The Rudolf Steiner Archive

[Ladies and gentlemen present!

The last time I drew attention to the fact that I wanted to talk about Pythagorean teaching. Pythagoras had founded a school in Lower Italy. It was not so much a school, but rather a discipleship whose spiritual leader was Pythagoras. He formed a doctrine. We can no longer say how much of it belonged to Pythagoras and how much to his disciples.

The world view of the Pythagoreans emerges before us, and this shows itself to be one of the most profound world views we have. Since it is very important for us to really introduce the things we are dealing with, I would like to introduce a modern Pythagorean before I mention Pythagoras himself, a Pythagorean who lived in Germany himself and whose world view always seems to me like a forecourt to Pythagoras.

You can understand this world view much better if you are familiar with the works and views of Baron von Hardenberg - Novalis, a poet of a thoroughly mystical nature. No one who knows his writings will doubt this.

Take his "Apprentices at Sais". This is something that can only be understood in its esoteric meaning. But anyone who knows the personality of Novalis - he was born in 1772 and died in 1801, so he was 29 years old - will understand this. This Novalis seems to have remained the most innocent youth throughout his life. He seems to us more like the revelation of an unearthly individuality than an earthly personality. It is quite impossible to understand that this immersion, this contemplation, could have been acquired in his immense youth.

When we read his "Heinrich von Ofterdingen", we find that he drew from direct sources, from the sources of mysticism. He then incorporated these into his novel "Heinrich von Ofterdingen" and thus showed that he understood the mysticism of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. If we look at his basic ideas, we will find a certain similarity with other mystics.

He searched for the "Blue Flower. People have often mocked this "Blue Flower. We will understand each other better if we remember Goethe's "Prophecies of Bakis", where he speaks of the serpent's thread and the flower, where he says that man can walk the path that is long and narrow. When man then walks this path, he sees knots before him. He also sees the knot in which lives are tied together. Behind him, he trails a snake. The snake disappears and the knot transforms into a flower in front of him.

This image, which Goethe repeatedly refers to, is egoism, the approach to the highest spirituality or deepest knowledge. The symbol for this is the "blue flower. It is also a symbol of that which arises for man as an entanglement of life when he progresses along the path of knowledge. It is this "Blue Flower" that Novalis has in mind for his Heinrich von Ofterdingen.

We also find this flower in Master Klingsohr, who can prophesy. The future lies open before him. Goethe says: The future also lies open before him who really has a complete overview of the past. [...] - Master Klingsohr reveals the future to Heinrich von Ofterdingen. This satisfies him to such an extent that he is able to see the individualized Blue Flower in the daughter, as he has progressed so far that he can see the highest in the female being.

Matilda dies away from Henry of Ofterdingen. He decides to die after his beloved. For him, reality turns into a dream. What he was previously inclined to regard as a dream, the higher spiritual world, is now reality. He no longer finds this highest in the individual being, but he

finds it in other beings as well. He finds a second girl. It is the same for him. He finds Mathilde again in Cyane. She is like a new embodiment of him. He lives a life of the afterlife.

We find the idea of this in his "Apprentices of Sais". A beautiful fairy tale is woven into it about the boy Hyacinth, who loves the girl Rosenblüthe. Only the trees and birds of the forest know of this love. Then we find Hyacinth changed. He is overcome by a longing to seek something deeper. He leaves Rosenblüthe without sufficient reason. Then he comes to the evil old man, who plants in him the longing to seek the mother of all things, or the veiled maiden. He sets off on his journey to the temple of Isis, comes upon an image, and when he unveils it, he finds nothing but roses. [He finds the beloved as the solution to the riddle, as the veiled image of Sais.

This is reminiscent of the higher concept of "Know thyself", as he expressed it in an epigram. He stands before the veiled image at Sais. He lifts the veil and - wonder of wonders - he finds himself. A magical individualism consists in the fact that one can find the infinite in the finite, [that one can turn the spirit into immediate reality].

So in Novalis we undoubtedly find a mystical personality. So if we assume that in Novalis we are dealing with a deep-seated, mystical nature, and if we then get to know him, he does not appear to us as a mystic, as he has just been described, but as a resurgent old Pythagorean disciple.

When we let Novalis pass us by, when he seems more like a memory, and when we then see how this touch of the earthly, how this personality nevertheless stands firmly in life, has tendencies that we would least expect to find in such romantically inclined natures, then we are referred to the Pythagoreans as to fleeting ghosts.

We must by no means equate this view and philosophical contemplation, as we have it of Romanticism in him, with the view of the other Romantics, with contemporaries of his who lack any depth. Friedrich Wilhelm Schlegel or Tieck, [E-T.A.] Hoffmann and so on must not be confused [with him]. But anyone who allows Novalis to have an effect on them will not be tempted to make such a confusion. What is astonishing about Novalis - despite his [poetic] nature - is that he is one of the most enthusiastic admirers of everything mathematical. He has a thoroughly educated, mathematical psyche, an immediate revelation of what he calls the magical in nature. In this he finds the law of the spirit. That which he who wishes to enter the higher regions would like to leave behind, we find in Novalis as the main thing, as that which led him to emphasize the magical in his [idealism]. In the concatenation of basic mathematical concepts he sees the most intriguing revelation of the mystery of the world. He sees free matter at the bottom of things. Mathematics is the foundation on which existence rests, it is therefore nothing other than the highest form, the purest form of spirituality.

If we find this as the basis of his view, then he appears to us as a representative of Pythagoreanism. We can understand Pythagoreanism much better if we imagine it like Novalis. The Pythagorean soul must be imagined in this way, then we arrive at where Novalis stands; [just as] Pythagoras was able to arrive at the view that the basic structure, the basic essence, the basic spirit of the universe is actually given in the connection between numerical quantities and spatial quantities in this harmony.

If we want to gain an insight into a Pythagorean soul from the first elementary beginnings, we must imagine it in the following way. The pupil was led up step by step to the knowledge to which he was to come. He was guided in a very careful way. The first was mathematical knowledge, the second astronomical. Astronomy was preferably mathematical. The regularity resulted from the numerical relationship in the universe. He was first introduced to these numerical relationships. Then he was gradually led on to the knowledge of man himself. The fulfillment of the desire "Know thyself" [came] last. First he was introduced to mathematics.

How can one imagine that man can actually come to the idea that mathematics is the spiritual foundation of the entire universe? How can this be imagined in the form of harmony, formed in space and time? If we immerse ourselves in those areas of space and time which outwardly already show a regular grouping, such as the movement of the celestial bodies, if we immerse ourselves in that, then we have basically given nothing other than an embodied mathematics, an embodied arithmetic, in this construction of the celestial vault that we perform in our minds.

No human being can actually find anything of a mathematical structure, of a spatial structure of geometric figures in the world and in reality, if he has not first formed these mathematical figures in his mind. If someone described a circle or an ellipse, we would not know what it is that he is describing as an object. We would be able to trace the line in the various places in space and connect these places. But we would not be able to connect a concept with the whole line that describes the object if we had not already formed the concept. We can draw a star and then think about what kind of line the star describes. But only then can we find the figure if we already have it in our minds. The same is also the case with other things, even if we take the numerical relationships. We will only recognize the objects outside in space in their certain mutual numerical relationships, in their numerical diversity, if we have formed these relationships in our minds. If we know that 2 x 2 = 4, then we can also recognize it outside in space. We would not be able to connect any concepts with reality, we would not be able to grasp them at all, they would pass us by like nothing, they would not be there for us at all, if we had not formed the images in a purely spiritual way in our psyche.

So it is that the Pythagoreans could say: That which I see outside must also be contained in a certain way in my mind. What emerges from the source point of my soul is the same as what I perceive outside as the primordial ground of the world itself. The Pythagoreans thought about this more deeply and said to themselves: "It is impossible that two things that are completely separate from each other, spirit outside and world inside, [merely] exist side by side [and do not agree]. The coincidence would only have meaning if what is in the spirit is exactly the same as what is outside in space. If the circle, the ellipse that I perceive within me, the numerical relationships, are the same as those outside, which I see in the outer world, then it makes no sense at all if [the Pythagorean] does not have something that he forms within himself. If he sees the spirit of things and has it within him, then it has only one meaning.

Therefore the Pythagorean did not initially think like the philosophers of the nineteenth century under the influence of Kant. He did not ask: How is it that my imagination inside me corresponds to the things outside? My experience is quite different. That is the unquestionable unity of what is outside and what is in my mind. This is how the Pythagorean thinks.

It makes no difference whether I take the ideas of the Pythagoreans' astronomy or apply the new ones. It doesn't matter at all. So when the Pythagorean sees the celestial body describing an orbit in the form of an ellipse, it is a direct experience for the Pythagorean that the ellipse that he perceives within himself and the ellipse that exists outside as the orbit of a star are not two ellipses, but only one. And that is experience.

Schelling also expressed this, and this makes the matter clear in the simplest way. He has taken up the "power of attraction that physicists have always [known]. They imagined that objects exert a force of attraction on each other. The earth attracts the moon, the sun attracts the earth. When the sun attracts the earth, it acts on the earth. It is difficult to attribute an effect to a body where it does not exist. But the fact is that when a body acts on the earth, it is on the earth. A body is where it acts. The boundary of light is not the boundary of the real sun. The sun is in the entire space where it exerts its gravitational pull. The space that the earth fills is also part of solar space.

Imagine this Schellingian idea as [already] underlying the Pythagorean doctrine. The human spirit fills the entire world space. It is not enclosed in a single organism. The spirit is where it perceives.

For the philosophers of the nineteenth century who followed Kant, the question is this: How is it that the mind perceives what is outside it? - The Pythagorean does not say this at all: How is it that the mind perceives that which is apart from it? The Pythagorean says: If the mind perceives an ellipse in the sky, then it is a fact that the mind is not enclosed in the organism, that it is not there where it perceives with the senses, but that it is there where it perceives [mentally]. The limit of the spirit is not the sense, but the spirit is where it perceives. - There is a separation between the numerical relationships in space and what exists in our head as numerical relationships, which does not exist for the Pythagoreans. The Pythagoreans do not recognize the idea that man is initially a sensual, finite being, enclosed with the psyche in a fabric that connects the senses with the outside world. This gives people today the impression that the mind is also enclosed in [a] housing.

When other philosophers take this for reality and ask: "How is it that we perceive external things?", the Pythagoreans take the opposite view. They do not ask: How is it that the mind is enclosed in such an organism? - It is perhaps better that I do not say "individual", but "individual being". This then leads to an understanding of a world view such as the Pythagorean one. It leads to an understanding that can only be grasped if one sees in the mathematical that which constitutes the basic structure in the universe, and which, if one thinks of the whole world as filled with spirit, constitutes the basic structure of the spirit itself.

So we actually have in the basis of the thing that can be perceived with the senses deep down, on a lower level, in the spatial-temporal of the universe, commonalities that can be expressed through spatial sizes and numerical ratios, that which appears to the spirit on a higher level. The spirit has a numerical, geometrical basis. The spirit has its origin where things are regular. The spirit grows out of the mathematically constructed world. Therefore [the Pythagorean] seeks the primordial grounds of existence in the mathematically constructed world.

I have pointed out that there is a difference between the Greek worldview, as represented by Heraclitus, and the Pythagorean one. At the time, I constructed my remarks in such a way that they came back to Goethe's basic view. I said then that Goethe says that the seed and the plant are one and the same being. The material seed contains everything that is still in it in complete concealment. It is the same as the fully developed plant. The plant is not in it, but it has the sense that in a spiritual way the plant is the same in every form as in another form, so that the plant with its foliage and petals, with its whole fruit and with all that is in it, is to be regarded as that which has become material, materially, which is in the seed in an ideal way. Goethe therefore says that the seed is the whole plant, except that the spirit is still concealed behind it. That which is ideal in the seed becomes material reality in the whole plant.

The same image can be applied to the whole world. One can understand the world by observing it in its highest state, by immersing oneself in its blossom and fruit, in the human soul, by studying the "Know thyself" and going to the human being. There, where the purely spiritual-soul then appears directly, i.e. in the deepening, in the direct immersion into the self, one can first look for a world view, a world view. But you can also examine a seed. You can find ways and means to examine the seed. One can assume that what lies in the seed is already indicated and that the world view that is gained from the human being is the highest. The Pythagoreans do not seek man where he is soul, nor where he appears as spirit, but where he is apparently not spirit at all, where he apparently is not at all. The Pythagorean seeks certain reality through indifferent numbers. And that is why he seeks the spirit where he already knows the spirit. That is why he also finds the primal source, the basic structure of existence, in mathematics.

I just wanted to say that this world view of the Pythagoreans can only be understood if one understands the immersion of Novalis, which must be understood mathematically - of Novalis, who was of a thoroughly poetic nature and as such was what literary history calls a "Romantic", yet was rooted in such laws that he could see strict mathematics as the primal source of existence. That is why the Pythagoreans, because their spirit was powerful enough, were able to find spirit in the relationships of numbers. They started from the lowest level of the spiritual. Just as the seed is not yet a plant, but can become a plant, so they ascended from the seemingly unspiritual to the spiritual.

This is what can make us understand the whole world view of the Pythagoreans. The Pythagorean worldview is usually presented as if it were the numerical aspect of the world that led the Pythagoreans to regard number as the origin of things. And one cannot quite imagine what they meant by that. I must confess that if we follow what is written in the textbooks and read that the Pythagoreans regarded number as the origin of all things, it would seem meaningless to me. Only if I imagine how it is in reality, if I assume that they grew up in a completely different theory of knowledge, can I understand what they meant. Their view is simply described by the word: the Pythagorean did not look for the spirit where it appears to be a sensual entity, but where he perceives it as something that fills the whole of space.

That is one side of the Pythagorean world view, that is the reason why they descended to numbers and geometric shapes. On the other hand, the reason is also because they found something in these numbers and geometric figures that they could address as spirit.

What do geometric or mathematical ratios mean? Anyone who can only imagine a circle or an ellipse when they are drawn on the blackboard cannot be said to have any idea of the real geometric or mathematical relationships. If he has to put five peas or beans on the table when he wants to imagine the number <>, we cannot say that he has an idea of the real numbers.

On the contrary, we are aware that what we call a circle, what we call an ellipse, can only be represented approximately in material reality. We know that the material circle we draw is only an approximation of what we can create in our minds. We also know that what the celestial bodies in outer space describe is only an approximation of a circle. However, it is the same law that governs the creation of the world as the law that governs us when we imagine a circle in our minds, when we no longer need to deduce the spiritual from the sensual. That is why mathematics would be the best thing to introduce us to the spiritual. This is also why the Pythagoreans placed the highest value on mathematics. So if you really want to recognize the spirit, you have to be able to disregard everything sensual. You must be able to realize that it is not what you draw on the blackboard with chalk that is a real circle, but what remains for the spirit without the chalk drawing on the blackboard. Using the salt cube, it was possible to show that the cube is something completely different from the [salt] cube. In this way, the pupils could be shown that the spiritual - also of other things - can only be understood if the sensual remains absent. This is easy to show with the salt cube. The spiritual content is not the same as the outer cube.

But if we understand this for the whole sum of world phenomena, if we understand that the spiritual can be detached from the material, then this leads us up to higher levels. Everyone admits that mathematics has nothing to do with the things of the world, but with the spiritual. But if this goes further up, people confuse the spirit with reality

A strange document on the confusion of the spirit with reality has just come out these days. A book has been published entitled "Kritik der Sprache" (Critique of Language) by Fritz Mauthner, which aims to show how all our knowledge floats in the air, how nothing is given to us but the sensory world, and if we disregard the sensory world, we have nothing more in our imaginary world than empty words.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, this is something that someone who is unable to detach the spirit of things at a higher level of reality, as he can do with mathematical entities, can very easily come to. He who has no intuition, who does not really have from the source point of his spirit what he has to hold up to things, who is sterile and barren, who cannot fill his soul with spiritual realities, believes that he has nothing more when he goes beyond [the sense world] than words. Instead of a "critique of knowledge, he writes a "critique of language.

The book comprises two volumes. It seems to me as if someone wanted to write a critique and had not mastered what he wanted to criticize. He confuses what the mind adds to the formations. What Mauthner gives would be - compared to what spiritual content can and should give - a critique of pencil drawing. It shows how much the pencil is capable of depicting circles. Thus sterile views cling to those who are unable to feel the true content. He does not know that the spirit gradually acquires the ability to ascend to the higher realms of existence and is aware of its difference from material things at every stage of spiritual life, just as the mathematician is able to detach the spiritual, the spiritual from things, i.e. to advance from what is not yet spirit to the immediate God in the world.

This was something that the Pythagoreans sought to achieve step by step by trying to lead the student from the lower to the higher. They were convinced that by ascending from the lower to the higher, man was not merely having an experience within himself, but was fulfilling a task in the universe itself. They were convinced that he was doing something in the world, they were so convinced that they only compared the ascent with the numerical relationships themselves. They said to themselves: The individual human being who perceives is apparently a duality. The perceiver and the perceived. These two great opposites stood for the Pythagoreans at the basic level of their table of knowledge.

But they said to themselves: All this is only apparent because man does not stand on the highest level of perfection, but on the lower levels. The perceiving and the perceived must be overcome if they are to become one. Thus the Pythagorean imagines that, just as now in human cognition, unity triumphs over duality, over what is separate in the world, the Pythagorean must imagine everything according to numerical relationships and specifically again in such a way that what is separately a duality presents itself to him as unity.

Now the Pythagorean is convinced that the whole multiplicity of the world, the fact that there are many things in the world, derives only from the fact that man first sees the appearance, not the thing, that he does not see things as they are, but that he sees them as they are not, because of the limitations of his own existence. He sees that this multiplicity, when he overcomes appearance, then presents itself in reality, in truth, as unity. What man ultimately achieves is the primordial unity, the primordial One of the world, and the Pythagorean also sees this as the foundation from which everything springs.

This is what makes it possible for man to perceive something in space. This is the general unity of the world, but man can only gradually ascend to it. What is revealed last is there first, and that is because it is a member of this multiplicity. After it has been placed in a corner for a while, it integrates itself into the world structure and becomes one with the world harmony. The numerical harmony, the geometric regularity of the world view embraces the human being. And so he finds it by integrating himself into the structure of numbers. Therefore, the Pythagorean can say that all good, all virtue consists in man overcoming appearances and finding numerical, geometric regularity, whereby he integrates himself into the great world existence.

Thus man appears to himself like a tone in harmony, and because he appears to himself like a tone in harmony, he has to give himself the right tone and the right proportion. He does not fulfill a task for himself, but fulfills a moral task. If he does not fulfill it, then he is not in the right numerical proportion. He has something to [contribute] not to himself, but to the whole structure of the world. Through every transgression, man brings upon himself an unlimited responsibility, and, recognizing this, he should strive more and more to attain the mood that he has to fulfill in the great music of the world.

So to the Pythagorean, what is spread outside in space and time appears as a moral task itself. For the Pythagoreans, the moral task is not to be understood as a mathematical one on a higher level. The mathematical task is that he discovers the world space, but in such a way that he is thereby integrated, that he is thereby integrated like a tone in the world music, like a number in the law of numbers. He then discovers that when he does something - because he is not just his own redeemer - it is not just important for himself, but something that concerns the whole universe. The spirit is not only in me, but also where it works. He then sees that the spirit not only has to work on its own moral perfection, but also on the harmonization of the whole universe. When the Pythagorean imagines the harmony of the universe in such a way that he thinks of the world as permeated by musical tones, by music of the spheres analogous to music itself, this happens because music is based on tonal relationships.

The Pythagorean translates this by saying: Just as the tonal relationships become perceptible to our senses as a harmony of tones, there is also a harmony of tones, a music of the spheres in the world, which acts like the numerical relationships in the world. But if it does not find the right numerical relationship, the right tonal relationship to the world within itself, then it disturbs the harmony of the world.

This is why the insights of the Pythagoreans had to lead to the strictest educational system. The Pythagorean is aware, when he teaches the individual this or that, that he is taking upon himself a responsibility, not only towards that person, but towards the whole universe.

Answer to the question:

Everyone's special disposition enables them to gain knowledge of the spirit. The Pythagoreans endeavored to create this possibility for everyone.

[Mathematical ideas are only easy to prove because they are simple, almost without content.

For those, however, who are not at all suited from the outset to immerse themselves in the content of the world, the best and safest school will be to go through mathematics. Plato therefore demanded a thorough knowledge of mathematics from his students. Otherwise it might not have worked for everyone. I would like to explain this to someone who has gone through the Pythagorean school: Let's imagine a person who can only feel. Such an organism would be able to perceive geometric shapes and also be able to conceive of numbers. In fact, blind and deaf people have been taught these relationships and turned into accomplished mathematicians. Such an organism can also arrive at music in a mathematical way. The numerical relationships only appear to him in a shadowy way. Now let us imagine that such a person suddenly hears. He will then perceive the same thing that he had previously understood. He now perceives it with his ears. It is the same with the blind. Through an explanation of the vibrations of the world, he can get an idea of the colors through the numerical relationships. The Pythagorean should now also bring the higher senses to rise. It is the same thing as when a mathematician comes to a musician who is constructing his work himself and calculates it for him. Then the musician can say: "Stay away from that. If you have the necessary receptivity, you can have perceptions even without mathematical representation.

I have contrasted two currents. One current within Hellenism, which starts from Heraclitus, and the other, which starts from Pythagoras. Heraclitus and Pythagoras stand before us as two who have the same object. Heraclitus, as it were, as the composer, Pythagoras as the one who mathematically calculates his subject. It is the same with us as with Pythagoreanism. You first have to teach the blind and the deaf and then you can lead them to higher levels.

Mathematical concepts devised by humans are often confirmed in the outside world. In the case of electricity, people calculate that this or that must be one way or the other. If you then carry it out in reality as an experiment, it must agree [with the calculation].

I would like to cite a famous conversation between Schiller and Goethe. Goethe and Schiller left a scientific lecture together and got into a conversation about what they had heard. In the course of the conversation, Goethe took a piece of paper and drew a symbolic plant, an ideal plant, saying: "This plant is actually in every plant. Every plant is actually an individual embodiment of this general plant. To which Schiller replied: Yes, but that's just an idea! To which Goethe replied: But then I see my ideas with my eyes.

[Or let's take a] triangle [it is presumably drawn]: The angles add up to 180 degrees. Because we have seen a triangle, we can form a quadrilateral by connecting the blue one with the green one. This can be extended in the mind. We can move from the triangle to the square. But we cannot go from one shade of color to another. We can only perceive sensually what belongs to the world of the senses. In mathematics, the spiritual is the easiest to grasp. The mathematical is the most spiritual.

