The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Ladies and gentlemen present!

Today it falls to me to speak about the relationship of the soul and spirit to the physical world among the Pythagoreans. Up to now I have spoken primarily about the organization of the universe among the Pythagoreans and today I would like to add what we can know from the Pythagoreans about the ideas of the soul, of the spirit and of their relationship of the spiritual and the spiritual to the physical world.

Historically, we know about Pythagoreanism in this area not only from the scanty information we have from the Pythagoreans, but we know much more precisely from the Platonic discussions! A large part of what Plato worked on comes from Pythagoreanism. Plato went to school with the Pythagoreans and drew a large part of his teachings from Pythagoreanism.

However, the teachings of Pythagoreanism can only be properly understood if one starts from certain ideas - which can be gained at all times - and from certain relationships of the spiritual [to] the physical and asks: How do the views of the Pythagoreans relate to these, how do they compare to them? The Pythagoreans had the deepest immersion in the human ego! They transferred a view to their disciples that grasped the human self to the extent that it must be grasped if it is to spill over into the material world.

At a certain level, the material ceases to have meaning; space and time also cease to exist. Images are afflicted with all the properties of sensual nature. If we continue to ascend and imagine these images more spiritually and more spiritually, then we come closer and closer to the spiritual - not insofar as it is spatial and temporal, but only insofar as it is eternal. The Pythagoreans had this view that things are based on a being that is the same at all times, regardless of whether we look at this or that thing. They rose to this view, not only to the view of the conceptual, but actually to the view of the One. It was precisely through the way in which they developed the theory of numbers that they showed that they saw in the great harmony nothing other than the embodiment of a deity in the universe.

The Pythagoreans were influenced by Egyptian views. This Egyptian symbolically shows us the view that the "Nous lives in everything. The Egyptians used symbols in their knowledge that we also find in the Pythagoreans. It is impossible to misjudge these symbols among the Egyptians. If you think you can only look at them superficially, you will find that you cannot understand them. They can only be understood if they are interpreted in a deeper way. We will look at this in more detail when we consider the Platonic world of ideas.

I must draw attention to this in order to make it easier to understand Pythagoreanism and its doctrine of the soul.

I have already hinted at the doctrine of Osiris. In this legend we meet Osiris, who is dismembered by a hostile force called Typhon and scattered throughout the universe; and Isis, a female deity, reassembles the ruins of Osiris. These are then the human being.

A second Egyptian legend follows, according to which the younger god Horus is born of Isis after the death of Osiris. According to the news, legends and stories, these views indicate that the Egyptians symbolically expressed the view in this legend that the universe has flowed out into the world of appearances, into the world that is riding towards us. And the fragmented God is the All-Spirit, which for the Egyptians dissolved into the four elements: Water, Fire, Air and Earth, reunites and binds them, and brings about the various numerical ratios in the mixture of substances.

This then became part of the Greek view. We find it in the form that love and hate hold the world together. These are the thought powers of Osiris, Isis and Typhon. Osiris lives on only in the four elements, which are presented as "Osiris. It is hatred that forces the elements to lie next to each other as multiplicity, and love that wants to lead the fragmentation back into unity.

This is also how we have visualized the idea of the gods among the Greeks. We can also find this symbol when we look at an Egyptian obelisk. It is four-sided and runs together in a point. This symbolizes the four elements that make up the harmonious unity of the world. The obelisk is decorated with the image of a beetle spinning a ball, or with the image of a ram carrying a ball [on its head]. We know that the Egyptians thought of the sphere as the All-Unity.

Now, however, one thing must be noted about this idea: Pythagoreanism can only be fully understood - insofar as it is a world view - if it is based on the idea that Osiris has actually dissolved into the four elements, that he no longer leads a separate existence. Through the separation of the forces, Osiris has been split into the elements, into the elements existing in the outside world.

The Pythagorean was therefore clear about the fact that when he was searching for Osiris, on the way to recognizing God, he did not have to look for this God outside the world in a "thing in itself", but where he could only be found, in the world as such. He was clear about the fact that God is in the world. Therefore, the Pythagoreans did not regard the world as God's creation, but as God's existence. Whoever lives in the world lives in God! The Pythagoreans sought God only within the world. Pythagoreanism is therefore a doctrine that deals with the world and its relationships. It is interesting how they attached Greek names of gods to some numerical relationships.

So we see from this that what the Greeks represented as images of gods, the Pythagoreans represented in the numbers that held the world together for [them].

Pythagoreanism appears as the highest expression of what was present in the world. Just as the Pythagoreans envisioned the world as the confluence of the four elements, they also envisioned man. For the Pythagoreans, the human being was nothing other than the most harmonious combination of the four elements. By "elements [they imagined] not coarse substances, but potencies! It was not a material interaction, but something similar to what [they] imagined by "harmony in music". In the same way, what appears in the human soul was best expressed in the harmony produced by the body. The soul therefore always emerges in the form of the symbol of the body, which is, as it were, composed of the elements.

They distinguished three things in human organics. They realized that man has a longing to return to that from which he originally came. They were clear that man was nothing other than an incarnation of Osiris, an incarnation of the deity that had flowed out into the world. This was what emerged in their view of the world and of which they were convinced that it was the same in every human being, that it was the same in every being.

Whoever was able to develop the view in his consciousness saw the world as a whole - by seeing himself. The universe expanded into selfhood within the ego, and the ego became the universe! But man could only go through this as an individual being. Man is only man in that he has this urge, this inclination towards Osiris, and that he has this power only in so far as he is in a power connection with the whole material world. Therefore the Pythagoreans first distinguished the actual Osiris nature in man and in the universe, the All-I, which was present as a single entity in the universe, and as a second entity a part of the manifold, the corporeal man, a part of the merely sensual-physical man, which arises and passes away and which can be observed through the senses. Man presents himself as a sensory being, perceptible to himself and to others, and then also as a being that is seen purely from within, which is nothing other than a reflection of the light that has flowed down from the Godhead.

Now the Pythagorean had to come to the conclusion that these two opposing things behave in the same way as all other dualities among the Pythagoreans, i.e. that everything diverges into a duality. They distinguish a duality in everything, including man. I could list the various dualities that the Pythagoreans had in the world. Everywhere they looked for them, everywhere they looked for a kind of polarity: that was the "limited and the "unlimited, the "even and the "odd, the "good and the "evil, the "square and the "cube, the "rectangle" and the "column and so on. Thus they distinguished a duality everywhere, in every spiritual and physical identity. Now in man it is not spiritual and physical, but as I have described it. Let us stick to what I have described. This duality needs a connection, and this connection is the third part of which the Pythagoreans composed the human being. This third part is what is called the soul in the Greek world view and in all later world views. This third is a combination of spiritual allness, all-unity on the one hand with diversity, materiality on the other, so that we have three parts: spirituality, materiality and, as the third, the soul. On the one side is the material, and on the other side is the highest spirituality. Together with the other, the third side, this is what makes up the unique human personality.

So for the Pythagoreans, the human personality only exists because the unified spirit, with the help of the soul, is connected to the diversity of materiality. Man discovers the soul within himself and has a right to spirituality when he directs his gaze towards the sphere of spirituality, i.e. when he belongs to the material world on the one hand and is an inhabitant of the spiritual world on the other, with which he is supposed to connect. Thus, for the Pythagoreans, man is divided into three potencies:

1. into that which makes him an individual;
2. into that to which he devotes himself;
3. into that which frees it from singularity;

They distinguish that which belongs to the individual human being, which shines upwards towards the spiritual, but which at the same time also shines downwards towards the physical. So that which the Pythagoreans recognize as the third, which mediates between the divine and the material principle.

So not only Osiris is incarnated, but also something that is closer to the individuality than Osiris as such. So something is reincarnated that is between the personality - to which sensuality belongs - and spirituality - to which sensuality no longer belongs - something that participates in the world and that is both singularity and allness at the same time!

This something [incarnated in man] constitutes that which is the unified Osiris-nature, the individuality, which here below individualizes into the personality - which is not the same for the Pythagoreans - and which, through the mediation of the personality with Osiris, constitutes a unity. This individuality does not live itself out completely in the personality, so that the latter will find something in itself if it looks around within itself and measures its consciousness, where it must say to itself: This does not belong to the piece in which I am incarnated; it is this individualized piece which is the individual.

There are therefore three things connected in human nature:

1. the personal individuality;
2. the spiritual substantiality that transcends the personality;
3. the light of Osiris, the unity that lives in the universe and that can only live because individuality stands between the other members.

This individuality is not only linked to the individual manifestation of the personality, but means more than the individual personality. What can be found in the individuality does not coincide with what can be found in the individual personality.

When the follower of Pythagoreanism looks around to explain this, he will not be able to stop in his consciousness at the personality, but will have to reach out to other individualities. Within his individual personality he will not be able to find everything that lives as a being in the personality. He will find: Man cannot be explained by himself. Only if he assumes in relation to the individuality, the personality - no matter how metaphysically conceived - that the individuality can remain, can incarnate itself in other details, so that a series of developmental stages, a series of such personalities come into consideration for the individuality, will he find the explanation. And here you also have the form which the Pythagoreans gave to the [idea of reincarnation].

In the second potency, the Pythagoreans recognized the soul as encompassing a single personality, and they recognized that more goes into it than the single vessel, the single personality, so that we may therefore speak of a pre-existence of that which lives itself out as individuality in the single personality.

Plato also expounded this doctrine in his discussions. In it, he made Socrates a teacher, and we can imagine that Plato therefore put his teachings into conversational form and made Socrates a teacher in order to show how a pupil can gradually be led up to the highest level.

If we want to imagine the development of a Pythagorean, we can take the discussion on the development of the soul, "Phaidon", to hand. The "Phaidon" is not to be understood as an exoteric conversation, but as a symbol for Pythagorean teaching. This is clearly demonstrated by a passage in the introduction.

We know little about the historical Socrates, and what is false in the external, tangible sense, we can easily leave out. Therefore, when Plato places special emphasis on external facts and communicates them, as is the case in the Phaedo, where he tells us that the delivery of the cup of hemlock is delayed because a certain ship is sailing to Delos, we must see something special in this communication. We can see from the story that in Greece they were forced to send seven young men and seven virgins to King Minos for a time. They were freed from this plague by Theseus, who killed the Minotaur. In return, the Greeks sent a ship to Delos at certain times to make offerings [to Apollo]. No one was allowed to be executed during this time. The condemnation of Socrates took place just at this time and it was therefore necessary to wait. This fact was told to us at the beginning of the "Phaidon". It is not at the beginning by chance. It has a certain meaning. It's just like the Egyptians. When we see a sphinx standing there, it means that we must not limit ourselves to being satisfied with the simple description, but that we should seek deeper truths behind it.

This story at the beginning of Plato's "Phaedo" is just such an allusion. It always indicates that we have something to look for underneath. The legend of Theseus is a symbol of the fact that, once Theseus was freed from certain passions, from certain connections with materiality, i.e. once he had undergone a certain development, he no longer needed to make the sacrifices that others had to make to sensuality. Only after he no longer needed to make these sacrifices did he reach a certain stage of development. This is expressed in the overcoming of the Minotaur. That is symbolic.

We are therefore dealing here with the representation of Pythagorean teaching. The fact that Socrates overcame death in accordance with the facts is intended as a symbol of what and how the Pythagorean must overcome in the sequence of stages of his teaching. Thus we also see that the Pythagorean understands the soul as something that transcends the individual and that he thereby leads his students to a spiritual understanding of the world.

The "Phaidon" presents us with the ascent to spiritual individuality. This is introduced by the legend of Theseus, who found his way out of the labyrinth. The labyrinth represents the path that the individual personality has to go through in order to find its way back to the light of Osiris. Here, then, we encounter the soul doctrine of Pythagoreanism. We may assume that we have here given the soul doctrine of Pythagoreanism in a form that [Plato] believed he could already communicate to certain initiated disciples.

The essence is developed and first shown through all kinds of considerations that the essence of the soul is something that goes beyond the material, which no longer has anything to do with the material as such.

This problem of the soul is solved in many different ways in the "Phaidon". Firstly, it is based on the world of the senses, which is in eternal development. Every being develops from what it is not. In the same way, death emerges from life and life from death, so that we are dealing with the alternation of death and life. But that is only the lowest level.

Now a Pythagorean appears here in the conversation, who presents his image of the lyre with its strings. [...]. Socrates thinks that we cannot compare [it] with harmony. The strings are there first. But the harmony is not in the strings as such, but in the harmony of the strings, in something that first emerges from the strings. And now Socrates rises to a spirituality that is no longer bound to physicality. Socrates leads upwards: I have looked around at all the sciences, at all the philosophers. When I say: I have seen, or: I am going, people everywhere ask: Why? And the answer is: I have, because ..., I go, because ... Everywhere I go I am only told the reasons. That has never satisfied me. The thing is far from being explained when we know the cause.

Now Socrates uses a subtle comparison to make it clear that a thing is not yet explained by stating the cause. He says: I am sitting here in prison. The Athenians have condemned me to this. I expect to die because I didn't want to escape.

So what would the natural scientist say? He would give all the causes. But what if Socrates had escaped? Then [the naturalist] would also be able to find the causes there; you can state causes everywhere, collect causes. They are true, but nothing is explained by them. If he had fled, there would also be causes. If I am sitting here, the causes are also there. So there must be something that transcends purely natural existence. It is that which is not identical with that which can be grasped with natural causes, which has nothing in common with the natural, but with the world that stands above the natural facts; which is indeed expressed in the world of causes, but which stands above the world of causes.

So he seeks to make comprehensible in words that which is incarnated for him in the world of causation and is expressed within the world of causation.

Now we must ask: How was this way of looking at things in the Greek world - causality links the natural world, in which the soul does not merge - to be justified in the natural science of the Greeks? It seems important to me whether such a thing can stand up to our present-day knowledge. We must draw attention to the fact that natural science struggles to achieve a spirituality in order to give birth to a world view out of itself. That spirituality cannot be exhausted in the world of causes can already be proven by natural science. It can be proven that the physicality in which we now live is enclosed within quite [certain limits], that it is a limited thing, and that this already has a certain significance.

I want to show you how natural science today can already show that corporeality has a limit, that the spiritual must extend beyond this corporeality, that it is only incarnated in this corporeality, so that corporeality is something that cannot encompass the spirit. This seems to me to be something that needs to be emphasized. The modern world view has led us to no longer see the world as if it were a random structure of things, it has led us to see transformations of the elemental force in the individual forces of the world. We no longer say that mechanical work is present in electricity, heat, magnetism, pressure and so on, but we see all of these as forms of a single elemental force. Today we say to ourselves that if we apply a mechanical force, for example by exerting pressure on a table, the area of the table is heated. This heat is generated by pressure. Today we have the view that the force that pushes the locomotive forward is nothing other than the force of steam, and this in turn is nothing other than the force of coal and so on. So we have a constant transformation. When we heat a room, we heat it with what was stored up as chemical forces a myriad of years ago. The plants have transformed into denser matter, then into the chemical forces of coal. These are transformed back into heat. So what we use to heat our rooms today is what came from the sun millions of years ago. So even in physics we are dealing with a constant transformation of forces. What is exactly true is the connection between thermal and mechanical energy. Heat is converted into mechanical working power in order to move something forward. What happens in the steam boiler is exactly the same as what moves the train forward. The heat is transformed into mechanical work. This happens because the heat is lost, because it is no longer present. This heat that has been transformed has disappeared, has been transformed into something else. We see this process everywhere in the universe.

Fifty years ago, people were still saying that solar heat is transformed into chemical power, chemical power into mechanical work and so on. So we can imagine that one transforms into the other, that the cycle of forces is formed. This creates an eternity of the material world. The forces are transformed into an eternal cycle. Today we have to admit that this material world does not allow such a cycle of matter, but is limited. We have to admit that what exists is self-explanatory. If we transform the heat of the steam into that which moves the train forward - for heat is always lost, and it is impossible to transform all the heat into mechanical power - then the heat suffers a loss. This is not because the machines are imperfect; the complete transformation cannot take place, a certain amount of heat would always remain. Wherever something happens by transforming heat into mechanical power, a mechanical residue remains.

If we continue this and imagine that all the work is done, something would always be left behind. The consequence of this would be that once all possible heat [would] be transformed, that eventually a state [would] occur where it [would] no longer be possible to develop any amount of heat from things. The available heat [would] reach a minimum. [If this state was reached, it would no longer be possible for anything to happen in this world. It [would] no longer be possible for any work to [emerge] from any heat source. Life [would] be extinguished. This whole incarnation of the earth [would be] self-contained.

So we see that the spiritual is not exhausted by reincarnation, but that the spiritual spills over into the [associated material] world, that the spiritual is that which will have to seek a new expression or return into itself.

However, this material world can only exist because it is permeated by the spirit. The moment this material world is exhausted, the spirit is no longer that which can dominate the world. It has then lost its meaning, it has stepped out of being into non-being. The spirit has then purified itself of all this.

This is not the result of a philosophical consideration, nor the result of a metaphysical consideration, but merely what every physicist must also admit. It is the same as what the Greeks say, that the One lives itself out in the world, lives through it, and that the world as such comes to an end and then, as we have seen, will again be the unlimited and will stand purified in itself as the All-One. This is the great world process that takes place in what the Pythagoreans see as the overarching. He saw this overarching element at the lower level in individuality.

This is the method by which the Pythagorean says: If I find something in the personality that transcends into the spiritual, then I must assume that individuality is as little exhausted with the individual personality as the Osiris unity is exhausted in the individual world. - In the Pythagorean world the unity is not exhausted, but it lives itself out in the worlds, which are limited, closed. In the Pythagorean view, individuality lives itself out in such a way that it only seeks its incarnation within the continuous individual existence.

So in the Pythagorean world view we have a strictly closed chain of ideas that leads us upwards from the earthly level to the highest spiritual unity. But in Pythagoreanism we have a strict adherence to the doctrine of individuality, which reaches beyond the individual personality. From this flowed for the Pythagoreans the view that the individual personality, when it rises to the view of individuality, can no longer merely feel responsible for what it does as an individual personality, for what occurs in it, in so far as it is an individual being in the sensuous manifold, but that it must also feel responsible in so far as it must cooperate and collaborate in that which goes beyond the individual personality into individuality. The ordinary person does not feel responsible for what goes beyond the personality.

This is roughly what can be said about the Pythagorean doctrine of the soul. We may therefore say that the Pythagoreans reached the view that they imposed a much higher responsibility on man, namely that which he bears as an individuality and which is not exhausted in the individual personality. This is the idea of reincarnation seen from within.

Answer to the question:

The Unity of All in All

Enq. Having told me what God, the Soul and Man are not, in your views, can you inform me what they are, according to your teachings?

Theo. In their origin and in eternity the three, like the universe and all therein, are one with the absolute Unity, the unknowable deific essence I spoke about some time back. We believe in no creation, but in the periodical and consecutive appearances of the universe from the subjective on to the objective plane of being, at regular intervals of time, covering periods of immense duration.

Enq. Can you elaborate the subject?

Theo. Take as a first comparison and a help towards a more correct conception, the solar year, and as a second, the two halves of that year, producing each a day and a night of six months' duration at the North Pole. Now imagine, if you can, instead of a Solar year of 365 days, ETERNITY. Let the sun represent the universe, and the polar days and nights of 6 months each — days and nights lasting each 182 trillions and quadrillions of years, instead of 182 days each. As the sun arises every morning on our objective horizon out of its (to us) subjective and antipodal space, so does the Universe emerge periodically on the plane of objectivity, issuing from that of subjectivity — the antipodes of the former. This is the "Cycle of Life." And as the sun disappears from our horizon, so does the Universe disappear at regular periods, when the "Universal night" sets in. The Hindoos call such alternations the "Days and Nights of Brahma," or the time of Manvantara and that of Pralaya (dissolution). The Westerns may call them Universal Days and Nights if they prefer. During the latter (the nights) All is in All; every atom is resolved into one Homogeneity.

