The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Let us once again recall the deeply significant fact that the knowledge and truths contained in the Mysteries of Hibernia gradually lost force and influence as they moved from the West towards Central Europe and the East; and in place of a knowledge of the Spiritual—even in matters pertaining to religion—physical perception, or at any rate a tradition based upon physical perception, made its appearance.

You will remember the picture to which we came at the end of the last lecture. We spoke of the time when the Mystery of Golgotha took place. Over in Hibernia were the Initiates with their pupils; and there, without any means for physical perception of the Mystery of Golgotha and without any possibility of receiving information of the Event, the Mystery was none the less celebrated with all solemnity, because the Initiates knew from their own insight that the Mystery of Golgotha was happening—externally—at that very time.

These Initiates and their pupils in the Mysteries of Hibernia were thus under the necessity of experiencing an actual physical reality, an event in the world of the senses, in a spiritual way. But for their peculiar disposition of soul and for the orientation of knowledge then customary in Hibernia, there was no need to have anything more in the physical world than the Spiritual alone. In Hibernia the Spiritual was always predominant.

By all manner of secret streams in the spiritual life, what had been begun in Hibernia was carried over to the British Isles and to Brittany, to the lands that are now Holland and Belgium, and finally by way of the present Alsace to Central Europe. Though not recognisable in the general civilisation of the first centuries of Christian evolution it can nevertheless be discovered in all these regions; here and there we find single individuals who are able to understand what had come over from the Mysteries of Hibernia. In order to find these individuals we must set out with a deep and intimate longing for knowledge. In the first Christian centuries they are still fairly numerous, but later on, from the eighth and ninth to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, they become very rare. Yet in these centuries too, individuals are still to be found who gather around them, in silent places far removed from the great world and its civilisation, little groups of pupils through whom what had been begun in Hibernia in the West of Europe could be fostered and continued.

In general, we find instead all over Europe that for which spiritual perception is not required; people receive readily the historical tradition of the physical events which took place in Palestine at the beginning of our era. From this stream proceeded that element in human history which takes account only of what happens in physical life. Humanity in general was less and less able to perceive the contradiction which lies in the fact that the Mystery of Golgotha, an Event that is comprehensible only by means of the deepest spiritual activity, should be referred to an external phenomenon, perceptible to the physical senses. This line of development became necessary for a time. Fundamentally speaking, it had been gradually prepared over a long period, but it could be realised only because a very great deal of the old Mystery knowledge, even such as still existed in Greece, had been forgotten.

Now these Mysteries of Greece were divided into two kinds. One kind was engaged in directing man’s senses towards the spiritual world, towards the actual guidance and ordering of the world in the spirit; while the other investigated the secrets of Nature, all that rules in Nature, and especially the forces and beings connected with the powers of the Earth. Many of the candidates for the Mysteries were initiated into both kinds. Of these candidates it was said that they had knowledge on the one hand of the Mysteries of the Father, the Mysteries of Zeus, and had been initiated into them, and that on the other hand they had also been admitted into the Mysteries of the Mother, the Mysteries of Demeter. When we look back into those times we find a spiritual perception which though somewhat abstract can extend into the highest regions, and side by side with this, a conception of Nature capable of descending into the depths. And as has been said, we also find what is of special significance—the union of the two.

Now in this union of the heights and the depths a fact was perceived that today is but little noticed. It is the fact that man has certain external substances of Nature within him, but not certain others. This fact was observed and studied in its deepest meaning in the Chthonic Mysteries in ancient Greece. You know that iron is part of man’s make-up. There are also other metals in him, calcium, sodium, magnesium, and so on; but there are many more metals which are not in him. If we were to try to find these other metals in man by the use of ordinary scientific methods, that is to say, by analysing the substances in him, then by means of this external investigation we should find in him no lead, no quicksilver, no tin, no silver and no gold.

That was the great riddle which occupied the Initiates in the Greek Mysteries, eventually finding expression in the question: How does it come about that man carries iron in him, that he carries sodium, magnesium and other substances which can also be found in outer Nature, but does not, for instance, carry lead or tin in him? They were deeply convinced that man is a ‘little world’, a microcosm, and yet it would appear that man does not carry in his make-up these other metals—lead, tin, copper and so on.

Now we may truly say that the older students and Initiates in Greece were of the opinion that this was only apparently the case; for they were steeped in the knowledge that man is a real microcosm, which means that everything which reveals itself in the Cosmos, man must also carry in himself.

Let us consider for a moment the mood of a man about to be initiated in Greece. He would be instructed somewhat as follows—and here I must, of course, gather together into a few sentences an instruction that extended over long periods. He would be told the following.—Observe how the Earth today carries everywhere in it the iron which is also in man. Once upon a time, when the Earth had not yet become Earth, when it existed in a previous planetary condition, when it was Moon, or perhaps even Sun, and also contained in itself lead, tin, and so on, all the Beings who partook in this earlier form of the Earth shared in these metals and their forces, even as man today shares in the forces of iron. But after the various changes which the ancient form of the Earth underwent, the iron alone persisted in such strength and density that man could permeate his being with it. The other metals named are also still contained in the Earth, but they are no longer of such a nature that man can directly permeate himself with them. They are however also to be found, in an infinitely rarefied condition, in the whole cosmic space which surrounds man.—

If I examine a small piece of lead, I see before me the well-known greyish-white metal, which has a definite density. I can take hold of it. But this same lead which appears in the lead ores of the Earth exists in infinitely fine rarity in the whole cosmic space surrounding man, and it has significance there. For it radiates its forces everywhere, even where there is apparently no lead, and man comes into contact with these forces of the lead, not through his physical body, but through his ether body; because outside the lead ores of the Earth lead exists in a rarefied, fine condition such as can work on the ether body of man. And so in this condition of rarity, and spread out over the whole of cosmic space, lead works upon man’s ether body.

The pupil of those ancient Chthonic Mysteries in Greece learned that, just as today the Earth is rich in iron—for it is a planet concerning which the inhabitants of another planet could say: that planet is rich in iron, the only other planet rich in iron being Mars—just as the Earth is rich in iron, so Saturn is rich in lead. What iron is for the Earth, lead is for Saturn; and we have to imagine that once upon a time, when Saturn separated from the common planetary body of the Earth (as described in my book, Occult Science), this fine division of lead took place. One can say that Saturn took the lead out with him, as it were, and through his own planetary life-force, through his own planetary warmth, retained it in such a condition that he is able to permeate the whole planetary system to which our Earth also belongs, with this finely divided lead.

You must therefore imagine the Earth and in the distance Saturn filling the whole planetary system with finely distributed lead; and then imagine this fine lead substance working in upon man. You can still find evidence that this was taught to those who were to be initiated in ancient Greece, and that they learned to understand how this lead worked. They knew that without it the sense organs, especially the eye, would claim the whole of man’s being, and not allow him to come to self-dependence. Man would be able only to see, and not to think about what he had seen. He would be unable to detach himself from what he saw and say: ‘I see’. He would, as it were, be overpowered with seeing, unless this lead influence were present in the Cosmos. It is this working of lead which makes it possible for man to be independent in himself, placing him as Ego over against that sensitiveness to the outer world which is in him. It is these lead forces which, entering first the ether body of man, and then from the ether body impregnating also, in a sense, the physical body, bestow upon him the faculty and power of memory.

It was a great moment for a pupil of the Chthonic Mysteries in Greece, when after having learned all this, he was led on to know what follows. With deep solemnity and ceremony he was shewn the substance of lead, and then his senses were directed towards Saturn. The relationship of Saturn with the lead of the Earth was brought before his soul, and he was told: ‘The lead which you see is concealed in the Earth, for in its present state the Earth is not in a condition to give the lead a form in which it can work in man; but Saturn, with his very different condition of warmth, with his inner life-forces, is able to scatter this lead out into the planetary spaces, and make you an independent human being, possessing the power of memory. For you are a human being only through the fact that today you can recollect what you knew ten or twenty years ago. Think how the human part of you would suffer if you did not carry within you what you experienced ten or twenty years ago. Your Ego-force would be shattered unless this power of memory were present in full measure. The power of memory is due to what streams to you from distant Saturn. It is the force which has come to rest in the Earth in lead, and in this state of rest cannot now work upon you. The Saturn lead-forces enable you to fix your thoughts, so that after a time these thoughts can arise again out of the depths of the soul and you can have continuity in your life in the external world, and not merely live in a transitory way. You owe it to the Saturn lead-forces that you do not merely look around you today and then forget the objects you behold, but retain the memory of them in your soul. You can retain in your soul what you experienced twenty years ago, and can cause this so to live again that your inner life is transformed and becomes again as it was at that time.

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It was a deep and powerful impression that the pupil received. With great and solemn ceremony this knowledge was brought before him. And now he learned also to understand that if these Saturn forces alone were active— giving him the power of the Ego, the power of memory—he would be completely estranged from the Cosmos. Inspired by Saturn with the power of memory, he would become, as it were, a hermit. And then he was told that over against the Saturn force another force must be placed—the force of the Moon. Let us suppose that these two forces act in such a way that the force of Saturn and the force of the Moon approach from opposite sides, and flowing into each other, descend to the Earth and to man upon the Earth. Then what Saturn takes from man, the Moon gives to him. And what Saturn gives to man, the Moon takes from him. And just as in iron the Earth has a force which man can inwardly transmute, and just as Saturn has a corresponding force in lead, so the same force is possessed by the Moon in silver.

Now silver, as it exists in the Earth, has arrived at a condition in which it cannot enter directly into man, but the whole sphere that is embraced by the Moon is actually permeated by finely divided silver; and the Moon, especially when its light comes from the direction of the constellation of Leo, works in such a way that man receives through these silver-forces of the Moon the opposite influence to the lead-forces from Saturn, and he is therefore not estranged from the Cosmos, in spite of the fact that he is endowed by the Cosmos with forces of memory. It was a deeply solemn moment when the Greek pupil was led to see this opposition of Saturn and the Moon. In the holy solemnity of night he was told: ‘Look up to Saturn surrounded by his rings. To him you owe the fact that you are an independent being. Look to the other side, to the Moon streaming out her rays of silver. To her you owe it that you are able to bear the Saturn forces without being cut off from the rest of the Cosmos.’

In this way, with direct reference to the connection between man and the Cosmos, teaching was given in Greece which we find caricatured later on in Astrology. In those days it was a true wisdom, for men saw in the stars not merely the points of specks of light above them in the sky; in the stars they beheld living spiritual Beings. And the human being of the Earth they saw to be in union with these living spiritual Beings. Thus they had a natural science which reached up into the heavens and extended right out into cosmic space. Then, when the pupil had received such an insight, when this vision of light had been deeply inscribed into Iris soul, he was led into the real Mysteries of Eleusinia. (You have heard how these things took place in my description of other Mysteries— for instance, the Mysteries of Hibernia.) The pupil was led before two statues. The first of these two statues represented to him a Father Godhead—the Father God surrounded by the signs of the planets and the Sun. It showed Saturn, for example, raying out in such a way that the pupil remembered: Yes, that is the lead radiation of the Cosmos; and the Moon so that he was reminded: Yes, that is the silver radiation of the Moon. And so on with each single planet. Thus in the statue which represented the Father nature, there appeared all the secrets which stream down to Earth from the planetary environment and are connected with the several metals of the Earth, of which man is now no longer able to make use in his inner make-up.

Then the pupil was told the following.—‘The Father of the whole World stands there before you. In Saturn He carries lead, in Jupiter tin, in Mars iron—iron which is closely connected also with the Earth, but in a quite different condition; in the Sun He carries radiant gold, in Venus the radiantly streaming copper, in Mercury the radiant quicksilver, and in the Moon the radiant silver. You yourself bear within you only so much of the metals as you were able to assimilate from the planetary conditions through which the the Earth passed in earlier times. In its present condition you can assimilate only the iron. But as an earthly human being you are not complete. The Father who stands before you shows you in the metals that which today cannot exist within you as coming from the Earth but which you have to receive from the Cosmos; and in this you have another part of your being. For only when you look upon yourself as a human being who has lived through the planetary transformations of the Earth—only then are you really a complete human being. You stand here on Earth as a part only of man. The other part of you the Father carries around His head and in His arms; he bears it for you. That which stands here on Earth together with that which He carries forms the real ‘you’. You stand on the Earth, but the Earth was not always as it is today. If the Earth had always been as it is today, you could not be on it as a human being. For the Earth today carries within it, even though in a dead condition, the lead of Saturn, the tin of Jupiter, the iron of Mars (in that other state), the gold of Sun, the silver of Moon, the copper of Venus, and the quicksilver of Mercury. It carries all these things within it. But the condition in which the Earth carries these metals within it today is no more than a memory of the condition in which, once upon a time, silver lived during the Old Moon-existence of the Earth, or gold during the Sun-existence of the Earth, or lead during the Saturn-existence of the Earth. That which you see today in the dense metallic ores of lead, tin, iron, copper, silver, quicksilver— with the exception of the iron as you know it, which is not essentially earthly but belongs to Mars—all these metals, which you now see in dense, concentrated form, once poured from the Cosmos into the Earth in quite different conditions. The metals, as you know them today on the Earth, are the corpses of what they once were; they have remained as the corpse of the metal substance and metal nature which played a part on the Earth in her ancient form—during the Old Saturn period, and later on in a different stage during the Old Moon period. Tin played a part, together with gold, during the Old Sun period of the Earth, in an altogether different condition. And when you behold this condition in the spirit, then this statue becomes for you, in what meets you today, a true “Father statue”.’

And in the spirit—as it were in a real vision—the Father statue of the true Mysteries of Eleusis became alive, and handed to the female figure standing beside it the metals in the state they then were. In the vision seen by the pupil, the female figure received this ancient form of the metals and surrounded it with what the Earth could give out of her own being, when she became Earth. This wonderful process the pupil now beheld. Once upon a time, what the pupil now saw in a symbolic way had actually happened. The mass of metal streamed or rayed forth from the hand of the Father statue; and the Earth, with its chalk and other stones, came to meet that which streamed in, and surrounded these instreaming metals with earthly substance. A hand outstretched in love from the Mother statue came to meet the metal forces coming from the Father statue. This made a deep and powerful impression upon the pupil, for he saw how the Cosmos worked together with the Earth in the course of the aeons; and what the Earth has to offer—that he learned to perceive and understand in the right way.

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Look at the metal substance in the Earth today in all its variety! You find it crystallised and surrounded with a kind of crust which is from the Earth. The metal is from the Cosmos; and that which is of the Earth receives with love what comes from the Cosmos. You may see this all around you if you walk about in those parts of the Earth where metals are found, and interest yourself in them. That which came to meet the metal was called ‘Mother’.¹ The most important of these Earthly substances which, as it were, placed themselves there before the Heavenly metals in order to receive them, were called the Mothers. And this is also one aspect of the ‘Mothers’ to whom Faust descends. He descends at the same time into those pre-earthly periods of the Earth, in order to see there how the mother-like Earth takes into herself what is given, father-like, by the Cosmos.

Through all this a deep inner feeling was aroused in the pupil of the Eleusinian Mysteries. He felt that he was indeed sharing in the life of the Cosmos; he began to know, with a knowledge that is of the heart, the products and processes of Nature upon the Earth.

When a man of today observes the products and processes of Nature, it is all dead for him, it is nothing but a corpse. And when we occupy ourselves with physics or chemistry, are we really doing anything else with Nature than what the anatomist does when he dissects the dead body? The anatomist has before him the dead remains of what is made and intended for life. In the same way we with our chemistry and physics dissect a living Nature! A very different natural science was given to the pupil in Greece—a science of what is living, which enabled him to see, for example, our present lead as the corpse of lead. He had to go back into the times when lead was alive. And he learned to understand the mysterious relation of man to the Cosmos, the mysterious relation of man to all that is around him on the Earth. And now, after the pupil had experienced all this and it had been deepened in his soul by contemplation of the Father-like statue and the Mother-like statue, which made present for him in his soul the two opposing forces, the forces of the Cosmos and the forces coming from the Earth—after this experience he was led into the very holiest place of all. There he had before him the picture of the female figure suckling at her breast the Child. And he was introduced to the meaning of the words: ‘That is the God Jacchos who will one day come.’

Thus did the Greek disciple learn to understand beforehand the Mystery of Christ. Those who sought Initiation in Eleusis also had the Christ placed before them; and it was again in a spiritual way. At that time however, men could only learn of the Christ as of One Who was to come in the future, as of One who was still a child, a Cosmic Child, who must first grow up in the Cosmos. Those who were to be initiated were called Tellists—that is to say, those who have to look towards the end and goal of Earth evolution.

And now came the great turning-point. Now came the great change which finds such clear and even historic expression in the transition from Plato to Aristotle. It was indeed a remarkable happening. As the fourth century approached in the evolution of Greek culture and civilisation, human thought underwent the first ‘turn’ in the direction of becoming abstract. And then, at a time when Plato was already an old man and near the end of his life’s course, the following scene took place between him and Aristotle.

Plato spoke to Aristotle somewhat as follows. (I have to clothe it in words, but of course the whole event took place in a much more complicated way.) ‘Many things that I have said in my lectures have not seemed to you quite correct. All that I have taught to you and the other pupils is however nothing else than an extract from the ancient and holy Mystery wisdom. But a time will come in the course of evolution when human beings will acquire a nature and an inner organisation which will gradually lead them to a stage that is in truth higher than what is now represented in man; at the same time it will become impossible for them to accept natural science as it is current among the Greeks.’ (I have explained to you what this means. ... All this Plato made clear to Aristotle.) He continued: ‘Therefore I intend to withdraw for a time and leave you to yourself. In the world of thought for which you are specially endowed, and which is destined to be the world of thought for humanity for many centuries—in this world of thought try to build up and develop in thoughts what you have received here in my School.’

Plato and Aristotle then remained apart, and in this way Plato fulfilled, through Aristotle, a high spiritual mission.

I am obliged, my dear friends, to describe the scene as I have done. If you look in the history books, you will find the same scene described, and I will tell you how it is given there. Aristotle, so runs the story, was in reality always a headstrong pupil of Plato. Plato once said that Aristotle was indeed a gifted pupil, but was like a horse that has been trained and then turns and kicks its trainer. As time went on, the trouble between them led at last to this result, that Plato withdrew from Aristotle, was annoyed, and never again went into the Academy to teach. That is the account given in history books.

The one story is in the history books; the other, which I have related to you, is the truth. And it bears within it an impulse of great significance. For the writings of Aristotle were of two kinds. One set of writings contained an important natural science, which was the natural science of Eleusis, and which came to Aristotle indirectly through Plato. The other writings contained the abstract thoughts which it was Aristotle’s task to develop in pursuance of Plato’s instructions—in fulfilment, that is, of the mission that Plato had in his turn received from the Eleusinian Mysteries.

Now what Aristotle had to give to mankind, besides being of two kinds, followed also a twofold path. There were his so-called logical writings, which owe their most productive thoughts to the ancient Eleusinian wisdom. These writings, which contained only little natural science, Aristotle entrusted to his pupil, Theophrastus, through whom, as well as through many other channels, they came over to Greece and Rome, and formed throughout the Middle Ages the whole wisdom and learning of the teachers of philosophy in Central Europe, who in those days also participated actively in the civilisation of their time.

The development which I described in the last lecture came about because men were destined to reject and turn away from the Mystery wisdom of Hibernia and there was left for them only the tradition of the Event that had taken place in the physical world of the senses at the beginning of our era. With this was now united what had become separated out from the wisdom of Plato, that wisdom which existed still in Aristotle, and which was in reality the wisdom of the Eleusinian Mysteries. The true natural science, bearing within it still the spirit of the Chthonic Mysteries which flowed over into the Eleusinian Mysteries, this natural science which, in order to find an explanation for the Earth, reached out to the Heavens and soared aloft into the wide spaces of the Cosmos—for this the time was past in Greece. Only so much of it was saved as could be saved by Aristotle becoming the teacher of Alexander, who made his campaigns into Asia and did everything possible to introduce Aristotelian natural science to the East. In this way it passed over into Jewish and Arabian schools, whence it came back and across through Africa to Spain, and there, in a diluted form, had a certain influence upon those isolated individuals in Central Europe who, as I explained to you in the last lecture, still carried—within a newer civilisation—something of the impulse of the Hibernian Mysteries. Theophrastus had given his Aristotle to the teachers and fathers of the Church in the Middle Ages. Alexander the Great had carried the other Aristotle over to Asia. The Eleusinian wisdom which in a very much weakened and diluted form had made its way through Africa into Spain, lights up here and there in the Middle Ages; notwithstanding the utterly different general character of the civilisation, it was studied and cultivated in certain monasteries—for example, by Basil Valentine, who is looked upon in our time almost as a mythical personality. It lived on—hidden as it were within the general civilisation, under the surface; while on the surface prevailed that culture of which I spoke in the last lecture, a culture that had no place for such truth as could still be taught in the time of Aristotle. For even then it was taught that the Christ must be known and recognised. The third picture, the female form who carried at her breast the Child, the Jacchos Child, had also to be understood; but it was said that what would bring the understanding of this third figure was still to come in the evolution of humanity. This truth Aristotle made clear again and again to Alexander the Great, although he was not able to write it down.

So we see how there lies in the bosom of time the demand to understand in its pristine reality what has been so beautifully put before the world by the Christian painters—the Mother with the Child at her breast. It has not yet been fully understood, neither in the Madonnas of Raphael, nor in the Eastern Ikons. It still awaits understanding.

Something of what is necessary to acquire such understanding will be spoken of in the lectures to be given here in the near future. In the next lecture I will describe the path along which many occult secrets travelled, on their way from Arabia into Europe. This will help to place before your souls a certain great historical event; and in the course of lectures ² which will be given to the delegates at Christmas and are intended to show the occult foundation of the historical evolution of humanity, I shall have occasion to explain to you the full significance of the journeys of Alexander the Great, in their connection with the teachings of Aristotle.

• 1. In English still called the ‘Matrix’. (Note by Translator.)
• 2. The title of these eight lectures is, World History in the light of Anthroposophy. (English translation by George and Mary Adams, 1950) Rudolf Steiner Press.

After what I told you yesterday, you will perhaps understand me when I say of Aristotle—who in the fourth century b.c. collected together the whole knowledge of ancient times—that although we find what was spread over Europe by his influence to be no more than a kind of system of logic, he nevertheless stood upon the ground of the Greek Mysteries, and indeed of all the Mysteries of his time. I can go further and say that anyone who is in a position to receive a world-conception not merely with his intellect, but with his heart and understanding, will be able to feel even in the logical and philosophical writings of Aristotle that they have implicit within them a close and intimate connection with the secrets of Nature.

To spread over Europe a system of logic was the destiny of Aristotle rather than, if I may so express it, his proper path of development. For after all—to give an illustration of this fact—it would be almost unthinkable that Plato should have been Alexander’s teacher, whereas Aristotle could be. Plato, it is true, continued the teachings of the old Mysteries. But he did so in his own way, in the form of ‘ideas’; and for this very reason he was the one who led man away from the secrets of Nature, whilst Aristotle led back to them—as you will have gathered from the short account of him given in my book, Riddles of Philosophy. We can come to realise this in more detail and completeness when we are able to form an idea of the content of the seven years’ instruction given by Aristotle to Alexander. Let me now summarise for you in brief the content of this teaching which was drawn from the ancient Mysteries.

In those times it was so that whenever one spoke in an authentic way about Nature, one did not understand by the word what the Natural Science of today understands— namely, the purely earthly phenomena, from which one then goes on to infer in an external manner the phenomena of the Heavens beyond the Earth. No, Man was thought of always as a member and part of Nature in the widest sense; and this necessitated looking also for the Spirit in Nature—for to regard man as devoid of soul or devoid of spirit was quite impossible in those olden times.

And so in the Mystery teaching about Nature, we find that Nature was thought of as extending far out into the Cosmos, as far indeed as the Cosmos was in any way accessible to man through his relationship with it.

Now you must understand that all teaching that was seriously undertaken in those olden times did not make appeal primarily to the intellect or to the faculty of observation. What we think of today as ‘knowledge’ was really of very little account in those ancient times, even as late as the days of Aristotle. And if a modern historian of some particular science wants to give an account of the progress of thought in that domain of knowledge, he should really begin with Copernicus or Galileo, for anything he may add to his account by going further back, is beside the point. And if he goes back as far as to the knowledge of Greek times, then what he tells is mere phantasy. It is a continuation of the present back into earlier times which is utterly unreal. For even in the time of Aristotle any education that was taken seriously involved a complete change in the very nature of the pupil, for it made appeal not merely to thought and observation but to the whole life of the human being. The essential thing in the Mysteries was that the human being should become through his education an altogether different being from what he was before. And in Aristotle’s time the endeavour was made to bring about this change by subjecting the soul to two diametrically opposite impressions.

In the first place the pupil who was to attain to knowledge step by step, was exhorted to feel his way as Man right into the Nature that was all around him. ‘Behold now,’ it was said to him, ‘you breathe the air. And in summer the air you breathe is warm, while in winter it is cold. In winter you can perceive your own breath in the form of vapour. Your breath is invisible when you breathe the warm air in summertime.’

A phenomenon like this was taken as a starting-point. The teacher of those olden times did not try to make the connection with Nature by saying: ‘Here is a body that has such and such a temperature. I warm it in a retort and it undergoes such and such a change.’ No, he brought Nature into direct contact with the human being himself, by making him attentive to the feeling he experienced in connection with the breathing process. And the pupil learned to develop a true feeling, on the one hand, of the warmed air. ‘Picture yourself,’ said the teacher, ‘what it really means—warmed air. It wants to rise; and you must feel, when the warmed air comes toward you, that something is trying to carry you out into the far spaces. And now feel, on the other hand, as a contrast, cold water in some form or other. You do not feel at home in the cold water. In the warm air you feel at home, you feel how it is trying to carry you out into the far spaces. In the cold water you feel strange. And you feel that if you go away from the cold water and let it do what it will away from you, then it will make the snow crystals that fall down upon the Earth. You feel yourself in your right place outside the snow crystals, watching them from without. The warm air you can only feel in you, and you would gladly let yourself be carried out into the far spaces of the worlds by the ascending warm air. The cold water you can only really feel outside you, and in order to have a relationship with it, you would rather observe it in its results by means of your senses.’

These were the two opposite experiences to which the pupil was brought. If we describe it as ‘learning to feel the difference between what is within man and what is outside him’— that is an empty expression! It really does not say very much. But ‘warm air’ and ‘cold water’ mean a great deal! Through these opposite experiences man is placed into the world with his whole inner being. ‘Outside’ begins to have meaning and reality when we think of it as damp and cold, and ‘inside’ when we think of it as warm and gaseous. The contrast was experienced as having a qualitative character; man learned to feel how he is placed qualitatively into the world. And then the teacher ceased speaking of things, and spoke of the human being himself. He told how the ‘warm air’ leads to the Gods in the Heights, while the ‘cold damp’ leads to the demons under the Earth.

With the journey to the sub-earthly demons is connected the knowledge of Nature. Only the pupil must bring with him into the lower regions the knowledge and experience he has gained through the warm air in the heights, lest the lower regions have evil designs upon him.

And when with this inner experience of the contrast between the warm air and the damp cold, the pupil afterwards approached Nature, he was able, through further experience of the things and processes of Nature, to look far into the real being of the whole world. Today, the chemist examines hydrogen and attributes to it certain properties. Then he observes the spaces of the worlds, finds there something which reveals the same properties as hydrogen does in the laboratory and draws the conclusion that hydrogen is present also out there in the far spaces. Such a method of instruction would have seemed sheer nonsense in Aristotle’s time. One went to work then in quite a different way.

