The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Following on from the reflections of the Fifth Gospel, today we want to lead our soul to the effectiveness of the Christ-Spirit on human development, as it took place in the spiritual worlds before the Mystery of Golgotha.

We must remember the fact of the two Jesus-children: the Solomon-like child, in whom the Zarathustra-ego lived, and the Nathan-like child. We must look at the Nathan-like child and ask ourselves: what kind of being was this child, in whom the Zarathustra-ego later lived?

To understand this being, we must go far back in the evolution of the earth and of man. This being, which was active in the Nathanic Jesus-child, had entered into physical embodiment for the first time in Jesus of Bethlehem. Before that it had taken part in the evolution of mankind from the spiritual world, but had never lived in a physical human body. It had lived through the times when the human shells were created, lived through the Saturn period, in which the germ of the physical body was laid, the sun and moon period, when the etheric and astral bodies were formed, and also lived through the smaller stages that repeated the great periods of time. But when the human ego descended into the three sheaths in the Lemurian period, this being had remained in the spiritual worlds as it were as a part of the divine human being and had not taken part in the development of the ego in the three sheaths and its seduction through the Luciferic-Ahrimanic influence. This part of the divine human being, this spiritual being, which remained in the spiritual worlds, descended into a physical body for the first time as the Nathanian boy Jesus in order to allow the Christ to permeate it. The baptism of St. John represents the permeation of Jesus by the Christ-Spirit.

But this was not the first time that it had allowed itself to be permeated by the Christ. While it lived as a spiritual being in the spiritual worlds, it had already been able to allow itself to be permeated repeatedly by the Spirit of the Sun. In preparation for the Christ event in the physical body, something similar had taken place beforehand in the spiritual worlds and had an effect on human evolution.

Let us look back to the Lemurian period when man united with his sheaths, and let us see how the human being would have formed if only the cosmic forces with which he was then in contact had had an effect on man. At that time, the twelve cosmic forces that act on man threatened to be thrown into disorder by demonic beings. As a result, man would have had to develop quite differently from what he has become today. The senses of man, which were developing at that time, would have become overly sensitive under the effect of the forces that were about to fall into disorder. Today, man is able to perceive light and all other perceptions calmly. Under the effect of the Luciferic-Ahrimanic impact, the life of the senses would have had to trigger the strongest desires and impulses. If, for example, the human being had seen a red color – and this is how the sun's rays would have had to have worked – the desiring soul would have had to flee in burning pain, and upon perceiving blue, it would have had to overcome itself in agony, consumed by itself. The soul would have had to suffer terribly with every sensory perception, hunted by animal lust and desire for scorching pain and agony.

Then the tortured humanity's cry of pain reached the spiritual being. It drove it to the sun spirit, so that it could be imbued by the Christ. In this way the inner strength of the sense perception was mitigated, and the being was able to resist the strongest temptation of Lucifer and Ahriman. By moderating the excessive effect of the forces on the senses, it transformed the life of perception into a moderate passive one.

And let us go further back into Atlantean times. A new danger loomed over people: the Luciferic-Ahrimanic influence threatened the functions and organs of human life. If, for example, a dish had been placed before a person, animal greed would have awakened to devour it. His soul would have been entirely greed. Breathing, inhaling and exhaling, would have been particularly sensitive. Bad air would have filled the human being with shuddering disgust. Everything related to the functions of nutrition and life triggered a tremendous agitation of sympathy and antipathy, driving the soul from devouring greed to repulsive disgust.

And again it was that spiritual being that averted this danger for man. A second time it allowed itself to be permeated with the Christ-spirit and thereby saved the life forces of man, which would otherwise have been thrown into disarray.

And at the end of the Atlantean era, a third danger arose for man through the Luciferic-Ahrimanic influence. There was a threat that the human soul forces, thinking, feeling and willing, would fall into disorder, into disharmony with each other, that the three forces could no longer resonate properly together in the human soul. Glowing with passion, man would have followed every impulse, or, filled with fear and hatred, would have fled, without reason being able to regulate the forces. How did the spiritual being bring help? The spiritual being had to submerge itself in the human soul, which was filled with passion, had to become passion itself, had to become a dragon, in order to transform the soul forces and to allow the Christ-spirit to shine through a third time.

We find this spiritual event mirrored in the myths of all peoples, in the myth of Saint George, the archangel Michael, conquering the dragon. In the post-Atlantean cultures we see a consciousness alive of the Christ's influence in the spiritual worlds on the process of becoming human through that spiritual being. In the Zarathustra cult, we encounter the high sun-being, and like an image of this, the service of Apollo appears in Greek consciousness. The temple of Apollo stands at the Castalian Spring, and it is to this that the Greeks, well prepared, journey to seek Apollo's counsel. Python, who rests over the vapors that rise from the crevice and entwine Mount Parnassus like a snake, is defeated by Apollo, and in his place stands the priestess Pythia, through whose mouth Apollo reveals his wisdom to the Greeks. From spring to fall, Apollo dwells in his place, then he moves north to the land of the Hyperboreans. Apollo must move north as the spirit of the sun, while the physical sun moves south. And we find Apollo associated with music, the playing of the lyre. It represents the expression of the harmony of the three human soul powers. And it is said of a famous man with ears that were too large, King Midas, that Apollo caused him to grow the ears of an ass as punishment for his having decided the musical contest between Apollo and Marsyas in favor of Apollo, because he preferred Marsyas's flute to Apollo's playing of the strings.

Three times, therefore, before the Mystery of Golgotha occurred, the Christ had connected himself with humanity from the spiritual worlds, by threefold penetration of that spirit being who was later to become the Nathanian Jesus-child : first, to regulate the senses in the Lemurian period; secondly, to regulate the life forces at the beginning of the Atlantean period; thirdly, to regulate the soul forces at the end of the Atlantean period. Only then did the Mystery of Golgotha take place for the fourth time, in order to regulate the I in its relationship to the world.

The danger for the human ego, into which it was led by the temptations of Lucifer and Ahriman, was sensed in the Egyptian priestly centers in the Greco-Latin period. They sensed the approach of the ego and sought to wrestle with the forces that sought to bring it into disorder. In many places in the temples, the following ceremonies were observed, often repeated: the priest formed a hideous, shapeless creature, a crocodile, spat on it, threw it to the ground and burned it. Other priests told the people: Re, the sun god, moves in the sky from east to west. In the west, he grows pale and falls, because he has to fight demonic beings.

The powers of the self were felt to be pushed out. It comes to us in two forms. We see the appearance of Sibylline activity in the seventh and eighth centuries B.C. in all the southern European countries. In this activity there lived that which showed that the I can develop. But the Sibylline element was connected with the elemental powers of the earth, which work in the subconscious of the soul and force their way out in a passionate way. The prophecy of the Jewish people is contrasted with this sibylline being. The prophets want to repress all sibylline nature in their souls and only listen to the revelation that opens up to the powers of the ego, which are conscious. Michelangelo depicts the prophets in contemplative absorption and, in contrast to them, the sibyls associated with the elemental forces of the earth, with wind, fire and air.

Without the Mystery of Golgotha, the Sibylline element would have triumphed over the conscious powers of the I, would have pushed the I forces back. The I would have been lost to the evolution of mankind. We see the Christ impulse at work in the course of humanity as a force, even without human consciousness having taken it up, as a force that shapes cultures, that shapes the history of the European peoples, that determines the shaping of Europe. October 28, 312 AD is the defeat of Maxentius by Constantine. Maxentius consults the Sibyls and is given the answer: “If you march with your army outside the gates of Rome, you will defeat Rome's greatest enemy.” Maxentius then has a dream, and he follows the Sibylline oracle and dream. He marches outside Rome, against all reason, the advice and all the plans of his generals. Constantine also dreams: He sees himself carrying the banner of Christ and conquering his opponent, who is four times stronger than he is. Contrary to all human reason, the battle takes place, and Constantine wins, carrying the cross in front of his army.

We can present the historical course of humanity from 800 BC to the present day. In the centuries before Christ, we see the profound Greek wisdom rising to its highest point. In it, humanity consumes the last inherited powers of the gods. Then, at point zero, the Mystery of Golgotha enters and has an effect on humanity. In the time after the Mystery of Golgotha, the stimulating forces of the Christ Impulse worked in various ways, emanating from different planes of the spiritual worlds.

To summarize, we can first grasp the time of the first eight centuries after Christ. We saw how human reason fails in the face of the Christ impulse (gnosis), but how it is effective as a fact in human events (Maxentius and Constantine). In the first eight centuries, the power from the highest spiritual worlds, from the upper Devachan, was at work. We see a transition, a conclusion of this period in the work of Scotus Erigena around 850. In his system of thought, the Christ impulse still works like a force wave from the highest spiritual world into the physical one.

Then, from 800 to 1600, the impulse from the lower Devachan into the physical world takes effect. People seek to bring the Christ impulse home to their souls through various forms of belief. But thought proves to be unsuitable and the efforts fruitless. Neither the Crusades nor the attempts to prove the existence of God can establish an inwardly living connection.

At the transition to the next epoch stands the Maid of Orleans. The impulses of Christ were revealed to her soul from the spiritual worlds, in whose name she intervenes in the shaping of human history.

The power that asserts itself in man directly from the higher spiritual realms is increasingly being lost. The forces are growing ever weaker; from 1600 to the present day, the impulse has only worked from the astral world, the soul world. That is why theology is becoming more and more erudite and abstract. In place of the cosmic divine being, the Christ, it sets the “simple man from Nazareth.” Yet our time would have been much more advanced in materialism, much more imbued with the anti-Christian moment, had it not been for the special way in which the forces of the Christ, working in from the astral world, asserted themselves: In the 15th and 16th centuries, strange stories emerged everywhere and spread throughout the whole of Western Europe. In the most diverse places, in all countries of Europe, men appeared with calloused feet, wearing poor clothing, and with long flowing hair, and told of how they had been present at the Mystery of Golgotha, and had seen the Christ walking on earth. But when He passed by their house, they had not shown Him reverence, and had insulted Him. That is why, from that time on, they have had to wander ceaselessly, without rest or respite, telling, as penance, what they once experienced. (Eternal Jew.) They told all this as if from memory. They were welcomed everywhere, received by bishops and prelates. They lived in a glimpse of the Akasha Chronicle and could not but live their whole life in this way and bear witness to the Christ event. Their other consciousness was clouded, but through the impulses from the astral world they could arrive at this vision. In this way people were saved from the encroachment of antichristianity, saved from the worst materialism.

Then, from 2400 onwards, the epoch will come when the forces for understanding Christ will come from the earth alone, when the Christ will work on people from the physical plane. But the harbingers of what will be essential after 2400 are already reaching into our time: the Christ will reveal Himself on the physical plane in an ethereal form. Thus we see eight hundred years of history unrolling in connection with impulses from the spiritual worlds. In my book “Welt- und Lebensanschauungen des 19. Jahrhunderts” (World and Life Views of the 19th Century), as expanded in the new edition as “Die Rätsel der Philosophie” (The Riddles of Philosophy), one can follow the development of human consciousness in the same periodic steps.

The history of human thought shows us that, if the forces necessary for the future understanding of Christ are to be present, thought itself must take on a different form, and thinking activity must undergo a transformation. Today we see that the life of thought is placed between two points of view, and man suffers from this “being squeezed in between” and cannot find the transition from one point of view to the other. On the one hand, there is Haeckel, who, accepting only outer perception, has created a picture of the world that cannot, however, recognize the reality of thought. And on the other side stands Fichte, who, starting from thought as a spiritual reality - the weaving and living of thought in truth is the active spirit - builds up a world picture of thought, but cannot recognize time as reality. What thought needs is to be allowed to become living reality.

It is important to bring thoughts to life, just as a plant seed is brought to life. Seeds can be sown, harvested and then used for food. In doing so, they stray from their true purpose, which is to sprout new plants from the seed. Thus, man has collected the seeds of thought in the barns of natural science and philosophy, heaped them up and allowed them to dry out. The seed of a plant must, by its very nature, be sunk into the environment that gives it life if it is to sprout anew. So it is important to sink Hegel's seeds of thought into the soil of spiritual science, where they can grow into fruitful life, into the spiritual faculties of imagination, inspiration and intuition. In place of the categorical imperative, the I will activate the “moral imagination” out of the power of awakened thinking. But then it will also be possible to understand the coming Christ impulse out of the forces of the earth. This is the connection between the world of thought in the “Philosophy of Freedom” and the higher powers of knowledge that arise in our soul, through the paths that spiritual science points out.

In harmony with the coming Christ event, I had to speak to you today about the vitalization of thinking for future spiritual knowledge.

[ 1 ] There are magic formulas which continue to act in perpetually new ways throughout the centuries of the history of ideas. In Greece one such formula was regarded as an oracle of Apollo. It is, “Know thyself.” Such sentences seem to contain an infinite life within themselves. One meets them in walking the most diverse paths of spiritual life. The more one advances, the more one penetrates to an understanding of all phenomena, the deeper appears the meaning of these formulas. At many moments in the course of our meditations and thoughts they flash like lightning, illuminating our whole inner life. At such times there arises in us something like the feeling that we perceive the heartbeat of humanity's development. How close we feel to personalities of the past when one of their sayings arouses in us the sensation that they are revealing to us the fact of their having had such moments! One then feels oneself brought into an intimate relationship with these personalities. Thus for instance, one becomes intimately acquainted with Hegel when, in the third volume of his Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, one comes upon the words: “Such stuff, one says, are the abstractions we behold when we let the philosophers dispute and quarrel in our study, and decide matters in this way or in that; these are abstractions made up of mere words.—No! No! They are acts of the universal spirit, and therefore of fate. In this the philosophers are closer to the master than those who feed upon the crumbs of the spirit; they read or write the cabinet orders in the original: it is their function to take part in writing them. The philosophers are the mystics who were present at the act in the innermost sanctuary and who participated in it.” When Hegel said this he experienced one of the moments described above. He spoke these sentences when he had reached the end of Greek philosophy in the course of his analysis. And through them he has shown that the meaning of Neoplatonist wisdom, of which he speaks at this point, was at one time illuminated for him as by a stroke of lightning. At the moment of this illumination he had become intimate with such spirits as Plotinus and Proclus. And we become intimate with him as we read his words.

[ 2 ] And we become intimate with the solitarily meditating vicar in Zschopau, M. Valentinus Wigelius (Valentin Weigel), when we read the words of introduction to his booklet, Erkenne dich selbst, Know Thyself, written in 1578. “We read in the old sages the useful proverb, ‘Know thyself,’ which, although it is principally used to refer to worldly behavior, such as, Look well at yourself, what you are; Search in your bosom; Judge yourself, and leave others uncensored: although it is, I say, used in human life with respect to behavior, yet we may well apply this saying, ‘Know thyself,’ to the natural and supernatural understanding of the whole man, so that man shall not only look at himself and thus remember what his behavior should be with respect to other people, but also understand his nature, internally and externally, in the spirit and in nature: whence he comes, of what he is made, and what he is meant for.” From his own points of view Valentin Weigel has thus arrived at insights which were summed up for him in the oracle of Apollo.

[ 3 ] A similar road to understanding, and the same position with respect to the “Know thyself,” can be ascribed to a series of penetrating spirits beginning with Meister Eckhart (1260–1327) and ending with Angelus Silesius (1624–1677), to which Valentin Weigel also belongs.

[ 4 ] What is common to these spirits is a strong feeling that in man's self-knowledge arises a sun which illuminates something beyond the incidental individual personality of the beholder. What Spinoza realized in the ethereal height of pure thought, that “the human soul has a sufficient knowledge of the eternal and infinite nature of God,” lived in them as immediate perception; and for them self-knowledge was the path by which this eternal and infinite nature was to be reached. It was clear to them that self-knowledge in its true form endows man with a new sense which opens to him a world that has the same relation to what can be attained without this sense as does the world of the physically sighted to that of the blind. It would not be easy to find a better description of the importance of this new sense than that given by J. G. Fichte in his Berlin lectures in the year 1813. “Imagine a world of people born blind, who therefore know only those objects and their conditions which exist through the sense of touch. Go among them and speak to them of colors and of the other conditions which exist only for sight through the medium of light. Either you will speak to them of nothing, and it will be better if they say so, for in this way you will soon notice your mistake, and, if you cannot open their eyes, will put an end to this fruitless talk.—Or for some reason they will want to give a meaning to your teaching; in this case they will only be able to understand it through what they know from touch: they will want to feel the light, the colors, and the other conditions of visibility; they will think that they feel them, will, within the realm of touch, make up something that they call color and deceive themselves with it. Then they will misunderstand, turn things around, and misinterpret.” Something similar may be said of that toward which the spirits under discussion strove. In self-knowledge they saw the opening up of a new sense. And in their opinion this sense leads to insights which do not exist for one who does not perceive in self-knowledge that which differentiates it from all other kinds of knowing. One to whom this sense has not opened itself thinks that self-knowledge arises in a way similar to knowledge through external senses, or through some other means acting from the outside. He thinks, “Knowledge is knowledge.” However, in one case its object is something situated in the external world, in the other case it is in his own soul. He hears only words, at best abstract thoughts, in what, for those who look deeper, constitutes the basis of their inner life namely, in the dictum that in all other kinds of knowing the object is outside of ourselves, while in self-knowledge we stand inside the object; that every other object comes into contact with us as something completed and closed, while in our self we actively and creatively weave what we observe in ourselves. This may appear as an explanation consisting of mere words, perhaps as a triviality, but if properly understood, it can also appear as a higher light which illuminates all other knowledge in a new way. He to whom it appears under the first aspect is in the same situation as a blind man to whom one says, A brilliant object is there. He hears the words, but for him brilliance does not exist. One can unite in oneself the sum of the knowledge of a period; if one does not perceive the significance of self-knowledge then in the higher sense all knowledge is but blind.

[ 5 ] Independent of us, the world lives for us because it communicates itself to our spirit. What is communicated to us must be expressed in the language characteristic of us. A book would be meaningless for us if its contents were to be presented to us in an unknown tongue. In the same way the world would be meaningless for us if it did not speak to us in our language. The same language which reaches us from the realm of objects, we also hear in ourselves. But then it is we who are speaking. It is only a matter of listening aright to the transformation which occurs when we close our perception to external objects and listen only to that which then sounds in ourselves. It is for this that the new sense is necessary. If it is not awakened we think that in the communications about ourselves we perceive only communications about an object external to ourselves; we are of the opinion that there is something hidden somewhere which speaks to us in the same way as do external objects. If we have the new sense we know that its perceptions are quite different from those which refer to external objects. Then we know that this sense does not leave outside of itself that which it perceives, as the eye leaves outside of itself the object it sees, but that it can completely incorporate its object within itself. If I see an object, the object remains outside of me; if I perceive myself, I myself enter into my perception. One who seeks some part of his self outside what is perceived, shows that the essential content of what is perceived has not become apparent to him. Johannes Tauler (1300–1361) expressed this truth in the apt words: If I were a king and did not know it, I would not be a king. If I do not become clear to myself in my self-perception, then I do not exist for myself. But if I do become clear to myself then in my most fundamental nature I possess myself in my perception. No part of me remains outside of my perception. J. G. Fichte strongly indicates the difference between self-perception and every other kind of perception in the following words: “It would be easier to get most people to consider themselves to be a piece of lava in the moon than a self. He who is not in agreement with himself about this understands no thoroughgoing philosophy and needs none. Nature, whose machine he is, will lead him without his doing anything in all the acts he has to perform. In order to philosophize one needs independence, and this one can only give to oneself.—We should not want to see without eyes, but we should also not affirm that it is the eye which sees.”

[ 6 ] The perception of oneself is thus at the same time an awakening of the self. In our knowing we connect the nature of things with our own nature. The communications which things make to us in our language become parts of our own self. A thing which confronts me is no longer separate from me once I know it. That part of it which I can take in is incorporated into my own nature. When I awaken my own self, when I perceive what is within me, then I also awaken to a higher existence what I have incorporated into my nature from the outside. The light which falls upon me when I awaken, also falls upon what I have appropriated to myself of the things of the world. A light flashes in me and illuminates me, and with me everything I know of the world. Everything I know would remain blind knowledge if this light did not fall upon it. I could penetrate the whole world with my knowledge; it would not be what it must become in me if knowledge were not awakened to a higher existence within me.

[ 7 ] What I add to things by this awakening is not a new idea, is not an enrichment of the content of my knowledge; it is a raising of knowledge, of cognition, to a higher level, on which everything is endowed with a new brilliance. As long as I do not raise my cognition to this level, all knowledge remains worthless to me in the higher sense. Things exist without me too. They have their being in themselves. What does it mean if with their existence, which they have outside without me, I connect another spiritual existence, which repeats things within me? If it were a matter of a mere repetition of things, it would be senseless to do this.—But it is a matter of a mere repetition only so long as I do not awaken to a higher existence within my own self the spiritual content of things received into myself. When this happens, then I have not repeated the nature of things within me, but have given it a rebirth on a higher level. With the awakening of my self there takes place a spiritual rebirth of the things of the world. What things show in this rebirth they did not possess previously. There outside stands a tree. I take it into my mind. I throw my inner light upon what I have apprehended. Within me the tree becomes more than it is outside. That part of it which enters through the portal of the senses is received into a spiritual content. An ideal counterpart to the tree is in me. This says infinitely much about the tree, which the tree outside cannot tell me. What the tree is only shines upon it out of me. Now the tree is no longer the isolated being which it is in external space. It becomes a part of the whole spiritual world living within me. It combines its content with other ideas which exist in me. It becomes a part of the whole world of ideas, which embraces the vegetable kingdom; it is further integrated into the evolutionary scale of every living thing.—Another example: I throw a stone in a horizontal direction. It moves in a curved line, and after some time falls to the ground. In successive moments of time I see it in different locations. Through reflection I arrive at the following: During its movement the stone is subject to differing influences. If it were only under the influence of the impulse I gave to it, it would fly on forever in a straight line, without any change in its velocity. But the earth also exercises an influence upon it. It attracts it. If I had simply let it go without giving it an impulse, it would have fallen vertically to the earth. During the fall its velocity would have constantly increased. The reciprocal action of these two influences produces what I actually see.—Let us assume that I was not able to separate the two influences mentally, and to reconstruct mentally what I see from their combination according to certain laws; matters would remain at that which is seen. It would be a spiritually blind looking-on, a perception of the successive positions occupied by the stone. But in fact matters do not remain at this. The whole process occurs twice. Once outside, and there my eye sees it; then my mind lets the whole process occur again, in a mental fashion. My inner sense must be directed upon the mental process, which my eye does not see, in order for it to realize that with my own forces I awaken the process in its mental aspect.—One can again adduce a dictum of J. G. Fichte, which makes this fact clearly intelligible. “The new sense is thus the sense for the spirit; that sense for which only the spirit exists and nothing else, and for which the other, the given existence, also assumes the form of the spirit and becomes transformed into it, for which therefore existence in its own form has actually disappeared ... This sense has been used for seeing as long as men have existed, and everything great and excellent in the world, and which alone makes mankind endure, has its origin in the visions of this sense. But it was not the case that this sense saw itself in its difference from and its opposition to the other, ordinary sense. The impressions of the two senses became fused; life split into these two halves without a unifying bond.” The unifying bond is created by the fact that the inner sense perceives the spiritual, which it awakens in its intercourse with the external world, in its spirituality. Because of this, that part of things which we take up into our spirit ceases to appear as a meaningless repetition. It appears as something new in opposition to what external perception can give. The simple process of throwing a stone, and my perception of it, appear in a higher light when I make clear to myself the task of my inner sense in this whole matter. In order to combine intellectually the two influences and their manners of acting, a sum of mental content is required which I must already have acquired when I perceive the flying stone. I thus use a mental content already stored within me upon something which confronts me in the external world. And this process of the external world is integrated into the pre-existing intellectual content. In its essence it shows itself to be an expression of this content. Through a comprehension of my inner sense the relationship of the content of this sense to the things of the external world thus becomes apparent to me. Fichte could say that without a comprehension of this sense, for me the world splits into two halves: into things outside of me, and into images of these things within me. The two halves become united when the inner sense understands itself, and therewith realizes what kind of light it sheds upon things in the process of cognition. And Fichte could also say that this inner sense sees only spirit. For it sees how the spirit illuminates the world of the senses by integrating it into the world of the spiritual. The inner sense lets the external sensory existence arise within it as a spiritual essence on a higher level. An external thing is completely known when there is no part of it which has not experienced a spiritual rebirth in this way. Every external thing is thus integrated with a spiritual content, which, when it is seized upon by the inner sense, participates in the destiny of self-knowledge. The spiritual content which belongs to a thing enters wholly into the world of ideas through the illumination from inside, just as does our own self.—This exposition contains nothing which is either capable of a logical proof or requires one. It is nothing but a result of inner experiences. One who denies its purport only shows that he lacks this inner experience. One cannot dispute with him any more than one disputes about color with a blind man.—It must not however be asserted that this inner experience is made possible only through the gift possessed by a few chosen ones. It is a common human quality. Everyone who does not refuse to do so can enter upon the path to it. This refusal however is frequent enough. And one always has the feeling when one meets with objections made in this vein: it is not a matter of people who cannot acquire the inner experience, but of those who block their access to it by a net of various logical chimeras. It is almost as if someone who looks through a telescope sees a new planet, but nevertheless denies its existence because his calculations have shown him that there can be no planet in that location.

[ 8 ] At the same time there exists in most people a definite feeling that with what the external senses and the analytic intellect perceive, not all of the nature of things can be given. They then think that the remainder must lie in the outside world, just as do the objects of external perception themselves. What they should attain by perceiving again, with the inner sense and on a higher level, that is, the object which they have perceived and seized upon with the intellect, they displace into the outside world as something inaccessible and unknown. They then speak of limits to cognition which prevent us from attaining the “thing in itself.” They speak of the unknown “nature” of things. That this “nature” of things becomes clear when the inner sense lets its light fall upon things, they will not acknowledge. An especially telling example of the error which lies hidden here was furnished by the famous “Ignorabimus” speech of the scientist, Du Bois-Reymond, in the year 1876. Everywhere we should go only so far as to see manifestations of “matter” in the processes of nature. Of what “matter” itself is, we are not to know anything. Du Bois-Reymond asserts that we shall never be able to penetrate to the point where matter haunts space. But the reason we cannot penetrate to this point lies in the fact that nothing whatsoever can be found there. One who speaks like Du Bois-Reymond has a feeling that the understanding of nature gives results which point to something else, which this understanding itself cannot give. But he does not want to enter upon the path which leads to this something else, namely the path of inner experience. Therefore he is helpless when confronted by the question of “matter,” as by a dark mystery. In the one who enters upon the path of inner experience things come to a rebirth; and what in them remains unknown to external experience then becomes clear.

[ 9 ] Thus the inner life of man not only elucidates itself, but also external things. From this point an infinite perspective for human cognition opens up. Within glows a light which does not confine its luminosity to this interior. It is a sun which illuminates all reality at once. Something appears in us which unites us with the whole world. We are no longer merely the single accidental man, no longer this or that individual. In us the whole world reveals itself. To us it discloses its own interconnection, and it shows us how we ourselves as individuals are connected with it. Out of self-knowledge is born knowledge of the world. And our own limited individuality takes its place spiritually in the great interconnection of the world because something comes to life in it which reaches beyond this individuality, which embraces everything of which this individuality is a part.

[ 10 ] Thinking which with logical prejudices does not block its way to inner experience will at last always reach a recognition of the essential nature working within us, which connects us with the whole world, because through it we overcome the contrast of inner and outer where man is concerned. Paul Asmus, the prematurely deceased, clearsighted philosopher, comments on this state of affairs in the following way (cf. his work: Das Ich und das Ding an sich, The Self and the Thing in Itself, p. 14f.): “We shall make this clearer to ourselves by means of an example. Let us imagine a piece of sugar; it is round, sweet, impenetrable, etc.; all these are qualities we understand; there is only one thing in all this that appears to us as something absolutely different, that we do not understand, that is so different from us that we cannot penetrate into it without losing ourselves, from the mere surface of which our thought timidly recoils. This one thing is the bearer of all these qualities, and is unknown to us; it is the very essence which constitutes the innermost self of this object. Thus Hegel says correctly that the whole content of our idea is only related to this dark subject as an accident, and that we only attach qualifications to this essence without penetrating to its depths,—qualifications which finally, since we do not know it itself, have no truly objective value, are subjective. Comprehending thinking, on the other hand, has no such unknowable subject in which its qualifications are only accidents, rather the objective subject falls within the concept. If I comprehend something, it is present in my concept in its totality; I am at home in the innermost sanctuary of its nature, not because it has no essence of its own, but because it compels me, through the necessity, poised over both of us, of the concept, which appears subjectively in me, objectively in it, to re-think its concept. Through this re-thinking there is revealed to us, as Hegel says,—just as this is our subjective activity,—at the same time the true nature of the object.”—Only he can speak in this way who is able to illuminate the processes of thought with the light of inner experience.

[ 11 ] In my Philosoph ie der Freiheit, Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, departing from different points of view, I also have pointed to the primordial fact of the inner life: “There is thus no doubt: in thinking we hold the universal processes by a corner where we have to be present if they are to take place at all. And it is just this which is important. This is just the reason why things confront me in such a mysterious fashion, that I am so unconcerned with the process of their becoming. I simply come upon them, but in thinking I know how it is done. Therefore there is no more primordial point of departure for the contemplation of the universal processes than thinking.”

[ 12 ] To the one who regards the inner experience of man in this way the meaning of human cognition within the whole universal process is also clear. It is not an unimportant addition to the rest of the universal process. This is what it would be if it represented only a repetition, in the form of ideas, of what exists externally. But in understanding occurs what does not occur anywhere in the external world: the universal process confronts itself with its own spiritual nature. This universal process would be forever incomplete if this confrontation did not take place. With it the inner experience of man becomes integrated into the objective universal process; the latter would be incomplete without it.

[ 13 ] It can be seen that only that life which is dominated by the inner sense, man's highest spiritual life in the truest sense, thus raises him above himself. For it is only in this life that the nature of things is revealed in confrontation with itself. Matters are different with the lower faculty of perception. The eye for instance, which mediates the sight of an object, is the scene of a process which, in relation to the inner life, is completely similar to any other external process. My organs are parts of the spatial world like other things, and their perceptions are temporal processes like others. Their nature too only becomes apparent when they are submerged in the inner experience. I thus live a double life: the life of a thing among other things, which lives within its corporeality and through its organs perceives what lies outside this corporeality, and above this life a higher one, which knows no such inside and outside, and extends over both the external world and itself. I shall therefore have to say: At one time I am an individual, a limited I; at the other time I am a general, universal I. This too Paul Asmus has put into apt words (cf. his book: Die indogermanischen Religionen in den Hauptpunkten ihrer Entwicklung, The Indo-European Religions in the Main Points of their Development, p. 29 of the first volume): “We call the activity of submerging ourselves in something else, ‘thinking;’ in thinking the I has fulfilled its concept, it has given up its existence as something separate; therefore in thinking we find ourselves in a sphere that is the same for all, for the principle of isolation, which lies in the relationship of our I to what is different from it, has disappeared in the activity of the self-suspension of the separate I; there is only the selfhood common to all.”

[ 14 ] Spinoza has exactly the same thing in mind when he describes the highest activity of cognition as that which advances “from the sufficient conception of the real nature of some attributes of God to the sufficient cognition of the nature of things.” This advance is nothing other than illumination of things with the light of inner experience. Spinoza describes the life of this inner experience in glorious colors: “The highest virtue of the soul is to apprehend God, or to comprehend things in the third—the highest—kind of cognition. This virtue becomes the greater the more the soul comprehends things in this way of cognition; therefore the one who grasps things in this way of cognition attains the highest human perfection and consequently becomes filled with the highest joy, accompanied by the conceptions of himself and of virtue. Hence from this kind of cognition springs the highest possible peace of soul.” One who comprehends things in this way transforms himself within himself; for at such moments his separate I is absorbed by the All-I; all beings do not appear in subordination to a separate, limited individual; they appear to themselves. At this level there is no longer any difference between Plato and me; what separates us belongs to a lower level of cognition. We are only separate as individuals; the universal which acts in us is one and the same. About this fact also one cannot dispute with one who has no experience of it. He will always insist: Plato and you are two. That this duality, that all multiplicity is reborn as unity in the unfolding of the highest level of cognition, cannot be proved: it must be experienced. Paradoxical as it may sound, it is true: the idea which Plato represented to himself and the same idea which I represent to myself are not two ideas. They are one and the same idea. And there are not two ideas, one in Plato's head, the other in mine; rather in the higher sense Plato's head and mine interpenetrate; all heads which grasp the same, single idea, interpenetrate; and this unique idea exists only once. It is there, and the heads all transport themselves to one and the same place in order to contain this idea.

[ 15 ] The transformation which is effected in the whole nature of man when he looks at things in this way is indicated in beautiful words in the Indian poem, The Bhagavad Gita, of which Wilhelm von Humboldt therefore said that he was grateful to his destiny for having permitted him to live until he could be in a position to become acquainted with this work. The inner light says in this poem, “An external ray from me, who has attained to a special existence in the world of personal life, attracts to itself the five senses and the individual soul, which belong to nature.—When the effulgent spirit materializes in space and time, or when it dematerializes, it seizes upon things and carries them along with itself, as the breath of the wind seizes upon the perfumes of flowers and sweeps them away with itself.—The inner light dominates the ear, the touch, the taste, and the smell, as well as the mind; it forms a bond between itself and the things of the senses.—Fools do not know when the inner light flames up and when it is extinguished, or when it unites with things; only he who partakes of the inner light can know of this.” So strongly does The Bhagavad Gita point to the transformation of man that it says of the “sage” that he can no longer err, no longer sin. If he seems to err or sin he must illuminate his thoughts or his actions with a light in which that no longer appears as error and as sin which appears as such to the ordinary consciousness. “He who has raised himself and whose knowledge is of the purest kind does not kill and does not defile himself, even though he should slay another.” This only indicates the same basic disposition of the soul, springing from the highest cognition, concerning which Spinoza, after describing it in his Ethics, breaks into the thrilling words: “With this I have concluded what I wanted to set forth concerning the power of the soul over the affections and over the freedom of the soul. From this it appears how superior is a wise man to an ignorant one, and how much more powerful than one who is merely driven by passions. For the ignorant man is not only driven in many directions by external causes and never attains to true peace of soul, but he also lives in ignorance of himself, of God, and of objects, and when his suffering comes to an end, his existence also comes to an end; while the wise man, as such, hardly experiences any agitation in his spirit, but rather never ceases to exist in the as it were necessary knowledge of himself, of God, and of objects, and always enjoys true peace of soul. Although the path I have described as leading to this appears very difficult, it can be found nevertheless. And it may well be troublesome, since it is found so seldom. For how is it possible that, if salvation were close at hand and to be found without great effort, it is neglected by almost everyone? But everything sublime is as difficult as it is rare.”

[ 16 ] Goethe has adumbrated the point of view of the highest cognition in monumental fashion in the words: “If I know my relationship to myself and to the external world, I call it truth. And thus everyone can have his own truth, and it is still always the same truth.” Everyone has his own truth, because everyone is an individual, distinct being beside and together with others. These other beings act upon him through his organs. From the individual point of view, where he is placed, and according to the nature of his faculty of perception, he forms his own truth in intercourse with things. He achieves his relationship to things. Then when he enters into self-knowledge, when he comes to know his relationship to himself, his particular truth becomes dissolved in the general truth; this general truth is the same in everyone.

[ 17 ] The understanding of the suspension of what is individual in the personality, of the I in favor of the all-I, is regarded by deeper natures as the secret revealing itself within man, as the primordial mystery of life. For this too Goethe has found an apt expression: “And as long as you do not have it, this Die and Become, you are only a dreary guest on the dark earth.”

[ 18 ] What takes place in the inner life of man is not a mental repetition, but a real part of the universal process. The world would not be what it is if it were not active in the human soul. And if one calls the highest which is attainable by man the divine, then one must say that the divine does not exist as something external to be repeated as an image in the human spirit, but that the divine is awakened in man. For this Angelus Silesius has found the right words: “I know that without me God cannot live for a moment; if I come to naught He must needs give up the ghost.” “God cannot make a single worm without me; if I do not preserve it with Him, it must fall apart forthwith.” Such an assertion can only be made by one who premises that something appears in man without which an external being cannot exist. If everything which belongs to the “worm” also existed without man, it would be impossible to say that the worm must “fall apart” if man does not preserve it.

