The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Continuation of the themes introduced in the last lecture leads us today to material that will serve as preparation for the two following lectures. It leads us to study the connection of man, the whole man, with our planet Earth. As I have often said, man is under an illusion if he ascribes to himself as a physical being an existence separate from the Earth. As a being of soul-and-spirit man is independent and individual; as physical man and to some extent also in respect of his etheric body, he belongs to the organic totality of the Earth.

I will begin today by describing how this connection between man and Earth-existence appears to supersensible vision. Let us suppose that someone with Imaginative Consciousness were to take a journey through the primeval Alps where the rocks consist of quartz, of silicious minerals and similar formations. These primeval mountains are composed of the hardest rocks on Earth, but as well as being the hardest, these rocks, when they appear in their original form, have an inherent purity about them, a quality untouched by the commonplace things of Earth. We can well understand it, when in a beautiful essay which has already been read here, Goethe speaks of his experiences among these primeval mountains, of the solitude he felt as he sat there, and the impressions made upon him by these granite rocks, towering up from the Earth. Goethe speaks of granite, composed as it is of silica, mica and felspar, as the ‘enduring son of Earth’.

When with ordinary consciousness a man approaches these primeval mountains he can of course admire them from outside; he is deeply impressed by their forms, by their wonderful moulding, primitive as it is, but extraordinarily eloquent. But if he approaches this hardest rock of the Earth with Imaginative Consciousness he penetrates beneath the surface of mineral nature and is then able with his thinking to grow together, as it were, with the rock. The soul reaches into the depths of the rock, and in spirit, man enters into a holy palace of the Gods. The interior is revealed to Imaginative vision as transparent, and the outer surface as the walls of this palace of the Gods. At the same time the knowledge comes that within this rock there is a reflection of the Cosmos outside the Earth. The world of stars is mirrored once again before the soul. Finally we get the impression that all quartz rocks are like eyes through which the Earth can see into the Cosmos. We are reminded of the many-faceted eyes of insects which divide into numbers of parts whatever comes towards them from outside. We should, and indeed must, picture innumerable quartz and similar formations on the surface of the Earth as being eyes enabling the Earth inwardly to reflect and indeed inwardly perceive the cosmic environment. And gradually the knowledge dawns in us that every crystal formation present in the Earth is a sense-organ for perceiving the Cosmos.

The majesty of the Earth’s snow-covering, but even more of the falling snowflakes, lies in the fact that in each single snowflake there is a reflection of part of the Cosmos; so that with this crystallised water, reflections of part of the starry heavens fall down upon the Earth.

I need not remind you that the starry firmament is there by day as well as at night, only it cannot be seen by day because the sunlight is too strong. If you ever have an opportunity of going into a deep cellar with a high tower above it open at the top, you can see the stars even in the daytime because you are looking out of the darkness and the sunlight does not obtrude. There is, for example, such a tower in Jena through which the stars can be seen in the daytime. I mention this in passing to make it clear to you that this reflection of the stars in the snowflakes and indeed in every crystal is of course there in the daytime too. It is not a physical reflection, it is a spiritual reflection, and the impression of it must be communicated inwardly.

That is not all. This spiritual sense-impression, if I may call it so, gives rise to an impression in the soul that if you enter imaginatively into the crystal covering of the Earth you yourself are able to share in all the experiences coming from the Cosmos to the Earth through the crystals. You thereby extend your own being into the Cosmos and feel yourself one with the Cosmos. And most important of all: it now becomes a deep truth to one possessed of Imaginative vision that our Earth, with everything belonging to it, has in the course of ages been born out of the Cosmos. The kinship between the Earth and the Cosmos comes vividly before the eyes of soul. And so this inner penetration into the millions of the Earth’s crystal eyes is a preparation for feeling and experiencing in soul the inner kinship of the Earth with the Cosmos.

Through this experience, however, you again feel that as Man you are closely united with the Earth. For this birth of the Earth out of the Cosmos took place when Man himself was still a very primitive being, not a physical but a spiritual being. But in his own being Man shared in the processes undergone by the Earth after its birth out of the Cosmos. In actual fact the same inner connection once existed between the Earth and the neighbouring Cosmos as that between an unborn child with the body of the mother. Later, however, the child begins to make itself independent. Similarly, the Earth gradually developed into independence after having been more completely one with the Cosmos during the earliest Saturn epoch. Man accompanied this process towards independence until he was finally able to say: My finger is a finger only as long as it is part of my organism; the moment I sever it from my organism it is no longer a finger and it perishes. And if man as a physical being can be thought of as separated by a few miles only from the conditions of the Earth-organism he would wither and decay like the amputated finger. Because he can move freely over the face of the Earth man deceives himself into thinking that as a physical being he has an existence of his own, independent of the Earth, whereas a finger cannot move over the organism. If it could do so, it would be succumbing to the same delusion to which man succumbs if he thinks of himself as a physical being independent of the Earth. It is precisely through higher knowledge that this integration of physical man into the Earth becomes clear.

Such is the acquaintance that can be made, through Imaginative Consciousness, with the hardest component of the Earth’s surface. Further acquaintance can be made by descending a little more deeply into the Earth, to the veins or lodes of metal ores, or any metallic substance in the Earth’s interior. Here you have penetrated below the surface of the Earth. But metals have a very special character, a character deviating from that of other earthly substance. Metals have a certain independence which can be experienced, and this experience is of very great significance for man.¹

Even someone who acquires certain higher knowledge through Imaginative vision has not yet reached the goal when, through experiencing the quartz and other primeval rocks as the million eyes of the Earth, he expands his being into the Cosmos. If however he penetrates further into the interior of the Earth, the first impulses for experience can arise from the wonderful stimuli that can be received in a metal mine. Once the impulses have been set in motion, however, all that is necessary to be able to experience the nature of metallic substance without going down the shaft of a mine, is spiritual vision. But the first feeling of the experience in question can be acquired with particular intensity in metal mines themselves. It is no longer the case today but it was still true a few decades ago, that miners who are inwardly wedded to their work display something of this profound sense of the spiritual reality in metals. For the metals do not only ‘see’ the surrounding Cosmos: they speak in a spiritual way, but nevertheless they do speak and tell their story. And the language they speak is similar to the impressions of language from a different domain.

When we succeed in establishing an inner connection of soul with human beings living between death and rebirth we shall need a special language to communicate with them. What the Spiritualists say is puerile, for the simple reason that the dead do not speak the language of earthly man. Spiritualists believe that the dead speak in such a way that their words can be written down, just as though a letter were being received from a contemporary living on the Earth. True, in most cases the messages heard in seances sound high-flown and pompous, but the same sort of thing is sometimes written even by living contemporaries. The fact of the matter is that we have first to find the right approach to the language which the dead speak and which bears no resemblance whatever to any earthly language—this is so, although it also has a vocal-consonantal character. But the same language which can be apprehended only by spiritual hearing is spoken by the metals in the interior of the Earth. And the same language by means of which we come near the souls of the dead living between death and a new birth, can also recount the memories of the Earth, the experiences undergone by the Earth in its course through the periods of Saturn, Sun, Moon, and so on. The metals can tell us of the past history of the Earth. The destinies of our whole planetary system, however, are to be learnt from what Saturn has to communicate. It is of what the Earth has undergone in the evolutionary process that the metals tell.

The language spoken by the metals of the Earth can also take two forms. In its usual form it will reveal what the Earth has undergone in the course of its evolution since the Saturn period. What is said about this evolution in the book Occult Science: An Outline originated in the way I have often described—by direct spiritual perception of the process concerned. That, however, is a rather different way of learning about the Earth’s history from the one I have in mind just now. The metals—if I may put it in this way, although naturally it seems to be rather strangely expressed—the metals tell us more of the ‘personal’ experiences of the Earth, of the Earth as a specific entity in the Cosmos. So if I wanted to lay particular emphasis upon the stories told by the metals, stories learnt by spiritual penetration into the interior of the Earth, I should have to give many details of the Saturn-, Sun-, Moon-periods, and so forth.

A first example would be that the conditions on Old Saturn described in the book Occult Science as consisting of differentiations of warmth, appear as mighty, gigantic beings-of-warmth, which even during the Saturn period had reached a certain degree of density. To put it crudely: if it were possible—which of course it is not—for a man of Earth to encounter these beings he could become aware of them and even touch them. Thus about the middle of the Saturn period these beings were not purely spiritual but displayed a certain physical quality. If you had tried to touch them your fingers would have blistered. It would be wrong to assume that they had a temperature of millions of degrees of warmth but their temperature was such that any contact would have caused blisters.

Then we should have to pass to the Sun period and to relate, as I did in Occult Science, how other beings appeared, manifesting wonderful transformations, metamorphoses. Gazing at these beings in process of metamorphosis we should get the impression that the metamorphoses described by classical authors such as Ovid have something to do, though of course not directly, with experience of the communications make by the metals. Ovid was certainly not himself capable of understanding the language of the metals directly, nor indeed does his work Metamorphoses wholly convey the impression one gets, but what he says is derived from this source, and the underlying process is very definitely indicated. Paracelsus, who lived at a much later time than the personality to whom I have just referred, did not go to college to learn what he regarded as of greatest importance. I do not imply that he did not actually go to college, for as a matter of fact he did, and I have no objections whatever to such a course. But for knowledge of the greatest importance he went where more significant information could be obtained. He went, for example, to men such as metal-miners and acquired a great deal of his knowledge in this way.

Anyone familiar with the technique of acquiring knowledge is aware of how extraordinarily illuminating the simple words of a peasant engaged on the business of sowing and reaping can be. You will say that he does not understand what he is talking about, but what matters is that you who are listening should understand. Certainly it will be only very rarely that the speaker himself understands what he has said—it is a matter of instinct. And even more fundamental knowledge can be acquired from creatures such as beetles and butterflies and birds, who understand nothing at all about what they say to us.

Pythagoras on his travels studied with great intensity what could be learnt by listening to the speech of the metals in the mines of Asia Minor, and a great deal of what he learnt made its way into what then became Greco-Roman culture. In a weakened form it appears in a work such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses. This is one form of the speech of the metals in the interior of the Earth.

The other form—grotesque as this seems, it is true—the other form is revealed when the speech of the metals becomes poetical, begins to be cosmic poetry. Cosmic phantasy comes to expression in the speech of the metals. And then this cosmic poetry tells of the most intimate relations existing between the metals and the being of man. These most intimate relations do indeed exist. The crude relations known to physiology involve only a few metals. It is known that iron plays an important role in human blood; but iron is really the only metal of this kind. A few others—potassium, calcium, sodium, magnesium—also play a certain part. But a larger number of metals that are important for the structure and functioning of the Earth, seem to crude observation to play no part in the human organism. But that is only apparently the case. If you penetrate into the Earth and there learn to know the speech of the metals, you will also learn that the metals are truly not present only in the interior of the Earth but everywhere in its environment as well, although in exceedingly fine distribution, in a hyper-homeopathic solution, if I may so express it.

In the crude, material sense we cannot have lead within us; in the finer, more ethereal sense we cannot live without it. For what would become of man if lead from the Cosmos, from the atmosphere, did not have an effect upon him, if lead in an infinitely fine state of distribution did not penetrate with the rays of the sun through his eye into his skin, if lead did not penetrate into him through the breathing-process, and again in an infinitely fine state, into the foodstuffs? In short, what would man be if lead did not work in him?

Without lead he would indeed have sense-perceptions; he would be able to perceive colours and musical tones, but with every perception he would become slightly faint, slightly out of his body. He would never be able to stand back from his perceptions and reflect in thoughts and mental concepts about what he had perceived. If we did not absorb any lead in the infinitely fine homeopathic potencies of which I spoke, into our nervous system and, above all, into our brain, we should be entirely given over to all our sense-perceptions as if they were something outside us. We should be unable to form any mental picture of our sense-perceptions or retain any picture of them in our memory. It is the finely distributed lead in our brain that makes this possible.

If a considerable quantity of lead is introduced into the human organism the result is lead-poisoning—a dreadful condition. But those who are aware of the facts can realise from this power of lead to poison, that just because it has a disastrous effect if introduced into the human organism in any considerable quantity, if administered in extremely fine hyper-homeopathic dilution, it can at any moment bring about fading, dying processes to the extent necessary to enable a man to be a conscious being, not perpetually involved in processes of growth and formation—which cause faintness and loss of consciousness. For this is what happens if the growth-forces become overpowering.

Man has definite relationships to all metals, including those of which crude physiology says nothing. Knowledge of these relationships is the foundation for a true therapy. Intimate information about the relationships of the metals to the human being can be given only by the poetic speech of the metals of the Earth. So it may be said that the ordinary speech of the metals gives information about the actual destiny of the Earth; information about the curative relationships of the metals to the human being is given by the metals when their speech becomes poetic.

It is a remarkable thought that from the cosmic aspect, medicine is a kind of poetry. But many mysteries of existence lie in the fact that what at one level causes or leads to illness, is, at another level, something lofty, most perfect, most beautiful. This is what emerges when Inspired cognition finds access to the metallic veins and metals in the Earth.

Now still another relationship can be established with metals, namely, when they are subjected to natural forces, for example, to fire. Just think of the remarkable formation of antimony orc. It is composed of single spear-shaped structures, showing by this formation that it follows certain lines of force that are active in the Cosmos. If antimony is subjected to a process of combustion it becomes the ‘antimony mirror’. When it is spread on glass it develops a special power of reflection. It has other peculiarities, too, for example it readily explodes if it is deposited on the cathode. All these characteristics of antimony indicate how a metallic substance of this kind is related to the forces of the Earth, of the Earth’s environment. The same can be said of all metals. All of them can be studied when brought into the process of combustion and if the temperature rises higher and higher they pass over into the super-homeopathic condition of which I have spoken. It is at those temperatures that they assume a quite different form. In this connection the ideas of modern physicists are rigidly schematic. As the lead is being melted the physicists picture it getting softer and softer, and so it does, to begin with. The lead gets softer and softer as the temperature rises, and it also gets hotter and hotter, increasingly fluidic, until lead-fumes are produced. What the physicists do not know is that all the time something that does not reach beyond a certain temperature is being thrown off, separated off. This they do not know. Lead in this finest, ‘super-homeopathic’ state passes over continually into the universal invisible life and in that form works upon man.

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In the Earth itself there are metals of infinite kinds, but above the Earth these metals are everywhere present in the finest possible state of distribution; they have vaporised. Down in the Earth the metals have their sharp contours and definite structures; at a still greater depth they exist in a molten condition. But in the environment of the Earth, the metals in the finest possible state of distribution continually radiate out into cosmic space. Now in cosmic space there is inner elasticity. The forces do not radiate into infinity—as the physicists imagine to be the case with light-rays—but these forces radiate to a certain boundary and then return. These backward radiating forces may be pictured as returning in all directions from the periphery of the universe. And we become aware that these backward-streaming forces are at work where we witness one of the most wonderful, most beautiful of all sights in human life: when a child is learning in the first years of earthly life to walk, to speak and to think.

It is one of the most wonderful sights in the whole of life to observe how a child stops crawling and stands up in order to orientate himself in the world; to ‘come to himself’ as a human being. It is the backward-radiating forces of the metals that work inwardly in the forces which give the child the power of orientation. As the child learns to raise himself from his horizontal position in crawling, he is permeated by the backward-radiating force of the metals. This is the force that actually raises the child into the upright position. If this connection is recognised, another experience comes simultaneously. It is that in the deeds, in the essential nature of the human being living here on Earth, one recognises the connection with his earlier incarnation. The faculties for perceiving the workings of the metals in the Cosmos and the karmic connection between the successive lives on Earth, are the same. The one recognition comes with the other and neither is possible without the other. That is why I once said in an entirely different context that in this power of orientation, in the power which enables the child to rise from crawling to standing and walking, the faculty of learning to speak and think, lie the fruits coming from earlier lives on Earth. I said then that anyone with an eye for these things perceives in the way the child takes his first steps, whether in taking steps he tends to put toes or heels down first, whether he bends his knees sharply or only slightly—in all this, karmic disposition from an earlier incarnation can be perceived. It shows itself primarily in the gait. This is because together with the faculty which enables the backward-raying forces of the metals to be perceived comes the faculty to perceive the connection of a man’s present life with his earlier lives.

The assertion that Anthroposophy is not open to proof is entirely unjustified. Those who assert this are accustomed to bring forward sense-perception as proof. But that is tantamount to saying: Are you actually telling me that the Earth moves freely in space? It is simply not possible. Either there must be something to support it or it must fall!—In point of fact it does not fall because cosmic bodies mutually support each other. Support is necessary only in the conditions prevailing on the Earth. So it is only for truths recognised by the everyday consciousness that proofs can rightly be offered, if they are demanded. Truths relating to the spirit are mutually confirmatory—but this must also be felt as an inner conviction.

I have told you that from the way a child—or an adult—walks, whether he raises toes or heel first, treads firmly or lightly, bends his knees a great deal or is more prone to stand stiffly—from all this the fulfilment of his karma from the previous earthly life can be perceived. Today I have shown you how the backward-raying forces of the metals enable us to recognise the connection between earthly lives. Here you have two mutually confirmatory truths. But what happens all the time is that we hear a truth, then after some time we hear the same truth from a different angle and perhaps we hear it a third time. In this way the truths of Anthroposophy confirm one another— just as in the Cosmos the heavenly bodies uphold each other without needing extraneous supports. It must indeed be so when we ascend from truths that are valid for everyday consciousness only, to truths that are self-sustaining realities in the Cosmos. And what anthroposophical knowledge comprises is indeed self-sustaining reality. You must hold together in your mind statements made at different times, statements which mutually support, attract, or also resist each other, revealing thereby the inner life of anthroposophical knowledge. Other forms of knowledge, customary today, live by virtue of the supports on which they are based; Anthroposophical knowledge is self-sustaining.

• 1. See True and False Paths in Spiritual Investigation, Lectures 3 to 5. (Rudolf Steiner Press.)

As an extension of my comments of the last few days, I would like today to take a closer look at the astronomical aspect of Easter. To do this, however, I will first have to touch upon certain facts relating to the so-called mystery of the moon.

For as long as there was Mystery knowledge people spoke of a secret of the moon. Inasmuch as human beings participate in the cosmos as a whole, this secret was related to human nature. It must be understood that with respect to our whole nature we are connected with the cosmos, just as through our physical bodies we are connected with the earth. Our materialistic times, however, have deprived us of the ancient awareness of the spirituality pervading the universe, spirituality that lives in the forms of constellations and in the motions of heavenly bodies. Our perception of heavenly bodies is now purely external; all we can do with them is calculate their movements, as we do with the planets.

Such an approach to astronomy, however, is like studying the human organism while ignoring that it is animated by a being of soul and spirit. Attending only to measurable quantities and to mechanical laws of motion, we overlook the spirit and soul that express themselves through these phenomena.

This spirit and soul, as they manifest themselves in the human being, are unified by the ego into a single entity, whereas in the cosmos as a whole we have to do in spiritual observation not with one but with a multitude, an immeasurable, limitless multitude of spiritual beings. Some of these express themselves in the forms of the constellations, others in the wanderings of the planets, still others in the radiant light of the stars, and so on.

This many-faceted heavenly spirituality is related to humanity's inner nature in the same way that earthly foodstuffs are related to our physical nature. The secret of the moon represents the most basic of these inner relations between us and the cosmos.

To the earthly eye the moon appears engaged in a constant metamorphosis. From a round, luminous disk such as we see now, it diminishes to half, then to a quarter, until finally it vanishes from sight in a phenomenon we call the new moon. This is followed by a gradual growth in size back to the full moon.

The usual explanation for this is, of course, that the moon is just a body that moves about in space and is illuminated from different angles by the sun, so that its shape apparently changes. Such an explanation, however, does not encompass everything the moon means to earth and to earthly humanity. Instead it must be realized that when we look at something as physically conspicuous as the full moon, something that presents us with a physical aspect, we are dealing with a completely different thing than when the same object presents itself to us as the new moon, which obviously cannot manifest itself in a visible, physical way due to the celestial configuration connected with it. However, we must not conclude from this that the new moon is completely without effect. When the state of the heavens is such that we know the moon to be new, it is simply a matter of the moon being present in an invisible and therefore more spiritual manner than when it appears in the physical light as full moon. The moon is therefore present at one time in a completely physical way, at another in a completely spiritual way, always rhythmically alternating between these two forms of expression.

In order to understand why this is so, it is necessary to recall certain facts with which you may be familiar from the account I give of them in my Outline of Occult Science. [Rudolf Steiner, An Outline of Occult Science, (Spring Valley, N.Y.: Anthroposophic Press, 1972). ] We must particularly call to mind that the moon was once inside the earth. It was part of it. Then it split away, becoming a satellite, as they say, and since then has orbited around it. But during the time when it was still joined with the earth, it acted upon human beings from within it.

Humanity, of course, lived and developed completely differently on the earth when it still had the moon within it. Earth was impoverished when the moon split off, because the forces by which humanity was shaped and held fast from then on were entirely earthly rather than both earthly and lunar. Lunar forces that once acted upon human beings from within the earth now exert their influence from without.

At one time the lunar forces radiated into the human being from below upwards, affecting first the feet and legs and coursing upwards from there into the entire body. Since the moon split off, however, these forces have acted in the opposite direction, from the head downwards, and in doing so have acquired a completely different role in the life of humanity from the one they had previously.

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Where do we see this different function of the moon? In descending from pre-earthly existence to a new life on earth the human being has very definite experiences. When he has undergone everything necessary in the period between death and a new birth, the human being prepares to come down to earth, to unite himself with a physical body provided by an earthly father and mother. But before his ego and astral body can unite themselves with a physical body, he must clothe himself in an etheric body, which he gathers form the surrounding cosmos. It is here that the new role of the lunar forces comes to expression, for this process has changed fundamentally since the moon separated from the earth. Prior to that time, human beings who had completed the life between death and a new birth and again approached earth needed forces to gather the ether, which is scattered throughout the cosmos, around their ego and astral bodies, in order to fashion from it the shape of their etheric bodies. Such forces were provided by the moon from within the earth. Since the moon split off, human beings have obtained the necessary forces from outside the earth, that is, from the moon. Immediately before they enter earthly existence, then, human beings must call upon what lies in the moon forces, that is, upon something cosmic, in order to fashion their etheric bodies.

This etheric body must be shaped in such a way that it has, so to speak, an outside and an inside. This may be depicted as follows:

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In fashioning the outer side of the etheric body human beings need forces of light, for in addition to other substances the etheric body is composed primarily of the streaming light of the cosmos. Sunlight, however, is of no use for this. Sunlight cannot bestow the forces that enable human beings to shape their etheric bodies. To obtain these we need the light that shines from the sun to the moon and is then reflected back, for in this process the light is essentially changed. All the light we receive from the moon, the light that the moon sends out into the cosmos, contains the forces we need to form the outside of our etheric bodies. Conversely, the spiritual forces that radiate from the new moon are the ones we need to shape the inside of our etheric bodies.

Thus our ability to form the outside and inside of our etheric bodies is related to the moon's rhythmic alternation between light and darkness. And this is possible only because the moon, contrary to the idle chatter of modern science, is really more than just a body in space; in reality it is permeated with spirit; it bears a multiplicity of spiritual beings within it.

On various occasions I have explained that when the moon separated from the earth not only did physical matter stream out into space but also a class of spiritual beings who had lived on earth in spiritual rather than physical form and who were mankind's original teachers. These beings went with the moon into space and founded a sort of lunar colony. We must therefore distinguish between the moon's physical-etheric and its soul-spirit aspects, keeping in mind that the latter is a multiplicity rather than a unity.

The activity of the moon's spiritual beings is entirely determined by how they view the surrounding world from their standpoint. To express myself pictorially, these beings first direct their gaze to what is most important to them, namely, to the planets. All occurrences on the moon, including those that assure human beings of the forces they need to fashion their etheric bodies, depend upon the results of observations that the beings living in the moon make of our solar system's planets—Mercury, sun, moon, and so on.

This was known in certain of the old Mysteries. Initiates of such Mysteries were aware that the moon-beings acted according to observations of the planets' positions and motions. This was expressed by bringing the moon, by which celestial configurations important to the fashioning of the human etheric body were determined, into human awareness and in connection with the other planetary forces. This was done by means of the names given to the days of the week:

In this way the moon's viewpoint was incorporated into a structuring of time that reminded human beings of the entire planetary context. In this way the ancient Mysteries attempted to awaken people's memories of pre-earthly existence, of a time when they had needed forces created on the moon by the moon-beings' observation of the planets. People were to be reminded that they owed the particular form of their etheric bodies to what the moon had been able to glean from Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and so on.

Thus we have on the one hand the moon's rhythmic oscillation between light and darkness as it orbits around the earth, and on the other the entire planetary system, inscribed into human consciousness by the names of days of the week. And to this the Mysteries could add even more. They taught, for example, that because the moon-beings can look toward Mars, we receive etheric bodies endowed with the capacity for speech. Likewise, because the moon-beings can observe Mercury, our etheric bodies are infused with the capacity for movement. In fact, if we consider these same teachings from an altogether different point of view, we can discover how eurythmy arises from human speech. Eurythmy develops out of speech when we explore the mysteries of speech by asking the moon-beings about their observations of Mars, and then watch how these observations change when they shift their gaze to Mercury. If we transform the Mars experiences of the moon-beings into their Mercury experiences, then we see the capacity for eurythmy develop out of our capacity for speech. This is the cosmic perspective on how speech is metamorphosed into eurythmy.

The capacity for wisdom that lives within us is made possible by the moon-beings' experiences of Jupiter. Our ability to love and to appreciate beauty derives from their experiences of Venus. Inner warmth of soul is planted into our etheric bodies by what the moon-beings learn from observing Saturn. And in order that our etheric body's formation not be disturbed during the period immediately preceding our descent to earth, everything that derives from the sun is kept at a distance; one could almost say, it is pushed away. It is from the sun or rather from the sight of the sun that protective forces must shield us if we are to become self-contained beings through the formation of an etheric body.

In this way we come to know what takes place on the moon, as well as how the etheric body is fashioned as the human being descends from pre-earthly into earthly existence. These are the facts I mentioned relating to the secret of the moon.

Such things may be spoken of today. In certain of the older Mysteries they were not merely spoken of, but actually lived through. What I wrote on the blackboard was not just known, but inwardly experienced:

The Mysteries of which I spoke to you yesterday enabled initiates to transcend the merely external use of their bodily senses, to free or distance themselves from their physical bodies, and to live exclusively in their etheric bodies. When they did so, however, they lived with all the realities of which I have just spoken. Rather than the speech that is formed in the larynx, they experienced the cosmic language that resonates from Mars. Their movements, too, were in harmony with the guidance Mercury exerts over the cosmos. They moved, that is, not with feet and legs, but in their essential being in accordance with Mercury's direction. And instead of having the wisdom we normally acquire with such difficulty as we progress through childhood and youth—nowadays it is really a lack of wisdom—the initiates lived entirely within the wisdom of Jupiter, not directly, but by uniting themselves with the moon-beings who observed it.

Through this form of initiation one could live entirely in the moon's radiant light. One actually left the earth.

No longer a being of earthly flesh and blood, one lived within the moonlight, but in the moonlight structured and modified by what lived in the other planets of the solar system. Through this kind of spiritual observation one actually became a light-being of the moon.

