The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Kristiania (Oslo), May 16, 1909

Today we shall stress more the occult side of yesterday's observation. The four post-Atlantean cultures somehow had to reflect the great cosmic events in the souls of human beings as they had happened in historical sequence. However, beginning with the thirteenth or fourteenth century of our cultural epoch, such a reflection no longer took place because the external events in human evolution must be traced to more profound reasons.

We know that the etheric bodies of the great Atlantean initiates had been preserved for the Seven Holy Rishis, and we also know how the etheric and astral body of Zarathustra had been woven into those of Moses and Hermes. At any time the possibility existed that such etheric bodies, which had been cultivated and prepared by the initiates, could be further used in the spiritual economy of the world. But other things took place as well. For especially important personalities, such etheric bodies are formed in the higher worlds. When somebody was especially important for the mission of humanity, an etheric body or an astral body was woven in the higher worlds and was then imprinted on this personality.

This is what happened in the case of Shem who indeed has something to do with the whole tribe of the Semites. A special etheric body was coined for such a tribal ancestor, and Shem became a sort of dual personality by this process. It may sound fantastic to the modern mind, but a clairvoyant would see a personality like Shem as he would see an ordinary human being with his or her aura; but then also in such a way as if a higher being that extends down from higher worlds completely filled his etheric body and as if the aura became a mediator between this personality and the higher world. Residing in a human being, such a divine being, however, has a very special power: it can multiply such an etheric body, and the multiplied etheric bodies then form a web that is continually woven into the descendants. Thus the descendants of Shem received an imprint of the copy of his etheric body. However, the Mystery Centers kept not only the multiplied copies but also the etheric body of Shem himself. Any personality that was meant to receive a special mission had to use this etheric body if it wanted to be able to communicate with the Semitic people, similar to the way in which a very educated European would have to learn the language of the Hottentots if he wanted to communicate with them. Therefore, the personality with a special mission had to bear within himself the real etheric body of Shem in order to be able to communicate with the Semitic people. Such a personality, for example, was Melchizedek: he could show himself to Abraham only in the etheric body of Shem.

We now have to ask ourselves something. If it is only now, in the fifth post-Atlantean cultural epoch, possible for us to develop an understanding for Christianity, what was the situation in the remainder of the Graeco-Latin era, which lasted into the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries? A mysterious, occult process took place. Christ lived only three years in the sheaths of Jesus of Nazareth, who was such a sublime individuality that He was able to leave the physical world at the age of thirty when the dove appeared over His head so that He could enter the spiritual world. Since the Christ-Individuality lived in the physical body, it filled out the three highly developed bodies of Jesus. Invisible to the physical eye, they were now multiplied as had formerly been the case with the etheric body of Shem so that the copies of the etheric and astral bodies of Jesus of Nazareth were available from the time he died on the cross. This has nothing to do with His ego; it passed into the spiritual world and has repeatedly reincarnated itself afterward.

We see how Christian writers in the first few centuries after the Christ-Event still worked on the basis of an oral tradition that was transmitted by the disciples of the Apostles, who set great value on a direct, physical transmission of the Christ-Event. However, this would not have been a sufficient building block for later centuries, and that is why a copy of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth was woven into especially eminent heralds of the Christian message beginning with the sixth and seventh centuries. One such herald was Augustine, who in his youth had to go through tremendous struggles. However, only when the impulse of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth came to work in him in a significant way did he begin to become engaged in Christian mysticism of his own initiative. His writings can be understood only in this light. Many other personalities in the world, such as Columban,⁴⁰ Gallus,⁴¹ and Patrick,⁴² carried within themselves such a copy of Jesus's etheric body and were therefore in a position to spread Christianity and built a bridge from the Christ-Event to the succeeding times.

By contrast, we see human beings whose astral body received the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Such a personality was Francis of Assisi. When we look at his life from this point of view, we will understand it in quite a few ways. His qualities of humility and Christian devotion will become especially clear to us when we tell ourselves that such a mystery lived in him. In the time from about the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries such human beings became the heralds of Christianity by the very fact that the astral body of Jesus was woven into their own astral body. Hence, they received Christianity by virtue of Grace.

Although the ego of Jesus of Nazareth left its three sheaths at the baptism of John, a copy of this ego remained in each of them similar to the imprint a seal leaves behind. The Christ-Being took possession of these three bodies and of that which remained as the imprint of the Jesus-Ego. Beginning with the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries, something like an ego copy of Jesus was woven into human beings who began to speak of an “inner Christ.” Meister Eckhart and Tauler were individuals who spoke from their own experience like an ego copy of Jesus of Nazareth.

There are still many people present who carry within themselves something like the various bodies of Jesus of Nazareth, but these are now no longer the leading personalities. Increasingly we can see how there are human beings in the fifth epoch who must rely on themselves and on their own ego and how such inspired people have become a rarity. It was therefore necessary that a spiritual tendency develop in our fifth epoch to ensure that humanity would continue to be imbued with spiritual knowledge. Those individualities who were capable of looking into the future had to take care that human beings in the times to come would not be left simply to rely on their human ego only. The legend of the Holy Grail relates that the chalice from which the Christ Jesus took the Last Supper with his disciples was kept in a certain place. We see in the story of Parsifal the course of a young person's education typical for our fifth post-Atlantean epoch. Parsifal had been instructed not to ask too many questions, and his dilemma arose from his following those instructions. That is the important transition from the traditional to more modern times: in ancient India and later with Augustine and Francis of Assisi the student had to live in a state of the highest degree of passive devotion. All these humble people allowed themselves to be inspired by what was already alive in them and by what had been woven into them. But now things changed in that the ego became a questioning ego. Today, any soul that accepts passively what is given to it cannot transcend itself because it merely oberves the happenings in the physical world around it. In our times the soul has to ask questions; it has to rise above itself; it has to grow beyond its given form. It must raise questions, just as Parsifal ultimately learned to inquire after the mysteries of the Grail's Castle.⁴³

Spiritual investigation today begins only where there is questioning, and the souls today that are stimulated by external science to ask questions and to search are the Parsifal souls. And this has led to the introduction of Rosicrucian education—that much maligned mystery school of thought—that accepts tradition gratefully but does not accept traditional wisdom blindly. Yet that which today constitutes Rosicrucian spiritual orientation has been investigated in the higher worlds directly with the spiritual eye and with the means the student himself has been instructed to utilize This has not come about simply because this or that is written in old books or because certain people believed one thing or another. Rather, the Rosicrucian spiritual method proclaims wisdom that has been investigated today. It was gradually prepared in the Rosicrucian schools that were founded in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries as a result of the work of an individuality by the name of Christian Rosenkreutz.

This accumulated wisdom can today be proclaimed as Spiritual Science. This is so because today it is no longer possible to instill in human beings what is to inspire them from the inside without their having a hand in the process. Today people who feel that Spiritual Science speaks to their hearts must approach it through their own free will, through their own free impulse, and through the fact that they feel enlivened by spiritual knowledge. Hence we need not attempt to stir up an interest in Spiritual Science.

Through this theosophical-Rosicrucian orientation of the spirit, we again bring close to ourselves what is still present in the copies of Jesus of Nazareth's ego. Those who prepare themselves in this manner will pull into their souls the copy of the ego of Jesus of Nazareth so that they become like imprints of a seal, and it is in this way that the Christ- Principle finds its way into the human soul. Rosicrucianism prepared something positive, and since anthroposophy is meant to become life, the souls that absorb and truly accept it will gradually undergo a metamorphosis. To accept anthroposophy within yourself means to change the soul in such a way that it is able to come to a true understanding of the Christ.

The anthroposophist makes himself or herself a living recipient of what was given to Moses and Paul in the JavehChrist-Revelation. It is written in the fifth letter of the Apocalypse that the people in the fifth cultural epoch are those who can really absorb the things that will be quite obvious for the cultural period of the Philadelphia community. The wisdom of the fifth cultural period will open as a flower of love in the sixth period.

Today mankind is called upon to accept into itself something new, something divine, and thereby to undertake again the ascent into the spiritual world. The Spiritual Scientific teaching of evolution is being imparted not because people are supposed to put their blind faith into it, but because mankind is supposed to reach an understanding of it through its own powers of judgment. This teaching is being directed to those who bear the core of the Parsifal nature within themselves. And it is not being proclaimed just in special places or to a special group of people, but human beings from all of humanity will come together to listen to the call of spiritual wisdom.

• 40. Columban (545–615) was an Irish missionary.
• 41. Gallus was a sixth-century Irish-Scotch missionary.
• 42. Patrick (c. 384–c. 460) was an English missionary.
• 43. Steiner is referring to the German courtly epic Parzival by Wolfram von Eschenbach (about 1200/10). The Frenchman Chretien de Troyes was the author of the first great artistic treatment of the theme; in his unfinished poem “Percivale” finds the Grail and heals the king. Wolfram's story is drawn from Chretien's model but is much more spiritualized in its triadic structure: innocence, fall, salvation. The Simpleton Parsifal is educated as a knight who knows proper courtly behavioral codes, one of them being not to ask too many questions. This attitude causes him to be expelled from the Grail's Castle, and only after he has undergone a second, Christian phase of education does he know how to express his charity by asking the appropriate question of the ailing king.

Berlin, May 25, 1909

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Buddha to Christ

Budapest, May 31, 1909

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1909 was the year when Rudolf Steiner published Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment and completed An Outline of Occult Science, the sequel to his important book Theosophy, which had appeared in 1904. These three works, along with the earlier The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity (1894), contain the nucleus of Steiner's anthroposophical thought.

The eleven lectures translated in this book were also given in 1909 and have been taken from the first half of a volume of lectures published in German under the title Das Prinzip der spirituellen Ökonomie im Zusammenhang mit Wiederverkörperungsfragen. Ein Aspekt der geistigen Führung der Menschheit (Rudolf Steiner Verlag: Dornach, Switzerland, 1979). The titles of this German volume and its component lectures are not by Rudolf Steiner but were assigned later on the basis of expressions used by him. Inasmuch as individual lectures in the German language have been published individually, their titles go back to the Complete Edition (CE) of Steiner's works begun by Marie Steiner. Steiner himself first spoke about the “principle of spiritual economy” in Berlin in 1908 when he was already working on his book An Outline of Occult Science.

The theme “spiritual economy” is directly related to Steiner's investigations about “the spiritual guidance of human beings and humanity” and later lectures dealing with karma. The eleven lectures translated in this book and the ten lectures translated and published under the title Esoteric Rosicrucianism (Anthroposophic Press: Spring Valley, N.Y., 1978) occupy a special place in Rudolf Steiner's work because the aspect stressed in the two volumes is not presented in this fashion elsewhere in the Complete Edition.

The Anthroposophical Society was founded as a separate organization in 1912, but Steiner did not actively guide it until 1923, two years before his death. At the time when the following lectures were given, Rudolf Steiner was still General Secretary of the German Section of the Theosophical Society and was using the terms “theosophy” and “theosophical,” but always in the sense of the anthroposophical spiritual science presented by him from the beginning. He suggested later that these designations be replaced by “anthroposophy,” “spiritual science,” “ anthroposophical,” or “spiritual scientific.”

As the excerpt from his autobiography printed at the end of this book indicates, Rudolf Steiner directed his lectures largely to individuals who were somewhat familiar with the rudiments of anthroposphical teachings and who joined him in the struggle and labor. Then, as he listened “to the pulsations in the soul-life of the members,” the form of a lecture began to emerge. This process—admirable in itself—is problematic for the translator of Steiner's lectures because the style, syntax, and choice of words were intended to involve the souls of a listening, and not a reading, audience in a process of discovery.

Another problem facing the translator is the fact that most of the lectures collected were originally transcribed from Steiner's shorthand notes by different individuals and that the quality or completeness of these transcriptions differs considerably. Most can be considered nearly literal transcriptions of the spoken word, but in this book there seems to be gaps in the fourth, fifth, and ninth lectures. The reader should take into consideration that these three lectures were extracted from lecture cycles whose transcription was of insufficient quality to warrant their publication as a whole. The three seemingly incomplete lectures mentioned above were included in the present collection because they contain important details relevant to the subject matter and are not mentioned in other lectures. Finally, although the sixth lecture, given at the dedication ceremony of the Francis of Assisi Branch, seems repetitive and somewhat tedious, it too offers insights that add to the understanding of the theme.

Given these special circumstances I have tried to grasp the connotative quality of words, phrases, and sentences as Steiner used them in his probing, searching manner and render them in an English form that is simultaneously comprehensible and suggestive to a modern American speaker. Ultimately, however, such an attempt must not be considered more than an approximation of the author's original sense and a confirmation of Wilhelm von Humbolt's dictum that “all understanding is also a misunderstanding.”

The translation of some words in this book may require an explanation. Throughout the eleven lectures I have endeavored to translate the German word Mensch, which has a masculine grammatical gender, not with “man” and in the plural with “men,” but with “human being,” choosing “human beings” when the repeated use of the reflexive pronouns “himself” and “herself” would seem awkward. I employed this practice in deference to modern female readers and because I wanted to dispel even the slightest hint of a mistaken notion arising from the use of “man” or “men” that human evolution and the reincarnation of the human soul applies primarily to males. One of the few exceptions to this practice is the rendering of Geistesmensch or Geistmensch as “spirit man,” because “spirit human being” would sound awkward.

I capitalized Spiritual Science, an approximation of the German word Geisteswissenschaft, because I wanted to give the term greater prominence in a text that abounds with words related to spirit and because I consider it a proper noun that designates systematic anthroposophical thought and spiritual activity. At no place in the lectures does Rudolf Steiner use the word Geisteswissenschaft in its more widely known academic meaning of “humanities” or “liberal arts.”

Furthermore, I rendered Ätherleib as “etheric body,” rather than the “ether body” preferred by some translators because the word “ether” may conjure up distracting connotations in the minds of some and also because adjectival consistency of the term with the related concepts “physical” and “astral” (body) seemed to be desirable. On the other hand, I was reluctant to, but finally did, choose “ego” for German Ich, which in English can mean “I” or “self.” Steiner once described the ego as “that which says ‘I’ to itself,” but once, in the first lecture of the present book, he uses both Ich and “ego” to designate the same entity in different physical bodies. I felt that even though the current use of “ego" in psychology and popular speech can conjure up imprecise and misleading feelings, it is nevertheless a term to which many modern American readers ascribe a soul quality. Whenever Steiner uses the word Ich, which I have rendered in these lectures with “ego,” it should be understood to mean the fourth body or principle with which the human being has been endowed—the other three being the physical, the etheric, and the astral bodies.

The few footnotes that were deemed necessary to provide some background information to the reader not familiar with certain historical personalities or contexts have been placed at the end of the book. Although I am sympathetic to the argument that the constant flipping of pages in search of a footnote can be distracting, I felt that the overriding concern should be that the reader gets a sense of the uninterrupted flow of thoughts with which Rudolf Steiner managed to involve his audience in the substance and dynamics of his presentations.

The lectures presented in this book touch on the very core of Rudolf Steiner's teachings and visions, according to which four basic facts govern human evolution from prehistoric times to the present. First, humanity has evolved as a result of the dialectics between forces and counterforces in the spiritual world. Second, earthly lives are repeated in a variety of spiritual ways, and valuable components are preserved for later use. Third, evolutionary forces have changed human consciousness, and new soul qualities are developed at certain intervals. Finally, the Mystery of Golgotha is the centerpiece of human evolution, but the influence of Christ-Impulse was manifest long before the birth of Jesus and can be observed in individualities such as Buddha, Zarathustra, and Moses.

Anthroposophy is not a religion—it goes beyond that—but its totality is subsumed under Rudolf Steiner's Christology. The reader will encounter recurring questions in these lectures—sometimes in a fresh combination, sometimes in a slightly different context, always thought provoking. For example, What is Spiritual Science and what can it do for us? What is human thought from a spiritual scientific point of view? How can it be that the Event at Golgotha is the centerpiece of all human evolution? Who was the Christ from an anthroposphical perspective, and how did the Christ-Impulse evolve? Why do the teachings of Zarathustra and Buddha constitute a transition in human consciousness and what, from an anthroposophical perspective, is the fundamental difference between the Buddhist and the Christian interpretation of life? How has the etheric body of Shem been preserved in all the Hebrew people? In what way does spiritual economy provide for certain etheric and astral bodies to remain active for the benefit of humanity, and what is the function of an avatar? Finally, why are we in the modern era, destined to undergo the complete unfolding of the ego?

It was Steiner's firm belief that his listeners or readers should never follow the teachings of anthroposophy blindly, but that they would have to struggle to find answers and new questions about the origin and the destiny of humanity. The seriousness of such a struggle gradually gives comfort to the human soul, and it is hoped that reading these lectures will have the same effect.