[ 19 ] In self-knowledge the innermost core of the world comes to life as spiritual content. For man, the experiencing of self-knowledge means an acting within the core of the world. One who is penetrated by self-knowledge naturally also performs his own actions in the light of self-knowledge. In general, human action is determined by motives. Robert Hamerling, the poet-philosopher, has rightly said (Atomistik des Willens, Atomism of the Will, p. 213f.): “It is true that man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills, because his will is determined by motives.—He cannot will what he wills. Let us examine these words more closely. Do they contain a rational meaning? Would freedom of willing then consist in being able to will something without cause, without motive? But what does willing mean if not to have a cause for preferring to do or to aspire to this rather than that? To will something without cause, without motive, would mean to will something without willing it. The concept of motive is inseparably connected with that of willing. Without a definite motive the will is an empty capacity; only through the motive does it become active and real. It is thus quite correct that the human will is not free insofar as its direction is always determined by the strongest motive.” For every action which does not take place in the light of self-knowledge the motive, the cause of the action must be felt as a compulsion. Matters are different when the cause is included within the bounds of self-knowledge. Then this cause has become a part of the self. The will is no longer determined; it determines itself. The conformity to laws, the motives of willing, now no longer predominate over the one who wills; they are one and the same with this willing. To illuminate one's actions with the light of self-observation means to overcome all coercion by motives. Thereby the will places itself into the realm of freedom.

[ 20 ] Not all human actions bear the character of freedom. Only that acting which is inspired in each one of its parts by self-observation is free. And because self-observation raises the individual I to the general I, free acting is that which proceeds from the all-I. The old issue of whether the will of man is free or subordinated to a general regularity, an unalterable necessity, is an improperly posed question. Those actions which are performed by man as an individual are unfree; those are free which he performs after his spiritual rebirth. Man is thus, in general, not either free or unfree. He is the one as well as the other. He is unfree before his rebirth, and he can become free through this rebirth. The individual upward development of man consists in the transformation of this unfree willing into one which bears the character of freedom. The man who has penetrated the regularity of his actions as being his own, has overcome the compulsion of this regularity, and therewith his unfreedom. Freedom is not a fact of human existence from the first, but rather a goal.

[ 21 ] With free acting man resolves a contradiction between the world and himself. His own deeds become deeds of the universal existence. He feels himself to be in full harmony with this universal existence. Each dissonance between himself and another he feels to be the result of a not yet fully awakened self. But the destiny of the self is that only in its separation from the universe can it find contact with this universe. Man would not be man if as an I he were not separated from everything else; but he would not be man in the highest sense if, as such a separated I, he did not enlarge himself out of himself to the all-I. Above all, it is characteristic of human nature that it should overcome a contradiction which originally lies within it.

[ 22 ] The one who will allow spirit to be only the logical intellect may feel his blood run cold at the thought that things should experience their rebirth in the spirit. He will compare the fresh, living flower outside, in the fullness of its colors, with the cold, pale, schematic thought of the flower. He will feel especially uncomfortable at the idea that the man who takes his motives for acting out of the solitude of his self-knowledge should be freer than the spontaneous, naïve personality which acts out of its immediate impulses, out of the fullness of its nature. To such a man, who sees only the one-sided logical aspect, one who submerges himself within himself will appear as a walking schema of concepts, as a phantom, in contrast to one who remains in his natural individuality.—One hears such objections to the rebirth of things in the spirit especially among those who are, it is true, equipped with healthy organs for sensory perception and with lively drives and passions, but whose faculty of observation fails when confronted with objects of a purely spiritual content. As soon as they are expected to perceive something purely spiritual, their perception is wanting; they are dealing with the mere shells of concepts, if not indeed with empty words. Therefore, when it is a matter of spiritual content, they remain the “dry,” “abstract men of intellect.” But for one who has a gift of observation in the purely spiritual like that in the sensory realm, life naturally does not become poorer when he enriches it with spiritual content. I look at a flower; why should its rich colors lose even the smallest part of their freshness if it is not only my eye which sees the colors, but also my inner sense which sees the spiritual nature of the flower as well. Why should the life of my personality become poorer if I do not follow my passions and impulses in spiritual blindness, but rather irradiate them with the light of a higher knowledge. Not poorer, but fuller, richer is the life reflected in spirit.¹

• 1. Addendum I to the 1923 Edition:
  The fear of an impoverishment of the life of the soul through an ascent to the spirit is to be found only in those personalities that know the spirit only in a sum of concepts abstracted from sensory perceptions. One who in spiritual seeing raises himself to a life that surpasses the life of the senses in content and in concreteness, cannot know this fear. For it is only in abstractions that the sensory existence grows pale; in the “spiritual seeing,” for the first time it appears in its true light, without losing anything of its sensory richness.—Addendum I to the 1923 Edition

In the introductory lecture yesterday our attention was drawn to the fact that certain events in the more ancient history of mankind can be rightly understood only when we not merely observe the forces and faculties of the personalities themselves, but when we realise at the outset that through the personalities in question, as through instruments, Beings are working who allow their deeds to stream down from higher worlds into our world. We must realise that these Beings cannot take direct hold of the physical facts of our existence because, on account of the present stage of their development, they cannot incarnate in a physical Body which draws its constituents from the physical world. If, therefore, they desire to work within our physical world, they must make use of the physical human being—of his deeds, but also of his intellect, his powers of understanding. We find the influence and penetration of such Beings of the higher world the more clearly in evidence the farther back we go in the ages of the evolution of humanity. But it must not be imagined that this downpouring of forces and activities from the higher worlds into the physical world through human beings has ever ceased; it continues even into our own time.

To the spiritual scientist who for years now has been absorbing principles which lead his feelings and ideal to accept the existence of higher worlds—to him a fact such as this will certainly, from he outset, be to some extent comprehensible; for he is accustomed always to draw the connecting threads which link our knowledge, our thinking, our willing, with the Beings of the higher Hierarchies. But from time to time the spiritual scientist is also in the position of having to guard against the materialistic conceptions which are so prevalent in the present age and make it impossible for those who stand aloof from the development of the spiritual life even to enter into what has to be said about the working of higher worlds into our physical world.

Fundamentally speaking, it is considered an antiquated attitude in our time even to speak of the influence of abstract ideas in the events of history. Many people to-day regard it as quite impermissible, in face of the genuinely scientific approach, to speak of certain ideas, abstract ideas which properly speaking can live only in the wind, taking effect in the successive epochs of history. A last semblance, at least, of belief in the influence of abstract ideas—although how they are to work is incomprehensible precisely because they are abstract ideas!—was still in evidence even in the 19th century, in Ranke's exposition of history¹⁰ But even this belief in ideas as factors in history is gradually being discarded by our progressively materialistic development, and in a certain respect to-day it is regarded as the sign of an enlightened mind in the domain of history to believe that all the characteristic features of the several epochs merely represent the convergence of physically perceptible actions, outer needs, outer interests and ideas of physical human beings. The time is now past when spirits such as Herder, as if through a certain inspiration, still portrayed the development of human history in a way which enables one to perceive that it is based on the assumption, at least, of the existence of living powers, living super-sensible powers manifesting through the deeds and the lives of men.¹¹ Those who want to be accounted very clever to-day, will say: “Well yes, a man such as Lessing certainly had many really intelligent ideas, but then, at the end of his life, he wrote nonsense such as you find in The Education of the Human Race, where the only way in which he could help himself out of his difficulties was by linking the strict conformity to law shown by the flow of historical development with the idea of reincarnation.” In the last sentences of The Education of the Human Race,¹² Lessing has actually expressed what is described by Anthroposophy on the basis of occult facts—namely, that souls who lived in ancient epochs and then absorbed active, living forces, carry over these forces into their new incarnations, so that behind physical happenings there is not an abstract onflow of ideas but an actual and real onflow of the spirit. As I said, a clever ass will insist that in his old age Lessing hit upon ideas as confused as that of reincarnation, and that these ideas must he ignored.—This reminds one again of the bitterly ironic yet brilliant note once written by Hebbel in his diary, to the effect that a fair motif would be that a master, taking the subject of Plato in his school, has among his pupils the reincarnated Plato, who understands what the master is teaching so little that he has to be severely punished!

The conception of the historical evolution of humanity has lost much of the earlier, spiritual insight, and Spiritual Science will really have to guard against the onslaught of materialistic thinking which comes from all sides and regards communications which are based on the spiritual facts as so much lunacy. That things have come to a pretty pass is shown, for example, in the fact that all those mighty pictures, those grand symbolical conceptions which emanated from the old clairvoyant knowledge and are expressed in the characters of legends and fairy-tales, have interpreters of the very oddest kind. The most curious production in this domain is undoubtedly Solomon Reinach's little book Orpheus, which has caused a certain furor in many circles in France. Everything from which the ideas of Demeter, of Orpheus, and of other mythological cycles are supposed to have sprung, is traced back in this book to purely materialistic happenings and it is often utterly grotesque how the historical existence of this or that figure, standing, let us say, behind Hermes or Moses, is alleged to have originated, and with what superficiality an attempt has been made to explain these figures as the inventions of poetic license, of human fantasy. According to Solomon Reinach's method it would be easy, sixty or seventy years hence, when outer memory of him will have faded somewhat, to prove that there never was such a man, but that it was simply a matter of popular fantasy having transferred the old idea of Reinecke Fuchs to Solomon Reinach. According to his method this would certainly be possible. The absurdity of the whole book is on a par with what is said in the Preface—that it has been written “for the widest circles of the educated public, even for the very young.” “For the very young”—since he emphasises that he has avoided everything that might cause a shock to young girls—although he has not avoided tracing back the idea of Demeter to a pig! He promises, however, that if his book gains the influence he hopes for, he will write a special edition for mothers, which will include everything that must still be withheld from their daughters.—That is the kind of thing we have come to!

One would like to remind students of Spiritual Science particularly, that it is possible to prove on purely external grounds that spiritual powers, spiritual forces have worked through human beings right up to our own century—and this quite apart from the purely occult, esoteric research with which we shall be mainly concerned here. But in order that we may understand how it is possible for Spiritual Science to maintain, on purely external grounds, that super-sensible powers exercise sway in history, let me point to the following.

Anyone who gains a little insight into the development of modern humanity, let us say in the 14th and 15th centuries and on until the 16th, will realise how infinitely significant in this outer development was the intervention of a certain personality, one in respect of whom it can be proved from completely external evidence that spiritual, super-sensible Powers worked through her. In order to throw a little light on the occult understanding of history, we may ask the question: What would the development of modern Europe have been if at the beginning of the 15th century the Maid of Orleans had not entered the arena of events? Anyone who thinks, even from an entirely external point of view, of the development that took place during this period, must say to himself: Suppose the deeds of the Maid of Orleans were erased from history ... then, according to the knowledge obtainable from purely external historical research, one cannot but realise that without the working of higher, super-sensible Powers through the Maid of Orleans, the whole of France, indeed the whole of Europe in the 15th century, would have taken on an altogether different form. Everything in the impulses of will, in the physical brains of those times, was directed towards flooding all Europe with a general conception of the State which would have extinguished the folk-individualities and under this influence a very great deal of what has developed in Europe during the last centuries through the interplay of these folk-individualities would quite certainly have been impossible.

Imagine the deed of the Maid of Orleans blotted out from history, France abandoned to her fate without this intervention, and then ask: Without this deed, what would have become of France? And then think of the role played by France in the whole cultural life of humanity during the centuries following! Add to this the facts which cannot be refuted and are confirmed by actual documents concerning the mission of the Maid of Orleans. This young girl, certainly not highly educated even by the standards of her time, suddenly, before she is twenty years old, feels in the autumn of 1428 that spiritual Powers of the super-sensible worlds are speaking to her. True, she clothes these Powers in forms that are familiar to her, so that she is seeing them through the medium of her own mental images; but that does not do away with the reality of these Powers. Picture to yourselves that she knows that super-sensible Powers are guiding her will towards a definite point—I am speaking to begin with, not of what can be told about these facts from the Akasha Chronicle, but only of what is confirmed by documentary evidence.

We know that the Maid of Orleans confided her vision first of all to a relative who—one would almost say, by chance-happened to understand her; that after many vicissitudes and difficulties she was introduced to the Court of King Charles who, together with the whole French Army, had come to his wit's end, as the saying goes. We know too, how after every conceivable obstacle had been put in her way, she finally recognised and went straight to the King, who was standing among such a crowd of people that no physical eye could have distinguished him. It is also known that at that moment she confided to him something—he wanted to test her by it—of which it can be said that it was known only to him and to the super-sensible worlds. You also know from ordinary history that it was she who, under the unceasing impulse and urge of her intense faith—it would be better to say, through her actual vision—and in face of the greatest difficulties, led the armies to victory and the King to his crowning.

Who intervened at that time in the course of history?—None other than Beings of higher Hierarchies! The Maid of Orleans was an outer Instrument of these Beings, and it was they who guided the deeds of history. It is possible that someone may say to himself: “If I had guided these deeds I would have guided them more wisely!”—because he finds one thing or another in the procedure of the Maid of Orleans at variance with his own way of thinking. Adherents of Spiritual Science, however, should not wish to correct the deeds of gods through human intellect—a very common practice in our so-called civilisation. There have also been people who quite in the Spirit of the present age, have wanted, as it were, to unburden modern history of the deeds of the Maid of Orleans. A characteristic modern work with this materialistic trend has been written by Anatole France. One would really like to know how materialistic thinking manages to reconcile itself with much irrefutable evidence—I am still speaking only of actual historical documents. And so because we are in Stuttgart and I sometimes like to take account of local matters, I want to quote from a document to which reference has already been made here.

Those who belong to Stuttgart certainly know that there once lived here a man¹³ who carried out important research on the Gospels. As spiritual scientists we certainly need not agree with the things—some of them extremely clever—that were brought forward by Gfrörer—that was his name—and we may be quite sure that if he had heard what is now being given in the domain of Spiritual Science he would have used terms he was often wont to apply to his opponents—whom he, with his stubborn-headedness, by no means always let off lightly. He would have said that these Theosophists, too, are people who are “not quite right in the head.” But this was before the time when, as is the case to-day, historical documents can be passed over for purely materialistic reasons if they happen to deal with inconvenient facts and obviously point to the working of higher forces in our physical world. And so I will again quote from a short document—a letter published in the first half of the 19th century. I will read you just a few paragraphs from this letter, which was quoted by Gfrörer at that time in justification of his belief. I will read a passage characterising the Maid of Orleans, and then ask you to think of the implications of such a vivid description.

After the writer of this letter has set forth what the Maid of Orleans accomplished, he continues:

“This and much more has the Maid brought about, and with God's help she will accomplish still greater things. The girl is of appealing beauty and manly bearing; she speaks little and shows remarkable sagacity; when she speaks she has a pleasing, delicately feminine voice. She eats little and abstains from wine. She takes pleasure in fine horses and weapons and admires well-accoutred and noble men. To be obliged to meet and converse with large numbers of people is abhorrent to her; her tears often overflow; she loves a happy face, endures unheard of toil, and is so assiduous in the manipulation and bearing of weapons that she remains uninterruptedly for six days—day and night—in full armour. She says that the English have no right to France, and therefore—as she says—God has sent her to drive them out and conquer them, but only after previous warning. For the King she shows the deepest veneration; she says he is beloved by God, is under special protection, and will therefore be preserved. Of the Duke of Orleans, your nephew, she says that he will be delivered in a miraculous way, but only after a demand for his release has been made to the English who hold him prisoner.

“With that, revered Duke, I bring my report to a conclusion. Still more wonderful things are happening and have happened than I can write of or describe to you in words. While I write this, the afore mentioned Maid has already gone to the neighbourhood of the city of Rheims in Champagne, whither the King has hastily set off for his anointing and crowning under God's protection. Most respected and powerful Duke, and greatly venerated master! I commend myself to you in all humility, while praying the Almighty to protect you and fulfil your desires. Written at Biteromis, the 21st day of June in the year 1429.

Your humble servant
PERCEVAL
Lord of Bonlaninth. Counsellor and
Chamberlain of the King of the French
and of the Duke of Orleans, Seneschal of
Berry.”

This letter¹⁴ was written by one who knew the Maid and was in close contact with the King. It is indeed amazing when one discovers all these things on purely occult grounds and with occult means of proof—for they are indeed to be found in the Akasha Chronicle—and then sees how, in cases like this, actual historical documents can also be produced. In short, it seems almost madness to doubt what was working through the Maid of Orleans. And when we also take into consideration the fact that through her deeds the whole history of modern time assumed a different aspect, this gives us the right to say that here, verified by documentary evidence, we can see the direct intervention of the super-sensible worlds. When the spiritual researcher goes further and seeks in his own way for the one who was the real Inspirer of the Maid of Orleans, he finds something very remarkable as he investigates the successive epochs of time. He finds that the same Spirit who worked through the Maid of Orleans as his instrument at that time had inspired—in a quite different form, a quite different way—another personality who was a philosopher at the Court of Charles the Bald. This was Scotus Erigena, through whose philosophical and theological ideas in an earlier period Europe had been so deeply influenced. And so we see that the same Powers work in different epochs in a different way through human beings who are their instruments; that there is continuity, an onflowing stream of happenings in what we call history.

I showed you yesterday how a significant myth of Babylonian-Chaldean times points to the penetration of the spiritual worlds into men upon whom much depended for the third Post-Atlantean period, for the whole of historical development in ancient Chaldea, in ancient Babylonia. But we must now also observe from the standpoint of occult science the two personalities hidden behind the legendary names of Gilgamish and Eabani. In the Sense of occult history we have to see in them personalities who stand at the starting-point of the Babylonian-Chaldean epoch of culture. The impulses proceeding from them are to be discerned again in the development of the really spiritual culture of ancient Babylonia and Chaldea.—Now Gilgamish was a personality who had many incarnations behind him and may therefore be called an “old” soul within the evolution of humanity.

You know from the book Occult Science that during the Lemurian epoch of earth-evolution only very few human beings had outlasted, on the earth itself, the happenings of this evolution, that only a few remained on the earth during the Lemurian epoch; that before the actual danger of the mummification of everything human began, the majority of souls withdrew from the earth to other planets, continuing their life on Mars, Saturn, Venus, Jupiter, arid so forth. Then, from the end of the Lemurian epoch and during the Atlantean epoch, these souls gradually came down to the earth in order to incarnate in earthly bodies under the changed earthly conditions, and to appear in ever new incarnations. Thus there are souls who came down comparatively early from the planetary worlds and others who came down late; indeed not until the later periods of Atlantean evolution. The souls who came down early have therefore more incarnations behind them in earth-evolution than those who came down later; hence we can call these latter, in contrast to the former, “younger” souls—souls who have taken less into themselves.

The individuality hidden behind the name Gilgamish was an old soul, and a younger soul was incarnated in Eabani, at the starting-point of the Babylonian civilisation. Indeed, in connection with human souls being younger or older in this sense, something very remarkable discloses itself—something that might almost be said to cause astonishment even to the occultist. If someone has reached the point to-day of giving a little credence to the truths of Spiritual Science, but otherwise still clings to the prejudices and criteria of the external world, it will seem plausible to him that modern philosophers or scholars, for example, should be accounted among the older souls. But, strangely enough, occult research finds just the opposite; and for the occultist himself it is surprising to find that in Kant, for example, there lived a young soul. Yes, the facts show that it is so ... it cannot be gainsaid. It can also be intimated here that younger souls—the majority at any rate—incarnate in the coloured races, so that it is the coloured races, especially the negro race, which mainly brings younger souls to incarnation. The characteristic quality of that kind of thinking which comes to expression in erudition, in the materialistic science of to-day, calls for younger souls. And it can be shown that in the case of many a personality where one would not in the least expect it, the preceding incarnation was in an uncivilised race. That again is what the facts tell us! It must be kept strictly in mind, for it is so. Naturally this does not in the least detract from the significance or value of the opinions we have formed about the world around us; nevertheless it must be grasped in order fully to understand the essentials here. In this sense, in Eabani we have to do with a young soul and in Gilgamish with an old soul in ancient Babylonia. The whole nature of an old soul will enable it early in life to grasp not only the essential element, the essential factor, in the existing culture, but also that which strikes into it as a new impulse, opening up a wide vista into the future.

There will be many, of course, who will protest if one tries to make it plausible to them that the Theosophists whom they are wont to look down upon are, generally speaking, older souls than people who deliver scientific lectures. Investigation shows, however, that this is so; and although spiritual research must not be misused for the purpose of forcing people to change their criteria of judgment, or of scoffing at what is after all part of the very make-up of our civilisation, nevertheless the truth must be faced fairly and squarely. Gilgamish, then, was a personality who, owing to his particular condition of soul, participated in the most progressive spiritual elements and spiritual factors of the age—in everything that threw light far into the future and at that time could be attained only if such a personality went through a kind of initiation. Through the imparting of something that can be received only through a certain initiation, Gilgamish was to be enabled to provide a kind of leaven for the Babylonian culture. He had to experience an initiation up to a certain degree.

Let us think of this Gilgamish at the point where he stood in the evolution of humanity before this initiation. He was a man of the third Post-Atlantean epoch. But in this epoch twilight had already fallen over the natural human clairvoyance, over what men were able to achieve through forces that were innate in them. These forces were no longer present to the degree that could enable any great number of men to look back into their earlier incarnations. If we were to go farther back, into the second or into the first Post-Atlantean epoch, we should find that the majority of human beings then on the earth could look back into their earlier incarnations, into the course of their soul-life before their present birth. But that faculty had been lost. In the case of Gilgamish, the Being who was to reveal himself through him, and who could do so only by leading him presently to a kind of initiation, kept a guiding hand upon him from the outset and set him at the place where he came to recognise his own position in the history of the world. As it were through super-sensible events, presented to us in the pictures of the myth I outlined to you yesterday, a friend was placed at the side of Gilgamish, a friend whose barbarity and uncivilised nature are indicated by the statement that his outer form was half animal. It is said that this friend had skins of animals on his body, which means that he was still covered with hair like the men of primeval times, that his soul was so young that it built for itself a body which showed the human being still in a savage state. Thus the more advanced Gilgamish had in Eabani a man at his side who, because of his young soul and the bodily Organisation conditioned by it, still possessed ancient clairvoyance. This friend was given to Gilgamish in order that he might find his own bearings in life. With the help of this friend he was then able to achieve certain things, such as the retrieval of that spiritual Power presented to us in the myth in the picture of Ishtar, the Goddess of the city of Erech. I told you how this Goddess had been stolen by the neighbouring City and that for this reason Gilgamish and Eabani together waged war against this city, vanquished its king and brought the Goddess back.

If we are to understand in the true historical sense such things as are presented to us in these old myths, we must investigate their occult background. Behind this rape of the City Goddess there lies something similar to the rape of Helen, who was carried off to Troy by Paris. We must realise that there are good grounds for what is stated in my little book, Blood is a very special Fluid. It is pointed out there that in the peoples of ancient times there was a kind of collective consciousness. A man did not merely feel his personal ego within his skin, but he felt himself as a member of the tribe, of the city-community. Just as the individual human soul is felt to be the centralising factor for our organism as a whole, uniting fingers, toes, hands, legs, so did man in very ancient times feel himself a member of the group-soul. Something of the kind still persisted in the early city-communities, even in ancient Greece. One common spirit, a folk-egohood, a tribal egohood, lived and weaved through the single personalities of the tribe or folk. But whatever could come to men's consciousness from this collective egohood had to be under the guidance of the Mysteries in the secret temples, where the priests directed the common spiritual affairs of a city or a tribe. And it is not a mere figure of speech, but in a certain sense an actual reality, to say that such a temple-sanctuary served as a dwelling-place for the city-ego, for the group-soul. There this group-soul had its habitation, and the priests of the temple were its servants. It was they who received the instructions of this group-soul through inspiration—through what was known as an Oracle—and bore them out into the world in order that one thing or another might come to pass. For we must think of the Oracles exactly in the sense I have indicated.

Now the direction of these temple-sanctuaries was bound up with certain secrets, and many conflicts in ancient times arose because the temple-priests of one city were carried off by the neighbouring city, so that in this way, together with the priests, the most important secrets of a city came into the hands of the neighbouring one. There you have the reality behind the picture of the abduction of Ishtar, the city Goddess, the group-soul of Erech, by the neighbouring city. The priests, the trustees of the temple secrets were made prisoners, because the neighbouring city hoped in this way to come into possession of the holy secrets and therewith of the power of the city in question. That is the real background.

In the condition of soul at first prevailing in him, Gilgamish could not himself be aware of such things; he did not see their full implications. But a younger soul could be for him as it were the clairvoyant sense which enabled him to recapture the temple treasure for his own city. Gilgamish now realised that in human life, especially in times of transition, there is such a thing as is described in the legend of the blind man and the cripple: each is helpless alone, but together they can make progress inasmuch as the blind man carries the cripple on his shoulders and the cripple lends the blind man his power of sight. In Gilgamish and Eabani, whose respective gifts differed so greatly, we see the same kind of co-operation transformed into the spiritual. In the historical facts of ancient times we find this at every turn. And it is important to understand it, for only then do we realise why it is that myths and sagas so often tell of friends who have to achieve something together—friends who are generally as unlike in their nature of soul as were Gilgamish and Eabani. But what Gilgamish also acquired through his friend Eabani was this: he was as it were “infected” by Eabani with a clairvoyant power of his own, so that to a certain extent he could look back into his own earlier incarnations. This would certainly have been beyond his normal faculties. And now let us picture vividly how Gilgamish must have been influenced by this vision of his past incarnations.

What was he able to experience from the moment when it became possible for him to look back into what his soul had lived through in earlier incarnations? At first it all seemed alien to him. He could not penetrate fully into what he himself had been in these earlier incarnations; he did not, as it were, recognise himself. So it would be with any human being if he began to look back into his previous incarnations. In most cases things would be different from what they are in the vain imaginings which are always so much in evidence when there is talk of some person or other being an incarnation of this or that individual. We may well come across a person who cites a whole series of great names in history as those of his former incarnations ... in fact numbers of people are convinced that they were never below the rank of a queen or a princess! In these matters, which should be treated with great earnestness, there must be no unlawful play of fancy, no misusage.

Now one who, like Gilgamish at that time, begins to look back on his successive incarnations, may also now and then be veritably astonished. Gilgamish himself looked back to incarnations when he was still involved in all kinds of conditions determined by the sway of the group-soul. To be sure he had, in a certain respect, as a person, worked his way out of these connections; through Eabani he had also come to know for the first time the whole import of what is symbolised in the myth through the figure of the city Goddess. But when he looked back there was much in his earlier incarnations that did not please him, that went against the grain. He found, for example, that in these incarnations his soul had had unusual friendships, human connection, of a kind which in his present life he would have regarded as shameful. Thus, in face of what the City Goddess had revealed to him indirectly, through Eabani, he began in a certain way—as the myth indicates—to upbraid, to reproach his own soul. In the myth it is said that he reproaches the Goddess about her lovers, for he is jealous of them. He is looking as it were across the horizon of his own soul and the visions are living realities before him, as real as human beings who stand around someone in the physical world, eliciting feelings of sympathy or antipathy towards them. In the reproaches leveled by Gilgamish against the Goddess we perceive that he is really speaking in terms of what is happening in his own soul. Thus, for example, when it is said that he reproaches the Goddess about her previous relationship with one who is called Ishullanu (Ischlanu) in the myth, this signifies that his own friendship with a certain person who had been his master's gardener in the preceding incarnation was not pleasing to him.¹⁵ What took place in the soul of Gilgamish and which first imparted to it that inner content, that inner realisation, which he needed in order to become the inaugurator of the Babylonian civilisation—all this is shown to us in the picture of the regaining of a certain clairvoyance, of the ascent into super-sensible worlds which, because he was an old soul, were in a certain sense lost to him. This is shown to us in the myth.

And then Gilgamish was to undergo a kind of initiation by being led back to that kind of vision which his own soul had possessed during Atlantean incarnations. What the myth presents as the journey over the sea, and the wanderings of Gilgamish to the West, is nothing else than the inner path towards initiation by which his soul is led upwards to spiritual heights where it can perceive its ancient Atlantean surroundings, when, still clairvoyant, it had gazed into the spiritual world. The myth tells that an this, his spiritual journeying, Gilgamish was brought to the great Atlantean Being, Xisuthros, This was a Being who belonged to certain higher Hierarchies and who during the Atlantean time lived in the sphere of humanity but was afterwards transported from the world of men to dwell in higher regions. Gilgamish was to meet this personality in order that through beholding him he might come to know the condition of souls when they are able to look into the spiritual worlds. Thus he was to be led upwards again into the spiritual spheres by being transported in his life of soul into Atlantean times. And when he is bidden not to sleep for seven nights and six days, this signifies nothing else than an exercise which was to make the soul capable of penetrating fully into the corresponding spiritual regions. When we are now told that he was not able to endure the test, Isis again signifies something of great importance, namely that Gilgamish is represented as a personality who was brought to the very brink of Initiation—who was destined, as it were, to look through the portal of Initiation into the mysteries of the spirit but owing to the conditions of the times was not able to penetrate fully into their depths. In short, this is intended to indicate that the inaugurator of the Babylonian civilisation had remained at the portal of Initiation, that he could not look with full clarity into the higher worlds, with the result that he gave Babylonian culture the stamp that is a sign of no more than a glimpse into the secrets of Initiation.

We shall now see that the nature of external Babylonian culture was indeed such that it confirms what has just been said. Whereas, for example, everything points to the fact that Hermes was a personality who gazed into the very depths of the holiest secrets of Initiation and could therefore become the great inaugurator of ancient Egyptian culture, it must be said that the Babylonian culture was prepared in the way I have just described: through a leading personality who had in his soul all those qualities which develop when penetration into the innermost essence of Initiation has not been fully achieved. Hence historical development in ancient Babylonia gives clear evidence of an external culture and an inner, esoteric culture running parallel to one another. Whereas in the life of ancient Egypt there was greater interplay between these two aspects, in the ancient culture of Babylonia they fell apart. And within what must be regarded as the Babylonian culture inaugurated by Gilgamish, there was enshrined the content and substance of the most sacred, most hidden Mysteries of the Chaldeans.

The Initiates of these Mysteries were indeed initiated into the innermost secrets, but this influence flowed through the external culture only as a tiny stream. This external culture proceeded from the impulse given by Gilgamish. Everything that has been said points to the fact that Gilgamish, as a personality, had not actually reached the point where he could have experienced complete Initiation. But just because at the time in which he was working he did not give effect to his own, personal impulses, did not impart his own personal forces to the world, he was very specially able to let one of the spiritual Beings we place in the rank of the Fire-Spirits, the Archangeloi, work through him. Such a Being did indeed work through Gilgamish, and it is in a Fire-Spirit that we must see the source of the ordering of Babylonian life and its impelling forces, for which Gilgamish was the instrument. So we shall rightly conceive of this Gilgamish in a picture that suggests the symbol of the ancient centaur. Such ancient symbols correspond more closely to reality than is generally supposed. A centaur—half man, half animal—was always intended to represent how in the more mighty of men of old the highest spiritual manhood and that which united the single personality with the animal organisation in a certain sense actually fell apart. Gilgamish gave the impression of a centaur to those who were capable of judging what he was, and it is the same to this day.

Remarkably enough, this picture of the centaur is cropping up again in the field of modern scientific thought. There has recently been published a book which sets out to base itself entirely on scientific facts, and yet goes to work with a certain absence of prejudice, hence it does not produce such an amateurish, senseless hotch-potch as do those who call themselves Monists. The author makes a genuine effort to understand man, and how, as an independent being of soul-and-spirit, he is related to the physical organism. And then this author, who bases himself on natural science, comes out with a remarkable picture. Quite certainly he was not thinking of the centaur when he conceived this picture, but referring to what results from natural-scientific ideas about the relation of the soul to the body, he says: This may be likened to a horseman riding upon his horse. The facts of natural science, when rightly understood, compel one to say: The soul is independent and uses the body as its instrument, as a rider uses his horse.—Yes, the centaur is here again; things will develop rapidly, and before people are aware of it, spiritual-scientific ideas will take root in our contemporaries under the compulsion of the facts of natural science itself. Not long ago I was talking to a philosopher who sets great store by materialistic ideas, and he said to me: “Of course the picture of the centaur arose because the old inhabitants of Greece saw certain tribes coming down from the North on their horses, and as it was generally misty, they thought that horse and rider were a single form. With all their superstition they might easily imagine this.”

That is a really ingenuous idea—perhaps not exactly philosophical—but certainly ingenuous! This picture of the centaur, which did not arise because the Greeks could not distinguish the rider how his horse but because the earlier peoples inevitably thought of the spiritual being of man as independent of the bodily nature—this idea of the centaur is again cropping up in our time out of the very concepts of natural science. It must therefore be said that despite all materialistic ideas we are coming to the point to-day when materialism itself, if only it will take the facts as they really are, will lead by and by to what Spiritual Science has to say from its occult sources. But if, in line with our studies, we want to focus our occult observation upon a figure such as Gilgamish—who has already become an object of interest to external research—we must realise that there we have to do with penetration by a Being of the spiritual Hierarchies. So that while we must in truth see every human being, in respect of his spirituality, in the picture of the centaur, in the case of one who works as Gilgamish worked, we must recognise, in addition, that the spiritual part of the centaur is directed by higher Powers who are sending down their forces to further the progress of humanity. And we shall find an going farther back into history that this is revealed even more clearly. We shall also see how modification takes place in the course of the ages up to our own time and how spiritual forces, when they work through human beings, assume constantly different forms the nearer we come to the immediate present.

---

• 10. Leopold von Ranke, 1795–1886. See Rudolf Steiner, Karmic-Relationships: Esoteric Studies, Vol. II, lecture XIV.
• 11. J. G. Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, written between 1784 and 1791. Tr. by T. Churchill; Outline of a Philosophy of the History of Man. (London, 1803.)
• 12. G. E. Lessing. The last paragraphs of The Education of the Human Race, published in 1780, are as follows:
  
  “But ... why should not every individual man have existed more than once upon this world?
  “ Is this hypothesis so laughable merely because it is the oldest? Because the human widerstanding, before the sophistries of the Schools had dissipated and debilitated it, lighted upon it at once?
  “Why may not even I have already performed those steps of my perfecting which bring to man only temporal punishments and rewards ?
  “And once more, why not another time all those steps, to perform which the views of Eternal Rewards so powerfully assist us?
  “Why should I not come back as often. as I am capable of acquiring fresh knowledge, fresh expertness ? Do I bring away so much from one, that there is nothing to repay the trouble of coming back?
  “Is this a reason against it? Or, because I forget that I have been here already? Happy is it for me that I do forget. The recollection of my former condition would perrnit me to make only a bad use of the present. And that which even I must forget now, is that necessarily forgotten for ever?
  “Or is it a reason against the hypothesis that so much time would have been lost to me? Lost?—And how much then should I miss?—Is not a whole Eternity mine? "
  
  Tr. F. W. Robertson (1872).
  Reprinted (1927) by Anthroposophical
  Publishing Co.
• 13. August Friedrich Gfrörer, 1803—1861.
• 14. Letter of Perceval de Boulainvilliers, 21st June, 1429. See: Procés de condamnation et de réhabilitation de Jeanne d' Arc, ed. Quicherat, Tome V, pages 114—21. (Paris, 1849) where the text is in Latin. The name Boulainvilliers is said to have been incorrectly rendered in several of the earlier translations.
• 15. See Thompson, op. cit., p. 33. (Gilgamish is reproaching Ishtar):
  
  Lovest thou, too, Ishullanu, the gardener he of thy Sire, Bringing delights to thee ceaseless, while daily he garnish'd thy platter...."
  
  (From the Sixth Tablet.)

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A

Absoluteness. When predicated of the UNIVERSAL PRINCIPLE, it denotes an abstraction, which is more correct and logical than to apply the adjective "absolute" to that which can have neither attributes nor limitations.

Adam Kadmon (Heb.) "Archetypal man, Humanity. The "Heavenly man" not fallen into sin. Kabalists refer it to the Ten Sephiroth on the plane of human perception." In the Kabala Adam Kadmon is the manifested Logos corresponding to our third Logos, the unmanifested being the first paradigmic ideal man, and symbolizing the universe in abscondito, or in its "privation" in the Aristotelean sense.

The first Logos is "the light of the World," the second and the third, its gradually deepening shadows.

Adept (Lat. adeptus). In Occultism, one who has reached the stage of initiation and become a master in the Science of Esoteric Philosophy.

Aether (Gr.) With the Ancients, the Divine luminiferous substance which pervades the whole universe; the "garment" of the Supreme Deity, Zeus, or Jupiter. With the Moderns, Ether, for the meaning of which, in physics and chemistry, see Webster's Dictionary, or some other. In Esotericism, AEther is the third principle of the Kosmic Septenary, matter (earth) being the lowest, and Akasa, the highest.

Agathon (Gr.) Plato's Supreme Deity, lit. "the good." Our ALAYA or the Soul of the World.

Agnostic. A word first used by Professor Huxley, to indicate one who believes nothing which cannot be demonstrated by the senses.

Ahankara (Sans.) The conception of "I," self-consciousness or self-identity; the "I," or egoistical and mayavic principle in man, due to our ignorance which separates our "I" from the Universal ONE-Self. Personality, egoism also.