Evolution and Illusion

Enq. But who is it that creates each time the Universe?

Theo. No one creates it. Science would call the process evolution; the pre-Christian philosophers and the Orientalists called it emanation: we, Occultists and Theosophists, see in it the only universal and eternal reality casting a periodical reflection of itself on the infinite Spatial depths. This reflection, which you regard as the objective material universe, we consider as a temporary illusion and nothing else. That alone which is eternal is real.

Enq. At that rate, you and I are also illusions.

Theo. As flitting personalities, to-day one person, to-morrow another — we are. Would you call the sudden flashes of the Aurora borealis, the Northern lights, a "reality," though it is as real as can be while you look at it? Certainly not; it is the cause that produces it, if permanent and eternal, which is the only reality, while the other is but a passing, illusion.

Enq. All this does not explain to me how this illusion called the universe originates; how the conscious to be, proceeds to manifest itself from the unconsciousness that is.

Theo. It is unconsciousness only to our finite consciousness. Verily may we paraphrase verse v, in the 1st chapter of St. John, and say "and (Absolute) light (which is darkness) shineth in darkness (which is illusionary material light); and the darkness comprehendeth it not." This absolute light is also absolute and immutable law. Whether by radiation or emanation — we need not quarrel over terms — the universe passes out of its homogeneous subjectivity on to the first plane of manifestation, of which planes there are seven, we are taught. With each plane it becomes more dense and material until it reaches this, our plane, on which the only world approximately known and understood in its physical composition by Science, is the planetary or Solar system — one sui generis, we are told.

Enq. What do you mean by sui generis?

Theo. I mean that, though the fundamental law and the universal working of laws of Nature are uniform, still our Solar system (like every other such system in the millions of others in Cosmos) and even our Earth, has its own programme of manifestations differing from the respective programmes of all others. We speak of the inhabitants of other planets and imagine that if they are men, i. e., thinking entities, they must be as we are. The fancy of poets and painters and sculptors never fails to represent even the angels as a beautiful copy of man — plus wings. We say that all this is an error and a delusion; because, if on this little earth alone one finds such a diversity in its flora, fauna and mankind — from the sea-weed to the cedar of Lebanon, from the jelly-fish to the elephant, from the Bushman and negro to the Apollo Belvedere — alter the conditions cosmic and planetary, and there must be as a result quite a different flora, fauna and mankind. The same laws will fashion quite a different set of things and beings even on this our plane, including in it all our planets. How much more different then must be external nature in other Solar systems, and how foolish is it to judge of other stars and worlds and human beings by our own, as physical science does!

Enq. But what are your data for this assertion?

Theo. What science in general will never accept as proof — the cumulative testimony of an endless series of Seers who have testified to this fact. Their spiritual visions, real explorations by, and through, physical and spiritual senses untrammelled by blind flesh, were systematically checked and compared one with the other, and their nature sifted. All that was not corroborated by unanimous and collective experience was rejected, while that only was recorded as established truth which, in various ages, under different climes, and throughout an untold series of incessant observations, was found to agree and receive constantly further corroboration. The methods used by our scholars and students of the psycho-spiritual sciences do not differ from those of students of the natural and physical sciences, as you may see. Only our fields of research are on two different planes, and our instruments are made by no human hands, for which reason perchance they are only the more reliable. The retorts, accumulators, and microscopes of the chemist and naturalist may get out of order; the telescope and the astronomer's horological instruments may get spoiled; our recording instruments are beyond the influence of weather or the elements.

Enq. And therefore you have implicit faith in them?

Theo. Faith is a word not to be found in theosophical dictionaries: we say knowledge based, on observation and experience. There is this difference, however, that while the observation and experience of physical science lead the Scientists to about as many "working" hypotheses as there are minds to evolve them, our knowledge consents to add to its lore only those facts which have become undeniable, and which are fully and absolutely demonstrated. We have no two beliefs or hypotheses on the same subject.

Enq. Is it on such data that you came to accept the strange theories we find in Esoteric Buddhism?

Theo. Just so. These theories may be slightly incorrect in their minor details, and even faulty in their exposition by lay students; they are facts in nature, nevertheless, and come nearer the truth than any scientific hypothesis.

On the Septenary Constitution of Our Planet

Enq. I understand that you describe our earth as forming part of a chain of earths?

Theo. We do. But the other six "earths" or globes, are not on the same plane of objectivity as our earth is; therefore we cannot see them.

Enq. Is that on account of the great distance?

Theo. Not at all, for we see with our naked eye planets and even stars at immeasurably greater distances; but it is owing to those six globes being outside our physical means of perception, or plane of being. It is not only that their material density, weight, or fabric are entirely different from those of our earth and the other known planets; but they are (to us) on an entirely different layer of space, so to speak; a layer not to be perceived or felt by our physical senses. And when I say "layer," please do not allow your fancy to suggest to you layers like strata or beds laid one over the other, for this would only lead to another absurd misconception. What I mean by "layer" is that plane of infinite space which by its nature cannot fall under our ordinary waking perceptions, whether mental or physical; but which exists in nature outside of our normal mentality or consciousness, outside of our three dimensional space, and outside of our division of time. Each of the seven fundamental planes (or layers) in space — of course as a whole, as the pure space of Locke's definition, not as our finite space — has its own objectivity and subjectivity, its own space and time, its own consciousness and set of senses. But all this will be hardly comprehensible to one trained in the modern ways of thought.

Enq. What do you mean by a different set of senses? Is there anything on our human plane that you could bring as an illustration of what you say, just to give a clearer idea of what you may mean by this variety of senses, spaces, and respective perceptions?

Theo. None; except, perhaps, that which for Science would be rather a handy peg on which to hang a counter-argument. We have a different set of senses in dream-life, have we not? We feel, talk, hear, see, taste and function in general on a different plane; the change of state of our consciousness being evidenced by the fact that a series of acts and events embracing years, as we think, pass ideally through our mind in one instant. Well, that extreme rapidity of our mental operations in dreams, and the perfect naturalness, for the time being, of all the other functions, show us that we are on quite another plane. Our philosophy teaches us that, as there are seven fundamental forces in nature, and seven planes of being, so there are seven states of consciousness in which man can live, think, remember and have his being. To enumerate these here is impossible, and for this one has to turn to the study of Eastern metaphysics. But in these two states — the waking and the dreaming — every ordinary mortal, from a learned philosopher down to a poor untutored savage, has a good proof that such states differ.

Enq. You do not accept, then, the well-known explanations of biology and physiology to account for the dream state?

Theo. We do not. We reject even the hypotheses of your psychologists, preferring the teachings of Eastern Wisdom. Believing in seven planes of Kosmic being and states of Consciousness, with regard to the Universe or the Macrocosm, we stop at the fourth plane, finding it impossible to go with any degree of certainty beyond. But with respect to the Microcosm, or man, we speculate freely on his seven states and principles.

Enq. How do you explain these?

Theo. We find, first of all, two distinct beings in man; the spiritual and the physical, the man who thinks, and the man who records as much of these thoughts as he is able to assimilate. Therefore we divide him into two distinct natures; the upper or the spiritual being, composed of three "principles" or aspects; and the lower or the physical quaternary, composed of four — in all seven.

The Septenary Nature of Man

Enq. Is it what we call Spirit and Soul, and the man of flesh?

Theo. It is not. That is the old Platonic division. Plato was an Initiate, and therefore could not go into forbidden details; but he who is acquainted with the archaic doctrine finds the seven in Plato's various combinations of Soul and Spirit. He regarded man as constituted of two parts — one eternal, formed of the same essence as the Absoluteness, the other mortal and corruptible, deriving its constituent parts from the minor "created" Gods. Man is composed, he shows, of (1) A mortal body, (2) An immortal principle, and (3) A "separate mortal kind of Soul." It is that which we respectively call the physical man, the Spiritual Soul or Spirit, and the animal Soul (the Nous and psuche). This is the division adopted by Paul, another Initiate, who maintains that there is a psychical body which is sown in the corruptible (astral soul or body), and a spiritual body that is raised in incorruptible substance. Even James (iii. 15) corroborates the same by saying that the "wisdom" (of our lower soul) descendeth not from the above, but is terrestrial ("psychical," "demoniacal," vide Greek text); while the other is heavenly wisdom. Now so plain is it that Plato and even Pythagoras, while speaking but of three "principles," give them seven separate functions, in their various combinations, that if we contrast our teachings this will become quite plain. Let us take a cursory view of these seven aspects by drawing two tables.

THEOSOPHICAL DIVISION [SANSCRIT TERMS // EXOTERIC MEANING // EXPLANATORY]

LOWER QUATERNARY

(a) Rupa, or Sthula-Sarira // Physical body // Is the vehicle of all the other "principles" during life.

(b) Prana // Life, or Vital principle // Necessary only to a, c, d, and the functions of the lower Manas, which embrace all those limited to the (physical) brain.

(c) Linga Sharira // Astral body // The Double, the phantom body.

(d) Kama rupa // The seat of animal desires and passions // This is the centre of the animal man, where lies the line of demarcation which separates the mortal man from the immortal entity.

THE UPPER IMPERISHABLE TRIAD.

(e) Manas — a dual principle in its functions // Mind, Intelligence: which is the higher human mind, whose light, or radiation links the MONAD, for the lifetime, to the mortal man // The future state and the Karmic destiny of man depend on whether Manas gravitates more downward to Kama rupa, the seat of the animal passions, or upwards to Buddhi, the Spiritual Ego. In the latter case, the higher consciousness of the individual Spiritual aspirations of mind (Manas), assimilating Buddhi, are absorbed by it and form the Ego, which goes into Devachanic bliss.¹

(f) Buddhi // The Spiritual Soul // The vehicle of pure universal spirit.

(g) Atma // Spirit // One with the Absolute, as its radiation.

Now what does Plato teach? He speaks of the interior man as constituted of two parts — one immutable and always the same, formed of the same substance as Deity, and the other mortal and corruptible. These "two parts" are found in our upper Triad, and the lower Quaternary (vide Table). He explains that when the Soul, psuche, "allies herself to the Nous (divine spirit or substance), ² she does everything aright and felicitously"; but the case is otherwise when she attaches herself to Anoia, (folly, or the irrational animal Soul). Here, then, we have Manas (or the Soul in general) in its two aspects: when attaching itself to Anoia (our Kama rupa, or the "Animal Soul" in "Esoteric Buddhism,") it runs towards entire annihilation, as far as the personal Ego is concerned; when allying itself to the Nous (Atma-Buddhi) it merges into the immortal, imperishable Ego, and then its spiritual consciousness of the personal that was, becomes immortal.

The Distinction Between Soul and Spirit

Enq. Do you really teach, as you are accused of doing by some Spiritualists and French Spiritists, the annihilation of every personality?

Theo. We do not. But as this question of the duality — the individuality of the Divine Ego, and the personality of the human animal — involves that of the possibility of the real immortal Ego appearing in Seance rooms as a "materialised spirit," which we deny as already explained, our opponents have started the nonsensical charge.

Enq. You have just spoken of psuche running towards its entire annihilation if it attaches itself to Anoia. What did Plato, and do you mean by this?

Theo. The entire annihilation of the personal consciousness, as an exceptional and rare case, I think. The general and almost invariable rule is the merging of the personal into the individual or immortal consciousness of the Ego, a transformation or a divine transfiguration, and the entire annihilation only of the lower quaternary . Would you expect the man of flesh, or the temporary personality, his shadow, the "astral," his animal instincts and even physical life, to survive with the "spiritual EGO" and become sempiternal? Naturally all this ceases to exist, either at, or soon after corporeal death. It becomes in time entirely disintegrated and disappears from view, being annihilated as a whole.

Enq. Then you also reject resurrection in the flesh?

Theo. Most decidedly we do! Why should we, who believe in the archaic esoteric philosophy of the Ancients, accept the unphilosophical speculations of the later Christian theology, borrowed from the Egyptian and Greek exoteric Systems of the Gnostics?

Enq. The Egyptians revered Nature-Spirits, and deified even onions: your Hindus are idolaters, to this day; the Zoroastrians worshipped, and do still worship, the Sun; and the best Greek philosophers were either dreamers or materialists — witness Plato and Democritus. How can you compare!

Theo. It may be so in your modern Christian and even Scientific catechism; it is not so for unbiassed minds. The Egyptians revered the "One-Only-One," as Nout; and it is from this word that Anaxagoras got his denomination Nous, or as he calls it, Nous autokrates, "the Mind or Spirit Self-potent," the archetes kinedeos, the leading motor, or primum-mobile of all. With him the Nous was God, and the logos was man, his emanation. The Nous is the spirit (whether in Kosmos or in man), and the logos, whether Universe or astral body, the emanation of the former, the physical body being merely the animal. Our external powers perceive phenomena; our Nous alone is able to recognise their noumena. It is the logos alone, or the noumenon, that survives, because it is immortal in its very nature and essence, and the logos in man is the Eternal Ego, that which reincarnates and lasts for ever. But how can the evanescent or external shadow, the temporary clothing of that divine Emanation which returns to the source whence it proceeded, be that which is raised in incorruptibility?

Enq. Still you can hardly escape the charge of having invented a new division of man's spiritual and psychic constituents; for no philosopher speaks of them, though you believe that Plato does.

Theo. And I support the view. Besides Plato, there is Pythagoras, who also followed the same idea.³ He described the Soul as a self-moving Unit (monad) composed of three elements, the Nous (Spirit), the phren (mind), and the thumos (life, breath or the Nephesh of the Kabalists) which three correspond to our "Atma-Buddhi," (higher Spirit-Soul), to Manas (the EGO), and to Kama-rupa in conjunction with the lower reflection of Manas. That which the Ancient Greek philosophers termed Soul, in general, we call Spirit, or Spiritual Soul, Buddhi, as the vehicle of Atma (the Agathon, or Plato's Supreme Deity). The fact that Pythagoras and others state that phren and thumos are shared by us with the brutes, proves that in this case the lower Manasic reflection (instinct) and Kama-rupa (animal living passions) are meant. And as Socrates and Plato accepted the clue and followed it, if to these five, namely, Agathon (Deity or Atma), Psuche (Soul in its collective sense), Nous (Spirit or Mind), Phren (physical mind), and Thumos (Kama-rupa or passions) we add the eidolon of the Mysteries, the shadowy form or the human double, and the physical body, it will be easy to demonstrate that the ideas of both Pythagoras and Plato were identical with ours. Even the Egyptians held to the Septenary division. In its exit, they taught, the Soul (EGO) had to pass through its seven chambers, or principles, those it left behind, and those it took along with itself. The only difference is that, ever bearing in mind the penalty of revealing Mystery-doctrines, which was death, they gave out the teaching in a broad outline, while we elaborate it and explain it in its details. But though we do give out to the world as much as is lawful, even in our doctrine more than one important detail is withheld, which those who study the esoteric philosophy and are pledged to silence, are alone entitled to know.

The Greek Teachings

Enq. We have magnificent Greek and Latin, Sanskrit and Hebrew scholars. How is it that we find nothing in their translations that would afford us a clue to what you say?

Theo. Because your translators, their great learning notwithstanding, have made of the philosophers, the Greeks especially, misty instead of mystic writers. Take as an instance Plutarch, and read what he says of "the principles" of man. That which he describes was accepted literally and attributed to metaphysical superstition and ignorance. Let me give you an illustration in point: "Man," says Plutarch, "is compound; and they are mistaken who think him to be compounded of two parts only. For they imagine that the understanding (brain intellect) is a part of the soul (the upper Triad), but they err in this no less than those who make the soul to be a part of the body, i.e. those who make of the Triad part of the corruptible mortal quaternary. For the understanding (nous) as far exceeds the soul, as the soul is better and diviner than the body. Now this composition of the soul (psuche) with the understanding (nous) makes reason; and with the body (or thumos, the animal soul) passion; of which the one is the beginning or principle of pleasure and pain, and the other of virtue and vice. Of these three parts conjoined and compacted together, the earth has given the body, the moon the soul, and the sun the understanding to the generation of man."

This last sentence is purely allegorical, and will be comprehended only by those who are versed in the esoteric science of correspondences and know which planet is related to every principle. Plutarch divides the latter into three groups, and makes of the body a compound of physical frame, astral shadow, and breath, or the triple lower part, which "from earth was taken and to earth returns"; of the middle principle and the instinctual soul, the second part, derived from and through and ever influenced by the moon; ⁴ and only of the higher part or the Spiritual Soul, with the Atmic and Manasic elements in it does he make a direct emanation of the Sun, who stands here for Agathon the Supreme Deity. This is proven by what he says further as follows:

"Now of the deaths we die, the one makes man two of three and the other one of (out of) two. The former is in the region and jurisdiction of Demeter, whence the name given to the Mysteries,telein, resembled that given to death, teleutan. The Athenians also heretofore called the deceased sacred to Demeter. As for the other death, it is in the moon or region of Persephone."

Here you have our doctrine, which shows man a septenary during life; a quintile just after death, in Kamaloka; and a threefold Ego, Spirit-Soul, and consciousness in Devachan. This separation, first in "the Meadows of Hades," as Plutarch calls the Kama-loka, then in Devachan, was part and parcel of the performances during the sacred Mysteries, when the candidates for initiation enacted the whole drama of death, and the resurrection as a glorified spirit, by which name we mean Consciousness. This is what Plutarch means when he says: —

"And as with the one, the terrestrial, so with the other celestial Hermes doth dwell. This suddenly and with violence plucks the soul from the body; but Proserpina mildly and in a long time disjoins the understanding from the soul.⁵ For this reason she is called Monogenes, only begotten, or rather begetting one alone; for the better part of man becomes alone when it is separated by her. Now both the one and the other happens thus according to nature. It is ordained by Fate (Fatum or Karma) that every soul, whether with or without understanding (mind), when gone out of the body, should wander for a time, though not all for the same, in the region lying between the earth and moon (Kamaloka).⁶ For those that have been unjust and dissolute suffer then the punishment due to their offences; but the good and virtuous are there detained till they are purified, and have, by expiation, purged out of them all the infections they might have contracted from the contagion of the body, as if from foul health, living in the mildest part of the air, called the Meadows of Hades, where they must remain for a certain prefixed and appointed time. And then, as if they were returning from a wandering pilgrimage or long exile into their country, they have a taste of joy, such as they principally receive who are initiated into Sacred Mysteries, mixed with trouble, admiration, and each one's proper and peculiar hope."

This is Nirvanic bliss, and no Theosophist could describe in plainer though esoteric language the mental joys of Devachan, where every man has his paradise around him, erected by his consciousness. But you must beware of the general error into which too many even of our Theosophists fall. Do not imagine that because man is called septenary, then quintuple and a triad, he is a compound of seven, five, or three entities; or, as well expressed by a Theosophical writer, of skins to be peeled off like the skins of an onion. The "principles," as already said, save the body, the life, and the astral eidolon, all of which disperse at death, are simply aspects and states of consciousness. There is but one real man, enduring through the cycle of life and immortal in essence, if not in form, and this is Manas, the Mind-man or embodied Consciousness. The objection made by the materialists, who deny the possibility of mind and consciousness acting without matter is worthless in our case. We do not deny the soundness of their argument; but we simply ask our opponents, "Are you acquainted with all the states of matter, you who knew hitherto but of three? And how do you know whether that which we refer to as ABSOLUTE CONSCIOUSNESS or Deity for ever invisible and unknowable, be not that which, though it eludes for ever our human finite conception, is still universal Spirit-matter or matter-Spirit in its absolute infinitude" It is then one of the lowest, and in its manvantaric manifestations fractioned-aspects of this Spirit-matter, which is the conscious Ego that creates its own paradise, a fool's paradise, it may be, still a state of bliss.