When the inner experience of the pupil had been deepened in the way I have indicated, the teacher led him to observe what is living in the flower as it raises itself upwards and opens out into the far spaces; he had now to pass on to knowledge of the plants. ‘Look into the opening petals of the flower,’ he was told, ‘and observe the impression it makes upon you as it rays out into the World.’

And when the pupil, whose feelings had been deepened in the way I have explained, gazed out over the opening blossoms of the plants, an inward knowledge, an inward illumination, dawned within him. The flowers became for him the proclaimers upon Earth of the secrets of the Cosmos: they spoke to him of the far spaces of the Worlds. And with deep earnestness, though always only in the way of gentle hints and intimations, the teacher then led the pupil to find for himself the secret that streams from the wide spaces of the World into the being of the flower. The teacher put the question: ‘What do you really perceive when you look at the opening flower, when you gaze at the opening petals and see how the stamens push forth and out to meet you? What do you then really perceive?’ And by-and-by the pupil became able to say in answer: ‘The plants tell me that the heavy, cold Earth has compelled them to take up their abode on the Earth; they say that they really do not come from the Earth at all, but have only been placed there and made fast in the Earth. In truth they are water-born, and in a previous condition of Earth existence’—it is the condition I have described in Occult Science as the Old Moon condition of the Earth—‘they enjoyed their true and genuine existence as water-born beings in all their livingness.’

The pupil was led to perceive that in the flowers he can see a reflection of the secrets and Mysteries of the Moon, which has gone out of the Earth and still preserves something of the old, pre-Earthly Moon condition. For the flowers did not tell him the same thing every night! What the flowers said when the Moon stood before Leo was different from what they said when the Moon stood before Virgo or before Scorpio. The flowers on the Earth told what the Moon experienced as she passed round the whole circle of the Zodiac. The secrets and mysteries of the World-All— it was of these that the flowers on Earth told. It was really so that through what came to the pupil in this way he was able to say out of the depth of his heart:

I look into the flowers.
They reveal to me their kinship with the Moon.
Captives on Earth are they,
For they are Water-born.

The pupil was able to have this feeling, because he had previously experienced the impression made on him by the cold, chilling water. That experience enabled him now to come to this knowledge about the flowers.

And when the pupil was sufficiently familiar with the secret of the Moon as it was disclosed to him in this way by the plants that grow up out of the Earth, he was led a step further, and had to contemplate the metals of the Earth— the principal metals, lead, tin, iron, gold, copper, quicksilver, silver.² We spoke of them in another connection yesterday. And when he approached the metals, with his feeling and understanding deepened in the way I have indicated, then he gradually made himself familiar with the secrets that they spoke to him; and from the metals he learned the secrets of the whole planetary system. For the lead explained to him about Saturn, the tin about Jupiter, the iron about Mars, the gold about the Sun, the copper about Venus, the quicksilver about Mercury, and the silver again about the Moon—that is to say, the Moon not now in her relationship with the Earth but as a member of the WorldAll. Just as the pupil had discovered the secret of the flowers, so now he discovered for himself the secret of the metals. First he learned the flower secret, and then the metal secret.

This secret or mystery of the metals which was given expression in the male statue of the Eleusinian Mysteries by means of the great Planisphere that I described to you yesterday, still formed part of the education given in Aristotle’s time, and in this secret of the metals was revealed the secret of the planets. Man’s feeling and perception were not so coarse as they are today. When the pupil directed his eyes to a piece of lead, the lead did not merely show itself blue-grey in colour to his eye, but this blue-grey had a very remarkable effect upon his inner eye. In a sense this blue-grey of the fresh lead extinguished all other colours, and the pupil felt as if he were one with this blue-grey metallic nature, is if he were moving with it. He came into a state of consciousness where he had experience of something utterly and entirely different from the present. He came really into a condition of soul when it was as though the whole past of the Earth rose up before him, as though the present were blotted out by the blue-grey. Saturn stood revealed!

In the case of gold, people point to external analogies to account for the fact that the ancients saw in gold a representative of the Sun. It was by no means due to some mere external analogy, such as that the Sun is regarded as something precious and valuable on Earth. Really nothing is too stupid for modern man to ascribe to the ancients! When the man of olden times looked upon the gold with its brilliant yellow colour—a colour that is, so to say, complete in itself—and saw how plain and unpretending and at the same time how proud it is in its outward appearance, then he felt in very truth that here was something that was allied to the blood-circulation in himself. Of the very quality of gold man had the feeling that he himself was within it. And through this perception he was able to come to an understanding of the nature of the Sun and of all that belongs to the Sun. For he felt how the quality of gold is allied to something of the Sun that works in man’s blood.

And so, taking the metals one by one, the pupil of the ancient Mysteries came to a perception of the whole planetary system. And as he learned to apply his thought to these things—we arc not, of course, to imagine his thinking to be abstract as is the thinking of the present day—he came to think of the metals in the following way:

I ponder on the metals
They reveal to me their kinship with the Planets.
Captives on Earth are they,
or they are Air-born.

For it is a fact that the metals that we find in the Earth today came out of the Cosmos in the form of air, and only during the Moon-existence gradually became fluid. They came first in the form of air, when the Earth was in her Old Sun condition; they acquired fluid form during the Moon-existence, and during the time of Earth they were taken captive and bound into hard solid form. That was the second mystery that was disclosed to the pupil.

The third mystery had to be approached by the pupil learning to observe how different are the peoples of mankind all over the Earth. If one were to go to the hot country of Africa with its own peculiar climate, one would find there people who are quite different even in the colour of their skin from the people of Hellas. Or if one travelled across to Asia, there one would find people who were different again. The Greeks had a fine feeling for all these external differences in human beings.

One of the most interesting of all the writings of Aristotle that have come down to later times is his book on Physiognomy, by which we are to understand not merely the physiognomy of the human countenance, but the physiognomy of the whole man studied with a view to becoming familiar in this way with the true nature of the human being. He points out, for example, how man’s hair is curly or smooth according to the climate in which he lives, and how it is not only the colour of his skin that varies with the climate of the land where he is born, but the whole expression of the human form.

In the flowers the pupil learned to see a reflection of the mystery of the Moon, and in the metals a reflection of the Planets; and now by means of this third teaching he came to know the mystery of man himself on Earth. The Natural Science of those times made great progress in the study of the variety of man on Earth, and it went far towards obtaining an answer to the question: What is the true and original form of Man that lies behind the purposes of the Gods?

As the pupil was introduced in a living way to the physiognomy, to the various forms of man over the Earth, he felt rise up within him the secret of the Zodiac. For the Zodiac influences the elements on the Earth; in conjunction with the Planets and with the Moon it carries the winds in one direction at one time of year and in another direction at another—now wafting warm air over some region, now again sweeping it with storms of cold rain. All these conditions affect man, they enter deeply into his life. And the researches into Nature in Grecian times sought for the origin of these natural conditions in the influences that stream down upon the Earth from the stars of the Zodiac, modified by Planets, Sun and Moon.

The Natural History of those times looked with great interest on the fact that a man had black, curly hair, a ruddy countenance, a nose of such and such shape, and so on. It was said: ‘That is a man who refers me to the Sign of Leo—Leo with his forces weakened or strengthened by tire Planets according to their position. He is a man who in accordance with his karma has such and such qualities in his liver. If, for instance, he has a quality in his liver that brings a trait of melancholy to his life of soul, then it is due to the fact that at a certain point of time Venus stood in a particular relation to Jupiter, and that gave a special character to the Leo rays. In the particular nature of the temperament in connection with the nature of the liver, I can behold how the man has been determined from the Cosmos. I can extend this to all the qualities of the different peoples of the Earth. In what the human being experiences from the whole atmosphere around him, I can behold the mystery of the Zodiac.’

And when the pupil had been led to this point, once again he felt a clear knowledge arise in his heart which he now clothed somewhat in the following words:

I experience the mystery of the Zodiac in the variety of men;
There stands before my soul the kinship of this variety of Men
With the Fixed Stars.
As Captives on Earth live Men in their variety,
For they are Fire-born.

(Born, that is, from the warmth ether—from the warmth ether under the influence of the Zodiac.)

Thus did man feel himself in his physiognomy as born of the Fire or Warmth. He knew that he had undergone change during the Moon-existence, and again during the Earth-existence, but that what he attained to in the old Saturn time was his true and original condition. Just as he perceived the metals of the Earth to be Sun-born, Air-born, and the plants and flowers to be Moon-born, Water-born, so did he perceive man to be Warmth-born.

Man had been prepared for all this by the feelings and perceptions he had been able to experience with the warm air and the cold water.

In the time of Aristotle men were able to perceive when they observed a human being, the effect he had upon the warm-and-gaseous in its combination with the cold-and-watery. Owing to the development they had undergone in their souls they were able, by looking at the physiognomy of a human being, to answer the question: How much does this man give to the warm-and-gaseous, how much does he take from the cold-and-watery? Men learned to look at the human being in this way, and gradually, little by little, they learned to look upon the whole of Nature in this aspect. This prepared the way for the old and genuine Alchemy that afterwards came across Africa to Spain and spread over certain parts of Central Europe. Every thing in the world, every flower, every animal, every cloud, every rolling mist, sands and stones, seas and river, woodland and meadow,— all were viewed in the light of the impression they made of the warm-gaseous and cold-watery.

And so men came to acquire a fine faculty of perception for four qualities in Nature. When they perceived the warm-gaseous, they developed a perception for the warmth, and at the same time for the air; they felt what the warmth is for the gaseous. And in the cold they developed a perception for the damp and the dry. They acquired fine faculties of perception and feeling for these differentiations, for their power of perception enabled them to stand with their whole being right within what the world offered.

Having once adopted this standpoint, it was natural for Aristotle’s pupil, Alexander the Great, to regard the whole region in which they both lived from this point of view. And being permeated throughout with the impressions that came to him through this faculty of perception of which we have been speaking, Alexander felt in the whole Greek nature, in so far at any rate as it revealed itself in Macedonia, the qualities of damp and gaseous. And that determined and constituted the mood of his soul at a particular time in his life. This perception that he attained through what one may call a special kind of Initiation received through Aristotle, he took to be an indication of the fundamental character of the world immediately surrounding him, the world of his own experience. It can only be the half of the world—so he said to himself. You see, in those times, people were taught about Nature in such a way that they experienced her. And their experience could lead up to an instruction such as the following:

Here you have a wind blowing from the North-West (if Macedonia were in the centre) and here a South-Westerly direction of wind, here again a North-Easterly wind, and lastly here a South-Easterly.

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Now Aristotle’s pupil Alexander had learned from his own experience to feel, in what came from the climatic influences and the winds of the North-West, the damp and cold; and in what came from the South-West, the warm and damp. In this way he had a perception for only half of the world. In the instruction he received, this perception was completed for him, and he himself was able also to feel that what he was taught belonged to what he already knew by his own experience. He was taught how from the winds that blow from the North-East came the dry and cold, while the wind from the South-East brought the dry and warm. So now he had learned to have in the four directions of the four winds the perception of dry and cold, dry and warm, warm and moist and cold and moist. Being a true man of his time, he had the desire to reconcile these opposites. Here in Macedonia one’s experience was limited to the cold and damp and the warm and moist; these must be united with the cold and dry and the fiery and dry, must be united with what blows over from the North of Asia, and with what blows over from the South through Asia.

Here you have the source of the irresistible urge that lived in Alexander to make expeditions into Asia. And from this example you may see how different things were then from the conditions that prevail in more recent times. Think of the education a prince receives today! Think of what he is taught, and then think of the education he receives ‘on the march’ with the troops. Try to make a clear picture of what kind of relationship exists between the instruction in physics given to a prince by some tutor, and what that prince experiences later on in the campaigns of war! Among the things that come out of a retort one does not as a rule find deeds done in a campaign of war! Such an example may help you to see how very far removed today is the knowledge that it is thought fit to teach a child in order to form his inner being, from what the child has actually to be later in external life. In the case of Alexander you have an era when complete unity was still striven for in knowledge between what was given the human being to mould and form him inwardly and what was given him to enable him to take his right place in the world. In those olden times history began in the schoolroom. But the schoolroom was a place that had affinity with the Mysteries, and the Mysteries meant the World ... and the World was seen to be the result of the forces that were in the Mysteries. It was this kind of education that gave the impulse to carry across into Asia the Natural Science of those ancient times.

In a much sifted condition this Natural Science came across Spain into Europe. It can still be traced in the writings of Paracelsus, Jacob Boehme and Gichtl, and many more besides who later had connections with men like Basil Valentine and others.

For a time it was inevitable that whatever of the knowledge could be expressed in logical forms of thought won the day and the other part of Aristotle’s knowledge had to wait. But now the time has come when this other part has fulfilled its time of waiting and all this knowledge of Nature must be rediscovered. It was really so that Alexander had to bury these secrets of Nature over in Asia, for it was nothing but their corpses that were brought across to Europe. It is not our task to galvanise these corpses but to rediscover the original living truth. And we shall only really find the necessary enthusiasm for such a task when we can develop a warm feeling for what took place at that turning-point of time, when we can perceive and appreciate the real purpose of Alexander’s campaigns. For only to outward appearance were they campaigns of conquest; in reality their object was to find the other side of the compass, to open up the other half of the world. They were also a search for a personal experience. And the personal experience consisted in this, that a certain discomfort, a certain lack of satisfaction was felt in the milieu of the cold-and-damp and moist-and-warm alone, and this needed to be complemented and satisfied by the addition of the other perception.

Of the immense historical significance of this event in the evolution of the whole Western world, I shall have to speak in the lectures that are to be given in the near future at the Delegates’ Meeting, on the subject of the occult foundations of the history of Man on Earth.

• 2. ee Lectures III to V of the volume True and False Paths in spiritual Investigation. (Rudolf Steiner Press.)

During these last weeks I have lectured on many forms of the Mysteries. We have been trying to gain insight more especially into those Mysteries which, in a certain sense, were the last of the great Mysteries connecting man’s inner life directly with Nature, with the spirit of Nature-existence. These were the Mysteries of Hibernia. And on the other hand we have seen how, through insight into Man himself, through insight of an altogether intimate, spiritual kind, individual and personal, the Greek Mysteries penetrated into the inner being of Man. One may indeed say: Just as in external Nature various regions of the Earth bear various kinds of vegetation, so in the course of human development in the different regions of the Earth the most manifold influences upon Man appear from the side of the spiritual world.

If we were now to proceed Eastward—as we shall be doing in the course of the next few days in our study of historical connections—we should find there many other forms of the Mysteries. Today, however, since all our visitors are not yet here, rather than start on something new, I will add to what we have already been considering. Looking back on the evolution of man we may describe it as a threefold development, as it appears with all clarity to the Imaginative consciousness. I say the ‘Imaginative’ consciousness, for by extending the epochs of which I am about to speak further and further into the past, we should of course arrive at a greater number than the threefold; and it would be the same if we were to penetrate farther into the future. Today, however, we will take for our study those middle stages of human evolution which do not appear first to Inspiration, but quite clearly even to Imagination. We will consider these today from a particular standpoint.

As late as the Egyptian epoch mankind was still at the stage when for the European-African as well as for the Asiatic peoples there was for the consciousness of man no such thing as what we call matter. There was no external coarse substance of any kind for human consciousness, much less those abstractions which we now call carbon, hydrogen, sulphur, and so on. There were none of these things; everything in outer Nature was immediately seen as the embodiment of divine-spiritual Beings who manifest themselves throughout the whole of Nature. If today we go into the hills and pick up a stone, we look upon it as a substance like any other. Nothing at all comes into our consciousness such as came into the consciousness of the ancient Egyptian and Oriental.

If we today stand before a man and look, let us say, at his finger, we do not consider what we find there as human finger to be an object just like any other. We regard it as belonging to the human organism as a v/hole. If we were to look, for example, at the last joint of the index finger, we could not do otherwise than speak of it as a part of a whole organism. Thus it was for the consciousness of the ancient Egyptians; and thus too it was for the consciousness of the ancient Orientals. If they came upon a stone and took it up, it was not for them merely a stone as it would be for us today; it was not ordinary earthly substance at all; it was a part of the divine body which the Earth appeared to them to be. Men of old regard the outer surface of the Earth just as we in our consciousness regard the human skin. Again, we may meet a man, and become conscious that he reminds us of someone else we already know, who is perhaps not now present; and if it afterwards transpires that the person we met is the brother or sister of the other, then we see at once : these two arc of the same flesh and blood, they belong in a special physical way to one another. When the ancient Greek or Oriental raised his eyes to Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and then looked at the Earth, he saw in the Earth the divine body of the God of the Earth, but at the same time he saw also in the Earth the sister or brother of the planets—in short, he saw a family likeness to the planets which revolve out there in space around the Earth,—Jupiter, Mars, Saturn.

Thus, in their perception of the Cosmos as a whole, and in their perception of the Earth as part of the Cosmos, there was for these ancient people something of soul and spirit. You must picture to yourselves what an utterly different experience this was from the experience modern man has in his perception. It means something, indeed, to gaze at the divine body of the Earth, and to see in the Earth a member of the great family of the planets of the Universe! The people of old did indeed think of the Universe as God-enfilled. For them not only was the whole Earth filled with the Gods, but the great planetary world-bodies, each single planet—all were God-enfilled. In stone and tree, in river and rock, in cloud and lightning, some spiritual being was revealed. This consciousness was awake in wide circles of people on the Earth, and this consciousness was intensified in the various forms of the Mysteries to be found here and there on the Earth.

To turn now to the Greek nature, at the time when the external political greatness of Greece sank into a kind of chaos and the Macedonian power arose, we find a new current flowing into human knowledge. It is what we came to know last time as Aristotelianism, as that which Alexander the Great in a spiritual connection had made his task. When we look at the culmination of the greatness of Greece on the one hand, and on the other the fall of Greece and the rise of Macedonia, we are faced, first of all, with what external history tells us, which is in reality a mere legend. But we can also see something else. In the subconsciousness of the deeper thinkers we perceive an impulse which came from those Mysteries to which Aristotle was very near—despite the fact that he never spoke of them outwardly. They were those Mysteries which, in the deeper sense, awakened to full life in their hearers the consciousness that the whole world was a theogony, a divine process of being, and that we see the world in an altogether illusory way if we believe anything comes to being in the world other than Gods alone. It is Gods who are manifested in the beings and entities of the world. It is Gods who have experiences in the world, it is Gods who perform deeds. And what we see in clouds, what we hear in thunder, what we behold in lightning, what we see on the Earth in rivers and mountains, in the mineral formations—all are revelations, expressions of the coming-into-being of the destinies of the Gods hidden behind them. And what appears externally as cloud, lightning, thunder, trees or forest, mountains or stream, is nothing else than a revelation everywhere of Gods’ existence—-just as the skin of a man reveals his inner nature of soul. And if everywhere there are Gods, then, as the pupils of the Mysteries were taught in Northern Greece, one must differentiate between the lesser Gods who are in single Nature-beings and Nature-processes, and the greater Gods who manifest as Beings of the Sun, of Mars, of Mercury, and of a fourth who cannot be made externally visible in an image or a form.

Those were the great Gods, the great planetary Gods, who were presented to man in such a way that his gaze was led out into the cosmic expanse, to see with his eyes, to see too with his whole heart, what lives in Sun, Mars, Mercury—yes, and what lives not only out there in one little circle in cosmic space but what lives everywhere in cosmic space. This was what was first of all revealed to man.

And then, after what I may call a majestic impulse had been awakened in the pupil of the Mysteries of Northern Greece, in that his gaze was directed out to the planetary spheres—then this insight was deepened within him in such a way that the eye was, so to speak, taken hold of by the heart, so that he might see with the soul. Then the pupil understood why, on the altar facing him, three symbolically formed vessels had been placed.

Here in Dornach we once introduced a portrayal of these vessels in a Eurythmy performance of Faust. They were presented there exactly as they appeared in the Samothracian Mysteries of Northern Greece. The important fact is that with these vessels in their whole symbolic form there was associated an act of consecration, an act of sacrifice. A kind of incense was put into them and lighted, and as the smoke streamed up, three words (of which we shall speak tomorrow) were uttered with mantric power into this smoke by the Father who was celebrating; and there appeared the forms of the three Kabiri. It happened in the following way. The human breath, as it was exhaled, took shape through the mantric word that was spoken, and communicated its form to the ascending, evaporating substance that had been incorporated in the symbolic jars. When in this way the pupil learned to read in the stream his own breath, to read what the stream of his breath wrote in the smoke, he learned at the same time to read what the mysterious planets said to him from out the wide Universe. For now he knew: as the one Kabir was formed through the mantric word and its power, so in actuality was Mercury; as the second Kabir was formed, so in actuality was Mars; and as the third Kabir was formed, so in actuality was Apollo, the Sun.

When we look at those fashion plate figures—if you will forgive such plain speaking—such as we see only too often in the galleries, of the later Greek plastic art, and which are only so greatly admired because people have no idea of the majesty from which they have declined, when we direct our gaze to those figures of an Apollo, a Mars, a Mercury, we must look at them with the gaze with which Goethe looked, during his Italian journey; for then we may gain some idea of what Greek art really was in the productions that are now lost—lost and destroyed along with so much else in the first centuries of the Christian era, in the frightful devastation which befell those times. If we look penetratingly at those late Greek plastic figures, held to be so great (and rightly on the one hand), as pointing the way, but on the other hand wrongly because they are mere imitative reproductions of the earlier—if we look through them back to that from which they arose, we see how in the older Greek times it was nothing less than the revelations accompanying the sacrificial rites that were reproduced in art—revelations that in those earlier times were even more majestic and grand than later on in the Kabiri Mysteries of Samothrace. We look back into times when the mantric word was uttered into the incense smoke, and the true figures of Apollo, of Mars, and of Mercury appeared.

Those were times when man would not say, in the abstract: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was a God—for then he could say something quite different. He could say: In me the outgoing breath takes shape, and inasmuch as it shapes itself in an ordered way, it shows itself as an image of cosmic creating; for it creates for me, out of the sacrificial smoke, forms which are for me living fines of writing, telling me what the planetary worlds would say to me.

When the pupil of the Kabiri Mysteries at Samothrace approached the gates of the places of Initiation, then through the instruction he had received the feeling came to him: Now I am entering the place that holds for me the magic acts of the celebrating Father. (The Initiate who celebrated in these Mysteries was called the Father.) What did the magic power of this celebrating Father reveal to his pupil? Through what was laid within man by the Gods, through the power of speech, the priest-magician and sage wrote into the sacrificial smoke the writing which expressed the secrets of the Universe.

Thus it was that the pupil, as he approached the gate, said in his heart: I am entering that place within whose shelter dwells a powerful Spirit, within whose shelter dwell the greater Gods, who unveil on Earth the secrets of the Universe through the sacrificial acts of man.—There, my dear friends, words were spoken and a writing written that appealed not only to the intelligence but laid claim to the whole man. In the Samothracian Mysteries there was still present something of a knowledge that is today quite dimmed. Modern man is perfectly able to speak with truth something of what he feels a quartz crystal to be like, he can say what hair feels like, or the human skin, or the fur of an animal, he can say how silk or velvet feels to him. Modern man has the capacity of realising such things through his feeling. In the Samothracian Mysteries something still existed by means of which man could truly say how the Gods let themselves be felt. For the sense of feeling, the sense of touch, was still capable of that of which in ancient times it had always been capable; it was still able to feel the spiritual, to touch the Gods.

And now the wonderful thing is this. We must certainly go back to very ancient times even to speak of how man could say with truth: I know through my finger-tips what the Gods feel like. In the Samothracian Mysteries, however, man had another way of touching the Gods. It was as follows:

When the priest-magician spoke the words into the smoke rising from the incense, when he intoned the words into the exhaled breath, then in the outgoing breath he felt as man otherwise feels when he stretches out the hand to touch; and as one knows that one touches differently with the fingertips in passing them over different substances—in feeling velvet, or cat’s fur, or the human skin,—so did the Samothracian priest-magician perceive with the outgoing breath; he perceived the exhalation which he breathed out towards the incense smoke as an expression of something coming out of himself, he felt it as an organ of touch reaching towards the incense smoke. He felt the smoke, and in the smoke he felt the great Gods, the Kabiri coming to meet him. He felt how the smoke forced itself and how the forms there shaping themselves came into the exhaled breath, so that the exhaled breath felt: here is something spherical, there is angularity, there again something is catching hold of me. The whole divine figure of the Kabir was touched and felt by the breath clothed in the form of the word. With the speech issuing from the heart the Samothracian wise men ‘touched’ the Kabiri, that is, the greater Gods descending to them in the smoke of the incense; it was a living interchange between the word within man and the word without in cosmic space.

When the initiating Father led the pupil to the sacrificial altar, and, step by step, taught him how man can feel with speech, and when the pupil progressed further and achieved for himself this ‘feeling with speech’, he came at last to that stage of inner experience in which he first had clear consciousness of the form of Mercury or Hermes, of Apollo, and of Ares or Mars. It was as if the consciousness were wholly raised up out of the body, as if that which the pupil earlier knew as the content of his head, had gone up above his head, as if the heart were located in a new place, being thrust up out of the breast into the head. Then, in the one who had in this way really gone out beyond himself, there arose a knowledge that inwardly formed itself into the words: Thus do the Kabiri, the greater Gods, will thee! From that time the pupil knew how Mercury lived in his limbs, the Sun in his heart, Mars in his speech.

So you see it was not by any means only natural processes and beings in the outer world that were presented to the pupil in ancient times. What was presented to him was something neither one-sidedly naturalistic, nor one-sidedly moral, but he was given something wherein Morality and Nature flowed into one. That was the secret of the Samothracian world—that to the pupil it was granted to have the consciousness: Nature is Spirit, Spirit is Nature.

To those times which found their last echo in the cult of the Kabiri, is to be traced the insight which brings earthly substances into connection with the Heavens. In olden times, when one saw that red-brown mineral with the coppery sheen, which we call copper, one could not simply say as we say today: ‘That is copper, that is a constituent of the Earth.’ It could not be thought of in this way. For the ancients it was no constituent of the Earth. They said: ‘Wherever copper is manifest, there is manifest a deed of Venus on the Earth. The Earth has only suffered rocks and stones to appear, such as sandstone, or chalk, in order to take up in her lap what the Heavens have planted on to the Earth.’ As little as we now should venture to say of a seed that it had merely grown out of the Earth—-just as little in those times would one have been able to say that copper ore was a constituent of the Earth. One had to say: The Earth that is here with its sandstone, or any other stone, is the ground within which something of a metallic nature has been planted by some planet. The metal is a seed planted in the Earth by a planet. Everything within the Earth was viewed as proceeding from the influence of the Heavens upon the Earth. Today the Earth and its substances are described as you may see it done in any mineralogical or geological work, and as it would never have been in the science of the ancients. In those times when man let his gaze wander over the Earth, looking at a substance meant looking up to Heaven and there in the Heavens beholding the essence and reality of the substance.

Copper, tin, lead, only apparently lie in the Earth; they are seeds planted in the Earth-existence during the time of Old Sun and Old Moon. This was still the teaching of the Kabiri in the Samothracian Mysteries. And this it was ultimately that worked upon Aristotle and Alexander—if only as an atmosphere or mood of knowledge. And then a beginning was made for something quite different.

Man did not, with his insight, come right down at once on to the Earth; he went through an intermediary stage. Even in the echoes of those ancient times, in the Samothracian Mysteries, if men wished to describe the metals of the Earth or other earthly substances such as sulphur or phosphorus, it was in fact the Heavens they were describing, just as one describes a plant when one wants to know the nature of a seed.