You don't know how to perceive sounds from numerical relationships? Sounds are not perceived [with the ears], only thought. Composers who become deaf therefore only have a surrogate. It is the same as when we deduce one mathematical entity from another. It is not [sensory] perception, but a mental experience.

The sensual is transformed [into the spiritual], it is elevated.

Studying mathematics makes no difference, but recognizing the essence of mathematics does. The most superficial person just splashes and splashes around in the primordial being. Someone can also have studied mathematics. Goethe studied little mathematics. But no one understood the essence of mathematics more than he did. Goethe arrived at his magnificent world of metamorphoses precisely because he had such a great idea of the nature of mathematics, even though he was only able to arrive at the [gap in the transcript] theorem.

He who can make razors may not be able to shave, and he who can shave usually cannot make razors. Thus the mathematician who knows mathematics [only] in form need not know its meaning and its application to the primal being.

[Dearly beloved!]

I must apologize for my cold; it will be difficult to hear me.

I have tried to show that this Pythagoreanism, which lived in southern Italy in the sixth century BC - this strictly self-contained and yet not self-contained school - had a great influence in all the centuries following Pythagoreanism, and that this whole direction was acquired in a difficult course of study that lasted many years. You really had to do a lot of exercises before you could grasp things in a purely spiritual way. I [wanted] to show that it is a pity not to have such a school today. I [wanted] to show that the Pythagorean is not so isolated, but that in Novalis we have a personality who thought in quite the same way. But there is something else.

It can seem somewhat strange when we hear that the Pythagoreans sought something in the strange harmony of numbers, in numbers and in the combination of numbers that represents the primal causes of things. It will not surprise us if we make the assertion that our science, ordinary natural science, insofar as it is physics and chemistry today, is on the way to becoming Pythagoreanism. In the course of the nineteenth century, only a certain group of sensual views prevented natural science from merging into Pythagoreanism. Today we are facing the reformation of natural science. We are on the verge of chemistry and physics becoming completely materialistic because only scientific ideas have been adopted. But perhaps in a few years' time we will no longer be able to think only materialistically about chemical and physical matters. Helmholtz, despite his merits and enormous inventions, and although he never got beyond a certain materialistic presentation at the end of his life, adopted a kind of idealism. At the Naturforscher-Versammlung he announced a lecture on "Apparent substance and true movement". Unfortunately, no notes remain in his estate. However, we can imagine what Helmholtz wanted to say. The physicist only gives a lecture [with such a title] when he has to. Having to give a lecture on "Apparent substance and true motion", on the fact that everything substantial is only apparent, and then the spiritual, the motion is the true, is of great importance. For it is not immediately possible for the physicist to ascend to the spirit. But it is already something if the physicist does not regard matter as the real, but only as something apparent. That is a symptom.

Our entire natural science is basically out to confirm the old Pythagorean theorem that everything that exists in space can be traced back to numerical relationships. To indicate what I mean when I say that natural science is Pythagoreanism, that it is on the way to seeing the decisive factor precisely in numbers, let us take the chemical substances: oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, lead or any of the various other elements. They form compounds, as we know. For example, when lead and oxygen combine, what is the decisive factor? The number! The number is the decisive factor when these two substances combine to form lead oxide. I can't go into this in detail, nor can I go into how the two substances can be separated again, because it would be going too far. However, it is enough for us to know that when lead and oxygen combine, they always combine according to a certain numerical ratio.

But this goes even further. Suppose mercury combines with oxygen. For example, 103 grams of mercury only combine with 8 grams of oxygen. You can see beforehand that if you want to combine 8 grams of oxygen, you need 103 grams of mercury.

But now it's like this: oxygen always combines with all other elements in such a way that certain parts by weight of other elements combine with eight parts by weight of oxygen. This is the case with all elements. For each of the seventy-three known elements there is a number that indicates the weight fraction with which it combines with all the others. The chemist must recognize this from a wealth of facts. That is just it: We have many more facts than the ancients. They had the same thoughts, but fewer facts!

Lead oxide combines 103 parts by weight of lead with 8 parts by weight of oxygen. If we combine lead with sulphur, 103 parts by weight of lead combine with 16 parts by weight of sulphur.

So, if you construct the whole world materially, you do not have something chaotic and arbitrary, but - as the Pythagoreans thought - something ordered according to the harmony of numbers.

And the further we go in science, the more we see that the organization and construction [of nature] can be expressed by numbers. Today's science provides confirmation of the correctness of the Pythagoreans' spiritual construction that we are dealing with numbers in nature.

Helmholtz seems to have wanted to say the same thing in his lecture. We are ultimately dealing with the spirit. Whether the mind is expressed by numbers or viewed in some other way, we will leave that aside for now. If we extract everything that lies dormant in the substance, then we finally come to the conclusion that we are dealing with spirit.

Science also provides us with proof of this. Science is disproving materialism more and more every day. The opinion that natural science needs materialism may still exist in some people's minds, but the truth is that nothing disproves materialism more than natural science. I would like to give you an example from contemporary natural science to show you how this natural science is overcoming materialism bit by bit day by day.

You know that the human eye consists of a displaced spherical envelope or shell filled with a glassy, watery liquid, the vitreous body, and that seeing an object is made possible by the fact that embedded in this mass is a small crystal lens that images the image on the background. Light penetrates through the black in the eye. This light is refracted in the lens, creating a small image, and this image becomes the cause of our vision. The various animals, vertebrates and also a number of invertebrates have similarly constructed eyes.

The octopus also has an eye that appears to be similar to that of humans. It has an eye with a vitreous body, embedded in the vitreous body is a lens that mediates vision. The interesting thing is that in humans, the crystalline lens grows in a completely different way to the octopus, even though both are crystalline lenses. In the octopus, the crystalline lens is formed because the crystalline lens has grown within the aqueous fluid of the eye [through excretion and thickening]. Now you can say to yourself: the eye with the aqueous fluid and the lens resembles a camera obscura. In humans, however, the lens is not formed by excretion and thickening, but by the surface pulling the lens out of itself and then pushing it into the eye. This crystalline lens emerged once from the eye and the other time in a different way from the outside and was then pushed into the vitreous body!

Can we still say, when we see how a material structure can arise in so many different ways, that it is the material that forms nature? Should we not say that nature is not built up according to material powers, but according to purely spiritual powers? The natural substance does not matter at all. One time it is formed from the inside, the other time from the outside. The substance as such is therefore basically the same for the construction of organisms. The mind constructs things.

The further we get in natural science, the more we find that we can never say what would come into being if we [only] took the substance into account. It is the spirit that uses matter to create forms. That is why the Pythagoreans divide the world into these two components: On the one hand, they conceive of the world as that which makes it perceptible/and then again as that which is not perceptible in the world, or let us say better, that which is only perceptible, recognizable to the mind; they have there clearly set apart two things in the human and animal eye; they see how the same eye is constructed in the one and in the other case.

This law - in general the whole spiritual that makes use of the material - cannot be perceived with the senses, it can only be perceived in a spiritual way. But space could not be fulfilled if the spirit could not make use of the perceptible.

The Pythagorean separates these two things: on the one hand, he has the eternally creative, the spiritual, which uses matter to create countless forms; on the other hand, he has matter, which is not active for itself, but only to make visible something that cannot be perceived by the senses.

The Pythagorean composes the whole world from the perceptible and the imperceptible. For him, the one is the number one. It forms the boundary for him. Something exists for us because it becomes one, because it becomes individual. But this is only apparent; it is connected to all other things in the world. And the "how" is conveyed by the number symbolism and the number context. And so we can understand it, because the Pythagoreans had this connection, they saw how much the number rules when it comes to material things and objects. But they also saw how the Pythagoreans endeavored to find the wonderful connection within the numbers and to find what they had found internally confirmed externally.

Whoever does not pay attention to this, whoever does not realize that it was the harmony of the inner and outer, whoever does not take this into account, that it was the delight for the Pythagorean, can very easily find gimmicks in the Pythagorean number teachings. But this only lives in the minds if they cannot become aware of the inner rapture, if they cannot understand, if they cannot grasp how for the Pythagoreans the whole counting becomes different when we have arrived at the ten.

If you don't understand this purely in the way the Pythagoreans understood it, you won't understand what the Pythagoreans meant. As long as we count to ten, we are dealing with units where we add one number to another. But when we reach ten, we continue counting. But we don't just count units, we count the tens: 10 = 1 x 10, 20 = 2 x 10, 30 = 3 x 10. While we have 10, we add 10 others. So we count in a spiritual way what we used to count materially. We count the numbers themselves from 10 onwards, so that when we count to 10, we are actually counting materially in the Pythagorean sense. But if we continue counting the tens, we can disregard the material. We do this by saying: 1 x 10, 2 x 10 and so on. And then we come to the hundreds. The further we count up, the more we forget the material basis and what we used to count. According to the Pythagoreans, it is precisely in counting that we have a means of raising ourselves more and more into the spiritual realm.

You have to consider what he understands by the so-called "gnomons". He understands this to mean nothing other than the inner lawfulness that prevails in our world of numbers if we study this world of numbers in the right way.

Take the following: If you take the consecutive numbers and multiply them, each number by itself, you get the so-called square numbers: 2 x 2 = 4, 3 x 3 = 9, 4 x 4 = 16, 5 x 5 = 25.

So if we multiply the individual numbers by themselves, we get the square numbers. However, there is a strange relationship between the numbers and the square numbers. This relationship was first explored by the Pythagoreans.

If you now take what is not yet in 2x2, take what is new for the 4; the 5, and add to it, you get the second square number. Strangely enough, this law applies continuously through the whole square numbers. 4 is the first square number, 9 is the second, 16 is the third.

2 + 2 = 4; the next new number is 5, so plus 5 = 9.

Take 3 + 3 = 6, the next new number is 7, so 3 x 3 = 9, plus 7 = 16.

You can continue like this. And this is what the Pythagoreans called the "gnomons".

Take 4: 4 x 4 = 16.16 + ( 4 + 4 + 1 =9 ) = 25, the square number of 5.

Take the 5: 5 x 5 = 25. 25 + ( 5 + 5 + 1 = 11) = 36, the square number of 6.

Take the 6: 6x 6 = 36. 36 + ( 6 +6 + 1 = 13 ) = 49[, the square number of 7].

You can find this inner regularity throughout the entire number range. Here you get an inner insight into the context itself. This was what compelled the Pythagorean to believe that the numerical has an inner regularity of its own. He found this in things like gnomons, so that the Pythagorean could say to himself: The same thing that I form within my mind I find outside in the cosmos, and the same thing that forms the inner context is in an inner harmony with the cosmos. If we have 3 x 3 things outside [in the cosmos] and have arranged them in this way, they correspond to what we have brought out in the spirit. We can form the whole of mathematics in our minds, we can form the whole of the theory of numbers, we don't need to know anything about the outside world. If we then close our eyes, the outside world will obey the laws we have devised!

This is what led Pythagoras to recognize a numerical law - and everything else that lies within it.

I would just like to draw attention to the great chemical discoveries of Lothar Meyer and the Russian Mendeleev, which are a complete confirmation of what the Pythagorean wanted with his views. I have said that the elements all combine in certain numerical ratios: Hydrogen always combines with oxygen in such a way that it is in a ratio of 8 or a multiple of 8. If we now examine the space between the individual given numbers, we get a complete regularity. We ascend from the oxygen with 16 or also from the element which has 7. The elements cannot combine with others according to a numerical ratio other than their own, but there is a regularity in these combinations.

- Lithium in a weight ratio of 7,
- Sodium in a weight ratio of 23.
- Potassium in a weight ratio of 39.

If you put these figures together, you get some strange correlations. If we take the weight ratio of 7 to 23, we get a difference of 16. If we take the weight ratio of 23 to 39, we get a difference of 16 again. There are many such consecutive triads of three consecutive substances in chemistry. We could also take other three elements and we would find that the same number spaces arise between them.

If we took the whole elements, we would always find spaces that can be expressed in numbers. We have certain substances that are grouped together quite nicely. But a number is missing in between. Let's assume we have lithium and sodium, we also have other substances and we know that there is a certain space between them; but then we are missing something in between! Now the chemist has become accustomed to something; he no longer says: There is an irregularity here, but he says: It is because we do not yet know the substance that has this numerical ratio. Many substances have been found recently. At first, we only suspected that they must exist. But later they were found. Trusting that the spirit would find it led to the spirit really finding it out.

[Uranus was found through observation. Neptune was predicted on the basis of calculations]. The laws according to which the planets move were seen. These laws did not apply to Uranus, and they said to themselves: there must be another body at a certain point in space [that deflects Uranus from its calculated orbit]. One has more confidence in the spiritual law than in sensory reality, and this has completely confirmed the spirit, has proved the spirit right.

This harmony between spirit and matter, as established by the Pythagoreans, is confirmed bit by bit by natural science. It will increasingly overcome what we see as material. It will increasingly come to the point where the apparent substance dissolves into spiritual relationships.

Matter is not merely frozen spirit, is not merely appearing spirit. It dissolves piece by piece, so that the spirit does not perceive something else, but itself. So what is emphasized today by the most diverse sides, natural science provides us with proof of this.

Annie Besant has drawn attention to similar relationships between her views and natural science. Starting from these basic views, the Pythagorean immersed himself in the world and now arrived at a view that must be particularly valuable to us because Goethe, in turn, arrived at a similar view in recent times, based on his scientific principles!

The Pythagoreans imagined the constitution of the world in such a way that this spirit, which they sought to capture in number, is limited by the unlimited and becomes perceptible by being limited.

Now the Pythagoreans imagined that all this becoming is the continuous interpenetration of the limited and the unlimited. The appearance of the unlimited as a boundary [they imagined] as a kind of matter. Matter is the indifferent that does nothing other than make the spirit visible. In order to form the entities out of matter, the spirit breathes in matter and breathes it out again into the world space. Therefore, the spirit [works] in a continuous inhalation and exhalation, a breathing process.

Goethe also uses this image, imagining this process as inhaling and exhaling the air. Goethe imagines that the earth influences itself from the outside with the air space, that it literally contracts into itself, breathes in what it needs in terms of world space and then breathes out again what it has processed within itself. It is a different air pressure when you inhale and exhale, a becoming stronger and also a becoming weaker. People left this path because they didn't want to believe in such regular ideas. [Goethe] wanted to show that the fluctuations of the barometer are not arbitrary, but essentially point back to basic fluctuations, to something that is quite regular. In the seemingly irregular processes, one can see regularity that stems from the fact that the earth breathes in air and then breathes it out again, a regularity that then produces regular fluctuations that indicate that we are dealing with inhalation and exhalation on the earth.

Goethe shows us this in an interesting way. I do not regard this as indifferent, but it seems to me that it is tremendously important that our ideas are spiritualized by such ideas. We can follow the processes in the outside world all the time, such as barometer fluctuations. If we have not grasped them, at least in terms of direction, we will not be aware of them at all. Such regular fluctuations are also found when we examine the irregular

and then subtract the regular. What remains is then irregular.

I wanted to point out that what the Pythagoreans taught is not something outdated, but that it is used in today's natural science. [The Pythagoreans approached astronomy in such a way that they also applied the spatial view of the bounded and unbounded to the cosmos.

Each time can only understand the various perceived things in the way that the state of the relevant perceptual science - astronomy, for example, and so on - is at that time. Research is carried out in the field of experience. The Pythagoreans also had to reckon with [the ideas of their time]. They placed themselves before the central fire, which represents the unity, the primordial ground of the world; that which continually breathes matter in and out and therefore brings the world into being. The stars with their regular movement represented to them a regular multiplicity, which was expressed in the numerical relationships. And what took place in the sphere below the moon was an irregularity, a continual struggle between the limited and the unlimited. But in that which lies above, the struggle is balanced to a great harmony. There the world bodies move in regular orbits. This has resulted in the regular orbits taking the place of the point, the sharply defined One. We are no longer dealing with the One, but with unity. This battle, which is constantly taking place before our eyes, is taking place between the earth and the moon, is taking place as an eternal battle. On earth, harmony and disharmony are constantly alternating. Man stands in this struggle because he is a unity. He seeks to reconnect, since he is torn out of the harmony of the world, by trying to come back into harmony with the world through what the Pythagoreans call virtue. You see that the Pythagorean penetrates from the lowest phenomena to those of human life with numerical ideas.

Now we are left with the most important things from the Pythagorean world of ideas, namely those elements of spiritual life to which the ethical sphere rises by the spirit attempting the deepest immersion into its own inner being. The Pythagoreans also had certain views on this, which were taken from cosmological ideas.

In that the Pythagoreans sought to establish an extraordinarily deep harmony with the world, with that which separates man from the whole universe, they arrived at the idea of reincarnation, of the connection between the various embodiments of all beings.

This is a matter that will occupy us in particular next time. I wanted to discuss the basic question, which was first communicated through Pythagorean physics and ethics, which was formed through such a world of ideas as has just been described, after a long period of training. One must not imagine that the communication of reincarnation or re-embodiment took place immediately! The pupil was first trained through things such as those expressed in the regularity of the world of numbers, which then led him deep into the matter. Then he was also shown what he had to do to achieve world harmony, to eliminate the so-called original sin from the world. The problem: How can the separation of the individual soul from the universe be justified? - became the great Pythagorean question.

And this question led the Pythagoreans to solve it within Pythagoreanism, and this is the basic feature of the Pythagorean training that we will talk about next time.

Question answer:

Question: [?]

Dr. Steiner's answer: The way a person breathes is intimately connected with the fact that a person can speak. If humans did not have a vertically positioned lung and a vertically

positioned larynx, they could not speak. A dog could never speak words. In general, dogs are more intelligent than parrots and starlings, but parrots and starlings can be made to speak more easily than dogs. This has to do with the whole constitution of the human lungs and larynx, and in particular with the fact that the lungs and larynx are upright. The production of articulated sounds can only take place with an upright larynx and upright lungs. Monkeys cannot produce articulated sounds, even if they can be made to walk upright. The organism is not built that way. The upright larynx exhales and inhales air in a peculiar way. This exhalation and inhalation produces articulate speech. And if we know that articulated speech is connected with the spirit, then we have the scientific possibility of the spirit taking hold in the organism. This possibility is only given in upright walking beings. Only when the body [knew how to walk] upright could the spirit take hold. Beings who still use their front limbs to move forward cannot harbor a spirit. In the Tertiary Period, namely in the Diluvial Period, we had gibbons, highly intelligent creatures. After it became colder, they migrated, but came back again and then had to live in colder climates where the plant life was not so abundant. They had to use their front legs as tools, then gradually learned to walk upright, and the spirit was then able to take possession of the brain.

Question: Can an octopus see like a human?

Answer: Kurd Laßwitz has written a fairy tale that deals with this question. It is highly probable that what comes about in the eye of a human also comes about in the eye of an octopus. One makes the crystal lens from glass, the other from rock crystal or another similar

material, and the same thing comes about through the crystal lens. In humans, the same thing is formed in another substance as in the octopus. But even if the octopus has the same image as the human being, the image must first be spiritualized, processed. Because you have a red circle in your eye, you do not yet have an object. It has to be connected with other images. We don't know whether the octopus can do this.

One could assume that the same animal is created in completely different ways. In the case of the dog, we are dealing with organically structured matter that is permeated by laws. The indifference of matter is what physicists see in the conservation of force or substance. What is used for the eye today can be used for something else tomorrow. Matter is the indeterminate. It would be different if matter had laws within itself. The same thing can consist of different material preconditions. The lawfulness does not depend on matter, but can be devised by us. That is the delightful thing for the Pythagoreans. The matter of the eye is the same as the matter of the ear. On the other hand, if one could make each of them, one would have to demand that one could see with the ears and hear with the eyes! Disharmonies arise that balance each other out again.

Question: [2] Answer: We no longer know the sublunary circle today.

[Question:] How is it that people fall so completely out of harmony?

[Answer:] The Pythagorean view is that there is no perfect harmony on earth, but a becoming of the harmonious out of disharmony. There is only a continual falling out and a drawing back into harmony. This is what forms the individual being. In the individual being we have the detached being that longs to return to harmony. The

world bodies as a whole describe their paths, which do not disturb each other. This is perfect harmony. There is also harmony and disharmony in hunger and satiety: the balance is life. There are beings at rest in themselves as opposed to those in motion. The [individualists] have restlessness within themselves. Christ says: "Where two or three are together, I am in their midst." That is a Pythagorean idea. And it is this: The Pythagorean sees the beginning in the one, in the two he sees the indeterminate added, and the completed being is where the three is added. Think of two points, connect them and you have a line. With three points you have a plane, the triangle. Something planar is only determined by the three. The three has a center, the two only has a side by side. The three has to achieve a balance. It is the spirit that connects them.

Question: [?]

Answer: The Bible is made up of the whole world. Nothing is easier than interpreting the Bible. With the esoteric interpretation, you can get it about right, but you can't know if you're getting it historically [right].

Question: [2]

Answer: Neptune would not be the last planet. In 1839, [Dawes] already communicated this. Kunowsky is a pleasing apparition.

Ladies and gentlemen present!

Today it falls to me to speak about the relationship of the soul and spirit to the physical world among the Pythagoreans. Up to now I have spoken primarily about the organization of the universe among the Pythagoreans and today I would like to add what we can know from the Pythagoreans about the ideas of the soul, of the spirit and of their relationship of the spiritual and the spiritual to the physical world.

Historically, we know about Pythagoreanism in this area not only from the scanty information we have from the Pythagoreans, but we know much more precisely from the Platonic discussions! A large part of what Plato worked on comes from Pythagoreanism. Plato went to school with the Pythagoreans and drew a large part of his teachings from Pythagoreanism.

However, the teachings of Pythagoreanism can only be properly understood if one starts from certain ideas - which can be gained at all times - and from certain relationships of the spiritual [to] the physical and asks: How do the views of the Pythagoreans relate to these, how do they compare to them? The Pythagoreans had the deepest immersion in the human ego! They transferred a view to their disciples that grasped the human self to the extent that it must be grasped if it is to spill over into the material world.

At a certain level, the material ceases to have meaning; space and time also cease to exist. Images are afflicted with all the properties of sensual nature. If we continue to ascend and imagine these images more spiritually and more spiritually, then we come closer and closer to the spiritual - not insofar as it is spatial and temporal, but only insofar as it is eternal. The Pythagoreans had this view that things are based on a being that is the same at all times, regardless of whether we look at this or that thing. They rose to this view, not only to the view of the conceptual, but actually to the view of the One. It was precisely through the way in which they developed the theory of numbers that they showed that they saw in the great harmony nothing other than the embodiment of a deity in the universe.

