The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The name Lucifer inspires a slight sense of dread in some, and is usually associated with notions of antipathy. Is this justified? The name Lucifer means: light bearer, light bringer. Medieval beliefs were different, but for those who have studied the deep knowledge of the world, Lucifer actually denotes something quite different.

Spiritual beings play a role in human life. The religions of the East speak of deva and dhyani chohan, the more Western religions, such as Christianity, speak of angels and archangels. To those who are familiar with the spiritual worlds, they represent something true and real. Higher beings play a role in human life. Lucifer is also understood to be among the guiding personalities, the leading or seducing ones.

Here we must be clear about dualism – duality – which plays a role in all areas of life. The ancients, including Pythagoras, speak of this duality: light and darkness, male and female, positive and negative magnetism, and we could cite many more such dualities. – When we make a glass rod electrically positive by rubbing it, we simultaneously make the rubbing material electrically negative. The electricity of glass and that of the rubbed material are related to each other as light is to darkness. In the Persian creation myth, we find Ormuzd and Ahriman: good deity, evil deity. Everything that drives the world forward is done by the good god, while everything that hinders it is withdrawn by the evil god. They place man in the middle.

Remember that everything in the world has a good and an evil side. What do human beings, with their culture, not owe to fire. And on the other hand, how destructive the power of fire can be in volcanic phenomena. Germany's great poet Schiller sang gloriously about this in “The Bell”: “Beneficial is the power of fire...” and so on.

This duality also works in man himself. For centuries, the one principle was seen as evil. A distinction was made between divine - good, and luciferic - evil. In the story of creation, the luciferic principle was represented as a snake. Man had to grow out of a dull nature, so the snake came and opened his eyes to good and evil, and thus another principle was opposed to the divine one. The ancient Indians called the Rishis a snake.

We have to go much deeper into the development of the human soul to see what reality underlies the Lucifer principle. In more recent times, views on this have undergone changes. These were already evident in the old Faust saga. Goethe reshaped it to meet human needs. Faust not only wanted to immerse himself in divine science, he also wanted to make a covenant with evil powers. Then he no longer wanted to approach theology, he wanted to remain a medical doctor. He put the Bible behind the bench and that was considered a reason to fall into the hands of evil forces. In Goethe's work, the crux of the matter is in the second part of Faust: “Whoever strives, we can redeem.” So it is not something destructive, but rather a power is evoked that is not opposed to the deity.

If we want to understand this power, we must realize how man fits into the world around him. Man forms one of the kingdoms; alongside him we have the mineral kingdom, the vegetable kingdom and the animal kingdom. Man perceives himself as a self-aware being and carries within himself all these kingdoms; he is the bearer of all these natures. He has a physical body in common with the mineral, and he also shares the etheric or life body with the plant. Through his world of feelings, which, as the astral body, is the carrier of passions, instincts, desires, he has something in common with the animal. Thus, man is in an interdependent relationship with the three realms.

Man can only sustain his life by breathing. He draws in the air of life – oxygen – into himself, combines the latter with carbon in his body and exhales this poison – carbonic acid. But man and animal could not live if the plant did not continually renew this air of life. Man and animal owe the possibility of life to the plant. The plant owes it to the mineral. It is only logical to extend this chain of development beyond man, not only to lower beings but also to higher ones. Just as man belongs to lower beings, so he also belongs to higher ones. The fact that man does not see higher beings is no reason why they should not exist. Higher senses can bring man this perception.

Man is first of all a tetrad: physical body, etheric body, astral body and the I. He is a developing being. How does his development take place? A savage still follows his animal instincts, he follows every urge; the one who is higher up only follows certain urges, and those who are very high up, let us say, for example, Schiller or Francis of Assisi, follow even fewer of the lower urges, but transform them into ideals. This results in an upward development of the astral body. The inferior man also has an astral body, but he has done little work in it. A superior man raises his astral body from the animal stage to a higher, nobler and more perfect form. The astral body consists of two parts: what other entities have given him, and what he himself has worked into it. That which he has worked into it himself, we call “Manas”, spirit self, and we thus designate the fifth limb of man. Manas is nothing other than the transformed astral body. But man can do much more than transform his astral body. An undeveloped person knows nothing of morality, law, logic; he has developed little Manas.

But there are even deeper changes. In the ninth and tenth centuries, people did not all have such perfect ideas, but much of what they had learned was incorporated into their astral bodies, because it is the carrier of everything we can learn in the world. What we learn changes quickly, but habits and temperaments change more slowly. We could compare what changes quickly with the minute hand of a clock and what changes more slowly with the hour hand. But there is also the opportunity to change what we are used to, and in doing so we change the etheric or life body: because it is denser, it makes it more difficult for the ego to change. As much as the human being changes his etheric body, so much 'budi' arises in him. Religions are instructions on how to work “Budhi” into the etheric body, while morality only changes the astral body. In the highest sense, art does the same as religions.

Thus you can now find the human being with six limbs, even if manas and budhi are only present in him in a germinal state. But there is already secret training that develops the etheric body. What is taught to the individual is doctrine; what transforms humanity is an influence on the budhi, is secret training. A chela, an occult disciple, works in his etheric body.

But what is hardly present in the seed is the Atman. It is such a strong power that a person can work with it right into his physical body. What can a person do in his physical body today? A person who can develop as an artistic human being, as a chela, can become master of his habits. But the person who has worked this seventh link, this Atman, into himself, also learns to control his pulse. And with this, he becomes partaker of the eternal. This is an achievement of mastery.

Now we see the human being with manas, budhi and atman. We now know that man, we said the I, stands in relation to the three lower realms, and now we see that he stands in relation to a realm above him, the divine realm, through what he has worked into himself as Manas. In this divine realm we have to seek the Elohim, divine spirits, of whom the Bible, as Jehovah, names one.

Through his Manas, his spiritual self, man is linked to the higher worlds. Therefore, we speak of man as one who is becoming, an evolving God. Christ Jesus says, “You are gods.” (John 10:34) Man will one day look back on his present spiritual level and he will feel like a human being who has grown out of it completely.

If we believe in evolution, we must also consider this for other beings, and looking back, we see that our older brothers, the Elohim, with them Jehovah, on an earlier planet or on the earlier embodiment of the earth, occupied the same stage that man now occupies on the present embodiment of the earth. The law of embodiment is not only the basis of man, but of all beings. Goethe speaks of the Earth Spirit: “In the flood of life, in the storm of action, I surge up and down,” and so on. The Earth was seen by individuals as a spiritual being and man as its members. The Earth was often embodied and in its previous embodiment it brought the present gods to the level of man. And in a later incarnation, the present-day human being will take on the level of his older brothers, the Elohim or gods. God, the Nameless, the Unfathomable, is not spoken of here. Elohim or Deva, better translated into German as: spirits.

To illustrate this “progressive” view, I will give an albeit trivial example: just as a student passes through different classes, the class that present humanity is going through is what the gods went through in their previous incarnation on Earth. Students also remain in classes, and so there were beings that did not go through this class completely.

Where do they stand today between humans and gods? They are higher beings than humans, but lower than the gods. In a sense, they are familiar with humans. The following law exists: Each of the basic parts of the human being is developed in an incarnation on earth. In the present incarnation on earth, the manas is developing; in the earlier incarnation, the astral body. The essential thing in this development on earth was that man has changed his entire astral body, that he no longer has anything of the animal in him. Through the development of the manas, he can enter into contact with manasic beings. Only when the atman is developed can he develop independently. Today, older brothers work, later still older ones in budhi and still older ones in atman. The higher spirits that have remained are related to the human astral body. They have already tasted of the Divine. Just as in Manas, demigods also help us to assert ourselves and to glow with the Divine. We would remain trapped in lower instincts if it were not for this stimulation. Thus the passions are transformed into higher instincts. There would only be a barren realm of moral principles, but they would not pulsate in man.

The Old Testament has wonderfully developed this law. The entities that evoke enthusiasm, the glow of love for the manasic, are called Luciferic entities. Thus, Lucifer is the one who evokes the astral passion for the divine in man. He thus arouses in him the desire to learn to love the divine, not as a duty, but as an inclination. He adds independence to submission. He is the instigator of human freedom.

Man becomes free only by following the divine out of his own urge. This is reflected in the biblical story of creation. God guided man, he could not choose. Then the serpent came, and the thought came into man, not only to live in God is desirable, but to become God himself, to carry the image of the deity in [himself] as a personality. Through Lucifer — biblically expressed through the serpent — the human body became the light bearer, as Lucifer himself was the light bearer, until Christ entered the world as “I am the light of the world” (John 8:12) and realized the principle of love for the divine. External knowledge, knowing what the laws of the world are, now seems dull to man. This external knowledge should grasp our inner being, should intervene directly as theosophy, as an independent inner experience. This is how Lucifer anchors himself in man. This research is called the school of Luciferian striving. These people are called: children of Lucifer.

If the gods gave science, Lucifer gave enthusiasm.

God: Revelation.

Lucifer: freedom.

We have a filial relationship with God; Lucifer awakened the feeling of being an independent being, of freedom. Devotion was a voluntary sacrifice. As everywhere, there must be a duality: God and Lucifer.

Thus, the Luciferic entities have not been left behind for no reason. They are those who strive to lead us to the divine by our own free choice. To do so, man must also have the opportunity to be evil. He can certainly become divine without it, but only through free choice.

If the Supreme is to be free, then it must be anchored in the other nature. In this way, God and luciferic entities work towards perfection and freedom.

Question & Answer: Question: [What does the] sphinx mean?

Rudolf Steiner: What the mind is trying to grasp today is nothing new as a concept. The pyramids represent the ancient views of our ancestors: there are four lines on which they stand = the fourfold nature of the human being, physical body, etheric body, astral body with the I. That is the foundation. Above it rises the triangle, representing the three basic parts that the ego works out of the four: Atman, Budhi, Manas. The trinity is not yet complete. If you want to feel this, then you must look at the sphinx. She represents the lower nature and from the eye the riddle of future development radiates towards you. In it, man prophetically seeks his future.

Question: [Not handed down.]

Rudolf Steiner: There are two writings – they are not actually writings in the strict sense – one is kept by a religious community, a church in secret, the other is kept by a master, a great leader of humanity.

Whether this applies to Romance and Germanic peoples is not necessary to discuss further here. It is a disaster for a people when those who are or are supposed to be leaders speak a different language and have different thoughts. Today there is one area where such a gap exists: it is the area of religious life. I will speak of the basis of this religious gap: the Bible.

Questions that occupy all people are: Where do people come from, what is the meaning, the goal of life, what is the essence and what is its form? Endless layers seek the solution to such questions in the Bible; but precisely what matters, the living feeling and attitude to the Bible, is lacking. There is a gulf between the theologians who study the Bible and the believers, and when someone says, “We want it to close,” for the time being it is only a wish. There are enough reasons, even without resorting to mysticism and occultism, to believe that the gulf is widening. There comes a time when teachers and believers no longer understand each other. People usually do not realize how great this gap is. Teachers of the past, who studied the Bible, based their teachings on the highest truths. There was a sense that what the Bible contains is something unspeakably high, that one is wise at the beginning, becomes wiser as one understands more and more. Teachers were formed through this wisdom-filled study of the Bible, and there were teachers. Those who listened, who listened intently, felt that this was where wisdom could be found. This is not to say that there are no such men today.

If we look back 150 years, there was still something of that feeling towards the Bible, a feeling of sacred awe, that such writing should be treated quite differently. Goethe was also familiar with this. Today, all this seems difficult to understand. We must realize that the spirit of materialism is not very intrusive where it appears as theoretical materialism. We see this in Haeckel's views. These are not the worst. The worst is the one that guides people to understand things materially and to see only what is tangible and to overlook the meaning behind it.

We want to touch on two things: biblical criticism and inspiration.

Tell a materialist about inspiration and he will laugh at you. Nevertheless, it is the current that we now call theosophical that is reawakening the dulled sense of the concept of inspiration. Inspiration, that is, inspiration from a higher world, would take a different position on what is in the Bible than on another book. The writer of those books was a point of passage, a conduit for the transmission of higher knowledge. This is a crude way of expressing the concept of inspiration, which is completely misunderstood, even in theology. Materialistic believers have suffered the greatest harm.

We will now only talk about what some Bible scholars say. Older and newer ones state that certain statements are made to us that prove that Moses could not have written the books in question, that passages must have been written centuries after Moses, that therefore the passages in question cannot be from him. I will mention one example that most likely makes people head shy. It is the twofold account of the creation of man. First it says: God created man male and female (Gen. 1:27). To make it quite clear: it does not say male and female. Then it says that God created man first and then the woman, his rib (Gen. 1:21-22). What is the basis for this? This is particularly characteristic. It was said that one and the same personality could not give rise to two different descriptions, so they must have been welded together.

So they searched the Bible for contradictions. Furthermore, they found certain differences in style and expression, so they concluded again that these are different sources and that some collector has combined both.

Let us take the six- or seven-day work. It presents in lofty thoughts the creation of the world from the first formation to the day on which God rested. It is a cosmic work that points out to us in vivid terms and intense images that we are dealing with an ancient document of inspiration. The creation of Adam, the leading to the animals, Eve's fall into sin, the snake as a symbol of sin (Genesis 3) led to the assumption that the six- or seven-day work came from a different source. Supercritical Bible researchers found the two designations: Elohists and Jahvehists; others found other discrepancies, so that finally it became clear what is now called the Rainbow Bible.

Thus the Bible work is fragmented. Now you may think that my word should be Bible criticism. That is not the case at all. I only know that in few areas so much diligence, ingenuity and intellect has been applied as to the fragmentation of the Bible. The original fervor, the devotion to this book, as inspiration from another world, has suffered. Now it is necessary to shine a light into this cleft in order to bring it back together again. It depends on the meaning behind it. I would like to use an example to illustrate the state of the art of this question. I will use a simple experience - I have experienced it - to explain. For many years I worked in the Goethe Archive in Weimar. In the records Goethe organized in the 1880s, there was a foreign transcript whose content he mistook for his own thoughts. However, he could not remember how he came to have this essay. When I came to Weimar in 1889, there were doubts that the essay was actually by Goethe. It was a scholarly question. I was able to prove that at that time Goethe had a man by the name of Tobler at his side, of whom Goethe said that he had an excellent memory. I thought that this settled the question; Goethe expressed the thoughts that Tobler wrote down, and so Goethe is the author. It is the passage that you find in the last Goethe volume: “Nature we are” and so on to the final sentence “Love is the crown”. A famous Goethe scholar – I won't mention any names, we owe him a great debt of gratitude – was keen to prove that the ink for these words had not flowed from Goethe's pen. It is not a sufficient comparison, but it is similar to biblical research. Efforts are made to prove when the content was created historically, factually, sensually, because thinking has a materialistic tendency. The sense of the spirit has been lost.

Now something else has to be added. Again, I can best make it clear with an example. Take geometry, this very ordinary school geometry. You can understand it from itself. You do not need to know how it came about. What does a schoolboy know about Euclid? What do we care who wrote it first? What matters is to explore it. When a learned house for all languages, which knows nothing about geometry, approaches Euclid, he is not yet explored by that. So something monstrous can come out at times. No philologist, no matter how famous, will understand Vedanta philosophy just because he is a philologist. If you know geometry, you know Euclid.

The question that now arises is: Is there any possibility at all of investigating the Bible? One must first know the worlds of which the Bible speaks, only then is one a qualified investigator. Is there access to the great riddles of existence? This is the path followed by the theosophical worldview. Just as there are ways to understand geometry, there are means and ways to penetrate into the spiritual world. A number of people are already walking these paths; they are seeking wisdom about the higher worlds. The result is that with each step one takes, the old religious documents arise before him in ever new forms. What does it matter from which sources, if we have the truth?

You know that for theosophical views, this world that we can see and touch is considered one world. This world would be different for us if we had other senses. Fichte once used the example: Imagine you are the only seeing person among blind people and enter the world of people who only grope around. You would be considered a fantasist if you still ascribed the quality of color to things. No one has the right to say that something is not. A person's perception depends on their organs, and how many of them they have.

Through the principle of initiation, an inner sense reveals itself to man, and with it the next world opens up to him, the imaginative or astral world, so called because it works in images. This pictorial consciousness can be tapped into. Those who apply the method described will enter this world. There is nothing, absolutely nothing of magic about it. The imaginative world presents itself as a flowing sea of light and color. These are not mere spots, but clearly defined forms, inwardly glowing and bright. So you rise to the world from which you come.

Develop these organs further and you will enter the world of inspiration. The School of Pythagoras called this world the harmony of the spheres. This is not an image, it is reality. It is not a sensual sound. Goethe and others point to this harmony of the spheres. Christianity calls it the Kingdom of Heaven or the Heavenly Kingdom. Goethe has his Faust say: “The sun resounds in the ancient way” and so on. That is not a poetic image. He knew that this was how to describe the characteristic. In the second part, Goethe says, “Sounds for spiritual ears” and so on, and by that he means the same thing.

This, then, is the world of inspiration, and beyond that is the world of intuition. There, there is an experience of the “thing in itself”, as our great philosopher Kant called it. There, love is something much higher, there is a merging with things.

Those who engage with the meaning of the concept of inspiration know what it means. In this way, a person can go through the world in his development. First, with the sensual eyes and the physical mind, the materialistic development of the human being begins. His astral development preceded this. Just as ice is related to water – water in another form – so your body is soul. Before it took on this form, it was merely soul. You lived in a world that can only be perceived by the imaginative senses. If you examine the world only with the outer senses, you can describe what Haeckel describes. It is all true, but only insofar as the ice remains only ice.

Go back even further, and the human soul was not yet condensed into the physical. The line does not end with imaginative knowledge. The soul has lived much earlier and comes to a point in its development that opens up the soul of man. Imagine this development in such a way that the soul lived separately because the physical world was not yet ready to offer it a suitable body. The world was a kind of stream in which the human being floated.

What enabled man to reclassify? A very specific organ, a kind of swim bladder was transformed into lungs. These were the times when the body became capable of being a condensed soul. In the Bible this is referred to as: “God breathed into the man the breath of life and he was a living soul.” (Genesis 2:7) There is an even higher world than that of inspiration. If we go even further, man was spirit. The body is a condensed soul; the soul is a condensed spirit.

As soon as one enters inspiration from imagination, male and female disappear. The Bible says: God created man male and female – undifferentiated. (Genesis 1:27) They all were in the spiritual body. Even without taking the Bible into consideration, we can establish this. Anyone who approaches the Bible quite freely today will feel it literally.

There are four possible attitudes towards the Bible:

1. The naive person takes it as it is offered to him.
2. the enlightened person sees it as a childish folk fantasy. These are the freethinkers. But some of them, and one of their most important representatives, Bruno Wille, has come to a symbolic interpretation.
3. Those who are beyond cleverness find a mystical-symbolic meaning for the Bible.
4. The theosophist adopts a literal interpretation.

Then comes the time when the person says to himself, “Now you are beginning to understand some of it.” One comes to assume that where one cannot keep up, one just does not yet understand. The Bible is conquered in such a way that the gap is filled again, and those who create the means to do so are inspired men. Those who grasped this initially did so under the influence of inspiration. We are heading towards a new conquest of the Bible and a new relationship between wisdom and the Bible.

Today, it is our turn to explain the relationship between the Bible and wisdom in more detail, but first we need to discuss the “Old Testament” some more. Yesterday, we only mentioned the creation of man and the important passage: God breathed into the man and so on. (Genesis 2:7) Today, we want to try to penetrate the content of the original source of the Bible. So let us first consider what may arouse wonderment in people. It is useful to pick out individual facts. The long lives of the patriarchs in the Bible can arouse amazement. The material scientist would of course say: that is not possible. A theosophy that indulges in generalizing a concept says: Adam, Seth and Enoch are not to be understood as individual people, but as tribes; thus, they are names of tribes. It is not that simple. We have to go deeper into the laws of life. We have to refrain once and for all from symbolizing and allegorizing, and not ask: What does it mean?