If you have a seed of corn before you, you cannot recognise its nature and kind unless you know the plant. What would you do with a seed which looks like this, for example, if you did not know what the aniseed plant looks like? What then, the men of old would have asked, would you make of the copper appearing in the Earth, if you did not know what Venus looks like, in spirit, soul and body, up there in the Heavens?

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From the knowledge of the Heavens, gradually a knowledge of the environment of the Earth, a knowledge of the atmosphere, was gained. When man regarded what was of the Earth, instead of describing what the stars are, in their essence and nature, he looked to a being of Earth and said to himself; There lives in it first of all what we see in the firm soil; and there lives in it that also which we see as fluid with the tendency to form into drops, and there lives within it too what tends to spread out on all sides, the aeriform, which lives, for example, in human breath and speech. And then there lives in it the fiery element which decomposes the single being so that from the scattered, disintegrated parts a new being may arise. Thus did man behold the elements in every earthly formation.

And as in the ancient Mysteries men looked to the Salt—true, it is also cosmic in nature, but it is formed and moulded by the Earth—as they looked to everything of a salt-nature and saw in it that which Mother Earth has brought to meet the metals, so they looked on the other hand to Mercury, and they saw the Mercurial in that which comes from out of the Universe and is destined to become metal.

It is really so utterly childish to try to give descriptions, as modern man does, of what was thought of as Mercury in olden times! Persistently in the background is the idea that by Mercury, even in the Middle Ages, something like quicksilver, some single metal, could be intended. This is not the case; no single metal alone is denoted. Mercury means every metal in so far as it stands under the influence of the whole Cosmos. For what would copper look like if the Cosmos alone, in its periphery, worked upon it? Copper would be globular like quicksilver. If the Cosmos alone affected it, what would lead be like? Lead would be globular, like quicksilver. What of tin, if it were affected only by the Cosmos? Tin would be globular. Every metal if affected only by the Cosmos would be quicksilver. All metals are Mercury in so far as the Cosmos acts upon them. But what about Mercury, the actual present-day Mercury which still takes on a globular form on the Earth? What, then, is it?

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I will tell you. The other metals—let us say, lead, copper, tin, iron—have progressed beyond the globular form. If the whole Earth were still under the influence of the spherical Cosmos all metals would be mercurial. They have progressed beyond the mercurial form. Today they crystallise into other forms. Only the true quicksilver, in the present-day sense of the word, has remained at that stage. What did the ancients and even the mediaeval alchemists say of quicksilver? They said: copper, tin, iron, lead are the good metals which have progressed with Providence. Quicksilver is the Lucifer among the metals, for it has remained at an earlier form. Thus it was in earlier times; when the terrestrial was spoken of in this way, in truth men were really speaking of the celestial.

Thence could men come to speak of that which lies between the periphery and the Earth. Between the periphery and the Earth there lies first, below, the Earth itself, then the watery element, the aeriform, and the fiery.

Thus did the ancients see everything on the Earth in the aspect of the Heavens. And thus did the men of mediaeval times, which came to an end in the first third of the fourteenth century, see everything in the aspect of the surrounding atmosphere. Then, in the fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries came the great change. Man, in his outlook, fell down right on to the Earth. And now to his consciousness the elements of water, air, fire, split up; they split up into sulphur, carbon, hydrogen and so forth. Man sees everything in its terrestrial aspect.

Therewith begin the times which I indicated when describing the fading of the Hibernian Mysteries—the times when man comprehended the Earth with his knowledge, but the Heavens became for him a matter of mathematics. He calculated the size of the stars, their movements, their distance away, and so on. The Heavens became an abstraction to him.

Nor was it only the Heavens which became an abstraction. The reflection of the Heavens in the living human being is his head, and what man can learn of the Heavens is in his head. Since man has learnt to know only the mathematics of the Heavens, that is, the logical and abstract, therefore from this time onwards only the logical and abstract lived in his head—only that which is of the nature of concepts and ideas. Man lost all possibility to receive what is of soul and spirit into his life of concepts and ideas. Then, when the spirit was sought for, there began that great struggle between what man could attain with the idea-content of his head, with his brain-content, and what the Gods desired to reveal to him from the Heavens. This struggle was fought out at its fiercest, and in its grandest aspects, in Rosicrucianism—in the true forms of what are called the Rosicrucian Mysteries in the Middle Ages.¹ There the helplessness of modern man was perceived as a preparation for true knowledge. For, even then, in circles of true Rosicrucian Initiation something very powerful made itself felt. And it was this. The pupil became—not abstractly, but inwardly—livingly illumined to perceive: As modern man you can penetrate only to the world of ideas; thereby, however, you lose the very essence of your being as Man.

And the pupil felt that what the new age was giving him could not lead him on to that which was his own true being. He felt: Either you must despair of knowledge or you must go through a kind of death of the pride in abstraction.

The Rosicrucian, the true Rosicrucian pupil, felt as if the master had given him a blow on the cheek, to indicate to him that the abstractions of the modern brain are not suited to penetrate into the spiritual worlds, and that he must make a recantation of the merely abstract, if he would enter those worlds.

That was indeed a great moment of preparation for what we may call the Rosicrucian Initiation.

• 1. See Rosicrucianism and Modem Initiation. Six lectures given at Dornach, 6th to 13th January, 1924. (Rudolf Steiner Press.)

[Before the lecture Rudolf Steiner officially Announces his Proposal for the Composition of the Executive Council. See GA 259]

The Mysteries were, as I said yesterday, spread in varied form over many regions of the Earth; and every region, according to its population and other conditions, had its special form of the Mysteries. But now there came a time which was of extraordinary significance for the Mysteries. It was the time in the Earth’s evolution which began some centuries after the foundation of Christianity.

In my book Christianity as Mystical Fact, it can be seen that what happened on Golgotha gathered together, in a certain sense, what had previously been distributed in the various Mysteries throughout the world. The Mystery of Golgotha, however, differs from all the other Mysteries which I have been describing, in that the Mystery of Golgotha stands so to speak on the stage of history before the whole world, while the older Mysteries were enacted in the obscurity of the inner temples and sent out their impulses into the world from the dim twilight of these inner temples.

If we look into the oriental Mysteries or into those I described to you as the Mysteries of Ephesus in Asia Minor, or again if we look into the Greek Mysteries, be it the Chthonic, or the Eleusinian, or those I spoke of yesterday, the Samothracian, or finally if we look into those Mysteries I have characterised as the Hibernian—everywhere we see how the Mystery in question was enacted in the obscurity of the inner temple, and thence sent out its impulses into the world. Whoever understands the Mystery of Golgotha—and merely to know the historical information available is not to understand it—whoever really understands the Mystery of Golgotha has understood thereby all the Mysteries which had gone before.

The Mysteries which preceded the Mystery of Golgotha, and culminated in it, all had a unique quality in respect of the feelings aroused by them. In the Mysteries many tragic things took place. He who attained to Initiation was obliged to undergo suffering and pain. You know these things; they have been described by me time and again. Before the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, however, if a candidate was to go through an Initiation and was warned beforehand that he would have to face manifold tests and trials, to suffer pain and sorrow, he would still have said: ‘I will go through all the fire in the world, for it leads to the Light, it leads into the Light-regions of the spirit where I may attain to a vision of what can be only dimly divined in ordinary human consciousness on Earth.’ It was really a great longing, and a longing at the same time full of joy, that took possession of one who sought the way to the older Mysteries; he was filled with a deep and sublime joy.

Then came an intervening time. In the lectures that are to follow in a few days I shall have to characterise these things from the historical standpoint. The intervening time led ultimately to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when, as you know, a new epoch began in human evolution. And now we find an altogether different mood in those who are setting out on a search for knowledge of the higher worlds.

We will first of all look once again, by means of the Akashic Records, into the ancient Mysteries. There we find joyful faces, deeply serious but filled notwithstanding with joy. If I were to describe to you a scene which even in these days can be brought to light again from the Akashic Records, a scene for example in the Samothracian Mysteries, I should have to say that the countenances of those who entered the innermost temple of the Kabiri, were full of depth and seriousness but were nevertheless joyful, happy countenances.

But now came the intervening time. And afterwards we come to that which had not exactly a temple, but was rather a gathering together in the moral or spiritual sense, as indeed was already the case also in the ancient Mysteries. We come to what is often described as the Rosicrucianism of the Middle Ages.

If we want to characterise the pupil of Rosicrucianism in the way I have just done for the ancient Mysteries, we shall have to say something very different of the pupil of the Rosicrucian Mysteries. For those who strove after knowledge in mediaeval times, those who endeavoured to make research into the spiritual world, bore not joyful but very tragic countenances. And so true is this that we may say: Those who did not bear a deeply tragic expression were certainly not sincere in their efforts. There was abundant reason why such men should wear a tragic expression on their countenances.

Let me now give you a picture of the way in which those who strove after knowledge learned gradually to relate themselves differently to the secrets of Nature and of the Spirit.

Yesterday I demonstrated to you how the phenomena and processes of Nature were for the man of olden time nothing less than divine. They would as little have thought of treating a phenomenon of Nature apart by itself, as we should think of considering a movement of the human eyes as a thing in itself and not as a revelation of the soul and spirit of man. The phenomenon of Nature was treated as an expression of the God who revealed himself through it. For the man of olden time the surface of the Earth was as truly the skin of the divine Earth-Being as is our skin the skin of an ensouled human being. We really have not the least understanding of the mood of soul of a man of antiquity, unless we know that he spoke in this way of the Earth as a body of the Gods, and of the other planets as brothers and sisters of the Earth.

But now this direct and immediate relation to the things and processes of Nature, which saw in the single object or phenomenon the revelation of the divine, underwent a change. That which is divine in the phenomena of Nature had, so to speak, withdrawn. Supposing it could happen to one of you that people saw in you merely the body—as we do the Earth—neutral, soul-less—it would be horrible!

But this horrible thing has really come about for knowledge in recent times. And the men of knowledge of the Middle Ages felt the horror of it. For as I said, the divine had withdrawn, for man’s knowledge, from natural phenomena. And whereas in ancient times the objects and processes of Nature were revelations of the divine, now comes this intermediary time, when they are only pictures, no longer revelations but only pictures of the divine.

The man of today, however, has not even any right idea of how the processes of Nature can be regarded as pictures of the divine. Let me give you an example, one that is quite familiar to anyone who knows a smattering of chemistry; it will show you what sort of conception of science these men had, who did at any rate still view the objects and processes of Nature as pictures of the divine.

We will take a quite simple experiment which is continually being made by chemists today. You have a retort and you put into it oxalic acid which you can procure from clover, and you mix the oxalic acid with an equal part of glycerine. Then you heat the mixture, and you obtain carbonic acid. The carbonic acid is given off, and what remains behind is formic acid. The oxalic acid is transformed by the loss of carbonic acid into formic acid. This experiment can easily be made in a laboratory: you can see it performed there before you, and you can look upon it as a modern chemist does, namely as a complete and finished process.

Not so the mediaeval man. He looked in two directions. He said: Oxalic acid is found especially in clover; but it occurs in a certain quantity in the whole organism of man, in particular in the part of the organism that comprises the organs of digestion—spleen, liver, and so on. In the region of the digestive tract you have to reckon with processes that are under the influence of oxalic acid. And the oxalic acid that is present in a higher degree in the lower part of the body, is acted upon by the human organism itself in a way that is similar to the action of the glycerine in the retort. Here too we have a glycerine action. And note the remarkable result: under the influence of the glycerine action the transformed product of oxalic acid, namely formic acid, goes over into the lung and into the breath. And man breathes out carbonic acid. You send out your breath, and with it you send out the carbonic acid. You can imagine instead of the retort the digestive tract, and where the formic acid is collected, you can imagine the lungs, and higher up you have once more carbonic acid, in the air breathed out from the lungs.

Man is however not a retort! The retort demonstrates in a dead way what takes place in man in a living way. The expression is absolutely correct, for if man never developed oxalic acid in his digestive tract he would simply not be able to live. That is to say, his etheric body would have no sort of basis in his organism. If man did not change the oxalic acid into formic acid, his astral body would have no basis in his organism. Man needs oxalic acid for his ether body and formic acid for his astral body. Or rather, he does not need the substances, he needs the work, the inner activity that goes on in the oxalic acid process and in the formic acid process.

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This is of course something which the chemist of today has yet to discover; he still speaks of what goes on in man as if it were all merely external processes.

This was then the first question put by the student of Natural Science in mediaeval times, as he sat before his retort. He asked himself: Such is the external process that I observe; now what is the nature of the similar process in man?

And the second question was this: What is the same process like in the great world of Nature outside? In the case of the example I have chosen, the researcher of those days would have said as follows: I look out over the Earth and see the world of plants. In all this plant world I find oxalic acid. True, it occurs in a marked degree in wood sorrel and in all kinds of clover; but in reality it is distributed over the whole of the vegetation, if sometimes only in homeopathic doses. Everywhere there is a touch of it. The ants find it even in decaying wood.

The ant-swarms, which we humans often find so troublesome, change the oxalic acid that occurs all over the fields and meadows and is found indeed wherever there is vegetation, into formic acid. We continually breathe in the formic acid out of the air, although in very small doses, and we are indebted for it to the work of the insects who change the oxalic acid of the plants into formic acid.

Thus the mediaeval student would say to himself: In man this metamorphosis of oxalic acid into formic acid, takes place. And in all the life of Nature the same metamorphosis is present. These two questions presented themselves to the student with every single process he carried out in his laboratory. There was besides something else most characteristic of the mediaeval student, something that has today been completely lost. Today we think: Why, anyone can do research in a laboratory! It does not matter in the very least whether he is a good or bad man. All the formulae are there ready; you have only to analyse or synthesise. Anyone can do it—In the days, however, when Nature was approached quite differently, when men saw in Nature the working of the divine, of the divine in Man, as well as of the divine in the great world of Nature, then it was required of the man who did research that he should at the same time be a man of piety. He must be apt and ready to direct his soul and spirit to the divine-spiritual in the world.

And it was a recognised fact that if a man prepared himself for his experiments as though for a sacred rite, if he were inwardly warmed in soul by the pious exercises he went through beforehand, then he would find that the experiments led him inward to the revelation of the human being and outward to the investigation of external Nature. Inner purity and goodness were regarded as a preparation for research.

I have now given you a description of the transition from the spirit of the ancient Mysteries to Mysteries such as were able to exist in the Middle Ages. If we are speaking out of what was preserved as tradition, then we can say that a great deal of the content of the ancient Mysteries found a place also in the Mysteries of mediaeval times. Nevertheless it was impossible in the Middle Ages to attain to the greatness and sublimity even of the Mysteries that survived comparatively late, such as the Samothracian or the Hibernian.

As a tradition we have still in our day what we call Astrology. As a tradition, too, has come down to us what we call Alchemy. For all that, we know nothing whatever today of the conditions of a true astrological or of a true alchemical knowledge.

It is quite impossible to come to Astrology by empirical research or thought. If you had suggested such a thing to those who were initiated in the ancient Mysteries, they would have replied: You might as well try to get to know a secret a man keeps from you, by empirical research or by sitting down to think about it. Suppose there were a secret known to one man and no one else, and someone were to contend that he was going to find it out by making experiments or by thinking about it. It would of course be absurd. He can learn the secret only by being told it. A man of antiquity would have found it equally absurd to try to arrive at a knowledge of astrological matters by thinking about them or by making experiments or observations. For he knew that it is the Gods alone, or as they were called later, the Cosmic Intelligences, who know the secrets of the starry worlds. They knew them and it is they alone who can tell them to man. And so man has to pursue the path of knowledge that leads him to a good understanding and relationship with the Cosmic Intelligences.

A true and genuine Astrology depends on man’s ability to understand the Cosmic Intelligences. And upon what does a true Alchemy depend? Not upon doing research after the manner of a chemist of today, but upon being able to perceive within the Nature processes, the Nature Spirits, upon being able to come to an understanding with the Nature Spirits so that they tell one how the process takes place, and what really happens. Astrology was in olden times no spinning of theories or fancies, neither was it mere research through observation; it was an intercourse with Cosmic Intelligences. And Alchemy was an intercourse with Nature Spirits. It is essential to know this. If you had gone to an Egyptian of olden times or more especially to a Chaldean, he would have told you: I have my observatory for the purpose of holding conversations with the Cosmic Intelligences; I hold conversations with them by means of my instruments, for my spirit is able to speak with the help of my instruments.—And the pious student of Nature in the Middle Ages who stood before his retort and investigated on the one hand the inner being of man, and on the other the weaving, moving life of great Nature—he would have told you; I make experiments, because through the experiments the Nature Spirits speak to me. The Alchemist was the man who conjured up the Nature Spirits. What was taken for Alchemy later was no more than a decadent product.

The Astrology of olden times owed its origin to intercourse with the Cosmic Intelligences. But by the time of the first centuries after the rise of Christianity, the ancient Astrology, that is to say, the intercourse with the Cosmic Intelligences, was gone. When the stars stood in opposition, or in conjunction, and so forth, then reckoning was made accordingly. Men had still the tradition that was left from the days of old. Alchemy on the other hand, remained. Intercourse with the Nature Spirits was still possible in later times.

And when we look into a Rosicrucian alchemical laboratory of the fourteenth or even the fifteenth century, we find there instruments not unlike those of the present day; at any rate, one can gain some idea of them from instruments in use today. But when we look with spiritual vision into these Rosicrucian Mysteries, we find everywhere the earnest and deeply tragic personality, of whom Faust is a later and indeed a lesser development. For in comparison with the student who stands in the Rosicrucian laboratory with his deeply tragic countenance, who has so to speak done with life—in comparison with him, the Faust of Goethe is something like a newspaper print of the Apollo of Belvedere as compared with the real Apollo when he appeared at the altar of the Kabiri, taking form in the clouds of sacrificial smoke.

It is verily so; when one looks into these alchemical laboratories of the eighth to the thirteenth centuries, one is confronted with a very deep tragedy. The tragic mood and tone that belonged to the serious and earnest people of the Middle Ages is not to be found recorded in the history books, for the writers of those books have not looked into the depths of the soul of men.

But the genuine students and researchers, who made investigations with retorts to learn about Man and about the wide world of Nature, are none other than glorified Faustian characters in the early Middle Ages. They are all deeply conscious of one thing. They can all say: ‘When we experiment, then the Nature Spirits speak to us, the Spirits of the Earth, the Spirits of the Water, the Spirits of the Fire, the Spirits of the Air. We hear their whispered murmurs, we hear their strangely wandering sounds, beginning with a humming and growing ever into harmony and melody that again turns back upon itself, melody unfolding melody. We hear them when Nature processes take place, when we stand before a retort.’ In all piety of heart, they steeped themselves in the process that was taking place. For example in the very process of which we have spoken, where they experienced the metamorphosis of oxalic acid into formic acid, when they asked the question of the process, and the Nature Spirit gave the answer, then it was so that they could as it were make use of what the Nature Spirit gave for the inner being of man. For then the retort began to speak in colour. And they were able to feel how the Nature Spirits of the earthy and of the watery rise up from the oxalic acid and assert themselves, and how the whole passes over into a humming melody, into a harmonious shaping of melodies that then again turns back into itself. Such was their experience of the process that results in formic acid and carbonic acid.

And if one is able to enter in this living way into the process and feel how it passes from colour into tone and music, then one can enter also with a deep and living knowledge into what the process has to tell concerning great Nature and concerning Man. Then one knows: The things and processes of Nature reveal something else, something that is spoken by the Gods; for they are pictures of the divine. And one can turn the knowledge to good account for man.

Throughout these times the knowledge of healing was closely and intimately bound up with the knowledge of the whole Universe.

Let us imagine we had the task of building up a therapy based on such perceptions. We have a human being before us. The same complex of external symptoms can of course be an expression of the most varied conditions of disease. With a method however that arises from this kind of knowledge—I do not say it can be done today as it was done in the Middle Ages for today of course it has to be quite different—but with such a method we would be able to say: If a certain precise complex is manifest, then it shows that the human being is unable to transform enough oxalic acid into formic acid. He has somehow become too weak to do it.—We would perhaps be able to provide a remedy by giving him formic acid in some form or other, so that we bring help to him from outside, when he cannot himself produce the formic acid.

Now it might easily happen that in the case of two or three people for whom you have made the diagnosis that they cannot themselves produce the formic acid—when you treat them with formic acid, it works quite satisfactorily; but in a third case it gives no help at all. Directly you give oxalic acid, however, the patient is at once better. Why is this? Because the deficiency in force lies in another place, it lies where the oxalic acid has to be changed into formic acid. In such a case, if we were to think on the lines of a researcher of the Middle Ages, we should say: Yes, under certain circumstances the human organism, when given formic acid, will reply: I do not want it. I do not ask for it in the lung or other organ, I do not need it brought into the breath and the circulation. I want to be treated in quite another place, namely in the region of the oxalic acid, for I want myself to change the oxalic acid into formic acid. I will not have the formic acid. I want to make it myself.

Such are the distinctions that show themselves. Naturally a great deal of swindling and stupidity has gone under the name of Alchemy, but for the genuine student who was worthy of the name, this was always the subject of his research: the healthy nature of the human being studied in connection with diseased conditions.

And it all led to nothing less than intercourse with the Nature Spirits. The researcher of mediaeval times had the feeling: I am in touch with the Nature Spirits, I converse with them. There had been a time when men have had intercourse with the Cosmic Intelligences. That is barred to me.

And now, since the Nature Spirits too have withdrawn from human knowledge, and the things and processes of Nature have become the abstractions that they are for the physicist and chemist of today, we no longer find the tragic mood of the student of the Middle Ages. For it was the Nature Spirits who awakened in him the yearning after the Cosmic Intelligences. These had been accessible to the men of antiquity; but the mediaeval student could no longer find the way to them with the means of knowledge at his disposal. He could only find the way to the Nature Spirits. The very fact that he did perceive the Nature Spirits, that he was able to draw them into the field of knowledge, made it so tragic for him that he was not able to approach the Cosmic Intelligences by whom the Nature Spirits were themselves inspired. He perceived what the Nature Spirits knew; but he could not penetrate through them to the Cosmic Intelligences beyond. That was the feeling he had.

Fundamentally speaking, the cause of this tragedy was that while the mediaeval alchemists still had knowledge of the Nature Spirits they had lost the knowledge of the Cosmic Intelligences. And this in turn was the cause of the fact that they were unable to attain to a complete knowledge of man, although they were still able to divine where such a complete knowledge of man was to be found. When Faust says:

‘And here, poor fool, with all my lore, I stand, no wiser than before.’

we may really take the words as reminiscent of the feeling that prevailed in many a laboratory of the Middle Ages. This teaching gave men the Nature Spirits, but the Nature Spirits gave them no true knowledge of the soul.

Today we have the task to find again much that has been lost even to tradition. These students of mediaeval times had still the tradition, they still heard tell of repeated Earth-lives. As they stood in their laboratories, however, the Nature Spirits spoke of all manner of things in connection with substances or, by way of description, of the happenings of the world, but never once did they speak of repeated Earth-lives. They took no interest in the subject at all.

And now, my dear friends, I have placed before you some of the thoughts that gave rise to the fundamentally tragic mood of the mediaeval student of Nature. He is indeed a remarkable figure, this Rosicrucian student of the early Middle Ages, standing in his laboratory with his deeply serious and sorrowful countenance, not sceptical of human understanding but filled with a profound uncertainty of heart, with no weakness of will but with the consciousness: I have indeed the will! But how am I to guide it, so that it may take the path that leads to the Cosmic Intelligences?

Countless were the questions that arose in the heart of the mediaeval student of Nature. The monologue at the beginning of Faust, with all that follows, is no more than a weak reflection of his numberless questionings and strivings.

Tomorrow we will look a little further at this earnest student with his deeply-moving countenance, who is really the ancestor of Goethe’s figure of Faust.

[Before the lecture Rudolf Steiner gives Instructions for the Christmas Conference and Reiterates his Proposal Regarding the Future Leadership of the Society. See GA 259]

We will utilise the last lecture before the Course which is to be given here, by bringing together what has been said about the various Mysteries belonging to this or that region of the Earth, and attempting to describe to you, at any rate from one point of view, the very nature and being of the Mysteries, in the form they took in the Middle Ages, approximately from the tenth to the fifteenth centuries.

I do not speak of this epoch because it is particularly complete in itself but because it can be used to show the form human striving was taking during that period in the most civilised parts of the Earth. The spiritual striving of that period is often described under the name of the Mysteries of the Rosicrucians. This designation is in a certain sense quite justifiable, but it must not be confused with the charlatan element we often meet in literature without realising how much charlatanry there is in the things of which we read. The name ‘Rosicrucian’ must direct our attention to that deeply earnest striving for knowledge which existed during these centuries in almost every region of Europe, Central, Western and Southern. We must realise that the figure of Faust as described by Goethe, with all his deep striving of soul, with all his earnest effort, is a later figure, no longer anything like as profound in soul as many a researcher to be found in the mediaeval laboratories. These are individuals of whom nothing reaches us by way of history but who nevertheless laboured earnestly during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. I spoke in the last lecture of the tragic note that predominates in the investigators of this epoch. The outstanding trait in them is the feeling that they must needs strive after the highest knowledge that can be creatively active in man; and yet they felt, not only that they could never reach this highest goal but that from a certain point of view the very striving after it gives ground for serious doubt.

I have said that we do not find among these scientists in their alchemical laboratories a knowledge that is ready-made and theoretical but a knowledge that is intimately connected with the whole human being, with the innermost feelings and deepest longings of the heart; it was indeed a knowledge of the heart.

What was its origin? You will most readily understand it if I try now to give you a picture of this tragic scepticism of the mediaeval investigators. Let me first direct your attention once again to the form taken by human cognition on the Earth in very ancient times.

The most ancient form of human knowledge, intimately bound up as it was with the life of the individual human being, was not of such a nature as to lead man to look up to the planets and perceive the grandeur and sublimity of their mathematical movements, such as men reckon out and devise today. At that time, each planet, as all else spread out in the Heavens, was a living being, and not only a living, but an ensouled being, nay even a being of spirit. Men spoke constantly of the families of the planets, of the families of the heavenly bodies, for they knew that just as there exists a blood-relationship between the members of a human family, similarly there exists an inner relationship between the members of a planetary system. There was an absolute parallel between what is to be found in man and what reveals itself outside in the Cosmos.

Let us take on region of the Earth as an example, and show from that the kind of knowledge man learned to acquire in the most ancient of the Mysteries when he looked up to the Sun. At that time there still existed Mystery-sanctuaries arranged with a specially prepared skylight, so that at certain definite times of day the Sun could be seen in a diminished light. Thus you must imagine the most important chamber in many an ancient Sun Temple with a skylight in the roof and the window filled with some kind of material—not glass in our modern sense but a material through which the orb of the Sun was seen in a dim light as of twilight at a certain time of day. The pupil was prepared in his soul to observe the solar orb with the right mood and feeling. He had to make his feeling receptive and sensitive, he had to quicken the inner perception of his soul, so that when he exposed it, through his eye, to the orb of the Sun, the latter made an impression on him of which he could form a clear idea in consciousness.

Now, of course, many people today look at the Sun through smoked glass, but they are not prepared in their power of feeling to receive the impression in such a way that it remains in their soul as a very special impression. The pupil in those ancient Mysteries, however, received a very definite impression of the dimmed solar orb after he had undergone long exercises beforehand. A man who was able once to have such an impression could truly never forget it.