The Pythagoreans were influenced by Egyptian views. This Egyptian symbolically shows us the view that the "Nous lives in everything. The Egyptians used symbols in their knowledge that we also find in the Pythagoreans. It is impossible to misjudge these symbols among the Egyptians. If you think you can only look at them superficially, you will find that you cannot understand them. They can only be understood if they are interpreted in a deeper way. We will look at this in more detail when we consider the Platonic world of ideas.

I must draw attention to this in order to make it easier to understand Pythagoreanism and its doctrine of the soul.

I have already hinted at the doctrine of Osiris. In this legend we meet Osiris, who is dismembered by a hostile force called Typhon and scattered throughout the universe; and Isis, a female deity, reassembles the ruins of Osiris. These are then the human being.

A second Egyptian legend follows, according to which the younger god Horus is born of Isis after the death of Osiris. According to the news, legends and stories, these views indicate that the Egyptians symbolically expressed the view in this legend that the universe has flowed out into the world of appearances, into the world that is riding towards us. And the fragmented God is the All-Spirit, which for the Egyptians dissolved into the four elements: Water, Fire, Air and Earth, reunites and binds them, and brings about the various numerical ratios in the mixture of substances.

This then became part of the Greek view. We find it in the form that love and hate hold the world together. These are the thought powers of Osiris, Isis and Typhon. Osiris lives on only in the four elements, which are presented as "Osiris. It is hatred that forces the elements to lie next to each other as multiplicity, and love that wants to lead the fragmentation back into unity.

This is also how we have visualized the idea of the gods among the Greeks. We can also find this symbol when we look at an Egyptian obelisk. It is four-sided and runs together in a point. This symbolizes the four elements that make up the harmonious unity of the world. The obelisk is decorated with the image of a beetle spinning a ball, or with the image of a ram carrying a ball [on its head]. We know that the Egyptians thought of the sphere as the All-Unity.

Now, however, one thing must be noted about this idea: Pythagoreanism can only be fully understood - insofar as it is a world view - if it is based on the idea that Osiris has actually dissolved into the four elements, that he no longer leads a separate existence. Through the separation of the forces, Osiris has been split into the elements, into the elements existing in the outside world.

The Pythagorean was therefore clear about the fact that when he was searching for Osiris, on the way to recognizing God, he did not have to look for this God outside the world in a "thing in itself", but where he could only be found, in the world as such. He was clear about the fact that God is in the world. Therefore, the Pythagoreans did not regard the world as God's creation, but as God's existence. Whoever lives in the world lives in God! The Pythagoreans sought God only within the world. Pythagoreanism is therefore a doctrine that deals with the world and its relationships. It is interesting how they attached Greek names of gods to some numerical relationships.

So we see from this that what the Greeks represented as images of gods, the Pythagoreans represented in the numbers that held the world together for [them].

Pythagoreanism appears as the highest expression of what was present in the world. Just as the Pythagoreans envisioned the world as the confluence of the four elements, they also envisioned man. For the Pythagoreans, the human being was nothing other than the most harmonious combination of the four elements. By "elements [they imagined] not coarse substances, but potencies! It was not a material interaction, but something similar to what [they] imagined by "harmony in music". In the same way, what appears in the human soul was best expressed in the harmony produced by the body. The soul therefore always emerges in the form of the symbol of the body, which is, as it were, composed of the elements.

They distinguished three things in human organics. They realized that man has a longing to return to that from which he originally came. They were clear that man was nothing other than an incarnation of Osiris, an incarnation of the deity that had flowed out into the world. This was what emerged in their view of the world and of which they were convinced that it was the same in every human being, that it was the same in every being.

Whoever was able to develop the view in his consciousness saw the world as a whole - by seeing himself. The universe expanded into selfhood within the ego, and the ego became the universe! But man could only go through this as an individual being. Man is only man in that he has this urge, this inclination towards Osiris, and that he has this power only in so far as he is in a power connection with the whole material world. Therefore the Pythagoreans first distinguished the actual Osiris nature in man and in the universe, the All-I, which was present as a single entity in the universe, and as a second entity a part of the manifold, the corporeal man, a part of the merely sensual-physical man, which arises and passes away and which can be observed through the senses. Man presents himself as a sensory being, perceptible to himself and to others, and then also as a being that is seen purely from within, which is nothing other than a reflection of the light that has flowed down from the Godhead.

Now the Pythagorean had to come to the conclusion that these two opposing things behave in the same way as all other dualities among the Pythagoreans, i.e. that everything diverges into a duality. They distinguish a duality in everything, including man. I could list the various dualities that the Pythagoreans had in the world. Everywhere they looked for them, everywhere they looked for a kind of polarity: that was the "limited and the "unlimited, the "even and the "odd, the "good and the "evil, the "square and the "cube, the "rectangle" and the "column and so on. Thus they distinguished a duality everywhere, in every spiritual and physical identity. Now in man it is not spiritual and physical, but as I have described it. Let us stick to what I have described. This duality needs a connection, and this connection is the third part of which the Pythagoreans composed the human being. This third part is what is called the soul in the Greek world view and in all later world views. This third is a combination of spiritual allness, all-unity on the one hand with diversity, materiality on the other, so that we have three parts: spirituality, materiality and, as the third, the soul. On the one side is the material, and on the other side is the highest spirituality. Together with the other, the third side, this is what makes up the unique human personality.

So for the Pythagoreans, the human personality only exists because the unified spirit, with the help of the soul, is connected to the diversity of materiality. Man discovers the soul within himself and has a right to spirituality when he directs his gaze towards the sphere of spirituality, i.e. when he belongs to the material world on the one hand and is an inhabitant of the spiritual world on the other, with which he is supposed to connect. Thus, for the Pythagoreans, man is divided into three potencies:

1. into that which makes him an individual;
2. into that to which he devotes himself;
3. into that which frees it from singularity;

They distinguish that which belongs to the individual human being, which shines upwards towards the spiritual, but which at the same time also shines downwards towards the physical. So that which the Pythagoreans recognize as the third, which mediates between the divine and the material principle.

So not only Osiris is incarnated, but also something that is closer to the individuality than Osiris as such. So something is reincarnated that is between the personality - to which sensuality belongs - and spirituality - to which sensuality no longer belongs - something that participates in the world and that is both singularity and allness at the same time!

This something [incarnated in man] constitutes that which is the unified Osiris-nature, the individuality, which here below individualizes into the personality - which is not the same for the Pythagoreans - and which, through the mediation of the personality with Osiris, constitutes a unity. This individuality does not live itself out completely in the personality, so that the latter will find something in itself if it looks around within itself and measures its consciousness, where it must say to itself: This does not belong to the piece in which I am incarnated; it is this individualized piece which is the individual.

There are therefore three things connected in human nature:

1. the personal individuality;
2. the spiritual substantiality that transcends the personality;
3. the light of Osiris, the unity that lives in the universe and that can only live because individuality stands between the other members.

This individuality is not only linked to the individual manifestation of the personality, but means more than the individual personality. What can be found in the individuality does not coincide with what can be found in the individual personality.

When the follower of Pythagoreanism looks around to explain this, he will not be able to stop in his consciousness at the personality, but will have to reach out to other individualities. Within his individual personality he will not be able to find everything that lives as a being in the personality. He will find: Man cannot be explained by himself. Only if he assumes in relation to the individuality, the personality - no matter how metaphysically conceived - that the individuality can remain, can incarnate itself in other details, so that a series of developmental stages, a series of such personalities come into consideration for the individuality, will he find the explanation. And here you also have the form which the Pythagoreans gave to the [idea of reincarnation].

In the second potency, the Pythagoreans recognized the soul as encompassing a single personality, and they recognized that more goes into it than the single vessel, the single personality, so that we may therefore speak of a pre-existence of that which lives itself out as individuality in the single personality.

Plato also expounded this doctrine in his discussions. In it, he made Socrates a teacher, and we can imagine that Plato therefore put his teachings into conversational form and made Socrates a teacher in order to show how a pupil can gradually be led up to the highest level.

If we want to imagine the development of a Pythagorean, we can take the discussion on the development of the soul, "Phaidon", to hand. The "Phaidon" is not to be understood as an exoteric conversation, but as a symbol for Pythagorean teaching. This is clearly demonstrated by a passage in the introduction.

We know little about the historical Socrates, and what is false in the external, tangible sense, we can easily leave out. Therefore, when Plato places special emphasis on external facts and communicates them, as is the case in the Phaedo, where he tells us that the delivery of the cup of hemlock is delayed because a certain ship is sailing to Delos, we must see something special in this communication. We can see from the story that in Greece they were forced to send seven young men and seven virgins to King Minos for a time. They were freed from this plague by Theseus, who killed the Minotaur. In return, the Greeks sent a ship to Delos at certain times to make offerings [to Apollo]. No one was allowed to be executed during this time. The condemnation of Socrates took place just at this time and it was therefore necessary to wait. This fact was told to us at the beginning of the "Phaidon". It is not at the beginning by chance. It has a certain meaning. It's just like the Egyptians. When we see a sphinx standing there, it means that we must not limit ourselves to being satisfied with the simple description, but that we should seek deeper truths behind it.

This story at the beginning of Plato's "Phaedo" is just such an allusion. It always indicates that we have something to look for underneath. The legend of Theseus is a symbol of the fact that, once Theseus was freed from certain passions, from certain connections with materiality, i.e. once he had undergone a certain development, he no longer needed to make the sacrifices that others had to make to sensuality. Only after he no longer needed to make these sacrifices did he reach a certain stage of development. This is expressed in the overcoming of the Minotaur. That is symbolic.

We are therefore dealing here with the representation of Pythagorean teaching. The fact that Socrates overcame death in accordance with the facts is intended as a symbol of what and how the Pythagorean must overcome in the sequence of stages of his teaching. Thus we also see that the Pythagorean understands the soul as something that transcends the individual and that he thereby leads his students to a spiritual understanding of the world.

The "Phaidon" presents us with the ascent to spiritual individuality. This is introduced by the legend of Theseus, who found his way out of the labyrinth. The labyrinth represents the path that the individual personality has to go through in order to find its way back to the light of Osiris. Here, then, we encounter the soul doctrine of Pythagoreanism. We may assume that we have here given the soul doctrine of Pythagoreanism in a form that [Plato] believed he could already communicate to certain initiated disciples.

The essence is developed and first shown through all kinds of considerations that the essence of the soul is something that goes beyond the material, which no longer has anything to do with the material as such.

This problem of the soul is solved in many different ways in the "Phaidon". Firstly, it is based on the world of the senses, which is in eternal development. Every being develops from what it is not. In the same way, death emerges from life and life from death, so that we are dealing with the alternation of death and life. But that is only the lowest level.

Now a Pythagorean appears here in the conversation, who presents his image of the lyre with its strings. [...]. Socrates thinks that we cannot compare [it] with harmony. The strings are there first. But the harmony is not in the strings as such, but in the harmony of the strings, in something that first emerges from the strings. And now Socrates rises to a spirituality that is no longer bound to physicality. Socrates leads upwards: I have looked around at all the sciences, at all the philosophers. When I say: I have seen, or: I am going, people everywhere ask: Why? And the answer is: I have, because ..., I go, because ... Everywhere I go I am only told the reasons. That has never satisfied me. The thing is far from being explained when we know the cause.

Now Socrates uses a subtle comparison to make it clear that a thing is not yet explained by stating the cause. He says: I am sitting here in prison. The Athenians have condemned me to this. I expect to die because I didn't want to escape.

So what would the natural scientist say? He would give all the causes. But what if Socrates had escaped? Then [the naturalist] would also be able to find the causes there; you can state causes everywhere, collect causes. They are true, but nothing is explained by them. If he had fled, there would also be causes. If I am sitting here, the causes are also there. So there must be something that transcends purely natural existence. It is that which is not identical with that which can be grasped with natural causes, which has nothing in common with the natural, but with the world that stands above the natural facts; which is indeed expressed in the world of causes, but which stands above the world of causes.

So he seeks to make comprehensible in words that which is incarnated for him in the world of causation and is expressed within the world of causation.

Now we must ask: How was this way of looking at things in the Greek world - causality links the natural world, in which the soul does not merge - to be justified in the natural science of the Greeks? It seems important to me whether such a thing can stand up to our present-day knowledge. We must draw attention to the fact that natural science struggles to achieve a spirituality in order to give birth to a world view out of itself. That spirituality cannot be exhausted in the world of causes can already be proven by natural science. It can be proven that the physicality in which we now live is enclosed within quite [certain limits], that it is a limited thing, and that this already has a certain significance.

I want to show you how natural science today can already show that corporeality has a limit, that the spiritual must extend beyond this corporeality, that it is only incarnated in this corporeality, so that corporeality is something that cannot encompass the spirit. This seems to me to be something that needs to be emphasized. The modern world view has led us to no longer see the world as if it were a random structure of things, it has led us to see transformations of the elemental force in the individual forces of the world. We no longer say that mechanical work is present in electricity, heat, magnetism, pressure and so on, but we see all of these as forms of a single elemental force. Today we say to ourselves that if we apply a mechanical force, for example by exerting pressure on a table, the area of the table is heated. This heat is generated by pressure. Today we have the view that the force that pushes the locomotive forward is nothing other than the force of steam, and this in turn is nothing other than the force of coal and so on. So we have a constant transformation. When we heat a room, we heat it with what was stored up as chemical forces a myriad of years ago. The plants have transformed into denser matter, then into the chemical forces of coal. These are transformed back into heat. So what we use to heat our rooms today is what came from the sun millions of years ago. So even in physics we are dealing with a constant transformation of forces. What is exactly true is the connection between thermal and mechanical energy. Heat is converted into mechanical working power in order to move something forward. What happens in the steam boiler is exactly the same as what moves the train forward. The heat is transformed into mechanical work. This happens because the heat is lost, because it is no longer present. This heat that has been transformed has disappeared, has been transformed into something else. We see this process everywhere in the universe.

Fifty years ago, people were still saying that solar heat is transformed into chemical power, chemical power into mechanical work and so on. So we can imagine that one transforms into the other, that the cycle of forces is formed. This creates an eternity of the material world. The forces are transformed into an eternal cycle. Today we have to admit that this material world does not allow such a cycle of matter, but is limited. We have to admit that what exists is self-explanatory. If we transform the heat of the steam into that which moves the train forward - for heat is always lost, and it is impossible to transform all the heat into mechanical power - then the heat suffers a loss. This is not because the machines are imperfect; the complete transformation cannot take place, a certain amount of heat would always remain. Wherever something happens by transforming heat into mechanical power, a mechanical residue remains.

If we continue this and imagine that all the work is done, something would always be left behind. The consequence of this would be that once all possible heat [would] be transformed, that eventually a state [would] occur where it [would] no longer be possible to develop any amount of heat from things. The available heat [would] reach a minimum. [If this state was reached, it would no longer be possible for anything to happen in this world. It [would] no longer be possible for any work to [emerge] from any heat source. Life [would] be extinguished. This whole incarnation of the earth [would be] self-contained.

So we see that the spiritual is not exhausted by reincarnation, but that the spiritual spills over into the [associated material] world, that the spiritual is that which will have to seek a new expression or return into itself.

However, this material world can only exist because it is permeated by the spirit. The moment this material world is exhausted, the spirit is no longer that which can dominate the world. It has then lost its meaning, it has stepped out of being into non-being. The spirit has then purified itself of all this.

This is not the result of a philosophical consideration, nor the result of a metaphysical consideration, but merely what every physicist must also admit. It is the same as what the Greeks say, that the One lives itself out in the world, lives through it, and that the world as such comes to an end and then, as we have seen, will again be the unlimited and will stand purified in itself as the All-One. This is the great world process that takes place in what the Pythagoreans see as the overarching. He saw this overarching element at the lower level in individuality.

This is the method by which the Pythagorean says: If I find something in the personality that transcends into the spiritual, then I must assume that individuality is as little exhausted with the individual personality as the Osiris unity is exhausted in the individual world. - In the Pythagorean world the unity is not exhausted, but it lives itself out in the worlds, which are limited, closed. In the Pythagorean view, individuality lives itself out in such a way that it only seeks its incarnation within the continuous individual existence.

So in the Pythagorean world view we have a strictly closed chain of ideas that leads us upwards from the earthly level to the highest spiritual unity. But in Pythagoreanism we have a strict adherence to the doctrine of individuality, which reaches beyond the individual personality. From this flowed for the Pythagoreans the view that the individual personality, when it rises to the view of individuality, can no longer merely feel responsible for what it does as an individual personality, for what occurs in it, in so far as it is an individual being in the sensuous manifold, but that it must also feel responsible in so far as it must cooperate and collaborate in that which goes beyond the individual personality into individuality. The ordinary person does not feel responsible for what goes beyond the personality.

This is roughly what can be said about the Pythagorean doctrine of the soul. We may therefore say that the Pythagoreans reached the view that they imposed a much higher responsibility on man, namely that which he bears as an individuality and which is not exhausted in the individual personality. This is the idea of reincarnation seen from within.

Answer to the question:

[Dearly beloved!]

It is not possible to determine exactly when the Book of the Dead was written. In any case, it is one of the most important documents, because it shows us that in such early times in Egypt a world view, a deepening, prevailed which aimed strictly at a unified world and which, on the other hand, already had the strange urge in itself to understand death as a symbol, to understand death in such a way that it does not appear as the terrible in itself, but that it appears as that which can be seen as a symbol, as a mere allegory, which still stands high above [life]. If death is to be overcome, it is certain that death can only be overcome spiritually. It essentially deals with the transition from physical life to life after death - and that means nothing other than life in general. We can describe even more precisely what is contained in the Book of the Dead. It contains chants, hymns to the sun god Ra, to Osiris, the son of the sun god, hymns which are preferably put into the mouths of the dead. These dead who have made their way to the afterlife, these dead are to experience something, they are to gain knowledge [of what they have seen and what they are aware of from those who are no longer bound to the body. That is the first part. The second part consists of the dead person being held up to account in a kind of judgment for the debts he has incurred. He is weighed, and depending on the findings, his value appears in the overall structure of the universe. Those who have reached a high level will not - as is often said - come to Osiris, but they will become "Osiris. It is curious that the book is divided into three parts. The first part deals with the [sun] god Ra, the second part deals with human destiny, the third part then shows the path to reach Osiris, the path that leads to deification. This book thus represents the path to life, the path from the individual life to the total life, which is achieved through the realization and deification of man.

The details of the Book of the Dead are important in the most diverse ways for the history of the development of world views. In the Book of the Dead, for example, we find the myth of Osiris' battle with Typhon, Osiris' enemy, hatred. Isis had to find Osiris again in the universe, and she then brings forth the younger Osiris, Horus, whom she describes as the deification of the universe. We find this in the Book of the Dead.

But then we also find the doctrine of the seven-part man in it. The Egyptians thought of man as being made up of the body, the spiritual body and the mummy.

So we have three stages:
[1.] Heart, sensation or mind,
[2-] Genius and creation,
[3-] the Holy Spirit and intelligence.

These are roughly the details of this Book of the Dead, which was in any case much better known in antiquity than in later times. In later times, the awareness of the teachings as they are expressed in the Book of the Dead has been lost. However, we often find the teachings of the Book of the Dead again in Greece, and the entire Greek spiritual life in the post-Pythagorean period can only be understood if one assumes that [its] views were the teachings of this Book of the Dead, the tripartite division of the human path of knowledge and the eventual merging into the Osiris nature. If one assumes that they were transplanted to Greece and that essentially the same views lived there. However, it must be noted that the Egyptians did not have an intermediate stage that played a greater role among the Greeks, namely the myth developed with [a certain sense of] beauty. The Greeks loved to embellish everything with beauty. We have therefore been compelled to regard the entire Greek religion, the entire Greek world view, which stands between Pythagoreanism and Platonism, as an aesthetic one. We can do this if we see it as born out of Greek myth, but in its spiritualized form.

We know the Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone, the myth of the Argonauts and so on. However, we can always assume - and we have to hold on to this - that the myth exists in a threefold meaning:

[1] The first meaning is that in its immediate form as the purely naturalistic conception,
2. then as a human, as a symbol and
3. thirdly as the divine.]

And the third, the divine, was the concept that was taught only to a select few, only to a few who had prepared themselves for it. We can already prove this historically. We are told of Samothrace, an island, that the deities there were nothing other than names for other deities. However, it is not to be believed that they were the same as the names of Greek or Egyptian deities. For outsiders, they had the same names. But for the insiders, they were deeper understandings of the entire myths and stories of the gods.

The best-known Greek myth is that of Demeter and her daughter Persephone and then the myth of Dionysus, which has already been mentioned several times. Demeter, one of the supreme female Greek deities, was first understood in a naturalistic sense. She had a daughter with Zeus, Persephone. She was stolen by Hades, the god of the underworld. Hades had asked to be allowed to take this daughter as his wife in the underworld. She was only to remain in the upper world temporarily. She was to remain two thirds in the upper world and one third in the underworld. This myth, which is alive everywhere in Greece in its naturalistic meaning, was also that which was to be found in certain mysteries, namely that on which the Eleusinian Mysteries were based. This myth also had a threefold meaning. The naturalistic meaning lies simply in the fact that one understands the actual as such, that one has a mythological history of the gods. The second conception would then be something that took place in [Greek] life, and that was the marriage of the Ionian spirit with the Doric.

The Greek people were divided into tribes. Among the most important were the Dorians and the Ionians. The myth of Demeter had originated among the Dorians, and the Ionians had adopted it and mixed it with the myth of Dionysus. We are interested in the Dionysus myth because it leads to an esoteric view. Dionysus is also a son of Zeus and Demeter. He was torn to pieces and only managed to save his heart. From this, Zeus had formed the younger Dionysus. But he could no longer take the limbs. It is therefore the case that the world represents the scattered limbs. This therefore represents the marriage of the Dorian Persephone with the Ionian Dionysus. The fusion of these two views has thus taken place in this myth.

