The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Before embarking on this subject, we must realise that since occultism has been popularised, a certain class of theosophical literature has given rise to mistaken ideas as to the real goal of occult science. It has been contended that the goal is the annihilation of the body through asceticism and that reality is an illusion which must be conquered, reference being made to the ‘maya’ spoken of by Hindu philosophy. This is more than exaggeration; it is an actual error, contradicted by the science and practice of occultism.

Greek imagery compares the soul to a bee and this is much truer to the facts. Just as the bee emerges from the hive and gathers the juice of flowers to distil and make it into honey, so does the soul come forth from the Spirit, penetrates into reality and gathers its essence which is then borne back again to the Spirit.

Occultism does not disdain reality but seeks rather to understand and make use of it. The body is not merely the vesture, it is the instrument of the Spirit. Occultism is not a science which subordinates the body but teaches us how to use it for higher ends. Could we be said to understand the nature of a magnet if we described it merely as a piece of iron shaped like a horse-shoe? No, indeed. But we have understood if we say: ‘The magnet is a piece of iron having the power to attract other pieces of iron.’ Visible reality is wholly pervaded with a deeper reality and it is this deeper reality which the soul tries to penetrate and master.

For thousands of years the higher wisdom was guarded in profound secrecy by Occult Brotherhoods. A man had to belong to one of these Brotherhoods before he could learn even the elements of occult science. To enter a Brotherhood he had to pass certain tests and swear not to make wrong use of the truths revealed to him. But the conditions of civilisation, and particularly of the human intellect, have entirely changed since the sixteenth century and above all in the last hundred years under the influence of scientific discoveries. As the result of science, a certain number of truths pertaining to Nature and the world of sense—which in olden times were known only to Initiates—have become public property. Knowledge possessed by science today was once in the keeping of the Mysteries. The Initiates have always known that which all men were destined, in time, to know. That is why the Initiates have been called prophets.

The advent of Christianity wrought a great change in the manner of Initiation. Initiation since the time of Christ Jesus has not been the same as before His coming. We can only understand this by studying the nature of man and the seven fundamental principles of his being.

(1) The physical body, visible to the natural eye and familiar to science. As a purely physical being, man corresponds to the mineral world; he is a combination of all the physical forces of the universe.

(2) The etheric body. How does it become perceptible?

We know that hypnosis induces a different state of consciousness, not only in the hypnotised subject but also in the hypnotist, who suggests anything he pleases to his subject. He can make him think that a chair is a horse, or that the chair is not there, or again that there is nobody in a room which is really full of people. The Initiate consciously exercises a power whereby he can blot out from his vision the physical body of the person in front of him. Then, in place of the physical body he beholds, not an empty space, but the etheric body. This body somewhat resembles the physical body and yet it is different. It takes on the form of the physical body, extending slightly beyond it. The etheric body is more or less luminous and fluidic. Instead of organs there are currents of diverse colours, the heart being a veritable vortex of forces and streaming currents. The etheric body is the ‘etheric double’ of the material body. Man possesses it in common with the plants. It is not produced by the physical body as naturalists might be led to believe; on the contrary, the etheric body is the builder of every living organism. In the plant, as well as in man, it is the force of growth, rhythm and reproduction.

(3) The astral body has neither the form of the etheric nor of the physical body. It is an ovoid and extends beyond the body like a cloud, an aura. The astral body can take on all the colours of the rainbow, according to the passion by which it is animated. Each passion has its astral colour. Besides this, the astral body is, in a certain sense, the synthesis of the physical and etheric bodies, for the reason that the etheric body always has a contrary character to the sex of the physical body. The etheric body of a man is female; the etheric body of a woman is male. In both man and woman, the astral body is bisexual. In this sense, therefore, it is a synthesis of the two other bodies.

(4) The self—Manas in Sanscrit, Joph in Hebrew—is the intelligent, rational soul. It is the indestructible individuality which can learn to build the other bodies—the ‘inexpressible,’ the human self and the divine self.

The union of these four elements was venerated by Pythagoras in the sign of the tetragram.

The evolution of man consists in transforming the lower bodies with the aid of the self into spiritualised bodies. The physical body is the most ancient principle—hence the most perfect—of man's being. The task of the present epoch of human evolution is to transform the astral body.

In civilised man, the astral body is divided into two parts—a lower and a higher. The lower part is still chaotic and dark, the higher is luminous, penetrated even now by the forces of Manas—that is to say, it has a certain order and regularity.

When the Initiate has purified his astral body of all animal passions, when it has become wholly luminous (the first phase of Initiation), he has arrived at the stage of catharsis. Only then can he work at his etheric body and by this means ‘affix his seal’ to the physical body. Of itself, the astral body has no direct influence upon the physical body. Its forces must pass by way of the etheric body. The task of the disciple, therefore, is concerned with the transformation of the astral and etheric bodies in order, finally, to acquire full and complete control of the physical body. This is how he becomes a master.

We are touching here upon a marvelous law of human nature, proving that the self and Manas are the central points of man's development. When Manas dominates the astral and etheric bodies, man acquires new faculties and these in turn influence the spiritual and divine form of man. When Manas works upon the etheric body, light and power for the purpose of man's spiritual being (Budhi) are generated. When Manas works upon the physical body, light and power for man's divine Spirit (Atma) are generated. The evolution of man, therefore, amounts to a transformation of the lower bodies by the higher Self.

We have a paramount example of the working of the lower self in an anecdote told by Darwin. On one of his journeys he conversed with a cannibal and asked, through an interpreter, if he felt no repugnance against eating human flesh. Whereupon the savage burst into laughter, saying: “One must have tasted human flesh before one can know whether it is good to eat. And you know nothing about it whatever!”

The transformation of the astral body goes hand in hand with the control of feelings and their purification.

The lower part of the astral body of man in our age is dark; the higher part is limpid and full of colour. The higher part has been transmuted and permeated by the self but not the lower part as yet. When man has transformed the whole of his astral body we say that he has changed it into Manas. Not until then can he begin to work on the etheric body. There is a reason why this is so. Everything in the astral body is ephemeral. Everything that happens in the etheric body leaves an indelible trace which is, furthermore, impressed like a seal into the physical body.

The higher stages of Initiation consist in controlling all the phenomena connected with the physical body, in mastering and controlling them at will. The Initiate possesses Atma to the extent to which he achieves this; he becomes a sage and has power over Nature.

The difference between Eastern and Western Initiation lies in the method by which the master brings the pupil to the point of being able to work on his etheric body. Here we must consider the different conditions in which man finds himself during sleep and waking life.

During sleep the astral body is partly freed from the physical body and is in a condition of inactivity, but the vegetative activity of the etheric body continues.

At death, the etheric and astral bodies are wholly severed from the physical body. In the etheric body—which is the bearer of memory—inheres a remembrance of the past life and at the moment the etheric body frees itself, the dying have before them a tableau of their whole life. Freed from the physical body, the etheric body becomes much more sensitive and impressionable because it is no longer impeded by physical substance.

Oriental Initiation consisted in a process whereby the etheric and astral bodies of the neophyte were forced out of his physical body. He lay in a trance lasting three days and during this time the hierophant controlled his freed etheric body, poured impulses into him and taught him wisdom which remained as a powerful, lasting impression. When he awoke from the trance, the new Initiate found himself in possession of this wisdom, for the reason that memory inheres in the etheric body. The wisdom was occult doctrine but it bore the permanent and personal stamp of the hierophant who had imparted it. A man who had passed through this Initiation was said to be ‘twice-born.’

The process of Western Initiation is quite different. Eastern Initiation takes place while man is in a state of sleep; Western Initiation must be achieved in a state of wakefulness. In other words, there is no separation of the etheric and physical bodies. In Western Initiation the neophyte is free; the master simply plays the rôle of an awakener. He does not try to dominate or convert; he simply recounts what he himself has seen,—And how ought we to listen? There are three ways of listening: to accept the words as infallible authority; to be sceptical and fight against what is heard; to pay heed to what is said without servile, blind credulity and without systematic opposition, allowing the ideas to work upon us and observing their effects. This latter is the attitude which the pupil should adopt towards his master in Western Initiation.

The Initiator knows that he who is master must also be servant. It is not his task to mould the soul of his pupil to his own image but to discover and solve the enigma of this soul. The teaching given by the Initiator is not dogma; it is simply an impulse for development. Every truth that is not at the same time a vital impulse, is a sterile truth. That is why all thought must be filled with the element of soul. Thought must be permeated with feeling; otherwise it will not pass into the realm of soul and it will be stillborn thought.

Now that we have seen what Theosophy has to say concerning the historical evolution of humanity, we will consider what the Apocalypse can tell us about it.

To understand this we must go beyond our culture back to the Greco-Latin cultural epoch, the fourth in our great post-Atlantean epoch. In spiritual science we calculate it to have begun in the eighth or ninth century of the pre-Christian age. Further back in the past we arrive at the Egypto-Chaldean cultural epoch, then the most ancient Persian age, concerning which the historical research of our day knows only the last faint echoes. Then we go further back to the primal holy age of the ancient Indian culture. In this way we finally arrive back at the time of the great Atlantean culture which is reported to us by all ancient religious writings. Before the great Atlantean water catastrophe, between Europe and America there existed the ancient Atlantean continent. That is where the precursors of humanity lived, those whom we call the Atlanteans.

We want to consider now the spiritual life of the Atlanteans; for, of course, the same souls who are present today lived there, but they were equipped with other soul abilities or states of consciousness that are of interest now to the spiritual researcher.

During the fullest blossoming of the Atlantean culture, we find the modern human being's capacity for perception present only in its first rudiments. The ancient Atlanteans did not see external objects as we do today, with sharply defined contours; they saw them rather surrounded by an aura. When they fell asleep at night, the external picture disappeared for them but they were conscious in the spiritual world. They had a dim form of clairvoyance. But they did not have any of what we today call counting and computation, the power of judgment or logical thinking. They had none of the mental abilities that our present-day culture has created; for example, they did not know about the power hidden in coal. Instead, they had magical abilities with which they could awaken the powers hidden in plant seeds and then put these powers in their service. In this way they possessed clairvoyant and magical powers. Those people in Atlantis best able to make use of their magical powers were the best technicians and engineers. What our present-day scholars and natural scientists represent, we can compare to the people most highly gifted with powers of clairvoyance in Atlantean times.

There were great mystery centers at that time. Our present-day mystery and occult schools work much more secretly than theirs did. The mystery centers of Atlantean times were generally known as both school and church. Piety and wisdom were cultivated at the same time. The leaders of that time can be called the great teachers of the mysteries. They taught in these Atlantean oracles of which there were seven. Students who had become sufficiently mature were initiated into the mastery of magical powers and into a conscious vision of the spiritual world. Unlike our culture, which is limited to the three lower kingdoms, Atlantean wisdom stretched over the physical earth and beyond to spiritual realities. Present-day science limits itself to the three kingdoms that do not go beyond the earth. However, through clairvoyant development, the Atlantean initiate also achieved a vision and experience of higher spiritual beings that work beyond the earth, even up to the region of the stars.

During those times there were mystery centers that were especially concerned with the various planets in our solar system and the spiritual powers standing behind them. For this reason there were Mars, Venus, Sun, Jupiter, Mercury, Saturn, and Moon oracles. However, the greatest and loftiest was the ancient sun oracle. The initiates of this sun oracle could survey all the other oracles and watch over them. The great sun initiate of the sun oracle stood at the top; he saw prophetically the water catastrophe of Atlantis. Therefore, he had the task of seeing to it that the culture was guided through and beyond the catastrophe.

Now those human beings who had possessed the best talent for clairvoyance were of no use at all for the post-Atlantean cultures. These new cultures required the selection of people who had nothing left of the ancient magic. Like a sunrise over the great post-Atlantean culture, they developed the individual spiritual capacities of thinking and judgment in their first primitive forms. The simplest people were precisely those best suited for the future.

They were led by the great sun initiate to a colony near present-day Ireland; later they were led to the middle of Asia. Those were the people whose consciousness was already then closest to our present-day consciousness. Furthermore, for the sake of this advanced population copies of etheric bodies of the greatest initiates of the Atlantean oracle were incorporated into those individuals who came from the various oracles with the best aptitude for present-day culture. This was necessary for the future.

It is a law of spiritual economy that what has once been achieved for humankind is not lost. If we were to survey the various oracles we would find everywhere what is achieved through occult training; the etheric body is transformed and organized through and through by the I. The etheric body of ordinary people who have not undergone this transformation dissolves at death into the world ether. However, with the highest initiate something different happens. An etheric body transformed in this way is preserved for the blessing and healing of humankind. The great sun initiate preserved the etheric bodies of the seven great Atlantean initiates as spiritual treasure and took them along to Asia. These were then imprinted into seven of the very best individuals so that they grew up endowed with the etheric bodies of the greatest initiates of ancient Atlantis. Through many generations the great sun initiate exercised his educational skills on the health and spiritual discipline of the people so that he developed, so to speak, the very best human material.

These seven individuals were in external life simple people; they had their I and their astral body for themselves, but in certain states of consciousness their speaking was inspired by higher powers. They were then sent by the great sun initiate down to ancient India, to those still longing to return to the true primal home of humanity and who characterized everything external as maya or illusion. That was the chorus of the seven holy Rishis. What this chorus harmonized together as a spiritual symphony was the primal wisdom of the pre-Vedantic age. We are looking into an age much more ancient than the Vedas. What is written in the Vedas is nothing more than an echo; it reaches us only in broken rays through the wisdom of the holy Rishis.

Now we come to the ancient Persian culture. In place of the seven Indian teachers came the first Zarathustra. He was himself an initiated student of the great sun initiate, who stood behind the Rishis. Because of this he could proclaim the great teaching concerning the spiritual being of the sun, concerning Ahura Mazdao. We see here how the great teachers of humanity guided the evolution of human development in wisdom.

From the beginning the ancient Indians were protected from falling into materialism. Their longing for clairvoyance, for the spiritual, for the feeling of connectedness with God was still too great. The Persians, on the other hand, were farmers and fighters. Therefore, in order not to fall into materialism, they had to receive the teaching concerning the great Ahura Mazdao, the spirit of the sun, the highest being. Zarathustra initiated one of his students in such a way that he brought the student's astral body to a higher stage of development. With another student he developed the etheric body to the highest stage of clairvoyant consciousness so that the student became able to read the Akashic chronicle by means of this etheric body which is, of course, always the vehicle for our memory.

Now, the first of these two students was reborn as Hermes, the great impulse giver for the Egyptian culture; his astral body was especially well developed. When he was reborn as the Egyptian Hermes, he bore within himself the astral body of the great Zarathustra and was therefore able to work with the intentions of Zarathustra.

The other student also became one of the most important personalities of post-Atlantean culture when he was born again as Moses. That is why Moses already as a child had to be brought to the point where his etheric body and I could be wholly influenced by Zarathustra's etheric body. For this reason he had to be placed in a basket deep in the water at a tender age;¹ this is a symbol for his calling. And so he became the great Akashic visionary who could write down the pictures he perceived in the Akashic chronicle. These are the majestic images found in Genesis. In these ways events of the past are led over into the future—behind the scenes of the physical, external development of humankind.

Zarathustra was also able to become the greatest teacher of the fourth post-Atlantean cultural epoch. Living in the Near East in the sixth century before Christ's birth he was known as Zarathos or Nazarathos. He was the teacher of the most important Greek teachers and initiates—Pythagoras, for example, was his student.

These four post-Atlantean cultures were inspired by the great sun oracle of ancient Atlantis, and the culture of the ancient Hebrew nation continued to develop uninterupted on a parallel course—a subgroup of this Hebrew nation always living contemporaneously with one of the named cultural epochs. The ancient Indian culture was initiated in the secrets of the spiritual world and the planetary states; the ancient Hebrew ... [gap in the manuscript.] Then, living contemporaneously with the Persian culture of Zarathustra, the Hebrew ancestors developed a teaching much like that in Persia concerning Ormuzd and Ahriman, a teaching concerning good and evil. The third, the Egypto-Chaldean culture, then followed. The exodus out of Egypt under Moses' leadership took place at the same time. Then the Greco-Latin culture developed during the time of the great Hebrew initiate-prophets, Elijah, Jeremiah, and so forth. Already in primal ancient times these prophets had been given the idea of the great being, Ahura Mazdao, announced to them by Melchizedek. In this way, the same nuances were at work simultaneously in the Hebrew culture as in the other nations through the epochs.

Now, such cultures always had their second blossoming. That of Hermes soon encountered a decline. It had contained deep mysteries for the ancient Egyptian culture but had fallen in the worst way and entered into the most terrible decadence as black magic. The ancient Indian culture had fallen into decadence the least.

So we see how all that had appeared successively was still maintained in the ancient Hebrew nation. In various groups they preserved the feeling and the states of consciousness of various other cultures. These groups could be addressed with the names of the ancient cultures, according to how their states of consciousness had been maintained.

When the writer of the Apocalypse speaks of the “community at Ephesus” he means the representative of the first, the Indian culture; the Persian finds its representative in the “community at Smyrna”; the Egypto-Chaldean in the name of the “community at Pergamon”; and finally, the fourth, the Greco-Latin culture in the “community of Thyatira.” He was able to address the representatives of the four ancient cultural epochs in concurrently existing groups.

Then he looked further into the future and saw our cultural blossoming in the “community at Sardes.” The “community” following ours—for which we are consciously preparing through the theosophical movement—he characterizes with the name “Philadelphia.” After that, humanity will finally reach the “community at Laodicea,” where new impulses can no longer be brought forward. When we work and act in the fifth epoch as conscious representatives of the theosophical spiritual life we are introducing the age of Philadelphia or brotherhood.

The seven spirits of God, the seven stars, are what we find in theosophical teachings concerning the evolution of the earth through the planetary states. These teachings should lead us up to an understanding of the secrets of the stars and their spirits. In this way we enter consciously the community of Philadelphia when we absorb the teachings of spiritual science.

• 1. In Exodus 2:3 we read: “And when she could hide him no longer she took for him a basket made of bulrushes, and daubed it with bitumen and pitch; and she put the child in it and placed it among the reeds at the river's brink.” RSV.

The remembrance of this Christmas Festival will be strongly imprinted on the souls of many, for a sharper mental contrast can scarcely be imagined than that which arises, when we lift our souls to the voices which sounded to the shepherds, presenting an eternal truth for all human progress of the post-Christian times:

‘Divine revelation in the heights and upon earth peace to the men who have goodwill,’

when we raise our souls to the ‘peace upon earth to men’ and then look at the facts of the present day which we find outspread over a great part of the civilised world.

By reason of this contrast, this Christmas Festival will be a permanent token in the memories and hearts of men upon the earth. For certainly, if we preserve that which we must always preserve within the fields of our occult thought, if we preserve our uprightness of heart and our inner sincerity of soul, we cannot celebrate this Christmas Festival with the same feeling with which we have celebrated others; for it must stimulate us to more profound reflection, must stimulate us very specially to that which arises from our occult deepening as ideas for the future of humanity—to that which can lead human hearts to the ages which will be so different from our own.

In the course of years we have registered much within our souls, which can indicate to us the sort of soul-condition which such ages will bring. Let us ask ourselves, what is that, of which we must feel that it is still so much needed at the present time? If we call up before the eyes of our soul that which has frequently formed the centre of our consideration, we shall see that within the depths of the human soul a true knowledge is wanting of that which drew into the world upon the day which we celebrate every year in this wintry Christmas.

The whole significance, the whole profundity, of that which took place in the time which we call to remembrance in this Christmas Festival, is truly not expressed unavailingly, but profoundly and significantly, in the passage which humanity of earth has accepted from affection, one might say, the passage which runs thus:

‘Divine revelation in the heights and upon earth peace to the men who have goodwill,’

The simplest things are often to the human heart the most difficult of comprehension, and simple as this verse sounds, we do well if we make it ever clearer to ourselves that all the future ages of the earth existence will be able to understand this verse more and more profoundly, to enter more and more deeply into the significance of these important words.

It is not without reason that out of all the secret history of the appearing of Jesus upon the earth, the Festival of Christmas has become the most popular—nothing has become more popular than the entrance of the Jesus-child into earth life. For with this we have the possibility of placing before the souls of men something which is received lovingly even by the heart of a little child, in so far as he is able to receive external sense impressions, even though perhaps not yet from words, and yet at the same time it is something which sinks deeply into the depths of those human souls through which the gentlest and yet at the same time the strongest love flows warmly.

Truly the humanity upon earth is not yet advanced beyond a childish comprehension of the Mysteries of Christ Jesus, and epoch after epoch will still have to elapse ere human souls again acquire those forces, by means of which they will be able to absorb the complete magnitude of the beginning of the Mystery of Golgotha. Thus on this occasion may no Christmas consideration as in other years be brought before your souls, but something which may show us how much we are wanting in that depth which is necessary in order to let the Mystery of Golgotha flash up rightly within our souls.

In the course of the last few years we have often spoken of the fact that on occult grounds we really have to celebrate the birth of not only one Jesus child but of two, and it may be said that because through the observations of Spiritual Science this mystery of the two Jesus children has been revealed, a faint beginning has been made to a new comprehension of the Mystery of Golgotha.

Only slowly and gradually could this Mystery of Golgotha grip the minds of men. How it has been absorbed into human minds can be brought before our souls when, for example, we glance at the fact that, to a certain extent, that which Christian humanity has gained in the idea of the Christmas child had to struggle through from East to West, by making its way through other versions of a Divine Mediator between the highest Divine-spiritual Beings and the human soul.

We have often considered the fact that, running parallel with the stream of Christian life from East to West, another stream of revelation flowed from the North, over the Black Sea, along the Danube, upwards to the Rhine, to Western Europe. The worship which we know as the worship of Mithras disappeared in the early centimes of the Christian era. But in the first centuries of the Christian era it had gripped as many hearts in Europe as had Christianity itself, and impressed itself deeply and extended in the regions of central and Eastern Europe. To those who followed this worship, Mithras appeared just as sublime and great a Divine Mediator descending from spiritual heights into earth existence, as the Christ appeared to the Christians. In the same way we hear of the entrance of Mithras into earth existence in the Winter Holy-night, the shortest day! In the same way we hear that he was born secretly in a cave, that shepherds were the first to hear his Song of Praise: in the same way was Sunday dedicated to him in contradistinction to the other more ancient feast days. And if we ask what is the characteristic feature in the descent of this Mithras-figure, we must say as follows: Mithras was not represented as was the Christ within Jesus. When an image, a symbolical representation, was formed of him, it was known that it was only a symbolical representation. The true Mithras was only to be seen by those who had the faculty of clairvoyance. Certainly he was represented as a mediator between man and the spiritual Hierarchies, but he was not represented as having been incarnated in a human child. He was represented in such a way that when he descended to the earth, in his true being he was only visible to the Initiates, to those who had clairvoyant vision. The idea did not exist in the Mithras worship that that spiritual Being, who was represented as a mediator between the Spiritual Hierarchies and the souls of men, was incarnated in an earthly body as a child. For the worship of Mithras depended upon the fact that the ancient primitive clairvoyance was still in existence in a large number of human beings.

If we investigate the path of worship of Mithras from East to West, we find that amongst the people who were worshippers of Mithras a large number were those who could see in those intermediate conditions between waking and sleeping, when the soul lives not in dreams, but in spiritual reality. These could see in such intermediate conditions the descent of Mithras from aeon to aeon, from stage to stage, from the spiritual world down to the earth. Many could see and bear witness that such a Mediator had arisen for man, a Mediator in the spiritual worlds.

That which lived as the cult of Mithras was an externalisation of the more or less symbolical representation seen by the seer. What is it really that we meet with in this worship of Mithras? Our whole understanding of the Cosmos makes it impossible to believe that the Christ has only been known since the Mystery of Golgotha. The Initiates and their pupils also knew Him in the pre-Christian times as that Spirit Who was to come. The Initiates always pointed again and again to Him Whom they saw as the Sun-spirit descending from the heights, Who was approaching the earth in order to take up His abode within it. They designated Him as the One Who was to be, the One Who was to come. They knew Him in spirit and saw Him descending.

Then the Mystery of Golgotha took place. We know what it signifies. We know that through this Mystery of Golgotha that Spirit through Whom the earth has gained its meaning drew into a human body. We know that since then this Spirit is connected with the Earth and we know how man is to develop in order, in no very distant future, to see again in spirit the Christ Who through the Mystery of Golgotha united His Own Life with the life of the earth I humanity. We are expressing nothing figurative when we say that That Which the ancient Initiates saw in the various Sanctuaries of the Spiritual is since then to be recognised as pressing through, streaming through, pulsating through, living through the earth-life.

But the clairvoyant perception had to be lost more and more, and with it the power to look up into the spiritual spheres to behold the Christ, Who had now descended to the earth. For now those who could not perceive clairvoyantly could see that He was permeated with divine love, that He was That Which they were always to possess as the highest treasure of the earth-man. Thus men were to feel fully that they had to receive within their earthly habitation the great gift of cosmic Love, the Christ, sent by the God Who is called the Father-God; they were to learn to know Him fully as the Being Who henceforth was to remain connected with the ages as the meaning of the earth evolution; they were to learn to know Him fully in His life, from the first respiration as a Child to the spiritual deed of Christ on Golgotha which can be revealed to the hearts of men.

In the course of later times, it has been possible for us to fill this gap by means of the Fifth Gospel, which has been added to the other Gospels, as in our age it was destined for us to know every step of this Divine Life upon earth yet more minutely. And thus because men were, as it were, to become familiar with Christ Jesus as with a brother, as with One Who from love of man has drawn out of the wide spiritual realms into the narrow valley of earth, because men were to learn to know Him in the most familiar, most intimate knowledge, therefore had the powers of perception and love in the human mind to be gathered together in order to perceive intuitively in a purely human-divine manner, I might say, that which was enacted among men as the beginning of a new age, the Christian age.

For this end the power of man had to be concentrated upon the life of Christ Jesus: for a time it had to be diverted from the vision upwards into the spiritual spheres by means of That Which had drawn into the Child of Bethlehem, Which had descended from cosmic heights. But to-day, we are living in a time in which the vision must again be extended, in which human progress and human evolution must again dominate evolution if the Christ, as descending from divine spiritual heights, is to remain what He is in the life of the earth.

The worship of Mithras was a last powerful remembrance of the Christ Who had not yet reached the earth but was descending. For humanity was destined to receive the Christ ever more into the soul in such a way that even the smallest child could receive Him; in such a way that with it there came a closing of the spiritual vision with regard to the spiritual world, that vision by means of which we know that the Christ is a Cosmic Being, by means of which we know what importance He has for the valley of the earth.