Enq. But what is Devachan?

Theo. The "land of gods" literally; a condition, a state of mental bliss. Philosophically a mental condition analogous to, but far more vivid and real than, the most vivid dream. It is the state after death of most mortals.

• 1. In Mr. Sinnett's "Esoteric Buddhism" d, e, and f, are respectively called the Animal, the Human, and the Spiritual Souls, which answers as well. Though the principles in Esoteric Buddhism are numbered, this is, strictly speaking, useless. The dual Monad alone (Atma-Buddhi) is susceptible of being thought of as the two highest numbers (the 6th and 7th). As to all others, since that "principle" only which is predominant in man has to be considered as the first and foremost, no numeration is possible as a general rule. In some men it is the higher Intelligence (Manas or the 5th) which dominates the rest; in others the Animal Soul (Kama-rupa) that reigns supreme, exhibiting the most bestial instincts, etc.
• 2. Paul calls Plato's Nous "Spirit"; but as this spirit is "substance," then, of course, Buddhi and not Atma is meant, as the latter cannot philosophically be called "substance" under any circumstance. We include Atma among the human "principles" in order not to create additional confusion. In reality it is no "human" but the universal absolute principle of which Buddhi, the Soul-Spirit, is the carrier.
• 3. "Plato and Pythagoras," says Plutarch, "distribute the soul into two parts, the rational (noetic) and irrational (agnoia); that that part of the soul of man which is rational is eternal; for though it be not God, yet it is the product of an eternal deity, but that part of the soul which is divested of reason (agnoia) dies." The modern term Agnostic comes from Agnosis, a cognate word. We wonder why Mr. Huxley, the author of the word, should have connected his great intellect with "the soul divested of reason" which dies? Is it the exaggerated humility of the modern materialist?
• 4. The Kabalists who know the relation of Jehovah, the life and children-giver, to the Moon, and the influence of the latter on generation, will again see the point as much as some astrologers will.
• 5. Proserpina, or Persephone, stands here for post mortem Karma, which is said to regulate the separation of the lower from the higher "principles": the Soul, as Nephesh, the breath of animal life, which remains for a time in Kama-loka, from the higher compound Ego, which goes into the state of Devachan, or bliss.
• 6. Until the separation of the higher, spiritual "principle" takes place from the lower ones, which remain in the Kama-loka until disintegrated.

The reflection of wisdom is feeling
The reflection of love is will,
and the reflection of the ego is thought.

The reflection of sanguine is air.
The reflection of phlegmatic is water. The reflection of melancholic is earth. The reflection of choleric is fire.

In pre-Christian times, thinking was cultivated in humanity by Pythagoras and other sages and philosophers.

Feeling was cultivated in the Christian era by the mystics.

The Will is said to be developed in the Rosicrucian era – Theosophy.

The sacred sign is interpreted to us.

The Imagination would be presented as follows: a blue sea, the rays of light in gold, and the upper part of the clouds illuminated.

We call the fifth degree the high degree of the Rosicrucian cross, the fourth degree that of the order [Royal Arch] (shibboleth?).

The following is given to us as meditation. An effective image: Imagine a mountain and rocks of different stones in the sea, air above, earth and plants of all kinds, a fire in one place, a skull – a black raven whose eyes are fixed on the rose cross.

A scene by Hugo von Hofmannsthal
Performance by the Freie Bühne, Berlin

The wise Pythagoras believed that the planets in celestial space produce a wonderful harmony through their movements, which one does not hear because one is accustomed to it. Imagine the ear suddenly opened to this music! How different the world would seem to us! What would happen in our soul if the sound of the planets had an effect on it! Such thoughts come to mind when confronted with Hugo von Hofmannsthal's art. He allows harmonies to emerge from things that surprise us, as if the planets were suddenly sounding together. He seems to me to be gifted with an infinitely delicate soul, with finely organized senses; and what he tells us about the world mostly escapes us because habit prevents us from hearing it. Hofmannsthal pays no attention to the coarser aspects of the world; the finer things are therefore revealed to his mind. He allows the prominent features in the phenomena that occupy people in ordinary life to recede; but he brings out the secret beauty that otherwise recedes. There is an infinitely endearing arbitrariness in his view of the world. In the "scene" referred to here, there is little of the rough, sharp lines with which playwrights usually depict life. Madonna Dianora awaits her lover; the man kills her because of her infidelity. This plot is poor and pale. But beneath the surface, as it were, it harbors a wealth of beauty. Hofmannsthal cuts away the surface and reveals the finest branches of inner beauty. His way of looking at things is like listening to a speaker and not listening to the meaning of the speech, not listening to the content of the words, but only to the sound of the voice and the music that lies in his language. It is understandable that this kind of performance cannot be perfectly realized with the means of our stagecraft. Despite the effort Louise Dumont put into the role of the Madonna Dianora, the Freie Bühne performance was therefore not very satisfying.

We can say that there are two kinds of people on earth. Two great spiritual streams may be seen among human beings. The difference between the two is that one kind seek to see everything in the light of knowledge whilst the other kind want to be guided, in a way. The very way in which the view of the world presented in the science of the spirit is received shows that the desire to look for bright, clear light is not widespread. The majority of people still have not reached the point where they want to know about everything. Many rather like to be befogged; it embarrasses them to be given complete clarity with regard to something. It will, however, be necessary to let go of anything that may cause the mind to be befogged. This also applies to the whole way we lead our lives. We need to be restrained also in feeding ourselves and avoid anything that will cloud consciousness, such as alcohol, for instance. Countless other things also prevent the clarity that is needed. Doing without such things will also make us more practical in everyday life. Belief in authority also puts us in darkness. We should let ourselves be stimulated by authority but not build on it.

Clarity, as it is meant here, has least to do with a subordinate way of seeing the higher worlds. Such a subordinate way is in fact connected with soul mists clouding the conscious mind. In earlier stages of human history this was widespread. In Atlantean times the human mind was much less clear than it is today. Today even the most savage tribes have gone far beyond the Atlanteans' state of mind. Going further and further back in human evolution we come to conditions where human beings had inner vision but did not grasp things with the rational mind. Rationality first began to dawn in the Atlantean race. At one time the Atlanteans lived in the place where Ireland is today. When another individual was approaching, astral images would arise in the Atlantean's mind. He was not yet able to reflect. Man was only able to say ‘I’ to himself when the forebrain had developed. Human beings first began to develop self-awareness in the part of Atlantis which is Ireland today. From there they spread through Europe and into Asia. The human bones found in the Neander valley came from the descendants of Atlanteans; these still had sloping foreheads. From then on, man very slowly learned to think rationally and develop self-awareness. When man began to live his life bearing the seed of the spirit in him here on earth he was already well beyond the animals, but as yet unable to speak or to think.

Divine spirits known as devas existed at the time who did not need a physical body but floated in astral space. They had gained the things they needed by being in a physical body on the moon. Other spirits had not completed their evolution on the Moon, had not been able to manage it. These are the luciferic spirits which lagged behind the devas. The gods, or devas, lived on something that had become a characteristic of humans on earth—love between two sexes. Love between human beings is the air, or the food, which the gods enjoy. In Greek mythology it was called nectar and ambrosia.

The cohorts of Lucifer had no real function in humanity for as long as human beings were still somnambulant. It was only in the fifth root race that they really made man their very own child. Human thinking is not all that old. Ancient wisdom lived among the earliest peoples. This ancient wisdom was revealed from within to the priests. True insight and perception only came a few centuries before the birth of the Christ, in about 600 BC. The power of judgement also only developed later in the world.

This brings us to an important mystery, a fact to be found among early peoples. To grasp this, we must be able to shine a light into the sphere of the soul. In a North American Indian tribe one hears strange terms used for family relationships. Among the Iroquois, first cousins were called ‘brothers and sisters’, but only the children of brothers, not those of sisters. This is a relic of ancient Atlantis. At that early period in human history, the family was all that mattered. A woman would have several husbands and it was impossible to say who was a child's father. All peoples originally had ancestors who would unconcernedly marry close relatives. Close blood bonds were not an obstacle to marriage. It was said that children from closely related parents were the most enlightened; they would be somnambulant. As evolution progressed, it happened more and more that people would marry who were not related by blood. It is a law that the union of individuals who were not so closely related the ether body came loose from its connection with the physical body. With marriages between blood relations the ether bodies of offspring would be firmly lodged. They would be illumined from within. They would still think more with the solar plexus but have no powers of judgement. This grew with distant marriages and showed itself to the degree to which the old marriages between blood relations disappeared. The old somnambulant vision would vanish then, and a new way of seeing things develop, power of judgement. This new period was referred to as the development of the Dionysian principle. Dionysus was cut to pieces, with only the heart preserved. When the Dionysian principle arose, people were cut to pieces and then brought together again through the heart, a meeting of souls, and this brought a complete change in sexual life. The rational mind is the earlier sexuality between relatives transformed.

The earlier developmental stages of humanity are recapitulated in seven-year rhythms in individual human lives. From the first to the seventh year, the child's ether body is still very much in the background. We therefore should not develop children's powers of memory before they reach their seventh year, only their senses. That is the time when we can influence the senses, rousing their inner powers with the help of the senses. We should stimulate those powers by giving children toys that bring their powers of imagination to life, perhaps a block of wood with dots painted on for eyes, and so on, but not dolls that are so complete that the child cannot add anything using his powers of imagination. From the seventh to the fourteenth year it is above all important to get children to develop firm habits that will give them something to hold on to later on in life. These are the years when everything by way of memory must be brought to the human being. It is thus better not to invoke the child's powers of judgement at this period in life. A child should have authority around him at that time but not be an authority himself. Influence him by telling stories, not preaching morals but refer to great examples. For moral development it would be necessary then to develop a feeling for it in the old Pythagorean form. Pythagoras¹³¹ said to his pupils: ‘Do not strike into the fire with your sword’—indicating that one should not do useless things. Another Pythagorean axiom of this kind was: ‘Do not turn back on the road before you have reached the end of it.’ Human beings should only learn to make their own judgements and form their own opinions once they have reached sexual maturity. The ether body loosens at this time, and the astral body will only then be ready to take action in the outside world.

This evolution, today gone through by every individual in seven-year rhythms, was gone through by humanity in the course of its great periods of evolution. Some of the subordinate powers in the human being were raised to a higher level so that the power of judgement could develop. And only then was it possible for Lucifer's cohorts to intervene. This luciferic power comes to expression in people's independent judgement. In those times, when the luciferic principle was intervening, people for the first time did independent work. If you study the past, you can say to yourself: in those early times, all that came about was what was needed to make a family. The individuals who wanted to put a purely spiritual element in the place of blood relationship were working in the name of Lucifer. The Church had developed as a continuation of ancient priestly wisdom. But parallel to it the stream arose where people sought the light, luciferic people such as the Templars, for instance.¹³² They said one had to find one's own light and truth. There was a sect in the middle ages, its members calling themselves Luciferians, who understood this. They would say: ‘Man may be truly blessed indeed, but without the light of knowledge; this is not for us; we want to fight our way through to the light.’¹³³

These are the two streams in humanity. One seeks only to be blessed, the others want the light. Those who are afraid of knowledge consider Lucifer to be evil. But for the others Lucifer is the light-bearer, the bringer of light. This is written in a manuscript kept in the Vatican, but the Church is keeping it a secret, and the people who take this direction in the Church warn people against Lucifer.

Dogma may indeed contain truth. The Pythagorean theorem is dogma for those who do not understand it. But if they do understand it they gain clear, lucid insight. Dogmas are presented as something given by authority. When one understands them they, too, become lucid insight.

At the time when Paul lived, the nature of Christianity was such that it could lead to general love of humanity. A tribal and national religion was to become a world religion. Belief in revelations was connected with the blood-based community. Moses gave established laws. The Christ did not give established laws, and instead of the law there was grace. The inmost human soul was coming alive.

The aims pursued in the Church are a wave that is going down; those of people who want freedom of opinion a wave that is rising. Some brotherhoods, like the Templars for instance, endeavour to seek the light. The race which is striving for the light—those are the children of Lucifer.

At a time when Christianity is beginning to be strictly organized, Edouard Schure¹³⁴ published his play The Children of Lucifer.¹³⁵ This is one stream in the Church, and there is also the other one, the luciferic principle. The children of Lucifer are the children of the inner light, not of belief in revelations. Those who seek to move on into the future must feel related in the spirit. It has been said in the science of the spirit that we must reach the light by our own efforts. Profound, most deeply inward freedom is to develop in the human soul.

The theosophical journal has been called Lucifer for good reason.¹³⁶ It is connected with the inmost nature of the theosophical movement. It needs to be stated for once that the luciferic principle was deliberately cast into the world. When the Roman Catholic Church established the dogma of infallibility,¹³⁷ the emphasis on the luciferic principle provided the counter pole. Conversely we might say that the dogma of infallibility arose in polar relationship to the declaration of spiritual freedom in theosophy, for this was the only way the Church could save itself.

• 131. Pythagoras(C.582–C.507 BC), pre-Socratic Greek philosopher. It has not yet been possible to identify the quotes given here
• 132. See Steiner R. Inner Impulses Working in the Evolution of Mankind (in GA 171). 7 lectures, Dornach 16-18, 23-25 Sept., 1 Oct. 1916. Tr. not known. Manuscript translation R 45, Rudolf Steiner House Library, London; and The Templars (in GA 171). Tr. not known. Lecture given in Dornach on 2 Oct. 1916. Manuscript translation Z 156, Rudolf Steiner House Library, London.
• 133. Followers of Bishop Lucifer von Cagliari (d. 370), existing for a time in Sardinia, Spain, Gaul, Italy and Africa
• 134. Edouard Schur
  é (1841–1929).
• 135. Authorized translation into German by Marie von Sivers and published in Leipzig in 1905. Rudolf Steiner then rewrote it in free rhythms (1909), published in Rudolf Steiner/Edouard Schuré Lucifer. Die Kinder des Lucifer, Dornach 1955.
• 136. See Lucifer-Gnosis. Gesammelte Aufsätze, 1903–1908 (GA 34). See also reference to this in Steiner R. Rudolf Steiner, an Autobiography (GA 28). Tr. R. Stebbing. New York: Rudolf Steiner Publications 1977.
• 137. 1869–70 Vatican Council—infallibility of the pope when he speaks ex cathedra on faith and morals.

Recently, I have presented a number of important facts about the human being that can be investigated by spiritual science. I attach less importance to the details of these facts being grasped – for I have often spoken about the nature of these facts – than to a certain impression being awakened by them: the impression of the nature of what may be called the deception of the physical physical world, so that you get a sense of what is actually meant when one speaks of the outer world as we see it around us - I say see, not have - is deception at first, and behind it lies the true, the real world. And I wanted to evoke a more thorough sense of what is meant when one speaks of the real world on the basis of spiritual science. So it is more about these general feelings. And with that, I have arrived at the point where we have, so to speak, another opportunity to tie our spiritual-scientific observations to important and significant interests in the spiritual life of the present, whereby I am thinking, of course, of a broader present, not just of today, but of the centuries in which we live.

Our intellectual life is caught in a conflict, a conflict that can be characterized in a variety of ways, that can be defined in many ways. But all these definitions must ultimately converge into a kind of feeling for two currents that we must form for ourselves as currents of ideas from the intellectual culture of the present, and that, to a certain extent, cannot be properly united. Two currents of ideas are present. One of them, we may call it in the broadest sense the scientific current, by which I do not mean merely what is thought and asserted in the circles of natural scientists, but that scientific current which today lives more or less in the perception of all mankind. This scientific current has gradually become a popular, widespread view. It produces concepts that have become deeply, deeply rooted in the soul life of people today. One can best see how this scientific world view has taken root when one considers that it is most deeply rooted where one believes one is penetrating to spiritual life. After all, what is commonly called spiritualism and what is advocated by very many as a theosophical theory is nothing more than an emanation of a materialistic worldview. What is generally known about the etheric body and the astral body, what is produced experimentally in spiritualistic séances, is entirely captured in concepts borrowed from the scientific world view, which is best demonstrated by people like du Prel, who believes he is addressing the spiritual world. But everything he says about the spiritual world, he thinks in scientific terms, that is, in terms in which one should think only about nature, not about the spirit. Similarly, it is downright laughable how materialistic the theories of most Theosophists are, how they positively endeavor to attach conceptions such as etheric body or even astral body to the scientific concepts that should only be applied to nature. The etheric body is very often imagined as something quite material, as a fine haze or the like. Now, I have often spoken about these things.

This is the one conceptual mass, I would say, that we have: the concepts of natural science. And, to avoid being misunderstood, I would like to emphasize once more that it is not so important that these scientific concepts be found in the natural sciences themselves, where they are largely justified. Rather, the important thing is that they creep into the general world and that they are used to understand spiritual matters, so that some people are even under the delusion that they are saying something special when they emphasize the similarity between the concepts they have in spiritual matters and the concepts of natural science.

The significant fact that we have to consider is that these scientific concepts can only capture a certain sphere of our world, a certain sphere of the world in which we live, in our understanding, that another world must remain beyond our understanding if we only apply scientific concepts. These scientific concepts thus form one current.

The other current is formed by certain concepts that we form about the ideal or the ideal, and probably also today, for a long time, about the moral. Take a scientific concept such as the concept of inheritance or the concept of development. You think scientifically when you think these concepts purely and cleanly; you think in terms when you extend these concepts of inheritance and development, as they are commonly used in science, to spiritual matters. Take certain concepts that are needed in life, for example, the concept of the inner freedom of our soul, the concept of goodwill, the concept of moral perfection, or higher concepts, the concept of love and the like, and you again have a stream of ideas, of concepts, that are also justified because they are needed for life. But only by indulging in self-deception can one build a bridge from the way of scientific thinking today to the way of thinking in terms of ideals, ideas or morals today. If someone thinks purely scientifically, that is, if they seek a scientific world view, as is the ideal of many people today, then within a world that corresponds to this world view there is no place for anything that is understood by terms such as goodwill, or, for that matter, happiness, love, inner freedom, and so on. A certain ideal of scientific thinking is to bring everything, as they say, under the concept of causality, to think of everything in terms of cause and effect. And a very popular generalization is – I have already mentioned this here – the law of the conservation of energy and of matter. If you form a worldview using only the concepts of cause and effect in the scientific sense, or of the conservation of energy and matter, then you can only either be ideologically dishonest or you have to say: Within such an order of the world, in in which only the law of causality, only the law of cause, applies, or in which the law of the conservation of matter and force applies, in such a world everything that is an ideal, that is an idea, that is a moral concept, is basically just nonsense. For a worldview that universally conceives of the law of the conservation of energy and matter, nothing else makes sense except to say: our world order develops according to this law of the conservation of energy and matter. Out of certain causes, the human race has also emerged within this world order. This human race dreams of goodwill, of love, of inner freedom, but all these are concepts that people make up, and when the time comes that such a state of affairs must occur in our world system according to scientific conceptions, then there is actually a general grave for all such ideas of goodwill, inner freedom, of love and so on. These are dreams that people dream while they are completing their existence within the evolution of the earth in accordance with the pure natural-law order, and there is no point in speaking of anything else in terms of the validity of ideals and ideas other than that they are dreams of people, because within such a natural-scientific world view, ideas and ideals have no power to realize themselves. What then should become of ideas and ideals if the world really corresponds to the scientific world view, once the state has been reached that one must necessarily think if one thinks only in scientific terms? They are buried, the ideas and ideals! But today people think in such a way — even if they do not admit it — that they have no inner power to realize themselves. They are mere thoughts that are realized when people attach their feelings to them, when people behave towards each other in a way that corresponds to the ideas. But they have no inner power to realize themselves, as magnetism, electricity or heat have – they have inner power to realize themselves! Ideas as such – so always think of moral ideas for my sake – do not have such inner power to realize themselves within our world view if we think only scientifically.