Peter Mollenhauer
Southern Methodist University

Originally published with the title, Christianity in the Evolutionary Course of Mankind, this lecture is included in Das Prinzip der spirituellen Ökonomie (#109/111 of the Bibliographic Survey, 1961).

You will have seen from the lecture given here on the more complicated questions of reincarnation that, with further progress in the development of the spiritual scientific view of the world, what in the beginning could be given as elementary truths becomes modified. Thus, we gradually rise to ever higher truths. Still, it was right to present the general cosmic truths at first in as simple and elementary a form as possible. It is, however, also necessary to advance slowly step by step from the simple abc's to the higher truths. Only through them will what spiritual science is intended to give gradually be attained; that is, the possibility of understanding and penetrating the world surrounding us in the physical, sense perceptible sphere. Now it is true that we have a long way to go before we shall be able to coordinate the spiritual lines and forces existing behind the world of the senses, but because of much that has been said in recent lectures, various phenomena of our existence will already have become clearer and more understandable.

Today we shall proceed a little further and speak again about more complicated questions of reincarnation or re-embodiment. To that end, we must first realize that differences exist among the beings who occupy leading places in the earth's human evolution. In the course of earthly evolution we must distinguish those leading individualities who have developed along with humanity from the beginning, but who have made more rapid progress. We might put it this way. If we go back into the past to the remote Lemurian time, we find the most varied stages of development among the human beings then incarnated. All the souls embodied at that time have since repeatedly experienced reincarnations during the succeeding Atlantean and post-Atlantean periods. These souls have developed with varying rapidity. Some have made relatively slow progress through their incarnations and still have long distances to travel in the future. But there are also souls who have developed rapidly, who, one might say, have utilized their incarnations to better advantage and are therefore at a stage of soul-spiritual development that will be attained by normal men only in the far distant future. Nevertheless, we may say that however advanced these individual souls may be, however far they may tower above normal men, they have still followed the same path in earthly evolution as the rest of humanity but have merely advanced more rapidly.

Besides these leading individualities, who in this sense are like the rest of humanity but are at a higher stage, there are also other individualities, other beings, who have by no means gone through various incarnations as other men have in the course of their evolution. We can perhaps illustrate what lies at the bottom of this by saying that there were beings in the time of the Lemurian evolution who no longer needed to descend so deeply into physical embodiment as the other men who have just been described. There were beings who could have accomplished their development in higher, more spiritual regions and who did not need to descend into bodies of flesh for their further progress. In order to intervene in the course of human evolution it is nevertheless possible for these beings to descend vicariously, so to speak, into just such bodies as our own. At any time, therefore, a being may appear of whom, if we make the necessary clairvoyant test, we cannot say, as we can of other human beings, that we trace the soul back in time and find it in a previous fleshly incarnation, trace it farther back and find it again in another incarnation, and so on. Instead, we must say that if we trace the soul of such a being back through the course of time, we may perhaps not find it at all in a former fleshly incarnation. If we do, it is only because the being in question is able to descend repeatedly to incarnate vicariously in a human body.

A spiritual being who descends thus into a human body in order to intervene in evolution as a human being, but without gaining anything from this embodiment for himself or experiencing anything here in the world of special significance for himself, is called an avatar. This is the distinction between a leading being who has sprung from human evolution itself and an avatar. An avatar being reaps no benefits for himself from his physical embodiments, or from even one embodiment to which he may subject himself; he enters a physical body for the blessing and advancement of mankind. Thus, an avatar being can either enter a human body just once or several times in succession, and when embodied is entirely different from other human beings.

The greatest avatar being who has lived on earth, as you can gather from the spirit of the lectures given here, is the Christ, that Being Whom we designate as the Christ, Who took possession of the bodies of Jesus of Nazareth in the thirtieth year of his life. This Being, Who first came in contact with our earth at the beginning of our era, Who was incarnated for three years in a body of flesh, and Who since that time has been connected with the astral sphere, the spiritual sphere of our super-sensible world—this Being is of unique significance as an avatar being. We should seek the Christ Being quite in vain in an earlier human embodiment, whereas other, lower avatar beings can be found to be embodied more than once. They incarnate repeatedly but obtain no benefit from their earthly embodiments for themselves. They only give; they take nothing from the earth. If. you want to understand these things perfectly, you must distinguish between such a lofty avatar being as the Christ and lower avatar beings who can have the most varied missions, and so as not to flounder about in speculation, we shall give a concrete instance to illustrate such a mission.

You all know from the story of Noah that in the ancient Hebrew narrative a great part of post-Noah humanity is derived from his sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth. Today we shall not go into what Noah and these three tribal ancestors are intended to represent in another respect, but shall simply realize clearly that the Hebrew literature that speaks of Noah's son, Shem, traces the whole tribe of the Semites back to him as its ancestor. A genuinely occult view of such a matter is always based upon deeper truths. Those who are able to carry on occult research into such things know the following facts concerning Shem, the ancestor of the Semites.

In the case of such a personality who is destined to be the forebear of an entire tribe, care must be taken from the time of his birth to make it possible for him to become this ancestor. Now in what way will care be taken that a personality like Shem, for example, can be the ancestor of a whole people, or of a tribal community? In the case of Shem it was brought about through his receiving a quite specially prepared etheric body. We know that when a human being is born into this world he fashions about his individuality his etheric or life body, along with the other members of his being. For such a tribal ancestor a special etheric body must be prepared that will be the model etheric body for all the descendants in the succeeding generations. So we have in such a tribal progenitor a typical model etheric body that, through blood relationship passes through the generations. In this wise, the etheric bodies of all the descendants who belong to the same tribe are copies in a certain sense of the etheric body of the ancestor. Thus, into all the etheric bodies of the Semitic people there was woven something like a copy of Shem's etheric body. Now by what means is such a circumstance brought about in the course of human evolution?

If we observe this man Shem a little more closely, we find that his etheric body received its archetypal form because an avatar had woven himself into it. Although he was not so exalted as certain other avatar beings, still, it was a lofty individuality who descended into his etheric body. This being was not united with Shem's astral body nor with his ego, but was woven into his etheric body alone. In this very example we are able to study the exact significance of the participation of an avatar being in the constitution and composition of a human being. What does it mean, then, that a man like Shem, who has the mission to be the ancestor of a whole people, should have an avatar being woven into his body? It means that whenever an avatar being is woven into a fleshly human body, some one member, or even several members, of the super-sensible constitution of this human being are capable of being multiplied and split into many parts.

It was really because an avatar being was interwoven with Shem's etheric body that it became possible for numberless copies of the original to be formed, and these many copies could be woven into all the descendants of this tribal ancestor in subsequent generations. Thus, the descent to earth of an avatar being is significant, among other things, in that it contributes to the multiplication of one or several members of the person in question who is animated by the avatar. There existed in Shem, as you can see from this, an especially precious etheric body, an archetypal etheric body, prepared by an exalted avatar. It was woven into Shem so that it could then descend in many copies to all those who were ordained to be related by blood to him.

Now we have already said in the lecture mentioned at the beginning that there is also a spiritual economy consisting in the fact that anything of especial value is preserved and carried over into the future. We have heard that not only is the ego re-embodied, but that also the astral body and the etheric body can be re-embodied. Aside from the fact that numberless copies of Shem's etheric body were formed, his own etheric body was also preserved in the spiritual world because it could later be useful in the mission of the Hebrew people. In this etheric body all the peculiarities of the Hebrews had originally come to expression, and if at any time something of especial importance was to occur for them, if a special task or mission was to be assigned to some one of them, it could best be accomplished by one who bore the etheric body of the ancestor. At a later time, a man who played an important role in the history of the Hebrews actually did bear the etheric body of the tribal ancestor, Shem. In fact, we have here one of those wonderful complications in human evolution that can explain a great deal to us. We have to do with an exalted individuality who was compelled to condescend, in somewhat the way a spiritually advanced person would have to speak to a lowly tribe, to speak to the Hebrew people in a manner appropriate to giving them strength for a special mission. He would, of course, be compelled to learn the language of this tribe, but it should not be maintained because of this that the language was something that would be used to advance him personally; he needed only take the trouble to learn the language. In this same way a lofty individuality had to make the effort to use Shem's etheric body to be able to give a definite impulse to the ancient Hebrew people. This personality is the one you find in Biblical history named Melchizedek. He took upon himself the etheric body of Shem so that later he could give Abraham the impulse you find so beautifully described in the Bible. So, aside from the fact that what was contained in the individuality of Shem was multiplied because an avatar being was embodied in it, which then became woven into all the other etheric bodies of the Hebrews, Shem's own etheric body was preserved in the spiritual world so that it could be borne at a later time by Melchizedek, who was to give the Hebrews an important impulse through Abraham.

Thus delicately interwoven are the facts existing behind the physical world that alone make explicable to us what occurs in it. We come to understand history only when we are able to point to such facts of a spiritual nature lying behind the physical ones. History can never be explained by considering physical facts alone.

What we have been discussing becomes especially significant. Through the descent of an avatar being the essential soul-spiritual members of the individual who is the bearer of this avatar being are multiplied and transmitted as copies to other human beings. This fact assumes special significance through the appearance of Christ on earth. Because the Avatar Being of Christ lived in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, it became possible for his etheric body to be multiplied innumerable times. This was true as well of the astral body and even the ego; that is, the ego as an impulse, as it was kindled in the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth when Christ entered his threefold sheath. First, however, we will take into account the fact that through the Avatar Being the etheric and astral bodies of Jesus could be multiplied.

Now, through the appearance of the Christ principle in earthly evolution one of the most significant phenomena in humanity occurred. What I have told you about Shem is fundamentally typical and characteristic of the pre-Christian times. When an etheric or an astral body is multiplied in this way, the copies are transmitted as a rule to those people who are related by blood to the one who had the original. Hence, the copies of Shem's etheric body were transmitted to the members of the Hebrew tribe. This was changed when the Christ Avatar Being appeared. The etheric and astral bodies of Jesus of Nazareth were multiplied and the copies preserved until they could be used in the course of human development. They were not, however, limited to any one nationality nor to any particular people. But when in the course of time a human being appeared who, irrespective of nationality, was ripe to have interwoven with his etheric or astral body an etheric or astral copy of the etheric or astral body of Jesus of Nazareth, they could be woven into his being. Thus, we see how it became possible in the course of time for all sorts of people to have woven into them copies of the astral or etheric bodies of Jesus of Nazareth.

The intimate history of Christian development is connected with this fact. What is ordinarily described as the history of Christian development is a sum of entirely external occurrences. Therefore, far too little consideration is given to the distinction of actual periods in Christian development. Anyone who can look more deeply into the evolutionary progress of Christianity will easily perceive that, in the early centuries of the Christian era, the manner in which Christianity was spread was entirely different from that of later centuries. In the first Christian centuries the spread of Christianity was connected with everything that could be procured from the physical plane. We need only look at the early teachers of Christianity to see how physical recollections, relationships, and relics were emphasized. Just consider the importance that Irenaeus, who contributed so much to the spread of Christian teaching in various lands in the first century, gave to the fact that his recollections extended back to those who had listened to the pupils of the Apostles. Great value was set upon being able to prove by means of such memories of physical life that Christ Himself had taught in Palestine. It was especially emphasized, for example, that Papias himself had sat at the feet of the Apostles’ pupils. Even the places where those personalities had sat who were still eye witnesses of the fact that Christ had lived in Palestine were pointed out and described. The continuing remembrance of physical happenings and places is what was especially emphasized in the early Christian centuries.

The great prominence that was given to everything of a physical nature can be seen in the words of the ancient Augustine, who says, “Why do I believe in the truths of Christianity? Because the authority of the Catholic Church compels me to.” The authority for the existence of something in the physical world is the important and essential thing to him. Thus, the determining factor for him is that a corporate body has been maintained that, linking personality with personality, reaches back to one, such as Peter, who was a companion of Christ. Here we can see that in the spread of Christianity during the early centuries it was the documents and the impressions of the physical plane to which the greatest importance was attached.

Now, after the time of Augustine, the situation changed. Up to the tenth, eleventh or twelfth centuries it was no longer possible to appeal to living memories, nor to draw upon the documents of the physical plane, which now lay too far in the past. Something entirely different also came into existence in the whole mood and disposition of the humanity that was then embracing Christianity. This was especially the case among Europeans. During that time, there was actually something like a direct knowledge of the existence of Christ, of His death on the cross and of His continuing life in the present. From the fourth or fifth centuries up to the tenth or twelfth there was a large number of people who would have considered it the greatest folly had they been told that the events of Palestine could be doubted because they knew better. They had always been able to experience inwardly in miniature a kind of Pauline revelation; that is, the experience through which Saul, on the road to Damascus, became a Paul.

What made it possible for a number of people in those centuries to be able to receive revelations, which were in a certain sense clairvoyant, concerning the events in Palestine? It was possible because the multiplied copies of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth had been preserved and were woven into a great number of people. They were able to wear them as garments that were woven into their etheric bodies. This was not Jesus’ own etheric body but copies of the original. In these centuries there were those who could possess such an etheric copy and who could thereby have a direct knowledge of Jesus of Nazareth and the Christ.

For this reason, the Christ picture became dissociated from external, historical, physical existence. A most extreme dissociation is presented in that wonderful work of the ninth century, the Heliand, a poem that was written down by an outwardly simple man of Saxony in the time of Ludwig the Pious, who reigned from 814 – 40. His astral body and ego could by no means equal what his etheric body contained because a copy of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth was woven into his etheric body. The simple Saxon pastor who wrote this poem had the certainty through direct clairvoyant vision that the Christ exists on the astral plane, and that He is the same as He who was crucified on Golgotha. Because this was a direct certainty for him, he no longer needed to cling to historical documents, nor did he need physical assurance that the Christ existed. He described Him, therefore, detached from the whole Palestinian setting, as something like a leader of a Middle European or Germanic tribe, and those who surrounded Him as His followers, the Apostles, he described as vassals of a Germanic prince. All external scenery was changed. Only what constitutes the structure of events, and the actually essential and eternal in the Christ figure remained. Having such a direct knowledge, which was built upon such an important foundation as the copy of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth, it was not necessary to hold rigidly to historical events when he was speaking of the Christ. Thus, he was able to invest his direct knowledge with a different external setting.

In the case of the writer of the Heliand we have been able to describe one of the strange personalities who had a copy of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth interwoven with his etheric body, and we could find other personalities in this period who had similar copies. We see here how the most important occurrences, with which we are able to explain history in an intimate way, take place behind the physical events.

If we follow Christian development further, we come to the period between the eleventh or twelfth centuries and the fifteenth. Here there was an entirely different mystery that now carried evolution forward. First, it was the memory of what had taken place on the physical plane; then it was the etheric element that was directly woven into the etheric bodies of the Christians of Middle Europe. In later centuries, from the twelfth to the fifteenth, it was especially the numerous copies of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth that were woven into the astral bodies of the most important supporters of Christianity. The egos of such people were capable of forming false notions of all sorts of things, but immediate sources of strength and devotion and a direct certainty of sacred truths existed in their astral bodies. Such people possessed deep fervor, absolutely direct conviction and also in some circumstances the ability to prove this conviction. What must sometimes seem so strange to us is that in their ego development they by no means equaled what their astral bodies contained because copies of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth were woven into them. What their egos did often seemed grotesque, but the world of their moods and feelings and fervor was grand and exalted.

Francis of Assisi, for example, was such a personality. This fact becomes explicable when we, as people of the present, study his life and are unable to understand his conscious ego, but are nevertheless compelled to hold the deepest possible reverence for the entire world of his feelings and for all that he did. He was one of those who had a copy of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth, and it was this that made his accomplishments possible. Many of his followers in the Order of the Franciscans also had such copies interwoven with their astral bodies.

All the strange and otherwise mysterious phenomena of that time will become luminous and clear to you, if you bring properly before the eyes of your soul this mediation in world evolution between that time and the past. It is also important to know, however, whether what was woven into these people of the Middle Ages from the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth was more from what we call the sentient soul, the intellectual soul or the consciousness soul, since the astral body must, of course, be considered in a certain sense as something containing all of this as well as enclosing the ego. All that was woven into Francis of Assisi was wholly sentient soul of Jesus of Nazareth. Wholly sentient soul of Jesus of Nazareth was also contained in that remarkable personality, Elizabeth of Thüringen, who was born in 1207. Knowing this secret of her life will enable you to follow her biography with your soul. She, too, was a personality who had a copy of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth woven into her sentient soul. The riddle of the human being is solved for us by means of just such knowledge.