Slowly and gradually the worship of Mithras flowed away, owing to the fact that Christ could appear to man as a Cosmic Being. The worship of Mithras was an echo of the old clairvoyant perception.

Then we see how, with the gradual flowing away, the clairvoyant perception also diminished, how even for those who still had the clairvoyant perception of the old sort, a flowing away of the clairvoyant capacities began, and how, with this flowing away, the possibility also ceased of perceiving the Christ completely in His true nature. He was perceived in His true nature when He was perceived not only in His earthly activity, but in His heavenly glory. The possibility gradually diminished, disappeared, of seeing Him in His heavenly glory beside His earthly existence. We see that it again appeared in a weakened form, in spite of the greatness of the teaching in other respects, in the founder of Manicheism. The Manu pointed to Jesus, but it was not an indication which was suited to simple, primitive, believing minds, because in this spirit which founded Manicheism the ancient clairvoyance still existed.

Yet there was nothing in it which could be counted as an opposition with regard to the comprehension of Christianity. Christ Jesus was for the Manu a Being Who had not taken on earthly corporality but had lived in a phantom body, as it were, in an etheric body upon the earth.

Now we see that with regard to the comprehension of the appearing of Christ Jesus a struggle began. Why was this? There was a striving to look upwards, as it were, to see how the Being of Christ descended. They were not, however, yet capable of seeing how the descending Being actually took up His abode in human flesh. A struggle of soul was inevitable before this complete comprehension was possible.

Again we see the teachings of the Manichees extending from East to West, a teaching which still looked up towards the Divine Spirit Who was descending, looked towards everything which the old conception of the world possessed, looked towards the permeation of the world not merely with the physical Being which presented itself to the human sense existence, but also with the Being which with the movements of the stars pervades the Cosmos.

The linking of human fate, of human life, with cosmic life, this pervaded the soul of the Manichee, this was deeply rooted within him, shunning the evil, which rules in human life in common with the activity of the good God. Deeply, deeply did Manicheism look into the riddle of evil. But this riddle of evil at the same time can only appear before the human soul when we are able to grasp it in connection with the Mystery of Golgotha, when we penetrate the Mystery of Golgotha with the riddle of evil in Manicheism.

Truly those who were called upon to yield their souls in the deepest, most intense manner, to the Mystery of Golgotha, have contended with that which shone into more modern times from the residue of the ancient clairvoyant perception. We need only think of one great leader of the West, St. Augustine. Before he struggled through to the Christianity of Paul he was given up to the teaching of the Manichees. A yet greater impression was made upon him when he was able to perceive how from aeon to aeon the Being of the divine spiritual mediator descended from divine spiritual spheres. This spiritual vision also illumined for Augustine in the first period of his struggle the perception of how the Christ had taken up His abode upon the earth in a fleshly body, and how with Him the riddle of evil was solved.

It is striking to see how Augustine conversed with the celebrated Bishop Faustus of the Manichees, and only because this Bishop was not able to make the requisite impression upon Augustine, he turned away from Manicheism and towards the Christianity of Paul. Here we see the flow and ebb of that which we can call the perception of the super-earthly Christ as He was before the Mystery of Golgotha. And in the main, only with the raising of the new age of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch did that completely disappear which was the residue of the old clairvoyant perception.

This old clairvoyant perception knew the heavenly Christ. Even in the beginning of Christianity He could be felt, but to see how He descended was only possible for the old clairvoyant perception. Deeply, deeply, must it affect us when we perceive how in the first age of the spreading of Christianity those who had drawn their perception from the old clairvoyance wished to picture the Christ; how in order to perceive the Christ they looked not merely towards Bethlehem but into the spheres of heaven, in order to see how He descended from thence to bring salvation to men.

We know that besides the worship of Mithras, and besides Manicheism, there existed in the West the Gnosis which wished to connect the old clairvoyant perception of the great Sun-Spirit, Who descended from the divine sphere, with the perception of the course of earthly life of Christ Jesus. And then it is striking to see how the human mind wished to concentrate itself ever more upon the earthly connections of Christ Jesus. It is striking to see how this simple human mind which can find nothing simple enough to represent it, is afraid of the greatness of the feeling which had to be experienced with regard to the lofty conception of the old Gnosis. The early Christians were afraid of these lofty conceptions. Up to our own age the fear strikes those who come into touch with spiritual knowledge that it is easy for the mind to come into confusion if it raises itself into the ages in which it could be seen that Christ descended from the loftiest heights in order to be able to dwell in a human body.

That which the Gnostics were able to say regarding the heavenly Christ beside the earthly Christ affects us very deeply and I should like to say that our soul-vision of the earthly life of Christ Jesus will in no way be blunted if, through Spiritual Science, it is shown the way to the new clairvoyance in order to find the Christ as He descended from the heights of heaven. Here we have a verse evidently of Gnostic origin:

‘Behold, O Father, how, distant from Thy Breath, this being upon earth
Wanders, the target and victim of all ill.
Lo, ill, perplexed, it flies the deadly chaos—how can it find its way?
Therefore send me, O Father,
Descending, victory to bring,
I traverse all the aeons,
Teaching all sacred knowledge;
Thus may God’s image be manifested,
And thus to you I give
The deeply hidden knowledge of the sacred way:
“Gnosis” it is called for you.’

We feel that the new Spiritual Science must again lead us into these things in order that we, in our conceptions, may be able to weave round the Christ- Event the spiritual Aura which for good reasons, as we have often emphasised and had to mention again to-day, was for a time lost to humanity. We must do it slowly and gradually: we must, to a certain extent, try to express that which Spiritual Science is able to reveal to us in such a way that the human mind, which to-day is far from the science of spiritual knowledge, may be able to grasp it.

And so we have endeavoured to express the whole anthroposophical wisdom concerning the Christ-Event, and especially concerning the Christmas night and its connection with the human mind, in simple words which are here presented to you:

In the eyes of the soul reflected
In the light of the cosmic hope,
In the human heart to the spirit exalted wisdom speaks:
The eternal love of the Father
To the earth has sent His Son
Who, filled with grace, on the human path sheddeth the light of heaven.

It is to be hoped that a time will come for earthly evolution in which more, much more can be expressed, and in far, far clearer words, regarding the Mystery of Golgotha, simple words in which for the whole world can be expressed that which Spiritual Science has to say to humanity regarding the Mystery of Golgotha.

We see how, up to the end of the fourth post-Atlantean period, even up to the beginning of the fifth, the old clairvoyant perception ebbed away in such a maimer that the last remains which were still left to man fell into disrepute. We see this downfall, as I might call it, embodied in that form which appeared in Europe and spread much further than is thought during the ebb of the fourth post-Atlantean period, in the figure of the popular adventurer (for he was an adventurer), who was still able to exhibit the last sign of clairvoyant perception—“Magister Georgius Sabellicus Faustus Junior, Magus Secundus, philosophus philosophorus, fons necromanticorum, chiromanticus, agromanticus, pyromanticus, in hydra arte secundus.” So ran the complete title of that Faust who lived in the sixteenth century as a representative of the moribund clairvoyance, that Faust who still had a vision into the spiritual worlds, even though the vision was chaotic. But it no longer happens in modern times that when the human soul is passive in certain conditions it can see spiritually, as in ancient times. For it can only see what is material and can acquire that which the intellect can combine out of the material. The whole tragedy of the final spiritual vision is brought to expression in the primitive communications regarding Faustus junior. By giving himself such a title we can perceive that he is, as it were, the final offshoot of those who were able to see into the spheres through which the Christ descended. He called himself Faustus junior, in allusion to the Manichee Bishop Faustus.

We know that he knew all about the Bishop Faustus for whom Augustine had longed, for the writings of Augustine were never so widely spread in Europe as at the time in which the writings of Faust junior appeared. And he called himself Magus Secundus, referring to the Magus Primus, the Simon Magus of old, who for those who were yet able to see, represented one whose vision towered up into the spheres of heaven, and of whom they stood in awe who were only desirous of concentrating within themselves the heavenly power.

Faustus alluded to him. And he alluded to yet another of whom we know through our observations of Spiritual Science that his vision unfolded in order to see into spiritual spheres. He called himself Pythagoras Secundus as the successor of that Pythagoras who was called Primus in this art.

We see the last glimmering evening-glow of that which existed as the ancient clairvoyance and we see how incomprehensible this ancient clairvoyance already was to men. Indeed that was actually realised which has been represented so strikingly to us in the legend of Faust, that Augustine longed for Faustus senior and that he became acquainted with the teaching of Faustus senior through an old man, a doctor. In the same way, carried forward into different circumstances, Faustus junior encounters us in the popular legend, and the old man again appears here, warning him: but he had already made his compact. He entrusted to Dr. Wagner his inheritance. When in surveying the ages and that which arose therein as conceptions of a spiritual world we see the age of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch approaching, we have to say: That is the legacy entrusted to Dr. Wagner. The question is how such a legacy can be administered. In the case of Faust, it is still a seeing into the spiritual worlds; in the case of this Dr. Wagner it is what can be described by saying that a man digs greedily for treasure and rejoices if he finds a glow-worm.

Such is the materialistic conception of the world of our modern times. It is no wonder that in this materialistic conception of the world the whole view of the heavenly Christ was lost, so that to-day people are afraid of the expansion of that picture upon which the earth-forces up till the present should have been concentrated. For we also know that the earth-humanity would have to lose, completely lose, all comprehension of this, if through a new spiritual view it were not able to weave a new aura round the touching picture of the Christ-child and His growth through thirty-three earth years. Spiritual Science will be called upon, as those souls who seriously apply themselves to Spiritual Science will perceive, again to quicken the vision of human minds for the heavenly Christ beside the earthly Christ. Then will the Christ be known for all the future earth-ages in such a way that He can never be lost to the progress and the salvation of mankind.

When wisdom shall again press upwards into the heights where, in the divine spheres, the fire of love bums, then will the human soul certainly not lose all that is wonderful, all that presses into the profoundest life-springs of men, all that human knowledge can know regarding Christ Jesus. And infinitely much will be acquired in addition: there will be acquired that which must be acquired if the evolution of humanity is to advance as it should.

The fresh springs of a new spiritual knowledge have already been opened; nevertheless, that which we are able to say to-day is truly such that we celebrate it at this time still in the symbol of the Christmas Festival. Deep, deep humility overcomes him who rightly experiences that which is to-day our occult knowledge. For we can only very dimly sense that which Spiritual Science will become for humanity in future days. For that which we are able to know of it to-day is in the same relation to that which in the days to come, when many, many ages have passed away, will be presented to humanity as that of the little Christmas child to the full-grown Christ Jesus. To-day in our newly-arisen Spiritual Science we have truly still the child. Hence the Christmas Festival is rightly our festival, and we perceive that, with regard to what can hold sway in the evolution of the earth as human light, we are to-day living in the profoundly dark winter night. Also with regard to our present-day knowledge we are actually standing before what is revealed in the profound wintry darkness of the earth evolution, just as once the shepherds stood before the Christ-child which was first revealed to them. With regard to the comprehension of Christ Jesus we can feel to-day exactly as did the shepherds at that time. We can so truly implore the springs of spiritual life which can ever more and more flow to mankind, implore them that indeed they may more and more bring to pass the Divine Revelation in the spiritual heights and through this revelation give to the human minds that peace which is in truth good for them. Then this Christmas Festival appears to us as a token. We still know little of that which the world will have as Spiritual Science in the days to come. We dimly sense what is to come, we dimly sense it in profound humility. But if we allow that little truly to enter our hearts, how does it appear to us then?

Let us cast a glance over present-day Europe—how the peoples think of one another, how each one seeks to lay the guilt of what is taking place upon the others. If the true anthroposophical conception is really impressed on our minds, then we shall understand the guilt which is now sought for by one people in the other, by one nation in the other. Truly, the guilt belongs to someone who is really and truly international, who guides his steps from nation to nation. But he is only spoken of in the circle of those into whose hearts a little Spiritual Science has penetrated. There we speak of Ahriman, the truly international being, who in conjunction with Lucifer is the truly guilty one. We do not find him if we turn our glance always to others, but if we seek the way to knowledge through self-knowledge. There, below in the chaotic depths, he goes; we feel him, this Ahriman. We shall learn to know him rightly and to know him in connection with that which the Mystery of Golgotha can be to us, namely, the proclamation of the revelation of wisdom and of peace in the heights and depths of the valley of the earth. Then only do we perceive what the whole fire of the Love is which can ray forth from the Mystery of Golgotha, which knows none of the limits which are set between the nations of the earth.

Much is contained in that which as Spiritual Science stands before our souls. Yet if we look at that which had already been manifested before this our chaotic present and which has now found an expression so convulsing, so sad and so painful, then we find how very very small is that dwelling, that soul-dwelling, in which to-day must dwell the new comprehension of the Christmas child which is to come to the earth. That Christmas child had to appear to poor shepherds, had to be born in a stable, concealed from those who at that time governed the world. Is it not again the same with regard to the new comprehension of that which is connected with the Mystery of Golgotha? Is not that which appears to us to-day outside in the world far removed from this comprehension? How far removed is the world at the beginning of our age from that which was revealed to the shepherds in the words:

Divine Revelation in the heights and upon earth peace to the men who have goodwill.

Let us celebrate this Christmas Festival of the renewed Christ comprehension in our hearts and in our souls if we wish to celebrate a true Christmas Festival, let us feel, as did the shepherds, far away from that which has now gripped the world. And through that which is revealed to us, as it was to the shepherds, we realise what had to be realised at that time, the promise of a certain future. Let us build within our souls confidence in the fulfilment of this promise, confidence that that which we feel to-day as the child which we must worship (the new Christ-comprehension is this child) will grow, will live, will grow to maturity in the near future, so that in it can be embodied the Christ appearing in the etheric, just as the Christ could be embodied in the fleshly body at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. Let us fill ourselves with the light which through the confidence in this out-pouring can shine into the deepest inner being of our souls. Let us permeate ourselves with the warmth which can flow through our minds. If we feel thus with regard to the heights in which the light of Spiritual Science appears before our souls, then alone can we be certain that it will some day fill the world.

When we thus think, we celebrate a genuine Christmas Festival even in this grave and painful time, for not only is it the profoundly dark winter night of the time of the year, but there is over the horizon of the nations the result of the Ahrimanic darkness which has been growing up since the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantean age. And just as the announcement of the Christ could only come at first to the shepherds but then filled the world ever more and more, so will also the new comprehension of the Mystery of Golgotha fill the world ever more and more, and times will come which as times of light will replace for humanity the time of winter darkness in which we are living to-day.

Thus let us feel as did the shepherds with regard to that which is still a child, with regard to the new Christ-comprehension, and let us feel that in all humility we can permeate with the new meaning the verse which is not only for ever to be preserved within the progress of the evolution of the earth, but is also to become more and more full of meaning. Let us with our minds and with heightened consciousness make ourselves one at this Christmas time with the motto so full of promise:

Divine Revelation in spiritual heights,
Peace ever and yet more peace
To all the souls of men on earth
Who have goodwill.

Spiritual science or “theosophy” is widely unknown even today. You may probably hear some judgement and criticism about this spiritual science, but only few people deal really with it. One surely knows a little about it in the circles of our educated people. Those few people deal most seriously and in quite scientific sense with the questions of the spiritual life, take the most elementary phenomena of this spiritual life as starting point and go up then to the highest questions which the human being can put to himself, to the questions of death and life, of the development of the whole humanity, even questions of the evolution of our planet or planetary system. Such questions find a widespread prejudice by which people think to be entitled not to get themselves into such attempts. Since what, they mean, can one suppose behind it? Any sect based mainly on dilettantish ideas.—They know very little that the human beings who belong to this supposed sect study the important questions with scientific seriousness and thoroughness after methods and authorities that are just quite unknown to most of our present educated people. They do not suspect that talking about spiritual science as something sectarian is equally reasonable, as if one considered chemistry or botany as something sectarian.

Since one believes, scientific methods are not at all possible compared with these questions, and believes to be offhand about such attempts. Today, indeed, one admits that one has to do preliminary studies in chemistry or botany, has to go to the resources to understand something of them, but one does not admit that it is necessary or even possible to do that concerning the highest questions of the spiritual life of humanity. Indeed, one is in case of spiritual science still in another situation than compared with chemistry or botany. These sciences treat things and questions that concern special fields of life and one can make use of that which they give within these special relations of life. However, we have to regard that which is done with scientific thoroughness in the area of spiritual science as questions of big significance for the human future, for our whole life praxis, for the firmness and confidence of our whole life.

If one considers the question of the significance of spiritual science for the future, I have to point with some words to the whole being of this spiritual science at first. This is necessary, although I already had the honour several times to speak about these questions and about the method of spiritual science in this city. If there is talk of science today, one has that science in mind which is based on our senses and on everything that one can attain with the reason, which is bound to the outer instrument of the brain. The question always originates concerning the highest areas of existence how far one can penetrate with such a science into these areas which tell something about the questions: how is the nature of life? How is the nature of death? Which is the nature of humanity generally and its development?

Spiritual science argues that there is not only an outer science, which is connected with a particular level of human cognitive faculties, but that these cognitive faculties are capable of development, so that—if we only want it—we can unfold higher cognitive faculties than those are which observe in the sensory-physical world with the senses and understand with the reason bound to the brain. As well as the present science points to the experiment, to attempts with outer, mechanical means, spiritual science points to an attempt which can be done solely with the means of our soul itself. Our soul behaves in the normal life in a particular way. However, one can change this way, so that we can also put questions to the spiritual world as we put them to the phenomena of nature with experiments. Not with outer attempts and tools we can penetrate into the spiritual world, but while we wake slumbering soul forces. There are particular soul exercises—they are discussed in detail in my writing How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?—, intimate performances of our soul which can strengthen our will, so that we can perceive contents in our soul or by our soul where we perceive nothing in the so-called normal life. Then we experience moments by such soul exercises that you can compare, on one side, with falling asleep, that are quite different on the other side. What do we experience at first if we fall asleep? We experience if we observe only externally that the outer impressions stop and, finally, unconsciousness spreads out in us.

There that technique to which spiritual science refers shows that we have to talk of unconsciousness in this case of falling asleep only because we cannot develop so strong forces if all outer impressions stop, that the soul feels its own being and that it cannot establish a relationship to its environment in which it is then and which is spiritual. If now the human being opens himself to particular contents of thought and feeling, he can also feel as a being if all outer impressions are quiet. Then he is in the same situation as someone is who sleeps, and, nevertheless, his situation is radically different. He can exclude all outer impressions consciously and by his will and everything that speaks, otherwise, in the wake state to him by the senses and the reason. Then he is not unconscious but lets the full contents of the soul life light up.

I can only indicate the soul exercises. With the usual mental pictures, we can never develop such strong forces. Another kind of mental pictures is necessary to put those forces in motion in our soul; we can call them symbolic ones. We can open ourselves to a picture so that we do not admit outer impressions in our soul, quieten our recollections, and free the soul as it were. I imagine, for example, a rose or something else, and I let this symbol come to life in myself as the only image to which I dedicate myself. This is not appropriate to deliver usual, physical truths; however, it can work like a seed in our soul. As a seed which is planted in the earth stretches its roots in all directions, this image sends out its different ramifications into the whole soul life, and this image grows in us. Indeed, if we want to do such intimate soul exercises, our soul life must have a steady hold; we are not allowed to be dreamy, fantastic, confused people. We have to know for sure what we do and that we have such an image in our soul.

Let us imagine, for example, three cases of actions out of compassion, and from the comparison [of the actions] we try to develop not an entire image of thought but an entire image of feeling of compassion. Now we try to forget everything that actions of compassion are in our world and let this impulse solely be active in our soul. Then we have such a sensation, from which the roots go out to rich, full contents of the soul. Thereby we can reach that moment gradually which can be compared with falling asleep, and which is, nevertheless, quite different from it. The everyday impressions, joy and sorrow, all thoughts have to sink down. Somebody who wants to become a spiritual researcher has to exclude all outer impressions while he has developed his will with such inner experiences. He has to establish that condition which the soul experiences if the body is in the state of unconsciousness. Then soul states are created in which quite different states of consciousness exist where the soul positions itself quite different to the outside world where it is for the soul like for a blind-born who has seen no colours and forms and sees them after an operation. In this clairvoyant state he sees something else than that which surrounds him, otherwise, in the physical world; he receives new impressions from the spiritual world which forms the basis of our physical-sensory world.

Then we may say, if the human being falls asleep in the evening, the whole human being does not exhaust himself in that which lies in the bed, but the core of the human being, the spiritual-mental, has left this outer cover. This core has no organs in the normal consciousness, but it has received spiritual-mental organs by the soul exercises characterised just now by which he feels moved into a new world. The real experience in the spiritual-mental is thereby given; a new world of observation is thereby given, and then from these elementary facts of spiritual experience we ascend to the highest facts. Now there are such single persons who do exercises full of renunciation to develop their souls as tools. If then these persons tell some people who are interested in such matters what they have found out in other states of consciousness, these believe it. With someone who becomes familiar with theosophy only cursorily it is comprehensible if he believes this, because if one knows only that which exists on the surface of life, it is exceptionally difficult to form an idea of how this spiritual science is practised. Hence, it is comprehensible that most people misjudge it. I have to emphasise this. One can understand that such persons only believe those revelations of the spiritual world that one attains in the described way. For most educated people it immediately suggests itself to regard such persons as daydreamers, romanticists, and sectarians.

However, one misjudges a particular fact: the developed soul, the developed other consciousness is necessary to do research in the spiritual world, to discover the spiritual truths. Even if today few people can only develop their souls as tools to behold into the spiritual world with them and then to inform what they have grasped there, it is enough for those who approach the matter with a certain sense of truth and with impartiality.

The trained soul of the spiritual researcher is necessary for discovering such truths; for understanding the facts, only unprejudiced logic is necessary. If such things are informed, they agree for everybody who wants to think in much higher degree with the whole life than any other philosophy does. Hence, everybody can check the probative force of that which the spiritual researcher informs. However, it is not enough to familiarise yourself with the results, because the logic and the whole system of concepts of the soul development to ascend to the higher worlds is subtle and strict. You can say that more strict demands are put on logic and comprehension than in the usual science in any field. However, if one does not want to judge the matters in a breath, but is anxious in the whole soul to settle in the way of this new imagination to understand what arises about the highest questions of existence, then this settling does not possibly work like suggestion, but the soul can pursue it consciously. Every soul can familiarise itself in those areas where the highest questions of human existence, of time and eternity are treated.

Does this proclamation of spiritual science or theosophy have any meaning for the human civilisation of today and the future? One has to put this question. Since one could argue, there can be people who are interested in such things because of certain longings, but they are mavericks who prefer to contemplate in their rooms, but would have nothing to do with the big processes in the human civilisation.—One cannot say this if one surveys the course of human development with understanding so that just the time at which we live now faces our soul after its being.

Our time has developed from that which humanity has experienced from prehistory up to now. From the present developmental level again the experiences of the future human beings develop. If we look back at the human states of consciousness, you realise that you are prejudiced if you believe that the whole soul condition, the way of thinking, the way how he forms ideas and concepts of his environment, that the states of the human consciousness are almost the same at all times. That is not the case. Indeed, one applies the word development to the transformation of the outer forms, but seldom to the human soul life, and just concerning the human soul life, is the concept of development something that points us deeply to the most important questions of humanity.

The spiritual-scientific investigation of the human soul and the conclusions, which you can draw from it, show that. Since at ancient times the human consciousness lagged far behind, it was different from that of today so that we can speak of times of the human development at which the human soul lived even in a kind of clairvoyant state of consciousness. However, it was not in such a way, as it is with the today's trained spiritual researcher. The clairvoyant state of the today's trained spiritual researcher takes place with full consciousness that he also has in the normal life. That was not the case with the old clairvoyant. He had a more dreamy clairvoyance, a dreamlike consciousness. It was in such a way that we can say, what the human being experiences today in his dreams is an atavistic rest of the ancient state of consciousness. While today dream images mostly mean nothing particular for the reality of the outside world, those old states of consciousness were images that you can compare, indeed, to our dream images, nevertheless, they were different from them. The images that were often symbolic were the contents of an old clairvoyant consciousness, which was not penetrated with modern intellectuality. In the soul of the prehistoric human beings, these images surged up and down. The prehistoric human beings possibly did not always have such pictorial consciousness. Wake states and sleeping states also alternated, but while these merge into each other with us and a mostly meaningless dream state is between them, the third state of consciousness existed in ancient times, the state of such a pictorial consciousness, in which our sensory images did not surge up and down in the soul but symbols as art has them at most in weakened form.

These symbols surged up and down with full liveliness in these three states of consciousness, and they were not like our dream images that we must not refer them to a reality, but they were clearly directed upon a reality, so that the outer reality was recognised with them, even if only in symbols. One experienced a spiritual world that was behind the sensory world. Thus, the prehistoric human beings had a picture consciousness, so that they did not need our today's intellectuality and wisdom of the wake consciousness. For it, they beheld into a spiritual world in the pictures of a dreamlike clairvoyance.

Now one may ask, is there anything in the outer world that proves that to some extent what you spiritual researchers behold there, if you look back at prehistory? Is there anything that can deliver a document that once humanity could behold into the spiritual worlds?—Oh, there is such a thing! However, the human beings have to learn to interpret this thing in right way. What is preserved of the prehistoric attempts to penetrate into the inner being of the things? With the prehistoric humanity, we look in vain for a science as we have it today, but legends and myths have been preserved. Now the present enlightened human being says that this corresponds to the childish imagination of the ancient humanity; we have entered into the manhood of science now. However, someone who delves into the myths of the various peoples experiences something else than such a superficial rater, he experiences that these images are associated in miraculous way everywhere [with the spiritual life of humanity]. If one penetrates into these images, deep connections with this spiritual life of humanity and its culture present themselves. One gets more and more respect for the wonderful arrangement of the pictures in the ancient myths and legends, so that you often say to yourself, what are all philosophies of the present compared with the wonderful pictures that the myths have preserved. They agree all over the world and they comply with that which the spiritual researcher can find with his method in the spiritual world, so that we have to ask ourselves, where from do these old images come which can be found all over the world?.

