The Rudolf Steiner Archive

[Dearly beloved!]

It is not possible to determine exactly when the Book of the Dead was written. In any case, it is one of the most important documents, because it shows us that in such early times in Egypt a world view, a deepening, prevailed which aimed strictly at a unified world and which, on the other hand, already had the strange urge in itself to understand death as a symbol, to understand death in such a way that it does not appear as the terrible in itself, but that it appears as that which can be seen as a symbol, as a mere allegory, which still stands high above [life]. If death is to be overcome, it is certain that death can only be overcome spiritually. It essentially deals with the transition from physical life to life after death - and that means nothing other than life in general. We can describe even more precisely what is contained in the Book of the Dead. It contains chants, hymns to the sun god Ra, to Osiris, the son of the sun god, hymns which are preferably put into the mouths of the dead. These dead who have made their way to the afterlife, these dead are to experience something, they are to gain knowledge [of what they have seen and what they are aware of from those who are no longer bound to the body. That is the first part. The second part consists of the dead person being held up to account in a kind of judgment for the debts he has incurred. He is weighed, and depending on the findings, his value appears in the overall structure of the universe. Those who have reached a high level will not - as is often said - come to Osiris, but they will become "Osiris. It is curious that the book is divided into three parts. The first part deals with the [sun] god Ra, the second part deals with human destiny, the third part then shows the path to reach Osiris, the path that leads to deification. This book thus represents the path to life, the path from the individual life to the total life, which is achieved through the realization and deification of man.

The details of the Book of the Dead are important in the most diverse ways for the history of the development of world views. In the Book of the Dead, for example, we find the myth of Osiris' battle with Typhon, Osiris' enemy, hatred. Isis had to find Osiris again in the universe, and she then brings forth the younger Osiris, Horus, whom she describes as the deification of the universe. We find this in the Book of the Dead.

But then we also find the doctrine of the seven-part man in it. The Egyptians thought of man as being made up of the body, the spiritual body and the mummy.

So we have three stages:
[1.] Heart, sensation or mind,
[2-] Genius and creation,
[3-] the Holy Spirit and intelligence.

These are roughly the details of this Book of the Dead, which was in any case much better known in antiquity than in later times. In later times, the awareness of the teachings as they are expressed in the Book of the Dead has been lost. However, we often find the teachings of the Book of the Dead again in Greece, and the entire Greek spiritual life in the post-Pythagorean period can only be understood if one assumes that [its] views were the teachings of this Book of the Dead, the tripartite division of the human path of knowledge and the eventual merging into the Osiris nature. If one assumes that they were transplanted to Greece and that essentially the same views lived there. However, it must be noted that the Egyptians did not have an intermediate stage that played a greater role among the Greeks, namely the myth developed with [a certain sense of] beauty. The Greeks loved to embellish everything with beauty. We have therefore been compelled to regard the entire Greek religion, the entire Greek world view, which stands between Pythagoreanism and Platonism, as an aesthetic one. We can do this if we see it as born out of Greek myth, but in its spiritualized form.

We know the Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone, the myth of the Argonauts and so on. However, we can always assume - and we have to hold on to this - that the myth exists in a threefold meaning:

[1] The first meaning is that in its immediate form as the purely naturalistic conception,
2. then as a human, as a symbol and
3. thirdly as the divine.]

And the third, the divine, was the concept that was taught only to a select few, only to a few who had prepared themselves for it. We can already prove this historically. We are told of Samothrace, an island, that the deities there were nothing other than names for other deities. However, it is not to be believed that they were the same as the names of Greek or Egyptian deities. For outsiders, they had the same names. But for the insiders, they were deeper understandings of the entire myths and stories of the gods.

The best-known Greek myth is that of Demeter and her daughter Persephone and then the myth of Dionysus, which has already been mentioned several times. Demeter, one of the supreme female Greek deities, was first understood in a naturalistic sense. She had a daughter with Zeus, Persephone. She was stolen by Hades, the god of the underworld. Hades had asked to be allowed to take this daughter as his wife in the underworld. She was only to remain in the upper world temporarily. She was to remain two thirds in the upper world and one third in the underworld. This myth, which is alive everywhere in Greece in its naturalistic meaning, was also that which was to be found in certain mysteries, namely that on which the Eleusinian Mysteries were based. This myth also had a threefold meaning. The naturalistic meaning lies simply in the fact that one understands the actual as such, that one has a mythological history of the gods. The second conception would then be something that took place in [Greek] life, and that was the marriage of the Ionian spirit with the Doric.

The Greek people were divided into tribes. Among the most important were the Dorians and the Ionians. The myth of Demeter had originated among the Dorians, and the Ionians had adopted it and mixed it with the myth of Dionysus. We are interested in the Dionysus myth because it leads to an esoteric view. Dionysus is also a son of Zeus and Demeter. He was torn to pieces and only managed to save his heart. From this, Zeus had formed the younger Dionysus. But he could no longer take the limbs. It is therefore the case that the world represents the scattered limbs. This therefore represents the marriage of the Dorian Persephone with the Ionian Dionysus. The fusion of these two views has thus taken place in this myth.

But what remains to be noted is the third, the divine conception. We can only understand this historically if we stick to the sparse information we have. We are first referred to the temple in which the service of Demeter takes place. This Demeter service is a service in which we encounter the three deities mentioned. Demeter herself is one of the greatest deities of Greece, symbolically shaped, with the inscription: "I am the origin of the soul, I am the origin of the spirit." At her side, Persephone is presented to us with the inscription: "I am death and carry within me the secret of life." Her brother Dionysus is presented to us with an even stranger inscription: "I am death, I am life, I am rebirth and adorned with wings." - If we understand this, we come to the interpretation of one of the most important Greek myths. Demeter loses her daughter. She has to give her Persephone to Hades. She could return to her mother if she had not already partaken of the fruit of the pomegranate with Hades and was therefore unable to return completely. This Persephone is supposed to save her brother. Only this makes it possible - now in a deeper sense - for Persephone to return, for Dionysus to sacrifice himself. We have to look at these two in context again. We must recognize that sacrifice is what matters here. This is shown to us by the fact that Orpheus - who is originally credited with having communicated the deeper content of this to the Greek people - was also sacrificed, for he is also said to have been torn apart and to have lived on as a spirit by having flowed out into the world matter. The child of eternal life must be sacrificed to Hades, to Pluto. We can only understand this if we see the material world in Pluto. Thus, according to the esoteric view, we see in Demeter the universal spirituality, the primordial mother of intelligence, and in Hades the material world. In the whole Persephone myth we see the necessity of Persephone's falling away from her mother. The daughter must enter matter. She must partake of the pomegranate of the underworld. Now she can no longer save herself from matter and therefore a second sacrifice is necessary. Persephone's brother, Dionysus, must sacrifice himself again. He must allow his [own] spiritual nature to flow out into the gross nature, so that Persephone now enters into a spiritual marriage with her brother, but can flow back again to the original spirit of the primordial mother, Demeter. This mystery of the spirituality's necessary departure from itself, this immersion of the spirits in the material and this longing of the spirit to return to the spiritual is expressed in the Demeter myth.

This was the vivid experience that was to be taught to those who were introduced to the Eleusinian Mysteries. They were to be given the urge to find their way back from matter to the spiritual primordial mother. This is what lived in Greece in the spirit of a few chosen ones and what carried the whole world view between Pythagoras and Plato. What lived as the deeper spirit in these personalities from Empedocles through Anaxagoras to Socrates and Plato sometimes appears to be merely a logical chain of thought, as presented to us by the philosophers. But it is an exposition of Greek myth, an exposition that was cultivated wherever a deeper foundation was sought. This is what appears to them as a mere logical chain of thought.

I would like to point out another myth, which was cultivated even more frequently than the Demeter myth, which is perhaps easier to understand, and which was cultivated in order to gradually lead initiates into a deeper spiritual understanding of the world. I would like to refer to the myth of the Argonaut voyage. This shows in each of its individual sentences that it can only be understood as the symbolic clothing of a deeper wisdom. Phrixos and his sister Helle set off on the ram [...] to the barbarian king. On the way, Helle falls into the sea and Phrixos alone reaches the coast on the ram. When they reached the barbarian people, the ram was sacrificed to the king. But the ram's skin was hung up in the sacred grove of the gods and guarded by a great dragon. Jason, together with Orpheus, Heracles, Theseus, Castor and Pollux, Meleager, Peleus, Neleus, Admetus, Pirithoos and many others, undertakes to retrieve this ram's skin [- the golden fleece]. These are the great heroes of Greece. It is significant that Jason, with the representatives of the highest Greek spirituality, undertakes to retrieve the skin. He actually wins the skin and brings it back. The dragon guarding the skin is defeated by Jason. The dragon's teeth are then sown, and out of these grow fierce men who fight each other. Finally, in short, he gets the fleece with the help of the sorceress Medea. On the way back, however, Medea decides to dismember [her] little brother Apsyrtos. The father Aietes collects the pieces and therefore does not reach the fugitives. The fleece is brought back to Greece.

We must also interpret this in a threefold sense. Firstly natural, secondly human and thirdly divine. [As a human event it is of no interest, but in its divine meaning this myth perhaps leads most deeply into the Greek intellectual world.] Phrixos is divine vision, that which points us to the abyss of divine being, to the premonition of an infinite depth. Nothing else is expressed in the personality of Phrixos. [Brightness is the personality, the representative of man before his fall into sin, for whom the struggle of the spirit with materiality has not yet existed] - the undivided humanity, which is connected with nothing other than the infinite vision of infinity. [Both set out on the path to the most sacred thing they have. And the representatives of the human soul first come to the sacred grove of the gods in order to sacrifice to it and to begin the path of life with this human soul]. We have only one other person in the Argonaut train. Phrixos begins his journey through life into the realm of the barbarians on the other side of the sea. This is to be understood as the realm of passions, the realm of sensuality. The human soul is to be sacrificed to the realm of materiality. It is to be sacrificed to the waves and bustle of the world. As a result, one thing is lost, the original innocence. It is initially submerged, lost. It is initially something that has flowed out into existence. [It is something that is initially completely lost, which is why it has sunk into the Hellespont. The soul is led into life, where we have nothing but a dark urge, where we must find our way back to the higher life]. But [the soul] must be redeemed anew, just as Persephone was redeemed by Dionysus. It must be redeemed. What had to be sacrificed to life must be redeemed. It must be redeemed here by Jason, the Greek hero. The ram is sacrificed to the gods. Only the ram's skin, that which surrounds the human soul as a shell, is first hung up in the sacred grove of the gods and carefully guarded by the dragon. This is initially nothing other than what is given in the Book of the Dead. [The ram's skin] is the representative of enlightenment, of knowledge. It must first be redeemed from the fury of the terrible powers that lurk before it. The king's son Jason must overcome these forces through knowledge in conjunction with spiritual and physical forces. He must lead this ram's skin back to Greece, supported by Medea, a female figure. I have already pointed out that the female figure signifies a state of consciousness in Greek. The soul must be redeemed with the help of Medea's magical power. From this immersion she can then be led back up to her deification, her divinization. That is the deeper meaning of the Argonaut saga.

The fact that the young son of Aietes, Medea's brother, has to be killed so that Medea's father cannot reach [the fleeing Jason] also has its significance. The one who has achieved this must leave behind many things that have been in his life. He has to leave some things behind, for the reason that [he cannot be caught up] on the path to deeper knowledge. This is how the saga of the Argonauts concludes. Basically, it is nothing more than a different version, more tailored to the individuality of man, of the myth that we also encounter in the Demeter myth.

This conception of the Greek myth then confronts us in a philosophically one-sided formation in a personality that represents a kind of fall from grace for the Greek world view: in Parmenides, the founder of the Eleatic school of philosophy. He first pointed out in an intellectual or rational way that sensual knowledge cannot satisfy man. He pointed out that man cannot get to the bottom of things and that the weighing up and weighing down of the world cannot be the truth, but that the truth must be something much deeper, that it can only be purely spiritual. He first put this into this form: true existence can only be achieved through pure thinking, through the deepest knowledge, while the senses only present us with a dream. - Parmenides thus divides the whole of existence into two parts, into sensual illusion on the one hand and intellectual, mental existence on the other. But there is still something that he could not find, and that is the ego. He could not find the figure of Dionysus in the figure of Persephone, in the urge to emerge from the sensual, the spirit. Parmenides did not take this [step]. He only saw that which is enchanted in the sensual world and on the other side Demeter [and Hades], the materiality. But he was unable to find the path that unites the two.

In a slightly different form, we encounter the same thing in Empedocles, who said that the primordial being had dissolved into a series of elements, into fire, water, earth and air. In these four elements he saw nothing other than individual eternal manifestations of the primordial being, the eternal world spirit. And in every single thing he saw certain mixtures of the four elements, even in man. The fact that the human being also consists of a mixture of the same elements as the world means that the human being can understand the world. The same can be recognized by the same. This is the same thing that Goethe says:

Were not the eye sun-like,
it could never behold the sun.
If God's own power were not in us,
how could the divine delight us?

This view was already held by Empedocles. He even had the view that the essence reigns in all being, [so that] he already [anticipated] the saying in Goethe's "Faust": "Exalted Spirit, you gave me, gave me everything ..." [anticipated]. Empedocles already recognized this totality of being. He believed that before it rises to the higher, it must pass through the lower stages. The spirit must pass through the stages of inorganic, elementary existence, the stages from plant to animal existence up to the form of man, and always follow them. This is why he sees love and hate as what brings the elements together. Empedocles thus describes life as a constant struggle between love and hate. In this way, the worldly sage also repeats the battle between [Osiris-Isis and Typhon] and the battle between Persephone and [Hades].

So we see in the Empedoclean doctrine nothing other than the elaboration of what [Empedocles] could get to know in the Greek mystery schools. We shall see that he does not consider anything incomprehensible that is described to the philosophers as incomprehensible.

We are told that human existence is not completed in the single individuality, but that this human existence was already there before it entered the individual personality, and that it will also be there again in other forms and shapes after it leaves this personality. In short, [Empedocles] stands on the standpoint of the transmigration of souls, of metempsychosis. He was initiated into the teachings of the Pythagoreans. The philosophers could not understand how Empedocles arrived at this doctrine if he assumed that the soul is a mere mixture of the four elements, but still ascribes to it a special existence in that it can take on different forms. We will understand that Empedocles sees in these four elements nothing other than the one eternal primordial being that has poured itself into existence, and that we therefore have to see in them only a special form of existence that flows back again to the primordial being. Thus in the spiritual conception of Empedocles we have something higher than the merely sensual. Empedoclean philosophy is nothing more than a philosophical dissection of the Argonaut legend, the legend of Demeter and Persephone and so on.

These teachings were then adopted by Socrates and Plato, and we are not to understand the historical Socrates in the figure of Socrates when we encounter him in the Platonic dialogues. Socrates appears to Plato as the master of the school, and he represents the school in his conversations. Socrates was regarded by Plato as such a leader. In the Platonic Discourses, it is not the historical Socrates who is the main subject, but the spiritual leader, the one who leads from the lowest levels of knowledge up to the highest. We cannot understand the meaning of the Platonic Conversations if we do not understand them as a mental image of mystical instruction, as instruction and guidance from the lowest to the highest levels of knowledge.

The other day I mentioned the talk about the immortality of the soul. This is usually understood as if immortality were to be proven by a logical thread. But it is not a question of proving the immortality of the soul, and what has been written about whether the proof has succeeded or failed. If it is said that the proof is no longer congenial to us today, then the person concerned only shows that he has not grasped the whole spirit of the "Phaidon". It is not a question of proving whether the soul is immortal, but of something quite different. We can assume that Plato also went through the schools of [the] Sophists. Protagoras was the founder of the "phrase: he is portrayed [in the Platonic dialog "Protagoras"] as someone who led knowledge astray. But we must not forget that Socrates was a profound [ironist]. We must not forget that the Greeks had their own conception of irony, that they understood it as something that was necessary for the illumination of the whole world view. Socrates fought the sophists with irony. What are the sophists? The sentences uttered by Protagoras characterize them:

["Man is the measure of all things, of those that are, that they are - of those that are not, that they are not." And:] We cannot prove anything rigorously. One thing can be said of every thing, but the opposite can also be said of every thing. This seemed to be the destruction of all knowledge. Even today it seems as if the sophists were playing a vain game with ideas, as if they wanted nothing more than to talk about every thing. Vanity was their purpose, as the measure of all things was only purpose. The Sophists by no means took this absurd and downright frivolous standpoint. The Sophists are, if I may say so, the personalities within Greek intellectual life who wanted to reduce to absurdity the knowledge that flows purely from the intellect, but who also put into practice in a different way the old Apollonian sentence: "Man is the measure of all things", which means nothing other than that man has to rise and seek within himself. - Do not recognize yourself with random intellectual knowledge, but immerse yourself in your true self. - They adjusted themselves to pure logic on a trial basis in order to lead them all the more surely into error. You can prove the one, and you can prove the other. But the sophists only wanted to show the worthlessness of logic. It is worthless to stop at what we encounter externally, at purely intellectual knowledge. Man would have to be just as unsatisfied in this knowledge as he would have to be unsatisfied within a purely mindless sensory life.

Plato had become acquainted with this sophism, and he apparently fought it, not because he regarded it as a worthless phenomenon, but as an irony. He took the standpoint of Protagoras, and Protagoras always falls short of Socrates, who does not want to grasp the world through reason, but through immediate life and through the mind. But this is not a different point of view from the one put forward by the Sophists. The sophists wanted to be opposed because they wanted to expose the absurdity of these propositions in order to show where each proposition leads. Thus Socrates, by leading beyond sophistry, led to deeper knowledge. He liberates his students from the belief in reason. This redemption is expressed to us in all those conversations [in which the sophists, Socrates' immediate predecessors, are combated]. The Discourses are written for the sole purpose of disabusing people of the belief in the provability of higher knowledge. That is the purpose of the Platonic Discourse. No one will believe that a flower can be proved. No one will seek proof that a flower exists. It is enough if we experience existence. You cannot prove a thing. You can prove the connection between things. You can prove that some fact must be there, from a context that you have already perceived. But you can never prove a thing that you have absolutely not perceived. So it is not a question of proving something logically, but of expanding the field of experience, of opening up the field of experience into a metaphysical realm. Something should be opened up that lies behind experience. [So it should not say: Here you have experience, and you should pay attention to something that lies behind it. It should not be deduced logically, but experienced spiritually. It should not be proven, but experienced.

This is also the case in the "Phaidon". You have to experience what Socrates means by "soul". He does not want to prove that the soul is immortal, but he wants to lead his students to experience the soul in the same way as the body. The "Phaidon" is about the discovery of the soul. It is about experiencing the soul. When his students have really experienced "soul, then [its] characteristics will soon become clear to them. If you want to be shown a flower, you show him the flower and don't let him prove it.

This is what is meant by the Socratic method. The Socratic method is usually understood in a much more trivial way. The Socratic method means nothing other than the opening of a completely new field of experience, the opening of new senses, the opening of a new field of experience, and the teaching of Socrates is such that every person can be led to such higher [cognitive] powers. And the leading to such powers in the Socratic method is the conversation.

We will find in the conversations the most profound method and the truest mysticism, and we will see the form in which [Greek] mysticism has expressed itself in the most profound and experiential way. I am convinced that Plato's teaching can only be understood superficially, that the doctrine of ideas can only be seen as an emptiness of ideas, if one does not draw this doctrine of ideas from the depths of Greek spiritual life, if one does not take into account the tragedy of life that the myth of Demeter expresses by showing that the dearest thing Demeter has must first fall away in order to then seek the way back again. And in the Argonaut legend, it is depicted that man must lose himself on the path of life in order to be able to redeem himself again with the help of his new powers. That saga thus expresses to us the deep tragedy that lies in the fact that [knowledge] must first be lost, sunk into the depths of materiality, and that it can only be found again by way of complete self-denial - and only by giving up many a love. And this expresses that this rediscovery of the highest knowledge is linked with the true redemption of this knowledge, with the finding of the infinite in the finite, with the overcoming of individuality, that therefore this knowledge can only be achieved through one of the most original forces that rule in man; and this again expresses itself meaningfully through the emergence of human vision, that which Phrixos has to sacrifice first, the vision which leads us into the indeterminate and into the deepest depths, which leads us to the point that we can never be satisfied and that we can only find ourselves on the perpetual path back to Demeter. This realization means the infinite path to rediscover lost knowledge. This is expressed in the distinction between the lower and higher consecrations.

When Schelling passed from his youth to a later age, he distinguished the teachings of his youth, which express the most spiritual and profound. He later expressed this philosophy of his youth as a lower consecration compared to his later one, because the height of that vision had dawned on him, in which he recognized that there are abyss-like depths that can never be reached [with the ordinary powers of thought]. The realization of certain spiritual powers to encompass this world is what he calls [higher] consecration. To lose this faith altogether in comparison to the lower consecration and to believe and experience the omnipotence of the infinite depth, which has been lost to us, is the infinite love into which the divine principle has flowed and can be found again through this infinite. This is what he calls the "higher consecration."

Answer to the question:

Question about the sacrifice of Abraham.

These teachings of the Old Testament are a distortion. Jewish secret teachings then emerge, in which these things are then pulled together again. It is the same as in the legends of Demeter, Persephone and Dionysus. In them the doctrine of man is carried out in a tangible way. The Abraham sacrifice would correspond to the second stage of the human stages, the necessity of sacrificing one's loved one. It is undoubtedly taken from religious systems in which this school of thought lives.

It must be assumed for a whole series of Christian myths that in the year 1 there was no awareness of the esoteric side at all. Paul was the founder of Christianity, which has lived in the church right up to our time.

If I interpret the "Sistine Madonna" esoterically and someone tells me that Raphael knew nothing about it, I say: Yes, it doesn't need to be. If that is attempted, I have to be pleased and regard it as a perfectly justifiable thing. I am always pleased when people try to show this. The philosophers in the pulpits don't get involved in esotericism. The most important is Kühnemann.

In Empedocles, there is something we cannot understand. We can only present [it] as something incomprehensible; all modern research deals only with the purely natural conception of the matter and finally only with the question of its origin, with the question: How could something like this have developed?

My dear Friends,

If now we would proceed to consider man from the three points of view—the occult, the theosophical and the philosophical—it will be necessary to speak first of the occult point of view. And we shall do best if we start by giving a description of how in the history of the evolution of mankind one or another human being has succeeded in raising himself to occult vision of the world.

As we said in the introductory lecture, there have naturally never been more than a few who were found ripe to partake in all that went on in the Mysteries and places of occult teaching and education. It is therefore of the development of these few that we shall have to speak.

It will, however, also have been clear to you from many other lectures I have given that we stand now at a point in time when through the popularising of theosophical knowledge more and more people will have to take part in occult life, instead of the very few who have done so in the past. So that what we have to consider today concerns everyone who takes an interest in theosophy and realises that occult knowledge—the knowledge, that is, of the hidden aspects of existence—must no longer remain secret, but must spread farther and farther, in accordance with the demands of a continually developing humanity.

A man who set out to attain occult knowledge had in the first place to turn his gaze away from the external world and direct it upon the forces of his own soul. Since he had, however, at the same time to remain a man of action in the external world, his occult development was, so to say, his own affair, was a matter that concerned himself alone In the world he continued to be a man among men, with all the duties that life had brought to him. This fact found striking expression in the very first step he had to take for the development of his soul forces. For the first thing the pupil had to do may be described in the following words he had to reconcile himself to his karma in respect of all that concerned his will. Reconciliation with karma (or destiny)—that was the first thing demanded of a man who was undergoing occult development.

Please do not imagine that such a reconciliation with one's karma necessitates the forming of a comprehensive theory about karma what is meant is much more a particular kind of culture and education of the life of feeling. Think how it is with a man who is beginning on a path of occult development Before the moment of time when he makes this beginning, he has lived in the world as a man among men. He has acquired a certain standing in life, he has made himself master of certain thoughts which enable him to carry out satisfactorily the external actions that his calling demands. He has also come to recognise certain duties or obligations that custom and society have laid upon him. It can at the very outset be assumed that any man who has not responded to what the world demanded of him, any man, that is, who does not want loyally to fulfil his obligations to the world around, would never have the urge to undergo occult development In fact, as a general rule, those who could be called to occult development were men who showed great ability in the positions in which life had placed them and who were also desirous of being in every respect equal to the obligations laid upon them by custom and society. The capacities and faculties a man shows in his position in life, the round of duties also that he recognises as incumbent upon him,—these are the very things that constitute karma in the positive sense. Here a man's karma comes to expression. And the first demand made upon a man who was preparing to step outside the bounds of his position in life as such and enter upon an investigation of the spiritual world, was that he should not in any way deviate from the karma of his life, but maintain it untouched. This meant that he made a promise, to himself and to those who were assisting him to penetrate into the occult world, not to make use in his outer standing in life of whatever should be acquired in the field of occult research. His will and action had to be so directed that others who were observing him would not be aware of any marked difference in the whole behaviour of his life since he had begun to take steps on the path of occult research. The power given him in occult research must never be allowed to interfere in the external life of the physical plane. This is what is meant by “reconciliation with karma.” The pupil forgoes all advantages that might be gained by occult means for his position in life.

We shall find that a right and regular following of the path does, as a matter of fact, lead often to a certain improvement in the pupil's external standing in life. This, however, has nothing to do with the obligation that has to be deliberately undertaken by one who sets out on the occult path. “You shall not attempt to make any use of your occult development to acquire an advantage over those who stand with you in life, but you shall direct your life in accordance with the very same rules which you have followed hitherto.” Such was the injunction constantly laid upon those who underwent occult development It was the first renunciation they were called upon to make,—to forgo all application to an egoistic end of the means acquired in occult life. What has just been said is intended to be taken quite exactly and literally; please receive the words as they stand, neither more nor less. You will observe that they are concerned with what the pupil is in a position to do, or is under obligation to do, in the external world by reason of the karma that is laid upon him.

From the very outset the egoistic will of man is thus consciously and deliberately excluded from all occult striving. This factor alone brings about a change in the whole mood and character of the pupil. If you reflect for a moment, you will see that this must be so. Hitherto the round of duties that devolve on him in his external position in life have been the one and only world in which he lived and to which he devoted himself. Now he takes upon himself the obligation to continue to live in this world in accordance with the same rules as he has followed hitherto, and yet at the same time to have forces to spare for something else quite different. This means that a boundary is set up for him between two regions within both of which he is active. A world now opens before him to which he previously never gave a thought. That is a fact of extraordinary importance. For verily man begins a new chapter in his life, when fresh interests suddenly enter and assert themselves strongly and persistently.

This then was what happened at the very beginning of occult development; a man's whole feeling and interest were claimed for a new world, a world in which he had previously had neither part nor place. Strict watch had to be kept on the pupil, especially in the more ancient Mysteries and schools of occult development, lest he be brought into any disharmony with his circle of external interests. It was sternly required of him to fulfil his duty in the widest sense in respect of the demands made by his calling or by his connection with the State or other form of community. Those who made any show of not being willing to do this or of rebelling against the duties of external life were not admitted into places of occult instruction. I am here simply relating facts. Study the history of occult development, and you will find that those who in outer life showed themselves rebellious in one direction or another against the whole ordering of life within which they lived were not members of any Mystery school or place of occult instruction.

The second thing required of the pupil was far more difficult of attainment. Consider the case of a man who has given himself and his teachers the promise of which we have spoken. He has had to declare: “I will not suffer to enter into my will, as it makes itself felt on the physical plane, anything that has come to me as a result of occult research.” He takes with him into the realm of occult research the entire forces of his soul, with the exception of the will. The will is held back in accordance with his promise; but every other faculty that he has at his disposal on the physical plane—judgment, fancy and imagination, memory, emotions,—all these forces and faculties of the soul with which he was previously active on the physical plane, can still be actively applied on that plane.

Take the intellect or understanding,—that capacity of the soul which enables us to discriminate and to form judgments about the facts of life. We could not get on without it in ordinary life; we have to apply it at every turn. Now let us suppose we become a member of an occult society or school. We achieve certain results in occult research; we acquire, let us say, knowledge about what we do in our external standing in life. We are not allowed to apply this knowledge with our will. But to begin with, there is nothing to prevent us from calling in the help of all the higher means we have from occult research in order to make intelligent observation of the things and persons that we meet with on the physical plane. Thus, we may not allow the results of occult research to flow into our action or into the resolves of our will, but we may allow occult research to have its influence upon the way we form our thoughts and conclusions on the kingdoms of nature as well as on our fellowmen,—in effect, upon the whole way in which we stand in the ordinary world with our intellect.