One phenomenon above all will become understandable when you know that during this time the most diverse personalities had sentient soul, intellectual soul or consciousness soul woven into them as copies of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth. From this you will be able to comprehend that little understood science, scholasticism. What task did the scholastics set for themselves? They set out to find, on the basis of judgment and intellect, verifications and proof of that with which there was no historical connecting link, and which was no longer available with the direct clairvoyant certainty that existed in previous centuries through the interwoven etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth. These people set themselves the task by saying, “It has been communicated to us through tradition that in history that Being appeared Who is known as Christ Jesus, and also that other spiritual beings of whom the religious documents bear witness have intervened in human evolution.” Then, from the intellectual soul, that is, from the intellectual element of the copy of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth, they set themselves the task of proving with subtle and clearly developed concepts all that existed in their literature as mystery truths. Thus arose the strange science in which an attempt was made to achieve what was perhaps the ultimate in human intellect. One may think of the content of scholasticism as one wishes, but simply by means of this delicate discrimination and exact outlining of concepts, the capacity for human reflection was developed and impressed upon the culture of that period. This capacity to think with acute and searching logic through scholasticism was implanted into humanity between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries.

Among those who were more imbued with the copy of what had constituted the consciousness soul of Jesus of Nazareth, the special conviction arose, because the ego functions in the consciousness soul, that the Christ can be found in the ego. Because they had within them the element of the consciousness soul from the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth, the inner Christ rose resplendent in their souls. These are the individuals whom you know as Meister Eckhart, Johannes Tauler and all the other bearers of medieval mysticism.

Here you see how the diversified phases of the astral body were multiplied because the exalted Avatar Being of Christ had entered into the body of Jesus of Nazareth, and they worked on in the following age to bring about the real development of Christianity. This was an important transition in other respects also. We have seen how in the course of its development humanity was dependent upon having incorporated within it copies of the other bodies of Jesus of Nazareth. In the early centuries there were people who were entirely dependent upon the physical plane; then in the following centuries came those to whom the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth was accessible to interweave with their etheric bodies. Later, between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, people tended more toward the astral body, the bearer of power and judgment, and so the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth came to be incorporated in them.

The awakening of the astral body can be observed also in another phenomenon. Before the twelfth century, the depths of mystery contained in the Holy Communion were especially well-understood. It was not widely discussed but was rather accepted in a manner that enabled one to feel all that was contained in the words, “This is My body and this is My blood.” Christ here indicated that he would be united with the earth, becoming its planetary Spirit. Because grain is the physical earth's most precious produce, bread became for man the body of Christ; the sap flowing through plants became something from His blood. Through this knowledge the value of the Lord's Supper was not diminished but was, on the contrary, enhanced. Something of these limitless depths was felt in these early centuries and it continued up to the time when the power of judgment awakened in the astral body. It was only then that disputes began about the Lord's Supper. Just consider the discussions as to what the Lord's Supper is intended to be that took place among the Hussites, Lutherans and the dissenting Zwinglians and Calvinists. This could not have been possible earlier when direct knowledge of the Lord's Supper still existed.

Here we see verified a great historical truth that should be of special importance to spiritual scientists. As long as people knew what the Lord's Supper was, they did not discuss it. In general, when people discuss, you can consider it a sign that they really have no knowledge of the subject they are discussing. Where knowledge exists, knowledge is imparted and there is no particular desire for discussion. Where there is desire for discussion, however, there is as a rule no knowledge of the truth. Discussion begins only when there is a lack of knowledge, and it is always and everywhere the sign of a decline regarding the seriousness of a subject when it is discussed. Disintegration of a particular trend is always proclaimed by discussions. It is important that in spiritual science we come increasingly to understand that the wish for discussion may really be taken as a sign of ignorance. On the other hand, the opposite of discussion, the will to learn, the will gradually to comprehend what is in question, should be cultivated.

Here we see an important historical fact verified by the development of Christianity itself. But we can also learn to see how, in these centuries of Christendom just described, the power of judgment, this acute intellectual wisdom residing in the astral body, is developed. Indeed, if we fix our attention on realities rather than dogmas, we can learn how much Christianity has accomplished since its inception.

When we consider scholasticism, not as to content, but as a means of cultivating and disciplining our faculties, what has become of it? It has become natural science. Modern natural science is entirely unthinkable without the Christian natural science of the Middle Ages. It is not only that Copernicus was a canon and Giordano Bruno a Dominican, but that the thought forms employed in the natural sciences since the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries are nothing but what was developed and nurtured by the scholastic science of the Middle Ages. Those people do not live in reality but in abstractions who look up passages in scholastic books, compare them with the statements made in recent natural science, and then say that Haeckel and others maintain something entirely different. Realities are what matter. The work of Haeckel, Darwin, du Bois-Reymond, Huxley and others would all have been impossible if the Christian scholastic science of the Middle Ages had not preceded them. The very fact that these scientists were able to think as they did, they owe to the Christianized science of the scholastics of the Middle Ages. That is the reality, and it is by this means that humanity has learned to think in the true sense of the word.

Furthermore, read David Friedrich Strauss. Try to observe the mode of his thinking; try to analyze his thought pictures and how he insists upon representing the life of Jesus of Nazareth as a myth. Do you know where the keenness of his thinking originates? He gets it from the Christian scholasticism of the Middle Ages. Everything used today to combat Christianity so radically has been learned from the Christian scholastic science of the Middle Ages. Actually, today there cannot be an opponent of Christianity of whom it cannot easily be pointed out that he would be unable to think as he does had he not learned the thought forms of the scholastic science of the Middle Ages. This, indeed, would be to observe world history in its reality.

What, then, has happened since the sixteenth century? The ego has come gradually into prominence, and with it human egotism, and with egotism, materialism. What the ego had previously acquired was unlearned and forgotten and it became necessary for man to limit himself to what the ego can observe, to what the physical sensory system is able to give to ordinary intelligence. That alone could the ego take into the inner sanctuary. The civilization since the sixteenth century is one of egotism. What must now enter into this ego? Christian evolution has passed through a development in the physical, etheric and astral bodies, and has penetrated as far as the ego. Now it must take into this ego the mysteries and secrets of Christianity. Following a time when the ego learned to think through Christianity and to apply the thoughts to the outer world, it must now be possible for it to be made into a Christ receptive organ. It must rediscover the primordial wisdom of the Great Avatar, Christ. By what means must this come about? By a more profound understanding of Christianity through spiritual science. Having been carefully prepared through the three stages of physical; etheric and astral development, the concern should now be that the organ within man be opened so that he may henceforth see into his spiritual environment with the eye that can be opened for him by the Christ.

As the greatest Avatar Being, Christ descended to earth. Let us view this in the right perspective and try to look at the world as we shall be able to see it when we shall have received the Christ into ourselves. We then find the whole process of our world evolution illuminated and pervaded by the Christ being. That is to say, we see how man's physical body gradually came into existence on Saturn, how the etheric body made its appearance on the Sun, on the Moon the astral body, and then on the earth, the ego. We find how everything tends toward the goal of becoming ever more independent and individual in order to incorporate into the evolution of the earth the wisdom that passes over from the Sun. In other words, the Christ and Christianity must become the perspective center of the cosmic view.

So you see how Christianity has gradually prepared itself for what it is to become. In the early centuries the Christian received Christianity with his physical capacity for knowledge, later with his etheric capacity, and throughout the Middle Ages with his astral capacity. Then for a time Christianity in its true form was repressed until the ego had been trained by the three bodies in the course of Christian development. But since this ego has learned to think and to direct its vision to the objective world, it is now capable also of seeing in all phenomena spiritual facts that are intimately connected with the Central Being, the Christ. It is capable of beholding the Christ everywhere in the most varied forms as the foundation of the objective world.

Here we stand at the starting point of spiritual scientific comprehension and knowledge of Christianity. We begin to understand the task and mission that has been assigned to this movement for spiritual knowledge, and we come to realize its reality. The individual human being has physical, etheric and astral bodies, and ego, and continues to rise to ever more lofty heights; it is the same in the historical development of Christianity. We might say that it, too, has physical, etheric and astral bodies, and an ego—an ego that can even deny its origin, as in our time, since it can become egotistic. But it is still an ego that can receive the true Christ Being into itself, thereby rising to ever higher stages of existence. What the human being is in particular, the great world is in its totality, and that includes its historical development. When observed in this light, a perspective of the far-distant future opens before us from the spiritual scientific viewpoint, and we realize how it can lay hold upon our hearts and fill them with meaning. We comprehend evermore what we have to do, knowing that we are not groping in the dark. We have not devised ideas that we intend arbitrarily to project into the future, but we intend to harbor and to follow only those ideas that have been slowly prepared through the centuries. It is true that, after the physical, etheric and astral bodies had come into existence, the ego appeared and is now to be developed little by little up to spirit self, life spirit and spirit man. It is also true that modern man, with his ego form and present thinking could only be developed from the astral, etheric and physical forms of Christianity. Christianity has now become ego. Just as truly as this was the development of the past, so it is also true that the ego form of humanity can appear only after the astral and etheric forms of Christianity have been developed. Christianity will develop on into the future. It will offer humanity far greater things and the Christian development and standard of life will arise in new form. The transformed astral body will appear as the Christian spirit self; the transformed etheric body will appear as the Christian life spirit. In a radiant perspective of the future of Christianity, spirit man shines forth before our souls like a star toward which we strive, illuminated and glowing through and through with the spirit of Christianity.

You will have been able to see from the one lecture given here on more complicated questions of reincarnation that, with further progress in the spiritual-scientific world-view, what we could give in the beginning as elementary truths becomes modified—we gradually rise to higher and higher truths. Still it was right to present the general cosmic truths at first in as simple and elementary a form as possible. It is, however, necessary also to advance slowly step by step from the abc to the higher truths, for only through these higher truths will that gradually be attained which, among other things, spiritual science is intended to give: namely, the possibility of understanding and penetrating the world which surrounds us in the physical, sense-perceptible sphere. Now it is true that we have a long way to go before we shall be able to coordinate the spiritual lines and forces existing behind the sense world. But because of much that has been said in recent lectures various phenomena of our existence will already have become clearer, more understandable. Today we shall proceed a little farther in this regard, and here also we shall speak again about more complicated questions of reincarnation, of re-embodiment.

To that end we must today clearly realize first of all that differences exist among the beings who occupy a leading place in the earth's human evolution. We have to distinguish in the course of our earth evolution those leading individualities who from the beginning, so to speak, have developed with the humanity of our earth just as it is—only that they have made more rapid progress. We might put it this way: If we go back into the past to the very remote Lemurian time, we find among the human beings then incarnated the most varied stages of development. All the souls embodied at that time have again and again experienced reincarnations, re-embodiments, during the succeeding Atlantean and our post-Atlantean periods. These souls have developed with varying rapidity. Some have made relatively slow progress through the various incarnations, and still have long distances to travel in the future; but there are also souls who have developed rapidly, who, one might say, have utilized their incarnations to better advantage, and are therefore at a stage of soul-spiritual development which will be attained by the normal man only in a very, very distant future. But, continuing to speak of this soul sphere, we may say nevertheless that however advanced these individual souls may be, however far they may tower above the normal man, still they have followed the same path in our earth evolution as the rest of humanity; they have merely advanced more rapidly. Besides these leading individualities, who in this sense are like the rest of humanity, only at a higher stage, there are also in the course of human evolution other individualities, other beings, who have by no means gone through various incarnations just as other men have. We can perhaps illustrate what lies at the bottom of this by saying: There were beings in that very time of the Lemurian evolution to which we have alluded who no longer needed to descend so deeply into physical embodiment as other men, as all the beings who have just been described—there were beings who could have accomplished their development in higher, more spiritual regions, who, in other words, did not need for their own further progress to descend into bodies of flesh. It is nevertheless possible for these beings, in order to intervene in the course of human evolution, to descend vicariously, so to speak, into just such human bodies as ours. At any time therefore a being may appear of whom, if we make the clairvoyant test, we cannot say, as we can of other human beings, that we trace the soul back in time and find it in a previous fleshly incarnation, trace it farther back and find it again in another incarnation, and so on—but we must say instead: If we trace the soul of such a being back through the course of time, perhaps we do not find it at all in any former fleshly incarnation; but if we do, it is only because the being in question is able to descend repeatedly, at intervals, and incarnate vicariously in a human body. A spiritual being who descends thus into a human body in order to intervene in evolution as a human being, without gaining anything from this embodiment for himself, so to speak, without experiencing anything here in the world of special significance for himself—such a being is called in oriental wisdom an Avatar. And this is the distinction between a leading being who has sprung from human evolution itself and one called an Avatar: namely, that an Avatar-being reaps no benefits for himself from his physical embodiments, or from the one physical embodiment to which he subjects himself, for he enters into a physical body for the blessing and advancement of mankind. Therefore, as we have said, such an Avatar-being can either enter into a human body just once, or several times in succession; and he is then something entirely different from other human beings.

The greatest Avatar-Being Who has lived on earth, as you can gather from the spirit of all the lectures given here, is the Christ—that Being Whom we designate as the Christ, Who took possession of the bodies of Jesus of Nazareth in the 30th year of his life. This Being, Who first came in contact with our earth at the beginning of our era, Who was incarnated for three years in a body of flesh, and Who since that time has been connected with the astral sphere, that is, with the spiritual sphere of our super-sensible world—this Being is of unique significance as an Avatar-Being. We should seek the Christ-Being quite in vain in an earlier human embodiment, whereas other, lower Avatar-beings could be embodied more than once. They incarnate repeatedly, but they obtain for themselves no benefit from the earthly embodiments. They only give; they take nothing from the earth. But if you wish to understand these things perfectly, you must distinguish between such a lofty Avatar-Being as the Christ and lower Avatar-beings. The latter can have the most varied missions on our earth, but we can speak first of one such mission; and in order not to flounder about in speculation, we shall at once give a concrete instance to illustrate this kind of mission.

You all know from the story of which Noah is the center that in the ancient Hebrew narrative a great part of the post-Noah humanity derives from the three ancestors, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Today we shall not go into what Noah and these three tribal ancestors are intended to represent in another respect; we shall simply realize clearly that the Hebrew literature which speaks of Shem, one of the sons of Noah, traces back the whole tribe of the Semites to Shem as its ancestor. A genuinely occult view of such a matter is always based upon the deeper truths. Those who are able to carry on occult research into such things know the following facts concerning Shem, the ancestor of the Semites.

In case of such a personality, who is destined to be the ancestor of an entire tribe, care must be taken from the very time of his birth to make it possible for him to be just this ancestor. Now in what way will care be taken that a personality—like Shem, for example—can be the ancestor of a whole people, or of a tribal community? In the case of Shem it was brought about through his receiving a quite specially prepared etheric body. We know that when the human being is born into this world he fashions about his individuality his etheric or life body, with the other members of his being. For such a tribal ancestor a special etheric body must be prepared which is the model etheric body for all the descendants in the following generations; so that we have in such a tribal progenitor a typical etheric body, a model etheric body; and then through blood relationship this passes through the generations so that in a certain sense the etheric bodies of all the descendants who belong to the same tribe are copies of the etheric body of the ancestor. Thus in all the etheric bodies of the Semitic people there was inwoven something like a copy of Shem's etheric body. Now by what means is such a thing brought about in the course of human evolution?

If we observe this man Shem a little more closely, we find that his etheric body received its archetypal form because into this very etheric body an Avatar had woven himself. Although he was not so exalted as certain other Avatar-beings, still it was a lofty Avatar-being who descended into his etheric body. This being was not united with Shem's astral body nor with his ego, but was woven, as it were, into his etheric body alone. In this very example we are able to study what the exact significance is when an Avatar-being participates in the constitution, the composition, of a human being. What does it mean, then, that a man like Shem, who has the mission to be the ancestor of a whole people, should have an Avatar-being woven into his body? It means that whenever an Avatar-being is woven into a fleshly human body, some one member, or even several members, of the super-sensible constitution of this human being are capable of being multiplied, of being split into many parts.

It was really because an Avatar-being was interwoven with Shem's etheric body that it became possible for numberless copies of the original to be formed; and these many copies could be woven into all the descendants of the tribal ancestor in the successive generations. Thus, the descent to earth of an Avatar-being has the significance, among other things, that it contributes to the multiplication of one or several members of the person in question who is animated by the Avatar. There existed in Shem, as you can see from this, an especially precious etheric body, an archetypal etheric body, prepared by an exalted Avatar, and then woven into Shem, so that it could then descend in many copies to all those who were ordained to be related by blood to this ancestor.

