The Rudolf Steiner Archive

(The German transcript has been slightly abbreviated)

The information revealed by the “Fifth Gospel” sheds new light upon the great steps taken, as it were in the whole Cosmos, in preparation for the Mystery of Golgotha. Spiritual Science conceives the Mystery of Golgotha to be a kind of interim culmination of other happenings with which it is connected in the streams of world-realities.

We have heard that the Jesus boys were born in preparation for the Mystery of Golgotha. One of them was the “Solomon Jesus Child” who bore within him the Ego of Zarathustra. The age of the two boys was approximately the same and when they were twelve years old, the Zarathustra-Ego passed over into the body of the other Jesus boy who had descended from the “Nathan line” of the House of David. Then—from the source of the Fifth Gospel—it was possible to give details of the life of Jesus of Nazareth. His three bodily sheaths were those of the Nathan Jesus Child and the Zarathustra-Ego was present these three sheaths until Jesus of Nazareth reached his thirtieth year. You have also heard of the conversation with the mother which then took place and how, as he poured his very Self—his Ego—into the words, the Zarathustra-Ego departed from the bodily sheaths. Then, at the Baptism by John in the Jordan, the Christ Being descended into the threefold bodily sheaths of Jesus of Nazareth.

This conception of the Being Christ Jesus gives us an infinitely deeper and grander impression than is possible to those who draw only upon the sources of hitherto existing knowledge and the information contained in the Gospels.

Thee Event which, together with the “Crucifixion” and the “Resurrection” we call the Mystery of Golgotha, followed three other Events as a kind of culmination.

One of these other Events had taken place in very ancient Lemurian times; the second in the early period of the Atlantean epoch, and the third towards its end. These first three Events, however, transpired in the spiritual worlds, not on the physical plane. We have therefore to turn our eyes to four Events, of which the last only—the Mystery of Golgotha itself—took place on the physical plane. The three others were Events in the spiritual world, as it were in preparation for the fourth.

I have told you that the altogether unique character of the Being we know as the Nathan Jesus was revealed in that immediately after his birth he spoke certain words—albeit in a language unintelligible to everyone except his mother, who in her heart and feeling was able to discern what the words implied. It must be realised that the Nathan Jesus boy was not an ordinary human being; unlike the Solomon Jesus boy who bore within him the Zarathustra-Ego and, as other human beings, had passed through many earthly lives, the Nathan Jesus boy had no earthly incarnations behind him for the whole of his previous existence had been spent in the spiritual worlds.

I have spoken of this in earlier lectures by saying that when, from the Lemurian epoch onwards, human souls were coming down to earthly incarnations, something was as it were kept back in the spiritual worlds and incarnated for the first time in the Nathan Jesus. Jesus of Nazareth therefore was not the bearer of a human Ego in the ordinary sense, for the “human Ego” passes on from one earthly incarnation to another, whereas the previous existence of this Being had been spent in the spiritual worlds. And only the Initiates in the ancient Mysteries who were able to see into the spiritual worlds knew that this Being—who would eventually be born as the Nathan Jesus and become the bearer of the Christ—had been connected with certain previous Events in the spiritual worlds. In order to understand the nature of these Events we must remind ourselves of the following.

Most of you will remember that in lectures on Anthroposophy given here some years ago, I spoke of the human senses. I emphasised then that in reality man possesses twelve senses—the five usually enumerated forming only a part of these twelve. We will not enter into this in greater detail to-day but speak of something else, namely, that the senses of man, the senses in the physical body, would have suffered a fate portending ill for human nature had not the first Christ Event taken place in the spiritual worlds during the epoch of ancient Lemuria in preparation for the Mystery of Golgotha. In the Lemurian epoch the foundations of the senses were actually present in man's bodily structure. But we know, too, that in this same epoch the Luciferic powers began to operate in human evolution and influenced the whole organism of man. If in the Lemurian epoch nothing else had happened than the descent of man to earthly incarnations and the onset of the Luciferic influence, the senses would not have developed into the organs they are to-day. They would have been hypersensitive, over-sensitive. We should have gone about the world with ‘untempered’ senses. The colour red, for instance would have affected the eye so strongly as to cause actual suffering; other impressions too would have caused pain to the senses. For example: the eye would have felt as if it were being drawn away, sucked away by the colour blue. And it would have been the same in all the other senses. The human being would have been obliged to go about the world with senses over-susceptible to pain or to immoderate, and therefore unhealthy, sensations of pleasure. Sensory activity would have been stronger and more intense than is healthy; the senses would have been affected by every single impression coming from the world outside. This would have been the outcome of the Luciferic influence, and it was averted from humanity not by anything that transpired in the physical world but by the first of the three Events which took place in preparation for the Mystery of Golgotha. In the Lemurian epoch, the same Christ Being Who later on, at the Baptism in the Jordan, came down into the body of Jesus of Nazareth, united at that time with a being still living in the spiritual world—the being subsequently born as “Nathan Jesus boy.”

If we say of the Event in Palestine that the Christ Being then united with a body, of this first Event we must say that in the spiritual world, during the Lemurian epoch, He “ensouled” (verseelte sich) a Being who in a later epoch came down to the Earth as the Nathan Jesus boy.

Thus there was present in the spiritual worlds a Being of soul-and-spirit Who through this union with the soul of the later Jesus of Nazareth and through all the consequences of this Deed, averted the calamity that would have befallen the human senses. It was as though this Being radiated His light from the spiritual worlds upon humanity in order that the senses might be saved from the suffering attendant upon over-sensitiveness. The first Event in preparation for the Mystery of Golgotha was for the well-being and salvation of the senses. The fact that we can go about the world with senses functioning as they now do, is due to this first Christ Event.

A second Event took place towards the beginning of the Atlantean epoch. The same being—the later Jesus of Nazareth—was again “ensouled” by the Christ Being, with the result that another evil was averted from human nature. Although the first Christ Event had brought salvation to the senses, the Luciferic and, later on, the Ahrimanic influences had so affected the seven life-organs of man that if the second Event had not taken place, human life in the world could not have been as it now is; man would have vacillated between wild, inordinate desire (in certain limits this is what we not call ‘sympathy’) and utter disgust for what he imbibes through his life-organs, for his means of nourishment. In the lectures on “anthroposophy” I also spoke of these seven life-organs. In the physical body they are vesicular organs, but what underlies them is actually a certain formation of the etheric body. Moreover for everything that found its way to his organs of breathing, too, man would either have felt inordinate desire or deepest loathing. Therefore the seven life-organs too would have become over-active as a result of the influence of Lucifer and Ahriman. The second Christ Event took place—again in the supersensible worlds. And this Event brought ‘moderation’ into the life-organs, enabled them to function with a certain restraint. Just as our senses would never have been able to face the world “in wisdom” if the first Christ Event had not taken place in the Lemurian epoch, so our life-organs could never have functioned with temperance and moderation if the second Christ Event had not transpired at the beginning of the Atlantean epoch.

But man was faced by yet another evil. This third evil threatened the astral body, in connection with thinking, feeling and willing and their due fields of activity. A certain harmony is maintained to-day in man's thinking, feeling and willing, and when this harmony is upset, the healthy life of the soul is disturbed. When thinking, feeling and willing do not interact in the right way, a man falls into conditions of extreme hypochondria, melancholy or actual insanity. As a result of the Luciferic and Ahrimanic influence, therefore, men's thinking, feeling and willing would have lapsed into utter disorder if, towards the end of the Atlantean epoch, the third Christ Event had not taken place. Once again the Christ Being united with the “Nathan-Jesus soul” in the supersensible worlds, bringing order and harmony into the soul-powers of thinking, feeling and willing.

These three Events all worked upon man from the spiritual worlds; they were not Events of the physical plane. But memories of the third Event in particular, have been well preserved in myths and legends; and as in many other cases, spiritual knowledge leads us to a much deeper understanding of the wisdom they contain.

We are all familiar with imagery often used for the portrayal of supersensible beings; the Archangel Michael, or St. George overcoming the Dragon, vanquishing death. This is a pictorial presentation of the third Christ Event: St. George or the Archangel Michael is inspired by the Christ Being; and the ‘Conquest of the Dragon’ indicates the overcoming of those elements in the desire-nature of man which would bring confusion and disorder into thinking, feeling and willing.

There is deep meaning in these pictures; they have not been created for the intellect but for the feeling, in order that what eludes intellectual understanding may be presented to the human soul in the form of visible symbols.

In earlier lectures we have heard how in its world of Gods and Spirit-Beings, Greek culture preserved the shadow-images of the Divine Spiritual Beings who in the Atlantean epoch had been present, in all their reality, in the sphere immediately above the world of men. The Greeks had preserved definite consciousness of the third Christ Event, the Event that is portrayed elsewhere as St. George or the Archangel Michael overthrowing the Dragon.—In their Apollo the Greeks portrayed the Christ Being permeating the soul of the later Jesus boy. And we may say with truth that in ancient Greece, St. George and the Dragon are real beings, cosmic beings. The Greeks had their Castalian fountain on Parnassos; vapours arose from a gorge in the earth and these vapours, winding around the mountain like snakes, were a picture of those wild tumultuous passions of men which cast thinking, feeling and willing into confusion and disorder. At the place—it was the abode of Python—where these curling, snake-like vapours issued from the gorge, the Greeks erected the sanctuary of the Pythian Oracle. Sitting there on her tripod above the gorge, she was transported by the rising vapours into a state of visionary consciousness and her utterances were conceived to by the words of Apollo himself. Those who sought advice addressed themselves to the Pythian Oracle and received it from Apollo through her mouth.

In Greece, therefore, Apollo was a real and living Being. We know now that he was the Being who was ensouled by the Christ and later on became the Nathan Jesus boy. This being was known to the Greeks as “Apollo.” He eliminates the effects of the Luciferic and Ahrimanic influences from what rises out of the earth into the soul of the Pythian Oracle. And because the Luciferic and Ahrimanic influences no longer creep into her soul with the vapours which had been purified by Apollo, the forces issuing from her no longer bring thinking, feeling and willing into confusion but into order and harmony on the Earth.

And so we perceive in the figure of Apollo the idea that the God whom we in later time call Christ sent His influence into the thinking, feeling and willing of men.—He was the God Who sacrificed Himself at that time by uniting with the soul of the later Nathan Jesus, in order that harmony and order might prevail in the thinking, feeling and willing of the human soul, instead of the confusion wrought by the influence of Lucifer and Ahriman.

In the supersensible worlds, therefore, three Christ Events take place in preparation for the Event of Golgotha.

What was actually achieved by this Event? What is it that would have fallen into chaos and disorder if the Event of Golgotha had not taken place?

In the Fourth post-Atlantean epoch, the Greco-Latin epoch, humanity was ready for the development of the ‘I’. The first peoples who were ready for this were those who inhabited the lands stretching from Western Asia across Southern Europe and into Middle Europe. The encounter between the Roman peoples and the Germanic peoples in Middle and Southern Europe was to give a strong impetus to this development of Ego-consciousness. The ‘I’, the Ego, was to develop in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch—but something would have gone wrong with this development had not the Mystery of Golgotha taken place in that same epoch. Just as the senses would have been impaired in the Lemurian epoch if the first Christ Event had not taken place; just as irregularity would have crept into the development of the seven life-organs if the second Christ Event had not taken place at the beginning of the Atlantean epoch; just as thinking, feeling and willing in man's life of soul would have been cast into disorder if the third Christ Event had not taken place towards the end of the Atlantean epoch... so, too it would have been with the development of the ‘I’, if the fourth Christ Event—the Mystery of Golgotha—had not taken place in the Greco-Latin epoch. For as we know, in this fourth post-Atlantean epoch men had reached the stage of Egohood, of ‘I’-consciousness.

For human beings not belonging to this particular phase of evolution, a different kind of revelation was given. The characteristic difference between the Buddha revelation and the Christ revelation is that the Buddha revelation was given to human beings not destined to unfold consciousness of the ‘I’ which passes through the series of incarnations. Without understanding what this implies, it is not possible to have a true conception of Buddhism. I have often spoken of a simile employed in a later phase of Buddhism, to the effect that the true Buddhist likens what passes over from one incarnation to another to the fruit of the mango which, when it is laid into the earth, produces a new tree upon which new fruit grows; the new mango fruit has in common with the old only ‘name’ and ‘form.’ The ‘form’ alone remains, the individual entity disappears and nothing that has real being passes on. Buddhism teaches nothing about the transmission of the Ego—for the reason that the Eastern peoples had not yet reached full consciousness of the ‘I’. And to this very day we find that when adherents of purely oriental teachings endeavour to understand Western thought and philosophy, they come to a standstill at the point where Egohood becomes an essential and basic factor. The Ego was destined to come to birth in the peoples of the West.

The time for the birth of the Ego was the Fourth post-Atlantean epoch, but if nothing had intervened, irregularity would have set in. This is indicated by something that made its first appearance in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, namely Greek Philosophy. Greek philosophy is a significant sign of the birth of the Ego, but side by side with Greek philosophy we find the Sibylline soothsayers. Unlike the Pythia under the influence of Apollo, the Sibyls were women whose life of soul lacked order and harmony, who allowed the revelations they received to work chaotically in their thinking, feeling and willing. Great and sublime truths were often contained in these Sibylline revelations which began to play a part from about the eighth century B.C. and continued right on into the Middle Ages.—But the wisdom was confused and chaotic, fraught with all kinds of extravagance. Sibylline ‘wisdom’ is a striking example of he fact that the birth of Ego-consciousness (just as would have happened to the twelve senses in the Lemurian epoch, the seven life-organs in the earthly Atlantean epoch and the three soul-faculties at the end of the Atlantean epoch had it not been for the first three Christ Events. In the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, disorder would have crept into the development of Ego-consciousness if the Mystery of Golgotha had not taken place.

The Mystery of Golgotha comes down as it were by stages, from those lofty heights of Spirit where the Christ Event had taken place in the Lemurian epoch, to the physical plane itself—as our earthly Mystery of Golgotha.

Here again we have an indication of the supreme significance of this unique Event in Earth-evolution, prepared for as it had been by great and momentous happenings in the spiritual worlds. The connection with the sublime Sun Being we know as the Christ is revealed, too, in the Greek Apollo, for Apollo is the ‘Sun God.’

I have spoken in bare outline only of matters which help me to realise the significance of the Mystery of Golgotha. All these things could be expounded in detail and would reveal the untold Cosmic significance of this Event.

We have been considering the Mystery of Golgotha from the aspect of the Cosmos; but it is possible, too, to make a different approach.

A human being passes into the spiritual world through the Gate of Death or through initiation, but we will think now only of one who enters the spiritual world through death. He lays aside his physical body and this outermost sheath is given over to the earthly elements through burial or through cremation. Suppose that after death a man looks back from the spiritual world upon what is happening to his physical body as it passes over through decay or through cremation into the physical elements of the Earth.—What he beholds in the processes here taking place can be called a ‘happening of Nature’, like any other, in which no moral concepts, for example, are involved—for we do not apply moral concepts when clouds form, when lightening strikes from one cloud to another, and so forth. Man looks at his physical body in process of dissolution, just as he looks at these phenomena of Nature. But for a few days, as we know, his connection with the ether-body remains and then the second separation, the separation of the ether-body from the astral body and Ego takes place.

As man looks back upon the discarded ether-body, the processes in which it is involved are not of the same character as those operating in the discarded physical body. After death we can by no means look at what the ether-body is and what is becoming of it, as if it were a ‘phenomenon of Nature’. The ether-body reveals its own individual character, coloured by the feelings and sentiments we have harboured during life. The whole gamut of our feelings—good or bad—is revealed to us by the ether-body. The temper and tenor of our soul is stamped into the ether-body and becomes visible to us after death. Then by a complicated process it dissolves into the universe of ether, is absorbed into the other world.

Looking back in this way upon what becomes of our ether-body, we have before us an image of what we ourselves were in earthly life. And this image tells us: ‘If your feelings were good, if you were truly devoted to the spiritual worlds, then you have given over to the universe of Ether something that is good and beneficial; if your feelings were unrighteous, if you turned a deaf ear to information concerning the spiritual worlds, then you have given over to the Cosmos of Ether something that is injurious and harmful.

In the spiritual world it is part of the destiny of our soul, that is to say of our astral body and Ego, to behold ourselves in the fate of the ether-body—which cannot be changed once the separation from the physical body has taken place. It is a moment of paramount significance after death when we realise that just as in the world of sense we saw clouds and mountains, so now, after death, we see, as a kind of background, all that we ourselves laid into our ether-body through our feelings and tenor of soul. The picture expands as the ether-body dissolves, becomes as it were a “firmament” against which everything else stands out in relief. After death, therefore, man sees what is happening to his ether-body.

Something else is revealed as well, namely, two different kinks of properties, or forces, in the now dissolving ether-body: one of these properties gives rise to an impression that must always weigh heavily upon the soul after death. The best way to understand what this means is to think of the destiny confronting the physical Earth.