You will observe that a rigid self-discipline will here be necessary. What is easier for a man who meets other men and has to take active part in their lives than to apply what he knows? Suppose, for example, he is able by the help of his intellect to perceive that he has to do with a morally inferior person, nothing is easier than that he should act accordingly. It would be the natural and obvious thing to do.

The occultist, however, may not take this line. By means of what occult research gives him he can, it is true, give wings to his understanding and have clearer insight than he could before into the character of a fellowman, can recognise perhaps that he is a morally inferior person; he can also regulate accordingly what he does to this person, for he has accepted no obligation in regard to his fellowman but only in regard to his own standing in life. He is under no necessity to refrain from applying his will in respect of what he does for the other person. What he does, however, on his own behalf,—for that he is under obligation to be reconciled with his karma and not to make use of the knowledge that accrues to him when he applies his intellect, reinforced with the means of occult research.

Let us suppose an actual case of a man who is at the stage of which we are speaking. Had he not become an occultist, he would perhaps have met the other person and not recognised him to be morally inferior,—with the result that he would have allowed himself to be taken in by him. Obviously such things can and do happen in the world, as you will all be ready to admit. One can be mistaken and take a man for better than he is, and then find oneself deceived.

The occultist has here an advantage He is able to recognise the moral inferiority of the person in question. But he has for the time being—please note the words—he has for the time being put himself under obligation not to apply this occult knowledge with his will, that is to say, not to apply it to his own standing in life. He has to know that the other is a morally inferior man and at the same time to conduct himself exactly as before; he has to put up with all the ways of the other just as though he had never acquired occult knowledge about him.

Here you have a striking illustration of the rigid self-denial a beginner in occultism has to practise. He must draw a sharp line of distinction between what he can know without occult research and what comes to him through occult research and might give him an unfair advantage in life. He who is so fortunate—being blessed either with natural talents or with particularly favourable conditions of life—as to recognise, without being an occultist, the moral inferiority of the other person, is inclined to consider the occultist a fool, because he waives any advantage that might accrue to himself from the knowledge. And this frequently happens. Other people through some good fortune or other are able to perceive what the occultist also perceives, only does not act upon, being under obligation to refrain from doing so. You will constantly find this happen,—as you will also find it happen that one or another who has made the promise fails to keep it. That is, however, his own affair! We may, if we will, consider the occultist a fool because he lets someone else get the advantage of him, but we must not let that lead us to conclude that he has no means for perceiving the character of men.

We have then this second stage: forgoing the use of the will for our own egoistic ends, we apply our understanding in the external physical world. The occult teachers of olden times allowed their pupils to remain rather long at this stage. For a considerable time the pupils had to go through the world learning to observe more deeply and with increasing penetration and insight not only their fellowmen but also the other kingdoms of nature, and yet all the time continuing to walk the path of ordinary life in exactly the same way as before. This meant they had to practise a very severe self-discipline, for they must learn never to place into the service of egoism the advantages their mind and spirit afforded them. Nor was this all; the whole experience brought them a step further in another direction as well.

When, after the intellect has spoken, the will comes behind and adds the action which is the natural sequence of what the intellect has said, then this intellect does not evolve nearly so much as when it is used by itself, completely isolated from the sphere of the will. If a man excludes himself as a being of will and egoism from a realm into which he enters by applying his intellect and understanding to the whole surrounding world, then he becomes increasingly able to detect fine differences. His understanding grows subtle and delicate. His faculty of judgment and discrimination grows steadily stronger.

The pupil has now absolved the second stage of occult development, the stage we may call the “cultivation of the will-emancipated understanding,” and is ready to go on to the next.

Having for a long time applied his understanding with all keenness and insight, the pupil must then begin to renounce even the use of this understanding. This step is a very difficult one. The pupil has to understand and judge as he did before he became an occultist. In respect of the objects of the external physical plane he must use only the power of understanding and judgment which he had previously. All that he has acquired on the occult path in the way of deeper understanding and that has brought him untold good and has meant a definite advance for his spirit,—all this he has now to shut out of his spiritual activity; he may only handle matters of quite ordinary knowledge. That which he has striven after so keenly and energetically for a long time, namely, the strengthening of his understanding, he must lay aside, he must absolutely root it out of his soul, in so far as conscious application of it is concerned, and say to himself: As I go about and fulfil my life on the physical plane, I must think and judge and discriminate as I did before my occult development, using only the degree of cleverness to which I had then attained. The pupil has, so to speak, to force himself to be again as stupid as he was before his understanding was sharpened.

What becomes of the understanding which he has now forgone? He must not now apply it. He has done so for a long time, but he may do so no more. What becomes in any case of the results of our power of judgment and understanding when we refrain from putting them to direct use? They pass over into memory. This is the next step. All the knowledge gained by the sharpening of the power of intellect has to become memory. The pupil must not advance any further in the cultivation of his intellect, he must also refrain from applying his strengthened intellect, must not desire to gain with his intellect any further knowledge about the connections of the world. That which he has already acquired by means of his strengthened understanding, he must look for in his memory; ever and again it must rise up in memory. He shall endeavour to bring it about that the knowledge he has gained becomes like the thoughts he had, say ten or twenty years ago,—thoughts he no longer thinks, but only remembers.

In occult schools such as the school of Pythagoras in olden time, and in many a Mystery school of Asia Minor, the selection of pupils was very strict. Only those were considered ripe who could be trusted to keep the vow not to let flow into their egoistic will the results of the cultivation of the intellect. They were then educated for a very long time in the cultivation of the intellect. In all possible ways they were shown first how to distinguish things and then how to combine and connect them again, and they developed a keener sense of discrimination than it is possible to attain in ordinary life. The greatest importance was attached in rightly conducted schools of ancient and medieval times to this cultivation through long periods of time of the power of judgment.

Then the pupil has to make this further, second renunciation. He has to vow to himself and to his teacher that he will cease to judge any more the things he sees on the physical plane, cease to employ in regard to them the power of judgment he has acquired with his understanding. Nor may he indulge in a critical attitude to the teachings imparted to him. All he may do is to compare what he receives from his teacher with what he has himself previously acquired through his own power of judgment. He must not make any criticism, he must be no more than a listener who compares what he now hears with what he has himself acquired with his sharpened intellect. Such is the requirement of the next stage of occult development, which may be called the “elimination of the sharpened power of the intellect and the restriction of the inner soul life to memory.” Fancy and imagination were still allowed play; these might reproduce the remembered ideas and opinions in symbols and in imaginative pictures.

Memory and fantasy—these two powers of the soul came as it were, into their own, and were able to manifest in their full effectiveness. For now they stood alone, forming as it were a pure distillate out of the rest of the soul life, instead of being perpetually influenced and counselled by the judgment of the intellect.

Therewith had the pupil taken a further step in occult development. The time he had to pass in this stage was generally spent in receiving communications, in the form of ideas, of the recognised truths of occultism in so far as these had already become a theosophy. The pupils stood there with such forces as they had already acquired by the exercise of their power of judgment, remembering what they had learned and at the same time opening themselves to the influence of what was imparted by their teachers.

It goes without saying that the length of time passed in this stage of development varied very much in the several Mystery schools, according as it was thought necessary for the general requirements of human evolution to impart more or less of occult secrets to those who were undergoing occult development in order to fit them to become leaders of mankind. For the most part, however, this stage of development took quite a considerable time.

The next task to which the occult pupil had to address himself was to summon up all his strength in an endeavour to extinguish and wipe out of consciousness even the memories and the symbolic paintings of the fancy, as well as also the ideas—be it noted!—he had acquired by his own efforts. This was in truth a task of quite peculiar difficulty, and it is, ordinarily speaking, impossible to conceive how a pupil could shoulder successfully such a task. You will be the better able to imagine that a pupil could master such a task—namely, to pour out complete forgetfulness over all that he had acquired by his own powers—when you take into consideration that such pupils had already learned to curb and restrain their wills, had already practised the severe self-discipline we have described. For when, instead of allowing the will free play, they were obliged to keep it under strict restraint, they acquired thereby great reserve forces in the will. It was literally so. For a man grows stronger and stronger in his soul, when he is in this way compelled to restrain his will outwardly and allow nothing whatever of the results of spiritual development to flow into it. It makes him so strong that he becomes at last able to take the great resolve to repress and obliterate from consciousness all that he has acquired in his occult training and has up to now been holding in remembrance. As one erases an idea that one cannot make use of in life, so has all this to be entirely erased. Such was the unconditional demand.

You are not to imagine that those who were occult pupils in this sense became blind followers of their teachers, receiving on authority all that was imparted to them. That was by no means the case. Easy believers in authority are generally also those who in a light kind of way apply at once their perfectly ordinary intelligence to pronounce judgment on what they hear. But those who have first sharpened their power of judgment and then, holding only in remembrance what they have acquired by it, have let occult instruction work upon them through the medium of memory and of fantasy, will most assuredly be no easy believers in authority, rather will they receive what occult instruction imparts in the same way as we receive what Nature tells us. Such will be the attitude of the occult pupil to the instruction that is now given to him, after he has passed through the previous stages.

The teachers themselves also took care that their words should work in the way that Nature works; there was accordingly no need to charge their pupils to have this or that opinion or thought. It was actually so that the pupils, after all they had undergone in the development of their powers of understanding and discrimination, met the words of their teachers as we meet, shall I say, a sunrise, or a wind-swept sea or some other natural phenomenon, which we observe with the desire to learn all we can about it,—not approaching it critically, for then we would never grow really acquainted with it. Those know least of all the inner power and might of a phenomenon in Nature who approach it with sympathy or antipathy. In the very same way in which one observes Nature herself did the occult pupil now observe what was given to him in occult instruction.

When the pupils have continued in this experience for a while, allowing only memory and fantasy to be active within them, applying their understanding to their external calling in life and to that alone, a time comes when they have to enter on a period of inner quiet and rest. They must forget their own powers and destroy their own attainments. For they can only attain complete inner rest of soul when even the memories and imaginations that they have acquired during their occult training are blotted out of consciousness.

The soul had to be made empty; and then, when it was empty, when the egoistic will and the egoistic understanding, and also the egoistic memory and the egoistic fancy were all driven out,—then an absolutely new world opened before the soul. There had first to be this emptying in order that the new world might be able to find entrance into the soul.

You must familiarise yourselves with the fact, that really and truly it was a new world that penetrated into the empty soul,—an altogether new world! You will, therefore, not be surprised if this world has strange qualities and characteristics. For what do we mean by strange? We call a thing strange when we find it contradicts our previous experience. Look around you in the world today and observe how often when some statement is made, people reject it right away. What reason do they give? They say: “That statement is contradictory.” What they mean is that according to the power of judgment they have so far been able to attain, they find the statement to be in contradiction to everything else they know; they then jump to the conclusion that they have scored a point over the man who has put forward the statement, just because they can point to a contradiction in it.

It is a fact that when one begins to speak quite openly of things, it always has the result that people point to contradictions and declare that what has been said must necessarily be false, because it contains a contradiction. We need to recognise that on this path we shall indeed meet with contradictions, for we are approaching something that cannot possibly have any similarity with the world that has been ours hitherto; we shall have to reconcile ourselves to complete and utter contradictions when this new world approaches us, for it can only be described in ideas which must needs appear to us as contradictory. It is inevitable that this should be so; the new world would not be a new world if it were in complete harmony with the old and never contradicted it in any way!

It should therefore not surprise us that when we come to describe the world man enters when he attains the peace of soul which follows the stage of forgetfulness, the first characteristic can only be given in words that, from the point of view of the world to which we are accustomed, are directly contradictory.

There are three things man finds when he has come to the stage we have described,—three things that can only be characterised by making use of expressions that are in themselves contradictory when regarded from the point of view of what man knows of the external world. These three things man learns to know when he really enters what we may call the super-sensible world.

The first is the unmanifest light. Look around you in the world! Can you not see light everywhere? It is of the very nature of light to reveal itself and be manifest. And yet the first thing man learns to know in the super-sensible world is the light that is unmanifest and unrevealed, the light that is dark and does not shine.

The second thing man learns to know in the super-sensible world is the unspoken word. In the ordinary world a word that is unexpressed is not a word. We have therefore again a complete contradiction in terms when we say that the second thing man learns to know in the super-sensible world is the unspoken word.

The third is the consciousness without any known object. Reflect how, when you develop a consciousness, when you know, you must have always an object of knowledge. But the consciousness we find as the third thing to be met with on entering the super-sensible world is a consciousness without object.

These then are the three things the pupil encounters when, having undergone the preparation we have described, he enters right into the realm of occultism. These are the first three actual occult things he learns to know:

The unmanifest light,
The unspoken word,
The consciousness without knowledge of an object.

It is a moment of the very greatest significance for the occult pupil when he can learn to unite a meaning with what appears to be in entire contradiction to all he has known hitherto. When he is able to unite something of his own inner experience with the three ideas of the “unmanifest light,” the “unspoken word” and the “consciousness without knowledge of an object,” then he has in that moment become an occultist; the pupil in occultism has really begun to tread the path of occult knowledge.

From Buddha to Christ

Budapest, May 31, 1909

I do not wish to offer you here an observation about the philosophy of religion or a treatise on literary history, nor do I wish to give you a scientific lecture about the subject matter. I simply want to tell you what Spiritual Science or occultism have to say about such great individualities as Buddha and Christ, more precisely what knowledge they can offer from the vantage point of Rosicrucian occultism.

In a lecture intended for more advanced theosophists, I presume you will permit me to speak more intimately of such truths. I shall present to you broad outlines, and I will incorporate certain details into them. Rosicrucian occultism presents one of the great principles of occult theosophical investigation from which spiritual life should flow into our hearts. Even though the goals and ideals of theosophy can also be found outside the Theosophical Society, there is nevertheless a difference in the means employed by anyone seriously trying to struggle for the attainment and right application of knowledge and truth, for occult investigation can and must flow directly into life.

Allow me to illustrate this point with a trivial example. The human soul is like a stove that does not need to be persuaded to heat a room because heating is its function. The stove does this on its own, provided we put wood into it and light it. It could be objected that the appearance of the wood does not suggest to us that it can generate heat, and yet it does precisely that. By putting some firewood, the appearance of which is so different from the stove, into it and lighting it, we bring warmth into our house. Similarly, by getting used to spiritual scientific concepts, we also become accustomed to our ability to make judgments and to orient ourselves freely in this world. It is not our task to preach ideals but rather to provide human souls with the fuel that can generate spiritual wisdom, genuine brotherliness, and true humanity. To realize this is our goal.

What we designate as the Rosicrucian stream arose in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries when the spiritual stream of Christianity was already obscured since it had taken on an external form. At a time when Christianity in the outer world increasingly was taking on an external form and when its true original meaning had faded, Rosicrucianism, received the task to cultivate ancient wisdom and to preserve the treasures of primordial wisdom. In the outside world, wherever people deemed only external forms and hardened dogmas to be important, they abjured and cursed anything that was venerated in the mysteries as the highest and holiest truths. One frequently heard the words: “I curse Skythianos; I curse Boddha; I curse Zarathas.” These are the three names that were venerated in greatest secrecy in the mysteries and in the Rosicrucian mystery schools as sacred names of the masters.

Zarathas is the same individual as Zarathustra—not the Zarathustra known to history, but the exalted individual who founded ancient Persian culture and who was the teacher in the occult schools of that time. Skythianos was a highly developed individual of ancient times. In one of his subsequent incarnations he led the occult schools of Central Asia, and later he also became the teacher of esoteric schools in Europe. Boddha and Buddha are one and the same person.

In order to understand what an initiate felt when he heard these three names and in order to gain some idea of what they could give him, we have to go back in human evolution and examine the character of Rosicrucian occultism more closely. Let us gain an understanding through listening and through looking back into the past. There have always been highly advanced personalities who stood out from the masses and to whom average people looked up in reverence as one would to high ideals. To look up to the individuals who had reached such a lofty stage of wisdom and intellectual power had the effect of animating the average person's moral sense and vital energies. Even today the forces of these lofty spirits flow into our finer bodies.

Let us look back into the past to all the spiritual individualities of whom I want to speak to you, all the way back to the ancient Indian culture. If we went further back in human evolution to the remote age of Atlantis and its end, this would lead us to the event that separates us from an even more ancient epoch of humanity where our souls led lives greatly different from the ones they lead in our present physical bodies. However, rather than dealing in detail with a description of life and culture in those ancient times, let us today be content to illuminate the answer to the question: How was humanity guided in ancient times, and where did the forces that influenced it come from?

When a seer whose spiritual eye is opened so that he knows how to read the fine script of the Akasha Chronicle looks back into the spiritual worlds, he discovers the sites from which the culture and all spiritual life of those times emanated. Our souls can discover the sites where the masters and their disciples assembled in the mystery schools of that time. There were many such Mystery Centers on the ancient Atlantean continent, and they differed from those of today and were given a different name. They were not just churches and not just schools, but rather a combination of both. Those who searched for truth could find both religion and wisdom in the mystery schools; here, religion and wisdom were one. Using a modern word, we can characterize the concept of those cultic centers, the mystery schools, by the term “Atlantean Oracles.” This is the name given to them by the European mystery schools, but originally they were called something entirely different.

In the Atlantean Oracles and their centers of wisdom, spiritual life was differentiated in the same way that external knowledge and the areas of trade and professions are subdivided in external life today. There were various branches of spiritual investigation and occult wisdom in ancient Atlantis, but everything in those times depended on different conditions. Wisdom varied from one oracle to another according to the capacities of the human beings and their external environment. A connection existed between certain human capacities and certain planets, that is, certain mystical occult capacities were connected with special planets. Therefore, on the Atlantean continent we should distinguish between oracles of the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.

Our present capacities, too, developed out of the cosmos, as did our earth, and they are in each case tied to different planets and their influences. On Atlantis, people who were suited to develop this or that cognitive capacity were chosen from the population and assigned to one of the seven oracles. Of the seven oracles, which were named after the seven planets in ancient Atlantis, the Sun Oracle stood out from all the others, but next to it the Vulcan Oracle prepared itself in secrecy for its future task.

Each of these oracles had emanated from the cosmos according to its capacity, but there was one center in which the capacities of all seven oracles flowed together, and it was here that the wisdom of the seven oracles in Atlantis coalesced. The adepts of this center, of the Holy Sun Oracle, had been initiated into the mystery and service of what we today know as the Sun. We should not forget that the physical sun is only the external expression or physiognomy—the body and garment—of the spiritual life of the exalted Sun-Being.

All of you have heard of the time when the sun separated from the earth, and along with the physical sun those beings abandoned the earthly arena who had advanced through the human state and, therefore, could no longer use the earth for their development. After the moon too had left, the earth was able to realize its destination of becoming the abode of humanity. If the sun alone had influenced the earth, the latter would have gone through such a rapid development that human beings would have become old soon after birth. By contrast, if our earth had been only under the influence of the moon, human beings would have been stiffened and become mummies Development would have been too slow, and their bodies would have reached a state of rigidity and lignification. However, through a wise guiding force, sun and moon maintained a balance in the external influence they exert on the earth; and this enabled earth and human beings to develop at a speed suitable to them. The beings of Mars, Mercury, Venus, and so on, who did not need the forces that had left with the moon and earth for their development, departed with the sun to take up their own abode. Yet they continued to be connected with the earth and sent their beneficial forces down to it in the sunlight.

During the ancient Atlantean epoch, the adepts of the Sun Oracle had been initiated into the deeds of this lofty Sun-Being. The Great Initiate who was the leader of this highest oracle had been initiated in the most comprehensive ways into these mysteries. The entire ancient Atlantean and, as we shall see, also the post-Atlantean culture proceeded from him. The “Manu,” as this leader of the Sun Oracle was called—although the name doesn't really matter all that much—did not choose the main representatives of the post-Atlantean culture from among the so-called scholars and scientists, nor from the clairvoyants and Magi of that time. The people who were endowed with spiritual and psychic knowledge and who in those days were approximately comparable to the scientists and scholars of our time were not considered suitable by him; rather plain people who had begun gradually to lose the clairvoyant faculty were chosen. Our present state of consciousness began to develop only at the end of the Atlantean epoch. That was the time when the old clairvoyant consciousness was waning, gradually giving way to a full consciousness of self, to the ability to address the “I” in oneself. The great Manu gathered about him those who were able to function intellectually, not the clairvoyants and Magi but those who absorbed and developed the rudiments of arithmetic. They were the despised who knew nothing in the opinion of the leading people, and in this they were not unlike the theosophists today. Yet it was they with whom the great Manu journeyed to the sanctuary in Asia from which the postAtlantean culture was to emanate.

Disregarding America for this purpose, let us say that Europe, Asia, and Africa have all been populated by the descendants of the ancient Atlanteans who had moved to these continents under Manu's leadership. This initiate of the Sun Oracle now had to take care that the founding of this post-Atlantean culture and the evolution of its human beings would proceed under the proper influence. From the very beginning he had to take care that everything that was valuable for a future development should be carried forward. This preservation of values from the past is a law of occultism, of spiritual economy, but it is also a law that can only be known through spiritual wisdom.

Now the Great Initiate took something very valuable with him when he journeyed from ancient Atlantis to Europe. To accomplish this, he had—let me put it this way—traveled to and inspected the other oracles. You all know that in the case of ordinary people the etheric body separates from the astral body and the ego soon after death and gradually dissolves in the universal ether. The same happens with the astral body after a certain time, but this law is sometimes broken in the interest of spiritual economy. This is what happened in the case of the etheric bodies of the seven greatest initiates who were the leaders of the ancient Atlantean oracles.

What does it mean when we say we work on ourselves? It means that we purify the etheric body and the astral body. Now, once purified, the spiritualized etheric and astral bodies do not dissolve after death but are preserved in accordance with the law of spiritual economy. In short, it was known in the mysteries how to preserve the valuable etheric and astral bodies developed by the great initiates, but it would lead me too far afield to speak about this in detail. Suffice it to say that these bodies were kept by the preservers of the mystery schools.

It is for this reason that the Great Initiate of the Sun Oracle journeyed to the other Atlantean oracles to collect and take with him the seven etheric bodies of the greatest Atlantean initiates. And then he attracted through his wisdom a number of human beings who were to become fit for their coming culture. He taught these humans who were gathered around him so that they became increasingly more capable and pure. What followed may be called an art. After some time had elapsed, it became possible to incorporate the seven more important etheric bodies of the seven greatest initiates of the ancient Atlantean oracles into seven human beings. In regard to their egos, their power of judgment, and so on, they were simple people whose existence had no significance from an external point of view. However, they carried within them the seven most highly developed etheric bodies of the seven most significant initiates. These etheric bodies had streamed into these people, thereby enabling them to exude the great, powerful visions and truths of evolution through inspiration from above. Thus, they were able to speak of all this exalted wisdom.

The Great Initiate sent these seven bearers of wisdom to India where people still had a sense and an understanding of the spiritual and of spiritual worlds. In India human beings still had the feeling and the consciousness of having at one time emanated from a primordial spiritual world and of having been born from the womb of the Godhead. Therefore, the whole physical world appeared to them as maya, as illusion, and they longed to return to this world of the gods, to those divine-spiritual beings with whom they had once lived. To such people the seven bearers of wisdom could speak. They were called the Holy Rishis, and it was they who inaugurated the dawn of our post-Atlantean culture. The people who had preserved for themselves the consciousness of and the longing for the spiritual world with its divine-spiritual beings were thus given the opportunity to learn more about this world and to find the way back to it.

Subsequent ages gave birth to not only peoples who were destined to look into the spiritual worlds, but also to those who wanted to contribute to the founding of a new culture. They were meant to become fond of the physical world and to see it not only as maya or illusion. Rather, they began to understand that this physical world is but the expression or physiognomy of the spiritual world that lies behind it. This was the second epoch, the ancient Persian or Zarathustran culture. Ordinary history records only a relatively late Zarathustra because historians are unaware that it was customary in ancient times for a successor to receive the name of a great leader from the past. I am here referring to the greatest of all Zarathustras, who was one of the most intimate disciples of the Initiate of the Sun Oracle. His task was to find the connection between the physical and the spiritual world. He had to teach his disciples that the physical sphere of the sun is the body of spiritual beings who have their abode on the sun and that this whole physical world should be viewed as the members and limbs of the physical body of divine-spiritual beings. Just as the sun is surrounded by a great aura, so the human being is surrounded by his or her own small aura, which is a microcosmic expression of the sun's great aura. The sun is the body of the Sun Spirit who revealed himself in the Sun Oracle of the ancient Atlantean epoch. Zarathustra beheld this spirit in clairvoyant vision. He also designated the aura of the sun as Sun Spirit, and this is the same being whom he also called Ahura Mazdao. Occultists of later ages called it Ormuzd.

Zarathustra taught his disciples to see Ahura Mazdao in the physical sun and not to be led astray by Ahriman. Ahriman has lived in the physical world since the last third of the Atlantean epoch and attacks the human soul through sense perception, that is to say from the outside. By contrast, Lucifer attacks the soul from within. Zarathustra had to kindle in the hearts of humans the love for the great Sun Spirit, and he did this in powerful words that cannot be adequately rendered in our modern languages. All the magnificent words that you find in the Vedas and Gathas, no matter how beautiful, are but a feeble superficial expression of the great and lofty words originally uttered by Zarathustra. In our language, they can be approximated by the following:

“I wish to speak, now hearken and listen to me, you from near and from afar, who are filled with longing for these words. I want to speak about that which is the highest truth to me in this world and what was revealed to me by the great and mighty Ahura Mazdao. Hearken and listen to me now and mark my words carefully: No longer shall the teacher of falsehoods, the evil one whose lips bore witness to an evil faith, lead you astray for He—the mighty Ahura Mazdao—has manifested himself! Those who do not want to listen to the words as I say them and to the meaning that I give to them will experience evil things when the course of time reaches its end.”

And at other times Zarathustra said this: “So great and mighty is He who revealed Himself to me in the sun that I surrender everything for him. I rejoice in sacrificing to Him the life of my body, the etheric existence of my senses, and the expression of my deeds”—the astral body. Such was the vow that Zarathustra made a long time ago.

Zarathustra had two disciples. To one of them he revealed through spiritual means everything that one can perceive with clairvoyant astral organs. This disciple was reincarnated under the name Hermes, the Egyptian Hermes. To the second disciple he imparted truths that one can know through the clairvoyant etheric body: the wisdom of the Akasha Chronicle. This second disciple was Moses, and you can find the wisdom imparted to him in the Book of Moses of the Old Testament.

When the first disciple was reincarnated as Hermes, he bore within him the astral body of Zarathustra, who had revealed to him not only his teachings, but also his own nature. Such a transfer is possible for what Hermes had received was nothing else but the astral body Zarathustra had sacrificed for him. Hence it was Zarathustra's wisdom that Hermes, the founder of the third post-Atlantean epoch, proclaimed.

The other disciple, to whom Zarathustra had given wisdom through the etheric body, was also born again. When he reincarnated, the etheric body that Zarathustra had sacrificed was woven into him. This disciple was Moses. You can find such facts recorded in religious documents, but in a veiled manner only. Read the story of the birth of Moses. What happened then? The child was placed into an ark of bulrushes which was then put into the water. What does that mean? It means that he was completely cut off from the world. His ego and astral body were not to become manifest until they were permeated by the principle of the etheric body. How can this take place? During the time when Moses lay isolated in the ark on the water, the etheric body that had been woven into him became illuminated. Only then could the astral body and the ego begin to work in him. Are not the powerful images of Genesis, which will occupy humanity for a long time to come, images taken from the Akasha Chronicle? These things cannot be understood without the aid of occultism.

We now come to the fourth epoch of the post-Atlantean culture, to the Graeco-Roman epoch. Up to this point, human beings were developed in such a way that they should learn to love the earth. Yet there were also those who had been the companions of the gods in the Atlantean age, and it is therefore justified to ask what had become of the egos of the great initiates of that time. Atlantean egos had dwelled in a softer and finer body, and for them existence on earth was such that individualities had to go through an incarnation only for the time necessary to maintain the connection between the world's primordial spiritual wisdom and humanity.

The great Buddha is one of the individualities who was actually able to imbue the oriental writings with that deep wisdom and spiritual force that we find in them now. As occultists, we are able to understand the communications relating to him, and we may even take them literally. For example, it is true when we read about him: “At his birth he shone like the bright light of the sun.” We can also take it literally when Buddha says: “I have entered my last incarnation and need not return to earth unless I do it on my own free will.” During the post-Atlantean epoch he also toiled to pass through stages of intellectual insights, and we can understand him when he says that the lines of incarnations and different stages of initiations through which he had passed flashed up before him:

Before me stood the splendor of the forms,
But my intuition was not yet pure!