Now we have already said in the lecture mentioned at the beginning that there is also a spiritual economy consisting in the fact that anything of especial value is preserved and carried over into the future. We have heard that not only is the ego re-embodied, but that also the astral body and the etheric body can be re-embodied. Aside from the fact that numberless copies of Shem's etheric body were formed, his own etheric body was also preserved in the spiritual world; for it could later be very useful in the mission of the Hebrew people. In this etheric body all the peculiarities of the Hebrew people had originally come to expression; and if at any time something of very especial importance was to occur for the ancient Hebrew people, if a special task, a special mission, was to be assigned to some one, it could best be accomplished by one who bore the etheric body of the ancestor. At a later time a man who played an important role in the history of the Hebrew people actually did bear the etheric body of the tribal ancestor. In fact, we have here one of those wonderful complications in human evolution which can explain a great deal to us. We have to do with a very exalted individuality who was compelled to condescend, as it were, in order to speak to the Hebrew people in an appropriate manner, and to give them the strength for a special mission—in somewhat the way a spiritually advanced person would have to speak to a lowly tribe. He would of course be compelled to learn the language of this tribe; but no one should maintain on this account that the language is something which would serve to advance him personally, for the one concerned need only take the trouble to learn the language. In the same way a lofty individuality had to make the effort to use Shem's etheric body, in order to be able to give a very definite impulse to the ancient Hebrew people. This personality is the one you find in the Biblical history named Melchizedek. He took upon himself, as it were, the etheric body of Shem, in order later to give to Abraham the impulse which you find so beautifully described in the Bible. And so, aside from the fact that what was contained in the individuality of Shem was multiplied, because an Avatar-being was embodied in it, and then became woven into all the other etheric bodies belonging to the Hebrew people, Shem's own etheric body was preserved in the spiritual world, so that it could be borne at a later time by Melchizedek, who was to give to the Hebrew people an important impulse through Abraham.

Thus delicately interwoven are the facts existing behind the physical world which alone make explicable to us what occurs in that world. We come to understand history only when we are able to point to such facts: to facts of a spiritual nature which lie behind the physical ones. History can never be explained out of itself, if we consider physical facts alone.

What we have just been discussing becomes especially significant: namely, that through the descent of an Avatar-being the essential soul-spiritual members of the personality who is the bearer of this Avatar-being are multiplied and transmitted to other human beings, and appear in copies of the original. This fact assumes very special significance through the appearance of the Christ on earth. Because the Avatar-Being of Christ dwelt in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, it became possible for the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth to be multiplied innumerable times, as well as the astral body, and even the ego,—that is, the ego as an impulse, as it was kindled in the astral body when the Christ entered into the threefold sheath of Jesus of Nazareth. But first we will take into account the fact that through the Avatar-Being the etheric body and the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth could be multiplied.

Now just through the appearance of the Christ Principle in the earth evolution, there occurred in humanity one of the most significant phenomena. What I have told you about Shem is fundamentally typical and characteristic for the pre-Christian time. When in this way an etheric body or an astral body is multiplied, the copies of it are transmitted as a rule to those people who are related by blood to the one who had the original; hence, the copies of Shem's etheric body were transmitted to the members of the Hebrew tribe. That was changed by the appearance of the Christ Avatar-Being. The etheric body and the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth were multiplied, and these copies were preserved as such until, in the course of human development, they could be used. They were not, however, limited to any one nationality nor to any particular people; but when in the course of time a human being appeared who—irrespective of nationality—was ripe, was fitted to have interwoven with his own astral body an astral copy of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth, or an etheric copy of his etheric body, these could be woven into his being. Thus we see how it became possible in the course of time—let us say—for all sorts of people to have woven into them copies of the astral body or of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth.

The intimate history of Christian development is connected with this fact. What is ordinarily described as the history of Christian development is a sum of entirely external occurrences; and therefore far too little consideration is given to a fact of very great importance: namely, to the distinction of actual periods in Christian development. Anyone who can look more deeply into the evolutionary progress of Christianity will easily perceive that in the early centuries of the Christian era the manner in which Christianity was spread was entirely different from that of later centuries. In the first Christian centuries the spread of Christianity was connected, as it were, with everything that could be procured from the physical plane. We need only to take a look at the early teachers of Christianity to see how at that time physical recollections, physical relationships, and physical relics are emphasized. Just consider what great importance was given by Irenæus, who in the first century contributed much to the spread of Christian teaching in various lands, to the fact that recollections extended back to those who had themselves listened to the pupils of the Apostles. Great value was set upon being able to prove by means of such physical recollections that Christ Himself had taught in Palestine. It was especially emphasized, for example, that Papias himself had sat at the feet of the Apostles' pupils; even the places were pointed out and described where those personalities had sat who were still eyewitnesses of the fact that Christ had lived in Palestine. The physical continuance of remembrance is what was especially emphasized in the early Christian centuries.

What great prominence was given to everything of a physical nature that still existed can be seen in the words of the ancient Augustine, who says: “Why do I believe in the truths of Christianity? Because the authority of the Catholic Church compels me to.” The physical authority for the existence of something in the physical world is to him the important and essential thing: that a corporate body has been maintained which, linking personality with personality, reaches up to one who was a companion of the Christ—such as Peter. For him that is the determining factor. Thus we can see that in the spread of Christianity during the early centuries it was the documents, the impressions of the physical plane, to which the greatest importance was attached.

Now the situation changes after the time of Augustine up to, let us say, the 10th, 11th, or 12th century. During that period of time it was no longer possible to appeal to the living remembrance, nor to draw upon the documents of the physical plane, for they lay too far in the past. At that time also something entirely different came into existence in the whole mood and disposition of the humanity which was then embracing Christianity ; and especially was this the case among European peoples. During that time there was actually something like a direct knowledge that a Christ exists, that a Christ died on the cross, and that He continues to live. From the 4th or 5th century up to the 10th or 12th there were a large number of people who would have considered it the greatest folly had they been told that the events of Palestine could even be doubted, for they knew better. They had always been able to experience inwardly a kind of Pauline revelation in miniature—what Paul, who up to that time was a Saul, experienced on the road to Damascus, and through which he became a Paul. How did it happen that in those centuries a number of people were able to receive revelations which were in a certain sense clairvoyant concerning the events in Palestine ? It was possible because in those centuries the multiplied copies of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth, which had been preserved, had been woven into a great number of people; because it was granted to them to wear these as a garment, so to speak. There was inwoven with their etheric bodies, not Jesus' own etheric body, but only a copy of the inborn original one of Jesus of Nazareth. In these centuries there were those who could possess such an etheric body, and who could thereby have a direct knowledge of Jesus of Nazareth, and also of the Christ. This was the reason also that the Christ picture became dissociated from external, historical, physical existence. And the most extreme dissociation is shown to us in that wonderful poem of the 9th century, known as the Heliand poem, which originated in the time of Ludwig the Pious, who reigned from 814–840, and which was written down by an outwardly simple man of Saxony. His astral body and his ego could by no means equal what his etheric body contained, for into his etheric body was woven a copy of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth. The simple Saxon pastor who wrote this poem had the certainty through direct clairvoyant vision that the Christ exists on the astral plane, and that He is the same as He who was crucified on Golgotha! And because this was a direct certainty for him, he no longer needed to cling to the historical documents. He no longer needed the physical mediation to assure him that the Christ existed. He described Him, therefore, as detached from the whole Palestinian setting. He described Him as something like a leader of a Middle-European or Germanic tribe; and those who surrounded Him as His followers, the Apostles, he described as vassals of a Germanic prince. All the external scenery was changed; only the actually essential, the eternal, in the Christ Figure remained,—only what constitutes the structure of the events. Having such a direct knowledge, built upon such an important foundation as the copy of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth, it was not necessary to hold himself rigidly to the immediate historical events when he was speaking of the Christ. He invested what was for him direct knowledge with a different external setting. And just as in the case of this writer of the Heliand poem we have been able to describe one of the strange personalities who had a copy of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth interwoven with his etheric body, so we could find other personalities in this period who had similar copies. Thus we see how the most important occurrences of all, which are able to explain history to us in an intimate way, take place behind the physical events.

If we now follow Christian development farther, we come, let us say, into the period between the 11th or 12th century and the 15th. Here there was an entirely different mystery, which now carried the whole evolution forward. First it was, so to speak, the memory of what had taken place on the physical plane; then it was the etheric element which was directly inwoven with the etheric bodies of the bearers of Christianity in Middle-Europe. In the later centuries, from the 12th to the 15th, it was especially the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth which in numerous copies was woven into the astral bodies of the most important bearers of Christianity. Such people then had an ego which as ego was capable of forming very false notions of all sorts of things; but in their astral bodies there existed immediate sources of strength, of devotion, a direct certainty of sacred truths. There existed in such people deep fervor, absolutely direct conviction, and also in some circumstances the ability to prove this conviction. What must sometimes seem so strange to us in these very personalities is that in their ego their development by no means equalled what their astral body contained, because the latter had a copy of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth woven into it. What their ego did often seemed grotesque; but the world of their moods and feelings, of their fervor, was grand and exalted. Such a personality, for example, was Francis of Assisi. And when we, as people of the present time, study Francis of Assisi and are not able to understand his conscious ego, but are nevertheless compelled to have the deepest possible reverence for the entire world of his feelings and for all that he did,—that fact becomes explicable from such a point of view. He was one of those who had a copy of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth inwoven. Because of this he was able to accomplish just what he did accomplish, and many of his adherents from the Order of Franciscans, with its servants and minorites, had similarly such copies interwoven with their astral bodies.

All the strange and otherwise mysterious phenomena of that time will become luminous and clear to you, if you bring properly before the eyes of your soul this mediation in world evolution between past and future. The important question was whether what was woven into these people of the Middle Ages from the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth was more what we call the sentient soul, or more the intellectual soul, or more what we call the consciousness soul. For the astral body of man must of course be considered in a certain sense as something containing all this; that is, it must be thought of as enclosing the ego, and containing sentient soul, intellectual soul, and consciousness soul. All that was in Francis of Assisi was wholly sentient soul of Jesus of Nazareth, so to speak. Wholly sentient soul of Jesus of Nazareth was contained in that remarkable personality whom you will follow biographically with the soul when you know the secret of her life: Elizabeth of Thüringen, born in 1207. Here we have a personality who had a copy of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth woven into the sentient soul. The riddle of the human being is solved for us by means of just such knowledge.

Above all, one phenomenon will be understandable when you know that during this time the most diverse personalities had sentient soul, intellectual soul, or consciousness soul woven into them as copies of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth. You will be able to understand that science, otherwise so little understood, which we ordinarily designate as scholasticism. What kind of a task did the scholastics set for themselves? The task of finding, on the basis of judgment and intellect, verifications, proofs, for that with which there was no historical connecting link, and concerning which there was no direct clairvoyant certainty, such as existed in previous centuries because of the interwoven etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth. These people had to set themselves the task in this way: They said to themselves: It has been communicated to us through tradition that in history that Being appeared Who is known as Christ Jesus; that other spiritual beings of whom the religious documents bear witness have intervened in human evolution.—From their intellectual soul, from the intellect element of the copy of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth, they set themselves the task of proving with subtle and clearly developed concepts all that existed in their literature as mystery truths. Thus arose that strange science which tried to achieve what was perhaps the ultimate in sagacity, in intellect, that has ever been reached by humanity. One may think of the content of scholasticism as one wishes, but through several centuries, simply by means of this very delicate discrimination and exact outlining of concepts, the capacity for human reflection was developed and impressed upon the culture of the period. It was between the 13th and 15th centuries that humanity had implanted into it through scholasticism the capacity to think with acute and searching logic.

Among those who, in turn, were more imbued with the consciousness soul—that is, the copy of what had constituted the consciousness soul of Jesus of Nazareth—there appeared the special conviction—because the ego functions in the consciousness soul—that the Christ can be found in the ego. And because they themselves had within them the element of the consciousness soul from the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth, the inner Christ rose resplendent in their souls. These are the individuals whom you know as Meister Eckhart, Johannes Tauler, and all the bearers of mediæval mysticism.

Thus you see how the very diversified phases of the astral body were multiplied because the exalted Avatar-Being of Christ had entered into the body of Jesus of Nazareth; and they worked on in the following age and brought about the real development of Christianity. In other respects also this was an important transition. We see how in the course of its development humanity is dependent in other ways also upon having incorporated within it these fragments of the Jesus of Nazareth being. In the early centuries there were people who were entirely dependent upon the physical plane; then in the following centuries came those who were accessible to the interweaving with their etheric bodies of the element of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth. Later people tended more, so to speak, toward the astral body; hence the copy of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth could now likewise be incorporated in them. The astral body is the bearer of the power of judgment, which awakened particularly between the 12th and the 14th centuries. You could observe this from another phenomenon also.

Up to that time it was especially well understood what depths of mystery the Holy Communion contained. At most there was only slight discussion about it, but it was accepted in a manner that enabled one to feel all that lay in the words : This is My body and this is My blood,—because the Christ indicated that He would be united with the earth, would be the planetary Spirit of the Earth. And because the most precious thing coming out of the physical earth is grain, bread became for man the body of Christ; and the sap which flows through the plants became for him something from the blood of Christ. Through this knowledge the value of the Lord's Supper was not diminished, but was on the contrary heightened. Something of these limitless depths was felt in these centuries, up to the time when the power of judgment awakened in the astral body. It was only from then on that disputes began about the Lord's Supper. Just consider how among the Hussites, among the Lutherans and the dissenting Zwinglians and Calvinists, there was discussion as to what the Lord's Supper is intended to be. Such discussion would not have been possible earlier, because there was still a direct knowledge of the Lord's Supper. But we see verified here a great historical law which should be of special importance for spiritual scientists: namely, that as long as people knew what the Lord's Supper was they did not discuss it. In general you can consider it a sign that people really have no knowledge of a certain matter .when they begin to discuss it. Where there is knowledge, knowledge is imparted, and no particular desire for discussion exists. Where there is desire for discussion, there is as a rule no knowledge of the truth. Discussion begins only when there is a lack of knowledge, and it is always and everywhere the sign of a decline as regards the seriousness of a subject when discussion begins. Disintegration of a particular trend is always proclaimed by discussions. It is very important that in the spiritual-scientific field we come to understand more and more that the wish for discussion may really be taken as a sign of ignorance; on the other hand, that which is the opposite of discussion, the will to learn, the will gradually to comprehend what is in question, should be cultivated.

Here we see a great historical fact verified by the development of Christianity itself. But we can learn something else besides, if we see how in these centuries of Christendom just described the power of judgment—which resides in the astral body—this acute intellectual wisdom, is developed. Indeed, if we fix our attention upon realities, not dogmas, we can learn how much Christianity has accomplished in the course of its progress. What has become of scholasticism, if we consider it, not as to its content, but as a means of cultivating and disciplining the faculties? Do you know what became of it? It became modern natural science. Modern natural science is entirely unthinkable without the Christian natural science of the Middle Ages. It is not only that Copernicus was a canon, and Giordano Bruno a Dominican, but that all the thought-forms employed in the natural sciences since the 15th and 16th centuries are nothing but what was developed and nurtured by the scholastic science of the Middle Ages. Those people do not live in reality, but in abstractions, who look up passages in the books of the scholastics, compare them with the statements of more recent natural science, and then say: Haeckel and others maintain something entirely different. Realities are what matter!

A Haeckel, a Darwin, a DuBois-Reymond, a Huxley, and others, would all have been impossible if the Christian scholastic science of the Middle ages had not preceded them. For the very fact that these modern scientists were able to think as they did they owe to the Christianized science of the scholastics of the Middle Ages. That is the reality. By this means humanity has learned to think in the true sense of the word.—The matter goes further still. Read David Friedrich Strauss. Try to observe the mode of his thinking; try to analyze his thought pictures: How he insists upon representing the whole life of Jesus of Nazareth as a myth. Do you know whence he has the keenness of his thinking? He gets it from the Christian scholasticism of the Middle Ages. Everything by means of which Christianity is so radically combated today has been learned from the Christian scholastic science of the Middle Ages. Actually there could not be today an opponent of Christianity concerning whom it could not easily be pointed out that he would not be able to think as he thinks at all, had he not learned the thought-forms from the scholastic science of the Middle Ages. This, indeed, would mean to observe world history in its reality.

What then has happened since the 16th century? Since the 16th century the ego itself has come more and more into prominence, and with it human egotism also, and with egotism, materialism. What the ego had acquired as content has been unlearned and forgotten. It was therefore necessary for man to limit himself to that which the ego can observe—to that which the physical sense-instrument is able to give to the ordinary intelligence—and that alone could it take into the inner sanctuary. The civilization since the 16th century is a civilization of egotism. What must now enter into this ego? Christian evolution has passed through a development in the external physical body, a development in the etheric body, and also in the astral body, and has penetrated as far as the ego. Now it must take into this ego the mysteries and secrets of Christianity itself. Following a time when the ego learned to think through Christianity, and applied the thoughts to the outer world, it must now be possible for the ego to be made into a Christ-receptive organ. This ego must now rediscover the wisdom which is the primordial wisdom of the Great Avatar, of Christ Himself. And by what means must this come to pass? By a profounder understanding of Christianity through spiritual science. Carefully prepared through the three stages of physical, etheric, and astral development, the matter of concern should now be that the organ within man be opened, so that he may henceforth see into his spiritual environment with that eye which the Christ can open for him. As the greatest Avatar-Being, the Christ descended to earth. Let us get a perspective view of this; let us try to look at the world as we shall be able to see it when we shall have received the Christ into ourselves. We then find the whole process of our world-becoming illuminated and pervaded by the Christ-Being. That is to say, we describe how upon Saturn man's physical body gradually came into existence, how on the Sun the etheric body made its appearance, on the Moon the astral body, and then on the Earth the ego is added; and we find how everything tends toward the goal of becoming ever more independent and individual, in order to incorporate in the Earth evolution that wisdom which passes over from the Sun to the Earth. In other words : for the liberated ego of modern times the Christ and Christianity must become the perspective center of the cosmic view.