But what remains to be noted is the third, the divine conception. We can only understand this historically if we stick to the sparse information we have. We are first referred to the temple in which the service of Demeter takes place. This Demeter service is a service in which we encounter the three deities mentioned. Demeter herself is one of the greatest deities of Greece, symbolically shaped, with the inscription: "I am the origin of the soul, I am the origin of the spirit." At her side, Persephone is presented to us with the inscription: "I am death and carry within me the secret of life." Her brother Dionysus is presented to us with an even stranger inscription: "I am death, I am life, I am rebirth and adorned with wings." - If we understand this, we come to the interpretation of one of the most important Greek myths. Demeter loses her daughter. She has to give her Persephone to Hades. She could return to her mother if she had not already partaken of the fruit of the pomegranate with Hades and was therefore unable to return completely. This Persephone is supposed to save her brother. Only this makes it possible - now in a deeper sense - for Persephone to return, for Dionysus to sacrifice himself. We have to look at these two in context again. We must recognize that sacrifice is what matters here. This is shown to us by the fact that Orpheus - who is originally credited with having communicated the deeper content of this to the Greek people - was also sacrificed, for he is also said to have been torn apart and to have lived on as a spirit by having flowed out into the world matter. The child of eternal life must be sacrificed to Hades, to Pluto. We can only understand this if we see the material world in Pluto. Thus, according to the esoteric view, we see in Demeter the universal spirituality, the primordial mother of intelligence, and in Hades the material world. In the whole Persephone myth we see the necessity of Persephone's falling away from her mother. The daughter must enter matter. She must partake of the pomegranate of the underworld. Now she can no longer save herself from matter and therefore a second sacrifice is necessary. Persephone's brother, Dionysus, must sacrifice himself again. He must allow his [own] spiritual nature to flow out into the gross nature, so that Persephone now enters into a spiritual marriage with her brother, but can flow back again to the original spirit of the primordial mother, Demeter. This mystery of the spirituality's necessary departure from itself, this immersion of the spirits in the material and this longing of the spirit to return to the spiritual is expressed in the Demeter myth.

This was the vivid experience that was to be taught to those who were introduced to the Eleusinian Mysteries. They were to be given the urge to find their way back from matter to the spiritual primordial mother. This is what lived in Greece in the spirit of a few chosen ones and what carried the whole world view between Pythagoras and Plato. What lived as the deeper spirit in these personalities from Empedocles through Anaxagoras to Socrates and Plato sometimes appears to be merely a logical chain of thought, as presented to us by the philosophers. But it is an exposition of Greek myth, an exposition that was cultivated wherever a deeper foundation was sought. This is what appears to them as a mere logical chain of thought.

I would like to point out another myth, which was cultivated even more frequently than the Demeter myth, which is perhaps easier to understand, and which was cultivated in order to gradually lead initiates into a deeper spiritual understanding of the world. I would like to refer to the myth of the Argonaut voyage. This shows in each of its individual sentences that it can only be understood as the symbolic clothing of a deeper wisdom. Phrixos and his sister Helle set off on the ram [...] to the barbarian king. On the way, Helle falls into the sea and Phrixos alone reaches the coast on the ram. When they reached the barbarian people, the ram was sacrificed to the king. But the ram's skin was hung up in the sacred grove of the gods and guarded by a great dragon. Jason, together with Orpheus, Heracles, Theseus, Castor and Pollux, Meleager, Peleus, Neleus, Admetus, Pirithoos and many others, undertakes to retrieve this ram's skin [- the golden fleece]. These are the great heroes of Greece. It is significant that Jason, with the representatives of the highest Greek spirituality, undertakes to retrieve the skin. He actually wins the skin and brings it back. The dragon guarding the skin is defeated by Jason. The dragon's teeth are then sown, and out of these grow fierce men who fight each other. Finally, in short, he gets the fleece with the help of the sorceress Medea. On the way back, however, Medea decides to dismember [her] little brother Apsyrtos. The father Aietes collects the pieces and therefore does not reach the fugitives. The fleece is brought back to Greece.

We must also interpret this in a threefold sense. Firstly natural, secondly human and thirdly divine. [As a human event it is of no interest, but in its divine meaning this myth perhaps leads most deeply into the Greek intellectual world.] Phrixos is divine vision, that which points us to the abyss of divine being, to the premonition of an infinite depth. Nothing else is expressed in the personality of Phrixos. [Brightness is the personality, the representative of man before his fall into sin, for whom the struggle of the spirit with materiality has not yet existed] - the undivided humanity, which is connected with nothing other than the infinite vision of infinity. [Both set out on the path to the most sacred thing they have. And the representatives of the human soul first come to the sacred grove of the gods in order to sacrifice to it and to begin the path of life with this human soul]. We have only one other person in the Argonaut train. Phrixos begins his journey through life into the realm of the barbarians on the other side of the sea. This is to be understood as the realm of passions, the realm of sensuality. The human soul is to be sacrificed to the realm of materiality. It is to be sacrificed to the waves and bustle of the world. As a result, one thing is lost, the original innocence. It is initially submerged, lost. It is initially something that has flowed out into existence. [It is something that is initially completely lost, which is why it has sunk into the Hellespont. The soul is led into life, where we have nothing but a dark urge, where we must find our way back to the higher life]. But [the soul] must be redeemed anew, just as Persephone was redeemed by Dionysus. It must be redeemed. What had to be sacrificed to life must be redeemed. It must be redeemed here by Jason, the Greek hero. The ram is sacrificed to the gods. Only the ram's skin, that which surrounds the human soul as a shell, is first hung up in the sacred grove of the gods and carefully guarded by the dragon. This is initially nothing other than what is given in the Book of the Dead. [The ram's skin] is the representative of enlightenment, of knowledge. It must first be redeemed from the fury of the terrible powers that lurk before it. The king's son Jason must overcome these forces through knowledge in conjunction with spiritual and physical forces. He must lead this ram's skin back to Greece, supported by Medea, a female figure. I have already pointed out that the female figure signifies a state of consciousness in Greek. The soul must be redeemed with the help of Medea's magical power. From this immersion she can then be led back up to her deification, her divinization. That is the deeper meaning of the Argonaut saga.

The fact that the young son of Aietes, Medea's brother, has to be killed so that Medea's father cannot reach [the fleeing Jason] also has its significance. The one who has achieved this must leave behind many things that have been in his life. He has to leave some things behind, for the reason that [he cannot be caught up] on the path to deeper knowledge. This is how the saga of the Argonauts concludes. Basically, it is nothing more than a different version, more tailored to the individuality of man, of the myth that we also encounter in the Demeter myth.

This conception of the Greek myth then confronts us in a philosophically one-sided formation in a personality that represents a kind of fall from grace for the Greek world view: in Parmenides, the founder of the Eleatic school of philosophy. He first pointed out in an intellectual or rational way that sensual knowledge cannot satisfy man. He pointed out that man cannot get to the bottom of things and that the weighing up and weighing down of the world cannot be the truth, but that the truth must be something much deeper, that it can only be purely spiritual. He first put this into this form: true existence can only be achieved through pure thinking, through the deepest knowledge, while the senses only present us with a dream. - Parmenides thus divides the whole of existence into two parts, into sensual illusion on the one hand and intellectual, mental existence on the other. But there is still something that he could not find, and that is the ego. He could not find the figure of Dionysus in the figure of Persephone, in the urge to emerge from the sensual, the spirit. Parmenides did not take this [step]. He only saw that which is enchanted in the sensual world and on the other side Demeter [and Hades], the materiality. But he was unable to find the path that unites the two.

In a slightly different form, we encounter the same thing in Empedocles, who said that the primordial being had dissolved into a series of elements, into fire, water, earth and air. In these four elements he saw nothing other than individual eternal manifestations of the primordial being, the eternal world spirit. And in every single thing he saw certain mixtures of the four elements, even in man. The fact that the human being also consists of a mixture of the same elements as the world means that the human being can understand the world. The same can be recognized by the same. This is the same thing that Goethe says:

Were not the eye sun-like,
it could never behold the sun.
If God's own power were not in us,
how could the divine delight us?

This view was already held by Empedocles. He even had the view that the essence reigns in all being, [so that] he already [anticipated] the saying in Goethe's "Faust": "Exalted Spirit, you gave me, gave me everything ..." [anticipated]. Empedocles already recognized this totality of being. He believed that before it rises to the higher, it must pass through the lower stages. The spirit must pass through the stages of inorganic, elementary existence, the stages from plant to animal existence up to the form of man, and always follow them. This is why he sees love and hate as what brings the elements together. Empedocles thus describes life as a constant struggle between love and hate. In this way, the worldly sage also repeats the battle between [Osiris-Isis and Typhon] and the battle between Persephone and [Hades].

So we see in the Empedoclean doctrine nothing other than the elaboration of what [Empedocles] could get to know in the Greek mystery schools. We shall see that he does not consider anything incomprehensible that is described to the philosophers as incomprehensible.

We are told that human existence is not completed in the single individuality, but that this human existence was already there before it entered the individual personality, and that it will also be there again in other forms and shapes after it leaves this personality. In short, [Empedocles] stands on the standpoint of the transmigration of souls, of metempsychosis. He was initiated into the teachings of the Pythagoreans. The philosophers could not understand how Empedocles arrived at this doctrine if he assumed that the soul is a mere mixture of the four elements, but still ascribes to it a special existence in that it can take on different forms. We will understand that Empedocles sees in these four elements nothing other than the one eternal primordial being that has poured itself into existence, and that we therefore have to see in them only a special form of existence that flows back again to the primordial being. Thus in the spiritual conception of Empedocles we have something higher than the merely sensual. Empedoclean philosophy is nothing more than a philosophical dissection of the Argonaut legend, the legend of Demeter and Persephone and so on.

These teachings were then adopted by Socrates and Plato, and we are not to understand the historical Socrates in the figure of Socrates when we encounter him in the Platonic dialogues. Socrates appears to Plato as the master of the school, and he represents the school in his conversations. Socrates was regarded by Plato as such a leader. In the Platonic Discourses, it is not the historical Socrates who is the main subject, but the spiritual leader, the one who leads from the lowest levels of knowledge up to the highest. We cannot understand the meaning of the Platonic Conversations if we do not understand them as a mental image of mystical instruction, as instruction and guidance from the lowest to the highest levels of knowledge.

The other day I mentioned the talk about the immortality of the soul. This is usually understood as if immortality were to be proven by a logical thread. But it is not a question of proving the immortality of the soul, and what has been written about whether the proof has succeeded or failed. If it is said that the proof is no longer congenial to us today, then the person concerned only shows that he has not grasped the whole spirit of the "Phaidon". It is not a question of proving whether the soul is immortal, but of something quite different. We can assume that Plato also went through the schools of [the] Sophists. Protagoras was the founder of the "phrase: he is portrayed [in the Platonic dialog "Protagoras"] as someone who led knowledge astray. But we must not forget that Socrates was a profound [ironist]. We must not forget that the Greeks had their own conception of irony, that they understood it as something that was necessary for the illumination of the whole world view. Socrates fought the sophists with irony. What are the sophists? The sentences uttered by Protagoras characterize them:

["Man is the measure of all things, of those that are, that they are - of those that are not, that they are not." And:] We cannot prove anything rigorously. One thing can be said of every thing, but the opposite can also be said of every thing. This seemed to be the destruction of all knowledge. Even today it seems as if the sophists were playing a vain game with ideas, as if they wanted nothing more than to talk about every thing. Vanity was their purpose, as the measure of all things was only purpose. The Sophists by no means took this absurd and downright frivolous standpoint. The Sophists are, if I may say so, the personalities within Greek intellectual life who wanted to reduce to absurdity the knowledge that flows purely from the intellect, but who also put into practice in a different way the old Apollonian sentence: "Man is the measure of all things", which means nothing other than that man has to rise and seek within himself. - Do not recognize yourself with random intellectual knowledge, but immerse yourself in your true self. - They adjusted themselves to pure logic on a trial basis in order to lead them all the more surely into error. You can prove the one, and you can prove the other. But the sophists only wanted to show the worthlessness of logic. It is worthless to stop at what we encounter externally, at purely intellectual knowledge. Man would have to be just as unsatisfied in this knowledge as he would have to be unsatisfied within a purely mindless sensory life.

Plato had become acquainted with this sophism, and he apparently fought it, not because he regarded it as a worthless phenomenon, but as an irony. He took the standpoint of Protagoras, and Protagoras always falls short of Socrates, who does not want to grasp the world through reason, but through immediate life and through the mind. But this is not a different point of view from the one put forward by the Sophists. The sophists wanted to be opposed because they wanted to expose the absurdity of these propositions in order to show where each proposition leads. Thus Socrates, by leading beyond sophistry, led to deeper knowledge. He liberates his students from the belief in reason. This redemption is expressed to us in all those conversations [in which the sophists, Socrates' immediate predecessors, are combated]. The Discourses are written for the sole purpose of disabusing people of the belief in the provability of higher knowledge. That is the purpose of the Platonic Discourse. No one will believe that a flower can be proved. No one will seek proof that a flower exists. It is enough if we experience existence. You cannot prove a thing. You can prove the connection between things. You can prove that some fact must be there, from a context that you have already perceived. But you can never prove a thing that you have absolutely not perceived. So it is not a question of proving something logically, but of expanding the field of experience, of opening up the field of experience into a metaphysical realm. Something should be opened up that lies behind experience. [So it should not say: Here you have experience, and you should pay attention to something that lies behind it. It should not be deduced logically, but experienced spiritually. It should not be proven, but experienced.

This is also the case in the "Phaidon". You have to experience what Socrates means by "soul". He does not want to prove that the soul is immortal, but he wants to lead his students to experience the soul in the same way as the body. The "Phaidon" is about the discovery of the soul. It is about experiencing the soul. When his students have really experienced "soul, then [its] characteristics will soon become clear to them. If you want to be shown a flower, you show him the flower and don't let him prove it.

This is what is meant by the Socratic method. The Socratic method is usually understood in a much more trivial way. The Socratic method means nothing other than the opening of a completely new field of experience, the opening of new senses, the opening of a new field of experience, and the teaching of Socrates is such that every person can be led to such higher [cognitive] powers. And the leading to such powers in the Socratic method is the conversation.

We will find in the conversations the most profound method and the truest mysticism, and we will see the form in which [Greek] mysticism has expressed itself in the most profound and experiential way. I am convinced that Plato's teaching can only be understood superficially, that the doctrine of ideas can only be seen as an emptiness of ideas, if one does not draw this doctrine of ideas from the depths of Greek spiritual life, if one does not take into account the tragedy of life that the myth of Demeter expresses by showing that the dearest thing Demeter has must first fall away in order to then seek the way back again. And in the Argonaut legend, it is depicted that man must lose himself on the path of life in order to be able to redeem himself again with the help of his new powers. That saga thus expresses to us the deep tragedy that lies in the fact that [knowledge] must first be lost, sunk into the depths of materiality, and that it can only be found again by way of complete self-denial - and only by giving up many a love. And this expresses that this rediscovery of the highest knowledge is linked with the true redemption of this knowledge, with the finding of the infinite in the finite, with the overcoming of individuality, that therefore this knowledge can only be achieved through one of the most original forces that rule in man; and this again expresses itself meaningfully through the emergence of human vision, that which Phrixos has to sacrifice first, the vision which leads us into the indeterminate and into the deepest depths, which leads us to the point that we can never be satisfied and that we can only find ourselves on the perpetual path back to Demeter. This realization means the infinite path to rediscover lost knowledge. This is expressed in the distinction between the lower and higher consecrations.

When Schelling passed from his youth to a later age, he distinguished the teachings of his youth, which express the most spiritual and profound. He later expressed this philosophy of his youth as a lower consecration compared to his later one, because the height of that vision had dawned on him, in which he recognized that there are abyss-like depths that can never be reached [with the ordinary powers of thought]. The realization of certain spiritual powers to encompass this world is what he calls [higher] consecration. To lose this faith altogether in comparison to the lower consecration and to believe and experience the omnipotence of the infinite depth, which has been lost to us, is the infinite love into which the divine principle has flowed and can be found again through this infinite. This is what he calls the "higher consecration."

Answer to the question:

Question about the sacrifice of Abraham.

These teachings of the Old Testament are a distortion. Jewish secret teachings then emerge, in which these things are then pulled together again. It is the same as in the legends of Demeter, Persephone and Dionysus. In them the doctrine of man is carried out in a tangible way. The Abraham sacrifice would correspond to the second stage of the human stages, the necessity of sacrificing one's loved one. It is undoubtedly taken from religious systems in which this school of thought lives.

It must be assumed for a whole series of Christian myths that in the year 1 there was no awareness of the esoteric side at all. Paul was the founder of Christianity, which has lived in the church right up to our time.

If I interpret the "Sistine Madonna" esoterically and someone tells me that Raphael knew nothing about it, I say: Yes, it doesn't need to be. If that is attempted, I have to be pleased and regard it as a perfectly justifiable thing. I am always pleased when people try to show this. The philosophers in the pulpits don't get involved in esotericism. The most important is Kühnemann.

In Empedocles, there is something we cannot understand. We can only present [it] as something incomprehensible; all modern research deals only with the purely natural conception of the matter and finally only with the question of its origin, with the question: How could something like this have developed?

[Ladies and gentlemen present!

I have taken the liberty of describing the development of Greek spiritual life in the centuries before Plato - as a kind of preparation for Greek mysticism proper, that is, for the time in which the mystery system merged into what is usually called mysticism.

I note provisionally that Plato, who belongs to the fifth to fourth centuries before the birth of Christ, appears as a great confluence of all that Greek intellectual life had produced before Plato. He died at the age of eighty in 347 BC. Into this life was squeezed a continuous development that must appear particularly ascending [and] great to those who know how to read the Platonic writings correctly.

Plato's history of development in Greece took place at a time when life in Greece had taken on the strangest character. We must be clear about the fact that when Plato appeared, a kind of split also occurred, so that we only have to see the [one] branch of Platonic mysticism that developed after him and which can be called the "striving for truth". [The other branch, which has detached itself from the unified mystery being, has become art], above all in the form that confronts us in Greek tragedy, in the tragedy of Aeschylus and in the less important tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides.

Plato's [life] coincided with this period. Mystery became flattened into mere tragedy. Mystery united in undivided unity that which art and Greek mysticism had sought on separate paths. Such a division between truth and beauty, between mysticism and art, did not yet exist at the time of the ancient Greek Mysteries, and to a certain extent we will also see that a large part of the Mysteries took refuge in art. The most fleeting thing is the ideal.

We do not understand the concept of art at all if we do not understand it as something that has arisen as a distillation of the Greek Mysteries. But we can only understand this when we have penetrated the meaning of the ancient Greeks of the pre-Platonic period, who understood the really deep meaning of the word mystery. The Greek mystery being of pre-Platonic times united everything that can be expressed in inner aspirations. And what confronts us on the surface - including Heraclitus' philosophy - are only the diluted products of those who penetrated the depths of the mystery being, who threw them into the others because they could not penetrate, so that they could at least suspect, even if they could not see.

What the Greeks were looking for is something that Plato also gradually became aware of. It is that which presents itself to us in the writings that are usually referred to as the writings of the first eight years of Plato's writing career.

If you take these writings from the first period of Plato's writings, you will see that you are dealing with purely philosophical writings, ethical writings, moral writings. And that is the character of the so-called "Socratic philosophy". Socrates boasts that he was never initiated into the mysteries. After Socrates' death, an extremely important development begins for Plato, which then reaches its climax in Plato's most important work, the "Timaeus".

That which was present [in the heyday of spiritual life in Greece, before Christianity had a transforming effect on Greek spiritual life] and which Plato went through, this entire developmental process was called "initiation" in Greek spiritual life. It is what those who wanted to be initiated into the Mysteries strove for. For the Greeks, receiving initiation and becoming an initiate were one and the same thing.

And now, if I want to develop Platonic mysticism before you in the form in which it will appear to us as a process of continuous initiations, I must say something in advance. I must say in advance that what the Greeks had about the nature of initiation was expressed in a strange myth which cannot be understood if it is not regarded as a symbolic representation of initiation. It forms a parallel to the myth of Dionysus, a side piece to it; it is, however, quite different.

We know: Dionysus is the son of a mortal, Semele. Semele perished. She had asked Zeus to appear to her in his heavenly splendor and glory. When he granted her this, he had to appear like this and she was struck by his lightning bolt and burned to death. Dionysus had to be born a second time, [after Zeus had saved him by bringing the still immature child to maturity in his own thigh,] so that Dionysus, who was born as a man, was then burnt and then appeared as god-born.

This Dionysus myth presents us with the world process, the world's evolution, as the process of the incarnated god, as the process that the god goes through, that the one who has become god goes through. These myths were mysteries that related to the world process without taking into account the role that man plays within the world.

This Dionysus myth is accompanied by another myth, like a side piece. This is the myth of Heracles. It presents itself to us as a humanized Dionysus myth. Heracles was also the son of a mortal: He really is born of Alcmene. Now it turns out that this birth is delayed by Hera's jealousy, that he is born too late. Eurystheus was born beforehand, to whom he ceded the birthright. Because he was born second in line, Heracles had to perform his twelve well-known labors in the service of Eurystheus. So here we see the myth of Dionysus in a humanized form. So both were fire. Heracles then performs his human labors, and only after completing them is he transported to Olympus. Then he dissolves in fire.

So Heracles appears to us like the humanized Dionysus. He appears to us as one who has taken all suffering upon himself, in contrast to Dionysus, who has been spared this suffering. These twelve labors are nothing other than human trials that man has to pass in order to gradually ascend to the highest level he can reach. This whole myth can only be understood as a symbolic representation of the initiation process, and the twelve labors represent twelve successive states of the human soul. Through these, man gradually reaches an elevated consciousness, the entrance, the attainment of the actual divine consciousness.

The nature of these labors proves that the twelve labors of Heracles are nothing other than tests that man has to undergo in the course of the initiation process. It might seem to us that these labors have been juxtaposed by poetry as the overcoming of twelve monsters. 'But if you compare them, you will find that they are not tests of strength by a strong man, but meaningful symbolic things.

These are monsters, which were brought forth by the brother and sister Phorkis and Keto, from which the actual earthly things emerged. In connection with the Pontus, it is the deities who bring forth the liquid - standing between the fire and the earthly. Phorkis' and Ketos' descendants are the monsters that Heracles has to overcome. They must be overcome, these entities, they must be cast off. Let's take a look at these monsters against which Heracles fights:

[Firstly:] The 'Nemean Lion': He presents himself to us as a descendant of the sibling pair Phorkis - Keto. Citing the relationship would lead nowhere, but the genealogical structure is completely correct. The important thing is that the lion has an impenetrable hide. Heracles can only strangle him. He does so and brings him to his master. But his master is now afraid of him, so Heracles has to stay outside the city on his orders. The impenetrable force of nature is fully represented by the impenetrable fur. You cannot pierce the veil, you cannot pierce it with arrows; you can only leave it in place, you can only paralyze its mighty willpower. But you have to let it exist as an entity next to you. It cannot be killed completely.

We can only remain partial victors in this battle. We can only achieve the beginning, only a part. That is the important thing in this work. In the whole struggle, the forces of nature appear to us as voiceless powers whose voice we cannot recognize on the lower stages of development. Nature stands before us as a mute goddess. We must allow her to exist, we can only partially conquer her. This is symbolized for us in this first work.