The destiny of the physical Earth is recognised to-day even by the physicists, who rightly speak of the “Wärmetod” (equilibration of heat and cold) to which the physical Earth will succumb. The relation of heat to the other physical forces is such that as scientific calculations already show, a time will come when all temperature will be reduced to a dead level. No life or existence in the physical kingdom of Earth will then be possible; the whole physical Earth will perish.

Materialists are bound to assume—for otherwise they would be inconsistent—that this equilibration of temperature, the Wärmetod, also entails the end of everything know to them as culture, the end of all human thinking, reflection, aspiration, endeavour, in short the disappearance of all human existence.

Those who understand the conditions as revealed by Spiritual Science know what this means, namely, that the physical Earth will fall away from the Spiritual like a corpse, just as the physical corpse falls away from that part of a man's being which passes onwards through the Gate of Death. At death, the corpse is discarded and as a being of soul-and-spirit, man lives through an intermediate period between death and a new birth, passing over from one state of existence to another. In the same way the spiritual part of the Earth will pass over to the ‘Jupiter existence’ when physical existence comes to an end. This ‘Jupiter existence’ will be a further embodiment of everything that is connected spiritually with the Earth.

And so when we are able after death to look back at the ether-body, we realise that in very truth one part of the ether-body has to do with everything in the realm of Earth that will ultimately perish. Certain forces in our ether-body have to do with the process by which the Earth is led onwards to its end. But the ether-body contains other forces too, quite different forces. We can picture the relation of these forces to the physical Earth by thinking of the seed of the plant surrounded by substance out of which the next plant arises. Similarly, we perceive in the ether-body, forces which have only to be active as long as the Earth exists, until the Earth comes to an end with the Wärmetod. But there are other forces too, ‘young’, fertile forces, and these are connected with everything that makes the Earth capable of germination in the Cosmos, of passing over to its next embodiment. This ‘fertile’ part of the ether-body can only be perceived—and here we come to another significant secret disclosed by Spiritual Science—when the human being has established a certain relationship with the Christ, the Christ Impulse. For this part of the ether-body is permeated with the Christ Forces which since the Mystery of Golgotha have poured into the sphere of the Earth. It is these Christ Forces in the ether-body which enable the ‘fertile seed’ in the human soul, too, to pass over to the Jupiter embodiment of the Earth. Our connection with the Christ Impulse therefore, enables us to perceive the fertile seed, the seed of the future within our ether-body. And this brings the certain knowledge that the power of the Mystery of Golgotha has flowed, in very truth, into the Earth-sphere and that this power was responsible for quickening the spiritual forces of the Earth with which we ourselves, as human beings, are inwoven. When a human being who has attained Ego-consciousness in the real sense—as is the case in the West to-day—gazes upon his ether-body after death, he must not find this ether-body devoid of the forces flowing from the Christ Impulse. For it means a life of unblessedness after death if the vista of the ether-body reveals that ether-body is not permeated by the Christ Impulse.

I have said many, many times that Christ has come to the Earth as a Real Being and that even those who in their surface-consciousness to-day resist the Christ Impulse... they too will gradually find their way to it, although perhaps one or two incarnations later than the peoples of the West. Man's blessedness after death depends upon the realisation that the Christ Impulse is present in the ether-body; whereas he is doomed to tribulation if he can perceive in the ether-body only that which must inevitably perish with the Earth. A man belonging to Western civilisation, born as he is with the clear Ego-consciousness to which the Oriental peoples have not yet attained, is doomed to a state of unblessedness if, after death, he must look back upon an ether-body lacking the‘substance’ of the Christ Impulse and containing only those forces by which Earth-evolution is finally led to its end. When a man cannot perceive the young, fertile forces of the Christ Impulse in his ether-body, it is rather like having to live after death under the constant impression of an earthquake or a volcanic eruption.

These young, fertile forces of the Christ Impulse... what are they?

Of one aspect I have spoken many times, namely, of the part played by the blood in the physical body of Christ Jesus. The blood is, of course, one of the physical components of the body, and in the case of an ordinary human being it dissolves away at death in the physical Elements. This did not happen to that part of the blood in the body of Christ Jesus which flowed from the wounds on Golgotha. This blood was ‘etherised’, was actually taken up into the etheric forces of the Earth. The blood that flowed from the wounds on Golgotha became Ether-Substance. And perceiving this Ether-Substance gleaming and glistening in the ether-body after death, man knows it to be the young, fertile life by which he is borne onwards into the future.

These quickening, freshening life-forces pour into the human ether-body from yet another source. Contemplation of the Fifth Gospel reveals—it is a deep and solemn impression—that after the body of Christ Jesus had been laid in the Grave, a certain happening led, in actual fact, to the scene described with such marvellous exactitude in the Gospel of St. John: the clothes lay scattered around the empty Grave. The Fifth Gospel reveals that it was indeed so. An undulating earthquake had produced a rift in the earth and into this rift the body of Christ Jesus fell. The rift then closed again and, as described in St. John's Gospel, the clothes in which the body had been shrouded were hurled about the empty sepulchre by the tempest. When these things are revealed to one from the Fifth Gospel, it is a deeply moving experience to find them confirmed in the Gospel of St. John.

And so something else too flowed into the human ether-body. What had been received into the rift in the earth poured through the blood now agleam in the Ether, making this gleaming blood visible in the human ether-body. As I said before, the ether-body expands after death and man sees it as a ‘firmament’ against which everything else stands out in relief. And the feeling arises: The body of Christ Jesus, empty of blood, spreads through the expanding ether-body like a basic substance. The body which had fallen into the chasm passed into the Earth, and the etherised blood now reveals itself in the tableau of the human ether-body, filling the tableau with life. And from this revelation arises the certainty: Mankind does not perish, but lives on as the spiritual essence of Earth-existence when the Earth falls away, just as the corpse falls away from the indwelling spiritual being on man. True, the ‘I’ and astral body guarantee freedom and immortality for man; but he would live on only for himself, he would pass over to Jupiter only to find himself in an alien world if the forces poured by the Christ Impulse into the Earth-sphere were not carried over to Jupiter.

If individual human beings were not rooted within an Earth-sphere that has been pervaded by the Christ Impulse, they would pass over to Jupiter in ‘poverty of soul’, with faculties hardly richer than those belonging to the Lemurian epoch. And this ‘poverty of soul’ which would give the conviction that earthly life is doomed to perish would betoken a state of unblessedness for man between death and rebirth; whereas realisation of what the Christ Impulse has wrought for the spiritual part of the Earth brings blessedness to the soul in the life between death and rebirth.

Since the Mystery of Golgotha, every experience by which the human soul is quickened and enriched comes from what was poured into the spiritual aura of the Earth by the Christ Impulse.

I have often quoted Goethe's saying, when he felt in Italy the echo of the nature of Greek Art. I may remind you of it once again today, now that we shall show a few representations of Greek sculputre. Goethe was writing from Italy to his friends in Weimer. He had seen something in Italy of the Grecian Art, and he had divined still more. He had made acquaintance with it. And he wrote: After this experience he had become convinced that in the creation of their works of art the Greeks proceeded according to the same laws by which Nature herself proceeds—and he himself was on the track of their discovery.

This saying of Goethe's always seemed to me of deep and lasting significance. Goethe at that moment divined that something was living in the Greeks, in intimate unison with the laws of the great Universe. Alread before his journey to Italy, he had been trying to discover the principle of universal evolution and becoming. He had done so, above all, in his Theory of Metamorphosis. He found that the manifold forms of Nature can be referred to certain typical or fundamental forms, in which is expressed the spiritual Law and Essence that underlies the outer things. He started, as you know, from Botany—the study of the Plant world. He tried to perceive the growth of the plant in this way: A single fundamental organ, whose basic form he recognised in the leaf, undergoes constant metamorphoses. All organs are transformations of this one. Not only so, but having thus begun, he sought to understand the several plant species as diverse manifestations of one archetypal form, the primary plant.

Likewise he looked for a connecting thread throughout the world of animals. We have often spoken of this work of Goethe's. But, as a rule, we have not a ufficiently vivid conception of what he intended. We are wont to conceive things too abytractly, and we do so in this case. Goethe, if I may put it thus, wanted to take hold in a really living way of the life of living things, in their organic metamorphosis. He wanted to discover the principle on which Nature works. In so doing, he was, indeed, steering straight towards what must be the characteristic of the Science of the fifth post-Atlantean age, even as that which the Greeks conceived and expressed in their works of art was characteristic of the fourth.

In this connection I have often called upon you to observe what is recognisable in the Golden Age of Greek Art, and notably of Grecian sculpture, in so far as it been preserved for us. The Greek artist created from an altogether different starting point. He had a certain feeling. To exprec it in our fully concrete way, we must describe it thus: He felt how the Etheric Body in its living forces and mobility underlies the forms and movements of the Physical. He felt how the Etheric is manifested or portrayed in the forms of the Physical Body, while in the movements of the latter the living forces that abound in the Etheric Body come to expression.

The Greek art of Gymnastics, the Greek Athletics, were built on this foundation. Those who partook in them were to gain thereby a real feeling of what lives invisibly within the visible being of man. And in his plastic art the Greek wanted to portray what he himself experienced in his own nature. All this, as I have often said, grew different in later times, for afterwards men copied what they saw before them with their eyes, what they had outwardly before them. The Greek copies what he felt within himself. He did not work after the model as was done in later times—(whether they do so more or less obviously or indistinctly is not the point). To work from the model is only a peculiarity of the Fifth post-Atlantean age. Nevertheless, in this very age there murst arise a new view of Nature, for which the living starting-point is given in Goethe's “Metamorphosis.” True, there are weighty obstacles, as yet, to such a view of Nature. In this sphere, as in all others, materialistic prejudices stand in the way of a healthy conception of existence. The latter will have to work its way forth in the overcoming of these hindrances. We have to witness in our time things that are little noticed yet—movements that tend in the long run to brutalise even the artistic life. Goethe recognised in a beautiful way the connection between Truth in knowledge or science and Truth in Art, in practice. Science to him was still a living life within the Spirit.

Among the hindrances in this regard is one thing to which—if able to look more deeply into all the impulses of hindrance and of progress in our timei—we cannot give a pleasant name. I refer to what are now called sports and games, athletics and the like, which—if we look more deeply—are also largely among the forces of hindrance in modern civilisation. I can describe them in no other way, than as a tendency to degrade civilisation to the level of the ape. Modern sports and athletics—themselves an outcome of the materialistic conception of life—represent, as it were, the other pole. At the one pole, materialism tends to conceive man as a merely more perfect ape, while at the other pole—through many of the activities that fall under the heading of sport—they are working hard to turn him into a kind of carnivorous monkey. The two things run parallel with one another. Needless to say, modern sports and games and athletics are regarded as a great sign of progress. Indeed, they are often thought of as a kind of resurrection of the spirit of ancient Greece. But in their real essence they can only be described as working towards the ideal, to “monkeyfy” the human race. What can become of man if he proceeds along this path of modern sports, etc? Precisely a “monkeyfied” man, whose chief distinction from the real monkey will lie in the fact that the latter is a vegetarian, while monkeyfied man—presumably—will be a carnivorous species of monkey. The hindrances that face us in the civilisation of today must sometimes be described grotesquely; otherwise we do not describe them strongly enough to bring them home—however little—to the people of today. It is quite in keeping with the propensities of our time: On the one hand theoretically, they are at pains to understand Man as a more perfect ape, while on the other hand in practice they work to bring out the apishness of Man. For if that human being were developed, who is the underlying ideal of the extremer movements in sports and games today, a scientist could truly describe him in no other way, than in all essentials as an offshoot of the ape-nature.

We must think truly on these matters, to gain some understanding of those noble forms of Humanity which underlay the Golden Age of Grecian Art. It was inevitable in the Fifth Post-Atlantean age, for man to leave behind him his life within the spiritual ... The ancient Greek was living in it still. When he moved his hand, he knew that the Spiritual—the etheric body—was in movement. Hence, too, as a creative artist, in all that he imparted to the physical material, he strove to create, as it were, the expression of what he felt within him—the movement of the etheric body. The man of today must go a different path. By way of outward vision, contemplation,—combined with the living Imagination of the weaving of the Ethereal in the organic reelm,—he must bring ancient Greece to life again on a higher level, permeated this time by conscious knowledge, according to the true impulses of the fifth post-Atlantean age. In an elementary way, Goethe was striving towards this end in his Theory of Metamorphosis.

Goethe lived with his whole being in this striving towards a living conception of the Spiritual in the world. For this reason he was glad to refresh and strengthen himself by all that came to him from the study of Greek Art.

To understand the art of ancient Greece in its proper nature—its characteristics entirely a product of the mood of soul of the fourth post Atlantean age—we must start from such ideas as we have just set forth. In this respect it is interesting to see how the Greek Art found its way. Few of the original works have been preserved. Most of them are only handed down to us through later copies. It was with the help of later copies that a man like Winckelmann, in the 18th century, strove so wonderfully to recognise the essence of the art of ancient Greece. Winckelmann, Lessing and Goethe, in the latter half of the 18th century, tried to express in words the essence of Greek Art—tried to find their way back, to re-discover it. And we may truly say: Greek Art in its essence, once it is really grasped, can bring salvation from the perils of materialism.

It would take us too far afield if I were to give you even an outline sketch of the real history, the occult history of Greek Art. Only this much may be said, in connection with the illustrations we shall see today. Even in the early works of the Fifth or of the end of the Sixth century B.C., the relics of which have come down to us; the underlying foundation which I described just now is clearly recognisable. Albeit, in that early period the Greeks had not yet the ability to express through the material what they experienced within, nevertheless even in the archaic forms, imperfect as they are, we can see that the artist's creation is based on a feeling of the inner life and movement of the etheric body. By this means the Greek could find the way to raise the human form so marvellously to the Divine. The Greek was well aware that the figures of his Gods were based on real Being in the ethereal universe. Out of this there arose quite instinctively (for everything in that time was more or less instinctive) the need to represent the world of the Gods and all that was connected with them, in such a way that the outer form was the human form idealised. The point was by no means merely to idealise the Human—that is only the idea of an age that fails to understand the real depths. Through the idealised human form they were able to express what lives and weaves in the ethereal life.

In the earliest figures we still see a certain stiffness. But out of this, in their Golden Age, the Greeks evolved the power to express in the outer physical form the etheric human being. In the earliest pictures we shall still see a certain stiffness; but even here it can be seen that the shaping of the limbs proceeds from a true feeling for the ethereal in movement.

Then as we go on to Myron and bring some of his works before our souls, we shall see how what first came to expression only in the forming of the limbs, begins to take hold of the whole body. In Myron we already see how when an arm is moved—or represented in movement—it means something for the whole breathing organism, the forming of the chest. The human being as a whole is felt through and through. And this must have been the case to the highest degree in Phidias and his School and in Polycletus—in the Golden Age of ancient Greece.

Thereafter we find a gradual descent of Art from this sublime feeling of the ethereal. Not that the ethereal is left out; but they now try to master the actual forms of Nature, they follow the forms of Nature more faithfully, more humanly and less divinely. Nevertheless, the forms are still an expression of the living etheric movement within.

In looking at the several pictures, we shall be less concerned to discuss the individual artists; we chiefly want to see the gradual evolution of the Grecian Art as a whole. Nor does it matter so much, whether we speak—as the historians of Art are wont to do—of a decline in the latest works. In the earlier period the body was conceived, as it were, more in position, thus a certain restfulness or repose pervades the older works. Movement itself is conceived as though it had come to rest. We have the feeling that the artist endeavors to represent the body in such a way that the position in which the figure is might be a lasting one. The later artists strive for a more dramatic quality, holding fast the moment of time in the progressive movement. Thus there is more of movement in the later works. It is, after all, a mere matter of choice—arbitrary human choice—whether we call this a decline or not.

After these few remarks we will see some illustrations, and whatever more there is to say can be said in connection with the single works that will be shown.

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1. Apollo of Tenea. (Glyptothek. Munich.)

This is of an early period—about 600 B.C. Observe how the limbs, especially, are permeated with the ethereal ... One feature of the earliest Greek sculpture is often emphasized: the smile, as it is called, about the lips. In time to come this will be recognized as arising from the effort to represent not the dead human being—the mere physical body—but really to seize the inner life. In the earliest period they could do this in no other way than by this feature.

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2. Dying Warrior. Eastern Pediment. Temple of Aegina. (Glyptothek. Munich.)

These works of art in the Doric Temple at Aegina were done as a thank-offering for the Battle of Salamis. They chiefly represent battle-scenes. Dominating the whole is the figure of Pallas Athene, which we shall see presently. This dying recumbent figure is a beautiful example of the figures that are found in this temple. The figures are grouped in the pediment. It is most interesting to see the composition, the perfect symmetry. The figures are distributed to the left and right with the most beautiful symmetrical effect.