Ain-Soph (Heb.) The "Boundless" or "Limitless" Deity emanating and extending. Ain-Soph is also written En-Soph and Ain-Suph, for no one, not even the Rabbis, are quite sure of their vowels. In the religious metaphysics of the old Hebrew philosophers, the ONE Principle was an abstraction like Parabrahm, though modern Kabalists have succeeded by mere dint of sophistry and paradoxes in making a "Supreme God" of it, and nothing higher. But with the early Chaldean Kabalists Ain-Soph was "without form or being" with "no likeness with anything else." (Franck's Die Kabbala, p. 126.) That Ain-Soph has never been considered as the "Creator" is proved conclusively by the fact that such an orthodox Jew as Philo calls "creator" the Logos, who stands next the "Limitless One," and is "the SECOND God." "The Second God is in its (Ain-Soph's) wisdom," says Philo in Quaest et Solut. Deity is NO-THING; it is nameless, and therefore called Ain-Soph — the word Ain meaning nothing. (See also Franck's Kabbala, p. 153.)

Alchemy, in Arabic Ul-Khemi, is as the name suggests, the chemistry of nature. Ul-Khemi or Al-Kimia, however, is really an Arabianized word, taken from the Greek chemeia from chumos "juice," extracted from a plant. Alchemy deals with the finer forces of nature and the various conditions of matter in which they are found to operate. Seeking under the veil of language, more or less artificial, to convey to the uninitiated so much of the Mysterium Magnum as is safe in the hands of a selfish world, the Alchemist postulates as his first principle, the existence of a certain Universal Solvent in the homogeneous substance from which the elements were evolved; which substance he calls pure gold, or summum materiae. This solvent, also called menstruum universale, possesses the power of removing all the seeds of disease out of the human body, of renewing youth, and prolonging life. Such is the lapis philosophorum (philosopher's stone). Alchemy first penetrated into Europe through Geber, the great Arabian sage and philosopher, in the eighth century of our era; but it was known and practised long ages ago in China and Egypt. Numerous papyri on Alchemy, and other proofs that it was the favourite study of Kings and Priests, have been exhumed and preserved under the generic name of Hermetic treatises (see Tabula Smaragdina). Alchemy is studied under three distinct aspects, which admit of many different interpretations, viz.: the Cosmic, the Human, and the Terrestrial.

These three methods were typified under the three alchemical properties — sulphur, mercury, and salt. Different writers have stated that these are three, seven, ten and twelve processes respectively; but they are all agreed there is but one object in Alchemy, which is to transmute gross metals into pure gold. But what that gold really is, very few people understand correctly. No doubt there is such a thing in Nature as transmutation of the baser metal into the nobler; but this is only one aspect of Alchemy, the terrestrial, or purely material, for we see logically the same process taking place in the bowels of the earth. Yet, besides and beyond this interpretation, there is in Alchemy a symbolical meaning, purely psychic and spiritual. While the Kabalist-Alchemist seeks for the realization of the former, the Occultist-Alchemist, spurning the gold of the earth, gives all his attention to and directs his efforts only towards the transmutation of the baser quaternary into the divine upper trinity of man, which when finally blended, is one. The spiritual, mental, psychic, and physical planes of human existence are in Alchemy compared to the four elements — fire, air, water, and earth, and are each capable of a three-fold constitution, i. e., fixed, unstable, and volatile. Little or nothing is known by the world concerning the origin of this archaic branch of philosophy; but it is certain that it antedates the construction of any known Zodiac, and as dealing with the personified forces of nature, probably also any of the mythologies of the world. Nor is there any doubt that the true secrets of transmutation (on the physical plane) were known in the days of old, and lost before the dawn of the so-called historical period. Modern chemistry owes its best fundamental discoveries to Alchemy, but regardless of the undeniable truism of the latter, that there is but one element in the universe, chemistry placed metals in the class of elements, and is only now beginning to find out its gross mistake. Even some encyclopedists are forced to confess that if most of the accounts of transmutation are fraud or delusion, "yet some of them are accompanied by testimony which renders them probable. By means of the galvanic battery even the alkalis have been discovered to have a metallic basis. The possibility of obtaining metal from other substances which contain the ingredients composing it, of changing one metal into another . . . must therefore be left undecided. Nor are all Alchemists to be considered impostors. Many have laboured under the conviction of obtaining their object, with indefatigable patience and purity of heart, which is soundly recommended by Alchemists as the principal requisite for the success of their labours." (Pop. Encyclop.)

Alexandrian Philosophers (or School). This famous school arose in Alexandria, Egypt, which city was for long ages the seat of learning and philosophy. It was famous for its library, founded by Ptolemy Soter at the very beginning of his reign (Ptolemy died in 283 B. C.) — a library which once boasted 700,000 rolls, or volumes (Aulus Gellius), for its museum, the first real Academy of Sciences and Arts, for world-renowned scholars, such as Euclid, the father of scientific geometry; Apollonius of Perga, the author of the still extant work on conic sections; Nicomachus, the arithmetician: for astronomers, natural philosophers, anatomists such as Herophilus and Erasistratus; physicians, musicians, artists, etc. But it became still more famous for its eclectic, or new Platonic school, founded by Ammonius Saccas in 173 A. D., whose disciples were Origen, Plotinus, and many other men now famous in history. The most celebrated schools of the Gnostics had their origin in Alexandria. Philo-Judaeus, Josephus, Iamblichus, Porphyry, Clement of Alexandria, Eratosthenes the astronomer, Hypatia, the virgin philosopher, and numberless other stars of second magnitude, all belonged at various times to these great schools, and helped to make of Alexandria one of the most justly renowned seats of learning that the world has ever produced.

Altruism, from Alter, other. A quality opposed to Egoism. Actions tending to do good to others, regardless of self.

Ammonius Saccas. A great and good philosopher who lived in Alexandria between the 2nd and 3rd centuries of our Era, the founder of the Neo-Platonic School of the Philalethians or "lovers of truth." He was of poor birth and born of Christian parents, but endowed with such prominent, almost divine goodness as to be called Theodidaktos, the "God-taught." He honoured that which was good in Christianity, but broke with it and the Churches at an early age, being unable to find in Christianity any superiority over the old religions.

Analogeticists. The disciples of Ammonius Saccas (vide supra) so called because of their practice of interpreting all sacred legends, myths, and mysteries by a principle of analogy and correspondence, which rule is now found in the Kabalistic system, and pre-eminently so in the schools of Esoteric philosophy in the East. (Vide "The Twelve Signs of the Zodiac," by T. Subba Row in "Five years of Theosophy.")

Ananda (Sans.) Bliss, joy, felicity, happiness. A name of a favourite disciple of Gautama, the Lord Buddha.

Anaxagoras. A famous Ionian philosopher, who lived 500 B. C., studied philosophy under Anaximenes of Miletus, and settled in the days of Pericles, at Athens. Socrates, Euripides, Archelaus, and other distinguished men and philosophers were among his disciples and pupils. He was a most learned astronomer, and was one of the first to explain openly that which was taught by Pythagoras secretly — viz., the movements of the planets, the eclipses of the sun and moon, etc. It was he who taught the theory of chaos, on the principle that "nothing comes from nothing," ex nihilo nihil fit — and of atoms, as the underlying essence and substance of all bodies, "of the same nature as the bodies which they formed." These atoms, he taught, were primarily put in motion by nous (universal intelligence, the Mahat of the Hindus), which nous is an immaterial, eternal, spiritual entity; by this combination the world was formed, the material gross bodies sinking down, and the ethereal atoms (or fiery ether) rising and spreading in the upper celestial regions. Ante-dating modern science by over 2,000 years, he taught that the stars were of the same material as our earth, and the sun a glowing mass; that the moon was a dark uninhabitable body, receiving its light from the sun; and beyond the aforesaid science he confessed himself thoroughly convinced that the real existence of things, perceived by our senses, could not be demonstrably proved. He died in exile at Lampsacus, at the age of seventy-two.

Anima Mundi (Lat.) The "Soul of the World," the same as Alaya of the Northern Buddhists; the divine Essence which pervades, permeates, animates, and informs all things, from the smallest atom of matter to man and god. It is in a sense "the seven-skinned Mother" of the stanzas in the Secret Doctrine; the essence of seven planes of sentiency, consciousness, and differentiation, both moral and physical. In its highest aspect it is Nirvana; in its lowest, the Astral Light. It was feminine with the Gnostics, the early Christians, and the Nazarenes; bisexual with other sects, who considered it only in its four lower planes, of igneous and ethereal nature in the objective world of forms, and divine and spiritual in its three higher planes. When it is said that every human soul was born by detaching itself from the Anima Mundi, it is meant, esoterically, that our higher Egos are of an essence identical with It, and Mahat is a radiation of the ever unknown Universal ABSOLUTE.

Anoia (Gr.) is "want of understanding folly"; and is the name applied by Plato and others to the lower Manas when too closely allied with Kama, which is characterised by irrationality (agnoia). The Greek agnoia is evidently a derivative of the Sanskrit ajnana (phonetically agnyana), or ignorance, irrationality, and absence of knowledge.

Anthropomorphism. From the Greek Anthropos, man. The act of endowing God or the gods with a human form and human attributes or qualities.

Anugita (Sans.) One of the Upanishads. A very occult treatise. (Vide Clarendon Press series "The Sacred Books of the East.")

Apollo Belvidere. Of all the ancient statues of Apollo, the son of Jupiter and Latona, called Phoebus, Helios, the radiant, and the Sun — the best and most perfect is the one of this name, which is in the Belvidere Gallery in the Vatican, at Rome. It is called the Pythian Apollo, as the god is represented in the moment of his victory over the serpent Python. The statue was found in the ruins of Antium in 1503.

Apollonius of Tyana. A wonderful philosopher born in Cappadocia about the beginning of the first century; an ardent Pythagorean, who studied the Phoenician sciences under Euthydemus, and Pythagorean philosophy and other subjects under Euxenus of Heraclea. According to the tenets of the Pythagorean school he remained a vegetarian the whole of his long life, ate only fruit and herbs, drank no wine, wore vestments made only of plant fibres, walked barefooted and let his hair grow to the full length, as all the Initiates have done before and after him. He was initiated by the priests of the temple of AEculapius (Asclepios) at AEgae, and learnt many of the "miracles" for healing the sick wrought by the God of medicine. Having prepared himself for a higher initiation by a silence of five years, and by travel — visiting Antioch, Ephesus, and Pamphylia and other parts — he repaired via Babylon to India, alone, all his disciples having abandoned him as they feared to go to the "land of enchantments." A casual disciple, Damis, whom he met on his way, accompanied him, however, on his travels. At Babylon he got initiated by the Chaldees and Magi, according to Damis, whose narrative was copied by one named Philostratus one hundred years later. After his return from India, he showed himself a true Initiate in that the pestilence, earthquakes, deaths of kings and other events, which he prophesied, duly happened.

At Lesbos, the priests of Orpheus got jealous of him, and refused to initiate him into their peculiar mysteries, though they did so several years later. He preached to the people of Athens and other States the purest and noblest ethics, and the phenomena he produced were as wonderful as they were numerous, and well authenticated. "How is it," inquires Justin Martyr, in dismay, "how is it that the talismans (telesmata) of Apollonius have power, for they prevent, as we see, the fury of the waves, and the violence of the winds, and the attacks of wild beasts; and whilst our Lord's miracles are preserved by tradition alone, those of Apollonius are most numerous, and actually manifested in present facts?" (Quest. XXIV.) But an answer is easily found to this, in the fact that, after crossing the Hindu Koosh, Apollonius had been directed by a king to the abode of the Sages, whose abode it may be to this day, and who taught him their unsurpassed knowledge. His dialogues, with the Corinthian Menippus, give to us truly the esoteric catechism, and disclose (when understood) many an important mystery of nature. Apollonius was the friend, correspondent, and guest of kings and queens, and no wonderful or "magic" powers are better attested than his. Towards the close of his long and wonderful life he opened an esoteric school at Ephesus, and died at the ripe old age of one hundred years.

Archangel. Highest, supreme angel. From the two Greek words, arch, "first," and angelos, "messenger."

Arhat (Sans.), also pronounced and written Arahat, Arhan, Rahat, etc., "the worthy one"; a perfected Arya, one exempt from reincarnation; "deserving Divine honours." This was the name first given to the Jain, and subsequently to the Buddhist holy men initiated into the esoteric mysteries. The Arhat is one who has entered the last and highest path, and is thus emancipated from rebirth.

Arians. The followers of Arius, a presbyter of the Church in Alexandria in the fourth century. One who holds that Christ is a created and human being, inferior to God the Father, though a grand and noble man, a true adept, versed in all the divine mysteries.

Aristobulus. An Alexandrian writer, and an obscure philosopher. A Jew who tried to prove that Aristotle explained the esoteric thoughts of Moses.

Aryan (Sans.) Lit., "the holy"; those who had mastered the Aryasatyani and entered the Aryamarga path to Nirvana or Moksha, the great "fourfold" path. They were originally known as Rishis. But now the name has become the epithet of a race, and our Orientalists, depriving the Hindu Brahmans of their birthright, have made Aryans of all Europeans. Since, in esotericism the four paths or stages can only be entered through great spiritual development and "growth in holiness," they are called the Aryamarga. The degrees of Arhatship, called respectively Srotapatti, Sakridagamin, Anagamin, and Arhat, or the four classes of Aryas, correspond to the four paths and truths.

Aspect. The form (rupa) under which any principle in septenary man or nature manifests is called an aspect of that principle in Theosophy.

Astral Body. The ethereal counterpart or double of any physical body — Doppelganger.

Astrology. The science which defines the action of celestial bodies upon mundane affairs, and claims to foretell future events from the positions of the stars. Its antiquity is such as to place it among the very earliest records of human learning. It remained for long ages a secret science in the East, and its final expression remains so to this day, its esoteric application only having been brought to any degree of perfection in the West during the lapse of time since Varaha Mihira wrote his book on Astrology, some 1400 years ago. Claudius Ptolemy, the famous geographer and mathematician who founded the system of Astronomy known under his name, wrote his Tetrabiblos, which is still the basis of modern Astrology, 135 A. D. The science of Horoscopy is studied now chiefly under four heads, viz.: (1). Mundane, in its application to meteorology, seismology, husbandry. (2). State or Civic, in regard to the future of nations, Kings, and rulers. (3). Horary, in reference to the solving of doubts arising in the mind upon any subject. (4). Genethliacal, in connection with the future of individuals from birth unto death. The Egyptians and the Chaldees were among the most ancient votaries of Astrology, though their modes of reading the stars and the modern methods differ considerably. The former claimed that Belus, the Bel or Elu of the Chaldees, a scion of the Divine Dynasty, or the dynasty of the King-gods, had belonged to the land of Chemi, and had left it to found a colony from Egypt on the banks of the Euphrates, where a temple, ministered by priests in the service of the "lords of the stars," was built. As to the origin of the science, it is known on the one hand that Thebes claimed the honour of the invention of Astrology; whereas, on the other hand, all are agreed that it was the Chaldees who taught that science to the other nations. Now Thebes antedated considerably, not only "Ur of the Chaldees," but also Nipur, where Bel was first worshipped — Sin, his son (the moon), being the presiding deity of Ur, the land of the nativity of Terah, the Sabean and Astrolater, and of Abram, his son, the great Astrologer of Biblical tradition. All tends, therefore, to corroborate the Egyptian claim. If later on the name of Astrologer fell into disrepute in Rome and elsewhere, it was owing to the frauds of those who wanted to make money of that which was part and parcel of the Sacred Science of the Mysteries, and who, ignorant of the latter, evolved a system based entirely on mathematics, instead of transcendental metaphysics with the physical celestial bodies as its upadhi or material basis. Yet, all persecutions notwithstanding, the number of adherents to Astrology among the most intellectual and scientific minds was always very great. If Cardan and Kepler were among its ardent supporters, then later votaries have nothing to blush for, even in its now imperfect and distorted form. As said in Isis Unveiled (I., 259), "Astrology is to exact astronomy, what psychology is to exact physiology. In astrology and psychology one has to step beyond the visible world of matter and enter into the domain of transcendent spirit."

Athenagoras. A Platonic Philosopher of Athens, who wrote an apology for the Christians in 177 A. D., addressed to Marcus Aurelius, to prove that the accusations brought against them, viz., that they were incestuous and ate murdered children, were untrue.

Atman, or Atma (Sans.) The Universal Spirit, the divine monad, "the seventh Principle," so called, in the exoteric "septenary" classification of man. The Supreme Soul.

Aura (Gr. and Lat.) A subtile invisible essence or fluid that emanates from human, animal, and other bodies. It is a psychic effluvium partaking of both the mind and the body, as there is both an electro-vital and at the same time an electro-mental aura; called in Theosophy the Akasic or magnetic aura. In R. C. Martyrology, a Saint.

Avatara (Sans.) Divine incarnation. The descent of a god or some exalted Being who has progressed beyond the necessity for rebirth, into the body of a simple mortal. Krishna was an Avatar of Vishnu. The Dalai-Lama is regarded as an Avatar of Avalokiteswara and the Teschu-Lama as one of Tson-Kha-pa, or Amitabha. These are two kinds of Avatars: one born from woman and the other "parentless" — Anupadaka.

B

Beness. A term coined by Theosophists to render more accurately the essential meaning of the untranslatable word Sat. The latter word does not mean "Being," for the term "Being" presupposes a sentient consciousness of existence. But as the term Sat is applied solely to the absolute principle, that universal, unknown, and ever unknowable principle which philosophical Pantheism postulates, calling it the basic root of Kosmos and Kosmos itself, it could not be translated by the simple term "Being." Sat, indeed, is not even, as translated by some Orientalists, "the incomprehensible Entity"; for it is no more an "Entity" than a non-entity, but both. It is as said absolute BENESS, not "Being"; the one, secondless, undivided and indivisible ALL — the root of nature both visible and invisible, objective and subjective, comprehensible and — never to be fully comprehended.

Bhagavat-Gita (Sans.) Lit., "the Lord's Song," a portion of the Mahabharata, the great epic poem of India. It contains a dialogue wherein Krishna — the "Charioteer" and Arjuna his chela have a discussion upon the highest spiritual philosophy. The work is pre-eminently occult or esoteric.

Black Magic. Sorcery; necromancy, or the raising of the dead and other selfish abuses of abnormal powers. This abuse may be unintentional; still it has to remain "black" magic whenever anything is produced phenomenally simply for one's own gratification.

Boehme (Jacob). A mystic and great philosopher, one of the most prominent Theosophists of the mediaeval ages. He was born about 1575 at Old Diedenberg, some two miles from Gorlitz (Silesia), and died in 1624, being nearly fifty years old. When a boy he was a common shepherd, and, after learning to read and write in a village school, became an apprentice to a poor shoemaker at Gorlitz. He was a natural clairvoyant of the most wonderful power. With no education or acquaintance with science he wrote works which are now proved to be full of scientific truths; but these, as he himself says of what he wrote, he "saw as in a Great Deep in the Eternal." He had "a thorough view of the universe, as in chaos," which yet opened itself in him, from time to time, "as in a young planet," he says. He was a thorough born mystic, and evidently of a constitution which is most rare; one of those fine natures whose material envelope impedes in no way the direct, even if only occasional, intercommunication between the intellectual and spiritual Ego. It is this Ego which Jacob Boehme, as so many other untrained mystics, mistook for God. "Man must acknowledge," he writes, "that his knowledge is not his own, but from God, who manifests the Ideas of Wisdom to the Soul of Man in what measure he pleases." Had this great Theosophist been born 300 years later he might have expressed it otherwise. He would have known that the "God" who spoke through his poor uncultured and untrained brain was his own Divine Ego, the omniscient Deity within himself, and that what that Deity gave out was not "what measure he pleased," but in the measure of the capacities of the mortal and temporary dwelling IT informed.

Book of the Keys. An ancient Kabalistic work. The original is no longer extant, though there may be spurious and disfigured copies and forgeries of it.

Brahm (Sans.) The student must distinguish between the neuter Brahma, and the male Creator of the Indian Pantheon, Brahma. The former Brahma or Brahman is the impersonal, Supreme, and uncognizable Soul of the Universe, from the essence of which all emanates, and into which all returns; which is incorporeal, immaterial, unborn, eternal, beginningless and endless. It is all-pervading, animating the highest god as well as the smallest mineral atom. Brahma, on the other hand, the male and the alleged Creator, exists in his manifestation periodically only, and passes into pralaya, i. e., disappears and is annihilated as periodically. (Vide infra.)

Brahma's Day. A period of 2,160,000,000 years, during which Brahma, having emerged out of his Golden Egg (Hiranya Garbha), creates and fashions the material world (for he is simply the fertilizing and creative force in Nature). After this period the worlds being destroyed in turn by fire and water, he vanishes with objective nature; and then comes

Brahma's Night. A period of equal duration, in which Brahma is said to be asleep. Upon awakening he recommences the process, and this goes on for an AGE of Brahma composed of alternate "Days" and "Nights," and lasting for 100 years of 2,160,000,000 each. It requires fifteen figures to express the duration of such an age, after the expiration of which the Mahapralaya or Great Dissolution sets in, and lasts in its turn for the same space of fifteen figures.

Brahm-Vidya (Sans.) The knowledge or Esoteric Science about the true nature of the two Brahmas.

Buddha (Sans.) "The enlightened." Generally known as the title of Gautama Buddha, the Prince of Kapilavastu, the founder of modern Buddhism. The highest degree of knowledge and holiness. To become a Buddha one has to break through the bondage of sense and personality; to acquire a complete perception of the real Self, and learn not to separate it from all the other Selves; to learn by experience the utter unreality of all phenomena, foremost of all the visible Kosmos; to attain a complete detachment from all that is evanescent and finite, and to live while yet on earth only in the immortal and everlasting.

Buddhi (Sans.) Universal Soul or Mind. Mahabuddhi is a name of Mahat (q. v.); also the Spiritual Soul in man (the sixth principle exoterically), the vehicle of Atma, the seventh, according to the exoteric enumeration.

Buddhism is the religious philosophy taught by Gautama Buddha. It is now split into two distinct churches: the Southern and Northern. The former is said to be the purer, as having preserved more religiously the original teachings of the Lord Buddha. The Northern Buddhism is confined to Thibet, China, and Nepaul. But this distinction is incorrect. If the Southern Church is nearer, and has not, in fact, departed, except perhaps in trifling dogmas, due to the many councils held after the death of the MASTER from the public or exoteric teachings of Sakyamuni, the Northern Church is the outcome of Siddharta Buddha's esoteric teachings which he confined to his elect Bikshus and Arhats. Buddhism, in fact, cannot be justly judged in our age either by one or the other of its exoteric popular forms. Real Buddhism can be appreciated only by blending the philosophy of the Southern Church and the metaphysics of the Northern Schools. If one seems too iconoclastic and stern, and the other too metaphysical and transcendental, events being overcharged with the weeds of Indian exotericism — many of the gods of its Pantheon having been transplanted under new names into Thibetan soil — it is due to the popular expression of Buddhism in both churches. Correspondentially, they stand in their relation to each other as Protestantism to Roman Catholicism. Both err by an excess of zeal and erroneous interpretations, though neither the Southern nor the Northern Buddhist clergy have ever departed from Truth consciously, still less have they acted under the dictates of priestocracy, ambition, or an eye to personal gain and power, as the later churches have.

Buddhi-Taijasi (Sans.) A very mystic term, capable of several interpretations. In Occultism, however, and in relation to the human "Principles" (exoterically), it is a term to express the state of our dual Manas, when, reunited during a man's life, it bathes in the radiance of Buddhi, the Spiritual Soul. For "Taijasi" means the radiant, and Manas, becoming radiant in consequence of its union with Buddhi, and being, so to speak, merged into it, is identified with the latter; the trinity has become one; and, as the element of Buddhi is the highest, it becomes Buddhi-Taijasi. In short, it is the human soul illuminated by the radiance of the divine soul, the human reason lit by the light of the Spirit or Divine SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS.

C

Caste. Originally the system of the four hereditary classes into which Indian population was divided: Brahman, Kshatriya, Vaisya and Shoodra — (a) descendants of Brahma; (b) warrior; (c) mercantile, and (d) the lowest or agricultural Shoodra class. From these four, hundreds of divisions and minor castes have sprung.

Causal Body. This "body," which is in reality no body at all, either objective or subjective, but Buddhi the Spiritual Soul, is so-called because it is the direct cause of the Sushupti state leading to the Turya state, the highest state of Samadhi. It is called Karanopadhi, "the basis of the cause," by the "Taraka Raj" Yogis, and in the Vedanta System corresponds to both the Vignanamaya and Anandamaya Kosha (the latter coming next to Atma, and therefore being the vehicle of the Universal Spirit). Buddhi alone could not be called a "Causal body," but becomes one in conjunction with Manas, the incarnating Entity or EGO.

Chela (Sans.) A disciple. The pupil of a Guru or Sage, the follower of some Adept, or a school of philosophy.

Chrestos (Gr.) The early gnostic term for Christ. This technical term was used in the fifth century B. C. by AEschylus, Herodotus and others. The Manteumata pythocresta, or the "Oracles delivered by a Pythian God" through a pythoness, are mentioned by the former (Cho. 901), and Pythocrestos is derived from chrao. Chresterion is not only "the test of an oracle," but an offering to, or for, the oracle. Chrestes is one who explains oracles, a "prophet and soothsayer," and Chresterios, one who serves an oracle or a God. The earliest Christian writer, Justin Martyr, in his first Apology, calls his co-religionists Chrestians. "It is only through ignorance that men call themselves Christians, instead of Chrestians," says Lactantius (lib. IV., cap. VII.). The terms Christ and Christians, spelt originally Chrest and Chrestians, were borrowed from the Temple vocabulary of the Pagans. Chrestos meant, in that vocabulary, "a disciple on probation," a candidate for hierophantship; who, when he had attained it, through Initiation, long trials and suffering, and had been anointed (i. e., "rubbed with oil," as Initiates and even Idols of the Gods were, as the last touch of ritualistic observance), was changed into Christos — the "purified" in esoteric or mystery language. In mystic symbology, indeed, Christes or Christos meant that the "way," the Path, was already trodden and the goal reached; when the fruits of the arduous labour, uniting the personality of evanescent clay with the indestructible INDIVIDUALITY, transformed it thereby into the immortal EGO. "At the end of the way stands the Christes," the Purifier; and the union once accomplished, the Chrestos, the "man of sorrow" became Christos himself. Paul, the Initiate, knew this, and meant this precisely, when he is made to say in bad translation, "I travail in birth again until Christ be formed in you" (Gal. iv., 19), the true rendering of which is, " . . . . until you form the Christos within yourselves." But the profane, who knew only that Chrestos was in some way connected with priest and prophet, and knew nothing about the hidden meaning of Christos, insisted, as did Lactantius and Justyn Martyr, on being called Chrestians instead of Christians. Every good individual, therefore, may find Christ in his "inner man," as Paul expresses it, (Ephes. iii., 16, 17) whether he be Jew, Mussulman, Hindu or Christian.

Christ (see CHRESTOS).

Christian Scientist. A newly-coined term for denoting the practitioners of a healing art by will. The name is a misnomer, since Buddhist or Jew, Hindu or Materialist can practise this new form of Western Yoga with like success if he can only guide and control his will with sufficient firmness. "Mental Scientists" is another rival school. These work by a universal denial of every disease and evil imaginable, and claim, syllogistically, that since Universal Spirit cannot be subject to the ailings of flesh, and since every atom is Spirit and in Spirit, and since, finally, they — the healers and the healed — are all absorbed in this Spirit or Deity, there is not, nor can there be, such a thing as disease. This prevents in nowise both Christian and Mental Scientists from succumbing to disease and nursing chronic diseases for years in their own bodies just like other ordinary mortals.

Clairaudience. The faculty — whether innate or acquired by occult training — to hear things at whatever distance.

Clairvoyance. A faculty of seeing with the inner eye or spiritual sight. As now used, it is a loose and flippant term, embracing under its meaning both a happy guess due to natural shrewdness or intuition, and also that faculty which was so remarkably exercised by Jacob Boehme and Swedenborg. Yet even these two great seers, since they could never rise superior to the general spirit of the Jewish Bible and Sectarian teachings, have sadly confused what they saw, and fallen far short of true clairvoyance.

Clemens Alexandrinus. A Church Father and voluminous writer, who had been a Neo-Platonist and a disciple of Ammonius Saccas. He was one of the few Christian philosophers between the second and third centuries of our era, at Alexandria.

College of Rabbis. A college at Babylon; most famous during the early centuries of Christianity, but its glory was greatly darkened by the appearance in Alexandria of Hellenic teachers, such as Philo-Judaeus, Josephus, Aristobulus and others. The former avenged themselves on their successful rivals by speaking of the Alexandrians as Theurgists and unclean prophets. But the Alexandrian believers in thaumaturgy were not regarded as sinners and impostors when orthodox Jews were at the head of such schools of "hazim." There were colleges for teaching prophecy and occult sciences. Samuel was the chief of such a college at Ramah; Elisha, at Jericho. Hillel had a regular academy for prophets and seers; and it is Hillel, a pupil of the Babylonian College, who was the founder of the sect of the Pharisees and the great orthodox Rabbis.

Cycle (Gr.) KUKLOS. The ancients divided time into endless cycles, wheels within wheels, all such periods being of various durations, and each marking the beginning or end of some event either cosmic, mundane, physical or metaphysical. There were cycles of only a few years, and cycles of immense duration, the great Orphic cycle referring to the ethnological change of races lasting 120,000 years, and that of Cassandrus of 136,000, which brought about a complete change in planetary influences and their correlations between men and gods — a fact entirely lost sight of by modern astrologers.

D

Deist. One who admits the possibility of the existence of a God or gods, but claims to know nothing of either, and denies revelation. An agnostic of olden times.

Deva (Sans.) A god, a "resplendent" Deity, Deva-Deus, from the root div, "to shine." A Deva is a celestial being — whether good, bad or indifferent — which inhabits "the three worlds," or the three planes above us. There are 33 groups or millions of them.

Devachan (Sans.) The "Dwelling of the Gods." A state intermediate between two earth-lives, and into which the Ego (Atma-Buddhi-Manas, or the Trinity made one) enters after its separation from Kama Rupa, and the disintegration of the lower principles, after the death of the body, on Earth.

Dhammapada (Sans.) A work containing various aphorisms from the Buddhist Scriptures.

Dhyana (Sans.) One of the six Paramitas of perfection. A state of abstraction which carries the ascetic practising it far above the region of sensuous perception, and out of the world of matter. Lit., "contemplation." The six stages of Dhyan differ only in the degrees of abstraction of the personal Ego from sensuous life.

Dhyan Chohans (Sans.) Lit., "The Lords of Light." The highest gods, answering to the Roman Catholic Archangels. The divine Intelligences charged with the supervision of Kosmos.

Double. The same as the Astral body or "Doppelganger."

E

Ecstasis (Gr.) A psycho-spiritual state; a physical trance which induces clairvoyance, and a beatific state which brings on visions.

Ego (Lat.) "I"; the consciousness in man of the "I am I," or the feeling of I-am-ship. Esoteric philosophy teaches the existence of two Egos in man, the mortal or personal, and the higher, the divine or impersonal, calling the former "personality," and the latter "individuality."

Egoity (from the word "Ego"). Egoity means "individuality" — indifferent — never "personality," as it is the opposite of Egoism or "selfishness," the characteristic par excellence of the latter.

Eidolon (Gr.) The same as that which we term the human phantom, the Astral form.

Elementals, or Spirits of the Elements. The creatures evolved in the Four Kingdoms, or Elements — Earth, Air, Fire, and Water. They are called by the Kabalists, Gnomes (of the Earth), Sylphs (of the Air), Salamanders (of the Fire), and Undines (of the Water), except a few of the higher kinds and their rulers. They are rather the forces of nature than ethereal men and women. These forces, as the servile agents of the occultist, may produce various effects; but if employed by elementaries (Kamarupas)— in which case they enslave the mediums — they will deceive. All the lower invisible beings generated on the fifth, sixth, and seventh Planes of our terrestrial atmosphere are called Elementals — Peris, Devs, Djins, Sylvans, Satyrs, Fauns, Elves, Dwarfs, Trolls, Norns, Kobolds, Brownies, Nixies, Goblins, Pinkies, Banshees, Moss People, White Ladies, Spooks, Fairies, etc., etc.

Eleusinia (Gr.) The Eleusinian Mysteries were the most famous and the most ancient of all the Greek mysteries (save the Samothracian), and were performed near the hamlet of Eleusis, not far from Athens. Epiphanius traces them to the days of Iacchos (1800 B. C.) They were held in honour of Demeter, the great Ceres, and the Egyptian Isis; and the last act of the performance referred to a sacrificial victim of atonement and a resurrection, when the Initiate was admitted to the highest degree of Epopt. The festival of the Mysteries began in the month of Boedromion (September), the time of grape-gathering, and lasted from the 15th to the 22nd — seven days. The Hebrew Feast of Tabernacles — the feast of ingatherings — in the month of Ethanim (the seventh) also began on the 15th and ended on the 22nd of that month. The name of the month (Ethanim) is derived, according to some, from Adonim, Adonia, Attenim, Ethanim, and was in bonour of Adonai, or Adonis (Tham), whose death was lamented by the Hebrews in the groves of Bethlehem. The sacrifice of "Bread and Wine" was performed both in the Eleusinia and during the Feast of Tabernacles.

Emanation (The doctrine of) is in its metaphysical meaning opposed to evolution, yet one with it. Science teaches that, physiologically, evolution is a mode of generation in which the germ that develops the foetus pre-exists already in the parent, the development and final form and characteristics of that germ being accomplished by nature; and that (as in its cosmology) the process takes place blindly, through the correlation of the elements and their various compounds. Occultism teaches that this is only the apparent mode, the real process being Emanation, guided by intelligent forces under an immutable LAW. Therefore, while the Occultists and Theosophists believe thoroughly in the doctrine of Evolution as given out by Kapila and Manu, they are Emanationists rather than Evolutionists. The doctrine of Emanation was at one time universal. It was taught by the Alexandrian, as well as by the Indian philosophers, by the Egyptian, the Chaldean, and Hellenic Hierophants, and also by the Hebrews (in their Kabala, and even in Genesis). For it is only owing to deliberate mistranslation that the Hebrew word asdt was translated "angels" from the Septuagint, while it means Emanations, AEons, just as with the Gnostics. Indeed, in Deuteronomy (xxxiii. 2) the word asdt or ashdt is translated as "fiery law," whilst the correct rendering of the passage should be, "from his right went (not a fiery law, but) a fire according to law," viz., that the fire of one flame is imparted to and caught up by another — like as in a trail of inflammable substance. This is precisely Emanation, as shown in Isis Unveiled. "In Evolution, as it is now beginning to be understood, there is supposed to be in all matter an impulse to take on a higher form — a supposition clearly expressed by Manu and other Hindoo philosophers of the highest antiquity. The philosopher's tree illustrates it in the case of the zinc solution. The controversy between the followers of this school and the Emanationists may be briefly stated thus: The Evolutionist stops all inquiry at the borders of 'the unknowable'; the Emanationist believes that nothing can be evolved — or, as the word means, unwombed or born — except it has first been involved, thus indicating that life is from a spiritual potency above the whole."

Esoteric. Hidden, secret. From the Greek Esotericos — "inner," concealed.

Esoteric Bodhism. Secret wisdom or intelligence, from the Greek Esotericos, "inner," and the Sanskrit Bodhi, "knowledge," in contradistinction to Buddhi, "the faculty of knowledge or intelligence," and Buddhism, the philosophy or Law of Buddha (the Enlightened). Also written "Budhism," from Budha (Intelligence, Wisdom) the Son of Soma.

Exoteric (Gr.) Outward, public; the opposite of esoteric or hidden.

Extra-Cosmic, i. e., outside of Kosmos or Nature. A nonsensical word invented to assert the existence of a personal god independent of or outside Nature per se; for as Nature, or the Universe, is infinite and limitless there can be nothing outside it. The term is coined in opposition to the Pantheistic idea that the whole Kosmos is animated or informed with the Spirit of Deity, Nature being but the garment, and matter the illusive shadows, of the real unseen Presence.

Eurasians. An abbreviation of "European-Asians." The mixed coloured races; the children of the white fathers, and the dark mothers of India, and vice versa.

F

Ferho (Gnostic). The highest and greatest creative power with the Nazarene Gnostics (Codex Nazaraeus).