With this impression the pupil also gained more understanding for certain things around him than he formerly had. Thus after he had been prepared by the majestic impression made upon him by the Sun, the special quality of the substance gold was allowed to work upon him; and through this Sun-preparation, the pupil actually came to a deep understanding of the quality of gold.

When one looks into these things, it is painful to realise the triviality of our modern consciousness, when we find in so many historical works the reason why this or the other ancient philosopher allocated gold to the Sun or gave the same symbol to gold and to the Sun. Man has no longer any idea that what was thus known in those olden times, proceeded from long exercises and preparations. A pupil who looked with his whole soul, who as it were steeped his sight in this dimmed light of the Sun, was thereby prepared to understand the gold of the Earth.

How then did he understand it? His attention awoke to the fact that gold is not receptive for that which constitutes for living organisms the breath of life, namely oxygen. Many, indeed most of the other metals are thoroughly receptive to oxygen, but oxygen does not affect or alter gold. This non-receptivity, this obstinacy of gold in the face of that in which man, as you know, has his very life, made a deep impression on the pupil of the ancient Mysteries. He received the impression that gold cannot directly approach life. Now neither can the Sun approach life directly; and the pupil learned that it is well that neither gold nor the Sun can directly approach life. For then he was gradually led to realise the fact that because gold has no relationship with oxygen, the breath of life, when it is introduced in a certain dose into the human organism, it has a quite special effect. It has no relation to the etheric body, no direct relation to the astral body; but it has a direct relation to what lies in human thinking.

My dear friends, just consider how far thinking is removed from life—especially in our modern age! A man can sit like a block of wood and think quite abstractly. He can even think quite livingly in an abstract way. But on the other hand, he cannot by thinking bring about any change in his organism. Man’s thought has become more and more powerless. But this thinking is set in motion by the Ego-organisation, and gold inserted in the right dose into the human organism, can bring back power to thought. It restores to the life of thought the power to work down into the astral body and even into the etheric body; thus through the working of gold man is quickened in his thinking.

One of the secrets of these ancient Mysteries was the secret of gold in connection with the Sun. This relationship between the substance gold and the cosmic working of the Sun was perceived by the pupil of these ancient Mysteries. In a similar way the pupil was led to experience the working of the opposite pole of gold. Gold is an impulse for the quickening of human thinking, so that human thought can work down as far as into the etheric body. But what would be the opposite pole of that?

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Ego-organisation, astral body, etheric body and physical body are the members of the human organism, and we may say that through gold the Ego-organisation becomes capable of working down into the etheric body. The etheric body can then go further and work upon the physical body, but gold brings it about that one can actually hold the thoughts in all their power as far as the etheric body.

Now what is the opposite pole of this? It is an activity that manifests itself when the breath of life—oxygen—is attracted by something in man or in nature. For as gold is obstinate in the face of oxygen, repels it, will have nothing to do with it, and has therefore no direct influence on the etheric body or on the astral body but only on the thought-world of the Ego-organisation—as gold repels oxygen, so carbon on the other hand has in man a direct affinity with oxygen.

We breathe out carbonic acid gas. We make it by uniting carbon with oxygen. And the plants require carbonic acid for their life. Carbon possesses the exactly opposite property of gold.

Now carbon played a great part in the very ancient Mysteries. They spoke on the one hand of gold as a very specially important substance in the study of man, and on the other hand of carbon. Carbon was called the Philosopher’s Stone. Gold and the Philosopher’s Stone were very important things in olden times.

Carbon appears on Earth in a variety of forms. Diamond is carbon—a hard carbon; graphite is carbon; coal is carbon; anthracite is carbon. Carbon appears to us in most diverse forms. Through the methods which were practised in the ancient Mysteries, men learned however to understand that there exist still other forms of carbon, besides those we find here on Earth. And in this connection the pupil in the Mysteries had to undergo another preparation. For besides the Sun-preparation of which I have spoken, there was also in addition the Moon-preparation.

Along with the ancient sanctuaries of the Sun Mysteries we find too a kind of observatory, wherein a man could open his soul and his physical vision to the forms of the Moon. Whereas in the Sun-training the pupil had to behold the Sun at certain times of day in a diminished light, now for weeks at a time he had to expose his eyes to the different forms which the orb of the Moon assumes by night. Gazing thus with his whole soul, the pupil received a definite inner impression, which gave him a new knowledge. Just as the soul by exposing itself to the Sun became endowed with the power of the Sun, similarly, by exposing itself to the phases of the Moon, the soul became endowed with the power of the Moon. Man now learned what metamorphoses the substance of carbon can undergo. On the Earth, carbon is coal or graphite or diamond or anthracite; but on the Moon that which we find here on the Earth as diamond or anthracite or coal—is silver; and that was the secret possessed in these ancient Mysteries. Carbon is silver on the Moon. Carbon is the Philosopher’s Stone, and on the Moon it is silver.

The knowledge that was impressed so profoundly on the pupil in the ancient Mysteries was this: any substance whatsoever is only what it seems in this one place, at this one time. It was sheer ignorance not to know that carbon is diamond, coal or anthracite only on the Earth. What exists on the Earth as diamond or graphite, on the Moon is silver. If we could at this moment dispatch a piece of ordinary black coal to the Moon, it would there be silver.

A vision of this radical metamorphosis was what the pupil attained in those ancient times. It is the foundation, not of that fraudulent Alchemy of which one hears today, but of the true Alchemy. This ancient Alchemy cannot be acquired by any such abstract means of acquiring knowledge as we have today. We observe things and we think about them. Alchemy could not be attained in that way at all. Today man directs his telescope to a certain star, he determines parallel axes and the like, and reckons and reckons; or if he wants to study a certain substance, he applies the spectroscope and so on. But everything that can be learned in this way is infinitely abstract compared with what could once be learned of the stars; and this ancient wisdom, this true astrology, could only be learned, as I explained in the last lecture, by establishing a real and living intercourse with the Intelligences of the Cosmos. That itself was attainment of knowledge, when man was able to hold converse, in his soul and spirit, with the Intelligences of the Cosmos.

What gold signifies for the human organism is connected with the secret of the Sun; and through exposing his soul to the Sun-existence, man thereby entered into relation with the Intelligences of the Sun. They it was who could tell him of the properties of gold. In like manner he entered into relation with the Intelligences of the Moon.

And man learned to know how the Intelligences of the Moon were themselves once in olden times the great Teachers of Earth-humanity, who taught on Earth the primeval wisdom. They were the same who today let their forces and impulses work from the Moon. They withdrew from the Earth at a certain time in evolution, and there on the Moon they founded, as it were, a colony after the Moon had separated from the Earth.

Thus those Intelligences who once lived on the Earth and are today the Moon-Intelligences have to do with this second secret, the carbon-silver secret. Such was the character of knowledge in ancient times.

Let me quote another example. As the pupil could receive impressions from the Sun or from the Moon, so by means of a still further preparation of soul he could also receive impressions from the other planets; and one of the secrets thus obtained was that relating to Venus. Venus is studied today through the telescope, and is regarded as being like any other star or planet. The human body, on the other hand, is studied by investigating, say, a section of the liver and then a section of the brain, and analysing them according to their cellular structure, just as though brain substance and liver substance were not radically different. And in the very same way a student will direct his telescope to Mercury, Venus, Mars, and so on, believing all of them to be composed of substances of a like nature. But in ancient times it was known that if a man were considering the Moon or the Sun, he was able to come to an idea of them by means of that which has direct relation to the physical Earth: the earthy, the watery, the airy, the fiery. And if he extended his observation in a spiritual way to the Moon, he came to the ether. If, however, he extended his observation to Venus, then he knew that he came into a spiritual world, a purely astral world. What we see as physical Venus is but the external sign for something which lives and has its being in the astral, in the astral light. Physical light is in the case of Venus something quite different from physical Sunlight, for instance. For physical Sunlight still has a relationship with what can live on the Earth as Earth-produced fight; whereas Venus-light—it is childish to think it is simply reflected Sunlight—Venus-light shines forth from the spiritual world. If the pupil exposed his soul to this light, he learned to know the Intelligences connected with Venus.

These were Intelligences who lived in continual opposition to the Intelligences of the Sun; and a great role was played in the ancient Mysteries by this opposition between the Intelligences of Venus and the Intelligences of the Sun. Men spoke, with a certain justification, of a continual conflict between them. There were starting-points of such conflicts, when the Venus Intelligences began to combat the Intelligences of the Sun. There were times of intensified conflicts, there were culminations, catastrophes and crises. And in that which lay between an attack and a catastrophe or crisis, you had, as it were, a section of that great battle of opposition which takes place in the spiritual world, and appears in its external symbol only in the astrological and astronomical relationships between Venus and the Sun. It worked itself out in successive phases. And no one can understand the inner impulses of history on Earth if he does not know of this conflict between Venus and the Sun. For all that takes place here on Earth in the way of conflict, all that happens in the evolution of civilisations, is an earthly picture, an earthly copy, of this conflict of Venus versus Sun.

Such knowledge existed in the ancient Mysteries because there was a relation between the human beings on the Earth and the Intelligences of the Cosmos.

Then came the epoch of which I have spoken, the epoch from the tenth to the fifteenth centuries a.d. The mediaeval investigators in their alchemical laboratories were no longer able to reach up to the Cosmic Intelligences. They could get only as far as the Nature Spirits. They made countless experiments—of which I gave you an instance in the last lecture, when I spoke of the transformation of oxalic acid into formic acid—countless experiments of such a kind as would reveal to them the divine working and weaving in the processes and things of Nature; but they could only do so inasmuch as they had prepared themselves in the right way through that spirit of piety of which I told you; then, through their experiments, the Nature Spirits spoke to them. Now let us realise quite clearly the position of such an investigator at that time.

He stood in his laboratory, and he could say: ‘I bring to my laboratory the substances, the retorts, the heating ovens, and I make various experiments. I put certain questions to Nature. And when I do this the Nature spirits enter my laboratory with their revelations. I can perceive them.’ This went on even as late as the fifteenth century. The Nature Spirits could still approach the Rosicrucian investigators who were prepared in the right way. But the Rosicrucian investigators knew that in ancient times investigators had not merely been able to reach the Nature Spirits, but could come in touch with the higher Cosmic Intelligences who spoke to them of the gold-secret connected with the Sun, of the silver-secret and the carbon-secret connected with the Moon, and of the important secrets of history connected with Venus, and so on. It is true they had records preserved from still older traditions, records that told them how there had once been this knowledge, but the records were not specially important for them; if one has once been touched by the spiritual, then historical documents are not so terribly important as they are for our modern materialistic age. It is really astounding to see how infinitely important it is to many people when some discovery is made such as the recent case when the skeleton of a dinosaurus was found in the Gobi desert. Of course it is an important find, but such discoveries are never anything but isolated, broken fragments; whereas in a spiritual way we can really enter into the secrets of the Cosmos. Historical documents were certainly not likely to impress those mediaeval investigators. It was in another way that the mediaeval alchemist acquired a knowledge of how man had once been able to attain this cosmic knowledge but that he could now reach only the Nature Spirits, the Spirits behind the Elements. It happened in this way. In moments when certain observations of Nature were made, or certain experiments performed, when these investigators were thus approaching the sphere of the Nature Spirits, then certain Nature Spirits were there present and told how there had once been human beings who stood in connection with the Cosmic Intelligences. That was the pain that gnawed at the heart of these mediaeval investigators! The Nature Spirits spoke to them of a former age when man had been able to come into connection with the Intelligences of the Cosmos. And the investigators had to say: ‘These Nature Spirits tell us of a past age now vanished into the abyss of human knowledge and human existence.’ Thus this gift of the mediaeval alchemist, his gift of access to the Nature Spirits, was really a doubtful one. On the one hand he approached the spiritual of Nature, the spiritual of air, and of water—he approached Gnomes, Sylphs and Undines in all their living reality. On the other hand, there were some amongst these beings who told him of things that overwhelmed him with despair, telling him how humanity had once been in connection not only with the Nature Spirits but with the Intelligences of the Cosmos, with whom the Nature Spirits themselves were still connected but whom man could no longer reach. That was the feeling of these mediaeval alchemists and it often came to expression in a far more sublime, a far more grandly tragic manner than we find in Goethe’s Faust, beautiful and powerful though it is!

The utterance which Faust addresses to the Moon, to the silver shining light of the Moon in which he would fain bathe, would have been made with much greater depth by the investigators of the Middle Ages when the Nature Spirits told them about the secret of carbon and silver, a secret which again is closely and intimately bound up with man. For what was it that man experienced in ancient times in this connection? He experienced not merely how gold is connected with the Sun, but how gold works in man, how silver and carbon work in man, and similarly how other metals related to the other planets work in man. In olden times man experienced these things in the circulation of the blood in his body. He experienced them in a conscious way. He felt the blood streaming and pulsing through his head, and at the same time he felt it as a picture of the whole Earth, this streaming of the blood through the head. And in that sphere where the head is not enclosed by bone, where it opens downwards towards the heart and the breast, he felt a copy in miniature of the rising up of the atmosphere from the Earth. Thus in what man learned from the Cosmos he recognised the metamorphoses that went on in his own organism; he could follow the planets as he passed through the various organs of the body. We find here a confirmation of the penetrating words of Mephistopheles, where he says, ‘Blood is a very special fluid’. For in its metamorphosis our blood reflects the magnificent metamorphosis from carbon to silver. It all lives in man’s blood.

Thus did the mediaeval investigator regard man’s loss of the knowledge of the Cosmic Intelligences as a loss of his own humanity. And it is in reality but a faint reflection of this experience that we find in Faust when he opens the Book of the Macrocosm and wants to rise to the Cosmic Intelligences, then shuts the Book again because he cannot do it, and contents himself with the Spirit of the Earth. We have here only a faint echo of the tragic mood we find in these mediaeval investigators, whose names even have not come down to us. They had to hear from the Nature Spirits, whose sphere they entered through their alchemical investigations, how there had once been a connection between man and the Cosmic Intelligences.

Now all this is very deeply linked with what had to develop in ancient Greece when it became necessary for the Mysteries of Samothrace, the Mysteries of the Kabiri, to be diluted and weakened down into the philosophy of Aristotle, which then played such an important role in the Middle Ages. All the time, below the surface of what we know as Aristotelianism, there continued to work powerfully, although tragically, right on into the fifteenth century what I have been able to sketch for you in this fragment out of those times.

Behind the Macedonian epoch lie two kinds of Mysteries. There lie the Mysteries that saw deeply into the secrets of the cosmic substances and their connections with the Cosmic Intelligences; and there lie, too, the Mysteries with which man began to descend from the Cosmic Intelligences to the Nature Spirits. Man’s vision was closed to those Cosmic Intelligences, but it was turned for that very reason to the Nature Spirits. That was the crisis which came to fulfilment at the time of Alexander and Aristotle. In all that happened at that time we can still see how the abstractions of Aristotle are rooted in the ancient Mysteries. Anyone who knows about the carbon-silver secret, and then reads the observations of Aristotle that have come down to posterity—his most important writings have not come down to us—but anyone who reads what is written there relating to the secret of the Moon, will at once understand the connection with those olden times.

These are things which will be illuminated in the lectures ² I now intend to give on the historical development of humanity from the standpoint of Anthroposophy.

• 2. Eight lectures given in Dornach, 24th to 31st December, 1923. English translation published with the title: World History in the light of Anthroposophy. (Rudolf Steiner Press.)

In the evening hours of our Christmas Gathering,¹ I should like to give you a kind of survey of human evolution on the earth, that may help us to become more intimately conscious of the nature and being of present-day man. For at this time in man's history, when we can see already in preparation events of extraordinary importance for the whole civilisation of humanity, every thinking man must be inclined to ask: ‘How has the present configuration, the present make-up of the human soul arisen? How has it come about through the long course of evolution?’ For it cannot be denied that the present only becomes comprehensible as we try to understand its origin in the past.

The present age is however one that is peculiarly prejudiced in its thought about the evolution of man and of mankind. It is commonly believed that, as regards his life of soul and spirit, man has always been essentially the same as he is to-day throughout the whole of the time that we call history. True, in respect of knowledge, it is imagined that in ancient times human beings were childlike, that they believed in all kinds of fancies, and that man has only really become clever in the scientific sense in modern times; but if we look away from the actual sphere of knowledge, it is generally held that the soul-constitution which man has to-day was also possessed by the ancient Greek and by the ancient Oriental. Even though it be admitted that modifications may have occurred in detail, yet on the whole it is supposed that throughout the historical period everything in the life of the soul has been as it is to-day. Then we go on to assume a prehistoric life of man, and say that nothing is really known of this. Going still further back, we picture man in a kind of animal form. Thus, in the first place, as we trace back in historical time, we see a soul-life undergoing comparatively little change. Then the picture disappears in a kind of cloud, and before that again we see man in his animal imperfection as a kind of higher ape-being. Such is approximately the usual conception of to-day.

Now all this rests on an extraordinary prejudice, for in forming such a conception, we do not take the trouble to observe the important differences that exist in the soul-constitution of a man of the present-time, as compared even with that of a relatively not very far distant past,—say, of the 11th, 10th, or 9th century A.D. The difference goes deeper when we compare the constitution of soul in the human being of to-day and in a contemporary of the Mystery of Golgotha, or in a Greek; while if we go over to the ancient Oriental world of which the Greek civilisation was, in a sense, a kind of colony, we find there a disposition of soul utterly different from that of the man of to-day. I should like to show you from real instances how man lived in the East, let us say, ten thousand, or fifteen thousand years ago, and how different he was in nature from the Greek, and how still more different from what we ourselves are.

Let us first call to mind our own soul-life. I will take an example from it. We have a certain experience; and of this experience, in which we take part through our senses, or through our personality in some other way, we form an idea, a concept, and we retain this idea in our thought. After a certain time the idea may arise again out of our thought into our conscious soul-life, as memory. You have perhaps to-day a memory-experience that leads you back to experiences in perception of some ten years ago. Now try and understand exactly what that really means. Ten years ago you experienced something. Ten years ago you may have visited a gathering of men and women. You formed an idea of each one of these persons, of their appearance and so on. You experienced what they said to you, and what you did in common with them. All that, in the form of pictures, may arise before you to-day. It is an inner soul-picture that is present within you, connected with the event which occurred ten years ago. Now not only according to Science, but according to a general feeling,—which is, of course, experienced by man to-day in an extremely weak form, but which nevertheless is experienced,—according to this general feeling man localises such a memory-concept which brings back a past experience, in his head. He says:—‘What lives as the memory of an experience is present in my head.’

Now let us jump a long way back in human evolution, and consider the early population of the Orient, of which the Chinese and Indians as we know them in history were only the late descendants: that is, let us go back really thousands of years. Then, if we contemplate a human being of that ancient epoch, we find that he did not live in such a way as to say: ‘I have in my head the memory of something I have experienced, something I have undergone, in external life.’ He had no such inner feeling or experience; it simply did not exist for him. His head was not filled with thoughts and ideas. The present-day man thinks in his superficial way that as we to-day have ideas, thoughts, and concepts, so human beings always possessed these, as far back as history records; but that is not the case.

If with spiritual insight we go back far enough, we meet with human beings who did not have ideas, concepts, thoughts at all in their head, who did not experience any such abstract content of the head, but, strange as it may seem, experienced the whole head; they perceived and felt their whole head. These men did not give themselves up to abstractions as we do. To experience ideas in the head was something quite foreign to them, but they knew how to experience their own head. And as you, when you have a memory-picture, refer the memory-picture to an experience, as a relationship exists between your memory-picture and the experience, similarly these men related the experience of their head to the Earth, to the whole Earth. They said:—‘There exists in the Cosmos the Earth. And there exists in the Cosmos I myself, and as a part of me, my head; and the head which I carry on my shoulders is the cosmic memory of the Earth. The Earth existed earlier; my head later. That I have a head is due to the memory, the cosmic memory of earthly existence. The earthly existence is always there. But the whole configuration, the whole shape of the human head, is in relation to the whole Earth.’ Thus an ancient Eastern felt in his own head the being of the Earth-planet itself. He said: ‘Out of the whole great cosmic existence the Gods have created, have generated the Earth with its kingdoms of Nature, the Earth with its rivers and mountains. I carry on my shoulders my head; and this head of mine is a true picture of the Earth. This head, with the blood flowing in it, is a true picture of the Earth with the land and water coursing over it. The configuration of mountains on the Earth repeats itself in my head in the configurations of my brain; I carry on my shoulders my own image of the Earth-planet.’ Exactly as our modern man refers his memory-picture to his experience, so did the man of old refer his entire head to the Earth-planet. A considerable difference in inner perception!

Further, when we consider the periphery of the Earth, and fit it, as it were, into our vision of things, we feel this air surrounding the Earth as air permeated by the Sun's warmth and light; and in a certain sense, we can say: ‘The Sun lives in the atmosphere of the Earth.’ The Earth opens herself to the Cosmic universe; the activities that come forth from herself she yields up to the encircling atmosphere, and opens herself to receive the activities of the Sun. Now each human being, in those ancient times, experienced the region of the Earth on which he lived as of peculiar importance. An ancient Eastern would feel some portion of the surface of the Earth as his own; beneath him the earth, and above him the encircling atmosphere turned towards the Sun. The rest of the Earth that lay to left and right, in front and behind—all the rest of the Earth merged into a general whole.

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Thus if an ancient Oriental lived, for example, on Indian soil, he experienced the Indian soil as especially important for him; but everything else on the Earth, East, West, South of him, disappeared into the whole. He did not concern himself much with the way in which the Earth in these other parts was bounded by the rest of Cosmic space; while on the other hand not only was the soil on which he lived something important, but the extension of the Earth into Cosmic space in this region became a matter of great moment to him. The way in which he was able to breathe on this particular soil was felt by him as an inner experience of special importance.

To-day we are not in the habit of asking, how does one breathe in this or that place? We are of course still subject to favourable or unfavourable conditions for breathing, but we are no longer so conscious of the fact. For an ancient Oriental this was different. The way in which he was able to breathe was for him a very deep experience, and so were many other things too that depend on the character of the Earth's relation and contact with cosmic space. All that goes to make up the Earth, the whole Earth, was felt by the human being of those early times as that which lived in his head.

Now the head is enclosed by the hard firm bones of the skull, it is shut in above, on two sides and behind. But it has certain exits; it has a free opening downwards towards the chest. And it was of special importance for the man of olden time to feel how the head opens with relative freedom in the direction of the chest. (See Drawing). And as he had to feel the inner configuration of the head as an image of the Earth, so he had to bring the environment of the Earth, all that is above and around the Earth, into connection with the opening downwards, the turning towards the heart. In this he saw an image of how the Earth opens to the Cosmos. It was a mighty experience for a man of those ancient times when he said: ‘In my head I feel the whole Earth. But this Earth opens to my chest which carries within it my heart. And that which takes place between head, chest and heart is an image of what is borne out from my life into the Cosmos, borne out to the surrounding atmosphere that is open to the Sun.’

A great experience it was for him, and one of deep meaning, when he was able to say: ‘Here in my head lives the Earth. When I go deeper, there the Earth is turning towards the Sun; my heart is the image of the Sun.’ In this way did the man of olden times attain what corresponds to our life of feeling.

We have the abstract life of feeling still. But who of us knows anything directly of his heart? Through anatomy and physiology, we think we know something, but it is about as much as we know of some papier-mâché model of the heart that we may have before us. On the other hand, what we have as a feeling-experience of the world, that the man of olden times did not have. In place of it he had the experience of his heart. Just as we relate our feeling to the world in which we live, just as we feel whether we love a man or meet him with antipathy, whether we like this or that flower, whether we incline towards this or that, just as we relate our feelings to the world—but to a world torn out, as it were, in airy abstraction, from the solid, firm Cosmos—in the same way did the ancient Oriental relate his heart to the Cosmos, that is, to that which goes away from the Earth in the direction of the Sun.

Again, we say to-day: I will walk. We know that our will lives in our limbs. The ancient man of the East had an essentially different experience. What we call ‘will’ was quite unknown to him. We judge quite wrongly when we believe that what we call thinking, feeling and willing were present among the ancient Eastern races. It was not at all the case. They had head experiences, which were Earth experiences. They had chest or heart experiences, which were experiences of the environment of the Earth as far out as the Sun. The Sun corresponds to the heart experience. Then they had a further experience, a feeling of expanding and stretching out into their limbs. They became conscious and aware of their own humanity in the movement of their legs and feet, or of their arms and hands. They themselves were within the movements. And in this expansion of the inner being into the limbs, they felt a direct picture of their connection with the starry worlds. (See Drawing). ‘In my head I have a picture of the Earth. Where my head opens freely downwards into the chest and reaches down to my heart, I have a picture of what lives in the Earth's environment. In what I experience as the forces of my arms and hands, of my feet and legs, I have something which represents the relation the Earth bears to the stars that live far out there in cosmic space.’

When therefore man wanted to express the experience he had as ‘willing’ human being—to use the language of to-day,—he did not say: I walk. We can see that from the very words that he used. Nor did he say: I sit down. If we investigate the ancient languages in respect of their finer content, we find everywhere that for the action which we describe by saying: I walk, the ancient Oriental would have said: Mars impels me, Mars is active in me. Going forward was felt as a Mars impulse in the legs.

Grasping hold of something, feeling and touching with the hands, was expressed by saying: Venus works in me. Pointing out something to another person was expressed by saying: Mercury works in me. Even when a rude person called some one's attention by giving him a push or a kick, the action would be described by saying: Mercury was working in that person. Sitting down was a Jupiter activity, and lying down, whether for rest or from sheer laziness, was expressed by saying: I give myself over to the impulses of Saturn. Thus man felt in his limbs the wide spaces of the Cosmos out beyond. He knew that when he went away from the Earth out into cosmic space, he came into the Earth's environment and then into the starry spheres. If he went downwards from his head, he passed through the very same experience, only this time within his own being. In his head he was in the Earth, in his chest and heart he was in the environment of the Earth, in his limbs he was in the starry Cosmos beyond.

From a certain point of view such an experience is perfectly possible for man. Alas for us, poor men of to-day, who can experience only abstract thoughts! What are these in reality, for the most part? We are very proud of them, but we quite forget what is far beyond the cleverest of them,—our head; our head is much more rich in content than the very cleverest of our abstract thoughts. Anatomy and physiology know little of the marvel and mystery of the convolutions of the brain, but one single convolution of the brain is more majestic and more powerful than the abstract knowledge of the greatest genius. There was once a time on the Earth when man was not merely conscious as we are of thoughts lying around, so to speak, but was conscious of his own head; he felt the head as the image of the Earth, and he felt this or that part of the head—let us say, the optic thalamus or the corpora quadrigemina—as the image of a certain, physical mountainous configuration of the Earth. He did not then merely relate his heart to the Sun in accordance with some abstract theory, he felt: ‘My head stands in the same relation to my chest, to my heart, as the Earth does to the Sun.’ That was the time when man had grown together, in his whole life, with the Cosmic Universe; he had become one with the Cosmos. And this found expression in his whole life.

Through the fact that we to-day put our puny thinking in the place of our head, through this very fact we are able to have a conceptual memory, we are able to remember things in thought. We form pictures in thought of what we have experienced as abstract memories in our head. That could not be done by a man of olden times who did not have thoughts, but still had his head. He could not form memory pictures. And so, in those regions of the Ancient East where people were still conscious of their head, but had as yet no thoughts and hence no memories, we find developed to a remarkable degree something of which people are again beginning to feel the need to-day. For a long time such a thing has not been necessary, and if to-day the need for it is returning it is due to what I can only call slovenliness of soul.