Of course, very few people are aware of the dichotomy that exists between these two currents of our present time, but it is there, and the fact that it is at work in the subconscious of people is much more important than being aware of it in theory. Only one class of people is theoretically aware of what I have just said, and it is this one class of people that we should keep an eye on in the present day. Clearly stated, the fact of the matter is that the whole world is only scientifically ordered and that ideas and ideals only have a meaning because people feel that they must follow them in their mutual behavior, this view can only be found within the socialist theory of the present. Contemporary socialist theory therefore rejects all spiritual science, even regards the traces of old spiritual science that can still be found in jurisprudence, morality and theology as prejudices that belong to the infancy of human development, and it wants everything that could be called spiritual science to be understood as social science: it wants to form socialist social science as merely valid for the mutual behavior of people. The world is organized by natural science, and apart from the natural scientific explanation of the world, there is only one social science left. This is the fundamental conviction of every self-aware socialist.

If you want to get to the bottom of such things, you cannot indulge in confused concepts. Of course I know that one can come and say: Yes, but that is not how socialists think! But that is not the point. As I explained in the first few days of my return here, it is not the content of ideas that is important, but how ideas are put into practice, how they penetrate and take root. And the socialist idea takes root by rejecting any talk of any spiritual world content, by claiming that the world content is only scientifically organized and that spiritual science is to be replaced by mere social science.

Now man feels that mere ideas and ideals, if they are thought as they are thought in the present, really have no more power than to find their way into the human emotional life and thereby to realize themselves, to realize themselves as a dream that humanity dreams within the evolution of the earth. No idea, however beautiful or ideal, has the power to bring anything into being, to generate warmth anywhere, to move a magnet or the like. Thus it is already condemned to be a mere dream, because — as long as one thinks of the world order only as the sum of electrical, magnetic forces, of light forces, heat forces and so on — it cannot intervene in the structure of these forces, especially if one postulates the law of the conservation of force and matter, according to which force and matter are supposed to have eternal validity. Because then they are always there, and then ideas can't intervene anywhere, because force and matter then have their own eternal laws.

With this law - I say only in parentheses - of the conservation of force and matter, a lot of nonsense is done. As one finds spoken of in the literature today of the law of conservation of force and matter, namely of force and energy, it is also often attributed to Jz / ius Robert Mayer. Anyone who is really familiar with Julius Robert Mayer's writings knows that it is just as foolish to attribute the law of the conservation of energy and matter to Julius Robert Mayer, as is done in the literature today, as it would be to attribute the invention of the printing press to Gutenberg in the case of pulp fiction. For what is presented in textbooks and popular manuals as the law of conservation of energy and matter has nothing to do with the law of Julius Robert Mayer, who was locked up in an insane asylum for his work.

Now, for anyone who takes spiritual science seriously, the question arises from all that I have presented: what is the relationship, what is the connection between what can never be united within the present world view: moral idealism and naturalistic observation of the world? This question cannot be answered theoretically without further ado. In many cases, the present age craves theoretical answers, and even those who turn to theosophy or anthroposophy sometimes crave theoretical and dogmatic answers more than anything. But the answers that are to be given on the basis of spiritual science must be answers based on direct perception. In this respect, it is not acceptable to carry the present age's preference for dogmatism into spiritual science. Spiritual science demands something else. Of course, in many cases scholars demand that other dogmas be established, but spiritual science cannot agree at all with the view that other dogmas should be established than those that already exist. Rather, it demands that thought be approached differently and viewed differently, that certain things be thought of from completely different points of view. What is often practiced today as spiritual science, especially as theosophy, can often give the impression of a somewhat modified scholasticism of the Middle Ages. I do not want to speak out against scholasticism, because scholasticism has things in it that are much more significant than what is produced philosophically in the present. But the tendency of many people today is to have only other dogmas, about God and immortality and heaven and hell, and to think differently about these things, but only to think, not to arrive at views that are based on quite a different ground than earlier ideas. If one is truly grounded in spiritual science, one says to oneself: During the scholastic period, there was enough speculation about the Trinity, about the nature of man, about his immortality, about the Christ problem, if I do not use the term now with any kind of unpleasant connotation. For the real value of this scholasticism does not lie in the dogmas it has established, but in the technique of thinking, as I once described it in my writing 'Philosophy and Anthroposophy', which is now being republished in a new edition that has been significantly expanded; it lies in the way of thinking about things. But nowadays it is actually better to learn this thinking by going to the scholastics than by turning to the often confused ideas that have been called theological or philosophical in recent times. There has been enough theorizing about these things in the Middle Ages. For example, the Christ-problem was wrestled with in such a theoretical way. Those who know the nature of this struggle cannot derive much benefit from a somewhat modified scholasticism, as it has been practiced in theosophy, for example, where, instead of having, in the past, trinity, immortality or other things, one now has again physical body, etheric body, astral body. It is a different kind of theotizing, but basically it is qualitatively the same thing. Those who are well informed about this school of the Middle Ages know that it is a moot point to want to penetrate, let us say, to the Mystery of Golgotha. Today it is much more important, for example, to penetrate to the figure of Christ Jesus, which is being attempted by us here in the center of the structure, where we are trying to really find the figure of Christ Jesus again. Those who are really interested in earlier dogmas will be much more interested today in bringing the figure of Christ out of spiritual life, because today is the time to do so. The Middle Ages were the time for keen reflection and the spinning out of scholastic concepts; today — as I have already characterized many times — is such a point in the fifth post-Atlantic period, where man's view must be directed towards spiritual forms. What was previously sought as the form of Christ are, after all, fantastic forms. I have often spoken here about the development of the figure of Christ. The form of the Christ will be found again through spiritual vision. Each time has its special task. It is not important that something is fixed, but that humanity seeks in its development and thereby reaches ever further and further stages of its development.

What is important, then, is to find a kind of bridge where the modern world view cannot find a bridge, but where, if it understands itself correctly, it must necessarily come to socialism, that is, to socialist theory – not to socialism in its justification; I have spoken about this before. But this bridge can only be found if one has the honest will to penetrate into what happens between birth and death, and also into what happens between death and a new birth, if one does not just have the will to analyze the world here, so to speak, but if one has the will to really engage with the spiritual. One speaks of man and says: Man consists of a physical body, an etheric body, an astral body, the I and so on. That is certainly justified; but it is justified for the human being who lives here between birth and death. However, what I explained last time and the time before that can already point out to you that one can now speak in a similar way about the human being after death, about the human being between death and a new birth. If you want to ask: What does the human being consist of? you cannot merely ask: What does the human being consist of here on earth? And answer: He consists of a physical body, an etheric body, an astral body and an ego. Rather, we must now also raise the question: What does the human being consist of when he is not on earth, but in a spiritual world between death and a new birth? How can one speak of the members of human nature there? One must be able to speak of the members of human nature in just as real a way there. And if one is completely honest with oneself in such a matter, one must realize that each age has its special task.

People do not really realize that the way they think, imagine, even feel, yes, even look at the outside world – just remember certain statements I made in my “Riddles of Philosophy” about the relatively short period of six hundred years before our era to us – is only like this now. We cannot go back over the eighth century before the Mystery of Golgotha with the thinking and the feeling and the looking that we have now. I have given you the exact year: 747 BC before the Mystery of Golgotha is the true founding date of the city of Rome. If we go back beyond this 8th century BC, then the whole way of human life is different from the one we now know as the life of the soul. All ways of looking at the world become different. There is, however, one boundary that can be observed better than the others, which can actually be observed well, but not yet for the present-day human being: the boundary that lies in the 15th century. The 15th century is too close for present-day people; they cannot really put themselves in the place of the great change that occurred there. On the whole, people imagine: they have always thought and felt the same way as they do now, even if they go further and further back; but how little they go back! Well, the thing is that as soon as you go back beyond the 8th century BC, you have a completely different way of thinking. And now we can ask the question: why did they have a different way of thinking back then? Nowadays, when people imagine things, they come up with rather foolish ideas, one might say. When people of the present day hear how, let us say, in the Egyptian mysteries — which were the most sought-after in those days — it was taught, when they hear how the truths were discussed there, they think: Well, that corresponds to the fantastic times of yore, when people were not as clever as they are now, when they still had childish ideas; now we have the right thing! It is particularly easy for a modern person to think this way, because they cannot imagine anything different, since they have sunk so terribly into this way of thinking in the present. Let us assume that a Greek, Pythagoras for example, came to Egypt and studied there, just as someone today goes to a famous university to learn. But what did he learn? I will tell you something that Pythagoras really could have learned there: He learned that in primeval times Mercury once played chess with the moon, and in this chess game Mercury won. He won twenty minutes from the moon for each day, and these twenty minutes were then added up by the initiates. How much do these twenty minutes amount to in three hundred and sixty “days”? They amount to exactly five days. Therefore, the year was not counted as three hundred and sixty days, but rather as three hundred and sixty-five days. These five days are what Mercury won from the moon in the game and what he then gave to the other planets and to the whole human race, in addition to the three hundred and sixty days in a year.

Now, if you say that Pythagoras could have learned something like this from the wise Egyptians, then every person in the present will laugh, quite naturally. Nevertheless, it is only another clothing for a deep spiritual truth - we will speak of it again in these days - that the present has not yet rediscovered at all, but it is a truth.

You may ask: Why was it calculated quite differently in the past? Compare the lecture of such an Egyptian sage, who lectures the clever fox Pythagoras: Mercury has won twenty minutes from the moon for each day in the game of chess – with a lecture on modern astronomy, which is held in a lecture hall, you will better notice the difference. But if you ask yourself why there is such a difference, then you have to delve a little deeper into the whole nature of human development. For if we go back to the 8th century BC – Pythagoras does not belong to this early time, but in Egypt the remnants of a wisdom have been preserved that was founded well before the 8th century BC, when it could still be imprinted – if it was taught in this ancient time, there is a profound reason for it. The whole relationship of man to the world had been viewed differently, and had to be viewed differently in those days.

I would like to point out that various remnants of old views have been renewed again and again atavistically, whereby I do not mean or understand the word “atavistically” to mean anything derogatory. Anyone who, for example, reads a work like Jakob Böhme's “De signatura rerum” will, if he is honest, actually say today: he cannot do anything with it. For there are given very strange arguments that either have to be judged from a higher point of view – then they make sense – or that, from the point of view of a modern-thinking person, should actually be rejected as the unreasonable stuff of a layman who has gone a little crazy. All the fantastic talk that is often heard in immature theosophical circles about Jakob Böhme is actually harmful. Nevertheless, from a higher point of view, Jakob Böhme is reminiscent of modern science in his whole way of thinking, in the way he analyzes certain words, for example, when he breaks down words like sulfur and searches in the broken-down parts for something. We do not want to look at the material but on the way he proceeds in his work 'De Signatura rerum', he reminds us much more of a certain concrete connection of the human being with the entire spiritual world than any of the abstract sciences, which only exist in public today. He, Jakob Boehme, is much more immersed in this spiritual world. And this immersion in the spiritual world is characteristic of thinkers who lived before the 8th century BC, before our era. They did not think with the individual, separate reason with which we think today. We all think with our individual reason; they thought more with cosmic reason, with creative reason, with the reason that one must, I would like to say, still listen to in some of its creations if one wants to come upon it.

Today there is actually only one area in which one can perceive a little bit of how something like creative reason still pours into and works in human life. One can still perceive something of a realization of the ideal in one area; but, I would like to say, there is only a shadow of it left, and this shadow is mostly not taken into account. Today, there are a number of naturalistic anthropological theories about the origin of language and how it is thought to have developed. As you know, there are two main theories, as I have mentioned before. One is called the 'wauwau' theory, the other the 'bimbam' theory. The woof-woof theory is advocated more by continental scholars, while the Max Müller school of thought favors the ding-dong theory. The woof-woof theory is based on the idea that humans started out in a very primitive state and that their internal organic experiences barked out like a dog when it goes “woof woof.” Through a corresponding development evolution - everything develops, doesn't it, from the primitive to the perfect - the dog's “bow-wow”, which can still be seen in humans at its primitive level, has become human language. If you follow the development from the baying of the dog to today's speech, in a similar way to the theory of evolution, Darwin or Haeckel, starting with the simplest monera, that is, from the simplest, most inarticulate form to today's language, then that is just the baying theory. Another theory says that one can develop a certain feeling of kinship with the tones of the bell: ding dong; one would have a certain inner sound each time that one imitates. According to this, one would follow more of an evolutionary theory with the woof woof, and more of an adaptation theory with the ding dong, an adaptation of the human being to the inner nature of the material words. Then you can also combine things in a witty way, the Bim-Bam theory with the Bow-Wow theory, which is then something more perfect, then you have combined development with adaptation. Well, these things are more or less common practice today. There are also those who laugh at these two theories and have other theories; but in principle they are not much different either.

From a spiritual point of view, there can be no question of the development of language being as it has just been characterized. Rather, purely externally, the structure of language shows that real reason prevails in the formation and development of language. And it is interesting to trace the workings of reason precisely in language, for the simple reason that it is still in language that an ideational element lives most vividly, that is to say, that which is observed in the one current today, and because language does not merely address itself to the human mind, but has its own laws, so that the ideational is already realized in it in a certain way, even if only shadowily, in relation to natural laws. Take, for example, a word – I will only draw your attention to a few very elementary cases – where you can see how inner reason prevails in the emergence of language; take a word like: oratio, speech. It is remarkable when we take a word like oratio, speech, and then observe what becomes of this word in the life of man after death, for there is a remarkable similarity with what has been the work of nascent reason in the development of language. This gives us a certain certainty that today can hardly be gained in any other way. At best, we can only arrive at hypotheses by other means. The dead person will rarely, at least after a certain time has passed since death, still understand the word oratio; he will no longer understand it, he loses the understanding of it. On the other hand, he will still understand a contemplation, an imagination that leads back to what can be expressed by the words: Os, Oris, Mund, and: Ratio, Vernunft. The dead man breaks down the word oratio into os and ratio. And in evolution the reverse process has actually taken place: the word oratio has actually come into being through a synthesis of original words, os and ratio. Oratio is not as original a word as os, oris and ratio, but oratio is formed from os and ratio.

I would like to give you a few more examples of such elementary things. These things can be most vividly studied in the Latin language because they are most clearly evident there, but the laws that can be found are also important for other languages. Take, for example, three original words: Ne ego otior; that would mean, if taken as a word: I am not idle. Ego otior: I am idle; ne ego otior: I am not idle. These three words are composed through the ruling cosmic reason in Negotior, that is, doing business. There you have three words put together into one, and you see the structure of the words in a rational way. You see reason at work in the development of language.

I would not, as I said, assert this so strictly if the remarkable fact did not occur that the dead dissolve what has been put together here in the world. The dead dissolve something like negotior into: Ne ego otior, and he understands only these three words or ideas, which he combines from this trinity, and he forgets that which was created by the combination.

Another obvious example is: unus, the one, and alterque, the other; this is combined into the Latin word uterque, each of the two. We would be quite happy if we had a word in modern languages like Uterque, which gives that concept; the Frenchman can only express it by staying with the upper one: I'un ct l'autre; he doesn't have a single concept to express that. But Uterque expresses it much more precisely.

Take an example to illustrate the principle I am talking about. You all know the word “se”, the French word “se”: to oneself. You know the word “hors” (out): you could also say “hors de soi” (out of oneself), and “tirer” (to draw) – I'll just keep the “tir” – “tir”: to draw, to draw away. If you then combine these three things according to the same principle, you get “sortir”, to go away, which is nothing more than a combination of “se hors tir”; “tir” is the rest of the word “tirer”. So you can still see the same governing reason at work in a modern language. Or take an example where the matter is somewhat obscured by the fact that different levels of language are at work: “coeur, the heart; ‘rage’, that is the lively, the invigorating, the enthusiasm that comes from the heart; composed: ‘courage’. These are not just any inventions, but real events that really happened. That is how the words are formed.

But the possibility of forming words in this way no longer exists today. Today, man has stepped out of the living connection with cosmic reason, and therefore there may be a possibility at most in very sporadic cases of venturing to approach language in order to extract from it words that are, as it were, in the spirit of language. But the further back one goes, and especially the further back one goes behind the 8th century BC, also in the Greek and Latin languages, the more the principle is active in real life that language develops in this way. And what is significant here is that one has to point to this as if it were eurythmic, by discovering in the dead person: he pulls the words apart again, he breaks them down again into their parts. He has more feeling, the dead man, for these parts of the words than for the whole words. If you think about it consistently, you would break the words apart into the sounds, and if you then translate the sounds, not into movements in the air but into movements of the whole human being, then you have eurythmy. Eurythmy is therefore something that the dead can indeed understand very well when it is practised perfectly. And you can see that such things, like eurythmy, cannot be judged externally, but that one can only understand their place in the overall structure of human development if one is also able to enter into this overall development of the human being.

Much more could be said about what eurythmy actually aims to achieve, but there will be an opportunity to do so later. For now, I wanted to draw your attention to a field, however shadowy, where, even in ancient times, the ideal was still reflected in the real through the living activity of human beings themselves. I said at the beginning today: In today's world view, we no longer find the possibility of building a bridge between the ideal, the moral, and that which lives in nature. The bridge is missing. It is also quite natural for the bridge to be missing in the current cycle of human development. The ideal no longer creates. I wanted to show you an example in the human realm itself, even if, as I said, it is a shadowy one, where something ideal still exists in the human being himself. For in the composition of such words, it was not the agreement of people or the consideration of a single human individuality or personality that was at work, but reason, without the human being being really present. Today, people want to be present in everything they do: Now, if something as beautiful, great and meaningful as this were to be done – you should see what would come of today's human wisdom if language were to be formed today! But it was precisely in those times when man was not yet so self-aware that these great, wise, significant things happened in humanity, and they happened in such a way that in this event, a close coexistence of the ideal and the real interacted, namely, ideal, that is, rational becoming, and real movement of air through the human respiratory organs. Today we cannot build a bridge between the moral idea and, for my sake, the electrical force; but here a bridge is built between something that happens and something that is rational. Of course, this does not lead us to build the same bridge – I will elaborate on this tomorrow – it must be built in a completely different way today. But you can see from this that humanity has progressed to its present state from a different state: from being inside a living web that was close to what, in a certain way, takes place in reverse post mortem, that is, after the death of human beings. Today, after death, in order to find his way between death and a new birth, man must again take apart what has been so joined together by forces - we will speak of this again tomorrow - that this joining together can still be clearly seen if one goes back to the older stages of speech formation.

These are important things, things that we really must consider when we turn our attention to the question of how spiritual science can be integrated into the whole structure of contemporary spiritual life. We have often spoken about this, and it is something we must consider. And if we repeatedly speak of the importance of integrating spiritual science into the whole of evolution, then we must also think concretely in this field. In these lectures I would now like to contribute something to this concrete thinking. If it were possible for spiritual science to be carried by a certain movement in the present day, by a human movement, then this spiritual science would be able to have a fruitful effect in all fields. But above all, there would have to be the will to respond to such subtleties, as they are often emphasized here. For it is on these subtleties, which always relate to the relationship of our spiritual science to contemporary spiritual culture, that we must base what we can call our own engagement with the spiritual movement of the present day through spiritual science. It is truly the case that the sad, catastrophic events of the present should make people aware that old worldviews have gone bankrupt. Not from spiritual science alone, but from its relationship to these old worldviews, one could see what has to happen for us to emerge from the bankruptcy of the present time.