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3. Pallas Athene from the Pediment of the Temple at Aegina. (Glyptothek. Munich.)

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4. Reconstruction of the Western Piedemont of the Aphaia Temple.

These works take us to the beginning of the 5th century B.C.

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5. Head of a youth.

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6. Charioteer from Delphi

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7. Runner (middle of the 5th century B.C.)

And then I ask you to note, as with Myron—as we come in to that age that one can denote as the pinnacle—as with Myron, that a very different treatment of the body arises, in that he no longer separates, what even here is still the case, but he knows how to treat the whole body in connection with the limbs.

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8. Discus Thrower

Thus we stand in the middle of the 5th century and find in such a shapes a tryly high degree of perfection in the direction, we have tried to characterize.

And now we come, or are already in, to the Age of Periclean. From the time of Phidias, of whomwe unfortunately know very little, you have the so-called Athena Lemnia:

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9. Athena Lemnia

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10. Head of Athena

We will now give a few examples of the famous Parthenon. You may read the interesting story of these figures in any History of Art. The greatest of them have in all probability been lost. We can only gain some idea of them from the drawings made by the Frenchman, Carrey, in the 17th century. Subsequently they were largely destroyed by the Venetians, and only the relics were discovered by Lord Elgin in the 19th century.

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11a. Drawings of the eastern pediment.

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11b. Remains of the left side of the eastern pediment. (Bristish Museum. London.)

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11c. Reconstruction of the figures in the last photo.

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11d. Hestia, Dione, and Aphrodite from the right side of the eastern pediment. (British Museum, London.)

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11e. Far right of the eastern pediment.

Now for the Parthenon western pediment:

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11f. Drawings of the western pediment.

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11g. Reconstruction of the western pediment.

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The Parthnon Friezes:

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12a. Drawings of the Friezes.

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12b. Calvary. (Western Frieze.)

We may assume that these works were mostly executed in the presence of Phidias himself by his pupils. The next group is from the Eastern Frieze:

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12. Poseidon Group. (Eastern Frieze.)

With Phidias, indeed, all that was typical of Greek Art was already given. The stamp, the signature, as it were, was now given to the bodily figure, as it should be represented in Art. The way in which Phidias and his pupils saw it lived on for a long time. It was felt that the line of the face, the features, the movement of the limbs, the flow of the drapery and so forth, should accord with what was evolved in this ideal age.

Through all the traditions this was handed down, even into the times when they were able to imitate quite superficially what had lived so strongly in this Golden Age of the Art of ancient Greece. Unhappily, the greatest works have been destroyed. It is no longer possible to gain by outer vision a conception of Phidias' greatest masterpieces, which were transcendent and sublime. We must realise that in the 18th century, when Goethe and others, stimulated by Winckelmann, entered so deeply into the essence of Greek Art, they could only do so with the help of poor, late imitations. Truly, great intuition was necessary to penetrate into the nature of Greek Art through the poor imitations that were then available. And if we really try to feel the truth about these things we cannot but admit: In the time when Goethe was a young man, or when he travelled in Italy, there was still quite a different instinctive feeling for Art than later in the 19th century,—let alone the 20th. For otherwise it would have been impossible for these late imitations to inspire the lofty conceptions of Greek Art which lighted forth in Winckelmann or in Goethe.

Look, for instance, at the next, the head of Zeus, which is to be seen in Rome:

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13. Zeus of Otricoli. (Vatican. Rome.)

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14. Athena

Here you can see something like a later continuation of the type that was evolved in the time of Phidias. This is, of course, a later imitation, though undoubtedly it still appears with a certain grandeur,—With a far less grandeur they imitated the Hera type which had been evolved by Polycleitus. And as to the famous Pallas Athene, which is also to be seen among these statues in Rome, here I must say the imitation has become insipid, fatuous. Indeed, this figure shows already the type of the later imitations of Pallas Athene. These things even become a little reminiscent of fashion-plates! We can but divine how magnificent were the works from which these later imitations were derived.

In this head of Zeus you see the tradition that was handed down from Phidias.

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14a. Zeus

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14b. Profile of Zeus.

And now we will go back to the figures from the temple of Zeus at Olympia. Here, too, the composition is magnificent:

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15. Western Pediment. Temple of Zeus at Olympia.

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16. Figure of Apollo.

The next, too, is from the School of Phidias:—

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17. Orpheus Relief. (Museum. Naples.)

We remember how Phidias was accused by his fellow-citizens of stealing gold for his gold-and-ivory statue of Athene. His “grateful” fellow-citizens threw him into prison.

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18. Bust of Pericles. (Berlin.)

Truly an ideal conception—lifted far beyond the sphere of portraiture.

The next is perhaps a work of Phidias' youth.—

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19. Amazon.

Here we will insert a work of Polycleitus:—

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20. Amazon.

Myron and Phidias are the artists of the Golden Age of Grecian Art; they, indeed, created the traditions.

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21. Amazon.

Another Amazon. The next is more difficult to date; it represents about the turn of the 4th and 5th centuries B.C. We insert it here to show that ancient Greece was quite capable of producing something of the character of Genre:—

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22. Boy, extracting the Thorn from his Foot. (Rome.)

And now we gradually come into the age of which I tried to indicate just now that the whole conception is lifted down into a more human realm, even though the figures be still the figures of the Gods. Take the following, for instance:—

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23. Aphrodite of Cnidos. (Vatican, Rome.)

Although it is the figure of a Goddess, it is brought down into a more human sphere. The sublimity of the earlier artists is made more human. We see this already in Praxiteles. This picture represents the so-called Aphrodite of Cnidos. Praxiteles brings us to the 4th century B.C. In connection with this we will also show the

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24. Demeter of Cnidos. (British Museum.)

It breathes the same spirit. The next is the Hermes of Olympia:

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25. Hermes of Olympia, (By Praxiteles.)—holding the Dionysos child in his left hand.

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26. Satyr, by Praxiteles. (Capitol. Rome.)

To the same epoch belongs the famous Niobe Group,—Niobe losing all her children through the wrath of Apollo.

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27. Figure in Flight, from the Niobe Group. (Vatican. Rome.)

Going on into the 4th century, we come into the Alexandrian age. Lysippus actually worked in the service of Alexander the Great.

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28. Bust of Alexander. (Louvre. Paris.)

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29. Hermes. (Museum. Naples.)

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30. Youth, in Adoration. (By Lysippus.) (Berlin.) His arms are lifted up to Heaven in reverence, in prayer.

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31. Alexander the Great. (Munich.)

Here we already see the descent of Art from the Typical to the Individual—though in the Grecian Art the process nowhere went as far as in the later epochs.

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32. Medusa Head. (Glyptothek. Munich.)

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33. Sophocles. (Vatican. Rome.)

This status reaches back again to the best, ideal tradition of the older times; it reminds us of the Golden Age. We might equally well entitle it: The Poet, as such. This is symbolised by the rolls of script which are put there of set purpose. Compare this with the figures that now follow, tending more or less towards a portrait likeness in each case. You will see how they strive away from the ideal type, towards the quality of portraiture.

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34. Socrates.

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35. Plato. (Vatican. Rome.)

Of course, these portraits are not done from the model, but still there is an attempt at a human likeness—by which I do not mean to say that they are really like the original.

These remarks will refer especially to the Homer which will now follow:—

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36. Homer. (Museum. Naples.)

Now we gradually approach the 2nd century.

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37. The Victory of Samothrace. (Louvre. Paris.)

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38. The Venus of Milo. (Louvre. Paris.)

This famous work does, indeed, preserve the tradition of the Golden Age, although it belongs to a later period.

In the next picture, on the other hand, we see a fresh attempt to bring in movement:—

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39. Sleeping Ariadne.

This is probably a work of the same period, but you will see a distinct contrast between the two.

And now we come towards the last century before the birth of Christ. We come to the School of Rhodes.

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40. Laocoön. (Vatican. Rome.)

This is the famous Laocoön group—the starting-point, as you know, of many an artistic discussion, ever since Lessing's Laocoön of the 18th century. It is the work of three sculptors of the School of Rhodes. Lessing's writings on this subject are, indeed, most interesting. He tried to show, you will remember, how the poet describes is not placed before the eyes. We must call it to life in our imaginations. Whereas what the plastic artist has created is there before our eyes. Therefore, says Lessing, what the plastic artist portrays must contain far more repose; it must represent moments which can at least be imagined—for a single moment—in repose.

Much has been said and written about this Laocoon group, especially in relation to Lessing's explanations. It is interesting how the aestheticist, Robert Zimmermann,—without, of course, having any knowledge of Spiritual Science—arrived at an explanation which needs, no doubt, to be supplemented, but which was none the less correct for an age that had not Spiritual Science. His explanation contains—albeit only as an instinctive suggestion—some element of what I have been setting forth today. We see the priest, Laocoon, with his two sons, wound around by the serpents and going towards their death. Now we cannot but be struck by the peculiar way in which the body has been moulded. Much has been written on this subject. Robert Zimmermann rightly pointed out: The whole representation is such that we have before us the very moment where the life (or, as we should say, the etheric body) is already fleeing away. It is already a moment of unconsciousness. Hence the artist represents it as though the body of Laocoon were already falling asunder. That is the marvellous quality about this figure. The body is already being differentiated into its parts. Thus even in this late product we see how the Greek was aware of the etheric body. He brings to expression the actual moment where life is passing into death. It is the quick withdrawal of the etheric body through the shock—the shock that is expressed by the awful snakes coiling around. This effect of the etheric body withdrawing from the physical, and the physical falling asunder, is the characteristic thing in the Laocoon; not the other things that are so often said, but the peculiar way the body becomes differentiated. We could not imagine the body thus, unless we conceived it as the moment when the etheric body is drawing away.

And now two more examples—imitations of earlier works, perhaps, which have, none the less, made a great impression on later students of Art.

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41. Apollo Belvedere. (Vatican. Rome.)

This is the famous Apollo Belvedere—Apollo represented as a kind of battle-hero.

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42. Artemis. (Louvre. Paris.)

This, too, will be a later imitation of an earlier work.

Now, as we know, the Art of the ancient Greece gradually drew near its decline, when Greece was subjugated by Rome. In Rome, to begin with, there was a kind of imitation of the Greek Art. It was carried across to Rome, but it was soon submerged in the widespread unimaginativeness of the Roman people, to which we have frequently referred.

The next centuries, as you know ... were to a large extent a dark and troubled age for our evolution. Then a new age began. I will only repeat quite briefly:—In the 12th and 13th centuries in Italy, when through manifold circumstances they rediscovered some of the ancient works of Art that had been buried in the early Middle Ages, the contemplation of the ancient works kindled the rise of a new Art, which grew in time into the Art of the Renaissance. From the 13th century onwards, artists would educate themselves by means of the Antique—the works of Art that had been found or excavated, though the number at that time was relatively small.

We will now consider this re-discovery of the ancient Art in the period immediately preceding the Renaissance. In Niccola Pisano in the 13th century we find a wonderfully refined spirit who waxed enthusiastic over the relics of Greek Art, and tried to create once more in the spirit of the Greeks—out of his own imagination fructified, as it were, by the Greek Art itself.

Our first picture is the famous pulpit in the Baptistery at Pisa; note the reliefs in the upper portion:—

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43. Niccola Pisano. Pulpit in the Baptistery at Pisa.

The pulpit is supported by antique columns between which are Gothic arches. Underneath are also lion figures; above are the relief in which he expressed so wonderfully what he owed to the inspiration of the antique. Niccola Pisano worked until the end of the 13th century.

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44. Niccola Pisano. Adoration by the Three Wise Men. (Relief. Details of the above.)

Another representation of the same subject:—

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45. Niccola Pisano: The Crucifixtion. (Relief. Pulpit in the Cathedral at Siena.)

We now go on to Giovanni Pisano. In his works you will observe already a far greater element of movement. A certain quietude pervades all the figures of Niccola Pisano.

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46. Giovanni Pisano. Pulpit. (San Andrea. Pistoja.)

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47. Giovanni Pisano. Capital from the above Pulpit.

Truly, it was due to the stimulus and inspiration of the Antique, arising, to begin with, in the Pisanos, that the Christian Art afterwards became able to express its motifs so perfectly as it did in
the Renaiscance.

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48. Giovanni Pisano. Bas-Relief from the same Pulpit.

The next two are by Giovanni Pisano:—

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49. Giovanni Pisano. Pulpit in the Cathedral at Pisa.

We see at the same time how naturally the Antique grew together with the Gothic.

And two Madonnas from him:

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51. Giovanni Pisano. Madonnas. (Berlin and Padua.)

And now we have a sample of the work of Andrea Pisano, who was summoned to do one of the Bronze gates of the Baptistery at Florence.

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52. Andrea Pisano. Tubal Cain. (Campanile. Florence.)

A Bas-Relief representing Tubal Cain, inventor of the craft of metallurgy according to the Bible, the Old Testament.

We have thus approached the 15th century, and we come to Ghiberti, the great artist who at the age of twenty years was already able to compete with the others in designing the doors of the Baptistery in Florence.

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53a. Ghiberti. The Offering of Isaac. (Baptistry. Florence.)

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53b. Ghiberti. Northern Door of the Baptistery in Florence.

At the early age of twenty he was already allowed to do the Northern Portals. From a simple goldsmith's apprentice he grew to be one of the very greatest artists. These bas-reliefs of the doors of the Baptistery in Florence are, of their kind, among the greatest things in the whole evolution of Art. Afterwards the Eastern door was also given to him to do. It represents scenes from the Old Testament. Michelangelo said that these were worthy to be the gates of Paradise. [Note:the doors at the Florence Baptistery were moved causing some confusion as to where the works of Ghiberti and Andrea Pisano are located. – e.Ed.]

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54. Ghiberti. The Gates of Paradise. (Baptistery. Florence.)

This work had, indeed, a great influence on the whole Art of Michelangelo himself. Even in the details we can recognise certain motifs in Michelangelo's paintings, which he took from these bronze reliefs.

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55a. Ghiberti. Sacrifice of Isaac. (Detail from the 'Gates of Paradise.')

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55b. Ghiberti. Creation of Man. (Detail from the 'Gates of Paradise.')

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56. Ghiberti. St. Stephen

These works of Ghiberti's were undoubtedly due to a faithful contemplation of the Antique.

We will now insert the Art of the della Robbias. To begin with:—

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57. Luca della Robbia. Dancing Boys. (Cathedral. Florence.)

The della Robbias are famous as the inventors of a special art—the use of burnt clay as a material. To a large extent their works were done in this material.

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58. Luca della Robbia. Singing Boys. (Cathedral. Florence.)

Luca della Robbia covers practically the whole period of the 15th century.

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59. Luca della Robbia. Madonna in the Bower of Roses. (Museo Nazionale. Florence. )

Observe once more the age that we have now come into. The Art of antiquity that had been derived from immediate inner experience—experience of the Etheric—works as a great stimulus and inspiration. Yet at the same time the Art of this age is founded on what is seen—the faithful representation of what is actually seen. It is no longer based on something felt and sensed inwardly. It is very interesting to receive the impression of the two epochs, one after the other, in this way.

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60. Andrea della Robbia. Bambino. (Spedale degli Innocenti. Florence.)

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61. Madonna (della Cintola Fojano). Andrea della Robbia.

The Madonna is shown in the spiritual world.

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62. Giovanni della Robbia. Reception of the Pilgrims and Washing of the Feet. (Hospital. Pistoja.)

We now go on to Donatello, who was born in 1386. In him we observe the influence of the Antique combined already with a decided tendency to Naturalism. His vision has a naturalistic stamp. Donatello enters lovingly and sympathetically into Nature. But while he becomes a real naturalist, he derived his technique from what his predecessors had evolved out of the old tradition.

His naturalism went so far that his friend and companion in his strivings, Brunelleschi, seeing a Christ that Donatello attempted, exclaimed; “That is not a Christ that you are doing, that is a peasant:” Donatello at first did not understand what he meant. The anecdote is interesting, if not historically true; it gives us a right impression of the relation between the two artists—the contrast between the two artists—the contrast between Donatello and Brunelleschi with his high idealism—immersed as he was in the contemplation of the Antique, in its rebirth. Brunelleschi thereupon himself undertook to model the Christ. Donatello—for they lived together—had gone out to buy things for their breakfast. He returned with all the dainties for their common meal wrapped up in a kind of pinafore. Just as he entered, Brunelleschi unveiled his Christ. Donatello gaped with wide open mouth, and his astonishment was such that he dropped all the breakfast on the ground. What Brunelleschi had achieved was a revelation to him. We cannot say that the impression he experienced went very deep. None the less, Brunelleschi undoubtedly had an ennobling influence on him. The above story goes on to relate, Donatello was so overwhelmed that he even imagined the breakfast had disappeared. “What have we now to eat?” he said. “We'll just pick the things up again,” said Brunelleschi. “I see I shall never be able to do any more than peasants,” said Donatello.