This must not be taken symbolically or abstractly. Just as today when we take a walk into Basel and back, we are fully conscious that what we are experiencing is real, so at that time people could be conscious of actually paying the moon-beings a visit through initiation. Initiates were conscious of taking leave for a while of their physical bodies and of moving into the moon's luminous realm as beings of spirit and soul. Clothed in bodies of light and united with the moon-beings, they could gaze out into the solar system and observe what revealed itself there.

Primary among the things they observed was that sun-beings exerted forces that could not be permitted to play any part in the fashioning of the human etheric body. They perceived, that is, that the sun tends to disintegrate or destroy the etheric body. And for that reason they knew that the forces emanating from the sun-beings must be received by the higher human members, the ego and the astral body, but not by the etheric body. Only upon the higher members could the sun-forces be allowed to work. For the etheric body, on the other hand, one turned not to the sun but to the planets. For the astral body and even more so for the ego's full inner power one had to turn to the sun.

This was the second thing revealed by the Mysteries that had access to the secret of the moon. Initiates knew that through their etheric bodies they belonged to the system of the planets, but that their ego forces in particular and also those of their astral bodies derived from the sun. In other words, through this form of initiation they became one with the moonlight, but looked at the same time toward the sun.

Initiates grasped that the sun shines its light upon the moon because it may not directly transmit that light to human beings. We then have moonlight in conjunction with the influences of the planets, out of which, as we have seen, the human etheric body is fashioned. That was the knowledge conveyed by this particular form of initiation, which thus also revealed the extent to which an initiate carried within himself the power of the spiritual sun. The initiate observed this directly, achieving thereby the level of a Christ-bearer. He became the bearer of a sun-being, not a vessel, but a bearer. Just as the moon itself, when it is full, is a sunlight-bearer, the initiate became a Christ-bearer, a christophor. His initiation into this was a thoroughly real experience. He escaped form the earth and ascended to become a being of light.

Now try to imagine this real experience, this earlier, inner Easter experience, transformed into a cosmic festival. In later times people no longer knew that they could rise above the earthly, unite themselves spiritually with the moon, and from there observe the sun. However, a reminder of all this had to be preserved, and it was preserved in the Easter festival.

Although in later times people with a more materialistic outlook could not recognize the possibility of such experiences, they did retain an abstract recollection of them. Rather than looking within themselves and knowing that they could unite themselves with the moonlight, they looked up to the full moon, imagining that not they but rather the entire earth was striving up towards it.

At no time could this be experienced more strongly than at the beginning of spring, when forces rise upward from the earth's surface out of the seeds buried in it.

Even after developing into plants these forces continue to stream upward into the cosmos. In the ancient Mysteries it was known that human beings could most readily achieve the lunar and solar initiation and become christophors when the earth's inner forces streamed up in this way into the cosmos through the stems and leaves of plants. The Mysteries represented this in the image of a human being floating upward on these forces toward the moon. This could only happen, however, when the moon was full.

Something of this knowledge survived into later times, but it became abstract. “The moon must be full.” Dimly, no longer realizing it could be an actual human experience, people subconsciously imagined something other than themselves streaming upward in the spring toward the first full moon. The moon itself, they thought, then looked toward the sun, that is, toward the first following Sunday. In other words, instead of a christophor looking at the sun from his newly-gained vantage point in the moon, people imagined that the moon looked at the sun, that is, at its symbolization in Sunday. Thus we have the following sequence:

March 21: Full moon: Sunday.

March 21 is the beginning of spring; the earth's forces burgeon forth into the cosmos. One must then wait until the proper observer, the full moon, is there. The moon then observes the sun, making the following Sunday Easter. Our method for fixing Easter's date is thus an abstract vestige of what was once a thoroughly real Mystery procedure, one that in ancient times many people experienced.

This procedure, however, is different from the one I described the day before yesterday. The latter, as you will recall, led to an understanding of the nature of death. I said that the process of resurrection, which was symbolized by the rituals of the Adonis cult and of others like it, demanded that one first undergo a kind of death experience in order to rise in the spiritual world after three days. For reasons I have already set forth, this resurrection process took place in the fall. By contrast, the procedure I have described today was celebrated or enacted in a different set of Mysteries, those conferring the solar and lunar initiation. It carried the initiates back before the beginning of earthly life.

Thus we look back to a time when certain Mysteries recognized our descent from pre-earthly into earthly life, while others, the autumnal Mysteries, recognized our ascent into the spiritual. In later times, however, when people no longer sensed this living relationship between themselves and the cosmos, the autumnal Mystery of ascent was mistakenly combined with the spring Mystery of descent.

Here materialism began to show its effects. For materialism not only gave rise to false opinions, it cast people into total confusion concerning things that had previously lent a kind of sacred order to human existence.

Part of that sacred order was that when fall came, a cosmic festival was observed that pointed toward a Mystery procedure, the spirit of which might be captured by the following words: “Nature is falling into decay, withering away. In this it resembles the decay of our own physical being. However, even as we look at nature, perceiving only transient things, the eternal lives within us. This must be viewed with spiritual eyes and is not affected by what happens in nature. After death it rises again in the spiritual world.”

Through the spring Mysteries, on the other hand, humanity realized that nature is overcome by the spirit.

Spirit works in from the cosmos, causing physical life to burgeon and sprout forth from the earth. People were thus reminded, not of how we proceed into the spiritual world at death, but rather of how we emerge from it and descend to earth. In other words, precisely when nature was on the rise, human beings were reminded of their descent into the physical, while when nature fell into decay, they were to reflect upon their rise, their resurrection, into the spiritual.

You can imagine the extent to which inner life was deepened by this experience of humanity's relation to the cosmos.

Different regions stressed different festivals. In ancient times there really were peoples who were more autumnal, while others were more vernal. The autumnal peoples celebrated Mysteries like those of Adonis; the others had Mysteries based upon such realities as I have described today. Only people of whom it is reported, and correctly so, that they traveled like Pythagoras from place to place, from Mystery center to Mystery center seeking knowledge, were able to have the entire range of human experience. Traveling from one place to another, they might at one time behold the autumnal Mystery, which is actually the Mystery of the sun, and at another the spring Mystery, which is the Mystery of the moon. This is why the ancient universal initiates are always portrayed as traveling from one Mystery center to another. And it may truly be said that they thereby inwardly experienced the year through the various festivals. Coming to a place where an Adonis festival was celebrated, they might say: “I behold the cosmic autumn and the radiance of the spiritual sun at the onset of winter's night.” Where a spring Mystery was celebrated they might say: “I behold the Mystery of the moon.” In this way they came to know the year's full inner meaning.

Thus, as you can see, Easter as we know it today is encumbered with things that do not really belong to it. It should actually be a ceremony of burial, one that goads us into working, just as the spring festivals did for ancient peoples. Such festivals gave them the spiritual incentives they needed for work in the summer; in other words, Easter was an admonishment to prepare for the summer's work. By contrast, the fall festival of resurrection was celebrated at a time when human beings left work behind. In leaving it behind, however, they experienced within themselves something of supreme importance to beings of spirit and soul, namely, an awakening to the eternal in them. This they experienced by contemplating the soul's resurrection in the spiritual world three days after death.

By proceeding from earthly Mysteries to cosmic Mysteries, from earthly knowledge to cosmic knowledge, we thus begin to recognize the year's inner structure as revealed through the festivals, even though much of the festivals' hidden meaning has been lost. Tomorrow, as time permits, I will try to go more deeply into matters that have been described today in more general, cosmic terms, by focusing on particular Mystery centers.

Dearly beloved! In many respects it is already extraordinarily difficult today to penetrate with a certain understanding into [the life and work of] figures of the past who are not too far behind us. But the difficulties become especially great when we are to penetrate into the depths of the soul and the workings of such human individuals who, in the very, very distant past – one might say in prehistoric times – placed themselves with their work in culture, in the development of humanity. And such a figure, such an individuality should arise before our spiritual gaze today in the often mentioned figure of the old Persian founder of religion and world view, Zarathustra, or, as it is also said, Zoroaster.

I said that it is relatively difficult for us today to really objectively understand thinking and feeling that is not so far behind us. Nowadays, one has the strong feeling that when one believes to have understood something and regards one's knowledge as the truth, it is in a sense the only true truth and that everything else is wrong, basically nonsense. The fact that truth and human knowledge itself are subject to development, that each epoch is forced to look at the riddles of the world in its own way and solve them to a certain degree, that each epoch must speak a different language, so to speak, about these riddles of the world – this is not well understood today. We can only hope that the descendants of today's human race will not behave towards it as we so easily behave towards our ancestors.

Who would not decree today from his strict, let us say scientific, throne that a mind like Paracelsus', who lived and worked so little time ago, was full of the prejudices of an era long past, with all kinds of judgments that are, of course, long outdated today. It does not occur to one, though it would be natural, that what we today consider to be seemingly irrevocable in relation to our science, will certainly be just as corrected and to a certain extent transformed when so much time has passed after us as between Paracelsus and us, as the Paracelsian views have been transformed by ours. We can only hope that future generations will be fairer than we are, that they will know that truth is in a state of development and that basically every way of expressing the truth is only a form of expression for what we would like to call original truth or original wisdom. In short, what we humans call truth is in a constant state of change, and therefore we must see the human pursuit of truth only as developing. If we imbibe this view and ask ourselves: How did our ancestors think? What about them can make a great impression on our souls today? — then we will also be able to look back without prejudice to minds as far back as the great, the shining Zarathustra.

There has never been any real agreement as to the age in which Zarathustra lived. There are even scholars today who claim that Zarathustra probably only lived six centuries before our era; other scholars point to a period of 1000 years before our era, and still others go back even further. What spiritual science has to say through its research will be mentioned here only briefly, because for us it is less a matter of establishing mere historical facts than of illuminating the soul of this great individuality. Therefore, it should only be briefly mentioned that spiritual science must go back at least five millennia before our era - even into the sixth millennium - if it wants to meet this luminous figure of Zarathustra with a backward glance.

Now, although one may argue about the age in which Zarathustra lived - one should not really argue about it, because the course of human cultural development speaks too clearly, because what is associated with the name Zarathustra and what has emerged from Zarathustra as a cultural movement has exerted the deepest, most significant, and even extraordinarily long-lasting influence on human progress. If we would fathom the soul of Zarathustra, if we would recognize the mission that this unique individuality has fulfilled in the progress of humanity, then we must attempt to understand Zarathustra's task on a larger scale. we must realize that we can only come close to what he was if we assign him a task of the very first order in the development of humanity since the great Atlantic catastrophe, as seen by spiritual science. Much is said about this catastrophe; the religious records, the religious traditions of all the peoples of the earth report about it - the Christian tradition speaks of it as the great flood.

We cannot now go into the details of the time when this catastrophe swept across our earth; but even the external, geological science is today increasingly being driven to recognize that such a great catastrophe once took place and that through this catastrophe the face of the earth was thoroughly changed. If spiritual science is forced by its research to recognize that where the Atlantic Ocean is today was once dry land, where people lived at a time when most of the present-day continents of Asia, Africa and Europe were still under water, it may be said that today, natural science is no longer far from admitting that the fauna and flora in the western regions of Europe and the eastern regions of America do indeed indicate that there was once land between the west of Europe and the east of America that became the bottom of the sea due to subsidence during that great catastrophe. And that our present continents have repeatedly risen and sunk has already become common truth even in geological circles.

For spiritual science, such great catastrophes, such changes in the face of the earth, are connected with significant processes within the development of mankind. Today I can only hint at what I have already explained in more detail to the listeners of my lectures on earlier occasions. I can only hint that the human race that lived on the Atlantic continent in that epoch had a very different state of soul from that of today's people, who are the descendants of those ancient Atlanteans. If we want to give a brief indication of what kind of culture was present in that primeval time of humanity, we can, if we do not misuse the word, call this culture a “clairvoyant culture”. However, the word “clairvoyant” must not be misused in the sense in which it is very, very often misused today. What does this tell us - “clairvoyant culture”?

Yes, if you want to speak from the point of view of spiritual science, then you have to honestly believe in human development, then you have to honestly be convinced of this human development, then you can't just be fascinated by the development that the popular Darwinists talk about today. We look back at an earlier humanity that had a very different kind of knowledge and soul capacity. We can briefly form an idea of this ancient state of mind by remembering what remains, as an inherited residue from that time, in the dream consciousness, where man sees echoes of the day's life in dream images. These dream images no longer have any reality for us today; they are echoes of what was experienced during the day – some pictorial representations of this or that that occurred. Dream consciousness, however, is like an old inheritance, a faded remnant of a prehistoric human consciousness, when people did not see and recognize their environment as directly as today's people, who only recognize everything with their senses and with the mind, which is tied to the brain. The people of that time saw what explained and solved the riddles for them in what, from today's point of view, were abnormal soul states. They saw with a kind of image consciousness, but these images were not phantasms like our dream images. Man did not speculate about the riddles of the world in terms of concepts and ideas, but experienced states – abnormal states by today's standards – in which images appeared that were not dream images, but which depicted the very foundations of existence.

And this humanity, which had such an awareness, also had guides and teachers who had led this awareness to a very special height and who - clairvoyantly - looked very deeply into the spiritual background of existence. I can only mention this today in the introduction. These teachers of old, who had clairvoyant insight into the spiritual world, related to humanity much as those who today, in their normal consciousness, come to ingenious insights, ideas and concepts. Just as these relate to humanity as a whole, so too did the great seers of old, because they had a concept of how to look into the spiritual world, because they had natural clairvoyance. The development of humanity begins with the fact that humanity really did come from spiritual origins. Today, we are no longer very aware of this; this awareness [of the spiritual origin of human beings] has actually been lost, although in the first centuries of the Christian era there was still a clear awareness of an ancient, inherited wisdom that had come from the forefathers of humanity and of which nothing else remained but traditions taken from that old clairvoyant insight into the spiritual world. Plato, for example, speaks of the people of the Kronos realm, saying that they could see into the spiritual world and that they were the keepers of the original world wisdom. Plato was aware that much of that wisdom had simply been handed down from generation to generation. And Plato, the philosopher who had come a long way in what he was able to explore himself, was nevertheless aware that this primal wisdom could penetrate deeper into the very foundations of the world than anything he himself could give his students through the normal powers of human beings. We also find the greatest respect for the primal wisdom of the world in other thinkers. We must seek this primeval wisdom in its original form before the Atlantean catastrophe, which has been characterized above.

The development of humanity consists in the fact that in this post-Atlantean epoch, in which we live today, man has gradually, so to speak, seen this primeval wisdom dwindle, that he has lost the old, elementary because he should develop the sense to judge things by external, sensual perceptions and to penetrate the riddles as far as possible with the mind bound to the brain. Today's short-sighted people will naturally believe that today's knowledge is the sum of all wisdom, that there cannot be any other wisdom. But anyone who takes a broad view of human development knows that even knowledge bound to the intellect, which humanity had to gain in its present era (the previous one was the era of childhood), is only a transitory epoch, only a point of passage in human development.

They know that people will rise again to a future clairvoyance and that they will take with them what they have gained through the knowledge of the physical world. A necessary transition point is this kind of knowledge. And so we can say: What we today, as normal human beings, call our knowledge, and even more so, what we have under the influence of this knowledge in terms of moral and aesthetic ideals, in terms of moral judgments about the world, all this has only just been acquired. Everything that we have recognized as the actual characteristics of today's human being is based on the old clairvoyance that human beings lost for a while. But this present-day realization is so characteristic of our present epoch that we must say: The post-Atlantean time, the time in which the earth has the present physiognomy, is called to develop just this thinking and feeling and to close the door, so to speak, to all clairvoyance for the normal human condition, so that man is forced to fix his gaze on the sensual reality in order to also go through this epoch in his development of knowledge.

There were now two cultural currents in this post-Atlantic epoch, which really had the mission to lead humanity out of the wisdom of the forefathers into the wisdom of understanding and reason, as I have just characterized it. There were two currents. And strangely enough, the originators of these two currents are quite close to each other geographically and in terms of world history. We have to look for the one main current of the post-Atlantic period in the settlements that formed after the Atlantic catastrophe in India, the venerable cultural land. We have to look for the other main current to the north of it, in the area that was fertilized by the great, luminous spirit of Zarathustra. And although these two currents of human spiritual development are so close, although to the outside eye they look so similar that sometimes the words for this or that in the older languages of the two cultural currents are the same, we must, when we look deeper into things, see in these two currents of post-Atlantic cultures quite opposite ways of founding our present culture.

You see, when the spiritual researcher looks back to that ancient culture of time-honored India, which can only be seen with the spiritual eyes – because what is contained in the great, wonderful Vedas is only a late echo of the primeval world wisdom of the Indians . We are then led back to something that preceded all Vedic culture and that is of such sublimity that the human being, who has a sense for the transformation and development of the human spiritual life, stands with the deepest reverence before this ancient-holy culture of India. And there is some truth in what is usually taken only as legend: that this ancient Indian culture goes back to a series of great sages, to the seven Rishis of ancient India. If we examine this ancient Indian culture from a spiritual scientific point of view, how does it appear to us?

We cannot describe it more precisely than to say that it appears to us as a kind of ancient heritage that could be passed down from that wisdom that existed as the common wisdom of humanity before the Atlantic catastrophe. We must only imagine the right way of inheriting an ancient store of world wisdom. Just as it was still present in Atlantean humanity as primeval world wisdom, so this wisdom, based on clairvoyance, could not, of course, be directly transmitted to a humanity whose soul capacities were quite differently constituted. The ancient wisdom was adopted into Indian culture in the same way as a tradition that has to be adapted to a new faculty of the soul. Basically, only a few people were still able to develop something in their souls that could point to the realm that had been seen in ancient times through living clairvoyance behind the world of the senses. Whoever wanted to rise in living inwardness to the vision that was once normal for humanity in a certain way had to become what is called an initiate or an initiate. He had to develop certain abilities of the soul that are not normally present; he had to undergo certain exercises, a certain training of the soul, in order to develop an ability that otherwise slumbers in his soul. Then he was able to learn through his own observation what the great teachers of the Indians, the seven Rishis, had to proclaim. What was he led to then? He was led back, as it were, to an earlier state of development; he was able to see something that humanity in the normal state could no longer see, but which it had been able to see earlier.

This is essentially how we understand this ancient, pre-Vedic Indian culture, which then resonates in the Vedas. This is also the source of the underlying mood in which something is spread out over this ancient and sacred Indian culture, like a wistful look back that says: There was a time when people could see into the spiritual world, when the origin of people was revealed. That time is gone. The senses now have only the ability to see the external, physical reality. And only by developing a special ability can one transport oneself back to those ancient times; then one can again see the spiritual, which is hidden by the human being's sensory capacity for knowledge, by the intellect, which is bound to the brain. Thus did he feel who, in the world-view of the ancient Indian, lived with the realization that man is cut off from the contemplation of his spiritual origin, and he has a longing for this origin. Thus the ancient Indian believed that truth was only to be found beyond what humanity could see at that time. He believed that above and beyond all that humanity could see at that time, the great illusion spread out, “maha aja”, the great deception, “maja”, the great non-being. And behind that lay true being, which people had once seen.

A worldview, such as that of the pre-Vedic Indian, cannot be understood by merely looking at what appears to be dogmas, but only by putting oneself in the shoes of people felt at that time, how they felt cast out of their spiritual home into a world of maya, of illusion, and how they longed to return from this external, sensual-physical reality to that ancient, original world. And it is wonderfully moving, in the highest sense, to place oneself in this ancient Indian soul with its pessimism, which is not as frivolous as it sometimes appears today, but which is a heroic pessimism that does not complain about this great deception, but says: the sense world is simply not reality; reality is found by turning away from this sense world and going back into earlier epochs in one's soul.

What do we actually find when we go back to what the people of old in India were able to see? I have already pointed out that all spiritual science leads us to the fact that the soul that now lives in us between birth and death has often lived on earth and will live many more times. Spiritual science therefore leads us to the realization of repeated lives on earth, so that when we look back into past times, we do not find other souls, so to speak, but our own souls, that is, ourselves in earlier embodiments. And the soul of such an old Indian man could say to himself: As I now live between birth and death, I am bound to the illusion. I am now more entangled in the body of the senses than I was in earlier lives, for example when the primeval wisdom was experienced by myself. Basically, such a member of the ancient Indian culture looked back into his own earlier soul states. His soul used to live in such a way that it could look into the spiritual world itself. It descended into the world of the senses and can no longer see into the spiritual world. If a member of the ancient Indian faith wanted to regain this earlier vision, he basically ascended to his own earlier embodiment; he penetrated completely into himself. This is roughly how we can characterize the mood of ancient India.

In a sense, the exact opposite was offered by the cultural impact that occurred in the north of ancient India, in Bactria, Media, Persia, through Zarathustra. If we can call the ancient Indian wisdom a kind of heritage from ancient times, which also awakened a yearning for that ancient time, we must say that what was given to people through Zarathustra, what was imprinted on human development through him, points just as strongly to the future as the ancient Indian teaching points to primeval wisdom. There is a remarkable contrast between the teachings of Zarathustra and the ancient Indian teachings. If we allow not dogmas, not teachings, on which it actually matters little in human development, but moods, feelings to come before our soul, then we can say: the mood of the ancient Indian world view that has just been characterized is a mood of redemption: out of this body, which can no longer see the truth, into the earlier seeing! That was the mood of the ancient Indian: to be redeemed from a body that is dependent on maya. Therefore, in the best sense of the word, everything that emerged from ancient Indian culture, right up to Buddhism, is a kind of religion of redemption.

In Zarathustra's view, what appears first is not a religion of redemption, a worldview of redemption, but rather a worldview of resurrection, a worldview of awakening. And in this respect, the teaching of the doctrine in the north is the exact opposite of the teaching that arose in the south. Zarathustra was to be the first great leader of humanity to radically point out that it is a necessary point of passage for them to develop the senses for what is spreading before them, and to develop the mind for what is logical thinking, what is reasonable understanding. Only, the great Zarathustra does not stop at the materialistic level of the external sense world. As an initiate, he says in his own way: Certainly, post-Atlantean humanity has the task of sharpening the senses for what presents itself to the eyes, to the ears, to the entire sense-perceiving human being. Post-Atlantean humanity has the task of grasping the phenomena of the sensual world in accordance with reason and intellect, but as we grow together with the sensual world, we must become capable, if we develop certain slumbering powers in our soul, not of stopping at what the senses offer us, but of penetrating through the sensual cover to what lies behind this sensual world.

This is the great contrast between the Indian world-view mood and the Zarathustra world-view mood. The ancient Indian says: If I look at the world that spreads out in color, form and all its sensual qualities, it is not a true world, but Maya. I can only enter the true world by turning away from this external sense world; so I turn away my eyes and ears and the other senses, and I let the mind stand still, insofar as it combines ideas and concepts. I pay no attention to this sensual world if I want to see the truth, but I delve into the human interior, I live myself into that self that was there in previous embodiments; I climb up the ladder of embodiments to acquire the ability to see the truth. In a sense, the basic mood of the ancient Indian was to flee from the world of the senses and to ascend to the truth through strict immersion in one's own inner self, in that which can live in the soul when it disregards its surroundings. It was a mystical immersion in the inner life of the soul, distracted from the outside world, which wants to know nothing of “maha aja”, the great illusion: this is the tendency of ancient India.

Joyful acceptance of the reorganization of our soul-faculties, which shows us the world with all that it can offer to the open eye, what it can offer to all outer human possibilities, and also to the mind bound to the sense world; joyful acceptance of all that spreads out as an outer carpet of the senses before the senses: that was the mood of Zarathustra! If an Indian looked at the plant cover, at animals and clouds and air and mountains and stars, he said to himself: All this is only outer illusion. Dare to look at the one who has exhaled this great Maja, at Brahma, but who can only be found within! And Zarathustra says: Turn your gaze to that which spreads out before your external senses, use the soul capacity that is right for the present age of humanity. But don't stop there; grow together with the sensory world, penetrate it, go through it, and when you go through this sensory world and don't let yourself be held back, then you will find a spiritual world beyond it out there – beyond the stars, beyond the mineral, plant and animal world. Not only when you go into yourselves, no, also when you go out into the world of the senses, then you grow together through your new abilities with a spiritual world.

What expresses the individuality of Zarathustra most beautifully – take it as a comparison for my sake – is when it is said of him: When he was born, the first thing that happened to him as a miracle was that he smiled at the first glance at the world – the Zarathustra smile! One must be able to put oneself in the place of what is said with such a truly magically deep formula for such an individuality. It is suggested that in Zarathustra an individuality is born that looks at the whole carpet of the sensory world, but penetrates it as if clairvoyant and sees the spiritual behind it, and that in the consciousness of man's superiority to that which spreads around him, lets that exultation flow out of itself, for which the smile of Zarathustra is a symbol.

And so we see that in Zarathustrianism there is a completely different mood than in Indianism. Therefore, this Zarathustrianism could point to what the human soul is now to take up, what it is now to unite with itself. The fact that people look out onto the world of sense and normally no longer see in pictures what is not in the world of sense means that they take in something that they will carry over into the future and that will be a new component of the human soul in the future. Through this new component it will experience a resurrection: In the future, the human soul will not only be as it was in the past, but it has taken on this new element that can only be acquired in the sensory world. That is why this deep idea of resurrection lives in the Zarathustra teaching. I cannot today go into this in detail, justifying my views from this or that passage; I will merely characterize them, and everyone can see from the usual communications that what is to be given today as a characteristic of Zarathustrianism is well founded.

Zarathustra said to himself: It is basically not compatible with the right progress of humanity that only old heritage in humanity is praised as the highest. Why should people go back to earlier embodiments and the way they looked at the world then? They should take in what is offered to them as new, they should enrich and expand their world view, give it a greater scope. Thus did Zarathustra say to men: Look into the future, take in the new, look up to that spiritual world which presents itself to you when you sense the world of sense as a transparent covering. That was what he had to say to the world, and in saying it he felt a deep reverence for the spiritual world behind the whole world of sense. He felt that it was like the beginning of a new ascent [into the spiritual world] when we strive to penetrate the sensual world in order to enter the spiritual world, just as the old Indian wanted to enter a spiritual world by descending into his own inner self. He felt that humanity had actually fallen from a higher, spiritual point of view to a lower, physical one, and that it had the added awareness of wanting to longingly return to the old one by holding on to an old, inherited wisdom.

Zarathustra was deeply imbued with the fact that something had been working on the human soul that had led it down and entangled it in the world of the senses. But he was equally clear that this human soul could now be seized by something that would lead it up the path to the spiritual world. That, so to speak, was before Zarathustra's spiritual eyes: the opposition of two powers, one leading humanity down into the world of the senses and the other lifting it up into the spiritual world. This contrast is evident where we read that Zarathustra speaks of the one power that leads man upwards, of Ahura Mazdao, Auramazda, which later became Ormuzd, and opposes this to another power that leads the human soul downwards: Ahriman, Angra Mainyu.