To do this, it would of course be necessary to finally address the intentions that I have often expressed as those of the spiritual scientific movement. It would truly be necessary to recognize the reasons why, for example, working on the building has become so fruitful within certain circles, while other endeavors of the Anthroposophical Society have remained equally fruitless, so to speak; why, if one disregards what it has really achieved, namely the Dornach building, the Society often fails. On the one hand, if it is not to evoke the opposite, such an achievement always requires that many other things happen. It is necessary that the Anthroposophical Society should not fail in other respects, as it has completely failed in during the years of its existence. This failure need not be emphasized again and again if the opinion were much more widely spread that one must reflect on why the Anthroposophical Society fails in so many other respects. If people would reflect more deeply, they would recognize, for example, why the opinion keeps spreading in the world that I only lead the Anthroposophical Society by the hand and give everything away; while there is hardly a society in the world where less happens that a so-called leader wants than in the Anthroposophical Society! As a rule, the opposite of what I actually intend happens. So, it is not true that the Anthroposophical Society in particular can show how far reality is from its so-called ideals in practice. But then one must also have the will to stand on the ground of reality. In a society, there are naturally personal issues; but one must also understand these personal issues as personal. If people in some branch are fighting for purely personal reasons, one should not make black out of white or white out of black, but one should calmly admit: We have personal reasons, we do not like so-and-so for personal reasons. Then one is speaking the truth; there is no need to distort reality into an ideal. It is therefore necessary to recognize that while on the one hand I am endeavoring to lift everything of an intellectual nature out of the sectarian, to strip away everything that is sectarian, the Anthroposophical Society is increasingly sinking into sectarianism and has a certain love for the sectarian. If there is anywhere an effort to get out of the sectarianism, then this very desire to get out of the sectarianism is hated.

Of course, I do not want to criticize anyone, nor do I want to be ungrateful for the beautiful aspirations that are everywhere, I fully recognize everything, but it is necessary to reflect a little on some things, otherwise things will arise again and again, and I have been told about them again in these days. Isn't it true that the personal is also intimately entwined with the matter? If some kind of disaster occurs in a country, the constitution of the Anthroposophical Society is such that I might say the Society has the sensation of quarreling a little, and from all this quarreling, I myself am personally insulted in the most disgraceful way. Yes, if this repeats itself over and over again, we will not get anywhere. If I am always insulted in the most vicious way because the others quarrel and I am played out, if it always comes down to me being played out, then of course I can no longer hold the anthroposophical movement in the world. It would be possible to work in a positive way if one wanted to focus more on the positive, which I am always hinting at enough. It would be possible to keep such things in the background, which are mostly based on terribly inferior things. But in many circles there is much more desire to quarrel, much more desire for dogmatic disputes, out of which personal quarrels often develop. And then it happens that the cursing usually turns against me – which of course leaves me personally highly indifferent, but the movement cannot continue if it is to go on like this. It is not that I am criticizing what the friends have done in such a case, but I would point out that they have not done something else, which is not for me to suggest in a blunt way, but which would much more surely prevent what is constantly happening than the way it is constantly being attempted. Today it is already the case that one can say: We have only given cycles to members of the Society, and I know how I myself am often strangely approached by this or that member of the Society when I am much more liberal than members on the fringes often want to be in giving cycles. Yes, what has been brought into the world through the cycles could never have fared worse through outsiders than it has through members of the Anthroposophical Society! This must also be taken into account. Today we have already reached the point where the cycles are being abused by members, by apostate members of the Anthroposophical Society, to such an extent that it may soon be said that we no longer set any limits, we sell the cycles to anyone who wants them. It cannot get much worse.

I am not saying that it will happen tomorrow, but I am merely hinting that society does not work as a society at all – always except for the building and except for individual circles – that it does not actually do what a society would otherwise do. As a result, society is of no help at all; it is not at all what a movement would result in.

Here it is so clear that I cannot mean anyone personally, that I can discuss this here quite impartially, for the simple reason that this is precisely the place where work is being done fruitfully out of society, namely on the building. This is already a real thing that has emerged out of society. And if other things that could be much cheaper than construction were to be worked on by such a social spirit as the workers on our construction site, then the Anthroposophical Society would be able to produce tremendous blessings. But then one must call white white and black black. One must also really say when personal matters are at hand: these are personal matters — and not inflate them into lofty idealism; otherwise one will just have to consider what needs to be put in the place of the Anthroposophical Society. A society could not be substituted, because it would be the same old misery all over again! Right? The society cannot be just a means to an end, a way of dealing with all kinds of inferior personalities. But it has become a means that forces you to take into account all kinds of inferior stuff.

Well, I don't want to bore you any longer with this matter today, but I just wanted to add it after the time was up. I finished the lecture beforehand; I only say such things when the lecture time is up, afterwards as an appendix.

(Given at the conclusion of the General Meeting of the German Section of the Theosophical Society)

May I once more make it known¹ that I intend to hold a lecture tomorrow morning about certain contemporary occult questions connected with Freemasonry. And that will take place, following an ancient occult practice, separately for men and for women. The lecture for men will take place at ten o'clock; for women at half past eleven. Perhaps you may ask why this custom is retained, since—only through the theosophical view of things—it will become superseded. That will become clear through the content of the lecture. I would also like to say that the Besant Branch² will have its regular meeting tomorrow evening at eight o'clock.

Now I would like to speak about the relationship of occultism to the theosophical movement and about a few other connected questions. On that topic, it is very often debated whether the theosophical movement, and the Theosophical Society in particular, should be an occult movement, or whether it must be kept distinct from all occultism.

The theosophical movement as such, in so far as it expressed in the Theosophical Society, cannot be an occult movement. An occult movement is based on different assumptions from those which can find expression in the Theosophical Society. There have been occult societies in all periods. One thing above all else has been necessary for them; namely, that, on account of the whole manner of their endeavours, they have some kind of hierarchy in their Organisation. That means that the members of such a society, of such a brotherhood, were ranked by degree. Every degree, from the first up to the ninetieth, had its quite specific task. In each degree there were quite specific tasks. Nobody could be promoted to a higher degree until he had fulfilled the tasks of the lower one.

I can only indicate very broadly why that is so. We must then speak only generally about the tasks of such occult brotherhoods. The honoured friends will understand me all the better today, who have so often heard me speak about such things. Occult brotherhoods are the guiding brotherhoods of mankind. They have the task of preparing the things of the future. Everything which is to happen in the future is indeed preparing itself now, is finding its expression now, as an idea, as a plan, and will then be realised in the future. Even when you consider the development of the human race on the outward physical plane, you would then find that things which later find fulfillment were much earlier in the bud as ideas, bursting to find expression in the minds and souls of leading personalities and individualities. Take the steam engine for example: you will find, if you trace the matter back, how the steam engine developed itself from the simplest facts; how the pan filled with boiling water already contained the idea of the steam engine, which then developed itself from this simplest form to the most complicated mechanism.

These are however trifles compared with the great structure of humanity that we confront. The most important matters are based on much greater and more significant perspectives. They presuppose that what is to happen in the far distant future is already, in a specific way, being prepared today. How can anything happen in this way? Through it being in one's grasp today already to introduce forces into the world which will take effect in the future. Whatever is going to take place here on the physical plane in the future has prepared itself on the astral and Devachanic plane, long before its physical manifestation; so that the forces bringing about really distant future events can be identified in the higher planes and worlds. However, man cannot satisfactorily influence the future unless he prepares the effect in the light of a knowledge of the influencing forces. Man is a self-aware creature, and has to take his destiny into his own hands. Therefore, there have always been advanced Brothers of our human race, who can see not only on the physical plane but also on higher planes.

Let us seek to conceive what it means to have foresight on higher planes. Let us suppose you have water in a pond. You can foresee that the pond will become frozen if the temperature falls, so that skating and so on will be possible. In a similar way do we have [foresight] with the relationship of the so-called astral plane to the physical plane, that is to the world in which we are involved. If therefore one follows events on the astral plane one could then in fact see what will be, in a later period, with the help of astral happenings, as if it were a thickening of them. And so one can watch those astral events which subsequently step forth, solidified, on the physical plane. Physical events are nothing else than such thickened occurrences which have already taken place in the higher worlds.

An example: throughout antiquity there were mysteries. These had the task of receiving individual men and initiating them into the secrets of existence, or—as John of the Apocalypse says—showing what must ‘shortly,’ that is to say in the future, come to pass. In the precincts of such temples, the pupils who were to be received into the first degree were instructed. Now there was a further instruction for each successively higher level of development in the pupils. The first stage was for the candidates to purify their astral bodies. This meant that they did not merely embrace the ordinary bourgeois ethic; the bourgeois ethic was the preliminary requirement, what was then involved had to be followed in the strictest performance of duty. For, as the pupil progressively advanced to higher ideals, passing beyond the passions and instincts of ordinary life to yearnings above human pettiness, so purifying his sympathies and antipathies that the great world-embracing affairs of the human race became his own—as he reached out beyond himself in his feelings and perceptions, then he was on the way to completing what one calls the purification of the astral body. Then he was allowed to work upon the denser bodies. He was allowed to work upon his etheric body, and was no longer restricted to reshaping the soft, flexible and compliant astral substance of his soul and spirit bodies, but was allowed to work on his etheric body. He was then what is called a Chela. Such a Chela is one who acknowledges not only higher duties, who has undertaken not only enough purification to make humanity's duties his own, but is so advanced that he has outgrown the lower and higher affairs of individual nations and even of individual creeds. His gaze is now addressed to the life of the whole of humanity. And through his by now thoroughly structured etheric body he becomes a participant in the great affairs of the building of the earth. To do all this, the following must happen.

The Chela has to immobilise all the forces which hinder his work on his etheric body. If you have a human being before you, he has indeed a physical body, an etheric body and an astral body. The Chela has refined his astral body, and is allowed to work upon his etheric body. What happens when the astral body has been purified? What then penetrates the etheric body?—that which is organised in the astral body. The things which live in the astral body stamp themselves on the etheric body. The more you work at your astral body, the more you can redress its defects; the astral substance is thin and soft, you can always bring it back into balance again. However, if a person has begun to develop his etheric body as a Chela, then these qualities stamp themselves on the etheric body, and that is much more permanent. The man who made his earthly defects permanent would thereby become dangerous as a member of humanity. Hence the constant stress on necessary purification. The etheric body is stamped by the forces that work on it. Think of it separated from the physical body, it would then have quite a different elasticity. If it is fixed in [the physical body] this is held in by the form; but so long as it remains there, it is at first too weak to stamp into itself what has undergone catharsis as astrality.

Therefore throughout ancient times the following had to be done. One had to set aside those forces which impeded the elasticity of the etheric body. That was achieved by bringing the whole physical body into a lethargic condition. The human being lay down, and the etheric body was drawn out of the physical body. While the physical body lay as if dead, the astral body came to be formed by its autonomous forces. That is the entombment, the [body] concerned being kept in a lethargic state for three to three and a half days. And then he could work on the etheric body. And then, after he had formed his etheric body in conformity with his astral body, he returned into his physical body. He had thus awakened an inner life in himself; he was one of the resurrected and was given a new name.

This was a transaction on the astral plane. Everything which I have described took place on the astral plane; the physical body had nothing to do with it. This event repeated itself in all the ancient mysteries. Every initiate knew it. Now imagine it densified, translated down into the physical plane, so that something [physical] has happened, through this event, which had previously only happened astrally; analogous to, for example, your having a piece of ice where you had water before. Many such astral events must combine, must flow together, for the physical thickening eventually to become possible. Through this means the Mystery of Golgotha became historically possible, it could be translated down on to the physical plane, in that, through the appearance of Christ, things happened on the physical plane which previously had happened over and over again on the astral plane. We learn to conceive, through this example, how the future is actually prepared in the occult brotherhoods.

If we were now to ask ourselves: what then is really happening here?—then we should answer: One can certainly comprehend a great deal in thought, in ideas. But ideas have no real existence. An idea is nothing more than what has been brought down from higher planes to the physical plane. What man thinks about [something] is however the most ineffectual aspect, since this is only extant on the physical plane. It is different when such an idea is brought face to face with something which also originates from the higher spheres. Take as an example Pythagoras's teaching about the music of the spheres³ as he imparted it to his pupils. Philosophers try to make the occult music of Pythagoras out to be quite a simple notion. Reason could easily grasp it. But what was important [for Pythagoras] was that the pupil only approached this [subject] when his soul, his disposition had been prepared for it. Thus it is impossible to explain the deeper meaning of Raphael's Sistine Madonna to anyone who has no feeling for pictures which originate in the astral. One has to raise heart and soul up to it. What leaves one cold as an idea, appears in the picture as artistically full of life, as divine universal thinking, as something the divine forces followed in creating the world—and a simple line becomes something holy! Thought, by twining itself around a divine element, is brought face to face with divine influence. Thus, what matters in this sort of training is to prepare man step by step, as he is able to approach the great world thoughts, as he receives them. Then he will gradually combine with that influencing but otherwise occult power that penetrates these great world thoughts and which is already preparing, on the astral plane, the future of the physical plane. If the leading brother of mankind perhaps has pupils who follow such spirit-filled ideas, then these will be a force which also helps him forward in his work for the outward world; great centres of spiritual activity will spring up. You see, therefore, that what I have called occultism really has very much to do with the progress of humanity. And in our times we have a quite particularly important task. Let us seek just to indicate, in a few words, how we have come to this our task.

We are within the great Root Race of humanity, which has peopled the earth, since the land on which we now live rose up out of the inundations of the ocean. Ever since the Atlantean Race began slowly to disappear, the great Aryan Race has been the dominant one on earth. If we contemplate ourselves, we here in Europe are thus the fifth Sub-Race of the great Aryan Root Race. The first Sub-Race lived in the distant past in Ancient India. And the present-day Indians are descendants of that first Sub-Race, whose spiritual life is still extant in the ancient Indian Vedas.⁴ The Vedas are indeed only echoes of the ancient culture of the Rishis. At that time there was of course no writing yet—there was only tradition. Then came the second, third and fourth Sub-Races. The fourth Sub-Race adopted Christianity. Then, halfway through the Middle Ages, we see that the fifth Sub-Race formed itself, to which we and the neighbouring nations belong.

The ancient Indians of the first Sub-Race lived under conditions different from ours, and were also basically organised differently. Even the modern descendants, the Indians of today, are essentially differently organised from our European races. He who, as an occultist, investigates the difference finds that, in the ancient Indian people, the etheric body was much less closely fettered to the physical body, had not so totally submerged itself in the physical body, and that it was much easier to influence it from the astral body. The corollary of that is that the Indian race can easily transfer something from the astral to the etheric body, can easily work on the etheric body. That signifies no less than that the Indian can more easily attain to certain higher perceptions through occult training. The easier it is for the etheric body to be influenced through the astral body, the easier it is to work into the etheric body with pictures, without abstract concepts. And the easier it will be for someone who undergoes yoga training in the astral to come into contact with higher realms through pictorial concepts. These work into the etheric body, which is still pliable. One does not have to work with harsh concepts, since one can work upon the soul of an Indian person with very straightforward pictorial images; and he will [thereby] be able to arrive at very high stages of development.

The human race has undergone change through the various Sub-Races. Our etheric body is today much more strongly under the influence of the physical body than was the case with the ancient Indians. And thus it comes about that we have to work much harder and more inwardly in order to influence the etheric body. We cannot grasp half-dreamlike concepts. We must subject everything to rigorous concentration, we must work upon our inner being by strongly concentrating our soul in the purely super-sensible, not merely by means of imaginative concepts. Such a concept which brings about a strong concentration of our inner being, can then influence the etheric body fettered to the physical body much more strongly. For the astral body to be able to work upon the etheric body, it had in earlier times to be drawn out of the etheric [physical?] body. Nowadays, however, the etheric body can be influenced by the astral body even inside the physical body. Were we to make the same experiment that was customary in the ancient Mysteries, and induce a state of lethargy, we would then be in a position to influence the etheric body. But when the earthly consciousness, the mobility of thought, returned, what the astral body had imprinted on to the etheric body would immediately be erased again. We have to influence the etheric body very strongly if we want it to retain what we have impressed upon it. The occult task has become different today and is now more inward.

Thus you see also how great differences arise in the course of time in the successive occult schools. The yoga system of the Indians is something different from the instruction of the Rosicrucians. The Rosicrucian teaching takes into account what I have just explained. But something else still crops up. For such a step forward to be able to occur at all, the reasoning power had to be influenced. The reason was exerted much more than hitherto, and could then develop its process of transference towards comprehending the super-sensible. In more recent times, therefore, much more was learnt in concepts; more importance was ascribed to the development of reason and to the ability to conceptualise abstractly.

Just compare the transubstantiation in culture between the ancient Indian age and our own. In ancient India you have high intuition and very little outward expression of civilisation; nowadays, in our time, it is the other way round. The consequence is that even the position of occultism has become something quite different; the consequence is that much of what was formerly kept secret has today become a matter of common knowledge. Many, many such perceptions and concepts were formerly guarded within the occult brotherhoods, and people only came near to these things if their whole hearts had been transformed. Today this no longer lies in the hands of the occultist. Much of what was formerly reserved for the later stages of instruction must now be acknowledged as having been revealed in the culture of the outward world. The initiate in the mysteries must reckon with that. And so many of the truths which had been taught in the occult schools were perforce gradually disseminated on the physical plane.

Even what is taught in present-day elementary schools would deflect us from the spiritual, if occult backgrounds did not come into play from another side. In earlier times the pupil knew that behind what he received in school and in the academic world as precepts, there was something still higher, and that he himself might perhaps one day attain this higher knowledge. He knew that he was a cell in a spiritual organism. Today, in the democratic world, one receives many concepts which do not lead to such an insight. Therefore to the structure of outer democratic knowledge the apex of the pyramid has, as it were, to be added. The elementary knowledge of the powers hidden in the world had now been imparted; the apex was missing still, which would lead to a spiritual view of the world. To provide this, a world-embracing movement had to be founded. The theosophical movement was conceived as such. Hence, in certain brotherhoods, it was resolved, as the popularisation of the hitherto secret knowledge went still further and further, to share with the world as much as was necessary of the underlying secrets, in order to bring the knowledge of the outer world into harmony with the all-embracing occult knowledge of the brotherhoods.

We have here arrived at the point where we can see the connection of the theosophical movement and the Theosophical Society with occultism. The theosophical movement is no occult movement, no occult brotherhood, for it is formed on a democratic basis by which each member is as worthy as the next. Nevertheless, it is another matter if one is to understand the Theosophical Society's task. The Society's task is on the physical plane. If one wishes to grasp it fully one must be able to see into the higher worlds. But the point is not that the theosophist is already able to see into higher worlds, but that, within the movement, occult forces are indeed being developed, so that the Theosophical Society can be a place from which occultism can emanate and come to be discussed. It is a different question, whether a society is an occult brotherhood, or whether it says to itself: We are, indeed, no occult brotherhood, but, in our society, occultism comes to be discussed.

Today, when basically the whole of mankind longingly gazes towards the higher worlds without finding the way there, yet another installment of occult knowledge must be popularised in a form appropriate for them. And the occultism within the Theosophical Society has this task. Spiritual movements have always had a fruitful influence on cultural development, even on the physical plane. Its outward expression is nothing else than the realisation on earth of what has been spiritually prepared. What difference is there, if we contemplate, for example, the works of Michaelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci? In these works you have something spiritual conjured up on to the wall in colour and form; the picture is permeated with what first lived in the soul of the artist as something spiritual. The spiritual preceded its subsequent expression as a manifestation in the material world.