Fire-Philosophers. The name given to the Hermetists and Alchemists of the Middle Ages, and also to the Rosicrucians. The latter, the successors of Theurgists, regarded fire as the symbol of Deity. It was the source, not only of material atoms, but the container of the Spiritual and Psychic Forces energising them. Broadly analysed, Fire is a triple principle; esoterically, a septenary, as are all the rest of the elements. As man is composed of Spirit, Soul, and Body, plus a four-fold aspect; so is Fire. As in the works of Robert Flood (de Fluctibus), one of the famous Rosicrucians, fire contains — Firstly, a visible flame (body); secondly, an invisible, astral fire (soul); and thirdly, spirit. The four aspects are (a) heat (life), (b) light (mind), (c) electricity (Kamic or molecular powers, and (d) the synthetic essences, beyond spirit, or the radical cause of its existence and manifestation. For the Hermetist or Rosicrucian, when a flame is extinct on the objective plane, it has only passed from the seen world into the unseen; from the knowable into the unknowable.

G

Gautama (Sans.) A name in India. It is that of the Prince of Kapilavastu, son of Sudhodana, the Sakhya King of a small territory on the borders of Nepaul, born in the seventh century B. C., now called the "Saviour of the world." Gautama or Gotama was the sacerdotal name of the Sakya family. Born a simple mortal, he rose to Buddha-ship through his own personal and unaided merit; a man — verily greater than any God!

Gebirol. Salomon Ben Jehudah, called in literature Avicebron. An Israelite by birth, a philosopher, poet and kabalist; a voluminous writer and a mystic. He was born in the eleventh century at Malaga (1021), educated at Saragossa, and died at Valencia in 1070, murdered by a Mahomedan. His fellow-religionists called him Salomon, the Sephardi, or the Spaniard, and the Arabs, Abu Ayyub Suleiman-ben ya'hya Ibn Dgebirol, whilst the Scholastics named him Avicebron (see Myers' Quabbalah). Ibn Gebirol was certainly one of the greatest philosophers and scholars of his age. He wrote much in Arabic, and most of his MSS have been preserved. His greatest work appears to be The Megoy Hayyim, i. e., The Fountain of Life, "one of the earliest exposures of the secrets of the Speculative Kabbalah," as his biographer informs us.

Gnosis (Gr.) Lit. "knowledge." The technical term used by the schools of religious philosophy, both before and during the first centuries of so-called Christianity, to denote the object of their enquiry. This spiritual and sacred knowledge, the Gupta Vidya of the Hindus, could only be obtained by Initiation into Spiritual Mysteries of which the ceremonial "Mysteries" were a type.

Gnostics (Gr.) The philosophers who formulated and taught the "Gnosis" or knowledge. They flourished in the first three centuries of the Christian Era. The following were eminent: Valentinus, Basilides, Marcion, Simon Magus, etc.

Golden Age. The ancients divided the life cycle into the Golden, Silver, Bronze and Iron Ages. The Golden was an age of primeval purity, simplicity and general happiness.

Great Age. There were several "Great Ages" mentioned by the ancients. In India it embraced the whole Maha-Manvantara, the "Age of Brahma," each "Day" of which represents the Life Cycle of a chain, i. e., it embraces a period of Seven Rounds (vide "Esoteric Buddhism," by A. P. Sinnett). Thus while a "Day" and a "Night" represent, as Manvantara and Pralaya, 8,640,000,000 years, an "age" lasts through a period of 311,040,000,000,000; after which the Pralaya or dissolution of the universe becomes universal. With the Egyptian and Greeks the "Great Age" referred only to the Tropical, or Sidereal year, the duration of which is 25,868 solar years. Of the complete age — that of the Gods — they said nothing, as it was a matter to be discussed and divulged only at the Mysteries, and during the Initiation Ceremonies. The "Great Age" of the Chaldees was the same in figures as that of the Hindus.

Guhya Vidya (Sans.) The secret knowledge of mystic-mantras.

Gupta Vidya (Sans.) The same as Guhya Vidya. Esoteric or secret science, knowledge.

Gyges. "The ring of Gyges" has become a familiar metaphor in European literature. Gyges was a Lydian, who, after murdering the King Candaules, married his widow. Plato tells us that Gyges descending once into a chasm of the earth, discovered a brazen horse, within whose opened side was the skeleton of a man of gigantic stature, who had a brazen ring on his finger. This ring when placed on his own finger made him invisible.

H

Hades (Gr.), or Aides, the "invisible," the land of shadows; one of whose regions was Tartarus, a place of complete darkness, as was also the region of profound dreamless sleep in Amenti. Judging by the allegorical description of the punishments inflicted therein, the place was purely Karmic. Neither Hades nor Amenti were the Hell still preached by some retrograde priests and clergymen; and whether represented by the Elysian Fields or by Tartarus, they could only be reached by crossing the river to the "other shore." As well expressed in the "Egyptian Belief," the story of Charon, the ferryman (of the Styx) is to be found not only in Homer, but in the poetry of many lands. The River must be crossed before gaining the Isles of the Blest. The Ritual of Egypt described a Charon and his boat long ages before Homer. He is Khu-en-na, "the hawk-headed steersman." (See Hell.)

Hallucinations. A state produced sometimes by physiological disorders, sometimes by mediumship, and at others by drunkenness. But the cause that produces the visions has to be sought deeper than physiology. All such, particularly when produced through mediumship, are preceded by a relaxation of the nervous system, generating invariably an abnormal magnetic condition which attracts to the sufferer waves of astral light. It is these latter that furnish the various hallucinations, which, however, are not always, as physicians would explain them, mere empty and unreal dreams. No one can see that which does not exist — i. e., which is not impressed — in or on the astral waves. But a seer may perceive objects and scenes (whether past, present or future) which have no relation whatever to himself; and perceive, moreover, several things entirely disconnected with each other at one and the same time, so as to produce the most grotesque and absurd combinations. But drunkard and seer, medium and adept see their respective visions in the astral light; only while the drunkard, the madman, and the untrained medium, or one in a brain fever, see, because they cannot help it, and evoke jumbled visions unconsciously to themselves without being able to control them, the adept and the trained Seer have the choice and the control of such visions. They know where to fix their gaze, how to steady the scenes they wish to observe, and how to see beyond the upper outward layers of the astral light. With the former such glimpses into the waves are hallucinations; with the latter they become the faithful reproduction of what actually has been, is, or will be taking place. The glimpses at random, caught by the medium, and his flickering visions in the deceptive light, are transformed under the guiding will of the adept and seer into steady pictures, the truthful representation of that which he wills to come within the focus of his perception.

Hell. A term which the Anglo-Saxon race has evidently derived from the name of the Scandinavian goddess, Hela, just as the word ad, in Russian and other Slavonian tongues expressing the same conception, is derived from the Greek Hades, the only difference between the Scandinavian cold Hell, and the hot Hell of the Christians, being found in their respective temperatures. But even the idea of these overheated regions is not original with the Europeans, many people having entertained the conception of an under-world climate; as well we may, if we localise our Hell in the centre of the earth. All exoteric religions — the creeds of the Brahmans, Buddhists, Zoroastrians, Mahomedans, Jews, and the rest, made their Hells hot and dark, though many were more attractive than frightful. The idea of a hot Hell is an afterthought, the distortion of an astronomical allegory. With the Egyptians Hell became a place of punishment by fire not earlier than the 17th or 18th Dynasty, when Typhon was transformed from a God into a Devil. But at whatever time they implanted this dread superstition in the minds of the poor ignorant masses, the scheme of a burning Hell and souls tormented therein is purely Egyptian. Ra (the Sun) became the Lord of the Furnace, in Karr, the Hell of the Pharaohs, and the sinner was threatened with misery "in the heat of infernal fires." "A lion was there," says Dr. Birch, "and was called the roaring monster." Another describes the place as "the bottomless pit and lake of fire, into which the victims are thrown" (compare Revelation). The Hebrew word gai-hinnom (gehena) had never really the significance given to it in Christian orthodoxy.

Hermas, an ancient Greek writer, of whose works only a few fragments now remain extant.

Hierogrammatists (Gr.) The title given to those Egyptian priests who were entrusted with the writing and reading of the sacred and secret records. The "scribes of the secret records" literally. They were the instructors of the neophytes preparing for initiation.

Hierophant. From the Greek Hierophantes, literally "he who explains sacred things"; a title belonging to the highest adepts in the temples of antiquity, who were the teachers and expounders of the Mysteries, and the Initiators into the final great Mysteries. The Hierophant stood for the Demiurge, and explained to the postulants for Initiation the various phenomena of creation that were produced for their tuition. "He was the sole expounder of the exoteric secrets and doctrines. It was forbidden even to pronounce his name before an uninitiated person. He sat in the East, and wore as symbol of authority, a golden globe, suspended from the neck. He was also called Mystagogus." (Kenneth R. H. Mackenzie, IX., F. T. S., in The Royal Masonic Cyclopoedia.)

Hillel. A great Babylonian Rabbi of the century preceding the Christian Era. He was the founder of the sect of the Pharisees, a learned and a saintly man.

Hinayana (Sans.) The "Smaller Vehicle"; a Scripture and a School of the Buddhists, contrasted with the Mahayana, "The Greater Vehicle." Both schools are mystical. (See Mahayana.) Also in exoteric superstition, the lowest form of transmigration.

Homogeneity. From the Greek words homos, "the same"; and genos, "kind." That which is of the same nature throughout, undifferentiated, non-compound, as gold is supposed to be.

Hypnotism (Gr.) A name given by Dr. Braid to the process by which one man of strong will-power plunges another of weaker mind into a kind of trance; once in such a state the latter will do anything suggested to him by the hypnotiser. Unless produced for beneficial purposes, the Occultists would call it black magic or sorcery. It is the most dangerous of practices, morally and physically, as it interferes with the nerve fluids.

I

Iamblichus. A great Theosophist and an Initiate of the third century. He wrote a great deal about the various kinds of demons who appear through evocation, but spoke severely against such phenomena. His austerities, purity of life and earnestness were great. He is credited with having been levitated ten cubits high from the ground, as are some modern Yogis, and mediums.

Illusion. In Occultism everything finite (such as the Universe and all in it) is called Illusion or Maya.

Individuality. One of the names given in Theosophy and Occultism to the human Higher Ego. We make a distinction between the immortal and divine and the mortal human Ego which perishes. The latter or "Personality" (personal Ego) survives the dead body but for a time in Kama Loka: the Individuality prevails for ever.

Initiate. From the Latin Initiatus. The designation of anyone who was received into and had revealed to him the mysteries and secrets of either Masonry or Occultism. In times of antiquity they were those who had been initiated into the arcane knowledge taught by the Hierophants of the Mysteries; and in our modern days those who have been initiated by the adepts of mystic lore into the mysterious knowledge, which, notwithstanding the lapse of ages, has yet a few real votaries on earth.

Iswara (Sans.) The "Lord" or the personal god, divine spirit in man. Literally Sovereign (independent) existence. A title given to Siva and other gods in India. Siva is also called Iswaradeva, or sovereign deva.

Iu-Kabar Zivo, Gnostic term. The "Lord of the AEons" in the Nazarene system. He is the procreator (Emanator) of the seven holy lives (the seven primal Dhyan Chohans or Archangels, each representing one of the cardinal virtues), and is himself called the third life (third Logos). In the Codex he is addressed as the Helm and Vine of the food of life. Thus he is identical with Christ (Christos) who says: "I am the true vine and my Father is the husbandman." (John xv. 1.) It is well known that Christ is regarded in the Roman Catholic Church as the "Chief of the AEons," as also is Michael, "who is as God." Such also was the belief of the Gnostics.

J

Javidan Khirad (Pers.) A work on moral precepts.

Jhana (Sans.) or Jnana, Knowledge: Occult Wisdom.

Josephus Flavius. A historian of the first century; a Hellenized Jew who lived in Alexandria and died at Rome. He was credited by Eusebius with having written the 16 famous lines relating to Christ, which were most probably interpolated by Eusebius himself, the greatest forger among the Church Fathers. This passage, in which Josephus, who was an ardent Jew and died in Judaism, is nevertheless made to acknowledge the Messiaship and divine origin of Jesus, is now declared spurious both by most of the Christian Bishops (Lardner among others) and even by Paley (see his Evidence of Christianity). It was for centuries one of the weightiest proofs of the real existence of Jesus, the Christ.

K

Kabbalah (Heb.), or Kabbala. "The hidden wisdom of the Hebrew Rabbis of the middle ages derived from the older secret doctrines concerning divine things and cosmogony, which were combined into a theology after the time of the captivity of the Jews in Babylon." All the works that fall under the esoteric category are termed Kabalistic.

Kamaloka (Sans.) The semi-material plane, to us subjective and invisible, where the disembodied "personalities," the astral forms called Kama Rupa, remain until they fade out from it by the complete exhaustion of the effects of the mental impulses that created these eidolons of the lower animal passions and desires. (See Kama Rupa.) It is the Hades of the ancient Greeks and the Amenti of the Egyptians — the land of Silent Shadows.

Kama Rupa (Sans.) Metaphysically and in our esoteric philosophy it is the subjective form created through the mental and physical desires and thoughts in connection with things of matter, by all sentient beings: a form which survives the death of its body. After that death, three of the seven "principles" — or, let us say, planes of the senses and consciousness on which the human instincts and ideation act in turn — viz., the body, its astral prototype and physical vitality, being of no further use, remain on earth; the three higher principles, grouped into one, merge into a state of Devachan (q. v.), in which state the Higher Ego will remain until the hour for a new reincarnation arrives, and the eidolon of the ex-personality is left alone in its new abode. Here the pale copy of the man that was, vegetates for a period of time, the duration of which is variable according to the element of materiality which is left in it, and which is determined by the past life of the defunct. Bereft as it is of its higher mind, spirit and physical senses, if left alone to its own senseless devices, it will gradually fade out and disintegrate. But if forcibly drawn back into the terrestrial sphere, whether by the passionate desires and appeals of the surviving friends or by regular necromantic practices — one of the most pernicious of which is mediumship — the "spook" may prevail for a period greatly exceeding the span of the natural life of its body. Once the Kama Rupa has learnt the way back to living human bodies, it becomes a vampire feeding on the vitality of those who are so anxious for its company. In India these Eidolons are called Pisachas, — and are much dreaded.

Kapilavastu (Sans.) The birthplace of the Lord Buddha, called the "yellow dwelling," the capital of the monarch who was the father of Gautama Buddha.

Kardec, Allan. The adopted name of the Founder of the French Spiritists, whose real name was Rivaille. It was he who gathered and published the trance utterances of certain mediums and afterwards made a "philosophy" of them between the years 1855 and 1870.

Karma (Sans.) Physically, action; Metaphysically, the LAW of RETRIBUTION; the Law of Cause and Effect or Ethical Causation. It is Nemesis only in the sense of bad Karma. It is the eleventh Nidana in the concatenation of causes and effects in orthodox Buddhism; yet it is the power that controls all things, the resultant of moral action, the metaphysical Samskara, or the moral effect of an act committed for the attainment of something which gratifies a personal desire. There is the Karma of merit and the Karma of demerit. Karma neither punishes nor rewards; it is simply the one Universal LAW which guides unerringly and, so to say, blindly, all other laws productive of certain effects along the grooves of their respective causations. When Buddhism teaches that "Karma is that moral Kernel (of any being) which alone survives death and continues in transmigration" or reincarnation, it simply means that there remains nought after each personality, but the causes produced by it, causes which are undying, i. e., which cannot be eliminated from the Universe until replaced by their legitimate effects, and so to speak, wiped out by them. And such causes, unless compensated during the life of the person who produced them with adequate effects, will follow the reincarnated Ego and reach it in its subsequent incarnations until a full harmony between effects and causes is fully re-established. No "personality" — a mere bundle of material atoms and instinctual and mental characteristics — can, of course, continue as such in the world of pure spirit. Only that which is immortal in its very nature and divine in its essence, namely, the Ego, can exist for ever. And as it is that Ego which chooses the personality it will inform after each Devachan, and which receives through these personalities the effects of the Karmic causes produced, it is, therefore, the Ego, that Self, which is the "moral Kernel" referred to, and embodied Karma itself, that "which alone survives death."

Kether (Heb.) "The Crown, the highest of the ten Sephiroth; the first of the supernal Triad. It corresponds to the Macroprosopus, Vast Countenance, or Arikh Anpin, which differentiates into Chokmah and Binah."

Krishna (Sans.) The most celebrated Avatar of Vishnu, the "Saviour" of the Hindus and the most popular god. He is the eighth Avatar, the son of Devaki, and the nephew of Kansa, the Indian Herod, who while seeking for him among the shepherds and cowherds who concealed him slew thousands of their newly-born babes. The story of Krishna's conception, birth and childhood are the exact prototype of the New Testament story. The missionaries, of course, try to show that the Hindus stole the story of the Nativity from the early Christians who came to India.

Kshetragna, or Kshetragneswara (Sans.)Embodied Spirit in Occultism, the conscious Ego in its highest manifestations; the reincarnating Principle, or the "Lord" in us.

Kumara (Sans.) A virgin boy or young celibate. The first Kumaras are the seven sons of Brahma, born out of the limbs of the god in the so-called Ninth Creation. It is stated that the name was given to them owing to their formal refusal to "procreate" their species, and thus they "remained Yogis" according to the legend.

L

Labro, St. A Roman Saint solemnly beatified a few years ago. His great holiness consisted in sitting at one of the gates of Rome night and day for forty years, and remaining unwashed through the whole of that time, the result of which was that he was eaten by vermin to his bones.

Lao-Tze (Chin.) A great Sage, Saint, and Philosopher, who preceded Confucius.

Law of Retribution (vide Karma).

Linga Sharira (Sans.) "Astral body," i. e., the aerial symbol of the body. This term designates the doppelganger, or the "astral body" of man or animal. It is the eidolon of the Greeks, the vital and prototypal body, the reflection of the man of flesh. It is born before man and dies or fades out with the disappearance of the last atom of the body.

Logos (Gr.) The manifested deity with every nation and people; the outward expression or the effect of the Cause which is ever concealed. Thus, speech is the logos of thought; hence, in its metaphysical sense, it is aptly translated by the terms "Verbum," and the "Word."

Long Face. A Kabalistic term, Areekh Anpeen in Hebrew; or "Long Face"; in Greek, Macroprosopos, as contrasted with "Short Face," or Zeir Anpeen, the Microprosopos. One relates to Deity, the other to man, the "little image of the great form."

Longinus, Dionysius Cassius. A famous critic and philosopher, born in the very beginning of the third century (about 213). He was a great traveller, and attended at Alexandria the lectures of Ammonius Saccas, the founder of Neoplatonism, but was rather a critic than a follower. Porphyry (the Jew Malek or Malchus) was his pupil before he became the disciple of Plotinus. It is said of him that he was a living library and a walking museum. Towards the end of his life he became the instructor in Greek literature of Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra. She repaid his services by accusing him before the Emperor Aurelius of having advised her to rebel against the latter, a crime for which Longinus, with several others, was put to death by the Emperor in 273.

M

Macrocosm (Gr.) The "Great Universe" or Kosmos, literally.

Magic. The "great" Science. According to Deveria and other Orientalists, "Magic was considered as a sacred science inseparable from religion" by the oldest and most civilised and learned nations. The Egyptians, for instance, were a most sincerely religious nation, as were, and are still, the Hindus. "Magic consists of, and is acquired by, the worship of the gods," says Plato. Could, then, a nation which, owing to the irrefragable evidence of inscriptions and papyri, is proved to have firmly believed in magic for thousands of years, have been deceived for so long a time? And is it likely that generations upon generations of a learned and pious hierarchy, many among whom led lives of self-martyrdom, holiness and asceticism, would have gone on deceiving themselves and the people (or even only the latter) for the pleasure of perpetuating belief in "miracles"? Fanatics, we are told, will do anything to enforce belief in their god or idols. To this we reply: — In such cases Brahmans and Egyptian Rekhget-amens or Hierophants, would not have popularised the belief in the power of man by magic practices, to command the services of the gods: which gods are in truth but the occult powers or potencies of Nature, personified by the learned priests themselves, who reverenced only in them the attributes of the one unknown and nameless Principle. As Proclus, the Platonist, ably puts it: "Ancient priests, when they considered that there is a certain alliance and sympathy in natural things to each other, and of things manifest to occult powers, and discovered that all things subsist in all, fabricated a sacred science from this mutual sympathy and similarity. . . . and applied for occult purposes both celestial and terrene natures, by means of which, through a certain similitude, they deduced divine natures into this inferior abode." Magic is the science of communicating with, and directing supernal supramundane potencies, as well as commanding those of lower spheres; a practical knowledge of the hidden mysteries of nature which are known only to the few, because they are so difficult to acquire without falling into sin against the law. Ancient and mediaeval mystics divided magic into three classes — Theurgia, Goetia and Natural Magic. "Theurgia has long since been appropriated as the peculiar sphere of the Theosophists and metaphysicians," says Kenneth Mackenzie. "Goetia is black magic, and 'natural' or white magic has risen with healing in its wings to the proud position of an exact and progressive study." The remarks added by our late learned brother are remarkable: "The realistic desires of modern times have contributed to bring magic into disrepute and ridicule. . . . Faith (in one's own self) is an essential element in magic, and existed long before other ideas which presume its pre-existence. It is said that it takes a wise man to make a fool; and a man's idea must be exalted almost to madness, i. e., his brain susceptibilities must be increased far beyond the low miserable status of modern civilisation, before he can become a true magician, for a pursuit of this science implies a certain amount of isolation and an abnegation of self." A very great isolation certainly, the achievement of which constitutes a wonderful phenomenon, a miracle in itself. Withal, magic is not something supernatural. As explained by Iamblichus, "they, through the sacerdotal theurgy, announce that they are able to ascend to more elevated and universal essences, and to those that are established above fate, viz., to god and the demiurgos: neither employing matter, nor assuming any other things besides, except the observation of a sensible time." Already some are beginning to recognise the existence of subtle powers and influences in nature, in which they have hitherto known nought. But, as Dr. Carter Blake truly remarks, "the nineteenth century is not that which has observed the genesis of new, nor the completion of old, methods of thought"; to which Mr. Bonwick adds, that "if the Ancients knew but little of our mode of investigation into the secrets of Nature, we know still less of their mode of research."

Magic, Black (vide supra). Sorcery, abuse of powers.

Magic, Ceremonial. Magic, according to Kabalistic rites worked out, as alleged by the Rosicrucians and other mystics, by invoking Powers higher spiritually than Man, and commanding Elementals who are far lower than himself on the scale of being.

Magic, White, or "Beneficent Magic," so called, is divine magic, devoid of selfishness, love of power, of ambition or lucre, and bent only on doing good to the world in general and one's neighbour in particular. The smallest attempt to use one's abnormal powers for the gratification of self makes of these powers sorcery or Black Magic.

Mahamanvantara (Sans.) Lit., the great interludes between the Manus — the period of universal activity. Manvantara here implies simply a period of activity as opposed to Pralaya or rest — without reference to the length of the cycle.

Mahat (Sans.) Lit. "The Great One." The first principle of Universal Intelligence and consciousness. In the Puranic philosophy, the first product of root-nature or Pradhana (the same as Mulaprakriti); the producer of Manas the thinking principle, and of Ahankara, Egotism or the feeling of "I am I" in the lower Manas.

Mahatma (Sans.) Lit., "Great Soul." An adept of the highest order. An exalted being, who having attained to the mastery over his lower principles, is therefore living unimpeded by the "man of flesh." Mahatmas are in possession of knowledge and power commensurate with the stage they have reached in their spiritual evolution. Called in Pali Rahats and Arthas.

Mahayana (Sans.) A school of Buddhistic philosophy; lit., the "Great Vehicle." A mystical system founded by Nagarjuna. Its books were written in the second century B. C.

Manas (Sans.) Lit., the "Mind." The mental faculty which makes of a man an intelligent and moral being, and distinguishes him from the mere animal; a synonym of Mahat. Esoterically, however, it means, when unqualified, the Higher Ego or the sentient reincarnating Principle in man. When qualified it is called by Theosophists Buddhi-Manas, or the spiritual soul, in contradistinction to its human reflection — Kama-Manas.

Manasaputra (Sans.) Lit., the "Sons of Mind" or mind-born Sons; a name given to our Higher Egos before they incarnated in mankind. In the exoteric though allegorical and symbolical Puranas (the sacred and ancient writings of Hindus), it is the title given to the mind-born Sons of Brahma, the Kumara.

Manas Sutratma (Sans.) Two words meaning "mind" (Manas) and "Thread Soul" (Sutratma). It is, as said, the synonym of our Ego, or that which reincarnates. It is a technical term of Vedantic philosophy.

Manas Taijasi (Sans.) Lit., the "radiant" Manas; a state of the Higher Ego which only high metaphysicians are able to realize and comprehend. The same as "Buddhi Taijasi," which see.

Mantras (Sans.) Verses from the Vedic works, used as incantations and charms. By Mantras are meant all those portions of the Vedas which are distinct from the Brahmanas, or their interpretation.

Manu (Sans.) The great Indian legislator. The name comes from the Sanskrit root man to think, MAN really standing only for Swayambhuva, the first of the Manus, who started from Swayambhu, the Self-Existent, who is hence the Logos and the progenitor of mankind. Manu is the first legislator — almost a divine being.

Manvantara (Sans.) A period of manifestation, as opposed to Pralaya (dissolution or rest); the term is applied to various cycles, especially to a Day of Brahma — 4,320,000,000 Solar years — and to the reign of one Manu — 308,448,000. Lit., Manuantara — "between Manus." (See Secret Doctrine, Vol. 11, p. 68, et seq.)

Master. A translation from the Sanskrit Guru, "Spiritual teacher," and adopted by the Theosophists to designate the Adepts, from whom they hold their teachings.

Materialisations. In Spiritualism the word signifies the objective appearance of the so-called "spirits of the dead," who re-clothe themselves occasionally in matter; i. e., they form for themselves out of the materials at hand found in the atmosphere and the emanations of those present, a temporary body bearing the human likeness of the defunct, as he appeared when alive. Theosophists accept the phenomenon of "materialisation," but they reject the theory that it is produced by "Spirits," i. e., the immortal principles of disembodied persons. Theosophists hold that when the phenomena are genuine — which is a fact of rarer occurrence than is generally believed — they are produced by the larvae, the eidolons, or Kamalokic "ghosts" of the dead personalities. (See "Kamaloka" and "Kamarupa.") As Kamaloka is on the earth-plane and differs from its degree of materiality only in the degree of its plane of consciousness, for which reason it is concealed from our normal sight, the occasional apparition of such shells is as natural as that of electric balls and other atmospheric phenomena. Electricity as a fluid, or atomic matter (for Occultists hold with Maxwell that it is atomic), is ever, though invisibly, present in the air and manifests under various shapes, but only when certain conditions are present to "materialise" the fluid, when it passes from its own on to our plane and makes itself objective. Similarly with the eidolons of the dead. They are present around us, but being on another plane do not see us any more than we see them. But whenever the strong desires of living men and the conditions furnished by the abnormal constitutions of mediums are combined together, these eidolons are drawn — nay pulled down from their plane on to ours and made objective. This is necromancy; it does no good to the dead, and great harm to the living, in addition to the fact that it interferes with a law of nature. The occasional materialisation of the "astral bodies" or doubles of living persons is quite another matter. These "astrals" are often mistaken for the apparitions of the dead, since, chameleon-like, our own "elementaries" along with those of the disembodied and cosmic Elementals, will often assume the appearance of those images which are strongest in our thoughts. In short, at the so-called "materialisation seances," it is those present and the medium who create the peculiar apparition. Independent "apparitions" belong to another kind of psychic phenomena.

Materialist. Not necessarily only one who believes in neither God nor soul, nor the survival of the latter, but also any person who materializes the purely spiritual; such as believe in an anthropomorphic deity, in a soul capable of burning in hell fire, and a hell and paradise as localities instead of states of consciousness. American "Substantialists," a Christian sect, are materialists, as also the so-called Spiritualists.

Maya (Sans.) Illusion; the cosmic power which renders phenomenal existence and the perceptions thereof possible. In Hindu philosophy that alone which is changeless and eternal is called reality: all that which is subject to change through decay and differentiation, and which has, therefore, a beginning and an end, is regarded as MAYA — illusion.

Mediumship. A word now accepted to indicate that abnormal psycho-physiological state which leads a person to take the fancies of his imagination, his hallucinations, real or artificial, for realities. No entirely healthy person on the physiological and psychic planes can ever be a medium. That which mediums see, hear, and sense, is "real" but untrue; it is either gathered from the astral plane, so deceptive in its vibrations and suggestions, or from pure hallucinations, which have no actual existence, but for him who perceives them. "Mediumship" is a kind of vulgarised mediatorship in which one afflicted with this faculty is supposed to become an agent of communication between a living man and a departed "Spirit." There exist regular methods of training for the development of this undesirable acquirement.

Mercavah, or Mercabah (Heb.) "A chariot. The Kabbalists say that the Supreme, after he had established the ten Sephiroth — which, in their totality, are Adam Kadmon, the Archetypal Man, used them as a chariot or throne of glory in which to descend upon the souls of men."

Mesmerism. The term comes from Mesmer, who rediscovered this magnetic force and its practical application toward the year 1775, at Vienna. It is a vital current that one person may transfer to another; and through which he induces an abnormal state of the nervous system that permits him to have a direct influence upon the mind and will of the subject or mesmerized person.

Metaphysics. From the Greek meta, beyond, and physica, the things of the external material world. It is to forget the spirit and hold to the dead letter, to translate it beyond nature or supernatural, as it is rather beyond the natural, visible, or concrete. Metaphysics, in ontology and philosophy is the term to designate that science which treats of the real and permanent being as contrasted with the unreal, illusionary or phenomenal being.

Microcosm. The "little" Universe meaning man, made in the image of his creator, the Macrocosm, or "great" Universe, and containing all that the latter contains. These terms are used in Occultism and Theosophy.

Mishnah (Heb.) Lit., "a repetition" from the word Shanah, "to repeat" something said orally. A summary of written explanations from the oral traditions of the Jews and a digest of the Scriptures on which the later Talmud was based.

Moksha (Sans.) The same as Nirvana; a post-mortem state of rest and bliss of the "Soul-pilgrim."

Monad. It is the Unity, the ONE; but in occultism it often means the unified duad, Atma-Buddhi, — or that immortal part of man which incarnating in the lower kingdoms and gradually progressing through them to Man, finds thence way to the final goal — Nirvana.

Monas (Gr.) The same as the Latin Monad; "the only," a Unit. In the Pythagorean system the Duad emanates from the higher and solitary Monas, which is thus the First Cause.

Monogenes (Gr.) Literally, the "only-begotten"; a name of Proserpine and other gods and goddesses, as also of Jesus.

Mundakya Upanishad (Sans.) Lit., the "Mundaka esoteric doctrine." A work of high antiquity; it has been translated by Raja Ram Mohun Roy.

Mysteries (Sacred). They were enacted in the ancient temples by the initiated Hierophants for the benefit and instruction of candidates. The most solemn and occult were certainly those which were performed in Egypt by "the band of secret-keepers," as Mr. Bonwick calls the Hierophants. Maurice describes their nature very graphically in a few lines. Speaking of the Mysteries performed in Philae (the Nile-island), he says: — "It was in these gloomy caverns that the grand mystic arcana of the goddess (Isis) were unfolded to the adoring aspirant, while the solemn hymn of initiation resounded through the long extent of these stony recesses." The word "mystery" is derived from the Greek muo, "to close the mouth," and every symbol connected with them had a hidden meaning. As Plato and many of the other sages of antiquity affirm, these mysteries were highly religious, moral, and beneficent as a school of ethics. The Grecian Mysteries, those of Ceres and Bacchus, were only imitations of the Egyptian, and the author of "Egyptian Belief and Modern Thought" informs us that our own word "chapel or capella is said to be the caph-el or college of El, the solar divinity." The well-known Kabeiri are associated with the mysteries.

In short, the Mysteries were in every country a series of dramatic performances, in which the mysteries of Cosmogony and nature in general were personified by the priests and neophytes, who enacted the parts of various gods and goddesses, repeating supposed scenes (allegories) from their respective lives. These were explained in their hidden meaning to the candidates for initiation and incorporated into philosophical doctrines.

Mystery Language. The sacerdotal secret "jargon" used by the initiated priests, and employed only when discussing sacred things. Every nation had its own "mystery" tongue, unknown to all save those admitted to the Mysteries.

Mystic, from the Greek word mysticos. In antiquity, one belonging to those admitted to the ancient mysteries; in our own times, one who practises mysticism, holds mystic, transcendental views, etc.

Mysticism. Any doctrine involved in mystery and metaphysics, and dealing more with the ideal worlds than with our matter-of-fact, actual universe.

N

Nazarene Codex. The Scriptures of the Nazarenes and of the Nabotheans also. According to sundry Church Fathers, Jerome and Epiphanius especially, they were heretical teachings, but are in fact one of the numerous Gnostic readings of cosmogony and theogony, which produced a distinct sect.

Necromancy. The raising of the images of the dead, considered in antiquity and by modern occultists as a practice of Black Magic. Iamblichus, Porphyry and other theurgists deprecated the practice no less than Moses, who condemned the "witches" of his day to death, the said witches being often only mediums, e.g., the case of the Witch of Endor and Samuel.

Neoplatonists. A school of philosophy which arose between the second and third century of our era, and was founded by Ammonius Saccas, of Alexandria. The same as the Philalethians, and the Analogeticists; they were also called Theurgists and by various other names. They were the Theosophists of the early centuries. Neo-Platonism is Platonic philosophy plus ecstasy, divine Raj-yoga.

Nephesh (Heb.) "Breath of Life, Anima, Mens Vitae, appetites. The term is used very loosely in the Bible. It generally means Prana, 'life'; in the Kabbalah it is the animal passions and the animal soul." Therefore, as maintained in theosophical teachings, Nephesh is the Prana-Kamic Principle, or the vital animal soul in man.

Nirmanakaya (Sans.) Something entirely different in esoteric philosophy from the popular meaning attached to it, and from the fancies of the Orientalists. Some call the Nirmanakaya body "Nirvana with remains" (Schlagintweit), on the supposition, probably, that it is a kind of Nirvanic condition during which consciousness and form are retained. Others say that it is one of the Trikaya (three bodies) with "the power of assuming any form of appearance in order to propagate Buddhism" (Eitel's idea); again, that "it is the incarnate avatara of a deity" (ibid.)Occultism, on the other hand, says ("Voice of the Silence") that Nirmanakaya, although meaning literally a transformed "body," is a state. The form is that of the Adept or Yogi who enters, or chooses, that post-mortem condition in preference to the Dharmakaya or absolute Nirvanic state. He does this because the latter Kaya separates him for ever from the world of form, conferring upon him a state of selfish bliss, in which no other living being can participate, the adept being thus precluded from the possibility of helping humanity, or even devas. As a Nirmanakaya, however, the adept leaves behind him only his physical body, and retains every other "principle" save the Kamic, for he has crushed this out for ever from his nature during life, and it can never resurrect in his post-mortem state. Thus, instead of going into selfish bliss, he chooses a life of self-sacrifice, an existence which ends only with the life-cycle, in order to be enabled to help mankind in an invisible, yet most effective, manner. (See "Voice of the Silence," third Treatise, "The Seven Portals.") Thus a Nirmanakaya is not, as popularly believed, the body "in which a Buddha or a Bodhisattva appears on earth," but verily one who, whether a Chutuktu or a Khubilkhan, an adept or a Yogi during life, has since become a member of that invisible Host which ever protects and watches over humanity within Karmic limits. Mistaken often for a "Spirit," a Deva, God himself, &c., a Nirmanakaya is ever a protecting, compassionate, verily a guardian, angel to him who is worthy of his help. Whatever objection may be brought forward against this doctrine, however much it is denied, because, forsooth, it has never hitherto been made public in Europe, and therefore, since it is unknown to Orientalists, it must needs be a "myth of modern invention" — no one will be bold enough to say that this idea of helping suffering mankind at the price of one's own almost interminable self-sacrifice, is not one of the grandest and noblest that was ever evolved from the human brain.

Nirvana (Sans.) According to the Orientalists, the entire "blowing-out," like the flame of a candle, the utter extinction of existence. But in the exoteric explanations it is the state of absolute existence and absolute consciousness, into which the Ego of a man who had reached the highest degree of perfection and holiness during life, goes after the body dies, and occasionally, as is the case of Gautama Buddha and others, during life.

