Luke xiv, 26, would appear to be of doubtful origin. [Ed.]

3. Von der Gewalt, die alle Wesen bindet,
Befreit der Mensch sich, der sich überwindet,
Und in dieser Uberwindung sich selber erst in Wahrheit findet,
Wie die ganze Menschheit in Christus sich selber in Wahrheit finden kann.’