I have already spoken to you about the cause of this old age in another context. At the time, I cited a conversation between two poets, Anzengruber and Rosegger. You know Rosegger's charming description of the mountain people. Everything he presents to us has been carefully observed. When you see Anzengruber's plays, you see farmers who stand firmly on their feet. Now something very strange. Anzengruber never lived among farmers. He lived in the city and didn't like to go out. Rosegger said to him: If you would observe the farmers more closely, you would be able to describe them much better. Anzengruber replied: I have never seen farmers, but my father, mother, grandparents were farmers, and that has remained in my blood and rumbles in me.

Direct inheritance seems much more vivid than when the blood is mixed. This is still the case today when a son comes from unmixed blood. In the past, this was the case to a high degree; it was not only in the imagination. In the old days, people did not marry outside their tribe. It was considered a great sin to step outside the blood. In all ancient peoples you find sagas and structures where breaking this commandment had to be atoned for. No blood brotherhood existed among ancient peoples, and what was in the blood was a completely different power. In those days, consanguinity brought with it a kind of clairvoyance. Today that has passed, today it would even cause harm. This clairvoyance was expressed in such a way that one not only lived in the imagination, but one had real memories that went back a long way. Just as you remember your youth today, so one remembered events from the life of the father, grandfather and great-grandfather. Today's man does not believe that. At that time, what the father had done was felt as: I have done it. For today, this is a highly wonderful situation. Thus, what was the experiences of the fathers, as in Anzengruber, passed into the memory. You could have felt your father as your self at that time, so that you did not say “I” to yourself, but you took father, mother, grandfather and great-grandfather all together as “I”, you felt the whole generation as “I”. So Adam was everything that people felt for centuries as a common consciousness, patriarchs are a whole generation embracing self-awareness. You have to know that consciousness arose through blood-brotherly memory. This is how we understand those statements in the Bible, and a great wisdom is revealed to us. So I could explain from chapter to chapter how theosophy is based on our religious feeling.

And now from the “Old Testament” to the “New”, to the actual Gospel. We distinguish the time before Christ Jesus and the time after Christ Jesus. The coming of Christ Jesus into this world is the most significant, most powerful event in the development of humanity. Something completely new occurred there. Recent research has gradually unraveled the Gospels. Contradictions were sought and these have done little to further understanding. What confusion would such a dissection of the Apocalypse create, for example? I will mention only one fact here: the secret revelation of John was seen by Bible researchers as a prophecy of future events of humanity, or even of past ones. For example, some said that the presbyter John lived after Nero and only wrote what happened in terms of earthquakes, plagues and so on. Now I still want to point out a remarkable passage where great events and upheavals were brought about by a beast. The number of this beast is a human number, “666”. The researchers have heard something ringing here; they have heard that things have been expressed through numbers, certain names, forms. There was a possibility of using the alphabet as numbers. This was the practice in certain secret schools. Now researchers have found out, diligent, hard-working researchers, that Nero is supposed to mean the beast, just to avoid believing that there is something spiritual behind it. They simply did not know what it was. The true theosophist must first learn wisdom to understand the meaning of the Bible.

666 is composed of 400, 200, 60 and 6. This means or is called: Sorat. This also has a specific sign: a staff with two wings or ram horns. (Rev 13:11) That is the sign for this being. Spiritual science sees in everything not only a material but also a spiritual essence; for example, the sun is the body of the sun soul. For spiritual science, it is the spirit that moves people forward; its opponent is Sorat – 666. The Book of Revelation says: This beast has two horns, like a lamb or a ram. If you know these things, then you also know what the writer says. You see that you first have to know what it is about, and this requires wisdom.

Augustine, the recognized church teacher of various denominations, said an important sentence regarding the secular position of Christianity: “What is called Christianity has always been there, only that the true religion, which has always existed, has been understood in different ways.

But where did Christianity live before Christ Jesus appeared? In the mystery. What was mystery? That which is today called a church, school or art institution. The knowledge of things was used as a preparation to then serve as an introduction to understanding, just as the divine spirit bent down and ascended again. There one also learned to listen to the secrets of world existence expressed in sounds. Richard Wagner felt this again and tried to reproduce it. Such schools existed, and each person was first tested to see if they were capable of being gradually introduced to a tangible self-awareness through their comprehension, feeling, and understanding. This was the initiation or initiation. There were different levels, because people progressed to different degrees. One thing was necessary: that one went through a prescribed course of development, and this was passed on in the schools of the initiated. The different levels had different names:

1st stage: the Ravens.
2nd degree: the Occultists.
3rd degree: the fighters.
4th level: the lions.
5th stage: had a national name, for example, Persians. Christ says of Nathanael: true Israelite. (John 1: 47)
6th stage: the sun hero (son). 7th stage: one did not say (father).

Let us take one of the 6th stage, a sun hero. His life was as it has been for thousands of years. He could no more stray from his prescribed path than the sun can step out of its orbit, and so he follows the strictly harmonious world orbits. If he were to step out, an unimaginable disaster would occur, as if the sun were to step out. In ancient, ancient legends, there is talk of solar heroes: Hermes, Buddha, Zarathustra, Pythagoras; even in Germanic countries: Siegfried, with a few changes, a basic type. Why is that? Because in those days the process was exactly the opposite of what it is today. The old principle was: not to concern oneself with everyday matters, but to seek the essential. At that time, one described what one had to go through for initiation. The prescribed life of a thousand years was the description of life. Hermes had lived according to this prescription, and thus, when he described his life, he described what others had already experienced before him.

We will better understand the matter if we understand the meaning of the stages: one was used to form the character, another brought the phenomena of the astral world closer, and others brought explorations of even higher worlds. When one had grasped that at the time, then something special occurred. Then there was a final act of initiation. The initiate, through the initiated hierophant, was brought into a state in which the body was dead for three and a half days. The etheric and astral bodies were drawn out and wandered around in the spiritual worlds, guided by the high priest-hierophant. Then they were led back into the body and the person received a new name. Now he knew from his own experience what happens in the spiritual worlds, and was now reborn. He could bear witness that the spiritual life conquers death. Every time a person came back into the body, he woke up with the cry: “My God, my God, how you have glorified me.

Only those who achieved the victory of life over death could attain knowledge. This has happened over and over again in the secret schools of spirituality. This process has been veiled.

Compare this with the description of the life of Christ Jesus. In his case, what happened within in the mysteries took physical appearance. First came the test by the wise man, then came the baptism, and finally he was placed in a coffin similar to a cross. Outwardly, this took place historically in the Mystery of Golgotha. Some do not want to understand this and say, “You interpret it that way and take it as a historical event.”

The hanging on the cross is the outer representation of what previously applied prophetically to the initiated; a deep meaning that is mystically and historically true at the same time. It is as if you were entering a temple of art, where a drama depicts the year 1920 and what was seen would later come true. Before that, the mysteries depicted what later happened in the life of Christ Jesus. Those who described this life brought over ancient initiatory traditions from prophetic mysteries. Such a solar hero had to live according to the rules of initiation. They existed for thousands and thousands of years and therefore the same applied to the Gospels. Hence the great agreement, the exclamation: my God, my God, how hast thou glorified me, or: how hast thou forsaken me, looks very similar in writing and pronunciation. So Augustine could say: Christianity is the true religion.

The saying, “Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have come to believe” (John 20:29), referred to the vision of the initiates. Thus the Gospels are the same as the ancient books of initiation. They existed before Christ Jesus. But He lived through them in the physical world, because the mighty power of this unique personality made it possible. Thus Christianity appears to us as the fulfillment of ancient wisdom, and in the Bible we have what could be experienced in the initiations, the wisdom of the initiates.

The simple person who simply approaches the Bible builds his heart on it, and with fervor he feels the wisdom that underlies it all. No one would feel this wisdom if wisdom did not bring the Bible about.

Today, with a few exceptions, people are no longer able to approach it with faith. A new understanding of the Bible must now be opened up. I will give you a comparison here. In the Middle Ages, people swore by the books of Aristotle. Galileo could not do that. He was the first to perform an autopsy on a human body and to show that certain nerves originate in the brain and not, as Aristotle taught, in the heart. At that time, things really contradicted each other, and Galilei said: Get rid of the whole of Aristotle. — What about today? What Aristotle called a nerve was not a nerve at all, and so Aristotle was proved right again. First you have to go to the things themselves, then you come back to Aristotle.

The same thing must happen with regard to the Bible. What he himself sees, imagined inspiration – figuratively presenting inspiration, independent of any book, describes the spiritual researcher, and we can thus assume that what he himself sees is literally written correctly. When we understand this, great reverence for this book arises, and we feel that this Redeemer's life was truly written by inspiration.

Through such an achievement, our relationship to the spiritual worlds will change, and we will learn to look up to the inspired with great reverence. First, a bridge must be found to those who are exploring the wisdom of the Bible. The teacher will be wiser, the listener more fervent – the hearts of teachers and believers will resonate. That will be the success of Theosophy:

two things will come:

1. wisdom independent of the Bible,
2. How

Thus the book that used to be sacred will become sacred to us again, and so a true spiritual movement will be the reconquest of the ancient wisdom taught by the Bible. Through the Bible, the most free knowledge and true progress must be made fruitful again for religious life through theosophy. Questions

Question: [Not handed down].

Rudolf Steiner: Everything is in development, including the I. This I has emerged from a group I. Just as the finger of your hand does not feel itself as an I, so the human being at that time felt itself as a group I.

Question: [Not handed down].

Rudolf Steiner: There are personalities who were contemporaries of Christ Jesus. There are no historical sources about him. One passage in Josephus is a forgery; and so is one in Tacitus. Historians therefore say: There is no testimony of this Christ Jesus.

In our time there are deeply initiated people; but if someone wanted to prove historically whether there were initiates after 1900 years, they would find nothing about the initiates. But today there are personalities who were contemporaries who know and can testify that they stood eye to eye with Christ Jesus.

Question: Does keeping silent develop certain powers?

Rudolf Steiner: Through the suppression of certain words that are not said. Certain religious communities are led according to certain basic laws. The Trappists know full well that whoever is a good man of silence now will be a good speaker in the next incarnation.

My dear Friends,

We have now to give our consideration to the third experience in the super-sensible world,—the consciousness that holds sway there. But before we can do so, we must first take cognisance of something which everyone possesses but which not everyone takes the trouble to observe, namely, the ordinary consciousness of this world, the consciousness which is centred in the fact that man becomes aware of his ego, becomes aware of himself as a self-existent being having knowledge of the objects and beings around him.

This consciousness is an element in our life which we have to examine with particular care and accuracy, when we are considering occultism. For it is true to say that this consciousness, which we may call an ego-consciousness, is for the occultist that element in his life which he is in the greatest danger of losing when he passes over into the super-sensible worlds. A man who wants to penetrate into super-sensible worlds has to exercise extreme caution on this account, since the loss of this ego-consciousness, the cessation and suppression of it, is as dangerous as it is necessary! Here, you see, we have come again to a contradiction, but I have already told you how inevitable contradictions are in this realm.

If you will reflect a little upon the ego-consciousness, you will see that it is really the ground of your existence in yourself through the fact that you have an ego-consciousness, you are in your soul self-contained. When you are not using your senses, then, except when you are asleep, you must always be as it were together with yourself in your consciousness. The consciousness only sinks down into darkness when you fall asleep.

Now it does not require much thought to perceive that what we are accustomed to call the Divine, or the One and undivided Foundation of the Worlds, cannot be counted as forming part of this consciousness, for man loses this consciousness every evening when he goes to sleep and finds content of it again every morning. Everything he has in it in the evening when he falls asleep remains, and he is able on awakening to take up again the threads of his inner life where he dropped them when he fell asleep. It has all stayed as it was; only, man has had no knowledge of himself while he slept. The one Divine Ground of the World that maintains everything must, therefore, maintain also man's consciousness while he sleeps It must keep watch over man's nature, both when he wakes and when he sleeps.

From this it will be evident that man must necessarily think of the Divine Ground of the Worlds as outside the Earth consciousness within which he himself stands. Consequently man cannot by means of his own consciousness have any knowledge whatsoever of the Ground of the Worlds, This has naturally always meant that since with ordinary Earth consciousness man is unable to approach by his own efforts the things that belong to the Foundation of the Worlds, these things have had to come to him by means of what is called “revelation.” Revelations, and particularly the revelations of religion, have always been given to man, for the simple reason that he cannot find them within his own consciousness, in so far as it is the Earth consciousness. If he wants to establish a relationship with the Ground of the Worlds, if he wants to inform himself about the nature and being of the original Ground and Foundation of existence, he must receive a revelation. And revelation has come, as we know, again and again, throughout the evolution of mankind. When we look back into ancient pre-Christian times, we find many great religious teachers,—such, for example, as were called in the language of Buddha, Bodhisattvas; other peoples knew them by other names. These great teachers came among men and communicated to them what men were unable to discover by means of their Earth consciousness.

The question may here be asked: how did these religious teachers obtain knowledge of the things that lie behind human consciousness? You know very well that there has always been in the world what we call “initiation,” and all great religious teachers have had either to undergo initiation, that is to say, ultimately to ascend for themselves an occult path, or to receive teaching from initiates who have ascended the occult path and have come to a comprehension of the Divine, not with their Earth consciousness but with a consciousness that has gone beyond the Earth consciousness.

This was the origin of the religions of olden times. All the communications and revelations that men received in pre-Christian times from great teachers of mankind go back ultimately to such founders of religion,—initiates who had themselves experienced in super-physical conditions what they communicated to mankind. And in consequence the relationship of a religious man to his God is always of such a kind that he conceives of his God as a Being outside his world, a Being who is beyond and of whom he can by special means receive a revelation.

Unless man lifts himself up to initiation, he must necessarily maintain this attitude. He must feel himself to be standing here on Earth, surveying with his consciousness the things of Earth, and receiving from the founders of religion knowledge of the things that are outside the world of the senses and outside the world of the understanding, in a word, outside the world of human consciousness. This is how it has been with all religions, and in a certain respect we may say it is so still. We know, for example, that Buddhism is to be traced back to the great founder Buddha. And whenever the foundation of Buddhism is spoken of, it is always expressly stated that the Buddha attained to initiation and higher vision while under the Bodhi tree, which is only a particular way of expressing the fact that in the twenty-ninth year of his life he became able to look into the spiritual world and to reveal what he saw and learned.

What exactly is revealed is not for us of very great importance. It varied in accordance with man's need and capacity to receive. Take, for example, ancient Greece. In so far as ancient Greece received its religious ideas through the teaching of Pythagoras, we find again here the consciousness that Pythagoras has undergone an initiation and has consequently been able to bring down from spiritual worlds and incorporate into human consciousness what he saw to be right and necessary for the men who were on Earth at that time.

Such then is the relation of the religious man to the spiritual world; nor can we imagine it otherwise. Man and the divine world stand over against one another. Whether in that world man beholds a plurality of Beings or a unity, whether polytheism or monotheism is taught, need not concern us here. The important point is that man finds himself standing over against the divine world, which must be revealed to him.

This is also the reason why theology has made such a point of not allowing place in religious ideas for knowledge man acquires by himself. Such knowledge could only have been attained by undergoing inner development and rising into the spiritual worlds. It would thus imply a penetration into regions which theology—not religion as such, but theology—is most anxious to exclude from having any influence upon the religious conceptions of mankind. Hence the care that is taken in theology to warn man of two wrong paths that are to be avoided. One is the path that leads to theosophy, where man seeks to develop himself upward to his God, when he should only stand over against his God as a man, and the other, so say the theologians, is the path of mysticism,—although theologians themselves not infrequently make little detours into the regions both of theosophy and of mysticism. But religious people, people who are purely and simply religious, are to be distinguished not only from theosophists, but also from mystics; for the mystic too is quite different from the religious man. The religious man is essentially one who stands here on the Earth and establishes a relationship with a God who is outside his consciousness.

Now there are, as you know, other things in the soul of man besides what we have already touched on today. There is in the soul of man the life of thought, that makes use of the instrument of the brain. Inasmuch as man has his ordinary consciousness, he has of course also his brain and his world of thought. Consciousness cannot be there without them. Playing into what we may call human consciousness, we have the thoughts, the experiences man has when he makes use of the instrument of the brain. Religions have consequently always contained thoughts that employ the instrument of the brain, since one who is a revealer, a founder of a religion, can clothe the divine revelations in forms men will understand by making use of the instrument of the brain. Religion can however also be clothed in ideas which make use rather of the instrument of the heart. Any particular religion, therefore, may speak either more to the brain or more to the heart of man. If we make comparison between the various religions of the world, we find that some speak more to the understanding, to those experiences of man which are connected with the brain, while others speak rather to the ideas and feelings of the heart, appeal to the life of inner perception and feeling. This difference can readily be observed in the several religions. All religions have, however, this characteristic in common, that man maintains intact his ego-consciousness, he remains conscious as man. Here on Earth works the ego-consciousness, and upon it from without works what belongs to the nature of the divine super-sensible world.

All this is changed when a man becomes a mystic. For when a man becomes a mystic, then everything connected with ordinary Earth consciousness is thrown to the winds. What is so carefully guarded in religion, so long as it remains religion pure and simple,—namely, that a man stands on his own feet and confronts the divine world in full consciousness—breaks down in mysticism. Mystics, pre-Christian as well as Christian, have always done their best to break down the human consciousness. Their concern has ever been to take the upward path into the super-sensible worlds, that is to say, to come right out of ordinary human Earth consciousness, to transcend it. That is the characteristic of mysticism. It sets out to overcome ordinary consciousness and live its way into a state where self-forgetfulness supervenes. And then, if the mystic can come so far, self-forgetfulness passes on to self-annihilation, self-extinction. Essentially mystical states, raptures, ecstasies have all of them this end in view, to do away with the limitations of Earth consciousness, to grow out beyond them into a higher consciousness.

It is difficult to form a conception of the nature of mysticism because it shows itself in so many different forms. It will be good if at this point we consider some individual examples.

We will imagine that a mystic, in accordance with what I have just explained to you, feels called upon to suppress his ordinary ego-consciousness, to break it down and get beyond it. He will still have left of course the other experiences of the soul, the experiences man has by the use of the brain and the heart. The mystic tries to extinguish his consciousness, but he does not necessarily at the same time extinguish as well the experiences of brain and heart. The way opens here, as you see, for many different shades of mysticism. Let us consider what varieties are possible.

A mystic can have experiences of brain and of heart, while consciousness is extinguished. Then we can say of him that he goes out of himself in ecstasy, but that we recognise from the thoughts and feelings he still has that he has not obliterated what is thought and felt by the use of brain and heart. To discover mystics who can truthfully be reckoned in this category we have to go rather far back in history. We may find them among those who, after the founding of Christianity, endeavoured to rise to the divine Self with the help of the philosophy of Plato,—Neo-Platonists, that is, such as Iamblichus and Plotinus. In this class too, belongs Scotus Erigena, and if one does not hold too strictly to the definition but admits a mystic in whom the brain experiences outweigh the experiences of the heart, then we may include also Master Eckhart, These will then form class A; mystics who still admit experiences of brain and heart.

A second kind of mystic is one who shuts out not his consciousness alone, but in addition his brain experiences, retaining only the ideas and conceptions that are acquired by use of the instrument of the heart. We generally find that mystics of this order have no love for anything that is thought out. They want to exclude thought altogether as well as consciousness. What the heart can achieve,—that is all they will allow themselves to use for their development. Such mystics, although their endeavour is to overcome human consciousness, to go out beyond it in ecstasy, retain nevertheless a connection with their fellows through the fact that they base their relationship with the surrounding world on the experiences of the heart.

Picture to yourselves a mystic of this type,—an ecstatic whose desire and aim is to come out of himself, who loves to be in a state where he is entirely free from himself! Such a mystic will at once reject anything you set out to communicate to him which requires him to use his brain. He will have nothing to do with it. Whether what you have to say concerns the higher worlds or the world of external nature, it makes no difference; he will in either case reply that there is no need to know all that.