I saw the Spirits of Insight,
But my intuition was not yet pure!

I saw the site of initiation,
But my intuition was not yet pure!

I was the companion among them:
Now my intuition was pure!

This is Buddha's illumination. He was one of those with whom we live in Rosicrucian theosophy.

We have already named three of the Masters: Zarathas, Skythianos, and Boddha or Buddha, and we can see how the lives of these leading personalities extend into our present time. An occultist can test these findings. In the realm of spiritual economy we not only find what these exalted men left behind; everything else that is of value to humanity is preserved. Take, for example, an individual such as Galileo, who in the sixteenth century achieved such significant results in physics. Galileo had an etheric body that was not allowed to die with him. Far away from the place where Galileo had worked, there lived a man in the middle of the eighteenth century who prepared himself for a great task after two decades of a devotional childhood. Deep in Russia, at the White Sea, lived a man in the plainest circumstances. His name was Michael Lomonosov. Unknown and without means, he hiked to Moscow and subsequently laid the foundations for Russian grammar. Lomonosov bore within him the etheric body of Galileo. And now it happened that a personality, who knew that the etheric body of Galileo had been preserved and who, in fact, had been present when this connection was being investigated occultly, knew nothing about Michael Lomonosov. This is no disgrace since on the physical plane one cannot know everything. But here we see that valuable elements are preserved and the past is connected with the future through the law of spiritual economy. In the Rosicrucian mysteries, too, we encounter the individuality who lived in the body of Buddha on the physical plane. During the Atlantean age, he had lived only as a bodhisattva, but later on he descended into the physical body of Buddha.

Let us now look at the times of Buddha and Zarathustra and observe what souls had to do in the ages between these two spiritual leaders. On the one hand, we have the teachings of Ahura Mazdao, on the other, that side of humanity that increasingly became fond of the earth. Let us envision once again the Indian, Persian, and Chaldean-AssyrianBabylonian times during which the soul gradually lost its connection with the spiritual world. Then, in ancient Greece the soul came to love the earth so deeply that the statement of a famous Greek, “Better to be a beggar in the upper world than a king in the world of shadows,” was accepted as truth. During this fourth post-Atlantean, the Graeco-Roman epoch, everything in the external world appeared to be beautiful and charming. The seer may, for example, observe the ruins of the Temple of Paestrum with his physical eye and revel admiringly in the beauty of the temple's form and in the intriguing charm of its lines. However, when he takes his eyes off the temple and looks for a similar substance in the spiritual world, he finds nothing. Everything seems to be blotted out. This is what these souls experienced between death and rebirth. They were isolated within the cold circumference of their individuality, cut off from all spiritual things and longing only for the physical world and all its beauty.

Ahura Mazdao himself, the Leader of the Sun, had to descend to earth to bring light into this icy separateness. He had to become a human being in the physical world in order to help both the living and the dead. He had to be a human among humans! The high and the magnificent that lives in the sun descended to earth and revealed itself in and to humanity. Previously, it had revealed itself in the elements, for example to Moses in the fire of the burning bush and in the lightning on Sinai. The Israelites were to make no graven image of their God. Why? Because no external name can be given to “Me,” the Divine Being; only an entirely different name can express the “I am the I am!” The only possibility of discovering the spirit of the sun's name is to seek it in the human being. That which lives as “I” in human beings is the Christ-Being.

The Jehova revelation precedes the Christ. That was at the time when the Christ-Being could gradually descend to the earth. What had Zarathustra once vowed to the high Sun-Being? What sacrifice did he want to make to him? His body, senses, life, and speech. Zarathustra was reincarnated as a contemporary of the great Buddha. He could then build up the etheric and astral bodies that he had sacrificed. He was reborn as Zarathas or Nazarathos, and he became the teacher of Pythagoras, who himself was reincarnated as one of the three Wise Men of the East and became one of the disciples of Jesus of Nazareth. Zarathustra, who had once sacrificed his etheric and astral bodies, was also able to give up his external sheath to Him whose coming he had once announced. As the Jesus of Nazareth of Western occultism, he could place his physical body at the disposal of the Sun Spirit and was then able to say, “I am the Light of the World!”

The Christ-Being was known in all the mysteries. In ancient India, at the time of the Seven Rishis, the being who represented Christ was called Vishva Karman. Zarathustra named him Ahura Mazdao, and in Egypt he was known as Osiris. The Jewish people called him Jahve or Jehova, and then in the fourth cultural epoch this very same being lived for three years on our physical earth. This is the being who will in the future reunite the sun with the earth. Mystically, the Christ united Himself with the earth when the blood streamed from His wounds at Golgotha. At that time He appears in the aura of the earth, and He has been in it ever since.

Who was the first man to see Christ in the aura of the earth? It was St. Paul, who did more than anyone else for the dissemination of Christianity. What caused Saul to become Paul? Neither the teachings nor the events that took place in Palestine, but the event at Damascus, which was of a super-sensible nature. Before that experience, Paul could not believe that the one who had died so disgracefully on the cross had been the Christ, but as an initiate of the cabala he knew that the Christ would be visible in the aura of the earth once He had appeared on earth. That was the experience of Paul, which transformed him from Saul to Paul. Paul said of himself that he was born prematurely, and the same is also said of the Buddha. This means that such an individuality does not descend too deeply into the physical realm. When Paul became clairvoyant before he came to Damascus, he saw and knew who Christ was.

The Christ was working in Buddha as a bodhisattva, and it was He who was now the planetary spirit of the earth since the event of Golgotha and who could since be found in the physical aura of the earth. Through the Christ-Principle a new light has been kindled in this world and beyond. The body of Jesus of Nazareth—the etheric and astral bodies and the ego of Jesus of Nazareth—exist in many copies in the spiritual world. Such a statement expresses something of great significance, and for a better understanding of it we can draw on nature for a number of enlightening examples. Just think of a grain seed that grows into a stalk and multiplies itself many times in the process. This apparently simple natural process is a parable of the events in the super-sensible world that are governed by certain laws. Many copies of the etheric and astral bodies and of the ego of Jesus of Nazareth exist in order to be incorporated in the preliminary bearers of the Christ-Principle. Everything connected with the Christ-Principle is so momentous that humanity can grasp it only little by little.

St. Augustine, for example, bore within him a copy of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth; and once you know that, you will be able to appreciate his life, his errors, and his accomplishments. His ego and his astral body were left to their own resources, and only in his etheric body did his great mystical gift come to life. St. Francis of Assisi and Thomas Aquinas had copies of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth woven into their souls, and it is this fact that allowed them to be such dynamic teachers. They worked from a sphere in which Christ had once lived.

In some cases external events such as natural catastrophes or similar things enhance this weaving of spiritual bodies into the soul of the recipient. It is said of St. Thomas Aquinas that lightning struck and killed his little sister in the room where he happened to be standing, but spared him. He interpreted this lightning bolt next to him to the effect that elemental forces were necessary to help him take up the copy of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth. Elisabeth of Thüringen also had an imprint of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth in her soul.

Zarathustra, or Jesus of Nazareth, is one of the three Masters of the Rosicrucians. Many copies of his ego, that is of the ego in which the Christ Spirit Himself had dwelled, can be found in the spiritual world. The copies of the ego of Jesus of Nazareth are waiting for us in the spiritual world to be utilized for the future evolution of humankind. People who endeavor to strive upward to the heights of spiritual wisdom and love are candidates for these copies of the ego of Jesus of Nazareth. They become bearers of Christ, true Christophori. On this earth they shall be heralds of His Second Coming.

We derive strength for our future work from the knowledge of which individualities are behind the missions of important human beings. It is possible to test these facts. Not everyone is able to investigate what goes on behind the curtains of the physical world, but everyone can examine the results of such investigations by looking at the Holy Scriptures written before and after Christ. These facts can illuminate the way to understanding; and if they do, they change within us and become spiritual life blood.

Eight days ago I was allowed to speak to you about the esoteric core, about the spiritual contents of those great legends in which Central European thinking and feeling express themselves in the first third of the Middle Ages with the renewal of which Richard Wagner achieved something prophetic for our art at the same time. Today another legend type has to occupy us, two legends that Richard Wagner also renewed and which were made accessible to art significantly in our time. The Parzival and the Lohengrin legends should occupy us today. With both these legends we touch a land different from that was which occupied us eight days ago. I want to characterise in a few words once again, what takes, actually, the Siegfried and the Nibelungs legends up and what lives in them. The old spiritual experience of the ancestors expresses itself in the consciousness of the Central European population. This consciousness is sunken in the darkness of the time, and the usual sensory view has already substituted it in the epoch in which these legends originated. It was the old spiritual experience, which still lived like an echo, just as the world of the gods or legends.

The legends of the Nibelungs and of Siegfried are echoes of the ancient pagan time with its secret doctrines, with its views of the initiation of the old leaders of the people, and we have found Siegfried as such a great initiate of the Teutons. However, Lohengrin and Parzival are individualities of quite different type. We enter that time with them when Christianity, a worldview completely new to Central Europe, had spread out and won influence. Now the whole being of the newly emerging Christianity and everything that is connected as a result with it lives in these both legends, in the Parzival and in the Lohengrin legends. We want to imagine how the being of medieval-European development expresses itself in this legend world at first. We have emphasised eight days ago that to us the legends of Siegfried and the Nibelungs point to an ancient prehistoric time in which a kind of natural ties of love connected the single tribes, the single parts of the population. Something like an echo of this time is contained in that which Tacitus reports when he says that the Germans still revered an old tribal god at whom they looked up like at a father with whom they were connected by family ties, which extended to tribal communities.

The blood, the natural relationship gave that love. Every single tribe had such a tribal divinity that had a kind of ancestor again. This natural love is a result of the blood relationship, resting like a breath on these old times, and just the recollection of these old times and tribal communities, of this old love, based on blood relationship, is expressed in the legend type of the Nibelungs. We have seen that the legend type of the Song of the Nibelungs originated in a time in which the tribal love had already withdrawn. Something else replaced it: greed, everything that is symbolised by the gold that is connected with egoism and is based on it. The old love based on blood relationship was no longer authoritative, but new connections that were based on statutes, contracts and laws. This reversal is reflected in the legend of the Nibelungs.

Later, other aims replaced these old communities, which were based on gold, so to say, on possession and mere warlike knightly bravery, which were out for possession. Other ideals gradually appeared with Christianity. The inner being of Christianity maybe was nowhere expressed as magnificently and tremendously as in the legends into which we settle down bit by bit and in which the task of Christianity within Central Europe is represented allegorically: in the Lohengrin and Parzival legends.

What did Christianity have as its elixir of life? The absolute equality of all human beings. One felt Christianity that way at least at that time. One felt freedom, equality before the highest that the human being can imagine as the jewel, as the real mission of Christianity. The ancestors of the Teutons were proud of the name of their ancestors, of the name of a tribe or of a family name. They referred to it if they wanted to assign value to themselves in the world. They referred to the law, to titles and names in the time, which had superseded the family love. Now both should no longer be valid, but simply the human being had to be important who felt intrinsically in his core. The human being without title, without name was the Christian ideal. Something great was said with it. The Lohengrin and the Parzival legends express this.

How do both legends express this? If we take the Parzival legend, we need only to visualise the structure of the Parzival legend how it lived in the Middle Ages, lived in Wolfram von Eschenbach (~1170-~1220). We have to deal with a young person who grows on, torn out from any community, torn out from that which gave distinction and weight to the human beings at that time. The mother Herzeloide experienced that sufferings, pains could be connected with the old order that was based on titles, distinctions, and names. In the old order, her husband was led to the East where he had an accident. Now she wants to bring her son up far from all those things. He should know nothing about the striving of the worldly knights. However, one day he sees such worldly knights. There he decides to depart, and he starts hiking. We know that this hike leads him to two places that we must consider as something particularly important for the spiritual perception in the middle of the Middle Ages.

The first place to which the Parzival comes is the Round Table of King Arthur; the other place is the castle of the Holy Grail. What are these? In the Middle Ages one imagined the Round Table of King Arthur as a community from which all spiritual strength goes out for that which existed in the Middle Ages before the influence of Christianity as worldly knighthood, generally as all worldly. We come back to ancient times, to those times to which we could point already last time in the talk on the Song of the Nibelungs. We know that the Teutons, the ancestors of the German and Anglo-Saxon tribes took an area in possession that other tribes inhabited, the Celts in primeval times. The Celts: one only knows a little about them; history tells a little only about these past times of Europe in which these strange people had big influence which was pushed then by the invading Teutons to the west, but was also forced back there as people. The Celts were forced back as people. Their influence has remained. A spiritual sediment of this old Celtic time exists in Europe. In this Celtic time people still beheld clairvoyantly into the spiritual regions. Ideas of the spiritual world remained from that.

Among the Celts, the old clairvoyance was preferably home, the immediate consciousness that one could have experiences in the divine-spiritual world. The stories and dramatic actions are an echo of the instructions that the initiate Celtic priests gave to their pupils and via the pupils to the whole people. There we refer to those primeval times of Europe, when there were real initiates, initiates of the old Celtic paganism on European territory.

What I have told to you about the initiation of Siegfried, of Wotan and so on, all that leads back to the old initiations of the old Celtic priests. These old Celtic priests were of the same spirit as in ancient Egypt, in ancient Chaldea or ancient Persia the priest sages were as rulers. They were the rulers. Everything that happened in the world that belonged to the external organisation was done according to the instructions of the priest sages. Everything public, everything common was controlled by the wisdom of these original scholars of Europe.

King Arthur about whom one says that he withdrew with his Round Table to Wales and lived there was nothing else than the learnt lord of these sages who formed a spiritual centre, a kind of spiritual monarchy. One felt that this spiritual centre, I would like to say of “original scholars,” with his choice twelve companions was there. This has good reasons. Thus, one tells that King Arthur was nothing else than the successor of that directing scholar of the old Celtic priests in Wales. With it, we immediately recognise that there was something in Europe that we call a Grand Lodge in spiritual science.

Let us now realise the concept of a Grand Lodge. You know that we think seriously of development, that humanity develops, that humanity ascends higher and higher, that every single human being can ascend the path of knowledge up to those stages where he himself beholds into the spiritual worlds, where the primal ground behind the world manifests to him.

If we speak of the possibility of development of humanity, it is also not abstruse to realise that there are higher developed individualities in humanity already today who have run ahead of the remaining humanity and have walked the paths of knowledge and wisdom due to a life full of renunciation, so that they can be leaders of modern humanity. Today where one levels everything, where one does not want to recognise anything, where one talks of development, but does not want to believe in development, one does not accept this. However, in the times when one knew something of it one really spoke of the existing development.

According to a natural principle, we find twelve different forces of the spirit. I have said about Goethe that he himself talks about such a secret brotherhood that he considers as Rosicrucians. One spoke of such a Grand White Lodge in the Middle Ages. From this, the strands went out which controlled life. One recognised that who directed all that in King Arthur, who lived concealed in Wales. Around him were his knights who were, indeed, no longer at the height of the priests of the old Celtic time for whom the time of love had transformed into a time of egoism when one attempted to conquer countries with the sword in the hand. However, they were still under the guidance of the White Lodge.

Indeed, the question immediately suggests itself: if there are such lodges—also even today—, why do they not appear?—I have said often enough that it depends not only on the fact that somebody appears, but also on the fact that he can be recognised. Today also, Jesus would probably not be recognised. It is hard to recognise a sage within his time. It belongs just that to it which theosophy or spiritual science wants to bring again to humanity. If it finds its way, one understands such a thing as the Round Table of King Arthur, the directing white lodge.

This was the one: Arthur. The other is the castle of the Holy Grail. Only by way of a hint, we can deal with it. One says that the Holy Grail is the chalice in which once Christ Jesus with his disciples took the Last Supper, the wine, and in which his blood was then collected. Then the lance was also brought to Europe with which the side of Jesus was pierced. The chalice of the Holy Grail is on monsalvaesche (mons salvationis = mountain of salvation) where a holy castle was built up. The Holy Grail has the capacity to give everlasting youth, the force of everlasting life generally to somebody who is familiar with its miracles who lives with its sun of grace.

Again, these are twelve, but Christian spiritual knights now. The old Templars guard the Holy Grail, and they used the forces, which they suck from this guard to pour out the spiritual knighthood of the heart, of the inner life, over Europe. Thus, one countered the white lodge of the worldly knighthood that moved to Wales with the spiritual knighthood in the castle of the Holy Grail, which is placed on the Spanish mountain monsalvaesche.

Which task did the knights have who were in the castle of the Holy Grail? The task of the knights of the Holy Grail was not to make conquests, not to acquire external possession, not to appropriate seigneuries; their task was to make the conquest of the soul life. One tells to us about the treasure of the Nibelungs, about the gold as a symbol of possession, as an aim worth striving for by the Nibelungs, the Holy Grail is the spiritualised treasure of the Nibelungs, the treasure of the soul. What is the strength that goes out from the Holy Grail in reality? What do those twelve knights work who are in its castle? A spark of the divine lives in every human being, as often the theosophical worldview emphasises. The mystics of the Middle Ages had their great ideas in the same time in which also these legends originated. They spoke of the fact that the human being is a fourfold being. There is at first the external physical human being who lives here in this world who strives for possession who is on the lookout for gold. The second one is the mental human being who suffers and is glad who has instincts, desires, and sensations who must be gradually improved. The third human being is an even more internal one. He is a spiritual human being who attains admission to the spiritual world bit by bit. The innermost human being is the divine human being. This is that who today and this was felt in particular in the Middle Ages—is only in the earliest stages. To develop this disposition of the divine spark more and more, to raise the human being to the higher worlds, this one had aimed at in the initiation of the old paganism. One aims at this now within the Christian world in a new way. In addition, the Christian initiation was internalised.

You remember from the former talks how the initiation ceremonies were in the old times how the human being had to go through procedures that lifted out the internal soul from the physical body, so that the human being was enraptured to the higher world and could witness the qualities of the higher world. An external procedure belonged to it to go through all that. Christianity should bring an initiation that takes place only in the deepest inside, in the concealed sanctum of the soul. There the god should be searched for, the god, who brought salvation to Christianity by pouring his blood; every single human being in his soul should find this god. The single human being should really be able to attain that which Angelus Silesius, the great Christian mystic, later expressed with the words: “If you rise above yourself and allow God to prevail, then ascension takes place in your mind.” The task of the knights of the Holy Grail was to develop the internal vital spark in the human being.

The Holy Grail was nothing else than the deepest inside of the human nature, and it was something uniform because the internal human nature is a uniform one, because a life spent in the pursuit of wisdom raises hope that one could understand what is meant with the big unity, with the big divine spark. They were there as the brothers of the Holy Grail. Parzival wanted to find the way to the Holy Grail. The legend tells now that when he came to the Holy Grail, he found King Amfortas bleeding at that time. One had said to him to ask not much and nothing wrong. Hence, he did not ask for the wounds of the king and not for the meaning of the Holy Grail. That is why he is cast out. He should ask for the qualities of the Holy Grail and the wounds of the king. This belongs to the experiences that are to be done in the divine life that one must ask for it. He must long for it. The Holy Grail exists; one can find it, it is bestowed on everybody, but it does not impose itself. It does not come to us; we must feel the longing for the Holy Grail, the internal sanctum, the divine vital spark in the human soul. We must have the desire to ask for it. If the human soul has found the path up to the god, the god descends to it. The secret of the Holy Grail is the descent of the god who descends, if the human being develops up to the divine.

John the Baptist shows this following the baptism of Jesus: a dove came down and sat down on the head, and a voice spoke from heaven: “You are my beloved Son; in you I take delight” (Mark 1:11). The Holy Grail is shown in the figure of a dove allegorically.

Parzival was not yet ripe with his first visit in the Grail castle to experience what we have just described. When he felt cast out, something came to his soul that must come to every soul once if it should really become ripe for the last stages of knowledge. Doubt, disbelief, inner mental darkness come to Parzival's soul. Indeed, someone who wants to ascend to knowledge must go through the hard school of doubt once. Not before one has doubted and has gone through the tortures and everything that doubts may bring along, he has acquired that certainty in his inside that he will never lose knowledge again. Doubt is a bad brother, but a purifying brother. Parzival goes through these doubts now, and he brings himself to that knowledge which consists of something else than of intellectual knowledge. Richard Wagner expresses this knowledge with magnificent correctness, maybe not quite philosophically or psychologically correctly but analogously, while he calls Parzival (Parsifal) the “pure fool” who becomes knowing by compassion.

Thus, we come to the description of the way that someone has to go through who still has to struggle through to the stages of higher knowledge. You know that it is the path of the pupils and that one distinguishes there three stages. If anybody has acquired the qualities that constitute the preparatory path, if he has purified himself of the uncontrolled ideas and leads a pure life, then he becomes ripe for chelahood, then he becomes ripe to get the guru, the spiritual leader. The first stage of the path to higher knowledge consists of the fact that one learns to behave quite impartially to the world, to practice love without the slightest trace of any prejudice from the inside. Why do the human beings love in the usual life at first?

Because they have a blood relationship, because they have been connected by any ties for long. This is right. However, who wants to go the path of knowledge must penetrate to another form of love. Nothing that ties me together with a human being in a special way is allowed to prefer him regarding my love. I am only allowed to ask for that which is outside me. Has my brother or my brother-in-law any advantage? No! With it, I say nothing against the love for our relatives; it should concern only the traits of the human being. Even if he is quite foreign to us, we recognise that he is worthy of our love, then we love him like one who is connected with us for long. Such a human being is on the first level of chelahood. We call him the homeless human being because he has lost what one calls home in the ideal sense. This is also meant by the sentence you find in the New Testament: “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, even his own life, he cannot be a disciple of mine” (Luke 14:26). This sentence means the same, and one felt Christianity that way in Central Europe. No name and no title should give a preference of love. Someone who ascends the path of knowledge should found love for any human being on his innermost worthiness and value.

If the human being has climbed up the first steps of the path of knowledge, the hard moments of doubt come. While we get to know the world more and more and delve into love more and more, the more we also get to know the black and bad side of the world. These are the hard days of the initiates. The initiate struggles upwards bit by bit. Then there awakes that soul light which like an internal sun illuminates the spiritual things and beings. We see the objects round ourselves with eyes because the light shines on these objects. Actually, we see the rays only which are reflected by the objects to us. We do not see the spiritual things because no spiritual light shines on them.

However, who has advanced so far that the so-called kundalini light shines to him is on the second stage of the path of knowledge. Someone has arrived at the third stage who has succeeded in feeling his ego without preference, who does not esteem himself higher than other human beings, who finds his higher ego in the love to all beings. Who does no longer hope for his own selfish ego, but hears the properties of the beings speaking has arrived at the third stage of the path of knowledge. We call him a swan in the secret doctrine, and this is a term that is used all over the world where there is spiritual research.

What does this degree bring? It brings the effluxion about all beings. There we are no longer concluded like within a skin from the world. Foreign pain is our pain, foreign joy is our joy, and we live and are active in the whole existence. The whole earth belongs to us. We feel in everything. Then one does no longer know that one looks at the objects from the outside, then it is, as if one is in them, as if one had penetrated into them by love and thereby knows them. By compassion, by this empathy all knowledge has originated.

A hermit, Trevrizent, initiated Parzival in this wisdom. The fact that he is a hermit is typical. He is somebody who is lifted out of the remaining humanity who has really left everything behind: father, mother, brother, sister, and has become a disciple of that who does not know such differences. There Parzival is informed of the higher virtues, and there he becomes ripe for entering the castle of the Holy Grail and for asking which the miracles of the Holy Grail are. He is taken up; he releases the wounded Amfortas and becomes Grail King. An internal, human way, the way that the secret doctrine prescribes all over the world, transferred into the Christian, a way on which Parzival is described. Lohengrin belongs to the Grail Table. He is the son of Parzival. Whereas the passageway of the human being to the higher self is described in Parzival, a historical-social mission of the middle of the Middle Ages is described in Lohengrin.

Initiates led the medieval folk consciousness, it was not blind as the scholars imagine. This folk consciousness recorded an important epoch in the middle of the Middle Ages. What happens there? Briefly: an important historical event happened, the so-called urban civilisation started. The old feudal time experiences a mighty revolution. Whereas one dealt once only with land ownership, only with a rural population, now we see in Germany, France, Belgium, in Russia everywhere single cities originating. Cities are founded; one notes a jerk forward in the human development. What had happened there in these foundations of cities? The human beings were torn out from the connections to which they have belonged once. Everybody who felt enslaved went to the city. There he was on his own. There he was only as much worth as he could achieve. The bourgeoisie came into being in the middle of the Middle Ages. This mighty reversal is expressed in the legend of Lohengrin.

Whereas Parzival shows how the human being finds a higher ego in himself, how he dedicates himself to the pilgrimage to the higher ego, Lohengrin shows how the medieval folk goes through a tremendous epoch of human development, namely the human being is freed and his personality comes to light from the old organisations.

If we want to understand the connection of this historical event with the legend of Lohengrin, we have to know that in all mysticism this stage is symbolised by a female personality. Therefore, Goethe also spoke at the end of the second part of his Faust of the fact that the everlasting-female draws us upwards. This must not be interpreted trivially. In truth, the human soul is meant which pulls up the human being. In the general, the soul is shown as female and that which surrounds the human being from without as male. The striving soul is always shown as female.

In the secret doctrine, one knows that the great leaders of humanity, the initiates, further humanity always to a higher stage. Lohengrin is the herald of the Holy Grail. The medieval consciousness regards him as the great initiate leader who furthers humanity to a higher stage in the middle of the Middle Ages. He was the bringer of the urban civilisation, who inspired the bourgeoisie in its originating. This is the individuality of Lohengrin. Elsa of Brabant is nothing else than the symbol of the medieval folk soul which has again to make a developmental step forward under the influence of Lohengrin. This progress in the history of humanity is nicely and tremendously shown in the legend.

We have seen that the pupil initiated in the third degree is called a swan. The master who is deeply initiated rises higher, he rises into the transcendent world, in those worlds, to which the human consciousness does not extend. He knows everything that expresses itself in humanity only in his inside. One cannot ask him, where from you are, which name do you have?—It is the swan that brings him from even higher spheres. Hence, the swan brings Lohengrin into the epoch of urban civilisation. Look at the progress, which has been made in the old Hellenism. The gods in Greece are nothing else than deified initiates. Take Zeus, who consorts with Semele; from this affair Dionysus originates. The Greek culture arises from it. All great proceedings of humanity are shown in this way. Elsa should not ask for the name and origin of that who leads her and becomes her husband. It is with all great masters that way; they go unrecognized and unnoticed through humanity. If one asked them, they would be shooed away from humanity. It is necessary that they save the sanctum from profane looks and questions. This would be also the case if one gave people an understanding of the being of such an initiate. At such a moment, such a being would also disappear as Lohengrin also did. Lohengrin is called a son of Parzival. That means that the liberation of the medieval bourgeoisie took place under the influence of Christianity.

Thus, we look into the legends of the Middle Ages and see how nicely the facts of the spiritual life are expressed in both legends. The mission of Christianity for the medieval culture became with it the mission of the liberation of the human being from the earthly human body. This mission was shown in both legends. It worked on Richard Wagner in particular. He always tried to show the pure love that makes the human being clairvoyant. Already in 1856, he started a drama, called The Victors: a Jandala girl loves Ananda, a Brahmin young man. However, Ananda is far separated from the love of the Jandala girl because of the caste division. He is not allowed to pursue the love of the Jandala girl. He becomes a victor about his nature becoming a pupil of Buddha. As adherer of Buddha, he finds the victory, there he finds himself again, and there he overcomes the human affection. One tells that the Jandala girl was a Brahmin girl in a former life and rejected the love of a Jandala young man. Then she also becomes a victor and is spiritually united with Ananda, the Brahmin. Later, Wagner wanted to use the figure of Jesus of Nazareth in a drama.

He had in mind the complete inner nature of Christianity and the teaching of the free human being who is not bound to title and to anything else. The Holy Grail seeks in the inside of the human soul. In 1857, on Good Friday—Wagner tells—he faced a wonderful nature in Zurich. There something flowed out to him for a moment that expressed the whole mood in him that penetrated the whole knighthood and the Christian knighthood. He says to himself, like by an inspiration, at that day when Christ Jesus died, no one is allowed to bear weapons.