Thus you see how Christianity gradually prepared itself for what it is to become. In the early centuries the Christian received Christianity with his physical capacity for knowledge; then later with his etheric capacity; and throughout the Middle Ages with his astral capacity for knowledge. Then for a time Christianity in its true form was repressed, until the ego had been trained by the three bodies in the course of Christian development. But since this ego has learned to think and to direct its vision to the objective world, it is now capable also of seeing in all phenomena in this objective world spiritual facts which are intimately connected with the Central Being, with the Christ Being: it is capable of beholding the Christ everywhere in the most various forms as the foundation.

With this fact we stand at the starting point of spiritual-scientific comprehension and knowledge of Christianity. We begin to understand what task, what mission, has been assigned to this Movement for Spiritual Knowledge, and we realize at the same time the reality of this mission. Just as the individual human being has physical body, etheric body, astral body, and ego, and gradually rises to ever more lofty heights, so is it also in the historical development of Christianity. We might say that Christianity has also a physical body, an etheric body, an astral body, and an ego—an ego which can even deny its origin, as in our time, since the ego can in any case become egotistic—but still an ego which can at the same time receive the true Christ Being into itself, and can gradually rise to ever higher stages of existence. What the human being is in particular, the great world is in its totality, as well as in its course of historical development. If we observe the matter in this light, there opens before us from the spiritual-scientific viewpoint a perspective far into the future. And we know how this can lay hold upon our heart and fill it with meaning. We comprehend more and more what we have to do, and we know also that we are not groping in the dark; for we have not devised any ideas which we intend arbitrarily to project into the future, but we intend to harbor and to follow only those ideas which have been gradually prepared through the centuries. Just as it is true that the ego must first appear and be developed little by little up to Spirit Self, Life Spirit, and Spirit Man, after the physical body, the etheric body, and astral body were already in existence, so is it true that the modern man with his ego-form, with his present-day thinking, could only be developed out of the astral, the etheric, and the physical form of Christianity. Christianity has become Ego. As it is true that this was the development in the past, just so true is it that the ego-form of humanity can appear only after the astral and etheric form of Christianity has been developed. Christianity will develop on into the future; it will offer humanity far greater things, and the Christian development and the Christian standard of life will arise in new form: the transformed astral body will appear as the Christian Spirit Self; the transformed etheric body as the Christian Life Spirit. And in a radiant perspective of the future of Christianity, Spirit Man gleams forth before our souls like a star toward which we strive, illuminated and glowing through and through with the spirit of Christianity.

Translated by Steiner Online Library

When words are to be spoken at the dedication of an Anthroposophical Group, it is of greater importance to make clear the object and the aim of spiritual scientific work than to give important revelations concerning mysteries of the higher worlds. If we wish to visualize the significance of the spiritual scientific world-conception for the human soul, we must cast our eye over many different realms.

Picture to yourselves a person living in the 13th or 14th century! Such a person lived at a time when the art of printing had not yet been invented—an art by means of which such a powerful influence has been exercised upon the human soul in modern times. Picture to yourselves a person living at that time and ask yourselves what took place within his soul when for instance he looked up at the sky. This person whose way of viewing the world was not yet influenced by accumulated knowledge and materialistic learning as is the case with those living to-day, saw space resplendent with the brilliant light of the sun in the day-time, and at night agleam with shimmering stars, and at such a time his soul felt cosmic space to be pervaded by spiritual forces and spiritual beings. He felt them. Through the culture of those times, images of divine-spiritual facts arose within him, and he felt them directly. And so it was also in the spring-time when he saw the plants springing up out of the earth; his soul felt Nature to be illumined and imbued by the forces of divine, spiritual beings.

Such a feeling, such direct experience of the living spiritual forces diminishes the more we approach our present time. This statement is not meant as an adverse criticism of our time, for the diminishing of this feeling has been accompanied by the rise of another way of approaching Nature, by a more intellectual, external way of regarding the world; and it is only right that hereby mankind has gradually gained control ever the forces of Nature, has learned to investigate the world in detail with the aid of the microscope and to follow the stars in their courses through space with the telescope. It is right that in a certain sense men are proud that they are able to increase their mastery of the forces of Nature more and more, but at the same time we must make clear to ourselves that hereby all human impulses have become different.

When a human being looked up to the stars in former times, he said to himself, “I feel something divine and spiritual in the stars”. To-day, however, he only sees them as physical objects, and it is difficult for any one living in our day to picture to himself the divine and the spiritual. Humanity has really lost its understanding of this divine-spiritual vision. In spite of this fact it is true that even to-day there are many souls which are wonderfully stirred by their understanding of that which is divine and spiritual. Oh, the soul thirsts to imagine how space is filled with divine spiritual beings, filled with a spiritual power, and it feels the need of learning to know this power. Now the materialistic development here described has come to such a pass that just the most earnest and most ardent seekers after truth have gradually begun to think of late that it can be only a childish point of view to feel something divine in the world, and that mankind has now matured far enough to do away with such antiquated ideas. Even our school-children have to experience a discord which leads to the profoundest consequences in life. On the one hand the child is given lessons in natural science in a purely materialistic way, on the other, lessons in religion. Between them there is no bridge, no connecting link. What is the result in later life? We can say that the whole of humanity is divided into two camps, according to the consequences arising from this discord. On one hand there are those who have become indifferent and no longer care about anything, and on the other hand those who take things tragically, who brood, but still do not gain clear insight, and at last despair of solving the riddles of life. Thinking humanity is really divided into these two camps. Perhaps it is, in the end, only the simple souls who have kept a certain feeling for the spiritual. He who does not regard everything from the outside only, knows that just in the middle of the 19th century the danger that humanity would sink completely into materialistic life was at its greatest. The whole disposition and frame of mind of man tended towards materialistic feeling and experience. Therein lay a dreadful danger for humanity. Do you know what would have happened if spiritual science had not intervened? Man's manner of thinking would have become submerged ever deeper in the materialistic element; the forms of thought would have become gradually harder and more rigid; their outlines would have become ever sharper and more unalterable, instead of adapting themselves in constant active flow. No one would have been able to feel for anyone else, or sympathise with anyone else; but everyone would have felt that he alone was in the right and would have despised and hated all those that [who] thought or felt differently. Quite rigid in form, devoid of all love, our thinking would have become; and the spirit would finally have been pushed back so far into the background that all contact with it would have been made forever impossible, and the way into the spiritual world have been lost. The earth would have become a moon. For this reason, those who have insight into the higher spiritual worlds have brought spiritual science to mankind.

But from what sources does the science flow which is destined to save humanity from this great danger?

Precisely on a day like this, when a newly-founded Group is to be dedicated, it is indeed appropriate to speak about these things.

These sources are still concealed to most people, but gradually they will be revealed more and more. And from out these sources spiritual science was created. Now what does spiritual science say? It speaks of many things which the ordinary human being, with his ordinary senses, does not perceive. It says, for instance, that man does not only consist of the externally visible body, but that he has a fourfold nature. Besides the visible body he has also a life, or etheric body, not visible for ordinary man, a sentient or astral body, and, as a fourth member, he possesses the Ego, which passes from incarnation to incarnation, in order, throughout a long period of time, to complete its course of evolution. And spiritual science tells us still more. It tells us, for example, that the earth itself also goes through an evolution from one incarnation to the other, an evolution of a cosmic nature. It shows us further how the sun and the planets play the most important parts in this process of evolution, and how the existence and development of all these celestial bodies are connected with the existence of spiritual beings.

But what then is all this? Where are the sources of these truths? They come from the initiates. And who are the initiates? They are those whose spiritual eyes have been opened, and who can therefore speak of the spiritual world because they know this world. They are like those who can see among the blind. Fichte has already alluded to this relationship, and in truth for him “who can see”, spiritual things are just as real as the physical ones,—yes, even more real, for the latter are for him only an outward expression of the former.

It is true that when the seer speaks of the etheric body, the sentient body, etc., and of other revelations of a spiritual nature, many people will say that he is a dreamer and a fantast and takes theories and mere hypotheses for realities. The seer understands perfectly that those who do not see should raise such objections. Among a group of physically blind people we may speak as much and as exactly as we please about colours and light, yet for the blind this remains mere theory; and one who can see physically will be unable to disclose the concept, the actual reality-laden, concept, of colour and light to one who is physically blind. For to grasp this concept, the blind would have to be able to see for themselves; and only when a blind person has undergone a successful operation can the world of light dawn upon him.

Let us try to picture this relationship in still another way. Let us imagine that we had a large receptacle full of water before us, and let us suppose that there were a person who could neither see nor feel water with his senses, nor perceive it in any way. For this person the receptacle would be empty. Now let us suppose further that, in some way, cold currents could be made to pass through the water, causing it to freeze. At first ice-crystals, like needles, would form here and there, and as they continued to form they would accumulate into large clumps. But as ice is a solid substance, this person, who is unable to perceive water, would nevertheless be able to perceive the particles of ice as they formed. And what is it that he now perceives? He perceives that ice is forming. But out of what does it seem to him to be forming? Out of nothing!

This is the situation in which the initiate finds himself in his relation to other men. Where they see nothing, he sees. But now people say, “How can I believe that which I cannot verify for myself? And inasmuch as I cannot do so, what object is there in occupying myself with such things or in entering into them at all?” In this respect it is especially the dogmatists of monistic philosophy who make the following demands—firstly, that everything be admitted which they themselves assert, and secondly, that no one may know more than they know themselves. They set themselves up as infallible and as able to determine the limits of knowledge.

The true initiate will never deny the facts found by scientific investigation, but will whole-heartedly acknowledge the truths and merits of science. He must refuse, however, to admit that the scientific dogmatist is capable of determining the limits of knowledge. The scientist is proud of understanding, in contrast to believing. But if it is here a question of believing and not believing, and the scientist is of the opinion that belief plays no part in the results of his researches, he is mistaken. It is simply impossible to investigate or to teach anything without believing. Consider, for example, the cellular theory. In books we have very fine representations of cells, the division of the cells, the life of the cells, and so forth, clear and exact in every detail. But who among us has ever really seen this for himself with such distinctness? We all simply believe that it is so. Even the university professors, who teach these things, have in the rarest cases seen all this with their own eyes, and yet they lecture on it. They have not been able to see it for themselves, because things of this kind are both so difficult and so rarely possible to observe that only a few single individuals have succeeded in seeing them, and also because in reality they are by no means so clear and distinct as they appear in the pictures. Let us also consider embryology, for instance. Scientists believe that they know exactly how the embryo looks at every moment throughout pregnancy. But how extremely seldom is a scientist in the position, perhaps through a sudden case of death occurring at a particular moment of pregnancy, to have insight into these things! How many of these scientists have never seen the things which they teach! But until he is able to see for himself, the scientist is obliged to believe, and the others with him. Yet he demands of spiritual science that no one shall believe, and that no one shall know more than himself.

The essential character of the initiate lies in the fact that he is able to see into the spiritual world. For him the sources are spiritual scientific knowledge.

Yes, but of what use is this to those who do not possess this knowledge? A comparison will show us this.

Look for a moment at this stove! And now imagine that someone were to stand before this stove and say to it: “Thou stove, thou hast been created to spread warmth! Bethink thee of thy mission and warm this room!” Would it do so? Would these words have any effect? No, the stove would not stir. But if instead of speaking, we get wood and coal and light the fire, then it will fulfill its mission.

So it is with the communications of spiritual-scientific truths. They are fuel for the human soul. For thousands of years morality has been preached and people have been told, “Be good and love one another”. But do they really then do so? Do not matters look rather sad in spite of all Christian doctrines? In a town in southern Germany, a preacher once said to me, “I can make no objection whatever to all that you say of the Gospels, but what is the use of founding little conventicles for spiritual science here and there, when the church carries on practical education on a large scale?” Yes, if this preacher were right, then it would indeed be of no use. But he is not right, for if the church really performed its task in full measure, from whence do so many evil deeds still continually arise? And does everyone really go to church? In truth the church does not teach practical morality, but “stove morality”. In our day there are no longer many people who grow better simply upon urgent request. And indeed it is just the most able and gifted people who have turned away from the church. And were this to go on, the adherents of the church would become scarcer and scarcer, and materialism would become greater and greater, until one day not very much would be left of the church. And this is just the reason why spiritual science has come; it has become necessary, in order to supply the “fuel”! It is itself fuel in this sense, for the simple communication of truths from out the spiritual world animates and furthers the spiritual development of the individual, helping it forward not only in the sphere of morals, but also in spiritual vision.

Even among students of spiritual science there are those who are of the opinion that we need only be good and noble and strive to attain perfection, and then in the end our spiritual eyes will open of their own accord. At the same time they think that the communication of higher truths is of no great significance, and that we should only wait till we can see for ourselves, till the veil is of itself withdrawn from before our eyes. Those who think in this way are mistaken. They fail to recognise the character of these communications which act as fuel. The essential point it to stimulate active inner motion within the soul which would not come about in any other way, nor develop of its own accord.

But what is it that can shine forth within man, that will indeed shine forth within him, if he understands and pursues his development aright, which is the task of spiritual science? To explain this we shall have to go far back in history.

We must go back as far as the ancient Indian culture, which we call the age of the Seven Rishis. These Seven Rishis were the initiates of this age and guided the development of humanity. When, out of their spiritual vision, they bore witness of the highest mysteries, they said, “High above all that exists there is a Cause, a Being, which we call Vishva-Karman. We can neither know nor fathom it, it can only be divined. It lies too distant, as it were, to be known by us. Later on however, long after our time, it will draw nearer to humanity.”

Then in a much later period another initiate spoke about this Being. It was Zarathustra; not the historical Zarathustra, but one who preceded him. When he spoke to the people in his old, holy Persian language, the splendour of which can scarcely be described to-day, he said, “I see the Highest Being in the sun, round about the sun. It is, indeed, in the atmosphere of the sun.” And that is why he called it Ahura Mazdao—the great Aura—in contrast to man, the small aura. In the great Aura he saw an image or a model for the small aura, man. Ahura Mazdao is the same as Ormuzd. And Zarathustra taught that in days to come Ahura Mazdao would manifest himself in man. This was what he foresaw. But he saw also that there are forces in man which hold him back and prevent the manifestation of the Highest Being within him. These forces he called Ahriman—the Evil.

Still later, in another period, we again meet with a great initiate. Knowledge had, we might say, drawn still closer to him. In the case of the Rishis the Highest Being was concealed within universal space, as it were, immensely tar away. For Zarathustra it had approached as far as the sun. But for Moses knowledge was already close enough to be actually grasped. In the burning thorn-bush which spoke to Moses, the Aura had become part of the earthly elements. Moses knew that the Highest Being was present in the earth. For the initiate, this Being had descended first to the sun and then to the earth. Here it now lived within the elements. And when Moses asked this Being what he was to tell the people, the answer was—“I am the I am, Jahve.” With these words it becomes clear that this Being has come in order to unfold its life more and more within the human Ego. This was, however, not yet the case at that time. Man had not yet brought to birth a consciousness of the Highest Being within his inmost self. Moses, however, knew that this would come to pass.

And later still another man appears upon whom spiritual vision was bestowed, namely, Paul. He knew that this Highest Being was embodied in Jesus Christ. But he could not believe, could not comprehend, that this Being had to die upon the cross. Then he was initiated. That this was possible was due to the peculiar circumstance that he had been born too early. One who is born prematurely, a child that has not been carried in the womb for nine months, has not descended quite so far into the world of matter. For this reason it will be easier for such a person to attain insight into the spiritual world. And when Paul became clairvoyant, he saw that the Highest Being lived in Christ. Now it had actually come to life in man. Therefore Christ said at the Last. Supper—The bread is My body, the wine is My blood. Bread—earth; wine, or the juice of the plant—Spirit.

I wanted to lead you thus far to-day, so that you might feel what it signifies that such a Being has approached the earth, has descended into the earth. And this is what took place at Golgotha.

Did this Being really stream out over the earth at Golgotha? In order to answer this let us examine and compare a time 600 years before the birth of Christ, let us say, with a time 600 years after the birth of Christ. What has happened here—wherein does the difference consist?