Thus one must first perceive these two powers and how they work: the one leading the human soul down into the sensual world, the other leading it up into the spiritual world. But Zarathustra is completely consistent in the deepest sense, in that he does not accept the external, sensual world in the abstract and say that something spiritual is behind it - as the pantheists say today - but he says: the individual formations of the sensual world differ; one appears in one way and the other in another. One appears as mighty, luminous and effective for the rest of the sensual world, the other as small and insignificant. And everything that appears to our world as a great and mighty power through its external form, Zarathustra sensed, in the sense of the world view also adopted by his people, as a component of the sun - that sun which, every year anew, conjures up the plant world necessary for man, that sun without which there can be no life on earth.

But even with regard to the sun, which he felt to be the most powerful, the most powerful influence on earth, Zarathustra was clear that it too belongs to the external world of the senses, that what external science can fathom about this sun is only the external expression of what lives behind this sun. And he felt it so that he said: Just as plants are magically produced on earth in spring through the power of the sun's rays, so that which lives as the spiritual power behind the sun is that which draws man out of the world of the senses, that which can create the powers for man with which he can penetrate through the world of the senses. Behind the sun, therefore, for Zarathustra lives that mighty spiritual essence which he has just named Ahura Mazdao, Ormuzd. But what is it?

We can only form an idea of the thoughts that lived in Zarathustra if we remember that in spiritual science we do not consider the physical body of the person as the only thing, just as the person stands before us, but that we say: this physical body is the outer expression of his spiritual being. And when the eye becomes clairvoyant, it sees this spiritual essence, and we call that which the clairvoyant eye sees as the content of the spirituality, the aura of the human being. We perceive the physical body as the expression of the human aura, the small aura. Now Zarathustra says: Just as man has his aura, as he has his spiritual behind the physical, so is the sun the outer body of a spiritual being, namely the great aura, the Great Ahura - the word always means the same - the solar aura. - There we have Ahura Mazdao, the great aura, in contrast to the small aura of man.

Thus, Zarathustra pointed people to what lives out there in the universe as a mighty spiritual being and has its body in the sun, just as a human being has a body that is permeated by a spiritual-soul being, the small aura. That is [also] Ormuzd, that is what can unleash all the powers of man that go towards the spiritual. For this spirit that lived in Zarathustra, this Ahura Mazdao, this great aura, was a truth, a reality, before the clairvoyant gaze. And he said to his disciples, to those he could initiate more intimately into his secrets, something like the following: Look here, if you seek that which urges and leads man to the good, then you must raise your gaze to that which stands spiritually behind the sun. Man is indeed called upon to ascend ever higher and higher in the course of his development on earth. Ahura Mazdao will help him to do so. But not always, says Zarathustra, will that which is the spirit of the sun be seen only up there behind the body of the sun, but it will become ever greater and greater, will embrace more and more of the earth and will finally expand to the earth. The spirit of the sun will one day become a spirit active on earth.

If we survey the time [of Zarathustra] and the development of humanity, we see that these are in harmony with each other. What Zarathustra saw behind the physical sun was, for his time, only to be found in the sun in outer space; today, however, it has expanded to such an extent that we find it within the earth aura itself. And the event in which Ahura Mazdao, the great aura, descended to earth, we see, if we stand on the ground of true spiritual science, in what took place through the Christ impulse, which played out on earth in the events of Palestine.

From the standpoint of spiritual science, we can understand what Zarathustra once said to his disciples: “I will speak; now come and listen to me, you who long for it from far and near - now I will speak and no longer shall he who leads men to error with evil will through his tongue be able to poison the development of mankind. I will speak of what in the world God has revealed to me, what He Himself reveals to me - He, the Great Ahura. And anyone who does not want to hear my words, as I mean them, will experience bad things when the circles of earth's development will approach their completion. - When Zarathustra spoke of the spirit of the sun, we, who stand on the ground of modern spiritual science, say: He spoke of the same spirit that in his time could only be found in the vastness of the heavens, and today we find it when we study the mystery of the origin of Christianity in its full truth, as it emerged from the Mosaic religion. Having evolved to the Christian era, Ahura Mazdao descended, as it were, from the sun, and the Christians call him Christ. And he who interferes with the development of the world in order to halt the progress of human evolution, which is brought about by the great power of Ahura Mazdao, is Ahriman.

Zarathustra did not see the development of the world and of humanity in such a one-sided way that he could have asked, as many modern people do: Yes, how can I actually believe in an all-wise, great God when there is so much evil in the world? This is generally said today; one does not want to believe in a wisdom that permeates and lives through the world when one has to notice so much evil. Zarathustra does not speak in this way, and he also guides his disciples not to speak in this way. Zarathustra was clear that what comes from Ahriman, what stands as an opponent in all life, and that it must be allowed by the wisdom of the world, so that people who are to undergo an upward development can strengthen themselves through the resistance and gradually also lead the bad to the good. In this way a higher development is attained than if man had been simply comfortably placed in all that is good and had nothing bad to overcome.

Thus, although Ahriman was felt by Zarathustra and by all those who professed him to be the enemy of Ahura Mazdao, he was felt to be a necessary part of the development of the world. If we wish to understand the inner structure of the Zarathustra teaching, we must draw attention to individual things that may indeed cause great offence among today's clever people, who believe that they are so firmly grounded in the most modern world view. But what good does it do to carefully want to conceal the truth over and over again? We must plunge into Zoroastrian clairvoyance and explain in detail the structure of the system of thought which I have just characterized in superficial terms. Here it must be clearly understood that Zarathustra was one of those thinkers who, although they turned their gaze joyfully to the sensual world, nevertheless sought the truth in the spiritual world and, in essence, saw the essence of all world content in the spiritual. Powers such as Ormuzd and Ahriman are spiritual forces; they confront us in the world as spiritual entities.

But how did such high spirits as Zarathustra think about the outer structure of the world in the face of these spiritual powers? Just as Zarathustra looks up at the sun and says, “This is the outer body of a spiritual power,” so he looked up at the starry sky and at everything that the outer, sensual gaze could grasp, and he and his disciples perceived what was spread out in space as writing, as symbols, as metaphors that expressed the weaving and essence of the spiritual powers. This is extraordinarily important. Not in the way that we are accustomed to today with our materialistic sense, did Zarathustra and his students look at the outer world of the stars and see only spheres moving through space, but they saw in this world of the stars the expression of spiritual entities and spiritual processes, and in the arrangement of the stars they saw the symbols for what the spiritual entities behind them were doing. The starry sky was a starry writing to them, expressing to them the deeds of the spiritual world that took place behind it. Neither in the direction of today's materialistic sense nor in that of today's materialistic astrology, which would like to see the cause of the fate of mankind in the stars themselves, while they are only signs - neither in one nor the other direction did Zarathustra's thinking go. For him, what he could see in the starry writing was something like the meaning of a sentence for us, which we put on paper with characters. For him, the stars were cosmic characters. And what mattered to him were the spiritual entities behind them.

Zarathustra saw the highest spiritual entities in Ormuzd and Ahriman. For him, they belonged together, even though one is the enemy of the other. They originated, so to speak, in a single, great spiritual entity. In the sense of the Persian language, this primal being can be called Zaruana Akarana or, as it is often expressed, “eternity shrouded in glory”. It is difficult for today's human sense to penetrate to the heights where the followers of Zarathustra stood and where they grasped what must be grasped if one wants to see Ormuzd and Ahriman in one. The best way to achieve this is to endeavor to gradually arrive at the idea that if I look back in time, further and further back, I come to that which existed in prehistoric times and where the causes of the present lie. I myself also come from that which has developed out of this past current. But in the opposite direction there is a future current, and if one can rise to the point of seeing that the future is something that comes towards us from the other side, that we go towards, then one gradually comes to a true understanding of what Zarathustra sees as the unity behind Ormuzd and Ahriman.

Imagine a curved line, running forward and backward in such a way that it forms a small circle. If you make the circle larger, the line is less curved; make the circle even larger, and the line approaches more and more a straight line. If you take the diameter of the circle to infinity, then the arc of the circle gradually becomes a straight line that extends to infinity. Thus, we can assume that every straight line, by tracing it backwards and forwards, is a circle of infinite size. And so we can also say: if we go back into the past, we come to a point where the past and the future join together in a circle. This is the eternal current that Zarathustra pointed out – Zaruana Akarana. Past and future have become intertwined in the eternal cycle of the world, and from this the god of the sun, of light, of all that is good - Ormuzd, Ahura Mazdao - and likewise the god, through whose resistance the good forces must develop - Ahriman - both emanate from the snake of eternity: Zaruana Akarana. One must only feel one's way into these conceptions of eternity, then one gets a sense of the mood that prevailed among those who were around Zarathustra, then one feels something of the full magnitude of the feelings that flow from the teaching of Zarathustra, who continues to work in humanity to this day.

And so, for example, Zarathustra said to his disciple: Now you have a mental picture of the closing circle of the world, of one part of the world circle as the higher power of light, Ahura Mazdao, and of the other part as the dark power, Ahriman. What we have just spoken is written in the Star-writing, and in the Star-writing you see this circle, which closes in upon itself as a symbol of Zarana Akarana: the zodiac that closes around the vault of heaven. This is the symbol of the outer circle of the world, and when you stand on the earth and turn your gaze to the zodiac, imagine the sun as the great Ormuzd, passing through this circle. And what the deeds of the circle of light are, that shows itself to you as the realm of creation of Ormuzd, and what lies in the night, what is immersed in darkness for man and stands on the other half of the earth, that is what Ahriman symbolizes. The seven signs of the zodiac in the daytime course of the sun on one side and on the other side the five signs in the nighttime course of the sun: these are the symbols of Ormuzd and Ahriman.

Thus the stars were perceived as writing in the sky for what Ormuzd and Ahriman were. Such entities, which stand behind the sensory world, were imagined to have an effect on human nature, but it was realized that they were not a unified whole, but that there were partial spirits, sub-spirits. And in the individual signs of the zodiac, the symbols for seven or six serving spirits of Ormuzd were now felt. These were sub-spirits, called Amshaspands in the old Persian language. The best translation is the one that Goethe chose in his “Faust” when he said:

But you, the real sons of the gods,
Enjoy the living, rich beauties!

Sons of the gods! Six of them – on the light side of the Zodiac – were connected with Ormuzd, while the other five spirits, opposed by Ahriman, were called Devs. This sounds strange and shows the contrast to Hinduism, to what the Indians worshiped as their highest powers, the Devas. While for Zarathustra the highest spiritual powers are found in the penetration of the sense-covering - these are the Asurian powers that work in the outer world - so for the Indians the highest powers are those that are found by penetrating into the mystical interior of man. The simplest explanation for the fact that ancient India saw the highest in the devas, while the Persian religion, on the other hand, saw something dangerous in them, and that furthermore the Indians saw something in the asuras that they did not want to know anything about, while the Persians revered them, is this: In the Zarathustra sense, one should take leave of that world which relies on the inner alone, which can become seductive for man if he does not want to grasp the outer world of the senses. Therefore, delving into the inner, into the world of the Devas, became somewhat dangerous for the Persians, while for the Indians they were something of the highest.

Thus the five spirits of Ahriman are symbolized by the five dark winter constellations of the zodiac. And so there are twelve spiritual entities: Ormuzd with his servants and Ahriman with his servants. Basically, we have to think of the realms of Ormuzd and Ahriman in such a way that these twelve [spirits] work together in the spiritual world - Zaruana Akarana! How do they work? By communicating to the human being that which, for Zarathustra, is the expression of the goal of the world, by pouring into the human being that which they allow to flow through the universe. Zarathustra felt that man, as a small world, is a confluence of what is spread out as great cosmic forces throughout the universe. Thus he felt. Therefore, it would be only natural to find that Zarathustra did not see what is found today through anatomy, physiology and so on in the dissected human being. The Zarathustra wisdom did not dissect the human being, but there was a clear-sighted insight that showed how the spiritual forces worked into human nature and composed human nature. Zarathustra says: “Through the universe, twelve forces emanate from the twelve spirits of Ormuzd and Ahriman; they compose the human body. Like a seal imprint, the human body expresses in miniature what is spread out in the great world in the Amshaspands, the sons of the gods. In there, it continues to have an effect as currents from outside.

What does the disciple of Zarathustra actually mean by what continues to have an effect in there? What I am about to say is somewhat disturbing for modern science. In its own way, more recent science has rediscovered what flows in as the twelve currents, what makes human beings a being that can strive up into the spiritual world, that can have a brain, an intellect; it has rediscovered it in the twelve main nerves of the head. But that is a nuisance for modern science, almost the height of madness, when one says that these twelve nerves are the crystallized, condensed currents that the twelve Amshaspands, according to Zarathustra, channel into the human organism. And so, in materialistic research, we see a concentrated focus on the human being of what Zarathustra – the luminous, clairvoyant personality – revealed as a spiritual secret. At that time, one saw in spirit what was important. And it is our time's task to see in the material what is, as it were, the condensed spiritual.

Zarathustra continued: Yes, you see, just as today man, through his spirituality, which is bound to the brain, strives up into a higher world, to a higher development, so in earlier times he strove for something else. Just as man is connected with Ahura Mazdao today, he was once bound to lunar development. This is also something that annoys modern science. Nevertheless, it is a spiritual truth. This lunar development expresses itself in a further stage of condensation of spirituality. Lower spirits came into play here. Just as the twelve great Amshaspands worked into man, so before that other spiritual entities had brought about a lower spiritual activity. Today we would say: When a person reflects, it is a higher spiritual activity; when he reflexively chases a mosquito away from his face without thinking, it is a lower activity. We see these lower activities as connected to the nerves, which have their center in the spinal cord. What intruded into the human organization as a lower activity, Zarathustra attributed to an earlier spiritual influx.

He said that the twelve great spirits were opposed by 28 others, whom he called Izeds. These Izeds had an effect on the human body and constituted it. He further said that this implied a certain irregularity in that the lunar government had been replaced by the solar government. In addition to the 28 Izeds, which correspond to the 28 lunar days, there are three more, which are inserted by the [longer] solar cycle - up to three irregularly inserted days. So you can count 28 to 31 Izeds. This brings us close to what newer science has as these Izeds: They are the 28 to 31 nerves in man running to the spinal cord - these are the crystallized izeds. So you see the Zarathustra wisdom crystallized in the human anatomy, so to speak. It would never have occurred to anyone to direct human thinking in such a way that it could have researched and searched in the way it does today if Zarathustra had not provided the impetus for it.

He pointed to higher spiritual powers that radiated into man. And to the extent that these were Amshaspands, they became the twelve brain nerves in the physical organization of man; to the extent that they were Izeds, they became spinal nerves. This is something that seems even more twisted than what I said yesterday about reincarnation. But it is something that people will gradually come to recognize, namely, that humanity started out from a spiritual world view and only then descended into materialism. People will gradually come to see how useful it is to raise our eyes again to those great geniuses who, so to speak, saw it as their mission to give people a spiritual gift that can in turn lead them out of this world of the senses. From what it had previously seen in the spirit, humanity descended to sensual things.

Now, today people are not inclined to find such things anything other than annoying, but only because certain things are easily forgotten. For example, everyone will say: How should we actually imagine the structure of the world after Kepler's laws, other than as a sum of purely mechanical processes? Well, one should just remember that Kepler came to his laws precisely through a spiritual worldview and made the statement: “So I carried the sacred vessels of Egyptian secrets up to the north and translated them into the language of the present.” Those who were truly great cultural mediators knew how to tie in with the time when one could still see into the spiritual world. Thus, in essence, Zarathustra stands before us as the one who, in his spiritual worldview, feels the mission to point out to the human being who has the tool in the physical body for his work in the world, but who still points to it with spiritual means. That is why Zarathustra is so tremendously significant. He is always spoken of in connection with the entire outer life of the people in whom he was incarnated.

It is deeply significant that the legend, told so wonderfully, tells how this people, in whom Zarathustra lived, migrated down from the north. The legend, which is truer than history, tells us the following: This people once lived far to the northwest of the areas they later moved into. Before Zarathustra worked there, it was once able to live in these northwestern lands because the conditions there were favorable. But then strange changes occurred – so the legend goes: Winters came that lasted ten months; the people could no longer stay there, and King Dschemschid led them away [to more southern areas]. He received [from Ahura Mazdao] a golden dagger, which he plunged into the earth at various places. As a result, grain grew in those areas, and the people settled there.

If we translate what this legend tells us into the most sober truth, we have to say: This people, into which Zarathustra was introduced, was dependent as a people on cultivating the earth; it was dependent on tackling the real work of life with its hands. Zarathustra's mission for this people is, to begin with, the dissemination of spiritual wisdom, but at the same time it is a guidance to the immediate sensual reality. Hence their turning away from that world view, which wants to know nothing of work that has to be done in the sensual world and which perceives as Maja that towards which the work of the hands should be directed. No, for those who had Zarathustra as their teacher, the soil was not Maya. It was a reality as it was.

And it was a reality that was to be led higher and higher by extracting its fruits from the soil. By working, one connected with what Ormuzd wanted. Work was service to Ormuzd. And everyone felt the Zarathustra mood in their veins when they worked the soil: “I must not abandon myself to the mood that leads me to long for another world; no, here I will be a servant of Ormuzd. By thrusting the spade into the earth, I work as a servant of Ormuzd. And man has to live here on earth in truth. Therefore, in those who were the followers of Zarathustra, there was also the most sublime and beautiful belief in truth and truthfulness, in moral purity. And that is one of the most beautiful impacts associated with the mission of Zarathustra, that the sense of truth and truthfulness developed because of this connection with the outer world, in which one needs a sense of truth.

And so we also see that among all the things that were seen as something bad, as belonging to Ahriman - deception, lies, slander - the worst vices in the teaching of Zarathustra were seen.

Thus the gaze of Zarathustra and his people was directed towards external reality, but in such a way that the spiritual world was sought behind it. In this spiritual world, man hoped to find his resurrection, his future union with Ahura Mazdao, when he had worked his way through the world of sensuality. The religion of resurrection, the first religion of resurrection, is the teaching of Zarathustra. And so it became a world view that looked with kindness, love and goodwill at what further south was regarded only as Maja. Within the Zarathustra religion, that which instincts are for reality, for working on reality and for connection with reality developed. Therefore, in this religion there was not that tendency to chastise the body so that the spirit could emerge from it as easily as possible, but rather it had that instinct that wants to shape the body so that the senses can become as fine as possible and the thinking as sharp as possible. And that had to develop into instinct. And so one sees a wonderful sum of healthy rules of life developing, from such healthy rules to eating, that later Plato stood in admiration before the Zarathustra religion precisely in this respect.

Yes, how long one appreciated the mission of Zarathustra - until the materialistic time made this impossible - we can see from the fact that it was said that Pythagoras learned geometry from the Egyptians, astronomy from the Chaldeans, other sciences from the Greeks, but that he learned the worship of the gods and the wisdom of nature from the magicians of the Zarathustra religion. So they revered those people in the followers of Zarathustra, who are called the Magi, who understood something about how to see through the world of the senses into the spiritual, who knew that one does not come to the spiritual through mere mystical immersion into one's own inner self, but how to make the outer carpet of the senses transparent. In short, those who said of Pythagoras that he had learned the worship of the gods from Zarathustra saw in the followers of the Zarathustra religion – if I may express it thus – “specialists” with the right view of the spiritual world, with the right worship of the gods. This is how people thought of what Zarathustra gave to humanity. But the time will come when people will look up to Zarathustra in veneration again, and that will be when, through spiritual science, they will gain the possibility of understanding such great spirituality as can be found in Zarathustra.

It is useful and significant to turn our gaze back to the starting points of human cultures. When we do that, then among the luminous figures to whom we look back to see how we actually have become and how our present culture has gradually emerged, there will always be the one who was there, the “Goldstar” - Zoroaster, Zarathustra, because one can with some justification translate this honorific name as “Goldstar”. Gold has always been regarded as a symbol of wisdom, and for the followers of Zarathustra, wisdom was something vividly effective, not an abstract, dead science. It is therefore a tremendous aberration for people to believe that the Amshaspands were abstract ideas for Zarathustra and his followers. Anyone who takes even a cursory glance at this cultural movement must realize that living spirits were meant.

Zarathustra's followers sensed that when he spoke of the spirits within himself, for example of “Vahumano”, of the attitude that draws man up to the spiritual world that lies behind the carpet of the world of the senses, the truth of the living spirituality that permeates space lived in him like a seal impression. They understood what Zarathustra had to give to humanity from the source of his soul when they heard him say: “Everything that weaves and lives through the world as a spirit of light, as the power of light and fire, can work in and ignite an inner fire in people. What is spread out in space can gather in a center, so that man feels placed in the macrocosm. And as the disciples of Zarathustra look up to the spirit of the macrocosm, they say: Something in us resounds like an echo of what flows to us as a secret [from the macrocosm]. We feel within us what the power of light - the being clothed in glory - can become in us if we allow to resound within us what flows towards us from all sides. - The students called what they experienced within “Ahuna Vairja”, which later became “the word”, “the logos”. And this was felt like a prayer detaching itself in the soul, humbly flowing back to the secrets of the world - like a living echo that man can send out as a prayer into the universe on all sides like an image of the primal light.

Only when one is able to understand that Zarathustra, the luminous spirit, was able to evoke such sublime feelings in his disciples and through them in a large part of posterity right up to our time, only then does one feel something of the mission of Zarathustra. It cannot be felt if one only points to dogmas and names, but only if one feels the living power of the feelings that ignite in the living interaction between Ahura Mazdao and the space-filling light and the Logos, the holy word that streams out as an echo from the primal light. If one feels this interaction and understands the world-historical mission of Zarathustra, then one looks back in the right way to that being who was embodied in a human body about 5000 years before Christ and who became essential for all humanity.

What Zarathustra was for humanity and what his mission was should be indicated today with a few words. It should be pointed out that Zarathustra is one of the great leaders of humanity, who from epoch to epoch proclaim the old, the present and the future truths that give comfort and security and strength to man in all situations of life. And we can summarize this in the words:

They speak to the human sense
The things in space
They change over time.
The human soul lives
Through space
Unlimited and unharmed through time.
It finds in the spiritual realm
The deepest reason of one's own being.

In view of what has been said we may ask whether all the spiritual beings in existence are to be found behind the phenomena of the sense world, or whether there are others having no expression or manifestation in the physical world. Supersensible consciousness knows that although it is true that a spiritual being or spiritual fact is to be found behind every external phenomenon, yet there do exist spiritual beings having no expression in the physical world. Experiences await the initiate other than those whose projections or shadow images are thrown into the physical sense world. There exist, moreover, spiritual beings and spiritual facts that have no expression in the inner life of the soul, in the phenomena of conscience, thought, feeling, and sensation ... The spiritual world is seen by the higher consciousness to embrace much more than can be experienced in the physical world.

Those of my readers who have studied earlier lectures on these subjects, will realise that a host of spiritual beings, at different stages of evolution, have been involved in what has come to pass in the human, animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms during the course of our Earth evolution All such beings intervene in some way or other in the evolutionary texture of the Earth and of the kingdoms belonging to it. Behind the phenomena surrounding us is a richly constituted spiritual world, just as there was during the periods of Old Saturn, Old Sun, and Old Moon. We must not attempt to understand these spiritual kingdoms by inventing permanent names for these spiritual beings. The names used are not, for the most part, intended to designate individualities, but offices or spheres of duties. So if a particular name is used in connection with a being active during the Old Sun period it cannot be applied in the same sense to that being as regards its work or function in the Earth evolution; it has progressed by that time. It is necessary to speak of these matters with great accuracy and precision.

The Earth period was not only preceded by three embodiments of the Earth globe, but by three mighty spiritual kingdoms, essentially different from one another when examined by super-sensible consciousness. Investigation of the Old Saturn, Old Sun and Old Moon periods reveals many things which cannot be compared with anything we can name on the Earth, and of which one can only speak by analogy.

It will be remembered that I have spoken of the Old Saturn period as being essentially one of warmth, or of fire; on Old Sun this warmth condensed to air; on Old Moon the air condensed to water, and on Earth the earth element appeared for the first time. But the application of our concept of fire or warmth directly to the evolution of Old Saturn would result in an incorrect picture, for the fire of Saturn differed essentially from the fire of our Earth. There is only one phenomenon which can legitimately be compared to the Saturn fire, and that is the fire which permeates the blood as warmth. This vital warmth, or life principle, is more or less comparable to the substance of which Old Saturn was entirely composed, and the physical fire of today is a descendant, a later product of the Saturn fire; in its external form as perceived in space, it has appeared for the first time on the Earth. The warmth of the blood, then, is the only thing which can be compared to what was present during the physical evolutionary period of Old Saturn. There is very little indeed in the realm of our present day experience which can be compared in any way with the qualities of these earlier evolutionary periods, all of which were very different from our present Earth existence.

It must be understood, however, that everything in the Saturn, Old Sun and Old Moon periods is comprised within the Earth evolution, only it has changed in character. What was laid as a germ on Old Saturn and evolved through the Sun and Moon periods, is to be found in the Earth evolution, although in a changed condition; we can, however, instance the fundamental elements brought over from the earlier evolutionary periods by examining what is not to be found in this transformed state.

When the Earth first appeared it had absorbed into itself three preceding evolutionary conditions, and all the degrees of spiritual beings involved in them. The beings were at different stages of evolution, however, so it is obvious that distinction must be made between these three different realms of spiritual beings and of spiritual substances; we must realise, in considering the beginnings of the Earth, that certain things which we find there could come into existence only because the Saturn, Old Sun and Old Moon periods preceded our Earth evolution, and at its beginning the three are united within it.

This fact was always present in the ancient, instinctive consciousness of man, which connected him with the spiritual world. And when the number Three was mentioned as characteristic of the higher worlds, those individuals who looked at things in the concrete and not in the abstract, who had facts rather than conceptions or ideas in their mind's eye, always felt in their souls the truth that our Earth has received, into her womb, as it were, everything that came over from Saturn, Old Sun and Old Moon. That is the so-called higher, pre-terrestrial triad ... This triad consisting of Old Saturn, Old Sun and Old Moon has evolved into our Earth. In its concrete meaning the higher triad signifies these three pre-terrestrial states; but the quaternary refers to the gradual transformation of these three into the Earth. Accordingly men whose instinctive consciousness brought them into touch with the realities of the spiritual world felt the mystery of the birth of the Earth to be expressed by the relation of three to four. And they turned reverent eyes to the sacred triad of Saturn, Sun and Moon, which had become the quaternary manifested by the Earth period. It is obvious that the modern expressions Saturn, Sun and Moon had other equivalents in the instinctive consciousness of ancient humanity.

If we now follow up the course of the Earth evolution we may ask how the separate classes of spiritual beings participate in its progress. Spiritual beings at different stages of evolution directed the processes of the separation of the Sun and Moon from the earth, as a result of which that progress came to pass. We have first to consider a class of spiritual beings which attained a certain stage of evolution during the Old Sun period; they belong to the Old Sun evolution because it was destined to provide a field of action for them. These are beings which separated the sun from the earth during the Earth period, because during Old Sun they were Sun-bound in the same way as humanity is now Earthbound. As we have seen, they needed the Sun for their further evolution and with the Sun they left the Earth in order to work upon the latter from without. When the Sun spirits had withdrawn the Saturn and Moon spirits were left on the Earth. The development of the Saturn spirits was such that they could direct and guide the separation of the Moon from the Earth; they had passed through the same stage on Old Saturn as the Sun spirits had done on the Old Sun; their maturity had preceded that of the Sun spirits, and they were therefore able to separate the Moon from the Earth and to stimulate from within the inner development of man, who, otherwise, would have hardened and become mummified. It may be said that the withdrawal of the Sun was brought about by the Sun spirits, and that of the Moon by the Saturn spirits. The Sun is a cosmic symbol for the act of the Sun spirits, the Moon for that of the Saturn spirits. And what is left upon the earth itself Spirits of the Old Moon period.