At that time, he realised the whole greatness of the figure of Parzival who attained knowledge becoming engrossed in humanity and in all beings. Now he resumes his incomplete piece The Victors in a Christian-modern way. He shows Parzival as somebody who leaves his home who knows nothing about names and titles, about ties and nothing of father and mother. He meets, on one side, the magic castle of Klingsor and the enchantress Kundry. Meeting Kundry he experiences the whole significance of the earthly sensuous life and what it means if the human being gets to know it only by desires. On the other side, he realises in that moment when Kundry kisses him that this sensuous appears in its true acceptation in the human being only if it is free of desires. Richard Wagner nicely shows the sensuousness free of desires how it is gained by the internal strength of the spirit, the Parzival spirit that he calls the Christian one. He shows how it is gained on one side by the Holy Grail and on the other side in the magic castle. On one side by overcoming it, on the other side by deadening it. These are two sides, which are used to ascend to the spirit. The ones deaden the sensuous living ascetically; they take the organs away from themselves in order not to become addicted to weakness.

The others remain human beings, they do not want to ascend to higher knowledge this way, but they want to develop the higher to a bigger strength in themselves. Parzival recognised this way as the right one. One has to become stronger as strong as the temptations may be. Then it is that time to be taken up in the Holy Grail. Now he asks correctly and is initiated into the secrets of the Holy Grail, he is ripe for becoming the Grail King.

Wagner endeavours to show the Holy Grail. For years, he pursued studies, not academically, but fulfilled with artistic and visionary gifts. He pursued studies, while he complied with the spirit of the medieval legends, so that he really expresses that guidance caused by initiates of the Middle Ages where the old order is represented by Ortrud, the new order by the emerging consciousness of the people which wants to free itself. This consciousness, which the swans introduce, the chelas of the third degree, is symbolised quite appropriately by Elsa of Brabant and Lohengrin.

Wagner appropriately shows the greatness that is in it. The renewal of art was crucial to Wagner. He wanted to make something out of art again that came close to religion, he wanted to embody moods with his pieces of art that lead the human beings again to the divine by which he wanted to make the artists religious leaders. Wagner needed topics that led beyond the usual life. He also wanted to represent the spirit of Christianity, the spirit of love for humanity artistically. He felt deeply and seriously, how in the newer time the spirit of egoism, the spirit of the external possession, substituted the spirit of love. He describes that which developed as social order and with which he went along intensively and radically, as pursuit of gold, as a time the real Christian spirit of love must supersede again. He wanted to represent something like love flowing in a world where the gold rules in his music dramas with the means of the supernatural and divine living in the human being. Hence, he also resorts with these questions to the great legends of the Middle Ages. This lived in Richard Wagner.

You can realise how theosophy or spiritual science approaches with its view of the myths the art of Wagner. The theosophist realises above all that we have to see in the legends nothing else than pictures and expressions of great truth. The pictures of the development of the external life and the soul were given to the ancient peoples. In the Lohengrin legend, something is made clear, so that the human being knew what happens to him if he has arrived at certain stages. Truth is announced to people in such a way that they can grasp it. There were and there are tribes and peoples that can grasp the great truth only in legend form. Today we are no longer talking pictorially. Spiritual science contains the same truth that was put before the folk in magnificent legends, which Wagner tries to renew. Spiritual science speaks in another way, but what it lets stream into the world is the same spirit. Thus, we feel that not only that is true which Schopenhauer says that the great spirits like Plato and Spinoza, Buddha and Goethe, Giordano Bruno and Socrates, Hermes and Pythagoras understand each other, talk with each other, communicate mentally. Not only this is true, not only the choice individualities understand each other, but also that which lives as truth in the spirit of the people. This sounds together for a big historical sound of the spheres, and we feel this if today we realise what lives in the legends and myths, if we let it rise for the higher soul of the present. Truth lives at all times and expresses itself in the most various forms. If we penetrate into this truth, we understand how the peoples and times speak in these single forms, and we hear it echoing how in the manifold tones the one truth announces itself to all peoples, to all human beings.

In this lecture we shall speak about the Mystery of Golgotha and connect it with an anthroposophical consideration of Easter. In the last lecture I was able to point out that the Mystery of Golgotha is extremely important, not only in the historical development of humanity, but that it has the deepest significance for the evolution also of the earth, inasmuch as we human beings are included in it. If an observer were to direct his gaze for thousands of years towards our earth from a distant planet it would appear to him to be undergoing a transformation. If he were to see clairvoyantly and not only physically, he would be able to observe that with the advent of Christ Jesus a spiritual transformation took place, and that the spiritual atmosphere of the whole earth changed. The earth also has a physical body, etheric body and astral body, and we are all enveloped not only by air but also by the etheric body and astral body of the earth. The observer would see that up to the advent of Christ Jesus these bodies exhibited certain colours; they then changed and took on new colours and different movements, so important was this event to the earth and to the evolution of humanity! But we must not think that with the birth of Jesus, with the advent of Christ, this transformation took place suddenly: it was being prepared during hundreds of years, and the change is not yet complete; it will, in fact, be a long time before all the fruits have matured, the seed for which was sown through the advent of Christ. If we wish to understand this, we must once more bring to mind the whole of evolution. We must go back to the time when man first assumed his present shape; we know that this was in the Lemurian epoch. We are now living in the so-called fifth age of the fifth epoch of our earth. If we were to go back to the Graeco-Latin age we should find in that fourth age a wonderful art and a wonderful justice. Further back, in the third age, the Egyptian-Chaldean-Babylonian- Hebrew Age, the priestly wisdom flourished. In ancient Persia appeared the first germs of religion which the wise Zarathustra sowed in the second age of our fifth epoch. Still further we come to the time when the most ancient Indian culture flourished, not that which we know from the Vedas and the Bhagavad Gita; further back than that there was a wonderful ancient culture in the first age of our fifth epoch which was guarded and guided by the ancient Rishis, who instructed and led even the Initiates! Immediately prior to that, old Atlantis had been engulfed by the great flood. In Atlantis, which is called the fourth epoch, there lived people who had neither laws nor commandments; they were not yet able to think logically, neither could they reckon nor count. However, at that time people possessed other psychic powers, for example, their memory was extraordinary, and they lived in what to us would appear a wonderful intercourse with nature. We only imagine this epoch aright when we know that at that time the physical conditions which surrounded humanity were quite different from what they are to-day. A remembrance of it has been preserved in the Sagas of Niflheim or Nebelheim. Heavy, dense volumes of mist filled the whole atmosphere of ancient Atlantis, and as all the beings lived in these masses of mist the spiritual conditions also were entirely different. If we go still further back we come to the third epoch, to ancient Lemuria. The humanity which developed in this epoch did not come to an end, like the Atlanteans, through a gigantic flood, but through a mighty upheaval by the forces of fire. This ancient Lemuria lay south of present Asia, north of Australia and east of Africa. The seer who with spiritual vision looks back to the first portion of this Lemurian epoch, finds human beings with quite a different form from present-day humanity. They did not yet possess the germ of the higher soul which dwells in present-day humanity; they only had the coverings of this soul. These coverings consisted of physical body, etheric body and astral body, and these coverings had a kind of indentation in which to receive the Ego or ‘I.’

The self-consciousness, that of which we say ‘I,’ this immortal kernel in the nature of man still rested in the bosom of the Deity. Below on the earth were those bodies which were ready to take in this germ; and if we could see them they would seem very grotesque and extremely ugly. Just as at the present time these human coverings are enveloped by the air, so at that time the beings were enveloped by a spiritual atmosphere, they lived and moved in it. They had a form, a covering (the diagram may make this more comprehensible), which was ready to take in the ‘I,’ the higher soul. But this was still in a spiritual stratum which surrounded and moved around man. We must clearly understand that the spirit can assume different forms and that, which at that time was your spirit, had not till then needed a body; that is just its development, that it took up its abode in man, that it needed the physical body for its further development. The several souls at that time were not yet separated, but might be compared to a glass of water which consists of a great number of drops of water; just as the several drops are united with one another in this glass of water, so were all the souls dissolved in this spiritual atmosphere and united with one another. And if I now place a great number of tiny sponges in this water and each one absorbs a drop of it, so that the water is then divided up among the sponges, in the same way must we conceive of the process of the ensouling of the human bodies. That, which previously was around, sank into the bodies and thus the common spiritual substance was individualised in the several human coverings. However, these human vehicles did not take in the soul entirely. I had to indicate to you the method of ensouling in this manner, but you must clearly understand that outside the body, in the environment, a great deal of this spiritual substance was left over. And the development from Lemurian times up to our own consisted in this spiritual part which remained outside mankind, drawing in more and more into the human bodies.

You must imagine that at that time man was continually in a half-sleeping, half-waking condition. Just as to-day when a sleeper is observed with spiritual eyes it is seen that only the physical body and etheric body He on the bed, while the astral body is outside and works upon the physical body (for the condition of sleep is produced through the astral body being outside), in the same way at that time one would have been able clairvoyantly to see these human beings always in this condition, but dreaming the most vivid dreams. When one human being approached another there arose in his soul a form of colour which signified sympathy or antipathy according as the other was a friend or a foe. Thus did the human being perceive the objects around him. But the more that which I have just described to you sank into man from the spiritual environment, the more did his consciousness become like the present-day consciousness and along with this went a physical fact. In the Bible there is the statement that ‘God breathed breath into man and he became a living soul’! In fact, at that time not only the breath was breathed into man as a physical movement of air, but there was also that which was contained in the air as Spirit. That which is within us as material air, the air which we can trace, is the physical body of a spirit surrounding the earth! When we breathe we inhale spirit.

It is quite true that that which sank into the coverings of man at that time when he breathed in the breath is the spirit, and the air is only the substance of this spirit! Really and truly we to-day inhale the body of this spirit; that which sank into man at that time is what is called the Holy Spirit! We must clearly understand that together with this kind of air-breathing, together with this in-sinking, there was something else which was interiorly connected with it, namely, the warm blood of man. Before this period of time had arrived there were no warm-blooded beings on the earth, these only originated later. Therefore at that time something else also took place: into the human body came a certain amount of warmth. The warmth which you now have within you was at that time in the environment of the physical ancestors of mankind. Imagine that the warmth which is in the blood of all mankind upon the earth was still at that time outside man, enveloping the earth. Warmth and spirit surrounded the globe,—it was enveloped in a mighty atmosphere of warmth. In this warmth was embodied a different spirituality, which was similar to the spirits who had reached their perfection on the Sun, when the Sun was still a planet. The spirituality embodied in warmth, equals in perfection the beings now inhabiting the sun. In fact, at that time, when this warmth-spirituality enveloped the earth, it was the vehicle of a common spiritual nature for all mankind, indeed it was none other than that of the Spirit of the Earth itself. For just as each man has a spirit, so to those who can see these things each planet is the expression of a spiritual being; and thus our earth is the body of a spirit, the Earth-Spirit, and the means by which this spirit penetrates into man is the warmth of the blood; through it the Spirit of the Earth penetrates into man himself. We must imagine that when the Lemurian development began, the spirit which belongs to the air sank into man, and also at the same time, as a higher spirit there began to sink into man, the spirit which is contained in the warmth of the blood, namely, the true Earth-Spirit.

The first spirit, which has its body in the air, makes it possible for man to develop the power of Speech; with the breathing process speech develops, the process of the utterance of the Ego begins, attaining its culmination in the Atlantean epoch. At the moment when God breathed breath into man the spirit began to speak out of the inner being of man, the soul began to utter its language,—from within man spoke Jehova Jahve—that is: ‘I Am. He Who is, He Who was, and He Who will be!’ This is the eternal kernel of being in every man, which is imperishable, and which will develop to all eternity as the permanent individuality. This was the first outpouring of the Deity into man; it is called the outpouring of the Holy Spirit or the outpouring of Jehova I According to the myths and sagas this god lives in the rushing wind; that which dwells in the air, that which is perceived as a sort of Storm-God or Wind-God is Jehova. It indicated that this Deity has His external body in the air. This Deity worked at the individualisation of mankind. He could not, however, accomplish this individualisation all at once, he had first to find a means to this end. At first mankind was divided into groups; a human being did not yet feel himself separated as an individual, he felt that he belonged to a tribe. The man of the present day, who has such a different consciousness, can scarcely form a right idea of this ‘feeling that one is part of a tribe.’ As a hand feels itself to be a part of our organism so did a human being feel himself to be a part of his tribe. The more the tribe expanded to a nation the more individual did the several human beings become.

What we know as the process of becoming more individualised is connected with the blood. When this outpouring of the spirit took place in the Lemurian epoch, it was not one common spirit which sank into the human bodies. There were many separate individualities in the spiritual environment of the earth. Jehova was one Deity among many! It is because many such Race-Spirits sank down, that mankind split up into peoples; the more they sank down the more were the greater races formed. But a complete union of humanity into one single brotherhood was impossible in this way! Brotherhood is only possible when in addition to this ensouling which acts in many races, the common Earth- Spirit which dwells in warmth gradually streams into mankind! When one speaks of Jehova one has really to speak of many Jehovas, many Holy Spirits; but when we speak of the spirit dwelling in warmth we are then speaking only of one. In this one spirit we have the Logos itself, the Christos, the Spirit of the Earth, the unifying spirit of humanity on the earth!

If we reflect that everything contained in what pertains to Manas exists in multitude, and that everything contained in Buddhi acts as unity, we have here the contrast between the two, and we understand it in this way: That through the outpouring of spirit through Manas humanity had to be prepared for the outpouring of the uniting Spirit of Buddhi, until Christos Himself came Who gathers all together into an unity!

At the time when Christos appeared there was a common covering which surrounded the whole earth. In it we have all that exists as Christos Spirit, as the unifying principle. And just as in Lemuria the Spirit was out-poured, so also the Christos Spirit was poured forth slowly into humanity and is still being out-poured, that Spirit Who has His Body in the warmth of the blood. When He is completely poured forth, there will be in the whole of humanity the consciousness that it is a single brotherhood. Each one will feel himself drawn to the others as a brother; all that separated will have given way, and humanity will be gathered into one great community.

In the earth-planet and in all the beings connected with it we have what is called the body of the Christos Spirit. Therefore, we have to take quite literally the statement, ‘He who eats My bread treads upon Me with his feet!’ (John 13, 18, Lutheran version). For whose bread does man eat? What does he tread upon with his feet? He eats the bread of the body, and treads with his feet upon the body, which is described as the body of the Christos Spirit, that into which the Christos Spirit has come!

If we had been able from another planet to observe our earth a few centuries before Christ, and then on through further centuries, we should have been able to follow with the eyes of the spirit how that which previously formed the spiritual atmosphere gradually began to pour into the several human beings, and how the whole atmosphere of our earth has thereby changed. This is the Christos Spirit, Who from that time has poured Himself in, and that is the cosmic significance of Christ Jesus!

Preparations for this were made thousands of years before Christ. Anyone able to follow the evolution of the earth would see that the transformation began in the circle of the so-called founders of religion. In Egypt Hermes Trismegistus, Hermes the Thrice-Great, guided humanity in the transformation of the narrow tribal-principle; Zoroaster, Moses, Pythagoras, Plato, all worked at this transformation also. Only when we understand all this do we learn to understand the spirit of Christianity more and more.

The outpouring of the Spirit was able to bring it about that the love of human beings towards one another was connected with the blood: people loved one another more as members of a tribe, their love was conditioned by the blood which they had in common; but the spirits who came into mankind as Race-Spirits, who brought about this love which was connected with the blood, acted at the same time in such a way that they separated and individualised the human beings more and more; men thereby became more and more egoistic and selfish. But then, on the other hand, there poured down the spirit of Christianity, the spirit of the unifying Christos. Only when these two streams work fully in man can he, entirely of himself, and filled with the Christos Spirit, find his way to others in love.

Now we must clearly understand that with the human blood was connected that which produced the feeling which expressed the blood-love. This later developed into selfishness; the blood took on the character of egoism, selfishness. This blood which had become egoistic had to be overcome. The surplus egoism in human blood was sacrificed on the Cross. If it had not flowed then, selfishness would have become greater and greater, egoism would have had the upper hand more and more. Human blood was sacrificed in order to cleanse humanity from egoism, and this cleansing of the blood from the egoistic ‘I’ is the Mystery of Golgotha!

He who sees only the material process, he who only sees the Man bleeding upon the Cross can never understand this deeply mystic event! We only understand the Mystery of Golgotha when we know that on the Cross flowed the blood which humanity had to lose in order to be set free from the bonds of egoistic selfishness. He who cannot understand this spiritually can never understand Christianity, nor can he understand the so-called redemption. We only understand the evolution of humanity when we comprehend the central position occupied in it by the Mystery of Golgotha, which expresses the highest spiritual development of humanity.

In ancient times before the Christos-principle entered into human evolution we have the Mystery of the Spirit; later, when Christos Jesus came in, the Mystery of the Son was revealed; in the future there will be the Mystery of the Father. This last is announced in the Apocalypse where the future Mysteries of the Father are described.

We shall now describe the Mysteries of the Spirit. They were founded in the ancient seminaries of the Adepts in a place lying between America and Europe, in ancient Atlantis. These ancient Atlantean Adept-Schools have been continued up to our day. The Mysteries in Post-Atlantean countries were a continuation of these ancient Turanian Adept-Schools. We find these Mysteries everywhere, in ancient India, in Persia, Chaldea, Egypt and Greece. One who was sufficiently prepared and who had withstood the necessary tests was admitted to the training and could be initiated. He had received the teachings of the Wisdom, he had purified himself from impulses and desires, he had accustomed himself to a regulated thought-life, he loved all humanity; he had become homeless, for he could love all men equally—not only those to whom he belonged through the ties of blood. All this was done in these Schools. What was gained in them and is still gained to-day is a stage of development in advance of the normal.

The pupil who had advanced so far that he no longer felt himself as the son of a tribe or a family, who had reached this last phase so that he loved all humanity, and had thus become the Son of Man, passed on to initiation, to the secret of the Pyramids. He was then put into a sleep which lasted for three days. In this sleep the Initiator was able to withdraw the spirit of the pupil, just as your spirit is withdrawn from your body in sleep; this process, however, was conscious in the case of the pupil. The Initiator was thus able to lead over into life what the pupil had previously learned. He had learned that there is an astral and a devachanic world, he had acquired ideas and feelings, and because he passed out of his physical body with these ideas and feelings, which are anchored in the astral body and etheric body, the Initiator was able to present all this before him in actuality; the pupil went through the astral and devachanic worlds, he experienced what he had previously learned, he thus became one who knows. Those worlds were no longer hidden from him; be brought back the remembrance of them. When he then reawakened in his physical body there came a cry which wrung itself from the soul when it returned from the spiritual worlds, when the ‘I’ had become a citizen of the higher worlds, when it had sojourned among spirits. When the pupil had experienced the secrets of the spiritual worlds, when he had returned into this life and become a missionary, a messenger of the spirit—all this on awaking burst forth exultantly in the words, ‘Eh, Eh, lama azobothami!’ that is, ‘My God, my God, how hast thou glorified me 1’ This was what one heard from each one who was initiated in this way: ‘My God, my God, how hast thou glorified me!’

If you had tested such a person you would have found that initiation was a pre-announcement of what is contained in Christos Jesus; that in the etheric body of such an Initiate Buddhi had awakened; in him Christ had inwardly awakened, but He had not come as far as to the physical body. As etheric men these Initiates had become immortal, in their etheric body they had experienced immortality.

Then came a great advance. It came with the advent of Christos to the earth,—with the One Who died upon the Cross. He experienced everything down even to the physical body: in the physical body everything had become life within Him which the Initiate in the Mysteries underwent in his etheric body. One could now see this with physical eyes.

The Initiates could feel bliss because they inwardly experienced how fife must conquer death. After this time one needed this no longer; through Golgotha there had descended to the physical plane that which formerly was experienced in the Mysteries.

I must now describe one thing to you before we can understand the Mystery of the Son. In the Gospel we find a description of the last Easter-supper. This was not an ordinary meal. Christos Jesus was surrounded by twelve human figures. He sat among them as if at table. And as what did they appear, these twelve human figures? Each one who as an Initiate had gone through the experiences of the higher worlds, had experienced the same. By these twelve Apostles are to be understood twelve of the Initiate’s own embodiments, twelve of his own fives through which he himself had passed. And these twelve fives were nothing else than that which he bore within himself as the parts of his body. In an occult sense the body is divided into twelve parts, and this is also meant to be nothing else than the representation of twelve incarnations. Each incarnation signifies an ascent; a human being is gradually purified in this ascent through his incarnations. Thus a human being is surrounded by the forms through which he himself has passed. They surround him as on the occasion of a meal; he himself, the human being, is the host. This is a picture which comes before the soul of each one in the Mystery of the Spirit. The one who comes last is the Son of Man; this is the man who through the series of his incarnations is so purified from egoistic love that he no longer feels himself as the son of a family, tribe or nation, but as the son of all humanity. This is the thirteenth among the twelve, who represents the highest perfection, he who loves all; this is the Initiate, he himself. That which was experienced by each one who was initiated into the higher world was repeated by Christos Jesus on the physical plane in this Easter meal.

Let us now trace this repetition. It is enveloped as if by a veil. Just as everything esoteric is given externally, exoterically, hidden as with a veil, so also was this Easter meal which Christos Jesus gave. This is not an ordinary meal; that which the Initiates of the Spirit had formerly experienced so often on the higher plane was to be repeated on the physical plane as an external, physical gathering.

In St. Luke’s Gospel, Chapter 22, v. 8-20, we read: ‘His disciples asked Him: Where wilt Thou that we prepare the Pascal Lamb? He sent His disciples, saying: Go into the city and you will meet a man carrying a pitcher of water, follow him. And where he goes in, say to the householder, the Master saith unto thee, where is the guest-chamber where I may eat the Pascal Lamb with My disciples? And he will show you a large room furnished with cushions and ready, there make ready for us.’ (Also Mark 14, v. 12-25.)

During the Easter meal He explains once more that He is the Spirit of the Earth, that the bread is His Body and the wine His Blood. As the Spirit of the Earth He may say of all the fluids which course through the earth, ‘This is my Blood,’ and with regard to all the materials which make up the body of the earth he may say, ‘This is My Body.’

Then comes the scene where Jesus develops the Mystery of the Spirit into the Mystery of the Son, in order to lead it up to the Mystery of the Father.

If you bear in mind the fact of the embodiment of twelve of his own incarnations as the figures which represent around him twelve of his own parts,—if you bring this to mind correctly and then with delicacy and inward tactfulness of soul try to comprehend a passage which contains what is deepest in Christianity, then in it you will be able to see the transition from the Mystery of the Spirit to the Mystery of the Son.

Remember once more what had to happen before the Mystery of the Son could come. That blood which is important to egoism on the earth had to be lost. Times will come when men will become more and more egoistic, and precisely for this reason had the superfluous egoistic blood to be sacrificed, in order that humanity might be united into one great brotherhood.

That which had been produced by humanity as such was spiritualised and ennobled by Christianity, although the egoistic element grew greater and greater through humanity becoming more and more independent. If we survey what since then has surrounded the globe; for example, if we consider all the means of external intercourse, all that reason has devised, all that the egoistic intellect has produced—all these things are only subsidiary means for the gratification of egoism. People were less egoistic when they produced fire by knocking two stones together and when they satisfied their needs in the simplest manner! The only counterbalance to this egoism was Christianity.

Just as the Son of Man sees the twelve figures around Him as the expression of his own incarnations, so will one who sees into the future recognise in these figures what humanity has still to pass through before it attains the conditions of completeness. He who passes through the Mystery of the Son sees into the future, and indeed to the end of the earth’s evolution when the earth passes over from the astral condition it will then have attained, into the Jupiter condition, the new planetary condition. Then as the fruit of its development it will imprint into the Jupiter condition the perfect love which will have been divested of all egoism, which will be entirely refined, purified, and spiritualised.

Hence Christos Jesus could say, ‘You who now sit around Me represent the various parts of My bodies, various degrees of perfection, and when I look into the future these are the twelve stations which must be surmounted in order to lead to the Father, to perfection.’ All that pertains to sensuality, all impulses and passions, instincts and passionate desires must be overcome. This is shown symbolically by what happens to the twelve. The age which follows is represented by Judas Iscariot! The lowest sensuality is here connected with the greatest egoism. It is Judas Iscariot who betrays Christianity! There will come a time when that which took place upon Golgotha will take place over the whole earth. It will seem as if egoism would put Christos and Buddhi to death. That will be the time of Antichrist. It is the law that everything that took place around the Cross will have to take place also on the physical plane. Then in a still later period of development everything that is base in man will fall away from him, and even now there is being prepared what he will become later. He will then no longer create from the impulse of lower passion. Just as at the present time he produces the word which can embody the highest that is in his soul, so he will in the future work creatively by the word; just as through sexuality he has become egoistic, so by the falling away of the same he will again become selfless. The blood of man will be transformed so that in the future he may create from pure, selfless feeling. There will be a human race which will create by the Word. The sexual organ will be transferred to the heart, lungs and larynx, and here we have one of the two evolutions which follows after Christianity.

The age when egoism rules is represented by Judas Iscariot. He who considers the events of the world impartially sees how sexuality in man is in the position to betray and kill everything spiritual. Man will become more alive when his higher part, the Word, is creative and when his heart is his spiritual creative organ. This is a picture which is to be compared with a passage in St. John’s Gospel from which we may see what will be the consequence when Christianity shall have made all mankind selfless and brotherly.

That which makes mankind egoistic you see embodied in Judas Iscariot; and the ultimate goal to which humanity will develop in the distant future, the twelfth station, is the Figure of Christ Himself.

The transformation comes about through the creative power pressing upwards from the lap to the heart. Now read the passage concerning the disciple of Jesus whom He loved most, and of whom it is said that he lies on Jesus’ breast. This is the passage which tells how the lowest power of production, the creative power of man, moves upwards from the lap to the heart, which is connected with the lungs and larynx. This passage tells that John is initiated into the Mystery of the Son by Christ Jesus. After the pupil has experienced this, he will have transformed his lower productive power into the higher and he will come through the Son to the Father.

And what may he then say? He may say what all Initiates say, ‘My God, My God, how hast Thou glorified Thy Son.’

Read in St. John’s Gospel: ‘Then Jesus said, Now is the Son of Man glorified, and God is glorified in Him.’ Then the Easter meal, which took place on the physical plane, was finished.

Those who have gone through this by the side of Christos Jesus, will, when they pass out of earthly evolution and rise to a higher development, gather around Christos, and He will then once more be able to utter in the midst of this gathering the words which He uttered at that time on the Cross.

This passage has been wrongly translated as it passed through the Greek. It ought to read, ‘My God, My God, how very much hast Thou glorified me!’ (That is, spiritualised me).

This passage reveals to us the struggling loose from matter: The Mystery of the Son. It shows us that at that time the seer’s inner vision of the Redeemer of the world saw to the end of the earth’s evolution.

The great goal of humanity consists in overcoming all difference and in founding the great love of humanity. This goal will not be gained in any other way than by people learning to penetrate more and more into the spiritual worlds. But they will then not be dissolved in the Deity, as they were before they descended into the several human beings, they will be individualised—like the water in the tiny sponges. Humanity proceeded from the Divine Being and developed the various egos, and it will ultimately, completely individualised, but at the same time united into a brotherhood, form an unity which will give birth to a new star: the new star which in the Apocalypse is called The New Jerusalem. And then the Sphere-Harmony will echo the words, ‘My God, My God, how hast Thou glorified Me!’

These words were uttered on Golgotha, and they will be repeated when humanity has risen to the highest stage, when it has progressed from Son to Father. Far, very far does the spiritual vision extend when it seeks to comprehend this Mystery of Golgotha!

The great festivals of the year are important times at which we ought to halt, lift ourselves above ordinary everyday affairs and cast our eyes over the great path of human evolution; they are occasions when we ought to survey not only centuries but thousands of years, and when at the same time we ought to look back consciously at the stations through which humanity has passed in the course of its evolution.

Recently I have endeavored to sketch the being of man and the three worlds surrounding him, namely, the actual physical world, the soul world and the spirit world. Later on, I plan to speak about the main anthroposophical concepts regarding the origin of man, the earth and the heavenly bodies in general. Thus, the overall outlook on the theory of life as developed by anthroposophy will have been outlined.

Today however, I would like to present a few suggestions on how man's inner development must progress if he desires to reach conclusions of his own concerning the statements proclaimed by an anthroposophical world outlook. It must be kept in mind that there is a great difference between arriving at an understanding of the concepts presented by a spiritual scientist as truth gained through his cognition and experience, and the inner development of the human soul and spirit that enables a person to attain to such cognition and perceptions on his own. One has to distinguish between an elementary level of development leading to comprehension of an experienced spiritual teacher's statements, following them as it were in thought and feeling and acknowledging them as truth within certain limits, and an advanced level on which one attains the personal experiences in soul and spirit realm. This elementary level shall be the subject here. The advanced level concerns actual clairvoyance and to the extent that indications pertaining to such actual clairvoyance can be given at all in public, they will form the topic of a later presentation. The problem of how one may gain personal comprehension of anthroposophical truths shall occupy us today.