[Secondly:] The second work that Heracles undertakes is the battle against the 'Lernaean serpent'. It has nine heads, of which the middle one is immortal. These have the property that they are always renewed when they are cut off. The battle is therefore a very difficult one. Heracles can only overcome this renewal by burning them with fire. This reveals something significant to us: he handles fire.

But we will see that this second work has a special meaning. It presents itself to us as a link between the temporal and the eternal. The middle, immortal head is nevertheless an obstacle to actual entry into the eternal. This can only be overcome through spirituality. But Heracles is not at the stage where he can accomplish this work. We must realize that it is like playing with fire by someone who does not know how to handle it properly. So this second work seems to be something that cannot really be of importance to Heracles. It is strange that the link between the temporal and the eternal should appear so early.

[Thirdly:] The third work is the conquest of the "Kerynite hind", which is sacred to Artemis, the virgin goddess of the hunt. In the reference to the virgin Artemis, to the arts of peace, we see that it is an ascending process. This hind [Heracles] caught alive. He was only allowed to catch her alive and bring her home alive. This was a work that he accomplishes in the purely earthly. He abandons the struggle for the immortal. He endeavors to stand firm and turn around.

[Fourthly:] Having gained strength in this way, he sets about another task, [namely capturing the "Erymanthian boar alive]. He brings it bound to Mycenae. This is warlike work. This tells us that, having overcome his warlike longing, he must descend again and can now go on to more meaningful work. We see that he now - as if by chance - accomplishes something else: he wounds the Centaur Chiron, who has to fulfill the important task of standing up for Prometheus. We see how the Prometheus legend is linked here with the Heracles legend. We see how the element of will is linked here with the actual course of Heracles' development. We see how Heracles creates and orders the being that is to deliver Prometheus from his torments. Thus we see how Heracles at this stage, after he has overcome himself and desisted from the struggle, after he has gone through the renewed conflict, is now called to do something for striving humanity. This is the meaning behind the connection between the Heracles myth and the Prometheus myth.

[Fifth:] The cleansing work of the stable of Augeas. Those who sought admission to the Mysteries had to undergo a kind of purification, a baptism. This fifth work can be accomplished by those who have completed the first. It is not an actual work, it comes to man of its own accord. It is not an actual work of Heracles. The second and fifth labors cannot really be considered Heracles labors. The second leads too early to the eternal, and the fifth is something that comes to him of its own accord. They are therefore a kind of intermediate stages.

[Sixthly:] A special work of Heracles is that which he accomplishes with the "Stymphalian birds". These are birds with which he also has to do battle. Pallas-Athena comes to his aid in this work. We have already seen what she is. She has great significance in the Odysseus saga. She is the deity of wisdom, of heavenly wisdom. Now, after the purification, Pallas-Athena stands at his side. Pallas-Athena is - in contrast to knowledge - the right wisdom.

[Seventh:] Overcoming the birds was only one stage of development. But only with the help of Athena is he able to bring the "Cretan Bull alive to Mycenae.

The bull is a symbol in all mysteries that was widespread in the ancient world at that time, a symbol that passed from Persia through Asia Minor, Egypt and then spread from there through Greece. It is a symbol for the fruitful living nature. Therefore, in the Mysteries of Mithras, we see the bull paired with a strange symbol, a symbol of living nature. The tail of the bull runs out into a bunch of ears of wheat. This is definitely the symbolic representation of fertile and living nature. And the Mithras symbolism represents nothing other than this work of Heracles. This appears as a higher work of Heracles: the "Nemeijic lion is the lower, the bull the higher. The bull is the nature from which life sprouts, while the lion is the nature that is blind, dull.

This bull is sacred to Poseidon. We also know that this bull is depicted for those who were admitted to the battles of Mithras, as a bull on which a youth sits, thrusting his sword into the bull's side. A dog jumps in. Below is a snake, lengthwise. In front of and behind the bull are two attendants. The youth represents nothing other than the one on the path of initiation. On one side he has a companion with a raised torch, on the other side a companion with a lowered torch. This represents a process between life and death, which is the process of initiation. The upper part represents the passing sun god, the ascending and descending one. This rightly represents to us as spiritual what goes on below. This is the corresponding process in the realm of Dionysus, while the lower one is that in which Heracles finds himself. The image contains nothing other than the seventh work of Heracles. This is contained in all the representations of the Mysteries throughout the ancient world.

[Eighth:] Now Heracles can accomplish a very important work. He can overcome the world hostile to man at his highest level. The trials are renewed again and again, and that which is now to be overcome presents itself to us in the eighth work, the overcoming of the "fire-breathing horses of the son of Ares Diomedes. These "fire-breathing horses become immediately clear to us when we hear that they have to be fed with human flesh. The misanthropic violence on the higher level is that which can still impose a test on man, even if he has already achieved a high level of spiritual conquest. Here he overcomes by presenting the horses himself and then leading them to Olympus, where they are torn apart by wild animals. Now he is able to carry out the further trials. We see how what man can achieve on his path of development gradually forms into a well-rounded whole.

[Ninth:] He then conquered the "Belt of the Amazon Queen". This represents the empowerment of that which prevents us, as it were, from attaining the higher levels of consciousness as something with which we are connected. We are dealing here with a female element. It must take possession of the "belt of the Amazon Queen".

[Eleventh:] But it is significant for us because he erects the pillars of Heracles on one side of the world and on the other. The test course is now completed for him with the erection of the two border pillars.

Heracles could thus appear to us as a kind of initiate. However, the second and fifth works have something questionable about them. In the works of the "Cleansing of the Augean Stable and the 'Lernaean Serpent', however, it is expressed that he did not achieve his complete initiation. The two works were not accepted.

11 b: "He had to seize the apples of the Hesperidens. They were the bridal gift of Hera, [which Gaea had given to Hera at her marriage,] the symbol of knowledge itself. Heracles must first retrieve it from Hera's garden, [where they were guarded by four maidens, the Hesperides, and the dragon Ladon, a descendant of Phorkys and Keto]. 11 c: In this way he frees Prometheus and 11 d overcomes Antaios, the giant figure who is always sucking new power from the earth, who only needed to touch the earth to receive new power, natural power. Only after Heracles has passed these almost insurmountable tests of nature can he fetch the apples of the Hesperides. The [overcoming of] natural power is not yet something permanent. At this stage he must realize that this knowledge must be continually renewed. This test must always be carried out anew. The only thing that can be achieved is that the Antaios must always be fought anew. It will always gain new strength when it touches the earth. It is therefore an ongoing battle.

[Twelfth:] Before Heracles accomplishes the twelfth labor, he is initiated into the mysteries. That is what we are told. We don't need to interpret it. Before he does his twelfth labor, he is initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries. And what does he accomplish here? He descends into the underworld, frees Theseus and achieves what is described by the words: he can bring Cerberus up from the underworld. The secret of the underworld becomes clear to him. Heracles acquires the Heraclitean wisdom of "overcoming life with death". He learns to understand Heraclitus' formula, in which he says: "The worship of Dionysus is at the same time the worship of Hades. In it, the highest deity of life flows together with the god of the underworld, Hades. The fruit is therefore the attainment of the underworld, something that we already encounter in Odysseus. It is the symbolic representation of the initiation process that we find in the Heracles legend. It only remains so incomprehensible that we don't really know what to do with it because it didn't really grow out of Greek philosophy, but out of mystery.

When we understand the legend of Heracles, we understand the corresponding teachings of all peoples, of the Indians, Persians and Egyptians. The mysteries of Heracles have existed alongside the mysteries of others. They all represent to us the initiatory process, and the initiatory process is the same throughout the ancient world. I have cited the Mithras myth only to show how the Heracles myth lives throughout antiquity and how the Greek spiritual life in the Dionysus myth represents the higher development of the Heracles myth, representing the higher as opposed to the lower. [This is illustrated by the parallelism of the Dionysus process with that of the others. It is also shown in Angelus Silesius that the Initiate is not something indifferent in the world process, but something significant.

The Greek spiritual world also created an equivalent for the "above" and "below". What went on in Dionysus was referred to as the "spiritual process", the "above"; what went on in man was referred to as the "below". For the purpose of mediating between the two, an image was created, the figure of Hermes, the messenger of the gods. He takes care of errands, love letters and so on, but also has a deep esoteric meaning. He presents himself as the mediator of the Dionysian and the Heraclean. He is the son of Zeus and a mortal, Zeus with a daughter of Atlas, Maja, who lives in the Arcadian caves. Through the mediation, the connection of Maja with Zeus, the mediation between the "upper" and "lower" arises. Hermes is the symbol for the actual human spiritual power, which represents the mediation between the "above" and the "below".

The whole myth of Hermes is proof that the human striving for knowledge is simultaneously a matter of earthly and spiritual nature. This dual striving for knowledge is expressed in Hermes. He is the "clever one, the 'cunning one'. Even as a child he raids Apollo's herd of cattle and drags away a number of cattle. His cunning as a child is already so great that the pursuer cannot even follow their trail. He leads them in such a way that the cattle go the other way. The pursuer is thus misled. Apollo [does] solve the mystery with the help of Zeus.

Hermes has succeeded in forming a lyre from a tortoise shell. Here you can see how the power of the spirit leads through man from the "lower" to the "upper". He gives this turtle-shell lyre to Apollo for the herd of cattle.

There we see how a separation occurs: on the one hand, we have the actual pursuit of knowledge. - Music and the arts have passed to the other messenger of the gods; Apollo is also a messenger of the gods. Hermes and Apollo are two messengers of the gods. In Hermes we have the sense of truth and in Apollo the sense of beauty. Here again we have the gift of imagination as a connection between the lower and the higher. Thus Hermes and Apollo appear to us as mediators of the lower and the higher. They are the two forces that connect the Dionysian with the Heraclean. They present to us separately that which was present to us as a unified process on the original level.

This is how the later mystery teachings developed. These are the later myths that could only arise from those that contained truth, beauty and goodness in an undivided form. When the festivals that were celebrated in the mystery temples contained everything as if in one trunk, "Hermes and "Apollo" could not exist. But when the artistic striving arose, as in the tragedies of Aeschylus, and the striving for truth in Socrates and Plato, these two branches of the original trunk appeared. On the one hand, we have the pursuit of knowledge, which originated with Socrates and Plato, and on the other, art, which strangely enough has never - not even to this day - been connected with the pursuit of truth in the consciousness of the majority of humanity.

It was only at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that the realization dawned that these two tribes belong together, that neither of them can exist without the other and that real deepening is only possible when these two tribes reunite. For a large part of human consciousness, this unification cannot be described as achievable. But where we have encountered something significant in this respect, it can be found in Goethe. How deeply Goethe looked into these things can be seen from the content of the following words: "I have the suspicion that the Greeks proceed according to the eternal laws according to which nature itself has proceeded."

There dawned upon [him] a ray of that [primal ray] from which Greek spiritual life developed. And the result was many a thing that has come to us as a shining point.

Answer to the question:

[Question:] What is the relationship between the emergence of Plato's mystical philosophy on the one hand and the emergence of tragedy on the other?

[Answer:] The origin of tragedy has been sought in the origin of tragedy in Greek life. In Wagner's camp, it is clear that in late Greek times there was still an idea of what the mere shadow of the mysteries, tragedy, was all about. We can see this from Aristotle's description of tragedy and epic. What he writes about it has been incredibly misunderstood. A myriad of books have been written with conjectures about what he might have meant by "purification through fear and pity". Through catharsis we are purified from fear and pity. One cannot know what catharsis represents if one does not consider it on the basis of the wisdom of the Mysteries, the Mystery Being. The passions were calmed by soothing music. Only then did the players appear. This is the first stage of the initiation process. Tragedy presents this process to us exoterically. It is the shadowed great catharsis within the Greek mysteries. If one reads Aristotle's poetry, the "Poetics", with this presupposition, then one can also understand what Aristotle was able to say. Without this background, it is completely worthless.

In this way, you really understand that art has grown out of immense depths. It is not something eternal; it presents itself as something temporal alongside the pursuit of truth. Art presents itself to us as something against which the convincing power of truth has dwindled in human consciousness. Therefore, it is not even felt that art basically also wants to strive for truth. This awareness has been lost. It has been deprived of the core of truth.

The other tree appears to us in Platonic philosophy, in Philonic philosophy as a new striving for truth. In Platonic philosophy we have before us a striving to advance towards knowledge by the one-sided path of striving for truth. It is quite natural that Plato arrived at the doctrine of ideas: For Plato, the world process was, on the one hand, emergence from chaos, and on the other, emergence from ideas. The world process consists of the continuous interpenetration of the spiritual with the material, of ideas with chaos.

The demiurgos, the world soul, arises as the first product. It is the first matter into which the breath of the spirit has penetrated. Plato depicts this in the form of a cross. And connected with this form is the entire world of ideas of the Logoi, as the Platonic world of ideas must be called. Thus it presents itself as the pursuit of pure truth and then again in the "Timaeus" as truth itself. This truth is presented to us under the new image, under the new symbol "of the Logos stretched on the world cross. We have the Logos in connection with the world cross.

You will now see that it was already in the original Platonic mystic that in the form in which Christianity later developed - after it had passed through a Greek spiritual consciousness - [...] it had to deepen from mere myth to true mysticism. After all, the Logos crucified on the world cross is found in Greek.

[Dearly beloved!]

Eight days ago I took the liberty of characterizing this great transition, which for a mystical view of things expresses itself in the further development of the Mystery Being, of the Mystery Mysteries to Platonic-Socratic mysticism, and I ask you to consider from the outset, if I may, the Platonic philosophy, in the center of which the personality of Socrates appears as the bearer of a series of powerful ideas, that everything that I allow myself to develop as Platonic mysticism should certainly be understood in such a way that I develop everything out of Platonism that appears to me as Platonic mysticism.

From the outset, it will perhaps appear to those who view Platonic philosophy in a scholarly manner as an impossible, perhaps even a daring undertaking to illuminate the Platonic world of thought from the so-called mystical point of view. To the historian in particular, much of what I find in Greek philosophy, especially in Platonic philosophy, must appear to be unhistorical. The sources that led me to it, however, caused me to regard Platonism as a decidedly mystical doctrine, which I cannot avoid, which I cannot do without as a precursor of Neoplatonism and the teachings of early Christianity, to which I want to hasten.

These views are for me undoubtedly components of the mystical development in the West, and therefore I ask you to regard them as necessary components of mysticism, but not to regard them as any contribution to a purely scholarly conception of Platonic philosophy.

The last time I took the liberty of showing how art grew out of the basic view [of the Mystery Being], [which] was not yet divided into art and beauty, into wisdom and truth, on the one hand, and what is called philosophy grew out of it on the other, that a one-sided striving for truth, a one-sided striving for knowledge arose in the higher and lower form of logic, which, however, as I said, is nothing other than having grown out of an [originally unified] striving for the spiritualization of man.

I have endeavored to show that Aristotle's work can only be understood if it is regarded as a faint echo, a shadow of this original conviction of Greek mysticism, just as this basic conviction was in the Mystery Cult, that one cannot arrive at wisdom through the ordinary pursuit of truth, of logic, but that one can arrive at this wisdom through a method that still contains the pursuit of art and the pursuit of truth unmixed.

We are at the point in Greek development where, through Socrates, the pursuit of art stands out from human spiritualization and expresses itself on the one hand in Greek art and tragedy and on the other in the one-sided pursuit of truth, as we encounter it individually in Socrates and Plato.

In the course of the previous lectures I have tried to show that nothing else was to be understood from the mystery cults than a conception of the core of truth in the highest sense of myth, and how such a deepening of the Greek mythological ideas is possible that we must say to ourselves that the grasp of Greek mythology through the mystery cult appears to us as the detachment of the originally existing core of truth within Greek philosophy.

Now it is natural that at that time, when knowledge on a logical basis branched off from the actual original mysticism, the need had to arise to become clear about how myth actually relates to what is called truth in the ordinary sense. We have seen that it was a completely different striving for truth, which expresses itself quite differently, expresses itself in a kind of tongue of fire, which immediately leaps over into a kind of symbolic mode of representation. We have seen that they deviated completely from what we call scientific work. We saw that the prosaic need for truth jumped over into the mythological-allegorical mode of representation, so that we had the dress on one side and the core of the myth on the other.

After Socrates and his disciples had endeavored to pursue the truth in a purely intellectual, rational way, the question had to arise: How does what emerged in the myths relate to our abstract pursuit of truth? Socrates, who was initially interested in nothing other than knowledge of human nature, rejected the interpretation of myths. He rejected it and regarded himself as an uninitiated person. We will see that this has its deeper meaning in the Platonic account.

However, he had to take a stand on the question of myth. He took a highly peculiar position for those who look at the matter superficially. This can be seen from two works when we speak of Platonic philosophy. These two works are the Phaedrus and the Phaedo. Both deal with areas which contrast the contemplation of the finite with the contemplation of the infinite, or which rise from the contemplation of the temporal to the contemplation of the eternal.

If we therefore note this, the contemplation of the finite in relation to the infinite, we are confronted with the curious fact that Plato is quite resolutely opposed to any rationalistic interpretation of myth. We encounter this particularly in the "Phaedrus", in the discussion about love.

The other strange thing is that Plato [indeed] rejects a rational interpretation of myth, [but that at the same time] where he passes from finite truths to infinite truths, he himself becomes a myth-denier. Plato expresses himself symbolically and allegorically where he wants to speak of what we cannot see with our eyes or hear with our ears. Thus, where he speaks about the "Phaedrus", he expresses himself mythologically, while on the other hand the meaning of myth, as it was cultivated by the sophists, is understood in such a way that myth must be explained simply on the basis of pure reason and rules of understanding, as, for example, the carrying away of the king's daughter by the wind is interpreted as a simple natural event. This is simply rejected [in the "Phaedrus" by Socrates].

At the same moment, however, when contemplation rises from the ordinary things of life, Plato himself becomes a mythmaker. The deeper reason for this is none other than the fact that Plato has the definite feeling that everything that goes beyond sensory observation, beyond the observation of the intellect, is impossible for man to express in any other way than through myth. It is impossible for him to give a form of transmission other than by using the ordinary, prosaic word, as we see and hear it with the senses, connect it with the intellect, separate it logically and so on, mythologically. We have no language and are forced to resort to myth ourselves.

Now let us see what Plato says about the doctrine of the soul itself. The Platonic "Phaedrus" is about the subject that we have seen as the center of all Greek thought. It is about the path from subordinate levels of consciousness to the superior levels of consciousness. It is nothing other than a more logical approach, a more intellectual approach, which Plato practises compared to the approach practised by the Mysteries.

This way of looking at things undoubtedly has the great advantage for man that it is initially closer to the logical thinker, the person who prefers to appeal to reason. But then it also has the disadvantage that only very few can rise with Plato from the sensual, intellectual contemplation to the higher contemplation of a true myth. By a true myth I do not mean one that is supposed to include a miracle, but one that is borne by that higher concept of truth that we have come to know as the bearer of mythology, as the bearer of myth.

I think we have to follow the path, roughly, if not exactly, in the Platonic version, that a student of Plato would have taken under the leadership of a personality like Socrates. In the Phaedrus we are led to that principle in man, that force that drives him upwards from the lower states of the soul to the higher ones. And for Plato, this driving force that leads him from the lower to the higher states is love, that is Eros, that is what leads man with elemental force from an everyday life to a higher spiritual life.

And if we now visualize the process on the basis of the "Phaidros", we find three states of moral life characterized. These are:

Firstly, the state in which man is completely dominated by the lowest forms of love, in which he strives to fulfill the needs of his lustful feelings, in which he is completely driven by his lustful feelings. He is dominated by the pursuit of the pleasurable, and this is completely immersed in everyday life. He lives entirely in the life that is given to him through his senses. He lives entirely in the feelings that can only be awakened through his senses. This thus dissolves in the manifold and [in the finite,] in that which surrounds him and to which he also belongs. The power in man, which he has as a single member in this multiplicity, is sensuality, which evokes his feelings of pleasure and which he strives to satisfy.

The next higher level to which man can rise is that on which man does not stand exclusively on the ground of the sensual world. This is the form of prudence. There he rises above the world of the senses to the use of his actual spiritual power. He now regulates his needs [no longer merely according to pleasure, but according to the principle] of usefulness, according to what appears useful to him. That which appears useful to him for his temporal and, in his view, eternal existence becomes the content of his view of life and he satisfies this on his next, higher level.

This power in man, which will guide and lead him to satisfy his needs, is the human mind, which divides all things into useful and harmful in life. A person who allows his ethical life to be guided by his intellect will reject many things from his life's path that would give him pleasure but do not appear useful. Therefore, man is not always uplifted, but often pulled down. Prudence shows this. The prudent person will refrain from doing many things that give pleasure, and he will not conceal from himself the fact that what is useful is often only a hidden means of satisfying his pleasure. It may therefore be a higher level. However, we must assume that man must by no means completely abandon lust and sensuality. That would mean a weakness of human nature, because if man had to completely drown out his senses, he would find that he would not be able to elevate this sensual world through prudence.

[Thirdly:] Prudence should represent nothing other than a spiritualization of the life of the senses, the stage at which love takes the form of enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is not something that relates to the finite, but something that raises man from the finite to the infinite. Therefore, no one is capable of enthusiasm who, in addition to avoiding the sensual, is not able to grasp the eternal, the imperishable, the permanent. And here, where he first discovers his soul, where he first outgrows it and where he must feel himself as a member of multiplicity, and here, where he feels within himself that something higher presents itself in the moment of existence, he rises from finitude.

Here Plato falls into a form of representation that we must describe as mystical, symbolic, allegorical. Here he believes that we are dealing with something that is impossible to express in intellectual forms. Here he does not write as one writes from the intellect, but as one who has immersed himself in the sea of the infinite. He does not write like someone who can only reproduce the logical form, but like someone who has a new, higher form of representation that represents nothing other than a higher truth in relation to the logical truth.

If you do not look at it this way, the soul myth appears to you as nothing more than any other. But if you look up, you will find that Plato - unlike his predecessors - was what is called an initiate, that is, he was a man who was able to reproduce in image the deeper truths that were revealed to him. The person who is able to reveal the secret of this image, this mystery, can also know what Plato wants. This will also be different for different people. One person will only be able to guess what is hidden in the image, and the secret can only gradually be revealed to him. In any case, however, it is symbolism that expresses the deeper truths, because it is not a matter of brutally presenting them externally to the mind.