It will be useful at this point to bear in mind a definite epoch of the Earth evolution; that at which the Moon had just left the Earth. The Earth, from which the Sun had withdrawn still earlier, was then in a very different condition from that of today. If the Earth had then been in an exactly similar state to that of today, the whole process would have been unnecessary.

It was compared to the present mineral vegetable, animal and human kingdoms—very imperfect in that early period. The various continents had not separated off from each other everything was in a kind of chaos. Super-sensible sight would search in vain at that period for the mineral, vegetable, animal and human kingdoms as they are today. These forms have all developed as a result of the influence of the Sun and the Moon from without, and this was the purpose of the withdrawal of these two bodies. The influences which worked upon the Earth from the Sun and the Moon charmed from it, as it were, everything that has since arisen upon it and all that surrounds us today. The outer forms of the minerals, the plants, the animals and of physical man have been produced by the beings which work from the Sun; whereas the beings which work from the Moon have stimulated the soul life of men and of animals. This is an approximate and broad sketch of evolution from the so-called Lemurian epoch on into that of Atlantis. It was during the Atlantean epoch that, very slowly and gradually, the Earth began to wear an appearance more or less similar to that which we see around us today. It is necessary, therefore, to distinguish in the course of the Earth evolution since the withdrawal of the Moon, between a chaotic Earth and an organised one which has been influenced by the Spiritual beings in its environment.

What is here stated need not necessarily be acquired from historical tradition. Suppose for example that the initiate wisdom of ancient and venerable India, of the Persian sages, of the Egyptian initiations, or of the Greek Mysteries had all been lost; suppose no external documents of any kind whatever were left to tell us of the pristine teaching concerning the spiritual foundations of our earth evolution. Even then the possibility of developing super-sensible consciousness would not be lost; everything that is said here can be discovered by means of super-sensible investigation without the aid of any historical document. We have to do with something, which at the present time can be studied at its source; even mathematics may also be learnt from original sources.

Let us now try to find a link between the results which super-sensible investigation has given us and life in ancient times. It is obvious that some other method might be adopted, but the purpose of this course of lectures is to compare what can be found irrespective of any historical record, with what has been handed down by another kind of tradition. We will go back, not so very far, to a historical personage who lived in a comparatively ancient period of Greek culture, of whom history knows very little and the length of whose life even is veiled in much uncertainty. Pherecydes of Syros is in a certain respect the forerunner of the other Greek sages.

He lived at a time in Greek spiritual development called the epoch of the Seven Sages.—This period preceded that of all historical Greek philosophy. The little that external history tells us of Pherecydes of Syros is very interesting; he, among others, is spoken of as the teacher of Pythagoras; and many of the teachings of Herakleitos, of Plato and of later sages can be traced back to him. It is said that he taught the existence of three principles fundamental to the whole of evolution, and called them Zeus, Kronos and Chthon. Now what precisely did he mean by these names? It will at once be realised that Kronos is only another name for the Old Saturn evolution. In the teaching of Pherecydes, Kronos is the totality of spiritual beings belonging to the kingdom of Old Saturn, who during the course of the Earth evolution were able to bring about the separation of the Moon. Now for Zeus! Zeus is a word of uncertain meaning when used in ancient times, for it was applied to spiritual individualities at very different stages of evolution. But men in ancient Greece who know something of initiation recognised in Zeus the ruler of the Sun spirits. Zeus lives in the influences which came to the Earth from the Sun. Chthon is a designation of the somewhat chaotic condition of the earth after the withdrawal of the moon, at which time neither plant nor animal nor human forms were to be found. In most remarkable words, Pherecydes spoke of the holy primordial triad, of Zeus, Kronos and Chthon, principles fundamental to the earth, having come over from pre-terrestrial ages; he also speaks of a further evolution. But in ancient times men did not clothe matters of this kind in such dry, crude concepts as they do today, they drew vivid pictures of what they saw and recognised in spiritual realms. Pherecydes said: ‘Chthon becomes Gea (today called earth), because of the gift of Zeus whereby she came to be covered as with a garment.’ This is a wonderful description of that evolution which I have just outlined in a few short words. The earth was alone; outside it were the sun and the moon, the spiritual kingdoms of Zeus and of Kronos. The sun from without began to work upon the earth and to fructify it in its then chaotic state; or, in the language of the old Greek sage, Zeus fructified Chthon. The beneficent influences of the kingdom of Zeus were sent down to the physical earth in the warmth and light of the sun. This was the gift made by Zeus to the earth. The earth covered herself with the garment of plant and animal forms, and with the forms of physical men. Chthon becomes Gea; therefore, because of the gift of Zeus the earth covers herself with a garment.

This is a wonderful picture, expressed in beautiful language, of what super-sensible consciousness is able today to rediscover in the epoch of the Seven Greek Sages. And Pherecydes could not have made such strikingly vivid statements, which can be verified by modern super-sensible consciousness, without definite personal knowledge. This knowledge he derived from the so-called Phoenician initiation. He was an initiate of the temples of ancient Phoenicia and had brought over into Greece the Temple wisdom which he was at liberty to teach. A great deal of oriental wisdom came over in this way.

This is one example, among many, of the things that may be re-discovered in the words of the old sages independently of historical tradition. In this instance we have not gone back so very far in human history. If we are able rightly to interpret the expressions used, it is also possible to re-discover original teachings of very ancient times. It would, however, be false to accept the simple explanation that this or that Eastern teaching concerning the evolution of the world is found under the same form in Pherecydes of Syros, in the old Egyptian epoch, in the days of the Chaldean sages, and in the ancient Indian period. If this were the case, it might well be imagined that a wisdom rediscovered today is to be found, in different form, wherever humanity has striven after it; that wisdom is one and the same at all times and in all places. In its abstract sense there is not the slightest objection to be raised to this statement; it is true, but it expresses only a portion of the whole truth. Just as from the rest of a plant to the fruit there is not a regular succession of similar forms, but a variety, composed of green leaves, coloured petals, stamens, etc., of higher and higher development, so does diversity appear in the progress of human life on earth. Correct though it is to say that the sense wisdom appears again and again in different forms, an evolution or a development does nevertheless take place; and it is not at all correct to say that we find in ancient Indian times exactly the same conditions as exist today. That would be as inaccurate as to state that the blossom of a plant is the same as the root. True, the same force exists within it, but the reality emerges only if progress and development are recognised to be fundamental expressions of the secrets underlying human evolution. The teachings of the first post-Atlantean epoch may still be given today; what Pherecydes of Syros taught can be repeated today; but the earth evolution has also been enriched, and impulses have since been poured into it.

The importance of the Christ impulse in human evolution has already been indicated. That is a thing apart, standing alone in the evolution of the earth; there is nothing which can be compared with it. It has come to my knowledge that people have spoken of injustice in connection with human evolution if it were true that, for so many thousands of years before the coming of the Christ, full wisdom could not be imparted to mankind. Why was it, these people ask, that anything could be withheld from pre-Christian men? They seem to think, in view of the fact that justice is universal, that although the forms of truth have changed, new truths cannot have been added to the old; for if it were otherwise, men living in post-Christian days would be destined to receive something higher than men of pre-Christian times. Now it is understandable that such things should be said in the outer world, but it is not understandable that students of spiritual science should make such statements. And why? Because the men who incarnate during the post-Christian epoch are those who have passed through previous incarnations, and what they could not possibly learn before the appearance of Christ on earth they must learn after that event. Anyone who believes that man incarnates again and again only to learn exactly the same wisdom, has no serious appreciation and feeling for reincarnation in his soul; for to believe in reincarnation seriously means to realise its goal and its purpose and to know that there is good reason for our returning to earth repeatedly. We come back in order to have new experiences. It is a platitude to say that exactly the same wisdom is to be met with again and again in different conceptions of the world. The concrete fact is that wisdom develops, that it takes on higher and higher forms, until there comes into being on the Earth something that is ripe to pass over into another condition, in the same way as Saturn, Old Sun and Old Moon passed over to the Earth condition. There is real progress and not mere repetition—that is the whole point. And here lies the difference between Eastern and Western modes of thought. Western thought, in face of the whole task and mission of the West, can never separate itself from an actual, a concrete historical conception of the evolution of the Earth; and an historical conception implies the idea of progress, not of mere repetition. It was in the West that the real concept of historical development arose. If anyone falls into a purely oriental way of thought (and its truth is not in any way questioned, only the historical sense must be added to it) because he has not grasped the idea of historical progress, he may easily lose sight of the meaning of history altogether. He may find himself faced with the question: ‘What is the purpose of this eternal repetition or recurrence of the same thing?’ That was a problem raised by Schopenhauer who had no understanding of history in its real sense, and whose exoteric teaching was influenced in high degrees by what he had absorbed from Oriental life. Statement of a higher truth in no way impugns a lower, lesser truth; spiritual science fully assents to statements of a non-historical nature in Oriental spiritual life. But the point at issue here is that of raising a mode of thinking to a higher level; or, as we may say, of illuminating Oriental thought by the light of the West.¹

What I have said here in general terms I should like to illustrate by an example. From what has been said it will be realised that the discoveries of modern super-sensible investigation are to be found under another form in ancient times, if we look for them there. It is only possible to throw light on antiquity by starting from the present. Let us in this connection take a definite spiritual individuality. If we go back to a time when men brought down into the Vedas what was in a certain respect an echo of the sublime wisdom of the Holy Rishis, we find, among many appellations of divine beings, the name of Indra. If, from the point of view of modern super-sensible investigation I were to give an answer to the question: ‘What kind of being is the Indra mentioned in the Vedas?’ it would be best for me to explain how it is possible for a modern man to acquire a conception of that being by means of spiritual sight. We have already seen that by rising from the physical to the soul world, Spiritual beings can be perceived behind everything surrounding us in the world, behind fire, air, water and earth, which are their external expressions or manifestations. In the spiritual realm behind the element of air, for instance, a host of spiritual beings appear, beings which do not descend so far as the physical world, but express themselves—therein through the air. In the soul-world we meet them as entities, as individualities, and the mightiest of them is still to be found today in him who in ancient India was named ‘Indra.’ Indra is associated with the whole regulation of man's breathing process, and to his activity we owe the fact that we breathe as we do today. Humanity may look up to this being forever and realise that it is the mighty Indra who has endowed them with the instrument of breath. The activities of such a being are not however limited to one sphere, and humanity owes much else to Indra; they owe to Indra the force which must pour through their muscles if their enemies are to be conquered in war. Hence men were able to pray to mighty Indra for power to be victorious in battle, since this also was one of his functions. To this same being (which needs no name if only its presence is realised) is to be ascribed the flashing of the lightning effects of storms. For these things, too, prayers may be raised, if, in the praying, the gods are thought of.

Indra exists for us today as he existed in ancient Vedic times, but we must now pass on to another consideration. Suppose we take this being named Indra as actually seen by the Old Indian initiates when their spiritual sight was opened in the soul world, and ask ourselves whether the initiate of modern days sees him in the same form? The answer is that he does, in fact, see everything perceptible to the ancient initiate, but something else as well. To take a rather trivial example, suppose we consider a man in the fortieth year of his life and call him Muller. He is the same person who thirty years previously was a boy of ten, but he has changed, even if his name is the same. It would be incorrect to describe this man Muller as a man of forty if we took his appearance at the age of ten; he has passed through a certain development, which must be taken into account when speaking of him in his present condition. Is it to be imagined, then, that while men on the earth continually develop during their single lives and also from life to life, spiritual beings remain at the same stage at which they manifested themselves to the spiritual consciousness of an ancient Indian initiate? Is it right to conceive of the gods as remaining unchanged through thousands of years? It certainly is not; Indra has passed through an evolution since the days when seers of ancient India looked up to him with reverence. Now what has happened to this mighty figure of Indra, and how does his evolution manifest itself if we look back upon it with spiritual consciousness? At a certain moment in evolution something very remarkable with regard to Indra comes to pass. In order to have a clear conception we must repeat certain things. We will direct our spiritual consciousness in the soul world to the ancient Indian god, Indra and follow him through thousands of years. We come to a point of time when there is an appearance of rays of light falling from an entirely different spiritual being upon Indra, who is himself illumined by them and ascends to a higher stage of development. It is rather like learning something important from another individual at a certain age, which changed one's whole life. This happened in the case of great Indra, and since that time there has streamed from him the same influence as was to be found in ancient India, only enriched by the spiritual light of another being which was shed upon him. It is possible to indicate the precise moment in the history of the evolution of humanity when this took place. The God, Indra, is to be found in the soul world at a time when the Christ was not yet perceptible to Earth evolution, although the Christ light shone upon him. A man who is able to perceive Indra may well say that this Being now reveals something different from his earliest revelations; for at first the Christ light did not ray back from him. Since the point of time in question, Indra has not shed his own light into the spiritual evolution of the earth, but has reflected the light of Christ, just as the moon reflects the light of the sun. The light thus rayed back by Indra, not directly perceptible on earth and in which therefore we cannot actually recognise Christ, was proclaimed by Moses to his people. Moses gave the name of Jahve or Jehovah to this Christ light rayed back by Indra as the sunlight is reflected by the moon. In lectures upon the Gospel of St. John, I have spoken about another aspect of this matter. The Christ is heralded, and Jahve or Jehovah is the name of the Christ light rayed back by an ancient deity. It is a prophetic heralding of Christ. Indra himself passed to a higher stage of evolution through this contact with the Christ light. He did not of course become Jehovah. It is not correct to say that Jehovah is Indra. But we can understand that as Indra manifests himself in lightning and thunder, even so does Jehovah manifest himself therein, because a being can only reflect in accordance with its own nature. Jehovah therefore was manifested in lightning and thunder.

This is an instance of spiritual being accomplished in its own realm in the same way as human evolution in our world, and of the fact that the same picture of the spiritual beings is not forthcoming after the lapse of thousands of years. History is being made in the spiritual world, and earth history is only the outer expression of this spiritual history. Every earthly occurrence has its course in events of the spiritual world, and it is necessary to understand these spiritual events in detail.

By this example I have tried to show what it means to throw light upon antiquity from a modern point of view. History is a concept which must be taken quite seriously, and the instance given should elucidate spiritual life. If we bear in mind the fact that there are wisdom-beings to be found today by occult research which we encounter again when we go back in time, only under different names and different manifestations—and at the same time remember that historical evolution and progress are realities in spiritual life—which underlie all that is physical, we have grasped two principles of fundamental importance to all progressive spiritual science that is to influence the future of humanity.

• 1. This seemingly rather sweeping statement is justified by the fact that it deliberately opposes the oft-repeated declaration of mystical world-conceptions that fundamentally the, different religions, etc., are only the transformation of a single primordial wisdom and nothing more than that.

Today we are going to consider something from the point of view of spiritual science that may be said to be of eminent value if it is taken the right way. We are going to talk about some aspects of nutrition and healing. More than with any other kind of subject you’ll have to remember, however, that all we can do is aphoristically take individual details from an infinitely vast field and that it is extremely difficult to speak about these things at this time in a language that everyone can understand. We can therefore only consider these things in an approximate way, for in this kind of wider group I am speaking not only to the initiate who would be in a position to sense the true value of every word that is spoken.

In occult schools whose members are already at a higher level one can agree to use a specific way of saying things, so that a particular word will express a specific feeling impulse. All such things—and today we can only touch on them lightly—often have different meanings in ordinary life. But an attempt will nevertheless be made to speak about these matters, seeing that they are also of practical value. People who do not believe that effects arising from causes that lie in the world of spirit are much more powerful than the effects you get in the outer physical world will not gain much from it, however. Many will admit, in theory, that something we must call spirit, something that has a powerful influence in the world, has powers similar to those of electricity, magnetism, and so on. The science of the spirit finds itself in all kinds of positions in modern cultural life. Above all it is misunderstood by people who conservatively want to have life continue along old-established lines and also by the many people who want to bring about reforms in all kinds of areas. All these different groups of people come to the science of the spirit and consider it only natural that the science of the spirit should come to them and not they to the science of the spirit. It will of course be easy to see that someone who is a radical protector of animals will not make his energies and experience available to the spiritual scientific movement but will get really angry if all theosophists do not immediately join the animal protection movement. This is something you’ll see in all kinds of specific areas. And it is, of course, perfectly natural. But the theosophical movement is something that is universal. It relates to the different individual movements the way an architect’s plans relate to the work of the carpenters, masons, skilled craftsmen of all kinds who are working on the house. The latter are individual workers. But the person who is in charge of the building project must ask the workers to come to him to be given their particular instructions. This is also why it is not acceptable for other movements—homoeopaths, teetotallers and others—to ask that the science of the spirit should come to them. Instead, all the specialist areas must be part of the spiritual scientific movement which must aim for basic reform in a
spheres of life, but from within.

The position of theosophy in relation to science in particular is readily misunderstood. Not only do scientists believe theosophists to be against them, not wanting to have anything to do with them. Even friends of theosophy have this opinion. Above all physicians who have had a scientific training and are working to meet official requirements will easily develop the prejudice that theosophy does not involve scientific methods and therefore does not go with science. That is not the case, however.

Today you keep hearing slogans, nothing but slogans, from people. There is some justification for having specialists. But it is not the representatives of specialist fields but mainly their followers who use such slogans. One of them is one I'd particularly like to mention. You often hear that the public practically freeze with horror if you use the term ‘poison’. It seems perfectly sensible to say that no poison should ever get into the body. And people like to talk about ‘natural medicine’ in that case. But what do we really mean by ‘natural’? and by ‘poison’? The effect which the belladonna poison has on the human organism is natural, a purely natural effect. Nature does, of course, include all actions that come under the laws of nature. And what is a poison? Water is a powerful poison if someone consumes it by the bucketful, for it will then prove most destructive. And arsenic is a very good thing if you use it in particular combinations. What we need, therefore, is a truly thorough study of the human organism and the things to be found in the natural world outside.

Paracelsus⁷² was very specific about the way particular processes in the human body relate to those in the natural world outside, for instance cholera to arsenic. He called someone with cholera an ‘arsenicus’, for he knew that the same factors played a role in arsenic and cholera and he also perceived how things harmonize. We thus have a natural process which must first be understood.

Something else that proves an obstacle in the matter of entering into dialogue with scientists is the materialistic way of thinking. This has distorted people’s views on all the matters we are concerned with here. Remember what has been said about the effects of some metals on the human organism.⁷³ Someone may say the science of the spirit is pure materialism when it is said that the powers inherent in minerals and metals have material effects on the human organism. But in the science of the spirit we also know that material things have a particular relationship to the spirit. Someone who truly speaks for a spiritual view of the world will have realized that substances like these are not just matter and that spirit and soul dwell in them just like in a creature that lives in a skin. That is the sense in which a theosophist will speak of the spirit embodied in gold, in quartz or in belladonna poison. To the occultist, the world is full of spiritual entities. The spirit embodied in lead has the relationship to the human organism you heard me speak of yesterday. For theosophists it is not a matter of looking for some kinds of peculiar spiritual entities that have nothing at all to do with our world, but rather for entities that are present in every piece of metal and indeed in everything there is in the world around us. That is how one sees the spirit in matter from the point of view taken in the science of the spirit. Spiritual analogies are something based on genuine spiritual research.

We are not therefore in opposition to expert knowledge. There have to be specialist fields, and we must not ignore the outer facts. But it is impossible to gain a comprehensive point of view concerning the world on the basis of specialist knowledge. A medical practitioner is also a person and as such needs to know something of the higher worlds. He will then arrange his work in a very different way from someone who knows nothing of the great scheme of things, for he will then also rate symptoms differently. A single observation or experience may well be taken to be something quite minor if one has an overview of the whole. Just as everyone working in the sphere of culture has to meet certain preconditions, so the future will demand physicians who know the science of the spirit. An example would be Hahnemann, the founder of homoeopathy. The difference between Paracelsus and Hahnemann is enormous. The 16th-century physician was still clairvoyant to some extent. Hahnemann was no longer clairvoyant. He was only able to assess the actions of medicines by what his senses told him.⁷⁴

An analogy may be found for the relationship we are speaking of between the human being and the creatures and objects of the natural world. It is the relationship between the sexes, which is largely governed by sympathy. It is a mysterious attraction that brings the sexes together, a power at work in the sphere of life. It should not be taken to be something mystical in the bad sense of the word that one particular man feels drawn to one particular woman. Someone who trains himself to be an occult observer of the world has a similar relationship to all living things around him, one that may be called universal. Just as there is a specific relationship between the one man and the one woman, so there is a specific relationship between one person of the kind I am speaking of and the phenomena in the world around him. People who have developed these powers gain knowledge that lets them perceive the connection that exists between a particular thing and the human being. And this then also leads to insight into the actions of medicinal powers.

Paracelsus did not have to try things out first, no more than a magnet which attracts iron needs to try it out. He was able to say that a particular healing power lay in the red foxglove. Such knowledge will only be regained when a physician realizes that it is a matter not only of intellectual understanding but of one’s inner attitude to life; when he knows that he himself must become a completely different person. When he has transformed his temperament, his character, the whole tenor of his soul, then and only then can he develop the power of vision and understanding for the powers in the world that harmonize the human being. This will be possible in a future that it not too far off. The view of the world held in the science of the spirit must above all offer particular principles, some of which will be mentioned now, after this more general view. Anyone who is willing can gain much from this.

Four elements are involved in this. The first is that there is a connection between the process we call digestion and the process we call thinking activity, in other words, what digestion is at a lower level, thinking activity is in a higher sphere. In the human organism, as it lives on the physical plane, the two are intimately connected. Let me give you a piece of real evidence of this. It is part of thinking activity that one must be able to draw logical conclusions, seeing how one concept evolves from another. This is a quite specific part of thinking activity. You can do exercises to make this thinking activity follow a particular course. The process such exercises bring about at soul level, in your thinking activity, is brought about by a particular substance in the digestive process, and that is coffee. This is no wild assumption, it is a fact that can be proved. What you do to your stomach with coffee is the same as you do to your thinking with practical exercises in logic. If you take coffee, you encourage logical consistency in your thinking. And if it is said that taking coffee enhances the activity which is needed to strengthen one’s thinking, this may well be true. But coffee only encourages consistency in one’s thinking in a way that shows dependence; it is acting as if under compulsion. You feel a certain lack of independence in you, something like an influence coming from outside. Someone who wants to be consistent in his thinking but also to remain dependent, may drink a lot of coffee. But if he wants to be independent in his thinking, he must free himself from the very things that act on his lower nature; he must develop powers in himself that come from the soul. He will then also find that his stomach functions properly again, or continues to function properly, after the exercises in question.

Something else. The opposite of well-ordered thinking activity is the kind of thinking that cannot stay with a thought, a thinking that lacks a sound basis. This, too, has its correlate in the action which a particular substance has on the digestion, a substance contained in tea. Tea does indeed act on our lower functions as something which causes all flightiness in one’s thinking in the upper human being. You may conclude from this that some of the harmful effects of tea can be quite disastrous on occasion. But do not think that someone who takes tea all his life will finally have to be quite scatty inwardly. If tea does not have that kind of harmful effect on him this merely proves that his organism has sufficient powers of resistance.

Just as digestive functions correspond to active thinking, so do the functions of the heart and blood relate to the life of the will and of appetites; every influence brought to bear on the blood by certain substances such as certain foods will have its correspondence in an active will. This can be observed especially by considering the reverse. You often hear today that the notion of it being possible to heal someone with thoughts is something that has long since been overcome; that it is not possible, for instance, to cure someone suffering from religious mania or also persecution mania by means of correspondingly opposite thoughts. What one sees on the outside is only a symptom, and if one were able to remove this symptom the disease would shift to another organ and take a different form. Occultists have known this fact established in materialistic medicine for a long time. An occultist would never dream of trying to cure a delusion by an idea that is its opposite. But it is a different story if one intervenes much more deeply, using occult means to influence the original cause. Let us assume someone has become sick in the sphere of the will and appetites; this would be due to disorders affecting particular organs. Not only the heart comes into this, but some other things that are also connected. A materialistic physician will say: ‘I cannot cure the situation which shows itself here by teaching the patient the right ideas.’ But you have to consider that there are not just two things to be considered in the organism, not only the material basis and the life based on it; there is a third element, and the occultist knows this. Yes, an organic function lies behind immediate soul activity on the physical plane, that is, behind the things that come to expression in will impulses. But behind this organic activity lies the third element, which is that the organ has been created by the spirit, it has developed out of something that is spiritual. And it is this spiritual principle behind the organ, having created it, which we must consider. To try and give someone suffering from religious mania the right ideas will serve no purpose. But if your influence on this person is such that you address the creator of the organ function—which is the ether body—you can achieve something, not with ideas but by doing something which on the surface seems to have no connection at all with the life of ideas.

To understand this, let us consider the concept of a religious truth. You can approach the idea of the religious truth in such a way that you grasp it. This is all that is needed for the rational mind. But you can understand as many ideas as you like, this will have no effect at all in your organic life—life in the ether body as well as the physical body. It is also of no avail to try and teach a patient right ideas from conviction, for this will have no effect at all on his will activity. But if you don’t think of this truth as something that works only in terms of the rational mind, but say to the person: ‘You need to grasp this not just once, but you must let these ideas influence you again every day; they have to be repeated rhythmically day after day, and this needs to go hand in hand with quite specific feelings and images.’ To do something once has no effect. But if it happens regularly for quite some time, then it will have an effect that also reaches the organic constitution. This is what we call concentration and meditation. So you don’t influence people with just teaching them something. But if you give instructions and they follow them daily for many weeks you will influence them a little bit, for you will reach the principle that is behind the organ, its creator. Occultism does not have a different basis from the scientific approach to medicine, but there is greater knowledge. It is of course not yet possible to make these ideas publicly known.

Our breathing function is connected with the life of feeling and of the senses in the widest possible sense. You can discover many things if you get a clear picture of everything connected with the breathing function and how this can influence the life of feeling and of the senses. Breathing depends on sufficient oxygen getting into the blood and organic matter being maintained by this. People who take pleasure in things of the mind, who have a life of the spirit that puts them in a cheerful frame of mind and influences them all the time—such people influence their organs out of the spirit in a way that brings health.

Going back again to digestion and thinking activity, we shall find that this is a field where much needs to be done. It has to be understood that humanity must change more and more to a deliberate way of feeding itself. People seeking to gain knowledge in this field do, however, often fall into a particular error. They want to learn too much of what they call ‘nature’; they want to follow ‘nature’ and ‘nature’ only. Paracelsus said: 'We should not be subservient to nature. A physician has to pass nature’s examination, it is true, but he must be an artist, he must take nature further',⁷⁵ And he did not think the right medicines were things taken straight from nature but new products created in the spirit of nature. He believed a time would come in medicine when such new products would be the truly effective medicines. It is solely and entirely a matter of taking nature further in this field.