A conscientious research finds the explanation only if it supposes that these things are remains of an ancient clairvoyance. One judges wrong if one says, the myths of the ancient peoples have arisen from childish imagination. No, we can understand them only if we assume that our ancestors beheld with their clairvoyant picture consciousness [into the spiritual world].

Still about 1800 numerous persons had a notion of the fact that there was such pictorial wisdom and that the wonderful spiritual voices from the myths of the various peoples tell of a primeval wisdom. At that time they were still clear in their mind that the peoples which one regards as decadent today have only descended from a higher point of view that, however, everything that humanity has as culture today goes back to primeval times where the knowledge of the spiritual world was still alive.

There were serious researchers who were convinced of this fact. If we ask Aristotle, Plato, and the other Greek philosophers, we find numerous passages where they speak about the fact that any science goes back to the primeval wisdom that the gods had given the human beings. Plato speaks of human beings of the Cronus age who took over the old wisdom directly from the spiritual world. The spiritual researchers do not only say to us that this was in such a way, but also, why this ancient clairvoyance gradually disappeared from humanity.

There we come to the important law that you can also observe in nature that is especially obvious, however, in the spiritual life of humanity: the fact that for the development of a certain force at first another force has to withdraw. The ancient human beings who could behold in certain states of their consciousness into a spiritual world did not yet have our intellect; they had no science, no civilisation in our sense. Intellectuality had only to develop. Development is something that leads us to the deepest questions of the soul life. Our intelligence, the intellectual condition that we have today, where we completely rely on the sensory perception and on the reason bound to the brain could enter in the general human consciousness only while the old clairvoyance withdrew for a while, was drowned by the intellectual consciousness.

Somebody who knows something of the basic character of the Middle Ages knows that the peculiar spiritual development of the Middle Ages can be explained if one knows that the Middle Ages were the time in which gradually the old clairvoyance disappeared. The biggest impulse in the human development, the Christ impulse that will once induce humanity to take up clairvoyance completely had the task to make the old clairvoyance withdraw. Thus, a peculiar phenomenon appears with the advent of the new time: the old clairvoyance withdraws, only the traditional truths remain which one had gained with the old clairvoyance. Thus, the branches of knowledge propagated in the Middle Ages which were gained on the basis of the old clairvoyance. However, one did not know that, one had only understood the ideas which were found in primeval times, yes, one applied them even quite wrong at the end of the Middle Ages.

One example: Aristotle was already at the turning point of the intellectual age, but he still saw back in dark notion at the time in which the human being knew something by clairvoyance, at the processes of human imagining and feeling, at the human evolution, and he describes this. He did no longer have the ancient clairvoyance; he had the tradition only. There he said, if the human being is active in his soul, in his wake state, we deal with the physical body at first, and this has its organs. However, Aristotle would still have been reluctant to regard the material body as the only member of the human being. He pointed to a higher member that has its centre near the heart, and from this supersensible member certain currents originate which go up especially to the brain and spread as supersensible currents in the human body. One still called these currents “cold light” in the Middle Ages that pours forth in particular into the brain to invigorate its physical organs. Still in the Middle Ages people spoke of this cold light which spreads out where the physical heart is.

One can understand Aristotle only if one knows that that which he lets originate from the heart is thought as supersensible currents that he does not mean physical strands, organs, or the like. Now the Middle Ages came. The people lost the understanding of the old clairvoyance. They read Aristotle, and through the Middle Ages the faith in Aristotle was like a faith in the Bible. Aristotle was the basis of natural science, of medicine, of everything. Everything was based on Aristotle. However, people had no idea of that which, actually, Aristotle had meant. Thus, a peculiar mental picture could develop just with the most religious supporters of Aristotle, with those who believed bravely in him, but did no longer understand him. Since—as everybody knows—it is not necessary that everything is understood that one believes. Mental pictures could develop so that one did not mean supersensible currents that originate in the heart but sensory strands. Thus, Aristotle's believers believed that from the heart the nerves originate.

Now the great researchers and thinkers came at the end of the Middle Ages, like Giordano Bruno, Galilei and others who designed a new worldview on the basis of the worldview of Copernicus. However, Aristotle's believers were not inclined to accept this new worldview simply. Galilei and Giordano Bruno pointed to the real world of the senses because now the time began in which the human beings should develop their knowledge by sensory observation and intellect. There it happened that Galilei led a friend who was a good Aristotle believer in front of a corpse and showed him that the nerves originate not from the heart but from the brain. The friend saw this and said, yes, it seems to be in such a way, as if the nerves originate from the brain, but I read something different with Aristotle, and if a contradiction exists, I believe Aristotle.

This time was ripe to dismiss what of the ancient clairvoyance was handed down as tradition, because it was completely misunderstood. At that time, there was a special impetus of the intellectual development. Many physical concepts lead back to the way of thinking of Galilei with which we still work today. The material, mechanical thinking was directed immediately upon the outer sensory world and upon its intellectual understanding. The age of intellect was dawning in scientific areas, and now we can observe from that time up to now repeatedly how the human being wants to conquer this area of the human soul life whose most important part was the conquest of the outer reality with the intellect. The following shows a particularly drastic expression how one could think solely materially in the Middle Ages, but still had the old tradition.

None of the old clairvoyant wise men would have come up with the idea that the spiritual world is “on top,” that there is a blue firmament, which encloses our world. The old clairvoyants did not think this way; one only misunderstood them later. There one pointed to the fixed starry sky as a kind of bowl that surrounds our world. It was a great moment, when Copernicus pulled the rug out from under the feet of the human beings as it were. It was a great moment when Gordano Bruno expanded this “bowl” into the infinity of the physical space. However, Giordano Bruno put something else beside the sensory picture. We need only to call a few words of Giordano Bruno in mind and we realise that he accomplished the great action to put a spiritual picture beside this sensory picture. He said that everything that surrounds us in the sensory world is rooted in the thoughts of the universal spirit, which manifest in the outer forms, in that which we perceive with the senses. If Giordano Bruno points to the endless cosmic space and looks for the being of the things manifest to the senses, this was for him, nevertheless, nothing but the embodiment of the thoughts of the universal spirit. Giordano Bruno calls the human mental pictures shades of the divine thoughts, not shades of the outer things. If Giordano Bruno turns the physical view to the outer world, the idea of the universal spirit enters into his soul mysteriously, and the human concepts are not shades of the outer sensory things but the thoughts of the universal spirit.

It is very important that we face Giordano Bruno as a great spirit who points to the cosmic space but also strongly to that which connects the human soul with the primeval spirit. You can compare this attitude already with the intelligence and the attitude of the today's science which was still fertilised, however, by the traditions of the old clairvoyance. One may say, a shade of the old clairvoyance and of the relationship with the divine-spiritual world still lived in Giordano Bruno. However, to us only the picture remained which he designed of the outer sensory world, and no more that which was still alive in him at that time. The picture of the old clairvoyance that lived in him disappeared. You only need to pursue the development without prejudice up to now, then you realise that more and more the mere intellect spread in the normal consciousness.

Hence, what has one to say about our age? There one may say that we live so surely in the age of intellect, of reason and its application to the sensory world. Now one has to investigate the peculiar effect of the intellect in the sense of spiritual science compared to the clairvoyant knowledge. This differs substantially from the knowledge of the intellect and the sensory observation. The difference consists in the fact that any clairvoyant knowledge that anyhow enables the connection of the human being with the spiritual world works on our mood, and from it, a feeling of the position of the human being in the whole universe arises. The clairvoyant knowledge is powerful, it pours sensations and feelings in our souls, it satisfies our longings, strengthens our hopes, kindles our love. One cannot imagine that the human being participates in the supersensible knowledge without changing it into feeling and sensation. Hence, we realise how the pictorial legends and myths were taken up in the images of ancient peoples not indifferently, but in such a way that the whole soul either could be delighted and given to a supersensible world or be contrite about its own smallness. This also belongs to the nature of intelligence that it darkens any supersensible knowledge in a way. We can observe that in our usual soul life. When any pictorial image which appears, as one says, intuitive or on the way of inspiration is grasped in abstractions, the deep emotional contents disappear which it gives the whole personality and the whole soul life. Intellect brings understanding largely, but extinguishes any immediate soul effect of the supersensible knowledge.

I bring in nothing made-up, nothing that you cannot read in numerous books. There the representatives of intelligence point to Buddha, to Christ, to Zarathustra, to Pythagoras and so on and say, the human soul faces the big world, it grasps the world in different way. The fact that the supersensible knowledge reaches to the soul was connected with strong courage for existence that caused the consciousness of our connection with the spiritual of the world. Indeed, intelligence leads to understanding on the surface of the things, but it cannot evoke a feeling of inner courage. Thus, we see despondence, feebleness toward the penetration of knowledge as a characteristic feature of our time. Our time praises and emphasises that which science accomplishes. They do that rightly. However, where people believe to think deeper they say that the human being does not come to the primal grounds of the things. Neither Pythagoras, nor Christ, nor Zarathustra would have known how to say something about these primal grounds. Nevertheless, this proves very well that instead of the old knowledge and confidence a knowledge of despondence appeared.

There are two forms of resignation. The old clairvoyant could say, as well as in my conditions, in my age the human abilities have developed, they are not sufficient to behold into the primal grounds of the things—- one has to resign.—This was another resignation than that which we find today. Why did the old clairvoyant resign? Because he realised: as I am, I am not yet capable to attain knowledge.—He resigns out of modesty, out of the consciousness that in him, indeed, the highest forces are, but that he cannot unfold them because of his imperfection. This is heroic resignation, full of confidence; this is the human being to whom the gates of the world riddles are not closed.

However, one says today, the human being cannot at all penetrate [into the knowledge of higher worlds]; as well as he is constituted; his cognitive faculties can never be so highly developed.—This is a fundamental resignation. It differs quite substantially from the heroic resignation; it has something arrogant because it declares the level of knowledge to be absolute. What it cannot recognise is generally beyond the human knowledge.

The age of intelligence is fulfilled with other sensations, with sensations of negative kind because it cannot be productive, in contrast to the times of the old clairvoyance. Humanity had to come to this point if it should lose all old mental pictures, also those of faith, and for that, it required the culture of intelligence.

However, the inner life would become banal if only the intelligence should be entitled to illumine the inner life of the human being. Hence, spiritual science or theosophy appears in the present and shows that it is possible again to bring out forces from the depths of the human soul that penetrate the intelligence with a higher cognitive power which leads the human beings again into the spiritual worlds. Thus, the new clairvoyant knowledge wants to be an incentive and a help to the intellectual knowledge, and it gives humanity again that which it needs to possess the light of intelligence not only that leaves the soul empty, but also to possess such a knowledge which again brings strength and confidence and hope in our lives. Numerous human beings long for such knowledge that can be changed into courage and power in our soul. Someone who understands the whole spirit of the new development from the aurora of the intellectual age up to its today's climax will also understand that for the future of humanity the fulfilment of the soul with contents is necessary. Since intelligence only would be able to extinguish the soul, but would not deliver new soul contents. Advanced people of the present criticize the old mental pictures or register them at most as history. One dives, so to speak, back to register the old mental pictures. However, spiritual science will be,—although it is true science—always such a science, which gives the powerful feeling of the coherence with the spiritual worlds. It wants to give our souls contents and to fertilise them with contents.

With it spiritual science points to its future mission. Such a science will again give sensation and feeling in the most natural way. Indeed, intelligence builds the bridge from the ancient times to the future, but the mission of spiritual science is to penetrate this intelligence with the living value of the spiritual life as food for the souls. Because in our time intelligence has reached its highest development, just this time was chosen by those who know how to interpret the spirit of the time to attempt to intervene by spiritual science to conquer [living soul contents for] the soul gradually again.

Thus, spiritual science positions itself not as something arbitrary or as something arbitrarily invented in our age, but as something that has to get to know the real sense, the deepest tasks, and riddles of our age. If the human soul opens itself to spiritual science with complete impartiality, then it will feel that spiritual science copes with any outer science concerning logic and intellect that it develops the logic in such a way that it appears as a force of love, of compassion, of life security in our souls. Any soul will feel the high sense of spiritual science and understand whose nature we can summarise with the words:

The things of cosmic space
Speak to the human senses;
They change in the course of time.
The human soul lives recognising,
Spatially unlimited and not
Confused by the course of time,
In the realm of the eternal spirit.

The previous talk should provide the basic mood for the today's explanations. In that talk, I wanted to show in particular that in the basic mood of the theosophist nothing of fanaticism should be contained. It has maybe arisen from the whole tone of the last talk that one should not consider the reasons against theosophy, as if one should disprove them bit by bit in this talk. One should rather consider them in such a way that they show a part of those thoughts, sensations, and feelings that arise to someone who approaches theosophy from the today's consciousness. Putting it another way, one should not consider the arguments against theosophy as unjustified but as highly entitled arguments in the sense of modern consciousness, as those which arise as real and not only as putative difficulties. However, from it I feel justified to speak in this talk in such a way that everything that I argue for theosophy today is considered in the same light as the refutations of theosophy I gave “tentatively” as it were in the previous talk.

I have there characterised the contents of theosophy briefly with few words, and I have said how one has to think about the origins of theosophy, about the real origins of that knowledge. These origins do not arise to the usual normal consciousness, but they arise only if the human being submits himself to certain inner exercises that reach beyond the normal experience, and cause that condition which happens, otherwise, while falling asleep—but in completely different way—that all the outer impressions are quiet and also all thoughts and sensations which evoke them. Unless then by the processes of the soul life the unconsciousness of sleep occurs, but such strong inner forces are unfolded that the consciousness remains, and if forces are brought up from the soul which slumber, otherwise, under the surface of the consciousness, then a higher intuitive faculty appears in the soul. Then such a soul is on a higher level in the same situation as a blind-born who is successfully operated and sees the world of light and colours spread out. In the same sense, all things and beings of the spiritual world are around us of which theosophy or spiritual science speaks. However, they can dawn on us if the spiritual eyes, the spiritual ears are woken from slumbering as it were by inner mental-spiritual energy. Then a new world appears before us.

I have said that the outer science must take offence at such a thing just because it strives seriously and conscientiously for making the contents of knowledge independent from the human subject. Since one argues rightly that that which the human being experiences in his inside is nothing but something subjective that everybody experiences different which can have an individual subjective validity only. If the human being may get from his subjective soul experiences to convictions about another world different from the physical world—an opponent of theosophy may say—, he may sort that out for himself. For one cannot prove this in the same way as those things which we get as knowledge with experiments, scientific observation or historical research.—Hence, some people will probably accept these things and say, indeed, the outer research has its limits; it cannot lead us into the areas that are maybe the most valuable ones to us; but everybody has to sort out for himself what exceeds the outer research, because everybody must have an individually coloured picture of that which exceeds sense perception.

However, if this were right, one could not maintain theosophy, then everything would be only something that every single human being would have for himself as his subjective conviction, and theosophy could not at all claim any objective validity. However, this is not in such a way. The human being can only find out this if he does the soul exercises to get to such origins of the supersensible knowledge.

In such an orienting talk, I can indicate only sketchily, what it concerns. From the comparison of the waking state with the sleeping one arises that the forces of our soul can grow weak with falling asleep and do no longer bring up cognitive forces from the depths. Hence, the darkness of unconsciousness spreads out while falling asleep. Therefore, that who wants to go through this state consciously has artificially to cause such moments of seclusion from the outside world in which he still has an inner experience. He has to evoke strong inner forces. You attain them by meditation and concentration of thoughts, feelings, and sensations. Unless we consider that only which the outer world gives us as a mediator of knowledge or as impulses of our action, but if we start delving into important, strong impressions of the outside world at first, while we solve these strong impressions from the outside world using them not directly, but taking them in our souls—separated from the outside, then we gradually develop forces slumbering in the soul. I would like to show that at an example.

We can see how one human being helps the other. This can cause such a strong impulse of compassion in our souls that this impulse moves us to tears. We may be minded in such a way that we get such an impulse of compassion every time when we see such an action. This can be increased in us in such a way that we ourselves act benevolently if we see the hardship of a fellow man that we can have empathy with him and are stimulated to an action of compassion from the impression of the outside world. Perhaps we can advance so far that we unfold the same feeling that expresses itself in the tears even if we have faced a picture of such an action only. There are numerous people who, for example, if they read a novel get to a passage where only the picture of human misery and human compassion is conjured up before their souls, and then tears appear. They are touched by that which is only a picture of outer reality so that in their souls a similar impulse is released as it can be released, otherwise, only by an outer impression of physical reality.

However, if we assume now that we think in the usual consciousness simply about such an action, then we will already notice that this impulse is endlessly weaker that we are not able to increase it in such a way that it moves us to tears.

If we are able by soul exercises to think a thought which is associated with compassion, with helpfulness, with empathy without being induced from the outside world anyhow,

If we let such a thought emerge freely and can delve into it in such a way that we completely identify with it,

If we let this picture become strong so that it shakes our soul in such a way as it can happen, otherwise, only by an outer impression,

We have made a start with a “feeling meditation.”

If you let such a feeling meditation be active in yourself not once, not fifty times, but over and over again, you notice that such a meditation conjures up forces into such feelings from our soul which develop it internally. To someone who does such exercises these pictures appear which are still vivid in another way than possibly pictures of usual imagination are. If you delve into such meditations repeatedly, you experience yourself really in such a way, as if you were full of inner life as you only feel, otherwise, if you have impressed the inwardness into your outer body.—Yes, while the soul is stressed and penetrated with that which the meditation emits and immediately enters our consciousness, you experience something so that you say to yourself, I live now with everything with which I have secluded myself, otherwise, in sleep from my physical body. I live in it so strongly and vividly as I only can live if I am in my physical body and my eyes and ears and the other senses carry the outer impressions to me.

What I characterise here one cannot prove anyhow theoretically but only experience. After one has experienced it, it is available in our consciousness as an immediate feeling: Now you are free of your outer body; now, however, you do not live in nothing, but in a spiritual-mental essentiality that is as real as the experiences of the physical body.—Such a consciousness has to exist before doing research in the spiritual world. Someone who has attained such a consciousness is possibly as far as somebody who has prepared everything for an outer experiment, so that he only needs to set all things in motion to recognise a physical principle by this experiment. Then he is so far that he can penetrate into the origins of the spiritual world that are always around us.

However, I have to stress repeatedly that such soul exercises are only necessary to do research to experience in the spiritual world; however, they are not necessary to understand what the spiritual researcher gets down from the spiritual worlds and tells as results. Since the messages of theosophy can be understood with the natural feeling of truth and with healthy logic. The spiritual researcher can only investigate the facts and beings of the spiritual world, however, every unprejudiced person can understand them with natural feeling of truth and healthy logic.

Thus, we have to say, the origins of this worldview that we call theosophy are gained only by developing the soul. If now anybody wants to argue, everything that the human being produces this way as knowledge that is not controlled by the outer reality is the opposite of scientificity in modern sense because it is something individual and, besides, every human being must get to something different. On the other side, one has to stress that it is, indeed, completely right which is said this way but only for certain preparatory levels of soul development. The human being has to survive some serious fights and many a thing that only is significant for himself if he wants to advance to such knowledge. He probably gets to know how difficult it is to separate himself from the world to which we belong anyway with these subjective soul experiences. Immense difficulties thereby arise. There many things happen in us that apply only to us.

Then, however, you reach a point of soul development where you know immediately: now I am way beyond the subjective; now I experience truth, which is free of everything subjective. Now one has the immediate feeling, one has penetrated into the world of spiritual-mental realities. A simple consideration shows that there is also within our usual sciences a particularly prominent one with which knowledge is gained in such a way, as I have just characterised: mathematics. Already with the simplest mathematical operations, you can convince yourself that truth is gained with entire isolation of the soul. He who has found, however, such a truth knows that everybody who carries out the same operations must get most certainly to the same results. Nobody can recognise the theorem of Pythagoras—even if one visualises the operations of thought on the board—other than that one experiences the suitable relations internally. Someone who has worked once internally on the theorem of Pythagoras knows that everybody must get to the same result. Thus, it is with the mathematical cognition. Now we can say that the method of spiritual research takes place after the same principle as in mathematics that one considers as the surest science. Millions of people may think different about a mathematical theorem, somebody who has experienced it in his inside once knows that it is true. That also applies to the knowledge that you attain in the spiritual world.

Somebody who wants to do epistemological objections could say, one attains the mathematical truths in the deepest inside of the soul, but one cannot directly apply them to existence. Indeed, we can figure relations out in reality with the mathematical knowledge—somebody may say—, but no mathematics can decide on whether beings really exist who carry these mathematical principles in themselves; one has to experience reality in other ways than with mathematical judgements.

This objection is completely justified. It belongs even to those, which one holds to the theosophist, so that he cannot easily defend theosophy. However, with this objection, one has to consider that the human being does not experience with mathematical judgements what he experiences if he rises to a supersensible world. No mathematical judgement can give the view of the own ego as an object of the own ego, as if we leave our personality and look at ourselves. We cannot find our ego as an object with mathematical judgements. The view of the own ego is essential. With the mathematical judgements, we remain within our personality, with them we cannot penetrate into the outer reality. At the moment when we face ourselves, we have withdrawn from our body with a part of our being and have entered into objectivity. We feel in the things, we are inside of reality. This is the difference, the fact that mathematics gets, indeed, to inner certainty, but does not reach reality. Against it, the supersensible knowledge reaches reality. Hence, someone who advances on the way of spiritual research also gets to a new concept, a new idea of reality. Now with this new concept of reality that is at the same time a visual conception the human being can approach the consideration of human life. We want to bring that home to ourselves with the help of an example.

For the sensory view, the human being enters existence at birth and he finishes it at death. For the time before birth or conception and for the time after death the outer sense perception cannot recognise anything of man's objective nature. However, if the human being faces himself and has learnt to look from without at the human being in the just characterised way, her realises at the same time that this outer nature, which the senses can perceive, is based on something supersensible that is the real creator of this sensory organism. He realises that from the moment of birth on the mysterious human development begins. There we can realise how from a deep subsoil of human existence in the still uncertain features of the child certain trains gradually impress themselves, how his gestures and abilities develop more and more certain from within outwardly. The brain, the tool of our thinking, develops after birth still long; it is still transformed and organised. Now, however, the brain is the tool of our mental experience. If we look at this human life spiritual-scientifically, we have to ask ourselves, when does the moment take place in the human life where the mental-spiritual is completely able to use its tool, the brain? This is not yet the case in the first childhood years. Since, otherwise, the child did not need to attain many things by the impressions of the outside world and by imitation, and we did not need to educate the child. Only in the course of the first years, we can gradually use the tool of the brain. We can express this spiritual-scientifically in such a way: our brain becomes able first in the course of our life to become the tool of the ego.

When we are somewhat older—twenty years or more—, we have completely learnt to use our brain, to go back to former life epochs, then the spiritual-scientific observation shows that the brain has been only worked out during the early childhood. It becomes obvious to the spiritual researcher that that which is later in the human being to use the brain is the same as that which has worked on the development of the brain from forces that no sensory eye can see. Someone who approaches these matters with reason can say, so you state that you behold a childish spiritual atmosphere around the child head and that from this childish atmosphere, from a kind of head aura spiritual forces are emitted which work on the brain of the child, so that it can later become the tool of the ego. Then, you state, this head aura, which like an astral form surrounds the child head, slips into the inside to use this as tool from within on which it itself has worked in childhood. Thus, you state that that which uses the brain is a spiritual thing in childhood. It moves from without inwards, is active in the human organism first, then it enters into its inside and considers and understands as ego the world with the tool which has come about with its own power. No tool can be put into the service of the intelligent human culture that the human intelligence itself has not produced.

If you have attained such a spiritual view that you behold the spiritual-mental of the human being working on the configuration of your figure as it develops in life, then you can almost say to yourself: therefore, it is the spiritual-mental that is involved in that which is its physical.—You may still say to yourself, so we have to acknowledge the mental-spiritual in such a way that it exists before the physical-bodily because the physical-bodily has to be developed only.—However, you have to advance with observing and have to ask yourself then, is that spiritual-mental which has formed the brain the same for all human beings that works before birth on the human being? Alternatively, is it anything individual for every human being?

Of course, a real observation of life cannot help admitting that every human being is built individually that he has, hence, individual abilities that depend on the use of his outer instruments, on his outer forces, and, hence, he cannot be built up by a general human nature but by a human individuality.

That is, if we ascend to the creator of the human figure that appears to the clairvoyant in the aura of the child, we have to say, it is created completely individually. If we look as an expert educator at the adolescent human being, we can see how certain abilities appear, with one human being this way and with the other that way. About these abilities, we have to say, they search for that which is available just in a certain cultural region, for example, one child has an artistic talent, the other has a manual talent, a third an intellectual one, and so on.

Where from does that originate which appears in our present life? What urges the adolescent child to such performances that are given in our culture? That has developed beyond the child for which it strives. The child has this or that ability, this or that particular talent. If, however, we want to recognise this coherence, we have to go back in our culture to former states. If such a child were not related to that which happens on earth, it could be, indeed, inclined to something general, but not to something particular that originated from our cultural life. Hence, it is comprehensible that the child must have acquired certain relationships with that which it searches within the culture for its ability. Hence, we cannot think different, the souls which embody themselves and show this or that ability were already on earth once and have prepared themselves at that time to that for which they develop such affinity.

However, in the normal consciousness we can only think this. Then, however, we realise that spiritual science can ascend from this mere possibility of thinking to the view of the facts. Now one can ask, where can one observe the childish aura outwardly, which immerses itself in the inside to use the brain as its tool?

Yes, this moment appears very clear. Every human being who tries to remember his former living conditions gets to a certain point only—then memory breaks off, and at most still the parents or those who were around him can tell him what was before. However, every human being has to suppose that his ego also existed in the times that he cannot remember. To the precise observer this time coincides with the time when the human being learns as a child to say “I" to himself; that is when the ego-consciousness appears. Up to this time, the memory of a human being also goes back. What exists before the awakening of the ego-consciousness escapes from memory. Here we have the time: the child that has said: “John is there”, “Mary is there”, says now: “I am there.” At the time when the human being starts feeling as an ego, the clairvoyant consciousness beholds the childish aura moving into him.

From this fact, we may conclude that our memory is determinative in no way of the existence of our ego. We are also allowed to stress that beyond doubt there is a time in our life where the ego exists and still the human being cannot find this ego in his memory. However, someone who would like to believe that the ego awakes only then or would be impressed into the human being when the child learns to say "I", would believe something absurd. If our ego extends more backward than our memory reaches, we also are not surprised if spiritual science states that it is possible to expand the ego even more—behind birth to former lives. However, one just gets gradually to the view of the ego in these stadia of development which are not accessible to the normal consciousness, with particular soul exercises, meditations et cetera. I would like to describe the most elementary of such soul exercises here.