And the materialistic external culture is only the copy of the materialistic tendency in mankind's inner convictions. The purely materialistic urban culture has spread itself throughout civilised countries since 1850. We can see the great things that it has achieved on the physical plane, but we also see what it has been unable to achieve. In the realm of art, for instance, no really new style has been evolved, with one exception, and that is the style of the department store. This is something which, in relation to our outward civilisation, is inwardly real. All else, what has been inherited from the past, has no relation to the present. Only if we have formed a society whose members are seized by a spiritual power such as that which used to live in Christianity, and as it still lives as a longing in the best Christian souls, and can be won back again, then we will again have a spiritual culture. And such a culture will again produce artists in all spheres of life. Only let theosophy live in the souls of men and it will flow out of those souls again as style, as art, it will be visibly and audibly there. The world can again be an outward expression of the spiritual, if this can already be brought to life in such a society today.

In this sense the Theosophical Society could help to shape the culture of the distant [future]. If we are together, we must be clear that we are the cells that have to combine to create a future culture. In our souls, those powers will be prepared which will so transform the future world that it will be a physical copy of our present state of mind and outlook on life. Everything which is now revealed and manifest, was once occult. Just as electricity is a revealed force today, so it once used to be an occult force. And what is still occult today is destined to become a motive force for the future. Exactly as our human body has been prepared in advance millions of years ago by forces which are all around us, so a higher body is preparing itself in us today, a body of the future; however, this body of the future will only become ours in a far-off time.

Let us briefly trace the path of our evolution. What used to be there? A dim dream-like human consciousness, mirroring a world very different from our own; men had a dreaming awareness. And even when their communal existence developed, they had no parliament for the exchange of opinions; they had nothing of that kind. Everything was merely mirrored in the consciousness which was developing in man. As for present-day bodily organs, how did they originate? Through those forces having worked upon man. Just as the animals in the dark caves of Kentucky lost their ability to see⁵ because they did not use it, so too, what we possess in the way of eyes and ears was organised by outward forces. These were formed by the forces of sound and of light, and evolved out of our organism. Our spiritual organism of the future will be evolved out of what lives in us today. Those things which stand before us as the expression of our spiritual culture, the churches and so on, the works of culture which bring beauty and truth to us, these will impress themselves in the higher members of our being. And when one day these unfold themselves towards a self-developing life, then what lives in the outward culture as beauty and truth will rise up in our inner being. What eyes and ears perceive now, these will be the stones for building and organising a higher future. If we contemplate the world from this point of view, then man's inner being takes on a totally different meaning.

Here we are confronted with a fact that can explain in a simple way what is called yoga, or inner training. From the words I have spoken, you will be able to gather that the forces which have created the world, that are working and creating in the world, were formerly taken from our inner being. What is in me today was formerly outside me: that is the fundamental thought in occult training. Before our physical body existed, our etheric body was already there. Again, our etheric body is a structure which has been formed by our astral body. And that is the starting point of the yoga training. Whoever engages in yoga training descends into his etheric body, and knows that he will find forces in it which constructed it once, millions of years ago. The physical body slowly developed itself out from the basis of the etheric body.

I can only describe broadly how the descent into the etheric body takes place. Certain currents exist in the etheric body which are the precursors of the physical bodily organs. The nervous system, the nerves themselves, the sympathetic [nervous] system which extends into the back, the ganglia of the sympathetic nervous system, these are parts which were developed etherically in primeval times. That is a process which took place in the remote past. Then, after man had progressed further and further, there came a time when, within his body—which already contained within it the potentiality to develop the physical nervous system—a structure developed which gave man the ability to develop his inner bodily warmth, which prepared him for warm blood. That, again, is a later structure from the etheric body, which then was already strongly influenced by the forces of the astral body. And out of what we subsequently find to be the basic structure of the brain, the spinal column formed itself, again out of the etheric body, as the other pole of the etheric body, which on the one hand developed towards the brain, and on the other hand towards the inner warm blood. That happened in the past. It was not only natural forces that worked on this development of man, but also higher spiritual beings.

When the yogi descends step by step into his etheric body he penetrates into the times gone by in which his spiritual archetypal form was influenced by these forces and beings, times when what lives in us today was produced. When a person thus descends into life, he can then reach that point once again in his descent. He descends from the head down into the lower parts of the body, which were formed in the most ancient times, and then goes back into the head. That is a description, if only a sketchy one, of the path of occult perception. More can be imparted in the occult schools. The pupil of mystery wisdom thus developed the ability to look back into past epochs; so the time comes when he is able to undertake his occult pilgrimage. He attains to this by means of a special exercise through which he overcomes his own personal self and thereby ceases to be a small fettered ego. Only then can he accomplish his ascent into the universe. Once again he descends into the ocean of the past, taking the world forces with him. Then, taking the ascending curve, he can slowly retrace point by point the way that he has thus traveled. Slowly, gradually, the person learns to proceed [further] down into the ocean of his formative forces, and at length he arrives at a point near to [his] origin. Thus must it have been for the person in whom an eye first evolved, with which to direct his gaze into the universe. Then, for the pupil, the flowing together of his ego with the great universal ego blossoms. And now he must learn to say to the little ego: I am not thou.

It is an important moment when he realises what this means: I am not thou. That is a moment when a person begins to understand that in nature there are higher forces than thought, that there is something outside of him, which cannot be expressed in contemporary thought, but which brings it about that two people, both able to speak on the same thing, can in the case of one of them talk clearly but be dull, whereas the other's speech is vibrant with the warm light that will create the future.

When the pupil is this far, he can learn now in another way than has hitherto been possible for him. He thereby experiences something very special. A spiritual being confronts him in the super-sensible world: he meets that individuality with whom he was once, formerly, very close. It is a great and significant mystery, when particular stages of our existence recapitulate themselves. We rise consciously from Manas to the higher forces; we once descended from spiritual worlds, and at that time this same being implanted something in us, whom we now meet again at the level corresponding to that point in the past at which he was with us. It is the teacher, the so-called guru. Long ago we met him for the first time; we now meet him again, when we can grasp consciously what he implanted into us at that time, and was received by us unconsciously. And if we descend still further we meet with the spirits who shared in our creation aeons ago. We meet with the Twelve Spirits: the Spirits of Will, the Spirits of Wisdom, the Spirits of Form, the Spirits of Movement, the Spirits of Personality or of Egoism, the Spirits of Warmth or Fire, the Spirits of Dusk or Twilight, and so on. All of this offers itself to our spiritual sense through this descent into the universe, through this pilgrimage. And this alone makes it possible for us to gaze into the future, makes it possible to anticipate what ‘shortly’—as the writer of the Apocalypse puts it—will happen.

That is the task of occultism. It is to be discharged, because that discharge is necessary. There are movements in plenty which are idealistic, which are ethical. But the movement called theosophy distinguishes itself from the others, in that occultism consciously comes to expression in this movement.

With that, the connection between occultism and theosophy is made clear. The Theosophical Society can never want to be an occult brotherhood. What must give it the strength to fulfil its task, what must give it life, can only be the things that emanate from occultism. Therefore the Theosophical Society will thrive if the cultivation of occult teaching and occult life is understood. That is stiff not a demand that the members themselves should be occultists. But if the Theosophical Society were to forget that this blood pulses in it, then it might remain an interesting society, but what was intended for it by the sublime powers who assisted at its birth would not be achieved.

Whoever understands this will never want to take away the Theosophical Society's occult character. All the same, whoever thus belongs to the Theosophical Society will be brought into a two-sided situation. He must necessarily give an ear to the side whence flow the occult truths, on the other hand he must turn his attention to the exoteric life of the Society. These aspects must be kept strictly apart; they must never be mixed together. When one talks about the outward Theosophical Society, one must never, however, even mention the occult personalities who stood over its inception. The powers who live on the higher planes and who live for the sake of mankind's evolution, outside of the physical body, never interfere in these affairs. They never impart anything other than impulses. Whenever we are engaged, in a practical way, in extending the Theosophical Society, the great individualities whom we call the Masters are standing at our side; we may turn ourselves to them and allow them to speak through us. When it concerns the propagation of occult life, it is the Masters who speak. When it only concerns the Organisation of the Society then they leave it to those who are living on the physical plane. That is the distinction between the occult current and the framework of the theosophical organisation. Allow me to express the difference between what flows as inward spiritual stream and what manifests through individual personalities, as it can perhaps best be expressed: When it concerns spiritual life, then the Masters speak; when it only concerns Organisation, since error is possible, the Masters are then silent.

• 1 . The first announcement was most probably given during the General Meeting of the German Section which had taken place beforehand.
• 2 . The then name of the Berlin Branch which held its usual evening meetings.
• 3 . The principle teaching of Pythagoras (ca. 580–500 B.C.) was that the universe was conceived in the form of a harmoniously ordered whole (the harmony of the spheres).
• 4 . Veda (Sanskrit word for ‘sacred knowledge’). The Vedas are the complete collection of the oldest religious documents of the Hindus, written in Sanskrit, to which a supersensible origin has been attributed. They contain a comprehensive literature which was handed on by word of mouth for many ages. The Vedic manuscripts are divided mainly into the following: 1. the Sanhitas; 2. the Brahmanas; 3. the Aranyakas and Upanishads. The Sanhitas are the anthologies of songs, sacrificial formulae and magical incantations. Four such anthologies are distinguished, usually referred to simply as ‘the four Vedas.’
• 5 . This example is often cited by Rudolf Steiner. The phenomenon of the rudimentary organs was first observed in the American caves. See: Darwin's Origin of Species, Chapter 5, ‘The Laws of Mutation.’

We shall discuss a few intimate questions of reincarnation that can be examined only in a circle of well prepared anthroposophists. By this we mean not only that they should be well prepared in theoretical knowledge but also that they have developed their sensitive faculty by working with others in a branch. For we all remember that our perceptions and sensibilities for truth have changed by virtue of this collaboration. What today we do not merely believe but perceive as truths that are beyond the realm of faith used to be incredible to us in earlier days and today still appears as fantastic nonsense or reverie to outsiders. Thus it is an indication of advancement if people have become accustomed to really living in these perceptions for only then can they begin to consider special questions. Much of what will be mentioned here seems to be remote, and yet even though we will first have to go back to far-distant periods of human evolution, all these things have an enlightening effect on our understanding of life and its phenomena. We must start by putting before our souls how the process of reincarnation takes place in general.

When human beings pass through the portal of death, they first have certain experiences. Their first experience is the feeling that they are growing larger or that they are growing out of their skin. This has the effect of the human being attaining another perception of things than was the case earlier in physical life. Everything in the physical world has its definite place—either here or there—outside the observer, but that is not so in this new world. There, it is as if the human being were inside the objects, extended with or within them, whereas earlier he or she was only a separate object in its own place. The second experience after death consists of a human being's attaining a “memory tableau” of the life just completed, so that all events in it recur in comprehensive memory. This process lasts a definite amount of time. For reasons that cannot be stated here today, the duration of this memory is shorter or longer, depending on the individual. In general, the duration of this state can be determined from the length of time each human being was able to stay awake during the past life, continuously and without once succumbing to the forces of sleep. Supposing that the outer limit for a person's staying awake continuously had been forty-eight hours, then the memory tableau after death will also be forty-eight hours. And thus, this stage is like an overview of the past life.

Then the etheric body leaves the astral body, in which the ego is living. All three had been connected from the time they left the physical corpse, but now the etheric body separates itself from the other two and becomes an etheric corpse. However, today's human beings do not lose their etheric body completely but take an extract or excerpt along with them for all the times to follow. So in this sense the etheric corpse is cast off, but the fruit of the last life is carried along by the astral body and by the ego. If we want to be quite precise, we will have to say that something is taken along from the physical body as well: a kind of spiritual abstract of this body—the tincture medieval mystics spoke about. However, this abstract of the physical being is the same in all lives; it merely represents the fact that the ego had been embodied. On the other hand, the essence of the etheric body is different in all lives, depending on what one has experienced in a life and on the degree of one's progress in it.

There follows the condition of what is called kamaloca, the time of weaning the soul from the effects of physical, sensuous existence, which lasts about a third of the time of a person's physical life. After the etheric body has been cast off, the astral body still contains all the passions, desires, and so on that it had at the end of life; they must be lost and purified, and that is kamaloca. Then the astral body is cast off and here, too, the fruit, the astral essence, is taken along; but the rest—the astral corpse—dissolves into the astral world. The human being now enters devachan where he or she prepares in the spiritual world for a new life in the future. Here human beings live with spiritual events and beings until they are again called into the physical world, be it because the karma of a person demands it or because an individual is needed on the physical earth.

This is a general description of the process. However, life in the spiritual realm progresses steadily in that the future joins itself to the past, and coming events are shaped with the help of past events. If one considers the details of this process, there is much among the wondrous things that become apparent, which is not contained in a simple presentation of the process of reincarnation. It is, after all, clear that great differences exist when one looks at the course of human development and that the extracts or abstracts of their bodies can have different values depending on the kinds of fruit they were able to extract from life. And when we remember that there are great leaders of humanity, initiates who lead other human beings into the spiritual worlds, then we have to ask ourselves this question: What causes the accomplishments of the initiates to be preserved for the future? External history is, of course, incapable of providing an answer to this question. What we have to do is scrutinize the reincarnation of the initiates and then apply the results of our investigation. We will begin with the oldest initiates.

Before humanity inhabited the continents as we know them today, the physiognomy of the earth was quite different. The area that is today covered by the Atlantic Ocean used to be the continent of Atlantis, which was destroyed by great catastrophes, as is reported by many peoples in their “saga of the great flood.” The Atlanteans—and that is we ourselves—had their great leaders and initiates, and even in those days there existed places of instruction or schools where the initiates taught. The existence of these schools can be verified today by clairvoyant investigation. A good name for these schools where the leaders taught and lived is the word “oracle.” the most important leader lived in one of the largest and most important oracles—the Sun Oracle. His main task consisted of revealing the secrets of the SUN—not the physical, external sun, but the real SUN. The latter consists of spiritual beings who make use of the physical sun much in the same way as human beings make use of the earth. To perceive and reveal the inner secrets of this Sun-existence was the task of the Great Sun Oracle. For it, sun light was not something physical, but rather every ray of sunshine represented the deed of the spiritual beings who reside on the sun. These great beings were exclusively on the sun during the time of ancient Atlantis. Later, when the great Being who was to be called the Christ united with the earth, this was no longer the case. Therefore, one can also call the Sun Oracle the Christ Oracle. The unification of the Christ-Being with the earth took place when the blood flowed from the wounds of Jesus Christ at Golgotha. That is when His essence united with the atmosphere of the earth, as can be perceived even today in clairvoyant retrospection. That is how the Christ-Being came down from the Sun to earth. When the light of spiritual illumination fell on Saul-Paul near Damascus, Paul beheld the Christ that was united with the earth and knew immediately that it was He who had shed His blood at Golgotha.

The sun oracle of ancient Atlantis had already prophesied the coming of Christ, of the Sun-God. To be sure, he was named the Christ only much later, but we can still say that the Sun Oracle is the Christ Oracle. These oracles had many successors in later periods, such as the Jupiter, Mars, Venus, Mercury, and Vulcan oracles, each with its great mysteries and teachings. Toward the end of the Atlantean era a group of advanced human beings was formed in the vicinity of what is today Ireland. The Great Leader chose a few from their midst who should carry on cultural life when the impending catastrophe would finally take place. However, enormous migrations had taken place a long time before to the continents of Europe, Asia, and Africa, which were beginning to rise out of the sea. Many successors of the old oracles came into being on these continents, but not without gradually losing the significance of the old oracles. The Great Leader, however, chose the best people in order to lead them into a special land. They were plain and simple people who were different from most other Atlanteans in that they had almost completely lost their clairvoyance. You will remember that the majority of the Atlanteans were clairvoyant. When they fell asleep at night, they did not lose consciousness, but rather the sense world disappeared and there arose in its place the spiritual world in which they were the companions of divine-spiritual beings. The advanced people in Atlantis had begun to develop their intellect, yet they were simple people who possessed inner warmth and were deeply devoted to their leader. He took this select group East to the center of Asia, where he founded the center of the post-Atlantean culture. After the group had arrived in central Asia, it was kept in isolation from the human beings who were unsuited to the task. The descendants of this group were educated with special care, and only they developed the qualities necessary to make them great teachers.

All this happened in a mysterious way. It was the task of the Manu, the Great Leader, to make the necessary preparations for preserving for the new race everything that was good in the Atlantean culture and thus to lay the foundation for the progression of a new culture. The sages living in the smaller oracles were unable to devote themselves to this task because only the Manu had preserved from the great initiates of the oracles that which we call the etheric body. As we have seen, this etheric body normally dissolves as the second corpse, but in certain cases it was preserved. The greatest of these sages in the oracles had worked so much into their etheric bodies that the latter had become too valuable simply to be dissipated into the general etheric world. Therefore, the seven best etheric bodies belonging to the seven greatest initiates were preserved until the Manu had developed the seven most outstanding people from his group in such a way that they were suited to absorb the preserved etheric bodies. Only the etheric body of the Great Initiate of the Christ Oracle was, in a certain sense, treated differently from the others. And so the seven sages, or Rishis, who had received the seven etheric bodies of the greatest initiates, went to India, where they became the founders and great teachers of Indian culture.

This very ancient, holy culture of the pre-Vedic era originated from the seven Rishis who bore the preserved etheric bodies of the initiates of the various oracles, such as Venus, Jupiter, Mars, and so on. In a way, a copy of those initiates, a repetition of their capabilities, came to be at work in these Rishis, even though they were plain and simple people when seen from the outside. Their significance was not evident from their external appearance, nor was their intellect commensurate with the loftiness of their prophecies. Possessing their own astral bodies and egos but being endowed with the etheric bodies of those great sages, these Rishis were not scholars and did not rank so highly in terms of their power of judgment as did many of their contemporaries, or even as many people in our times. But in inspired ages they were, in a way, seized upon by these oracle beings whose etheric bodies became active in them. In that sense they were only instruments through whom that ancient wisdom was proclaimed—those Vedas that are far too difficult, if not incomprehensible, for human beings in our age. And this is how the old wisdom of the ancient oracles was revealed, with the exception of the Sun, or Christ, Oracle which could not be completely revealed in such a way. Only a faint reflection of the Sun-wisdom could be transmitted because it was so lofty that even the Holy Rishis could not grasp it.

We can see here that reincarnation does not always proceed as smoothly and in such general ways as is often supposed. Rather, if an etheric body is especially valuable, it is—to express it metaphorically—preserved like a mold that can be imprinted on human beings of later ages. Such an occurrence is not all that rare, and many a plain person can have an extremely valuable etheric body that is preserved for later use. Not all etheric bodies dissolve after death, but some of those that are especially useful are transferred to other human beings. But the “I” of the individual receiving the etheric or astral body is not at all identical with the ego of the donor. Disregarding this fact can easily lead to great misconceptions on the part of someone who investigates a human being's past with faulty clairvoyant methods. It is for this reason that the occult theories about the earlier lives of human beings are often completely wrong, just as it would be wrong to say that the seven Rishis had the same egos as the initiates whose etheric bodies they had received.

Only when we know such things can we gain clarity about much that is important in human evolution, such as the preservation of human achievements for nature's economy. It is through the transmission of these seven etheric bodies that the highest values of the Atlantean culture were saved and preserved for posterity.