If in that time of which I have spoken one were to enter the region inhabited by people who were still conscious of their head, chest, heart and limbs, one would see on every hand small pegs placed in the earth and marked with some sign. Or here and there a sign made upon a wall. Such memorials were to be found scattered over all inhabited regions. Wherever anything happened, a man would set up some kind of memorial, and when he came back to the place, he lived through the event over again in the memorial he had made. Man had grown together with the earth, he had become one with it with his head. To-day he merely makes a note of some event in his head. As I have pointed out already, we are beginning once more to find it necessary to make notes not only in our head but also in a note-book; this is due as I said, to slovenliness of soul, but we shall nevertheless require to do it more and more. At that time however there was no such thing as making notes even in one's head, because thoughts and ideas were simply nonexistent. Instead, the land was dotted over with signs. And from this habit, so naturally acquired by men in olden times, has arisen the whole custom of making monuments and memorials.

Everything that has happened in the historical evolution of mankind has its origin and cause in the inner being of man. If we were but honest, we should have to admit that we modern men have not the faintest knowledge of the deeper basis of this custom of erecting memorials. We set them up from habit. They are however the relics of the ancient monuments and signs put up by man in a time when he had no memory such as we have to-day but was taught, in any place where he had some experience, there to set up a memorial, so that when he came that way again he might re-experience the event in his head; for the head can call up again everything that has connection with the earth. ‘We give over to the earth what our head has experienced’—was a principle of olden times.

And so we have to point to a very early time in the ancient East, the epoch of localised memory, when everything of the nature of memory was connected with the setting up of signs and memorials on the earth. Memory was not within, but without. Everywhere were memorial tablets and memorial stones. It was localised memory, a remembering connected with place.

Even to-day it is still of no small value for a man's spiritual evolution that he should sometimes make use of his capacity for this kind of memory, for a memory that is not within him but is unfolded in connection with the outer world. It is good sometimes to say: I will not remember this or that, but I will set here or there a sign, or token; or, I will let my soul unfold an experience about certain things, only in connection with signs or tokens. I will, for instance, hang a picture of the Madonna in a corner of my room, and when the picture is before me, I will experience in my soul all that I can experience by turning with my whole soul to the Madonna. For there is a subtle relation to a thing belonging so intimately to the home as does the picture of the Madonna that we meet with in the homes of the people, when we go a little way eastwards in Europe; we have not even to go as far as Russia, we find them everywhere in Central Europe. All experience of this nature is in reality a relic of the epoch of localised memory. The memory is outside, it attaches to the place.

A second stage is reached when man passes from localised to rhythmic memory. Thus we have first, localised memory; and secondly, rhythmic memory.

We have now come to the time when, not from any conscious, subtle finesse, but right out of his own inner being, man had developed the need of living in rhythm. He felt a need so to reproduce, within himself, what he heard that a rhythm was formed. If his experience of a cow, for instance, suggested ‘moo,’ he did not simply call her ‘moo,’ but ‘moo-moo,’—perhaps, in very ancient times, ‘moo-moo-moo.’ That is to say, the perception was as it were piled up in repetition, so as to produce rhythm. You can follow the same process in the formation of many words to-day; and you can observe how little children still feel the need of these repetitions. We have here again a heritage come down from the time when rhythmic memory prevailed, the time when man had no memory at all of what he had merely experienced, but only of what he experienced in rhythmic form,—in repetitions, in rhythmic repetition. There had to be at any rate some similarity between a sequence of words. ‘Might and main,’ ‘stock and stone’—such setting of experience in rhythmic sequence is a last relic of an extreme longing to bring everything into rhythm; for in this second epoch, that followed the epoch of localised memory, what was not set into rhythm was not retained. It is from this rhythmic memory that the whole ancient art of verse developed—indeed all metrical poetry.

Only in the third stage does that develop which we still know to-day,—temporal memory, when we no longer have a point in space to which memory attaches, nor are any longer dependent on rhythm, but when that which is inserted into the course of time can be evoked again later. This quite abstract memory of ours is the third stage in the evolution of memory.

Let us now call to mind the point of time in human evolution when rhythmic memory passes over into temporal memory, when that memory first made its appearance which we with our lamentable abstractness of thought take entirely as a matter of course; the memory whereby we evoke some-thing in picture-form, no longer needing to make use of semi-conscious or unconscious rhythmic repetitions in order to call it up again.

The epoch of the transition from rhythmic memory to temporal memory is the time when the ancient East was sending colonies to Greece,—the beginning of the colonies planted from Asia in Europe. When the Greeks relate stories of the heroes who came over from Asia and Egypt to settle on Grecian soil, they are in reality relating how the great heroes went forth from the land of rhythmic memory to seek a climate where rhythmic memory could pass over into temporal memory, into a remembering in time.

We are thus able to define quite exactly the time in history when this transition took place,—namely, the time of the rise of Greece. For that which may be called the Motherland of Greece was the home of a people with strongly developed rhythmic memory. There rhythm lived. The ancient East is indeed only rightly understood when we see it as the land of rhythm. And if we place Paradise only so far back as the Bible places it, if we lay the scene of Paradise in Asia, then we have to see it as a land where purest rhythms resounded through the Cosmos and awoke again in man as rhythmic memory,—a land where man lived not only as experiencing rhythm in a Cosmos, but as himself a creator of rhythm.

Listen to the Bhagavad-Gita and you will catch the after-echo of that mighty rhythm that once lived in the experience of man. You will hear its echo also in the Vedas, and you will even hear it in the poetry and literature—to use a modern word—of Western Asia. In all these live the echoes of that rhythm which once filled the whole of Asia with majestic content and, bearing within it the mysteries of the environment of the Earth, made these resound again in the human breast, in the beat of the human heart. Then we come to a still more ancient time, when rhythmic memory leads back into localised memory, when man did not even have rhythmic memories but was taught, in the place where he had had an experience, there to erect a memorial. When he was away from the place, he needed no memorial; but when he came thither again he had to recall the experience. Yet it was not he who recalled it to himself; the memorial, the very Earth, recalled it to him. As the head is the image of the Earth, so for the man of localised memory the memorial in the Earth evoked its own image in the head. Man lived completely with the Earth; in his connection with the Earth he had his memory.

The Gospels contain a passage that recalls this kind of memory, where we are told that Christ wrote something in the Earth.

The period we have thus defined as the transition from localised memory to rhythmic memory is the time when ancient Atlantis was declining and the first Post-Atlantean peoples were wandering eastward in the direction of Asia. For we have first the wanderings from ancient Atlantis—the continent that to-day forms the bed of the Atlantic Ocean—right across Europe into Asia, and later the wanderings back again from Asia into Europe. The migration of the Atlantean peoples to Asia marks the transition from localised memory to rhythmic memory, which latter finds its completion in the spiritual life of Asia. The colonisation of Greece marks the transition from rhythmic memory to temporal memory—the memory that we still carry within us to-day.

1. Localised Memory
2. Rhythmic Memory
3. Temporal memory.

And within this evolution of memory lies the whole development of civilisation between the Atlantean catastrophe and the rise of Greece,—all that resounds to us from ancient Asia, coming to us in the form of legend and saga rather than as history. We shall arrive at no understanding of the evolution of humanity on the Earth by looking principally to the external phenomena, by investigating the external documents; rather do we need to fix our attention on the evolution of what is within man; we must consider how such a thing as the faculty of memory has developed, passing in its development from without into the inner being of man.

You know how much the power of memory means for the man of to-day. You will have heard of persons who through some condition of illness suddenly find that a portion of their past life, which they ought to remember quite easily, has been completely wiped out. A terrible experience of this kind befell a friend of mine before his death. One day he left his home, bought a ticket at the railway station for a certain place, alighted there and bought another ticket. He did all this, having lost for the time the memory of his life up to the moment of buying the ticket. He carried everything out quite sensibly. His reason was sound. But his memory was blotted out. And he found himself, when his memory came back, in a Casual Ward in Berlin. It was afterwards proved that in the interval he had wandered over half Europe, without being able to connect the experience with the earlier experiences of his life. Memory did not re-awaken in him till he had found his way—he himself did not know how—into a Casual Ward in Berlin.

This is only one of countless cases which we meet with in life and which show us how the soul-life of the man of to-day is not intact unless the threads of memory are able to reach back unbroken to a certain period after birth.

With the men of olden time who had developed a localised memory, this was not the case. They knew nothing of these threads of memory. They, on the other hand, would have been unhappy in their soul-life, they would have felt as we feel when something robs us of our self, if they had not been surrounded by memorials which recalled to them what they had experienced; and not alone by memorials which they themselves had set up, but memorials too erected by their forefathers, or by their brothers and sisters, similar in configuration to their own and bringing them into contact with their own kinsmen. Whereas we are conscious of something inward as the condition for keeping our Self intact, for these men of bygone times the condition was to be sought outside themselves—in the world without.

We have to let the whole picture of this change in man's soul pass before our eyes in order to realise its significance in the history of man's evolution. It is by observing such things as these that light begins to be thrown upon history. To-day I wanted to show, by a special example, how man's mind and soul have evolved in respect of one faculty—the faculty of memory. We shall go on to see in the course of the succeeding lectures how the events of history begin to reveal themselves in their true shape when we can thus illumine them with light derived from knowledge of the human soul.

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• 1. Die Weihnachtstagung zur Begründung der Allgemeinen Anthroposophischen Gesellschaft. Jahresausklang und Jahreswende 1923/24 by Rudolf Steiner, Collected Works, Dornach 1962.

From the foregoing lecture it will be clear to you that it is only possible to gain a correct view of the historical evolution of humanity when one takes into consideration the totally different conditions of mind and soul that prevailed during the various epochs. In the first part of my lecture I attempted to define the Asiatic period of evolution, the genuine ancient East, and we saw that we have to look back to the time when the descendants of the races of Atlantis were finding their way eastwards after the Atlantean catastrophe, moving from west to east and gradually peopling Europe and Asia. All that took place in ancient Asia in connection with these peoples was under the influence of a condition of soul accustomed and attuned to rhythm. At the beginning of the Asiatic period we have still a distant echo of what was present in all its fullness in Atlantis—the localised memory. During the Oriental evolution this localised memory passed over into rhythmic memory, and I showed how with the Greek evolution that great change came about which brought in a new kind of memory, the temporal memory. This means that the Asiatic period of evolution (we are now speaking of what may rightly be called the Asiatic period, for what history refers to is in reality a later and decadent period) was an age of men altogether differently constituted from the men of later times. And the external events of history were in those days much more dependent than in later times on the character and constitution of man's inner life. What lived in man's mind and soul lived too in his entire being. A separated life of thought and feeling, such as we have to-day was unknown. A thinking that does not feel itself to be connected with the inner processes of the human head, was unknown. So too was the abstract feeling that knows no connection with the circulation of the blood. Man had in those times a thinking that was inwardly experienced as a “happening” in the head, a feeling that was experienced in the rhythm of the breath, in the circulation of the blood, and so on. Man experienced his whole being in undivided unity.

All this was closely connected with the altogether different experience man had of his relation to the world about him, to the Cosmos, to the spiritual and the physical in the Cosmic Whole. The man of the present day lives, let us say, in town or in the country, and his experience varies accordingly. He is surrounded by woods, rivers and mountains; or, if he lives in town, bricks and mortar meet his gaze on every hand. When he speaks of the cosmic and super-sensible, where does he think it is? He can point to no sphere within which he can conceive of what is cosmic and super-sensible as having place. It is nowhere to be laid hold of, he cannot grasp it: even spiritually, he cannot grasp it. But this was not so in that ancient oriental stream of evolution. To an Oriental, the world around him which we to-day call our physical environment, was the lowest portion of a Cosmos conceived as a unity. Man had around him what is contained in the three kingdoms of nature, he had around him the rivers, mountains, and so forth; but for him this environment was permeated through and through with Spirit, interpenetrated and interwoven with Spirit. The Oriental of ancient time would say: I live with the mountains, I live with the rivers; but I live also with the elemental beings of the mountains and of the rivers. I live in the physical realm, but this physical realm is the body of a spiritual realm. Around me is the spiritual world, the lowest spiritual world.

There below was this realm that for us has become the earthly realm. Man lived in it. But he pictured to himself that where this realm ends another realm begins, then again above that another; and finally the highest realm which it is possible to reach. And if we were to name these realms in accordance with the language that has become current with us in anthroposophical knowledge—the ancient Oriental had other names for them, but that does not matter, we will name them as they are for us—then we should have above, for the highest realm, the First Hierarchy: Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones; then the Second Hierarchy: Kyriotetes, Dynamis, Exusiai; and the Third Hierarchy: Archai, Archangels, Angels.

And now comes the fourth realm where human beings live, the realm wherein according to our method of cognition we to-day place the mere objects and processes of Nature, but where the ancient Oriental felt the whole of Nature penetrated with the elemental spirits of water and of earth. This was Asia. Asia meant the lowest spirit realm, in which he, as human being, lived. You must remember that the present-day conception of things that we have in our ordinary consciousness was unknown to the man of those times. It would be nonsense to suppose that it were in any way possible for him to imagine such a thing as matter devoid of spirit. To speak as we do, of oxygen and nitrogen would have been a sheer impossibility for the ancient Oriental. To him oxygen was spirit, it was that spiritual thing which worked as a stimulating and quickening agent on what already possessed life, accelerating the life-processes in a living organism. Nitrogen, which we think of to-day as contained in the atmosphere together with oxygen, was also spiritual; it was that which weaves throughout the Cosmos, working upon what is living and organic in such a way as to prepare it to receive a soul-nature. Such was the knowledge the Oriental of old had, for example, of oxygen and nitrogen. And he knew all the processes of Nature in this way, in their connection with spirit; for the present-day conceptions were unknown to him. There were a few individuals who knew them, and they were the Initiates. The rest of mankind had as their ordinary everyday consciousness a consciousness very similar to a waking dream; it was a dream condition that with us only occurs in abnormal experiences.

The ancient Oriental went about with these dreams. He looked on the mountains, rivers and clouds, and saw everything in the way that things can be seen and heard in this dream condition. Picture to yourself what may happen to the man of to-day in a dream. He is asleep. Suddenly there appears before him a dream-picture of a flaring fire. He hears the call of ‘Fire!’ Outside in the street a fire engine is passing, to put out a fire somewhere or other. But what a difference between the conception of the work of the fire-brigade that can be formed by the human intellect in its matter-of-fact way with the aid of ordinary sense-perception, and the pictures that a dream can conjure up! For the ancient Oriental, however, all his experiences manifested themselves in such dream-pictures. Everything outside in the kingdoms of Nature was transformed in his soul into pictures.

In these dream-pictures man experienced the elemental spirits of water, earth, air and fire. And sleep brought him again other experiences. Sleep for him was not that deep heavy sleep we have when we lie, as we say, ‘like a log’ and know nothing of ourselves. I believe there are people who sleep so in these days, are there not? But then there was no such thing: even in sleep man had still a dull form of consciousness. While on the one hand he was, as we now say, resting his body, the spiritual was weaving within him in a spiritual activity of the external world. And in this weaving he perceived the Beings of the Third Hierarchy. Asia he perceived in his ordinary waking-dream condition, that is to say in what was the everyday consciousness of that time. At night, in sleep, he perceived the Third Hierarchy. And from time to time there entered into his sleep a still more dim and dark consciousness, but a consciousness that graved its experiences deeply into his thought and feeling. Thus these Eastern peoples had first their everyday consciousness where everything was changed into Imaginations and pictures. The pictures were not so real as those of still older times, for example the time of Atlantis or Lemuria, or of the Moon epoch. Nevertheless they were still there, even during this Asiatic evolution. By day, then, men had these pictures. And in sleep they had an experience which they might have clothed in the following words:—We ‘sleep away’ the ordinary earthly existence, we enter the realm of the Angels, Archangels and Archai and live among them. The soul sets itself free from the organism and lives among the Beings of the higher Hierarchies.

Men knew at the same time that whereas they lived in Asia with gnomes, undines, sylphs and salamanders, that is with the elemental spirits of the earth, water, air and fire,—in sleep, while the body rested, they experienced the Beings of the Third Hierarchy in the planetary existence, in all that lives in the whole planetary system belonging to the Earth.

There were however moments when the sleeper would feel: An utterly strange region is approaching me. It is taking me to itself, it is drawing me away from earthly existence. He did not feel this while immersed in the Beings of the Third Hierarchy, but only when a still deeper condition of sleep intervened. Though there was never a real consciousness of what took place during the sleep-condition of the third kind, nevertheless what was then experienced from the Second Hierarchy impressed itself deep into the whole being of man. And the experience remained in man's feeling when he awoke. He could then say: I have been graciously blessed by higher Spirits, whose life is beyond the planetary existence. Thus did these ancient peoples speak of that Hierarchy which embraces the Kyriotetes, the Dynamis and the Exusiai. What we are now describing are the ordinary states of consciousness of this ancient Asiatic period. The first two states of consciousness—the waking-sleeping, sleeping-waking and the sleep, in which the Third Hierarchy were present—were experienced by all men. And many, through a special endowment of Nature, experienced also the intervention of a deeper sleep, during which the Second Hierarchy played into human consciousness.

And the Initiates in the Mysteries,—they received a still further degree of consciousness. Of what nature was this? The answer is astonishing; for the fact is, the Initiate of the ancient East acquired the same consciousness that you have now by day! You develop it in a perfectly natural way in your second or third year of life. No ancient Oriental ever attained this state of consciousness in a natural way; he had to develop it artificially in himself. He had to develop it out of the waking-dreaming, dreaming-waking. As long as he went about with this waking-dreaming, dreaming-waking, he saw everywhere pictures, rendering only in more or less symbolic fashion what we see to-day in clear sharp outlines; as an Initiate however he attained to see things as we see them to-day in our ordinary consciousness. The Initiates, by means of their developed consciousness, attained to learn what every boy and girl learns at school to-day. The difference between their consciousness and the normal consciousness of to-day is not that the content was different. Of course the abstract forms of letters which we have to-day were unknown then; written characters were in more intimate connection with the things and processes of the Cosmos. Reading and writing were nevertheless learned in those days by the Initiates; although of course by them alone, for reading and writing can only be learned with that clear intellectual consciousness which is the natural one for the man of to-day.

Supposing that somewhere or other this world of the ancient East were to re-appear, inhabited by human beings having the kind of consciousness they had in those olden times, and you were to come among them with your consciousness of the present day, then for them you would all be initiates. The difference does not lie in the content of consciousness. You would be initiates. But the moment the people recognised you as initiates, they would immediately drive you out of the land by every means in their power; for it would be quite clear to them that an initiated person ought not to know things in the way we know them to-day. He ought not, for example, to be able to write as we are able to write to-day. If I were to transport myself into the mind of a man of that time, and were to meet such a pseudo-initiate, that is to say, an ordinary clever man of the present day, I should find myself saying of him: He can write, he makes signs on paper that mean something, and he has no idea how devilish it is to do such a thing without carrying in him the consciousness that it may only be done in the service of divine cosmic consciousness; he does not know that a man may only make such signs on paper when he can feel how God works in his hand, in his very fingers, works in his soul, enabling it to express itself through these letters. Therein lies the whole difference between the initiates of olden time and the ordinary man of the present day. It is not a difference in the content of consciousness, but in the way of comprehending and understanding the thing. Read my book Christianity as Mystical Fact, of which a new edition has recently appeared, and you will find right at the beginning the same indication as to the essential nature of the initiate of olden times. It is in point of fact always so in the course of world-evolution. That which develops in man at a later period in a natural way had in former epochs to be won through initiation.

Through such a thing as I have brought to your notice, you will be able to detect the radical difference between the condition of mind and soul prevalent among the Eastern peoples of prehistoric times and that of a later civilisation. It was another mankind that could call Asia the last or lowest heaven and understand by that their own land, the Nature that was round about them. They knew where the lowest heaven was.

Compare this with the conceptions men have to-day. How far is the man of the present time from regarding all he sees around him as the lowest heaven! Most people cannot think of it as the ‘lowest’ heaven for the simple reason that they have no knowledge of any heaven at all!

Thus we see how in that ancient Eastern time the Spiritual entered deeply into Nature, into all natural existence. But now we find also among these peoples something which to most of us in the present day may easily appear extremely barbarous. To a man of that time it would have appeared terribly barbarous if someone had been able to write in the feeling and attitude of mind in which we to-day are able to write; it would have seemed positively devilish to him. But when we to-day on the other hand see how it was accepted in those times as something quite natural and as a matter of course that a people should remove from West to East, should conquer—often with great cruelty—another people already in occupation and make slaves of them, then such a thing is bound to appear barbarous to very many of us.

This is, however, broadly speaking, the substance of oriental history over the whole of Asia. Whilst men had as I have described, a high spiritual conception of things, their external history ran its course in a series of conquests and enslavements. Undoubtedly that appears to many people as extremely barbarous. To-day, although wars of aggression do still sometimes occur, men have an uneasy conscience about them. And this is true even of those who support and defend such wars; they are not quite easy in their conscience.

In those times, however, man had a perfectly clear conscience as regards these wars of aggression, he felt that such conquest was willed of the Gods. The longing for peace, the love of peace, that arose later and spread over a large part of Asia, is really the product of a much later civilisation. The acquisition of land by conquest and the enslavement of its population is a salient feature of the early civilisation of Asia. The farther we go back into prehistoric times, the more do we find this kind of conquest going on. The conquests of Xerxes and others of his time were in truth but faint shadows of what went on in earlier ages.

Now there is a quite definite principle underlying these conquests. As a result of the states of consciousness which I have described to you, man stood in an altogether different relation to his fellow man and also to the world around him. Certain differences between different parts of the inhabited Earth have to-day lost their chief meaning. At that time these differences made themselves felt in quite another way. Let me put before you, as an example, something which frequently occurred.

Suppose a conquering people has made its way from the North of Asia, spread itself out over some other region of Asia and made the population subject to it. What has really happened?

In characteristic instances that are a true expression of the trend of historical evolution, we find that the aggressors were—as a people or as a race—young, full of youth-forces. Now what does it mean to-day to be young? What does it mean for men of our present epoch of evolution? It means to bear within one in every moment of life sufficient [amount] of the forces of death to provide for those soul-forces that need the dying processes in man. For, as you know, we have within us, the sprouting, germinating forces of life, but these life forces are not the forces that make us reflective, thoughtful beings; on the contrary, they make us weak, unconscious. The death forces, the forces of destruction, which are also continually active within us—and are overcome again and again during sleep by the life forces, so that not until the end of life do we gather together all the death forces in us in the one final event of death—these forces it is that induce reflection, self-consciousness. This is how it is with present-day humanity. Now a young race, a young people, such as I have described, suffered from its own over-strong life forces, and continually had the feeling: I feel my blood beating perpetually against the walls of my body. I cannot endure it. My consciousness will not become reflective consciousness. Because of my very youthfulness I cannot develop my full humanity.

An ordinary man would not have spoken thus, but the initiates spoke in this way in the Mysteries, and it was the initiates who guided and directed the whole course of history.

Here was then a people who had too much youth, too much life forces, too little in them of that which could bring about reflection and thought. They left their land and conquered a region where an older people lived, a people which had in some way or other taken into itself the forces of death, because it had already become decadent. The younger nation went out against the older and brought it into subjection. It was not necessary that a blood-bond should be established between conquerors and enslaved. That which worked unconsciously in the soul between them worked in a rejuvenating way; it worked on the reflective faculties. What the conqueror required from the slaves whom he now had in his court was influence upon his consciousness. He had only to turn his attention to these slaves and the longing for unconsciousness was quenched in his soul, reflective consciousness began to dawn.

What we have to attain to-day as individuals was attained at that time by living together with others. A people who faced the world as conquerors and lords, a young people, not possessed of full powers of reflection, needed around it, so to say, a people that had in it more of the forces of death. In overcoming another people, it won through to what it needed for its own evolution.

And so we find that these Oriental conflicts, often so terrible and presenting to us such a barbarous aspect, are in reality nothing else than the impulses of human evolution. They had to take place. Mankind would not have been able to develop on the earth, had it not been for these terrible wars and struggles that seem to us so barbarous.

Already in those olden times the Initiates of the Mysteries saw the world as it is seen to-day. Only they united with this perception a different attitude of mind and soul. For them, all that they experienced in clear, sharp outlines—even as we to-day experience external objects in sharp outlines, when we perceive with our senses—was something that came from the Gods, that came even for human consciousness from the Gods. For how did external objects present themselves to an Initiate of those times? There was perhaps a flash of lightning (to take a simple and obvious illustration). You know very well what a flash of lightning looks like to a man of to-day. The men of olden time did not see it thus. They saw living spiritual Beings moving in the sky, and the sharp line of the flash disappeared completely. They saw a host, a procession of spiritual Beings hurrying forward over or in cosmic space. The lightning as such they did not see. They saw a host of spirits hovering and moving through cosmic space.

The Initiate also saw, with the rest, this spiritual host, but he had developed within him the perception that we have to-day, and so for him, the picture began to grow dim and the heavenly host gradually disappeared from view, and then the flash of lightning could become manifest.

The whole of Nature, in the form in which we see it to-day, could only be attained in olden times through initiation. But how did man feel towards such knowledge? He did not by any means look on the knowledge thus attained with the indifference with which knowledge and truth are regarded to-day. There was a strong moral element in man's experience of knowledge. If we turn our gaze to what happened with the neophytes of the Mysteries, we find we have to describe it in the following way. When a few individuals, after undergoing severe inner tests and trials, had been initiated into the view of Nature, which to-day is accessible to all, they had quite naturally this feeling: consider the man with his ordinary consciousness. He sees the host of elementary beings riding through the air. But just because he has such a perception, he is devoid of free will. He is entirely given up to the Divine-spiritual world. For in this waking-dreaming, dreaming-waking, the will does not move in freedom, rather is it something that streams into man as Divine will. And the Initiate, who saw the lightning come forth out of these Imaginations, learned to say: I must be a man who is free to move in the world without the Gods, one for whom the Gods cast out the world-content into the void.

Now you must understand, this condition would have been unbearable for the Initiate, had there not been for him moments that compensated for it. Such moments he did have. For while on the one hand the Initiate learned to experience Asia as God-forsaken, Spirit-forsaken, he learned also to know a still deeper state of consciousness than that which reached up to the Second Hierarchy. Knowing the world bereft of God, he learned also to know the world of the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones.

At a certain time in the epoch of Asiatic evolution, approximately in the middle [of it]—later on we shall have to speak more exactly of the dates—the condition of consciousness of the Initiates was such that they went about on Earth with very nearly the perception of the kingdoms of the Earth which is possessed by modern man; they felt it, however, in their limbs. They felt their limbs set free from the Gods in a God-bereft earthly substance.

In compensation for this, however, they met in this godless land the high Gods of the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones. As Initiates they learned to know, no longer the grey-green spiritual Beings that were the Pictures of the forest, the Pictures of the trees, they learned as Initiates to know the forest devoid of Spirit. Theirs, however, was the compensation of meeting in the forest Beings of the First Hierarchy, there they would meet some Being from the Kingdom of the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones.

All this, understood as giving form to the social life of humanity, is the essential feature in the historical evolution of the ancient East. And the driving force for further evolution lies in the search for an adjustment between young races and old races, so that the young races may mature through association with the old, with the souls of those whom they have brought into subjection. However far back we look into Asia, everywhere we find how the young races who cannot of themselves develop the reflective faculties, set out to find these in wars of aggression.