600 years before Christ, Buddha lived. He lived in a king's palace. Then he went out into the world and learned to know old age, sickness, poverty, death, and the corpse. He saw that the whole life of man is suffering. Old age is suffering, sickness is suffering, poverty is suffering, birth is suffering, death is suffering, to be parted from those whom we love is suffering; in short, the whole of existence is suffering. So he said to himself, and taught the people, that they must lose, must learn to forget, their craving for existence. Here we have the hopeless renunciation of all creation

But 600 years later came the Mystery of Golgotha. As a symbol we see a cross erected, and upon the cross a human corpse. And the people look up to the corpse and are filled with a sense that all suffering can be healed. Herein lies a great difference. In death human beings no longer see the token of suffering, but the token of the healing of suffering. They can become victors over all that their life here on earth brings them. And this means that a fruit will be carried over into the other life.

If man now understands that birth and life are not suffering, but afford the possibility of emerging from it, inasmuch as life gives him the opportunity to develop the Spiritual which leads out beyond all suffering—if man understands this, old age is no longer suffering, but a drawing nearer to the fruit of life. Death is no longer suffering, but redemption; not to be united with those he loves is no longer suffering, if he has united himself with the Christ-Being, the Being of infinite Love, and thus envelops with his love all beings and all worlds.

All this was felt 600 years after Christ, and since that time it has been possible for man to feel united with the Christ, the Spirit of the Sun, Who is also the Spirit of the Earth—Who, even as he permeates the earth, permeates also each one of us, and calls forth mildness, warmth and love within our souls—Who awakens infinite love and transforms the earth.

Because spiritual science, in communicating spiritual truths, does not teach morals, but gives a basis for practical morality, it will build a bridge leading into the spiritual world for the man of to-day. It may well be that those who stand at the apex of our present culture, the leading personalities in industry and learning, those who have the greatest influence, will smile at these small conventicles of spiritual science, and also at all that is investigated here. But let them think what they like! At one time there was also a mighty world of Roman culture—that ancient, imperial Rome, the ruins of which we still admire. In the ancient gigantic Coliseum incense was burned to drown the smell of flesh which arose where the Christians had been torn to pieces by wild beasts. That was ancient Rome, above, in the daylight. And below? Let us descend into the catacombs! There we find the first followers of Christianity, of the Mystery of Golgotha, persecuted and despised. There below, hidden away, they worship Christ; there they perform their symbolic rituals. Down there the first Christian communities are founded. Although small in number and despised, they never doubt. Down below a little flock, despised and outcast; up above, a mighty throng who have great influence. Yet a few centuries later ancient Rome has disappeared; and those who were there below, in the under-world, have ascended. In the same way spiritual science will ascend in a few centuries, will rise above industry, learning, and the various concerns of humanity to-day. Yet if, in your little conventicles, you compare yourselves with those of subterranean Rome, do so, not with a feeling of pride, but with humility. And if you picture to yourselves how the brilliant science of our present day will melt away before spiritual science, then picture this to yourselves in humility only. If you take this feeling with you and carry it with you from this hour, so that it always remains alive within your souls, you will help to spread universal human love, and you will enter into a new culture.

I call upon all the good spiritual forces that they may watch over this newly-founded Group, and may help you to attain your goal and facilitate your work.

[ 1 ] This course of lectures will take us into the high spiritual regions we shall be led from the earth, where we live, not only into the wide physical spaces of our universe, but also be uplifted to those spiritual worlds, from which this whole physical universe has derived its origin.

Such a course will show us, that the fundamental object of all knowledge and all wisdom is to solve the greatest problem of all — the problem of humanity. In order to make the human being understandable, explanatory facts have to be brought from far away. Above all it is necessary that those who wish to follow this course should be acquainted with the fundamental conceptions of Anthroposophy; although it is true that all Anthroposophists are acquainted with them in a general way. In these lectures we may rise in spirit to very exalted spheres, but we shall always endeavour to bring those facts which lie so far afield near to you and make them as comprehensible as possible.

[ 2 ] When we have to speak of what we call the Spiritual Hierarchies, it means that our souls' gaze must rise to those beings who, in the sphere of our earth, have a higher existence than man. In the visible world we can only progress to beings that represent four degrees of one hierarchy, i.e., the mineral world, the plant world, the animal world and the human world. Above man begins a world of invisible beings, through the knowledge of the super-sensible world, and man is able (as far as it is possible for him) to rise a certain distance towards those beings and powers, which are the continuation in the invisible world of the four grades found within the realm of the earth. The knowledge and investigation which lead us into those regions has not, as you all know, come into existence only at our present time in evolution. There is what we may call a primeval world-wisdom; — all that man can fathom, all that he can know and realise, all that he has gained in ideas and conceptions, all that he has attained through clairvoyant imagination, inspiration, and intuition, — all has been lived before, and known before, by those Beings who are higher than he. He only follows so to say, in their track. To make use of a trivial example: the watchmaker has first the idea, then he makes the watch according to the idea. A watch is made after the maker's ideas which preceded the watch; afterwards everyone can study and observe for himself from what ideas the watch was made, he can follow up the thoughts of the watchmaker. At the present point of evolution it is indeed only this kind of connection that man can have with primeval world-wisdom and with the spiritual beings that stand above him. Spiritual beings had first those imaginations, inspirations, intuitions, those ideas and thoughts according to which the world, as we see it, was formed. Man finds these thoughts and ideas in the world again; when he rises to clairvoyant vision, he finds the imaginations, inspirations, and intuitions, by the help of which he can penetrate into the world of those spiritual beings. We can, therefore, say that before our world came into being there already existed the wisdom of which we are going to speak: it is the Plan of the World.

[ 3 ] How far must we go back, while still remaining within the limits of reality, if we want to come into touch with that primeval world-wisdom? Must we go back to some time or other in the historical past, when some great teacher was teaching? We can certainly learn a great deal if we do; but to come into touch with true primeval world-wisdom we must go back to the time when there was no outwardly visible earth, when no world visible to the outer senses was as yet in existence. It was from out [of] that wisdom itself that the world came forth. But this wisdom, out of which spiritual beings formed our world, was imparted to man later. Man with his thoughts could see behind those thoughts, could realise the thoughts according to which spiritual beings have built the world. After this primeval wisdom, this wisdom of the creators of the world had worked through many forms, it appeared in a form known to many of you: after the great Atlantean period it appeared in those ancient, holy Rishis, the great teachers of India, during our first epoch of civilisation. [ 4 ] With these sublime Rishis the primeval wisdom expressed itself in a form which the man of the present day can but little understand. The human capacities of feeling and thinking have greatly changed since the times when the great teachers of India taught man in the first epoch of civilisation after Atlantis; and if the words which came from the Rishis were simply repeated as they were said, there would be hardly one soul in the whole earth who could hear anything more in them nowadays than just words and again words. One has need of other capabilities of feeling than those at present existing, in order to understand the wisdom which was given to humanity in the first epoch after Atlantis. For all that is found in the best books regarding primeval world-wisdom, is but a faint echo of what this really is which in many ways is but a deceptive, obscured wisdom. However grand and sublime the Vedas appear to us, however beautiful the songs of Zarathustra sound, and however magnificent the language in which the ancient wisdom of Egypt speaks, so that we can never sufficiently admire it; still, all that has been written down gives us but a dim, dull reflection of the wisdom of Hermes, of the grand teaching of Zarathustra, or of the sublime knowledge which the Ancient Rishis proclaimed. This sublime wisdom has been preserved and guarded for humanity; it was always to be found in certain very limited circles of people who watched over what is called the knowledge of the Mysteries. In the Mysteries of India, Persia, Chaldea, Egypt, and in the Christian Mysteries, all the primeval wisdom of humanity has been safely preserved up to our times. Up to a short time ago it was only in those narrow circles, that not book-wisdom, but living wisdom, could be found. For certain reasons which will be made clear in this course of lectures, our time has been chosen for extending to larger masses of people that which has been kept alive by those little groups. The original wisdom of the Rishis, for instance, has never lost life. It permeated, like the fountain of youth, the age which we regard as the beginning of our era. The very holy wisdom which the Rishis gave to man was continued through Zarathustra and his pupils, through the Chaldean and Egyptian teachers. It also flowed in the words of Moses, and it came forth again with. an altogether new impulse, as from the fountain of life, with the appearance of the Christ upon earth. It then became so deep, so intrinsically internal, that it could only gradually flow again into humanity. Thus we see that since the outward declaration of Christianity, the primeval world wisdom has penetrated but slowly and gradually into humanity from most elementary beginnings. [ 5 ] Its messages are there, they are to be found in the Gospels and in other Christian writings which include the wisdom of the holy Rishis, in a new form; like a new birth out of a new fountain. But how could these messages be understood at the beginning of the era for whose purification Christianity had been created? Through the Gospels it was least of all understood; they only attained very gradually to further comprehension and in many ways to a still further obscuration, and to-day the Gospels are, in truth, the most sealed of all books for the larger part of humanity — books which will only be first understood by a future age which will have refreshed itself at the source of the original world-wisdom. But the treasures hidden in the Christian revelation have been preserved, treasures no other than those of the Eastern wisdom, but renewed by means of fresh forces They have been guarded in narrow circles which were the continuation of Mystery Societies, like the Brotherhood of the Holy Grail, and finally in the Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross. These treasures of truth have been kept well hidden and have been accessible only to those who through severe trials had prepared themselves for the living wisdom. Thus the treasures of the Eastern and Western wisdom, through all the centuries of evolution from the beginning of our era, were made almost inaccessible to the larger mass of humanity.

[ 1 ] Only a little trickled through here and there to the outer world: the most part remained a secret of the new Mysteries. [ 6 ] Then came a time when some of the contents of primeval wisdom, treasured in narrow circles, was allowed to be given out to larger masses of humanity in a language comprehensible to them. Since the last third of the nineteenth century or thereabouts one can speak of this world wisdom in a more or less unveiled form. It is only because certain things have taken place in the spiritual worlds that the Guardians of the Mysteries received permission to allow some of the ancient wisdom to penetrate to the outer world. All of you, my dear friends, know the course of development of the Anthroposophical Society. You know how the ice in which its development was bound was, so to say, broken by those words of wisdom, revealed in a way which I am not going to enter into now — the stanzas of Dzyan. Those stanzas of Dzyan, of the secret teaching, contain in truth some of the deepest and most important wisdom; they have in them much of that which coming from the teaching of the holy Rishis has flowed through the sanctuaries of the East. They contain also much of what has streamed into Western Europe since the Christian rejuvenation. For the stanzas of Dzyan do not include only the wisdom which had to be kept exclusively for the East, but also a great deal of that which streamed as a clear light through the centuries of our time, through the Middle Ages into the Mystery Schools of the West. Much that is to be found in the stanzas of Dzyan will only be gradually understood in all its depth. It may well be said here that the wisdom of the stanzas of Dzyan is of such a kind that it cannot yet be understood in the widest anthroposophical circles, or fathomed with the exoteric capabilities of the present day.

[ 7 ] After the first ice had been broken in this way, the time came when one could speak more openly from the sources of Western occultism, which is no other than the occultism of the East transplanted and continued in a way that has adapted itself to new circumstances and conditions of physical and spiritual life.

The time has come when one can speak from those ever living sources of occultism which have been faithfully treasured in the Mysteries of the Rosy Cross. There is no wisdom of the East which has not streamed into Western occultism and into the teaching and investigations of the Rosy Cross; in them is to be found absolutely all that the great teachers of the East ever had in their keeping. Nothing, nothing whatever of that which is to be found in the Eastern wisdom is lacking in the wisdom of the West. The only difference — if it can be called a difference — is that Western occultism has to include the whole of the Eastern wisdom and teaching and, without losing anything, to blend it with the light which has been kindled in humanity through the Christ Impulse. When one speaks of Western occultism, of that which has its derivation from the hidden Western Rishis (whom certainly no eye hath seen) it is impossible to say that in it is wanting one single iota, one single shred of the Eastern wisdom. Only it had all to be brought forth again fresh and new from the fountain-head of the Christ Impulse. All the great treasures of wisdom which were first revealed by the holy Rishis regarding superhuman worlds and super-sensible existence, resound in the description we have to give of the spiritual hierarchies and their reflection in the physical world. Just as the geometry of Euclid has not become something different from what it used to be, because one teaches and learns it with new human capabilities, just as little has the wisdom of the holy Rishis changed because we learn and teach it with the new capabilities which have been kindled in us by the Christ Impulse. Therefore much of what we have to say about the spiritual worlds can be called Eastern wisdom. There must not be any misunderstanding in these things — and misunderstandings happen so easily. [ 8 ] Those who will not free themselves of a misconception, in order to come to understanding, can very easily misinterpret what, for instance, was said yesterday at the Easter lecture. They might assert about the so-called truths of Buddha, that I had said that the Buddha had taught and revealed the truths about life and life's pain as follows: ‘birth is pain, illness is pain, old age is pain, death is pain; to be separated from those one loves is pain, not to be united with what one loves is pain, not to have what one desires is pain’ and that I said: ‘Let us look at those who, in the times after Christ, really understood the Christ Impulse; for all the holy truths of the Buddha about the pain of life have no more their full importance; something has been created by the Christ Impulse that is like a cure for the pain of life.’ The Buddha taught: ‘Birth is pain’; but those who understood the Christ would answer that through birth we enter into a life shared with the Christ, and through the Christ's share in it the pain of life will be extinguished. Illness will also be extinguished through the healing power of the Christ Impulse, and there is no more pain in illness for one who understands Christ, and death also has no more pain for him who understands Christ. Yet someone might reply to this ‘Yes, but I could point to the Gospels to show that also there you will find it said that illness is pain, life is pain’: and one might superficially come to the conclusion: ‘We have those modern religious documents, but what they contain can also be found in Buddhism, therefore religions are not making progress, there is no evolution in them. All religions say the same things, but you have spoken of a progress, you expounded to us how, with the help of Christianity, the old truths of Buddhism would not be true any more.’ If anyone were to say this he would be guilty of a very serious misunderstanding. For that was not said: everything indeed was said with the exception of the last sentence. It is very important that this very subtle question should be rightly understood. A fanatic can never understand with precision, but a man who is objective can. [ 9 ] No one who speaks with knowledge of Rosicrucian wisdom will ever expound anything that would be against any of the writings of the great Buddha, or say that anything in them is untrue. Every man who speaks from the sources of Rosicrucian wisdom shares the conviction of Buddha, no one denies it. ‘Yes,’ such a man says, ‘what thou, great Buddha, through thy inner illumination, hast seen of the great truths about pain and life is exactly true, it is true to its last iota.’ Nothing, absolutely nothing will be taken away from it. All of it remains as it was. And it is just because all of it remains as it was, because all is true of what the Buddha said about the pain of life, of illness, of old age and of death, just because of this, the Christ Impulse is such a powerful and important saving help to us, for it is just this which lifts the pain, because it is true that pain would be there, if the world could not be lifted beyond and above it through that great Impulse. Why could the Christ work effectively? Because the Buddha had spoken the truth. Humanity had to be brought down out of the spiritual heights where the primeval world wisdom is active in its purest form; man had to be led to independence, through physical existence with which life's pain and illness are bound up, and the great healing help had to oppose those unavoidable facts in the course of further evolution. Does that man deny the reality of facts who, while declaring that these realities exist, holds at the same time that remedy has been given us by which the facts, about which those truths have been said, can be brought to a salutary development; does he who says this deny any existing reality? Oh! in those heights of existence where we must look for the spheres of the spiritual hierarchies — there Buddhism is not opposed to Christianity, nor Christianity to Buddhism; there the Buddha gives his hand to the Christ, and the Christ to the Buddha. But every misconception regarding human evolution, every misconception as to its ascending development, is a misconception also of that spiritual act in our earthly evolution which is the Act of Christ.