Let us discuss another example, which could not be mentioned earlier, and look at the ancient Persian time, the period of Zarathustra's culture.¹ We consider it an important period because it was the first post-Atlantean time in which greater emphasis was placed on the conquest of the physical world. During the Indian epoch, the longing for the spiritual realm dominated the thinking of human beings. Most of them considered the spiritual world as being real and felt like strangers in the physical realm, which to them was transitory, illusory, maya.² This consciousness changed in the prehistoric Persian culture through the teachings of Zarathustra, that is to say the teachings of the original and first Zarathustra, because there were many Zarathustras after him. His task as a leader was to draw the attention of human beings to the physical plane, to make inventions, manufacture instruments and tools, and thus to conquer the physical world. This was necessary because human beings had to become acquainted with the physical world as something that was important to them. However, the tempter within a human being tells him or her that the physical is the only reality and that there exists nothing beyond the earthly realm. This belief, Zarathustra teaches, is false because behind the physical there is the spiritual world, just as the physical sun is for us the external sign of the great Sun-Being, of the Spiritual-Divine, of the Great Aura, of Ahura Mazdao, of Ormuzd. These names designate a Being that is now physically invisible and lives far away from the earth on the sun. But, as goes Zarathustra's teaching, some day this Being will reveal Itself; later It will make Its appearance on earth, just as It is now present on the sun.

Zarathustra initiated his most intimate students into these mysteries, but the most profound teachings he imparted to two of them. The first one was primarily instructed in everything that concerns human judgment, such as natural science, astronomy and astrology, agriculture, and other disciplines. All this knowledge was transmitted to this one disciple by a secret process of communication between the two. This prepared the disciple in such a way that in the following reincarnation he was able to carry the astral body of his teacher; and he was reincarnated as Hermes,³ the great teacher and sage of the Egyptian Mysteries. Born with Zarathustra's astral body, Hermes became the bearer of the great wisdom.

The second intimate disciple was instructed in the subject matters that express themselves especially in the etheric body and are deeper in substance. This disciple received in the following incarnation the etheric body of Zarathustra. The stories about this in religious documents are comprehensible only through these explanations. At his reincarnation, the student had to be animated in a very special way, that is the etheric body had to be strong before the astral body could be awakened. That could be achieved through the circumstances surrounding the birth of this reincarnated disciple, who was none other than Moses. The fact that he was placed into a box made of bulrushes that was allowed to float on the water and so on had the purpose of awakening completely the etheric body of the child. That enabled Moses to survey in his memory times long past, to pictorially record the genesis of the earth, and to read in the Akasha Chronicle.⁴ And, thus, one sees that these things are at work behind the scenes, as it were, and that through this process everything valuable is preserved and re-utilized.

There are other examples from later times, for example Nicholas of Cusa (Cusanus),⁵ a curious personality of the fifteenth century. Here we can see the interesting case of how the research of this man, as it were, laid the groundwork for the entire body of the teaching of Copernicus,⁶ who lived in the sixteenth century. To be sure, this body of teaching is not yet quite as ripe in Cusa's books as in those written by Copernicus, but they contain all the essential ideas, a fact that confounds most traditional scholars. The fact is that the astral body of Cusa was transferred to Copernicus even though the ego of the latter was different from that of Cusa. This is how Copernicus received the foundation and all the preparations for his own doctrine.

Similar cases occur often. What is especially valuable is always preserved; nothing vanishes. But this fact also enhances the possibility of error in any attempt to establish correspondences, especially when people attempt to investigate the earlier lives of a human being with the help of a medium in séance. The transfer of an etheric or astral body to a human being in more modern times usually happens now in such a way that an astral body is transferred to a member of the same language group, whereas an etheric body can be transferred to a member of another language group.

When a pioneering personality dies, his or her etheric body is always preserved, and occult schools have always known the artifical methods by which this was accomplished. Considering now another characteristic case, we can say that it was important for certain purposes in the more modern age that the etheric body of Galileo⁷ should be preserved. He was the great reformer of mechanical physics whose accomplishments were so tremendous that one can say many of the purely practical accomplishments of the modern age would not have come about without his discoveries, for all technical progress rests on Galileo's science. The tunnels of St. Gotthart or Simplon have become possible only because Leibniz,⁸ Newton,⁹ and Galileo developed the sciences of integral and differential calculus, mechanics, and so on. With regard to Galileo, it would have been a waste in nature's economy had his etheric body, the carrier of his memory and talent, been lost. And that is why his etheric body was transferred to another human being: Michail Lomonosov,¹⁰ who came from a poor Russian village and was later to become the founder of Russian grammar and classical literature. Lomonosov, however, is not the reincarnated Galileo, as might be supposed as a result of superficial investigation.

And thus we see that there are many such cases and that the process of reincarnation is not so simple as most people of our time think. If, therefore, people investigate earlier incarnations with the help of occult methods, they have to exercise much greater caution. In many instances, it is nothing but childishness if people state or imagine they are the reincarnated such and such, perhaps Nero, Napoleon, Beethoven, or Goethe. Such silly things must, of course, be rejected. But the matter becomes more dangerous when advanced occultists make mistakes in this regard and imagine that they are the reincarnation of this or that man, when in fact they carry only his etheric body. Not only is this an error that is regrettable in itself, but the human being coming to these conclusions would live under the influence of this mistaken idea, and that would have nearly catastrophic consequences. The result of such an illusion would be that the whole development of the soul proceeds in the wrong direction.

We have seen not only that the egos are capable of reincarnation, but that the lower members of the human constitution in a certain sense undergo a similar process. The result of this is that the whole configuration of the process of reincarnation is much more complicated than is usually supposed. And thus we see that the ego of Zarathustra was reincarnated as Zarathas—Nazarathos, who in turn became the teacher of Pythagoras.¹¹ On the other hand, Zarathustra's astral body reappeared in Hermes and his etheric body in Moses. Therefore, nothing is lost in the world; everything is preserved and transmitted to posterity, provided it is valuable enough.

• 1. The “original” Zarathustra (or Zoroaster) Rudolf Steiner refers to in these lectures is not the historical religious teacher and prophet of ancient Persia whose dates are ca. 628–551 B.C., but the prophet who, according to early Christian tradition and according to Plutarch was born about 6400 B.C. He gave the impulse for the founding of the second post-Atlantean epoch.
• 2. The term maya in the Hindu Veda means magic power, but in Mahayana Buddhism it denotes illusion or non-reality; and this is how Steiner uses the term.
• 3. Historical scholarship usually considers Hermes as a mythical figure in ancient Egypt, but Steiner thinks he was a living prophet who appeared about 4200 B.C. when the sun moved into Taurus. According to historical speculation the so-called Hermetic books—metaphysical pronouncements about the community of all beings and things—were authored by the Egyptian god Thoth (the Thrice Great), whose name was often translated into Greek as Hermes Trismegistus.
• 4. The “Akasha Chronicle” is an occult “script” containing the complete story of the universe. Occultists of all ages have tried to “read” it by freeing themselves from the limitations of time and space. Rudolf Steiner had refined his spiritual faculties to such a degree that he was able to read the “Akasha Chronicle.” To understand his work, it is necessary to assume that he did possess this capacity. For a thorough description of the nature of the Akasha Chronicle, see Rudolf Steiner, Cosmic Memory, pp. 38–41.
• 5. Nicholas of Cusa (1401?–1464) was a German humanist, scientist, and philosopher of the highest rank who became Bishop of Brixon in 1450. His astounding achievements in science included a theory that the Earth revolves on its axis around the sun and that the stars are different worlds.
• 6. Polish-born Nicholas Copernicus (1473–1543) was the founder of modern astronomy. His main work on the orbits and revolutions of heavenly bodies, completed in 1530, but not published until 1543 when he was on his deathbed, expressed his views on the structure of the physical universe.
• 7. Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) was the great Italian astronomer, mathematician, and physicist who laid the foundations of modern experimental science. The time of his death in the text (toward the end of the seventeenth century) is an error in transcription.
• 8. Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646–1716) was the famous German philosopher, mathematician, and statesman who invented calculus independent from Newton and is widely regarded as the founder of symbolic logic. His philosophical achievements include the Theodicy and the famous Monadology.
• 9. Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727) was the great English mathematician and physicist whose works marked a turning point in modern experimental science. Few people know that in the later years of his life Newton spent much of his time in the study of theology and alchemy.
• 10. Michail Vasilyevich Lomonosov (1712–65) was perhaps the most outstanding scientist, scholar, and writer of eighteenth-century Russia.
• 11. Pythagoras (c. 582–c. 507 B.C.) was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher and mathematician of whose personal life traditional science knows little. He migrated from his native Samos to Gotona and established a mystery center. The followers of Pythagoras believed, among other things, in the transmigration of souls.

The Meaning of the Name

Enquirer. Theosophy and its doctrines are often referred to as a new-fangled religion. Is it a religion?

Theosophist. It is not. Theosophy is Divine Knowledge or Science.

Enq. What is the real meaning of the term?

Theo. "Divine Wisdom," (Theosophia) or Wisdom of the gods, as (theogonia), genealogy of the gods. The word theos means a god in Greek, one of the divine beings, certainly not "God" in the sense attached in our day to the term. Therefore, it is not "Wisdom of God," as translated by some, but Divine Wisdom such as that possessed by the gods. The term is many thousand years old.

Enq. What is the origin of the name?

Theo. It comes to us from the Alexandrian philosophers, called lovers of truth, Philaletheians, from phil "loving," and aletheia "truth." The name Theosophy dates from the third century of our era, and began with Ammonius Saccas and his disciples ¹, who started the Eclectic Theosophical system.

Enq. What was the object of this system?

Theo. First of all to inculcate certain great moral truths upon its disciples, and all those who were "lovers of the truth." Hence the motto adopted by the Theosophical Society: "There is no religion higher than truth." ² The chief aim of the Founders of the Eclectic Theosophical School was one of the three objects of its modern successor, the Theosophical Society, namely, to reconcile all religions, sects and nations under a common system of ethics, based on eternal verities.

Enq. What have you to show that this is not an impossible dream; and that all the world's religions are based on the one and the same truth?

Theo. Their comparative study and analysis. The "Wisdom-religion" was one in antiquity; and the sameness of primitive religious philosophy is proven to us by the identical doctrines taught to the Initiates during the MYSTERIES, an institution once universally diffused. "All the old worships indicate the existence of a single Theosophy anterior to them. The key that is to open one must open all; otherwise it cannot be the right key." (Eclect. Philo.)

The Policy of the Theosophical Society

Enq. In the days of Ammonius there were several ancient great religions, and numerous were the sects in Egypt and Palestine alone. How could he reconcile them?

Theo. By doing that which we again try to do now. The Neo-Platonists were a large body, and belonged to various religious philosophies; ³ so do our Theosophists. In those days, the Jew Aristobulus affirmed that the ethics of Aristotle represented the esoteric teachings of the Law of Moses; Philo Judaeus endeavoured to reconcile the Pentateuch with the Pythagorean and Platonic philosophy; and Josephus proved that the Essenes of Carmel were simply the copyists and followers of the Egyptian Therapeutae (the healers). So it is in our day. We can show the line of descent of every Christian religion, as of every, even the smallest, sect. The latter are the minor twigs or shoots grown on the larger branches; but shoots and branches spring from the same trunk — the WISDOM-RELIGION. To prove this was the aim of Ammonius, who endeavoured to induce Gentiles and Christians, Jews and Idolaters, to lay aside their contentions and strifes, remembering only that they were all in possession of the same truth under various vestments, and were all the children of a common mother.⁴ This is the aim of Theosophy likewise.

Enq. What are your authorities for saying this of the ancient Theosophists of Alexandria?

Theo. An almost countless number of well-known writers. Mosheim, one of them, says that: —

"Ammonius taught that the religion of the multitude went hand-in-hand with philosophy, and with her had shared the fate of being by degrees corrupted and obscured with mere human conceits, superstitions, and lies; that it ought, therefore, to be brought back to its original purity by purging it of this dross and expounding it upon philosophical principles; and the whole Christ had in view was to reinstate and restore to its primitive integrity the wisdom of the ancients; to reduce within bounds the universally-prevailing dominion of superstition; and in part to correct, and in part to exterminate the various errors that had found their way into the different popular religions."

This, again, is precisely what the modern Theosophists say. Only while the great Philaletheian was supported and helped in the policy he pursued by two Church Fathers, Clement and Athenagoras, by all the learned Rabbis of the Synagogue, the Academy and the Groves, and while he taught a common doctrine for all, we, his followers on the same line, receive no recognition, but, on the contrary, are abused and persecuted. People 1,500 years ago are thus shown to have been more tolerant than they are in this enlightened century.

Enq. Was he encouraged and supported by the Church because, notwithstanding his heresies, Ammonius taught Christianity and was a Christian?

Theo. Not at all. He was born a Christian, but never accepted Church Christianity. As said of him by the same writer:

"He had but to propound his instructions according to the ancient pillars of Hermes, which Plato and Pythagoras knew before, and from them constituted their philosophy. Finding the same in the prologue of the Gospel according to St. John, he very properly supposed that the purpose of Jesus was to restore the great doctrine of wisdom in its primitive integrity. The narratives of the Bible and the stories of the gods he considered to be allegories illustrative of the truth, or else fables to be rejected." Moreover, as says the Edinburgh Encyclopoedia, "he acknowledged that Jesus Christ was an excellent man and the 'friend of God,' but alleged that it was not his design entirely to abolish the worship of demons (gods), and that his only intention was to purify the ancient religion."

The Wisdom-Religion Esoteric in All Ages

Enq. Since Ammonius never committed anything to writing, how can one feel sure that such were his teachings?

Theo. Neither did Buddha, Pythagoras, Confucius, Orpheus, Socrates, or even Jesus, leave behind them any writings. Yet most of these are historical personages, and their teachings have all survived. The disciples of Ammonius (among whom Origen and Herennius) wrote treatises and explained his ethics. Certainly the latter are as historical, if not more so, than the Apostolic writings. Moreover, his pupils — Origen, Plotinus, and Longinus (counsellor of the famous Queen Zenobia) — have all left voluminous records of the Philaletheian System — so far, at all events, as their public profession of faith was known, for the school was divided into exoteric and esoteric teachings.

Enq. How have the latter tenets reached our day, since you hold that what is properly called the WISDOM-RELIGION was esoteric?

Theo. The WISDOM-RELIGION was ever one, and being the last word of possible human knowledge, was, therefore, carefully preserved. It preceded by long ages the Alexandrian Theosophists, reached the modern, and will survive every other religion and philosophy.

Enq. Where and by whom was it so preserved?

Theo. Among Initiates of every country; among profound seekers after truth — their disciples; and in those parts of the world where such topics have always been most valued and pursued: in India, Central Asia, and Persia.

Enq. Can you give me some proofs of its esotericism?

Theo. The best proof you can have of the fact is that every ancient religious, or rather philosophical, cult consisted of an esoteric or secret teaching, and an exoteric (outward public) worship. Furthermore, it is a well-known fact that the MYSTERIES of the ancients comprised with every nation the "greater" (secret) and "Lesser" (public) MYSTERIES — e.g. in the celebrated solemnities called the Eleusinia, in Greece. From the Hierophants of Samothrace, Egypt, and the initiated Brahmins of the India of old, down to the later Hebrew Rabbis, all preserved, for fear of profanation, their real bona fide beliefs secret. The Jewish Rabbis called their secular religious series the Mercavah (the exterior body), "the vehicle," or, the covering which contains the hidden soul. — i.e., their highest secret knowledge. Not one of the ancient nations ever imparted through its priests its real philosophical secrets to the masses, but allotted to the latter only the husks. Northern Buddhism has its "greater" and its "lesser" vehicle, known as the Mahayana, the esoteric, and the Hinayana, the exoteric, Schools. Nor can you blame them for such secrecy; for surely you would not think of feeding your flock of sheep on learned dissertations on botany instead of on grass? Pythagoras called his Gnosis "the knowledge of things that are," or e gnosis ton onton, and preserved that knowledge for his pledged disciples only: for those who could digest such mental food and feel satisfied; and he pledged them to silence and secrecy. Occult alphabets and secret ciphers are the development of the old Egyptian hieratic writings, the secret of which was, in the days of old, in the possession only of the Hierogrammatists, or initiated Egyptian priests. Ammonius Saccas, as his biographers tell us, bound his pupils by oath not to divulge his higher doctrines except to those who had already been instructed in preliminary knowledge, and who were also bound by a pledge. Finally, do we not find the same even in early Christianity, among the Gnostics, and even in the teachings of Christ? Did he not speak to the multitudes in parables which had a two-fold meaning, and explain his reasons only to his disciples? "To you," he says, "it is given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven; but unto them that are without, all these things are done in parables" (Mark iv. 11). "The Essenes of Judea and Carmel made similar distinctions, dividing their adherents into neophytes, brethren, and the perfect, or those initiated" (Eclec. Phil.). Examples might be brought from every country to this effect.

Enq. Can you attain the "Secret Wisdom" simply by study? Encyclopaedias define Theosophy pretty much as Webster's Dictionary does, i. e., as "supposed intercourse with God and superior spirits, and consequent attainment of superhuman knowledge by physical means and chemical processes." Is this so?

Theo. I think not. Nor is there any lexicographer capable of explaining, whether to himself or others, how superhuman knowledge can be attained by physical or chemical processes. Had Webster said "by metaphysical and alchemical processes," the definition would be approximately correct: as it is, it is absurd. Ancient Theosophists claimed, and so do the modern, that the infinite cannot be known by the finite — i.e., sensed by the finite Self — but that the divine essence could be communicated to the higher Spiritual Self in a state of ecstasy. This condition can hardly be attained, like hypnotism, by "physical and chemical means."

Enq. What is your explanation of it?

Theo. Real ecstasy was defined by Plotinus as "the liberation of the mind from its finite consciousness, becoming one and identified with the infinite." This is the highest condition, says Prof. Wilder, but not one of permanent duration, and it is reached only by the very very few. It is, indeed, identical with that state which is known in India as Samadhi. The latter is practised by the Yogis, who facilitate it physically by the greatest abstinence in food and drink, and mentally by an incessant endeavour to purify and elevate the mind. Meditation is silent and unuttered prayer, or, as Plato expressed it, "the ardent turning of the soul toward the divine; not to ask any particular good (as in the common meaning of prayer), but for good itself — for the universal Supreme Good" of which we are a part on earth, and out of the essence of which we have all emerged. Therefore, adds Plato, "remain silent in the presence of the divine ones, till they remove the clouds from thy eyes and enable thee to see by the light which issues from themselves, not what appears as good to thee, but what is intrinsically good." ⁵

Enq. Theosophy, then, is not, as held by some, a newly devised scheme?

Theo. Only ignorant people can thus refer to it. It is as old as the world, in its teachings and ethics, if not in name, as it is also the broadest and most catholic system among all.

Enq. How comes it, then, that Theosophy has remained so unknown to the nations of the Western Hemisphere? Why should it have been a sealed book to races confessedly the most cultured and advanced?

Theo. We believe there were nations as cultured in days of old and certainly more spiritually "advanced" than we are. But there are several reasons for this willing ignorance. One of them was given by St. Paul to the cultured Athenians — a loss, for long centuries, of real spiritual insight, and even interest, owing to their too great devotion to things of sense and their long slavery to the dead letter of dogma and ritualism. But the strongest reason for it lies in the fact that real Theosophy has ever been kept secret.

Enq. You have brought forward proofs that such secrecy has existed; but what was the real cause for it?

Theo. The causes for it were: Firstly, the perversity of average human nature and its selfishness, always tending to the gratification of personal desires to the detriment of neighbours and next of kin. Such people could never be entrusted with divine secrets. Secondly, their unreliability to keep the sacred and divine knowledge from desecration. It is the latter that led to the perversion of the most sublime truths and symbols, and to the gradual transformation of things spiritual into anthropomorphic, concrete, and gross imagery — in other words, to the dwarfing of the god-idea and to idolatry.