Only a few mere hints can be given here since the training that the human soul and spirit must undergo for attainment of the understanding mentioned above is an extensive one. It requires a long period of inner study and the many necessary details involved in such training can certainly not be elaborated upon in the course of a brief lecture. The information that can be related here is but a scant outline of what would be conveyed in personal instructions. Thus it must initially be noted that most people require the aid of a personal teacher in this field. Some might be of the opinion that a person can develop in himself inner abilities, soul forces and spiritual perception by his own attempts, and it might seem unfortunate that in this vital area of life personal guidance is supposedly necessary. The nature of such guidance, however, gives sufficient guaranty that no person comes by any means under any sort of dependence upon another. Nobody evaluates and honors the dignity of man and the respect for the individual more highly than the occult teacher. The instructor of mystical and anthroposophical development never gives anything but advice. Indeed, the greatest teachers in this field never did more than advise and suggest. It is left entirely to the judgment of the individual to what extent, if at all, he intends to follow such advice. It is left up to the individual what task he sets before his soul and spirit; the consideration of human freedom is too pronounced on the part of the teacher to do more than advise and guide. Everything that can be conveyed in any manner in this area must be understood with this reservation.¹

Another important point is that the main part of this schooling does not express itself in any particular external formalities, nor does it require any definite external measures. This schooling is, rather, a completely intimate development of the human soul, and all the significant degrees of development one must undergo take place in the innermost depth of being. Precisely here a transformation takes place in a person, but nobody, not even his closest friend, need notice anything different. Thus, in privacy, tranquility and seclusion the mystic trains himself to acquire understanding of soul and spirit worlds. It cannot be emphasized enough that nobody devoting himself to inner spiritual development needs to change his everyday occupation in any respect whatever, nor neglect his daily duties in any sense, nor take time away from them. On the contrary, he who is of the opinion that a special amount of time must be spent on his inner training and consequently neglects his ordinary duties and, by his attempts at insight into spiritual worlds, becomes an anti-social, inferior member of human society, will soon discover that by these means least is achieved.

This inner training quietly progresses without undue haste in complete inner tranquility. I must stress at this point that no “extra-special” rules or directions are being given here but rather the descriptions of such a path of inner development. The directions when followed do require one thing of the aspirant without which no higher personal experience can ever be attained. That is endurance. He who has no patience and endurance, who cannot persevere over and over again and follow with complete calm the inner rules that are applicable here, will generally achieve nothing at all. There is one rare exception that allows for success without compliance to these rules. This is the case in which an individual is far advanced on his path of evolution as a human being. The course that the inner training takes is quite different and much shorter in the case of an individual who in a former incarnation had already attained to a certain level of clairvoyance. He who gives the corresponding rules for inner development will soon be aware of this fact and his task will then be only one of eliminating the obstacles blocking the path to enlightenment.

Since the directions for the road to enlightenment vary with each individual, it is as a rule not advisable to seek mystic development without personal guidance. He who sets forth the guide-lines must be closely acquainted with his pupil, not in the ordinary sense of the word but in a spiritual sense. While the occult teacher need not know anything about his pupil's profession, manner of living, family members or experiences, he does need to acquire an intimate knowledge of his soul and spirit conditions and their level of development. It would lead too far today to disclose the ways and means by which the occult teacher acquires this knowledge. They will be discussed in future lectures on clairvoyance.

Inner development is connected with certain definite consequences for those who set out on this path and they must realize that, resultingly, certain definite qualities will appear in their personality. These qualities are symptoms and direct results of the level of inner development and require careful observation. The occult teacher must know how to interpret these symptoms so as to assure the proper manner of progress of this inner development.

The development of the inner man is birth on a higher level. It is the birth of soul and spirit, not in a figurative, allegorical sense, but as a fact in the literal sense of the word. Even in this area a birth is not without consequences and the occult teacher must know how to deal with them. All this had to be mentioned in advance.

After initial acquaintance with some of the basic teachings of anthroposophy such as reincarnation and karma—the teaching that the human soul has in the past been incarnated repeatedly in a physical body and will continue to return in future incarnations, and the teaching of karma, of compensatory justice—most people will ask how one can comprehend these teachings and how one can acquire an understanding of these on one's own. This is the big question that now confronts each person. There is one golden rule that must be followed that will eventually lead anybody to the desired comprehension This has been the common experience of all who have earnestly subjected themselves to the exercises in question. There is nobody who cannot in the easiest manner possible acquire this comprehension of reincarnation and karma. One is inclined, however, to say with Goethe, “Though it is easy, the easy is hard.” This is so because few are those who resolve to call forth the will-power, endurance and patience necessary for achieving certain definite conditions of soul and spirit essential for this comprehension. The golden rule is this, “Live your life as if reincarnation and karma were truths and they will become truths for you.” It appears as if this is to be achieved by a form of self-suggestion but this is not the case. The mystic symbol of the snake that bites its own tail is a familiar one. This symbol has several profound meanings but among the many interpretations it contains is the one expressed here in the golden rule.

It is evident that the supposition inherent in this golden rule negates itself in a sense in like manner as the snake that curls up around itself. How are we to understand this? If reincarnation is a fact, then certain efforts made by man that have an effect on his soul cannot be made in vain, but should become the soul's nature later on. One of the great laws of man that must be intimately tried out on his own self, is expressed in an ancient Indian text, “What you think today you will be tomorrow.” He who believes in reincarnation must realize that a quality that he develops within himself, a thought that he imprints in himself by constantly holding it in his mind, becomes something permanent in his soul that will emerge ever again. Therefore, a person seeking mystical development must first of all make the attempt to give up certain formerly held inclinations. Then, new inclinations must be acquired by constantly holding the thought of such inclinations, virtues or characteristics in one's mind. They must be so incorporated into one's being that a person becomes enabled to alter his soul by his own will-power. This must be tried as objectively as a chemical might be tested in an experiment. A person who has never endeavored to change his soul, who has never made the initial decision to develop the qualities of endurance, steadfastness and calm logical thinking, or a person who has such decisions but has given up because he did not succeed in a week, a month, a year or a decade, will never determine anything within himself about these truths.

Such is the intimate path the soul must tread. It must be able to acquire new characteristics, thoughts and inclinations. A person must have the ability to emerge in due time with brand new habits acquired through sheer force of will. A formerly careless person must get accustomed to being neat and exacting and this he must accomplish not through any external pressure but by steadfast resolve of will. It is particularly effective in the case of insignificant characteristics and small matters. The clearer the issues that a person perceives concerning himself, the better his comprehension in the area of truth. If, for example, a person is able to objectively observe a gesture, a facial expression or some other insignificant habit, if he becomes aware of it as if observing another person, and then by sheer will-power puts in the place of the habit or gesture something of his own choosing, incorporating it into himself, such a person is well on the way to comprehending the great law of reincarnation on his own. A chemist can give descriptions of processes taking place in a laboratory. Similarly, a person can establish directions to be tried on himself. Through insignificant alterations the loftiest heights are indeed reached.

Regarding karma, the great law of just compensation, perception and understanding of it can be gained if one lives one's life as if karma was a fact. If a disaster or a sorrow befall you, try keeping in mind the thought that this sorrow or accident has not occurred by some miraculous chance but that there must be a cause, a reason for it. You need not probe for the cause. Only he who clairvoyantly can command a view of karma would be able to actually perceive the cause of a joyful event, a sorrow or some mishap. You do need a mood, a certain feeling to which you can surrender yourself so that you can sense how a given sorrow or joy must have a cause and, in turn, can cause future events. He who permeates himself with this mood and looks at his life and all that happens to him as if karma was a fact, will find that his existence becomes increasingly comprehensible to him. He who suppresses his anger when something annoying happens to him and thinks instead that just as a stone rolls if pushed so the annoying matter must have come about due to some inevitable set of laws of the universe, attains to comprehension of karma. As certain as it is that you will wake up tomorrow morning, provided circumstances and your health remain unchanged, so it is equally certain that you will comprehend the laws of karma if you view life in this manner.

These are the two prerequisites for a person desirous of spiritual schooling; the aspirant must view life in these ways. He does not, however, have to give himself up to these thought attitudes as if they were the gospel truth. On the contrary, he must leave it open as to whether or not they are really true. He must have neither doubt nor superstition because these two are the worst obstacles. Only a person who views life thus with an open mind is prepared to receive mystical instruction.

Still a third aspect must be considered. No occult teacher will ever instruct a person who is filled with superstition or common prejudice, or one who is prone to senseless judgment or apt to fall prey to any illusion. The golden rule applying here is that, before even taking the first step in the direction of higher learning, a person must free himself from any flighty thinking or possibility to mistake illusion for reality. Above all an aspirant for spiritual enlightenment must be a person of common sense wire only devotes himself to disciplined thinking and observations. If a person leans toward prejudice and superstition in the world of sense reality, it soon tends to be corrected by sense reality itself. If, however, a person does not think logically but indulges in fantasies, correction is not so simple. It is essential, therefore, that one have one's thought-life completely in hand and be able to exercise strict control over one's thoughts before ever venturing into soul and spirit worlds. One who easily leans to fantasies, superstitions and illusions is unfit to enter into the schooling prerequisite for spiritual teaching. It would be simple to reiterate that one were free of fantasies, illusion and superstition. But it is easy to deceive oneself here. Freedom from fantasies, illusions, prejudices and superstitions is gained by stern self-discipline. Such freedom is not easily attained by anyone. It must be remembered to what extent most people tend to sloppy, careless thinking and are unable to control their thought-life through their own will-power.

In pondering the demands everyday life makes it becomes clear that it is an impossibility to completely free one's mind from outside impressions. To do so, it becomes necessary, therefore, to set aside a short period of time every day. This short time, which is needed and which must not conflict with one's obligations, is sufficient. Even five minutes or, indeed, even less is enough. For this brief period, a person must be able to tear himself away from all sense impressions, from what flows into him through his eyes, ears and his sense of touch. For this brief duration of time he must become blind and deaf to his outer surroundings. Everything that crowds into us from the outside world unites us with sensuality and the ordinary everyday world. All this must be silenced and total inner calm must take its place. When this inner silence, this shedding of all sense impressions has occurred, all memory of past sense impressions must in addition be extinguished. It suffices to ponder for a moment how completely we are tied up with matters of time and space, with all that is temporal and mortal. Check the thought that passed through your head a moment ago and see if it is not associated with something of a transitory nature. Such thoughts have no value for inner development.

So all thoughts that connect us with finiteness and transitory matters must be silenced. Then, when such silence has been produced in the soul and for awhile all our surroundings, be they of the era, the nation, the race or the century we live in, are subdued and eliminated, the soul will begin to speak of its own accord. This will not happen immediately. First, the soul must be prepared for this point and there are means and directions that will call forth this inner sounding. Man must give himself up to thoughts, concepts and sentiments that originate not in the temporal but in the eternal. Their content must be true not only for today, yesterday, a century or tomorrow but forever. Such thoughts are found in the various religious books of all people. They are found as an example in the Bhagavad Gita, the hymn of human perfection. Too, they are found in the Old and New Testaments, particularly in the Gospel of St. John beginning with the thirteenth chapter. Again, effective thoughts are to be found in the first four sentences of the book, Light on the Path, by Mabel Collins, familiar to members of the Theosophical and Anthroposophical Movements.²

These four sentences, which are carved into the inner walls of every temple of initiation, are not dependent on time and space. They belong not to one man, one family. They are not part of one generation or one century, but they extend over the whole of evolution. They were true thousands of years ago and will be true thousands of years hence. They awaken the slumbering soul faculties; let them arise out of the inner realm. Certainly this has to be correctly understood. It is not sufficient to assume that one comprehends the meaning of these sentences. One must allow such sentences to quicken and come to life in one's inner self. One must permit the whole significance of such sentences to radiate in one's inner being, must surrender oneself to it completely. One must learn to love such sentences. If a person believes that he comprehends them, then only has the right moment arrived to let the sentences rise resplendent again and again in himself. The intellectual comprehension is not important; the love for such a spiritual truth is. The more the love for such inner truths streams through us, the more the power of inner sight grows in us. Such sentences must not occupy us one or two days, but weeks, months and years until finally such powers of soul awaken in us. Then at last comes a certain definite moment when still another illumination takes place.

He who proclaims spiritual truths by his own experiences is familiar with this contemplative inner life. The great spiritual truths that he proclaims day by day are part of a vast spiritual world panorama that he can view with the inner power of his soul and spirit. He turns his gaze into soul and spirit realms. He turns his sight away from earth to the solar systems to explore them. This inner power would, however, soon be extinguished if he did not give it new nourishment every new day. This is the secret of the spiritual investigator that the immense panorama of universe and humanity, which he has let pass through his soul hundreds and hundreds of times, must pass through his soul anew every morning. Again, it is not important here that he comprehends it all but that he learns to love it more and more. Thus he performs a divine worship every morning during which he gazes up in reverence to the great Spirits. He has learned to survey the whole panoramic picture in a few minutes. Thankfulness for what it has given his soul permeates him. Without treading this path of reverence one does not arrive at clarity. It is essential that the spiritual investigator's utterances are formed out of this clarity. Only if this has become the case is he truly appointed to speak about the truths of mysticism, the truths of anthroposophy and spiritual science. In this way does the spiritual investigator function and thus must everybody begin, that is, in the simplest, most elementary manner until he comes to comprehension of these teachings.

Human individuality and that of cosmic beings is profound, unfathomingly profound. One cannot achieve anything in this area save by patience, perseverance and loving devotion toward the cosmic powers. These are forces which, like electricity in the external world, are powerful in the internal world. They are not only moral forces but forces of cognition. When the aspirant for enlightenment has become proficient in allowing such truths to dwell within his being for some time, if he has accepted them in thankfulness toward those who revealed them to him, then he will at last reach a special point, which sooner or later becomes available to everybody who has allowed tranquility and silence to come to fruition in his soul. This is the moment when his soul begins to speak, when his own inner being begins to perceive the great, eternal truths. Then, suddenly the world around him lights up in colors never seen before. Something becomes audible that he had never heard before. The world will radiate in a new light. New sounds and words will become audible. This new light and radiance ray toward him from the soul realm and the new sounds he hears come to him from the spirit realm. It is characteristic of the soul world that one “sees” it. It is equally characteristic of the spirit world that one “hears” it.

If self-development is sought for in this area, then part of it comes about through obedience to and observation of a great sum of rules and directions. Here I could only sketch in sweeping lines how something like this comes about and is experienced. These individual rules must be followed diligently, just like the chemist must weigh and measure with the most delicate instruments the minutest substances needed for a chemical compound. A description of the rules that can be made public will be found in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment. These rules offer specific instructions for treading this path. They, too, require most diligent patience and perseverance.

The rules presented in this book were never made public in former times when, it must be understood, occult instruction was only taught in occult schools. Such instruction is still being given out in occult schools today because it is an intimate teaching process that takes place between two persons. It does no good to seek instruction on one's own initiative by hearing or reading special rules in fragmentary form in one place or another. All the instruction that one can receive from various places, and there are indeed shops advertising such instructions, are no more than tiny fragments torn from the great book of occult schooling. A person who makes use of them must realize that he is leaving himself open to certain dangers. It is not expedient to be introduced to matters that refer to an actual alteration of the soul, that relate to the most profoundly important aspects of soul life, through commercial channels. Occult training methods that are advertised for monetary gain are not only worthless but can be dangerous under certain circumstances. This had to be said because in this present age so much of this sort of thing confronts man. Precisely because so many so-called occult methods crowd the scene today, it has become necessary to present a picture of the truth.

The rules that are put down in the book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment, stem from ancient traditions. Because it is essential that the truth become known, the guiding spirits of evolution have given permission for the publication of these rules. Still, it is only possible to publish a certain amount. The rest had to be excluded because the most important rules can only be disclosed by word of mouth.

What is found in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment is apart from other books of instruction in that it is harmless. Only those guide lines are disclosed that cannot do damage to a person, even if they are not followed with patience and perseverance. They can do no harm even if a person practices them improperly. This had to be mentioned because the question has arisen as to why and by what authority a set of esoteric rules was published.

Another point of consideration is that in order to awaken in the soul world, one must have sense organs for this soul world just as one has sense organs for the material world. Like the body, which possesses eyes and ears, the soul and the spirit must possess organs to perceive the radiance of the soul realm and the soundings of the world of spirit. A person with experience in this field, who is clairvoyant, can actually perceive the process of development of such soul organs in a person engaged in inner training. They are perceived in his aura enveloped in a cloud of light. The aura of a spiritually undeveloped person is seen like a nebulous cloud formation. When a person sleeps, the aura hovers above the physical body because the astral body³ separates in sleep from it. The aura's appearance is that of two entwined spirals like rings of mist. They wind around one another and disappear in continuous spirals into indefinable realms. When a person undertakes occult training, his aura becomes increasingly definable. The indefinable ends of the spirals disappear and the two entwined spiral formations become clearly organized. They become increasingly defined, compact structures. Certain organs appear in the aura that are called chakrams in esoteric language. These are the sense organs of the soul. Their structure is delicate and in order to come into bloom they must be cared for and guarded. Under no other circumstances can they develop. He who rails in this will never enjoy true spiritual perception. A person must suppress all negative sensations and feelings within himself in order to nurture these soul eyes. The chakrams cannot emerge if a person becomes angry at every opportunity. Equanimity must be preserved, patience must be practiced. Anger and fury prohibit the soul eye's appearance; nervousness and haste will not permit its development.

Furthermore, it is necessary that man rid himself of something that is difficult to cast aside in our civilization, namely, the urge to learn “what is new.” This has tremendous influence on the soul-organ. If one cannot get hold of a newspaper fast enough and tell the news to somebody else, if a person also cannot keep what he has seen and heard to himself and cannot suppress the desire to pass it on, his soul will never achieve any degree of development. It is also necessary that one acquire a certain definite manner of judging one's fellowmen. It is difficult to attain an uncritical attitude, but understanding must take the place of criticism. It suppresses the advancement of the soul if you confront your fellowman immediately with your own opinion. We must hear the other out first, and this listening is an extraordinarily effective means for the development of the soul eyes. Anybody who reaches a higher level in this direction owes it to having learned to abstain from criticizing and judging everybody and everything. How can we look understandingly into somebody's being? We should not condemn but understand the criminal's personality, understand the criminal and the saint equally well. Empathy for each and everyone is required and this is what is meant with higher, occult “listening.” Thus, if a person brings himself with strict self-control to the point of not evaluating his fellowman, or the rest of the world for that matter, according to his personal judgment, opinion and prejudice and instead lets both work on him in silence, he has the chance to gain occult powers. Every moment during which a person becomes determined to refrain from thinking an evil thought about his fellowman is a moment gained.

A wise man can learn from a child. A simple-minded person can consider a wise man's utterances in like manner as a child's babblings, convinced that he is superior to a child and unaware of the practicality of wisdom. Only when he has learned to listen to the stammering of a babe as if it were a revelation, has he created within him power that wells forth from his soul.

Finally, one cannot expect the soul eyes to open immediately. A person who combats rage, anger, curiosity and other negative qualities, is first of all removing hindrances that walled up his soul. Ever and again must this effort be repeated. A clairvoyant person can evaluate to what extent the delicate soul organs are emerging. When human utterances have lost their edge and have become kind and filled with understanding for fellowmen, the spiritual organ located in the vicinity of the larynx is awakened. It takes long practice, however, before a person becomes aware of this himself. It took millions of years for the physical eye to develop in man, from tiny pin-points to early beginnings of a lens to the complicated structure of the eye. The soul eye does not take as long. It requires several months in one, longer in another person. One must have patience. The moment when these delicate soul structures first begin to perceive comes to everybody sooner or later. That is, if a person continues the exercises and particularly if he develops certain virtues, which sometimes the hardships of life itself can develop. There are three virtues in particular that must be developed that nearly turn man into a clairvoyant. Only they must he practiced with the necessary intensity and emphasis. They are: Self-confidence paired with humility, self-control paired with gentleness, and presence of mind coupled with perseverance. There are the great levers of spiritual development.. The three first-mentioned virtues, however, will lead to dreadful vices if they are not each coupled with the three other virtues, humility, gentleness and perseverance.

All this must be taken in the sense of broad outlines. They are examples of the directions that the spiritual pupil must follow on the three levels toward spiritual awakening. The three stages of occult schooling are called preparation or catharsis, enlightenment and initiation. During the first stage or level, man's being is prepared in such a manner as to allow the delicate structures of the soul to emerge. On the level of enlightenment man gains the means of perceiving in the soul realm, and through initiation he attains the faculty of expressing himself in the spirit realm. What I have had to say today might be considered as difficult to understand by some, and though it is really easy, it does hold true here that the easy is difficult.

Everybody can tread the occult path; it is not closed to anybody. The secrets lie in each person's own inner being. Only earnest inner endeavor is required and man must make the attempt to free himself from all the fetters obstructing this inner life. We must realize that the loftiest and grandest truths come to us in the most intimate way. The greatest sages of mankind did not discover the great truths by any other than the path described above. They found these truths because they found the path leading into their inner being and because they knew that patience and perseverance were required in practicing the various exercises.

Thus, when a person reaches down to the depth of his being, when he turns away from the thoughts that assail him from outside and instead arises to the thoughts belonging to eternity, he kindles the flame within himself that will light up the soul worlds for him. When a person develops within himself the qualities of equanimity, inner calm and peace, as well as the other virtues mentioned above, he nourishes this flame with the right sustenance. If a person is able to keep silent and utter only significant, lofty thoughts, if he lives a love-filled existence and his life becomes one of divine worship, all the world around him will begin to “sound.” This is what Pythagoras called, “Music of the spheres.” This is by no means meant symbolically, it is a reality.

Only mere hints could be given here that point the direction to the path leading to a narrow gate. Everybody can reach this narrow gate and to him who is not afraid of trials and hardships, the gate will be opened. Then he will find what all the great religious and philosophical ideologies have proclaimed: The Eternal One Truth and the Way of Life!

• 1. In a foreword to the 1918 edition of Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment, Rudolf Steiner wrote in regard to the matter of personal instruction: “The statement that the student needs personal instruction should be understood in the sense that this book, itself, is personal instruction. In earlier times, there were reasons for reserving such personal instruction for oral teaching; today we have reached a stage in evolution of humanity in which spiritual scientific knowledge must become far more widely disseminated than formerly. It must be placed within reach of everyone to a quite different extent from what was the case in older times. Hence, the book replaces the former oral instruction ...”
• 2. The first four sentences ofLight on the Path are: "Before the eyes can see, they must be incapable of tears. Before the ear can hear, it must have lost its sensitiveness. Before the voice can speak in the presence of the Masters it must have lost the power to wound. Before the soul can stand in the presence of the Masters its feet must be washed in the blood of the heart."
• 3. See Theosophy: an Introduction to the Super-sensible Knowledge of the World and the Destination of Man for a clarification of this, and other, anthroposophical terminology.

In this and the two following talks we want to occupy ourselves with what Goethe called his apocalypse, his secret revelation.

We have seen, among which lofty brotherhood Goethe counted himself. He was convinced that knowledge is not anything that is ascertained once from a human point of view but that the human cognitive faculty can develop and that this soul development is subjected to principles about which the human being needs to know nothing at first, just as little as the plant knows the principles according to which it develops. The general theosophical teachings of the developing cognitive faculty comply completely with the Goethean approach to life. In various ways Goethe expressed this view.

He now answered a question that he tried to answer in infinitely deep way that he approached when his friendship with Schiller became closer and closer. This friendship was hard to make because both personalities stood spiritually on quite different ground. Only in the middle of the nineties (of the 18th century) they met forever and complemented each other. At that time, Schiller invited Goethe to contribute to the Horen (Horae), a magazine in which the most beautiful products of German cultural life should be made accessible to the public. Goethe promised his cooperation, and his first contribution in this magazine was his apocalypse, his “secret revelation:” The Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily (1794/95).

It concerns the great connection of body and spirit, of the earthly and the super-sensible he wanted to demonstrate, as well as the way which the human being must take using his developing cognitive faculties if he wants to ascend from the earthly to the spiritual.

It is a question that the human being must always put to himself. Schiller had demonstrated this problem spiritedly in his way in the Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man. This treatise, little known and studied, is a repository for somebody who approaches this riddle. Goethe was thereby inspired to comment the same question and he did it in the Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily which he annexed later to the Conversations of German Emigrants.

This fairy tale leads deeply into theosophy. Theosophy says also that the contents of knowledge of our soul are dependent any time on our cognitive faculty, and that we can develop this cognitive faculty higher and higher, so that we gradually do not have anything subjective as contents of cognition in our souls, but that we can experience objective world contents. The Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily shows the development of the human soul to higher and higher insights, because all human soul forces can develop not only the human intellectual capacity. All soul forces, also feeling and willing, can penetrate into the objective world secrets. But you have to eliminate everything personal.

This fairy tale is so profound that it is worthwhile to consider it more intimately. It leads us into the depths of Goethe's world view. Goethe himself said of it to Riemer (1774–1841, Goethe's secretary) that the same applies to it as to St. John's Book of Revelation that only a few find the right thing in it. Goethe put his most profound ideas into it that he knew about the human destiny. He was always very reserved about it: he said if hundred human beings were found who understand it correctly; he would give an explanation of it. They were not found up to his death, and the explanation was not given. After Goethe's death, a big number of attempts to explain were made which were collected by Meyer-von Waldeck (1824–1899, German writer). They are partly valuable as building stones, however, cannot fathom the profound sense.

The question could appear: why did Goethe put his real life secret into such a fairy tale? He himself said that he could speak on such a question only pictorially. He did the same with it as all great teachers of humanity who did not want to teach in abstract words who treated the loftiest questions in pictures, symbolically.

Up to the foundation of the Theosophical Society it was only possible to give this highest truth pictorially. Thereby comes about what Schopenhauer so pleasantly called the “choir of the spirits,” if the spark is enkindled in the souls like by hieroglyphics. Where the world view became completely personal, completely intimate to Goethe, he could express himself only in this form. One finds two important clues in Goethe's conversations with Eckermann.

Later Goethe still expressed himself in two other fairy tales more intimately, in The New Melusine (1807) and then in The New Paris (1810). These three fairy tales are the most profound expression of Goethe's world view. In The New Paris he says in the end: “whether I can tell you what happens further, or whether it is expressly forbidden to me, I do not know.” This should be a hint to the sources of this fairy tale.

These fairy tales are revelations of Goethe's most intimate approach to life and world view. The fairy tale The New Paris points clearly to the sources from which it comes. It begins: all clothes drop from the boy's body, everything drops from the human being that he has acquired within the culture in which he lives. A man, young and nice, approaches the boy. This welcomes him joyfully. The man asks: do you know me? The boy answers: you are Mercury. This I am and I was sent by the gods with an important order to you!

Let us look at these three fairy tales as Goethe's most profound revelations. At first the Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. The fairy tale immediately begins mysteriously. Three fields are brought forward to us, a this-worldly one, a yonder one and in between them is a river. It shows the world of body, soul and spirit, and the path of the human being to the super-sensible world. The near side bank is the physical world, the yonder one, the country of the beautiful lily, is the spiritual world; in between is the river, the astral world, the world of desire.

Theosophy speaks of the soul life in the physical world, of this mortal world, then of the devachan which the soul experiences after death, but also if it got free of anything personal by means of an esoteric development already here in the physical world. Then it can ascend to the beyond, to the kingdom of the beautiful lily; then it finds the way to the yonder bank, where the human being constantly strives for, the way to the home of his soul and spirit. The river in between, the astral world, the current of desires and passions separating the human beings from the spiritual world must be overcome.

A bridge is now built across the river and the human being gets to the kingdom of the beautiful lily. This is the goal the human being strives for. Goethe was completely familiar with the significance of the lily in medieval mysticism. He was, so to speak, initiated in the secrets of the mystic world view and knew the alchemical efforts of the Middle Ages. After he had recognised the deepness of mysticism on one side, he also met the trivial reflection of it in the caricatures of literature.

In the first part of Faust, he still shows us humorously that the problem of the connection of the human being with the beautiful lily stood before his eyes. In the Easter walk you read before he makes the acquaintance with Mephistopheles of the efforts of the human being in a distorted alchemy.

My father was a worthy commoner,
who in good faith, but in his own eccentric way,
laboured at fanciful speculations...
...
...
there a mercurial suitor, the Red Lion,
would in a tepid bath be married to the Lily...