Nirvanee (Sans.) One who has attained Nirvana — an emancipated Soul. That Nirvana means something quite different from the puerile assertions of Orientalists, every scholar who has visited India, China, or Japan, is well aware. It is "escape from misery," but only from that of matter, freedom from Klesha, or Kama, and the complete extinction of animal desires. If we are told that Abhidharma defines Nirvana as "a state of absolute annihilation" we concur, adding to the last word the qualification "of everything connected with matter or the physical world," and this simply because the latter (as also all in it) is illusion or Maya. Sakyamuni Buddha said in the last moments of his life: — "the spiritual body is immortal." (Vide "Sans.-Chin. Dict.") As Mr. Eitel, the scholarly Sinologist, explains it: "The popular exoteric systems agree in defining Nirvana negatively as a state of absolute exemption from the circle of transmigration; as a state of entire freedom from all forms of existence, to begin with, freedom from all passion and exertion; a state of indifference to all sensibility" — and he might have added "death of all compassion for the world of suffering." And this is why the Bodhisattvas who prefer the Nirmanakaya to the Dharmakaya vesture stand higher in the popular estimation than the Nirvanees. But the same scholar adds that "Positively (and esoterically) they define Nirvana as the highest state of spiritual bliss, as absolute immortality through absorption of the Soul (Spirit rather) into itself, but preserving individuality, so that, e. g., Buddhas, after entering Nirvana, may re-appear on earth — i. e., in the future Manvantara."

Noumena (Gr.) The true essential nature of Being as distinguished from the illusive objects of sense.

Nous (Gr.) A Platonic term for the Higher Mind or Soul. It means Spirit as distinct from animal-Soul, Psyche; divine consciousness or mind in man. The name was adopted by the Gnostics for their first conscious AEon, which, with the Occultists, is the third logos, cosmically, and the third "principle" (from above) or Manas, in man. (Vide infra, "Nout.")

Nout (Eg.) In the Egyptian Pantheon it meant the "One-only-One," because it does not proceed in the popular or exoteric religion higher than the third manifestation which radiates from the Unknowable and the Unknown in the esoteric philosophy of every nation. The Nous of Anaxagoras was the Mahat of the Hindus — Brahma, the first manifested deity — "the Mind or spirit Self-potent." This creative principle is the primum mobile of everything to be found in the Universe — its Soul or Ideation. (Vide "Seven Principles" in man.)

O

Occultism. See OCCULT SCIENCES.

Occult Sciences. The science of the secrets of nature — physical and psychic, mental and spiritual; called Hermetic and Esoteric Sciences. In the west, the Kabbala may be named; in the east, mysticism, magic, and Yoga philosophy. The latter is often referred to by the Chelas in India as the seventh "Darshana" (school of philosophy), there being only six Darshanas in India known to the world of the profane. These sciences are, and have been for ages, hidden from the vulgar, for the very good reason that they would never be appreciated by the selfish educated classes, who would misuse them for their own profit, and thus turn the Divine science into black magic, nor by the uneducated, who would not understand them. It is often brought forward as an accusation against the Esoteric Philosophy of the Kabbala, that its literature is full of "a barbarous and meaningless jargon," unintelligible to the ordinary mind. But do not exact Sciences — medicine, physiology, chemistry, and the rest — plead guilty to the same impeachment? Do not official scientists veil their facts and discoveries with a newly-coined and most barbarous Graeco-Latin terminology? As justly remarked by our late Brother, Kenneth Mackenzie, "to juggle thus with words, when the facts are so simple, is the art of the Scientists of the present time, in striking contrast to those of the seventeenth century, who called spades spades, and not 'agricultural implements.'" Moreover, whilst their "facts" would be as simple, and as comprehensible if rendered in ordinary language, the facts of Occult Science are of so abstruse a nature, that in most cases no words exist in European languages to express them. Finally our "jargon" is a double necessity — (a) for describing clearly these facts to one who is versed in the occult terminology; and (b) for concealing them from the profane.

Occultist. One who practises Occultism, an adept in the Secret Sciences, but very often applied to a mere student.

Occult World. The name of the first book which treated of Theosophy, its history, and certain of its tenets. Written by A. P. Sinnett, then editor of the leading Indian paper, the Pioneer, of Allahabad, India.

Olympiodorus. The last Neoplatonist of fame and celebrity in the school of Alexandria. He lived in the sixth century under the Emperor Justinian. There were several writers and philosophers of this name in pre-Christian as in post-Christian periods. One of these was the teacher of Proclus, another a historian in the eighth century, and so on.

Origen. A Christian Churchman, born at the end of the second century, probably in Africa, of whom little, if anything, is known, since his biographical fragments have passed to posterity on the authority of Eusebius, the most unmitigated falsifier that has ever existed in any age. The latter is credited with having collected upwards of one hundred letters of Origen (or Origenes Adamantius), which are now said to have been lost. To Theosophists, the most interesting of all the works of Origen is his "Doctrine of the Pre-existence of Souls." He was a pupil of Ammonius Saccas, and for a long time attended the lectures of this great teacher of philosophy.

P

Panaenus. A Platonic philosopher in the Alexandrian school of the Philalethians.

Pandora. In Greek Mythology, the first woman on earth, created by Vulcan out of clay to punish Prometheus and counteract his gift to mortals. Each God having made her a present of some virtue, she was made to carry them in a box to Prometheus, who, however, being endowed with foresight, sent her away, changing the gifts into evils. Thus, when his brother Epimetheus saw and married her, when he opened the box, all the evils now afflicting humanity issued from it, and have remained since then in the world.

Pantheist. One who identifies God with nature and vice versa. If we have to regard Deity as an infinite and omnipresent Principle, this can hardly be otherwise; nature being thus simply the physical aspect of Deity, or its body.

Parabrahm (Sans.) A Vedantin term meaning "beyond Brahma." The Supreme and the absolute Principle, impersonal and nameless. In the Veda it is referred to as "THAT."

Paranirvana. In the Vedantic philosophy the highest form of nirvana — beyond the latter.

Parsees (or Parsis). The present Persian followers of Zoroaster, now settled in India, especially in Bombay and Guzerat; sun and fire worshippers. One of the most intelligent and esteemed communities in the country, generally occupied with commercial pursuits. There are between 50,000 and 60,000 now left in India where they settled some 1,000 years ago.

Personality. The teachings of Occultism divide man into three aspects — the divine, the thinking or rational, and the irrational or animal man. For metaphysical purposes also he is considered under a septenary division, or, as it is agreed to express it in theosophy, he is composed of seven "principles," three of which constitute the Higher Triad, and the remaining four the lower Quaternary. It is in the latter that dwells the Personality which embraces all the characteristics, including memory and consciousness, of each physical life in turn. The Individuality is the Higher Ego (Manas) of the Triad considered as a Unity. In other words the Individuality is our imperishable Ego which reincarnates and clothes itself in a new Personality at every new birth.

Phallic Worship, or Sex Worship; reverence and adoration shown to those gods and goddesses which, like Siva and Durga in India, symbolise respectively the two sexes.

Philadelphians. Lit., "those who love their brother-man." A sect in the seventeenth century, founded by one Jane Leadly. They objected to all rites, forms, or ceremonies of the Church, and even to the Church itself, but professed to be guided in soul and spirit by an internal Deity, their own Ego or God within them.

Philalethians. (Vide "Neoplatonists.")

Philo-Judaeus. A Hellenized Jew of Alexandria, a famous historian and philosopher of the first century, born about the year 30 B. C., and died between the years 45 and 50 A. D. Philo's symbolism of the Bible is very remarkable. The animals, birds, reptiles, trees, and places mentioned in it are all, it is said, "allegories of conditions of the soul, of faculties, dispositions, or passions; the useful plants were allegories of virtues, the noxious of the affections of the unwise and so on through the mineral kingdom; through heaven, earth and stars; through fountains and rivers, fields and dwellings; through metals, substances, arms, clothes, ornaments, furniture, the body and its parts, the sexes, and our outward condition." (Dict. Christ. Biog.) All of which would strongly corroborate the idea that Philo was acquainted with the ancient Kabbala.

Philosopher's Stone. A term in Alchemy; called also the Powder of Projection, a mysterious "principle" having the power of transmuting the base metals into pure gold. In Theosophy it symbolises the transmutation of the lower animal nature of man into the highest divine.

Phren. A Pythagorean term denoting what we call the Kama-manas, still overshadowed by Buddhi-Manas.

Plane. From the Latin Planus (level, flat), an extension of space, whether in the physical or metaphysical sense. In Occultism, the range or extent of some state of consciousness, or the state of matter corresponding to the perceptive powers of a particular set of senses or the action of a particular force.

Planetary Spirits. Rulers and governors of the Planets. Planetary Gods.

Plastic. Used in Occultism in reference to the nature and essence of the astral body, or the "Protean Soul." (Vide "Plastic Soul" in the Theosophical Glossary.)

Pleroma. "Fulness"; a gnostic term used also by St. Paul. Divine world or the abode of gods. Universal space divided into metaphysical AEons.

Plotinus. A distinguished Platonic philosopher of the third century, a great practical mystic, renowned for his virtues and learning. He taught a doctrine identical with that of the Vedantins, namely, that the spirit soul emanating from the One Deific Principle was after its pilgrimage on earth reunited to it. (Vide Theosophical Glossary.)

Porphyry (Porphyrius). His real name was Malek, which led to his being regarded as a Jew. He came from Tyre, and having first studied under Longinus, the eminent philosopher-critic, became the disciple of Plotinus, at Rome. He was a Neo-Platonist and a distinguished writer, specially famous for his controversy with Iamblichus regarding the evils attending the practice of Theurgy, but was, however, finally converted to the views of his opponent. A natural-born mystic he followed, like his master Plotinus, the pure Indian Raj-Yoga system, which, by training, leads to the union of the soul with the over-soul of the universe, and of the human with its divine soul, Buddhi-Manas. He complains, however, that in spite of all his efforts, he reached the highest state of ecstasy only once, and that when he was sixty-eight years of age, while his teacher Plotinus had experienced the supreme bliss six times during his life. (Vide "Porphyry," in the Theos. Gloss.)

Pot Amun. A Coptic term meaning "one consecrated to the god Amun," the Wisdom-god. The name of an Egyptian priest and occultist under the Ptolemies.

Pragna, or Prajna (Sans.) A term used to designate the "Universal Mind." A synonym of Mahat.

Pralaya (Sans.) Dissolution, the opposite of Manvantara, one being the period of rest and the other of full activity (death and life) of a planet, or of the whole universe.

Prana (Sans.) Life Principle, the breath of life, Nephesh.

Protean Soul. A name for Mayavi rupa or thought-body, the higher astral form which assumes all forms and every form at the will of an adept's thought. (Vide "Plastic Soul" in the Theos. Gloss.)

Psychism. The word is used now to denote every kind of mental phenomena, e.g., mediumship as well as the higher form of sensitiveness. A newly-coined word.

Puranas (Sans.) Lit., "the ancient," referring to Hindu writings or Scriptures, of which there is a considerable number.

Pythagoras. The most famous mystic philosopher, born at Samos about 586 B. C., who taught the heliocentric system and reincarnation, the highest mathematics and the highest metaphysics, and who had a school famous throughout the world. (See for fuller particulars, Theos. Gloss.)

Q

Quaternary. The four lower "principles in man," those which constitute his personality (i.e., Body, Astral Double, Prana or life, organs of desire and lower Manas, or brain-mind), as distinguished from the Higher Ternary or Triad, composed of the higher Spiritual Soul, Mind and Atman (Higher Self).

R

Recollection, Remembrance, Reminiscence. Occultists make a difference between these three functions. As, however, a glossary cannot contain the full explanation of every term in all its metaphysical and subtle differences, we can only state here that these terms vary in their applications, according to whether they relate to the past or the present birth, and whether one or the other of these phases of memory emanates from the spiritual or the material brain; or, again, from the "Individuality" or the "Personality."

Reincarnation, or Re-birth; the once universal doctrine, which taught that the Ego is born on this earth an innumerable number of times. Now-a-days it is denied by Christians, who seem to misunderstand the teachings of their own gospels. Nevertheless, the putting on of flesh periodically and throughout long cycles by the higher human Soul (Buddhi-Manas) or Ego is taught in the Bible as it is in all other ancient scriptures, and "resurrection" means only the rebirth of the Ego in another form. (Vide Theos. Gloss.)

Reuchlin, John. A great German philosopher and philologist, Kabbalist and scholar. He was born at Pfortzheim in Germany, in 1455, and early in youth was a diplomat. At one period of his life he held the high office of judge of the tribunal at Tubingen, where he remained for eleven years. He was also the preceptor of Melancthon, and was greatly persecuted by the clergy for his glorification of the Hebrew Kabbala, though at the same time called the "Father of the Reformation." He died in 1522, in great poverty, the common fate of all who in those days went against the dead-letter of the Church.

S

Sacred Science. The epithet given to the occult sciences in general, and by the Rosicrucians to the Kabbala, and especially to the Hermetic philosophy.

Samadhi. The name in India for spiritual ecstasy. It is a state of complete trance, induced by means of mystic concentration.

Samkhara. One of the five Buddhist Skandhas or attributes. (Vide "Skandhas.") "Tendencies of mind."

Samma Sambuddha. The sudden remembrance of all one's past incarnations, a phenomenon of memory obtained through Yoga. A Buddhist mystic term.

Samothrace. An island in the Grecian Archipelago, famous in days of old for the mysteries celebrated in its temples. These mysteries were world-renowned.

Samyuttaka Nikaya. One of the Buddhist Sutras.

Sanna. One of the five Skandhas, or attributes, meaning "abstract ideas."

Seance. A term now used to denote a sitting with a medium for sundry phenomena. Used chiefly among the spiritualists.

Self. There are two Selves in men — the Higher and the Lower, the Impersonal and the Personal Self. One is divine, the other semi-animal. A great distinction should be made between the two.

Sephiroth. A Hebrew Kabalistic word, for the ten divine emanations from Ain-Soph, the impersonal, universal Principle, or DEITY. (Vide Theos. Gloss.)

Skandhas. The attributes of every personality, which after death form the basis, so to say, for a new Karmic reincarnation. They are five in the popular or exoteric system of the Buddhists: i.e., Rupa, form or body, which leaves behind it its magnetic atoms and occult affinities; Vedana, sensations, which do likewise; Sanna, or abstract ideas, which are the creative powers at work from one incarnation to another; Samkhara, tendencies of mind; and Vinnana, mental powers.

Somnambulism. "Sleep walking." A psycho-physiological state, too well known to need explanation.

Spiritism. The same as the above, with the difference that the Spiritualists reject almost unanimously the doctrine of Reincarnation, while the Spiritists make of it the fundamental principle in their belief. There is, however, a vast difference between the views of the latter and the philosophical teachings of Eastern Occultists. Spiritists belong to the French School founded by Allan Kardec, and the Spiritualists of America and England to that of the "Fox girls," who inaugurated their theories at Rochester, U. S. A. Theosophists, while believing in the mediumistic phenomena of both Spiritualists and Spiritists, reject the idea of "spirits."

Spiritualism. The modern belief that the spirits of the dead return on earth to commune with the living. (See "Spiritism.")

St. Germain (Count). A mysterious personage, who appeared in the last century and early in the present one in France, England and elsewhere.

Sthula Sharira. The Sanskrit name for the human physical body, in Occultism and Vedanta philosophy.

Sthulopadhi. The physical body in its waking, conscious state (Jagrat). This term belong to the teachings of the Taraka Raj Yoga School.

Sukshmopadhi. The physical body in the dreaming state (Svapna), and Karanopadhi, "the causal body." This term also belongs to the teachings of the Taraka Raj Yoga School.

Summerland. The fancy name given by the Spiritualists to the abode of their disembodied "Spirits," which they locate somewhere in the Milky Way. It is described on the authority of returning "Spirits" as a lovely land, having beautiful cities and buildings, a Congress Hall, Museums, etc., etc. (See the works of Andrew Jackson Davis.)

Swedenborg (Emanuel). A famous scholar and clairvoyant of the past century, a man of great learning, who has vastly contributed to Science, but whose mysticism and transcendental philosophy placed him in the ranks of hallucinated visionaries. He is now universally known as the Founder of the Swedenborgian sect, or the New Jerusalem Church. He was born at Stockholm (Sweden) in 1688, from Lutheran parents, his father being the Bishop of West Gothland. His original name was Swedberg, but on his being ennobled and knighted in 1719 it was changed to Swedenborg. He became a Mystic in 1743, and four years later (in 1747) resigned his office (of Assessor Extraordinary to the College of Mines) and gave himself up entirely to Mysticism. He died in 1772.

T

Taijas (Sans.) From tejas "fire"; meaning the "radiant," the "luminous," and referring to the manasa rupa, "the body of Manas," also to the stars, and the star-like shining envelopes. A term in Vedanta philosophy, having other meanings besides the Occult signification just given.

Taraka Raj Yoga (Sans.) One of the Brahmanical Yoga systems, the most philosophical, and in fact the most secret of all, as its real tenets are never given out publicly. It is a purely intellectual and spiritual school of training.

Tetragrammaton (Gr.) The deity-name in four letters, which are in their English form IHVH. It is a kabalistical term and corresponds on a more material plane to the sacred Pythagorean Tetraktys. (See Theos. Gloss.)

Theodidaktos (Gr.) The "God taught," a title applied to Ammonius Saccas.

Theogony. From the Greek theogonia, lit., the "Genesis of the Gods."

Theosophia (Gr.) Lit., "divine wisdom or the wisdom of the gods." [For a fuller explanation of such words as "Theosophy," "Theosophists," "Theosophical Society," etc., vide the Theos. Gloss.]

Therapeutae, or Therapeuts (Gr.)A school of Jewish mystic healers, or esotericists, wrongly referred to, by some, as a sect. They resided in and near Alexandria, and their doings and beliefs are to this day a mystery to the critics, as their philosophy seems a combination of Orphic, Pythagorean, Essenian and purely Kabalistic practices. (See Theos. Gloss.)

Theurgy (from the Greek theiourgia). Rites for bringing down to earth planetary and other Spirits or Gods. To arrive at the realization of such an object, the Theurgist had to be absolutely pure and unselfish in his motives. The practice of theurgy is very undesirable and even dangerous in the present day. The world has become too corrupt and wicked for the practice of that which such holy and learned men as Ammonius, Plotinus, Porphyry and Iamblichus (the most learned Theurgist of all) could alone attempt with impunity. In our day theurgy or divine, beneficent magic is but too apt to become goetic, or in other words Sorcery. Theurgy is the first of the three subdivisions of magic, which are theurgic, goetic and natural magic.

Thread Soul. The same as Sutratma, which see.

Thumos (Gr.) A Pythagorean and Platonic term; applied to an aspect of the human soul, to denote its passionate Kamarupic condition: — almost equivalent to the Sanskrit word tamas: "the quality of darkness," and probably derived from the latter.

Timaeus (of Locris). A Pythagorean philosopher, born at Locris. He differed somewhat from his teacher in the doctrine of metempsychosis. He wrote a treatise on the Soul of the World and its nature and essence, which is in the Doric dialect and still extant.

Triad or Trinity. In every religion and philosophy — the three in One.

U

Universal Brotherhood. The sub-title of the Theosophical Society, and the first of the three objects professed by it.

Upadhi (Sans.) Basis of something, substructure; as in Occultism — substance is the upadhi of Spirit.

Upanishad (Sans.) Lit., "Esoteric Doctrine." The third Division of the Vedas, and classed with revelations (Sruti or "revealed word"). Some 150 of the Upanishads still remain extant, though no more than about twenty can be fully relied upon as free from falsification. These are all earlier than the sixth century B. C. Like the Kabala, which interprets the esoteric sense of the Bible, so the Upanishads explain the mystic sense of the Vedas. Professor Cowell has two statements regarding the Upanishads as interesting as they are correct. Thus he says: (1) These works have "one remarkable peculiarity, the total absence of any Brahmanical exclusiveness in their doctrine. . . . They breathe an entirely different spirit, a freedom of thought unknown in any earlier work except the Rig Veda hymns themselves; and (2) the great teachers of the higher knowledge (Gupta Vidya), and Brahmans, are continually represented as going to Kshatriya Kings to become their pupils" (chelas). This shows conclusively that (a) the Upanishads were written before the enforcement of caste and Brahmanical power, and are thus only second in antiquity to the Vedas; and (b) that the occult sciences or the "higher knowledge," as Cowell puts it, is far older than the Brahmans in India, or even of them as a caste. The Upanishads are, however, far later than Gupta Vidya, or the "Secret Science" which is as old as human philosophical thought itself.

V

Vahan (Sans.) "Vehicle," a synonym of Upadhi.

Vallabacharyas Sect (Sans.), or the "Sect of the Maharajas;" a licentious phallic-worshipping community, whose main branch is at Bombay. The object of the worship is the infant Krishna. The Anglo-Indian Government was compelled several times to interfere in order to put a stop to its rites and vile practices, and its governing Maharajah, a kind of High Priest, was more than once imprisoned, and very justly so. It is one of the blackest spots of India.

Vedanta (Sans.) Meaning literally, the "end of all knowledge." Among the six Darsanas or the schools of philosophy, it is also called Uttaramimansa, or the "later" Mimansa. There are those who, unable to understand its esotericism, consider it atheistical; but this is not so, as Sankaracharya, the great apostle of this school, and its populariser, was one of the greatest mystics and adepts of India.

Vidya (Sans.) Knowledge, or rather "Wisdom Knowledge."

Vinnana (Sans.) One of five Skandhas; meaning literally, "mental powers." (See "Skandhas.")

W

Wisdom-Religion. The same as Theosophy. The name given to the secret doctrine which underlies every exoteric scripture and religion.

Y

Yoga (Sans.) A school of philosophy founded by Patanjali, but which existed as a distinct teaching and system of life long before that sage. It is Yajnawalkya, a famous and very ancient sage, to whom the White Yajur Veda, the Satapatha Brahmana and the Brihak Aranyaka are attributed and who lived in pre-Maha-bharatean times, who is credited with inculcating the necessity and positive duty of religious meditation and retirement into the forests, and who, therefore, is believed to have originated the Yoga doctrine. Professor Max Muller states that it is Yajnawalkya who prepared the world for the preaching of Buddha. Patanjali's Yoga, however, is more definite and precise as a philosophy, and embodies more of the occult sciences than any of the works attributed to Yajnawalkya.

Yogi or Yogin (Sans.) A devotee, one who practises the Yoga system. There are various grades and kinds of Yogis, and the term has now become in India a generic name to designate every kind of ascetic.

Yuga (Sans.) An age of the world of which there are four, which follow each other in a series, namely, Krita (or Satya) Yuga, the golden age; Treta Yuga, Dwapara Yuga, and finally Kali Yuga, the black age — in which we now are. (See Secret Doctrine for a full description.)

Z

Zenobia. The Queen of Palmyra, defeated by the Emperor Aurelianus. She had for her instructor Longinus, the famous critic and logician in the third century A. D. (See "Longinus.")

Zivo, Kabar (or Yukabar). The name of one of the creative deities in the Nazarene Codex. (See Isis Unveiled.)

Zohar (Heb.) The "Book of Splendour," a Kabalistic work attributed to Simeon Ben Iochai, in the first century of our era. (See for fuller explanation Theos. Gloss.)

Zoroastrian. One who follows the religion of the Parsis, sun, or fire-worshippers.

It is of the greatest interest to delve into the way in which this remarkable document, the Bible, has been received by people of all times, and what reflection this book of books has evoked in the minds and souls of people. You can learn so much about the developmental history of human souls from the impressions that this book has evoked.

The impression that the writing makes on the human individualities of different periods of time is quite different. Of course, these different stages can only be touched on very briefly, because the material is too vast, and it is done because it is important to recall it to the soul. For example, how the Jewish people at that time had something of the Scriptures from which they learned about their own origin and ancestry, astronomy, the justification of the social order, the legislation, regulations for everyday life. The whole life of the soul and its wisdom were in it. The scholars of late Judaism applied all their ingenuity and all their mental power to understanding this book. And so it was in those times that the highest knowledge was applied to achieve understanding. And with the utmost respect, the Kabbalists can even be mentioned, who sought to interpret it down to the letter. And then later, the New Testament in connection with the Old Testament: In the first Christian century, we again find this deep, sacred earnestness in the search for understanding. In mystical and other communities, everything is geared towards understanding the Bible. The Gnostics and others of that time immersed themselves with the greatest effort in what is given in the Bible in the person of Christ Jesus. We find profound thought in this Bible study. Let's say the 9th century, John, the great Scot — Scotus Erigena. There is no doubt in this man's mind about the truth of the Bible, about the truth of the written word, that it is inspired; man has no choice but to seek to understand. From Thomas Aquinas and John Tauler to Jakob Böhme, a bold philosophy was applied to understanding what is written in the Bible.

Now, however, something very remarkable is happening with regard to the Bible. Whereas everything before – even in the eighteenth century – was explanation, a feeling of the deepest reverence for the Bible, in the nineteenth century what is called Bible criticism emerged. One could almost call the nineteenth century the century of Bible criticism. This sentiment would not have been understood at all in the past. In the past, it was always a case of looking up to the Bible and feeling down about oneself. It was only now that a feeling arose that man felt towards the Bible as he would towards any other book and that he could look down on the Bible. Critics dare to question the Bible, its individual documents and writings, doubt later appearances and so on, and finally even dare to question the person of Christ Jesus.

David Friedrich Strauß is one of those; he resolves everything in the Bible into legends and myths. He says that the facts of Jesus' life are not important; these feelings and ideas were simply in the people and so it was gradually put together. Other criticism and all that today's science has to say about it should be mentioned. Specifically, the seven-day work of creation is widely criticized, as is the narrative of the creation of man in it, how man emerged from the great cosmos. And then his creation is retold a second time. From this, it is concluded that there are two accounts of creation. All the many and incalculable things that have been achieved in it could be mentioned.

The Bible is the book of life for mankind, but all this has changed people's attitude towards it, and those in authority felt compelled to take their present position. And much, much more than one suspects and can know, people's attitude towards the Bible has changed. Only the soul researcher can gauge that. Even the most religious person of today has no idea of the deep fervor and inner bliss that one once had towards the Bible. Anyone who tries to observe the times and the psychology of the soul knows that since materialism has permeated all popular thinking, this is no longer possible. Since then, a change, a fundamental metamorphosis of intimate feelings can be observed. Many noble people among us look back on the days of their youth with a certain wistfulness, conflict or satisfaction, thinking of how they absorbed the stories from the Bible back then. The inner conflict between then and now is in many a soul.

But what violence, what significance this book of books has, emerges from the fact that scholars and scientists are constantly trying to bring the seven-day work into line with it. One must come to terms with the way the creation of the world is presented in the Bible. The power that the content of the Bible has repeatedly had over people is proven by the fact that, for example, in the early days of the Christian era, people turned to Plato for answers to such questions, and gave him the certainly strange name of the Attic-speaking Moses. So Plato's teachings are related to the Old Testament.

The same is said of Pythagoras and other great philosophers. Even Apollo has a very beautiful oracle that proves this: “Steep is the path to the / gap]” — “Steep is the path / gap]”

But there were mortals who did climb this path. The most significant of these were those who lived in Chaldea and those who were called Judean men.

Paracelsus, the great medieval physician, also made a very strange statement about the Bible: “All medicine, all healing can be learned from the Bible.” Of course, this must be thought of in the right way in Paracelsus' sense. He meant how he thought of the relationship of man and his position to the Bible. You must not just open it, read it and retell it, no, the words that are in the Bible are not only to be taken literally, but there are magical powers in them. If you let the words live in your soul, they will fertilize it; the soul will become wise and knowledgeable by letting not the content but the power of the Bible word live in you. No science can or should dissuade you from the Bible.

Take Darwinism, for example. Charles Darwin says: “So we would have fathomed” and so on, - “those whom the Creator once breathed life into.” And a second saying of his, that language is something higher than the animal inarticulate sound: “Language can never have come about through mere natural causes and could never develop in this way. One must assume an intelligent creator who has wisely ordered everything.”

Many sayings of great scholars who, in this respect, do recognize the Creator, could still be cited. Jean Baptiste Biot, who rendered outstanding services to the science of light, said: Moses either knew as much as we do or he was inspired! — All that has been said is not meant as any criticism on our part, but only as an explanation that it had to come in the materialistically thinking present. Even in our time, many great men have honestly endeavored to understand the Bible by interpreting it, but who knows about it? Example: Fabre d'Olivet: “The Mystery of the First Books of Moses”.

In the face of biblical criticism, spiritual research or theosophy yields a different point of view. Theosophy never criticizes, never tears down, but only seeks to understand. One thing is characteristic of theosophy: it is not a thought, not a concept, but an attitude. Everything in theosophy must be imbued with this attitude. We have this attitude towards all of nature. We see regularities and monstrosities in nature, we know that it would be nonsense to criticize nature, we do not do that, we seek to understand it. Understanding is the basic attitude we must have; we must pursue everything in the spiritual life with understanding, pursue everything with love, not with the yardstick of sympathy and antipathy. Understanding everything and everyone – you cannot define it intellectually, it has to be an attitude. If you have this attitude, you will have an experience: that the Bible is a book in the face of which criticism begins to fall silent. What you may have criticized in the past is now seen in a completely different light, it becomes clear.

One must rediscover the key to the Bible through spiritual research, and then biblical criticism will be replaced by an ever deeper interpretation of the Bible. The development of humanity is not considered if one considers only the external aspects of it. What science has brought, theosophy does not question; but it does not only pursue the external material phenomena, which are only the expression of a spiritual phenomenon of the underlying spiritual development. The task of theosophy is to explore the nature of today's man and his position in the universe. It must therefore say something about the creation report. Theosophy regards the whole human being, not just his physical body. Where natural science has to stop, theosophy begins. When it comes to the words “I smell the scent of roses, I hear the sound of an organ”, the natural scientist sees only the movement of atoms in the brain; but he cannot explain what must take place to produce the idea “I smell the scent of roses” and so on. The task of Theosophy is now a completely different one. Du Bois-Reymond ties in with Leibniz's saying: the idea of the soul, why it is that the scent of roses is smelled, you – [the] natural scientists – would not be able to explore.

Du Bois-Reymond ties in with the word: natural science is actually only capable of observing and fathoming the sleeping human being because the soul experience has been extinguished. Precisely that which the natural scientist cannot explain is there in waking. But can we then recognize what is not there in sleep and what is there in waking? Yes, I will give you a comparison that will make it clear to you how spiritual science relates to the other sciences. An example: Imagine a piano being played, with a deaf person sitting next to it. He cannot hear the notes, but there is a way to make them understandable to him if he is otherwise of sound mind. Open the piano and scatter so-called paper riders on the strings. By the jumping of the paper riders, the deaf person can see that something is going on; he can get an idea of the strings and their trembling. But there is a difference between his idea and the real objective, the sense is missing, the open ear.

This is how Theosophy relates to the so-called science of facts. The latter conducts research in the way we have described here the perception of the deaf. To perceive what is going on in the soul, one must have the sense for it. What Haeckel and others, in fact modern science in general, has brought is all true for Theosophy, but there is an awakening of the higher senses to follow the material processes, and to look back with one's higher spiritual organs and follow the spiritual facts of the higher spiritual organs that Theosophy teaches to develop. Thus Theosophy perceives what is present in the sleeping and waking human being. To do this, one must have spiritual eyes and spiritual ears.

What does the sleeping person do at night, what does he work on? He repairs the physical body to remove the fatigue substances from the outside. The other type of activity of the astral body is present in the so-called initiate or initiate.

What is an initiate? We must first realize that we can perceive as much as we have organs. There are as many worlds around man as he has organs, and each time he acquires new organs, he perceives a new world. And there are methods in the secret schools where this is taught, whereby such new organs are formed. An initiate is someone who has developed abilities within himself through which the higher worlds can be perceived.

We divide the human being into four parts: physical body, etheric body, astral body or soul, and I. Now, in the initiate, the astral body is equipped with organs of perception. The initiate sees into other worlds. He feels the need to express himself in a different way. For ordinary language is created only for our physical life, and even the words that have been used for the supersensible are taken from the world of sense perception. The initiates must therefore follow Goethe's dictum:

All that is transitory Is but a parable.

What the initiates see in the higher worlds, they can only express in images from the sensual world in order to be understood by people. Every student of the Rosicrucian school of thought, which has existed in Germany since the 14th century and is the most suitable for modern man, must therefore also learn to express himself in such images. What you find in books about the Rosicrucians is unclear and incorrect; for their secrets were not entrusted to books. He must acquire the so-called imaginative knowledge, that is, the knowledge of how to express in a parable what one beholds in the spiritual world. The initiate feels quite differently about a parable. He sees the immortality of the soul in the parable — doll and butterfly — the permanent in the transitory, which is always behind it. The initiate sees the great connection between all facts, the highest spiritual and the lowest physical facts, he sees the high in all this. And if he tells such a parable to a child, for example, he tries to make it clear to him, then he himself firmly believes in this parable, and feeling flows from him to the child. So he also looks at these little ones with the same fervor of heart.

It is the task of theosophy to make it clear that everything spiritual finds its expression in a material way. Not those who deny matter will penetrate to the spirit, but those who learn to grasp the truth that all matter is condensed spirit. If we recognize this, then we will also understand why the Bible gives instructions about the simplest things in life. With heartfelt love we must then enter into these simplest of processes, into something that goes with the phenomena of everyday life. Such knowledge should spiritualize life, not remove people from it. He is not a true theosophist who claims: Oh, what do I care about the brain molecules and their movements, the spirit is in him, that's enough for me! No, he must learn to understand that the brain is the expression of the spirit. Our goal is not to rise above the appearance to the so-called being, but to understand what lives in the appearance of being. This must be brought home to people again in images, in parables.

The spiritual was there earlier than the physical. The astral body has built up the physical body, structured it out of itself. All material substance has been structured out of the spiritual, and the spirit is the older, the earlier. Before the physical there was the astral; it formed, it created this body — in the likeness of water and ice. The naturalist sees only the time when the ice had already formed in the stream, the theosophist the time when there was no ice yet in the stream, and the one with the ice. The material — the ice — separates from the water, which still comes from something higher. The Bible expresses this process very beautifully: “The Spirit of God moved over the waters.” (Genesis 1:2) Water is the image of all secret schools.

The wisdom in the Bible is given in images and parables, in comparisons. The seven-day work is no different. We are not dealing with external facts here, but with long, long periods of time. There is no document in the world that contains theosophical truths in a more magnificent way than the Bible. Theosophy will offer an explanation of the Bible, an understanding of it again. Even something like the splitting of the creation account will bring it closer to human understanding again. The spiritual man is already contained in the stream of water, when the spirit of God still hovered over the waters. “Male and female” is the literal translation, not ‘a little man and a little woman’ (Gen. 1,27); this is the spiritual man. And then a condensation of the spiritual, asexual man to the physical man - to the egg - takes place, and thus a second creation, a sexual-physical.

“The letter kills, but the Spirit gives life” (2 Cor 3:6); we must understand this saying as Goethe means it when he says, “And as long as you do not have this dying and becoming, you are only a gloomy guest on the dark earth.” That is, the becoming of a higher soul that slumbers in man, but which can be awakened and developed through schooling. You must give birth to a higher human being out of the physical body, so that this physical body becomes a tool for the spiritual human being, but the physical body should not be the one that rules us. When man is free from the physical, the physical body becomes such a tool. Thus one should explore the spirit from the letter. Theosophy wants to build up from what is there; because even the smallest, the most material, is condensed spirit. Therefore, a theosophical attitude also understands that, as in the Bible, there may be rules that relate to simple daily life.

Those who fight the Bible do not understand it; they are fighting their own delusion, which they have created for themselves. It is only in the last four hundred years that this materialistic view of the seven-day cycle, an apparent reproduction of it, has developed. Even today, believers often interpret the Bible too materialistically. The Bible is to be taken literally; but one must learn to understand the letter and grasp the spirit through the letter. Theosophy does not want to found a confession, but to understand what is there; and that, what wisdom has poured into the souls through the millennia. The truths change; but a common original truth runs through all of them, for past, present and future. We find it in the Bible and its effect; it contains words that come from the divine wisdom of the world. Thus the readers found themselves imbued with the magical powers of the Bible, which live in the words. Religious documents and especially ones like the Bible, which in its two parts even points to our division of time, cannot be taken deeply enough. Only by delving deeply into them will people be led to spiritualization again.

Dear friends, as on other occasions when I have been able to speak to you since the serious events of the present time took their beginning, let our thoughts go out at this moment to those who are at the front offering their souls and their bodies in sacrifice for the tremendous demands made in our time and having to take up, with the whole of their physical existence, the challenge of the time:

Spirits of your souls, guardian guides,
On your wings let there be borne
The prayer of love from our souls
To those whom you guard here on earth.
Thus, united with your might,
A ray of help our prayer shall be
For the souls it seeks out there in love.

And the spirit who has gone through the Mystery of Golgotha, the spirit we have long been seeking in our movement, may he be with You and guide you to the goals that you have to seek.

Spirits of your souls, guardian guides,
On your wings let there be borne
The prayer of love from our souls
To those whom you guard here on earth.
Thus, united with your might,
A ray of help our prayer shall be
For the souls it seeks out there in love.