A mystic who is in this way connected with his surroundings through the heart alone is able to be of good service to mankind. But since all the experiences of the human soul he lets speak only the experiences of the heart, he will not find easily accessible the complicated ideas that are acquired on the path of occultism; to receive these one does need to do at any rate a little thinking!

It was a mystic of this kind who, when asked whether he would not like to have a Book of Psalms—for he never read the Holy Scriptures—made answer: “If a man once uses a Book of Psalms, he will very soon want a bigger book, and there is no telling what more he will want when he begins to desire after knowledge in the form of thoughts.” The same mystic had no wish to have thoughts even about Nature. He used to say: “Man can know nothing he does not know already.” With this gesture he put all knowledge from him. Here then was a mystic with experiences of the heart alone, belonging to our second category,—class B.

Now in the case of such a mystic you will find there is a kind of economy of his soul forces In so far as he makes no use of his understanding and his power of thought, to that extent his soul forces are, as it were, husbanded. Consciousness also he puts out of use. All this has an interesting result. For when he is in his ecstatic states, with human Earth consciousness shut off, then because he still perceives around him whatever he can see with his eyes and hear with his ears and so on, and yet does not want to comprehend his surroundings, not thinking there is any necessity so to do, such a mystic will have great forces to spare which enable him to feel in the surrounding Nature all the more.

As mystic, one can protect oneself entirely from theology; but Nature surrounds all mystics. A mystic of this kind however will have nothing to do with any knowledge even about Nature. In this way he saves up the forces he would otherwise use in reflecting upon Nature in thought. He rejects all study of the Science of Nature. But the forces of the heart,—these he uses, and they will be able to develop all the more strongly. He will feel through the instrument of the heart all that the Being of Nature can say to him, and he will feel it more powerfully than a man who uses up his soul forces for his intellect and self-consciousness. Consequently we shall expect to find in a mystic of this type a feeling for Nature that is very positive and very concrete. Such a one did in time past clothe his feeling for Nature in the following words, which I will here read to you, that you may see how, for a mystic of this type, life itself becomes a feeling for Nature.

“Oh, Most High, Almighty, Good Lord God, to Thee
belong praise, glory, honour and all blessing.
Praised be my Lord God! and with all His creatures, and
especially our brother the Sun, who brings us the
day and who brings us the light: fair is he, and he
shines with a very great splendour.
O Lord he signifies to us Thee!
Praised be my Lord for our sister the Moon, and for
the Stars, the which He has set clear and lovely in
the heaven.
Praised be my Lord for our brother the wind, and for
air and clouds, calms and all weather, by which
Thou upholdest life and all creatures.
Praised be my Lord for our sister water, who is very
serviceable to us, and humble and precious and clean.
Praised be my Lord for our brother fire, through whom
Thou givest us light in the darkness; and he is
bright and pleasant and very mighty and strong.
Praised be my Lord for our mother the earth, the
which doth sustain us and keep us, and bringeth
forth divers fruits and flowers of many colours, and grass.”

We have here, as you see, a complete exodus of the soul from self-consciousness, a kind of intoxication of the heart. All is feeling. The poem is saturated with something that the eye cannot perceive (for the writer is a mystic) but the soul can feel. Observe however, it is what the soul feels when it does not yet go so far as to enter into the experience of the Divine in Nature. When this also becomes a part of the experience of the soul, then there can arise that feeling for Nature which is so beautifully expressed by Goethe in his Faust:

“Spirit sublime, thou gav'st me, gav'st me all
For which I prayed. Not unto me in vain
Hast thou thy countenance revealed in fire.
Thou gav'st me Nature as a kingdom grand,
With power to feel and to enjoy it.
Thou Not only cold, amazed acquaintance yield'st,
But grantest, that in her profoundest breast
I gaze, as in the bosom of a friend.
The ranks of living creatures thou dost lead
Before me, teaching me to know my brothers
In air and water and the silent wood.”¹

Here we have an echo of the same feeling, and its mystery has been solved. When we look at the figure of Faust, we can see how this experience becomes a part of his soul life.

To return to the hymn quoted above. It is the hymn of a mystic in whom this one aspect of human experience overshadows all others. He stands in such intimate relation to Nature that the Sun is his brother and the Moon his sister; the water too, he calls sister, the fire, brother, and the Earth herself his mother. This is how he feels the spiritual in Nature. You have here a mystic who comes right out beyond ordinary human consciousness, but at the same time retains all those experiences of the soul which are acquired through the instrumentality of the heart. He is a mystic whom you all know well,—Francis of Assisi.

In Saint Francis of Assisi we have a striking example of a mystic of whom we can actually assert that for this one incarnation he rejected all theology and all knowledge whatsoever, even of super-sensible things. On the other hand we find that on this very account he was able to live in extraordinary intimacy with the spirit of Nature. This was indeed an outstanding feature of his life.

In Saint Francis we have no mere vague pantheism of the spirit,—which has always a trace of affectation about it. He does not just sing rapturously of a universal Spirit in Nature; he sings of definite positive feelings that fill his soul when he encounters the beings of Nature,—filial, sisterly, brotherly feelings.

We must now pass on to a third class of mystics, class C. These are mystics who set out to experience ecstasy—that is to say, the loss or the darkening of self-consciousness—and under certain conditions to shut out also the experiences of the soul which make use of the heart, while on the other hand retaining thoughts, or experiences, of the brain. Such men are often not described in ordinary language as mystics at all, since it is generally expected of a mystic that his experiences shall be permeated with feeling. And it is easy to see why. Think of a man who has driven out of his soul-experiences all his personal self-consciousness. This will mean that there is absent in him the very thing that most people find interesting in their fellowmen,—namely, personality. People are interested in each other on account of their personality. Now experiences of the heart have still so much of the personal about them—for example, in Saint Francis of Assisi,—they exercise still such a compelling influence upon what is human in us, that we are kept awake in our consciousness and we go with such a person with interest,—though not, it is true, so readily with our will. And that is also quite right for ordinary life, especially in the present day; we cannot all be like Saint Francis of Assisi! The universality of the heart, when it manifests as it did in Saint Francis, has a powerful influence upon people, even when the essentially personal element is dulled and darkened. This suppression and extinction of consciousness leads on the one hand, in a mystic like Saint Francis, as you know, to a kind of radicalism in life, and on the other hand it restrains people from imitating him even when their interest is aroused. For as a general rule people are not at all anxious to come out of their consciousness, they are afraid they will lose the ground from under their feet.

But now consider how it might be with a mystic who shuts out all personal consciousness and in addition all experiences of the heart. Such a mystic would give to men nothing but pure thoughts,—thoughts and ideas that make use of the brain alone. No one will easily be able to carry on his life in such a condition. A man may be a Saint Francis as much as he likes, for the experiences of the heart can be helpful to mankind in general. But a mystic who suppresses not only his personal ego-consciousness but also his heart experiences and lives in thoughts alone—thoughts that are bound to the brain—will find it necessary to limit his devotion to this path to particular solemn moments of his life. For life always calls one back, again and again, to the personal element on Earth, and anyone who lived in thoughts alone and used only his brain would not be able to perform any ordinary Earth activity. He can, therefore, only occupy himself in this way for quite short periods; no one can ever use the brain exclusively for more than moments at a time. And as for his fellowmen, and his relation to them, they will simply not concern themselves with him, but will all run away from him! For what interests people most of all is personal experiences; and these he suppresses. And the heart experiences, which work so powerfully upon people, these too he renounces. The consequence is, people will steer clear of him altogether, they will not have the least desire to approach him.

The philosopher Hegel is a mystic of this kind in the true sense of the word. What he gives in his philosophy is expressly intended to exclude every personal point of view and also in addition all experiences of the heart. It sets out to be pure contemplation in thought, and we may accordingly take Hegel as an eminent example of a mystic with brain experiences alone. Such a man leads us up into the purest ether heights of thought. Whereas in ordinary life man is accustomed only to have thoughts that are rooted and grounded in personal interest and in self-consciousness, these are the very thoughts that in a philosophical mystic of this kind are forbidden. And he excludes also what makes the spiritual attractive and desirable, namely, its interplay with the experiences of the heart. He devotes himself in majestic resignation to following the course of the experiences of the brain and these alone. Of all that the human soul can experience, there remain to him only thoughts.

This is the very thing of which so many people complain in Hegel; there is nothing to recall the experiences of the heart, everything is put forward solely and entirely in thought pictures. Most people feel they are left desolate and chill, when they find what they themselves love with their heart crystallised out in cold thought. And the consciousness of self, wherein personality is rooted and whereby man stands fast in earth life,—Hegel has it only as a thought. Of course he devotes consideration to the ego, because it is for him the thought of a particularly important experience. This he does. But it remains no more than a thought picture; for him, human personality is not fired with that living and direct quality which springs from self-consciousness.

We have still one more possible kind of mystic. It would be a mystic who shut out all three,—Earth-consciousness, heart experiences, brain experiences. We would then have as class D, mystics who obliterate all Earth experiences of the soul. You can well imagine, such a thing is extraordinarily difficult to accomplish. For an occultist, it is quite a matter of course; we shall go into that more deeply in the coming lectures. An occultist rises to states where he silences all that is connected with the brain as well as with the heart, in so far as these are composed of Earth forces and in so far as they make use of consciousness. A practical occultist who ascends into higher worlds will regard this step as obvious. But at this point the occultist begins to live and experience in the super-sensible world, and during the time that he is shut off from everything in connection with the world that surrounds man on Earth he has around him the higher world. He steps out of [one] thing into another. A mystic on the other hand who shuts out all these three experiences that make use of the instruments of Earth, would enter into nothing that can fill his consciousness. He does not, of course, step into nothingness, for outside our consciousness is, as we know, the divine spiritual super-sensible world. But he does not enter this world as the occultist does, to whom is then revealed the unspoken word and the super-sensible light; no, he suppresses his consciousness, he suppresses all the powers that are in him, and only feels at last, after suppressing all these human experiences, a sense of being united with something, of being within something.

There begins for him an experience that has the impression, after the extinction of consciousness and all Earth experiences, of a marriage with something that is felt and perceived in a kind of intoxication. The mystic unites himself with it in rapture and ecstasy, but he cannot make any communication about it, because it is not experienced in any definite way, he has no concrete impressions of which he can tell.

We shall see, when we go on to speak further of occultism, into what desperate situation a man would come who eradicated all three kinds of experience—experiences of heart and brain and consciousness. He would become a mystic who underwent the so-called mystic union, but was, in the ecstasy, just like a man asleep, united with the Divine in sleep and knowing nothing of it, not even having a feeling that he has been united with the Divine. If the mystic is to retain any degree of living feeling for his union with the Divine he must at any rate wipe out these several personal experiences in succession.

Now, we have an example of such a mystic, a person who actually trod this path and in her writings even went so far as to recommend it to others. First, she strove with all her powers to overcome personal self-consciousness, to suppress it and extinguish it altogether. There were then left still active within her the powers of the heart and of the intellect. The next step was the conquest of the power of the understanding. Last of all, she overcame the powers of the heart. The fact that the powers of the heart remained with her longest accounts for the extraordinary force and intensity with which she experienced the entry into the world that lies beyond consciousness. The three things were overcome in this order; first the consciousness, then the brain experiences, and last of all the experiences of the heart.

It is characteristic that the one who accomplished this feat with remarkable order and regularity was a woman. As you know, these things must be looked at quite objectively; and when speaking with theosophists I need have no fear of being misunderstood when I say that this path comes easier to a woman. For, as we shall come to understand also from other connections, it is a peculiarity of woman's nature that it is less difficult for her to conquer herself, that is to say, to conquer all her soul experiences. The woman whose experience of mysticism followed the path we have described—extinguishing and eliminating one after the other the experiences connected with brain and with heart, and then experiencing a union with the Divine Spirit which was like a marriage, like an embrace—was Saint Theresa.

If you will study the life of Saint Theresa in the light of our considerations today, you will be prepared to admit that it can only be in very exceptional cases that a mystic comes through on this path. It will much more usually happen that the several soul experiences are not overcome in such utter purity and power as was the case with Saint Theresa, but are only partially conquered, so that some portion of them remains.

This gives us, in fact, three more kinds of mystics. We have those who mean to overcome all soul experiences, but in whom the experiences bound to the brain remain unextinguished. Such mystics are as a rule persons who may be described as wise and practical in the best sense of the word, who know their way about in life, because they make good use of their brain, and who, having to a large extent suppressed the personal element, are in their impersonal character sympathetically received by their fellowmen.

Then there are mystics who also try to overcome all their soul experiences, but have only partial success with those of the heart. Mark well the difference between a mystic of this kind and a mystic like Saint Francis of Assisi. Saint Francis of Assisi made no attempt to overcome the experiences of the heart; on the contrary he retained them in full, and the consequence was, he retained them in perfect health. That is what is so grand and majestic about Francis of Assisi; he enlarged his heart to cover his whole soul. I am not speaking of mystics of this kind, who do not endeavour to overcome the experiences of the heart. I am speaking of mystics who make great endeavours, who wrestle with all their might in this direction, but do not succeed.

In the case of these mystics we do not find that same wonderful kind of marriage with the super-sensible and spiritual which we meet with in Saint Theresa. When a mystic has striven to get free of all that is personal and human and earthly and has nevertheless still retained in conspicuous measure the experiences connected with the heart, then something very much of the nature of human limitations interferes in his striving. And it can actually come about that this marriage, this embrace of the Divine and spiritual, becomes very like the feelings and instincts of human love in ordinary life.

Mystics of this kind abound who, so to speak, love their God and their divine world in the same way as man loves in human life. Look through the histories of the saints and the accounts of monks and nuns, and you will find a great number of this type of mystic. They are “in love” with the Madonna with an altogether human passion. She is for them a substitute for a human wife. Or again, you find nuns who are in love with the Christ as their Bridegroom, they have for Him all the feelings of earthly human love. We have here reached a chapter that is very interesting from a psychological point of view—perhaps more interesting than attractive,—religious mystics who strove after what we have described but were not able to reach it because human nature held them back.

We find mystics—such, for example, as Saint Hildegard—who have good and beautiful impulses but who have also a considerable measure of ordinary earthly instinct and desire, and this taints their mystical feelings and perceptions. They come to an experience that is very like an erotic experience, they come into a kind of mystic eroticism, as you will find if you study the history of the mystics. The outpourings of their heart speak of the “Bride of their soul,” or of their passionate love for the “Bridegroom Jesus,” and so on.

We are the more ready to bear with mystics of this kind, if they have preserved quite a good bit of ordinary human consciousness, and are able as it were to stand aside in their human personality and look on at their own mystical experience. For, as they do this and see that they have not really won the victory but have still something very human left in them, a trace of humour and irony will often enter their consciousness. This gives a personal touch to the whole thing, and we do not dislike them so much; we even begin to feel a sympathetic interest in their unattained conquest of the experiences of the heart. Otherwise it repels one; the whole thing savours of pretence and hypocrisy. For the mystic sets out to compensate for the failure to overcome what lives in ordinary human impulses and instincts in a roundabout way, by asceticism.

If, however, this trait of humour and irony is present, if the person in question has moments when he uses his ordinary human consciousness, turns round on himself and tells himself the truth from the ordinary human standpoint, interspersing in this way his mystical moments with moments when he tells himself the hard plain truth, then we can feel a certain sympathy with him—as we do, for example, when we study such a mystic as Mechthild of Magdeburg.

For there is this difference between Mechthild of Magdeburg and mystics who are like her in other respects, that while she too manifests erotic passion for the Divine and Spiritual, and speaks of her Divine Lover in the same terms as men speak of human love, she expresses herself always with a certain touch of humour. She does not use high-flown language, but speaks in such a way that we can always detect a trace of irony in her words. The difference is very marked between such a mystic as Hildegard who has also not succeeded in overcoming the human personal consciousness, and Mechthild of Magdeburg, who feels herself passionately moved as she comes to the boundary of the Divine, but expresses herself with honest truthfulness and does not call that which still contains erotic passion of the heart by the specious name of “religious rapture,” but calls it quite plainly “religious love,” and speaks constantly of her Lover, her divine Bridegroom.

As you see, there are all manner of shades of mysticism! And even now, we have not so much as touched upon the ancient Greek mysticism which you will find described in my book Christianity as Mystical Fact. We shall have to speak of that later. One thing you will have been able to learn from the kinds of mysticism we have studied today; namely, that the endeavour of all mystics is to make their way out beyond ordinary personal ego-consciousness, to eliminate this consciousness, but that in reality, if man is not then to lose the ground from under his feet, another consciousness must emerge. It is of the nature of mysticism to come to the boundary of the spiritual, to experience the Divine and Spiritual like a kind of marriage, but not to enter into the world of the Divine and Spiritual. The mystic divests himself of the consciousness that requires an external object. His endeavour is to rid himself entirely of this consciousness. What the mystic wants is to go out beyond himself. If however a man wants then to experience consciously the unspoken word and the unmanifest light he must obviously experience them in a new and different consciousness. In other words, if the mystic wants to become an occultist, he must not merely undertake the negative striving, but must centre his attention also on the development of a new and higher consciousness, namely, the consciousness without an object of knowledge. We will speak further tomorrow about this higher consciousness into which the occultist has to enter.

• 1. From Bayard Taylor's Translation.

In the early lectures of this Course it will be necessary to repeat certain things that were said in explanation of the Gospel of St. Luke. There are facts and happenings in the life of Christ Jesus which cannot be understood unless these two Gospels are compared.

For any deeper understanding of the Gospel of St. Matthew it is of primary importance to know that in respect of his physical body, the Individuality with whom this record is primarily concerned had descended from Abraham through three times fourteen generations; he therefore represented a kind of quintessence of the whole Hebrew race. Spiritual Science knows that this Individuality and the original Zoroaster or Zarathustra were one and the same.

In the lecture yesterday some idea was given of the external scene of Zarathustra's activities in the very ancient times in which he lived, and now the views of life and the world prevailing in his environment must also be considered. Principles of profound significance were contained in the world-view held by men in those regions and to speak of only a few of the teachings that are rightly regarded as having been given by the first Zarathustra is to point to deep foundations of all post-Atlantean thought.

External history itself tells us of the two fundamental principles underlying the teachings of Zarathustra: the principle of Ormuzd, the Good Being of Light, and that of Ahriman, the Being of Darkness and Evil. But even in exoteric presentations of this religious system it is emphasized that these two, principles—Ormuzd or Ahura Mazdao, and Ahriman—derive from one universal principle: Zeruane Akarene.

What is this single, undivided origin, from which the other two principles—at war with one another in the world—derive? Zeruane Akarene is generally translated ‘uncreated Time’. The primal principle of which Zarathustra's teaching tells may therefore be thought of as the calm, as yet undisturbed flow of cosmic Time. Moreover, the very sense of the words implies that it is meaningless to pursue the question further—to ask what was the origin of this calm flow of Time. It is important to realise once and for always that one may speak of something in cosmic existence without being justified in putting further questions, let us say, about the causes of a First Principle such as this. Whenever mention is made of a cause, abstract thinking will seldom refrain from asking further questions about the cause of that cause, and so on, forcing the concepts back as it were to infinity But when there is a desire to stand firmly on the ground of Spiritual Science, genuine meditation will make it clear that questioning about causes must end somewhere and that to continue it beyond a certain point is merely to indulge in fantasy.

In the book Occult Science—an Outline I referred to this form of mental procedure. As an example, I said that the sight of wheel-tracks on a road may evoke the question: What has caused them? The answer is: The wheels of a cart. Further questions might be: Where, exactly, are the wheels joined to the cart? Why do they make tracks and why was the cart being driven along the road? Such questions can be answered. The cart made the tracks because it was being driven along the road and it was driven because someone wanted to be carried in it—but this kind of questioning leads finally to the intention which caused the person concerned to use the cart. And if a halt is not made here, further questions regarding the cause of the intention lose point and become no more than a game.