This is a technical term of alchemy: lily signifies Mercury. According to the theosophical world view Mercury is the symbol of the wisdom the human being strives for, and lily that condition of consciousness in which the human being exists if he has obtained the highest. The marriage of the male with the female in the human soul is shown here. “In a tepid bath” means in the alchemical sense “being released from the fire of desires.”

We speak of ahamkara in theosophy, the striving of the human self which wants to enclose the highest. This human principle striving at first in selfness is shown in alchemy as a lion which has been freed from selfness, from desires and passions, and is allowed to combine with the lily. Even if one did no longer know a lot of the true alchemy in mediaeval times, one had preserved the names. All higher truth stands in the etheric shine before us if we approach it, released from stormy desires, from the lion of desires which were cooled down in the tepid bath. Then the human mind can find the lily, the eternal-female, which attracts us; he can have the union with these truths of the spiritual worlds. This is a way which the souls have always gone in the fullest clearness. Mystic is somebody who strives for the clearness, the highness, and the purity of the views.

There must not be sympathy and antipathy of wisdom, but only an unselfish being merged in it. Because one does not feel any passion with the truths of mathematics, no quarrel is possible; if human sensations came into question, it would be also argued whether two times two are four. In the same etheric shine all higher truths stand before us if we express this attitude. It was this serenity in all that Pythagoras called catharsis, purification. Goethe described this whole way with its intimate secrets in his fairy tale because our colloquial language is not really suitable to show these matters. Not until we succeed in describing that in coloured pictures which lives in the soul of the mystic, we find the language to describe the highest form of the human consciousness, the lily.

One likes to represent mysticism as something unclear. But unclear is only somebody who does not find the way to the heights. The mystic strives for the most precious clearness of the concepts in pure etheric height, free of harsh immediate reality. We need to acquire the concepts only which lead us to this country of clearness. Goethe looked for this country of clearness, he strove for mathematical knowledge. In Goethe's estate I found a notebook fifteen years ago. This confirmed that Goethe concerned himself with mathematical studies even during later years, even up to the highest problems. Like a real gnostic he made his studies on nature and the human soul. Because of his intuitive spirit he could also behold the archetypal plant, for example.

But as he was hard understood concerning the archetypal plant and animal, he was still less understood concerning the soul-life. I remind of the conversation with Schiller in Jena in 1794. Goethe expressed himself to Schiller in such a way that he said that an approach of the world and its contents could be probably found which does not pick the things to pieces, as science does, but which shows the connecting band of all forms, which points to something higher, something uniform behind all sensuous phenomena. Goethe drew his archetypal plant, a formation which was similar, indeed, to a plant, but not to living ones which you can perceive with outer senses, and he said to Schiller: this is the essentiality of plants, the archetypal plant, this is the connecting band of the plants; but this archetypal plant lives in no single plant, but in all plant beings. It is the objective of all plants.

He answered to Schiller's objection that his archetypal plant were an idea: “If this is an idea, I see my ideas with eyes.” At that time, Goethe showed how he stands to the spirit; there is an intuitively beheld plant for him which lives in every plant being. Only an intuitive beholding can perceive the objective behind all sensory things, only thinking free of sensuousness can attain this. The will-o'-the-wisps of the fairy tale show us how thinking can develop to objectivity. Who cannot rise toward Goethe's view does not understand what he means; at that time even Schiller did not correctly understand what Goethe meant, but he did his best to penetrate into Goethe's world view. Then the letter of the 23rd August, 1794 came. This broke the ice between both spirits.

Goethe hid a lot of his higher spiritual beholding in this fairy tale. Let us now try to penetrate into the fairy tale.

You read: In the middle of the night, two will-o'-the-wisps wake up the old ferryman who sleeps on the other bank in the spiritual world, and want to be ferried over. Fro the kingdom of the lily he ferries them over the river whipped by the storm. They behave discourteously, dance in the small boat, so that the ferryman must say to them that the small boat topples over. Finally, after they had arrived at the bank with effort, they want to pay him with many gold pieces which they shook off from themselves. The ferryman rejects them and says sullenly: It's a good thing that you have not thrown them into the river which can stand no gold and would have wildly foamed and devoured you. Now I have to bury the gold. However, I myself can be paid only with fruits of the earth. He does not let them loose until they promise three cabbages, three artichokes and three onions. Then the ferryman hides the gold in the abysses of the earth where the green snake lives. This consumes the gold and becomes radiant from within. It can now walk in its own light and sees how everything round it is transfigured by this light. The will-o'-the-wisps meet it and say to it: you are our aunt of the horizontal line. The will-o'-the-wisps are its cousins who stem from the vertical line. These are ancient expressions, vertical and horizontal, which were always used in mysticism for certain soul states.

How do we come to the beautiful lily? - The will-o'-the-wisps ask. Oh, it lives on the other bank, the snake answers. Alas! We have nicely made our beds, from there we come! The snake informs them that the ferryman is allowed to ferry over everybody to this bank but not back to the other. Are there no other ways? Yes, at midday I myself form a bridge, the green snake says. But this is not convenient to the will-o'-the-wisps, and that is why the snake points to the shade of the giant who himself is powerless, but is capable to do everything with his shade. At sunrise and at sunset the shade lies down as a bridge across the river.

The snake tries, after the will-o'-the-wisps had gone away, to satisfy a curiosity which had tormented it for long. On its wanderings through the rocks it had discovered with its feeling smooth walls and manlike figures which it hopes to recognise now with its new light.
It creeps through the rock and finds a room in which the portraits of four kings are put up. The first of the kings is of gold, he is decorated with a wreath of oak leaves. He asks the snake where from it comes: from the abysses where the gold lives! What is more marvellous than gold? The king asks. The light, the snake answers. What is more refreshing than light? The conversation, the snake answers. Then it looks at the remaining kings, the second is of silver, decorated with a crown, the third is of ore, he is decorated with a laurel wreath, the fourth king is misshapen and composed of all these metals.

Now a bright light spreads; an old man with a lamp appears in the vault.

Why do you come, although we have light? The golden king asks. You know that I am not allowed to illuminate the dark. Does my empire end? The silver king asks. Late or never, the old man answers. The bronze king begins: when will I get up? Soon, the old man answers. With whom should I combine? The silver king asks. With your older brothers, the old man replies. What will become of the youngest? He will sit down.

During this conversation the snake looked around in the temple.

Meanwhile the golden king says to the old man: how many secrets do you know? The old man answers: three. Which is the most important? The silver king asks. The obvious one, the old man answers. Do you want to reveal it to us? The bronze king asks. As soon as I know the fourth one, the old man says. What do I care, the composed king murmurs to himself. I know the fourth, the snake says, approaches the old man and hisses something in his ear. The old man shouts with booming voice: the time has come! The temple resounds; the metal statues sound, and at this moment the old man disappears to the west and the snake to the east, and both roam the abysses of the rocks very quickly.

So far for the moment the contents of the fairy tale. Schiller writes to Cotta: “The public will still find out something, one reads the resolution in the fairy tale.” We are in a point where we want to begin with the resolution. Because we do not want to go too far afield, we have to get some ancient expressions of the secret doctrine clear in our mind to understand the pictures: flames signify something certain to the mystic. What did Goethe show in the flames, the will-o'-the-wisps symbolically? The flames which are the will-o'-the-wisps represent the fire of passions, of the sensuous desires, of the impulses and instincts. This is the fire which lives only in warm-blooded animals and in the human being.

Once there was a time when the human being did not yet have the same figure as today. This fire was not there before the Lemurian race; before it was incarnated in the human body, there were any desires and impulses in this race. The human being became a longing, wishing being by the penetration with the warm-bloodedness, kama manas. The fish and reptiles belong to the cold-blooded animals. That is why mysticism makes an even stronger distinction than the natural sciences between cold-blooded and warm-blooded beings.

At that time, in the middle of the Lemurian age, a moment happens at which the human being develops from lower to higher stages. This moment is called in the myths, in the Prometheus legend, the bringing down of the fire. About Prometheus it is told that he had brought it down from heaven, and he was forged to the rock the physical, mineral human body.

The sum of the desires, emotions, instincts, and passions is the fire which pushes the human beings to new actions. In theosophy this flame is called the emergence of the human self-consciousness, of the ability to say "I" to oneself. If the human being did not get round to becoming the flame, he could not have developed the self-consciousness and with it he would not be able to ascend to the knowledge of the divine. There is a lower self-consciousness, the self-consciousness, and a higher one. The lower nature of the desires and the higher one of the consciousness are linked in the human being. The physical human being originated by the penetration of his self with the blood, with the flame. The flames of the will-o'-the-wisps show the emergence of the self-consciousness within the impulses, desires and passions. This is kama manas as we say in theosophy. With it the human being lives in the physical world at first, on this side of the river.

But the home of the human being in which he stays before he is born is beyond the river, in the spiritual world. The ferryman ferries the human being from this spiritual world over the river of the astral world to the physical, this-worldly existence. However, the seeking soul strives incessantly again back to the land beyond the river; but the ferryman nature cannot bring them back. That means: if they found him also on this bank, he would not accept them, because he is allowed to ferry over everybody to this bank, but nobody to the yonder bank. The snake says this to the will-o'-the-wisps. Natural forces have brought in the human being by birth to the physical world. If the human being wants to be brought back to the higher worlds during life, he must do this himself. There is a road back. The self can collect knowledge. Gold is the occult symbol of knowledge. Gold and wisdom knowledge correspond to each other.

The lower humanity also has the gold of knowledge represented by the will-o'-the-wisps and becomes a will-o'-the-wisp if it does not find the right way. There is a lower wisdom which the human being acquires within the sensory world, while he observes the things and beings of this sensory world, makes ideas of them and combines them by his thinking. However, this is wisdom of mere reason. The will-o'-the-wisps want to pay the ferryman with this gold which they take up easily and cast off easily again. But the ferryman rejects it. Wisdom of reason does not satisfy nature, only that gift can have an effect on nature which is connected with the living forces of nature. Immature wisdom makes the river of the astral foam, it does not accept it. The ferryman demands fruits of the earth as a pay. The will-o'-the-wisps did never enjoy them. They did never strive for penetrating into the depths of nature, but they must still pay tribute to nature. They must promise to fulfil the demand of the ferryman soon. This demand comprises fruits of the earth: three cabbages, three artichokes and three big onions. What are these earth fruits? Goethe takes these fruits which have skins representing the human covers.
The human being has his three covers, his three bodies: the physical body, the etheric body and the astral body. Within these covers the core of the human being lives. In these bodies which surround it like sheaths the self has to gather the fruits of an incarnation after the other. Earth fruits must be gathered. These fruits do not consist of the knowledge of reason. The ferryman demands these three bodies as a contribution to nature. Goethe hid this teaching intimately in his fairy tale.

The gold comes to the snake. This is the gold of real wisdom. The snake was always the symbol of the self that does not keep to itself, but is able to take up the divine in selflessness, to sacrifice itself, gathers earth wisdom unselfishly, creeping in the “abysses of the earth.” It ascends to the divine not unfolding egoism and vanity, but trying to make itself similar to the divine. The snake in its unselfish striving takes up the gold of wisdom, it penetrates itself completely with the gold and thereby it becomes luminous from within. It becomes luminous as the self becomes if it has advanced to the stage of inspiration where the human being has become internally luminous and full of light and where light radiates toward light. The snake notices that it had become transparent and luminous. Before long one had asserted to it that this phenomenon is possible. It was green before, now it is luminous. The snake is green because it is in sympathy with the beings around, with the whole nature. Where this sympathy lives, the aura appears in bright green hues. Green is the colour in which the aura of the human being appears if mainly unselfish, devoted striving lives in the soul. Now when it itself has become luminous from within, the snake does see, before it felt only in its striving endeavours. All leaves seem to be of emerald, all flowers are glorified most marvellously. It sees all things in a new, glorified light. The things appear in such luminous emerald hues to us if the spirit flows from them toward us, if light radiates toward light.

Now after it has become luminous and has taken up the higher divine nature in itself, it also finds the way to the subterranean temple.

The sites, the mystery temples, in which in former times the truths were announced, were deeply hidden in the caves and abysses of the earth There light faces light.

Indeed, up to now the snake was compelled to creep without light through these abysses; but it could probably distinguish the objects by feeling. It perceived objects by feeling which revealed the forming hand of the human being, above all human figures. Now it is in the possession of light, and light faces it. It finds the temple and four kings therein, and the old man with the lamp approaches it. The man with the lamp signifies the ancient wisdom, the ancient wisdom of humanity which is only light and does not shadow which contains something that modern natural sciences cannot understand. Goethe says profoundly that the lamp of the human soul only shines if another light which the soul must produce is shown. It is the same view which he expresses in the saying which he placed in front of his theory of colours and about which he says that these are the words of an old mystic:

Unless the eyes were like the sun,
How could we see the light?
Unless God's own force lived in us,
How could delight us the divine?

Theory of Colours. Didactic Part

After the snake's eye has become sun-like because the light of the divine is enkindled in the snake, the light of the ancient wisdom of the world shines toward it.

The fire of passion has changed to the light. The fire which has changed in the earth to the light of wisdom is able to shine toward the bringer of wisdom, the “old man with the lamp.”

The snake looks at the four kings with amazement and reverence. Amazement and reverence are always the soul forces that bring the human beings forward and upwards. It beholds the golden king first, and he starts talking: where do you come from? From the abysses where the gold lives, the snake answers. What is more marvellous than gold? The king asks. The light, the snake answers. What is more refreshing than light? He asks. The conversation, the snake answers. In the conversation wisdom comes to the fore intimately for the human being, this is more refreshing than the great revelation. Does one not think of the Platonic dialogues in this discussion of the king with the snake? There were world secrets expressed with few words, few sentences. Goethe wants to explain: what is in the temple and happens there concerns the highest secrets of human development.

Which alchemy transforms the things that way? It is the initiation. Even the modern theory of evolution takes the perpetual transformation of the things as basis. The temple has to be subterranean at first, it is closed to the most human beings; but now the moment approaches when it is open to all human beings. It wants to send the gold of wisdom which has become light from human being to human being.

Who is the golden king, and who are the other three kings, the silver one, the bronze one and the mixed king? The golden king is manas, wisdom itself which could only develop higher in the mystery temple up to now. This is that soul-force which the human being can gain with purified thinking free of sensuousness. The silver king indicates an even higher element than wisdom: it is love, the creative word of the world buddhi, the god, being aglow with love. Its kingdom is called the kingdom of appearance; Christianity calls it glory (gloria in excelsis). It is pointed to a time which becomes later accessible only; then buddhi has the mastery over humanity. The bronze king whom the snake does not see at first and who is apparently little valuable is of huge seize. He looks rather like a rock than a human form. This is the king who expresses the willing-like soul-force which rests in the human being covertly.

He represents atma with which the striving human being is endowed last what he finds last.

Thus Goethe showed in a beautiful picture the endowment of the human being with the three highest virtues which are given to him one day. Without having attained this maturity, nobody was admitted to initiation in former times.

Then there is still the fourth king, of cumbersome figure; he consists of a mixture of gold, silver and bronze, but the metals seemed to have not correctly melted with the casting, nothing correlates with each other. This is the soul of the undeveloped human being who does not yet develop higher striving, in who thinking, feeling and willing are chaotically disorganised and which give “the picture a disagreeable appearance.” The fourth king shows the force of thinking which is still clouded with the sensory impressions, the fire of the soul which does not unfold love but lives in desires and impulses, the disordered will of the human being.

Remember the discussion of the kings with the man with the lamp. The golden king asks the old man: how many secrets do you know? Three, the old man replies. Which is the most important one? The silver king asked. The obvious one, the old man answers. Do you want to disclose it also to us? The bronze king asked. As soon as I know the fourth one, the old man said. I know the fourth one, the snake said, approached the old man and hissed something in his ear. The time has come! The old man shouted with penetrating voice.

There are three secrets the most important one is the obvious one. If this is disclosed, the fourth one can be known! This is the most important word of the whole fairy tale and at the same time the key of it as Goethe said in a discussion with Schiller. The old man knows three secrets; these are the secrets of the three realms of nature. The realms of nature have become steady in their development. However, the human being develops perpetually. He is able to do this, because the spirit, the self lives in him. The three secrets which the old man knows explain the principles of the mineral realm, the plant realm and the animal realm.

With its own forces the soul has to find the principle which must live in the human soul if it wants to obtain the maturity of initiation. The snake has found it. It hisses it in the ear of the old man. What did the snake say to the old man? That it wants to sacrifice itself! Sacrifice is the principle of the spiritual world. – Somebody can walk the path to the higher knowledge only who does not regard this knowledge as an end in itself, and seeks for it in the service of humanity. All true mystics know this soul path; they all have gone through this experience of sacrificing like the snake. As soon as the words sound in the temple: I want to sacrifice myself! The old man shouts: the time has come!

The words of the old man, the time has come, point to the distant future when the whole humanity has attained the maturity. Then the time has come that the temple rises up above the river, that the whole humanity takes part in wisdom, in the initiation which was otherwise given to few people only in the temples, in the abysses.

To somebody like me who concerned himself with this fairy tale for twenty years deeper and deeper profundities appear, time and again the lines point to an even more profound primary source. Here are treasures to be found; however, we have to find them. We must only take care not to permit ourselves something in view of Goethe that Goethe lets Mephisto characterise in his Faust in such a way:

To understand some living thing and to describe it,
the student starts by ridding it of its spirit;
he then holds all its parts within his hand
except, alas! for the spirit that bound them together!

(Faust's Study, verses 1936–1939)

Let us seek for this spiritual band in Goethe's creations.

Note:

The text of this and the following lectures are based on two incomplete transripts which were complemented with handwritten notes of two other participants.

The question as to the meaning and purpose of existence frequently arises in life and in the sphere of philosophy. Study of Spiritual Science will certainly produce a kind of humility in regard to this question, for although we know that investigation of the spiritual worlds leads thought and perception beyond the material world of sense, we also realise that it is not possible to speak forthwith about the primal origins or the ultimate and highest meaning of life. The retort of superficial thinking here will certainly be: “What, then, do we know, if knowledge of the meaning and purpose of life is beyond our reach? ”

An analogy that is entirely in line with the attitude of Spiritual Science and indicates what is permissible or not permissible in regard to this question, can be put in the following way: Suppose a man wants to journey somewhere—In his home town he can only get information as to how to reach a much less distant place, but he is sent off with the assurance that once there, further help will be available. Although he makes inquiries here and there as he goes along, he cannot know the exact path which will bring him to his final destination; nevertheless he is sure of arriving eventually because he is always able to find his way from place to place.

As students of Spiritual Science, we do not ask about the “ultimate goal” but about the one lying immediately ahead, in other words, about the goal of the Earth. We realise that it would be senseless to inquire about the “ultimate goal” for we have recognised that “evolution” is a reality in the life of man. It must therefore never be forgotten that at the present stage of our existence it is not possible to understand the goals of much later phases of evolution and that a higher vantage-point must be reached if we are to understand the meaning of a far distant goal. And so we ask about the goal lying immediately ahead, realising that by keeping it before us as an ideal and striving with the right means, we shall eventually attain it, thereby reaching a further stage in development. At that stage it will be legitimate to ask about the “next” goal, and so on. Thus if it were ever suggested that Spiritual Science might tend to make a man arrogant because his outlook extends beyond the ordinary world into a spiritual world, in reality his attitude will be one of humility towards these sublime matters about which superficial questions are so often asked.

We inquire, to begin with, about the goal of the Earth. In other words: What is it that man adds, essentially, to the fruits of the preceding periods of Saturn-, Sun-, and Moon-evolution, by developing on the Earth through repeated physical incarnations? We will here recall certain matters which will help us to associate concrete and definite ideas with what may be called the “meaning and purpose of Earth-evolution.” Let me speak, to begin with of the following.

When intellectual thinking, based upon reason, came to birth during the Graeco-Latin epoch—it would actually be true to say, in the sixth century B.C.—a certain thought found frequent utterance, namely, that all philosophy, all deeper contemplation upon the secrets of existence, proceeds from Wonder, Amazement. In other words: As long as the human being can feel no wonder at the phenomena of life around him, so long is his life vapid and thoughtless, and he asks without intelligence about the why and wherefore of existence. “All philosophy begins with wonder” was a much quoted saying during the ancient Graeco-Latin epoch. What, in reality, does it signify in man's life of soul?

It would be difficult today to find anyone in civilised Europe who has never set eyes on a locomotive in motion; not so very long ago, however, there were such persons—although nowadays they would, of course, only be found in very remote districts. If such a person sees a train moving along, he will feel wonder and amazement at the sight of an object going forward without any of the means with which he is acquainted. It is a known fact that many such people, in their astonishment at seeing a locomotive in movement, asked if the horses pulling it along were inside! Why were the people cast into amazement and wonder by what they saw here? It was because they were looking at something which in a certain sense was known, and at the same time unknown to them. They knew that things move forward, but whatever they had seen had always been provided with quite a different means of movement. Now they were looking at something on which they had never set eyes before. And this gave rise to wonder.

If during the Graeco-Latin epoch, men could only become philosophers when they were capable of wonder, they must have been persons who perceived, in everything taking place in the world, something at once known and unknown, in so far as the happenings and phenomena seemed to contain more than appeared on the surface—something unknown to them.

Why had the attitude of the philosophers to be that the primary causes and certain attributes of things in the world lay in a sphere unknown to them? As it will be admitted that philosophers are at least as clever as people who give no thought at all to what goes on around them, it cannot be supposed that philosophers are capable of accepting only what is to be perceived by means of the ordinary senses. Therefore they must find something lacking—or rather, they must surmise the presence of something which sets them wondering—something that is not present in the world of sense. And so, before the days of materialism, the philosophers always sought for the Supersensible in the phenomena presented to the senses. The wonder felt by the philosophers, therefore, is associated with the fact that certain things are not to be comprehended through what presents itself to the eyes of sense. They said to themselves: “What I there perceive does not tally with what I picture it to be; I must therefore conceive that super-sensible forces are present within it.” But in the world of sense the philosophers perceived no super-sensible forces. That alone is enough to make a thinking man realise that a subconscious memory, not reaching into consciousness, has persisted in the human being since times when the soul perceived something more than the actual phenomena of the sense-world. In other words: Remembrance arises of experiences undergone before the descent into sense-existence. It is as though the soul were to say: “I discern things and their effects which can only call forth wonder in me, because they are different from what I have seen before; enlightenment on them can only be found by means of forces which must be drawn from the super-sensible world.” And so all philosophising begins with wonder, because in reality man approaches the phenomena of existence as a being who comes into the world of the senses from a super-sensible world and finds that the things of the sense-world do not tally with what he perceived in the super-sensible world. Wonder arises in him when the form in which the things of sense are made manifest, can only be explained by knowledge he once possessed in a super-sensible world. And so wonder points to the connection of man with the super-sensible world, to something belonging to a sphere he can only enter when he transcends the world in which his physical body encloses him. This is one indication of the fact that here, in this physical world, there is a continual urge within the human being to reach out beyond himself. A man who can only remain shut up in himself, who is not driven by wonder beyond the field of the “I,” of the ordinary Ego, remains one who cannot reach beyond himself, who sees the sun rise and set without a thought and with complete unconcern. This is the kind of existence led by uncivilised peoples.

A second power which releases the human being from the ordinary world, leading him at once away from material perception into super-sensible insight, is Compassion, Fellow-feeling (Of this, too, I have spoken). Those who go heedlessly through the world do not regard compassion as having any great mystery about it; but to the thoughtful, compassion is a great and mysterious secret. When we look at a being only from outside, impressions come from him to our senses and intellect; with the awakening of compassion we pass beyond the sphere of these impressions. We share in what is taking place in his innermost nature, and transcending the sphere of our own “I”, we pass over into his world. In other words: we are set free from ourselves, we break through the barriers of ordinary existence in the physical body and reach over into the other being. Here, already, is the Supersensible—for neither the operations of the senses nor of the reasoning mind can carry us into the sphere of another's soul. The fact that compassion exists in the world bears witness that even in the world of sense we can be set free from, can pass out beyond ourselves and enter into the world of another being. If a man is incapable of compassion, there is a moral defect, a moral lack in him. If at the moment when he should get free from himself and pass over into the other being, feeling, not his own pain or joy but the pain or joy of that other—if at that moment his feelings fade and die away, then something is lacking in his moral life. The human being on Earth, if he is to reach the stature of full and complete manhood, must be able to pass out beyond his own earthly life, he must be able to live in another, not only in himself.

Conscience is a third power whereby the human being transcends what he is in the physical body. In ordinary life he will desire this or that; according to his impulses or needs he will pursue what is pleasing and thrust aside what is displeasing to him. But in many such actions he will be his own critic, in that his conscience, the voice of his conscience sounds a note of correction. Final satisfaction or dissatisfaction with what he has done also depends upon how the voice of conscience has spoken. This in itself is a proof that “conscience” is a power whereby the human being is led out beyond the sphere of his impulses, his likes and dislikes.

Wonder and Amazement, Compassion or Fellow-feeling, Conscience—these are the three powers by means of which the human being, even while in the physical body, transcends his own limitations, for through these powers, influences which cannot find entrance into the human soul by way of the intellect and the senses, ray into physical life.

It is easy to understand that these three powers can only unfold through incarnations in a body of flesh. Man must, as it were, be kept separate by a body of flesh from what pours into his life of soul from another sphere. If a body of flesh did not separate him from the spiritual world and present the outer world to him as a sense-world, he would be incapable of wonder. It is the material body which enables wonder at the things of the world of sense to arise in man, compelling him to seek for the Spirit. Compassion could not unfold if the one human being were not separated from the other, if men were to live an undivided existence in which a single flow of spiritual life pervaded the consciousness of them all, if each soul were not separated from other souls by the impenetrable sheath provided by the physical body. And conscience could not be experienced as a spiritual force sending its voice into man's world of natural urges, passions and desires, if the material body did not hanker after things against which warning must be given by another power. And so the human being must be incarnated in a physical body in order that he may be able to experience wonder, compassion and conscience.

In our time, people concern themselves little with such secrets, although they are profoundly enlightening. But in a past by no means very remote, a great deal of attention was paid to these things:—

Think only of the world of the Greek Gods, the Gods of Homer; think of their actions and activities; try to understand the nature of the impulses working in Achilles, a being who stands there like a last survivor of an earlier generation on Earth. He, too, was born of a divine mother. Read through the Iliad and the Odyssey and ask yourselves whether this being, standing halfway between Gods and men, was ever stirred by anything like “conscience” or “compassion”? Homer builds the whole of the Iliad around the fury of the “wrath” of Achilles—and wrath is a passion. Everything in the Greek legend centres around this; the Iliad tells of what came about as the result of a passion—the wrath of Achilles. Consider all the deeds of Achilles described in the Iliad and see if you can say of a single one that Achilles is here moved by anything like compassion or conscience. Neither is there a single example of the stirring of wonder. The very greatness of Homer lies in his power to depict these things with such sublimity. When Achilles is told of some terrible happening, his behaviour is far from that of a man filled with wonder. And then turn to the Greek Gods themselves: they give vent to all kinds of impulses which are certainly of the nature of egotism when they manifest in a human being enclosed in a physical body. In the Gods they are spiritual impulses. But among the Greek Gods there is no compassion, no suggestion of conscience, nor anything like wonder. Why not? Because Homer and the Greeks knew that these Gods were Beings belonging to a period of evolution preceding that of the Earth—a period when the Beings who were then passing through their “human stage” under the conditions prevailing in existence, had not yet received into the life of soul the powers of wonder, compassion and conscience. It must be constantly remembered that the earlier planetary conditions through which the Earth has passed and in which such Beings as the Greek Gods underwent their human stage, were not there for the purpose of implanting “Wonder,” “Compassion,” and “Conscience” in the life of soul. That is precisely the mission of Earth-evolution! The purpose of Earth-evolution is that there may be implanted into the evolutionary process as a whole, powers which could otherwise never have come into existence: Wonder, Compassion and Conscience.