The human being has to develop a particular mood in himself that one may call “calmness” if he wants to behold into the future. If he can behold with calmness into the future, he has reached a lot to attain the higher beholding. One can describe this mood possibly in such a way: the human being says to himself, the world may praise us, it may condemn us, this or that may be imposed to us in future, dreadful or nice things—I shall stand upright and accept everything that may come with equanimity and face future intrepidly.

You can describe this very easily—but you can attain it only with long soul practise of meditative kind. If the human being develops this mood in himself, he learns to push the gate open at first that separates the usual consciousness from the experiences of the first childhood; then he learns to look into the first childhood years and then even further. Briefly, he makes the retrospect of former lives on earth accessible to himself. We bring in as a special method of it the achievement of an intrepid mood for the future. With absolute calmness toward the future, we acquire the possibility to pursue the course of our ego up to the point where the ego-consciousness appears in life. Then, however, the spiritual researcher does not want to stop, but he can extend his consciousness beyond the usual measure, and the repeated lives on earth can become reality to him.

One can still argue a lot against that which I have indicated today. However, I wanted only to give the ways on which you can find the methods to defend theosophy. I could only break the first ground, but the pursuit of this way can gradually lead to defending theosophy against such attacks that are completely justified, seen from the other side.

It is similar if these attacks concern the moral area. There we had to say that those have a certain authorisation who say, your teaching of reincarnation almost supports egoism. Since people may say to themselves, we have to do the good; since if we do the bad, we have to harvest the fruits of the bad in the future life. However, if we do the good, we harvest the fruits of the good. It is subtle egoism only which arises from it. One can expand this also to the work of karma. If we dwell on this idea, we may possibly say the following, we consider a human being, for example, who says to himself, I want to do the good, because the good brings me good fruits, and it is not advantageous to do the bad, because I have to carry the fruits of the bad, so I abstain from it.—We compare such a human being with another who thinks in a upright way about the things with which he is concerned, we assume, for example, parents who have the principle of educating their children to competent human beings. If we could ask these parents, why they do this, we would maybe get the answer, when we have grown old once, we have children who are able to cope with life who can support us then.—There we have a case that shows us that the good is done because of the fruits, which are to be expected once, because such an education is carried out certainly also from a selfish viewpoint.

Where to may such a viewpoint still lead, even if it is selfish? Since the fact that people have the viewpoint to educate their children to capable persons, so that they have support in old age, this is at first—quite objectively considered—a thing that one cannot manage with moral declamations. It is rather something that shows that the proposition of the philosopher is true: preaching morality is easy, founding morality is hard.—However, that is not to say that one should not educate his children from such a viewpoint, but that one recognises how the human beings have become under such an influence. If the parents use any care to educate their children to capable human beings, and then the children become capable in life, they do not only help their parents, but they are also useful members of the human society. However, we can notice an additional effect. If the parents start educating their children in such a way—even if their viewpoint was selfish at first—, then something unselfish awakes soon with such an education. That is reached which could not be reached by mere preaching moral: life itself educates us from egoism to altruism.

Just as with education, it is with the principle that we may have if we do the good and omit the bad, so that we have the fruits of the present life in the next life. This is selfish at first, but we know that the human nature has such an egoism. However, it does not concern that that is in such a way, but it concerns the question: how does life overcome egoism?

There we can realise that a human being can accept the teaching of karma in such a way that he says to himself, I abstain from the bad because it brings me bad fruits, and I will do the good because I have the good fruits. However, then under the influence of this principle the selfish attitude changes gradually into an unselfish one.

Hence, we have to say, if any ethics puts up ever so nice principles, nevertheless, it resembles—if it only preaches the good—a person who stands before an oven and says, dear oven, you know that it is your nature to warm up the room.—There you may preach long; it does not become warm. However, if we spare our sermon and give coal and wood as fuel into the oven, it makes the room warm, and then we found its oven morality without preaching. That also applies to the human beings. The expert of psychology is clear in his mind how little is done in life by mere preaching morality. Morality has to flow as a force into the human nature. If we give the soul the karma doctrine as fuel material, then it is maybe accepted at first because of egoism, but the soul forces are thereby stoked up, so that then from egoism the unselfish action can arise.

Thus, theosophy as doctrine does not only concern ethics, but we understand it as a sum of ideas that work in the soul and change us into other human beings. Nobody understands the karma doctrine in such a way that he says, I still have many lives before myself; I still have time up to the next life to become a decent human being.—Nobody can think this way. Someone who penetrates himself with the karma doctrine knows: you experience the fruits of your current life in the next life; now you lay the foundation for a decent, human being you can be in the next life. However, if you do not create the causes for a decent human being now, you cannot become one in the next life.

If you understand the karma doctrine correctly, you cannot carry egoism too far. Ssince it will persuade us any time to transform not only egoism into altruism, but also to realise that we do not fatalistically build on that which destiny imposes to us. We recognise that we ourselves have caused what works then in our karma.

Now I would still like to come on that which could be argued from the religious view against theosophy. There one may say, the theosophist acknowledges that in the human being something highest lives, as a drop is from the sea of the divine. There that which the human being can gain to himself is put, so to speak, like a divine force into the human soul, and then with such an attitude one cannot develop that devotion to that Being that interweaves the world. The mood—anybody may say—which the really religious human being feels in the most unselfish devotion to God who penetrates the universe would be impaired by the theosophical mood which transfers a spark of the divine into the human being as his “higher ego” which gradually struggles through to the viewpoint of Paul: not I—but Christ in me. One has to say, everything that the human being can recognise is got out from that which interweaves the universe.

Is not anything else possible? If one understands that which I have represented in the best sense, you may say to yourself, so a part of God's power lives in you. You are given not only to yourself, but you stand there with a part of God's power. If you have proceeded for a while—in this or in the next life—then consider what was your duty there. It was your duty to develop the seeds of God's power, which are laid in you—in other words, to make yourself more and more similar to that which this power demands from you. Gradual development, gradual perfection becomes the duty, so that God's power can arise in you more and more active. Theosophy does not demand such a religious feeling that consists only of the mere devotion to the divine, but such one that says to itself, I have to work on my perfection. If I do not do this, I let God's seeds in myself undeveloped, and then I do not become a picture, but a caricature of the divine. However, this must not happen. I have the duty to perfect myself.

That is active devotion to the divine. That is a religious mood that calls on the human being to do more and more for his knowledge, to care more and more for his moral, to be keener and keener to develop those forces that have been put as divine forces into his soul. Thus, we live with a religious mood in the future that does not provide a passive devotion to the divinity, but a mood that demands from us to make our egos more and more divine. Toward the divine that interweaves and lives in the universe, it would be the biggest breach of duty if we left our egos imperfect. We are not allowed to leave the talent unused that we have received; we have to make the most of our talents. One has to take this active mood into consideration if one speaks about the religious element that can come from theosophy.

Thus, you can realise that there are many things, which one brings in as elements to show that theosophy can strengthen life on one side, can change egoism into altruism, and cause a religious mood which can unfold an active piety for the future. We considered the other side of the question last time. We may say, the objections and refutations are entitled which one may argue against theosophy, but then we can position ourselves against these objections in such a way as I have stated now. Then we can ask our whole human being, not only our mind and our reason unilaterally, and we can say to ourselves, nevertheless, maybe it is true that there are things that begin where reason stops. Then we must set our whole human being in motion, and he has to decide. However, every single soul can decide this. Hence, theosophy is the spiritual element that speaks most intensely to the human individuality, while it calls upon the human individuality to the highest decision even compared with reason.

If the human being feels to be put into such living and holy impulses, he gradually finds the way which reveals him: you stand here on this earth; you belong as a physical-sensory human being to the physical-sensory world, and you belong with your soul and mind to a spiritual world.

You receive your mission from the spiritual world, and you have to impress into the whole earth development what you have brought down from the spiritual world. You have the mission to be a mediator between the earth process and the spiritual that forces its way to the earth, which wants to flow into the earth existence. If you learn to recognise by theosophical meditation that it is in such a way, and you can change the theosophical deepening into a disposition which gives you that infinitely blissful fulfilment of your mind, of your heart which can express itself in the consciousness of the connection with the temporal, the transient as well as with the everlasting, then you can say to yourself that you are rooted with your being in the everlasting that you are bound, indeed, as a sensory human being to the earth, but only to realise the everlasting in earthly form with your mission.

Theosophy can become such an attitude, if it changes in the human being with a basic mood that one can artistically express with the words:

The things of cosmic space
Speak to the human senses,
They change in the course of time.
The human soul lives recognising,
Spatially unlimited and not
Confused by the course of time,
In the realm of the eternal spirit.

Berlin, May 25, 1909

It is often emphasized, and with good reason, that Spiritual Science should not simply be a theory about the world, life, and the human being, but that it should become the most profound content of the human soul: that which gives life its meaning. If one approaches Spiritual Science with the right attitude, it can indeed become the very substance of life within a human being. However, let me stress emphatically that it can take on this function only gradually, little by little, because Spiritual Science is much like everything that grows and develops: first it must have a seed that keeps growing, and then by virtue of this growth it becomes ever more effective.

It is also a fact that nobody could hope to extract from Spiritual Science the right way of life just by an intellectual understanding of its truths. Judging Spiritual Science by its outward features, one may come to the conclusion that it is a view of the world, albeit one that is more comprehensive and sublime than others. But no, it is still something else, for what other theory would be able to advance those comprehensive ideas about Saturn, Sun, and Moon? What other theories of the world today would dare to make very concise statements about this? None, because they end up with abstract concepts when they attempt to raise themselves above the objects we perceive with our physical eyes and ears. Such theories and conceptions of the world can offer only vague concepts about the divine that weaves and works behind material reality. As far as other less ambitious truths are concerned, such as the doctrines of reincarnation and of karma, Spiritual Science is also far ahead of anything traditional science has to offer when it talks about the evolution of the human being. To be sure, science too could adopt these doctrines for if one really wants to draw the proper conclusions from the materialistic-scientific facts, reincarnation and karma would long have been popular ideas. However, because modern scientists have not dared to come to these conclusions, the discussion about the subject has simply been put to rest. Evolution from the perspective of natural history and of history is discussed, but nobody wants to hear anything of the true evolution of the human individuality, which continues from one life to another and carries the human soul into the future.

Those who observe life properly will be compelled by its very consequences to embrace the doctrine of the four members of the human constitution, which is also revealed by clairvoyant investigation. But because thinking in the modern age lacks all courage, this doctrine is proclaimed only by Spiritual Science, which as a body of knowledge is in many ways ahead of other conceptions of the world and of the philosophies presented to human beings at the present time.

However, when all has been said and done, all that is not the real fruit of Spiritual Science. Its fruit does not consist in the fact that one accepts its teaching as satisfying and far- reaching. We cannot have the fruit without the seed. What we develop today as the fruit of the anthroposophical world view can make our hearts happy and warm our capacity to love. Yet nobody can enjoy this fruit of our spiritual scientific world view without the seed, that is without spiritual scientific knowledge itself. People may say: Of what use are these ideas about reincarnation and karma, or about the members of the human constitution and the evolution of the world? What is really important is the development of human love and of moral character. To this I would answer: Certainly, that is important, but true human love that is fruitful for the world is possible only on the basis of knowledge—Spiritual Scientific knowledge.

As a branch of knowledge, Spiritual Science has an advantage over other world conceptions in many areas. When it is experienced by us in a truly intimate manner, when we do not tire to awaken in our souls time and again those great comprehensive thoughts and carry them with us, then we will see that this body of teaching can in a very definite sense become the content and substance of one's life. Spiritual scientific teaching is a body of ideas that leads us into super-sensible worlds, and in spiritual scientific thinking we must therefore soar to higher worlds. Every hour spent in spiritual scientific study means that the soul reaches out beyond the concerns of everyday life. The moment we devotedly give ourselves to the teaching, we are transported into another world. Our ego is then united with the spiritual world out of which it was born. Thus, when we think in a spiritual scientific way, we are with our ego in our spiritual home, at the fountainhead from which it came.

If we understand this in the right sense, then we can truly compare spiritual scientific thinking with that state of consciousness that we recognize from the spiritual point of view as sleep. When human beings fall asleep at night and sleep themselves into a spiritual world, then they have transported the ego into the world whence it was born and from which it emerges every morning so that it can pass into the world of the senses within the human body. In times to come, the soul will live consciously within this spiritual world; however, at the present such is normally not the case. And why not? It is because in the course of the ages consciousness of the spiritual world has become weaker and weaker in the ego. In the Atlantean epoch the ego during sleep saw itself surrounded by divine-spiritual beings, but after the Atlantean catastrophe the ego was pushed out into the world of the senses and increasingly lost its capacity to gaze into the world that it inhabits during sleep. The idea that the ego is blotted out at night and resurrected in the morning is absurd. It is in the spiritual world but is not conscious of it.

Spiritual scientific thinking gives us the strength to tie ourselves consciously, little by little, to these spiritual realities. By leading us—at least in thinking—into the spiritual world, anthroposophy has certain beneficial qualities in common with sleep. The cares and worries that issue from the things of the sense world are obliterated in sleep. If human beings are able to sleep and their thinking is blotted out, they forget all worries. That is the most beneficent effect of sleep, an effect resulting from the fact that the ego lets the forces of the spiritual world stream into it during sleep. These spiritual streams contain strengthening forces, the effect of which is to help us forget our worries and cares during sleep and also to repair the damage that such worries and cares have inflicted upon our organism. The injuries caused by the sense world are healed by spiritual powers—hence the refreshment, the regeneration that every healthy sleep bestows upon us. In a higher sense, these then are the qualities that spiritual scientific thinking has in common with sleep.

Spiritual thoughts are powerful if we accept them as living forces. When we elevate ourselves to the thoughts that are connected with the past and the future of the earth and allow these momentous events to work on us, then our keyed-up soul will be drawn to these events, far away from the worries of the day. Thoughts of how the ideal of our own sovereign will grows for us out of karma—this plan of destiny—give us courage and strength so that we say to ourselves: “However insurmountable some of the problems of our lives may be today, our strength will grow from one incarnation to the next. The sovereign will within us is becoming stronger every day, and all the obstacles will help us to strengthen it even more. In the process of overcoming these obstacles, our will is going to develop ever more, and our energy is going to increase. The trivialities of life, all the inferior things in our existence, will melt away as the hoar does in the sun—melted by the very sun that rises in the wisdom that permeates our spiritual thinking. Our world of feeling is made to glow throughout and becomes warm and transillumined; our whole existence will be broadened, and we will feel happy in it.”

When such moments of inner activity are repeated and we allow them to work on us, a strengthening of our whole existence into all directions will emanate from this process. Not from one day to the next, to be sure, but constant repetition of such thoughts will bring about the gradual disappearance of our depressions, lamentations about our fate, and an excessively melancholy temperament. Spirit knowledge will be medicine for our soul, and when that happens, the horizon of our existence widens and implants in us that way of thinking that is the fruit of all spirit knowledge. This resulting way of thinking and feeling, this attitude of mind and heart, must be considered the ideal state to which spiritual scientific endeavors can lead. All discord, all disharmonies of life will disappear opposite the harmonious thoughts and feelings that bring about an energetic will. Thus, spiritual investigation proves to be not just knowledge and doctrine, but also a force of life and a substance of our soul. Seen in this light, Spiritual Science is capable of working in life in such a way that it frees human beings from cares and worries. And that is how it has to work in our time, for it owes its existence not to arbitrariness, but to the knowledge that it is needed.

The individualities who in their knowledge were far ahead of normal human beings, the Masters of Wisdom and of the Harmony of Feelings, knew that Spiritual Science had to flow into our culture if it was not to wither. Spiritual Science is a new sap of life, and humanity needs such new sap from time to time. Spiritual Science is the stream necessary for our time. Those who have a feeling for these great truths should hurry to us and absorb the truths so that they can be salt and ferment for the spiritual life of all humanity The striving individual must see this as a sort of duty. It is not difficult to understand why the highest authorities have issued a call for Spiritual Science in our time precisely so that those with open hearts and unprejudiced minds may be assembled.

We have been viewing with our souls post-Atlantean humanity and have traced its cultural epochs from the ancient Indian down to our own fifth post-Atlantean epoch. We have seen that during this time human beings lost their consciousness of the spiritual world bit by bit. In the first epoch, the ancient Indian, human beings still had a profound yearning for the spiritual world. The world of the senses was considered maya, illusion. Then came the ages that issued a call to human beings to do external, physical labor. Human beings had to learn to love the world of the senses because only then were they able to cultivate it. At this time, human beings no longer said that the external world was nothing but maya. On the contrary, human beings now had to immerse themselves into the world and work on it with their faculties and wisdom. That, however, resulted in human beings' gradually losing the consciousness of the spiritual world so that Zarathustra, the initiator of the Persian culture, felt compelled to tell his disciples: “All living beings are called into existence by the force that streams from the sun as physical force. But this physical force is not the only thing. In the sun lives Ahura Mazdao—the spiritual Sun Being.” It was necessary to demonstrate to people how the material world is but the physical expression of the spiritual world.

Thus it was first in the ancient Persian epoch that there arose the sentiment that would express itself as follows: “Certainly, what the sun shines upon is maya, but I must seek the spirit behind this maya. The spiritual world is always around me, but I cannot experience it with physical eyes and ears. I can experience it only with super-sensible consciousness. Once this consciousness has been awakened, then in the physical existence also can I recognize the Great Spirit of the Sun with all its subordinate beings who also belong to the Sun. But an age is approaching when my soul will no longer have this knowledge.” It was difficult to transmit this knowledge fully to human beings. They must gradually be made more mature through renewed incarnations in order to recognize the divine-spiritual element behind all physical phenomena and to understand that all of nature is permeated by it.

In the ancient Persian culture, human beings were still capable of recognizing the divine element in this life, but they were unable to take this consciousness into the time period between death and rebirth. For the peculiar thing in this epoch was that consciousness between death and rebirth became increasingly darker. By contrast, let us look at the soul of an individual in ancient India. When it passed through death into the other world, it lived there among spiritual beings in a comparatively light-filled world. In the Persian culture, such was less the case; the world between death and rebirth had become darker. Obstacles between various souls accumulated, and the soul felt lonely; in a manner of speaking, it could not extend its hand to another soul. But that is the difficult and dark side of life in the spiritual world: the soul may not share its path with others.

In the Egyptian epoch, a substantial part of the soul's capacity to link up with other souls had already been lost to such an extent that the soul longed for the preservation of the physical body, which was to be preserved in the mummy. The reason for this was that the soul sensed it had very little strength that could be taken into the life between death and rebirth. Human beings at this time wanted to preserve the physical body so that the soul might be able to look down on it as on something that belonged to it, thus compensating for the power it no longer had in the spiritual world. Cultural phenomena such as mummification are deeply connected with the evolution of the human soul.

An Egyptian had the notion that in death he would be united with Osiris. He said these words to himself: “Long ago, in ancient ages, the soul was able to gaze into the beyond. It has now lost this visionary power, but it can make up for the loss if in this life it develops qualities by which it will become more and more like Osiris himself. The soul will then itself become Osiris-like and will be united with Osiris after death.” And so, by clinging to Osiris, the soul tried to create a surrogate for everything that could no longer be preserved from ancient times.

However, what Osiris was unable to give to the human soul is told in an Egyptian legend, whereby Osiris was once living with human beings on earth, until his evil brother Seth shut him up in a wooden box similar to a casket. This means that Osiris did live on earth with human beings when they were still more spiritual. But then he had to remain in the spiritual world because he was too sublime to fit into the physical human form. Similarly, if the soul wanted to create a substitute for the lost spiritual power of vision between death and rebirth, it had to become a being that is too sublime, too good for the human form. By becoming similar to Osiris, the soul would be able to overcome its loneliness in the beyond, but it could not take into a new incarnation what it had received in the spiritual world through the characteristics it had in common with Osiris. This is so because, after all, Osiris was not suited for this physical incarnation.

The grave danger threatening humankind in those times was that incarnations were steadily deteriorating because there could be no new influx of spiritual forces. Only what had remained from ancient ages could be further developed, and all that reached its ultimate maturity in Graeco-Roman times. This was made manifest in the magnificent art of the Greeks—the mature fruit from earlier blossoms. Greek art was the finest fruit of the heritage bequeathed to humanity beginning with primeval times. But hand in hand with this accomplishment came the feeling of deep darkness in the life between death and new birth, and a noble Greek individual was right when he said: “Better to be a beggar in the upper world than a king in the realm of the shadows.”⁴⁴ Yes indeed, human beings in Greece and the Roman states possessed so much to delight and satisfy their senses, but they could take nothing with them into the life between death and new birth.

Then came the event of Golgotha—the event that is of significance not only for the external physical world, but also for all the worlds through which a human being must pass. The moment when the blood flowed from the wounds of the Redeemer, when the corpse was hanging on the cross, the Christ appeared in the underworld and kindled the light that once again gave sight to the souls below. And the soul was able to realize from that moment on that once again strength could also be derived from the world below and benefit the physical world. No longer does the soul endeavor to unite itself with Osiris in order to have a surrogate for the loss of vision. From now on, it could say to itself: “In the underworld, too, I can find the light of Christ—that which has immersed itself into the earth, for the Christ has become the spirit of the earth. And now I imbibe a new force from a spiritual fountainhead, a force that I can take back to earth when I return for a new incarnation.”

What was necessary so that this force could flow into the soul in the right way? A complete reversal in the way human beings looked at the physical world was necessary. First, let us ask what the people in ancient India experienced when we reconstruct what one of them might have said: “This world is maya, the great illusion. Whenever I perceive this world and relate myself to it, I have fallen victim to the illusion. Only by withdrawing from it and by elevating myself to primeval spiritual things beyond the world of the senses can I be in the world of the gods. Only by withdrawing from the outer world can I traverse through my inner being that has remained with me as an ancient legacy of these spiritual worlds and thus return to my ancient home. I must return to this primeval holy realm from which I once started out to the world of the senses, and I can return only by giving free rein to my spiritual powers, thereby diverting my attention from the lure of the outer world.” In the days of the ancient Indian culture it was possible for human beings to take this step back into the far-distant past. Inside of them, they had retained much of the force that could help an individual, if properly applied, to find the way back to the old gods. Thus did the human being in ancient India find his Devas, the beings from whom everything had come into existence.

Now came the epoch of ancient Persia, when the human soul had lost much of the power that was like a legacy from ancient times. If in this epoch the soul had said: “I will turn back because I do not wish to remain in this world,” it would not have found the ancient gods because the power to make that possible was no longer adequate. This fact is related to the evolution of humanity. Had the soul attempted to divert its gaze away from the outer world and consider it as nothing but maya, this would have led to its seeing not the higher gods, but rather the subordinate Devas who were evil spiritual beings that did not belong to the ranks of higher gods. Because this danger existed, the soul had to be shown how this world of the senses could be seen as the outward expression of the spiritual by starting from the world of the senses and not turning away from it. In looking up to the sun, the soul learned to see in it not only its external physical sun force, but also the Sun God Ahura Mazdao, and thereby it learned to know something of the divine-spiritual reality.

The soul of the ancient Persian had become too weak to activate the spiritual forces that could lead it back to the ancient gods. Hence, it had to be educated to pierce through the veil of materiality covering the spiritual. In the outer world the evil Asuras lay hidden, but human beings were not yet capable of seeing the beneficent spiritual beings beyond the world that was regarded as maya. That is why all names for spiritual beings came to be reversed during the time between the Indian and the Persian epochs. Devas were the good beings in ancient India, but in the Persian culture, they became the evil gods. The true reason for this reversal is evident from the continuing development of the human soul; in relation to the external world it had become increasingly stronger, in relationship to the inner world, increasingly weaker.

Preparation for what was to come was now made by those beings who guide and direct human evolution. After Zarathustra had learned to look up to the sun and see in its aura the Sun God, he knew that this Sun God was no one else but the Christ-Spirit, who at that time could reveal Himself only from outside the world. The human being in his soul here on earth could not yet perceive the Christ-Being. The being that was formerly seen in the sun and had been given the name Ahura Mazdao had to descend to earth because only then could the human being learn from within to recognize a Deva, a divinely spiritual principle, within his own soul. In the age of ancient Persia, life in the human body was not yet capable of receiving the Christ-Spirit, let alone be permeated by it. All that had to happen slowly and gradually. We must acquaint ourselves with the thought that the gods can reveal themselves only to those who prepare themselves as recipients of a revelation. Deva, the god who can be perceived through our inner forces, could appear only to that part of humanity that had prepared itself for his coming.

Everything in human evolution comes to pass slowly and gradually, and evolution does not proceed everywhere in the same manner. After the Atlantean flood, the tribes had migrated to the East. Since they settled in various regions, their development also differed. What enabled the ancient Indian to have a vivid feeling for the spiritual world? This happened because the evolution of the ego in this part of the world had taken a very special course. In the people of ancient India the ego had remained deeply entrenched in the spiritual world so that it was disinclined to make much contact with the physical world. It was the peculiar characteristic of an individual in ancient India that he or she would cling to the spirituality of preceding ages while at the same time confining relations with the physical world to a minimum. Since the individual in ancient India did not want to connect his or her ego with the physical world, the achievements of external civilization have not blossomed in India or in many other regions of the East where people by and large seem to have lacked inventive genius. By contrast, the inventiveness of the people in the West prompted them to take hold of the external world since they considered it their task to cultivate and improve it. Ancient Persia formed, as it were, the boundary between East and West. The people who paid little attention to the material existence in this world tended to settle and remain in the East. That is why the teaching of a Buddha was still necessary for the people of the East six hundred years before Christ. Buddha had to be placed into world evolution at this juncture because it was his mission to keep alive in the souls the longing for the spiritual worlds of the past, and that is why he had to preach against the thirst for entering the physical world. However, he was preaching at a time when the soul still had the inclination, but no longer the capacity, to elevate itself into the spiritual worlds. Buddha preached to human beings the sublime truths about suffering, and he brought to them the insights that could lift the soul above this world of suffering.

Such teaching would have been unsuitable for the Western world. It needed a doctrine that was in tune with the people's inclination to embrace the physical world and that could be summarized by the following explanation: “You must work in the outer world in such a way that the forces of this world are placed in the service of humanity; but after death, you can also take the fruits of your life into the spiritual world.”