The same is true in connection with the great questions of Cosmogony. Somewhere our questioning must end. For the deeper teachings of Zoroastrianism it is meaningless to go back beyond the calm flow of ‘uncreated Time’.

We now see that Zoroastrianism divides Time itself again into two principles, or—better said—speaks of two principles proceeding from Time: a good principle of Light characterized as that of Ormuzd, and an evil principle of Darkness, that of Ahriman. This dual conception is based upon a profoundly significant truth, namely that all Evil in the world, everything that in its physical image must be called dark and sinful, was not originally so. I said that in ancient Persian thought, the wolf, for example—which in a certain way represented something savage and evil, an outcome of the working of the Ahriman-principle—was regarded as having degenerated; when left to itself the Ahriman-principle could become active in it. Thus the wolf had descended from a being in which the presence of the Good cannot be denied. According to the conceptions of the ancient Persians and the earliest Aryan peoples, the fundamental principle in evolution is that Evil comes into being because something that was good in the form in which it existed in an earlier epoch retains this form in a later age; in failing to transform itself it becomes retrogressive, for it preserves the form suitable for an earlier time. Therefore the cause of all Evil :all Darkness, was to the earliest Aryan peoples simply this: a form of being that was good in a previous epoch continues without change into later times and the consequence of the impact of such a form with one that has made progress is a. battle between the two—the battle between Good and Evil. So in the thought of ancient Persia, Evil is not absolute Evil but, rather, Good manifesting out of its appropriate time, something that once, in an earlier period, was good but is no longer so. Evil in the present, therefore, manifests in the form of events through which conditions suitable for the past are carried into the present. When there is as yet no conflict between the earlier and the later, Time is still undifferentiated, not divided into single ‘moments’.

This profoundly significant world-view held by very early post-Atlantean peoples can be regarded as, the basis of, Zoroastrianism; it includes the concept that was characterized in the lecture yesterday and was dominant in those who adhered to the teachings of Zarathustra. There is evidence on every side that these peoples recognized two phases proceeding from the hitherto undivided flow of Time—two phases coming into conflict as they encounter one another and resolving their conflict only in the stream of onflowing Time. It was realised that the new must come into being and that the old must not be swept away; the goal of the Universe—above all, the goal of the Earth—will be achieved through the creating of balance, of harmony, between the old and the new. This conception, as it has now been characterized, lies at the basis of all forms of higher development originating in Zoroastrianism.

Once the original centre of Zoroastrianism had been established in the region and epoch indicated yesterday, its influence was effective wherever it made its way. And we shall see what a tremendous effect it had upon subsequent epochs, giving expression everywhere to the teaching on the polarity between the old and the new.

The reason why Zarathustra was able to exercise such a far-reaching influence upon posterity was that at the time when he had attained the highest Initiation possible in his day, he had two intimate pupils of whom I have previously spoken.¹ To one of these pupils Zarathustra taught everything relating to the secrets of surrounding physical Space, the secrets of contemporaneous existence. To the other pupil he taught the secrets of Time in flow, the secrets of evolution, of development. On a previous occasion I said that at a certain point on the path of Initiation such as this, something of great significance is able to take place, namely that the teacher can offer up part of his own being to his pupils. And Zarathustra offered up to his two pupils his own astral body and his own etheric body. The Individuality of Zarathustra, the inmost core of his being, remained intact for ever-recurring incarnations. But his astral ‘raiment’, that is to say the astral body in which he had lived as Zarathustra in a very early post-Atlantean epoch—this astral raiment was so perfect, so charged with the essence of his whole being that it did not disperse as do the astral sheaths of other human beings, but remained intact. In the great process of evolution the power of an Individuality bearing human sheaths of this quality, may enable them to remain intact and be preserved, and this was so in the case of the astral body of Zarathustra.

The pupil who had received from Zarathustra the teaching about Space and everything that exists contemporaneously in physical Space—this pupil was reborn in the personality known in history as the Egyptian Thoth, or Hermes. Occult investigation reveals that he was destined not only to consolidate in his own being all the teaching imparted to him in an earlier incarnation by Zarathustra, but to do even more. This was made possible by the fact that through a process enacted in the holy Mysteries, the preserved astral body of Zarathustra himself was incorporated into him. Thus the Individuality of this pupil of Zarathustra was reborn as the inaugurator of Egyptian culture. The Egyptian Hermes therefore bore within himself part of the being of Zarathustra, and this power, together with the fruits of his own former discipleship, enabled Hermes to give the impulse for all that was great and significant in the culture and civilization of ancient Egypt.

In order that the mission of this messenger of Zarathustra might be fulfilled, there had naturally to be a folk suited to receive the impulse. Only among those peoples who had taken the more southerly path from Atlantean territories, had settled in the East of Africa and in whom a high degree of clairvoyance in its Atlantean form had been preserved—only among such peoples could fruitful soil be found for what Hermes, the reborn pupil of Zarathustra, was able to impart. The soul-life prevailing in the Egyptian population came into contact with the teaching of Hermes and from this source the culture of ancient Egypt developed.

It was a culture of a very special character. Think of what treasures of wisdom had been received by Hermes when Zarathustra imparted to him the secrets of things existing contemporaneously in Space. Hermes bore within his own being this supremely important teaching of Zarathustra. As we have often heard, the most characteristic feature of Zarathustra's teaching was that he directed the attention of his people to the Sun and the external light of the Sun, explaining to them that this solar body is only the outer sheath of a lofty Spiritual Being. Thus Zarathustra entrusted to Hermes the secrets of the the reality of being underlying the whole of Nature in the world of Space, the reality of being which underlies everything in contemporaneous existence but goes forward through Time from epoch to epoch, manifesting itself anew in each particular epoch. The wisdom possessed by Hermes concerned all that proceeds from the Sun and evolves to further stages. And the reason why he was able to instill this teaching into the souls of the descendants of Atlantean peoples was because those souls had at one time themselves gazed into the mysteries of the Sun and had preserved in memory something of their vision. Everything, of course, had advanced in evolution—the souls who were destined to receive the wisdom of Hermes, as well as Hermes himself.

Circumstances were different in the case of the second pupil of Zarathustra. To him had been entrusted the secrets relating to the flow of Time, and he had necessarily to experience the conflict between the old and the new, the active principle of contrast, of opposition and of polarity, implicit in evolution. Zarathustra had offered up part of his being for this second pupil as well, and when the latter was reborn he too was able to receive what had been bequeathed to him. Whereas the Individuality of Zarathustra remained intact, the astral and etheric sheaths were separated from him, but because they had been borne by such a mighty Individuality, they too remained intact and did not disperse. At a certain point in his new incarnation, this second pupil, to whom had been communicated the wisdom relating to Time—in contrast to that relating to Space—this second pupil received into him-self the etheric body of Zarathustra, who had offered it up as he had offered up his astral body. This second pupil of Zarathustra was reborn as Moses, into whom, in very early childhood, the preserved etheric body of Zarathustra was incorporated.

Religious chronicles that are genuinely based on occultism contain mysterious clues pointing to the secrets disclosed by occult investigation. To enable Moses, the reincarnated pupil of Zarathustra, to receive into himself the etheric body of his former teacher, something quite unusual must necessarily happen to him. It was essential that the miraculous legacy he was to receive from Zarathustra should be incorporated into him before impressions from the environment were made upon his individuality, as in the case of other human beings. This is narrated symbolically in the story that he was laid in a cradle of reeds and lowered into a river—an indication of a remarkable Initiation, During the process of Initiation a human being is shut off from the outer world for a certain period of time and what he is destined to receive is then instilled into him. Thus the etheric body of Zarathustra that had been preserved intact was incorporated into Moses at a certain moment while he was shut off from the outer world; and then there could come to flower within him the wonderful wisdom concerning Time once imparted to him by Zarathustra. He was able, now, to give expression to it in pictures suitable for his people.

Hence we have from Moses the mighty pictures of Genesis—external Imaginations of the wisdom of successive epochs. These pictures were the expression of reborn knowledge, of wisdom that had once been imparted to him by Zarathustra and was now rooted in his very being because the etheric sheath of Zarathustra himself had been incorporated into him.

But in a measure of such significance for the evolution of humanity, two factors are essential. Not only must there be an Initiate to inaugurate an impulse in culture, but it must be possible for this great Individuality to plant the seed of future culture in the folk-soil suitable for it. And to understand the nature of the folk-soil into which Moses could plant what had been transmitted to him by Zarathustra, it will be well to concern ourselves with a certain, characteristic of the Mosaic wisdom.

In an earlier incarnation, then, Moses had been a pupil of Zarathustra. At that time there had been imparted to him the wisdom relating to Time together with the secret that in all epochs the earlier clashes with the later, thus producing contrast. If Moses as the bearer of this wisdom was to become a factor in the evolution of humanity, it had to be presented as a contrast to the other stream of wisdom—the Hermes-wisdom. And this was what actually happened.

Hermes had received from Zarathustra the direct wisdom, the Sun-wisdom, that is to say, knowledge of the reality of being working mysteriously in the outer, physical sheath of the light—the solar body. With Moses it was different. The kind of wisdom of which he was the recipient is harboured more in the denser, etheric body, not in the astral body. His was the wisdom that does not only look upwards to the Sun, seeing all things streaming from the Sun, but is also concerned with what stands over against the light and essential quality of the Sun; this wisdom assimilates—without being corrupted by it—that which has become earthly, dense, solidified, old. This was Earth-wisdom, comprised, it is true, within Sun-wisdom, but for all that essentially Earth-wisdom, The secrets of Earth-evolution, of how man develops on the Earth and how the Earth evolves when the Sun has separated from it—these were the secrets imparted to Moses. And this, if we study the inner, not the external aspects of the matter, explains why we encounter in the teachings of Hermes something that is an utter contrast to the wisdom of Moses.

In studying all such matters, certain modes of thought current at the present time apply the principle that in the night all cows are grey! Those who think in this way have eyes only for similarities and are overjoyed when, for example, they find the same thing in the teachings of Hermes and of Moses: here a triad, there a triad, here a quaternary, there a quaternary, and so on. But there is not much point in this. It would be rather like a person setting out to train someone else to be a botanist without teaching him what differentiates, let us say, a rose from a carnation, but speaking only of features that are identical in both. This does not help. We must know in what respects the beings themselves, and also the forms of wisdom,differ; we must realise that the Moses-wisdom was quite different in character from the Hermes-wisdom. Both forms of wisdom proceeded, originally, from Zarathustra; but just as unity, divides and manifests in very various ways, so did Zarathustra give essentially different revelations to each of his two pupils.

If we steep ourselves in the Hermes-wisdom, we find illumination on cosmogony—it explains to us the origin of worlds and the operations of the inpouring light. But in the Hermes-wisdom we do not find the concepts which reveal the fact that in the evolutionary process the earlier works on into the later, and because of this, the past and the present come into conflict, causing the opposition between Darkness and Light. Earth-wisdom which makes intelligible to us how the Earth, together with Man, evolved after the Sun had separated—this is nowhere contained in the Hermes-wisdom. But it was to be the special mission of the Moses-wisdom to make comprehensible to men the evolution of the Earth after the separation of the Sun. Earth-wisdom was to be the gift of Moses; Sun wisdom, the gift of Hermes. To Moses, with his remembrances of all that had been imparted to him by Zarathustra, there is revealed the process of the Earth's evolution and man's evolution on the Earth. His starting-point as it were is the earthly; but the earthly is separated from the Sun and contains the Sun-nature in a weakened form only. The earthly comes towards and meets the Sun-nature. Hence the Earth-wisdom of Moses had actually to encounter the Sun-wisdom of Hermes in concrete existence; these two streams of wisdom had to contact each other. The outer circumstances too indicate this in a most wonderful way. Moses is born an Egypt, his people are brought thither and make contact with the. Egyptians—the people of Hermes. These happenings are the outer reflection of the contact of Sun-wisdom with Earth-wisdom. Both forms of wisdom stem from Zarathustra but pour over the Earth in quite different streams of evolution, eventually meeting and working in conjunction.

Now certain wisdom connected with proceedings in the Mysteries always expresses itself in, a very special way about the deepest secrets of human and other happenings. In the lectures on Genesis given at Munich, I indicated how extraordinarily difficult it is to speak in terms of current language of these great truths which embrace not only the deepest secrets of the being of man but also cosmic facts. Our words are often fetters, for they bear the connotations that have come to be attached to them from long usage, and when with the great wisdom-truths unfolding themselves in the soul we resort to language, endeavouring to clothe these inner revelations in words, we find ourselves battling with a dreadfully feeble instrument.

The greatest piece of nonsense uttered in the course of the 19th century and repeated times without number is that it should be possible to couch every real truth in simple words and that language, with the means of expression it offers, should actually be a criterion of whether a person is in possession of some particular truth or not. This statement, however, only shows that those who make it are not in possession of essential truth but only of such truths as have been conveyed to them through language in the course of the centuries, the forms of which may change. For such people language is adequate and they feel nothing of the struggle that must often be waged with it. But this struggle becomes only too glaringly real when something of great consequence has to be expressed.

(I referred in Munich to the hard struggle I had with language in connection with the passage spoken in the meditation chamber at the end of the first scene, in. the Mystery Play, The Portal of Initiation. It was actually no more than a faint echo—all that could be expressed through the feeble instrument of language—of what the Hierophant was intended to say to the pupil.)

In the sacred Mysteries the very deepest secrets were brought to expression and the inadequacy of language for this purpose was felt at all times. Hence the age-long efforts in the Mysteries to find means of expression for the soul's experiences. Terms and phrases that had been used in ordinary intercourse for centuries proved to be utterly inadequate, whereas the opposite was true of the pictures arising when the gaze was directed to the expanse of universal space, to the constellations, to the appearance of a certain star or the eclipse of one heavenly body by another at definite times. These were pictures well fitted to portray particular happenings and experiences in man's life of soul. I will give a brief example.

Let us suppose it was a matter of announcing that something of great and far-reaching importance would take place at a particular moment in time because some human soul would then be sufficiently mature to undergo a sublime experience and to communicate it to his people; or perhaps there might have been a desire to indicate that a people, or a particular section of humanity, had reached a certain state of maturity in evolution and that an Individuality had come to dwell among them, possibly from some quite different region. In the latter case, the highest point reached in the development of this individual was coincident with the highest point reached in the development of the folk-soul of the people concerned and it was desired to express the unique nature of this event. Nothing that could be conveyed through ordinary language was found to be lofty enough to impress men's feelings with the significance of such an event. It was therefore expressed pictorially by saying : When the highest power developed by an an individual coincides with the highest power developed by a particular folk-soul, it is as when the Sun is in the constellation of Leo and radiates its light from there. In this example the picture of the Lion was chosen to denote something manifesting in its greatest strength in the evolution of humanity. A phenomenon in cosmic space was thus used to indicate a happening in the life of humanity. Such is the origin of certain expressions used in history; they were derived from the stars and constellations,and were the means used to express spiritual facts in the life of mankind.

When it is said, for example, that an event in the evolution of humanity is expressed symbolically by a phenomenon in the heavens such as the Sun in Leo or in some particular constellation, trivial thinkers are very apt to reverse the real meaning and state that all happenings connected with the early history of humanity were mythical descriptions of movements of celestial bodies; whereas the truth is that earthly events were expressed in pictures taken from the constellations. The truth is invariably the opposite of the theories loved by superficial thinkers.

This connection with the Cosmos is something that should fill us with reverence for what we are told about the great events in the evolution of mankind and the expression of them in pictures derived from cosmic phenomena. There is actually a mysterious connection between all cosmic existence and what comes to pass in man's existence; for happenings on Earth are reflections of happenings in the Cosmos.

In a certain respect the convergence of the Sun-wisdom of Hermes and the Earth-wisdom of Moses in Egypt is also a reflection, a mirror-image, of happenings in the Cosmos. Picture to yourselves certain forces streaming out from the Sun and other forces streaming back from the Earth into cosmic space; the point in space at which they meet will not be without importance; according to whether the contact is made at a point nearer to or farther away from the sources in question, the effect of the radiations emitted and then sent back, will be different. The contact between the Hermes-wisdom and the Moses-wisdom in ancient Egypt was presented in the Mysteries in such a way that comparison was possible with something that according to spiritual-scientific cosmology had already taken place in the Cosmos. We know that Sun and Earth had separated, that for a time the Earth was still united with the Moon, that then a part of the Earth moved out into space to become our present Moon. The Earth had therefore sent back part of itself towards the Sun in cosmic space. And when, in Egyptian civilization, the Earth-wisdom of Moses came into contact with the Sun-wisdom of Hermes, this remarkable happening was also like a ‘radiation’—this time from the Earth towards the Sun.

After its subsequent separation from the Sun-wisdom of Hermes, the wisdom of Moses Earth-wisdom—can be said to have developed further as the science of the Earth and of Man; in its course towards the Sun it absorbed and steeped itself in the direct wisdom radiating from the Sun. There was, however, to be a limit to this absorption; the wisdom of Moses was destined to progress on its own and develop independence. Hence it remained in Egypt only until enough had been absorbed for its needs; then came the “Exodus of the Children of Moses from Egypt”, in order that the Sun-wisdom received by the Earth-wisdom might be assimilated and also developed.

Two phases must therefore be distinguished in the wisdom of Moses: one while it is developing in the sphere of the wisdom of Hermes, surrounded by it on all sides and perpetually absorbing it. Then comes the separation, and after the exodus from Egypt the wisdom of Moses, although now developing independently, elaborates the wisdom of Hermes it has absorbed and on its own further course reaches three stages . What was its goal and, its destined task?

The task of the wisdom of Moses was to find the way back again to the Sun. It had become Earth-wisdom. Moses was born with all that had been imparted to him by Zarathustra as a wise man of the Earth and he sought for the way back to the Sun in different stages. At the first stage he had steeped himself in the wisdom of Hermes; the course of his further development can best be portrayed in pictures drawn from cosmic existence. When the effects of what happens on the Earth stream back into cosmic space, the first encounter on the path towards the Sun is with Mercury. (We know that thc Venus of ordinary astronomy is Mercury in the terminology of occultism and the Mercury of astronomy is Venus according to occultism.) On the way from the Earth towards the Sun, therefore, the Mercury-nature is encountered first, at a later stage the Venus-nature and then the Sun-nature. Hence through, inner processes in the life of soul, Moses was to develop the heritage received from Zarathustra in such a way that on the returning path it would be able to find the Sun-nature again; it had therefore to reach a definite stage. The wisdom inculcated by Moses into culture and civilization had necessarily to develop in the form in which he had imparted to his people. Hence on the path of return, having first absorbed something of the wisdom imparted by Hermes as directly radiating from the Sun, Moses developed it with a new orientation, that is, in the opposite direction.

It is said that Hermes later called Mercury (Thoth), brought to his people art and science, knowledge of the external world, external art, in the form suitable for them. But it was in a different, indeed opposite way, that Moses himself was to reach this Hermes-Mercury-wisdom and develop it to further stages on the returning path. This process portrayed in the history of the Hebrews up to the time and reign of David; he is described as the royal psalmist, as a divine prophet, as a man of God, an armour-bearer and also a player on the harp. David is the Hermes, the Mercury, of the Hebrew people who had now developed to the stage of being able to produce a Hermes- or Mercury-wisdom in an independent form. At the time of David, therefore, the Hermes-wisdom, once assimilated by the Moses-wisdom, had reached the region, or stage, of Mercury.

On the returning pail towards the Sun the wisdom of Moses was to advance to the Venus-stage. Hebraism reached this stage at the time when the Moses-wisdom, as it had flowed down the centuries, was destined to unite with an entirely different element, with a stream of wisdom that had come from the other direction.

Whatever rays back from the Earth into space encounters Venus on the path to the Sun, and during the Babylonian captivity the wisdom of Moses encountered the wisdom that had made its way over from Asia and was presented in a modified form in the Babylonian and Chaldean Mysteries. This contact was made during the time of the Babylonian captivity. Like a wanderer who, having started from the Earth with a knowledge of what the Earth is, had passed through the region of Mercury and arrived in the region of Venus in order there to receive the light of the Sun falling upon Venus, so did the wisdom of Moses absorb what had proceeded directly from the sanctuaries of Zoroastrianism and was being continued in a modified form in the Mysteries of the Chaldeans and Babylonians. It was this that the Moses-wisdom received during the Babylonian captivity, thus assimilating wisdom that had made its way to the region of the Euphrates and the Tigris.