I have told you how the birth of conscience can clearly be traced to a certain period of Greek culture. In the works of Aeschylus, what we call “conscience” played no part; there were only remembrances of the avenging Furies, and not until we come to the works of Euripedes is there any clear expression of “conscience” as we know it now. The concept of conscience arose only very gradually during the Graeco-Latin epoch. I have told you that the concept of wonder arises for the first time when men begin to philosophise in the world of Graeco-Latin culture. And a remarkable fact in the spiritual evolution of Earth-existence throws far-reaching light upon what we know as compassion, and also, in the true sense, love. In the age of materialism it is exceedingly difficult to maintain in true and right perspective, this concept of compassion or love. Many of you will realise that in our materialistic times this concept is distorted, in that materialism associates the concept of “love” so closely with that of “sexuality”—with which, fundamentally, it has nothing whatever to do. That is a point where the culture of our day abandons both intelligence and sound, healthy reason. Through its materialism, evolution in our time is veering not only towards the unintelligent and illogical but even towards the scandalous, when “love” is dragged into such close association with what is covered by the term “sexuality.” The fact that under certain circumstances the element of sexuality may be associated with love between man and woman is no argument for bringing so closely together the all-embracing nature of love or compassion, and the entirely specific character of sexuality. So far as logic is concerned, to associate the concept of, say, a “railway engine” with that of a man being “run over,” because engines do sometimes run over people, would be just about as intelligent as it is to connect the concept of love so closely with that of sexuality—simply because under certain circumstances there is an outward association. That this happens today is not the outcome of any scientific hypothesis but of the irrational and, to some extent, unhealthy mode of thinking prevailing in our time.

On the other hand, another telling fact points to the significance inherent in the concept of love and compassion. At a certain point in the evolution of humanity, and among all the peoples, something is made manifest which, while differing in many essentials, is identical in one respect all over the Earth, namely in the adoption of the concept of love, of compassion. It is very remarkable that six or seven centuries before the inpouring of the Christ-Impulse into humanity, founders of religion and systems of thought appeared all over the Earth, among all the peoples. It is of the highest significance that, six centuries before our era, Lao-tse and Confucius should have been living in China, the Buddha in India, the last Zarathustra (not the original Zarathustra) in Persia, and Pythagoras in Greece. How great the difference is between these founders of religion! Only a mind abstracted from reality and incapable of discerning the differences can suggest, as is often mischievously done today, that the teachings of Lao-tse or Confucius do not differ from those of other founders of religions. Yet in one respect there is similarity among them all; they all teach that compassion and love must reign between soul and soul! The point of significance is this: six centuries before our era, consciousness begins to stir that love and compassion are to be received into the stream of human evolution. Thus whether we are thinking of the birth of wonder, of conscience or of love and compassion in the stream of evolution ... all the signs point to the fact that in the Fourth Post-Atlantean epoch of culture, something was imbued into mankind which we may recognise as the “meaning and purpose of Earth-evolution.”

It is so superficial and foolish when people say: “Why was it necessary for man to come down from the worlds of Divine Spirit into the physical world, only to have to reattain them? Why could he not have remained in the higher worlds?” Man could not remain in those worlds because only by coming down into the physical world of Earth-evolution could he receive into himself the forces of wonder, love or compassion, and conscience or moral obligation.

We look at the Fourth Post-Atlantean epoch of culture and perceive, during its course, the dawn of impulses which—in reality only from that time onwards—spread more and more widely among mankind. It is very easy today to emphasise how seldom humanity is ruled by compassion and love, how seldom by conscience. But in pointing to these things, we must also be mindful of the fact that in the Graeco-Latin age, slavery was still an accepted custom, and that even a philosopher as great as Aristotle still regarded the existence of slaves as a necessary principle of human life; we must also remember that since those days, love has so far gained ground that even if today inequalities still persist among men, there is already present in their souls something like a feeling of shame that certain conditions exist. This in itself indicates that the forces which entered at that time into evolution are unfolding within the souls of men. Nobody would dare nowadays—if he is to avoid the tragic fate of Nietzsche—(the “followers” of Nietzsche can be ignored altogether, for in his right mind Nietzsche would have repudiated them)—to stand openly for the introduction of slavery as it was in Greece. Nobody will deny that the greatest of all forces in the human soul is that of love and compassion, and that it must be man's task to make the voice that sounds out of another world into the soul, more and more articulate.

Holding firmly in our minds that the unfolding of the three powers described constitutes the meaning and purpose of Earth-evolution, we turn to the greatest of all Impulses—the Christ-Impulse which poured into evolution during the Fourth Post-Atlantean epoch. Even outer circumstances indicate that this Impulse is given at the very time when the Earth is ready for the development of the three powers of wonder, compassion or love, and conscience, or moral obligation, as intrinsically human qualities. Many studies have given us a picture of how the Christ-Impulse made its way into the evolution of humanity.

I want here to refer to one aspect of the Christ-Impulse. I have told you that certain spiritual, superhuman forces were held back in the spiritual worlds at the beginning of the evolutionary process on the Earth. This Impulse streamed into the Earth at the time of which an indication is given in the Bible, namely, at the time of the Baptism in the Jordan. It was an Impulse, therefore, untouched by the Luciferic forces as it had been kept back until the Fourth Post-Atlantean epoch; in that epoch it streamed into humanity. And now think of this in connection with certain things we have ourselves experienced.—If people are incapable of giving any concrete explanation of how the spiritual world plays into the physical world, it is really out of place for them to come out with crude and unreal ideas like that, for example, of the “Three Logoi.” I have said many times that the word “Logoi” can convey to the ordinary intelligence nothing more than its five letters. When it is alleged in certain quarters outside that here we speak of Christ as the “second Logos,” we do well to realise that misrepresentation and distortion are the order of the day. We ourselves are quoted as the source of statements which have actually originated somewhere else! Our constant endeavour is to deepen, to widen and to gather from every side, knowledge that can shed light on the Christ Idea. Yet outside our field of work, by talking round an abstract concept, people allege that we speak of the Christ as the “Second Logos.” In the Theosophical Society, conscience ought to be too sharp to permit such allegations. So long as sheer misrepresentation of other people's views is possible, the Theosophical Movement cannot be said to have reached any particularly high level, and while this sort of thing goes on, it is futile to boast about freedom of opinion in the Society. This is an empty phrase as long as people allow themselves to spread false ideas of the views held by others. Certainly there must be freedom to spread every shade of opinion—but not freedom to misrepresent the views of others! Spiritual conscience must be sharpened in this respect; otherwise all feeling for truth would in the end be driven out of the Theosophical Movement and then it would not be possible to cultivate the true spiritual Movement within the framework of the “Theosophical Movement.” These things must not be glossed over but taken really seriously. Certainly, there may be fewer publications, if the aim is to print only those things which are founded upon genuine, reliable knowledge. But after all, what harm will be done if there is less printing? What does it matter if less is said, so long as what is said is true and in accordance with reality? It was recently stated in periodicals abroad that the Christ is spoken of by us as the “Second Logos” and that we are said to be cultivating a “narrow” Theosophy, suitable for Germany, but not for any other country; we are said to be cultivating a “narrow” Theosophy, whereas a really “broad” Theosophical Movement is being conducted from a certain centre in Leipzig of which you have heard. When things of this kind are to be read, it can only be concluded that there does not exist in the Theosophical Movement the sharpness of conscience that is the pre-requisite of a spiritual movement. And if we lack this sharpness of conscience, if we do not feel, the most intense responsibility to the holiest truth, we shall make no progress on any other path. These things have had to be said. And within the Theosophical Movement it will above all be necessary to have eyes for the quality of love and compassion.

If we conceive the Christ Impulse to be the down-pouring of that spiritual power which was kept back in the ancient Lemurian time in order to flow into evolution during the Fourth Post-Atlantean epoch at the point marked by the Baptism in the Jordan, reaching its culmination in the Mystery of Golgotha—then it is clear that He Who is known as the “Christ” was not, even at that time, incarnated in the ordinary sense, in a physical human being. We know what complicated processes were connected with the man “Jesus of Nazareth” in order that for three years of his life the Christ Impulse might live within him. We are therefore able to understand that for three years the Christ Impulse lived on the Earth in the three sheaths of a human being, but we realise, too, that even at that time, the Christ Impulse was not “incarnated” on the Earth in the ordinary sense but that He “pervaded” the body of the Being “Jesus of Nazareth.” This must be understood when it is said that it is not possible to speak of a “return” of Christ, but only of an Impulse which was present once, during the time of the events in Palestine beginning with the Baptism in the Jordan, when there remained only the physical body, the ether-body and the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth; within these sheaths the Christ was then present on the very soil of the Earth. From that time Christ has been united with the spiritual atmosphere of the Earth and can there be found by souls who are willing to receive Him. From that time onwards—and only from that time onwards—He has been present in the spiritual atmosphere of the Earth. The great turn given to Earth-evolution lies in the fact that from that time forward there was a power in the Earth which it did not previously contain.

We know that what we actually see in the kingdoms of Nature around us is not reality, but “Maya,” the “Great Illusion”. In the kingdom of the animals we see the individual forms coming into being and passing away; the Group-Soul alone endures. In the plant kingdom, the individual plants appear and disappear, but behind them there is the Earth-Spirit which does not pass away. So it is, too, in the kingdom of the minerals. The Spiritual endures, but the Physical, whether in the animal, plant or mineral kingdom, is transient, impermanent. Even the outer senses discern that the planet Earth is involved in a process of pulverisation and will at some future time disintegrate into dust. We have spoken of how the Earth-body will be cast off by the Spirit of the Earth, as the human body is cast off by the individual human Spirit. What will remain as the highest substance of the Earth when its goal has been reached? The Christ Impulse was present on the Earth, so to say as “spiritual Substance.” That Impulse endures and will be received into men during the course of Earth-evolution. But how does It live on? When the Christ Impulse was upon the Earth for three years, It had no physical body, no ether-body, no astral body of Its own, but was enveloped in the three sheaths of Jesus of Nazareth. When the goal has been reached, the Earth, like man, will be a fully developed being, a meet and fitting vehicle for the Christ Impulse.

But from whence are the three sheaths of the Christ Impulse derived? From forces that can be unfolded only on the Earth. Beginning with the Mystery of Golgotha, whatever has unfolded on the Earth since the Fourth Post-Atlantean period as the power of wonder, whatever comes to life in us as wonder—passes, finally, to the Christ, weaving the Astral Body of the Christ Impulse. Love or Compassion in the souls of men weaves the Ether-Body of the Christ Impulse; and the power of conscience which from the time of the Mystery of Golgotha until the goal of the Earth is attained, lives in and inspires the souls of men, weaves the Physical Body—or what corresponds with the physical body—for the Christ Impulse.¹

The true meaning of words from the Gospel can only now be discerned: “Whatsoever ye have done to one of the least of these My Brethren, ye have done it unto Me.” (Matt. 25. 40). The forces streaming from man to man are the units integrating the Ether-Body of Christ: love, or compassion, weaves the Ether-Body of Christ. Thus when the goal of Earth-evolution is attained, He will be enveloped in the threefold vesture woven from the powers that have lived in men—and which, when the limitations of the “ I,” have been transcended, become the sheaths of Christ.

And now think of how men live in communion with Christ. From the time of the Mystery of Golgotha to the attainment of the goal of Earth-evolution, man grows more perfect in that he develops to the stature that is within his reach as a being endowed with the power of the “ I.” But men are united with the Christ Who has come among them, in that they transcend their own “ I ”—and through wonder, build the Astral Body of Christ. Christ does not build His own Astral Body, but in the wonder that arises in their souls, men share in the forming of the Astral Body of Christ. His Ether-Body will be fashioned through the compassion and love flowing from man to man; and His “physical body” through the power of conscience unfolding in human beings. Whatever wrongs are committed in these three realms deprive the Christ of the possibility of full development on the Earth—that is to say, Earth-evolution is left imperfect. Those who go about the Earth with indifference and unconcern, who have no urge to understand what the Earth can reveal to them, deprive the Astral Body of Christ of the possibility of full development; those who live without unfolding compassion and love, hinder the Ether-Body of Christ from full development; and those who lack conscience hinder the development of what corresponds with the Physical Body of Christ ... but this means that the Earth cannot reach the goal of its evolution.

The principle of Egotism has to be overcome in Earth-evolution. The Christ Impulse penetrates more and more deeply into the life and culture of humanity and the conviction that this Impulse has lived its way into mankind, free from every trace of denominationalism—as, for example, in the paintings of Raphael, this conviction will bear its fruit. How Christ may truly be portrayed is a problem still to be solved. Men on Earth will have to be greatly enriched in their life of feeling if, after the many attempts made through the centuries, another is to succeed to some slight extent in expressing what the Christ is as the super-sensible Impulse living on through Earth-evolution. The attempts made hitherto do not even suggest what form such a portrayal of Christ should take. For it would have to express how the enveloping sheaths woven of the forces of wonder, compassion and conscience are gradually made manifest. The countenance of Christ must be so vital and living that it is an expression of the victory won over the sensory, desire-nature in men of Earth—victory achieved through the very forces which have spiritualised the countenance. There must be sublime power in this countenance. The painter or sculptor will have to express in the unusual form of the chin and mouth, the power of conscience unfolded to its highest degree. The mouth must convey the impression that it is not there for the purpose of taking food but to give utterance to whatever moral strength and power of conscience has been cultivated by men through the ages; the very structure of the bones around the teeth in the lower jaw will seem to form themselves into a mouth. All this will have to be expressed in the countenance. The form of the lower part of the face will have to express a power whose outstreaming rays seem to shatter the rest of the way that certain other forces are vanquished. With a mouth like this, it will be impossible to give the Christ Figure a bodily form similar to that possessed by the physical human being today. On the other hand, all the power of compassion will flow out of His eyes—the power that eyes alone can contain—not in order to receive impressions but to bear the very soul into the joys and sufferings of others. His brow will give no suggestion of thought based upon earthly sense-impressions. It will be a brow conspicuously prominent above the eyes, arching over that part of the brain; it will not be a “thinker's” brow which merely works upon material already there. Wonder will be made manifest in this projecting brow which curves gently backwards over the head, expressing wonder and marvel at the mysteries of the world. It will be a head such as is nowhere to be found in physical humanity.

Every true representation of the Christ must be a portrayal of the Ideal embodied in Him. When man reaches out towards this highest Ideal and strives through Spiritual Science to represent it in Art, this feeling will arise in greater and greater strength:—If you would portray the Christ, you must not look at what is actually there in the world, but you must let your whole being be quickened and pervaded by all that flows from contemplation of the spiritual evolution of the world, inspired by the three great impulses of Wonder, Compassion and Conscience.

• 1. See also: Christ and the Twentieth Century (25.1.12). Published in the volume entitled: Turning Points of Spiritual History.

We have seen that if man would enter into the realm to which, among other things, the woven fabric of our dreams belongs, he must take with him from the ordinary world something we designated as an intensified self-consciousness. There must be a stronger and fuller life in his ego than he needs for his purposes on the physical plane. In our age this excess of self-consciousness is drawn forth from our soul by the experiences we gain through occult exercises such as I have given. Thus the first step consists in strengthening and intensifying one's inner self.

Man instinctively feels that he needs this strengthening, and for this very reason a kind of fear and shyness comes over him if he has not yet attained it. He tends to shrink from the prospect of developing into higher worlds. We must continually bear in mind that in the course of evolution the soul of man has passed through many different stages. Thus, in the period of the Bhagavad Gita it was not yet possible for a human soul to intensify its self-consciousness by such occult exercises as may be practiced today. In that ancient time, however, something else was still present in the self; I mean, primeval clairvoyance. This is also a faculty man does not really need for his ordinary life on the physical plane, if he can be content with what his epoch offers him. But the men of that ancient time still had the remnants of primeval clairvoyance.

So, we can look far back and put ourselves in the place of a person living at the time when the Bhagavad Gita originated. If such a man were to express his experience he would say, “When I look out into the world around me I receive impressions through my senses. These impressions can be combined by the intellect, whose organ the brain is. Apart from that I still have another faculty, a clairvoyant power that enables me to acquire knowledge of other worlds. This power tells me that man belongs to other realms, that my human nature extends far beyond the ordinary physical world.” This very power, by means of which there arises in the soul the instinctive knowledge that it belongs not only to the physical world—this power is actually a stronger kind of self-consciousness. It is as though these last remnants of ancient clairvoyance still had the power to surcharge the soul with selfhood. Today man can again develop in himself such surplus forces if he will go through the right occult exercises.

Now, a certain objection might be made. You know that in anthroposophical lectures we must always forestall objections that the true occultist is well aware of. It might be asked, “Why should it occur to present-day man to want to undertake occult exercises at all? Why isn't he content with what his ordinary intellect offers him?” That, my friends, is a big question because we touch something here that is not only a question but an actual fact for every thoughtful soul in the present cycle of evolution. If man did not reach out to anything more than what his senses and his brain-bound intellect can show him, he would certainly be content with his existence. He would observe the things and events around him, their relationships, and how they come into being and pass away again, but he would ask no questions about this ebb and flow of activity. He would be content with it as an animal may be content with its existence. In fact, if man were really the being that materialistic thinking considers him, he could quite well accept his life as such and ask no questions. This is the life of the animal, being content with all that arises and passes before its senses. Why isn't this the case with man?

Remember that we are speaking of present-day man, for even in ancient Greece the human soul was different in this respect from what it is today. When we today give ourselves with our whole soul to the study of natural science, or when we consider all the events of historical evolution and gain knowledge of the external science of history—with all this something else finds its way almost imperceptibly into our soul, something that has no purpose or sense for physical life. Many comparisons have been made to illustrate this fact. I would like to mention one of them because people often make use of it without considering its deeper significance. A famous medical authority in the last third of the 19th century, wishing to enhance the honor of pure science, once drew attention to a Greek philosopher Pythagoras who was asked, “What do you think of the philosophers who spend their time speculating on the meaning and purpose of life? How does their occupation compare with the activities of ordinary men who pursue some useful calling and play a useful part in community life?” The philosopher replied, “Look at a fair or market; men come to buy and sell and everyone is busy, but there are a few among them who do not want to buy or sell but simply want to stroll about and watch what is going on.” The philosopher implied that the market represented life, people busy in all sorts of ways; but the philosophers are not busy with such affairs, instead they look at what is happening and try to learn all about it.

Somehow a great respect for the philosophers who do not seem to take part in any productive activity has penetrated deeply into the minds of the so-called intellectuals among mankind. The philosophers are honored just because their science is independent, detached, self-sufficient. Yet this comparison ought to give us food for thought, for it is by no means so banal as it might appear at first sight. After all, it is curious that philosophers should be compared to idlers in the market-place of life, useless folk while their fellows labor. One might indeed think of it in this way, but we must realize that judgments are passed that originally are quite correct but become altogether wrong if they linger on for centuries, or as in this case for thousands of years. Therefore we ask again if these people who stroll about in life are really to be judged as idlers. That depends upon the standards by which we value human life. Certainly there are those who regard the philosophers as useless loiterers and think they would do better to carry through some productive work. From their point of view they may be quite right, but when man today observes life through the senses and considers it by means of the brain-bound intellect, something steals into his soul that obviously has no connection with the outer world of the senses. That is the point.

This can be seen clearly in books that try to construct a satisfactory picture of the world and life on a purely materialistic basis. It usually turns out that the big questions do not arise until the end. These books claiming to solve the riddle of the universe actually begin to set forth those riddles only in their concluding pages. In effect, when one begins today to study the external world that is the subject treated in such books, the thought slips in that either man exists for other worlds besides, or else the physical world deceives us and makes fools of us because it is continually putting questions we cannot answer.

An enormous part of our soul life is meaningless if life really ends with death; if man has no part in, no connection with a higher world. Indeed, it is not the longing for something he does not have, but the lack of sense for what he has, that impels man to follow up these questions and ask what it is that comes into the soul that does not belong to this world of the senses. Thus he is driven to cultivate something evidently without foundation in the external world. He is impelled to take up occult exercises. We would not say man has an inward longing for immortality and therefore invents the idea of it, but rather that the external world has implanted something in his soul that would be meaningless, unreal, if the whole of existence were included between birth and death. Man is impelled to ask the very nature, not of something he does not have, but of something he has.

In fact, present-day man is no longer quite in the position of a mere loiterer or on-looker, so he cannot appeal now to the Greek philosopher. In those times the comparison held good, but today it does not. Today we might say that buyers and sellers come and go. When at length they close the market and make up accounts they find something that certainly could neither have been bought nor sold, nor can they find out whence it came. That never happens in an ordinary market, but so it is in the market of life. (Every comparison has its flaw and this one is all the better for it.) As we go on living we are continually finding things that life opens to view, yet no explanation for them is to be found in the world of sense. That is the deeper reason why there are people in the world today who despair of life yet at the same time have vague, unrecognized longings. Something is active in them that does not belong to the physical world but keeps on putting forth questions about other worlds. For this reason we now have to acquire a spiritual culture. Otherwise we shall be overcome by hopelessness and despair.

What today we have to acquire, a man like Arjuna had, simply because he lived in the ancient age of primeval clairvoyance. Yet it also was a period of transition, because he belonged to that time in evolution when only the last remnants and echoes of that clairvoyance remained. If we are to understand the Bhagavad Gita it is important to realize that at the time of its origin men were entering an age in which this old clairvoyance gradually became lost. In this lies the deep undercurrent of that sublime poem; or we may say, the source of the breath poured out through it. For this song resounds with tones of a great turning-point in time, when, from the twilight of the old clairvoyance, a night was to begin in which a new force could be born to mankind. Only in that night could a force be born that the soul of today possesses, but that souls of that time did not yet possess. About Arjuna then we can say that ancient clairvoyance is still present in his soul but it is flickering out. It is no longer a strong, spontaneous force but requires such a harrowing experience as I have described to re-awaken it. What then can Arjuna perceive through this awakening of the ancient power of vision, which at other times was dying away within him? He sees the Spiritual Being who is called Krishna.

Here it is necessary to point out that though man may lift his soul today into that realm where his dreams are woven, this is no longer enough to give him a full understanding of Krishna's being. Even if we develop the forces enabling us to consciously pass into the region of dream-consciousness, we still are not able today to fully discover what Krishna is. Referring again to what was said yesterday, let us call our everyday consciousness the lowest realm. About it lies a realm we are unconscious of in daily life, or rather that reaches us in a kind of phantom picture veiled in our dreams. When we push these aside impressions from another world enter. Into all the experiences man has of his physical environment something now enters that is like a kind of overflow in his soul and belongs really to other worlds, to inner super-sensible worlds. Now he has an experience that cannot be described as a reminiscence of ordinary life, because the world now has a different aspect from anything known on the physical plane. We discover that we are seeing something we do not see in the ordinary world. Though we often imagine that we see light, in reality it is not so. On the physical plane we never see light, only color and different shades of color, darker and lighter colors. We see the effects of light but light itself speeds invisibly through space. We can easily convince ourselves of this fact. When a ray of light strikes through the window we see a kind of streak of light-rays in the room, caused by dust in the air. We see reflections of light from the glittering particles of dust, the light itself remaining invisible.

After lifting his experience to the higher realm we have spoken of, man really does begin to see the light itself. There he is surrounded by flowing light, just as in the physical world he lives in flowing air. Only he does not enter this world with his physical body. He has no need to breathe there. Man enters that world with the part of his being that needs the light as in the physical world his body needs the air. In this region light is the element of life—light-air we might call it—and it is a necessity for existence.

Further, that light is permeated and transfused with something not unlike the cloud-forms shaping and re-shaping in our atmosphere. The clouds are water, but up there what meets us like floating forms is nothing else than the weaving life of sound, the music of the spheres. Still further we shall perceive the flowing of life itself. Thus we may begin to describe the world into which our soul enters, but the terms of our description must remain meaningless for the physical world. Perhaps he who uses words most lacking in meaning for the physical world will best describe that other world that has a far higher reality.

Of course our materialistically-minded friends will find it easy to refute us. Their arguments against what the occultist has to say are plausible enough. The occultist himself knows how easily such objections are made, for the very reason that the higher worlds are best described by words not suitable for things of the physical plane. For example he would speak of light-air, or air-light. On the physical plane there is no such thing, but over there, there is. Indeed, when we penetrate into that realm we also discover what it is to be deprived of this life element, to have insufficient light-air. We feel a pain of suffocation in our soul, comparable to losing our breath for lack of air on the physical plane. There we also find the opposite condition, a fullness of pure, holy light-air when we live in it and when we perceive spiritual beings who manifest themselves in full clearness in this element of airy light and have their life in it. Those are the beings who stand under the guidance of Lucifer. The moment we enter that realm without sufficient preparation, without proper training, Lucifer gains the power to deprive us of the light-air we need. We can say he suffocates our souls.

It is not quite the same effect as suffocation on the physical plane. But like a polar bear transported to the South, we thirst and long for something that can reach us from the spiritual treasure, the spiritual light of the physical plane. That is just what Lucifer desires, for then we do not pay attention to all that comes from the higher hierarchies but thirstily cleave to all that Lucifer has brought onto the physical plane. This is what happens if we have not sufficiently trained ourselves in preparation. Then when we stand before Lucifer he takes away the light-air from us. We crave breath, and long for the spiritual that comes from the physical plane.

Let us suppose that someone goes through a training that brings him far enough to enter the higher worlds, to reach this upper region. But suppose he has not done all that belongs to the training; suppose he has forgotten that with all his exercises he must at the same time be ennobling his moral sense, his moral feelings, that he must tear all earthly ambitions and lust for power from his soul. Indeed a man can reach the higher worlds even though he is vain and ambitious, but then he takes these qualities with him. When a person has not purified his moral feelings Lucifer takes the light-air away from him, so that he perceives nothing of what is really there, and instead he longs for the things on the physical plane. He breathes in, so to say, what he has been able to perceive on the physical plane. So he may imagine that he perceives something only to be seen spiritually in the light-air. He imagines that he sees the different incarnations of various human beings. But it is not so. He does not see them because he lacks the air-light. Instead, like a thirsty being, he sucks up into that realm things of the physical plane below, and describes all manner of things acquired there as though they were processes in the higher region. Actually there is no more harmful way of raising one's soul into the higher worlds than by means of vain and earthly love of power! If one does this, one will never be able to bring down true results of knowledge. What one brings will be a mere reflection, a phantom picture of the speculations and conjectures one may have made in the physical world.

Here we have been describing what may be called the general scenery of that realm. There are also Beings we meet there, whom we may call Elemental Beings. In the physical world we often speak of the forces of nature. In that higher realm these same forces manifest themselves as real beings. There we make a definite discovery. Through the actual facts that meet us we discover that whereas on the physical plane good and evil exist together, in that higher realm there are separate, specific forces of good and evil. Here in the physical world good and evil are combined and interwoven in each human soul. One has more of a tendency to good, another less. In that realm there are evil beings who exist to battle against the work of good beings. On entering that realm, therefore, we already have occasion to make use of the strengthened self-consciousness we mentioned yesterday. We have need of the more acute power of judgment that must come with our enhanced self. Then we may really be in a position to say that here in the higher realm there must needs be beings who have the mission of evil. Such beings have to exist alongside those who have the mission of good.

We often hear it asked, “Why didn't the all-wise God of the universe simply create the good alone? Why isn't it everywhere, always?” Now we gain this conviction, however, that if only the good were present the world would become one-sided, it would not bring forth all the fullness of life that it does yield. The good must have something to oppose it. This, in fact, can already be realized on the physical plane, but in that higher realm we perceive it with far greater force. There we see that only people who are content with a merely sentimental and dreamy outlook can imagine that good beings alone could bring about the purposes of the universe. In the realm of everyday life we might do with sentimentality, but we cannot tolerate it when we enter the stern realities of the super-sensible world. There we know that the good beings alone could not have made the world. They would be too weak to mold this universe. In the totality of evolution those forces must be included which come from the evil beings. There is great wisdom in this fact that evil is mingled in cosmic evolution. Thus, one of the things we have to get rid of when we enter spiritual life is sentimentality. Bravely and unflinchingly we must approach the dangerous truths that dawn upon us when we perceive the battle that is fought in just this realm—the battle between the good and evil beings that can there be revealed to us. All these are experiences we have when we have trained and adapted our souls to entering consciously into this realm.

So far we have only entered the realm of dreams. We human beings live in still another realm, one for which we are so little adapted in ordinary life that we generally have no perceptions whatever in it. It is the realm through which we live in dreamless sleep. Here already an absolute paradox appears, for sleep after all is characterized by the complete cessation of consciousness. In normal human life today man ceases to be conscious when he falls to sleep, and he does not regain consciousness till he wakes up again. In the age of primeval clairvoyance this realm too was something the soul could experience. If we go back into those ancient periods of evolution there was actually a condition of life corresponding to our sleep in which, however, man could perceive in a still higher, still more spiritual world than the world of dreams. This was true even in early post-Atlantean times. There we find conditions that, in regard to the usual human processes, are exactly like the condition of sleep, but are not, because they are permeated by consciousness. When we have reached this height we do not see the physical world, even though we still see the world of light-air, of sound, of cosmic harmony, and of the battle between the good and evil beings. The world we see may be said to be still more fundamentally different from all that exists in the physical world. So it is yet more difficult to describe than the world we find on entering the region of dream consciousness. I would like now to give you an idea of how one's consciousness in this realm works, and of its actual effects.