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Donatello. Crucifix. (Florence.)

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Filippo Brunellesco. Crucifix. (Florence.)

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63. Donatello. David. (Museo Nazionale, Florence.)

And now we come to the beautifully self-contained marble statues by Donatello in Florence, showing his ability—out of his naturalistic vision—to create human figures strong and firm, even as he wanted them, their feet firmly planted on the ground.

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64. Donatello. David. (Florence.)

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65. Donatello. St. Peter. (Or San Michele. Florence.)

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66. Donatello. Jeremiah. (Campanile. Florence.)

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Habbakuk

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67. Donatello. St. John Baptist. (Campanile. Florence.)

In Donatello Naturalism certainly finds its way in. It is not the inner soul that we found in the Northern sculpture, but a decidedly naturalistic vision of what the outer senses see.

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69. Donatello. Habakkuk. (Campanile. Florence.)

Niccola Pisano and Donatello were two artists who powerfully influenced Michelangelo. Those who afterwards saw what Michelangelo created—especially in his early period—remembered Donatello and coined the phrase which then became current: Donatello Michelangelosed or Michelangelo Donatelloised.

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70. Donatello. Lodovico III Gonzaga

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71. Donatello. St. George. (Florence.)

Most characteristic is this St. George by Donatello. All the power of his naturalism is in it. Such works of Art arose out of the freedom of the free city of Florence, which also gave birth to Michelangelo.

By a wider historic necessity—a cosmopolitan historic necessity, we might say,—it was in Italy that the Antique came to life again. On the other hand, the naturalistic tendency everywhere was bound up with the mood and feeling that arose in the culture of the Free Towns or Cities. Here, as in the North—though in different ways, of course, according to the different characters of the people,—we find this element arising out of the life of the free cities, where man became conscious of his dignity, his freedom, his individual being. In the characteristic works of Art which we found in the Netherlands and other Northern parts, we were reminded again and again of the life of the free cities and the feeling that pervaded them. And so it is here, when we look at this figure of a man, so firmly established in the world of space, this Florentine St. George. We cannot but think of the civilisation of the Free Cities, whose atmosphere made such a thing possible.

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72. Donatello. Bas-Relief. St. George and the Dragon. (From the Base of the St. George Statue.)

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73. Donatello. Madonna Pazzi. (Berlin.)

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74. Donatello. Bas-Relief. Angels Singing. (Uffizi. Florence.)

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75. Donatello. Annunciation. (Santa Croce. Florence.)

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76. Donatello, Portrait of Niccolo da Uzzano.

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Donatello. Gattamelata.

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Donatello. Gattamelata.

Finally, we will show some examples of Verrocchio—teacher of Leonardo and Perugino—in his capacity as a sculptor. First the famous equestrian statue:—

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77. Verrocchio. Bertolomeo Colleoni. (Venice.)

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79. Verrocchio. Head and Shoulders. (Detail of the above.)

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80. Verrocchio. Guiliano de Medici. (Paris.)

And in conclusion:—

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81. Verrocchio. David. (Museo Nazionale. Florence.)

And so, my dear friends, we have had before us the artists of the pre-Renaissance. They entered deeply into the Antique and brought it forth again, in a time when men no longer lived within the soul in the same inward way as did the ancients. They brought to life again in outer vision, contemplation, what the ancients had felt and known inwardly—what they had feelingly known, knowingly felt, I should say. Moreover, they united this with the element which had to come in the 5th Post-Atlantean epoch—the element of naturalism, with clear outward vision. They thus became the fore-runners of the great artists of the Renaissance—of Leonardo, of Michelangelo, and, through Perugino, of Raphael himself. For all these were influenced directly by the Art of the precursors, whose works we have seen today. They stood, undoubtedly, on the shoulders of these artists of the pre- Renaissance period, the early Renaissance.

It is interesting to see, in relation to this figure, for example, how quickly they progressed in that time. Compare this David with the David by Michelangelo. Here you still see a comparative inability to dramatise the theme—to take hold of it in movement. Michelangelo, on the other hand, in his David, has seized the very essence of dramatic movement; he has caught the actual moment of resolve to go out against Goliath.

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82. Michelangelo. David, Marble Statue (Florence, Academy)

Thus we have tried to bring these things to some extent before our souls:—On the one hand what radiates from the Greek Art itself, and on the other, its lighting-up-again in the age when Humanity was trying to find the life of Art once more with the help of the Greek Art which came to life again.

Naturally a great deal more could be said in conclusion to what I have put before you here. In speaking one is obliged to explain things in words and ideas. What is intended is the unity of character, the unity of force, that one would wish to make stream through the words and ideas. Let me sum up by using a half pictorial form to convey what I still wish to say to you. Elaborate it for yourselves and you will perhaps understand better what I mean.

Now from various aspects I have drawn your attention to how every civilized human being today lives in intellectualism in a life of concepts, which in our epoch has developed in the most intense, penetrating way. Mankind has worked itself up to the most abstract concepts. You need only compare, for instance, how in an age preceding our own, Dante received descriptions of the world from his teacher. Everything was still permeated with soul, everything was still of a spiritual nature; it wafted like a magic breath through the whole of Dante's great poem. Then came the time when humanity molded what was experienced inwardly into abstract concepts. Men have always had concepts but, as I have already explained to you, they were revealed concepts, not concepts that no longer corresponded to inner revelations of the soul. Only when men had wrestled through to concepts no longer springing from revelations did they evolve concepts from observation of external Nature, and from outer experiments—only then did they allow validity to what was received from outside through mere observation.

If we go deeply into the old world of thought, into that of the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, we have the feeling that it was united with the inner being of the soul. There was still an inner life then, a living from within outwards, an experiencing which arose in man because he had united himself with this life.

The conceptual system even of the most primitive human being is acquired from outside today, from external Nature observed by the senses. And even those who still cling to the older concepts no longer hold to this belief with any depth of conviction, not even the peasant. When something is passed on from outside, something established scientifically and verified by Nature, it becomes the ideal towards which people strive. But concepts, ideas, arising out of the inner life of the soul, have the characteristic by thus struggling out of the soul, as I have already explained, of becoming dead concepts. And the human being feels it right that, in so far as they are born out of his inner being, these concepts shall die. But the strange thing that has come to pass during the last few centuries, reaching its culmination in the nineteenth century, is that the concepts dying in the inner being took on fresh life from the outer world. It can actually be proved by a historical phenomenon. Think how Goethe out of his inner being built up a whole conception of evolution. It reached its zenith in his concept of metamorphosis. We have the feeling that we are working out of the living into the dead, but that the human being has to work into what is dead because the living implies coercion. Freedom could only arise by concepts becoming dead. Yet these concepts have taken on new life from outer Nature. Inasmuch as Darwinism, for instance, has come upon the scene—even in our Middle European civilization—we have concepts and ideas which acquire new life from outer Nature. But it is a life which devours the human being.

Today we must feel the full intensity of being surrounded by a thinking bound to Nature but which devours the human being. How does it devour the human being? With the ideas the most advanced kind of thinking draws from Nature, we can never understand man. What does our magnificent theory of evolution provide? It gives us a survey of how animals evolve from animals, and how man stands before us—but only as the culminating point in the ranks of the animal kingdom, and not what we are as men.

This is what modern civilization tells us. Previous civilizations understood the kingdoms of Nature as arising out of man, modern civilization grasps man as arising out of Nature, as the highest animal. It does not grasp to what extent animals are imperfect men. If we fill our soul with what our thinking has become through Nature, there appears in the picture of the man-devouring dragon what is the most potent factor in modern civilization. Man feels himself confronting a being who is devouring him.

Consider how this devouring has taken effect. Whereas from the fifteenth century onwards natural science has been triumphantly progressing, knowledge of man has been more and more on the downgrade. The human being could only keep going with difficulty, by preserving and handing on the old no longer living ideas and traditions. Only with difficulty could man protect himself from having his innermost life devoured by the dragon. And in the last third of the nineteenth century the dragon stood with particular intensity before the human being, threatening in the most terrible way to devour the individual life of the soul. Those who had within them a fully developed life of soul felt how the dragon, who was destined for death, had acquired fresh life in the new age through observation and experiment, but it was a life that devoured the human being.

In more ancient times men played a part in producing the dragon, but endowed with the necessary amount of death-forces, they could master him. In those days man contributed to his experience only as much intellectuality as he could master through forces of the heart. Now, the dragon has become sternly objective; he meets us from outside and devours us as beings of soul.

This is the essential characteristic of civilization from the fifteenth century on into the nineteenth. We see it correctly only when we consider the picture of the dragon; in olden times it had a prophetic meaning and pointed to what would come in the future. But olden times were conscious of having given birth to the dragon, and also of having given birth to Michael or St. George, to forces capable of overcoming the dragon.

But from the fifteenth century and on into the nineteenth, humanity was powerless against this. It was the epoch that has gradually succumbed to complete belief in the material world. As a result it had become so paralyzed in its soul-life that in respect of the deepest treasures of the soul, truthfulness had gone. An era which made the world arise out of the Kant-Laplace primeval nebula which densifies into a globe, and in this process engenders living beings and finally man—could but say: Ultimately such activity must disappear into universal death by warmth, but that will also be the death of everything man has developed in the moral sphere! There have always been people who sought to prove that the moral world-order could find a place in a world-order as conceived by Kant-Laplace, ending with universal death, yet such a view is not sincere. And by no means sincere, by no means honest, was the view that considered moral development to originate in illusions and disappear when the universal death through warmth brings about complete annihilation.

Why did such a view of the world ever arise? Why does it fundamentally live in all souls today? Because the dragon penetrates even to the remotest country cottage—though not consciously recognized—and slays the heart. Why is this so? It comes about because man can no longer understand man.

For what takes place in man? There is taking place every moment in man what occurs nowhere else in the earthly world around us. He takes in the foodstuffs from the surrounding world. He takes them from the kingdom of the living and only to a small extent from what is dead. But foodstuffs as they pass through the digestive system are destroyed, even the most living ones. Man takes in living substance and completely destroys it in order to infuse his own life into what has been killed. And not until the foodstuffs pass into the lymph ducts is the dead made living again in man's inner being.

One can see if one penetrates the being of man that in the human organic process, permeated as it is with soul and spirit, matter is completely destroyed and then created anew. In the human organism we have a continual process of destruction of matter so that matter within the human organism can be newly created. Matter is continually being changed into nothingness and newly created in us.

The door to this knowledge was firmly barred in the nineteenth century, when man arrived at the law of the conservation of matter and of energy, and believed that matter is also conserved in the human organism. The establishment of the law of the conservation of matter is clear proof that the human being is no longer inwardly understood.

But now consider how infinitely difficult it is today not to be considered a fool if one fights against what is regarded in modern physics as a definite fact. The law of the conservation of matter and of energy simply means that science has entirely barred the way leading to man. There the dragon has entirely devoured human nature. But the dragon must be conquered, and therefore the knowledge must gain ground that the picture of Michael overcoming the dragon is not merely an ancient picture but that it has reached the highest degree of reality just at this time! It was created in ancient times because men still felt Michael within themselves permeating their unconscious, and by which they unconsciously overcame what arose out of intellectualism. Nowadays the dragon has become quite external. Nowadays the dragon encounters us from outside, threatening continually to kill the human being. But the dragon must be conquered. He can be conquered only through our becoming aware how Michael, or St. George, also comes from outside. And Michael, or St. George, who comes from outside, who is able to conquer the dragon, is a true spiritual knowledge which conquers this center of life (which, for man's inner being is a center of death)—the so-called law of the conservation of energy so that in his knowledge man can again become man in a real sense. Today we dare not; for so long as there is a law of the conservation of matter and of energy, moral law melts away in the universal death through warmth—and the Kant-Laplace theory is no mere phrase!

Man's shrinking away from this consequence is the fearful untruth that has penetrated right into the human heart, into the human soul, and has seized hold of everything in the human being, making him a being of untruth upon the earth. We must acquire the vision of Michael who shows us that what is material on earth does not merely pass through the universal death through warmth, but will at some time actually disperse. He shows us that by uniting ourselves with the spiritual world we are able to implant life through our moral impulses. Thus what is in the earth begins to be transformed into the new life, into the moral.

For the reality of the moral world-order is what the approaching Michael can give. The old religions cannot do this; they have allowed themselves to be conquered by the dragon. They accept the dragon who kills man, and by the side of the dragon establish some special, abstractly moral divine order. But the dragon does not tolerate this; the dragon must be conquered. He does not suffer men to found something alongside him. What man needs is the force that he can gain from victory over the dragon.

You see how profoundly this problem must be grasped. But what has happened in modern civilization? Well, every science has become a metamorphosis of the dragon, all external culture too is an outcome of the dragon. Certainly, the outer world-mechanism, which lives not only in the machine, but also in our social organism, is rightly called a dragon. But besides, the dragon meets us everywhere, whether modern science tells us about the origin of life, about the transformation of living beings, about the human soul, or even in the field of history—everywhere the result proceeds from the dragon. This had become so acute in the last third of the nineteenth century, at the turn of the nineteenth century and on into the twentieth, that the growing human being, who longed to know what the old had received, saw the dragon coming towards him in botany, zoology, history, out of every science—saw himself confronted in every sphere by the dragon waiting to devour the very core of his soul.

In our own epoch the battle of Michael with the dragon has for the first time become real, to the highest degree. When we penetrate into the spiritual texture of the world, we find that with the culmination of the dragon's power there also came—at the turn of the nineteenth century—Michael's intervention with which we can unite ourselves. The human being can have, if he will, Spiritual Science; that is to say, Michael actually penetrates from spiritual realms into our earthly realm. He does not force himself upon us. Today everything must spring out of man's freedom. The dragon pushes himself forward, demanding the highest authority. The authority of science is the most powerful that has ever been exercised in the world. Compare the authority of the Pope; it is almost as powerful. Just think—however stupid a man may be yet he can say: “But science has established that.” People are struck dumb by science, even if one has a truth to utter. There is no more overwhelming power of authority in the whole of man's evolution than that of modern science. Everywhere the dragon rears up to meet one.

There is no other way than to unite ourselves with Michael, that is to say to permeate ourselves with real knowledge of the spiritual weaving and being of the world. Only now does this picture of Michael truly stand before us; for the first time it has become our essential concern as man. In olden times this picture was still seen in Imagination. That is not possible today for external consciousness. Hence any fool can say that it is not true that external science is the dragon. But it is the dragon all the same.

Yet some saw themselves confronting the dragon but were not able to see Michael: those who grew up with science and were not so bewitched by the dragon that they quietly let themselves be devoured, who reacted against the soul being investigated by apparatus for testing the memory—who found no answer to their search for man, because the dragon has devoured him. This lived in the hearts of many human beings at the beginning of the twentieth century—they felt instinctively that they saw the dragon, but could not see Michael. Hence they removed themselves as far as possible from the dragon. They sought for a land which could not be reached by the dragon; they wanted to know nothing more of the dragon. The young are running away from the old because they want to escape from the region of the dragon. That also is an aspect of the Youth Movement. The young wanted to flee from the dragon because they saw no possibility of conquering the dragon. They wanted to go where the dragon was not.

But here there is a mystery and it consists in the fact that the dragon can exercise his power everywhere, even where he is not spatially present. And when he does not succeed in killing man directly through ideas and intellectualism, he succeeds by so rarefying the air everywhere in the world that one can no longer breathe.

And this will certainly be the case—young people who ran from the dragon so as not to be injured, and who came into such rarefied air that they could not breathe the future, felt intensely the nightmare of the past because the air had become unwholesome where it was formerly possible to escape the immediate influence of the dragon. The nightmare that comes from within is, as regards human experience, not very different from the pressure that comes from without, from the dragon.

In the last third of the nineteenth century, the older generation felt direct exposure to the dragon. The young people then experienced the nightmare of the air corrupted by the dragon—air that could not be breathed. Here, the only help is to find Michael who conquers the dragon. Man needs the power of the victor over the dragon, for the dragon receives his life out of a world quite different from that in which the human soul can live. The human soul cannot live in the world out of which the dragon receives his life-blood. But in the overcoming of the dragon the human being must acquire the strength to be able to live. The epoch from the fifteenth century to the nineteenth, which has developed the human being so that he has become quite empty, must be overcome. The age of Michael who conquers the dragon must now begin, for the power of the dragon has become great!

But it is this above all that we must set going if we want to become true leaders of the young. For Michael needs, as it were, a chariot by means of which to enter our civilization. And this chariot reveals itself to the true educator as coming forth from the young, growing human being, yes, even from the child. Here the power of the pre-earthly life is still working. Here we find, if we nurture it, what becomes the chariot by means of which Michael will enter our civilization. By educating in the right way we are preparing Michael's chariot for his entrance into our civilization.