When, however, we turn our gaze away from Asia to the land of Greece, we find a somewhat different development. Over in Greece, in the time of the full flower of Greek culture, we find a people who did indeed know how to grow old, but were unable to permeate the growing old with full spirituality. I have many times had to draw attention to the characteristic Greek utterance: Better a beggar in the world of the living than a king in the realm of the shades. Neither to death outside in Nature, nor to death in man, could the Greek adapt himself. He could not find his true relation with death. On the other hand, however, he had this death within him. And so in the Greek we find, not a longing for a reflective consciousness, but apprehension and fear of death.

Such a fear of death was not felt by the young Eastern races; they went out to make conquests, when as a race they found themselves unable to experience death in the right way. The inner conflict, however, which the Greeks experienced with death became in its turn an inner impulse compelling humanity, and led to what we know as the Trojan War. The Greeks had no need to seek death at the hands of a foreign race in order to acquire the power of reflection. The Greeks needed to come into a right relation with what they felt and experienced of death, they needed to find the inner living mystery of death. And this led to that great conflict between the Greeks and the people in Asia from whom they had originated. The Trojan war is a war of sorrow, a war of apprehension and fear. We see facing one another the Greeks, who felt death within them but did not know, as it were, what to do with it, and the Oriental races who were bent on conquest, who wanted death and had it not. The Greeks had death, but were at a loss how to adapt themselves to it. They needed the infusion of another element, before they could discover its secret. Achilles, Agamemnon—all these men bore death within them, but could not adapt themselves to it. They look across to Asia. There in Asia they see a people who are in the reverse position, who are suffering under the direct influence of the opposite condition. Over there are men who do not feel death in the intense way it is felt by the Greeks themselves, over there are men to whom death is something abounding in life.

All this has been brought to expression in a wonderful way by Homer. Wherever he sets the Trojans over against the Greeks, everywhere he lets us see this contrast. You may see it, for instance, in the characteristic figures of Hector and Achilles. And in this contrast is expressed what is taking place on the frontier of Asia and Europe. Asia, in those olden times, had, as it were, a superabundance of life over death, yearned after death. Europe had, on the Greek soil, a superabundance of death in man, and man was at a loss to find his true relation to it. Thus from a second point of view we see Europe and Asia set over against one another.

In the first place, we had the transition from rhythmic memory to temporal memory; now we have these two quite different experiences in respect of death in the human organisation. To-morrow we will consider more in detail the contrast, which I have only been able to indicate at the close of to-day's lecture, and so approach a fuller understanding of the transitions that lead over from Asia to Europe. For these had a deep and powerful influence on the evolution of man, and without understanding them we can really arrive at no understanding of the evolution we are passing through at the present day.

Thirteen years ago, almost to the day, in a course of lectures¹ that I gave in Stuttgart between Christmas and New Year, I spoke of the same events that we shall treat of in the present course of lectures. Only we shall have to alter the standpoint somewhat. In the first two introductory lectures we have been at pains to acquire an understanding for the radical change in man's life of thought and feeling that has come about in the course of human evolution, prehistoric as well as historic. In to-day's lecture, at any rate to begin with, we shall not need to go back more than a few thousand years.

You know that from the standpoint of Spiritual Science we have to regard as of paramount importance in its consequences for human evolution the so-called Atlantean catastrophe which befell the Earth in the time commonly known as the later Ice Age. It was the last Act in the downfall of the Atlantean continent, which continent forms to-day the floor of the Atlantic Ocean; and following it we have as we have often described, five great successive epochs of civilisation, leading up to our own time. Of the two earliest of these we have no trace in historical tradition, for the literature remaining in the East, even all that is contained in the magnificent Vedas, in the profound Vedantic philosophy, is but an echo of what we should have to describe, if we wanted to recall these ancient epochs. In my Outline of Occult Science I have always spoken of them as the Ancient Indian and the Ancient Persian.

To-day we shall not have to go so far back as this; we will direct our thoughts to the period which I have often designated as the Egypto-Chaldean, the period preceding the Graeco-Latin. We have already had to draw attention to the fact that during the time between the Atlantean catastrophe and the Greek period, great changes took place in regard to man's power of memory and also in regard to the social life of humanity. A memory such as we have to-day—the temporal memory, by means of which we can take ourselves back in time—was not in existence in this third Post-Atlantean period; man had then, as we have described in an earlier lecture, a memory that was linked to rhythmic experience. And we have seen how this rhythmic memory proceeded from a still earlier memory that was particularly strong in the Atlantean period, namely, the localised memory, where man only bore within him a consciousness of the present, but used all manner of things which he found in the external world or which he himself set there, as memorials by means of which he put himself into relationship with the past; and not alone with his own personal past, but with the past of humanity in general.

In this connection we have not only to think of memorials that were on the Earth; in those ancient times the constellations in the heavens served man as memorials, especially in their recurrences and in the variations of these recurrences. From the constellations man perceived how things were in earlier times. Thus did heaven and earth work together to build for an ancient humanity the localised memory.

Now the man of long past times was different in the whole constitution of his being from the man of a later time, and still more so from the man of our own time. Man to-day, in his waking condition, bears the Ego and astral body within him unnoticed, as it were; most people do not notice how the physical bears within it, along with the etheric body, a much more important organisation than itself, namely, the astral body and the Ego-organisation. You, of course, are familiar with these connections. But an ancient humanity felt this fact of their own being quite differently.

And it is to such a humanity that we must return, when we go back to the third epoch of Post-Atlantean civilisation,—the Egypto-Chaldean. At that time man experienced himself as spirit and soul still to a great extent outside his physical and etheric body, even when awake. He knew how to distinguish: This I have as my spirit and soul,—we, of course, call it the Ego and the astral body—and it is linked with my physical body and my etheric body. He went through the world in this experience of twofold-ness. He did not call his physical and his etheric body ‘I.’ He called ‘I’ only his soul and spirit, that which was spiritual and was in a manner connected downward with his physical and etheric bodies, had a connection with them that he could observe and feel. And in this spirit and soul, in this Ego and astral body, man was made aware of the entry of the Divine-spiritual Hierarchies, even as to-day he feels the entry of natural substances into his physical body.

To-day man's experience in the physical body is of the following nature. He knows that with the process of nourishment, with the process of breathing, he receives the substances of the external kingdoms of Nature. Before, they are outside; then they are within him. They enter him, penetrate him and become part of him. In that earlier age, when man experienced a certain separation of his soul-and-spirit nature from his physical and etheric nature, he knew that Angels, Archangels and other Beings up to the highest Hierarchies are themselves spiritual substance that penetrates his soul and spirit and becomes—if I may put it so—part of him. So that at every moment of life he was able to say: In me live the Gods. And he looked upon his Ego, not as built up from below by means of physical and etheric substances, but as bestowed on him through grace from above, as coming from the Hierarchies. And as a burden, or rather as a vehicle, in which he feels himself borne forward in the physical world as in a vehicle of life—so did he conceive of his physical-etheric nature. Until this is clearly grasped, we shall not understand the course of events in the evolution of mankind.

We could trace this course of events by reference to many different examples. To-day we will follow one thread, the same that I touched upon thirteen years ago, when I spoke of that historic document² which represents the most ancient phase of the evolution we have now to consider,—I mean, the Epic of Gilgamesh.

The Epic of Gilgamesh has in part the character of a Saga, and so to-day I will set before you the events that I described thirteen years ago, as they manifest themselves directly to spiritual vision.

In a certain town in Asia Minor—it is called Erech³ in the Epic—there lived a man who belonged to the conquering type of which we spoke in the last lecture, the type that sprang so truly and naturally out of the whole mental and social conditions of the time. The Epic calls him Gilgamesh. We have then to do with a personality who has preserved many characteristics of the humanity of earlier times. Clear though it is, however, to this personality that he has, as it were, a dual nature,—that he has on the one hand the spirit-and-soul nature into which the Gods descend, and on the other hand, the physical-and-etheric into which substances of the Earth and the Cosmos, physical and etheric substances, enter,—it is none the less a fact that the representative people of his time are already passing through a transition into a later stage of human evolution. The transition consisted in this. The Ego-consciousness, which a comparatively short time previously was above in the sphere of spirit and soul, had now, if I may so express it, sunk down into the physical and etheric, so that Gilgamesh was one of those who began no longer to say ‘I’ to the spirit-and-soul part of their being, in which they felt the presence of the Gods, but to say ‘I’ to that which was earthly and etheric in them. Such was the stage of development in the human soul life of that time.

But along with this condition of soul, where the Ego has drawn down from the spirit and soul and entered as conscious Ego into the bodily and etheric, this personality had still left in him habits belonging to the past; and especially the habit of experiencing memory solely in connection with rhythm. He still retained also that inward feeling that one must learn to know the forces of death, because the death-forces can alone give to man that which brings him to powers of reflection.

Now owing to the fact that in the personality of Gilgamesh we have to do with a soul who had already gone through many incarnations on Earth and had now entered into the new form of human existence which I have just described, we find him at this point in a physical existence that bore in it a strain of uncertainty. The justification, as it were, of the habits of conquest, the justification, too, of the rhythmic memory, were beginning to lose their validity for the Earth. And so the experiences of Gilgamesh were throughout the experiences of an age of transition.

Hence it came about that when this personality, in accordance with the old custom, conquered and seized the city that in the Epic is called Erech, dissensions arose in the city. At first he was not liked. He was regarded as a foreigner and indeed would never have been able alone to meet all the difficulties that presented themselves in consequence of his capture of the city. Then there appeared, because destiny had led him thither, another personality—the Epic of Gilgamesh calls him Eabani⁴—a personality who had descended relatively late to the Earth from that planetary existence which Earth-humanity led for a period, as you will find described in my Outline of Occult Science.

You know how during the Atlantean epoch souls descended, some earlier, some later, from the different planets, having withdrawn thither from the Earth at a very early stage of Earth evolution.

In Gilgamesh we have to do with an individuality, who returned comparatively early to the Earth; thus at the time of which we are speaking he had already experienced many Earth incarnations.

In the other individuality who had now also come to that city we have to do with one who had remained comparatively long in planetary existence and only later found his way back to Earth. You may read of this from a somewhat different point of view in my Stuttgart lectures of thirteen years ago.

Now this second individuality formed an intimate friendship with Gilgamesh; and together they were able to establish the social life of the city on a really permanent footing. This was possible because there remained to this second personality a great deal of the knowledge that came from that sojourn in the Cosmos beyond the Earth, and that was preserved for a few incarnations after the return to Earth. He had, as I said in Stuttgart, a kind of enlightened cognition; clairvoyance, clairaudience and what we may call clair-cognition. Thus we have in the one personality what remained of the old habits of conquest and of the rhythmically-directed memory, and in the other what remained to him from vision and penetration into the secret mysteries of the Cosmos. And from the flowing together of these two things, there grew up, as was indeed generally the case in those olden times, the whole social structure of that city in Asia Minor. Peace and happiness descended upon the city and its inhabitants, and everything would have been in order, had not a certain event taken place that set the whole course of affairs in another direction.

There was in that city a Mystery, the Mystery of a Goddess, and this Mystery preserved very many secrets relating to the Cosmos. It was, however, in the meaning of those times, what I may call a kind of synthetic Mystery. That is to say, in this Mystery revelations were collected together from various Mysteries of Asia. And the contents of these Mysteries were cultivated and taught there in diverse ways at different times. Now this was not easily understood by the personality who bears the name of Gilgamesh in the Epic, and he made complaint against the Mystery that its teachings were contradictory. And seeing that the two personalities of whom we are speaking were those who really held the whole ordering of the city in their hands and that complaints against the Mystery came from so important a quarter, trouble ensued; and at length things became so difficult that the priests of the Mysteries appealed to those Powers Who in former times were accessible to man in the Mysteries. It will not surprise you to hear that in the ancient Mysteries man could actually address himself to the Spiritual Beings of the higher Hierarchies; for, as I told you yesterday, to the ancient Oriental, Asia was none else than the lowest heaven and in this lowest heaven man was aware of the presence of Divine-spiritual Beings and had intercourse with them. Such intercourse was especially cultivated in the Mysteries. And so the priests of the Istar Mysteries turned to those Spiritual Powers to whom they always turned when they sought enlightenment; and it came about that these Spiritual Powers inflicted a certain punishment upon the city.

What happened was expressed at the time in the following way: Something that is really a higher spiritual force, is working in Erech as an animal power, as a terrible spectral animal power. Trouble of all kinds befell the inhabitants, physical illnesses and more especially diseases and disturbances of the soul. The consequence was that the personality who had attached himself to Gilgamesh and who is called Eabani in the Epic, died; but in order that the mission of the other personality might be continued on Earth, he remained with this personality spiritually, even after death. Thus when we consider the later life and development of the personality who in the Epic bears the name of Gilgamesh, we have still to see in it the working together in the two personalities; but now in such a way that in the subsequent years of Gilgamesh's life he receives intuitions and enlightenment from Eabani, and so continues to act, although alone, not simply out of his own will, but out of the will of both, from the flowing together of the will of both.

What I have here placed before you is something that was fully possible in those olden times. Man's life of thought and feeling was not then so single and united as it is to-day. Hence it could not have the experience of freedom, in the sense in which we know it to-day. It was quite possible, either for a spiritual Being who had never incarnated on Earth to work through the will of an earthly personality, or, as was the case here, for a human personality who had passed through death and was living an after-death existence, to speak and act through the will of a personality on Earth. So it was with Gilgamesh. And from what resulted in this way through the flowing together of the two wills, Gilgamesh was able to recognise with considerable clearness at what point he himself stood in the history of mankind. Through the influence of the spirit that inspired him, he began to know that the Ego had sunk down into the physical body and etheric body,—which are mortal; and from that moment the problem of immortality began to play an intensely strong part in his life. His whole longing was set on finding his way by some means or other into the very heart of this problem. The Mysteries, wherein was preserved what there was to say on Earth in those days concerning immortality, did not readily reveal their secrets to Gilgamesh. The Mysteries had still their tradition, and in their tradition was preserved also in great measure the living knowledge that was present on Earth in Atlantean times, when the ancient original wisdom ruled among men.

The bearers of this original wisdom, however, who once went about on Earth as Spiritual Beings, had long ago withdrawn and founded the cosmic colony of the Moon. For it is pure childishness to suppose that the Moon is the dead frozen body that modern physics describes. The Moon is, before all, the cosmic world of those Spiritual Beings Who were the first great teachers of earthly humanity, the Beings Who once brought to earthly humanity the primeval wisdom and Who, when the Moon had left the Earth and sought a place for itself in the planetary system, withdrew also and took up their abode on this Moon.

He who to-day through Imaginative cognition is able to attain to a true knowledge of the Moon, gains knowledge too of the Spiritual Beings in this cosmic colony, Who were once the teachers of the ancient wisdom to humanity on Earth. What they had taught was preserved in the Mysteries, and also the impulses whereby man himself is able to come into a certain relationship with this ancient wisdom.

The personality who is called Gilgamesh in the Epic had, however, no living connection with these Mysteries of Asia Minor. But through the super-sensible influence of the friend who, in the after-death existence, was still united with him, there arose in Gilgamesh an inner impulse to seek out paths in the world whereby he might be able to come to an experience concerning the immortality of the soul. Later on, in the Middle Ages, when man desired to learn something concerning the spiritual world, he would sink down into his own inner being. In more modern times one could say that a still more inward process is followed. In those olden times, however, of which we are speaking, it was a matter of clear and exact knowledge to man that the Earth is not the mere lump of rock which the geology books would lead one to imagine, but that the Earth is a living being,—a living being, moreover, endowed with soul and spirit. As a tiny insect that runs over a human being may learn something of that human being as it passes over his nose and forehead, or through his hair, as the insect acquires its knowledge in this way by making a journey over the human being, so in those times it was by setting forth upon journeys over the Earth and by learning to know the Earth with its different configurations in different places, that man gained insight into the spiritual world. And this he was able to do, whether access to the Mysteries were permitted to him or no. It is in truth no mere superficial account that relates how Pythagoras and others wandered far and wide in order to attain their knowledge. Men went about the Earth in order to receive what was revealed in its manifold configurations, in all that they could observe from the different forms and shapes of the Earth in different places; and not of the Earth in its physical aspect alone, but of the Earth too as soul and spirit.

To-day men may travel to Africa, to Italy,—and yet, with the exception of external details, at which they gape and stare, their experience in these places may be very little different from their experience at home. For man's sensitiveness to the deep differences that subsist between different places of the Earth has gone.

In the period with which we are now dealing, it had not died out. Thus the impulse to wander over the Earth and thereby receive something that should help to the solution of the problem of immortality, betokened something full of meaning for Gilgamesh.

So he set forth upon his wanderings. And they had for him a result that was of very great significance. He came to a region that is nearly the same as we now call Burgenland, a district much talked of in recent times and concerning which there has been a good deal of contention as to whether it should belong to Hungary or not. The whole social conditions of the country have of course greatly changed since those far off times. Gilgamesh came thither and found there an ancient Mystery—the High Priest of the Mystery is called Xisuthros⁵ in the Epic—an ancient Mystery that was a genuine successor, as it were, of the old Atlantean Mysteries; only, of course, in a changed form, as must of necessity be the case after so long a time had elapsed.

And it was so that in this ancient Mystery centre they knew how to judge and appraise the faculty of knowledge that Gilgamesh possessed. He was met with understanding. A test was imposed upon him, one that in those days was often imposed on pupils of the Mysteries. He had to go through certain exercises, wide-awake, for seven days and seven nights. It was too much for him, so he submitted himself only to the substitute or alternative for the test. Certain substances were made ready for him, of which he then partook, and by means of them received a certain enlightenment; although, as is always the case when certain exceptional conditions are not assured, the enlightenment might be doubtful in some respects. Nevertheless a degree of enlightenment was there, a certain insight into the great connections in the Universe, into the spiritual structure of the Universe. And so, when Gilgamesh had ended his wandering and was returning home again, he did in fact possess a high spiritual insight.

He travelled along the Danube, following the river on its northern bank, until he came again to his home, to the home of his choice. But before he reached home, because he did not receive the initiation into the Post-Atlantean Mystery in the other way that I described, but instead in a somewhat uncertain way, he succumbed to the first temptation that assailed him and fell into a terrible fit of anger over an event that came to his notice,—something, in effect, which he heard had taken place in the city. He heard of the event before he reached the city, and burst out into a storm of anger; and in consequence, the enlightenment he had received was almost entirely darkened, so that he arrived home without it.

Nevertheless,—and this is the peculiar characteristic of this personality—he still had the possibility, through the connection with the spirit of his dead friend, of looking into the spiritual world, or at least of receiving information thence.

It is, however, one thing by means of an initiation to acquire direct vision into the spiritual world, and another thing to receive information from a personality who is in the after-death condition. Still, we may say with truth that something of an insight into the nature of immortality did remain with Gilgamesh. I am setting aside just now the experiences that are undergone by man after death; these do not yet play very strongly into the consciousness of the next incarnation, nor did they in those days;—into the life, into the inner constitution they do work very strongly, but not into the consciousness.

You now have before you these two personalities whom I have described and who together bring to expression the mental and spiritual constitution of man in the third Post-Atlantean period of civilisation at about the middle point of its development,—two personalities who still lived in such a way that the whole manner of their life was in itself strong evidence of the duality in man's nature. The one—Gilgamesh—was conscious of this duality; he was one of the first to experience the descent of the Ego-consciousness, the descent of the Ego into the physical and etheric nature in man. The other, inasmuch as he had passed through but few incarnations on Earth, had a clairvoyant knowledge, by means of which he was able to know that there is no such thing as matter, but that everything is spiritual and the so-called material only another form of the spiritual.

Now you can imagine that, if a man's being were so constituted, he could certainly not think and feel what we think and feel to-day. His whole thinking and feeling was indeed totally different from ours. And what such personalities could receive in the way of instruction was of course quite unlike what is taught to-day at school or in the universities. Everything of a spiritual or cultural nature that men received in those days came to them from the Mysteries, whence it was spread abroad as widely as possible among men by all manner of channels. It was the wise men, the priests, in the Mysteries, who were the true teachers of humanity.

Now it was characteristic of these two personalities that in the incarnation that we have described they were unable just because of their special constitution of soul, to approach the Mysteries of their own land. The one who is named Eabani in the Epic stood near the Mysteries through his sojourn in the extra-earthly regions of the Cosmos; the one who is named Gilgamesh experienced a kind of initiation in a Post-Atlantean Mystery, which however only bore half fruit in him. The result of all this was that both felt in their own being, as it were, something that made them kin to the primeval times of earthly humanity. Both were able to put the question to themselves: How have we become what we are? What share have we had in the evolution of the Earth? We have become what we are through the evolution of the Earth; what part have we played in its evolution?

The question of immortality that was the occasion of such suffering and conflict to Gilgamesh, was connected in those days with a necessary vision into the evolution of the Earth in primeval times. One could not think or feel—using the words in the sense of those times—about the immortality of the soul unless one had at the same time some vision of how human souls who were already there in very early phases of the Earth's evolution, during the Ancient Sun and Ancient Moon embodiments, saw approaching them, that which later has become what we call earthly. Men felt they belonged to the Earth. They felt that to know himself, man must behold and recognise his connection with the Earth.

Now the secret knowledge that was cultivated in all Mysteries of Asia, was first and foremost cosmic knowledge; its wisdom and its teachings unfolded the origin of the evolution of the Earth in connection with the Cosmos. So that in these Mysteries there appeared before men in a living way, in such a way that it could become living Ideas in them, a far-spread vision, showing them how the Earth evolved, and how in the heave and surge of the substances and forces of the Earth, all through the Sun, Moon and Earth periods of evolution, man has been evolving together with all these substances. All this was set before men in a most vivid manner.

One of the Mysteries where such things were taught, was continued on into much later times. It was the Mystery centre of Ephesus.⁶ This Mystery had in the very middle of its sanctuary the image of the Goddess Artemis. When we look to-day at pictures of the goddess Artemis, we have perhaps only the grotesque impression of a female form with many breasts. This is because we have no idea how such things were experienced in olden times; and it was the inner experience evoked by these things that was all-important. The pupils of the Mysteries had to go through a certain preparation before they were conducted to the true centre of the Mysteries. In the Ephesian Mysteries the centre was this image of the Goddess Artemis. When the pupil was led up to the centre, he became one with such an image. As he stood before the image, he lost the consciousness that he was there in front of it, enclosed in his skin. He acquired the consciousness that he himself is what the image is. He identified himself with the image. This identification of himself in consciousness with the divine image at Ephesus had the following effect. The pupil no longer merely looked out upon the kingdoms of the Earth that were round about him—the stones, trees, rivers, clouds and so forth—but when he felt himself one with the image, when he entered as it were into the image of Artemis, he received an inner vision of his connection with the kingdoms of the Ether. He felt himself one with the world of the stars, one with the processes in the world of the stars. He did not feel himself as earthly substance within a human skin, he felt his cosmic existence. He felt himself in the etheric. And as he did so, there rose before him earlier conditions of Earth-experience and of man's experience on Earth. He began to see what these earlier conditions had been. To-day we look upon the Earth as a great piece of rock or stone, covered with water over a large part of its surface and surrounded by a sphere of air containing oxygen and nitrogen and other substances,—containing, in fact, what the human being requires for breathing. And so on and so on. And when men begin to explain and speculate on what passes to-day for scientific knowledge, then we get a fine result indeed! For only by means of spiritual vision can one penetrate to the conditions that prevailed in the earliest primeval times. Such a spiritual vision, however, concerning primeval conditions of the Earth⁷ and of mankind was attained by the pupils of Ephesus, when they identified themselves with the divine image; they beheld and understood how formerly what surrounds the Earth to-day as atmosphere was not as it now is; surrounding the Earth, in the place where the atmosphere is to-day, was an extraordinarily fine albumen, a volatile, fluid albumenous substance. And they saw how everything that lived on the Earth required for its own genesis the forces of this volatile, fluid albumenous substance, that was spread over the Earth, and how everything also lived in it. They saw too how that which was in a certain sense already within this substance—finely distributed but everywhere with a tendency to crystallisation—how that which was present in a finely distributed condition as silicic acid was in reality a kind of sense-organ for the Earth and could take up into itself from all sides the Imaginations and influences from the surrounding Cosmos. And thus in the silicic acid contained in the earthly albumenous atmosphere were everywhere Imaginations, concretely, externally present.

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These Imaginations had the form of gigantic, plant-like organisms, and out of that which was, so to speak, ‘imagined’ into the Earth in this way, there developed later, through absorption of the atmospheric substance,—the plant; everything that is of a plant-like nature. At first it was in the environment of the Earth, in volatile, fluid form; only later did it sink down into the soil and become what is known to us as the plant.

Besides the silicic acid, there was imbedded also in this albumen-atmosphere another substance, lime, in a finely-divided condition. Again, out of the lime substance, under the influence of the congelation of the albumen there arose the animal kingdom. And the human being felt himself within all this. He felt one with the whole Earth. He lived in that which formed itself as plant in the Earth through Imagination, he lived too in that which was developing on Earth as animal, in the way I have described. Each single human being felt himself spread out over the whole Earth, felt himself one with the Earth. So that the human beings were all—as I have described it for the Platonic teaching in my book Christianity as Mystical Fact, in reference to the human capacity for ideas—were all each within the other.

Now destiny brought it about that the two personalities, of whom I spoke in Stuttgart and of whom I am speaking to you again here, reincarnated as adherents of the Mystery of Ephesus, and there received with deep devotion into their souls the things that I have here pictured to you in brief outline. Thereby their souls were, in a manner, inwardly established. Through the Mystery they now received as Earth-wisdom what had formerly been accessible to them only in experience,—for the most part unconscious experience.

Thus was the human experience of these personalities divided between two separate incarnations. And thereby did they bear within them a strong consciousness of man's connection with the higher, the spiritual world, and at the same time a strong, an intense capacity for feeling and experiencing all that belongs to the Earth.

For if you have two things that perpetually flow together, so that you cannot keep them apart, then they merge and lose themselves in each other. If, on the other hand, they show themselves clearly distinct, then you can judge the one by the other. And so these two personalities were able on the one hand to judge the spiritual of the higher world that came to them as a result of life-experience and that lived in them as an echo from their earlier incarnations. And now, as the origin of the kingdoms of nature was communicated to them in the Mystery of Ephesus under the influence of the Goddess Artemis, they were able, on the other hand, to judge how the things external to man on the Earth came into being, how gradually everything external to man on the Earth was formed out of a primeval substance, which substance also included man. And the life of these two personalities—it fell partly in the latter end of the time when Heraclitus⁸ was still living in Ephesus, and partly in the time that followed—became particularly rich inwardly and was powerfully lit up from within with the light of great cosmic secrets. There was in them moreover a strong consciousness of how man in his life of soul may be connected, not merely with that which lies spread out around him on the Earth, but with that too which extends upward,—when he himself reaches upward with his being. Such was the inner configuration of soul of these two personalities, who had worked together in the earlier Egypto-Chaldean epoch and then lived together at the time of Heraclitus and after, in connection with the Mystery of Ephesus. And now this working together was able to continue still further. The configuration of soul that had been developed in both, passed through death, through the spiritual world, and began to prepare itself for an Earth life that must needs again bring problems which will now of course present themselves in quite a different way. And when we observe in what manner these two personalities had to find their part later in the history of Earth evolution, we may see how through the experiences of the soul in earlier times—these experiences having their karmic continuation in the next life on Earth—things are prepared which afterwards appear in totally different form in the later life, when the personalities are once more incorporated into the evolution of humanity on Earth.