The peculiar essence of Christianity is usually not properly understood. In the Roman world it did not appeal much to those who were able to enjoy the treasures and riches of this world, but those who were condemned to toil in the physical world liked Christianity. They knew that in spite of all their work in the physical world, they were developing something in this life that they could take with them after death. Such was the feeling of exaltation inspiring the souls of those who accepted Christianity. Human beings could say to themselves: “By setting up Christ as my ideal, I develop something in this world that cannot be annihilated even by death.” This consciousness could develop only because Christ had actually been on earth not as a Deva, but as a being who had incarnated in a human body and who could be a model and an ideal for every human being. For this to happen, the impulse and the proper forces had to be created, and this preparatory work had been done by Zarathustra. He had experienced so much that he was prepared to take this mission.

In ancient Persia, Zarathustra had been able to behold the Sun God in the aura of the sun, but he had had to prepare himself for that task in earlier incarnations. During the era that was still inspired by the teachings of the Holy Rishis, Zarathustra had already gone through some sublime experiences in incarnations. He had been initiated into the teachings of the Holy Rishis, having absorbed them stage by stage in seven subsequent incarnations. Then he was born into a body that was blind and deaf, which afforded him as little contact with the outer world as was possible. Zarathustra had to be born as a human being who was practically nonsusceptible to outer sense impressions, and then out of his innermost being the memory of the teachings of the Holy Rishis from a previous incarnation welled up in him. And at that moment the Great Sun God was able to kindle in him something that went ever further than the wisdom received from the Holy Rishis. That experience awakened in him again in his next incarnation, and it was then that Ahura Mazdao revealed himself to Zarathustra from without.

You can see, therefore, that Zarathustra had experienced a great deal before he could become the teacher and inspirer of the people of ancient Persia. We also know that Moses and Hermes were his disciples and that he gave his astral body to Hermes and his etheric body to Moses. Moses was the first to proclaim the teaching that emanated from the Akasha Chronicle, the teaching of the “I am the I am.” (Ejeh asher ejeh). And thus Zarathustra prepared himself slowly for an even greater and more prodigious sacrifice. When Zarathustra's astral body reappeared in Hermes and his etheric body in Moses, his ego—whose development had steadily progressed—was able to form a new astral body and a new etheric body for the new incarnation, commensurate with the full powers of the ego. And six hundred years before Christ, Zarathustra was born again in the land of Chaldaea and became the teacher of Pythagoras under the name Zarathos, or Nazarathos. Within the Chaldaean culture he then prepared the new impulse that was to come into the world. This is reflected in that passage of the New Testament that speaks of the Three Wise Men from the East who came to greet the Christ as the new Star of Wisdom. Zarathustra had taught that the Christ would come, and those who were left as disciples of this significant Zarathustra doctrine knew at what point in time the great Impulse of Golgotha would arrive.

There is always a certain connection between great individualities of the world, such as Buddha, Zarathustra, and Pythagoras, because what is at work in the world is a force—a fact. Great spirits work together, and they are born into a certain age for a purpose. Likewise, the great impulses in human evolution weave themselves into each other. Zarathustra had pointed to the One who was to make it possible, through the Event of Golgotha, for human beings to find the world of the Devas through the force of their own inner being; moreover, they would be increasingly able to do so as they developed forward into the future. And in the same epoch, the Buddha was teaching: Yes, there is a spiritual world, compared to which the whole world of the senses is maya. Turn your steps back into the world in which you were before the thirst for an earthly existence awakened, and then you will find Nirvana—rest within the divine!

Such is the difference between the teachings of Buddha and Zarathustra. Buddha taught that the human being can reach the divine by going back; Zarathustra, in his incarnation as Zarastra, taught that the time is approaching when the light will incarnate within the earth itself, which will enable the progressive soul to come closer to the divine. Buddha said, the soul would find God by going back; Zarathustra said it would find Him by going forward.

Regardless of whether you regress or progress, whether you seek God in the Alpha or in the Omega, you will be able to find Him. What is important is that you find Him with your own heightened human power. Those forces necessary to find the God of the Alpha are the primal forces of a human being. However, the forces necessary to find the God of the Omega must be acquired here on earth by striving human beings themselves. It makes a difference whether one goes back to Alpha or forward to Omega. He who is content with finding God and just wants to get into the spiritual world has the choice of going forward or backward. However, the individual who is concerned that humanity leave the earth in a heightened state must point the way to Omega—as did Zarathustra.

Zarathustra prepared the way for that part of humanity that was to become involved with the very forces of the earth. Yet Zarathustra also fully understood the Buddha, for their quest was ultimately the same. What was Zarathustra's task? He had to make it possible for the Christ-Impulse to descend to the earth. Zarathustra was reborn as Jesus of Nazareth, and because of what had transpired in the previous incarnation, his individuality was able to unite itself with many a force that had been preserved as a result of spiritual economy. The world is profound and truth is complicated!

There was also interwoven in Jesus of Nazareth the being of the Buddha. It had advanced on different paths because many powers work in the one who is supposed to have an influence on humankind. The ego of Jesus left the physical, etheric, and astral bodies at baptism in the Jordan River, and the Sun God—the Christ-Spirit—entered and lived three years in the bodies of Jesus of Nazareth. And this is how Zarathustra had prepared humanity to be the recipient of the Christ-Impulse.

An important moment in the evolution of the earth had arrived with these events. It had now become possible for human beings to find God in their innermost being; in addition, they were now able to take something with them from the life between death and new birth into the new incarnation. And now, in our own age, there are already present souls who feel strongly enough that they have been in a world illumined by the Light of Christ. The fact that this is dimly divined in many a soul means that human beings today are capable of receiving and understanding the teachings of Spiritual Science. And because such people exist today, the Masters of Wisdom and of the Harmony of Feelings have expressed the hope that such people will also feel the truths of Spiritual Science and will make them the very substance of their lives. Knowing all this, the Masters assigned the mission of proclaiming anthroposophy in the present age to those who have already attained a high level of understanding.

It is essential that Spiritual Science begin now to become a spiritual impulse of our time. Christ Himself has prepared human souls for Spiritual Science, and it is guaranteed to stay in this world for the simple reason that the Light of Christ, once kindled, can never be extinguished. Once we inspire ourselves with the feeling that the stream of anthroposophical spirituality is a necessity, then we are immersed in it in the right way, and it will always stand before us as an unshakable ideal.

Yes, the human personality had to develop to such an extent that light could descend and say in a human body: “I am the Light of the world!” The Light of the World first came down into the soul of Zarathustra and spoke to it. Zarathustra's soul understood the meaning of this universal light and sacrificed itself so that these significant words would go out to all humanity—from a human body: “I am the Light of the World.”

• 44. Homer, Odyssey, Canto 489–491. These words are spoken by the soul of Achilles after Ulysses had conjured it up from the Underworld.

The secrets of space and time. The Moses and Hermes Wisdom. Comparison of the Turanians and the Hebrews.¹

In the opening lines of the Gospel of Matthew emphasis is laid on the descent of the physical nature of the Jesus of this Gospel from Abraham. The fact of most importance to the spiritual scientist is that by inheritance throughout thrice fourteen generations this individual bore within him an extract of the whole race of Abraham. He is the same individual who is spoken of as Zoroaster or Zarathustra.

In the last lecture we described the external conditions in which Zarathustra worked. Something must now be said of the opinions and ideas that obtained in his immediate circle.

In that district where in very far-off ages Zarathustra worked, conceptions and ideas flourished that, in their broad outlines, were of profound importance. It needs but a few extracts from what since earliest times has been regarded as the teaching of the first Zarathustra to show how deeply these affected the thought of the whole post-Atlantean period. Even external history relates how the teaching of Zarathustra proceeded from two principles, which we describe as the principle of Ormuzd, the beneficent Being of Light, and Ahriman, the dark Being of Evil. At the same time historical descriptions of this religious system trace the origin of these two principles back to a single common principle Zeruane Akarene. It is customary to translate Zeruane Akarene as ‘Uncreated Time.’ It may, therefore, be said that the teaching of Zarathustra leads back to an original principle, in which we have to recognize quiescent Time, Time flowing on in its universal course. The very meaning of the word shows us that it is unnecessary to question further as to the origin of this Time, this revolution of Time.

True, the external abstract thinking of man will hardly ever refrain from inquiring again and again after the cause of this cause, forever driving his conceptions back, forever seeking the primal cause. But the spiritual scientist realizes through deep meditation that questionings about the beginnings of things must cease somewhere. To continue them beyond a certain point is merely to play with thinking, as is shown clearly in Occult Science. It is stated there that when wheel tracks are seen on a road it may well be asked whence they came. The answer will probably be that they were caused by the wheels of a carriage. A query as to the reason for the wheels on the carriage may produce the information that they were needed to enable it to travel along the road. A further inquiry as to the cause of this may bring the reply that someone wished to travel along the road. Ultimately we arrive at the resolve of the man which led him to travel along the road. Here it is advisable to stop, for further inquiries would inevitably lead to losing one's way in a maze of questions.

It is the same as regards great universal questions—a halt must be made somewhere; made at what lies at the fountain of the teaching of Zarathustra; at Time, calm, onflowing Time. Then, according to Zarathustra, there proceeded from Time, Ormuzd, the principle of Light, and Ahriman, the evil principle of Darkness. The profound meaning underlying this Iranian or old Persian idea is that the wickedness in the world, all that in its physical form is described as darkness, was not originally wicked, dark and evil. In the same way the wolf was originally good, but when left to itself it degenerated so that Ahrimanic forces could be active in it. To the Iranians or Persians evil came to pass through something that at one time—a time suited to it—was good, retaining its form on into a later age with which it was out of harmony. To them, all that was black and evil arose through a form which was good in one age, continuing on into a later age, instead of adapting itself to change. Through the clashing of such forms of being with the more advanced ones of a later time, the struggle between good and evil arose. Evil is therefore not absolute evil, but misplaced good, something that was good in an earlier time. There, where earlier conditions did not as yet come into collision with later conditions, enduring Time rolled on, Time that was undifferentiated, not yet separated into individual moments.

Such is the very important point of view expressed in Zarathustrianism; and this should be recognized as the fundamental principle of the teaching of Zarathustra among the earliest post-Atlantean peoples, and must be associated with the facts given in the first lecture. The people influenced by him had, above all, insight into the necessity for the birth of this duality from out the uniform stream of Time, and for the coming of opposition, which opposition would only be overcome in the course of time. We see the necessity that the new should arise and the old remain behind; that in the balance between the old and the new, the goal of the universe, and especially the goal of the Earth, will gradually be attained. It is this point of view that lies at the root of all that higher development which has sprung from Zarathustrianism.

The impression made by the influence of Zarathustra on subsequent ages was strong and deep. It was possible through the fact, that having reached the highest summit of initiation attainable at that time, he had also trained two pupils. These pupils I have spoken of before. To one he taught everything connected with the mystery of Space as it is spread around us, and therewith the mystery of all things contemporaneous. To the other he imparted the mystery of the flight of Time, the mystery of development and of evolution. I have also already indicated that at a definite point of time of such a discipleship as existed between these two great disciples and Zarathustra, something quite especial enters: the teacher can sacrifice part of his own being to his disciples. And Zarathustra, as he was in his Zarathustra-age, gave up to his pupils something of his own being, he sacrificed his own etheric and astral bodies. His individuality, his own inmost being, he retained for future incarnations; but his remarkable astral ‘garment,’ in which he had lived as Zarathustra in the earliest post-Atlantean periods, which had attained such a degree of perfection, and was so permeated by his whole being that instead of dispersing like that of an ordinary man, it remained intact—he gave this to another. The depth and power of the individuality of this great Initiate made this possible, and this is why the astral body of Zarathustra persisted. Similarly his etheric body remained also intact.

According to occult investigation, one of these pupils, the one who had received knowledge concerning the mystery of Space, of all that fills space contemporaneously, reincarnated as that personality known to history as Thoth, or Hermes of the Egyptians. Hermes had not only to establish in himself what he had received from Zarathustra in an earlier incarnation, but he had to establish it more firmly; this he was able to do in the Holy Mysteries, because he had received into himself the astral sheath of the great Initiate. Permeated by the teaching of Zarathustra, and filled by his astral nature, the individuality of this pupil was born again as Hermes, the inaugurator of the civilization of Egypt. We have, therefore, a direct member or principle of the being of Zarathustra in the Egyptian Hermes. With this principle, and with what he had brought with him of the teaching of Zarathustra, Hermes was able to give the impulse for all that was best and of greatest moment in Egyptian civilization. Naturally, a suitable race was necessary in order that the work of the messenger of Zarathustra might be effective. A race promising a fruitful soil for the development of this work could only be found among those Atlantean wanderers who had taken the more southern way and had settled in East Africa and had retained much of their old clairvoyance. The essential soul-nature of this race was quick to receive the wisdom of Hermes, and in this way Egyptian civilization arose. It was a very special type of civilization. You must try to realize how all that is included in the mysteries of contemporaneous things, of that which exists side by side in space, was contained in the wisdom of Hermes—all this had been entrusted to him as a precious gift from Zarathustra, so that in his own being Hermes possessed the most important teachings that Zarathustra had to impart.

It has often been stated that the most characteristic teaching of Zarathustra referred to the external sunlight and the external physical light-body of the Sun as the outer sheath of an exalted Spiritual Being. What was confided to Hermes was the mystery of that which as Being, underlies all Nature, all space and everything contemporaneous, yet which advances ever in time from epoch to epoch, and reveals itself in certain epochs Hermes knew what comes from the Sun, and what through the Sun continues to develop. This knowledge he implanted in the souls of the Egyptians, who retained a memory of the Atlantean Sun-Mysteries, and were, therefore, specially adapted to receive his teachings. All this, within the advancing line of evolution, was in the soul of Hermes, as well as in all those souls ripe to absorb his wisdom.

The mission of the second of Zarathustra's pupils was very different. Upon him had been bestowed the secrets of the passing of Time. He had to experience within himself the conflict between the old and the new, how in evolution something was active as opposition, as polarity. As already stated this pupil had also received part of the being of Zarathustra; on reincarnating he could therefore receive the sacrifice of Zarathustra.

Thus, while the individuality of Zarathustra remained intact, his sheaths were separated from him, they endured and were not dispersed for they were held together by such a mighty individual. This second pupil—to whom was imparted the wisdom concerning Time in contradistinction to that concerning Space—received at a specific moment of his reincarnated existence the etheric body of Zarathustra, which had been sacrificed in the same way s his astral body. This reborn pupil was none other than Moses. Moses received in quite early childhood the fully preserved etheric body of Zarathustra.

Our religious documents which are really founded on occultism contain all this, though in a veiled form. In them we find suggestions of the secrets revealed through occult investigation. As Moses was the reincarnated pupil of Zarathustra and had received his etheric body, something quite unusual had to take place in him. This is recorded in the Scriptures. Before he could receive the ordinary impressions from his surroundings like another human being, before he could descend with his individuality so as to receive impressions from the external world, there had to percolate into his being that which he was to receive as a marvellous inheritance from Zarathustra. This fact is expressed in the symbolic legend which relates that Moses was placed in a casket and lowered to the river. This should be accepted as indicating a remarkable initiation.

Initiation consists in a man being withdrawn from the world for a certain time, during which he slowly absorbs what has been given to him. While thus withdrawn, Moses was able to be united at the right moment with the etheric body of Zarathustra that had been preserved for this purpose. The wonderful wisdom concerning Time, the gift of Zarathustra in an earlier period, was then able to blossom within him; he gave this wisdom to his people in a series of pictures fitted to their understanding. Hence from Moses we have those mighty pictures of Genesis, those imaginations dealing with the wisdom of Time, of the ages as they succeed one another, received from Zarathustra. This was a re-born knowledge—a re-born wisdom—received by him, and was firmly established in his inner nature since he had received the etheric sheath of Zarathustra himself.

An initiate is not only needed as inaugurator of a new civilization for the advancement of the human race, but he must have a suitable medium in which to work, a race fitted to receive the germ of this new civilization. To understand the folk-soul, the folk-germ in which what had been received by Moses from Zarathustra was to be planted, it would be well to consider more exactly the peculiar wisdom of Moses.

In a former incarnation, Moses as Zarathustra's pupil had received the wisdom concerning Time, and that secret which we referred to as the ‘opposition between the earlier and the later’ that arises in every age. If the wisdom of Moses was to enter human evolution it had to be established as a polarity to that other wisdom, already in existence, the wisdom of Hermes. And this took place.

Hermes had received direct Sun-wisdom from Zarathustra: that is to say, through his astral body he had gained knowledge of the Being dwelling mysteriously within the outer physical sheath of Light—the body of the sun. With Moses it was otherwise. Moses, whose wisdom was connected with the denser etheric body, received the Sun-wisdom less directly. His was not that wisdom which looks up to the Sun asking: “Does not everything come forth from the Being of the Sun?”; but he was the recipient of a contrasting knowledge, the wisdom that understood earthly things, things that had become dense and fixed, and appeared old, though not degenerate—Earth-wisdom in contrast to direct Sun-wisdom. Earth-wisdom was indirect Sun-wisdom. It derived its life from the Sun, yet was of the Earth. Moses declared the mystery of the Earth's origin, of the formation of the solid Earth after the withdrawal of the Sun, and told how man evolved on it. This is revealed to our inward, not our outward, vision; and now we see how and why the teaching of Hermes presents such a vivid contrast to that of Moses.

There are certain people to-day who consider all such problems on the principle that in the night all cows are grey. They can only see resemblances, and are enchanted when, for instance, some likeness between the Hermetic and Mosaic teachings is discovered; here they find a trinity, there a trinity, there a quaternary, and here a quaternary. This leads nowhere. It is like someone training a botanist by pointing out the likeness between a rose and a carnation, but omitting the differences. Through Spiritual Science we learn in what way both beings and forms of knowledge differ. The wisdom of Moses was quite different from that of Hermes, even though both proceeded from Zarathustra. As unity divides and manifests itself in various ways, so Zarathustra imparted to his two pupils revelations of a very different kind.

When we are steeped in the influences streaming from the wisdom of Hermes, we become aware of all that fills the world with Light, of the origin of the world, and how this was affected by the Light; but we do not learn from him how, in all development, the earlier influences the later; how this brings about strife between past and present, and the opposition of Light to Darkness. Earthly wisdom, the wisdom concerning the development of the Earth and of man after the separation from the Sun, is nowhere to be found in the teaching of Hermes. But it was the special mission of Moses to make the development of the Earth, after its separation from the Sun, comprehensible to man. Hermes brought us Sun-wisdom; Moses Earth-wisdom. Moses, with his Zarathustrian inheritance, taught of the dawn of earthly existence and of the earthly evolution of man. He starts from the things of earth, but these earthly things, though separated from the sun, still contained, if weakened, something of the nature of the sun. Therefore the Earth-wisdom of Moses had to encounter the Sun-wisdom of Hermes in concrete existence. These two streams of wisdom had to meet. This is shown most wonderfully in the initiation of Moses in Egypt, where he came in contact with the Hermes-wisdom. In the birth of Moses in Egypt, in the sojourning of his people there, in the conflict between them and the Egyptians, who were the people of Hermes, is seen the reflection in external life of the clashing of the Earth-wisdom with the Sun-wisdom. Both had originated with Zarathustra, and though they followed entirely different courses of evolution they had to work together and to coincide.

There is a certain kind of knowledge, one closely connected with the profound secrets of human and earthly existence, which in accordance with the methods of the Mysteries, is always expressed in a special way. This was referred to in Munich in the lectures on the Biblical Secrets of Creation. There it was shown how unusually difficult it is to speak in ordinary language of such mighty truths, truths comprising not only the deepest mysteries of man but of the universe. We are often hampered by words, for they have their precise meaning determined by long usage; and when endeavouring to express the mighty facts revealed inwardly to the soul, we often find ourselves in conflict with the feeble instrument of speech which is really in a certain respect so extraordinarily inadequate.

The greatest triviality of the newer culture in general that has been uttered in the course of the nineteenth century, is that every truth can be expressed simply, and that the mode of expression is the criterion of whether someone possesses this truth or not. Such a statement only shows that those who use it are not in possession of absolute truth, but only of those truths which, in the course of centuries, have been communicated in words, the form of which they only alter a little. For such people words suffice: they are quite unaware of the great struggle which must sometimes be carried on with words. This struggle becomes apparent whenever the soul strives to express what is grand and exalted. I spoke in Munich of how in the Rosicrucian Mystery Drama, The Portal of Initiation, at the end of the scene in the room provided for meditation, there was for me a very great difficulty with language. What the Hierophant had to say to the pupil could only be expressed in a most restricted way through the feeble instrument of speech.

Within the Holy Mysteries, however, the most profound secrets had to be expressed. There the inadequacy of speech to call up the images of reality was felt most strongly. Hence the age-long effort in the Mysteries to find other means to express the inner experiences of the soul. These feeble means of expression—words—have for centuries been reserved for external intercourse, but the pictures and images seen when men turned their gaze towards the heavenly spaces have proved far more suitable. The constellations, the rising of a star at a certain time, the occultation of a certain star by another at a definite time—such pictures were used to express experiences within the human soul.

Let us suppose that someone desired to say that a great event was to take place at a certain time, because at that particular moment a human soul would be sufficiently ripe to receive a great experience and to pass this on to his people; or that some nation, or a large part of mankind, having reached a certain high stage of ripeness, a certain individuality could appear among them, coming perhaps from a quite other direction. In such a case the climax of development of the individual would coincide with the highest point of development of the folk-soul. No words are sufficiently exalted to convey the full meaning of such an event. Therefore it was expressed in this wise: The coincidence of the climax of power of an individual, with the climax of power of a folk-soul, is as when the sun is in the constellation of Leo and thence sends us its light. The constellation of the Lion is here chosen to represent, in a pictorial way, something that had to be expressed as taking place with utmost power in human evolution. What could be seen thus outwardly in cosmic space was used as a means of expressing something taking place in humanity. Certain expressions found in human history have arisen in this way; they are taken from the movements of the heavenly bodies, and are the method used to denote spiritual facts.

When it is stated, for example, that the sun is in the sign of Leo, or that through some event in the heavens, such as an eclipse of the sun by a certain constellation, a fact in human evolution is symbolically expressed, it may very well happen that people reverse this and suppose, in a trivial way, that all the events relating to mankind's history were myths clothed in the motions of the stars; whereas the truth is that incidents in the life of humanity were expressed by means of images taken from the constellations.

This connection with the cosmos ought to fill us with certain feelings of reverence towards all we are told concerning the great events of human evolution, when we find these expressed in images taken from cosmic existence. But there is, nevertheless, an intimate connection between the existence of the whole cosmos and the life of man this is, that events taking place on earth are a reflection of cosmic events. Thus the meeting of the Sun-wisdom of Hermes with the Earth-wisdom of Moses in Egypt is, in a certain way, a reflection of cosmic activities. Picture to yourselves that certain forces streaming from the sun to the earth meet others streaming from the earth into cosmic space. It is not a matter of indifference where these two forces meet; but according as the meeting be near or far, the result of the outgoing and incoming forces is different.

Now the contact of the wisdom of Hermes with that of Moses was pictured in the Mysteries of ancient Egypt as representing something that, according also to Spiritual Science, had previously taken place in the cosmos. We know that early in evolution the sun separated from the earth, leaving the moon for a period within the earth. Later a part of this globe separate from the earth, and remained as the present moon. Thus the earth sent a portion of itself; as moon, into universal space, towards the sun. We may think of the remarkable occurrence of the meeting of the Earth-wisdom of Moses with the Sun-wisdom of Hermes as comparable with this streaming forth of the Earth-forces towards the sun. One might say: The wisdom of Moses, in its further course, after separating from the Sun-wisdom of Zarathustra, developed as the wisdom of the earth and of men in such a way that it drew again towards the sun, absorbing and filling itself with direct solar wisdom. The earth was destined to receive direct Sun-wisdom only to a certain extent, then to develop further alone and independently. The wisdom of Moses, therefore, only remained in Egypt until it had absorbed sufficient for its needs. Then came the Exodus of the children of Israel from Egypt, in order that the Sun-wisdom taken up by the Earth-wisdom might be assimilated and brought to greater self-dependence.

The wisdom of Moses was two-fold. One part was developed under the sheltering wing of the Hermes-wisdom which it continually absorbed from every side, then, after the exodus from Egypt, it separated from this development, continued further within itself, and later passed through three stages. Towards what should this wisdom evolve? What is its task? Its ultimate task was to find its way back from the earth to the sun. It had become earthly wisdom. Moses was born with all he inherited from Zarathustra, as a wise man of earth. He was to find the way back, and he sought it in three stages, the first being that in which he absorbed the wisdom of Hermes. These stages are again best expressed in the images drawn from cosmic events. When what takes place upon the earth streams back in space from the earth towards the sun, it first encounters what is of the nature of Mercury (in ordinary astronomy the Mercury of astronomy is the Venus of Occult Science), then that of Venus, and ultimately that which is of the nature of the sun. The soul of Moses had to develop his Zarathustrian inheritance in inner experiences in such a way that he might return and find once more what appertained to the Sun. In order to do this he had to attain a certain degree of development. The wisdom Moses had implanted in western culture had to develop according to the way he gave it to his people. The wisdom he had gained from Hermes and which came to him like the direct rays of the sun, he had to develop anew, and reflect it back again in a changed form, after he had absorbed some part of it.

Now we are told that Hermes, who was later called ‘Mercury,’ brought to his people science and art, that is, external knowledge and art, in a form suitable to them. But it was in a different and almost opposite way that the wisdom of Moses attained to the Hermes-Mercury standpoint. Moses had himself to develop the wisdom of Hermes further. This is shown in the progress of the Hebrew people up to the age and reign of David. David, who is presented to us as the royal singer of Psalms and holy prophet, who as a man of God worked both as warrior and harpist, is the Hermes, or Mercury, of the Hebrew people. That stream of the Hebrew folk had now so far evolved that it had developed an independent form of Hermetic or Mercury wisdom. At the time of David the wisdom received from Hermes had reached the Mercury sphere, or Mercury stage, on its return journey. It then continued to the region of Venus. This came to pass for the Hebrews when the Moses-wisdom, or rather that version of it which had endured as his wisdom for hundreds of years, had to unite with an entirely different element, with a stream issuing from another direction.