We must no longer nurture the dragon by cultivating a science with thoughts unconcerned with penetrating into the human soul, into man, so as to develop him. We must build the chariot, the vehicle for Michael. This needs living manhood, a living humanity such as flows out of super-sensible worlds into the earthly life and manifests there, precisely in the early periods of human life. But for such an education we must have a heart. We must learn—speaking pictorially—to make ourselves allies of the approaching Michael if we want to become true teachers. More is accomplished for the art of education than by any theoretical principles, if what we receive into ourselves works so that we feel ourselves Michael's confederates, allies of the spiritual being who is entering the earth, for whom we prepare a vehicle by carrying out a living art of education of the young. Far better than all theoretical educational principles is to lift up our eyes to Michael who, since the last third of the nineteenth century, has been striving to enter our outworn dragon-civilization.

This is the fundamental impulse of all educational doctrine. We must not receive this art of education as a theory, we must not take it as something we can learn. We should receive it as something with which we can unite ourselves, the advent of which we welcome, something which comes to us not as dead concepts but as a living spirit to whom we offer our services because we must do so, if men are to experience progress in their evolution. This means to bring knowledge to life again, it means to call forth in full consciousness what once was there in man's unconscious.

My dear friends, in olden times when an atavistic clairvoyance was still natural to human beings, there were Mystery centers. In these Mystery centers, which were at the same time church, school, and center of art, the pupils sought also for knowledge, though more of a soul nature, in their development. Many things could be found in such centers—but libraries did not exist. Do not misunderstand me—no library in our own sense. Something existed akin to our library, that is to say, things were written down; but everything that was written down was read with the purpose of working upon the soul. Nowadays a great deal of what constitutes a library is only there to be stored up, not to be read. The bulk is used only when a thesis must be written because there such things are discussed. But people would prefer entirely to eliminate livingness. What is supposed to come into these theses must be quite mechanical. The aim is for the human being to enter into them as little as possible. Man's participation in spirituality has been wrested from him.

Spirituality, but now in full consciousness, must become living again, that we do not merely experience what can be perceived by the senses but experience once more what can be perceived by the spirit. The age of Michael must begin. In fact everything that has fallen to man's lot since the fifteenth century has come to him from outside. In the age of Michael the human being will have to find his own relation to the spiritual world. And learning, knowledge, will acquire a quite different kind of value.

Now in the ancient Mysteries what was in the libraries was more of the nature of monuments upon which was inscribed what was intended to pass into man's memory. These libraries contained what cannot be compared in any way with our books. For all leaders in the Mysteries directed their pupils to another kind of reading. They said: Yes, there is a library—but they did not call it so—and this library is out there in the human beings walking about. Learn to read them! Learn to read the mysteries that are inscribed in every man. We must return to this. Only we must come to it, as it were, from another side so that as teachers we know: All accumulation of learning, of knowledge, is worthless. As such it is dead and gets its life only from the dragon. We should have the feeling that in wishing “to know,” knowledge cannot be stored up here or there, for then it would at once fall apart. In literature, what is Spirit can only be touched upon lightly.

How can you really find within a book what is Spirit? For the spiritual is something living. The spiritual is not like bones. The spiritual is like the blood. And the blood needs vessels in which to flow. What we recognize as spiritual needs vessels. These vessels are growing human beings. Into these vessels we must pour the spiritual in order that it may hold together. Otherwise we shall have the spirit so alive that it immediately flows away. We must so preserve our knowledge that it can flow into the developing human being.

Then we shall make the chariot for Michael, then we shall be able to become Michael's companions. And what you seek, my dear friends, you will best attain through being conscious of wishing to become companions of Michael.

You must once again be able to follow a purely spiritual Being who is not incarnated on the earth. And you will have to learn to have faith in a human being who shows you the way to Michael. Humanity must understand in a new and living way the words of Christ: “My Kingdom is not of this world.” For it is just through this that it is in the true sense “of this world!” For the task of man is to make the Spirit, which without Him would not be on earth, into a living content of this world. The Christ Himself came down to earth. He did not take man away to an earthly life in the heavens. The human being must permeate his earthly life by a mediating spirituality which gives him power to conquer the dragon.

This must be understood so thoroughly that one can answer the question: Why did human beings tear each other to pieces during the second decade of the twentieth century?—They tore each other to pieces because they carried the battle into a region where it does not belong, because they did not see the real enemy, the dragon. To the conquest of the dragon belong the forces which, only when developed in the right way, will bring peace upon earth.

In short, we must take seriously our entrance into the Michael age. With the means available at present, we shall have to guide man again to the experience of being surrounded by the picture of Michael, powerful, radiant; for Michael, through the forces developing in man towards a full life of soul, can overcome the dragon preying on humanity. Only when this picture can be received in a more living way than formerly into the soul, will there come forces for the development of inner activity out of man's knowledge that he is of the company of Michael. Only then shall we participate in what can lead to progress and bring peace between the generations, in what can guide the young to listen to the old, and the old to have something to say which the young long to receive and understand.

Because the older generation dangled the dragon in front of youth, they fled to regions poor in air. A true youth movement will only reach its goal when instead of being offered the dragon, the younger generation finds in Michael the forces to exterminate the dragon. This will show itself by older and younger generations having something to say to each other and something to receive from each other.

For, in fact, if the educator is a complete human being he receives as much from the child as he gives to the child. Whoever cannot learn from the child what he brings down from the spiritual world, cannot teach the child about the mysteries of earthly existence. Only when the child becomes our educator by bringing his message to us from the spiritual world will the child be ready to receive from us tidings of earthly life.

It was not for the sake of mere symbolism that Goethe sought everywhere for things that suggest a breathing—outbreathing, inbreathing; outbreathing, inbreathing—Goethe saw the whole of life as a picture of receiving and giving. Everyone receives, everyone gives. Every giver becomes a receiver. But for the receiving and the giving to find a true rhythm it is necessary that we enter the Michael Age.

So I want to conclude with this picture for you to see how the preceding lectures were actually meant. Their aim was that you should not merely carry away in your heads what I have said here, and ponder over it. What I should prefer is for you to have something in your hearts and then to transform what you carry in your hearts into activity. What the human being carries in his head will in time be lost. But what he receives into his heart, the heart preserves and carries into all spheres of activity in which man is involved. May what I have ventured to say to you not be carried away merely in your heads—for then it will certainly be lost—but if it is carried away in your hearts, in the whole of your being, then, my dear friends, we have been talking together in the right way.

Out of this feeling, let me give you my farewell greeting today by saying: Take what I have tried to express as if I had wanted, above all, to let something that cannot be uttered in words penetrate to your hearts. If hearts have found some connection with what is meant here by the Living Spirit, then at least in part what we wanted to achieve in these gatherings will have been fulfilled. With this feeling we will separate today; with this feeling, however, we shall also come together again. Thus we shall find association in the Spirit, even though we work apart in different spheres of life. The chief thing will be that in our hearts we have found each other; then the spiritual, all that belongs to Michael, will also flow into our hearts.

In our present civilization we need, above all, a new knowledge of Christ. This new Christ knowledge is to be gained increasingly through the effects upon us of the science of the spirit. Much, however, that today bears the official seal of Christianity is antagonistic to this new knowledge. It must come to be realized that a school of unselfishness is needed in our present culture. A renewing of responsibility, a deepening of man's moral life, can come only through a training in unselfishness, and under the conditions of the present age only those can go through this school who have won for themselves an understanding of real, all-pervading selflessness.

We can search through the entire evolution of the world without finding a deeper understanding of selflessness than that offered by Christ's appearance upon earth. To know Christ is to go through the school of unselfishness, and to become acquainted with all those incentives to human development that fall gently into our souls, warming and animating every unselfish inclination within us, arousing it from passive to active soul life.

Under the influence of materialism the natural unselfishness of mankind was lost to an extent that will be fully realized only in the distant future. But by contemplating the Mystery of Golgotha, by permeating our knowledge of it with all our feeling, we may acquire again, with our whole soul-being, an education in selflessness. We may say that what Christ did for earthly evolution was included in the fundamental impulse of selflessness, and what He may become for the conscious development of the human soul is the school of unselfishness. We shall best realize this if we consider the Mystery of Golgotha in its most inclusive connection.

This mystery, as we know it, took place once in the physical evolution of the earth. The Being whom we acknowledge as the Christ clothed Himself once in a human body, in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. But this act was preceded by three preparatory steps. Three times earlier something of a similar nature occurred, not as yet on earth but in the spiritual world, and we have in a sense, three Mysteries of Golgotha that had not yet been fulfilled upon the physical plane. Only the fourth took place in the physical realm, as related in the Gospels and in the Pauline Epistles. This greatest of earthly events was prepared for by three supramundane acts, one taking place in the old Lemurian period and two in the Atlantean. Although these three preparatory events occurred in the supramundane sphere, their power descended to the earth; we shall try to understand the effect of these forces upon human evolution.

In relation to our moral life, our understanding of the world, and in relation to all the activities of our consciousness soul, we must first become selfless. This is a duty of our present culture to the future. Mankind must become more and more selfless; therein lies the future of right living, and of all the deeds of love possible to earthly humanity. Our conscious life is and must be on its way to unselfishness. In a certain connection, essential unselfishness already exists in us, and it would be the greatest misfortune for earthly man if certain sections of his being were as self-seeking as he still is in his moral, intellectual and emotional life. If the same degree of selfishness could take over our senses, it would be a great misfortune because our senses now work in our bodies in a truly unselfish manner.

We have eyes in our body; through these eyes we see, but only because they are selfless and we do not feel them. We see things through them, but the eyes themselves are apart from our perception; it is the same with the other senses. Let us assume that our eyes were self-seeking. What would happen to men? We should approach the color blue, for example, and because our eyes would use up the color immediately within themselves instead of letting it pass through, we should feel a sort of suction in the eyes. If our eyes were as selfish as we are in our moral, intellectual and emotional life, and they wished to experience the effect of red in themselves, we should feel a sharp stab. If our eyes were self- seeking, all our impressions would give us sucking or stabbing pains. We should be painfully conscious that we have eyes. Today, however, humanity is aware of color and light without having to think of the seeing process. The eye is selflessly extinguished during perception. It is the same with the other senses.

In our senses unselfishness reigns, but they would never have reached this unselfishness if Lucifer, even in the old Lemurian age, had been left to his own devices. The spirit who said, as related in the Bible, “Your eyes shall be opened,” made it necessary to transfer man to a sphere of earthly life in which his eyes, if they had developed as they would have done under Lucifer's influence, would have become self-seeking. With every impression—and it would have been the same with the other senses—man would have cried out, “Oh, it stabs me here!” He would not have perceived red in his environment. Or he would have said, “Oh, something sucks in my eyes!” He would not have been aware of the color blue, but would have simply felt the suction. This danger to humanity was averted in the Lemurian age by a Being Who later, through the Mystery of Golgotha, incarnated in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. In this earlier age, however, He ensouled Himself—I cannot say incarnated—in one of the archangels.

While the earth was working through the Lemurian age, a Being living in spiritual heights became manifest—one might say, as a sort of prophecy of John's baptism—in an archangel who offered up his soul powers, and was thus permeated by the Christ. Through this means a force was released that acted within human evolution upon earth. Its effect was a quieting and harmonizing of our senses so that today we can use them and find them selfless. If we, understanding this, have become grateful to the world order, we shall say, looking back to these ancient times, that what makes it possible for us as sensory beings to enjoy without pain all the splendor of surrounding nature is Christ's first sacrifice. By ensouling Himself in an archangel He brought forth the power to avert the danger of the selfish senses in man. That was the first step leading to the Mystery of Golgotha.

The human being will gradually learn to develop this deep, significant and religious feeling when he is confronted with the beauty of nature, when he looks up at the starry heavens and at all that the sun illumines in the animal, mineral and vegetable kingdoms. He will learn to say, “That I am so placed in the world that I can look at it around me, my senses being instruments for the perception of its splendor rather than sources of pain, I owe to Christ's first sacrifice in preparation for the Mystery of Golgotha.” In perspective we see before us a time in which all observation and enjoyment of nature will be permeated by Christ; when men, refreshing themselves in an invigorating springtime, in the warmth of summer, or in any of the other delights of nature, will say to themselves, “In taking up all this beauty into ourselves, we must realize that it is not ourselves, but Christ within our senses Who enables us to experience it.”

In the first period of the Atlantean evolution selfishness tried—this time through Lucifer and Ahriman—to take possession of another part of the human organism; that is, the vital organs. With this in mind, let us consider what is intrinsic in our life-organism. What is its essential nature? You need only think what it is like when injured by organic disease. Then man begins to suffer from the self-seeking of heart, lungs, stomach or other organs, and the time comes when man knows that he has a heart or stomach, knows it by direct experience, because he has a pain. To be ill means that an organ has become selfish and is leading its own independent life within us. In ordinary normal conditions this is not the case. Then the single organs live selflessly within us. Our everyday constitution holds us up securely in the physical world only when we do not feel that we have stomach, lungs, etc., but have them without feeling them, when they do not demand our attention but remain unselfish servants of the body.

On some other occasion and at some other time we shall consider the reason why illness results from the selfishness of our organs. Today we will confine our discussion to normal conditions. Had it depended upon Lucifer and Ahriman, quite a different state would have existed as early as the Atlantean period. Every single human organ would have been self- seeking, and the results most extraordinary. Assume, for example, that the human being looked at a fruit or something else in the outer world that can be eaten, or that stands in some sort of relation to his vital organs. Someday these relations of the outer world with our organs will be the subject of genuine scientific study. If the other sciences allow themselves to be aligned with spiritual science, it will be known that when a human being gathers cherries from a tree and eats them, something enters with the cherries that is related to a particular organ; other fruits are related to other organs.

Everything that enters the human organism is in some way related to it. If Lucifer and Ahriman could have carried out their designs during the Atlantean period, then, when we picked cherries, for example, the related organ would have felt an inordinate greed. The human being would have felt, not the self-seeking organ only, but all the other organs also, striving against it with equal selfishness! Let us take a different case. Suppose something harmful were present, for while certain things in the world are related to humanity in a beneficial way, others affect it injuriously. Suppose someone were to approach a poisonous plant, or anything else harmful to this or that organ; he would then recognize that he was confronting something that gave a burnt out feeling to one of his organs.

Now let us consider not what we eat, but the air surrounding us. Every element of the atmosphere is related to our organs. If we had become what Lucifer and Ahriman intended and had been thrown upon our own resources, we should have been chased about the world by animal desires for what satisfied one organ or another, or by terrible disgust for all that was injurious. Just imagine how we could possibly develop ourselves in this world if we had such physical organs that we were tossed to and fro like a rubber ball, a plaything for every agreeable odor that we would run after, or were forced by nausea to flee from. That this did not happen, that our vital organs were subdued and harmonized resulted from the great event in the first Atlantean epoch when, in supramundane spheres, the second step was taken toward the Mystery of Golgotha. The Christ Being ensouled Himself again in an archangel, and what was accomplished by this deed shone down into the earth's atmosphere. Then that harmonizing and balancing of the vital organs took place that rendered them selfless.

In our connection with the outer world we should be continuously exposed to severe illnesses and we could not be at all healthy but for this second Christ event. We see in perspective for the future that the human being will acquire, when he is able to imbue himself with a true understanding of the spiritual world, a feeling of gratitude toward the spiritual beings upon whom humanity depends. He will say in true piety, “I realize that I am able to exist as a physical man with unselfish organs because not I alone have developed myself in the world, but Christ in me, Who has so conditioned my organs that I can be a man!” Thus we come to learn so to regard all that makes us human, fundamentally and in the most comprehensive sense, that we say, “Not I, but Christ in me.” In His three preparatory steps, taken before the actual Mystery of Golgotha, Christ provided for the complete evolution of humanity.

In the last part of the Atlantean period humanity faced a third danger. Thinking, feeling and willing were threatened with disorder through the entrance of selfishness. What would have been the result of this? Well, the human being would have intended this or that, and followed this or that impulse of will, while his thinking would have impelled him in quite a different direction, and his feeling in still another. It was necessary for human evolution that thinking, feeling and willing should become unselfish members of the united soul. Under the influence of Lucifer and Ahriman they could not have done this. Thought, feeling and will, becoming independently self-seeking, would have rent asunder the harmonious working of the Christ. In consequence, toward the end of the Atlantean evolution, the third Christ event occurred. Once more the Christ Being ensouled Himself in an archangel, and the power thus generated in the spiritual world made possible the harmonization of thinking, feeling and willing. Truly, as the rays of the physical sun must act upon earth to prevent the withering of plant life, so must the Sun Spirit be reflected upon earth from supramundane spheres as I have just explained.