People wanting to give reasons today why a mixed diet is best in their view tend to say that herbivores are ruminants and have a special stomach and digestive tools for this. Carnivores, they’ll say, are predators with digestive tools and teeth made for meat-eating. In their view, human teeth and digestive tools are half-way between those of ruminants and predators, so that nature herself destined humanity to have a mixed diet. But everything in the world is in a state of flux, changing and growing. What matters is not the way human beings look today but how they may change. If people change to a vegetable diet, the organs more designed for meat eating will gradually disappear and the organs needed for a vegetable diet will develop. You have to consider how things were in the past and how they can be in future. We are therefore not giving human beings the right diet if we consider their present state but only if we take account of their inner development and change. Statistics and external facts will only give you the existing condition, they do not show the direction in which humanity must go. One must look at the world on a larger scale to some extent.

Take the national character of Russian country people, as they are today, and that of English people. Russian country people will put as little emphasis as possible on the I. The opposite is the case with English people. You can even see this from the way they write the word. English people use a capital I. Further investigation will show that sugar consumption is five times as high in England as it is in Russia. Once again we have mutual correspondence between digestive activity and thinking activity. The process brought about in the digestion by taking in relatively large amounts of sugar has its correlate in greater independence of thinking in the upper human being.

Now as you can imagine, it is also possible to take corrective measures in this sphere. Some people may make their diet such that they need only a short time to digest it, while others may well spend a long time on the process. This again allows us to see deeply into the human organism. For if someone eats rice and has soon finished digesting it, energies are left over that will then be available for thinking activity. Someone else who may be eating wild duck, for example, and needs a correspondingly longer time to digest it may well be intelligent; but when he produces thoughts it is in reality his stomach which is thinking. One person may not be a great thinker but may think independently, another a great thinker but dependent in his thinking. You can also learn something from this.

To mention something else. Great care must be taken to give the body neither too much nor too little protein. It is most important to find the right measure, for proteins in our digestion correspond to the generation of ideas in our thinking. The same activity which makes our thinking fruitful is evoked by proteins in the lower organism. If the body does not receive a balanced amount of protein, the proteins will cause an excess of energies in the lower bodily functions that correspond to the functions which in the upper organization create ideas. Human beings should, however, be more and more in control of their ideas. Protein intake should therefore be kept within limits; otherwise people are overcome by idea-creating activities from which they should really be free. Pythagoras was thinking of this when he told his students not to eat beans.

Now people will of course come and say: ‘Look at the rice eater. He’s a poor thinker.’ Well that person eating his rice has not yet developed. The point is not one of knowing the rules, thinking that everyone merely has to follow them. If the lower and the upper do not agree, this, too, may create havoc. Think of someone who has recently taken up vegetarianism. Activity in the lower man then is of a quite specific kind. Certain energies change from material powers into those of mind and spirit, but they can grow harmful if left unused and may even limit brain activity. If you then do not occupy yourself in any other way than a banker, for example, or with ordinary book learning, you can cause yourself a lot of damage unless you take up spiritual ideas with the powers saved by a vegetarian lifestyle. A vegetarian must therefore also take up life in mind and spirit, otherwise he’d do better to remain a meat eater, for his memory might suffer, certain parts of the brain may be damaged, and so on. It is not enough to feed on fruits to have the most sublime realms of life in the spirit open up to you.

Another correspondence in the organism is the following. The function in the upper organism which corresponds to reproductive capacities is the visionary element, as it is called, and thus in a way also inner imaginative activity. This is why some religious orders used to demand a degree of asceticism, which, however, was also a source of great dangers. These can only be avoided by purity in the inner life, trust in one’s own individual nature, and the ability to maintain composure in all life situations. If one does not give oneself up to affects and external influences, one is secure in this area and will be able to avert harmful influences.

White magic demands not only a pure life, but also one that is strong and certain, with the inner life firmly in control and the ability to maintain composure in all situations. If on the one hand you have so much self-control that nothing can take you aback, then you will also be secure inwardly, and be able to cope more easily with falls from grace.

A new era can come if people resolve to make theosophical wisdom their guide in all these things. In future it will be necessary, for instance, to see how one can transform certain powers that become available in the organism into powers that can be used to gain spiritual insight. One day a substance will be produced in laboratories that will be of greater value than milk. Even now it would be perfectly possible to establish a food laboratory and thus gain influence on the feeding of the nations. But a time will come when those who study the science of the spirit will be doing chemical work that is in harmony with evolving nature and not with nature as it has come to be. Goethe thus said:

Gaze on them as they grow, see how the plant
Burgeons by stages into flower and fruition.⁷⁶

Please accept these few aspects taken from a vast field and consider that they need to be developed. You will then see that you can gain nourishment for mind and spirit from these things and discover the practical significance they may have for you.

• 72. Paracelsus (see note 62). 'From the external put together the whole human being: thus you find in the same the evident corpora of all materia, and find in these all species of the parts, of health and sickness, and also all their essences ... It arises from this that you should not say: that is cholera, that is melancholia, but: that is an arsenicus, that is an aluminosum. And also: he is of Saturn, he of Mars: not: he is of melancholy, he is of cholera. For one part belongs to heaven, one part to earth, and are mingled as fire and wood are, where each may lose its name, then they are two things in one.' From Das Buch Paragranum, edited and introduced by Dr Franz Strunz, Leipzig 1903, S 29 f. On Paracelsus, see the lecture given in Berlin on 26 April 1906 (in GA 54): Paracelsus, Anthroposophical News Sheet 1941; 9:37-40.
• 73. See preceding lecture in this volume (21 October 1906).
• 74. 'The appropriateness of a medicine... depends not only on being the right homoeopathic choice, but also on the dose being of the right degree of magnitude, or rather smallness... Here the question arises as to what this appropriate degree of smallness may be ... Pure experiment, careful observation and experience alone will determine it.' Hahnemann, Samuel, Organon der rationalen Heilkunde, Dresden 1810, paragraphs 300 ff.
• 75. 'How can the medicine be reconciled with such things, that the physician might reasonably call himself a physician? He is therefore subordinate to nature, and God is the lord of nature.'
  'Now the physician comes from the medicine, and not from himself, and he must therefore pass nature's examination, nature being the world and all it encompasses. And what nature teaches him he must entrust to his wisdom; yet he should not seek anything in his wisdom, but solely in the light of nature, and then keep safe what he has learned in the cell of that same vessel.'
  Theophrastus Paracelsus, Volumen Paramirum und Opus Paramirum, published by Dr Franz Strunz, Jena 1904, S. 74, 85.
  'Then nature is so subtle and accurate in its things, that it cannot be used without great skill. For it will not reveal anything that is in a perfect state; man has to perfect it. This perfection is called Alchimia.'
  'Thus the physician must furthermore be skilful. One who wishes to be skilful must have experience in everything, for the foundation of your skills goes beyond the realm of the arts; it is not the foundation of teaching but of your understanding in the skills needed for medicines.'
  Das Buch Paragranum (see note 72), S. 70, 105.
• 76. Metamorphosis of Plants, 17/18 June 1798.

Initiation makes it possible for a person to gain insight into higher worlds. It is a process of development in the inmost soul. Different people take different paths, but the truth is the same for all of them. Having reached the summit of a mountain you have an open view in all directions. But it would be quite nonsensical not to take the path to the top that is nearest to the point where we actually are. And it is the same with initiation. Once we have reached our goal and truly gained an open view, the insight gained will be the same for all.

It is not good, however, for someone to take a route other than the one that suits his nature. There should really be a separate path for every individual. All of them do, however, fall into one of three types—the yoga path, gnostic and Rosicrucian Christian initiation. One of these three different routes may be taken. They differ because there are three kinds of human beings. Only few Europeans can take the Oriental yoga route. It therefore is not right, as a rule, for a European to take that route. People live in an entirely different climate in the Orient, where the light of the sun is completely different. The anatomical differences between Orientals and Europeans are not easily demonstrable, but the difference in soul and spirit is profound, and this must be taken into account, for inner development intervenes deeply in the soul and spirit nature of a person. Anatomists cannot perceive the finer structure of the Hindu brain. But if you were to ask of a European the things that can be asked of an Indian, you would destroy him. An Indian may be asked to do certain things which serve no purpose at all for a European and may even be bad for him. Above all the yoga path makes one basic demand on pupils that has to be met if the path is to be taken at all. It demands the strict authority of a teacher, who is called a guru. To take that path one must accept the guru's directions in every detail of life. Quite apart from that, the Indian yoga route can hardly be taken unless one tears oneself away from the external conditions of life. It is necessary, you see, to make all kinds of external arrangements that will support the exercises one is given. If you experience things that make a deep impression on your feeling life, this will have a profound influence on you as you are going through occult inner development. The Oriental yoga pupil must therefore ask his guru about every detail of his life. To make any change whatsoever in his life, he must first ask the guru for direction. The yoga path therefore requires absolute subjection to a guru. You have to learn to see things through the guru's eyes, and to feel the way he does. It is impossible to follow this path unless there is profound trust, perfect love, combined with utter trust and an unconditional surrender that has precedence over everything else.

For the gnostic Christian path there is only one great teacher, the central guru. What is needed is belief in Christ Jesus himself not only his teachings. A gnostic Christian pupil must be able to believe that the one and only sublime divine individual spirit was incarnated in Christ Jesus, an individual spirit that cannot be compared with any other, not even the highest. All other individuals started at a lower level on earth and then ascended, examples being Buddha, Hermes, Zoroaster and Pythagoras, and their spiritual stature is the result of many earlier incarnations. This is not the case with Christ Jesus. He cannot be compared with any other individual, with anything else on earth. It would be impossible to follow the gnostic Christian path unless one believes this.

A third path is the Rosicrucian Christian one. There the teacher is the counsellor who essentially limits his counsel to the actual measures taken for spiritual development. This spiritual development must be organized in such a way that it has a deep-reaching influence on the life of the individual. A teacher must always be present for initiation. There is no serious initiation without a teacher. Anyone who wants to say there is, would be saying something as silly as someone who thought it was possible for a child to be bom without the two sexes playing a role. Initiation is a spiritual fertilization process which would in fact be harmful if it were not brought about in such a dual relationship between teacher and pupil.

The Indian yoga path is in seven stages. The sequence is not always the same, however. Different stages may be combined, in a way. It is not necessary to go through stages 1 to 7 in that order. It may happen that one is asked to take something from somewhere in the sequence earlier on, and an exercise may be given that relates to another stage. It depends on the individual concerned. A pupil may do this in a few years, or even a few months. Asked how long initiation takes, Subba Row¹⁴⁸ said it may be 70 incarnations or 7, some need 7 years, others may need 7 months, or 7 days, or indeed 7 hours. It depends entirely on the spiritual maturity of the person. Spiritual maturity shows itself sooner in some and needs longer in others. This is a matter of karma. We may well ask why someone may not be outstanding in this respect though he may have reached a very high level of spirituality in an earlier existence. There may be obstacles in his physical or soul nature. The teacher's task is above all to remove such obstacles. The physiognomy of a person in ordinary life has nothing to do with it. An earlier incarnation may lie hidden deep down in the soul and be unable to emerge because of some kind of obstacle or other.

Yama is the first stage of Indian yoga training. It signifies ‘restraint’; or ‘forbearance’. To an Indian this means not to lie, not to kill, not to steal, no dissoluteness, no desires. To enter more deeply into what this means to an Indian, we must consider it in its whole context. Thus we may be vegetarians, but we still have not got out of the habit of killing things. Our life is in fact impossible without this. We actually kill as we breathe, for we exhale carbon dioxide. If the earth's green plant cover did not continually take up the carbon dioxide and give off oxygen, humans and animals would be unable to live. It is part of the yoga exercises to get out of the killing habit. Indians take this very seriously. Many of the connections we have in our life would also come under the heading of stealing for them. Each of us must accept money in some way. Many conditions are involved in our getting this money. When we buy a coat we have no way of knowing if human blood has not been shed for it. People do not give much thought to the fact that they are in a social context and partly responsible for what they do. If we take these things seriously, we must feel responsible for the things that happen because of us.

You help other people most by having few wants. Someone who reduces his wants helps others more than a philanthropist does. Thus if we do not write unnecessary letters this may save some people the effort of having to climb stairs. It is quite wrong to think that you help people by making more demands, thus providing more work. You do not in the least add to the things people need by making work for them. In Europe the situation is so complex nowadays that it is getting more and more difficult to meet the requirements of the Eastern yoga path. This can of course be followed in the proper, strict way in a country where there are no banks and where the cultural situation is clearly apparent.

The 2nd stage is niyana, observance of ritual. The Indian yoga way certainly demands ritual, so that the teachings may be linked with religious rites. It is strictly required that everyone taking the yoga way observes a ritual. Things should be enacted before their eyes. Just as in the case of art it matters that it comes to real expression in objects, so in the case of initiation it is important to have things presented in rituals.

The 3rd stage is asana, body positions assumed to be in accord with specific currents in the cosmos. When people still had a feeling for such things, they would always put the main altar at the eastern end of their religious buildings. Indians are so subtly organized that it matters in which direction they face. The current that goes from north to south is indeed different from the one that goes from east to west. Body positions are important for yoga initiation because the Oriental body is much softer, and taking a particular position leaves much more of an imprint. A European wanting to take the Oriental yoga way would have to do all these things as well.

The 4th is pranayama, bringing rhythm into the breathing process. We can best understand this if we consider that under present-day conditions, the human breath kills things. The teacher instructs the pupil to regulate his breathing according to certain rules he gives him, at least for a time. If we were to examine the breath we would find that the air exhaled by a yoga pupil has quite a different composition, quite a different carbon dioxide content, than the breath of ordinary people. It is therefore true that by regulating the breath the pupil influences the future evolution of the earth. Constant dropping wears the stone. You don't see results from one day to the next. But it all adds up and will have definite significance over long periods of time.

At a particular time, Rosicrucian teachers also get their pupils to bring rhythm into their breathing. What does the breathing process bring about? The physical human being cannot be thought of without the plants. We inhale oxygen which combines with carbon in the lung, and we exhale carbon dioxide. The plant does exactly the opposite. There is a continuous cycle between human beings on the one hand and plants on the other. In far distant times human beings will develop an organ of their own which will take care of the function plants perform today. They will be able to process the carbon dioxide in themselves. Human beings will have an organ able to separate the carbon from the oxygen and make it part of themselves. The principles we take in with our food today to build up our bodies will then be something we consciously do within ourselves. We'll thus change carbon dioxide into oxygen again. This process is indeed helped by making the breathing process rhythmical. This was taught extensively in 14th century Rosicrucian schools. Some of these secrets were betrayed, so that they appeared in the popular literature. In an 18th century work reference is made to the philosopher's stone.¹⁴⁹ The statement is literally true. The author himself probably did not know what this was really about. The whole human being must change if he is to achieve what the plant does for him now. His physical body will then be carbon, but not black coal, nor hard diamond, which after all is only a symbol for the philosopher's stone. The philosopher's stone is meant to be a body which is transparent, with the other organs integrated within it. It will consist of a mass of gel-like carbon, rather like the white of an egg. Man is following a course where he will one day develop into this marvellous glory. The rhythmic breathing which leads to this is called ‘alchemy’. The philosopher's stone is the lapis philosophorum. The man who wrote this did not actually know what it was he was writing.

The 5th stage on the yoga path is pratyahara. It consists in being able to suppress external sensory impressions. We have to know the things that are truly our soul world and leave aside everything that has come to us from outside. Most of the things people think have come to them from outside. When someone is able to give himself up consciously to his inner thoughts and make himself blind and deaf to the world around him, though he is inwardly awake; if he is able to have a thought without reflecting on external things, his sleep will be filled with dreams and he'll be practising pratyahara.

At the 6th stage one needs not only to blot out completely anything the eyes see and the ears hear but also suppress inner ideas rising from the soul itself. Having removed everything from the soul that has come to it from life, one then holds one idea, which the guru has given, in one's inner soul. These may be ideas like those given in the first four rules in Light on the Path. The best soul contents are those a special teacher is able to give us.

Such a soul content is allowed to act for some time before one lets go of it, without losing conscious awareness. One then has the function of the life in mind and spirit, without the thinking content. When this 7th stage has been reached the world of the spirit enters into us. This condition is called samadhi.

The path of Christian gnosis is also in seven stages. This method is designed for a somewhat less subtle body and above all for the world of sentience and feeling. The Christian teacher has to guide the pupil's world of sentience and feeling. The seven stages of Christian initiation are 1) the washing of the feet, 2) the scourging, 3) the crown of thorns, 4) the crucifixion, 5) the mystic death on the cross, 6) the entombment, 7) the ascension to heaven.

It is best to consider these 7 stages by describing the way the teacher works with the pupil. The teacher will say, for instance: ‘Look at the plant. It roots and grows in the world of minerals. Addressing itself to the mineral world it would have to say: “It is to you that I owe my existence, and I am only able to live because of you. Thank you!”’ In the same way the animal should say to the plant world: ‘I owe my existence to you and am only able to live thanks to you.’ Looking at the natural world around him and at the human beings who are at a lower level, a similar feeling should live in his soul. It is never possible to develop and reach a higher level unless there are also lower levels. Because of this, people who are socially at a higher level must also go down to those who are below them and give thanks to them. Christ Jesus suggested this when at the washing of the feet he bent down to his disciples and washed their feet. Someone who is at the first stage of Christian initiation must fill his heart and mind with such a feeling of gratitude to all that is below him. Two symptoms will indicate what he has achieved. He will have an astral vision where he sees himself in the washing of the feet situation. This happens to everyone who goes through this in the right way. Secondly he will have a feeling as if water were washing around his feet.

At the 2nd stage the pupil must learn to bear all the pain and suffering that life brings and which is always present all around him. He must stand up straight, even when he has to suffer the greatest pain. The symptoms will be an astral vision where he sees himself being scourged and he will feel something like needle pricks in different places on his body.

At the 3rd stage the pupil gains the ability to bear it when scorn and derision are poured on things that are most sacred to us. The teacher says to the pupil: ‘If you are able to bear mockery and derision of what is most sacred to you and stand up for it nevertheless, you will be able to wear the crown of thorns.’ The pupil will experience a particular kind of headache when he has reached this level.

At the 4th stage he must learn to consider the body as something wholly external to himself carrying it around the way we carry around an instrument, a hammer or some other tool. In some schools the pupils learn to speak of their body like this: ‘My body goes through the door’—and the like. In his astral vision the pupil then sees himself nailed to the cross. He has Christ's stigmata on his hands and feet and on the right side of the body. Red stigmata appear at the moment of meditation and concentration.

The 5th stage is the mystic death. Here the individual feels as if a veil was placed between him and the rest of the world, like a black curtain. He then comes to know inwardly all the badness there can be in the world. Descent into hell—that is the mystic death. A vision will then show the curtain being torn apart.

At the 6th stage one has a feeling as if everything else were one's own body. You are united with the earth. That is the entombment.

The 7th stage, resurrection, cannot be put into words. Someone who goes through those feelings in his soul gains insight into the world of the spirit.

The third kind of initiation is the Rosicrucian way. It has been known in Europe from the 14th century. It is above all concerned to strengthen and empower the inner will. Where the Oriental school puts the emphasis on thinking, and the Christian school on feeling, the Rosicrucian way aims to develop the will. The stages of this way are 1) study, 2) Imagination, 3) learning the occult script, 4) bringing rhythm into life, 5) coming to understand the correspondence between microcosm and macrocosm, 6) contemplation of or entering into the macrocosm, 7) godliness.

For study, the pupil must have the patience to gain certain ideas concerning the world. He must first of all accept the teaching he is given. Thus he must, for example, devotedly study the teachings of elementary theosophy. He must try and enter as deeply into these as he can. Patient acquisition of ideas is essential for anyone who wants to reach higher levels. This calls for a specific way of training one's thinking, getting used to living and being active in the pure thinking element. Books such as The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity and Truth and Knowledge¹⁵⁰ have been written for those who want to achieve Rosicrucian initiation and train their minds. It is a matter of overcoming the difficulties, which many find insurmountable, of following one's thoughts and perceiving how one thought of necessity arises from another. Oriental training required strict submission to the guru. For gnostic Christian training the pupil must put the Christ at the centre of all endeavour. In Rosicrucian Christian training the teacher is by his side, his friend and counsellor.

We are more apt to take a tumble when we come to the higher regions. It is therefore important to gain inner certainty. In everyday situations life itself puts us right. It will sometimes correct our errors in terrible ways. Such correction is not given when we ascend to the higher worlds. This is why in Oriental training one must see with one's guru's eyes and feel through him. The European teacher is a counsellor. One needs the guidance of another when ascending into the higher worlds. In the astral world, perceptions are entirely different from those we have in the physical world; and in the devachanic world, too, a new world of perceptions opens up for us. The three worlds differ completely in the impressions to be gained. But one thing is the same for all of them, and that is logical thinking. This can be a reliable guide on the astral and devachanic planes. When study has taught us to think logically, we can also manage on the astral and devachanic planes. The logic of the physical plan no longer applies on the buddhi plan, however.

The 2nd stage of Rosicrucian training is Imagination. European pupils should take their time over this, for it is easy to take a tumble. Man must learn to develop a moral relationship to things. All that is transient should be seen as a simile for something that is eternal. If we look at the natural world in this way, the autumn crocus, for instance, becomes the image for us of a solitary spirit seeking to rise upwards in a melancholy way. The violet will be a symbol of something that has its existence in undemanding, calm beauty. Every stone makes us think—it is a simile for something that lies behind it. Our world thus grows richer. Things tells us of their inmost nature. One flower will then be the tear through which the earth gives expression to its pain, another the expression of joy. Looking at a grain of rice, for example, we may observe a small flame arising from it. The small flame becomes an image of what will later be the haulm growing from the grain.

At the 3rd stage a whole world of the spirit arises from all that is. The spiritual reality, the spiritual content of all things floats above them. The whole astral world becomes visible. You then find yourself as if in the waves of the ocean, feeling as if you were floating in the sea. You see the colour of a tulip lifted out of it, as it were, and realize that this is the garment of a spiritual entity. At this third stage the pupil learns the occult script. We must learn this if we truly want to live in the astral world. Thus many things are based on a spiral in this world (Fig. 4).

We see such a spiral in the Orion nebula and in the configuration of life forms. Human and animal embryos are spiral in form at an early stage. One part is an image of the physical aspect, the other part, which winds into it, of the astral. The beginning of a new stage in human history is also symbolized by a double spiral. It is the sign of Cancer in the zodiac. When ancient Atlantis had perished and the post-Atlantean period began, with the ancient Indian race, the sun rose in the sign of Cancer at the beginning of spring. Learning the occult script we gain our orientation in the astral world.

The 4th stage consists in learning the rhythm of life. The pupil is instructed to regulate his breathing in a particular way. In nature, everything goes in rhythms. Every plant will rhythmically flower at the same time. Rhythm may also be seen in the animal world. Thus an animal is only fertile at certain times of the year. In man, however, rhythm becomes chaos. Man must create a new rhythm for his life. Many people only have rhythms that are imposed on them. Generally speaking, people do not have rhythms chosen of their own free will. The Rosicrucian must see to it that his life becomes rhythmical. Rhythm is given to the breathing process according to special instructions given by the teacher.

The 5th stage is getting to know the correspondence between microcosm and macrocosm. A bond exists between human beings and all things around them in this world. Ordinarily this only shows itself as love between the two sexes, the feeling that the one person finds in the other exactly what is familiar and related to him, what belongs to him. Many things are due to this mysterious relationship between world and man. An example is Paracelsus' discovery of the relationships that exist between certain plants and man. Having this ability he also came to know how other substances relate to man.¹⁵¹ He called someone suffering from cholera an Arsenicus, because arsenic will evoke exactly the symptoms in a healthy person which one also sees in a case of cholera.¹⁵² One can have a personal relationship, a loving relationship with all things, one that is wholly of the spirit. This must be practised. You achieve it by following specific directions. If you think of the point that lies between the eyebrows and above the root of the nose in relation to a particular word, insight into a quite specific process in the world will come to you after some time. Thinking of the inner eye you gain knowledge of the sun's nature, of the processes that occurred when sun and earth were still one heavenly body. Another exercise makes it possible to know the moon in its spiritual aspect, or the condition of the earth 18 million years ago.

You then enter deeply into the correspondence between microcosm and macrocosm. Concentration on the point between the eyebrows and above the root of the nose you are able to penetrate into the time when the I entered into the human being. The human being then grows into the macrocosm in his conscious mind. He has to practise this for some time, growing into all things, be they far or near.

The 7th stage is that of godliness, when one grows beyond the limited bodily shell and is able to live with the macrocosm.

Pupils are instructed according to their occult status. When a pupil has gone through these stages as a real experience, he has reached the summit of insight into higher worlds.

• 148. Subba Row (Rao) (1856–1890), Indian scholar. Esoteric Writings, 2nd edition, Adyar 1931.
• 149. Karl Arnold Kortüm (1745–1828) published a treatise on the philosopher's stone in a paper called the Reichsanzeiger on 8 October 1976. Those able to read German may also see Kleeberg L. Wege und Worte 2. Aufl., Fussnote auf Seite 131. Stuttgart 1961.
• 150. Steiner R. The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. A Philosophy of Freedom (GA 4). Tr. R. Stebbing. London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1989. Steiner R. Truth and Knowledge (GA 3). Tr. R. Stebbing. West Nyack NY: Rudolf Steiner Publications 1963.
• 151. Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, called Paracelsus (1493–1541), son of a Swiss physician. Studied alchemy and chemistry at Basel, the properties of metals and minerals in mines. Later town physician at Basel, moving to Salzburg in 1541. Revolutionized old medical methods, basing himself on empiricism.
• 152. ‘It arises from this that you shall not say “that is cholera”, “that is melancholia”, but “that is Arsenicus, that is Aluminosum”; and thus also "he is of Saturn, he is of Mars”, not “he is of melancholia, he is of cholera”. Then one part is of the heavens, one part of the earth, mingled together like fire and wood, so that each may lose its name; then they are two things in one.’ From Paragranum, collected medical works in German, edited by K. Sudhoff vol. 8 p. 74. Munich 1922–23.

We really ought to acquaint ourselves, somewhat, with the fundamental problem and fundamental currents of Christianity, if we wish to throw light upon the two ideals of the Christian world-conception in all their profundity. You already know, through previous lectures, that the teachings of Christianity, as generally proclaimed, are based upon a so-called esoteric Christianity. You know, moreover, that even in the Gospels we find intimations concerning this esoteric Christianity, clearly expressed in the words: When the Lord stood before the people He spoke in parables, but when he was alone with His disciples He explained these parables unto them. Thus, it is clear that He gave one form of his Teaching to those who had less understanding—to whom it was necessary to speak in parables, for it was not yet possible to go into things any deeper with them; and He proclaimed another Teaching which was destined for the initiated.

In the same way, also, Paul—the great expander of Christianity—taught, before the people, an external form of that Teaching, which we know through his Epistles. On the other hand, in addition to this Teaching of Paul—which was an external Teaching, meant for the people—he expounded an esoteric Teaching, as well. External history knows nothing about the fact that Paul founded the esoteric School at Athens, which was under the leadership of Dionysius. In this School of esoteric Christianity, the same Mystery-Teaching, or Occultism, was taught, which you also—at the present time—are learning to know anew, through Spiritual Science. Scientific learning does not know very much concerning those Teachings which were proclaimed at that time, at Athens, by the esoteric companions of St. Paul, to their more intimate disciples. One even speaks about a false Dionysius, because—it is said—it is not possible to prove that any of these Teachings were ever recorded in writing.