Just as that which streams back in space from the earth towards the sun encounters Venus, so the wisdom of Moses encountered an Asiatic wisdom that came from another direction during the Babylonian Captivity. The Moses-wisdom came in touch with the weakened form of another wisdom in the Mysteries of Babylon and Chaldea. Like a wanderer who, having acquired knowledge of the earth, leaves it for the Mercury sphere, and thence passes on to Venus desirous of experiencing the sunlight as it is felt there, so the Moses-wisdom, having received the direct Sun-wisdom from the holy teachings of Zarathustra, passed over in a weakened form to the mystery schools of Chaldea and Babylon. The wisdom of Moses experienced this weakening during the Babylonian captivity, where it united with all that had penetrated into the lands of the Tigris and Euphrates. Here something else happened.

In the sanctuaries which the wise men among the Hebrews were obliged to frequent during their captivity, the wisdom of Moses was directly impregnated with the qualities of the Sun-wisdom. For at this time Zarathustra was himself incarnated and taught in the mystery schools of the Tigris and Euphrates, and was known to the learned among the Hebrews. He who had relinquished part of his wisdom so that he might receive it back again, was himself teaching at this time. He had frequently reincarnated, and in this incarnation in which he was known as Zarathos or Nazarathos, he taught the captive Jews in Babylon.

Thus in the course of its further progress, the wisdom of Moses came in touch with what Zarathustra had himself become after he had withdrawn from the more distant Mystery Sanctuaries and had entered those of Asia Minor. Here he became the teacher of the initiate Chaldean disciples, as well as teacher of the Hebrews. They now received a fructification of their Mosaic wisdom by a stream they were now fitter to encounter, because what had once been given to their ancestor Moses by Zarathustra came to them now directly from himself, in his incarnation as Zarathos or Nazarathos. This was the destiny through which Mosaic wisdom passed. Originally it sprang from Zarathustra, but was then transplanted into an alien land. It was as if a Sun-being with bandaged eyes had been brought down to earth, and now, on its backward journey, had to seek all it had lost. Such a wanderer was Moses, the pupil of Zarathustra. His destiny had placed him within Egyptian civilization, so that all the wisdom given him at one time by Zarathustra might be quickened and illuminated in his inner being. He was cut off, as it were, from the sun on the fields of earth, where unaware of the source of his illumination he moved unconsciously towards what once was sun. In Egypt he was attracted towards the wisdom of Hermes, which brought to him direct Zarathustra-wisdom, not an indirect reflection like his own. After absorbing sufficiently of this, the wisdom of Moses continued its development in a more direct way. Having founded an Hermetic wisdom at the time of David, and a science and art of its own, it turned again towards the sun from which it had originally come forth, though in a way that had at first to appear veiled.

In the ancient Babylonian schools of learning where, among others, Zarathustra taught Pythagoras, his teaching was restricted by the type of physical body of the period. If Zarathustra was to give full expression to his Sun-nature through a form suited to those times, as he was able to do in that earlier incarnation when he had passed it on to Moses and Hermes, he would require a bodily instrument fitted to the new age. Restricted by a body such as could be produced in ancient Babylonia, he was only able to convey such wisdom as he passed on to Pythagoras, to the learned Hebrews and wise men of Chaldea and Babylon, who in the sixth century before Christ, were ready and able to hear it. In respect of this teaching it was exactly as if the sunlight were first taken up by Venus and prevented from shining directly on the earth; as if his teaching could not shine with its original splendour but only in a weakened form. Before the Sun-wisdom of Zarathustra could shine forth once more in its pristine power, a body suited to him must first be provided, and in a very special way. This will now be described.

In the first lecture, we told of the three folk-souls of Asia, the Indian in the South, the Iranian, and the Turanian to the North, and we described the connection of these with the Atlantean migrations into Asia. Where the northern stream which came from Atlantis met the southern stream which passed through Africa, an extraordinary mixture of races occurred. From this admixture a race developed from which later the Hebrew people sprang.

Something unusual occurred in the development of these ancestors of the Hebrews. The lower astral-etheric clairvoyance which had become so decadent among certain races because it was the last phase of external perception, had in those people who developed into the Hebrew race, turned inwards and manifested as an organizing force. That which we have described as being externally decadent, as having remained behind in certain races as a last phase of declining clairvoyance, and as being permeated somewhat by the Ahrimanic element, had progressed among the Hebrews in the right direction by becoming an actively organizing force within the human body. Through this, bodies became more perfect. What among the Turanians was decadent worked constructively and progressively in the Hebrews. Within the physical nature of the Hebrews, as propagated from generation to generation in the close bond of blood relationship, all those forces were active which had accomplished their mission in developing external sight. These were no longer required to provide external sight, so could enter on another sphere of action, thus passing into their right element. That which had given to the Atlantean the power to gaze spiritually into space and into spiritual realms, that had run wild in the Turanians, appearing as a last relic of clairvoyance—all this force worked inwardly in the little Hebrew nation. What in the Atlantean had been spiritual and divine, worked inwardly in the Hebrew race to form certain organs. It worked constructively in the body and could therefore flash forth in the blood of this people as and inward divine consciousness. With the Hebrew people it was if all the Atlantean had seen when directing his clairvoyant vision into space was turned inwards, as if it constructed inwardly an organ of consciousness which was the Jahve-consciousness—the consciousness of God within him. This people felt the God Who filled all space to be united with their blood, felt they were filled, impregnated with Him, and that He lived in the pulsation of their blood.

As in the last lecture we contrasted the Iranians and the Turanians we have now considered the Turanians and the Hebrews, and have seen that what in its further progress and in its essence had become decadent in the Turanians, pulsated later in the blood of the Hebrew people. All that the Atlantean had seen, lived on in the Hebrew as an inward feeling, and could be comprised in a single word: Jahve or Jehovah. The consciousness of God lived throughout the generations of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob concentrated as into a single point, invisible but inwardly felt. The God Who had revealed Himself to the Atlantean clairvoyance behind all living things was now the God dwelling in the blood of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and led the generations of their race from destiny to destiny. The outward had thus become inward it was experienced, no longer seen; it was no longer described by different names, but by one single name ‘I am the I am!’ It had taken on an entirely different form. Whereas for the Atlantean this was found where he was not—in the external world—it was now found by man in the centre of his own being; in his ego; he was conscious of it in the blood that coursed through the generations. The mighty God of the Universe had now become the God of the Hebrews; the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and flowed through the generations as the blood of the race.

It was in this way that the race was founded whose special inner mission for humanity we shall consider in the next lecture. We have thus far only been able to indicate the very earliest stage of the composition of the blood of this people, in which was concentrated everything that in the age of ancient Atlantis, humanity had allowed to be impressed upon it from without. We shall see later what mysteries were fulfilled in that which had here its beginning, and shall learn to recognize the peculiar nature of that people from which Zarathustra could take his body to become the being we call Jesus of Nazareth.

• 1. In a footnote to this lecture the reader is recommended to study these early lectures in conjunction with the author's lectures on St. Luke, in order to understand the events in the life of Christ Jesus.

Interchanging activity of Thoth-Hermes and Moses, as reflection of a cosmic process. The secret of the Hebrew people. Human thought the reflection of divine vision. The power of ancient clairvoyance passes into the inner organization of man. The law of numbers in respect of heredity in the sequence of generations

Before passing on to our main theme, I should like to make a slight addition to something mentioned yesterday. This was, that when human evolution, especially the most important events in our existence, are described, this can best be done in a language drawn from cosmic events. I showed how impossible it was to clothe these mighty mysteries in ordinary words, or to give any clear idea of the wonderful interchanging activities of Hermes or Thoth and Moses, the two great pupils of Zarathustra. We represent them best when we treat them as a repetition of cosmic events, accepting them altogether in the sense of Occult Science

Let us glance back in thought to the separation of the earth from its sun, after which each pursued its further life in the cosmos with an independent centre. In a primeval past the whole substance of earth and sun may be pictured as forming one whole, one great cosmic body, which later divided into sun and earth. Parallel to this, other cosmic events took place, namely, the separation of the other planets of our solar system. These need not be considered here; for our present purpose it is sufficient to consider such a separation as the Sun forming the one centre, and the Earth the other.

In those remote times, it must be remembered, the earth still contained the substance of the present moon, so that really the sun and the earth-moon confronted one another. All the spiritual and physical forces that had existed as one heavenly body were now divided—the coarser elements, the denser, grosser activities, remaining with the earth, the finer, more spiritually-etheric ones, going out with the sun. It must be realized that for long ages the earth and sun continued each to develop its separate life, and that what streamed from the sun towards the earth was quite different from what comes from it to-day. There was at first a kind of earthly existence and earthly life of an inward nature, secluded, contracted, and receiving little from the life of the sun—little of that which spiritually (though expressed physically) streams from the sun to the earth to-day. The earth, in this first period of the separation between sun and earth, experienced a drying-up, hardening, mummifying process. If this had continued, if the earth had retained the moon within it, the human life of to-day would never have evolved. As long as the earth contained the moon within it, the life of the sun could not fully manifest its activities. This it could only do later when the earth had parted with the moon and its substance, and the spiritual moon-beings. But something else was bound up with the separation of moon and earth.

We must clearly realize that life on the earth has evolved very slowly and gradually. The stages of this evolution are described in Occult Science: first, the existence of ancient Saturn, then that of the ancient Sun, followed by that of the ancient Moon, and lastly that of the Earth. What has just been described as the separation of the sun from the earth or the earlier union of sun and earth was preceded by all these other evolutionary states which were of a quite different kind. When the earth first came into existence in its present form, it still had united with it the substances of all the planets of our solar system, these only differentiated from the earth later, which differentiation was the result of forces active during the Saturn, Sun, and Moon periods of existence.

Now we know that during the ancient Saturn existence, matter or substance, as it is to-day, did not exist; neither solid bodies, fluid, nor watery bodies, misty, nor even gaseous nor atmospheric bodies, existed on Saturn. In its whole composition Saturn consisted merely of warmth it was nothing but differentiated warmth. Saturn had a body of heat, and everything that developed upon it was within this element of warmth. It is hardly necessary to repeat that such a statement is not made without recognition of the attitude of modern physics, which regards the existence of a body consisting solely of heat as an impossibility. Heat to modern physics is a condition, not a substance but our concern here is not with modern physics, but with truth.

Evolution continued from the heat body of the Saturn-evolution, and passed on to the next state, that of the ancient Sun. As described in my book, Occult Science, the heat body now in part condensed to the gaseous vapoury condition found on ancient Sun, and a part of it became more rarefied, evolving upwards towards light, where there was not only a process of condensation but one of rarefication. Passing on from the condition of ancient Saturn to that of the ancient Sun, we find a globe containing air, heat, and light. At the next stage, that of the ancient Moon, a further densification took place, and a further rarefication, a densification, on one hand, to water, and a rarefication, on the other, to sound-ether or chemical-ether.

This sound-ether is not what we are aware of in physical sound, which is but its reflection. Sound-ether is known to clairvoyant perception as the harmony of the spheres, the etheric tone which lives within and permeates all space. It is something much more spiritual, more etheric, than ordinary sound.

From the condition of ancient Moon, evolution passed on to that of the earth. Here condensation to solid matter took place for the first time, and also a corresponding rise to life-ether. So on the earth there was now warmth, gaseous or atmospheric bodies, watery or fluid bodies, and solid bodies; and on the other hand light-ether, sound-ether, and life-ether. All this has come to pass in the evolution of the earth. While on Saturn there was but one condition—the middle one, that of warmth—on the earth there are seven elemental conditions.

We must picture the earth as living and weaving within these seven conditions of elemental life when at the beginning of its present existence it emerged from cosmic night, wherein it was still one with the sun and the other planets. With its separation from the sun, something very remarkable took place.

Among the influences and conditions streaming to-day from the sun to the earth, and affecting external life, we certainly find heat and light, but among these influences which belong to the world of sense-perception, the externalization and manifestation of sound-ether and life-ether do not belong. This is also the reason why the activities of sound-ether are only manifested in the chemical combinations of material existence. What we call the forces of life-ether streaming down as they do from the sun, cannot be perceived directly by sense perception, that is, by the means employed by man to distinguish between light and darkness. Life is perceived by him in its results, in living beings; he cannot see the downward streaming life-ether directly. Hence science is forced to state that life, as such, remains a riddle.

So we find that the two highest etheric manifestations, life-ether and sound-ether, though proceeding directly from the finest substances of the sun, are not directly perceptible on earth. We have here something which, though proceeding from the sun, is hidden from ordinary perception. Yet, even under present conditions, there is something corresponding to what lives in sound and life-ether; something in man's inner being that is perceptible. Though the direct effects of these life-ethers and sphere harmonies are not seen, what is at work on the whole constitution of man is perceptible.

This can be explained most simply by referring to man's evolution on earth. It is known to Spiritual Science that in ancient times, down to the Atlantean age, man was gifted with direct clairvoyance, and beheld not merely the world of the senses, but also the whole spiritual background of physical existence. This was possible because for the man of those times there was an intermediate condition between our present-day waking consciousness and our sleeping consciousness. When awake, man perceives the physical world of the senses when asleep, nothing is perceptible—at least to the majority. Man then merely lives. But the spiritual investigator makes strange discoveries about the life of man during sleep, discoveries especially strange to those who only regard life externally. During sleep the astral body and ego of man are outside his physical and etheric bodies, but these should not be pictured as resembling a nebulous cloud floating near the physical body. That which is compared to a ‘cloud’ and is apparent to lower astral clairvoyance, and is sometimes called the ‘astral body,’ is merely the coarsest, first beginnings of what is revealed of a human being during sleep. If this cloud is accepted as the whole of what can be seen, then it is certainly viewed from the lowest form of astral clairvoyance. The reality of man's being during sleep extends to far distances. The fact is that at the moment of falling asleep, the inner forces in the astral body and ego begin to expand over the whole solar system; they become part of the solar system. From the whole of this solar system the man draws into his astral body and ego during sleep, forces for the strengthening of his life and on awakening, when he again passes within the confines of his own physical body, he bears with him what he has absorbed during the night from the solar system.

It was because of this that mediaeval occultists named this spiritual body of man, the astral body; for it is associated with the world of the stars whence it draws its forces. So we can say that during the night man is actually extended over the whole solar system.

What is it that permeates our astral body while we sleep? It is the music of the spheres. The sphere-harmonies live and move within the human astral body when at night man is outside his physical and etheric sheaths; harmony which otherwise can only be found in the sound-ether. As a metal disc, on which sand has been scattered, responds to the vibrations in the air when it is struck by a violin bow, disclosing in the sand what are known as the Chiadnic sound-forms, so man trembles and pulsates nightly in response to the sphere-harmonies, which bring form and order into what, through his sense-perceptions, he has brought into disorder during the day. And that which lives in the life-ether is also active in man during sleep, but he is quite unaware of this inner life of his sheaths when separated from his physical and etheric bodies. Normally he is only conscious when he plunges down again into his two lower sheaths, and can use the external organs of his etheric body for thought, and those of his physical body for sense-perception.

But in ancient times there were intermediate conditions between waking and sleeping which can only be induced to-day by abnormal means; and these ought never to be employed in ordinary life, for they are fraught with danger. In Atlantis these intermediate conditions of perception were evolved normally. Through them man was able to place himself within that which lived and moved in the harmony of the spheres and the life-ether. In other words, the man of ancient times, through his clairvoyance, could perceive the harmony of the spheres streaming to him from the sun, and life as it pulsates through space, even though the sphere-harmonies were only manifest in the earthly effects and life was only perceptible in living beings. The possibility of this experience gradually diminished. With the closing of the door on the old clairvoyance, these revelations disappeared, but something else appeared in their place—the capacity for inner knowledge and the inner powers of understanding. All that in waking life is called contemplation and the thought connected with sense-perception—the whole of the individual inner life—began to evolve with the disappearance of clairvoyance. The inner life of to-day, our feelings, perceptions, thoughts, and ideas, which are fundamentally the origin of all that is creative in our civilization, were not yet possessed in the earliest Atlantean times. Man lived in the intermediate states between sleeping and waking, poured out into a spiritual world, and the sense-world he beheld as in a mist; he lived entirely without the power of human understanding, or any inner reflected images of external life.

With the gradual disappearance of the old clairvoyance, external life came more and more into prominence. Slowly something developed in man's nature that was a feeble reflection of the harmony of the spheres and the activities of the life-ether. In the same measure as man became inwardly aware of feelings and perceptions reflecting the outer world and forming his inner life as it is to-day, the music of the spheres sounded ever more faintly to him. As his realization of himself, of his ego-hood became clearer, his perception of the divine life-ether filling all space became fainter. Present conditions had to be paid for by the loss of a certain part of what had been man's outer life. As earthly being he felt life enclosed within himself, he ceased to feel it streaming to him from the sun; and in his inner life there remains to-day but a faint reflection of that mighty cosmic life, of sphere-harmony and life-ether.

What gradually evolved as human understanding was like a recapitulation of the earth's evolution. When separated from the sun, the earth would have become enclosed within itself and hard, had it retained all the substances left within it. The influences of the sun could not penetrate at first into the development of the earth they failed to do so until the moon had separated from it. In ‘Moon’ we must recognize those rejected substances that made it impossible for the earth to receive the direct influences of the sun. By ejecting the moon, the earth really opened her whole nature and being for the first time to the influences of the sun, from which she had been parted. She sent part of her being back towards the sun, in the opposite direction to that from which she had herself gone forth from it, and this part—the moon—reflects back the sun-nature to the earth as outwardly it reflects its light.

The separation of the moon from the earth must be regarded as an event of the greatest importance; it was a voluntary opening of the earth to the influences of the sun. This cosmic event had now to be enacted again in the life of humanity. A long time after the earth had thus opened herself to the reception of the sun-forces, the moment arrived when man himself had to be cut off from these forces.

By means of their clairvoyance, the direct solar influences could still be perceived by the Atlanteans; but just as at a certain stage in its evolution the earth began to harden, so a time came when man withdrew within himself and began to develop an inner life of his own. Like the earth, he became unable to open himself to the direct influences of the sun. The process of developing an inner life by ceasing to be susceptible to solar influences, and only of developing in himself what was a faint reflection of the activities of the life-ether and sound-ether, continued for long into post-Atlantean times. Direct perception of the solar forces, which was characteristic of the early Atlanteans was eventually lost. As the effects of these forces could no longer penetrate to the consciousness of mankind, his inward life continued blossoming more and more. Then came the time when it was only in the Mysteries that man's spiritual powers could be developed. There, by means of Yoga, a pupil of the Mysteries could be withdrawn from earthly conditions and made directly aware of the solar influences. Therefore, during the second half of the Atlantean period what were rightly called ‘Oracles’ appeared. They were places where a class of people, who no longer perceived the activities of the higher ethers normally, were received as pupils and trained, in sacred wisdom. Here, through training, they learnt to suppress mere sense-perceptions and to become conscious of the revelations of the sound-ether and life-ether. The power to do this was preserved in the true centres of occult science. Indeed, the possibility of this endured so powerfully that even external science, without understanding it, still retains a tradition from the school of Pythagoras that one can hear the harmony of the spheres. Science, ignorant however of what the true ‘Harmony of the Spheres’ was, has changed it into a mere abstract idea. The pupils of Pythagoras understood as the power to perceive the harmony of the spheres, the actual reopening of a man's being to the tone-ether and the divine life-ether.

Zarathustra, or Zoroaster, was the first who taught in the most sublime way that behind the activities of the sun streaming to the earth as light and warmth, there was something else, something which as the activity of sound-ether and life-ether is feebly reflected in the inner life of man. Were we to translate his teaching into modern words, it might read: ‘When you look up to the sun you are aware of its beneficial warmth and light flowing down to earth; but when you have evolved higher organs, when you have developed spiritual perception, you will behold the Being of the sun Who lives behind the physical sun. You will then perceive the activities of sound, and within these the meaning of life!’ This, the first thing of a spiritual nature to be perceived behind the physical activity of the sun, was described by Zarathustra to his pupils as Ormuzd, or Ahura Mazdao, the mighty aura of the sun.

Therefore Ahura Mazdao is sometimes translated as ‘The Great Wisdom,’ to distinguish it from the little wisdom evolved by men to-day. Man perceives ‘The Great Wisdom’ when he perceives the spiritual being of the sun, the great sun aura.

‘The sun-orb sings, in emulation,
‘Mid brother-spheres, his ancient round:
His path predestined through Creation,
He ends with step of thunder-sound.’

FAUST—Prologue in Heaven.

In these words a poet, gazing back into the ancient days of human evolution, refers to what is a fact to the spiritual investigator. But the ‘resounding’ of the sun is to some people not a fact but a pleasing fancy, a poetic licence. They do not realize what a poet, in the sense in which Goethe was a poet, really is. He describes reality when he says, ‘The sun-orb sings his ancient round,’ that is, as ancient humanity heard it, and as it still sounds to-day for those who are initiates. Truths such as these were given by Zarathustra to his pupils, and above all to his two most intimate disciples, those who later incarnated as Hermes and Moses. But to each he gave a separate and different instruction concerning the sun aura. Hermes was instructed in a way that led him to remain within the influence that emanated directly from the sun: Moses was inspired so that he retained the secret of the sun-wisdom as in a memory.

If, in accordance with occult science, we picture the earth after her separation from the sun and the moon, and see her opening her being to greet the sun, we have in Venus and Mercury that which stands in between the sun and the earth. If we now divide the whole space between the sun and the earth into three parts, we might say: The earth parted from the sun; she then thrust out from her the moon towards the sun, then Venus and Mercury separated from the sun and came towards the earth. We have to see therefore in Venus and Mercury, something which approaches the earth from the sun, and in the moon, something that approaches the sun from the earth.

The conditions of human evolution are thus seen to resemble the conditions of cosmic relationships; they reflect them as in a mirror. If we regard the teaching of Zarathustra as ‘sun-wisdom,’ which he imparted, on one side to Hermes, and on the other to Moses, then because Hermes had received the astral sheath of Zarathustra, the wisdom which dwelt in him may be likened to the streaming out of the sun-wisdom; while the wisdom that lived in Moses was, as it were, cut off, like a separate planet of wisdom, and had to go through a further development before it could receive those outpourings coming directly from the sun.

Just as with the moon's departure the forces of the earth opened to receive those coming from the sun, so the wisdom of Moses opened to receive the direct sun-wisdom as it streamed from Zarathustra. These two, the earth-wisdom of Moses, and the sun-wisdom of Zarathustra as given to Hermes, met in Egypt; where the teaching of Moses came into contact with that of Hermes. The wisdom developed by Moses, which he acquired through being separated from Zarathustra, might be compared with the throwing-off of the moon-substance by the earth. The wisdom he imparted to his people can also be called the wisdom of Jahve or Jehovah, for when rightly understood this name is like a resumé of the whole Moses-wisdom. Accepted in this sense you can understand why, according to ancient tradition, Jehovah is called the Moon Deity. This fact is to be found in many records, but is only comprehensible when we begin to realize these far-reaching connections.

As the earth thrust what it contained within it as moon, towards the sun, so the earth-wisdom of Moses had to go out to meet that of Hermes, who possessed in his astral sheath the direct wisdom of Zarathustra, and afterwards had to carry on its own evolution.

It has already been explained how after the meeting with Hermes, Mosaic wisdom continued to develop up to the time of David, and how a revised form of Hermetic or Mercury-wisdom appeared in the kingly warrior and divine singer of the Hebrew people. And we have seen how once more the content of the teaching of Moses came in touch with the sun-element during the Babylonian captivity when the reincarnated Zarathustra or Nazarathos taught the initiates among the Hebrews.

So in the course of the development of the wisdom of Moses we have to see a repetition of cosmic events; the separation of the earth from the sun and all its subsequent development. Such correspondences were regarded with deep veneration and awe by the wise men of the Hebrew race, and by all, who had understanding. They felt something like a direct revelation streaming towards them from cosmic spaces and cosmic life. To them, a personality such as Moses seemed like a messenger from the cosmic powers themselves. They felt him to be this, and as such he must be regarded by us if we would rightly understand these ancient times, otherwise it all remains an empty abstraction.

It was supremely important that the wisdom of Zarathustra, which had developed through Hermes and Moses, should evolve further and afterwards appear at a higher stage and in another form. In order that this might come to pass, Zarathustra, the individuality who had already offered up his astral and etheric bodies, had himself to appear again in a physical body, so that this might also be sacrificed. What he thus experienced was an ascent, a beautiful ascending progress. First, in very ancient times, Zarathustra lived in his own being and gave the impulse to post-Atlantean civilization in ancient Persia and Iran; he then sacrificed his astral body so that through Hermes the next civilization might be established, and to Moses he bequeathed his etheric body. These two sheaths he had already sacrificed. An opportunity for the sacrifice of his physical body had yet to come, for the great mystery of human evolution demanded that one individual should sacrifice his three bodies. The sacrifice of the physical body required special preparation, and to this end the physical body of Zarathustra had to be specially prepared.

I showed in the last lecture how, through the peculiar life of the Hebrew people, this special physical body had been in preparation for many generations. This was then offered up by Zarathustra as his third great sacrifice. In order that this could happen it was necessary that all the force formerly employed by the Hebrew people for direct spiritual perception, the forces that had fallen into decadence among the Turanian peoples, should be turned inwards and become inwardly constructive. This is the secret of the Hebrew people. While among the Turanians the ancient forces, lingering as an heirloom, served to prepare external organs of clairvoyance, in the Hebrews they turned inwards and organized their inner physical nature, so that this people was chosen to perceive and feel inwardly what in Atlantean times had been seen behind the different objects of the sense-world. Jehovah, as he was consciously named by the Hebrews, focussed to a single point, was the ‘Great Spirit’ who was seen by an earlier clairvoyance, behind all things and all beings. I also showed how the progenitor of the Hebrew people—as Father of the race—had been endowed with this inner organization in a very special way.