What would have become of the human being without this third Christ event? As if by furies, he would have been seized by his unruly desires, by the activity of his will. He might have gone mad even though his self- seeking reason might have thought with scornful mockery about all that the raging will brought forth. This was averted by the third Christ event when Christ took for the third time the soul of an archangel as an outer vehicle.

Mankind has preserved some memory of how human passion and human thinking were harmonized at this period by forces that descended from supramundane worlds, but the sign of this memory is not rightly understood. St. George who conquers the dragon, or Michael who conquers the dragon, are symbols of the third Christ event, when Christ ensouled Himself in an archangel. It is the dragon, trodden under foot, that has brought thinking, feeling and willing into disorder. All who turn their gaze upon St. George or Michael with the dragon, or some similar episode, perceive, in reality, the third Christ event. The Greeks who in their wonderful mythology made copies of what happened in the spiritual world at the end of the Atlantean age, revered the Sun Spirit as the harmonizer of man's thinking, feeling and willing. “Thou Sun Spirit,” so said those who knew something about it, “Thou hast ensouled Thyself in an etheric spirit form,” for such is the form of those we call archangels today; “Thou has brought thinking, feeling and willing, which might otherwise rage through us in confusion, into order with Thy lyre, sounding upon it harmoniously the tones of the human soul!”

So the Sun Spirit became the guardian of the wild, stormy passions when they, as it sometimes happened, gushed forth in the fumes that rise from within the earth and break through its surface. If a human being should expose himself to them and allow only these vapors to work upon him, then thought, feeling and will would rage madly within him. The Greeks placed the Pythia over those vapors, which, in rising out of the earth, bring the passions into disorder through Lucifer and Ahriman. But Apollo shone upon the Pythia, conquered the unruly passions and she became a sibyl. For the Greeks, Apollo, the Sun Spirit, represented the Christ at the stage of His third sacrifice, and the results of Christ's deed were discerned in the attuning of men's passions under the power of the Pythia, conferred upon her by the god Apollo. In this connection Apollo was to the Greeks what is expressed in the victory of Michael or St. George over the dragon.

We see also the meaning of the extraordinary pronouncement of Justin Martyr, a saying which, since it emanated from him, we must regard as Christian, although many representatives of Christianity today would consider it heretical. Justin said, “Heraclites, Socrates and Plato were also Christians, the only kind of Christians possible before the actual consummation of the Mystery of Golgotha.” Theologians of today no longer realize it but in the first centuries of Christianity the Christian martyrs still knew that the old Greek sages, although they did not use the name of Christ, if asked about Apollo, would have answered out of their Mystery wisdom, “The great Sun Spirit, Who in the future will live as a man on earth, appears to us in Apollo as though ensouled in him in the form of an archangel.”

Then came the fourth, the earthly mystery, that of Golgotha. The same Christ Being Who had ensouled Himself three times in archangelic form incarnated through what we call the Baptism by John in the Jordan in the body of Jesus of Nazareth.

I admit that it may seem strange when I say that this great Being was ensouled three times in an archangelic form, and then incarnated in a human being. It would seem a more orderly progression if between His ensoulment as an archangel and His human incarnation He had taken an angelic form. So it may seem to us. Yet, even though it is claimed that the statements of spiritual science are fictitious, truly it is not so. You may gather this from corroborative evidence. If you ask me how it happens that Christ did not descend from hierarchy to hierarchy and only afterward to man—if you were to ask me that, I could only answer that I do not know, for I never make theoretical combinations. The facts adduced by spiritual research are that Christ chose three times an archangelic form, leaving out the angelic form, and then made use of a human body. I leave it to future research to determine the reason, which I do not yet know, though I do know that it is true.

Then came the fourth step in the Mystery of Golgotha, and this averted another danger, that of the Luciferic and Ahrimanic influences upon the human ego or I. In the Lemurian age the sense organs would have become disordered through Lucifer; in the first Atlantean period the vital organs were threatened with disorder and disharmony, and in the late Atlantean era the soul organs, the organs that underlie thinking, feeling and willing. In the post-Atlantean period the human ego itself was endangered.

Because the ego or I at this time was to take its place as a living factor in human evolution, an effort was made to establish harmony between this ego and the powers of the cosmos lest it become their plaything. This might have happened. The ego might have so developed that it could not keep a hold upon itself, and had it been delivered to these forces, everything that came from the soul would have been overpowered by all sorts of elemental forces that arise from wind, air or water. They would have driven the human being violently in all directions.

Michelangelo painted it. In the Sibyls he showed what had threatened mankind. With wonderful skill he made them express the human types of those who felt the coming derangement of the ego, so that although all possible wisdom might come forth, human beings could neither manage nor direct it. Look at the way in which Michelangelo has painted the different degrees of derangement in egos given over to elemental beings.

Upon the other side, however, he gives us something else. In the same space he has painted the musing figures of prophecy whose aspect shows the illumination of what preserves the integrity of the ego toward the cosmos. It touches us deeply when we see in the prophets the urgency, the pressure toward the ego and, on the other side, human beings suffering disorder through the ego itself. Then, standing in this space, is the Christ, incarnate in a human body, Who had to bring into order and harmony the ego that was to come into the world.

Yes, the science of the spirit will impress upon us ever more deeply that this human ego, through the fourth Christ event, the Mystery of Golgotha, can come to true unselfishness. The senses have said, “Not I, but Christ in us.” The vital organs have said, “Not I, but Christ in us.” In his moral and intellectual life man must learn to say, “Not I, but Christ in me.” Every step into the spiritual world shows us this.

I wished to explain this today in order that upon another occasion in the near future we may offer certain occult proofs of these facts in order to show that what we call spiritual science will pour itself into our moral and intellectual lives in such a way that human beings may become students of selflessness, that Christ may live within us so that we may feel Him vitally in every word that is uttered in discussions of spiritual science.

One more thing, my dear friends. You know that since 1909 we have been producing our Mystery Dramas in Munich. What we presented on the stage there may be considered good or bad; that is not the present question. What was done there, however, required a certain spiritual power, a power that does not approach the human being simply because of his existence upon earth. Since we can now work in Dornach and carve our different kinds of hard wood, we need muscular strength. We cannot say that we can give this strength to ourselves consciously. It comes from our bodies, from our souls' capacity; it is not under our control. Equally, we have not under our control all that we perform in the spirit and for which we need spiritual power. That is not entirely dependent upon our natural ability, just as what we do physically is not dependent alone upon our talents but also upon the muscular strength of our bodies. We need spiritual powers that are as much outside ourselves as our muscular strength is outside our souls. I know that superficial critics may say, “You are a fool; you believe that spiritual powers come to you from without, whereas they simply rise from your own inner being.” Let them think me a fool; I regard them as belonging to the clever men who cannot distinguish hunger from a piece of bread. I know how spiritual powers from without flow into human beings. The idea that hunger creates the bread that satisfies it—believed only by a crazy man—is as false as that the power of our own soul can create the forces needed for our spiritual activities. These forces must flow into us. Just as we know clearly that our hunger is within us, and that bread comes from without, does one who lives in spiritual worlds know what is within himself and what comes to him from without. Since 1909 I have felt personally, more and more, the spiritual power that came from without whenever there was occasion to develop, in stillness and calm, what was necessary for the Mystery Plays. I knew that a spiritual eye was resting upon what had been accomplished, and I relate this as a direct experience.

In the early days, when we were working at spiritual science in Germany, an acquaintance came to us who accepted with enthusiasm what we were able to give at that time. She accepted what it was possible to give out concerning human evolution, cosmic mysteries, reincarnation and karma, not only with devotion and enthusiasm but added to them a wonderful aesthetic sense. Every experience with this person, whether of teaching or conversation, was steeped in beauty. We were few at that time. We had no need to crowd ourselves into such a room as this, and what we now say to a large audience was then discussed by three people—two others and myself. One of these, the person mentioned above, left us upon the physical plane in 1904, and entered the spiritual world. Such people go through a development after death. When we produced Schuré's reconstruction of the Mystery of Eleusis at our Congress in 1907, no spiritual influence was perceptible. In 1909 it began, and has come more and more frequently since then. I have accurate knowledge that it was the individuality of our friend whom, objectively and because of her originality, we all loved. Removed to the spiritual world, she acted as a guardian angel to all that we accomplished in the combining of the aesthetic and esoteric elements in our Mysteries. We felt well protected, and looked gratefully upward, realizing that what penetrated us and flowed over into our earthly activities was an expression of the watchfulness of a spiritual personality. But then when it came to conversation with this personality—one may call it conversation since there was a certain reciprocal action—she asserted that she found the way to us easier the more we were permeated with the thought of Christ in the evolution of the earth. If I were to put into earthly words what she reiterated, I should say, expressing symbolically, of course, what is quite different in the spiritual world, “I find the way to you so easily because you are finding evermore the way to make spiritual science into an expression of the living Word of Christ.”

The Christ impulse will become for us the living bridge between earthly life and life in superphysical worlds. From the spiritual world Christ three times conditioned for the human being the spiritual constitution that he needed in order to live rightly. Christ intervened three times, making the human sense, life and psychic organs unselfish. It is now man's task to learn unselfishness in his moral and intellectual life through his understanding of the saying, “Not I, but Christ in me.”

The world will recognize that the message of the science of the spirit is the Word of Christ. He said, “I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.” The mission of the science of the spirit in our age is to open doors to the living Christ. The dead, who know that Christ has found the passage from heaven to earthly activities, unite with the understanding of the living. If the dead, as their nearest protectors, bend to the earthly living, they will find those souls most intensive who are penetrated and spiritualized by the Christ impulse. Christ, as the great Sun Spirit, descended from superphysical worlds through the Mystery of Golgotha in order to find a dwelling in the souls of men. Spiritual science is to be the message, telling how Christ may find that dwelling in human souls. If Christ will find His abode in men's earthly souls, then the Christ power will stream back from the earth's aura into the worlds that He forsook for the salvation of mankind, and the whole cosmos will be permeated through and through by Him.

We can work up gradually to such a deep understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha as this by completely imbuing ourselves with spiritual science. If we thus consider this and, in addition, think of it as a school of unselfishness for the intellectual and moral life of future humanity, we shall realize the necessity of the spiritually scientific proclamation of the Mystery of Golgotha! Then we shall know the meaning of the spiritually scientific impulses that are striving to enter our present life. Then that Christ impulse will penetrate humanity that all men can, indeed, accept, for Christ did not appear to one nation only but, being the great Sun Spirit, He belongs to the whole earth and can enter all human souls, regardless of nation and religion. May many gradually find the way to such an understanding of the Christ impulse and of the Mystery of Golgotha! Then, perhaps, that will appear the most Christian that today is stamped as unchristian and heretical.

If we strive, not for a mere intellectual understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha, but for the ability to grasp it with our whole souls, we then need the science of the spirit and, as members of our spiritual stream, we shall belong to those souls who are permitted to know and understand the necessities of mankind now and in the immediate future.

Part I

Fragment: handwritten manuscript by Rudolf Steiner (see editor’s introduction ‘About this volume’). Words given in italics are underlined in the original MS.

Earth evolution: Handwritten notes which had been enclosed with a letter written to Marie von Sivers (Marie Steiner from Dec. 1914) dated 6 January 1906. The letter no longer exists. The additional comments are taken from the letter written on 7 January 1906 (in Correspondence and Documents (GA 262), tr. C. v. Arnim, London/New York: Rudolf Steiner Press/Anthroposophic Press 1988).

Shortly before this he had sent her his description of Moon evolution with a letter dated 19 November 1905. This manuscript is no longer extant. A comment in the letter: ‘I’ll need to do some more work on it for Lucifer,' suggests that, like others from those early days, the manuscript was then kept by the printer.

The nature of the Christ: Extract from a handwritten letter to Marie von Sivers dated 13 January 1906 (from GA 262—as above).

Names of the days in the week and human evolution: Handwritten material enclosed with an undated letter [Nuremberg, 25 November 1905] to Marie von Sivers (from GA 262—as above).

Three lectures on cosmology: notes taken by Franz Seiler and Walter Vegelahn.

Planetary evolution: Handwritten notes of Mathilde Scholl and Marie von Sivers.

Part II

The first, second and third sonhood of God: two handwritten notebook pages (Archive No. NZ 471/72), undated, c. 1903/04, probably written down for Marie von Sivers.

The godhead revealed as All Soul and All Life: Handwritten copy of Rudolf Steiner’s original by Jan Peelen. Original no longer extant. Written down at Peelen’s request in Cologne on 27 April 1905.

Signs and evolution of the three Logoi in humanity: Written down by hand by Rudolf Steiner for Edouard Schuré. Title added in the latter’s writing. Probably written down during visit to Schuré in Barr/Alsace in September 1906. Schuré probably asked for this as he was planning to report on the 18 lectures Rudolf Steiner gave in Paris in May 1906 (in Esoteric Cosmology, Spring Valley: St George Publications 1978), where the three Logoi were discussed in the lecture given on 9 June 1906.

Notes from private teaching sessions: In the summer of 1903 and 1904, Rudolf Steiner gave a number of private lessons for Marie von Sivers, her sister Olga and her friend Maria von Strauch-Spettini in Marie von Siver’s flat in Berlin- Schlachtensee. Marie von Sivers had made brief notes. About the Logoi: These notes, with no date or place given, came from Mathilde Scholl, probably from a private lesson she was given.

Part III

About the cabbala: Notes taken by Franz Seiler and Marie von Sivers.

Symbols reflecting original wisdom: Notes taken by Marie von Sivers, Walter Vegelahn and Camilla Wandrey.

The book of ten pages: Notes taken by Walter Vegelahn, Marie von Sivers, Camilla Wandrey and an unknown person. They themselves marked the larger gaps in taking down notes (...).

The sketches

In the Notes, the sketches are facsimiles of copies made of Rudolf Steiner’s sketches.

The sketches in the lectures on planetary evolution are facsimiles of Mathilde Scholl’s original sketches. It should be noted that they were copied from the blackboard, so that minor variations cannot be excluded.

Marie von Sivers’ notes do not include sketches.

Earlier publications

From Part I

Earth evolution / The nature of the Christ as the macrocosmic human being in reverse / Names of the days in the week and human evolution: in Correspondence and Documents (GA 262), tr. C. v. Arnim, London/New York: Rudolf Steiner Press/Anthroposophic Press 1988).

Planetary evolution: in Beiträge zur Rudolf Steiner Gesamtausgabe Nr. 67/68, Nr. 69/70, Nr. 71/72, Nr. 78. English typescript translation R 73, Rudolf Steiner House Library, London.

From Part II

Berlin, 2, 3, 4, 7 July 1904: in Beiträge zur Rudolf Steiner Gesamtausgabe Nr. 67/68.

Schlachtensee summer 1903: in Über die astrale Welt und das Devachan, GA 88.

From Part III

Berlin, 18 March 1904 and Berlin 3 April 1905: in Beiträge zur Rudolf Steiner Gesamtausgabe Nr. 29 and 32 resp.

Titles

The volume was given its title by the editors.

Titles of the texts in Part I: ‘Earth evolution’ and ‘Names of the days in the week and human evolution’ by Rudolf Steiner; titles of the two lecture courses by the note-takers; the rest by the editors of this volume.

Titles of texts in Parts II and III: The title of the material written down for Edouard Schure was added by the latter; the titles given to lecture notes come from the note-takers; the rest are by the editors of this volume.

[ 1 ] Christianity as a Mystical Fact was the title given to this book by its author when eight years ago he included in it the contents of lectures held in the year 1902. This title was intended to indicate the particular character of the book. It represents an attempt to describe not merely the mystical content of Christianity in its historical form, but how Christianity arose out of mystical conception. Underlying this was the idea that involved in this process was a spiritual reality which can be seen only through such conception. Only the content of the book can prove that the author has not used the word “mystical” to denote a conception which relies more on indefinite knowledge gained through feelings, than on “strictly scientific exposition.” In many circles today the word “mysticism” carries such a connotation, hence the tendency is to explain this as a region of the life of the human soul which can have nothing to do with “real science.” In this book the word “mysticism” is used for the exposition of a spiritual fact whose nature can be recognized only when the powers of cognition are taken from the source of spiritual life itself. Whoever declines a method of cognition founded on such a source will be unable to take any position with regard to this book. Only one who admits that in “mysticism” the same clarity can exist as in the truthful exposition of natural phenomena will accept this method of describing the mystical content of Christianity. For even more important than the content of the text is the means of cognition which has led to its existence.

[ 2 ] In our present day many people violently abhor such a means of cognition. They see it as contradictory to true scientific method. This is the case not only among those who will not allow the validity of any interpretation of the world which is not founded upon “genuine natural scientific fact,” but also among those who wish to consider Christianity in the capacity of believers. The author of this text takes as his basis an interpretation which acknowledges that the natural scientific achievements of our day demand elevation to true mysticism. This interpretation can show that any other attitude toward cognition absolutely contradicts everything offered by natural scientific achievements. The means of cognition which so many people who assume that they stand on firm natural scientific ground, would like to use, simply do not embrace the facts of this natural science.