But something else came to pass as well. Moses had encountered the wisdom that once upon a time had streamed from the Sun. In the sanctuaries that were known to and frequented by the wise men among the Hebrews during the captivity, the legacy of the wisdom bequeathed by Moses to his people mingled with the Sun-nature of the wisdom harboured in the Mystery-centres in the regions around the Euphrates and the Tigris where the reincarnated Zarathustra was teaching. Approximately at the time of the Babylonian captivity, Zarathustra himself was incarnated; thus while teaching in that region, he who had already given over one part of his wisdom, receive it back again. He himself incarnated time and time again, and in his incarnation as Zarathas or Nazarathos he became the teacher of the captive Jews who knew of the sanctuaries existing in those regions.

Thus in its later course the wisdom of Moses came into contact with what Zarathustra himself had been able to achieve after he had moved from the more distant Mystery-centres to those of Asia Minor. There he became the teacher of the initiated pupils of Chaldea as well as of individual initiated teachers; there were also those in whom the Moses-wisdom was fructified by the stream with which they could now make contact, being able to receive from Zarathustra himself, in his incarnation as Zarathas or Nazarathos, what he himself had formerly imparted to their ancestor—Moses. Such was the destiny of the wisdom of Moses. It had actually originated with Zarathustra and had been transplanted into foreign lands. It was as if a Sun-being with bandaged eyes had been carried down to the Earth and on the return journey must seek again for what it had lost.

Moses, then, was the reincarnated pupil of Zarathustra. In his existence in Egyptian civilization everything once imparted to him by Zarathustra lit up again within him; but isolated in the domain of the Earth, it was as if he did not know the source of his illumination. Hence he took the path towards what had once been of the nature of the Sun; in Egypt he turned to the Hermes-wisdom which presented the wisdom of Zarathustra in its direct form, not in reflection as in his own case. After he had absorbed enough of the Hermes-wisdom, the stream of his own wisdom developed in a straightforward course. Having established in the Davidic age a form of Hermes-Wisdom, with its own science and art, the stream of Moses-wisdom moved towards the Sun whence it had originally issued, but in a form which at first concealed its real nature.

In the centres of learning in ancient Babylon where he was also the teacher of Pythagoras, Zarathustra—Zarathas or Nazarathos—could only teach in a way that was possible in a specially constituted body, for he was obliged to use such a body as his instrument. If he was to give expression to the Sun-nature in its fullness as he had once done and had then imparted it to Hermes and Moses—if he was to give expression to this wisdom in a new form, suitable for the later epoch, he needed a bodily sheath that would be a worthy instrument. It was only in a form conditioned by a body such as ancient Babylonia was able to produce that Zarathustra could bring forth again all the wisdom which he then conveyed to Pythagoras, to the learned Hebrews and the Chaldean and Babylonian sages who at that time—in the sixth century B.C.—were in a position to hear it.

In regard to what Zarathustra was able to teach, it was actually as if the light of the Sun had first been intercepted by Venus and could not find its way directly to the Earth; it was as if the Zarathustra-wisdom could not manifest itself in its primal form but only in modification. For to enable this wisdom to work in its original form Zarathustra would have to be enveloped in a suitable body and such a body could only be produced in an altogether unique way—which may be characterized somewhat as follows.

It was said in the lecture yesterday that there were three folk-souls in Asia, each of a different character : the Indian in the South, the Iranian and the Turanian to the North. It was indicated that these three species of souls came into being, firstly, because the northern stream of the Atlantean peoples had passed into Asia across these regions and had spread through them. But another stream had passed through Africa and its final offshoots had penetrated as far as the regions of the Turanian peoples. Where the northern stream which had passed from Atlantis towards Asia met the other stream which had passed from Atlantis through Africa, a remarkable mixture of peoples was produced and a racial stock formed from which the Hebrews subsequently sprang.

Something very remarkable came to pass in these people. Faculties of astral-etheric clairvoyance that had remained in a state of decadence among certain people and had become corrupt as the last phase of a faculty of clairvoyance directed outwards—all this turned inwards in those who became the Hebrew people. The direction was entirely changed. Instead of manifesting in its outer operations in the form of a lower astral clairvoyance, as the remains of the old Atlantean clairvoyance, it worked as an organizing power in the inner constitution of the body. What had become a decadent outward clairvoyance and having remained static had been permeated by the Ahrimanic element—this had then developed in the right way through becoming an active force in the inner, organic constitution of the human body. In the Hebrew people this faculty did not come to expression as an outdated form of clairvoyance but it worked as a transforming force upon the bodily nature, thus bringing it to a stage of greater perfection. The faculty that in the Turanian people had become decadent, worked creatively and with transforming power in the inner constitution of the Hebrews.

The following may therefore be said. In the bodily nature of the Hebrew people as propagated through blood-relation- from generation to generation, there were working the forces which as outward clairvoyant vision had had their day and were no longer to continue in this form but were now to function in a different sphere where they would be in the right element. The faculty that had enabled the Atlanteans to look with spiritual vision into space and into spiritual regions and in the Turanians had become a degenerate residue of clairvoyance—this faculty turned inwards in the Hebrew people. What had been of a divine-spiritual nature in Atlantean culture worked inwardly, in the Hebrews as an organic formative force and within their blood was able to light up as an inner consciousness of the Divine. It was as if everything that had been seen by the Atlantean when he directed his clairvoyant gaze outwards to the expanse of space had now become wholly inward, arising in the inmost organism of the Hebrews as consciousness of, Jahve or Jehovah, as inner, consciousness of the Divine. Thus the Hebrews felt the Godhead to be united with their blood, felt themselves pervaded, impregnated, by the Godhead outspread in space, and knew that this same Godhead was living within them, pulsing through their very blood.

Yesterday we considered the contrast between the Iranian and the Turanian civilizations. Now, having compared the faculties of the Turanians with those of the Hebrew race, we see that what had become decadent in the former progressed in the latter, subsequently working in the blood. What had been visible to the Atlantean now manifested in the Hebrew in the form of inner feeling. This experience is summed up in a single word—the name JEHOVAH. Compressed as it were into a single point, into one inner centre of consciousness of the Divine, lived the God who had been revealed to Atlantean clairvoyance behind all external phenomena. Invisible and inwardly experienced, the God lived in the blood of the generations of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, leading them and all their succeeding generations from event to event on their path of destiny. In this way the outer had become inward; the outer was now experienced within, no longer seen, no longer called by different names but known by a single designation: ‘I AM THE I AM !’ The Divine had assumed an entirely different form. Whereas with the faculties man possessed in the Atlantean epoch he had found the God out yonder in the Universe, he now found the God in the centre of his own being, in his ‘I’, felt the God in the blood flowing through the generations. The great God of the Universe had now become the God of the Hebrews, the God of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob, the God who flowed in the blood through the generations.

Thus was founded the racial stock whose inner mission for the evolution of humanity we shall study tomorrow. It has only been possible to-day to give an indication of the very earliest stage in the composition of the blood of this people, the stage when everything that in the Atlantean age man had allowed to work in upon him from outside was now com-pressed within his own being. We shall see what mysteries are fulfilled in happenings that have only been touched upon to-day, and we shall learn to understand the unique nature of the people from whom Zarathustra, as the Being we call Jesus of Nazareth, could derive his body.

• 1. e.g. in the Lecture Cycle The Gospel of St. Luke, Lecture Five.

When you consider the fundamental basis of our anthroposophically oriented science of the spirit in comparison with other so-called world views—and there are many now appearing—you will note especially one characteristic. This is the fact that spiritual science as a view of the world and of life endeavors actually to apply to the whole of human life, to everything that the human being encounters in life, what it seeks to establish through research in the spiritual worlds. Whoever has a feeling for what is essential in the urgent problems and impelling forces of our present time will probably be able to achieve for himself an understanding of the fact that the tremendous need of the present and of the immediate future is to be found just here, that is, in connecting directly with life itself the comprehensive ideas constituting world conceptions. Among the causes that have brought about the present catastrophic situation of humanity, not the least significant is the fact that the world views held by human beings, whether rooted in religion, science, or aesthetics, have all gradually lost their connection with life in the course of time. There has existed a tendency—we might call it a perverse tendency—to separate the so-called daily practical life, in the most comprehensive sense of the word, from what men seek in their effort to satisfy their needs in the realm of religion and world conceptions. Just reflect how life during the last centuries has gradually taken on such form that people have carried on their external activities, were practical men as the saying goes, and conducted their lives according to practical principles, and then applied half an hour each day more or less, or no time at all, or Sunday, to the satisfaction of those needs of the heart and soul that impel them to seek for a connection with the divine spiritual element permeating the world.

All this will be utterly changed if an anthroposophically oriented science of the spirit can take possession of the minds and hearts of men. This will take on such a character that thoughts will stream forth from this world view that will be applicable to life itself in all its aspects, thus enabling us to judge life with true insight. The principle of the Sunday vesper sermon shall by no means be that of our anthroposophically directed world conception, but the whole of life shall be permeated on all days of the week and on Sunday forenoon as well with what can be given to humanity by the anthroposophical comprehension of the world. Because such has not been the case up to the present time, the world has gradually drifted into chaos. People have neglected to direct their attention to what has really been happening in their immediate vicinity and they are now surprised because the results of this oversight are clearly manifest. They will be still more surprised in the future as these results become more clearly manifest.

Under no circumstances should we fail to pay attention today to what is spreading among people over the entire earth. With the powers of judgment that enable us to see into the great impulses at work in world events, we must endeavor to find our way into what confronts human hearts and minds today, in part in such an enigmatic way; that is, into what is threatening to transform the social structure into a chaos. It will not do to continue further in such a way that we decide simply to let come what may without endeavoring to penetrate into things with a sound power of judgment.

It is necessary to abandon the basic maxim that says,“This is an everyday matter, this is secular, it belongs to the external life; we turn our backs on this and direct our attention toward the spiritual and divine.” This must come to an end. The time must begin in which even the most trivial everyday matter must be brought into connection with the spiritual and divine; that is, the time in which what is derived from the spiritual life shall no longer be viewed only from the most extremely abstract point of view.

In the course of these reflections, I have stated that a favorable change in the social movement cannot come about in any other way than through an increase in the interest that a person feels in another human being. A social structure is something men create in company with one another. Its ills cannot be healed unless the person knows that he is really within this order, unless he is within the social structure in his attitude of mind. The unsound element in the present epoch, which has brought about this catastrophe, lies in the neglect of people to acquire any sort of attitude of mind toward the way in which a person belongs to a social community. The interest that binds us as human beings to other human beings has come to an end in spite of the belief frequently manifested by people that they do have such an interest. Most certainly the past theosophical maxim, “I love all human beings; I have an interest in all human beings,” is not effective; it is abstract; it does not lay hold upon real life and laying hold upon real life is what really matters. This must be understood in a deeper sense. A lack of understanding of real life has been the characteristic of recent centuries. Now, these recent centuries have brought about the present situation without a realization of this process on the pap of humanity, and they will cause future situations. In the historic life of humanity, conditions cannot be what they should be unless people accompany what is happening, what occurs among them in the social life, with their thinking. But the events that have occurred over a relatively long time cannot be accompanied thus unless we acquire a sound sense for certain phenomena.

To an objective observer it has been all too obvious that administrations and governments have been conducted and are being conducted according to fundamental principles that were really out of date centuries ago, whereas life has naturally moved forward during recent centuries. An essential element that has entered into the evolution of humanity is modern industrialism, which has created the whole modern proletariat. But this genesis of the modern proletariat has not been accompanied by thinking. The leading classes have continued to live in the old manner, administering their positions of leadership as they have been accustomed to do for centuries. Without their doing anything about it, without their having even accompanied the process of world history with their thinking, the modern proletariat has evolved out of the existing facts, actual occurrences, and the rise of modern industrialism. This began essentially with the invention of the mechanical loom and spinning machine in the eighteenth century. Thus the destiny of world history for the present and the immediate future depends upon what is going on in the world in the heads of the modern proletariat—what haunts them, you may say, like a specter. This proletariat is striving for power through majority control and it is to be considered in its actions just as we consider the results of natural events and elemental occurrences. It should not be looked upon as something to be criticized that may please or displease us. The proletariat must be judged in its actions somewhat as we judge an earthquake or a tidal wave of the sea, or anything else of the kind.

We are now seeing the preliminary stages of what takes its rise from the modern proletariat—or, better expressed, from the tendencies and feelings of the modern proletariat. Like the action of an advance guard we observe what is known to us in a certain aspect in Russian bolshevism. This Russian bolshevism as I have often declared, is not in harmony with the original disposition of the Russian people. It has been introduced from without. But this is not a matter of any consequence if we wish to face the facts since it actually exists within the regions that formerly constituted the Empire of the Czar. It has taken root there, and it must be observed like a phenomenon of nature that has the tendency to spread. In observing such a thing as Russian bolshevism it is most important of all to disregard secondary phenomena. We must pay attention to the matter of main importance. The fact that bolshevism had its beginning in 1917, and that it was accompanied by certain external phenomena, may have been determined by certain obvious causes. I have said to you that even the incompetence of Ludendorff and also various other things have not been free of responsibility for the actual outbreak of bolshevism. But all this must be eliminated if we wish to view things in a fruitful way, and we must pay attention to the active forces that are alive in this Russian bolshevism. We must simply ask ourselves as a mere matter of fact what the objective of Russian bolshevism is and how it is related to the whole evolution of humanity. Beyond question, it is not something ephemeral and transitory. Rather, it is a phenomenon of far-reaching consequences in world history. It is exceedingly important that we should examine the basic structure as visualized by Russian bolshevism in order to be able to reflect upon it in a certain way as it emerges from deeper impelling forces of the world.

If we consider the fundamental characteristics of Russian bolshevism, we must conclude that its first endeavor aims at the destruction of what we have characterized in the marxian sense as the bourgeoisie. It is a fundamental maxim, so to speak, to destroy, root and branch, as something harmful in the evolution of humanity according to their point of view, everything that has taken its rise in the evolution of history as the bourgeois class. Bolshevism is to arrive at this objective in various ways. First, it aims at the removal of all class distinctions. Bolshevism does not direct its efforts toward such factual removal of the distinctions into classes and ranks as I have presented them to you. Bolshevism itself thinks in a wholly bourgeois manner, and what I have introduced to you is not conceived in a bourgeois but a human manner. Bolshevism intends to overcome the differentiation among classes and ranks in its own way. It says to itself that the contemporary states are constructed on the basis of the bourgeois conception of life, so the forms of the contemporary states must disappear. Everything that is a subordinate outgrowth of the bourgeois social class in the contemporary states such as the police system, the military system, the system of justice must disappear. In other words, what has been created by the bourgeoisie for its security and its administration of justice must disappear with the bourgeois class. The whole administration and organization of the social structure must pass into the hands of the proletariat. Through this process the state, as it has existed until now, will die away and the proletariat will administer the whole human structure, the whole community life of society.

This cannot be achieved by means of the old system of arrangements that the bourgeois class had created for itself. It cannot be achieved by the election of a Reichstag or any other sort of body of representatives of the people, chosen on the basis of any sort of suffrage, as this has been done under the conception of life characteristic of the bourgeois class.

If such representative bodies continued to be elected, only the bourgeois class would perpetuate itself in these bodies. In other words, such representative bodies, under whatever system of suffrage chosen, would not render possible the attainment of the goals that are there striven for. Therefore, the matter of importance is that such measures shall now really be applied as have their origin in the proletariat itself, such as cannot come to birth in any middle class head, since a middle class head inevitably conceives only such regulations as must be abolished. Nothing whatever can be expected, therefore, from any kind of national or state assembly, but something is to be expected solely from a dictatorship of the proletariat. This means that the entire social structure must be handed over to a dictatorship of the proletariat. Only the proletariat will have the inclination actually to eliminate the bourgeois class from the world because, should persons of the bourgeois class be members of representative bodies, they would have no inclination to eliminate themselves from the world. That is what is really necessary, that the whole bourgeois class shall be deprived of its rights. Thus, the only persons who can exercise an influence upon the social structure must be those who belong to the proletariat in the true sense, that is, only those who perform labor, who are useful to the community.

Consequently, according to this proletariat world conception, a person who causes others to perform any sort of service for him, and remunerates them for this, cannot have the right to vote. That is, whoever employs persons, engages persons to serve him and remunerates them for their service, has no right to participate in any way in the social structure, and has no right, therefore, to a vote. Neither does anyone possess the right to vote who lives on income from his property or who profits from income. Nor does a person who is engaged in trade have the right to vote or one who is a distributor and does not perform any practical labor. In other words, all who live by means of income, who employ other persons and remunerate them, who are engaged in trade or are middle men, are excluded from being representatives of the government when the dictatorship of the proletariat takes control. During the continuance of this dictatorship of the proletariat, there is no general freedom of speech, no freedom of assembly, no freedom to organize, but only those who are engaged in actual labor can hold meetings or form organizations. All others are deprived of freedom of speech, the right to assembly, and the right to organize societies or unions. Likewise, only those enjoy the freedom of the press who perform practical labor. The press of the bourgeois class is suppressed, and not tolerated.

These are, in a general way, the guiding principles, we may say, during the transitional stage. After these principles have been dominant for a certain length of time the proletariat world conception expects from their operation that only men engaged in practical labor will exist. Only the proletariat will continue to exist. The bourgeois class will have been exterminated.

To these things, which have primary importance for the transitional period, will then be added those that have permanent significance. To these belongs, for example, the universal obligation to work. Every person is under obligation to produce by labor something useful to the community.

A decisive principle of a permanent character is the termination of the right to private ownership of real estate. Larger estates are handed over to agricultural communes. According to this proletariat world view, there will exist in future no private ownership of land. Industrial establishments, establishments of entrepreneurs are confiscated and passed under the control of society, being administered by the centralized administration of the workers, at the head of which is the Supreme Soviet for the national economy. This is simply bolshevism in Russia. Ranks are taken over by the state. A universal system of bookkeeping is instituted, embracing the entire community and comprising all production. All foreign trade of this single communal entity is made communal, that is, the establishments are taken over by the state.
These are, in a general way, the fundamental principles constituting the ideal of Trotsky and Lenin, and you will see clearly in them the cardinal points of what is willed by the modern proletariat.

It does not suffice, of course, to be informed each day by the newspapers that a certain number of bloody deeds have been done by bolshevism. If we compare the bloody deeds done by bolshevism with the immense number of those done by reason of this war, the deeds of bolshevism obviously become an insignificant affair. The really important thing is to see what has been hitherto overlooked and neglected in order that the evolution of humanity may in the future be followed with our thinking. It is really necessary that we fix our attention, first in our hearts and then with our minds, upon these things that are so intimately connected with the progressive evolution of humanity. It is precisely the mission of the science of the spirit to fix our attention upon these things with our minds and hearts. The time must come to an end in which lazy pastors and priests preach to the people from the pulpit every Sunday theoretical stuff having no connection with life for the so-called warming of their souls. On the contrary, a condition must begin in which everyone who desires to participate in spiritual life shall be in duty bound to look into life, to establish an immediate connection with life. No small share in the responsibility for the misfortune of the present time rests upon the fact that those who have been custodians of the religious feelings of humanity for a long time past have preached to people from their pulpits such things as actually have no relationship whatever with life. They have directed discourses for the sole purpose of providing the people with insipid stuff for their hearts and souls that affected them in a pleasant way but never grasped life. It is for this reason that life has remained without spirit and has finally fallen into chaos. You may seek for much of the responsibility, for which recompense is required at present, precisely in the stupid discourses of those who have been the custodians of the religious feelings of people and who have had no relationship with life. What have they achieved of all that must take place in the epoch during which a whole new humanity in the form of the proletariat has evolved? What have these people achieved who have proclaimed useless stuff from their pulpits, such stuff that it has been desired by people only because they wished to delude themselves with all sorts of illusions regarding the realities of life? This is a serious time and things must be viewed in a serious light.

