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The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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Search results 571 through 580 of 1057

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97. The Christian Mystery (2000): The Children of Lucifer, Love in the Spirit Taking the Place of Blood-based Love 04 Apr 1906, Düsseldorf
Translated by Anna R. Meuss

These are the luciferic spirits which lagged behind the devas. The gods, or devas, lived on something that had become a characteristic of humans on earth—love between two sexes. Love between human beings is the air, or the food, which the gods enjoy. In Greek mythology it was called nectar and ambrosia. The cohorts of Lucifer had no real function in humanity for as long as human beings were still somnambulant.
A woman would have several husbands and it was impossible to say who was a child's father. All peoples originally had ancestors who would unconcernedly marry close relatives. Close blood bonds were not an obstacle to marriage.
260. The Christmas Conference : Continuation of the Foundation Meeting 29 Dec 1923, Dornach
Translated by Johanna Collis, Michael Wilson

Practise spirit-recalling In depths of soul, Where in the wielding will Of world-creating Thine own I Comes to being Within God's I. And thou wilt truly live In the World-Being of Man. For the Father-Spirit of the heights holds sway In depths of worlds begetting being.
Practise spirit-beholding In stillness of thought, Where the eternal aims of Gods World-Being's Light On thine own I Bestow For thy free willing. And thou wilt truly think In the Spirit-Foundations of Man.
31. Collected Essays on Cultural and Contemporary History 1887–1901: Letters from Fichte 01 Jan 1894,

She wouldn't be if I didn't trust her with the same principles. But a 74-year-old old man, her father, is inextricably linked to her. His age requires rest; he cannot expose himself to the danger of being driven about, to which I myself may well expose myself.
Under these conditions I now expect protection, and peace in Jena, at least as long as my old father-in-law lives; and I ask for the word of the bland prince about this. May I add a few observations to show the fairness of my request.
She did not actually spoil anything that I remember. Ifland portrayed the tender father very well, especially in the third act, the one melting in the thought of the believed loss, and made a powerful impression on his audience: but it always remained a tender father from one of his mountain family plays: the nobility of the first vassal, secret husband of the proud princess, father of the high daughter, the importance of the darkly threatening star on the political horizon of this realm, were lost - not to the detriment of the play, as it seems to me, with the true spectator; for whoever knows Ifflanden besides, will not take him for identical with such a person, and at the poet's hint will gladly supplant dignity, and majesty, and depth.
310. Human Values in Education: Stages of Childhood 19 Jul 1924, Arnheim
Translated by Vera Compton-Burnett

This accounts for the surprises we get when faced with the education of very young children. A father came to me once and said, “What shall I do? Something really dreadful has happened. My boy has been stealing.” I said, “Let us first find out whether he really steals. What has he done?” The father told me that the boy had taken money out of the cupboard, had bought sweets with it and shared them with the other boys.
An anthroposophist, a student of spiritual science knows that the emergence of the butterfly from the chrysalis is actually a picture of the immortality of the human soul placed into the world by the gods. He can never think otherwise than that the gods inscribed into the world this picture of the emerging butterfly as an image of the immortality of the human soul.
33. Biographies and Biographical Sketches: Arthur Schopenhauer

The wonderful expectations that the thought of the journey aroused in the young Schopenhauer caused him to repress his love of science and choose the profession that appealed to his father. This was a decision that his father foresaw, as he was well aware of his son's desire to see the world.
In the early days of 1805, the now seventeen-year-old young man arrived back in Hamburg. He now had to keep his father's word and dedicate himself to the commercial profession without refusal. He was apprenticed to Senator Jenisch in Hamburg.
Nevertheless, there were reasons that prevented him from throwing off the hated shackles immediately after his father's death. He loved his father dearly. It was contrary to his feelings to take a step that the deceased would never have approved of.
68a. The Essence of Christianity: Religion, Science and Theosophy 31 Jan 1908, Mainz

We may recall the moment when Goethe stood in Italy before the great works of art he had longed for so much before coming to Italy. “There is necessity, there is God,” he said when speaking of them. When he wanted to explain why necessity and God shone out of artistic form for him, he said: “I suspect that the Greeks proceeded according to the laws by which nature itself proceeds, and which I am on the trail of.
In what the old artists created, he saw necessity, God. For him, the genuine artist was the one who caught the spiritual light of God in his soul, as a burning glass catches physical light.
One could say: There you can see how the disposition of father and mother is inherited. But that does not contradict the fact that a spiritual process is at work behind the physical process.
118. The Advent of Christ in the Ethereal World: The Return of Christ in the Etheric 06 Feb 1910, Kassel

If you look into this in more detail, you learn that his name was not Petöfi at all, but that his father was Serbian and his mother Croatian. There was nothing Magyar in him. What was not Hungarian built up in him: that was the external development.
Within the dark age, we must find that which could not be anywhere else: 3000 years after the beginning of this age, we find the event of Golgotha. Humanity could no longer ascend to the gods. Therefore, a god had to descend. This is what happened with the Christ event. The human ego could only live out itself in the Kali Yuga.
That is why it is not understood today. Because this God led an earthly life, it was possible to speak of Him in earthly words. That was also a time of transition.
198. The Festivals and Their Meaning II: Easter: The Blood-relationship and the Christ-relationship 03 Apr 1920, Dornach
Translated by Dorothy S. Osmond, Alan P. Shepherd, Charles Davy

He knew that he was born out of the divine and spiritual. Out of God I am born, out of God we are all born—this was a self-evident truth to man in those days, for he beheld its reality.
In ancient times a man could say: Everything I see in the world reveals to me that objects and beings come from the gods, that their existence is not enclosed within the limits of earthly life. Man was conscious of the eternal nature of his own being, because he knew that he originated from the gods.
We have the assurance of eternal life, for we come from God and God will take us to Himself again. That, after all, was the knowledge emanating from the ancient, primeval wisdom.
213. Spiritual Wisdom in the Early Christian Centuries 16 Jul 1922, Dornach
Translator Unknown

The four hundred and seventy-four Gods include all the Gods of all the different peoples: Zeus, Apollo, Baal—all the Gods. The reason why the peoples have different Gods is that one race has chosen twelve or maybe seventeen Gods from the four hundred and seventy-four, another race has taken twenty-five, another three, another four. The number of racial Gods is four hundred and seventy-four. And the highest of these Gods, the God who came down to earth at a definite point of time, is Christ.
He declares: Plotinus was possessed by a demon, not by a God! And then, in the nineteenth century, the Gods became demons, the demons Gods. Men were no longer capable of distinguishing between Gods and demons in the universe.
205. Psychoanalysis in the Light of Anthroposophy: Connections Between Organic Processes and the Mental Life of Man 02 Jul 1921, Dornach
Translated by Mary Laird-Brown

All this, coming in essence from the cosmos, is determined by the mother. Through the father and impregnation comes that which is formed in the physical body and in the ego. This ego, as it is then, after the Midnight Hour of Being, passes over into an entirely different world.
There the two poles of humanity meet as it were, through mother and father, from the upper world and from the netherworld. What I am now saying was an intrinsic portion of the Egyptian Mysteries which came out of the old instinctive knowledge, at least so far as is known to me. The Egyptian Mysteries led particularly to knowledge of what they then called the upper and the lower gods, the upper and the underworld of gods; and it may be said that in the act of impregnation a polar equilibrium of the upper and the underworld of gods is brought about.

Results 571 through 580 of 1057

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