Such a brutally presented truth is not recognized in its full depth and cannot be recognized in its full depth. This is the same thing that compelled Goethe to speak as he did in his "Fairy Tale" of the green snake and the beautiful lily or in the second part of his "Faust". It is a need that is connected with human nature and that reverent shyness before the deeper truth:

He who has an inkling of the infinite capacity of such truths will find that it is necessary to live through the content of these truths, he will find that it is impossible for this content to be expressed logically. That is why Plato always becomes mystical, allegorical at the deepest points.

Plato describes the virgin soul in mystical form in such a way that he creates a myth out of it. It is intended to represent his conception of the soul. This Platonic myth is something you will find in theosophical literature from all over the world, including Buddhism. And if this myth does not correspond to what you know as "esoteric Buddhism", there will still be an opportunity to show a deeper correspondence between Platonic philosophy and esoteric Buddhism.

A calculation is not always wrong because something else comes out. You have to know whether the calculation is based on completely different assumptions from the outset. We calculate with decadic numbers. But there can also be systems where you only count to five. There would be a new order, so that all types of calculation would appear different to us. Some things will be different, and this is how I would like to characterize the teaching of the Mysteries in relation to esoteric Buddhism.

For Plato, it is therefore the case that one ascends or submerges into the world of infinity on three levels. And this world of the infinite, which no longer transmits the same properties as our senses, with which our mind reckons, separates and connects, can be grasped. Where man ascends, where he grasps the spirit in its sense-free form, we use the word "intuition". So we use the word intuition where the human being does not use the spirit to process the sensual, but perceives the spiritual as the sense perceives the sensual. Just as the sense perceives the sensual, so the spirit perceives the spiritual. And so it is a reflection of the eternal.

Here, then, Plato rises from the perception of the temporal to the perception of the eternal. Here Plato has reached the point where all the things, all the forms in which man perceives the ordinary sensory world, no longer have any validity, so that one can no longer speak about space and time. Above all, at this moment, when man rises from prudence to enthusiasm, the prospect of a new world opens up in his soul.

It must be noted that Plato knew, not merely believed. We know that Plato knew the difference between belief and knowledge. Belief disappears. Therefore, for Plato it is simply a foregone conclusion that the things that present themselves to a person on the third stage are eternal in nature. Just as it is clear to him that something stands before his eye, so it is clear to him that the things that present themselves to a person on the third stage are of an eternal nature. But just as he who can see colors is not able to give a colorblind person a real insight into the diversity of colors - he can [only] offer him a surrogate for it - just as he is not able to show him the colors, so the spiritually seeing person is not able to teach the spiritually blind person this. He who is not able to develop his outer world of the senses up into the world of the intellect as far as the spiritual world, where things are transformed from the temporal into the eternal, is not able to go along with Plato up to this point. Here ends what the physical mode of conception has enclosed in the usual way.

Whoever is enclosed between birth and death gains here a view into that which is not enclosed between birth and death. What connects Plato from such concepts, we must be clear that it is an exoteric talking around. Imagining the soul as a sensual thing, no matter how diluted its resemblance to the physical, is not yet an esoteric view.

We must realize that it is impossible to speak of an actual proof of the eternity of the soul before an actual Platonic way of thinking. That is simply nonsensical. One will prove things that are attainable through logic. One proves some mathematical theorem for my sake. When you prove it, you have a complicated manifold in mind, which you break down into parts and then put together what you want to prove. The entire basis of what a proof refers to must be given by observation. No other proof can prove anything. Therefore, for Plato it is not a question of proving the immortality of the soul.

There was no room for such a proof for Plato. For him, it was about elevating man so that he could see the spiritual without senses. And that is nothing other than the Platonic world of ideas. Anyone who sees it free of sensual qualities, who sees things as they appear to the spirit, has an idea of the Platonic world of ideas. This can also be called the soul's "participation in the world of ideas". At this moment, the soul immerses itself in the world of ideas. It penetrates it so that it is incorporated into an eternal stream and ceases to belong to merely temporal life. It surveys the temporal from a higher point of view. Thus, for Plato, rising above the world of the senses is the actual world of the spirit or the knowledge of the soul.

For Plato, the elevation to the actual spiritual world or the knowledge of the soul is not a logical process, but a real process of the soul. Man becomes a different person, he ascends and conquers his soul. At the moment when he has done this, when he can set aside the sensual qualities of the world, he has achieved that to which space and time are not applicable, where one can no longer speak of coming into being and passing away. He has attained that which is sublime above birth and death; he has become a partaker of eternity, so that what Plato understands by "becoming a partaker of eternity" is something that must be conquered.

In the Platonic view, we cannot say: We carry an eternal soul within us, and we only need to recognize ourselves and we will recognize the eternal soul. That would not be the correctly understood Christian theory. But that is the Christian trivial theory. The soul is present in the human being. You can go looking for it like something hidden behind a door. It is there. Knowledge is there without us going through the [stages of] knowledge.

This view is not like the Platonic view. Those who do not want to go through the process of development, but want to recognize something that they already have within themselves, remain stuck in the sensual, in the intellectual. They remain in the sensual and do not reach that which is new. That is the cancer of our modern theory of knowledge.

This disaster has been caused by Kant's philosophy, which starts from the point of view that all truth is finished, that all truth is already there and that man only has to discover the truth, that he only has to pull away the veil and that he is actually the fifth wheel in the world's gears. Man is necessarily part of it. And when Plato speaks of the Godhead, the Godhead is just as dependent on man as man is on the Godhead, because the Godhead could not achieve perfection if man were not involved. It would remain at a lower level if man did not help it to achieve its goal. What man develops in the spirit is part of the world process.

This is also the point at which Platonic development can also say yes to our scientific theory of development. If we see it simply as a series of perceptions, but one that is infinite and never complete, if we view the sensory stages as a chain and see man as the pinnacle of nature, who in turn continues the same development out of himself, so that he represents a link in the development, then we have before us in the modern world what we also have before us in the Platonic world.

The human being who does not merely dissect and interpret sensuality, whose process of cognition is a real one, who does not merely recognize in the process of cognition, but who does something, who transforms the soul, transforms it from a temporal into a divine soul. It is the transition that must be found. And the driving force that conjures up the divine, that elevates man from sensual desire to enthusiasm, where his spiritual drive finds the transition, that is Eros, that is where he attains the higher standpoint and gains the overview.

He then does not take these drives from temporality, they are borrowed from the eternal world of ideas. We call this timeless and spaceless world the world of ideas because everything spatial and temporal is discarded, because we know that we are dealing here with the spirit. At this level, we cease to speak of the soul enclosed in finiteness and can only speak of the eternal. Everything that man gains in temporality is nothing other than a shining forth of the eternal world into the temporal, and the temporal world is nothing other than a reflection of the eternal in temporality.

If we translate this back, such a reflection appears in our imaginary life. If the matter becomes such that we see things in the light of eternity, then this is not an idea that has arisen, of which we can say that it was not there. It has always been there, only it has not been in the consciousness of man. It is exactly the same as with an idea that took root in our consciousness yesterday, which we did not think about, but which re-enters our consciousness today. Such an entry into consciousness is also the entry of eternal ideas into consciousness. It is the ability to remember.

So Plato can understand all higher knowledge as a memory by translating the [temporal into the eternal] back. And so he can say: Everything that we imagine in our imaginary life is the recollection of an earlier, purely spiritual life. And that which thus shines in cannot perish. It is what remains, it is what lies beyond death and beyond birth.

This, then, is the transition from the [temporal to the eternal]. Now think of how Plato speaks of the soul, saying: The soul remembers the former states before birth. The way in which he expresses himself is again a language of infinity translated back into temporality. But this prompts Plato to express the idea in a mystical way so as not to evoke the sensual imagination.

And now, in Plato, the process takes place that has taken place in all myth-making, a process that will always prevent us from interpreting the myths in a realistic way. The process takes place that must develop in every human being when he has to say goodbye to the logical. Here are the limits of logic.

Kant only knows about intellectual cognition. When man finds the way out from the knowledge of reason to the knowledge of experience, then he knows that this higher knowledge exists. When man is able to recognize as Johann Gottlieb Fichte did [that is] in such a way that he perceives the visible from the spiritual, because the spiritual becomes so fluid, then he feels compelled to resort to myth.

The myth that Plato chose for the virginal soul presents the soul as a team of two horses, one rushing along, the other heading for heaven. They are steered by a guide on their journey through the world. First they come to the region of the sky and then to the region of the sky above.

Through these regions of the world, the soul, guided by its leader in the sense of this Platonic myth, reaches the heaven above after ten thousand years. During the transition from the sphere of the mundane to the sphere of the divine, it has to overcome the greatest obstacles. This is where it faces the greatest danger. The steed inclined towards sensuality threatens to shy away. If the senses are not able to gain an insight into the Supermundane, [the soul] can be thrown back. But when it returns, it can undergo the marriage with heaven. Within ten thousand years it undergoes ten embodiments in one millennium each. The soul is free to choose its body once every millennium and is thus able to shorten its path. The ten thousand years can be shortened to three thousand years.

By imbuing itself with philosophy, theosophy and mysticism, the soul is able to shorten the path. This enables it to limit life to a smaller series of physical embodiments. Physical life is on the one hand - I may not say a marriage of the spiritual with the material - but a marriage of the soul with the sensual. It is a sensual reflection of the spiritual. And this marriage necessarily takes place according to the eternal laws of the universe. Man is necessarily compelled, after a series of years, to make that great transition where he must gain passage through the purely spiritual realm of the world of ideas. At the same time he is free on this path, which he accomplishes both below and above, to give himself his embodiment. He is a being that floats between freedom and necessity, that carries out his life between freedom and necessity. Thus Plato can understand life in the temporal as a recollection of the life he experienced in the extra-temporal. Man must participate in this retrospection of the world of ideas if he wants to rise to the higher levels of knowledge.

This is Plato's poem about the transition from the finite to the eternal. He speaks of it as if he were speaking of a journey, he speaks of it as if it were a fictionalized world of the senses. But this is nothing other than the art of awakening the imagination through myth. This has to do with the fact that, whatever one may speak about these things, one sees even deeper foundations coming before the soul, and that one would therefore only restrict, only limit these things with every intellectual limitation, with every conceptual expression.

If, on the other hand, they are expressed in a symbolic way and the symbol is conceived in a higher sense and is not too sober and unambiguous, then everyone will perhaps be able to draw higher, more meaningful things from this symbol by penetrating into it than those who speak in symbols. The person who speaks in symbols does not claim to have already thought everything that the listener can put into it.

But what about the question: did he mean what he said? Well, he wants us to be able to read more into his symbol than he himself was perhaps able to see in it. This is the exoteric and esoteric understanding of the symbol. The esotericist is aware that every human being, no matter how high a level of knowledge he may reach, still only has individual knowledge, and that it is possible for him to find the point of passage through the human spirit to that which the individual human consciousness cannot exhaust. He is aware that man can express truths in poetry without knowing what lies within these truths. And it can be the case that someone else, who comes afterwards, can first peel out what is contained therein.

This difference must be noted, so that we must not ask: Did he who created a myth of the inner life put these things into the myth? No, it is a need for man to express himself mythically when he comes to things that go beyond the human. When we come across such a mystical thing, an allegory or a symbol, it is a sign that a different interpretation is now coming in, and proof that we may now apply not a "finite but an "infinite interpretation".

It is quite the same as with the one who stands before the ordinary views of human life. Such a person can only describe the mountains to us in a finite form. He cannot tell us everything that the mountain has shown us. He cannot convey the same impression. But the one who does it the way Plato did it does not want to give us a description, he will not say: Use this description, which will lead you on the right path. The Platonic writings will only be used by a higher understanding in a higher way when they serve as a kind of "spiritual Baedeker". They should not be interpreted, they should be travel descriptions in the realm of the spiritual and lead you to the things themselves. But then the very language of myth, which makes certain things disappear in a kind of indeterminacy, will be appropriate because it does not create the impression that the thing itself is to be completed with the strict contours. No, what is handed down to us should only be an indication of what the person concerned saw. It should be a guide, not a story, a manual on how to study history.

Question answer:

The number 10,000 as the time of reincarnation.

Everything contained in "Esoteric Buddhism" tempts us to interpret everything exoterically.

The symbol is not a truth, but a path that can lead us to the truth.

Allegories. Not all allegories are original. Many will be taken over. Otherwise, every allegory corresponds to a spiritual. You draw them from your inner life.

[Ladies and gentlemen present!

At the center of the Platonic structure of ideas is Plato's discussion on the immortality of the soul, the "Phaedo". And this discussion is perhaps the most important of the Platonic discussions apart from the "Timaeus". It is a work which perhaps in the most eminent sense provides proof that in Plato we are dealing with "true mysticism", indeed with "theosophy". I must emphasize quite explicitly that we are dealing here with theosophy, even though the name is not applied to it. Nor can it be used because the name 'theosophy' has only been used in literature since the third century. Before that, everything was called 'philosophy'. So the logical part of theosophy was also philosophy. This was no different in Plato's time. The word 'philosophy' is as old as Pythagoreanism. The word 'theosophy', however, dates back to the third century.

We know that this Platonic theosophy comes to light in the "Phaedo" in particular. This conversation, like the other conversations, is linked to Socrates. He is at the center of this conversation. Moreover, it is the innermost and most intimate circle of friends that gathers around Socrates. Therefore, it is probably also the most intimate thoughts that are expressed in it. The other conversations also take place between Socrates and a wider circle of friends. Therefore, much is spoken in a form that we need not take as the precise Platonic opinion, whereas in the Phaedo we actually have the deepest opinion [of Plato] before us. Moreover, this Phaedo ties in with one of the most significant historical moments, the death of Socrates. We are now led through philosophy from the conquest of life to the comprehensibility of death. When we then look at Dionysus, the god of pleasure, and what is said of him in the Phaedo, this is elevated in the Phaedo by the fact that we see that it is Socrates who is having this conversation immediately before his death. In the moments before he dies, he once again sets out his views on life and on overcoming life; he talks about the eternity of the soul. It is therefore a significant moment in which the conversation begins, so that we perhaps have to look for the most important thing that Plato believes he can tell us.

When Socrates' pupils visit him in the dungeon and are on the verge of the sad event, some weep for him, while others say that he is dying the death of the wise man and should therefore not be mourned. But one thing we notice immediately is that a significant change has taken place with Socrates. Socrates is the turning point that drew wisdom out of spiritual life. We have seen that in the Mysteries there was the highest spiritual life, that they united religion, art and truth. Socrates was the one who strove only for the truth, who searched only for clear, pure concepts.

The purpose of Socrates' dealings with his students was to reduce everything to clear, pure concepts. This is why Socrates is portrayed to us throughout his life as not actually being a friend of poetry. This was combined with the art of singing and music. He was portrayed as a man who pursued the truth in a prosaic, sober form. Musicality was alien to him. Shortly before his death, however, he was musical. From this mood, he draws his pupils' attention to the fact that swans also sing before they die and that such an animal as a swan obviously only sings when it feels joy. So, he thinks, it will also be Socrates' turn to sing at the hour of death. Besides, he says, I have been singing all my life. Philosophy is the expression of the deepest tones in the world. So, having sung my own work throughout my life, at the end of life I may well sing as other people have sung.

This is the conversation that Socrates had with his students. It is significant that Socrates gets into a singing mood shortly before his death. I would like to point out that all those who imbue themselves with this kind of wisdom have the same basic feeling. I would like to refer to Goethe's Faust poem. Worry also approaches "Faust. It makes him blind. But it also makes him see inwardly. That which the eyes are throughout their entire life, [namely] seeing, Faust becomes inwardly in the end. This view that in the hour before death Socrates does the same thing that other people before him have done throughout their lives is the same basic feeling as when Goethe lets Faust become what the others have been throughout their lives. This is expressed as the basic tone that runs through the entire "Phaidon"

One should not believe that Platonic philosophy, with its knowledge of the sensory world, must necessarily abhor sensory life in an ascetic manner or glide beyond sensory life to an unreal beyond. This cannot be the case. Plato does not want to destroy the life of the senses immediately, because he wants to transition from the life of the senses to the life of the pure spirit.

This is also not what Platonism strives for. It does not lead to ascetic renunciation, but by allowing people to look into the hereafter, it only leads them to a different illumination of the sensory world. It is rather like imagining the hereafter as a dark twilight realm, as a gloomy vault. No light shines into this vault for those who have not awakened supersensible powers within themselves. But the moment they are awakened, the light of eternity shines into the sensory world. We must not assume that we are distracted by the sensory world. No, it "only appears in a new light. "Only I say. It is only said to those who believe that it disappears. No, it will be completely retained and will only appear in a new light.

Now we have to ask ourselves: Where does it actually come from that, in the sense of Platonism, we have to distinguish between the "finite sensory world" and the "infinite spiritual world", between the "eternal" and the "temporal" world? The difference is there in the material world. If [this difference] also existed for an infinite faculty of perception, then perhaps Platonism could not be understood, because the question would then eternally arise: How do the two worlds, the spiritual and the sensory world, relate to each other?

This world of the spiritual would itself have to become finite if it still had one next to it, if it were not able to dissolve it into itself. For Plato, the separation between the sensory and spiritual worlds only exists in the human being within the human faculty of perception. It only exists for the human soul. It would not exist for a soul which had reached the end, which had perfected its perceptive faculty to such an extent that it was able to survey the whole universe. It is only because the human soul is enclosed between two potencies, because it participates in part in forces below and above it, that the human soul has a perceptive faculty which it must divide into the sensual-material and the spiritual world. Such dualism is only possible for a person who has not reached higher levels.

Because we are on the material level, we all carry two world potencies within us, we carry two forces within us, that force of will, that Promethean nature, which tends to become one with the Logos; that is the Promethean striving. The other is the striving downwards, it is the striving of Prometheus' brother, Epimetheus. What we can overlook is the nature of Epimetheus, is the non-spiritual nature in us, is that which lies within us as the [reflective], the explanatory. Prometheus is the [thinking ahead], the one who looks to a higher level. If we were to imagine a seven-part path and if we were to think of the path from the material to the spiritual as passing through all the stages, we would have to imagine this striving as a Promethean one. And if we looked back, we would have to describe this as the force that is presented to us in the Greek imagination as Epimetheus.

Suppose that we had all reached the highest stage of development. For such beings, there would be no more Prometheus. We would all be transformed into "Epimetheus®. One could now ask: Is this the reason why Platonic-mystical philosophy has a dualism, assuming a world divided into a sensual and a spiritual part? It is not there for purely sensual beings, nor for those who have been identical with the divine being, but for those who are on the way there. Therefore, the way upwards and the way downwards must be given. These two perspectives are intertwined in Platonic philosophy. Those who do not understand Platonic philosophy in such a way that it regards man as changing will not be able to understand it, nor will those who regard it as self-contained if they fall into myth with a view to the immortal, if they want to extract the higher truths from the unconscious.

We have to process the facts from knowledge, to determine them from reality. Science demands facts. But they only apply to those looking downwards. Man can only find facts as far and on the path he has traveled himself. At the point where man has now reached, he ceases to find anything beyond the sensual. For an animal, for example, there are only sensory perceptions.

Man who advances through the third and fourth stages of life [of the seven-limbed path] is no longer limited to the sensual. When he gets beyond the fourth stage of life, he sees higher psychological truths. There he no longer has sensory perceptions, but spiritual ones. Only on the path below us do we perceive facts. But in that part into which we look only from below, which we have not yet passed through, which is not seen by us, which reveals its secrets to us only gradually from above, which flows into us, we can never be given such facts as those which lie on our path. These have to be put into the form of myth. And Plato puts them in such a form. This is the upward perspective. This is the reason why Plato switched to mythical representation in his most important works. And this reason is also present in the "Phaidon", the discussion about the immortality of the soul.

Now I have already mentioned that Plato does not want to teach his intimate students about eternity in such a way that he provides them with evidence. It is not a question of providing logical proofs, but of leading them, as it were, to higher perceptions, leading them where they have not been before, leading them where they can see the world in a new splendor, in a new light.

There we also have the method. We start with the simplest thing imaginable. Can we not already find something in our sensory world that could lead us further towards knowledge of the soul? Let's take a look at the sensory world around us. We do not see things around us that remain, but things that come into being and pass away. We see flowers that come into being, blossom and fade. We see an eternal becoming and passing away. This is characteristic of all of nature. We must therefore assume that this "becoming and passing away" runs through the entire universe. That which is germ before is fruit after. Because that which was previously dead is life, we are dealing with an eternal cycle.

As it is with falling asleep and waking up, so we will also have to do in the higher, the actual spiritual spheres. It is no objection to say that what applies to the lower spheres need not apply to the higher spheres. It is very much a part of higher knowledge that what happens in the higher sensory world is only a reflection of the eternal, and we may well use it to illustrate what is going on in the world of the spiritual. This is particularly important for understanding Platonism. We must not imagine that it is as if Plato were rejecting or delimiting the sensory world, as if the non-sensory world were something quite different from the sensory world. That is not the case. We only need to illuminate the sensual world with the spiritual world. If we do this, then we can also see the images of the eternal.

Plato used a comparative image. We know that when our eye is directed towards sensual objects, it only sees the passing images. Imagine people sitting in a cave. All the things that are real are behind the people. A source of light is also located behind people. People cannot turn around, they can only see what is happening on the opposite wall. So they do not see the objects themselves, because the light and the objects are behind them. But they see the shadows, and they also see the shadows of themselves.

This is also the case with sensory perception. If we stop at sensory perception, we only see the world in sensory shadow images. We do not see ourselves as we are, we only see ourselves as shadow images. Only in the face of spiritual deepening, only when man is able to deepen into his inner self, only when man has attained this "know thyself", when he sees himself, does he become aware of the deeper basis of things.

But the shadows are also part of reality. We must not imagine that the shadow is not real. No shadow will really move without the underlying real form having moved. What presents itself in the shadow realm is only a consequence of what takes place in the sensual and spiritual world. Anyone who understands the shadow images can also recognize the processes in the spiritual world in the sensory world. Every atom shows itself to him as an expression of the spiritual realm.

In the same way, Plato was able to deduce from the eternal cycle of life the becoming and emergence of things, from the realm of the senses, from the shadow images, to the realm of the spirit. But now he has Socrates say: "This is correct. But let us look at things even more sharply and ask ourselves whether, when we direct the mind towards things, we can have no sensory perception, whether something eternal does not shine into our cognition in the subtlest way, in a shadowy manner. This argument is very correct. The materialists do not realize what difference there must be between animal perception and human perception. Although human perception is first dominated by animal perception, it is of such a nature that the spirit cannot be separated. Even in the coarsest human perception there is still a spiritual trace. And therefore the Platonic perception is also correct. When we perceive a trace of the spiritual, it means an "ascent to the spiritual". We could not ascend if the higher did not enter our sensory world.