Thus nothing is denied. of the wisdom of the East, the wisdom which has brought down to us the teaching of the holy Rishis, and with it the primeval world-wisdom, which through such long epochs of time has ever been streaming into humanity. But, all through those very long epochs, large masses of humanity could not penetrate to the sources of that wisdom, could only understand it with great difficulty; it was precisely the understanding of it which came with such difficulty. [ 10 ] In ancient Atlantean times, before the great catastrophe, when the masses of humanity were still clairvoyant with the thin ancient clairvoyance, they beheld something quite different when they looked upwards to the spaces of heaven, to the spiritual hierarchies, from what they saw in the times after Atlantis when the larger part of humanity had lost its clairvoyance and so could gaze only with its physical eyes into the physical distances of the heavens. Therefore, in the times before the Atlantean catastrophe, it would have been quite senseless to speak to them of the heavenly bodies spread out in space as they are to-day. The clairvoyant human eye gazed into heavenly distance and saw the spiritual worlds. In those times there would have been no sense in speaking of Mercury or of Neptune or of Saturn, etc., as our astronomy speaks. The way astronomy speaks of the spaces of the world and what they contain is merely a reflection of what is seen by our own physical sight when it looks into depths of the sky. This did not exist for the ancient clairvoyant humanity of Atlantis; when they looked upwards, they did not see physically-limited stars, what the physical eye sees to-day is but the outer physical expression of the spiritual realities which people then beheld. When looking to-day with one's physical eye through a telescope at the place where Jupiter is, one perceives a physical globe surrounded by moons. What was seen by the man of Atlantis when he lifted his clairvoyant gaze to that same point which we look at to-day with our physical eyes? The Atlantean's eyes would have seen as little of what our sight sees to-day, as we should if we looked at a light through a thick autumn fog. The eye of the Atlantean would not have seen the physical star Jupiter, but he would have seen that which is also united with Jupiter to-day, which the man of the present day does not see: the aura of Jupiter, a totality of spiritual beings, of which the physical Jupiter is only the external expression. Thus did the gaze of man, before the Atlantean catastrophe, sweep round the spaces of the world seeing everywhere its spiritual content. He could speak only of the spiritual, for it would have had no meaning to speak of physical stars, when the physical eye was not yet opened as it is to-day. Looking into the spaces of the universe man saw spiritual beings — the spiritual hierarchies. He actually saw beings. [ 11 ] We can compare the changes that took place with further evolution in this way: let us suppose that we are going out into a thick fog; we do not see separate lights, everything is surrounded by aura or fog. The fog lifts and disperses, the separate lights are visible, but their aura becomes invisible ... This is only a physical process which must serve for an example. But the ancient eye saw the aura of Jupiter, it saw spiritual beings in that aura which at certain points of their evolution were united to Jupiter. Humanity then developed further, to the attainment of physical sight. The aura remained: men could no longer see it, but the physical body in the centre became ever clearer and clearer, spiritually it was lost to sight as its corporeal part became visible. But the knowledge of the spiritual, the knowledge of the beings surrounding the star was kept and guarded in the holy Mysteries.

All the holy Rishis speak of that knowledge. In the times when men already saw only in a physical way, the Rishis spoke to them of the spiritual atmospheres, of the spiritual inhabitants of those spheres which are spread out in the spaces of the world.

[ 12 ] Consider what the situation then was. In the centres of knowledge, spiritual beings were spoken of which surround the spheres of the universe. Outside where the physical eye was growing always sharper, physical matter was spoken of more and more. When the Ancient Rishis said the word Mercury (they did not use that word, but we take it as an example), did they mean by it the physical orb of that name? No! — even the ancient Greeks did not use it in that sense; what they meant was the totality of spiritual beings belonging to that planet. Spiritual world and spiritual beings were spoken of when, in the centres of secret knowledge for instance, the word Mercury was pronounced. When the disciples of that sacred knowledge spoke of the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn pronouncing these words in their different languages, they expressed the gradations of spiritual beings. When those names are used to-day, only the coarsest part is meant of that which was originally understood by Moon, Mercury, Venus. The principal part is just what is omitted to-day; the ancient teacher of wisdom said the word Moon and with that word he evoked the idea of a great spiritual world. When he, pronouncing the word ‘Moon’, pointed to the place in heaven where the moon was, he felt in his consciousness that it was the lowest stage of the spiritual hierarchies, but the man to whom he was showing it, who was getting ever further from that spiritual sight because humanity was growing more and more physical, saw only the physical moon, and called it ‘Moon.’

One single word for two things which, though they certainly belong to each other, call forth quite different ideas in man. It was the same when the sages of the sacred knowledge pointed to Mercury, Sun, or Mars. [ 13 ] Thus we see that the two currents grew always further apart in humanity, the spiritual one describing something quite different from the material current. In the sacred Mysteries these words — which later became the mere names of physical planets — were always understood as descriptions of spiritual worlds and gradations of spiritual realms. The outer world always understood it materially up to the time of modern Mythology — I use the word purposely — which is called Astronomy. And as Anthroposophy has recognised the full worth of all the other Mythologies, it has also, as you will understand, given full value to that Mythology which is called modern Astronomy, which sees only space and in it, the physical world-spheres as physical orbs. But to him who knows, modern Mythology is only a special phase of all Mythologies. What the ancient inhabitants of Europe said in their myths about gods and stars, what the Romans gave in their Mythologies, and what appeared as the obscured Mythology of the Middle Ages, lead up in a straight line to the wonderful and admirable discoveries of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo. A future will come when modern Mythology will be spoken of somewhat in this way: ‘There was a time when people found it right to place a material sun as the middle point of an ellipse and let the planets rotate within it, and spin round themselves on their own axes in different ways; they arranged a world system in that way, as people of earlier times also did. To-day’ — so will that future age think — ‘all that is only legend and fairy tale.’ Yes, that future age will come, although the man of the present who laughs at former Mythologies thinks it impossible that one could ever speak of Copernican Mythology. But this consideration will make clear to us how through the same words something ever more different may be meant. In spite of this the true primeval wisdom has always been cultivated and has always continued; it has however always been less understood exoterically and its spiritual side less seen, the more it has been materially explained.

In the beginning of our era, when there was a rejuvenescence of primeval wisdom, (in order that humanity should not lose all touch with that ancient wisdom), it was said. in sharp, clear words, that when man looks at the outer space of the world and his physical eye sees only what is physical, the space is filled with spirit. It was the most intimate pupil of St. Paul, Dionysius the Areopagite, who said in clear-cut words: ‘There is not only matter out there in space; there is, for the soul which rises consciously into the spaces of universal existence, the spiritual part which stands above man in the evolution of existence.’ And he used words which sounded different from the old ones, for if he had used the old words everybody would have understood them in the material sense. The Rishis spoke of the spiritual hierarchies, they expressed in their language what the Greek and Roman wisdom still described when speaking of the ascending scale of worlds: of the Moon, of Mercury, Mars and Venus, Jupiter and Saturn. Dionysius, the pupil of the Apostle Paul had the same worlds in his mind as the Rishis, he repeated in clear cut words that here one had to do with spiritual realms, and he used words which he could be certain would be understood in their spiritual sense: he spoke of Angels, Archangels, Archai, Powers, Mights, Dominions, Thrones, Cherubim, and Seraphim. For now humanity had completely forgot what it once knew. Had it still been able to understand the connection between what Dionysius and the Rishis had seen, it would have grasped, while hearing on the one side of the Moon, and on the other side of the Mysteries of the Angels, that these were one and the same thing. It would have heard the word Mercury on the one hand and Archangel on the other, and would have known they were the same. The word ‘Archai’ spoken by the one, and ‘Venus’ by the other, were the same. And men. would have understood that with the words ‘Sun’ and ‘Powers’ the same worlds were meant. With the name ‘Mars’ they would have felt that they had to rise to the Mights (Dynamis). When they heard Jupiter mentioned, they would have known that it was the same as when in the school of Dionysius, Dominions were described. Saturn corresponds to ‘Thrones’; [ 14 ] but in wider circles this was not known any more, it could not be known. Thus there was on the one side a science of matter, which became ever more material, and the old names which once signified spiritual forces, were now used in a material sense. And on the other side, there was a spiritual life which spoke of Angels and Archangels, etc. which had lost its connection with the physical designations of these spiritual beings.

Thus we see how the primeval wisdom enters through Dionysius into the school which Paul had inaugurated, and how this new inauguration had to be penetrated by the ancient spirit. It is the task of modern Spiritual Science, or anthroposophy to form once more the bond which must unite the physical to the spiritual, the bond between the earth and the spiritual hierarchies. It is impossible for those who do not know where their ideas about the outer world of the senses come from, to realise the other, the spiritual side of knowledge. [ 15 ] This will be particularly noticeable when we have to deal with those writings which, although they are but a faint echo of the primeval cosmic wisdom, can still be understood in the light of that wisdom.

Let me show you an example of the difficulty there is in understanding writings which come down to us from that primeval wisdom. It is an example out of the Song Celestial, the Bhagavad Gita, where a sentence throws a very significant light on the connection between human life and the hierarchies. It is the following: (8th Chap. beginning with 23rd verse) ‘I will explain unto thee, oh man seeking for truth’ (it is thus generally translated) ‘under what circumstances those who know the Eternal leave the earth through the gate of death, to be later reborn or not. I will tell thee: Behold the fire, behold the day, behold the time of the waning moon, behold the half year when the sun is high — those who die at that time, who die in fire, in the day, in the time of the waxing moon, those enter through the gates of death into Brahma, but those who die in the sign of the smoke, in the night, when the moon is waning, in the half year when the sun stands low, these when they leave the world and pass through the gates of death enter only into the light of the moon, and return again to the world.’ [ 16 ] Here you have, my dear anthroposophical friends, a sentence from the Bhagavad Gita, in which it says that the condition of man's progress and of his reincarnation depends on whether he dies in the sign of the light, by day, with the waxing moon, during the half year when the sun stands high, or whether he dies in the sign of the smoke, by night, when the moon wanes and when the sun is low. It is said that this refers to the material sun. Of those who die in the sign of the fire by day, with the moon waxing, and during that half of the year when the sun is high, it is said that they do not need to return. Those who die in the sign of the smoke, by night, with the moon waning, and when the sun is low, must return into the world. This sentence out of the divine song of the East presents the greatest difficulty to all those who want to explain it within the limits of exoteric life. It can be explained only when it is illuminated by the light of spiritual knowledge, by the light in which it was received and written, the light which streams out of the Mystery schools, which can be increased. which has known its rejuvenescence through Christianity and which shows us how to find the link which binds the names Moon to Angels, Mercury to Archangels, Venus to the Archai and so on. With its help we shall find the key to such sentences as the one we gave as an example. Our course of studies will start from the explanation of this sentence in the Bhagavad Gita, a thing which is impossible in exoteric life; and after we have found the key to it, we shall pass on to further explanations of the spiritual hierarchies.

[ 1 ] The teaching which came from the holy Rishis, during the first post-Atlantean period of civilisation was a knowledge that sprang from purely spiritual sources of existence. What is so important in that teaching and in the investigations of those times is that it entered so deeply into the processes of nature and realised so well the activity of the spirit in those processes. In reality we are always surrounded by spiritual activities and by spiritual entities. When during the time of that ancient holy teaching, mention was made of the phenomena of the world surrounding us, one was always referred to as being the most significant, the most important of all these, this was considered (by that ancient spiritual science) to be the phenomenon of fire. In all explanations of what exists and happens upon the earth, the central point of importance was always given to the spiritual investigation of fire. If we want to understand what we may call the Eastern teaching about fire, which was of such far-reaching importance in those ancient times for the acquisition of the knowledge and understanding of all life, then we must look around us at the other phenomena and occurrences of nature and see how these were considered by that very ancient teaching, which can still be useful nowadays for the purposes of spiritual science. [ 2 ] All that surrounds man in the world was then referred back to the so-called four elements. These four elements are respected no longer by the materialistic science of to-day. You all know that these four elements are called Earth, Water, Air, Fire. But where spiritual science flourished the word ‘earth’ had not the same meaning as it has nowadays. It stood for a certain state in the material realm: the state or condition of solidity. All that is solid was called ‘earthy’ by the spiritual science of those times. So whether we take the solid earth of a field, or a piece of crystal, or lead, or gold, anything that is solid was then called earth. Everything liquid, not only the water of to-day, was characterised as watery, or as water. If for instance you take iron, pass it through heat to the point of melting so that it can flow, then that liquid iron would have been called water by spiritual science. All metals when liquid were described as water. Everything that has the character of air for us to day, no matter whether it was the condition we call gas, or oxygen, or hydrogen, or other gases, was called air. [ 3 ] Fire was considered the fourth element. Those of you who remember elementary physics will know that modern science does not see in fire anything that could be compared with either earth, water or air: the physical science of to day sees in it only a certain condition of movement. Spiritual science sees in warmth or fire something which has in it a still finer substance than air. Just as earth or solidity changes into liquid, So does all air-substance change gradually into the condition of fire — according to spiritual science — and fire is so fine an element that it interpenetrates all other elements. Fire interpenetrates the air and makes it warm, the same with water and earth. The other three elements are, so to speak, separated from each other, but we see the element of fire interpenetrating them all.

[ 4 ] Both ancient and modern spiritual science agree that there is yet another still more remarkable difference between what we call Earth, Water, Air, and what we call Fire or Warmth. How do we come to the cognisance of earth or solidity? Through touching it. We realise the solid through touching it and feeling its resistance. It is the same with watery substance. This gives way, it is not so resistant, still we realize it as something external that offers resistance. And it is the same with the element of air. We recognise it also as something external. With warmth it is different. Here we find something which modern science does not consider important, but which must become important for us if we want to study the real problems of existence.

We can realise warmth without coming in contact with it externally. What is essential is that we can realise warmth by touching a body which has a certain degree of warmth: we can perceive it externally in the same way as we realise the three other elements, but we also feel it in our inward conditions. Therefore ancient science says (and did so already at the time of the old Indians), that earth, water, air, can be realised only in the outer world, but warmth is the first element which can also be felt within oneself. Thus, fire or warmth has, so to speak, two sides to it. An outer, which it shows when we take cognisance of it in the outer world and an inner when we feel that we ourselves are in a certain state of warmth. Man feels his own condition of warmth; he is hot, or he freezes; but consciously he is not much concerned with the gaseous or liquid or solid substances — the air, water, or earth — which are in him. He begins to ‘feel’ himself in the element of warmth. The element of warmth has an inner and an outward side. Therefore both ancient and modern spiritual science agree that warmth or fire is that wherein matter begins to become soul. And so in the true sense of the word — we may speak of an outer fire which we realise in the other elements, and of an inner psychic fire within our soul.

[ 5 ] In this way, spiritual science always considered fire as the link between the outer material world on the one side, and the realm of the soul on the other, which can be known by man within his inner being. Fire or warmth was placed in the centre of all observations of nature, because fire is, so to speak, the portal through which we may pass from the outer into the inner. In all truth, fire is like a door in front of which one stands. One sees it from outside, one opens it and can observe it from within. Such is fire amongst the objects of nature. One touches some object and becomes acquainted with fire, which streams towards us from outside like the three other elements: one realises one's own inner warmth and feels it as something belonging to oneself; one stands inside the portal, one has entered into the realm of the soul. Thus was the science of fire described. In fire was seen the interplay of soul and matter. We have now placed before our souls an elementary lesson of primeval human wisdom.

[ 6 ] The ancient teachers may have spoken thus: ‘Look at that burning object. See how the fire destroys it. Thou seest two things in that burning object.’ In those ancient times one was called smoke, and it may still be so called nowadays, and the other was called light, and the spiritual scientist saw the fire in the middle between light and smoke. The teacher said: ‘Out of the flame are born simultaneously light on the one side, smoke on the other.’ [ 7 ] Now we must for once put very clearly before us a very simple but very far-reaching fact, which has to do with the light, which is born of fire. It is most probable that many people when asked whether they see the light would answer: ‘Yes, of course.’ And yet this answer is as false as possible; for, in truth, no physical eye can see light. Through light one sees objects which are solid, liquid, or gaseous, but the light itself one does not see. Imagine the whole of universal space illuminated by a light the source of which was somewhere behind you, where you could not see it and you were to look into the world spaces illuminated through and through by that light. Would you see the light? You would see absolutely nothing. You would first see something when some object was placed within that illuminated space. One does not see the light, one sees the solid, the watery, the gaseous, by means of the light. One does not see physical light with the physical eye. This is something which comes before the spiritual eye with particular clearness. Spiritual science says therefore: light makes everything visible, but is itself invisible. This sentence is important: light is imperceptible. It cannot be perceived by the outer senses: one call perceive what is solid, liquid, or gaseous, finally one can perceive warmth or fire outwardly. This one can also begin to feel inwardly, but light itself one can no longer perceive outwardly. If you believe that when you see the sun you see light you are mistaken: you see a flaming body, a burning substance out of which the light streams. It could be proved to you that you have there gaseous, liquid, and earthy substances. You do not see light, you see that which is burning. [ 8 ] But spiritual science says we pass in ascending order from earth to water, from air to fire, and then to light, we pass thus from the outwardly recognisable world, from the visible world into the invisible, into the etheric-spiritual world. Fire stands on the border between the outwardly visible, material world, and that which is etheric and spiritual, which is no more outwardly visible or recognisable. What happens to a body that is destroyed through fire? What happens when something burns? When something burns, we see on one side light appear, which is outwardly imperceptible and which is operative in the spiritual world. Something that is not merely outer material gives forth the warmth and when it is strong enough to become a source of light it yields something invisible, something which cannot be recognised any more through the outer senses, but it must pay for this in smoke. From what was formerly translucent and transparent it has to bring forth something not transparent — something of the nature of smoke. Thus you see how warmth or fire becomes differentiated, how it divides. On one side it divides itself into light, with which it opens a way into the super-sensible world, and in payment for that which it sends up as light into the super-sensible world, it must send something down into the material world, into the world of non-transparent, visible things. Nothing one-sided comes forth in the world. Everything that exists has two sides to it. When light is produced through warmth, then turbid, dark matter appears on the other side. That is the teaching of primeval spiritual science.