My particular intention with the words I spoke here on the last occasion was to let a truth flow into your minds, a truth to be found through spiritual science, that the great and serious events in life really enable us to see how outward appearances have to be regarded in the light that comes to us from spiritual science. It is only then that they will no longer appear to us as Maya, the great illusion, but in their profound truth. This is not to say that these outward appearances in themselves are Maya or illusion—that is an erroneous view people often pick up from a philosophy with a more oriental orientation—but that our senses and our intellect err in the interpretation, in their comprehension, of outer events unless we illumine those external events with the light that comes to us from an understanding of the spiritual world.

Today I want to take certain individual facts that have already been touched on during the years of our anthroposophical work and present them in a perspective that is somehow in accord with our time.

We are fully conversant with the thought that since the Mystery of Golgotha intervened in events on earth, the impulses, the forces and entities that have gone through this Mystery of Golgotha have played an active role, as living forces, in all that happened in human evolution on earth. In other words, and to put it more concretely, I want to say: In all major events, in all the important and essential things that have happened, the Christ impulse has been active through those who are his servants, his spiritual helpers. At the present time the term Christianity is generally understood to cover only what men have been able to comprehend. But, as I stressed on many occasions, what has come into the world through Christianity is so great, so tremendous, that human reason, the human intellect, is in no position, or has not been in a position to the present moment, really to grasp even the most elementary aspects of the powers of the Christ impulse. If Christ had worked only on the basis of what men have been able to grasp of him, he would have been able to achieve little. But what matters is not what has entered into mankind through human reason and understanding, what concept men have been able to form of the Christ, but rather the fact that he has been present since the Mystery of Golgotha, active right among men and in their ways of doing things. It is not a question of how far men have understood him but that he has been present as a living entity and has entered wholly into all significant events in evolution.

Of course, our spiritual science enables us to grasp only a little of the profundity of the Christ impulse even today. Future times will come to understand and see more and more. There is no reason to feel pride in such understanding of the Christ impulse as we have so far achieved. Spiritual science will grasp a little more today than it has been possible to grasp of the Christ in the past. In past times people were able only to reflect on the Christ by using the means available through external intellect, external reason, external research. Now we have spiritual science as well, and with this we see into the supersensible worlds, and out of the supersensible worlds we are able to provide many answers concerning the significance of the Mystery of Golgotha. Immediate comprehension of what the Christ is, and what the spiritual powers are that serve him as folk souls and the like, has been least possible for the peoples living in regions where the Christ still had to enter, as it were. Yet the Christ impulse had to come in, for instance in the Roman world. And there is one particular example which we have already considered in another context that will be the best way of demonstrating how the Christ is at work as a living power, directing his spiritual servants when events have to be brought about that are essential in evolution, to bring real progress for mankind.

The event I mean is one I should like to mention again. It happened in AD 312 that the man through whom Christianity became the official state religion, Constantine,¹⁶ son of Constantinus Chlorus, entered the field with his army against Maxentius, then the ruler of Rome. Of course, if one considers those two armies facing each other one would have to say that the situation was the worst possible for Constantine, his army being five times smaller than that of Maxentius. It is possible to imagine, however, that considering the state of the art of war at the time, both armies had a number of outstanding generals. Yet what mattered particularly at that time was not the the skill of men but that opportunity was given for the ongoing Christ impulse to influence mankind in a way commensurate with the needs of the time.

It is possible to see how much of the Christ impulse could be understood at the time, how much of that Christ impulse human hearts had been able to absorb in the state of consciousness then prevailing if we consider what happened a few decades later around Rome and out of Rome. Julian the Apostate¹⁷ fought Christianity out of honest conviction, on the basis of what could be gleaned from human knowledge in those times. Anyone considering the way Julian and his followers fought Christianity can say to himself: ‘There is no doubt that as far as human knowledge was concerned, Julian and his followers were very advanced for their time; they were much more enlightened in this respect than the Christians of their day, although they had reverted to worship of the old gods.’ They stood for what might be considered to represent human knowledge at that time. Yet in AD 312 it was not the stand of human knowledge that determined the issue; it was rather that the potential had to be there for the Christ and his servants to intervene in the historical evolution of mankind. However much Maxentius and his army were able to rely on the skills of their generals and on anything else human knowledge and human wisdom may have achieved at that time, if nothing else had happened, then, undoubtedly, something destined to emerge at that time would not have emerged. And what did happen?

What happened was the following. The continuing Christ impulse flowed into soul activities that were not within men's consciousness, into activities men were not aware of. And it did indeed guide men in such a way that what had to come about did come about. The battle between Constantine and Maxentius was fought by the Red Rock, the Saxa Rubra, on 28 October 312. It was decided not by human skill, but—and enlightened minds may refuse to accept this as much as they like—by dreams; that is by what is generally called ‘dreams’, though they are not just dreams to us. For through their dreams there entered into the souls of the two army leaders what could not enter into them out of human reason. Maxentius had a dream before the battle that he would have to leave his city. He consulted the Sibylline Oracle and was told that he would achieve what was to happen if he dared to join battle outside the city and not within it. It was the most unwise thing he could have done, particularly as his army was so much more powerful than Constantine's. He should have known that anything received from the higher worlds first had to be interpreted and that the oracle would mislead him. Constantine in his turn was told in a dream that he would win if he led his troops into battle under the sign of Christ. He acted accordingly. What had entered into the souls of these men by the roundabout route of a dream became deed, and as a result the world was greatly changed at that time. We need only reflect a little to be able to say: What would have become of the Western world if supersensible powers had not taken a hand in events in a way that is indeed perfectly apparent.

Let us now look at those events in more details. At the time souls had incarnated in the West and South of Europe who were destined to be bearers of Christianity. Even the most enlightened souls were unable to become bearers of the Christ impulse at the time by using their minds, their intellect, because the time for this had not come. They had to find the way to Christianity through what had been created around them, externally. We may say they assumed Christianity like a garment. Their deeper nature was not greatly affected by it. They became serving members rather than receiving the Christ impulse into their innermost being. Fundamentally speaking, that was to hold true for the best souls in the western parts of Europe for a long time to come, into the 8th and 9th centuries and beyond. They needed to assume Christianity as a garment, to wear this garment of Christianity in such a way that they wore it in their ether bodies and not in their astral bodies. You can judge what it means when I say they bore Christianity in the ether body. It means they assumed it in such a way that they were Christians when awake but were unable to take their Christianity with them when outside their physical and ether bodies. The way they went through the gate of death also was such that we can say: they were able to look down from the realm through which man has to pass between death and rebirth, look down at what they had been in their last earth life. But one thing that was not immediately possible for them at the time was to take the Christian impulses arising from their former life into their future life. They wore Christianity more as a garment.

Because of something I will come to shortly, let us hold on to this way in which the souls accepted Christianity in their outward lives and the way Christianity was not part of what souls were able to take with them through the spiritual world, when passing through the gate of death, to prepare for a new life on earth. Let us remember that these souls were only able to enter into a new earth life having forgotten Christianity. For we do not in a later earth life remember what we merely wore as a garment in our former life. If it were otherwise our children would not have to learn Greek again at grammar school, for many of them did once incarnate in Greece. They have no memory of their Greek incarnation, however, and therefore have to learn Greek again. Those souls who had incarnated in the West of Europe were unable to carry their Christianity through the life they had to go through between death and rebirth because they had not integrated these impulses inwardly with their ego and astral body. That was the particular way in which those souls lived on into later incarnations. Let us remember this and now move on to another fact, one I have also mentioned before.

We know that the time we live in now, the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, began mainly around the 15th-16th centuries. That was the time when preparation was to be made for the European world for elements that were predominantly to lead to the development of the spiritual soul. That is really what our fifth epoch of civilization is about. Whatever had to be achieved there had to be achieved with regard to the fact that in the external aspect of earth life, too, conditions were arising on earth that were particularly favourable for the evolution of the spiritual soul—the soul able to develop by directing itself towards material earth life, the external facts of physical existence. That had to take its beginning and it did take its beginning. We merely need to recall how horizons expanded in Europe as the great discoveries were made and with everything they brought with them. The spiritual soul, therefore, had to develop primarily under the influence of the material world. We merely need to think of one thing, and again reference has already been made to this: the evolution and development of the spiritual soul is the special mission, the one-sided mission, of that which belongs to the sphere Of the British folk soul. Considering all the details, one could hardly imagine anything proceeding more according to plan than the way the British folk soul was directed towards these material roles in life. This was definitely predestined in the evolution of mankind.

Let us imagine, for instance, that during the 15th century England had been deflected from its propensity for those regions of the earth towards which it had been directed as the vast lands outside Europe were discovered, and that the British folk soul had instead experienced large territorial gains on the Continent of Europe. Let us imagine that the map of Europe had been changed to this effect. Then it would have been impossible in the first place to achieve what had to be achieved in the sphere of material civilization and, secondly, to achieve what had to be achieved in Europe by developing the inner life. This inner development proceeded specifically from that point onwards, overcoming all kinds of obstacles, with a role played also by Protestantism which in turn was influenced in many ways by German mysticism. Intervening in the process of evolution the Christ impulse had to ensure that the British Isles were kept away from the region where souls still had to be prepared to become outward, external bearers of the Christ impulse.

The Christ impulse had to flow into the deeds done on the Continent of Europe. It had to act in such a way that it achieved a great deal more than could come about through mankind, through the arts and skills of man. And what happened?

The marvellous thing happened that a poor shepherd girl from Orleans, Joan of Arc, [16 January 1412–30 May 1431] did everything those who were very advanced for their time had not been able to do. At that time it was indeed the Christ impulse acting in Joan of Arc, through its Michaelic servants, that prevented a possible merging of France and England, causing England to be forced back onto its island. And this achieved two things: first, France continued to have a free hand in Europe. This can be seen if we study the history of France over the following centuries—the essential element of the French spirit was able to influence European culture entirely without hindrance. The second thing which was achieved was that England was given its domain outside the continent of Europe. This deed, brought in through Joan of Arc, was a blessing not only for the French but also for the English, compelling them to take up their domain.

If we consider this in connection with what is implied by the advance of the Christ impulse on earth, the deed of Joan of Arc achieved something about which the following may be said: The degree to which she understood those things in a genuine human intellectual way was as good as zero compared to the deed which has given the map of Europe its present form. Events had to take that course so that the Christ impulse could spread in the right way. There we see the living Christ erupting into historical events out of the subterranean depths of human nature. That is not the Christ men think they know, for the Christ impulse may be seen in two ways. On the one hand we may ask ourselves: What did the people of that time understand of the Christ impulse? If we open our history books and study the history of mankind we find that over the centuries theologians were in dispute, defending or contending all kinds of theories, attempting to show how human freedom, the Holy Trinity and other things should be understood. So we see countless theologians fighting each other, acknowledging each other as orthodox theologians or else accusing each other of heresy. We observe how Christian doctrine spread entirely in accord with the situation as it was at the time. That is one side of it. But it is not the thing that matters, just as now it does not matter what people are able to do with their ordinary intellect. What matters is that the Christ lives among men, unseen but a living entity, and is able to stream up from depths beyond our perception and enter into the deeds of men. And he has done so at a point where there was indeed simply no need for him to come in through the human intellect, through a reasoning mind, but where he was able to come in through the soul of a girl of simple mind, through the soul of the Maid of Orleans. And when he came in like this, what was the attitude of those who were able to grasp Christianity in form of the orthodox doctrine? Well, they found they had to burn the girl who bore the Christ impulse at the stake. It has taken some time for official doctrine to take a different view. There may have been a point to it where official doctrine is concerned, but canonizing Joan of Arc is not exactly the right response to the events of that time.

This is a real example of how the Christ intervened in human evolution through his servants. As I said, he acted through his Michaelic spirit in the case of the Maid of Orleans. He intervened as a living entity, not merely through whatever men were able to understand of him. This particular example also shows something else, however. Christianity did exist. The people who were there around the Maid of Orleans, as it were, did call themselves Christians. Their Christianity did mean something to them. But all we can say about their understanding is: He whom you seek is not here,¹⁹ and the one who is here is not the one you seek, for you do not know him.

It must be clearly understood, however, that it was essential for Christ evolution to proceed within the evolution of Europe also in the form of an external garment. Souls were part of this development that were able to assume Christianity exactly as such an outer garment, who were able to wear it on the outside as it were. They were souls trailing behind, souls that had been incarnated there earlier and still did not take the Christ into their ego, merely into the ether body. The great difference between Joan of Arc and the others was that she had taken the Christ impulse into the very depths of her astral body and was acting for the Christ impulse out of the deepest forces of her astral body. This is one of the points where we can gain a clear understanding of something that really must become clear to us: the difference between the progressive evolution of nations and the progressive evolution of individual human personalities.

If we consider the French as they are today, for example, it is of course true that a number of individual human personalities exist within the French nation. These individual personalities were not, of course, part of the nation in their previous incarnation, part of a nation that had assumed the outer garment of Christianity there in the West of Europe. It was because a number of people had to assume Christianity as an outer garment in the West of Europe that they were in a condition on passing through the gate of death that necessitated their being united with Christianity in their astral body and ego in their next life, under different conditions. It was because they had been incarnated in the West of Europe that the necessity arose for them to have their next incarnation somewhere else. It is indeed very uncommon—note that I am saying uncommon, though it does not always have to be so—that a soul belongs to the same community on earth through a number of consecutive incarnations. Souls pass from one earthly community to another.

We have one example, however—and I am saying this without wishing to rouse sympathies or antipathies, and with no intention of flattering anyone—we have one example of souls actually assuming the same nationality a number of times. That is the case with the people of Central Europe. These Central European people include many souls that are incarnated among them today and have also been incarnated in the Germanic tribes in the past. This is a fact we are able to trace. It cannot always be fully explained with the means now available in occult science, but it exists nevertheless. A fact like that presented in last Thursday's public lecture on The Ancient Germanic Soul and the German Spirit,²⁰ for example, is illumined when we know that souls make repeated appearances within the Central European community. The fact is that cultural epochs were cut short within this particular community.

We only have to realize what it means that there was an epoch at the dawn of Germanic culture when the writers of the German poem the Nibelungenlied lived, or Walther von der Vogelweide (German lyric poet, minnesinger, c. 1170–12301 and others. And we need to realize that later there was a' time when a new flowering of German culture began and the first had been completely forgotten. For when Goethe was young nothing was known, as it were, of the first flowering of Germanic culture. It is because the souls return to the same community that it was necessary to forget what had gone before, so that the souls would find something new on their return and could not pick up the threads of what remained from earlier times. It has not happened with any other people that a metamorphosis was gone through, as it were, the way it happened in the case of the Central European people: from the height that had been reached in the 10th, 11th and 12th centuries to that later height that came about the time between the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th centuries and which we may hope will continue. There is no continuous line from the first to the second of these periods, and this can only be explained once we know that souls do return particularly in this culture. It is possible that another deeply moving fact I have already mentioned to you is also connected with this, the fact that it was noted how the Central European fighters of the present continue the struggle once they have gone through the gate of death, that soon after they have passed through the gate of death it is possible to see how they continue to join the struggle. This fact can raise wonderful hopes for the future, because one can see how not only the living, in the physical sense living, but also the dead, those who have died, are making their contribution to events.

Let us now pose the question: What is the situation with souls that were incarnated in Western Europe at the time when Christianity was assumed like an outer garment, that is in the 6th, 7th 8th and 9th centuries, and accepted Christianity there, or also under the Romans, though they were not yet able to unite it with their astral body and their ego? What is the situation with those souls?

Grotesque as it may seem to modern man with his materialistic thinking, the things spiritual science can teach achieve real meaning for life if the concrete facts are considered. People still think reference to repeated earth lives is a matter of mere fantasies produced by a handful of foolish dreamers. The idea is one that is not accepted, though it is once again considered excusable to make reference to it in view of the fact that in an hour of weakness even the great Lessing accepted the idea of repeated earth lives.²¹ Yet if we take the findings made in occult research seriously we cease to be fools begging the forgiveness of greatly enlightened folk. It will be necessary for us to consider some of the things arising from occult research in detail, for that will be the only way of throwing light on something which otherwise has to remain a great illusion.

It is a strange thing that a great many souls that lived to the west of us towards the end of the Roman epoch, when Christianity was slowly gaining influence, finally becoming the established church, now come from the East, as souls growing up in the East, souls now among Russia's fighters. I said we must remember the fact I referred to earlier. For among the people killed in the East, those who are fighting there and being taken prisoners, are souls who towards the end of the Roman epoch lived in the western part of Europe. They now come towards us from the East, people who in those past times allowed the Christian faith to flow into their ether bodies and now, in a civilization that is relatively speaking at a lower level, take Christianity into their souls in a waking state and do so in such a way, due to the peculiarities of life in the East, that they have an emotional, instinctive bond with it. They are thus linking themselves to the Christ impulse in their astral bodies, doing now what they had been unable to achieve in their previous incarnations. This is a very strange fact brought to light by occult research in the present day. Many facts that deeply move the soul may come within the occult horizon triggered by the events of our time and this is one among them. What, then, can we learn from these facts?

We have to be clear about the following. We have to remember that is it part of the direct progress of the life of the spirit in Central Europe that the soul life of the German peoples is very consciously linked with the Christian faith, that it is taken upwards to the heights of a straight Christian culture. The streams, the paths, leading to this have been most marvelously laid out in advance over centuries. We see it all taking shape. It is specifically when we look at our own age with all its errors and mistakes that we see how the seed is there in Central European culture, how preparations have been made and no effort spared in the German folk spirit, the folk soul of the German-speaking peoples, so that now the Christ impulse may be taken hold of in conscious awareness.

That is a fact of infinitely greater importance than the 15th century event when Joan of Arc had to save France because that country had an important mission at that time. We therefore have before us the significant fact that the German spirit is called upon to take in the Christ impulse more and more consciously in future, take it in with the elements that have come into the life of the spirit in German countries and do so in a state of full waking consciousness. This Christ impulse had to announce itself in what went on at subconscious level over the centuries, as we have consistently shown. In the future it will have to unite with souls in such a way that there will be people—and in Central Europe there will have to be such souls—who in full awareness unite also their ego and astral body with the Christ impulse, exerting the powers of their conscious mind and not only the powers inherent in their physical and ether bodies. We can see efforts being made among the best. Let us take the best of them all: Goethe. We may quote Goethe as an outstanding example, but all souls have the potential within them, so long as they strive for it, however darkly.

Goethe showed Faust, the representative of mankind, to be striving for the highest.²² In Part 2 of the play he transports him to Greek civilization to share the experience of nations, guiding him into this in such a way that Faust has a significant experience of the future when he desires to wrest land from the sea and establish something that to him lies in the far distant future. And where does Goethe take Faust in the end? Goethe himself once expressed it like this in conversation with Eckermann: he had to make use of the vivid images of Christianity²³ to show Faust ascending into the spiritual world. And if you consider the profoundly beautiful picture of Faust's soul being received by the Mater gloriosa. you see it as the opposite image to that which led Raphael [1483–1520] to paint his famous Sistine Madonna, where the virgin mother is bringing the soul down. In the last scene of Faust we see the virgin mother upwards. That is the birth of the soul in death. And so we see a deeply inward striving arising from the human spirit in full conscious awareness. It is striving always to gain all that can be gained from Christianity in such a way that it may be borne through the gate of death and into the life man is going to live through in the new earth life that will follow preparation between death and rebirth. What we see there in Goethe himself is a character trait of the German people. It can give an indication as to the mission given to human beings. The mission is, and we can present this very clearly to our souls, that true benefit for the progress of mankind will arise only if within a certain group of people a harmonious relationship is established between Central Europe and Eastern Europe.

It is possible to visualize Eastern Europe expanding westwards, across Central Europe, by brute force. It is possible to visualize this happening. That, however, would be equivalent to a situation where Joan of Arc had not done her deed in the 15th century and England had annexed France in those days. If it had come to that, and I state this emphatically, something would have come about that would not only have brought calamity to France but would have meant calamity also for England. And if German culture were now to suffer through what may come from the East, this would be to the detriment not only of German culture but also of the East. The worst that can happen to the East is that it might expand for a time and have an adverse effect on German culture. For as I said, the souls formerly incarnated in Western Europe or on the Italian peninsula and now growing up in the East unite with the Christ impulse as though instinctively, in the unconscious depths of the astral body. Yet the Christ impulse that is to grow within them can never arise through linear progression of the instinctive element that lives in their souls under the name of orthodox catholicism which, on the whole, is Byzantine of course, for this is a name not an impulse. It is just as impossible for this to evolve into what it is predestined to become as it is impossible for a woman without a man to have a child. What is preparing in the East can only come to something if Central Europe strongly and consciously—that is in a state of full awareness—unites the force of the human ego and human powers of insight with the Christ impulse' out of what souls are striving for out of egoic nature.

What has to come about for the civilization and culture of the future will only come about if the German folk spirit finds souls that transplant the Christ impulse into their astral body and ego the way it can indeed be implanted there in a state of full conscious awareness' It has to come about through harmony being established, by uniting with that which is consciously achieved in Central Europe—more and more consciously.

This will need not just one or two centuries, but a very long time. The time needed will be so long that we may reckon on about two thousand years, I would say, counting from the year 1400. Adding two thousand years to 1400 we get the approximate time when something will emerge in the evolution of the earth that has had its seeds in the German life of the spirit, ever since there has been such a life of the spirit. We therefore realize that we have to consider a future lying not just centuries ahead but more than a thousand years. And the mission of the Central European, the German folk spirit, a mission already before us, is that there will have to be more and more of that nurturing of the life in the spirit through which men take op in conscious awareness—right into the astral body and ego—a comprehension of the Christ impulse that in earlier times moved through the peoples of Europe as a living but unconscious impulse. Once evolution takes this course then the East, too, will gradually, by twining upwards, reach the level reached in Central Europe because of what is already inherent there. That is the intention of the cosmic intelligence. We only interpret the intention of the cosmic intelligence rightly when we say to ourselves: It would be the greatest misfortune also for the East of Europe to harm the very spiritual power it needs to use as a support in twining upwards, a power the East should indeed revere, revere in friendship, foster and cherish. It will have to come to this. For the moment the East is very far indeed from achieving this. The very best of them still fall far short. Short-sightedly. they still refuse to accept what Central European culture in particular is able to give.

I went into this already in my first public lecture here in Berlin.⁵ Tonight you can see the deeper occult reasons behind what in the public lecture I was able only to put exoterically. in an extraneous way. This is of course something one always has to be careful about, to speak in terms close to the understanding of one's listeners in public lectures. The real impulses to say one thing and omit another, looking for the one context or the other, always have their occult reasons. At all events it is possible to see from what has been discussed today that when we look at things in an external way they present to us the great illusion, Maya. It is not that the outside world in itself is Maya. It is not. But we only gain understanding for it if we illumine it with the truths derived from the spiritual world. In the present case, the truths streaming from the spiritual world show that it is essential for Central Europe not to be overcome by Eastern Europe today, just as in 1429–1430 it was essential for France not to be overcome by England. It will of course be obvious, from what has been said, that for those in the East of Europe it is quite impossible to understand the crux of the matter and that, fundamentally speaking, this can be understood only in Central Europe. Surely this is understandable. In all humility, therefore, without any feeling of superiority, we must take on this mission, and we shall have to accept that it will be possible to misunderstand us. We must find that perfectly understandable. For what is preparing in the East will only be rightly understood in the East itself in time to come.

That is the one thing arising from what I have to say. The other is that we consider the great transition occurring in human evolution in our time exactly on a basis such as this. On previous occasions we have considered it from many different aspects. Now we consider it in such a way that we are able to see how the element which entered into man's evolution on earth through the Mystery of Golgotha needs to be understood in increasingly greater conscious awareness in our day, by those who are able to do so after this incarnation. In the days of Constantine or of Joan of Arc, for instance, it would have been impossible for the Christ impulse to bring about at a conscious level what it had to bring about at an unconscious level. But the time will have to come when it will be able to act at a fully conscious level. That is why we receive out of spiritual science what we are able to take into our soul in increasingly greater conscious awareness. Again it is possible to point to a particular fact—honestly, without getting worried about any sympathies or antipathies that may arise and with no intention of flattering anyone. After all, it is always better to base one's views on facts rather than on what they are so often based on today. For if we look out into the world a little bit we shall see that opinions really and truly are not always based on facts but on passion, on strong national feelings. Yet it is also possible to base the views that determine the attitude of the human mind on facts.

Anatole France²⁴ was a man who considered Joan of Arc from the rationalistic and materialistic point of view now current. In the cultural sphere of Germany it has been quite natural to understand Joan of Arc out of a supernatural context since Schiller's great deed.²⁵ There are people even in Germany today who think Schiller made a big mistake; but those are the literary historians and in their case that is understandable. After all, it is their function to 'understand' art and literature—which is why they are unable to understand it. No, the essential thing is for us to let arise before our eyes, from the depths of spiritual life as though glorified, the figure of which Schiller said: ‘The world indeed loves to blacken all that is radiant and drag down into the dust all that is sublime.’

And so it is indeed that acknowledgement of the fact that the Christ impulse intervened in a human individual in a situation not affecting our own nation can bring us the confidence to accept what I have put forward in my public lecture: that it is possible to perceive in the life of the spirit in Germany how it tends towards spirituality the way it has evolved, tends towards spiritual science. We can see that it is its special—though not exclusive—mission to take all that has been achieved and aimed for the life of the spirit in Germany and carry it upwards to perception and understanding of the spirit in the spirit. That is the mission of the German people. The other missions, being the same soul mission expressed in bodily form, as it were, have to serve it. What has to come to pass, out of cosmic wisdom, will come to pass. But, as I have said before, it will be necessary for the twilight we live in today to evolve into a true Sun-age for the future. To make this possible, there will have to be people in the future who have a connection with the spiritual worlds in order that the soil now being prepared with the blood and suffering of so many will not have been prepared in vain. The existence of souls capable of bearing within them their connection with the spiritual worlds justifies everything that happens, even the most horrific, terrible and fearsome, events, so that the Central European mission in spiritual life may be achieved. This, however, will depend on individual souls being able to get in touch with this spiritual life through their karma, and taking it wholly into themselves. Then, when the sun of peace is once again shining over the fields of Central Europe, they shall bear perception of things spiritual, a feeling for things spiritual, within them. Then the inclination developed in a few souls that are capable of this in their present incarnation will make it possible for that to happen which I want to condense in the following words. These words sum up all I wanted to put to you, so that we write the device into our souls under which souls will be able to grow in the right way towards the potential for the future that may arise out of these difficult times:

Out of courage shown in battle,
Out of the blood shed in war,
Out of the grief of those who are left,
Out of the people's deeds of sacrifice
Spirit fruits will come to grow
If souls with knowledge of the spirit
Turn their mind to spirit realms.

• 16. Heraclitus (c. 540–480 BC), Greek philosopher of Ephesus: Fragment B53 in H. Diels Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, Vol. I.
• 17. Constantine I (the Great) (274 –337), Roman emperor 306-337 (sole ruler from 323). Victory over Maxentius at Pons Milvius, a bridge crossing the Tiber to the north of Rome, in 312. See also the lecture given by Rudolf Steiner at Dornach on 30 January 1915 in Wege der geistigen Erkenntnis und der Erneuerung künstlerischer Weltanschauung (GA 161).
• 19. See Matthew 28:6; Mark 16:6; Luke 24:5,6.
• 20. Lecture given on 14 January 1915 ‘Die germanische Seele und der deutsche Geist vom Gesichtspunkte der Geisteswissenschaft’ (GA 64).
• 21. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing: Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlecthtes (1780) paragraph 98:
  
  ‘Why should I not return as often as I am sent to gain new knowledge, new skills? Do I carry off so much at one go that it is not worth the effort to return?’
• 22. See Rudolf Steiner, Geisteswissenschafiliche Erläuterringen zu Goethes ‘Faust’ (Vol. I ‘Faust, der strebende Mensch’; Vol. 2 ‘Das Faust-Problem’ (GA 272 and 273). Engl. GA 272 in part translated and published in different books and journals: GA 273. The Problem of Faust in R Series of typescript lecture courses at Rudolf Steiner Library, London.
• 23. See J. P. Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens, 6 June 1831:
  
  ‘And of course you'll admit that the conclusion, where the soul which has been saved is taken upwards, was very difficult to do. With something so noumenal, scarely to be intuited, I could so easily have ended up in vagueness, but I used the sharply defined figures and concepts of the Christian church to give my poetic intentions the much needed form and consistency.’
• 5. Lecture given on 29 October 1914 entitled ‘Goethes Geistesart in unsern schicksalsschweren Tagen und die deutsche Kultur’ in Aus schicksaltragender Zeit (GA 64). In The Dramatic Art of the Goethenaum I (tr. L. Dreher) London: Rudolf Steiner Publishing Co. 1936.
• 24. Anatole France, Vie de la Jeanne d 'Arc (49th edn, 2 Vols.) Paris 1927.
• 25. Friedrich Schiller, 3rd verse of the poem Das Mädchen von Orleans (The Maid of Orleans).

Today, we want to take a look at the world of medieval legends from the point of view of the theosophical worldview. Two important legends are characteristic of the intellectual development of Europe in the Middle Ages, the two legends that are grouped around the Holy Grail.

In earlier times, the knowledgeable expressed themselves to the people about the deepest truths through legends and myths. If the people who lived where Northern and Central Europe is today had been taught such concepts as we now get in the theosophical world view, the people of yore would not have understood them. The sages spoke to each people and age as that people and age could understand. They always based their teachings on the law of reincarnation.

The sages who told the secrets of the world to the peoples of Northern and Central Europe were the Druids. “Druid” means “oak”. When it is said that the Germans celebrated their religious services “under oaks”, it does not only mean that they really celebrated their services under natural oaks, but it also means that they were under the guidance of the Druids. And when it is said that Boniface “fell the oak,” it means that the old Druidic service was overcome by Christianity. A true fact was given in the form of the saga. The Druid introduced the true facts into the sagas. The Druid priest was already speaking to all the souls that are today absorbing our worldview. He spoke to them in a way that was appropriate for that time. All of us who have adopted the theosophical worldview have heard the same things before in myths and fairy tales, otherwise we would not be able to understand them today. This is the secret of the great masters: they live fully in the awareness that they are among people who are repeatedly embodied.

Throughout the Middle Ages, the basic truths of Germanic-Central European culture lived in a great saga. If we get to know this saga, we understand what was present in the Middle Ages. The Druid priests nourished the awareness that once upon a time there was a high culture far to the west. This culture was in a land called Nifelheim or Nibelungenheim. This Nifelheim was the old Atlantis. It used to be a foggy place because of its peculiar atmospheric conditions, which were very different from ours.

The Germanic tribal saga thus truly reflects the truth. It points to an ancient land that once existed between Europe and America, where the Atlantic Ocean is now. This ancient land of Atlantis perished, along with the treasures of power and wisdom. These treasures were referred to as gold, and their demise is told in the saga as the sinking of the gold of the Nibelungen hoard. The treasure of the Nibelungs is to be raised in a new way, more in the East, in Europe. First Wotan, then Siegfried are the initiates who have the task of bringing the old treasure back to today's Europe, of making the Nibelung hoard fruitful again for newer culture in a certain way. The fact that the saga presents us with a secret initiate, Wotan, helps us to gain a deep insight into another ancient culture. The letters W and B correspond to each other. Wotan, Wodan is the same as Bodha Buddha. Wotan is actually the Germanic form of the word Buddha. We come across a common origin of the European Wotan religion and the Asian Buddha religion. The Buddha religion did not spread so much in India, but among those peoples of Asia who still had something of the Atlantean culture in them. The Wotan peoples also brought their views from the Atlantean culture. Their further development was expressed in the legends that the Druid priests had taught them. The saving of the hoard of the Nibelungs - the Atlantean culture - by Wotan and Siegfried is particularly beautifully expressed in these sagas.

A tragically prophetic thread runs through these sagas, which can be found from Russia via Germany to France and England, and can be found everywhere where druid priests taught. They taught prophetically: a twilight of the gods will come. We are the remnants of Atlantean culture. We must die to make way for something better. Our initiates are prophets of what is to come. A certain tragedy is expressed in all those who are initiated in the manner of Siegfried. The Song of the Nibelungs contains an ancient form of initiation: the distress of the Nibelungs, the lament of the Nibelungs. The very intimate disciples were taught that another would come who would bring the spiritual life. The mood of the Götterdämmerung was spread everywhere. All lived in the feeling and the intimate disciples in the certainty: One will come who will be very different from our initiates. - This is expressed in the saga through Siegfried.

In Scandinavia and Russia, the Drotten mysteries were analogous to the Druid mysteries. “Drotte” is another form of Druid. Throughout the ancient mysteries, Sig is the name of the original, great initiate. All names composed with “Sig” lead back to Sig, for example Sigurd, Sigmund, Sieglinde and so on. Siegfried was the initiate who had found peace in initiation. “Peace” means that which leads the human being beyond all doubt; it is the satisfaction of desire, the desire for knowledge, for power. Siegfried is depicted in all pictures as invulnerable. Achilles, the Greek initiate, remained vulnerable at one point, at the heel. Siegfried, after overcoming the dragon, became invulnerable except for one point, the point between the shoulder blades. This is where the cross is to be carried. This symbol played a profound role in the ancient mysteries. There it was said: You are all vulnerable at the point where one will have the cross. The one who will cover this place with the cross, the cross-bearer, will be the great initiate who is no longer vulnerable. This is what gives the Nordic saga its great appeal. This wisdom was an apocalyptic wisdom.

All occultists know that this wisdom emanates from a central oracle of twelve initiates, the so-called “White Lodge”. From there, the wisdom is carried out into the world. Nowhere is this different from the fact that the individual knows himself to be connected to the others. Everywhere there were twelve members of the lodge. Such are also the twelve apostles. The consciousness of those who intuitively perceive and the wisdom of those who know leads back to the Round Table of King Arthur. This is nothing other than the Great White Lodge, which in the Siegfried initiation made clear to the nations what it had to say to the world. Great initiates were members of the Round Table, which existed in Wales until the time of Queen Elizabeth of England. Then it was abolished for political reasons.

Two very specific political currents were traced back to these primeval times by medieval popular consciousness. In the Frankish people, who were so fortunate as to conquer the West of Europe, there was a dynasty that actually traced its origins back to the times of Atlantis. They were called the “Wibelungen” or “Nibelungen” — from which the word “Ghibellines” later emerged. There was an old consciousness of a ruling dynasty rising among the Franks, rooted in the old Nibelungen land, combining secular and priestly power. That is why Charlemagne tried to have the royal crown placed on him in Rome, to add a spiritual element to the secular one.

Originally, all the power that was assumed was derived from what had come over from Atlantis. The fact that people thought and sensed that a twilight of the gods was coming also connected a certain tragic trait to the ruling dynasty. It was said: Those who want to know can well become initiates, but they must be replaced by something else. This sentiment was first expressed in the well-known Barbarossa saga; then something was added that was not in the usual saga. Barbarossa was correctly thought of as a continuation of the old Franconian rulers. The Hohenstaufen were the Ghibellines, Waiblingen, Wibelungen, Nibelungen, in contrast to the Guelphs, the Guelfs. The more intimate version adds to the well-known Barbarossa saga that Barbarossa brought the Holy Grail from Asia to Europe. He himself perished as a physical personality and now waits for his time to come. This expresses the whole mood of the Middle Ages towards ancient paganism and the new Christianity.

People began to look at their own national soul and said: We brought our culture over from ancient Atlantis. But it is destined to perish; Christianity must take its place. But it will rise again, purified, cleansed, elevated by Christianity. — A beginning was made to create a transition from the end of the descent to the beginning of the ascent. A beginning was made to imagine the course of the lower German spiritual culture in such a way that the clairvoyant, Atlantean consciousness was replaced by something that had yet to come. Natural bravery, piety, virtue had to be reclaimed in a different, new way. There were three conceptions, conceptions of three definite powers: Wotan is the intuitive power as represented by the initiate; Wili is the will itself; We is the mind, with a tragic trait where it becomes apocalyptic. Now another time was to come. Now, through the Christian teaching, the point of passage was to be gained, and one was to ascend again to what was before the twilight of the gods.

That Barbarossa sits in the mountain means that he is an initiate. The “mountain” is the place of initiation. Christ went with his disciples “on the mountain” - into the mystery. The ravens signify an initiation of Barbarossa. In the Persian initiation ritual, there are seven stages of initiation. The “ravens” signify the first stage of personal initiation. They denote the still existing connection of the initiate with the environment. Think of the ravens of Elijah. We also find ravens with Wotan. They mediate his communication with the environment. Thus, Barbarossa, the initiate, also had the ravens around him, which still kept him connected to the world.