What has been said regarding the necessity for individuals to acquire an interest in one another must not be regarded only in a manner harmonizing with the mood presented in the Sunday vesper sermon. It must be considered according to the profound indication it gives in regard to the social structure of the present age.

Consider a concrete example. How many people there are today who have an abstract and confused conception of their own personal lives! If they ask themselves, for example, “What do I live on?”—for the most part, they do not do this, but if they did it once, they would say to themselves, “Why, on my money.” Among those who say to themselves, “I live on my money,” there are many who have inherited this money from their parents. They suppose they live on their money, inherited from their fathers, but we cannot live on money. Money is not something on which we can live. Here it is necessary at last to begin to reflect. This question is intimately connected with the real interest that one individual has in another. Anyone who thinks he lives on the money he has inherited, for example, or has acquired in any way whatever except by receiving money for work, as is the custom today—whoever lives in this way and supposes that he can live on money has no interest in his fellow men because no one can live on money. We must eat, and what we eat has been produced by a human being. We must have clothing. What we wear must be made through the labor of people. In order that I may put on a coat or a pair of trousers, human beings must expend their strength in labor for hours. They work for me. It is on this labor that I live, not on my money. My money has no value other than that of giving me the power to make use of the labor of others. Under the social conditions of the present time, we do not begin to have an interest in our fellow men until we answer that question in the proper way, until we hold the picture in our minds of a certain number of persons working for a certain number of hours in order that I may live within the social structure. It is of no importance to give ourselves a comfortable feeling by saying, “I love people.” No one loves people if he supposes that he is living on his money and does not in the least conceive how people work for him in order to produce even the minimum necessary for his life.

But the thought that a certain number of persons labor in order that we may possess the minimum necessities of life is inseparable from another. It is the thought that we must recompense society, not with money but with work in exchange for the work that has been done for us. We feel an interest in our fellow men only when we are led to feel obligated to recompense in some form of labor the amount of labor that has been performed for us. To give our money to our fellow men only signifies that we are able to hold our fellow men on a leash as bound slaves and that we can compel them to labor for us.

Permit me to ask whether you cannot answer out of your experience the question how many men realize that money is only a claim upon human strength employed in labor, that money is only a means for gaining power. How many persons really see clearly that they could not even exist in this physical world but for the labor of other persons upon which they depend for what they demand for their lives? The feeling of obligation to the society in which we live is the beginning of the interest that is required for a sound social order.

It is necessary to reflect about these things, otherwise we ascend in an unwholesome way into spiritual abstractions and do not rise in a wholesome way from physical reality to spiritual reality. The lack of interest in the social structure has characterized precisely these last centuries. During recent centuries, men have gradually formed the habit of developing a real interest in the matter of social impulses only with regard to their own respected persons. In greater or lesser degree everything has borne in a roundabout way only upon one's personality. A wholesome social life is possible only when interest in one's own respected personality is broadened into a genuine social interest. In this connection the bourgeoisie may well ask themselves what they have neglected.

Just consider the following fact. There is such a thing as a spiritual culture. There are cultural objects. To select one example, there are works of art. Now, ask yourselves to how many people these works of art are accessible. Or, rather ask yourselves to how many persons these works of art are utterly inaccessible. For how many persons do these works of art actually not exist. But just calculate how many persons must labor in order that these works of art may exist. One or another work of art is in Rome. One or another bourgeois can travel to Rome. Just add up the total of how much labor must be performed by creative workers, etc., etc.,—these etceteras will never come to an end—in order that this bourgeois, when he travels to Rome, may see something that is there for him because he is a bourgeois, but is not there for all those persons who are now beginning to give expression to their proletariat conception of life. This very habit has taken form among the bourgeois of looking upon enjoyment as something self-evident. But enjoyment should really never be accepted without repaying its equivalent to the whole of society. It is not because of any element in the natural or spiritual order that some part of society should be deprived. Time and space are only artificial hindrances. The fact that the Sistine Madonna remains forever in Dresden, and can be seen only by those persons who are able to go to Dresden, is only a by-product of the bourgeois world conception. The Sistine Madonna is movable, and can be taken to all parts of the world. This is only one example, but the necessary steps can be taken to make sure that whatever is enjoyed by one may also be enjoyed by others.

Although I have given only one example, I always choose them to exemplify and clarify everything else. We need only to strike such a note, as you see, in order to touch upon many matters that people have really not thought of at all, but have simply taken as something self-evident. Even within our own circle, where this could so easily be understood, people do not always reflect that everything we receive obligates us to return an equivalent to society and not simply enjoy.

Now, from all that I have presented to you as examples, which could be multiplied not only a hundredfold but a thousandfold, this question will be obvious to you. “How can the situation be otherwise if money is really only a means for acquiring power?” This is already answered in that fundamental social principle I introduced last week because that is a peculiarity of what I introduced to you as a sort of social science taken from the spiritual world. It is just as certain as mathematics. In connection with the things I have presented to you, there is no question of anyone's looking into practical life and saying, “Now then, we must first investigate whether things really are so.” No; what I introduced to you as a social science derived from spiritual science is much like the theorem of Pythagoras. If you consider Pythagoras's theorem, if you know that the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides of a right angle triangle, it is impossible that anything should exist within the world of experience to contradict this. On the contrary, you must apply this fundamental principle everywhere. So it is with the fundamental principle I introduced to you as underlying social science and social life. Everything that a person acquires in such a way that it is received in exchange for his work within the social system has an unwholesome effect. A wholesome condition results within the social system only when the human being has to support his life, not by his own work, but from other sources within society. This seemingly contradicts what I have just said, but only seemingly. What will render work valuable will be the fact that it will no longer be remunerated.

The goal toward which we must work—of course, in a rational and not a bolshevistic way—must be that of separating work from the provision of the means of existence. I have recently explained this. When no one is any longer recompensed for his work, then money will lose its value as a means for acquiring power over work. There is no other means for overcoming the misuse that has been perpetuated with mere money than by forming the social structure in such a way that no one be recompensed for his work, and that the provision of the means of existence shall be achieved from an entirely different source. It will then naturally be impossible to use money for the purpose of compelling anyone to work.

Most of the questions that now arise appear in such a form that they are confusedly understood. If they are to be lifted into a clear light, this can happen only by means of spiritual science. Money must never in future be the equivalent for human labor, but only for inanimate commodities. Only inanimate commodities will be acquired in future by means of money, not human labor.

This is of the utmost importance. Now, just consider the fact that in the proletariat world conception the idea that labor is a commodity stares us in the face in all sorts of forms. Indeed, the fact that labor in modern industrialism has become in the most conspicuous way a commodity is one of the fundamental principles of marxism, one of those fundamental principles by means of which Marx was most successful in winning followers among the proletariat. Here you see that a demand appears from an entirely different quarter and in a confused and chaotic fashion, that must, nevertheless, be fulfilled, but from an entirely different direction. This is characteristic of social demands of the present, that, to the extent that they appear instinctively, they are due to entirely justified and sound instincts. They arise, however, from a chaotic social structure. For this reason they are in a confused form that necessarily leads to confusion. So it is in many fields. It is necessary for this reason really to lay hold upon a spiritual-scientific view of the world because only this can result in true social healing.

Now, you will ask whether this will bring about a change. For example, if a person inherits his money, he will still continue to purchase commodities with the money he inherited, and the labor of other persons is surely concealed in these commodities. So nothing is changed, you will say. Certainly, if you think abstractly, nothing is changed. But, if you will look into the whole effect that comes about when the provision of the means of existence is separated from labor, you will form a different opinion. In the sphere of reality, the situation is not such that we simply draw abstract conclusions, but there things produce their actual results. If it actually comes about that the provision of the means of existence is separated from the performance of labor, inheritances will no longer exist. This will produce such a modification of the social structure that people will not come into possession of money in any other way than for the acquisition of commodities. When something is conceived as a reality, it has all sorts of effects. Among other things this separation of the provision of the means of existence from labor has one quite peculiar effect. Indeed, when we speak of realities, we cannot so express ourselves as to say, “But I do not see why this should be so.” You might just as well say, “But I do not see why morphine should cause sleep.” This also does not come to you as a conclusion out of a mere interrelationship of concepts. It becomes manifest only when you actually trace the effect.

There is something extremely unnatural today in the social order. This consists in the fact that money increases when a person simply possesses it. It is put in a bank and interest is paid on it. This is the most unnatural thing that could possibly exist. It is really utterly nonsensical. The person does nothing whatever. He simply banks the money, which he may not even have acquired by labor but may have inherited, and he receives interest on it. This is utter nonsense. But it will become a matter of necessity when the provision of the means of existence is separated from labor that money shall be used when it exists, when it is produced as the equivalent of commodities that exist. It must be used. It must be put into circulation and the actual effect will be that money does not increase but that it diminishes. If at the present time a person possesses a certain sum of money, he will have approximately twice that amount in fourteen years under a normal rate of interest, and he will have done nothing except merely to wait. If you think thus of the transformation of the social order, as this must occur under the influence of this one fundamental principle that I have presented to you, then money will not increase but will diminish. After a certain number of years, the bank notes I acquired before the beginning of those years will no longer have any value. They will have matured and become valueless.

In this way the trend will become natural in the social structure toward bringing about such conditions that mere money, which is nothing more than a note, an indication that a person possesses a certain power over the labor of human beings, will lose its value after a certain length of time if it has not been put into circulation. In other words, it will not increase, but will progressively diminish and, after fourteen years or perhaps a somewhat longer time, will reach the zero point. If you are millionaires today, you will not be double millionaires after fourteen years but you will be broke unless you have earned something additional in the meantime.

Of course, I am aware that people wriggle as if they had been bitten by fleas when this is mentioned at the present time—if you will permit such a comparison. I know this, and I would not have employed this comparison but for the extraordinary movements I observed in the audience!

Since, however, the situation is such that this matter causes people to feel as if fleas had bitten them, we have bolshevism. Just search for the true causes and there they are. You will never be able to free the world of what is coming to the surface unless you determine really to penetrate into the truth.

The fact that the truth is unpleasant makes no difference. An essential part of the education of humanity today and in the immediate future will consist in putting an end to the belief that truths can be controlled according to subjective estimates, subjective sympathies and antipathies. But spiritual science, if it is grasped with a sound human intelligence, can solve this problem of money because it can also be considered spiritually.

Nothing is accomplished by that vague way of talking I have heard even among anthroposophists who hold money in their hands and say, “This is Ahriman.” At present money signifies an equivalent for commodities and labor. It constitutes a claim upon something that actually occurs. If we pass over from mere abstractions to realities, if we reflect, then, when a person has ten one hundred mark notes and pays these to someone, he causes the labor of a certain number of persons to pass as an equivalent from hand to hand. Because these notes possess the power to cause a certain number of persons to work, he then actually stands within life with all its branches and impulses. He will no longer continue to be satisfied with the mere abstraction, the unthinking abstraction, of the payment of money, but he will ask himself, “What is the significance of the fact that I cause ten one hundred mark notes to pass from hand to hand, thus bringing it about that a certain number of persons endowed with head, heart and mind must perform labor? What is the significance of that?”

The answer to such a question can be afforded, in the last analysis, only by a spiritual observation of the matter. Let us take the most extreme example. Suppose someone who has never put forth an effort in behalf of humanity has money. There are such cases. I will consider this extreme instance. Someone who has never put forth an effort in behalf of humanity has money. He buys something for himself with this money. Indeed, he is enabled to fashion for himself an altogether pleasant life by reason of the fact that he possesses this money, which is a claim upon human labor. Fine! This person is not necessarily a bad human being. He may even be a good man; indeed, he may be an industrious person. People frequently simply fail to see into the social structure. They do not possess an interest in their fellow men, that is, in the real social structure. People suppose that they love human beings when they buy something for themselves with their inherited money, for example, or when they even give it away. When it is given away, the only result is that we cause a certain number of persons to work for those to whom the money is given. It is simply a means for acquiring power. The fact that it is a claim upon labor makes it the means for acquiring power.

But this situation has simply come into existence and developed to this stage. This is a reflection of something else. It is a reflection of what I mentioned in the preceding lecture. I there called your attention to the fact that the Jehovah divinity has controlled the world for a certain length of time through the fact that he won a complete victory over the other Elohim, and that he can no longer save himself from the spirits thus aroused. He drove his companions, the other six Elohim, from the field. Because of this, what the human being experiences even in the embryo has acquired complete dominance in human consciousness. The six other forces, which are not experienced by man in the embryo, have thereby been rendered inactive. They have thereby come under the influence of lower spiritual entities. In the fifth decade of the last century, as I have said, Jehovah could no longer save himself. Since the Jehovah wisdom acquired in the embryonic state renders it possible to grasp the conception of providence only in external nature, crass atheistic natural science has invaded the world. The reflection of this, the fact that money simply passes from one person to another without any transfer of commodities, consists in the circulation of money apart from the circulation of commodities.

No matter with what energy a person may exert himself in any field, the ahrimanic power lives in what seems to be produced by money as money. You cannot inherit without having a certain amount of ahrimanic power transferred with the money. There is no other possibility of possessing money within the social structure in a wholesome way than by possessing it in a Christian way; that is, by acquiring money only by means of what one develops between birth and death. In other words, the way in which a person comes into possession of money must not be a reflection of what is related to Jehovah even though the fact that we are born, that we pass from the embryo into the external life, is something that pertains to him. The reflection of this, I say, is the fact that we inherit money. Those characteristics that we inherit with the blood are inherited through the laws of nature. Money that we inherit and do not earn would be a reflection of this.

The fact that Christian consciousness has not yet taken its place in the world, that the social structure is still brought about by means of the ancient Jehovah wisdom or its specter, the Roman conception of the state, has brought about everything that has led to one aspect of the present unfortunate situation.

I said that the matter must not be considered so abstractly when money produces money, but we must view it in its reality. Whenever money produces money it is something that occurs only on the physical plane, whereas what constitutes the human being is always connected with the spiritual world.

What are you doing, then, when you perform no labor but you have money that people must work to get? The human being then has to bring to market what constitutes his heavenly share and you give him only what is earthly. You pay him with the merely earthly, the purely ahrimanic. You see, this is the spiritual aspect of the matter. Wherever Ahriman is at work, only destruction can come about.

This, again, is an unpleasant truth. But it does not help at all when a person says to himself, “Now, really, I am otherwise a respectable individual and I am doing nothing wrong, therefore, when I use my income to pay for this or that.” The actual fact is that you give Ahriman in exchange for God. Of course, we are frequently compelled to do this within the present social structure, but we should not play the ostrich game and conceal this fact from ourselves. Rather should we face the truth because what the future is to bring depends upon our doing so. Much of what has broken in upon humanity with such calamitous results has occurred for the reason that people close their eyes and the eyes of their souls in the presence of the truth. They have fabricated for themselves abstract concepts of right and wrong, and have been unwilling to deal with the real and the concrete. In regard to this we shall speak further tomorrow, when we shall lift our discussion into spiritual heights.

A study of two of the most significant pictures in the world can help us to see the way in which the Theosophist should make his life's ideal into the very content of his soul. By means of these two pictures Raphael was able, in an age of great artistic development, to give utterance to the impressions and feelings which passed through his soul concerning the evolution of mankind through many centuries. The picture called “The School of Athens” (so-called in Baedeker, but it would be better if this name were allowed to disappear), and the picture called the “Disputa”—what do these, pictures represent when we study them in order to discover the great thoughts that underlie them, as well as the artistic impression they make upon us?

I have had the opportunity of seeing these pictures several times; as you know, they are in Rome, at the Vatican, in the famous Raphael Room ... You can always see people standing there with their guide-books and reading: This is Socrates, that is Plato, that other is Aristotle, and so on. They are immensely pleased when Baedeker enables them to discover whom this or the other figure represents, whether this one here is a bishop or an early Father of the Church, whether another is Paul or Peter or Moses … But how little has all this to do with the artistic value of the pictures! I should like to suggest by rather a grotesque supposition how one can approach such pictures in an artistic way. In this case the artistic and theosophical methods of approach are one and the same.

We know that there are inhabitants of Mars, although they are of course very different in appearance from the inhabitants of Earth. For us however they are very real beings. To be sure, we do not interest ourselves in that wild idea of some modern visionaries as to whether it might not be possible to draw the theorem of Pythagoras in lines of electric light over a great tract of Siberia and in this way set up communication with the inhabitants of Mars. We will leave such dreaming to the materialistic visionaries of our day. Anyone who takes his stand on the ground of reality knows that the inhabitants of Mars are of quite a different nature from those of Earth. But now let us suppose that one of these Mars inhabitants were to descend to Earth and let us imagine that he visited the Vatican picture-galleries and saw there these two pictures by Raphael. We could not expect that he should at once study the whole history of Greek philosophy and the whole spiritual development of the Middle Ages, in order that we might be able to converse with him in our own way. For it would, you know, seem quite ridiculous to him if we were to begin explaining, “Here is Augustine, there is Ambrose,” and so on. If he could speak an earthly language at all, he would probably reply, “I do not know these gentlemen!” We have a general acquaintance with them, having assimilated certain ideas about them—whether right or wrong need not concern us now. The artistic impression produced upon one by these pictures is not altered in the least because the beholder happens to be an inhabitant of Mars, who knows nothing of Mr. Aristotle or Mr. Plato or Mr. Socrates; for the artistic impression depends solely and entirely upon what confronts us in the picture, and makes itself best felt when we pay no attention at all to anything but what speaks from the picture itself. The inhabitant of Mars would therefore really be the best observer from a purely artistic point of view.

Let us try to enter into the feelings of such a one on his first descent to Earth, who has not been given a handbook of Greek and Mediaeval philosophy. He would say to himself: “I see figures, human figures, in these pictures—but I see no figures like them among the men of to-day.” For indeed it is hardly likely that among the people standing there with him and looking at the pictures he should recognise any as being persons of like dignity and importance.

He would however become aware in the pictures of something that must have grown out of the life of Earth itself. He would read in them that the inhabitants of Earth desire to say something which is not connected with any particular moment of time, but with the whole of Earth. He could contemplate the one picture and say “Here I see very remarkable forms,—two figures in the centre, and on their right and left other figures. I notice a certain expression—the uplifted hand of the one, the hand of the other pointing to the ground,”—and so on. (He would see all this without having any knowledge of Plato or Aristotle.) “There are also persons doing something or other in various parts of the picture. And around all these human beings is nothing but quite simple architectural forms. It can however also be seen that in the hearts and souls of these people something is living. That can quite clearly be noticed!”

Now suppose the inhabitant of Mars turns his attention to the other picture. It has quite a different appearance. There he sees, down below, a world which looks much the same as our external world to-day. Up above, he finds a scene that could only be represented by bringing together things which do not belong together in the external world. For there we behold human forms among the clouds—and yet in such a way as to recall something quite real and true. And higher up still, above this interweaving of the forms of clouds and men, figures are to be seen on a golden background which have little left to remind one of the human form. What would the visitor from Mars say,—who knows nothing of the spiritual life of Earth, and only judges the pictures by what they themselves tell him?

He would be compelled to say: “These men have the Earth around them; but there are times when they feel the need to express a world the physical eyes do not see, a world completely remote from the senses, and which they can only represent by clouds and human forms interwoven together, and by forms on a golden background that bear no resemblance to man. There must therefore be something by means of which these men are able to raise themselves; they must have inner forces, stronger than all, they meet with in the world of sense. That other world must have come into some relation with them.” And he would ask himself the question: “How did these men come into touch with that other world?”