Plato has Socrates say: "Listen, how can the number <> come about? - By adding one sensual thing to another. A combination has taken place. This has created a "two. That is a combination. The mind observes this joining by first counting "one" and then "two". However, the sensory process can also happen in such a way that I split the "one". I then get the "two" by splitting the "one" apart and not joining it together.

This is exactly the opposite way for sensuality. On the one side we have a joining together, on the other a splitting apart. But the result is the same when viewed from the spiritual realm. Sensory perception is something that can depict the spiritual in the most diverse ways. We can say: If man did not add a spiritual to the sensual, he would not regard anything in the sensual as the same. There would not be an equal for him if the sensual process were not exactly the same for him. Thus, for Plato, the spiritual shines into the sensual. But we cannot perceive whether the sensual shines into the spiritual. We must admit that even in the simplest processes, the spirit is at man's side in the sensory processes and that man therefore lives, carries out his life, through the fact that the spirit, even if only a spark at first, is present right into sensory perception.

If we imagine the seven-part nature of man and the world being, they consist of pure matter and of what we call force, of what we call matter and of what we call spiritual, astral. But then there is also what is present in the animal, what we call the animating, the principle that animates matter. As the fourth link we then consider that which we find in the higher human being, and with this we have penetrated as far as the spirit without matter.

So we must imagine with Plato that this spark of the spirit, which is also present in the lower man, goes from above to below. We have to imagine that on the one hand matter goes from bottom to top and on the other hand the spiritual goes from top to bottom, so that they interpenetrate and man becomes a double being through the interpenetration of the spiritual and the sensual. So when we examine the matter, we find in any case that the spiritual is present in man, even if only in the thinnest form - as in mathematics.

If the soul can only grasp the spiritual at one end, then it can regard this beginning of the spirit as a guarantee that it has a share in the spiritual and thus in the eternal, because the spiritual is the eternal in relation to the material, because it is the permanent in relation to the existing, the lasting, because it always remains the same as the spiritual in the sensory world.

For Plato, it is a matter of leading the students to where the spiritual, the eternal, is grasped at one end, and [then] leading them to the perception of the spirit in sensuality, so that [they] thereby [become] citizens of the infinite realm. This is what Plato tells us in his book. He has arrived at the point where he shows us how the spiritual enters into the sensual.

An important objection of his students is this: If we imagine that we have the sensual in its multiplicity before us and that the soul has a share in the infinite, we can imagine something else entirely. We can imagine that the soul only appears to have a share in the infinite. Let us think of the manifoldness symbolized as a series of taut strings on the lyre. We can produce a harmony through the sounding together of the taut strings of the lyre. Perhaps it is also just a uniform, harmonious tone that is merely struck. But we are always dealing with a harmony.

Socrates objects to this: Let's take a closer look. With harmony, shouldn't we say that the strings - each one individually - fit into the harmony, so that each individual string contributes to the harmony? Is this also the case with sensuality in the soul? Does it not have to go beyond sensuality? Harmony only exists in the parts and through the parts. But the soul must overcome the parts in their details if it wants to be a whole. And the essence of the soul lies in this ability to overcome the individual parts of multiplicity. The essence of the soul is therefore more than harmony. It is a life in itself. The spiritual life is not merely the harmony of the sensual, but something that is independent.

And now Socrates makes a very important remark: we have now finished with harmony. Let us now see how it goes with the "Kadmos". - Now we are led back into the myth. It is interesting that it is precisely at this point that this myth comes into play. Theologians have wondered in many ways about the inclusion of this myth. Kadmos is the hero whose sister Europa is stolen by Zeus. [Zeus] did this in the form of a [bull]. So Kadmos followed the trail of an ox, came to Europe and founded the castle of Thebes. He brought the Greeks, the Thebans, the science of the Orient, the alphabet and also the spiritual content of the alphabet. We are then told that he married after he had founded Thebes and established the Greek order.

Kadmos is the independently striving human being, the person who constantly strives for perfection. This is a trait that we also encountered in other figures of the gods. Harmonia, to which he wedded himself, is simply the harmony of the striving human being with the world. And when Socrates says that we are finished with harmonia, this has a meaning.

We have seen that harmony is not the highest, but that higher is the independent comprehension within the harmony. So at this point we have gone beyond harmony. We are ascending to Kadmos. We can grasp this independence ourselves.

And now Socrates is made aware of important objections by his students. Even if it is conceded that the soul is a harmony, it is not eternal. We must assume that a soul is alive in the face of sensual diversity. But this soul-life, even if it expresses much more personality in the earthly personality, does not have to be eternal, it can also be of temporal duration.

In the image, in the relationship between "rock" and "man", we can imagine the relationship between "body" and "soul". We can also imagine that the skirt is changed once. Once the person dies, the skirt passes on to someone else. The skirt outlasts the person. It could be the same with the soul. It might also outlive the next sensual form, and another soul could take possession of this body. One could imagine that the soul is independent, but not of infinite duration.

So we must also overcome this limited duration, we must show that we can find an independent entity within the human being, we must show that it is not just something that lasts for a shorter or longer time but is still temporary, but that it is the eternal that shines into the human being.

Platonism provides this proof, albeit in a figurative sense, by saying that when we look at something in the sensory world, we are searching for a connection. His predecessor Anaxagoras always looked for causes. When a stone fell to the ground, he looked for the cause. If a stone was heated, he looked for the cause that heated it, the sun's rays or some other cause. But now he asks himself: Can we get by with that? Aren't we going round in circles if we look for the cause of every effect? Don't we have to acknowledge that we are actually claiming something of which the opposite can be just as true?

He clarified this with an example. He asked himself: Why is this beautiful? Because it has a beautiful shape, a beautiful color and so on. So if we want to know: "Why is this thing beautiful", we come to the conclusion that it can be beautiful in different ways. It can be beautiful because of its color or because of its shape and so on. Therefore he says: All things are beautiful that are partakers of beauty. It is the same with goodness, greatness and other things. All things are partakers of imperishable, eternal ideas. What is beautiful today and what was beautiful millions of years ago are the same. They are the same ideas. They are in the same beauty. Therefore, there is a piece of the eternal in everything that is transient.

We only need to ask ourselves: What communion does the transient have with the eternal? And then: How is man related to the eternal? And the answer arises: through what we call the soul in him and through the fact that he has something that distinguishes him in it. We have said: A thing is good if it is a partaker of goodness, a thing is beautiful if it is a partaker of beauty. What is it that makes us call the soul "soul"? Each thing excludes another. Let us take snow. Snow is part of the cold. When the fire gets to the snow, the snow is no more. Fire and snow are not compatible. Let us look for what remains in man when we separate out sensuality. Let us seek that which is present in man just as beauty is present in beauty, greatness in greatness and so on, let us seek in man that which is as incompatible with the transitory as fire is with snow. What we find there is life.

The lifeless melts away before the primordial living just as the snow melts away before the fire. As a result, this spark of the infinite, which protrudes into the material, becomes in man what he recognizes as the actual soul principle. And so he must say to himself: This primal living is absolutely alive, is alive through and through, and therefore, because man is partaker of the living, he is also partaker of the eternal.

This is the highest stage in the process of proof to which the Platonic Socrates ascends in the "Phaidon". First he tries to make it clear how we first have to deal with "spirit" in every sensual work. This must be grasped, and then we can have a view of the rest of the spiritual world.

You might think it could be an illusion, a mere harmony. But now Socrates refutes the idea that we are dealing with a harmony and shows that we are not dealing with a harmony but with an independent entity, because it is not merely the harmony but the individual parts that are overcome. These can only be overcome by an independent entity.

And now he asks about the independent entity and discovers that the independent entity is the primordial living being, which is as incompatible with the transient as fire is with snow. Therefore, we cannot speak of Kadmos as being temporary, but as a completely independent entity that shines in here, and we must assume that we are partakers of a real, infinite life.

So Socrates leads his students step by step up to the primordial living, where he gives them what he has set out as wisdom as myth. He leads his students up to the ethereal heights of heaven and tries to describe how the earth would look if we were to view it from the ether. Wouldn't it look very different to us walking around on earth? Think of the inhabitants of the seabed. They live on the mud of the earth. Above that is the water, then the air of the earth. Now we can imagine the transformed human being who would be just as astonished as a deep-sea creature if it were to look at the seabed from the air. He shows you another possibility in a vividly intuitive form. He describes the underworld, the various rivers and so on. The soul will take a different course in the underworld; it will receive different treatment in the underworld. Some are immediately thrown into Tartarus. These are the ones who were bad, criminals. The others will be washed back onto the shore and can once again call upon those who have offended them and ask for forgiveness.

The sensual image is less important. It is much more important when he says: It could be like this, but it could also be different. It is not an exoteric perception, but a visualization. It is nothing other than the reassurance of what has previously been achieved in me. In any case, the pictorial is completely justified by the preceding wisdom. If wisdom is to be visualized, then Plato leads over into myth. He allows a higher language to enter. This is the language of myth.

So we see that this Platonic conversation about the eternity of the soul is basically an argument about the whole of Platonic mysticism. It is one of the most important works that Plato has left us, perhaps one of the most important that we have. It shows us what Plato actually wanted to give us: a philosophical-mystical image for the gradual perfection of man within the [path of knowledge], an image of how man ascends through the form to the seizure of the spirit and how man does not come to conviction by providing himself with logical proofs, but by understanding things himself.

It is significant that Plato chose the form of conversation. This form is conditioned by the Platonic way of thinking, by the Platonic attitude. Plato is convinced that it is a matter of seeing spiritual, higher powers, and these must be developed through the word. The word is that which is the key to the spiritual: it is therefore also the word that compelled Plato to present the gradual capacity for perfection, the gradual capacity for development in the form of conversations that the teacher conducts with his pupils.

Question answer:

It is amusing to see how our philosophers stop at one point when interpreting Platonic philosophy. To a certain extent, Kühnemann realizes that it is a matter of education, of enlivening the soul, that immortality is still to be acquired through knowledge. He goes as far as the narratives that he can no longer control.

Plato is a predecessor of Philo. I would like to develop Philo's late Platonic mysticism. We have a continuous rise of mysticism. With Philon, the mystical deepening was also the highest peak. This is also the basis for Christian mysticism, namely for the Gospel of John, and also leads to an understanding of the Apocalypse.

With our division into seven, we are dealing with the end points as two opposite poles.

The [Greek] letter writing ties in with Kadmos.

In his "Philosophy of Revelation", Schelling created a "positive philosophy in contrast to the "negative philosophy of logic. He gave a philosophy of experience in contrast to merely conceived philosophy.

The history of dogma is the further development of external myths in scientific form. Schelling was formally ridiculed here in Berlin. He had no success in Berlin in 184[1]. He died in 185[4].

[Dearly beloved!]

Eight days ago, I took the liberty of speaking about the Platonic "Phaedo" on the conversation about the immortality - or rather the infinity - of the soul, in order to show how Plato has his hero, let's say Socrates, speak to a kind of initiate, to those of like mind, to souls who can understand him. I said it is a kind of spiritual conversation with those who are already in the matter. And we have seen that it is primarily about leading the participants up to where they actually develop within themselves that of which Goethe says: "And as long as you do not have this, this dying and becoming, you are only a dull guest on the dark earth."

The conversation ties in with Socrates' death in order to show what Plato thinks of as sensual, how it appears in [his] spiritual retrospection, how Plato understands this retrospection, how he allows [eternity] to peer through it into our temporal existence and how, for him, all things that are given in the world of the senses appear in their true meaning, in their transience and insignificance. "Phaedo" is the most significant of the Platonic dialogues in that it presents the event of death, which is the event that forces man down the most, as an untrue event. It expresses the strongest possible belief in the spiritual world. He says to himself: I believe in the living; and because I believe in the living, I overcome all other things that appear to me in the world of the senses. I also overcome the belief in death, I do not believe in the truth of the appearance of the senses, I believe in the truth of the primordial living.

The point here is not to provide a logical proof. Through the direct perception of the spiritual, the pupil should awaken the perception of the primordial living, so that death is also only an event of the sense world. Hence this conversation in the face of Socrates' death. The spirit should be in direct harmony with what is shown as a sensual event, so that Socrates simultaneously represents as a spiritual interest what he expresses in the conversation, so that it is expressed as a symbol, so that the dying Socrates in the moment when he approaches sensual death, Socrates, as he approaches sensual death, tries to teach his disciples the belief that death and all that is connected with it is a continual overcoming of sensuality, that life is a continual dying, a coming to terms with everyday life.

As he brings this teaching to his students, he is also able to seal with death what he has taught. This is how the "Phaidon" stands for us. Even in its external composition it is a symbol of what is inside. Socrates is the bright [guest] who had grasped it, this dying and becoming, and who sought to make it comprehensible to his students in the face of death.

The other Platonic conversation, the "Banquet", in which [Plato] also has Socrates converse with his friends, appears as a counter-image to this. Here we have the direct opposite. We have Socrates in the presence of the highest affirmation of life, in the midst of carousing people, in the midst of an idea which, like the immortality of the soul in the "Phaedo", is love in the conversation about the "Banquet". This idea is also slowly being grasped again. But the comprehension is such that among the guests [Socrates] alone is the clairvoyant. All those around him have not found it and have not grasped it. They have not grasped it. Socrates rises like a pillar above those who speak out of darkness and error. Among them, Socrates appears to us as the only bright one. It is therefore an addition to the actually clairvoyant conversation of the "Phaidon". Here, in the "Banquet", we are shown how infinitely excellent he is who possesses the highest consecrations of Plato and [how they are represented in Socrates]. Socrates is confronted with the most diverse views. We see how [the guests] personally express their views on love. First Phaidros, a man of ordinary life, who has thought about it from the point of view of common sense. Then Pausanias, a statesman, then a physician, then a poet of the comic type of poetry and then one of the tragic - in short, personalities who have not penetrated into the depths of the mind.

We can now see how he formed the contrast between the different people. Phaidros said that Eros is the divine, that which is absolutely valuable. Those who are united in love are thereby also compelled to virtuous behavior. He who loves another, who is bound to him in friendship, will feel compelled to behave virtuously in a completely different way. He will feel ashamed if he allows himself to be tempted by an unvirtue. We see [...] that everything practical, the utilitarian point of view, is praised as the originator of virtue.

The statesman declares that all the order of the state is founded on love and that the state is held together by it.

We then see how the physician sings the praises of love, how he shows how illness is cured by it, in that the substances that love or do not love each other give direction to the medicine, so that they act according to the deepest laws of the world. It is the disharmony in the universe from which the disease develops. Harmony is what the physician strives for. It is love from which harmony develops. Thus the scholar stands opposite Eros, which permeates everything. I have already spoken about how Empedocles has the world composed of four primary substances and how the primary substances then assume a hostile opposition. What the physicist calls repulsion and attraction, Empedocles calls hate and love.

[The fourth thing that confronts us]: Aristophanes gives us his view of love in the myth. We have seen that Plato seizes on myth when he wants to ascend to higher powers. Where scientific concepts do not suffice, he resorts to myth, to poetry. It is not something [that should appear as a higher fantasy], but a reflection of higher spiritual events that poetry should be. Aristophanes expresses himself thus: 'Originally human nature was of a very different kind. If we could look back to the origin of the earth, we would see people who are not only divided into individuals, but also those in whom several individuals are united into one. Only later, through a kind of fall into sin, were these individuals separated. They have retained a longing for each other from this original state. This longing is expressed in their love for each other. They seek what they once were and strive towards each other in order to regain their original state, their original nature. For the beloved being, love is nothing other than the striving for their other half, from which they have been separated by the world. - This is the strange worldview in which he expresses his view. He leads them back to what is below what is now human nature. Where the collision of the spiritual and the natural occurs, where they come together in a direct way, the comic confronts us. Every single comic phenomenon consists in nothing other than the succession of the natural, in the [clash] of the natural with the spiritual, without us being able to see the harmonious balance between the two.

The joke arises from the fact that one seeks to bring about a connection between things that do not belong together, so that the gaping chasm between sensual diversity and spiritual unity always appears. It is this search of the spiritual being for the original natural foundation, this gaping fissure, in which Aristophanes seeks his image for Eros.

The tragic poet [Agathon] seeks to sing the praises of the god of love in a serious manner. He also makes his views known. He describes the nature of the god of love by saying: "He is that which manifests itself as the fire of the mind, that which winds its way from mind to mind. While longing is a property of reason, love arose when wisdom took possession of the mind. As the human mind feels drawn to the primordial mind of the world, the infinite workings of Eros are revealed. It shows how all human beings are an outflow of the mind, it shows that the highest form of virtue is based in the middle state. It is precisely the love-filled mind that triumphs over blind power everywhere.

The wisdom of the mind is stronger than the blind force that prevails in the world. [Eros] is stronger than the blindly rushing Ares. These are worldly views that he presents to us. He now contrasts these with the Socratic ones.

It is Socrates who now makes his views on love known. He is the only bright guest among the dull guests, who rises above the world of the senses and at once enters the vision of the eternal, of ideality. I will show in a moment what a strange appearance Plato allows to occur in relation to Socrates' arguments, and we will see how Plato has given a counter-image to his "Phaidon". We shall see that [Socrates] does not say: I give here a conviction. For all those I have cited are actually stating their opinions. He, as a personality, says Socrates, has no opinion at all. [It has no value at all, is not even worth considering. He immediately puts his personality in the right light. He shows immediately: I am a member of the manifold world. But that which I have elevated myself to should speak from me. That is why he says: I do not give my wisdom - but he points to a seeress, saying that she has initiated him into that which he gives for the best.

Here you have the passage in Plato's work where you can see what the Greeks meant by this. Wherever a female figure, a priestess, a goddess or heroine or any other female entity enters the spiritual process, a state of consciousness is always meant. We have seen this in the development of the Greek myths and we see it today too. Socrates makes nothing known. He does not want to say anything from the ordinary level of consciousness, but from the higher one. He rises to what the [seeress] Diotima taught him. What does Socrates explain that Diotima taught him? He first explains, in his own way, what love is, and asks: Is it really to be praised as that which has no matter with it at all? Is it really as different as the others have made it out to be? It has been said that Eros is the oldest and most valuable god. But let us only see how he expresses himself. This deity expresses itself by leaning towards something that it does not have itself. We must therefore say that it is based on [lack]. The wise seer taught me something else. She taught me [- says Socrates -] that love, Eros, was conceived at the birth festival of Aphrodite by the god of abundance on the one hand and by the goddess of scarcity, of lack, on the other. Need and wealth are the parents of Eros. We therefore see that where love appears, it is not actually a divine thing, but it is precisely that which stands between the human and the divine. It is that which has not emerged from the pure need of life, but has emerged from the lack of life and from the richness of the eternal as that which forms the mediation that draws man upwards.

This is how Socrates portrays love. Eros is precisely the mediator that leads from the sensual to the spiritual fullness. Eros is therefore not actually a god, but a mediator between the divine and the human. That is why [Socrates] calls him a "demon". Therefore, this is also an explanation [when otherwise speaking of the demon]. Socrates says that he obeys an inner voice when he should do or refrain from doing something. This demon is nothing other than that which confronts us here as Eros, that which leads us up to the divine. That is why he describes Eros as something demonic, not as something divine. It is the power that leads up to the divine, to the infinite. When we find it in diversity, when we find it as that which appears to us as light, when we have left the darkness, then it is Eros that leads us there, leads us up to the infinite. So it is Eros that Socrates presents as the guide to the essence. Eros, love, confronts us in the same way as in India, when Krishna says: "In the middle of the sun is light, in the middle of light is truth, in truth is essence."

In the Platonic view, we are also confronted with the fact that the infinite being emerges in the truth that appears in the perspective of eternity. This Platonic view is accompanied by the fact that the demonic force that leads man from his immediate sensuality to the eternal view is nothing other than the demon of love.

So Socrates appears to us as the one who follows Eros in order to be led up to the immediate truth. Socrates is portrayed to us in such a way that he appears in the midst of the other speakers as the clairvoyant, the clairvoyant. The "banquet" is a wild affair. They are caught up in the sensory world. And while Socrates proclaims wisdom in his speeches, other speakers fall asleep, which means that they cannot escape from the dark diversity. He talks to the comic and tragic poets and discusses ideas with them. As the last ones who have remained bright, he tries to lead them to the eternal vision. He converses with them, saying that the poet, the real poet, must be able to express the comic as well as the tragic.

Here we see how Socrates goes beyond the poet, but retains his belief in poetry to the end. Here he points out that the tragic and the comic are capable of rising to the eternal. The comic and the tragic arise from the fact that the manifold is measured against unity, the [transient against the eternal,] against truth. Wherever we encounter the tragic or the comic, the spirit must in some way confront us with the sensual. The tragic hero in a tragedy only appears tragic because in him the idea ultimately triumphs over the demise of the external, the mortal. The spirit, as opposed to the earthly-material, appears as the comic. When man looks over the disharmony of the earthly, after he has already gone through a certain development on the spiritual ladder, when he thus looks back on what is going on down there, what does not appear as harmony in the manifoldness, while before his eyes it does appear as a kind of harmony, then it appears to him as humor. The one who looks back is actually the comical one in the sense in which Socrates expresses his words from the standpoint of eternal vision.

And when the spiritual emphasizes the immense difficulties it has to overcome, emphasizes how difficult it is to escape from the material, when the spiritual is not held up in a light sense, but in such a way that the opposite word is held up seriously, then tragic poetry appears. [What the wise Silen answers the tragic King Midas] to the problem is: What would be best for man? The best thing for man would be not to be born and, having been born, to die soon.

This is to be understood in such a way that what is enclosed in the temporal form overcomes this form and penetrates through to the eternal. This is how man overcomes tragedy. Therein lies the primal tragedy that everyone must feel who has the perspective upwards into the spiritual and downwards, depending on the mood that overcomes him, depending on whether he views the penetration from below or above. The world appears tragic or comic to him depending on his perspective. The poet must be able to deal with both the tragic and the comic, depending on the view upwards or downwards. The one who has a clear view upwards and downwards can do this.

Socrates remains the clairvoyant, not like the one who sees the spiritual and the material side by side, but like the one who recognizes the interweaving of the two, who is no longer humorous and also no longer serious, but who dissolves the contrast in the great development, where the material has increased, the spiritual penetrates from above and thereby enlivens the material. It is a unified view that takes the place of the tragic and the comic. He is the wise one beside the two. They fall away, and Socrates alone remains. It is he who outlasts them. From the point of view of the Greek view of life, not as a crude symbolic representation, it should be mentioned: he drank the most. The others have fallen away. He is the one who alone remains awake. Even if this is a dubious symbol for us, it was intended to express the fact that Socrates was so far initiated that he could not be kept from his clairvoyance by any sensual-material effect. It is he in whose personality is expressed what Plato describes as the fusion of the material and the spiritual.