Pseudo-Dionysius is the name given to the man who taught this form of esotericism during the 6th century. Yet only those persons can call him by that name who do not know what was customary, in earlier times, in connection with Initiate-teachings of this sort. Only in our days has it become customary for people to record everything, as quickly as possible, in writing. Whatever was contained in the holiest Truth was preserved from publicity, in those days. One to whom such a Truth was to be entrusted was first scrutinised carefully. Only within the esoteric Schools was this Truth passed on from mouth to mouth—and only to such persons as could really value it aright. Thus it was that these particular teachings of esoteric Christianity were likewise handed down from man to man—till, finally, some of them were written down during the sixth century. Since it was customary for the leaders of such a School to always bear the name of Dionysius, the leader of this School at Athens, during the sixth century, therefore also bore this name—the same name which had been borne by his great predecessor at Athens, the friend of Paul.

Let us now consider in the spirit of this esoteric School, and actually in the way in which it was taught there, the concept of Sin, or, we might say, of slander against the Holy Ghost—and the Christian concept of Grace.

If we wish to grasp the fundamental meaning of Christianity, we must return, in thought, to a very remote past in the history of human evolution; and we must realise that, through the appearance of Christ-Jesus, something entirely new has actually been impressed upon the history of the spiritual evolution of humanity. What it is that has thus been impressed finds its fervent expression in the initiation of Paul himself.

The fact that a man like Saul, through so sudden an illumination, could attain to complete conviction of the Truth of Christianity, would not have been possible before the appearance of Christ-Jesus. We have already often spoken about the form of initiation which preceded the appearance of Christ-Jesus upon earth. Let us now do this, once again, in order to understand what the Spirit of Truth really signifies, in the Christian sense. If we wish to grasp what is was that took place, in the ancient sites of initiation, we must briefly recall to our minds the nature and being of man.

We know that man consists of a seven-fold being. His physical body is built up out of the same substances as those contained in the lifeless materials of the physical world. His etheric body calls these forces into life, and works—at every moment of life—against the decay of the physical body; only at death does the etheric or life-body go out of the physical body. The crystal is able to hold its substances together, through its own forces; the living body, on the other hand, decays as soon as it is abandoned and left to itself. It is indeed a fact that, at every moment, there is a fighter battling within this body against death; if this fighter ceases to battle, death ensues.

Man's third member is the astral body, or the consciousness-body. His fourth member is the Ego; by means of this member he is the crown of creation.

All Mystery-Teachings have thought of man as being built up of these four members. In the Pythagorean School, each disciple had to be introduced, first of all, to this Teaching of the fourfold man. Only when this Teaching had become his innermost conviction, could he be advanced to higher knowledge. Hence he had to take this vow: "I vow allegiance, by virtue of what is deeply engraved in our hearts: to the holy fourfold Being, to the sublime spiritual symbol—the primal fount of all natural and spiritual Creation."

Even the most undeveloped human being has these four members. Man evolves, throughout the course of his various incarnations, to an ever greater degree o perfection, through the fact that the Ego works upon these three members of his being.

It begins, first of all, within the astral body, to work upon everything that constitutes the progress of civilisation and logical scientific learning—upon everything, that is to say, which serves to bring about a freedom from the animal stage. This is the work of the Ego upon the astral body. In the case of every moderately-developed human being, whose Ego has already worked upon the astral body, we find that the astral body divides into two parts: into the originally existing part, and that part produced by the Ego. This latter part which expands more and more—the more the human being progresses—is designated by the name of Manas or Spirit-Self.

Christian esotericism designates this part as the Holy Ghost—the Holy Spirit, in contrast to the unpurified, unholy part of the astral body.

Thus, we have learned to know the fifth member. But the Ego can also work upon the more dense, etheric body. In a certain sense, this already takes place in the ordinary human being—that is to say, unconsciously. It has often been stated that we should learn to distinguish between the work upon the astral and the etheric bodies. The ratio of speed, in the progress of the first of these, in relation to the latter, may be compared with the movement of the minute-hand of the clock, in relation to the hour-hand. If a human being surrenders himself to the impression made upon him by some lofty work of art, this has a transforming effect upon his life-body and his consciousness-body. Every great artistic impulse has this effect. Strongest of all is the effect of those religious impulses which were brought into the world by the founders of religions, and which direct the Ego toward the Eternal. The clairvoyant eye can see how the etheric body becomes more and more beautiful and pure.

That part of the human etheric body which is spiritualised by the Ego, is called Budhi or Life-Spirit; it is the transformed life-body. Christian esotericism designates this part, which is transformed by the Ego, the Christos. The fifth member of the human being is the Holy Ghost—the sixth member is the Christ, the inner Christos.

Our attention has already been called to the fact that so-called Mystery-schoolings, or preparations, have always existed for man—enabling him to become an Initiate, and to look into the spiritual world. Such a training is based upon the transformation, on a higher plane, of the etheric or life-body. For this reason, we must be quite clear in our realisation that every higher form of schooling is more than a mere acquisition of concepts and material for study. The occult training consists, rather, in the transformation of the qualities of our etheric body. Anyone who has transformed a temperament has thereby achieved far more than if he had acquired an infinite amount of scientific learning.

Now, there is a still higher form of metamorphosis, which takes place only through secret or occult schooling. Through this, the human being purifies his physical body. How much, indeed, does man know concerning his physical body! Through the fact that he examines it by dissection in an "anatomical museum" he does not by any means acquire any real knowledge concerning the laws which rule it, nor any inner control of these laws. Yet there is a possibility for him to look into himself, so that the movements of the nerve-currents, of the pulse-beat, and of the breath-streams, will become clear to him, and he can then be consciously active within these. When the human being, accordingly—through so-called occult training—is able to transform his physical body also, this now transformed body is designated as Atman, because the work upon it begins with the regulation of the breathing processes. (In German "Atmen" means: to breathe.) The seventh member of the human being is Atman—in Christian esotericism: the Father.

Thus we first attain to the Holy Ghost, to the transformed astral body; through the Holy Ghost we come to the Christ—to the consciousness of the etheric body; and through the Christ, to the Father, or the consciousness of the physical body.

If you have understood how these seven members of human nature are inter-related, you will also understand how Initiation took place in ancient times, before Christ, and how this Initia-tion took place, after Christ-Jesus had appeared on the earth.

When the human being is asleep, only his physical and etheric bodies lie in bed—his astral body is outside. When he dies, he leaves his physical body behind: only that part of the physical body which he has already transformed goes with him: forces, that is to say, not substances. What the human being thus takes with him, is very little indeed. Nevertheless, it is just this part which, in a new incarnation, serves to build up a new physical body. Materialism designates this part as the "permanent atom". And this part of the physical body, which the human being himself has transformed, is the first to leave the physical body; then the etheric body leaves it; then the consciousness-body, and then the Ego. After a short time, that part of the etheric body which the human being has not yet worked upon separates itself.

Thus it is that the human being enters Kamaloca, the Place of Purification. After another period of time, that part of the astral body which the Ego has not yet worked upon, severs itself likewise… And then there comes the time when the human being has left to him, from his three bodies, only those parts which the Ego has worked upon and transformed, through its own forces; and this is what passes through Devachan—this is the eternal kernel of man's being. It increases more and more, the more the Ego has worked upon it.

The Holy Ghost is the eternal Spirit in man. The Christ is the eternal part of the life-body; the Father, the eternal part of the physical body. These Three accompany the human being throughout all time, as that part of him which is eternal.

Before the Christian era, Initiation took place in such a way that the disciple was first prepared for everything which Mystery Teaching was able to give, until he reached the point where he was familiar with all the concepts and ideas, all the habits and feelings which are needed for living and perceiving in the higher worlds. This was followed by what was designated as the Awakening, which lasted for three and a half days and three nights. This consisted of a process whereby, through the skill of the Temple-Priest, the human being was artificially placed in a condition resembling death, for three and a half days. Whereas, normally the physical and etheric bodies remain connected during sleep, the initiating priest now drew out, during this space of time, the etheric body of the disciple about to be initiated, so that only a very loose connection existed between the etheric and physical body, on the one hand, and the remaining two bodies, on the other hand. It was a deep, trance-like sleep. The Ego of the man lived in the higher worlds, during this period of time. As the disciple had been given a knowledge of the higher worlds, he now felt at home there. The Priest was his guide. First of all, the Priest had to free the etheric body from the lethargic physical body, in order to lead it out of the physical body; in a fully-conscious state, the human being would never have been able to rise to these higher worlds ; it was necessary for him to be lifted out of such a state. Although the experiences which a human being passed through in such a process, were sublime and overpowering, he was nevertheless entirely in the hands of the Priest; he was under the power of another, and only under these conditions was he able to enter the higher worlds.

What the human being was like, after having passed through this experience, may be imagined if we bear in mind that it gave him the opportunity of experiencing his own eternal being: he was then emancipated from the part which was not eternal—his physical body—which he could not use, if he wished to move about in the higher worlds. Such a human being returned as one endowed with knowledge—as one who could bear witness, through his own vision, to the victory of life over death. Those who could bear witness, in this way, were Initiates. Their etheric body had to be lifted out of the physical body, in order that they might experience the Christos in man. These Initiates were able to say to themselves: "I have learned through my own experience that there is a part in man, which is eternal, which outlasts all incarnations. I know it, for I myself have experienced this eternal kernel of man's being". In order to attain to this, they were obliged to dwell for three days in a state of profound, dream-like sleep.

But there was something else that was connected with this—this kind of Initiation was dependent upon still another factor. And, the further we go back in time, the more we realise the truth of this. I have already characterised this to you, when I once explained that, in ancient times, there existed what we might call "close marriage", in contrast to distant marriage. In all nations, we find small communities which were inter-related; people married within these communities, and it was considered immoral to abandon them by marrying outside. The same blood always streamed through these marriages. Only very gradually was this close marriage substituted by the principle of distant marriage. Indeed, in the case of initiation, very special measures had to be observed, it was necessary to choose most carefully, from preceding incarnations, in order to produce the best possible mixture o blood. Such a genealogy then produced the one who was capable of passing through the higher grades of Initiation. In the case of persons related by blood, it is especially easy to draw the etheric body out of the physical body. In the case of distant marriages, this is by no means so easy. Throughout long generations of priests, it was their duty to see that the blood was maintained in a specially determined way. Human life is complicated; it does not always follow a straight road; and it is necessary to penetrate more and more deeply into the riddles of existence.

In ever increasing measure, this principle of close marriage was broken; the tribe extended more and more to the folk or nation. In the case of the Israelites, we see how the tribal principle rose completely to the idea of the national community. Christ extends this perspective into the far distant future: "He that forsaketh not his father, mother, brother or sister for my sake, cannot be my disciple."—In a stern, yet in a most deeply true way, do these words indicate the direction followed by Christianity. Within the national community, one would say: This is my brother, for he was born in the same nation. in the human brotherhood, which must encompass the whole human race, one should say: Because you are a human being, you are my brother. This is the most profound of all Christian principles. All narrow-mindedness contained in the other form of relationship must be torn asunder, and a common tie must unite human beings. At the same time, this implies also that the old principle of Initiation has been torn asunder; for it was based upon relationship of the blood.

The new principle of Initiation—which is not connected, since the coming of Christ, with any physical quality—is clearly indicated to us, in the case of Paul: He is initiated in the Light, not in the darkness of the Temple. This could not have taken place, earlier. When we bear this in mind, we shall be able to realise the tremendous turning-point brought about by Christ Jesus. The way to this was prepared by Moses, Zarathustra Buddha, Pythagoras;—but it was brought to fulfilment by Christ-Jesus.

Thus we see also that in the Christian Schools of Initiation this new principle is carried through, for the first time—the principle of not drawing the human being out of the physical body, in order to lead him into the higher worlds, but of leading him into the higher worlds while completely conscious in his physical body. This is what took place, accordingly, in the Christian esoteric Schools. In contrast to this, there is the old way—and this still includes a great part of humanity, even at the present time—in which there is the initiating Temple-priest, to whose stern authority the neophyte surrenders himself. Only by subjecting oneself entirely to the power of such an Initiating priest, was it possible to ascend to higher worlds.

The principle of enforced authority came to expression also in social life. The Priests were rulers. Every law of government, the whole structure of the state, was in the power of the Initiates. From the blood-community of the tribe, up to the community of the nation, this was possible. But, through the fact that the old principle of initiation was eliminated, the way was opened for an entirely new form of authority: a free authority, based solely upon trust and confidence. "Believe only in the one whom you trust"—this is the most sublime Christian idea to which we can rise, by virtue of which we all face one another as brothers, and the one who, stands higher will be recognised as the one who deserves our trust.

"Watch and pray": this is a fundamental Christian principle. The new Initiation takes place in a state of full consciousness. "You will know the Truth, and the Truth will make you free”: these are profoundly Christian words, for they signify a perspective into the farthest future of Christianity. Christianity is at the beginning of its evolution.

Let us consider the intensely close tie that existed between the initiating Teacher and the disciple, during the ancient Temple-Sleep, which lasted three and a half days—when the neophyte was being initiated into the highest Mysteries. This relation was of a kind which we cannot even imagine, to-day. The relation between the hypnotiser and the one who is hypnotised may give a faint idea of the way in which the initiating Temple-priest first called to life the Holy Ghost, and then the Christos. The disciple reflected the Holy Ghost and the Christos of the Teacher: the personalities of the Teacher and the disciple streamed into each other, and the clairvoyant could observe the process. During the three days, the Teacher and disciple were one. The Ego of the Guru thus lived on, in all of his disciples, and was deeply merged with them, during the three and a half days.

Let us observe the pyramidal structure of social life: the folk below; above the folk, the Initiates; and, above these, the Teachers of the Initiates. One and the same Spirit streamed down through all these stages. Many things, consequently, passed over into, and lived on, in those who were initiated in this way—even things that were alien to them.

As a result of the Christian principle, the individuality appeared in its full value. This explains the fundamental principle of Christian initiation. Never should the disciple become merged with the Teacher in the old way. They must not become one person, during Initiation. The Holy Ghost must arise, and awaken within the Ego of each single human being: this has become the principle of Christian Initiation. And this is also expressed symbolically, in the miracle of Pentecost. The possibility of Initiation, in that case, was given through the fact that all who were present began to speak in different tongues.

The Teacher respects the individuality of the other person; he enters into the heart of his disciple—he does not draw this out of the physical body.

We should bear in mind that, for the modern human being, everything depends upon the free and independent development, within each one, of the Holy Ghost and the Christos. We shall then realise that it is through this principle of Christianity that—for the first time, indeed—this human personality can be looked upon as free and independent. Only through Christianity has the human individuality become really free; and, for this reason, through Christianity, an entirely new relation to Truth and Wisdom has become necessary.

In olden times, the spirit of Wisdom ruled over all things, because it was centralised. Through the cleavage that followed, it became de-centralised; but Egoism arose. The more the principle of distant marriage begins to hold sway, the greater must become the power of that element which brings together human beings, now become free. And what is this element? If we consider what we may learn to-day, in the elementary parts of spiritual science, and then go back to ancient times, we shall find that this knowledge was in the possession of small communities only—and, indeed, even then, only in the possession of the highest authority. For this reason, the ruling principle was based upon compulsion. We are now approaching the time when Wisdom will become m.re and more popular. This will be the means whereby the great Brotherhood of humanity will be established.

Two occultists will never be of a different opinion. Where-ever this is the case, one of the two opinions is wrong. Wisdom is something unified—a oneness—which cannot contain differences. The more individualised human beings become, the more they will need this wisdom; for, through it, they will be drawn together. To-day, we are living in an age of transition. The principle of different viewpoints ceases entirely, through the progressive development of Wisdom. The more individualised men become, the wiser they must grow; for knowledge will lead them together. This is the Spirit of Wisdom which Christ-Jesus his promised to His followers. The Sun of Wisdom draws into itself all differing standpoints—just as the sun attracts the plants. The Spirit which will make men free, is the Holy Ghost. Against this Spirit, no Christian may ever sin. For he who sins against it, sins against Christianity itself—against that promised Spirit which is able to draw together all separate human individualities.

There is a passage which tells us that Christ-Jesus cast out demons. Demons exist only as long as the human being is not free—as long as he has not yet received into himself the Spirit of Wisdom. The human being is absolutely filled with all kinds of beings, which stream in and out of his lower members. (Perhaps we may use the trivial comparison of a piece of cheese, with maggots creeping in and out of it). We call these beings shadows, spectres, ghosts, or demons. In making Himself known as the Spirit who casts out demons, Christ-Jesus has shown that He is the Spirit of Freedom. For demons can be cast out only by calling forth the one Spirit against the others—the Spirit of Freedom against all the other spirits.

Let us now consider once more the ancient communities—extending from the tribal community to the nation. How may these human beings, who are not yet individually free, be drawn together? Imagine to yourselves that everyone who is sitting here has become truly free—that the Spirit of Truth lives in each one! Would we, in that case, ever quarrel, ever fall into dissension? No—for where the Spirit unites us, there can be no divergence of opinions. In ancient times, external law had to hold sway, in order to hold human beings together. Where two human beings know the Spirit of Truth, they will, because of this, feel themselves drawn to each other.

At the beginning of human evolution was the Law: at the end of evolution, there will be peaceful, harmonious cooperation from within. Esoteric Christianity calls this, in contrast to the Law—Grace. To be able to share, in complete harmony, the feelings of one's fellow-man: this is the profoundest concept of Christianity.

The astral body that has been filled with the Holy Ghost, is the same in all men—the Spirit of Truth, in each one, is the same. Imagine to yourselves this Spirit within a human individuality in which also the Christos has been awakened—that is to say, that principle which is active as Life-Spirit within the Life-Body. If each one of us were to permeate his etheric body with this feeling, we should then have, in every heart, the feeling for the One, unified Spirit. Human individualities are brought together by the Wisdom which is common to all; and what each one feels within himself, is Caritas—Grace.

The One who brought Grace to earth was He Who, at the beginning of our Era, contained within His own individuality the whole Christos—the One Who fulfilled, for the first time, the principle of humanity, as a whole. Christ-Jesus developed in Himself what should live in every single human being. Whatever exists through freedom and peaceful cooperation, has come into the world through Him.

"Become alive again in Christ and kill the Spirit of discord", says Paul.

A human being may sin against everything which is not contained in this Spirit. But, if he were to sin against this Spirit of a common humanity, if he were to deny this Spirit—he would no longer be a Christian.

The human being must reach the stage of being conscious of the Spirit. If he develops himself, ever more and more, his consciousness-body becomes transformed into the Holy Ghost. It is for this reason that the Sin against the Holy Ghost cannot be forgiven. In the case of an uninitiated person, the transformation of the etheric body takes place unconsciously. As long as the human being is not initiated, the unforgivable sin can be committed only within his astral body. The Initiate may not sin, even against the physical or etheric body: to the one who is not initiated, these sins may be forgiven. All of this takes place with the help of those who are the Leaders of humanity.

It is important to be aware of the need which existed in the anthroposophical movement for Christianity to be asserted, specifically among those who were initially what might be described as ordinary listeners. For the theosophical movement under the guidance of H.P. Blavatsky had adopted an expressly anti-christian orientation. I wish to throw a little more light on this anti-christian attitude, a perspective which I also mentioned in connection with Friedrich Nietzsche.

It has to be understood that the Mystery of Golgotha occurred in the first instance simply as a fact in the development of mankind on earth. If you look at the way in which I have dealt with the subject in my book, Christianity As Mystical Fact, you will see that I attempted to come to an understanding of the impulses underlying the ancient Mysteries, and then to show how the various forces which were active in the individual mystery centres were harmonized and unified. Thus what was initially encountered by human beings in a hidden way could be presented openly as a historical fact. In this sense the historical reality of the Mystery of Golgotha represents the culmination of the ancient Mysteries. Remnants of the ancient mystery wisdom were present when the Mystery of Golgotha took place. With the aid of these remnants, which were incorporated into the Gospels, it was possible to find access to this event, which gave earth development its true meaning.

The impulses derived from ancient wisdom which were still directly experienced began to fade in the fourth century AD, so that the wisdom was preserved only in a more or less traditional form, allowing particular people in one place or another to revitalize these traditions. But the kind of continuous development which the Mysteries enjoyed in ancient times had disappeared, taking with it the means to understand the Mystery of Golgotha.

The tradition remained. The Gospels existed, kept secret at first by the communities of the church and then published in individual nations. The cults existed. As the western world developed it was possible to keep alive a memory of the Mystery of Golgotha. But the opportunity to maintain the memory came to an end in that moment in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch when intellectualism, with what I described yesterday as modern education, made its appearance. And with it a type of science of the natural world began, which pre-empted any understanding of the spiritual world as it developed the kind of methodology seen to date. This methodology needed to be expanded in the way that anthroposophy has sought to expand it. If one does not progress beyond the scientific method introduced by Copernicus, Galileo and so on, the Mystery of Golgotha has no place within the resultant view of nature.

Now consider the following. In none of the ancient religions was there any division between knowledge of the natural world and knowledge of God. It is a common feature of all pagan religions that there is a unity in the way in which they explain nature, and in how that understanding of nature then ascends to an understanding of the divine, the many-faceted divinity, which is active in nature.

The kind of abstract natural forces we are now aware of, unchallenged in their absoluteness, did not exist. What did exist were nature spirits which guided the various aspects of nature, and with which links could be established through the content of the human soul.

Now anthroposophy will never make the claim that it somehow wants to become a religion. However, although religion will always need to be an independent spiritual stream in mankind, it is a simple human desire for harmony to exist between cognition and the religious life. It must be possible to make the transition from cognition to religion and to return from religion to cognition without having to cross an abyss. That is impossible, given the structure of modern learning. It is impossible, above all, to discover the nature of Christ on this scientific basis. Modern science, in investigating the being of Christ ever more closely, has scattered and lost it.

If you bear this in mind, you will be able to understand what follows. Let me begin by talking about Nietzsche, whose father was a practising minister. He went through a modern grammar school education. But since he was not a bread-and-butter scholar but a thinker, his interest extended to everything which could be learnt through modern methods. So he consciously and in a radical way became aware of the dichotomy which in reality affects all modern minds, although people do not realize it and are prone to illusion because they draw a veil over it. Nietzsche says: Nowhere does modern education provide a direct link to an explanation of Jesus Christ without jumping over an abyss. His uncompromising conclusion is that if one wants to establish a relationship with modern science while preserving some sort of inner feeling for the traditional explanations of Christ, it is necessary to lie. And so he chose modern learning, and thus arrived at a radical indictment of what he knew about Christianity.

No one has been more cutting about Christianity than Nietzsche, the minister's son. And he experiences this with his whole being. One example is when he says—and it is not, of course, my standpoint—that what a modern theologian believes to be true is certainly false. And he finds that the whole of modern philosophy has too much theological blood flowing through its veins. As a result he formulates his tremendous indictment of Christianity, which is of course blasphemous, but which is an honest blasphemy and therefore worthy of greater attention than the hypocrisy which is so often found in this field today. It needs to be emphasized that a person like Nietzsche, who was serious about wanting to understand the Mystery of Golgotha, was not able to do so with the means at his disposal, including the Gospels in their present form.

Anthroposophy provides an interpretation of all four Gospels,¹ and these interpretations are rejected decisively by theologians of all denominations. But they were not available to Nietzsche. It is the most difficult thing for a scientific mind—and almost all people today have scientific minds in this sense, even if at a basic level—to come to terms with the Mystery of Golgotha, and what is precisely not the old Mysteries, but the discovery of a whole new mystery knowledge. The discovery of the spiritual world in a wholly new form is necessary.

Basically Blavatsky's inspiration also came from the ancient Mysteries. If one takes The Secret Doctrine as a whole, it really feels like nothing fundamentally new but the resurrection of that knowledge which was used in the ancient Mysteries to recognize the divine and the spiritual. But these Mysteries are only capable of explaining the events which happened in anticipation of Christ. Those who were familiar with the impulses of the ancient Mysteries when Christianity was still young were able to adopt a positive attitude to what happened at Golgotha. This applied into the fourth century. The real meaning of the Greek Church Fathers was still understood: how their roots stretched back to the ancient Mysteries, and how their words have quite a different tone from those of the later Latin Church Fathers.

The ancient wisdom which understood nature and spirit as one was contained in Blavatsky's revelations. That is the way, she thought, to find the divine and the spiritual, to make them accessible to human perception. And from that perspective she turned her attention to what present-day traditional thinking and the modern faiths were saying about Christ Jesus. She could not, of course, understand the Gospels in the way they are understood in anthroposophy, and the knowledge which came from elsewhere was not adequate to deal with the knowledge of the spirit which Blavatsky brought. That is the origin of her contempt for the way in which the Mystery of Golgotha was understood by the world. In her view, what people were saying about the Mystery of Golgotha was on a much lower level than all the majestic wisdom provided by the ancient Mysteries. In other words, the Christian god stands on a lower level than the content of the ancient Mysteries.

That was not the fault of the Christian god, but it was the result of interpretations of the Christian god. Blavatsky simply did not know the nature of the Mystery of Golgotha and was able to judge it only by what was being said about it. These things have to be seen in an objective light. As the power of the ancient Mysteries was drawing to a final close in the last remnants of Greek culture in the fourth century AD, Rome took possession of Christianity. The empirical attitude of Roman culture to learning was incapable of opening a real path to the spirit. Rome forced Christianity to adopt its outer trappings. It is this romanized Christianity alone which was known to Nietzsche and Blavatsky.

Thus these souls whom I described as homeless, whose earlier earth lives were lighting up within them, took the first thing on offer because their sole aim was to find access to the spiritual world, even at the risk of losing Christianity. These were the people who began by seeking a way into the Theosophical Society.

Now the position of anthroposophy in relation to these homeless souls has to be clearly understood. These were searching, questioning souls. And the first necessity was to find out what questions resided in their innermost selves. And if anthroposophy addressed these souls, it was because they had questions about things to which anthroposophy thought it had the answer. The other people among our contemporaries were not bothered by such questions.

Anthroposophy therefore considered what came into the world with Blavatsky to be an important fact. But its purpose was not to observe the knowledge which she presented, but essentially to understand those questions which people found perplexing.

How were the answers to be formulated? We need to look at the matter as positively and as factually as possible. Here we had these questioning souls. Their questions were clear. They believed they could find an answer to them in something like Annie Besant's book The Ancient Wisdom,² for instance. Obviously, it would have been stupid to tell people that this or that bit of The Ancient Wisdom was no longer relevant. The only possible course was to give real answers by ignoring The Ancient Wisdom at a time when this book was, as it were, dogma among these people, and by writing my book Theosophy,³ which gave answers to questions which I knew were being asked. That was the positive answer. And there was no need to do more than that. People had to be left completely free to choose whether they wanted to continue to read The Ancient Wisdom or whether they wanted to use Theosophy.

In times of great historical change things are not decided in as rational and direct a manner as one likes to think. Thus I did not find it at all surprising that the theosophists who attended the lecture cycle on anthroposophy when the German Section was established, remarked that it did not agree in the slightest with what Mrs Besant was saying.