Barbarossa had brought the Holy Grail from the Orient. This Holy Grail had been kept on the Mons salvationis, the mountain of salvation. It is now surrounded by the successors of King Arthur's Round Table, the twelve knights who added the Christian initiation to the old pagan initiation. The Grail is the symbol of the Christian initiation. Those who wanted to be initiated into the secrets of the Holy Grail became Christian initiates. One becomes a Christian initiate by first going through all doubts and then getting a firm hold in the connection with Christ Himself. One thing is necessary for this: direct trust in the figure of Christ. The first disciples placed particular emphasis on the fact that Christ was there. They say: We want to bear witness that we were with Him. We have laid our hands in His wounds. What we have seen and heard ourselves, that we proclaim. Paul is an apostle because he has truly seen the Risen One in spirit. It depends on the direct experience, which one acquires not through wisdom and logic, but directly.

It is clear to us what Parzival is meant to achieve on his wanderings. Parzival's mother is called Herzeleide. If you read Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival, who was a thoroughly initiated man, deeply, between the lines and words, you will find that the name of Parzival's mother, Herzeleide, is a reflection of the tragic trait that lay in the German soul. Those who do not follow the Parzival path carry sorrow in their hearts; they have to gain peace for themselves. Wolfram von Eschenbach knew how to clothe the saga in a beautiful form. With the one fact, he meant a profound symbol - the female personality always signifies consciousness: Herzeleide is the state of consciousness from which Parzival starts. At first he has a tragic consciousness. He struggles through everything that worldly knighthood can offer, with a naive, simple consciousness, in order to come to the secret of the Holy Grail.

We must keep this together with the Barbarossa saga. Barbarossa went to Asia to seek the secrets of the Holy Grail, the initiation of Christianity. But he perished on the way to the Holy Grail. He has to wait “in the mountains” until Christianity can find the connection to the earlier initiation. Barbarossa brought Christianity, but has not yet achieved the deeper initiation of Christianity.

Parzival is the new Christian initiate, the great symbol that replaces the Siegfried initiation. Siegfried has overcome the lower nature, the lindworm, the snake. Parzival becomes the initiate of the Holy Grail, who gets to know the one who is invulnerable where Siegfried was still vulnerable. In Parzival, the original idea of Christianity is expressed. It no longer knows the idea of reincarnation. One regards the one life between birth and death as the only one. The valuable thing is the one incarnation. One no longer looks up to Manas, Budhi, Atma. The Parzival initiation was only to come to the awareness of the connection with Christ, to consider the one incarnation in which man comes to knowledge through compassion and not through knowledge to compassion, as it happens through theosophy. Theosophy teaches us to recognize how we are one with all people. Through it, one knows that one is responsible for what our brother does. Theosophy leads through knowledge to compassion. But humanity had to go through a period of development for a while, where it was to come to knowledge through compassion. It had to descend into the depths of compassion, because one can also come to knowledge there. It had to be so, in order that people might get to know this earthly world in all its importance. Christianity was to educate humanity, so that the earthly might also be grasped in its significance. Therefore, man first had to be directed, steered downwards, in the moral sense, towards physical life. Only then could he arrive at the great achievements that begin with city culture.

The progress of the Middle Ages is described in the saga in the transition from the Parzival saga to the Lohengrin saga. This saga emerges at a time when cities are being founded all over Europe, primarily serving the emerging bourgeoisie, which is no longer based on the spiritual life but on the material life. All material achievements are prepared in the cities, for example, the art of printing. Without the culture of the cities, modern science would not have been able to develop in this way. The universities are also a consequence of this culture. A Copernicus, a Kepler, a Newton and so on would not have been possible without it. Dante's “Divine Comedy” and the painters of the Renaissance can also be traced back to the culture of the cities.

The saga of the connection between Parzival, the father, and Lohengrin, the son, points to the importance of urban culture. Elsa of Brabant represents the cities, the urban consciousness. In all mysticism, that which works against the physical world is presented as something feminine. Goethe speaks of the “eternal feminine”; in Egypt, Isis was worshipped in this sense.

Let us consider the stages of the chela's initiation. The chela must first overcome three stages. The first step is that of the homeless man, where man is torn out of the physical world, where he becomes objective towards the physical world. He must unlearn to be partial, he must learn to love everything equally; he does not love less, but he transfers his love to everything that deserves love, not just to his homeland and so on. The second step is where the chela builds huts. He finds a new home. The disciples on the mountain have reached this stage. They are beyond space and time, they see Elijah and Moses. That is why they say: “Let us build huts.” The third stage is that of the swan. A swan is the chela who has come so far that all things speak to him, even those who have their consciousness on higher planes. On the physical plane, only man has the ego. The animal has consciousness on the astral plane, the plant on the mental plane (rupa plane), the mineral on the higher mental plane (arupa plane). One must rise to higher worlds to find the I, the names of other beings; there things speak their own names to the chela. The world then becomes resounding and sounding for him everywhere. In view of this fact, Goethe says:

The sun resounds in the ancient manner In the spheres of the brothers' song, And its prescribed journey it completes With a thunderclap.

He repeats this reference from the prologue in heaven where he leads Faust over into the higher worlds:

The new day is already born for the ears of the spirit. Rock gates creak and rattle, Phoebus' wheels roll and clatter, What a roar brings the light! It trumpets, it trompets, the eye blinks and the ear is amazed, Unheard-of things are heard.

It is not a matter of indifference that the Prologue in Heaven in the first part of “Faust” and the second part begin in this way. Goethe was pointing to something very specific: it is the third degree of chelaship, where the world around us becomes resounding and all things tell us their name. Jesus had reached such a degree when he was to receive Christ. This degree was designated in the White Lodge as the swan. Swans were those who were no longer allowed to speak their name, but to whom the whole world revealed its names.

Lohengrin, the son of Parzival, is the initiate who founded city culture, who was sent by the great Grail lodge to fertilize the consciousness of medieval humanity. Elsa of Brabant characterizes the striving human consciousness, which is fertilized by the environment, the masculine. The urban consciousness represented by Elsa is to be fertilized by Lohengrin, by the Holy Grail. The connection between Lohengrin and Elsa of Brabant is the connection between material culture and the spiritual task of the fifth sub-race. The swan is the man initiated in the third degree, who brings in the Master from the Great Lodge. Man must let the Master work upon him without asking about His nature. Elsa of Brabant must accept what He gives her as her due. The moment she asks out of curiosity, the initiate disappears. All this is expressed in the Lohengrin saga.

The Templars had brought the initiation wisdom of the Holy Grail from the Orient to the Mountain of Salvation, mons salvationis, the place of initiation of Christianity. An initiation ceremony pointed directly to the future of the whole human race. It was said: a time will come when Christianity will experience a new phase. The progress of human spiritual culture has always been consciously referred to as the progress of the sun. Before 800 BC, the sun passed through the constellation of Taurus for about 2200 years. Over in Asia, the bull was worshipped as the divine. Even before that, the twins were worshipped in Persia for the same reason: good and evil, duality. Around 800 BC, the Sun entered the sign of Aries or the Lamb. This is indicated by the legend of Jason and the Golden Fleece. Christ calls Himself the Lamb of God because He appeared under this sign. [Today the Sun is in the sign of Pisces.] The Knights Templar point to the next constellation; the Sun will then enter the constellation of Aquarius. There Christianity will truly arise for the first time, paganism united with Christianity. This culture will resurrect a new John. This moment will occur when the sun is in the sign of Aquarius. John means 'water bearer'; he will be the herald of a new era of Christianity. It is said that the Knights Templar pointed to John the Baptist, not to Christ. But the John of whom they speak is the Aquarius.

The last phase of Christianity, which originated with the initiate Lohengrin, has brought about the period of usefulness, which has now reached its peak. The theosophical movement wants to be the successor of such movements, as the Parzival movement was and as the one that originated with the initiate Lohengrin. Modern materialism also owes its origin to great initiates, but it must be replaced by a new phase, by a new cycle. This is what Theosophy wants to bring about. But it is always the initiates who speak when a new cultural impact is to be given.

The topic of this lecture should be a kind of supplement of that about which I spoke here four weeks ago, a supplement on the topic Theosophy and Spiritism. Today I want to explain something more exactly that I could note at that time only indicating. In particular I want to speak about the phenomena of somnambulism which lead into mysterious fields of the human nature and into fields which are interpreted most differently from different sides.

You probably know what somnambulism is. This word should point to certain conditions of the soul which appear in the human being when in his everyday states of consciousness a certain change has happened, above all when the usual everyday consciousness, that consciousness with which we perform our everyday actions with which we get used to nature is not in full activity if it is eliminated, as it were, and the human being still acts emotionally, is still within certain conditions of the soul. We understand as somnambulism any soul activity without full activity of the everyday waking consciousness, as it were from the depths of the soul which are not illuminated by the daytime ego-consciousness. The human soul acts then from this dark depth, and it brings up actions from these depths which differ very substantially from those which the human being accomplishes, otherwise, in the course of his life. We also know that not any person is suited to carry out soul actions with such effacement and elimination of the usual waking consciousness. We know that only those persons whom we call somnambulists who can be transported into a kind of trance or dream state are able to show such phenomena. These persons are in a kind of unconscious condition, while such phenomena arise from their nature, and one has interpreted these conditions in the most different way at different times.

If we transport ourselves once to the ancient Greece, we see which interpretation such actions of somnambulistic persons found in the ancient Greece at that time about which normally the Greek history tells to us. There we meet the priestesses, the so-called oracle priestesses who wanted to make known—from the depth of their souls under effacement of their daytime condition of consciousness—all sorts of things which went beyond the usual human knowledge. Events of the future should got out from such deep souls; whether important state actions whether important legislations are justified or not, these oracle priests should decide about that; briefly, one ascribed that which they made known to a divine inspiration. One believed that the soul when the usual daytime consciousness is extinguished stands under divine influence and conveys the volition of the godhead itself. Not only those human beings enjoyed divine devotion who could be transported into such somnambulistic condition, but above all the revelation the priests made known.

If we go from this time of ancient Greece towards the end of the Middle Ages, we find another view and interpretation of such somnambulistic persons. We see that such persons were understood as being in alliance with all sorts of bad, diabolical, demoniacal powers. We see that that which they made known was considered as something reprehensible, as something that can bring in only damaging, bad influence to the human life. We see that these persons were prosecuted as witches that they were prosecuted because of their devil alliances. Some of the dreadful cruelties towards the end of the Middle Ages are to be attributed to this interpretation of the somnambulistic condition.

In newer time on the other hand when in the outset of the 19th century, in the last third of the 18th century one began to study conditions of the human soul, there were some people who believed that one could gain higher explanations of the human soul studying these conditions; because our usual brain consciousness is eliminated and the senses are not receptive to the outside world, they assumed that the human being is able to find out something about spiritual processes and beings which one cannot perceive with the usual senses. Others looked at these conditions as only pathological ones and understood them merely in such a way that one must eliminate them from everything that can be considered as justified for the normal human being. In the beginning in particular it was science which rejected any interpretation, any explanation of these phenomena in its materialistic confidence and regarded them as symptoms, related to insanity in any way, not at all as anything else than quite abnormal matters. These are some interpretations which one has given of the phenomena.

For us the question must be at first: how can be such phenomena caused?—Because we know that some people get completely by themselves to such a condition where their usual waking consciousness is extinguished where they behave towards the outside world completely as sleeping where they understand nothing of that which takes place in their surroundings with their regular senses where they do not hear if in their nearness a bell sounds where they do not see if in their nearness a light shines where they are receptive, however, in strange way to a particular influence, we say, for example, to the words of a certain person. They see and hear nothing around themselves; they are only receptive to that which a single person says to them or to impressions of certain kind. Yes, they often are even more receptive to the thoughts of a particular person in the room in which they are. These are such phenomena which appear with certain people completely by themselves every now and then. Then we say: such persons are somnambulists; they think, act, feel, perceive in a kind of waking dream, in a kind of sleep which is, however, a particular sleeping state that cannot be compared with the usual sleep to which the human being abandons himself every now and then to get over the tiredness of the day.

We also know that with such somnambulists not only the perception, the sensitivity to certain states can appear, but that such somnambulists can move on particular actions that they carry out actions which they could never carry out in their usual daytime consciousness. We experience that they carry out rationally appearing actions to which, however, more belongs than the sense of direction of the usual daytime consciousness. We see them climbing on roofs, jumping over abysses without anticipating any danger in which they are, over abysses over which they would never jump, otherwise; we see them carrying out actions which they would not be able at all to carry out if they are in their usual waking state. These are only indications of such states at first. Such conditions can appear without any reason, but they can also appear because a person exerts a particular influence on another person; they can appear because the usual daytime consciousness is extinguished in a person with the help of particular manipulations of another person that the concerned person is then transported into an artificial somnambulistic condition. Then such artificial somnambulists show the same phenomena as the natural ones. One calls—we do not consider expressions as especially definite—that person who can transport another person into the somnambulistic condition a mesmerist if the somnambulistic condition is light, and one calls the person magnetised; one says that it is transported into a magnetic sleeping state.

Now the question arises: what do such phenomena mean to the spiritual life, which role do they play in the whole interrelation of the spiritual life, and what can we experience by such phenomena and what do they explain to us about the being and the nature of the human soul and mind? We must ask ourselves: are such phenomena actually such an abnormal matter which does not resemble to the other phenomena of the everyday life? Then, however, the view could take place which simply sees abnormalities in such phenomena; then the view of our doctors could take place, and we would not receive particular information from them.

The dream is often interpreted as something that flits only fantastically through the dream consciousness, as a kind of empty imagination and one is hardly inclined to scrutinise the strange phenomena of the dream world really. But, nevertheless, there were also finer spirits who were inclined to scrutinise these flitting pictures of the dream consciousness, and then one thing appears above all: indeed, it is for the most dreams correct that in the dream an enormous irregularity and arbitrariness prevails that we deal mostly only with snatches of the waking consciousness, of the recollections and pictures which have passed our consciousness during the day, and perhaps of other things which are due to our physical condition during sleep, or also to certain symptoms and the like. This is the lowest kind of dreams, these flitting pictures, subject to complete arbitrariness, which pass through the dream consciousness irregularly.

But the attentive viewer cannot escape that already the most usual personal consciousness, if it is in the sleeping state, also has other dreams beside these irregular and arbitrary dreams, dreams which show a particular regularity. I want to draw your attention only to single examples, which intensely illuminate this regularity which we already find within the usual dream consciousness. You have a watch lying beside yourselves. You do not perceive the ticking of the watch during sleep; you dream of a regiment of soldiers passing outside your window and hear the clatter of the horses exactly. You wake and discover that you have heard the ticking of the watch at this moment; since this continues in your consciousness. You have heard it, however, not as a ticking as your usual ear hears it, but it has transformed itself, has symbolised itself to the scatter of the horses of a passing cavalry regiment.—Or a dream which has really taken place: a farmer's wife dreams that she would go with another woman to the city on Sunday morning. They go to the church and see the priest ascending the pulpit and starting to preach. They listen longer time. There something quite strange soon becomes apparent: the priest transforms himself, he gets wings, he changes into a cock, he crows!—This is a real dream which has happened. The farmer's wife who dreamt this wakes and really hears the cock crowing outside.

You see again what has happened: the ear has heard the crowing cock, but it has not heard the real cockcrow at first, but the dream consciousness has made a symbol of that which it has heard; it has transformed the cockcrow symbolically into this whole story which I have told to you. The dream consciousness spins out such stories quite dramatically. You see that the sensory impressions are not perceived immediately by the dream consciousness, but they are transformed to symbols, and the especially typical is that this dream consciousness really dramatises.

I would like to mention another example—a dream which has really taken place; today I want to mention the right examples only which have been experienced: a student dreams that he is at the door of the auditorium. He is bumped by another. There develops a verbal exchange which leads, in the end, to a duel. The student experiences any preparations of the duel—a long story! The duel really takes place at the arranged place, everything is there, the seconds are there, the first shot is fired, and the dreaming student awakes. He has upset a chair beside his bed; he has heard the chair toppling over, but not in such a way as it is, but this event has transformed itself like lightning into a quite dramatic action. This sleeping dream consciousness is a symbolising one which could be lighted up in its peculiar symbolising activity by countless examples.

Now we ask ourselves: how does this everyday consciousness relate to that which takes action in the human soul, while it dreams? Our everyday consciousness does not immediately take part of these dream actions; for if the consciousness appears in the dream, a kind of another ego appears, a kind of dream-ego; because the dreaming person can see himself, so to speak, he can face himself in the dream. We retain at first that a kind of splitting can happen between the dream-ego and the real ego that really the dreaming person can observe himself quite objectively among the different percepts which he has in the dream. The situations in which this dream appears are determined by the dream consciousness and completely transported to the symbolic-dramatic action that takes place.

A higher level of this dream consciousness happens if we experience conditions of our own physical inner life symbolically in the dream. Again I mention particular examples. Somebody dreams that he is in a musty cellar. Webs are in the ceiling and eerie beasts crawl about. He awakes with headache. Headache has expressed itself symbolically in this cellar. Or another example: somebody is in the dream in an overheated room; he sees a red-hot stove, wakes and has violent palpitations. All these dreams which I tell you are really substantiated. Particular organs of our inside, particular feelings for our inside symbolise themselves in the dream as particular events. Yes, one can say: for the one and same person—who is able to observe on this field knows this—a particular organ takes on a stereotyped appearance which always remains the same. Somebody who suffers from palpitations, has always the same dream, namely the dream which he has had once, let us assume that he saw an overheated stove and the like more. So not only events and facts of the outside world, but also our own physical body express itself allegorically in the dream.

This is only a step to that strange phenomenon where dreamers have illnesses before themselves symbolically by which they are infected or by which they are infected only in a few days. They perceive their own conditions during the dream consciousness. That happens, indeed, only with particular persons who already belong to the somnambulists in a certain respect. From there up to the other phenomenon it is again only a step that a peculiar kind of human instinct points out a remedy or a necessary performance to the full somnambulists. So the dream can really work as a doctor, it can point to the illness and to the remedy at the same time. However, this happens only with particular persons who already have somnambulistic dispositions in a certain respect.

So you see that we deal with a sequence of conditions: from the arbitrary dream up to such quite regular dream perception controlled by particular laws. Everything that I have shown up to now is more or less dream perception; but from there a further step leads to the dream actions.

The most usual dream action is speaking in sleep. We know that it is a very frequent phenomenon that sleepers speak. Yes, we know that they sometimes give striking answers to particular questions, sometimes also answers from which we see that they have not exactly understood what we have spoken to them, or that that is more or less allegorically, symbolically transformed which one has spoken to them, and that is the reason why the dreamer answers that way. One will observe this behaviour if one knows to observe systematically.

A further step leads us then from dream speaking to the dream actions as I already said in my introduction. The dreaming person, in particular if he has a somnambulistic disposition, moves on actions, he rises from his bed, sits down, we say, if he is a student, to his desk and opens his school books. But it also happens that stronger inclined persons sit down and really keep on writing what they have written in the evening or at least copy something and the like more. These matters show us that a transition has taken place from the mere perception to the real action, from the mere feeling to the willing. There are persons who—even though they can be transported into a very strong somnambulistic condition—get to percipience only, and there are those who progress relatively little with regard to perception, but can carry out fearless actions of that kind I have mentioned in the introduction.

Such sleeping actions of somnambulistic persons are carried out with a necessity which has an automatic character. We only need to remember that we often carry out such automatic actions in the everyday life. If any special light impression works on our eye, we automatically close our eye. Our everyday life delivers numerous other actions of this kind about which we do not think further. Everything that we accomplish within our so-called vegetative physical life, our digestion, our breathing, and our heartbeats are actions which we carry out without having a consciousness of them. In similar way we carry out reasonable actions during the somnambulistic state, and such actions result from particular external stimuli with absolute necessity.

Now we must ask ourselves: how have we to understand such phenomena? You know perhaps that there are many people who are really of the opinion that we can eavesdrop on the soul independently of the body in such actions that we have to regard such actions as proofs that the soul can perceive independently of its physical organs like eyes and ears, can act independently of conscious reflection. A lot of people believe that we have to regard such actions as a much more immediate expression of the soul which is detached there as it were from the physical and acts and perceives directly from the spiritual. We want to ask ourselves how we have to consider such phenomena in the light of our theosophical view.

Theosophy shows us that the human being is not this single, isolated being which usually appears to us, but that he is connected by means of countless threads with the universe. Theosophy shows us above all that the human being has various things in common with nature that he has various things in common also with the other worlds which our everyday senses do not perceive, and we can understand the actions, about which we have spoken, best of all if we look at the entity of the human being in the theosophical light. Let me, therefore, briefly indicate what theosophy teaches about the entity of the human being.

Theosophy can consider the physical body with all its organs, including the nervous system, the brain and all senses, according to its observation only as one of the members of which the complete human being consists. This physical body contains substances and forces which the human being has in common with the whole remaining physical world. What takes place in us as chemical and physical processes is nothing else than what also happens outside our body in the physical world. But we have to ask ourselves: why do these physical and chemical processes take place within our body in such a way that they are combined to a physical organism? No physical science can give us information about that. Natural sciences can teach us only of that which takes place in physical and chemical processes in us, and, indeed, it would not be appropriate if the naturalist called the human being, therefore, a strolling corpse because he as an anatomist can discover nothing but physical in the human body. Something must be there that holds together the chemical and physical processes, and arranges them as it were in the form as they take place within the human body. We call this next member of the human being the etheric double body in theosophy. This etheric body is in any human being. Somebody who develops a certain clairvoyant capacity can behold this etheric body; the clairvoyant can behold it the easiest.

If a person stands before you and you are a clairvoyant, you are able to put the usual physical body out of your mind. Just as you can do it in the everyday life with things which are before you and to which you do not direct your attention, you are able as a clairvoyant to not direct your attention to the physical body. Then, however, there remains in the space, which the physical body has filled, still the whole physical appearance in the form of the double body which resembles the external physical body very much. It has a very luminous colour which resembles the colour of peach-blossoms. This etheric double body holds together the physical processes. At death the etheric body leaves the physical body with other higher members which we get to know. The physical body is handed over to the earth and carries out nothing but physical processes. The etheric double body causes that this does not happen during life.

Within this etheric double body, even towering above it at different sides, is the third member of the human being, the so-called astral body. This astral body is a kind of image of our impulses, our desires, our passions, our feelings. In this astral body the human being lives like in a cloud, and he is very well discernible for the clairvoyant, whose spiritual eye is opened for such appearance, as a luminous cloud within which the physical body and the etheric double body are. This astral body is different with a person who always follows his animal-like drives, his sensual propensities; there it shows other colours, other cloud-like formations than with a person who has always lived spiritually; it is different with a person who indulges in egoism, from that of a person who devotes himself in unselfish love to his fellow men. Briefly, the life of the soul finds expression in this astral body. But it also passes on the real sensory perception. You can never look for the sensory perception in the senses themselves. What happens if the light of a flame meets my eye? The so-called etheric waves move from the source of light in my eye, they penetrate into my eye, they cause certain chemical processes in the background of my eyeball, they transform the so-called visual purple, and then these chemical processes spread in my brain. My brain perceives the flame, it gets the light impression. If another could see those processes which happen in my brain, what would he perceive? He would perceive nothing but physical processes; he would perceive something that happens in space and time; however, he could not perceive my light impression in my brain among the physical processes. This light impression is something else than a physical impression which forms the basis of these processes. The light impression, the picture which I only must create to myself to be able to perceive the flame is a process within my astral body. Somebody who has a visual organ to be able to perceive such an astral process sees exactly the physical phenomena within the brain transforming in the astral body into the picture of the flame which we experience.

Within these bodies, which I have mentioned to you, within the physical body, the etheric double body and the astral body, is our real ego; what we call our ego in which we become conscious saying: we are it. This ego has higher parts again about which I do not want to speak today. This ego uses the other members of the human being as its tools.

If we understand this composition of the human being, this can also give us a particular view of the phenomena which we find with somnambulists. What takes action then if we are in our usual waking consciousness? A light impression is caused because oscillations of the ether come to my eye and are transformed by the astral body into a picture of light, and one understands this picture as a mental picture; that is why I realise this picture. Now, however, we assume that my ego is eliminated; in the usual sleep such an elimination of the ego is to be noticed.

Today I do not want to tell where this ego is to be sought for; but if we have a sleeping person before ourselves: what do we have before ourselves? In the true sense of the word only somebody whose spiritual eye is opened can give information about that; he exactly beholds the ego together with the astral body being lifted out of the physical body and the etheric double body. But everybody has this as a phenomenon before himself; everybody knows that during sleep the everyday ego, the ego of reality is eliminated, and that the physical body and the etheric double body, which hold it together, are left to their own resources. During our usual day life our ego, our consciousness is always present when we receive the impressions of the outside world; the daytime ego always controls these impressions of the outside world. If this ego is eliminated, we also receive these impressions of the outside world perpetually. Or do you believe if a bell sounds beside you, while you are sleeping, that then this bell causes no oscillations in the air which penetrate into your ear? Do you believe that your ear is differently constructed at night than during the day? This is not the case. Everything that takes place in the physical body during the day also takes place in the sleeping human being. But what is missing? The ego-consciousness does not penetrate the human being, this is missing.

We can show, so to speak, experimentally in natural way which conditions prevail between the single members of the human being, which I have stated. I would like to give you a simple example which one can make easily with every somnambulist. Imagine that a somnambulist gets up at night, sits down to his desk, kindles a candle and tries to write. Now you do the following: you illuminate the room quite brightly using ten lamps for instance—the experiment was done—and the person concerned keeps on writing calmly. Now you extinguish one flame, the small candle flame which he has put beside himself, and he does not keep on writing, he feels as dark; he takes a match, kindles the candle, then he feels it again as a light and can go on working. The other lighting around him does not exist for him, only the flame is there for him which he has taken up in his dream consciousness. The whole remaining sea of light does not exist for him. You see that it is necessary that the human being penetrates his organs of perception from within in a particular way, infiltrates them, so to speak, so that the external sense-perception can take place. It is not only necessary that we have eyes and ears, but it is necessary that we enliven that from within which eye and ear deliver to us that we oppose something from within that transforms it into pictures, into mental pictures and that is why it exists for us.

In the everyday life it is our ego, our bright, waking consciousness which offers resistance of own accord, as it were, from within to the outside world. We need that to lift out the impressions and to make them our impressions of consciousness. Imagine this consciousness being extinguished. What is then still in activity? Then the physical body, the etheric double body and the astral body are still in activity. Now, indeed, this astral body can transform what it receives from without into pictures but not into mental pictures, is not taken up into the waking consciousness. Thus the astral body of the human being transforms such impressions into pictures which surround him, either in irregular way or in regular way if the ego is present, so to speak, at this whole process.

In such a contact with the outside world is the astral body, the soul of the person who is in a somnambulistic state; yes, in a similar state is already the soul of a dreamer. We have only to make a distinction between both kinds of dreams which I have stated: the irregular dreams which mostly penetrate the dream consciousness of the human beings, and the nice, dramatic, symbolic dreams. With the irregular dreams it will be the etheric double body which is above all active and conveys the contacts with the outside world; with the dreams, however, which run in symbolic, dramatic way, it is the astral body of the person which symbolises the outer impressions, expresses them allegorically and transforms them into a quite dramatic dream. Only because in the present level of development our daytime ego is minded more realistically because we rely in our daytime consciousness above all on our deducing, calculating reason, therefore, any single sensory sensation appears to us to be linked with the others as just this is the case in the waking consciousness. However, we can imagine other states of consciousness; we can imagine that the human being looks deeper into nature. Then this purely rational view also comes to an end. This is just again the case of the higher kinds of soul-life. These should concern us less today; but what must occupy us today above all is the question: how is it possible that the human being shows regular actions, certain psychic phenomena in the somnambulistic state, which is an increase of the usual dream state? One can understand that only if one does not consider the human being as an isolated being, but in connection with the whole remaining world according to the theosophical world view; that one realises above all that outside us in the remaining world not only dead matter exists, but that in the outside world higher forces are active.

The human being normally does not put the question to himself: why do we find the laws, the concepts and ideas in the outside world which we have excogitated in our mind in a lonesome twilight hour? The human being mostly does not get the most significant phenomena clear in his mind, phenomena which throw the brightest light on the nature of the human being. However, think only once about the fact that the mathematician sits in his room, mulls over the question what is a circle, an ellipse that he finds this law of the ellipse, of the circle without observation of anything outside him and illustrates them on paper, and then after he has produced these laws out of himself, he finds these laws in the orbits of the planets and in other phenomena of the outside world. It is that way wherever one goes in our spiritual life. The laws which our mind thinks up in the loneliness are the same laws which also control this outside world. If we call that which the human being thinks up wisdom, so we must say: wisdom becomes apparent in the human ego and outdoors in the world we find that the things are built in the same way in which the human being can recognise them using his thinking. But we find if we more exactly look at the world that this wisdom of the world excels even a lot of that which the human being can think up and concoct.

I give some extreme examples: take the performances of the beavers. The performances of the beavers are of really astonishing kind, not only that their dens are true creations of an instinctive architecture which could not be more perfect if one erected them according to all rules of mechanics and engineering. No, they deliver something else: they protect themselves in their hiding places by means of dams with which they keep the water away, accelerate or slow down it in certain way. These dams are built in such a way against the power of the water that an engineer who has learnt long to get to know the mechanical principles according to which one must make such an arrangement best of all could not make them better. Yes, they are built in such a way that one can calculate from the inclination of these dams and from the angles which speed or power the flowing water has. They are constructed in such a way that the engineer could not calculate them better in his engineering firm using his science which a lot of human thoughts and endeavours has produced.

Now another example: consider a usual human femur. This femur is, if you look at it with the microscope, no compact structure like a piece of mortar, but the bone seems to be fragile, a composition of delicate formations which are built up like a quite delicate frame and scaffolding. A network of fine bone trabeculae is built up; these are interwoven and support each other; and if one study this whole network of bone trabeculae, one perceives a strange wisdom of nature with the construction of such an organism. If one wanted to build, for example, a scaffolding which should support the single parts of a frame in such a way that one achieves the greatest possible effect with the slightest expenditure of energy, one could not make better than nature in its wisdom has constructed such a femur from countless small bone trabeculae which hold and support each other. You find the wisdom that the human being can invent after many mental efforts in any single part of nature.

If we could study nature, we could pour out our mind over nature, so that we could perceive in nature outside, then we would perceive nature not as a product by chance, but as the result of infinite wisdom. Imagine instead that the calculating reason perceives the impressions of the outside world through the gates of the senses and can only think about that which it perceives from without, imagine instead that you would have no senses, but the reason would be poured out as it were over the whole nature. You would not perceive the effects of the things on our senses but the being of the things themselves, then you would stand in the wisdom of nature, then you would be a part of the wise nature. One can attain this really, if our waking consciousness is eliminated. One attains that with somnambulists as I have suggested now. I said that one may imagine that our reason, our consciousness forces its way from our brain and penetrates the wisdom of nature in any of its performances and facts.

Because we have such clear, waking consciousness, we are secluded from the remaining nature; that is why we must receive the impressions of nature through the gates of our senses. Here is the flame, it makes an impression on my eye; the eye is the gate through which the impression gets to my consciousness. My consciousness causes the mental pictures from within. I am secluded from the outside world because I have sensory gates, and this outside world must enter through the sensory gates into my consciousness first. I am in the situation in my consciousness compared with the remaining world like somebody who stands on a meadow and has a view in all directions and then enters a small house and takes note of everything that is on the meadow only through the windows of the small house.

Thus is the wisdom of the whole nature which we perceive in every bone, in every plant which appears from the starry heaven down to the microscopic smallest particle of the body. This wise nature has entered as it were into our consciousness as in a single point and has erected the shell of our organs with their sensory gates round us. Our consciousness is secluded from this being outside and can take up the being outside only through the sensory gates.

However, if you eliminate the consciousness, then you get contact, then you live really again connected with the outside world; because the astral body is not separated from the remaining world like the ego, your immediate consciousness. No, everywhere astral threads run out in all directions, so that you witness the life of the whole outside world and not only that of the physical nature, but also the astral and spiritual processes which are perpetually around us. We perceive them if our consciousness is eliminated. What we remember, think up and deduce appears in the somnambulistic state immediately as a phenomenon which the outside nature leads in. As well as you see no star in the sky during the day with the bright sunshine, while, nevertheless, the whole sky is covered with stars because the bright sunshine outshines the light of the stars, it is the same with our bright waking consciousness. What exists in our physical or astral bodies is a weak light, are weak processes which the bright waking consciousness drowns out. If we extinguish this, it will become visible what takes action in the lower bodies like the stars become visible if the sun does no longer shine. In such circumstances are somnambulistic persons and, therefore, we have to realise that the person is in a closer, more immediate connection with the remaining nature if a somnambulistic state happens. It is in such a way to use a nice expression of the German thinker Stilling who characterised this circumstances wonderfully at the end of 18th and outset of the 19th century: “if the sun of the bright daytime consciousness sets, the stars shine in the somnambulistic consciousness.”

Nevertheless, we have to ask ourselves: can we rely on these phenomena which appear during the somnambulistic state? They are true phenomena, they concern a reality; but this reality approaches us with exclusion of the organ which the human being has developed gradually, so that he can orientate himself in the world, with exclusion of his bright daytime consciousness. A state is really caused in the human being which reveals something to him that remains, otherwise, concealed but which downgrades him from a level which he got once. Because we know as theosophists that the states which the human being reaches this way and which should allegedly be “higher,” are really states which he has gone through before he attained his present full human consciousness.

I cannot explain that to you today; but just as the scientific theory of evolution shows us the purely physical evolutionary processes, theosophy shows us that the human beings gradually got to the level which they have today. This consciousness, through which we orient ourselves in our environment, only appeared after we had gone through other states of consciousness in millions of years of slow development. The human being had a kind of dream consciousness before he developed this bright daytime consciousness in himself. At that time he was really a being which did not perceive the processes round itself in the way as we perceive them with our bright daytime consciousness, but everything round us was symbolised, as well as the dream symbolises even today.

A big number of the legends which are still preserved come from such times in which the human beings were still near this dream consciousness and formed these symbolic legends. About that you can find more precise information in a very interesting book of my deceased friend Ludwig Laistner who collected the different forms of legends of the world and showed how these legends were worked out from a symbolising human consciousness not yet awoken to the daytime consciousness. There some legends are really attributed to such states of the somnambulistic consciousness.

If we go back even farther, we get to lower and lower states which were, however, closer to nature and to the starting point of the physical evolution at the same time. When the human being began as a wish of the divine being at first, he was generally in a kind of deep trance. At that time the whole humankind was in a kind of deep trance, in a similar trance in which today those somnambulists can be who can be transported into the deepest, so-called magnetic sleeping states. The human being has gone through all these states once, and now we are in the period of the bright waking consciousness. This is even a transitional state which leads us to that ability within the waking consciousness that the human being had in former times but without the waking consciousness, because it was not yet developed.

This is the future course of human development: again pouring out the spirit on nature directly to become clairvoyant with full waking consciousness. Some among us who have developed their inner organs using certain methods which theosophy gives are already ahead of the development and able to look really with full waking consciousness into this world of the beings and the spiritual life which surrounds us. Today certain individualities are already among us who are, so to speak, again free of the gates of the senses who are in immediate contact with the spiritual environment. On account of their clairvoyant ability they experience the higher facts with full waking consciousness which are closed to the usual consciousness as we go through between tables and chairs, where they perceive the spiritual world round themselves, which surrounds us at every moment. The theosophical teachings flowed from such views. The somnambulistic consciousness delivers similar teachings in certain respect, and what a somnambulistic person can see after elimination of the bright waking consciousness is often the same that the clairvoyant sees with his bright waking consciousness. But the somnambulist can never control what she/he sees; the somnambulist never is able to control what she/he tells you about spiritual processes in the environment what she/he tells you about percepts which one cannot see by means of the senses. He/she cannot even control whether that which he/she perceives is really true, as she/he perceives it.

The strangest delusions may happen to the somnambulists. You can stand before this somnambulist and can say to her/him that you are a person living at another place. The somnambulist will believe this absolutely, will have the true impression that you are that man as whom you pose. The somnambulist believes it, and this becomes the danger. If the somnambulist informs us not only about such easily controllable matters, but if the somnambulist informs us about the higher world which we cannot perceive with the senses, about the so-called astral world or about the higher spiritual world, then it can happen that the somnambulist says to you that she/he perceives any deceased person. Indeed, the somnambulist perceives a spiritual fact, she/he perceives a being; but it does not need to be right that this being is the deceased person in question. This can be another being, a being which generally has nothing to do at all with a usual earthly being. It may be a being which lives in the astral world and has never entered into an earthly world. Briefly, the somnambulist can never convince her/himself because he/she does not have the controlling consciousness whether the impression which he/she had is the right one.

This is a danger for the somnambulist, above all a danger which the astral world immediately offers if one enters it. This astral world has—I can say this only by way of a hint—quite different concepts, for example, of good and bad, Our earthly world has concepts of good and bad which are adjusted to our sensuous states. The astral world has another good and bad. If now the somnambulistic person perceives in the astral world, his concepts of good and bad are shaken very easily, and this is the reason why somnambulistic media that inform you in the beginning really only about true matters out of this somnambulistic state of consciousness can be ruined thoroughly in time, so that they can impossibly distinguish deception from reality.