I have brought forward this example, because these two personalities make their appearance later in a period that was of extraordinary importance in the history of mankind. I indicated this in my lectures at Stuttgart thirteen years ago; in fact, I dealt with all these matters from a certain point of view. These personalities who had first in the Egypto-Chaldean epoch gone through what I may call a widely-extended cosmic life, and had then deepened this cosmic experience within them, thereby in a sense establishing their souls, now lived again in a later incarnation as Aristotle⁹ and Alexander the Great.¹⁰ When one understands the underlying depths in the souls of Aristotle and Alexander the Great, then one can begin to understand, as I explained in Stuttgart, all that was working so problematically in these two personalities, whose lives took their course in the time when Greek culture was falling into decay and Roman rule beginning to have dominion.

• 1. See Occult History. Historical Personalities and Events in the Light of Spiritual Science by Rudolf Steiner, Anthroposophical Publishing Company, London, 1957.
• 2. The Epic of Gilgamesh was discovered in the ruins of a palace of Assurbanipal written in cuneiform characters on twelve tablets. This text is based on older Sumerian documents of which fragments remain.
• 3. Called Erech in the Bible (1 Moses 10, 10), the city is named Uruk in the cuneiform text.
• 4. The cuneiform text has Enkidu or Engidu.
• 5. This is the Sumerian name Ziusudra used by Berossus, priest of Bel in Babylon, who wrote a history of Babylon and Chaldea in Greek around 280 B.C. based on the archives of the Temple in Babylon. In cuneiform script it is Utnapishtim.
• 6. Rudolf Steiner spoke in detail about this place in the 6th lecture of Mystery Knowledge and Mystery Centres, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1973.
• 7. See the 5th lecture in Mystery Knowledge and Mystery Centres.
• 8. Heraclitus of Ephesus, Greek philosopher. He lived around 500 B.C. and deposited his chief work in the Temple of Artemis. See Christianity as Mystical Fact and the Mysteries of Antiquity by Rudolf Steiner, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1972.
• 9. Greek philosopher from Stagira (384–322 B.C.). See Riddles of Philosophy by Rudolf Steiner, Anthroposophic Press, New York, 1973.
• 10. (356-323 B.C.). From 336 King of Macedonia. Died in Babylon.

It was my task yesterday to show from the example of individual personalities how the historical evolution of the world runs its course. If one seeks to come further in the direction of Spiritual Science, one cannot represent things otherwise than by showing the consequences of events as they reflect themselves in the human being. For not until our own epoch does man feel himself for reasons which we will discuss in the course of these lectures, shut off as an individual being from the rest of the world. In all previous epochs man felt—and, be it noted, in all subsequent epochs man will again feel himself as member of the whole Cosmos, as belonging to the entire world; even as a finger (as I have often expressed it) can have no independent existence for itself, but can only exist on a human being. For the moment a finger is separated from the human being, it is no longer a finger, it begins to decay, it is something quite different, subject to quite other laws than when attached to the human organism. And as a finger is only a finger in unison with the organism, so in the same way is man only a being having some form or other, whether in Earth-life or in the life between death and a new birth, in connection with the entire Cosmos. The consciousness of this was present in earlier epochs and will again be present in a later time; it is only darkened to-day because, as we shall hear, it was necessary for man that it should be darkened and clouded in order that he might develop to the full the experience of freedom. The farther we go back however into ancient times, the more do we find man possessing this consciousness of belonging to the whole Cosmos.

I have given you a picture of two personalities,—the one called Gilgamesh in the famous Epic and the other Eabani. I have shown you how these personalities lived in the ancient Egypto-Chaldean epoch in accordance with what was possible to men of that time, and how they afterwards experienced a deepening through the Mysteries of Ephesus. And I told you at the end of my lecture yesterday that these same human beings had their part later in the historical evolution of the world as Aristotle and Alexander.

In order now fully to understand the course of Earth evolution in the times when all these things were taking place, we must look more closely into what such souls were able to receive into themselves in these three successive periods.

I have told you how the personality who is concealed behind the name of Gilgamesh undertook a journey to the West and went through a kind of Western Post-Atlantean initiation.

Let us first form an idea of the nature of such an initiation, that we may the better understand what came later. We shall naturally turn to a place where echoes of the old Atlantean initiation remained on for a long time. This was the case with the Hibernian Mysteries,¹ of which I have recently spoken to the friends who are here in Dornach. I must now repeat some of what I then said before we can come to a clear and full understanding of the subject we are treating.

The Mysteries of Hibernia, the Irish Mysteries, were in existence for a long time. They were still there at the time of the foundation of Christianity. And they are the Mysteries that in some respects preserved most faithfully the ancient wisdom-teaching of the Atlantean peoples. Let me give you a picture of the experiences of a person who was initiated into the Irish Mysteries in the Post-Atlantean epoch. Before he was able to receive the initiation he had to be strictly prepared; the preparation that had to be undergone before entering the Mysteries was always in those times of extraordinary strictness and rigour. The important thing in the Hibernian Mysteries was that the pupil should learn to become aware in powerful inward experience ofthat which is illusory in his environment,—in all the things, that is to say, to which man attributes being on the ground of his sense-perception. Then he was made aware of all the difficulties and obstacles which meet man when he searches after the truth, the real truth. And he was shown how, fundamentally, everything which surrounds us in the world of the senses is an illusion, that what the senses give is illusion, and that the truth conceals itself behind the illusion, so that in fact true being is not accessible to man through sense-perception.

Now, very likely you will say that this conviction you yourselves have held for a long time; you know this quite well. But all the knowledge a man can have in the present-day consciousness of the illusory character of the sense-world is as nothing compared with the inner shattering, the inner tragedy that men of that time suffered in their preparation for the Hibernian initiation. For when one says theoretically in this way: Everything is Maya, everything is illusion,—one takes it quite lightly! But the training of the Hibernian pupils was carried to such a point that they had to say to themselves: There is for man no possibility of penetrating the illusion and coming to real true Being.

The pupils were by this means trained to content themselves, as it were in desperation, with the illusion. They came into an attitude of despair: the illusory character, they felt, is so overpowering and so penetrating that one can never get beyond it. And in the life of these pupils we find always the feeling: Very well then, we must remain in the illusion. That means, however: we must lose the very ground from under our feet. For there is no standing firm on illusion! In truth, my dear friends, of the strictness and severity of the preparation in the ancient Mysteries, we to-day can scarcely form any idea. Men shrink in terror before what inner development actually demands.

Such was the experience that came to the pupils in regard to Being and its illusory character. And now there awaited them a similar experience regarding the search after Truth. They learned to know the hindrances man has in his emotions that hinder him from coming to truth, all the dark and overwhelming feelings that trouble the clear light of knowledge. And so once more they came to a great moment when they said to themselves: If Truth is not, well then we live—we must live—in error, in untruth. For a man to come thus to a time in his life when he despairs of Being and of Truth means, in short, that he tears out of him his own humanity.

All this was given in order that the human being, through experiencing the opposite of what he was finally to reach as his goal, might approach that goal with the right and deep human feeling. For unless one has learned what it means to live with error and illusion, then one cannot value Being and Truth. And the pupils of Hibernia had to learn to value Being and Truth.

And then, when they had gone through all this, when they had, as it were, experienced to the bitter end, the opposite pole of what they were eventually to reach, the pupils were led (and here I must describe what happened in the picture-language that can rightly represent what took place as reality in the Hibernian Mysteries)—they were led into a kind of sanctuary where were two pillar-statues of infinitely strong suggestive force, and of gigantic size. The one of these pillar-statues was inwardly hollow; the surface that surrounded the hollow space, the whole substance, that is, of which the statue consisted, was elastic throughout. Wherever one pressed, one could make an indentation into the statue; but the moment one ceased to press, the form restored itself.

The whole pillar-statue was made in such a way that the head was more particularly developed. When a man approached the statue, he had the feeling: Forces are streaming forth from the head into the colossal body. For of course he did not see the space within, he only became aware of it when he pressed. And the pupil was exhorted to press. He had the feeling that the forces of the head rayed out over the whole of the rest of the body, that in this statue the head does everything.

I willingly admit, my dear friends, that if a modern man in our present-day prosaic life were led before the statue, he would scarcely be able to experience anything but quite abstract ideas about it. That is certainly so. But it is a different matter, first to experience with one's whole inner being, with soul and spirit, yes, and with blood and nerves, the might of illusion and the might of error,—and then, after that, to experience the suggestive force of such a gigantic figure.

This statue had a male character.

By the side of it stood another, that had a female character. It was not hollow. It was composed of a substance that was not elastic, but plastic. When the pupil pressed this statue—and again he was exhorted to do so—he destroyed the form. He dug a hole in the body.

After the pupil had found how in the one statue, owing to its elasticity, the form was always re-established, and how in the other he defaced the statue by pressing it, and after something else too had taken place, of which I shall speak presently, he left the place, and was only led back there again when all the deformations he had caused in the plastic non-elastic female figure had been restored, and the statue was intact. Thanks to all the preparations which the pupil had undergone—and I can only give them here in outline—he was able to receive in connection with the statue having a female character a deep inner experience in the whole of his being—body, soul and spirit.

This inner experience had of course been already prepared in him earlier, but it was established and confirmed in full measure through the suggestive influence of the statue. He received into him a feeling of inward numbness, of hard and frozen numbness. This so worked in him that he saw his soul filled with Imaginations. And these Imaginations were pictures of the Earth's winter, pictures that represented the winter of the Earth. Thus was the pupil led to perceive Reality, in the spirit, from within.

With the other, the male statue, he had a different experience. He felt as though all the life in him, which was generally spread out over the whole body, went into his blood, as if his blood were permeated with forces and pressing against his skin. Whereas before the one statue he had to feel that he was becoming a frozen skeleton, he had now to feel before the other that all the life in him was being consumed in heat, and he was living in a tightly-stretched skin. And this experience of the whole inner man pressing against the surface enabled the pupil to receive a new insight. He was able to say to himself: You have now a feeling and experience of what you would be if, of all the things in the Cosmos, the Sun alone worked upon you. In this way he learned to recognise the working of the Sun in the Cosmos, and how its working is distributed in the Cosmos. He learned to know man's relation to the Sun. And he learned that the reason why man is not in reality what he now felt himself to be under the suggestive influence of the Sun-statue, is because other forces, working in from other corners of the Cosmos, ‘mummify’ this working of the Sun. In such manner did the pupil learn to find his bearings in the Cosmos, to be, as it were, at home in the Cosmos.

And when the pupil felt the suggestive influence of the Moon-statue, when he had in him the hard frost of numbness and experienced a winter landscape within him (in the case of the Sun-statue, he experienced a summer landscape in the spirit), then he felt what he would be like if the Moon influences alone were present.

What does man really know about the world in the present-day? He knows, let us say, that the chicory flower is blue, that the rose is red, the sky blue, and so forth. But these facts make no violent or overwhelming impression upon him. They merely tell him of what is nearest at hand, of what is in his immediate environment. If man would know the secrets of the Cosmos, then he must become in his whole being a sense-organ,—and, to an intense degree.

Through the suggestive influence of the Sun-statue, the whole of the pupil's being was concentrated in the circulation of the blood. He learned to know himself as a Sun-being, as he experienced within him this suggestive influence. And he learned to know himself as Moon-being, by experiencing the suggestive influence of the female statue. And then he was able to tell from out of these inner experiences he had received, how Sun and Moon work upon the human being; even as we to-day can say, from the experience of our eyes, how the rose affects us, or from the experience of our ears can tell the working of the sound of C sharp, and so on.

Thus the pupils of these Mysteries experienced still, even in Post-Atlantean times, how man is placed, as it were, in the Cosmos. It was for them an immediate and direct experience.

Now what I have related to you to-day is but a brief sketch of the sublime experience that came to men in the Mysteries of Hibernia, and continued so to come until the first centuries of the Christian Era. It was a cosmic experience—this Sun-experience and Moon-experience.

In the Mysteries of Ephesus in Asia Minor the pupil had to undergo experiences of quite a different character. Here he experienced in a particularly intense manner, with the whole of his being, that which later found such perfect expression in the opening words of the John-Gospel: ‘In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was with God. And a God was the Word.’ In Ephesus, the pupil was led, not before two statues, but before one,—the statue that is known as the Artemis (Diana) of Ephesus. Identifying himself—as I said yesterday—with this statue which was fullness of life, which abounded everywhere in life, the pupil lived his way into the Cosmic Ether. With the whole of his inner feeling and experience he raised himself out of mere earthly life, raised himself up into the experience of the Cosmic Ether. And now he was guided, to a new knowledge. First of all, the real nature of human speech was communicated to him. And then from human speech, from the human image, that is, of the Cosmic Logos, from the humanly-imaged Logos, it was shown to the pupil how the Cosmic Word works and weaves creatively throughout the Universe.

Once more, I can only describe these things in bare outline. The process was such that the attention of the pupil was especially drawn to what happens when the human being speaks, when he impresses the mark of his word on the outgoing breath. He was led to experience what happens with that which, through his own inner deed, man leads over into life,—to feel how his “word” looks in the element of air; and moreover, how two further processes are united with what takes place in the element of air.

Imagine that we have here the expired air, on which are impressed certain words that the human being speaks. Whilst this breath, formed into words, streams outwards from the breast, the rhythmic vibration goes downwards and passes over into the whole watery element that permeates the human organism. Thus at the level of his throat, his speech-organs, man has the air-rhythms when he speaks. But along with his speaking goes a wave-like surging and seething of the whole fluid-body in the human being. The fluid in man, that is below the region of speech, comes into vibration and vibrates in harmony. This is what it really means when we say that our speech is accompanied by feelings. If the watery element in the human being did not vibrate in harmony in this way, man's speech would go forth from him neutrally, indifferently; he would not be able to permeate what he says with feeling. And upwards in the direction of the head, goes the element of warmth, and accompanying the words that we impress upon the air are upward-streaming waves of warmth, which permeate the head and there make it possible for our words to be accompanied by thought.

Thus, when we speak, we have to do with three things: air, warmth and water. This process, which alone presents a complete picture of what lives and weaves in human speech was taken as the starting-point for the pupil of Ephesus.

It was then made clear to him that that which thus takes place in the human being is a cosmic process made human, and that in a certain far-off time the Earth itself worked in that way; only it was not then the air element, but the watery element, the fluid element—which I described yesterday as a volatile, fluid albumen—that had this wavelike moving and surging. Like the air in man, in the microcosm, when he speaks on the outgoing breath, so was once the volatile, fluid element, the albumen which surrounded the Earth like an atmosphere. And as to-day the air passes over into the warmth-element, so the albumen went upwards into a kind of air-element, and downwards into a kind of earthly element. And as with us feelings arise in our body through the fluid element, so in the Earth the Earth-formations, the Earth-forces sprang into existence, all the forces that work and seethe within the Earth. And above, in the airy element the cosmic thoughts were born, the soaring cosmic thoughts that work creatively in the earthly substance.

Majestic and powerful was the impression that the human being received at Ephesus, when he was shown how in his own speech lived the microcosmic echo of what had once been macrocosmic. And the pupil of Ephesus, when he spoke, felt an insight come to him through the experience of speech into the working of the Cosmic Word. He could perceive how the Cosmic Word set in motion the volatile fluid element, giving it movement full of meaning and import; he saw too how it went upward to the creative cosmic thought, and downward to the Earth-forces coming into being.

Thus did the pupil live his way into the Cosmos, by learning to understand aright what was in his own being. ‘Within thee is the human Logos. The human Logos works from out of thee during thy time on Earth. Thou, as man, art the human Logos.’ (For in very deed through that which streams downwards in the fluid element we are ourselves formed and moulded out of speech, whilst through that which streams upwards, we have our human thoughts during our time on Earth.) ‘And even as in thee the essence of humanity is the microcosmic Logos, so once in the far-off beginning of things was the Logos, and It was with God and Itself was a God.’

In Ephesus men had a profound understanding of this for they understood it in and through the human being.

In considering such a personality as is concealed behind the name of Gilgamesh, you must remember how he led his life in the whole milieu and environment that radiated out from the Mysteries. For all culture, all civilisation, was in earlier times a radiation from the Mysteries; so that when I name Gilgamesh to you, you must think of him—as long as he was living in Erech—not indeed as himself initiated into the Mysteries of Erech, but as living in a civilisation that was permeated with the feeling and experience man could have from his relation to the Cosmos.

An experience then came to this personality during his journey to the West, which made him directly acquainted, not with the Hibernian Mysteries themselves—he did not travel so far afield—but with what was cultivated in a colony of the Hibernian Mysteries, situated, as I told you, where the Burgenland now is. What he experienced there lived in his soul and then developed further in the life between death and new birth; and in the next earthly life he underwent at Ephesus a deepening of the soul in connection with this same experience.

The deepening of the soul took place for both the individuals of whom we have been speaking. Verily it was as though a torrent surged up from the depth of the civilisation of that time and broke like a great wave on the souls of these two. They experienced in vivid and intense reality what survived in Greece after the Homeric period only as a beautiful semblance, as the glory of something that is gone.

In Ephesus one could still have a feeling of the whole Reality in which man had once upon a time been living, in the days when he still had an immediate relation to the Divine-Spiritual; when Asia was for him only the lowest of the heavens, when he still had connection with the higher heavens bordering upon it. In those far-off times man had experienced in ‘Asia’ the presence of the Nature Spirits, and above, the presence of the Angels, Archangels, etc., and above them again, the Exusiai and the rest of the Hierarchies. Of all this one could still have as it were an after-feeling in Ephesus, in the place, that is, where Heraclitus also lived and where so much of the old Reality was still experienced even in later Grecian times, down to the 6th and 5th centuries B.C.

It was indeed characteristic of the Greek that he took what had once been experienced by man in connection with the Cosmos and steeped it in the myth, in beauty, in the element of art, turning it into images that man felt more human and more near to him.

Now we must turn our thoughts to a time when on the one hand the Greek civilisation had reached its zenith, when it had proudly pushed back, in the Persian wars, the last thrust as it were of the old Asiatic Reality, a time when however on the other hand Greece itself was already beginning to decline; and we must picture to ourselves what a man of such a time would experience if he still bore in his soul the unmistakable echoes of what had once been the Divine-Spiritual earthly Reality in body, soul, and spirit of mankind.

We shall have to see how Alexander the Great and Aristotle lived in a world that was not altogether adapted to them, in a world indeed that held great tragedy for them. The fact is, Alexander and Aristotle stood in an altogether different relation to the Spiritual from the men around them; for although they cannot be said to have concerned themselves very much with the Samothracian Mysteries, they had nevertheless a strong affinity in their souls to what went on with the Kabiri in those Mysteries. And right on into the Middle Ages there were those who understood what this meant. Men of the present day build up altogether false ideas of the Middle Ages: they do not realise that there were individuals of all classes in life, on into the 13th and 14th centuries, who possessed a clear spiritual vision, at any rate in that realm which in the ancient East was designated as ‘Asia.’ The Song of Alexander² that was composed by a certain priest in the early Middle Ages is a very significant document; in comparison with the account history gives to-day of the doings of Alexander and Aristotle, the poem of the Priest Lamprecht is a sublime and grand conception, still akin to the old understanding of all that had come to pass through Alexander the Great.

Take for instance a passage in the poem where a wonderful description is given after the following style. When Springtime comes, you go out into the woods. You come to the edge of the wood. Flowers are blooming there, and the sun stands where it lets the shadow fall from the trees on to the flowers. And there you may see how in the shadow of the trees in Spring spiritual flower-children come forth from the calices of the flowers and dance in chorus at the edge of the wood.

In this description of Lamprecht the Priest we can perceive distinctly shining through, an old and real experience which was still accessible to men of that time. They did not go out into the woods, saying prosaically: Here is grass, and here are flowers, and here the trees begin; but when they approached the wood while the sun stood behind it and the shadow fell across the flowers, then in the shadow of the trees there came towards them from the flowers a whole world of flower-beings—beings that were actually present to them before they entered into the wood. For when they came in the wood itself they perceived quite other elemental spirits. This dance of the flower-spirits appeared to Lamprecht the Priest and he delighted especially in picturing it. It is indeed significant, my dear friends; Lamprecht, even as late as the 12th or beginning of the 13th century wishing to describe the campaigns of Alexander, permeates them everywhere with descriptions of Nature that still contain the manifestations of the elemental kingdoms. Underlying his Song of Alexander, there was this consciousness: ‘To describe what took place once upon a time in Macedonia when Alexander began his journeys into Asia, when Alexander was taught by Aristotle, we cannot merely describe the prosaic Earth as the environment of these events; no, to describe them worthily we must include with the prosaic Earth the kingdoms of the elemental beings.’ How different from a modern book of history, which is, of course, quite justified for present times. There you will read how Alexander, against the counsel of his teacher Aristotle whom he disobeyed, conceived himself to have the mission to reconcile the barbarians with civilised mankind, creating so to speak an average of culture; the civilised Greeks, the Hellenes, the Macedonians and the barbarians.

That, no doubt, is right enough for modern time. And yet how puerile, compared to the real truth! On the other hand we have a wonderful impression when we look at the picture Lamprecht gives us of the campaigns of Alexander, attributing to them quite a different goal. We feel as though what I have just described—the entry of the Nature-elemental kingdoms, of the Spiritual into the Physical in Nature,—were intended merely as an introduction. For what is the aim of Alexander's campaigns in the Alexanderlied of Lamprecht?

Alexander comes to the very gates of Paradise. Translated as it is into the Christian language of his time, this corresponds in a high degree, as I shall presently explain, to the real truth. For the campaigns of Alexander were not undertaken for the mere sake of conquest, still less against the advice of Aristotle to reconcile the barbarians with the Greeks. No, they were permeated by a real and lofty spiritual aim. Their impulse came out of the spirit. Let us read of it in Lamprecht's poem, who in his own way with great devotion, albeit 15 centuries after the life of Alexander, tells the heroic story. He tells us how Alexander came up to the gates of Paradise, but could not enter in, for, as Lamprecht says, he alone can enter Paradise who has the true humility, and Alexander, living in pre-Christian time, could not yet have that. Only Christianity could bring to mankind the true humility.

Nevertheless, if we conceive the thing not in a narrow but in a broad-minded way, we shall see how Lamprecht, the Christian priest, still feels something of the tragedy of Alexander's campaigns.

It is not without purpose that I have spoken of this ‘Song of Alexander.’ For now you will not be surprised if we take our start from the campaigns of Alexander in order to describe what went before and what went after in the history of Western mankind, in its connection with the East. For the real underlying feeling of these things was still widely present, as we have seen, at a comparatively late period in the Middle Ages. Not only so; it was present in so concrete a form that the ‘Song of Alexander’ could arise, describing as it does with wonderful dramatic power the events that were enacted through the two souls whom I have characterised.

The significance of this moment in the history of Macedonia reaches on the one hand far back into the past, and on the other hand far on into the future. And it is essential to bear in mind how something of a world-tragedy hangs over all that has to do with Aristotle and Alexander. Even externally the tragedy comes to light. It shows itself in this, my dear friends. Owing to peculiar circumstances—circumstances that were fateful for the history of the world—only the smallest part of the writings of Aristotle have come into Western Europe, and there been further studied and preserved by the Church. In point of fact it is only the writings that deal with logic or are clothed in logical form.

A serious study, however, of the little that is preserved of Aristotle's scientific writings will show what a powerful vision he still had of the connection of the whole Cosmos with the human being. Let me draw your attention to a single passage.

We speak to-day of the earth-element, the water-element, the air-element, the fire- or warmth-element, and then of the Ether. How does Aristotle represent all this? He shows the Earth, the hard firm Earth; the fluid Earth, the Water; then the Air; and the whole permeated and surrounded with Fire. But for Aristotle the ‘Earth’ in this sense teaches up as far as the Moon. And from the Cosmos, reaching from the stars to the Moon, not, that is to say, into the Earth-realm, but only as far as the Moon, coming towards us, as it were, from the Zodiac, from the stars—is the Ether, filling cosmic space. The Ether reaches downwards as far as the Moon.

All this may still be read by scholars in the books that have been written about Aristotle. Aristotle himself, however, used continually to say to his pupil Alexander: That Ether that is away there beyond the realm of earthly warmth—the light-ether, the chemical ether and the life-ether—was once upon a time united with the Earth. It came in as far as to the Earth. And when the Moon withdrew in the ancient epoch of evolution, then the Ether withdrew from the Earth. And so all that is around us in space as dead world—so ran Aristotle's teaching to his pupil Alexander—is not permeated by Ether. When however, Springtime approaches, and plants, animals and human beings come forth to new life on the Earth, then the elementary spirits bring down again the Ether from out of the realm of the Moon, bring it down into these newborn beings. Thus is the Moon the shaper and moulder of beings.

Standing before that great female figure in the Hibernian Mysteries, the pupil of the Mysteries had a most vivid experience of how the Ether does not really belong to the Earth, but is brought down thither by the elementary spirits, every year, in so far as it is needed for the up-springing into life.

And this was so for Aristotle. He, too, had a deep insight into the connection of the human being with the Cosmos. His pupil Theophrastus did not let the writings come westwards that treat of these things. Some of them, however, went to the East, where there was still an understanding for such truths. Thence they were brought by Jews and Arabs through North Africa and Spain to the West of Europe, and there met, in a manner that I shall have yet to describe, with the radiation of the Hibernian Mysteries, as these expressed themselves in the civilisation and culture of the peoples.

But now all that I have been describing to you was no more than the starting-point for the teaching that Aristotle gave to Alexander. It was a teaching that belonged entirely to inner experience. I might describe it in outline somewhat as follows. Alexander learned from Aristotle to understand how the earthy, watery, airy and fiery elements that live outside the human being in the world around him live also within the human being himself, and how he is in this connection a true microcosm. He learned how in the bones of the human being lives the earthy element, and how in his circulation and in all the fluids and humours in him lives the watery element. The airy element works in all that has to do with the breathing, and the fiery element lives in the thoughts of man. Alexander had still the conscious knowledge of living in the elements.

And with this experience of living in the elements of the world went also the experience of a near and intimate relationship with the Earth. In these days we travel East, West, North, South, but have no feeling for what streams into our being the while; we only see what our external senses perceive, we only see what the earthly substances in us, not what the elements in us perceive.

Aristotle, however, was able to teach Alexander: When you go eastwards over the Earth, you pass more and more into an element that dries you up. You pass into the Dry.

You must not imagine this to mean that when one travels to Asia one is completely dried up. We have here, of course, to do with fine and delicate workings, that Alexander was perfectly able to feel in himself after he had received the guidance and instruction of Aristotle. When he was in Macedonia he could feel: I have a certain measure of dampness or moistness in me, that diminishes as I go eastward. In this way, as he wandered over the Earth he felt its configuration, as you may feel a human being by touching him, let us say by drawing your hand caressingly over some part of his body, feeling the difference between nose and eye and mouth. So was a personality such as I have described to you able to perceive a difference between the experience he had when he came more and more into the Dry, and the experience that was his on the other hand in going westward and coming more and more into the Moist.

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The other differentiations man still experiences to-day, though crudely. In the direction of the North he experiences the Cold; in the direction of the South the Warm, the Fire element. But the interplay of Moist and Cold, when one goes North-West—that is no longer experienced.

Aristotle awakened in Alexander all that Gilgamesh had passed through when he undertook the journey over to the West. And the result of it was that his pupil could perceive in direct inner experience what is felt in the direction of North-West, in the intermediate zone between Moist and Cold:—Water. A man like Alexander not merely could, but did actually speak in such a manner as not to say: There goes the road to the North-West—but instead: There goes the road to where the element of Water holds dominion. In the intermediate zone between Moist and Warm lies the element where the Air holds dominion.