Of course it could not agree, because the answers had to be found in what the deepened consciousness of the present can provide. Until about 1907 each step taken by anthroposophy was a battle against the traditions of the Theosophical Society. At first the members of the Theosophical Society were the only people whom one could approach with these things. Every step had to be conquered. A polemical approach would have been useless; the only sensible course was hope, and making the right choices.

These things certainly did not happen without inner reservations. Everything had to be done at the right time and place, at least in my view. I believe that in my Theosophy I did not go one step beyond what it was possible to publish and for a certain number of people to accept at that time. The wide distribution of the book since then shows that this was an accurate assumption.

It was possible to go further among those who were engaged in a more intensive search, who had been caught up in the stream set in motion by Blavatsky. I will take only one instance. It was common in the Theosophical Society to describe how human beings went through what was called kamaloka after death. To begin with, the description given by its leaders could only be put in a proper context in my book Theosophy by avoiding the concept of time. But I wanted to deal with the correct concept of time within the Society.

As a result I gave lectures about life between death and a new birth within the then Dutch Section of the Theosophical Society. And there I pointed out, right at the start of my activity, that it is nonsense simply to say that we pass through kamaloka as if our consciousness is merely extended a little. (see diagram above). I showed that time has to be seen as moving backwards, and I described how our existence in kamaloka is life in reverse, stage by stage, only at three times the pace of the life we spend on earth. Nowadays, of course, people leading their physical lives have no idea that this backward movement is a reality in the spiritual realm, because time is imagined simply as a straight line.

Now the leaders of the Theosophical Society professed to renew the teachings of the old wisdom. All kinds of other writings appeared which were based on Blavatsky's book. But their content took a form which corresponded exactly to the way things are presented as a result of modern materialism. Why? Because new knowledge, not simply the renewal of old knowledge, had to be pursued if the right things were to be found. Buddha's wheel of birth and death and the old oriental wisdom was quoted on every occasion. That a wheel is something which has to be drawn as turning back on itself (see diagram) was ignored by people. There was no life in this rejuvenation of the old wisdom, because it did not spring from direct knowledge. In short, it was necessary through direct knowledge to create something which was also capable of illuminating the ancient wisdom.

Nevertheless, in the first seven years of my anthroposophical work there were people who denied that there was anything new in my material in relation to theosophy. But people never forgot the trouble I caused in the Dutch Section by filling my lectures with living material. When the congress took place in Munich in 1907⁴ the Dutch theosophists were seething that an alien influence, as they perceived it, was muscling in. They did not feel the living present standing against something which was based merely on tradition.

Something had to change. That is when the conversation between Mrs Besant and myself took place in Munich,⁵ and it was clarified that the things which I had to represent as anthroposophy would work quite independently of other things active within the Theosophical Society. What I might describe as a modus vivendi was agreed.

On the other hand, even at that time the absurdities of the Theosophical Society which eventually led to its downfall began to be visible on the horizon. For it is clear today that it has been ruined as a society which is able to support a spiritual movement, however great its membership. What the Theosophical Society used to be is no longer alive today.

When anthroposophy began its work the Theosophical Society still contained a justified and full spirituality. The things which were brought into the world by Blavatsky were a reality, and people had a living relationship with them. But Blavatsky had already been dead for a decade. The mood within the Theosophical Society, the things which existed as a continuation of Blavatsky's work, had a solid historico-cultural foundation; they were quite capable of giving something to people. But even at that time they already contained the seeds of decay. The only question was whether these could be overcome, or whether they would inevitably lead to complete disharmony between anthroposophy and the old Theosophical Society.

It has to be said that a destructive element existed in the Theosophical Society even in Blavatsky's time. It is necessary to separate Blavatsky's spiritual contribution from the effect of the way in which she was prompted to make her revelations. We are dealing with a personality who, however she was prompted, nevertheless was creative and through herself gave wisdom to mankind, even if this wisdom was more like a memory of earlier lives on earth and restricted to the rejuvenation of ancient wisdom. The second fact, that Blavatsky was prompted to act in a particular way, introduced elements into the theosophical movement which were no longer appropriate if it was to become a purely spiritual movement.

For that it was not. The fact is that Blavatsky was prompted from a certain direction, and as a result of this she produced all the things which are written in Isis Unveiled. But by various machinations Blavatsky for a second time fell under outside influence, namely of eastern esoteric teachers propelled by cultural tendencies of an egoistic nature. From the beginning a biased policy lay at the basis of the things they wished to achieve through Blavatsky. It included the desire to create a kind of sphere of influence—first of a spiritual nature, but then in a more general sense—of the East over the West, by providing the West's spirituality, or lack of it if you like, with eastern wisdom. That is how the transformation took place from the thoroughly European nature of Isis Unveiled to the thoroughly eastern nature of Blavatsky's The Secret Doctrine.

Various factors were at work, including the wish to link India with Asia in order to create an Indo-Asian sphere of influence with the help of the Russian Empire. In this way her teaching received its Indian content in order to win a spiritual victory over the West. It reflected a one-sidedly egoistic, nationally egoistic, influence. It was present right from the beginning and was striking in its symptomatic significance. The first lecture by Annie Besant which I attended dealt with theosophy and imperialism.⁶ And if one questioned whether the fundamental impulse of the lecture was contained in the wish to continue in Blavatsky's spiritual direction or to continue what went alongside it, the answer had to be the latter.

Annie Besant frequently said things without fully understanding the implications. But if you read the lecture “Theosophy and Imperialism” attentively, with an awareness of the underlying implications, you will see that if someone wanted to separate India from England in a spiritual way, the first, apparently innocuous step could be taken in a lecture of this kind.

It has always spelled the beginning of the end for spiritual movements and societies when they have started to introduce partisan political elements into their activity. A spiritual movement can only develop in the world today if it embraces all humanity. Indeed, today it is one of the most essential conditions for a spiritual movement whose intention it is to give access to the real spirit that it should embrace all mankind. And anything which aims to split mankind in any way is, from the beginning, a destructive element.

Just consider the extent to which one reaches into the subconscious regions of the human psyche with such things. It is simply part of the conditions for spiritual movements, such as anthroposophy wants to be, that they honestly and seriously endeavour to distance themselves from all partisan human interests, and aspire to take account of the general interest of mankind. That was what made the theosophical movement so destructive, in so far as it contained divisive elements from its inception. And on occasion they also veered in their position; during the war there was a tendency to become very anglo-chauvinistic. But it is essential to understand very clearly that it is completely impossible to make a genuine spiritual movement flourish if it contains factional interests which people are unwilling to leave behind.

That is why one of the main dangers facing the anthroposophical movement today—in an age deteriorating everywhere into nationalist posturing—lies in the lack of courage among people to discard these tendencies.

But what is the root cause of this tendency? It arises when a society wants to accrue power by something other than spiritual revelation. At the beginning of the twentieth century there was still much that was positive in the way the Theosophical Society developed an awareness of its power, but that awareness had almost completely disappeared by 1906 and was replaced by a strong drive for power.

It is important to understand that anthroposophy grew out of the general interests of mankind, and to recognize that it had to find access to the Theosophical Society, because that is where the questioners were to be found. It would not have found accomodation anywhere else.

Indeed, as soon as the first period came to an end, the complete inappropriateness of the theosophical movement for western life became evident, particularly in its approach to the issues surrounding Christ. Where Blavatsky's contempt for Christianity was still basically theoretical, albeit with an emotional basis, the theosophical movement later turned this contempt into practice, to the extent that a boy was specially brought up with the intention of making him the vehicle for the resurrection of Christ. There is hardly anything more absurd. An Order⁷ was established within the Theosophical Society with the aim of engineering the birth of Christ in a boy already alive here.

This soon descended into total farce. A congress of the Theosophical Society was to take place in Genoa in 1911,⁸ and I felt it necessary to announce my lecture “From Buddha to Christ” for this congress. This should have resulted in a clear and concise debate by bringing into the open everything which was already in the air. But—surprise, surprise—the Genoa Congress was cancelled. It is, of course, easy to find excuses for something like that, and every word that was uttered sounded uncommonly like an excuse.

Thus we can say that the anthroposophical movement entered its second stage by pursuing its straightforward course, and it was introduced by a lecture which I delivered to a non-theosophical audience of which only one person—no more!—is still with us, although many people attended the original lecture. That first lecture, lecture cycle in fact, was entitled “From Buddha to Christ”. In 1911 I had wanted to deliver the same cycle. There was a direct connection! But the theosophical movement had become caught up in a hideous zig-zag course.

If the history of the anthroposophical movement fails to be taken seriously and these things are not properly identified, it is also impossible to give a proper answer to the superficial points which are continually raised about the relationship between anthroposophy and theosophy; points made by people who refuse absolutely to acknowledge that anthroposophy was something quite independent from the beginning, and that it was quite natural for anthroposophy to provide the answers it possessed to the questions which were being asked.

Thus we might say that the second period of the anthroposophical movement lasted until 1914. During that time nothing in particular happened, at least as far as I am concerned, to resolve its relationship with the theosophical movement. The Theosophical Society remedied that when it expelled the anthroposophists.⁹ But it was not particularly relevant to be in the Theosophical Society and it was not particularly relevant to be excluded. We simply continued as before. Until 1914 everything which occurred was initiated by the Theosophical Society. I was invited to lecture there on the basis of the lectures which have been reprinted in my book Eleven European Mystics. I then proceeded to develop in various directions the material contained in it.

The Society, with its unchanged views, then proceeded to expel me—and, of course, my supporters. I was invited in for the same material which later caused my exclusion. That is how it was. The history of the anthroposophical movement will not be understood until the fundamental fact is recognized that it was irrelevant whether I was included in or excluded from the theosophical movement. That is something upon which I would ask you to concentrate in your self-reflection.

Today how many souls have a hint of such homelessness about them? That is revealed in incidents such as the following, which was reported very recently. A professor announced a course of university lectures on the development, as he called it, of mystic-occult perceptions from Pythagoras to Steiner. Following the announcement, so many people came to the first lecture that it could not be held in the usual lecture hall but had to be transferred to the Auditorium Maximum which is normally used only for big festive occasions.

Such occurrences demonstrate the way things are today, how the tendency to such homelessness has become an integral element in many souls. All of this could be anticipated: the rapidly growing evidence of a longing in homeless souls for an attitude to life which was not organized in advance, which was not laid out in advance; a longing for the spirit among them which was increasingly asserting itself, and asserting itself more strongly week by week.

• 1. Rudolf Steiner: The Gospel of St. John (Hamburg 1908). Translated by M. B. Monges. Anthroposophic Press, New York, 1962. The Gospel of St. John and its Relation to the Other Gospels (Kassel 1909). Translated by S. and L. Lockwood, revised by M. St. Goar. Anthroposophic Press, New York, 1982. The Gospel of St. Luke (Basel 1909). Translated by D. S. Osmond and O. Barfield. Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1975. The Gospel of St. Matthew (Bern 1910). Translated by D. S. Osmond and M. Kirkcaldy. Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1965. The Gospel of St. Mark (Basel 1912). Translated by C. Mainzer, edited by S. C. Easton. Anthroposophic Press, New York, 1986. Background to the Gospel According to St. Mark (Berlin and other places 1910/11). Translated by E. H. Goddard and D. S. Osmond. Rudolf Steiner Press, London, and Anthroposophic Press, New York, 1968.
• 2. Published in 1897.
• 3. Theosophy: An Introduction to the Supersensible Knowledge of the World and the Destination of Man (1904). Translated by M. Cotterell, revised by A. P. Shepherd. Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1989.
• 4. From 18–21 May 1907 the fourth annual Congress of the Federation of European Sections of the Theosophical Society took place in Munich. Under Rudolf Steiner's guidance the attempt had been made to create a harmonious correlation between the spiritual activity in and the artistic arrangement of the conference room. In addition there was a performance of E. Schure's reconstruction of The Holy Drama of Eleusis. See The Course of My Life, Chapter XXXVIII.
4
• 5. In the lecture of 14 December 1911 Rudolf Steiner said: In front of a witness (Marie von Sivers) who is willing to testify to this at any time, Annie Besant said in Munich in 1907 that she was not qualified to deal with Christianity. And that is why she, as it were, handed the movement over to me, in so far as its Christian aspects were concerned. See Aus dem Leben von Marie Steiner-von Sivers, p.45f.
• 6. The lecture—Theosophy and Imperialism. A Lecture by Annie Besant. London (Theos. Publ. Soc.) 1902—was delivered at the Theosophical Society Congress in London in July 1902. cf. Rudolf Steiner's lecture of 12 March 1916 in GA 174b (not yet translated).
• 7. See Lecture Two, Note 2.
• 8. See Aus dem Leben von Marie Steiner-von Sivers, p.70f.
• 9. See Lecture Two, Note 2.

All of our medieval stories—Parsifal, the Round Table, Hartmann von Aue—reveal mystical truths in esoteric form, even though they are usually only understood in their outward aspect. Where do we search for their origin? We must look to a time before the spread of Christianity. Into Christianity was blended what had lived in Ireland, Scotland ... [Gap in the notes.] We are led to a particular centre whence this spiritual life was disseminated. The spiritual life [of Europe] emanated from a mother lodge in Scandinavia, ‘Drottes’ Lodge. Druids = Oak. For this reason the Germanic peoples were said to receive their instructions beneath oak trees.

‘Drottes’, or Druids, were ancient Germanic initiates. They still existed in England till Elizabethan times. All that we read in the Edda or can find in the ancient German sagas refers back to the temples of the ‘Drottes’ or Druids. The author of these tales was always an initiate. The sagas not only have a symbolical or allegorical meaning, but something else as well.

Example: We know the saga of Baldur. We know that he is the hope of the gods, that he is killed by the god Loki with a branch of mistletoe. The God of Light is killed. This whole story has a deep mystery content which all who underwent initiation not only had to learn, but had to experience.

The Mysteries. Initiation: the first deed was called the search for the body of Baldur. It was supposed that Baldur was always alive. The search consisted of a complete enlightenment about the nature of man. For Baldur was the human being who has gone astray. Once upon a time the human being was not as he is today, he was undifferentiated, not bowed down by passionate experiences, but composed of finer ephemeral substance. Baldur, the radiant human being. When truly understood, all things which appear to us in the form of symbols must be understood in a higher sense. This human being who has not descended into what today we call matter, is Baldur. He lives in each one of us. The Druid priest had to search for the higher self within him. He had to become clear about where this differentiation took place, between the higher and the lower ... [Gap]

The secret of all initiation is to give birth to the higher human being within oneself. What the priest accomplishes more quickly, the rest of mankind must undergo in long stages of development. To become leaders of the rest of mankind, the Druids had to receive this initiation.

Man who had descended deeper now had to overcome matter and regain his former higher level. This birth of the higher human being takes place in all the Mysteries in a similar sort of way. The man who had become submerged in matter had to be reawakened. One had to make a series of experiences—real experiences—which were unlike any sense experiences one can have on the physical plane.

The stages. The first step was that one was led before the ‘Throne of Necessity’. One stood in front of the abyss: really experienced through one's own body what lived in the lower kingdoms of nature. Man is both mineral and plant, but the man of today is unable to experience what is undergone by the elementary substances and yet the enduring, the constraining things in the world are due to the fact that we are also mineral and plant in our nature.

The next step led the human being to all that lived in the animal kingdom. Everything which existed in the form of passions and desires was beheld in swirling and interweaving movement- All this had to be observed by the candidate for initiation so that his eyes would be opened to what lay behind the veil of the senses. Man is not aware that what swirls around in astral space is hidden behind the physical sheath. The veil of maya is really a sheath which must be penetrated by him who is to be initiated—the sheaths drop away, the human being sees clearly. That is a very special moment: the priest becomes aware that the sheaths had dammed back the impulses which would have been frightful if they had been let loose.

The third step led to a vision of the elemental nature forces. That is a step which man finds difficult to comprehend without previous preparation. That powerful occult forces are residing in these nature forces and through them express elemental passions, is something which makes man aware that there are powers quite outside the scope of anything he can experience as his own suffering.

The next trial is called the ‘Handing over of the Serpent’ by the hierophant. One can only explain it by means of the effects which it brings about. It is elucidated in the Tantalus saga. The privilege of being allowed to sit in the Council of the Gods can be abused. It signifies a reality which certainly raises man above himself, but dangers accompany it which are not exaggerated in the story of the Tantalus curse. As a rule man says he is powerless in face of the laws of nature. These are thoughts. With that kind of thinking, which is only a shadowy brain-thinking, nothing can be achieved. In creative thinking, which builds and constructs things of the world, which is productive and fruitful, the passive kind of thinking is replaced by a thinking permeated by spiritual force. The blown skin of a caterpillar is the empty sheath of the caterpillar; when filled with [productive] thinking it is the living caterpillar. Into the sheath-thoughts, living active power is poured so that the priest is enabled, not only to see the world in vision, but to work in it through magic. The danger is that this power can be abused. He can ... [Gap]

At this stage the occultist acquires a certain power, whereby he is enabled to deceive even the higher beings. He must not only repeat truths but experience them and decide whether a thing is true or false. That is what is called ‘The Handing over of the Serpent by the Hierophant’. [it denotes the same thing on a spiritual level that the rudimentary stages in the formation of the spinal cord signify on the physical level. In the animal kingdom we pass through the fishes, amphibians and so on till we reach the brain of the vertebrates and man. See notes.] We have a spiritual backbone, too, which determines whether we are to develop a spiritual brain. Man goes through this process at this stage of his development. He is lifted out of Kama (feelings, passions, desires) and endowed with a spiritual backbone so that he can be raised up into the spiraling of the spiritual brain. On a spiritual level, the windings of the labyrinth are the same as the convolutions of the brain on the physical level. Man gains access to the labyrinth, to the windings within the spiritual realm.

Then he had to take the oath of silence. A naked sword was presented to him and he was obliged to swear the most binding oath. This was that he would henceforth keep silence about his experiences where it concerned people who had not been initiated as he had. It is quite impossible to reveal the true content of these secrets without preparation. He, [the initiate] however, could create these sagas so that they became the expression of the eternal. One who could give utterance to things in this way of course had great power over his fellow men. The creator of a saga of this kind imprinted something into the human spirit. What is thus spoken is then forgotten and only the merest vestige of it survives death. Eternal truths remain longest after death. Of less elevated scientific thought hardly anything remains. The eternal does so and appears again in a new incarnation.

The Druid priest spoke out of the higher plane. His words, though simple, being the expression of higher truths, sank into the souls of his hearers. He spoke to simple folk but the truth sank into their souls and something was incorporated into them which would be reborn in a new incarnation. At that time men experienced the truth through fairy stories; thus today our spirit bodies have been prepared and if we are able to grasp higher truths today it is because we have been prepared.

Thus this time, which came to an end in 60 A.D., had prepared the spiritual life of Europe, had provided the soil on which Christianity could build. These teachings have been preserved and whoever searches will be able to find access to what was taught in these Lodges.

After he [the Druid] had given his oath on the sword he had to drink a certain draught—and this he did from a human skull. The meaning of this was that he had transcended what was human. That was the feeling which the Druid priest had to develop concerning his lower bodily nature. He had to look upon all that lived within his body with the same objective, cool attitude as he felt towards a containing vessel. Then he was initiated into the higher secrets and shown the path to higher worlds. Baldur ... [Gap] He was led into an immense palace which was roofed by flashing shields. He encountered a man who cast forth seven flowers. Cosmic Space, Cherubim, Demi-urge [Maker of the World]. Thus he became truly a Priest of the Sun.

Many people read the Edda and are unaware that it is an account of what really took place in the ancient ‘Drottes’ mysteries. An immense power lay at the disposal of the ancient ‘Drottes’ priests, a power over life and death. It is true that everything becomes corrupt in time. It was once the highest, the holiest of things. At the time when Christianity was spreading, much had degenerated and there were many black magicians, so that Christianity came as a redemption.

The study of these old truths alone is able to give an almost complete survey of the whole of occultism.

Unlike our present practice, not one stone was laid upon another in the building of a Druid temple without the use of exact astronomical measurement. Doorways were built according to astronomical measurement. The Druid priests were the builders of humanity. A faint reflection of this is preserved today in the views which the Freemasons hold.

Learning to penetrate astral substance, viewing the sun at midnight: First initiation.

Handing over of the Serpent by the Hierophant: Second Initiation.

The journey into the Labyrinth: Third Initiation.

Note on Lecture III

The only source for this lecture was the short notes of Marie Steiner von Sivers. Sentences enclosed in square brackets are the amendments of the editor, where the text seemed insufficiently clear.

Further source material has been appended below, gleaned from the writings of Charles William Heckethorn on the subject of the Druids and the Scandinavian Mysteries. A copy of Heckethorn's book in German translation was in Rudolf Steiner's private library, and from marginal notes in Rudolf Steiner's handwriting it appears to have been used by him in connection with this lecture and other lectures included in this volume. (Charles William Heckethorn Geheime Gesellschaften, Geheimbünde und Geheimlehren, Leipzig, 1900. Original English edition: The Secret Societies of all Ages and Countries, London,1875.)

From Charles William Heckethorn
The Secret Societies of all Ages and Countries
Chapter VIII. The Druids.

The Druids, the Magi of the West.
The secret doctrines of the Druids were much the same as those of the Gymnosophists and Brahmins of India, the Magi of Persia, the priests of Egypt, and of all other priests of antiquity. Like them they had two sets of religious doctrines, exoteric and esoteric. Their rites were practised in Britain and Gaul, though they were brought to a much greater perfection in the former country, where the Isle of Anglesey was considered their chief seat. The word Druid is generally supposed to be derived from “an oak,” which tree was particularly sacred among them, though its etymology may also be found in the Gaelic word Druidh, “a wise man” or “magician.”

Temples.
Their temples, wherein the sacred fire was preserved, were generally situate on eminences and in dense groves of oaks, and assumed various forms—circular, because a circle was an emblem of the universe; oval, in allusion to the mundane egg, from which, according to the traditions of many nations, the universe, or according to others, our first parents, issued; serpentine, because a serpent was the symbol of Hu, the Druidic Osiris; cruciform, because a cross is an emblem of regeneration; or winged, to represent the motion of the divine spirit. Their only canopy was the sky, and they were constructed of unhewn stones, their numbers having reference to astronomical calculations. In the centre was placed a stone of larger dimensions than the others, and worshipped as the representative of the Deity. The three principal temples of this description in Britain were undoubtedly those of Stonehenge and Avebury in the south, and that of Shap in Cumbria. Where stone was scarce, rude banks of earth were substituted, and the temple was formed of a high vallum and ditch. The most Herculean labours were performed in their construction; Stukeley says that it would cost, at the present time, £20,000 to throw up such a mound as Silbury Hill.

Places of Initiation.
The adytum or ark of the mysteries was called a cromlech, and was used as the sacred pastos, or place of regeneration. It consisted of three upright stones, as supporters of a broad, flat stone laid across them on the top, so as to form a small cell. Kit Cotey's House, in Kent, was such a pastos. Considerable space, however, was necessary for the machinery of initiation in its largest and most comprehensive scale. Therefore, the Coer Sidi, where the mysteries of Druidism were performed, consisted of a range of buildings, adjoining the temple, containing apartments of all sizes, cells, vaults, baths, and long and artfully contrived passages, with all the apparatus of terror used on these occasions. Most frequently these places were subterranean; and many of the caverns in this country were the scenes of Druidical initiation. The stupendous grotto at Castleton, in Derbyshire [Peak Cavern], called by Stukeley the Stygian Cave, as well as the “Giants Caves” between Luckington and Badminton [in Wilts.], certainly were used for this purpose.

Rites.
The system of Druidism embraced every religious and philosophical pursuit then known in these islands. The rites bore an undoubted reference to astronomical facts. Their chief deities are reducible to two,—a male and a female, the great father and mother, Hu and Ceridwen, distinguished by the same characteristics as belonged to Osiris and Isis, Bacchus and Ceres, or any other supreme god and goddess representing the two principles of all being. The grand periods of initiation were quarterly, and determined by the course of the sun, and his arrival at the equinoctial and solstitial points. But the time of annual celebration was May-eve, when fires were kindled on all the cairns and cromlechs throughout the island, which burned all night to introduce the sports of May-day, whence all the national sports formerly or still practised date their origin. Round these fires choral dances were performed in honour of the sun, who, at this season was figuratively said to rise from his tomb. The festival was licentious, and continued till the luminary had attained his meridian height, when priests and attendants retired to the woods, where the most disgraceful orgies were perpetrated. But the solemn initiations were performed at midnight, and contained three degrees, the first or lowest being the Eubates, the second the Bards, and the third the Druids. The candidate was first placed in the pastos bed, or coffin, where his symbolical death represented the death of Hu, or the sun; and his restoration in the third degree symbolized the resurrection of the sun. He had to undergo trials and tests of courage similar to those practised in the mysteries of other countries, and which therefore need not be detailed here.

The festival of the 25th of December was celebrated with great fires lighted on the tops of the hills, to announce the birth-day of the god Sol. This was the moment when, after the supposed winter solstice, he began to increase, and gradually to ascend. This festival indeed was kept not by the Druids only, but throughout the ancient world, from India to Ultima Thule. The fires, of course, were typical of the power and ardour of the sun, whilst the evergreens used on the occasion foreshadowed the results of the sun's renewed action on vegetation. The festival of the summer solstice was kept on the 24th of June. Both days are still kept as festivals in the Christian church, the former as Christmas, the latter as St. John's Day; because the early Christians judiciously adopted not only the festival days of the pagans, but also, so far as this could be done with propriety, their mode of keeping them; substituting, however, a theological meaning for astronomical allusions. The use of evergreens in churches at Christmas time is the Christian perpetuation of an ancient Druidic custom.

Doctrines.
The Druids taught the doctrine of one supreme being, a future state of rewards and punishments, the immortality of the soul and a metempsychosis. It was a maxim with them that water was the first principle of all things, and existed before the creation in unsullied purity, which seems a contradiction to their other doctrine that day was the offspring of night, because night or chaos was in existence before day was created. They taught that time was only an intercepted fragment of eternity, and that there was an endless succession of worlds. In fact, their doctrines were chiefly those of Pythagoras. They entertained great veneration for the numbers three, seven, nineteen (the Metonic cycle), and one hundred and forty-seven, produced by multiplying the square of seven by three. They also practised vaticination [prophecy], pretending to predict future events from the flights of birds, human sacrifices, by white horses, the agitation of water, and lots. They seem, however, to have possessed considerable scientific knowledge.

Political and Judicial Power.
Their authority in many cases exceeded that of the monarch. They were, of course, the sole interpreters of religion, and consequently superintended all sacrifices; for no private person was allowed to offer a sacrifice without their sanction. They possessed the power of excommunication, which was the most horrible punishment that could be inflicted next to that of death, and from the effects of which the highest magistrate was not exempt. The great council of the realm was not competent to declare war or conclude peace without their concurrence. They determined all disputes by a final and unalterable decision, and had the power of inflicting the punishment of death. And, indeed, their altars streamed with the blood of human victims. Holocausts of men, women, and children, inclosed in large towers of wicker-work, were sometimes sacrificed as a burnt offering to their superstitions, which were, at the same time, intended to enhance the consideration of the priests, who were an ambitious race delighting in blood. The Druids, it is said, preferred such as had been guilty of theft, robbery, or other crimes, as most acceptable to their gods; but when there was a scarcity of criminals, they made no scruple to supply their place with innocent persons. These dreadful sacrifices were offered by the Druids, for the public, on the eve of a dangerous war, or in the time of any national calamity; and also for particular persons of high rank, when they were afflicted with any dangerous disease.