[ 3 ] Only that reader will accept this book who is able to admit that full understanding of our present marvelous knowledge of nature can be combined with genuine mysticism.

[ 4 ] By means of what is here called “mystical cognition” this book sets out to show how the source of Christianity created its preliminary conditions in the ancient Mysteries. In this “pre-Christian mysticism” is demonstrated the soil in which Christianity germinates as an independent seed. This point of view enables one to understand Christianity in its independent essence, although at the same time one can follow its development out of pre-Christian mysticism. If one ignores this point of view it is only too easy to miss recognition of its independence through the belief that Christianity is merely a further development of what existed in pre-Christian mysticism. Many opinions of today lapse into this error, comparing Christianity with pre-Christian viewpoints, believing that the Christian viewpoint is merely a further development of the pre-Christian. This book sets out to show that Christianity presupposes the previous mysticism as the plant seed does its soil. It seeks to emphasize the unique essence of Christianity through cognition of its origin, not to extinguish it.

[ 5 ] It gives the author profound satisfaction to mention that this exposition of the “essence of Christianity” has met with the assent of a personality whose notable writings on the spiritual life of mankind have enriched the thoughts of our time in the deepest sense. Édouard Schuré, author of Les Grands Initiés, The Great Initiates^*, agreed so thoroughly with the standpoint of this book that he himself undertook its translation into French under the title: Le mystère chrétien et les mystères antiques. The fact that the first edition was translated into French and other European languages is mentioned here as a symptom of the great longing of the present day to understand the essence of Christianity in the sense of this book.

[ 6 ] The author has not found occasion to make any essential changes in this second edition. There are, however, extensions of the exposition made eight years ago. The effort has also been made to state many things more fully and accurately than was possible then. Unfortunately, through volume of work the author has been forced to allow a long interval to elapse between the time when the first edition went out of print and the appearance of the second.

RUDOLF STEINER
May 1910

• *. The Great Initiates, A Study of the Secret History of Religions, by Édouard Schuré, published Fall 1961 by St. George Books, 65 South Greenbush Road, West Nyack, New York. In a new one-volume translation by Gloria Rasberry, the book contains an introduction on Édouard Schuré and Rudolf Steiner by Paul Allen.

These lectures are so arranged that separate themes will be introduced, and then I shall bring in considerations which will lead towards the themes and throw light upon them. One theme, accordingly, resides in what was said about the difficulty of understanding the Being of Christ Jesus. Then we came to the significance of the prophecies of the Sibyls as illustrating one side of human soul life during the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. Finally, at the close of yesterday's lecture, I introduced the theme of Paul and the olive tree.

I will return to these leading themes, but we must approach them as it were in circles, with our themes inscribed at the centre. What is really meant by the themes will then gradually emerge. Today I would like to say something about the Christ Being as such. We shall then see how in Paul the Christ Being is reflected in a certain definite way.

From earlier lectures we know that the Christ Being can be understood if we follow the evolution of our system back to the Old Sun existence.¹ And on various occasions, in lectures already published, attention has been drawn to the fact that in the Christ Being we have to do with a high spiritual Being—that is the term we will use for the present—for whose own evolution the Old Sun period was especially important. I will not go further into that just now. We will simply look up to the Christ Being as a high spiritual Being. But for understanding human evolution something else is necessary, and we have seen how necessary it is, for in relation to a certain fact the concepts and ideas which in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch aspired to understand the Being of Christ were powerless to do so.

Again and again, especially during the early centuries among the Gnostics, among the Apostolic Fathers and among the persons who contributed in one way or another to the founding of Christianity, this question came up—How was the nature of Christ related to the nature of Jesus? Now we already know that we have to distinguish two Jesus-boys.² Of one of these we need not speak further here, for he can be readily understood from previous anthroposophical explanations. I mean the Jesus in whom lived the Ego of Zarathustra. Here we have a human being who in the second post-Atlantean epoch had already reached a high degree of evolution; who at that time founded the Zarathustrian spiritual stream and then had subsequent lives; who later reincarnated in the Solomon Jesus-child and in him, up to his twelfth year, underwent the development appropriate for so lofty an Ego in that period. We know also that the Zarathustra Ego passed over into the body of the other Jesus-child, on whose nature the Luke Gospel throws some gleams of light.

We must now consider a little this Nathan Jesus child. I have already drawn your attention to the fact that in this child we have not to do with a human being, like other human beings, in the strict sense of the term. We cannot say of this Being that he had previously been incarnated on Earth in this or that individual. We have always emphasised that of the soul-element which has come forth from spiritual worlds in order to live in single individuals on Earth, something as it were remained behind; and that what had thus remained behind appeared in the Nathan Jesus-child. Hence of this child we cannot say that in him there lived an ordinary human ego which had developed in a certain way through earlier incarnations. We have to recognise (this follows from what is said in my book, Occult Science—an Outline) that he had not previously walked the Earth as man. The only question is: Did this Being, whom we will now call simply Jesus of Nazareth, have any previous connection with Earth-evolution?³ We must remember that the Beings and Powers connected with human evolution are not confined to those who incarnate on the Earth itself; there are also spiritual Beings and Powers who belong to the higher Hierarchies. If therefore we say that something of the substance which divided itself among single human souls remained behind, and was then in a certain sense born in the Nathan Jesus-child, we are not saying that this .Being had no previous relation with Earth evolution. We are saying only that he was not related to the evolution of the Earth and of humanity in such a way as to have walked the Earth as man. We must look for him not in the history of the physical Earth, but in pre-earthly spiritual realms. And then, for the kind of observation I have often spoken about—clairvoyant observation—the following is revealed.

Let us recall what is described in Occult Science—how from the Lemurian Age onwards souls gradually came down from the other planets (with the exception of one principal human pair who had stayed on earth) and were incarnated in human bodies throughout Atlantean times. We must accordingly think of Earth-evolution as being such that the souls withdrew from the Earth's cosmic surroundings and at various points of time took up again their evolution on Earth. We know that before the Lemurian Age they had gone away to other planets. But we know also that the evolution of the Earth had been exposed to the attacks of Lucifer, and later to those of Ahriman. Thus the souls of men had to enter into bodies wherein they were exposed in the course of human evolution to the attacks of both these spiritual Beings. If nothing further had come about—if, that is, the human souls had come down from planetary existence into evolution on Earth, there to encounter the Luciferic and Ahrimanic influences—then something else would have happened to them as they went through subsequent incarnations; something I did not intimate in Occult Science, for at the present day one cannot say everything in public.

First of all, when the human beings came down from the planets into physical bodies, the development of their senses would have been exposed to a certain danger. We must not think it was a quite simple matter for these human souls to come down from their planetary abodes and assume bodies on Earth, and that after that everything went on normally. Because the Luciferic and Ahrimanic principles held sway in these bodies, they were not so organised as to enable human beings to pursue the course of evolution which in fact they did pursue. If these souls had simply gone on using the forces which governed the sense-organs of these bodies, they would have had to use their senses in a peculiar way—a way not really human.

For example, the eye would have been so impressed and affected by a colour that it would have felt itself permeated with intense feeling. At the sight of one colour it would have positively glowed with pleasure; for another colour it would have felt intense, painful antipathy. And so, because of the Luciferic and Ahrimanic influences, the souls descending from the planets would have found no bodies equipped with senses of the right kind. They would have been tormented by sympathy and antipathy; on seeing one colour or another they would have been seized with bliss or repulsed with acute pain, all through their lives. That was how evolution was going; cosmic forces, especially those from the Sun, would have worked on the Earth in such a way as to give the senses this character. Any contemplation of the world, in a spirit of quiet wisdom, would have been ruled out. So a change had to be brought about in the forces which flowed from the cosmic environment into the Earth and had built up the senses of man. In the spiritual world something had to happen so that these forces would not turn the senses into mere organs of sympathy and antipathy, for they would then have been under the sway of Lucifer and Ahriman. Hence the following took place.

The Being of whom we have said that he had not chosen the path down from the planets to the Earth, but had remained behind, the Being who later appeared as the Nathan Jesus-child and who had dwelt from primal ages in the spiritual worlds—this Being resolved (if we may use this expression, for of course all these expressions are taken from human speech and cannot fully convey what one wants to say) while still in the world of the higher Hierarchies to go through a development which would enable him to be permeated for a time by the Christ Being. Thus we have to do not with a man but with a superhuman Being who (if we may speak in this way) lived in the spiritual world and as it were heard the distress of the human sense system crying out to the spiritual world for help, and in response to this cry made himself fitted to be permeated by the Christ.

So it was that in the spiritual worlds the Being who later became the Nathan Jesus-child was permeated by the Christ Being, and then brought about a change in the cosmic forces which were streaming in to build up the human senses. These senses were changed in such a way that instead of being mere organs of sympathy and antipathy, they became organs that human beings could use, and so could look with wisdom at all the nuances of sense-perception. Very differently would the cosmic forces have flowed into mankind if this event, far back in the Lemurian Age, had not taken place in the spiritual worlds. This Being who appeared as the Nathan Jesus-child was then still living (if I may use the phrase) in the Sun-sphere, and because he listened to the human cry of distress, he experienced something which made it possible for him to be permeated by the very Spirit of the Sun, so that the activity of the Sun was modified in such a way that the human sense organs, which derive essentially from solar activity, did not become organs of mere sympathy and antipathy.

Here we touch upon a significant cosmic secret, and one which will enable us to understand much that happened later on. A certain order and harmony, imbued with wisdom, could now flow into the realm of the human senses, and evolution could go on normally for a while. The worst activity of Lucifer and Ahriman had been turned away from the human senses by a deed in the higher worlds.

Later on came a time, in the Atlantean Age, when it once more became apparent that the human bodily constitution could not be a suitable instrument for the further course of evolution. The human vital organs, and their underlying forces in the etheric body, which for a time had developed in a suitably useful way, had fallen into disorder. For the cosmic forces which had worked on them from the surroundings of the Earth, and whose task it was to bring order into these organs—the organs of breathing, blood circulation and so on—these forces would have developed under the influence of Lucifer and Ahriman in such a way that the vital organs would have ceased to be usable by human beings on Earth. They would have acquired a quite peculiar character. The forces which provide for these vital organs do not flow in directly from the Sun, but from the seven planets, as they used to be called. The planetary forces worked from the cosmos into man. And it was necessary that these forces, also, should be modified. If they had remained under the sway of Lucifer and Ahriman, the vital organs would have become merely organs of greed or organs of loathing. For example, a man would not have been able to restrain himself from hurling himself greedily upon a given dish, while a terrible loathing would have driven him from another. These are things which unveil themselves as world secrets, as cosmic secrets, when we try to penetrate into them clairvoyantly.

So again something had to happen in the spiritual worlds in order that this destructive activity should not enter into human life. And this same Being, who later appeared as the Nathan Jesus-child and who (as we have explained) dwelt in earlier times on the Sun and was there permeated by the Christ Being, the sublime Sun-Spirit—this Being went from planet to planet, touched in his innermost nature by the fact that human evolution could go no further, as things were. And this experience affected him so strongly, while he was assuming a form of body on the different planets, that at a certain time during the Atlantean evolution the Spirit of Christ permeated him again. And through what was now brought about by the permeation of this Being by the Christ Spirit, it became possible for moderation to be implanted in the vital organs of man. In the same way that wisdom had been given to the sense-organs, so moderation was now bestowed on the vital organs. Thus it came about that when a man breathed in a particular place, he was not impelled to suck in the air greedily, or to recoil with loathing from the air in another place. That was the deed accomplished in the spiritual worlds through a further permeation of the Nathan Jesus-child by the Christ Being, the high Sun-Spirit.

Then in the further course of human evolution a third thing happened. A third confusion would have arisen if the souls had been obliged to continue using the bodies then available for them on Earth. We can put it in the following way.

At this time the physical nature of man was in order. Through the two Christ deeds in the super-sensible world, the human sense organs were in a condition serviceable for man on Earth, and so were the vital organs. But it was not so with the soul-organs, thinking, feeling and willing. If nothing further had happened, these soul-organs would have become disordered. I mean that willing would have been continually disturbed by thinking, feeling would have interfered with willing, and so on. Men would have been condemned as it were to a perpetually chaotic use of these soul-organs. They would have been maddened by an excess of will, or confused by repressed feeling, or there would have been people plagued with fleeting ideas through a hypertrophy of thinking, and so forth. This was the third great danger to which humanity was exposed on Earth.

Now these three soul-powers, thinking, feeling and willing, are coordinated from the surroundings of the Earth, for the Earth itself is essentially the scene of action for the Ego. The working together of thinking, feeling and willing has to be kept in order; not, however, from all the planets, but only from Sun, Moon and Earth, so that through the inter-working of Sun, Moon and Earth, if this is harmonious, man is made fit for the harmonious cooperation of his three soul-powers.

Help for these soul-forces had to be provided from the spiritual world. And now the soul of that Being who later became the Nathan Jesus-child assumed a cosmic form such that his life was in a sense neither on the Moon nor on the Sun, but as though it encircled the Earth and felt a dependence on the influences of Sun, Moon and Earth at the same time. The Earth influences came to him from below; the Sun and Moon influences from above. Clairvoyant observation really sees this Being, in the spring time of his evolution—if I may use that phrase—in the same sphere as that in which the Moon goes round the Earth. Hence I cannot say exactly that the Moon influence came to him from above, but rather that it came to him from the place where he was, this pre-earthly Jesus-Being. Again there rose to him a cry of distress, a cry that told of what human thinking, feeling and willing were on the way to becoming; and he sought to experience completely in his own inner being this tragedy of human evolution. Thereby he called to himself the high Sun-spirit, who now for the third time descended upon him, permeating him. So in the cosmic height, beyond the Earth, there was a third permeation of this Nathan Jesus-child by the high Sun Spirit whom we call the Christ.

Now I would wish to depict for you this third ensouling rather differently from the way in which I described the other two. That which took place through these successive stages of spiritual evolution—or heavenly evolution, I would say—was reflected in the various world outlooks of the post-Atlantean peoples. For it had effects which worked on into later times; the Sun's activity continued to be influenced by the fact that in ancient Lemurian times the Being who afterwards became the Nathan Jesus-child had been permeated by the Christ Being. And the essential thing about the initiation of Zarathustra was that he perceived the activity of the Sun impregnated with this influence. In this way his teaching arose; his initiation had revealed to him—had projected into his soul—what had happened in primeval times.

The third post-Atlantean epoch, which we call the Egyptian-Chaldean epoch, came about partly through the reflection in human souls, as a continuing human experience, of the activities that had originated from the permeation by the Sun-Spirit of the Nathan Jesus-Being while that Being was journeying round the planets. From this arose that science of planetary activities which comes before us in Chaldean astrology; people today have a very meagre conception of what it really was. Among the Egyptian-Chaldean peoples of the epoch there developed also that star worship which is indeed known exoterically; it arose because the moderating of planetary influence was still making itself felt at that later time.

Later still, in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, we can see in Hellenism a reflection of planetary spirits who had as it were come into existence because the Being who had been permeated by the Christ journeyed from planet to planet and on each planet became one or other of these spirits. On Jupiter he became the one whom the Greeks later called Zeus; on Mars, the one later called Ares; on Mercury, the one later called Hermes. In the Greek planetary gods there was this later reflection of what Christ Jesus in the super-sensible worlds had made of the planetary beings who were imbued with the Luciferic and Ahrimanic principles. When a Greek looked up to his heaven of the gods, he came into touch with the adumbrations, the reflections, of the activity of Christ Jesus on the individual planets, together with much else that I have described.

To this was added as a third event the reflection or adumbration of that which the Jesus-Being, in the later post-Atlantean times, had experienced as a celestial Being in relation to Sun, Moon and Earth. If we are to characterise this we can say: The Christ “ensouled” himself in an angelic Being. We say of Christ that he embodied himself in Jesus of Nazareth, but we are speaking now of an event that took place in spiritual worlds: the Christ “ensouled” himself in an angelic Being. And the effect was that human thinking, feeling and willing took an orderly course. This was an important event, coming early in the evolution of humanity: the development of the human soul-powers was brought into good order. The two earlier Christ events had brought order rather into the bodily constitution of man on Earth: what then had had to happen in the celestial worlds for this third event to come about?

It will be easier to recognise this third event if we look for the reflection of it in Greek mythology. For just as the planetary spirits projected themselves into the figures of Zeus, Ares, Hermes, Venus or Aphrodite, Kronos and so on, so was this third cosmic event reflected not only in Greek mythology but in the mythologies of the most diverse peoples. We can understand how it was reflected if we allow ourselves to compare the reflected images with their sources; if, that is, we compare what happened in Greece with what first happened in the Cosmos.