Such was the teaching in the ancient Greek Chthonian Mysteries, and in the ancient Samothracian Mysteries; and thus did Aristotle teach his own immediate pupil.

And in the zone between Cold and Dry—that it to say, looking from Macedonia, towards Siberia—men had the experience of a region of the Earth where Earth itself, the earthy, holds dominion—the element Earth, the hard and the firm. In the intermediate zone between Warm and Dry, that is, towards India, was experienced a region of the Earth where the Fire element ruled.

And so it was that the pupil of Aristotle pointed Northwest and said: There I feel the Water-Spirits working upon the Earth; pointed South-West and said: There I feel the Air-Spirits; pointed North-East and there beheld hover especially the Spirits of the Earth; pointed South-East towards India, and saw the Spirits of Fire hover over the Earth, saw them there in their element.

And in conclusion, my dear friends, you will be able to feel the deep and close relation both to the natural and to the moral, when I tell you how Alexander began to speak in this way: I must leave the Cold-Moist element and throw myself into the Fire—I must undertake a journey to India. That was a manner of speaking that was as closely bound up with the natural as it was with the moral. I shall have more to say about this tomorrow.

I wanted to-day to give you a picture of what was living in those times; for in all that took place between Alexander and Aristotle we may see at the same time a reflection of the great and mighty change that was taking place in the world's history.. In those days it was still possible to speak in an intimate way to pupils, of the great Mysteries of the past. But then mankind began to receive in increasing measure logic, abstract knowledge, categories, and to push back the other.

We have therefore to see in these events the working of a tremendous and deep change in the historical evolution of mankind, and at the same time an all-important moment in the whole progress of European civilisation in its connection with the East.

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• 1. See the 8th and 9th lectures in Mystery Knowledge and Mystery Centres.
• 2. Composed about 1125 by the Franconian priest Lamprecht; the first German secular epic poem.

Among the mysteries of ancient times Ephesus holds a unique position. You will remember that in considering the part played by Alexander in the evolution of the West, I had to mention also this Mystery of Ephesus. Let us try to see wherein lies the peculiar importance of this Mystery.

We can only grasp the significance of the events of earlier and of more recent times when we understand and appreciate the great change that took place in the character of the Mysteries (which were in reality the source whence all the older civilisations sprang) in passing from the East to the West, and, in the first place, to Greece. This change was of the following nature.

When we look back into the older Mysteries of the East, we have everywhere the impression: The priests of the Mysteries are able, from their own vision, to reveal great and important truths to their pupils. The farther back we go in time, the more are these Wise Men or Priests in a position to call forth in the Mysteries the immediate presence of the Gods themselves, the Spiritual Beings who guide the worlds of the planets, who guide the events and phenomena of Earth. The Gods were actually there present.

The connection of the human being with the macrocosm was revealed in many different Mysteries in an equally sublime manner to that I pictured for you yesterday, in connection with the Mysteries of Hibernia and also with the teachings that Aristotle had still to give to Alexander the Great. An outstanding characteristic of all ancient Oriental Mysteries was that moral impulses were not sharply distinguished from natural impulses. When Aristotle points Alexander to the North-West, where the Spirits of the element of Water held dominion, it was not only a physical impulse that came from that quarter—as we to-day feel how the wind blows from the North-West and so forth—but with the physical came also moral impulses. The physical and the moral were one. This was possible, because through the knowledge that was given in these Mysteries—the Spirit of Nature was actually perceived in the Mysteries—man felt himself one with the whole of Nature. Here we have something in the relation of man to Nature, that was still living and present in the time that intervened between the life of Gilgamesh and the life of the individuality Gilgamesh became, who was also in close contact with the Mysteries, namely, with the Mystery of Ephesus. There was still alive in men of that time a vision and perception of the connection of the human being with the Spirit of Nature. This connection they perceived in the following way. Through all that the human being learned concerning the working of the elementary spirits in Nature, and the working of the Beings of Intelligence in the planetary processes, he was led to this conclusion: All around me I see displayed on every side the plant-world—the green shoots, the buds and blossoms and then the fruit. I see the annual plants in the meadows and on the country-side, that grow up in Spring-time and fade away again in Autumn. I see, too, the trees that go on growing for hundreds of years, forming a bark on the outside, hardening to wood and reaching downwards far and wide into the Earth with their roots. But all that I see out there—the annual herbs and flowers, the trees that take firm hold into the Earth—once upon a time, I, as man, have borne it all within me.

You know how to-day, when there is carbonic acid in the air, that has come about through the breathing of human beings, we can feel that we ourselves have breathed out the carbonic acid, we have breathed it into space. We have therefore still to-day this slight connection with the Cosmos. Through the airy part of our nature, through the air that gives rise to the breathing and other air-processes that go on in the human organism, we have a living connection with the great Universe, with the Macrocosm. The human being to-day can look upon his out-breathed breath, upon the carbonic acid that was in him and is now outside him. But just as we are able to-day to look upon the carbonic acid we have breathed out—we do not generally do so, but we could—so did the initiates of olden times look upon the whole plant-world. Those who had been initiated in the Oriental Mysteries, or had received the wisdom that streamed forth from the Oriental Mysteries, were able to say: I look back in the evolution of the world to an ancient Sun epoch. In that time I bore still within me the plants. Then afterwards I let them stream forth from me into the far circles of Earth existence. But as long as I bore the plants within me, while I was still that Adam Cadmon who embraced the whole Earth and the plant-world with it, so long was this whole plant-world watery-airy in substance. Then the human being separated off from himself this plant-world. Imagine that you were to become as big as the whole Earth, and then to separate off, to secrete, as it were, inwardly something plant-like in nature, and this plant-like substance were to go through metamorphoses in the watery element—coming to life, fading away, growing up, being changed, taking on different shapes and forms—and you will by this imagination call up again in your soul feelings and experiences that once lived in it. Those who received their education and training in the East at about the time of Gilgamesh were able to say to themselves that these things had once been so.

And when they looked abroad upon the meadows and beheld all the growth of green and flowers, then they said: We have separated the plants from ourselves, we have put them forth from us in an earlier stage of our evolution; and the Earth has received them. The Earth it is that has lent them root, and has given them their woody nature; the tree-nature in the world of plants comes from the Earth. But the whole plant-nature as such has been cast off, as it were, by the human being, and received by the Earth. In this way man felt an intimate and near relationship with everything of a plant-nature.

With the higher animals the human being did not feel a relationship of this kind. For he knew that he could only work his way rightly and come to his true place on the Earth by overcoming the animal form, by leaving the animals behind him in his evolution. The plants he took with him as far as the Earth; then gave them over to her that she might receive them into her bosom. For the plants he was upon Earth the Mediator of the Gods, the Mediator between the Gods and the Earth.

Men who had this great experience acquired a feeling that may be put quite simply in a few words. The human being comes hither to the Earth from the World-All. The question of number does not come into consideration; for, as I said yesterday, they were all and each within the other. That which afterwards becomes the plant-world separates off from man, the Earth receives it and gives it root. The human being felt as though he had folded the Earth about with a garment of plant growth, and as though the Earth were thankful for this enfolding and took from him the watery-airy plant element that he was able, as it were, to breathe on to her.

In entering into this experience men felt themselves intimately associated with the God, with the chief God of Mercury. Through the feeling: We have ourselves brought the plants on to the Earth, men came into a special relation with the God Mercury.

Towards the animals, on the other hand, man had a different feeling. He knew that he could not bring them with him to Earth, he had to cast them off, he had to make himself free from them, otherwise he would not be able to evolve his human form in the right way. He thrust the animals from him; they were pushed out of the way and had then to go through an evolution on their own account on a lower level than the level of humanity. Thus did the man of olden times—of the Gilgamesh time and later—feel himself placed between the animal kingdom and the plant kingdom. In relation to the plant kingdom he was the bearer, who bore the seed to the Earth and fructified the Earth with it, doing this as Mediator for the Gods. In relation to the animal kingdom he felt as though he had pushed it away from him, in order that he might become man without the encumbrance of the animals, who have consequently been stunted and retarded in their development.

The whole animal-worship of Egypt has to do with this perception. The deep fellow-feeling, too, with animals that we find in Asia is connected with it. It was a sublime conception of Nature that man had, feeling his relationship on the one hand with the plant world and on the other hand with the world of animals. In relation to the animal he had a feeling of emancipation. In relation to the plant he felt a near and intimate kinship. The plant world was to him a bit of himself, and he felt a sincere love for the Earth inasmuch as the Earth had received into herself the bit of humanity that gave rise to the plants, had let these take root in her, had even given of her own substance to clothe the trees in bark. There was always a moral element present when man took cognisance of the physical world around him. When he beheld the plants in the meadow, it was not only the natural growth that he perceived. In this growth he perceived and felt a moral relation to man. With the animal man felt again another moral relation: he had fought his way up beyond them.

Thus we find in the Mysteries over in the East a sublime conception of Nature and of Spirit in Nature. Later there were Mysteries in Greece, too, but with a much less real perception of Nature and of Spirit in Nature. The Greek Mysteries are grand and sublime, but they are essentially different from the Oriental Mysteries. It is characteristic of these that they do not tend to make man feel himself on the Earth, but that through them man feels himself a part of the Cosmos, a part of the World-All. In Greece, on the other hand, the character of the Mysteries had changed and the time was come when man began to feel himself united with the Earth. In the East the spiritual world itself was either seen or felt in the Mysteries. It is absolutely true to say that in the ancient Oriental Mysteries the Gods themselves appeared among the priests, who did sacrifice there and made prayers. The Mystery Temples were at the same time the earthly Guest Houses of the Gods, where the Gods bestowed upon men through the priests what they had to give them from the treasures of Heaven. In the Greek Mysteries appeared rather the images of the Gods, the pictures, as it were, the phantoms,—true and genuine, but phantoms none the less; no longer the Divine Beings, no longer the Realities, but phantoms. And so the Greek had a wholly different experience from the man who belonged to the ancient Oriental culture. The Greek had the feeling: There are indeed Gods, but for man it is only possible to have pictures of these Gods, just as we have in our memory pictures of past experiences, no longer the experiences themselves.

That was the fundamental feeling that took rise in the Greek Mysteries. The Greek felt that he had, as it were, memories of the Cosmos, not the appearance of the Cosmos itself, but pictures; pictures of the Gods, and not the Gods themselves. Pictures, too, of the events and processes on Saturn, Sun and Moon; no longer a living connection with what actually took place on Saturn, Sun and Moon,—the kind of living connection the human being has with his own childhood. The men of the Oriental civilisation had this real connection with Sun, Moon and Saturn, they had it from their Mysteries. But the Mysteries of the Greeks had a pictorial or image-character. There appeared in them the shadow-spirits of Divine-Spiritual Reality. And something else went with this as well that was very significant. For there was yet another difference between the Oriental Mysteries and the Greek.

In the Oriental Mysteries, if one wanted to know something of the sublime and tremendous experience that was possible in these Mysteries, one had always to wait until the right time. Some experience or other could perhaps only be found by making the appropriate sacrifice, the appropriate super-sensible ‘experiments’ as it were, in Autumn,—another only in Spring, another again at Midsummer, and another in the depth of Winter. Or again it might be that sacrifices were made to certain Gods at a time determined by a particular constellation of the Moon. At that special time the Gods would appear in the Mysteries, and men would come thither to be present at their manifestations. When the time had gone by one would have to wait, perhaps thirty years, until the opportunity should come again when those Divinities should once more reveal themselves in the Mysteries. All that related to Saturn, for example, could only enter the region of the Mysteries every thirty years; all that was concerned with the Moon about every eighteen years. And so on. The priests of the Oriental Mysteries were dependent on time, and also on place and on all manner of circumstances for receiving the sublime and tremendous knowledge and vision that came to them. Quite different manifestations were received deep in a mountain cave and high on the mountain top. Or again, the revelations were different, according as one was far inland in Asia or on the coast. Thus a certain dependence on place and time was characteristic of the Mysteries of the East.

In Greece the great and awful Realities had disappeared. Pictures there still were. And the pictures were dependent not on the time of year, on the course of the century, or on place; but men could have the pictures when they had performed this or that exercise, or had made this or that personal sacrifice. If a man had reached a certain stage of sacrifice and of personal ripeness, then for the very reason that he as a human being had attained thus far, he was able to have view of the shadows of the great world-events and of the great world-Beings.

That is the important change in the nature of the Mysteries that meets us when we pass from the ancient East to Greece. The ancient Oriental Mysteries were subject to the conditions of space and locality, whilst in the Greek Mysteries the human being himself came into consideration and what he brought to the Gods. The God, so to speak, came in his phantom or shadow-picture, when the human being, through the preparations he had undergone, had been made worthy to receive the God in phantom form. In this way the Mysteries of Greece prepared the road for modern humanity.

Now, the Mystery of Ephesus stood midway between the ancient Oriental Mysteries and the Greek Mysteries. It held a unique position. For in Ephesus those who attained to initiation were able still to experience something of the tremendous majestic truths of the ancient East. Their souls were still stirred with a deep inward experience of the connection of the human being with the Macrocosm and with the Divine-Spiritual Beings of the Macrocosm. In Ephesus men could still have sight of the super-earthly, and in no small measure. Self-identification with Artemis, with the Goddess of the Mystery of Ephesus, still brought to man a vivid sense of his relation to the kingdoms of nature. The plant world, so it taught him, is yours; the Earth has only received it from you. The animal world you have overcome. You have had to leave it behind. You must look back on the animals with the greatest possible compassion, they have had to remain behind on the road, in order that you might become Man. To feel oneself one with the Macrocosm: this was an experience that was still granted to the Initiate of Ephesus, he could still receive it straight from the Realities themselves.

At the same time, the Mysteries of Ephesus were, so to speak, the first to be turned westward. As such, they had already that independence of the seasons, or of the course of years and centuries; that independence too of place on Earth. In Ephesus the important things were the exercises that the human being went through, making himself ripe, by sacrifice and devotion, to approach the Gods. So that on the one hand, in the content of its Mystery truths, the Mystery of Ephesus harked back to the Ancient East, whilst on the other hand it was already directed to the development of man himself, and was thus adapted to the nature and character of the Greek. It was the very last of the Eastern Mysteries of the Greeks, where the great and ancient truths could still be brought near to men; for in the East generally the Mysteries had already become decadent.

It was in the Mysteries of the West that the ancient truths remained longest. The Mysteries of Hibernia still existed, centuries after the birth of Christianity. These Mysteries of Hibernia are nevertheless doubly secret and occult, for you must know that even in the so-called Akashic Records, it is by no means easy to search into the hidden mysteries of the statues of which I told you yesterday—the Sun Statue and the Moon Statue, the male and the female. To approach the pictures of the Oriental Mysteries and to call them forth out of the astral light is, comparatively speaking, easy for one who is trained in these things. But let anyone approach, or want to approach, the Mysteries of Hibernia in the astral light, and he will at first be dazed and stupefied. He will be beaten back. These Irish, these Hibernian Mysteries will not willingly let themselves be seen in the Akashic pictures, albeit they continued longest in their original purity.

Now you must remember, my dear friends, that the individuality who was in Alexander the Great had come into close contact with the Hibernian Mysteries during the Gilgamesh time, when he made his journey westward to the neighbourhood of the modern Burgenland. These Mysteries had lived in him, lived in him after a very ancient manner, for it was in the time when the West resounded still with powerful echoes of the Atlantean age. And now all this experience was carried over into the condition of human existence that runs its course between death and a new birth. Then later the two friends, Eabani and Gilgamesh, found themselves together again in life in Ephesus, and there they entered into a deeply conscious experience of what they had experienced formerly during the Gilgamesh time more or less unconsciously or sub-consciously, in connection with the Divine-Spiritual worlds.

Their life during this Ephesus time was comparatively peaceful, they were able to digest and ponder what they had received into their souls in more stormy days.

Let me remind you of what it was that passed over into Greece before these two appeared again in the decadence of the Greek epoch and the rise of the Macedonian. The Greece of olden time, the Greece that had spread abroad and embraced Ephesus also within its bounds, and had even penetrated right into Asia Minor, had still in her shadow-pictures the after-echo of the ancient time of the Gods. The connection of man with the spiritual world was still experienced, though in shadows. Greece was however gradually working herself free from the shadows; we may observe how step by step the Greek civilisation was wresting its way out of what we may call divine civilisation and taking on more and more the character of a purely earthly one.

My dear friends, it is only too true that the very most important things in the history of human evolution are simply passed over in the materialistic external history of to-day. Of extraordinary importance for the understanding of the whole Greek character and culture is this fact: that in the Greek civilisation we find no more than a shadow-picture, a phantom of the old Divine Presence wherein man had contact with the super-sensible worlds, for man was already gradually emerging out of this Divinity and learning to make use of his own individual and personal spiritual faculties. Step by step we can see this taking place. In the dramas of Æschylus we may see placed before us in an artistic picture the feeling that yet remained to man of the old time of the Gods. Scarcely however has Sophocles come forward when man begins to tear himself away from this conscious sense of union with Divine-Spiritual existence. And then something else appears that is coupled with a name which from one point of view we cannot over-estimate—but of course there are many points of view to be considered.

In the older Grecian time there was no need to make written history. Why was this? Because men had the living shadow of everything of importance that had happened in the past. History could be read in what came to view in the Mysteries. There one had the shadow-pictures, the living shadow-pictures. What was there then to write down as history?

But now came the time when the shadow pictures became submerged in the lower world, when human consciousness could no longer perceive them. Then came the impulse to make records. Herodotus,¹ the first prose historian, appeared. And from this time onward, many could be named who followed him, the same impulse working in them all,—to tear mankind away from the Divine-Spiritual and to set him down in the purely earthly. Nevertheless, as long as Greek culture and civilisation lasted, there is a splendour and a light shed abroad over this earth-directed tendency, a light of which we shall hear tomorrow that it did not pass over to Rome nor to the Middle Ages. In Greece, a light was there. Of the shadow-pictures, even the fading shadow-pictures of the evening twilight of Greek civilisation, man still felt that they were divine in their origin.

In the midst of all this, like a haven of refuge where men found clear enlightenment concerning what was present, as it were in fragments, in Greek culture,—in the midst stood Ephesus. Heraclitus received instruction from Ephesus, as did many another great philosopher; Plato, too, and Pythagoras. Ephesus was the place where the old Oriental wisdom was preserved up to a certain point. And the two souls who dwelt later in Aristotle and Alexander the Great were in Ephesus a little after the time of Heraclitus and were able to receive there of the heritage from the old knowledge of the Oriental Mysteries that the Mystery of Ephesus still retained. Notably the soul of Alexander entered into an intimate union with the very Being of the Mysteries as far as it was living in the Mystery of Ephesus.

And now we come to one of those historical events of which people may think that they are mere chance, but which have their foundations deep down in the inner connections of the evolution of humanity. In order to gain an insight into the significance of this event, let us call to mind the following. We must remember that in the two souls who afterwards became Aristotle and Alexander the Great, there was living in the first place all that they had received in a far-off time in the past and had subsequently elaborated and pondered. And then there was also living in their souls the treasure of untold value that had come to them in Ephesus. We might say that the whole of Asia—in the form that it had assumed in Greece, and in Ephesus in particular—was living in these two, and more especially in the soul of Alexander the Great, that is to say, of him who afterwards became Alexander the Great.

Picture to yourselves the part played by this personality. I described him for you as he was in the Gilgamesh time; and now you must imagine how the knowledge that belonged to the ancient East and to Ephesus, a knowledge which we may also call a “beholding,” a “perceiving,”—this knowledge was called up again in the intercourse between Alexander the Great and Aristotle, in a new form. Picture this to yourselves; and then think what would have happened if Alexander, in his incarnation as Alexander, had come again into contact with the Mystery of Ephesus, bearing with him in his soul the gigantic document of the Mystery of Ephesus, for this majestic document of knowledge lived with extraordinary intensity in the souls of these two. If we can form a idea of this, we can rightly estimate the fact that on the day on which Alexander was born, Herostratus threw the flaming torch into the Sanctuary of Ephesus; on the very day on which Alexander was born, the Temple of Diana of Ephesus was treacherously burnt to the ground. It was gone, never to return. Its monumental document, with all that belonged to it, was no longer there. It existed only as a historical mission in the soul of Alexander and in his teacher Aristotle.

And now you must bring all this that was alive in the soul of Alexander into connection with what I said yesterday, when I showed you how the mission of Alexander the Great was inspired by an impulse coming from the configuration of the Earth. You will readily understand how that which in the East had been real revelation of the Divine-Spiritual was as it were extinguished with Ephesus. The other Mysteries were at bottom only Mysteries of decadence, where traditions were preserved, though it is true these traditions did still awaken clairvoyant powers in specially gifted natures. The splendour and the glory, the tremendous majesty of the olden time were gone. With Ephesus was finally put out the light that had come over from the East.

You will now be in a position to appreciate the resolve that Alexander made in his soul: to restore to the East what she had lost; to restore it at least in the form in which it was preserved in Greece, in the phantom or shadow-picture. Hence his idea of making an expedition into Asia, going as far as it was possible to go, in order to bring to the East once more—albeit in the shadow form in which it still existed in the Grecian culture—what she had lost.

And now we see what Alexander the Great is really doing, and doing in a most wonderful way, when he makes this expedition. He is not bent on the conquest of existing cultures, he is not trying to bring Hellenism to the East in any external sense. Wherever he goes, Alexander the Great not only adopts the customs of the land, but is able too to enter right into the minds and hearts of the human beings who are living there, and to think their thoughts. When he comes to Egypt, to Memphis, he is hailed as a saviour and deliverer from the spiritual fetters that have hitherto bound the people. He permeates the kingdom of Persia with a culture and civilisation which the Persians themselves could never have produced. He penetrates as far as India.

He conceives the plan of effecting a balance, a harmony between Hellenic and Oriental civilisations. On every hand he founds academies. The academies founded in Alexandria, in Northern Egypt, are the best known and have had the greatest significance for later times. Of the first importance however is the fact that all over Asia larger and smaller academies were founded, in which the works of Aristotle were preserved and studied for a long time to come. What Alexander began in this way continued to work for centuries in Asia Minor, repeating itself again and again as it were in feebler echoes. With one mighty stroke Alexander planted the Aristotelian Knowledge of Nature in Asia, even as far as India. His early death prevented his reaching Arabia, though that had been one of his chief aims. He went however as far east as India, and also into Egypt. Everywhere he implanted the spiritual Knowledge of Nature that he had received from Aristotle, establishing it in such a way that it could become fruitful for men. For everywhere he let the people feel it was something that was their own,—not a foreign element, a piece of Hellenism, that was being imposed upon them. Only a nature such as Alexander's, able to fire others with his own enthusiasm, could ever have accomplished what he did. For everywhere others came forward to carry on the work he had begun. In the years that followed, many more scholars went over from Greece. Apart from Edessa it was one academy in particular, that of Gondishapur, which received constant reinforcements from Greece for many centuries to come.

A marvellous feat was thus performed! The light that had come over from the East,—extinguished in Ephesus by the flaming torch of Herostratus,—this light, or rather its phantom shadow, now shone back again from Greece, and continued so to shine until the dramatic moment when beneath the tyranny of Rome² the Schools of the Greek philosophers were ultimately closed. In the 6th century A.D. the last of the Greek philosophers fled away to the academy of Gondishapur.

In all this we see two elements interworking; one that had gone, so to speak, in advance, and one that had remained behind. The mission of Alexander was founded, more or less unconsciously, upon this fact: the waves of civilisation had advanced in Greece in a Luciferian manner, whilst in Asia they had remained behind in an Ahrimanic manner. In Ephesus was the balance. And Alexander, on the day of whose birth the physical Ephesus had fallen, resolved to found a spiritual Ephesus that should send its Sun-rays far out to East and West. It was in very truth this purpose that lay at the root of all he undertook: to found a spiritual Ephesus, reaching out across Asia Minor eastward to India, covering also Egyptian Africa and the East of Europe.

It is not really possible to understand the spiritual evolution of Western humanity unless we can see it on this background. For soon after the attempt had been made to spread abroad in the world the ancient and venerated Ephesus, so that what had once been present in Ephesus might now be preserved in Alexandria,—be it only in a faltering hand instead of in large shining letters—soon after this second blooming of the flower of Ephesus, an altogether new power began to assert itself, the power of Rome. Rome, and all the word implies, is a new world, a world that has nothing to do with the shadow-pictures of Greece, and suffers man to keep no more than memories of these olden times. We can study no graver or more important incision in history than this. After the burning of Ephesus, through the instrumentality of Alexander the plan is laid for the founding of a spiritual Ephesus; and this spiritual Ephesus is then pushed back by the new power that is asserting itself in the West, first as Rome, later under the name of Christianity, and so on. And we only understand the evolution of mankind aright when we say: We, with our way of comprehending things through the intellect, with our way of accomplishing things by means of our will, we with our feelings and moods can look back as far as ancient Rome. Thus far we can look back with full understanding. But we cannot look back to Greece, neither can we look back to the East. There we must look in Imaginations. Spiritual vision is needed there. Yes, we can look South, as we go back along the stream of evolution; we can look South with the ordinary prosaic understanding, but not East. When we look East, we have to look in Imaginations. We have to see standing in the background the mighty Mystery Temples of primeval post-Atlantean Asia, where the Wise Men, the Priests, made plain to each one of their pupils his connection with the Divine-Spiritual of the Cosmos, and where was to be found a civilisation that could be received from the Mysteries in the Gilgamesh time, as I have described to you. We have to see these wonderful Temples scattered over Asia; and in the foreground Ephesus, preserving still within its Mystery much that had faded away in the other Temples of the East, whilst at the same time it had already itself made the transition and become Greek in character. For in Ephesus, man no longer needed to wait for the constellations of the stars or for the right time of year, nor to wait until he himself had attained a certain age, before he could receive the revelations of the Gods. In Ephesus, if he were ripe for it, he might offer up sacrifices and perform certain exercises that enabled him so to approach the Gods that they drew graciously near to him.

It was in this world that stands before you in this picture that the two personalities of whom we have spoken were trained and prepared, in the time of Heraclitus. And now, in 356 A.D. on the birth-day of Alexander the Great, we behold the flames of fire burst forth from the Temple of Ephesus.

Alexander the Great is born, and finds his teacher Aristotle. And it is as though from out of the ascending flames of Ephesus a mighty voice went forth for those who were able to hear it: Found a spiritual Ephesus far and wide over the Earth, and let the old physical Ephesus stand in men's memory as its centre, as its midmost point.

Thus we have before us this picture of ancient Asia with her Mystery centres, and in the foreground Ephesus and her pupils in the Mysteries. We see Ephesus in flames, and a little later we see the expeditions of Alexander that carried over into the East what Greece had to give for the progress of mankind, so that there came into Asia in picture-form what she had lost in its reality.

Looking across to the East and letting our imagination be fired by the tremendous events that we see taking place, we are able to view in a true light that ancient chapter in man's history,—for it needs to be grasped with the imagination. And then we see gradually rise up in the foreground the Roman world, the world of the Middle Ages, the world that continues down to our own time.

All other divisions of history into periods—ancient, medieval and modern, or however else they may be designated—give rise to false conceptions. But if you will study deeply and intently the picture that I have here set before you, it will give you a true insight into the hidden workings that run through European history down to the present day.

• 1. Herodotus of Halicarnassos, the first Greek historian, lived in the fifth century B.C. Wrote history of the Persian Wars.
• 2. Justinian, Byzantine Emperor from 527–565, son of a peasant, sent an edict to Athens in 529 forbidding the teaching of philosophy and law. Thereupon the last seven Athenian philosophers left the Roman Empire and emigrated to Persia.