Priestesses.
The priestesses, clothed in white, and wearing a metal girdle, foretold the future from the observation of natural phenomena, but more especially from human sacrifices. For them was reserved the frightful task of putting to death the prisoners taken in war, and individuals condemned by the Druids; and their auguries were drawn from the manner in which the blood issued from the many wounds inflicted, and also from the smoking entrails. Many of these priestesses maintained a perpetual virginity, others gave themselves up to the most luxurious excesses. They dwelt on lonely rocks, beaten by the waves of the ocean which the mariners looked upon as temples surrounded with unspeakable prodigies. Thus the island of Sena or Liambis, The Saints, near Ushant, was the residence of certain of these priestesses, who delivered oracles to sailors; and there was no power that was not attributed to them. Others, living near the mouth of the Loire, once a year destroyed their temple, scattered its materials, and, having collected others, built a new one—of course a symbolical ceremony; and if one of the priestesses dropped any of the sacred materials, the others fell upon her with fierce yells, tore her to pieces, and scattered her bleeding limbs.

Abolition.
As the Romans gained ground in these islands the power of the Druids gradually declined; and the were finally assailed by Suetonius Paulinus, governor of Britain under Nero, A.D. 61, in their stronghold, the Isle of Anglesey, and entirely defeated, the conqueror consuming many of them in the fires which they had kindled for burning the Roman prisoners they had expected to make—a very just retaliation upon these sanguinary priests. But though their dominion was thus destroyed, many of their religious practices continued much longer; and so late as the eleventh century, in the reign of Canute, it was necessary to forbid the people to worship the sun, moon, fires, etc. Certainly many of the practices of the Druids are still adhered to in Freemasonry; and some writers on this Order endeavour to show that it was established soon after the edict of Canute, and that as thereby the Druidical worship was prohibited in toto, the strongest oaths were required to bind the initiated to secrecy.

Chapter IX. Scandinavian Mysteries

Drottes.
The priests of Scandinavia were named Drottes, and instituted by Sigge, a Scythian prince, who is said afterwards to have assumed the name of Odin. Their number was twelve, who were alike priests and judges; and from this order proceeded the establishment of British juries. Their power was extended to its utmost limits, by being allowed a discretionary privilege of determining on the choice of human victims for sacrifice, from which even the monarch was not exempt—hence arose the necessity of cultivating the goodwill of these sovereign pontiffs; and as this order, like the Israelitish priesthood, was restricted to one family, they became possessed of unbounded wealth, and at last became so tyrannical as to be objects of terror to the whole community. Christianity, promising to relieve it from this yoke, was hailed with enthusiasm; and the inhabitants of Scandinavia, inspired with a thirst for vengeance on account of accumulated and long-continued suffering, retaliated with dreadful severity on their persecutors, overthrowing the palaces and temples, the statues of their gods, and all the paraphernalia of Gothic superstition. Of this nothing remains but a few cromlechs; some stupendous monuments of rough stone, which human fury could not destroy; certain ranges of caverns hewn out of the solid rock; and some natural grottos used for the purpose of initiation.

Rituals.
The whole ritual had an astronomical bearing. The places of initiation, as in other mysteries, were in caverns, natural or artificial, and the candidate had to undergo trials as frightful as the priests could render them. But instead of having to pass through seven caves or passages, as in the Mithraic and other mysteries, he descended through nine—the square of the mystic number three—subterranean passages, and he was instructed to search for the body of Baldur, the Scandinavian Osiris, slain by Loki, the principle of darkness, and to use his utmost endeavours to raise him to life. To enter into particulars of the process of initiation would involve the repetition of what has been said before; it may therefore suffice to observe that the candidate on arriving at the sacellum had a solemn oath administered to him on a naked sword, and ratified it by drinking mead out of a human skull. The sacred sign of the cross was impressed upon him, and a ring of magic virtues, the gift of Baldur the Good, delivered to him.

Astronomical Meaning Demonstrated.
The first canto of the Edda, which apparently contains a description of the ceremonies performed on the initiation of an aspirant, says that he seeks to know the sciences possessed by the Aesas or gods. He discovers a palace, whose roof of boundless dimensions is covered with golden shields. He encounters a man engaged in launching upwards seven flowers. Here we easily discover the astronomical meaning: the palace is the world, the roof the sky; the golden shields are the stars, the seven flowers the seven planets. The candidate is asked what is his name, and replies Gangler, that is, the wanderer, he that performs a revolution, distributing necessaries to mankind; for the candidate personates the sun. The palace is that of the king, the epithet the ancient Mystagogues gave to the head of the planetary system. Then he discovers three seats; on the lowest is the king called Har, sublime; on the central one, Jafuhar, the equal of the sublime; on the highest Tredie, the number three. These personages are those the neophyte beheld in the Eleusinian initiation, the hierophant, the daduchus or torchbearer, and the epibomite or attendant on the altar; those he sees in Freemasonry, the master, and the senior and junior wardens, symbolical personifications of the sun, moon, and Demiurgus, or grand architect of the universe. But the Scandinavian triad is usually represented by Odin, the chief deity; Thor, his first-born, the reputed mediator between god and man, possessing unlimited power over the universe, wherefore his head was surrounded by a circle of twelve stars; and Freya, a hermaphrodite, adorned with a variety of symbols significant of dominion over love and marriage. In the instructions given to the neophyte, he is told that the greatest and most ancient of gods is called Alfader (the father of all), and has twelve epithets, which recall the twelve attributes of the sun, the twelve constellations, the twelve superior gods of Egypt, Greece, and Rome. Among the gods of the Scandinavian theogony there is Baldur the Good, whose story, as already hinted above, formed the object of the initiatory ceremonies. Baldur is Mithras, the sun's love. He foresees the danger that threatens him; he dreams of it at night. The other gods of Valhalla, the Scandinavian Olympus, to whom he reveals his sad fore-bodings, reassure him, and to guard against any harm befalling him, exact an oath from every thing in nature on his behalf, except from the mistletoe, which was omitted on account of its apparently inoffensive qualities. For an experiment, and in sport, the gods cast at Baldur all kinds of missiles, without wounding him. Hoder the blind [that is, Fate], takes no part in the diversion; but Loki [the principle of evil, darkness, the season of winter] places a sprig in the hands of Hoder, and persuades him to cast it at the devoted victim, who falls pierced with mortal wounds. For this reason it was that this plant was gathered at the winter solstice by the Druids of Scandinavia, Gaul, and Britain, with a curved knife, whose form symbolised the segment of the zodiacal circle during which the murder of Baldur took place. In the Edda of Snorro we have another legend of Odin and Freya, the Scandinavian Isis or Venus, giving an account of the wanderings of the latter in search of the former, which, of course, have the same astronomical meaning as the search of Isis for Osiris, of Ceres for Proserpine, etc. One of the chief festivals in the year, as with the Druids, was the winter solstice; and this being the longest night in the year, the Scandinavians assigned to it the formation of the world from primeval darkness, and called it “Mother Night.” This festival was denominated “Yule,” and was a season of universal festivity.

[Dearly beloved!]

I must apologize for my cold; it will be difficult to hear me.

I have tried to show that this Pythagoreanism, which lived in southern Italy in the sixth century BC - this strictly self-contained and yet not self-contained school - had a great influence in all the centuries following Pythagoreanism, and that this whole direction was acquired in a difficult course of study that lasted many years. You really had to do a lot of exercises before you could grasp things in a purely spiritual way. I [wanted] to show that it is a pity not to have such a school today. I [wanted] to show that the Pythagorean is not so isolated, but that in Novalis we have a personality who thought in quite the same way. But there is something else.

It can seem somewhat strange when we hear that the Pythagoreans sought something in the strange harmony of numbers, in numbers and in the combination of numbers that represents the primal causes of things. It will not surprise us if we make the assertion that our science, ordinary natural science, insofar as it is physics and chemistry today, is on the way to becoming Pythagoreanism. In the course of the nineteenth century, only a certain group of sensual views prevented natural science from merging into Pythagoreanism. Today we are facing the reformation of natural science. We are on the verge of chemistry and physics becoming completely materialistic because only scientific ideas have been adopted. But perhaps in a few years' time we will no longer be able to think only materialistically about chemical and physical matters. Helmholtz, despite his merits and enormous inventions, and although he never got beyond a certain materialistic presentation at the end of his life, adopted a kind of idealism. At the Naturforscher-Versammlung he announced a lecture on "Apparent substance and true movement". Unfortunately, no notes remain in his estate. However, we can imagine what Helmholtz wanted to say. The physicist only gives a lecture [with such a title] when he has to. Having to give a lecture on "Apparent substance and true motion", on the fact that everything substantial is only apparent, and then the spiritual, the motion is the true, is of great importance. For it is not immediately possible for the physicist to ascend to the spirit. But it is already something if the physicist does not regard matter as the real, but only as something apparent. That is a symptom.

Our entire natural science is basically out to confirm the old Pythagorean theorem that everything that exists in space can be traced back to numerical relationships. To indicate what I mean when I say that natural science is Pythagoreanism, that it is on the way to seeing the decisive factor precisely in numbers, let us take the chemical substances: oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, lead or any of the various other elements. They form compounds, as we know. For example, when lead and oxygen combine, what is the decisive factor? The number! The number is the decisive factor when these two substances combine to form lead oxide. I can't go into this in detail, nor can I go into how the two substances can be separated again, because it would be going too far. However, it is enough for us to know that when lead and oxygen combine, they always combine according to a certain numerical ratio.

But this goes even further. Suppose mercury combines with oxygen. For example, 103 grams of mercury only combine with 8 grams of oxygen. You can see beforehand that if you want to combine 8 grams of oxygen, you need 103 grams of mercury.

But now it's like this: oxygen always combines with all other elements in such a way that certain parts by weight of other elements combine with eight parts by weight of oxygen. This is the case with all elements. For each of the seventy-three known elements there is a number that indicates the weight fraction with which it combines with all the others. The chemist must recognize this from a wealth of facts. That is just it: We have many more facts than the ancients. They had the same thoughts, but fewer facts!

Lead oxide combines 103 parts by weight of lead with 8 parts by weight of oxygen. If we combine lead with sulphur, 103 parts by weight of lead combine with 16 parts by weight of sulphur.

So, if you construct the whole world materially, you do not have something chaotic and arbitrary, but - as the Pythagoreans thought - something ordered according to the harmony of numbers.

And the further we go in science, the more we see that the organization and construction [of nature] can be expressed by numbers. Today's science provides confirmation of the correctness of the Pythagoreans' spiritual construction that we are dealing with numbers in nature.

Helmholtz seems to have wanted to say the same thing in his lecture. We are ultimately dealing with the spirit. Whether the mind is expressed by numbers or viewed in some other way, we will leave that aside for now. If we extract everything that lies dormant in the substance, then we finally come to the conclusion that we are dealing with spirit.

Science also provides us with proof of this. Science is disproving materialism more and more every day. The opinion that natural science needs materialism may still exist in some people's minds, but the truth is that nothing disproves materialism more than natural science. I would like to give you an example from contemporary natural science to show you how this natural science is overcoming materialism bit by bit day by day.

You know that the human eye consists of a displaced spherical envelope or shell filled with a glassy, watery liquid, the vitreous body, and that seeing an object is made possible by the fact that embedded in this mass is a small crystal lens that images the image on the background. Light penetrates through the black in the eye. This light is refracted in the lens, creating a small image, and this image becomes the cause of our vision. The various animals, vertebrates and also a number of invertebrates have similarly constructed eyes.

The octopus also has an eye that appears to be similar to that of humans. It has an eye with a vitreous body, embedded in the vitreous body is a lens that mediates vision. The interesting thing is that in humans, the crystalline lens grows in a completely different way to the octopus, even though both are crystalline lenses. In the octopus, the crystalline lens is formed because the crystalline lens has grown within the aqueous fluid of the eye [through excretion and thickening]. Now you can say to yourself: the eye with the aqueous fluid and the lens resembles a camera obscura. In humans, however, the lens is not formed by excretion and thickening, but by the surface pulling the lens out of itself and then pushing it into the eye. This crystalline lens emerged once from the eye and the other time in a different way from the outside and was then pushed into the vitreous body!

Can we still say, when we see how a material structure can arise in so many different ways, that it is the material that forms nature? Should we not say that nature is not built up according to material powers, but according to purely spiritual powers? The natural substance does not matter at all. One time it is formed from the inside, the other time from the outside. The substance as such is therefore basically the same for the construction of organisms. The mind constructs things.

The further we get in natural science, the more we find that we can never say what would come into being if we [only] took the substance into account. It is the spirit that uses matter to create forms. That is why the Pythagoreans divide the world into these two components: On the one hand, they conceive of the world as that which makes it perceptible/and then again as that which is not perceptible in the world, or let us say better, that which is only perceptible, recognizable to the mind; they have there clearly set apart two things in the human and animal eye; they see how the same eye is constructed in the one and in the other case.

This law - in general the whole spiritual that makes use of the material - cannot be perceived with the senses, it can only be perceived in a spiritual way. But space could not be fulfilled if the spirit could not make use of the perceptible.

The Pythagorean separates these two things: on the one hand, he has the eternally creative, the spiritual, which uses matter to create countless forms; on the other hand, he has matter, which is not active for itself, but only to make visible something that cannot be perceived by the senses.

The Pythagorean composes the whole world from the perceptible and the imperceptible. For him, the one is the number one. It forms the boundary for him. Something exists for us because it becomes one, because it becomes individual. But this is only apparent; it is connected to all other things in the world. And the "how" is conveyed by the number symbolism and the number context. And so we can understand it, because the Pythagoreans had this connection, they saw how much the number rules when it comes to material things and objects. But they also saw how the Pythagoreans endeavored to find the wonderful connection within the numbers and to find what they had found internally confirmed externally.

Whoever does not pay attention to this, whoever does not realize that it was the harmony of the inner and outer, whoever does not take this into account, that it was the delight for the Pythagorean, can very easily find gimmicks in the Pythagorean number teachings. But this only lives in the minds if they cannot become aware of the inner rapture, if they cannot understand, if they cannot grasp how for the Pythagoreans the whole counting becomes different when we have arrived at the ten.

If you don't understand this purely in the way the Pythagoreans understood it, you won't understand what the Pythagoreans meant. As long as we count to ten, we are dealing with units where we add one number to another. But when we reach ten, we continue counting. But we don't just count units, we count the tens: 10 = 1 x 10, 20 = 2 x 10, 30 = 3 x 10. While we have 10, we add 10 others. So we count in a spiritual way what we used to count materially. We count the numbers themselves from 10 onwards, so that when we count to 10, we are actually counting materially in the Pythagorean sense. But if we continue counting the tens, we can disregard the material. We do this by saying: 1 x 10, 2 x 10 and so on. And then we come to the hundreds. The further we count up, the more we forget the material basis and what we used to count. According to the Pythagoreans, it is precisely in counting that we have a means of raising ourselves more and more into the spiritual realm.

You have to consider what he understands by the so-called "gnomons". He understands this to mean nothing other than the inner lawfulness that prevails in our world of numbers if we study this world of numbers in the right way.

Take the following: If you take the consecutive numbers and multiply them, each number by itself, you get the so-called square numbers: 2 x 2 = 4, 3 x 3 = 9, 4 x 4 = 16, 5 x 5 = 25.

So if we multiply the individual numbers by themselves, we get the square numbers. However, there is a strange relationship between the numbers and the square numbers. This relationship was first explored by the Pythagoreans.

If you now take what is not yet in 2x2, take what is new for the 4; the 5, and add to it, you get the second square number. Strangely enough, this law applies continuously through the whole square numbers. 4 is the first square number, 9 is the second, 16 is the third.

2 + 2 = 4; the next new number is 5, so plus 5 = 9.

Take 3 + 3 = 6, the next new number is 7, so 3 x 3 = 9, plus 7 = 16.

You can continue like this. And this is what the Pythagoreans called the "gnomons".

Take 4: 4 x 4 = 16.16 + ( 4 + 4 + 1 =9 ) = 25, the square number of 5.

Take the 5: 5 x 5 = 25. 25 + ( 5 + 5 + 1 = 11) = 36, the square number of 6.

Take the 6: 6x 6 = 36. 36 + ( 6 +6 + 1 = 13 ) = 49[, the square number of 7].

You can find this inner regularity throughout the entire number range. Here you get an inner insight into the context itself. This was what compelled the Pythagorean to believe that the numerical has an inner regularity of its own. He found this in things like gnomons, so that the Pythagorean could say to himself: The same thing that I form within my mind I find outside in the cosmos, and the same thing that forms the inner context is in an inner harmony with the cosmos. If we have 3 x 3 things outside [in the cosmos] and have arranged them in this way, they correspond to what we have brought out in the spirit. We can form the whole of mathematics in our minds, we can form the whole of the theory of numbers, we don't need to know anything about the outside world. If we then close our eyes, the outside world will obey the laws we have devised!

This is what led Pythagoras to recognize a numerical law - and everything else that lies within it.

I would just like to draw attention to the great chemical discoveries of Lothar Meyer and the Russian Mendeleev, which are a complete confirmation of what the Pythagorean wanted with his views. I have said that the elements all combine in certain numerical ratios: Hydrogen always combines with oxygen in such a way that it is in a ratio of 8 or a multiple of 8. If we now examine the space between the individual given numbers, we get a complete regularity. We ascend from the oxygen with 16 or also from the element which has 7. The elements cannot combine with others according to a numerical ratio other than their own, but there is a regularity in these combinations.

- Lithium in a weight ratio of 7,
- Sodium in a weight ratio of 23.
- Potassium in a weight ratio of 39.

If you put these figures together, you get some strange correlations. If we take the weight ratio of 7 to 23, we get a difference of 16. If we take the weight ratio of 23 to 39, we get a difference of 16 again. There are many such consecutive triads of three consecutive substances in chemistry. We could also take other three elements and we would find that the same number spaces arise between them.

If we took the whole elements, we would always find spaces that can be expressed in numbers. We have certain substances that are grouped together quite nicely. But a number is missing in between. Let's assume we have lithium and sodium, we also have other substances and we know that there is a certain space between them; but then we are missing something in between! Now the chemist has become accustomed to something; he no longer says: There is an irregularity here, but he says: It is because we do not yet know the substance that has this numerical ratio. Many substances have been found recently. At first, we only suspected that they must exist. But later they were found. Trusting that the spirit would find it led to the spirit really finding it out.

[Uranus was found through observation. Neptune was predicted on the basis of calculations]. The laws according to which the planets move were seen. These laws did not apply to Uranus, and they said to themselves: there must be another body at a certain point in space [that deflects Uranus from its calculated orbit]. One has more confidence in the spiritual law than in sensory reality, and this has completely confirmed the spirit, has proved the spirit right.

This harmony between spirit and matter, as established by the Pythagoreans, is confirmed bit by bit by natural science. It will increasingly overcome what we see as material. It will increasingly come to the point where the apparent substance dissolves into spiritual relationships.

Matter is not merely frozen spirit, is not merely appearing spirit. It dissolves piece by piece, so that the spirit does not perceive something else, but itself. So what is emphasized today by the most diverse sides, natural science provides us with proof of this.

Annie Besant has drawn attention to similar relationships between her views and natural science. Starting from these basic views, the Pythagorean immersed himself in the world and now arrived at a view that must be particularly valuable to us because Goethe, in turn, arrived at a similar view in recent times, based on his scientific principles!

The Pythagoreans imagined the constitution of the world in such a way that this spirit, which they sought to capture in number, is limited by the unlimited and becomes perceptible by being limited.

Now the Pythagoreans imagined that all this becoming is the continuous interpenetration of the limited and the unlimited. The appearance of the unlimited as a boundary [they imagined] as a kind of matter. Matter is the indifferent that does nothing other than make the spirit visible. In order to form the entities out of matter, the spirit breathes in matter and breathes it out again into the world space. Therefore, the spirit [works] in a continuous inhalation and exhalation, a breathing process.

Goethe also uses this image, imagining this process as inhaling and exhaling the air. Goethe imagines that the earth influences itself from the outside with the air space, that it literally contracts into itself, breathes in what it needs in terms of world space and then breathes out again what it has processed within itself. It is a different air pressure when you inhale and exhale, a becoming stronger and also a becoming weaker. People left this path because they didn't want to believe in such regular ideas. [Goethe] wanted to show that the fluctuations of the barometer are not arbitrary, but essentially point back to basic fluctuations, to something that is quite regular. In the seemingly irregular processes, one can see regularity that stems from the fact that the earth breathes in air and then breathes it out again, a regularity that then produces regular fluctuations that indicate that we are dealing with inhalation and exhalation on the earth.

Goethe shows us this in an interesting way. I do not regard this as indifferent, but it seems to me that it is tremendously important that our ideas are spiritualized by such ideas. We can follow the processes in the outside world all the time, such as barometer fluctuations. If we have not grasped them, at least in terms of direction, we will not be aware of them at all. Such regular fluctuations are also found when we examine the irregular

and then subtract the regular. What remains is then irregular.

I wanted to point out that what the Pythagoreans taught is not something outdated, but that it is used in today's natural science. [The Pythagoreans approached astronomy in such a way that they also applied the spatial view of the bounded and unbounded to the cosmos.

Each time can only understand the various perceived things in the way that the state of the relevant perceptual science - astronomy, for example, and so on - is at that time. Research is carried out in the field of experience. The Pythagoreans also had to reckon with [the ideas of their time]. They placed themselves before the central fire, which represents the unity, the primordial ground of the world; that which continually breathes matter in and out and therefore brings the world into being. The stars with their regular movement represented to them a regular multiplicity, which was expressed in the numerical relationships. And what took place in the sphere below the moon was an irregularity, a continual struggle between the limited and the unlimited. But in that which lies above, the struggle is balanced to a great harmony. There the world bodies move in regular orbits. This has resulted in the regular orbits taking the place of the point, the sharply defined One. We are no longer dealing with the One, but with unity. This battle, which is constantly taking place before our eyes, is taking place between the earth and the moon, is taking place as an eternal battle. On earth, harmony and disharmony are constantly alternating. Man stands in this struggle because he is a unity. He seeks to reconnect, since he is torn out of the harmony of the world, by trying to come back into harmony with the world through what the Pythagoreans call virtue. You see that the Pythagorean penetrates from the lowest phenomena to those of human life with numerical ideas.

Now we are left with the most important things from the Pythagorean world of ideas, namely those elements of spiritual life to which the ethical sphere rises by the spirit attempting the deepest immersion into its own inner being. The Pythagoreans also had certain views on this, which were taken from cosmological ideas.

In that the Pythagoreans sought to establish an extraordinarily deep harmony with the world, with that which separates man from the whole universe, they arrived at the idea of reincarnation, of the connection between the various embodiments of all beings.

This is a matter that will occupy us in particular next time. I wanted to discuss the basic question, which was first communicated through Pythagorean physics and ethics, which was formed through such a world of ideas as has just been described, after a long period of training. One must not imagine that the communication of reincarnation or re-embodiment took place immediately! The pupil was first trained through things such as those expressed in the regularity of the world of numbers, which then led him deep into the matter. Then he was also shown what he had to do to achieve world harmony, to eliminate the so-called original sin from the world. The problem: How can the separation of the individual soul from the universe be justified? - became the great Pythagorean question.

And this question led the Pythagoreans to solve it within Pythagoreanism, and this is the basic feature of the Pythagorean training that we will talk about next time.

Question answer:

Question: [?]

Dr. Steiner's answer: The way a person breathes is intimately connected with the fact that a person can speak. If humans did not have a vertically positioned lung and a vertically

positioned larynx, they could not speak. A dog could never speak words. In general, dogs are more intelligent than parrots and starlings, but parrots and starlings can be made to speak more easily than dogs. This has to do with the whole constitution of the human lungs and larynx, and in particular with the fact that the lungs and larynx are upright. The production of articulated sounds can only take place with an upright larynx and upright lungs. Monkeys cannot produce articulated sounds, even if they can be made to walk upright. The organism is not built that way. The upright larynx exhales and inhales air in a peculiar way. This exhalation and inhalation produces articulate speech. And if we know that articulated speech is connected with the spirit, then we have the scientific possibility of the spirit taking hold in the organism. This possibility is only given in upright walking beings. Only when the body [knew how to walk] upright could the spirit take hold. Beings who still use their front limbs to move forward cannot harbor a spirit. In the Tertiary Period, namely in the Diluvial Period, we had gibbons, highly intelligent creatures. After it became colder, they migrated, but came back again and then had to live in colder climates where the plant life was not so abundant. They had to use their front legs as tools, then gradually learned to walk upright, and the spirit was then able to take possession of the brain.

Question: Can an octopus see like a human?

Answer: Kurd Laßwitz has written a fairy tale that deals with this question. It is highly probable that what comes about in the eye of a human also comes about in the eye of an octopus. One makes the crystal lens from glass, the other from rock crystal or another similar

material, and the same thing comes about through the crystal lens. In humans, the same thing is formed in another substance as in the octopus. But even if the octopus has the same image as the human being, the image must first be spiritualized, processed. Because you have a red circle in your eye, you do not yet have an object. It has to be connected with other images. We don't know whether the octopus can do this.

One could assume that the same animal is created in completely different ways. In the case of the dog, we are dealing with organically structured matter that is permeated by laws. The indifference of matter is what physicists see in the conservation of force or substance. What is used for the eye today can be used for something else tomorrow. Matter is the indeterminate. It would be different if matter had laws within itself. The same thing can consist of different material preconditions. The lawfulness does not depend on matter, but can be devised by us. That is the delightful thing for the Pythagoreans. The matter of the eye is the same as the matter of the ear. On the other hand, if one could make each of them, one would have to demand that one could see with the ears and hear with the eyes! Disharmonies arise that balance each other out again.

Question: [2] Answer: We no longer know the sublunary circle today.

[Question:] How is it that people fall so completely out of harmony?

[Answer:] The Pythagorean view is that there is no perfect harmony on earth, but a becoming of the harmonious out of disharmony. There is only a continual falling out and a drawing back into harmony. This is what forms the individual being. In the individual being we have the detached being that longs to return to harmony. The

world bodies as a whole describe their paths, which do not disturb each other. This is perfect harmony. There is also harmony and disharmony in hunger and satiety: the balance is life. There are beings at rest in themselves as opposed to those in motion. The [individualists] have restlessness within themselves. Christ says: "Where two or three are together, I am in their midst." That is a Pythagorean idea. And it is this: The Pythagorean sees the beginning in the one, in the two he sees the indeterminate added, and the completed being is where the three is added. Think of two points, connect them and you have a line. With three points you have a plane, the triangle. Something planar is only determined by the three. The three has a center, the two only has a side by side. The three has to achieve a balance. It is the spirit that connects them.

Question: [?]

Answer: The Bible is made up of the whole world. Nothing is easier than interpreting the Bible. With the esoteric interpretation, you can get it about right, but you can't know if you're getting it historically [right].

Question: [2]

Answer: Neptune would not be the last planet. In 1839, [Dawes] already communicated this. Kunowsky is a pleasing apparition.