What was it that happened up there in the Cosmos? The need was to drive out something which would have raged chaotically in human souls; this had to be overcome. The angelic Being who was permeated with the Christ had to accomplish the deed of vanquishing and driving out from the human soul that which had to be driven out if thinking, feeling and willing were to be harmonised. And so there arises the picture—let us bring it vividly before our souls—of an angelic Being, dwelling still in the spiritual worlds, who later became the Nathan Jesus-child: he appears to us ensouled by the Christ and thereby rendered capable of special deeds—able to drive out from thinking, feeling and willing the element which would have raged within them as a dragon and brought them into chaos.

A reminiscence of this is preserved in all the pictures of St. George vanquishing the Dragon which are found in the records of human culture. St. George and the Dragon reflect that celestial event when the Christ ensouled the Jesus-Being and enabled him to drive the Dragon out of the soul-nature of man. This was a significant deed, made possible only with the help of Christ in the Being of Jesus, at that time an angelic Being. For this angelic Being had actually to connect himself with the Dragon-nature; to take on as it were the form of the Dragon in order to hold off the Dragon from the soul of man. He had to work from within the Dragon, so that the Dragon was ennobled and brought out of chaos into a kind of harmony. The training, the taming of the Dragon—that is the further task of this Being. And so it came about that the Dragon indeed remained active, but because there was poured into him the influence and power of the Being I have described, he became the bearer of many revelations which proved their worth to human civilisations throughout the course of post-Atlantean evolution. Instead of the chaos of the Dragon manifesting in maddened or bewildered men, the primal wisdom of the post-Atlantean time came forth. Christ Jesus used the Dragon's blood, as it were, so that with His help it could transfuse human blood and thereby make human beings the vehicles of divine wisdom. A significant reflection of this is apparent—even quite exoterically—in Greek mythology from the ninth century B.C. onwards.

It is remarkable how for the Greek mind one particular divine figure emerged from the others. The Greeks, we know, reverenced a variety of gods. These gods were the reflections or projections of the Beings who originated from the journey round the planets of the Being, permeated by the Christ, who later became the Nathan Jesus-child. The Greeks saw them in such a way that when they looked out into cosmic spaces, when they looked up through the light-aether, they rightly ascribed to the planet Jupiter—in an inward spiritual, not an external, sense—the origin of the Being they spoke of as Zeus. So they spoke of Pallas Athene, of Artemis, of the various planetary gods who were the reflections of what we have spoken about. But from these pictures of the various figures of the gods there emerged one figure—the figure of Apollo. The figure of Apollo emerged in a distinctive way: what did these Greeks see in him?

We come to know Apollo if we look at Parnassus and the Castalian spring. To the west of it there was a cleft in the earth, and over this the Greeks built a temple—why? Vapours used to rise up out of the cleft, and when the air-currents were right the vapours crept up the Mountainside like the coils of a snake, like a dragon. And the Greeks imagined Apollo as shooting his arrows at the dragon, as it rose from the cleft in the form of turbulent vapours. Here, in the Greek Apollo, we see an earthly reflection of St. George, shooting his arrows at the dragon. And when Apollo had overcome the dragon, the Python, a temple was built, and instead of the dragon we see how the vapours entered into the soul of the Pythia, and how the Greeks imagined that Apollo lived in these swirling dragon-vapours and prophesied to them through the oracle, through the lips of the Pythia. And the Greeks, that self-conscious people, rose through the stages for which their souls had been prepared; they accepted what Apollo had to say to them through the Pythia, who was imbued with the dragon-vapours. It meant that Apollo lived in the dragon's blood and filled men with wisdom from the Castalian spring. And the place became a meeting-place for the most sacred plays and festivals.

Why was Apollo able to do this—who was he? It was only from spring to autumn that he caused wisdom to flow up from the dragon's blood. Towards autumn he went away to his ancient home in the north, in the Hyperborean land. Farewell festivals were held at the time of his departure, and his return was welcomed in the spring. A deep wisdom resides in this idea of Apollo going north. The physical sun withdraws towards the south; in a spiritual sense it is always the opposite. The story shows that Apollo has to do with the sun. Apollo is the angelic Being of whom we have spoken; he was a reflection, projected into the Greek mind, of the angelic Being who had in fact worked at the end of the Atlantean time and who had been permeated by the Christ. This reflection was the Apollo who spoke wisdom to the Greeks through the mouth of the Pythia. And what was the content for the Greeks of this Apollo wisdom? We might say it was everything that led them, on the most important occasions, to take this or that decision. Again and again people went to Apollo at difficult moments in their lives, with their souls well prepared, and received prophetic guidance from the Pythia, who was stimulated by the vapours in which Apollo lived. And Asklepios, the Healer, is for the Greeks the son of Apollo, the healing god. The weakened form of the Angel in whom Christ once dwelt is a healer on Earth, or for the Earth. For Apollo was never physically embodied, but he worked through the Earth-elements.

And the god of the Muses, above all the god of song and the art of music, is Apollo. Why is this? Because through the power of song and string-music he brings thinking, feeling and willing into harmony. We have only to keep firmly in mind that in Apollo there was a projection of what had happened at the end of the Atlantean time. Something had then worked from spiritual heights into the human soul, and a weak echo of it could be heard in the musical art cultivated by the Greeks under the protection of Apollo. They knew it as an earthly reflection of the ancient art which the Angel-Being, permeated by the Christ, had cultivated in the heavenly heights in order to bring thinking, feeling and willing into harmony. They did not say so openly; only in the Mysteries was the meaning of it understood.

In the Apollonian Mysteries it was said: A high Divine Being once sank Himself into a Being of the Hierarchy of Angels and thereby brought harmony into thinking, feeling and willing. The art of music was a reflection of that happening, especially the Apollonian art which flowed from the sound of strings. The music which demands less of the elements than wind instruments do; which depends in the main only on the skill of human hands; in short, the music that sounds from the strings of Apollo—to this music the Greeks ascribed the musical effects which bring harmony into the soul. And persons who have no inclination for Apollo's music, or do not value it highly enough, were said by the Greeks to carry a bodily mark of their obtuseness in this respect; a sign that they had stayed behind, atavistically, at an earlier stage.

It is remarkable that when a certain man—King Midas—was born with exceptionally long ears, the Greeks said he had come into the world with ass's ears because in his life before birth he had not rightly devoted himself to the influence of the Being whom the Christ had enfilled. Therefore, said the Greeks, he had asses ears, and that was why he preferred wind instruments to string instruments. And when once a child was born who so to speak had no skin—he is known in mythology as the Flayed Marsyas—the Greeks said it was because before his birth he had not paid heed to all that flowed from the angelic Being. For that is how it looks to occult observation: Marsyas was not flayed in his lifetime, but before his birth, and it was then that his misdeed occurred.

Many towns founded by the Greeks as colonies were named Apollonia, because the sites for them had been chosen after consulting the Pythia. The Greeks cherished their freedom and so were not politically united, but they had an ideal unity through the god Apollo, for whom a kind of confederation was founded later on.

We see how the Greeks revered in the god they called, Apollo the Being of whom we have spoken; and we might say that in the Being who truly corresponded to Apollo at the end of the Atlantean time, the Christ was ensouled. Who then was Apollo—not the reflection revered by the Greeks, but Apollo himself? A celestial Being who from the higher worlds poured out healing forces for the soul, paralysing the Luciferic and Ahrimanic powers. These forces brought about in the human body a harmonious co-operation of brain, breath and lungs with the larynx and the heart, and it was this that came to expression in song. For the right co-operation of brain and breathing with the speech organ and the heart is the bodily expression of harmony in thinking, feeling and willing. The Healer, the celestial Healer, is Apollo. We have seen this Being pass through three stages of evolution, and then the Healer, whom Apollo reflected, was born on Earth and men called him Jesus, which in our language means “He who heals through God”. He is the Nathan Jesus-child, the one who heals through God, Jehoschua-Jesus.

Now, at this fourth stage, this Being made himself ripe to be enfilled with the Christ Being, with the ‘I’. This came to pass through the Mystery of Golgotha. For if this Mystery had not been enacted—if the Being whom we have followed through cosmic ages had not given embodiment to the Christ—then in the course of later time human souls would not have found bodies in which the Ego-force could come to necessary expression on Earth. The Ego had been brought to its highest stage in Zarathustra. The souls who had taken part in the evolution of the Ego would never have found earthly bodies suitable for its further development if the Mystery of Golgotha had not come to pass.

We have now seen the four stages of harmonisation: the harmonising of sense perception, of the life-organs, of thinking, feeling and willing, and the harmonisation in the Ego, this last through the Mystery of Golgotha. You have the connections between the Being who was born as the Nathan Jesus-child and the Christ Being, and the way in which this was prepared. It is now possible, through that which it is permissible to reveal in true Anthroposophy, to understand this kind of growing together, belonging together, of the Christ Being and the human nature of Jesus. This is possible for us. And a healthy development of spiritual life in the future will depend on this—on it becoming possible for more and more people to grasp that which could not be grasped by the thoughts and ideas of the epoch in which the Mystery of Golgotha was fulfilled.

• 1. See Occult Science—an Outline, Chapter IV. Chapter IV. (Rudolf Steiner Press, London.)
• 2. See, among others, the following references in lecture courses by Dr. Steiner: The Gospel of St. Luke, notably lectures 4 to 7; The Gospel of St. Matthew, notably lecture 6; The Spiritual Guidance of Man and of Mankind; Deeper Secrets of Human History in the Light of St. Matthew's Gospel.
• 3. See lecture given by Dr. Steiner at Pforzheim (7–3, 1914): Pre-Earthly Deeds of Christ.

Conscious awareness on the first planet was at deep trance level. It had the widest horizon, yet it was also the dimmest. The human being had an overview of the whole planetary system in this state. On the second planet, conscious awareness was at the dreamless sleep level—somewhat brighter but also narrower. On the third planet, dream-filled sleep level awareness was distinctly brighter and narrower. At the dreamless sleep level, human beings were able to perceive life, at the dream-filled sleep level also the inner feelings. Conscious awareness on the fourth planet is daytime consciousness, narrowed down to the greatest degree but also destined to perceive the conscious self in another individual. This is the clearest state of conscious awareness. The psychic level of awareness on the fifth planet will be far brighter than our present one. It will extend across the whole astral sphere. On the sixth planet, conscious awareness will be at the hyperpsychic stage. The lower thought world will be openly apparent to human beings. On the seventh planet humanity will reach the spiritual stage of conscious awareness. Then the higher mental world will open up before them. Every developmental phase within such a level of conscious awareness is called a ‘planet’ or a ‘planetary evolution’. This covers the evolution of conscious awareness.

A review of the evolution of life follows. Every stage of awareness has to go through seven life stages, these being the first, second and third elemental worlds, the mineral, plant, animal and human worlds. Each phase of passing through a life stage is called a ‘round’. We thus have 7 rounds on each planet, and on the 7 planets together 49 metamorphoses of life.

The stages of form.

Every life stage has to go through seven form stages, the forms of the

1. arupic
2. rupic
3. astral
4. physical
5. plastic (physically mobile—life governs form)
6. intellectual (not only mobile, but can be penetrated by thought)
7. archetypal (the whole I lies exposed to the outside world)

These form stages are called 'globes'. Every stage has a special function. Let us consider these functions in the case of human beings.

Human beings first of all go through the seven worlds in the seven form stages in deep trance awareness. On every planet, the densest stage is the middle one (No. 25 in the table below). We thus have the first elemental world in the arupic, rupic, astral, physical, plastic, intellectual and archetypal stages; then the second elemental world in the same seven stages, and likewise the third elemental world. We also have the mineral world in the stage states. These realms were only at the seed stage, however; in reality there was only one world. Number 49 is the human world in the archetypal stage, as the last globe in the last round—form, life, spiritual awareness.

The characteristic physical form is gone through in the middle of the 49 stages. The human being entered into evolution as a universal spirit which then became a separate spirit. First of all an individual orb separated off from a general orb. Those individual human orbs went through the different transformation stages. One of the later transformation processes yielded the ‘ether double body’. This stage of first separation from the universal is called ‘conscious awareness going down into the abyss’.⁶⁰ It is reached in the physical stage of the first planet. 24 stages went before, with another 24 to follow. The middle stage, the 25th, is the densest. The physical potential for the human being arose as a dense physical orb. At that time the Earth was like the ether or like the consistency of light on our present Earth. When awareness had fallen into the abyss it had a form rather like a mulberry.

On the second planet, in the deep sleep state of awareness (dreamless sleep), the human being became immersed in number. The orbs developed on the first planet were acting in a certain regular harmony. A relict from that second state is that chemical elements do not combine in any random numbers. Colours and sounds are in an order determined by their wave lengths. On the second planet we thus find order based on measure, number and weight.

Only one world existed at the first stage (Saturn); at the second stage (Sun), when the human being had become immersed in number, it was possible to separate into two worlds. One world arose which remained a continuum all the way to the human being, and another containing everything that was not suitable for developing as far as the human being. This became a separate second world (potential for animal and plant worlds, the lower forms of life). Law: It is not possible to have higher development unless something is separated out and left behind at a lower level. The degree of development was specific and given in that potential of the first planet. From it followed the law of life. It is the law of unequal but full development—no taking without giving. The first obligation of the esoteric student is to give something back.

On the third planet a third element developed—the law of elective affinities. People develop sympathy and antipathy for one another. This law applies in all worlds, in chemistry, for example, and in the mineral world. This also made it possible for a new world to develop. The animal, plant and mineral worlds developed. The human being as we see him today did not yet exist at that time. He was still a kind of animal then, at the kamic level. The spirit had not yet entered into the body.

On the fourth planet, in waking consciousness, a new potential developed for some entities so that they were not subject to the law of elective affinity. A life form that went further had to come. This was birth and death, which did not exist before. This form of life could only come because entities no longer existed in isolation but were held together by a supersensible thread of life. Individual incarnations were as if threaded on some cotton. The entity became manifold in time through birth and death. Before, human beings were manifold only in space. On the third planet (Moon), multiplication happened by tying off and division, and all lived in sympathy and antipathy with one another. Everything which multiplies by division is therefore immortal in material terms. Because of this the lowest animals, monads, are immortal (according to Weismann).⁶² Death is only possible when insemination exists as well as division. The price for birth and death was that entities continued to be split off, with the human being developing at the cost of other entities. Because of this, birth and death was also imposed on all other entities, which have no individual karma. The human being had to push each of the worlds which were below him down by one level.

Birth and death are connected with human karma. On the next planet, the human being, having gained a higher level of awareness, will be aware not only of the workings of karma but will have conscious awareness in karma itself. His inner strength will have grown to such an extent that he will have the will to be his karma. He will bear it in his figure and physiognomy. His physiognomy will reveal what lies in his astral and mental body. It will then happen that someone who is good will also be truly seen to be good from the outside, and someone who is evil as evil. Such evil people will then be found only among those who trained in black magic. The great judgement will come, dividing good from evil. This will happen on the fifth planet. From the fifth planet onwards we can only speak of the evolution of goodness.

On the sixth planet everything that is meaningless will be eliminated as evolution continues—anything that shows itself to be senseless and illogical on the lower mental plane. This sixth planet is the planet of the Logos, the word, for it is the word which gives meaning.

On the seventh planet, a wholly purified condition will prevail. The planets that went before will have performed their functions, and the fruits of this will be gathered. This is the state of being in complete harmony with God.

The spirit was present all the time when the human body was evolving and going through all these stages. Initially it floated above the body, and then, in the middle of the Lemurian age, it united with the body. The spirit is meant to gather experience on the lower planes through the body. In Greek esoteric teaching, the human soul was compared to a bee gathering honey from the planetary evolutions, from the fall into the abyss on the first planet to the state of complete harmony with God on the seventh planet. Redemption is thus happening all the time. What is held under a spell in matter is released and redeemed. Human beings only gathered experiences from the time when they inhabited the body. Before that they were the architect who built the whole of it in order to inhabit it.

The human being thus goes through the following process of evolution.

The 25th level, the middle one, is always the deepest and densest. We are now on the fourth planet and at the 25th level, which means in the densest state. On the seventh planet, in the seventh world, the human world, and the seventh form, which is archetypal, human evolution will reach its greatest perfection. The human being will then have his archetypal form, be truly godlike and human, with an all-embracing, spiritual conscious awareness.

• 60. See notebook page ‘777 incarnations’ and Special Note, both in this volume. In a lecture given in Paris on 9 June 1906 (An Esoteric Cosmology, in GA 94; Spring Valley: St George Publications 1978), we read that the number 7-7-7 signifies the esoteric cipher of the three Logoi and the exoteric number is the multiplication of these three sevenhoods in the evolutional plan, i.e. 343.
• 62. August Weismann (1834–1914), zoologist. Rudolf Steiner wrote about him in his essay ‘Haeckel und seine Gegner’ [in German] in GA 30.