I have often remarked, and may well repeat it again, that myths and legends, telling in a pictorial way of long-ago events, come nearer the truth than many results of modern anthropological investigations which piece together tales of the origin of the world drawn from recent excavations and fragmentary remains. For the most part ancient legends are corroborated by the facts of Spiritual Science. I say, ‘for the most part,’ for I have not investigated them all, though the content of all really old legends is probably true. Research into the origin of the Hebrew people leads us, not to the conjectures of modern anthropological research, but to an original progenitor, to the Father of the Hebrew race mentioned in the Bible. Abram, or Abraham, is a real figure, and what the Talmud legends relate of him is true. We are told in these legends that the father of Abraham was a captain in the service of that legendary but real person, described in the Bible as Nimrod. To Nimrod it was foretold, by those who could read the signs of the times in dreams, that the son of his captain would dethrone many kings and rulers. Nimrod was afraid when he heard this, and ordered that his captain's son should be killed. After presenting another man's child, not his own, to Nimrod, the father of Abraham fled; his own child was reared in a cave. Occult investigation confirms this legend; it contains the truth. It indicates that Abraham was actually the first to turn inward the powers formerly used in external clairvoyance and transform them into organizing forces which led to an inward consciousness of God. This reversal of the whole sum of forces is indicated in the legend which tells that during the three years the child dwelt in the cave it sucked milk, by the grace of God, from the fingers of its own right hand. This self.. nourishment, this turning inwards of the forces formerly used in ancient clairvoyance, and the employment of them for organizing man inwardly, is explained to us wonderfully in the story of Abraham, the ancestor of the Hebrew people. Such legends, when experienced profoundly, have a powerful effect, making us realize that the ancient teachers of mankind could communicate true wisdom in no other way than by images. Such images were able to give rise, if not to a consciousness, yet to a feeling, for these mighty events, and this was sufficient for those ancient times.

Abraham was thus the first to develop the inward reflection of divine wisdom, of divine perception in a truly human way, as human thoughts concerning the Godhead. Abram, or Abraham as he was called later, had actually a different physical organization from other men living at that time. This is always insisted upon by occult investigation. The men around him were neither capable of nor organized for forming thoughts inwardly, by means of a special instrument. They could form thoughts when free of the body, through the forces of their developed etheric bodies, but they had no instrument for the formation of thoughts within the physical body. Abraham was the first to develop such an instrument; hence he is not wrongly called the inventor of arithmetic—though this statement must naturally be taken cum grano salis—as arithmetic is pre-eminently the science of physical thought. Arithmetic, on account of its inner certainty, approaches closely to clairvoyant knowledge; but it is dependent upon a physical organ.

Thus we have here a deep inward connection between the external forces, employed until then for the purpose of clairvoyance, and those now employed by an inner organ, for thought. This is what is referred to when Abraham is described as the inventor of arithmetic. He must be regarded as the man in whom the physical organ of thought was first implanted, that organ by which man was able to raise himself through his physical thinking to the contemplation of divinity. Before this time men could only learn of God and of divine existence through clairvoyance. In order that they might rise in thought to the divine, a physical instrument was necessary, and this organ was implanted for the first time in Abraham. The fact that thoughts had now to be apprehended through a physical organ, meant that the whole relationship of these thoughts concerning divinity to the objective world, and to the subjective nature of man, was completely changed.

Formerly, thoughts concerning God were conceived in the divine wisdom of the Mystery Schools, and from there were passed on to others able to receive them, that is, to those who had been freed from the organs of the physical body and rendered capable of etheric perception. There is but one way of passing on a physical instrument from one to another: through physical descent. In order that a physical organ of such importance as that possessed by Abraham could be preserved, it had to be propagated through physical inheritance from one generation to another. It can be easily realized why the handing down of this physical attribute through the blood of the race mattered so much to the Hebrew people. The organ, that in the first place had been shaped and crystallized in Abraham for the comprehension of divinity, had to be established. As it was handed down from generation to generation, it entered ever more deeply into human nature, and it grasped this the more deeply, the more it was inherited. For a physical organ can only be perfected when through inheritance it is passed on from one generation to another.

If he whom we have learnt to know as Zarathustra was to have the most perfect body possible (and this means a body with a physical organ capable of becoming an instrument for the conceiving of thoughts of God), the physical instrument implanted in Abraham had to be brought to the highest degree of perfection. It had to be so fully established and developed inwardly through inheritance that a fitting instrument could be evolved for Zarathustra. The development of such a perfect physical body through inheritance, inevitably meant the perfection not only of one but of the other sheaths as well, the etheric and the astral sheaths. They too had to be perfected through inheritance.

Now there is a certain fixed law in evolution which has often been described. From birth to his seventh year is a very special time in the development of man—in it he develops his physical body; from the seventh to the fourteenth–fifteenth, his etheric; and from then to the twenty-first—twenty-second year, his astral body. The evolution of the individual man is expressed in a law that is governed by the number seven. A similar law exists for the evolution of humanity as a whole, and affects the outer sheaths of men as they pass from one generation to another. The more profound working of this law will be considered later.

Whereas the individual man undergoes a stage of evolution every seven years and as the physical body becomes more perfect during the first seven years, so the whole structure of the physical body improves throughout the generations until the seventh generation, when it attains a certain state of perfection. But qualities are not transmitted directly from a man to his next descendant inheritance does not work in this way, but from father to grandson. Important qualities do not pass directly from father to son, or mother to daughter, but to the second generation, then to the fourth, and so on. Inheritance is of necessity connected with the number seven, but as every other generation is missed, it is really the number fourteen that has to be considered. It was only after fourteen generations that the physical qualities implanted in Abraham could reach perfection.

If the etheric and astral bodies were to be associated with this advance, their evolution had also to continue through seven, or rather, fourteen generations, in the same way as the etheric and astral bodies of the single individual evolves from the seventh to the fourteenth year, and from the fourteenth to the twenty-first. This means, therefore, that the physical organization which had been implanted in Abraham, the father of the race, had to pass through three times seven (or rather three times fourteen) generations, for not until then could it completely lay hold of the physical, etheric and astral bodies. After forty-two generations it was possible for a man to have developed perfectly in his physical, etheric and astral bodies, the aptitude first received by Abraham. Only such a body as this would be suitable for Zarathustra. This is the fact given out by the writer of the Gospel of St. Matthew. In his table of descent, he points expressly to this by enumerating fourteen generations from Abaham to David, fourteen from David to the Babylonian captivity, and fourteen from the captivity to Christ. During this long period the mission of the Hebrews, which began with Abraham, reached full development; by then it had been indelibly impressed on the different principles of the people of the race, so that from them a body meet for Zarathustra could be found in an age when something entirely new was to be revealed to men.

From such profound depths as these the Gospel of Matthew has its beginning—depths that can only be realized when they are understood. We must recognize that in the story of these three times fourteen generations we are shown that in the body inherited from Joseph by Jesus of Nazareth there dwelt the essence of what in its first beginnings existed in Abraham; that this essence then spread from him through the whole Hebrew people, and was then concentrated in a single instrument—in a single sheath. This was the sheath for Zarathustra, in which the Christ could incarnate.

The Christmas festival which we are about to celebrate is given deep significance again and a new life in the spirit with the anthroposophical view of the world. Spiritually, the Christmas festival is a sun festival, and it is as a sun festival that we shall meet it today. To begin with, let us hear the most wonderful apostrophe⁸¹ addressed to the sun, words Goethe wrote for his Faust:

The throb of life returns, with pulses beating Soft to ethereal dawn. O steadfast earth,
True through the night, you waited for my greeting,
Breathing beneath my feet in glad new birth,
And, clothing me afresh in joy of living,
In high resolve that banishes misgiving,
You stir my soul to prove life’s utmost worth.—

In gold of dawn the quickened world lies gleaming,
The forest is alive with myriad voices,
Through dell and vale the misty shapes are teeming,
But nature’s deepest heart in light rejoices;
Now burgeon, freshly quivering, frond and bough,
Sprung from the fragrant depth where they lay dreaming;
On flower and blade hang trembling pearls, and now Each colour stands out clear, in glad device,
And all the region is my Paradise.

Look up on high!—The giant peaks that stand In joy of light above the mountain-brow,
Are heralds of the solemn hour at hand,
That brings the blessing down upon our land.
Already, down the soft eternal stair,
The shine has reached the lower Alpine sward,
Where clarity and brilliance are restored,
As downward, step by step, the light is poured—
The dazzling sun strides forth, and fills the air.
I turn, from greater power than eyes can bear.

And thus it is, when hope with earnest striving Has toiled in aims as high as man may dare,
Fulfilment’s open gates give promise fair,
But from those everlasting depths comes driving,
A fiery blast that takes us unaware:
We thought to light life’s torch, but now, depriving Our highest hope, a sea of fire surrounds us.
Such fire! Of love? Or the fierce glow of hate?
The blend of joy and sorrow that confounds us Sends us to earth: to veil our troubled state,
For benefice of Spring we supplicate.

And so I turn, the sun upon my shoulders,
To watch the waterfall, with heart elate,
The cataract pouring, crashing from the boulders,
Split and rejoined a thousand times in spate;
The thunderous water seethes in fleecy spume,
Lifted on high in many a flying plume,
Above the spray-drenched air. And then how splendid To see the rainbow rising from this rage,
Now clear, now dimmed, in cool sweet vapour blended.
So strive the figures on our mortal stage.
This ponder well, the mystery closer seeing;
In mirrored hues we have our life and being.⁸²

These are the tremendous words Goethe lets his representative of humanity utter as the sun rises in the morning. It is not this sun, however, awakening anew every morning, which we are considering in connection with the festival of which we want to speak today. We want to let the true nature of the sun influence us in a much deeper sense. And the reality of that sun shall be our lodestar today.

We shall now hear the words that reflect the most profound meaning of the Christmas mystery. These words sounded as the pupils listened in deep devotion in the mysteries of all ages, hearing them before they were permitted to enter into the mysteries themselves.

Behold the sun
At the midnight hour!
In the lifeless ground
Build thy rocky tower!

So, when in depths thou mourn,
Find thou in death’s dark night
Creation’s pulse new-born With living morning light.

The powers on high make known
The eternal word divine;
The deeps must guard their own—
Peace, in their sacred shrine.

In gloom thou livest—
Create anew a sun!
In matter weaves—
Know spirit-bliss begun!⁸³

Many people who today know only the Christmas tree with its candles believe it to be an institution that has a long tradition. This is not the case, however. The Christmas tree is in fact a fairly recent European institution. Even the earliest Christmas tree was only just over a hundred years ago. But young as the tree may be, the Christmas festival is old indeed.

The Christmas festival was known and celebrated in all the mysteries of earliest times everywhere. It is not a mere sun feast but one that takes humanity to true perception or at least an idea of the wellsprings of existence. It was celebrated annually by the highest initiates in the mysteries at the time when the sun sent the least energy to the earth, gave the least warmth. It was also celebrated by those who could not yet take part in the whole of it, but knew only an outer reflection of the most sublime mysteries, a reflection in the form of images. And these secrets from the mysteries have survived through the ages and assumed a different garb among different peoples, depending on their beliefs. Christmas is the name given to the solemn night, this holy night celebrated in the great mysteries. These were occasions when the initiator would let the higher human being be resurrected in those who had been adequately prepared, or, to put it in present-day terms, when the living Christ was born in the inner human being.

People who do not know that spiritual principles are at work as well as chemical and physical principles, and that like chemical and physical principles these have their particular seasons in the cosmos, people like this are the only ones able to believe that it does not matter when the higher self is awakened. The essence of the great mysteries was that human beings lived through an event in which they were allowed to see the creative powers in the glory of colour, in bright light; were permitted to see the world around them filled with spiritual qualities, with many spirits; were permitted to see the world of spirits around them, and had the greatest experience a human being can have. One day this moment will come for all and everyone. All will know it, though perhaps only after many incarnations—but the time will come for all and everyone when the Christ will rise within them and new seeing, new hearing will awaken in them.

Mystery pupils who were being prepared for the awakening would first be taught what this awakening meant in the great universe. After this the final acts would come to bring awakening, and these acts were performed at the time when the darkness was greatest, when the sun was at its lowest in the outside world—at Christmas, for those who knew the true facts in the spirit knew that powers moved through cosmic space at this time that were helpful for such an awakening. During the preparation the pupils would be told that those who truly wished to know must know not only what had been happening on this globe through millennia but must also learn to have an overview of the whole of human evolution. They also had to know that the great festivals had been made part of the year and its seasons by leading spirits and that they must devote themselves to looking up to the great eternal truths.

The eye was guided to roam over millions of years. Look to the time, the pupils would be told, when our earth was not yet the way it is now, when there was no sun as yet, no moon, but the two were still one with the earth; when the earth was still one body with the sun and the moon. Human beings were there at that time, but they did not yet have a body. They were spiritual entities, and no light of the sun fell on those human souls and spirits from outside. The light of the sun was in the earth itself. It was not like the sunlight of today, which falls on creatures and objects from the outside. It was a light that had power of spirit in it, and shone forth at the same time in the inner life of every human being. Then came the time when the sun moved away from the earth. It separated from the earth and its light then fell on the earth from outside. The sun had withdrawn from the earth. Darkness had come to the inner human being.

This was where the human race began to evolve towards the future point in time when they would find the inner light shining again within them. Humanity had to gain knowledge of the things of this earth, using the outer senses. Human evolution tended towards the time when the higher human being, the spirit human being, would once again be aglow and alight within. From the light through the darkness to the light—that is the course of human evolution.

When the pupils had been prepared they would be guided towards awakening at the moment in time when as a chosen group they were to have an inner experience of something which the rest of humanity is only to experience in the distant future. Then they would see the light of the spirit with eyes that had been opened in the spirit. This solemn moment was to come when outer light was weakest, on the day when the sun shone least in the outside world. Then, on that day, the pupils of the mysteries would be brought together, and the inner light would open up for them.

Others who were not yet able to take part in this celebration were to have at least an outer image that would tell them: ‘You, too, shall one day know this great moment. Today you see an image. Later you shall experience the event you now see in the image.’

Those were the lesser mysteries. They would show a reflection of what the initiate would experience at a later time. Today we’ll share in the experience of what happened in the lesser mysteries around the midnight hour. It was the same everywhere—in the Egyptian mysteries, the Eleusinian mysteries, the mysteries of Asia Minor, in the Babylonian and Chaldean mysteries and also in those of Persian Mithra worship and the Indian Brahma mysteries. Everywhere the pupils of those mystery centres would have the same experience around the midnight hour of that solemn night.

They would gather in good time on the eve of the event. In quiet thought they had to gain insight into the significance of this, the most important event. They would sit in absolute silence, having gathered in the dark. When midnight approached they would have been sitting in the dark room for hours. Thoughts of eternity went through their inmost minds. Then, towards midnight, mysterious sounds would arise, flooding the room, growing louder and then softer again. Hearing these sounds the pupils would know it to be the music of the spheres. Profound, solemn devotion filled their hearts. Then a faint light would come from a dimly lit disk. Those who saw it would know that this disk represented the earth. The luminous disk would then grow darker and darker until finally it would be quite black. At the same time the room around them would grow progressively lighter. Those who saw it knew that the black disk was the earth. The sun, which otherwise shone through the earth had been obscured. The earth could no longer see the sun. Then halo upon halo would develop around the earth’s disk, in rainbow colours, going outwards. Those who saw this would know that it was the iris.⁸⁴ And around midnight, a luminous reddish violet halo would arise in place of the black earth disk; a word was written on this. The word would be a different one, depending on the nations whose members were allowed to experience the mystery. In our present-day language it would be Christos.⁸⁵ Those who saw it would know it to be the sun. It appeared to them in that midnight hour when the world all around was lying in profound darkness. The pupils would be told that they had now experienced something in images which in the mysteries was called ‘to see the sun around midnight’.

A true initiate truly learned to see the sun around the midnight hour, for the material principle in him had been extinguished. The sun of the spirit alone lived in him, its light shining out over all the darkness of matter.

This was the most blessed moment in human evolution when the human being found himself released from darkness and living in the light of eternity. It was shown as an image in the mysteries, year after year, around the midnight hour of that solemn night. The image showed that there is a sun of the spirit as well as the physical sun, and like the physical sun this must be born from deep darkness. To make it even clearer to them, the pupils were taken to a cave after their experience of the rising sun, the Christos. The cave appeared to contain nothing but rock—dead, lifeless matter. They would then see ears of corn arise from the stones, a sign of life, a symbolic picture of life arising from apparent death, life being born in dead mineral. They would then be told that just as the power of the sun will wax again from this day onward, the day when it appeared to have died, so new life was forever rising from life that was dying.

The same event is referred to in the words ‘He must wax but I must wane’ in the New Testament.⁸⁶ John, herald of the coming Christ, of the light of the spirit when it is at its greatest height in the course of the year at midsummer, this John must wane, and as he wanes the power of the light that is coming waxes, growing more and more powerful as John wanes. Thus the new, the coming life is preparing in the seed which must perish and die so that the new plant may arise.

The inner feeling pupils were meant to develop was that life lies dormant in death, that new, magnificent flowers and fruit arose from death and putrefaction, that the earth was filled with the power to give birth. They had to come to believe that something happens in the inner earth at this time—the overcoming of death through life. When they were shown the conquering light they were shown the life that was present in death. They experienced this inwardly, they lived through this when they saw light arise and shine out in the darkness. They now saw sprouting life in the rock cave, life arising in glorious abundance from something that was seemingly dead.

That is how the pupils were trained to develop this belief in life, and belief in what may be called the greatest human ideal was made to grow in their hearts and minds. They learned to look up to this, the greatest human ideal, to the time when earth will have completed its evolution, when light will be radiant in the whole of humanity. The earth itself will then fall to dust, but its spiritual essence will remain, with all the human beings who have grown inwardly luminous through the light of the spirit. And earth and humanity shall awaken to a higher form of existence, a new stage of existence.

When Christianity arose in the course of evolution, this was its ideal in the highest possible sense. It was inwardly felt that the Christos, being the immortal spirit of the earth, was to appear as the foundation not only of all material, sprouting life, but also of spiritual rebirth, the great ideal of all humanity; that he was born around Christmas time, the time of greatest darkness, as a sign that a higher human being can be born out of the darkness of matter in the human soul. Before people came to speak of a Christos, they would speak of a sun hero in the earlier mysteries; he was seen to be connected with the same ideal as the Christos of Christianity. The individual connected with the ideal was called the sun hero. Just as the sun completes its cycle in the course of the year, as its light increases and decreases, just as its heat seems to be withdrawn from the earth and then radiates again, just as its death holds life, letting it stream forth once again, so the sun hero has become lord over death and night and darkness because of the power of his life in the spirit.

Seven degrees of initiation were known in the Persian Mithras mysteries. The first was the ‘raven’, someone able only to go as far as the portal of the temple of initiation. The ravens became mediators between the material life of the outside world and the spiritual life of the inner world; no longer belonging to the material world they were not yet part of the spiritual world. We find these ravens come up again and again, always playing the same role as messengers going to and fro between the two worlds and conveying knowledge between them. We also have them in our Norse and German myths and legends—Odin’s ravens and the ravens flying around the Kyffhäuser mountain. The second degree, that of the ‘occult person’, took the disciple from the portal into the inner initiation temple. There he matured until he reached the third degree, the ‘protagonist’ who would go out and make known to the world the occult truths he had experienced in the temple. The fourth degree, that of the ‘lion’, was gained when his consciousness was no longer limited to the individual but to a whole tribe. Hence the Christ was known as the ‘lion of Judah’. Someone whose consciousness extended even further, embracing a whole nation, would have reached the fifth degree. He would no longer have a name of his own but would bear the name of the nation. Thus people spoke of a ‘Persian’, or an ‘Israelite’. We can see why Nathanael⁸⁷ was called a ‘true Israelite’; it was because he had reached the fifth degree of initiation. The sixth degree was the ‘sun hero’, and we need to understand what this means. We shall then come to see that pupils in the mysteries would feel a shudder of veneration if they knew something about a sun hero and were able to share in the festival to celebrate the birth of a sun hero at Christmas.

Everything in the cosmos takes its rhythmic course. All the stars follow a great rhythm, as does the sun. If the sun were to abandon this rhythm for even a movement, if it were to leave its orbit for just a moment, this would cause a revolution of unheard-of importance in the whole of the universe. Rhythm governs the whole of nature, from lifeless nature all the way to the human being. We see it in the plant world—a violet, a lily flowering at the same season. Animals are on heat at given times in the year. This changes only in humans. Rhythm, active in powers of growth, reproduction and so on all the way up to the animal world, comes to a halt in human beings.

Humanity is meant to be embedded in freedom, and the more civilized people are the more is this rhythm on the decrease. Just as the light vanishes at Christmas time, so has rhythm apparently completely disappeared from human lives, and chaos prevails. But human beings are meant to bring this rhythm to birth from within and do so on their own initiative. They are meant to shape their lives of their own free will so that they run within rhythmic boundaries. Life’s events are meant to follow one another as firmly and securely as the sun’s orbit. And just as it is unthinkable that the sun’s orbit should ever change, so it should be unthinkable that the rhythm of such a life could be broken.

The sun hero was the embodiment of such a life rhythm. With the strength of the higher human being who had been born in him he gained the strength to govern the rhythm of his own biography. This sun hero was also the Christ Jesus for the first two centuries, and this is why the celebration of his birth was moved to the time when the birthday feast of the sun hero had been celebrated from time immemorial. Hence also everything connected with the life story of Christ Jesus, hence also the midnight mass, celebrated in caves by the early Christians in memory of the sun festival. At this mass, a sea of light shone out in the darkness of midnight in memory of the spirit sun that rose in the mysteries. Hence the story goes that Jesus was born in a stable, in memory of the rock cave out of which life was born in those ears of corn that were the symbol for life.

Just as life on earth was born out of dead rock, so was the highest—Christ Jesus—born out of the lowest. The legend of three priestly sages, the three kings from the east, was connected with his birth. They brought gold, the symbol of external power full of wisdom, myrrh, the symbol of life vanquishing death, and incense, symbol of the cosmic ether in which the spirit lives.

In the deeper meaning of the Christmas festival we can therefore sense echoes from man’s earliest times. And this has come down to us in the particular quality which Christianity has. Its symbols reflect the earliest symbols known to humanity. The tree with its candles is such a symbol. It is an image of the tree of paradise for us.⁸⁸ That tree represents the life-giving principle and the gaining of knowledge in paradise. Paradise itself is the whole, complete sphere of material nature. Spiritual nature is represented by the tree in the midst of it, the tree that encompasses knowledge and the tree of life. Knowledge can only be gained at the cost of life.

A story tells us the significance of the tree of knowledge and the tree of life. Seth stood before the gates of paradise and asked to come in. The cherub guarding the entrance let him enter. This is to indicate that Seth became an initiate. When Seth was in paradise he found that the tree of life and the tree of knowledge were firmly intertwined. The archangel Michael, he who stands before god, allowed him to take three seeds from the intertwined tree.

This tree prophesies the future of humanity. When the whole of humanity has gained insight and has been initiated, it will bear within it not only the tree of knowledge but also the other tree, that of life. Death will then be no more. For the time being, however, the initiate was only allowed to take three seeds, the three seeds that signify the higher principles of the human being.

When Adam died, Seth placed the three seeds in his mouth and a flaming tree grew on Adam’s grave. This had the property that new shoots and leaves would grow from any wood cut from it. In the bush’s circle of flame were written the words ehjeh asher ehjeh, meaning ‘I am the one who was, who is and who shall be’. This signifies the principle that goes through all incarnations, the power of man to renew himself, come into existence again and again, descending from the light into the darkness and ascending from the darkness into the light.

The rod Moses used to perform his miracles was cut from the wood of this bush. The gate of Solomon’s temple was made of it. Wood was taken from the bush and put into the pond at Bethesda and gave it the power of which the story tells. And the cross of Christ Jesus was made of this wood, the cross which shows life dying away, life perishing in death which nevertheless has the power in it to bring forth new life. Here we have before us the great symbol for the world—life that overcomes death. The wood of the cross had grown from the three seeds that came from paradise.

The same symbol—of the lower principle dying and the resurrection of the higher principle sprouting forth from it—is also shown in the Rose Cross, and the red roses. Goethe put it in these words:

For as long as you do not have
this word ‘die and become’,
you are but a troubled guest
in the darkness of this earth. ⁸⁹

This is a wonderful connection between the tree of paradise and the wood of the cross! The cross may be a symbol for Easter, but it also deepens the Christmas mood for us. We can feel the new life welling forth in the Christ idea as we contemplate it in the night when Christ Jesus was born. We see the idea reflected in the living roses decorating our tree here. They tell us that the tree of holy night has not yet become the wood of the cross but the power to be this wood is beginning to arise within it. The roses growing among the green are a symbol of the eternal conquering the temporal.

The square of Pythagoras (Fig. 12) is a symbol for the fourfold nature of man—physical body, ether body, astral body and I.

Pythagoras">

Above it is the tao (Fig. 16), the sign reminding us of the image our earliest ancestors had of God. Before Europe, Asia and Africa were cultivated land, those ancestors lived on Atlantis, which has gone down beneath the waves. Norse mythology still holds memories of Atlantis in the legends of Niflheim, home of mists. For Atlantis did not have clear air. Vast, mighty masses of mist rolled and boiled above the soil, similar to the experience we may have today walking in the clouds and mists at high altitudes. Sun and moon were not clearly visible in the sky. On Atlantis they appeared surrounded by rainbow haloes the sacred iris. People were then still much more able to understand the language of nature. The lapping waves, the sound of the wind in the trees, the whispering leaves, the rumble of thunder still speak to us today, but we no longer understand them. The ancient Atlanteans did. They felt that a divine element was speaking to them in all these things. In the midst of all those speaking clouds and water and leaves and winds a sound reached the ears of the Atlanteans: tao—it is I. The essence of the whole natural world lived in that sound. Atlantis heard it. The tao later became the letter T. The circle at the top is the sign for the all-encompassing nature of God the Father.

Finally the principle which is present in the whole of the universe and exists as the human being is shown in the symbol of the pentagram (Fig. 17) which we see at the top of the tree. It is not permissible to speak of the deepest sense of the pentagram here and now. It does show us the star of evolving humanity. It is the star, the symbol of the human being which is followed by all who have wisdom, as the priestly wise men did in the distant past. It is the meaning of the earth, the great sun hero who is born in holy night because the most sublime light shines out in the deepest darkness.

Humanity will live on into a future when the light will be born in them; when words pregnant with meaning will give way to others and it will no longer be said that the darkness cannot comprehend the light. Truth will sound out in cosmic space, and the darkness will comprehend the light that shines out for us in the star of humanity. Darkness shall yield and comprehend the light, that is, will be taken hold of by it. And this is meant to sound out for us from our inmost being in the Christmas festival. Only then will we be celebrating Christmas in the right way, for it will then tell us that one day the light of the spirit will shine out from the inmost human being into the whole world. And we’ll then be able to celebrate Christmas as the feast of the most sublime ideal for humanity. It will then have real meaning again, be alive again in our souls, and the Christmas tree, too, will once more have its true meaning as a symbol of the paradise tree, truer than the meanings it is given today, however thoughtful. In our hearts, celebration of holy night will lead to joyful hope and to understanding that yes, I too shall experience within me what we must call the birth of the higher human being; in me, too, the birth of the saviour, of the Christos, will come.