[He was led by] Eros to the vision of eternity, to spirituality. He is sensuality transformed into spirituality. He appears in his personality as the bearer of wisdom, as the bearer of this spirituality, while the others are presented to us as those who have remained dull. Here it is the brighter spirit of Socrates who has grasped it, who has detached himself from all sensual multiplicity, who has reached it, the primeval, through the power of Eros, by which he has allowed himself to be guided.

So the "Banquet" is a complete antithesis to the talk of immortality or the infinity of the soul. It is intended to show us how Socrates ascends to the eternal, while the others are attached to the temporal. The best thing is how Plato shows us how he lets [Socrates] cease as a sage and how he lets him reproduce what he has received as inspiration from the goddess, the priestess. This is proof that the Greek mystic always uses the symbol of the feminine, which represents the deepening of the state of consciousness.

So we see that Plato is always talking about leading people up to deeper or higher states of consciousness. What Plato means in his view of eternity is not so clear to us in his work. It only appears to us in a later age at the same time as the emergence of Christianity in the West. We will see how these thoughts first acquire their true content through philonic mysticism.

What Plato shows us as a spiritual path can also be preserved in terms of content within the West. But those who stick more to the external form of Plato have an unopened bud in him. He shows us what he has grasped in his inner being, like a bud. We will only see this bud unfold when we go beyond Plato. Just as in Plato we see the emergence of Heraclitus' philosophy, so in Philo we see the emergence of Platonic philosophy.

I do not want to say that Plato did not stand on a higher level of knowledge. The ancients succeeded in saying this in a more direct way than Plato did. I would describe mysticism up to neo-Platonic mysticism as a continuous unfolding. [We have a strong folding together] with Heraclitus. He drew directly from the wisdom of the Mysteries. Heraclitus is a very important point in the dawn of Greek spiritual life. That is why Heraclitus was well aware that just as the Logos must follow descending paths in the development of the world, so matter must follow the ascending path. The Logos must spiritualize matter, and so it is called to penetrate it. At first it appears as a mere babble. Only later does the word attain the power to directly represent the spirit. Thus the whole spiritual process is a continual permeation of the word with the spirit.

600 years before the birth of Christ, the Buddha already said this. His words have a divine power. They will perhaps reveal more of themselves than what they now seem to contain. They are, as it were, the body for what they contain. They already contain this. But the body has only been able to develop through approximation. In the rise of Christianity, the spirit took possession of the word and appropriated dominion over the word at the time when the word really became flesh. Only after Plato did the word become the direct expression of the spiritual. With Plato, this is still veiled like a bud. This is also the reason why Platonic philosophy, if it is taken merely in an exoteric sense without the deeper mystical insight, cannot directly reveal what it wants to reveal. After all, it has the abyss-like depth of all essential penetration. But this depth is still resolved in the depths of the matter itself. The outer garment of the Platonic dialogues has not yet received all the wisdom driven out of it. And this is where the assertion that Platonic philosophy contains contradictions comes from.

In the juxtaposition of the material with the spiritual, one sees [according to Plato] a kind of "Achilles heel", and we must also admit this for the exoteric. Platonic mysticism only becomes comprehensible if we look at it esoterically, as we tried to do with the Phaedo and the Banquet. But if we take it in this way, many things become clear to us that would otherwise seem incoherent. On the one hand, Plato places the view of ideas, on the other the world of sensual existence. Plato did not succeed in showing that the one is actually also the other, that the one rules in the other. He did not succeed in showing that "I" is "You" and "You" is "I", that the individual does not have the right to speak "I" to himself, that he may only say "I" to himself when he has overcome the individual ego.

Plato contrasted the earthly diversity and the unity hovering above the earthly. He must overcome the sensual being and can then advance to the eternal. How then does the temporal appear to us? The temporal is powerless in the face of the eternal. The temporal is not spiritualized by the eternal. Plato has not found a transition. Plato has the eternal, but not as the eternal creator. Plato does not know the creative, divine personality, says the Christian. Temporality belongs to creation, says the Christian to Plato. He may have referred to the eternal, but he did not understand how to explain the temporal through the eternal, how to harmonize them. This can rightly be said if one takes an exoteric view of the matter.

Plato distinguishes between two types of knowledge. Sensory knowledge or the wisdom of temporality and the wisdom of infinity. And here we have come to see how its bud must be made to burst open. The one who still sees "I" and "You" as separate has not yet reached the point where the being is "one". He therefore knows that there are two kinds of knowledge, the wisdom of the infinite and the wisdom of the finite. But he also knows that these two kinds of knowledge only appear as two as long as the being itself is caught up in multiplicity, in finiteness. He points out not to contrast two kinds of knowledge in the absolute sense, but to recognize that there is a ladder in the direction where wisdom leads, that one can indeed lift oneself up to wisdom.

We always see beings developing upwards to divinity, from sensual knowledge to divine knowledge. We can also see this as a characteristic of the Greek striving for wisdom, that the Greek sage was aware that on his path of wisdom the earthly must also be transformed into the eternal, that he must also rise on the path of wisdom, that knowledge must not remain where it is worldly knowledge, but that just as the religious must set out on the path, so must he who seeks wisdom set out on the same path. The Greek sage is aware that the pursuit of wisdom is one of the paths to the infinite.

Here is what led Heraclitus to find the right expression, what led Heraclitus to real theosophy, to real philosophy. He made the distinction between earthly and divine wisdom. When the soul ascends from the body to the free ether, then it will be an immortal God, then knowledge is on the way to becoming divine wisdom. - Viewing from the eternal perspective of the gods, becoming God - that is what the Greek development of wisdom strives for. Not a knowledge of a place or thing lying behind things, but a becoming wisdom, that is what Greek development strives for.

I think we have seen that Platonic mysticism is one of the most important stages in the Greek pursuit of wisdom from the earthly-temporal, from purely human opinion to divine wisdom.

Answer to the question:

"Timaeus" and "Phaedo", which lead out of philosophy into mysticism, are the pinnacles of Platonic philosophy. These will then lead us to the Gospel of John and the Apocalypse.

Socrates looks down on suffering and joy from a higher point of view.

The manifold is not to be overcome in knowledge, but as such itself. In the mystery of Christ, death itself is overcome as such, not merely in the realization that death is nothing. Suffering, which Socrates only had to console himself about, must here be conquered, overcome. Victory must be achieved. There must be an absolute necessity for this victory to be achieved.

Wisdom is merely an abbreviation of the path. In exoteric terms, Plato shortened it to a third. Man has to overcome death through initiation, through the divine within the purely spiritual, as with Plato through knowledge. Not everyone can walk the path of wisdom. There must therefore also be a path that runs in real life, where the Word made flesh, the spirit made corporeal, is the overcoming. That is why the Socratic overcoming is there for the wise. For the ordinary man, however, the Socratic overcoming cannot exist under ordinary circumstances. For the higher truths and insights there is no great difference. But there is a great difference for the human being. Hübbe-Schleiden expresses it like this: Mysticism is of the highest value to man; but he who wants to bring the whole race on the path must also take spiritual knowledge to his aid. That is why this idea relates to the Socratic idea as life relates to the spirit. The salvation that is achieved through the Christ idea is salvation in life as opposed to salvation in the mere spirit.

[Ladies and gentlemen!]

We have passed by the basic ideas in the Platonic worldview. I call them basic ideas because they are actually the most important for understanding Platonic mysticism, namely the Platonic ideas of the eternity of the soul and the ideas of love. The one idea has been revealed to us through an examination of the Platonic discussion "Phaidon", the other through an examination of the "Banquet". We have seen that these two ideas, which perhaps play the greatest leading role in the spiritual development of mankind - the great goal of the eternity of the soul and the path of love - are also among the most important and fundamental ideas in Platonic mysticism.

This is also the point where we can best understand the influence of Platonism on Christianity, i.e. how Christianity developed under the influence of Plato. It would not be making the most necessary contribution to clarity if we did not, on the occasion of the consideration of the eternity of the soul and love, at the same time draw attention to how these two basic ideas have reappeared in Christianity. I will pass over the intermediate stages. They will become all the more understandable if we touch on the relationship between Platonism and Christianity. I have thought a lot about this. You will therefore forgive me if I have to address some of the more difficult questions.

I am of the opinion that the views and relationships that exist between Platonism and Christianity have not unjustly given rise to such a great literature, a literature that is centuries old, because through the shadowing, through the peculiar way in which the Platonic spirit has settled into the Occident through Christianity, one can see how the Occident is influenced by Platonism. It can only be understood - and it is only possible to show the true relationship between Platonism and Christianity - if one looks at its mystical elements and considers the core ideas of Christianity.

The liberal, theological approach still insists that the relationship between Platonism and Christianity should be presented according to a mystical method. And so we must be clear about the fact that we must seek out the actual core ideas of Christianity in their original meaning. Only in this way will we be able to understand where Platonism meets Christianity and thus understand what Plato presents to Christianity as a kind of world view. Only the theosophical-mystical direction has the possibility of really grasping the core. All exoteric methods do not have the possibility of grasping what had to come from ancient mysticism in order for Christianity to emerge.

But in order to show what has happened, I would like to show the characteristic features, illustrated by the consciousness of the builders, those who have contributed to its development. I would like to show how it presented itself to the souls of the first [church fathers and teachers]. Then the most important key point is that [Christianity] presents something fundamentally new compared to Platonism. This fundamentally new thing is nothing other than that Christianity is direct, real life, life as it presents itself before our eyes and ears. If you do not hold on to this core point, you will not be able to see what distinguishes it from the old religions and also from the mysteries and Platonism.

I would like to point out once again what is emphasized in Platonism and Christianity. It was the immediate life, that which the everyday person perceives directly, that Platonism was supposed to overcome; and on the other hand, it was that it rose to something higher, which cannot be perceived with the senses, into the eternal view. Plato's "Phaidon" wants nothing other than eternity of the soul. He does not want to prove the eternity of the soul. It is not about logical proofs. His aim is to bring to life that which gathers around Socrates and to bring it into a new world. The soul should rise by turning away from what can be seen with the eyes and heard with the ears. In short, eternity should be something that one acquires, that one acquires through the introduction to the mysteries. Plato's pupil says: "The soul can become immortal when it rises to the vision of eternity. When it sees the spiritual, it participates in spiritual life. This makes it eternal. This is a developmental process that we went through in the Platonic "Phaidon", and also a developmental process that we see in the "Banquet". We see that it was Diotima who lifted us up to the higher standpoint.

I drew attention to what Goethe said about his view of such eternal conversations. He says: "If I have inserted myself into the spiritual course of development of the universe, then I am entitled to have a place assigned to me by nature. We are not immortal in the same way. We must first acquire this right. We have to develop this first claim first.

This is the basic element that runs through Plato's "Phaedo". Plato says [in essence]: You can see what you want, but if you only perceive what your eyes, ears, the external senses give you, then you cannot enter the spiritual. The supersensible is what guarantees you the eternity of the soul. - He could not have soul eternity proven. The disciples should acquire it, they should become immortal. This is the basic conception of the Platonic method. - Logic can only link together perceptions that you already have.

And now let us look at what lived in the first centuries of Christianity. The experience of the senses was what was emphasized. The message of salvation was to consist in the fact that the Savior, the one who brought the right to eternity for man into the world, was visibly there. So it is the Savior who is perceived by the senses. - Here are a few passages that show that it is about becoming visible, about the Good News:

"We behold his glory. - He who has seen it testifies to it, and his testimony is true, and he is conscious of speaking the truth so that you may believe." [John 19:35]

We have not preached the presence of Jesus Christ to you in a sophisticated way, but as eyewitnesses. We have heard his voice. - I am not saying that this is to be understood symbolically, I am saying that this is to be understood literally, not symbolically. - What we have heard and touched, we tell you so that you may have the message with us.

It is essential that we are assured by Irenaeus that we can be assured of this by people who have known such people themselves. Irenaeus himself still knew people who were disciples of the apostles, and he says that they still had personal experiences. This is the sensual truth that lived in the consciousness of the first Christians. This sensual truth, which was there for the eyes to see and the ears to hear, lives on in the Church. This [truth] is there for all time. It is not only the temporal truth that took place at the time when Jesus lived, but it lives on as such. This is what we call Christian mystery.

The Lord's Supper is not just a symbol and must not be just a symbol if we do not want to end up with something completely watered down. Christ has appeared today - Christmas. We must take this as an eternal truth, that what has happened once can happen again and again. So it does not happen symbolically, but in such a way that it is really there in the present.

This mystical view existed in the first centuries when Christianity was formed. I would therefore like to agree with [Möhler] and consider it to be the only correct thing to say: viewed from one side, the Church is one in which the living Christ lives, whose personality is repeated and continues uninterruptedly. Not in the way of a deceased person. He does it in a sensual way. In baptism he always takes us into his fellowship. The Savior has been foretold. And for the apostles and the first Christian teachers, the word and sensory perception are valid. They relied on the Old Testament as well as on visual evidence.

We must be clear about the fact that they see an incomprehensible continuation of life. What has happened once must be there forever. This must be emphasized, just as the words of Augustine must be emphasized again and again, which show us that even at the time of Augustine, appearances compelled him to do so, for he says: I would not profess it if the sensually perceptible authority of the Church did not compel me to do so. This is what guarantees the truth of the message of salvation.

There are two aspects to this: firstly, being a naturalized eye and ear witness and secondly, the authority of the truly continuing church. Without this continued existence of the church, even Paul would not have felt comfortable believing in it. The church must be the embodiment of the mystery, it must be a mystical community, it must be added to the testimony of the apostles and apostles' disciples. It must be clear to us that these views became firmer and firmer in the first centuries, and that they also became firm in Augustine's worldview.

What I have now explained as the basic characteristic of Christianity in the first centuries is the necessity that the content cannot be proven, but only vouched for, that human thinking has nothing to do with this content, that it can at most be a point of reference for understanding this content. We have to keep that in mind. It is essentially linked to Christianity that it is based on certainty.

The mysteries also have nothing to do with logic, they are also based on experience. Plato was familiar with the mysteries. Anyone who wanted to become a Mystic had to personally submit to the required process. He had to take part in it personally and allow himself to be initiated. He had to ascend to the pinnacles of knowledge. They had to climb up personally. And so it was in the Platonic initiation.

In Christianity, something new was added: the substitution by a single personality living in history. It was something that antiquity had in mind as an exemplary type of commitment in a historical act by a single historical personality. Three things had to come together - and that is the important thing that had to happen in order for Christianity to come into being. It had to be there:

- firstly, what lived in the ancient mystery cults as an explanation of the world;
- secondly, the initiation process that everyone who wanted to be initiated had to undergo;
- thirdly, a transformation had to take place.

Let's take a closer look at what this transformation was like. Platonic mysticism has already shown us the beginnings. This [transformation] is that we are dealing with a - I may best say - first materialization of the eternal being, let us say with a materialization of God. And then again we are dealing with the ascending process of the development of the worldly into the divine. We have to do - now let us say - with the divine, in order to make the conception that comes into consideration clear - with the eternal, divine essence, and on the other side with the Logos that forms itself in matter, that develops, that transforms itself in the most manifold ways, with a sequence of stages in the development of the Logos. [We need only follow Philon of Alexandria], and we will find this sequence of stages of the Logos.

First, we have the Logos before us in its pure spiritual form. No human being can grasp it, although human individuality rests in it. According to [Philon], this spiritual entity is the primordial Logos. It is a [prototype] of what appears in the world as the divine world order. Whoever lives and works in the world and recognizes the world must - and this must be noted - consider on the one hand the descending line that goes from the spiritual to the material, and on the other hand the line that ascends and goes from the material to the spiritual. Only by standing in the middle can he understand why he is an individual. Only through this can he understand why he is a being appearing as a duality. By realizing that he can have hope of entering into the spiritual primordial being, but also by realizing that this being forms the world order itself.

Because the world itself is spiritualized, he becomes aware that he is dealing with a twofold Logos, with a Logos that cannot be reached and with a Logos that is poured out, with the Logos that has become flesh, with the Logos that has become material. The material world is an exact image of the divine world; but it is not the same as the original divine essence.

[Philon] distinguishes between these two entities. God is the Father of all things, the primordial Logos; and the Son of God, the children of God are the materialized Logos in the world. It is that which develops, transforms, strives upwards towards the primordial Logos. This upward striving in one form or another can be found in mysticism. We will see this in neoplatonic theosophy, which form mysticism can still take. Then we have the basic skeleton that underlies all mysticism. That is one element.

The other element is the initiation process; and here I must try to express myself particularly clearly, because - according to the experiences of others - they say things somewhat differently. I am compelled by my experiences to express myself somewhat differently. I will try to be as clear as I can. We have to understand what it was all about. I will only be able to prove this with a few glimpses, let's say, of the initiation process of the Egyptian schools. [Gap in the transcript]

We must be clear that man, by moving further along this path, is making a journey that leads back in the true sense of the word. Now I would like to draw your attention to this: Initiation is that which a person achieves when he walks back along his path, goes through it, when his consciousness is illuminated. Deeper and deeper truths can be revealed to people. And these are the initiations that man encounters on his path into his inner being. These initiations are the same as the Principia of the world. They are the fundamentals and the foundations of the world that come to development in the world. Let us call the principles of development in the world "Logos. If man can really progress on the path of initiation to the real principles of the world, then he will find within himself the same thing that he finds outside as a principle. Thus initiation was a real, actual process, something that man actually goes through. It is not of subjectively human significance, but of objectively divine significance. The path of knowledge is a way back, a reconnection of man with the original source of existence. What he finds in himself is what he rests with in the objective of the world, that is what leads man to deification, to divinization. The path of knowledge is the path of deification.

The second way is that which is based on principles, on the Logos. This is also a real process. It is a real process, not an allegory. The idea that it is a real process can only be obtained through spiritual experience. Think of the initiation process that every Myste had to go through, intertwined with the process of the creation of the world. And now, instead of understanding this as an exemplary process that every Myst had to go through, think of a unique historical process, think of a single initiate and think of him as the original initiate, as the representative initiate for all others, then you have the image of the "Christ as it developed in the first century of Christianity. The materialization, the incarnation of the divine Logos conceived as a one-time event, but in such a way that it is the real incarnation of the divine Logos, then you have the Christ-appearance.

Three things must therefore be distinguished:
1. the old doctrine of the origin of the world,
2. the initiation process and
3. the combination of these two things with a historical

conceived, individual act. This is the view that Theosophy has of the origin of Christianity, and this is the one against which, of course, not the slightest objection can be raised from the esoteric point of view, because the esotericist must regard precisely this way of looking at the truth as much deeper.

Here you have what lived in the consciousness of the old Christians. They claimed that which was presented to them as a process of development in the old schools and which then happened as a single act. And that made it necessary to make it dependent on appearance. The purpose of the initiation process is to raise the lower aspects of man, to divinize them, so that the Word becomes flesh in the individual, so that the individual struggles upwards, is sanctified upwards. This was demanded as something done.

So instead of continuing the mysteries of antiquity, Christianity had to bring a new mystery into the world. Spiritual survival is not merely an allegory, but a matter of faith, and the ecclesiastical principle of authority had to take its place. For Plato, the concept of love was central. He regarded it as a kind of demon. It is that which leads people from the lower levels to the higher levels of knowledge, which transforms people from the temporal to the eternal. Love is the mediator between the temporal and the eternal. But love is also the demonic agent that brings about the process of development in each individual human being, the passage from the temporal to the eternal. And to the extent that this love is not at work, to that extent the review of ideas, as Plato says, cannot take place.

What is achieved through this initiation process, which is described to us as the initiation process of ideas, is an introduction to the divine, to seeing. This can only be mediated through love, which is a guide for every personality. Platonic love is something else. It is not to be confused with what "Christian love is. What can be found in Christian writings is not to be put together with Platonic love. Just think that the path was there in the ancient mystical teaching. The path of the mystics was a personal one. It was such for an individual. Now we are dealing [in Christianity with a vicarious mystery] with a historical event that happened once. It is a question of what used to serve as the idea of the origin of the world becoming, as it were, the map according to which the path is traveled. This whole world, which Plato calls the world of ideas, was removed from the personal perspective, it was removed from personal observation. It was that which was guaranteed by historical tradition or ecclesiastical authority. But that which underlies the ancient mystery, the eternal truth of the incarnation of the Logos, was that which was moved beyond the human perspective. For the people of Platonic philosophy, this was called the way of love. This love, this Eros, took on a different, a new form. It now became a principle through which man could look up to something that was beyond human comprehension. Everything Plato said boiled down to this: knowledge was there to lead to where one could make perceptions; but this knowledge could not lead there [because the Eternal born in the midst of knowledge, in the midst of light - Brahma, so to speak - was not accessible to knowledge]. What had to take the place of love was not something that had an end, but something that offered a view, that led to remaining in the apparent, in the historical. At the same time, a path was closed which the old Myste wanted to reach, but which can no longer be traveled. This is why Christianity had to put forward a different idea for the "path of love". And that is "faith. Faith is that [which no human knowledge can achieve, it is that] which can only be revealed, which must be guaranteed by sight. The Christian can believe, but not strive for the content of the infinite. This is what took place at the beginning of Christianity, because these views were actually transformed, because in each individual the mystical initiation process was re-stamped as a unique historical event. The element of Hermes, the guide from the earthly to the divine, was also transformed into an abstract element that had only a subjective meaning. The way in which the Platonic conception and the mystery doctrine in particular still had to take on an earthly form in everything that presents itself to us as Christianity is something I would like to talk about next time.

Answer to the question:

The Christ has been completely eliminated. Two things are to be distinguished, the believers and the teacher who taught the doctrines of the ancient mysteries. The parables reveal a teacher of the Essaean community. He spoke to the people as it was appropriate for the people. Behind Jesus stands the actual teacher, as with Krishna, Ramah and so on. What Jesus taught is no different from what the Orient taught. But what Christianity has become is something else. What was demanded by the mystics is something else[: to believe in] a unique historical fact.

The content of the Christian dogmas of the first centuries is exactly the same as in the old mystery schools. The content of the mystery teachings is presented as a diabolical imitation of the divine word in order to be able to say that they teach something else after all.

Philon deepened the Platonic philosophy. Philon broke through the principle of strict isolation from the outside world. The external dissemination of doctrine through the parable was cultivated. The esoteric core disappeared, the exoteric shell remained. Paul deepened the exoteric nature of Christianity.

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