Anyone who describes that sublime world into which our dreams find their way, and about which I have given the merest hint, will be labeled a fantastic visionary by the bigoted intellectualism of today. If anyone begins to speak of that still higher realm through which man ordinarily sleeps, then people, if they take any notice at all, do not stop at abusing him as a visionary. They altogether lose their heads. We have already had an example of this. When my books were first published in Germany, the critics, who are supposed to represent the intellectual culture of today, attacked them with all sorts of insinuations. In one point, however, their criticism ran absolutely wild; in fact, they became foolish in their fury. I mean the point where I had to call attention to something that could only originate in the spiritual realm we are now considering. This was the question of the two Jesus children mentioned in my book, The Spiritual Guidance of Mankind.

For those of our friends who have not heard of this I may say once more that it appeared as a result of occult research, namely, that at the beginning of our era not only one but two Jesus children were born. One was descended from the so-called Nathan line of the House of David, the other from the Solomon line. These two children grew up side by side. In the body of the Solomon child lived the soul of Zarathustra. In the twelfth year of the child's life this soul passed over into the other Jesus child and lived in that body until its thirtieth year. Here we have a matter of the deepest significance. Zarathustra's soul went on living in the body that until its twelfth year had been occupied by a mysterious soul. And then, only from the thirtieth year onward, there lived in this body the Being Whom we call the Christ, Who remained on earth altogether for three years.

We really cannot take amiss the reaction of the critics to this statement, as it is natural that they should want to have something to say about the matter from their scholarly viewpoint. But what they set out to criticize comes from a realm in which they are always fast asleep! So we cannot expect them to know anything about it. Yet a healthy human understanding is able to grasp this fact. People only will not give themselves a chance to understand. In their haste they change their power of understanding into bitterness and fury.

Such truths as that about the two Jesus children, which are to be found in this higher realm, never have anything to do with sympathy and antipathy. We find such truths; we never experience them in the way we gain experience in the usual manner of knowledge in the physical world, or even in the realm of dream life. In both these areas we are there, so to say. We are present at the origin of our knowing or perception. This is true also of those occultists who are conscious only as far as the realm of dreams. We can say that a person witnesses the birth of his knowledge, of his perceptions, in that realm, but truths like this concerning the two Jesus children can never be found in this way. When truths come to us in that higher realm and enter our consciousness, the moment in which we actually acquired them has long since passed. We experienced them long before we met them with our full consciousness, as we have to do in our time. We have them already in us. So that when we reach these truths—the most important, the most living and essential of all truths—we distinctly have the feeling that when we gained them we were in an earlier time than the present; that we are now drawing out of the depths of our soul what we acquired in an earlier time and are bringing it into our consciousness. Such truths we discover in ourselves, just as in the outer world we come across a flower or any other object. Even as in the outer world we can think about an object that is simply there before us, so can we think about these truths when we have discovered them in ourselves, in our own self.

In the outer world we can only judge an object after we have perceived it. In the same way we find those sublime truths objectively in ourselves, and only then do we study them, in ourselves. We inwardly investigate them as we investigate the external facts of nature. Just as it would have no meaning to ask of a flower whether it is true or false, there would be no sense in asking about these truths that we simply come upon in ourselves, whether they are true or false. Truth and falsehood only come into the picture when it is a question of our power to describe what we find or what arises in our consciousness. Descriptions can be true or false. Truth and falsehood do not concern the facts, they concern the manner in which any thinking being approaches or deals with those facts. Thus, when we do research and get results in this realm we are really looking into a region of the soul we have lived in before but did not look into with our consciousness.

In carrying on our occult exercises we are best able to enter this realm if we pay positive attention to those moments when from the depths of our soul not mere judgments arise, but facts; facts that we know we did not consciously take part in originating. The more we are able to wonder at the things there unveiled, like the objective things of the outer world, the more astonishing it all is for us, the better are we prepared to enter into this realm. So, as a general rule, we do not make a good entrance if we have all sorts of conjectures and constructions in our minds. For example, there is no better way of finding nothing at all about the previous incarnations of some person than to speculate as to who they may have been earlier. Let us say you wanted to investigate the earlier incarnations of Robespierre. The best way of finding out nothing at all about him would be to search about for historical personalities you think might possibly have been his previous incarnations. In that way you never can discover the truth. You must get out of the habit of making conjectures and theories and forming opinions.

He would become a true occultist who would set himself to making as few judgments as possible about the world because then he will most quickly attain the condition in which the facts can meet him. The more a man cultivates silence in his conjectures and opinions, the more will his soul be filled with the actual truths of the spiritual world. Someone, for example, who had grown up with a particular religious bias, with definite feelings and ideas or perhaps views about the Christ—such a person in general would not be the most adapted to discover a truth like the history of the two Jesus children. Just when one feels a little neutral about the Christ event one is well prepared for such a discovery, provided of course he has made all the other necessary preparations. People with a Buddhistic bias will least easily be able to talk sense about Buddha, just as those with a Christian bias will least easily be able to talk sense about Christ. This is always true.

If we would enter into the third realm just described, it is necessary that we go through all the bitterness—for in ordinary life we cannot help feeling it in this way—of becoming, so to say, a twofold person. We are, in fact, twofold beings in ordinary life, even if we make no conscious use of the one-half of our existence, for we are both waking and sleeping beings. Different as these two conditions are, so is that third realm in the higher worlds different from this physical world. That realm has a peculiar existence of its own. There also we are surrounded by a world, but one so altogether new and different that we get to know it best if we extinguish not only the sense impressions of this world of ours but even our feelings and sentiments and all the things that have the power to arouse our passions and enthusiasms. In ordinary life man is so little fitted for conscious experience of that higher world that his consciousness is extinguished every night. He can only attain experience there if he is able to become a twofold man. Those who have the power at will to forget and to blot out all their interests in this physical world, are then able to enter that higher realm. The world between—that is to say, where our dreams are woven—is made of the materials of both worlds, it is penetrated by reflections of the higher worlds of which man is generally not aware, and by reminiscences of ordinary consciousness. That is why no one can perceive the true causes of events in the physical world who is not able to penetrate with understanding into that third realm.

Now if a man of today wishes to discover through his own experience who Krishna is, he can only make that discovery in the third realm. Arjuna's impressions, which in the sublime Gita are described to us through the words of Krishna, have their origin in that world. For this reason I have had to prepare the way today by speaking of man's ascent into the third realm. Only so will you be able to understand the origin of the strange and wondrous truths that Krishna speaks to Arjuna—truths that sound so altogether different from anything that is spoken in ordinary life.

These lectures are to help us gain knowledge of Krishna; that is to say, of the very essence of the Bhagavad Gita. Also, the occult principles of this wonderful Song are to give you something which, if you really make use of it, can enable you to find the way into the higher worlds because the way is open to every man. We have only to realize that the grain of gold with which we must begin is ours once we are aware of how many things there are in which the highest spiritual beings live and work and are interwoven in our everyday life.

My dear friends,

I would have liked to carry out for you today some experiments to round out the series of facts that lead us to our goal. It is not possible to do so, however, and I must accordingly arrange my lecture somewhat differently from the way I intended. The reason for this is partly that the apparatus is not in working order and partly because we lack alcohol today, just as we lacked ice yesterday.

We will therefore take up in more detail the things that were begun yesterday. I will ask you to consider all these facts that were placed before you for the purpose of obtaining a survey of the relationships of various bodies to the being of heat. You will realize that certain typical phenomena meet us. We can say: These phenomena carry the impress of certain relations involving the being of heat, at first unknown to us. Heat and pressure exerted on a body or the state of aggregation that a body assumes according to its temperature, also the extent of space occupied, the volume, are examples. We are able on the one side, to see how a solid body melts, and can establish the fact that during the melting of the solid, no rise in temperature is measurable by the thermometer or any other temperature-measuring instrument. The temperature increase stands still, as it were, during the melting. On the other hand, we can see the change from a liquid to a gas, and there again we find the disappearance of the temperature increase and its reappearance when the whole body has passed into the gaseous condition. These facts make up a series that you can demonstrate for yourselves, and that you can follow with your eyes, your senses and with instruments. Yesterday, also, we called attention to certain inner experiences of the human being himself which he has under the influence of warmth and also under the influence of other sense qualities such as light and tone. But we saw that magnetism and electricity were not really sense impressions, at least not immediate sense impressions, because as ordinary physics says, there is no sense organ for these entities. We say, indeed, that so far as electrical and magnetic properties are concerned we come to know them through determining their effects, the attraction of bodies for instance, and the many other effects of electrical processes. But we have no immediate sense perception of electricity and magnetism as we have for tone and light.

We then noted particularly, and this must be emphasized, that our own passive concepts, by which we represent the world, are really a kind of distillation of the higher sense impressions. Wherever you make an examination you will find these higher concepts and will be able to convince yourselves that they are the distilled essence of the sense impressions. I illustrated this yesterday in the case of the concept of being. You can get echoes of tone in the picture of the conceptual realm, and you can everywhere see showing through how these concepts have borrowed from light . But there is one kind of concept where you cannot do this, as you will soon see. You cannot do it in the realm of the mathematical concepts. In so far as they are purely mathematical, there is no trace of the tonal or the visible. Now we must deceive ourselves here. Man is thinking of tone when he speaks of the wave number of sound vibrations. Naturally I do not refer to this sort of thing. I mean all that is obtained from pure mathematics. Such things, for instance, as the content of the proposition of Pythagoras, that the sum of the angles of a triangle is 180°, or that the whole is greater than the part, etc. The basis of our mathematical concepts does not relate itself to the seen or the heard, but it relates itself in the last analysis to our will impulse. Strange as it may seem to you at first, you will always find this fact when you look at these things from the psychological point of view, as it were. The human being who draws a triangle (the drawn triangle is only an externalization) is attaining in concept to an unfolding of the will around the three angles. There is an unfolding of action around three angles as shown by the motion of the hand or by walking, by turning of the body. The thing that you have within you as a will-concept, that in reality you carry into the pure mathematical concept. That is the essential distinction between mathematical concepts and other concepts. This is the distinction about which Kant and other philosophers waged such controversy. You can distinguish the inner determination of mathematical concepts. This distinction arises from the fact that mathematical concepts are so rigidly bound up with our own selves, that we carry our will nature into them. Only what subsists in the sphere of the will is brought into mathematical operations. This is what makes them seem so certain to us. What is not felt to be so intimately bound up with us, but is simply felt through an organ placed in a certain part of our make-up, that appears uncertain and empirical. This is the real distinction. Now, I wish to call your attention to a certain fact. When we dip down into the sphere of will, whence came, in a vague and glimmering way, the abstractions which make up the sum of our pure arithmetical and geometrical concepts, we enter the unknown region where the will rules, a region as completely unknown to us in the inner sense, as electricity and magnetism are in the outer sense. Yesterday I endeavored to illustrate this by asking you to imagine yourselves living, thinking rainbows with your consciousness in the green, in consequence of which you did not perceive the green but perceived the colors on each side of it, fading into the unknown. I compared the red to the dipping down inwardly into the unknown sphere of the will and the blue-violet to the outward extension into the spheres of electricity and magnetism and the like.

Now I am inserting at this point in our course this psychological-physiological point of view, as it might be called, because it is very essential for the future that people should be led back again to the relation of the human being to physical observations. Unless this relationship is established, the confusion that reigns at present cannot be eliminated. We will see this as we follow further the phenomena of heat. But it is not so easy to establish this relationship in the thinking of today. The reason is just this, that modern man cannot easily bridge the gap between what he perceives as outer space phenomena in the world, or better, as outer sense phenomena and what he experiences within. In these modern times there is such a pronounced dualism between all which we experience as knowledge of the outer world and what we experience inwardly, that it is extraordinarily difficult to bridge this gap, But the gap must be bridged if physics is to advance. To this end we must use the intuitive faculties rather than the rational when we relate something external to what goes on within man himself. Thus we can begin to grasp how we must orient ourselves, in observing phenomena so difficult as those arising from heat. Let me call your attention to the following:

Suppose you learn a poem by heart. You will, as you learn it, first find it necessary to become acquainted with the ideas that underlie the poem. At first you will always have the tendency, when you recite the poem, to let those ideas unroll in your mind. But you know that the more frequently you recite the poem, especially when there is a lapse of time between the recitations, the less intensely you are obliged to think of the ideas. There may come a time when it is not necessary to think at all, but simply to reel off the recitation mechanically. We never actually reach this point; do not wish to, in fact, but we approach the condition asymptotically as it were. Our feelings as human beings prevent us from reaching this stage of purely mechanical repetition, but it is thinkable that we would get to the point where we needed to think not at all, but when we spoke the first line the rest of the poem would follow without any thinking about it. You recognize the similarity between such a condition and the approach of the hyperbola to its asymptotes. But this leads us to the conception that when we speak a poem we are dealing with two different activities working simultaneously in our organism. We are dealing with a mechanical reeling-off of certain processes, and along with this go the processes included in our soul concepts. On the one hand, we have what we can properly speak of as playing itself out mechanically in space, and on the other hand, we have a soul process which is entirely non-spatial in nature.

When now, you fasten your attention simply on that which reels itself off mechanically, and you do this in thought, for instance, if you imagine you recited a poem in an unknown language, then you have simply the mechanical process. The instant you accompany this mechanical process with thinking, then you have an inner soul activity that cannot be brought out into space. You cannot express in space the thinking with which a man accompanies the recitation, as you can the mechanical processes of actual speaking, of the pronouncing of words.

Let me give you an analogy. When we follow the heating of a solid body up to the time it arrives at its melting point, the temperature becomes higher. We can see this on the thermometer. When the body begins to melt, the thermometer stands still until the melting is complete. There is an analogy between what we can follow with the thermometer, the outer physical process, and what we can follow physically in the spoken word. And there is an analogy also between what escapes us, and lies in the concepts of the reciter and what happens to the heat while the melting goes on. Here you see, we have an example where we can, by analogy, at least bridge the gap between an outer observation and something in the human being. In other realms than that of speech we do not have such ready examples to bridge the gap. This is because in speech there is, on the one hand, the possibility imaginable, at least, that a person could mechanically speak out something learned by heart. Or on the other hand, that the person would not speak at all but simply think about it and thus remove it entirely from the realm of space. In other spheres we do not have the opportunity to make this cleavage and see precisely how one activity passes over into another. Especially is this difficult when we wish to follow the nature of heat. In this case we have to set out to investigate physiologically and psychologically how heat behaves when we have taken it up into ourselves.

Yesterday, by way of illustration, I said to you: “I go into a room that is comfortably warmed, I sit down and write.” I cannot so directly find the inter-relationships between what I experience or feel when I go into the warm room. What goes on within me parallels the outer warmth, when I write my thoughts down. But I cannot determine the relationship so readily as I can between speaking something and thinking about it. Thus it is difficult to find the something within that corresponds to the outer sensation of warmth. It is a question of gradually approaching the concepts that will lead us further in this direction and in this connection I want to call your attention to something you know from your anthroposophy.

You know, when we make the attempt to extend our thinking by meditation, to increase its inner intensity, and so to work with our thoughts that we come again and again into the condition where we know we are using soul-forces without the help of the body, we notice a certain thing. We notice that in order to do this, our entire inner soul life has to change. With ordinary abstract thoughts man cannot enter the higher region of human soul life. There thoughts become picture-like and they have to be translated out of the imaginative element in order to get them into abstract form, if they are to be brought into the outer world which is not grasped by the imaginative element. But you need to understand a method of looking at these things, such as is presented, for instance, in my Occult Science. In this book the endeavor is to be as true to the facts as possible, and it is this which has so disturbed the people who are only able to think abstractly. For the attempt must be made to get things over into picture form, as I have done to some extent in the description of the Saturn and Sun states. There you will find purely picture concepts mixed in with the others. It is very hard for people to go over into the pictures, because these things cannot be put into the abstract form. The reason for this is that when we think abstractly, when we move within the narrow confines of concepts, in which people today are so much at home, and especially so in the realm of natural science, when we do this we are using ideas completely dependent on our bodies. We cannot, for instance, do without our bodies when we set out to think through the things set forth as laws in the physics books. There we must think in such a way that we use our bodies as instruments. When we rise to the sphere of the imagination, then the abstract ideas must be completely altered, because our inner soul life no longer uses the physical body.

Now you can take what I might call a comprehensive view of the realm of imaginative thought. This realm of imaginative thought has in us nothing to do with what is tied up in our outer corporeality. We rise to a region where we live as beings of soul and spirit without dependence on our corporeality. In other words, the instant we enter the realm of the imaginative, we leave space. We are then no longer in space.

Note now, this has an extremely important bearing. I have in the previous course, made a very definite differentiation between mere kinematics and what enters into our consideration as mechanical, such as mass, for instance. As long as I consider only kinematics, I need only think of things. I can write them down on a blackboard or a sheet of paper and complete the survey of motion and space so far as my thinking takes me. But in that case I must remain within what can be surveyed in terms of time and space. Why is this? This is so for a very definite reason. You must make the following clear to yourselves: All human beings, as they exist on earth, are as you yourselves, within time and space. They are bounded by a definite space and are related as space objects to other space objects. Therefore, when you speak of space, you are not able, considering the matter in an unprejudiced way, to take seriously the Kantian ideas. For if space were inside of us, then we could not ourselves be within space. We only think space is inside of us. We can free ourselves of this fancy, of this notion, if we consider the fact that this being-within space has a very real meaning for us. If space were inside of us, it would have no meaning for a person whether he were born in Moscow or Vienna. But where we are born has a very real significance. As a terrestrial-empirical person, I am quite completely a product of space facts. That is, as a human being, I belong to relations that form themselves in space. Likewise, with time, you would all be different persons if you had been born 20 years earlier. That is to say, your life does not have time inside of it, but time has your life within it. Thus as experiencing persons, you stand within time and space. And when we talk of time and space, or when we make a picture of will impulses, as I have explained we do in geometry, this is because we ourselves live inside of spatial and temporal relations, and are therefore quite definitely conditioned by them, and so are able, a priori, to speak of them as we do in mathematics. When you go over to the concept of mass, this is not so. The matter must then be put otherwise. In respect to mass, you are dealing with something quite special. You cannot say that you cut out a portion of time or space, but rather that you live in the general space mass and make it into your own mass. This mass then, is within you. It cannot be gainsaid that this mass with all its activities, all of its potentialities, is active inside of you; at this moment it falls into a different category from time and space so far as its relations to you are concerned. It is precisely because you yourself take part, as it were, with your inner being in the properties of the mass, because you take it up into your being, that it does not allow itself to be brought into consciousness like time and space. In the realm where the world gives us our own substance, we thus enter an unknown region. This is related to the fact that our will is, for instance, closely connected with the phenomena of mass inside us. But we are unconscious of these phenomena; we are asleep to them. And we are related to the will activity and accompany mass phenomena within us in no other way than we are to the world in general between going to sleep and waking up. We are not conscious of either one. Both these things are hidden from human consciousness, and in this respect, there is no immediate distinction between them.

Thus we gradually bring these things nearer to the human being. It is this that the physicists shy away from, the bringing of such things near to man. But in no other way can we obtain real concepts except by developing relationship between the human being and the world, a relationship that does not exist at the start, as in the case of time and space. We speak of time and space, let us say, out of our rational faculties, whence comes the remoteness of the mathematical and kinematical sciences. Of the things experienced merely through the senses, in an external fashion, things related to mass, we can at first speak only in an empirical fashion. But we can analyze the relation between the activity of a portion of mass within us and outer mass activity. As soon as we do this we can begin to deal with mass in the same way that we deal with the obvious relation between ourselves and time or ourselves and space. That is, we must grow inwardly into such relation with the world in our physical concepts, as we have for the mathematical or kinematical concepts.

It is a peculiar thing that, as we loosen ourselves from our own bodies in which all those things take place to which we are asleep, as we raise ourselves to imaginative concepts, we really take a step nearer the world. We approach always nearer to that which otherwise reigns in us unconsciously. There is no other way to enter into the objectivity of the facts than to push forward with our own developed inner soul forces. At the same time that we detach ourselves from our own materiality, we approach more and more closely to what is going on in the outside world.

However, it is not so easy to obtain even the most elementary experiences in this region, since a person must so transform himself that he pays attention to things that are not noticed at all under ordinary circumstances. But now, I will tell you something that will probably greatly astonish you. Let us suppose you have advanced further on the path of imaginative thinking. Suppose you have really begun to think imaginatively. You will then experience something that will astonish you. It will be much easier than it formerly was for you to recite in a merely mechanical way a poem that you have learned by heart. It will not be more difficult for you, but less so. If you examine your soul organism without prejudice and with care, you will at once find that you are more prone to recite a poem mechanically without thinking about it, if you have undergone an occult training than if you have not undergone such a training. You do not dislike this going over into the mechanical so strongly as you did before the occult development. It is such things as this that are not usually stated but are meant when it is said over and over again: The experiences you have in occult training are really opposed to the concepts that are ordinarily had before you enter occult training and thus it is, when the more advanced stage is reached, that one comes to look more lightly on the ideas of ordinary life. And therefore, anyone who advances in occultism is exposed to the danger of afterwards becoming a greater mechanist than before. An orderly occult training guards against this, but the tendency to become materialistic is quite marked in the very people who have undergone occult development. I will, by example, tell you why.

You see, in ordinary life, it is really, as the theorists say it is, the brain thinks. But ordinarily, a man does not actually experience this fact. It is quite possible in this ordinary life to carry out such a dialogue as I did in my childhood with a youthful friend who as a crass materialist and became more and more so. He would say, “When I think my brain does the thinking.” I would say to that: “ Yes, but when you are with me you always say, I will do this, I think. Why do you not say, my brain will do this, my brain thinks? You are always speaking an untruth.” The reason is that for the theoretical materialist, quite naturally, there does not exist the possibility of observing the processes in the brain. He cannot observe these physical processes. Therefore, materialism remains for him merely a theory.

The moment a person advances somewhat from imaginative to inspirational ideas, he becomes able really to observe the parallel processes in the brain. Then what goes on in the material part of the brain becomes really visible. Aside from the fact that it is extremely seductive, the things a person can observe in his own activity appear to him more and more wonderful to a high degree. For this activity of the brain is observable as something more wonderful than all that the theoretical materialists can describe about it. Therefore, the temperature comes to grow materialistic for the very reason that the activity of the human brain has become observable. Only one is, as has been said, protected from this.

But as I have explained to you these steps in occult development, I have at the same time showed you how this development creates the possibility of a deeper penetration into material processes. This is the extraordinary thing. He who functions in the spirit simply as an abstract thing, will be relatively powerless in the face of nature. He grows into contact with other natural phenomena as he has already grown into contact with time and space.

We must now set up on the one side, all the things we have just tried to place before our minds, and on the other side, those things that have met us from the realm of heat.

What has come to us from the realm of heat? Well, we followed the rise of temperature as we warmed a solid body to melting point. We showed how the temperature rise disappeared for a time, and then re-appeared until the body began to boil, to evaporate. When we extended our observations, another thing appeared. We could see that the gas produced passed over in all directions on its surroundings. (Fig. 1a), seeking to distribute itself in all directions, and could only be made to take on form if its own pressure were opposed by an equal and opposite pressure brought to bear from the outside. These things have been brought out by experiment and will be further cleared up by other experiments. The moment the temperature is lowered to the point where the body can solidify, it can give itself a form (Fig. 1b). When we experience temperature rise and fall, we experience what corresponds externally to form. We are experiencing the dissolution of form and the re-establishment of it. The gas shows us the dissolution, the solid pictures for us the establishment of form. We experience the transition between these two, also, and we experience it in an extremely interesting fashion. For, imagine to yourselves the solid and the gas and the liquid, the fluid body standing between. This liquid need not be enclosed by a vessel surrounding it completely, but only on the bottom and sides. On the upper side, the liquid forms its own surface perpendicular to the line between itself and the center of the earth. Thus we can say that we have here a transition form between the gas and the solid (Fig. 1c). In a gas we never have such a surface. In a liquid such as water, we have one surface formed. In the case of a solid, we have that all around the body which occurs in the liquid only on the upper surfaces.

Now this is an extremely interesting and significant relation. For it directs our attention to the fact that a solid body has over its entire surface something corresponding to the upper surface of a liquid, but that it determines the establishment of the surface on a body of water. It is at right angles to the line joining it to the center of the earth. The whole earth conditions the establishment of the surface. We can therefore say: In the case of water, each point within it has the same relation to the entire earth that the points in a solid have to something within the solid. The solid therefore includes something which in the case of water resides in the relation of the latter to the earth. The gas diffuses. The relation to the earth does not take part at all. It is out of the picture. Gases have no surface at all.

You will see from this that we are obliged to go back to an old conception. I called your attention in a previous lecture to the fact that the old Greek physicists called solid bodies Earth. They did this, not account of some superficial reason such as has been ascribed to them by people today, but they did it because they were conscious of the fact that the solid, of itself, takes care of that which is the case of water is taken care of by the earth as a whole. The solid takes into itself the role of the earthly. It is entirely justified to put the matter in this way: The earthly resides within a solid. In water it does not reside within, but the whole earth takes up the role of forming a surface on the liquid.

Thus you see, when we proceed from solid bodies to water, we are obliged to extend our considerations not only to what actually lies before us but in order to get an intelligent idea of the nature of water, we must extend them to include the water of the whole earth and to think of this as a unity in relation with the central point of the earth. To observe a “fragment” of water as a physical entity is absurd, just as much so as to consider a cut-off garment of my little finger as an organism. It would die at once. It only has meaning as an organism if it is considered in its relation to the whole organism. The meaning that the solid has in itself, can only be attached to water if we consider it in relation to the whole earth. And so it is with all liquids on earth.

And again, when we pass on from the fluid to the gaseous, we come to understand that the gaseous removes itself from the influence of the earth. It does not form surfaces. It partakes of everything which is not terrestrial. In other words, we must not merely look on the earth for the activities of a gas, we must bring in the environment of the earth to help us out, we must go out into space and seek there the forces involved. When we wish to learn the laws of the gaseous state, we become involved in nothing less than astronomical considerations.

Thus you see how these things are related to the whole terrestrial scheme when we examine the phenomena that we have up to this time simply gathered together. And when we come to such a point as the melting or boiling point, then there enter in things that must now appear to us as very significant. For, if we consider the melting point we pass from the terrestrial condition of the solid body where it determines its own form and relations, to something which includes the whole earth. The earth takes the sold captive when the latter goes over into the fluid state. From its own kingdom, the solid body enters the terrestrial kingdom as a whole when we reach the melting point. It ceases to have individuality. And when we carry the fluid body over into the gaseous condition, then we come to the point where the connection with the earth as shown by the formation of a liquid surface is loosened. The instant we go from a liquid to a gas, the body loosens itself from the earth, as it were, and enters the realm of the extra-terrestrial. When we consider a gas, the forces active in it are to be thought of as having escaped from the earth. Therefore, when we study these phenomena we cannot avoid passing from the ordinary physical-terrestrial into the cosmic. For we no longer are in contact with reality if our attention is not turned to what is actually working in the things themselves.

But now another phenomena meets us. Consider such a thing as the one you know very well and to which I have called your attention, namely that water behaves so remarkably, in that ice floats on water, or, stated otherwise, is less dense than water. When it goes over into the fluid condition its temperature rises, and it contracts and becomes denser. Only by virtue of this fact can ice float on the surface of the water. Here we have between zero and four degrees, water showing an exception to the general rule that we find when temperature increases, namely that bodies become less and less dense as they are warmed up. This range of four degrees, where water expands as the temperature is lowered, is very instructive. What do we learn from this range? We learn that the water sets up an opposition. As ice it is a solid body with a kind of individuality, but opposes the transition to an entirely different sphere. It is very necessary to consider such things. For then we begin to get an understanding as to why, under certain conditions, the temperature as determined by a thermometer disappears, say at the melting or boiling points. It disappears just as our bodily reality disappears when we rise to the realm of imagination. We will go into the matter a little more deeply, and it will not appear so paradoxical when we try to clear up further the following: What happens then, when a heat condition obliges us to raise the temperature to the third power, or in this case to go into the fourth dimension, thus passing out of space altogether? Let us at this time, put this proposition before our souls and tomorrow we ill speak further about it. Just as it is possible for our bodily activity to pass over into the spiritual when we enter the imaginative realm, so we can find a path leading from the external and visible in the realm of heat tot he phenomena that are pointed to by our thermometer when the temperature rise we are measuring with it disappears before our eyes. What process goes on behind this disappearance? That is the question which we are asking ourselves today. Tomorrow we will speak of it further.