He would then see the wonderful group which we call “God the Father,” “God the Son,” and “The Dove” as the expression of the Spirit; and, below, an Altar, and upon it the Host, the symbol of the Lord's Supper. Since the evolution of Mars is not yet so far advanced as the evolution of Earth, there is nothing on Mars like what we have on Earth in the two thousand years' tradition of Christianity. The visitor from Mars would accordingly not know what this picture represents. But from the relation of the groups on the right and left to the central group he could see that through the power of the symbol something is being given to the souls which opens to them the higher worlds.

Our visitor would then examine the pictures more closely and discover that in the first picture there are all manner of figures, but among them in particular two female figures, one on the right hand and one on the left. And remarkable figures they are! As one looks at them it is evident that they differ totally in their expression and even in their dress. Let us study them a little.

Looking at the one on the left (we are standing in front of the so-called “School of Athens”), we see in the whole expression something indicative of the Earthly kingdom of sense here below, and of what the senses directly give us. Male figures stand all around; and one dimly feels that what dwells in the heads of these men belongs to the world of sense. What presents itself to us in the female figure? Her expression conveys to us that which is living in the heads and souls of the men, until we come to her white garment, the garment of innocence, showing us that the force which comes from the mere working of the things of sense has not yet been active in her. We understand the countenances of the men when we understand what this female figure expresses.

And now let us pass to the other female figure on the right-hand side of the same picture. She is quite different, and already begins to notice what the men are doing. Whereas the left-hand figure indicates only the physical environment, the right-hand figure is following what the men have done, her gaze follows what the human spirit has brought forth. Even if we know nothing of Greek Philosophy, we can quite clearly see that there is an advance from the left to the right side of the picture. On the right hand we see what the men have made of their environment. (It really goes much further; it is expressed also in the colour.)

Now these two women appear also in the other picture, which is called the “Disputa.” Here again we see the figure first on the left, where people are standing, contemplating with rapture the symbol in the centre. We are looking into early times when the Christian religion was still entirely a religion of feeling, when Wisdom itself was still nothing but feeling. On every countenance we can see a kind of enthusiasm for Christianity, and all hearts are filled with warm feeling. This is reflected too in the female figure. And now when we pass to the other side of the picture we see again a progress. Here we have the Christian philosophers who have brought their knowledge to bear on the whole content of the Christian Wisdom.

There is St. Augustine dictating, and the woman writing it down. We could really reconstruct a great part of the history of man from the whole way in which Raphael has worked out this motif, with his great knowledge and understanding and his wonderful artistic powers. All that is living in the souls of the men is brought to expression in this woman figure, which we find four times repeated in the pictures.

The above is no more than a first rough sketch for a consideration of these pictures. The two paintings have to be studied together one after the other. They are an expression of what happened from the pre-Christian age down to the later part of the Middle Ages, and they express it in artistic form. Just imagine how great and mighty must have been the impression made upon a really sensitive soul who saw these pictures, first one and then the other, and said to himself:—“I am myself inter woven into this onward path of Wisdom, which mankind follows in the course of evolution; I am part of it, I belong to the march of events as it is shown in these pictures.” For the man who understood the sense of evolution in those days really felt this. He looked back to the pre-Christian age when men were surrounded only by the world of sense, just as the architecture surrounds the people in the picture; and he beheld too a time when through the entrance of Christ Jesus into human evolution the spiritual was revealed to mankind. He felt that he belonged to all this; he felt how his own existence takes part in the life of thousands and thousands of years. What lived in men's souls was borne along the flow of fantasy and streamed into the hand of the painter, who painted these pictures in order that men should meet in the outer world that which dwells in the inner world. For the Theosophist these pictures can he an earnest call and summons to inscribe the great ideal into his soul.

Let us look with the eye of the spirit at the “Disputa.” In the centre we see “God the Father,” then “God the Son” or Christ, and below, the Dove or the Holy Spirit. And now let us recall many other pictures that are to be found in various galleries. Whenever you have opportunity to visit picture galleries, you will find pictures of this kind, created out of good and great traditions. You will often meet with the following motif,—Christ coming forth from a figure like a bird, Christ being born as it were from a winged being. For the whole mystery of Christ, His whole descent from the higher worlds was formerly felt as a kind of breaking loose from a nature which had itself been born as a higher world,—higher even in the spatial sense. Hence the descent out of a birdlike form. Christ born from the bird,—let us hold the motif before our soul, and with that study the “Disputa.”

Here we find another “bird-being,”—the. Dove of the Spirit. The Dove of the Spirit, what a great riddle that is among all the Christian symbols! Much, very much is contained within it. The painters of the future will have to paint what comes to birth from out of this Dove of the Spirit. This Dove of the Spirit is a transitory symbol; something else will take its place in the Trinity. The day will come when from the Dove of the Spirit will be born, as it were, the human soul that is liberated by the wisdom of Theosophy. Every human soul that has the will to receive the spirit of Theosophy will be born again at a higher stage—spiritually, in a new form. This Dove of the Spirit will break its form, and from it will come forth the human soul which will have for its life-blood the spiritual conception of the world which meets us to-day in its first form as Theosophy. Other figures, new figures, will be around the symbol. And these liberated ones will show in their countenances what is living in their souls,—how through the events of the spiritual world as they reveal themselves to one who can rise above the world of sense, the soul is set free, and how then these liberated souls can each confront every other with real brotherly love.

And so it seems to me good that we should sometimes have these pictures before us, inasmuch as they are at the same time a prophetic foreshadowing of a third picture, A pre-Christian conception of the world is expressed in the first picture; the second expresses what has come about through Christ in the world of form; and what will come about through the Spirit, which has been sent by Christ and will divest itself of its coverings, will be expressed in the third picture that can stand before the soul of every Theosophist as a great and mighty ideal. This picture cannot be painted yet, for the models are not yet here; but in our own souls the two pictures must already be finding their completion in the third …

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CONCERNING THE CONCEPT OF GOD

This document consists of notes on two lectures, the first set of notes could be from a lecture on a different date: The Reunion of the Moon with the Earth. These notes of lectures were translated from shorthand reports, unrevised by the lecturer, by an unknown translator.

The lectures on colour and the Ego show the real nature of man in relation to the Cosmos, turning from the Earth to what is super-earthly. Our time demands this. We have seen that human power of thought has become shadowy and no longer rests in reality. This points to the fact that man must necessarily receive new impulses in his soul. In the book Occult Science we read that certain great events have played into human evolution. For instance, the Moon which to-day shines from cosmic space was formerly united with the Earth. We know what significant transformations took place in man when the Moon left the Earth at the time of the Atlantean Flood.(sic) We have seen that the minerals owe their existence to the fact that the Moon left the Earth. We have to bring these cosmic events to an artistic understanding. Man has brought over his being from Saturn, Sun and Moon. During the transformations no mineral kingdom existed in man's environment. What we call mineral matter was inserted into the human being during the earth epoch. Man as regards his whole being is inserted into the entire Cosmos before the moon left the earth. The mineral evolved in the earth in the colours we see to-day. Originally man was not destined for the Earth. For a time his destiny hung in the balance; it was a question with the spiritual guides of earthly evolution as to whether man should pass his existence on the Earth itself or external to it. That it is possible for man to become an earthly being from the exit of the Moon is due to an impulse from the guides of human evolution. Thereby his relation to the Cosmos was changed. Man was not originally a personal being and he became so because the forces building his body were pressed together and in this way he obtained freedom. His development on earth took place in various stages after the exit of the moon. Had nothing intervened man would have continued to possess the power of forming the old clairvoyant pictures. The latter was not taken away by the exit of the moon but evolution has progressed and man has not remained fettered to the earth; he has undergone a backward evolution which reached its culminating point in the 19th century. In ancient times man to a certain extent was endowed with the functions of assimilation and became subject to earthly gravity; on the other hand as a head-man he is capable of leading a cosmic existence. That is to say, man developed his intellect in which the old clairvoyant pictures hardened up to the 4th century after Christ, and from the 15th century they became more and more shadowy. Although the human intellect is spiritual it has no real existence, it has a shadow existence. This culminated in the 19th century. Man's thoughts are not rooted in reality; spirituality is now lacking; man lives in a spiritual element of thought yet has become a materialist, thinking only of matter. He is no longer ensouled by pictures, he only conceives of the material world.

We know that some day the Moon will re-unite with the Earth. This is known by abstract astronomy and other sciences, but they push the time far into the future—it is however really not very far off.

In the course of evolution humanity is becoming younger and younger and retains the power of evolving in body and soul to a definite age. In ancient India man retained plasticity up to the age of 56. At the time of Golgotha to the age of 33; now, to the age of 27. In the 6th post-Atlantean epoch it will be to the age of 21-14 in the 7th epoch, 14-7.

Woman will cease to be fertile, another mode of entering earthly life will take place when the Moon re-unites with the Earth, in 8,000 A.D. The re-uniting of the Moon with the Earth will be of great significance; we shall be connected with the Earth differently.

The intellect will become more and more shadowy. If man does not resolve to absorb what is to descend from the spiritual world, he will pass completely over to the shadowy side of his intellect. The intellect is now only able to understand the mineral kingdom, it cannot penetrate to the human being. Plant life is a deep riddle to it, animal life is more so, human life is completely opaque. The formation of images devoid of reality will continue unless man resolves to develop imagination. If he does this the shadowy pictures will be re-animated by Spiritual Science, and become not merely human events but cosmic as well. We read in Occult Science that human souls at one time left the earth for other planets and later returned to earth existence. In turn those from Mars, Jupiter and the other planets returned to the earth. All these events are substantiated by investigations of the spiritual world and in this connection we find an extremely significant event in the 7th decade of the 19th century. Man returned to earth from the other planets up to 1879. Since then other beings from foreign cosmic regions enter into relation with man on the earth. In Atlantis man was the last being to enter the earth; since 1879 Vulcan beings descend into earthly evolution. They are the first, Super-earthly Beings to bring messages; to them we owe our Spiritual Science. The human race does not welcome these Beings, as a whole it ignores them. This will bring the Earth into a tragic condition ultimately. They will continue to descend, but man will not understand their speech except by understanding Spiritual Science which should transform the social environment. These Vulcan Beings, from between the Moon and Mercury, are trying to obtain a foothold in earthly existence. They seek to be the fore-runners of the end of the earth and the return of the moon. Our shadowy intellectual understanding must be re-animated by the pictures of Spiritual Science. Shock after shock will arise and the earth will dissolve into chaos if these Beings meet with opposition from humanity.

It may seem harmless to think only automatic thoughts of mineral, plant and animal and man; to-day they are merely thought but should this continue until the re-union of the Moon the result will be chaos. Full humanity must be drawn into the intellect. Incorrect and unreal thoughts will receive at a blow the real truth at the re-union of the Moon. These materialistic thoughts will then bring forth a terrible race of automatic beings who stand in their nature between the plant and mineral kingdoms. They will be endowed with great power of intellect and understanding and will enclose the earth in a kind of net or spiders web. They will enclose what man imagines without Spiritual Science. (Machinery is really thought poured into mineral) All modern unreal thoughts will become endowed with being. As the earth to-day is enclosed in an atmosphere, these mineral plant—like spiders, terribly evil, weaving into each other, will cover the Earth like gnats in the air. If man will not unite with the Vulcan Spiritual Beings he will have to unite his own being as far as it is not spiritual with this spider race; he will have to live with it and continue his evolution in the midst of it. Advanced man will direct his body from outside like the group-souls. There are people who are aware of this and yet desire to hold evolution back; they are conscious allies of these spider beings whom they know from ancient traditions. Man must not shrink from descriptions of this nature for much of this lies behind what many people say to-day. Our evolution cannot progress unless the veil of secrecy be withdrawn and these things known so that Spiritual Science may be accepted or rejected. Humanity will seek this union with the spider race; this means the further development of shadowy thought in cosmic existence. It is not enough merely to accept the formulae of Spiritual Science we must see how thoughts become reality: The scope and full importance of this is not realised, therefore humanity is in danger of being entangled in this web.

The way of release is by earnest acceptation of thoughts raised to feeling and being, and scientific vision, raising theory into the artistic.

What of education, medicine and science? In modern physics the human being is explained in abstract thoughts. They learn by means of the corpse. This is the mineral part of man which began with the exit of the Moon and ends with its re-union with the Earth. Knowledge and science must be raised to reality. Only mineral is understood to-day. To understand the plant, thought must be raised to artistic comprehension, artistic concepts. A real impulse of will is needed to fructify thought.

In 8,000 A.D. man will no longer be born of woman. Physical birth began with the exit of the Moon and to this man owes his Intellect, his personality and his individuality. This change however is only temporary. Spiritual Science can teach us these things. The mutual interweaving of this spidery web will resemble the staff of Mercury. Man can only meet these beings with understanding by raising himself to an artistic perception and insight, We saw how throughout nature something of an artistic nature prevails. True Spiritual Science points to an artistic understanding. The longing exists to absorb Spiritual Beings from the Cosmos. The terrible torture chamber of the prevailing inartistic ideas gives no true knowledge of the real nature of the plant, animal or human being. Modern science is a product of Ahriman which may lead humanity into earthly destruction. The study of Spiritual Science is not something abstract; it opens the door to cosmic influences which have sought to pour themselves into the Earth since the last third of the 19th century.

The Moon which reflects the Sunlight was separated from the Earth in order that man might become a free human being.

CONCERNING THE CONCEPT OF GOD

19 January 1905, Dusseldorf

The Indian was in a different position from the European towards God. His highest conception was Brahman. The European pays but little attention to the Divinity but devotes himself to abstract thought. He seldom thinks of the Divine. The mystics however recognise the Hierarchies which are between God and man—from Seraphim to Archangels. They used to try to understand them. Although the Hierarchies live in the astral and mental or devachanic planes their work penetrates to the physical and we enter into communication with them on the physical plane. We live in all three planes. The mystic tries to understand them without trying for the concept of the unitary Divinity behind them.

What is the relation between God and man? Why did God create man? Why did God create the world? In order that man and the world might gradually develop. It is extremely difficult to answer these questions. To do so training is necessary. In the East this was done by Yoga. In the West by catharsis in the Mysteries. The pupil was taught: you can only teach your soul of immortality when you no longer desire immortality. Immortality must be faced as a mathematical problem—that is—without feeling or desire. The higher the question the more passionless must the soul be. All self-seeking must be set aside. The pupils of Pythagoras were so trained. The Gnostic teaching was called “Mathesis;” because it was tranquil and passionless.

How does the Godhead stand towards the world?

We see in nature the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms; man has the qualities of all these kingdoms within him. The form and cohesion of the minerals; the life of the plant; and the feeling and power of inner life of the animal kingdom, man is the sum total of them. He has attained his evolution and powers at their cost. Originally animals were more perfect. Man's ascent was brought about by their descent. In this way the human kingdom has risen. If a holy person (Saint) is to develop, it means the pushing down of many beings to decadence. For each saint there are many transgressors. Were it not for these two extremes there would be no evolution. Evolution is the removal of either side.

Man's intellect is needed to work-over the animal kingdom—constructing machinery or digging a hole or grave. This will continue with new forces. The artist adds his share, working his thoughts and ideas into the mineral. The task of today is to work-over the mineral kingdom. Man's works only transmute the world in this way. At present man can only work upon minerals. He cannot incorporate life through his spirit into any being.

Man has pushed down the mineral from his own being in order to have material to work upon, to permeate it with his own spirit. He will thereby redeem it and make good his former transgression towards it. The external mineral will be dissolved and redeemed by man's own work.

In the first cycle (Saturn) the mineral kingdom was pushed out and will be redeemed in the fourth (Earth). In the second cycle the plant was pushed out and will be redeemed in the fifth. In the third cycle the animal was pushed out and will be redeemed in the sixth. In the seventh cycle man will redeem the human kingdom itself.

If a saint develops it means the pushing down of other beings; he will make good and redeem those others. This idea gives sympathy with the entire Cosmos.

Man in raising himself must desire to raise and redeem others, for he has evolved at the cost of the whole surrounding world.

Going back before all these kingdoms we come to Spiritual Beings. The spiritual world attained to higher stages by pushing out the mineral and other kingdoms. They became the creative Spirits of our Cosmos, and our Leaders. This is the opposition of spirit and matter. We then come to a perfect God. How did He create from Himself? If we could resolve to make each thought perfect we should create a free resolve to carry over our own perfection. Something similar occurred with God; He resolved to make each being as perfect as Himself. This was only possible by giving them the power to evolution. This can only be done at the cost of others. If one member mere perfect he alone would fill up the Divine idea; therefore this can only be done gradually by all. By seizing one thought and sending all other thoughts back into unconsciousness.

Good cannot arise without evil. If one member develops, another has to remain back, and the progressed one has to redeem the other.

Even above humanity, beings develop at the cost of those below them and must redeem them. This brought about evil and made evolution possible, otherwise all could not be made perfect as God.

We cannot grasp the Divine Being with any one force of the soul, such as intellect. Intellect is not the highest power. It is something pushed out in order to produce higher powers. It must be redeemed.

Finally, we live in the Divine and evolve to it. The whole process is one of redemption.

Any opinion of the Divine must be developed further. Truth cannot be grasped as an intellectual concept.

God wanted to make each member as perfect as Himself. This was a sacrifice, not a necessity. This makes perfection possible.

[ 1 ] A foreshadowing of a new element produced by thought life itself emerges in St. Augustine (354–430). This element soon vanishes from the surface, however, to continue unnoticeably under the cover of religious conception, becoming distinctly discernible again only in the later Middle Ages. In St. Augustine, the new element appears as if it were a reminiscence of Greek thought life. He looks into the external world and into himself, and comes to the conclusion: May everything else the world reveals contain nothing but uncertainty and deception, one thing cannot be doubted, that is, the certainty of the soul's experience itself. I do not owe this inner experience to a perception that could deceive me; I am in it myself; it is, for I am present when its being is attributed to it.

[ 2 ] One can see a new element in these conceptions as against Greek thought life, in spite of the fact that they seem at first like a reminiscence of it. Greek thinking points toward the soul; in St. Augustine, we are directed toward the center of the life of the soul. The Greek thinkers contemplated the soul in its relation to the world; in St. Augustine's approach, something in the soul life confronts this soul life and regards it as a special, self-contained world. One can call the center of the soul life the “ego” of man. To the Greek thinkers, the relation of the soul to the world becomes problematic, to the thinkers of modern times, that of the “ego” to the soul. In St. Augustine, we have only the first indication of this situation. The ensuing philosophical currents are still too much occupied with the task of harmonizing world conception and religion to become distinctly aware of the new element that has not entered into spiritual life. But the tendency to contemplate the riddles of the world in accordance with the demand of this new element lives more or less unconsciously in the souls of the time that now follows. In thinkers like Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109) and Thomas Aquinas (1227–1274), this tendency still shows itself in such a way that they attribute to self-supportive thinking the ability to investigate the processes of the world to a certain degree, but they limit this ability. There is for them a higher spiritual reality to which thinking, left to its own resources, can never attain, but that must be revealed to it in a religious way. Man is, according to Thomas Aquinas, rooted with his soul life in the reality of the world, but this soul life cannot know this reality in its full extent through itself alone. Man could not know how his own being stands in the course of the world if the spirit being, to which his knowledge does not penetrate, did not deign to reveal to him what must remain concealed to a knowledge relying on its own power alone. Thomas Aquinas constructs his world picture on this presupposition. It has two parts, one of which consists of the truths that are yielded to man's own thought experience about the natural course of things. This leads to a second part that contains what has come to the soul of man through the Bible and religious revelation. Something that the soul cannot reach by itself, if it is to feel itself in its full essence, must therefore penetrate into the soul.

[ 3 ] Thomas Aquinas made himself thoroughly familiar with the world conception of Aristotle, who becomes, as it were, his master in the life of thought. In this respect, Aquinas is, to be sure, the most prominent, but nevertheless only one of the numerous personalities of the Middle Ages who erect their own thought structure entirely on that of Aristotle. For centuries, he is il maestro di color che sanno, the master of those who know, as Dante expresses the veneration for Aristotle in the Middle Ages. Thomas Aquinas strives to comprehend what is humanly comprehensible in Aristotelian method. In this way, Aristotle's world conception becomes the guide to the limit to which the soul life can advance through its own power for him. Beyond these boundaries lies the realm that the Greek world conception, according to Thomas, could not reach.