Theosophy is Not Buddhism

Enq. You are often spoken of as "Esoteric Buddhists." Are you then all followers of Gautama Buddha?

Theo. No more than musicians are all followers of Wagner. Some of us are Buddhists by religion; yet there are far more Hindus and Brahmins than Buddhists among us, and more Christian-born Europeans and Americans than converted Buddhists. The mistake has arisen from a misunderstanding of the real meaning of the title of Mr. Sinnett's excellent work, "Esoteric Buddhism," which last word ought to have been spelt with one, instead of two, d's, as then Budhism would have meant what it was intended for, merely "Wisdomism" (Bodha, bodhi, "intelligence," "wisdom") instead of Buddhism, Gautama's religious philosophy. Theosophy, as already said, is the WISDOM-RELIGION.

Enq. What is the difference between Buddhism, the religion founded by the Prince of Kapilavastu, and Budhism, the "Wisdomism" which you say is synonymous with Theosophy?

Theo. Just the same difference as there is between the secret teachings of Christ, which are called "the mysteries of the Kingdom of Heaven," and the later ritualism and dogmatic theology of the Churches and Sects. Buddha means the "Enlightened" by Bodha, or understanding, Wisdom. This has passed root and branch into the esoteric teachings that Gautama imparted to his chosen Arhats only.

Enq. But some Orientalists deny that Buddha ever taught any esoteric doctrine at all?

Theo. They may as well deny that Nature has any hidden secrets for the men of science. Further on I will prove it by Buddha's conversation with his disciple Ananda. His esoteric teachings were simply the Gupta Vidya (secret knowledge) of the ancient Brahmins, the key to which their modern successors have, with few exceptions, completely lost. And this Vidya has passed into what is now known as the inner teachings of the Mahayana school of Northern Buddhism. Those who deny it are simply ignorant pretenders to Orientalism. I advise you to read the Rev. Mr. Edkins' Chinese Buddhism — especially the chapters on the Exoteric and Esoteric schools and teachings — and then compare the testimony of the whole ancient world upon the subject.

Enq. But are not the ethics of Theosophy identical with those taught by Buddha?

Theo. Certainly, because these ethics are the soul of the Wisdom-Religion, and were once the common property of the initiates of all nations. But Buddha was the first to embody these lofty ethics in his public teachings, and to make them the foundation and the very essence of his public system. It is herein that lies the immense difference between exoteric Buddhism and every other religion. For while in other religions ritualism and dogma hold the first and most important place, in Buddhism it is the ethics which have always been the most insisted upon. This accounts for the resemblance, amounting almost to identity, between the ethics of Theosophy and those of the religion of Buddha.

Enq. Are there any great points of difference?

Theo. One great distinction between Theosophy and exoteric Buddhism is that the latter, represented by the Southern Church, entirely denies (a) the existence of any Deity, and (b) any conscious post-mortem life, or even any self-conscious surviving individuality in man. Such at least is the teaching of the Siamese sect, now considered as the purest form of exoteric Buddhism. And it is so, if we refer only to Buddha's public teachings; the reason for such reticence on his part I will give further on. But the schools of the Northern Buddhist Church, established in those countries to which his initiated Arhats retired after the Master's death, teach all that is now called Theosophical doctrines, because they form part of the knowledge of the initiates — thus proving how the truth has been sacrificed to the dead-letter by the too-zealous orthodoxy of Southern Buddhism. But how much grander and more noble, more philosophical and scientific, even in its dead-letter, is this teaching than that of any other Church or religion. Yet Theosophy is not Buddhism.

• 1. Also called Analogeticists. As explained by Prof. Alex. Wilder, F. T. S., in his "Eclectic Philosophy," they were called so because of their practice of interpreting all sacred legends and narratives, myths and mysteries, by a rule or principle of analogy and correspondence: so that events which were related as having occurred in the external world were regarded as expressing operations and experiences of the human soul. They were also denominated Neo-Platonists. Though Theosophy, or the Eclectic Theosophical system, is generally attributed to the third century, yet, if Diogenes Laertius is to be credited, its origin is much earlier, as he attributed the system to an Egyptian priest, Pot-Amun, who lived in the early days of the Ptolemaic dynasty. The same author tells us that the name is Coptic, and signifies one consecrated to Amun, the God of Wisdom. Theosophy is the equivalent of Brahm-Vidya, divine knowledge.
• 2. Eclectic Theosophy was divided under three heads: (1) Belief in one absolute, incomprehensible and supreme Deity, or infinite essence, which is the root of all nature, and of all that is, visible and invisible. (2) Belief in man's eternal immortal nature, because, being a radiation of the Universal Soul, it is of an identical essence with it. (3) Theurgy, or "divine work," or producing a work of gods; from theoi, "gods," and ergein, "to work." The term is very old, but, as it belongs to the vocabulary of the MYSTERIES, was not in popular use. It was a mystic belief — practically proven by initiated adepts and priests — that, by making oneself as pure as the incorporeal beings — i.e., by returning to one's pristine purity of nature — man could move the gods to impart to him Divine mysteries, and even cause them to become occasionally visible, either subjectively or objectively. It was the transcendental aspect of what is now called Spiritualism; but having been abused and misconceived by the populace, it had come to be regarded by some as necromancy, and was generally forbidden. A travestied practice of the theurgy of Iamblichus lingers still in the ceremonial magic of some modern Kabalists. Modern Theosophy avoids and rejects both these kinds of magic and "necromancy" as being very dangerous. Real divine theurgy requires an almost superhuman purity and holiness of life; otherwise it degenerates into mediumship or black magic. The immediate disciples of Ammonius Saccas, who was called Theodidaktos, "god-taught" — such as Plotinus and his follower Porphyry — rejected theurgy at first, but were finally reconciled to it through Iamblichus, who wrote a work to that effect entitled "De Mysteriis," under the name of his own master, a famous Egyptian priest called Abammon. Ammonius Saccas was the son of Christian parents, and, having been repelled by dogmatic spiritualistic Christianity from his childhood, became a Neo-Platonist, and like J. Boehme and other great seers and mystics, is said to have had divine wisdom revealed to him in dreams and visions. Hence his name of Theodidaktos. He resolved to reconcile every system of religion, and by demonstrating their identical origin to establish one universal creed based on ethics. His life was so blameless and pure, his learning so profound and vast, that several Church Fathers were his secret disciples. Clemens Alexandrinus speaks very highly of him. Plotinus, the "St. John" of Ammonius, was also a man universally respected and esteemed, and of the most profound learning and integrity. When thirty-nine years of age he accompanied the Roman Emperor Gordian and his army to the East, to be instructed by the sages of Bactria and India. He had a School of Philosophy in Rome. Porphyry, his disciple, whose real name was Malek (a Hellenized Jew), collected all the writings of his master. Porphyry was himself a great author, and gave an allegorical interpretation to some parts of Homer's writings. The system of meditation the Philaletheians resorted to was ecstacy, a system akin to Indian Yoga practice. What is known of the Eclectic School is due to Origen, Longinus, and Plotinus, the immediate disciples of Ammonius — (Vide Eclectic Philos., by A. Wilder.)
• 3. It was under Philadelphus that Judaism established itself in Alexandria, and forthwith the Hellenic teachers became the dangerous rivals of the College of Rabbis of Babylon. As the author of "Eclectic Philosophy" very pertinently remarks: "The Buddhistic, Vedantic, and Magian systems were expounded along with the philosophies of Greece at that period. It was not wonderful that thoughtful men supposed that the strife of words ought to cease, and considered it possible to extract one harmonious system from these various teachings. . . . Panaenus, Athenagoras, and Clement were thoroughly instructed in Platonic philosophy, and comprehended its essential unity with the Oriental systems."
• 4. Says Mosheim of Ammonius: "Conceiving that not only the philosophers of Greece, but also all those of the different barbarian nations, were perfectly in unison with each other with regard to every essential point, he made it his business so to expound the thousand tenets of all these various sects as to show they had all originated from one and the same source, and tended all to one and the same end." If the writer on Ammonius in the Edinburgh Encyclopoedia knows what he is talking about, then he describes the modern Theosophists, their beliefs, and their work, for he says, speaking of the Theodidaktos: "He adopted the doctrines which were received in Egypt (the esoteric were those of India) concerning the Universe and the Deity, considered as constituting one great whole; concerning the eternity of the world . . . and established a system of moral discipline which allowed the people in general to live according to the laws of their country and the dictates of nature, but required the wise to exalt their mind by contemplation."
• 5. This is what the scholarly author of "The Eclectic Philosophy," Prof. A. Wilder, F. T. S., describes as "spiritual photography": "The soul is the camera in which facts and events, future, past, and present, are alike fixed; and the mind becomes conscious of them. Beyond our every-day world of limits all is one day or state — the past and future comprised in the present." . . . Death is the last ecstasis on earth. Then the soul is freed from the constraint of the body, and its nobler part is united to higher nature and becomes partaker in the wisdom and foreknowledge of the higher beings." Real Theosophy is, for the mystics, that state which Apollonius of Tyana was made to describe thus: "I can see the present and the future as in a clear mirror. The sage need not wait for the vapours of the earth and the corruption of the air to foresee events. . . . The theoi, or gods, see the future; common men the present; sages that which is about to take place." "The Theosophy of the Sages" he speaks of is well expressed in the assertion, "The Kingdom of God is within us."

Spiritual science is theosophical in nature because it leads man back to his original source. People today fight against theosophy and are therefore anti-theosophical in their thinking.

The entire soul and spiritual being is engaged in the first years of childhood in order to develop the physical organization, especially the nervous system; all forces are consumed in this work. From a certain point on, the human organism has become harder and more determined. This is the moment when self-awareness arises in the child. The spiritual and mental powers are reflected back upon themselves; before that, he [the human being] threw them all into the organism. Now the spiritual and mental is thrown back upon itself. At first we see as through a pane of glass, but then the organization becomes like a mirror that reflects the spiritual and mental life back upon itself. Then he says to himself “I”. From then on, life proceeds in self-awareness.

The fact that in early childhood our physical organization is transformed into a mirror and our spiritual and soul life is reflected back into itself is how the human being owes his entire earthly destiny and essence. The forces he has brought with him from his previous lives he has worked into his physical organization. In life, the forces are poured into the organization. At first, the child has no self-awareness because the spiritual and soul forces are still flowing into the physical and material organization; this must face us like a mirror. Man would be born a theosophist if he could see this working into the physical organization himself. A new germ is also forming in man, as in plants, that future life demands.

The child would have to remain stunted if it were conscious, because then the spiritual-soul forces would not all pour into the bodily organization. In the spiritual-soul forces, through which we raise our self-awareness, germinal forces for our next life are formed. These, however, must not rise up into our self-consciousness; they must remain asleep, for they are constructive forces and may only unfold their character in our next life. If man were aware of these germinal forces, he would have to fall into a dream or sleep; if we knew of these germinal forces, we would know ourselves in the divine, we would be born theosophists.

The forces that can develop our self-awareness ever more strongly must be formed out of the soul-spiritual world. During our earthly life, we must swim through a stream, on one bank of which lies the transition from theosophical to self-awareness and on the other, the transition from self-awareness to theosophical consciousness. It is precisely from our being set apart from our divine-spiritual mood that we draw the forces of our self-awareness. Our earthly mood must be anti-philosophical.

After the preparations, he [man] can penetrate to these germinal forces, as was explained in the previous lecture. The human being would believe that his self-awareness would be endangered, undermined, and therefore the human being is afraid to let the germinal forces arise for his next life, hence the anti-sophistic mood. The human being has a revulsion for the fact that the germinal forces could overwhelm his self-awareness and throw him into world consciousness. The human being has a secret fear of letting the connection emerge from the foundations. The soul must first become strong and energetic before it can confront the deeper forces, just as a self-confident person confronts this mirror. Man can make his future into a mirror to see his spiritual self, just as we have a mirror in the physical body through which our self-consciousness arises.

By having the secret human being within himself, the spiritual researcher has a guarantee that he is immortal, that he is preparing a life in immortality; just as the germinating powers of the plant guarantee the emergence of a new plant.

We must cultivate those forces most strongly that lead us away from our divine spiritual connection; we cultivate an anti-sophical mood. Humanity has to develop between opposites. Just as man oscillates between freedom and bondage, so he also oscillates between theosophy and anti-theosophy. But there are moments when man becomes aware of his original source, and this mood can grow and lead him to theosophy. Our present culture in its complexity was favorable for the anti-sophical mood. When life was much less complicated, the time was favorable for the theosophical mood. King Leon of Phlius, as Cicero tells us, once asked Pythagoras what he considered his life's work. “I see myself as a philosopher,” he said. ”I can express it in a comparison. I see life as a kind of fair. People come from everywhere to enjoy the festivities, to buy and sell things, for the sake of profit. But there are also those who come just to watch and see everything.” He feels the same way about the fair of life. He leads an inner life that is of no external use to anyone, that exists for its own sake; Pythagoras, a philosophos, was considered such a person.

Now a strange philosophical worldview is coming over from America to Europe. James, Schiller and so on are its representatives, and it is called the pragmatic worldview. This wants to say: What people acquire in ideas that go beyond sensory observations has no basis in truth. One only forms the ideas that are useful; what is useful for life is seen as truth. We form the concept of breath because it is useful to imagine something like this; one cannot perceive it. It is useful to imagine life in terms of ideals and to organize life according to ideals, which is why ideals are true. For our view of the world, it is useful to imagine a God and to bring order to the world. The “Philosophy of the As If” is the European edition of the American one. After its author ceased to be a professor, he published this philosophy. You can't find security, so you act as if there is a God, as if there are ideals, not that they are there in any way. This philosophy is also called fictionalism. Under the ownership of the former and the current religion, it was possible for a “philosophy of as if” to arise, and no matter how much this old religion is renewed, it will continue to develop as a “philosophy of as if”.

In his Ignorabimus speech, Du Bois-Reymond, the great physiologist, sought to define the field that science is capable of grasping. He shows that it is impossible for this science to comprehend sensation, the simplest psychic phenomenon. Regarding everything that is spiritual and mental, Reymond says: We will never recognize it. This attitude makes people materialistic and monistic. At the end, Reymond says: Science must limit itself to what exists and happens in space and time, and therefore must remain incomprehensible to everything that looks beyond spatial and temporal events, because only supernaturalism could know about that, but that is where science ends. If this sentence were true, then no logic could exist, no speech could be there. Spiritual science seeks to explore the question: How do people come to say: Where the sensory ends, science must end?

The soul is greater than consciousness. Many people cannot give clear reasons for their actions, and this is recognized by psychology. The unconscious reasons can be imaginative or affect- and drive-like. The hidden person in us still has power, still beats; man is under his influence.

So man is under the influence of fear; it can be conscious or unconscious, he acts accordingly. The Danish scientist Lange has written a paper “On the Expression of Emotional Movement”. Under the influence of fear, a person turns pale and their eyes become cloudy. The person cannot find a way to find their footing. The vessels contract and with them the muscles. Then the person cries: Where is something I can hold on to, or I will fall over? Thinking directed outwards brings the person into the same state in his nervous system, in his vascular system, as fear. This fear does not come to the consciousness, it remains subconscious. On the one hand we see the timid person who is too weak to stand on his own, who needs external support; on the other hand, the thinker who, through his outward-looking thinking, comes into the same situation. All materialism is an unconscious fear; its clamor for matter is a result of its subconscious fear. They need the material world to support them. When I enter the supersensible world, I fall over; may something hold me – so they unconsciously call out to the material world out of fear. What Reymond said last was an expression of horror of thinking.

Today the human pendulum is swinging in the direction of anti-Sophian sentiment. The consequence will be that Theosophy will also grow strong. Anti-Sophia is one-sidedness; the whole soul must do justice to the consciousness of self and of God. The soul finds rest only where its power is bound to the divine power. The best people, those who have advanced humanity, have sensed Theosophy. Goethe was imbued, aglow and warmed by the theosophical mood. Once, an anti-theosophical mood met him; anti-theosophists can also be great minds. One of them was Albrecht von Haller. He said:

No created mind can penetrate the innermost nature,
Happy the man to whom she shows only the outer shell.

To remain in the shell is anti-philosophy in the most eminent sense of the word. Goethe's answer is well known:

Nature has neither core nor shell, [...]
Only thou, thou, examine thyself,
Whether thou art core or shell.

Fichte says from his theosophical mood: Whoever recognizes himself in his real self is already standing in the spiritual world. - In his lecture on “The Destination of the Scholar,” Fichte expresses himself as follows:

I raise my head boldly to the threatening rocky mountains, and to the raging waterfall, and to the crashing clouds floating in a sea of fire, and say: I am eternal and I defy your power. Break down on me, all of you, and you earth and you sky, mingle in wild tumult, and you elements all - foam and rage and grind in wild struggle the last sun dust of the body that I call mine call mine; my will alone with its firm plan shall float boldly and coldly over the ruins of the universe; for I have seized my destiny, and it is more enduring than yours; it is eternal, and I am eternal, like it.

To those who are anti-Sophian, he says:

That ideals cannot be represented in the real world is something we others perhaps know as well as they do, perhaps better. We only claim that reality must be judged by them and modified by those who feel the strength to do so. Even if they cannot be convinced of this, they lose little by doing so, once they are what they are; and humanity loses nothing by it. It merely makes it clear that they are not counted on in the plan for the ennoblement of humanity. The latter will undoubtedly continue on its way; let kind nature prevail over the former, and give them rain and sunshine, beneficial nourishment and an undisturbed circulation of the fluids, and, in due course, wise thoughts! Question

Question: Can reincarnation be linked to facts, or does it have to be accepted as dogma?

Rudolf Steiner: It is no more a dogma than memory is. After all, memory is also an inner fact. You can't pump out and look at what you need to remember. Thus, we cannot prove past memories of previous earthly lives other than by experiencing them.

This is how it is with all supersensible truths. To understand them, only an unprejudiced contemplation of life is necessary; to investigate them, one needs clairvoyance. Between death and a new birth, the decisive point of view is the striving to perfect oneself and also the whole world, not the question of whether it is pleasant or unpleasant or causes pain. One can come to an understanding of reincarnation if one behaves as if strokes of fate are not random, but [as if] one has inflicted them on oneself. These are soul proofs, so we must be there ourselves.

Question: [What about the] seven-year periodicity, and what deeper causes [does it] have? [What about] suicide?

Rudolf Steiner: Regarding the question of suicide, the [Schopenhauer] saying applies: “It is easy to preach morality, but difficult to explain it.” One should do good because it is absorbed into one's soul. (?)

Question: Which is the best prayer? Is it the Lord's Prayer?

Rudolf Steiner: The Lord's Prayer is indeed a universal prayer for the most primitive and the most developed mind. It has this power in itself, even if one does not know its laws, just as a plant grows according to laws that it does not know. Every prayer must be carried by a devotional mood, otherwise it can also be of evil. “Not my will, but Thine, be done.” It is only through this mood that every prayer becomes a true prayer.

Question: The point where man simply feels the connection with the higher worlds, how does he express himself? Please give me more details.

Rudolf Steiner: This is similar to the question: How can I imagine the spirit? - Just spiritually. No spiritual materialism! In the Theosophical Society one could hear such expressions [as]: Today there are wonderful spiritual vibrations in the room. The spiritual researcher would simply say: There is a good atmosphere in the room today. In the theosophical books, the spirit is described as follows: First there is matter, then it becomes thinner and thinner, but matter never actually ends. You should imagine the spirit without leaning on anything material. Feeling is something that has its center within itself.