It is a matter of course for somebody who knows these higher realms that he does not presuppose that the medium has cheated, even if the facts are not correct. A mediumistic woman may go, for example, to the next best corner shop—this is a case of whose truth I have convinced myself, she is in such a somnambulistic state, that her ego-consciousness, her waking consciousness is extinguished; she buys a small picture of a saint which she puts in her pocket. Then she gets out of this somnambulistic state and has no notion where she got the small picture from. Later she gets—the somnambulistic states are of very intricate kind—again in the trance state and produces the small picture as something that she has brought in from the super-sensible world to this world. The somnambulistic woman, the medium, never has a notion of the fact that she herself bought this small picture or in which way she got it. She is absolutely honest in the usual sense, although the fact is a feigning. Thus the case can happen because of the influence which is exerted on such a somnambulist after the elimination of the waking consciousness that a deception takes place; however, the medium needs not to be a swindler, but she may be completely intact and honest.

This shows you that we can do nothing but to position ourselves on the theosophical point of view if we consider the question of somnambulism Theosophy and the theosophical movement are of the determined view that one should enter the higher spiritual world, which can also be made accessible to us by somnambulists, only in the presence of a clairvoyant with a waking consciousness who knows how to get used to the spiritual world, who knows a lot about the spiritual world like about the physical one.

Therefore, theosophy demands that if experiments with media should be done—and, indeed, conditions may happen where this is recommended—that they take place only in the presence of a perfect expert, of a clairvoyant working with waking consciousness who can have an overview of everything that happens there really, while the medium and normally also those who experiment with the medium are not able to have an overview of this. Such mediumistic phenomena do not involve a danger at any rate; but we have seen that this danger may result because the sense of direction is missing. Every clairvoyant who works with waking consciousness knows at any single moment what takes action and what a somnambulist sees really, even though she/he pretends to see something else; he knows which influence really takes place, even though the somnambulist pretends that this or that influence takes place. This is just the difference between spiritual science and other similar attempts. I would not like to doubt the truth of the other attempts in any way, but its reality also applies, of course, as well as it applies to other attempts. Because such experiences cannot achieved in one go, because it is impossible that a complete ideal is realised at every point in time, therefore, theosophy does not regard as its task to combat other spiritual attempts like the experiments with somnambulists, because one knows that these experiments produce the same result in the end: the conviction of a spiritual world round us.

But the theosophical movement itself tries only to perform under the ideal of the conscious clairvoyance what it has to do in accordance with other spiritual movements. In accordance with other spiritual movements it wants to work, it wants to look at the other spiritual movements as its brother movements. It is ready any time, if it is asked for advice whether this and that is real and true in this or that sense, to give this advice. However, it will let all spiritual attempts be carried out only under the aegis of the expert clairvoyance. This applies to the spiritistic like other spiritual attempts. Occult researches are to be carried out for the purposes of theosophy only under the influence of individualities who can have an exact overview, in conscious way what it concerns. Also one is allowed to heal spiritually only in such a way as one heals physically: with full conscious overseeing the concerning circumstances.

Theosophy looks at the somnambulistic phenomena that way. You see that the theosophical view defers somewhat from the superficial external view which sees in the somnambulistic phenomena nothing else than pathological, abnormal phenomena to be rejected, and it also has somewhat different views of these phenomena than those have who believe only on account of them to get to know the higher spiritual life. Theosophy knows where these phenomena come from. It can inform of these phenomena using its clairvoyance. It considers the other attempts and movements, however, which are related to these phenomena in the sense that they regard them as manifestations of the spiritual life as brother movements, with which it strives for the same goal: to give a spiritual, a really idealistic world view, a true knowledge of the spiritual world to the present materialistic humankind.

This is a deep truth which a German seer about whom one normally does not know that he is a seer, namely Goethe, expressed that we cannot unveil the secrets of nature with the help of our tools, not by mechanical, physical tools, but that the mind has to search for the spirit everywhere

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

But Goethe did not doubt the manifestations of the spirit around us; because he realised clearly what he expressed in his Faust in the nice words from which he said that a sage spoke them:

The spirit world is not sealed off –
Your mind is closed, your heart is dead!
Go, neophyte, and boldly bathe
Your mortal breast in roseate dawn!
Faust I, verses 443-446

An excellent contribution to the history of German dramaturgy was recently made by Heinrich Bischoff. (Ludwig Tieck als Dramaturg. Bruxelles, Office de publicite). Tieck's relationship to dramatic literature and the theater requires an objective appraisal. Bischoff has summarized the reasons for this well in his introductory chapter. "I do not know," wrote Loebell to Tieck's biographer R. Köpke in 1854, "whether there is a second example in the whole of literature of a hatred against an author that so dominates the criticism than against L. Tieck. - For example, the Low German word "Schrullen", which otherwise hardly occurs in the written language, has been found for Tieck's critical opinions. The Bremen-Lower Saxon dictionary explains Schrulle as "an attack of nonsense, evil, foolish mood. And G.Schlesier accuses Tieck in the "Allgemeine Theater-Revue, (Stuttgart and Tübingen, 1st year, S.3 f.), he has broken the German theater, blocked its path and its development, misled the poets and actors and cheated them of a happy development of their talent". Tieck's critical masterpiece, the "Dramaturgische Blätter, would like to banish Schlesier for a few hundred years; there is poison on every page of it."

Bischoff cites a variety of reasons for this unprecedented underestimation of Tieck. Tieck was regarded as the head of the Romantic school. This is why opponents of this literary movement hated him from the outset. Personal envy was also a factor among his contemporaries. "We know for certain that Tieck fought a hard battle in Dresden, where he developed his main dramaturgical activity, against a small-minded, ill-intentioned party that envied his intellectual superiority. The Young Germans, Heine, Laube, Gutzkow, to whom Tieck was opposed in a series of his novellas: Reise ins Blaue, Wassermensch, Eigensinn und Laune, Vogelscheuche, Liebeswerben, were also ill-disposed towards him."

In more recent times, finally, little effort has been made to study Tieck's dramaturgical writings. The judgment of his contemporaries and immediate successors is taken without much scrutiny. "A striking example is provided by the recently published work by E. Wolff, "Geschichte der deutschen Literatur in der Gegenwarv. In his overview of the history of German dramaturgy, Wolff not only makes no mention of Tieck, but also ascribes to O. Ludwig's "Shakespeare-Studien" the merit that is due to Tieck's "Dramaturgische Blätter". The "clarifying reckoning with Schiller was carried out by Tieck almost half a century before O. Ludwig. The conclusion reached by O. Ludwig that true historical tragedy must return from Schiller to Shakespeare is, so to speak, the pivotal point of Tieck's dramaturgical writings. Just as Lessing settled accounts with the French, Tieck settled accounts with Schiller, with full recognition of his talent and merits, and, like Lessing, pointed to Shakespeare. This is why it is not Ludwig's "Shakespeare-Studien" but Tieck's "Dramaturgische Blätter" that stand out as a landmark in the history of German dramaturgy."

The fact that he did not present his views in a closed system, but rather occasionally, has also contributed greatly to Tieck's misunderstanding. They can be found scattered throughout his various writings. Bischoff gives an overview of the writings that come into consideration: (a) the preliminary reports to his poetic works, (b) the conversations about art and literature in "Phantasus", (c) the satirical outbursts in the fairy tale comedies and Schwänken, especially in "Zerbino" and "Puss in Boots", d) the "Unterhaltungen mit Tieck" contained in the second volume of Köpke's biography, e) as the main source the "Kritische Schriften", which Tieck published in four volumes with Brockhaus in Leipzig from 1848-1852, f) the "Nachgelassene Schriften" published by Köpke can be considered as an appendix.

Ludwig Tieck was not fond of aesthetic studies. He was of the opinion that theory could never be used to make the fine distinctions that come into consideration in art. One must theoretically exaggerate the truth in some direction in order to arrive at a precise definition. That is why such theories remain stuck in half-truth, if they do not have to resort to the completely untrue.

Bischoff proves himself to be a good psychologist by establishing the difference between Tieck the dramatist and Tieck the dramatist. Anyone who overlooks this must underestimate Tieck. In Tieck's dramas an unclear fantasy prevails; nowhere does the poet know how to restrain the creations of the imagination by critical reason; there is little to be found of orderly composition, and yet Tieck, the dramaturge, demands artistic deception from the drama first and foremost. This can never be achieved with such an overgrowth of fantasy as prevails in his own dramas. Tieck the dramatist demands an image of life; Tieck the playwright gives a fantastic play. Furthermore, Tieck, the dramatist, seeks his material in the Middle Ages; at the same time, as a dramatist, he demands the immediate presence of the action. As a critic, Tieck frowned upon mood-painting in drama; as a poet, he inserted ottavas, tercinas, stanzas and canzonas into his dramas, which serve nothing but to lyrically paint the mood.

In his "Karl von Berneck", Tieck drew the true archetype of a gruesome tragedy of fate; yet as a critic he condemns this dramatic genre in the harshest terms.

Bischoff explains this dichotomy in Tieck's personality in a plausible way. One must distinguish between two periods in his work: a Romantic period, which lasts until around 1820, and a period which is characterized by a turning away from all Romanticism and a return to a more realistic view of the world. The dramas belong to the first period, the dramaturgical studies fall into the time after the change in his basic aesthetic convictions. "Tieck concludes his Romantic production with "Fortunat" before turning to modern life in his novellas, a long series of which he began in 1820, and depicting it in a predominantly realistic manner." "The sharp contrast between his dramatic and dramaturgical production is thus explained by a complete change in his aesthetic views; his dramaturgical activity only began when his dramatic work was finished."

Tieck's "Letters on Shakespeare" were published in 1810. At this time, the views of the Romantics were also his own. But over time, he turned away from these views completely. He expressed this clearly to Köpke: "They wanted to make me the head of a so-called Romantic school. Nothing has been further from my mind than that, just as everything in my entire life has been party-oriented. Nevertheless, people never stopped writing and speaking against me in this way, but only because they didn't know me. If I were asked to give a definition of the romantic, I would not be able to do so. I don't know how to make a distinction between poetic and romantic." "The word romantic, which one hears used so often, and often in such a wrong way, has done a lot of harm. It has always annoyed me when I have heard people talk about romantic poetry as a special genre. People want to contrast it with classical poetry and use it to describe a contrast. But poetry is and remains first and foremost poetry, it will always and everywhere have to be the same, whether you call it classical or romantic." - For Tieck, the greatest, the typical dramatist is Shakespeare. At first, this enthusiasm for Shakespeare may well have been of romantic origin. But in his mature years he reproaches Romantic Shakespeare criticism for detaching Shakespeare from the general course of development of his time and presenting him as a miracle that had fallen from the sky. Nevertheless, there is no great difference between Tieck's view of Shakespeare and that of Schlegel. It is not his opposition to Romanticism that is particularly clear. Rather, this is the case with his judgment of Calderon. Tieck sees Calderon's powerful influence on German drama as a pernicious one: "Soon Calderon had become our nation's favorite poet without further criticism. The accidental, the strange, the conventional, which his time imposed on him, or which he elevated to artificiality, was not only equated with the essential, the great dramatic in his works, but often preferred to the truly poetic. People forgot for a long time what they had recently admired in both Germans and Englishmen, and, however unequal the two poets might be, Calderon and Shakespeare were probably regarded as twin brothers; and others, still more enthusiastic, thought that Calderon began to speak where Shakespeare left off, or performed those difficult tasks in a grand manner which the colder Northerner did not feel equal to; even Goethe and even Schiller took a back seat to the drunks at that time, those intoxicated people who truly and seriously believed that true salvation for poetry could only come from the Spaniards and especially from Calderon. "

The critic Tieck detested most was the German tragedy of fate. He turned against the blind, demonic fear of fate, which played such a large role in the world view of Romanticism, in the sharpest way and with biting derision, although the same power plays a terrible role in his youthful dramas. "Karl von Berneck" is, as far as I know, the first time an attempt has been made to introduce fate in this way. A ghost who is to be redeemed by the fulfillment of a strange oracle, an old guilt of the house that must be purged by a new crime, which appears at the end of the play as love and innocence, a virgin whose tender heart forgives even the murderer, the ghost of an unforgiving mother, everything in love and hate, except for a sword itself that has already been used for a crime, must serve a higher purpose without it being able to be changed, without the characters knowing it. I realized even then how different this fate was from that of Greek tragedy, but I deliberately wanted to substitute the ghostly for the spiritual". He later condemned such dramatization: "Instead of debts and financial hardship, a crime, kidnapping, adultery, murder, blood; instead of the uncle, stern father, strange old man or general, heaven itself, which is even more stubborn than those family characters and cruel to boot, because it knows no other development than fear of death and burial."

The contrast between Tieck, the dramatist, and Tieck, the playwright, becomes clear in Tieck's harsh condemnation of the dramas of the mature Schiller. It seems like a mockery of his own production when Tieck bitterly rebukes the workings of fate in the "Bride of Messina". For Schiller attempted to give the dark rule of fate a semblance of necessity; while Tieck himself, in his "Abschied" and "Karl von Berneck", grants it a desolate reign in the form of chance.

Tieck's rejection of the Romantic as opposed to the natural, the human, is expressed most harshly in his criticism of Schiller's and Goethe's anticizing tendencies. He is generally an enemy of humanism, which carries ancient education and views into modern life. He believed that art could only flourish if it drew its content from the soil of the national. In "Goethe and his time" he speaks out against humanism: "It would be desirable that a mind as brilliant as Rousseau's or Fichte's should show, with the same sharp, perhaps even sharper one-sidedness than they wrote about the closed commercial state and the harm of the sciences, what a disadvantage knowledge of the ancients has brought us. How everything that was still remembered has sunk into contempt, how all new, good and correct endeavors have been inhibited, how the peculiar, patriotic has often been destroyed by a wrong worship and half-understanding of the ancients." And in his dramatic fairy tale "The Life and Deeds of Little Thomas, Called Thumbelina", he mocks by ironically depicting objects borrowed from folk tales, for example the seven-league boots, in an antique light: "Believe me, I can see from these boots that they have come down to us from ancient Greece; no, no, no modern artist does such work, so secure, simple, noble in cut, such engravings! Oh, this is a work by Phidias, I won't let that be taken away from me. Just look at it, when I place one of them like this, how completely sublime, sculptural, in quiet grandeur, no excess, no flourish, no Gothic addition, nothing of that romantic mixture of our days, where sole, leather, flaps, folds, tufts, jizz, everything must contribute to produce variety, splendor, a dazzling being that has nothing ideal; the leather should shine, the sole should creak, miserable rhyming being, this consonance in appearance; . .I have modeled myself after the ancients, they will not let us fall in any of our endeavors." Tieck has the court cobbler Zahn say this.

The modern world and modern life are fundamentally different from those of the Greeks, Tieck believes. This is why he condemns the dragging of ancient ways into modern drama, as demanded by Goethe, Schiller and the two Schlegels. Tieck also valued above all that which approached the modern in its presentation and conception, such as the dramas of Euripides, while the Graecomans were more attracted to Sophocles and Aeschylus, in which the specifically Greek is expressed more purely. The praise that Goethe and Schiller bestowed on Aristotle was thoroughly repugnant to Tieck. He sees a fundamental difference between the living conditions of Greek and German drama. For the Greeks, it was the shaping of the fable, the plots that mattered; for the moderns, the main thing is the development of the characters. "The newer drama is obviously essentially different from the old; it has lowered the tone, motives, character sketches, the contingencies of life are more prominent, the emotional forces and moods develop more clearly, the composition is richer and more varied, and the relationship to public life, the constitution, religion and the people is either silenced or stands in a completely different relationship to the work itself. The meaning of life, its aberrations, the individual, the strange, have been given more prominence; and those authors who have sometimes tried to strike the round, full tone of the old tragedy have almost always lapsed into bombast and the tone of Seneca."

Tieck contrasts the modern character drama with the old situation drama. At the center of his dramaturgical explanations is the idea that modern drama has the task of cultivating characterization and realism. He therefore turns against Schiller's idealism and never tires of opposing it with Shakespearean realism.

Consistent with these statements are Tieck's following comments on Goethe: "I admired Goethe immensely in his youthful poems and still admire him; I have spoken and written so much in his praise that, when I now hear so many uncalled-for panegyrists, I could still be tempted in my old age to write a book against Goethe for a change. For there can be no mistake about the fact that he, too, has his weaknesses, which posterity will certainly recognize." "We must never concede," is another statement, "that Goethe later stood higher in his enthusiasm, poetic power and opinion than in his youth... His striving for the many-sided has fragmented his powers, his consciously looking around has caused him doubt and at times removed his enthusiasm."

In contrast, Tieck emphasizes the stamp of the German spirit and the truly modern character in the dramas of the Sturm und Dränger. His judgment of Heinrich von Kleist gives us a good insight into Tieck's view. His deep penetration into the characters portrayed and his truthful realism cannot be emphasized often enough. His comments on the "Prince of Homburg" are particularly characteristic. He rebuked the public, who had become accustomed to seeing all heroes drawn according to a certain template. The general concept of a hero has clouded the view that an individual heroic figure can also be like the Prince of Homburg. According to this general concept, a hero should above all despise death and hold life in low esteem. But Kleist once drew a hero whose fear of death is understandable from the nature of his soul.

Bischoff correctly describes Tieck's relationship with Lessing. This relationship also illustrates Tieck's attitude towards naturalism. Lessing, according to Tieck, had turned with zeal against the eccentricity and silliness of conventional idealism. But he fell into the error of wanting to depict nature as such. In this way, he became the inventor and creator of domestic, natural, sensitive, petty and thoroughly untheatrical theater. For Tieck, despite his realistic creed, never wanted to see mere naturalness on the stage, but rather a deepened naturalness recognized in its essence. This is why Kleist's characters, who reveal their souls, seemed more dramatic to him than Lessing's characters, who are assembled from individual observations.

One result of Tieck's views on drama is his comments on the art of acting. In the great battle between the Hamburg and Weimar schools, he took the side of those who defended and practised the former. He did not want declamation, but character portrayal, not the beautiful, but the meaningful. He is said to have spoken harshly against Goethe's view of the art of acting. He probably made derisive remarks about the rules as defended by the Weimar poet and theater director: that everything should be beautifully portrayed, that the spectator's eye should be stimulated by graceful groupings and attitudes, or that the actor should first consider not working out the natural, but presenting it ideally. In this respect Tieck is much closer to modern views than Goethe. He had no understanding of the fact that the actor must always turn three quarters of his face towards the audience, never play in profile, nor turn his back to the spectators. Tieck called such acting artificial declamation and false emphasis. In contrast, he praises Schröder: "It is simplicity and truth that characterized Schröder, that he did not adopt a captivating manner, never rose and fell in tones in declamation without necessity, never pursued the effect merely to excite it, never struck up that singing lament in pain or emotion, but always led the natural speech through correct nuances and never abandoned it."

Tieck is said to have been a captivating reader. He proved precisely how highly he valued a stylistically perfect form of speech despite his demand for naturalness.

In general, Tieck's aspirations should not be confused with demands for a complete stripping away of everything that the stage demands by its very nature. He had a keen sense of the possibilities of the theater. Characteristic is what he says about the decorations: "Why should the stage not be decorated where it suits, amuse with dress and dance? Why should a thunderstorm not be represented naturally? There is only talk of this not becoming the main thing and displacing the poet and actor." The ideal that Tieck had in mind for the stage was a middle ground between the old English stage with its lack of ornamentation and the modern development of all kinds of refined means, which only blunt the receptivity for the actual poetry. In 1843, he staged Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" with the help of the three-storey Mystery Stage, because this arrangement avoids the countless transformations that destroy all coherence and destroy a sensation that was just in the making.

Devrient, the author of the "History of German Dramatic Art", was the most enthusiastic in his recognition of Tieck's services to German dramaturgy. While working on this work, on March 24, 1847, Devrient wrote to Tieck: "The History of German Dramatic Art, which I have undertaken to edit, brings everything I have ever heard from you about the nature of our art back to my mind, the further and deeper I research, and makes so much that I otherwise doubted become a complete conviction. I feel more and more in agreement with what you have said here and there in your works about the development of the German stage - unfortunately it is far too little for my needs - so that I have come to recognize your views as the most infallible."

You will have come to realise from many of my lectures that a deep significance underlies the world of saga, that myths are the expression of esoteric truths. Today I should like to speak of one of the most interesting of these sagas, one that has a bearing on the evolution of our fifth root-race.¹ At the same time I shall be able to show you that the esotericist can pass through three stages in the understanding of saga. First, the sagas live in one or other of the peoples and are understood exoterically in their literal meaning. Then disbelief in their literal interpretation begins, and educated people search for their symbolic meaning. Behind these two interpretations are hidden five others, for every saga, has seven interpretations. The third stage is the one in which they can, in a way, be taken literally again. Of course, you have first to come to understand the language in which they are expressed. To-day I want to speak of one that is not very easy to understand, I want to speak of the Prometheus saga.

In a chapter in the second volume of her Secret Doctrine² Madame Blavatsky refers to this saga, and what she writes will enable you to see what a profound meaning is hidden in it. Nevertheless, it is not always possible to say the last word in published works. To-day we can go a little beyond the explanations given by Blavatsky.

Prometheus belongs to the world of Greek saga. He and his brother Epimetheus are the sons of a Titan, Japetus. The Titans are themselves sons of the ancient Greek god Uranus and his wife Gaia. Uranus means ‘heaven’, and Gaia ‘earth’. And let me draw your attention to the fact that Uranus is to the Greeks the same as Varuna to the Indians. Thus Prometheus is a Titan and one of the sons of Uranus, as is also his brother Epimetheus. Chronos (Time) usurped the throne of his father Uranus and obtained the rulership for himself. For this he was in his turn dethroned by his own sons and, with all the other Titans, cast into the underworld. Only Prometheus and his brother Epimetheus remained loyal to Zeus during these events. They fought side by side with Zeus against the other Titans.

Now Zeus had created the human race. But humanity had become rebellious, hence he wanted to exterminate it. Then Prometheus made himself humanity's representative. He devised a plan to give men the means whereby they could save themselves and be no longer entirely dependent upon the help of Zeus. Thus we are told that Prometheus taught men the use of writing and of the arts, but above all the use of fire. Because of Zeus's anger Prometheus was chained to the Caucasus, and was forced to endure there much suffering over a long period.

Further, we are told that the gods, with Zeus at their head, then caused Hephaestus, the god of the smiths, to make a statue of a woman. This female statue was provided with all those external attributes which adorn human beings of the fifth root-race. This woman was Pandora. She was sent to bring gifts to mankind, first to Epimetheus, the brother of Prometheus. Prometheus warned his brother not to accept the gifts, but the latter allowed himself to be persuaded. All these gifts of the gods, except one, were showered upon humanity. They constitute for the most part human miseries and sufferings. Only the gift of hope was withheld in Pandora's box.

Thus Prometheus was chained to the Caucasus and a vulture gnawed continuously at his liver. But he knows something which will ensure his rescue. He knows a secret of which even Zeus is ignorant, a secret which Zeus is trying to discover. But Prometheus does not betray the secret, although Zeus sends to him Hermes, the messenger of the gods.

Now in the course of the story we are told of a remarkable release. Prometheus can only be freed through the intervention of an initiate. Such a one “was Hercules, who performed the twelve labours. The execution of these twelve labours was the achievement of an initiate. They symbolise the twelve tasks of initiation. Moreover it is said of Hercules that he had undergone initiation into the Eleusinian Mysteries. Nevertheless someone had to be sacrificed, and so Chiron the centaur was sacrificed for Prometheus Chiron was already suffering from an incurable malady. He was half animal and half man. That is how Prometheus was rescued.

This is the exoteric saga of Prometheus. In it lies the whole history of the fifth root-race, and in it real Mystery-truth is hidden. The story was told in Greece as genuine saga; but it was also represented in the Mysteries, so pupils in the Mysteries had a knowledge of the destiny of Prometheus before them. And in Prometheus and his destiny they were meant to see the past and the future of the whole of the fifth root-race. You will only be able to understand this if you bear in mind one thing.

In the middle of Lemuria there came about for the first time what we call incarnation, incarnation in the sense in which we have human beings to-day. Mankind was guided by great leaders and teachers whom we call ‘the sons of the fire mist’. To-day the fifth root-race is also guided by great initiates, but our initiate are different from the leaders of mankind at that time. You must now come to understand what this difference was. There is a great difference between the leaders of the two preceding root-races and those of our fifth race. The leaders of those races too were united in a White Lodge. But they did not undergo their earlier evolution on our earth planet, but in another environment. They descended to earth already mature, descended as human beings of higher development, in order to instruct men who were still in their infancy, in order to teach them the first arts which they needed. This period of instruction lasted through the third, fourth, and right into the fifth root-race.

This fifth root-race originated in a little band of men who were singled out from the previous root-race. They were led into the Desert of Gobi and later dispersed over the earth. Their first leader, the leader who gave the impulse for this evolution of mankind, was one of those whom we call the Manus, he was the Manu³ of the fifth root-race. This Manu is still one of those leaders of the humanity who descended at the time of the third root-race, one of the leaders who had not gone through their evolution only on the earth but who brought maturity to earth with them.

It was not until the fifth root-race that the development of men such as we are ourselves began, the development of men who, like us, have undergone their evolution on the earth alone, men who have evolved from their lowest stages entirely on the earth.

Thus we have some human beings who are already exalted Leaders and Masters, and others who strive to become such Leaders. Within the fifth root-race, therefore, we have Chelas and Masters⁴ who have passed through all that our earth has passed through. One of the Masters who has the guidance of the fifth root-race is destined to undertake the guidance of the sixth. The sixth root-race will be the first to be guided by an earthly Brother as its Manu. The earlier Masters surrender the leadership to mankind.

With the dawn of our fifth root-race we have the beginning of all that we call the development of the arts, the development of skill and dexterity. The Atlanteans still led quite a different life. They had no inventions and discoveries. They worked in an entirely different way. Their technique and their skill were quite different. It was only with our fifth root-race that what we call engineering and craftsmanship in our sense developed. The most important discovery was that of fire. You must be quite clear about this, you must be quite clear how much of our widespread engineering, industry and craftsmanship depends upon fire. I think that the engineer will agree with me when I say that without fire nothing of modern engineering would be possible, so that we may say that the discovery of fire was the fundamental discovery, the discovery that gave the impulse to all others. And you must also understand that at the time when the Prometheus saga arose, the term ‘fire’ comprised everything in any way connected with warmth. Fire was also understood to be the cause of lightning. Fire was the comprehensive expression for the causes of all phenomena of warmth.

The consciousness that humanity of the fifth root-race stands under the sign of fire is what is primarily expressed in the Prometheus saga. And Prometheus is none other than the representative of the entire root-race. His brother is Epimetheus. Prometheus means ‘thinking in advance’, Epimetheus means ‘thinking afterwards, reflecting’. There you have the two activities of human thought, clearly contrasted in the man of reflection and the man of forethought The reflecting man is the man who allows the things of this world to work upon him, and then thinks; such thought is the Kama-Manas⁵ thinking. To-day the man of the fifth root-race still thinks predominantly like Epimetheus. However in so far as he does not merely allow what is already there to work upon him, but becomes an inventor or a discoverer, to that extent he is a Prometheus. Inventions could never be made if all men were like Epimetheus. An invention occurs when a human being creates something that was not there before. It is first there in thought and then the thought is converted into reality. That is Prometheus-thinking. This Prometheus-thinking in the fifth root-race is Manas-thinking.⁶ Kama-Manas and Manas run like two streams side by side in the fifth root-race. The Manas-thinking will gradually become more and more widespread.

This Manas-thinking of the fifth root-race has yet another peculiar characteristic, which we understand if we look back to the Atlantean root-race. In Atlantis there was more of an instinctive thinking which was still bound up with the life-force. The Atlantean root-race was still able to make motor-power from the force in seeds. Just as to-day we have in our railway coal-yards a kind of reservoir of power for the movement of engines and freight, in the same way the Atlanteans had stores of plant-seed containing power, which they were still able to convert into power to drive those air-ships which are described in Scott Elliott's book on Atlantis.⁷ The spirit of the Atlantean man was still able to subjugate living nature; the spirit of the fifth root-race can only control lifeless nature, the latent forces that lie in stone, in minerals. Thus the Manas of the fifth root-race is chained to the mineral forces, as the Atlantean race was bound up with the life forces. All Promethean force is chained to the rock, to the earth. Hence, too, Peter is the rock upon which the Christ built. It is the same as the rock of the Caucasus. The man of the fifth race has to seek his evolution on the physical plane. He is chained to the inorganic forces.

Try to acquire an idea of what we mean when we speak of this engineering, this technology, of the fifth root-race. What is its purpose? Viewing the matter generally, you will see that when intelligence, the power of Manas is applied to the inorganic, to the mineral world, the results of all these powers of invention and discovery, however prodigious, are by and large in the service of human egotism, of men's personal interests. Starting from the earliest inventions and going on right up to the telephone, one of our latest inventions, you will see what mighty forces have been made serviceable to us. But what ends do they serve, what is it that we transport by rail and steamer from foreign lands? Foodstuffs. We order food by telephone. It is really human karma that begins with these inventions and discoveries in the fifth root-race. This is what an objective study of the matter must make clear to us. Then we shall understand that the higher man, that higher man who has been plunged into matter, is in fact, during the fifth root-race, chained to it. Therefore it is in matter that his karma will reach its fulfilment.

If you enter into esoteric realms, you will find that man's principles have a specific relationship with his organs. Sometime I will explain this more fully. To-day I will mention only that our seven principles have a specific relationship with the organs of the human body.

First we have what we call the physical. This has an occult connection with the upper part of the face, with the root of the nose. When the physical structure of man took its start (man was formerly purely astral, and then built himself into the physical), it began with this part; the physical structure began at the root of the nose and built itself up from that point, so that the esotericist recognises the root of the nose as belonging to what is essentially physical-mineral.

The second principle is Prana, the etheric body; with this we associate the liver. The liver has a specific occult connection with the etheric body.

Then comes Nama, the astral body. This has developed its activity in the structure of the digestive organs, represented by the stomach. If the astral body did not have the specific stamp in man which in fact it has, then the human digestive organs, including the stomach, would not have the specific form which they have to-day. If you study firstly the physical basis of the human being, secondly his etheric body, and thirdly his astral body, you have what in the fifth root-race is fettered to the mineral element.

Through his higher bodies man wrests himself from his fetters again, and mounts up to something higher. Kama-Manas works its way up again, in Kama-Manas man frees himself again from the pure nature-basis. Therefore there is an occult connection between Kama-Manas and the organ through which man is severed from his nature-basis. There is an occult connection between the lower Manas and the umbilical cord. If there were no Kama-Manas in man, then the embryo would not be severed from the mother in this manner.

If we pass on to the higher Manas, we find that it has a similar occult connection with the human heart and with the blood.

Buddhi (Life-Spirit) has an occult connection with the larynx, and Atma (Spirit-Man) with what fills out the entire man, with the Akasha contained in man.

These are the seven occult, relationships. In considering them we have to stress the importance for our fifth root-race of the relationships with the etheric and the astral bodies. And if you bear in mind what I said earlier of the control by the Atlanteans over Prana (the life-force permeating the etheric body) you will see that in one way the Atlantean stood at a still lower stage. His etheric body still had the original relationship with the external ethers and because of this he controlled the Prana of the outer world. Because man has risen to one stage higher, his work has become one stage lower. That is a law. If there is an ascent on the one hand, there must be a descent on the other. Whereas formerly man worked on Kama from Prana, now he has to work with Kama on the physical plane.

You will see how profoundly the Prometheus saga symbolises these occult connections. A vulture gnaws at Prometheus's liver. The vulture symbolises Kama, which really destroys the forces of the fifth race. The vulture gnaws at the human liver, the basis of life; so does this force of the fifth root-race gnaw at the essential life-forces of man, because man is chained to mineral nature, to Peter, to the rock, the Caucasus.

During the fifth root-race only human initiates are able to bring release to fettered man. Hercules, a human initiate, has to go all the way to the Caucasus in order to set Prometheus free. It is thus that the initiates will wrest men from their bondage.

The human being who still has a connection with the animal nature—the centaur Chiron—must make a sacrifice. The man of earlier times must be sacrificed. The sacrifice of the centaur is as important for the development of the fifth root-race as man's release by initiates.

It is said that in the Greek Mysteries the future was foretold to men. This does not mean that people were given a vague abstract account of what was to happen in the future, but they were given indications as to the paths that are to lead over into the future. The great Mystery-drama of Prometheus is an expression of what is to evolve as human capacity.

By the three generations of gods—Uranus, Chronos and Zeus—we have to understand three Beings who were leaders of men one after another. Uranus means heaven, Gaia the earth. If we go back beyond the middle of the third race, the Lemurian, we find no men as we now know them, but one man, who is called in the secret doctrine Adam Cadmon⁸—the man who is still without sex, who does not yet belong to the earth, who has not yet evolved the organs for earthly sight, who still belongs to the Uranus-nature, to heaven. By the marriage of Uranus with Gaia there arose the man who descended into matter, and thereby stepped into Time. Chronos (Time) becomes the ruler of the second generation of gods from the middle of Lemuria right up to the beginning of Atlantis. The Greeks symbolised these leading Beings as, first of all Uranus, later Chronos, and after that they went over to Zeus. But Zeus is still one of the leaders who did not undergo their training on earth, he is still one of the immortals, as in fact were all the Greek gods.

During the fifth root-race mortal man is expected to stand on his own feet. This humanity of the fifth root-race is represented by Prometheus. The fifth race was the first to acquire human skill and the primeval art of fire-making. Zeus is jealous of this race, the race in which men come to have their own initiates, initiates who in the sixth race will take the lead into their own hands. But humanity has to pay the price for this. Hence its primordial initiate must first of all take upon himself the sum of all suffering. Prometheus is the archetype of the initiate of the fifth root-race, one initiated not only into wisdom but into deed. He runs through the whole gamut of suffering, and is released by the man who makes himself mature enough to free humanity little by little and to lift it above the mineral realm.

The saga thus expresses great cosmic truths. That is why I said at the outset that anyone who reaches the third interpretation may take it literally once more. Every saga undergoes change. It is derived from primordial times and transforms itself at a certain point There is a point in every saga at which it is to be taken literally again. In the Prometheus saga you have the vulture gnawing at the liver. That can be taken quite literally. The vulture gnaws at the liver of the fifth root-race. This Promethean struggle with suffering is repeated in the fifth root-race in every single man. What is here expressed in the saga is to be taken quite literally. Without this struggle the destiny of the fifth race would be quite different.

Thus sagas can be interpreted in three ways. First there is the exoteric meaning, secondly the allegoric—the human struggle—thirdly, the occult significance, where again a literal interpretation enters in. From this you will see that so far as these sagas can be interpreted in this way, they originate in the Mystery Schools, and are no less than the record of what has been revealed in those schools as the great destiny of man. Just as I was able to show you that Odin represents what took place in the Druid Mysteries, so in Prometheus we have what the pupil of the Greek Mysteries experienced to give him energy for life in the future.⁹

• 1. Root-races. The root-races are the main periods of earth-evolution The fifth root-race is the fifth main period.
• 2. The Secret Doctrine. Vol. 2, Part 2, Section 6. (pp. 546 – 556 in the third edition.)
• 3. The Manu of the fifth root-race. In the English version of An Outline of Occult Science, this Being is called ‘the leader of the Christ-initiates’ or ‘the leader of the Christ-oracle’. (p. 177 in the 1949 edition).
• 4. Chela means pupil of the Mysteries; Master means teacher in the Mysteries.
• 5. Kama is the astral body, Kama-Manas the intellectual or Mind-soul, the lower Manas.
• 6. Manas. Here is meant the higher Manas. In the book Theosophy Rudolf Steiner calls it ‘the spirit-filled Consciousness-soul’ or ‘Spirit-Self’. (p. 57, revised English edition, 1954).
• 7. The Story of Atlantis, by W. Scott-Elliott, published by the Theosophical Publishing Co., London, 1896. See also Rudolf Steiner's Atlantis and Lemuria.
• 8. Adam Cadmon. See also Rudolf Steiner's lecture given at Oxford, 22nd August, 1922, which appears in English in the book Man's Life on Earth and in the Spiritual World.
• 9. Unfortunately no report exists of the lectures to which Dr. Steiner here refers, but reference can be made to his lectures given in Berlin, 29th, April, 1st and 6th May, 1909, published in Dornach, 1955, under the title “Isis and Madonna, Altearopaische Mysterien, Die eurapaischen Mysterien und ihre Eingeweihten. (Not yet published In English)