[ 9 ] But the process we have just described is only the outer side, the physical, material process. At the foundation of this physically material process there lies something essentially different. When you have only warmth in some object which as yet does not shine, then this warmth which you perceive is itself the outer physical part but within it is something spiritual. When this warmth grows so strong that it begins to shine and smoke is formed, then some of the spirit which was in the warmth must go into the smoke. That spiritual part which was in the warmth and has passed into the smoke, which being gaseous and belonging to air is a lower element than warmth, that spiritual part is transmuted, bewitched, as it were, into smoke. Thus with everything which like a turbid extract or a materialisation is deposited by the warmth, there is also associated what might be called the bewitching of some spiritual being. We can explain it still more simply. Let us imagine that we reduce air to a watery condition. Air itself is nothing but solidified warmth, densified warmth in which smoke has been formed. The spiritual part which really wanted to be in the fire has been bewitched into smoke. Spiritual beings, which are also called elementals, are bewitched in all air, and will even be bewitched, banished, so to speak, to a lower existence, when air is changed into water. Hence spiritual science sees in everything that is outwardly perceptible something that has proceeded from an original condition of fire or warmth and which has turned into air, smoke, or gas, when the warmth began to condense into gas, gas into liquid, liquid into solid. ‘Look backwards,’ says the spiritual scientist, look at any solid substance. That solidity was once liquid, it is only in the course of evolution that it has become solid and the liquid was once upon a time gaseous and the gaseous formed itself as smoke, out of the fire. But a transmutation, a bewitching of spiritual being is always connected with these processes of condensation and with the formation of gases and solids.

[ 10 ] Let us now look around at our world: we see solid rocks, flowing streams of water, we see the water changing into rising mist: we see the air, we see all the solid, liquid, gaseous things and we see fire, so that at the foundation of all things we have nothing but fire. All is fire — solidified fire: gold, silver, copper, are solidified fire. All things were once upon a time fire; everything has been born out of fire. But in all that solidified realm, some bewitched spirits are dwelling.

[ 11 ] How are those spiritual, divine beings who surround us able to produce solid matter as it is on our planet — to produce liquids, and air substances? They send down their elemental spirits, those which live in the fire: they imprison them in air, in water and in earth. These are the emissaries, the elemental emissaries of the spiritual, creative, building beings. The elemental spirits first enter into fire. In fire they still feel comfortable — if we care to express it by images — and then they are condemned to a life of bewitchment. We can say looking around us: ‘These beings, whom we have to thank for all the things that surround us, had to come down out of the fire-element; they are bewitched in those things.’

[ 12 ] Can we as men do anything to help those elemental spirits? This is the great question which was put by the Holy Rishis. Can we do anything to release, to redeem, all that is here, bewitched? Yes! We can help them. Because what we men do here in the physical world is nothing else than an outward expression of spiritual processes. All we do is also of importance for the spiritual world. Let us consider the following. A man stands in front of a crystal, or a lump of gold, or anything of that kind. He looks at it. What happens when a man simply gazes, simply stares with his physical eye upon some outer object? A continual interplay occurs between the man and the bewitched elemental spirits. The man and that which is bewitched in the substance have something to do with each other. Let us suppose that the man only stares at the object and takes in only what is impressed on his physical eye. Something is always passing from the elemental being into the man. Something from those bewitched elementals passes continually into the man, from morning till night. While you are thus regarding objects, hosts of these elemental beings, who were and are being continually bewitched through the world-processes of condensation, are continually entering from your surroundings into you. Let us take it that the man staring at the objects has no inclination whatever to think about those objects, no inclination to let the spirit of things live in his soul. He lives comfortably, merely passes through the world, but he does not work on it spiritually, with his ideas or feelings or in any such way. He remains simply a spectator of the material things he meets with in the world. Then these elemental spirits pass into him and remain there, having gained nothing from the world's process, but the fact of having passed from the outer world into man. Let us take another kind of man, one who works spiritually on the impressions he receives from the outer world, who with his understanding and ideas forms conceptions regarding the spiritual foundations of the world, one who does not simply stare at a metal, but ponders over its nature and feels the beauty which inspires and spiritualises his impressions. What does such a man do? Through his own spiritual process, he releases the elemental being which has streamed into him from the outer world; he raises it to what it was before, he frees the elemental from its state of enchantment. Thus, through our own spiritual life, we can, without changing them, either imprison within us those spirits which are bewitched in air, water and earth, or else through our own increasing spirituality, free them and lead them back to their own element. During the whole of his earthly life, man lets those elemental spirits stream into him from the outer world. In the same measure in which he only stares at things, in the same measure in which he simply lets the spirit dwell in him without transforming them, so, in like measure as he tries with his ideas, conceptions and feeling for beauty to work out spiritually what he sees in the outer world, does he release and redeem those spiritual elemental beings.

[ 13 ] Now what happens to those elemental beings which, having come out of things, enter into man? They remain at first within him. Also those which are released at first remain, but they stay only until his death. When the man passes through death a differentiation takes place between those elemental beings which have simply passed into him and which he had not led back to their higher element, and those whom he has through his own spiritualisation led back to their former condition. Those whom the man has not changed have not gained anything from their passage from the outer world into him, but others have gained the possibility of returning to their own original world with the man's death. During his life man is a place of transition for these elemental beings. When he has passed through the spiritual world and returns to earth in his next incarnation, all the elemental beings which he has not released during his former life flock into him again when he passes through the portals of his new birth, they return with him into the physical world; but those he has released he does not bring back with him for they have returned into their original element.

[ 14 ] Thus we see how man has it in his power, by the way he acts and feels towards outer nature, either to release those elemental spirits which have been necessarily bewitched through the coming into existence of our earth, or to bind them to the earth still more strongly than they were before. What does a man do when, in looking at some outer object he releases from it an elemental being by elucidating it? He spiritually does the opposite of what has been done before. Previously, smoke had been brought forth out of fire, but man spiritually forms fire again out of that smoke; only after death does he release this fire. Now think for a moment of the endless depth and spirituality of the ancient ceremonies of sacrifice, as seen in the light of primeval spiritual science! Imagine to yourselves the Priest at the sacrificial altar in those times when religion was built on the real knowledge of spiritual laws; think of the Priest lighting the flame, and the rising of the smoke, and as the smoke rises a real sacrifice is offered, for it is followed upwards by prayers — What happens then? What happens during such a sacrifice? The Priest stands at the altar where the smoke is produced. Where something solid comes out of the warmth, a spirit is being transmuted, bewitched. But because the man follows the whole procedure with prayers, he at the same time receives that spirit into himself in such a way that after death it rises again into the higher world. What did the teacher of ancient wisdom say to those who had to understand this? He said: ‘If thou lookest upon the outer world in such a way that thy spiritual process does not stop at the smoke, but rises to the element of fire, then after thy death thou dost free the spirit which is bewitched in the smoke.’ Yes! The teacher who knew the fate of the spirit, which after being bewitched in the smoke had passed into man, spoke thus: ‘If thou leavest that spirit as it was when it was in the smoke, then it must be reborn with thee and cannot rise into the spiritual world after thy death; but if thou hast released it and restored it to the fire, then after thy death it will rise again into the spiritual worlds and will not need to return to the earth at thy rebirth.’

[ 15 ] Now we have explained one part of that profound sentence from the Bhagavad Gita of which I spoke in my last lecture. It does not speak here at all of the human Ego, it speaks of those nature spirits, of these elemental beings which enter into man from the outer world, and it says there: ‘Behold the fire, behold the smoke, that which man through his spiritual processes turns into fire are spirits which he liberates with his death.’ That which he leaves as it is, in the smoke, must remain united to him at his death and must be reborn with him when he returns to earth. It is the destiny of the elemental spirits that is here described; through the wisdom which man develops, he continually liberates at his death these elemental spirits; through lack of wisdom, through the materialistic attachment to the mere things of the senses, he ties those elemental spirits to himself and forces them to follow him into this world, ever to be born again with him.

[ 16 ] But these elemental beings are not only associated with fire and with what is connected with fire, they are the emissaries of higher spiritual divine beings in all that takes place in the outer sense world. There never could have been that interplay of forces in the world that produce the day and the night, for instance, if numbers of such elemental being had not worked suitably at the rotation of the planet through the universe, so that precisely this interchange of day and night could come about. All that takes place is the result of the activity of hosts of lower and higher spiritual entities belonging to the spiritual hierarchies. We have been speaking of the lowest order, of the messengers. When night becomes day and day night, elemental beings live also in that process, and so it is that man stands in an intimate relationship with the beings of the elemental world which have to take part in working at the day and the night. When man is idle and lets himself go, he affects those elementals who have to do with the day and the night quite differently, than when he has creative force, when he is active, diligent, and productive. When a man is lazy for instance, he unites himself with a certain kind of elemental and he also does so when he is active, but in a particular way. Those elementals of the second class, just named, who are active during the day, are then in their higher element. As fire elementals, those of the first class, are bound in air water and earth, so certain elemental being are also tied to darkness; and day could not turn into night, day could not be divided from night, if these elementals were not so to speak imprisoned in night. That man is able to enjoy daylight, he has to thank divine spiritual beings who have driven forth elemental spirits and have chained them to the night-time. When man is lazy these elementals flow into him continually, but he leaves them as they are, unchanged. Those elemental spirits which at night are chained to darkness, he let through his idleness remain in the same state; those elemental who enter into him when he is active and industrious and filled with working power, he leads back into daylight. Thus he continually releases these elementals of the second class. Throughout the whole of our lifetime we bear within us all those elemental spirits which have entered into us either during our hours of idleness or during those of active work. When we pass through the gates of death those beings whom we have led towards daylight can now return into the spirit world; those we have left chained to the night through our idleness, must return with us in our new incarnation. With this we arrive at the second point in the Bhagavad Gita. Again it is not the human self, but those elemental beings which are indicated with the words: ‘Behold the day and the night. That which thou hast thyself released by turning it from a being of the night into a being of the day through thy diligence; that which comes forth out of the day enters when thou diest, into the higher world; that which thou takest with thee as beings of the night, thou forcest to reincarnate with thee again.’

[ 17 ] And now you will see clearly how the matter proceeds. As it is with the phenomena of which we have just spoken, so it is on a larger scale with our month of 28 days, with the changes of the waxing and waning moon. Whole flocks of elemental beings have to come into activity to direct the motions of the moon so that our lunar periods can come about as they do with all the influences they bring with them upon our visible earth. For this purpose certain of the higher beings had again to be bewitched, doomed, chained. Clairvoyant vision sees how, with the waxing moon, spiritual beings of a lower kingdom ever rise into a higher. But, so that order should exist, other spiritual elemental beings must again be transformed into those of lower realms. There are also those elementals of a third realm who stand in relationship with men. When man is serene and bright, when he is pleased with the world, when he has feelings of gladness towards all things, he continually releases those beings which are chained to the waning moon. These beings enter into him and are continually set free, through his soul's peaceful attitude, through his inner contentment, through his harmonious feelings and ideas towards the whole world. The beings which enter into man when he is sullen, peevish, morose, discontented with anything, when everything depresses him — when he is pessimistic — these spirits remain in the condition of bewitchment they were in at the time of the waning moon. Oh! There are men who through the harmonious condition of their soul, through the bright way they look upon the world, release and set free great numbers of these bewitched elemental beings. The man of harmonious and optimistic feelings and who feels inner satisfaction with the world, is a deliverer of elemental spiritual beings. The pessimist, he who is morose, sullen and discontented, becomes through his depression the gaoler of elemental spirits which could have been released by his cheerfulness. Thus you see that the conditions of mind and soul have not only a personal importance for this man, but also that he works either at the liberation or the imprisonment of spiritual beings; either deliverance or fetters proceed from him. The conditions of soul that a man experiences go out in all directions into the spiritual world. We have here the third point of that important teaching in the Bhagavad Gita: ‘Behold what man does through the feelings and conditions of his soul, how he sets spirits free, as they are set free by the growing moon.’ When the man dies, these released spirits can return to the spiritual world. If through his depression and hypochondriacal moods, he calls to him the elemental spirits which are around him, and then leaves them as they are, as they have to be in order to bring about the orderly courses of the moon, then these spirits remain chained to him and must reincarnate with him into this world.

[ 18 ] And last of all we have a fourth degree of elemental spirits, those who have to work at the annual course of the sun, so that the summer sun may shine upon the earth to awaken and fructify it, so that spring can appear and be succeeded by autumn. In order that this may come to pass certain spirits must be fettered to winter-time, must be bewitched during the time of the winter sun. And man acts upon these spirits in the same way as we have described his acting on the other grades of spirits. Let us take man who at the beginning of winter says to himself: ‘The nights are getting longer, the days shorter, we come to that time of the sun's yearly course when the sun withdraws his fructifying forces from the earth. The outer earth dies, but with this deadening of the earth I feel it my duty to be all the more spiritually awake. I must now take more and more of the spirit within me.’ Let us take a man who acquires a more and more religious mood appropriate to the season as Christmas comes on, who learns to know the significance of Christmas and to know also that when the outer world of the senses is dead the life of the spirit must now grow stronger. This man lives through winter until Easter. He remembers that with the awakening of the outer world is combined the death of the spiritual: he lives through the Easter festival comprehending its meaning. Such a man has not only an outer religion; he has religious understanding of the processes of nature, of the spirit which rules it; and through his piety, his spirituality, he releases numbers of that fourth class of elemental beings which continually stream in and out of him, which are connected with the course of the sun. But the man who is not pious in this sense, who denies or does not understand the spirit and is always muddling through a materialistic chaos, into him these elementals of the fourth class flow, but remain unchanged. At death it happens again: that these elemental spirits of the fourth degree are either set free in their own element, or else are bound to the man and have to return with him at his next incarnation. Thus, the man, who uniting with the winter spirits does not change them into summer spirits, does not redeem them through his spirituality, dooms them to rebirth, whereas they might have been freed and not have had to return with him. [ 19 ] Behold the fire and the smoke! If you so unite with the outer world that the activity of your soul and spirit is like that of fire, from which smoke comes forth, so that you spiritualise things, through knowledge and through right feeling, you help certain spiritual elemental beings to rise; but if you unite with the smoke you condemn them to rebirth. If you associate yourself with the day, you then set free the corresponding spirits of day and so on. Behold the light! Behold the day! Behold the waxing of the moon and the sunny half of the year! If you act so that you lead the elemental spirits back to the light, to the day, to the waxing moon, to the summer-time of the year, you then at your death release these elementary spirits which are so necessary to you. They rise to the spiritual world. If you associate yourself with the smoke, if you only gaze at the solid things of the earth, if through laziness you unite yourself with the night and with the spirits of the waning moon, and if through your depression you unite yourself with those spirits who are chained to the winter sun, then through your lack of spirit, your godlessness, you condemn these elementary beings to be reincarnated with you again!

[ 20 ] Now we know for the first time what this passage in the Bhagavad Gita really means. If anyone thinks that man is here spoken of, he does not understand the Bhagavad Gita; but those who know that all human life is a continual interplay between man and the spirits who live bewitched into our surroundings and who must be released again — those know that these sentences speak of the ascension or of the reincarnation of four groups of elemental beings. The mystery of this lowest kind of hierarchy has been preserved for us in these sentences in the Bhagavad Gita. Yes! When one has to bring forth out of primeval wisdom what is presented to us in the documents of ancient religion, one sees how grand these are and how wrong it is to understand them superficially and not in all their profundity. They are only considered in the right way when one says to oneself: ‘No wisdom is exalted enough to discover the mysteries herein contained.’ Only when these ancient documents are interpenetrated by the magic of real devotional feeling, do they become what in the true sense of the word they must be — self-ennobling and purifying forces for human evolution. They point frequently to fathomless abysses of human wisdom, and only when that which springs from the sources of the occult schools and the mysteries, streams forth from now on to all mankind, only then, will these reflections of the primeval wisdom (for they are but reflections) be seen in all their greatness. [ 21 ] We have had to show, by means of a comparatively difficult example, how in the times of primeval wisdom the co-operation of all those spirits which are everywhere around us was well known, how it was also known that the deeds of men represent an interchanging activity between the spiritual world and the world of man's own inner being. The problem of humanity first becomes important for us, when we know that in all we do, even in our moods, we influence a whole Cosmos, and that this small world of ours is of infinitely far-reaching importance for all that comes to pass in the macrocosm. An increase in our feeling of responsibility is the finest and most important of all the things we gain from spiritual science. It teaches us to grasp the true meaning of life and to realise its importance, so that this life which we cast on the stream of evolution may not enter that stream void of meaning.