• 81. In rhetoric, a passage where the speaker specifically turns away from the main discourse and addresses a present or absent person or thing.
• 82. Goethe, J. W. Faust 2, Pleasing landscape. Faust speaking. Translated by Philip Wayne. London: Penguin Classics, Penguin Books Ltd 1959.
• 83. Version as found in a notebook entry Rudolf Steiner made in 1906. Different versions appeared in later years. English version given here taken from Steiner R. Verses and Meditations. Translated by F. Melland. London; Rudolf Steiner Press 1979.
• 84. In Greek mythology, Iris was the messenger of the gods. In another set of notes it says: 'an image of St Iris'.
• 85. The Greek ὁ Χριστός means ‘the anointed’, corresponding to the Hebrew ‘the Messias’. The ‘χρηστος’, Chrestos, used by Gnostics and Manicheans means 'the good one'; according to Marcion (early Christian Gnostic, c. 100–165 AD), the most sublime good god as distinct from the demiurgos, the creator god who was merely just. 'Chrestos' was introduced in the 3rd edition of the special German booklet Zeichen und Symbole des Weihnachtsfestes, for Rudolf Steiner used it in the lecture he gave on 14 December 1905 (in GA 54; English in Christmas). The context was a different one, however, and a further review of the original records shows that 'Chrestos' does not appear in any of the sets of notes available to us (Literary Estate Administration in Dornach).
• 86. John 3: 30.
• 87. John 1:47.
• 88. See 'Der Baum des Lebens und der Erkenntnis des Guten und des Bosen. Die Geheimnisse der Kunst' in GA 162.
• 89. In ‘Selige Sehnsucht’, Westöstlicher Diwan.
• 90. Lully (or Lull), Raymond (c. 1232–1315). See Steiner R. World History in the Light of Anthroposophy (GA 233), lectured dated 5 January 1924. Tr. G. & M. Adams. London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1977.

The more deeply we penetrate into the occult records of the various ages and peoples, that is to say, into the truly occult records, the more we are struck by one feature of them which meets us again and again. I have already indicated it in discussing the Gospel of St. John, and again on a later occasion in speaking of the Gospel of St. Mark. I refer to the fact that on looking deeply into any such occult record it becomes ever clearer that it is really most wonderfully composed, that it forms an artistic whole. I could show, for instance, how St. John's Gospel, when we penetrate into its depths, reveals a wonderful, artistic composition. With remarkable dramatic power the story is carried up stage by stage to a great climax, and then continues from this point onward with a kind of renewal of dramatic power to the end. You can study this in the lectures I gave at Cassel on St. John's Gospel in relation to the three other Gospels, especially to that according to St. Luke.

Most impressive is the gradual enhancement of the whole composition while the super-sensible is placed before us in the so-called miracles and signs; each working up in ever-increasing wonder to the sign that meets us in the initiation of Lazarus. It makes us realize how we can always find artistic beauty at the foundation of these occult records. I could show the same for the structure of St. Mark's Gospel. When we regard such records in their beauty of form and their dramatic power, we can indeed conclude that just because they are true such records cannot be other than artistically, beautifully composed, in the deepest sense of the word. For the moment we will only indicate this fact, as we may come back to it in the course of these lectures.

Now it is remarkable that the same thing meets us again in the Bhagavad Gita. There is a wonderful intensification of the narrative, one might say, a hidden artistic beauty in the song, so that if nothing else were to touch the soul of one studying this sublime Gita, he still could not help being impressed by its marvelous composition. Let us begin by indicating a few of the outstanding points—and we will confine ourselves today to the first four discourses—because these points are important both for the artistic structure and the deep occult truths that it contains.

First of all Arjuna meets us. Facing the bloodshed in which he is to take part, he grows weak. He sees all that is to take place as a battle of brothers against brothers, his blood relations. He shrinks back. He will not fight against them. While fear and terror come over him and he is horror-stricken, his charioteer suddenly appears as the instrument through which Krishna, God, is to speak to him. Here in this first episode we already have a moment of great intensity and also an indication of deep occult truth. Anyone who finds the way, by whatever path, into the spiritual worlds, even though he may have gone only a few steps—or even had only a dim presentiment of the way to be experienced—such a person will be aware of the deep significance of this moment.

As a rule we cannot enter the spiritual worlds without passing through a deep upheaval in our souls. We have to experience something which disturbs and shakes all our forces, filling us with intense feeling. Emotions that are generally spread out over many moments, over long periods of living, whose permanent effect on the soul is therefore weaker—such feelings are concentrated in a single moment and storm through us with tremendous force when we enter the occult worlds. Then we experience a kind of inner shattering, which can indeed be compared to fear, terror and anxiety, as though we were shrinking back from something almost with horror. Such experiences belong to the initial stages of occult development, to entering the spiritual worlds. It is just for this reason that such great care must be taken to give the right advice to those who would enter the spiritual worlds through occult training. Such a person must be prepared so that he may experience this upheaval as a necessary event in his soul life without its encroaching on his bodily life and health, because his body must not suffer a like upheaval. That is the essential thing. We must learn to suffer the convulsions of our soul with outward equanimity and calm.

This is true not only for our bodily processes. The soul forces we need for everyday living, our ordinary intellectual powers, even those of imagination, of feeling and will—these too must not be allowed to become unbalanced. The upheaval that may be the starting-point for occult life must take place in far deeper layers of the soul, so that we go through our external life as before, without anything being noticed in us outwardly, while within we may be living through whole worlds of shattering soul-experience. That is what it means to be ripe for occult development: To be able to experience such inward convulsions without losing one's outer balance and calm. To this end a person who is striving to become ripe for occult development must widen the circle of his interests beyond his everyday life. He must get away from that to which he is ordinarily attached from morning to night, and reach out to interests that move on the great horizon of the world.

We must be able to undergo the experience of doubting all truth and all knowledge. We must have the power to do this with the same intensity of feeling people generally have only where their everyday interests are concerned. We must be able to feel with the destiny of all mankind, with as much interest as we usually feel in our own destiny, or perhaps in that of our nearest connections of family, nation, or race. If we cannot do this, we are not yet completely ready for occult development.

For this reason modern anthroposophy, if pursued earnestly and worthily, is the right preparation in our age for a true occult development. Let those who are absorbed in the petty material interests of the immediate present, who cannot find sufficient interest to follow the anthroposophist in looking out over world and planetary destinies, over the historical epochs and races of mankind—let them scoff if they will! One who would prepare himself for an occult development must lift up his eyes to the heights where the interests of mankind, of the earth, of the whole planetary system become his own. When a person's interests are gradually sharpened and widened through the study of anthroposophy, which leads even without occult training to an understanding of occult truths, then he is being rightly prepared for an occult path.

In our time there are many who have such interests for the whole of mankind. More often they are not to be found among the intellectuals but are people who appear to lead quite simple lives. Yes, there are many today who have a humble place in life and as if by natural instinct feel this interest in the whole of mankind. That is why anthroposophy is in such harmony with the spirit of our age.

First, then, we must learn of the mighty upheaval of the soul that has to come at the beginning of occult experience. With wonderful truth the Bhagavad Gita sets such a moment of upheaval at the starting-point of Arjuna's experience, only he does not go through an occult training but is placed into this moment by his destiny. He is placed into the battle without being able to recognize its necessity, its purpose, or its aim. All he sees is that blood relations are about to fight against each other. Such a soul as Arjuna can be shaken by that to its innermost core, for he has to say to himself, “Brother fights against brother. Surely then all the tribal customs will be shaken and then the tribe itself will wither away and be destroyed, and all its morality fall into decay! Those laws will be shaken that in accordance with an eternal destiny place men into castes; and then will everything be imperiled—man himself, the law, the whole world. The whole significance of mankind will be in the balance.” Such is his feeling. It is as though the ground were about to sink from under his feet, as though an abyss were opening up before him.

Arjuna was a man who had received into his feeling something that the man of today no longer knows, but that in those ancient times was a primeval teaching of tradition. He knew that what is handed on from generation to generation in mankind is bound up with the woman nature; while the individual, personal qualities whereby a man stands out from his blood connections and his family line are bound up with the man nature. What a man inherits as common, generic qualities is handed on to the descendants by the woman, whereas what forms him into a unique, individual being, tearing him out of the generic succession, is the part he receives from his father. “Must it not then have an evil effect on the laws that rule woman's nature,” says Arjuna to himself, “if blood fights against blood?”

There is another feeling that Arjuna has absorbed, on which for him the whole well-being of human evolution depends. He feels that the forefathers of the tribe, the ancestors, are worthy of honor. He feels that their souls watch over the succeeding generations. For him it is a sublime service to offer up fires of sacrifice to the Manes, to the holy souls of the ancestors. But now what must he see? Instead of altars with sacrificial fires burning on them for the ancestors, he sees those who should join in kindling such fires assailing one another in battle. If we would understand a human soul we must penetrate into its thoughts. Above all we must enter deeply into its feelings because it is in feeling that the soul is intimately bound up with its very life. Now think of the great contrast between all that Arjuna would naturally feel, and the bloody battle of brother against brother that is actually about to take place. Destiny is hammering at Arjuna's soul, shaking it to its very depths. It is as though he had to gaze down into a terrible abyss. Such an upheaval awakens the forces of the soul and brings it to a vision of occult realities that at other times are hidden as behind a veil. That is what gives such dramatic intensity to the Bhagavad Gita. The ensuing discourse is thus placed before us with wonderful power, as developing of necessity out of Arjuna's destiny, instead of being given us merely as an academic, pedantic course of instruction in occultism.

Now that Arjuna has been rightly prepared for the birth of the deeper forces of his soul, now that he can see these forces in inward vision, there happens what everyone who has the power to behold it will understand: His charioteer becomes the instrument through which the god Krishna speaks to him. In the first four discourses we observe three successive stages, each higher than the last, each one introducing something new. Here in these very first discourses we find an accent that is wonderful in its dramatic art, apart from the fact that it corresponds to a deep occult truth. The first stage is a teaching that might appear even trivial to many Westerners in its given form. Let us admit that at once. (Here I should like to remark, especially for the benefit of my dear friends here in Finland, that I mean by “Western” all that lies to the west of the Ural Mountains, the Volga, the Caspian Sea and Asia Minor—in fact the whole of Europe. What is to be called Eastern land belongs essentially in Asia. Of course, America too forms part of the West.)

To begin with then we find a teaching that might easily appear trivial, especially to a philosophical mind. For what is the first thing that Krishna says to Arjuna as a word of exhortation for the battle? “Look there,” he says, “at those who are to be killed by you; those in your own ranks who are to be killed and those who are to remain behind, and consider well this one thing. What dies and what remains alive in your ranks and in those of the enemy is but the outer physical body. The spirit is eternal. If your warriors slay those in the ranks over there they are but slaying the outer body, they are not killing the spirit, which is eternal. The spirit goes from change to change, from incarnation to incarnation. It is eternal. This deepest being of man is not affected in this battle. Rise, Arjuna, rise to the spiritual standpoint, then you can go and give yourself up to your duty. You need not shudder nor be sad at heart, for in killing your enemies you are not killing their essential being.”

Thus speaks Krishna, and at first hearing his words are in a sense trivial, though in a special way. In many respects the Westerner is short-sighted in his thinking and consciousness. He never stops to consider that everything is evolving. If he says that Krishna's exhortation, as I have expressed it, is trivial, it is as though one were to say, “Why do they honor Pythagoras as such a great man when every schoolboy and girl knows his theorem?” It would be stupid to conclude that Pythagoras was not a great man in having discovered his theorem just because every schoolboy understands it! We see how stupid this is, but we do not notice when we fail to realize that what any Western philosopher may repeat by rote as the wisdom of Krishna—that the spirit is eternal, immortal—was a sublime wisdom at the time Krishna revealed it. Souls like Arjuna did indeed feel that blood-relations ought not to fight. They still felt the common blood that flowed in a group of people. To hear it said that “the spirit is eternal” (spirit in the sense of what is generally conceived, abstractly, as the center of man's being)—the spirit is eternal and undergoes transformations, passing from incarnation to incarnation—this stated in abstract and intellectual terms was something absolutely new and epoch-making in its newness when it resounded in Arjuna's soul through Krishna's words. All the people in Arjuna's environment believed definitely in reincarnation, but as Krishna taught it, as a general and abstract idea, it was new, especially in regard to Arjuna's situation. This is one reason why we had to say that such a truth can only be called “trivial” in a special sense. That holds true in another respect as well. Our abstract thought, which we use even in the pursuit of popular science, which we regard today as quite natural—this thinking activity was by no means always so natural and simple.

In order to illustrate what I say, let me give you a radical example. You will think it strange that while for all of you it is quite natural to speak of a “fish,” it was by no means natural for primitive peoples to do so. Primitive peoples are acquainted with trout and salmon, cod and herring, but “fish” they do not know. They have no such word as “fish,” because their thought does not extend to such abstract generalization. They know individual trees, but “tree” they do not know. Thinking in such general concepts is by no means natural to primitive races even in the present time. This mode of thinking has indeed only entered humanity in the course of its evolution. In fact, one who considers why it was that logic first began in the time of ancient Greece, could scarcely be surprised when the statement is made on occult grounds that logical thinking has only existed since the period that followed the original composition of the Bhagavad Gita. Krishna impels Arjuna to logical thought, to thinking in abstractions, as if to a new thing that is only now to enter humanity.

But this activity of thought that man has developed and takes quite for granted today, people have the most distorted and unnatural notions about. Western philosophers in particular have most distorted ideas about thought, for they generally take it to be merely a photographic reproduction of external sense reality. They imagine that concepts and ideas and the whole inner thinking of man simply arises in him out of the external physical world. While libraries of philosophical words have been written in the West to prove that thought is merely something having its origin in the stimulus of the external physical world, it is only in our time that thought will be valued for what it really is.

Here I reach a point that is most important for those who would undergo an occult development in their own souls. I want to make every effort to get this point clear. The medieval alchemists used to say—I cannot now discuss what they really meant by it—that gold could be made from all metals, gold in any desired amount, but that one must first have a minute quantity of it. Without that one could not make gold. Whether or not this is true of gold, it is certainly true of clairvoyance. No man could actually attain clairvoyance if he did not have a tiny amount of it already in his soul. It is generally supposed that men as they are, are not clairvoyant. If that were true they could never become clairvoyant at all, because just as the alchemist thought that one must have a little gold to conjure forth large quantities, so must one already be a little clairvoyant in order to be able to develop and extend it more and more. Now you may see two alternatives here and ask, “Do you think then that we all are clairvoyant, if only slightly, or, do you think that those of us who are not clairvoyant can never become so?” This is just the point. It is most important to understand that there is really no one among you who does not have this starting-point of clairvoyance, though you may not be conscious of it. All of you have it. None of you is lacking in it. What is this that all possess? It is something not generally regarded or valued as clairvoyance. Let me make a rather crude comparison.

If a pearl is lying in the roadway and a chicken finds it, the chicken does not value the pearl. Most men and women today are chickens in this respect. They do not value the pearl that lies there in full view before them. What they value is something quite different. They value their concepts and ideas, but no one could think abstractly, could have thoughts and ideas, if he were not clairvoyant. In our ordinary thinking the pearl of clairvoyance is contained from the start. Ideas arise in the soul through exactly the same process as what gives rise to its highest powers. It is immensely important to learn to understand that clairvoyance begins in something common and everyday. We only have to recognize the super-sensible nature of our concepts and ideas. We must realize that these come to us from the super-sensible worlds; only then can we look at the matter rightly.

When I tell you of the higher hierarchies, of Seraphim and Cherubim and Thrones, right down to Archangels and Angels, these are beings who must speak to the human soul from higher spiritual worlds. It is from those worlds that concepts and ideas come into the human soul, not from the world of the senses. In the 18th century what was considered a great word was uttered by a pioneer of thinking, “O, Man, make bold to use thy power of reason!” Today a great word must resound in men's souls, “O, Man, make bold to claim thy concepts and ideas as the beginning of thy clairvoyance.” What I have just expressed I said many years ago, publicly in my books Truth and Science and The Philosophy of Freedom, where I showed that human ideas come from super-sensible, spiritual knowledge. It was not understood at the time, and no wonder, for those who should have understood it were—well, like the chickens! We must realize that at the moment when Krishna stands before Arjuna and gives him the power of abstract judgment, he is thereby giving him, for the first time in the whole of evolution, the starting-point for the knowledge of higher worlds. The spirit can be seen on the very surface of the changes that take place within the external world of sense. Bodies die; the spirit, the abstract, the essential being, is eternal. The spiritual can be seen playing on the surface of phenomena. This is what Krishna would reveal to Arjuna as the beginning of a new clairvoyance for men.

One thing is necessary for men of today if they would attain to an inwardly-experienced truth. They must have once passed through the feeling of the fleeting nature of all outer transformations. They must have experienced the mood of infinite sadness, of infinite tragedy, and at the same time the exultation of joy. They must have felt the breath of the ephemeral that streams out from all things. They must have been able to fix their interest on this coming forth and passing away again, the transitoriness of the world of sense. Then, when they have been able to feel the deepest pain and the fullest delight in the external world, they must once have been absolutely alone—alone with their concepts and ideas. They must have had the feeling, “In these concepts I grasp the mystery of the worlds; I take hold of the outer edge of cosmic being,”—the very expression I once used in my The Philosophy of Freedom! This must be experienced, not merely understood intellectually, and if you would experience it, it must be in deepest loneliness. Then you have another feeling. On the one hand you experience the majesty of the world of ideas that is spread out over the All. On the other hand you experience with the deepest bitterness that you have to separate yourself from space and time in order to be together with your concepts and ideas. Loneliness! It is the icy cold of loneliness. Furthermore, it comes to you that the world of ideas has now drawn together as in a single point of this loneliness. Now you say, I am alone with my world of ideas. You become utterly bewildered in your world of ideas, an experience that stirs you to the depths of your soul. At length you say to yourself, “Perhaps all this is only I myself; perhaps the only truth about these laws is that they exist in the point of my own loneliness.” Thus you experience, infinitely enhanced, utter doubt in all existence.

When you have this experience in your world of ideas, when the full cup of doubt in all existence has been poured out with pain and bitterness over your soul, then only are you ripe to understand how, after all, it is not the infinite spaces and periods of time of the physical world from which your ideas have come. Now only, after the bitterness of doubt, you open yourself to the regions of the spiritual and know that your doubt was justified, and in what sense it was justified. For it had to be, since you imagined that the ideas had come into your soul from the times and spaces of the physical world. How do you now feel your world of ideas having experienced its origin in the spiritual worlds? Now for the first time you feel yourself inspired. Before, you were feeling the infinite void spread around you like a dark abyss. Now you begin to feel that you are standing on a rock that rises up out of the abyss. You know with certainty, “Now I am connected with the spiritual worlds. They, not the world of sense, have bestowed on me my world of ideas.”

This is the next stage for the evolving soul. It is the stage where man begins to be deeply in earnest with what has today come to be a trivial, commonplace truth. To bear this feeling in your heart will prepare you to receive in a true way the first truth that Krishna gives to Arjuna after the mighty upheaval and convulsion in his soul: The truth of the eternal spirit living through outer transformations. To abstract understanding we speak in concepts and ideas. Krishna speaks to Arjuna's heart. What may be trivial and commonplace for the understanding is infinitely deep and sublime to the heart of man.

We see how the first stage shows itself at once as a necessary consequence of the deeply moving experience that is presented to us at the start of the Bhagavad Gita. Now the next stage.

It is easy to speak of what is often called dogma in occultism—something that is accepted in blind faith and given out as gospel truth. Let me suggest to you that it would be quite simple for someone to come forward and say, “This fellow has published a book on Occult Science, speaking in it about Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions, and there is no way of controlling these statements. They can only be accepted as dogma.” I could understand such a thing being said, because it corresponds to the superficial nature of our age; and there is no getting away from it, our age is superficial. Indeed, under certain conditions this objection would not be without foundation. It would be justified, for example, if you were to tear out of the book all the pages that precede the chapter on the Saturn evolution. If anyone were to begin reading the book at this chapter it would be nothing but dogma. If, however, the author prefaces it with the other chapters, he is by no means a dogmatist because he shows what paths the soul has to go through in order to reach such conceptions. That is the point, that it has been shown in the book how every individual man, if he reaches into the depths of his soul, is bound to come to such conceptions. Herein all dogmatism ceases.

Thus we can feel it natural that Krishna, having brought Arjuna into the world of ideas and wishing to lead him on into the occult world, now goes on to show him the next stage, how every soul can reach that higher world if it finds the right starting-point. Krishna then must begin by rejecting every form of dogmatism, and he does so radically. Here we come up against a hard saying by Krishna. He absolutely rejects what for centuries had been most holy to the highest men of that age—the contents of the Vedas. He says, “Hold not to the Vedas, nor to the word of the Vedas. Hold fast to Yoga!” That is to say, “Hold fast to what is within thine own soul!”

Let us grasp what Krishna means by this exhortation. He does not mean that the contents of the Vedas are untrue. He does not want Arjuna to accept what is given in the Vedas dogmatically as the disciples of the Veda teaching do. He wants to inspire him to take his start from the very first original point whence the human soul evolves. For this purpose all dogmatic wisdom must be laid aside. We can imagine Krishna saying to himself that even though Arjuna will in the end reach the very same wisdom that is contained in the Vedas, still he must be drawn away from them, for he must go his own way, beginning with the sources in his own soul. Krishna rejects the Vedas, whether their content is true or untrue. Arjuna's path must start from himself, through his own inwardness he must come to recognize Krishna. Arjuna must be assumed to have in himself what a man can and must have if he is really to enter into the concrete truths of the super-sensible worlds. Krishna has called Arjuna's attention to something that from then onward is a common attribute of humanity. Having led him to this point he must lead him further and bring him to recognize what he is to achieve through Yoga. Thus, Arjuna must first undergo Yoga. Here the poem rises to another level.

In this second stage we see how the Bhagavad Gita goes on through the first four discourses with ever-increasing dramatic impulse, coming at length to what is most individual of all. Krishna describes the path of Yoga to Arjuna. We shall speak of this more in detail tomorrow. He describes the path that Arjuna must take in order to pass from the everyday clairvoyance of concepts and ideas to what can only be attained through Yoga. Concepts only require to be placed in the right light; but Arjuna has to be guided to Yoga. This is the second stage.

The third stage shows once more an enhancement of dramatic power, and again comes the expression of a deep occult truth. Let us assume that someone really takes the Yoga path. He will rise at length from his ordinary consciousness to a higher state of consciousness, which includes not only the ego that lies between the limits of birth and death but what passes from one incarnation to the next. The soul wakens to know itself in an expanded ego. It grows into a wider consciousness. The soul goes through a process that is essentially an everyday process but that is not experienced fully in our everyday life because man goes to sleep every night. The sense world fades out around him and he becomes unconscious of it. Now for every human soul the possibility exists of letting this world of sense vanish from his consciousness as it does when he goes to sleep, and then to live in higher worlds as in an absolute reality. Thereby man rises to a high level of consciousness. We shall still have to speak of Yoga, and also of the modern exercises that make this possible. But when man gradually attains to where he no longer, consciously, lives and feels and knows in himself, but lives and feels and knows together with the whole earth, then he grows into a higher level of consciousness where the things of the sense world vanish for him as they do in sleep.

However, before man can attain this level he must be able to identify himself with the soul of his planet, earth. We shall see that this is possible. We know that man not only experiences the rhythm of sleeping and waking but other rhythms of the earth as well—of summer and winter. When one follows the path of Yoga or goes through a modern occult training, he can lift himself above the ordinary consciousness that experiences the cycles of sleeping and waking, summer and winter. He can learn to look at himself from outside. He becomes aware of being able to look back at himself just as he ordinarily looks at things outside himself. Now he observes the things, the cycles in external life. He sees alternating conditions. He realizes how his body, so long as he is outside himself, takes on a form similar to that of the earth in summer with all its vegetation. What material science discovers and calls nerves he begins to perceive as a sprouting forth of something plant-like at the time of going to sleep, and when he returns again into everyday consciousness he feels how this plant-like life shrinks together again and becomes the instrument for thinking, feeling and willing in his waking consciousness. He feels his going out from the body and returning into it analogous to the alternation of summer and winter on the earth. In effect he feels something summer-like in going to sleep and something winter-like in waking up—not as one might imagine, the opposite way round. From this moment onward he learns to understand what the spirit of the earth is, and how it is asleep in summer and awake in winter, not vice versa. He realizes the wonderful experience of identifying himself with the spirit of the earth. From this moment he says to himself, “I live not only inside my skin, but as a cell lives in my bodily organism so do I live in the organism of the earth. The earth is asleep in summer and awake in winter as I am asleep and awake in the alternation of night and day. And as the cell is to my consciousness, so am I to the consciousness of the earth.”

The path of Yoga, especially in its modern sense, leads to this expansion of consciousness, to the identification of our own being with a more comprehensive being. We feel ourselves interwoven with the whole earth. Then as men we no longer feel ourselves bound to a particular time and place, but we feel our humanity such as it has developed from the very beginning of the earth. We feel the age-long succession of our evolutions through the course of the evolution of the earth. Thus Yoga leads us on to feel our atonement with what goes from one incarnation to another in the earth's evolution. That is the third stage.

This is the reason for the great beauty in the artistic composition of the Bhagavad Gita. In its climaxes, its inner artistic form, it reflects deep occult truths. Beginning with an instruction in the ordinary concepts of our thinking it goes on to an indication of the path of Yoga. Then at the third stage to a description of the marvelous expansion of man's horizon over the whole earth, where Krishna awakens in Arjuna the idea, “All that lives in your soul has lived often before, only you know nothing of it. But I have this consciousness in myself when I look back on all the transformations through which I have lived, and I will lead you up so that you may learn to feel yourself as I feel myself.” A new moment of dramatic force as beautiful as it is deeply and occultly true!

Thus we come to see the evolution of mankind from out of its everyday consciousness, from the pearl in the roadway that only needs to be recognized, from the particular world of thoughts and concepts that are a matter of everyday life in any one age, up to the point from where we can look out over all that we really have in us, which lives on from incarnation to incarnation on the earth.