Therefore, human thinking for Thomas Aquinas is in need of another light by which it must be illuminated. He finds this light in revelation. Whatever was to be the attitude of the ensuing thinkers with respect to this revelation, they could no longer accept the life of thought in the manner of the Greeks. It is not sufficient to them that thinking comprehends the world; they make the presupposition that it should be possible to find a basic support for thinking itself. The tendency arises to fathom man's relation to his soul life. Thus, man considers himself a being who exists in his soul life. If one calls this entity the ego, one can say that in modern times the consciousness of the ego is stirred up in man's soul life in a way similar to that in which thought was born in the philosophical life of the Greeks. Whatever different forms the philosophical currents in this age assume, they all hinge on the search for the ego-entity. This fact, however, is not always brought clearly to the consciousness of the thinkers themselves. They mostly believe they are concerned with questions of a different nature. One could say that the Riddle of the Ego appears in a great variety of masks. At times it lives in the philosophy of the thinkers in such a concealed way that the statement that this riddle is at the bottom of some view or other might appear as an arbitrary or forced opinion. In the nineteenth century this struggle over the riddle of the ego comes to its most intensive manifestation, and the world conceptions of the present time are still profoundly engaged in this struggle.

[ 4 ] This world riddle already lived in the conflict between the nominalists and the realists in the Middle Ages. One can call Anselm of Canterbury a representative of realism. For him, the general ideas that man forms when he contemplates the world are not mere nomenclatures that the soul produces for itself, but they have their roots in a real life. If one forms the general idea “lion” in order to designate all lions with it, it is certainly correct to say that, for sense perception, only the individual lions have reality. The general concept “lion” is not, however, only a summary designation with significance only for the human mind. It is rooted in a spiritual world, and the individual lions of the world of sense perception are the various embodiments of the one lion nature expressed in the “idea of lion.”

Such a “reality of ideas” was opposed by Nominalists like Roscellin (also in the eleventh century). The “general ideas” are only summary designations for him, names that the mind forms for its own use for its orientation, but that do not correspond to any reality. According to this view, only the individual things are real. The quarrel is characteristic of the specific mentality of its participants. Both sides feel the necessity to search for the validity, the significance of the thoughts that the soul must produce. Their attitude to thoughts as such is different from what the attitudes of Plato and Aristotle were toward them. This is so because something has happened between the end of the development of Greek philosophy and the beginning of modern thought. Something has gone on under the surface of historical evolution that can, however, be observed in the attitude that the individual thinkers take with respect to their thought life.

To the Greek thinker, thought came as a perception. It arose in the soul as the red color appears when a man looks at a rose, and the thinker received it as a perception. As such the thought had the immediate power of conviction. The Greek thinker had the feeling, when he placed himself with his soul receptively before the spiritual world, that no incorrect thought could enter from this world into the soul just as no perception of a winged horse could come from the sense world as long as the sense organs were properly used. For the Greeks, it was a question of being able to garner thoughts from the world. They were then themselves the witnesses of their truth. The fact of this attitude is not contradicted by the Sophists, nor is it denied by ancient Scepticism. Both currents have an entirely different shade of meaning in antiquity from similar tendencies in modern times. They are not evidence against the fact that the Greek experienced thought in a much more elementary, content-saturated, vivid and real way than it can be experienced by the man of modern times. This vividness, which in ancient Greece gave the character of perception to thought, is no longer to be found in the Middle Ages.

What has happened is this. As in Greek times thought entered into the human soul, extinguishing the formerly prevalent picture consciousness, so, in a similar way, during the Middle Ages the consciousness of the “ego” penetrated the human soul, and this dampened the vividness of thought. The advent of the ego-consciousness deprived thought of the strength through which it had appeared as perception. We can only understand how the philosophical life advances when we realize how, for Plato and Aristotle, the thought, the idea, was something entirely different from what it was for the personalities of the Middle Ages and modern times. The thinker of antiquity had the feeling that thought was given to him; the thinker of the later time had the impression that he was producing thought. Thus, the question arises in him as to what significance what has been produced in the soul can have for reality. The Greek felt himself to be a soul separated from the world; he attempted to unite with the spiritual world in thought. The later thinker feels himself to be alone with his thought life. Thus, the inquiry into the nature of the “general ideas” begins. The thinker asks himself the questions, “What is it that I have really produced with them? Are they only rooted in me, or do they point toward a reality?”

[ 5 ] In the period between the ancient current of philosophical life and that of modern philosophy, the source of Greek thought life is gradually exhausted. Under the surface, however, the human soul experiences the approaching ego-consciousness as a fact. Since the end of the first half of the Middle Ages, man is confronted with this process as an accomplished fact, and under the influence of this confrontation, new Riddles of Life emerge. Realism and Nominalism are symptoms of the fact that man realizes the situation. The manner in which both Realists and Nominalists speak about thought shows that, compared to its existence in the Greek soul, it has faded out, has been dampened as much as had been the old picture consciousness in the soul of the Greek thinker.

[ 6] This points to the dominating element that lives in the modern world conceptions. An energy is active in them that strives beyond thought toward a new factor of reality. This tendency of modern times cannot be felt as the same that drove beyond thought in ancient times in Pythagoras and later in Plotinus. These thinkers also strove beyond thought but, according to their conception, the soul in its development, its perfection, would have to conquer the region that lies beyond thought. In modern times it is presupposed that the factor of reality lying beyond thought must approach the soul, must be given to it from without.

[ 7 ] In the centuries that follow the age of Nominalism and Realism, philosophical evolution turns into a search for the new reality factor. One path among those discernible to the student of this search is the one the medieval Mystics—Meister Eckhardt (died 1327), Johannes Tauler (died 1361), Heinrich Suso (died 1366) – have chosen for themselves. We receive the clearest idea of this path if we inspect the so-called German Theology (Theologia, deutsch), written by an author historically unknown. The Mystics want to receive something into the ego-consciousness; they intend to fill it with something. They therefore strive for an inner life that is “completely composed,” surrendered in tranquillity, and that thus patiently waits to experience the soul to be filled with the “Divine Ego.” In a later time, a similar soul mood with a greater spiritual momentum can be observed in Angelus Silesius (1624–1677).

[ 8 ] A different path is chosen by Nicolaus Cusanus (Nicolaus Chrypffs, born at Kues on the Moselle, 1401, died 1464). He strives beyond intellectually attainable knowledge to a state of soul in which knowledge ceases and in which the soul meets its god in “knowing ignorance,” in docta ignorantia. Examined superficially, this aspiration is similar to that of Plotinus, but the soul constitution of these two personalities is different. Plotinus is convinced that the human soul contains more than the world of thoughts. When it develops the energy that it possesses beyond the power of thought, the soul becomes conscious of the state in which it exists, and about which it is ignorant in ordinary life.

[ 9 ] Paracelsus (1493–1541) already has the feeling with respect to nature, which becomes more and more pronounced in the modern world conception, that is an effect of the soul's feeling of desolation in its ego-consciousness. He turns his attention toward the processes of nature. As they present themselves they cannot be accepted by the soul, but neither can thought, which in Aristotle unfolded in peaceful communication with the events of nature, now be accepted as it appears in the soul. It is not perceived; it is formed in the soul. Paracelsus felt that one must not let thought itself speak; one must presuppose that something is behind the phenomena of nature that will reveal itself if one finds the right relationship to these phenomena. One must be capable of receiving something from nature that one does not create oneself as thought during the act of observation. One must be connected with one's “ego” by means of a factor of reality other than thought. A higher nature behind nature is what Paracelsus is looking for. His mood of soul is so constituted that he does not want to experience something in himself alone, but he means to penetrate nature's processes with his “ego” in order to have revealed to him the spirit of these processes that are under the surface of the world of the senses. The mystics of antiquity meant to delve into the depths of the soul; Paracelsus set out to take steps that would lead to a contact with the roots of nature in the external world.

[ 10 ] Jakob Boehme (1575–1624) who, as a lonely, persecuted craftsman, formed a world picture as though out of an inner illumination, nevertheless implants into this world picture the fundamental character of modern times. In the solitude of his soul life he develops this fundamental trait most impressively because the inner dualism of the life of the soul, the contrast between the “ego” and the other soul experiences, stands clearly before the eye of his spirit. He experiences the “ego” as it creates an inner counterpart in its own soul life, reflecting itself in the mirror of his own soul. He then finds this inner experience again in the processes of the world. “In such a contemplation one finds two qualities, a good and an evil one, which are intertwined in this world in all forces, in stars and in elements as well as in all creatures.” The evil in the world is opposed to the good as its counterpart; it is only in the evil that the good becomes aware of itself, as the “ego” becomes aware of itself in its inner soul experiences.

Among the many spiritual currents that have emerged in recent times to satisfy the deepest questions and riddles of existence is also theosophy. It has been about thirty years since this movement has spread more and more in different countries. It originated in India, but it is also spreading to other countries and is having an effect through what is called the Theosophical Society. This Theosophical Society is divided into individual sections and these sections can be found everywhere in the developed countries of the world. We have an Indian, an American, British, Dutch, French, Italian, Scandinavian, German section, and so on.

From this we see that Theosophy is no longer something that only a few people explore, but that it satisfies the longing and the need of the widest circles. Nevertheless, it must be said that it is often misunderstood; just saying the word “Theosophy” makes many suspect dark superstition, fantastic fantasies; and when obscure movements arise somewhere in the world, one can still experience today that the word Theosophy is always mentioned. Others think that Theosophy is unscientific; no science could profess it. From another side, Theosophy is even treated with fear, it is said to be a sect that is directed against Christianity; anyone who wants to remain a good Christian must not become a Theosophist. And finally, it is referred to with the word that we can read over and over again in the newspapers: “New Buddhism”, and if someone today attaches the word “Buddhism” to Theosophy, a large proportion of all Westerners will be greatly alarmed.

All these thoughts are prejudices; Theosophy is neither a renewal of blind superstition nor is it unscientific. Those who have a thorough and logical understanding of modern science will not only be surprised when they take a look at Theosophy, but will also realize, when they draw certain conclusions from the natural sciences, that these lead them to Theosophy and can only be understood through it. And if one says that Theosophy is a sect, then we shall see later, after we have discussed the essence of Theosophy in more detail, how far removed it is from having anything sectarian about it, and how it does not in the least conflict with today's deeply understood, comprehensible Christianity, and how little it has to do with any Buddhism, least of all with the Buddhism that was founded by Buddha 600 years before Christ. A strange misunderstanding has prevailed, which has already been clarified by H. P. Blavatsky in the “Secret Doctrine”. There are many books that have been written about Theosophy. One of these books, which has contributed enormously to the spread of Theosophical science, is Sinnett's “Esoteric Buddhism”. Mrs. Blavatsky said that this book is neither esoteric nor Buddhism, because something is only esoteric if it is passed from person to person. It is only possible to transmit the most intimate thoughts in the most intimate communication between teacher and student. What flows from soul to soul and is called esoteric can never be published. A book can never be esoteric Buddhism, but the book is not about Buddhism at all.

Within the world view known as Theosophy, there are certain teachings about the structure of the human being. Let us briefly repeat this teaching, which is the common property of all those who stand on the ground of spiritual science, this teaching, which has been saying for millennia that what is known only through the external senses, through the material view of man, is only a small part of the human being. This physical human body, which we perceive through our external senses, is shared by humans with all beings on earth, and with everything that surrounds humans, because even stones and crystals are made up of the same substances that are contained in the human body.

Now spiritual science says: This physical body is only one part of the human being, the second part, which is actually much more real and actual, because it creates and forms the physical body, is called the etheric body or life body. This is what humans have in common with all living beings that surround them here on earth, including plants. The physical body is nothing more than a mixture of physical substances that would be impossible and would immediately disintegrate if it were not held together by the etheric or life body. The etheric body has the task of protecting the physical body from decay.

The third link of the human being is, in the sense of spiritual science, the astral body. This astral body is the carrier of all desires, instincts and passions, in short, of all affects, of all that is inwardly mirrored within the human being, and this astral body the human being has in common only with animals, but no longer with plants.

Spiritual science then distinguishes a fourth element of the human being, by which he is the crown of creation, by which he differs from all the creatures around him. This fourth element is called the “I” in the English language, which works from within the human being. There is only one name that can never sound from the outside when it refers to the human being itself. This is why all great religions say: Here we have the ineffable name of God, a drop from the ocean of divinity that has flowed into every human being. Just as the individual drop of the sea is not the whole sea, the human soul is not the whole of divinity. Only because the Godhead begins to speak in the soul, with the pronunciation of the Zch, does the soul begin to speak within itself, or, as religions say: the god speaks in man.

Today, this spiritual science is made exoteric through public lectures and writings; it is no longer passed on esoterically as it used to be, from person to person. One of these spiritual schools where teaching was only passed on from person to person was the old Pythagorean school in Greece.

Now let us see how the I works within the human being. Let us consider a savage at the most primitive level. On one of his journeys, Darwin came across a tribe of wild people who were still cannibals. He wanted to make it clear to one of them that this was not allowed, and he had the interpreter tell him that it was bad to eat people. The savage replied that he did not know whether it was good or bad before he had eaten the person. We see from this example that at this stage of existence, the uneducated savage knows nothing but how to satisfy the basest instincts and desires of his astral body. But when he undergoes a higher development, when he comes to the realization: You must not follow these lower instincts and desires, when he recognizes moral and ethical laws and commandments, then his ego works on the ennoblement of his astral body. The primitive man, at the lowest level of existence, whose ego has not yet worked on the astral body, has only the one astral body that the powers gave him at his birth. The more highly developed man has two parts in his astral body: the part that he has ennobled through his ego, and the other part, which is still as the powers gave it to him. The part of the astral body that is a product of the ego is called the manas or spirit self.

Now, a person can also work on their etheric or life body. To understand the difference, let us think about what each of us knew as an eight-year-old child and what we have acquired since then. We have absorbed a tremendous amount of ideas and concepts since then. Let us now compare this sum of ideas with what has slowly changed in our temperament, passions, habits and character. If we compare the changes in the human astral body with the minute hand of a clock, we can compare the advancement, the changes in the etheric body with the hour hand of the clock. The processing of the etheric body takes place much more slowly. A child's violent temper or melancholy, for example, will in most cases continue to resurface time and again, even at a later age.

There are now impulses in intellectual development that have a strong effect on the etheric body, and through which it can also be transformed. Art, for example, is one of these impulses. When a person learns to look through the mirror of matter at the divine that speaks to him through the work of art, he transforms the etheric body and forms a part of the etheric body in such a way that it too is a product of the ego. And the more and more perfect the human being becomes, the greater the part of the etheric body that is ennobled, transformed by the I. This ennobled part of the etheric body is called Budhi, so that Budhi is what transforms the human being's life body into life spirit. The impulses that are most capable of transforming the etheric body are religious impulses, whether they come from Hermes, Zarathustra, Buddha, Moses, or any of the other great initiates of humanity. They are the great, powerful impulses that are able to transform the life body into the life spirit.

Even more powerful are the impulses that affect the student in the secret schools who is undergoing spiritual training. It becomes completely clear to the person undergoing this spiritual training that there is what is called a spiritual core of being. When man in the secret training is made a seer, then he works even deeper into his etheric body, he develops an ever greater core of wisdom that lives in him and is able to conquer death. When the disciple then received this Budhi, when he developed the life body more and more into the life spirit, then he was called an initiate, and the greatest initiates are the founders of religions. This great wisdom was given by them in images, so that the people who were taught by them could absorb this original wisdom. Thus Hermes gave the Egyptian people an image of the original wisdom, and the Rishis taught in a way that the ancient Indians could understand. This original wisdom was made understandable by Zarathustra for the Persian people, and it was Pythagoras who did the same for the Greeks. So it was with the greatest religious teacher, who was no ordinary initiate but carried a divine spirit within him, with Christ Jesus, to whom it was reserved to found the greatest and purest religion, which, when it is understood by all, will be the universal religion of mankind. We also understand a word of Christ Jesus: “If you do not leave father and mother” (Luke 14:26; Matt. 19:29) and so on. This is not spoken in order to destroy the sacred bonds of the family, but to found a brotherhood of all mankind, where people shall live together fraternally, although they are not physically brothers and sisters and bound by family ties. Thus Christ has cast the original wisdom of the world into this form.

If we look at Buddhism, it is what is tailored for the Indian people, and the one who brought this religion to the Indian people is called Buddha because he said: “I give you the Budhi, which in me stimulates the life body to become a life spirit.” But what Sinnett described in his book is not what the Buddha taught, but those teachings that figure in the secret schools as the Budhi for transforming the life body into the life spirit. Sinnett's error is therefore nothing more than a spelling mistake; he wrongly writes Budhi with two d's. However, it is not about Buddha and Buddhism, but about the transformation of the life body into the life spirit. In the secret training, the disciple also learns to work into his physical body. The physical body of man is the densest and therefore it is the hardest to work into it. Because it is the lowest of the four limbs of the human being, the highest power is needed to work into it. What does man know about his physical body, about the process of digestion, the blood circulation, the work of the muscles? It is not meant what the anatomist can determine about the physical body, but that one can see how the nerve currents flow, how breathing and blood circulation proceed, that it becomes light in the physical body. When a person consciously works on transforming the physical body, it is said that he has developed Atman when he gains control over the physical body through his I. Now there is a communal teaching that underlies all religious beliefs. Everything that the human being has not yet worked through the ego of his physical, etheric and astral bodies falls away from the human being and remains behind as a corpse. But what the I has worked into these outer shells, which we call the physical body, ether body and astral body, becomes the eternal core of the human being. And now spiritual science explains that there is a core of being formed by the ego, which is eternal, which must often re-embody itself, and will become more and more perfect as the human being goes through his normal course until he has come to the point of view where he has transformed the lower bodies, deified them, so that he will be taken up again into the bosom of the Godhead, where the soul once came from in primeval times. Man consists of two parts, the eternal essence and the perishable part of man. It is clear that he cannot immediately reach the level of perfection, that he must go through many, many lives. What we have sown in previous lives, we will now reap; man is born again and again until he stands at the height of humanity. We can understand many things if we look not at just one, but at many lives on earth. It makes our need and misery, luck and misfortune, clear to us, because all of this is prepared in previous lives. These are not fates, but consequences of our own actions. So we must not only understand karma in relation to the past, but also see it in the future. Then karma becomes a great comfort to us, something that gives us work in life and strength and comfort for the future. Thus karma becomes a practical point of view for life, a moral foundation for our lives. This is how religions have spoken to people, about the eternal essence and its re-embodiment.

Now Gautama Buddha was the one who presented this teaching of reincarnation and karma, as we have now developed it, most purely. But if this teaching had always prevailed, humanity would never have reached today's level of culture. If we compare the time when this teaching was communicated to mankind with the present time, we see that the laborer at the Egyptian pyramid said to himself that this arduous life is one life among many, and he looked up to the eternal divinity, but in so doing he lost touch with the physical. People look to the spirit, but lose touch with the earthly, and it would never have been possible to achieve the level of civilization that surrounds us today. Man had to learn to love the one life between birth and death. Only because Christ Jesus appeared as such a powerful personality was it possible for man to develop his personality to such an extent that it brought him together with this world. This culture would never have come about without Christianity. The teaching of reincarnation was also taught by Christ Jesus, but esoterically, in parables. Only to his most intimate disciples did he say: “For a while, the teaching of karma and reincarnation must remain secret, but the time will come when it must be proclaimed again before all people. That time has come today. And this is the wisdom that Theosophy wants to bring to people today. That is why Theosophy is not a sect, but an instrument, a servant that leads to an understanding of the highest spiritual existence. That is why it is not unscientific, and precisely because Theosophy shows the common essence in Buddhism and Christianity and all other major religions, it is not a religious community at all, but an instrument for understanding every religion.